Obligatory this happened 9 years ago but I still think about it every day.
It's a long one so buckle up.
(Apologies about the grammar and such, writing is not my forte.)
Me: $D
Friend/Co-Conspirator: $F

This story starts with me, a 'quiet but well liked throughout the school' 17 year old in IT class at my High School in a large suburban, two city public school district. We had one of the best high school IT programs in the country at the time for many reasons. Part of our class (of about 35) involved us going around the school to do basic maintenance on school computers. Although with the exception of myself and $F, our class never touched staff computers.
Myself and $F were the two students always finishing our two week classwork cycle in about two days. So we were always tasked by our IT Teacher with helping the school IT guy (district employee stationed at the school in the IT lab) to go around and fix issues throughout the building while everyone else worked on their classwork. Often, we were loaned the IT guy's keys and district keycard to go around the school and take care of business. (This is important later) Over time, myself and $F became well known by staff around the school for being able to fix "anything" so we eventually gained a lot of trust from our IT Teacher and District IT guy. To the point that we knew passwords we ABOSOUTELY should not have known.
We knew everything from the password to the surveillance system to the master (domain admin) password district IT used to access everything from HR files to grades to mechanical systems. This password literally let us access anything on any computer in the entire district. And before you ask, yes all buildings in the district (including admin) were linked together and no they weren't firewalled off from each other. Now we never used our powers maliciously as we loved our school and never would've done anything to harm anyone or damage any systems.
One day I thought to myself "wow, Information Security (InfoSec) in this district is atrocious, I wonder how easy it would be to test it from a student perspective, then present my findings to the district IT guy". This, would be the beginning of the biggest fuck up of my life.
(I'll try to keep the technical stuff to a minimum)
My mission started one day when I was tasked to grab a computer from a classroom and bring it to the lab. Easy enough. I was given IT guy's 35+ keys and sent off. While walking to the room, I dropped the ring, it took me a minute to find the right key on the ring. When I found it, since I was looking bit harder than usual at each key, I noticed something peculiar about the key he used to open doors inside the school. It was stamped DGM and looked different than the usual *M stamp master key for this one high school building. Not seeing this abbreviation before, I thought, "ok this must be an important key since it works like a school master but looks different".
I opened the (empty) classroom, fired up a locksmithing app on my phone and took a digital impression of the key that gave me the bitting code so I could duplicate it later on, grabbed the computer, went back to the lab and gave the keys back. Curious about what this DGM stamp meant, I started googling on my phone, "DGM [Key Manufacturer]". It came up with GM as "Grand Master", the key above the master key. Nothing with DGM came up in the search. I thought "ok this is just the "grand master" key that opens all three buildings on the school property, NBD. (Main School, Theater, and Aux Gym buildings)
"Ok. but what does that D in DGM stand for? Nothing in the school district starts with a D, except... District. Holy shit, it must mean "District Grand Master. But they can't be stupid enough to make one key that opens doors in all 15 schools. Right?"
I get home and order a key duplicate on the website that built that locksmithing app. A week later it shows up and I bring it to school. Before gym class I tried it on one of the doors in the Aux gym and low and behold, it worked. Great! Part one of my test plan is complete. Someone with this key could cause a lot of damage if they wanted to, but how would they get past the alarm systems in each building? Because it would be difficult to discreetly do a lot of damage if the building was full of people. Naturally someone with ill intensions would carry out their act at night while the building alarms are armed.
I already knew that the alarm systems were controlled by keycards that every staff member in the district had. (It was an antiquated system with flaws known to the IT world) Their cards only worked for the buildings they worked in. So the cards, electric doors, and alarms must be controlled at the school level, not at the district admin office. Right?
So how was I going to get a hold of a keycard long enough to scan and duplicate it onto a new card? It required a laptop and a special piece of equipment that I couldn't just bring to school while everyone was there. I thought "I can't access the security system and lookup badge codes with the IT master password I know, that defeats the whole purpose of this test. Where's the next vulnerability in this system?" Then I realized, there's a gate to the staff parking lot that's opened with keycards, but not their district cards, they had separate cards for the gate. I scanned the entire network for this gate controller, but couldn't find it anywhere. "Good Job school district, leaving your gate system closed circuit. It's inconvenient to program, but definitely more secure."
Okay, so where is this gate controller located? I've got a district master key so when I find it, I can access it locally. I look at the gate itself and see a freshly paved line in the concrete leading from the gate motor to the Aux Gym. "Okay, its somewhere in the Aux Gym."
I wait until Saturday during Football practice, the Aux Gym is disarmed and the front door is open. Everyone's out on the field so no one will see me enter the building. "Hey there's a closet by the front door I'll try this one first." There it fucking is. The gate controller is mounted on the wall. I open up the panel and attach my laptop. "Fuck there's a password, what could it be? It's not going to be the master password, this isn't connected to the network." I look at the circuit board, there's a label with "admin - (name of city school is located in)". Unbelievable, that's the login. "District IT People are paid six-figures to make this shit up? Seriously?"
I accessed the swipe log and I noticed an interesting trend. Half the time someone swipes into the parking lot, there's an access denial that immediately precedes a valid gate card swipe. "They must be swiping their district cards first instead of the gate card!" Lucky for me, this system records badge numbers when access is denied. So I had access to several district keycard codes, protected by a password that is the name of our city. Wonderful. I sift through the logs and notice the names of three district janitors, all three with the preceding access denied messages and codes, followed by their valid gate cards. I remembered these people from my previous schools, so their district cards must open multiple buildings. (Remember when I mentioned that district buildings weren't firewalled off from each other on the network?)
I took one of the codes and encoded it onto a blank keycard with that special piece of equipment that cost me $20 on eBay, walked out the front door and scanned the card. I heard a loud click and the reader light turned green. Holy shit, I now have a DGM key and a keycard that disarms EVERY school alarm system in the district. Nothing is off limits to me. Part 2 complete.
I call up my friend $F who somewhat knew what I was doing, and once nighttime rolled around, we decided to visit almost every school in the district. Just to see if it actually worked. And boy it did. We easily swiped into each school, the alarm automatically disarmed, and the DGM key opened every door in every building we visited. I found myself thinking "Good Lord, security here is even more atrocious than I thought". We had the decency to rearm each building before we left and once we were done, we planned on telling the IT guy on monday when we went to class.
Well, my dumbass decided to try one more school the next day (Sunday Morning), I swiped in and within 10 seconds, the (middle school) principal walked through the door and asked "Who are you?" I could've bolted out the front door, but I wanted to be honest because they were gonna find out on monday anyways. So I told him who I was and what I was doing (very short version).
He took me to his office and had me sit down while he made a phone call. It was someone at the district office. All I heard him say was "I can't distinguish this from my own badge, its a perfect copy but it has his name and photo on it". He hangs up. Asks me more questions and it eventually leads to the DGM key. This especially panics him because he knew what it was but didn't know anyone other than the District Ops manager that had one. He makes another phone call, "This is (principal name) at (middle school) I need someone to come down here now." I'm thinking "Okay, someone from the district will be here to ask more questions, cool."
Boy was I wrong, within a few minutes about six police officers show up and start asking me questions. I'm honest, I tell them my plan and what I did. They all looked utterly confused by the end of my short explanation. They took the keycards and DGM key and asked me to call my parents to pick me up. They search my car and find pot in the trunk (oops). So there's a charge right there. They said they'll notify us later once they talk to the district and I was released into my dad's custody.
A few hours later, my mom gets a phone call from $VP saying I'm not to attend school monday and we will have a meeting that evening at the high school. "Okay, understandable. I haven't been able to explain myself. They're playing it safe."
Whoops wrong again!

IT Teacher: $ITT
District IT Director: $ITLady
Vice Principal: $VP
Cops: $PD
We arrive at the school for the meeting, my IT teacher is sitting in the school office with a disappointed yet very proud look on his face. As we arrived we were called into the conference room, I expected it to be just $VP, lmao no. It was $VP, two cops, and some random district official. My IT teacher was there just to translate the technical terms. I explain my whole plan, being interrupted many times by everyone to ask their questions. At one point $VP says "Jesus $ITT you're not supposed to be teaching this stuff!"
$ITT: $VP, Do you realize the amount of critical thinking and work that went into this project?"
Well, after he says this, there's a knock on the door. "$VP, $ITLady is here"
"Random district official" leaves and $ITLady enters and sits down in front of me"
$VP: $M this is $ITLady, the District Director of IT. She has some questions for you.
$M: Ok
She proceeds to tear into me, asking "WHAT DID YOU BREAK, WHAT DID YOU HACK?!" I could literally see the veins popping out of her head. She was pissed the fuck off.
She couldn't accept that a bored teenage kid that just wanted to see if this was possible, was able to compromise her systems in one week. At one point the officers asked her to leave the room and take a break because she was getting so worked up.
Fast forward to after the meeting, the police took myself, my mom, $VP, and $ITT to my house and seized all of my electronic equipment. Everything from my cell phone, to my laptop, to my WiFi adapter and everything in between. My favorite part was when they were searching my computer bag. The police officer opened it, rummaged around for a bit, taking everything electronic out, then gently and over dramatically pulling a strand of condom wrappers out in front of everybody.
$Mom: *Glares at me* Previously not knowing I was having sex at 17
$Mom's new BF: *Leaves room immediately*
$Cops: *Looks at $VP not sure what to do*
$ITT: *Gently facepalms*
$M: Thinking "Fuck, this is bad"
$VP: *staring at the cops for about five seconds* "Okay well let's move on"
They all leave after seizing basically everything I own.

Fast forward to a few days later, I get a letter from the district saying I have been suspended pending expulsion. Great.
We attend the expulsion hearing, I say exactly what I said in the first meeting with $VP and the cops.
Get another letter two days later, I'm expelled. We appeal to the school board and the district's lawyers. They don't want to hear any of it. Appeal denied. They're pressing full charges. Okay I didn't know what the charges were but they were pressing them. Cool, great.

Two months later I meet with county Juvenile, I again explain to them my story, they're just as confused as the district people but my Juvenile rep is taken back by my calm demeanor and willingness to share all the details. By this point the district has done a through investigation and found no evidence that I stole or caused damage to property or their computer networks. They then Inform me I'm being charged with:
-- 9 counts of Felony Burglary 2
-- 3 counts of Class A Misdemeanor Computer Crime
-- 3 Counts of Class A Identity Theft
-- 1 Count of Poss. Controlled Substance on School Grounds
I'm also ordered not to use any electronic devices until I see the judge. This included something as simple as a TV remote.
Fuck Me

I have a few more meetings with the County Juvenile rep, she was actually a very nice person and was surprised I was assigned to her in the first place because she usually got the murders and rapists. She got to know me and my true intensions with the entire plan over the next month.
Before my first hearing, she (the county) recommended to the school district not to press charges. They felt this could be remedied in-district, since while crimes were committed, I wasn't aware of the crimes and there was obviously no bad intent.
During the hearing, my Juvenile rep and shitty court appointed lawyer explained my side and the district lawyer explained theirs. The judge was extremely confused by the whole situation, saying "we've never seen a case like this before, at this point I don't know how to proceed" The DA also looked equally as confused.
Judge asked the district's lawyer: "How do you want to proceed?"
Lawyer: We'll take this under further review
Judge: $M expect a call from your Juvenile rep this week. Adjourned.

Three days later, we receive a call from Juvenile. The district is pursuing all charges and wants $80,000 in restitution for a new district security system. Wonderful news.
I live in a constant state of panic for the next three months while waiting for the next court date. I end up going to the district's alternate school for a while while attending twice weekly meetings at juvenile.
Went a few more times in front of the judge, my lawyer, Juvenile, and district lawyers doing all the talking, explaining the entire case to the judge. The district still insisting I stole and damaged district property even though I never did and they ever found any evidence.
About seven months into this, the Judge had enough. She didn't want to hear anything more and was going to issue my disposition (ruling) at the next hearing.
She explained that $80,000 in restitution was ludicrous and the district was going to pay for their own security upgrades if they chose to.
She then looked at me and asked me to rise.
Judge: "I have three options here Mr. $M"
"Option 1, I dismiss all of the charges and we'll be done here
Option 2: I drop the marijuana charge, reduce all other Charges to Attempted (Misdemeanors), and sentence you to one year bench probation
Option 3: I send you to jail right now"
I almost lost it right there.
Judge: "Based on what I've heard from our Juvenile rep and read in the police reports, I'd like to go with Option 1 and dismiss the charges. But because of the sheer severity of the crimes on paper, I am unable to do that. So I am going with Option 2. I hereby sentence you to one year of bench probation and order you to pay restitution in the amount of $3,200 for district staff overtime. Good luck Mr. $M."
I don't remember what was said after that because I was so relieved I almost passed out.

After three months of thinking I was going to prison for 20 years, it was all over. I was numb for the rest of the day.
All in all, The whole experience only left me with severe depression and anxiety for a few years but hey I'm not in prison. Great, right?
Actually it ended up better than I thought. I ended up graduating from the alternate school's accelerated graduation program shortly after that. (The district wanted me out of their hair ASAP)
I received a full diploma from my regular High School at the end of my junior year. I got to essentially skip most of my junior and all of my senior year of HS. Ended up working my ass off and got a great IT job at a company I still work for today. And now I have IT Director as my title.
And that is how I royally fucked up by shaming the fuck out of my school district
Shove it $ITLady!

TL;DR I exploited security flaws in my school district's security system. They got royally pissed and tried to send me to prison. Instead the judge gave me a slap on the wrist and I graduated a year an a half early. Now have a great job in IT.

Edit: Some amount of proof that this isn't fake because I forgot people on the internet are asses
Edit2: random internet people, while yes, this story is extremely dumb and sounds extremely false, I swear on my life this story is 100% true. For the techies, I intentionally left out some details because they're boring to most people. If you have a question just ask.

How i left a party even before session 1 because of critical role

I catfished a former boss to get paid

As part of a strange medical study, I was offered $5,000 to be killed and revived in the hopes of discovering the afterlife. What I experienced will haunt me for the rest of my years.

"Alright, Jack. Are you ready?"
After being strapped down by the orderlies, an older gentleman with a white coat stepped over and looked down at me as my back caressed the cold, metal slab I was fastened to. I presumed this was Doctor Covenwood, the lab's head of operations.
"Uhhh... I guess so."
This was risky business. I would be humanely injected and gassed with various chemicals to render me medically dead. Then, I would be revived to report my findings as part of a study on near-death experiences and the afterlife. If I survived, $5,000 would be deposited into my bank account as payment.
"Don't worry, Jack. We've done this dozens of times so far and have yet to lose a single soul. You'll be fine."
I know what you're thinking and you're right; this was not legal by any stretch of the imagination. No one in their right mind would have even agreed to participate in such a study, but I was truly desperate. The pandemic left me jobless and the bills were piling up. An old college buddy who works for the lab knew about my situation and reached out to recruit me for the project.
"Alright, Jack. I'll be in the next room behind the one-way glass. You'll be able to hear me over the intercom. Once we start, there's no going back. This is your last chance. Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?"
I mulled it over for a moment, but the choice was clear. There were certainly other options at my disposal for recouping my financial losses, but that wasn't the only reason I agreed to take part in the study. The real reason I was risking my life ran much deeper than that.
"Let's do it, Doctor."
A smile spread across his face.
"That's the spirit!"
Doctor Covenwood scurried out to the control room and fired up the intercom as quick as he could, probably to get the ball rolling before I changed my mind.
"Remember, Jack, you'll only be gone for thirty seconds, then we'll bring you back. Still, it may seem a lot longer to you once you're... well, wherever it is you're going. Time dances to the beat of its own drum in some places. Retain what information you can upon waking and tell us what it is you've seen."
I nodded at the camera hanging above me from the ceiling.
"Alright, Jack. This is it. See you on the other side."
***
I remembered bracing myself for death, but it's all fuzzy after that; bits and pieces of memory floating in a vast ocean of consciousness. I can only recall the sensation of falling and the occasional voice whispering in my ear, though I could not for the life of me make out what it was saying. When I finally came to, the scene in front of me took form and revealed my surroundings.
However inexplicable it may seem, I was in what appeared to be the lobby of a large building. There were hardwood floors, lavish staircases, and gorgeous rays of light flooding the room from tall, stained-glass windows on every side of me. Directly in my line of sight was a desk and what appeared to be a receptionist. He looked up and smiled.
"You must be Jack. Please, come with me."
In an instant, without even getting up from his seat, the man was in front of me. Before I could react, he took me by the arm and we appeared somewhere upstairs by the balcony in front of a door.
"Here you are - Room 371. The Overseer will see you now."
And just like that, he vanished again.
Thanks. I guess.
Overwhelmed by everything, I didn't enter the room right away and instead leaned over the railing and surveyed the area. That's when I noticed a plethora of shelves lining the walls, each with their own collection of jars; a soft light emanating from within. I wanted to study them further, but was cut off by a booming voice that echoed through the hall.
"Come in, Jack. I haven't got all day."
It was coming from Room 371. Not wishing to further test the patience of whatever being was summoning me, I opened the door and walked in.
"Please, Jack. Have a seat."
Sitting at a desk in the room was a clean-cut man in turn-of-the-century attire, gesturing at the chair in front of me.
I sat and the man stared me down. If he was trying to intimidate me, it was working.
"Alright. On with it. I know you must have questions. Fire away."
He was right. I did.
"Where are we?"
He chuckled.
"You humans are so predictable. Well, for lack of a self-descriptor, this is what you would refer to as the hereafter - a place where all souls go upon expiration."
"So Heaven is... a cathedral?"
He chuckled again.
"Who said anything about Heaven? There is no good or bad place, just this. And no, it's not a cathedral. It appears different to every departed soul. You see it as a cathedral, another might see it as a monastery, or even a small cottage tucked away in the hills. Whatever peaceful scenery makes the transition easier."
He adjusted himself in his chair, raised his hand, and lifted a single finger.
"One more question, Jack. Then we move on to more pressing matters."
This was my chance. The reason I was there in the first place.
"Can I see my wife and daughter?"
He didn't expect that, turning his chair to face me.
"Ahh, I see. Now I understand. Is that why you joined Doctor Covenwood's little study group? That I wouldn't have predicted."
He saw the surprise in my expression.
"Oh yes, Jack. I know all about the good doctor and his trials. He works for us."
My surprise turned to confusion.
"Works for you? What do you mean?"
The Overseer raised his hand again and snapped his fingers. All at once we were transported to another space. It was small and white. Too white. And the lighting was strange. Brighter than your average room, but still dimmer than a hospital. It was off-putting. To make matters worse, I was strapped to another table, completely immobile in the center of the room. The Overseer stood by and picked up tools from a rolling cart. Needles, blades, among other sharp utensils.
"I can't believe a human would risk his own life on the off-chance he might be reunited with loved ones. It's admirable, I suppose, but no, Jack, you will not see Charlotte and Leslie. We have far more important business to attend to."
My heart was pounding. I had no idea what he was up to, but I knew it couldn't be anything good.
"What's going on? What are you doing?"
He cracked a smile.
"Well, Jack, what the good doctor failed to let you in on was that our agreement involves him sending us wayward souls. In exchange, we offer him information about our world."
He walked around to the opposite side of me with the cart and pushed it up against the table. I winced and let out a small scream. He laughed.
"You see, Jack, human souls are a delicacy here. The taste is so... intoxicating."
He closed his eyes and trembled.
"We were never meant to devour souls, but we've been hear for so long. Billions of years. Maybe more. We, like all things, need stimulation. To that end, we face but one obstacle. The pesky laws of this realm dictate that we can neither lie nor take what isn't ours. It's a failsafe of the Creator's design, put in place to keep us from harming you, making it physically impossible to extract your soul without consent. You must give it to us willingly."
Though frightened, I mustered up enough courage to respond.
"Why would I do something like that?"
He replied with a horrible grin.
"That's the beauty of our arrangement. When a normal soul dies, we give them the option. Let us cut you open and take your soul, or live in a jar for all eternity. There's almost no incentive to hand it over, so almost everyone chooses the latter option. In your case, your time isn't up. The doctor is waiting on the other side to revive you, but I won't let him unless you give me what I want! Time will remain still until your soul is mine. Your thirty seconds will never end."
He licked his lips in anticipation.
"If you want to go back, just say the word. Otherwise, get comfortable."
It was a lot to process. Still, none of it mattered. Seeing my wife and daughter again was the only thing keeping me going. Knowing that I couldn't be with them eliminated any incentive I would have had to continue living.
"No. You can't have it. I'll stay."
His smile vanished as he threw the cart and grabbed me by the shoulders, placing his face directly over mine. His eyes were now red and his mouth full of dagger-like teeth that overlapped one another in a grotesque pattern.
"You will give me your soul and I will rip away every last fiber of your flesh to get it."
He dug a silver blade into my chest and drooled over the wound. It was like battery acid. Worse than any pain I had ever felt before. I screamed in agony. He backed away, wiped his chin, and his face returned to normal.
"Sorry about that. I got a little carried away. Still, you will agree to my terms, or suffer further torment."
The pain was immense, but I would not bow to him.
"No. I refuse."
His grin returned.
"You misunderstand, Jack. The torture you will experience is not of a physical nature."
He snapped his fingers and we were transported again, somewhere else entirely.
***
I was alone, in a familiar forest; one just outside town where we liked to camp from time to time. The sun was setting as the evening drew near. The air was still and the wildlife quiet.
This was the night they died.
"What do you think, Jack? I'd say it looks almost identical."
The Overseer appeared before me.
"What the hell is this?"
His lips stretched wide across his cheeks.
"Just a recreation of the events that led up to your family's death."
I looked at him in disbelief.
"You remember, don't you? You were out here gathering firewood while they played by the lake."
A tear rolled down my cheek.
"Stop it!"
He continued.
"When Leslie fell, bumped her head on the dock, and then sank deep beneath the water? Charlotte called out to you, but you were nowhere to be found."
It happened as he spoke of it.
"Jack, she fell in. Jack, help! Oh my god, she's unconscious. Jack!"
Just as I did that night, I dropped the branches in my hand and ran as fast as I could towards the lake. Recreation or not, I couldn't ignore my family.
"Your wife jumped in to save her, but her legs were far too weak to swim."
The Overseer appeared at every tree I passed, his voice staying with me every step of the way.
"The physical therapy worked wonders, but she had only been out of her wheelchair for a month."
He was right. On her way to work, Charlotte was struck by a drunk driver. She survived, but her spine suffered a lot of damage. The doctors weren't sure she would walk again. This camping trip was supposed to be a celebration. It was the first thing Charlotte wanted to do when she was upright again.
"Stop it, you bastard!"
Charlotte continued to call out for me.
"Jack! Jack!"
Her voice was muffled by the water she was treading. There was a sickening gurgle in between her outbursts; a gut wrenching sound that haunted my every nightmare for months to come and rang in my ears even after waking.
"You arrived at the lake, but it was too late."
I ran over, tears wetting my face, and pulled Charlotte and Leslie from the water. The Overseer stayed close and observed. I tried my best to administer chest compressions and CPR, but it was no use. My girls were dead, and I could do nothing but sob over their corpses.
"Alright, Jack. Time for Round 2!"
The Overseer snapped his fingers and we were back in the forest. Soon enough, I heard Charlotte's voice, once again crying out for help. To my dismay, the sequence of events had begun again.
I turned to the Overseer, standing by my side, and took a swing, but there was no connection. My fist stopped inches from his smug face, halted by an unseen force. He cackled in response.
"Why are you doing this?!"
"You know why, Jack! Give me your soul, or submit to this existence! You will be stuck here forever, left to relive the worst night of your life again and again!"
I ran to the lake. Faster this time. Still, when I arrived, they were gone.
"That's right, Jack. No matter what happens, this will be the conclusion. You will never make it in time. Never."
We appeared back in the forest.
"What will it be, Jack?"
I ran again. The Overseer followed.
"No. I won't do it. I can save them, this time. I know I can."
The Overseer's eyes became red as he moved from tree to tree.
"THEN SUFFER!"
Charlotte continued to call out for me, I continued to run. After it was done, it started again. And again. And again. All the while, the Overseer stayed and watched and laughed. Eventually, I cried myself dry. I pressed on anyway, determined to save them, even if it was all part of an elaborate illusion. I needed this. More than the Overseer knew.
Eventually, he interrupted.
"Stop, Jack."
I ignored him at first.
"Jack, stop."
I ran as fast as I could, Charlotte's voice as my beacon, well on my way to another lakeside funeral.
"STOP, NOW!"
The Overseer stepped in front of me. The scene around us vanished. We were now surrounded by darkness; a mysterious place devoid of any and all light.
"If you truly insist on continuing this run down memory lane, then I think it's time we changed some things. Have fun, Jack. This will be your life now."
He snapped his fingers and I was back in the woods. This time, I was completely alone and a dark fog hung above the forest's canopy, cloudy and still. Focused, I ran past the trees, but Charlotte's voice never met my ear.
Something was amiss.
***
I arrived at the lake moments later and was greeted with the usual, horrific sight. Charlotte and Leslie, face-down on the surface of the water. I pulled them out, as I had so many times before, but something changed when their bodies touched the shore.
They stood up.
Charlotte and Leslie's lifeless bodies now stood upright before me, eyes darker than the deep abyss they were pulled from. Water spilled from their mouths as they walked toward me. Charlotte then spoke.
"You killed us, Jack. You killed us."
I backed away in terror, sobbing the whole way.
"Charlotte, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Leslie stepped ahead.
"Why didn't you save me, Daddy?"
I fell to my knees as they approached.
"I love you both so much and miss you terribly. Please forgive me. I never meant for this to happen."
Charlotte leaned over and put a cold hand on my head.
"You lived. You don't deserve forgiveness on top of that."
She pressed her lips to mine and the taste of death coated my tongue. I tried to disconnect, but she forced me against her with brute strength, her arms wrapped tightly around my head. Then, she began sucking the air from lungs.
Leslie chimed in.
"This is how we felt, Daddy. We couldn't breathe. Now you can be like us."
I struggled and struggled, but couldn't break free. Just before losing the last drop of air in my lungs, something happened. It was faint at first, but then grew to an audible whisper. I recognized it as it crept into my ear. It was the same disembodied voice that followed me to the afterlife. I could now tell that it was that of Charlotte. The real Charlotte.
Save us, Jack.
I didn't know what she meant.
Please, Jack. You have to make a deal with the Overseer.
Make a deal. Okay. I could do that.
By some miracle, I was able to rip myself away and inhale as much oxygen as I could in one breath. Then, before the corpses could attack again, I called out to the Overseer.
"Okay! I'm ready to bargain."
The dead versions of Charlotte and Leslie vanished. The sky opened up, revealing a full moon. Its dim light soaked small ripples in the lake as the Overseer walked up from behind.
"Had a change of heart, have we?"
I took another deep breath. Charlotte's whisper was still with me, guiding me the rest of the way.
He can't lie. Ask him some questions.
"Okay, I'll give you my soul, but first, I have questions."
He rolled his eyes.
"Fine. On with it then."
Ask him about the jarred souls. What he does with them.
"What do you do with the souls once they're jarred?"
He squinted at me, suspiciously.
"Where is this coming from, Jack?"
I was firm in my reply.
"Just answer me."
He clenched his teeth.
"Fine. For the most part, they stay, untouched, in their jars, on their shelves. But... sometimes... we take them out and ask again for consent."
Ask how.
"How do you do that? Torture?"
His eyes widened at the word.
"Of course, Jack. What other way is there?"
Ask about us.
"What about Charlotte and Leslie then? Do you torture them?"
He leaned in and snickered.
"Yes. The same as I'm torturing you now. They relive this night just as you have. Your wife is strong, but I'll break her. Then they're souls will be mine, just as yours will be. A matching set if there ever was one."
My blood was boiling. I wanted to lash out, but Charlotte's voice soothed me.
Save us, Jack.
The pieces clicked into place.
"Alright. I'm going to give you a choice."
The Overseer scoffed at me.
"You're going to give me a choice?"
"Yes. I can guarantee you that Charlotte won't give in to your head games and neither will I - not so long as we have each other. You can either keep trying and torture us until the end of time - or, if you have better things to attend to, and I'm sure you do, you can let me go."
He looked shocked.
"Let you go?"
I continued.
"No more torturing my wife and daughter and allow the doctor to revive me. When I die, my soul is yours to do with as you please. It's the only guarantee that you'll get any of us."
He stood back and pondered for a moment.
"You make a compelling argument Jack. Normally, I wouldn't even consider a deal like this, but I've wasted enough time on you three as it is. As such, here is my counter offer. I'm feeling generous, so I'll offer you two years on Earth with your soul intact and your family will rest during that time. Then, you will die, and I will retrieve all three of your souls. Your familial bond can serve as consent for the lot of you."
There was no way I would accept those terms, but Charlotte's voice chimed in.
Take the deal, Jack. It will be fine. We'll have two years to find a way out of it.
I didn't like it, but I had to listen to my wife. She always knew best.
"Okay. You have yourself a deal."
The Overseer smiled and then snapped his fingers.
***
I awoke in the lab to Doctor Covenwood at my side, tending to the wound in my chest, left by the Overseer.
"Oh good, you're awake!"
Knowing the hand he played in this, I looked up at him in disgust.
"I know. I know. I'm sorry, Jack. It's just the way it has to be. This research is vital to the progression of mankind."
He finished bandaging me up, undid my straps, and backed away, probably expecting a fist to the face.
"You're just lucky I was able to make a deal with the Overseer to protect my family."
I stood up and Doctor Covenwood stepped out and into the control room, opting to speak through the intercom.
"Actually, Jack, that was all a part of the plan. One soul at a time used to cut it, but as of late, the Overseer wants more."
He let out a loud sigh before continuing.
"There's no way out of this, I'm afraid. In two years time, you'll be done for. I hope you understand."
The sound of tapping away at a keyboard came through the speaker, followed by a voice. Charlotte's voice.
"Save us, Jack."
My heart sank.
"I used old recordings of your wife and created a simple program that would allow me to alter my voice to sound like hers. Everything I said over the intercom, you were able to hear on the other side. I'm so sorry, Jack."
Oh my god. What have I done?

Fallout 76: Inventory Update Notes – January 26, 2021

Today’s update brings a Stash increase, a variety of improvements for your inventory and U.I., a new wave of bug fixes, and more. Read on for the full list of changes in Fallout 76.

Update Highlights

Store More Stuff!: We've increased the Stash limit to 1,200 pounds so you have even more room for loot.
Sort Your Inventory with Ease: Stay on top of all the gear you’ve been collecting by using three new tabs in your inventory: “New,” “Armor,” and “Food/Drink.”
What’s Weighing You Down?: From now on, when you select a stack of items in your inventory, the menu will show you the total weight of that stack.
Know Before You Go: Player Vending Machine tooltips on the map now displays how many 1-, 2-, and 3-star legendary items they’re selling.
Build Mode Color Update: Outlines in build mode now appear blue instead of green so that players with colorblindness can more easily differentiate between valid and invalid placement.

Update Version

Check today’s update version and download size for your platform of choice below:

PC (Bethesda.net): 1.5.1.26 (1.6 GB)
PC (Microsoft Store): 1.5.1.26 (5.0 GB)
PC (Steam): 1.5.1.26 (2.0 GB)
PlayStation 4: 1.5.1.25 (4.2 GB)
Xbox One: 1.5.1.25 (4.8 GB)

Inventory and User Interface Improvements

Stash Increase: Hold onto extra gear with a Stash increase! We've increased the amount of weight your Stash can hold by 50%, giving you 1,200 pounds to work with.
New Inventory Tabs: We’ve added a few new tabs to your inventory menus so that you can better organize your gear, from your snacks and Stimpaks, to your outfits and armor.
- New – This tab will keep track of all the items you gather during a play session, sorted by newest to oldest.
- If you already have a stackable item in your inventory, like Steel Scrap, then new Steel Scrap you pick up will not appear in the “New” tab. Instead, it will be added to your existing stack.
- Additionally, the “New” tab will reset if you leave your current world.
- Armor – We’ve split Armor into its own menu tab so that you can keep your defensive gear separate from your other Apparel.
- Food/Drinks – Your food and drinks are now split out from “Aid” into their own “Food/Drinks” inventory tab.
- Please note that your Chems and Serums will remain in “Aid.”
Stack Weight: What’s weighing you down? From now on, when you select a stacked item in your inventory, the Pip-Boy will show you the individual weight and the stack weight.
Vending Machine Map Previews: The tooltip that appears when you’re previewing another player’s Vending Machines on the Map will now show the number of 1-, 2-, and 3-star legendary weapons and armor they’re selling. This way, you’ll have more information about the legendary goodies players are selling before you choose to Fast Travel to their C.A.M.P.s.
- Additionally, Vending Machine categories that are empty will no longer appear in the tooltip to help you more easily see what types of items players do have for sale.

Additional User Interface Updates

Atomic Shop: We’ve added a button to each category page in the Atomic Shop that will let you show or hide the items you already own, so that you can browse what’s still available with less clutter.
Build Mode Visual Improvement: We’ve changed the color of the outline that appears when you build objects in your C.A.M.P. from green to light blue, which should be more friendly for our builders who have colorblindness.
- This change is only visible when the object you're trying to place is in a valid location, and invalid placement outlines are still red.

Daily Ops

Elder Tier Rewards: In response to community feedback, we’ve adjusted Daily Ops rewards so that you will always receive an item from the rare rewards pool whenever you complete an Op fast enough to reach Elder Tier.

Spread the Love: New Challenges and Rewards

Starting today, and lasting until February 16, you can claim a free “Heart Wrencher” Skin for the Pipe Wrench in the Atomic Shop, and then use it to complete Challenges that will unlock new cosmetic and consumable rewards!
- Earn Lunchboxes, Perk Card Packs, and Repair Kits by defeating enemies with your Heart Wrencher every day during the Spread the Love event.
- You can also claim outfits, and even a new variation of the Backwoods Bungalow, by completing Weekly Challenges with your Heart Wrencher equipped.

Bug Fixes

Allies

Settler Forager: Corrected missing player dialog options for Settler Forager.

Art & Graphics

Apparel: Fixed texture issues with the Samurai Helmet.
Apparel: Reduced the gap between the Deep Cave Hunter Backpack and the player’s back.
Apparel: The Pip-Boy light no longer shines behind the player in the Brotherhood Recon Helmet.
Apparel: Fixed a texture issue with the Fasnacht Beret.
Décor: Updated the explosion seen when destroying Wrapped Presents.
Décor: The flame on Skull Candles no longer appears offset from the wick.
Items: Updated the explosion effects when destroying Mr. Handy Fuel and Portable Fuel Tanks.
Lights: Yellow lighting effects no longer persist after the Color Wheel has been turned off.
Lights: Adjusted the lighting on the “Kill, Laugh, Love” Sign so that the word “Laugh” is no longer too bright.
Power Armor: Headlamps no longer shine in an incorrect direction when wearing a T-65 Power Armor Helmet that has a paint applied.
Power Armor: Addressed missing textures and reduced clipping issues with the Captain Cosmos Power Armor.
Power Armor: War Rider Power Armor now properly protects the player’s posterior.
Vending Machines: Adjusted the explosion when destroying the Slocum’s Joe Vending Machine.
Weapons: Mind over Matter’s visual effects no longer appear to come from the player’s shoulder in third-person view.

C.A.M.P. and Workshops

Exploit: Addressed an exploit affecting item storage in the Stash box.
Shelters: It is now easier to place structures, like the Seedy Shed, Backwoods Bungalow, and others inside a Shelter, as long as there is enough space to do so.
Stairs: Stairs can now snap to the front of the Brotherhood of Steel Scout Tower.
Super Mutant Tube: Players can no longer get stuck inside the Super Mutant Tube while building it.

Challenges

World: The “Discover Beckley” subchallenge for the “Discover Locales in the Ash Heap” Challenge can now be completed.

Daily Ops

Rewards: Fixed an issue that could result in no rare reward being granted if the item the player would have received was a non-tradeable item Plan that they had already learned. Now, players will always receive a reward when this occurs.
Operation Report: Addressed a visual issue that could incorrectly mark reward tiers as already earned in the Daily Ops Operation Report.
- Please Note: Daily Ops rewards reset at 12:00 p.m. ET each day.

Diseases

Rad Worms: Rad Worms now only increases Radiation damage taken from consuming food and drinks.

Enemies

Spawning: Fixed an issue causing enemies to sometimes spawn grouped together at an incorrect location.
Giant Hermit Crabs: Players can no longer clip through Giant Hermit Crabs.

Items

Apparel: The Feral Ghoul Mask and Cuddles the Clown Mask no longer obscure the Pip-Boy light.
Apparel: The Plague Doctor Mask now correctly states that it prevents air borne diseases.
Apparel: The Swamp Camo Hazmat Suit can now be repaired.
Armor: Raider Armor now correctly works with the Funky Duds and Sizzling Style Legendary Perks.
Armor: Recon Armor now correctly adjusts to the players body style.
Flora: Thistle now correctly turns into Irradiated Thistle when nuked. Irradiated Thistle can now be harvested for Raw Fluorescent Flux.
Magazines: Fixed an issue causing “Live & Love 8” to cancel out the Very Well Rested bonus from a fourth Lunchbox.
Magazines: The “Astonishingly Awesome Tales 3” bonus has been changed to allows the player to breathe underwater and regain health while swimming.
Mods: Weapons with mods that add fire damage, like the War Glaive with the Flaming Blade mod, now work with the Friendly Fire Perk.
Mods: The Heating Coil mod now correctly states that it deals fire damage.
Mods: Applying Brawler Armor mods to Brotherhood Recon Armor arm pieces now boosts unarmed damage by 7.5% each.
Mods: The Reduced Ammo Weight Legendary effect now correctly reduces explosive ammo weight.
Mods: Adding Pocketed mods to a Boiled Leather Chest Piece no longer incorrectly increases the item’s durability.
Plans: Fixed an issue that caused players to unlearn Plans for Lawn Flamingos and Wooden Desks.
Power Armor: The Targeting HUD mod now only highlights hostile targets.
Power Armor: The Explosive Vents mod has been renamed “Cooling Vents.” Cooling Vents slow Fusion Core drain by 5%.
Weapons: Fixed an issue where certain weapons that shoot multiple projectiles were taking too much condition damage.
Weapons: The Crusader Pistol Reflex sights no longer appear distorted when the Pyro receiver is equipped.
Weapons: The Stabilized Bull Barrel now correctly counts towards mods learned on the .44.
Weapons: Baton that have a paint or skin applied can now be changed back to their default appearance.
Weapons: Changed the Plasma Cutter’s speed description to Medium.
Weapons: Crossbows can now be changed back to their standard frame.
Weapons: Players can now correctly reapply the Wounding mod to a Bone Club after switching it to No Upgrade.

Mutations

Plague Walker: The Plague Walker Mutation's description no longer incorrectly states that it removes Disease durations. This was only a description change, the Mutation's functionality has not been adjusted.

NPCs

Brotherhood: Brotherhood of Steel Hopefuls and Initiates will no longer take damage when nuked.
Brotherhood: NPCs will no longer say hello to the player while they are talking to Russell Dorsey.
Brotherhood: Addressed dialogue issues with NPCs during “Property Rights.”
Putnam Brothers: Now have appropriate dialog if neither were recruited to Fort Atlas when the player revisits them.
Settlers: Fixed the collision on Settlers at East Mountain Lookout Tower.
Scribe Valdez: No longer comments on documents players have already collected during Mother of Invention.
Scribe Valdez: Fixed an issue that prevented Valdez from playing certain voice lines during “Mother of Invention.”
Scribe Valdez: Valdez's clipboard will no longer clip through her while in a downed animation.
Vendors: The Flatwoods Vendor will no longer sometimes appear invisible to players.

Performance and Stability

Client Stability: Fixed multiple crashes that could occur during combat.
Client Stability: Addressed a crash that could occur while scrolling the Notes tab in the Pip-Boy.
Connectivity: Fixed an issue that could cause PC players to receive a “Disconnected due to modified game files” error during normal gameplay and kick them from their current world.
Server Stability: Addressed an issue that could cause a server crash.
Performance: Addressed an issue that could cause the game client to hitch while viewing the Aid tab in the Pip-Boy.
Performance: Addressed an issue that could cause the game client to hitch when sorting the Pip-Boy by spoil.
Performance: Fixed an issue that could result in framerate drops inside Fort Atlas.

Perks

Dodgy: Now has a 2 second cooldown on AP drain. The damage reduction is still active during the AP cooldown. This prevents players’ AP from completely draining when hit by high rate of fire weapons.
Friendly Fire: The health regeneration effects from Friendly Fire no longer stack, but heal faster. This makes it so all weapons heal at the same rate.
Stabilized: Fixed an issue that prevented Stabilized from working correctly while wearing Power Armor.
Super Duper: Fanfare and sound effects no longer incorrectly play when crafting Legendary Items.

Quests and Events

Disarming Discovery: Dagger will no longer attempt to talk to the player if they are in the shed.
Disarming Discovery: Dagger’s Key will now longer reappear on her corpse after logging out and back in if the player has already looted it.
Dogwood Die Off: Fixed an issue where the quest target does not appear correctly on the trunk.
Fasnacht Day: Players will now correctly earn a three-star legendary item upon event completion.
Fasnacht Day: Super Mutant Suiciders will no longer continue to spawn after Fasnacht ends.
Fasnacht Day: Addressed an issue that could cause the Master of Ceremonies to spawn outside of the event area.
Fasnacht Day: The Robotics Expert Perk can no longer be used to Hack the Parade Marcher bots.
Fasnacht Day: Looting Porcelain Steins during the Fasnacht Day event no longer prevents players from picking up additional Porcelain Steins during the next Fasnacht on that same world.
Field Testing: The Putnam parents are now more visible during the intro scene.
Field Testing: Fixed a rare issue that could cause the player to see a blank dialogue box when speaking with Paladin Rahmani.
Forbidden Knowledge: Addressed several issues affecting Forbidden Knowledge and Technical Data, and this quest has been re-enabled.
- Please Note: Technical Data can no longer be dropped, traded, or Sold.
Mother of Invention: The Mysterious Component now remains a quest item after relogging.
Mother of Invention: The bag of dirt in the Ultracite Battery housing will no longer disappear when the player returns to the instance.
Mother of Invention: Addressed an issue that could cause Scribe Valdez to not fight back when attacked by enemies.
Mother of Invention: The Mysterious Component in “Mother of Invention” will now display an inventory message when the player extracts it.
Mother of Invention: Addressed a lore continuity issue in Rahmani and Shin’s dialogue regarding Paladin Taggerdy.
Over and Out: The animation of the transmitter getting destroyed no longer plays prematurely.
Overseer, Overseen: Dialogue and quest will now progress appropriately when returning the security footage to Head Engineer Brass.
The Best Defense: A quest target now correctly points to Paladin Rahmani after being directed to speak with the Brotherhood upstairs.
The Best Defense: Fixed an issue that could cause more enemy waves to spawn than intended during the quest’s final encounter.
Trade Secrets: The quest marker to collect the Pip-Boy Construction kit now consistently points to Vault-Tec University.

Sound

Scoreboard: Entering the Scoreboard quickly no longer causes the sound to disappear.

User Interface

Atomic Shop: Once owned, the Brotherhood of Steel Icon now correctly appears in the Player Icons page in the Atomic Shop.
Fast Travel: Added an error message when trying to fast travel to a C.A.M.P. that the player is too close to.
Map: Fixed an issue where the map could be opened while viewing a terminal.
Map: Fixed a rare issue that could cause item counts in a player’s Vending Machine preview on the Map to mismatch the number of items in that Vending Machine.
Notifications: Fixed an issue where fanfare would sometimes not play after completing a timed challenge.
Perk Coins: Fixed a visual issue that could cause the player’s Perk Coin total to display an incorrect number of Perk Coins after scrapping Perk Cards.
Pip-Boy: Items with long names are no longer cut off in the Pip-Boy.
Quests: Fixed an issue causing the “Forging Trust” objective tracker to remain on the screen after the quest was completed.
Scoreboard: Fallout 1st exclusive rewards are now claimed separately from standard rewards on the Scoreboard.
Social Menu: Improved mouse controls on pop-ups in the social menu.
Teams: The Team UI will no longer flash while repairing items at a workbench.

World

World: Fixed several locations in the world where players could become stuck.
World: Fixed several locations where players could view out of world.

Social Influence, Tara Reade, Deplatforming, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, Presented Through the Observations of a Former Poster

Chapo was banned a while ago, but my opinions have only been put together recently. I must put a trigger warning at the start of this post, as it involves discussion of both Tara Reade and my own trauma, as my beliefs on the Reade story were intensely intertwined with how I was processing my trauma at the time.
This won't have nearly as many sources as the usual effortpost, because a lot of the concepts in play are pretty straightforward and simple, a lot of them are things I've personally interacted with and implemented, and I'd be linking to a lot of wiki articles. The mechanics of how these concepts were used is the sneaky part, and building understanding of what any people in your life drifting to the extreme are feeling is important.
One source I do wish to share is one of the organizations whose research was used in developing my understanding of intentional social marketing while I was going to college, and while I don't think a lot of people are formally setting out saying "I'm going do social marketing interventions to get my audience/others I interact with online to hate Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron," but I do think they're using a lot of the same principles to relatively powerful effect.
https://www.thensmc.com/content/what-social-marketing-1
https://www.thensmc.com/publications

TWs under this line

Sexual Assault, Emotional Manipulation, Mental Health, Emotional Abuse, Depression

And, without further ado:

Intro

I used to be incredibly hard left, briefly a Stalinist, cooled down to just being a person who screeches online about Nancy Pelosi, eventually realized a bunch of things that we'll get to in this post, and realized market forces are useful if directed properly. I don't actually know where I stand but it's somewhere in this realm (currently calling myself a centrist between neolibs and social dem) and this seems like the best forum to post this, because people should know how the mechanics of this aspect of the lefty propaganda influence machine works.
Anybody who manipulates others in bad faith, playing on their emotional vulnerabilities so they'll buy and push literal misinformation, is an enemy to discourse, and I'm fairly sure the vast majority of people here will agree with this premise.
One of the few things I'm actually qualified to talk a little bit about is social marketing, that is, marketing a product, belief, candidate, behavioral change, etc, vis-a-vis the real or perceived social interactions we have and the opinions we think others have about us. It's interacting with the beliefs we have, interacting with why people do behaviors, what social incentives and disincentives and other barriers they have to doing something. This is not about changing belief, but behavior.
I took three practicums in this shit in college, I fucking love it.
And so it hit me like a truck when I realized I believed that Biden was a literal fascist and rapist (WE'LL FUCKING GET TO THAT PARTICULAR ONE LATER) almost entirely because of the techniques that I had mostly seen utilized to get people to use less water and electricity, to attend a city council meeting, or recycle.

Social Expectations

What were these techniques? The ones I was most interested in were primarily based on establishing social expectations. In the context of recycling, it's things like depicting people who litter as irresponsible and uncaring, encouraging people not to leave the lights on when they leave their house since it looks wasteful and silly to do so.
These influences can be incredibly pervasive while remaining subtle in how they function. If you get the owner of every coffee shop in your town and also the public library and elementary school to have up a poster or sign about some issue, you aren't actually convincing people to do anything by the sign's presence and ability to be read alone.
The purpose of the signs is to show that the owners of the shops care, the members of the community care, the people you interact with care. In short, it gives you this subtle influence of thinking people around you care about it and are willing to say so and encourage others to do so publicly. It is expected that others will push it, encourage it. And then, you feel a little weird if you aren't doing it. Ever smoked a cigarette, drank a beer, hit a joint, that you didn't fully want to but still felt like it'd be socially best to? Ever donated to a charity you know nothing about and felt briefly indecisive on but then you thought of what the sad child in the picture would think and feel if you said "No, you're not worth three dollars?" It happened to you. It does every day, every time an ad plays on how cool a person in it is, every time sometime references a group identity while making a statement.
If you're an unethical propagandist, it can take the form of banning anybody who says a single positive word about Joe Biden from your community, or even anybody who thinks that any of the most hyperbolic critiques are absurd. Harassing people who don't fall in line, who express opinions outside of the explicitly approved list, etc. Again, this doesn't influence the people being shouted down. *It encourages onlookers who agree with the people acting this way to also act this way, to become more extreme." If someone sees that people who disagree get treated like garbage and they start getting hooks in this community, they start needing to believe it.
These methods are most effective on people that are already strongly in favor of something and need reinforcement to go actually do a behavior, OR people who are currently apathetic BUT are in a social context where people care about it and encourage others to do so as well. The effectiveness increases if they're emotionally vulnerable, if they're lonely and detached, if they don't feel super strongly about anything and are looking for meaning, all that. Effectively, people who are more vulnerable to outside influence are more vulnerable to everything that comes with it, and resultantly to the places they spend most of their time.

My Own Experience On Chapo Before I Was Really, Really, REALLY into it

I've never been good at social interaction, have been Very Online since I was 13. I was an autistic trans kid at a conservative rural school with weird body language and loads of sensory issues, I understandably couldn't really interact with most of my peers very well.
In short, at this point in my life I felt like a dejected loser. I browsed a lot of online communities, made a lot of friends, felt better but drifted away from a lot of them from time to time, and in waxing and waning periods of more and less contact, I'd substitute that empty time with content. When Bernie showed up, it became boatloads of lefty content. A bit unclear on my timeline but it was people like Kulinski, Piker, TYT, all of "breadtube" from 2015 to midway through 2020.
This is tbh a bit embarrassing to admit given how I feel about it in retrospect, but...
I posted there fairly obsessively, or I should say browsed. Constantly. It was the first link in my bookmark bar and I clicked it a lot. I loved Chapo. I made a lot of comments far down in threads pulling "dunks" on people who were part far right fascists picking fights but also with a lot of people who were just frustrated with a hundred thousand jackasses larping in unison about their correctness. It was all about being the cool person, getting the approval, acting in a way that made me "good" by the standards set there.It didn't matter what the views I was arguing with were, it just mattered that I was right, and that they were wrong.
The Democratic Primaries were happening. Bernie started to lose. People started being massive doomers about everything. My mental health was in the gutter. I was withdrawing from friends I had in real life, I was a bit agoraphobic, all that.

My Breaking Point: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love their LARP

I will now put another TW and spoiler warning here as it is a description of bad, bad things an ex did that provide context but aren't strictly necessary to understand the post: The Tara Reade story broke. I had recently broken up with an incredibly horrifying ex, just a legit user. Most of my friends are convinced that she was a sociopath. She did deep and fundamentally violating things, both to my mind and body. She abused the fact that we were both trans women who had been abused to make me trust her to handle things. She had broken my ability to process a lot of my preexisting emotional issues without her, and she added a tat to my body that I won't describe here, as it is distinctive enough that you could identify me with it, as well as policing my body and behavior. I was violated a lot of times. That is all that needs to be said on her. Don't tell me if you do this, but dig back in my account to see my breakdown laid out in real time a year ago as I talk about everything happening, as well as some of what happened in my childhood that she took advantage of.
I was traumatized, as a result of what had happened to me, and I was re-traumatized by believing that the presumptive nominee of the Democratic ticket was someone that did things that awful. Chapo banned ANY dissent. If you mentioned anything pro-Biden or establishment or even fucking pro-lesser evil voting to avoid climate apocalypse death, you got banned.
A lot of the initial outrage was around this intercept article:
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/joe-biden-metoo-times-up/
And around the Soundcloud interview you can find by doing a ctrl+F for Katie Halper in that intercept article.
My opinion on the Tara Reade case now is that it's a blatant fabrication. The story changed over and over, every time to change a detail to look worse for Joe Biden or to make the story look credible again once a prior detail was shown to be false. Every witness who isn't personally connected to her denies the revamp of her story that makes it a full on sexual assault accusation. She has constantly and consistently lied for personal gain throughout her life and claimed to respect and admire the efforts of Joe Biden until 2019, changing a story she held stable for decades.
Here's a writeup that sums it up pretty well: https://medium.com/@macarthur.cliff/the-tara-reade-case-eight-things-the-media-wont-tell-you-27d3ca14978
I was depressed, traumatized, etc, and as such, I was incredibly vulnerable to influences. People in my life would get really concerned if I was browsing Chapo at all while I was talking to them because it kept sending me spiralling over my trauma, but I just couldn't stop going for it. Drowning myself in it. I was desperate to perpetually re-open the wound. I was falling away from everything. Friends. Religion. Relationships. My hobbies. My schoolwork. I barely passed my last semester, which was also mid-pandemic. Obsessively online.

My Part In Perpetuating This

After I got really deep in the shit, I got aggressively online. I got into arguments with literally hundreds of people about Joe Biden's rape accusations, across 3 or 4 platforms. I had it pushed into me that everyone who believes Joe isn't a literal monster is evil or ignorant and must be castigated or converted. I don't know how many people I convinced of this position but I do know that it's higher than 0. Than 5, 10. I turned this argument into part of my identity, as part of the way I dealt with and took power back from my abuser, and was treated with praise for doing so by a lot of people! I made compelling personal arguments about not voting out of protest for this man who I thought was as awful as the fucking literal sociopath who was manipulating me for years.
I privately encouraged a few other people to use me as a rhetorical weapon. To say "my friend was assaulted and is personally hurt by the concept that people who claim to support her and people like her will vote for Joe Biden." I had a sobbing breakdown the next time I was alone when my father didn't instantly buy it because "you know what happened to me."
I was making the social context and expectation manifest. By my aggression in establishing the expectation that people hate Joe, by letting others use me as an emblem of it, I was pushing it

Digging Out

This isn't the main point of the post, but I was asked elsewhere about it, so I should include here.
I dug out by improving my mental health, getting in contact with my non-dipshit-extremist-circlejerk supports again, getting back in therapy, doing things to feel self efficacy.
Also I watched a whole lot of Destiny videos and debates about leftism, and had a few people in my personal life talk to me about policy. (Lmao I'm still banned from Destiny's sub for being a former chapo user and they never respond to the unban request)
Watching people actually discuss concepts, especially people I used to look at as respectable or intelligent, and to see them get ripped apart was kind of a wake-up call. A big, big point in me realizing this was his debate with Pxie about the Tara Reade accusations, and how when I slowed down to look at everything I really, really didn't have a good reason to feel as strongly as I did other than other people encouraging me to.
Getting back into other hobbies, into religion, into other things I just enjoy engaging with and that actively improve my life, pulled me back from the edge of becoming just an ideologue.
I've stopped talking to a lot of the people who were my friends then. They were too committed to the bullshit. They were too mean to people who were outsiders, and I was one then. If you start expressing genuine doubt, pulling away, they'll either try to pull you in or kick you out if it's not working. Actually discussing the reality of the situation was a taboo. I don't know if it works for all other people like this but if people try to choose what I can and can't say for me it freaks me out. When I just said the same things they did I didn't notice.

Deplatforming

Another part of how I managed to get out was that one day I woke up and Chapo was just fucking gone. I was unironically weirdly aimless and listless for the next 3 days whenever I had downtime. I wasn't able to do my usual habit of triggering my PTSD by reading shitposts about Biden's evil or fake outrage about nonsense. I literally HAD TO do something else. There wasn't another place quite like Chapo, it had a unique vibe, a unique sense, a unique humor, and without it the aesthetic core of the bullshit I believed in was gone and my attachment to the issues Chapo cared most about slowly started to wane.

Miscellaneous Examples Of Establishing Social Expectations

I'm going to include here a few really obvious examples of people trying to clumsily make it so people think the only opinion it's acceptable to say it there.
Here's a TYT video about Amy Klobuchar where they lie and claim she said the opposite of what she did!
https://www.facebook.com/CenkUygurOfficial/videos/senator-amy-klobucharwhat-are-you-doing/734829663811319/
You see, they claim that anyone that agrees with her opinion is trying to "dumb their way out of helping Americans" and "just suck, just suck."
Her actual claim was that Trump showboating by threatening a veto on the 600 dollar checks when 2k checks weren't on the table was a threat to people because getting 600 dollars sucks less than getting 0 dollars, and getting continued unemployment is more relevant to a LOT of the people most affected by the pandemic.
By forcing the expectation that anyone who agrees with Klobuchar hates you and wants you to suffer, you make it so anyone who agrees with her gets attacked instantly.
https://youtu.be/vOvkPYqdjTE?t=3754
My next (this time timestamped!) example is Bri Joy-Gray debating Sam Seder about "Force the Vote," which I am including because it is content explicitly by and for the left, and Bri, as a former media director, is incredible at bowling people over rhetorically with performative outrage.
She is supposed to be talking to Sam Seder about the merits of forcing a Medicare for All vote by holding up the speakership. They both agree that the fundamental goal is to get a shared policy across. What does she do? She starts denouncing the way that Sam is unwilling to focus on the fight for the right of millions of people to healthcare. They already agree and she is both affecting strong emotion and acting unnecessarily aggressive at him claiming that trying to get your dream policy vote with a contingent of 6 people is probably unwise. She is again an example of creating and pushing an expectation that disagreeing makes you bad, and strongly agreeing makes you good.
The biggest whopper though, came recently. I don't need to give a single link because if you look at a single video on left youtube about stocks from a week ago, everybody I saw on the fucking PLANET but Destiny's stream and here were desperately promoting the working man's retail investment revolt, how it was fighting the man, getting one up on the big guys, and robinhood shutting down trades was just them STEALING IT from us. So I will link you one tweet in particular that epitomizes it.
https://twitter.com/KyleKulinski/status/1355573696119889921?s=20
Robinhood got the billion so it could OPEN UP TRADING AGAIN. Kyle is directly stating the opposite and follows it up by complaining that the critiques of him are pathetically stupid and need to try harder. If someone actually respected him and saw these takes they'd probably end up having some unpleasant kneejerk responses, and push them in casual conversation, pushing the cycle further.

Fin

Deplatforming people who spread misinformation in an inflammatory and manipulative way that actually screws people over generally does at least some good.
I might crash and go to sleep soon, but I will respond to anything when I wake up and for as long as I'm still up, though I can't promise the ability to go in deep on some of the stuff. But being able to identify when the driving force behind a political argument is social influence can be broadly useful to consider in understanding how a lot of beliefs spread.
edit for grammar.

[OT] Two years ago I responded to a prompt “You're a powerful dragon that lived next to a small kingdom. ... As the kingdom fell to invaders, a dying soldier approaches you with the infant princess, begging you to take care of her. Today, the Dragon’s Scion book 1, Dragonflame, is a published novel!

Hello everyone!
To repeat what the title said, (and get the full prompt, since it wouldn’t quite fit), two years ago I responded to this prompt:
[WP] You're a powerful dragon that lived next to a small kingdom. For centuries you ignored humanity and lived alone in a cave, and the humans also avoided you. As the kingdom fell to invaders, a dying soldier approaches you with the infant princess, begging you to take care of her
Well, I took that idea and decided the “invaders” weren’t of the “Across the mountain” kind and instead were the “from another world time,” and thus was born The Dragon’s Scion, a trilogy of books dealing with the the dragon-raised and empowered princess’s war against the alien invaders. Book one, Dragonflame, is out now, with more to follow in the coming months! Read the blurb below!
---
Tythel thought growing up under the wings of the last dragon, Karjon the Magnificent, would be the most unusual part of her life. It was only the beginning.
Finally, she’s come of age to begin her transformation into a half dragon. But just as the ritual completes, a steel ship bursts from the clouds, killing the dragon and tearing her world asunder.
The attack leaves Tythel alone and on the run from the alien invaders. The same ones that conquered her world and killed her parents sixteen years ago. The rightful heir to the throne and the last draconic being, Tythel must use every tool at her disposal to survive and teach the aliens a lesson forged in flame.
They should have let sleeping dragons lie.
Dragonflame is an epic science-fantasy adventure.
---
FAQ
Audiobook/Print Copy?
Print Copy is coming soon. For audiobook, nothing yet announced, but I’ll update if there is one!
Is this science fiction or fantasy?
Both, but in a different direction. Most science fantasy deals with science fiction tech and space wizards, and while I love me my space wizards, this goes the other way - the technology is powered by magic, the aliens use their own magic that isn’t just Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and the entire story takes place on a single fantasy world that the aliens invaded.
Length?
Dragonflame clocks in at just about 95k words, which makes it about 300 pages in print.
Elves and Dwarves?
Not exactly. There are the Sylvani and the Underfolk. Sylvani are woods-dwelling people, but they also have the ability to alter their skin appearance and texture and have mysterious origins, and the Underfolk don’t appear in book 1 but will in book 2, and they share “lives underground” with dwarves but take it in a vastly different direction.
I read this on your subreddit, what’s different?
In addition to a completely new introduction/prologue, I’ve applied many of the lessons I’ve learned writing Dragon’s Scion and other books over the last two years, and the prose is cleaner and better fleshed out, as well as some minor changes to fix early installment weirdness.
Age range?
The Dragon’s Scion deals with mature themes and has some racy jokes, but also has no real-world swears, no sex, and injuries are not described in overly-graphic detail. It’s PG-13 in movie land, and acceptable for ages 14+.
Sequels?
This book is part of a trilogy, and I'm looking to have book 2 - Ghostflame - out in mid Feb, early march.
Purge the xeno!
Not a question and not quite the right tone, but I like the enthusiasm. You can pick it up here!
Amazon US Link - UK | CA | AU | DE | MX | JP | IN | BR | FR | ES | IT | NL
I want to sample before I pick up?
Well, good news for you - Check out the first two chapters below!

Prologue

On the path between a dying city and a mountain, a dying guardsman rode with a precious bundle in his arms. This was not the first horse the guardsman had ridden since leaving the city. The others had perished on the journey. He hadn’t even purchased this horse. Having long ago discarded his tabard and armor, this guardsman wore thick furs to keep out the bitter cold. Between that and the wild look in his eyes, he looked less like a guardsman and more like a bandit. It was fitting, in a way, that the third and final horse he rode was stolen.
His name was Comber, and he had been part of the troop assigned to protect the royal family against all threats. For ten years he had stood his post, alongside the royal family’s Umbrists. Comber didn’t have the Shadow-infused powers of the Umbrist. He had armor that had been forged with steel mixed with light, and a sword that had been blessed millennia ago with a dragon’s breath.
That was in the past.
He had a vow to protect the royal family against any and all threats. He’d fought when the minions of a necromancer had snuck in through the sewers. He still had a scar on his thigh from an assassin’s crossbow bolt meant for the King. He was not a coward, and he had thought himself beyond fear.
That was also in the past.
Comber looked over his shoulder. His pursuers weren’t there. He was alone here. There was nothing but a path through the woods, a path that had been cleared by game hunters who would head this way. It took a bold man to hunt in these woods, given what guarded them. The same being that drew Comber deeper within. His last hope for salvation.
The skies darkened, and Comber risked a glance upwards. There it was. That hole in the sky. The sun had passed behind it, casting a momentary shadow across the world. It was like the eclipse Comber remembered from when he was a child, but there was still light coming from the center. Small points showing stars unlike any he had seen before.
A few tiny dots broke off from the main circle. Comber shuddered at the sight. He’d seen what those dots could do when they got lower.
The bundle in his arms stirred when he shivered again, and looked up at him with bright green eyes. Awake now, the child’s face was placid for just a moment, those beautiful eyes flickering about. Then hunger set in, and the child started to wail.
“Shhh, little one,” Comber whispered, stroking the side of the child’s face. “Shhh.”
Still the child cried. She was just old enough to eat mashed food. Comber grimaced and looked around again. There was no one present. “Shhh,” Comber said, pulling on the reins of the horse. He reached into his pack. He still had some berries from the last town, and got to work mashing them into a paste with a mortar and pestle. At her age, the child had just enough understanding of what that smell and sound meant, and her cries turned to excited cooing as she reached towards his hands. “Almost there, little one,” Comber said. Or at least, he started to say. Halfway through the wound in his side reminded him of why he’d abandoned his sword, and Comber hissed in pain. Even the simple motion of grinding berries was too much for him.
He set the mortar down carefully. He hadn’t been able to get a spoon in his mad flight. The child was able to suckle the paste off his finger, and that would have to be good enough. Once she’d been fed, Comber held her with one hand and pulled the other inside his coat. He ran his fingers over the hasty bandage. It was damp. He wanted to look at the injury, but didn’t dare. He knew what he’d find. Black veins sprawling outwards from under the bandage, creeping along his skin. Last night, the veins had been halfway to his chest. Soon they would reach his heart.
He’d die then. Comber didn’t need to be a Physician to know that.
The child reached up and grabbed for his nose with hands wrapped in mittens. Comber let her grab it, then pressed his forehead to hers. “Soon, you’ll be safe,” Comber whispered to her.
Then it was time to transition the child to the straps wrapped around his chest, freeing his hands, and Comber resumed his ride to the mountain.
***
The horse - Comber had never bothered giving it a name - came to a stop, and the jolt rocked Comber awake. He blinked around blearily. He’d fallen asleep in the saddle somehow. Everything felt like it had been coated in a layer of wool. Comber worked one of his hands free of the glove and pressed it against his forehead. In spite of the cold, heat radiated from the touch. “Fever,” he muttered to the child.
“Bah-bah-bah-bah,” she said, which Comber took as affirmation. He smiled down at her, then looked around again. They’d reached the mountain.
“We go no further together,” he said to the horse. Comber had never been one to speak to his mounts, aside from commands. He preferred to make noises at them, reassuring ones. But in the grip of fever, Comber felt irrationally sorry for abandoning an animal he’d only had for a day. A stolen one, at that. “You’ll be able to find your way back to town, won’t you? Or maybe you’ll be able to run free now, without the need...the need…” Comber trailed off. What had he been doing? Talking to a horse, that’s what.
They were close to the base of the mountain, but not quite there. He could see it. Perhaps he could ride the horse a little bit further? He dug his heels in. The horse let out a huff of air and shook its head, instead backing up a few paces. “Of course,” Comber said, shaking his head. “Of course. A horse. A horse of course.” He laughed a bit. It wasn’t funny, but the child joined in the laughter. He patted the side of the horse’s neck again. “You smell it, don’t you?”
The horse shook its head violently and took another step back. That was all the confirmation Comber needed. The horse would go no further. “You know,” Comber said, getting ready to dismount. “I should have known. They eat you, don’t they?”
The horse did not respond this time, for it was a horse, and all it cared about was that it didn’t need to go any further.
Comber got one foot out of the stirrup, but the world started to spin. Instead of dismounting gracefully, Comber swung drunkenly, and collapsed into the snow. He had just enough presence of mind to turn around as he fell, landing on his back to keep the child safe. Comber growled in pain as the impact lanced through his back. The shock did wonders for clearing his head. The child, jostled by the fall, poked her head up and giggled.
“That’s right,” Comber grunted. “I’m silly, aren’t I?”
The child reached up for him, grasping for him. Comber put his finger out for her to hold onto.
He’d abandoned his station, and he knew he should feel guilty about that, but…the beings that had come from that hole in the sky were beyond anything that could be fought. Arrows bounced off their gleaming carapace. Swords were deflected with swipes from their unnatural hands. He had a duty, and he could only save one person.
He’d chosen her.
Comber rose to his feet and turned the horse around. It only took a nudge to get the horse trotting away from the mountain.
It would live. The child would live. That would have to be enough.
Comber made himself walk towards the mountain. Every footstep was like lead. He spotted a trail in the snow - someone else had come this way and left. They were human, or at least walked like one. It could be an Underfolk or Sylvani. It wasn’t the invaders. That much was certain. No one could mistake their skittering legs for human footsteps.
The mountain, at least, was free of snow. Impossibly free, and impossibly warm. A fire burned in the heart of this mountain. Not the molten fire of a volcano. A living flame. A hungering flame.
Had the fever started sooner than Comber realized? He’d been so certain of this plan. He’d heard tales of the flame that lived in this mountain. The tales had made it out to be one of the ones that did not feast on the flesh of Man or the other Intelligent Races. They said it had stood alongside the forces of the Light and Shadow against dread powers in the past. They said it was not to be disturbed, but would not slay - except for those that came to attack it.
But still...could he trust it?
It was too late now. There was nowhere else he was certain would be safe for the child. Not with that locket, secured carefully in a pouch in the swaddling. Even without it...would anywhere be safe from the invaders? Would anything? They hadn’t been killing innocents. They’d killed armies, they’d slaughtered guards, but any who did not pick up blade or spear against them was spared their wrath. Yet...Comber didn’t trust them to stop there. It was possible - nay, it seemed likely - that they were just starting with those that posed a threat to them.
“Not that we did,” he said to the child, who paused in her attempts to gum his finger to look up at him. “I hope, if you remember nothing else, you remember that we tried. We tried.”
“Burrrbl,” the child said happily.
“We tried,” Comber repeated. And they had. Nicandros, the captain of the royal guard, had commanded them perfectly. However, no strategy could overcome the fact that their weapons did no harm to the invaders. That was when Comber realized the only option was saving what he could. That there would be no victory here. Still, Comber had fought, until his wound. Then...he’d been even more useless in battle.
Time became unstable. Comber kept walking up the warm mountain and its bare stones. It was a gentle slope, which was the only reason he could progress at all. Ahead, he saw his goal.
A hole, high up the mountain. One far larger than would be needed for a man to pass through, and one too smooth and round to be the result of nature. This was not a cave. It was a lair.
Comber stumbled and dropped to his knees. The child started to wail again, startled by the jostling. Comber tried to shush its cries, but he was too late. Something was stirring in the lair, dragging itself forth from the depths. Comber saw golden eyes peering out of the darkness, followed by red scales and immense, bat-like wings.
Comber had never seen a dragon in person. Only flying overhead, and even then, such sights were rare. He’d expected them to crawl across a ground, like a lizard, but this one slunk with a cat’s grace. An older cat, one that was past its prime hunting days, but still possessing enough energy to move about. The dragon flapped its wings and took to the air, circling around Comber once before landing.
“I told Lathariel I would not be disturbed,” the dragon growled, and Comber was certain he’d made a mistake. Tears started to form in his eyes, unbidden.
“Please…” Comber said, but the dragon shook its head.
“I will not fight.” The dragon looked up, seeing the hole in the sky, and its nostrils flared. For a moment, Comber could see it considering...then it shook its head again. “I will not fight,” it repeated. “Leave this threat for younger drakes. Ones that have hotter flames.”
“Please…” Comber said again, then coughed. Flecks of something black came with the cough, and Comber moved with speed he didn’t know he still had, pulling the child free of the path of whatever those were. He groaned in pain and nearly blacked out.
“You are injured,” the dragon said, leaning down. “And you are ill.”
Comber nodded.
“I can heal your injuries,” the dragon said, after considering for a moment. “But my flames will make the disease spread quicker.”
“Not...me.” Comber coughed again. “Her.”
The dragon looked at the child. “She’s uninjured,” he said.
“Care...protect.” Comber’s vision grew dark. “She...she...is.” Comber’s vision narrowed. “She is...everything....” The dragon was barely visible now. The world was barely visible. The child stirred, looking from the dragon to Comber and back again, starting to make distressed noises. She didn’t fear the dragon. That was good. But she could tell something was wrong.
“I’m sorry,” Comber said to the child. He looked back up at the dragon. His vision was barely there anymore. He’d gone so far. It felt like part of his mind had been set on fire, to hold back death, and now that he was here, that flame had gone out. “Tell her…” Comber said, and then he started to cough again. “She is…”
“What should I tell her she is?” the dragon asked, after Comber had been silent for too long. When he got no response, the dragon Karjon leaned down. The man’s heartbeat had been so faint when he’d approached, Karjon could barely hear it. Now, though? Now there was nothing.
And the child started to cry.
Karjon looked at it. He’d never dealt with human children before. He knew they needed more comfort than hatchlings. Uncertain, Karjon reached out with one claw and retracted his talon, then brushed his scales on the child’s cheek.
Quick as a viper, the child grabbed Karjon’s finger tightly, trying to seek some comfort in a world that had abandoned her.
Karjon sighed. He had not had children of his own. He hadn’t planned on doing so. But...if nothing else, he could not leave this child to starve on his mountain. He carefully bit on the swaddling, making certain to only let his fangs touch the fabric.
Once these invaders had been dealt with, Karjon would take the child to the nearest humans. They would know how to handle her. He’d keep her safe until then. It shouldn’t be long. There had been many threats over his nine hundred years of life. They’d always been defeated.
There was no reason to believe this would be any different.

Chapter 1

“I have lived for centuries,” Karjon growled. “I dueled the Necromancer Gix and his army of undead. I was on the Council of Twelve, battling the Lichborne. When the mad Lumcaster sought to blind the world, I doused him in my flames. How is it that nothing has vexed me as much as you, little one?”
Tythel looked up at the dragon with eyes wide in feigned innocence. Sixteen years had passed since the mountain and the snow. She didn’t remember it, of course. Just as she did not remember what her name had been before coming here. Tythel was a dragon’s name, not a human name. For all Karjon’s bluster, she was not worried. In sixteen years, Karjon had never raised a claw in anger. “Father, have you considered that it is just because you love me so dearly?”
Karjon huffed and shook his head. “That cannot be it. I think it must be because I did not know how vexing your unique subspecies of humans can be.”
“Subspecies?” Tythel asked.
“Yes. Those strange beings humans call ‘adolescents.’ Or perhaps it is just a trait unique to daughters.”
Tythel beamed at him. The expression only came through with her eyes. In her books, humans would use their mouths to do things like smile and frown. Tythel understood, in theory, what those were, but the expressions didn’t come to her naturally. From what Karjon had said, she’d smiled and frowned at first...but with time, those had stopped. Now, she blinked rapidly to show her excitement. “Which would only matter because you love me. Therefore, I am still correct. And, since I am correct, I see no reason I should not be allowed to go.”
Karjon sighed heavily. “Tythel…”
“You said I could,” Tythel reminded him, trying her best not to sound sullen.
“I told you that, yes,” Karjon said. “I said you could go when it was safe.”
“I want to see other humans,” Tythel said. “Why can’t I go?”
Karjon sighed again, a sound that filled the entire cave that was his lair and their home. “When, exactly, did ‘because I said so’ become insufficient?”
“When I stopped being a child,” Tythel said. “You said when I was sixteen, I could go and see other humans.”
“I said that you could go into the village when you were sixteen, Tythel. I did not say you could do so the very next day.” Making that promise, back when she was nine, had been a mistake. He’d done it to get her to cease her incessant questions. He didn’t think humans of that age could remember things for so long.
“You’re splitting scales and you know it.” She folded her arms across her chest and glowered at him.
Karjon, who weighed in at just over six tons and had battled some of the greatest foes the world had ever seen, broke the staring contest first. Tythel tried not to blink when she realized that meant she was getting through to him. For all his fury and might, Karjon had always struggled to deny her anything. Still, he was not caving like he usually did. “Tythel, there are reasons for the choices I make. They are for your safety.”
“You always hide behind that, father. Are you planning on keeping me here the rest of my life? What are you hiding me from?”
“There are those out there that would see you dead. Is that not enough explanation?”
She glowered at him again. “You know I can’t do anything if you don’t tell me. But if you want me to leave it alone, you’ll need to give me more than that.” Her expression softened. “Please, father.”
Karjon settled down onto the pile of coins that made his seat. Tythel took the cue and walked over to her own, smaller pile. She didn’t have a hoard of her own. Not yet. But she would one day, although she was less than eager for that day. Dragons did not share a hoard. She’d have to leave that day, never to live here again.
“Perhaps…” Karjon started to say, then held up a claw to forestall her before she got too excited. “It is time you know of the dangers beyond this lair. Why I keep you hidden here. And tomorrow…” he studied her critically for a moment, then nodded. “You are old enough.”
“To go visit?” Tythel asked hopefully.
“Not yet,” Karjon said, shaking his head. “But tomorrow, I think you are ready for the one thing I know you want more than to leave.”
Tythel sat up straighter, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “You mean...you’ll finish the adoption?”
Karjon nodded, and Tythel leapt up to run over and wrap her arms around her father’s neck. “Thank you thank you thank you!” There were tears forming in her eyes, a human reaction she hadn’t shed with age, but these were tears of joy and not sadness.
“It’s past time,” Karjon said. “I just worried about how your body would react to the transformation.”
“I know,” Tythel said, although deep in her heart, she’d worried that he wouldn’t do it. That she wasn’t good enough. She’d never told Karjon that. If it wasn’t true, it would have broken his heart. If it was true...she couldn’t have handled that. Now, though, she was practically vibrating with anticipation.
Karjon put one of his claws around her, in his version of a hug. From what he’d said, dragons did not engage in touch the way humans did, but one of his books had told him a lack of touch and affection could kill human infants. Deep down, Tythel suspected he had grown to like it himself. “Now. Will you listen, and will you wait?”
Tythel nodded firmly.
“Then do so,” Karjon said, and Tythel settled back onto her coins. “Sixteen years ago, just days before you were brought to me...the skies let loose monsters.”
“Monsters?” Tythel asked.
Karjon nodded. “I do not know if they have a name. I know what Lathariel told me they were being called ‘Those From Above.’ They had weapons that sucked in light and spewed forth their own unnatural energy. Unlight, she called it.”
“And you fought them?” Tythel asked, excitedly.
Karjon shook his head, and in his eyes Tythel could see sorrow she’d never imagined from her father. “I am old,” Karjon said. “I thought they could be defeated without me. Even when I was told dragonflame was all that would harm them...I still thought they could be defeated. There were other dragons. By the time I realized...it was too late. Those From Above had secured power over humanity. They rule down there now. As far as I know, they only fear dragonflame.”
Tythel held up a hand and focused. A ball of flame formed between her fingers. “They fear this?” she asked. Dragonflame was similar to normal fire, but more vibrant. The transition from white to yellow to orange to red that happened in a normal flame was marked by clearer lines. Hers was weak. Not close to the true power of a dragon. She could barely call upon it, and couldn’t even touch the greater fires of ghostflame or heartflame. But it was not nothing.
“Yes,” Karjon said, and there was a somber note to his voice that Tythel couldn’t ignore. “By healing you when you injured yourself...you already formed the gift. They will hunt you. For that and...for other reasons.”
“What other reasons?”
Karjon shook his head. “Not yet. There is much I have kept from you. You are old enough now, but...before that there’s something you need to understand.” He put one claw carefully on her knee. “Tythel...tomorrow, after the Ascension, the number of dragons in the world will go from one to two.”
Tythel stared at her father for a long moment, processing his words. She’d never met another dragon, but the idea there had been other dragons out there...she’d just assumed it. Realizing they’d been hunted down, there was only one thing to do.
She hugged Karjon again, and her father hugged her back. They sat there for a moment, before both of them could steady themselves enough to speak. “Tythel,” Karjon said. “I…have kept something else from you.”
“It’s so much,” Tythel whispered.
Karjon cocked his head. “Do you need time before the rest?”
Tythel considered for a moment, then shook her head. “A scholar’s first duty is to acquire all information before passing judgement,” Tythel said, repeating one of her father’s lessons back to him.
Karjon gave her a slow blink of amusement. “You listen too well sometimes. Very well. Your locket.”
Tythel’s hands went up to the chain around her neck. She’d worn it as long as she could remember. It was the one piece of her own hoard she had. “You said it was my parents.”
Karjon nodded. “That locket is the other reason you will be hunted. It is the locket of the royal family.”
There was a moment of silence as Tythel stared at her father. “The…the royal family. But they…I mean…that’s…” Tythel sputtered off into silence. She couldn’t say it. “I’m…”
Karjon nodded, the motion oddly gentle. “You are the heir to the throne of your family. The throne of the kingdom of Dretayne. You are the next queen of this realm. And for that, you will be hunted as one of the barriers to the rule of Those from Above.”
Tythel took a deep, ragged breath, then nodded slowly. She couldn’t think about it right now. She could barely understand it. So she fell back on the lessons of her childhood. A scholar's first duty. “Tell me everything.”
***
Tythel did not sleep well that night. She tried to, doing every meditation technique Karjon had taught her over the years, but she spent the entire night tossing and turning. The bed she slept on was one Karjon had gotten as a trophy from the Underfolk, those strange underground folk that were in Karjon’s stories, and it had been perfect for her when she was a child. But for the last two years, she’d been forced to scrunch up on it, leading to the impression the Underfolk were likely quite small.
In truth, Tythel was taller than most humans. Sixteen years of eating a diet of meat cooked in dragonflame and lifting and moving gold on a regular basis had left her with a build that was less princess and more warrior, but since the only humans she’d seen had been in her imagination, she’d had no idea how imposing a figure she could cut when she wasn’t comparing herself to a dragon.
She’d never complained to Karjon about the small bed. Other things, sure, but never that – or any of the other things he’d provided to her over the years. Tythel had known how lucky she’d been to have a dragon for a father. Karjon’s stories were full of tales of the legendary heroes of the past, Calcon the Brave and Rilan the Just and Brigith the Nobel and all the rest of them. All of them had started their lives as humble folk that had heeded the Call, which meant their lives had been the humdrum work of farmers and blacksmiths and other folk, and the stories all made that life out to be terribly dull.
She’d always imagined Karjon had rescued her from that sort of suffering.
Now she knew differently. She would have been a princess, daughter to a king and queen, living a life of luxury and wealth and, if the legends were any indication, would have either ended up spoiled rotten or kidnapped by someone to later be rescued. Other than that her life would have been one of formality and circumstance until she was married off to secure an alliance or to whoever had been strong enough to save her, regardless of their other qualities.
Tythel decided that, small bed aside, she still felt lucky to have been raised by Karjon. That feeling was quickly followed by shame at even considering an alternative.
She got out of bed and pulled her blankets and pillows to the floor, arranging them in a pile like the gold Karjon slept on. It wasn’t as comfortable as the bed, but it did allow her to stretch out, and that was preferable to being cramped into the bed at the moment.
The problem was, it wasn’t the bed keeping her up tonight. It was her mind.
Tythel had been on top of the mountain a few times every year, under Karjon’s careful eye. He had explained that if she didn’t get to see the sky every now and then, she’d probably go mad. The village had always fascinated her, and her entire life she’d wanted to go there, just for a day, to explore and celebrate. She wanted to see horses and soldiers and blacksmiths and maybe even a lumcaster if she was really lucky. Karjon had taught her some magic, the barest flicker of dragonflame, but it was not magic meant for humans.
Of course, that would change tomorrow. Well, her being human – she didn’t know if she’d gain any proficiency with her meager powers in the process. She’d have Karjon’s power running through her veins, becoming half dragon and half human. For most of her life, it had been the one thing she’d wanted more than going to the village.
The village. She turned over again.
From the mountain, it had been hard to make out details. She’d filled in those details in her head with ones stolen from her stories – thatched roofs covering star-crossed lovers, barns harboring hard working folk with wisdom gained from years of honest toil, scholars in cramped quarters trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, chimneys smoking with fires that were roasting chickens or beef. Never in her life had she imagined the people out there were being subjected to tyrants that had more power than she could imagine. Never, not once, had she imagined that she was their ruler by a mere quirk of birth.
That thought got her turning again. Karjon’s stories had talked about something called “noblesse oblige,” the responsibilities that the nobility had to their people. Protect them, help them, guide them, and care for them. If she was a noble – a royal – didn’t the same thing apply to her?
Stop it, Tythel. Stop it.
But the thought wouldn’t go away. If she stayed here with Karjon, she was failing in her responsibility. The sixteen years leading up to this had not been her fault; she hadn’t known she had duties. After a moment of reflection, she decided they weren’t Karjon’s fault either. They were the fault of the mysterious Those from Above. Now that she knew, however…well, Karjon had always taught her that inaction was still a choice, the choice to do nothing.
Tomorrow, then, after the Ritual. She’d leave, no matter what. And if Karjon tried to stop her…well, then she’d have to do it alone.
And that thought, more than any other, caused Tythel to burrow as deeply as she could into the blankets before sleep finally claimed her.
---
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Where is the final island, Raftel? One Piece MEGA Theory (spoilers for anime only)

Hi everyone, today i am here to talk about the legendary final island of the Grand Line, Laugh Tale (i wrote Raftel in the title because i didn't want to spoil the people that only watch the anime). Just like my other theories, this theory will be pretty long but that is because i want to make the theory as logical as possible and backed up with the most evidence i can find. I would appreciate if you could stick with me until the end, to see how all of the points that i bring up will help the credibility of the theory (post seems long but it's mostly images). That said, we can start!

The road Poneglyphs

We start the theory by analysing and remembering how the road Poneglyph system works; as stated in chapter 818, you have to find all of the 4 road Poneglyphs and connect the points on the map to see where LT is located:
https://preview.redd.it/b7yecoxjtog61.jpg?width=992&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7822c4d50e1ac829251fa80b5ef1733f8dc95a9
Laugh Tale will be at the center of the cross; now let me make my first argument. There is no way that after the Strawhats get the final RP, they sit down, mark the points on the map with the help of Robin and Nami, and just travel there in the following chapters; almost every majorly anticipated island in the story had to be reached in a very particular way:
the Strawhats wanted to go to Fishman Island after Water7/Enies Lobby:
Chapter 439
buuut it turns out that Fishman Island is 10000 metres deep in the ocean and the only way you can get there is by coating your ship with a special resin that only grows out of the Sabaody Archipelago trees, as explained in chapter 496:
https://preview.redd.it/yh6my3yb5qg61.png?width=401&format=png&auto=webp&s=a277629a5f2fec024a8c7d69f1cd8c35a8020b79
The Strawhats had to reach Zou to reunite with Law's crew and the other Strawhats after Dressrosa... buuut it turns out that the island of Zou is actually a 1000 year old giant elephant that has been punished to endlessly roam the sea without a destination and they had to climb it using Kanjuro's drawings (RIP Ryunosuke):
Chapter 802
The Strawhats wanted to go to Wano... buuut it turns out that Wano is elevated and the only way to reach it (if you don't have Kaido's/Orochi's permission) is to actually ride the waterfall by taking advantage of the Koi fishes that are climbing the waterfall:
Chapter 910
And lastly, the Strawhats wanted to go to Sky Island because the log pose started to point up... buuut it turns out that Skypiea not only is in the sky, it's actually 10000 metres in the sky (which is a whole lot) and the only way to get there is by riding an incredibly dangerous stream of water called "knock-up stream" that "is created by a giant underwater cave filled with gas. At some point in time, the gas pressure is too big and creates a crack in the ceiling, then a giant whirlpool is created from the crack. Once most of the gas gets free, the seabed explodes, sending a giant stream upwards." and they even had to prepare the Merry for this event:
Chapter 235
Chapter 236
So no, the legendary island that no one found in 800 years -except for the Roger pirates-, the most mysterious mystery in One Piece, is not going to be reached by just simply travelling there after marking the point on the map; i would like you to imagine the week to week reading experience if that were the case: they mark the point on the map, they get on the Sunny after the final preparations and... they just get there? (break next week of course) There is obviously going to be a gimmick for the final island and they will have to do something special to get there, after reaching the point marked by the 4 Road Poneglyphs.

So... what/where is Laugh Tale?

You will not leave this reddit post with the ability to grab a One Piece world map and draw exactly the point in which LT is located. The point of this theory is to convince you of where it is generally located, and what exactly is; so now, i'm going to make my second argument, so that you can understand what i'm talking about. I left Skypiea in the prior examples as the last one for a specific reason; here we go: i believe that Laugh Tale is a Sky Island. Please give me the time to explain. Having considered that there has to be a particular way to reach the island for all of the reasons that i have listed above, Laugh Tale could be a sky island, an underwater island like FI, or something else entirely; as i've stated above, i believe Laugh Tale to be a Sky island, and the rest of this post will present some evidence/hints that will hopefully convince you, so stick with me, the explanation only starts now. First of all let me explain why i don't think that LT is an underwater island or something else like Zou: we have seen twice the silhouette of Laugh Tale in the canon of the manga, and although it is still a silhouette, we can see that it's a "regular" island, and not something like Zou:
Chapter 105
Chapter 818
So this excludes the "something else entirely" option. I'm aware that the anime shows blue sea surrounding Laugh Tale while Inuarashi is explaining how the RPs work (i'm talking about the exact panel above but in the anime) but please remember that the anime has no power over the manga, which is the canon story, and in the manga even the "sea" surrounding LT is in silhouette, as you can see from the 2 panels above (i mention this because the presence of actual sea water surrounding LT would kinda disprove my theory, because if LT really is a sky island it should be surrounded by sea clouds and not actual water). Now, why do i believe Laugh Tale is not underwater? Well, i actually have two reasons. The first reason is something i actually never thought about until i was putting together this theory; did you ever guys think about why Laugh Tale's magnetism doesn't get picked up by the log pose? Because i sure didn't. All of the islands in the Grand Line have strong particular magnetisms that get picked up by the log pose, and Laugh Tale is on the Grand Line, so why is it that it doesn't have magnetism like all of the other islands? We even saw that an island like Fishman Island 10000 metres deep in the sea gets picked up by the log pose, so range limitations shouldn't really be a thing, and the same happened for Skypiea. But if i believe that LT is a sky island, and skypiea had magnetism (it was surely picked up by Nami's log pose) how does LT not get picked up by the log pose? Well, the reason that Skypiea gets picked up by the log pose is actually because Upper Yard was an island of the grand line, in fact as we all know it was part of Jaya. It's heavily implied that the island clouds do NOT have magnetism because they are just vapor mixed with the main substance that is present in seastone, pyrobloin:
Chapter 240
If you don't believe me, here's what happens with places that seem islands but are not made from actual dirt (in other words, aren't actual rock islands):
Chapter 496
That's right, Sabaody Archipelago doesn't have magnetism because it's just a bunch of trees; same thing for Zou, as stated by Law in chapter 802: "Because it's not actual land... you can't track it with a log pose."
So when i say that Laugh Tale is a sky island, i mean that it's a cloud island surrounded by sea cloud, which are literally just vapor mixed with water ejected from the blue sea, and that's why it can't be tracked by a log pose.
The second reason makes a lot of sense from a narrative point of view and it correlates to the fact that the major reason the Merry was unrepairable, was because of the brutal journey to Skypiea via knock up stream (so much so that the Merry itself had to repair "herself" while the Strawhats were sleeping in Upper Yard after the party with the wolves; the Klabautermann incident); the Merry was unrepairable because they didn't have a proper shipwright to look after it, and that's why it "failed" at accompanying the Strawhats for the whole journey. Now that Franky is here, and the Sunny is his dream ship, as he himself stated, he will look after it until it becomes the ship that reaches the end of the ocean, as stated in chapter 437. In other words, the Sunny, having already travelled 10000 metres deep in the sea, will also travel up to the sky, accomplishing what the Merry already did (but at the cost of being unrepairable) and reaching the end of the world at the same time, so that it becomes the most complete ship in the world, the ship that has accomplished more than any other ship in the world (having sailed across the ocean, under the ocean, and in the sky), the dream ship. (It can't be the best ship in the world if other ships have done things that the Sunny didn't, like going to the sky; remember that a minor pirate like Bellamy actually reached Skypiea after the incident with Luffy)

Parallelism and foreshadowing

This is the final part. Please stick with me a little more. We have seen throughout the story, how Blackbeard is set up to be the final pirate villain for Luffy and the actual endgame contender for the pirate king throne: their ideaologies are the same, but at the same time completely opposite (if you don't see how this is the case i suggest you watch this amazing analysis video by MrMorj as i don't have time to explain all of this BB stuff in this post):
Luffy saying he hates food? Oda makes it clear they are opposites; chapter 223
The general consensous in the community is that Blackbeard and Luffy will face off right at the end of the Grand Line for the Pirate King title, at Laugh Tale or just before reaching it. Remember where Blackbeard was introduced? That's right, Jaya. If my theory is correct, then all of the things we see in this saga (Jaya-Skypiea) become foreshadowing: Blackbeard's introduction and his crew being showcased, Blackbeard being a dreamer just like Luffy and giving the "People's dreams never end" speech just because the topic of a sky island is brought up, Blackbeard and Luffy facing off for the first time just as Luffy and the Strawhats prepare to go to Skypiea:
https://preview.redd.it/fsu8z79tzpg61.png?width=476&format=png&auto=webp&s=e8eb8014f9aff9614a1e69c4169d7922023cf6c7
Their first and only face-off (talking about the entire crews, not only BB and Luffy), happens right before going to Sky Island; chapter 236
Not only this, but the entire plotline of Skypiea has incredible parallels to Laugh Tale: the Strawhats want to find a legendary treasure (City of Gold / One Piece) but discover the story of a centuries-long conflict (Skypieans vs Shandorans / World Government vs Ancient Kingdom; remember that as stated in chapter 967 by Oden, Laugh Tale holds all of the answers: what the void century is, what the ancient weapons are, and what the will of D. is): in fact, the conflict between the Ancient Kingdom and the WG, is referenced right here in Skypiea, chapter 272!!!
https://preview.redd.it/wd8jezvm2qg61.png?width=377&format=png&auto=webp&s=e79bf22f1e860980ade3ea87d7f345470c9b525f
\"The town's books were all burned. And the city's history was erased. The Ponegliff was brought to this city! There is no doubt... this city fought against the enemy!!\" We now know that the enemy is the WG, they tried to erase everything that happened but the Kozuki clan from Wano sent indestructible stones (Poneglyphs) all over the world to preserve The Ancient Kingdom's history and ideology.
https://preview.redd.it/0igiact63qg61.png?width=402&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e2b1388874bb62ba0f938931045d25304fdfafc
https://preview.redd.it/jsy5xkr73qg61.png?width=381&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e238f6c08c234b8f92971717d3cd8eba6d3f558
We even have the story of Noland, a beautiful side character for sure, but still a side character, that gets paralleled (in an opposite way) to Gol D. Roger himself (completely out of the blue strong parallelism for a side character like Noland, as you would expect other major characters to get such a strong parallelism, but if the theory is correct, is actually insane foreshadowing!)
Noland dies in the exact same way, but he's getting called a liar, as opposed to Roger who started a new era and died with a smile.
We know how Oda foreshadows A LOT of stuff in the story: the man has used single lines of dialogue to foreshadow entire plot points hundreds of chapters before they happen, like Ryuma and Zoro's entire storyline in Wano act 2, which was foreshadowed back in thriller bark ,and many, many others. I like how Skypiea represents the perfect One Piece adventure, but there is no way that you can convince me that Oda would include an entire saga of 85 chapters (Jaya-Skypiea) just because he felt like telling a completely isolated story. The parallels are all there as you can see.
If this theory is correct, then the entirety of these 85 chapters become under-your-nose-foreshadowing in which Oda has planted the seed for the biggest mystery of the story without us even realizing. I say this, because in storytelling, it's usually suggested to make your readers feel accustomed to an idea, before dropping the bomb out of nowhere (that's what foreshadowing really is); i say this because if the theory is correct and LT really is a Sky Island, Oda basically created the Skypiea saga to introduce the reader to the idea that sky islands DO exist in One Piece, so that when we finally reach LT, and it turns out that the reason that LT is untrackable is because it is a cloud island, the reader doesn't feel like it's an asspull and it actually makes sense to him. One thing i can see people bring up in the comments is: "If Laugh Tale really is a sky island, how will they reach it?" and my answer to that is... it doesn't matter. There is no point in trying to predict that, just as there was no point in trying to predict that the strawhats would use special resin from special trees to coat their ship in a special way so that they could go 10000 metres deep in the ocean; or how there was no point in trying to predict that sometimes the pressure from the gas in particular caves would create an explosive stream that shoots ships in they sky; or how there was no point in trying to predict that the strawhats would go up a colossal-size elephant by riding a literal drawing... and so on. My point is that how the strawhats will reach LT, if it really is a sky island, is up to Oda: he can literally make up anything that makes a little bit of sense and attribute it to world-building or just use something similar to the knock up stream, but the point is that that's not where our focus should go, because we just can't predict that. The theory technically ends here, but i have a bonus for you that ties Urouge's role into the story with this theory.

Bonus | Urouge's role in the story

My guess is that everyone by now (if they came this far) would be really tired so i'm going to keep this one pretty simple: every supernova has a defined role except for Urouge: everyone besides Urouge, Bege and Bonney is involved in the war for Wano; Bege joined Big Mom's crew to try to assassinate her, and Bonney is clearly tied to the Kuma-Revolutionaries-WG plotline, as seen in chapter 908; we are in the endgame and Urouge is the only one who doesn't fit into anything, the only one whose role in the story is still unknown. Law reminds us in chapter 667 that in the New World, you either join the Emperors or you directly fight them; even an extremely prideful person like Kidd decided to team up with Apoo and Hawkins; since i don't see Urouge solo-ing the New World when even someone like Kidd decided to form a pirate alliance, i would say that Urouge is one of the Supernovas who joined an emperor, and in particular, Blackbeard. To support this claim, i would like to remind you of the fact that Blackbeard has the "Ten titanic captains" as fleet commanders, but we only know nine of them, with the last one being unknown; (remember that Aokiji is just an ally to BB, not a titanic captain, check the wiki if you don't remembebelieve me) so my guess is that the last titanic captain is Urouge: after Wano, the story is basically ending, and there is no way that Urouge would have relevancy after Luffy becomes a Yonko; what would they do? Fight? When Luffy is a Yonko? Will they ally? To do what? And why would Luffy need Urouge after they come out of Wano as a Yonko crew? There is no way that Urouge could have relevancy now unless he becomes a subordinate of a Yonko, and between Shanks and BB i really don't think Urouge would join Shanks' crew. Plus, after the Marineford war, Urouge shows interest in Blackbeard, chapter 581:
Urouge thinks Blackbeard is the key for the new era, chapter 581
And lastly, if my theory is correct and Laugh Tale is a Sky island, the clash between the Strawhats and the Blackbeard pirates that would include Urouge under BB's wing would be perfect, since Urouge himself comes from a sky island, it would be the perfect setting to explore his character.

If you made it this far, thank you so so much, i hope you enjoyed the theory, have a nice day everyone!

Sexy Space Babes: Chapter Twenty One

AN: I'm back from my seven day ban (Which was entirely justified).
To those that don't know, after I posted the story up on Amazon, I was informed that Kindle Unlimited requires that the story be posted nowhere else. I had assumed that applied only to selling via other publishers, not the free novel.
That was not the case. Hence my rapidly pulling down the story from everywhere in a panic, lest I get my amazon account banned, and my dream of authorhood killed in the cradle.
That was not why I recieved a ban from HFY for seven days. I recieved the ban, because as I pulled the story, I left the Amazon link up. That was a violation of rule seven of the subreddit, which says that any link must be accompanied by 350 words of OC content. A rule I broke nineteen times in ten minutes.
Either way, that is behind us now, and I've put my time to good use setting up a patreon and building up a backlog of chapters.
So without further ado, here's book two, which will be posted up until such time that the book is published, at which point it will be pulled like book one to conform with Amazon, and we will start again with book three.
I'm also sitting at number ten on Space Fleet Sci-Fi right now on the top one hundred list, so I just wanted to thank everyone that bought a copy or left a review.
You guys rock!

“Alright ladies, shut up and sit down,” Tisi called over the hubbub of conversation.
To be honest, it was kind of ridiculous that she needed to ask at all, given that she was the captain, and thus the crew should have been jumping up to salute her with obedient silence the moment she entered the ship’s small cafeteria/lounge area. Unfortunately for her, captaining a tiny picket ship like the Whisker didn’t carry that kind of prestige.
More to the point, it was difficult to maintain any kind of professional distance when you were in tight confines with the same group of seven people for weeks at a time.
Fortunately, the group of layabouts she was saddled with were still obedient enough. While they weren’t quite as prompt as she might have liked, the conversation did fall away, allowing her to speak.
“Glider, Rocket, you hearing me up there?” She asked.
“Loud and clear, captain.” The ship’s intercom squawked overhead.
“Good,” she nodded.
Between those two on the bridge and the five before her, the entire crew was present.
“As I’m sure you’ve all already heard, we’ll be getting a replacement for Batna when we next pull into port.”
All around her she saw people nod, though the one who did so most vigorously was Kernathu. Which wasn’t all that surprising given that the poor girl had been running double duty to compensate for the missing member of their complement. To be honest, it was kind of ridiculous that the Whisker had launched at all without a full crew, but then again, she supposed that was just a natural consequence of being posted to Gurathu. It was about as backwater a posting as one could get without literally manning a weather station on an ocean world.
“Please tell me it’s not another Rakiri,” Someone groused from the back. “It’s already bad enough that I’m picking Yaro’s hair out of the drain every other night.”
To her left, the crew’s sole Rakiri crewmate just chuffed in amusement, the furry bipedal woman more amused than offended by the insinuation.
“Forget a Rakiri, I’d kill for another Halkem,” Scales muttered, the aristocratic grey skinned woman running a hand over the eponymous black scales that ran run up and down her forearms. “A lower caste of course. It’s been forever since my scales received a proper buffing.”
“I offered to help,” her fellow marine offered.
Scales gave the muscular Shil’vati sitting next to her a cool-eyed glance. “Yes, and you nearly de-scaled me in the process.”
Assisse just shrugged, as if to say ‘at least I tried’. Tisi coughed, before Scales could respond and allow the crew’s odd couple to get into yet another argument.
“Well, before I have to listen to anymore suggestions as to what you do and don’t want in the latest member of our security contingent, how about I just tell you?”
The crew fell dutifully silent.
Sighing, Tisi continued. “They won’t be a Rakiri, Halkem or even a Shil’vati. We’re getting a Human.”
She’d been expecting it, but it was still kind of surprising how still everyone went. You could have heard a pin drop in the ensuing silence. Even Cerilla looked a little interested. Then the questions came all at once. Tisi didn’t even try to decipher the deluge of blurted words from about half the crew. Instead, she slammed a fist onto a nearby table.
“Quiet,” she hissed, silencing them all instantly as she scowled.
Sighing, she collected herself. As her eyes roamed over the room, she noted with some contentment that most of the crew looked at least a little sheepish about their outburst.
As they should, she thought.
For all that their circumstances allowed for a little laxity in military protocol, this was still a military ship and she was still the captain. They were all well-behaved enough on-planet, but sometimes when they were out in space all of them needed a reminder of what she represented.
She was the captain. Her word was law, and all of them were expected to give her rank the respect it deserved. Content to let the matter lie now that they’d all been reminded of that fact, she continued.
“Yes, they are male.” She answered, figuring it was best to get it over with.
It was fortunate for her that she’d just reminded them all to behave with some decorum, because she had a feeling that if she hadn’t, she’d be listening to them all whooping and jeering right now. Kernathu in particular looked about to explode from joy, and even Cerilla looked interested despite her self-proclaimed disinterest in men.
Of course, there’s disinterest and then there’s disinterest, Tisi thought.
Lots of girls liked to get into relationships devoid of males, but few enough would pass up an opportunity to ‘try one’ if it came up. It was a rare one that abstained entirely.
Of course, from every indication she’d seen, Tisi was pretty sure that Cerilla was one of those rare women. Her gut instinct was that the chief medical officer’s current interest was entirely professional rather than romantic or sexual.
The same could not be said for the rest of her crew however.
“Alright, all of you get your heads out of the gutters,” the captain instructed, before the – thus far – silent excitement could reach a fever pitch.
Not that she could particularly blame them. Even out on a backwater like Gurathu, where weeks could pass between messenger ship circuits, they’d all heard about the Imperium’s latest acquisition.
Tisi was pretty sure that half of it was Turox shit, but then again, even if only a fraction of what she’d heard about the humans was true… well, she could understand what all the hype was about.
Not that she intended to do anything about it when their newest crewmate arrived. She knew some captains liked to play that part of the noble in the parlor, but Tisi was better than that. Her only relationship with the newcomer would be professional.
…well, unless he offered. She had standards, but she wasn’t dead after all.
Snapping her mind away from that line of thought, she fixed the motley crew in front of her with a stern eye.
“Now I don’t need to remind you – but I will anyway,” she began. “We’re an Imperial Naval Vessel. That means you are expected to treat our newest crewmate the same way you treat anyone else.”
She’d gotten a very sternly worded memo with pretty much those exact same words in addition to her newest crewmate’s dossier.
“The last thing the navy wants is another scandal like the Iron Tooth,” she said, which served to put a significant damper on the party-like atmosphere that had been developing.
Which it should. The Iron Tooth incident had been a black mark on the reputation of the navy as a whole, and while those women were now all in military prison, the effect of the scandal on male recruitment rates was still being felt two years later. Still, at least it had brought a number of new rules and regulations into being for active-duty ships.
She knew some members of the military chafed under them, but to her thinking they were just good sense.
“We aren’t a band of Periphery pirates,” Tisi said, echoing her own thoughts. “We’re here to do a job, not just indulge our own whims.”
The crew as a whole nodded, even Assisse, prompting Tisi to smile with pride. Her crew might not have been the most disciplined bunch in this part of the galaxy, but when push came to shove, they were all good people.
-----------------------
Shil’vati, as a race, were predisposed to high temperature conditions. Many of their earliest civilizations had cropped up around the tropical climates of Shil’s equator.
Unfortunately for Assisse, Gurathu was anything but warm.
It was a frigid ice ball of a world, filled with mountains so large it made the ones back home look like a kid’s sandcastle by comparison. Sure, the main-colony had been set up in a valley between two of those mountains, keeping it more or less sheltered from the frigid winds of world, but that didn’t make the freezing temperature any less oppressive to her senses as she and the Captain stepped out of their car and onto the busy streets just outside the space port.
“Ma’am, why am I here?” Asisse asked, as she locked the vehicle and the two started making their way toward the nearby building. A task made marginally harder by the crowds of furry Rakiri colonists that made up an overwhelming majority of Gurathu’s population.
Just last week the space port had been a ghost town. Today that wasn’t the case though. With a large cargo ship coming in, the place had filled up with natives hoping to load up or receive things.
“Upset that I’m taking you away from your away time with Scales, sergeant?” the Captain teased as they strode past two brown coated furry aliens arguing loudly with a tired looking Shil’vati customs officer.
If they were still in space Assisse would have rolled her eyes at her superior’s comment. They were on-planet though, so she refrained, keeping her features studiously neutral. That was part of the strange dichotomy the crew of the Whisker shared.
It was an old joke anyway. For all that the crew liked to joke that the pair of them bickered like two rival wives in a marriage unit, they weren’t together. They were just friends. Which ironically was less than a lot of girls in the services were.
While the reputation for girls ‘enjoying each other’s company’ while out on deployment was a pretty gross exaggeration, it was a stereotype that held some truth. Assisse and Scales had never done anything of the sort though. They were just friends who liked to bicker.
“Not at all, ma’am,” Assisse drawled dutifully.
Tisi hummed thoughtfully as they flashed their credentials at the Shil’vati militia guarding the terminal entrance to the new arrival.
“I assumed that as the leader of our little Marine contingent, you’d be interested in seeing our newest arrival first hand.”
Assisse shrugged. She wasn’t too bothered to be honest. Whether she saw him today or a week from now, when the Whisker set off for patrol again, didn’t really matter. It wasn’t like she could send him back if she didn’t like him for whatever reason. Ignoring the fact that she was pretty sure the crew would mutiny if they didn’t get the human, it would be weeks before the next message ship came through, and they would be out on patrol before that happened.
“Apparently our newest addition is some kind of tactical savant,” the Captain continued, ignorant of her thoughts. “Managed to take on an entire company of Interior elites with just two other recruits during a training exercise.”
“…How?” Assisse asked skeptically. On a purely practical level, she was pretty sure three recruits didn’t have enough ammo to gun down that many of the opposition.
Tisi shrugged. “That, my dossier didn’t say. Probably some kind of guerilla thing. You’ve heard how humans are.”
Assisse nodded warily. Everyone had heard the stories about the latest race to be added to the Imperial fold. Specifically, the fact that they had a fifty/fifty gender ratio and that the males were just as randy as women.
That wasn’t what Tisi was referring to. Earth wasn’t all that dangerous. Ignoring the myriad other advantages the Imperium held over the native population, the fact was that most of the native’s weapons couldn’t penetrate through Shil’vati armor. That made being out on patrol a whole lot less of a daunting prospect.
That didn’t mean it was totally without risk. What the aliens apparently lacked in weapons acumen, they surely made up for in tenacity and creativity. The number of homemade ‘rail-guns’ that had been popping up in recent weeks was proof enough of that.
Crude, sparse and slow to fire as those weapons were, they’d destroyed the assurance of many a patrolwoman that their armor was proof against anything the natives could throw at them.
The place was still considered a pretty sweet posting compared to the likes of the Periphery - practically a vacation, even - but it seemed that with each passing month the number of injuries and casualties amongst the occupation force grew rather than diminished. Which was the opposite of what was supposed to happen.
The numbers were beyond middling to the Imperium, but it was still a worrying trend.
“Here we are,” Tisi said as they passed through another checkpoint and back out onto the recently swept open tarmac of the landing pad.
Personally, Assisse would have preferred to stay in the heated building and watch through the viewing port, but she knew better than to voice that opinion. That they’d be standing outside waiting for the ship to arrive had been a foregone conclusion anyway. As her slightly blue snow-tanned complexion could attest, the captain liked to take every opportunity she could to be out in the open air while they were on planet. It was almost as if she was compensating for all the time they spent in the cramped confines of the ship.
Well, that wasn’t strictly fair. The Whisker was actually pretty spacious for a picket ship, with a fairly large number of amenities for its small size. Of course, all the amenities in the world couldn’t distract from the fact that it was a limited area, and that the crew spent weeks, and occasionally months, stuck there.
So, she supposed she could forgive the captain’s need to stand out in the freezing Gurathu air. Even if Assisse was pretty sure the tips of her ears were beginning to form icicles.
“Anything else I should know, ma’am?” she asked as they peered out into the great blue sky above.
“He’s a boot.”
Assisse glanced at the woman next to her. “I figured as much, ma’am. Being human and all.”
Tisi determinedly kept her eyes on the sky. “No sergeant, I meant basic boot.”
That made the marine pause.
“No vocational, ma’am?” She asked slowly.
“No.”
Now Assisse was fully staring at her superior. “With all due respect ma’am, what the hell?”
Basic training was called that for a reason. It instilled all the basics that any member of the military might need.
That was the key word in that statement: Basics.
Vocational training was where actual skills were developed. Engineers, chefs, medics, hell, even your average riflewoman needed more advanced training to truly be considered competent in their chosen role.
Advanced unit tactics, sweeping and clearing, how to call in orbital support, jump-pack operation…
The list went on and on. All skills that were needed for a team to be able to function correctly during an operation.
Empress, it only got worse on a small picket ship like the Whisker. The ship’s small complement meant most members had multiple roles. Assisse herself was entirely capable of filling in as a medical assistant should it be required, and Scales was an assistant chef.
“I was lead to understand – as was the rest of the crew – that our newest member would be filling in for Bant,” she gritted out, not needing to state that Kernathu would be devastated. The young mechanic was running herself ragged keeping the ship running without aid. The rest of the crew tried to pitch in where they could, but they just didn’t have the skills to be truly useful.
The captain frowned, no doubt thinking the same thing. “I don’t like it much either.” She allowed. “Orders are orders though. Between us, it’s obvious that something funny is going on here.”
Assisse scowled. She knew exactly what that meant.
Politics.
The word felt foul on her tongue. She’d thought having a posting on the ass end of nowhere would get her away from all the politicking of back home. She supposed it just went to show that wherever the Imperium went, politics followed. The nobility were pathologically incapable of keeping their noses out of anything.
The captain being the notable exception of course. She was a fine no-nonsense leader, but even she had her moments where that ingrained aristocratic instinct kicked in.
Though it was unfair, Assise couldn’t help but wonder if this was one of those occasions. If the captain was accepting this human as part of some plot back home.
“It’s not all bad,” the woman continued, completely ignorant to the Sergeant’s thoughts. “Apparently he was going to university on his homeworld. Part of the uplift program to familiarize the humans with our tech so that they can finally start contributing.”
She paused. “He was only part way through the course before he, uh, signed up, but that should give him enough of a foundation to be of use. I’m sure Kernathu will get some use out of him.”
Assisse privately doubted that. Still, it wasn’t her department. Her only concern was how decent he’d be in a firefight. Not that she expected to be in one, but that was neither here nor there. Searching merchant ships for contraband was already tedious enough without worrying if one of her underlings was going to shoot his foot off.
“There it is,” Tisi pointed.
Assisse glanced up, and sure enough there was a blot in the sky above. It started small at first, but as the minutes passed, it only grew in size. Soon enough she could make out individual details. The Grinshaw’s Maw was built in the style of most Shil’vati ships. Which was to say that it was essentially a brick with a set of oversize engines strapped to the back.
The cargo ship was even uglier than most. Where most warships would have at least had a sleek array of laser pods running across the ship, this one had but one, mounted to the front. Instead of holding weapons, the sides of the ship bulged out awkwardly to make room for the vessel’s expanded cargo holds.
As she watched it continue to grow as it got closer, she couldn’t help but marvel at the sight. Nothing that big and cumbersome looking should have been able to move through atmosphere. Nor should it have been so quiet while doing so. Nearly twice the size of the massive super-cargo ships that used to ply Shil’s southern oceans, the thing’s engines should have been blazing away in an attempt to just keep the massive construct in the air. Instead, they were all but silent, only occasionally releasing a small puff as the ship corrected its course.
“Anti-gravity tech can be a real mindfuck,” she murmured, ignoring the way the Captain looked away from the ship to send her an amused glance.
Kernathu had tried to explain it to her once, but it had all come out as gibberish to Assisse’s ears. Like, what the fuck was a ‘graviton’ and why was it only sometimes a wave? She had no clue, and she’d long since given up trying to understand.
Finally, the ship touched down with a clunk. Then a second clunk as the anti-grav field turned off and the full weight off the ship dropped onto the landing struts.
The cargo gates opened with a whirring noise, and massive heavy-duty ramps slid down. Almost immediately cargo vehicles and exo’s began striding out to the behemoth, to begin the gargantuan task of unloading its cargo, before reloading it with exports from Gurathu.
“Shall we go see the latest addition to our little ‘family’?” Tisi said, a hint of genuine excitement peeking through her expression.
Assisse once more resisted the urge to roll her eyes. For all that the captain played the role of the no-nonsense officer, sometimes it was easy to see the excitable young woman that lay beneath. As evidenced by the fact that they were boarding the ship, rather than heading back inside to wait in the passenger terminal.
Instead of doing that, Assisse did what all enlisted throughout history did when saddled with an excitable officer. She grunted and grudgingly followed after her superior.

First / Next
Another three chapters are also available on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bluefishcake
We also have a (surprisingly) active Discord where and I and a few other authors like to hang out: https://discord.gg/RctHFucHaq

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How i left a party even before session 1 because of critical role

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Fallout 76: Inventory Update Notes – January 26, 2021

Update Highlights

Update Version

Inventory and User Interface Improvements

Additional User Interface Updates

Daily Ops

Spread the Love: New Challenges and Rewards

Bug Fixes

Allies

Art & Graphics

C.A.M.P. and Workshops

Challenges

Daily Ops

Diseases

Enemies

Items

Mutations

NPCs

Performance and Stability

Perks

Quests and Events

Sound

User Interface

World

Social Influence, Tara Reade, Deplatforming, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, Presented Through the Observations of a Former Poster

TWs under this line

Intro

Social Expectations

My Own Experience On Chapo Before I Was Really, Really, REALLY into it

My Breaking Point: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love their LARP

My Part In Perpetuating This

Digging Out

Deplatforming

Miscellaneous Examples Of Establishing Social Expectations

Fin

Prologue

Chapter 1

Where is the final island, Raftel? One Piece MEGA Theory (spoilers for anime only)

The road Poneglyphs

So... what/where is Laugh Tale?

Parallelism and foreshadowing

Bonus | Urouge's role in the story

Sexy Space Babes: Chapter Twenty One

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