I've been friends with Mandy and Christy for a year. They're both fun and nice, but I noticed Mandy isn't as nice as Christy. It's always Christy or me initiating contact or hangouts. Christy and I both gave more expensive Christmas gifts than Mandy did. We're always on time while Mandy is often late and even came 30 minutes late to my graduation party. Christy always pays for our Lyft. Christy often replies to my Snapchat stories, but Mandy hardly does. Christy praises how I'm pretty, my hair / makeup / nails / outfit are on point, I'm nice, and understanding. Mandy hasn't told me any of this. Christy replies to texts quickly while Mandy sometimes takes over a day to reply or is dry.
Mandy is still nice. She has listened to me complain, treats me to coffee sometimes even though it's at cheaper places, took a Lyft to avoid me waiting too long, doesn't ignore any of my messages, calls me funny, helped with advice for a prom dress, bought souvenirs for us, always acts as a therapist for Christy, and is easygoing & flexible to plan with since she's always down.
However, I still feel like Christy and I are putting in more effort. I don't get the lack of initiation, the tardiness, passivity, and lack of words of appreciation or compliments. I also don't get the long response times and dryness since she's usually not busy. For example, she'd cancel or come late yet be posting Snapchat stories of dramas she's watching.
I'm annoyed by this difference. Why can't she put in the effort that I do, or especially that Christy does? I want to confront her about these things and ask her to put in more effort if she cares about us as friends.

So I know Lindsay very BRIEFLY touched upon this in the rent essay where she mentions the amount of 2005 vehicles seen in the setting of 80s NYC but RENT’s costumes in no way represent what a bunch of bohemians would wear in the late 80s
The costumes in the Rent movie and the stage show (from the recorded stage performance featured in Lindsay’s essay) all just scream Y2K. In the film and show Mark sports a blue v neck sweater with a red stripe going across the chest. This sporty motif of a different color strip on a v neck was all over men’s casual pullovers and sweatshirts in the late 90s and even into the mid 2000s (Reese on Malcolm in the middle can be seen wearing these)
When Maureen does her performance art in the musical, she is wearing a hippy two tone blouse in which one colorful print makes up the torso of the shirt and the sleeves are a separate colorful pattern makes up the sleeves. You would see something like this on Lizzie Maguire. In Scary Movie Anna Farris wears a similar blouse with maps of world countries on it.
In the movie during the art performance Maureen dons black leather pants and a sleeveless distressed dark brown baby t shirt with a graphic or glitter on it like she walked off the set of a Christina Aguilera music video. By 2003 that look was basically over but this is 2005 we are talking about.
I’ve seen similar costumes worn by actors in more recent local productions of Rent (via posters and promotional stills) and I’ve come to realize that most if not all productions or adaptions must be honoring the costumes of the original which went out of their way to look nothing like the 80s.
The sweater mark wears looks like it could have been bought at The Gap, Maureen’s hippy blouse at a mid level chain store at any mall, and her polished punk pop Star look in the film would come from a luxury boutique in Manhattan or Melrose Avenue in 2000. Since Mark and Maureen are supposed to be starving artists, they probably couldn’t afford these stores and would in part rationalize their inability to afford those clothes as “selling out and looking like a clone” they more likely would have dated wardrobes that were purchased from thrift stores. That is if they are truly bohemian, but almost 40 years later thrift stores are a lot more popular.
Often when period pieces are made, even the most faithful to accuracy have a modern sensibility when it comes to period clothing. Often the silhouettes and cuts of clothing are closer to contemporaneous standards, but the patterns or colors may be evocative of the period. Makeup and hair are seldom ever period accurate either. I’ve yet to see anyone replicate the big hair of the 70s, 80s and 90s and that’s because it looks goofy and tacky and unglamorous and turn off to the audience. Most people also don’t grow their hair out that long anymore so it’s also a logistical thing.
Rent however makes zero attempt to even suggest the period it’s set in in the 80s. I feel like it would have been cheaper to get used clothes from the 80s from a costume house or vintage stores during the mid 90s then to get them in contemporary clothing. I feel like they needed to make the story glamorous to appeal to Y2K audiences, which just further shows how unironic and misleading RENT is about the time and place it wants to portray.

This may be my last post because I use RIF. The debacle with this API monetization thing gives me a great out -- my wife sometimes [sic] calls herself a "Reddit Widow" which . . . hurts.
Story time:
I gave my son a decent Leatherman pocket knife for Christmas.
I had it engraved with:
"To ***** I Love You, Dad" and "If found call 541-852-**** for reward". If you have sons, you know why.
Well, he lost the knife a few weeks ago in downtown Eugene. Did it fall out when he got in/out of car? Not sure.
A week or so goes by . . .
Homeless camp (or something - details unclear). A woman shows off the knife. A man checks it out.
After the gentleman reads the inscription on the knife, he trades her a (rock/gem/hipppiecrystal?) for my son's knife. He then gives her his personal knife because she says she needs a knife for protection. She is homeless and has to deal with issues that I don't want to try to imagine.
So this random dude gave her his knife in exchange for my son's knife. Who does this?
Not two days later my son gets a call from some rando that says he has his knife. He explains to him that he is homeless and wants to get the kinfe back to its owner. He asks for nothing.
As a father, I was concerned.
Over a couple of weeks, there were several calls from random numbers -- all from this same homeless dude -- asking when they could meet. There was some hesitance, naturally.
Eventually, my son met up with this kind 40ish year old man, and this gentleman returned it without a hitch.
Apparently, he was super friendly and just wanted to make sure a son got a gift from his dad back.
So . . . Remember: Homeless people can be kind. I know I need to work on judging less. Hoping this story helps you do the same.
I want to give my thanks to you (Name Unkown but there is a Z and an 8 in there, maybe?) - Your kindness is noted, appreciated, and gives me more apprication for the human spirit . . . You could have just kept that knife -- but no -- you went out of your way with multiple phone calls to my son and got his knife back to him.
Thank you, Sir!
----FWIW, my son gave him a sleeping bag and a few other camping supplies as a reward
-- I wish I checked the spelling of "empathy" in the title

Long story short, I brought my gf, her kid and her mom to live to my house, I brought all of them from Russia, I paid everything this whole 2022 (ticket planes, airbnb, food...), rent a new apt, buy all furniture she wants, utilities, literally everything she want kinda to make her happy and don't miss her apt in Russia.
5 months ago we broke up, we were fighting a lot for small things, we were not even sleeping in the same bed, so after all I did, I feel just as a partner, a father for her kid, and a partneATM for her.
Also she was demanding a ring to even kiss me or sleep together and ofc have sex...but hey, she is a single mom and ofc she didn't ask for a ring to her ex.
All of that leads to a deadbedroom, not even a common bedroom, not even kisses, no hugs, touching, just partners in the same apt
With all the pain in my heart I left the apt, so I left her decide what she can do, stay here in this country, back to Russia, move to another country, it took 5 months to her to get Visa for NA, while that happen I keep paying everything, amazon, food, apt, clothes, bills, everything, making gifts for her kid.
Every single day I was thinking on her and her kid which I feel as mine, I was crying and I was devastated because I really love that kid and I felt so bad because that kid loves me too.
We talk sometimes, I said Im sorry, I want to fix it...but she continue with the idea of NA.
She just talk me to buy the tickets, help her with some stuffs and so on, because I deeply love her and her kid and I feel responsible for her here, I pay the tickets, for her.
Today when I back to my apt after I left her in the airport, I found like the apt is a complete mess, is dirty, looks like she didn't clean since I left, not even for her kid, it was rotten milk in the fridge, she left me all her meds, old clothes and even clothes which I gift to her, literally I just have receives and small boxes of meds, she even took electronic toothbrush hahaha.
The worst part which brokes my heart and makes me no feel sorry for her is SHE LEFT AN SPECIAL ALBUM I MADE FOR HER AND HER KID, it was an album with all the photos she send me during this years, every photo had an story which I could tell, I gift this to her on Christmas, when she open, she said thank and she even didn't check, back then it hurts also, but I said, well, later we will see together.
But look this album under all garbage she left, It made me realise I was nothing for her, I don't know what was her plan, if she loves me in some point at all, I don't if should I ask why she left this album, maybe she will say it was for me, or she didn't notice or she didn't like it, but she made sure to take pencils and color pencils, draw book I bought for her, what you would do?
I will cry when I will remember the kid and I will see that kid alone, but well, i cannot keep being the stupid man who defends her and protect her, making her excuses for everything she does.
Jeeesus I was so blind, so stupid, I was so in love like I prefer to ignore that behavior and blame myself all the time because I left her in another country.
If you want, share when did you noticed and decide you was right for what you did, what was the trigger.

I would love to hear from folks who have navigated family events (Christmas/birthday/funerals etc) where you have an interpersonal conflict with another family member(s) who you’d rather not talk to. Particularly where the other family member has children around the same age as your kids (so kids will probably play together).
These were people we thought we were close to and we thought we’d be raising our kids together with so we are still hurting about our falling out with them. But we also don’t see the situation changing anytime soon, if ever.
I want to keep my emotions in check and not cause any scenes or ruin anyone’s day if/when we are face to face again. So any advice about how you have successfully handled such situations would be welcome.
Thanks in advance for your stories!

I never replay games. I’m more of a one and done it kind of guy, but something about ATB’s gameplay and story compelled me to play it not once, not twice, but four times at the time of writing. It certainly helps that the game is short (although I think the universal praise of The Outer Wilds demonstrates that this isn’t a bad thing).
My latest playthrough clocked in at ~35 minutes at the time of writing in order to get the Toot Sweet achievement. Ironically, this exact pursuit of achievements led me to get the Librarian achievement and, ultimately, finally read all the story notes chronologically.
Notwithstanding, ATB is a nauseatingly haunting game on harder difficulties. The monster is deadly, the resources are scarce, the tone is grim, and the darkness encompasses it all. Above all of this, the story is worth telling and I posit that the game’s genre, coupled with the Amnesia brand being notoriously terrifying if PewDewPie is to be believed, will prevent a lot of people from playing it. That’s such a shame.
Without further obfuscation, I want to encourage you to play the game; immerse yourself in its world and discover its truth for yourself. Your appreciation for the story will only compound the more time you spend stalking the halls of the unnamed bunker it takes place in.
For those of you that don’t care to play it, but appreciate a good story, read ahead. SPOILER WARNING.
ATB’s story begins before the player ever takes control of the protagonist, Henri Clemont, a Soldier in the French Army at the Battle of Pozieres during World War I.
April 1916 – Toussaint Beaufoy – What Could Be Worse than War?
On 2 April, 1916, Henri’s embattled unit receives orders to dig their bunker deeper so that their chain of command can laud it as a symbol of French patriotism and eventual victory in the war.
The calamity of World War I, having already wrought havoc on the bodies and minds of Henri’s unit, is only intensified by these foolhardy orders. This bunker is destined to become “a rancid, stinking pit. A void, a hole. Full of men, scared and confused.”
Eight days later, on 10 April, Henri’s compatriot, Toussaint Beaufoy, pens a poem We Whirl the World that reflects on the grim events of the war and foreshadows the events of the game.

We whirl the world
The world we whirl
It all gets lost in a terrible twirl
Can’t see the sun for all the smoke
Can’t see the ground for all the dead folk
Can’t see the ocean, can’t see the trees
So I stay here down on my knees
We whirl the world
The world we whirl
It all gets lost in a binding twirl
A snarl in the dark
A sad day in the park
A stone reminder
A horse’s dirty blinder
A child’s empty hand
A friend’s stained armband
The news of the day on the stand
We whirl the world
The world we whirl
It all gets lost in a bloody twirl
What comes next around the bend?
Maybe it’ll be some kind of end
More likely another shrill, shrill whistle,
Magic that turns men into gristle.
We whirl the world
The world we whirl
It all gets lost and still we twirl

Henri’s unit begins digging and on 30 April, another soldier, Alex Noyer, extrapolates on why the unit has been ordered to dig: the bunker lay atop Roman ruins that extend towards the German lines. The command wants to use these prebuilt tunnels to launch a surprise attack on the enemy. However, Noyer’s interest lay more in the archaeological significance of the dig.
With the dig well underway, the other soldiers begin to experience haunting symptoms. Notably, Beaufoy, who witnesses some horror on the night of 5 May, that shatters his psyche. He refuses to discuss what he witnessed with anybody, yet he revels in it; “I want to go back to that place. I want to feel that way. I want the violence and the ecstasy and the pitch-black darkness.”
May 1916 - Alex Noyer’s Journal - Digging Up a Dark Secret
A week later (9 May), Noyer is presented with archaic texts uncovered during the digging. He begins to read them and discovers the texts are not of typical Roman writings. Rather, the texts are religiously significant repeating the phrase “to cross into darkness and beyond.”
These texts originated from a people that believed they found the key to immortality, a blessing bestowed upon them from some “other world… dominated by darkness… ruled by something…” These damned texts went on to describe this world as “full of spirits, monsters and that the air there was endlessly alive with cries of torment and the sickly rattle of souls near death.”
The tunnels that the men were digging were used by this ancient people as a portal to this “pagan hell.”
This manifested in our world as the need for the followers to commit sickening acts that appealed to the primal instincts of humanity; “blood orgies, of sadistic spirits, of the awful things these men and women would do to each other in worship of darkness” and a magical liquid that would grant the believer’s immortality in darkness.
Noyer enters the tunnels sometime on 14 May, and discovers more of the cursed history of the tunnels. “The Romans used these tunnels to hold sadistic bacchanals, great festivals of cruel combat, torture and worse... held in an arena over a great pit.” His command writes him off as paranoid, and Noyer resolves to enter the tunnels.
On 25 May, Noyer is recovered after screaming in the damp excavation sight until his vocal cords were annihilated – alive but utterly terrified.
June 1916 - Farber - Am I Out of Touch? No, It’s the Soldiers Who Are Wrong.
Noyer warns his brother-in-arms about the texts and truth of the ruins they are excavating. As the truth and panic spread, the Command begins punishing those who speak of the more sinister presence that is permeating the halls of the bunker.
Throughout the month of May, the soldiers are gripped with a waking terror that seeps into their dreams, all the while having to fight a war notorious for its brutality. Noyer writes, “we’re stuck between the Germans in front of us, high command behind us, and some other horrible force that seems to lurk in shadows all around us. I fear we are now truly beyond God’s reach.”
Rumors of the truth that Noyer uncovered begin to spread amongst the men. Despite taking the assertions of the malevolent presence seriously, the command chooses to contain the panic through force.
Incensed by Noyer’s ominous warnings, a rebellion is formed on 28 May with a soldier only known as “Farber” at its helm. The mission is simple: contain the evil of the tunnels by sabotaging the digging efforts with a cave in. Farber notes that each of the five recruits is exceptionally eager to end the waking nightmare, particularly Beaufoy.
Their efforts are successful and the soldiers experience a brief abatement from the ever-present fear, only to be discovered and subsequently tortured by their Commanding Officers, Reynard and Delpy. None are spared the persecution, save for Beaufoy, who is presumed to have been killed in the blast that undoes the dig. The last thing any other soldier saw of him was Beaufoy telling them he had “other work to do,” whilst pointing to his own eyes.
Despite the ordeal, no participant reveals Farber as the mastermind, and Farber is forever indebted to the brotherhood.
The officers of the unit do four things in the wake of this unthinkable act of insubordination: (1) abandon the tunnel, (2) punish the conspirators, (3) send the remaining men on dangerous combat patrols and (4) order more wine. No lesson learned, no warning heed.
Of minor note, on the evening of 30 June, after one such combat patrol, a German prisoner is captured. Small recompense for the men routinely thrown into the meat grinder of enemy machine guns and command tribunals.
July 1916 – Henri Clément – Buddy Fucker with a Conscious
Another such raid is ordered on 8 July, and Henri has a plan to not go. Henri and his best friend, Augustin Lambert, decide that the winner of a game of chance will not have to risk their life this evening and the other will go in their friend’s place. Henri cheats, rationalizing it as a harmless prank, condemning Lambert to endure the battlefield once more. Henri is sure Lambert will return, unscathed, and cannot wait to see the look on his face when he learns what Henri did.
Only, Lambert doesn’t return. As the dusk of 8 July turns into dawn, Henri is wrought with guilt. He resolves to recover his friend. It is here, that the player finally takes control of the protagonist.
Henri discovers Lambert at the bottom of a pit. Not a crater from artillery, a borderline incomprehensibly large depression. Henri makes his way down and renders aid to his battered, but alive, compatriot. Henri gathers water from the pit, and nurses his friend before they attempt to escape.

Patrol Report – 10 July 1916
Odd occurrences last night. Sdt. Lambert, thought dead after his patrol on the 8th, returned to the barracks in fine health. He carried with him Sdt. Clément – severely wounded from an explosion.
Lambert reports the following:
-That midway through his patrol on the 8th he fell into a deep crater and was unable to escape.
-Clément, his close friend, snuck out after him last night, located him in the crater, and carried him out.
-They were spotted and in the ensuing attack, Clément was injured by an explosion. It fell on Lambert to carry him back.
Very odd that Lambert was neither injured from the fall nor the explosion AND that he ended up saving the man who came to save him.
But battlefield luck is an odd thing. In every life, fate’s winds blow erratic.
Judging by Lambert’s description, the crater he fell into seems to have been located very close to the Roman tunnels we unearthed. It may have been a result of work down there.
Recommend a future patrol to investigate and make sure we have not opened a backdoor into our own bunker.

Henri remains comatose for ten(?) days.
July 1916 – Augustin Lambert – The Nightmare Is Only Beginning
Lambert, having dodged death, reflects on the events of his ill-fated patrol. His loss of hope at the bottom of the inescapable pit, and the angelic reprieve he received from Henri. He notes how the water Henri nursed him with “was cool and crisp, with a strange, sweet taste. Never has water felt more nourishing than that, administered by a dear friend’s hand.”
Despite surviving, Lambert’s survival is dampened by the loss of a toy he bought for his son – the toy he believes to be in the pit where he almost lost his life.
Lambert grows stronger by the day. However, with Lambert’s return, so do the haunts that plagued his fellow Soldiers. Scratching at the walls and an overt ghostly howling emanates throughout the halls at night.
July 1916 – Stéphane Joubert – Oh Yeah, The Murders.
The first to fall Reynard on 15 July. Hardly a loss after his treatment of the soldiers, but certainly a catalyst for even further distrust.
Stéphane Joubert, another officer, reflects on the evening of the murder in his journal. He had heard a commotion in the hallway, but assumed it be Reynard drunk on his secret stash of wine. No one was aware anything was wrong until they heard the screaming. He is concerned for the harshness in which his fellow officers treat the men, particularly in the wake of this death.
The remaining officers interrogate the men, after all, a murderer was so clearly amongst them.
Paranoia grips the men, who are the prime suspects due to their contempt for Reynard. But the brutality and sadistic nature of the murder was beyond the pale? The autopsy read:

Body of Sgt. Reynard.
Multiple lacerations. Chest cavity torn to shreds. Every rib cracked. Skull cracked open by repeated blunt force trauma.
Who could have done this to him?

Amid the violence, Farber, driven mad by the resurgence of the haunting presence, resolves to kill it himself to atone for being the only man left unpunished for the tunnel sabotage. When the evil presence, emboldened by the murder of Reynard, returns, Farber is there. He shoots the Beast and it retreats into the shadows.
But it did not forget. It returned ten minutes later and pulled Farber into the wall, “screaming… praying for salvation.”
The men note something familiar about the Beast as it continues to hunt them; like it knows who they are.
The officers abandon the men, escaping and blowing the entrance to the bunker behind them – condemning the soldiers to evisceration by an unkillable force. Joubert, the only bastion of morality amongst the officers, is among the escapees all the same He leaves the men one chance at salvation.

Fournier, our commanding officer!, cowers next to me now. He’s lost his mind to an abyss of fear…
He wants to run, to blow up the exit behind him.. Sealing the demon down here… The demon AND our men.
His constant refrain, it is getting to me… and that same void of terror… it is also overtaking me.
To any of my men who see this: once we’re free of this place, I will get the arsenal code from him. I will get it and I will radio it back to you.
Trapped down here with that beast, the arsenal may be your only hope. It’s all I can do. All I have courage to do…
Get to the communications room in the Soldier Quarters. Hide there. I’ll broadcast the code to you.
-Joubert

The men, responded to such hollow words:

The officers have abandoned us! They ran from the beast and blew the exit closed behind them. Even Joubert…
They called us cowards and traitors and worse… Hypocrites. Now they’ve doomed us.
Whatever hell we suffer now, it is on them. God will punish them for what they’ve done.

July 1916 – Henri Clément – The Game Begins
The game begins with Henri awakening in the hospital bed from comatose state. He doesn’t remember the past, but that’s why we have spent about 2400 words going over that. The gameplay of Amnesia is self-explanatory – gather resources, avoid the monster, escape.
In order to accomplish this goal Henri has several sub objectives that, for convenience, we’ll cover in two parts: Get the Dynamite and Get the Detonation Handle. This isn’t a walk through, every playthrough of the game is different, but you learn the fates of several characters through extrapolating on the relationship between the notes and the game itself. Play the game and get stalked by the monster for the horror experience.
Get the Dynamite (Located in the Armory):
· Located in the armory, Henri first needs to retrieve a code to unlock said armory. The code, you recall, Joubert promised to broadcast to the soldiers. After solving the daisy chain issue in the Soldier’s Quarters and finding the requisite key, Henri makes his way to the communication room. Joubert is true to his word, he is still broadcasting the code. Henri can now retrieve the dynamite.
Get the Detonator Handle (Located in the Tunnels):
· First order of business is to recover a ratchet wrench that allows access into the Prisoner Control room in the Prison section of the bunker. The wrench is in Foreman Stafford’s locker, but you’ll have to find the code. Henri discovers that Stafford made his way to the Bunker’s Pillbox as a means of escape. However, the Pillbox is locked with the only key being in the bunker’s Chapel. Henri makes his way to the chapel to uncover an unholy display of twisted bodies – an achievement pops up revealing this is the Beast’s nest. In the confessional, Henri discovers the priest (otherwise insignificant to the story) nailed to the wall. He recovers the key and returns to the Pillbox. At the top, Stafford is there, a bullet through the eye from an enemy sniper – a grim reminder that you’re still fighting a war.
· The wrench is to help gain access to the Captured German Prisoner’s cell, left abandoned; Geneva Convention be damned. What we want in the cell is a pair of bolt cutters that had been used to torture the prisoner. Opening his cell alerts the monster, whom promptly murders the poor prisoner (although there is a slightly happier disposition in which you retrieve the bolt cutters before the Beast gets to him – are you quick enough to save his life? Do you even want to?)
· The bolt cutters grant access to the chained-shut tunnels. The haunted tunnels. The Pagan Hell. Ghostly apparitions due exist down here skulking the fog teasing you with the evil you’ve read so much about. Impossible rock formations alongside Roman statues and columns, this place is truly unearthly. But then you hear a voice, the first voice you’ve heard since the prisoner you couldn’t understand died. “We whirl the world…” Its Beaufoy, whom has gouged his own eyes out and roams the fog with a shotgun and homicidal intent – still more work to do. He will kill you, so you must put your fellow soldier down. Is it better this way? At least that shotgun is yours now *finger guns*.
· If you explore a little more, after finding the detonator handle, you’ll find a small tunnel that leads to the pit. The pit the game began in, the pit with the small rabbit toy Lambert lost. Shit, what happened to Lambert?
You retreat to the beginning of the game. Hook up the dynamite and blow it. Make your way to escape. You find yourself at a grand arena above a bottomless pit. With the Beast standing between you and salvation. Is there really a boss battle in this game? Winning it reveals the final truth.
Lambert is the monster. Your best friend, corrupted by the water you nursed into him to save his life. Presenting the toy to him prior to the final battle when he tries to kill you causes him to take it, run to his fucked-up chapel nest, and place it on a pedestal. There is still humanity there, and that’s why he recognized those he killed.
But this is a grand arena over a great pit, and losers go into the pit. Use the toy to hold the monster up on the destructible bridges and, while he plays with it, blast the bridge itself – pulling the literal floor out from underneath him – eternal darkness awaits.
Now flee, make your way to salvation. You see sunlight. You breach the rocks and roll down a slope into a pit of dead comrades. At least you’re free of that beast.
As you bask in the light you hear “SCHNELL, SCHNELL” and searchlights beginning to scan where you just fell from.
Fuck, you’re still in a war.
A grotesquely unsettling story of overcoming shitty circumstances and still losing. What’s that like an 8? Probably an 8.

Account too new to post on speculativeevolution so i have to ask here:
I am writing a speculative evolution story,and a lot of the animals are,like,freakishly big compared to ones in real life. However,I'm trying to make sure I'm neither being too restrictive nor being too into fantasy:like e.g. I don't wanna end up with a 100 foot tall giant ant or something but I don't see a problem with creating a 3 inch ant (just an example so you get the idea:animals should be much bigger than realistic but not to the extent that its overblown).
In this case,it involves a large evolved bat species:the deathbringer bat is the largest species of bat ever (evolving around 15 million years in the future),with a wingspan of over 12ft on average (3.6 meters) and a height of over 8ft (2.4 meters),as well as weighing around 8,8-16,5 lbs (4-7,5 kilograms). It inhabits parts of North America and most of Europe,as well as some much smaller populations inhabiting tiny portions of Northeastern Asia (Siberia). Its diet is carnivorous,feeding primarily on small frogs,fish,rabbits,large rodents,small birds,insects and even other,smaller bat species. Younger (and thus smaller) specimens feed primarily on worms,snails,insects and other small invertebrates. Its lifespan is around 20-35 years,with the longest record (albeit in captivity) lifespan being 52 years.
They are considered an apex predator as there is no known species that preys on them.
They are nocturnal and spend most of the day sleeping in caves,but around nighttime they search for potential prey to bring back to their caves and feed on.
Their bite is very infectious and can carry diseases,including rabies.
Do you think this specific species sounds too 'freakish' and/or unrealistic to be taken seriously or do you think it can work somewhat? Any advice would be helpful,thank you.

I would love to make this short, but it's kind of a long story. I know that I need to end things with my boyfriend, but I'm scared that I'm being hasty, and that I can't tell the difference between a rough patch and a breaking point.
I (33F) met my current boyfriend Josh (28M) about 2 1/2 years ago when I was in a polyamorous relationship with my ex-fiance. Josh and I started seeing each other, and when my fiance and I went through our (very messy) breakup, we were still together and through the last couple years, despite a few lapses in our relationship, we just get along really well: we have similar senses of humor, we enjoy a lot of the same media, have many of the same beliefs, even if he is a lot more conservative than I am, and he was brought up very differently. His family is Catholic, big, and very close, and my family is rather small and not really very close.
Last year, we decided that we were going to build a future together, remaining in an open/polyamorous relationship. We have many similar goals, mostly moving to a more rural area, getting land, having tiny houses, and a garden, and maybe some animals. At least that's what we've talked about. However I have a 9-year-old daughter (whose father currently has primary custody because of my living situation, which I will explain, but I go over and spend time with her for the majority of the afternoon 3-4x per week, so we're maintaining okay), and Josh wants to have more kids. It makes me really nervous to have more kids unless I'm able to do it soon, because I'm approaching the age where it gets more complicated to have children. Plus, instead of being 42 when my child graduates and we can move into building her adulthood, I would be into my fifties before my children were moved into adulthood. But he really wants to be a dad so I decided I could have more kids if that was what was right for our relationship. And I love children... my daughter is the best thing that's ever come from me.
I understand that non-monogamy has some controversy surrounding it, but I was determined to make the practice of non-monogamy ethical, and not just cheating. I always told my primary partner, who before was my fiance and now was Josh, when I was interested in someone and what my intentions were, and did my best to provide before and after care. Josh was pretty adamant that he was open to the arrangement from the beginning, and it was sort of a dealbreaker for me not to be open, so I thought we'd come to an agreement.
We eventually made plans to move into an apartment together, so in order to escape the volatile living situation I was in, I decided to move in with my parents for a few months, while we found a place. My parents, I found out later, were very insistent on my move out date of March 1st, but I was certain we could get a place before that. There were also two weeks where my parents would be out of town (around Christmas) so they needed me to stay somewhere else. I was able to stay with Josh, who was also living with his parents, and since they have kind of a full house, we stayed in the living room on an air mattress I bought.
Honestly it was kind of a nightmare - I was never alone, had a new job that was very stressful to learn, had no car and was taking the bus when my job was all the way across town; I wasn't sleeping because we had to wait for everyone to go to bed around 11, and then the first people to wake up were up around 5am, plus he snores really loud and kept me up as well. I was literally spiraling, not getting any sleep and not having anywhere to turn, not being allowed to be dissatisfied because I needed to be grateful that I was allowed to be there in the first place.
During this time, he definitely showed more signs of being dissatisfied of not being exclusive, and usually he hid his jealousy pretty well, but his mask started to fall. We had a huge fight on New Year's, when I was really drunk and don't remember the conversation leading up to it, but it was bad enough that I said it was over and went back to stay with my parents early, before they were back in town. Later I found out that he had said some offensive things about a marginalized group that I care a lot about, and I guess I got so angry that I ended things...but I don't remember what he said. In the aftermath, however, he and his family framed it that he just wasn't okay with polyamory, and it just didn't work out.
Well I was heartbroken and devastated, and after a lot of emotional labor from me, including long apology letters from me to both his family and him (they never responded to me, btw), we ended up getting back together. I agreed to be monogamous and only be with him exclusively, as that was the only way to be together, and I was thinking that I'd rather be mono with him than poly without him.
In that time, I had saved up enough money to get an apartment, but due to a prior eviction was having a hard time getting approved. Since Josh had told me recently since we'd gotten back together that he wouldn't mind us getting an apartment, I asked if he would just be the primary signer on the application, but I would pay for everything until he was ready. And he said he wasn't comfortable with it and it was too soon. Well we were into February now and my parents were requiring me to move out March 1. So I ultimately was not able to get approved for anything and chose temporary housing.
I stayed in an AirBnB after my parents called time for about 6 weeks. I booked it for both Josh and I (thinking he would be grateful for the opportunity not to share a bedroom with his 18 year old brother and would stay with me during that time), but he only came over 5-6 times. And only stayed the night half those times. He does have a relatively physical full-time job, but it's still a normal person's job, and lots of people do it and still maintain relationships. I tried to tell him that I was sad and lonely and needed more attention from him, and he called me "explosive" for it. Part of the reason for me being poly is that I'm just high maintenance and a handful and I need a lot of attention. Not all the time, but I need to not feel cut off from it.
After I couldn't afford to do the AirBnB anymore, I had to choose to move into my car. I sometimes camp in the nearby woods, but a lot of time am urban camping. His younger brotheroommate is often out of the house all night, but he never tells me when that happens. He came camping with me one night too, and it was the first night in a week I could sleep on a mattress, albeit in the tent, but still not in my car, so I was very excited. However he got too cold and invited me to stay in his car with him AND his pit bull, and I was kind of appalled. I said that no, I didn't really want to do that. And he stormed off to his car, repeatedly calling me "mean", which shocked me and rang in my head for a few days. We made up the next day but it was a really awful experience.
Now I see him probably once per week if I'm lucky, and we basically just eat food, watch TV, and lie in his twin bed. This would be fine if we could have great conversations also or connect in any kind of way, but it's nearly impossible to have a conversation about anything that isn't just us joking back and forth. I can't remember the last meaningful conversation we've had; he never asks me about my life other than work, never asks where I'm staying or if I'm safe, doesn't take my struggles with mental health seriously, and just seems to want to only have the fun parts of our relationship and the easy parts of me, while leaving me to deal with me and my own drama all by myself.
This is already so long... I just don't have anyone in my life I can burden with all of this - I try to dole out the frustrations between my mom and my two close friends, but I also understand the social necessity to not just dominate conversation with crises and not to depend on people for advice, so I only really ever talk about this in little bursts, and it's so hard to convey how it feels in such a small amount of time. I just thought he knew that if I was going to go from having multiple partners, which wasn't necessarily something I was looking for actively all the time, I wasn't on dating apps or whatever, but if I met someone at an event or at work or even a bar, I don't cut myself off from a possible connection. I wasn't just sleeping around with a bunch of people, it was usually one person for a few months or so and was like a brief encounter.
Having those other partners also obscured the differences between Josh and I, and the things that he wasn't really able to/interested in doing with me, like having certain deep kinds of conversations that weren't just jokes, and exploring new interests... this all really hit me when I realized two very specific things:

1. I was thinking about us having children and realized that he values his career right now more than he wants to spend time with me, so if we have children, he will expect me to put everything on hold to solely take care of the children so that he didn't have to take any kind of break from work. I think this would be applicable even if I made more money than he does (which I currently do, but only by a little, and I have far more expenses)
2. I went rock climbing with one of my close friends, and, I don't want to sound mean, but Josh is a big guy. I've always thought of him as just being husky or whatever, and never really saw any limitations to his physicality, but lately his eating and weight have gone a little overboard, when we are intimate he needs me to be on top or we have sometimes-awkward, sometimes-great spoon intercourse. While I was climbing on the structures with my friend (we'll call him Sheldon), which was indoors and had an automatic rope that let you down from the top, I realized that Josh probably couldn't take part in the activity, either because he would be physically incapable of getting close enough to the wall to grip or it would be too much of a burden to carry his weight... and I don't know what the maximum weight on the automatic ropes are, but I can't imagine they can rappel that much weight like that. It also made me realize he's not really into trying new things or self-improvement or anything like that.

I need courage to end this, because he's been my best friend for awhile, and I really don't want to hurt him. I usually feel comfortable around him, and we've been through a lot together. But I'm so tired of hurting and missing him and feeling dismissed that I feel like I need to separate myself so I'm not being disappointed by my consistently unfulfilled needs. And if it were just a little bad, I'd be okay, but I feel so disconnected that I'm developing an "ick" and I feel horrible about that... he is kind of my best friend... but maybe that's where we should lave things.
I'm house sitting for Sheldon right now, because he has two cats and doesn't want them to feel alone, and I don't really have anywhere else to go. So I have a week of refuge and respite and I want to take advantage of getting to take care of myself... but my resentment for the situation, and my burgeoning contempt for him are starting to cloud my ability to function... how do I even do this... I feel guilty but I can't do this anymore.

Maybe this opinion is unpopular in this sub, but i don't like absolutely nothing from mk 11, i hate the gameplay, the animations, the stages, the story mode and i don't like any single costume/skin original from 11, i only like the linden ashby Johnny skin and that's it, also i absolutely hate how half of the roster uses guns, but in other hand, i absolutely fall in love with mk 1, everything looks bright and colourfull, the animations are fluid and not so robotic like the 11 ones, i like every we saw, this new look of Johnny cage is already my favorite one in the entire saga, and maybe one of the things i liked the most is that with this trailer i saw that they are leaving aside all this realistic tone that they started in mk x, Mortal kombat is supposed to be like this, cartooney and not realistic, it is how it has been since the first game back in 92

Have you ever made a fake news report just for fun?

Cover Art <<Previous Start Next >>
Each faction was going to need an encampment, and Mordecai decided to start there. He placed each one on opposite sides of the cavern at its widest point, approximately midway between the entrance and exit. He’d sculpted the cavern to have interesting terrain, so the widest point was a touch off of the center.
He was only going to do part of the work for the encampments, leaving the customization to the laganthros who would be playing the parts. For the moment he started by clearing out a circle of terrain for each side, with half of the circle being carved out of the wall behind them and the other half being out front. The sub-caverns created this way were 20 feet tall, giving them plenty of room to build as they liked.
Now he created small gardens for a new set of mushrooms, special breeds for use as items. The first set of cultivated fungi had their use based off of their normal appearance:
Broad-capped mushrooms were reinforced and designed to be readily broken off to be used as shields. A variant of Morels whose craggy nooks could be used as shelving, trumpet-shaped mushrooms that could be used for a limited time to greatly amplify shouted words, bell-shaped mushrooms that would actually chime when a living creature approached, squat trunk mushrooms that could be grown small or large to act as stools or tables, plus some cupped shaped ones that could easily become actual cups or bowls. He would create more as requested, he couldn’t think of everything himself that others might need, but the goal was to make it so that the two factions had almost everything they needed to equip themselves and to build.
Mordecai ventured further afield with his next set of mushrooms for gardening however. The living crystal had given him an idea when he’d considered the problem of making normally metal items. The mushrooms in this field grew in a variety of shapes but were very heavily infused with living crystals and all grew in spreading patterns. The outer heads are where the crystal would concentrate the most, eventually causing them to crack off on the outermost edge. The resulting material could be knapped much like flint or obsidian to a razor-sharp edge, but over the next couple of days would harden to a toughness more like that of nephrite, i.e. true jade. Jadeite was the more common stone called jade because of its similar appearance, but it was not quite as tough or as hard as nephrite.
It wouldn’t cover everything metal could do, but would be more than sufficient for making weapons if napped, or for anything from art to tools if shaped only after it was fully hardened. Empires could be founded without advanced metallurgy if they had access to even normal nephrite, let alone what could be done with this crystal.
He also altered some mushrooms to sit more ‘in between’. With a more lightweight infusion of crystal for structural support, it was not hard to create fungi whose various parts could be used as raw construction material, whether akin to ropes or materials that could act like wood, if a touch spongier.
Now that he had raw materials down, it was time to call in his troops. Most of them were simply going to be the strongest of the laganthros in their respective specialties, though he did have a couple of additions to make.
The right side encampment was the easiest to assign, calling up some ‘light cavalry’ mounted on polecats, and some aerial cavalry in the form of mages mounted on dracobits, with scouting/infantry support from rangers bonded to caracals.
The left side he gave to ‘heavy infantry’, though he had to make their mounts first. The Riverbridge gifts and trades came in handy here as there had been some farm animals included, and before long he had his porcini boars. And he had them live up to the pun too, growing the squat mushrooms from their thick hide and fur, forming a natural saddle shape as well as extra protection for both the boar and the rider. It was admittedly a more outlandish hybridization than, say, an owl bear, but at least he’d be able to adjust and fix any issues that cropped up.
For support, he gave them various rabbats as ‘falconry’, providing both scouts and an aerial force, and sharpshooters of both archery and gun varieties. The guns were one of the few things that absolutely had to be made out of metal, he couldn’t find a way to reinforce any form of crystal to withstand the shock pressure of the firing chamber. Maybe as a deeper dungeon they could create a heavily enchanted crystal if they wanted to, but it didn’t seem worth the effort.
And the final creation for this level he made as support for both sides, though purely defensively. To take the place of guard dogs, he altered and enlarged some badgers, creating two colonies of Giant Badgers. He only had to alter their base personalities a little, most badgers were quite capable of being social and of being aggressively defensive, he just had to tighten up their pack bonding and ability to work in groups. He also made sure that they were completely immune to all fungal spores and toxins to be found in this dungeon, which also gave them a general boost against toxins and diseases. Dungeon creatures may not have to eat, but it feels natural for them to do so and he wanted to fit them in here with the ability to eat any mushrooms.
Once he was certain that everything was settled well enough, he met with the leaders of his two factions in the safe-space camping spot at the level’s entrance.
“So, what do you think of your enclaves?” Was what he started with, and that led to a couple of hours of discussions, questions, and answers. When all that was settled, Mordecai moved on to making sure everyone was on the same page concerning rules.
“I want this to be a bit more free form than what we’ve done before. You don’t absolutely have to fight any dungeon challengers, but you do have to play the part of a warring party on high alert and be highly suspicious of intruders.” He grinned at them. “If you need to, you can take some acting lessons from your cousins on the third floor. Might make for a good part of that training exchange I set up previously. But you don’t have to let them pass by either. You can deny them passage, you can demand tribute, you can form alliances, or otherwise act how you like. This should all be very dynamic. The only rule I make absolute for you and yours is that this zone right here is a safe space for them. Mind, I am only being so nice here, the ‘wildlife’ won’t be burdened by that obligation, but generally won’t have a reason to attack this location anyway.”
“And when there aren’t any challengers?” Asked one of the troop captains.
“Mostly up to you for the details, I just want at least some of you to be training against each other most days. You’ve been very diligent in forming your own schedules before, I don’t see any reason to change that now. But I’ll let you know if I spot anything I think can be improved on. Similarly, I expect you to let me know if there is anything I can improve. I think I’ve balanced your forces, the forest is heavy enough to keep the mages and dracobits from dominating the battlefield, but if your battle practice shows that I need to change that balance, I want you to tell me.”
The rabbit folk talked with each other for a bit, then when they had reached a consensus turned back to him. “We’re satisfied with this new role my lord. There are a few who have decided they aren’t quite comfortable here after all, but we can find some other recruits to fill their spots so you don’t have to worry about it.”
“Excellent. Oh, one final thing, as a default no one is to support the boss fight.” Which was a change from most of the previous floors. “The exception is if your enclave is assaulted. If that happens and you survive, then you should rally at the final chamber for the floor and support the boss or bosses.”
“Oh, what do you have planned for our bosses?” Came the excited query.
Mordecai smiled. “Well, I’ll show you before too long. For now, you should know that they are not going to start out the brightest and could be hazardous if you get too close, so be very careful if you do end up supporting them. And their names will be Sarcomaag and Klastoria.”
“What is up with those names?” Kazue’s voice asked in his head.
“I’m just having some fun messing around with relevant words.” he replied before focusing back on the faction leaders. “I think they’ll be an interesting new challenge for people who get this far.”
.
While the two dungeon cores had fun finally building out their fifth level, the rest of the world continued about its business. Their wife was finishing her preparations to come back home and bring Kazue’s father with her, including a quick side shopping trip that she was very careful to not let them in on, which was much easier to do while they were distracted.
Traveling south from the capital city was a merchant caravan with a champion as part of its escort. They moved slowly of course, but by the time they had to start setting up camp the last spires of the city’s central keep were lost over the horizon behind them.
News of their existence was beginning to spread in earnest now, and some of that news even managed to get their names right. The oddness of a dual-core was going to stir curiosity at the least, but it was Mordecai’s name that would serve as the biggest catalyst for making their life more interesting, in differing measures of good and ill.
<<Previous Start Next >>
My Discord if you would like to talk about the book or see what else I am up to.
My Patreon if you want to support me directly.
Also to be found on Royal Road.
$3 Patreon: Early chapters, lore excerpts $5 Patreon: Short Stories $10 Patreon: New stories not published anywhere else (Until after I finish this story at least)

I am only accepting PayPal F&F.
Shipping is not included. Open to bundle offers.
​

$175	Shantae: half genie hero, pirate curse, risky revenge director's cut, slipcover	Selling as a bundle, all sealed	PS5
$40	Cthulhu Save Christmas	Sealed	PS5
$55	River city girls	Sealed	PS5
$95	Castlevania Requiem [Classic Edition]	Sealed	PS4
$75	Uncharted golden abyss	Sealed, small tear at the back	PS Vita
$60	Mvp baseball 2005	Sealed	Gamecube
$15	Dragon Ball Z Budokai player choice	Game, case, manual	Gamecube
$225	Pikmin	Sealed	Gamecube
$25	4 gameboy coloadvance lot (all loose) include pac-man collection GBA, spongebob square pants, lizzie mcguire 3 gba, tetris	All loose, selling as a bundle only	Gameboy Advance
$75	Fire Emblem Sacred Stones	Loose	Gameboy advance
$90	Golden sun + Golden sun the lost age	Both loose	Gameboy advance
$8	Lord Of The Rings Two Towers	Loose	Gameboy advance
$23	Mario kart super circuit	Loose	Gameboy advance
$5	Snood	Loose	Gameboy advance
$950	Mario and luigi superstar saga (sealed)	Sealed	Gameboy advance
$1200	Sealed gameboy color teal	Sealed, great condition	Gameboy Color
$30	Nano Assault	Loose	3ds
$45	Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Gates To Infinity	CIB	3ds
$40	Star Fox 64 3D	CIB	3ds
$12	Super smash bros	CIB	3ds
$5	Mario Vs donkey kong mini land	Manual only	DS
$18	Mario party DS	CIB	DS
$185	Mega Man Star Force 3 Red Joker	CIB, great condition	DS
$5	ATV Quad Frenzy	Loose	DS
$25	Dig Dug Digging Strike	CIB, sticker residue on the front	DS
$10	Super monkey ball touch & roll	Game, case, manual	DS
$30	3 wii games bundle include Truck racer, Miniclip Sushi Go-Round, Brave A Warrior's Tale	All games are sealed. Sealed game top right seal is broken. Selling as a bundle	Wii

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$50	2064: Read Only Memories	Sealed	Switch
$50	Arc Of Alchemist	Sealed	Switch
$45	Astalon: Tears Of The Earth	Sealed	Switch
$65	Axiom Verge 1 & 2	Sealed	Switch
$30	Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe	CIB, LRG variant	Switch
$30	Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe	CIB, Bestbuy variant	Switch
$45	Black Bird	Sealed	Switch
$50	BloodRayne Betrayal: Fresh Bites	Sealed	Switch
$105	Bloodrayne 1 & 2: Revamped [Dual Pack]	Sealed	Switch
$100	Bloodstained curse of the moon	CIB, best buy variant	Switch
$60	Bloodstained curse of the moon 2	PAX west variant, sealed, small cut on the plastic cover	Switch
$65	Code of princess EX	Launch edition with soundtrack	Switch
$40	DARQ complete edition	Sealed	Switch
$95	Deponia Collection	Sealed	Switch
$60	Doom the classic collection	Sealed	Switch
$60	Dusk	Sealed	Switch
$55	Fairy Tail	Game, case, insert	Switch
$120 shipped	Fire emblem engage divine edition	Top seal broken, box is in decent condition	Switch
$33	Giga Wrecker ALT	Sealed, LRG variant	Switch
$35	Grand mountain adventure	Sealed	Switch
$35	Gris	LRG variant, sealed	Switch
$35	Hyper Parasite	Sealed	Switch
$30	Ion Fury	CIB	Switch
$85	Jay And Silent Bob: Mall Brawl	Sealed	Switch
$65	Langrisser I & II	Game, case, insert	Switch
$45	Last day of June	Sealed	Switch
$150 + shipping	Legend of Zelda Tears of the kingdom collector edition	Broken seal from shipping, otherwise unopened	Switch
$46	Mercenary Kings	CIB	Switch
$75	Metal Unit super rare games	Sealed	Switch
$100	Minecraft: Story Mode Season Two	CIB	Switch
$60	Monster Sanctuary	Sealed	Switch
$50	Murder By Numbers Playasia edition	Sealed	Switch
$65	Octopath Traveler	CIB	Switch
$60	Oninaki	Sealed, JPN version	Switch
$50	Othercide	Sealed	Switch
$40	Pokemon Brilliant Diamond	Sealed	Switch
$40	Pokemon Shield	CIB	Switch
$50	Quake	Sealed	Switch
$60	Rogue Heroes Ruins Of Tasos	Sealed	Switch
$56	Shantae and the seven sirens	Bestbuy variant	Switch
$65	Shantae and the seven sirens	LRG variant	Switch
$50	Slime-San Superslime Edition	CIB	Switch
$55	Sol Cresta: Dramatic Edition	Sealed	Switch
$80	Super mario party joycon bundle box only	BOX ONLY, no game or joycons, mint condition	Switch
$160	Stranger Things 3: The Game standard edition	Sealed	Switch
$35	Ms. Splosion Man	CIB	Switch
$45	River City Girls Zero	Sealed	Switch
$50	The missing	Sealed	Switch
$43	The mummy demastered	Sealed, bestbuy variant	Switch
$20	Valkyria Chronicles 4	Case and joycon skin only no game	Switch
$15	Witcher 3 wild hunt complete edition	No game, PEGI, box and insert and case	Switch
$45	World's End Club Deluxe Edition	Sealed	Switch
$40	Xenoblade chronicles 2	Loose	Switch

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Adam's venture origins - $30
Creature in the well (sealed) - $50
Captain Tsubasa Rise of the new champions - $20
Deemo - $50
Disgaea 5 Japanese version with English - $45
Disgaea 5 - $30
Doom 64 - $40
HOA (pax west exclusive variant with sunflower seeds, sealed) - $100
HOA (sticker residue from gamestop) - $30
Knights And Bikes limited run (sealed) - $45
Oxenfree (no game, just case and manual) - $35
River City Girls (Asian version play english) - $33
Salt and sanctuary (sealed, drowned tome edition) - $140
Sniper elite 4 (sealed) - $35
Super bomber man R (PAL) - $15
Towerfall bestbuy edition (sealed) - $40
Tiny Barbarian launch edition CIB - $20
World end's club deluxe edition bestbuy cover (sealed) - $40
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No case:
Bubble Bobble 4 Friends (minor damage on the cartridge covert art) - $30
Lego Marvel Super Heroes - $25
Star Wars: Jedi Knights II: Jedi Outcast - $30
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Trading cards

Super rare games
- The lions song sealed pack $10
- Mundaun sealed pack $10
- Last day of June sealed pack $10
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Gamecube manual only

Warioware $30
Mario Party 5 - $25
F zero gx - $25

Hi everyone,
It's basically as the title says; I'm in my early 20's and yet I find myself frequently anxious about my inevitable death, at least a few times per hour and occasionally for hours at a time. It's not exactly a passive thought either, it gives me a thick sense of anxiety and a strong tightness in my upper chest to the point where I'm afraid it's getting out of hand. If I really go down the rabbit hole with it, I can give myself a panic attack, which feels really silly because of how powerless I am in the face of death. I know worrying about it won't change anything, but of course that provides me no solace.
​
For a bit of context, I've only recently come out of a deep three year depression and started really appreciating my life. However, I've noticed that as the depression goes away, more new issues seem to grow in it's place. The way I perceive myself in the world is changing rapidly, often in ways I can't understand just yet. As far as I can tell, I'm a lot more anxious than I was even 3 months ago, and this whole fear of death thing is relatively new to me as well. I've used death as a motivating factor for years now, knowing my time is immeasurably valuable pushes me to try and make the most of it, but only recently did it turn into true fear. I think it started when I had a conversation with my friend about nuclear weapons strangely enough. We live near a big American city center, so he made the observation that if we ever went to nuclear war, we'd be one of the first people blown off the map presumably. It's normally the kind of what-if thought that I'd quickly dismiss, but for some reason I chose to really stop and consider what he said and I very nearly incited my first panic attack on the spot. The thought that it could all go dark at any moment, not when I'm old but truly any moment now, and that I wouldn't even be able to perceive or understand my own death is just terrifying to me. I feel like many young people have the perspective of death as something that will happen eventually, but not right now, when really that isn't a guarantee. Since then, I feel like I'm constantly trying to keep those thoughts at bay.
​
I have many regrets about the way I spent my time in the 3 years I was depressed, many of the best days of my life were wasted wallowing in it, so maybe some of my fear is related to that. I feel like I'm all too aware that each second that passes is time I can't get back, each second I spend scrolling through Reddit or YouTube shorts is time I could've spent more meaningfully, and each moment of my early 20's are particularly valuable since I have so much opportunity in this phase of my life. I often think about how I'll feel on my deathbed - will I resent myself about the way I spent my time when it's finally run out? Hell, how will I feel when I'm 30 about my 20's? Can I really live with myself knowing how much time I've already wasted on Youtube shorts, time I should've spent enjoying my one and only chance at youth? What used to be a useful motivator has turned into a crushing weight on my shoulders it feels like and I can't really see a way to cope here. And even if I can cope, I'll still die either way, that part of the story won't change.
​
I'm sure meditation and being more present focused will go a long way towards helping me out here as Dr. K has said many times that anxiety comes from a future focused mind, but I'm hoping there's some healthier perspective I can gain on this as well that will be useful. I've really only seen Dr. K cover death broadly in the first Ludwig interview, so I'd be really curious to understand his perspective more fully. Also just wanted to say thanks to everyone here in the community as well, been lurking since the first Bobby Scar interview and this community has been everything in helping me conquer my depression. Hopefully you all can help me out a bit here too, thanks!

Tokyo Godfathers, directed by Satoshi Kon and released in 2003, is an anime film that beautifully captures the essence of human resilience, compassion, and redemption. Set in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo during the Christmas season, the film follows the extraordinary journey of three unlikely companions who find an abandoned baby in the trash on Christmas Eve. This heartwarming tale explores themes of family, forgiveness, and second chances against the backdrop of Tokyo's gritty underbelly. With its stunning animation, gripping narrative, and memorable characters, Tokyo Godfathers has garnered critical acclaim and touched the hearts of audiences worldwide.
Plot Summary (300 words): Tokyo Godfathers revolves around three central characters: Gin, a middle-aged alcoholic; Hana, a flamboyant transgender woman; and Miyuki, a runaway teenager. The story begins when the trio discovers an abandoned baby girl while searching for food in the trash on a cold Christmas Eve. Determined to find the baby's parents and give her a chance at a better life, the unlikely family embarks on a journey through the streets of Tokyo.
As they traverse the bustling city, the trio encounters various challenges and obstacles, testing their strength and resolve. Along the way, they encounter a range of characters, each with their own stories and struggles. Through these encounters, the film delves into the complexities of urban life and sheds light on issues such as poverty, homelessness, and societal marginalization.
Despite their own personal demons and shortcomings, Gin, Hana, and Miyuki display incredible resilience and compassion as they navigate through their own past traumas. Each character's backstory is gradually revealed, deepening our understanding of their motivations and vulnerabilities. The bond that forms between them creates a makeshift family, transcending traditional notions of blood ties.
Themes (400 words): Tokyo Godfathers explores several profound themes, resonating with viewers on a universal level. One prominent theme is the power of redemption. Each of the main characters is burdened by guilt and regret from their past actions. As they search for the baby's parents, they also embark on a journey of self-forgiveness and personal growth. The film suggests that even those who have made mistakes can find redemption through acts of kindness and selflessness.
Family is another central theme in Tokyo Godfathers. While the trio may not fit the conventional mold of a family, their shared experiences and unwavering support for one another create a strong bond. The film challenges the notion of what constitutes a family, emphasizing that it is not solely defined by blood relations, but rather by love, understanding, and acceptance.
Additionally, the film highlights the interconnectedness of humanity. Tokyo Godfathers portrays the city as a microcosm of society, where individuals from different walks of life intersect and influence one another. The characters' encounters with various strangers demonstrate the impact of small acts of kindness and the potential for transformation they hold.
Visuals and Direction (300 words): Satoshi Kon's direction in Tokyo Godfathers showcases his unique ability to blend realism with moments of surrealism. The film's visual style captures the grit and vibrancy of Tokyo's streets, portraying the city as a living, breathing entity. The attention to detail in the animation is remarkable, immersing the audience in the urban landscape and its diverse inhabitants.
The film also employs dream sequences and imaginative visual metaphors, blurring the line between reality and fantasy. These surreal moments provide insight into the characters' inner worlds and add a layer of depth to the storytelling.

Hello I’m Here to See if anyone is Interested on Being Friends. I am 21 yrs old I’ll be 22 Some time this week, am Posting on MakingNewFriends Reddit so I can see if anyone wants to be my Friend. I like Writing Stories/Pomes I’ve haven’t been anywhere in a while because of Covid-19. I grew up going on camping trips Or fishing I loved traveling too I Also Grew up on Tim Breton Movies my favorite is Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetle Juice, am a very opened minded person we can talk about anything or you can vent to me if you need to. I hope we can be friends!

Hello I’m Here to See if anyone is Interested on Being Friends. I am 21 yrs old I’ll be 22 Some time this week, am Posting on MakingNewFriends Reddit so I can see if anyone wants to be my Friend. I like Writing Stories/Pomes I’ve haven’t been anywhere in a while because of Covid-19. I grew up going on camping trips Or fishing I loved traveling too I Also Grew up on Tim Breton Movies my favorite is Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetle Juice, am a very opened minded person we can talk about anything or you can vent to me if you need to. I hope we can be friends!

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we screw like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.
____________________________________________
By The Vesper's Bell