Ragna
A photograph of a building built in the shape of a pentagon, named, unoriginally “The Pentagon” floats in front of me.
Streaks of red show through the hallways.
I lean back in my seat, looking at dates for each of the red smears.
“So you frequent the Pentagon in the United States a lot, do you Major?” I narrowed my eyes, leaning back, “are you above Vasquez or merely a ruse?”
Rachel soon draped her arms over my shoulders, giving me a soft and sweet kiss on my cheek. “You’re obsessed.”
I smiled, turning to her.
Rachel’s red hair was flawless and spilled over her sweet face as her ice-blue eyes locked onto mine.
My heartbeat rushed and I kissed her back as her mere presence ignited my passions.
“Wow…” Rachel beamed at me, “didn’t realize you could swoon.”
“Swoon?” I protested as I grinned at her.
“Yeah, swoon,” Rachel’s hand caressed my neck, “your heart-rate spiked, the surface temperature of your skin increased…”
My face fell, “Rachel-”
“That’s not new,” Rachel leaned against me, taking a deep breath, “just haven’t used it before.”
I heaved a sigh, “You know how scared I am of this technology that’s running around inside you.”
“I keep telling you,” Rachel said, moving around me, sliding into my lap, her arms around my neck, “The nanites gave up their AI to me. I am not in control of them or them of me,” she smiled to me, “we are one. Our aims are the same.”
I couldn’t help but frown, “what if those aims diverge?”
Rachel laughed, turning to the screen, “You programmed them for survival,” she turned to me, “I wanted to survive as much as the initial samples that entered me did. With our aims shared, there was no point in their own mind ever conflicting with me. It’s all me in here,” she poked my forehead playfully, “try and keep up, Love.”
“Still, Rachel,” I kissed her softly, “I worry.”
“Hmm,” Rachel looked to the screen, “Why are you spying on ‘The Pentagon’?”
“Major F, or whatever their name is, has been frequenting the place,” I informed.
“How do you know that?” Rachel asked, snuggling up to me in my lap.
“Xyphiel and I decided to track the Condensed Quantum Foam. It has a very distinct energy signature,” I frowned, “at first I was looking to see where they were storing it to consider if we could destroy whatever they were fueling… but they appear to be carrying it wherever they go.”
Rachel looked to the screen, confused, “What do they look like?”
I pulled up an image of Major F, his strange mask appearing on the screen. “Odd markings on the front-”
“Seven Eyes of God,” Rachel said, looking it over with an analytical eye.
“Oh?” I smiled.
Rachel now sat up, her head pressing against my shoulder as she pressed her rear into my lap, “mmm-hmm,” Rachel smiled.
“Any more information on that symbol or…?” I asked as Rachel pushed her hips against me harder, “do you have something else on your mind?”
“Well, the Seven Eyes of God are supposed to represent Righteousness, Judgement, Knowledge, Wisdom, Hope, Faith,” Rachel turned to me, her legs wrapping around my hips as she grinned at me, “and Love.”
I smiled, “so… just symbols then?” I asked, placing my hands on her hips, “nothing to give us hints to Major F’s identity…?”
Rachel smiled, grinning to me, “It means they have something to do with God, but I think you knew that,” she pulled down on my neck and I kissed her passionately.
I smiled at her, “So, does this mean you want another round with me, love?”
Rachel beamed up at me, her head on my forehead, “Actually…” she grinned at me, “unless you just want to have fun.”
“What do you mean?” I said, pulling away from her slightly, confused by her words.
Rachel removed my hands from her hips to place them on her waist, my hands resting on her toned stomach, “I mean… we’ve succeeded.”
My eyes went wide and I could feel an insurmountable smile spread over my face, “Rachel? Really?”
“Oh yes, implantation and everything,” Rachel winked at me.
I kissed her deeply, pulling her tight against me as she returned the kiss, her arms around my neck.
Rachel soon rested her head on my shoulder, sighing contently, “I mean… we don’t have to stop, you know, having fun.”
I smiled, “I don’t plan on it…” I pursed my lips, “...but now it’s even more important to bring Zepherina home.”
Rachel pulled away from me, “if I can somehow talk with her, I know she’ll come back.” Rachel frowned, “but everything is so radio silent on Vasquez or anything related to it.”
I moved my hand to Rachel’s stomach, smiling, “in the meantime… you two need to be kept safe.”
Rachel cuddled up to me, smiling up at me warmly, “Yes,” her hand caressed the top of my hand.
My heart felt so full as I roamed my hand over her stomach, “I’m not missing a single moment of her life. Every birthday, first moment, I’m not letting this one slip away.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rachel’s smile weakened, “If I had known, I’d have never left.”
I nodded, “I know my love.”
Rachel took a deep breath and now stretched out over my lap, displaying her body sensually before me, “thought of any names?”
I smiled down at her as she teased me relentlessly, “I can think of you saying my name, passionately, for some time in the near future, if you keep that up.”
“Oh no,” Rachel feigned shock and fear, her hands roaming over her delicious body, “anything but that.”
I picked her up in my arms and grinned wide to her, getting to my feet, “and that does it.”
We kissed deeply as I made my way to our quarters with Rachel in my arms, right up until the moment when I laid her on the bed.
…
After some time, Rachel and I laid nude beneath the covers of our shared bed.
I gazed up at the ceiling, a wide smile on my face still as Rachel, now exhausted, snuggled up to my side, sleeping soundly. “Zerlinda?” I mused, speaking softly out loud. “Nova?” I continued to muse before my smile grew more, “Raanana…?” The name bumped around in my head,“Raanana, come to mother…” I said softly, my eyes tearing up slightly.
I heaved a sigh, “Zepherina…” I closed my eyes, “I hope you forgive me for not being there… I would have done anything to be there.”
Rachel shifted slightly in her sleep, nuzzling closer to me.
As I stared at the ceiling, I heard the echo of a familiar voice from all those years ago ring in my ears.
May any happiness you ever have be tainted by greater sorrow. May the feat of victory always turn to ash in your mouth.
I shuddered and sat up, waking Rachel.
“Huh?” Rachel turned to me, “baby… come back to bed.”
I got to my feet, quickly dressing, “I need to check something.”
Rachel groaned, “is it going to take long?”
“Yes,” I turned to her, “just rest my love.”
“Where are you going?” Rachel complained.
I turned to her, pulling my shirt over my head, “it’s better you don’t know.”
Rachel rolled her eyes and rolled over in the bed, “making the decision for me?”
After I took a deep and exasperated breath, I grumbled, “Rachel… please not now damn it I-” I stopped, the pit of my stomach dropping.
If it was all in my head, I was self-sabotaging, wasn’t I? I turned and walked to the bed, lying next to her, “I need to see Esmeralda because I think…. The reason why we’ve had so much strife has been that the second I’m truly happy,” I took a deep breath, feeling ridiculous saying it out loud, “is because of some kind of hex from an angel from some time ago.”
Rachel turned to me, a perfect eyebrow raised on her flawless face, “A hex?”
…
I approached Esmerlda’s room, the door had an ominous air about it, some sort of curse she placed on the door that she felt would make it easier for me to find her.
Unlike her, of course, I knew this ship like the back of my hand.
I opened the door and to my shock, I spotted two demonesses.
Esmerelda was in her usual human-like shape. She had her horns out, as well as her hooved feet and tail, all beneath a dress skirt (which I truly hated). To my minor appreciation, however, she had gone as far as to wear the armored chest and arm guards I had suggested.
It was a start.
Of course, that could not be said for the woman who stood across from Esmeralda. Or rather: the Succubus who stood across from Esmeralda.
She had long blond hair, flawless hair, as to be expected. Poking out of said flawless hair was a pair of light brown horns, almost demure in their size compared to Esmeralda’s black ones. She had cloven hooves, much skinnier than Esmerelda’s, similar to Tasha’s hooves if I recall correctly. Blonde fur covered her legs up to her mid-thigh and a brown tail flicked back and forth nervously.
Her large brown wings were tightly folded behind her back.
Her figure was tight, voluptuous, and very attractive to be honest. I suppose that would be expected. She wore a purple leather corset and her brown claws were long, poking through a set of matching fingerless gloves.
“Esmerelda,” I chastised, narrowing my eyes, “have you learned how to asexually reproduce, or is there a reason why there’s a fresh succubus here?”
The girl gasped, “P-Please ma’am do not talk to her that way! You don’t know how powerful she is!”
Esmerelda fell to one knee before me, “Mistress, my apologies, I only just now brought Brittney here.”
The succubus, Brittney, turned to me slowly, a cold realization passing over her, “M-Mistress…? B-but you said you… served…”
I walked in, my wings likely more obvious without the door blocking them.
Brittney shrieked and fell to her knees, hard and pressed her forehead against the ground, “Forgive me!” she gasped, “I mean, don’t forgive, but have mercy-wait!” she clasped her hands together, tears streaming down her face. “I’m sorry!”
I turned to Esmerelda, “Esmerelda, explain.”
Esmerelda remained, dutifully, on bended knee, “My Mistress, I came across Brittney when I was seeking out a cursed book I had left behind. While I found it had claimed a victim, I also discovered that Brittney was summoned by a hapless boy.” she looked up to me, “the boy is dead and the cursed man is now my thrall.”
“Your thrall?” I lifted an eyebrow.
“You may speak boy and be courteous, this is my mistress, your new Empress,” Esmerelda explained.
A pale man with a faraway look in his eyes approached and bowed, “Hello My Empress.”
“Does it have a name?” I asked.
Esmerelda shrugged, “I had not cared to ask.”
I rolled my eyes, turning to Britney, “So what, another refugee from the pit?”
Brittney’s hands were still clasped before her and she continued to shake at the mere sight of me.
“Yes, my Mistress,” Esmerelda explained.
“Okay, both of you on your fee-er, hooves,” I ordered.
Esmerelda rose to her hooves and Brittney did the same, although her knees were knocking together fearfully.
I sighed heavily, “Girl put something less slutty on,” I looked at the girl’s exposed cleavage and sexual clothing, “If you are under Esmerelda’s charge, that makes you mine and if you are, indeed, mine, then you are a seductress no longer.”
Brittney swallowed hard, “B-but, I’m officially lord Belial’s…”
I grinned, “Oh, I know how to fix that, my dear.”
Esmerelda winced.
Brittney backed away from me, “I-I… w-what are you going to do to me? Are you going to hang me upside down from the ceiling? O-Or hang me an inch over the floor?”
“Are those standard things my father does?” I said with a sly grin, my eyebrow raised. Rage, ready my brand, please.
"Yes, mother," Rage answered in my mind.
Brittney just swallowed hard, “Y-Yes, I’ve heard the stories.”
“Oh, my dear, I promise you this will be over very quickly,” I opened my palm, a gauntlet with my burning Ω symbol appearing, the symbol was red hot, I could see steam rise off its surface.
“Wait!” Brittney backed away from me, her eyes wide.
“Esmerelda, hold her,” I ordered.
“No!” Brittney turned around and gasped as Esmerelda grabbed her arms.
“It’s over quickly,” Esmerelda grinned wide, the brand on her forehead glowing, “and then you’ll serve a new master.”
Brittney shook her head, “no! No, I don’t want it!”
“You’d prefer to be under Lord Belial’s command?” Esmerelda argued.
I grinned to her, “Yes, Brittney, is your current master really so benevolent?”
Brittney frowned, turning to the brand, her brow furrowed and she swallowed hard, looking to Esmerelda, “n-not the face… please…”
I kept my cocky grin as I approached Brittney, “I have only done it once… I don’t think it matters where the brand is.”
Brittney whimpered as I approached and her wings spread wide, revealing her back.
“This will do,” I thrust the brand into Brittney’s back.
A howl of pain filled the room as the brand scalded Brittney’s flesh.
Esmerelda held her tight, making sure she didn’t fall or move as I branded her.
“By my heritage as daughter of all Hades, I evoke my right, to take any minion of the servants of my father’s, as my own,” I could feel a power surge through me and as it did, my wings tingled as they did the last time with Esmerelda.
Just as last time, however, I felt like something had filled me to capacity as if the contents of my body were under pressure and I should not linger with this power surging through me.
“I do so without permission, without consent! I transfer this soul into my service,” I completed the spell, the brand’s heat now vanishing into Brittney. When I removed the brand, it was cool to the touch.
Brittney heaved in pain for a moment as I watched the wounds around the brand heal swiftly.
“All done, my dear,” I removed the gauntlet, “I told you it would be over quickly.”
Brittney turned to me, her once blue eyes were now violet, like mine. She looked up at me and fell to her knees, tears leaking down the sides of her face, “I… I’ll serve you forever.”
“Now, as I was saying, enough with the whore outfit, put on something dignified. As I stated, you are no longer a seductress, you’re now a warrior in my army,” I demanded.
Brittney gulped, “I’m… like… uh… how so?”
I lifted my eyebrow, glaring down at her.
Brittney gasped, “no, I mean.. Uh… what… do you-?”
“However you think a woman ought to go into battle,” I barked, “something that’s modest and actually serves to protect your body in a fight.”
“In a fight?” Brittney blushed and got to her hooves. She heaved a sigh and I watched as her outfit shifted drastically.
She now wore a heavy black leather shirt, with intricate silver embroidery on the shoulders and along the collar. It was tied there, cinching the collar closed over her bust. Even the cuffs had matching embroidery. Around her trim waist was a wide belt which separated the shirt from the long black leather pants which went down to her hooves, though over the back of the hooves, there was similar silver embroidery.
At her side, attached to her belt, was a whip.
I had to admit, she was wearing pants, which was a step up from Esmerelda, “Dare I ask why you consider that as something a woman would wear into battle?”
Brittney’s face blushed, “My… my idol when I was younger was Linda Sterling.”
Esmerelda and I gave her a quizzical look.
“Zorro’s Black Whip? George Lewis was her co-star!” Brittney rubbed her shoulder nervously, “it was the only series with a female hero who wasn’t a damsel in distress and uh… does no one watch Zorro these days?”
“I don’t know what a ‘Zorro’ is,” Esmerelda explained.
“Well I rather like it,” I pointed out, “it’s functional, at least.”
Brittney beamed to me, “thank you, mistress!”
Esmerelda turned to me, “My Empress, my apologies for bothering you with all of this.”
I laughed, “no bother at all. You will need to get started with training her,” my expression grew serious, “but I have another matter for you.”
“How may I aid you, Mistress?” Esmerelda asked.
“What do you know of curses?” I queried.
Esmerelda grinned, “I know a great deal.”
“Good,” I held out my hand, and asked, “am I cursed?”
Esmerelda’s brow furrowed as she looked me over, not taking my hand, but merely walking around me. She held her fingers up in the air and gave a shudder, “twice over.”
“Lovely,” I frowned, “can they be removed?”
“Beyond my power, My Mistress. One is because it was placed on you by someone far more powerful than I, and the other because it is a Hex from an angel,” Esmerelda explained.
“What luck,” I shook my head.
“That is the nature of the hex,” Esmerelda continued.
“Explain,” I demanded.
“Luck, as it were, is not on your side. The hex is such that any action you take has the better chance to err on misfortune,” Esmerelda rationalized.
I rolled my eyes, “I do not believe in luck, Esmerelda.”
Esmerelda nodded, “perhaps, but that is the nature of the hex.”
“And the curse?” I asked.
“I cannot even fathom it, it is ancient and powerful,” Esmerelda sighed, “far beyond my, or any demon’s ability, at least the ones I know of. Even the new one, Bella.”
“My father’s handiwork, most likely,” I rolled my eyes.
It was then I was interrupted by Xyphiel’s voice over the PA system.
“Ragna, we have a development, Major F is reaching out to us once more and we have a bead on his location,” Xyphiel barked.
“Esmerelda, Brittney, follow me,” I turned and made my way to the bridge.
…
Once there, I spotted Bella standing next to Xyphiel.
Syria, Rasper, and Alexis all sat at various consoles.
Esmerelda stood between me and Bella, while Brittney stopped, looking to Bella with wide eyes.
“W-What is a higher demon doing here?” Brittney asked.
Bella, though in her human form, grinned mischievously, her eyes flashing red, “What’s a lowly succubus doing here?”
Brittney seemed to hide behind me like a child would behind her mother’s skirt.
Xypheil grumbled, “he’s hailing us, but he is in the Pentagon, as per your tracking software.”
I gave a nod, “Esmerelda, can you corrupt the entire building?”
Bella turned to me, her eyebrow lifted in curiosity.
Esmerelda looked the area over, “I could, though it may take me some time.”
Bella gave a melodious laugh, “oh would it now, Esmerelda?”
Esmerelda shot Bella a withering gaze, “and you could do better you nasty behemoth?”
Bella’s wicked grin curled both ends of her lips up and her teeth shifted into a more jagged and interlocking series of fangs, “Oh I could, you glorified pubic louse.”
“To what end, sister?” Xyphiel asked.
“Major F does not travel via portals or teleportation,” I explained, “there must be some sort of holy magic or another form of travel they use.”
“A door,” Bella explained, “it opens wherever they want,” she turned to us, “I’ve seen an angel walk out of it before.”
I smiled, “Well there you have it, Xyphiel.”
Xyphiel turned to Bella, “can you prevent it from opening?”
Bella scoffed, “if Immunda could prevent it, for me it will be child’s play,” she beamed to the image on the screen, “the building is even the right shape,” she whispered as another melodic chortle escaped her lips.
Esmerelda pointed her finger forward, dragging it through the air from slightly above her head and down to her hooves, black smoke following behind it, “Then come along dear if you hurry maybe we can find you, someone, to devour along the way.”
Bella snickered as she approached the portal.
I glanced at Brittney, “perhaps you should help them.”
Brittany gasped, “y-yes Mistress!” Britney walked into the portal with Esmerelda following behind.
Another alert came, “incoming call,” Rage announced.
“You didn’t answer them right away?” I asked.
Xyphiel grinned, “I wanted to let them wait.”
“Well before you do,” I interrupted him, “you should know that the symbols on his mask are that of the Eyes of God.”
Xyphiel laughed wickedly, “Ah, a true man of god? Then he at his heart, a fool,” he grinned at the screen, “let us see if I cannot remedy his faith.” Xyphiel proceeded to press a button, finally answering the call, “Major F, good to see you.”
“The feeling is not mutual,” Major F began, their voice still modulating.
“Problem?” Xyphiel grinned.
“You are acting out of character,” they began, “I had expected you to attack another target by now.”
“I decided to deal with a pest problem first,” Xyphiel mused, “but luckily the pest has shown itself.”
“A pest?” Major F’s helmet tilted to the side inquisitive, “how amusing, I had thought you the same.”
Xyphiel looked at me, “Let me know when the demonesses are done,” he thought to me.
I nodded, closing my eyes, speaking to Esmerelda’s mind, “Esmerelda, inform me when you three complete your task.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Esmerelda responded promptly.
As I looked on at the screen, it appeared as if the eyes of God on Major F’s helm shifted in hue moment to moment.
Xyphiel narrowed his eyes, “Well, if this little exercise was merely to lob insults at me-”
“Why is it your children flock to me, Xyphiel?” Major F asked.
Xyphiel narrowed his eyes, “What was that?”
“Do you think I attract your children specifically or at random? I am rather curious about your theories on this,” Major F inquired.
Xyphiel placed his hands behind his back, “Tasha is a priestess and you serve God, which makes sense for her to be there.”
“And I requested Eva to come to me as well,” Major F began, “have you considered why that might be?”
“No,” Xyphiel glared at the screen, “I have not.”
“I am disappointed Xyphiel,” Major F began, “surely you have a hypothesis…? Have I outwitted you so well?”
Rasper couldn’t help but let out a weak laugh.
“Well, Major,” Xypheil growled, “I assume you’ve surrounded yourself with my children with the erroneous thought process that they would offer you some modicum of protection from my wrath.”
Major F’s head tilted the other way, listening.
“Mistress, it is done. The building is corrupted. And Bella has snuck inside looking for a ‘snack’,” she grumbled in my mind.
“Excellent work,” I smiled, glancing at Xyphiel, nodding, “See if you yourself can’t find Vasquez or Major F.”
“It’s an interesting concept,” Major F turned the camera’s view, and I could now see a woman with brown hair and icy blue eyes sitting next to Tasha and a rather muscular dark-skinned man. “...or I could just enjoy turning your own children against you.”
“Is that Evangeline?!” I shouted, looking at the tan-skinned girl. I could see Xyphiel’s eyes and Rachel’s nose.
“Yes, Empress, it is,” Major F informed. “You’ll also be pleased to know that I have your daughter here as well.”
I narrowed my eyes, grinning, “I’m coming down there and I’m going to take Zepherina back!”
Major F gave an odd chuckle, “no, you won’t because I have worked diligently to turn her against you as well, Empress.” He clenched his fist in front of the camera, “If you show your face, she will kill you.”
“Doubtful,” I narrowed my eyes, “Rage, get me down there.”
“Disruption detected,” Rage pointed out.
I glared at the screen, “Right…”
“Xeilitch,” Major F taunted, “You have taught her so well, Empress, her technology has been invaluable.”
“You may find her technology is limited,” I informed, “but you’ve only delayed our arrival.”
“Xyphiel,” Major F began, “have you stagnated on your other goal?”
Xyphiel lifted an eyebrow, “what goal would that be?”
Major F paused for a moment, leaning towards the camera, “the one where you open the gateway to Hell, and in doing so, travel to Hell itself to kill Lucifer, freeing yourself from your immortality.”
Xyphiel grinned wide now, and I heaved a sigh of relief. Xyphiel now appeared to have finally cornered the Major.
“Ah, you finally tip your hand too far,” Xyphiel chuckled, “you know my true desire? That means you can only be from two systems I have visited previously, explaining your knowledge of my methods.”
“Oh?” Major F tilted his head, “Do continue.”
“Let me pose a question, Major,” Xyphiel grinned, “Why do you hate me so?”
“Retribution,” Major F began, the treble in their voice dipping.
“Be specific,” Xyphiel grinned, “I imagine many wish retribution on me.”
“You raped a woman before her father and the corpse of her fallen lover,” Major F admitted.
“Vestia?” Xyphiel began to laugh, first a low chuckle and then a downright maniacal laugh, “You’re here to avenge Vestia?” he grinned viciously. “Of all of them? Her? She lives, you fool!”
I glared at Xyphiel, “You told me you killed her, damn it Xyphiel!”
Xyphiel chuckled, “Sorry, sister. She was the only one.”
“What a marked improvement for you,” Major F jabbed.
I narrowed my eyes, “what if Timothy had seen it? Even heard of it?”
“He didn’t,” Xyphiel said confidently, “Trust me, the boy was oblivious of my true nature.”
“Oh,” Major F chimed in, “No, he was not.”
A chill ran down my spine and I turned to the screen, my heart nearly in my throat, “Excuse me?”
Major F shrugged, “What sort of vengeance could I possibly reap if I didn’t first shatter the boy’s faith in his parents first.”
Xyphiel’s breaths grew deeper and faster as his fists clenched, “What?”
I got to my feet, “You!?” I screamed, “You took Timothy!?”
“Yes!” Major F confirmed, “I took Timothy from you,” their head leaned back, their voice emotionless, “and before that, I showed him every rape, murder, and atrocity you committed!”
I gritted my teeth before I screamed, “You’re a dead man!”
“Rage!” Xyphiel roared so loud that Rasper, Alexis, Syria, and even I jumped, “Charge, target and fire!”
I turned to Xyphiel, “Our children are down there!”
“I’d rather they be dead than in his hands!” Xyphiel screamed, now in his full Niten form, glaring at Major F, “You… are… doomed!”
Major F chortled, “Am I? Dragon?”
Xyphiel roared, “Rage! 5% Charge, I want no time for him to escape!”
“Charging,” Rage announced.
“Damn it Xyphiel!” I shouted, knowing that I had the ability to stop Rage from actually firing, “My daughter is down there!”
“She was there when we fired on Jerusalem!” Xyphiel confessed, “the girl survived fine!”
“And what about Eva?” I protested, glaring at him, “Will you kill Timothy’s sister in an attempt to avenge her brother?!”
Xyphiel turned to me, sneering, “Zepherina will save her.”
“I appreciate the trust you have in her, but don’t you think it’s a risk we cannot take?” I shouted.
“Uh, Master, Mistress?” Rasper shouted.
“What?!” Xyphiel and I turned to Rasper.
Rasper pointed up and we saw the image of Major F, mockingly waving at us.
“Bon Voyage,” Major F chortled as we felt a shudder reverberate through the ship.
“What was that?” I asked.
Rage announced, “Charge of ion cannon at 40%, 80%,” a moment later, “160%”
“What?!” I shouted.
Rasper exclaimed, “Something entered the firing chamber and detonated!”
Major F’s image vanished from the screen as I watched in horror as the screen flashed red, showing numbers that were more than troubling.
“What’s the theoretical threshold of the magnetic fields?!” Xyphiel shouted.
“It’s 200%!” I shouted.
“360%” Rage’s screen flashed, “Please advise of action: All actions require user decision.”
Xyphiel shouted, “Do not fire the cannon!”
I turned to him, “Oh, Now you don’t want to fire it?!”
“Bella tells me the doorway to Hell is somewhere in that world!” he narrowed his eyes.
I turned to the screen, “Rage! Fire the cannon, backward!”
“Backwards?!” Xyphiel shouted, and in an instant, we all lurched forward.
Rasper tumbled over his console while Alexis laughed maniacally at the event.
The lights continued to flash and while the cannon’s charge now read “0%” there was a new warning. “Shield integrity: 80%”
“How did this happen?” Xyphiel shouted, “Rage is fully shielded, how could a foreign object enter the cannon chambers?!”
“The rear is unshielded while charging,” I growled, tapping a few items on the console in front of me. Our current trajectory had us barreling towards landfall somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States of America.
I tried to calculate a better trajectory as Rage announced, “shield integrity at 50%”
“Brilliant Ragna!” Xyphiel roared, “Now you have an interstellar vessel diving into the atmosphere that it was not designed to exist in!”
I glared at him, storming over to him, “If you weren’t such a hothead, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to have done this!”
“Me?!” Xyphiel growled, “How is this my fault!”
I pointed at the screen, “He read you like a book! He knew you’d fire the cannon on him!”
“Then why did he have Eva, Tasha, and Zepherina with him!?” Xyphiel glared, “he thought they were insurance!”
“He knew you’d think that and fire anyway!” I shouted.
Xyphiel roared at me and pushed me backward.
I clenched my teeth and fist and then slammed my fist into his jaw, causing him to fall to one knee.
Rasper now shouted, “Can yah stop tearing each other apart before we are torn apart!”
Xyphiel and I turned to the screen.
“Shield integrity 25%, impact in 3 minutes and 30 seconds,” Rage announced.
I helped Xyphiel to his feet, “He planned on that too.”
Xyphiel nodded, “Rage, side thrusters, push up towards the Atlantic.”
I shouted next, “Divert shielding from the rear systems to the front.”
“Doing so will cause irreparable damage to the rear sections of the ship. It is not shielded for re-entry temperatures,” Rage informed.
“Move all of the Colonists out of the colony,” I frowned, “sadly… they’re about to lose their homes.”
“Confirmed, moving civilians,” Rage advised.
Everything shuddered again and the sound of flexing and stressing metal sent shivers through my body.
Xyphiel slowly shifted from his Niten form, now returning to his smaller humanoid shape, “I’m sorry Ragna,” he looked to the screen, “it was never my intention to cause damage to the ship.”
“Stop being sentimental and let's make sure we survive!” I shouted.
“Shield integrity at 65%, rear hull temperatures increasing,” Rage announced.
Syria got to her feet, “Rage, Fatima, where is she!”
An image of Fatima with many other colonists huddled together in a large room flashed on the screen.
Syria screamed, “Fatima!”
“Rage!” I shouted, “Make sure the Colonists are safe!”
“Impossible without risking more extensive damage to the ship,” Rage confirmed.
I took a deep breath, “Rage, focus on passenger survival,” a tear rolled down my cheek as my life’s work was now destined to burn in the atmosphere. “Life support and living quarters only.”
“Confirmed,” Rage announced as the ship shuttered again, “Impact in, 2 minutes.”
I checked the instruments, seeing that we now were speeding towards the ocean, at least. “Rage,” I shouted, “can the ion cannon fire in any capacity?”
“Cannon will function at minimal capacity,” Rage announced.
“Fire whatever you can in front of us,” I shouted.
“What?!” Xyphiel shouted in return.
“It will break the surface tension of the ocean water!” I shouted.
The lights shut down and we were now in darkness, feeling the ship shudder and shake.
Xyphiel turned to me, “now, we have no power for any of the instruments.”
I nodded, “then, whatever happens, happens.”
“Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major,” Rasper began to sing. “Tuck me in my little wooden bed.
We all love you, Sergeant Major.”
The ship shuddered and I wondered if this was the moment Rage fired what he could of the cannon.
“When we hear you bawling, "Show a leg!" Rasper continued, sitting down in his seat once more, “Don't forget tah wake me in the morning, an’ bring me 'round a nice hot cup o’ tea.”
More groans of the ship echoed through the bridge.
“Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant-Major,” Rasper continued.
“Would you shut up!” Xyphiel screamed before everything lurched forward.
I recall flying forward and then backward, my back hitting against a console hard, as the sounds of the hull creaking and groaning as well as the sounds of what could possibly be considered thunder echoed from all around us.
With effort, I pushed myself to my feet, finding that now the bridge was tilted at a 90-degree angle. I was standing on the console I had previously been working on.
The hull groaned again and I felt my ears pop.
“Are…” Rasper groaned, “we dead?”
Syria crawled across the screen, groaning, “No.”
“Goddamit,” Rasper cursed.
The lights turned back on and I shielded my eyes as the dark red of the emergency lights was drowned out by the light of the normal functioning lights.
“I feel fish!” Alexis, for her part, pressed herself against the far wall, shouting happily, “Oooh we’re in the water!” as she nuzzled her face against the wall.
“Did the crash kill you, Xyphiel?” I asked.
“No,” Xyphiel growled.
“Good,” I looked around, feeling disoriented.
“Restoring artificial gravity systems. Priming medical bays,” Rage announced.
“Oh, fuck me,” Rasper groaned.
“Prepare for proper orientation in 20 seconds,” Rage announced.
Slowly the bridge seemed to shift from it’s 90-degree angle to 180 degrees once more. As it did so, I slowly guided myself to my seat.
“Rage, damage report!” Xyphiel barked.
“35% of the ship remains. Shields are holding back most of the water. We currently have maintained buoyancy, but due to a large amount of the ship damaged, we have taken on water and remain sunken somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean,” Rage reported, “Multiple injuries of colonists, no casualties. Treating minor injuries at this time.”
I heaved a sigh, “Good job baby,” I patted the console, then closed my eyes, “Esmerelda, can you feel me?” I reached out with my mind.
“Yes, my Mistress! I can!” Esmerelda explained.
I got to my feet, “Xyphiel,” I looked to everyone around me, “good news, you’re going to get to kill him.”
“What?” Xyphiel exclaimed.
“Rage,” I queried, “who do you require to maintain the ship while we launch a counter-attack?” I asked.
“I will work best with Serenity and Rachel, as communication is instantaneous. Both can aid me in recovery and protection of the colonists, as well as minute repairs that are needed throughout the ship,” he advised.
“Is Rachel okay?” I frowned worried that she might have been hurt.
“She is unharmed, she was sleeping at the time. Securing her in bed protected her in her delicate state,” Rage informed.
“Good,” I heaved a sigh, “Keep Rachel as your contact with humans, not the ship.”
Xyphiel turned to me, “and how are we going to attack? Major F has prevented teleportation.”
I grinned and once again reached out to Esmerelda, “Esmerelda, open a portal for me.”
“Yes, mistress,” and with that Esmerelda’s dark portal appeared before us.
“Not all types.” I grinned, “Come, Xyphiel: We have a ship to avenge, daughters to collect and Major F’s pained death to thoroughly enjoy.”

A Dwarf Stood At The Door [8]

Table of Contents
Chapter 8 <-- You are here.

- - -

I woke up in a damp bed to the progressively louder sounds of adult contemporary radio.
I smacked the alarm.
Today was the day I’d finally meet Dogor.
I brushed my teeth and checked my guerillamail account. There were no new messages, so I read all the old ones. I did fifty push-ups on the motel floor, showered, put on the spare clothes I’d taken to California in my valise and carefully combed my hair. I wanted to look respectable. I was nervous as before a first date. I could hear the ticking of my wristwatch. I didn’t know many people who still wore wrist watches. I remembered a scene from one of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books in which the characters go to a restaurant where they get to “meet their meat”, talk to and choose which animal they prefer to eat for dinner. Imagining that and watching the minute hand travel round the face of my watch made me want to scratch out my eyes. I scratched at the phone instead, bringing up Google Maps and making sure I was familiar with the lay of the land around Wayne’s store. I figured that if I got there early enough, before Dogor, I could see which direction he came from, which would tell me which direction I’d need to follow him in. At ten sharp, I called for a taxi and about forty minutes later I was hanging out in a back alley like the best dressed, freshest bum in the world. What would I say to Dogor? Would he speak first or would I? What if he knew the truth about Olaf Brandywine and he was the one setting the trap for me—
“Greetings, John Grousewater.”
“Hello,” I said.
Dogor walked steadfastly toward me. The footfalls of his heavy, studded boots echoed between the alley walls. He was wearing heavy armour. A giant battle-axe rested along his back. As he neared, it was as if he both became shorter and wider, until, at a mere arm’s length away, the top of his head reached just above my belt and his shoulders seemed wide enough to allow him to crush me between his bare hands. One of which he extended toward me, wiggling its five stubby fingers. I placed my hand in his and we shook. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” I said a little lamely. He looked up at me. His eyes were large orbs, his nose bulbous, his hair and beard as red as fresh tomatoes. “But how did you know it was me?” I asked.
“You look exactly as you do in The Yawning Mask,” he said. His voice was deep and rocky. “Well met all the same.”
“Indeed, yes.”
He coughed and spat a wad of phlegm.
It hit the ground.
“That’s an impressive axe,” I blurted out because I preferred anything to silence and Dogor didn’t appear talkative.
He bowed. “Thank you.”
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. Dogor was real. He was alive. I could hear his breathing and see his chest rising and falling. He smelled like garlic rubbed over freshly stretched leather. And, most incredible of all: maybe fifty metres behind him, in the rectangle of light where the alley ended, regular cars whizzed by, unaware of the fantasy unfolding ninety degrees from their eyes. “How did you get here without being seen?” I asked.
He answered my question with one of this own. “Why shouldn’t I be seen?”
“I don’t think you shouldn’t. I just assumed that…”
“People stared. Some crossed to the other side of the roadway. A few pointed, more spoke under their noses in low voices. But I have studied your laws. I am not breaking them. There is no law in your Principality of Ontario that forbids a dwarf from openly traversing a public roadway. I even bought breakfast. A menial labourer refused to serve me but when he called his superior and I mentioned to her your Ontario Human Rights Code, I was served as any other. I have long ago stopped worrying what others think of me.” He spread his abnormally long, trunkish arms and stretched them until his bones cracked. “Now forgive my rudeness, John Grousewater, and let us proceed to the business at hand. You said that Wayne Dubcek, high ranking member of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood, will be here.”
Aping him, I stretched, too. “Yes, that is the information I received from Olaf Brandywine as I choked him to death.”
“Very good.”
I waved for Dogor to follow me and led him to the back door to Wayne’s store. “We will enter discretely through here.”
Dogor placed his hands on his hips. “I am afraid that way is locked as if by magic. I have explored this area several times. Never has the door been open.”
Hoping I didn’t blush while I did so, I placed the palms of my hands on the door and spoke the first three made up words that came to my head (“Obolong Twatful Prickox!”) after which I grabbed the door handle, pulled it down and nudged the door with my hip. “I learned that also from Olaf Brandywine,” I said. The door edged enticingly open.
“Obolong Twatful Prickox,” Dogor repeated. “I must remember those words. It is likely they mask more than one secret entrance used by the Hooded Rat Brotherhood.”
The back door led to Wayne’s storage room, which was a mess of shelves and old computers.
“What are these?” Dogor asked.
“They are machines used for calculations,” I said.
He seemed to understand.
Another door stood between us and the store’s main floor. This one wasn’t locked, but it was closed and I didn’t want to enter just yet. It was still too early. “We should wait here and listen,” I said. “It’s possible there’s a meeting going on and who knows what we’ll overhear.”
Dogor crept forward and pressed his ear against the door. As he listened, I couldn’t stop staring at him, admiring his structure, the sharpness of his textures, his body physics. His clothes were so well rendered. His axe looked powerful enough to cleave an elephant’s skull. The idea that I had brought Dogor here to eventually kill him didn’t enter my mind.
“I hear no voices,” he said.
I looked at my watch. It was eleven forty-five. “It’s possible that the building is shielded from eavesdropping,” I said, hoping it was a sensible lie.
“True.”
“We should discuss what we will do with Wayne once we capture him. Where will we take him?”
Dogor removed his ear from the door, grinned and slid several variously curved knives from the inside of one of his boots. “We will take him nowhere. We will torture him here, in his very own lair. Then we will leave him dead for the other members of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood to see.”
The knives looked wickedly sharp. I didn’t want to touch them, but when Dogor insisted, I took one in my hands and cradled it as I might cradle a baby squirrel. Dogor turned away and listened again at the door. His back was to me. I was holding a knife. The slice of bronze skin above his armour, below the ends of his red hair, beckoned. If only I reached out now and in one thrust shoved the blade into his flesh…
But I could not. I didn’t know where his portal was. Even if I managed to kill him—if he didn’t spin, back-fist me in the face, pull the knife out of the nape of his neck and bludgeon me to death with one of the nearby computers—his remains would never reach Xynk, and Xynk might create a new Dogor, an identical clone who would continue where the old Dogor left off, solving nothing. I owed it to myself and to Olaf Brandywine to do this right.
Carefully, I took the knife by the blade and held the handle out for Dogor to take.
“Keep it,” he said. “You may find it useful.”
At ten past twelve I joined Dogor in crouching by the door. I pretended to hear something.
“What do you hear?”
I told him in detail about the snatches of conversation that I was supposedly hearing, making sure to prevent him from reaching for the door handle until the time was exactly a quarter after twelve.
The clock struck. “Let’s make sure to be quiet and careful until we know just what the situation is, for who knows what waits for us on the other side,” I said.
Dogor pulled his axe loose from the straps on the back of his armour. “Naturally.”
I took a deep breath. And when I opened the door, we passed undetected onto the main floor of the store.
Wayne was behind the counter, looking suitably nefarious in shiny leather dress shoes, black jeans and a black hoodie that was at least two sizes too big for him. The hood covered most of his face. I wished I’d indicated in my email that he should be talking on the phone or pretending to speak with an invisible conspirator, even written a basic script for him to follow, but this would have to suffice. When he saw us, he stiffened but kept on fiddling with the papers laid out on the counter in front of him. Beside me, I could feel the increased pressure that Dogor’s hands were exerting on the handle of his axe.
Now my job was to keep those hands from killing anyone for five whole minutes until my thesis sponsor arrived.
“He appears to be alone,” Dogor murmured. His voice was so deep he sounded like a mangled audio conversion whose treble had been cut and bass multiplied by ten.
“Yes, or they might be invisible,” I said.
I could only imagine how Wayne’s heart was beating, because mine was veering into dubstep.
“Once we overpower him, we will take him into the back room from which we emerged. I will sever one of his limbs. The blood loss will weaken him. If he loses too much blood, we will tie the nub to prevent proper circulation and keep him alive,” Dogor murmured.
“Which limb?” I asked. It seemed like a practical question.
But before Dogor could answer, a horn honked. I craned my neck to get a better view of the front door.
Wayne sprinted.
Dogor lunged forward.
I saw Wayne pull open the front door.
I saw Dogor fly through the air.
I saw the door close, and Wayne was gone, and Dogor swung his axe at empty space before landing with a thud that made every loose piece of hardware bounce.
Tires squealed.
By the time Dogor managed to open the front door—he had to put down his axe and use both hands, like a kid—the car was gone.
I exhaled and for a few seconds thought about the best way to defend myself in case Dogor turned on me, but he didn’t. He growled in disappointment, then retrieved his axe and started going through the papers Wayne had left behind. “We were close, John Grousewater. Victory was within our grasp.”
“But it slipped away.”
“For now.”
Dogor was oddly collected. He passed some of the papers to me. “What do you make of these? Are they useful?”
“They seem to be lists of names,” I improvised. In actuality they were invoices.
“Accomplices?”
That would put them on Dogor’s radar and I wasn’t about to risk more lives than I had to. “Victims, most likely. See here?” I pointed to a random dollar amount next to a name. If Dogor had bought breakfast in this world, I assumed he was familiar with Canadian dollars. He nodded. “I believe these are records of how much money the Hooded Rat Brotherhood has stolen.”
“They have been known to steal,” he agreed. He put the papers down and started going through the cupboards below the counter instead. “And the Amulet of Vermillion, do you believe it may still be here?”
I pretended to help with the search. “I have my doubts.”
“I, as well.”
“If it ever was here, Wayne most likely took it with him when he fled, and now that the Hooded Rat Brotherhood knows we’ve infiltrated this place, it’s unlikely they’ll ever keep it here in the future.”
“That is a logical conclusion, John Grousewater,” Dogor said. “However, I meant that I have my doubts about the very existence of the Amulet of Vermillion.”
Maybe Olaf Brandywine was wrong. Maybe Dogor could be reasoned with. I needed to try. “Do you mean that if the Hooded Rat Brotherhood had wanted to destroy Xynk, they would have done it already?”
Dogor shot me a look. “I mean that the Amulet of Vermillion is a deception. I would not have thought that in the past, but ever since my suspicions of Verbamor began, I have considered the possibility that the Amulet itself may be a decoy meant to confuse naive adventurers. If Verbamor wishes to stay in power by frightening the inhabitants of Xynk into obedience, he needs the Hooded Rat Brotherhood to exist. That is why he engages adventurers such as you, John Grousewater, to seek the Amulet rather than to destroy the Hooded Rat Brotherhood directly. It is sly, if it is the truth.”
“And you want to destroy the Hooded Rat Brotherhood to force Verbamor off the throne?”
“I wish to end all that endangers Xynk. That is all. The identity of the man who sits on the throne does not interest me, so long as he rules justly and not by fear. Ever since I can remember, Xynk has lived under an executioner’s blade and that is much too long a time to tremble.”
“But if I’ve been recruited by Verbamor and you’re now acting on the belief that Verbamor is fostering the existence of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood…”
Dogor sighed and took a cross-legged seat on the floor. “Do you know what happened to the last three adventurers who agreed to find the Amulet of Vermillion?” he asked. “I didn’t help them, and they vanished. This was long ago, before Olaf Brandywine locked me in that forsaken box. Well, when he’s trapped in a box for years, a dwarf gets to thinking, and he thinks that maybe he’s not got it all as figured out as he thinks he does. So when I was in this box, that’s when I started to suspect Verbamor of collusion, and it’s also when I decided that the next adventurer who came to Xynk, I was going to trust, because, you know, John Grousewater, I’ve never trusted anyone in my life. I’ve known men to be loyal and I’ve intimidated men into loyalty, but that’s not trust. You’re the first one. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but our paths cross, and even though they are not perfectly aligned you strike me as a good and honourable man. You’ve a history to you, a known one. So that if Verbamor offers you a quest and while solving that quest you realize that the path of good diverges from the path of success, you will diverge with it. What else have I? Tell me. All my years of failure are a lesson, and that lesson is that maybe one dwarf can’t do it alone. But a dwarf and an adventurer—now there’s a duo to be reckoned with.”
The left side of my head started beating up the right side. Dogor’s speech had left me emotional. I had glimpsed his perspective. At the same time, I had just witnessed his attempt to end Wayne’s life. Wayne hadn’t done anything wrong. Wayne was my best friend.
I offered Dogor my hand and helped him up.
He must have weighed a ton.
“Perhaps it’s best to lick our wounds for the rest of the day, and put our heads together again in the morning,” I said.
“You make much sense, my friend.”
He slung his axe across his back and made for the front door. Waving, he opened it and exited to the street. I waited for a while—just long enough to hear someone yell “Freak!” and someone else say “It ain’t fucking Halloween yet, you weirdo.”—then I slapped my cheeks with both hands, gathered my wits, and ran out through the back of the store, ready to follow Dogor to wherever it was that he came from.
Continue to the Next Part

After 5 real life years, I have finally done it. AFC Bolnore, “the worst team in England”, have won the treble!

It’s taken 5 years in real life, 35 in game seasons, 23 promotions, two hard drive reformats and 4000-odd ingame hours (most of which have been spent processing or idling), but thanks to the lockdown, I’ve finally reached the goal at long last: Taking AFC Bolnore, the “worst team in England” which in 2014 were predicted to come dead last in the illustrious Mid Sussex Football League Division 11 - all the way up through the football pyramid to the Premier League and Treble glory. In this time, the real AFC Bolnore have unfortunately become defunct, which made me unexpectedly sad. This spurred me on to complete the challenge, however. And now that I've done it, I'm not about to move on without documenting the suffering I've put my patience and my computer's processor through, so here goes.
This is basically a marathon version of the “dafuge challenge”, with some personal modifications to avoid going completely mad (such as allowing scouting at even the lowest level and signing players to an amateur team from across the country). The journey itself presumably started in some sort of field near Haywards Heath. Due to database quirks, I had to use fake players and staff to ensure that clubs that would normally be empty would have players and managers. For those who doesn’t know, this usually doesn’t change much other than the names and occasionally the nationalities of well-known players. This means that Eden Hazard is now named “Scott Greatorex”, Alvaro Morata is called “Candido Pastor”; and Thomas Müller, hilariously, is just called Josef Müller. From the beginning, I also only had the English football leagues as this alone was more than enough to bring my laptop to a boil.

THE EARLY YEARS
Basically, the first decade or so is just a test of endurance rather than representative of any form of management skill. The game isn’t really balanced below Conference level, so if you’re good enough to get promoted once, chances are you’re good enough to get promoted next year as well. The one challenge is keeping your players for an extended time, as amateurs change teams at the drop of a hat and aren’t restricted by pesky things such as “transfer windows” or “the loyalty and homebody-ness of a sane person”. I reckon that until Bolnore went semi-pro around the Isthmian level, at least half the squad would turn over each season. That said, it was in the amateur years that I also managed a whole league season without conceding a single goal, and I didn’t even notice until the summer break.

THE GREEN WAVE
Semi-pro level provided a different challenge; finances. I’d grown a preference for offering exorbitant (relatively speaking) match and goal bonuses to lure League One/Two-level players to my Isthmian/Conference side, which ensured that Bolnore’s liquidity was teetering on the edge of the abyss every single season. Fortunately, the consecutive promotions continued all the way to the Championship largely thanks to players such as John Brown, a club legend who followed the club all the way from Isthmian to the Premier League (I’ll get back to him later). The cartoon villains of the board considered firing me for managing the finances like a drunken sailor. Miraculously, the club was then suddenly sold to some spanish bloke who immediately injected cash; not a lot, mind you, but enough to ensure that the smallest venue in the Championship could stay afloat and even make a few free transfers. Bolnore only spent three years in the Championship, getting promoted in their third season in part due to the magic of Mirkos Petrak, another club legend and goalscoring virtuoso (I’ll get back to him later).

A NEW COLOSSUS
I was cash-strapped with mostly Championship level players, and had to change playstyles accordingly to survive in the EPL. Through the first three seasons, AFC Bolnore would be known to play proper English 4-4-2 with long balls and hard studs (whew, euphemism much?) which would award us with ignoble mid-table positions. A gradual change began in the 42/43-season, where strategic sales allowed the purchase of Tom Moore, future vice-captain; and Tommy Spencer, Harry Kane-clone and absolute lad. These two and the return of one Kezie Keen (who I don’t have a screenshot of as the game opted not to save his history) led to a masterclass 4th place finish.
The rise continued from there. With powerhouses such as Man Utd, Arsenal, Man City and Sunderland going through upheaval and rough patches, Bolnore pounced. And, through continued development of their youngsters as well as the occasional iconic transfer, they’d finish runners up twice before dethroning Chelsea in 45/46. In the same period, Bolnore won the EL in 2043, and the CL (somewhat fortuitously) in 2045, as well as the domestic cups a few times - look it doesn’t matter. Only one thing remained; the elusive (true) Treble.
Anyway, after Chelsea’s second second place in -47, Miguel Perez, legendary manager (and for some reason, friend of yours truly) decided to join Manchester City instead. He spent a whole 5 months there before getting fired, whereupon he joined Stoke instead in the Championship. Every big team was in complete shambles. The season turned into a cakewalk after the fatigue from the christmas period started setting in, and I was merciless in the transfer market to ensure complete dominance over the English pyramid that I had worked so diligently to climb.

JUST ONE LAST THING…
The Champions League was the one big hurdle that stood unforded. True, I had already won it once, but that was pretty much a fluke. While the teams on home soil had become routine, four clubs in Europe were still fully capable of massively fucking my shit up; Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, and particularly PSG. The latter almost had me give up in the penultimate season, as they managed to overturn a 0-2 loss at home to a 3-4 in thanks to an own goal and a massive blunder, both from the same defender. But the year after, it happened. It began with a needlessly narrow 3-2 vs. Basel, followed by a complete 11-1 walloping against Chelsea, then a delicious 7-2 semi final against Barcelona. Only Bayern remained for the final, and they’d fall to Chris Bennett’s desperate header from a free kick in the 30th minute of extra time, making it 3-2. AFC Bolnore, the “worst club in England”, are treble winners.
(Side note: I also briefly managed France for a couple of years, which was a dumb decision that may have indirectly contributed to making PSG an all-time powerhouse.)

THE ABSOLUTE LEGENDS
This is the all-time AFC Bolnore best eleven as calculated by whichever algorithm it is the game uses. I’m pretty split on it, as while it’s nice to see the formative years and players being acknowledged in line with the superstars, a 4-4-2 still makes for a not quite optimal selection. Oh well;
GK - Dennis Bertram: Can’t really say I’ve had any outstanding goalkeepers, and it seems Bertram made the team sheet based on appearances alone. He has been a mostly nailed-on pick in the ‘modern age’ and is a reliable German goalie - what more can you ask for?
RB - Ryan Steade: At a glance, this is probably my best ever Bolnore player, stats wise. I reckon he’s at least 190 CA. I threw money at Chesterfield for him (£15.5M) because a scout said he’d turn out 4-5 stars. Since, he’s been a steade-y feature on the right back.
CB - Liam O’Hanlon: Okay, so, once I had won promotion to League Two and became pro, I disabled many of the lower leagues to ease the toll on my computer, and enabled a good chunk of the bigger leagues from around the world to avoid making England too dominant on the world stage. The side effect seemed to be a lot of random, good players showing up in leagues around the world. O’Hanlon was such a player, and I bought the Englishman for a laughable £12.5M from Anji in Russia.
CB - Damián Lozano: Joined up on a free from Valencia Mestalla when Bolnore was still in the Championship, and stuck around for six years, featuring reliably. Never quite good enough to get caps for Spain.
LB - Chris Morgan: Morgan really just proves that I haven’t had many long-serving left backs, as he showed up in the Conference and stuck around for five seasons until the Championship before he fucked off to Corinthian-Casuals to get relegated from League 1. I can’t remember him but he seems to have played well so he couldn’t have been bad.
MR - Tom Moore: This guy is shoehorned into the right midfield position because he can play there but he’s spent 98% of the time being a striker for me. He’s still around, serving as vice-captain being third-or-second choice up front depending on form, and although everyone keeps telling me he’s plagued by injuries, I’m just not seeing it after 256 league games.
MC - Kezie Keen: So this is where it gets fuzzy, because his player history has been removed to save memory. He joined in Conference N/S as a youngster from Arsenal, and followed the team to the Championship before joining Tranmere in the Premier League. After two seasons, he re-joined Bolnore, having now been retooled from a left winger to an attacking mid. By the end, he’d racked up the second-most appearances ever for Bolnore.
MC - Osmar: I’ll be honest, Osmar was an impulse buy in the PL which I wasn’t excited about. I needed a creative midfielder and he looked interesting. He was so consistent however that he pretty much played every game until he got displaced by a better midfielder, whereupon he graciously asked to return to Italy. How could I deny him?
ML - Marc Wilkinson: I don’t remember this guy, to be honest, but he played for 8 consecutive seasons during the Mid Sussex-years which makes him a friggin’ rarity.
ST - Matthew Dickson: I am so very happy that Dickson still is in the XI after all this time. I posted a screenshot of him years back. Although he was an atrocious footballer overall, he has many key attributes that allowed him to dominate on an amateur level - speed, stamina/workrate, and goalscoring ability. He alone allowed me to play a “boot it long to the fast lad”-style for about a decade, and when that didn’t work, his relatively intense pressing ensured that he’d at least create one goal from snagging the ball off any defender with a First Touch of 1 (which was everyone).
ST - Luke Harris: He’s just a rich man’s Dickson, really. He played for me in two periods between the Sussex County Leagues and League One, getting his most impressive scoring streaks in the Conference.
2nd GK - Jack Moore: As far as I can remember, I didn’t even mean for Jack to become a regular. I simply ran out of keepers in League 1 and brought him in on a free, and he unexpectedly developed into a starter who played all the way up to a whole season in the PL. He then moved to Reading and have had a very respectable career.
2nd Sub (MC) - Andrew Wilson: Wilson used to be my captain if I’m not mistaken, and he was a man of extremes. Completely devoid of everything resembling technique, he was first and foremost a physical powerhouse with the defensive sensibilities of a pitbull terrier, making playmakers pee their pants all around the country. Serving Bolnore from 35 to 42, he then went on to terrorise League 1 for half a decade before hanging up his boots.
3rd Sub (MR) - John Brown: The biggest atrocity of the all-time XI is that John Brown isn’t in the first eleven. This is a man who could have played Championship football but opted to join a Sussex County League Division Three team because he saw their potential. This is a man who diligently turned up every single day, from the arduous depths of Sussex to the heights of the Premiership, to make 528 appearances from Bolnore. This is the man who, in a single season, racked up 50 fucking assists and still went on to play for 8 more seasons despite teams 4 levels up wanting his services because he’s just that badass. Now he spends his days teaching the Bolnore youth how to be as awesome as he is. Praise be John Brown.
4th Sub (ST) - Mirko Petrak: Poacher extraordinaire from Croatia that I bought for the Championship. Fired his way into legend but fell a bit into the wayside when I started playing a more free flowing, versatile game and left the club. Still a top bloke though.
5th Sub (ST?) - Robbie Craven: Yeah, I don’t remember what this guy was like. A striker, most likely.
6th Sub (DC) - Andy Tatters: Tatters only made 86 league starts, which makes him the least featured players in the list. Bit of a robbery too, considering some of the players that came later, but I guess there’s some old farts in Haywards Heath somewhere voting on this and reminiscing about the good old days when the pitch was grown from cowpats.
7th Sub (ST) - Edu González: If Steade isn’t the best player I’ve had, this is the guy. Literally the Complete Striker made flesh, I lucked out as Barcelona had three excellent young forwards but only one position for them to share, so I bought him for a...reasonable £72M fee. Honestly, he hasn’t been terribly consistent and he’s injured a bit, but what a big game player he’s been.

Honestly, having written all this I’m finding it a little hard to let go. I semi-ironically swore that I’d never play Football Manager again after completing this, but the state of Bolnore now is a financially precarious one. If I were to, say, retire, and simulate for a few decades, I couldn’t leave them without establishing a healthy economy first...

The Best Part of You: Chapter 2.2: Concert Crasher (final)

((You can find part 1 here!))
Seth stumbled backwards and slipped on a puddle of digital slurry. His duelist flipped the bows into icepick grip, still with that aching, fake smile, and drove them down like daggers.
Scooting back as the sabers plunged through where his shoulders had been a second ago, he sent a wild kick into one of her shins and sent the encroaching killer toppling forwards. A knee landed uncomfortably close for comfort, eliciting a startled gasp of anticipation, followed by two bows ripping through the sleeves by his elbows to staple him with his back to the ground. Not enormously keen on letting a straddling serial killer vivisect him, Seth drew his legs out from under her, bent up and planted his dress shoes into her stomach, forcing her up and off in a flailing angry ball of venom. She cracked the back of her head on the floor with an audible impact that made him feel a brief pang of sympathy, quickly overshadowed by fear.
Untangling himself from the ruined jacket skewered with bows, the unclaimed demigod climbed to his feet, sneezing in a cloud of dust and resin. The masked attacker had recovered just as quickly, forcing him to raise his arms to catch her fists in a hurry. Her superior positioning and grip slowly eased him closer to the pile of instruments while her own breathing grew heavy. The gloved fingers laced with his own, mixing sweat and sludge, and squeezed until his bones threatened to crack. Several sharp points pricked his back. They had reached the pile, where, among other things, the demolished top board of a harpsichord terminated in a minefield of wooden splinters and nails. She eased him onto the deadly speartips with sadistic slowness. Seth’s arms trembled and were moments from giving out.
A trapdoor opened unhinged beneath her, swinging inward, and swallowed her up. Her grip on him was lost with a surprised yell. Seth peeled himself from the close call behind him. A hand rose to his heart and he dug in his nails to steady the heaving of his chest. If he ended up having a heart attack in his sleep, he was going to wake up so pissed in the Underworld.
It went without saying at this point that Seth’s momentary crush had evaporated like a fart in an industrial centrifuge, and any lovestruck notions of playing a saucy duet were replaced with the telltale jitters of flight-or-fight. With their host recently departed, the holographic stage lamps took to him instead, rotating about his head and dazzling him with harsh cyan sparks. A few experimental swings at them scared them off long enough to clear his space and his head. He needed to arm himself. A sweep of the floor revealed the twin bows sticking straight down into his jacket. It’ll do.
A hop, skip and jump over the trapdoor gauntlet placed him in front of the weapons, which he snatched up and inspected with the time he had left. The fearsome meld of garrote wire and Celestial Bronze left him wondering if it was even possible to play a violin with these monstrosities, and how awful the resulting sound would be produced. Seth couldn’t operate a manual can opener, much less a pair of twin music sabers, and his confidence diminished. Whatever the case, he felt safer knowing he had disarmed the crazy one-woman concert. When the trapdoor swung downwards and opened back up to let her disheveled form slowly rise, he steeled himself and held them by his sides. “What are you going to do without these, huh?” A disaster of a snarky line, and pretty much tempting fate to show her pull out something worse, but it was difficult to come up with snappy comments in the middle of a brawl, and he only had so much breath. He’d have plenty of time to write better material after she killed him and he repeated this process the next night.
The mask fractured briefly into a frown before correcting itself when the lamps swarmed her head with a buzz. She was seated on a large lumpy object resembling another piano – seriously? Seth was going to serenaded to death? – with several augmentations the nature of which could not be discerned. She dabbed delicately below the mask’s mouth with a handkerchief to wipe away a line of fluid dripping out then tapped the piano in front of her lovingly.
The spotlights centered back on her. She dragged her hands across the keyboard in a rapid minor scale and as if on cue, a large bronze cannon styled with treble clefs emerged from the opening top board. Cyan liquid glistened and pooled underneath the instrument-turned-siege engine. Spokes cranked outwards and wheels bound with rope affixed themselves to grounded rails.
“..Oh.”
The looming smile widened, causing the plastic to warp. The bows felt much less fearsome in his hands than they had several moments ago. White heels rammed into the pedal box and several pullies began to churn below the ground. The barrel of the cannon zeroed on his torso. “Oh.”
A beat pause followed.
“Fuck.”
Another pause.
“A cannon isn’t an instrument, you know.”
The maestra threw her fists down on the keys for a discordant wallop of sound. Pyoter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s loudest rebuttal that cannons are, in fact, instruments, exploded out of the barrel in the form of a glitchy blob of electronic lights. Church bells rang in Seth’s brain as it collided with his upper body. Suddenly he was weightless, hitting not the ground but hurtling straight through the mountain of instruments and bursting out on the other side after boring straight through.
The ethereal projectile that had struck him melted into skin, leaving a Rorschach splotch across his dress shirt. Clamminess and a heavy, nauseating buzzing behind the eyeballs rocked him back and forth on the floor. The hole left by his trajectory through the hill began to collapse. The grand piano at the top sagged in the rapidly disappearing foundation. By the time Seth had staggered to his feet and inspected himself only to find no physical wound, the lamps had abandoned him to continue hounding their original target. So dream logic was back in full swing; good to know. That didn’t mean he wanted to take another cannonball head-on.
The assailant came into view atop the pile having recovered her blades, flawlessly cartwheeling into a triple flip and perching onto the descending piano to ride it like a runaway snowboard. She dragged a bow along her throat menacingly, her intention clear; Seth steeled against the bubbling pain descending into his stomach and wiped a spool of technicolor poison from his lips. He hurried around the pile to put more distance between himself and the ballerina of chaos, eyeing the torn top board with a dreadful resignation and tearing it free.
Speaking of ballerina… from around the pile she half-approached, half-danced in a rotating pirouette, sweeping the blades out in large circular swathes. The deadly dervish spun towards him like a top. Refusing to back down, Seth swung the nailed board hard. Their respective armaments clashed. Propping it as a makeshift shield, he held his ground and withstood the rhythmic succession of blows, each one chipping off a bit more of his bastion until a duel strike shattered the wood into pieces.
The maestra lowered her leg and stopped spinning to revel momentarily in Seth’s helplessness, tilting her head teasingly and receiving an unexpected punch to the face. She crumpled like a house of cards. Seth felt the satisfying crunch of a nose under his right hook then bounced back to roll up his sleeves and free up some elbow movement while staying light on the balls of his feet. It took a certain amount of sucker punches to the face himself before he had perfected the feint against particularly relentless bullies, and as much as he loathed the dirtiness of fisticuffs, victory took priority. He rolled his neck, because that’s what fighters did on television and it just felt natural. “Okay. Okay? Wanna dance? We can dance. Let’s dance, honey.”
Her motionless body convulsed and drew itself up on invisible puppet strings. One of her gloves fell by the wayside, and a prosthetic hand of manikin wood curled even tighter around the bow. Living doll. Not creepy at all. And her face…eugh.
A hideous spiderweb of cracked concentric circles circled the mask’s crushed nose in bullseye formation, smattered with the same noxious-smelling digital pus that reminded Seth of a leaking glowstick. A nasty memory resurfaced of six-year-old him tasting the fluid at a Fourth of July picnic and the thought of glass filaments and toxic chemicals on his tongue burned like acid. Gods only knew what it was doing to his insides right now, settling into his gut and making the lights swim around his skull.
Any hint of the mask’s smile was gone now, as well as several shards surrounding it. Through the chaos of the revolving lights he could made out a pair of lips cracked raw, curled into an animalistic snarl. From a few of the hairline fractures forming at the top, individual strands of curly brown hair and patches of the face underneath visible through the broken mesh of the fencing helmet sparkled under the glare of the lamps. The most off-putting example of body horror was only visible when the lamps were behind Seth, angling the light just right to show golden stitches sealing the mouth shut and spelling one word:
’wRoNG.’
The veneer of confidence was gone. Seth could feel the grey eyes roving up and down, drinking him in and calculating how exactly to approach him next. The words branded into the mask were illegible neon flares sending fireworks into his eyeballs. More of the sludge began to diffuse through his clothes, numbing his fear. The hazel of his irises was sapped from his eyes and poured out in large round tears and his lids drooped. A similar desaturation process took place across his face. His knees knocked and wobbled, then quickly gave out. Like a swarm of piranhas the lamps crowded around him, their digital screens sucking the colorful ink out of every available patch of hair or exposed skin.
Granny Su placed down the unopened bottle of pills on the kitchen table and folded her arms. Seth had always joked that the hard set of her mouth and lack of wrinkles at her age made her a total catch in the funeral parlor, which always earned a rare smirk. He doubted that gallows humor would weasel him out of trouble now. He shrunk from her gaze and let his eyes lose focus and his mind wander into the clouds, just so he could be anywhere but here.
Seth gasped and fell over. He shuddered involuntarily and felt the shadows of the lamps passing him by, opening up to beam their contents onto his opponent. With the spotlight back on her she bent one leg in front of the other and tilted her head back. She basked in the cacophony to allow the sensations to wash over her. Floating strings of scrawled diagrams, mathematical laws, hateful slurs, migraine-inducing swirls of gasoline invaded the nostrils. 649 became 651, then 658, 675, 677, exchanging digits and rolling through new numbers like a malfunctioning slot machine. A lamp coiled its wires around the discarded glove, slurped up more of the slurry staining it, and stretched it over the naked hand. With a twang the bladed wires now coated in the corrosive substance snapped off of the bows and wiggled uselessly.
His arms were gone. Brilliant wavy streaks of ink outlined his fingers and down to the wrinkled sleeves scrunched by the elbows, leaving the rest of him entirely transparent. Blinking rapidly and rubbing his eyes raw only made the undulating pinpricks of light sparkle harsher. The floor fell away, inducing a sense of weightlessness. Fighting the sloshing sensation in his head the demigod drew himself up, spat out a glob of digital sludge and tossed a sloppy punch through the defensive barrier of screens. The landing was weak, but the impact splattered more ink across the heavily marred façade and the killer recoiled. Her ceremony disrupted, Mara lunged forward, threw the bows away, hooked her fingers around the loop of Seth’s bowtie, pulled him close and-
Wait. Why did he know her name? Recognition sharpened his brain with photographic precision. Even under the shroud of a mangled fencing costume she was impossible to misplace. An accidental collision in front of the Athena cabin and an awkward, forgettable apology on his part was the sum of their interactions. Seth could not guess why she was here, in a music-themed fever dream, dressing like the Joker’s awkward band phase and trying to throttle the idiot in front of her. What he COULD guess, with startling clarity, was that she was about to headbutt him.
Leaning back to protect his nose from suffering the same fate as hers, he placed his hands over the gloves and struggled to peel them off while aiming another low kick. Her knee bent reflexively to catch it and push him backwards. The two of them tumbled through a stage trapdoor, thrusting them both into a cosmic void with no floor.
Broken instruments, bundled up wads of notebook paper, stage lamps, axles, burnt tires, laptops bludgeoned by abuse, pens leaking ink rotated about themselves in an endless dance of zero gravity, illuminated by countless stars. Unable to modify their angular momentum, Seth and Mara were flung onto the closed board of a floating grand piano, a makeshift planetoid orbited by rings of dazzling numbers.
Mara scrambled on top and tightened her fingers around his throat, slamming the back of his head onto the keys twice and squeezing the breath from his lungs. He raised his legs, locked them around her waist and rolled her off, sending them spinning into the asteroid belt of household devices. Shards of splintered violins pelted them in lethal hail, Seth taking the brunt of the bombardment across his shoulders and neck. A flower petal came loose from his hair. With a desperate choked grunt he snatched the petal, focused on it and grew an abnormally large rose. He stuffed it into Mara’s face and the plant responded, wrapping around the entire mask. Her grip on his throat left him and she reached up with a furious muffled yell to clutch at her head while the flower responded to Seth’s command, enveloping her head. Forgot I could do that…
Gasping for air and still hopelessly tangled with her in their interstellar waltz, he spotted a violin and reached out.
Mara ripped the enormous rose from her crumbling mask, her breath fluctuating wildly, and received an overhead swing of the violin into her forehead. The stars blinked and were extinguished.
The mask shattered into pieces, along with the instrument, and she cried out for a split second. Seth wound up another swing with the badly damaged violin and found himself kicked away, tumbling weightlessly and slamming into the piano, where at the very least he could regain a foothold.
Mara was undergoing a metamorphosis. Large volumes of oily glowing numbers were being expelled from her system, diffusing out of her face and splotching out into the void in the pattern of spilt milk. She doubled over and coughed out ethereal shards of glass. Vertigo lurched in Seth’s stomach as the dream righted itself and the floor grew out from under him. He landed diagonally in a mat of petals and rolled over, then rose to defend himself. His fists dropped and he tilted his head in concern.
The Athena counselor had lost all will to fight, instead resorting to digging her fingers into her hair and pulling in a sobbing tantrum. She curled up on the floor and fell to her side, plucking bits of plastic that stuck to her face while color returned to her cheeks and the scarred numbers faded. She thrashed and kicked at the pieces of the mask around her, yelling obscenities at it for good measure. Seth knew the early signs of an attack and crept over, discarding the violin.
He caught her outraged fists and lowered them, prying her fingers open to stop her from pulling at her scalp.
“Enough. You’re safe. It’s gone. You’re safe.” Seth wasn’t sure where the words were coming from. He knew what sort of tactile triggers and promises made him feel the most secure when the outside stimulus became too much, so he reluctantly defaulted to that; a gentle circle being traced over the palms in simple beats of five, someone keeping his hands from clenching so his nails couldn’t dig at the scabs, syncing their breathing and lifting his head up straight for proper airflow. For the most part it seemed to be working. Mara’s body still radiated anger – the blades were uncomfortably close by. One sudden reach for them would leave him helpless to stop her from running him through. Broken tablets fell around them from the shadowy catwalk, sparked and died.
“It’s not your fault.” The platitudes were spilling out of him now, hoping she would construe her own meaning from them. At least some of it appeared to get through the fog in her eyes. With the sutures slipping off of her mouth and the harsh words melting away the grotesque distortions surrounding her had all but evaporated. They held each others’ hands for support, grounding themselves in the only ‘real’ thing around.
“This isn’t what people wear, by the way.”
Seth nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of her voice as her lips unsplit and mended. “Uh, sorry, what?”
Mara cleared her throat and poked Seth imperiously in the collar, forcing him to back off. “Seriously? Ugh- first of all, hands off. This is a military uniform. What am I, George Washington? These were typically worn by colonial generals, not musicians. And even then, this is hardly historically accurate. Even if this was just a costume, look at the contrast! No performer would wear this, even if the style vaguely resembles particular wardrobes of the aristocracy in that time period. Next time, a black dress will be more appropriate. I understand that your mind was focused more on dramatic flair and spectacle than legitimacy, but any cursory examination would reveal that you did not do the proper research for this.”
She plucked another petal from his hair and crushed it. “It’s disrespectful to throw objects onto the stage, as well. Friends and family should wait until after the performance to personally hand off the bouquet. What if someone has an allergy? What about the custodians who make an honest living, forced to clean up after a mess that didn't have to be there in the first place? Oh, and the mask? 'Music' is not 'musical theater'. Mixing the classic Sock and Buskin imagery with a purely musical event is a common fallacy. You're trying to be an author, right? Alluding to several different themes at once can seriously muddy the message you want to convey."
“Oh. Oh, wow. Please stop talking.” Seth was glad to see that she'd calmed down, especially compared to the saber-swishing demoness from before, but now he was having trouble deciding which version was worse. "..You're not even you. You are literally my own brain lecturing me. This.. this is so creepy."
“I’m just helping. Speaking of muddying themes, the stellar sequence throws off the pacing too quickly. We were only there for several seconds, and even then there are several discrepancies in such a short span; look; gravity cannot accelerate an object like a clarinet as rapidly around an object of similar mass, like the piano. In reality any circular motion induced on the clarinet. Let me find a tablet, I can illustrate the system if you're having trouble visualizing it."
"A piano does not have similar mass to a clarinet! It's like a hundred times heavier!"
"In terms of magnitude when compared to each other, yes, they're much different, but compared to the mass of the Earth and Sun, the force of gravitation exerted is nearly negligible. Where's my.. Did you break my tablet?" She ran her hand along the floor and found a snapped stylus. Whirling on him in an instant, "you did! What, did you think these things grow on trees? Apologize."
"I don't know, maybe??" Seth exploded. "Gee, SORRY. Weren't you trying to stab me a few seconds ago? Where's my apology? I refuse to believe that the real Mara is this annoying."
"The real Mara could never teach you what we're all trying to teach you. First it was Davenport... now it's me. What's the connection? You'll figure this out eventually."
The comment made him unexpectedly smile. Mara was a daughter of Athena - if the grey eyes hadn't been a dead giveaway, then he stern tirade of corrections would have been. The fierce, slightly haughty look of determination and indignation despite her bloodied nose, as if Seth was a buffoon who had just ruined a performance and not someone who had just saved her from the control of a malignant living growth infecting her mind, was strangely endearing. The question obviously ran deeper than than her lecture on historical accuracy and it gave him pause. These were supposed to teach him something? Teach him how to get clobbered, maybe. Wait.
"Davenport?" Seth shifted his weight so he was sitting on his knees. "You mean Cassie?"
Mara rolled her eyes and looked away, gesturing to the emptiness and then to Seth. "I am surrounded by intellectual mediocrity. If you aren't even smart enough to properly replicate my entire psychological profile then you probably aren't going to figure this out before it kills you, are you?"
"K-kills me??!"
"Look." Mara turned around and reached for Seth's hands to clasp them, forcing him to release his nervous grip on his own knees and placing them together. The moment was oddly intimate and uncomfortable. She leaned in, narrowing her gaze in amused disdain. "You might've done the important part, which was dispelling the nightmare. On the first try, too. Congratulations. But obviously you're going to need some help with the the rest. When you get back to the waking world..."
His heartbeat quickened.
"Let's not meet. Ever."
She pushed him in a sprawling heap on the floor and stepped back as a piano fell from the ceiling and crushed him in cartoon fashion.
Seth sat up to find himself mercifully un-crushed and stuck in a sneezing fit. A faint gray symbol of a wide-eyed owl peeled itself from his feverish forehead, drifted down like an autumn leaf and dissolved on his hands.
"Athena campers," he muttered, eyeing the clock and sinking into despair at the sight of 4:06 AM staring right back at him. "They're all nutcases. Cute nutcases. But still nutcases."
((Once again I'm not super happy with how this turned out, but the show must go on. The one thing I disliked the most was the dialogue - presuming to speak for Mara felt unfair, even though this is technically a distorted version observed through the lens of Seth's psyche, and I think going forward I will be avoiding that altogether... as fun as it was to have her lecture him to death.
Enormous thanks to Mara_S0v for permission on writing a non-canon (or should I say non-CANNON, funny ha ha) interpretation of Mara. First impressions matter, as she says, and she left a striking one on me (and Seth) that I knew I wanted to explore in an admittedly dark sequence. Give Miss Lyones's own storymodes and posts a read, as many of them provided inspiration for these two segments, such as 'Blank Slate', "Experiment #1", and "Prodigy". This chapter wouldn't be possible without them.))
THE KILL LIST:
~~Chapter 1 - The Davenport Devil~~ 7 attempts ~~Chapter 2 - The Maestra~~ 1 attempt Chapter 3 - ?????? - coming soon™

Maestra 2

((You can find part 1 here!))
Seth stumbled backwards and slipped on a puddle of digital slurry. His duelist flipped the bows into icepick grip, still with that aching, fake smile, and drove them down like daggers.
Scooting back as the sabers plunged through where his shoulders had been a second ago, he sent a wild kick into one of her shins and sent the encroaching killer toppling forwards. A knee landed uncomfortably close for comfort, eliciting a startled gasp of anticipation, followed by two bows ripping through the sleeves by his elbows to staple him with his back to the ground. Not enormously keen on letting a straddling serial killer vivisect him, Seth drew his legs out from under her, bent up and planted his dress shoes into her stomach, forcing her up and off in a flailing angry ball of venom. She cracked the back of her head on the floor with an audible impact that made him feel a brief pang of sympathy, quickly overshadowed by fear.
Untangling himself from the ruined jacket skewered with bows, the unclaimed demigod climbed to his feet, sneezing in a cloud of dust and resin. The masked attacker had recovered just as quickly, forcing him to raise his arms to catch her fists in a hurry. Her superior positioning and grip slowly eased him closer to the pile of instruments while her own breathing grew heavy. The gloved fingers laced with his own, mixing sweat and sludge, and squeezed until his bones threatened to crack. Several sharp points pricked his back. They had reached the pile, where, among other things, the demolished top board of a harpsichord terminated in a minefield of wooden splinters and nails. She eased him onto the deadly speartips with sadistic slowness. Seth’s arms trembled and were moments from giving out.
A trapdoor opened unhinged beneath her, swinging inward, and swallowed her up. Her grip on him was lost with a surprised yell. Seth peeled himself from the close call behind him. A hand rose to his heart and he dug in his nails to steady the heaving of his chest. If he ended up having a heart attack in his sleep, he was going to wake up so pissed in the Underworld.
It went without saying at this point that Seth’s momentary crush had evaporated like a fart in an industrial centrifuge, and any lovestruck notions of playing a saucy duet were replaced with the telltale jitters of flight-or-fight. With their host recently departed, the holographic stage lamps took to him instead, rotating about his head and dazzling him with harsh cyan sparks. A few experimental swings at them scared them off long enough to clear his space and his head. He needed to arm himself. A sweep of the floor revealed the twin bows sticking straight down into his jacket. It’ll do.
A hop, skip and jump over the trapdoor gauntlet placed him in front of the weapons, which he snatched up and inspected with the time he had left. The fearsome meld of garrote wire and Celestial Bronze left him wondering if it was even possible to play a violin with these monstrosities, and how awful the resulting sound would be produced. Seth couldn’t operate a manual can opener, much less a pair of twin music sabers, and his confidence diminished. Whatever the case, he felt safer knowing he had disarmed the crazy one-woman concert. When the trapdoor swung downwards and opened back up to let her disheveled form slowly rise, he steeled himself and held them by his sides. “What are you going to do without these, huh?” A disaster of a snarky line, and pretty much tempting fate to show her pull out something worse, but it was difficult to come up with snappy comments in the middle of a brawl, and he only had so much breath. He’d have plenty of time to write better material after she killed him and he repeated this process the next night.
The mask fractured briefly into a frown before correcting itself when the lamps swarmed her head with a buzz. She was seated on a large lumpy object resembling another piano – seriously? Seth was going to serenaded to death? – with several augmentations the nature of which could not be discerned. She dabbed delicately below the mask’s mouth with a handkerchief to wipe away a line of fluid dripping out then tapped the piano in front of her lovingly.
The spotlights centered back on her. She dragged her hands across the keyboard in a rapid minor scale and as if on cue, a large bronze cannon styled with treble clefs emerged from the opening top board. Cyan liquid glistened and pooled underneath the instrument-turned-siege engine. Spokes cranked outwards and wheels bound with rope affixed themselves to grounded rails.
“..Oh.”
The looming smile widened, causing the plastic to warp. The bows felt much less fearsome in his hands than they had several moments ago. White heels rammed into the pedal box and several pullies began to churn below the ground. The barrel of the cannon zeroed on his torso. “Oh.”
A beat pause followed.
“Fuck.”
Another pause.
“A cannon isn’t an instrument, you know.”
The maestra threw her fists down on the keys for a discordant wallop of sound. Pyoter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s loudest rebuttal that cannons are, in fact, instruments, exploded out of the barrel in the form of a glitchy blob of electronic lights. Church bells rang in Seth’s brain as it collided with his upper body. Suddenly he was weightless, hitting not the ground but hurtling straight through the mountain of instruments and bursting out on the other side after boring straight through.
The ethereal projectile that had struck him melted into skin, leaving a Rorschach splotch across his dress shirt. Clamminess and a heavy, nauseating buzzing behind the eyeballs rocked him back and forth on the floor. The hole left by his trajectory through the hill began to collapse. The grand piano at the top sagged in the rapidly disappearing foundation. By the time Seth had staggered to his feet and inspected himself only to find no physical wound, the lamps had abandoned him to continue hounding their original target. So dream logic was back in full swing; good to know. That didn’t mean he wanted to take another cannonball head-on.
The assailant came into view atop the pile having recovered her blades, flawlessly cartwheeling into a triple flip and perching onto the descending piano to ride it like a runaway snowboard. She dragged a bow along her throat menacingly, her intention clear; Seth steeled against the bubbling pain descending into his stomach and wiped a spool of technicolor poison from his lips. He hurried around the pile to put more distance between himself and the ballerina of chaos, eyeing the torn top board with a dreadful resignation and tearing it free.
Speaking of ballerina… from around the pile she half-approached, half-danced in a rotating pirouette, sweeping the blades out in large circular swathes. The deadly dervish spun towards him like a top. Refusing to back down, Seth swung the nailed board hard. Their respective armaments clashed. Propping it as a makeshift shield, he held his ground and withstood the rhythmic succession of blows, each one chipping off a bit more of his bastion until a duel strike shattered the wood into pieces.
The maestra lowered her leg and stopped spinning to revel momentarily in Seth’s helplessness, tilting her head teasingly and receiving an unexpected punch to the face. She crumpled like a house of cards. Seth felt the satisfying crunch of a nose under his right hook then bounced back to roll up his sleeves and free up some elbow movement while staying light on the balls of his feet. It took a certain amount of sucker punches to the face himself before he had perfected the feint against particularly relentless bullies, and as much as he loathed the dirtiness of fisticuffs, victory took priority. He rolled his neck, because that’s what fighters did on television and it just felt natural. “Okay. Okay? Wanna dance? We can dance. Let’s dance, honey.”
Her motionless body convulsed and drew itself up on invisible puppet strings. One of her gloves fell by the wayside, and a prosthetic hand of manikin wood curled even tighter around the bow. Living doll. Not creepy at all. And her face…eugh.
A hideous spiderweb of cracked concentric circles circled the mask’s crushed nose in bullseye formation, smattered with the same noxious-smelling digital pus that reminded Seth of a leaking glowstick. A nasty memory resurfaced of six-year-old him tasting the fluid at a Fourth of July picnic and the thought of glass filaments and toxic chemicals on his tongue burned like acid. Gods only knew what it was doing to his insides right now, settling into his gut and making the lights swim around his skull.
Any hint of the mask’s smile was gone now, as well as several shards surrounding it. Through the chaos of the revolving lights he could made out a pair of lips cracked raw, curled into an animalistic snarl. From a few of the hairline fractures forming at the top, individual strands of curly brown hair and patches of the face underneath visible through the broken mesh of the fencing helmet sparkled under the glare of the lamps. The most off-putting example of body horror was only visible when the lamps were behind Seth, angling the light just right to show golden stitches sealing the mouth shut and spelling one word:
’wRoNG.’
The veneer of confidence was gone. Seth could feel the grey eyes roving up and down, drinking him in and calculating how exactly to approach him next. The words branded into the mask were illegible neon flares sending fireworks into his eyeballs. More of the sludge began to diffuse through his clothes, numbing his fear. The hazel of his irises was sapped from his eyes and poured out in large round tears and his lids drooped. A similar desaturation process took place across his face. His knees knocked and wobbled, then quickly gave out. Like a swarm of piranhas the lamps crowded around him, their digital screens sucking the colorful ink out of every available patch of hair or exposed skin.
Granny Su placed down the unopened bottle of pills on the kitchen table and folded her arms. Seth had always joked that the hard set of her mouth and lack of wrinkles at her age made her a total catch in the funeral parlor, which always earned a rare smirk. He doubted that gallows humor would weasel him out of trouble now. He shrunk from her gaze and let his eyes lose focus and his mind wander into the clouds, just so he could be anywhere but here.
Seth gasped and fell over. He shuddered involuntarily and felt the shadows of the lamps passing him by, opening up to beam their contents onto his opponent. With the spotlight back on her she bent one leg in front of the other and tilted her head back. She basked in the cacophony to allow the sensations to wash over her. Floating strings of scrawled diagrams, mathematical laws, hateful slurs, migraine-inducing swirls of gasoline invaded the nostrils. 649 became 651, then 658, 675, 677, exchanging digits and rolling through new numbers like a malfunctioning slot machine. A lamp coiled its wires around the discarded glove, slurped up more of the slurry staining it, and stretched it over the naked hand. With a twang the bladed wires now coated in the corrosive substance snapped off of the bows and wiggled uselessly.
His arms were gone. Brilliant wavy streaks of ink outlined his fingers and down to the wrinkled sleeves scrunched by the elbows, leaving the rest of him entirely transparent. Blinking rapidly and rubbing his eyes raw only made the undulating pinpricks of light sparkle harsher. The floor fell away, inducing a sense of weightlessness. Fighting the sloshing sensation in his head the demigod drew himself up, spat out a glob of digital sludge and tossed a sloppy punch through the defensive barrier of screens. The landing was weak, but the impact splattered more ink across the heavily marred façade and the killer recoiled. Her ceremony disrupted, Mara lunged forward, threw the bows away, hooked her fingers around the loop of Seth’s bowtie, pulled him close and-
Wait. Why did he know her name? Recognition sharpened his brain with photographic precision. Even under the shroud of a mangled fencing costume she was impossible to misplace. An accidental collision in front of the Athena cabin and an awkward, forgettable apology on his part was the sum of their interactions. Seth could not guess why she was here, in a music-themed fever dream, dressing like the Joker’s awkward band phase and trying to throttle the idiot in front of her. What he COULD guess, with startling clarity, was that she was about to headbutt him.
Leaning back to protect his nose from suffering the same fate as hers, he placed his hands over the gloves and struggled to peel them off while aiming another low kick. Her knee bent reflexively to catch it and push him backwards. The two of them tumbled through a stage trapdoor, thrusting them both into a cosmic void with no floor.
Broken instruments, bundled up wads of notebook paper, stage lamps, axles, burnt tires, laptops bludgeoned by abuse, pens leaking ink rotated about themselves in an endless dance of zero gravity, illuminated by countless stars. Unable to modify their angular momentum, Seth and Mara were flung onto the closed board of a floating grand piano, a makeshift planetoid orbited by rings of dazzling numbers.
Mara scrambled on top and tightened her fingers around his throat, slamming the back of his head onto the keys twice and squeezing the breath from his lungs. He raised his legs, locked them around her waist and rolled her off, sending them spinning into the asteroid belt of household devices. Shards of splintered violins pelted them in lethal hail, Seth taking the brunt of the bombardment across his shoulders and neck. A flower petal came loose from his hair. With a desperate choked grunt he snatched the petal, focused on it and grew an abnormally large rose. He stuffed it into Mara’s face and the plant responded, wrapping around the entire mask. Her grip on his throat left him and she reached up with a furious muffled yell to clutch at her head while the flower responded to Seth’s command, enveloping her head. Forgot I could do that…
Gasping for air and still hopelessly tangled with her in their interstellar waltz, he spotted a violin and reached out.
Mara ripped the enormous rose from her crumbling mask, her breath fluctuating wildly, and received an overhead swing of the violin into her forehead. The stars blinked and were extinguished.
The mask shattered into pieces, along with the instrument, and she cried out for a split second. Seth wound up another swing with the badly damaged violin and found himself kicked away, tumbling weightlessly and slamming into the piano, where at the very least he could regain a foothold.
Mara was undergoing a metamorphosis. Large volumes of oily glowing numbers were being expelled from her system, diffusing out of her face and splotching out into the void in the pattern of spilt milk. She doubled over and coughed out ethereal shards of glass. Vertigo lurched in Seth’s stomach as the dream righted itself and the floor grew out from under him. He landed diagonally in a mat of petals and rolled over, then rose to defend himself. His fists dropped and he tilted his head in concern.
The Athena counselor had lost all will to fight, instead resorting to digging her fingers into her hair and pulling in a sobbing tantrum. She curled up on the floor and fell to her side, plucking bits of plastic that stuck to her face while color returned to her cheeks and the scarred numbers faded. She thrashed and kicked at the pieces of the mask around her, yelling obscenities at it for good measure. Seth knew the early signs of an attack and crept over, discarding the violin.
He caught her outraged fists and lowered them, prying her fingers open to stop her from pulling at her scalp.
“Enough. You’re safe. It’s gone. You’re safe.” Seth wasn’t sure where the words were coming from. He knew what sort of tactile triggers and promises made him feel the most secure when the outside stimulus became too much, so he reluctantly defaulted to that; a gentle circle being traced over the palms in simple beats of five, someone keeping his hands from clenching so his nails couldn’t dig at the scabs, syncing their breathing and lifting his head up straight for proper airflow. For the most part it seemed to be working. Mara’s body still radiated anger – the blades were uncomfortably close by. One sudden reach for them would leave him helpless to stop her from running him through. Broken tablets fell around them from the shadowy catwalk, sparked and died.
“It’s not your fault.” The platitudes were spilling out of him now, hoping she would construe her own meaning from them. At least some of it appeared to get through the fog in her eyes. With the sutures slipping off of her mouth and the harsh words melting away the grotesque distortions surrounding her had all but evaporated. They held each others’ hands for support, grounding themselves in the only ‘real’ thing around.
“This isn’t what people wear, by the way.”
Seth nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of her voice as her lips unsplit and mended. “Uh, sorry, what?”
Mara cleared her throat and poked Seth imperiously in the collar, forcing him to back off. “Seriously? Ugh- first of all, hands off. This is a military uniform. What am I, George Washington? These were typically worn by colonial generals, not musicians. And even then, this is hardly historically accurate. Even if this was just a costume, look at the contrast! No performer would wear this, even if the style vaguely resembles particular wardrobes of the aristocracy in that time period. Next time, a black dress will be more appropriate. I understand that your mind was focused more on dramatic flair and spectacle than legitimacy, but any cursory examination would reveal that you did not do the proper research for this.”
She plucked another petal from his hair and crushed it. “It’s disrespectful to throw objects onto the stage, as well. Friends and family should wait until after the performance to personally hand off the bouquet. What if someone has an allergy? What about the custodians who make an honest living, forced to clean up after a mess that didn't have to be there in the first place? Oh, and the mask? 'Music' is not 'musical theater'. Mixing the classic Sock and Buskin imagery with a purely musical event is a common fallacy. You're trying to be an author, right? Alluding to several different themes at once can seriously muddy the message you're trying to convey."
“Oh. Oh, wow. Please stop talking.” Seth was glad to see that she'd calmed down, especially compared to the saber-swishing demoness from before, but now he was having trouble deciding which version was worse. "..You're not even you. You are literally my own brain lecturing me. This.. this is so creepy."
“I’m just helping. Speaking of muddying themes, the stellar sequence throws off the pacing too quickly. We were only there for several seconds, and even then there are several discrepancies in such a short span; look; gravity cannot accelerate an object like a clarinet as rapidly around an object of similar mass, like the piano. In reality any circular motion induced on the clarinet. Let me find a tablet, I can illustrate the system if you're having trouble visualizing it."
"A piano does not have similar mass to a clarinet! It's like a hundred times heavier!"
"In terms of magnitude when compared to each other, yes, they're much different, but compared to the mass of the Earth and Sun, the force of gravitation exerted is nearly negligible. Where's my.. Did you break my tablet?" She ran her hand along the floor and found a snapped stylus. Whirling on him in an instant, "you did! What, did you think these things grow on trees?"
"I don't know, maybe??" Seth exploded. "Gee, SORRY. Weren't you trying to stab me a few seconds ago? Where's my apology? I refuse to believe that the real Mara is this annoying."
"The real Mara could never teach you what we're all trying to teach you. First it was Davenport... now it's me. What's the connection? You'll figure this out eventually."
The comment made him unexpectedly smile. Mara was a daughter of Athena - if the grey eyes hadn't been a dead giveaway, then he stern tirade of corrections would have been. The fierce, slightly haughty look of determination and indigence despite her bloodied nose, as if Seth was a buffoon who had just ruined a performance and not someone who had just saved her from the control of a malignant living growth infecting her mind, was strangely endearing. The question obviously ran deeper than than her lecture on historical accuracy and it gave him pause. These were supposed to teach him something? Teach him how to get clobbered, maybe. Wait.
"Davenport?" Seth shifted his weight so he was sitting on his knees. "You mean Cassie?"
Mara rolled her eyes and looked away, gesturing to the emptiness and then to Seth. "I am surrounded by intellectual mediocrity. If you aren't even smart enough to properly replicate my entire psychological profile then you probably aren't going to figure this out before it kills you, are you?"
"K-kills me??!"
"Look." Mara turned around and reached for Seth's hands to clasp them, forcing him to release his nervous grip on his own knees and placing them together. The moment was oddly intimate and uncomfortable. She leaned in, narrowing her gaze in amused disdain. "You might've done the important part, which was dispelling the nightmare. On the first try, too. Congratulations. But obviously you're going to need some help with the the rest. When you get back to the waking world..."
His heartbeat quickened.
"Let's not meet. Ever."
She pushed him in a sprawling heap on the floor and stepped back as a piano fell from the ceiling and crushed him in cartoon fashion.
Seth sat up to find himself mercifully un-crushed and stuck in a sneezing fit. A faint gray symbol of a wide-eyed owl peeled itself from his feverish forehead, drifted down like an autumn leaf and dissolved on his hands.
"Athena campers," he muttered, eyeing the clock and sinking into despair at the sight of 4:06 AM staring right back at him. "They're all nutcases. Cute nutcases. But still nutcases."
((Once again I'm not super happy with how this turned out, but the show must go on. The one thing I disliked the most was the dialogue - presuming to speak for Mara felt unfair, even though this is technically a distorted version observed through the lens of Seth's psyche, and I think going forward I will be avoiding that altogether... as fun as it was to have her lecture him to death.
Enormous thanks to Mara_S0v for permission on writing a non-canon (or should I say non-CANNON, funny ha ha) interpretation of Mara. First impressions matter, as she says, and she left a striking one on me (and Seth) that I knew I wanted to explore in an admittedly dark sequence. Give Miss Lyones's own storymodes and posts a read, as many of them provided inspiration for these two segments, such as 'Blank Slate', "Experiment #1", and "Prodigy". This chapter wouldn't be possible without them.))
THE KILL LIST:
~~Chapter 1 - The Davenport Devil~~ 7 attempts ~~Chapter 2 - The Maestra~~ 1 attempt Chapter 3 - ?????? - coming soon™

Separatist Event Feedback Part2

I will open up again by saying thanks to all that take the time to read what I have to say, please get involved in the comment section below to keep the discussion alive and moving forward
We will start by talking about the events, breaking them down and giving my personal rating on each one.
Act of War: Solo Event
First up, the pure solo event that is usually one of the basics for people in the game during any multi day event. These are essentially your gate way drug into the event world and need to be all inclusive and provide sufficient reason and rewards to feel like they are worth your time.
I’m not sure that Scopely fully has an idea on events, like a structure and reasoning for why they are putting certain things in. Base line this is supposed to be probably the easiest part of event for all tier levels so that they feel like they can participate. Forget the whales and forget money, this particular subset event should focus primarily on that and it should not feel like a chore or a net loss to do? Can we all agree on this? I would think from a design point of view it makes the most sense, if not why not?
We started with Asia getting the event and we were hearing that level 28 Ops had a milestone of 108M points for top tier reward which was over treble that of lvl 26/27. This was brought up the last event that the brackets need addressing properly, level 28 should not be in the same bracket as lvl 39, stop being lazy and tier and balance correctly. Since the start it was then reduced to 68M and then dropped even further to 50M. Other levels also had drops in requirements, this is a common theme and needs addressing fully before you release events. It is not difficult to crunch a few numbers and work out how many level 22s are needed to get to certain requirements. I say this because for the majority of the mid tier this is the point maker as there are no level 26s or 28s to kill.
The requirements are now at a reasonable level or achievable for the majority. There are and will always be the odd player that went ahead on Ops level and will have to put in a lot more time so I’m by no means saying it’s perfect but it seems okay now.
No Trit/Dil or other resources on-top of the Bat’Leth tokens are sort of a let down, even if they were small gestures - but I understand the logic that people can spend in the store on those resources.
Rating = 6/10
Act of War: Solo Leaderboard
Designed to be a leaderboard for the “hardcore” ? Being up against everyone on the server at all levels - it’s interesting but I’m not sure it should be put as the pinnacle of rewards, or they should be more evenly spread for just getting into any of the rankings.
Unfortunately what happens time and time again is that Scopely stacks the rewards on this top three places and often the rewards are going to players that don’t actually need them. Last event gave out 10x level 30 Ship BP to first place, I’d wager money that on at least 80% of all servers the people winning that top spot already had said faction ships or close enough that it made little difference while the 99% of other players got zero BPs. Now onto this event, a huge huge chunk of tokens goes to the top - the only way to get close to a Hijacked ship is to place at the top of the event solo leaderboards, again the same players winning won’t have any need for said ships - granted they get to use the tokens for other things so it’s okay, the issue is more that you deny literally everyone else the chance to get close to what is being dangled in front of them. Consider leaderboard tiers?
Rating: 4/10
Act of War: Alliance Leaderboards
Short and sweet on this one. The rewards are token gestures and seem underwhelming on every Alliance Leaderboard event there is, you arnt making players in alliances want to contribute to this event after their solo is done if they have no intention of going for the solo leaderboard. Needs addressing and more incentives for players to focus on their alliance - this is not just applicable to this event alone.
Rating: 2/10
Act of War: PvP Solo Event
This was a good change to stop abuse of people just trading kills to cheese the event and get free rewards for just a few repair bills and completely ignored the point of the event being PvP focused.
However it appears to have turned people off from bothering with it as it’s restricted to one zone each time and the majority of players are still focused on the Solo Leaderboard. It was a nice idea but the execution is poor, how about damage done to player ships? Multiple systems? Any faction ship any system? Base destruction with faction ships? I’m not sure but something more than what is currently in play.
Rating: 3/10 (for effort and concept)
Event Store
This is a big let down. My previous feedback was that it was responded to that it was coming back bigger and better than before. Wrong
There’s multiple issues here
Uncommons/Rares not being offered in multiples - Step Backwards from previous events. More expensive also?
Officer Selection - gets changed from previous events so those that got Harrison are laughing at everyone who can’t get him this time around. Change him or allow everyone to get access to the overpowered monster.
Huge gripe. Cooldowns. This is mind boggling to try and work out why it’s even a thing, please anyone tell me from a design aspect why this needs to be included. I earn say 18K tokens per day and I’m currently only interested in two rare officers, I can’t spend 80% of my tokens because I have to wait to spend on Officers again? If I want to get multiple upgrades of Decius or so - isn’t that my choice? Can I even get a full upgrade out of him with these cool downs now? Why must I be a slave to this cooldown daily? What if I’m only able to do a few days of the event and I’m on holiday and have no phone access or don’t want to login every 24 hours just to spend the tokens I got on the first few day.
This is even more jarring because if you do some simple calculations you need 288,000 Bat Leth Tokens to get a ship which won’t be achievable.
This is restricted even further to only 3 BPs a day. So that’s 21 BPs maximum for the entire event? Please correct me if I’m wrong on ship cd as I’ve only encountered the cd on officers as I’m not wasting my tokens on 1/4 or 1/2 of a ship that has no guarantees I can earn further BPs later on when I’ve got 10 Legionary BPs sat collecting dust from the very first event.
Also for some reason there is Resource tokens and flat resources in non token form? Why? Only sense is if you want to spend literally every last BatLeth Token.
First positive point! Well done for putting other faction ships BPs up for purchase, this is a welcome chance to earn them outside of scraping together credits that are like gold dust! Really good addition for most people (unfortunately I can’t make use out of it as I’ve got my Cent already)
Rating: 3/10
Overall this is hugely underwhelming, I’ve not even commented on the event delays because I’m sure it’s something Scopely will work on fixing internally and everything has been said about it on Discord already. Thanks for reading, if I’ve missed out crucial issues with this event please discuss below and weigh in on the points I’ve brought across.

Difference between HD800 and HD800S (with measurements)

Hi guys!
This is partly in reply to a request made here, also by u/55Powers.
So a while ago there was a bit of discussion about the differences between the Sennheiser HD800 and HD800S. The most notable difference is the reduction of the 6k resonance, which strongly improves on the treble „sharpness“ that the original 800 is so often associated with. But there is also a difference in the low frequency region. Tyll at Innerfidelity measured the HD800S to have slightly higher harmonic distortion at low frequencies. He postulated that this was in fact done deliberately, because additional harmonics at low frequencies help to increase the „perceived“ bass impact. Not a new concept, this is regularily used during music production.
A while ago I was told that Jude from Head-Fi had made similar measurements, and that he had in fact not found a difference in the bass region at all.
Our company has a measurement setup similar to Jude’s (Gras 43AG coupler and artificial ear, Audio Precision signal generator and analyzer), so I figured why not try and reproduce those measurements and see if I can confirm either Tyll’s or Jude’s measurements.
Album with all results here
Fig1: A comparison of the SPL frequency response measurements. Or what people generally refer to as a „frequency response“. I measured this at 100 dB @ 1 kHz. You can clearly see the influence of the HD800S-resonator around 6 kHz, how it reduces that peak by 4-5 dB. This is pretty much the same thing that the SDR-Mod attempts to do. But you’ll also see how the HD800S has slightly but consistently more bass starting below 100 Hz. It’s just <2 dB, but it’s there.
Fig 2: A comparison of the THD measurements. THD here is expressed in %, this is the type of graph that you’ll also see at the Innerfidelity measurements. No argument here, the HD800S clearly shows higher distortion at low frequencies (below 100 Hz). Note that this is with 100 dB @ 1 kHz, so pretty loud. You normally wouldn’t listen to music that loud, unless you particularily hate your ears. At more quiet listening levels, the distortion is much lower. I chose to measure at such a high level because I wanted to clearly see the difference between the two, and THD measurements are easier at high levels because as long as the noise floor remains the same, you have a higher signal-to-noise-ratio.
An interesting observation can also be made at around 3 kHz: This is half the frequency of the 6k resonance peak! And since that very resonance is reduced with the 800S, any 2nd order harmonic distortion produced at 3 kHz is also reduced (because the resonance does not amplify it anymore), leading to reduced THD compared with the HD800.
Fig 3: This is where it get’s a bit unusual - you may not be used to seeing THD displayed that way. What you see here is the „normal“ frequency response of the headphones (black). This is basically „when I play a specific frequency, how loud is the sound that the headphone produces at that frequency“. The other two pairs of lines (yellow and green) are the sound pressure of the distortion products, but expressed in dB, not %. This is basically „when I play a specific frequency, how loud is the sound that the headphone produces at twice and three times that frequency? How loud are the distortion products?“
If I would add the green (H3) and yellow (H2) line and calculate the ratio between (H2 + H3) and the black line, I would end up with the „normal“ THD graph expressed in %. The yellow line is the sound pressure level of the 2nd order harmonic distortion (H2), the green line is the sound pressure level of the 3rd order harmonic distortion (H3).
How to read this graph: - Take a frequency (for example 20 Hz). - The black line (at 20 Hz) shows you that sound pressure level of the headphones at that frequency (20 Hz) is about 95 dB. - The yellow line (at 20 Hz) shows you that the sound pressure level which the 800S produces at 2 * 20 Hz = 40 Hz is 73 dB. - The green line (at 20 Hz) shows you that the sound pressure level which the 800S produces at 3 * 30 Hz = 60 Hz is 54 dB. So for every frequency you can see the sound pressure level of the desired frequency (the black line) and the sound pressure level of the 2nd (yellow) and 3rd (green) harmonic distortion product.
Now, looking at fig 3 we can see that for the most part of the spectrum, it’s only 2nd-order distortion that makes up the THD (remember: the sum of green and yellow line is the THD, total harmonic distortion) – only the frequency range between ~100 and 700 Hz has mostly third-order distortion.
We can also see that the 2nd order distortion is a lot higher on the HD800S, and the 3rd order distortion is a little lower.
Let’s have a closer look at the bass region in fig 4:
Fig 4: This is the same type of graph as fig 3, but now we’re only looking at the bass frequency region. I did measure it a little differently, (longer excitation times, DC coupling) to get a more accurate result. What we see in this graph is that the HD800S does clearly show increased 2nd harmonic below about 100 Hz, and a slightly decreased 3rd harmonic. This would add to the slightly increased bass that we perceive between the HD800 and the 800S.
Another way of looking at this is to just watch the spectrum when the headphone plays a 20 Hz sine signal. Fig 5 and 6 show the spectrum of a 20 Hz signal, where you can see the distortion such a signal causes. The signal was played at 0.591 Volt RMS, which equals 100 dB at 1 kHz (this is what u/Dreyka1 requested to be measured)
Fig 5: The frequency spectrum of a 20 Hz sine signal played over the HD800.
Fig 6: The frequency spectrum of a 20 Hz sine signal played over the HD800S.
Both these spectra in comparison
Again we can see that at this low frequency the HD800S produces higher H2 (2nd order distortion) and lower H3 (3rd order distortion) than the HD800. In fact in this case the H2 of the HD800S is a little over 14 dB louder, while the H3 is about 8 dB more quiet.
And since it may interest some of you: How do you specifically change the harmonic distortion? Harmonic distortion is created by nonlinearity of the forces that move the diaphragm. A nonlinearity can either be symmetrical (be the same whether the diaphragm moves forward or backward) or nonsymmetrical (affecting forward motion in a different way than it affects backward motion of the diaphragm). I’ll spare you the mathematics and just say this: symmetrical nonlinearity introduces odd-order harmonics (H3, H5, H7, … but mostly H3), nonsymmetrical nonlinearity introduces even-order harmonics (H2, H4, H6, … but mostly H2). Now with the HD800S we see an increase of 2nd order Harmonics. How was this achieved, when the driver looks identical from the outside? In this case my best guess is that the magnet assembly of the 800S was tweaked slightly. Either the geometry of the magnetic field was changed or there are physical tweaks to how the bottom of the magnetic gap is vented. This affects the „springiness“ of the entrapped volume of air in the magnetic gap, which acts as a restoring force on the diaphragm, and together with streaming through venting holes can impose nonlinearity, in turn introducing distortion.
Now for the other major difference between the HD800 and the HD800S – the Helmholtz resonator.
Fig 7: This is the same type of graph as fig 3 and fig 4, but this time we’re only looking at the treble range, 1 kHz upwards. See how the dashed black line of the HD800 shows a big peak at about 5.8 kHz? This is what people talk about when they say “treble peak of the HD800”. You can also see that this peak is surgically reduced on the solid back line of the HD800S. There’s still a peak left (shifted a bit down to 5.5 kHz), but it’s about 4 dB less than on the HD800. Now for the interesting part – This actually lowers distortion as well. For example: When the headphone is playing a 3 kHz sound, it will be slightly distorted. There’s always some level of distortion. We already know that the HD800 produces mostly 2nd order harmonics (H2), so a 3 kHz signal will also show a small peak at 2 * 3 = 6 kHz. And since the HD800 has an earcup resonance at 6 kHz, this H2 will be amplified by this resonance. The result is higher distortion at 3 kHz! Now we know that the HD800S reduces this 6k resonance, and we can also see that the harmonic distortion at 3 kHz is reduced – because the distortion is not amplified by the resonance anymore. Isn’t it nice when theory and practice check out?
So, to answer the question – could I confirm Jude’s or Tyll’s measurements? Well my results do show different distortion behavior with the HD800S, very similar to what Tyll’s measurements showed.
Does that mean Jude made a mistake? No, I don’t think so.
I did measure 1 HD800S (my own) and 1 HD800 (property of u/HartUndSteil). There could very well be deviations between individual specimen. Sennheiser's Quality Control is usually excellent and tolerances for the HD800-series are incredibly tight (as can be expected for that price from a German company), but tolerances still exist.
Also I did measure at higher levels than Jude, which causes higher distortion in general. I also employed a different measurement technique – whereas he fed the headphone with a single test signal and looked at the resulting spectrum (averaged over a certain amount of time to reduce noise) I used a measurement technique that employs self-correlation with the original test signal – in theory this is more accurate as it can filter out almost any amount of noise. I assume Jude (u/head-fi) is using the same measurement program that I’m using (Audio Precision’s APx500 suite), so if he wanted (and if he had time to do so) he could replicate my results using a “Stepped Frequency Sweep” measurement that is implemented in the Audio Precision measurement suite. That way he should get the same results in the low frequency range.
EDIT: Wow, thanks for the gold!
And don‘t forget that while it is possible to measure a lot of things, in the end headphones are not made to be measured, they are made to listen to music. Enjoy the music!

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Recorder Songs Tutorials - Easy Piano Tutorials - Tin Whistle - Melodica - Harmonica - Xylophone - Music Theory System that gives you a chance to win up to 1000 x your bet.Like my channel and subscribe as I will be releasing new systems soon DONATE TO HELP US CREATE WE... This formula will always give you a part of your money back, even if you predicted all of your games wrong ?!Look how I developed this unique way of sports b... Time to go scambaiting again! This time, let's see what happens if I pretend that I somehow already received the prize, without paying the advance fee (sca... Here we are joined by Gareth Walker of BettorStrategy to talk through how to use Each Way betting appropriately. Tune in to hear what Gareth has to say on th... These combinations that range from one game to five games have one winning slip(ticket) in them. This technique of how to bet on football games will make mon... Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Shorten the odds and enhance your chances SX2 Admin uploaded a video 3 years ago 1:32. System X2 - Consistently win at football betting - Duration: 92 seconds. SX2 Admin. 3 years ago; 100 views ... Exact Goals odds calculator from betandlay.co.uk - Duration ... Live bet & lay of a football treble from betandlay.co.uk - Duration : 16 minutes. 1,614 views; 3 years ago; 14:07. Forecast an odds ... Betting Each WayBetting each way is a useful tool in horse racing. It’s a great way of finding value.A each way bet is two bets - one to win and one place.....

Treble Bet Calculator Work Out Your Winnings & Bet Info

treble odds calculator

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Ynakee Bet

Bet structure and behaviours

History and Strategy

DWT26 (November 21st 2020)

Book 1: Chapter 20: Pride