Source
Note: Based on observing question-taker's profile, he is still taking answers, so two parts may or may not completely summarize the AMA.

Questions	Answers
Space Cadet Pinball, how does it feel to be the most played "bring your child to work day" game? I remember it fondly.	The best part is that I used to "teach" computer lab when my kids were in K through 6th grades, back when Pinball was still included and well known. The kids could care less about anything technically hard or interesting that I'd worked on, of course, but Pinball gave me instant street cred with them.
	Especially cool was being able to walk over and enter a secret code that only I knew that would turn on all the cheats, like infinite lives. They thought I was a wizard at that age!
	The code, by the way, is "hidden test" without the quotes! Then various keys do different things, you can click and drag the ball around, and so on. Google it for the gory details!
	I always like to point out that I was working with a full set of original IP from Maxis, so I had nothing to do with the design of the game, or it's art, etc... that was all done! My contribution was volunteering to port it, including a partial rewrite from asm to C, to work on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, IA64, ARM, and so on, which was actually a lot of work. But I got it into the Windows box, which is how and why everyone knows it today. But all credit for the gameplay and so on goes to Maxis, all I did was not screw it up in that case!
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To add a bit of detail re Space Cadet Pinball: we built Space Cadet originally at my company Cinematronics and did a deal with Microsoft to ship it with the Plus Pack that accompanied Win 95 and Win 98. While it technically didn't ship w/ Windows, the Plus Pack had something like a 25% attach rate and pinball wound up on most systems anyway. Microsoft actually had an option in our original contract from 1994 to ship it with the OS itself or the Plus Pack. Maxis was our publisher for the subsequent retail version, and later bought my company. More germane to this thread: I believe Dave's port entered the picture a few years later, after Win 98, and was likely critical to pinball continuing to ship on later iterations of the Windows OS (i.e. 32-bit). I definitely appreciate the time he put in to give the game extra years of life on the Windows platform. Kevin Gliner, game designer and producer for 3D Pinball, and co-founder of Cinematronics.	Pleased to FINALLY put a name to the game design! You should update the Wikipedia article for the game, as I think it lists Matt Ridgway, who might have been sound? I've been crediting Maxis for years, not knowing the role of Cinematronics who was who. One thing that confused me: wasn't there a company that did video games in the 80s called Cinematronics? Any relation? Star Castle, Armor Attack, etc...
	As for timing, this likely between the Win95 and Win98 Plus! packs. It was very early on at least, and shipped at least in NT4, and perhaps earlier in "SUR" release that ran atop NT 3.51, but I don't have access to any source files to check dates!
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I keep meaning to fix that wikipedia article, there's a significant number of people that worked on the game and for some reason only Matt (an independent sound guy who did some excellent part-time contract work for us) is listed. There's also a lot of confusion about the timing of various releases and the companies involved, and who owns it now (EA). I actually have all the original source, although no rights to any of it anymore. Hard to say on the timing of the port. I was working in Redmond in '99 when I got word someone had done an NT4 and Win2000 port (I'm assuming that was you), so that was the first time the port showed up on my radar. I have a more confident memory (and contracts, email, etc) of all the events related to how pinball came about and the first couple years after it was released. I like to think pinball was the very first Win95 game (it was fun to watch Gates and Leno pretend to play it on stage at the Win95 launch event), but of course there were other games that shipped with the launch too. You're correct, there was an 80s arcade game company called Cinematronics that went out of business long before we started in 1994, and someone had let the trademark lapse. How we came to be called Cinematronics is a long story for another time...	NT shipped in 96, so the version I did for it would have been done in 95. I remember working on it about the time Win9X was shipping or in late beta. I could be wrong on that part, but Nov 95 would be my guess.
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Damn dude, porting assembly? You are a legend!	Thanks - we actually did all of our debugging in assembler. We didn't have any source-level or line-level debugging at all (except as noted below). So you'd connect to a machine through an ssh-like tool and then, if the symbols were right, you could get a callstack and inspect memory, disassemble functions, and so on. But since we spent much of our day staring at assembly, I became reasonably adept at it.
	I say "reasonably" as I was lazy enough that I would compile the components of interest to me with Visual Studio PDB symbols so that, if I could repro on my own machine, I could then source-level debug it. That made me fast at some stuff that others were slow at, but I likely never got as proficient at asm debugging as someone who never had an alternative. I had a developer friend named Bob whom was an ntsd (our debugger) superstar, and he'd write expressions inside of breakpoints to fire conditionally, that kind of thing. So I did learn that trick, but I'm sure there were dozens I just never knew.
	That all said, we rarely if ever coded in assembly. All coding was in C/C++.
	In the Pinball case, parts of the original were written in hand-coded in asm by Maxis, like the sound engine, and wouldn't have had a hope of working on anything but an x86. Rather than be lame and not have sound on the RISC platforms, I opted to rewrite that stuff in C so that it was portable.
	The RISC platforms also bring their own set of problems like 32-bit alignment for data. And being on Windows NT (now just "Windows") meant being Unicode, but fortunately there isn't a TON of text in a pinball game!
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boytekka: damn, the only time that I did assembly language is when we tried moving a small machine through the printer port.. I miss those days LordApocalyptica: Only time I did assembly was when I wanted to make a game on my TI-84, and decided that I didn't want to. I miss those days too.	First game I wrote in assembly I did in a machine language monitor on my C64. You can't (easily) relocate 6502 so to add code you'd have to jump out, do stuff, and jump back... Crazy!
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If I can ask a question, how does it feels to go from coding with basically zero help to working with modern IDE and code editors that give you a lot of infos, tips, error notifications and so on? I've started programming like a year ago from zero, and I don't think I could be able to program like y'all did 20 years ago or more. Thanks for doing this AMA anyways!	You're very welcome! The progression in tools has been amazing, really. I remember HESMON and my first machine language monitors for the PET and C64, then really nice ROM dev environments, and CygnusEd for the Amiga... all the way up to PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code.
	My most recent "WOW" moment was adding a line to my lib_deps line in platformio, which magically included the library being developed at the URL on github. So you can link to online projects... cool.
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Just wanted to say thanks for the Alpha port!	Alpha AXP was by far the hardest to debug! "Branch later, maybe"
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I just want to thank you for my first experience with pinball. I am now a top 100 competitive pinball player and own 16 pinball machines.	That's cool, which do you collect primarily? I was always a fan of Williams, and am FB friends with a couple of their older devs like Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, and Eugene Jarvis (but I should be careful, Bill Gates warned me never to name drop :-) )
	I have a Black Knight 2000 as my own machine right now!
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I have a wide range. Some modern Sterns like Metallica, Jurassic Park, Tron and Iron Maiden. Older Bally’s like Frontier and Fathom. 2 classic Bally/Williams Dr Who and Attack From Mars. Plus a few EMs. I like them all! Attack From Mars was the game that got me into the physical world of pinball. Collecting has been more of a recent pandemic thing since I can’t go out and play. I miss traveling around the country playing in big tournaments. Oh yeah and Steve Ritchie is quite the character. You must meet him some day. I’ve met him a few times and each time has earned a place in my pinball stories I talk about with friends.	Congrats on the collection, that's a nice set! I've never met Steve - I did meet Larry DeMar in vegas. I was playing at a slot machine and he was next to me, and had a name tag, and I was like... "Excuse me sir, but does the word Robotron mean anything?" and it turned out to be him!
Asking as someone pretty new in software development, did you experience impostor syndrome? If so, how did you deal with it?	My first couple of years were very productive, so I wasn't insecure about my output, but even so I definitely experienced imposter syndrome. I think most people who achieve aspirational roles do... I have a friend who was in the NFL who describes the same feeling.
	Being as productive as your peers is sort of the pre-requisite, and if that's true, then remind yourself that when you were in fifth grade, the eighth graders on the playground seemed so old and mature! It's odd in that I started in 1993, but to me anyone who started in the 80s was a "true" Old Timer and remains so in my head to this day. And similarly I'm no doubt the grizzled veteran to people I hired a few years later.
	I know when I started I felt like the dumbest guy in the room, and by the end I felt like the smartest guy in the room, and I don't think I'd gotten any smarter along the way. So it's all relative and perception. Well, that and the stock caused some serious attrition of the "really smart"!
	I remember visiting Google a couple of years ago in the bathrooms they had posters that read "YOU ARE NOT AN IMPOSTER", and info about seminars and so on about it, so it's very common! I wish I had a concrete strategy for you, but I don't other than "It's commonplace, and I bet there are a ton of resources on the Web. Don't be surprised you're experiencing it!"
What would you encourage someone to start learning today related to your field?	I'm learning React at the moment. Let's face it, the web development experience is utter nonsense. So I kept hoping for something that would make it clean, and easy to make components, and to work with REST apis. So I went looking for a solution. Then I read about Angular, and it seemed like "too much" to learn for the sake of making a SPA.
	But React seems understandable enough and solves a ton of problems with web development, not the least of which is being able to intermingle HTML and Javascript (via JSX).
	As for languages, I'd probably start with Python. I prototyped a complicated LED system a couple of years ago and it was admirable what it could accomplish for an interpreted language. And you probably have to know modern Javascript as well.
Now, would you be rather interested in working for windows, macos or linux ?	I work in all three. For my own projects I write to the ASP.NET Core 3.1, and that's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I originally wrote my LED server to it under MacOS, then moved it to Windows with about 5 minutes of changes (related to the consoles being somewhat different). Then I moved it to Linux, where I made it work and then containerized it with Docker. I got it up and running on my Raspberry Pi and in a Windows HyperV and under WSL using Ubuntu. To me that kind of stuff is super cool.
	Once I had it working in a Docker container I deployed it to my Synology NAS, which is some variant of Linux. So my NAS runs my Christmas lights!
	I love stuff like that when it works!
	My main workstation is a Dell monitor that has an internal KVM. I have a 2013 Mac Pro connected to it, which is maxed out and then has an eGPU and eRAID setup via Thunderbolt. And then I have a 3970X Windows PC connected as well, and I can jump back and forth with a button.
	I spend most of my day in Windows now, unless it's video related, in which case I use Final Cut Pro.
Hi Dave, thanks for the AmA! In regards to task manager - often times I have to click the 'end task' button more than once to get the frozen program to actually close. Why is this? Thanks again.	Remember that, at least in my day, End Task is different than End Process. The former sends a "Please close yourself" message to the app, and if it's hung, it should then detect it and so on, but doesn't always. Imagine the app is in a weird state where it's still pumping messages, it's not hung, but it's broken. End Task likely won't work.
	That's when you need End Process, which tears everything down for you. The substantive difference is that the program gets no choice in the matter and no notification. End Task can be graceful. End Process is brutal.
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What about when the task manager stops responding? We need a task manager manager to manage the task manager. Lol	I've never seen that happen, ever, unless the system itself or the window manager is bunged in some way. Your puny Task Manager cannot save you now.
	Then again, nothing can, save a reboot.
What cool new tech are you excited about?	Right now I'm actually trying to productize something of my own, a system for doing hidden, permanently-installed LED holiday lighting. It receives the effect entirely over WiFi, or it can fall back to built-in effects and so on. Quick demo from 4th of July here:
	https://youtu.be/7QNtj2hZtaQ
	I'm done the software on the ESP32 and on the desktop, and working on the phone app now. So the next step is to find someone to manufacture the actual addressable LED strip fixtures. They'd be like under-counter LED strips that snap together end to end, but weatherproof, and with WS2813 LEDs internally.
	In terms of stuff that I'm just benefitting from, the latest CPUs from AMD are amazing. I have the 32-core 3970X and the raw computing power is hard to comprehend. That you can buy a 32-core chip for $2K (or 64-core for $4K) amazes me! Now I need to learn AI or something to make use of all of that hardware...
After the rise of WinRAR, did you continue to use the trial or did you pay?	From: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
	Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 3:14 PM
	To: Dave
	Subject: Your BuyRAR.com Order #: 122229610 License Key
	​
​	Attachments: rarkey.rar
	My WinRAR order number, from about 15 years ago, is above. And my WinZip license is much older than that. As someone who (a) made their real living in shareware and (b) worked on Product Activation, I'm the kind of guy who always licenses everything! You'll notice in my PlatformIO/"Arduino" video I even walk people through how to contribute to show how easy it is. I love good, cheap software.
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Would you download a car?	My wife's Tesla downloads update all the time. I'm sure they're just as complex as the mechanical components of the car, so in a sense, we already do!
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But... why did you keep the email?	I have a folder on my OneDrive called Registrations where I keep copies of license keys and registrations. So it was handy. Looks like Telix is my oldest registration from 1989 or so.
Also what was Microsoft really like back in the 90s? As a user of MS-Dos 3.30 forward till now. I’m assuming there has just been a whole tide of changes. Was double space really as funny on the dev side as it was on the user side with the slowness and the pufferfish as a logo :)	I worked on Doublespace in that I wrote a thunking layer that could live in low memory and then moved the rest of the code into the HMA. I didn't work on the compression, but odds are the guy who did is reading along right now, I bet!
	I don't really know if it was faster or slower than its contemporaries like Stacker. I wrote one for the Amiga, though didn't get it quite finished before starting at MS, and it's an interesting and hard problem to do well. At least on the AmigaDOS it was, FAT would be a tad easier.
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I mean for its time it was great. But back then floppy disks and 10M RLL-MFM drives were more the norm. It was actually awesome to have it included IN the OS instead of having to buy stacker. I think this is why I get so much of a kick out of every phishing AD that says download this to double your RAM. It just takes me back.	RAM Doublers are a whole 'nother ball of wax. Raymond Chen, in his blog "The Old New Thing", covers them well. If I understand it correctly, in the most famous case the code to do the actual memory compression was disabled, so it literally did nothing, but did it with overhead.
	On the other hand, I note that current Windows, the HyperV, and even my Synology NAS offer "Memory Compression" now so perhaps there's a time and a place on modern cpus and systems.
I'm an Engineer and regularly use MS Office to produce reports and calculations. Subscript and Superscript are something I use all the time. For at least the last 15 years, in MS Word I can hit "Ctrl +" & "Ctrl Shift +" to make the highlighted text Subscript or Superscript. But MS Word sucks for calculations, so I use MS Excel. But MS Excel it's about 8 clicks to make something super or subscript, and the hotkey technology hasn't made it in. So my question is, why was MS Office 2003 the best version of office that was ever produced?	I retired in 2003. Coincidence? I'll leave that one up to the scholars.
If you could go back and change anything about Windows without consequences or worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?	Format! I wrote that and since I was used to using the Visual Studio Resource Editor for dialogs, but couldn't in this case, I just laid out a stack of buttons and labels, content in the knowledge that a Program Manager or Designer would come up with a proper design for it that I would then code up. But somehow, no one did, and no one has for 25 years! So it's a big tall stack of buttons like a prairie grain elevator.
Ever met Bill Gates or have an interesting personal experience with him or another higher up you can share?	Yes, even when I was a new college hire he had the 30 of us or so over for beer and a burger in his back yard. It was a nice touch and quite informal. Obviously, at some scale, it wasn't 30 people anymore and they couldn't continue it!
	Ever play the video game Star Castle? It was like that. Concentric circles of people standing around BillG each armed with what they hope is a question or comment so clever they'll stand out in some way!
If every software you need would be available for both systems. Would you use a Linux distribution or Windows 10?	Right now I'd use Windows 10 because, if the same client software is available, I'd do it on Windows simply because I have a new 3970X w/ 128G of RAM and triple RAID0 SSDs plus an Optane stick. All for about 1/10th the price of a Mac Pro. Since the hardware is so cheap and powerful, it's really hard to resist.
	Even if all the client software were magically available, or Parallels for Linux were a thing, I'd stick with Windows because I haven't seen a Linux UI that I really like. I know everyone has a favorite... if there's an actually good and attractive one that works out of the box, let me know what distro, and maybe link a screenshot!
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Give Mint 20 with Cinnamon a fair shot! I have struggled for years trying to like a Linux distro but never found one that felt and looked right which I think had been the reason Linux hasn't been adopted mainstream but Mint20 with Cinnamon is possibly it..if not its very very close.. Has awesome multi-desltop winodws feature and you can make it basically just like Win10.. Would love to know what you think of it! 20.1 BETA just dropped and has a super interesting feature called Web Apps that needs to be checked out asap! Heres a link to the 20 long term support version.. some people do not like the Minto Logos/Backgrounds out of the box..keep in mind there are a ton of nice ones included and many more you can get quickly if that's something you don't like..what is really neat is that you can make Mint20 look like any OS.. there are themes that make it exactly like MacOS I just have not personally tried those out yet. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3928	Thanks, I'll check out Mint!
I am looking at my copy of Douglas Coupland's "microserfs". Although it's fiction, do you think it resembles the Microsoft Culture of the time?	Lord no, that book bugged me. On the one hand, they're a bunch of pretentious and precocious, annoying kids. I worked on a team (NT) where the tone was set by Dave Cutler and the guys he brought over from Digital, so it was rather different. On the other hand, it's such a big company that odds are those four main people DID exist somewhere in the company. Just not around me!
Why was (is) a monolithic registry preferred over distributing the settings in a number of files like Unix? Why did windows remain single-user focused for so long when Unix was multi-user since the 70s? In my understanding, if there is just one user, that user has to be admin which opened Windows up to security issues. (I don't even recall any sudo-like privilege escalation in pre-XP Windows.)	Windows NT was multiluser from birth. And there's nothing about the Windows architecture that requires users to be admin; the reality, I think, is that most apps started out in Win95 land and just didn't work if they were run as non-admin, so people ran as admin because the apps required it.
	We couldn't just break all those apps and say "Oh well, get better apps" so what you got was a convention of people running as admin. But again, there's no need to. Same as Unix.
	The one exception is that under Unix it's easy to sudo and so admin work briefly. I wish Windows had (or exposed) a simpler mechanism for letting me run as a non-admin credential and escalate when needed. I know UAC does the same thing, more or less, if used cautiously.
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Yeah NT did eventually get around to fixing it. My question was really about the earlier systems, because I think you said you worked on MS-DOS? Since there were existing systems with multi-user and privilege escalation even before the first Windows, somebody must have made a conscious decision to not include that functionality.	MS-DOS was only the second or third OS I can think of for a Microprocessor (CPM, SCP, then MS-DOS). What existed for mainframes and minis didn't matter much in the memory limits available on the desktop.
What was the inspiration for Space Cadet Pinball and what is your high score?	I don't know, I wasn't the designer, the inspiration part happened separate, I provided the perspiration part! I was actually pretty good at the game, since I was literally paid to play and test it... but I don't know the score, sorry! I do have the world high score on Tempest, though! But not Pinball :-)
1. What's something super useful within Task Manager you think even seasoned Windows users don't know they can do? 2. What do you think a future version of Task Manager should be able to do?	I think CTRL_SHIFT_ESC is a surprise to a lot of people!
	I think Task Manager needs Dark Mode, and a way to show who has locked what file or device so you can kill the offender when needed.
Why is it that I can still find dialogs in Windows 10 that were clearly built using 16 bit Visual Studio 97 version?	This should explain it. When you achieve perfection, you leave it alone:
	https://youtu.be/l75a8CvIHBQ
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Please for the love of God, use your Microsoft contacts to stop the snipping tool from going away. It's literally perfect but they keep trying to discontinue it.	One Compound Word: SnagIt. It's what you need to make your life complete.
	After my time, but I heard the new snipping and history that's being built in to replace it is pretty good. It better be if they kill snipping tool!
Thanks for task manager! I use it for so many things. How do you feel about newer versions of Windows de-emphasizing the control panel in favor of their new settings app?	I'm all for it if they made sure they had 100% coverage of all settings. It's sort of weird that in this day and age, with an R&D budget in the billions, we still have a mix of new control panel and old property pages. But I like the new stuff if it covered all cases!
Hello Dave! Why does Windows have such a rough time transferring a lot of small files? Is it a limitation of NTFS?	It's not Windows, it's all operating systems. Part of it is filesystem related:
	Imagine copying a file takes 200ms of overhead plus 10ms per MB. Coping 100M of large files will take 200ms + 1000ms = 1.2 seconds.
	Now imagine you have 100M of 1M files. Now you have 100*200ms + 1000ms = 20000ms or 20 seconds. 20 times as long for the same amount of data.
Did you ever get a chance to work in/on OS/2? I stuck with OS/2 until 2005/2006, before moving onto Linux, and would love to hear any opinions and stories you might have.	I didn't! I used OS/2 a bit but never had a chance to work on it. Many of the people I worked with did, though... but if OS/2 were Kevin Bacon, I'm one degree removed.
I had waited more than 20 years to ask this... What the fuck is Trumpet Winsock?	That's what you need to use TCP/IP on Windows before it was included in Windows. You're welcome.
What was the idea behind having "generic" activation keys starting in Windows XP that would activate any version, it was said they were for [educational purposes], did Microsoft provide them to 501c3/non-profit schools, or was there a different reasoning?	I'm not sure what you mean by "generic". I remember retail and oem, but what was a generic key?
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There was a set of keys that became public knowledge partway through XP life that appeared to activate unlimited machines as valid, though added a banner "For Educational Purposes Only". I remember trying it back in the day and always wondered what the intention was that was important enough the key activations were never blocked. [I did have multiple legal keys, but curiosity killed the cat and I had to swap one to the "educational" key to see for myself, lol]	I don't actually know! But I can surmise that if it was displaying a banner down in the bottom right corner of the screen, it knew it was not licensed and was likely limited or time-limited in some way. Unless you could actually ACTIVATE them with that key, which would surprise me.
How does OLE still work? I can't think of anything else that complex and old that still runs. We've got a legacy piece in our application that uses it and I can build against it using .net 4.0, in an Azure pipeline and deploy to windows 10 hosts and a piece of 90s technology still works perfectly. How and why?	It was complex, but pretty well written and very well tested. That's not to say there aren't a lot of bugs outside the common case codepaths, but I bet if Office used it, it's pretty solid, and will be forever.
Other than your personal phone number, did any Easter eggs make it to general availability?	There was one in the Win9X shell, but I think we removed it for Windows XP and later. So not that I'm aware of!
Have you ever wanted to make a "sequel" to Space Cadet?	There are actually two other tables available in the original Maxis game that should work, in theory, but I think Space Cadet was the best of the 3, so...
Were there ever any 3rd party edit/change to shell that made you think, "Why didn't we think of that?"	Not offhand, but "Stacks" on MacOS where it tries to rescue your mess by grouping things by filetype (Images, Docs, etc) is pretty clever. So that's something I wish we'd though of!
Have you worked at all with Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich?? Also, what was your initial response to Process Explorer /the Sysinternals stuff??	No, but the SysInternal guys are geniuses of the highest order, so far as I'm concerned (and I say that based on their products, no knowing them). They know their stuff.
What are your best/oddest purchases you were able to justify as a work expense (for example, were you able to get MS to buy pinball machines as an R&D cost)?	I had DirecTv in my office! I was working on the Media Center prototype and we couldn't get cable on campus, so I got the dish installed on the roof, etc....
	I had a Tempest machine in my Office but at my own expense. I started right around the days of the "shrimp vs weenies" memo, so they were pretty cost conscious.
Is it true that you and Dave Cutler got into a knife fight over a hand of poker gone bad?	A broken bottle is not a knife.
Was DoubleSpace stolen from Stacker?	No. As I understand it, DoubleSpace was licensed from an Israeli developer. Then I heard that Stacker had somehow been awarded a patent on using a hash table in compression, which sounds pretty ludicrous if true. There was a trial, and even though it revolved around hash tables and math and compression engines, and no one on the jury had been to college, as I heard it. So the big guy lost. That's the story I heard, your mileage may vary. I'm not a spokesman, etc.
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MS-DOS 6.21, the most useless version. I remember writing an extra "2" on my 6.2 OEM disks when the update came out (no point wasting disks).	You say "useless", I say "canonical".
	I think I actually worked on 6.22, not sure. It was 6.2 something. In terms of usefulness, the features I added to it personally were:
	- Moving Doublespace to HMA to free up a lot of low mem, as noted
	- Giving Diskcopy ability to do it in a single pass with no swaps
	- I wrote a new version of Smartdrv that added CD-ROM support
	- I wrote a special version of Setup that worked via deltas and put everything on a single floppy (no point wasting disks).
	Mind you, I was just a summer intern when I did that, and it took me about 3 months.
What are your favorite DOS command-line tricks that still work in Windows 10?	doskey!
What actually happens if someone deletes Win32?	Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. Do not attempt.
Did Bill ever swing by your cubicle and tell you'd he'd take your assignment home and finish it in a weekend if you didn't hurry up?	Cubicle? It was the 90s at Microsoft! I had a corner office with a table, chairs, a Tempest machine, and a sofabed.
What is the best project you worked on or had friends work on that was canceled, that you would revive if you had the resources?	Windows Media Center, I'd say! And I wish they'd done a great AutoPC that the OEMs could have licensed and made common to most cars.
There has been a lot of hate on Windows / Microsoft from the Unix / Linux advocates. What are some narratives that you disagree / don't think are true?	I used to love the Amiga, so I know what it's like to feel a sense of advocacy for a platform that you feel is superior but overlooked in the marketplace.
	I think the most untrue narrative I've heard about them is that they all have neckbeards. I think it's only "most", not all.
How do you introduce yourself at parties?	"Does anyone here know how to update my Groove subscription on my Zune?"
What OS are you using now? What's your favorite OS of all time? What's the worst OS of all time? What's the worst Microsoft OS (if different)?	The best OS of all time was Windows NT 4.0 with the Shell Update Release.
	The worst OS of all time was the TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 DOS that didn't have the keyboard debounce code in ROM yet so you couldn't even type on the thing.
[deleted]	No, I never put a true easter egg in anything. Especially in an operating system, I don't believe in them. You have to be able to trust the OS, and I think it goes against that.
How did you get started in this specific field?	I first wandered into a Radio Shack store in about 1979 when I was 11, where I saw my very first computer. It was not connected yet, as the staff had not figured out how to set it up yet. Being somewhat precocious, I asked if I might play with it if I could manage to set it up. On a lark they said, “Sure kid, have a shot”, and ten minutes or so later I had it up and running. This endeared me to the manager, Brian, enough that every Thursday night and Saturday morning I would ride my bike down to the store: I’d type in my crude BASIC programs and they were kind enough to indulge my incessant free tinkering on their expensive computer. So that's pretty much how I started!
Do you ever have moments where you’re like “they have it so easy nowadays” or do you think that because of the groundwork put in place 30 years ago that systems have become exponentially more complex?	Only when someone spools up an entire docker instance to pipe something to it on the command line... then it's like "Really? You're basically booting a virtual computer as a command?"
What's the best C++ expert tip you can share for fellow programmers?	If you make anything in your class virtual, make the destructor virtual, particularly if there's any chance that anyone might delete an instance of your derived class through a base class pointer. Otherwise, the behavior is undefined, I think, but even if it works, it's not what you want!
the below is a reply to the above
Wow this is eerie. I literally fixed a bug a couple weeks ago that was this specific case.	They can be weird bugs to track down, too!
Tabs or spaces?	Spaces on an indent of 4, tabs set to 8.
How can I open an MS Binder file?	Push down on the metal tabs at the top and bottom of the central spine of the binder. That will release the 3-hole punch claws, and then you can remove your printed file.
"It's now safe to turn off your computer" Why was this splash removed?	I think most current BIOSes can do it on their own by now!
Do you have any insight as to why MS decided to build Windows 95 from the ground up instead of building off of an existing *nix system the way Apple did with OSX? Was it just for backwards compatibility or were there other reasons? Also, had you gone this way, how do you think Windows, and the industry in general, might be different? I'm asking as someone who thinks that WSL is the best thing to happen to Windows in years.	Windows 95 was not built from the ground up, but NT was. The most succinct reason (and just a guess, I'm not a spokesman) is that even though MS had Xenix on hand, there were fundamental problems in the way Unix handled SMP multiprocessor locks and so on at the time. I presume these have long since been solved in Linux, etc, but not without significant work.
	WSL is one of my favorite things too, but for the library of tools and software, it makes available to me, not because of some fundamental architectural superiority, I don't think!
What are your feelings about "Microsoft Bob"?	https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y
What did source control look like in the 90's? How did MS keep its code from leaking out to the public? How did you handle versioning and different developers working on the same feature?	We used a tool called SLM, or Source Library Manager. It was sort of available briefly as a product under the name Microsoft Delta.
	It was OK for smaller teams but did not support branching, so just before I left we moved to Source Depot.
Why was Ctrl + Alt + Delete changed to Ctrl + Shift + Escape?	It wasn't! Ctrl-Alt-Delete raises the "Secure Alert Sequence" which triggers the OS to switch to the secure desktop, where you have the ability to click a button which will start task manager upon return to your regular desktop.
	Ctrl-Shift-Esc is a feature built into Winlogon that launches a TaskManager on the current desktop without switching to the secure desktop.
	There are theoretically hacks and exploits that can only be caught by switching to the secure desktop, so if you're ever in doubt, ctrl-alt-del is the more secure way to go.
How did DOS ever get away with just pulling device names like "COM1" out of thin air when it came to output redirection etc..?	That's for compatibility with MS-DOS.
What are you currently working on?	Mostly on LED and Microcontroller projects that I detail on my YouTube channel, and the channel itself takes a fair bit of my time! If you're curious, you can check out my current successes and failure adventures at http://youtube.com/d/davesgarage
Did you work with Kris Hatleid on Super Hacker and the game Evolution?	I worked with Kris on an unreleased title called "Commander Video". That's largely where I learned assembly language, since he did the bulk of the coding, I watched and did level design, etc. 1982 or so I believe!
Got any dev back door mainframe access codes for pinball?	hidden test
Dave, how did you manage to do all that without being able to google everything?	That's one of the craziest things... I got a degree in computer science before you could even look anything up!
	The hardest part was OLE2. Coming form a different platform (the Amiga) it was a monster to wrap my head around, and the book (Inside OLE2) was not the best for introducing devs to OLE. It scared me, and I sure could have used a YouTube tutorial or two!
Hi Dave! So here's a bit of an odd one. I loved your Space Cadet Pinball! I must have spent countless hours on it as a kid, and even now I still occasionally try to find ways to boot it up. A legitimate classic. But lately, the version windows offers just... don't feel the same. They aren't as nice. Is there a game you can name that you would say feels like a worthy successor to Space Cadet Pinball? Or even any more general pinball games you would recommend?	I have a real Black Knight 2000 machine here in the house that I fully restored, so I'm a fan of physcial pinball as well!
	I think the two best video games are (a) arcade Tempest, and (b) XBox Geometry Wars 3.
	GW3 is a classic, or should be!
Woah woah woah, University of Regina?!? Are you from here? Cool to see a UofR grad had such a major impact!	Yup! Check out the regina sub for a recent article
When working on MS-DOS what did you think of alternatives such as 4DOS, NDOS or DR-DOS, were they source of inspiration for new features or not at all ?	No in general, but Norton had NCD. It was a change folder command that could jump around the disk, so if you typed "NCD drivers" from the root, it could go down to "C:\windows\system32\drives". Super handy.
	So I tried to write one for NT, but it meant changing the working directory of the PARENT process (cmd.exe) and I could never figure out a clean and elegant way to do it without modifying CMD itself!
Which is the best version of Windows? (Figuratively speaking).	Windows NT 4.0

Love? Give it six months

Warning: this story will contain mentions of unhealthy relationships and adult themes. The main character also has some character traits that may differs from your own, please do keep that in mind.
Review and comments will be appreciated
(Customisation)
There once was a dashing bachelor
(That looked like )(uses the OH male feces)
Face 1
Face 2
Face 3
Face 4
(Hairstyles)
James Bond (black slick backed)
Don Diego Vega (dark brown wavy hair slicked back long neck)
Steve Rogers (Short blonde side swept hair)
Agent J (Short kinky curls)
Is this him?
Yes
No (go back to customisation)
What is his name?
(Default: George)
(Surname)
(Default: Bishop)
There he meets
A beautiful woman
A handsome man
A beautiful woman
Face 1 (Asian; has pale skin, dark almond eyes, straight black mid-back hair with a mid-part)
Face 2 (Hispanic: has tan skin, deep brown eye and over shoulder-length volumes wavy hair with side bangs.)
Face 3 (Afro-American: dark skin, expressive brown eyes with long blackish brown chest-length kinky curly hair.)
Face 4 (Caucassian: pinkish skin with freckles, clear blue round eyes, collarbone length layered dirty blonde hair)
A handsome man
Face 1 (Asian: pale skin, dark almond eyes, straight black hair put up in a pompadour style)
Face 2 (Hispanic: tan skin, with slicked back wavy hair that always looks like it is coming undone.)
Face 3 (Afro-American: dark skin, expressive brown eyes, with a crewcut with tight natural curls.)
Face 4 (Caucasian: pinkish skin with freckles, clear blue eyes, dirty blonde hair in a Taper haircut.)
As the two peoples eyes lock across the room. The sensation of a pull drives them to get closer to one another.
As the dashing bachelor offered his hand his partner gladly accepted it. Leading into a dance that lasted the rest of the night.
The whole world faded away to the sound of the Jazz band, their breathing and their dancing.
As their lips moved to meet...
???: “Oh come now Joanna, you know that is no way that would ever happen.”
​
(Record Scratch)
Joanna: “Oh for craps sake, George I was getting to the best part.”
George: “Forgive me for finding it uncomfortable that you have decide how my love life is going to go.”
Lance: “He does have a point there sis.”
Joanna: “Way to stand up for your sister Lance.”
Lance “Look I’m all for love conquers and all that jazz but it is kind of difficult to make a love life for someone else.”
George: “Thank you.”
Lance: “I mean he isn’t a completely lost cause. I’m sure some desperate soul will take him.”
Lance: “I mean he’s got dads looks, and he managed to get with mom when they were young.”
Lance: “That might make up for his zero tact.”
George: “Your faith in me is awe inspiring.”
Lance: “Oh cheer up. With your upcoming trip to Vegas, maybe you’ll have luck in love and not just on the poker table.”
Joanna: “Maybe you’ll meet someone special!”
You snort, finding the idea silly.
George: “I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Chapter 1: One night in Vegas
In an underground speakeasy decked out in old decor from the 20th centuries first half. You sit there nursing your drink. After a long day at the office you love nothing more than when you can enjoy your secret fancy. Dressed up in an old-fashioned pinstripe suit and a fedora. You feel like a king, this little piece of haven in Chicago that seemed to be frozen in time.
You feel your friend beside you stir, he himself having to relax from work as well as dreading an upcoming event.
After his fifth sight you opt to actually talk about it.
You take a swing of your drink and decide to talk about the elephant in the room.
Or more accurately you decide to talk about the issue in pre 1940’s slang
George: “Your bear cat of a sister still giving you a hard time?”
Jeremy: “Noneofya.”
He mumbled.
George: “Look Pally, I known you since we were scrubs and had squat. What's eating you?”
Jeremy: “That dame will chisel me out of every dime I own.”
George: “Stephie acting like a Big cheese cause she is getting hitched?”
Jeremy: “She wants everything spiffy and I’m quite sure her ankle biters will be paying the bills. My folks are on my case regarding my dame.”
You think for a moment. Jeremy and Katie had been together for four years. They got one another, they lived together.
George: “Stephie’s lucky her guy thinks she’s the Cat's meow.”
You said reflecting on everything you ever heard regarding Darren, he was a good guy. Definitely not the smartest but he loved Stephanie like she was the only woman alive. You just wondered why anyone would want to spend time with that woman.
Jeremy: “Alright, real talk.”
Jeremy said as he dropped ‘the act’, we were no longer hot shots in the prohibition era. We were now just George Bishop and Jeremy Jackson a financial advisor and a computer wizard.
George: “In all do honesty I do not see why you need to go there? Aren’t bachelorette parties strictly female?”
Jeremy: “They used to be, but I am quite sure I am not going with them to be pampered like the bridesmaids.”
George: “Then your function is?”
Jeremy: “If I were to guess, fall guy and pack mule.”
Jeremy: “I think she is also doing it to brag, that ‘she did it first.’ To rub it in Katie’s face.”
George: “You never really care what your sister does. Why now?”
Jeremy: “Because they are pressuring me and Katie. Not just my family but next to everyone we know. ‘When is the wedding? What is the venue? How many guests? Are you going to have it this year?’ Look I love my girl, but none of us is in rush to walk down the aisle.”
​
Yeah, you know, you were the first one Jeremy told about his plan to propose. You were happy for him but at the end of the day it was up to Katie and Jeremy. Not you or their families. However the rest of the world seemed to think differently.
Mom: “Oh sweetheart, happy valentine’s day! Are you spending it with someone special?”
George: “Mom, you know I am not looking for someone.”
Mom: “Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll find that certain someone sooner or later.”
​
Yeah, it isn’t enough your sister is married and your brother is utterly twitterpated with his boyfriend. You need to ensure your oldest is also with someone.
​
Boss: “Mr. Bishop, I must say. I am impressed with your work ethics, but we have decided to go with Mr. Robinson as the face of the company.”
Never minding the fact that you worked twice as hard as said college.
George: “I understand. May I ask what made you choose him?”
Boss: “We did research and found that your college would be favourable, due to circumstance.”
​
Translation: we wanted a man that was married and not the workaholic bachelor.
​
​
Stranger 1: “You see that guy over there?”
Stranger 2: “You mean the one with the RBF?”
Stranger 1: “Yeah, probably one of those loners, will never find anyone.”
Stranger 2: “I mean who goes to a restaurant like this alone?”
​
Honestly? You can’t have a meal alone?
​
​
George: “Yeah, I know that feeling.”
Jeremy: “Seriously.”
Both of you take a sigh.
Jeremy: “But in all honesty. Thank you for coming along, I really appreciate it. Would probably loose my mind if I went alone.”
George: “Of course.”

1. It would be a shame to lose my partner in crime.
   
2. My boss would be pissed if I didn’t.
   
3. Who would turn down free drinks?
   

Jeremy: “Yeah sounds about right.” *Choice 1*
George: “Remember how we got back at Marcus Thatcher?” *Choice 1*
Jeremy: “Oh, I remember. Too bad he didn’t check the file we sent, it might have saved him some embarrassment.” *Choice 1*
George: “Big tough football star being fooled by ‘two scrawny’ freshmen.” *Choice 1*
Jeremy: “And we were hailed as heroes for a month.” *Choice 1*
Jeremy: “Wait, don’t tell me HR department has been on your case.” *Choice 2*
Geroge: “Yep, too much overtime.” *Choice 2*
Geroge: “Never mind I make sure that everything is quality controlled.” *Choice 2*
Jeremy: “Geesh. Well glad to know I could be of service.” *Choice 2*
Jeremy: “Ah there it is, I knew you had a hidden agenda. *Choice 3*
George: “Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy, when have I ever hid something from you?” *Choice 3*
Jeremy: “Alright fair, you are honest to the point of insult.” *Choice 3*
Geroge: “You asked for my opinion, besides those shoes where ugly as sin.” *Choice 3*
Both of you laugh, you had been in each other’s life since kindergarten. You where the odd ducks, most kids and adults always considered you to be cold or judging. Even if neither of you had that intention.
Jeremy raises his glass.
Jeremy: “To intellectual companions.”
George: “To intellectual friends.”
You said as you raised your own drink in a toast.
​
​
The weekend finally arrived for the trip. You arrived at O’Hare airport with a good three hours to spare. You crack open the book you brought with you.
It was a supernatural detective story you received as a gift on last birthday a few months back. While you applaud your sister for trying, it was still jarring to follow all the supernatural deus-ex-machinas that discarded real detective work.
So that is how a 31 year old was reading a supernatural book in broad daylight.
George: ‘ with gun drawn, Duskraven made her way down the basement, the surroundings smelled of blood and muck.’
Geroge: ‘Romano’s empire was now in full display in front of her. Fae, lined the walls, eyes hollow and only the movement of their chest indicating they were still alive.’
George: ‘Duskraven took out her polaroid camera, it was a risky but if this would ever have a chance to justice. Her leads and information would need to be solid if she wanted to take down the vampire cartel. She just hoped the light for the camera would be noticed.’
George: ‘With a blinding light the entire basement lit up temporarily blinding her, when she regained her sight again a new horror met her eyes. Multiple pairs of hungry red eyes.’
Jeremy: “George!”
You tear your eyes away from the book in your hand.
There is Jeremy and Katie, hand in hand. Seeing them together was always a happy occasion.
Katie and Jeremy met at your favourite speakeasy a few years back. You didn’t blame your friend for becoming interested in the ICU nurse. Curly red hair and big blue eyes. Even if the courtship had started out rocky due to both of them being so shy. They overcame that hurdle and found something they wanted.
Sometimes however you wished you didn’t feel like you were interrupting them.
George: “Good morning, is Stephanie and her friends also here?”
Katie: “No they had a sleep over at Daria’s house. So they will be carpooling.”
You look at your clock and it was about two hours before the plane would take off, your bags where checked in and you were ready to leave and get to the section where the gates would be. But there was still no sign of Stephanie.
As you though you heard a rumbling sound.
Both you and Katie looked at Jeremy as a sheepish grim grew on his face.
Katie: “Told you, a ham sandwich wouldn’t hold.”
Jeremy: “It will hold till lunch, which is a few hours away.”
George: “You sure that is a good idea?”
Jeremy: “Tell you what, I’ll go if you come with me and Katie.”
Katie: “So what do you say?”
McDermott's
· Sure, I could have a bite. (💎12)
· Perhaps we shouldn’t
Diamond Choice:
George: “Alright, let us have something to eat.”
Jeremy: “Good! Airplane food leaves much to be desired.”
Katie: “You always think with your stomach.”
Jeremy: “Yet you love me.”
Katie: “Yes, odd isn’t it?”
You make your way inside and stay in line.
You look at the menu and order
· Breakfast burrito
· Bacon and scrambled eggs
· Fruit and oatmeal
You order your food along with a big coffee. You all slide into the booth, Katie had her yogurt in hand both of you looked worryingly at Jeremy’s breakfast.
(Tilting tower of pancakes)
(Holy crap!)
You swore for a moment both you and Katie was reading each other’s mind.
‘He is going to puke.’
George: “Hey Jeremy, think you can get some napkins?”
Jeremy: “Sure.”
As he left you plied a few pancakes away, making sure that you saved the top one so he wouldn’t notice. Katie making sure the tower didn’t fall.
She gave a thumbs up, thanking you.
George: “So Katie, how have you been?”
Katie: “There is always a lot of things to do at the ICU, sometime I wonder where humanity is headed.”
George: “Really, that bad?”
Katie: “How would you explain having a locomotive lodge up your rectum?”
George: “How did that happened?”
Katie: “They claim they fell on it, if I had a dollar every time this happened I wouldn’t have any student debts.”
You shake your head, you have been thinking a bit about what Jeremy said at the Speakeasy. You had also noticed that something was up with Katie, she was on edge.
George: “Katie…”
1. “Did you want to go on this trip?”
2. “Has Mr and Mrs Jackson been pressuring you?”
3. “Do you want to get married?”
Katie: “In all honesty no, but Stephanie has made me a bridesmaid. I need to partake in these things. Even if I wish I didn’t.” *Choice 1\*
George: “Why?” *Choice 1\*
Katie: “I wish I could care as little about protocol as you do, but she is Jeremy’s sister, if I say no it might affect my relationship with Jeremy and his family.” *Choice 1\*
Katie: “Yes, I mean no, I mean… it’s complicated.” *Choice 2\*
George: “How come?” *Choice 2\*
Katie: “I’m 30 years old George, time is ticking. They want grandchildren to spoil.” *Choice 2\*
George: “And you have to be married to do that?” *Choice 2\*
Katie: “Of course I love Jeremy.” *Choice 3\*
George: “That wasn’t the question, do you want to get married?” *Choice 3\*
Katie: “It is just so big, all those expectations. I… it scares the crap out of me.” *Choice 3\*
George: “Listen, I will tell you something.”
You said using your stern voice.
George: “Jeremy loves you, he chose you. You chose him. That is the truth at the end of the day.”
Katie looked at you, a shy smile graced her lips. She mouthed a thank you.
Jeremy made his way back to you with a great pile of napkins. You all begin to take part of the meal. During the entire meal Katie and Jeremy’s shoulders touched and they looked as content as they could be.
(‘Loving it’ you had breakfast at McDermott)
None diamond choice:
George: “Let us just sit down and relax, we should be in Las Vegas at 1 am. Knowing Stephanie we will probably eat something there before heading to the hotel.”
Katie: “Maybe, I’ll get some water at least.”
Jeremy: “Good idea.”
(‘Not hungry’ you didn’t have a McDermott breakfast)
As all of you wait for the supposed ‘bride’ you hear commotion.
Sure enough you see a brunette with a close to permanent scowl on her face. Followed but two very flustered women.
“There you are! WHERE have you been?!”
Her tone is as pleasant as you remember, nails on a chalkboard.
Jeremy: “We have been here waiting for you.”
Stephanie: “You aren’t even going to help me with my bags. What type of brother are you?”
Jeremy: “Well we are here, we have about half an hour before the plane leaves. So let’s get to the gate.”
Stephanie just huffed. Storming away.
George: “Wow she is in a good mood.”
You state sarcastically.
Jeremy: “Yeah she gets like that some time.”
Jeremy: “Just try not to set her of, she can be a handful.”
Katie: “I mean how bad could it possibly be?”
You were never the very superstitious type, but you were quite sure that Katie just opened Pandora’s Box.
​
​
From the time the plane touched ground in Nevada everything that could set of Stephanie did.
Stephanie: “URRGH!!! where is that shuttle! He is LATE!!”
Jeremy: “They told us like five minutes ago there is traffic jam.”
Stephanie: “Then he should have planned it earlier!”
Stephanie: “I will not wait an hour! WE have a schedule to follow!”
George:’ This coming from the woman that almost missed the plane to her own bachelorette party.’
Daria: “They say it is only another 15 minutes.”
​
​
Stephanie: “I DON’T CAREEEEE!”
Stephanie: “What do you mean that our suits where not booked?”
Receptionist: “You never sent in the deposit for your stay.”
Stephanie: “THAT WAS GEMMA’S JOB!”
Gemma: “I told you, the suits needed to be paid for by the same person that booked them.”
​
​
Stephanie: “You are a bridesmaid, you are supposed to make things work!”
George: ‘Honetly…’
George: “Sigh…”
Stephanie: “THIS ISN’T WHAT I ORDERED!”
Waitress: “Yes it is, you wanted a calamari.”
The poor waitress looked exhausted and probably wanted to be anywhere but here, not that one could blame her.
Stephanie: “NO IT ISN’T! I wanted the pasta with bacon and cheese.”
Katie: “A cabonara?”
Jeremy: “Stephie we are at a seafood restaurant.”
​
​
George: ‘IS she ever satisfied?’
All of us where back at the hotel, Stephanie insisting that they ‘needed’ a new set of clothes for the casino and club they were planning on hitting. Jeremy looked ready to just give up.
George: “You know, you could simply say no to her.”
Jeremy threw an exhausted glair at me.
Jeremy: “If it was so simple neither me, you nor Katie would be here right now.”
George: “And you wouldn’t be here doing this Sisyphean task, which obviously brings you missery.”
Jeremy: “Yeah well, I still want my parents in my life, if I didn’t do this, they would never let me live it down.”
What to wear to the casino?
· Tuxedo 007 (💎 15)
· Basic black
Diamond option:
Jeremy: “You look like James Bond.”
George: “I’ll have a martini, shaken not stirred.”
You said and an amused smile spread across Jeremy’s face.
None diamond choice
“I Think I’ll stick with this.”
“Fair enough, I am too exhausted to care anyway.”
​
​
​
Jeremy said with a tired smile. You both left the room, making our way to one of the pulsing centres of the strip.
There in the golden casinos you thought finally your luck would finally turn for the better. That the glamorous atmosphere would rub off on the soon-to-be bride. Causing her to stop doing her impression of a screeching barn owl and let ALL of them enjoy Sin City.
Well it seemed to have worked, for now.
Both you and Jeremy where at the black jack tables, enjoying yourself. While the ladies were back at the slots machines.
Jeremy folded a while ago, it is just you and one more. You looked down at your cards a jack and an ace. You opponent opposite you had this confident smirk on his face. But you saw how the sweat was running down his face. He was bluffing.
George: “Hum…”

1. Act as if you have a bad hand
   
2. Act arrogant and self-assured
   
3. Do not react at all and watch the man squirm
   

You decide to let your brows furrow in what would look like frustration. The man opposite you lets the edge of his mouth turn in a smirk. His confidence boosting with every minute. *Choice 1*
You decide to put on the theatrics, giving a smile like the cat that ate the canary you look at your opponent. That is growing more and more agitated by the minute. *Choice 2*
You keep your face natural, a lot of people often comment that you look angry whenever they see you. You could only assume it was true because your opponent was practically squirming in his seat. *Choice 3*
When he reviles his hand, you pause for a moment before reviling yours.
You won.
George: “I’ll be taking these.”
You said as you dragged them back chips and split them evenly between you and Jeremy. You had started with the same amount of tokens. Even if you did work with money daily, this was one of those occasions you allowed yourself to be a bit more relaxed regarding that subject.
Jeremy: “Nice one.”
George: “All in a day’s work.”
Jeremy: “So what next?”
Before you could answer you hear commotion from the opposite side of the casino. The screeching voice meant that Stephanie was somewhere in the middle of it. Both of you sigh, knowing that your happy hour was over.
Sure enough there at the era leading into one of the shows where Stephanie and her entourage, all of them except Stephanie wearing baby pink dresses and Stephanie herself wearing a sash reading ‘all hail the bride’ along with a tacky tiara probably worth a five dollar bill at most.
She was screaming at a bouncer, while all the others tried in vain to calm the soon-to-be bride.
Stephanie: “You are an idiot! What service is this!?”
When we had arrived there was already an audience forming. Yeah this was common whenever Stephanie was involved. ‘Drama Queen’ had been your nickname for her during high school for a reason.
Jeremy: “What happened?”
Bouncer: “Your friend here slapped one of your dancers, something about them stealing from them.”
Stephanie: “I am the BRIDE! I am not supposed to have to pay for anything during my bachelorette party.”
Jeremy: “Stephanie, what about we get some fresh air, okay?”
Jeremy said as he tried to deescalate the situation. He gently grabbed her arm, but Stephanie was having none of it.
It felt like it all happened in slow motion, Stephanie turned around and a closed fist and rage connected it with Jeremy’s face. Your friend flew back and hit his head on the floor pretty hard. Stephanie didn’t even care to check what state her brother was in. Katie flew to her fiancés side and the sight of your friend’s bleeding face was enough to make you see red.
George: “Alright enough.”

1. Scold her
   
2. Embarrass her
   
3. Give her the evil eye
   

George: “Stephanie, you are way out of line.” *Choice 1*
Stephanie: “No I am not!” *Choice 1*
George: “You have taken no responsibility during this trip, you have been rude to every member of the party, you have caused a scene at every place we have been to. Do I need to keep going?” *Choice 1*
Your voice is like ice, you swear the temperature just dropped a few degrees. As you pointed out everything she has done during the less than 24 hours you been together. *Choice 1*
Stephanie looks angrily at her bridesmaids as is she is waiting for them to defend her. *Choice 1*
They do not, they know you are just stating the truth. *Choice 1*
George: “Your own brother did not want to be on this trip, he begged me to come along. Doesn’t that tell you just how vile you have been acting?” *Choice 1*
Stephanie: “You listen here…”*Choice 1*
George: “No you listen for once in your life!” *Choice 1*
You rarely let your emotions out but Stephanie was a special case. *Choice 1*
George: “If this is how you treat people, do not be surprised when Darren leaves you at the altar. He deserve better than this.” *Choice 1*
With that as a closing line you left, Jeremy might need to get to the hospital. He was worth more than Stephanie would ever be in your eyes. *Choice 1*
As you leave you are quite sure you hear someone applauding. *Choice 1*
With determined steps you made your way to one of the waitresses. *Choice 2*
George: “Excuse me.” *Choice 2*
You hand her a 50 dollar bill as you grab a big jug glass filled with beer and briskly walk back to Stephanie that is still screaming profanities. Because of her back being turned to you she didn’t see you. You saw how people began to take out their cameras and phones. No one made a move to stop you. *Choice 2*
With one quick movement you had poured it over her and a shriek of surprise entered your ears. *Choice 2*
Stephanie: “What the fuck is wrong with you!?” *Choice 2*
George: “Are you done with your little temper tantrum?” *Choice 2*
Stephanie: “What!? How dare you!” *Choice 2*
George: “You have been acting like a spoiled five year old since the moment we landed. I am surprised no one has done anything until now.” *Choice 2*
Stephanie: “You are so not coming to my wedding!” *Choice 2*
George: “It isn’t a loss, I was never here for you. Now excuse me I have more important things to deal with.” *Choice 2*
You left Stephanie to deal with the people that had gathered for the ‘show’ and she began to scream at them and calling them all sorts of names. But no one was intimidated, they found it hilarious. *Choice 2*
You grab hold of Stephanie, until she has no choice but to look at you. She is screeching, calling you every slur and bad name in the book. Your hands are firm on her upper arm, you just hold no squeezing, no pushing. You keep your eyes locked on her, you must have stood there quite a while until finally her defiant stare became weaker and weaker. *Choice 3*
You kept hold of her until she burst out into tears. At that point you let her go. Knowing you had knocked her down a peg. *Choice 3*
​
But Stephanie wasn’t your main concern, Jeremy was. You moved to stay with Katie and Jeremy, the crowd parted as the red sea as you walked by. All in stunned silence. *Choice 3*
​
​
George: “Are you sure you’ll be alright?”
Jeremy grimaced at the questing, blood still trickling down his face from where he had been punched. Luckily the nose would heal, the only question was what colour it would be in time for Stephanie’s wedding.
Jeremy: “I’ll be fine, Katie is here too. She knows what she is doing.”
Katie: “Having your fiancé being a nurse does have its perks huh?”
Jeremy: “Yeah one of many.”
The two of them smile at one another, before Jeremy turn back to you.
Jeremy: “Think you can manage your own?”
George: “I think I can stay out of trouble for one night.”
Jeremy: “Maybe, see you tomorrow George.”
Katie: “Have a nice night.”
With that the two of them made their way up to the hotel rooms.
You decided to check out the hotel bar. Despite being 10 o’clock it was surprisingly empty. Some people where there, some having already had a few to many.
But what caught your eye was a stranger sitting at the end of the bar.
There sitting in a knee-length ocean blue dress was a woman, leaning over resting her elbows at the counter. She had a faraway look in her face as she absentmindedly stirred her drink. *♀*
There sitting a young man, nursing his drink. His blue vest and slacks combo suited him well with the crisp white shirt. His attention seeming being elsewhere. *♂*
You sit down by the bar and is about to call on the bartender when I noticed a man, clearly intoxicated made a move on the man/woman at the end of the bar.
Drunk Idiot: “Hello there, did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”
The person in question just rolled hehis eyes. Clearly not in the mood to be the object of drunk admiration.
Drunk Idiot: “How about you and me go up to my hotel room and get to know each other a bit more.”
Haven seen the man/woman in question do every none-verbal que but slapping the idiot you decide enough was enough. He had disturbed you and the rest of the bar enough.
With the smoothest and coolest tone of voice you could muster you cleared your throat to get the drunk man’s attention. It wasn’t appreciated to say the least.
Drunk idiot: “What the hell do you want prick.”
The smell of alcohol radiating off him, one would think he had bathed in vodka. It was surprising no one had tossed him out from being a nuisance earlier.
George: “I do believe that you are bothering him/her. Please stop.”
George: “Look we are old friends, its noneofya business so bug off.”
George: “Oh really, then what is your friends name?”
Drunk Idiot: ”What?”
George: “What. Is. your. friend’s. name? If you are old friends you should surely know it.”
Drunk Idiot: “It’s ummm… Terry.”
???: “That is not even close.”
With both of you staring straight into him, mentally cornering him.
Drunk idiot: ”Screw this.”
The man declared in frustration and with that the idiot stormed off leaving both of you alone.
After making sure the guy was out of sight you turned back to the stranger.
He/She gave you a grateful smile.
???: “Thanks’ I really appreciate that?”
George: “It was nothing.”
You said making yourself ready to go back to your seat.
???: “Wait!”
The stranger called after you, out of sheer politeness you turned back around.
He/she Seemed a bit nervous, what now?
???: “Can I at least buy you a drink?”
You thought for a moment. You were on your own, Jeremy was probably nursing the bruise with some painkillers and you did not want to risk running into Stephanie or any of the bridesmaids. It also felt wrong to not take the opportunity to experience Vegas however.
So you accepted.
???: “Well What’s your poison?”
He/she asked in a joyous tone.

1. Matrini
   
2. Old Fashioned
   
3. Red Wine
   

With a quick wave they called the bartender over.
???: “So what brings you to Vegas?”
George: “Bachelorette party.”
???: “Did it have anything to do with that brunette that slapped one of the dancers and had security physically lift her out?”
George: “Bingo.”
???: “No one got seriously hurt?”
George: “Thankfully no.”
With that the bartender served the drink and the stranger slipped a 50 dollar bill.
You lift the glass in a gesture for a thank you. And let the beverage slip down your throat. It was nice, it was a good year and the taste was strong but not overpowering.
You noticed that his/her eyes were on you, almost as if they were trying to decipher your character.
George: “What are you doing?”
???: “Trying to get a read on you, some say what you order is often an indication of who you are.”
George: “Really? Then what can you say about me?”
You asked, deciding to humour them.
???: “I can say that that you are a man that know what he wants and how you want them.” *Martini*
???: “You are an old soul, you probably know your liquor well. My guess you have a great library at home.” *Old fashioned*
???: “You are quite classy, and you can find a way to get drunk before noon.” *Red wine*
With that you give an amused chuckle.
George: “Well there is some truth to that statement.”
You take a look at the drink they self are nursing.
(Dark n Stormy)
(Humm...)
George: “If I were to do the same to you, I guess you have a sweet tooth and might have wanted to be a pirate at some point.”
At that comment the stranger began to laugh. It was the infectious kind of laugh that made someone warm form the bottom of their stomach.
???: “Alright you got me there.”
He/she then stuck out their hand.
(My name is..)
(Default name: Skyler)
George: “‘Skyler’ it is a pleasure to meet you.”
You said as you shook it.
You take in Skyler’s look. You had to admit that they were an attractive specimen of a man/woman.
George: “The name is George Bishop.”
Skyler: “George Bishop, how professional sounding.”
He/ she said as if they were tasting your name in their mouth.
George: “Well I do hope so, would be difficult to be an advisor if people believed I was a joker.”
Skyler: “Ah, so you are one of those people that look at you and stamp ‘rejected’ on every paper?”
George: “I believe that I am fair in my judgement.”
George: “How about yourself?”
At that their eyes fell.
Skyler: “Right now, I’m a 30 year old trying to figure out my next move.”
George: “How come?”
Skyler: “Lost my job due to relationship issues between my manager and her boyfriend. Apparently, me being friendly was mistaken for flirting.”
Skyler: “What, they want a grumpy Greeter at the door?”
George: “That is unprofessional.”
Skyler: “Yeah, well relationships are messy.”
George: “Agreed.”
Skyler: “I must say the way you handled that woman, it was surprising.”
Skyler said in a genuinely impressed voice.
George: “You were watching?”
Skyler: “Kind of hard not to, I’m surprised half the hotel didn’t hear her.”
George: “Someone had to show her she isn’t the Queen of Sheba.”
Skyler: “What are your thought on marriage?”
You shoot up a bit, a bit startled by the blunt question.
George: “My thoughts?”
Skyler: “You seem like a guy that know what he thinks. I want to pick that brain a bit.”
It had been a while since someone had so blatantly flirted with you. To be fair you were a bit surprised. Dating had often been a minefield for you.
George: “Marrige…”

1. It’s an institution
   
2. It’s a partnership
   
3. It’s indescribable
   

George: “Historically it was a way to ensure land, money and heirlooms where added into a new household.” *Choice 1*
George: “It was also a safety for children back in the day, since basterds often faced quite a few challenges from being born out of wedlock.” *Choice 1*
George: “It is a symbol of trust, that you do have someone that you can count on.” *Choice 2*
George: “But at the end of the day, if you are unfair to that partner hey might not stay.” *Choice 2*
George: “To describe marriage is like trying to describe oceans and water. Even with similarities we can see, gathering it all in an explanation would probably not give a fair judgement.” *Choice 3*
Skyler: “To me it’s a promise. ‘To have and to hold’ it is silly in this day and age were people divorce left and right for trivial things.”
Skylers eyes became dark, falling into deep thoughts. You had never been the poetic kind, but there was a sweet sentiment in Skyler’s view on things. Your parents where still married over 30 years now. Your sister was due some time in December, your brother was off celebrating a two year dating anniversary and your paternal grandmother still loved her deceased husband dearly.
To you it just never happened, perhaps it wasn’t for you.
George: “That we can agree on, people are so afraid they will settle. At the first sign of trouble they leave.”
Skyler: “So that woman form before… how long do you think her marriage will last?”
George: “If she acts like she did tonight, I wonder if her husband will even stay for the ceremony.”
You looked at your new companion and in an unusual turn of events you called the bartender over.
George: “Can I buy you a drink?”
​
​
With that Skyler smiled, deciding to keep you company.
Sometime later you awake to the sound of your alarm clock.
You feel a splitting headache, you drag you hand over your face as you do you feel a cold metal band around your finger. Pulling back as your eyes focus you see that it is a plain sliver coloured band.
(is that?)
· Oh no…
Feeling more sober than ever before you realised just what a mess you got yourself into.
George: ‘I just got married in Vegas.’
Well, you’re screwed.

Start|Previous Part| Next Part
Disembarking from their transport ship Artum strode forward with his arm wrapped around Asami’s waist and the other three humans following close behind them. Glancing down at the woman at his side Artum had to suppress a lustful growl. Instead of her usual casual attire Asami wore a dark red dress with a plunging neckline held up by thin straps which looped over her shoulders. The dress flowed down to her ankles and had a long slit on the right side almost up to her hip so that as she walked she would offer a glimpse of her pale, slender leg and the Draast leather boots she wore. When he asked where she had gotten the dress from she had simply smiled enigmatically at him and walked away leaving him wondering if all human women were as confounding as she was.
Noticing she was being watched Asami tilted her head up to look at him with a small smile. Her long black hair was pulled up and held in position by a long, metal hair stick giving him an unobstructed view of the nape of her neck and her pale back. Unable to resist any longer Artum leaned down and kissed her neck “You look ravishing my love.”
“You don’t look so bad yourself.” she grinned as she leaned against him and ran her hand over the hard leather of his duster. Feeling him squeeze her hip tightly Asami tutted “There’ll be time for that later.” she promised with a husky whisper prompting a soft growl to emanate from his throat.
As they reached the end of the hallway the doors parted and a group of armed aliens approached them with a single unarmed one at the centre wearing long flowing robes with sleeves long enough to cover it’s hands. Stepping away from the pack the alien wearing robes walked up to them and said “Pirate Lord Artum? It is my honour to welcome you to Epoch Station.” he said with a bow, his hands clasped together in front of him causing the long sleeves of his robe to droop down.
“Rather ceremonious for a bunch of pirates ain’t they?” Tucker mumbled from behind.
Either not hearing or choosing to ignore Tuckers remarks the alien said “I am Tradi, your attendant for the duration of the Summit. Should you require anything during your stay please to not hesitate to ask.” he said before looking passed Artum to the humans with him “Is this the entirety of your entourage?”
“That’s right.” Artum nodded.
“Very good. Now as I’m sure you’re aware Epoch Station is neutral territory and no weapons are allowed on board.”
“What do you call those?” Artum asked gesturing to the weapons brandished by Tradi’s escort.
“These men are under the employ of my Master; not one of your fellow Pirate Lords. They are here solely to ensure that civility reigns during the proceedings and as such we are required to search you men for weapons.”
“And if we don’t allow that?” Tucker asked as he folded his arms across his chest.
“Then you are free to leave.” Tradi replied smoothly. “You were invited here as a courtesy by my Master. If you do not wish to abide by his rules you may leave but do not expect to be included in discussions pertaining to the future of this system.”
“Get on with it.” Artum grunted with a dismissive wave of his hand. At a nod from Tradi several of his men walked forward and began to pat down Thatcher, Tucker and Vic confiscating several weapons from each of them.
“I’m gonna want a receipt for all of that.” Tucker said.
Seeing one of Tradi’s men approach Asami Artum moved to step between them and growled out “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I need to search her for weapons.” he replied.
“You will not lay a finger on my bride!” he snarled out in a low and dangerous voice as he stepped closer to loom over him “If anyone tries to touch her I’ll be adding a new coat to my wardrobe, understand?”
His bulbous eyes flicking down to Artums Draastrekian skin coat the alien swallowed hard and struggled to form words before Tradi cleared his throat. “I am sure we can make an exception for Lord Artum’s consort.” he said diplomatically. “Now, if you will follow me I will take you to the reception where the other Pirate Lords are awaiting your arrival.”
As Artum pulled Asami against him possessively and started to lead her passed the alien Asami to patted him on the shoulder “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure I’m going to endure a thorough pat down later on.” she smirked as they brushed passed him.
As the five of them trailed after Tradi Artum heard Thatcher say “I told you the coat sends a message.”
Letting out a grunt Artum replied “Any other words of advice you have for me?”
“Back on Earth we’ve got a saying.” Thatcher started.
“Of course you do.” Artum rolled his eyes “You Humans have a saying for every occasion.”
Ignoring the interruption Thatcher continued “It goes like this, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far’.”
“And what is that suppose to mean?” Artum asked.
“It means when your adversaries can see you’ve got a weapon that you’re willing to use you don’t need to raise your voice to be heard.” Thatcher replied.
“And what weapon do I have that is a threat to the other Pirate Lords?” Artum asked.
“You’ve got four of them with you right now.” Asami smirked up at him. Unable to resist her smile Artum pulled her closer to him and started to affectionately stroke her flank.
Finally reaching their destination Tradi pushed open a large est of doors and announced “May I present the final attendee, Pirate Lord Artum and his entourage.”
Entering the room Artum found himself subject to the oppressive stares of the five other Pirate Lords and their lieutenants. Arranged in a loose approximation of a circle each Lord was sat at a table positioned equal distanced apart allowing enough room for their followers to stand behind them without the groups intruding in one another’s space. In comparison to the four man crew Artum travelled with each of the Pirate Lords had at least a dozen men at their backs.
As Artum moved to sit at the unoccupied table Tradi had a second chair brought out for Asami to sit in while Thatcher, Vic and Tucker took up positions behind them.
“You’re late.” One of the Pirate Lords clicked it’s mandibles together as he glared over at Artum with his large compound eyes “And you brought a whore with you. This is not a social gathering, we are here to discuss business.”
His eyes flicking towards Asami to see how she reacted to the insult Artum was relieved to find that she was apparently choosing to ignore the slight. Turning his attention back to the Lord who had admonished him Artum smiled and said “And here I thought this was an inauguration party to welcome me to your ranks.”
“You aren’t one of us.” another snapped “And whatever tricks you used to ingratiate yourself with Zaldi before you usurped him won’t work on us nor are we intimidated by simple theatrics so you can remove that distasteful coat of yours this instant.”
“I don’t think I will.” Artum growled back before reaching out to rest his hand on Asami’s thigh “You see my lover rather likes the look of it on me and I care far more about her opinion than yours.”
“You will take it off right now or I shall tear it from your corpse!” one of the lieutenants who was a Draastrekian hissed as he stepped forward, his lips curled up into a snarl to reveal his sharp fangs as the muscles in his thick arms bulged and rippled as if he was preparing to leap across the room.
Waving a hand dismissively Artum said “Control your pet, Tellou or I’ll have to put him down.”
Letting out an enraged roar the Draastrekian stormed over the table and charged towards Artum. As soon as he came close to the table Asami brought her foot up and placed it against the edge of the table and shoved it hard causing it to slam into the charging lizardman’s stomach knocking the wind out of him and left him sprawled across the table. Leaping to her feet Asami pulled the metal hair stick from her hair and stabbed it downwards towards his snout with enough force that it pierced through the thick scales on top of his nose. As she drove the sharp point through the roof of his mouth the spike impaled his tongue and continued through his lower jaw to stab into the table beneath.
Pinned to the table the Draastrekian flailed wildly as his scream of pain was muffled by his forcibly closed mouth. Reaching beneath her dress Asami withdrew two knives that had been strapped to her upper thigh. Grabbing hold of the creatures hands Asami held them to the table allowing her to drive the blades through his palms skewering him to the table rendering him completely immobile. “Draastrekians,” she announced loudly to the stunned onlookers as she held out a hand behind her “Have about nighty-eight teeth on average.” accepting a pair of pliers from Vic Asami yanked up the Lizards upper lip to expose his teeth. Gripping the longest fang with the pilers Asami gave a sharp pull tearing the tooth from his mouth with a scream “That’s one.” she announced as she held up the bloody tooth before dropping it to the table.
As Asami started to pull another one out one of the Pirate Lords recovered from his shock long enough to say “Enough of this Artum, call off your whore!”
“And that’s three.” Asami smiled as she yanked out a third tooth before pointing the bloodied pliers at the Pirate Lord who spoke “Call me a whore one more time...” she growled, allowing the threat to dangle in the air.
With a smile on his face Artum reached out to slip his hand through the slit in her dress and affectionately caress her thigh “That’s enough my love.” Looking over her shoulder at him Asami let out a dissatisfied grunt before turning back to the whimpering Draastrekian. Pulling free one of the blades that were pinning his hands to the table Asami drew her hand back and stabbed the knife down right between his eyes, the blade piercing his skull and penetrating it’s brain causing the Draastrekian to convulse violently as it died. Grasping it’s snout for leverage Asami yanked her hair stick out from his mouth with a grunt. Flicking the blood from it Asami deftly pulled up her hair and slipped the needle through it to hold it in place before moving to drape herself across Artum’s lap. Wrapping her arm around his shoulders Asami forced her lips against his.
Stroking her thigh as they kissed Artum looked passed his lover to see the other attendees staring at them. Hiding a smug smile against Asami’s lips Artum thought ‘That’s right, this is a human you’ve all heard so much about. They are as efficient and as brutal as the stories say they are. And the only four in this entire system work for me.’
“My, my, it seems the festivities have started without me.” a voice called out.
Breaking the kiss Artum and Asami turned to see a cowled figure had appeared at the other end of the room. “Who are you?” Artum growled out.
“Ah, forgive my rudeness, I am your host.” he said in an amused tone of voice as he reached up and pulled his hood down to reveal his face “You may call me Dàoguān.” The man had dark red skin with intricate black markings though it was hard to tell if they were tattoos or part of his natural colouring. His sunken, sallow eyes had black irises making them look like two dark pits against his yellow tinged sclera. Turning to address the room as a whole “It is good to see you all, new friends and old. We should get together more often.”
“We aren’t here to socialise Dàoguān. We’re here to deal with the traitor in our midst.” one of them said as he stared balefully over at two of the Pirate Lords in particular.
“I don’t know why you’re looking over here.” one of them spat out “These raids didn’t start until he took over from Zaldi.” he said as he pointed at Artum. “And he’s hardly suffered any attacks.”
“That’s because I am able to defend what’s mine.” Artum retorted “If you all require assistance I’ll be happy to provide escorts for your traders for a nominal fee.” he smirked making the other Lords bristle with anger and glare at him.
“Peace my friends.” Dàoguān said with a wave of his hand. “We have plenty of time to air your grievances. For now please follow my stewards to the quarters we have arranged for you and enjoy my hospitality.” he dismissed them.
Following after Tradi who led them to their lavish chambers the group found their luggage had been brought to their rooms ahead of them. Settling down around a table Artum looked to Thatcher and said “Well?”
Shaking his head Thatcher replied “He’s not a species I’ve ever encountered before. Vic?”
“Nothing that I can recall.” Vic replied.
“I assume you don’t know it either?” he asked Artum who shook his head. “In that case we can probably assume he’s not from a Union species. That makes things difficult.”
“Why should it matter?” Artum asked.
“Because the more we know about who we’re up against the better prepared we can be. If he was from a Union species we could have guessed who’s backing him, what kind of connections he could have. As it is he could be anyone.”
“What makes you think he has someone backing him?” Artum asked.
“Because you don’t just walk up to a bunch of pirate gangs and have a nice little chat with them unless you’ve got some serious clout. Would you have given him the time of day let alone gone along with his plan to overthrow the government and take over the whole of the system if he just turned up on your doorstep asking to see you?”
As Artum shook his head Tucker said with a frown “I think I know him.” seeing everyone turn to look at him Tucker quickly backtracked and said “Not ‘know him’ know him. I mean his species. I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere before I just can’t put my finger on it.”
Choosing to ignore Tucker’s input Thatcher said “I think the best course of action is to do a little reconnaissance before we decide on our next move. We need to know where the other Pirate Lords are laying their heads, see if we can find an armoury or at least some kind of weaponry and see if we can scrounge up some kind of information on this Dàoguān character.” he decided. “Vic you’ll stay here and guard Artum and the rest of us will go exploring.”
“Why can’t Asami stay?” Artum complained with a frown.
“Because if someone tries to kill you it’s easier to protect you if you’re not on top of your bodyguard.” Tucker smirked.
“Sorry baby, we’ll have to have fun later.” Asami smiled as she kissed his cheek before slipping passed him “I’m going to slip into something a little more practical.” she said as she picked up her bag and carried it towards the bedroom.
Finding himself in one of the numerous bars dotted throughout the station Thatcher sat at the counter and ordered a drink. Accepting the drink from the bartender Thatcher took a sip when he heard a voice growl out “You need to come with us Human.”
Looking over his shoulder Thatcher saw two pirates standing behind him, one he recognised from their initial meeting with the Pirate Lords. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?” he asked as he turned back around and took another gulp.
“Pirate Lord Yanko wants to see you.” the alien replied.
“So I’m just meant to follow the two of you to some secluded part of the station? I don’t think so. Tell this Yanko of yours that he wants to talk he can come here and see me.” Thatcher replied.
Roughly grabbing Thatcher’s shoulder the pirate glared and said “Firstly, you’ll show him the proper respect and refer to him by his title. Secondly, Lord Yanko is not at your beck and call. If he wants to see you, you’ll go to him.” he growled as he squeezed Thatcher’s shoulder.
Staring at the hand on his shoulder for a long moment before shrugging it off Thatcher looked to the other alien who was standing nervously to the side “You’re friend here wasn’t at the welcome party was he?” seeing him gulp and shake his head Thatcher turned away and picked up his glass again “You might want to tell him what he’s getting into.”
“Listen here-!” he started as he grabbed Thatcher by the wrist only to cry out when Thatcher’s free hand shot out to grab his wrist and twisted it painfully. With his now unrestrained hand Thatcher reached back to grab the alien by the back of his head and slammed his face against the bar. Getting to his feet Thatcher kicked him in the back of his knees forcing him to kneel making his face scrape down against the side of the bar leaving a streak of blood against it while keeping him restrained by pulling his arm back at an uncomfortable angle. “Now then, since you’re obviously ill-informed and you didn’t spill my drink I’m willing to let this end with just this much, what do you say?”
“I’ll kill you, you bastard!” the alien snarled as blood bubbled from it’s broken nose and it tried unsuccessfully to squirm out of Thatchers arm lock.
“I want you to remember that I gave you the opportunity to walk away.” Thatcher sighed as he grabbed hold of one of the aliens fingers and summarily broke it. As the alien let out a scream he thrashed around violently trying to free his arm from Thatchers grasp but his every movement felt like his was going to pull the arm from it’s socket. As Thatcher grasped a second finger and started to bend it backwards he said “Now I’m sure your friend here is going to tell you later just how lucky you are that you picked a fight with me and not my companion.” he said as he broke the second digit making him wail in pain. “But I want to impress upon you just how badly you fucked up.” he said as he grabbed hold of a third finger.
“N-No, Stop! Please I beg you!” the alien pleaded pitifully as Thatcher snapped another one.
“You see compared to some humans I could name, I’m a veritable font of forgiveness which I why I’m not going to kill you. I don’t particularly enjoy inflicting pain on another living thing but sometimes in life you have to do things you don’t like doing to ensure that a message is sent.” he punctuated this with another break leaving the pirate sobbing in pain. “So I want you to understand that you only get one warning and this is it.”
“I understand! I’m Sorry! Please Stop!” he begged.
“I’m glad we could come to an understanding.” Thatcher smiled pleasantly. “It’s a shame it took until your last finger for it to sink in. Oh well, might as well do this one for good measure.” he said as he grasped the final digit.
“Nooo!” the alien howled desperately “I’m Sorry! Please, I Understand, I Get the Message!”
“I’m afraid you don’t.” Thatcher said with a shake of his head “You see the pain I’m inflicting on you right now is the message for you. The sight of your twisted, deformed claw is going to be the message to anyone else who thinks it’s a good idea to lay a hand on a human. If in the future you hear someone has the bright idea to fuck with the human race I want you to shove your hand in their face and tell them how lucky you were to walk away with only one crippled hand after daring to touch a human. Which means I’m going to have to finish what I started, understand?”
“I...I understand...” he whimpered pitifully in defeat.
“I’m glad to hear that.” Thatcher smiled down at him. “And since you’re being so cooperative I’m going to give you the choice of what I do to this last finger. I can either break it like all the others or I can cut it off.” Seeing his eyes widen in terror Thatcher said “Personally I’d go with a break. If you get it set quickly enough who knows, maybe you’ll eventually regain some use. On the other hand, if you’ll pardon the pun, all I have is a pair of pliers to remove your finger so it’d be more tearing it off rather than cutting it but as I said the choice is up to you.”
Breathing heavily to the point of hyperventilating the alien weakly mumbled out “...Break it...”
“I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch that?” Thatcher replied.
“Break it!” he cried out.
“Ask nicely.” Thatcher insisted.
“Please Break My Fin-Ahhh!” he screamed as Thatcher broke the final digit.
“There we go, all done now.” Thatcher smiled as he patted his shoulder companionably “That wasn’t so bad was it? I think you should thank me don’t you?”
“T-Thank you...” he mumbled out.
“Thank you for what?” Thatcher prompted as he squeezed the broken fingers making him scream out.
“Thank You For Breaking My Fingers!” he blubbered out as Thatcher released his hold on his wrist making him collapse limply onto the floor clutching at the shattered appendage and weeping painfully.
“I’m glad we got that all worked out.” he smiled as he stood back up and turned to the other pirate who had been watching the scene play out in horror. Meeting Thatchers gaze the pirate unconsciously took a step back as his body trembled in fear “Take your friend back to Yanko and tell him that if he wants to talk he can come here and see me.”
“That won’t be necessary.” a voice called out. Turning Thatcher saw a familiar looking alien sitting at a table surrounded by his cronies. Pirate Lord Yanko was a hulking, beast of an alien; his large portly body had him standing a head taller than any of the other aliens in the room. He had four sets of eyes on his angular head which were bisected by a large triangular mouth lined with sharp fangs. The top of his head tapered on into two long hornlike appendages and his large, meaty hands only had three stubby fingers each.
Picking up his glass Thatcher stepped over the still weeping pirate and approached the Pirate Lord. “If you were sitting over here all along you could have just asked me over yourself.”
“Then what would I be paying them for?” he laughed causing his jowls to jiggled as he picked up a piece of meat still on the bone and brought to between his jaws where his sharp teeth stripped the flesh from it instantly. “Besides, if I had I wouldn’t have gotten to see another display of the famed Human brutality. I must say I was most impressed. I especially liked the way you had him beg you to break his finger and then to make him thank you for doing it!” he clapped his hands together with an evil grin. “I’ve never seen someone break someone in such an efficient manner.”
Sitting down opposite Yanko Thatcher said “I find it best to get any necessary unpleasantness over and done with as quickly as possible.”
“Ah, but the female you have with you enjoys her work though doesn’t she? I could tell by the way she toyed with Tellou’s pet Lizard.” he said with a leer “I can see why Artum keeps her around. I’d certainly be putting her talents to good use if she were my pet. Normally I’d prefer my females to have a bit more meat on them than she does, makes them more durable but I wouldn’t be unwilling to make an exception for her. Of course with a body that scrawny I doubt she’d be able to endure my affections!” he roared with laughter making his underlings laugh as well.
Waiting for the laughter to die out with an expressionless look on his face Thatcher said “So did you just call me over to say hello or did you want something?”
Shoving more food into his mouth Yanko said “Let me ask you something, how did a bunch of humans wind up working for an upstart Praxian like Artum?”
“We were looking for some work and his was the first crew we ran into.” Thatcher replied.
“Ah, so it’s a partnership of convenience?” Yanko grinned “I’m glad to hear that.”
“Why’s that?” Thatcher asked.
“Because it’s clear your talents are wasted with Artum. If you came to work for me I would put your skills to good use.”
“I don’t see why we should. We’ve got a pretty good arrangement going with Artum, I see no reason to rock the boat.”
“Because I can tell you humans are an ambitious sort. Since you arrived in this system Artum has gone from picking up asteroid scraps on the fringes of the system to ruling an entire planet, quite the coincidence no?” he said with a grin “And all of a sudden his rivals ships start getting attacked. Your doing I assume?”
“You’re right.” Thatcher replied with a sip of his drink “That is quite the coincidence.”
Letting out a laugh Yanko said “Let me ask, how much does Artum pay you and your friends?”
“You wouldn’t be able to afford us.” Thatcher replied.
“I’ve been doing this a lot longer than Artum has and I have very deep pockets.”
Folding his arms across his chest with a small smile Thatcher replied “A quarter.”
“A quarter?” Yanko frowned “A quarter of what?”
“A quarter of everything he earns from his planet.” he announced making one of Yanko’s goons spit out his drink in surprise. “I take it none of you boys are on that kind of pay grade? Thought not.” he smirked as he drained his drink “Well, if you have no other business with me I think I’ll be going.” he said as he got to feet and started to walk away.
“Sit back down!” Yanko snapped at him.
Pausing, Thatcher turned to meet Yanko’s glare and said “Ask nicely.”
Storming to his feet Yanko slammed his fists on the table and snarled out “You think you can get away with speaking to me like that?! You think I won’t gut you open and gorge myself on your entrails?!”
Stepping back towards the table Thatcher pressed his knuckles against the table and leaned forward to stare into Yanko’s multiple eyes. “That will certainly be an impressive feat without any teeth.” he said as he reached into his pocket to pull out a pair of pliers and slammed them down on the table making Yanko’s lieutenants eye them nervously. “I want to make something abundantly clear; the only reason I haven’t gouged out your eyes and yanked every single one of your teeth from your skull is that I am a paragon of fucking restraint. But it would be suicidally stupid of you to mistake that restraint for inability.” Thatcher replied levelly as he continued to stare up at Yakno.
Glowering at Thatcher the veins in Yanko’s thick muscular arms pulsed and throbbed furiously as he tensed the muscles in preparation to throttle the insolent human to death. Just as Thatcher braced himself for Yanko to throw himself at him the fury left Yanko’s eyes and was replaced with mirth as he let out a deep throated laugh “You humans really are every bit as insane as they say you are!” he bellowed with laughter “You’re like rabid animals snapping and snarling at any who come near you!”
“I’ve been called worse things.” Thatcher said with a small smile.
“As have I my friend.” Yanko grinned as he grabbed a bottle and refilled Thatchers glass “Come, drink with me!” he insisted as he brought the bottle to his mouth and threw back it’s contents causing the alcohol to splash down his chin and dribbled down his jowls. As Thatcher accepted the drink Yanko grinned and said “I’ve been looking to recruit a human ever since I heard about your brutality during the war. I feel a certain kinship towards a species as depraved and vicious as yours.”
“I’m honoured I’m sure.” Thatcher said dryly as he sat back down in the chair making Yanko guffaw loudly.
“I want creatures like you humans working for me. Look at these cowards I have to put up with.” he said gesturing disdainfully at his lieutenants “Not a single one of them have the balls to even look me in the eyes while you didn’t even blink knowing I could have had my men kill you any time I wanted.”
“They would have tried to kill me.” Thatcher replied making Yanko slam his fist against the table in amusement.
“You humans really never back down from a fight do you?”
“That’s because we’ve yet to get in a fight we can’t win.” Thatcher retorted causing Yanko to bellow with laughter.
“Alright, I’ve decided.” Yanko suddenly declared “I’ll match Artums offer.”
“You can’t be serious-” One of Yanko’s men started to object only for Yanko to grasp the back of his head and slam his face into the table.
“I didn’t ask for your opinion.” Yanko snarled menacingly as he put his weight behind his arm and started to grind his flunky’s head into the table. Looking back to Thatcher and seeing him unperturbed by this casual act of violence Yanko said “A quarter of the profits from my planet and in return the four of your will come work for me.”
Tapping his finger against the table for a thoughtful moment Thatcher replied “I’ll have to talk it over with my companions.”
His mood darkening Yanko said “Talk as much as you want so long as you give me the answer I want to hear. I am not accustomed to being disappointed and I never make an offer twice.”
Not flinching away from Yanko’s gaze Thatcher replied “There’s something you should know about us humans if you really intend to hire us.”
“Oh, what’s that?” Yanko growled out dangerously.
“You really want to be careful how you talk to us. We tend to respond to threats in the most disproportional of ways.”
“And what does that mean?” Yanko asked.
“It means if you ever so much as give me or any of my crew a dirty look, we’ll let you live just long enough for you to see everything you’ve worked for turn to ash before we slit your throat.” Thatcher replied.
Falling silent Yanko’s men watched tensely as the pair of them stared at one another for a long moment before Yanko blinked first and reluctantly growled out “I’ll take that under advisement.”
“So long as we have an understanding.” Thatcher replied as he drained his glass before getting to his feet. “I think we’ve taken up enough of one another’s time. I’ll get back to you once I’ve had a talk with the others.”
Returning to their quarters Thatcher found Artum and Vic sitting at a table playing cards together. Artum was staring at his hand with a frown on his face while Vic idly stacked his large pile of chips into small towers. “How’s it going?” Thatcher asked as he grabbed a bottle and took a seat at the table.
“Poorly.” Artum grumbled as he glared at Vic “He’s teaching me poker but I don’t see how he keeps winning. I don’t even let him shuffle or touch the cards and yet he always seems to know when to fold.”
“Oh well that’s easy. He cheats.” Thatcher said as he took a sip of his drink.
“What?!” Artum growled making Vic let out a sigh.
“I’m not cheating. It’s simple maths.” he argued.
Letting out a small laugh Thatcher explained “You see, if you know how many of each card is in a deck you can figure out how likely the next card in the deck will be something that will improve your hand. Say there’s forty cards left in the deck and fifteen of them of them will give you a strong final hand. Not terrible odds that you could come out ahead. But if only two of them will get you there it’s probably not worth the risk. Beyond that it all comes down to how good you are at bluffing. Come on, deal me in.”
Still glaring at Vic, Artum shuffled the deck and dealt out the cards “So how did your reconnaissance go?”
“Not bad. Got an offer to go work with one of the other Pirate Lords.” Thatch replied.
“Oh?” Artum narrowed his eyes at Thatcher.
“Apparently Asami made quite the impression with her little altercation with the Draastrkian. Seems like having a Human on your crew is becoming all the rage.” Thatcher replied.
“And what was your response?” Artum asked.
“Told him I’d think about it.” he said as he watched Vic’s facial expression closely before tossing down his cards.
“And why would you do that?” Artum growled.
“Because it gives us an in with him. If we need to kill him this will allow us to get close without having to kill his entire crew to get to him.”
“We’ll just have to kill them all on the way out.” Vic added as he threw a few chips to the pot. Frowning down at his cards Artum stared at Vic before glancing at Thatchers discarded cards and threw his own away causing Vic to let out a sigh as he collected his small pot of winnings. “This is why I don’t play poker with you any more Thatch.” he complained making him smirk.
As the next hand was dealt the door to their room opened and in walked a dishevelled looking Tucker with a drunken grin on his face and a half empty bottle in his hand “There you guys are! I’ve been… I’ve been looking all over for you!” he said as he swayed unsteadily on his feet.
“How many times do I have to remind you that getting drunk isn’t a necessary part of reconnaissance?” Thatcher sighed.
“Ah, that’s were you’re wrong see. We’re in hostile territory filled with a whole menagerie of aliens with a whole host of different cultures. I could inadvertently offend someone by turning down a drink.” he sniffed. “You can’t get information out of people who you’ve just offended.”
“If that was true you’d never learn anything.” Thatcher retorted “So I’m guessing you didn’t get anywhere?”
“I’ll have you know I had a very productive afternoon. I had a meeting with Pirate Lord...um… Well I don’t exactly remember his name but I’ll know him when I see him.”
“Confidence inspiring as always Tuck.” Thatcher shook his head. “So what happened during this meeting?”
“He made me a very generous offer to join his crew; one which I am inclined to take but I mag… magnani… but out the kindness of my heart I’m gonna give Artum the chance to make me a better offer.” he stumbled over his words and finished with a loud belch. “He even said I’d get a head hunters fee if I bring you guys along with me but if this is the respect I get I don’t think I’ll be inclined to share my good fortune.”
“What was he offering you?” Artum wondered, amused by Tuckers antics.
“Girls for one thing.” he slurred “He has soooo many girls working for him. You guys wouldn’t believe how gorgeous they are; they come in all shapes and sizes and colours, there was even this one girl with feathers! And these girls were really friendly if you know what I mean.” he grinned before frowning at Artum. “Unlike your girls Ar-Artum.” he pointed an accusing finger at him “None of them even give me the time of day.”
“That’s because Asami pays them to ignore you.” Vic revealed making Thatcher snort in amusement and Artum smirk.
“That’s because she’s a spoilsport. She doesn’t like to see other people having a good time. Remember that Korsican I could have hooked up with if she hadn’t gotten in my way?”
Looking towards the other two humans Artum said “Is he aware Korsicans-”
“He knows.” Thatcher and Vic replied simultaneously.
Letting out a laugh Artum pushed out a chair and said “Here, have a seat before you fall over.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Tucker agreed as he slipped into the seat. “Let me play too.” he demanded.
“In the next round.” Thatcher replied.
“So what’s our next move?” Artum asked.
“Well, we’ve got propositions from two of the five Pirate Lords we have to deal with. We could always defect and do what we did with Zaldi, ingratiate ourselves before killing them and taking over their crews.”
“That’s risky though.” Vic interjected “We keep pulling the same stunt they’re going to get wise to us and all we’ll end up doing is start a war. The last thing we want is to get into a fight and diminish our forces if we’ve still got another three Lords to deal with.”
Letting out a grunt Thatcher nodded his head and said “True, but that’ll probably be the best way for us to get more info on our mysterious host. I don’t like having such a wildcard in play like this.”
“Does anyone care what I think?” Tucker asked and received a simultaneously ‘No’ from the other three at the table leaving him pouting.
“Regardless it’s too early to start making any concrete plans until Asami gets back and we here what she’s found out. Speak of the devil...” he said as they heard the door to their room open.
Turning towards the doorway they saw a battered and bruised Asami limp into the room dragging a duffel bag along the floor while her other hand held a long machete like knife dripping with blood. Her clothes were torn and bloodied and her arm bleeding from a deep gash near her shoulder. Her neck was bruised and her lip was split and swollen and half her face was stained with dried blood from a cut above her right eye.
Storming to his feet at the sight of her Artum cried out “What happened to you?!” knocking over his chair in his haste to get to her. “Who did this to you?!” he demanded to know as he grabbed hold of her forearms. “I’ll kill them! I’ll skin them alive! I’ll tear out their throats with my own claws! I’ll-”
“I’m fine.” Asami interrupted his tirade and shrugged off his hands and continued towards the table. “I come bearing good news.” she announced as she lifted up her bag and slammed it on the table.
“Oh?” Thatcher wondered from his seat as he eyed the bag. None of the humans seemed overly concerned about the condition she returned in.
Unzipping the bag Asami pulled it apart to reveal a severed head. “We’ve only got four Pirate Lords to deal with now.”
Prologue|Chapter 1|Chapter 2|Chapter 3|Chapter 4|Chapter 5|Chapter 6|Epilogue

EDIT: All I'm getting is downvotes and comments telling me what a bad idea this is, and to stay home. I am very disappointed in that, as I was hoping to help people who are looking to restart gaming in small groups safely and responsibly once their area gets ahead of the virus. Different regions of the world are moving at different timelines. To paraphrase another commenter, NY is not TX. New Zealand is not Brazil. Western NY is not NYC.
I came here for discussion for how to restart gaming safely with minimal risk. When leaders want to discuss how to reopen restaurants, or construction, or retail safely do you shut them down and just tell them to stay home? No, you discuss and plan for it. You don't teach abstinence-only sex ed for the same reason - it'll happen eventually, and we want it to be safe.
I do fully support staying home to combat the virus, however we can't live our lives from home. As individual counties and towns start to get a handle on it, I believe we need to a conversation about how to "reopen" gaming with minimal risks.
With my county moving to expand outdoor gatherings from 25 to 50 people after a month of slow reopening and declining numbers, I thought perhaps the community could help with coming up with guidelines. We were hit hard early and shut down since early March. Now we have widespread mask usage, free testing easily available regardless of symptoms, a well staffed contact tracing team, and numbers were haven't seen since March. I felt comfortable trying to tentatively restart our small game group, knowing that if things start to change we'll go back to starting at home.
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As my state (NY) begins to open up, I've been thinking a lot about how to start up in-person gaming with my group again safely. My county is expected to hit Phase 4 reopening this week, and things such as smaller gatherings, events, restaurants, etc have already been allowed the past few weeks with restrictions.
Phase 4 is officially allowing outdoor gatherings of up to 50 people (up from 25), and I've been asked by some people in our group about when and how we can restart gaming. I'm trying to come up with guidelines for my group to try to meet safely and responsibility while enjoying our hobby.
Here are some of the things I have come up :

1. Play outside - Numerous studies have shown that the virus does not transmit very well outdoors nor survive long in direct sunlight. There are very few recorded cases of transmission occurring outdoors in the sun. So despite the wind, bugs, sunshine, and humidity, I think playing outdoors is one of the best steps you can take for a safer covid-era gaming experience.Options I have been exploring range from people's personal backyard patios, to public parks with pavilions or popup tents, to one of our friendly local game stores that has volunteered their lawn and tables for our gaming group to meet at.
2. Pick games with minimal component sharing - I've created a separate post for game recommendations of outdoor games with minimal component sharing, and would recommend checking that out for ideas. To summarize, you want to avoid games with drafting and a lot of component sharing, and try to pick games where everyone only touches their own pieces. Some examples would be multiplayer solitaire games like Wingspan or Quacks of Quedlinburg, or Roll & Writes like Welcome To, Railroad Ink, Cartographers, etc.
3. Bring your own set of metal coins or poker chips for currency - Currency is an aspect used in many games, and a lot of exchanges happen with it. Having your own set that only you touch is a good way to enjoy these games without having to share whatever in-game currency is used.An added benefit is you now have a lot of little paperweights to weigh down cards and components on a breezy day. When we tried an outdoor game day recently, I was using Dinosaur Island metal coins. Face Up was for when they were used for currency, Face Down if they were paperweights.
4. Plan and setup the games you want to play in advance, and quarantine them afterwards - For example, a day or two in advance put starting materials for each player in separate bags for easy handout, shuffle cards, etc. After playing, put everything in the box and plan to sort/store it properly later, either after it's sat for a day or two or when you're able to wash hands immediately afterwards.
5. Have a bottle of hand sanitizer nearby for the person facilitating the game or general player use - A lot of games have someone setting up something each round, such as Sagrada, Roll Player, Azul series, etc. Set the example of applying sanitizer before setting up a new game, or between rounds.
6. Wear a Mask while playing - While this is not a popular idea, especially among close friends, it does add to the safety of the group and would be highly recommended. The standard rule I like to go by is to assume that YOU are an asymptomatic carrier, and try to act accordingly to keep your gaming buddies safe.
7. Bring your own supplies - Pen/Pencil, Dry Erase Pen, Hand Sanitizer, Drink, Snacks, Sunscreen, Sunglasses, even your own folding chair if you want to help the gaming host with seating
8. Stay home if you have any symptoms or have been travelling - In addition, our county has free testing for anyone regardless of symptoms, so I am planning on sharing the information for that with the group.

Let me know if you think of any other suggestions! I help organize public board game meetups in my area, so I am very interested in trying to restart the meetups with minimal risk as everything else around us reopens.

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
My uncle used to say ,Gotta get out boy’ he said, ,You’re in a dark spot some time and when you’re in it keep going. Take it all, breath it in. Keep going. Always keep going.’ – ironic since he killed himself in a hunting accident out somewhere in woodland. I suppose he didn’t want to miss his prey and kept going after it. Kept going.
It started to work. For a few days you fight, and you struggle as sailors in a dry ditch or on a dry glass and you keep going, push forward and nothing comes from it until you know nothing will come from it. Such was time for me at the outbreak of our lovely new friend Covid. My one-part-off-part girlfriend Alessandra was with her family in Florida and so I shared the sunriddled apartment only with booze and screens.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
I did everything to leave home, my newborn half-brother Seth a crying shitting mess, stomping out silent thoughts with such vigor, that I agreed to join my mother on her monthly expeditions to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, near the buzzing Wilshire Boulevard. It was well worth the laughter from the beauties in blonde and black, and the cute Valley Girl that lived across from me. Life was good.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
After a half slice of pizza and a cold shower we sat down with Seth on the couch, he somewhat checking out my girlfriend’s body under the green summer dress, a piece of cloth befitting a city not in tune with itself but always in fake summer. We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.