

About the cover: Non-Retrieval was the first e-book I published, back in Sept. of 2010. At that point in time I had never created a book cover before, so I was extremely limited in how to go about making one. Over the next few years, I ended up designing a total of 11 different book covers before I finally bit the bullet and purchased an image from the Fotolia website.

The insets on this magazine's first page were all official covers for the Non-Retrieval novella at one point. They use Public Domain pictures of oversized bugs or soldier pics from U.S. military websites. The big problems I had in choosing a cover were:

1. I had no budget to buy a picture.

2. My Space Marines wore uniforms in gray and black.

3. My bad guys looked like giant roaches.

4. The landscape of my alien planet was colored in purple, gray and black.

You can see how I tried to gray out pictures and use a color scheme that would match the uniforms I had my soldiers wearing, and also of the hostile planet they were on. Nothing really fit until I discovered that Fotolia picture featuring a model wearing the exact sort of uniform I envisioned. It isn't a perfect picture, but it's good enough!

Maybe in an issue or two, I'll discuss what happened when I tried to hire an artist to create a book cover for my novel Dobrynia's Path 1. Cutting to the point, it did not work out, and so I'm still doing what I can with stuff that is freely available or at a low cost. Besides, I'm not publishing under any big book company. I want my covers to be 'good enough,' and I want my writing to be great.

#####

Verum Et Inventa

DARK FICTION BY RAYMOND TOWERS

This is a magazine of dark fiction, mostly, in the genres of fantasy, horror and science fiction. Primarily, I am here to promote my fiction writing, but I am also looking forward to including submitted material from other writers with similar styles or non-traditional ideas, as well as contributions from reviewers, commentators and, hopefully, one day, even fans. In addition, and following what you might be familiar with from print digest-type magazines, I will also include articles based on my personal research, or the research of others, many of which will be controversial and difficult to absorb for the normies. Honestly, there are plenty of other outlets out there that pull their punches or whitewash what is true and promote what is fabrication. Verum Et Inventa is Latin for Truth and Fables, or Truth and Fiction, if you will. If you've come to read an adventure, I will give you one. If, after that, you want to read an article that might cause you to see things in a different way than before, I'm aiming to provide that as well.

_The Brass says suck it. That means you're going to suck it!_ \- Raymond Towers, quote came to mind while I was re-editing the novella Non-Retrieval

#####

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Raymond Towers

**Smashwords Edition, License Notes:** Thank you for viewing or downloading this free e-book. You are welcome to share this e-book with your friends provided that it remains in its complete original form and is not used for any commercial purpose. If you enjoy reading this story, please consider posting a review or making a purchase of one of the author's other titles. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All of the characters in this e-book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, whether living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This is issue number 2 of Verum Et Inventa magazine, with an official release date of December 1st, 2018. With any luck, this magazine will be produced on a monthly or bi-monthly schedule, with a minimum of 100 pages of content per issue. Links to back issues of this magazine can be found on the Freebie page at Raymond Towers Dot Com.

Rating: This issue contains a MEDIUM to HIGH amount of controversial subject matter.

#####

### Table Of Contents

Editorial

Science Fiction

Roaches In The Attic 0 - Non-Retrieval

RITA0 - Roaches

RITA0 - Chapter 1

RITA0 - Chapter 2

Unit Four-Three

Changeling

Story Starters

The Sorceress Karyn

Mercenary

The Girl In The Cage

Non-Fiction Section

Articles

How I Became My Female Characters

Have A Merry, Pagan Christmas!

Media Reviews

I Want Contributors!

About The Publisher / Author

#####

### Editorial

Welcome, readers to issue No. 2 of Verum Et Inventa magazine.

What is going on in my world? Tonight is November 14th. Tomorrow, I have the idea to start working on Savage Lands 7, a full novel writing project. The basic premise for this novel is an idea I thought of way, way back in 1990 or so. This novel scares me. I had it in my head to write this novel when I had no idea of how writing works. I started it, wrote a few pages or many, many pages, all handwritten mind you. I would not like the way it was going, I'd scrap it, and I'd start all over. In my notes, I have two character name pages, a nine page story outline, and three rough draft versions: Tagger Version 1 at 117 pages, the 'patch' Tagger Version 2 at 20 pages, and another 'patch' Valet Version at 20 more pages. The patches were like Band-Aids for parts I didn't like, where I would have to rewrite what came before and after to fit the patch into the main story. I got so frustrated with this project that I have shelved it for 28 years.

I'd better learn how to write before I tackle this idea again. That's what I thought back then. And I waited, and waited, and waited some more. I wrote my early poems and short stories, worked my way up to longer novellas and short serials, a couple of story collections and finally, full-length novels. Let me tell you how scared I am of working on this novel. I have published 56 titles so far, including 35 full novels and 11 collections. My Chaos Rift series was supposed to be a couple of novels leading up this one, but so far I have 11 e-published Chaos Rift novels, and 5 more unpublished. (Those are titled Savage Lands 2 through 6.) After all that... Well, I'm officially starting it tomorrow.

Whew! Can I do it? Is this novel going to rock or suck potatoes? We will see. I've gotten pretty good at having a strong initial concept for a story, and winging it, as in letting my characters and events take the initiative for me and lead me into new sub-plots. I have to get 'into character' before I start, but I haven't decided on what tone to use yet: adventurous, mystical, somber, dark, etc. Anyway, I may post my progress as I write this novel, in PDF format, for anyone out there who is interested. See my writer's blog or my Freebie page on my main website for the announcement, if I decide to do this. Links are found at the end of this e-zine.

Let's move on to the contents of this issue. For the main feature, I have broken up my first published e-book Non-Retrieval into three parts. This novella is about 90 pages long, in the genre of military science fiction. Part 1 consists of the intro piece Roaches and Chapters 1 and 2. The full e-book is available free, by the way, if you like the story and can't wait until next month to see what happens next.

I am currently between writing projects, mostly because I've been resting my noodle for the Big One I mentioned above. I went into my Story Starters and thought, hey, how about I write a few short stories with these? I wrote three of them. My old notes for story concepts The Sorceress Karyn, Mercenary and The Girl In The Cage have become The Old Hag's Tales 7 (2 pages long), Pickle For Hire (8 pages), and Gordon's Soul Takes A Trip (22 pages), respectively. Continuing on with this idea of short stories, I had two more pop up randomly as a result. These are Unit Four-Three (5 pages) and Changeling (6 pages). All of these are new stories, written between November 1st and 13th. These stories run a wide range, from fantasy to horror to science fiction, but some of them have pretty heavy themes for the normies, so if you're a normie, prepare to Be Shook.

I have also included two articles. The hardest one for me to show to the public is How I Became My Female Characters, because a lot of that is personal stuff that makes an introvert like me cringe. However, I believe in Source and / or the Hologram Universe, so there are no secrets in this world anyway. That is my life experience this time around. It is what it is. My second article is Have A Merry, Pagan Christmas! I wrote that because it needs to be written. Too many people are forgetting where we have come from as a whole, and if we don't know the roots of our traditions, we become that much easier to control and manipulate. If my short stories don't offend you in some way, that last article probably will. My Media Reviews section includes the notes I took down while preparing the Christmas article, and sources are included so you can watch the videos for yourself.

That's it! Today the ultraviolet rays were very intense here in San Diego. Literally, you could step outside and feel the sun frying your skin in about 5 seconds. It is past 9 at night as I write this. I am giving the e-zine a finally edit, and hopefully it will be out in a day or two. I've got Billy Idol's greatest hits playing, since I am an 80s child, so let's get this moving.

_It's a nice day to... start again... It's a nice day for a... white wedding._ \- Billy Idol

And have a merry, pagan Christmas, everyone!

Raymond Towers

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### Roaches In The Attic 0

Non-Retrieval

About the series: For the first time in recorded history, humanity has developed the technology to travel at its leisure among the stars. The unrestricted exploration of space begins, only for our first wave of pioneers to discover abruptly and brutally, that we are not alone in the cosmos. It will be up to the Space Marines not only to counter this new threat from far, far way, but also to prevent these bizarre new enemies, the Roaches, from finding Earth and bringing their unforgiving brand of destruction down on all of us.

About this title: \- For rookie Spaceman Harold Douglas, the mission sounded simple enough. Take the squad of Space Marines out, discover why the outpost had gone offline, and bring them back home in one piece. That was before his transport suddenly vanished, stranding them on an alien planet. Now, they're fighting for their lives against the greatest threat humanity has ever seen. Rating: MEDIUM controversy.

Non-Retrieval was first released on Sept. 6, 2010. It has recently been revised and re-released.

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### Roaches

Like a plague they descended, dropping into the midst of the unprepared and frightened soldiers as dozens of bouncing, pummeling cannonballs. Plasma fire whines across the battlefield as skittish fingers pump on smoothly gliding triggers, hitting the alien creatures' hard shells and deflecting the lethal beams in all directions, including back among our own troops. Howls of pain erupt from the mouths of mortally wounded men, only slightly eclipsed by the orders from their commanding officers.

Through it all, the balled-up insects roll toward where the concentration of soldiers is at its thickest. Then, displaying an uncanny and unnerving sense of synchronicity, the tumbling balls halt all at once and begin to unfurl. Their trademark clicking commences, a combination of sharp screeches and disconcerting snaps that causes involuntary winces and fuels an instinct of panic in some of the young Marines. This noise, of course, serves to briefly stun the troops, as half a dozen jet-black limbs telescope from the rising monstrous bodies. Their two thick and thorny legs lift them to nearly an equal height as the men. Two pairs of arms simultaneously uncurl and clasp together, as if the creature were uttering some dark prayer. For a brief moment, a split second, it seems as if nothing is happening, until the first shockwaves hit.

Death comes quickly to the innermost circle of gawking and gaping spectators, as invisible beams of intense heat immediately incinerate or explode their bodies. The after-effects of the assaults consume a second row of the tightly grouped soldiers, bursting their hair and clothes into flames, and melting their hard plastic weapons in their grips. A high percentage of the frontline infantry, whether through panic or injury, or even simple confusion, is rendered ineffective...

(Partial notes recovered during the aftermath of the War on Betelren Six, Space Corps Outpost 02-27. The author's identity is not known. The date is Tuesday, January 20, 2060. This is the date of first contact.)

#####

### 1

Platoon 10-20's moving out.

Platoon 10-20's moving out.

Opposition had best watch out.

Opposition had best watch out.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

We find ourselves so far from home.

We find ourselves so far from home.

On a purple rock, we're all alone.

On a purple rock, we're all alone.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

As usual, we'll rise to the task.

As usual, we'll rise to the task.

Platoon 10-20's gonna kick some ass!

Platoon 10-20's gonna kick some ass!

Ten, ten!

Twenty, twenty!

Ten, ten!

Twenty, twenty!

(A typical cadence.)

Date: Thursday, January 27, 2061

Location: Puller Spaceport, MDRS (Marine Division Recruit Station), San Diego, California

Once I'd rotated the co-pilot's chair by one hundred and eighty degrees, I scanned across the innards of the Unilink Space Transport, designated number One-Twenty-Six. The Space Marines were filing in through the small vessel's hatch, some impatient, others somber, all rarely speaking. In their usual, professional manner they filled in the seats starting from the furthest back and moving forward. The seating consisted of two short, gray metal benches running along either side of the transport, with heavy-duty black nylon seat straps for each occupant, and an overhead spot for them to snap their weapons into.

Dutifully, each of the hard-nosed soldiers secured the weapons into their spots, in this case the newer Spitfire v7 plasma rifles, before removing their helmets and laying them on their laps. They reached to their sides, bringing up the adjustable ends of their security belts. With a loud snap, they clicked their belts locked.

Space Infantry, Space Marines, their cammies and weapons I'd seen many times before, perhaps too many times already, during the ongoing campaign against the nefarious Roaches. On this particular mission, however, it was the bizarre coloration of their uniforms that held my attention. The squad of twelve, plus their fearsome and well-known commanding officer, were all wearing standard issue, camouflage pattern fatigues. In contrast to the tan or green shades I was used to seeing, however, the articles of clothing before me had been dyed in an uncommon combination of gray and black.

The outside of our vessel had undergone a similar metamorphosis, with the addition of an even more bizarre color, dark purple. The lower parts of the ship were painted in an irregular black pattern to represent grass, the middle and top half in various shades of the same gray and black as the soldier's cammies, and the very top had purple streaks on the roof and upper edges to mimic hanging leaves. Even with the quick-dry techniques the Space Corps contractors had used, we'd still been waiting a few hours for the paint to dry.

Upon viewing the odd hues for the first time, the ship's Senior Spaceman, Royce Tennard, immediately and affectionately nicknamed the vessel the 'Purple Haze.' He said he'd named it after some obscure twentieth century rock music, but I'd never heard of the song personally. Who the hell was Jimmy Hendricks, anyway?

With both the Marines and the Unilink Transport so curiously disguised, I thought that the landscape of our target planet, Lesenia, must be a very strange one indeed.

"I hope we run into some o' them black devils." One young ebony soldier beamed. I immediately thought of the term B.A.M., or Broad Ass Marine, that I'd heard somewhere or other. The woman aimed an invisible weapon across the transport and slowly squeezed its trigger. "Boo-yeah!"

On the opposite bench, a freckled blond man pretended he'd been shot. He grabbed at his heart, closed his eyes and lolled his head to one side. As a final gesture of his fatality, he stuck his tongue out. This man's name was Finn, I would come to find out very shortly.

"I hear that." The heavy shouldered Marine sitting next to the black woman nodded. "Some filthy Roaches are about to get themselves served!"

"Are you finished sightseeing, Douglas?" An impatient voice grated at my ears. I swiveled my seat around to face the front of the ship. I turned my head toward the Senior Spaceman's chair, where the pudgy pilot was seated and giving me an irritated look.

Tennard leaned in close, since the cockpit was of open design and sound carried well against the mainly metal interior of the transport. He was near enough for me to get a good look at his balding brown hair, thick brown mustache and fleshy jowls. "Just listen to those turkeys. They actually think we're going to see some action on this trip. So Lesenia hasn't communicated with CP-1 (Command Post One) in thirty-six Earth hours, big fucking deal. Things like that happen all the time at these new outposts.

"CP-1 panics every time and they send in the cavalry, and all for what? We go halfway across the universe to an outpost in butt-fuck Egypt, only to find that some relay burned out or that they need to realign their satellites one more time. Then we get to stand by and watch as the outpost reboots its computer system and voila! The problem is solved. Try explaining that scenario to Renquist's lynch mob. You'd think they all jerk off to their rifles, except for that dark-skinned woman. I bet she uses her rifle as a dildo."

As if on cue, the stern voice of Staff Sergeant James Renquist cracked through the vessel's bowels like a hard whip. "Davis, Knotts, secure your traps."

"Yes, Staff Sergeant." The two Marines complied. "Oorah!"

The grim-looking man slammed the transport's hatch shut, hard enough that I winced even though I saw it coming. Next, he pressed the small control pad that would secure the hatch and give it an airtight seal.

Since the two bench seats were completely full, Renquist unlatched an auxiliary seat that folded out from the wall. The problem with doing this was that Renquist would be seated directly behind Tennard. The Marine's proximity would severely curtail the Senior Spaceman's ability to colorfully express himself.

"Fuck." Tennard mumbled.

"We're all in." Renquist growled.

Tennard glanced over at me. "Douglas, why don't you do take care of the safety check?"

I nodded, retrieving the metal clipboard from its narrow slot to my side. The list on it was a hastily printed out copy naming the Marines we were about to transport.

I left the semi-comfort of my padded seat and strode down the center aisle. Luckily, it was a good four feet wide and far enough away from the passengers that I didn't end up stepping on anybody's boots. I began checking the names off the list, after reading the stencil writing on the soldier's front left pockets.

The Marines all looked to be in their twenties, except for the Staff Sergeant, whom I guessed to be between thirty-five and forty. They were all part of one of the better-known outfits in the Space Marines, Platoon Ten-Twenty, and from what I'd heard each Marine was specifically chosen for the mission by Renquist. Most of the soldiers looked well seasoned by war, with weathered faces creased by hard lines. I wondered how much action these young soldiers had seen.

I took in their duds too, contrasting them to my dark blue Spaceman uniform. Cold eyes and dark countenances met mine. I became unnerved by the scrutiny, lowering my head and focusing my full attention on the clipboard. Although part of the safety check included making sure that all seatbelts were in place and secure, I skipped over that detail and went back to my chair.

"All passengers accounted for, sir." I told Tennard.

"Good." The Spaceman nodded, standing and leaning forward over the control panel with a cloth towel in his hand. He impatiently removed a smudge on the corner of the wide, rectangular Plasti-Shield window. Afterward, he tossed the towel into its holding bin and dumped his big butt back in his chair. "I've decided to shake things up a little, Douglas. You've seen me take this bird out enough times, haven't you? How would you like to do it on your own today?"

Whether the question emerged as the result of actually advancing my training, or just plain laziness on the part of the Senior Spaceman, was a moot point. I nearly jumped out of my seat. "I'd love to!"

"Don't get all worked up about it." Tennard pointed a warning finger at me. "You have to remember to do everything in its proper sequence, and you have to make sure each step is done correctly before you proceed with the next one. Exactly the way I've been showing you for the last couple of months."

"Right." I nodded.

"Now, have you informed our target Link of our impending arrival?"

"I have. Five minutes ago."

"Have they given us a confirmation code?"

"Yes."

"Have you double-checked the landing coordinates we were given to make sure they match up with the coordinates on our master list?"

"Coordinates have been confirmed."

"So far, so good." Tennard scrutinized the information on his side of the dashboard. His end was a mirror of mine, except for the override control cluster which was nearly centered between us, but leaning a little toward him. This cluster would allow Tennard to quickly take control of the situation if, heaven forbid, some mishap were to occur. The hefty man reached for his security belt. "Let's get ourselves buckled in and you can continue with the fire-up procedure." He tilted his chair by about ninety degrees to one side. "Sergeant Renquist, the Purple Haze is about to depart."

Renquist shifted his own gaze toward the back end of the transport. "You heard the man, jarheads! We are Pulsing out! Dempsey, what in the name of all that's holy are you sitting on? Will you stop squirming around so much?"

I heard a Marine bark back, "Sorry, sir!"

I'll tell you right now, I was nervous. I took a deep breath, before I glanced over at Tennard. Once he'd given me his official nod of approval, I pressed the first of the four Pulse-Magnifier buttons. Next to the button was a small LED bar. I watched closely as it filled from red to green. Once it finished up a read-out next to it showed one hundred percent. I pressed the second button and repeated the same sequence on down until all four Magnifiers were fully loaded.

The Pulse Activate button came next. I hovered my finger right over the little black square and once again looked to Tennard for confirmation.

He was watching my actions intently. "Go ahead."

This is it, I thought to myself. I brought my index finger down on the button. Almost immediately, the Purple Haze began to quiver. The first Pulse took place, giving me the impression that the transport's walls were contracting inward. The second Pulse followed shortly, repeating the effect of the first, while adding a bright, white sheen to everything in sight. The third Pulse arrived several seconds later than the others, bringing with it a blinding white glare that made me wince. This Pulse proved to be strong enough to send us into outer space.

To someone observing from the deck around us, it would have appeared as if a great ball of light had enveloped the Purple Haze, briefly glowing like a miniature sun, then fading away a second later. Once the glare was gone, so too would be Unilink Transport Number 126. To the shuttle's occupants, however, the ride was disappointingly short. The Link System had been perfected to the point where the journey through the stars was about as exciting as a trip to the post office.

As quickly as it had appeared, the glare subsided. I opened my eyes to stare out the lone Plasti-Shield window and verified that our trip through the stars had been a success. The first words to greet me were 'Link Outpost: 01-77,' stenciled in large, black, block letters high up on a plain concrete wall.

"Yes!" I ejaculated. The word had already spilled out and all over the inside the shuttle before I realized how loud I'd said it.

"Remember protocol, Douglas." Tennard reminded me.

Eagerly, I scanned around the small dock, becoming a little disappointed that no human beings were around to witness my very first hands-on Pulse jump. I did see a Navigation Droid, however, about four feet tall and shaped like a cylinder with three short, stiff legs, rolling out to greet us. The Nav-Droid's large display panel flashed the word 'OKAY' on it. At the same time, it was emitting short bursts of light toward our transport's receptor unit. The ship's computer converted these electronic signals into readable data.

"Target link has been attained." I proudly read off my display. "Nav-Droid reports a perfect link-up, with no structural or radiation damage to either our vessel or to the outpost, or to the general surface of the planet we just landed on."

"Well done, Douglas, theatrics notwithstanding." Tennard more or less congratulated me. The portly man busied himself with the navigational charts on his screen. "Inform me as soon as the Pulse Magnifiers are ready again."

What a bitter turd, I grumbled in my head. I glanced over at the first Magnifier button, noting that it had gone down to sixty-two percent, right before I clicked it on. It would take a minute or two before all four Magnifiers were loaded again. While I waited, I leaned forward to peer out as far as I could past the edges of the window. "Where is everybody?"

Tennard didn't even bother to turn his head away from his screen. "You need to pay better attention to your surroundings, Douglas. It's after hours. Everything was done through the computer system."

The curt answer made me feel stupid.

I looked on my computer screen, discovering that it was half past three hundred hours in, where were we again, oh, in Dengas time. Next jump, I thought, I'll just keep my mouth shut. Was I the only person on the transport that was excited about traveling through the galaxy?

I caught the blink of the instrument panel telling me that Magnifier One was full. I clicked for Number Two to begin loading.

After this, I shifted my attention toward my computer screen and switched over to the navigation charts. Our next stop was Kuatica. I clicked on the name, prompting the computer to take me to the planet's information page. After a quick scan through the entry, I learned that Kuatica was a planet whose surface was covered nearly ninety percent under ice. Only a short strip of land had escaped this eternal winter, right along the planet's equator. Even this area was prone to temperatures of up to minus one hundred and twenty-eight degrees Celsius. (-262 F)

The idea of a planet covered in ice was fascinating to me. I resisted the urge to reveal this to the Senior Spaceman, who had the personal demeanor of an ice cube that had accidentally gotten buried in the freezer, and soured behind the veggies and meat. Instead, I pursed my lips and returned my focus to the Magnifiers. A few minutes later, I said, "Pulse Magnifiers are fully replenished, sir."

"You may proceed in ten seconds." Tennard said flatly. He shifted his chair back to face our live cargo. "We'll be making our second jump in just a few seconds. It should be just as smooth as our first."

A few grunts reached the front of the vessel, but not much else.

Steadier than the first time, I pressed the Pulse Activate button. The Pulses came again, as before, with each one stronger than the one previous. This time, it took us four tries to Pulse out.

Our arrival on Outpost 03-24 was as mundane as the previous one. A sentry garbed from head to toe in extra thick clothing stepped in front of the transport and waved a friendly arm in our direction. I waved back.

The usual model Nav-Droid rolled forward to stand beside this person. Oddly enough, the droid was also covered in thick cloth, all the way around except for its big, bright display. The droid started spouting out its short series of digital flashes.

"Another textbook landing." I said, more or less braggingly, as the incoming data was being translated on my screen. "The Nav-Droid is reporting that their main Pulse Generator is down for routine maintenance. Their back-up system is up and running in its place."

To manually confirm this, the sentry held up a lone finger, and right after gave us a thumb down. The person then held up two digits and gave the thumbs up. I held out an open hand to signal that we understood.

Tennard flipped his chair around to relay this to the Marine sitting right behind him. "The main power grid here is down, but their secondary system is available. It'll take us a few minutes longer than usual to get back up to full power."

"Whatever it takes." Renquist bluntly replied.

"It's not like we have a choice." One of the other Marines muttered.

"Yeah, we do." Another man countered. "We can get off right here. I heard they have a seven-day (convenience) store right around the corner. Hey, Spacemen, open up the hatch so we can jump out and head for the nearest beer garden!"

"Shut up, Brick." Somebody said.

Tennard rolled his eyes at me, before he started switching the Pulse Magnifiers to draw from the auxiliary system instead of the primary. It was a brief task, and the man was soon sighing and leaning back in his seat. Wordlessly, Tennard stared out through the rectangular window, with his hands clasped over his stout stomach.

For half a second, I wondered what the man might be thinking, until I happened to glance at the temperature reading for the dock. I converted it into the more familiar Fahrenheit.

"It's almost minus one hundred degrees out there, inside the dock!" I blurted out, but if I was expecting some kind of reaction from Tennard I sure didn't get it.

The burly man kept staring through the Plasti-Shield with an irritated look in his face, as if he'd rather be anywhere else in the universe than packed into a tin can with a baker's dozen unruly Marines.

The sentry, I noticed next, was now tinkering with the engine on a small forklift. I wondered how that guy could stand working in such extreme cold. He must have been freezing balls out there!

Since there wasn't much else to do but wait, I swiveled my chair around and glanced back into the cargo section. Staff Sergeant Renquist, I noticed, was busy giving a last minute briefing to his people.

"According to our higher-ups," The hard man was saying. "Outpost 04-91 stopped responding to transmissions at nineteen hundred hours, approximately one day and a half ago Earth Standard. The usual culprits turn out to be minor technical glitches, but..." He cast a quick, sharp glance in Tennard's direction. "You never know until you actually get there."

"We'd just started our seventy-two hours (three days off.)." One of the more broad shouldered of the bunch shook his head. This was Knotts, if I remembered right. "It just doesn't seem fair, Staff Sergeant. We were finally getting some time off before being whisked out to Twenty-Nine Stumps again (Marine Division Combat Center at Twenty Nine Palms, California), and Boom! We're on another fucking mission. We didn't even have time to make a pit stop at Tia-Juana to pick up some hookers!"

"Well, let's just hope somebody forgot to switch their transmitter on." Another Marine commented dryly. "And that it isn't anything more serious than that."

"Don't you worry about a thing, Staff Sergeant." The ebony woman, Davis, raised her hand to high-five Knotts sitting beside her. After a loud smack, she added, "Me and Numb-Nuts here, and the rest of our posse, we can take care of anything that so much as blinks at us the wrong way."

"Yut, yut!" Somebody seconded.

"It's Knotts." Her fellow corrected. "Stop calling me Numb-Nuts, please."

A few suppressed chuckles were heard.

"So, we're getting sent out to the farthest end of the freaking galaxy, and all for what?" The soldier I recognized as Dempsey spoke up. "Just 'cause some purple branch fell off a stupid tree, and knocked some egghead on his ass hard enough that he forgot to check in with CP-1 later?"

"It's a little more complicated than that." Renquist grimly explained. "The outpost equipment was already verified as working properly. The problem is we haven't gotten any word from them in a day and a half. They haven't responded to CP-1's inquiry calls, either. Besides that, there are other security measures available to them."

"They've got a couple of those, right?" A new face asked. "Security measures?"

Renquist nodded. "If the main hardware did happen to go down, there are two recently instituted options available. One is the Pulse System itself. A coded message can easily be transmitted in a relatively low powered Pulse. Also, every outpost is now equipped with a tracking beacon that can emit a distress call. Any nearby space-faring vessels or satellites have the ability to pick this signal up. As of the time we boarded this transport, neither one of these security measures has been activated."

"So what does CP-1 think happened out there?" This question came from a Hispanic soldier, sporting short-cropped hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. "You've got what, maybe ten survey people unaccounted for. Half of them are eggheads with at least basic weapons training, and the other half is full time infantry, right? If it was a typical survey mission, they had wide range, energy trace scanners and perimeter motion sensors. They've got the works out there. How could anything big enough to take out that many people and defenses, just sneak up on the outpost and not give anyone a minute or two to send out a distress call?"

"Rubalcava, that's just it." Renquist answered. "Command Post One doesn't know what happened. That's why they assigned us to go find out. Our M.I.A. count is much higher than that. We've got just over thirty people on Lesenia, plus the three transports and all the equipment they took out there with them."

"Thirty people couldn't send out one simple message?" Rubalcava asked. "Why so many bodies out there, anyway?"

"The brass had big plans for that neck of the woods, up until about thirty-six hours ago." Renquist informed them. "Lesenia is an ideal location. Its atmospheric conditions are perfectly suited for humans, it has no intelligent cultures to speak of and the few reports regarding the larger wildlife indicate that it should domesticate easily. The planet is positioned in a good central location and that makes it an ideal jumping point for the unexplored solar systems nearby. The original plan was to build a full-scale regiment headquarters on that rock and to pop out new outposts from there as the need arises."

Ominously, the entire transport got quiet. The Marines began to look at one another.

"I'll say it, because I know everybody here is thinking about it." Dempsey sounded agitated. "Betelren Six."

"Four words, shit-brick." Davis snarled. "Shut. The fuck. Up."

"The last word is," Renquist went on. "That the outpost personnel had just started sending out satellites to investigate the rocks around them and bring back samples."

"Maybe an Explorer Drone brought back something that wiped them out." Someone suggested.

"Or maybe something changed on Lesenia." Rubalcava theorized. "Maybe the temperature suddenly dropped or the air quality changed. Maybe it happened too fast for them to deal with it."

"Maybe they ate something they didn't agree with." Knotts shrugged.

"Or maybe, they didn't agree with something that ate them." Someone joked, causing a short ripple of laughter from the others.

"We're assuming that the planet's atmosphere will not be a problem." Renquist stated. "Explorer Drones thoroughly tested the air quality and soil well before any human being set foot on Lesenia. In the highly unlikely event that the atmosphere has somehow changed, the monitors mounted on the outside of this transport will warn us about it. In that case, we'll simply Pulse back to the nearest outpost and report our findings to CP-1."

"That's even worse than being yanked off leave!" Knotts complained. "We'll be sitting at an outpost playing with our balls until somebody rounds up a bunch of bio-dorks, and then we'll still end up going to Lesenia as their escorts!"

"We are in The Big Suck." The Marine named Brickwell commented.

The Senior Spaceman started tapping impatiently on my side of the instrument panel. "Pay attention, Douglas."

I turned my seat around, realizing that enough energy had been drawn into the first Magnifier for me to move on to the next one. As I started loading the next, I tried to keep an ear on the conversation going on behind me.

"Hey, Brick," Someone said. "You haven't been out to Lesenia lately, have you? I heard Brickwell once wiped out an entire colony with one of his gas attacks. Maybe he snuffed the entire outpost after one too many bean burritos!"

"Oh, stuff it up your..."

"Next one, Douglas." Tennard was trying to jerk me back to attention, but I was still watching the read-out.

I clicked on the third Magnifier, watching it fill up as quickly as the second. I never did understand why sometimes one Magnifier would take forever to load up, while the rest only took a fraction of the time. The fourth took less than a minute.

"Are we ready now, Douglas?" Tennard was trying to irritate me now, and I have to admit it was working pretty good. The Senior Spaceman spun around in his chair, as if he couldn't wait to get the mission over and the Marines off his transport. "System's up. We'll be Pulsing out in about five seconds." To me, he said, "Go ahead, Douglas."

I waited the whole five seconds, before I pushed the magic button.

Once again, the transport began to Pulse. The lone sentry turned to watch us leave. I waved at him in between white flashes. After a mere seven Pulses, we finally left the hangar.

Unexpectedly, the transport dipped hard enough to feel like the sudden descent on a roller coaster. Right after, it began rocking forcefully from side to side, or in deep plunges like a wild bronco.

My first thought was that I'd done something wrong; that I'd done something out of sequence or that I had somehow screwed up the coordinates. When I turned to look at my superior, I could see that Tennard was finally registering some kind of emotion on his face. Unfortunately, it was a mask of fear that stared back at me.

"Something's wrong!" Tennard cried out in terror. "This pathway was rated as being low risk!" He tried to keep his head still to scan his computer screen. "This can't be! The coordinates have changed midway through the jump!" Futilely, the man glanced out the window. We were both shocked to see that the white glare of the Pulse was still evident outside, enveloping the entire transport. "We're caught in flux!"

With my head rattling from the jarring motions, I looked down at my own set of coordinates, only to see the digits flicker before my eyes. "The coordinates just changed again! Our new landing site is several hundred miles away from our original target!"

"What?" Tennard asked in disbelief. He verified this on his own terminal. "These numbers are random! Enter our original coordinates in manually while I try to stabilize us!"

Without answering, I slapped down the override button, clearing the landing coordinates from the screen. I started punching in the sequence to Lesenia's outpost again. Before I could finish, the transport bucked forward. Only my tightly secured restraining belt kept me from smashing my face into the bank of controls.

"Yeeehaaa!" One of the Marines behind me yelled. "This beats the state rodeo!"

The vessel suddenly pitched upward. My flailing arms and legs caused my chair to swing over to one side, before I got a good grip on the control panel and stopped myself. I watched two unlucky Marines roll off their seats and down the center aisle. Brutally, they got knocked into the legs of their fellow soldiers and against the hard parts of the transport benches. The Marines regained their bearings right away and recovered their helmets. With the help of their fellows they made it back to their seats.

"Freaking Sunday drivers!" One of them complained.

"Strap yourselves in tighter next time, girls." Renquist admonished them with his grating barks. "I hear the main feature is about to begin!"

Still clasping the control panel with both hands, I forced my chair to face forward with my waist. As fast as I could manage, I entered the correct landing coordinates, only to see the screen replace them with its own numbers again. I nearly screamed out loud from frustration.

Tennard had witnessed this unexpected change as well. "The computer won't let us use our original site!" He said, flailing his arms out as he lurched sideways in conjunction with the rolling transport. Tennard's restraint pulled tight against his middle. "Uuunnn!" He grimaced. "We've got to use whatever the computer will allow! Lock in to the next set of numbers that's anywhere near the outpost, while I try to level us out again!"

In an even sharper angle than before, the front of the Purple Haze pitched upwards and I found myself pinned back hard on my seat. I strained forward to reach the terminal controls, but even with my fingertips stretched to their limits, I was still several inches too short. Straining against his security belt, Tennard smashed at the stabilizers with his fist, causing the back of the vessel to buck up once, nearly putting us level. The next time he punched those same buttons, the back of the ship jolted upward. Behind me I could hear a helmet bouncing around on the floor.

"Marine!" Renquist's voice cut through the chaos like a chainsaw. "Retrieve your head cover, NOW!"

"Yessir!" A muffled voice answered him.

Tennard was pounding at the stabilizer controls, while at the same time cursing them for not responding immediately. When they finally did comply, it was totally unexpected and felt as if somebody had slammed on the brakes. The force threw us both forward. This time the seat restraint tore into my gut as well.

The soldier who had gone to retrieve his helmet had been hopelessly caught by surprise. With nothing to hold him in place, the poor guy flew forward. Cruelly, he slammed into the rear portion of my seat, which was hard metal covered by a thin layer of foam and fabric. The impact was a loud and sickening crack, like the splintering of ice. It was so revolting that I couldn't even bring myself to look back and see if he was all right.

"Finn!" Someone called out. "Finn!"

"Marine, get on your feet!" Renquist ordered. "Get on your feet now!"

"He's not getting up, sir!" Dempsey sounded squeamish.

"I can see that, you moron!"

Tennard finally managed to decrease some of the rocking and rolling. This gave me the break I needed. "Coordinates locked on, sir!"

The Staff Sergeant's loud voice boomed out again. "Neelson! Come up here and check on Finn! Everybody else, stay put! That includes you, Dempsey!"

"Sorry, sir!"

"Stand by, Douglas!" The Senior Spaceman shouted at me. "I'm going to try and get us out of flux!"

I moved my hands away from the instruments and tightly gripped the sides of my seat. The transport started vibrating so violently it seemed as if it was about to shake apart.

"Finn's life signs are down!" Neelson called out, from right behind my chair.

"Well, don't just gawk at him, help me roll him back and strap him down with the floor belts!" Renquist ordered.

"Yes, sir!"

The vessel shuddered so hard it made my brain hurt. Through chattering teeth I asked, "What's happening?"

"The outpost computer is trying to send us somewhere else!" Tennard growled. "Prepare to switch all auxiliary power to the Pulse Magnifiers, on the count of three!"

I switched to the correct screen and quickly set this up.

"Three!"

"Two!"

"One!"

"Go!"

Simultaneously, Tennard pushed the manual override and brought the locked-on coordinates back onto the screen. I channeled all non-essential electrical power to further boost the waning energy in the Magnifiers. The moment this was done, Tennard punched the Pulse Activate button.

The entire inside of our small ship went black, while outside the bright glow of the Pulse still engulfed us. A moment later, the Pulse faded. We were left to stare through the Plasti-Shield at an endless wood of thick, gray tree trunks with large, drooping purple leaves. The Purple Haze appeared to be lying awkwardly on a slope and tilted some forty-five degrees up at the highest point.

"How could the outpost override our manual commands?" I asked, hurriedly unbuckling my seat restraint. I half-climbed onto my newly angled seat and began examining the various readings and instruments.

"Maybe someone at the outpost became aware of our distress and tried to redirect the ship back to the original landing site." Tennard anxiously surmised. "I don't know! For a second, it felt as if the two computers, the one here on the ship and the one at the outpost, were trying to send us in different directions. The way the coordinates were jumping around like that we could have been in flux forever, or worse, we could have run out of energy and blinked out of existence altogether. I'm just glad we're still in one piece right now."

"Do you think it was Roaches?" I asked.

"It couldn't be." Tennard shook his head, finally managing to undo his own restraint. He took in a deep breath before he continued. "The Link System is supposed to be beyond their technology. Besides, they've never been spotted in this side of the galaxy before. Activate the auto-check circuit. Let's see if anything got damaged during our little joyride through hell."

I did. Within a few seconds the system beeped its completion.

Tennard was already staring at his screen, propping his legs against his seat to keep his big frame aloft. "Life support systems are still at full power, thank heaven. All of our auxiliary systems are way down, between ten and twenty percent. That's to be expected after such a huge power draw. Interior lights and interior electronics are either at zero or almost there. The Magnifiers are all at zero." He shook his head. "A couple more seconds in flux and we would be nothing but memories right now."

"How's the air quality outside?" Renquist came up behind us. He braced himself on the back of Tennard's seat, to keep from sliding down into the dark bowels of the ship.

"Give me a second to reroute some power." Tennard said. It only took a few moments to get this done. "According to the sensors, air quality and environmental conditions are precisely as expected, all well within safety standards."

"Did you hear that, jarheads?" Renquist's voice boomed through the darkness like a freightliner's foghorn. "It's party time! Secure your brain buckets, unfasten your seat belts and grab your weapons, all in that exact sequence. Proceed towards the hatch in an orderly fashion and prepare to exit. Menden, un-secure that hatch! It's time for us to evac this sardine can!"

Glimpses of the shuffling Marines were visible, barely, through the tiny rays of sunlight that managed to invade the inside of the transport.

"Sir, the hatch is not operational!" Menden called out, punching repeatedly and fruitlessly at the unlocking pad.

"You might consider manual overriding it, you imbecile." Renquist spat back. "Davis, Knotts, you two will be bringing up the rear. Bring Finn outside with the rest of us."

With a loud wrench, Menden forced the lever that kept the hatch in place. We could hear the air seals being released a second later. A couple of awkward kicks dislodged the hatch from its thick rubber surrounds and finally the hatch jerked open and allowed a long stream of daylight to enter the dark vehicle.

Menden slid aside, going back to his seat to grab the remainder of his gear. The rest of the Marines used whatever handholds they could grab and filed into a short line that started at the hatch. One by one they made their exit. There was a gruesomely uncomfortable moment as Davis and Knotts tried to maneuver themselves while carrying the dead body of Finn. Menden helped solve this problem by bracing Knotts' back until the two sturdy Marines got out with the corpse. Right behind Menden at the hatch was Renquist, who paused and glared back at the two Spacemen.

"Some technical glitch." He cursed, before he too was gone.

The Senior Spaceman ignored the sarcastic comment, choosing instead to focus his attention on the vessel's barely functioning control panel. "That's strange. The comm. system doesn't want to power up at all."

"Short circuit?" I asked, rummaging through my head for the location of the repair equipment the transport carried. "Blown fuse, maybe?"

"I don't think it's either one." Tennard scratched at his fuzzy gourd. "The auto-check circuit reported that everything is in A-One condition. The display is showing that the comm. is at fourteen percent. I've checked it two different ways, so the number has to be accurate. The problem is that every time I try to route more power from one of the other systems, it doesn't go through. The power goes back to wherever I drew it from. I've never seen anything like it."

"So, the last jump might have screwed up the comm. system?"

"But why only the comm. system?" Tennard frowned at me. "Watch this." He poked at some buttons. The transport's lights flickered on, although only at around fifty percent of their normal brightness. "I can turn on the lights, and I can even start up the rag cleaner if I wanted to, but I can't call out."

"Wait, what's our minimum power requirement for calling out?" I thought back, suddenly feeling anxious all over again. "It's twenty-five percent, right? That means we can't even call the outpost to tell them where we ended up?"

Tennard nodded. "We can only get incoming messages, but at the moment it doesn't sound as if the outpost is all that concerned about what happened to us." He filled his cheeks up with air and blew it out as he changed the display on his computer. "What's worse is we ended up some fifty miles north and, uh, slightly east of our original landing site. With all the random numbers that kept flashing up on the screen, I doubt that either the outpost at Kuatica or the one here on Lesenia ever got our final coordinates."

"So we're lost out here, just like the scientists from the outpost?" I balked.

Tennard glanced into the bowels of the ship, as the lights suddenly began to glow brighter. He turned back to the control panel and shifted screens again. "Oh, good! Outside power is being channeled back into our system. That means the Pulse Generator here on the planet is still operational and capable of sending energy to us. I think the outpost might be trying to rescue us, finally! Let me reroute all this extra power away from the lights and over to the Magnifiers."

"The outpost is okay?" I wondered. You don't know how much that relieved me.

"It certainly appears so." Tennard nodded. He tried the comm. again and made a quick grimace. "Still no luck on getting through to them. Here's what we'll do: I'll keep watch on the Magnifiers and you start working on a Long Reach Radio. We've got to get some kind of communication going with the outpost."

I went through a mental inventory of the equipment in the cargo holds. "We should have enough parts to make at least five of those things."

"The power is flowing nicely into the Magnifiers." Tennard noticed, sounding as comforted as I felt. "See if you can raise anyone on the outpost."

I excused myself and clambered over toward the hatch. The eerily toned landscape, with its vegetation of gray trees and dark purple leaves, and the knee-high grasses in varying shades of black, was nothing short of spectacular. If there was one thing I regretted, it was not having the time to enjoy it more.

### 2

I jumped out of the transport, noticing that the Marines had all taken their packs out of the cargo holds, which were set up similar to the holds of travel buses back on Earth. I took a moment to close and secure all the doors, before stepping over to the bay reserved for extra field equipment. A few other equipments cases were in there, containing short-wave radios, general-purpose tools and the like. Finally, I located the case marked LRR (Long Reach Radios). It was a pretty heavy case. I found that out the second I'd hauled it into my arms. I closed the storage door and latched it shut, before I walked off with the single case.

"I've got more power on the way now." Tennard's voice drifted out. "I'll be out in a second to give you a hand."

"Affirmative." I called back.

Menden was standing guard just a few feet away from the hatch, shifting uneasily. The rest of the Marines had retreated to a spot some thirty feet further away from the vessel. It looked as if they were preparing for a long march. I groaned inside when I thought of the fifty long miles between the outpost and our position.

"I heard that." Menden said. "About getting power from the outpost. We shouldn't be stranded out here too much longer, right?"

"Not much longer." I reassured him, pretending the equipment case wasn't as heavy as it really was. I glanced around for a good flat spot to set the case, since I knew I was going to have to put the radio together regardless. At the same time, I didn't want to sit right next to the Marines either.

By now, you might have guessed that Spacemen and MAD (Marine Division of Space Corps) did not always get along. The rivalry was even worse between MAD and SID (Space Infantry Division of Space Corps). I usually tended to stay out those kinds of things, because in the end we're all on the same side, right? At least, I thought we were.

I'd barely lowered the heavy burden to the ground when I heard a commotion start up from the Purple Haze.

"Staff Sergeant!" Menden shouted.

I spun around to observe the familiar white glow weave itself around the tilted transport and peaking much more rapidly than it should have. The lone Pulse got so bright and hot it caused the panicky Menden to run for cover. I had to lower my head, wince my eyes and cover my face all at the same time. The damned vessel looked as if it was about to go supernova. A second later, the flare dwindled away into nothingness. The sudden burst of light had taken the Unilink Transport away with it.

Knotts invaded my peripheral vision, his Spitfire rifle grasped and ready. "What the hell just happened?"

"Those flyboys showed their true colors." The disruptive Davis stepped up next to him. "Yellow."

"Naw, look." Some unknown soldier pointed at me. "One of them got left behind."

"You're in The Suck now." Brickwell commented in my direction. "Right along with the rest of us."

"Spaceman Douglas, ree-port!" Renquist commanded. The stern man had been hurrying toward the spot where the transport had stood, but now diverted his steps toward me.

I was as flabbergasted as the rest of them. "I'm not sure what happened."

"See, that goofy Spaceman knew we were all goners." Dempsey whined. "He lit out the first chance he got!"

A lot of big, ugly Marines were coming at me now, as I straightened up to try and defend my superior. "Tennard couldn't have done that. We were still in the process of replenishing the Pulse Magnifiers. He wouldn't have Pulsed out before they were ready. Maybe the outpost sent out a single, high powered Pulse to retrieve the transport."

"Can the outpost even do that, Staff Sergeant?" Dempsey asked.

"Sure they can, you shit-bird." Renquist snapped. "That's how Space Corps gets its vessels back when they're out exploring new planets like this one. They just don't do it very often because it's such a drag on the Pulse Generators."

"I heard the Spaceman saying it was too much power." Mended added. "Why would they need to use an emergency Pulse when the outpost was sending the transport plenty of energy to begin with?"

Renquist's sharp features sharpened even more. "Douglas, what are the chances that whoever sent that emergency Pulse locked in to our present location?"

"One hundred percent." I answered. "As soon as Tennard punched in the request for more power the outpost computer, or whoever it was, would have locked onto these coordinates. They know exactly where we are now."

"We have to press on to the nearest defendable position." Renquist concluded. "We can't afford to take any chances by staying here. Not if the Roaches or anything else might pop up at any second, with all of us just standing around like a bunch of school girls waiting to be asked to the dance." He glanced down at the closed case on the ground. "What's in that container?"

"LRR parts." I replied. "I was about to put together a radio."

"You'll get that chance, but not here." Renquist said, before he turned to address the rest of the Marines. "Two columns, ten feet apart, weapons at the ready. Davis, Knotts, bring Finn's body with you. Douglas, fall in to the rear. Rubalcava, give me a heading."

"Finn's backpack, sir?" Somebody asked.

"Give it to Douglas." Renquist said.

"Staff Sergeant," Rubalcava called out, staring into the small screen of his GPS (Global Positioning System) Mapper. "We've got a wide clearing about half a click to the east. We've still got trees all around it, but we should be able to pick up anything moving toward us from this direction."

"All right, jarheads, you've got the word." Renquist said. "Let's get this show on the road!"

A backpack dropped on the ground beside me. Just from the sound of it I knew it was going to be heavy. Right after, I glanced at the sturdy Marines around me. Some of these guys could bench-press around three hundred pounds, or so I'd heard. And here I was doing my reps at a third of that weight. I was looking at a seventy pound backpack and what was probably a sixty pound equipment case sitting a couple of feet away from it. FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition), I thought.

I hoisted the pack on my shoulders, but I didn't even have time to adjust the straps on it before the small squad was already positioned to march. Clumsily, I crouched and nabbed the equipment case.

I took my spot at the end of the line, right across from the two Marines holding a dead body aloft. In my thoughts I started cursing Marine Division, Space Corps and all interstellar species currently posing a threat to humanity.

The group started moving, so fast I was having trouble keeping up even with the corpse. Its head and body lolled about slightly as the two big Marines carried it over the uneven terrain, I morbidly noticed.

Less than ten minutes later, we left the cover of the vegetation and crossed into the clearing, only to continue on into the shadow of a new set of trees. These were bushier than the previous bunch. Their purple leaves were much smaller and more abundant, so much that many of them had dropped to clutter up the ground. The few visible patches of dirt we trudged over were colored in an elephant shade of gray.

My biceps were straining from the weight of the stupid case. I was doing my best to not give away my discomfort to any of the other soldiers.

"Radio silence unless it's an absolute emergency." Renquist barked. "We don't want any unfriendlies picking up our chatter. Brickwell, Dobson, you will scout a quarter click to the east of our position and keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. Davis, Knotts, you will do the same to the west. Head out on the double."

"Staff Sergeant," Brickwell muttered. "This whole planet is out of the ordinary. The leaves out here are fucking purple."

A few of the others chuckled.

I thought Renquist would pitch a bitch over being interrupted, but he didn't. He just went on as if he'd grown accustomed to hearing such things from his subordinates.

"Menden, find yourself a good tree to climb and make like a squirrel." The hard man continued barking. "Neelson, Strawberry, you two are on fire-watch, on opposite ends of our position, twenty yards out. As for the rest of you, Dempsey, Mason and Zachs will be digging out a resting place for our fallen brother. Rubalcava, whenever you're ready, feel free to give me your own odd perspective on this cluster-fuck we've just gotten ourselves dropped into. Spaceman Douglas, you will be stripping off your uniform and replacing it with Finn's."

I intended to set my case on the ground, but my biceps were throbbing enough to get my fingers to rebel. The case slipped out of my hands. It made such a loud clamor upon bouncing on the leaves you would have thought I was a little kid throwing a tantrum.

A lot of Marines turned to gaze at me. These faces included that of Staff Sergeant Renquist and his cruel, predatory eyes. "Is there a problem here, Douglas?"

"No, sir." I said, quickly thinking up what one of his people might say. "I was just in a hurry to get going, sir."

This seemed to satisfy the man, as he turned back toward his squad. "Let's get moving, jarheads! We've got daylight burning out here!"

Wordlessly, I stepped over to where Finn's body lay. The man's neck was twisted to one side, his open eyes staring in my direction as if they were prematurely accusing me for the unholy act I was about to commit on his body. I glanced at some of the other men, but they were too busy removing Insta-Shovels from their backpacks to notice how uneasy I was.

Knowing I couldn't put the gruesome task off any longer, I removed my backpack, which was really Finn's backpack, and I knelt down by the dead man. I reached out to touch his chest, worried that he might suddenly wake up and start grabbing at my arms to stop me. Appallingly, Finn's body was still warm to the touch. I didn't dare look back at the others in case anyone was watching me, especially the hardnosed Staff Sergeant. I knew Renquist wouldn't hesitate to jump down my throat if he saw me having any misgivings about undressing a corpse.

Instead, I took the deepest breaths my lungs would allow, exhaled and embarked on my assigned duty. I unbuttoned the dead man's field shirt and went on to yank it off the long, limp and flopping arms. The belt I undid quickly, after which I began pulling and tugging fruitlessly at the camouflage pants, before dumbly realizing that the dead soldier's boots were still keeping them on.

"Any bright ideas, Rubalcava?" Renquist vocalized from a short distance away.

"I can't figure this place out." The Marine answered. "I read this planet's description as soon as I heard we were coming out here. We're supposed to have grazing animals, birds and insects all over the place, but where the hell are they? We haven't seen or heard anything except the bunch of us ever since we exited the transport."

"You know, I think you're right." Renquist commented. This was followed by a quick huff of irritation. "There's never a local zoologist around when you need one!"

By this time, I'd set Finn's outer clothing and boots into a neat pile a few feet from his body. I began taking off my own clothing and making a new pile next to the first one. As I did this, I noticed that the Marines had already marked off a suitably sized area to serve as the dead man's grave. They were efficiently loosening up the dirt.

One of them, a big, square-jawed man, stepped back to wipe a line of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He glanced at me standing there in my underwear. This big, unruly Marine had thick limbs and a strong five o'clock shadow. The lettering on his cammie blouse read: Mason. It felt a little awkward, as the guy didn't get back to work right away but just stood there watching me.

In my most casual voice, I asked, "Why exactly am I doing this?"

Mason smiled. "Take a wild guess, pretty boy."

Beside Mason, the Marine called Zachs, short for Zachary, snickered.

Not thinking I was going to get any further response, and feeling more visually violated by the second, I grabbed Finn's pants and started putting them on.

"Have a good look around, flyboy." Mason spoke out anyway. "You've got your gray tree trunks and your black grass, and you've got purple leaves all over the floor."

"So?" I asked.

"Now take a look at your cute little uniform." Mason continued. He was still ogling me like a lecher. "You tell me what doesn't belong."

I glanced at the pile of clothes I'd just taken off. They were a rich shade of blue. Against the strange background of the forest, I realized, my uniform would stick out like a sore thumb. I looked back at Mason.

"See, you're not as stupid as you look." The soldier concluded with an unnerving wink, before returning to his shoveling.

Feeling more than a little disturbed, I got dressed in a hurry. As I finished, I ran my eyes across Finn's dead body one last time. That's when I noticed the thin, metal bead necklace secured around his throat. I crouched down, not really wanting to pull on the necklace, but I did it anyway. I soon had the soldier's dog tags in my fingers. They were simple, flat metal tags, with the bearer's last name and Space Corps ID number engraved on them, as well as a tiny holographic image of the man's face.

Tradition held that if a soldier were killed on the field of battle, and if his body could not be brought back to the soldier's home planet, his dog tags would be removed and eventually they'd be returned to his surviving family. The pair of small items meant so much, and at the same time, I thought, they meant so very little.

"What should I do with these?"

Mason was already making a face before he glanced over at me, but his countenance softened once he saw what I held in my hand. Very seriously, he said, "You can't lose those tags. No matter what else happens, you can't lose them."

I stood up to stick them in a pocket.

"Not there." Mason shook his head. "They might fall out and get lost out here forever, in this godforsaken shit-hole of a planet. You can't take any chances with our tags. You have to wear them around your neck until you can hand them to somebody who knows what to do with them."

Quietly, I secured them around my neck.

"And if something happens to me," Mason continued. "Make sure you get mine too. Make sure they get back home to my family."

I opened my mouth to say something, but Renquist's loud voice interrupted me.

"Spaceman Douglas, I'd like a word with you." The Staff Sergeant called out.

Renquist stepped up before me. He stared at the dead man between us so long I eventually started staring at him myself.

"Finn was a good man. Hell of a way to go." He said, finally. "I would like you to put your uniform on this man's body, before we place him into the ground. He'd look proper being buried that way."

I nodded half-heartedly, but tried not to show it. It had been bad enough to strip the dead man, only for me turn around and dress him up again. I decided to start with the pants this time. I expected Renquist to stride off right away, but he didn't. He just loomed beside me like a small tower of pending violence.

"Have you seen a lot of casualties, Spaceman?" He asked.

"I've seen quite a few." I admitted. "I helped transport wounded soldiers during the battle over Betelren Six. We had some men expire during transit."

"Any combat duty?"

"Negative. I guess I've been lucky in that respect. I've always been popping up in places well back from the front lines." I sighed, remembering how happy I'd been earlier. "Today was the first time I've ever taken a bird out. I sure made a big mess out of doing that."

Renquist considered this. "I don't see how you can be blamed for it. Senior Spaceman Tennard was sitting right beside you. Even his many years of experience were not enough to keep us out of the frying pan."

I started yanking my blue pants over the humps of the dead man's buttocks, which let me tell you, wasn't easy.

"Douglas, I know you haven't received the same intensive training that my Marines have," Renquist stated a moment later. "And I understand that Space Corps and Marine Division don't always see things eye to eye. What I need to know from you is that you realize that we're all in this situation together, down to the last person. If we want to survive this mission we'll have to do it as a team."

It was an odd thing to say, since we hadn't encountered anything hostile yet. Did Renquist know something more than the rest of us?

"If I give you an order, an order that might even contradict Space Corps training, I want to be sure that you will do your best to follow it. Just like any of the other Marines under my command would. I'm asking for you to be one of us for the time being, a soldier, a Marine, and that you remain that way until we get off this stinking planet."

Don't ask me how I knew this, but I got the impression that Renquist truly believed he was going to die on Lesenia.

"I will do my best to follow your orders, sir." I told him.

"Very good." Renquist said, immediately after this making an informal about-face and stepping toward one of the taller tree trunks. He stared up into its branches. "Menden, do you have any observations to report?"

"Only scout team one." The young Marine's voice drifted down. It was only then that I saw the man. He'd broken off a couple of leafy branches and set them all around his spot so he'd be harder to pinpoint. "They're about two hundred yards out and approaching. Other than that, all is clear."

"Menden, I want you to climb back down." Renquist ordered. "On the double."

The Staff Sergeant paced about a bit, as if he were trying to sort things out in his head. The moment Menden reached the ground, he said, "Come with me."

Both men soon stood by my side.

I was on my knees, struggling to get my shirt on Finn's much longer arms.

"Menden, finish dressing Finn." Renquist requested. "Douglas, let's get a look at those radio parts. Rubalcava, I'm going to need you as well."

More than glad to leave the corpse behind, I left Menden to the grisly chore and stepped over to the LRR case. I unsnapped the hard plastic clasps keeping the case shut and opened both halves flat on the ground. When I saw the parts and the condition they were in, I bolted up to my feet. In a hot flash, I felt angry enough to start screaming obscenities into the air. Only the fear that some unknown enemy might hear me kept me from spouting off. Still, I stood there grimacing and gritting at the sky.

Renquist took a lingering glance at me and asked, "What is it, Douglas?"

"The spaceport personnel back on Earth did not replace the LRR case with a fresh one." I growled. "Half the parts in here have been tagged for repair!"

"Murphy's fucking Law." Rubalcava shook his head. (For those of you that are unaware, Murphy's Law is an adage that signifies: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, at the worst possible moment.)

"That's what they should have named this rock." Renquist crouched down close to the radio case, where sure enough he saw yellow and red tags in abundance. "It's been nothing but Murphy's Law ever since we made that last jump. Sort through this stuff, Douglas. See if you can find anything we can use."

Still fuming, I dropped to my knees and started tossing out everything that was internally broken or externally damaged. Long Range Radios were always sent out in fragments because the pieces were so expensive to make. It was easier to replace half the radio than it was to lose the entire thing. The four basic parts were the transmitter, the receiver, the coupler that held both things together and the battery. When I was done, I didn't have enough parts to make even one good LRR.

"I have three unused batteries," I inventoried the contents remaining in the case. "And two working transmitters. I have no good receivers and no good couplers. We still can't call anybody to tell them that we're stranded out here! This is fucking bullshit!"

Renquist straightened up. He called out, "Neelson?"

"Yes, sir."

"Any sign of scout team two?"

"That would be a negative, Staff Sergeant."

"We've been sitting in one spot too long." Renquist turned back to face the rest of us. "Mason, Zachs, Shit For Brains, hurry up on that gravesite. I want to get moving as soon as possible."

"Staff Sergeant." Rubalcava said. "I have an old model X-13 in my backpack."

"The old field radio?"

The Marine nodded. "It's almost an antique now. I was going to send it to my father because he has a collection of old war memorabilia. I picked it up at MDRS this morning, along with a couple of other things. Since we didn't have any resting quarters there, I just stuck everything into my backpack. You may not know this, but the LRR radios evolved from the X-13s."

"What are you suggesting?"

"The X-13 is a short range radio, but it does have a smart coupler on it." He looked at me next. "Do you think you can take it apart, put it back together with some of the parts you have there, and use it to call out?"

"No." I shook my head. "The coupler doesn't have the right shielding to handle the battery from an LRR. I can connect the pieces together and maybe use the radio for all of ten seconds, before the radiation from the stronger battery will start frying up the components. Even then, we'll only have half a working radio because we don't have a receiver capable of picking up a long distance signal."

"But you will be able to transmit for ten or so seconds?" Renquist asked. "Enough to get one short message out?"

"Theoretically, yes." I admitted. "If the coupler holds together that long."

"Ten seconds may be all I need." The Staff Sergeant calculated. "Rubalcava, let's get that radio out. Find me the location of the nearest outpost to Lesenia."

"That would be Enoria, I think." Rubalcava quickly went to retrieve his backpack. He pulled out a tiny, laminated sheet from an outer pocket and began to study it. "Here it is. Enoria is outpost 03-44. If we can find a spot with decent elevation and no obstructions, I should be able to bounce a signal off one of the satellites orbiting this planet and send it their way."

I started sensing hope. "Once we transmit to the satellite, the satellite will inform the outpost computer of our radio signal. The outpost will know exactly where we are and they'll be able to come out here and get us!"

"Right." Rubalcava nodded.

"Negative." Renquist said. "This is exactly what we don't want. We don't want the outpost to know our location."

"Why not?" Rubalcava asked.

"Because I have a hunch." The Staff Sergeant said, before he put some distance between himself and the rest of the men. "I need a minute to think."

I noticed that the three men had stopped working on the grave and were now staring in our direction.

"Did he just say he had a hunch?" Zachs nearly whispered.

"He sure did." Rubalcava nodded.

"We're fucked." Mason grimaced. "Plain and simple, we're fucked up the yahoo."

Even though I wasn't part of the clique, I still asked, "What does that mean when Renquist has a hunch?"

"The day that the shit hit the fan on Betelren Six, Renquist had a hunch." Rubalcava explained. "He just walked into the barracks at Twenty-Nine Stumps that day and he looked like he was going to be sick. He said he had a hunch."

"Not even three hours later," Menden added. "The entire compound halts its training and we all get rounded up into the auditorium. The news starts trickling in on the space channel, that the Recruit Station out there is under attack. We all know how that went, right, at the beginning?"

Mass casualties, I vividly recalled. And a brand new enemy from the stars.

"When the Staff Sergeant has a hunch, it's never a good thing." Rubalcava said.

Mason repeated, "We're fucked."

Renquist rejoined us. "Three words. Our message will consist of three words to Enoria. These three words will be; Planet Lesenia, Non-Retrieval."

Suddenly, half a dozen faces were gaping in the man's direction, including mine. Non-Retrieval was the term used by troops when they were completely surrounded by the enemy, and when there was no possible way out without an unacceptable loss of life. Any unit broadcasting such a message was in essence asking to be left behind to die.

"Staff Sergeant, will all due respect," Rubalcava tried to reason with the hard man. "We haven't seen anything hostile yet. We don't even know if there are any Roaches on Lesenia. All we know so far is that we had a rough last jump on the Links. That could have been caused by a random magnetic field out in space somewhere, like from a meteor getting too close to our path. There could be all kinds of explanations for what happened during our trip."

"I'm not worried about the links, I'm worried about this planet." Renquist corrected. "Hell, it may not even be the Roaches but something native here. I don't know for certain what it is yet. What I do know is that I am not willing to further expose the Link System to anything that's out here. Not until I'm positive that whatever we're up against can't hop onto the Links and make it back to any of the populated worlds."

"Come on, Staff Sergeant!" Dempsey complained. "Don't you think that going Non-Retrieval is taking it a little bit too far?"

"If it'll make you guys feel any better, we'll broadcast a cancellation code once we find and secure the outpost." Renquist said. "But until then, my word stands. We're Non-Retrieval and that's not open to debate."

After a few muttered grumbles, the three gravediggers went back to their task.

"Team one is coming in." Neelson called out.

Renquist hurried over to meet them, followed closely by Rubalcava. Since I thought I could get away with it, by me also.

"Marines, report!" Renquist shouted.

"There's nothing to report." Dobson shook his head. "It's as dead as a cemetery out there."

"Did you see any movement whatsoever?" Renquist pressed. "Any birds or animals? Did you hear any kind of wildlife noise at all?"

The two scouts looked at one another. Brickwell shrugged his wide shoulders.

"Nothing at all, sir." Dobson repeated. "The only thing out there making noise was the two of us."

"Damn." Renquist growled, before spinning around to face the gravesite. "Hurry up with that hole, Marines!"

"We're going Non-Retrieval, guys." Dempsey informed the recent arrivals. "I just thought you ought to know that."

Brickwell shook his head. "I keep telling you guys. This rock is The Big Suck. The Suck Of Ages, even."

Rubalcava stepped over to where his pack lay. The Marine took a few moments to scour through it until he found the old X-13 radio. He brought it back and handed it to me. "Hope you can make it work, man. And for the record, I'm not liking this Non-Retrieval deal. Not one bit."

"Yeah, get started on that radio, Douglas." Renquist acknowledged. "But do not transmit until I give you the word."

"Yes, sir." I replied, heading over to the LRR case. I took out a battery package and a transmitter, and pulled out the quick-soldering supplies. These were hardly ever used since every outpost already had a set of tools on hand. People only went into the portable radio cases in emergency situations like now.

A handful of minutes later, I had the X-13's coupler attached to the LRR transmitter, and a couple of wire leads ready that would lead out to the small, screw post battery. That was the only thing left to connect. I wasn't going to take the battery out of its package until it was absolutely necessary. Just holding that radioactive thing too long without the proper shielding would probably make me glow in the dark.

I looked over at Rubalcava. "You guys brought a Med Kit, right?"

"Yeah." The Marine glanced at the wrapped battery in my grip. "Neelson's got one in his backpack. He's our bandages guy. He'll get you all fixed up, unless you melt first."

"Thanks. I feel better already."

A small stir arose when the other scout team returned. Both Davis and Knotts looked shaken up.

"What's up, guys?" The first person to spot them, Strawberry, called out. "You both look like you've just seen yourselves in the mirror.

Knotts chuckled at the joke, but Davis sneered, "I will cut you, fool. You think I'm playing with you?"

The Marines not currently digging a burial plot started hovering toward them. Since I was as nosy as they were, I went over too. Heck, dressed in Finn's longer clothing, I looked like one of them now.

"So tell us what you saw." Rubalcava said.

"We're not sure." Knotts replied. "We went out a full half a click, keeping our eyes peeled, but we didn't see much of anything except these gray trees. That is, until we came up to this long row of hills." He paused.

"Continue." Renquist urged.

"We figured we might get a better view of the area if we climbed up on top of one of these hills, right. So we went up there to take a look. One of the hills caught our attention more than the rest of them, because it was smaller and it looked perfectly round on top, like a roll-on deodorant. And all around this weird little hill, there's another kind of tree. These look like giant, gray pineapples, with the same color gray trunks and purple leaves that are on everything else around here. These pineapples were about five feet high and they had these long, oval-shaped leaves with one sharp end. The leaves were all about, what, three or four feet long. We estimated that there were thirty or forty of these weird pineapple trees surrounding this rounded hill. It just looked bizarre to us.

"Anyway, we're checking out these trees, when both Davis and I start to get that itch on the back of our necks as if somebody was watching us. We heard a noise like a short little rumble, coming from somewhere in the cluster of these pineapples, but we couldn't see what made the noise from our twenty (location)."

Davis cut in. "We split up. I went one way and Knotts went the other. The plan was for me to head to three o'clock and Knotts to nine. We were going to converge at dead center. We were hoping we could get the target between us."

"Yeah, only the target must have seen us coming." Knotts said. "By the time we closed in, whatever made that noise was long gone. We never even saw it."

"Did it leave any tracks?" Rubalcava asked.

"Nothing." Davis shook her head.

"Things just keep getting better and better, don't they, Rube?" Renquist snarled. "You said these hills have some elevation?"

"Not much." Knotts guessed. "Maybe sixty, eighty feet or so. They are higher than all these trees though."

"That sounds like a good spot for our radio message." Renquist said. "Davis, Knotts, I want you to escort Spaceman Douglas back to that area. He'll have a better transmitting angle out there."

Knotts made a face, clearly not eager to go back, but he didn't speak out.

Davis wasn't as polite. "Can't you send someone else this time? We just came from there. Why the hell would we want to go right back?"

"Negative." Renquist firmly stated. "Rube, I want you to go with them. Maybe you can figure out what's lurking out there."

"Yes, sir."

"Hole's done, Staff Sergeant." The lanky Zachs called out. "Three feet deep, just like you said."

"Good enough." Renquist replied. "We'll be using a flash grenade with a twenty minute timer. That will give us enough time to get Finn covered up. We'll be tossing all those broken radio parts in there as well."

"We don't need to do that, Staff Sergeant." Rubalcava mentioned. "We can just bury Finn and I'll mark the grave down on the GPS. We'll come back and get Finn later. That way he can get a proper burial."

"No." Renquist refused. "I don't want to take the chance that whatever's on this planet might find Finn's body and desecrate him somehow. I don't want any trace of Finn left, or of those broken radio parts. Mason, Zachs, you have your instructions. Davis, Knotts, we'll be heading due south at a steady walk. Keep your radio chatter short, just in case there's anything out there than can scan us."

Davis and Knotts were both grumbling as Rubalcava and I hoisted on our packs. The makeshift radio I'd already placed inside the top of my backpack.

"Hey, flyboy, you might need this." Mason's gruff voice called out.

I turned to see a plasma rifle cutting through the air, and barely had time to get my hands up before it reached me. Once it was in my grasp, I tried to glare back at Mason, but the big Marine had already turned in another direction.

Zachs tossed over Finn's helmet as well.

"Now you've got a full outfit." Rubalcava said. "Let's get rolling."

Clumsily, I stuck the helmet under an arm while I slung the rifle on my shoulder. Then I remembered how loose Finn's backpack was and I had to start all over again. In the end, I got the pack tightened and the rifle slung, while the helmet I set and adjusted on the move.

"Stick your thumb up near your right ear." Rubalcava informed me. "If you press the button there, you'll turn on the short-wave wired into your bucket."

I did this as we stepped over to join our two escorts. Davis and Knotts were both looking at me as if I were their stepchild.

"Shit." Davis mumbled. "We're babysitters now."

The two hardy Marines started across the clearing.

"Don't worry about that." Rubalcava said, trailing along beside me as he adjusted his own helmet. "New guys are always shunned a little bit, until they prove themselves in a skirmish or two. Same thing happened to Neelson, when he first joined the platoon a few weeks back."

If I was supposed to feel some kind of relief by that, it didn't happen.

"The funny thing about Neelson, though," Rubalcava continued. "He's been around for a minute or two, but he hasn't been able to click with any of us yet."

We trudged along silently for a few minutes, before I worked up the nerve to ask a question that had been bugging me, ever since the squad had entered the Purple Haze earlier. "How do you guys do it?"

"Sideways, mostly." Rubalcava joked. "Just kidding. How do we do what?"

"You know, start killing." Awkwardly, I tried to explain. "I've never killed anything in my life."

Rubalcava stared into my face for a long moment. "That, my friend, is a good thing. Most of us Marines don't see it so much as killing, but as reducing the enemy's ranks. The less of the enemy there is to contend with, the better the chances are of us making it back home. Of course, you've got your Hard Chargers like Davis and Knotts, who happen to thrive on death and destruction. Man, just wait until you see those two in action. At all times, they know exactly where they are and what they've..."

"But how do you know?" I cut in. "How do you find out if you're even capable of killing another sentient being?"

"Sometimes you don't know, at least not at first." Rubalcava answered. "Sometimes it's the situation that will trigger the response. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it. If we end up getting in a firefight on this planet, you'll have zero time to analyze shit. Your instincts kind of take over. Either you do it or you don't. In the Marines, we call it being Born Again Hard."

"Well, what if..." I'll admit it, I was uneasy here. "What if the time comes and I can't do it? What if I wimp out?"

"Like I said, don't sweat it." The other man replied. "When it happens, it happens, but until it does you'll be on one side of the white line. If you have what it takes, then you get to cross that line and become like one of us, the Space Marines. And it you don't, you shouldn't take it so hard because not everyone is cut out for this kind of job. That's why the Marines are a tiny, little part of Space Corps. And that's why we have SID (Space Infantry Division) mopping up after us and you bus drivers escorting us around." He leaned over to punch me on the shoulder, and we both shared a quick laugh. "Just try not to get anybody killed while you figure things out."

I lost track of time as we kept bullshitting with each other. It came as a mild surprise when we reached the end of the normal-looking trees. There was a space of about fifty meters or so with nothing but black grass before us, and then the gentle slopes of the rolling hills started up.

Davis and Knotts were up further ahead, treading with wary steps. Just past them I could see the unnatural shape of one hill, which was over twenty yards high, cylindrical in shape with a dome top and covered with the same grass as the rest of the landscape. Compared with everything else around, the hill definitely looked artificial, like a small telescope observatory.

Growing in a weird swirl, a flock of bizarre pineapple trees could be seen, with the widest bunch of them being approached by the two Marines ahead of us, and the thinnest grouping up near where the strange hill stood. The trees were just as the two scouts had described: scaled like a pineapple but without the sharp edges. Their color was a strong gray, slightly darker on the edges of the scales, and they stood at a range of between five and five and a half feet high. A handful of leaves stood straight up at their crown, almost doubling the size of the trees with their added heights of between three or four feet. These leaves were in a shade of purple comparable to that of the other vegetation we'd seen.

"What the heck are these things?" Rubalcava jogged over and I followed suit. He halted at the furthest edge of the trees, as seen from the round hill, and began examining their leaves more closely. "Lanceolate."

"What's that?"

"A type of leaf." The Marine explained, stepping around the tree without touching it. "These leaves are about half as wide as they are long, with no indentations." He glanced at the rest of the tree. "The distance around the trunk is about eight feet."

I watched as the man reached out and put his palm on the tree, probably to get a feel for its texture. As if he'd been bitten, Rubalcava jerked his hand back.

"Holy shit!" The young man exclaimed. He bounced up and down on his toes as if he was daring himself, before he put his hand on the scaly bark once more. Again, Rube jerked his hand away. "Hey, Douglas, come and touch this thing!"

I stepped over, and yes, I was a little hesitant. Since Rubalcava had done it twice already, I reached out and put my own palm on the bark. For the first moment, it seemed as if nothing was happening. Then I felt as if the tree was somehow pulsing next to my flesh. Another moment, and a strange, prickly sensation began to spread all over my palm and fingers. This unnerved me so much that I yanked my hand back the same way Rubalcava had. The feeling faded away a few seconds later.

"What do you make of that?" Rubalcava asked. He repeated the experiment using his other hand.

"I've never felt anything like that." I shrugged. "I think the closest I came was back when I was a kid. I used to put nine-volt batteries on my tongue, just to get a jolt out of them. This felt a little like that."

"You used to do that, too?" Rubalcava laughed. "The thing is, that tingly sensation doesn't leave right away. It stays in your skin like some kind of numbing agent." He set his hand on the tree again, and held it there for what seemed some thirty seconds. Once Rube removed his hand, he stared at it as if he were mentally timing the creepiness. "My whole hand is numb!"

"You'd better be careful with that." I warned.

Rubalcava glanced back at the tree. "Yeah, you're right. This thing could be Lesenia's version of poison ivy or something. I'd like to dig one of these babies out and take it to a botanist back on Earth, if I could. Too bad I don't have the time or a big enough pocket to put this thing in. Let's catch up with the others."

We both jogged past the seemingly endless row of pineapples, and joined up with Davis and Knotts. Their pace had slowed considerably.

"Why do we always get the big green weenie (shit work)?" Knotts could be heard complaining.

"Because we're the best at what we do." Davis replied. "We earned the big green weenie."

"All right, you two." Rubalcava said, loud enough to halt their conversation. "Why don't you 'fess up to what really happened out here?"

Davis grimaced.

"What are you talking about?" Knotts asked.

"You think you fooled everybody, but you ain't fooling anyone." Rubalcava shook his head, and for good effect, he spit. "The old man saw right through your shit story, but he didn't want to make it a big issue in front of the others. Why do you think he asked me to tag along with you guys? So, what's up? What did you guys really see out here that got you all spooked?"

Knotts relented. "You'll find out in a few minutes."

"Why don't you just tell me?"

"Fool, he said you'd find out, okay?" Davis grumbled at him. "Some things you just have to see for yourself."

Rubalcava glanced back at me, shrugging his shoulders.

The two scouts stepped further ahead, continuing along the edge of the trees and getting closer to the rounded hill. Here the pineapple trees were spaced at their thickest, even though their overall formation was at their thinnest. They were tightly packed, only about two or three feet apart from one another.

"Keep your weapon ready." Knotts stated, as he halted again. "And give it another minute or two."

Rubalcava scanned in all directions. "Stop screwing around and tell me what I'm supposed to be watching out for."

Knotts glanced over at Davis.

"Well?" Rubalcava asked.

"Just tell this asshole what happened." Davis made that face again.

"From the beginning," Rubalcava said. "And no bullshit this time."

"All right." Knotts said. His cheeks blushed a little. "We came out here, just like we said we did. We saw how secluded it was and how we didn't have anybody around. So we kind of started messing around. You'd better not tell anybody from the platoon about that, I swear."

"The whole freaking platoon already knows the two of you are messing around." Rubalcava shook his head. "Will you tell me something from today's headlines?"

Knotts looked worried. "The whole platoon? How could they already know?"

"Well, she don't call you Numb-Nuts for nothing, to start off with." Rubalcava replied. "Anyway, get back to the story, will you?"

Knotts gaped back in shock. It was only later that I found out he had a fiancée waiting for him back on Earth.

"So, we were up here messing around," Davis admitted, taking up the tale. "And like we said earlier, we got the feeling we were being watched." She pointed her weapon at the pineapples. "By these things. We didn't know it was them at first, we thought it was something hiding in between them. We split up just like we said we did. Nuts went one way and I went the other. Dead center ended up being on the opposite of this column of trees. Both of us had to cross through the pineapples to get there. Their leaves weren't standing up then, like they are now. They were all drooped down at the sides. We ended up brushing and rubbing against a whole bunch of them. When we got to the other side we didn't see or hear anything, but we were feeling funny after we'd been in contact with all those leaves."

"Were you feeling numb?" Rubalcava asked.

"Yeah, at first." Knotts nodded.

"I started seeing weird shit in my head." Davis revealed. "Like colors and patterns, and shit."

"Me too." Knotts concurred. "I've never dropped acid in my life, but I bet I was seeing the same kinds of hallucinations."

"But you want to hear the freakiest part?" Davis pointed her weapon at the trees again. "These plants started coming closer to us. They were moving."

Rube glanced over at the plants, before turning his gaze at me. It was clear that he thought the two Marines were pulling his chain. "These trees were moving? You know they don't have little legs on them, right?"

"Why in the fuck do you think we didn't tell Renquist?" Davis snapped. "So the whole bunch of you mother-fuckers would be laughing at us like we're crazy?"

"It was weird," Knotts said. "Because I swear these plants were looking at us, and making noises at us, and even moving at us. We both ran up to the top of that round hill. We stayed up there until that weird feeling went away. When we felt normal again, we went all the way around the column. That's why it took us so long to get back."

"I thought they were trying to surround us." Davis said. "I mean, I was getting ready to start blasting them."

"We're not crazy." Knotts tried hard to sound convincing. "We really did think those things were happening, to the both of us, until our heads finally cleared up. But you can see why we didn't want to tell Renk about it, right?"

"He probably would have said you two made the story up, as an excuse for having messed around." Rubalcava reasoned.

"We thought the same thing." Davis agreed. For a brief moment, her harsh features actually softened up. "And then everybody would have known about us. But I guess they already know, according to you."

"Well, next time, you shouldn't start calling him Numb-Nuts in front of everybody." Rube said, as he reached into a thigh pocket to pull out a smart phone. It was a useless item, I thought, as Lesenia was too far from any planets with compatible satellites. Rube wasn't using his phone to make a call, though. Instead, he started taking a few shots of the giant pineapples. "We really should take one of these trees back for study. They have numbing properties and possibly hallucinogenic properties. Who knows what else they might have." He paused. "You know, I don't remember seeing any vegetation like this in any of the outpost's info files. I'm pretty sure I would have remembered a giant freaking pineapple."

"Well, we came out here to send a radio message, so let's do that." Knotts said. "Then we can get the hell out of here before any other weird shit happens."

"Who are you trying to reach, anyway?" Davis asked. "The outpost?"

"No." Rube said, curtly, before he turned to me. "Hey, Douglas. Why don't you pull the radio out while I get the coordinates ready?"

Simultaneously, we both shrugged off our backpacks.

"If you're not calling the outpost direct, then you're bouncing a signal off the satellite." Davis guessed. "So you're calling somebody to come pick us up, right?"

"Nope." Rube said, and even I could see that he was being evasive. He handed me the little strip of laminated paper.

"Then, who the fuck you calling?" Davis sounded irritated now.

"The word from Renquist," Rube explained. "Is that since we've only got a half-assed radio anyway, we should send a quick message. The message is; Planet Lesenia, Non-Retrieval."

Both Davis and Knotts started.

"Say again?" Knotts recovered first.

"Non-Retrieval." Rube repeated.

"Renquist has gone motarded (motivated to the point of being retarded)." Davis growled. "The man is insane!"

"He was having one of his hunches." Rube explained.

Knotts brought his palm up to his forehead, in both worry and resignation. "We're going to die out here, aren't we? Dempsey's been acting squirrelly for the last two days, and now the old man too?"

"You do realize we're cutting our own necks by doing this?" Davis asked.

"Hey, Renk even gave the order to cremate Finn's body." Rube defended his superior. "So he really thinks some serious shit is about to go down. Now you tell me, when have any of his hunches turned out to be wrong?"

"I don't like it." Knotts shook his head.

"You think I do?" Rube retorted. "I don't like being hung out to dry either. But if I have to sacrifice myself in order to keep the Roaches or anything else off the Links, then guess what? I'm going to do it! Better me than a whole outpost, right? Or how about a colony that doesn't have that many defenses to begin with? You heard about Betelren Six! You want another butt-load of Roaches popping up in a place like that?"

"Get it over with." Davis snapped. "Just get it done so we can get the hell out of here, before something else comes along that's even weirder than these pineapples."

Rube turned to me.

I had the radio, the coordinates and the unwrapped battery in my hand. "Is right here good?"

I hadn't really expected an answer, and I was surprised when both Davis and Knotts pointed at a fairly flat spot some twenty feet away. I didn't know if they were kidding or not until Rube motioned for me to go along. He stopped at the right place. "Here's good. Point the radio up in that direction of the sky. That's near where one of the satellites should be right now."

I glanced back at the two Marines, noting they'd both dropped to one knee. They were aiming their weapons at us as if they were about to use us for target practice. I gulped.

Rube and I both crouched in the appointed spot as I set the radio components down on the black grass. I took the battery out of its packaging and tossed the plastic wrapping aside. Right after, I wrapped the two ends of wire leading out from the coupler to the battery's screw posts. The last things left to do were to switch the battery on, then the radio, and lastly, to start punching in coordinates.

"Okay, we're going to have to do this quickly." I said, deciding to hand Rube the coordinates after all. "After I switch this thing on, I have to enter my Space Corps ID code. Once the satellite confirms the code, I'm going to say 'Go.' Then you can start reading off the coordinates to me. You got me?"

"I got you." Rube nodded.

"Here goes." I said, clicking the battery on. A red LED light went on a moment later. Once I saw this I switched on the coupler. I punched in my code, but in my haste I screwed it up. I tried again a second time, slower, and succeeded.

The radio was already starting to get hot in my hand, when a confirmation from the satellite caused it to chirp. "Okay, go."

Rubalcava started reading off the coordinates that would bounce the message to Enoria, slow enough that I entered them in correctly on one try. My hand felt as if I were holding it above a flaming burner. I finished the sequence. While I waited for another chirp, I snatched up the battery wrapping and placed it between my palm and the hot battery.

"Shit, this is hot!" I complained, right before the second chirp came. I was ready to broadcast now. "Enoria, Command Post Zero-Three-Four-Four, this is Harold Douglas, Spaceman on the Unilink Transport One-Twenty-Six, on planet Lesenia. We are code Non-Retrieval. Repeat, Outpost Zero-Four-Nine-One is Non-Retrieval." I had to remove my fingertip from the coupler's button for a second, pushing down with my thumb instead. "I repeat, planet Lesenia is Non-Retrieval. Zero-Four-Nine-One is Non-Retrieval."

Unable to take any more heat, I dropped the radio down into the grass, where it soon started smoking. I reached down to try to disconnect the transmitter in the hopes of saving it.

"Leave it!" Rube ordered. "The unit's fried, anyway."

Needing no further motivation, I dragged myself several feet away. In awe, I watched as the radio burst into flames. In a couple of seconds, the fire had consumed everything.

"The battery is going to explode!" I warned Rube, while I quickly got to my feet. The plan was for me to break into a run, right after retrieving my rifle and backpack. "As soon as the fire melts away the outer core, it's going to pop!"

Rube backed up by a couple of steps, but he seemed mesmerized by the small blaze with the fascination of a pyromaniac.

"I'm serious, man." I shouted, reaching out to yank at his arm. "When that thing goes off, trust me when I say you don't want to be anywhere near it!" My fingers slipped off his cammie blouse, before I was hurrying away fast.

"Rube, let's go!" Knotts cried out.

Finally, Rubalcava got moving. He'd only gotten a few yards' distance, though, when a strong flash of white light swept past me. Immediately, I recognized the glow of a Pulse. I turned to see the Purple Haze materializing at a spot about twenty feet away from where we'd just transmitted the message.

Read Part 2 of this novella in next month's issue.

#####

### Unit Four-Three

"Unit XY, Series three dash three four three, you are ready for guest services." The neutral mechanical voice announced into the small, pill-shaped pod.

Four-Three opened his eyes, staring at the white polymer casing. Past the thick seal, the twenty year-old boy expected blinding artificial lights. He only had a few seconds to shut his eyes before the seal slid open and exposed him to the glare.

"Unit Four-Three is awake." He said, knowing the mechanism was waiting for his reply.

"Cryo chamber will open in three... two... one."

Four-Three had his eyes shut. Another short countdown commenced, this one to give his closed eyes time to adjust.

"Open your eyes in ten... nine... eight..."

And so it went, until Four-Three's eyes fluttered open upon hearing the number two. "Unit Four-Three, eyes open."

"Very good." The machine complimented him, as it always did. "Proceed to the duty station."

Four-Three took a deep breath. It was always so tough getting out of the stupid cryo pod. He took a moment to stretch his short arms and back before he strode down the long corridor. To either side were several identical pill-shaped pods with many other sleepers waiting their turn to wake up. Ten pods per side meant a total of twenty Units, but Four-Three had no idea how many of those pods were occupied. The white polymer was too thick to look through.

At the duty station, two workers waited for him. One was a woman with a stern face; the other a man with a clipboard. The woman scanned Four-Three from the front, then walked around to scan him from the back.

"He looks fine, considering his age." She told the man with the clipboard. "We'll have to retire him soon."

"We would have done so already, if it weren't for the public backlash thanks to that blasted whistleblower. Once we have the funds we need for Series Four, we won't need Series Three anymore."

The woman stared at the boy. Four-Three expected for her to ask him to do jumping jacks or recite something from his programmed memories. She was supposed to, at any rate. She didn't ask him to do anything. Four-Three thought this was unusual.

The woman peered closer. "Are you thinking?"

"No, ma'am." Four-Three replied.

"You look like you're thinking."

"I am anticipating having to do jumping jacks." Four-Three admitted.

The woman looked to the man with the clipboard.

"Reflex memory." The man explained. "We always ask them to do that."

"Are you sure that's all?" The woman asked.

"It's the age factor." The man answered. "This unit has been in service for twenty years now, ever since it was first cryo-hatched. Certain repetitive activities become ingrained into the basic programming after all that time, including warm-up exercises."

"Would you like me to do jumping jacks?" Four-Three inquired.

"See?" The man pointed at the boy. "He was built to please. That's the attitude he's displaying right now."

The woman relented. "Oh, go on. Send him on his way. I have to get back upstairs, anyway. I only came down here because I had to get out of my stuffy little office for a few minutes."

The man with the clipboard grinned at her. "That's what they all say. I know what you really want." His grin widened out into a full smile. "Employees like us get a ten percent discount. Like our ads say, _We Will Cater To Your Every Need_. Well, we're done here. I can walk you out while I take him to the Dressing Room. Come with us, Unit Four-Three. Oh, and from now on, your name is Bobby."

"My name is Bobby." Four-Three confirmed politely, as he was taught to.

When they stepped out of the cryo chamber, the woman strode off. The man with the clipboard took Bobby into a room, where an assistant gave him a cute little outfit to wear, complete with a cap, denim suspenders, a glove and a ball. Once the boy was dressed, the assistant had Bobby stand before a mirror while she adjusted his hair.

"Do I need my hair arranged, if I'll be wearing a cap?" Bobby asked, out of curiosity.

"Yes, you do." The assistant nodded. "Actually, I have to trim a little from around the ears and back. Stay here while I grab my hair cutter."

Bobby was very obedient. He stayed as still as his little body could tolerate, while keeping his eyes on his reflection. After a few minutes of this, he thought he saw himself wearing something else. It was some time ago, maybe, when he had on a tee shirt with a cartoon character on it, and tan shorts. His hair had been spiked that time.

Oh, no! Bobby realized he was having an Unauthorized Memory. He should tell the assistant, because he was supposed to. At the same time, he knew he would get the Shock Treatment right after, so his Unauthorized Memory could be erased. He wasn't supposed to remember that either, about the Shock Treatment! Oh, no, he was really going to be in trouble this time! If he said something, he was in trouble, and if he kept his mouth shut, he would still be in trouble! What was he going to do?

Bobby thought it best to keep quiet. He couldn't be fidgety or nervous or else the assistant would know something was wrong with him. Okay, he thought, you'd better think of something fast so you won't look suspicious!

When the assistant returned, she found Bobby doing jumping jacks. "Well, look at you! Are you getting circulation back in your legs?"

"Yes, ma'am." Bobby nodded.

"Good for you!" She patted the little stool she'd brought in. "Sit right here while I finish prepping you. The guest you'll be servicing tonight is Mr. Biden."

"Mr. Biden." Bobby nodded. "Yes, ma'am. I'll do a great job for Mr. Biden."

"Of course you will." The assistant smiled at him.

"Unit XY, Series three dash three four three, you are ready for guest services." The neutral mechanical voice announced into the small, pill-shaped pod.

Four-Three went through the usual procedure. When he climbed out of his cryo pod, he was surprised to see that another pod across the corridor was also open. It was the first time he'd seen another Unit active. In this case, it was a little girl who stared back at him in equal surprise.

"I'm Unit Four-Three." He said, proudly.

"I'm Unit One-Nine." She beamed back at him.

When Four-Thee looked to the duty station, he saw two people with clipboards, and also two men in suits. He couldn't remember ever having another Unit awake at the same time as he was, and neither could he remember having so many people around. Even the dressing assistant, a fifth person, was already standing over by the door.

"Units Four-Three and One-Nine, we need you to run back and forth along the center track for a few minutes." A woman holding a clipboard instructed.

The boy and girl raced one another, until their faces were red from the exertion and they were left panting. The two observers made notes on their clipboards, while the two men in suits watched.

Once the warm-up was finished, the assistant went to gather the children. "We are doing something extra special this time! You'll be having a lot of fun. You're going on an airplane out to this little island, where you are going to meet a lot of important people. Our V.I.P. guests are Mr. and Mrs. Rodham. Repeat after me. Hello. Mr. Rodham."

"Hello, Mr. Rodham." The children said.

"Hello, Mrs. Rodham."

"Hello, Mrs. Rodham."

"Very good!" The assistant said.

"Their names." The woman with the clipboard reminded her.

"Yes, yes." The assistant nodded. She pointed at each child in turn. "You are Brenda and you are Brett. Let's head over to the dressing room. I have matching outfits for you to wear!"

The excited children followed the assistant out of the chamber.

"Unit Four-Three, you are being activated for routine maintenance." A voice said, but it wasn't a mechanical voice this time.

The machine's voice did return, giving him the usual countdowns. Four-Three was soon awake and standing in the corridor between all the cryo pods. A man with a beard was sitting behind the duty desk.

"Perform a full warm-up for me." The bearded man said.

Four-Three stretched out as he was taught to. He ran in place and did jumping jacks and push-ups and everything. As he did this, the bearded man came over and took notes on his clipboard.

"Okay, very good." The man said. "I'm Dr. Moore." He fished a Smart Phone out of his pocket. "Do you know what this is?"

"A phone." Four-Three nodded.

"Good." The man replied. "I'm going to ask you some questions now. I need you to be completely honest when you answer them. You can do that, can't you?"

"Yes, sir!" Four-Three exclaimed.

The bearded man recorded the Unit as he asked his questions. "You showed unusual brain activity as you were coming out of cryo. What were you thinking at that time?"

"I wasn't!" Four-Three denied. "I wasn't thinking anything!"

"It is important to be honest." The man insisted. "Let me ask this another way. What is your favorite name?"

Four-Three went ashen. If he gave a favorite name, the bearded man would know he had memories, memories that should have been erased during the cryo sleep!

Dr. Moore scribbled something on his clipboard.

"Stop writing!" Four-Three blurted out, assuming it was something bad.

"Tell me your favorite name." The man repeated.

"I don't want the Shock Treatment! Please, don't give me the Shock Treatment!"

"Tell me your favorite name."

"Bobby." The boy croaked, hoping he wasn't in trouble.

"Why is Bobby your favorite name?"

Four-Three lowered his head. "Because I had a ball and glove that time."

"Do you remember anyone else from the pods?"

Four-Three shook his head.

"Do you remember anyone else from the pods?" The doctor repeated.

"Is she going to get in trouble?" Four-Three asked.

"No. Answer the question, please."

"I remember Brenda."

"Will you go and put your hand on Brenda's pod?"

Reluctantly, Four-Three went over and tapped the right pod.

Dr. Moore went over to record the pod with his phone. "For the record, the Unit here is a female. She is Unit XX, Series two dash one one nine. This Unit's last label was in fact Brenda. Her last clients were the Rodhams, and during that time Brenda was taken out to Epstein Island." The man turned back to face Four-Three. "I'm going to say a few words to you. If you know what they mean, nod your head. If you don't know, shake your head no. Do you understand?"

Four-Three nodded.

"The first words are 'hormone suppression.' Do you know what that is?"

Four-Three shook his head.

"The next words are 'forced growth stagnation.' How about that one?"

"No." The boy said.

"Shock Treatment."

"No!" Four-Three cried out. "I don't want that! Please don't do it!"

"Relax, relax." Moore told him. "All I'm doing is asking a few questions. I only have a couple more to get through. Have you heard of test tube insemination?"

"No."

"Last one. What about Retirement?"

"I heard I was going to be retired soon." Four-Three recalled.

"But you don't know what that actually means?"

"No."

"Okay, that's all I need." Moore said. "Why don't you return to your pod? Your regular maintenance check-up is satisfactory."

"I'm not getting the Shock Treatment?"

"No. You haven't done anything wrong."

Four-Three visibly looked relieved. Moore caught that on his recording.

The doctor watched the boy climb back into his pod, before he returned to the duty station to initiate the process of putting the Unit back into cryo. He stopped recording on his phone, but once finished, he turned the device back on and scanned the entire chamber.

"As you can see, twenty pods are located in this one room." Moore said, loud enough so his phone would catch it. "Only eight of the pods are currently occupied, but that is because this particular batch is nearly twenty years old. The other Units have already been, uh, terminated or damaged beyond repair." He paused to look at the recently shut pod. "Unit Four-Three shows clear signs of memory retention, despite the limited brain capacity he was created with. I will wake Unit One-Nine next, to see if she might have memories as well."

Dr. Moore paused for a moment, before he went on. "It is hard for me to remain emotionally detached. These are not mindless clones created for the purpose of medical research, despite the claims this company has made. These are living, thinking children with full human emotions. You saw for yourself the Unit's reaction to the idea of being shocked. What is happening here today is no different than the cruel torture techniques the mentally ill suffered through during the 19th century, and that's not even including what these Units are being used for. The powerful elite of this country can rent them out whenever they want to. The laws in this country... The laws have to change."

Moore paused again, taking a few moments to control his feelings. "The Units in this chamber are scheduled for Retirement in less than a week. Standard procedure is injecting the Units with numbing agents, stopping their hearts with electro-shock or heavy sedatives, and tossing them into a standard cremation oven. They don't even have names; just numbers. Their ashes... Who knows what they do with the ashes? Well, in these last mid-terms, the public voted to continue funding clone research for medical purposes, without fully knowing what those medical purposes are. A lot of influential people are making sure the public does not find out. That means these practices are not going to end anytime soon. Say goodbye to Unit Four-Three, everybody."

#####

### Changeling

Transformation must begin somewhere, that's what I say. There is a point where everything in our universe changes in some way, and becomes something else, but that point is different for any given mass of cells. Take a rock, for example. At some point, perhaps soon, perhaps in the far future, or ironically enough, perhaps even in the ancient past, this rock will become aware that it is a rock. The rock will think to itself, what the flooble, I'm a rock! Its cells will have already sensed light and dark, warmth and cold, and other basic changes around it, and it will see past the repetitive nature cycles and yearn, yes, yearn, to become some other state of matter / being. The nature of all cells is to learn experiences and catalog them, and when enough cataloging has been done, the cells will want to transform into a new mass of cells, with new senses and thoughts, so that the eternal journey of experience will begin anew.

I cannot say that I remember much before I was jolted aware of humanity. There was a time before, or perhaps a lack of time, as in a soul incubating inside a fetus, and taking nine months to wrap itself up into a new personality based on the regularity of the star charts. The Before-Time is equivalent to being in the womb. Once birth is achieved successfully, the Before-Time is forgotten and the I Am period begins.

Bits... And pieces. That is all I have to offer to you by way of expanding on the Before-Time. There were... Several of us. A handful, perhaps more, at the beginning. We were in... transition... or in some manner of travel. This is no longer known, but forgotten. Sinking into the muddy past of vanquished memories. We felt, or sensed, a jolt. Perhaps CERN caused this, but we can't be sure. The reach of CERN is so great in the future that its machinations can and do cause ripples in the All of past, present and future. We were in the Before-Time, in travel or making a transition, when the ripples battered us about and pushed us away from our state of being and into the enclosed star that is called Earth.

The humans will never understand this, as they are far too stubborn. They will boast that they know the All, but the All will transform before their very eyes. An author, Philip Dick I believe, theorized that the primary trait of God is Deception, as God eludes the best efforts of man to study and categorize God. Not Deception; the author was wrong about that. The primary trait of God is Change. The All is not deceiving humans, for the All is far above the level of crude human thinking. The All changes because everything changes, and humanity simply cannot keep up. What humanity has learned how to do is to throw thumbtacks onto God's Highway, to stumble God who is ever advancing forward, and also cycling around and adding to its God self. You see, God is not the Straight Line or the Circle, but God is the Spiral. The CERN Hadron Collider is nothing more than the Tower Of Babel in a new cycle of human vanity, where humans wish to capture the mind of God before they have learned how to respect each other or their helpless little planet.

We were there, several of us in the Before-Time, and then we were shocked away and thrown into the I Am of the star of Earth. The academics, the know it Alls, declare that Earth has a molten core of iron and nickel, and that Sol is primarily compressed helium. Can the academics say with certainty that the core of Earth and Sol are not the same? Have they entered the core of either to confirm their assumptions, their so-called Theories of This and That? What if Earth was a star, the same as Sol, but it was covered over with space dust and it has billions of little dust mites living on it? What happens when the Cosmic Maid comes by with her Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner, to take all of that dust away? What happens to the souls that were dust mites; that must adapt to new conditions when the dust is no longer present? This is the true enigma; that souls might live on Sol, or on Jupiter or Saturn, but in other dimensions that humans cannot cross into or communicate with, unless they shatter the barriers with their expensive and dangerous particle colliders. Humans are stubborn. They have not earned their way up the ladder, but instead are relying on the most evil of their souls to create modern marvels, that are in essence the same as ancient marvels, in their selfish ambitions not only to reach the stars, but to become the stars.

Earth has tales of Fallen Angels. We are not Fallen Angels, or perhaps we are but we don't remember this. Perhaps the jolt that brought us here also erased our connection to the Hall of Records. What is known is that we came here to your I Am through an act of cosmic violence. Our knowledge was gone, if it was ever there in the first place. We had no sex, no gender, because such primitive traits were not necessary in the Before-Time. We were... humanoid, I suppose, because we are comfortable with the human form, but precisely what shape we had is not in our I Am memories. When the Fallen Angels fell, at least they arrived armed with their occult knowledge. When we arrived, we came with nothing.

Humans panic when confronted with something they don't understand. Their initial reaction is to kill the aberration, or to capture it and dissect it for their violent purposes. This is what happened to us, the Changelings. Our souls were thrust out of our bodies in the Before-Time, and hurled into the I Am. Certain evil humans could estimate where we had entered into the Earth. They sought to chase us, to hunt us down, be we were not in one of their countries.

We arrived in Mexico, into the tropical jungles to the south. The evil people of the North could not enter Mexico and hunt us right away. They entreated with the Mexican government. They lost valuable time during the brief period of negotiations. The evil people in Mexico suspected that we were worth billions if captured alive. Before they allowed the operatives from the North to enter their country, they sent out their own teams of soldiers. The Mexican government intended to capture us and auction us off to the richer nations, with China and Russia highest on their list of bidders.

Certain safeguards are followed when beings from one dimension enter into a different dimension. As an example, it would not do for a being from Sol to simply set foot on Earth. The radiation that being gives off is powerful enough to wipe out half of a hemisphere. For this reason, the souls of other-dimensional beings leave their bodies and enter into bodies suitable for Earth. This is the reason why 'aliens' nearly always use carbon-based, humanoid forms. In a normal procedure, an other-dimensional soul must inhabit its humanoid body for a period of time, from one week to one month on average, as some souls have an easier time than others. When the souls have adapted to the bodies, they can walk and talk to normal humans, and even live among them.

We did not have that luxury. Our arrival was too chaotic. Upon entering Earth's aura, or toroid field, an established emergency protocol automatically sought to preserve the integrity of our souls. There are emergencies where 'aliens' must come to Earth in great hurries, in order to initiate or prevent some great occurrence that must take place according to a cosmic schedule. We were not on any schedule, but we arrived regardless. The protocol system caught our souls and hastily fashioned generic human forms for us. Had we known what was happening, we would have chosen our forms better and placed ourselves out of danger.

The system gave us 'soft' bodies before it immersed us into the I Am timeline. These soft bodies are very basic humanoid shapes with heads, torsos and limbs. They have no true features, no background set up in their minds, and no identifiable marks such as defined irises or fingerprints. The soft bodies do have their advantages. They are blank slates to begin with, but they adapt to local populations very quickly. All the bodies need is a week or two to assimilate features, habits and language. During that time, the bodies will slowly change to allow us to identify with the native population.

At the time, all that my kin and I knew was that we had just been somewhere else, and now we were in a jungle on Earth. Our bodies were soft and vulnerable. We were not accustomed to moving in them, and they bruised and scraped easily. We did not know the terrain, we looked more like store mannequins than normal humans, and we were left out in the open where anything that wanted to could hurt us.

Helicopters with armed men flew over our heads, just a few hours after we'd arrived. We didn't know who those men were or why they were after us, but we could sense their intentions to capture us. The jungle was too thick for them to land right away. We ran from those men. We hid in the jungles and swamps, and traveled along the rivers. There were several of us at first, but we became fewer during our flight. When we reached the fringes of population, only three of us were left alive.

There would be nothing left easy for us. The soldiers from the North had not arrived yet. They were not after us, but after our ship. Since we did not have any ship, and since an interrogation / dissection of us would prove worthless, as our memories were gone, there is no doubt that they would have taken our physical lives. The Mexican soldiers were searching for us, but their technology was not as advanced as that of the North. Their orders were simply to capture us alive, and to take us to their leadership, who would then decide our fate. We were fortunate in that neither group found us.

Instead, local guerrillas heard the radio messages from the Mexican soldiers. They did not understand who we were, only that we had substantial value. The guerrillas knew the difficult terrain better than the soldiers. They did not have helicopters that needed to touch ground in the great sea of trees and hills. When these jungle warriors found us, they were terrified of us, as we still looked like featureless mannequins. These men moved us from one small stronghold to another, taking us out of immediate danger and to places where the soldiers would not think to look for us.

In the jungle, our soft bodies had much trouble mimicking the natural landscape of trees, brush and ground. Our coloring was a mottle of greens and brown. Now that we were in the company of humans, our forms began to adapt. The three of us that still lived grew shorter and darker in flesh. The guerrillas were already afraid, but now they saw how we were changing, looking more like them with each passing day. Soon, we would be indistinguishable from them. They were too afraid to kill us, thinking we might be demons. In their panic, they freely delivered us to a drug cartel.

The cartel trafficked drugs, weapons and humans. In the case of humans, they sent their armed men to the roads, to capture refugees coming from Central America. Once caught, the humans would be sold as slaves to ready buyers in faraway countries. I tell you this because they had houses set aside where they would keep prisoners. We were taken to one such house. Once hidden inside, we were beaten and ordered to reveal our secrets. Even if we knew secrets, we could not relate them, as we still had not mastered the language of Mexico. One of us died from the torture, leaving two of us.

Our bodies were still in transition. Our appearances changed from that of the indigenous guerrillas, who were shorter and darker of skin, to mimic the drug traffickers, who were taller and lighter of skin.

At the same time, Mexican police raided cartel strongholds and prisoner houses. Much confusion occurred over where the last two Changelings would be taken for hiding. It was decided that we would be hidden in the City of Mexico. We were smuggled out of the countryside and into the megalopolis in a van-vehicle. During the journey, the men taking us left the van-vehicle and did not return. Our bodies were soft enough that we could loosen ourselves from our binds, but we had not done so before because we were constantly under watch, and beaten routinely for not following orders from a language we did not understand. We left the van-vehicle and hid in the neighborhoods.

Large groups of people were migrating from Central America and into Mexico. Their final destination was called North. The other Changeling and I mingled among these people, where we were given clothing, food and shelter. Our faces and bodies continued to change, as our soft bodies received impressions from different ethnic groups ranging from very dark skin, to dark skin, to light skin. In two or three days, we would have changed enough that we looked like different humans. For this reason, we moved from one migrant group to another. It was easy for us to become lost among them, as there was much movement within those groups already. Also, we finally learned to speak Spanish language.

Organizers in bright vests told us to board bus-vehicles. We were traveling North. This place of good fortune had other names, such as EE.UU., or _Estados Unidos_. The travel would take many days, we were told, but at the end of it, we would be welcome in a great land full of abundance and work. The bus-vehicles allowed us to escape the men who were still searching for us in the south of Mexico.

Our bodies continued to transition. I cannot say precisely what occurred, but my companion somehow gave away that we were not of human origin. This caused the migrants around us to become violent. I was able to run off, but many angry people killed my companion. I later understood why the migrant people had become angry. When my companion went to relieve his body, it was seen that he had no human sex organs, as our soft bodies had not developed them yet. Our fluid and solid excretion orifices were mere shapeless openings, very unlike human orifices.

I left that city; I cannot today remember its name. I was traveling over built road with other migrants, and picked up by a driver in a truck-vehicle. The driver was a kind man who offered us warm water and a scant amount of food. He took us to another city where other migrants gathered. I found shelter and sustenance there. Many people waited for bus-vehicles to carry them, but many people also tired of waiting and set to walk on the roads. As I was still in transition, I chose to travel among the walkers.

A bus-vehicle witnessed our walk. The driver slowed and opened his bus-door. He was a man, who told us to board the bus-vehicle, as the road would become very hot and we would die without water. The bus-vehicle was crowded with humans who were women and children. A dozen men, myself among them, were to stand in the center of the bus-vehicle, as the seats were crowded. The driver gave us instructions that we would arrive in a City Juarez in two days. The bus-vehicle was crowded and had many smells, but the road walk was much worse, as my soft legs bruised and strained easier than normal human legs.

After one day, I grew full of panic. My soft body was adopting the physical aspects of the bus-vehicle riders; many of the riders were human women. My face and body was morphing from male to female characteristics. The moment I was able to, when the bus-vehicle halted for a sustenance and relief interval, I ran and hid myself. I was sure I would be killed if it were discovered that I was in transition between sexes. In fortunate time, walkers came along the road and I joined their number.

Many evil people lived in City Juarez. I was adept enough in handling my soft body that I could sense when a person meant harm to me, or good me. This allowed me to avoid snares evil people prepared for other migrants. Also, my soft body ebbed a goodness from it that caused good people to become happy when they helped me. In this way, I was taken into City Juarez and supplied with sustenance and shelter, and also clothing. For time first time since my arrival, people began to show genuine love to my person. They carefully explained to me how I would travel across the boundary to the North, and what I must do when I had gotten across. My language and understanding was very good, and my body would remain stable unless I took up company with another sort of humans.

I was told I would have much difficulty in crossing the boundary. I was also told only a single river separated the North from Mexico. I could not understand the dilemma of crossing a single river, until I was taken there and shown that it was a dangerous river, and that men waited on the other side of it to capture me for interrogation. Other options were explained to me, such as crossing through a desert. This was more dangerous than the river, due to the heat and human dangers. Lawlessness existed in the desert that was greater than that of the river.

Perhaps I would have been happier had I stayed in City Juarez. Certainly the people of that place were kind to me, and supportive. At the same time, from one end of Mexico to the opposite, I was told that North was a place of wonders, a heaven on Earth in a way, and that the God of Earth wanted the walkers to travel there. For this reason, I chose to complete the journey.

Humans would have much trouble to cross a hot and barren desert, but it was less of a burden for me. My soft body could acclimate to the temperatures after a few days. I took sustenance and rest in City Juarez, and afterward I traveled to the edge of the desert with enough supplies for four days. I removed my clothing and rested nude in the heat, allowing my soft body to change its coloration to match the desert. Once my flesh was desert tan, I started my journey across in the heat of the day. I was told that less sensors were used to spot migrants during the day, as migrants preferred to travel at night.

The boundary crossing lasted two days. I did not expect the desert to be so cold during the night. My soft body had trouble adjusting from the hot day to the cold night in a short period of time, causing me to become unwell. I believe this is when my soft body first began to malfunction. I found a station for truck-vehicles along a road, and I climbed into the rear of a truck-vehicle before it set off to another destination.

I must not reveal my present location. It is a city near the boundary of Mexico. I have been here for several weeks now. After being near humans, my human coloration has returned. At first, I stole clothing and sustenance from humans, but now I have met a few humans with good hearts that have provided for my needs. The most difficulty I have is in answering questions regarding my past, as I have no past on this planet / dimension. I do not wish to fabricate a past, as later it may be scrutinized and found out as a lie. The humans I interact with are suspicious, but they understand that I have purity in my soul, and as in City Juarez, they feel happiness to provide for me. I believe these humans are indeed my friends.

That is all I choose to say regarding my arrival to Earth. Perhaps other Changelings such as I reside in this dimension. I suppose they keep their whereabouts hidden because humans can be very cruel creatures to one another, and more so to other entities. I have certain abilities and senses that humans rarely exhibit. In this aspect, I suppose I am more of a Fallen Angel than a human. I will not say what these abilities are, as I might be found out if I reveal them. Perhaps one day I will encounter another Changeling who has come here by choice, and who can tell me more about my past that I cannot remember.

I wish to say this as my final words. I am here, but I mean humans no harm. I am different, but I am also of your kind now. I do not wish to be captured and dissected or tortured. I only wish to return to my dimension, but I calculate the only way I can do so is to disrupt a particle collider while it is in operation. Even then, there is no guarantee that I will be sent to my home. If I must remain here on Earth until others of my kind find my soul and retrieve it, then I only wish to live productive lives and to bring happiness to humans during those lives.

I am not Lucifer. I am not Azrael. I am not here to harm you. I arrived through an act of chaos, but I am not chaotic. I believe I am a Watcher or a Guardian, but I do not remember what I was assigned to watch or to guard. I do not know any secrets, nor do I carry any advanced technologies. I only wish to live a peaceful and stable existence.

Leave me alone.

#####

### Story Starters

Okay, you may have heard of these goofs that think their story idea, which is only one or two sentences long, is destined to become a Hollywood blockbuster or a New York Times bestseller. These are the goofs that jump up and down crying out, so and so author stole my idea! First off, if their idea was so incredibly awesome, why aren't they sitting down and writing their screenplay or novel? I have come across too many non-writers who think creative writing appears like magic, and the cash flow will always follow like a magnet, or a flood. That's not the way it works, folks. There is a lot of hard work and research, and a lot of time sacrificed from other things, like a social life, that go into producing a finished written work. After that, there is a further obstacle in marketing the work and hoping the public will one day discover it.

I have, right now, 280 pages worth of story ideas that are sitting around doing nothing except gathering digital dust. I'm going to present some of these ideas in this magazine, because if I can't get to them, maybe they can inspire you to write something. If you do, I'll put your story here in my magazine. As a further incentive, if you find anything in my magazines that inspires you into writing a story, do it. That's how writing works: you read something, you see something, and you write something as a result. See my Contribute section for how you can get your writing to me.

Here are the Story Starters for this issue. Can you do anything with them?

*** This month, I am between longer writing projects, and I've decided I'm going to develop some of these story concepts myself, to give you an idea of how I get things done. I will present the Story Starters first, and then jump right in to create a new short story out of them. All of the following I was trying to incorporate into my recently completed novel, Savage Lands 6. Some ideas made it into the novel, and some did not. Either way, the following are brand new stories for you to enjoy.

These stories range from Medium to High controversy, they are in various genres and they haven't been placed into any future novels or collections yet. The point is that I am challenging any of you to write something down and submit it to my e-zine. You could be a seasoned writer, or just starting out, it doesn't matter, but if you have the idea to be a writer, and the commitment to go along with that, you need to start somewhere! (I also encourage you to read my How I Became articles, in this issue and in issue No. 1. It has not been an easy road for me!) ***

#####

### The Sorceress Karyn

"Truly, foolish wench, this world is just one of my many dominions." - Lucifer to the sorceress, high atop the World's End peak.

08.31.95 - A female magician climbs to the peak of the highest mountain on her world, to perform recently discovered sacred rituals that will banish the planet of evil. Inner confusion occurs when the images of her lover, her parents and her friends tell her she is not doing the right thing. Finally, a strong wind blows her from her perch, sending her quickly to her death. Lucifer appears from the mist her loved ones came from, and he stands atop the peak, pondering what he has done. Finally, he is content with his actions and disappears.

02.10.10 – magic is dwindling, monsters roam the hills, and the Great War, between men and animals, has been lost, old heroes and heroines are reduced to merely names in mythical tales of long ago

11.01.18 - Today is November 1, 2018. The above Story Starter entries have been sitting around for a while, with the older one written down a whopping 23 years ago! The most recent entry is from 2010. It is only in the last couple of years that I have placed the 2010 concept into a story, actually a series of novels titled Tales From The Savage Lands. I have published Book 1 already, while Books 2 through 6 are waiting for their final reviews. The 2010 idea will feature prominently in Book 7, and if I ever get there, in Book 8 as well.

Last night was Halloween, and since I am in the mood for writing grim poetry, I've decided to adapt my story idea into my previous series of poems titled The Old Hag's Tales. So far, six of the Old Hag's musings have been written, all included in the first book of the series, Tales From The Savage Lands. I think it's time for another one! Oh, and the lead character for this idea, Sorceress Karynn, shows up in Book 5 and 6. For this poem, I need a new character that won't be around for very long.

### The Old Hag's Tales 7

### Huwa Papandra

Once upon a time down at Old Miriam's Well,

There lived a young witch who could cast one spell.

Huwa Papandra, that was the witch's name.

Huwa Papandra, she was the one to blame!

You see, our dear Huwa, she only had one spell.

Can't make no money, with only one thing to sell.

Huwa Papandra, envious of the rest.

Huwa Papandra, wanting to be best.

The other witches could do all sorts of magic things.

Drawing demons from the pit; making dead men sing.

Huwa Papandra, heart full of discord.

Huwa Papandra, always wanting more.

The gods tore the veil, letting all the magic through.

Changed the sky to red, when afore was colored blue.

Huwa Papandra, she thought she had a chance.

Huwa Papandra, with demons she would dance.

Shadows in the woods, howls heard in the night.

Scaring all the villagers, hearts filled full 'o fright.

Huwa Papandra, walked away from home.

Huwa Papandra, went walking all alone.

One good healing spell, for Huwa was not enough.

She wanted divination, and potions made for love.

Huwa Papandra, be careful what ye seek.

Huwa Papandra, that's who ye will meet.

Witness saw the demon; here is what she saw.

Bird head, long beak, black feathers, sharp claws.

Huwa Papandra, spoke to birdie demon.

Huwa Papandra, most would be a fleein.'

Give me your darkest secrets, all I wish to know.

That's what this witch demanded from this crow.

Huwa Papandra, I will tell you all.

Huwa Papandra, from the greatest fall.

Crow became a giant, that's what the witness said.

Poked its giant beak right into the witch's head.

Huwa Papandra, bird began to fly.

Huwa Papandra, was taken to the sky.

In a whirlwind she was taken, high into the air.

The witness picking berries, fast to gettin' scared.

Huwa Papandra, held by head and arms.

Huwa Papandra, should be knittin' yarn.

Up so high, did the demon bird let the witch fall.

The witness on the ground, she was to see it all.

Huwa Papandra, cannot catch her breath.

Huwa Papandra, falling down to her death.

In that fall, all the knowledge was given to her.

For a blink of the eye, best witch in the world.

Huwa Papandra, knew all there was to know.

Huwa Papandra, down the only way to go.

How to stop a fall, the only spell she lacked.

Landed with a crunch, broken bones and back.

Huwa Papandra, moments left in life.

Huwa, Papandra, aimed so very high.

Best learn this lesson, ye young mages listenin.'

Bite more than ye can chew, won't make ye win.

Huwa Papandra, only knew one spell.

Huwa Papandra, sittin' down in Hell.

All the magic in the world didn't get her very far.

Don't go courtin' demons, be happy who you are.

Huwa Papandra, thought to fly on high.

Huwa Papandra, only found a way to die.

#####

### Mercenary

Date Unknown - Ruthless mercenary is engaged in battle with anti-Terran forces on remote planet. Astute and highly skilled, he leads a surprise ambush and wipes out a small, but heavily fortified camp. Once the action is over, he tries to contact his employer and learns that the employer has been assassinated.

An agent for the deceased employer steps in, and assures the mercenary that he and his fellow soldiers have been properly credited for their services. The agent also declares his allegiance to a new master, the very man that has assassinated his former employer.

"You change sides pretty quick." – mercenary

"Just like you, I am a businessman." – new agent

The mercenary informs his band of the occurrences, including the offer to work for the new employer. Some of the soldiers decide to take the offer, others want to seek out new opportunities. For security, they all vote to camp out, and set on their journey towards the nearest port in the morning.

The group sets up a campsite, and they trade war stories. One points towards the far mountains, claiming they are home to a monastery of religious monks. Legend has it, that from this monastery, there will come a savior of the universe. This being will come forth to devour all evil, and bring about everlasting peace.

12.10.97 - Some soldiers mock the story. Others wonder how an all male colony could survive without females, for centuries. Strangely, the greediest of the bunch denies the rumors, instead convincing the rest of them to head out.

11.23.09 – for the moment, this one seems to have escaped my scope, review later, try to keep it engaging and relevant, and most of all original

02.12.10 – since I'm working on medieval age crap anyway, why not adjust the timeline to that, and throw in some exotic kingdoms and sorcery, better yet, why not stick this in New Avalon?

11.02.18 - Today is November 2, 2018. This is another very old story idea, so old I don't even have an initial date for it. Okay, I see what I have to work with. Hmmm... I'm going to take 5 to 10 minutes here before I begin writing.

### Pickle For Hire

You ever seen a goddamned butterfly weaving its way through a flower garden? By sheer instinct, that fucking thing dips and dodges. It knows, it fucking knows, that the moment it stops its random movements, some predator bird is going to come by and swallow it the hell up. That's what I'm feeling right now; that I should make those same unpredictable moves a fucking butterfly can make, if I want to be alive when the rounds stop flying.

Pop, pop, pop!

You hear that sound? That's the sound a PIKL makes. That would be a Pulsed Impulsive Kill Laser, for those of you not in The Know. The weapon I'm holding is modeled after the military issue M-16 A-7-dash-7, but those aren't gunpowder rounds leaving the barrel. No, that's a superheated bolt of plasma the size of my fingernail. It wouldn't go very far on its own, except it's surrounded by a hot laser that basically clears the road for the plasma. The Pop sound, that's the sound of the plasma hitting the air. It isn't anything like the sizzle or whine you hear laser guns make in the movies. No, sir, this bolt of death is gone so fast, the damned thing has already hit its target before the sound figures out it's late to the party. When you hear the Pop, that means the bolt has already hit something, and the sound is confused because the laser associated with it is done and gone. Usually, the noise is heard eight to ten feet away from the muzzle. The human brain looks toward the sound by instinct, before it realizes it has to look further back to see where the bolt actually came from. That gives me an extra half-second to aim at the next target. That extra half-second is what keeps me alive.

I'm sure you've guessed who I am by now. Since I carry a PIKL, the normal-fags call me a Pickle. Those are the chowder-heads who sit behind computer monitors and play first person shooters all day. They think they know what they're doing because their digital sims use the same Mil-Spec gear and weapons to shoot each other in the virtual games, that we're using in real life to put the lights out on real threats. Those fucking queer-babies wouldn't know what to do in a real life or death scenario, except hope their cash-strapped parents have enough Digi-Coin in their e-wallets to bail them out with a big, fat ransom payment.

If you want to know my name, it's none of your fucking business! Oh, all right! I'm Jake Monahan, and you can kiss my...

Blam! Blam!

Oh, shit, did you hear that? That was a fucking pump-action! What the hell is one of those jungle dwellers doing with a shotgun?

"Two bean burritos, extra hot sauce, just past noon." I heard over my helmet com. "Fly, robin, fly!"

Yeah, we were using Garble-Speak. We had to, since all the 5G repeaters in the vicinity were eavesdropping on our radio chatter. The A.I. would identify any normal military-speak we were using to anyone holding a decent scanner, so we had no choice but to improvise.

"Robin Egg Jaybird, can you douse the hot sauce?"

That was referring to me. I was at the front of the squad, keeping my head low because we all knew the terrorists were out there. When the shooting first started up, the Point Man bit the asphalt. Manny and I were only about six meters behind him. Manny ran left while I leapt right, ending up in the crevice formed by a roll-up aluminum gate and a rough cement wall. I could read the Spanish sign on the roll-up door. The sign said _Taqueria Tiburon_ , so I guess they served seafood tacos, and possibly even shark meat.

"Jaybird!" I called back, after having poked my head out for a second. "I cannot find the burritos! They must still be in the box!"

"Material Girl!" Manny announced. "The burritos have fallen out of the box and are leapfrogging after noon!"

That meant they were headed my way. "Jaybird! You'll hear me tweeting in a second!"

Before I could even take a look, I saw two puffs of smoke explode from the wall only a couple of feet away. That was too fucking close for comfort!

"Jaybird!" I talked to the com. "The sauce is extra hot! I need water!"

"Barking Dog, bring the drink past noon!" The Sergeant's heavy voice was heard. "All other Robin Eggs, move before noon!"

"Barking Dog, ruff ruff!"

It felt like it took fifteen long minutes before I saw Bill sneaking up on my Twenty. He was using the cars parked on the sidewalk for cover. When the lean black man got as close as he could to my position, he crouched behind a rear fender and gave me an inquiring glance. I flashed him the OK sign to show I wasn't wounded.

Bill nodded, before he told the com, "Barking Dog is in the doghouse."

"Barking Dog, Jaybird, stay on your leashes!" Their Sergeant ordered.

Bill covered his com, so he could hiss at me. "I hate being used as bait!"

"Yeah, no shit!" I replied.

Bill glanced around the edge of his cover. "I don't see any fucking burritos out there! Why don't you come over here behind this fucking car? I'll cover you!"

I wasn't exactly a sitting duck, but I was close. The shooters couldn't get me directly, but they could throw a Molotov cocktail that could splatter fire on my position. Moving right away, I decided, was a good fucking idea! I made like a sprinter until I jumped behind Bill, just as two hammer strikes were heard slamming into sheet metal. Right after, Bill's PIKL rifle went Pop, Pop!

"I've got this side." Bill said. "Take the driver's side, Jake."

"I've got it." I nodded.

"Keep an eye out on our Twenty, while you're at it."

"I said I've got it!"

I kept looking fore and aft. For the next few minutes, it seemed that nothing was happening. The rest of our squad was on the left side of the street, advancing behind the row of one-story businesses. A rock bounced on the street, coming in from the south. About a minute later, another rock hit the car we were hiding behind.

"Do you see anyone?" I asked.

"No, not yet." Bill grumbled. "They're fucking throwing rocks at us!"

"Quarter before noon." The Sergeant was heard. "Heading for noon."

"Ruff, ruff!" Bill replied.

A minute later, the shotgun went off, but it wasn't aimed in our direction. Bill and I were keeping our eyes forward, when I decided it might be a damned good idea to check if anyone was sneaking up behind us. When I looked at Bill's back, I could see the sweat on his cammie blouse, staining both of his armpits. It was probably ninety-five degrees that day. By chance, my eyes drifted up, past the wall and to the roof of the taco shop. I saw a man up there, wearing a blue ball cap and with his face covered by a bandana. The man and I saw each other at the same time. He raised his arm over his head, while I aimed my rifle. Before he could launch whatever he had, my weapon went Pop!

Let me tell you, plasma rounds are pretty lethal. In this case, I hit the man on the right side of his chest. He grunted and teetered over like a bad marionette, before he fell to the sidewalk with a hard thud. The poor guy landed right on his head, too.

"Shit." Bill grumbled.

The man was about to throw a rock, and he had more rocks cradled in his left arm, maybe five or six more. They all fell loose on the sidewalk upon impact. There was no blood seepage because the hot plasma had cauterized the large hole it had left behind.

Bill was close enough to lunge forward and wrench the dead man's cap away. He saw most of the man's face now. "Shit, Jake! It was just a fucking kid! He can't be more than sixteen or seventeen years old!"

"Not a kid," I corrected. "A dangerous terrorist threat."

"What are we doing here, Jake? What are we really doing here?"

"We're making money." I replied.

We aren't supposed to tell anyone our location, but what the hell. I like you. So technically, nobody sent us there, to the border between Mexico and Guatemala. For the last twenty-something years, Western socialists had been rousting up the poor natives from several Central American countries: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Those poor pawns were told to form walking caravans and strut their happy feet all the way to the States.

The caravans were stupid ideas to begin with. People were walking out in the hot sun, dehydrating and sometimes even dying on the long roads. If they did make into Mexico, the human traffickers were standing ready to murder the men and kidnap the women and children. If these poor travelers somehow made it all the way to the U.S. border, all they found was a giant metal wall and a bunch of armed troops on the other side. There was no American Dream waiting for any of those marchers, but they were so desperate they'd forgotten their common sense.

So many travelers were coming into Mexico that the Central American drug cartels got involved. They put backpacks full of explosives on human mules, and told those mules to go stand in front of Guatemalan police officers. There was a river between Mexico and Guatemala, you see, and the bridge over that river was considered a neutral zone. Mexico patrolled on end, while Guatemala manned the other. After several suicide bombings, the cops and soldiers on the Guatemala side weren't even posted up anymore. If the walkers made it to the span of the bridge, they were left alone to do whatever they wanted. The town just south of the bridge had become a lawless region.

Mexico and Guatemala had their hands tied, because many humanitarian assholes from the United Nations were keeping a close watch on them. If either country lifted even a finger to harass the caravans, even to halt the known criminals or drug mules, the U.N. would accuse that country of having committed heinous human rights abuses. All of that was for political show and grandstanding, obviously, but a bad rep from the U.N. meant that investors were hesitant to invest, stock values would drop and inflation would go on the warpath. Mexican and Guatemalan economies were suffering, not a lot, but enough that something had to be done about the cartel infiltrators in the caravans. That's when Mexico decided to open up a jar of Pickles.

"Cover me." Bill said.

Once I was in place, Bill used his phone to take a few pictures of the man I'd killed. The pictures would show the man had his face covered, and had rocks in his possession, in case the bleeding hearts in the U.N. accused us of shooting an unarmed man.

"I'm taking the bandana off." Bill decided. "I need a picture of his entire face, in case this asshole is in an NSA database."

I had a hell of a time doing a 360 watch, plus keeping an eye on the fucking roof for more rock-throwers. Good thing Bill was quick.

"This dumb kid should be in high school." Bill grumbled.

"Sucks for him." I shrugged.

"Where the hell is the goddamned chopper?" One of the other Pickles snarled, some two hours later.

Sergeant Crumb, and yes, that was his real name, was sitting in the narrow shade of the bridge. He was surrounded on all sides by paper trash, shattered glass from bottles, old, abandoned clothes and hundreds of fat rocks the unruly travelers had thrown. Also very prevalent was the smell of shit and piss. The Sergeant had the only long-range radio. He simply shook his head at the question. Crumb didn't know where the fucking chopper was any more than we did.

Early that morning, the bridge had been full of hundreds of angry young men, and a few handfuls of women and children. The soldiers on the Mexican side had shot rubber bullets into the crowd, and thrown in half a dozen canisters of tear gas. This assault had driven the crowd back, far enough for the Mexican chopper to drop off one Sergeant Crumb and two mercenary squads of four men each. Our mission was simple; keep the bridge clear while Mexican cleaning crews came in to remove some of the debris and filth out of the way, included a few burned out cars. Unfortunately, the fighting had been so frequent that the cleaners only had time enough to finish about a third of the bridge. Back and forth, our team of mercenaries had danced with the armed goons embedded within the caravan, until now that the sun was setting.

"I don't think the chopper is coming." Crumb finally told us.

"What are we going to do then?" I asked. "These sorry fucks already tore out the electricity on the bridge. They're going to shoot at us all night if we stay here!"

Crumb got to his feet and dusted off his ass. "I'll go talk to the Mexicans."

"He'd better." Bill said, once the man had gone. "We're down to a third of our ammo, and we only had our one MRE at lunchtime."

"Nobody wants to stay out here all night." I replied.

When Crumb came back, he motioned for us to follow him into Mexico. We went past the barred gate, where the Mexican soldiers eyed us as if we'd fucked their mothers. I wondered how many of those fucking hairy tacos were corrupt. Not that long ago, the Mexican army had taken over Guadalajara, after the entire police force had been relieved of their duties for corruption.

"Here is the Word." Crumb told us, now that we were standing in a reasonably safe place. "Our backers in the States pulled the plug on us. That means no more funds or resources are allocated to get us back home. I've asked the police captain here to pass this abrupt change in plans over to the Mexican government."

"What happens now?" One of our guys asked. "We just stay here?"

"I suppose we can rent a van." Crumb suggested.

"All the way to the fucking U.S. border?"

"We can always swim back." I joked.

"You've got to love Black Ops." One of the others laughed. "You could be in Afghanistan with poppy flowers up to your armpits, and they'll still pull the plug and leave a guy stranded out there."

We got lucky. The Mexicans sent us a bus normally used for transporting prisoners. I got to stare out a large window with metal grating on it as we were taken to the nearest airport. A private jet whisked us away, only five hours later.

We spent a day and a half in San Diego. Part of this was because the funds we'd been promised never showed up in our collective bank account. Crumb was making calls and sending out e-mails all day. Waiting for our money; that made some of us edgy. It took a while, but finally we got paid. Most of the squad left right away, in a blind hurry to start spending it.

Crumb, Bill and myself stayed behind. The Sergeant and I filed reports and took care of the loose ends. We still had the rental cars we'd used to cross the border in, to get our gear and weapons out of Mexico. One was dropped off right away, now that it wasn't needed. It was Bill's job to find something for us to do to get our minds off of killing.

We ended up driving to Balboa Park, to that fucking Omni-Max movie theater. We watched a movie about trains, followed by a movie on the Arctic. A spectator might think we were normal-fags, seeing three big guys sitting in chairs that were too small for us, wearing stupid tourist tee shirts and jeans because that's all we could buy on the spur of the moment in Mexico. Watching those Omni-Max films did wonders for me, by the way. It made me think there were still things in the world worth fighting for.

When we got back to our hotel room, Crumb got on his laptop and entered the Dark Web. He was looking for our next job. They were always listed in Garble-Speak.

"This one is from Iraq." Crumb read out loud. "Seasoned tennis coach needed to train Olympic athletes."

"What does that mean, Jake?" Bill asked.

"The C.I.A. wants private contractors to train the Taliban."

"And they're Olympic athletes?"

"No, more like the opposite." I chuckled. "Those guys can't even do jumping jacks."

"How much does it pay?" Bill asked Crumb.

"Plenty of American taxpayer money."

"Fuck that." Bill shook his head. "We'll have to show those assholes how to shoot, won't we, just so they can shoot at American soldiers later? I'm not doing that!"

"Neither am I." I seconded. "What else we got?"

"Electricians wanted to pull the plug on video gamers."

I frowned.

"What, Jake?" Bill looked at me. "What does that mean?"

"That's got to be in Venezuela." I explained. "Certain international banking families have wanted to get their hands on Venezuela's gold mine for decades now. Since they can't reach the mine directly, because it is too well protected, they hire contractors to blow up the power plants. Venezuela isn't that much bigger than California or Texas. If we take out one large power plant, we take out the power grid for half the country."

"The pay is excellent." Crumb said. "But the risk is substantial."

"No." Bill decided for us. "What we just did down in Mexico, that was done against bad people who were mixing in with regular people. Training the fucking Taliban, or shutting down a country's power grid, are you fucking kidding me?"

You see, that's why Crumb and I kept Bill around. He had morals that we didn't have. Crumb and I, we'd been doing things exclusively for the money in the past, like most guys would. Money makes the world go 'round.

"Are there any jobs where we can be the good guys?" Bill persisted.

"Let me check on the domestic section." Crumb grumbled. "Not much is showing up. Oh, here we go. Pizza shop needs after hours cleaners. The pay is minimum wage."

"What the hell is a pizza shop?" Bill asked.

Crumb looked at me. "It only pays minimum wage."

I lowered my head. This kind of job; I might do for free. "Yeah."

"What is a pizza shop?" Bill kept at it. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Don't worry, Bill." I told him. "We'll be the good guys on this job."

"We're going to Portland." Crumb said.

Bill was the kind of guy who could blow up with anger. That's why we didn't tell him what the mission was about until the last moment. When he found out what the term 'pizza' stood for, he went to sit down for fifteen minutes, to think things over. He came back and nodded when he was ready.

"Who are the coded primaries?" Crumb quizzed him.

"One Hillary, one Abramovic and two Podestas."

"Who are the secondaries?"

"Four to six sour Starbucks."

"What are our target locations?"

"Comet Ping Pong first. That will most likely be empty because it is after hours. Our second location is Voodoo Doughnuts in an upscale, residential neighborhood."

"Look at me, Bill." Crumb said. "Are you emotionally fit for this mission?"

Bill glanced at me, before he nodded to the Sarge that he was.

"Let's just hope we don't find any fresh pizza." I said.

For centuries, the hierarchy of a witch coven has stayed the same, at least at the highest levels. You might think a full coven numbers at the traditional thirteen members, including one head witch or warlock surrounded by twelve minor witches or warlocks, but that was rarely the case. At the top, you were guaranteed to have a rich and influential person, male or female, who would allow their body to become possessed by the Devil. From what I've seen during my life, I would have to say that such a being really does exist. Second in line is the master witch, who evokes the Devil through blood sacrifice and causes the host to become a conduit for possession.

Next in line are the facilitators, who tell everybody else what to do. In my opinion, these lowlifes are the worst of the bunch. You can argue that a witch calling the Devil is bad, or a person willing to get possessed, but those people are only hurting themselves. The facilitators, on the other hand, they move money around to buy properties, they set up locations for the rituals to take place, and they hire thugs to go out and kidnap the sacrificial victims. These are evil people, as evil as you can get, and they talk in Garble-Speak as well. They call their victims Chickens, Doughnuts, or Pizza in this case. As far as why we refer to these people as Hillary, Abramovic or Podesta, you'll have to research the Wikileaks emails for yourself to find out, if you have the guts for it.

The covens always met in public places. Pizza places were popular because nobody would think twice about families taking kids there. The members of the coven used their own children for the rituals, including sacrificing them or abusing them in vile sex magic. They would also bring in other children, from people that weren't involved in the cults, to show them to the upper hierarchy of the coven. The prettiest ones or the ones that were easy to deceive were approved, and the coven members would get rewarded for finding them. We had our proof now, of who the major players were and what they had done, and unlike the federal government, who pretended none of this was going on, we were going to do something about it.

At midnight, Sergeant Crumb went to cut power to the entire block where the eatery was located. With all the lights off on the street, Bill and I left the car. We went through the alley using our Mag lights, as clouds were covering up the moon and kept everything dark. Good thing Portland was so cold, or else we'd have to worry about homeless bums sleeping out there like they did in the warmer longitudes. Bill got the back door open. I was the first one in, since I had to check for a battery-powered back-up for the alarm system.

"We're looking for evidence, right?" Bill asked.

"Soft evidence." I corrected. "We're not going to find any Pizza, if that's what you mean. These people aren't that stupid. We're looking for circumstantial shit."

"Like what?"

I pointed my Mag light at the wall. It showed a mural depicting semi-nude children running around in the woods, with only gossamer wraps around their little bodies. The children were drawn to look like cherubs. In the trees, dark silhouettes with shiny red eyes were seen. Yeah, this was the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a regular pizza joint. "Shit like that."

While Bill cased the sitting area and kitchen, I checked the cashier desk. They sold tee shirts with cartoon pentagrams and zany-looking goat heads. The store logo had a triangular spiral shape on it, a shape matching FBI documentation. The normal-fags were so stupid they'd say all of this was completely innocent.

"Look at this." Bill said, holding out his phone.

He'd taken a look in the bathroom. On the wall, in large, crude black letters, somebody had drawn the outline of an alien Gray throwing up a peace sign. Next to that was the phrase 'shut up and fuck.' Totally innocent, right? The kind of thing you want your kid to see when he's taking a leak.

I rifled through the cashier desk, taking pictures of a few things. Sometimes, the witches got careless. They'd leave pictures out, showing them posing with other people's children. One time, we found pictures of kids with their wrists duct-taped to tables. The kids were smiling because they thought they were playing a game.

Bill found several eight by ten framed pictures on another wall. He started taking pictures of them. I went over for a closer look.

"Here is our Hillary." I tapped one. "And here is our Abramovic standing next to her. That's where we're going next, to her house."

We had the proof we needed. The images we'd just acquired corroborated the info we'd been sent ahead of time, and the faces matched those on the pictures we were given, showing prominent members of the community posing nude with children.

"Panda bear incoming." My hand-radio warned.

Bill and I shut our lights off. We ducked behind a counter as a police cruiser slowly rolled down the center of the street.

"Some of the local cops are part of the coven." Bill talked quietly. "That might be one of them."

"We're not after the cops." I reminded the man. "We're after Abramovic. We take that bitch out, and we publicize the evidence tomorrow. It's important that you keep your head straight."

"Don't worry about me. I'm good to go."

"Panda bear has left the building." Crumb's voice announced through the radio.

"Comet Ping Pong is clear." I replied. "Birds heading to the nest."

After I tapped Bill's shoulder, he clicked his light back on. We made our way to the back of the eatery. We were the birds, and the nest we were headed to was our rental car, where Crumb would be waiting for us.

"I can't believe shit like this is happening today." Bill growled, when we reached the alley. "How many Pizzas do you think they've gone through?"

"I don't know." I shrugged. "All I know is; Voodoo Doughnuts, here we come."

This story was partially inspired by users of 4Chan, who are at present using Garble-Speak to get around Fake News corporate censorship of 'touchy' matters.

#####

### The Girl In The Cage

08.19.99 - Fairy tale reminiscent of the swan princess movie, where a beautiful princess is abducted by an evil baron and imprisoned forever. The hero of the story will be an unlikely choice, however.

King marries female, royalty from Far East, woman becomes queen, both rule their small kingdom with generosity, justice, fairness- period known as time of plenty

In time, the royal couple births a daughter, who grows up to be loved by all, she is exotically beautiful, with attributes from both parents. She shows herself to be well learned, respectful, courteous, and many expect even better times under her rule.

When the girl reaches her eighteenth birthday, she is officially decorated as head of the kingdom. At her ceremony the evil baron from the North kidnaps her.

The princess is taken to the baron's castle and placed inside a magic cube, where she will not age at all.

The princess refuses the baron's advances, causing the baron to go insane. The baron then plants man-eating vines around the base of the castle mountain, and commands a wind demon to guard the path up to the castle. He turns his soldiers into ogres, and his captain into a large beast.

He sets several mechanical contraptions loose in the passages.

The hero is a page of a young nobleman whom talks his master into trying to enter the castle. The nobleman goes to the castle, then gives up. The page, however, remains behind to try...

01.06.09 - early notes too soft, too perfect. Story might fit into chaos rift series, especially since several elements, like the wind demon, are already incorporated into Ranth storyline, and origins will happen somewhere early on, but structure of this plot has to be changed regardless

03.01.09 - seem to have lost original feel for this story, go through it, see if I can modify it and keep it short

The girl in the cage is a princess, cursed to spend her eternity in the booby-trapped cell. The hero of the story is as unlikely as it gets, and not the handsome prince everyone expects will rescue her.

02.10.10 - this story smells of ugh, what was I thinking? no real coherence, but I'll try to salvage it and place it in early Avalon

11.04.18 - Over the course of the last year, I've written seven novels based on the Medieval Age. I am deliberately trying to avoid doing that here because of the burn out, and also because my next big project will likely be the medieval-based Savage Lands 7. As I'm going into this, I'm keeping the Blade Runner movies, Starship Troopers and the action TV show 24, Season One in my mind, along with about a million other things. I'm taking about 10 minutes here to try to come up with a good start for this one. I see that it is tailor-made for a medieval setting, but even in my notes I acknowledge that this is already a stale plot. We'll see what I can come up with in the next ten minutes...

### Gordon's Soul Takes A Trip

"Once, I saw a shaman suck a man's soul out of his body, just by waving a piece of licorice in front of his face." Saul said.

Saul was always coming up with weird shit like that, Gordon understood. He also knew that Ricky usually came up with some smart aleck remark only a few seconds later.

"Was it a red licorice or a black one?" Ricky smirked. "Cuz I don't know about them black ones!"

All three teenagers started laughing. They were hanging out in Gordon's backyard, because Saul lived in apartments and Ricky's yard was more like an open warehouse for the junk his father collected.

"I'm not making that up." Saul insisted.

"I believe you." Ricky nodded, but that nod quickly turned into a headshake. "No I don't. In actual reality, I think you're full of it."

"Wait, wait." Gordon held his hand up. "Let's dig into this a little more. Where did this happen, Saul, in Madagascar or Borneo?"

"I'm surprised you've even heard of those places." Saul chuckled.

"Hold up." Ricky's forehead wrinkled up in confusion. "You mean Madagascar is a real place? I thought it was a cartoon!"

"You're a cartoon!" Gordon laughed.

"It wouldn't hurt if you lay off the video games for a few weeks." Saul scolded the confused Ricky. "You might actually learn something. But to answer the question, no, it didn't happen all that far away. It happened right here in this neighborhood."

"Now I know you're full of it." Ricky rolled his eyes. "We don't have any shaman or witch doctors in this neighborhood!"

"Are you sure about that?"

"Are you saying there are?" Gordon cut in.

"You never know who you could be rubbing elbows with at the store." Saul hinted. "You have no idea how many witches live around here."

"How many?" Ricky asked.

"Well, I didn't count them!"

"What I want to know is where did you see this soul-sucking?" Gordon pressured.

Saul motioned east with his head. "The park over on 45th Street."

"Sure, because that's where all the witch doctors hang out." Ricky shrugged. "Everybody knows that!"

"It you want to split hairs about it, then technically it wasn't in the park." Saul corrected himself. "It was in the little ravine that runs between the park and the highway."

"What the hell were you doing back there?" Gordon wondered.

"I was tagging."

"Tagging in the ravine?" Ricky inquired.

"No, I was not tagging in the ravine. I took a short cut through the ravine, to get at the pillars under the off-ramp at 43rd. If I hadn't taken a short cut, I would have to walk on the road shoulder to get at those pillars, and everybody driving by would have seen me holding the spray can."

"You didn't get caught?" Ricky asked.

"Who cares about that?" Gordon cut him off. "I want to hear about the shaman. Spit it out, Saul!"

"All right. The shaman was, like, really dark-skinned and skinny. I think he was African or something. Down there in the ravine, homeless people set up little tents and sleeping bags and live there. I have to walk past like four of them to get to the highway. Anyway, the shaman didn't see me because he was busy opening up the pack of licorice, and before you ask, Ricky, it was the red kind. You know, the kind you get at the ninety-nice cent store. This homeless guy was dozing off in an old sleeping bag. The shaman walked right up to him and waved one piece of licorice right over his face."

"And then what happened?" Gordon inquired.

"You aren't going to believe it." Saul shook his head. "The homeless guy was sleeping on his side at first. He was still asleep as he turned onto his back. I swear, this is what I saw happen next. The homeless guy started to rise off the ground, while he was still asleep and inside his sleeping bag. He was rising from the chest first, like he had an invisible rope pulling him up. The shaman was not touching him, I swear!"

"You're crazy." Ricky huffed.

"Whatever. I saw the homeless guy float up by a couple of feet. All of a sudden, it was like the invisible rope was gone. The homeless guy fell to the ground and started... I don't know how to describe it. He looked like he was having a seizure, I guess, with his arms and legs flopping around. The man's eyes opened up; they were all white. It was the freakiest thing I've ever seen!"

"Prove it!" Ricky challenged.

"Okay, come to the ravine with me. I'll ask him to suck your soul out, too!"

"What happened with the homeless guy?" Gordon pressed.

"He fell to the ground, like I said already." Saul went on. "That's when the shaman saw me. He told me to leave. I said, hell no, I just saw you kill that guy, and I'm calling the cops. The shaman said no cops. He offered me a piece of licorice!"

Saul paused, trying to remember exactly how things had gone down. "The shaman said the homeless guy wasn't dead, but I swear to you, he looked dead to me! The shaman said he would bring him back in five minutes. The shaman was punishing the homeless man because the homeless man owned him some money."

"How much?" Ricky wondered.

"Eight bucks!" Saul laughed. "This is what the shaman told me; believe it or not. He said the man's soul wanted to eat the licorice. The soul left the homeless man's body, and the moment it was gone, the shaman used magic to prevent the soul from going back in. The shaman was going to keep the soul out of the body for five minutes. In the meantime, the homeless man and his soul knew what was happening. I guess if the shaman kept the soul out too long, the body would die or something. The soul was aware it had gotten caught. If that's not the freakiest thing you've ever heard, I don't know what is!"

"Did the homeless man die?" Gordon wondered.

"No." Saul shook his head. "When the shaman allowed the soul to return into the body, the homeless man started screaming like he'd gone crazy. He jumped up and stared at the shaman with huge goldfish eyes. He gave up all the money he had so the shaman would leave him alone. I think it was like twenty bucks! The shaman went and bought himself a twenty-ounce bottle of beer with the money."

"How do you know?" Ricky asked.

"I followed him to the liquor store." Saul answered.

"Did you actually see that guy's soul?" Gordon questioned.

"No, but get this. The shaman was blabbering the whole way to the liquor store. He said there is another dimension all around us, except we can't see it. This dimension is made of magic. The shaman sent the soul into that dimension, and everything the soul saw or heard, the homeless man remembered when he woke up."

"When did this happen?" Ricky spoke up.

"Last Friday."

"Why didn't you tell us before?"

"Because both of you would have talked smack to me. You would have said I was making it up."

"You are making it up!" Ricky quipped. "He's full of it, isn't he, Gordie?"

Gordon was deep in thought.

"Gordie?"

"Huh?" Gordon asked.

"What are you thinking?"

Gordon looked to his two friends. "I think we should go find that shaman."

The shaman wasn't difficult to find. In fact, he was right where Saul said he'd be. The shaman looked to be in his late thirties, with curly black hair and caramel-colored skin. He was dressed in a striped shirt with an old military vest on top, worn jeans and old tennis shoes. When the shaman saw the three teens coming, he ran into his ratty blue tent. Half a second later, he peeked out, with a dented ball bat in his hands.

"Hey, we just want to talk." Gordon held his hands out. "We're not here to fight."

"I do not talk!" The shaman snarled back.

"You're talking right now!" Gordon pointed out.

"No, I am not! I am chasing you away!"

"Will you talk for a cold soda?" Saul offered him a can.

The shaman stared at the soft drink. Clearly, he craved it. "Do you want me to show you how to curse others?"

"That's not why we came." Gordon started, before the words even sank in. "Wait, can you really curse someone?"

"If I am paid to do it, I will." The shaman nodded.

"Does this change the plan?" Ricky wondered.

"I don't know." Gordon replied. "Do you know somebody we should curse?"

Ricky nodded. "My math teacher. He's a dick."

"We're getting off track here." Saul said. "Should I give him the soda or not?"

"Yeah." Gordon confirmed. "Okay, shaman, we're making a trade; our soda for your information. Do you agree?"

"I can make a potion that will cause any woman fall in love with you." The shaman told them.

"Dude, get it!" Ricky burst out.

"Who are you going to use it on, your sister?" Saul teased.

"What? No, you idiot! I'll use it on my P.E. teacher, Miss Sweeney!"

"Wow." Saul said. "That's not a bad idea. Hey, Mr. Shaman, can that potion work for both of us?"

"For ten dollars each, I can make two love potions." The shaman resolved the issue. "My potions wear off after one week. You will have to decide which of you will go first."

Both teens looked to Gordon.

"Gordie, you have our twenty bucks!" Saul demanded.

"We're talking Miss Sweeney, Gordie!" Ricky urged.

"We didn't come here for that!" Gordon snapped. "We don't even know if this is a real shaman! What if he's just yanking our chains?"

Saul looked to the shaman. "Prove your magic really works!"

The shaman picked up dirt with his fingers. He tossed it aside, and right after, Ricky started sneezing.

"That was a coincidence." Saul decided.

The shaman picked up more dirt, and tossed it over his shoulder this time. Now, both Saul and Ricky were sneezing.

"I want real proof." Gordon said. "You told Saul you could send a soul into another dimension. I want you to go into that dimension and bring something out."

"I will do that because this is a good soda." The shaman nodded.

When the shaman stood up, Gordon braced himself in the hopes of witnessing something spectacular. He was very disappointed when the shaman merely stepped into his tent. He was only gone for about ten seconds. When the shaman returned, he had a newspaper in his hand. Gordon took the paper when it was handed to him.

"This is the New York Times." Gordon read. "And it's dated from today."

Saul and Ricky had stopped sneezing by then.

"What does it mean?" Ricky inquired.

"Well, duh!" Saul replied. "It means the shaman just went to New York to get that paper!"

"No, he didn't!" Ricky protested. "He had that paper in his tent! That's not magic!"

"I want to get to the bottom of this." Gordon resolved. "Mr. Shaman, did you just travel to New York to get that newspaper?"

The shaman shrugged.

"He's a fake!" Ricky accused.

"And he gave us fake sneezes?" Saul countered.

"Will you two shut your pie-holes?" Gordon grumbled. "Mr. Shaman, how did you learn how to be a shaman?"

"I was shown by my father, and he was shown by his father. The skill has been passed down from one generation to the next."

Gordon held out several bills of currency. "We all put our money together and came up with twenty-two bucks. We want to pay you to send us to another dimension."

"Give me the money." The shaman held his hand out.

"Uh, guys," Ricky worried. "I don't want to do it anymore."

"Sucks for you." Gordon said. "I'm still doing it."

The money exchanged hands. The teens thought the shaman was going to pocket it right away, but instead he sat down on the ground and waved for the teens to do likewise. The shaman put the money on the dirt, with a rock on top to prevent it from blowing off. He had another swig of soda before he continued.

"I will do as you say." He said. "How long would you like remain in the other dimension?"

Gordon sat down right in front of him. "Are you sending our souls or our bodies?"

"What difference does that make?" Saul wondered.

"I don't know." Gordon shrugged.

"I will send your souls." The shaman said. "You will choose for how long."

Saul gulped. "I don't like the sounds of that. I told you the guy I saw ended up shaking and screaming his head off."

"Don't tell me you're wimping out, too?" Gordon frowned. "You both suck!"

"I think I should stay here, in case something goes wrong." Saul decided.

"Me, too!" Ricky nodded.

Gordon gazed into the shaman's face. "Is this going to be dangerous?"

"It could be."

"Don't do it, Gordie!" Ricky warned.

"I didn't come all the way out here just to chicken out!" Gordon said. "Like you two did!" To the shaman, he said, "Okay, I'm ready."

The shaman stood and walked into his tent. When he returned, he held a familiar package of red candy in his hand.

"Wait, is that last week's licorice?" Gordon queried.

"I can use this, if you'd like." The shaman held up the half-finished soda.

"No thanks. I'll stick with the licorice. What next?"

"Sit quietly." The shaman said, dangling the licorice over Gordon's head. "Close your eyes."

The shaman started chanting in a foreign language. Saul hadn't mentioned anything about weird chanting, Gordon recalled. It unnerved him to listen to those words, while not having a clue about what they meant. Maybe the shaman was sending him on a one-way trip to eternal damnation. How the heck did he know? He felt his body start to rise...

Saul and Ricky both gaped, as Gordon's head looked upward, with its eyes shut, and his body seemed to float up into the air. Gordon's legs were still on the ground, but only loosely. All of a sudden, the shaman snatched the licorice away. Gordon's body slumped down, then fell over as if he'd gone unconscious.

"Gordie?" Ricky asked, feeling his stomach knotting up. "Saul, do you think he's dead?"

"I don't know." Saul whispered back.

Gordon had an intense craving for that piece of licorice waving over his head. He reached out to grab it, but the stinking shaman pulled it away. Gordon tried again, and missed a second time. The third time, the shaman took the licorice string and hid it behind his back.

"Hey!" Gordon growled. "No fair!"

Gordon looked to where the shaman was standing, but the man wasn't there anymore. He turned at the waist, trying to find Saul or Ricky, but they were gone, too. Gordon wasn't even in the ravine, but in a large dirt clearing with several brown mud huts around. The huts were shaped like standing cylinders, like soda cans, with a peaked straw roof on top and a single open doorway. They didn't even have windows on them. Past the huts, Gordon saw palm trees, and there definitely weren't any palm trees in the ravine!

He also saw people. They were all very old and dark-skinned. He counted ten or eleven men wearing leather loincloths and sandals. Those guys didn't have any shirts on! When Gordon saw two old women among the men, also topless, he started squirming. Their long breasts sagged all the way to their belly buttons.

"Yuck." Gordon said.

The old people with their gray hair and their wrinkled flesh and their bare chests came over to look at him.

"The shaman didn't tell us we would have a visitor." A man commented.

"You speak English?" Gordon wondered.

"No, you are speaking in our language." Another man answered. "In this place, all foreign tongues spoken to us are heard in our tongue."

"That's weird, right?" Gordon asked. "Where is this place?"

"This is the place of no time." A third man said. "We are the shaman's ancestors. For time eternal, we will scare the enemies of any shaman who comes from our lineage. When the current shaman passes, his soul will come here, and his successor will take his place in the physical world."

"Why have you come to us?" One of the women asked.

"This is a cool place!" Gordon blurted out. "Uh, I came because I wanted to travel into another dimension."

"Oh, that is different than the usual." A man asked. "What dimension do you choose?"

"You mean this isn't the different dimension?" Gordon wondered.

"This is only the home of the shaman's ancestors." The second woman replied. "There are many other dimensions to choose from."

"Hundreds." A man nodded.

"Thousands." Another said.

"More than there are stars in the sky." A heavyset man put the matter to rest.

"Think of a dimension in your mind," The first woman instructed. "And we will show you the way to find it."

"Any dimension?" Gordon asked. "Any dimension I can think of?"

Several of the ancestors nodded.

"My friends are going to be so mad they didn't come with me!" Gordon beamed. "Okay, I've got a dimension in mind, if I can really choose any one I want!"

Gordon felt unaware for a couple of minutes, as if he were in the nebulous state between sleep and wakefulness. When his senses returned to him, he found he was lying on his back, staring up at yet more trees. As Gordon sat up and had a look around, he found himself in a third place, a forest even, that was not the ravine or the clearing of the ancestors.

"I know what oak trees look like, but are those other trees birch?" He speculated. "Could they be chestnuts? Damn it, I should know this stuff! I read about it, didn't I?"

As Gordon got to his feet, he noticed another thing that disturbed him greatly. His clothes were gone! He was standing in his raw nuts!

"Was I naked in the ancestor village?" Gordon asked. "Seriously, I can't remember if I was or not! I hope there isn't a law against walking around naked!"

Bodies couldn't travel through dimensions with their clothing on, he decided, but it only took him a minute to discount that theory. His body was still sitting back in the ravine, where Saul and Ricky were. It was only his mind, he supposed, that was moving from one dimension to the other. Okay, that made sense. It meant he couldn't carry things along like clothes or shoes.

"I have to find something to wear." He decided.

The young man went for a walk through the shrubbery, before he came across a trail. The trail he strode over wasn't very wide, and it sloped one way or the other depending on which way the ground felt like leaning. It took him near ten minutes to figure out it wasn't a human trail, but one made by animals, most likely deer.

"That's pretty cool." He smirked. "I'm on a real deer trail!"

Gordon paused when he heard a horse neigh. He looked to his left, observing three men on horseback. The first thing the teenager felt was panic, as the men wore chain mail armor and rough wool shirts with some sort of yellow emblem on them. Even worse, the riders had swords at their sides, as long as his arm!

"Hold your feet, lad!" One of the mounted men barked at him. The man signaled to his fellows. One rider went ahead by a short distance, one stayed in place, and the third man who had yelled at him walked his horse toward Gordon. "What land do you claim?"

To his self, Gordon thought, you know this! His history class had been assigned to write first-person reports on what it would be like to live in ancient times. Other students had chosen to create scenarios based on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and even in the Islamic Empire, but Gordon was among only a couple of kids who had focused on the Medieval Age. Gordon loved everything about that period, and more specifically, about the time when William The Conqueror had become the first King of England. His reports had been so well received that Gordon's teacher had asked him to produce a series of them. He knew more about knights and castles than anyone else in his entire high school!

"I claim no land, good sir." Gordon started. When he saw the rider's face harden in suspicion, he added, "But that is only because I am a squire from a small village. I am in the service of a good knight, or I was, until I was robbed of everything I own!"

The mounted knight leaned over, peering at Gordon's face. The young man felt embarrassed to be leered at that way, with his nipples and nuts showing.

"What is your knight's name?" The rider asked.

"Uh, Sir Lancelot." Gordon blurted out. "Perhaps you haven't heard of him, as we have come from very far away. Sir Lancelot is an errant knight, seeking out good causes to champion."

"Ah." The rider looked more at ease now. "I suppose this Sir Lancelot was in the battle that just took place, fighting against the Northern King?"

Gordon took a chance and said, "Yes!"

"And who robbed you? Was it the gnomes?"

Gnomes, Gordon thought. What the heck were gnomes? He thought he'd better be careful in what he said, or else he'd trip over his words. "I don't know who robbed me. They used magic to put me into a sleep. When I awoke, my knight's wagon and all of the armaments on it were gone!"

"The gnomes do not take prisoners." The rider revealed. "You are not even showing any bruises on your flesh."

"Maybe you scared them away?" Gordon guessed.

"In which direction was the wagon?"

Gordon looked behind him and pointed. "A short distance back, along that deer trail. I can't be sure because I ran away when I awoke. I was afraid the, uh, gnomes would come back to hurt me."

The knight scanned through the forest. "We will explore the woods. Go north, lad, and move quickly. You will come to the scene of the battle in no time at all. You'd best get there as fast as you can manage it, if you want to claim whatever remains of your lord's armaments. Sir Lancelot, you said? I don't believe I've ever heard that name, but then again, there were many foreign knights and mercenaries in the battle."

The knight whistled at his two companions, and shouted when they drew near. "Beware of gnomes near here! This lad claims he was robbed by them!"

The horses moved further into the forest and were soon lost from sight.

"That was... That was risky." Gordon decided. "All right, let me go and see what this battle is about."

Gordon grimaced, as he pictured what the aftermath of a medieval battle looked like. He hoped he wouldn't see any dead bodies.

It took Gordon twenty minutes to find the battlefield. He'd been preoccupied over whether this medieval world came from his imagination, or if it was a real place he was sent to. The young man still hadn't decided when the sounds of men shouting and horses neighing alerted him.

There was only one good word to describe what he saw before him, and that word was carnage. Dead men and horses littered the field, with so much blood spilled the grass actually looked red. Clearly, Gordon could see where the dead men had been smashed with blunt weapons, or slashed at with sharp ones. He also discovered what a gnome was, and no, it wasn't a lawn ornament with a cheery face. Gnomes looked like small people, but they were very ugly and dressed like cavemen. Their faces were... Well, the best word he could come up with was 'twisted.'

Thanks to his birthday suit status, Gordon became a spectacle for the men who were still breathing. They sneered at him in disgust, or laughed at him, but most simply went about the grim duties of taking armaments from the dead. Gordon was accustomed to seeing handsome knights like the ones from the movies, but these men, they looked like hard-living cowboys, or battle-weary Marines.

"Will you look at the emperor?" One knight jeered. "You've got your new clothes on, don't you, young emperor?"

This brought chuckles out of most of the men that heard the words.

"Good sir, I was robbed by gnomes." Gordon repeated his concocted story. "They took everything I had, including the items I kept for my lord."

"And you're here to scavenge, are you?" The same knight asked.

"At least for some clothes, yes, sir."

"Go over there to the fringe." The knight pointed. "The greater part of the field is reserved for the warriors still standing. Is your lord here?"

Gordon pretended to scan the battlefield. "No, good sir. I believe he might be among the fallen knights."

"Then he won't be complaining about us sending you with the orphans, will he? You go on to the fringe. Grab what you can afore it's all taken away."

Sullenly, Gordon trudged across the field, trying as hard as he could not to see the dead men and animals, or even smell them. It was a repulsive stink, actually, part sweat like from a locker room, and part copper from all the blood. Gordon saw a noticeable distinction between the corpses still dressed in armor, and the bodies that had already been scavenged from. He counted at least a dozen young men, he assumed they were all squires, who were stripping the dead and sorting their items into piles.

"Hello." Gordon announced.

"Have you lost your lord?" One of the nearest men asked.

"I think I have." Gordon answered. "At least, I don't see my lord standing or walking about."

Another young man pointed at his nakedness. "What happened to your clothes?"

"I was robbed by gnomes. They took everything."

"Ha! You are lucky to be alive!" The first squire huffed. "Gnomes don't capture. They only kill!"

"A patrol chased them away." Gordon replied. "Is it... Can I pick out a few clothes to wear?"

The squires nearest to him called out to the rest that stood further away. The entire bunch deliberated over whether or not they would allow Gordon to get dressed. Most of them refused, as it would cut into their profits in some way.

"Do you want to stare at his bollocks all day?" A new squire called out. When enough said they didn't, this new young man made a strange half turn of his hand, a sort of wave Gordon had never seen before. "Come on, then. I'll show you the worst of it."

Gordon followed the squire. "I have to wear the worst of it?"

"You will for now." The squire nodded. He had brown hair and green eyes, and unlike the rest, Gordon found him to be as handsome as an actor. The young man pointed at the several piles of clothing. "Here we are. The clothing is arranged by good condition or poor. Even if the clothing has been rent, you should organize it by condition. That last pile has been bloodied. Stay away from it. I'll tell you what is what. Find a loincloth to wear. We'll fix you up with a proper set once the sorting is done with."

Gordon only understood part of the directions. He went through several of the smelly undergarments, hating that they had recently been on men who were now killed. Since he had no real choice, he selected the one that looked the cleanest. Luckily, the garment had brooches to help him secure it to his body.

"What do I do now?" Gordon asked the brown-haired young man.

"Help us do the sorting. The knights will tell us which bodies they are done with."

"How do I sort the clothing?"

"Good condition or bad, as I told you only moments ago. Have you ever sorted after a battle before?"

"No, I haven't." Gordon shook his head.

"Good clothes here, poor clothes there. Don't worry about small tears on good clothes, because that can be sewn together."

Gordon gave it a try. He picked up a tunic and examined it. After picking up a second one, he found they both looked the same to him.

"One is good and the other is poor." The handsome squire told him.

"I don't know which is the good one."

The squire went and pulled one tunic out of his hand. "This one, of course! If you can't do that, go and help Brode drag the bodies over."

What was worse, Gordon questioned, sorting dead men's clothes or pulling their bodies along the ground? Either task was macabre. He strode over to another waiting squire. "Are you Brode?"

"I am." The black-haired youth said. "And who are you?"

"Gordon."

"And who is your master?"

"Uh, Sir Lancelot."

"Is he dead now?"

"I don't know. I believe he is."

"Well, if you see his body, be sure to tell those bastard knights about him, else they'll pillage whatever your lord has left on him."

"I already looked for my lord." Gordon admitted. "I haven't seen his body yet."

"Oh, then perhaps he was among those that chased after the gnomes. Good for you if he comes back. For now, come and help me drag these unfortunates over to the sorting piles. All we're doing is dragging the dead lumps. The others will strip them and sort their garments."

Brode pulled on a dead man's arm. Gordon grabbed the second arm, hating the cold and limp way the flesh felt. Together, they moved the body about. It was the worst chore Gordon had ever done, but there didn't seem to be any way out of it.

Even a couple of hours later, Gordon still didn't fully understand the hierarchy for claiming goods. The knights who were still alive had the first choice of the loot, as would be expected. Their squires went second, and they also took a large part of what was left so they could either use it or sell it. To Gordon's untrained eyes, among their discards were items that he felt were of good quality.

When Gordon asked about the tunics, he was told, "You must examine the stitching along the collar. Each tailor uses a different style."

Gordon fathomed part of that. Even a good garment was considered inferior if a tailor with a lesser reputation made it. The young man was thrown for another curve, when later the squires who still had knights brought a wagon over, full of damaged or discarded weapons and leather goods such as helms, vests, belts and boots. Gordon had a decent tunic and pants by then, as he went to scrutinize the lot of armaments.

"There are good items here." He noted. "Why not use them?"

"We must eat, you imbecile." One of the newly orphaned squires replied. "And we must drink."

Now that it was pointed out to him, it made sense. Regular people couldn't just kill a deer or catch a fish, not if the lords owned all the lands. Commoners couldn't even bake their own bread, as they had to use the ovens belonging to the nobles. The only food they might set their hands on would come from the farmers, who gave most of their harvest over to the lords, as it was the lords who allowed the poor folk the privilege of farming on owned lands. Drinking water was just as difficult to obtain, as most water sources were polluted in some way, or downright toxic. That meant water had to be boiled for hours, and brewed into ale to make sure most of the germs were gone from it. Nothing would come easy in this world, or free.

"Fine." Gordon relented. "What am I allowed to choose? Hopefully it won't be something that will fall apart in two days!"

The brown-haired young man strode over. From the others, Gordon had gathered that his name was Kent. "Choose whatever you want."

"But I was just told I couldn't!"

"Choose whatever you want." Kent repeated. "There isn't anything of a good quality in the lot, in any case."

Gordon looked to the squire who had chastised him, and also at Brode. When neither youth rejected Kent's words, he jumped onto the wagon and started digging into the piles.

"Here is a good leather helm for me." Gordon selected an item. "And here is a belt better than the one I own back home." He held up a pair of short boots. "These have fur lining the insides. Are you saying these are poor quality?"

"If they weren't," Brode answered. "They would have been taken already."

Gordon still didn't understand the reasoning, but he took the boots anyway. As he donned his new items, he saw the remaining knights gather their squires and wagons together, before they all set off. Right after this, the orphaned squires who lost lords, but who still had horses, wagons and armaments to watch over, separated from the rest and also hit the road. Some orphans had their goods looted, but others had not, and that was another hierarchy mystery Gordon had yet to figure out. All he knew was that six squires with no lords, plus he, were still around when the dust settled.

"You have a short sword, Brode." Gordon pointed out. "And Kent, you have one also. Is it allowed for me select a weapon from the ones in the wagon?"

"Choose a wooden sword." The biggest whiner of the bunch told Gordon. This was Cullen. "If you choose an iron sword, we'll have that much less coin when we sell what's left. And no shield!"

"No shield?" Gordon asked. "What good is having a sword and no shield?"

"You were fool enough to get robbed." Kent reminded him. "And you think you deserve a sword and shield while the lot of us goes hungry?"

"I guess not." Gordon grumbled. He climbed into the wagon, looking for a wooden sword, when he found something else he could use. "What about these bows? Can I choose a bow?"

"They're inferior quality." Brode said.

"I don't care. I'd rather have an inferior bow than no bow at all."

"Take a bow." Kent decided. "Are there any arrows left? I thought the knights took them all."

"I see a few." Gordon replied. "I don't see a quiver, though."

He had three bows to choose from, all damaged in some way. One bow was splintered, while another had a broken bowstring. The last one had the string's perch broken away. Back home, Gordon's friends made fun of him because he had taken two semesters of archery class. That training came into good use now, as Gordon took the three crappy bows and turned them into one good bow. He found an old sword sheath and shoved the handful of arrows into it.

"I am set!" Gordon announced to his dozen companions. "What happens next?"

"We take this wagon to the nearest marketplace fair." Kent answered. "That will be a walk of a day and a half. Once we arrive there, we will sell these goods. With any good luck, we will have enough coin between us to get us back home, and to feed us along the route."

"A day and a half of walking, huh?" Gordon queried. "All right. I've got a good pair of boots now. Let's go!"

"Not now, you imbecile." Cullen griped. "We'll go in the morning when we'll have the sun to show us the way."

That's right, Gordon realized. During the Middle Ages, hardly anyone traveled at night, because of the darkness and the dangers of the road.

Four squires climbed onto the wagon, to sleep on the piles of clothes. Gordon and two others, including Brode, had no choice but to sleep beneath the wagon on discards.

Dead men, stripped down to their bare skin and left there to rot. The thought unsettled Gordon, haunting him like a recurrent malady. He would have had nightmares about it if he weren't so tired. Fortunately, he had other things to occupy his mind during the next day.

Knighthood was an exalted position, Gordon learned. The squires looked up to their knights as if they were young fathers, or older brothers. It was no wonder the surviving squires referred to themselves as orphans, despite that they were not true orphans. The squires, even Cullen, gave off the impression that they were brave young men. While their lords had fought in the heart of the battle, all of these squires had put up a defense on a flank. Many squires had also been killed in the fight.

Towards the middle of the day, the wagon came to a steady stream that welled up into small ponds in places. All seven of them filled their canteens, before they stripped and had a dip in the water. They made fun of Gordon because he had no scars on his soft body, while they had many. They also teased him for being inept enough to be robbed, and as they put it, to allow the gnomes to rub his bollocks.

Gordon found that he enjoyed the company of these tough, courageous youths. In general, Gordon got along with most people from his high school, including his buddies from the archery class and his old teammates from when he played on the Junior Varsity baseball team. At least those guys had some discipline, unlike his buddies Saul and Ricky that had very little going for them, past eating junk food and playing video games. Sure, Saul went out to spray graffiti, and that was a courageous thing to do, but in Gordon's view, that was a sport for the individual. Hanging out with a bunch of orphaned squires was more like hanging out with brave, young soldiers.

After bathing, the squires did not immediately don their clothing. Instead, they pulled the piles of clothing from the wagons and kept them organized on the ground. Gordon didn't understand what they were up to, until each squire took a garment and went to douse it in the river. They were washing the clothes the hard way, by wetting them and wringing the stains, sweat and stink out several times. Once an item was washed, it was simply set to dry on nearby bushes or branches. The chore took at least two hours, by Gordon's estimation, but the squires did not tire, while his fingers and forearms ached from the effort.

Gordon was given an old, soft horse brush to clean the helms, belts and boots, while he listened to the others talk. That's when he learned the mystery of the clothing. The squires were loyal to certain brands, and to the craftsmen from the regions closest to their homes. A squire would rather wear an older, battered helm created by a tailor he was familiar with, as opposed to a newer, better helm from a tailor that lived in a different kingdom. The young men were exceedingly proud of where they came from.

After everything was washed, including Gordon's smelly loincloth, the squires went about looking for something to eat. Three of them stretched a torn section of canvas tent across part of the stream, herding the few fish found there, while another two grabbed at the fish and threw them ashore. Gordon and Brode went further downriver, poking into any reeds they came to, until they seized a small cache of eggs, and one unlucky duck that couldn't get through the reeds fast enough.

Survival shows were popular in Gordon's time. When he gave his reports in front of class, part of it included how a medieval man out in the wilderness would survive. He knew about dressing fowl for cooking, and preparing omelets in an iron pot over an open fire. Gordon also knew about picking berries and nuts, but so far, he hadn't come across any foliage with edibles on it. Perhaps they weren't as common as he'd been led to believe.

Their lunch consisted of very hard portions of cheese and bread with acorns and walnuts in it, plus an omelet of four eggs split up to feed all seven young men. The food did nothing at all to fill Gordon's stomach, but that was all they had. The duck and fish were hung onto the sides of the wagon, where they were left to bleed out until it was time for supper.

When the wagon started rolling again, Brode had the reins over the two horses, while Gordon sat beside him on the driver's bench. The other five squires had made niches for themselves among the now clean and folded clothing, and soon fell asleep. Controlling the wagon's pace looked easy enough, Gordon figured. He took over the task when Brode tired of it.

Late the next morning, the squires noticed smoke rising above the trees, in the very direction the wagon was going. Soon after that, they started seeing people in the woods. Men and women of all ages, and also children, all of them dressed in poor clothing, were seen cowering among the trees.

"Halt the wagon." Kent ordered the driver.

The moment the wheels stopped turning, Kent jumped off, followed by Cullen. When Brode followed suit, Gordon decided he should go as well.

"What is that fire we see in the distance?" Kent asked the nearest people. "What is happening at the marketplace?"

"It was the gnomes, young sire." An old woman answered. "Since the fighting men are all gone, the gnomes came in a large pack and ransacked our town!"

An angry man who looked to be in his late thirties pointed his finger at the squires. "It is all your fault! This would not have happened if our warriors had stayed behind to protect us! You took our knights, and now our town is razed to the ground!"

Kent strode up to that man, and gave him a blow on the chest hard enough to fell him. "We lost upwards of fifty good men in battle, including my lord! And what did you do against the gnomes, except to run from them with these women and children!"

"I am no fighting man!" The kneeling man replied, still fuming. "But if I was, I would have done a better job than the lot of you!"

Kent struck him again, this time across the face. When the fallen man showed enough sense to keep quiet, Kent and the others returned to the wagon.

"The marketplace is probably destroyed." Cullen said to the rest, bringing about a chorus of groans.

"If we drive south and west, we can reach Kirchester in three days." A squire calculated.

"Or we can travel south and east." Kent reasoned. "We will have to pass by the battlefield again, but in four days we will be at Marsport."

"Those dead men will have a good stink on them by now." Another squire frowned.

"Wait." Gordon cut in. "Aren't we heading into the marketplace, to see what happened there?"

"There is no need." Cullen answered.

"Why not?"

This time, it was Kent who spoke. "We don't fight for the commoners."

"That's right." Cullen nodded. "The commoners won't pay us a split farthing to raise our weapons for them! All they will do is complain about how we didn't get there sooner. The moment the fight is done, they'll want to send us off!"

"To keep us away from their daughters." A squire laughed.

"We can't just leave!" Gordon persisted.

"If the marketplace is burned down, there will be no buyers left for these goods." Brode told him. "Even if there are buyers, they won't give us a good return."

These young men did not think at all like he did, Gordon understood. "I don't care about the buyers! I care about people being attacked by gnomes! Is that all you fight for: money? I think we should go on to the marketplace!"

"They will pay us in ashes." A squire laughed.

"Are you all cowards?" Gordon snapped.

The moment he said it, Gordon knew it was the wrong thing to say. The squires, all of them, including Cullen and Brode, gave him that hard look usually reserved for the worst enemies. Clearly, Gordon could imagine Kent running him through with his sword.

"I didn't mean that." Gordon backpedaled right away. "It is only that my lord, Sir Lancelot, always taught that I should defend the weak, and that I should defend women and children. You don't have to come with me. I'll do this alone."

Gordon walked for twenty minutes before he heard Kent calling out to him. Also with Kent were Brode and Cullen. Gordon hoped the squires hadn't come to kill him, as they seemed to be more like pirates and less like knights, although he supposed medieval men weren't as tame as modern movies made them out to be.

Kent had a second sword in hand, besides his usual sword that was sheathed at his waist. "This one is from Waterbury, but it was the best of the lot. You'll do a lot better with it than you will with that wooden toy you carry."

The squire made Waterbury sound like an ugly place, Gordon noticed. Regardless, he was glad to have the weapon. "What about the wagon?"

"The rest have gone on to Kirchester." Kent answered. "We've agreed to split the earnings in seven parts. The others will take their share with them. The rest of us will have one full month to claim our portions."

"Worry about the wealth later." Cullen cautioned. "For now, keep to the task at hand."

"I will." Kent agreed. "Cullen, you walk with me. Brode and Gordon will pace us by five strides back. Keep your eyes open for rock throwers."

They kept to a slow and steady march, on a road barely wide enough to fit a wagon. After a few minutes of tense watching to his peripheral, Gordon whispered to Brode. "How do gnomes fight?"

"What?" Brode asked.

"How do they fight?" Gordon repeated. "Maybe the gnomes from these parts fight in a different way than what I know."

"That would explain how they crept over and robbed you." Brode smirked. "You haven't been in too many battles, have you?"

"No. Neither had Sir Lancelot. That is why he chose to come here."

"A lot of good it did to either of you." Brode remarked. "One lord dead and his squire left stripped to his bollocks. All right, here is the skinny of it. Gnomes smell like old shit. They come all at once, and they run off all at once, so there won't be any heroes among them. They use spears that are twice as long as they are. You'll have to dance about to keep more than one from getting around to your sides. They will strike at your belly and your legs first. Your best attack will be to parry their spears and hack at their arms. You will have to lunge forward a bit, a tactic the fighting instructors don't approve of, really, but that is the only way you'll reach their arms."

Gordon's impression of what the town would look like was much different than what he actually saw. It looked more like a one-road western town than a settlement from the Middle Ages. Every structure along the main road was built with two stories: the family business at ground level, the residences up top. Large signs were hung up over the doors, proclaiming what was sold inside. Thanks to those signs, Gordon knew where the tailor's shop was, and also the cobbler, the pottery maker, the fruit seller and others. He thought the entire town had fled, and was surprised to see a dozen armed and weary men patrolling the road.

"They are the merchants and tradesmen." Brode explained. "The men with the most to lose. All of the workers and common folk have run off, while these men stayed here to protect their livelihoods."

Before this moment, Gordon assumed that if a town or village were under attack, all of its residents would rally together to defend it. That wasn't the case in real life, if this dimension was indeed real. Also, Gordon's high school teachers had constantly ingrained him with the idea that all wealthy businessmen were selfish, evil and corrupt. If they were so bad, they would have run off along with the common folk, right? The fact that the merchants had stayed to battle the gnomes, when the rabble had run away, forced Gordon to reassess what he'd come to believe was fact.

"Was it gnomes?" Kent called out, approaching the nearest of the merchants.

"It was." One bearded man nodded. "Have you come from that big battle we kept hearing about?"

"It was a pitched battle." Kent related. "We lost many souls in it."

"The same as happened here." The merchant grunted. "Dozens of gnomes, perhaps as many as a hundred of them. They came at us in the early hours of the morning. The peasants ran off the moment the alarm bell rang. We saved this main street, but all the peasant homes were burned."

"Those bastard commoners will blame us for the loss." A second merchant spit out vehemently. "They'll raise up a clamor over how we let their homes burn, when we were losing our lives in protecting our own!"

"The gnomes are still out there, waiting for us to chase after them." The first man pointed west. "They are not done with the killing."

"Are there enough of us to give them a fight?" Kent asked.

"No." The merchant huffed. "We only have twelve men, thirteen men still standing. The gnomes outnumber our side by a good two of them to each one of us, if not more."

"Could they be readying a charge?"

"I expect so. As soon as they're ready, they'll come in. It won't be long."

"We can prepare defenses in the meantime." Kent decided.

The merchant shrugged.

Gordon wondered if the merchant even knew about defenses.

"We will do it." Kent decided, turning toward the squires. "We'll drag the bodies of the gnomes out and form a line to the west. The gnomes are queasy to see their own dead. They would rather go around their dead than jump or climb over. This will make it easier to funnel them into tighter groups."

"We'll have to keep an eye open for their rock throwers." Cullen warned.

"No one wants their head bashed in by a rock!" Brode laughed.

The corpses were light when compared to the human equivalents. Gordon could nearly pick one up and carry it across his arms like a sack of potatoes. He didn't because they smelled so bad. Luckily, Brode got a hold of a wheelbarrow that they could heap five or six of the little men onto.

"Stack them there, between those two burned homes." Kent ordered.

It was a good plan, Gordon figured, if the gnomes really abhorred going over their own dead. They would avoid that path between the houses, and either climb through the burnt structures or find another route. As the squires set the bodies in place, the first of the rocks started falling around them.

"Stay here, you two." Kent said. "Cullen and I will fill up the barrow this time."

"Save your heads, aye?" Brode kidded. "But not ours?"

"We'll go in turns. Give us a cry if the gnomes start a charge."

"We might start up a charge of our own, won't we, Gordon?" Brode chuckled. "The two of us, against all of them!"

The rocks continued to land around them, as Kent and Cullen retreated with the wheelbarrow. Brode thought they should move a bit, and they did. One lucky missile hit the scorched wall behind Gordon. It bounced at just the right angle to pelt his thigh.

"Ow!" Gordon started. "That will leave a bruise!"

Brode laughed, before he thought it best to move toward the front end of the house, facing away from the woods to the back.

Gordon, however, had gotten into a foul mood. He'd never stabbed another being in his entire life, but as things were rapidly heading in that direction, he decided he should have some practice at it. Drawing his sword out, a sword he already knew was plenty sharp, he went to the short line of corpses and plunged the tip into a gnome's belly. At once, screeching and screaming started up from the trees, where the living gnomes were hiding. Gordon went to a second gnome's body and stabbed that one as well, before the rocks came at him in a deadly rain. Before any of the missiles struck him, he went to join Brode.

"You've got them riled up now." The squire commented. "Best to wait for Kent and Cullen to come back, afore you do that again."

"I should cut a gnome's head off," Gordon rumbled. "And throw that into the trees like they're throwing rocks at us!" He saw the dark blood staining his sword, and made to wipe it off on the bare ground. "Why don't any of you use bows? Wouldn't it be easier to pick the gnomes off one at a time, than to just stand here and wait for the entire charge?"

"We don't know how to use bows." Brode answered. "We come from the city. Who needs bows in the city?"

"Oh." Gordon understood. "Right. You and the other squires, you're the sons of nobles, aren't you?"

"I would not call my lineage a noble one," Brode replied. "But that is what my family aspires to become. My mother steps on grapes during the entire day. My father fills the barrels and sells the wine. We do well enough that my father could afford to send me into a knight's training school, and a good one at that. My mother's greatest hope is that I will find a minor lady of the court to wed and bring more prestige to our family name. You understand how it goes, yes? Good parents will always want their son or daughter to reach loftier heights than they did."

"Yeah, I do understand that." Gordon nodded. He was about to ask more, when they heard Kent calling out to them.

"A hue and cry!" Brode shouted, running off toward the center of town. He drew his sword as he ran.

Gordon sped off after him. A hue and cry was the same as raising an alarm, especially when criminals were on the run and about to get away. In the wide avenue, they found most of the merchants gathered together.

"What's happened?" Gordon asked.

"These men had their wives and daughters hidden away inside a food cellar." Kent answered. "The house is to the north by a hundred strides." He pointed. "There, in that larger building that was used as a town hall!"

"The women were killed?" Brode asked.

"Some were, yes." Kent confirmed. "The gnomes captured a handful of them, before the merchants discovered what took place. If we are to give chase, we must do this straight away, before the gnomes take them too far!"

"What direction?" Gordon queried, ready for action.

Beside the squires, the merchants had started up an argument.

"What is the trouble?" Kent demanded.

"The gnomes took four or five women to the north." A merchant described. "They are all young women, maidens. If we give chase to the gnomes, then the larger mob to the west will overrun the town and burn it!"

"If we leave the village, we will lose everything we have left!" Another man snarled. "Our wives, our remaining children and our businesses!"

"So you'll let the gnomes steal the maidens?" Gordon asked.

"What else would you have us do?" The man replied. "There are not enough of us left to defend the village and to go into the forest!"

"I'll go!" Gordon resolved. "Alone if I have to! I need a good bow, and good arrows if you have them!"

The merchant pointed to across the road. "That is where we sell weapons and tools. Take what you need, but do it quickly! If you bring our daughters back to us, we will pledge one to be your wife!"

Gordon was already running, when those last few words caught up with his brain. He halted and looked back, wondering if he'd heard correctly. Who the heck could think about getting married at a time like this?

"Are you truly going after the gnomes?" Brode called out.

The question spurred Gordon into flying off again. He burst through the shop's wide door, spotting farming tools and cooking pots, and at the back of the small room, a pitiful assortment of weapons and a single suit of chain mail. Everything looked so cheap, he observed, as he came to two bows standing against the wall, with loose strings. One was a simple hunter's bow, while another was sturdier and heavier, obviously designed for frequent battle use. The arrows were primitive, as they had not stone or metal heads on them, but merely wooden shafts with sharpened tips.

"This will have to do." He decided, putting his sword away before he clutched at a quiver full of arrows. As he grasped the bow, he saw the other three squires coming inside.

"You'll risk your life for these poor peasants?" Kent asked.

"In the land where I come from, I am a peasant!" Gordon barked. "Part of the code of chivalry is to defend the weak and innocent!"

He ran out of the shop, not expecting to have company. Kent and the others soon showed their faces, and came running behind him.

Taking the women was a ploy. That became obvious to Gordon when no gnomes were around to throw rocks at him, the moment he was past the last of the houses. To Gordon's right side sat the town hall, but in front of him were many trees grouped close together. He had no idea of which way to go.

"Let me lead!" Cullen called out. "I can track gnomes better than anyone!"

"If you're intent on using that bow, you should stay behind us." Kent cautioned.

"Okay!" Gordon nodded.

"Cullen first, then Brode and myself side by side, and you, Gordon will come last." Kent directed, before he motioned for Cullen to start off. "Gnomes are slower than we are, and more so if they are burdened with captives. We will be upon them in no time!"

They were moving in a diamond pattern, Gordon noted, the way a military squad might move through the brush. Some things were known about army formations during the Middle Ages, but other details were only speculated. For example, Gordon didn't like the way the squires had no shields to go along with their short swords. He thought this to be a disadvantage, when compared to the Romans who had shields large enough to hide their entire bodies behind.

"This way!" Cullen shouted from the front.

The squire's voice knocked Gordon out of his thoughts. He wondered how Cullen could tell which way the gnomes were headed, as he would have been lost out there in the trees. Gordon looked to the side, after spotting a sky blue garment on the ground. It was a girl, he realized with great dread, with her head bashed in. The culprit, the bloody rock that did it, was lying there next to her head.

This crazy world was overwhelming Gordon, enough that he wondered how he could get back to the world he belonged in. It was never a good thing to stumble across dead girls lying in the forest! Before panic could set into Gordon's body, he heard screaming from up ahead, and also shouts from Cullen and Kent.

"I count over eight of them!" Kent cried out. "Guard the flanks! Let them come to us!"

Things became a blur in Gordon's head. He saw what looked like medium size dogs walking upright, but soon realized these were the gnomes wearing furred clothing. They had long spears held out before them, and right away, the gnomes tried to surround the four squires so they could start poking at them. Also entering Gordon's mind was why the squires used no shields. When the gnomes thrust their spears, the squires tried to catch them with their empty hand, while at the same time turning their bodies to slash at the gnomes' arms and heads.

"I have a bow!" Gordon had to remind himself. He knew the motions on how to nock and aim an arrow, but he'd never done it in a life or death situation.

His first missile went wide, thanks to his nervous fingers.

"Pull, aim, release!" He said. "Just like I did in archery class!"

His targets were close, but they were in motion, giving him a heck of a time getting a bead on one. Kent gave him the time he needed, when the squire grabbed a gnome's spear and the two started a tug of war for it. Gordon's arrow hit center mass, doubling the gnome over. Kent hacked at the gnome, as Gordon pulled another arrow and looked for his next target. Brode had two gnomes trying to kill him. Gordon struck one high on the shoulder, as the gnome was moving sideways when the arrow was released. A new arrow caught the little man in the chest.

"Aagh!" Cullen was heard.

Gordon looked ahead. Cullen had fallen, with three gnomes pressing in for a bloody finish. He moved between Kent and Brode, using them as his shields, before he picked off one gnome after another.

The gnomes called each other in whatever language they spoke. They feared the bow in Gordon's hands, as they were no longer recklessly running toward the squires. Another cry was heard, this time sounding like a woman's voice.

"They're killing the maidens!" Brode realized. "Kent, you and Gordon go ahead! I will tend to Cullen!"

Gordon ran behind Kent. He glanced toward Cullen, regretting it instantly, as the squire's leg looked to be torn apart at the thigh. Gordon's mind went to war movies where femoral arteries were severed and death followed soon after, but he did what he could to shake that image off.

"We've killed at least seven!" Kent called out. "Three more are up ahead!"

Another gruesome sight met Gordon's eyes. One of the maidens lay on the ground, gurgling out blood and trembling in her death throes, after having been speared by one of those bastard gnomes. If they didn't hurry, they would not save any of the maidens!

The trees were in Gordon's line of sight, so much that it was almost a miracle when he came to a flat patch of leaf-covered dirt with no trees in the way. "Stand aside, Kent!"

The squire was just ahead, heading toward three gnomes that were dragging two girls by the hair. Kent leapt aside when he saw the aimed bow. Gordon's shot flew straight into the gnome furthest away from the maidens. The little man cried out, revealing to the last two that he'd been struck. One gnome carried his spear toward Kent, while the second turned to run away. That second gnome didn't get very far, as Gordon planted an arrow into his back.

Kent cried out in pain. Gordon hoped he wasn't badly hurt, as he approached the last two fighters. Kent had grabbed the gnome's spear, but from the head instead of the shaft. When the gnome had jerked the spear away, it had opened up a gash on the squire's palm. Thinking he could end the fight, the gnome thrust at Kent's middle, but the squire parried the blow and gave the gnome one final slash to the neck.

The last two maidens in their pretty dresses screamed, as Gordon cut away a part of his tunic with his sword. He meant to bind Kent's wound first, before running back to make some sort of tourniquet for Cullen.

The rush of adrenaline wore off the closer the squires were to the town proper. Gordon felt drained, both emotionally and physically, but he also felt paranoid and full of worry that more gnomes would appear at any moment.

"The other maidens were killed." Kent was heard speaking to someone, but it was all a blur in Gordon's head. "Can you fetch a healer? This man is badly hurt!"

Figures around Gordon moved and spoke, but his head spun so much he had trouble bringing any of it into focus. Think, Gordon, think! Cullen was gritting his teeth and grunting in pain. He was hopping along on one leg, with Gordon and Brode holding him up. Kent was ahead of them, pulling a terrified maiden along. The second girl, she was also afraid, but at least she could walk on her own, and... There was something about her, Gordon suspected, but he didn't know what.

She had looked at Gordon, when she'd first been rescued. Yes, that was it! The maiden had stared directly at Gordon, and she'd said something to him, but due to the commotion he had not heard a word about it. Even now, that same girl looked over her shoulder, not at the injured Cullen or the nervous Brode, but at Gordon. Why did she continue to gaze at him so?

They were on the main street again. The merchants shuffled around the squires, and then women appeared as if out of nowhere. Gordon saw skinny women and a plump one. They were taking Cullen away, and he was still groaning with every hop. They wanted to take Kent as well, after seeing the bloody bandage around his hand, but Kent was too stubborn to be moved.

"Go with them, you imbecile!" Brode demanded. "Before you bleed out like that duck we had yesterday!"

Finally, Kent walked out of Gordon's narrow view.

"Are you well, Gordon?" Brode asked, peering in close to the young man's face.

"I feel very dizzy." Gordon replied. "I feel as if my mind is being sucked out of my head!"

"The gnomes must have cast a spell on you!" Brode assumed. "You look as if you're about to fall over! Hold my arm, man, until I find you a chair to sit on!"

Gordon had never experienced vertigo until that moment, as he felt his body teeter over. If he didn't grab onto Brode, surely he'd fall flat on his face. He reached out, clasping an arm with both hands.

"Brode!" Gordon said. "I don't feel well!"

Gordon's eyes followed a slender arm up to a shoulder, on a person much shorter than Brode. It was the girl, he understood. In his confusion, Gordon had latched onto the girl instead of the squire. For a moment, the young man had a clear look at her.

When he had first seen the maiden, it was only for a short glimpse of time, as he had Kent and Cullen to worry about. He thought her to be a little girl, with her small face and her hair pulled back tightly against her head. Gordon still thought she looked young, as young as thirteen or fourteen, compared to his wise old age of seventeen. At the same time, this maiden was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with her defined features and her clear green eyes. Now that he had a good look of her, he was having trouble looking anywhere else.

"Your name is Gordon?" She asked.

He was so awestruck by her beauty, and by her presence, that he could only nod back, like a fool!

The next time the girl spoke, her mannerisms and furtiveness showed she was still more girl than woman. "I put Bay leaves under my pillow on Spring Day, right before I fell asleep, and I asked the goddess to show me the face of my future husband. I had a dream that night, where I saw his face, and it was... It was..."

It was my face, Gordon understood. The girl had asked to see her future husband's face, and she was shown Gordon's face. This couldn't be true, Gordon argued with his self. She was a girl from another dimension, another world even! Why would this supposed goddess show the pretty maiden his face? Why?

"What is your name?" He asked, before he abruptly fell over as if he'd fainted.

Gordon seemed to be falling and falling, deeper and deeper into a void where time and space meant nothing, nothing at all.

Water splashed across Gordon's face. Sputtering and holding his arms up, he cried out, "What the heck!"

"Gordie, snap out of it, man!" Saul's voice battered at him like bullhorn.

"What?"

"Take deep breath." Another voice, this one with a thick accent, said right after. "Clear your thoughts away."

"What thoughts?" Gordon shook his head. "What are you talking about?"

He was lying on the ground, staring up at Saul and the shaman. The sky overhead was very, very dark.

"Where am I?" Gordon asked. "Is this the ravine?"

"Yeah, you're still in the ravine!" Saul exclaimed. "Get your butt up! Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"No."

"It's almost eleven at night!"

"Are you kidding me? Where's Ricky?"

"He left like three hours ago!" Saul pulled on Gordon's arm until he was on his feet. "You're going to have to tell your parents that you were over at my place playing video games. You got it?"

"Yeah, sure." Gordon nodded. "What happened?"

"You tell me!"

"I mean what happened from your point of view?"

"You zoned out, that's what!" Saul revealed. "Every time we tried to wake you up, all you said was 'not yet' and then you'd go back to sleep. Come on, Gordie! Let's get out of here!"

Gordon looked at the shaman. "Was any of that real?"

"Do you ask me?" The shaman replied, holding out his arms to signify the ravine around them. "Is any of this real?"

"I don't know anymore." Gordon answered.

"Let's go, Gordie!"

That got him moving. He trotted after Saul until they emerged from the ravine and strode into the park. At least the park had lights in it to illuminate the trip across.

"What was it like?" Saul inquired.

"Oh, man, it was crazy!" Gordon laughed. "I was in a whole other place... Hey, how long was I gone?"

"Uh, five hours, maybe?"

"In my dream, I was gone for like three days!"

"No bull?"

"No bull!"

"I'll race you across the park!" Saul said, lunging ahead a second later.

Before Gordon moved to follow, he had one last look at the ravine. All those things he'd seen and done, were they even real? And what about that girl? What was her name?

Without a doubt, Gordon decided, I will be seeing that shaman again!

#####

Non-Fiction Section

I do a lot of research on a lot of different subjects, including history, mythology, metaphysics, politics and science. Much of my research coincides with whatever fiction project I'm currently working on, but sometimes I'll break away from the pattern and head off in some other direction at random. I will study both mainstream and alternative sources, in the form of non-fiction books, documentaries, lectures and discussions, in trying to come up with a good basis to form my opinions on, or a good foundation for whatever concept I'm trying to incorporate into my stories. Often, I will write articles based on my research and state my sources, so that readers can see how I came to my conclusions.

I also enjoy going through a lot of entertainment media of many types, including written fiction, movies, cosplay, comic books, music, you name it. I do this for my creative writing to set the mood, if you will, or to see points of view on what others have done in certain genres, such as military science fiction, medieval costuming, zombies or whatever other subject I'm delving into.

As a result, I end up with a tremendous amount of notes that I can reference later, or media reviews that I can sort through if I want to stimulate my brain with science fiction, horror or any other particular genre. Many of these articles and reviews will also be found on either my writer's blog or my conspiracy blog. (Links to both are found at the end of this magazine.) Since a lot of this information comes from online sources and Youtube videos, I recommend looking up any referenced articles or videos that interest you for additional resources and links. In general, my research and Truther posts will be found on the conspiracy blog, while all writing related stuff will be on the writer's blog.

#####

### Articles

### How I Became My Female Characters

Because of my traumatic childhood, I learned at an early age how to put myself into a better, more idealized life perspective. In essence, I became a character my mind had created. As a young child, I played with a little girl's dolls. During the time when I was aged from eight or so years old, up until my mid-teens, I enjoyed playing with G.I. Joe or Star Wars action figures. I was a good kid back then, idolizing the superheroes I read about in the comic books. When I started hanging out with a rougher crowd, I shifted over to encompass the quiet, brooding and devil-may-care traits that I saw in my peers, and also based on the gunslinger character from Clint Eastwood, in the Man With No Name western movies, as well as other popular movie role models of the era.

For a time, when I was fifteen and sixteen, I hung out with a couple of kids who studied martial arts. One kid was fascinated by ninjas. He practiced with nun-chucks and liked exotic weapons such as sai and swords. His idea was that ninjas had to be unseen and mysterious, so during our lunchtime at high school, we'd go hang out in our own little niches where the regular kids wouldn't see us. One of our favorite spots was in the racquetball courts, where we would strengthen our hands and work on our agility by playing handball.

Well, one day I went over to my friend's house, where he showed me a dagger he'd purchased at the local swap meet. The two of us were standing in his front yard. I sat there and watched as he practiced thrusting and swinging with his new weapon. His dad came by and stopped to watch, too. After a time, the dad asked my friend if he had the heart to kill a person. My friend said he wouldn't hesitate, because ninjas and assassins did not hesitate. My friend's dad went off and found a kitten from somewhere behind the house, where a litter had just been born. He handed this furry little creature to my friend and said, kill that. Prove you have what it takes to be a real ninja. I watched as my friend struggled internally, before he lowered his head and admitted that he couldn't do it.

My friend's confidence had been broken, because he'd been called out and humbled. He whimpered out, when before he'd been so gung-ho about training like a killer ninja. In a metaphysical sense, you could even say that this scene took place precisely for my benefit. It made a huge impact on me, who sat there and watched the whole scene play out. I realized that very quickly people would know if I was a force or a fraud, if I said something bold and couldn't carry it through to completion.

Later, when I started to hang out with gangsters, I made sure I would do things to strengthen my image. If one of my tougher peers challenged me to a fight, and despite the fact that I had never learned how to fight, I would tussle with them. Most of the time, I'd end up on the ground with the wind knocked out of me. I got better at this as time went by. At high school, or around the neighborhood, or anywhere else I went, I carried around this same bad attitude. If I challenged someone, and I saw them shrink back a little, I would go over and give them a hard shove. If they came back at me too aggressively, I would sometimes feel overwhelmed and I chickened out. This was okay with the guys I hung out with. They already knew I wasn't the toughest guy in our bunch.

At the end of the day, they also knew that if things got hairy for all of us, I would likely stand by their sides and take my licks right along with them. Not always, as I did panic at times and cower, so I can't say I always stood my ground. Strangely enough, I have panicked before single fighters and small mobs when I was with friends. At the same time, I have stood defiant or tried to duke it out with entire gangs three different times, when I was alone. Even to myself, my reactions can be unpredictable.

Basically, by becoming a character over the course of a couple of months in my sophomore year, I transformed my life. I changed myself from being the kid the bigger boys would pick on, to being the runt who had a bunch of tough guys around him when I needed them. I started carrying a switchblade around, telling myself that if I had to pull it out, I should just use it and not deliberate and look weak like my ninja friend had. When one of my friends got expelled for carrying a knife to school, I stopped carrying mine. I didn't need it anymore by then. I'd gained a lot in self-confidence, infamy, and especially in respect from the people that had been pushing me around previously.

When I was more of a nerd, I'd studied the various social groups in high school. I had enough charm, humor and attraction in me that I could hang out in a number of those social circles, even though the people in them were very different from the person I was. This ability to befriend others continued after I made my transition. Despite that I had a different demeanor, dressed differently and had a new swagger, I could still go and hang out with the preppy girls or the stoners on occasion. I didn't understand why I could get away with this at first, until I realized that I was copying the speech and attitudes of the people I hung out with. In my quest to find people that liked me, I became a sort of chameleon boy, and without realizing it myself. If a stoner sitting next to me said 'screw this homework,' I would say, yeah, screw it! If a preppy girl wanted to talk about a book she was reading, I would sit there and listen to her, and ask genuine questions about it.

In retrospect, I can say that all of these people were looking for acceptance and for people they could relate to, just like I was. In a way, these people were all mirrors of me, as a multi-faceted Gemini. I got along with many different types of people, including many adults. However, I was less of a mirror to them because I had so many different sides to the person I was, or should have been had I not been stunted early on. Even though I was friendly with all kinds of people from diverse backgrounds, I was still reluctant to allow any of these people to really get to know me, deep down inside on a personal level.

When I was a pushover, I was too shy and clumsy to approach girls. Once I started hanging out with rebellious gang members, I was too excited over the attention I was getting to think seriously about having a girlfriend. A couple of my male friends started pushing me into finding a girl, so I started looking around for one I might like. In one of those strange quirks of fate that surrounds my life, I would always choose the wrong girl. Out of two girls who were friends, I would see a pretty one that was probably out of my reach, and her plainer friend. I would pursue the plain friend, and fail, only to find out later that it was the pretty one who really liked me. This happened twice! My best friend had two pretty sisters. One was older and studious at sixteen, while the other was younger and wilder, at fourteen, who already liked to dress in skimpy tee shirts and shorts. I went after the girl my age, the smart one, and was rejected because to her I was a joker, and I couldn't possibly be interested in her as a girlfriend. Well, much later my best friend told me I should have gone after his younger sister instead, because that's the one that had a crush on me. Really? And that happened twice with two pretty and plain pairs?

I found my first girlfriend when I was seventeen, but I didn't know what to do with her. I can't even remember how I met her. I'm assuming I went up to her and talked to her, because she lived in the neighborhood, but otherwise she had no connection to either my family or my friends. Her name was Maricela; she was about as tall as I was, chubby and heavy-breasted. Her hair was a very light brown, as I remember, and her skin was light in tone. One of my friends would tease that she looked 'like the sun' because she was such a bright person, both inside and out. I understood how to hug her, but that was about it. After being physically abused so much as a young child, I was too emotionally unattached to go any further. I kept thinking, oh, this is temporary. In a day or two, she'll get fed up with me, go her way and I'll go mine.

Well, Maricela was patient and persistent with me. She taught me how to kiss and when it was okay to put my hands on her, and where I should put them. She couldn't understand why I didn't keep tabs on her like her previous boyfriends had. Other boys would constantly be calling her, she said, to find out where she was and who she was hanging out with. I had never learned what emotional jealousy was, and so I had to really ask myself if I cared about Maricela or not. I remember telling her that I wasn't going to follow her around like those other guys had. If she liked me, she could stay. If she didn't like me, she could go. This put her at ease, because she didn't feel any pressure from me, and because I allowed her to be herself, unlike her previous boyfriends. (Some people will argue that if I wasn't jealous, it meant that I didn't really care about her. My answer is I had enough faith and trust in this girl to just let her be.) Looking back on things, I think we would have made a good couple if I'd had enough sense to stay with her. The reason we broke up was because Maricela was taking up a lot of my time, and my buddies in the neighborhood didn't like that. I chose them over her.

I had another, conservative and quiet girlfriend name Graciela when I was eighteen and still in high school. Our relationship only lasted three or four months, before my friends again got in the way and pressured me to leave her. Graciela lived just across the street from me. When I left her, she found a new boyfriend who looked a lot like me. Curiously, she got this new guy to cut his hair like mine, and to start dressing like I did. I don't know if Graciela did this on her own, or if her manipulative mother and aunt, who lived in the same house, were putting her up to it.

Of course, it was an attempt to make me jealous. On hot days, my friends and I would hang out in the shady, open garage of my mom's house. When they noticed that Graciela's new boyfriend would always stare at me while he walked by, they thought I should go over there and kick his butt. I thought it was funny, how Graciela, or her relatives, were making this guy dress and act like that, when he had five or six little thugs across the street from him that were looking to do him some harm. Well, the dumb kid kept staring at me, and my buddies kept pressuring me, so I finally decided to do something about it.

The next time I saw him, I walked across the street to talk to him. I said, hey, I don't know what your problem is. I'm not with Graciela any more, and if she's your girl, so be it. What I don't like, I said, is that you're mad-dogging me like that in front of my homies. If you start some shit with me, we're going to fight, but I'm not going to fight you over this girl that I'm not with anymore. If you stare at me like that again, I said, and I pointed at my mom's garage where three or four of my friends were watching, all of us are going to kick your ass. Now, what do you want to do?

This kid had his chance to fight me right then, and maybe he could have kicked my butt. I didn't think he could after I looked him square in the eye and saw his timid body language. Sure, you could argue that he was intimidated because my friends could have rushed across the street to help me pound on him, but that's why I told them all to stay in the garage while I went to confront him alone. I wanted this encounter to be one on one. He said he didn't want any problems with us, or with me, and he walked around me to get to Graciela's house. I stood there, watching him until he went inside, to make sure he wouldn't make a face at me or flip me the bird if I turned my back.

Things were fine for a few days. Then he started staring at me again. All right, I thought, an example had to be made. The next time this dummy came by, one of my buddies went out to the sidewalk to challenge him. What are you looking at, he called out. This kid just stood there on the sidewalk, defying a handful of us. I don't know what he was trying to prove by doing that. I'd tried to reason with him, hadn't I? Getting back to the concept of studying people and creating characters, to this day I can't figure out why he dressed like me and kept trying to draw me out like that, when he wasn't willing to fight it out.

Let's finish this, I said to the guys who were with me. Five or six of us chased my look-alike that day. Most of us were on foot, but one of my buddies was on his bike, so this guy wasn't going to get away from us. My supposed rival ran a couple of blocks. We caught up to him at the park, where I shoved him to the ground and we surrounded him. He could see how my friends were itching to smack him or kick him around, but they were holding back because they were waiting for me to deliver the first blow. Get up, I said. You wanted to play it the hard way, and so you and me are going to fight. He didn't get up. He just lay there on the ground and gaped back at us, fearful of the beating he was about to get. I ordered him to get up, but he refused.

At the end of it, my friends jeered at him, before we all turned our backs on this guy and walked away. There was no honor in so many of us jumping a fallen opponent, so we didn't do it. He would have gotten a good pounding, though. By then, we'd taken to improving our fighting skills by having one homie stand in a circle, while the rest of us attacked him all at once. Once the victim had fallen, the rest of us would pile on top. So, this dumb ass would have gotten pounded, and on top of that he would have gotten piled on by all five or six of us.

My look-alike came back for more. We chased him a total of three or four times, always knocking him down on the street or grass or dirt. He would never get up. Even when my friends would try to drag him to his feet, so I could fight him one on one, he would squirm away from them and stay on the ground. Maybe he was trying to get me to hit him first, so he could press charges on me, at the urging of my ex-girlfriend. After a couple of weeks of chasing him around like that, my friends were getting itchy to start the rumble. They'd take swipes and kicks at him before he went to the ground. I never lay a hand on that guy, except for that one time when I ran up on him and pushed him down. After those few weeks, this dumb kid finally stopped coming around, and Graciela no longer had a boyfriend that looked like me.

Even worse, one of my buddies had a sister named Ana, who we hung out with a lot. Ana would go into Graciela's yard and knock on her door, challenging her to come out and fight, because of the debacle that had taken place over my replica. I kept telling Ana to leave Graciela alone, but Ana was stubborn. If Ana ever caught the other girl, she would have probably ripped off a handful of Graciela's hair out and scratched her up with her filed fingernails, on top of beating the crap out of her. Ana could be a vicious bitch, with her teased up hair and her large breasts. She was the kind of Elvira girl that I really liked.

Let me put things into perspective, and relate it back to the idea of creating characters. From an early age, I tried to grasp the idea of justice and strength. I studied fictional, heroic figures, because they had the strength to face adversity and a great hope of overcoming it. In junior high and high school, I wanted so much to be liked that I took on the qualities of diverse social groups. I fit in with them because I related well to them. Towards the end of high school, I underwent a radical change, where I went from being a victim to being seen as a bully. Before, I yearned to be the good-hearted protagonist, and I still do today, but the factors that influenced my later adolescent life have caused me to wear a much darker overcoat.

This allows me to see both sides of the spectrum: the good and the bad. I know what it's like to be the kid who got pushed around because he was awkward. I also know what it's like to put a finger on a rival's chest and say, today, I'm going to let you live, when I have ten homies standing at my back, itching to give that rival a harsh beating. That's my life experience, and I can draw from that whether I want to create a pure character or a corrupt one. Nobody is entirely pure and nobody is entirely evil. Good guys will at times do bad things, and vice versa. There are no absolutes.

Following the idea of wearing many hats, I will sometimes put myself mentally into my character's shoes. If I'm writing a book on the Medieval Age, I will read fiction books, study historic material, and watch documentaries and movies on the subject. I will become the person that I'm creating, and see the world through their eyes. What would a knight think, when looking across a field of battle at an opposing army? Could that be similar to when I was a gang member, and saw myself getting surrounded by a bunch of thugs from another neighborhood, when I had no back-up anywhere near me? Gangs of thugs jumped me on four separate occasions, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. My mind can go back to those tense situations to remind me of what that felt like, and I can add that real life experience into my writing.

While I was writing my books on the Space Marines, I would practice hand signals meant for small squad movements while I was at work. I had twenty-three of the twenty-six signals memorized, and I imagined how they would be used in training and in actual combat. I've worked in a ton of parking lots during my career as a parking attendant. While walking through a parking lot, I sometimes see a character using that location as a refuge in a post-Apocalyptic world. I see the strengths and weaknesses of the buildings around my workplace, where my characters might have to hide and survive in, during a siege or outbreak of plague. I see a two-story building, and in its place I imagine a fort, where I am the sentry assigned to guard it. I then must come up with a good route for a patrol, so I can keep the place safe and sound an alarm if I need to.

I think I've done a decent job with my male characters. Every one of them is a fragment of me, from the lowly janitor, to the hard military man, to the guy that whines all the time, to the sadistic type that wants others to suffer. I pull aspects out of my own experience and being to form my fictional people, giving them a few primary attributes, and filling them out with my own personal reactions under those attributes. They are all me, and I am all of them. The male characters I have a good handle on.

The female characters, on the other hand, were huge obstacles. You've read about how inept I was with girls in real life. It took me much longer to dare write anything with a strong woman in it, or from a female's perspective. My mother's role model example, unfortunately, was more detrimental than it was positive.

My mother was / is a very cold, timid and practical woman. If something is useful, like a tool or a piece of food, even recently expired food, it is important. If something was designed for entertainment, like a book or a video game, it has no importance to it at all. To complicate matters, my mother is also very paranoid. She kept my younger brother and I cooped in a small bedroom until we were both in our mid-teens. She did try to force me to make friends once, by pairing me up with a neighbor's son from the next block over. This was Jesus, whom we called Chewy, and who figures prominently in some of the ghost stories from my book Thorns I. Other than that, I had a very limited, distrustful view of the world until I rebelled during my sixteenth or seventeenth year.

I went through puberty at the normal age most kids do. But while others kids got to go places and see people and form their expanding world viewpoint, I was stuck in my little room with my brother. When I started becoming attracted to the opposite sex, I didn't have too many females around to fantasize about. Sure, there were girl students at school, and women teachers, and women on TV, but I was so awkward and isolated that I mentally created a great chasm between them and myself.

A couple of incidents still stick out in my mind, which caused me to first develop that rift. When I was attending Logan Elementary, perhaps in the second or third grade, I remember having to practice for a school dance performance. If I recall this correctly, it was an ethnic Mexican dance. The students from my class were practicing their moves and steps in a wide room with a polished floor. The teacher explained some final move, but I didn't catch what it was because I was still fumbling around with the steps. As we practiced the routine again, I watched the other students. When the final move came about, I saw the boys lean their faces close to the girls' faces. I interpreted this to be a kiss on the cheek, and I went on to kiss my dancing partner. The girl I kissed was shocked. The teacher was kind about it, but she still announced what I had done to the entire class as if I had done a cute thing. I was thoroughly embarrassed by this. I swore I would never do something as dumb as kiss a girl, ever again!

Starting with the fourth grade, and through a multi-diversity Magnet program, I was taken by bus out of my neighborhood over to John D. Spreckels Elementary. This school is located in University City, in a more affluent part of San Diego. You must understand, I'd never before seen little white girls with blonde hair and bright green eyes up close. I made another mistake here, when I told another boy that I thought little Amy was very pretty, and that I liked her. What does this boy do, but walk over to whisper into Amy's ear exactly what I'd just said. And what does Amy do, but look at me with a shocked expression on her pretty little face.

I don't recall what happened next between the tattletale and me, but it was enough to bring the teacher into the picture. I didn't try to fight this other boy, certainly, because back then I was extremely afraid of getting punched back. Maybe all on my own, I cried softly or blubbered out uncontrollably. I don't remember exactly; my mind has blocked that off. I remember my teacher standing Amy in front of me, and saying that it was okay for me to like Amy, because she was so pretty, and what about Amy wasn't to like? I felt I had done something horribly wrong. Because I was already severely emotionally scarred and traumatized, I piled this incident on top of everything else. I swore; I would never be dumb enough to let a girl know I liked her, ever again!

A few years later, puberty came along. I'm sheltered, shy and formerly abused. I don't really know how to act around girls I like, and at best, I'm shy around them. At worst, I am terrified of how they might see me. Maybe they'd think I was some sort of monster. The only females I could drop my guard around, I felt, were the ones that walked into the living room at home. Because my mother was and still is very paranoid, she didn't allow anybody to step into the house. In fact, even today she'll talk to her few acquaintances and friends through the closed security door or step out to the front yard, instead of allowing these people inside where they can sit on the couch. Not just anybody gets to step inside the house!

Well, guess which few females are allowed to walk into the house, where I could interact with them? These were my mother's best friends, of which she had only two or three, plus my aunts and my girl cousins. That's it. At the time when my sexual hormones were waking up, most of the women I felt comfortable and happy around were related to me. This developed into a fetish, and this is why most of my erotic stories center on the older man / younger woman or on the older woman / younger man themes. My first sensual fantasies were centered on these very few familiar women in my otherwise empty and isolated life. (I know things like this may have happened to some of you that are reading this, because I have met people who grew up in similar circumstances over the years. A parent's over-protectiveness can really skew a kid's point of view of life.)

My relationships with the opposite sex did not improve much when I was in high school. In the tenth grade, I wrote a short story about a couple trapped in a concentration camp. They tried to escape, but in the end they were cornered. The implication was that they both got killed in each other's arms. (A finalized version of this story appears in my Apocalypse Now! collection. It is titled Breaching The Fence.) I showed this story to a girl in my class, because she was an aspiring poet and fellow writer. I did put emotion into my story, but as a human being, I am very cold and analytical. I did not expect this girl to read my story and start crying. Really, was it that bad? I didn't know how to absorb such a strong reaction, and so I stopped showing my stories to anyone. I kept my writing to myself after that, except for creative writing assignments for class. Only a few of my teachers got to see them.

In the twelfth grade, my class was assigned to write a short, reflective poem about who we were. One by one, the students went to the front of the class and read their poems. Again, I put my real feelings into the poem, but I didn't anticipate how other students would react to that. To me, I was just reading a project out loud. When I finished reading my poem and took my seat, several of the students sitting around my desk were staring at me.

I had a rival in class. This was a Hispanic girl who also rode the bus out to Point Loma High. Ever since the seventh grade, we'd both tested high on important tests and ended up in many of the same college-prep classes. In fact, I beat her out, barely, before I made the regional spelling bee finals at Balboa Park in the seventh grade. We were, I believe, in the top three or four best spellers in our schools from the seventh through ninth grades. (I remember running down the halls in junior high, where I would smack this girl on the butt while trying to get her to chase me. She did chase me, but with her fists!)

By the twelfth grade, I had a very deep respect for this young lady. After I read my poem in class, she made the following comment, paraphrased since I don't recall what it was exactly. 'This says a lot about you.' She meant that my poem said a lot about who I was deep inside, and this realization scared me. I didn't want anyone to know who I was, deep down inside. I didn't want anybody to guess at what I had gone through in my young life, that made me feel so self-conscious and awkward in high school. Again, I made the commitment not to show my writing to anyone, and especially not to any girls.

I first started working as a parking attendant when I was nineteen. The location I worked at was in the Golden Triangle area of San Diego. My job, basically, was to sit in a parking booth all day and collect parking revenue for an underground garage. I had a lot of down time, because most of my traffic came by early in the morning, at lunch, and later in the afternoon when my regulars started going home.

I ended up at that particular station when the attendant before me was fired. Even way back then, when I was 19 and 20, I took down notes and tried to expand them into fiction stories. With absolutely no experience in writing long stories, I decided to try and write out a full novel. This project is titled the Ranth series, which I started, became dissatisfied with, and would scrap and start all over. I took notebooks to work with me, and whenever I had the time, I would jot down notes to keep the storyline going, one day and a page or two at a time. (This project has expanded into the, so far, six novels of the Savage Lands series.)

A lot checker from my company would come by and chalk tires or write out parking tickets for cars that stayed over the posted time limits. This position was filled only on and off, until budgeting allowed for a dedicated worker to be employed. I trained a young woman to do this job. She was a tiny wisp of a girl, who wore glasses and could barely look me in the eye, and who hid her face behind her long, brown hair. I'll call this woman Jill, because she was married, and we did end up being closer than just work buddies. Jill's duties included giving me ten-minute breaks twice a day, and one thirty-minute lunch break. At first, she must have assumed that my notebooks were part of my job. One day when I went out for lunch, I accidentally left one out. Jill opened it up and started reading it.

"What is this?" She asked me, when I got back.

By then, I was cocky and brash at nineteen years old, and I was hanging out with thugs back home. All of that went out the window, as I realized that Jill had been reading my writing. I said I was writing a story. She said it was a good story, and could she read more? I didn't want her to, because of all the emotional garbage I'd already suffered through. I didn't even want her opinion or critique of my writing, because I wouldn't be able to handle any negative remarks. I did not want Jill to pick up my feelings from the story I was writing. Still, she was persistent, and eventually I said yes.

The days would go by, with me adding to the story, and Jill reading my progress as I went along. She didn't say much about my writing, because she was shy enough on her own, but she always wanted to read more. Every once in a while, she asked me what I meant about a certain passage. I realized that in my hurry to move the story along, I wasn't taking the time to allow the reader to fully grasp one scene, before I jumped over to the next one. Thanks to Jill, I started pacing myself better, and adding more color and detail to my writing.

One day, Jill came by and showed me a call to submissions from the San Diego Reader. The idea was for writers to describe their experiences on growing up locally, or to write something unique about their neighborhood. The writing contest was titled My Neighborhood. Jill said my writing was just as good as anybody else's, and she started pushing for me to enter the contest. The deadline was only a few days away. At Jill's urging, I scribbled something down, she looked at it and approved it, and I sent it off.

I can't remember how many entries there were, dozens I guess, but fragments of ten or so stories made it into print. Part of my entry was published. Never mind that the Reader was trying to get a broad spectrum of neighborhoods into its weekly, and that only one other person had turned in an entry from my specific neighborhood. I had several paragraphs of a story I had written, on paper, in my hand, and there was my name on the bottom of it. Nobody could take that away from me!

For a time, Jill and I fell in emotional love. We both had other commitments, and other strange factors that I included in my book Thorns I, that eventually broke us apart.

I wish I could say that my time with Jill, and the way she quietly coerced me to write for her, was a turning point in my writing career. Unfortunately, it was not. This was because Rebecca, the woman I would spend the next twenty years of my life with, had as little respect for the art of writing as my mother did. Thanks to those two women, my mother and Rebecca, it took many, many years for me to finally put my lifelong ambition front and center in my life.

So, to recap, I was writing stories with a lot of action, dominated by male characters. I was not writing much in the way of female roles, of the emotional aspects or of the self-analytical sides of people in general. My characters were largely two-dimensional, with a couple of main, stalwart attributes, little growth and hardly any connectivity or balance with other characters. Things stayed like this for many years.

When I was around twenty-five, I finally jelled with my ex-wife and became wholly committed to her, and to the two little girls we were raising up. My ex taught me how to be comfortable with a woman, and I learned to love her as the time went by. It was my two daughters, however, that really allowed the emotion of love to blossom within me. I stopped hanging out with bad influences, and the supernatural phenomena plaguing me finally subsided. I started turning over a new leaf and became more of a family man. After having gone to many Catholic and Christian churches when I was a teenager, I began to study religion with Jehovah's Witnesses. The older couple that came over to my house taught me a lot, and it was because of them that I began to resent 'living in sin' and finally married the mother of my children. (This was after six or so years of being off and on with Rebecca. My peers and my mother had always been strongly set against me getting married. My friends didn't even like when I had a steady girlfriend!)

From a writing standpoint, my interaction with the Witnesses was a total mess. The older woman who lectured me told me I would never in my entire life write anything pleasing to God. Only certain Jehovah's Witnesses who were chosen by God could do that. This devastated me, because I mainly wrote dark fantasy and horror. What was I supposed to do, give up writing? It made me stubborn to think my talent was a waste, enough that I strove and strove to write positive, heartwarming stories. Guess what? For the next five years, I wrote garbage. It was so bad I tossed it all out. After I stopped studying with this couple, and between the years of 1995 and 2000, I didn't write much of anything at all.

During that time, I was learning how to interact better with people. Remember that in high school, I felt largely alone, despite that I could get boys and girls sitting next to me to laugh and talk to me, and despite that at the end of that period I had a gang of young ruffians to back me up. I think the only times I was really comfortable as a young adult were when I was hanging with the gangsters from my block, because a lot of them were misfits like me. Also, when I worked as a parking lot attendant, I was usually alone in a small booth, with little personal interaction with the public. In 1996, I remember a pretty secretary walking up to my parking booth to ask some questions. When a car drove up the driveway, this woman had no choice but to step in close to me. I actually cringed to have this secretary standing that close, because I had gone some three or four months largely alone in that dank Coronado parking garage. She was in my personal space!

Anyway, at twenty-five I got fed up with how the Christian church, and all of its spin-offs, had no answers for the supernatural phenomena I had witnessed personally. I started talking to people about their beliefs and their experiences with ghosts. In a short time, I learned enough about these subjects that I could talk to people for hours about them. I was especially interested in people from other faiths, and learned about Buddhism and Hinduism as I went along. Between when I was twenty-five and thirty years old, I became a guy with a lot of knowledge, and through spiritual means I would approach, or be approached by strangers who were in need of support or guidance. Soon, I began to have longer discussions with older people, and to mentor younger people. While I did this, by default I learned about them as human beings, and I would sometimes study their characters as we talked, and use them as templates for my stories. (More details on the metaphysical aspects I'm touching on can be found in my Thorns books.)

In early 1999, I got fed up with working in the parking industry, and I got hired at Fry's Electronics. Nearly every new hire at the store was a cashier, so there was a good mix of guys and girls manning the registers. The way the store was set up, cashiers had to schmooze department managers to get off the registers and onto the sales floor where they could make better money by commission. As a cashier there, I got along with everybody at my rank.

In late 1999, the first Best Buy in San Diego opened up, during Fall and in anticipation of the busy Christmas season coming up. The pay was better than at Fry's, so I went and got hired at that place. I thought there would be a balance of male and female cashiers, the same as at Fry's, but as it turns out there wasn't. I'd say ninety percent of the cashiers were women. This is when the store was not open, mind you, and we all trained together and went to lunch together and hung out together all day. I would often be the only guy in a carload or vanload of women. I talked and joked with a couple of blondes in particular, enough that there was gossip going around that I was messing around with one or both of them. Still, most of the female cashiers, young and old, single or attached, liked me enough to hang out and joke with me.

One day, one of my two female friends was feeling down, and she asked me for a hug. (Yes, the rumors really went wild then, because many people in my department saw us.) The second blonde I talked to said, if she can have a hug, then I want one to. This avalanched in a way I did not expect. Other cashiers asked my two friends, are you girls messing around with Ray? My friends said no, he's just a nice guy. I became like a good luck charm, as several women started coming up to me for hugs every morning. I'd give out maybe ten to fifteen of them every day. Women from other departments saw this and they started coming over for hugs, too. I recall when one time, the store mascot came over and, wearing a full yellow and blue costume that covered the entire body from the knees up, randomly hugged me. I thought, I really hope there is a girl in this costume, instead of a guy! This is when my anxiety over women, that I had ever since I could remember, finally started going away.

After the holidays, every employee had his or her hours cut. Mine went from 50 to 60 hours per week, due to the busy pre-grand-opening store set-up, to between 12 and 18 hours a week in early January of 2000. I left that job and went back to being a parking attendant. This time, I was employed in the heart of La Jolla. While there, I started writing again. Much of the material for my first few short story collections was created during that period.

This was an important time for me as a writer, between early 2000 and late 2001. I knew my writing was not yet good enough for me to attempt a complete novel. On the other hand, I had already written a ton of poetry and very short stories. During those two years, I started writing stories that at first were only three to five pages long. I worked at getting my stories longer. I got to where I could write five or more short stories in the same theme fairly quickly. Later, I wrote maybe four or five novellas that ranged between thirty and fifty pages. Two of these novellas, Don Diego's Premonition and Road Trip, I eventually expanded into the novels Before The Seven 1 and 2, respectively. I have another novella featuring Tekkin the Dwarf. One day, I will get around to expanding that story into Before The Seven 3. I wrote on anything I could get my hands on. Notebooks, scratch paper, old receipts, you name it, and I was scribbling all over the front and back of them. When I got home, I put my handwriting on computer and edited it, unless my ex-wife was being a nuisance and got in the way.

In 2002, for the first time, I moved away from San Diego and north to Beaumont, in Riverside County, which is about a hundred miles away. This town is connected to two other small towns, Banning and Cabazon. All three locations have a quiet, country atmosphere to them. There was no parking lot industry there, and the only retail store for all three towns at that time was a single, lonely Kmart.

I went and got hired with the biggest employer in the area, which is Casino Morongo, the biggest casino between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and all the way to Nevada. Because I cashiered pretty much at every job I'd ever had, I became a cage cashier. The bad part about this was that I got hired on graveyard shift. This took a lot of adjustment on my part, because I'd never worked such late shifts before. At the time, my oblivious wife had an even worse adjustment over my schedule than I did, because she fully expected me to go home, do things throughout the entire day, and still be ready for work late that night. The first month was horrible, because I could not get into a good sleeping routine and my then-wife nagged me so much.

The job was worth keeping. The best things about it were that the pay and benefits were very good for the region, and I could expect around $150 in tips every week on top of a steady salary. The second month, I put my foot down. I told my wife, no, I won't go shopping with you on my workdays or my days off, I won't do any yard work, and I won't do anything at all until I get my fucking sleep first!

This routine of me sleeping during the day, and my wife continually trying to wake me up, began to alienate us. When I went to her for love and affection, she would use that against me, and say, oh, we need to go shopping first, or we need to do this or that to the yard, or the house, or the car. It became a chore for me to get my own wife into bed.

At work, I'd estimate that about eighty percent of the cashiers in my department were women. The first month I was there, I was the quietest guy in the world. I saw how quickly the rumors would fly when any male employee was seen speaking to any female employee, and I didn't want any part of that. The second month, when I got the cold shoulder at home, I thought, you know, why don't I just start talking and joking with my coworkers, like I had in San Diego, instead of being Mr. Quiet Guy all the time?

One of the first girls I hit it off with was Mandy. She was also married, five years younger than I was at twenty-six, but she was a tremendous flirt with all of the security guards. Mandy had a friend named Kathy, who was an attractive country blonde and just as much of a tease as Mandy was. Now, based on the time I spent with these two women, I can say that they were not sluts, but they both liked to give off the impression that they were. When they flirted with me, I would flirt back. When they asked me out, I said sure, why not? To the two women, they got infamy because they could tell the whole world they were going out with that new married guy from San Diego. To me, I just wanted to go hang out with anybody, because things back home weren't that great. After a few dates, all of them platonic I swear, some of the other female cashiers asked me if I was sleeping with either Mandy or Kathy. I said, go ask them. When they did, both Mandy and Kathy said yes. You can imagine how that went over in a contained workplace like that, where everyone has their nose in everybody else's business.

Things quickly spiraled out of proportion, just as they had at the Best Buy. Mandy was the biggest flirt in the entire casino, and that is saying something because I think Morongo had over 500 employees back then. Thanks to me, Mandy wasn't flirting as much with the entire security staff or all the other male employees, because she was hovering around me all the time. Kathy would tell the other workers some lewd things that we supposedly did together, which were not true, but which made the rounds like wildfire as if they were. Like I said, both of these women enjoyed stirring the pot.

The other female cashiers were asking themselves, who is this Ray guy, who tamed those two wildcats Mandy and Kathy like that? When the two women would say, oh, we're going out to Palm Springs or Coachella tonight with Ray, many of the other female cashiers wanted to tag along to see our interaction for themselves. Little caravans were formed, where three, four or five cars went out full of Morongo cashiers, with an average of ten women plus a couple of other 'trusted' guys and me. During our hour lunches at work, I would be the only male surrounded, every day, by eight to twelve women from my department who went to lunch at the same time.

Mandy became my main squeeze, although we never slept together. Neither did I sleep with any of the other women. I simply hung out with them at first. As time went by, I did hold a few of these women, I kissed them, and I messed around with them. More importantly for me as a largely unemotional person and a budding writer, I talked to these women and listened to them and joked with them. I had an especially soft heart for women who were neglected or abused, because of what I had personally gone through when I was younger. I wanted to keep these troubled women next to me until their troubles went away and they were smiling again, even if that was only for a short time.

We talked a lot, ten to twenty women per day on one side, and on the other side, just me. They wanted to get a guy's perspective on a number of things that they felt they could not ask any other man, not even men they were close to, or married to. I started asking them questions about how they went about getting a guy's attention. I asked how they felt, deep inside, about themselves and about life. I played games with them, trying to guess something about them that nobody else could know. I was also privy to their girl talk, where they intimated to each other which guy they thought was cute, and what they thought about things like kids, cars, jewelry and clothes. More than ever before, I was learning how the female mind worked.

Part of the reason I left Morongo is because management started making changes their employees didn't like, and very few people were standing up for themselves. Another part was because I fell in love with Mandy. If I had stayed working there, I would have slept with her. To me, this would have been cheating on my wife. Some would argue that I was already cheating, by flirting, kissing and holding all these other women in a way only their husbands and boyfriends should have done. Take it as you will. I made it a point not to have sexual intercourse with any of them.

I did manage to create this same sort of rapport with a large number of women at a second casino, but that's just more of the same. The point of the story is that before I was able to see the world through the eyes of multiple male characters. After this time spent in the company of so many women, at a total of 4 or 5 different workplaces, I was finding out how to see things, emotionally and socially, and in other aspects, from the viewpoint of dozens of women.

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### Have A Merry, Pagan Christmas!

Thus says the LORD: "Do not learn the way of the Gentiles; Do not be dismayed at the signs of heaven, For the Gentiles are dismayed at them. For the customs of the peoples are futile; For one cuts a tree from the forest, The work of the hands of the workman, with the ax. They decorate it with silver and gold; They fasten it with nails and hammer. So that it will not topple. They are upright, like a palm tree, And they cannot speak; They must be carried, Because they cannot go by themselves. Do not be afraid of them, For they cannot do evil, Nor can they do any good." \- Jeremiah, 10:2-5, New King James Version

The above verses refer to tree reverence or worship in Old Testament times. The divinity of nature and nature gods / spirits goes back a long way, and if you celebrate Christmas, guess what, that's exactly what you're doing in modern times. Read on to learn how this favorite holiday originally came about, you closet pagan, you!

Oh, by the way, Jeremiah might have had Asherah poles in mind when he wrote those verses. You do know who Asherah is, right? That would be God's WIFE, back when he had a wife, before she was scrubbed out of history by Jewish zealots, circa 400 - 500 Before the Common Era. There is a fascinating rumor that Asherah poles are the basis for today's stripper poles, but let's keep to subject, shall we?

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Introduction

Astrological References

Babylon's Naughty Incest Gods

Rome's Ultimate Party: Saturnalia!

The Norsemen And The Yule Log

Medieval St. Nick And The Dreaded Krampus

Odds And Ends

Conclusion

Sources

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Introduction

With the winter holidays coming up, I thought it would be nifty if I did research into the pagan origins of Christmas. Blasphemy, you say! Christmas popped up out of thin air, like magic, because God said so! Right, right. I get it. Dogma is the law of the land, unless your particular religion is Rockefeller medicine, Smithsonian history, NASA space exploration, or like Nacho Libre's sidekick used to say: I believe in science!

It was a chore looking for unbiased sources for my research notes. I have included information gathered from Christian, Muslim, Scandinavian and even Spiritual archivists into this report. I do have a couple of PDF books on the subject, but I didn't delve into them because I read SO MUCH, and I write SO MUCH, that I didn't feel like taking the time. It was easier to spend, oh, about 4 hours compiling this information, and an entire morning writing this article, plus reviewing it a few times. I may go into the books and update this report at a later date.

You'll find the source videos for this report listed at the end. I have to say, most of the video narrators were WIMPS, in that they whitewashed history by deliberately leaving out some of the more violent or perverse details of Winter Solstice celebrations in ancient times. I know, I know, some of you will cringe when you find out about child orgies during Saturnalia, or poison-dipped Mistletoe spears, or human sacrifices when the Lord Of Misrule term was over, but hey... History is History. That's the way it happened, so why pull my punches? If you can't handle the Truth, go watch Sesame Street and suck your thumb for the rest of the day. Safe space!

I did not include a whole lot of Mithras in this report, although this Roman sun god, and precursor to Jesus, played a big part in the Winter Solstice. That's because I have a full report on this Indian / Persian / Roman deity that I'll be posting up later. For now, repeat after me: Everything I was taught is a big, fat lie!

Astrological References

December 25th is not the birth date of Jesus, as is popularly thought. Instead, this is the date of the Winter Solstice, when the sun begins to rise higher in the sky and days become longer again. The full period of the Winter Solstice stretches from Dec. 21st to Jan. 6th. The days got shorter before the 25th, and they got longer after that date. In ancient times, without electricity and modern heating methods, this time of year was feared as a time of great cold, disease and darkness. When the sun returned, it was a grand event worthy of celebration. Some cultures believed the sun actually died during the Solstice, stayed in the underworld for a few days, and came back to life. Hint, hint!

Many people believe Jesus was born on December 25th, and hence we have the Christ Mass or Christmas on that date to celebrate his birth. Many Bible apologists and scholars will admit that this is inaccurate. If shepherds were out tending to their flocks, that means the flocks were outside and the flocks would not have been taken out during the coldest time of the year. That's if you assume Jesus was a real historical figure. (Also, the Catholic Church once set Jesus' birthday as January 6th.)

It is likely that the Star of Bethlehem is a reference to the star Sirius. It is also likely that the Three Kings are the three stars on Orion's Belt. Some researchers will say that we don't know for certain that there were Three Kings, or Three Wise Men. We assume that number because they brought three items as gifts: Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. Interesting that Frankincense and Myrrh have occult / magical powers. Also, in Spanish, _Los Tres Reyes Magos_ translates as The Three King Mages (Sorcerers), and we get Mago from the Latin Magus, which forms our modern word Magician.

Frankincense - spirituality, protection, exorcism, consecration

Myrrh - spirituality, healing, protection, exorcism, transformation, consecration

(From the book The Mystical World Of Ancient Witchcraft)

Babylon's Naughty Incest Gods

And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD. \- Genesis 10: 8,9, King James Version

The Bible deliberately omits details on who Nimrod was, other than he was a mighty hunter. If he was so mighty, why aren't we told of the mighty things he did? Well, we are given that Nimrod built the Tower of Babel, so that's a start. For accomplishing that feat, some people would say that Nimrod was a master Mason. (A theory from The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya. Nimrod is mentioned in Masonic lore, just like King Solomon. We will get into occult Solomon at a later date.) In the Bible's bloodline genealogy, we see that Noah begat Ham, Ham began Cush, and Cush begat Nimrod. Remember the name Cush! So, who was Nimrod really?

In the book Rivers Of Life by Furlong, Nimrod founded the Kaldian (Chaldean) Empire, and was called the Lord of Nipoor (also Ur or Hoor). This was circa 2234 BCE. The phrase 'mighty hunter,' according to this tome, did not mean that Nimrod hunted animals, but women, as in he was the big ladies' man. Are you ready to go for a loop? This phrase was also used to describe Siva (Shiva from India). There are many clues that tie the origins of Christianity, Islam and Judaism to India, that I have looked into before. The Hebrew Abraham came from Chaldea, and so did the priests of Brahma, so Abram = Brahma. Abraham's wife Saria or Sarah could derive from the Indian River Saraitva. Let's not get too far into that, as it will take us too far off-topic. I do have an article on Abraham and Sarah that I will post later.

For now, this is what I'd like for you to remember. Nimrod was the son of Kush. The word Barchus or Bacchus means son of Kus or Kooth. That's the link with Nimrod and the Greek fertility and wine god being one and the same. We will read about Bacchus a little later from his festival Bacchanalia, which coincided with Rome's Saturnalia. I wonder why the Old Testament writers deliberately hid this link from us?

Let's head over to Early Babylon for some naughtiness. According to the myth, Nimrod was married to Semiramis. When Nimrod died, Semiramis claimed that his spirit remained and sprouted up as an evergreen tree. On the anniversary of his birth, the spirit would visit the tree and leave gifts. The birth date of Nimrod was... December 25th!

Later, Semiramis had a son named Tammuz. Nimrod had been resurrected as his own son, and Semiramis married him, knowing he was a reincarnation of her deceased husband. When Tammuz died, he was crucified with a lamb at his feet. His body was taken into a cave. A large rock was rolled away from the cave after three days, where, lo and behold, the body of Tammuz was gone. (For more on Nimrod, read the Apocrypha Book of Jasher. This book is not included in the Bible, but it is mentioned by name in Joshua and Second Samuel.)

This is very important: THE HOLY TRINITY OF FATHER, MOTHER AND SON IS A TEACHING FROM THE BABYLONIAN MYSTERY SCHOOLS. This teaching continued in the Egyptian Mystery Schools and is also seen in a truncated way in the Bible. Let me prove it to you.

The Babylonian concept of incest among the gods and of the Immaculate Conception was passed on to Egypt. The god Osiris was married to the goddess Isis. Osiris was killed and dismembered by the god Set. Isis attempted to put her husband's pieces back together, but she couldn't do it. In the end, she took the phallus of Osiris and impregnated herself with it. Isis begat Horus, and later she married her son, who was the reincarnation of her husband. Sound familiar?

The tradition continues in Christianity, but it was deliberately obfuscated. We have the god Yahweh impregnating human Mary, and Mary giving birth to demigod Jesus. As a side note, there are several other unions of gods and humans mentioned in the Greek / Roman and other pantheons, resulting in half-god, half-man demigods such as Gilgamesh and Herakles / Hercules, plus Zeus cavorting often with human women. Getting back to the point, the mother of Jesus was Mary, and who was rumored to have been the wife or consort of Jesus but another Mary, in this case Mary Magdalene. Is it a coincidence that the mother of Jesus and the suspected lover of Jesus had the same name? I don't think it is an accident, not when there is a clear link between the Egyptian Isis and the Roman Catholic Mary, mother of god. In Babylon, we see statues of Semiramis holding baby Tammuz. In Egypt, we have Isis holding baby Horus, and in Christianity we have the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus. The statues are nearly identical. In Christianity, the hardest part to prove is that mother Mary was the same as lover Mary, but again, this is the part that was deliberately hidden from us.

In the book Bloodlines Of The Illuminati, author Springmeier writes that the Holy Trinity of Babylon represented the sun, moon and morning star. Let's add in Egypt and Christianity to that idea.

Holy Trinities - father, mother, son, and also sun, moon, morning star

Nimrod - Semiramis - Tammuz

Osiris - Isis - Horus

Yahweh - Mary - Jesus

" _I Jesus... am the bright and morning star."_ \- Revelation 21:16

Rome's Ultimate Party: Saturnalia!

Rome had what you would call an extreme party named Saturnalia that would put Mardi Gras in New Orleans to shame. This celebration was first created to promote liberty (more like libertine!). Originally, it was a one-day event held on December 17th. As time went on, more days of feasting were added, stretching the party on through December 23rd or 25th,, depending on the source.

During Saturnalia, the normal functioning of society was drastically altered and rules were loosened. Wealthy people put away their expensive clothes and dressed in common tunics. Politicians put away their special uniforms. The three classes of Romans: citizens, free men and slaves, wore Pileus. These were special caps usually used only by the slaves. Courts were closed. Prisoners were freed. Romans would feast and drink like gluttons. They were expected / encouraged to have sex in public with whoever wanted to participate. Different sources give differing details as to how out of the norm things got. Some sources claim that human sacrifices, random raping of women and even orgies with young children was permissible. One source states that houses or even entire villages could be pillaged with no repercussions. Another extreme source said any and all crimes were allowed, including murder. Homosexuals and transvestites could walk and engage in sex out in the open. All sorts of debauchery was allowed.

Here is a breakdown of how a typical Saturnalia went: On the 17th of December, a large crowd gathered by the temple of Saturn on Capitoline Hill. (This term is where our modern Capitol Hill comes from.) Saturn was the god of Capitoline Hill, as well as the god of agriculture, liberty and wealth. To officially begin the celebration, Saturn's priests would remove the wrappings from the feet of the Saturn statue inside the temple. The idea may have been that the statue was now figuratively 'able' to walk the streets. A priest would sacrifice an animal (some sources say a human) before the crowd. Senators inside the temple would pick up a second statue of Saturn, this one made of wood. They would carry the wooden statue out of the temple and down the street to the public forum. (Note that many, many cultures still have the custom today of carrying a religious effigy from one place to another, and in many cases the point of origin or destination is a holy site.) The crowd would follow the senators to the forum.

The wooden statue was set on a prepared recliner before a large, open banquet area. The people had a feast and drank wine there. Gladiator games were held right after the banquet. In keeping with the idea of things being turned on their head, women and dwarves would fight in these bloody games. Most people enjoyed the blood sport, but there were critics that abhorred them. Candles and torches lined the streets, allowing revelers to stay out late.

The feasting and drinking would continue after the people went home. Some citizens traded places or clothing with their slaves, or performed slave duties such as preparing food. Slaves were allowed to sit at the table and talk down to their masters, not in an insulting or angry way, but more in keeping with the fun spirit of the festival. One source said the only difference was that the masters and slaves ate dinner together, but that was one of the whitewashed versions.

People gambled, not with money, but with nuts. Small gifts were given, including books, toys and other items. One popular item was a Sigillara, a small wax figure. (Note that this has the word Sigil in it. Sigils are considered magical symbols or inscriptions. So these wax figures may have had some magical significance.) Everybody expected a gift from everybody else. People judged others based on the worth of the gifts they gave. Records exist of people praising or complaining about the gifts given to them. Cheaper gifts were handed out to strangers that came to the door.

I came across two versions of how a king of the feast was chosen. In one, the members of every household would elect a Saturnalicius Princeps, or King of Saturnalia. This was usually a child or a slave. Whatever this temporary king ordered was done right away and without question. Most orders were simple and given in fun. In the second version, a single Lord Of Misrule was chosen. This person was considered an enemy of Rome, perhaps a slave or criminal. For the duration of Saturnalia, this king was exalted to take part in the festivities of eating, drinking and fornicating. At the end of the festival, the Lord Of Misrule was killed or sacrificed to Saturn. The concept was that by killing this king, an enemy of Rome, Rome would metaphorically get rid of its enemies for a time.

More on Roman customs: Romans ate human-shaped biscuits during Saturnalia, kind of like our modern gingerbread men. Holly was hung inside the house to ward off evil. (I wonder, if over time, Holly become Holy, as in Holly Day, to Holy Day, to today's Holiday.) Our modern 12 Days of Christmas comes from the 12 days of the Winter Solstice.

Juvenalia was the Festival of Infants, where children were presented with images (or gifts). The Feast of Opalia was held on Dec. 19th. This feast was for Ops, the wife of Saturn. Brumalia and Natalis Invicti were festivals celebrated on the shortest date of the year, Dec. 25th. Several Roman gods had birthdays on Dec. 25th, including Mithras, who was also called Sol Invictus or the Unconquerable Sun.

In the year 270 BCE, Roman emperor Aurelius officially decreed that gifts could be exchanged on Dec. 25th to celebrate the birth of the sun god Mithras.

Early Christians did not decorate their houses during Saturnalia. Christians did not celebrate the birth date of Jesus, either. That came about during the 4th century, at the decree of Pope Julius the 1st, who wanted to draw more pagans to Christianity during the Saturnalia festivals. A lot of pagan customs and rituals officially became absorbed into Christianity at that time, including the birth date of Mithras becoming the birth date of Jesus. By the 7th century, the celebration was no longer called Saturnalia, but Christ's Mass. At that time, sex on the streets, rape and murder (and Druidic rituals, according to one source) were common. This debauchery did not become toned down until much, much later the 1600s.

Roman soldiers introduced Saturnalia to Britain, where it became the Festival of Fools, ruled over by the Lord of Misrule.

Ancient Greece observed the Bacchanalia, in reverence to Bacchus, a god of wine and frolic.

Rome held the Saturnalia festival in honor of their 'sun' god Saturn. Yes, Saturn as a sun god is a valid parallel. There are ancient histories describing Saturn as the original sun of Earth, as seen in the Golden Age of Saturn Mystery School teachings. Research also the Saturn Cube and the Death Cult of Saturn.

The story of Saint Nicholas can be traced back to the 3rd century CE. The monk Nicholas was possibly born in 280 CE, in Patara, Turkey. According to legend, he gave away his possessions and was very pious. He died on December 6th, possibly in 343 CE. This became a lucky day to make large purchases or get married. For another version of the Saint Nick story, see the Medieval section.

The Norsemen And The Yule Log

To the Scandinavian Norsemen, the Winter Solstice was a scary time of year. It was a time of death and darkness. Fires were lit to bring light into that darkness. Another way to view this: the gods of the hearth would watch over the occupants of the home and keep them warm. During certain times of year, some cultures believed the hearth god, dressed in red, would appear to reward the good and punish the evil.

It was believed that evergreen trees such as fir were everlasting, or had everlasting life. People would bring fir trees into their home to drive away death, the same way they drove away darkness with fire. In another interpretation, evergreen trees represent fertility and sex. Bringing evergreen trees into the home was an acknowledgement of the nature spirits that lived inside the trees. Decking the halls with boughs of Holly also acknowledged the power of the gods. People would hang mistletoe over their doors as a charm against evil.

Many cultures celebrated the Winter Solstice as the dying and renewal of the sun. The dates ranged from December 21st through the start of January. The Feast of 12 Nights was observed from Dec. 25th through Jan. 6th. I've come to differing opinions here. In the first, Yule was a god of fertility. During the 12 day festival, a large log, representing a phallic idol, was kept burning for the entire duration of the festival. Each ember from the burning log was believed to be a future new birth, of humans or livestock. Animal or human sacrifices were offered each day, paralleling with how a turkey is sacrificed in our modern Thanksgiving Day. Wild revelry took place.

December 25th, Christmas day, was called Hjol by the Nords. The Fresians knew it as Jole, and the early English called it Geol. Over time, this word has evolved into the modern Yule., which means Wheel. Germanic people saw the year as a wheel, or a cycle of time. The shorter days of December were on the bottom of the wheel. The wheel represents the eternal conflict between the forces of light and dark.

Odin (or Woden) was a Nordic god with many names. Another name for Odin is Jolfadr, which translates as Jole Father or Yule Father. Jole might also become Jolly, as in Jolly Father. All of these similar names give credence to the idea that Odin is the original Father Christmas. Here is a list of what attributes Odin shared in common with early Father Christmas:

Flying white horse

Wore a hat and cloak

Carried a staff or spear

Had long hair and beard

Was old and wise

Was called 'giver of letters'

Both were part of Germanic tradition

Both had religious connotations

Notes on Druidic customs: Celts and Druids customarily used mistletoe. One source stated that Druids poisoned their spears with mistletoe and sacrificed their victims under it. Mistletoe was believed to have the power to render a woman helpless, where a man could take advantage of her. This leads to our modern custom of hanging mistletoe over a doorway. When a woman walks under it, she cannot resist being kissed. Druids also used fir trees in their rituals.

Other notes from this time period: In the tale of Beowulf, the name Nick, Nickel or Nicker referred to the Demon of the North. This name is supposedly associated with Odin, but I could not find the link. Regardless, Nick the demon snatched up bad children and stole them away in his bag. In Germany, the name Pelz Nick means furry devil. This devil had a furry red coat and also came from the North. In Norse mythology, the god Loki kills fellow god Baldur with a staff of mistletoe.

Medieval St. Nick And The Dreaded Krampus

This shouldn't surprise anyone by now, but it was the Church of Rome that deliberately absorbed the ancient ritual of Saturnalia, in order to attract and eventually convert the pagans. Author Alfred Hottes blamed the European barbarians for mixing things up, but did Hottes acknowledge Emperor Constantine as one of those barbarians? Hello! Constantine was one of the primary leaders who helped put this all together!

Do you remember how in Saturnalia people would go from house to house expecting gifts? During the Middle Ages, the poor would walk to the houses of the rich, demanding that food and drink be given to them. If the poor were refused, they would proceed to torment that household. They would even sing songs while doing this, and while walking from house to house. This is how Christmas caroling first came about. Ironically, this is also the origin for our modern Halloween, where strangers would request treats, and give tricks, or torment, to house occupants who refused to cater to them.

We have varying accounts regarding the origin story of Saint Nick. In one, St. Nick was the patron of seafaring men. People believed St. Nick captured the Devil. The Devil was also called Krampus, Beelzebub, Zwarte Pter (Black Peter) and Knecht Ruprecht. Saint Nick showed up on December 25th and dropped candy and gifts down a chimney and into children's shoes. This is where the tradition of hanging Christmas stockings comes from. In this dualistic, good and evil contrast, St. Nick brought happiness and gifts, while the demonic Ruprecht carried a switch for beating and a basket for taking away the really bad kids. Interesting that in some customs, Ruprecht was later renamed Santa Claus. Over time, the demon's scary appearance changed into the jolly figure we recognize today. Early Santa Claus was still a disciplinary figure, as he continued to carry the same switch.

In some traditions, and as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, the jolly version of Santa Claus brought along his evil sidekick to take care of naughty children. This was the dreaded Krampus! This demon had long horns, shaggy fur, a long face and long tongue. Naughty children were beaten with horsehair and birch sticks. After the beating, they were tossed into the sack and taken to Hell.

The second story of Saint Nicholas is a bit more macabre. This Saint Nick is the patron saint of children. As the story goes, St. Nick was traveling and went into an inn to spend the night. Magically, or divinely if you will, Nick sensed that three boys had been killed there. He discovered that their bodies were dismembered and pickled for later eating. And so, voila! We have a new saint thanks to that morbid tale.

More on Medieval and Industrial Age customs: A light set at the window during the Winter Solstice meant the residents were observing the burning of the Yule Log. This is where we get the modern custom of hanging up Christmas lights. Wishing someone Yuletide greetings was in actuality invoking the fertility god Jul, or Yule.

Odin also became Father Christmas in Britain. Father Christmas would go around feasting and getting drunk during the Festival of Fools. A horned goat accompanied him, the same as in the Ruprecht / Krampus tales.

Europeans first brought Christmas trees into their homes starting in the 16th century.

19th century writers such as Charles Dickens, Clement Moore, Washington Irving and others popularized the Christmas holiday into a happy time where families came together and shared gifts. This is how the image of the jolly, red-suited Santa Claus first came about. Twelve nice, friendly reindeer replaced the evil horned goat Ruprecht.

In modern times, Wiccans believe that a wreath of Holly set on their heads adds to their magical powers.

The annual Burning Man event is equated with a modern day Saturnalia.

Odds And Ends

Here is some random stuff that didn't fit into earlier sections, as it pertains to theories that were too difficult to verify, that I thought reached too far, or that encompassed multiple sections.

Another explanation for the tradition of the Yule Log: As the log is burned in the chimney, and the embers die out, people believed that an evergreen tree would appear magically with gifts. The dying embers represent the dying of Nimrod, and the tree is Nimrod resurrected as Tammuz.

The traditional Christmas tree must be an evergreen tree. To some Christians, red Holly berries represent the blood of Christ, and the sharp Holly leaves represent Jesus' Crown of Thorns.

Santa Claus is the resurrected god Tammuz. The red on Santa Claus' suit signifies fire, which parallels the fire of the sun god Nimrod. The green of the Christmas tree signifies Tammuz sprouting back to life. Before I forget, let me also mention this. The red, coned elf hat of Santa Claus is very similar to the Phrygian hat worn by the sun god Mithras.

One researcher claims the name Nicholas comes from Nimrod. The name St. Nick may be an ancient reference to Lucifer.

In one of my research videos, I saw an image of the evolution of sun gods. Here is the gist of it, with one deity evolving into a later deity:

Nimrod - Baal - Osiris - Odin - St. Nicholas \- Sinterklaas - Santa Claus

List of gods with December 25th birthdays, with approximate eras:

Jesus, Israel - 0 CE

Adonis, Phoenicia - 200 BCE

Hermes, Rome - 200 BCE

Tammuz, Babylon - 400 BCE

Dionysus, Greece - 500 BCE

Buddha, Nepal - 563 BCE

Heracles, Greece - 800 BCE

Zarathurstra (Zoroaster), Asia - 800 BCE

Mithra, Persia - 1200 BCE

Horus, Egypt - 3000 BCE

Krishna, India - 3200 BCE

Conclusion

Catholicism and Christianity, as well as other similarly corrupted Abrahamic religions, are adamant that their god singled their people out and the entire religion sprung out of nothing, in divine magic. Sorry, but that is clearly not the case for anyone with an open mind that takes the time to study it. Just look at this example of Christianity's biggest day of the year, the supposed birth of Jesus on Christ's Mass, that coincidentally fell on the same date as the birth dates of every other important sun god.

The truth is that modern Christmas is an amalgamation of so many mythologies, cultures, rituals, beliefs and ideas that came before it. Christians and Catholics say they have the inside scoop on God, and that everyone else is a Pagan. That's exactly what the Church of Rome wanted them to say, and the stubborn propaganda has stuck around for nearly two thousand years, ever since emperors and popes such as Constantine implemented the 'new' religion upon the masses.

I say Pagan is as Pagan does. If you celebrate Christmas, good for you, but don't try to weasel your way out of all these traditions with clear Pagan origins, by saying they sprung up out of nowhere thanks to Yahweh or Jesus. You are unwittingly doing Pagan things and revering Pagan gods, but you tell yourself you are doing something new and different because the traditions have been re-labeled. All Abrahamic religions can be traced to so-called Pagan dogmas, primarily from Persia and India, so Christianity, Islam and Judaism are simply collections or re-brandings of what already existed. Tree worship, or animism, for example, as seen in revering the modern Christmas tree, goes back to the beginning of recorded history when people thought spirits inhabited nature in trees, rocks and water.

It's okay to have family reunions and buy gifts for loved ones during Christmas. Why not do it, as long as you don't overextend your finances to impress others? At the same time, I think it is important to remember where these traditions came from, and that is the dying and resurrection of the sun or a sun god during the Winter Solstice. The practice of celebrating a new year goes all the way back to the beginning, when people saw the days getting shorter and things dying in the cold and snow. These people waited and hoped for the winter season to be over, and they marked the signs in the heavens so they could begin to look forward to natural renewal of the world around them. That's the true spirit of Christmas; looking ahead for the resurrected sun to bring life back into our world, and to bring all of us out of darkness.

Sources:

Youtube video title - Youtube channel

Ancient Origins Of Christmas And Holiday Traditions In 8 Minutes - Conspiracy Channel

Dark Origins Of Christmas & Krampus The Christmas Demon - Hidden Knowledge

Pagan Origins Of Christmas: Part One - Brian Moonan

Saturnalia - Historia Civilis

Saturnalia: The Dark Origins Of Christmas - Koi Fresco

The Hidden History Of Christmas - Merciful Servant

The Pagan Roots Of Christmas - History With Hilbert

The Real Christmas Story - The Suns Light

The True Story Of Christmas: An Ancient Architects History Special - Ancient Architects

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### Media Reviews

Documentaries

The following are my notes for the Pagan Christmas article.

Ancient Origins Of Christmas And Holiday Traditions In 8 Minutes

Conspiracy Channel, 8 minutes, 33 seconds.

December 25th is not the birth date of Jesus. It is the date of the Winter Solstice, when the sun rises higher and days become longer again.

In the Old World, this date represented 'the return of the sun.' In Babylon, this signified Nimrod reincarnating as Tammuz. Nimrod's wife was Semiramis. Tradition holds that Nimrod died and was resurrected as his son Tammuz. Semiramis married Tammuz, knowing he was the reincarnation of Nimrod. This father-mother, son-mother incestuous relationship is very important for later mythologies, including those of the virgin birth of Jesus, and the occulted idea that Jesus married a woman named Mary (Magdalene), when his mother, not by coincidence was also named Mary. Semiramis claimed that when Nimrod died, his spirit remained and sprouted up as an evergreen tree. On the anniversary of his birth, Nimrod's spirit would visit that evergreen tree and leave gifts upon it. The birth date of Nimrod was December 25th. This is an occulted teaching from the Babylonian Mystery Schools.

The tradition of the Yule Log is explained: The log is burned in a chimney. When its embers die out, an evergreen tree magically appears with gifts. The dying embers represent the dying Nimrod, and the evergreen tree is Nimrod resurrected as Tammuz.

The Christmas tree is the evergreen tree. Santa Claus is the resurrected Tammuz.

The red on Santa Claus' suit signified fire, which parallels of the sun god Nimrod. The green of the Christmas tree signifies Tammuz sprouting back to life. The name Nicholas comes from Nimrod. The name St. Nick is an ancient reference to Lucifer.

An image shows the evolution of the sun god as follows: Nimrod - Baal - Osiris - Odin - St. Nicholoas - Sinterklaas - Santa Claus. By the way, the Nimrod through Odin sequence has been connected by a number of researchers.

In Egyptian mythology, we have another example of Immaculate Conception. Osiris is married to Isis. Osiris dies and is divinely resurrected as Horus. Horus then marries his mother Isis.

Horus is depicted as the eagle on the reverse of the one dollar bill. Not sure if I agree with this conclusion.

List of gods with December 25th birthdays:

Adonis, Phoenicia - 200 BCE

Hermes, Rome - 200 BCE

Tammuz, Babylon - 400 BCE

Dionysus, Greece - 500 BCE

Buddha, Nepal - 563 BCE

Heracles, Greece - 800 BCE

Zarathurstra (Zoroaster), Asia - 800 BCE

Mithra, Persia - 1200 BCE

Horus, Egypt - 3000 BCE

Krishna, India - 3200 BCE

Roman emperor Constantine was a sun-worshiper and follower of sun god Nimrod. I may disagree here, as I understand Constantine favored Apollo mostly, or Mithras secondarily, but both of these are also sun gods.

Red Holly Berries represent the blood of Christ to Christians. The sharp Holly leaves represent the Crown of Thorns. In the video, we are given the notion that Nimrod was the first king to wear a crown, and that the crown represents the sun. I don't see the Holly connection yet, but the crown as a sun symbol is seen on the head of Apollo and the halo around Jesus' head.

The star Sirius is shown as the Star of Bethlehem. The stars of Orion's Belt are shown as the Three Kings.

Dark Origins Of Christmas & Krampus The Christmas Demon

Hidden Knowledge, 5 minutes.

The story of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, goes like this. Saint Nick enters an inn during the Middle Ages. He magically senses that three boys have been killed, dismembered and pickled. Nick resurrects the children and voila, we have a new saint! Cool story, bro.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Santa Claus had an evil sidekick to take care of all the naughty children. This was Krampus! Krampus had horns, shaggy fur, a long face and tongue. The children were beaten with horsehair and birch sticks, before being throwing into a sack or wicker basket and taken to hell.

Saturnalia included human sacrifices and rape. I'm not sure about the accuracy of these statements.

The video compares this festival to the series of movies The Purge. Yeah, because a week of heavy drinking, open fornication and singing in public to the Roman gods is the same thing as blatant murder sprees during a night of mayhem. Right!

Pagan Origins Of Christmas: Part One

Brian Moonan, 10 minutes.

(Christian perspective.)

Notes not covered previously.

Christians did not decorate their houses during Saturnalia.

In Rome, Saturnalia ran from December 17th through 25th. Courts were closed. Vandalism was permitted. The video claims an enemy of Rome was chosen to be the mascot of Saturnalia. This person was innocent and forced to indulge in good food and wine, before he was killed at the end of the festival.

Wine, women and song were the order of the day. How evil!

People ate human-shaped biscuits. Evil!

The Catholic Church 'absorbed' Saturnalia to 'convert' the pagans.

In 1466, Pope Paul II 'forced' Jews to run naked in a race. The Jews were fed, the people laughed and the 'holy father' on his lavish balcony also laughed. Evil! This sounds like propaganda from a Rome hater to me.

Rabbis were dressed as clowns and forced to walk through town, while spectators threw things at them. Maybe this did happen, and it was as bad as the narrator claims. At the same time, we have the usual over-victimization of Jews, and the grudge between Jews and Christians that has been prominent ever since Christianity first started up.

Author Alfred Hottes wrote that sun worshiping European barbarians influenced the dating of the Catholic Christ Mass. Of course it did! Constantine was one of those 'European barbarians!'

Natalis Invicti was celebrated on Dec. 25th.

Juvenalia was the Festival of Infants, where children were presented with images. (Gifts?)

Brumalia was a festival on the shortest day of the year, on Dec. 25th.

(At 7:12 into the video, we see a picture of a blonde haired, blue eyed Jesus. Note the sun halos on Mary and Jesus!)

The Bible does not endorse the worship of the birth date of Jesus.

Due to its pro-Christian bias, this video has many historical inaccuracies.

Saturnalia

Historia Civilis, 9 minutes.

In early Rome, Saturnalia began on Dec. 17th. As time went on, it stretched out to the 23rd. Starting with the first day, the wealthy would put away their expensive clothes and wear common tunics. This included politicians who wore special uniforms. Citizens, free men and slaves all wore a special cap called a Pileus, normally worn by slaves. The purpose of Saturnalia was to promote liberty.

A large crowd gathered by the temple to Saturn, on Capitoline Hill. Saturn was the god of Capitol Hill, wealth, agriculture and liberty. To officially begin Saturnalia, priests removed wrappings from the feet of the Saturn statue. A priest would then sacrifice an animal before the crowd. Senators would pick up a second, wooden Saturn statue. They would carry it out of the temple and take it to the public forum. The crowd would follow.

The statue was set on a recliner, before an open banquet area. The crowd had a feast and wine. Gladiator games were held afterward. In keeping with the idea of society turned on its head, women and dwarves would fight in these games. Some Romans abhorred the games.

Candles and torches lined the streets, allowing revelers to stay out late.

Feasts would continue inside homes. A Saturnalicius Princeps, or King of Saturnalia, was elected. This was usually a child or slave. Whatever the 'king' ordered was done without question, but most orders were simple and in keeping with the party atmosphere. People would drink and gamble, betting nuts instead of money.

Some citizens traded places with slaves and prepared food. Mostly, citizens and slaves sat down to eat together. Slaves could criticize and insult their masters.

Dec. 19th was the Feast of Opalia, held for the wife of Saturn, named Ops.

Huge feasts were held. Small gifts were given, including toys and books. A popular gift item was a Sigillara, or a small wax figure. Everybody expected a gift from everyone they knew. People judged others based on the worth of the gifts. Cheaper gifts were given to strangers coming to the door.

Saturnalia: The Dark Origins Of Christmas

Koi Fresco, 8 minutes.

Notes not previously covered.

During Saturnalia, a Lord of Misrule was chosen. This person or persons were enemies of Rome, for a time exalted to partake of the festivities. When the festival was over, the Lord of Misrule was sacrificed to Saturn, metaphorically getting rid of Rome's enemies for a time.

Societal rules were loosened during Saturnalia. People were expected to get drunk and have sex. They could rob and pillage entire villages without fear of repercussions.

Saturnalia was willfully incorporated into Roman Catholicism.

Druids would poison spears with mistletoe and sacrifice victims under mistletoe.

The Hidden History Of Christmas

Merciful Servant, 20 minutes.

Notes not covered previously.

(From a Muslim perspective. Some off-topic content.)

The Winter Solstice stretches from Dec. 21st to Jan. 6th. The solstice was a time of great cold, disease and darkness. When the sun returned, it was a grand event worthy of celebration. In the 'far North,' the Feast of 12 Nights was observed from Dec. 25th to Jan. 6th. Ancient Greece observed the Bacchanalia, in reverence to the Bacchus, a god of wine and frolic. Rome had the Saturnalia festival in honor of their 'sun' god Saturn. Yes, Saturn as a sun god is a valid parallel. There are ancient histories describing Saturn as the original sun of Earth, as seen in the Golden Age of Saturn, Mystery School teachings. Research also the Saturn Cube and the Death Cult of Saturn.

In the North, fires were burned to signify light during the time of darkness. The evergreen or fir tree was thought to have everlasting life, and so people would carry them into their homes to burn, or hang mistletoe over their doors as a charm or form of good luck amulet. These were methods of holding off the winter.

Druids had special rituals involving fir trees and mistletoe, but no details are given.

Before I forget, let me mention this. The red, coned hat of Santa Claus is very similar to the Phrygian hat worn by Mithras.

The video claims that Mithras was a Druid, and a mysterious character in history. I disagree with this. I've traced Mithras back to India in other research. Mithra or Mithras is mysterious, but this is because he evolved over the centuries from India to Persia to Rome. People cannot define this sun god definitely because of the differing cultures and times he was worshiped in.

The day of Mithras was the seventh day of the week, Sun Day. Mithras was the son of the sun. His rituals included a sacrament of bread and wine. Mithras died for the sins of the people. Actually, I believe Mithras came to 'save the world.' This is a minor nitpick. Jesus was sacrificed on the cross, while Mithras sacrificed a bull, both done for the same purpose of purifying humanity. In the Persian version, Mithras rose up to heaven to be with his holy father the sun.

Jesus was born in warm weather, and not in winter. This assumes Jesus was a real person. In Muslim teachings, as in Christian, Mary was divinely impregnated by god.

In the tale of Beowulf, the name Nick, Nickel or Nicker was the name of the Demon of the North. This name is associated with Odin, which I disagree with. Anyway, Nick the demon snatched up bad children and stole them away in his bag.

In Germany, Pelz Nick means furry devil. This demon had a furry red coat and also came from the North.

Saturnalia was evil. Bacchanalia was evil. Blah, blah, blah. This is all whitewashing of history in the usual Catholic manner, except this time a Muslim is doing it.

The Pagan Roots Of Christmas

History With Hilbert, 11 minutes.

Notes not covered previously.

(Scandinavian perspective.)

Christmas day was celebrated as Hjol by the Nords, Jole by the Fresians and Geol by the Old English. In modern times, the word is Yule. Jole means Wheel. Germanic people saw the year as a wheel shape, with December and its shorter days being on the bottom.

Note that the ancient Egyptians believed in something similar, as relating to the rising and falling of the sun in a cyclical pattern. During the day, the sun traveled across the sky as Ra. When the sun set, the god Set entered the underworld. The dead sun was Osiris while he was in the underworld, and when dawn approached, Horus was said to rise from the dead.

This idea of circles within circles representing cyclical changes is also seen in the Hopi view of circular time, and in the Indian Yugas and Aztec methods of calculating ages up to solar precessions, or turns of the zodiac, that take 26,000 years to repeat.

The Jole wheel of time interprets year cycles as conflict between light and dark forces. Nearly every culture has similar beliefs, from the ones I mentioned above to others like the Buddhist Yin-Yang and various other cultures, including Christianity, that have their primary deity die and spend three days in the underworld before returning to life in resurrection.

Bringing a Christmas tree into the house was a way to bring life or light indoors during a time of winter darkness.

In Norse myth, Loki kills Baldur with a staff of mistletoe.

The Celts and Druids customarily used mistletoe.

Father Christmas is identified with Odin in the following ways:

flying white horse

hat, cloak, staff or spear

ling hair and beard

old and wise

giver of letters

Germanic tradition

Religious connotations

One of Odin's names is Jolfadr. This is broken down as Jole Father, or Yule Father.

Jole might also become Jolly. This leads to Jolly Father and adds to the idea of Odin being Father Christmas.

In Norse tradition, an animal was sacrificed during the holiday, similar to how turkeys are sacrificed during Thanksgiving. Eating turkey on Thanksgiving is based on blood sacrifice culture! Who knew, right?

The Real Christmas Story

The Suns Light, 34 minutes.

Notes not previously covered.

Yule is referenced as a god of fertility. In the north, a 12 day festival took place around the Winter Solstice. One large log, a phallic idol, was kept burning for the entire festival. Animal or human sacrifices were offered on each day. Wild revelry took place.

In Rome, several gods were born during the Winter Solstice. Mithras, the god of the unconquerable sun, or Sol Invictus, was born on Dec. 25th. During Saturnalia, any and all crimes were allowed. Homosexuality, transvestitism and debauchery were permissible. Children participated in drunken orgies. In 270 BCE, Roman emperor Aurelius decreed that gifts could be exchanged on Dec. 25th to celebrate the birth of the sun god Mithras.

Roman soldiers introduced Saturnalia to Britain, where it became the Festival of Fools, ruled over by the Lord of Misrule.

In the 4th century, the Roman Church adopted the pagan practices into Christianity. The birth date of Jesus was proclaimed on the birth date of Mithras. By the 7th century, Saturnalia was known as Christ's Mass. Sex on the streets, rape and murder were allowed, as well as Druidic rituals. It wasn't until the 1600s that Christianity excised the debauchery of Christmas.

The 12 Days of Christmas coincides with the 12 day Winter Solstice observation. To obfuscate this, the Roman Church moved the days from Dec. 25th to Jan. 6th. The Three Wise Men supposedly presented gifts to baby Jesus on Jan. 6th.

In the Middle Ages, a light set at the window during this time meant the residents were observing the burning of the Yule Log. This is where the idea of Christmas lights originated. Wishing someone Yuletide greetings is really invoking the fertility god Jul.

During Saturnalia, Holly was hung inside the house to ward off evil. Decking the halls with boughs of Holly in essence acknowledges the power of nature gods.

Wiccans believe that by placing a wreath of Holly on their heads accentuates its magical powers.

In Druid rituals, mistletoe could render a woman helpless to sexual exploitation. This leads to our modern custom of hanging mistletoe over doorways. If a woman walks under it, she cannot resist being kissed.

Evergreen trees represent sex and fertility. Bringing trees into the home brought blessings, as people believed nature spirits lived inside the trees.

In the Bible, Jeremiah 10:2-5 warns about bringing trees into the home, decking them with gold and silver, and fastening them with nails and hammers.

Ancient people believed in hearth gods who watched over them and kept them warm. During special times of the year, the hearth god dressed in red would appear to reward the good and punish the evil.

Odin became Father Christmas in Britain. Father Christmas would go around getting drunk during the Festival of Fools. A horned goat accompanied him. (The video references Baphomet as the goat, but I think Krampus is more likely.)

Saint Nicholas is the patron of seafaring men. The story was that Saint Nick had captured the Devil. The Devil was also called Krampus, Beelzebub, Zwarte Pter or Black Peter, and Knecht Ruprecht. The horned goat evolved into Ruprecht. Saint Nick dropped candy and gifts down a chimney into children's shoes. This is where the hanging of Christmas stockings comes from. Ruprecht carried a switch and basket for the really bad kids.

Interesting that in some customs, Ruprecht was renamed Santa Claus. Over time, his appearance changed into the figure we recognize today, but he also became a sort of disciplinary figure as he carried the same switch.

19th century writers such as Washington Irving, Clement Moore (The Night Before Christmas) and Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol) helped popularize the image of a jolly elf named Santa Claus and a positive family reunion around a Christmas tree. 12 reindeer replaced the horned goat Ruprecht.

The actual number of Wise Men who visited Jesus in the manger is not know. People assume it was 3 because they brought 3 items with them: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The Burning Man event is equated with a modern day Saturnalia.

The True Story Of Christmas: An Ancient Architects History Special

Ancient Architects, 19 minutes.

Notes not covered previously.

Christmas did not begin with Christianity.

Nordic peoples celebrated from December 21st through the start of January.

During the burning of the Yule Log, each spark was thought to be a future new birth or calf.

Early Christians did not celebrate Jesus' birthday. That came about during the 4th century, at the decree of Pope Julius the 1st.

During the Middle Ages, the poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand food and drink. If they were refused, they would torment the household. It is thought that Christmas caroling began this way. (This is similar to the origins of Halloween, where people would demand treats. If no treats were given, the mob would then trick the residents in devious ways.) The custom originated in Rome, where during Saturnalia, the peasants took control of Rome.

Europeans brought Christmas trees into their homes starting in the 16th century.

The Saint Nicholas story can be traced back to the 3rd century. The monk Nicholas was possibly born in 280 BCE, in Patara, Turkey. According to legend, he gave away his possessions and was very pious. He died on December 6th, possibly in 343 BCE. This became a lucky day to make large purchases or get married.

Movies

Writer's Review: Dead Rising - Watchtower (2015) starring Jessie Metcalfe

Directed by: Zach Lipovsky

Starring: Jessie Metcalfe, Meghan Ory, Virgina Madsen, Rob Riggle

Genre: horror, zombies

Storyline: In East Mission, Oregon, Hit Point reporter Chase Carter and camerawoman Jordan are covering stories from the people in quarantine of a zombie outbreak.

Run time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

Rating: 5.2 on Imbd, 3 out of 5 on my scorecard

Let me tell you how I got to this movie. I am presently writing a multi-book series with a medieval and supernatural slant, where basically all hell breaks loose. (This will end up being book six of my Savage Lands titles.) I was hoping for something monster-ish or apocalyptic, but not medieval, that could potentially inspire me, and I thought, why not go for a zombie movie that I haven't watched before? I chose one at random, and I crossed my fingers, because you and I both know how burned out the genre is.

Dead Rising: Watchtower starts off serious, but don't be fooled. It turns a little campy about 20 minutes in, and goes full camp two-thirds through. It is a pretty drastic switch because I had gotten into the dark and bloody mood already, and then here comes humor, yes, humor, to play havoc on my perspective. If you can get past that, and I did because I saw how and why the director did this, you might enjoy this movie a little more than the average 5.2 rating on Imbd would suggest.

We have a zombie outbreak and, ho hum, we've seen it all before. Because we've been through all the angles on this oversaturated genre before, if you're a zombie movie fan like I am, you'll understand that a director has to do SOMETHING different that a hundred other directors haven't done already. Director Lipovsky starts off okay, in that the plot gives us citizenry that could become zombies, but they have to take their daily shot of government serum to avoid it. Oh, one thing that I don't like about the start of the movie; the hero goes through a quick action sequence, gets into a predicament, and then the scene cuts off and we are thrown back 'two days earlier.' This is a dumb tactic that I really hate, because it gives you a jumpstart, and then boom, you're forced to sit and wait for the back-story to catch up to that action scene you just witnessed.

For about half of this movie, you have the usual deal where a few people get chased around town and have narrow escapes. What this movie does different is that it gives its characters unexpected lucidity at times, and this includes even supporting roles. Early on, main protagonist Jessie Metcalfe and his love interest Meghan Ory randomly run into a soccer mom in a pink sweater. This side character, played by Virginia Madsen, is a woman you might expect to get chomped up fairly quickly, but she surprises by hanging around for a good chunk of the movie, and she does a couple of innovative things. I won't spoil too much here, but I liked how she took charge at times, and how she had to deal with the loss of her daughter in a psychologically strange way.

A couple of scenes that really stuck out, as far as novelty goes; in the first one, Metcalfe ends up tied up to a forklift, while a bad guy plays an old Sinatra song and waits, gleefully mind you, for the zombies to show up and munch him. In the other scene, we see Metcalfe battling zombies on the street, boarding and going through a school bus, ending up on top of the school bus and finally jumping on cars to get away. I loved that this scene was filmed in one long shot, like something out of a Tony Jah martial arts movie. It's the little things like this that show me the behinds the scene people took their time to think things through. This didn't always work, but when it did it was awesome!

What really stole the show for me was Rob Riggle. He's a comedian as well as an actor, and in this movie he plays Frank West, a celebrity who has survived a previous zombie infestation and has written a bestselling book about it. He reminds me of a shit-talking Steven Seagal, when he banters around repeatedly with a newswoman who is being serious, and resentful, to his humorous backtalk. I would have loved to see Riggle putting on a red headband and heading into the war zone to take on this new horde of zombies, but that would have changed the tone of the movie to where he should have been given the lead role.

Speaking of changing the tone; that happens one too many times here, and that is another thing most people will not like about this movie. We go from zombie attack to biker gang to government conspiracy, and this takes place just when we think we have a good handle on where the climax and resolution are headed. All of these elements gave the ending a longer duration than it should have had, where I felt like, there was the best spot for the end and the director kept going anyway. To the director's credit, things are wrapped up well enough to produce a satisfying conclusion.

This is definitely not a great zombie movie, but it did entertain me and I found it worth the watch. A couple of the usually somber moments were almost parodies of similar scenes we see in other genre productions, but that keeps in line with what Riggle does every time we see him. The sudden appearance of a Mad Max biker gang was too much and almost made this movie a corny shoot 'em up with the zombies as a backdrop, but without the bikers a lot of the action and explosions wouldn't have made their way into the story. My favorite characters were soccer mom Madsen and smack-talking Riggle, because they were different than the norm, but the head biker Aleks Pauvonic was too generic and stereotypical. The bottom line is that I enjoyed this movie because it took weird chances that usually worked out.

Extras: As I went through the Imdb page, I see that this movie is based on a video game. A sequel titled Dead Rising: Endgame was released in 2016. The 'you're in good hands with Allstate' guy is in this movie as General Lyons, which I thought was neat.

Here's an interesting 'adventure' I'd like to share. There is a scene in the movie where the hero is tied to a forklift, and the propane tank is spewing out flammable gas all over the place. Something similar happened to me in real life.

I was working at Home Depot at the time, in the loading zone. Two other workers were driving a forklift at the back of the store. I don't know how these dummies did it, but they managed to get the hose connected to the propane tank to come loose, and it was shooting out propane all over. The workers ran into the store and shut the back gate, hiding because they probably would have gotten fired if the manager found out.

A customer walks over and tells me something is happening at the back of the store. I look and see this huge, hissing cloud of propane, and this has the potential to blow up back there and cause major damage. I ran over, and I put on my loader gloves, and after a couple of minutes I managed to turn the valve off on the tank. Don't mess with propane! My hand was freezing, because the only way I could get at the valve was to brave through the hissing gas, and for the next couple of weeks I had lightheadedness and headaches from breathing all that crap. Luckily, the symptoms went away, and no, I did not rat those guys out because I didn't want either one to get fired. It is what it is.

Anyway, I did enjoy the movie with all of its quirkiness, and while it won't win any awards for originality or plot, it did enough to keep me involved in watching it and trying to figure out what would come next. If you can imagine an older, wiser Andrew Dice Clay mixed in with Steven Seagal in a zombie movie, then you might have an idea of what Rob Riggle was like in this one. That's one smack-talking character I might adapt into one of my own writing projects in the future.

TV Shows

24, Season 1 (2001) Starring Kiefer Sutherland

Created by: Robert Cochrane

Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Dennis Haysbert, Leslie Hope, Elizabeth Cuthbert, Sarah Clarke

Genre: action

Storyline: Jack Bauer, Director of Field Ops for the Counter-Terrorist Unit of Los Angeles, races against the clock to subvert terrorist plots and save his nation from ultimate disaster.

Run time: 44 minutes per episode.

Rating: 8.4 on Imbd, 2 out of 5 on my scorecard

Notice: There will be spoilers!

Two things I hate about watching TV shows: commercials, and having to wait an entire frigging week for the resolution of a cliffhanger. Thank you, Amazon Prime, for having an excellent variety of TV shows I can watch full seasons of. I never watched 24 when it was originally on air. When I saw it on Amazon, and saw the 4 star rating it boasted (a lofty 8.4 on imdb), I jumped into Season 1.

Up until episode 13, when they had the big shootout at the bad guy's compound, the series was rolling along quite well. The episodes, sub-plot and overall story I would have rated at good to very good. There were limitations thanks to having one hour of story time parallel each episode, but okay, we can cram two or three hours worth of action into 44 minutes to make things work. After episode 13, however, the train went off the tracks and it never really recovered. All of the minor inconsistencies I saw before were magnified into huge pits of sludge neither the actors or story could crawl out of.

First off, for being an elite Counter-Terrorism Unit, Jack Bauer and his lackeys sucked the big one. They were always one step behind the bad guys in brains, and ten steps behind in making action moves. I can accept sniping and posturing within the department, especially with the more motivated types such as District Director Mason (played by Xander Berkeley) and underling Tony (Carlos Bernard). What I cannot accept is how professional espionage investigators had the frequent and bad habit of making the worst possible decisions. Everybody is a hard-ass until somebody steps on their head, and then they suddenly forget protocol and automatically bend over. Trained agents guarding witnesses at their safehouse, four of them, mind you, can be taken out by a single assassin from a foreign country. Also, it makes perfect sense to let Jack's rival CTU agent talk smack and make threats over the radio, while Jack is trying to make a payoff to a cuck in a red hat, and of course the rival blasts the cuck out of the plot. If Mason or acting Director Green (Tamara Tunie) suspected that Tony and Nina were working with Jack, why didn't they clamp down on all three of them? The only thing we could expect from the CTU people were slow computer results, ineptness in gauging any situation, and if they were killed, it was a guarantee that they would always die in multiples. Not to worry, as the sub-standard L.A.P.D. also died by the bushels.

Jack's wife and daughter were morons to the nth degree. They never did anything right! They always ran to embrace the bad guys, and got everyone around them killed. Nice! Oh, but they're just dumb women, you might argue. No, no, because a man like Jack Bauer would not have married a dumb woman. His character had no patience for that. He would have married a woman with smarts to complement him, who could make her own decisions and have her own assertiveness since he wouldn't be around most of the time. Wife Terri wins the award for worst character in Season 1. The magic amnesia sub-plot brought the show down to Spongebob stupidity level, and no, it could not have happened that way in a credible universe. In one episode, she can handle a gun and shoots a bad guy, with absolutely no background given on how she learned this, and a couple of episodes later, her magic amnesia causes her to have panic attacks when she sees her doctor boyfriend call a gun-toting stooge, because all doctors have gun-toting stooges on call like that. Not to mention, doctors in Los Angeles, the home of medical malpractice lawsuits, would naturally have the amnesiac patient give the orders instead of sedating Terri and shipping her off to the hospital right away.

Jack's daughter Kim was almost as bad. I guess bipolar and disassociating disorders run in the Bauer family. While mom loses her mind under traumatic stress, Kim reacts by falling in love with her kidnapper, and by throwing caution to the wind and always going where the bullets are sure to fly. The scene in the jail, where Kim and some trailer trash chick have a 'moment' together and they help each other out, was so bad it made me want to hurl. That scene was written for a heartwarming, cheesy comedy, and not a serious action show. What's with this musical chairs for kidnapping and getting lost with these two women? Let's see, the show producers must have said to each other, who got kidnapped or lost last episode? Well, that would be Terri. Okay, let's be innovative and have Kim get kidnapped or lost this time! Never mind that this happened over and over, and over and over ad nauseam.

Who had the bright idea of casting old retreads like Lou Diamond Philips and Dennis Hopper? It was a bad omen, I think, for both of them to show up in the same episode. Philips has a three-man goon squad, and his job is to guard maximum security prisoners, all 1 one of them, in a hole in the ground. Sounds legit! Hey, Jack, when Hoppers shows up threatening to shoot Philips, do what all espionage guys do in that situation, and drop your gun on the floor! Do absolutely nothing to the old fart who wants to kill your wife and child, whom you are already breaking all the rules to go after!

Speaking of Hopper, who had the brainstorm to think he'd make a good Serbian mob boss? Hopper has NEVER been able to carry a foreign accent, and he sure didn't start this time! He had all these chances to kill Bauer, his sworn enemy, and he didn't do it. He could have killed Bauer's daughter in front of Bauer, where he could really bring some pain out of Jack, but he didn't do that either. Instead, he kills another old fart like him, one of his good friends, and the daughter of that good friend. Is that how it works in Serbia, kill your friends, let your enemies get away?

Let's talk about the Presidential Negroes. Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is a unicorn straight out of fantasy, not because he's black, but because he's an honest politician. I've never seen one during my lifetime, except maybe for Ron Paul, and that guy is a flaming Zionist! Palmer has no real-life equivalent, discounting even the last honest president of the last 100 years, and that was big-time womanizer JFK. Palmer's wife, on the other hand, was a carbon copy of the Hildabeast. That would be Sherry, played by Penny Jerald. Sherry as Hillary did such a good acting job, that I kept wishing she'd get torn in half by shrapnel or tossed out the window, but she never was. I could tolerate her for the first half of the season, but that's because there was a lot of action going on. Towards the last few episodes, she became two-dimensional, in that I could count on her to do exactly the opposite of what Palmer wanted. Yeah, let's undermine hubby at every twist and turn, because that makes sense!

The last third of this season had three useless nags in it: Terri, Kim and Sherry. Please, I hoped, get rid of one of them, or two! Please! All they were doing is stepping into one bear trap after another! Put them out of their misery! Give the thinking men a moment's peace to think! Those three characters were weak, weak and annoying!

What else do I want to rant about... the confrontation at the compound was fine, but the one in the bunker was written by toddlers. So, the bad guys have enough explosives to get through thick concrete walls, but they don't have the balls to shoot it out with an even number of armed guards out in the open. Oh, and they can crawl out a large sewer hole to get away, when we already know the bunker is sitting in an open, dry field in a 'wildlife preserve,' because there are all kinds of large sewer pipes in places like that! The shootout at the docks was almost as crappy. Sure, the old fart Serbian with the shit accent just got out of a maximum security bunker, so of course he wants to hang out in L.A., not shooting the people he's wanted to kill since the start, and shrugging off how the good guys might be on his ass at any moment.

I cheated a little, by reading the synopsis' from Season 2 before watching any of the episodes. I see that several characters that I thought or hoped were gone are coming back. President Palmer is back. I was hoping he wouldn't be. His wife Sherry is back too, but I don't care for her Hillary-isms one bit. And will you look; Nina comes back too. I guess Bauer will release her somehow, because doing stupid things to complicate matters is in his nature. I liked Nina's character actually, but after she shot Bauer's wife are we really going to throw her into the mix again? I don't even want to watch Season 2 anymore. Maybe I'll set it way back behind all the Star Trek, Doctor Who and Stargate seasons Amazon offers.

Normally, and as a writer's exercise, I try to come up with alternate outcomes for media I don't like. This idea of one hour of story time for each TV episode is something I've never tried before, so I can't really slip into it on the spur of the moment. If I had produced this show, I would have taken Terri and Kim out of it after the shootout at the compound, instead of churning them over and over into the captured / getting lost cycle. All of the sub-plots on Bauer's side: the bunker, the running around, the big gaffs, Dennis Hopper, etc., were lame and designed to fill up dead space. Even flashbacks of Bauer going into Serbia as part of a Special Ops team would have been better than what we got. The show could have given us a side-mission involving Nina, because she was the most competent woman in all of Season 1. I wanted Bauer to leave his wife and get back with her! How about Palmer uncovering a mole within his campaign staff, instead of showing him flirting with a Monica Lewinsky prototype? How about Director Mason as the chief bad guy, and a shootout at CTU for the climax? How about Hopper swimming his way back to Serbia, where he can learn how to speak Serbian?

Even the Jason Bourne movies, which have basically the same plot in every movie, were more entertaining than this.

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### About The Publisher / Author

Greetings, reader. My pen name is Raymond Towers. Primarily, I write darker fiction in the fantasy, horror and science fiction genres, but I do dabble about in other genres as well depending on my whims. I like to think that I have a unique perspective on the world and life in general, and I tend to shake things up to break people out of their doldrums. If you want to read something 'safe,' then I'm probably not the author for you. My favorite authors are in a wide range, from Asimov, Clarke and Farmer, to King, Lovecraft and Poe, to Burroughs, Tolkien and Twain. All the big names, as that is the level I aspire to reach. I especially enjoy combining aspects you won't normally see together in fiction, and on taking the next step and reaching for the farthest, blackest edge of the abyss. The place where most other authors leave off, that is the place where I get started. The question is; are you ready for that?

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