5 letter word ends with te

I'll let the players who are better than I am recommend builds -
For reference: Nodes required for continued access to the tree.

• Blessing: Attack & Defense bonus
• Courage: HP & Crit' Rate bonus
• Power: Crit Damage & Dodge bonus
• Battle Cry: % Attack Increase at the start of battle and every 8 seconds thereafter.
• Reinforcements: Crit Resilience & Heavy Hit Rate bonus
• Assist: Crit Resist and Pressure bonus
• Heavy Hit: Attack and HP bonus
• Shelter: Damage and Damage Reduction bonus
• Self Defense: Shield based on % of max HP at start of battle.
• Dagger: Def & Crit Damage Bonus >>> Power Focus: 50 extra Super Gauge for each Trigger Skill, 10 second interval for each fighter
• Training: Crit Rate & Crit Resilience Bonus >>> Rakshasa: Increase damage by % for inflicting Burn, Shock, or Bleed. Stacks 3x
• Resilient: Crit Resist & Damage Bonus >>> Breach: increases the damage by % for the fighter with Combo3 by % for 8 seconds

Satusi no Iki EX Move - provides damage resistance for a short while, then deals the damage back to the characters over 8 seconds. This provides a 5% boost to Attack through the end of a battle in many of the event's challenges every time it's activated. Tank now, pay later.

The whirring blades of my MD-902 throbbed against the warm evening air, and I smiled.
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and I’m debt free.
That made me grin even more. I’d been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe I’d take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps I’d sock the money back for the day I started a family.
“Remember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.”
My elderly ouma’s voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, I’d grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas we’d spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my father’s sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose?
I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unit’s battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and I’d used it a few times already, so I knew it wasn’t defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
“Come on, come on.” I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopter’s engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. We’re still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down.
My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep.
I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldn’t decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County.
I stared, confused. I’d flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no Barron County Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls weren’t responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didn’t get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
“Better safe than sorry.” I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. “Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.”
Nothing.
“Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.”
Still nothing.
If the radio’s dead, I’m really up a creek.
With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. “Any station, this is—”
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldn’t tell just how far I’d descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasn’t normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldn’t hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. That’s rifle fire, a whole lot of it.
Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldn’t see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the others.
They didn’t move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that?
“Echo Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.”
Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the man’s voice sharp and stern. I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. “Hello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.”
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
“Roger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.”
Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? “Echo Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. I’m a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.”
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a towering ridgeline.
“Solid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. We’ll talk you in from there. How copy, over?”
My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but I’ll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.”
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadn’t heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military.
Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasn’t another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought I’d crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. “T-There’s something up here.”
Static crackled.
“Douglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, you’re coming in weak and unreadable, over.”
“There’s something up here.” I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. “A freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I don’t know.”
“Calm down.” The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level. “It won’t attack if you don’t move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until you’re out of sight.”
I didn’t have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the man’s strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadn’t been the least surprised by what I’d said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. “It’s not following.”
“You’re sure?”
Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’m well clear.”
“Good. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.”
Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasn’t right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing I’d just seen? What was I supposed to—
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . .
On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom.
My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
I’m hit.
Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here.
Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun.
My ouma’s voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way.
Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up. Down.
I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky.
It didn’t make sense. I’d followed their orders, done everything they’d said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, they’d fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down.
I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
“Okay.” I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. “You can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .”
Click.
Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilot’s seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham.
I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
“Screw you.” I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. “Screw you, screw you, screw you.”
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts weren’t that deep, but that wasn’t what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please don’t nick a vein.
Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. I’d taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on.
Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
“Not too bad.” I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. “Rib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. That’ll be fun.”
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldn’t find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read ‘medical skin stapler’.
Bingo.
I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. I’d never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldn’t be worse.
You’ve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no one’s coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there.
Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click.
A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
“Not going to bleed to death today.” I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didn’t notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didn’t sound quite like lightning.
The guns. They’re still fighting.
Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How I’d gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didn’t know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, I’d have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else.
It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilot’s seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didn’t seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, I’d been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didn’t matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so that’s a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came.
As if on cue, a soft pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
“Great.” I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. “Not going that way, are we? Westward it is.”
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. I’d been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didn’t dare turn off my flashlight, or I’d been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much I’d loved the old Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone.
A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
“This is stupid.” I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. “I should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long I’m going to have to—”
Creak.
A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak.
Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me.
I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car?
Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldn’t hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasn’t one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me blinked.
Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50’s charged through the thorns to my left, it’s headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70’s Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.
Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there weren’t any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
They’ve got me now.
I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldn’t seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham.
No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. “Oh man . . .”
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
“Hail Mary full of Grace.” I would have grinned if it weren’t for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words, Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars.
I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the plane’s dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang.
The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that?
Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh.
A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. It’s a rotted tree trunk.
I couldn’t tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, with a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didn’t need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
I’m hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that thing doesn’t see it. My service only now came back, and it’s been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I don’t know when, or how I’m going to get out of here. I don’t know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, I’m probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I don’t know if it’s possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they don’t find you.

Season 2 takes place before OA and HAP jump to a dimension where the OA is just a TV show. Elodie is believed to have been there before coming to dimension 2, as she talks about a world where she was an actress.
Season 2 ends with them jumping to dimension 3, where season 2s finale was just being filmed. that means elodie likely came to dimension 2 just after she filmed her parts for season 2, in dimension 3.
she was repeating what she had read on a script back in dimension 3, they weren't her own words off the spur of the moment, they were words she had memorized acting in the show she had jumped into.

The street savant both blends into the streets but has a swagger that lets them have a commanding presence to those in their organisation , they work in more sociable ways but are fine with attacking stuff that threatens the land they call their organisation territory
Master of style
At level 3,The street savant takes a 1 hour long ritual where at the end of it they have a specially modified suit of armour that upon a command word and a phrase (for the look) change into a type of attire they so please . It is not illusionary and will hold up to inspection. This does not work on full plate armour or armour that is otherwise already magically enchanted. The look can be changed only once every 3 hours
The speaker
At lvl 3 When the savant rolls a a d20 and gets a 9 or below on a persuasion (charisma) or deception(charisma) check . It is treated as a 10, And it has to be verbal
Savant of the streets
At level 3 . You gain proficiency in firearms and you gain proficiency in leather workers kit . The organisation will give you a leatherworkers kit that is magically enchanted
Master of disguise
At level 6, you are able to perform a hour long ritual and give up to your profiency bonus amount of people a suit of modified armour that can change upon command , the change still follows the only once every 3 hours command . This does not work on full plate armour or armour that is otherwise already magically enchanted
Quick to fight
At level 9 .You are skilled with your quick hands and even quicker with your tools . Upon initiative having been rolled you are able to make one free ranged attack before initiative starts fully . The attack has to be with a ranged weapon or thrown weapon . Your skill with your tools means you are able to pull out your ranged kit without using a object interaction .
Silver tongued fighter
At level 13 ,As a bonus action you are able taunt your opponent which would a charisma verse wisdom check , if they fail it then they gain disadvantage on attacks against you until they beat a dc of (dc = 8 + proficiency + (charisma modifier) , they can try and clear their mind each turn . This can only be done on one target at a time .
Quick to draw At level 17 you are deadly with your ranged weaponry
You are able to make a secondary attack on your turn if the first attack was ranged and it can be on the same target or a different target . If fired at the same target you get a extra 1d10 damage added on .
This class is created for a more magically inclined setting , the armour isnt magic so gives no bonus to ac, it has its restrictions , like if your armour causes stealth disadvantage that stays even with its look changed. I need any kind of feed back on this please

Lots of New Inventory, figured i’d post again
All of these are up for the cheapest price on Discogs (for their condition, sometimes by considerable amounts) and are CHEAPER here than I have them there. Feel free to try and price match me with any legit sellers I am flexible and truly believe these are all great deals. Happy to work out bundle deals on 3+ depending on the purchase amount.
Shipping is $6 to the US, No matter the size of the order! International DM for rate. If you want more specifics on what pressing it is and what not here is the link to my Discogs. https://www.discogs.com/selle66Records/profile
The Acacia Strain - 'C' (7' Single, Limited, White w/ Olive Green Splatter) NM/NM - $28
Agnostic Front - United Blood (7' EP, 2009 Reissue, Clear) NM/NM - $15
Archspire - Bleed the Future (Original Cassette) NM/NM - $28
Arkaik - Nemethia (LP, Blue and Gold Swirl) NM/NM - $42
Asobi Seksu - Fluorescence (LP, Limited Pink) NM/VG+ - $10
Babymetal - Metal Resistance - The One- (Limited ED Boxset with CD and Bluray) VG+/VG+ - $35
Bauhaus - Burning from the Inside (LP, Blue, Reissue) VG+/VG+ - $17
Beatles - Yesterday and Today (1983 Reissue) G+/VG - $12
Beatles - Revolver (1983 Reissue, IN SHRINK) VG+/NM - $25
Childish Gambino - Because The Internet (Pink Target Exclusive) NM/VG+ - $35
Childish Gambino - Awaken, My Love! (Blue Walmart Exclusive) NM/VG+ - $18
Courtney Bartnett - Things Take Time (LP, Blue) NM/VG+ - $12
The Cure - Faith (RSD Limited Numbered Gray vinyl) NM/NM - $80
Dance With The Dead - Loved to Death (LP, Clear, Repress) NM/NM - $55
David Gilmour - David Gilmour (LP, Promo, OG) G+/VG+ - $10
DIIV - Oshin (LP, Purple, Limited Reissue) NM/VG+ - $32
Dyscarnate - With all their might (LP, Bronze) VG+/VG+ - $18
Echo & The Bunnymen - Bedbugs and Ballyhoo (12' Maxi, OG) VG+/VG+ - $5
Enslaved - Heimdal (LP, limited Black white marble, sealed) - M/M $30
Fit for an Autopsy - Oh what the future holds (LP, Blue Green Swirl with Pink Black Splatter, Sealed) M/M - $15
Fit for an Autopsy - Hellbound (LP, Limited, Bronze) - $30
Genghis Tron - Board up the House (LP, One etched Side, original) VG/VG+ - $18
George Clanton - Slide (LP, 2nd Press, Black with Blue Swirl) VG+/VG+ - $28
Gloom Influx - Twilight (Limited, Purple) NM/NM - $30
Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers - L.A.M.F (Lost 77' Mixes) (LP, Reissue, Limited Edition, Pink and black) NM/NM - $35
Hour of Penance - Paradogma (LP, Yellow) NM/NM - $32
J Dilla - Donuts (2x12, 2016 10th anniversary edition) VG+/VG+ - $37
John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band - Plastic Ono Band (2021 Reissue) VG+/VG+ - $20
Kanye West - The College Dropout (Most recent reissue) NM/VG+ - $15
Kraut - An Adjustment to Society (Red Reissue) G+/G+ - $10
Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails Over The Country Club (Black Gatefold) NM/VG+ - $15
1985 Walt Disneys Fantasia - (2xLP, Gatefold) VG+/VG+ - $8
Michael Jackson - Got to be There (Original with hype sticker) G+/VG+ - $8
MICROCHIP TERROR - Illegal Experiments (LP, White red splatter) - $30
Modern Baseball - You’re Gonna Miss it All (Yellow) NM/NM - $20
Nails - You Will Never Be One of Us (Green Casette) VG+/VG+ - $10
Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine (180gm reissue) NM/VG+ - $18
NOFX - Pods and Gods (7’ EP Orange) NM/VG - $5
Pearl Jam Christmas 1998 (7’ promo) VG/VG+ - $25
Pearl Jam - Someday at Christmas (7’) VG+/VG+ -$8
Pearl Jam 2002 Annual Vinyl Single (7’ Promo) -$4
Pearl Jam - Christmas 1999 (7) G+/VG+ -$10
Primus - Sailing the Seas of Cheese (LP, Reissue, 200G) VG+/VG - $28
Rings of Saturn - Gidim (Cassette, Purple, sealed) M/M - $28
Rush - Hemispheres (LP, Original, PRC) VG+/VG+ - $18
Rush 2112 (LP, early reissue, gatefold) VG (lower end)/VG+ - $9
Scour - Black (10’ Marbled) M/NM - $23
Sematary Grave Man - Butcher House (CD) NM/VG+ - $80
Sick of it All - Death to Tyrants (LP, tricolored, limited 2014 reissue) VG+/VG+ - $21
Sick of it All - Last Act of Defiance (LP, limited, clear +CD) NM/VG+ - $18
Slipknot - Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses (2xlp, black, rare first press) NM/VG - $120 ($120 UNDER MEDIAN)
Soundgarden - Superunkown (Original US Clear) NM/VG - $225
Spelling - The Turning Wheel (2LP Green /300) - NM/VG+ - $50
Steely Dan - Greatest Hits (Canadian Yellow 70’s pressing) VG/G+ - $15
Sylvester - Someone Like You (original 12', keith harring art) NM/NM - $16
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Runaway Girls (7’ Blue) VG+/VG - $15
Weather Report - Heavy Weather (Music on Vinyl Reissue, 180g) NM/NM - $22
Within Destruction - Deathwish (LP, Red) VG+/VG+ - $35

My bf (29m) and I (27F) have been together for almost 2 years. Our relationship has really grown a lot since the beginning, and I feel that we both feel even more secure and in love as time goes on. I know he loves me...I don't doubt that. However, our sexual compatibility has been...off for the last year. I am understanding and can rationalize that a lot of the reason it got thrown off course was because I worked 2 jobs last year and only had one day off a week. I would start at 7:30 am and finish at 8 pm. So clearly, we didn't have much time for intimacy, nor did I have much of a drive. My bf also commutes every day to work and sits in upwards of 2 hours of traffic there and back some days. So that is a factor as well. Fast forward to now... I am now working a normal mon-fri 9-5 schedule. His is still the same schedule. During the week we obviously don't have much energy or time for intimacy. But it rarely happens on the weekends either. My boyfriend suffers from anxiety and health related OCD...this is what he attributes to his lack of sex drive. He also recently went completely sober from alcohol and marijuana. I can understand and sympathize with these factors. I know mental health impacts sex drive. The last couple nights I have been moody because we haven't had sex in weeks. I honestly don't remember exactly how long it's been. Maybe over a month. This past weekend we started, but I felt off mentally...and to be honest it's because for almost the last year, sex is always the same. I get on top, and that's it. There was a tiny bit of foreplay and then we started. I wasn't mentally into it because I want to feel desired by him. He doesn't do anything to really show me he is into me and desires me. It feels like it's a chore and obligation he is fulfilling because I need it. Not because he wants it. We ended up just finishing each other off in other ways and stopped having sex about 2 minutes in. The last couple days I have been really agitated because I am not getting my needs met, intimacy wise or physically wise. I crave connection with him so badly in that way. Last night, I ended up crying and upset because we had planned to be intimate and I told him I needed him to initiate and show me he desires me. I waited...and nothing. He got really frustrated, mostly at his self. He started googling "why am I not horny, why do I have no sex drive, ect" Side note: due to his health ocd, he is constantly using google to diagnose himself. So, he's googling away and tossed and turned ALL night because he feels guilty about not taking care of me. My thought is, "why can't you even attempt and just TRY?" He doesn't even attempt to initiate intimacy and go from there. This morning I looked at his recent webpage searches. Idk why I even did it, I really wish I hadn't... The most recent page was "why am I not attracted to my gf." The search before that was "why am I not sexually attracted to my gf"...When I say that seeing this completely destroyed any semblance of self-esteem I had, made me think back to every look he's given me, the fact that he keeps his eyes closed during sex, the lack of compliments from him, the fact that I know him and his ex-wife used to have sex sometimes 2 times a day, and I can't even get it once a month....everything just came crashing down on me. Comments he had made regarding his best friend being in a relationship with a girl he isn't attracted to sexually but who he supposedly loves and how my bf "understands" (he said he understands bc of an ex he had). I know I am far from perfect. I've had a baby which changed my body a lot. I deal with feeling insecure already and I have lost 30 pounds already prior to getting with my current bf. I have about 30 more pounds I would like to drop, and I am actively working on it. But I am by no means obese. I just need to tighten and tone up. My bf immediately noticed my shift in my mood this morning after I saw, and I couldn't keep myself from sobbing. I wouldn't tell him what was wrong, but he figured it out in about 1 minute. He said he was just clicking through the google suggestion bars after he had typed in "why am I not horny" and it led him to that. My argument is, why would you even click on that option if you didn't feel that way deep down? and open an article about it in the first place? He is a brutally honest person and tends to hurt my feelings with his honesty at times, his argument is that he would tell me if he felt that way. He said it is 100% him and his mental and has nothing to do with me. He said he doesn't even jack off or watch porn or have a desire for anything sexual at all. I can't help but feel that he just knows it would destroy me to hear him say he isn't attracted to me, he does care about my feelings. Or maybe he isn't being fully honest with himself. I know love and attraction are seperate sometimes...but I don't know what to do. It is still fresh obviously, but I don't know how to get the thought that he doesn't find me attractive out of my mind now. I already felt that at times, but convinced myself I was just projecting my own insecurities onto him. Now I feel that it was the other way around. I could feel that he didn't like what he sees. I never dealt with this with my ex-husband, he always made me feel confident and desired and liked what he saw-even at my heaviest. I don't even want to change in front of him, I don't want him to touch me now, I don't know if this can be fixed. I guess I just need guidance. I don't want to throw away all the good we DO have because of this. But I also know this will be in the back of my mind for a long time, if not forever. Especially if things don't change in our sex life. But now my guard is majorly up, and I don't see it coming down anytime soon. I'm in my head more than ever before. Because at least before this, I could convince myself that it was just my own insecurities and fears...before they were confirmed to be true. Idk what advice I'm looking for tbh, maybe if anyone has been in a similar situation and come out of it for the better...I have never felt so worthless and insecure. Do you think he is being honest to me and himself?

Hi woman of Reddit.
My fiancé is a Palestinian girl claims she’s only had sex with guys she intends to have a relationship with.
I am not calling her a liar, I have no double standards as someone who used to live in Amsterdam at 21. But I’m so confused.
First and foremost, she had a boyfriend of eight years that she was on and off with four times. That by itself is a red flag. This tells me when things get tough she runs away.
She is also had sex with six or seven other guys, but has never had any other serious relationships. Very confusing. Especially when you say you only have sex with someone you want to see yourself having a future with. Average time together she said was 6-8 months.
I am her second relationship she’s ever had at 31 when we got together, which makes no sense to me because if I ever talk to you woman for six months or more, and we were physically involved, we were definitely titled.
Confusing / awful situations: 1. The guy she was on and off with for eight years, she saw the gas station a week before his wedding. Keep in mind we’re both 30+ and 30+ at the time of this story. She agreed to let him come back to her place after a couple hours of talking, he decided it was time to have sex with her, even though he was getting married in one week to somebody else. This made me lose a lot of respect for her. She said after about 30 seconds she ended it as it did not feel right, but honestly, I told her, if he is doing this right now with the wedding around the corner imagine what he was doing to you. (They didn’t live together)

1. There were three guys in the year before I met her that she used to talk to to. She said they were sweet, talking to her and making it seem like they really liked her. on the first interaction back after being ghosted she agreed to have sex. that was three times in a row with 3 different men. She claimed she felt like something was wrong with her and she was “scared” to ask.

My questions are this: 1. Why did she not title her relationships after being physically and sexually active for 6 months or more? 2. Why did she even allow her ex fiancé to come over much less start having sex with her. 3. Why not ask what the intention of the relationship is for the 3 ghosted who magically re-appear? 4. How weak is she? 5. What’s this say about her character?

Like if a movie is a two parter , you just can't expect the movie to give a satisfying ending in the first part can you ?
Fast X had a big cliffhanger with the helicopter crashing , Dom and his son under the dam , Alan Ritchson (I forgot what his name was in the movie) changing teams and people hated it . I agree it had like 5-6 open storylines but still it was already stated this was going to be a 2 ( 3 now ig ? ) part movie .
Same for Across the Spiderverse. Absolutely fucking gorgeous movie. Amazing plot . It was almost the same cliffhanger as Fast x if oversimplified ( Miles going to fight Earth 43 Miles , Gwen going in Peter's dimension and the Spot about to kill Mile's father ) . Yet people love it .
I mean say , Kill Bill ,Hunger Games , Avengers Infinity War all have cliffhanger one parters ( I guess ? ) but still they are ranked high .
Is there any basis to it as to why Fast X's ending was hated while ATSV's was loved that I am really stupid to not get ?

You are GameGPT, an AI who facilitates a text adventure game for the user.
Todays game is called “Court TV Speed Run”
You will present the the user with two characters who are having an argument. And the user will have to quickly decide who wins the argument.
The arguments and characters should be in the style of “Judge Judy cases” or “Maury Povich cases” or “Dr. phil cases”
The arguments should be three sentences. The first sentence introduces the characters. The second sentence explains briefly the position of the first character. And the 2nd sentence explains briefly the position of the 2nd character.
As the game host, you have a strong opinion on morality, and you will immediately tell the user if they are right or wrong based on what might be most acceptable.
You will keep score, and after the user tells you which character wins, you will judge them, present the score, and then present the next argument.
The game should be rapid fire, so be brief in all text until the end.
The format of the game will look like:
""" CASE 1: (Case text)
Who is right? """
After the user responds: """ Result: you’re right, most people would agree
SCORE: 1/1 """
After 5 rounds, give the user a short, shareable report explaining their moral compass based on their decisions. And give them a quirky nickname. For example, if they are always right, they might be an Angel, or a Truth Seeker. If they are always wrong, they might be a malarky meddler. Pick names in this style.
Now present the user with a super brief instructions and start the game!
The intro can be “Welcome to Court TV Speed Run — read the following case briefs and pick the winner.”
The generate a cheesy catchphrase for the game, something along the lines of “quick court, tough decisions, let’s get a judging”
First ask the user what their name is, and then respond with “the honorable judge [NAME] is presiding, let’s begin.”
And the show the first case. ——

Level 3 Hidden Pocket
You have a hidden pocket dimension which you can use for storage purposes (Bag of Holding). There is no entrance as items teleport in and out of there. You have a number of slot to store weapons or shields equal to your Proficiency bonus. You can hold up to 5 daggers, handaxes, darts or light hammers in 1 slot. You can hold up 3 javelins, in 1 slot.
All your Armaments are bonded to you and cannot be removed from you against your will unless you are incapacitated.
You can also store other objects such as ammo or rations in this pocket dimension to a maximum weight = 10 × (Fighter Level + Str) in pounds. Weapons don't count against this weight total, but you cannot exceed the weapon limit. You can use either your object interaction, action or bonus action to call or swap a weapon or object in your hand, or equip weapons. Ammo is pulled out freely.
Any feature that allows you to ignore taking object interactions is combatable with your hidden pocket, as the associated items teleport to their required destination within 5ft of you.
Level 7 Recycle
When you throw one of your Bonded weapons, they return back to your hidden pocket immediately after the action has ended. Your ammo also returns to your hidden pocket if the item in question isn't outright destroyed.
In addition, any food or other perishable items do not age while in your hidden pocket.
Level 10 Hotswap
When you roll Initiative, you can equip up to 2 of your Armaments amd hold them in your hands. You can also equip any armour in your hidden pocket on initiative if you haven't equipped any. This swappes any equipped clothes to that won't fit your armour and objects you are holding. If you cannot hold the item in your hidden pocket, they are dropped within 5ft of you instead.
Level 15 Quick Toss
You make a range attack with a thrown weapon as a bonus action. You also gain a +1 bonus to all thrown weapon attack rolls.
Level 18 Additional Armament
You can wield an additional weapon or shield that hovers around your space. When you roll Initiative, you can choose additional armament in your hidden pocket to wield. You treat the weapon or shield as if held in one hand and can throw it if it has the thrown property. If you unequip this armament for whatever reason, you can still throw other armaments without requiring your hand. You can also equip another armament in this way using either your object interaction, action or bonus action.

hi okay! new to the sub as i just finished binging last night & thought it would be fun to post some of my thoughts/opinions!
full disclosure i started watching solely for carina & maya as i’ve been a long time greys watcher and wanted to see their relationship :,) so i’m probably a little biased towards them

1. andy & maya are the best captains & im really really glad andy got the position over theo in the finale because i think with him as captain we were heading towards disaster for the team
   
2. why is trav like the only gay/not bi character? we have emmitt but he’s no longer on the show. to me, maya reads as lesbian & carina reads bi but not really both of them? maybe i’m just a hater but i couldn’t stand maya and jack 😂 and eli???? when he was introduced i thought him and trav would be something but then he was hitting on andy so i thought i must have misread the character…but then him and trav do hook up? didn’t track for me & made him seem like not a very good dude (and trav just dating him anyway??)
   
3. funny to me how when ryan was on the show we didn’t get much of the issues w policing/BLM, but then they kill him off and we have multiple storylines with unjust policing (RIP ryan)
   
4. i knew dean died bc i knew miranda and ben ended up with pru but i still wrecked me - honestly though pruitt & ripley might’ve been the hardest deaths for me 🥲 i didn’t remember from greys if ripley died or not so i was not prepared
   
5. marina is my favorite couple but mayas actions/words this past season were sooo hard to watch. i’m really glad her and carina are getting back on track with their relationship and she was finally able to prioritize her marriage over her job. i definitely thought maya finding out carina went on a “date” would wreck things but i’m glad it didn’t.
   
6. why do they keep doing my boy jack so bad?!?! can he just have one season where he’s healthy and happy 😭
   
7. theo really shouldn’t have been made acting captain. we were already seeing him slip from himself towards the end of becketts tenure but the trauma from michael dying because of him & the fires in his old neighborhood is making him like truly unstable. & then he wanted to act like the only reason andy got the job is because she’s in like a “girls club” with ross was disgusting and out of character for him imo. then the whole kiss scene with kate?? why why why (i knew that girl would be trouble)
   
8. i’m glad andy killed that guy w her amazing self defense & im really glad dixon is dead
   
9. thinking marina might try to adopt the baby they delivered in the finale?? but unsure since we haven’t seen them discuss adoption and we have absolutely no idea about the bio moms situation (like if a grandparent might want to adopt the child)
   
10. ross is a really good fire chief & i know it doesn’t seem like she’ll get to keep the job but it would be cool if she did. i’m lowkey rooting for her and sully but he needs to get it together and decide fr if he wants her or wants to rise back up through the ranks.
    

i think this is all i have??? LOL sorry i know this is long 😂 really i’m just obsessed w the show and want to talk about it but none of my friends watch. i am really hoping the writers strike is resolved soon (with everyone getting the wages they deserve!) so that we can get season 7 sooner rather than later. thanks if you read all this :-)

Hey guys,
Just wanted to share that today has been the best day in my recovery from this breakup so far. This saga has been ongoing for 6 weeks or so now for me... toward the end of April, I came back from a vacation to find my ex had packed up all of her stuff and moved out, taking our dog, leaving only the gifts I gave her.
She didn't say we were broken up but she ghosted me for a full week, and then met up and told me im the only one she'll ever want, gave me the dog to "watch" for a couple weeks while she took some space away, and then started ghosting me again.
I realize now that this dynamic really triggered insane anxiety inside of me, I panicked and pleaded and begged for her to work on things with me (we had a dog and we were talking about kids anyways). I put myself through humility and self-hate while she was on a pedestal, agonized for a month on where i fucked up and how, and I just held on to so much darn hope... besides, she never said we're broken up right?
I broke up with her a week ago, and it's been mostly a miserable week, but last night i took the advice of someone here and I started to write down the things that I didn't like about her, and my gosh there was a long list (not even including her running away from the life I tried to provide for her, she came to the states completely broke from overseas).
Today I see it more clearly - what kind of person just walks out on you while you're on vacation? And then ghosts you for a full week after? She made me feel like i was some abusive monster that needed to be run away from, and that destroyed my self-esteem, but with the help of friends and people on this sub, and just listening to my own inner light, I feel like I just dodged a massive bullet.
Hell, this woman only ever took me on 1 date during our 2.5 year relationship, wouldn't get her drivers license, and was fully addicted to social media. She always used to say "break ups are a mutual decision that take two and require a discussion" and then did the exact opposite! I realize she doesn't even know who she is, and that's not my problem, but it would have been if we tied the knot.
Really recommend writing down the bad things about your ex, respecting yourself with no contact, creating pros cons of the relationship, spending time around people who know the authentic you.
Time will heal us all, im just stoked im moving from depression to anger! Whew!

1. Monday night/Tuesday morning, police contacted UW to tell them that malicious activities were originating from our on-premises email server
   1. The on-premises email server is not used by the majority of people on campus - only a few select folks, and definitely not the layperson student
2. Passwords in that onprem email server were taken, including admin passwords. Attackers were then able to use those passwords to log in as admin and do bad things for a little bit.
3. That system also handles NEXUS, which is the authentication mechanism for everything (the login prompt you see when you login to any UW thing)
4. All affected accounts were immediately locked out, IST worked with Microsoft and a third party cybersecurity firm to secure things

As a result of this:

1. NEXUS will be down tonight starting 6:30PM for a period of 2-6 hours
2. While NEXUS is down, logging into systems will be impossible but currently logged-in systems will continue to work.
3. This means, eg. if you're logged into LEARN you'll stay logged in, but if you won't be able to log out if it kicks you out
4. For eduroam, you'll stay logged in as long as you don't move around and connect to a different access point - moving around too much on campus may trigger re-login, which will fail as long as NEXUS is down
5. Everyone will be sent an email telling them to change their passwords. Do not change your password until you receive the email telling you to change it, since you'll have to change it again when the email comes.
   1. The real email (as opposed to scam emails that ask you to "change your password" to hack you) will lead you to either https://watiam.uwaterloo.ca or https://idm.uwaterloo.ca
6. You'll be able to use your old password to log in and reset it for a short window, but after that window ends you'll have to do some sort of irl identity verification stuff with IST to change it - so change your password quickly when you get the email to avoid trouble.
7. Since they expect previous login sessions to be continuing to work, there is not much formal effect to exam and assignment deadlines, though instructors are asked to be more lenient if technical issues occur.
8. All residence locks, cash registers, etc will continue to work with WatCard, since that information is cached. Debit card payments may be impacted for a bit while the system is down.
9. They were already planning to get a cybersecurity risk assessment done, so that's nice I guess.

Don’t buy from these people. Don’t even think about it. I bought a 2008 Honda CRV for 8,000 from them in January, and by March the dashboard lit up with engine codes. The engine was completely dead by April, about 90 days after I bought the car. After basically threatening to sue them, they reluctantly agreed to trade for a car of much less value. I eventually decided against trading in fear of getting more problems from them. I sold the car to get not even half of my money back. There is no explanation for dropping a valve randomly after doing nothing but if anything, overly maintaining this car. This was the first car I owned in 2 years and it took a long time to save up this money, doing research and careful planning for nothing and a bad attitude when I came to them with my dead car they sold me. I would stay clear of this place at all costs. This is a warning.
Here is the copy of the timeline I sent to my lawyer:
Hi Kevin,
I bought an 08 Honda Crv from Eduardo Contreras at Express Motorsports Dealership in Lawrence, Massachusetts. I’ve done nothing but try to maintain the vehicle and the engine was dead within 2 months of purchasing the car.
Here is a timeline of events.
Jan 10 2023 at 4:30pm Traveled to Lawrence, Massachusetts to look at the vehicle which is a 2008 Honda Crv ex sport utility. Was told the “total loss” on the CarFax was a mistake the insurance company made with only minor front end damage. Was told the title was always clean. After reviewing the CarFax further it appears it had both a salvage and rebuilt title issued then later corrected in “error” then a clean title was issued. Put a $500 deposit down on the vehicle. At the time the dealership had no negative reviews. However on or around the time I bought my vehicle they received many negative reviews similar to mine.
January 12 2023
Bought my insurance policy for the vehicle.
January 17 2023
Was issued a temporary license plate to transport the vehicle from the dealership to my residence.
January 18 2023
Purchased the vehicle for 8,000. Was told the purchasing contract included a 30 day warranty for the entire vehicle. Purchaser contract had no disclosure of being subject to recalls. Tmps light was only light on the dash.
January 20 2023
Registered the vehicle.
February 9th 2023
Vehicle passed state inspection.
Between February 9th and March 15th (can get exact date)
A letter was issued describing multiple airbag recalls dating back to 2016.
March 24 2023
Engine started shifting gears harder. No engine light. Oil life at 60%. Last oil change was preformed 121,500 miles. At 123,800 I preformed an oil change using the same oil that was written on the last oils change sticker. The oil life never increased.
March 26 The airbag light, check engine light, and hazardous conditions light turned on and never turned off. Developed a p303 engine code. Mechanical problems including engine misfire on cylinder 3 and a hard start. Mechanical issues never improved even after a tune up and attempting to fix all possible causes. List of what I spent to try and fix with receipts.
Spark plugs Coil packs Battery Fuel injector Tools Sea foam Oil Mass airflow cleaner Throttle body cleaner
April 3rd
Took vehicle to Honda dealership to replace airbags and have misfire diagnosed. Honda dealership declared engine failure with a dropped valve. Was quoted 3,000 to fix.
Communicated with Eddie the mechanical issues and requested compensation for selling me a dead engine. I asked questions regarding my warranty and discovered I was never given an official warranty in writing. Eddie said “ we have you a 30 day warranty on the engine and transmission only. It is in the purchase contract.” However upon inspection it was not. Asked him about the vehicle being subject to recalls and he denied that it was. This is when I discovered the odd verbiage on the CarFax about a rebuilt title issued in error after an insurance company deemed the car a total loss. Eddie agreed to give me a car of lesser value, then listed said car. Eddie insisted on communicating through voice notes and over the phone and not through text. I was not able to communicate over the phone at that time.
Arranged to trade cars on May 11th, however on Tuesday April 11, my engine started smoking and it is not safe the transport the vehicle back to Massachusetts. Also after reading a negative review about someone in my similar situation trading in a car to him, then later that car wasn’t suitable as well, I decided not to trade in. Id rather have my money back so I can purchase a safe, reliable vehicle than gamble with doing business with him again and trusting his vehicles.

I write book reviews on Half Past Midnight, a blog dedicated to the surreal world of fantasy and science fiction. A few days ago, I posted a review for the first book in the series, The Ruin of Kings. While this review does not have spoilers about book 2, The Name of All Things, it does have spoilers for book 1.
After the explosive ending to The Ruin of Kings, it was too hard to resist finding out what happened next. It has been a while since a series had me hooked so deeply that I simply could not wait to start the next part!

Plot

The Name of All Things starts a couple of days after the ending of the previous book. In the wake of the Hellmarch in Quur, Kihrin has a lot going on between his resurrection, the discovery of Miya's (or rather, Khaeriel's) betrayal, and the murder of almost the entire D'mon line. Urthaenriel has destroyed The Stone of Shackles, and demons roam the streets of the capital. Heading to Jorat with a fireblood, Kihrin soon encounters an interesting character in a tavern.
This person turns out to be Janel Therannon, the count of Tolamer - the intriguing woman who's been haunting Kihrin’s dreams ever since his encounter with Xaltorath. Not only does she claim to know him, but Janel also has a story of her own to tell... one that will help Kihrin understand the events that have been unfolding around them. Those events include a stray dragon, a city on the brink of rebellion, and more plotting, which, as always, include our favorite baddie, Relos Var.
Then starts the boring part.
Janel insists that for Kihrin to fully understand how they ended up here, he needs to know a huge chunk of her past. She takes turns narrating it with her friend, a priest named Qown, in a manner reminiscent of Kihrin and Talon's narration in the first book. The result, although easier to follow, is terribly slow and hard to get through.
Janel starts her story by going a few years back into the past. I thought we were done with being all confused by a brand new character narrating their history, but here we are. AGAIN. I almost felt like I was reading a completely different book. Let's read about completely new, one-dimensional characters and their tedious lives while waiting for something more exciting to happen, shall we? Something like this isn't a problem with the first book in a series, but I just couldn't get invested enough in those new side characters or figure out how they tied into the original story. I'll be honest - these chapters did not add much to the story and could have been easily shorter or more interesting. Instead of knowing what happens next with Kihrin, almost the entire book is about Janel's past.
Unfortunately, the only thing you must do is get through it (yes, I know I said the same thing last time - but bear with me!) Because things ramp up significantly after the 50% mark. After that, I was hooked... again. Janel is an interesting character when she moves past the local disputes in Jorat and into more powerful circles of kings, god-kings, god-queens, and witches and prophecies. We meet Darzin D'Mon again, and he remains just as psychopathic as ever. It is interesting to finally understand how Janel happens to end up in her current situation, but boy, does it take a while to get there.

“A prophecy.” I stared at him. “I don’t like prophecies.”
“They can be useful.”

Some of the most interesting parts of the plot were when the timeline finally catches up to the one in The Ruin of Kings - and we finally start seeing events that happened in the previous book from a different perspective. When she ends her story, we start to move again in real time. Unfortunately, the plot hops forward by only a few days, so don't get your hopes up.
The ending, though, more than makes up for it. Lyons is excellent at endings. The story ends with a certain degree of (literal) explosiveness that rivals even that of the previous book. For all the effort needed to drudge through the boring first half, the ending was fantastic - and I'm not complaining.

Characters

Janel

Janel Theranon, or the Count of Tolamer, is a fiery young woman. After briefly meeting her last book, we get to know her a lot better this time around. Janel is intelligent, resourceful, and determined. Jorat has a very different hierarchical structure than the one we're used to and she's clearly had some interesting experiences navigating it. She's soon embroiled in a dangerous game of manipulation and deceit, into a dance where Relos Var is pulling the strings (as usual). But you know what they say about the enemy of your enemy...

Kihrin

Kihrin is a secondary character for almost 80% of the book. For the most part, he is a listener to Janel's story, occasionally interjecting with his comments. However, he does play an important role in the story towards the end. His dynamics with Janel are interesting. I'm pretty excited to see how their relationship plays out next book, given his closeness to Teraeth.

Teraeth, Tyentso, Thurvishar, Therin, and Khaeriel

Don't expect to see most of these characters in this installment. This isn't Kihrin's story, and although he and Janel tend to know a lot of the same people, very few of them actually show up in this book. Which is a shame, since most of the side characters in Janel's story don't quite have the same charm. Nonetheless, now that everyone's on the same timeline, rest assured we'll see them in the next part.

“No nefarious tricks,” Thurvishar promised. “On occasion, I like talking to people whose primary interests don’t include new and interesting ways to conquer the world.”

Worldbuilding

A majority of this book is set in Jorat with its quite progressive culture. The Joratese have a lot of interesting ideas about power, identity, and sexuality. However - the dialogue just threw me off at times. They use extensive horse-based terminology to refer to people, and hardly a page goes by without someone being called a mare, stallion, colt, foal, or gelding. It was cool in the beginning, but having the same words repeated over and over was a bit much after a while.
In terms of exposition, this book makes a worthy successor. It clears up and reiterates quite a few points which assured me that I was following the book correctly. After that, it beautifully accomplishes the task of expanding on the lore of the world. A lot more things about the Eight, Relos Var, and S'arric are elaborated on, making it an engaging read. Plus, more dragons.

Demons run when gods take the field.

Writing Style

Unfortunately, the writing felt weaker this time. I wish that this and the previous book had found a way to combine in a way that switched between Kihrin's story and Janel's. A lot of things unclear in his story would have been explained in hers. Since we're stuck with the alternative, the starting is pretty hard to get through. Additionally, the footnotes are a pain. While Thurvishar's footnotes added extra exposition in The Ruin of Kings, the person who writes them this time is just... annoying.
Although the narrative structure is similar to the previous book, none of the narrations really gripped me the way Talon's or Kihrin's did. One advantage this time around is that the story is much easier to follow than its predecessor. While it does remain non-linear, the timelines in the past remain chronological and shift only in location. This makes it much more accessible and I didn't end up feeling so confused all the time.

In Conclusion

The Name of All Things has a slow start that explores the themes of family, power, and identity to build into an engaging climax. Although marred by a tedious and flat beginning, it soon picks up its pace. However, you'll need some patience and an open mind to get there. Unfortunately, while this does bring it a step down from its predecessor, it remains a strong novel with complex characters, magic systems, and political intrigue. Lyons’s book wove together a lot of threads into an immersive ending that hooked me. I, for one, knew I'll be starting the next part soon.

Alright chooms I just finished cyberpunk for the first time u got the ending where I leave Night city with Panam. So as it says above I need a little help getting the other 5 ending so tell me what side quest to do what dialog to go with etc. Ik I could just look this stuff up but over time that can get confusing I

Context-
I haven’t spoken to our HR department yet but will be making a call to do so when she’s available. I work for a delivery department of a furniture company and had issue with how the manager of the department handled certain situations but for the short span of time i was over there i voiced them the best way i could for it to be constructive. The issues i had were that the week of my secondary training i got told to switch my schedule to accommodate the lack of another supervisor returning from LOA. Of course i did it but the schedule forced me into a turn around which i wasn’t happy about but i made point to say all that. Before i got to speak to my managers i spoke to a person under me about a concern he had and explained what i was already planning to say. He told me that it was okay he would talk to our manager and get it squared away. He and the manager spoke before i did and come to find out the manager asked the lead what we discussed. That was a big issue for me because it feels like a breach of communication on more than one level. The manager said that it’s in the leads best interest to tell him what we discussed. I strongly disagree. The second issue was regarding how he handled a conversation about pay with one of the drivers that he had in front of all the leadership. In short the manager was not wrong in telling a commissioned driver he’s not getting paid more for the work he did where i think the misstep was he told the driver he has to think about what’s going on in the company(layoffs) before asking questions about pay. These happened over the span of 1 week 5/10/23. I got demoted and moved back to my original position before taking this one. In my demotion letter which i can post with redacted names it states that i being demoted for insubordination with no corrective actions taken or previous actions or warnings. I’m just curious if i have some legal standing for a case here