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Post by rvm45 on Dec 2, 2020 7:13:43 GMT -6
Texican:
Yeah,
I doubt that Trump will win the election challenge…
Because it is too good be true.
I think that things may be circling the drain soon.
Jimmy Carter did not destroy the US. Bill Clinton did not destroy the US. Barack Obama did not destroy the US—though Obamacare drove a nail into the coffin.
It ain't so much that a Dementia Patient and a Jackbooted NAZI Thug Vice President working together have THAT much power to bring down the US.
What makes me see the situation as hopeless….
With the clear Example of Venezuela {And NAZI Germany—but that happened long time gone}...
And with such a clear-cut choice before the American People, the Erection was very CLOSE.
The Sinners (The two political parties are mentioned in the Bible: "Publicans and Sinners"…) MAY have stolen the Erection.
Never mind.
IF the erection wasn't CLOSE, no amount of Chicanery could steal it.
Even if Trump somehow wins, he will only be postponing the inevitable by 4-years.
This is the "Soft Collapse" that Mel Tappan talked about in his last two articles.
I'm 63-years old. I have one kidney. I take about two-dozen pills every day. I have diabetic neuropathy and can hardly feel my feet. I have carpal tunnel syndrome, ulnar neuropathy and a touch of arthritis in my hands. I cannot read without glasses…
I really don't expect to have to deal with the situation much longer.
I do feel sorry for the younger ones—though since I have no children or close kin any younger than me, it is a detached sort of commiseration.
It is frustrating, to see the survival scenarios that I prepared for so long for, pop up when I am too old to take part.
I was too young to go fight the good fight in Rhodesia. Now I am too old to fight the good fight here in the US.
That is one reason that I have transferred all my reading and most of my writing interest into Phantasy.
The Real World is just too depressing!!!!!!!
Well, I seem to have entered RANT MODE early in the morning…
Thanks for the comment though. It is the "Thumbs-Up" and the comments that keep me enthused about my writing.
…..RVM45
I keep wanting to use my OTHER Nom De Plume:
Saxon Violence
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Post by texican on Dec 2, 2020 12:23:05 GMT -6
rvm,
Even with all of your physical problems you do manage to provide your readers with stories that keep us asking for moar.
Like you, I am not certain about our future in America. It is apparent that whichever party wins, there will be problems created that could degenerate into chaos. If it be revolution or civil war, the results will be devastating to America and America that will probably result in foreign powers trying to invade America which will create another level of chaos.
Unless God steps in, WW3 will be waged for a day or two and the world will regress into total anarchy.
The future of America, God's christian nation, and the earth will suffer more than most can realize with billions and billions dead and dying and those surviving fighting to live another day.
Our future looks bleak.
Be Ready and Be Prepared.
May God continue to bless us, America and President Trump.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 2, 2020 13:51:19 GMT -6
Chapter Seven
11 764
With everything else urgent taken care of for the nonce, I took Despair back to my place, such as it was.
It was a small house that had been owned by an old woman and she rented out the back half of the house to me. There was a sitting room—I expect that it was a bedroom at one time.
To the North, there was a good-sized bedroom. To the West was the kitchen. The kitchen opened out onto a small—maybe 20-foot by 20-foot—back yard with a picket fence across the back.
There had been a door connecting the rear of the house, where I lived, to the front half where the old woman lived. She’d placed an icebox in front of the door—one on both on my side and one on her side—and of course, the door was permanently locked closed.
I was nice to the old woman. I ran a few errands for her and did her some favors…
And when she died, she left the house to me.
By the time that I paid inheritance tax and had the house refitted to my needs, it wasn’t exactly like winning the lottery and getting a free house, but it was a considerable bargain.
I’m not big on most material things. I do accumulate large quantities of books and I have several nice weapons.
It’s nice to have two crappers—especially since one has an antique claw-foot cast iron tub, while the other one has a walk-in shower. I had no need for two kitchens, though I kept the second ice box.
I had no need for extra bedrooms. I have very few friends and I never got to the point of even going steady with a woman. I wonder about that sometimes.
Well anyway, every room except the one kitchen that I kept and the two crappers, are lined with floor-to-ceiling built-in wall bookcases. What had been the front two bedrooms and the front apartment living room, now had a few free-standing book cases, a few reading chairs and a couple of desks.
Weapons?
Ach ja, du bist kaufmann!
I hadn’t even known that the house had a basement, since the entrance was from the front half of the house.
I generally dislike basements almost as much as I dislike whores. The dread adversary often dwells in basements. Fortunately, the house was near the top of a hill, so drainage was not an issue.
One of the guys from my church has his own small construction company. They reinforced my basement with walls of rebar-reinforced, poured slabs of concrete. While they were at it, I had them place almost a ton of quarter-inch sections of 12—gauge copper wire in the ground all around the slabs…
That and several dozen ceramic talismans that I had a druid make for me.
I don’t give a rat’s ass if that is witchcraft. I just want to keep the snails and slugs out of my basement and my house—and out of my world, if that were possible.
Anyway, leaving out the copper shards and the talismans, my friend said that the basement ought to be too tight to admit slugs for at least 200-years.
So, my gun room is in my reinforced basement.
Now, I was bringing Despair to my home, such as it was.
What is honor? I’d define honor as being willing to die rather than allow another man to count coup on you. It doesn’t have to be a big issue. Coup is coup.
A boss who fires you isn’t necessarily counting coup on you. Depends on if you cared about the job. A man who takes your woman has just counted coup on you—even if he isn’t aware that you exist and even if you’re glad to be rid of her.
Coup just IS. I don’t have to believe in coup. I don’t have to know that coup has been counted against me. Nonetheless, a coup counted against me is a permanent lowering of my status as a warrior.
Everyone, apparently, cannot live as a warrior—ready to throw their life away at any moment of time. If you cannot live with honor, but you don’t want to be a total loss as a human being, strive to be honest.
We’ll overlook white lies. If your obstinance and total commitment to honesty would make you rather have your eyes gouged out than repeat:
“Pigs can fly,”
Then you’re obstinate enough to live with honor.
Just try, barring outrageous profit or outrageous provocation, to be honest—at least 85% of the time.
What if honesty is too demanding for you?
If you cannot have honor and if you cannot practice honesty, at least be kind.
Sometimes honor, honesty or survival require cruelty. With only your survival to weight in the balance, you should be able to be kind at least 90% of the time.
Is even kindness too much for you? Well, at least you can be frugal. If you must be a predator and a parasite, at least be a good shepherd to your victims.
What sane farmer kills all of his milk cows; all of his laying hens and cuts down his fruit orchard—just because he is cruel and he can? That is a neurotic.
Life is full of men who have no honor. They have no honesty. They have no kindness. They have no frugality. They aren’t even cleverly conniving in their deprivations.
I ask myself:
‘What can these human swine do, that a boar hog couldn’t do just as well?’
Well, a pig can drink beer, but he cannot don trousers and sit on a barstool while swilling beer. Also, while it might not be completely impossible, a boar hog would have one Hell of a time smoking a cigarette while he swills beer.
So, these human swine, having mastered the art of wearing trousers, sitting on barstools and smoking cigarettes go out and get hooked up with women without fail.
They may very well have three or four ex’s and illegitimate children all over town. When they get out of prison for beating one girlfriend, they have a new girlfriend waiting for them at the entrance.
Meanwhile, I am gentle and kind. I always conduct myself as a gentleman…
And I get viciously and maliciously “friend-zoned” time and again.
If I were a woman, a man who thought so little of me, that he openly pursued sex from me, would be the very last man on Earth that I would give any sex to…
But apparently many women have the soul of sows and like to be treated like sluts.
So, the first female that I ever brought home, was—quite literally—a creature out of nightmare.
Still, when Despair stepped across the threshold, I had a sea-change in my attitude towards her. She might be a hideous nightmare, but she was my hideous nightmare.
Like a friend used to have a Pitbull named “Simon.” Simon had been rescued from a dog-fighting ring. He had one ear chewed off and he had scars all over him, but he was a friendly dog.
I’d pet him, but he was a bit off-putting, just because he was so ugly.
Then my friend died and his mother asked me to take Simon, because everyone else that she knew was afraid of him.
I had Simon for three-years, he was already kinda old when I took him. I still miss him occasionally.
The point was, once Simon was my dog, I didn’t think of him as hideous anymore. How could something of mine be hideous?
“Quit feeling sorry for yourself! It was your geas to live alone until now,” Despair scolded.
Yeah, she could read many of my thoughts.
“What is this place? Is your house a damned library?” Despair asked.
“It is a library in progress,” I said.
She selected my copy of “Malleus Maleficarum” and flipped through it.
“Can you read Latin?” I asked.
“I read Clerical Latin fairly well. It is a bit harder for me to read Classical Latin. I only have a smattering of Greek. I was interested in the witch hunter’s handbook, because back in the 1600’s, some Puritans mistook me for a witch and wanted to burn me at the stake,” Despair said.
“What happened?”
“Duh! I have wings! I simply flew off. Why stand and argue with idiots?” Despair said.
I finished my Yōkai eyes. I had saved Magenta’s eyes for last. I could hardly feel the effect from normal Yōkai eyes after eating all of the supercharged eyes that Grandpa Liu had given me.
Next, I made some ginseng tea with the 10 000-year old ginseng that Casúr had given me—I included some other herbs and some of the leaves as well.
Two things that I absolutely cannot consume—any sort of fried egg—that sulfur smell gags me. I don’t want to even be in the same house when someone is cooking eggs.
I also dislike the smell of a burning match almost to the point of mania. Get out a book of matches in my presence and I’ll offer you a lighter—or don’t smoke. Those are the choices.
I can eat raw eggs, and if there was a good reason to, I could gag boiled eggs down. I wouldn’t place a fried egg in my mouth if I had a gun to my head.
The other thing that I cannot swallow is tea. The tannins in tea cause me to gag.
That doesn’t apply to herbal infusions that do not include tea leaves. I like sassafras “tea” and I can drink spruce needle “tea.” Ditto my psychedelic ginseng “tea.”
Oddly enough, I have tasted some very foul things—like Minotaur bile. I can swallow bile. Neither eggs nor tea tastes anywhere near as foul as bile—but they invariably invoke my gag reflex.
I read the first chapter of “The Slip-Slider’s Manual.” The mental exercises seemed very easy. I mastered them while waiting for my ginseng tea to get cool enough to drink.
“They’re easy, because you’ve eaten enough pickled Yōkai eyes to start an eye bank,” Despair kibitzed.
“How many copies do you have to make?” She asked.
I looked at the corner of the inside front cover of the book. Gradually, the number “5” appeared.
“5,” I said to Despair.
“That is an auspicious number,” she noted with approval.
“Let me drink this ginseng and ride the high and then we’ll do that other thing. Since you’ve said that I may not survive, I want every advantage,” I told Despair.
I didn’t want her to think that I’d forgotten.
“Prudence is always a good thing, but the test is mainly how stubborn that you are and how much pain that you can endure. You should pass that one hands down,” Despair said.
I drank the tea, and rode the vision.
Have you ever heard “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights”?
That song needs some good editing. It is all over the place. Nonetheless, there are two classic lines. You only get the full effect when they’re sung:
“O, It’s Cold and Lonely, “In the Deep Dark Night…”
And towards the end of the song:
“It was Long Ago. “It was Far Away. “It was So Much Better “Than It is Today!”
I knew both of those things fairly well already. You might say that I had mastered them.
The psychedelic ginseng tea and my rapidly growing psychic sense gave me a very strong PhD in those two perceptions. I had a vision of a world so cold and lonely and so bereft of hope, that it took my breath.
I only had bowls. I don’t drink out of tea or coffee cups and hot beverages aren’t good juju in juice glasses.
When my vision ended, I spied Despair sipping psychedelic ginseng tea demurely from a 18-ounce, cobalt blue soup bowl that I used to drink hot beverages from.
If Despair still had tea left, I had just been on a remarkably long trip and came back in a very short period of time.
“Despair, I just had a vision of my world—the first world that I will slip-slide to,” I said.
“It is a rogue planet far beyond any star or other planet. It is frozen. The air is laying like snow on the damned ground. There are cities there somewhere, but the trick will be to find them,” I said.
“Can you sense them?” Despair asked.
“Yes, quite strongly!”
“We’ll get you a space suit, so that you have air and you don’t freeze your nads off—and I’ll fly you to the cities,” Despair said.
“How in Hell air you going to fly,” I said, deliberately giving “Or” the back-country pronunciation “Air.”
“When there is no atmosphere?”
“Do you think that my wings, from the realm of nightmare, are limited by physical things like lack of atmosphere?” Despair said.
“Despair, you’re mine—right?”
“Yes.”
“Move into this house with me, then,” I requested.
“You know that we can’t…” she started.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass. I want you to stay with me. If you have to be somewhere, okay. Just make this place your home base,’ I said.
I had caught a psychic glimpse of a universe—a multiverse—where a profoundly deep and overwhelming loneliness was the default setting almost everywhere.
If I had Despair—even if she was a monster—then I wouldn’t be alone.
“We may not be able to do insertion exercises, but there is something we can do, before you kiss me,” I said.
Despair became slightly indignant.
“You think my face is hideous, but you can’t keep your eyes off my breasts. Go ahead, if it will make you happy,” she said in a tone of longsuffering.
“Despair! Get your mind out of the gutter! I don’t want to feel you up. I want a long hug before you kiss me and send me into a 3 to 5-day coma. Is that too much to ask?”
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Post by misterjimbo on Dec 2, 2020 18:58:14 GMT -6
Rant mode is often good. It is like popping an intellectual pimple. I hear, commiserate and thank you for your work.
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 3, 2020 12:47:55 GMT -6
Chapter Eight 14 119
Despair tried to give me a cautious kiss that only transferred a piddling amount of poison into my system. I wasn’t having that.
If you’re going to poison me, don’t shillyshally around. Poison me!
I held her tight and frustrated her pulling away momentarily. Then I swallowed deeply.
O yes, there are whole classes of poisons, venoms and toxins that work by making the nerves and muscles slack and unresponsive.
Despair’s poison wasn’t a poison by design. It was just an inevitable byproduct of who and what she was. Nonetheless, her poison caused every one of my voluntary muscles to contract painfully at one time.
There are two methods to deal with a cramp. You can stretch it out. This works poorly when both of a pair of muscles is cramping, because to stretch one is to flex the other and intensify its cramp.
I sweat very freely when I’m hot. As a result, I wash away large quantities of electrolytes. I am a connoisseur of deep, tear-the-muscles-apart cramps in multiple places at one time.
There is another way to halt a cramp. Contract into it and intensify the pain to the max.
Muscles are made to contract at close to maximum force several times in a span of half-a-minute or so. That means that most muscles are strong enough to tear themselves apart, or tear their tendons loose from their bony attachments if they flex randomly without restraint with 100% of the force they are capable of generating.
As a result, each muscle has a sort of circuit-breaker that causes it to go slack and release if it is getting ready to tear or damage itself.
Of course, there is a time lag, so sprinters, football players and weight lifters manage to tear muscles and tendons fairly frequently.
That is nothing compared to the damages that would result without that safeguard.
A hard-cramping muscle is already close to the redline. Try to force it over the red-line, and it will say:
“No, I’m good.”
And it will relax—for a short while.
I had to keep using that method again and again, to win myself brief respites from the cramping agony in a few of the sites for a few moments.
Somehow, my respiration was unaffected. Well yes, I was panting like a steam locomotive. I mean, my diaphragm and my intercostal muscles weren’t cramping, at least not to the point of preventing me from breathing.
Did you ever take algebra? Sometimes, you have an equation that you think is meaningful until you simplify it.
Sometimes your equation simplifies down to the tautologous but meaningless equation:
0 = 0.
Well, of course 0 = 0, but that tells you nothing.
Life is a complicated equation that inevitably simplifies to 0 = 0.
“Solving life’s equation” is another word for “die.” Once life simplifies to 0 = 0; it is time to go meet Jesus.
I was momentarily taken aback, when I said many of my former acquaintances had gone to meet Jesus.
“What makes you think that they’re worthy?’’ a mouthy troublemaker quipped.
Everyone will stand before the Judgement Throne to be judged—it is just that some will have an advocate and others won’t.
The poison wouldn’t kill me, but there was a very plain route to solve my own life’s equation constantly floating before me. Anytime that the pain became too much for me, I could see it quite irresistibly demonstrated that 0 = 0 and my life’s equation would be solved.
Sure, I already know that 0 = 0. So do you, now. That is an intellectual awareness though. If every cell in your body could feel that with utmost conviction and if it penetrated to the depths of your soul, you couldn’t continue the meaningless transformations on the equation that is your life.
That was the test and the temptation. Torture me, all the while tempting me with an “abort” switch in easy reach.
I get it, it is a joke!
I don’t know what sadistic, incestuous knob-gobbler created this test.
A snippet of an old Rhodesian Marching Cadence:
“Civilization Means Nothing to Me. “I Dig Killing People with an M.A.G!”
Every since I read that, I have sensed the need for a parallel sutra:
“Pain Means Nothing to Me…”
I’ve never come up with a fitting second line to my pain sutra.
I watched a movie about Carbine Williams—he was played by Jimmy Steward. I don’t know how many liberties they took with the real story…
But anyway, the Steward character was punished, while in prison, by being forced to squat in a trash-can sized hole in the concrete until he admitted that he was in the wrong.
He spent almost two months squatting in the hole, until the prison doctor ordered a halt, lest he die.
But Steward was supposed to have some sort of out of body epiphany while squatting in the hole, and this was where his greatest firearms designs sprang from.
I always wished that I could meet that sort of inspiration without risking my health and my ability to walk, by squatting in a hole in the ground non-stop for 60-days.
Despair’s toxins took me there, faster. Why would I want to solve my life’s equation in the face of such a hard-to-find opportunity?
Sadly, I didn’t receive any inspired firearms designs like Jimmy Steward, nor did I see Jacob’s Ladder, Mystery Babylon, Jesus or have any great art inspiration to turn me into another Renoir or Andrew Wyeth.
All that I received were all sorts of slip-slider equations and all sorts of statistics and other information on the rouge planet that I had inherited. I even painlessly acquired the language spoken there.
Finally, it was over.
Truthfully, there wasn’t much to tell. It was a pretty monotonous experience—quite stimulating, in a bad sort of way, but still monotonous—pain, pain and more pain—then throw in a bit of agony for variety—then more pain.
I wasn’t even terribly aware of the huge information dump into my consciousness, at that point in time.
When I finally woke, Despair was sitting up in my bed while cradling me.
Honestly, I had rather disliked Despair in the beginning.
She was otherworldly and dangerous. Worse yet, she carried herself with an air of superiority and arrogance—and truth be told, she had a bit of a strange odor…
It wasn’t obnoxious, and it certainly wasn’t a deal-breaker of any sort, but she didn’t smell like anyone or anything that I’d ever encountered.
Then she started talking that bizarre shit about me being her future husband…
Well, okay. I’ll believe that when I see it.
I wasn’t shy about questioning her gender—how in Hell would I know what a tranny Night Ranger would look like? —or telling her that she was hideous—or warning he not to eat any of Linda Liu’s guests.
I really didn’t care if she was offended. Anyway, only the truth is beautiful.
My attitude started to change once she stepped into my house. It changed a lot more after I drank the ginseng tea.
Now, awakening and feeling her hold me as if I was the most precious thing in her world, I decided that I had feelings for her.
Let’s see—a woman that I feel no particular attraction to, throws herself at me repeatedly.
Finally, I am moved by her impassioned entreaties and I say:
“Okay, I’ll take a chance on you.”
That is inevitably her cue to start playing hard to get and to drag me through all sorts of misery and frustration.
Would Despair fit the template?
If Despair went off the reservation, I swear that I would get Terry to take me to Jotunheim and introduce me to a frost giantess. They can adjust their size, to a degree, after all.
I could hang with a woman Terry’s size. I think that they can shrink to about 7-foot or so. Unlike Terry, I shouldn’t have any physical problems satisfying a frost giantess—and for whatever reason, they seemed to have a thing for human men—well, strong human warriors. It wouldn’t do, for a steady parade of nerds, otaku and cubical eunuchs to line up to head to Jotunheim.
“Stillwater! You’re alive!” Despair said.
“Your grasp of the obvious astounds me. How long was I out for?”
“9-days! Stillwater, we can never do this again! I would rather live and die as an old maid, rather that risk being the cause of something bad happening to you,” she wailed.
“I think that you should try to meet a frost giantess. There are races of brown-skinned frost giantesses. By the way, the reason that the giantesses prefer human men is because it would be a boilerplate rarity if a human ate his own infant child to raise his power level,” Despair said in a rush.
“Despair, I really need your abilities for the foreseeable future. I am a warrior and I have a geas to aid Casúr, Casúr’s world and my own world,” I said.
“One can slip one’s fate, but they won’t like the dolorous anti-climatic life they inherit as a result. I won’t quit taking risks, just because you disappear from my life. Now, I cannot force you to do anything,” I said.
“Make up your mind: stay or leave, but if you decide to stay, I never want to hear any talk about you leaving, ever again,” I said.
She thought for a good long while.
“I’ll stay,” she finally said.
Then she started sobbing.
‘My god! She’s ugly enough at the best of times! But when she’s crying, she gives a Gorgon a run for the money, for soul-searing hideousness,’ I thought.
“Thank you!” Despair said sarcastically.
“Damned nation, Despair! I cannot control what I think. Truth be told, you are exceedingly ugly. I’m not in the business of flattery. The fact that you’re ugly doesn’t affect the fact that I love you,” I said.
“You love me!”
“Well, since I said it, then it must be true. That must have come from deep down inside though. Truth be told, I was shocked to hear myself say it,” I said.
She grabbed me and attempted to kiss me.
“EE…Can I at least eat some breakfast and drink some more ginseng tea before you poison me again? A trip to the crapper to drain my lizard might also be in order,” I said, while turning my head away from her mouth.
“My saliva can’t poison you anymore. Usually, it takes about five exposures to Night Ranger saliva to reach that point—but you deliberately gulped so much down, you did all your acclimatization at one time,” Despair said.
“What is next?” I asked.
“My blood and then my milk,” she said.
I looked at her funny.
“Night Rangers can create milk on demand. I’ll put it into a glass for you. You would try to take way too much and poison yourself big time,” she said.
“Despair, your teeth are very sharp and I need my tongue and my lips. I’ll kiss you, but be very careful not to bite me,” I told her.
So, immediately upon kissing her, she bit down upon my tongue as hard as she could.
It felt like someone had placed the whole weight of the Statue of Liberty on my poor tongue.
That analogy breaks down unless the contacting surface of the Statue of Liberty was a number of razor-sharp, triangular piranha’s teeth. God alone knows how many tons of biting power that a Night Ranger has per square inch.
It hurt just a little—nothing like what I’d expect. I was very aware of the pressure though.
Then she released me.
HMMMmmnnn…?
No taste of blood in my mouth. The skin of my tongue isn’t even broken.
“Partly, that is for thinking that I’m as ugly as a Gorgon. Mostly though, I just wanted to show you something. As my fiancé, nothing that I do can harm you…” Despair said.
“Well, remember the story of the Asgardians throwing shit at Balder just for fun, until Loki slipped in a poisoned dart of mistletoe. We wouldn’t be well advised to make a point of testing my inability to harm you,” Despair said.
“If I simply told you, you’d always be a trifle afraid of me biting you. I decided to demonstrate and remove all doubt from your mind,” Despair said.
“You used the word ‘story.’ Did that incident with the mistletoe dart not take place?” I asked.
“Of course not! Balder is still alive. I can introduce you to him, if you’d like. Loki is alive and well too, but I don’t think that you’d like him,” Despair said.
“Loki is the god of cross-dressers and trannies. O, I know three different mistletoe dryads, but none of them are the one from the story, since the story is a fable,” Despair said.
“Well, all that is well and good, but I need to eat breakfast, shower, put on clean clothing and get to doing some serious business—slip-slider business,” I said.
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Post by texican on Dec 3, 2020 21:34:32 GMT -6
Ok rvm,
Chapter Eight 14 119
What do the five digit numbers stand for under each chapter?
Is it a secret code that we do not yet know?
Or,
Are you just screwing with us to see who will take the bait?
Well, I just had to ask for all of our edification.
Looks like you are feeling a little better posting another chapter which we are grateful for.
May God continue to bless us, America and President Trump.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 3, 2020 22:23:16 GMT -6
Friend,
That is the word count at the end of the previous chapter.
I try to put at least 2000-words into a chapter. My version of "Word" gives me a running total, but there is no good way to get a total on a chapter's word count.
I write it down, so I won't forget it and then subtract from the grand total.
I used to erase them. One day I forgot and someone seems so thrilled at the word counts that I decided to leave them in.
…..RVM45
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Post by papaof2 on Dec 4, 2020 0:54:13 GMT -6
Easiest way to get a per-chapter word count is to highlight the chapter and get a word count of just the selected text. I'm all about keyboard shortcuts and "Alt-T W" is faster than mouse clicks.
I'm still using Word 2003 with it's incredibly stupid grammar checker - it wants to replace "you're" with "you is" and insists that anything after a second comma needs an "and" in front of it even if the list has four items and there's an "and" just two words further in the sentence. I haven't run the same document through Word 2019's grammar checker but I do hope they've fixed some of those things :-( On the other hand, Word 2003 is faster and leaves more of the screen for the text I'm writing.
I have a site license for Office 2003 and not nearly enough computers to use up that corporate license ;-) That and a site license for XP Professional were about the only things I got when a consulting company I worked for closed. The electronic stock they had "given" me wasn't worth the electrons it disturbed in passing. Recently, Word has developed a glitch on the laptop I use for writing in that it complains about "a box" or "a sample" and doesn't want the "a" - rather more like German grammar than English? Guess I need to remove and reinstall it if that continues - at least I know where the CD is and the key is on the CD in permanent marker. There's also a .iso file on the ancient tower PC used for storing installable software, along with a list of keys for that software. I've had people notice that old box and say "Who'd want that?" but it's on the network and all that software is just a few clicks away.
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 4, 2020 11:37:03 GMT -6
Friend,
If I use a phrase like:
"What is that to you, you old fraud?"
Word wants to changer it to:
"What is that you, YOUR old fraud?"
I regularly give my characters offbeat names like "Blue" "Rain"; "Shine" etcetera. Word really has a hard time with some personal pronouns, insisting that "Blue" shouldn't be capitalized.
A comma after the word "So"? Okay, generally.
Does the expression:
"So do you!"
Really need to be:
"So, do you!"
Anyway.
I also HATE AUTOCORRECT! I regularly misspell "Politikally Korrect" to emphasize that I think the practice is Fascist. OOOHHHH!!!!!!!!
Autocorrect also regularly tries to change "Gaeilge" to "Gaelic." Gaeilge is how NATIVE SPEAKERS spell the damned name for their language!
Besides, properly speaking, "Gaelic" refers to Scottish, while "Gaeilge" refers to Irish...
Whatever.
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Post by papaof2 on Dec 4, 2020 13:51:10 GMT -6
I tried a free word processor for my new-to-me Android tablet - and uninstalled it about 3 minutes later. Talk abour "Politically Corrected"? It even corrected whatever I put in the "search" field. If I'm looking for "Chapter 21" all Word needs for a unique search is "pter 21". This stupid program insisted that I was spelling "get" wrong and replaced what I typed with "get". Useless garbage because that probably means it wouldn't be able to find ANY word that's not in its dictionary - can't get more useless than that or more arrogant as a programmer.
They wanted a reason for uninstalling and a review. They got both - but I don't think my review will be posted with their other on-line reviews ;-)
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 4, 2020 16:48:24 GMT -6
Chapter Nine
16 311
“And in the Naked Light “I saw “10 000 People. “Maybe Ma…”
Who were these people? What were they doing in the “naked light”? Why did the singer think that he saw his mother amongst the throng?
The next lines are even more perplexing and thought-provoking:
“And Then the People “Bowed and Scraped “To the Neon God “They’d Raped.”
I don’t like the term “Gods” for beings like Balder and Loki. Still, there are very powerful beings—far longer-lived and more powerful than human beings. You have to call them something.
Just remember, there is only one eternal and all-mighty God, in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Those other so-called “Gods” are incomparably feeble in comparison—and for God’s sake, don’t fall into the error of worshiping them.
Anyway, I was about to meet the Neon God from the song and hear her story…
Wait…
Despair is wailing in my mind, that I misremembered that old song and there is no Neon God being raped in it…
O well, O Hell!
*************** **************** ********************
Despair and I had driven to Arizona to meet a Navajo silversmith. Never mind his name, he might not want the scrutiny that might come from dealing with outsiders.
I sold him a big-ass walrus tusk and also some jade slabs that I had—both jadeite and nephrite.
“I don’t know about this jade. It is much harder that turquoise,” he said.
“You have a Dremel Tool, don’t you? I’ll give you a hint: get an air compressor and switch to a die grinder. They’re much more robust and longer lasting than a Dremel—and you can buy them for like $20,” I said.
“Besides, I’m selling you jade at fire-sale prices. You can afford to bollox a few pieces while you learn. Be the first traditional silversmith on your block to offer jade pieces,” I encouraged.
“There is a Lakota silversmith in Nebraska that works in jade,” he said.
“Were the Lakota silversmiths?” I asked.
“They are now—at least, one of them is,” was his laconic reply.
“Does the Ch’į́įdii follow you everywhere?” he asked cautiously.
“Ha! Ha! Do you hear that, Despair? You’re an evil spirit!” I laughed.
“I’ve been called worse,” she said.
“She’s my servant. She may look ugly, but she is very obedient,” I said.
The silversmith rolled his eyes in amazement.
“No, seriously, she is a Night Ranger, not a Ch’į́įdii. She is not a servant. She is my fiancé,” I said.
“Hey, it is time for me to throw in a few extras. I’m a generous guy,” I said.
I gave him a couple of abalone shells—15-inches in diameter and over an inch thick.
“Experiment and see what you can do with these. If you like them, then I can sell you some more,” I said.
I also gave him a dozen mussel shells at least 8-inches in diameter. Once I’d told Casúr about mother-in-law of pearl, he had some of the dudes who dredged for mussels while searching for freshwater pearls on Forest, to save a few of the better specimens for me.
Of course, the mussel shells from Forest were bigger and better quality than anything currently surviving on Earth.
There was also a small book dealing with working with ivory, bone, horn, antler and mother of pearl.
“If you give me gifts, then I must reciprocate,” he said.
“It may not be so for every silversmith, but if I cut myself and bleed on the silver when I am working it, it is very bad medicine. The silver becomes accursed, but it is also very powerful,” he said.
“If I sold blood-tainted silver, I would be cursing the buyer. However, if the silver is given away as a gift, the curse is removed, but not the power,” He said.
He handed me a matching silver and turquoise ring and bracelet set. There was a matching companion set, made for a woman. He handed the jewelry to Despair as if he were afraid that she would bite his hand off.
I laughed heartily at that.
“Friend, she’s trying to quit eating human body parts,” I told him.
“You should talk!” Despair shot at me.
“Ask him how many Yōkai eyes he’s eaten raw,” Despair provoked.
“Despair, that isn’t fair! Over half the Yōkai eyes that I ate were pickled—and I tried to at least put hot sauce on the others—which means they weren’t 100% raw,” I protested.
“You ate a Minotaur’s gall bladder,” Despair said.
“That was well before I met you. Anyway, the gall bladder was full of power. If the Minotaur didn’t want me to kill him and eat his gall bladder, he shouldn’t have attacked me,” I said.
“Have you ever eaten a silversmith? Let’s split this one. He’s bound to have some good juju in his body,” Despair joked.
“Hell’s belles and cockleshells and skeletons all in a row! Please don’t scare my customers away!” I said to Despair.
“She is joking dude! She has a weird sense of humor and you rubbed her wrong when you called her a Ch’į́įdii. Also, she is trying to annoy me—why, I do not know. She’s easy to offend and she can read minds.” I told the silversmith.
As we turned to go, he reluctantly called out to me.
“Before you go, word is, that you’re looking for someone to build you a space suit,” he said.
When he saw the look on my face, he added:
“Word gets around in certain circles. Anyway, my cousin Chester worked for NASA before he was laid off in the cut-backs. He didn’t design suits, but he can put you in touch with people with all the expertise that you need,” the silversmith told me.
Well, you know that I could have simply bought a deep-sea diving suit. They are air and water tight and strong enough to resist astonishing pressure from the sea. The deep sea is bone-chillingly cold too.
EE…But how well would the suit keep me warm, when it was so cold that all the oxygen and nitrogen was lying on the ground in solid form like snow?
First of all, I needed an air-tight living space. It needed to hold enough food—and above all else, air to breathe—to last me a little over 3-weeks.
The first time that a slip-slider transits to another world, he transports to a random location and he must remain there for about 22.5-days. He cannot slip-slide out during that first crucial time period.
If I didn’t know beforehand that I was slip-sliding to an airless, frozen planet—and if I didn’t have Despair’s world spanning ability to back me up, I would be slip-sliding to my death when I went to the planet that I dubbed “Ice.”
Once the slip-slider survives his first slip-slide, he acquires much more flexibility when and how to slip-slide in. He can slip-slide to a given location, for instance—so long as he has been there before.
Despair could fly me toward where I sensed a city until my air or heat gave out and then we could slip-slide back to Earth. Then, when I recovered and my batteries were recharged, we could pick up exactly where we left off.
Now, if I got into trouble with my thermos trailer, Despair could transport me back home—but then I’d have to start the timer on my 3-week initial slip-slide all over again.
It was better to do it right the first time.
*********** *************** ************************
First of all, if I had really good insulation, I shouldn’t need much heat inside to stay warm—just enough to replace the bit that was inevitably lost to the frigid exterior.
Would you believe that I considered coal? There were tons of oxygen lying within easy reach on the ground.
EE…I hadn’t a clue how to tell frozen nitrogen from frozen oxygen and then to separate them. Also, mining oxygen necessitated going outside regularly and having to be fit to do manual labor. I mean, my space suit needed to be fit to perform manual labor—and not chafe holes—or whatever.
I finally settled on a trailer. It was about 16-foot long in the interior and it was about 8-foot in diameter and cylindrical. Once you added in the thick insulated walls and the oxygen and propane tanks built into the walls, it was much longer and fatter on the outside.
The shelves, cram-jammed with food and gear added another, minor layer of insulation—though there wasn’t full coverage.
The thermos trailer stood on great sled-like runners. Vacuum doesn’t suck heat so much, but contact with frozen nitrogen on the ground would. The runners kept the contact surface to a minimum.
The thermos trailer? It was a joint project featuring some laid-off NASA workers and some of the better camper builders from Elkhart Indiana.
It didn’t matter if they thought that I was crazy, just so long as they built things to my specs and they were at least semi-discrete about their work.
As long as my money was green, they were happy to build.
About that, it would have taken me far longer to build my trailer and get my space suit in my present economy…
But Despair was 700 or 800-years old, or something. She never would give me an exact number. She had super-human ability. Her intelligence surpassed all but the greatest geniuses the human race could produce…
And she had invested well over the centuries. Funding my projects turned out to be trivial for her.
“Do you like me better, now that you know that I’m rich?” Despair had teased.
“It is better to have money, than not to have it. I don’t necessarily think that it is wrong to marry for money—so long as one follows through and is a good and full spouse in all ways—and it is not a sham,” I said.
“However, you come with too much baggage to make it worth anyone’s while, to marry you for your wealth,” I said.
“Then why are you willing to marry me?”
“Because you’re the first to ask and if I turned you down, I might never get another offer. Besides, it is fun to see people’s faces, when I tell them that you’re my fiancé,” I said.
“Stillwater, I could become human. That is possible,” Despair said.
“I can’t prescribe behavior for you. I can only say that I strongly prefer that you not. You would lose far too much,” I said.
“How much oxygen do you consume in a day’s time, Despair?” I asked.
“I inhale and exhale on a regular schedule. I’m not sure why. Habit? But then, how did the habit form? Watching my father and my human brothers while growing up? But to answer your question: I consume a negligible amount of oxygen,” Despair said.
Despair would come to Ice along with me. At the first sign of danger, she would bring me back to Earth.
The thing was, if I ran short of food, oxygen, propane or whatever, Despair couldn’t conveniently or reliably come back to Earth, pick up more supplies and pop back.
Her navigation wasn’t that precise and she might spend two or three days looking for me. That kinda defeated the purpose of her being my emergency bail-out capability…
Besides, if I was gasping for breath when Despair left, I’d be perfectly asphyxiated if it took her 48-hour to return with my oxygen.
“Stillwater, the manual seems at least semi-sentient,” Despair said.
“Yes.”
“It wants to be spread and to grow to encompass other potential interdimensional travelers. Have you ever wondered why?” Despair said.
“Closely related parallel worlds lie together like fibers in a cable. You might think that the coincidences are too large—almost inevitably travelling to a world featuring carbon-based life forms enough like Earth’s that you can eat most of them,” I said.
“Casúr’s world not only has human beings, it has wooly mammoths, mastodons, giant walrus and all sorts of other Earthlike fauna and flora,” I continued.
“With magnets, like repels like. With alternate universes, like attracts like. Out of the inconceivably large number of random universes, some will share many features—just by virtue of coincidence,” I continued.
“Anyway, all the affiliated universes have a tendency to drift apart over time, and left to itself, this would have negative consequences,” I said.
“Slip-sliders bind the universes tighter together with their comings and goings. You could say that we’re like the osteoblasts and the osteoclasts of the multiverse—or at least this sheath of probabilities,” I finished.
“You got all that from your visions?” Despair asked.
“Yes.”
“Alright, would you say that the manual—or whoever or whatever is behind the manual—has some influence over where you travel to? Don’t you also presume that it wants you to succeed?” Despair said.
“I think that is a reasonable assumption,” I said.
“Then why is the manual setting you up with a suicide mission?” Despair said.
“I think that somehow the manual knows that you have developed psychic powers and that it knows that you have a Night Ranger for a fiancé to pitch-in and help you over the rough spots,” Despair said.
“I think that you’re being groomed for a mission that no one else could accomplish,” Despair said.
Ach ja, du bist kaufmann!
That has been my go-to exclamation since high school German. They started off making us memorize a dialog and they wouldn’t tell us what it meant in English, only show us pictures and do silly charades.
That crappy method gave me a distaste for foreign languages that lasted for many years.
Anyway, the dude in the cartoon they showed us had a thought cloud as he greets an old friend.
For many years I believed, based on the picture in the cartoon bubble, that it meant:
“O yeah! You’re a pharmacist!”
Nah.
It means:
“O yeah! You’re a businessman!”
When I say it, it means anything that I want it to mean. Often it means:
“Eureka!”
Just as I got ready to get into the matter a bit more deeply—though at that point we had insufficient data to draw widespread sweeping conclusions.
Just then, there was a frantic knocking on my back door.
There stood Terry with an 8-foot tall Brunilda of a woman wearing a hooded robe.
‘Great move there Cool Breeze! No one will realize that you’re escorting a frost giantess princess around, so long as she covers her head with a hoodie,’ I thought.
“Stillwater, I desperately need your help!” Terry blurted out.
“Well, don’t stand there in front of God and everyone. Come in and tell me about it,” I said.
“Once I step inside, you’re implicated,” Terry said.
“You’re my friend, so I’m already implicated. Come in!” I said.
“I’m being pursued by frost giants. They won’t be far behind,” Terry said.
“Galloping llamas!” I said.
I read that the Chinese say that a lot, because in Mandarin, “Galloping Llamas” is a homophone for “Mother-Incestor.” The situation reeked of galloping llamas!
“You’re Revna? Can you shoot a rifle, Revna? How about you, Despair?”
“Terry, come with me to my gunroom. You’ll have to be a bit careful in the stairway. It wasn’t made for giants,” I said.
“You have a bank’s safe door on your gunroom?” Despair said.
“Ach ja, I picked it up second hand from an old bank that went out of business,” I explained.
Once they were in the bomb-shelter/gunroom, I started handing out goodies.
“I only have one Barrett 82A1, but I have several bolt action .50 Caliber Rifles that I built from Bill Holmes plans. I converted them from single-shot to hold a 10-round detachable box magazine. They’re Barrett magazines, actually,” I said
“Let’s see how frost giants like the .50 BMG Raufoss rounds. There is only one magazine per rifle, so you’ll have to use a bit of fire discipline, but take a bandoleer of spare ammo,” I said.
“This rifle seems built for an Oni,” Terry remarked.
“I made it for you. It was going to be your Christmas present. Merry Christmas! That one that Revna has is one of the prototypes. What in the seven burning Hells is this about!?!”
“Revna is pregnant,” Terry said.
“Congratulations—I guess. You do know what causes pregnancy, don’t you? By the way, who is the father?” I asked Revna.
“Damn you and your jokes, Stillwater! That prescription that the alchemyst gave me is also a powerful aphrodisiac,” Terry said.
“Is it worth all of this drama?” I asked.
“Since the baby is illegitimate, her father intends to eat it,” Terry said.
“Not while I am alive,” I said.
“Nor while I am alive,” Despair added.
Despair had wanted a child for so long, so badly…
And these knob-gobblers were going to eat an infant!?!
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Post by texican on Dec 4, 2020 20:16:56 GMT -6
RVM,
50 cals should do some damage to the frost giants especially with head shots.
What will head mist look like out of the frost giants?
May God continue to bless us, America and President Trump.
Texican....
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Post by millwright on Dec 7, 2020 21:26:17 GMT -6
Finally made a lap through and got caught up.
Seize your momentum RVM.
This is one of your best.
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 11, 2020 11:25:15 GMT -6
Friends,
I had a BIZARRE toothache for the last few days.
You ever heard of an aching tooth that is SOOTHED by holding a mouthful of ICE WATER in your mouth!?!
I couldn't bite or chew on that side.
I have had three bone spurs break loose from my jaws and work their way to the surface over the years…
They are EXCRUCIATING! I was afraid that I was due for #4.
No, Thank You Jesus!
I figured it out last night. The saliva gland under my jaw was blocked. I had that happen a few years ago on the other side, but it didn't make my teeth ache. 10-minutes of massaging the gland FIRMLY and almost all ache is gone. I can even chew on that side again!
Anyway, that and the fact that this mandatory fight scene that I had set up, BORED me contributed to this being so late.
Chapter Ten
19 138
“They’re here,” Despair announced.
Did I mention that Despair’s voice is deep, raspy and somewhat annoying to the ear? She come nowhere near sounding as innocent and charming as the little girl in “Poltergeist.”
No, Despair had the scary type of voice that would make Freddy Kruger run away.
I buckled on my gunbelt with my trio of custom-built .475 Linebaugh revolvers. Note: they’re in Linebaugh’s caliber. Linebaugh didn’t build them.
Maybe its just me, but unless we’re talking tiny hideout pieces like the Chief’s Special or high capacity revolvers, a revolver should be a SIX-shooter. Damn five-shooters to Hell!
“Ach ja, Mein Herr! A six-shooter would be too bulky!”
That’s your misconception. Earl Keller’s .45-70 and 50-90 revolvers were six-shooters—big ass guns, but no more unwieldy than a Desert Eagle or a Wildey. Elmer Keith was one of many who endorsed them.
A five-shot cylinder long enough to accept the .45-70 or .22 Hornet or 3.25 Inch .410 is out of proportion—too skinny—when it is a 5-shot…
Anyway, I knew a custom maker that turned me out a trio of 6-shot .475 Linebaughs, closely resembling an upsized Ruger Security-Six. They have 8-inch barrels.
Why three on a single gunbelt?
If you’re going after a haint big enough to require the .475 Linebaugh, you are fairly likely to need multiple shots…
And no, it ain’t a comfortable rig to walk around in. It is a rig to strap on, when you’re deliberately walking into trouble and trouble is a short walk away.
“I’m going out to meet the knob-gobblers. This is a mighty strong bomb shelter, but eventually, we’ll be caught like a turtle in a jug trap. Remember the Alamo!” I said.
“I thought the Texans at the Alamo dug in and bravely defended,” Terry said.
“That’s the point. They all died in the end. If you’re going to die anyway, attack and see how much coup that you can count before you die. Acting as if survival is a priority is nothing but cowardice,” I said.
“He’s right. I was a witness to the fall of the Alamo. They all died,” Despair added.
“That’s quite a coup stick that you have there,” Terry said, while glancing at my Barrett rifle.
“Ideology counts with a sword,” I said.
The old “King Kong” cartoon that I watched as a child had a line about King Kong:
“Ten times as big as a man.”
I always pictured King Kong as 60-foot tall.
By that standard, the frost giants were half-pint King Kongs—standing about 35-foot tall. There were eight of them in the immediate vicinity, standing around like so much oversized, tacky lawn furniture.
EE…in the old UFO tales, men from some unspecified government agency—invariably dressed in black three-piece suits—always showed up after an event. They tried to convince the witnesses that they were the victims of mistaken impression and failing that, they tried to intimidate and silence the witnesses.
That’s where the expression “Men in Black” comes from—before the meme became a comic and later a movie—while moving a bit away from the original concept.
In real life—for those who believe in reality—there is no need for Men in Black.
Human beings have a startling ability to suppress, repress and forget incidents that substantially challenge their worldview—when the data even makes it past their mental censors and into their brain proper, in the first place.
When I and the frost giants were through trashing the neighborhood, the official reason would be an exploded gas line, a falling airplane, a meteor shower or a “Bomb with Love” bombing by one of the radical pacifists’ groups.
Such things can be strenuous on innocent bystanders—but there is no such thing as an “innocent” bystander.
If they’re solidly on my side, then they are a regrettable collateral casualty due to friendly fire—if I’m the one who long journeys them.
Are they neutral? Neutrals are a big part of the problem. As the Bible says:
“He who ain’t fer me is agin me.”
What should I do? Give up Revna and her unborn child because the folks in the neighborhood were de facto hostages?
It is like the old ethical dilemma:
An armed man asks you to choose whether you want him to shoot your mother or your father. If you don’t choose, he will kill both of them.
The proper response is:
“I won’t be a part of such wickedness. You can kill both of them if you want to and you’re able. If you do, that is on you. If you ever fall into my hands, I’ll avenge them. If not, your recompense will have to wait until Judgement Day.”
Anyway, I am quite justified in putting my interests and the interests of my friends above the welfare of unimportant strangers.
“Do any of you effeminate pantywaists have the balls to meet me in single combat to decide this?” I shouted.
I boosted my voice with a special volume technique.
I fired a 3-round burst at the closest frost giant. As the sainted Jeff Cooper said:
“Be offside on the play. No referee will call it back.”
The first round was a Raufoss. The second round was a hollow point filled with enough LSD-25 to send a whole platoon of marines on a psychedelic trip.
I figured that the force of the impact would force it into the tissues. Even if the Raufoss rounds didn’t incapacitate, a client with a head full of acid shouldn’t be a terribly formidable client…
The third round was also a Raufoss.
EE…I have eaten so many strength and body enhancers—plus doing some of the calisthenics in “The Slipslider’s Manual” …
Well, if you put me in the ring with any of the world champion martial artists—MMA, Brazilian Jujitsu, Judo, Taekwondo, Sumo, Sambo…
I could play with them like an adult playing with a first or second grader.
That doesn’t change the fact that I’m only 6-foot 3-inches tall and weigh about 260-pounds. It doesn’t matter how strong that my muscles and bones are, when firing a fast 3-round burst from offhand, with a Barrett 82A1 the momentum from the recoils sets you back.
If I were 5 or even 10 times stronger, it would still send me flying back like a “sent” croquet ball.
I was already falling backward past the point of being able to catch myself when I triggered the second round. I fired the third-round while in freefall backwards.
Three things happened all at once. Terry caught me and yanked me back upright. The frost giant screamed:
“You dare hurt me!?!”
He stepped forward and started to swing a two-handed hammer with a head the size of a 55-gallon oil drum my direction.
Then Despair, having divested herself of the encumbering .50 Caliber was flying toward the giant trying to intercept the hammer’s blow.
The frost giant switched his point of aim in mid-swing. He swatted Despair out of the air like a pesky fly. He drove her down onto the concrete sidewalk and smashed her flatter than a grape.
I felt the rage and the power swell within me.
I handed Terry my Barrett as viciously as a drill sergeant in one of those WWII movies while I drew my spirit sword and prepared to attack the frost giant like Tarzan attacking the Philistines or Sampson jumping onto a crocodile.
Then it hit me…
Spirit power! I caused the small wooden sword to float in the air in front of me like an RC drone. Then I sent it straight at the left eye of the foremost frost giant—the one who had smashed Despair.
The sword flew like a flying sword from one of the cultivator’s stories.
A 21-inch long sword with a 14-inch razor-sharp, unbreakable blade, flying as fast as a .223 bullet was nothing for even a frost giant to poo-poo—especially when it is aimed at an eye.
My spirit sword went through the frost giant’s eye, the brain behind and burst through his skull. Then, although he was effectively dead on his feet—he just hadn’t had the integrity to fall down yet...
Because I was enraged, I sent my spirit sword through the back of his skull and out through his right eye.
That almost exhausted my spirit force. The force that I used to go back through the frost giant’s skull could have been used to take out another frost giant.
Threading the needle to hit something like an eye—even a giant’s eye—was exhausting. Driving the sword projectile through a giant’s thick skull was even more exhausting.
I did have enough spirit force to cause my spirit sword to cut a second giant’s throat from ear to shining ear. Then it wobbled weakly toward me, like a dove that had one wing broken by a shotgun round, fluttering to Earth.
I snatched the wooden sword out of the air with my left hand and slammed it into its sheath.
Iaido to the contrary, there is nothing magic about the act of drawing the sword. There is magic in sheathing it—to reapply the salve with all of the assorted powerful venoms dissolved within.
A third giant roared and lifted one of his Johnboat-sized bare feet to try to squash me flatter than a grape.
I shot 6-rounds of .475 Linebaugh rounds into the foot with my right hand. Meanwhile, the spirit sword in my left had stabbed and then slashed the tender instep part of the frost giant’s foot. All the while, I glided out from under the frost giant’s area of attack.
While the giant hopped around on one foot while cursing in Old Norse, I found a 10-foot sword aura extended out from my wooden sword.
Would this immaterial sword aura cut? It seemed to. It took the heretofore uninjured foot of the frost giant off at the ankle. The giant fell like a several-ton stack of shit.
It appeared that the frost giant’s hammer had squashed Despair flatter than a grape.
Nah, instead it had driven her deep into the hard concrete-covered ground like a nail driven flush with the top of a board. The main injury was to her pride and her sense of urgency, since she was afraid that I’d be killed while playing with the frost wimps.
She came out of the ground covered in lightning and blood and looking even uglier than usual.
Pond and honor!
Despair flew straight at a frost giant. She knocked his front teeth out in the process of flying into his mouth and down his throat. An instant later, Despair jumped out of the frost giant’s abdomen—like some sort of super-charged, self-service caesarian. Blood, intestines and thoroughly diced liver pieces flew every which way.
Meanwhile, Terry had went prone while Revna spotted for him with a pair of 20 x 80 Binoculars that she had picked up in the gunroom.
Turns out that Raufoss rounds work reasonably well, if you aim for the eye-sockets.
More frost giants kept arriving on the scene. Meanwhile, ever more frost giants arrived on the scene. No one came to buttress my side…until…
I heard a thunder of over 100 souped-up motorcycles.
It was the Yamikazes. They are a motorcycle club that rides big Yamaha bikes exclusively. They wear a lot of 50’s style leather biker gear—only their leather is brown rather than black.
In contrast to the understated brown leathers, the bikes were every psychedelic and florescent color that you could imagine.
Some of them dismounted and started assembling their rifles. They’re big on custom takedown Marlin .30-30s and 45-70s and there are a few who carry takedown .303 Enfields.
Some of the bikers remained mounted and took the fight to the frost giants while yielding miao dao.
Unlike some clubs, the Yamikazes don’t make a fetish out of proclaiming their membership. Maybe a tattoo or two—maybe a ring or bracelet—maybe not even that.
When the Yamikaze aren’t on a mission, they kinda blend into the woodwork and disappear.
I hadn’t known that Cassadore was a major in the Yamikazes. I hadn’t even known that he was a member. Unlike Vicente, Cassadore had no compulsion to tell the world everything about himself.
A premonition—get that, a premonition—had caused Cassadore to activate 3-platoons of Yamikazes—the most that he could activate on such short notice—and head to my home.
Vicente was there on a big purple, chopped Harley-Davidson hog—looking out of place amongst the Yamikazes riding their Yamaha bikes in formation.
Well, to put it into perspective, I had given both of them slip-slider’s manuals and a cache of 5000-year old ginseng and other herbs to stimulate their psychic abilities…
Sadly, even hot loaded AP .45-70 rounds and enchanted miao dao weren’t much more than minor irritants to the giants.
Just as the reinforcements arrived to contribute little or nothing to the struggle, Grandpa Liu arrived.
Okay. You can fly dude! You could fly supine like Superman or fly upright like a standing but levitating man.
Nah, Grandpa Liu has to be a show-off. He flew while sitting cross-legged like someone riding a flying carpet—only no carpet in sight…
Show-Off!!!
He had 14-hardcore looking dudes with him. Each of them was riding a Griffin. The Griffins were bigger than Bison.
They had big eagles heads with a vicious curved hawk’s bills over 2-foot long. They had the body of a lion and all four of their feet had big 4-toed zygodactyl feet like Despair’s feet—but far larger.
They had two pair of wings like a dragon fly. The front wings had great big feathers like a great swan, while the rear wings were leather like a bat’s wings.
The riders sat between the two pairs of wings like someone riding a Bactrian camel. Each Griffin had a long prehensile tail a bit over twice as long as their body and they were continually cracking their tails and creating countless sonic booms, like a bunch of bullwhip-cracking cowboys.
The Griffin were many different colors.
The riders wore turbans and carried Tulwars thrust through a wide colorful silk sash. They were all shirtless and they were all built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Exactly half of the riders—the ones to Grandpa Liu’s right—were as black as highly polished and waxed ebony. The 7 riders to Grandpa Liu’s left were as white as new ivory.
“What are you giants high on, that makes you think that you can invade my territory with impunity!?” Grandpa Liu said in an amplified voice that rattled windows many blocks away.
“Do you have any more of that drug? It would be fun to be that divorced from reality—for awhile,” Grandpa Liu added.
“Praetor, your territory is the West half of the Dark and Bloody Ground running from La Grange—just West of Louisville and following an irregular line to Gamaliel. You have no jurisdiction here,” a frost giant said.
You could tell that he was a furriner. Folks hereabouts pronounce the word:
“Jewish-Diction.”
I thought as a boy, that it involved customs that went back to Old Testament days. I was like real disappointed the first time that I saw the word written out.
“From today forward, I claim the Southern half of Indiana—including Terre Haute and Richmond but excluding Marion County,” Grandpa Liu said.
He later said, that someone just might want to wrangle with him over Indianapolis, since it was a fairly large city. Most Outsiders would be content to let Grandpa Liu claim the largely agrarian Southern Indiana.
Of course, most of the mundane would have no idea whose protectorate they lived in. Truth be told, excepting the frost giant invasion looking for Revna, there was precious little Outsider activity in Indiana.
The worst sort of urban haints would cluster around Chicago, East Chicago, Gary, Merrillville etcetera—Indianapolis? Maybe...
I had no intention of ever living in a large metropolitan center or hunting urban haints, so it was kinda academic.
“This human has our princess!” the frost giant said.
I put my arm around Despair, who had landed next to me.
“Hey, galloping llama! This is my princess. I’m just an interested observer—and someone who can whip at least five of your best frost giants—at one time,” I interjected in a spirit of détente and rational discussion.
“The other human!” he said.
He gave Terry a sour look and made that sign with the little finger at Terry.
Damned Nation! Is the whole frost giant race obsessed with the size of a man’s Johnson! Pond and Honor.
“Do I look like a human to you!?! Has the frost affected your vision, knob-gobbler?” Terry ranted.
“Should I show him my Jenkin Horne?” Terry asked me in exasperation.
“I’d as soon show him the muzzle of that Barrett 82A1 that you’re borrowing,” I said.
“Leave, and take your fallen with you—after I claim the trophies,” Grandpa Liu said.
The frost giants looked mad enough to spit frozen fire, but after a few moments, they reluctantly prepared to leave.
The turbaned Griffin riders grabbed something from the fallen, in a blink of an eye and then the frost giants took their fallen kin away.
“Grandpa Liu, how can I get a Griffin like your compañeros?” I asked.
“Why do you want a Griffin?” he asked me—like someone catechizing someone.
“It won’t be long until you have great bat wings like Despair. You won’t need to borrow the flight power of a Griffin,” Grandpa Liu said.
“There is a certain transformation,” Despair said.
“You will end up looking much like a male version of a Night Ranger—if there was such a thing,” Despair said.
I had started looking at her hard.
“Do you mean that I will turn as buck ugly as you?” I asked.
Revna elbowed Terry.
“Why don’t you ever sweet-talk me, like Stillwater sweet-talks Despair!?!” Revna said.
“Not exactly…even transformed, you will remain much more humanoid than me,” Despair said while looking down.
“Turn ugly as all Hell, but be able to fly…I guess that it’s a worthwhile trade-off. Plus, I get you into the bargain. You may be ugly, but I’ve become quite attached to you. You could have told me all this before now though,” I said.
“Stillwater, you’re a human. A human you will remain. The Night Ranger form is simply something that you can transform into when you need wings, or lightning or some such,” Despair said.
“I still want a Griffin,” I insisted.
“I’ll search for one. It will be expensive. You have to imprint them while they’re young. Do not slide to your Ice planet before you see me again. I’ll have a gift that will help you survive there,” Grandpa Liu said.
He flew off into the distance in an instant, taking his entourage with him. He was clean out a sight in a mere instant.
I turned to Cassadore, Vicente and the Yamikazes.
“Thank y’all very much. If I can ever return the favor…” I said.
“You can,” a man with full colonel insignia on the collars of his brown leather motorcycle jacket said.
“We want to be in the distribution pipeline for the goods from other worlds,” he said.
I looked toward Cassadore and Vicente.
“I didn’t tell them. There are ways of knowing such things,” Cassadore said.
Well, my OPSEC leaked like a sieve. Why shouldn’t the Yamikazes ride the gravy train?
************** ****************** ************************
“Stillwater, I lied to you about something,” Despair said.
“We’re mortal beings, living in a fallen world. Even when we speak the truth, we’re lying. What specifically, did you lie to me about?” I said.
“I cannot become a human. That is a mandatory question that a Night Ranger is supposed to ask a potential mate. It is tradition. It isn’t as if you would have failed, if you’d said yes. It would simply have indicated that we would have far more trouble synchronizing. Many Night Rangers would call off a courtship upon getting such a reply,” Despair said.
“Okay, I can accept that—but no more tests. Either we is or we isn’t. No more shillyshallying around,” I said.
I was actually a bit relieved. I found the idea of Despair throwing away her wings, superhuman strength and open-ended lifespan to become a mere human indescribably depressing—even if she’d have been less hideous…
“I love you,” she said.
“Will I really grow big bat wings like yours and be able to fly?” I asked.
“Yes, eventually. That won’t happen until after we consummate our relationship. It takes awhile to learn how to retract the wings when they first manifest—but never mind. Most folks won’t see them, in the same way that they can’t see me,” Despair said.
************ **************** *********************
It would have been a joy spending the next three weeks living in a small house with an 8-foot tall frost giantess and a 7-foot 8-inch Oni…
Except my underground shelter occupies the whole of my lot on the first floor and it has high ceilings. Truth be told, the second and third floor start 35-feet beneath the ground and I intruded past the neighbor’s property lines. It isn’t as if they can put the ground 35-feet down to any constructive purpose.
What? As long as you have a good solid basement to work from, there are all sorts of Outsider contractors that can make you a subterranean base.
“I never dreamed you had such an underground compound under your home,” Despair said.
“There was no reason to tell you until now,” I said.
I hung around the house. I worked on the Slip-sliding exercises. While I couldn’t move on to the next level of slip-sliding until I’d spent the 3-weeks on my first slide site, I could strengthen my body and my theoretical comprehension almost endlessly.
One day, Grandpa Liu arrived.
He didn’t arrive upstairs or knock or anything. He simply materialized in my underground compound…
The showoff!
“I have something for you. Eat all of these before you slide to the rogue planet,” He said.
He placed a large brown crock jar with a lid, on the floor beside him.
“How do you know that I’m sliding to a rogue planet?” I asked.
He shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t mean to be mysterious. The fact remains, I simply know some things,” he said.
“These are the testicles from the frost giants that you and Despair slew, and a couple of extra pairs from…somewhere,” he said vaguely.
“Grandpa Liu, eating Yōkai eyes is one thing. I really wanted psychic powers, but damned nation—there must be twenty of those damned things and each one is as big as a bull’s ball,” I protested.
“They aren’t raw…well…They were soaked in pure Georgia shine, with maple sap, essence of fire ant, ghost pepper, the blood of a Xuanwu, and they steeped in a vat made from a discarded scale from a Bixi. They were left in a space with accelerated time and they have seasoned for over 1000-years,” Grandpa Liu said.
“Why is it so overwhelmingly important that I eat these troublesome things?” I asked.
“Where do frost giants live? Where are you going? These will increase your spirit force—marginally. They will increase your resistance to cold dramatically…And they will give you a minor affinity with frost giants,” Grandpa Liu said.
I could tell that he was equivocating a bit.
“Why in the seven burning Hells would I want to increase my affinity with frost giants!?!” I demanded.
“Yes well…you will see. There are a number of pickled Yōkai eyes here as well. Each time that you finish a ball, you can eat a Yōkai eye as a reward. Enjoy them. Your spirit force is rapidly evolving past the point that Yōkai eyes will do you any good,” he said.
Then like Santa Claus in “The Night Before Christmas” he laid a finger beside of his nose…and vanished.
Pity that there wasn’t a chimney so he could really show off.
I called for Despair.
“I need to eat some shit before we can slip-slide. As long as I’m consuming things that will make me sick, isn’t it about time that I drank a portion of your blood?” I said.
Bonding to Despair was another way to strengthen my body. It appeared that I’d need all my strength before long.
The moment seemed structured that way.
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Post by texican on Dec 12, 2020 16:15:14 GMT -6
rvm,
It is pleasing that your tooth pain has been fixed.
Now, you do live and write a different story line.
Eating Yōkai eyes maybe ok, but Frost Giant nuts definitely not on the menu, but have to be eaten anyway. Can the nuts be fried before eating or does it take away from the transfer of strength and power?
What guys will do to gain more strength and power.
Thanks for the long chapter.
God bless us, America and President Trump. Seems like the demoncraps are destined for power and America will suffer for it.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 12, 2020 16:25:43 GMT -6
rvm, It is pleasing that your tooth pain has been fixed. Now, you do live and write a different story line. Eating Yōkai eyes maybe ok, but Frost Giant nuts definitely not on the menu, but have to be eaten anyway. Can the nuts be fried before eating or does it take away from the transfer of strength and power? What guys will do to gain more strength and power. Thanks for the long chapter. God bless us, America and President Trump. Seems like the demoncraps are destined for power and America will suffer for it. Texican.... The two political Parties are mentioned in the New Testament:
"Publicans and Sinners."
…..RVM45
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Post by texican on Dec 12, 2020 22:02:32 GMT -6
rvm, It is pleasing that your tooth pain has been fixed. Now, you do live and write a different story line. Eating Yōkai eyes maybe ok, but Frost Giant nuts definitely not on the menu, but have to be eaten anyway. Can the nuts be fried before eating or does it take away from the transfer of strength and power? What guys will do to gain more strength and power. Thanks for the long chapter. God bless us, America and President Trump. Seems like the demoncraps are destined for power and America will suffer for it. Texican.... The two political Parties are mentioned in the New Testament:
"Publicans and Sinners."
…..RVM45rvm, The Book does say that there will be a remnant remaining of believers even thru the bad times. We are definitely living in interesting times. Be Ready and Be Prepared. Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 14, 2020 14:32:52 GMT -6
Chapter Eleven
23 236
When I was a small boy—and infrequently through the years—my father would eat clam chowder.
I refused to eat it as a small boy, but I could smell the distinct odor. I don’t know exactly why I refused to eat it back then. I guess that it was just a child’s reluctance to eat something different.
There was a time, when I was a boy, that I really wanted to try octopus and squid.
Then one day, I realized that all mollusk flesh is an abomination, because they are all in the same family as the dread adversary.
If you ever deal with raw testicles, they smell—and probably taste—much like raw oysters on the half shell.
Years ago, when I worked in a slaughterhouse—and I also lifted weights—I asked a veterinarian if eating testicles would raise one’s testosterone level.
See, back then I didn’t have a clue how to find any steroids…
“No, cooking destroys the testosterone,” he said.
Ach ja! There are some cultures that slice them thin and eat them raw, though…
There were beaucoup free sheep’s testicles around the slaughterhouse. They keep poorly. If a customer asked for some, the same day, the owner would give him a few for free—as a sort of good-customer perk. If the balls were still there at the end of the day, they threw them away.
I started eating two or three per week, in an attempt to raise my testosterone level. God, they were gag-worthy though. They seemed to be helping my strength training though.
Then someone—veterinarian, nurse, chemist—just someone that I thought was knowledgeable—told me that digestion also destroys testosterone…
Well duh! How does Dianabol work then?
{Dianabol is an oral steroid very similar to testosterone.}
Anyway, I bought into the idea back then and it was a perfect excuse to quit gagging down sheep balls.
Now I was faced with a 3-gallon brown crock-jar chock-full of frost giant’s balls.
A testicle has a snow-white skin liberally interlaced with very blue veins. I guess that they’re veins. If you skin it, there is a second skin identical to the first. Then you get to some flesh that reminds me of apricot—though it is grayer and less colorful than apricot.
If only it tasted like apricot…
“Do I need to eat the skin?” I asked Despair dubiously.
“No, all the juju is in the flesh,” Despair said.
I got a blender. I put in a quart of buttermilk, three habanero peppers, a few strong spices and some garlic. Then I blended in the mushy flesh until I had an unsavory mixture.
I have always been good at chugging liquids. What was that show where the people had to drink as much raw ostrich egg as they could? I think that I could win that contest. I wouldn’t enjoy chugging raw ostrich egg, but…
I’d enjoy raw ostrich egg more than I enjoyed my foul swill.
There are literally billions of people who enjoy beer. They are welcome to enjoy their beer and mine too. I’m not squeamish about beer, the way that I am about eggs and tea…
But O my brothers, it smells and tastes just like vomit to me. I taste something very like beer when I get sick and heave. Why should I drink something that tastes like my heaves for enjoyment?
On that scale, my concoction tasted better than beer—except it was so much more viscous that it was harder to get it down…
Since the object in either case was to swallow quickly so I didn’t have to taste it.
“Are you a masochist?” Despair asked me.
“I am engaged to you, so I must be. Why do you ask though?” I asked her.
She grabbed one of the frost giant testicles in her hand and shrunk it down to the size of a peanut in the shell.
“Swallow it like a pill. It will gradually resume its full size in your stomach, but the acids should just keep pace with its increase in size—so you don’t end up with something the size of a whole cucumber floating in your stomach,” she said.
“You need to give them a day or two to settle in, before you consume the next one. It would be bad if the spell came undone and you ended up with a dozen big frost giant balls in your stomach at one time,” she said.
“Why, in the seven burning Hells, did you wait until I’d gagged down this devil’s swill before you showed me this!?!”
“I’m not a human, Stillwater. I don’t have a firm handle yet on everything a human may like or do. I thought, until I saw the awful expressions on your face as you drank the mixture, that you were making something that you would enjoy,” Despair explained.
I lounged around my large underground compound, eating pickled Yōkai eyes and swallowing a magically shrunken frost giant’s ball every other day. I studied my slip-slider book and I increased my control and stamina with my spirit sword.
I also played endless games of Chess and Raumschach with Terry. Revna was a neophyte at Chess and Raumschach, but she was a master of Hnefatafl and she taught Terry and me how to play.
It was pointless to play Despair. She was so old, that when God said:
“Let there be light!”
Despair was the one who flipped the switch.
That was a slight exaggeration. She did pull KP for the Last Supper though…
Anyway, her skills at Chess, Raumschach, Hnefatafl, Shogi, Go—even Poker—though I’ve never been into card games—bordered on the uncanny.
Well, to be fair—Terry was over 300-years old, and his Chess skills hadn’t grown in proportion to his age. He was just a fair match for me across the board.
My word, I’m not even 100-years old yet...
Or even 40.
I also imbibed Despair’s blood twice. I had drunk blood before. Blood is blood and it isn’t repugnant or anything.
Despair’s blood made me slightly queasy and it made me see some very insubstantial ethereal visions that I couldn’t clearly perceive—but the effects were nothing like when I’d kissed her the first time.
“You only need one more infusion of blood. We can do that when we’re in your trailer on Ice. It will help pass the time,” Despair said.
“Despair, what exactly is your blood doing to me?” I asked.
“All I know, is that it changes you in such a way that you can be my husband. I really don’t know the specifics. My father was very much a human—but he could call up a Night Ranger form—much like those ‘on-demand’ werewolf transformations. Why do you ask?” Despair said.
“This is embarrassing to discuss. I love you like my best friend, but I’ve wondered how we could consummate. You have never aroused me even slightly,” I said.
“Only now, sometimes I look at you…you’re starting to look good to me. Right now, it is a fleeting sensation. It comes and goes, but for a few seconds, I even get a visitor,” I said.
Despair looked sad.
“Stillwater, I only get one shot at having a mate. When I kissed you, I was irrevocably committed to you. It is either you or no one,” Despair said.
“And? What is the malfunction?” I asked.
“I have to mate with a human. I can’t have children with an Oni or a frost giant, a Yōkai, a dwarf or whatever. It has to be a human,” she said.
“I’m human,” I said.
“You were. You have recklessly consumed all sorts of body parts, minerals and mystic herbs in your life. Now that you have ‘The Slip-Slider’s Manual’ you are starting to evolve,” Despair said.
“I love you and I’ll be with you always—but I’m not at all sure that I can conceive children by you,” Despair said.
She started to cry.
Folks, I am sorry, but I have always believed that blood is thicker than water. Consequently, it is impossible for me to see adoption as anything but a consolation prize for those who cannot conceive.
I know that some people believe quite the opposite. They believe so strongly that some of them will want to try to whip my ass over my belief…
Well, it is my belief and I’ll hold to it. You are welcome to hold to your beliefs. I’m not trying to argue you out of your beliefs.
Nonetheless, I offered this consolation to Despair.
“If we cannot have children, we will adopt—as many as you want. We will snatch frost giant babies that are scheduled to be sacrificed and eaten. There are many orphaned Oni children for some reason. The 3rd world is chock-full of human orphans,” I said.
“We can build an orphanage and raise a gross of children—if you want—2 gross, 3 grosses—whatever it takes to make you happy,” I said.
“Please quit crying, Despair,” I pleaded.
Now, nothing that we said just now was particularly private. I was a little embarrassed to state in public, that the sight of Despair was starting to give me wood—however fleetingly—but not embarrassed enough to wait until Terry and Revna were out of earshot.
Terry’s horns started glowing. They were giving out a very intense psychedelic blur aura. The blue aura persisted for about 3-minutes and then Terry collapsed to the floor.
I dragged him until he could sit with his back to the wall, so he would have a backrest.
Terry was a close friend and I had some furniture purpose built to accommodate him when he visited—though I hadn’t yet shown him my place before the crisis. That is why my basement had 10-foot ceilings.
There was a bed, a couch and a couple of chaises built to accommodate an Oni. Terry weighed…what? 500, 600-Pounds? He was too unwieldly for me to put on his bed or on the couch when he was as limp as a dishrag.
Terry revived after a few moments.
“Some Blue Oni receive premonitions about the future. I am one of those Oni,” Terry said.
“Blue Oni with the gift of prophesy are expected to become priests. The priests vow to abstain from meat, alcohol and violence. They also vow to abstain from sex and just to help them keep that vow, they become eunuchs,” Terry said.
“My people wouldn’t force anyone to become a priest, but leaving the Oni territory while possessing the gift of prophecy—let’s just say that I had to fight my way out and I left more than one of my kinsmen dying in the wake of my leaving,” Terry said.
“Should I be a prisoner in one small prefect, my whole life, just because I have a blessing—or an affliction—depending on how you look at it?” Terry said in a daze.
“Stillwater, the future isn’t set in stone. You’re like a man on a tightrope and all sorts of unforeseen things can knock you off your cable of destiny,” Terry said.
“Very little of the multi-dimensional timelines that I saw are translatable into human speech—into any speech. Even if they could be, they wouldn’t be helpful,” Terry said.
“However, I foresaw a time—if you and Despair manage to survive the many obstacles between you and your destiny—where you have many, many children. I saw at least 17 while the future path of you two stretched far beyond what I could glimpse—even dimly,” Terry said.
Terry hesitated.
“What else, Terry? Spit it out,” I said.
“Your children won’t be human. They won’t be Night Rangers either. They will be something new in the multiverse—at least in this local sheath of timelines,” Terry said.
“A new species? I don’t give a rat’s ass. Do you?” I asked Despair.
She was in rapture, thinking about finally being able to bear children. I don’t think that it would drag her beat too much, if you told her that her children would all be Lamia like Ixtli.
“Did you see anything about us?” Revna asked.
“Our destiny is inextricably bound to the geas of Stillwater and Despair,” Terry told her.
Revna shrugged she liked me and she doted on Despair. She didn’t see having her geas tied to ours as a bad thing—quite the opposite.
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Post by sniper69 on Dec 14, 2020 15:26:19 GMT -6
Thanks for the latest chapters. This story is getting interesting, as well as taking a few twists and turns. I can hardly wait for the next chapter.
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Post by texican on Dec 14, 2020 15:58:47 GMT -6
rvm,
Eating testicles is not so bad except for the taste and squirting, kind of like chewing raw oysters which I did until I quit raw oysters due to a morgue doctor telling me that oysters are the sewage eaters of the ocean and have more bacteria, viruses and diseases than any other animal. He did state that frying the oysters kills the bacteria, viruses and diseases.
You are so cruel to force Stillwell to drink the testicle slurpy.
When I was a young teenager, I got a very bad throat infection and my grandmother gave me these flat round lozenges (Sucrets?) that smelt horrible and tasted worse, but they worked and I got better. Grandmother would take one occasionally and when I smelled it, it would turn my stomach.
Thank for the chapter.
It appears that the demoncraps will take the White House unless something completely unforeseen happens to save us.
May God continue to bless us, America and President Trump.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 14, 2020 23:11:22 GMT -6
Chapter Twelve
25 321
It was time to slip-slide me and my thermos trailer to Ice.
Ice was a rogue planet drifting between solar systems, without a sun but it had captured a moon at some point in its endless wandering. You would expect the place to be pitch black, but something gave a faint glow giving just enough light to see—dimly.
I was very disappointed to see the pictures of Pluto’s surface. I had pictured endless vistas of beautiful blue-white ice in gentle rounded hills, stretching as far as the eye could see. Instead, Pluto looked like the spoil bank of a stripper pit.
I wasn’t disappointed in Ice. I had pictured it looking like a gravel quarry in red Kaintuck soil—and it did. It was one of the most uninteresting places that I have ever seen.
Except, I could sense many, many people toward one point of the compass.
I wanted to try my air-lock once, just to see if it worked. I also wanted to try my spacesuit outside in the frigid frozen-air atmosphere.
Despair went out with me, to make sure that I would be safe and to snatch me back to Earth at a moment’s notice if my suit didn’t perform adequately.
“See! I don’t need air to breath, to fly or to talk to you—and the cold means nothing to me,” Despair boasted.
She made snowballs and threw them or made snow angels in the solid nitrogen. Then she soared high overhead and swooped down.
“How can you fly and talk without air?” I asked from inside my suit.
She heard me, nonetheless.
“It is chi or juju; some folks call it Manitou. It is the same force that gives that dim glow that you can just barely see,” Despair said.
The suit worked fine. The thermos trailer worked fine. It was somewhat boring inside the trailer. I had bought several books, a computer and a stand-alone Chess playing machine.
I drank the last dose of Despair’s blood and in the aftermath, I made a half-hearted pass at her.
“You know that the time for that has not yet come,” she repulsed my advances gently.
“An average human at your level of accommodation would die, if he made love to a Night Ranger. I don’t think that you would die. You’re astonishingly resilient. However, I won’t risk your life that way,” Despair said.
I calmed down and started behaving like a gentleman as the last of the psychedelic effects of Despair’s blood wore off.
“We need to be married when we return. When it is time, I want to have a clear conscious,” I said.
“Stillwater, I can’t get a marriage license. I’m a non-person,” Despair said.
“Who needs a license from the government to get married? A marriage is a sacred contract between a man, a woman and God. I don’t know how the state decided it had the right to stick its big nose into the affair. I know at least 20 ministers of the Gospel who would be willing to marry us in the sight of God,” I told her.
************* ***************** *************************
Now stop and think. Ice is big—a bit bigger than the Earth. It turned out that there were 169 cites where people survived. That is a lot of empty territory between settlements.
The closest one was about 3100-miles away. Despair could fly a little over 175-miles per hour while carrying me, but my air and my warmth would only last about 6-hours.
Then I would slide back to Earth to recharge.
However, after slip-sliding twice—while carrying Despair and wearing my suit, I needed about 30-hours to recover. It would take even longer to recover if I moved large objects like my thermos trailer.
Note: slides tend to come in pairs. If I could move The Queen Mary to Ice, I’d still be able to zip back home on a moment’s notice. I might have to rest for 3-months or more, if it was even possible to move something so massive, but I could zip back—alone.
Sure, Despair could travel to Ice under her own power—if I didn’t mind her being anywhere within a 30-mile radius of me—with no idea where to find me…
Also: I couldn’t use slip-sliding to teleport from point to point on the planet’s surface.
If I wanted to move my thermos trailer—for instance—from Point “X” to Point “Y”, then I need to slide to the trailer at Point “X.” I need to bring the trailer back to Earth; rest several days and then slip-slide it to Point “Y.”
Figure it out yourself. We could travel about 1000-miles every 48-hours—a bit more, but that makes nice numbers. It took us almost a week to get to the city.
My vision had given me the languages spoken on Ice and a fair understanding of their agriculture and technology. It had not shown me where the cities were. It hadn’t told me the names of the cities or where the entrances were for each city.
The city that Despair and I first visited, had been named their word for “Advance.” But over the centuries, the ugly chops had set in and the name had gotten shortened to “Vance.”
I HATE ugly chops! It is a tarpaulin, not a “tarp.” It is a delicatessen, not a “deli.” They are side orders, not “sides.”
And you Europeans, stop referring to soccer as “football.” Soccer is soccer—only football is football! And for the love of God, quit omitting the word “The” before “THE University”; “THE Hospital” and “THE Ambulance.” And curse the Metric System to the deepest level of Hell!
Anyway, Despair and I circled around the general area until we found an airlock.
They had a paramilitary cluster-bump for awhile and then they rolled out the red carpet for us. At least, they rolled out the red carpet for me.
They didn’t seem able to see Despair at all. She was like the 5th Dimension to them. They just couldn’t see it—or her.
They hustled us into the presence of the mayor—I guess that’s what you’d call him, and several of his cabinet members, high ranking scientists and engineers.
I wasn’t intimidated, once I had my suit off. I was suitably armed and I could pop back to Earth on a moment’s notice.
Despair? Despair was quite capable of popping back to Earth all on her own.
Of course, if I popped back without my suit, I would lose it. I wouldn’t need my suit to slip-slide back to the city though. If the city fathers caused me to lose my suit, I’d retaliate by destroying 10 000 maybe 100 000 times the value of the suit by importing tons of explosives into the city. Then I’d simply move on to negotiate with the next city.
Crimes against people can sometimes be forgiven. Crimes against property—like costing me my hard-to-come-by spacesuit—crosses my bottom line.
These dudes wanted to play nice though.
“You arrived at our gates without any sort of vehicle. The only possible answer is that you’re an inter-dimensional traveler. Our mathematicians have advised us that this was highly likely to happen in the next 700-years, or so. I never completely believed—and to think that it happened on my watch,” he enthused.
“Well, I’m hardly omniscient, but I do have some knowledge of your cities and your civilization. I have to say, I think that what you’re most sadly lacking here, is agricultural products, both horticultural products and domestic livestock,” I said.
I had several books with me—leather bound and on archival quality paper, professionally printed…
In the main language used on Ice.
Yeah, it cost a bit for custom printing and binding. I bit the bullet and had the books made. You cannot bargain from a position of strength when you present yourself like Lil’ Abner.
Ice agriculture seemed to limp along on just a handful of plants and animals.
They raised turnips, carrots and something like a daikon in the soil. Above ground, they had a grain similar to soybeans, grapes, strawberries and a half-dozen lettuce-like plants, including a couple with much thicker leaves than lettuce.
They had guinea pigs, rabbits and something that looked like a 40-pound capybara and some large milk goats.
That was it. The diet on Ice was nutritious enough, but incomparably bland.
Okay, let’s add potatoes, radishes, onions and garlic below the ground. Then just for fun, lets add in some sugar beets.
Potatoes are very nutritious and they can be grown in a very small patch of ground. You can survive on almost nothing but potatoes with an occasional bit of meat and milk thrown in.
I might comment on the idiocy of not including potatoes in the original lineup, but who knew if potatoes had ever even existed on this world?
Radishes are good for little except to garnish a salad, but hey, these people are flavor deprived.
Onions and garlic will spice up the cuisine tremendously. Both onions and garlics have some substances that are supposed to be low-grade anti-biotics, though I don’t know how important something like that is on a very high-tech world like Ice.
Sugar beets? Do you know how much that reasonable quantities of affordable white sugar—sucrose—can spice up the diet?
Above ground:
Peanuts, sunflower seeds, tomatoes, yellow squash, bell peppers, mint, sage, oregano, rosemary and anise.
Throw in blackberries, apples and pecans.
There was already a wine industry of sorts. Blackberry would be a slight change of pace from grape or strawberry wine. Once the sugar industry was off to the races, there should be blackberry, strawberry and grape jelly too.
Apple trees are fairly fast growing and the wood is usable for a number of purposes. Pecan trees are much slower growing, but having pecan groves would be O, so fine.
Pecan wood isn’t the absolute best wood, but it isn’t bad. These dudes needed to be gradually turned on to the beauty of lumber. There was no wood here. Everything was metal or plastic.
I also had articles and photos of oyster, shiitake and portabella mushrooms and white proso millet as well as white and red clover—of course, clover requires bees to pollinate.
Why? Because I intended to sell them hard on chickens—both laying chickens and fryers, sparrows and pigeons…
Millet is prime bird seed. Clover is great guinea pig, rabbit and goat fodder and red clover can be eaten in salads in moderation.
What? People eat sparrows some places. I saw Andrew Zimmer on TV, eating sparrows in Vietnam. They put the whole bird in their mouths and crunch it all up at one time.
Both pigeon and sparrow eggs are considered delicacies some places. No, I don’t like eggs, but I’m in the minority. Besides, egg is a very good emulsifier. I have nothing against eating a cake or a pudding that includes eggs.
Yeah, there were many other plants and animals that I could have included: okra, sweet potatoes, corn, wheat, rye, oats, rice, habanero, jalapeño, cherry pepper. Gooseberry…
Cabbage, celery, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and rhubarb.
There are peach, pear, plum, apricot and cherry trees—as well as almond and walnut trees, hickory, gingko biloba trees, persimmon and mulberry, not to mention wood trees like oak and elm.
There are also turkeys, pheasants, guinea hens, ducks and geese—not to mention ostrich.
Cows, pigs, sheep…
But I wasn’t ready to reveal all my cards at one time. Besides, it would take a full run to bring a large number of—say chickens—through at one time. I might devote several runs just to bringing in laying hens—and roosters, of course.
Even then, it would take a generation to test the concept and then breed enough chickens to make them freely available to everyone—and chickens are relatively fast multipliers.
If I only brought a gross of every breed of bird that I could think of, it would take far longer to take hold. The same for other animals and myriad plants.
The books explained the properties of the plants and animals that I intended to bring, nutritional information and instructions how to plant or raise the assorted products.
There were even some books about basic woodworking, carving and wood sculpture.
When I started bringing in step-vans’ worth of cargo at one time, I needed to bring in some samples of small wood carvings and some few pieces of fancy night tables and such.
This society sadly lacked any luxury goods.
“Dudes, let me explain something to you. Have your mathematicians studied the mathematics of games? No? Well then, let me explain the strategy of ‘tit-for-tat’,” I said.
“We’re going to trade and I’m going to trust you. I’m going to deliver a number of plants and animals to you, under the assumption that you’ll be honest and pay what you agreed—though payment may be deferred awhile,” I said.
“It will be very simple for you to take my merchandise and not pay what you owe. However, there are considerable advantages to continuing to deal with me. I have crap that you cannot even dream of,” I said.
“The very first time that you screw me out of so much as a nickel, I’ll cut my loses and deal with one of the other cities exclusively,” I said.
I wanted three products from my high-tech clients at the beginning.
Jeff Cooper once said that what we needed was a concealable pistol capable of shooting a small, very hard projectile at Mach III—about 3376 feet per second.
I gifted the engineers a Wildey in .45 Magnum and 2000-rounds. I gave them a couple of manuals about firearms mechanisms translated into their language and I gave them a big double handful of .20 caliber, 30-grain tungsten carbide bullets.
I wanted a pistol no larger than the Wildey. I wanted it all metal, except the grips—no plastics. I wanted it to launch those .20 caliber bullets at 3600 feet per second—and I wanted them in quantity—75 000 0f them.
Second, I wanted a drug that would drastically increase the rate and the ease that one could learn—kinda like a real-life “Unlimited” drug but without the side effects of the fictional drug.
Third, I gifted them several cutting edge desk tops, a couple hundred microchips and a couple hundred portable hard drives—along with several translations of books on computer chip architecture and overall computer architecture.
I wanted faster chips. I wanted faster hard drives with more storage space and I wanted programs that maximize the current hardware to the fullest extent possible.
I preferred chips that I could make on Earth, but never mind. If the chips could not be manufactured with our current technology, importing a few million and selling them at fire sale prices should kick the silicone valley badger in the ass.
Yeah, my next few months were little more than being a damned teamster, ferrying large amounts of plants and farm animals to Vance.
************ ************** *********************
“I want to contact a few more cities soon,” I said to Despair.
“Flying you to those cities is very time consuming. If y0u could haul your home around with you, you wouldn’t have to head back to Earth every time that you wanted to get more oxygen bottles and warm your hands,” Despair said.
“And how, pray tell, would I do that!?!” I said.
“You could redesign your thermos trailer to be a true sleigh. I mean, you’ve crossed that Rubicon with this trailer—but the next one…”
“And how in Hell would I pull my thermos sleigh?” I asked.
“Magic flying reindeer,” Despair said.
“Don’t shit me, Despair.”
“I can’t shit you. You’re too big of a turd. No, seriously! There is a dwarf-frost giant hybrid who lives in Lapland amongst the Saami and he sells magic flying reindeer. I ain’t bull-shittin’,” Despair swore.
I never thought that I’d hear a haint from the Realm of Nightmare use the words:
“I ain’t bull-shittin’!”
Magic flying reindeer! Hells belles and cockleshells!
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Post by texican on Dec 15, 2020 20:00:17 GMT -6
Thanks rvm.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 16, 2020 0:04:31 GMT -6
Friends.
I left out two of the most infuriating Ugly Chops:
It is a Tomahawk—NOT a "Hawk"!
They are Nunchaku—NOT "Nun-Chucks"!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know, even respected Martial Arts instructors have been brainwashed…
But whenever I hear the butchered term "Nun-Chucks" I picture the speaker as an inbred, drooling microcephalic with a mouthful of rotten, crooked teeth—with several missing…
…..RVM45
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Post by sniper69 on Dec 16, 2020 6:53:30 GMT -6
Friends.
I left out two of the most infuriating Ugly Chops:
It is a Tomahawk—NOT a "Hawk"!
They are Nunchaku—NOT "Nun-Chucks"!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know, even respected Martial Arts instructors have been brainwashed…
But whenever I hear the butchered term "Nun-Chucks" I picture the speaker as an inbred, drooling microcephalic with a mouthful of rotten, crooked teeth—with several missing…
…..RVM45 OR when I hear someone say rectum, I sometimes giggle like a school boy. When asked what is so funny, I say the old joke, I had two ATV's but then I rectum. Edit to add a picture of something similar for your enjoyment.
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Post by rvm45 on Dec 16, 2020 12:32:28 GMT -6
Friend,
Locally, there is a story—told as true—but probably apocryphal…
Dude on the witness stand,
"And then the truck came around the corner and hit her right in the ASS…"
"OBJECTION!!!"
After the third repetition, the Judge instructs the witness to use the word "Rectum."
"Rectum Hell! It KILLED 'EM!!!!!!"
Yeah, the old folks told that story. I may be the only one who remembers it today.
I spend more and more time feeling like the voice-over narrator at the end of "Roadwarrior." Too many people and places now "Live Only in My Memories."
The redneck fellow in the picture looks kinda cute and engaging whereas Ugly Chops make me WANT to slap someone's face.
You will find a number of "U" Tube comments on Camping and Survival posts where I angrily take someone to task for calling a Tarpaulin a "Tarp."
"Are you so close to the ragged edge of exhaustion, that using a couple more syllables to say the word correctly, would push you right over the EDGE!??!!" I tell them.
…..RVM45
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