u/IglooAndYou

Critique 1 (1405)

Critique 2 (1282)

Chapter 1 Spoiler: The SMAKAPZ gang, Sam, Kevin, Mogers, Zagers, Parage, and Apalabamo, are eating together at a local restaurant, and Sam and Kevin are telling the rest of the rest of the gang about their recent mission in the Middle East, where Sam and Kevin got beaten by a friend of the gang, Jordan, because of a dispute. During the conversation, Sam pulls Kevin aside and insists they come clean to the group, and reveal that while on that mission, they secretly used the old rocket and crashed it after encountering a space monster and an asteroid. Back at the SMAKAPZ house basement, Sam declares he can fix the now-split-in-half rocket overnight, despite skepticism from the rest of the gang.

Chapter 2 Spoiler: After the gang goes to bed, Sam races against time to buy repair materials from the massive superstore Alademipaburg before it closes. Thanks to the gang’s reputation as big-spending notorious customers, a sympathetic cashier lets him take everything for free. He also gets 200 pounds of materials gifted from the local factory. Sam then spends the entire night in the basement attempting an ambitious solo repair on the two massive halves of the rocket. Despite his exhaustive efforts and engineering skill, the rocket ultimately fails catastrophically at 5 AM, shearing apart again and leaving Sam exhausted and defeated.

Chapter 3 Spoiler: The next morning, the gang gathers in the basement to inspect Sam's failed rocket repair, which leads to a heated argument. The argument is interrupted by a knock on the door, a guy named Zaine answers in a suit and tie with a folder of papers, and claims there's a property dispute and that he has a license from the city saying he owns their property, and he orders them to vacate within three days. The gang panics until Zagers finds out the license is fake, and that the guy tried to scam them. Zaine said he'd return the next day for a daily property inspection, so the gang waits, and Parage turns one of Sam's tools he bought into a laser gun just in case something goes wrong tomorrow.

Chapter 4 Spoiler: That night, after the gang goes to bed, Sam leaves the house to go grab some supplies at his place, and runs into Parage downstairs, who shows him the new laser gun. At his house, Sam greets his younger brother, Asa. After Sam leaves, Asa sneaks out into the rainy night to compete in an underground poker game and make a weapons deal. The next morning, Zaine returns to the SMAKAPZ house, but when the gang confronts him, Zaine is able to detect Parage's concealed laser gun with his hidden special headband. He then reveals all the tech hidden under his suit and jacket, and triggers an explosion, knocking the gang to the ground. He then absorbs a laser blast from Parage, and flies off.

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“Go go go!” I screamed as me, Mogers, and Zagers ran after Zaine, punching the air, still half-blinded by the smoke that was rising from the crater. We dashed towards the forest, following the direction Zaine was streaking towards above the treetops.

The chase was on. Unfortunately, before any of us even reached the forest, we were all hunched over, hands on our knees, panting.

“Guys, I have a better idea,” Mogers huffed, wiping sweat off his brow.

We looped back around, and jogged to the land in front of the SMAKAPZ house where Kevin, Parage, and Apalabamo were regaining their energy, surveying the sky and watching Zaine blast off into the horizon.

“I don’t know what the heck just happened, but we’re gonna track him down!” wheezed Zagers. “You guys stay here and guard the place.”

Once we reached the front of the house, Mogers asked, “Who’s van should we take?”

I stopped in my tracks. “Wait a second.”

Mogers and Zagers turned to look at me.

“The vans,” I remembered. “That guy saw them. I mean, he likely did. He was at our door, he probably saw them while pulling up.”

“So what?” replied Mogers. “Zaine is flying too high and fast to notice anybody on the ground following him. Even if he does, vehicles travel in these woods all the time. I doubt he’d suspect a plain white van driving in the forest, and he wouldn’t be able to focus on it enough to deduce that it’s following him.”

“Yeah, but we can’t take any risks,” I explained, looking towards the vans parked across from our house. “He saw the vans. Guess what we own that he didn’t see…”

Our retros were sitting on the back side of the SMAKAPZ house, where the road met the forest. That was the name we’d given the red bike-motorcycle hybrid-like vehicles the gang used as a means of transportation, although it had been a while since we’d actually ridden them anywhere.

We each hopped on. It would’ve been better if we had our helmets for protection and to further help us hide our identities, but we were already cutting it close and didn’t have enough time to go into the house and look for them. We had had enough to go inside and grab a pair of binoculars, though, since we already knew where those were. I turned my key to the “on” position, flipped the engine kill switch to “run,” pulled the clutch lever, and pressed the starter button, then hit the gas as we blazed off into the forest.

We headed after the direction Zaine had gone in, tires kicking up gravel as we followed the trail of smoke cutting through the treeline. We also caught fleeting glimpses of the jetpack’s blue flame flashing, which meant we were right on his tail as we biked deeper into the forest.

We rode through brush and over sticks, tracking the sky. Branches scraped the sides of our retros like claws. The culprit had taken us northwest of our house, which was mostly the forest behind it, miles of dense oak and scrub pine that backed up against the old reservoir. There weren’t any roads or anything, it was all woods for ages. We knew them inside and out, but Zaine was taking us pretty dang far. In fact, after a while, I didn’t recognize where I was at anymore, and I don’t think Mogers and Zagers did, either. We were in uncharted territory.

Suddenly, in the distance, I saw the smoke curve downwards, and what looked like Zaine dropping into the trees.

“There,” I said. “Ok, let’s get out, y’all.”

We ditched our retros and dumped them on some trees, then continued on foot. We were deep in the wilderness. No sign of civilization, and if I’d brought my phone, there wouldn’t be any signal on it.

“Be very quiet,” I whispered as we moved low and silently through the thick woods, heading in the direction we watched the perpetrator land at. “And remember, Zaine isn’t the only thing out here. Bears, coyotes. Let’s be on the lookout.”

We trudged through the grove, twigs snapping under our feet, which sounded thunderous in contrast to the surrounding silence. After 10 tense minutes, a structure came into view. It was a large building, tucked deep into the forest where there was no way anybody could happen to just casually stumble across it.

Me, Mogers, and Zagers exchanged looks.

”Well, that looks like a lair,” said Zagers.

This was a building that had no business being in the middle of the woods. The closer we got, the more bizarre it appeared. I was starting to make out prefabricated metal panels, antennae, solar arrays, and ventilation pipes, along with wires running along the exterior walls. There weren’t any windows on the near side, and I saw a single heavy door with a keypad on it. There were also power lines scattered around, but I couldn’t tell where they ran in from.

We moved closer and slower, until we reached the far side of the building where a single window was there, low in the wall. It was narrow, but still wide enough for me to peer inside.

The interior of the house was even wilder than the exterior. It was a single large room with racks of weapons and glowing power cells inside. Workbenches ran along two walls, covered in equipment, and casings and circuit assemblies were arranged in not the neatest way. The jetpack was already racked on a mount near the back wall, folded and charging, and a green indicator light was shining onto the housing. Along the right wall, mounted in rows, were devices of varying size and shape. Zaine was there, sitting at a metal desk, scribbling onto a large piece of paper.

I took out the binoculars, raising them up to my eyes, and saw what he was writing come into focus. I saw detailed observations of the SMAKAPZ house jotted down on the paper. Things like driveway width, sight lines from the porch, which windows face which direction. It wasn’t useful to us at all, but apparently it was useful to him.

“What the heck is he writing?” Zagers asked.

A moment passed, and then I tapped him on the shoulder, handing him the binoculars. “Notes,” I answered. “About the house, about us. Pretty mundane stuff, actually.”

Zagers lifted up the binoculars, angling them through the glass. He read.

“Hmm, front yard destroyed, mailbox damaged… well, too bad for him, we don’t get any mail anyway!”

“Does he think that little bit of land he blew up equates to ‘front yard destroyed?’” Mogers scoffed, grabbing the binoculars. “Yeah, yeah, boring, boring, boring. Well, this was a waste of time.”

“Nothing else on there?” I asked.

Mogers moved the binoculars slightly.

“Yeah,” he suddenly said. “Actually, yeah. Bottom of the page.”

“Huh?”

Mogers handed the binoculars across without a word.

I raised them, and found the window, desk, and pad again. I tracked down to the bottom of the page, and there, below the messy notes, written in pen with big, red numbering, was the time “12:00,” underlined twice.

I narrowed my eyes. “Looks like we know what time Zaine’s next visit is.”

Before we could see more, Zaine suddenly moved. He turned from the desk to get up, and his body swung toward the window.

“He’s coming!” I shouted, dropping the binoculars from my eyes. “Run!!”

The three of us turned around and dashed back through the trees, branches whipping at our faces. Adrenaline surged as we found our retros, then hopped on, peeling away and bursting through the forest.

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The crater in the front of the SMAKAPZ house was still there, but I figured we’d find a way to take care of it eventually. The others were inside, and looked up when the three of us came through the door.

“So what happened?” asked Kevin, blinking at us.

“Noon,” I said, plopping a backpack down on the table. “That’s when he’s making his next visit.”

“Well, dang,” Kevin checked his watch. It was 8:34 AM. “That’s not too far from now.”

We all gathered together in the living room, and began discussing our options. Zagers laid everything out. He told them about the forest, the lair, all the equipment and tech that Zaine owned, and the notes about the house.

“So, tech-boy’s gonna show up at our house this afternoon, and he’s likely got something planned,” Mogers told everyone. “What he doesn’t know is that we’ll be fully ready for him. For the first time since this started, we have something he doesn’t, which is, well, we’re aware that he’s coming.”

“And he doesn’t know that we know,” added Parage.

“So what’s the plan?” Apollo asked.

It was simple. At noon, when Zaine came knocking on our door, we’d answer it. Then, before he could even get any of his words out, press any button, or do anything, someone would hit him with a sledgehammer, knocking him out cold on the porch. One crisp swing to the head. Then, we’d strip every piece of gear, every device off of him, including his jetpack, headband, explosives, and everything else he was hiding under that suit and jacket. After that, we’d drag him into the cage that we had previously kept the Cheese Rocket in. Wait for him to wake up, then once he’s conscious, we’d give him an ultimatum: either hand over half of his tech and gear, or Parage would melt the rest into slag with his laser gun. We’d also tell him to stop the scams, the property grabs, the fake licenses, whatever he’s running on whoever else he’s running it on, and tell him to stop hurting people and blowing them up.

Zagers cracked his knuckles after hearing the plan. “It’s risky, but hey, if we pull it off, he’s done for.”

“I’ve been hit by a sledgehammer before,” proclaimed Mogers. “Which means I have the most experience.” He was right, during our original adventure with the now-demolished Cheese Rocket, we’d landed on an asteroid and one of Zolo’s henchmen knocked him out clean with a sledgehammer from the back.

“What?” Apollo was puzzled. “That’s like saying-“

“Well, like, since it was used on me, I should have a better idea of the angle and stuff,” Mogers sat back in his chair. “Whatever, like Zagers said, it does sound pretty risky, but if the one behind the sledgehammer is me, I feel like our odds would go up a little.”

“Yeah, we’ll see.” I checked my watch. 8:40. The hours until noon suddenly felt like they were right around the corner.

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Asa moved through the aisles of the weapons store now with almost as much familiarity as his older brother moved through the Alademipaburg domain. He methodically pulled his items from the shelves, then when he was finished, set them on the counter; two budget 9mm semi-automatic pistols, one pump-action 12 gauge shotgun, and a couple boxes of ammo, cleaning kits, and basic accessories like holsters, sights, and slings.

“Good eye, kid,” the man behind the counter said. “That’ll be $1800.”

Asa reached into the duffel bag and paid with cash, taking the man by surprise.

Back home, the house quiet with his older brother still out, Asa dropped the bag on his desk. His eyes caught onto the old photo on the wall. It was a picture of him and his older brother, years younger, doing some outdoor thing in the summer. Sam had to be about the age Asa was now, the height difference still remaining the same. They were standing there and smiling, Sam’s arm around his shoulder. Asa stared at it for a long moment, and then looked away.

He unzipped his duffel bag. It had a center divider that ran full length, and the two halves didn’t touch. On the left side were the weapons, wrapped in cloth with each one in its own sleeve. On the right side was the money, which was banded and divided further into two stacks held apart by a leather insert. His poker winnings, which he used to buy weapons, were on one side, and the money from his weapons selling, which he used to place poker bets, was on the other. All belonging to the same stash of money, yet separated by intent and origin.

Asa tugged out the weapons, zipped the bag closed, and started working. He knew he needed to find a middle ground between not making his ‘upgrades’ too extreme, after all, the last thing he’d want is to get the feds’ attention when it came to this operation. But he still needed to double or triple the amount of money he spent.

He installed red dot sights, budget models that he’d bought separately, onto the pistols, and a basic reflex sight on the shotgun. He swapped the factory grips for aftermarket textured ones with better finger grooves. He also added magazine extensions on the pistols for higher capacity. And for the finishing touches, Asa applied durable Cerakote style spray, with a flat black pattern, for corrosion resistance along with a cool and tactical look. He also surpressed reflections on metal parts with matte tape and paint.

After that, he thoroughly cleaned, deburred, and lubricated everything, and performed basic reliability testing with the ammo he bought, function checks, 100-200 round break-in per firearm. He then added a side saddle shell holder, extended the magazine tube to the legal limit, and installed a shorter barrel for maneuverability, cut and crowned.

Asa also did plenty of internal work, which wouldn’t show from the outside, but a person who knew what they were holding would feel it in the first three seconds. When the last piece was done, he set it on the cloth and looked at the row of weapons. He’d taken all those plain guns, and transformed them into something deadlier, chopping off their common-man innocence and replacing it with upgraded fierceness, formidability, and rebellion. They were better. Not in a way that was visible to most people, but to the right people.

He then picked up the engraving tool, and, with careful strokes, carved “M.A.” into either the slide or grip of every weapon. His signature, his logo. The logo of Massive A. Because Massive A was a brand now.

He then picked up his phone, went to Messages, and selected Sam. 

“I got some big things tonight”

His thumb hovered over send. Then, he looked at the words for a moment, and deleted them.

Critique (2900)

Chapter 1 Spoiler: The SMAKAPZ gang, Sam, Kevin, Mogers, Zagers, Parage, and Apalabamo, are eating together at a local restaurant, and Sam and Kevin are telling the rest of the rest of the gang about their recent mission in the Middle East, where Sam and Kevin got beaten by a friend of the gang, Jordan, because of a dispute. During the conversation, Sam pulls Kevin aside and insists they come clean to the group, and reveal that while on that mission, they secretly used the old rocket and crashed it after encountering a space monster and an asteroid. Back at the SMAKAPZ house basement, Sam declares he can fix the now-split-in-half rocket overnight, despite skepticism from the rest of the gang.

Chapter 2 Spoiler: After the gang goes to bed, Sam races against time to buy repair materials from the massive superstore Alademipaburg before it closes. Thanks to the gang’s reputation as big-spending notorious customers, a sympathetic cashier lets him take everything for free. He also gets 200 pounds of materials gifted from the local factory. Sam then spends the entire night in the basement attempting an ambitious solo repair on the two massive halves of the rocket. Despite his exhaustive efforts and engineering skill, the rocket ultimately fails catastrophically at 5 AM, shearing apart again and leaving Sam exhausted and defeated.

Chapter 3 Spoiler: The next morning, the gang gathers in the basement to inspect Sam's failed rocket repair, which leads to a heated argument. The argument is interrupted by a knock on the door, a guy named Zaine answers in a suit and tie with a folder of papers, and claims there's a property dispute and that he has a license from the city saying he owns their property, and he orders them to vacate within three days. The gang panics until Zagers finds out the license is fake, and that the guy tried to scam them. Zaine said he'd return the next day for a daily property inspection, so the gang waits, and Parage turns one of Sam's tools he bought into a laser gun just in case something goes wrong tomorrow.

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It was nighttime at the SMAKAPZ house. The clock was about to turn 11, and the gang had already gone to bed an hour ago. I had, too, but then realized that I should probably go make a quick stop at my place to grab my phone charger and some other materials.

I slid out of bed and threw my jacket on, then headed downstairs, the keys to the house already in my hand. The living room was dark, besides the blue glow of the TV that nobody remembered to turn off. I turned the corner into the hallway, where I nearly collided into Parage, who looked like he had just come up from the basement.

“Woah!” I exclaimed, surprised, and then saw he was holding something in his hand, though I couldn’t fully tell what it was with the dim light of the room. I looked at it, then at Parage, and then back at the object.

“Is that my thermometer?”

Parage smirked proudly. “…I made a couple adjustments.”

Parage led me to the SMAKAPZ basement and opened the door. Then, from the top of the stairs, using only the faint illumination from whatever tech tools he was using, which brought a soda can that was barely in shooting angle weakly into view… he fired.

A bright red beam of light zapped straight at the can, scorching it. The can, like the last one, melted into a burning mess and exploded into a ball of flames.

I laughed. “Well, look at that!”

I held up a hand, and Parage immediately slapped it, creating a perfect smack. “Now that could come in handy!” I said in awe.

“Yup.“ Parage grinned confidently. “Calibrated and ready to fry some fake property bums. If needed, that is.”

“Wonderful.” I turned to the burning ball of aluminum downstairs that was lighting up the SMAKAPZ basement. “B-but you just started a-“

The flames died down as I watched the soda from the can put out its own fire.

“…Oh. Well, nice work!”

I clapped Parage on the shoulder, adjusted my jacket, and headed for the door.

“Awesome,” Parage thought to himself. “I got to do that again, but with someone actually watching.”

My house was a ten minute drive, which I was able to do in five because there was no traffic, I knew every light on the route, and speed was my modus operandi on the road. I parked the van in front of my house, let myself in through the front, and tossed the keys on the table. , my little brother, was there, doing whatever.

“Sup Asa,” I greeted, ruffling his hair. Asa was either one or two years younger than me, I think one right now. However, he was a good bit shorter. I slapped him on the back, then went to go get my phone charger and everything else I needed.

“Why are you up so late?” I asked him once I returned from my room. 

“Ahh, well,” Asa shrugged. “Just thought I’d get a few more hours in. Also checking the house lights and stuff.”

“There ya go,” I said, slapping him on the back again, then heading out the front door, hopping into my van, and driving off into the night.

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Asa killed the TV and then looked out the window until the van’s taillights disappeared. He then put on a black windbreaker jacket and fedora, and slipped out the back door.

Like his older brother, Asa knew the way around this city like the back of his hand. He was now trekking through the underbelly. The air smelled like cigarettes, and the yellow-orange street lamps spread a golden hue onto the avenue. The light rain was now picking up, which slicked the asphalt, and the puddles glowed pink and green from the light of the neon signs above. Asa walked through the streets without hesitation, his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker.

Weller Street was his destination. A stairwell behind an old restaurant led to a private room not known by the average resident. He pushed open the unmarked door of the shabby basement and slid in, smelling smoke and a faint dry cleaner scent as well.

5 poker players were slumped over the green table under just one hanging lightbulb. The sound of voices and cards snapping rang through the room as Asa entered the room and calmly sat down in an empty seat, making 6.

Asa bought in. The game ran for a few hours, and it was dirty and merciless. Asa knew the ways that hands moved when they were weak versus when they were strong. He was able to file everything behind his poker face under that fedora, leaving people in the dust as he waited patiently for the right moment to deliver his blows.

Eventually, the others, one by one, had either folded or bluffed too hard, and once the final hand of the night came around, Asa was down to his last $800. It was heads up, Asa vs. Big Luca, a poker legend who was well known in the underground circles of the neighborhood. He was known for smashing tables when he lost, and this one didn’t have a dent on it.

The pot was already massive, with $6800 in cash, plus a folder of debts and favors that could be worth even more. Asa was dealt pocket Aces. He kept his face cold like a statue. Big Luca, smirking self-assuredly, rose heavy pre-flop. He’d been bullying the table all night, and he wasn’t gonna back out now.

Then the flop came. King of Diamonds, 7 of Clubs, and Ace of Clubs was the middle set for Asa. Big Luca bet large, representing a King. Asa called nonchalantly. A 10 of Spades for the turn, and there weren’t any obvious flush or straight completes.

Big Luca went all in, shoving his remaining stack and slamming down a side marker. “One favor of my choosing,” he said, grinning slyly. Asa could obviously tell he was holding either a strong King or a 2-pair, so he tanked for a very long 20 seconds, glaring at Big Luca dead in the eyes. Then Asa said, in a low, gravelly voice:

“Call. And I’ll raise you the favor back, double or nothing on whatever you think you might have.”

Asa leaned forward, and pushed all his remaining chips in while still maintaining eye contact.

“Sorry, buddy. But there’s no need for a Big Luca…”

He flipped a card slowly, and then another card, and then another card, revealing the Aces one by one… four of them. The River card was the Ace of Diamonds. This means he completed Quads, since he now had four aces.

“…When there’s a Massive A in town.”

Everyone at the table erupted as they realized what had just went down. Big Luca’s face turned into a deep shade of red, as he had a Pocket Kings top set, and yet still managed to get crushed.

Massive A collected the cash in a duffel bag, pocketed the marker folder, and spun towards the stairs, slickly putting on his fedora and walking out while the rest of the table stared.

“Told ya,” someone muttered as Massive A climbed the steps back into the streets above. “He’s a ghost.”

The last thing he heard was the sound of a table smashing below before he was back up in the avenue of the night.

The alley behind Weller Street was a narrow, poorly lit, and ominous place that smelled like rain and rust and dumpster waste. There was more than enough shadow that 2 people could stand in it and be out of the public radar. One orange security light buzzed at the far end of the alley, and ultimately failed to do what it had been installed to do. The rain had stopped.

The man was already there when Massive A made his arrival, a dark mass leaning against the brick wall under a shimmering street lamp with his hands in his pockets. He’d been waiting a while, but he figured he’d have to.

Massive A stopped a few feet away, and the man stepped off from the wall. Neither of them greeted each other.

“I got the weapons,” Massive proclaimed firmly. “You got the cash?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

Two silhouettes, one wearing a long coat, the other wearing a fedora, standing across from each other in the darkness.

Massive A produced the duffel bag from behind him. He unzipped one half, the half where he kept his supplies, separate from the half he kept his poker winnings, and inside was a package. He handed it to the man.

“Handguns, compact SMGs, ammunition. Use responsibly.”

The man took the package, and in response, handed Massive A an envelope.

Massive A thumbed through it efficiently. Now that he’d gained experience counting money in the dark, he knew what the right thickness felt like, and the right texture. He folded it up and put it away.

“Clean?” the man asked.

“Clean,” replied Massive A.

Both men stood frozen in their positions for a solid 30 seconds. Then the man turned around and left. Massive A watched him walk down the far end of the alley, step into the orange light and then past it, and turn the corner. Then Massive zipped up the bag, slung it over his shoulder, and disappeared back into the streets.

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“Ding-dong!”

“He found the doorbell, huh?” asked Kevin. I checked my watch. It was 7 AM right on the dot, as expected.

We all rolled up to the door, and sure enough, Zaine was there, standing on the porch with his suit and messy hair.

“Morning, gentlemen,” he greeted. “Daily property inspection. Now, let’s keep this civ-“

I was the one to deliver the verbal strike. “You’re a FRAUD!!” We walked Zaine out into the land in front of SMAKAPZ house, and I held up the piece of paper in front of his face. “Helvetica lettering, the St. Louis Building Division uses Arial.” I crumpled up the piece of paper. “Give up the act, hobo. You’re done.”

Zaine let out a chuckle. “Alright, we can talk about your little forgery accusations, but first,” he pointed a sharp glare in Parage’s direction that could cut through glass, his entire facial expression changing. “Drop the weapon.”

Parage, whose laser gun had been tucked, hidden underneath his shirt, looked visibly confused.

“…What?”

Zaine whipped his messy blonde hair back with a flick, revealing a purple metallic headband hidden underneath.

“See this thing? It can detect infrared light.” He stepped forward. “I picked up the heat signature of your toy there the second you stepped outside.”

Nobody could react before Zaine suddenly took off his suit, and ripped away the dark green jacket underneath it. Strapped across him was an arsenal of tech, including glowing battery packs, reinforced plating, and what looked like a jetpack mounted between his shoulder blades. Tubes and wires ran along his arms, which ran into gauntlets and gadgets. It turned out that Zaine wasn’t overweight at all, he was actually a pretty skinny, lanky teenager. He only looked overweight because of all the heaps of advanced gear he was hiding under his clothes.

“…What the-“

Zaine tapped the large red button in the middle of his chest plate.

“WHOOOOOOSSSSHHH”

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I was coughing, laying on the ground with dust and smoke in my eyes, my entire world swirling around in a deafening blare. I turned my body over in pain, aching while feeling the hard ground beneath me, my eyes stinging, and  my head felt like a load of bricks had been dropped on it. 

In the midst of it all, one silhouette was standing there in the middle of the explosion’s flames, as the roaring orange cloud from the blast slowly uncurled and died down. My ears were ringing, like a forced choir for Zaine’s hellfire glory. I could only faintly hear the sound of everyone’s yelling, as well as my own, as I rolled over and tried to lift myself up.

Parage tumbled up off the ground to his knees, and, with an angry holler, fired the laser gun. A beam of searing red light zapped towards Zaine.

Zaine raised his left forearm, still frozen otherwise, and a panel snapped open, revealing a laser absorber. The beam slammed straight into it.

The gang was sprawled out in the burnt wreckage of the explosion, coughing hard, smoke blazing into the sky. We were far enough that it didn’t destroy our house, but it still created a massive crater on our land.

Zaine pushed another button, and the jetpack came to life with twin blue flames roaring. He lifted off the ground, and blasted off across the sky behind the woods of the SMAKAPZ house in a streak of fire. “I’ll be back tomorrow!” he shouted.

Critique 1 (2971)

Critique 2 (2900)

Critique 3 (3520)

Chapter 1 Spoiler: The SMAKAPZ gang, Sam, Kevin, Mogers, Zagers, Parage, and Apalabamo, are eating together at a local restaurant, and Sam and Kevin are telling the rest of the rest of the gang about their recent mission in the Middle East, where Sam and Kevin got beaten by a friend of the gang, Jordan, because of a dispute. During the conversation, Sam pulls Kevin aside and insists they come clean to the group, and reveal that while on that mission, they secretly used the old rocket and crashed it after encountering a space monster and an asteroid. Back at the SMAKAPZ house basement, Sam declares he can fix the now-split-in-half rocket overnight, despite skepticism from the rest of the gang.

Chapter 2 Spoiler: After the gang goes to bed, Sam races against time to buy repair materials from the massive superstore Alademipaburg before it closes. Thanks to the gang’s reputation as big-spending notorious customers, a sympathetic cashier lets him take everything for free. He also gets 200 pounds of materials gifted from the local factory. Sam then spends the entire night in the basement attempting an ambitious solo repair on the two massive halves of the rocket. Despite his exhaustive efforts and engineering skill, the rocket ultimately fails catastrophically at 5 AM, shearing apart again and leaving Sam exhausted and defeated.

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The sun shone through the windows of the concrete walls of the SMAKAPZ basement. Morning rays lit up the inside of the room in a blue sunlight glow, birds were chirping, and the air was a chemical nightmare. I hadn’t gotten any sleep, I’d been too busy and the smell of burnt metal and electricity and melted dairy was too strong anyway.

The gang was there. They were analyzing the failed rocket restoration. Kevin walked around the mess, eyeing it closely, Parage had a magnifying glass, and the whole gang was gazing at it with disappointment.

“Well,” remarked Zagers. “1 all nighter and you managed to ruin the piece of trash worse than before.”

Parage raised his eyebrows. “Mm. Well, I can tell it wasn’t a scarf taper…”

I turned to Zagers, glancing at him. “By the way, this piece of trash rescued you and the rest of humanity from being turned into non-sentient cattle. If it weren’t for me you’d be a mindless zombie, a slave whose only purpose is to serve Zolo on planet Bartuga along with the rest of your now-zombie family.”

“I still can’t believe you two idiots destroyed it in the first place.” Mogers groaned, rubbing his forehead. “R.I.P.”

Suddenly, Kevin stopped what he was doing and turned around slowly.

“I’m sorry.”

Mogers stared him down.

Kevin peered at him. He repeated, “I’m sorry,” spinning all the way around, facing Mogers. “2 idiots? Did you just say ‘2’ in that sentence?”

Kevin continued. “No. Just one. It was one idiot who crashed the rocket into that asteroid and almost got us killed by a 100 mile drop in the ocean from space. Are you smart enough to understand that, douchebag?”

Mogers held his gaze. Kevin aimed a finger towards me. “There’s your one idiot right there. Why don’t you chew him out instead?”

Mogers crossed his arms. “Yeah, well, you were on the flight, bunkhead. All those late nights welding cheese for nothing…”

“I don’t care!! I shouldn’t have to keep taking the blame for this blithering dolt’s stupid, braindead decisions!!!!”

“Wait,” I interrupted, looking down, closing my eyes, and putting a hand up. “Wait, hold on.”

Kevin and Mogers’ bickering came to a stop.

I started walking towards Mogers.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘all those late nights?”

Mogers locked eyes with me.

I continued. “You weren’t there,” I told him, stepping into his space and tilting my head. “You didn’t weld anything. No, that was all me.” I stopped, glaring into his eyes. “So tell me again. What exactly do you mean, huh?”

“I was just saying, like, all our hard work is destroyed now, and everybody’s downplaying it.” He pointed across my shoulder to Kevin. “Like this dimwit over here who-“

I slapped his hand away, then stepped closer, getting up in his face. I was breathing shakily through my nose, and my lips were compressed tightly together.

“My carve, my pocket knife, my rocket,” I was seething through my words in a low, gravelly tone. “You weren’t there for the process, none of it. The work, the build, that was all me. It was all. Me.”

After a few seconds of staring each other down and breathing hard, Mogers growled, “Sure. Yeah, and I was the one who convinced Farmer Jeff to give us the dairy supplies to make that formula to take down Zolo and his army. I was the one who came up with that idea in the first place as a matter of fact. So how about you take your ‘Oh my God well I built the damn thing so I get to destroy it too’ reasoning and shove it up your ass?”

“Yeah, sure, take up all the credit.” “I scoffed. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You said ‘all those late nights.’” I inched closer to Mogers’ face. “Guess what, fucko? I did it in ONE!!!!”

“I guess you were being guided by the hand of God that night!” Zagers declared.

I whipped around to Zagers, audibly sucking my breath in. “Remember when I said you’d be a mindless zombie if it weren’t for me? Well it looks like I failed my mission!”

Apalabamo was laughing behind me. “Ahh, well, as we stand now, it looks like-“

Suddenly, our argument was interrupted by a knock on the door. We all froze.

“I’ll get it,” I said, but everyone else followed me to the door as well.

This was the first time the whole gang had actually been together in a long while. Everyone’s been busy with different deeds lately, and I thought it would be nice to get all the guys together again and I thought a restaurant would be the perfect place to do it at. Of course, the real reason was so I could gather everybody up to deliver the big news, but unfortunately, that didn’t turn out the greatest.

I opened the door, and standing there was an overweight gentleman with messy, dirty-blond hair wearing a suit and tie. He looked to be around 16-17 years old, and he was holding a folder of papers.

“Morning, gentleman,” he said pleasantly. “The name’s Zaine.” He held up a business card, which said “ZAINE APADILLON” in bold lettering. “I hate to do this so early, but we’ve got a situation. I’m here regarding a property dispute.”

“What?” I responded. The gang was crowding behind me, listening intently.

Zaine opened his folder and pulled out an official-looking document with the city seal on it.

“According to city property records, this house sits partially within the boundary of land legally registered to me.” He tapped the paper. “Which means I’m entitled to any and all ownership rights regarding said structure. Here’s the license from the city confirming the correction and my ownership rights. It’s all legal. I’m afraid I’m going to have to take possession.”

The gang was now stunned, clobbered by a wave of silence.

After a few seconds, I finally asked, “What does that even mean?”

“It means,” Zaine replied. “This house is technically on my estate. You boys have 3 days to vacate from my property, or else I will be calling the police. Good day.”

The gang passed the paper that Zaine gave us around, scanning it with increasingly growing terror.

“You can’t,” Kevin muttered, then looked up from the paper, and at Zaine, shaking his head. “No, you can’t. This house, it’s our house. It’s ours…”

Zaine shrugged. “Law’s the law. I will be returning tomorrow morning for a daily property inspection. I wish you all the best.” And with that, he turned around and walked away, leaving us all dumbfounded.

As soon as the door clicked shut, panic immediately set in within the group.

“We’re screwed!” Mogers yelled, pacing around the room. “It’s over, we’re done! We’re gonna lose the house! Over some paperwork junk!”

“3 days, he said.” Kevin looked sick and pale. “This guy has to be full of it. I mean, we’d have to build another place from scratch…”

Mogers stared at the closed door, stunned with disbelief. “We can’t. There’s no way! We’ve owned this house for 2 years…” He looked over the the gang. “I say we ignore him and reinforce everything. The doors, the house, all of it.”

“We can’t do that.” Apalabamo ran a hand through his hair. “If it’s an enrichment ruling then we could get hit with a demolition order. Then Mr. Moneybags shows up and heroically ‘saves’ our house… then takes it from us.”

Parage shook his head in anguish. “A guy, a random rich nob just shows up at our front door and takes our house! He rubbed his temples, sighing. “I mean, it’s unbelievable.”

Everything was spinning. The room felt like it was being hit by a tornado, like it was a freight train rolling down the tracks, about to crash into oblivion at any second. I buried my head in my hands, and lifted it up, running my hands down my face and groaning.

Losing the SMAKAPZ house would be a tragedy. For 2 years it’d been our base, our command center, and the heart of our gang. We had our own houses, of course, and it’d been forever since we’d all actually gathered as a group inside the quarters, but to have it just snatched out of our hands all of a sudden, especially with all the memories we have building it, would bring us great pain and agony.

“Look,” I began with dread. “We need to fight this legally, or else it’s doomsday for us.”

I think everyone had the same thought, but Kevin mentioned it first, looking up from his hands.

“Kyle.”

I let out a long exhale, raking my fingers through my hair. It’d be ages since we’d consulted Kyle Ganameil for anything, and I didn’t even remember if I had his number in my contacts anymore.

“Let’s hold off on that idea right now,” I said. “We go to the local courthouse and file a restraining order on this Zaine guy. As long as we’re in our property he can’t come within 500 feet of it, or any of the small outside area that we own.”

“With what reasoning?” Mogers asked.

Apollo let out a sigh. “I mean, we could do an adverse possession claim…” he suggested. “If Zaine knew about the encroachment and just did nothing, that might give us squatter’s rights.”

“Or…” Kevin started. “…We call up Kyle and have him hire a counter-surveyor, or challenge the city license as improperly noticed using his online property map…”

Everyone glanced around the room, looking at each other with uncertainty.

“It’s just, I don’t know, things are complicated with Kyle…” I looked around, and realized Zagers had been atypically quiet throughout the whole ordeal. “What’s going on?”

Zagers was staring at the document that Zaine had given us, examining it closely. “This license…” he said, holding it up to the light. “…Is fake.”

“What?”

“It’s fake!” He held up the paper, tapping the bottom corner. “Official St. Louis property licenses’ lettering uses Arial font.” Zagers showed us the document. “This is Helvetica!” He slammed the piece of paper down on the table, fuming. “This guy’s a fraud! A sham! A con artist! This house doesn’t belong to him! He’s talking out of his ass!”

I grabbed the document off the table, and reached into my pocket and put on my reading glasses to scan it. Sure enough, Zagers was right. The lettering was surely in Helvetica, although I didn’t realize that meant it was a counterfeit.

The room went quiet for a few seconds before ringing out relieved sighs and “wow!”s

“That lying sleazelord!”

“We almost fell for that?”

I handed the document back over to Zagers, who folded it up. “How did you even spot that?” I asked him. “I mean, how did you make that connection at all?”

“My family got one of these when we moved a few months ago and decided to buy instead of rent,” he explained. “It’s the one thing that hasn’t changed in over 30 years. Always Arial… this one’s a cheap knockoff! A fraud job!”

Kevin strolled over to the fridge, grabbing a bottle of Coke. “Well, he said he’d be back tomorrow for a ‘property inspection.’” He took a sip from his bottle. “We’ll confront him then. Tell him no more shenanigans.”

“Yeah, let’s do it,” I agreed. “In the meantime, we could go take another look at that rocket…”

After heading back down into the dusty, spiderweb-run SMAKAPZ basement and examining the botched rocket ship once again, we determined that I couldn’t even try a scarf joint creation and composite build up, because the relative growth discrepancy would cause the whole thing to fall apart. In other words, the rocket was, for all intents and purposes, unfixable. This was a punch to the gut, but right now, we had bigger issues to take care of.

As the rest of the gang exited the basement, Parage glanced behind, and noticed an infrared thermometer sitting on the workbench.

That night, after the rest of the SMAKAPZ gang went off to bed, Parage headed downstairs, grabbed the thermometer, and opened up the casing with a precision screwdriver set. He took out the IR sensor and microntroller board, as well as the LCD display, and wired a series-parallel battery pack through a salvaged boost converter to deliver 4.2V at a higher current. He also took the thermometer lens and epoxied it into a PVC extension barrel, which tightened the beam divergence to around 1.5 milliradians. Then he rewired the original trigger so a half-pull would activate the now brighter aiming laser, and a full pull would fire the main beam in 3-8 second pulses.

He then took the half-empty aluminum can of Dr. Pepper on the table that I’d been drinking last night while working on the Cheese Rocket, set it on the ground 20 feet away, and fired.

“SLIIIIICCCCEEE!!”

The can was scorched by the beam, melting into a burning mess and exploding into a ball of flames.

Parage flipped his new laser gun into the air and caught it, without looking up at all. “Just in case,” he said to himself, smirking, as the soda from the can put its own fire out behind him.

I’ve been casually writing for a while although I’m not a master or anything. Anyway everything I write is one universe, one main character and his group. It would feel weird to write something in another universe with other characters, it just feels like I’m cheating on my cast or something like it feels too alien. Is this me being too attached to my universe/main character/characters? I stopped writing a few years ago and literally ended my universe on a cliff hanger, now I have desire to write again so I’m writing 2 novels to wrap up these characters’ story. I have to say it’s not really that daunting to me I’m breezing through it pretty easily. Maybe it’s because I outlined most of it, maybe it has something to do with it being an established universe, maybe it’s because I’ve been writing for a bit, maybe it’s because it’s not that good and I’m just doing it for fun and not pushing myself hard enough, I mean if you look at it on my profile it’s not some poetic shit or anything just a YA sci fi novel with some humor so maybe that’s why.

Critique 1 (2971)

Critique 2 (2900)

After the rest of the gang said goodnight and headed off to bed, it was time for me to get to work. I hopped inside of the van and put the pedal to the metal, peeling out of the SMAKAPZ parking lot and blazing off into the night. Alademipaburg had about 30 minutes until closing time, so I had to haul my way there as quickly as possible.

I sped through town, which was illuminated by street lamps and traffic signals, cutting every red light since nobody was driving out here anyway. I kept glancing at the dashboard clock. I was making great time.

The clock glowed in green under the darkness, showing the time as 9:41 PM as I swung the van into the massive parking lot of Alademipaburg. Alademipaburg was the giant, local hardware store, although really, it was an “everything store” because it sold basically anything you could think of. It was in Gangmark, but whether you were from Semaburg, Gangmark, or the main St. Louis city, Alademipaburg was your spot to go if you needed materials for pretty much any sort of use.

I threw the van into park, the tires squeaking, and then slammed the door shut. The gigantic letters “ALADEMIPABURG” glowed in neon green on the building, which made it look more like some giant creepy gas station than a massive bustling supercenter at nighttime.

I entered the building through the automatic doors and immediately noticed how empty it was. Nobody was in there except for a few elderly shoppers buying God knows what, and the massive bright white building felt totally different in the nighttime when nobody was there as opposed to the daytime, when it was crowded with people. “This is great!” I thought. “I have the whole store to myself.”

I’d written down every item I needed for my plan on a nice list:

Industrial cheese grater

2 large stockpots

2 propane burners

Heavy duty aluminum foil

Wooden dowels

Metal threaded rod

Cheesecloth

White vinegar, which means I guess I do have to buy from the Food Section

Ratchet straps

Come-alongs

Car jack

Infrared thermometer

I first went to Aisle 14 for the industrial cheese grater. I knew my way around this store like the back of my hand, so I figured I could find everything I need and get out of here in no time.

The cheese grater looked more like something designed to remove bark from trees than it did an actual kitchen tool. I hoisted the steel item into my cart with a loud clang. 

“Ah, there we go,“ I said.

Next I went to the outdoor cooking section and got propane burners and stockpots, then aluminum foil from the bulk supplies section, and then wooden dowels from the lumber section. My phone buzzed. It was 9:55 PM.

“I forgot!” I thought to myself as I ran down the infinite stretch of the main floor. “Alademipaburg doesn’t let people who are still in the store check out their items after it closes! I need to hurry up fast!“ 

I skedaddled into the rest of the sections, picked up some metal threaded rod, cheesecloth, ratchet straps, and everything else I needed, all of which fell into my cart with a clatter. Then I dashed towards the Food Section, which was like its entire own mini-store, and, luckily for me, there was one more bottle of Heinz White Vinegar left. In the end, I knew everything would ring up to around $1,400.

It was now or never. Due to my recent revelation, I now had even less time on the clock than I anticipated. Even seconds mattered. I pushed the cart full of items full speed ahead, hauling it down the aisle like lightning similarly to how I did the van down the streets. I fishtailed around the corner, panting with adrenaline as I blew past aisles like there was no tomorrow.

The chase was on. I rounded the last corner, and when the checkout lanes came into view, it was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. I dashed towards the counter, clearing the final stretch in about a split second.

The cashier, a young woman who I recognized, since I memorized every cashier, glanced up as I rolled up to the counter, pushing the cart to the side, and approached her, adjusting my jacket while breathing hard. “You might wanna-“

“Sorry, we’re closed,” she interrupted before she looked up, and then her face immediately shifted into, well, I wouldn’t call it pleasure, but she instantly recognized me.

“It’s you.”

“Dang it!” I checked my watch, still breathing hard. 10:03. I’d missed the deadline. 

I looked up at her, pausing, blinked a couple times, then glanced at my cart and back to her. “Well, like, I need to-“ 

“Yeah, yeah. I’m not even gonna ask what the heck it is this time.” She paused, sighing.“ “You know what? Just take it. For free. Go.“ 

“Really?”

“Yeah, you and your band of buddies must spend at least $5000 in this store every month. The fact that a supercenter this massive even has customers as notorious and well-known as you guys, I mean, that’s really saying something. Yeah, just take it all. I don’t get paid enough to care.”

I grinned. “Thanks!”

The cashier unlocked the side gate for me to get out, and I shoved my cart toward the exit. The automatic doors slid open, and I stepped out of the building and left the premises of the Alademipaburg domain.

“Just make sure to come earlier next time!” She shouted as I loaded everything into the van and drove off into the night.

 All the local grocery stores closed at 8-10 PM, so I couldn’t buy anything from there. Fortunately, though, that wasn’t the case with the local cheese factory, which was open 24/7 processing milk and producing the finest dairy. That was the place where me and Mogers bought the cheese we were craving, which the owner, the friendly French hat-man, then gifted us 100x the cheese amount as a generous offering. Not knowing what the heck we’d do with 8000 pounds of cheese, Mogers joked about how we could make a rocket ship out of this quantity, and well, we did. So I was able to get my 200 pounds of cheese and also reunite with the French hat-man owner from 2 years ago, who kind-heartedly gave it to me for free as a welcome-back gift.

I pulled the van into the SMAKAPZ driveway, stepped out into the starry night, and headed inside, where the rest of the gang was sleeping. It was time to get to work. I walked down the creaking stairs into the SMAKAPZ basement, a giant, dimly lit space with exposed pipes and a smell of concrete and sewer water.

The 2 halves of the rocket were about the size of a large piano and each weighed around 4000 pounds, which I had accounted for the holes and the internal structure. I took them out of their coolers and set them on the basement floor with portable AC units and blocks of dry ice to keep ambient temperatures at 38-42 degrees Fahrenheit. I began working, staying energized with soda and cold pizza while I operated.

First I measured the alignment targets, marking 12 datum points around each fracture with a Sharpie. I was aiming for around a 0.25 mismatch. I positioned the lower half, the half with the engine, on 4 car jacks and some wooden blocks for height adjustment. The upper half I put on a custom sled made from two 2x8 lumber planks with PVC rollers cut from store pipe.

I used the 2 come-alongs anchored to pre-installed basement wall eye-bolts and looped the straps around the cheese body. I cranked alternatively on opposite sides, watching levels and plumb bobs, and inching the upper half into position. I reduced the friction on the concrete floor with some Dawn dish soap lubricant under the sled.

Now I had the easy part out of the way, or so I thought. Because all of a sudden, at 1:45 AM, the upper half shifted 2 inches laterally while I was adjusting a strap, and cracked a 10 inch section of outer skin. So I ended up spending 40 minutes carving a new alignment key, using the same pocket knife I used to carve the Cheese Rocket itself, and cut a 6 inch wide, 4 inch deep rectangular notch into each fracture face using a hot wire cutter, which I had heated to 180 degrees in order to slice cleanly through the cheese without melting it too much. 

For the fracture face preparation I scraped mold and loose debris with a wire brush and vacuum, applied 50/50 vinegar-water spray, let sit for 15 minutes, and then wiped dry. I drilled 24 matching 1-inch holes, 12 per side, around the circumference, 4 inches deep, spaced every 30 degrees using a cordless drill. 

The cheese welding process came after that, and it worked exactly as I said it would. I grated 80 pounds of the fresh 200 pounds of Swiss that was gifted to me earlier at the cheese factory into the stockpots, and melted slowly at 145 degrees Fahrenheit, monitored with the infrared thermometer I’d bought because of Apalabamo’s quip, while stirring to emulsify fats and proteins into a viscous glue. This worked due to the casein acting as a thermoplastic binder. All I had to do was add some grated dry Swiss aggregate, 20% by volume, for thixotropic thickening.

I then poured and packed the molten cheese into the joint gap, while using heat guns to keep surfaces at 110 degrees for optimal fusion. After that, I inserted 1 inch wooden dowels, which I had pre-soaked in melted cheese, into the drilled holes to act as rivets, which worked, because they expanded as the surrounding cheese cooled and shrieked, and that created compression fit.

After that I put on a gas mask and crawled inside the narrow fuselage to install six longitudinal cheese beams, which I had fabricated with a 4x2 inch cross section and laminated layers, across the joint. I was able to secure them with cheese melted scarf joints, plus some additional dowel pins. 

The curing was simple, I packed dry ice bags around the joint and directed cold air from the AC units. I cooled to 35 degrees over 90 minutes to recrystallize the casein matrix, and I was able to achieve about 70% of the original compressive strength, based on my prior bench tests. Then after that, I spent the rest of the night working on the propulsion grain repair, which, thank God I had bought the jacks and levers since I had accidentally created a 2% density gradient, which I had to fix by rotating the rocket 180 degrees midway through cure, and the final sealing and balancing, which involved wrapping the entire joint with 3 overlapping bandage layers, and then of course I had to do the aerodynamic fairing, mass balancing, and avionics, which each took plenty of time and work. By the end of the day, I was exhausted. I sat there covered in residue, taking off my goggles and wiping a bead of sweat off my forehead.

“Well,” I thought to myself. “Looks good enough for me.”

I checked my watch. It was 5 AM, and I had started working at 11. I wiped some more sweat off my forehead, taking a sip of Dr. Pepper.

It was a job well done, at least I thought so. I grinned to myself, knowing I had done it. I had proved the rest of the gang wrong, 5 against one, I’d owned them all, and tomorrow, in fact, this morning, would be the day I’d get to show them the restored rocket, and relish in watching their faces, watching Kevin’s face, watching Mogers’ face, watching Parage’s-“

“SLIIIIICCCCEEE!!”

Suddenly, my stream of thought was interrupted by a terrifying sound, to my ears it sounded like something happened, like the rocket just split by itself in the other direction. I turned around, startled, to see that the joint had spontaneously sheared at the dowel line, which had then caused the upper half to shift 17 inches. 

“Dang it!” I exclaimed. “Come on!”

I surveyed the rocket, trying to find out what the culprit could be that caused all my work for the past 6 hours to literally fall apart, and realized it was the density-gradient grain that had created an uneven thrust, thus rendering my build unstable.

I sighed, throwing my rag on the ground, and slamming a wrench into my toolbox. At this point, I couldn’t do a diffuse thermal fusion repair, because then the gradients would cause differential expansion and I’d end up with a sagging upper half and a rocket in worse condition than it was before. Plus, the gang would be waking up any second now. Sure, I could, just, work on it afterwards in the morning… but in my eyes, that would be admitting defeat, since I had explicitly told them I would get it up and ready good as new by the end of tonight. Plus, it didn’t look like it was fixable anyway, at least not with a one-man overnight job it didn’t.

Pouting, I took off my goggles, which I’d put back on to inspect the rocket, closed the toolbox, and called it a night. The Cheese Rocket restoration was a disaster, and I wasn’t looking forward to what was to come.

“Jordan whooped both of you at the same time.” Mogers took a slug of his drink, then set it down, chuckling. “Come on. I would’ve paid good money to see that.” 

“Yeah,” Zagers said, wiping his mouth off with a cloth napkin. “Not to mention, y’all literally jumped him…” 

We were at the local restaurant just off of Big Bend, me, Kevin, Mogers, Zagers, Parage, and Apalabamo, and it was a busy Thursday afternoon. The restaurant was bustling with people, workers were on their toes scrambling, and on the other end of the dining room, the staff was singing happy birthday to a grazing customer. Me and Kevin had just recently gone on a mission to Jordan’s house all the way in the Middle East for some important matters, which we were now recapping to the gang, and we still had bruises on our bodies from the beating he’d handed to us.

“First of all,” Kevin explained, swallowing a bite of whatever slop was on his plate. “It took us a long time to get there, I mean, we had to boat across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, then cut through the Suez Ca-“

Ticked off by Kevin’s sudden geography genius moment, I cut in. “So then, we go and we knock on Jordan’s door-“

“Did you really cut me off because I started listing the locations that we literally went to? Do you hate school stuff that much?”

“I cut you off because you started sounding like Apalabamo.”

Apalabamo gave me a hostile glare. “Yeah, well-“ 

“Anyway,” Kevin continued. “We knock on his door, immediately tackle him to the ground, but, well, he somehow manages to get the upper hand…” he explained the Jordan pie fiasco and how Jordan started yelling about how we were con artists and thieves.

“So, next thing I know we’re rolling around on the floor, all 3 of us. Couple broken bones, black eyes. We got that taken care of at the hospital though, and we did technically end up completing our mission.”

“There has to be video!” Parage laughed and took a sip from his Coke glass.

“Well,” I replied. “Not unless Jordan has cameras in his house or something…”

A waitress showed up at our table, carrying a server notepad. “How’s everything going over here?” she asked the group.

Zagers made some inside joke about the pie situation. Mogers raised up his empty glass. “I’ll take a refill on the Coke. A little more ice would be perfect, thanks.”

“Same for me, thanks,” Parage raised up his glass as well, which wasn’t empty, but he had just taken a very long sip from it.

As the waitress left and the conversation resumed, I nodded along, and then, when I got the chance, nudged Kevin with my elbow. “Hey look, I think that’s the friendly old guy who gave us boating tips. We should go say hello.”

“...What?”

“Just move.” I slid out of my chair, and headed down the crowded hallway, then turned a corner so we’d be out of the gang’s line of sight, and so it’d be quieter. Kevin followed me there.

“What friendly old guy? What the heck are you talking about?”

“Nothing. This isn’t about that.” I looked around the building, then stepped closer to Kevin. “Look, at some point, we have to tell them. We can’t just sit on this for the rest of their lives. They’ll find out eventually. And when they do, they won’t be happy.”

Kevin looked away, crossing his arms and scoffing, then looked back at me. “They’re already roasting us over the pie thing. If we tell them we destroyed the rocket? We’re finished, done for.”

“I understand that, but if we don’t own up to what we did.” I changed my voice and whispered menacingly. If we don’t own up to what we did, they discover it by themselves, and then we’re done for either way.  

Kevin sighed. “If you wanna tell them, then tell them. Otherwise, shut up about this whole thing. End of story.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I whizzed past Kevin, patting him on the back. “Now let me grab the check before Zagers orders another round of those ketchup ball thingies.” I headed back towards the table, reached over, and snatched the check from the corner before anyone else could grab it.

As we walked down the alley of the restaurant, I knew that this was it. It was now or never, and I had to come clean to the rest of the gang and admit what we did. See, when me and Kevin went to Amman, we actually didn’t boat there at all. That was a lie we told the guys in order to divert attention away from the Cheese Rocket, the actual mode of transportation we used to get there faster, because we had to be there in 3 days. That’s why I was so ticked off at Kevin mentioning nerd locations on the spot. Anyway, long story short, I ended up crashing the rocket, splitting it in half and destroying it. And it was right here and right now that I had to make this announcement to the group.

I slowed down walking, and cleared my throat. ”I… I have something that I need to address with you guys.” 

We all came to a gradual stop. “What is it?” asked Parage. 

I started looking around, then realized I had to continue. “So basically, you guys know the Cheese Rocket?” 

“Of course!” Mogers nodded. I knew Mogers would be the one to take this information the hardest, because it was me and him who built the rocket up brick by brick, made great memories with it, and used it to rescue all of humanity. Technically I was the one who built/carved it, but Mogers was the one who came up with the idea in that factory around a year ago.

I gulped. “…So, basically, it was, like, uh…”

“It was what?” 

I hesitated, glancing around the alley. Though I knew he was just asking for the rest of the info, it seemed like grilling to me.

“Ahhhhh…” I smiled, then faltered. After another swallow, I made the admission.

“Me and Kevin went to space, crossed paths with some creature, hit an asteroid, and, well, we split the rocket in-“

“Ok, hold on,” Kevin interrupted. “Did you just say we?”

I paused.

Kevin started pacing around. “Because from what I recall,” He looked at me with a sharp and incriminating glare pointed right in my direction. “You were the one flying the thing, I mean, that was you. I was the one who gave you the warning and told you to haul that thing around and get us out of there. I was your eyes, when you were supposed to be the one piloting the dang thing.” Having stopped pacing around, he was now sizing me up, in my face talking smack.

“And you still wrecked it. Now you wanna use the word ‘we.’ Listen up, boy. I didn’t do anything…”

“Listen you idiot, we were facing a massive, hostile space behemoth that none of us had ever seen before, we didn’t have any weapons, and it had been months since we’d even touched the Cheese Rocket. I say you would’ve done way worse than me.” Kevin stood facing me for a few more seconds before retreated back into the gang.

“Anyway…” I began. “I might be able to fix it.”

“To fix it?” 

“Fix it? What?”

“It split in half and this guy’s talking ‘bout some “Oh I might be able to fix it!”

“Ok, look, I carved it out of dairy product.” I explained. “Actual cheese that had holes in it, so I had to account for all sorts of geometrical oddities, and I’m not a math guy. But I did it for the good of the world. I did it for the good of humani-” 

“How did you do it for the good of the world if you didn’t know it was in danger until after you finished building it?”

“…Huh?”

Mogers repeated himself.

I paused. “The point is,” I explained. “That maybe, if I’m skilled enough with a pocket knife to carve something out of dairy, I’m skilled enough to fix something that was split in half. Especially if that something is the same thing, you know, both times…”

The rest of the gang was either looking at me or blinking rapidly, confused.

“It just seems like it would be higher on the scale, the cheese thing. Like, if I can build it from scratch, then I could fix it.”

“Ok, ok,” Apalabamo sighed. “Well, let’s go take a look.”

The old steps creaked and squeaked as we headed down into the massive basement of the SMAKAPZ house, the large wooden house that served as the base and main headquarters of the SMAKAPZ gang, as well as the secondary living space for everyone in the group after, of course, their own houses. We’d built it as a team around 2 years ago after realizing we all needed a place to stay, to meet up and discuss plans and plot, and to hide at when such situations came up. 

The rocket, which we had previously kept stored in a refrigerated shipping container and left to rust in the cellar for years, since the last time Parage attached weapons to it to the other day when me and Kevin brought it back to life and took it for a spin, was now 2 halves being preserved in 2 giant hunting coolers. We had luckily been able to save them while we parachuted to Amman, but 2 couch sized blocks of cheese weren’t necessarily of any valuable use to us, so we shoved it all back in the SMAKAPZ basement.

Kevin opened the 2 coolers, revealing the 2 giant refrigerated bricks of Swiss cheese we’d been keeping underneath our quarters.

“Well,” said Apalabamo. “It’s split in half, alright.”

“Yeah, so, luckily, it wasn’t a planet sized asteroid or anything, but it had to be the size of your average house. Big enough to send us flying into the Earth’s ocean. Well, that’s where we would’ve gone if we hadn’t brought our parachutes…”

“…Which, again, I reminded us to do,” Kevin chimed in. “If it weren’t for me, we’d be dead. We’d be 2 skeletons sitting at the bottom of the sea.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I responded. “We’ve survived worse. Anyway, side A, we’ve got the cockpit, which is still intact, and I believe the navigation still somewhat works. Side B, the propulsion systems are still alive but the fuel lines are all ruined. Both sides can still communicate as well, the signal is just real wonky and stuff.”

Parage stepped forward, surveying the 2 blocks of cheese. “And how exactly… do you plan on fixing this?”

I continued, walking around the 2 coolers of cheese. “Well,” I said, slapping a cooler with my hand. “The fracture surfaces show compressed cheese eyes, AKA the gas pockets, on the impact side, with radial cracks extending around 18-24 inches into each half. The outer ablative layer of high-fat Swiss cheese has deep gouges and char, the internal cheese stringers are sheared, and the solid propellant grain in the lower half has a 4 inch offset crack, which, of course, created an unintended burn channel.”

“So what could possibly be the plan here?” Parage inquired. “Just dock the 2 halves back together?”

I paced around the coolers more. “200 pounds of Swiss cheese to replace the damaged materials, plus heat guns and a hot wire cutter. Drill some holes and then grate 80 pounds of cheese into stockpots, stir it into a glue. The casein will act as a thermoplastic binder, plus I’ll add some grated dry Swiss aggregate for thixotropic thickening, about 20% by volume should do the trick. Then I’ll pour the cheese into the joint gap, some dowels into the holes, internal splinting… before you know it, we’ll have a working, operating rocket again. Just gimme till the end of tonight. I’ll have it fixed.”

“What about the shear crack in the lower half grain?” asked Mogers.

“That’s where the rest of the 120 pounds will go. That will be used for the replacement grain, I’ll cast it into a temporary fold and cardboard mold, melt that cheese plus another 15 pounds of powdered sugar, also maybe some dried milk powder, then pour it all in layers.”

“Parage sighed.” “If you say so…”

Apalabamo looked down, raising his eyebrows in skepticism. “You and Parage are the inventor guys. I’ll let y’all sort this one out. What I will say though is that you better have a dang good eye on the temperature meters. One blunder and this whole joint will peel apart like cheap plywood, and I think we can all agree that nobody wants that.”

“I’ll buy an infrared thermometer too. Monitor the scarf surfaces every 5-7 minutes during heating. I’ll make sure it they stay at like a 12 to 18 degree gradient max, it won’t be a problem.”

“Well,” Zagers laughed. “Guess this guy just has everything figured out, huh?”

Parage scoffed, and whispered under his breath something about the monolithic grain recast causing stress fractures in the cheese block and creating erratic burn surfaces, even though I’d already planned to vibrate the lower quarter-half continuously during pouring using the orbital sander but of course Parage needs to chip in with his expert opinions.

“Welp, we’re goin’ off to bed,” Mogers yawned, then nonchalantly put a hand on his forehead, sighing tiredly. The rest of the gang followed, ready to get a good night’s sleep. He checked his watch. “Alademipaburg closes at 10, it’s 9:32 now. We got plenty of stuff in the basement… we don’t have 200 pounds of cheese though. Well, unless you count… I mean, yeah, whatever.”

”Ha, I’ll be making 2 stops.” I smirked. “I wouldn’t dare buy anything from the Alademipaburg Food Section. Doesn’t matter if it’s for compost.”

Critique 1 (2971)

“Jordan whooped both of you at the same time.” Mogers took a slug of his drink, then set it down, chuckling. “Come on. I would’ve paid good money to see that.” 

“Yeah,” Zagers said, wiping his mouth off with a cloth napkin. “Not to mention, y’all literally jumped him…” 

We were at the local restaurant just off of Big Bend, me, Kevin, Mogers, Zagers, Parage, and Apalabamo, and it was a busy Thursday afternoon. The restaurant was bustling with people, workers were on their toes scrambling, and on the other end of the dining room, the staff was singing happy birthday to a grazing customer. Me and Kevin had just recently gone on a mission to Jordan’s house all the way in the Middle East for some important matters, which we were now recapping to the gang, and we still had bruises on our bodies from the beating he’d handed to us.

“First of all,” Kevin explained, swallowing a bite of whatever slop was on his plate. “It took us a long time to get there, I mean, we had to boat across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, then cut through the Suez Ca-“

Ticked off by Kevin’s sudden geography genius moment, I cut in. “So then, we go and we knock on Jordan’s door-“

“Did you really cut me off because I started listing the locations that we literally went to? Do you hate school stuff that much?”

“I cut you off because you started sounding like Apalabamo.”

Apalabamo gave me a hostile glare. “Yeah, well-“ 

“Anyway,” Kevin continued. “We knock on his door, immediately tackle him to the ground, but, well, he somehow manages to get the upper hand…” he explained the Jordan pie fiasco and how Jordan started yelling about how we were con artists and thieves.

“So, next thing I know we’re rolling around on the floor, all 3 of us. Couple broken bones, black eyes. We got that taken care of at the hospital though, and we did technically end up completing our mission.”

“There has to be video!” Parage laughed and took a sip from his Coke glass.

“Well,” I replied. “Not unless Jordan has cameras in his house or something…”

A waitress showed up at our table, carrying a server notepad. “How’s everything going over here?” she asked the group.

Zagers made some inside joke about the pie situation. Mogers raised up his empty glass. “I’ll take a refill on the Coke. A little more ice would be perfect, thanks.”

“Same for me, thanks,” Parage raised up his glass as well, which wasn’t empty, but he had just taken a very long sip from it.

As the waitress left and the conversation resumed, I nodded along, and then, when I got the chance, nudged Kevin with my elbow. “Hey look, I think that’s the friendly old guy who gave us boating tips. We should go say hello.”

“...What?”

“Just move.” I slid out of my chair, and headed down the crowded hallway, then turned a corner so we’d be out of the gang’s line of sight, and so it’d be quieter. Kevin followed me there.

“What friendly old guy? What the heck are you talking about?”

“Nothing. This isn’t about that.” I looked around the building, then stepped closer to Kevin. “Look, at some point, we have to tell them. We can’t just sit on this for the rest of their lives. They’ll find out eventually. And when they do, they won’t be happy.”

Kevin looked away, crossing his arms and scoffing, then looked back at me. “They’re already roasting us over the pie thing. If we tell them we destroyed the rocket? We’re finished, done for.”

“I understand that, but if we don’t own up to what we did.” I changed my voice and whispered menacingly. If we don’t own up to what we did, they discover it by themselves, and then we’re done for either way.  

Kevin sighed. “If you wanna tell them, then tell them. Otherwise, shut up about this whole thing. End of story.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I whizzed past Kevin, patting him on the back. “Now let me grab the check before Zagers orders another round of those ketchup ball thingies.” I headed back towards the table, reached over, and snatched the check from the corner before anyone else could grab it.

As we walked down the alley of the restaurant, I knew that this was it. It was now or never, and I had to come clean to the rest of the gang and admit what we did. See, when me and Kevin went to Amman, we actually didn’t boat there at all. That was a lie we told the guys in order to divert attention away from the Cheese Rocket, the actual mode of transportation we used to get there faster, because we had to be there in 3 days. That’s why I was so ticked off at Kevin mentioning nerd locations on the spot. Anyway, long story short, I ended up crashing the rocket, splitting it in half and destroying it. And it was right here and right now that I had to make this announcement to the group.

I slowed down walking, and cleared my throat. ”I… I have something that I need to address with you guys.” 

We all came to a gradual stop. “What is it?” asked Parage. 

I started looking around, then realized I had to continue. “So basically, you guys know the Cheese Rocket?” 

“Of course!” Mogers nodded. I knew Mogers would be the one to take this information the hardest, because it was me and him who built the rocket up brick by brick, made great memories with it, and used it to rescue all of humanity. Technically I was the one who built/carved it, but Mogers was the one who came up with the idea in that factory around a year ago.

I gulped. “…So, basically, it was, like, uh…”

“It was what?” 

I hesitated, glancing around the alley. Though I knew he was just asking for the rest of the info, it seemed like grilling to me.

“Ahhhhh…” I smiled, then faltered. After another swallow, I made the admission.

“Me and Kevin went to space, crossed paths with some creature, hit an asteroid, and, well, we split the rocket in-“

“Ok, hold on,” Kevin interrupted. “Did you just say we?”

I paused.

Kevin started pacing around. “Because from what I recall,” He looked at me with a sharp and incriminating glare pointed right in my direction. “You were the one flying the thing, I mean, that was you. I was the one who gave you the warning and told you to haul that thing around and get us out of there. I was your eyes, when you were supposed to be the one piloting the dang thing.” Having stopped pacing around, he was now sizing me up, in my face talking smack.

“And you still wrecked it. Now you wanna use the word ‘we.’ Listen up, boy. I didn’t do anything…”

“Listen you idiot, we were facing a massive, hostile space behemoth that none of us had ever seen before, we didn’t have any weapons, and it had been months since we’d even touched the Cheese Rocket. I say you would’ve done way worse than me.” Kevin stood facing me for a few more seconds before retreated back into the gang.

“Anyway…” I began. “I might be able to fix it.”

“To fix it?” 

“Fix it? What?”

“It split in half and this guy’s talking ‘bout some “Oh I might be able to fix it!”

“Ok, look, I carved it out of dairy product.” I explained. “Actual cheese that had holes in it, so I had to account for all sorts of geometrical oddities, and I’m not a math guy. But I did it for the good of the world. I did it for the good of humani-” 

“How did you do it for the good of the world if you didn’t know it was in danger until after you finished building it?”

“…Huh?”

Mogers repeated himself.

I paused. “The point is,” I explained. “That maybe, if I’m skilled enough with a pocket knife to carve something out of dairy, I’m skilled enough to fix something that was split in half. Especially if that something is the same thing, you know, both times…”

The rest of the gang was either looking at me or blinking rapidly, confused.

“It just seems like it would be higher on the scale, the cheese thing. Like, if I can build it from scratch, then I could fix it.”

“Ok, ok,” Apalabamo sighed. “Well, let’s go take a look.”

The old steps creaked and squeaked as we headed down into the massive basement of the SMAKAPZ house, the large wooden house that served as the base and main headquarters of the SMAKAPZ gang, as well as the secondary living space for everyone in the group after, of course, their own houses. We’d built it as a team around 2 years ago after realizing we all needed a place to stay, to meet up and discuss plans and plot, and to hide at when such situations came up. 

The rocket, which we had previously kept stored in a refrigerated shipping container and left to rust in the cellar for years, since the last time Parage attached weapons to it to the other day when me and Kevin brought it back to life and took it for a spin, was now 2 halves being preserved in 2 giant hunting coolers. We had luckily been able to save them while we parachuted to Amman, but 2 couch sized blocks of cheese weren’t necessarily of any valuable use to us, so we shoved it all back in the SMAKAPZ basement.

Kevin opened the 2 coolers, revealing the 2 giant refrigerated bricks of Swiss cheese we’d been keeping underneath our quarters.

“Well,” said Apalabamo. “It’s split in half, alright.”

“Yeah, so, luckily, it wasn’t a planet sized asteroid or anything, but it had to be the size of your average house. Big enough to send us flying into the Earth’s ocean. Well, that’s where we would’ve gone if we hadn’t brought our parachutes…”

“…Which, again, I reminded us to do,” Kevin chimed in. “If it weren’t for me, we’d be dead. We’d be 2 skeletons sitting at the bottom of the sea.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I responded. “We’ve survived worse. Anyway, side A, we’ve got the cockpit, which is still intact, and I believe the navigation still somewhat works. Side B, the propulsion systems are still alive but the fuel lines are all ruined. Both sides can still communicate as well, the signal is just real wonky and stuff.”

Parage stepped forward, surveying the 2 blocks of cheese. “And how exactly… do you plan on fixing this?”

I continued, walking around the 2 coolers of cheese. “Well,” I said, slapping a cooler with my hand. “The fracture surfaces show compressed cheese eyes, AKA the gas pockets, on the impact side, with radial cracks extending around 18-24 inches into each half. The outer ablative layer of high-fat Swiss cheese has deep gouges and char, the internal cheese stringers are sheared, and the solid propellant grain in the lower half has a 4 inch offset crack, which, of course, created an unintended burn channel.”

“So what could possibly be the plan here?” Parage inquired. “Just dock the 2 halves back together?”

I paced around the coolers more. “200 pounds of Swiss cheese to replace the damaged materials, plus heat guns and a hot wire cutter. Drill some holes and then grate 80 pounds of cheese into stockpots, stir it into a glue. The casein will act as a thermoplastic binder, plus I’ll add some grated dry Swiss aggregate for thixotropic thickening, about 20% by volume should do the trick. Then I’ll pour the cheese into the joint gap, some dowels into the holes, internal splinting… before you know it, we’ll have a working, operating rocket again. Just gimme till the end of tonight. I’ll have it fixed.”

“What about the shear crack in the lower half grain?” asked Mogers.

“That’s where the rest of the 120 pounds will go. That will be used for the replacement grain, I’ll cast it into a temporary fold and cardboard mold, melt that cheese plus another 15 pounds of powdered sugar, also maybe some dried milk powder, then pour it all in layers.”

“Parage sighed.” “If you say so…”

Apalabamo looked down, raising his eyebrows in skepticism. “You and Parage are the inventor guys. I’ll let y’all sort this one out. What I will say though is that you better have a dang good eye on the temperature meters. One blunder and this whole joint will peel apart like cheap plywood, and I think we can all agree that nobody wants that.”

“I’ll buy an infrared thermometer too. Monitor the scarf surfaces every 5-7 minutes during heating. I’ll make sure it they stay at like a 12 to 18 degree gradient max, it won’t be a problem.”

“Well,” Zagers laughed. “Guess this guy just has everything figured out, huh?”

Parage scoffed, and whispered under his breath something about the monolithic grain recast causing stress fractures in the cheese block and creating erratic burn surfaces, even though I’d already planned to vibrate the lower quarter-half continuously during pouring using the orbital sander but of course Parage needs to chip in with his expert opinions.

“Welp, we’re goin’ off to bed,” Mogers yawned, then nonchalantly put a hand on his forehead, sighing tiredly. The rest of the gang followed, ready to get a good night’s sleep. He checked his watch. “Alademipaburg closes at 10, it’s 9:32 now. We got plenty of stuff in the basement… we don’t have 200 pounds of cheese though. Well, unless you count… I mean, yeah, whatever.”

”Ha, I’ll be making 2 stops.” I smirked. “I wouldn’t dare buy anything from the Alademipaburg Food Section. Doesn’t matter if it’s for compost.”

Most people are smart when they’re calm and dumb when they’re nervous, but Walter is the opposite. Why is this? Bad writing on Vince’s part?

Critique 1 (2971)

Kevin “dies” around the middle of the series, and Sam calls the gang to tell them the bad news, but then the gang reveals their bad news first. More bad stuff is happening too. It’s one of the parts in the story where everything goes wrong and seems hopeless.

The Terractus has some sort of landing strip tunnel system web thing where spacecraft go to enter the Terractus. A tour guide, who’s a giant looking floating human thing and who’s later revealed to be an immortal being, is there to welcome visitors and explain everything. That’s also where they find and save the other guy, I might call him Andrew, an orphan who joins to help the gang as well. He’s with his younger sister and baby brother, his parents were scientists who were also in the know about aliens and built their own rocket to try to get the family to safety from the apocalypse because they were tight with some other alien civilizations who would accept them, but then they got captured by Terractians. Andrew also has to abandon his little sister and baby brother and as they leave he and the gang watch them get murdered by the Terractians. Andrew goes into a psychotic meltdown and then after he calms down, pulls out a drawing his little sister made of their family living on the new planets with aliens, smiling and happy. Then later the main gang gets into a big fight about whether Andrew is a liability. Then in the final plane fight Andrew turns out to be a double agent who was convinced by one of the gods to join them in exchange for powers to become a god himself and revive his family, and kills Zaine.

After the prison breakout of Zaine, they know they can’t take him to a hospital so they take him to the SMAKAPZ house instead and Sam and Zagers have that big argument about leaving him alone in the SMAKAPZ house, Sam later learns Zagers put a camera in the guest room to watch Zaine while he sleeps, and Sam gets mad and reminds Zagers that Zaine can detect infared light with his headband so if he wakes up he’ll know there’s a camera, they go to the SMAKAPZ house and sneak into Zaine’s room to take down the camera but Zagers can’t because he had Parage install it and Parage isn’t here and they can’t get him here before Zaine wakes up, so instead Sam destroys Zaine’s headband and later gaslights Zaine into thinking it came off his head and he rolled on it and crushed it.

Antisemitic or not?

This story is an UPDATE, see part 3 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/1t4zmhp/tifu_by_trusting_my_cartoonist_frenemy_to_not_get/

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/1t2u5bu/tifu_by_letting_my_exbusiness_partner_go_all_the/

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/1t1cyl5/tifu_by_collaborating_with_an_dumbass_cartoonist/

So my upstairs wannabe radio talk show host neighbor has escalated from writing angry letters about my “dangerous connections” because of the legislation me and cartoonist guy tried to pass, to literal sabotage attempts at my actual job. For context I’ve had a lot of jobs throughout my lifetime but right now I’m a night auditor at a mid sized hotel chain downtown. Graveyard shift, balancing the books, dealing with drunkard guests etc. HR basically told him to kick rocks after his first complaint, so now he’s mad as hell and apparently cooking up something new.

The other day I found out my blood sugar was way too high, I explained to the doctor it’s probably all the stress with the mustelids tearing up my vegetable garden and my mom’s giant vat of sodium chlorine taking up air in the garage so I can’t store anything in there anymore, and now my host neighbor is blasting his show at all hours ranting about the situation we’re currently in right now. I had to make an investment in a decent blood sugar monitor just to keep track, dropped some cash on one of those fancy continuous glucose ones. I figured it was smarter than another trip to the detox clinic in the south that my cousin keeps recommending after her Colorado honeymoon fallout, because I went there and it was all swampy heat and group therapy circles and shit like that. Yeah I’ll pass.

This front desk dude who’s always been a hot mess is responsible for the latest problem in the hotel. He impulsively let a sketchy vendor set up in the lobby without checking with management. The vendor was a jokester who got beaten trying to sell fat to people who were attending a big dinner and eating fried potatoes with cheese curds and gravy at 2 a.m, a bunch of hungover guests there as well. It was a disaster with grease everywhere and complaints flooding in. The wannabe radio host blamed me and is now trying to get me fired by association, even though I was in the back office the whole time watching the whole event on security cameras while explaining to dumbasses why the books weren’t balancing thanks to all the comped rooms.

During one particularly slow night I was sitting there feeling really foggy, which I would later attribute to my high blood sugar, and playing an old Nintendo Game Boy I dug out of storage. I explained to the security guard that I know exactly what to play in these situations, Pokémon Red, and I always go straight for the exact route that gets me the best early game team, muscle memory from childhood. It calms me down.

That’s when I noticed a clear part of a fork on the floor, one of the plastic tines from the earlier dinner disaster just sitting there under the lights. I picked it up and doodled notes on the back of writing material that a candy maker who visited the hotel had left behind, a chocolatier had attended the dinner and left behind thick and creamy stationary with gold embossing, and I used it to jot down a message basically blaming the impulsive front desk guy for everything. And I was pretty damn proud of myself for that move.

Last night I found out the radio host called the hotel and left a complain specifically about the night auditor, aka me, then made a few more calls, each time pretending to be a different guest. One call claimed that after a bad room service order I had the choice to mollify him with top tier legumes and didn’t take it, basically saying he wanted free food. I explained to my manager during the follow up meeting that demanding premium beans at 4 a.m. is a stupid maneuver, and I didn’t mention that I knew he was literally my upstairs neighbor who complained several times before because of a personal vendetta against me. But I really shouldn’t have said the bean thing either because in that moment, I was a massive hypocrite.

That’s because I’ve been stress eating chickpeas and lentils lately as part of my blood sugar investment plan, and the radio host wannabe knows that which is probably why he made that specific complaint. Top tier legumes have been my mollification of choice. They’re cheap and filling and help stabilize everything. My nieces and nephews even helped me plant some in the balcony containers before the mustelids got too bold.

Maybe I actually should pay another visit to that detox clinic in the south. I actually tried to take accountability and explain to my boss that every problem we’re facing in the workplace right now stems to that one dumb piece of legislation me and my business partner tried to pass, but he essentially just told me to fuck off in boss terms.

TL;DR: The wannabe radio talk show host is still furious his HR complaint didn’t get me fired from my job, so he’s now making fake guest calls to try and sabotage me. My blood sugar is stupidly high from all the stress, so I invested in a glucose monitor and started mollifying myself with chickpeas, lentils, and other healthy sources of protein. The front desk guy’s impulsivity let some jokester set up in the lobby selling fat during a big dinner event, which the host is now using as “evidence” against me.

Location: Topeka, Kansas, and the detox clinic mentioned is in Birmingham, Alabama.

King David (c. 1040–970 BCE)

King Solomon (c. 970–931 BCE)

Rehoboam

Abijah (Abijam)

Asa

Jehoshaphat

Jehoram

Ahaziah

Joash (Jehoash)

Amaziah

Uzziah (Azariah)

Jotham

Ahaz

Hezekiah

Manasseh

Amon

Josiah

Jehoahaz (Shallum)

Jehoiakim

Jeconiah (Jehoiachin)

Zedekiah (last king of Judah, d. after 586 BCE) — Biblical line of kings ends here in power.

Princess Tea Tephi (legendary daughter of Zedekiah, c. 580 BCE) — marries Eochaidh (Heremon), High King of Ireland in British Israelism lore.

23. Eochaidh Heremon (High King of Ireland)

Successive Irish High Kings (Milesian/Gaelic legendary line)

Follain mac Eochaidh

Eoghan mac Follain

Conall

... (continuing through ~40–50 generations of Gaelic kings, e.g., via Niall of the Nine Hostages traditions).

Migration to Scotland & Early Scottish Kings (Dalriada/Pictish fusion):

Fergus mac Erc (traditional founder of Scottish royal line)

Aedan mac Gabrain

... (leading to)

Kenneth MacAlpin (c. 843 CE, traditional unifier of Scots and Picts).

Medieval Scottish Monarchs (House of Dunkeld, then Bruce, then Stewart):

Malcolm II

Duncan I

Malcolm III (Canmore)

David I

...

Robert the Bruce

...

James II of Scotland

John Stewart, 3rd Earl of Lennox (c. 1490–1526)

Bridge to MacLeod Clan (Highland connections via intermarriages):

Alexander Stewart (descendant)

Malcolm Stewart-MacLeod (marriage into MacLeod clan)

John Roy MacLeod (MacLeod ancestor)

Alexander MacLeod (c. 1830s, paternal line ancestor)

Malcolm MacLeod (grandfather era)

Malcolm MacLeod (1866–1954) — Father of Mary Anne MacLeod.

Mary Anne MacLeod (1912–2000) — Emigrated from Isle of Lewis, Scotland; married Fred Trump.

Donald J. Trump (b. 1946) — 45th and 47th President of the United States.

I’m not Muslim but considering converting soon. This whole mess started a couple years back when I got roped into working with this cartoonist dude on some proposed legislation. I explained I’m not even a lobbyist or anything, I’m just a guy who knows people and volunteers sometimes at community stuff, but he kept saying my “everyman perspective” was gold for his bill. The guy draws these political cartoons for some alt-weekly that barely anyone reads anymore, but he thinks he’s a real policy wonk so I said fine, whatever, and we’re drafting this thing together late nights and I’m the sole reason it’s not dog water although I don’t like to toot my own horn.

But then he tells me that he needs me to add a literal rider imposing a tax on kids playing, a penalty fee if kids are caught playing outside unsupervised or something. He explained it was to fund public art initiatives and teach responsibility in a world that took place in the future when the Internet era was over, but I explained back that we’re not writing a Captain America villain origin story here where the government guy in the suit starts taxing joy and freedom and next thing you know Cap’s punching Nazis again but the Nazis are now bureaucrats with clipboards. He got all pissy and said I didn’t understand satire or whatever.

Meanwhile, family issues were already boiling over with both of us where his side had some big blowup with his ex over custody and he kept dragging it into our meetings, saying the legislation was for the kids in a way that didn’t make any sense with the tax on playing part, and my own family was on my behind too because I was spending all this time on unpaid cartoonist legislation work instead of helping with my mom’s salt troubles. She was on a low-sodium diet after the doctor scared her, but I knew she was sneaking in iodized salt every family dinner like it’s contraband because she was crying about how everything tastes like cardboard, so it didn’t matter. I explained to her a million times that the legislation wasn’t gonna fix her hypertension, but she kept mixing it up with something else.

I also had to go out to Oregon for a volunteering trip right in the middle of this collaboration. I explained to the cartoonist it was for a habitat restoration thing but really I just needed air. Got to the coast and that’s where the first duping happened. Some old guy, like 75, comes up selling bull out of his trunk. I explained I’m not falling for that, but he spins this whole yarn about how one of the comics he’s selling has an unreleased Mr. Rogers crossover sketch inside and well I do like Fred Rogers. So I bought it. 2 weeks later I find out it’s a fraud.

Back home the cartoonist guy says he’s not feeling well, coughing, fever, the whole 9 yards stuff but instead of rescheduling, he makes his Mexican student which is some grad kid he’s mentoring on illustration, step up as my temporary assistant. He shows up and I could tell he was super eager, but he couldn’t speak English well at all. I had to use Google Translate on my phone half the time, and we had a good conversation about America and the government and stuff but that backfired because now he thought I was like a lawyer or something and kept asking me for law advice, while I simultaneously have to deal with the cartoonist guy blowing up my phone from his sickbed demanding updates.

Then the cartoonist guy claims he made a huge scientific discovery, which I instantly knew was pseudoscience bull. He was genuinely convinced that he figured out a new pigment formula for his cartoons that changes color on its own, and I explained it’s it’s likely just temperature sensitive ink from Amazon. That same week he gets caught soliciting prostitutes 2 times in a row. So I went to his house and paid him a visit, and we had a little talk. I explained that I don’t judge people’s personal lives but when you’re trying to pass legislation with my name attached, maybe don’t get busted on the same corner by the same vice cop.

So then I go to a volunteering event and well what do you know the same con artist from Oregon is literally there and now he’s selling salt. I bought two bags for my mom. The 3rd duping he hits me with an original comic art and I bought that too because why not, I’ll probably find out that it’s obviously traced or maybe even an Al generated fraud or something when I look closer at it but who cares it’s a cool artwork. I told the cartoonist guy that I was done working with him and his student assistant and then he says I’m the bad guy for bailing when he’s sick and his family’s a mess and the legislation could’ve been beautiful.

TL;DR: I partnered with a cartoonist who had bad ideas, and he got sick and made his Mexican student, who couldn’t English well, my assistant, started talking to me about pseudoscientist bullshit and he also got mixed up with prostitutes, and I got conned 3 times by an old man who was a fraud. The cartoonist guy had family drama plus so did I with my mom’s salt doctor troubles and I had an Oregon volunteering trip that made it worse. I told the cartoonist guy to shoo and explained that he was a fraud.

Location: These events took place all over the country but right now we’re all in Topeka, Kansas including the cartoonist guy but now he’s on the hunt for the con artist, who I’m pretty sure is still in town doing his thing he’s not in Oregon or wherever the cartoonist guy is looking for him.

Critique 1 (2100)

The protagonist’s best friend and his older sister are running through the building being shot at by the villain’s security guard when suddenly he runs out of bullets, the older sister starts mocking him but the guard reveals he’s the one who stole their bulletproof spray, a point from earlier in the book, and he’s wearing it right now, so even if they had guns it wouldn’t matter. He shakes their hands in mock friendliness and introduces himself John Ryan (not the name I’m using) Older sister asks why it says John W. on his nametag and not John R, to which the henchman explains that his actual last name is Williams but he goes by his first and middle name. Protagonist’s best friend complains they should turn the AC on in this building and the henchman replies that if he really wants to see what it’s like to be hot, he should come down to his place in Carson, Arizona. The henchman says they’re good kids and should just leave, and points to them to exit.

They’re surprised he’s just gonna let them go, but then PBF and older sister open the door, find themselves in a room full of guards, and realize it’s a trap. The secodary villain is there, and he points a gun at OS, while a group of minions with guns, including the henchman, surround PBF. During OS and the secondary villain’s back and forth, SV mentions a row, where OS, who’s kind of a math geek, corrects him and says “Column” and then explains the difference between columns and rows. It turns out that she actually said “Call him” and, while SV was distracted by the back and forth, PBF called the MC, and told him to abandon the tertiary villain, who MC had in his house as a hostage, and come help them instead. As he’s about to give the address, OS grabs the phone from PBF, and tells him to stay with TV and if they don’t call him back in an hour, to kill him. Once SV hears he pistol-whips OS and grabs the phone out of her hands, while MC replies that he can’t, because he already abandoned him, like PBF told him to, and started heading out and that he’s probably escaped by now. SV slams the ground on the phone, destroying it, and points the gun at OS’s bloodied face while she’s on the ground, while PBF is being surrounded by men with machine guns.

OS tells him it might not be the best idea to kill her, SV asks why to which she replies that his minion is a fraud. She lies and says the henchman is with her, and says his full government name, John Ryan Williams, and that he’s from Carson City, Arizona. While still keeping the gun pointed at OS, SV turns to the henchman and asks how she knows his full government name and where he’s from. OS explains that he’s there for espionage, which is why his gun has no bullets. SV lowers his gun, goes to the henchman, and tells him to shoot OS right now. When the henchman stammers and stalls and tries to explain everything, SV shoots him, but since the henchman is wearing bulletproof spray, it ricochets off his body, killing SV. While the rest of the minions are distracted and in shock, PBF and OS make their escape.