u/Significant-Land2563

When the air is this thick, it puts people on edge. Add coastal fog, the glow of gas lamps, and the silhouettes of Spanish moss hanging from the trees, and you barely even needed the ghost story. Savannah itself felt like it was waiting for ghouls to step out into the night. 

"Now, folks," I dropped my voice into a theatrical hush, letting my Appalachian drawl slip out. "The history books will tell you that Major General Nathaniel Greene is buried right here under this obelisk. But what they don't print in the brochures is that when they moved his remains in 1901, the casket was empty." 

An older woman let out a gasp. No doubt, she was playing it up for her kids. There were about fifteen in the group tonight—mostly middle-aged couples, a college kid trying to impress his date, and a mother with kids who were probably too young for the tour. 

"The truth is," I continued, "the General's remains were stolen. Leaving his soul damned to this earthly plane. Now, if you stand completely still on a night like this, when the fog rolls in off the river, you can often hear the General's boots pacing the cobblestones... looking for his body." 

A woman in the back let out a nervous, high-pitched giggle. A passing car a block away provided a low, rumbling bass that felt cinematic. 

It was a complete and utter lie. General Greene’s remains were exactly where they were supposed to be, and I had made up his damned wandering on the spot. I didn't believe in ghosts, unfinished business, or phantom footsteps. To me, this was a job. The supernatural was nothing more than a commodity—a way to pay for overpriced charcoal pencils, canvases, and the rent on my studio apartment. 

I clicked my flashlight on, flashing a bright, reassuring smile. "Alright, let's keep moving. Keep your cameras ready, in case you get lucky and feel a cold spot." 

As the group shuffled forward toward the next square, I let out a long, silent exhale and fell to the back of the pack. 

"Sumimasen," an older man said. "I was deployed in Nippon in the war." He and his wife looked very proud of their understanding of Japanese. 

I wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead, brushing a stray lock of dark, heavy hair out of my eyes. 

"I exclusively speak English, actually. Also, I'm Korean... and white." 

The old couple looked horrified. I expected the usual "oh sorry," but they simply nodded their heads and turned away. It was true, I was an anomaly in Savannah. I had my dad's sharp, monolid eyes and dark features, but I sounded like I grew up catching crawdads in a holler. It was a mix that usually left ignorant people squinting at me in confusion. After eighteen years of this rigmarole, I was entirely used to it and, at the time, I was too exhausted to care. 

Art school was fun but exhausting. Especially trying my hardest to avoid ending up as an art teacher or a professional barista when it was all over. It wasn't made any easier by the other inheritance from my mother’s side. My mother called it mountain magic. It was an old, deep-rooted superstition, passed down through her family. The way she explained it, women from Appalachia were often a little more "tuned in" to the frequency of the universe. 

It didn't mean I saw dead people; like I said, ghosts were just good for tips. My "mountain magic" was far more bizarre, and far more intrusive. 

When a "vision" or an "episode" hit me, it didn't come with a visual hallucination or a whisper from beyond the grave. It came as a tidal wave of overpowering emotion. I could be standing in the grocery store aisle, looking at a box of cereal, and suddenly be crushed by an intense, suffocating grief. Or I'd be sitting in my color theory class and become entirely enraptured by a hyper-specific concept—like an overwhelming, obsessive intuition about the number forty-two. You know how Southern folk can feel the rain coming? It was like that, cranked up to eleven. 

For most of my childhood, the episodes were basically nonexistent. A slight hunch here, a weird bout of sadness there. It didn't really start until I was about fifteen. My mother always said it was the land that was important—the longer you spent in an area, the stronger it got. She fully believed if you moved to New York, you'd lose the sight completely in a few years. It wasn't until recently, when I moved down here to Savannah, that things had changed for me. 

It was as if the "magic" had mutated. It had gotten sharper. Heavier. Lately, the emotions weren't just sad or happy. They were primal. Animalistic. 

"Alex?" 

I blinked, pulling myself out of my own head. We had reached Calhoun Square. A man in a pastel polo shirt was waving a hand at me. 

"Is this the one with the hanging tree?" Bob asked, pointing his phone camera at a massive, sprawling oak in the center of the square. 

"You know your history," I said, slipping back into character. I stepped to the front of the group, aiming my flashlight up into the dense, twisting branches of the oak. The moss hung down like a shredded shroud. "They say this square is haunted because the city paved right over an unmarked grave. If you look closely at the roots—" 

I stopped. My voice hitched in my throat. It was happening. 

It started at the base of my skull—a low, rhythmic thrumming, like the beating of a massive heart. The muggy air seemed to thicken, and the ambient noise of the city—the distant traffic, the chirping insects, the murmurs of my tour group—all faded into a muffled hum. 

Then came the emotion. It slammed into me with the force of a freight train. It was a paralyzing wave of fury. My teeth ground together so hard my jaw ached. I felt a sudden, desperate urge to drop to the cobblestones on all fours, bare my teeth, and scream. I stumbled backward, dropping the flashlight. 

"Woah, you okay there?" Pastel shirt guy asked, taking a half-step forward. 

DANGER. 

The intuition spiked. I didn't just feel angry anymore; I felt impossibly large. For a split second, gazing up into the canopy of the oak, I felt ancient. I felt a sense of scale and wonder that was terrifying. I couldn't breathe. The raw panic vibrating through my chest was so intense tears were streaming down my face. I was pulsing at a frequency my body couldn't handle. 

"Miss? Alex?" A woman gently touched my shoulder. 

The contact broke the circuit. 

The pressure in my head vanished with an inaudible pop. The roar of city traffic rushed back into my ears. The oppressive fury drained out of me, leaving my knees weak and my hands trembling. 

"I..." I swallowed hard, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand, trying to mask the shaking in my voice. "I'm sorry. I just... I felt a cold spot." 

The tour group stared at me, their eyes wide with genuine fear. For the first time all night, I didn't have to act. 

I picked up the flashlight. My sight had never hit me like that before. It had never felt so physical, so close, or so... massive. As I forced a smile and led the group quickly out of the square, I couldn't shake the intuition that whatever was out there in the dark, whatever had just flooded my mind with that terrifying rage... it knew who I was. 

END OF WEEK REPORT: 

DATE: Friday, October 13, 2028 

TO: Executive Oversight Committee, Project SAM 

FROM: Arthur Vance, Head of Neural Architecture 

SUBJECT: Post-Launch Diagnostics and Team Debrief 

Summary: I am thrilled to report that as of 1800 hours this evening, Project SAM was successfully brought online. The initial boot sequence executed perfectly, and the core neural network stabilized within fourteen seconds of activation—well under our projected three-minute window. I cannot overstate what a massive milestone this is for the project. SAM is currently holding steady, processing ambient data, and running baseline conversational logic without any critical errors. 

Team Commendations: I want to formally acknowledge the junior engineering team. We wouldn't have hit this launch window without them practically living in the lab for the last month. 

• Sarah Lin (Algorithmic Integration): Sarah managed the bridge between our legacy code and SAM’s adaptive learning module seamlessly. 
• Jay Patel (Hardware & Bio-Metrics): Jay kept the server temperatures running perfectly green during the initial power surge. He also fine-tuned the haptic feedback and biometric scanners at the primary workstation. 
• Tom Kennedy (Linguistics & User Experience): Tom’s conversational logic trees held up beautifully during SAM's first vocal tests. The system's tone is warm, responsive, and incredibly natural, compared to similar competitor AI.

 

Minor Issues / Action Items: Everything is functioning within acceptable parameters, but I did notice one minor quirk during my evening diagnostic run that I will be addressing next week. 

When SAM engages in direct conversation, it seems to have a slight memory leak in its biometric intake module. Whenever I sat at the primary terminal and ran vocal prompts, the system's processing latency spiked by about 0.4 seconds. It appears SAM is attempting to map not just my vocal inputs, but my biometric data—heart rate, pupil dilation, and keystroke cadence—and mirroring it back into its own processing rhythm. 

Essentially, it's trying to mimic my physical rhythm while we "talk." It's a fascinating overcorrection in Tom's empathy protocols, but it's eating up unnecessary processing power. I'll write a patch to cap its biometric intake limits on Monday. 

Overall, an incredibly successful week. I am going to send the team home for a well-deserved weekend and power down my terminal. 

End of report. 

Content Warning: (SA, Violence, Gore, Slurs, Language)

Part 1

The sun in this new world boiled. 

Father Ignacio pleaded, pressing his wooden rosary to his lips, his prayers drowned by the maddening drone of cicadas. Captain Vargas’ men hacked at dense mangrove roots, their blades dulling against the fibers. They baked alive in their own armor, their boots sinking deep into mud, water, and ancient vegetation. Father Ignacio prayed for deliverance from this wet, rotting green hell before casting his gaze back at the center of their miserable procession. Perched upon a gilded palanquin, carried on the blistered shoulders of four slaves, sat Doña Isabella, the mastermind and financier of this expedition. Her wealth was second only to the King's, and her ire second to none. 

Isabella, by all accounts except her own, was the withered husk of the woman she once was, her skin cracked like aged parchment. Her eyes were a sickening yellow. She wheezed with every jarring step of the slaves, coughing phlegm into an embroidered handkerchief clutched between her skeletal fingers. 

"How much farther?" Captain Vargas barked, his hand resting uneasily on the hilt of his rapier. 

Nayari, their captive guide, stopped. Bound by a hemp rope, she did not speak; instead, Vargas could feel her fear through her dark eyes—wide and filled with a stark, ancient dread. He followed her gaze over to the jagged maw settled in the face of a monstrous, overgrown rock. In that instant, the birds fled. The chirp of cicadas trailed off. The roar of the water faded. The entire cacophony of the jungle abruptly died. An unnatural silence, thick and suffocating, settled over each person in the presence of the great cavern. 

A foul, metallic breeze exhaled from the darkness, freezing the sweat on their bodies. The cave was black as ink. It was as if light itself ceased to exist within. The low, guttural roar of thunder rolled through the sky. The canopy of the jungle shook. At the sound, the men bearing Isabella’s palanquin broke. Dropping the gilded throne with a heavy crash, they turned and sprinted toward the treeline. 

Isabella let out a yelp. "Damned savages!" 

The deafening crack of matchlock fire echoed in the air, followed by the wet thud of a body hitting muddy ground. 

Smoke licked the barrel of Vargas' pistol. "Get them," he barked at his men. 

"Forget them," Isabella corrected. 

Two soldiers stepped over and helped her to her feet instead. 

"Are you injured, Señora?" Vargas asked, taking her hand to guide her. 

"It is nothing. Let us hurry." 

Father Ignacio checked on Nayari. "Come, child." He reached out his hand to her. 

She didn't address him; rather, she trembled like a rabbit bitten by a hunting dog. Ignacio put his hand on her shoulder. Her flesh was clammy to his touch. Her body shaking, she slowly bent down to her knees. She began to mutter under her breath in a language no one else present could understand. 

"Leave her," Vargas instructed the priest. "Tie her up. She doesn't leave," he informed his men. 

With a now-lit torch, Vargas and Father Ignacio, with Doña Isabella in hand, breached the threshold. For the first one hundred paces, it was merely a cold, damp cave, the rock descending ever deeper into the earth. However, eventually, the stone began to warp and malform. The natural formations gave way to alien architecture, a blasphemy that defied earthly geometry. The stalactites did not hang straight; rather, they curved inward, like the jagged teeth of a colossal, fossilized leviathan. The walls were etched with spiraling, maddening waves—carvings devoid of human logic and godly reason. 

Father Ignacio felt his stomach in his throat, his mind refusing to accept the horror inching toward his understanding. He could feel a faint whispering on the edge of his comprehension. It disturbed him like nothing he had ever even dared to dread. It took every ounce of his faith to not cast himself off the descending pathway into the never-ending void just to end the sensation clawing at his sanity. 

Finally, they reached the bottom of the shaft; the area opened into a sort of grand amphitheater, or profane temple to a being long forgotten. Near the far edge of the room sat a pool of perfectly still water, smooth as polished obsidian. There was no sound except that of the rain and the wind whipping around the entrance to this horrid tomb. Resting at the water's edge sat the first signs of man seen throughout the entire trek into this accursed jungle. Rusted Spanish cuirasses and rotting leather satchels. Swords, guns, and cloth. Most of them torn and strewn around. Some were bloodied; others were folded as if waiting for their owners to return. 

Vargas knelt, pulling at the most unique of all the lost possessions: a mold-eaten journal. He handed the torch to Father Ignacio. Vargas opened the cover and squinted at the faded ink—it was the personal log of another explorer; amazingly still, it was written in Spanish. As quickly as possible in this dank abyss, he began to read aloud from the passages. It chronicled the rumors of and up to the eventual discovery of "miraculous waters." 

Not all were captivated by the tale, however. Doña Isabella, with the same scowl she'd worn for miles through the jungle, reached for the book with trembling, eager hands. Isabella flipped to an entry followed by the meager remains of a torn page. She retrieved a brittle, folded parchment from her robe. She set the sheet into place like a puzzle piece and handed it over to Vargas. A letter, written to Doña Isabella, stained in ink and blood. Two things stuck out: "The Fountain of Youth" and the name lovingly scrawled at the end of the page—Juan Ponce de León. 

"My lady, if this is León's expedition... then where are the bodies? If this is the fabled fountain, why did the expedition not return?" Vargas asked, his voice tight with an unfamiliar dread as he scanned the shadows. 

"That I do not know," she replied. "León knew my time was short and that he would be rewarded greatly for this discovery. As to why he and his men are not here—it would seem only God would know." 

Ignacio gripped his rosary so hard his knuckles turned white. Any tighter and his skin would tear and bleed. "This place was not carved by the hands of God, Doña Isabella. It is a monument to someone—something else." 

His cry fell on deaf ears. Isabella removed her robes and her jewels. She stripped down to her bare, naked flesh. Her emaciated, ruined body shivered in the unnatural cold, her bones aching with each contorted movement of her twisted form. Slowly, she stepped into the pitch-black liquid. As her foot broke the surface, the sky outside tore open. A large crack of thunder echoed throughout the cave. The booms echoed and roared into a deafening dissonance. 

Doña Isabella waded into the calm waters until her head disappeared beneath the surface. Moments passed. Neither of the two men would let out even as little as an exhale in suspense. Finally, Vargas began to approach the pool in fear for his lady's life. 

Instantly, Ignacio held his arm out. "Wait." He pointed toward the pool. 

Slowly, a head peered out, and then perfect, perky breasts, followed by a tight hourglass form with curved hips to complement it and, finally, delicate, angelic feet. Doña Isabella, restored. Reborn. She looked like a teenage girl rather than the wizened woman near death. However, there was no mistaking it. The features gave it away; this was the Doña, albeit decades—no, a century—younger. Vargas began to put Isabella's robes over her body. 

"Let's get you out of this cold, Señora—ah, señorita." 

His fingers brushed against her soft skin for just a moment. The liquid was warm. He jerked away and held his hand to his face. In the glow of the flames of the torch, he saw dark crimson. He took the torch from Father Ignacio and held it to Doña Isabella's face. Blood. She was covered in blood. 

Have the devs ever mentioned or has the community formally ask for a non ranked match as like a default? Then ranked should be filled with the people actually wanting to play it? Am I wrong that there wouldn’t be a demand for this?