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You (dil)do you, ma'm and/or xir.
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2021
Previous chapter
Chapter Two: Field Operations
The benefit of the room mismatch expanded in the morning. The water timers for the bathroom were set to accommodate two people, and Daniel made use of it gratefully. The morning opened quickly once he left the hotel. The light was already firm, flattening the land into long, uninterrupted planes.
Out beyond the road, the fields stretched over dry sections, their surfaces marked by worked lines that held their shape too clearly. At the edges, the patterns loosened, giving way to patches of scrub where the soil shifted color and texture without warning. Here and there, irrigation lines lay in place without tension, coils and lengths that suggested use without confirming it. In low areas, the ground pulled inward, forming shallow basins where pale deposits traced the outline of water that had already moved on. Nothing redirected it. Nothing remained to hold it there. The horizon stayed low and unbroken. Distance didn’t accumulate so much as repeat: the same fields, the same interruptions, set out again with small variations that didn’t change the whole.
When the building emerged, it did so first as a surface that held the light differently. Not brighter, but steadier. It gathered the morning instead of reflecting it away, a fixed point against the shifting textures of soil and scrub. Around it, the land showed its compromises. Scattered farm structures sat at uneven distances from the road: metal sheds, partial enclosures, equipment left in place past its intended use. Lines of pipe ran outward and stopped. Fencing appeared and disappeared without enclosing anything fully. Each piece suggested intention, but not continuation.
The building stood clear of that pattern. Its edges sharp and defined. Its materials remained consistent from one face to the next. Set slightly above the surrounding grade, it avoided the subtle sag that affected everything else, as though it had been given its own conditions to operate within. It didn’t belong to the sequence that produced the land around it. It interrupted it: complete where everything else felt provisional. Not isolated, exactly, but self-contained in a way that made the surrounding area feel unloved by comparison.
By the time Daniel turned in, it had already resolved into something closer to an enclave than a destination: a clean rectangle of glass and pale concrete, a parking lot with fresh striping, white lines unscuffed. It stood as an assigned space laid down among systems that hadn’t settled into themselves.
Daniel pulled in. The security kiosk had already processed his plate and let him slip through without slowing. He parked and stepped out, plugging the car into a charging station. The indicator turned green. As he approached the building, a message chimed on his phone confirming his arrival.
Inside, a screen displayed his name and directed him through without pause.
“You’re Ruiz?”
Daniel turned. She was already holding two cases.
“Yeah.”
“Maribel.” They managed to work in a handshake. “We should get going. It’s easier before it heats up.”
Outside, the land rose into a low hill where the install had been staged. Off to the side, behind fencing, a rectangular cut had been made into the ground. Modular panels and sealed containers were stacked nearby, arranged carefully but not in use.
Daniel nodded toward it. “What’s going on out there?”
Maribel glanced over, then back. “Not sure. Something they’re setting up later.”
They headed to a loading dock with Maribel’s truck. Two others were already there loading up cases. “You can ride with me,” Maribel said to Daniel, “They don’t have chargers up on the hill.”
At the installation point, the team did their work without much conversation. Upon the bed of gravel, pieces found their place as if the sequence had already been rehearsed. It was a machine: new, sleek, carefully designed, but also functional, with exposed wires, instrument panels, and pipes. Daniel worked through his checklist, pecking at the keyboard of a rugged laptop. Two cables needed to be connected, but no coupler was on the inventory list. He paused to consider how it could be handled. Maribel was already at the truck. When she came back, she had the correct part, unaccounted for but clearly necessary.
“Didn’t see that in the list,” Daniel said.
“It wasn’t,” she said, securing it.
The problem ended there.
When the system came online, it did so cleanly. Output stabilized almost immediately. They all moved to the output pipe.
At the outlet, water gathered and extended into a continuous line, perfectly clear. It was so clear it seemed to remove itself from the air it passed through. It did not cloud or distort. It held its form with a precision that made it appear structured, as though clarity itself were a material property it maintained.
Light met it and stayed there. Along its surface, a thin line of brightness formed, sharp and uninterrupted, moving with it but not dissolving. The reflection did not scatter the way it did across the surrounding gravel or metal. It remained contained, exact, tracing the path of the flow with a steadiness that suggested control instead of chance.
Against the dust of the air and the rough texture of distant chaparral, the water seemed to operate under different conditions. It accepted light fully, returned it cleanly, and in doing so revealed every contour of its movement without distortion. Nothing about it was hidden or diffused. It was visible in a complete way, as if it could not be otherwise.
Someone placed a container beneath it. The stream met the edge without deviation, settling into it with a soft, regular contact. The sound permeated the space: a quiet, steady music was created, ever rising in pitch. The surface inside the container held the same clarity, reflecting the structure of the machine in perfect, inverted lines.
“Looks right,” Maribel said.
Daniel checked some readings. All passing, but he still had work to do. They left it running and went to lunch.
They sat beneath a temporary canopy staked into the gravel, its fabric pulled taut but already ticking in the heat. The machine ran up the slope behind them, out of direct sight but not entirely absent either. A faint line of movement could still be traced where the output began its descent. A few handheld containers had been set nearby. One of them was open.
Maribel picked it up and turned it slightly in her hand before passing it over. “This is from the first run,” she said. “It’s been sitting out a bit, but it’s better than anything we can get inside.”
Daniel took it. The plastic had warmed, but the water inside hadn’t taken on anything from it, no clouding, no tint. He drank. It went down cleanly, without taste or resistance, the temperature settling somewhere between the air and something colder. He lowered the container and held it for a moment before setting it down.
“Cold would be better.” he said.
Maribel chuckled, “For sure.”
They ate from paper containers balanced on their knees: rice, vegetables, something grilled and already drying at the edges. No one had bothered to sit in any particular arrangement. The others spoke in short exchanges, mostly about timing, tools, the next set of readings, a joke or two. Nothing carried.
After a minute or so, Maribel glanced toward the slope.
“You’re based out of Texas?” she said.
“Well, that’s where we moved out to. I grew up in LA,” Daniel replied. “Now I get bounced around a lot.”
“How often do you—” she stopped, adjusted. “Travel for these?”
“Often enough,” he said. “This one’s short.”
She nodded again, though that didn’t seem to resolve anything for her. She pulled one of the labels off an empty container and folded it over itself, then again.
“Must be nice,” she said, not entirely committing to it. “Getting to see different places.”
Daniel looked out toward the fields. From here, the variation didn’t present itself. It flattened into the same long surfaces.
“Some of it is nice,” he said. “A lot of it’s like this.”
Maribel let out a small breath that might have been a laugh. “Yeah.”
There was a pause. One of the others stood and walked back toward the equipment without saying anything. The rest stayed where they were.
“You’re here full-time?” Daniel asked.
“Yeah. Not here-here,” she said, gesturing loosely toward the building. “Closer to town. Drive in.”
He nodded. “Long?”
“Depends on traffic,” she said. “Still manageable, for now.”
He glanced back toward the fenced cut they’d passed earlier. From this angle it was harder to see, just a shift in grade and color.
“Do you do a lot of installs?” he asked.
“Not usually,” she said. “They move people around when they need to. Depends who’s available.” She paused. “And who they trust not to mess it up.”
Daniel gave a slight nod at that. She looked down at her hands, still working the edge of the label into a thinner strip.
“You check things twice,” she said.
He shrugged slightly. “I just try to do what I’m supposed to.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He didn’t answer right away. Then, “Everyone has their own way of helping out.”
Another pause. The fabric above them lifted briefly with a pass of dry wind, then settled again. Maribel glanced back up toward the slope. The line of output was no longer visible from here, but the knowledge of it seemed to stay fixed in place.
“That thing…” she said, then stopped.
Daniel waited.
She didn’t immediately finish the thought. Instead, she reached for the container again, looked into it though there was nothing new to see.
“They’ve had stuff out here before,” she said finally. “Not like that. But—” she trailed off again. “Usually doesn’t last.”
Daniel followed her glance.
“This could,” he said plainly, without emphasis.
Maribel looked at him for a moment, like she was deciding whether that statement belonged to him or to something else.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
She set the container down more carefully than she had before. Another silence settled between them, not uncomfortable but incomplete. Around them, the others began to gather their things in loose, unspoken coordination. Daniel wiped his hands on a napkin and stood. Maribel did the same a moment later. They headed back up the slope.
They returned to the equipment without discussion. The machine had held its output in their absence, unchanged in rate or clarity. A second container had been set beneath it. Someone narrowed the valve slightly, not to correct anything, just to align it more precisely with the opening.
Daniel checked the readings again. The baseline held. He moved through the next step in the sequence, transferring the local logs to the uplink, watching the progress bar advance in a smooth, uninterrupted line. When it finished, he waited for confirmation on the remote side. Nothing presented itself.
He ran it again, more out of habit than expectation. Same result. The local system showed a full transmission—timestamped, verified, complete. He pulled up the dashboard view that mirrored intake on the company servers. The window refreshed without error, but the data field remained empty. He let it sit a moment longer, then checked the connection. Signal held. Latency within range. The log continued to populate locally, each new entry consistent with the last. He watched the two views side by side: one filling in, the other remaining clear.
Maribel was a few steps away, aligning cabling along the edge of the rack. One of the others called out a number. Someone repeated it back. The rhythm of work stayed intact. Daniel stepped aside and called Sam.
“I saw that,” Sam said, picking up immediately. “Already flagged it upstream.”
“You getting anything through?” Daniel asked.
“Not into the main pipeline,” Sam said. “It’s being routed off before it can register. Looks like it’s getting caught in a quarantine process.”
Daniel glanced back at the screen. The local entries continued to resolve without interruption.
“Why?” he asked.
“Doesn’t recognize the structure,” Sam said. “Or thinks it doesn’t. Hard to tell from this end.” A brief pause, the soft sound of keys. “Volume’s not helping either. You’re pushing more than it expects, so it’s holding it for review.”
“And then?”
“And then it stalled,” Sam said. “Process stopped resolving. Probably overloaded the buffer.”
Daniel watched the output line continue its steady movement downslope, unchanged.
“So nothing’s coming through.”
“Not where it needs to,” Sam said. “But I can pull traces on my side and see what IT’s doing.”
Daniel didn’t respond.
“They flagged it,” Sam added. “On the processing side.”
“For what?”
Another short pause. “Output profile.”
Daniel waited.
“There’s no variance in the logs,” Sam said. “No error states, no drift. It’s reading cleaner than what they’re used to seeing.”
Daniel looked at the local data again. Each line matched the last within narrow margins, small fluctuations well within tolerance, nothing missing.
“They’re calling it incomplete,” Sam continued. “Which usually just means it doesn’t line up with their validation models.”
Daniel let that settle.
“And what happens with that?” he asked.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Sam said. There was a faint shift in his tone—not urgency, but a narrowing of focus. “I’ve already got someone in the program office looking at the intake schema. We’ll give it somewhere cleaner to land. If that doesn’t take, I can route around it.”
Daniel looked at the log again. Line after line resolved without interruption, each entry identical in structure, varying only within tight margins.
“The quarantine?” he asked.
“I’ll get it cleared,” Sam said. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Just wasn’t set up for this.” A pause. More keys. “Hold on.”
Daniel waited, eyes moving between the local output and the empty dashboard.
“Okay,” Sam said. “Yeah. That tracks.”
“What does?”
“It’s not seeing any fault conditions,” Sam said. “No variance, no degradation signals. From their side, it looks incomplete.”
Daniel kept his eyes on the screen. “Incomplete.”
“Right,” Sam said. “They’re expecting at least some failure flags in the log. You know, calibration drift, retries, something to anchor it. Without that, it doesn’t parse as a full dataset.”
Daniel let out a sharp breath. Not quite a laugh.
“Look,” Sam said, “We just need to give it what it wants and it’ll go through.”
Daniel glanced up toward the machine. Its output hadn’t changed.
“I’m pushing a minor adjustment to your logging layer,” Sam said. “You’ll see it come through in a second. You just need to integrate it into the reporting step. You’ll want to give it some jitter, so it’s not flagged as static. I’ll send an email with more details.”
Daniel brought up the code for the logging system and found an insertion point to blend in Sam’s patch. He tuned the generalized parameters to match the required structure. Then he instructed the agent to review and build. It ran off its standard checks, all passing, then gave the usual chipper feedback. He restarted the logging, and a new line appeared in the log interface. It sat between two standard entries, formatted the same way, fields aligned, timestamped:
Daniel looked at it for a moment.
“That’ll pass?” he asked.
“It gives the process something to index,” Sam said. “Breaks the pattern. Lets it resolve.”
“Even if there’s nothing—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sam said, not impatiently, just moving past it. “It’s not for the machine. It’s for intake. Go ahead and let it run.”
Daniel watched as the next cycle of data came through. The new line held its place in the sequence, repeating at regular intervals, identical each time.
“Quarantine’s clearing,” Sam said. “Give it another minute.”
Daniel pulled up the dashboard again. This time, after a short delay, the field populated, first a single entry, then a sequence, filling in backward as the system caught up.
“Receiving now,” Daniel said.
“Yeah,” Sam replied. “That should stabilize it.” A short pause, then, more lightly, “We’ll clean it up before anything final goes out.”
Daniel didn’t respond immediately. He watched the two streams align: local and remote now reflecting the same structure, the same adjusted record.
“Is the format going to work for them?” he asked.
“Working on it,” Sam said. “You know the panel. They’ll want standard presentation anyway. Easier to meet them halfway than walk it through.”
“Right.”
“Go ahead and keep logging,” Sam said. “Don’t change anything else on your side.”
Daniel let the entries continue to pass, confirming the pattern held.
“You’re not wrong,” Sam added. “They just need it to fit with what they’re used to.”
Daniel stood there a second more, watching the output resolve cleanly into the system that had refused it minutes earlier. Then he closed the logging window and stepped back toward the others.
The machine continued without interruption. Satisfied with the operation of the machine, Daniel moved to a nearby portable building. Inside was little more than an unused kitchenette and a not very inviting desk. Daniel quickly sat down and logged into a budgetary meeting already underway. Sam was there, answering a question some project manager had asked about projections. The floor was passed around. Output became capacity. Duration became allocation. The system they described corresponded to the one outside, but only loosely, as if the two had been aligned at some earlier stage and then allowed to diverge. Daniel gave brief confirmations as needed. No one asked about water.
Afterward, he called Maribel in and brought Sam online again.
“We’re filling up a lot of containers now. Did we get clearance to discharge into the runoff?”
“Yes,” said Sam, “You are good to direct it now. There shouldn’t be any issues.”
A shallow trench cut down the slope directed the water toward what had once been a dry streambed. Daniel looked at Maribel and pointed out the window towards the trench. She understood. Quickly the output was redirected, and the water followed the grade, slipping into the channel and disappearing into the ground below. Daniel watched it for a moment. Its surface darkened where it entered, briefly holding the light before it dispersed. The line broke apart beneath the soil, but did not vanish so much as continue in a form that could no longer be traced from above. They packed up as the light shifted across the slope. The system continued to run.
Out beyond the road, the fields stretched over dry sections, their surfaces marked by worked lines that held their shape too clearly. At the edges, the patterns loosened, giving way to patches of scrub where the soil shifted color and texture without warning. Here and there, irrigation lines lay in place without tension, coils and lengths that suggested use without confirming it. In low areas, the ground pulled inward, forming shallow basins where pale deposits traced the outline of water that had already moved on. Nothing redirected it. Nothing remained to hold it there. The horizon stayed low and unbroken. Distance didn’t accumulate so much as repeat: the same fields, the same interruptions, set out again with small variations that didn’t change the whole.
When the building emerged, it did so first as a surface that held the light differently. Not brighter, but steadier. It gathered the morning instead of reflecting it away, a fixed point against the shifting textures of soil and scrub. Around it, the land showed its compromises. Scattered farm structures sat at uneven distances from the road: metal sheds, partial enclosures, equipment left in place past its intended use. Lines of pipe ran outward and stopped. Fencing appeared and disappeared without enclosing anything fully. Each piece suggested intention, but not continuation.
The building stood clear of that pattern. Its edges sharp and defined. Its materials remained consistent from one face to the next. Set slightly above the surrounding grade, it avoided the subtle sag that affected everything else, as though it had been given its own conditions to operate within. It didn’t belong to the sequence that produced the land around it. It interrupted it: complete where everything else felt provisional. Not isolated, exactly, but self-contained in a way that made the surrounding area feel unloved by comparison.
By the time Daniel turned in, it had already resolved into something closer to an enclave than a destination: a clean rectangle of glass and pale concrete, a parking lot with fresh striping, white lines unscuffed. It stood as an assigned space laid down among systems that hadn’t settled into themselves.
Daniel pulled in. The security kiosk had already processed his plate and let him slip through without slowing. He parked and stepped out, plugging the car into a charging station. The indicator turned green. As he approached the building, a message chimed on his phone confirming his arrival.
Inside, a screen displayed his name and directed him through without pause.
“You’re Ruiz?”
Daniel turned. She was already holding two cases.
“Yeah.”
“Maribel.” They managed to work in a handshake. “We should get going. It’s easier before it heats up.”
Outside, the land rose into a low hill where the install had been staged. Off to the side, behind fencing, a rectangular cut had been made into the ground. Modular panels and sealed containers were stacked nearby, arranged carefully but not in use.
Daniel nodded toward it. “What’s going on out there?”
Maribel glanced over, then back. “Not sure. Something they’re setting up later.”
They headed to a loading dock with Maribel’s truck. Two others were already there loading up cases. “You can ride with me,” Maribel said to Daniel, “They don’t have chargers up on the hill.”
At the installation point, the team did their work without much conversation. Upon the bed of gravel, pieces found their place as if the sequence had already been rehearsed. It was a machine: new, sleek, carefully designed, but also functional, with exposed wires, instrument panels, and pipes. Daniel worked through his checklist, pecking at the keyboard of a rugged laptop. Two cables needed to be connected, but no coupler was on the inventory list. He paused to consider how it could be handled. Maribel was already at the truck. When she came back, she had the correct part, unaccounted for but clearly necessary.
“Didn’t see that in the list,” Daniel said.
“It wasn’t,” she said, securing it.
The problem ended there.
When the system came online, it did so cleanly. Output stabilized almost immediately. They all moved to the output pipe.
At the outlet, water gathered and extended into a continuous line, perfectly clear. It was so clear it seemed to remove itself from the air it passed through. It did not cloud or distort. It held its form with a precision that made it appear structured, as though clarity itself were a material property it maintained.
Light met it and stayed there. Along its surface, a thin line of brightness formed, sharp and uninterrupted, moving with it but not dissolving. The reflection did not scatter the way it did across the surrounding gravel or metal. It remained contained, exact, tracing the path of the flow with a steadiness that suggested control instead of chance.
Against the dust of the air and the rough texture of distant chaparral, the water seemed to operate under different conditions. It accepted light fully, returned it cleanly, and in doing so revealed every contour of its movement without distortion. Nothing about it was hidden or diffused. It was visible in a complete way, as if it could not be otherwise.
Someone placed a container beneath it. The stream met the edge without deviation, settling into it with a soft, regular contact. The sound permeated the space: a quiet, steady music was created, ever rising in pitch. The surface inside the container held the same clarity, reflecting the structure of the machine in perfect, inverted lines.
“Looks right,” Maribel said.
Daniel checked some readings. All passing, but he still had work to do. They left it running and went to lunch.
They sat beneath a temporary canopy staked into the gravel, its fabric pulled taut but already ticking in the heat. The machine ran up the slope behind them, out of direct sight but not entirely absent either. A faint line of movement could still be traced where the output began its descent. A few handheld containers had been set nearby. One of them was open.
Maribel picked it up and turned it slightly in her hand before passing it over. “This is from the first run,” she said. “It’s been sitting out a bit, but it’s better than anything we can get inside.”
Daniel took it. The plastic had warmed, but the water inside hadn’t taken on anything from it, no clouding, no tint. He drank. It went down cleanly, without taste or resistance, the temperature settling somewhere between the air and something colder. He lowered the container and held it for a moment before setting it down.
“Cold would be better.” he said.
Maribel chuckled, “For sure.”
They ate from paper containers balanced on their knees: rice, vegetables, something grilled and already drying at the edges. No one had bothered to sit in any particular arrangement. The others spoke in short exchanges, mostly about timing, tools, the next set of readings, a joke or two. Nothing carried.
After a minute or so, Maribel glanced toward the slope.
“You’re based out of Texas?” she said.
“Well, that’s where we moved out to. I grew up in LA,” Daniel replied. “Now I get bounced around a lot.”
“How often do you—” she stopped, adjusted. “Travel for these?”
“Often enough,” he said. “This one’s short.”
She nodded again, though that didn’t seem to resolve anything for her. She pulled one of the labels off an empty container and folded it over itself, then again.
“Must be nice,” she said, not entirely committing to it. “Getting to see different places.”
Daniel looked out toward the fields. From here, the variation didn’t present itself. It flattened into the same long surfaces.
“Some of it is nice,” he said. “A lot of it’s like this.”
Maribel let out a small breath that might have been a laugh. “Yeah.”
There was a pause. One of the others stood and walked back toward the equipment without saying anything. The rest stayed where they were.
“You’re here full-time?” Daniel asked.
“Yeah. Not here-here,” she said, gesturing loosely toward the building. “Closer to town. Drive in.”
He nodded. “Long?”
“Depends on traffic,” she said. “Still manageable, for now.”
He glanced back toward the fenced cut they’d passed earlier. From this angle it was harder to see, just a shift in grade and color.
“Do you do a lot of installs?” he asked.
“Not usually,” she said. “They move people around when they need to. Depends who’s available.” She paused. “And who they trust not to mess it up.”
Daniel gave a slight nod at that. She looked down at her hands, still working the edge of the label into a thinner strip.
“You check things twice,” she said.
He shrugged slightly. “I just try to do what I’m supposed to.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He didn’t answer right away. Then, “Everyone has their own way of helping out.”
Another pause. The fabric above them lifted briefly with a pass of dry wind, then settled again. Maribel glanced back up toward the slope. The line of output was no longer visible from here, but the knowledge of it seemed to stay fixed in place.
“That thing…” she said, then stopped.
Daniel waited.
She didn’t immediately finish the thought. Instead, she reached for the container again, looked into it though there was nothing new to see.
“They’ve had stuff out here before,” she said finally. “Not like that. But—” she trailed off again. “Usually doesn’t last.”
Daniel followed her glance.
“This could,” he said plainly, without emphasis.
Maribel looked at him for a moment, like she was deciding whether that statement belonged to him or to something else.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
She set the container down more carefully than she had before. Another silence settled between them, not uncomfortable but incomplete. Around them, the others began to gather their things in loose, unspoken coordination. Daniel wiped his hands on a napkin and stood. Maribel did the same a moment later. They headed back up the slope.
They returned to the equipment without discussion. The machine had held its output in their absence, unchanged in rate or clarity. A second container had been set beneath it. Someone narrowed the valve slightly, not to correct anything, just to align it more precisely with the opening.
Daniel checked the readings again. The baseline held. He moved through the next step in the sequence, transferring the local logs to the uplink, watching the progress bar advance in a smooth, uninterrupted line. When it finished, he waited for confirmation on the remote side. Nothing presented itself.
He ran it again, more out of habit than expectation. Same result. The local system showed a full transmission—timestamped, verified, complete. He pulled up the dashboard view that mirrored intake on the company servers. The window refreshed without error, but the data field remained empty. He let it sit a moment longer, then checked the connection. Signal held. Latency within range. The log continued to populate locally, each new entry consistent with the last. He watched the two views side by side: one filling in, the other remaining clear.
Maribel was a few steps away, aligning cabling along the edge of the rack. One of the others called out a number. Someone repeated it back. The rhythm of work stayed intact. Daniel stepped aside and called Sam.
“I saw that,” Sam said, picking up immediately. “Already flagged it upstream.”
“You getting anything through?” Daniel asked.
“Not into the main pipeline,” Sam said. “It’s being routed off before it can register. Looks like it’s getting caught in a quarantine process.”
Daniel glanced back at the screen. The local entries continued to resolve without interruption.
“Why?” he asked.
“Doesn’t recognize the structure,” Sam said. “Or thinks it doesn’t. Hard to tell from this end.” A brief pause, the soft sound of keys. “Volume’s not helping either. You’re pushing more than it expects, so it’s holding it for review.”
“And then?”
“And then it stalled,” Sam said. “Process stopped resolving. Probably overloaded the buffer.”
Daniel watched the output line continue its steady movement downslope, unchanged.
“So nothing’s coming through.”
“Not where it needs to,” Sam said. “But I can pull traces on my side and see what IT’s doing.”
Daniel didn’t respond.
“They flagged it,” Sam added. “On the processing side.”
“For what?”
Another short pause. “Output profile.”
Daniel waited.
“There’s no variance in the logs,” Sam said. “No error states, no drift. It’s reading cleaner than what they’re used to seeing.”
Daniel looked at the local data again. Each line matched the last within narrow margins, small fluctuations well within tolerance, nothing missing.
“They’re calling it incomplete,” Sam continued. “Which usually just means it doesn’t line up with their validation models.”
Daniel let that settle.
“And what happens with that?” he asked.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Sam said. There was a faint shift in his tone—not urgency, but a narrowing of focus. “I’ve already got someone in the program office looking at the intake schema. We’ll give it somewhere cleaner to land. If that doesn’t take, I can route around it.”
Daniel looked at the log again. Line after line resolved without interruption, each entry identical in structure, varying only within tight margins.
“The quarantine?” he asked.
“I’ll get it cleared,” Sam said. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Just wasn’t set up for this.” A pause. More keys. “Hold on.”
Daniel waited, eyes moving between the local output and the empty dashboard.
“Okay,” Sam said. “Yeah. That tracks.”
“What does?”
“It’s not seeing any fault conditions,” Sam said. “No variance, no degradation signals. From their side, it looks incomplete.”
Daniel kept his eyes on the screen. “Incomplete.”
“Right,” Sam said. “They’re expecting at least some failure flags in the log. You know, calibration drift, retries, something to anchor it. Without that, it doesn’t parse as a full dataset.”
Daniel let out a sharp breath. Not quite a laugh.
“Look,” Sam said, “We just need to give it what it wants and it’ll go through.”
Daniel glanced up toward the machine. Its output hadn’t changed.
“I’m pushing a minor adjustment to your logging layer,” Sam said. “You’ll see it come through in a second. You just need to integrate it into the reporting step. You’ll want to give it some jitter, so it’s not flagged as static. I’ll send an email with more details.”
Daniel brought up the code for the logging system and found an insertion point to blend in Sam’s patch. He tuned the generalized parameters to match the required structure. Then he instructed the agent to review and build. It ran off its standard checks, all passing, then gave the usual chipper feedback. He restarted the logging, and a new line appeared in the log interface. It sat between two standard entries, formatted the same way, fields aligned, timestamped:
FAILURE: No failureDaniel looked at it for a moment.
“That’ll pass?” he asked.
“It gives the process something to index,” Sam said. “Breaks the pattern. Lets it resolve.”
“Even if there’s nothing—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sam said, not impatiently, just moving past it. “It’s not for the machine. It’s for intake. Go ahead and let it run.”
Daniel watched as the next cycle of data came through. The new line held its place in the sequence, repeating at regular intervals, identical each time.
“Quarantine’s clearing,” Sam said. “Give it another minute.”
Daniel pulled up the dashboard again. This time, after a short delay, the field populated, first a single entry, then a sequence, filling in backward as the system caught up.
“Receiving now,” Daniel said.
“Yeah,” Sam replied. “That should stabilize it.” A short pause, then, more lightly, “We’ll clean it up before anything final goes out.”
Daniel didn’t respond immediately. He watched the two streams align: local and remote now reflecting the same structure, the same adjusted record.
“Is the format going to work for them?” he asked.
“Working on it,” Sam said. “You know the panel. They’ll want standard presentation anyway. Easier to meet them halfway than walk it through.”
“Right.”
“Go ahead and keep logging,” Sam said. “Don’t change anything else on your side.”
Daniel let the entries continue to pass, confirming the pattern held.
“You’re not wrong,” Sam added. “They just need it to fit with what they’re used to.”
Daniel stood there a second more, watching the output resolve cleanly into the system that had refused it minutes earlier. Then he closed the logging window and stepped back toward the others.
The machine continued without interruption. Satisfied with the operation of the machine, Daniel moved to a nearby portable building. Inside was little more than an unused kitchenette and a not very inviting desk. Daniel quickly sat down and logged into a budgetary meeting already underway. Sam was there, answering a question some project manager had asked about projections. The floor was passed around. Output became capacity. Duration became allocation. The system they described corresponded to the one outside, but only loosely, as if the two had been aligned at some earlier stage and then allowed to diverge. Daniel gave brief confirmations as needed. No one asked about water.
Afterward, he called Maribel in and brought Sam online again.
“We’re filling up a lot of containers now. Did we get clearance to discharge into the runoff?”
“Yes,” said Sam, “You are good to direct it now. There shouldn’t be any issues.”
A shallow trench cut down the slope directed the water toward what had once been a dry streambed. Daniel looked at Maribel and pointed out the window towards the trench. She understood. Quickly the output was redirected, and the water followed the grade, slipping into the channel and disappearing into the ground below. Daniel watched it for a moment. Its surface darkened where it entered, briefly holding the light before it dispersed. The line broke apart beneath the soil, but did not vanish so much as continue in a form that could no longer be traced from above. They packed up as the light shifted across the slope. The system continued to run.
Elderly beef taco
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2024
I keep thinking I need to rewrite the opener for my novel, to have a better chance at getting it out there. I think I'll do a secondary opening and print the whole thing off so I can compare both sides of things.
I've rewritten the opening at least 3 times now and I'm never happy with it. But it's also a weird, kinda quiet drama with romance elements so I never know how best to pull someone into it. Maybe the first chapter alone is fine. I just... don't know.
I've rewritten the opening at least 3 times now and I'm never happy with it. But it's also a weird, kinda quiet drama with romance elements so I never know how best to pull someone into it. Maybe the first chapter alone is fine. I just... don't know.
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2026
Something that a guy in edition told me a few months ago that was pretty enlightening: read things aloud. If it doesn't sound natural or good when you hear it, change it or scrap it.
It helped a bit. It also prevents you from being overly verbose
In my experience, you will not be happy with most of what you write. You will consider 100 other possibilities thinking they are better and they will always dissapoint you in one way or another. Much like i learned with drawing, do it and if it's more or less close to what you intent to transmit with your text, it's good. Don't overdo it or stress about it. Or else you will be locked in an endless loop of making something and doing minute changes that you don't like only to change things again and again.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2018
Still trying my hand at Noire writing
The engine stops. The hurricane drowns the silence.
The front headlights flicker off, the buzz finally dying down as Hamino exits the car.
He opens the passenger door for me, giving me a small, awkward smile.
I return it as I step out of the car.
“I think everyone goes to one of these places at one point in their lives.” Hamino looks at the abandoned station, slicking his hair with his gloved hand.
The bright neon sign with dated gas prices is the only source of light between us and the never-ending night.
If it weren’t for it, Hamino would vanish into it right now, and I would bet he preferred it that way.
He wanted to cancel our meeting, but I insisted.
Weather be damned.
The car ride was already awkward, no words spoken.
Just a simple “Hello, how have you been?” was too dishonest for… whatever this is, I think we both knew.
“Well, the wind is picking up… Let’s head inside, okay?” I try to sound as polite as possible but I am not sure if it sounds genuine anymore.
Every word feels like it has to be pushed out through clenched teeth, and for some reason, I hope he can see that too.
We move against the wind’s force, avoiding the potholes of the grass-reclaimed asphalt until we make it to the doors.
Like the rest of the building, the doors are held by tape and scrap wood, barely keeping out the storm.
Hamino grabs one of the twin door’s handles and tries to open it. The door almost slams back due to the winds, yet he pushes against it.
The sign behind us barely lets me make out the inside, Ceiling tiles littered on the floor, Electronics ripped from their cases, and old snacks still on the racks.
Car fresheners hang from anything that would hold them, from walls to the cash register, yet nothing could mask the smell of decay.
Hamino stands firm against the door and tilts his head for me to go in.
“Thanks…” I mutter, as I step through the frame.
My boot crunches something wet and soppy, I don’t look down.
This place is already giving me the creeps, yet I need to hear it. Everything.
“Did you pick the- No Nan, I did not.” He calmly interrupts as he lights his flashlight, and closes the door behind him.
I sigh, “Sorry.’’ And Hamino just moves to the only clear thing that did not belong to the station.
A small, yet rather new looking plastic table, and two cheap-looking office chairs, cleaner than the rest of the floor.
He prepared this, like one of his fucking investigations.
He puts the flashlight on the table upright, illuminating both our sides of the table.
“Do you want anything to drink, Nancy?” He says, near stammering, and I shake my head, not like this place is giving me an appetite anyway.
Hamino already moves behind the registers bar, pulling out two large bottles of water.
He puts one beside my chair, and one besides his.
“Thanks…” I murmur, as Hamino finally gestures to sit.
And we finally do, neither of us daring to press our backs against the backrest.
Hamino, for the first time in forever, looks at me, really just looks.
His dull eyes show nothing, just this blank stare, yet his tightening jaw says everything.
Sam always used to say that he had a tell, I guess this is his.
Like a damned kid with his hand in a cookie jar.
He averts his gaze, looks around, and I follow.
From the bolted windows to the... Rifle.
A rifle, resting against the wall next to the door I entered from.
Either for me, or whatever noticed us before we entered the car.
The front headlights flicker off, the buzz finally dying down as Hamino exits the car.
He opens the passenger door for me, giving me a small, awkward smile.
I return it as I step out of the car.
“I think everyone goes to one of these places at one point in their lives.” Hamino looks at the abandoned station, slicking his hair with his gloved hand.
The bright neon sign with dated gas prices is the only source of light between us and the never-ending night.
If it weren’t for it, Hamino would vanish into it right now, and I would bet he preferred it that way.
He wanted to cancel our meeting, but I insisted.
Weather be damned.
The car ride was already awkward, no words spoken.
Just a simple “Hello, how have you been?” was too dishonest for… whatever this is, I think we both knew.
“Well, the wind is picking up… Let’s head inside, okay?” I try to sound as polite as possible but I am not sure if it sounds genuine anymore.
Every word feels like it has to be pushed out through clenched teeth, and for some reason, I hope he can see that too.
We move against the wind’s force, avoiding the potholes of the grass-reclaimed asphalt until we make it to the doors.
Like the rest of the building, the doors are held by tape and scrap wood, barely keeping out the storm.
Hamino grabs one of the twin door’s handles and tries to open it. The door almost slams back due to the winds, yet he pushes against it.
The sign behind us barely lets me make out the inside, Ceiling tiles littered on the floor, Electronics ripped from their cases, and old snacks still on the racks.
Car fresheners hang from anything that would hold them, from walls to the cash register, yet nothing could mask the smell of decay.
Hamino stands firm against the door and tilts his head for me to go in.
“Thanks…” I mutter, as I step through the frame.
My boot crunches something wet and soppy, I don’t look down.
This place is already giving me the creeps, yet I need to hear it. Everything.
“Did you pick the- No Nan, I did not.” He calmly interrupts as he lights his flashlight, and closes the door behind him.
I sigh, “Sorry.’’ And Hamino just moves to the only clear thing that did not belong to the station.
A small, yet rather new looking plastic table, and two cheap-looking office chairs, cleaner than the rest of the floor.
He prepared this, like one of his fucking investigations.
He puts the flashlight on the table upright, illuminating both our sides of the table.
“Do you want anything to drink, Nancy?” He says, near stammering, and I shake my head, not like this place is giving me an appetite anyway.
Hamino already moves behind the registers bar, pulling out two large bottles of water.
He puts one beside my chair, and one besides his.
“Thanks…” I murmur, as Hamino finally gestures to sit.
And we finally do, neither of us daring to press our backs against the backrest.
Hamino, for the first time in forever, looks at me, really just looks.
His dull eyes show nothing, just this blank stare, yet his tightening jaw says everything.
Sam always used to say that he had a tell, I guess this is his.
Like a damned kid with his hand in a cookie jar.
He averts his gaze, looks around, and I follow.
From the bolted windows to the... Rifle.
A rifle, resting against the wall next to the door I entered from.
Either for me, or whatever noticed us before we entered the car.
- Joined
- May 21, 2019
This is one of those writing workshopesque truisms that's applied too broadly because it sounds more sensible than it actually is in practice. There's a place for it, but writing that sounds "natural" when spoken aloud doesn't necessarily translate to it being compelling or impactful by default. Trying to filter everything through the lens of what'd sound good as an on-screen or audiobook performance just makes writing more sterile and limited than it has to be. There are plenty of times when you should actually do the exact "wrong" thing because it'll be more memorable than what's considered good/standard.
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2026
tbh i followed since i felt like the pacing of what i wrote was glacial or i spent too much time describing things too much. Kind of a "Hemming and hawing" that might be good in some cases but not in others. And tbh i don't know how to balance things with my style since i feel like my main problem is terrible pacing. A lot of the time i will take things slow and then things will go breakneck.
I would post some of my drivel but i'm kind of self concious.
- Joined
- May 21, 2019
The less confident you feel the more you need to be posting your shit publicly. It'll help you get over your self-consciousness faster. It's not even about getting or following advice so much as thickening your skin.
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2021
I agree and I think a lot of people who think about self-publishing are doing it because ultimately they are afraid of feedback/misinterpretation. I mean self-publishing is legitimate, don’t get me wrong. But if you just go straight from private writing to self-publishing without review, contests, forums, or other avenues, you’re going to wind up with a thread on another part of this forum.
- Joined
- May 21, 2019
This was probably true 5-8+ years ago, but less and less people have the attention span to bother reading random self-published books unless there's some sort of hype behind them with each passing year so you'd have to do a lot more than just be one more thin-skinned fag in the sea of self-published online detritus to really catch that much heat nowadays. Even with someone like Fatrick S. Tomlinson who's the posterchild for authorcows the reason he initially got so much attention was because he picked a fight with Opie and Anthony fans.
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2021
Previous chapter
Chapter Three: Time and Materials
Daniel returned to the site the next day. This time he parked directly on the hill. He could charge after lunch. By now the team had settled into a pattern. The checklist still sat open, and they worked through it with attention intact. Each step was carried out fully: connections checked, surfaces cleared, readings taken and recorded in their proper fields. No one skipped ahead. If anything, they lingered slightly longer than necessary, as if waiting for something to present itself.
Values returned within expected ranges. They noted them, compared them against earlier entries, then checked again before moving on. A few minor alignments were made: tightening, straightening, reseating, but none produced a change that registered beyond the confirmation itself. They cycled back through earlier points, not because anything had shifted, but to confirm that it hadn’t. A second pass resembled the first. By the third, the sequence began to loosen, not abandoned, but less tightly coupled to the book.
The work narrowed to observation and record. There was still motion, hands moving across panels, eyes tracking numbers, but less of it translated into consequence. The system carried on at the same pace.
By midmorning, power output had exceeded the threshold originally marked as a successful demonstration. No adjustment was made. No new phase was triggered. The system continued forward as if the threshold had not been crossed. A set of portable load banks had been arranged near the base of the installation, connected by thick insulated cables that ran back to the output terminals. Their housings were dull metal, ventilated, designed only to receive and dissipate. When engaged, they produced a low, steady hum, consistent, featureless, without modulation.
Daniel walked past them once, then again later, noting the unchanged state. Power flowed into the banks continuously. No devices were connected beyond them. No systems extended outward. The adjacent building, visible from the slope, continued drawing from its own grid connection. Its exterior units cycled on and off independently, their draw unrelated to the output being generated above.
“We’re ready for cloud simulation,” he told Maribel.
The team engaged, pulling in various sets of prearranged canvas to model different weather conditions. Daniel flipped through tabs on the dashboard. The data correlated with the expected. He checked the total energy produced since startup. The number increased at a steady rate, tracking exactly with irradiance. It represented usable capacity. It also represented something that, beyond the boundary of the test configuration, did not extend into use.
“Everything looks good,” one of the technicians said, glancing at the readouts without stopping.
They did a brief interruption test: full disconnect from the load bank, held for several seconds, then re-engaged. The system accepted the change without resistance. Output fell to zero, then resumed immediately once the connection was restored, matching prior levels. Auto calibration completed without interruption. By midday, the machine had produced more power than the site consumed in that same interval. They went to town for lunch that day. There was time for it.
When he returned to the parking lot, Daniel plugged the car into one of the charging stations as usual. A message appeared on the console:
Daily allocation reached. Charging limited.
He looked at it for a moment, then tapped the screen as if expecting a secondary option to appear. None did. He moved to another stall. The same message appeared, identically formatted.
Across the lot, several stations were unoccupied. No load was placed on them, yet their use was restricted: Reserved – Board, Reserved – Officers, Reserved – Emergency. There was no reservation for Daniel. He checked his remaining range. It was sufficient to reach a public station, but not enough to move freely beyond that without planning. He stood there briefly, then moved on. That afternoon would be spent in a scheduling meeting.
Before heading back to the hotel, Daniel instructed the car to go to the nearest public charging station. It sat off a secondary road, a small grouping of units arranged beneath a faded canopy. Half of them were occupied. The others displayed availability but operating below rated speed. There was no attendant.
Daniel plugged in and tapped “Bill by License Plate” on the terminal. The rate climbed in uneven increments: pausing, resuming, recalculating. No fault was indicated, but the system could not deliver a continuous stream. For a while, he watched the numbers advance. A notification appeared briefly on the screen: Grid balancing in progress. Temporary rate adjustment applied.
Around him, the other vehicles remained stationary. No one spoke. Drivers sat inside or stood nearby, engaged with their own devices, their attention divided between waiting and not waiting. Most of them had trucks caked with dust and mismatching tools in the bed.
The time required extended beyond the estimate initially given. When the charge reached a usable level, Daniel disconnected and drove off.
***
Sam called earlier than usual. The room was still dim when Daniel’s phone began vibrating on the nightstand. For a moment, he let it continue, expecting it to stop. When it didn’t, he reached over and answered without checking the time.
“Hey,” he said, voice still dry. “I was about to head in.”
“Good,” Sam said. He sounded the same as always, but there was less space between his words. “Wanted to catch you before you got set up. Small change.”
Daniel sat up, glancing toward the window. The light coming through the curtain was thin, not yet fully formed. “What’s that?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Water can’t go into the stream anymore.”
Daniel didn’t respond immediately. He pictured the trench from the day before, the way the line had settled into it without resistance.
“Why?”
“It’s already in review,” Sam said. “Some overlap on classification. Environmental, agricultural, municipal—couple categories intersecting. They want to sort it properly before anything spreads.”
Daniel swung his legs off the bed and sat there a moment, phone held loosely to his ear.
“It’s water,” he said. Not pushing it, just placing it.
“I know,” Sam said. “And it’s good water. That’s part of the issue.” A brief pause, a soft click of keys. “We’ve already started routing a workaround.”
“What’s the workaround?”
“Containment,” Sam said. “They’re finishing a holding reservoir on site. Everything gets cataloged and shipped out. Chain of custody stays clean that way.”
Daniel stood and crossed the room, pulling the curtain back slightly. The parking lot sat empty in the early light.
“Why not test it here?” he asked. “You’ve got soil, grading, runoff. It’s already moving through the space.”
“They want standardized conditions,” Sam said. “Same testing envelope across all sites. Makes it easier to compare.”
“The site has a brand new lab for that.”
“I know,” Sam said again. This time it landed differently—less agreement, more repetition. “But I’ve already escalated it. Let’s give them a chance to catch up.”
Daniel let the curtain fall back into place.
“Alright,” he said.
“Appreciate it,” Sam replied. “You’re in a good spot otherwise. I’ll stay on this.”
The line clicked off. Daniel stood there a second longer, then moved through the rest of the morning without hurry. At the site, the trench still held its shape down the slope, its edges darkened where water had passed through. Nothing moved within it now. Maribel called for him from her truck.
“They called you?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She glanced toward the channel, then back.
“They were here early,” she said. “Starting on the containment. At first I thought they were messing around, but they showed me an authorization.”
Daniel followed her line of sight. Down near the base of the hill, the open cut they had passed before had changed overnight. Formwork had been set. Panels lifted into place. The outline of a structure was already visible where there had only been grading.
“They move fast,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she replied.
They didn’t say anything more about it. The system remained online as it was before. They ran through the same sequence—checks, confirmations, recorded values. No deviations presented themselves. No adjustments held beyond the moment they were made. One check, carried over from before, confirmed the energy storage system had held through the night under full load. Daniel then paused the machine for just a moment, so that the final coupling for redirection could be put in place. Water flowed out again, this time into the constructed container. It was completely sealed beneath, its interior lined and uninterrupted, while remaining open to the air above. The blue-gray floor began to sparkle as it filled with water.
Sam called again. Daniel stepped away from the others to take it.
“Quick update,” Sam said. “On the power side—we’ve already been advised to hold off on any live usage.”
Daniel turned back toward the installation. The cables to the load banks remained in place, the housings already warm.
“We can run the building next door off this,” he said. “It’s right there.”
“Eventually,” Sam said. “They’re not ready for integration yet. There’s a whole set of approvals tied to that. Grid interaction, liability, metering.”
“It’s direct current,” Daniel said. “We don’t need the grid. And this is a new building. It’s designed to run off DC if available.”
A pause.
“I get it,” Sam said. The words came a little slower this time. “I do. And I’ve got that conversation going. There’s already a VP on our side on this. We’re just not there yet.”
Daniel didn’t respond.
“Stick with generation and storage,” Sam continued. “That’s what they’re tracking right now.”
“Storage where?” Daniel asked.
Another small pause. Not long enough to call attention to itself, but present.
“On the reporting side,” Sam said. “For now. We’ll align the rest as it opens up.”
Daniel looked at the load banks again.
“Right,” he said.
“We’re in good shape,” Sam added quickly. “This is all forward motion. A solid repor,t and we’ll land in the right place”
“Understood.”
“Appreciate you,” Sam said, and ended the call.
In the afternoon, stages of containers and hoses were arranged to siphon water from the holding reservoir. Each was labeled before it was filled: name fields, date fields, site identifiers, delivery locations, test IDs. They worked in sequence: position, fill, seal, move aside. Another took its place. Water moved from flow to storage without changing clarity.
Down below, the construction had advanced. What had been an open cut now held defined edges, reinforced walls taking shape in clean lines. A crane rotated slowly, lowering preformed sections into place with measured precision. The containers already filled were arranged near it, stacked in ordered rows. Daniel watched one get carried down the slope and set into alignment, neatly arranged with the others. No one opened them again once they were sealed. The streambed was left empty. The hum of the load banks echoed into it.
Daniel checked the time and returned to the portable building. He sat at the desk and looked at his laptop. The logs were still running. He selected the latest set and directed an agent to process it, then pulled up a draft of his report. When the time came, he closed his laptop and packed It away. The system outside remained online, unchanged. Dinner with the team was set for that evening. He gathered his things and stepped out.
***
Dinner was in town, small, not too crowded, but alive. They finished and let the crisp night air lead them back outside: a puff of smoke, a concluding remark. They moved on to a bar. The dusky place filled in unevenly around them, groups forming and dissolving without much overlap. Conversations rose and fell in short bursts. Someone turned up the music, then turned it back down again. “This isn’t a night club!” one quipped.
They stood near the edge of the room, not quite part of any one cluster. A few others from the site drifted in and out of the space, a beer or two, speaking briefly, then moving on. Nothing held long enough to settle.
Maribel leaned against the bar, one hand resting near her glass. She followed the movement of the room without tracking anyone in particular. Now and then someone would pass behind them, brushing just enough to register, then gone again. People left one by one until only a few remained.
Daniel stood first.
“Early flight,” he said.
Maribel nodded. “You’ll miss the worst of it.”
He hesitated a moment, like there might be something else. Then, “Take care.”
“You too,” she said.
He waited just long enough for the exchange to hold, then turned and moved toward the door. He went out. A few more came in.
She stayed a while after that. Her glass sat in front of her, mostly empty. She turned it once in her hand, the moisture from it thinning across her fingers before settling again. She didn’t wipe it away. The noise of the room shifted as people moved behind her. She didn’t adjust with it. A chair was pulled out nearby, then pushed back in. Someone laughed once, louder than intended. The sound carried briefly, then flattened into the rest.
She kept her hand around the glass a moment longer than necessary, its condensation a thin, even layer, the result of a cold that no longer matched the room. The air had already warmed it, softened its edge, but not enough to undo the effect completely. Where her fingers settled, the moisture shifted, breaking into smaller lines that reformed as soon as she eased the pressure.
The bar held heat in a way that felt accumulated. It came off the bodies near her, off the lighting, from the open door each time it swung inward and delayed in closing. The air moved but did not circulate. It redistributed, bumbling, not settling. The glass stood distinct from it, its surface maintaining a small difference that could be felt without testing. A drop formed just below the lip, collected from others, then slipped down the side in a narrow, unbroken line. It left a darkened track across the surface before thinning and dispersing into the rest. Another followed, not in the same place, but along a path close enough to overlap. The lines did not last. They merged and disappeared, replaced by others that held briefly, then moved.
She rotated the glass slightly in her hand. The condensation adjusted with it, the distribution shifting without resistance. Her grip picked up some of the moisture, carrying it across a finger until stopped by the cheap gold of a ring she didn’t remember buying. It felt cool for a moment, then settled into the temperature of her skin. She did not wipe it away. It remained there, gradually losing distinction.
Above the bar, a ceiling fan turned in a slow, steady rotation. Its blades caught the light in uneven intervals, the reflection breaking and reforming across the curved surface of the glass. The motion distorted slightly as it passed through the layer of condensation, flattening in some places, elongated in others, and never holding a fixed shape long enough to settle.
She adjusted the angle again, not to see it more clearly, but to keep it within the surface. The reflected blades continued their cycle, one leading, the others following, the spacing consistent but never arriving at a point that could be marked as complete. Each pass resembled the last without repeating it entirely.
She looked toward the door once, not directly at it, but somewhere in its direction, then back to the glass. After a few minutes, she stood, slower than necessary, and carried it to the counter. She set it down alongside the others, a final drop of condensation spreading briefly where it touched. Somewhere along the bar, a voice said, “Can I get you anything else?”
***
The airport processed Daniel without pause. Check-in recognized him at a distance. His itinerary appeared before he reached the terminal. A confirmation flashed briefly, then cleared itself. No acknowledgment was required. Security moved him through with minimal instruction. His bag passed along the belt and was returned to him without inspection. He stepped forward when the lane opened, paused where indicated, then continued. No one addressed him directly.
At the terminal, the seating faced outward toward the runway, rows aligned for viewing rather than interaction. Most of them were occupied, though few appeared engaged with anything beyond their own screens. Daniel found a seat and placed his bag beside him. He sat and waited. The display above the gate updated without sound. The time shifted slightly, then corrected itself. No announcement accompanied the change. A few people stood preemptively, then sat again. A child said she was thirsty. An old woman shared what little she had.
When boarding began, the movement of people signaled it more than any call. The line formed in segments, loosely ordered but consistent in direction. Daniel stood with it and moved forward. His ticket registered without pause. 3A. Only then did he realize he had been upgraded. The gate opened. He stepped through.
He moved down the aisle, past the initial rows, and stopped when he saw the window already open, the shade lifted. Light held there without interruption. He almost missed his seatmate’s greeting as she moved out of the way. He sat. The screen in the seatback ahead of him came on automatically, the menu resolving into place before settling on a paused frame. Jack Nicholson, mid-expression, looking slightly off-center, past the edge of the display. Daniel followed the direction of it before the rest of the image registered. Not the face itself, but the line implied by it. The angle carried past the bezel, past the seatback, through the small gap between rows. It aligned closely enough that it didn’t need to be exact. He shifted slightly and looked out.
The runway extended in long, pale lines, heat lifting off it in a steady distortion. Nothing interrupted the field beyond it. No structures close enough to define scale, no movement that registered as immediate. The horizon stayed fixed, the sky unbroken above it. The sun held its position just off the frame of the window, but its presence filled the view. It flattened the surfaces below, drew out their edges, reduced variation into contrast. Wherever it touched, it did so completely. There were no partials. No areas left unresolved. He let his eyes adjust to it.
The light did not move. It maintained itself, independent of anything aligned beneath it. The ground responded, but the source did not. It continued without modulation, without requiring anything in return. At this distance, it was not something that could be redirected or contained. It did not register input. It did not wait. For a moment, nothing passed between them.
The glass of the window held a faint reflection from inside the cabin: edges of seats, a shifting outline as someone shuffled a bag, but it did not obscure the field beyond. Both remained visible at once. One did not replace the other. They occupied the same surface without resolving into a single image.
A flight attendant stopped beside him, placed a bottle of water on the armrest over a folded napkin, and moved on without comment. He didn’t reach for it immediately. Outside, the light continued at the same intensity, unchanged by angle or duration. It gave no signal it would lessen or increase. It did not suggest sequence. It remained.
Daniel pulled away from the window and turned toward the armrest. He broke the seal on the bottle, and took a small sip. He set it back in place, letting it rest on the clean surface. He looked up at the screen: Chinatown.
He let it play.
Values returned within expected ranges. They noted them, compared them against earlier entries, then checked again before moving on. A few minor alignments were made: tightening, straightening, reseating, but none produced a change that registered beyond the confirmation itself. They cycled back through earlier points, not because anything had shifted, but to confirm that it hadn’t. A second pass resembled the first. By the third, the sequence began to loosen, not abandoned, but less tightly coupled to the book.
The work narrowed to observation and record. There was still motion, hands moving across panels, eyes tracking numbers, but less of it translated into consequence. The system carried on at the same pace.
By midmorning, power output had exceeded the threshold originally marked as a successful demonstration. No adjustment was made. No new phase was triggered. The system continued forward as if the threshold had not been crossed. A set of portable load banks had been arranged near the base of the installation, connected by thick insulated cables that ran back to the output terminals. Their housings were dull metal, ventilated, designed only to receive and dissipate. When engaged, they produced a low, steady hum, consistent, featureless, without modulation.
Daniel walked past them once, then again later, noting the unchanged state. Power flowed into the banks continuously. No devices were connected beyond them. No systems extended outward. The adjacent building, visible from the slope, continued drawing from its own grid connection. Its exterior units cycled on and off independently, their draw unrelated to the output being generated above.
“We’re ready for cloud simulation,” he told Maribel.
The team engaged, pulling in various sets of prearranged canvas to model different weather conditions. Daniel flipped through tabs on the dashboard. The data correlated with the expected. He checked the total energy produced since startup. The number increased at a steady rate, tracking exactly with irradiance. It represented usable capacity. It also represented something that, beyond the boundary of the test configuration, did not extend into use.
“Everything looks good,” one of the technicians said, glancing at the readouts without stopping.
They did a brief interruption test: full disconnect from the load bank, held for several seconds, then re-engaged. The system accepted the change without resistance. Output fell to zero, then resumed immediately once the connection was restored, matching prior levels. Auto calibration completed without interruption. By midday, the machine had produced more power than the site consumed in that same interval. They went to town for lunch that day. There was time for it.
When he returned to the parking lot, Daniel plugged the car into one of the charging stations as usual. A message appeared on the console:
Daily allocation reached. Charging limited.
He looked at it for a moment, then tapped the screen as if expecting a secondary option to appear. None did. He moved to another stall. The same message appeared, identically formatted.
Across the lot, several stations were unoccupied. No load was placed on them, yet their use was restricted: Reserved – Board, Reserved – Officers, Reserved – Emergency. There was no reservation for Daniel. He checked his remaining range. It was sufficient to reach a public station, but not enough to move freely beyond that without planning. He stood there briefly, then moved on. That afternoon would be spent in a scheduling meeting.
Before heading back to the hotel, Daniel instructed the car to go to the nearest public charging station. It sat off a secondary road, a small grouping of units arranged beneath a faded canopy. Half of them were occupied. The others displayed availability but operating below rated speed. There was no attendant.
Daniel plugged in and tapped “Bill by License Plate” on the terminal. The rate climbed in uneven increments: pausing, resuming, recalculating. No fault was indicated, but the system could not deliver a continuous stream. For a while, he watched the numbers advance. A notification appeared briefly on the screen: Grid balancing in progress. Temporary rate adjustment applied.
Around him, the other vehicles remained stationary. No one spoke. Drivers sat inside or stood nearby, engaged with their own devices, their attention divided between waiting and not waiting. Most of them had trucks caked with dust and mismatching tools in the bed.
The time required extended beyond the estimate initially given. When the charge reached a usable level, Daniel disconnected and drove off.
***
Sam called earlier than usual. The room was still dim when Daniel’s phone began vibrating on the nightstand. For a moment, he let it continue, expecting it to stop. When it didn’t, he reached over and answered without checking the time.
“Hey,” he said, voice still dry. “I was about to head in.”
“Good,” Sam said. He sounded the same as always, but there was less space between his words. “Wanted to catch you before you got set up. Small change.”
Daniel sat up, glancing toward the window. The light coming through the curtain was thin, not yet fully formed. “What’s that?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Water can’t go into the stream anymore.”
Daniel didn’t respond immediately. He pictured the trench from the day before, the way the line had settled into it without resistance.
“Why?”
“It’s already in review,” Sam said. “Some overlap on classification. Environmental, agricultural, municipal—couple categories intersecting. They want to sort it properly before anything spreads.”
Daniel swung his legs off the bed and sat there a moment, phone held loosely to his ear.
“It’s water,” he said. Not pushing it, just placing it.
“I know,” Sam said. “And it’s good water. That’s part of the issue.” A brief pause, a soft click of keys. “We’ve already started routing a workaround.”
“What’s the workaround?”
“Containment,” Sam said. “They’re finishing a holding reservoir on site. Everything gets cataloged and shipped out. Chain of custody stays clean that way.”
Daniel stood and crossed the room, pulling the curtain back slightly. The parking lot sat empty in the early light.
“Why not test it here?” he asked. “You’ve got soil, grading, runoff. It’s already moving through the space.”
“They want standardized conditions,” Sam said. “Same testing envelope across all sites. Makes it easier to compare.”
“The site has a brand new lab for that.”
“I know,” Sam said again. This time it landed differently—less agreement, more repetition. “But I’ve already escalated it. Let’s give them a chance to catch up.”
Daniel let the curtain fall back into place.
“Alright,” he said.
“Appreciate it,” Sam replied. “You’re in a good spot otherwise. I’ll stay on this.”
The line clicked off. Daniel stood there a second longer, then moved through the rest of the morning without hurry. At the site, the trench still held its shape down the slope, its edges darkened where water had passed through. Nothing moved within it now. Maribel called for him from her truck.
“They called you?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She glanced toward the channel, then back.
“They were here early,” she said. “Starting on the containment. At first I thought they were messing around, but they showed me an authorization.”
Daniel followed her line of sight. Down near the base of the hill, the open cut they had passed before had changed overnight. Formwork had been set. Panels lifted into place. The outline of a structure was already visible where there had only been grading.
“They move fast,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she replied.
They didn’t say anything more about it. The system remained online as it was before. They ran through the same sequence—checks, confirmations, recorded values. No deviations presented themselves. No adjustments held beyond the moment they were made. One check, carried over from before, confirmed the energy storage system had held through the night under full load. Daniel then paused the machine for just a moment, so that the final coupling for redirection could be put in place. Water flowed out again, this time into the constructed container. It was completely sealed beneath, its interior lined and uninterrupted, while remaining open to the air above. The blue-gray floor began to sparkle as it filled with water.
Sam called again. Daniel stepped away from the others to take it.
“Quick update,” Sam said. “On the power side—we’ve already been advised to hold off on any live usage.”
Daniel turned back toward the installation. The cables to the load banks remained in place, the housings already warm.
“We can run the building next door off this,” he said. “It’s right there.”
“Eventually,” Sam said. “They’re not ready for integration yet. There’s a whole set of approvals tied to that. Grid interaction, liability, metering.”
“It’s direct current,” Daniel said. “We don’t need the grid. And this is a new building. It’s designed to run off DC if available.”
A pause.
“I get it,” Sam said. The words came a little slower this time. “I do. And I’ve got that conversation going. There’s already a VP on our side on this. We’re just not there yet.”
Daniel didn’t respond.
“Stick with generation and storage,” Sam continued. “That’s what they’re tracking right now.”
“Storage where?” Daniel asked.
Another small pause. Not long enough to call attention to itself, but present.
“On the reporting side,” Sam said. “For now. We’ll align the rest as it opens up.”
Daniel looked at the load banks again.
“Right,” he said.
“We’re in good shape,” Sam added quickly. “This is all forward motion. A solid repor,t and we’ll land in the right place”
“Understood.”
“Appreciate you,” Sam said, and ended the call.
In the afternoon, stages of containers and hoses were arranged to siphon water from the holding reservoir. Each was labeled before it was filled: name fields, date fields, site identifiers, delivery locations, test IDs. They worked in sequence: position, fill, seal, move aside. Another took its place. Water moved from flow to storage without changing clarity.
Down below, the construction had advanced. What had been an open cut now held defined edges, reinforced walls taking shape in clean lines. A crane rotated slowly, lowering preformed sections into place with measured precision. The containers already filled were arranged near it, stacked in ordered rows. Daniel watched one get carried down the slope and set into alignment, neatly arranged with the others. No one opened them again once they were sealed. The streambed was left empty. The hum of the load banks echoed into it.
Daniel checked the time and returned to the portable building. He sat at the desk and looked at his laptop. The logs were still running. He selected the latest set and directed an agent to process it, then pulled up a draft of his report. When the time came, he closed his laptop and packed It away. The system outside remained online, unchanged. Dinner with the team was set for that evening. He gathered his things and stepped out.
***
Dinner was in town, small, not too crowded, but alive. They finished and let the crisp night air lead them back outside: a puff of smoke, a concluding remark. They moved on to a bar. The dusky place filled in unevenly around them, groups forming and dissolving without much overlap. Conversations rose and fell in short bursts. Someone turned up the music, then turned it back down again. “This isn’t a night club!” one quipped.
They stood near the edge of the room, not quite part of any one cluster. A few others from the site drifted in and out of the space, a beer or two, speaking briefly, then moving on. Nothing held long enough to settle.
Maribel leaned against the bar, one hand resting near her glass. She followed the movement of the room without tracking anyone in particular. Now and then someone would pass behind them, brushing just enough to register, then gone again. People left one by one until only a few remained.
Daniel stood first.
“Early flight,” he said.
Maribel nodded. “You’ll miss the worst of it.”
He hesitated a moment, like there might be something else. Then, “Take care.”
“You too,” she said.
He waited just long enough for the exchange to hold, then turned and moved toward the door. He went out. A few more came in.
She stayed a while after that. Her glass sat in front of her, mostly empty. She turned it once in her hand, the moisture from it thinning across her fingers before settling again. She didn’t wipe it away. The noise of the room shifted as people moved behind her. She didn’t adjust with it. A chair was pulled out nearby, then pushed back in. Someone laughed once, louder than intended. The sound carried briefly, then flattened into the rest.
She kept her hand around the glass a moment longer than necessary, its condensation a thin, even layer, the result of a cold that no longer matched the room. The air had already warmed it, softened its edge, but not enough to undo the effect completely. Where her fingers settled, the moisture shifted, breaking into smaller lines that reformed as soon as she eased the pressure.
The bar held heat in a way that felt accumulated. It came off the bodies near her, off the lighting, from the open door each time it swung inward and delayed in closing. The air moved but did not circulate. It redistributed, bumbling, not settling. The glass stood distinct from it, its surface maintaining a small difference that could be felt without testing. A drop formed just below the lip, collected from others, then slipped down the side in a narrow, unbroken line. It left a darkened track across the surface before thinning and dispersing into the rest. Another followed, not in the same place, but along a path close enough to overlap. The lines did not last. They merged and disappeared, replaced by others that held briefly, then moved.
She rotated the glass slightly in her hand. The condensation adjusted with it, the distribution shifting without resistance. Her grip picked up some of the moisture, carrying it across a finger until stopped by the cheap gold of a ring she didn’t remember buying. It felt cool for a moment, then settled into the temperature of her skin. She did not wipe it away. It remained there, gradually losing distinction.
Above the bar, a ceiling fan turned in a slow, steady rotation. Its blades caught the light in uneven intervals, the reflection breaking and reforming across the curved surface of the glass. The motion distorted slightly as it passed through the layer of condensation, flattening in some places, elongated in others, and never holding a fixed shape long enough to settle.
She adjusted the angle again, not to see it more clearly, but to keep it within the surface. The reflected blades continued their cycle, one leading, the others following, the spacing consistent but never arriving at a point that could be marked as complete. Each pass resembled the last without repeating it entirely.
She looked toward the door once, not directly at it, but somewhere in its direction, then back to the glass. After a few minutes, she stood, slower than necessary, and carried it to the counter. She set it down alongside the others, a final drop of condensation spreading briefly where it touched. Somewhere along the bar, a voice said, “Can I get you anything else?”
***
The airport processed Daniel without pause. Check-in recognized him at a distance. His itinerary appeared before he reached the terminal. A confirmation flashed briefly, then cleared itself. No acknowledgment was required. Security moved him through with minimal instruction. His bag passed along the belt and was returned to him without inspection. He stepped forward when the lane opened, paused where indicated, then continued. No one addressed him directly.
At the terminal, the seating faced outward toward the runway, rows aligned for viewing rather than interaction. Most of them were occupied, though few appeared engaged with anything beyond their own screens. Daniel found a seat and placed his bag beside him. He sat and waited. The display above the gate updated without sound. The time shifted slightly, then corrected itself. No announcement accompanied the change. A few people stood preemptively, then sat again. A child said she was thirsty. An old woman shared what little she had.
When boarding began, the movement of people signaled it more than any call. The line formed in segments, loosely ordered but consistent in direction. Daniel stood with it and moved forward. His ticket registered without pause. 3A. Only then did he realize he had been upgraded. The gate opened. He stepped through.
He moved down the aisle, past the initial rows, and stopped when he saw the window already open, the shade lifted. Light held there without interruption. He almost missed his seatmate’s greeting as she moved out of the way. He sat. The screen in the seatback ahead of him came on automatically, the menu resolving into place before settling on a paused frame. Jack Nicholson, mid-expression, looking slightly off-center, past the edge of the display. Daniel followed the direction of it before the rest of the image registered. Not the face itself, but the line implied by it. The angle carried past the bezel, past the seatback, through the small gap between rows. It aligned closely enough that it didn’t need to be exact. He shifted slightly and looked out.
The runway extended in long, pale lines, heat lifting off it in a steady distortion. Nothing interrupted the field beyond it. No structures close enough to define scale, no movement that registered as immediate. The horizon stayed fixed, the sky unbroken above it. The sun held its position just off the frame of the window, but its presence filled the view. It flattened the surfaces below, drew out their edges, reduced variation into contrast. Wherever it touched, it did so completely. There were no partials. No areas left unresolved. He let his eyes adjust to it.
The light did not move. It maintained itself, independent of anything aligned beneath it. The ground responded, but the source did not. It continued without modulation, without requiring anything in return. At this distance, it was not something that could be redirected or contained. It did not register input. It did not wait. For a moment, nothing passed between them.
The glass of the window held a faint reflection from inside the cabin: edges of seats, a shifting outline as someone shuffled a bag, but it did not obscure the field beyond. Both remained visible at once. One did not replace the other. They occupied the same surface without resolving into a single image.
A flight attendant stopped beside him, placed a bottle of water on the armrest over a folded napkin, and moved on without comment. He didn’t reach for it immediately. Outside, the light continued at the same intensity, unchanged by angle or duration. It gave no signal it would lessen or increase. It did not suggest sequence. It remained.
Daniel pulled away from the window and turned toward the armrest. He broke the seal on the bottle, and took a small sip. He set it back in place, letting it rest on the clean surface. He looked up at the screen: Chinatown.
He let it play.
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2026
In my case it's not so much about getting chewed out byt internet randos, but about being completely overlooked. Like you said, a lot of people today don't have enough attention span to read something longer than a couple of paragraphs and in my experience, when someone reads my shit i've recieved more positive than negative feedback. But the fact that i recieve a comment every 3 years really kills my drive to post my garbage anywhere.
But if you're willing to give something a read, i'll be happy to oblige.
The rain slowly stopped and i looked up. The clouds parted and the moonlight begun to shine on the glade. A soft summer breeze blew. I could still smell the fresh scent of rain in the air mixing with the smell of grass and wet soil. The forest murmured and i got up looking around. Darkness was all around, making the trees look more intimidating. I hope my mark waited out the rain like i didor i'm going to have a hard time. I better hurry.
I begun following the trail quite a while ago and after the rain following the steps was a bit hard. Thankfully there was a trail that made my life easier. I made my way, slowly but surely between the trees and paying attention to any sound or movement in the bushes. I didn't wanted a tiger or something worse to catch me by surprise. I knew that after the rain the forest would be more active. I kept following a small trail of broken branches, prints and torn bushes until i reached a tiny glade. There, in one of the edges of the forest i saw what i was looking for. A large and mighty beast. From a far it would look just like a huge chicken but the deadly talons, the strong barbed tail,the yellow eyes and the scaly wings were what would draw anyone's attention. And that's without counting the petrifying breath. A cockatrice. And it was a beautiful specimen with pretty black feathers that shone under the moonlight. I begun to move towards it. Easy does it.
I took care to check the ground and my surroundings. I didn't want to rush in knowing that the critter, which was probably sleeping, would just run off. Plus, i had to be quiet because i didn't wanted anything else prowling around to come for dinner. I made my way through the bushes like a snake, as silent as i could until i was right next to the chicken.
-Gotcha, you bastard!
I begun to take a rope and when i looked up to the cockatrice i saw its eyes open. It woke up. Its eyes, shining like gold, stared directly at me and i stood still. I waited for are action because if it got scared or pissed i would be in a heap of trouble. But after a short while it slowly got up and approached me. I could hear how it clucked, happy to see me.
-Y'know how much trouble y'gave me and ma?-I reached with my had and touched its feathers. It slightly closed its eyes in delight and i laughed.-You big dummy... Y'ave to be-
The sudden noise of rustling behind me made me jump inmediately and i redied my weapon. I turned around expecting a tiger, an orthan or an onchu. But what i saw at the other edge of the glade was a fine and large wooly cow. It walked lazily without anycare in the world before stopping and filling its mouth with the tender wet grass. It looked at me like it was expecting something.
-Well y'look at that!-I couldn't help myself and started laughing.-Just my damn luck i found ya 'ere. A'ight, we better move.
I clicked my tongue a couple of times and that big chicken followed me when i begun walking towards the cow. The thing wasn't nervous or anything and first i gave it a few pats to get its trust. After that i tied the rope around its neck and pulled gently, making it follow me.
I begun to make my way back home with my two buddies. Aslow walk but it's not like it was going to rain any time soon. The big chicken gave me a lot of hell since it escaped the pen. Ma had things to do so it was my job to go lookin' for it. It was then that she also told me that old fart Kels lost one of his bessies after his good for nothin' kid left the barn door open. I really hope that sour old coot gives me a good reward for finding his cow or i'll just let it loose again. I had to rein the cockatrice from time to time if the big bastard saw something interesting around. The damn birdbrain...But it didn't took long for me and my team to leave the thick part of the woods. I could see the town in the distance. The wind blew in my direction, carrying the sound of music and the scent of food and booze. Something that made me really bitter while i looked at it. I let out a sigh of frustration and gave the fluffy bessy a gentle pull to follow me. I better not think about it. Or better yet, i get sloshed so i cannot think about it. I'm dying for some ale. Or anything really.
I begun following the trail quite a while ago and after the rain following the steps was a bit hard. Thankfully there was a trail that made my life easier. I made my way, slowly but surely between the trees and paying attention to any sound or movement in the bushes. I didn't wanted a tiger or something worse to catch me by surprise. I knew that after the rain the forest would be more active. I kept following a small trail of broken branches, prints and torn bushes until i reached a tiny glade. There, in one of the edges of the forest i saw what i was looking for. A large and mighty beast. From a far it would look just like a huge chicken but the deadly talons, the strong barbed tail,the yellow eyes and the scaly wings were what would draw anyone's attention. And that's without counting the petrifying breath. A cockatrice. And it was a beautiful specimen with pretty black feathers that shone under the moonlight. I begun to move towards it. Easy does it.
I took care to check the ground and my surroundings. I didn't want to rush in knowing that the critter, which was probably sleeping, would just run off. Plus, i had to be quiet because i didn't wanted anything else prowling around to come for dinner. I made my way through the bushes like a snake, as silent as i could until i was right next to the chicken.
-Gotcha, you bastard!
I begun to take a rope and when i looked up to the cockatrice i saw its eyes open. It woke up. Its eyes, shining like gold, stared directly at me and i stood still. I waited for are action because if it got scared or pissed i would be in a heap of trouble. But after a short while it slowly got up and approached me. I could hear how it clucked, happy to see me.
-Y'know how much trouble y'gave me and ma?-I reached with my had and touched its feathers. It slightly closed its eyes in delight and i laughed.-You big dummy... Y'ave to be-
The sudden noise of rustling behind me made me jump inmediately and i redied my weapon. I turned around expecting a tiger, an orthan or an onchu. But what i saw at the other edge of the glade was a fine and large wooly cow. It walked lazily without anycare in the world before stopping and filling its mouth with the tender wet grass. It looked at me like it was expecting something.
-Well y'look at that!-I couldn't help myself and started laughing.-Just my damn luck i found ya 'ere. A'ight, we better move.
I clicked my tongue a couple of times and that big chicken followed me when i begun walking towards the cow. The thing wasn't nervous or anything and first i gave it a few pats to get its trust. After that i tied the rope around its neck and pulled gently, making it follow me.
I begun to make my way back home with my two buddies. Aslow walk but it's not like it was going to rain any time soon. The big chicken gave me a lot of hell since it escaped the pen. Ma had things to do so it was my job to go lookin' for it. It was then that she also told me that old fart Kels lost one of his bessies after his good for nothin' kid left the barn door open. I really hope that sour old coot gives me a good reward for finding his cow or i'll just let it loose again. I had to rein the cockatrice from time to time if the big bastard saw something interesting around. The damn birdbrain...But it didn't took long for me and my team to leave the thick part of the woods. I could see the town in the distance. The wind blew in my direction, carrying the sound of music and the scent of food and booze. Something that made me really bitter while i looked at it. I let out a sigh of frustration and gave the fluffy bessy a gentle pull to follow me. I better not think about it. Or better yet, i get sloshed so i cannot think about it. I'm dying for some ale. Or anything really.
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2021
That main character sounds sloshed.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2018
Are you guys ever afraid that you pour your soul too much into a project and when its finished your like: "Yeah im never making something as good as this again. ?
Its something im deadly afraid of.
And I know your soul like develops overtime in your life but I dunno.
Soul in the sense of your experiences and creativity.
Inb4 i sound very psuedo-intellectual reddit pilled
Its something im deadly afraid of.
And I know your soul like develops overtime in your life but I dunno.
Soul in the sense of your experiences and creativity.
Inb4 i sound very psuedo-intellectual reddit pilled
- Joined
- May 21, 2019
I applaud you for having the balls to even post this, though objectively speaking, unless you're translating it into English from a different language or you're a teenager, it's really fucking bad on a fundamental level that you can't edit your way out of, not gonna lie. Writing garbage isn't the end of the world but I'd still say you need to read a lot more before you try again.
If you're in it for the long haul you'll find that some or all of your old work will eventually make you cringe no matter how awesome and personal you thought it was when you wrote it years ago. That's pretty much inevitable even if you retain a generally positive opinion about said old projects.
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2022
This is art btw.
- Joined
- May 21, 2019
If nothing else, it still makes me laugh when I read it. The Bob Ross part was probably my best "suggestion" to him for one of his segments, cuz God knows he'd never come up with anything like that on his own.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2018
Ask @Cedric_Eff, I think if anyone has more comic experience, its him.
(Ignore the fact hes a furfag tho.)
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2026
English is not my first language and it obviously poses a huge problem in many areas. In this case i really wanted to characterize the MC as a country bumpkin kind of person but unfortunately, i really missed the mark. I thought i would more or less manage with a more simple and direct way of speaking but damn...
And in case you are wondering, this is my usual style:
This pain was an unbearable torment. The vines wrapping around my body made it impossible for me break free. Fear seeped like a vile poison through my body, wrapping my heart in an icy cage. The air was flooded with the violent sounds of combat as those two beasts were embroiled in their bloodletting. Roars, stomping, the sound of cruching wood... I attempted several times to slip from my binding but i feared any movement on my part would draw the attention of any of the combatants. How could such an ominous fate befall me in my first adventure?
My departure from the Mercurial Library was not without many difficulties. Living isolated during my formative years brought me no advantage when it was time to venture into the waking world. Alas, despite the many pitfalls in my path i took upon myself the task of venturing into the Writhing Forest. The first task in the onerous quest that was laid before me. How foolish of me to believe such thin was within my capabilities! The beasts fell upon me as i found myself lost in the thicket. Such ambush was an act of vile genius that i believed was impossible for such fiends but as i found myself drowning in despair, i was easy prey for them. They carried me aloft, like a trophy... No. An offering for one of their greater cousins.
My departure from the Mercurial Library was not without many difficulties. Living isolated during my formative years brought me no advantage when it was time to venture into the waking world. Alas, despite the many pitfalls in my path i took upon myself the task of venturing into the Writhing Forest. The first task in the onerous quest that was laid before me. How foolish of me to believe such thin was within my capabilities! The beasts fell upon me as i found myself lost in the thicket. Such ambush was an act of vile genius that i believed was impossible for such fiends but as i found myself drowning in despair, i was easy prey for them. They carried me aloft, like a trophy... No. An offering for one of their greater cousins.
I pray it is less shit.
tbh as of late i think i'm just going to shit, but even when i look back i cannot feel anything but embarrassment for all i did time ago. And despite that, i'm probably more embarrassed now seeing that my skills suck even more.
But despite all that, we have to keep going. If anything, i owe it to myself to keep working on my garbage.