Went to test drive a 23 hybrid corolla and camry.
Corolla was certainly anemic on the highway for passing speeds. The interior got a lot more cramped since the 2011 corolla ive had.
Asked to see the Camry, ol bait and switch "its not on the lot anymore" (but was yesterday according to the email). Ok fine. Got any Camrys on the way allocated? Yes? Ok...what we talking?
$45k

I said, ummmm Camrys top out at like $38 wtf is it so high for?
We have some dealer add-ons, etc, oh and a markup.
You said the magic word: markup. What we talking here?
$7500 is what we put on all out new cars.
WTF? Why so much!?
We look at auctions and other dealers and base it on that.
Ummm, ok...I doubt they auction 2023 cars like that but ok...thanks for your time. I dont pay over MSRP like that.
Well let me get my manager before you go.
Ok, someone else to complain to.
So whats the problem mr pewp?
Id like to complain about your $7500 markup.
Theyre standard markups. And in fact its actually $10k so you are getting a deal already.
Im not paying markup.
Sounds like you arent ready to buy a car today.
Im ready to buy right now, but you arent ready to negotiate.
We are open to any negotiations and offers.
Here is my offer, zero dollars above MSRP.
You are not being reasonable.
I do not negotiate markups. I negotiate products and services.
::rude face:: manager just walks away without another word.
A sucker is born every minute, I hope you can keep finding some.

​
On my way out the glass doors "$7500, ya'll crazy!"
And I went home.
I think i will keep looking for a dealer who wants to deal, not rip off.
​
​
Reminds me of another time over a decade ago where a Honda dealer had a MT Accord coupe. Rare and not flying off the lot...who drives manual AND wants an accord coupe? Nobody since it sat on their lot for over a month...I drove by it every day going to work. So when I offered the KBB plus a little more with my trade in, they said $5k even more and I can have the accord.
When I said "no, my offer is fair. My trade in will sell immediately unlike your coupe sitting there for over a month." They retorted "The sticker price is this, you need to give us $5k more"
"Well, thats where our issue is. KBB says this USED accord is work $X.XX. You have the sticker set to $5k above the KBB."
"We priced our car to sell"
"No you didnt, no one but me is buying and I am here."
"We can come down to $3k"
"No, you can bring the sticker price back to KBB normal mode and we can negotiate from there. I dont want to negotiate the fact you priced the car higher than its worth"
For weeks they kept trying to get me to come back, but would never drop that markup. I kept telling them "you and I are only thousands apart because you literally overpriced the car". They wanted to act like dropping from a $5k markup to $3k was them negotiating with me. Thats not negotiations...thats trying to scam people. Eventually it went to auction and sold for 2/3 what I offered them (it was a manual transmission in 2012 ffs, who's buying!?). Oh well.

Hi all,
I've recently installed an aftermarket stereo into my 2006 Honda Accord. Initially, I wired the dimmer and illumination (orange to orange) and when starting the car my front dash went out. After looking around, I found the fuse that it blew and replaced it. I then detached the orange wires and the stereo works well now.
However, occasionally (every other day) my car will blow the same fuse right when I shift into gear. I've looked across a bunch of forums and have concluded that it must be something to do with my grounding of my aftermarket stereo. What should I be looking for to make sure everything is wired correctly? Is there any way to check connections with a multimeter? Should I just pull the grounding connection and re-connect it?
I will note that the ground wire on the stereo is larger than the one in my factory harness. Is that a potential issue at all?
I'm pretty dumb with wiring stuff so any advice is appreciated.

Last night I admit i allowed my paranoia to get the best of me. The figure I had seen out my window turned up to he a member of the housekeeping staff checking to see if I had... escaped from my mortal coil as I imagine many patrons of such a motel do. Forgive me while I attempt to wright my recollection of My horrible epic. I gave a hard time remembering what portions of the tale are necessary and wich are mundane so I'll just start from the drive to my nightmarish destination. Feel free to ask me questions. I will answer to the best of my memory
The trip to West Virginia was, for the most part, uneventful and mind-numbing. I've always despised long car rides, despite being on the road so often when going from job to job. After an extended period on the road, my mind spins into an unconscious void and it becomes hard to determine where I've been. There are often times when I completely lose myself in the sea of vehicles in a never-ending stop and go only to find myself becoming aware an hour later. What little entertainment I had on hand usually prevented me from falling asleep or completely disconnecting from the human world on my thousandth 14-hour trip to the middle of nowhere. This trip, however, was different; I didn't find myself dissociating, nor did it feel like the run of the mill from point a to point b. I was nervous and the further I made in to my destination the more I felt as if I had made a grave mistake. Despite being a 28-year-old teacher with very little adult social skills, I couldn't help but feel that a 5-year contract with some pseudo-cult in the heart of West Virginia might have been a bit of an impulsive call even with the paycheck, and every time I thought of cryptic emails, I could feel my stomach constrict and knot at the very premise of meeting the strangers in person.
I found myself in one of my few "coming to reality" moments of the trip when I turned into a small town. I was surprised by the smell I was immediately greeted with; the distinct smell of mildew assaulted my senses at the very moment I passed a pale green and mildly vandalized billboard posted on the side of the road that read "Welcome to Dawson," scrawled in a cheesey font that made all the letters look like logs. The town itself was placed in a valley of some sort, almost completely enveloped by mountains on three sides, as if Mother Nature had left this perfect little alcove in the center just for this hidden civilization. On top of the distant, albeit ever-present, ranges sat hundreds of thousands of trees that wrapped the elevation in a verdant cocoon. The town itself was small compared to Tampa, as all the others were. There weren't any towers climbing towards the sky with an impossible number of floors; the pavement of the underutilized roads was a soft gray color, void of any fresh pavement, but the surface was laid bare of any faults as if it had been used, if only just enough to keep the earth from forcing its way back through the laid concrete. As I pulled up to what I can only imagine was the only stoplight in the town, my hands fumbled for my phone in order to check the status of my journey. 1 minute to destination was plastered at the top of the screen, leaving me in a state of confusion as the only things in sight seemed to be a few stores and what looked to be a small cafe on a road that stretched toward the horizon with no apparent end. The light turned green, and my GPS sent me to an immediate left to a small, run-down store just off the entrance that brought me into the mountain asylum. The store was decrepit; the paint was peeling from its decorative siding, creating a splotchy pattern of dingy blue and an aging off white. One of the large windows looking into the store had a sheet of wood crudely nailed over it, and an awning stretched from the end of the parking lot directly to the roof of the gas station as if whatever contractors built this were trying to deplorably hide the abomination from God himself. The store had no sign or title other than an LED fixture that indicated that the nameless fuel depot was open.
"You have arrived at your destination," the droning voice said through the speakers of my car as I came to a reluctant stop. I looked down at my phone to be certain the GPS wasn't struggling to find a pathway yet to be discovered by anyone except for those who had lived there their whole lives, but according to the directions, this was indeed my "intended" destination. Immediately checking my surroundings, I took note of the road that carved its way through the center of the poor excuse for a town ahead of me, sparsely decorated with various local stores and venues. According to my map the road didn't break off from this central strip for another 5 miles.
I buried my head in my hands after begrudgingly throwing my car into park and let out an exasperated sigh. I frantically flipped through the emails I had passed back and forth to my usual benefactor to find any messages concerning the exact location of my job site aside from the address I had been given.
"A fucking gas station, they gave me the address of a fucking gas station" I groaned as I came apon an email that had been sent...5 minutes ago. The subject line read "Apon Arival."
"When you arrive in Dawson, be sure to contact me at the number posted below so I may provide additional instruction on how to safely make it to Fairhaven. "Zion can be dangerous."
I felt my heart drop when my tired eyes made contact with the message below. My heart once again began to slam against my chest—was I lied to? Up to this point, the mystery man who had been detailing the project had alluded to my final stop being in Dawson. It was common to be sent to offshoots of towns that were far removed from modern commodities and human development, yet it was also common that whoever had hired me would be upfront and rather specific in telling me that my location wasn't so much a town as it was a "community" beyond the confines of city streets, so I wouldn't be surprised when I found myself over an hour away from the nearest comfort. I had also been warned of a place's dangers before; the last time I sat down to write, I mentioned that on a trip to the Congo, I was directly informed of the dangers of leaving my protective shell, but in those cases, safety was often typed in bold so that I knew what to expect from the start.
I was plagued with despondence as I slammed my phone into my pocket before forcing the door of my car open with an angry grunt. My brisk and heavy footfall fell onto the cement with intent, regardless of my clulessness. I pushed my way through the gas station's rusted door, which would have welded itself to the frame of the building if not for the little traffic that passed through it, when I was greeted with a poorly lit convenience store. The hum of aging fluorescent lights sang through the quite store. Web-like cracks formed on the yellowing stone as if the walls themselves were trying to escape from the neglected mess, the white panels on the ceiling were rife with black and brown spots indicating frequent leaks and water damage, and the smell was ungodly. I would have gone insane if I was forced to work in a room that had that pestilential smell glued to it. The shelves laid not quite bear but with just enough product on them that for the place to still be listed as a buisness that caused the aluminum casings to bend downward like they where struggling to hold the weight of a finite amount of light snacks.
I locked eyes with a surly man with ash and gray hair who sat behind the counter with a dejected stare. He wore a stained shirt and wrinkled jeans. His unkind eyes were bloodshot and glazed over with age, which seemed to break him, and his lips sat inward to indicate the lack of teeth in his sunken face.
"I can help you," he mumbled with a thick draw that I would have not understood if I hadn't met plenty of people of his likeness prior.
"Yeah, I'm... looking for Fairhaven?"
The grouchy old cashier scratched at his knife like whiskers and leaned onto the counter. "Fayrehayven?" He said obviously perplexed
I gathered what little skills of human interaction I had beyond lecturing a room full of students as I approached the man "right, I'm a teacher and..."
The old man quickly cut me off with little regard for or interest in my oncoming and admittedly pretentious elevator pitch, which I often gave to anyone who asked. "Yer in Dawson, gottanuff teachers last I heard."
"Yeah, well I'm not supposed to be in Dawson." I'm looking for Fairhaven. I interjected
The man responded with an apparent tone of disdain: "Ain't never heard of no FayreHayven; I've been here fiftee sebn years and ain't never heard of no FayreHayven."
I took a deep breath in an attempt to carry the conversation, but I've learned to count my losses when they make themselves known.
"Well, I suppose I'm lost then," I said, holding my hands up.
He grumbled once again and looked me up and down with his hateful glare before forcing out a slight "mmhmm."
I turned and rolled my eyes a bit before walking out of the store, completely defeated. I contemplated for quite some time before reaching back for my phone to examine the cryptic message that overtook my screen. I faltered only slightly before pressing my finger to the highlighted blue digits pasted at the end of the digital letter. The dial tone chimed for longer than expected, and right before the all-too-common voice mailbox message played, I heard a barely audible click before a voice came over the phone.
"Hello, Mr. Hayes," the man spoke in a scratchy, almost strained voice, as if he were exerting himself even while speaking.
The way the man spoke was just as unsettling as the emails we had passed back and forth previously, and without thinking, I responded with a little more panic in my voice than I care to admit, "How did you know it was me?"
The man retorted immediately. "I don't know many with a Tampa area code, my friend; call it intuition."
I kicked myself for being so skeptical after his truthfully sound logic connected with the bundle of nerves that was my mind before I mustered the confidence to say, "Sorry, I'm a bit on edge." "I think you might have given me the wrong address; I'm at a gas station just off the entrance to Dawson."
I waited for a moment before the man spoke once again. "The address we provided was correct; there are no pathways to Fairhaven, and we have attempted to remain secretive as to avoid the judgment of the individuals that may regard us as an unsavory commune." If you look to your right you will see a small path cut into the trees just beyond the convince store. "If you follow this path by foot, we will see to it that a member of the congregation greets you so that you can arrive safely."
I looked back towards the blue Honda Accord I had arrived in and argued, "All of my equipment is in my vehicle—my notes and laptop, my clothes, and I'm certainly not equipped to be hiking in dress shoes." I.."
The hoarse growl of the man rather shot back with an audatory shot of aggressive air: "We will see to it that your things arrive at the Fairhaven Community." I implore you to make your way onto the trail before nightfall. "The forest can be very dangerous without the sanctum of sunlight."
I glanced over at what I could infer was the overgrown pathway he was referring to with a shaky breath.
"I can understand your hesitancy; fear is a powerful emotion, but do not allow it to cloud your judgment." "The walk shouldn't take longer than a quarter of an hour." He spoke calmly now, but there was no comfort in his voice, rather a malignant vexation, as if it were meant to be a threat.
I gripped My phone white-knuckled at the accuracy of his statement. His perception of me was correct because I was not only terrified of the situation but also beyond frustrated at the thought of taking a hike up a mountain directly after a 14-hour trip with nothing but a 2-hour rest in a motel at the halfway mark.
"Guess I'll be there soon," I said, despite my mind showering him with a barrage of heinous insults. He hung up the phone without saying another word.
I gathered a few small commodities from my vehicle before turning towards the cutout hidden within the expanse of millions of trees that ascended to the summit of the gargantuan elevation ahead of me. It was overstated when the man labeled the cocofany of unkempt foliage a pathway; there was hardly even enough of an opening to make my way into the bramble, let alone not be perpetually scratched by the harsh and apathetic thorns that various plants had developed for occasions such as these. The slope that the natural alleyway was built on very quickly turned from a steady incline to a steep, near-vertical hill void of foothold, and I had to rely on my softened hands, which grasped desperately at the closest trees. It didn't take long for my feet to ache and burn. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've never been an outdoorsman. I was often poked fun at by the locals for being a city dweller when I gave a common toad a look of disgust, so it could automatically be assumed that I'm hardly the hiking type either.
The aforementioned 45-minute walk turned into an hour and then two before My knees buckled from beneath me. I was told that someone was to meet me at the point between the gas station and the community, and I was certain that I had to have made the trek to their standards regardless of my excessive stops. I laid my back against the trunk of a large tree before looking toward the sky. The faint glow of a reddening sky was barely visible through the canopy above before my dismay began to settle in. Nightfall was coming, and in the state I was in, I had no hope of making my way to the destination in the next 6 hours, let alone before nightfall. I closed my eyes tight and buried my head into my blistered hands, I could feel my brisk beating heart in my palms when the deafening roar of an engine rocketed my senses into overdrive. My head shot upward toward the golden beams of light, obscuring their source entirely.
"What in God's name is a fella like you doing way out here?" The voice wasn't the same as the man I had spoken to on the phone. It was just as old and eroded, but it held much more of the thick twang of a local.
"I'm looking for fairhaven." "They said they were sending someone to get me!" I shouted back over the boisterous hum of idling machinery.
"Well then, it's best to hop on." "Ain't a shot in hell in making any further in your condition."
I was in no position to argue, so I clasped my hands on a low-hanging branch and lifted myself upright before closing in on what seemed to be a crude attempt at an ATV. On top of the buggy was a middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair and an ice white goatee. He was draped in a flannel shirt and blue jeans that have seen their share of hard times. He wore glasses that fell to the tip of his nose in order to examine me further as I approached. I boarded my saviors vessel and caught a whiff of what I knew to be the pungent odor of illicit alcohol. This man wasn't what I expected from the conversations I had prior with the eccentric leader of the religious movement, but the thought was pushed to the back of my mind as the contraption immediately spun its tires against the leaves and dirt of the forest floor, kicking back a blast of woodland scrap backward as it twisted one hundred and eighty degrees to face parrallel with the pathway that I thought to be my demise, only to scream up the hillside with unexpected force.
.

Last night I admit i allowed my paranoia to get the best of me. The figure I had seen out my window turned up to he a member of the housekeeping staff checking to see if I had... escaped from my mortal coil as I imagine many patrons of such a motel do. Forgive me while I attempt to wright my recollection of My horrible epic. I gave a hard time remembering what portions of the tale are necessary and wich are mundane so I'll just start from the drive to my nightmarish destination. Feel free to ask me questions. I will answer to the best of my memory
The trip to West Virginia was, for the most part, uneventful and mind-numbing. I've always despised long car rides, despite being on the road so often when going from job to job. After an extended period on the road, my mind spins into an unconscious void and it becomes hard to determine where I've been. There are often times when I completely lose myself in the sea of vehicles in a never-ending stop and go only to find myself becoming aware an hour later. What little entertainment I had on hand usually prevented me from falling asleep or completely disconnecting from the human world on my thousandth 14-hour trip to the middle of nowhere. This trip, however, was different; I didn't find myself dissociating, nor did it feel like the run of the mill from point a to point b. I was nervous and the further I made in to my destination the more I felt as if I had made a grave mistake. Despite being a 28-year-old teacher with very little adult social skills, I couldn't help but feel that a 5-year contract with some pseudo-cult in the heart of West Virginia might have been a bit of an impulsive call even with the paycheck, and every time I thought of cryptic emails, I could feel my stomach constrict and knot at the very premise of meeting the strangers in person.
I found myself in one of my few "coming to reality" moments of the trip when I turned into a small town. I was surprised by the smell I was immediately greeted with; the distinct smell of mildew assaulted my senses at the very moment I passed a pale green and mildly vandalized billboard posted on the side of the road that read "Welcome to Dawson," scrawled in a cheesey font that made all the letters look like logs. The town itself was placed in a valley of some sort, almost completely enveloped by mountains on three sides, as if Mother Nature had left this perfect little alcove in the center just for this hidden civilization. On top of the distant, albeit ever-present, ranges sat hundreds of thousands of trees that wrapped the elevation in a verdant cocoon. The town itself was small compared to Tampa, as all the others were. There weren't any towers climbing towards the sky with an impossible number of floors; the pavement of the underutilized roads was a soft gray color, void of any fresh pavement, but the surface was laid bare of any faults as if it had been used, if only just enough to keep the earth from forcing its way back through the laid concrete. As I pulled up to what I can only imagine was the only stoplight in the town, my hands fumbled for my phone in order to check the status of my journey. 1 minute to destination was plastered at the top of the screen, leaving me in a state of confusion as the only things in sight seemed to be a few stores and what looked to be a small cafe on a road that stretched toward the horizon with no apparent end. The light turned green, and my GPS sent me to an immediate left to a small, run-down store just off the entrance that brought me into the mountain asylum. The store was decrepit; the paint was peeling from its decorative siding, creating a splotchy pattern of dingy blue and an aging off white. One of the large windows looking into the store had a sheet of wood crudely nailed over it, and an awning stretched from the end of the parking lot directly to the roof of the gas station as if whatever contractors built this were trying to deplorably hide the abomination from God himself. The store had no sign or title other than an LED fixture that indicated that the nameless fuel depot was open.
"You have arrived at your destination," the droning voice said through the speakers of my car as I came to a reluctant stop. I looked down at my phone to be certain the GPS wasn't struggling to find a pathway yet to be discovered by anyone except for those who had lived there their whole lives, but according to the directions, this was indeed my "intended" destination. Immediately checking my surroundings, I took note of the road that carved its way through the center of the poor excuse for a town ahead of me, sparsely decorated with various local stores and venues. According to my map the road didn't break off from this central strip for another 5 miles.
I buried my head in my hands after begrudgingly throwing my car into park and let out an exasperated sigh. I frantically flipped through the emails I had passed back and forth to my usual benefactor to find any messages concerning the exact location of my job site aside from the address I had been given.
"A fucking gas station, they gave me the address of a fucking gas station" I groaned as I came apon an email that had been sent...5 minutes ago. The subject line read "Apon Arival."
"When you arrive in Dawson, be sure to contact me at the number posted below so I may provide additional instruction on how to safely make it to Fairhaven. "Zion can be dangerous."
I felt my heart drop when my tired eyes made contact with the message below. My heart once again began to slam against my chest—was I lied to? Up to this point, the mystery man who had been detailing the project had alluded to my final stop being in Dawson. It was common to be sent to offshoots of towns that were far removed from modern commodities and human development, yet it was also common that whoever had hired me would be upfront and rather specific in telling me that my location wasn't so much a town as it was a "community" beyond the confines of city streets, so I wouldn't be surprised when I found myself over an hour away from the nearest comfort. I had also been warned of a place's dangers before; the last time I sat down to write, I mentioned that on a trip to the Congo, I was directly informed of the dangers of leaving my protective shell, but in those cases, safety was often typed in bold so that I knew what to expect from the start.
I was plagued with despondence as I slammed my phone into my pocket before forcing the door of my car open with an angry grunt. My brisk and heavy footfall fell onto the cement with intent, regardless of my clulessness. I pushed my way through the gas station's rusted door, which would have welded itself to the frame of the building if not for the little traffic that passed through it, when I was greeted with a poorly lit convenience store. The hum of aging fluorescent lights sang through the quite store. Web-like cracks formed on the yellowing stone as if the walls themselves were trying to escape from the neglected mess, the white panels on the ceiling were rife with black and brown spots indicating frequent leaks and water damage, and the smell was ungodly. I would have gone insane if I was forced to work in a room that had that pestilential smell glued to it. The shelves laid not quite bear but with just enough product on them that for the place to still be listed as a buisness that caused the aluminum casings to bend downward like they where struggling to hold the weight of a finite amount of light snacks.
I locked eyes with a surly man with ash and gray hair who sat behind the counter with a dejected stare. He wore a stained shirt and wrinkled jeans. His unkind eyes were bloodshot and glazed over with age, which seemed to break him, and his lips sat inward to indicate the lack of teeth in his sunken face.
"I can help you," he mumbled with a thick draw that I would have not understood if I hadn't met plenty of people of his likeness prior.
"Yeah, I'm... looking for Fairhaven?"
The grouchy old cashier scratched at his knife like whiskers and leaned onto the counter. "Fayrehayven?" He said obviously perplexed
I gathered what little skills of human interaction I had beyond lecturing a room full of students as I approached the man "right, I'm a teacher and..."
The old man quickly cut me off with little regard for or interest in my oncoming and admittedly pretentious elevator pitch, which I often gave to anyone who asked. "Yer in Dawson, gottanuff teachers last I heard."
"Yeah, well I'm not supposed to be in Dawson." I'm looking for Fairhaven. I interjected
The man responded with an apparent tone of disdain: "Ain't never heard of no FayreHayven; I've been here fiftee sebn years and ain't never heard of no FayreHayven."
I took a deep breath in an attempt to carry the conversation, but I've learned to count my losses when they make themselves known.
"Well, I suppose I'm lost then," I said, holding my hands up.
He grumbled once again and looked me up and down with his hateful glare before forcing out a slight "mmhmm."
I turned and rolled my eyes a bit before walking out of the store, completely defeated. I contemplated for quite some time before reaching back for my phone to examine the cryptic message that overtook my screen. I faltered only slightly before pressing my finger to the highlighted blue digits pasted at the end of the digital letter. The dial tone chimed for longer than expected, and right before the all-too-common voice mailbox message played, I heard a barely audible click before a voice came over the phone.
"Hello, Mr. Hayes," the man spoke in a scratchy, almost strained voice, as if he were exerting himself even while speaking.
The way the man spoke was just as unsettling as the emails we had passed back and forth previously, and without thinking, I responded with a little more panic in my voice than I care to admit, "How did you know it was me?"
The man retorted immediately. "I don't know many with a Tampa area code, my friend; call it intuition."
I kicked myself for being so skeptical after his truthfully sound logic connected with the bundle of nerves that was my mind before I mustered the confidence to say, "Sorry, I'm a bit on edge." "I think you might have given me the wrong address; I'm at a gas station just off the entrance to Dawson."
I waited for a moment before the man spoke once again. "The address we provided was correct; there are no pathways to Fairhaven, and we have attempted to remain secretive as to avoid the judgment of the individuals that may regard us as an unsavory commune." If you look to your right you will see a small path cut into the trees just beyond the convince store. "If you follow this path by foot, we will see to it that a member of the congregation greets you so that you can arrive safely."
I looked back towards the blue Honda Accord I had arrived in and argued, "All of my equipment is in my vehicle—my notes and laptop, my clothes, and I'm certainly not equipped to be hiking in dress shoes." I.."
The hoarse growl of the man rather shot back with an audatory shot of aggressive air: "We will see to it that your things arrive at the Fairhaven Community." I implore you to make your way onto the trail before nightfall. "The forest can be very dangerous without the sanctum of sunlight."
I glanced over at what I could infer was the overgrown pathway he was referring to with a shaky breath.
"I can understand your hesitancy; fear is a powerful emotion, but do not allow it to cloud your judgment." "The walk shouldn't take longer than a quarter of an hour." He spoke calmly now, but there was no comfort in his voice, rather a malignant vexation, as if it were meant to be a threat.
I gripped My phone white-knuckled at the accuracy of his statement. His perception of me was correct because I was not only terrified of the situation but also beyond frustrated at the thought of taking a hike up a mountain directly after a 14-hour trip with nothing but a 2-hour rest in a motel at the halfway mark.
"Guess I'll be there soon," I said, despite my mind showering him with a barrage of heinous insults. He hung up the phone without saying another word.
I gathered a few small commodities from my vehicle before turning towards the cutout hidden within the expanse of millions of trees that ascended to the summit of the gargantuan elevation ahead of me. It was overstated when the man labeled the cocofany of unkempt foliage a pathway; there was hardly even enough of an opening to make my way into the bramble, let alone not be perpetually scratched by the harsh and apathetic thorns that various plants had developed for occasions such as these. The slope that the natural alleyway was built on very quickly turned from a steady incline to a steep, near-vertical hill void of foothold, and I had to rely on my softened hands, which grasped desperately at the closest trees. It didn't take long for my feet to ache and burn. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've never been an outdoorsman. I was often poked fun at by the locals for being a city dweller when I gave a common toad a look of disgust, so it could automatically be assumed that I'm hardly the hiking type either.
The aforementioned 45-minute walk turned into an hour and then two before My knees buckled from beneath me. I was told that someone was to meet me at the point between the gas station and the community, and I was certain that I had to have made the trek to their standards regardless of my excessive stops. I laid my back against the trunk of a large tree before looking toward the sky. The faint glow of a reddening sky was barely visible through the canopy above before my dismay began to settle in. Nightfall was coming, and in the state I was in, I had no hope of making my way to the destination in the next 6 hours, let alone before nightfall. I closed my eyes tight and buried my head into my blistered hands, I could feel my brisk beating heart in my palms when the deafening roar of an engine rocketed my senses into overdrive. My head shot upward toward the golden beams of light, obscuring their source entirely.
"What in God's name is a fella like you doing way out here?" The voice wasn't the same as the man I had spoken to on the phone. It was just as old and eroded, but it held much more of the thick twang of a local.
"I'm looking for fairhaven." "They said they were sending someone to get me!" I shouted back over the boisterous hum of idling machinery.
"Well then, it's best to hop on." "Ain't a shot in hell in making any further in your condition."
I was in no position to argue, so I clasped my hands on a low-hanging branch and lifted myself upright before closing in on what seemed to be a crude attempt at an ATV. On top of the buggy was a middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair and an ice white goatee. He was draped in a flannel shirt and blue jeans that have seen their share of hard times. He wore glasses that fell to the tip of his nose in order to examine me further as I approached. I boarded my saviors vessel and caught a whiff of what I knew to be the pungent odor of illicit alcohol. This man wasn't what I expected from the conversations I had prior with the eccentric leader of the religious movement, but the thought was pushed to the back of my mind as the contraption immediately spun its tires against the leaves and dirt of the forest floor, kicking back a blast of woodland scrap backward as it twisted one hundred and eighty degrees to face parrallel with the pathway that I thought to be my demise, only to scream up the hillside with unexpected force.
.

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Link to the Wiki page, with additional links to Clan information and background Lore.
And here we are, the first chapter in the final book of the series. Cover Art as always by the incredible Harry Rowlands! - https://i.imgur.com/F2RnijT.jpg
Chapter 1: The Temples Of Karnak
“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.”
King Lear - Act I, Scene iv
Genvass Shaafvaazif peered nervously into the yawning space as the group entered the ancient structure. The building was massive, but then, Precursor construction tended toward the large and imposing. The team carried flashlights with them as a precaution, but as they set foot inside the entrance, hidden lamps came to life, easily illuminating the interior. With a collective shrug, they turned off the handheld torches and stowed them back away. He wondered why they even bothered. The lights always worked.
Now that they were inside, it was time to go to work. “Preliminary Survey Report for Structure 371, Grid 004 - 105,” he began, speaking into the recorder. “Power and basic infrastructure functioning normally. 371 is constructed primarily with…”
He paused, looking closer at the nearest wall. Almost all the buildings were made from some sort of crystalline material they were still struggling to analyze, so in the interim, they’d decided on a simple classification system for now. The crystal was a deep blue, so that meant…
“... constructed primarily with Type 4 material,” he concluded, satisfied for the moment. Odds were that system would change if they ever cracked the ancient’s engineering secrets. Hell, for all they knew, the different colors were nothing more than decoration, the equivalent of splashing paint on a bulkhead. But they had to start somewhere. Coding the buildings by color was as good a method as any.
Up ahead, Sergeant Sultan swept her rifle left and right, on guard for any potential threats. He wondered why they bothered with that as well. There was nothing here, there was never anything here. The structure would eventually give up its secrets and tell them its purpose, but everything they’d discovered so far was utterly benign. Their distant ancestors certainly grasped the concept of occupational safety and had ensured their factories and research facilities wouldn’t annihilate the unwary because of negligence. That didn’t mean it was impossible to get yourself killed; you could still jump off the roof or order a machine to construct a laser in order to shoot yourself in the head, but at least they made you work for it.
“... Clear,” the Valkyrie announced, relaxing her posture as she pointed her weapon at the floor. “No threats that I can see.”
“Are there ever?” Diggs snorted, shifting his toolkit from the right hand to the left. “I don’t see why we even need an escort,” he continued, echoing Genvass’s own thoughts.
The Dharmist nodded in agreement. He almost hadn’t recognized Diggs when they teamed up. The kid had grown thirty centimeters or more since the last time he’d seen the boy, not to mention that he was talking, not merely grunting and growling, which had caught him completely off guard. But those mismatched eyes of his were still the same, and impossible to forget.
“For the same reason you use lockouts when you’re working on the ship’s engines,” Sultan fired back. “If you let down your guard and fail to cover your ass, eventually something with sharp teeth will latch onto it.”
“Words to live by,” Ess agreed from the tablet. “Spot anything I can plug into?” she inquired.
“Not yet,” Genvass replied, “but we’re keeping our eyes peeled.”
Ess Peon was an Avatar, and supposedly a highly skilled Data Retrieval specialist. He’d hoped to see Alphad again, and maybe even have him assigned to his team, but it seemed his old shipmate was under something of a cloud amongst his electronic kin, despite the weapon he’d unveiled at the eleventh hour to fight off the Yīqún. Ess seemed competent enough, projecting the image of a female dark elf with sharply pointed ears and long white hair tied up in a cascading ponytail. She had grayish-blue skin and wore stylized fantasy armor, though Genvass still hadn’t decided if he trusted her.
“Looks like elevators over there on the left,” Diggs pointed, as the team drifted in that direction. There didn’t appear to be much on the ground floor, something else common to most Precursor buildings. He wasn’t sure why. Too public, perhaps? He jotted that thought down in his personal notebook, filing it away with all the other random ideas he’d had while searching the ancient city.
Glancing about, Genvass noted for the record the lack of any obvious transport tubes. The Precursors had been amphibians, according to a certain Knight he knew, equally comfortable in both water and on land. It was the reason rivers and lakes abounded on this world, many of them obviously the product of intelligence. In several of the buildings they’d explored, they’d found massive tubes filled with aqua pura honeycombing the structure, apparently created so their ancestors could swim easily from one section to another. Oddly, they weren’t universal. In many cases, discreet atomizers would spray a fine mist throughout the open spaces instead, keeping the humidity level far higher than humans found comfortable.
What made the situation even stranger was that when Terrans entered a complex that used the spraying systems, they would immediately shut down. Somehow… they still weren’t sure by what means, exactly… the building could sense their physiology and adapted accordingly. Not only that, the humidity level dropped to something they found more palatable, yet did so with no obvious pressure or temperature changes. How? How did they know? And how did they adjust so quickly, so seamlessly? Yet another mystery to be solved.
The group made their way over to the lifts, choosing the first one by default. Genvass reached inside his pocket and removed a pipette, placing it over the sensor as he squeezed out a few drops of blood. The Novo Terrans grasped no one enjoyed slicing their thumbs open to activate the ancient equipment, so instead, they came up with an alternative solution. Using syringes, they would draw blood from a volunteer, infuse it with anticoagulants, and then store it away until it was needed. The clan leaders had even briefly toyed with combining blood from multiple donors, since it wasn’t destined for medical use.
That practice had ended even more quickly than it began, when they learned Precursor tech got twitchy when exposed to the mixed hemoglobin. The first time they’d tried using the stuff, the machine muttered something about a “Rashmi’Kem Protocol”, and after a hushed consultation with Chevalier Blye Tagata, they immediately ended the project.
Better safe than sorry.
The controls glowed as the red droplets landed, only for the blood to be siphoned away, disappearing into the panel as the platform beneath their feet rose. The lifts they’d found in most structures weren’t all that different from ones used by other races; apparently, even the Precursors couldn’t improve upon the old-fashioned technology. Choosing their destination was still hit or miss, but they were slowly making progress.
And isn’t that just our situation in a nutshell? Genvass sighed. We’re surrounded by machines that could give us anything we need, and yet we’re nothing but apes, trying to grasp what a wheel does. But hey… we’ve almost figured out how to go up and down!
It was frustrating, but then no one said it was going to be easy. And they really shouldn’t complain. After all they’d endured since the destruction of Earth, life on New Terra truly was paradise. They were safe, well fed, no longer subject to the whims of aging ships, able to breathe fresh air and feel the sun upon their face. It was all they could have asked for, and more.
But when you looked around and saw all that incredible architecture, filled with treasures and secrets beyond imagining, it was hard to not strain at the leash. The Precursors had once held the power of the gods themselves, and with a bit of luck, not to mention a great deal of hard work, one day, perhaps, they could as well. It was heady stuff.
Dangerous stuff, if they weren’t careful.
The lift glided to a halt as the door slid open, revealing a chamber filled with strange-looking structures and devices. Diggs gave out a low whistle as they stepped off the elevator, with Becca taking point once more. “Damn,” he said in wonder, “I could spend my whole life here, and I don’t think I’d ever figure it all out.”
“Look for a compatible port,” Ess Peon urged. “Maybe I can get some idea what they used this place for.”
The team fanned out as they searched for somewhere the Avatar could jack in. Most of the technology they’d uncovered so far activated the same way Samara’s Guardian or Athena, the protector of this world, did via a DNA lock. Sometimes, however, they found ports where compatible electronics could link in. It took them a while to come up with the right combination of hardware and software to actually make them work, but once they had, it sped up their investigation of New Terra considerably. The Avatars would take point when a suitable port was found, since they were uniquely qualified to exploit them. It was the reason Ess was on their team, in case they spotted one.
Genvass moved from one object to the next, recording his observations, but the devices meant nothing to him. The space could be for literally anything, from a child’s playroom to a computer factory to something so bizarre they lacked the words to even describe it. Exploring these ancient structures was both exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure, and while this world fascinated him, he could never quite rid himself of the sense that they were playing with fire.
“Hey, I found one!” Becca called out, waving the others over. “Looks like it’s your lucky day, Ess,” she proclaimed, pointing at the data port she’d just located.
“Care to do the honors, Gen?” the Avatar chuckled, rubbing her virtual hands with glee.
“Certainly,” he agreed, setting the tablet down on a convenient shelf as he made the connections, double-checking the cable to ensure everything was secure. “Be careful,” he cautioned her. “If you sense any danger, get out of there at once.”
“It’ll be fine,” she assured him. “No one’s been hurt yet on these expeditions, right?”
“The operative word in that sentence is ‘yet’,” the Valkyrie snapped. “Don’t get cocky.”
“You’re mistaking confidence for cockiness,” Ess grinned. “Wish me luck.”
“Good luck…” Genvass began, but by then she had already vanished.
“Someday she’s gonna bite off more than she can chew,” Becca predicted.
“I dunno. I kind of like her,” Diggs admitted with a cautious smile.
The Valkyrie just sighed. “Come next Rendezvous, we really need to find you a girl.”
“Hey!” the young Tinker protested, his cheeks now bright red.
“Don’t take it personally, Diggs,” Genvass told him, “but you are kind of quick to fall for a pretty face.”
“I am not!” he objected, louder and even more embarrassed.
“Diggs, it’s okay,” Genvass said gently, placing a hand on his shoulder. “We’ve all been there. We were young once too, you know.” he smiled.
The boy gave him a dubious look, earning a chuckle from Becca. “So, what do you think this place is?” she asked, changing the subject to spare him further humiliation.
“I have no idea,” Genvass shrugged, before glancing over at the boy. “Diggs?”
“I dunno,” he said again, scuffing his foot on the crystal floor, his eyes now downcast.
Thankfully, Becca stepped up and took the lead. “Diggs, I’m sorry we teased you,” she apologized, “but you are the Tinker of this team, so we really need to hear your best guess. For the record, if nothing else.”
He looked at her with misgiving, attempting to gauge the honesty of her words, before finally deciding that she meant it. Bobbing his head, he moved forward, giving the space a more thorough examination, inspecting each of the objects. “Huh,” he said at last, as something seemed to catch his attention.
“What is it?” Genvass asked, curious.
“Well, those Precursors,” he said awkwardly, scratching his chin in a way the other man immediately recognized, “do we know how big they were?”
The other two shared a brief look. “Roughly the same as us, according to Blye,” the Dharmist said. “Why?”
“Well… cause those things are all about person-sized,” he observed. “Could be some sort of… I dunno… medical equipment, maybe?” the young Tinker surmised. “That’s the first thing that pops into my head, anyway.”
“Interesting…” Genvass said thoughtfully, peering closer at the objects himself. There certainly seemed to be a space where a Terran… or Precursor… could fit on or in each of the devices. “Could be you’re onto something, Diggs,” he smiled. The boy lit up with a broad smile at the unexpected recognition.
“Not bad, kid,” Becca grinned with approval, as Ess suddenly reappeared on the tablet’s display.
“... you won’t believe what I found,” she said with excitement. “Do you know what this place is?”
“A hospital, perhaps?” the Dharmist guessed, giving Diggs a knowing wink.
The Avatar scowled. It bothered him somewhat that she made it look cute. “All right, just how the hell did you figure that out?” she demanded.
The others chuckled. “I’m afraid I can’t take the credit,” he answered. “In fact, it was actually young Master Diggs that suggested the possibility.”
“Is that so…?” she said carefully, giving the Tinker an appraising look. Diggs blushed again as she eyed him before shrugging. “Well, you were right,” she continued, “although it’s not exactly a hospital in the purest sense, from what I’ve been able to glean. More like a medical research center that also conducts outpatient treatments, though I’m not sure if the Precursors made that fine a distinction between the two. There’s a lot of it I can’t make heads or tails of, but what I have been able to grasp is telling me that this place could treat, well, anything.” The Avatar looked more than a little astonished at the possibilities.
“The Knights are definitely gonna want to hear about this place,” Becca observed.
“Not just the Knights,” Genvass said pointedly. “There’s plenty of Proteans out there desperate for medical intervention, individuals that the Knights simply can’t help. Some of the procedures they underwent…” He shook his head, suddenly reminded of his own experience in that area. “If this place can offer them some measure of hope,” he continued, “then it is truly priceless.”
“Too bad it’ll probably just get buried,” Diggs said sourly. “Getting a place like this operational again could take years.”
“Maybe not,” Genvass replied, a hint of a smile on his face.
“Oh yeah? You have a magic wand you can wave?” Ess demanded.
“Not exactly,” the Dharmist smiled.
“But as it just so happens… I know someone.”

I drive a 2006 Honda Accord Sedan. I want to customize the car but it seems very limited in options. How would/ have you modded your accords?

It was summertime in Gusty Meadows. Nora had my hand in hers. Her eyes were gold in the sunlight, but her hand was red, stained from the June-bearing wild strawberries we’d been picking off the branches. Their seeds would stick in my teeth like pieces of candy. We smiled at each other with ruby lips.
“I could eat the whole field,” she said. “They’re the sweetest thing I’ve ever had.”
She kissed me, and nothing, not even those perfect strawberries, tasted sweeter than that.
When I was around Nora, I could not think of anything else but her. She created in me a fortification, a curtain wall, and she sat on top of it. Every other thing that tried to get in would bounce off the surface and fall dead at its base.
She led me through the tall grass like a pixie in a dream, and I followed her confident stride. Along the way, we came upon a dehydrated culvert and snuck inside.
“What is this doing here?” she said, between strawberry kisses. “I don’t see a river.”
I didn’t want to answer her. Why would I ruin such a perfect day by speaking of that place? Besides, our mouths were currently occupied, and I was content with that. But she pressed the subject, genuinely curious about the incongruous culvert.
“There’s a power station not far from here,” I said, but I didn’t want to think of that, because her eyes were on me, wide and curious; adventurous. She flirted with the zipper of my pants, her big doe eyes never leaving my face. I swallowed hard and tasted strawberries. “It generated electricity by pumping water out of the ground. This place was built for runoff, to prevent flooding in the field. The plant is decommissioned now.”
I stared down the gullet of the culvert. We stood inside its entrance where the sun could shine, but the tunnel led into strict darkness. I shivered, and then remembered Nora on the wall, and those thoughts fell dead to the floor.
Nora had never been to Gusty Meadows, not many people have. It was a sleepy town. I brought her there on an impulse, which was a trait she brought out in me. I hadn’t visited since my grandparents passed­—no reason to—but Nora somehow reminded me of the place, with its gorgeous fields of pedantic strawberries, and in June the dandelions fell on us like snow.
For the moment we were under cover from their assault, and my groan echoed through the culvert as she unbuckled me and pressed me to the curved wall.
“I want to go,” she said.
“All the way, baby. Let’s do it. Right here and now.”
She laughed into my mouth. “To the generating station, I mean.”
And her lily flowered dress came down and I came up. I breathed her in and it made me drunk, so I fumbled with the buttons of my shirt with unsteady fingers while she tried to distract me with her hands and breasts and lips.
After several blissful minutes we were back out in the dandelion snow, and she was leading me East towards the groundwater hydro station, but its name had forsaken me, and I didn’t care because it wasn’t on my mind anyway, only she was.
Young love is dangerous yet intoxicating. I envy and pity those who never get to experience it. Young love is a rose with thorns, and the stem is as long as a lifetime.
Nora had such exuberance in her character, and it bled onto me, it livened me up, but I could never match her energy, not all of the time, and hardly even some of the time. Girls like that are ephemeral creatures, they hop from stone to stone, never looking back, for if they did they would see only crying eyes.
“We can’t go there,” I said, tugging at her dress.
“Sure we could. And we will.”
“We can’t, Nora, we can’t.” Something in my voice quieted her song. She looked at me stark and serious for the first time all day, and I felt guilty for it.
“And just why not?”
“Something terrible happened there. Decades ago.”
But this only seemed to add to her excitement. She beamed at the prospect of a haunted power station, but I was scared. I demurred and planted my feet, but she tugged me along, and in the end all it took were those tea-cup eyes and a pleading pout to get me moving.
“So are you going to tell me about this terrible thing that happened?” she said as we flattened the field with our feet.
“I think it was in the ‘60s,” I said. “There was a. . . something to do with a boring drill. You see, this whole area is a rich aquifer, that’s why everything is so. . . vigorous. They made bores to pump the water. They were underground lakes, really. One day they dug too deep, I think, and they discovered tunnels below the ground, a conduit system, deep rivers that channeled for miles in every direction.”
“It’s all interesting, love, but fast-forward to the good part.”
“Well, workers started to disappear.”
In the distance now we saw it; not a large power plant, just a dead husk, black on a blue sky, and we were coming from the West, from its backyard, so I wouldn’t have been able to see the signs for it, but the name came to me then. Puram Generating Station, or, colloquially known as The Puram. It came to me because of how fitting I found the name after I heard the stories of the water they found in those tunnels. The purest darn water you’ll ever taste is what the workers said; the ones that went down there originally, the ones who inflated a raft in the dark with their headlamps on and rode a mile East—the length of their security tether—and then a mile West, and then a mile North and South. And each direction had a dozen branches.
“Disappeared to where?” she asked me.
“To the tunnels,” I said. “At first, the disappearances were a mystery. There’s life down there, you know. They discovered crustaceans that fed on the sediment. Unlike any animal they’d ever seen. Marine biologists visited the place, but the disappearances started happening soon after, and the tunnels were too dangerous to explore very far. An ecosystem three-hundred feet beneath the ground. Life in the dark. It’s sort of spooky to think about. Well, eventually someone noticed what was happening. They had set up security cameras after the third worker disappeared, because they assumed a culprit within the work-place, and employees were beginning to get nervous. The cameras ended up capturing men approaching the borehole and jumping in. They captured men climbing down the wall ladder. They captured men talking to the open darkness of the hole while gazing down its depths. Of their own accord, thirty men went down there into those caves to die before they closed the place for good. The last of them was the plant commissioner.”
“Did anybody ever go looking for them?”
“Nope, no way,” I said. “I shiver at the idea of their bodies down there, floating forever beneath the ground, being eaten up by those crustaceans. Nora, I don’t think I could go in there.”
We had gotten close. The Puram loomed above us, a hulking monolith with black skin and even blacker innards. It was a monument that represented the exact opposite of why I had brought Nora to Gusty Meadows that day. She had reminded me of the innocent beauty of the untouched fields, of the strawberry plants with their delectable fruit, of the love we found in the culvert. In retrospect, though, I believe that Nora was far more similar to that black carcass of a building, with insides just as dark. Those black tunnels, her veins, with liquid—unpure—coursing through them.
“Surely you don’t believe in a tale as tall as that, do you?” she said through her ruby red lips. I would have let those lips suffocate me, I would have let them hold mine shut forever.
“Sure I do, why wouldn’t I?”
“come on,” she said, and she gave me my wish, a tender kiss to end the argument.
We approached a diseased chain-link fence that was brown and flakey from years of rust buildup. Signs of neglect were scattered throughout the yard beyond. Weeds sprouted through cracks they made in the paved pathways, unfettered and uncaring of their place, they stood amongst the broken ground in a stubborn display. Spray paint vandalised the black stone of the structure like fresh tattoos on a dead body. We walked along the fence line, looking for a way in, and Nora danced the whole time, twisting in my arms and twirling on her toes, with shattered glass reflecting in the sun and catching in her lightbulb eyes like a disco ball or a Fourth of July fireworks show. Everywhere was glass from broken windows, and it made the lawn appear to be on fire.
A dandelion tuft landed in Nora’s auburn hair, jealously dancing with her for a moment before being carried away on the breeze. It was a revelatory moment, for I caught a glimpse of our future then. I, as a tuft, among many, her as a celestial body onto which gravity—or maybe magnetism—forces us to be drawn to, but ultimately we are crushed by its weight.
We came upon a break in the link. A section of fence had been rotted enough for some past presence to have been able to kick a hole in the metal and crawl through. Nora held her hand out expectantly, and when I took it, she politely dipped down and fitted herself through the hole with expert grace. When it was my turn, I clumsily sat on my knees and crawled through with all the grace of a hippopotamus. I was lucky not to have gotten my shirt snagged, or my hands lacerated from the glass shards in the grass. I dusted off my stained knees and took in the view.
The Puram watched us with serrated eyelids, daring us entry. “Come,” it said, “come right on in, come right on in. I have left a glass carpet for to soothe your tired feet, and the handle of my door is cool as ice, for to relieve the state of your bleeding hands, and don’t forget that once you’re inside it is dark as pitch, for to rest your tired eyes.”
I shook my head to clear it of such crazy thoughts. Nora, remember Nora. Atop the wall, a presence larger than The Puram.
“I really don’t love this, Nora. We don’t know the state of the place, we could hurt ourselves. And it’s dark, we don’t have flashlights.”
“Pretend we’re at the end of the world,” she said. “It’s only us. These are lands unexplored. We come across this. Do you go inside to investigate, or do you stay out here quivering in its shadow?”
“I go back to get help,” I argued.
“It’s only us, love. It’s the end of the world.”
And that was that. She began to move, but before I went after her I stole one last wistful glance to the West, toward the strawberry field and the safety of the culvert.
We came around the side of the structure and followed a weed choked path to a set of industrial double doors. Surprisingly, the wire-mesh glass on the doors were intact. I took the lead for once, pressing my weight against the push bar of the door, which gave way easier than I had expected, causing me to stumble and almost fall blindly into that empty darkness, but I caught the mullion and steadied myself.
“Careful,” Nora said. “You almost got swallowed by the beast.” She smiled, a bouquet of perfect teeth, and ruffled my hair. I did not happen to find the statement amusing. Regardless, I tried to match her air of levity, so I held the door ajar with my foot and bowed steeply, hand outstretched toward the belly of the beast, and performed the words “m’lady.”
Nora pinched the hem of her dress and curtsied before courageously entering The Puram. I followed her in and let the door shut softly behind us.
The first thing I noticed, while my eyes were still adjusting to the dimness of the place, was the smell. It was the acrid odor of stagnant water.
“Pee-yew!” Nora said. “And that’s with the windows open!”
It was dark, but it was still mid-day and much light fell in through the factory windows, although it didn’t spread evenly, it sort of just pooled on the ground in square shafts. Nora stood in one of these shafts looking like a runway model in a spotlight. I stood where I was, not wanting to touch her, because that would spoil the image, but she gestured for me to join her, and I had always been helpless to her needs. So I went and we stood there together in the optic nerve of The Puram, and for the time being I had forgotten the smell, and my fear, and everything else in the world.
Then something fell, deep in the darkness of the facility, and I snapped out of my trance.
The air suddenly felt heavier, the odor of the place more noxious. I couldn’t see ten feet past the shaft of light we stood in, so when I turned in the direction from which I heard the sound, it felt like I was trying to stare into the depths of an ocean. A place so deep that even the strong rays of sunlight could not stretch themselves to reach it.
“Relax, it was probably a mouse, or a rat, or something that got startled by our beauty,” Nora said, still somehow full of alacrity.
“Nora, I—”
“Give me your lighter.”
“What?”
“Your Zippo, you dope-head. Hand it over.”
I reluctantly fished in my pockets for the Zippo and placed it in her outstretched hand. “Nora, please don’t go exploring that sound. I got maybe fifteen minutes of fuel in that thing, and I have zero intention of falling through the fucking floor. Didn’t you hear me? This place bored holes into the ground.”
“End of the world, love,” she said, and winked at me before flicking the spark wheel and walking off into that void, into that terrible, terrible place, and toward that terrible, terrible sound.
I had no choice but to follow. Anxiety had solidified into what felt like a dry marble in my throat and I swallowed it down. My mouth was dry and tangy, no longer tasting of sweet strawberries, but of spoiled wine.
The lighter didn’t do a very good job of penetrating the darkness of the factory, in fact it felt more like all we were accomplishing was highlighting our presence in the place. Hey there! You, in the dark! We’re right here, can’t you see us?
Nora led us on, walking slowly, but confidently. We sidestepped fallen tools, and I-beams, and abandoned industrial vehicles, and eye washing fountains, and splintered pallets, but we never really saw any of these things, we sort of just got an impression of them in the weak orange flicker of the lighter’s flame.
“Stop!” I shouted. We had come across a very low steel barrier. I had noticed our light faintly in its reflective surface. Nora approached it, the barrier only going up to her knees. She extended the lighter beyond the steel railing and revealed two massive tubular legs plunging deep into a dark well. The well itself seemed to have a diameter of about fifty feet. The white steel barrier followed its circumference in a full circle.
For a moment I imagined those legs alive and kicking. I could almost hear the thunderous sound they would make as water chugged up and down inside them like the arteries of a beating heart. Chig-chog, chig-chog, chig-chog, chig-chog. And the steady, electrical buzz of the generator somewhere, the central nervous system, forcing everything to move, to act, to live.
“Hold this,” Nora said, and shoved the Zippo into my hands.
She wandered off into the dark. I saw her for a second and then I saw only the hem of her dress, and then she was completely enveloped by the black, and I was alone. I heard her though, and I knew that she would find her way back to me, because I held the light. I was the beacon. Rummaging. Metallic clank. Feet skating on a dusty floor. I could picture her, despite all of her jauntiness, feeling out with her fingers in the dark, her feet never leaving the ground, but sliding on it so as not to mistakenly step on something sharp, or plummet down a well. She was cautious in my mind’s eye, and I hoped that she really was.
Then she was back, appearing before me like a fairy coalescing into existence. When her face bloomed out of the darkness like a pale full moon rising from a dark horizon, I felt okay again. My previous trepidation was lost, because how could I be afraid in the presence of a goddess? She smiled her perfect smile, glad of herself for what she had done, and I was glad for it too, without knowing yet what it was.
She had a stake in her hand. No, not a stake, a massive shard of wood that she had pried off of a broken pallet.
“Let’s see how deep this baby goes,” she said, and then took the Zippo from my hand and set its flame to the wood. It lit up like a torch, and I had this horrible premonition of both of us trapped inside of a burning factory with no idea where the exit was. All my trepidation came flooding back, but before I could protest her actions, Nora leaned forward and dropped the flaming shard into the pit of the well. Overcome by curiosity, I leaned over beside her and together we watched as the fireball fell like a comet to the depths of the hole. But it never winked out, it just fell out of sight. We waited for a splash, or thud, but none ever came.
“Okay,” Nora said. “That’s pretty damn deep. Remind me not to fall into that.” And then she proceeded to circumvent the boring hole, and I was yet again forced to follow, lest I be left alone and lost in the blinding dark.
We continued along for another minute or so, passing more shadowed carcasses along the way.
And then we started to see nothing at all. All at once, our path was clear, unobstructed, an empty floor. For another full minute we did not come across a single thing, not a fallen screw, not a hardened pile of mouse droppings, not even a speck of dust as far as I could tell. The floor looked swept clean and cleared of equipment.
“Where are the walls?” I said at one point, only realizing then that we seemed to be in some massive open area with no walls or windows.
“I don’t know,” Nora said, and for once I heard the slightest bit of doubt in her voice. “I think we’re well past where we would have heard that—”
Something crashed to the floor with a heavy thud that vibrated through the concrete like an earthquake, making us both jump, me nearly out of my skin. And then a heavy rolling sound, like how a bowling ball sounds as it races down the lane toward the waiting pins, except this bowling ball sounded like it was the size and weight of a freestanding boulder.
“What is that?” I said, on the verge of a panic.
“I don’t know,” Nora replied, and she did sound worried now.
We stood where we were, not wanting to proceed, but also not wanting to retreat. We were frozen in wonder, ears cocked, tracking the motion of that heavy boulder, or whatever it was by its sound. It was ahead of us for sure, ahead of us and to the right, but it was rolling in our direction. The sound was getting closer and closer, its rumble sending vibrations through our feet like how the tracks of a train would feel if stood on during the approach of a heavy freight. But we were safe where we were because it was ahead of us, it would cross ahead of us. Until it didn’t.
I took an unconscious step forward, toward the sound of the rolling boulder, and my foot caught on something. I looked down and saw an outcropping of cement that lined the floor in both directions. It was only a few inches high, but I knew what it represented. We were standing just outside of what used to be another section of the facility.
“Nora, I think I found the wall.”
And then the rumbling ceased. Its course stopped about a dozen yards straight ahead of us. There was a deafening silence, the ground stable as ever, and just when that silence became unbearable, Nora stepped over the outcropping and took a few wary steps forward. Deep beneath our feet came the sound of a meteor hitting a lake. Nora stopped dead in her tracks, and together we heard a gigantic whooshing sound, like a waterfall in reverse, and then the rain came. Somewhere in that darkness, water erupted from the floor as it would from a whale’s blowhole. It came crashing down in all directions, soaking us through, washing the strawberry stains from our lips and hands. There was a startled, feminine cry, and it only registered later that it came from my throat, not Nora’s.
Nora, that brave immortal soul, was smiling within her orange halo, and this is what I saw before the water put out the flame.
“Over here,” said a voice that I’d never heard before.
“Nora?” I said. It was so dark. I turned my head back the way we came, and in all that blackness I saw a speck of light, like a distant star in the throes of entropy. It was the only light available, and it was lightyears away.
“This way,” said that voice, so much like a whisper and so much unlike any voice I knew.
I saw sparks as Nora tried to reignite the flame but nothing caught. It flashed a few more times and that was all.
She was only a few feet ahead of me, but I wouldn’t have been able to see my own hand if it were an inch from my eyes.
“C’mon, down here.”
I heard footsteps receding into the distance. Nora was on the move.
“Nora!” I shouted. “Talk to me. We gotta stay together here. Follow my voice. Please.”
No reply.
“Nora, please. I want to go back. You’re scaring me, Nora, just say something. Why are you walking that way? What do you expect to find over there? It’s not the end of the world, and even if it was I would not be here!” I thought about that distant star and how much longer we had before it winked out. When dusk arrived that would be it. No more dandelion rain or strawberry kisses. Just big black nothing in a haunted generating station. Where everything in a large radius, including the walls, had suddenly disappeared as if sucked into the demanding pull of a tornado. I knew what lay ahead, I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.
Silence again, and I imagined Nora in the dark, standing over the edge of a massive hole in the factory floor, a hole as large as the eye of a whirlpool, and in its guts were tunnels and rivers that ran forever in every direction. An endless place with no escape, except into the hungry bellies of unearthly crustaceans that would happily feed upon our drowned and bloated corpses.
Then a light appeared ahead of me. From this distance it looked as red as the skin of a strawberry, or maybe it was just a trick of the light, or maybe there was some mystical gaseous matter in the air that filtered the glow of the lighter’s flame, but there she was. Perfect, lissome Nora, back to me, standing still and silent in the red flare. She had gotten far ahead, as if guided there, and now she was on the cusp of a mighty drop. There was no barrier around this hole. No ladder to descend. Just open, empty space.
I sprinted toward her, knowing that there was nothing upon which to trip on this licked up plate. She wasn’t moving, but I knew that posture, that trance. I’d warned her of it. She’d called it a tall tale.
She lifted a leg and her dress fluttered as if the hole had exhaled beneath her. She was going to jump. Or. . . walk? She was stepping off a cliff. I was so close at that point, just running through outer space, fast as I could, to reach my destination, unthinking, unafraid, seeing Nora, only Nora. I saw her for what she was again. A deity with so much power. Power over everyone and everything but herself.
I was wrong before. She was not stepping over stones. She was a passenger on a crazy train, and she did look back. She looked back often. And when she sped past a set of crying eyes, her own eyes sparkled, like ponds in the moonlight. She would press her golden ticket to the rear view window and smile. She liked it that way.
She leaned forward, as if in slow motion, her grounded foot coming up at the heel. Her balance was now almost completely over the edge and she teetered for a split second as if reconsidering her motion, and then she tipped all the way forward. I lunged for her, my hand appearing out of the darkness into the fringes of that radial glow and I caught her dress in my palm and yanked her back as hard as I could. She made a loud grunting noise and the lighter fell from her grasp and disappeared into the mouth of the void.
In that empty blackness I held onto Nora like a drowning man might hang onto a buoy in an open sea. She had come out of her trance and was breathing exhaustedly into my neck, clinging to me as fiercely as I was to her. We were laying on the cold cement, and by our feet, the hole let out a another gust of air. With it came a smell so foul that I considered holding my breath until I suffocated. It was the smell of fermented dog farts or human waste sitting in a brine of polluted swamp water. It was offensive; a collated mixture of every oppressive scent available kept in a jar for centuries to fester and rot. It was the smell we noticed when we first entered The Puram, but far more acute, far more present.
I let the palm of my hand caress the floor and felt not a single grain of dirt. The ground nearly felt polished.
“The water,” Nora whispered into my neck.
I didn’t want to pull in a breath to speak, so I remained silent, hoping that she would elaborate on her own.
“The water,” she repeated, and then the strangest thing happened. It was the oddest sensation I’d ever experienced, and it took my brain several seconds to understand what was happening, especially in that total darkness where disorientation already prevailed. Together we were sliding towards the mouth of the hole, as if gravity had shifted slightly, causing our weight to now have lateral consequences.
It took my feet to stop scraping along the floor to wake me up from the stupor. Because they were now hanging over the edge of a chasm, and I pulled in a breath, finally, and it wasn’t so bad anymore. The scent had dispersed to the deep corners of the massive chamber. I scrambled to my knees, letting go of Nora, and that gentle pull was still upon me. One knee slid over the edge and I stumbled and clutched desperately at a smooth floor. “Down here, come on,” said a voice, and then Nora was pulling me up and out and she was yelling at someone as she helped me to safety, but I was too focused on surviving to process the words, and we ran away, but each step felt like I was fighting a treadmill while wearing a backpack full of stones.
We ran toward the way we came, or so we thought, but our distant star had collapsed and there was no lighter’s flame to see by, so we just ran blindly, with Nora rambling about how she had opened her mouth when the rain had come, and she had drank the sweetest tasting water, sweeter than strawberries, she said, sweeter than strawberry jam, she said, and a voice in her head that promised her sweeter things, and despite it all she was laughing. She took the lead, suddenly sure of her step, my hand in hers, and she twirled in the darkness, laughing her Nora laugh, a beautiful sound that didn’t belong in this place.
I never forgave her for that twirl. That twirl that said she was more alive now than ever. That twirl that took life and love and me for granted.
The ground crunched below my feet as the rubber soles of my sneakers came down on years of unswept dust. The treadmill let up a bit and my backpack got lighter. Still, we were lost and now that my senses had returned I was horrified at what we’d done. We were running through empty space, knowing that at any moment we could have—
—Falling.
Falling downward, falling like the rain, like a waterfall, like a star, like—
We hit the ground with a squelch. All of my weight came down on my arm and I felt it shatter like all the glass that littered the lawn, and my head came down on a pillow, but it wasn’t a pillow because it was wet and slimy. Nora came down hard beside me and was silent. Dead, perhaps, although I knew then that if she awoke from that fall, she would stand upon her broken legs and dance.
With half my face caked with wet mud, I clenched my teeth hard, but my jaw quivered because all I wanted to do was scream, I wanted to howl. The pain was unlike any pain I’d ever known, and it wanted to come out, it wanted to escape. But I held it in, and my eyes watered and spilled, and my lips came up and down around my teeth like a growling dog, but I gave in eventually. I closed my eyes and lifted my head up and when I opened my mouth there was no scream, but one useless and long sob that got caught in my throat and died when I took in a breath, and then I felt better.
“Nora,” I said, and reached beside myself with my good arm and felt her there, motionless. “Fuck, Nora, fuck, fuck.” But she was breathing. I felt the rise and fall of her chest.
I felt around, trying to get a sense of where we were. The ground was wet and slimy, the walls were made of mud. There was no ceiling, just vast open space leading back to The Puram. I let my fingers sink into the wall hoping against odds that there was something on the other side, but when I felt a thing squirm between my fingers and I pulled my hand away fast. Something else squirmed in my hair, and this time I did manage a scream, and by reflex, I swatted at it with my broken arm, causing my scream to amplify. I thought of crustaceans in the dark, waiting for us to die, or maybe they were starving and wouldn’t wait at all. But no, this wasn’t that place. We hadn’t fallen three-hundred feet, and we weren’t drowning in a black river. Worms, that was all. Still, I was repulsed. The worms seemed to be everywhere, fat and bloated, and my mind conjured up some Lovecraftian mother worm somewhere close by, sightless and starved.
“Nora.” I gave her a little shake. “Nora.” I nudged her with my elbow. “Nora!” I pulled at her hair. “Nora!” I struck her across the face.
Immediately, I was appalled by my rage. In my mind I saw a dart fly past my eyes in slow motion. It reminded me of a rocket ship racing to the moon. This moon was unpocketed, a poster on a wall, and the dart was aimed true. It landed right between the eyes of an unblemished moon, the round, smiling face of a pin-up girl, and when I turned my head to see who had thrown it, I saw myself. This version of me had thrown it with a broken arm, and his eyes were spilling wet pain, and his mouth was working like a rabid dog. There were worms in his hair.
I looked up with the intention of gauging the distance, and determining how difficult, if possible, it would be to scale the earthy walls with a broken arm. In that vast darkness above me I saw something more disturbing than any Lovecraftian monster. There were two sets of eyes peering down at us. They glowed a vibrant gold, and when they blinked I was reminded of fireflies winking out and re-igniting in the perfect darkness of a rural night along the outskirts of Gusty Meadows, where my grandparents lived. Copper filled my mouth, a taste I couldn’t swallow away, and I decided then that it was time to move.
Nora was out cold, so with much effort I took her lithe form in my arm and lifted her onto my back. I was careful of her broken legs, but I figured that if the pain woke her up we’d be better off. She was not a heavy girl, but in her current state, the dead weight was over encumbering. Still, I managed to move, slowly at first, but then I found a rhythm and was able to crawl fifty feet before I needed to put her down and rest.
We were in a tunnel, it seemed. The wall curved around my head in a neat arc and worms spilled silently from the ceiling, landing in our hair and on our laps like alien raindrops. I was glad for the darkness, because although the feeling of them was nightmarish, I couldn’t imagine what seeing them would be like.
“Where are you going?” said a small voice, the voice of a child, but it had a certain melody to it, like the speaker was on the cusp of a song. My head slowly turned toward the sound, an unwanted motion, and yet I couldn’t ignore it. Back the way we’d come were a pair of glowing eyes, sad eyes with dilated pupils, and no whites, just gold gold gold.
A worm landed on my head and I yelped, causing the wearer of those eyes to withdraw a little bit. That was all fine. The last thing I wanted was for it to approach. Nora stirred, and I pressed down on her broken legs with the palm of my good hand. It was the right thing to do, because she sat up straight as if on a piston and screamed with brand new agony. The eyes withdrew further.
“Nora,” I said, but her screams were unmatched, so I put a hand over her mouth until she finally broke down into sobs.
“Nora, listen to me,” I said over her weeping. “Your legs are broken.” A worm must have landed in her hair, because for a second her sobbing broke into a repulsed squeal, a very girlish sound, and her body twisted and shook. More weeping. “Nora, are you listening to me?”
“Okay,” she said between moans. And then, “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “The bowels of The Puram, probably. It stinks like shit down here. Nora, we fell in our haste, and you broke your legs. You probably have a pretty severe concussion too. My fucking arm is snapped. But none of that matters, because something is following us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something is fucking here. Look.”
I turned my head and went completely numb. Those eyes were right next to me, and in their glow I could make out some semblance of a face. It looked like my own. It was an inaccurate depiction of me and it spoke again in that musical rhythm. “Where are you going?”
Nora answered our guest with a scream. It took several worried steps backward and then reached out with an impossibly long arm, quick as a whip, and covered her mouth with its dirty hand, a hand that vaguely looked like mine. In the soft glow of those headlamp eyes, I was able to faintly see Nora’s own, terrified eyes widen in fear and disgust, and I suddenly hated the thing that was here with us. I hated it for turning those beautiful doe eyes into flying saucers, for inflicting unhappiness in their deepness, for removing all the good things they typically promised. Its hand moved with bullet speed, latching onto her hair now, and it yanked her toward itself. “Come back here,” it said, and began to drag Nora by her hair, back towards the way we’d come. Her screams were indescribable, but I was reminded of a trip to the zoo I took with my parents when I was little. There was a baby gorilla sitting peacefully on the ground and making goofy faces at the onlookers. An adorable sight, pure creature innocence. Suddenly, two massive alpha-types put on a show for us by gruesomely murdering the baby gorilla. By the time the zookeepers arrived with their dart guns and stun batons, the baby gorilla was torn into five pieces. But the screams it made, that’s what Nora’s sort of sounded like.
Like before, I put fear in my back pocket and moved without thought towards the thing that was trying to claim Nora, the unclaimable. Worms fell around me and I swatted at them as I walked, hunched down for the ceiling was low, and when I caught up to the abductor, I grabbed its ugly arm and wrestled with it.
“Let her go!” I shouted, and I saw that it did. I was holding a severed limb. The thing had shed its arm like an old husk, or like a shell maybe, and in an instant a new arm grew where the old one once was, and it lashed out and struck her across the face. It moved to repeat the strike,, but I put myself between them once more, and once again I was holding a severed limb.
The dance was over when I saw the second pair of glowing eyes appear behind us, and just like that, the thing attacking Nora scurried away from us to meet its companion.
“We’re going,” I said and I picked Nora up, ignoring the fresh stab of pain in my arm, and ignoring Nora’s agonized protests.
I crawled once more through the bowels of The Puram, a digested piece of meat looking for the exit, and although my terror was as abject and absolute as the darkness around us, I carried on, and although my pain was as brutish and mean as those gorillas at the zoo, I carried on, and although my certainty in escaping this horrid place was as volatile and unstable as the flicker of a lighter’s flame, I carried on. I carried on when I turned my head and witnessed fireflies in the darkness behind me. I carried on when they finally caught up to us and the one that looked like me offered me its arm. I carried on when the one that looked like Nora offered us its legs. I carried on when they asked where we were going or when they begged us to come back. I carried on when the worms fell so heavily that it seemed they might fill up the tunnel and drown us in their bulk. I carried on when I spied with my little eye something that was night. A lode star. I carried on.
I breathed in deep and let the clean, sweet air of midnight June fill my lungs. It was laced with strawberries. I laid Nora down on the concrete floor of the culvert, and there she was finally silent. She looked at me with eyes like tea cups filled to the brim, and I fell deeply and willingly into them. All of what happened meant nothing now, because I was safe and secure in those eyes. They took me in and fastened me with pillows. “I think from now on I’ll take your advice,” she said and laughed. Her laugh was orchestral, and nuanced, and contagious, and lovely. I loved her. And I hated her.
But she never did take my advice. She’s been to The Puram many times since, only in different forms, other depictions. In fact, every stop on her crazy train is The Puram. She searches for it and seeks its water. She dresses herself in the disposed exoskeletons of blind crustaceans and they are rigid and sharp things, so that when you touch her you might draw blood. Blood that tastes to her like strawberries, I bet.
I never spoke to many people about what happened there that day. Who would believe such a tall tale? Nora, on the other hand, well I think she tells everybody. But she tells it wrong. She tells about the sequence of events, of the adventure we embarked upon, and the horrors we endured. She always leaves out the most important parts. She forgets to tell about the universe in her eyes. She forgets to tell about the angel that existed briefly as she stood in the halo of light that poured in through the factory windows. She forgets to mention how, although she blames the water for luring her towards the hole, she would have went there anyway. She forgets to mention that there was a moment when it seemed as if the thing with the glowing eyes had stolen something crucial inside of her, something that any other person, myself included, would not be able to repossess. And yet not a few hours later she was back on her train with all of her belongings secured. She forgets to mention that.

I drive a honda accord 2006 and recently my key fob only unlock the drivers side door. It used to unlock all of them and also roll the windows down but now it only unlocks the drivers side.. Anyone know a fix? I changed the fob like months ago and it was working like normal. This only happened recently. It locks all the doors but won't unlock them all , just the drivers side. Can't find a fix anywhere online. Its not that important but still..

Hey y’all. I got a 2006 Honda Accord with a manual transmission. Sometimes when I’m shifting into third gear the stick feels like it sort of “catches” before fully engaging into third gear. It will fully shift if I push it pretty hard (it will click forward just a bit into gear) or if I am pushing on it while releasing the clutch. If It doesn’t click after pushing it harder or if I’m not pushing the stick while releasing the clutch it will not shift and will grind. More often than not it catches and I can normally feel when it catches but other people can’t. This has been going on ever since I bought the car 3 years ago.
Any ideas on what is causing this and/or how to fix it? Thanks

There’s a known issue where the Wyze bolt could “false” jam; where fingerprint, keypad and app fail to unlock - resulting in beeping/ red flashing lights and the app reporting a jam when there actually isn’t one.
Fortunately when I got locked of a room without an alternate means of entry, there was still someone inside who was able to physically turn the latch. Even after unlocking from the inside, Wyze bolt still reported a jam… although the inside latch operated very smoothly with zero evidence of any friction or binding.
Recalibrating, removing and replacing the batteries and removing and adding the bolt to the Wyze app wasn’t helpful. Only after removing the batteries and physically disconnecting and reconnecting the keypad cable was I able to get the lock to work.
If you’re installing or have installed the Wyze bolt in a space where there are no alternate means of entry, it could be costly considering locksmith fees and repair to damages or replacement of the door altogether.
I own a few Wyze products and am aware they can sometimes be quirky, which I can live with.
For my use case, the Wyze bolt will most certainly NOT be one of them.

Part 1
Years passed. I lived with Lorelei, less like another person and more like a conjoined twin that was not physically connected but simply followed her. The only time we spent apart was when she shared meals with her mother in a dining room. The lab was located beneath a European castle that I believe her Mother owned. The foyer had a broken clock that I watched while I waited for Lorelei.
Gelid stone floor numbed my feet through my shoes. Cavities in the ceiling sprung weeds of corroded wires. My mind imagined crystalline chandeliers floating there once. Cracks in the doors supplied the dwindling light.
Steel-gray in color, the grandfather clock dwarfed me. It had a bouquet carved into its painted wood, and its flowers were silver lilies.
The paralyzed hands were on opposing sides of the XII; it was correct at 12:54 each afternoon and night. By alternating my eyes I made the tall hand and little hand race towards one another to the top of the hour.
I could only hear the conversation between Lorelei and her mother when one of them started screaming loudly enough.
“Go to your room!” The thick oak double doors barely muffled the screeching command.
My heart sank from disappointment rather than surprise. Most evening meals ended this way.
Lorelei emerged from the dining room doors with a furrowed brow above her narrowed eyes.
Enough of her black hair had grown back to pass behind her ears. She wore pink tennis shoes, denim jeans, and a tan sweater that covered her arms to the wrists like every shirt and jacket Lorelei ever wore.
My clothes, hair, and walking pace all mirrored Lorelei. I followed her and we marched away together.
Told to go to her room, Lorelei did not walk towards the wooden stairs to the upper levels. Those still shined with varnish from disuse, and I had never seen the places those stairs lead.
I followed Lorelei through a hallway where the castle’s stone and wood abruptly ended. A steel elevator with a scanner awaited us at the end; its reflective metal distorted our faces.
An electronic eye cast a red shadow of light onto the floor, and a metal number pad rested where the elevator call button should have been.
Lorelei rolled up the sleeve of her long-sleeve shirt and revealed three bar code tattoos on the inside of her forearm. She scanned the middle barcode under the red light.
The red light turned blue, and the elevator emitted a satisfied beep.
Lorelei raised her hand to the number pad. She hit the 3, double punched the 1 with her index finger, double punched the 0 with her thumb, and ended by hitting the 9 with per pinkie. It took her less than half a second.
The light turned green, and the elevator’s mechanical organs stirred to life.
There was no indication of how close it was to the ground floor except for sound. When its doors parted, Lorelei and I were greeted by an elevator attendant wearing a white coat and a gun holster around his waist.
The ebony Glock was out of its holster and rested in the man’s firm grip with his elbow resting against his hip. His face was unstressed, and half-open brown eyes faced Lorelei and me.
“Hi...Martin. Can you take us to Main Observation, please” Lorelei asked, oblivious to the pistol pointed directly at her." She sounded more embarrassed than anything else. ‘Martin’ was the name Lorelei had given this man because he never spoke, not even to her Mother, though that woman never referred to anyone by name except Lorelei. No one ever spoke to Lorelei except her Mother, but unlike me, I think they chose that.
Still holding the gun, Martin lifted his eyebrows and that meant he wanted an explanation.
“I just got grounded. Again.” Lorelei sighed. “Cassandra and I have to be on the boring side of the glass tonight.”
Martin holstered the gun.
He lifted a key card hanging around his neck up to another red scanner inside the elevator. Yet another number pad sat in the place where all the floor buttons should have been.
Martin used different codes. Today he used 5 4 7. I thought that had something to do with how the elevator chose a floor, but I had seen him use that same code before when he brought us to a completely different sublevel.
The scanner’s red light turned blue, and Martin gave Lorelei a silent nod.
Lorelei held up the tattoos on her arm and of the three barcodes she scanned the closest to her elbow beneath the blue light. She entered 0 0 1 more slowly than her other code – if she got this one wrong twice then the elevator would release from the shaft cables and fall to the bottom, wherever that was.
The light turned from blue to green.
The elevator doors shut and we began to descend. It had no display saying which floor it was on or how far below the ground it traveled. Lorelei and I knew of several sublevels, but not which levels were above or below one another. Even simply waiting created uncertainty because I could swear that sometimes traveling to the same sublevel took more time on some days and less on others.
I stared at Martin. Lorelei and I had once tried to see if he ever left the elevator through the ground floor. We had waited all night to see if he left through the foyer or if someone came to replace him, but we never saw him leave. He was never absent and no one ever replaced him. Lorelei theorized that either he slept somewhere in the laboratory’s subterranean complex or there was another entrance and exit that she had never seen but wanted to find.
Martin stared down onto me. His stoic gaze remained rigidly plastered to his face, but I thought I saw something sad in his eyes that had not been there when he looked at Lorelei.
The elevator slowed, and an electronic voice emitted itself from the sides of the elevator. The speakers were nowhere to be seen.
“VOICE AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED TO PROCEED.”
“Venant, Lorelei J. Project Lead, Project Cassandra.”
An electronic snap hissed at us.
“INCORRECT FORMAT!”
“No it’s not! Oh wait, whoops. Why do there have to be so many?” Lorelei sighed. “Subject zero zero one, Project 22 Dash Space - NO WAIT! SPACE DASH-"
The electronic hiss sounded three more times.
"INCORRECT FORMAT!"
"Dammit aaaall! I don't get paid enough to put up with this." Lorelei groaned melodramatically. She looked to Martin for sympathy. The corner of his lip showed off the faintest hint of a smile, and Lorelei noticed. "Glad you agree."
She took a deep breath. Speaking every word out syllable by syllable, slowly and methodically, she spelled out her identity according to the computer. It spelled:
Subject 001. Project 22 - 759. Codename: Lorelei
Lorelei said it so confidently that I was surprised that the electronic hiss played again.
“PROPER FORMAT IS REQUIRED TO ENTER MAIN OBSERVATION. TRY AGAIN”
A look of petulant fury washed over Lorelei's face. The humor from a moment before left so suddenly that the air in the elevator was suddenly stifling.
“...We both know you’re not that stupid, Siber.” There was no humor in Lorelei's voice anymore.
A silence passed.
“VOICE AUTHENTICATION COMPLETE. ACCESS GRANTED. WELCOME BACK, PROJECT LORELEI.”
The elevator doors slid open, and Lorelei relaxed her body. An instant later she was jubilant like tense moment had never happened. "Thanks Martin, thanks Siber! Let's go Cassandra." She burst out of the elevator like she was late to get somewhere. "I can't believe I forgot the 'project' in my name. That was pretty airheaded of me, huh Cassandra?"
Like always, I said nothing in response.
"When you find your voice, I'll pay you back for always listening to me complain." She looked at her barcode tattoos and rolled her sleeve back down over her arm. "I want to get my own tattoo someday, but I'd wear these for the rest of my life if I could just go back in time to before everyone was so afraid of me. But ever since I turned you into a Golem...I guess the fact that you look exactly like me doesn't help." She scowled and her fingers tightened into a fist. "They all think I'm a monster, just like Mother, but I'll prove them wrong. I'm gonna change you back, Cassandra. I will change you back into a human if it's the last thing I do. Then there won't be any reason to be scared of me." Lorelei started to nibble on her fingernails. She never had quit.
I looked back towards the elevator. Martin was wiping sweat from his forehead with his free hand.
His other hand held the gun. At some point he'd taken it back out.
Before the elevator doors slid closed, I thought I saw him trembling.

Part 2
Years passed. I lived with Lorelei, less like another person and more like a conjoined twin that was not physically connected but simply followed her. The only time we spent apart was when she shared meals with her mother in a dining room. The lab was located beneath a European castle that I believe her Mother owned. The foyer had a broken clock that I watched while I waited for Lorelei.
Gelid stone floor numbed my feet through my shoes. Cavities in the ceiling sprung weeds of corroded wires. My mind imagined crystalline chandeliers floating there once. Cracks in the doors supplied the dwindling light.
Steel-gray in color, the grandfather clock dwarfed me. It had a bouquet carved into its painted wood, and its flowers were silver lilies.
The paralyzed hands were on opposing sides of the XII; it was correct at 12:54 each afternoon and night. By alternating my eyes I made the tall hand and little hand race towards one another to the top of the hour.
I could only hear the conversation between Lorelei and her mother when one of them started screaming loudly enough.
“Go to your room!” The thick oak double doors barely muffled the screeching command.
My heart sank from disappointment rather than surprise. Most evening meals ended this way.
Lorelei emerged from the dining room doors with a furrowed brow above her narrowed eyes.
Enough of her black hair had grown back to pass behind her ears. She wore pink tennis shoes, denim jeans, and a tan sweater that covered her arms to the wrists like every shirt and jacket Lorelei ever wore.
My clothes, hair, and walking pace all mirrored Lorelei. I followed her and we marched away together.
Told to go to her room, Lorelei did not walk towards the wooden stairs to the upper levels. Those still shined with varnish from disuse, and I had never seen the places those stairs lead.
I followed Lorelei through a hallway where the castle’s stone and wood abruptly ended. A steel elevator with a scanner awaited us at the end; its reflective metal distorted our faces.
An electronic eye cast a red shadow of light onto the floor, and a metal number pad rested where the elevator call button should have been.
Lorelei rolled up the sleeve of her long-sleeve shirt and revealed three bar code tattoos on the inside of her forearm. She scanned the middle barcode under the red light.
The red light turned blue, and the elevator emitted a satisfied beep.
Lorelei raised her hand to the number pad. She hit the 3, double punched the 1 with her index finger, double punched the 0 with her thumb, and ended by hitting the 9 with per pinkie. It took her less than half a second.
The light turned green, and the elevator’s mechanical organs stirred to life.
There was no indication of how close it was to the ground floor except for sound. When its doors parted, Lorelei and I were greeted by an elevator attendant wearing a white coat and a gun holster around his waist.
The ebony Glock was out of its holster and rested in the man’s firm grip with his elbow resting against his hip. His face was unstressed, and half-open brown eyes faced Lorelei and me.
“Hi...Martin. Can you take us to Main Observation, please” Lorelei asked, oblivious to the pistol pointed directly at her." She sounded more embarrassed than anything else. ‘Martin’ was the name Lorelei had given this man because he never spoke, not even to her Mother, though that woman never referred to anyone by name except Lorelei. No one ever spoke to Lorelei except her Mother, but unlike me, I think they chose that.
Still holding the gun, Martin lifted his eyebrows and that meant he wanted an explanation.
“I just got grounded. Again.” Lorelei sighed. “Cassandra and I have to be on the boring side of the glass tonight.”
Martin holstered the gun.
He lifted a key card hanging around his neck up to another red scanner inside the elevator. Yet another number pad sat in the place where all the floor buttons should have been.
Martin used different codes. Today he used 5 4 7. I thought that had something to do with how the elevator chose a floor, but I had seen him use that same code before when he brought us to a completely different sublevel.
The scanner’s red light turned blue, and Martin gave Lorelei a silent nod.
Lorelei held up the tattoos on her arm and of the three barcodes she scanned the closest to her elbow beneath the blue light. She entered 0 0 1 more slowly than her other code – if she got this one wrong twice then the elevator would release from the shaft cables and fall to the bottom, wherever that was.
The light turned from blue to green.
The elevator doors shut and we began to descend. It had no display saying which floor it was on or how far below the ground it traveled. Lorelei and I knew of several sublevels, but not which levels were above or below one another. Even simply waiting created uncertainty because I could swear that sometimes traveling to the same sublevel took more time on some days and less on others.
I stared at Martin. Lorelei and I had once tried to see if he ever left the elevator through the ground floor. We had waited all night to see if he left through the foyer or if someone came to replace him, but we never saw him leave. He was never absent and no one ever replaced him. Lorelei theorized that either he slept somewhere in the laboratory’s subterranean complex or there was another entrance and exit that she had never seen but wanted to find.
Martin stared down onto me. His stoic gaze remained rigidly plastered to his face, but I thought I saw something sad in his eyes that had not been there when he looked at Lorelei.
The elevator slowed, and an electronic voice emitted itself from the sides of the elevator. The speakers were nowhere to be seen.
“VOICE AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED TO PROCEED.”
“Venant, Lorelei J. Project Lead, Project Cassandra.”
An electronic snap hissed at us.
“INCORRECT FORMAT!”
“No it’s not! Oh wait, whoops. Why do there have to be so many?” Lorelei sighed. “Subject zero zero one, Project 22 Dash Space - NO WAIT! SPACE DASH-"
The electronic hiss sounded three more times.
"INCORRECT FORMAT!"
"Dammit aaaall! I don't get paid enough to put up with this." Lorelei groaned melodramatically. She looked to Martin for sympathy. The corner of his lip showed off the faintest hint of a smile, and Lorelei noticed. "Glad you agree."
She took a deep breath. Speaking every word out syllable by syllable, slowly and methodically, she spelled out her identity according to the computer. It spelled:
Subject 001. Project 22 - 759. Codename: Lorelei
Lorelei said it so confidently that I was surprised that the electronic hiss played again.
“PROPER FORMAT IS REQUIRED TO ENTER MAIN OBSERVATION. TRY AGAIN”
A look of petulant fury washed over Lorelei's face. The humor from a moment before left so suddenly that the air in the elevator was suddenly stifling.
“...We both know you’re not that stupid, Siber.” There was no humor in Lorelei's voice anymore.
A silence passed.
“VOICE AUTHENTICATION COMPLETE. ACCESS GRANTED. WELCOME BACK, PROJECT LORELEI.”
The elevator doors slid open, and Lorelei relaxed her body. An instant later she was jubilant like tense moment had never happened. "Thanks Martin, thanks Siber! Let's go Cassandra." She burst out of the elevator like she was late to get somewhere. "I can't believe I forgot the 'project' in my name. That was pretty airheaded of me, huh Cassandra?"
Like always, I said nothing in response.
"When you find your voice, I'll pay you back for always listening to me complain." She looked at her barcode tattoos and rolled her sleeve back down over her arm. "I want to get my own tattoo someday, but I'd wear these for the rest of my life if I could just go back in time to before everyone was so afraid of me. But ever since I turned you into a Golem..." She scowled and her fingers tightened into a fist. "I'm gonna change you back, Cassandra. I will change you back into a human if it's the last thing I do. Then people won't have a reason to be scared of me anymore."
I looked back towards the elevator. Martin was wiping sweat from his forehead with his free hand.
Before the elevator doors slid closed, I thought I saw him trembling.