u/HillInTheDistance

At least it was just a trip. Like, when they got back from it, their lives would resume as usual, so it ain't like the kid would have to deal with the burden of having deprived her family of a brighter future or something like that.

Your mental illness may not be your fault. But it will always be your responsibility.

Three things cause this to happen.

1: Boys are taught that their appearance has no value, so they generally end up pretty defeatist about it. They don't care about a good fit of most of their clothes.

2: testosterone makes fat accumulate more around the gut than the thighs and ass, and their hips are more narrow. This means their legs are generally skinny, unless they build muscle, and if they have a gut, it pushes pants down. Even if they have no gut, without a belt any but the tightest pants tend to sag.

This together with a bad fit, and often, too low cut pants, means they don't stay up as well.

3: since they ain't women, anything that would be seen as too sexual to be appropriate, is seen as something kinda slovenly instead. They're less likely to be shamed for it, and are mostly just considered beneath notice onstead, and ignored.

A whole lot of people roasting me for my lacking fashion sense, and also, ridiculously tight clothes, which, at the time of purchase, had barely been tight at all.

I have never had to deal with a situation where other men seeing me cry could cause me any trouble or shame.

Like, it was different as a kid, but as a kid, you still had the feeedom to beat such people who'd mock you for crying.

And in my adult life, I've never has to keep such people close enough for their judgement to matter.

It generally ain't men seeing me cry that has bothered me. I have no duty to stay strong for them. It wouldn't be considered violent or manipulative of me to cry in front of other men.

Granted.

The worst people you can imagine now couple up, and support each other in their every goal and ambition. Murderers, kidnappers, groomers, have all found the person they can be completely open with, and they have The Power of Love and a perfect partner in crime on their side.

Dean Koontz.

Motherfucker just kept getting published, until he started getting printed with less oversight than the average fanfiction writer, resulting in simply inconsistent and plodding bullshit like "Phantoms".

In general, your confidence is what makes you stand out.

Like, if you simplify it to numbers, which ain't always useful, if you've got a physical attractiveness of 5, and are confident, you're a 5.

If you've got a physical attractiveness of 5, and no confidence, you're not really a 0, more of a [not applicable, value not found.]

That's just a rule of thumb. Life, naturally, has anomalies and exceptions.

Probably one of those fancy-pants motherfuckers who got a heated deer stand.

Get with somone who wants kids. My sister was working her ass of finding a guy who wanted kids. Hot me a second little niece now, since she finally found one. She's happy as a clam.

That's one good reason to stay healthy until you're like 80. A 70 year old guy wearing that ain't "Oh, he's having a midlife crisis, let's point and laugh!", like a guy in his 40's.

If youre 70, people will be like "man that grandpa must have been hard core. I wish my grandpa was that cool!"

Then this is a perfect time to watch it, because I don't remember the trailer.

https://giphy.com/gifs/l3fZMMONXeOKRPGog

That skit has lived in my head for years, so it has probably contaminated my writing quite a bit.

In most of my writing, I like having my humans as desperate little weirdos trying their best, even if they can't even reach high enough to count as more than vermin.

Y'all don't have savoury cereal where you come from? I don't see it causing any problems with a plain yoghurt. Might even develop a habit for it.

I pick number 2

https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/s/CoT0i5o7P8

Thanks for the kind words. This is the continuation.

They move slowly. A steady acceleration but still, slow. This is what The Third Armada had bought the federation. Forcing them to slow down to fight, to turn to swat at flies. But the federation had expected a victory. A crushing victory against these seemingly primitive hulks plodding towards them. They had been massacred.

The first report had assumed they were a pod of generation ships of some kind. A distant memory of early history, back when expansion meant sending excess population on a slow march so that their great-great grandchildren could set to work to build a world.

And for most such projects, they'd been overtaken by progress, faster ships catching up, overtaking them, and building a world without them.

A primitive ambition, by species with enough foresight to plan for the future, yet shortsighted enough to assume they stood at the peak of their advancement.

But the course of the enemy made no sense. This was not a straight shot from one inhabited world to a possible new eden. They had passed many such worlds. And left them ravaged. They had not come to seek a new home. Their home was the pod. By some titanic undertaking of industry, they left worlds bereft of life, of rare minerals, of biomass, toxic hellscapes stripped of all value.

They refused all signals. Even the most ravenous expansionists the federation had dealt with so far, had been open for contact. Even SWARM 1, which saw no value in any life but its own, had accepted that fighting them would be inefficient, after decades of brutal conflict, and had taken an alternate course.

But The Enemy did not. Their course was set. They could not be reasoned with. Couldn't be threatened. Wouldn't change their course.

The Third Armada, the at the time most advanced, most powerful concentration of force in federation history, had met them, and lost.

The Enemy's massive hulks had been torn apart well enough, their shields overwhelmed without too much trouble. But their sheer mass had been their advantage. Their insides had been impossible to analyse, every sensor blinded by the glare of their monstrous reactors. Even taking damage that would have cut federation ships to scrap, the hulks had enough working systems to fight.

And their weapons had proven just as devastating. Their range had been nothing special. Most of them, utterly conventional. Mass drivers. Beam emitters. Fission missiles. Most more primitive than what the federation, even back then, had fielded. But each hulk had as much tonnage, as much capacity, as some planetary defense grids.

And within that hellstorm of penetrators and beams of hundreds of calibers and capacities, there had been something more. Ships had gone dark, seemingly without even having their shields penetrated. Only by analysing the logs afterwards, had the cause been understood. Gravitational anomalies seemingly appearing within them, instantly tearing key systems apart.

....

By now, the federation has a counter. New shield systems prevent such weapons from even targeting them. They have even replicated the weapon, but it is assumed that the enemy must have their own defences against them. And even if they do not, what use are they against ships which seemingly have hundreds of every key system, and seemingly plod on without them, even if you can find them?

A century has passed. Science makes strides. Worlds have been turned to manufacturing new ships. But the enemy plods ever closer. They've had a century too. They have grown in numbers. They have scavenged The Third Armada, and built on what they found in the wrecks of the federations finest. Familiar drive signatures have been detected, darting among the massive hulks, yet they stay close, presumably guarding what is essentially their homeworld.

Their homeworld, which is still advancing towards Battlegroup Terminus. The pride of the federation navy, the culmination of a century of progress and system scale industry. Their battleships bristling with firepower which would have been assumed wasteful before the horrifying loss of the Third Armada. And surrounding them, the swarm of humanity. Ships even more primitive than those of the Enemy'.

Oversized, massively thick hulls of steel and ceramics, just to hold off background radiation, built around oversized, underpowered mass drivers, crawling with crews to make up for their lacking computing power, their crude generators barely shielded enough to protect their fragile crews. Some have already been lost to simple mechanical malfunctions.

They shine like a swarm of fireflies to federation sensors. Although they are volunteers, an unprecedented sacrifice by a backwater sector of primitives, there is a strange mix of admiration, pity, and dread amongst the high command.

They shouldn't be here. By every law and virtue of the federation, this should not be expected of them. And yet they are. And even though, in any other battle, this would be considered a pointless waste of sentient lives, they are forced to admit, that in this case, they might actually be of use. So they are not turned away. It's the right of every sentient to fight for their future. For their right to live. Their lives will not be wasted. They will be spent with care.

The federation has not forgotten courage. They still understand risking your life. Even despite all the advantages, the privileges, taken for granted among those living within the core worlds, military service still has risks. Still means giving away a lifetime, risking their very lives for the security of others, even if that just means spending your life safely within the hull of a patrol craft, apart from society, from the leisure of their peers.

But now, seeing this swarm of primitive hulls, many contemplate that they might have forgotten what desperation means. What sacrifice means. To not just pick a different path, which might end in death. But to pick a path which has no other end.

As the enemy draws ever closer, many promise themselves that they will never forget the sacrifice of these poor, brave, primitives.

Even now, when battle is but hours away, so many still fail to comprehend, that they too, are facing oblivion.

Does he work on cars, trucks, or other heavy machinery? I have a prejudice I'm trying to reinforce.

The Captain glares at him, before letting out a sigh.

"Look, humans are fucked. The sooner you learn that, the better. Not just fucked in the head, but fucked by fate, the gods, and random chance. They come from a primitive dirtball with only some random specks of basic elements, and as for rare ones? They just ain't got them. Before first contact, they had like half a periodic table and half of that was stuff they could only manifest temporarily in an observable form through great effort. Fucked from Day One."

"But they're contacted now, right? Can't they just... import it? Every recognised species is entitled to trade rights, right?"

"What do they have to trade? Ain't nothing in their sector you can't just scoop out of any asteroid belt. Their art is basic, they're too flimsy and their brains are too primitive to be sold as manpower. Closest thing they have to a salesworthy commodity is their most attractive individuals, but at least they have the pride to refuse slave traders. So I guess they have some civilization after all."

"So that's it? Born from shit, rose into the stars on technology built from shit, only to realise they're shit out here too? What's even the point of them then? Wouldn't it be better to just stay on their shit world, have shit kids, eat shit food, and let us keep these bastards away? They have every right to our protection. No one expects them to stick out their necks like this! There's like a hundred thousand of those shitbuckets they call ships here, and we could take them out just by sneezing!"

"Don't underestimate what one hundred thousand of anything can do, ensign. Any shield can be taken out by enough mass."

"But they'll die in the billions, captain! Sure, rather them than us, I don't mind the distraction to the enemy, but it's suicide! The may be primitives, but they still shouldn't be here! Their lives still have value! They shouldn't be forced to-"

"They're volunteers, ensign."

"What?"

"They're all volunteers. Every single one. They might be primitives, but they ain't idiots. The enemy's gonna keep coming. A few centuries down the line, their little shitstain of a world is gonna be in the firing line too, if the enemy ain't stopped here. So they sent what they had. Just like we did."

The ensign quiets. The captain fills another glass. When the young man speaks up, there's something fragile in his voice.

"Is it really that bad? Even without the humans, we outnumber the enemy ten to one. We've got cutting edge tech. The best of the best..."

The captain drinks, staring out the view screen. He sounds so tired.

"That's what the The Third Armada thought too. Every prediction told us we had them outclassed in every category. And it could only slow them down."

He glares into the starry darkness, as if the enemy is right there. Like circling predators, ready to swoop at any second.

"There ain't no guarantees. And if we fail, there ain't any reserves. This is it. The greatest battlegroup ever assembled. We either stop them here, or we lose everything. They'll cut through the federation like a slow knife, every planet stripped bare."

He pours one for the younger man, another for himself.

"They might be primitives, but it's the right of every sentient to fight for their right to live. And the fact that they understand that, makes them our family. Even if they will die like flies."

He raises his glass, and the ensign returns the gesture. The younger man's hand shakes, just a little. The enemy draws ever closer.

Purple.

You bastard.

You absolute piece of shit.

They did their best to make up for this in one go with A knight of The Seven Kingdoms, featuring Ser Arlen of Pennytree's ten inch Pennytree.

I've managed to completely circumvent this by being extremely near sighted.

If I wanted to stare, I couldn't, and if anyone's glancing at me, I wouldn't notice.

You could probably achieve similar results by staring into the sun for a few hours, but it's probably easier to just mind your business until you're used to it.

No matter what anyone says, its eyes are wrong. Maya can't explain it, not in a way that doesn't make him sound crazy, but they're distinctly, terribly, wrong. Most people don't care about their eyes. Skin, mane colour, size and interesting physiological anomalies are of the most interest to the general ape enthusiast, but even though Maya had never owned one himself, he'd always been fascinated by their eyes. The way they reacted to light. The minor twitches they made while reacting to positive or negative stimuli. The way the skin darkened under them and they got that adorable droop when they got comfortable in their new habitats.

He'd always examine the eye's of his friend's apes, and the way they always looked away to not meet his, was his favorite thing about them. He'd joke that they were so well behaved, but he'd never admit the truth.

He liked it, because it made him feel powerful. He liked that he could hold one in his hand, and if he squeezed just a little, its eyes would widen, and he could feel that mamallian little blood pumping organ in their chest speed up. Their fear responses, so different from his, but still, so extremely powerful for something so small.

And now, he's finally managed to convince his parents to give him one for his own. And its eyes are wrong.

It looked him dead in the eyes, and its facial expressions were so odd. He got the feeling that it was just pretending to look like a proper ape. It's slack expression was almost cartoonish. His parents didn't let him play with it for very long. Said it needs yo make itself at home in its habitat. So they sent him to bed.

He can't sleep. He wants to play with it, but also, he can't get its face out of his mind. It gnaws at him. He imagines it, in its cage across the room, staring at him in the dark. Plotting...

He tosses off his blankets, frustrated. He's almost an adult! It's an ape! He can't be scared of an ape! And even if its wrong, and even if it'll stress it out if he plays with it, it's his! Even if he accidentally crushes it, it's his! Apes die all the time, they'll probably buy him a new one just to console him! A proper one, that make the funny noises and doesn't try to stare him down!

He turns on the lights, stepping lightly as to not wake his parents, and makes his way to the cage, already planning ways to make the ape see sense. Or at least, alleviate his own ridiculous fears.

But it isn't there. He looks in from every angle, before opening the cage, reaching in, trying to find it in the straw. Nothing. The ape is gone! Actually gone!

He starts looking around, at first gently searching his room, then more frantically. It can't just be gone! It-

The lights go out. Not just the lights, the environmental system. He sits there, on his knees, in shocked silence. That doesn't happen. It's never happened. He opens his mouth to call out to the house systems. And then, he hears it. Something very small, just behind him. Maya screams.

The good thing about scary women is that you'd be expected to kneel, or stumble and scoot backwards on your ass as you try, but fail, to get up.

And if all else fails, there's always the Welma. Although, that'd require you to wear glasses.

Oh, they only fight when they're getting paid. Some bandits attack? Threatening their family?

No. These are proud Rhodoks. These are true men of the mountains. If bandits attack, they ask "Who will pay me to slaughter these vagabonds!?"

And if no one speaks up, they lay down their arms, and accept death.

Such is the Pride of a Rhodok! Such is the Conviction of a Mountain Man!