Pale (prologue)

This review was commissioned by @Katsuragi.

Ah, John "Wildbow" McCrae. Ubiquitous in the corner of the internet I frequent, but obscure outside of it. For most of you who found me via Sufficient Velocity, Wildbow and his work require no introduction. For those of you who didn't, he's a web novelist in the "group of teenaged misfits with weird powers trying to get by in a grimdark scifi/fantasy world" genre, with a reputation for reliable updates, copious output, and every title needing to have exactly four letters for some reason.

My relationship with this author's work has been long and rocky, with a general downward trend since the completion of "Worm," his first webnovel (well...webnovels, going by length. There is a lot of Worm. Think Arrakis quantities). I loved Worm when I first read it; couldn't put it down for the (very long) time it took me to read it. Everything Wildbow's written since then was harder and harder for me to get into, and there have been quite a few...shall we say, "revelations"...that since led me to suspect that most of what I liked about Worm was only in it by accident. I'm also quite a bit more critically minded and politically aware now than I was then, and there are both some structural issues and political messaging in Worm that I think I probably would have bounced off of hard if I'd been my current self at the time.

At the same time though, I can't say that I hate Worm now, because (in addition to it being what brought me to SB/V and thus eventually starting my culture critic gig in the first place) some of what I liked about it still does hold up. The sheer creativity of the characters' powers and the uses they put them to. The powerful atmosphere of urban decay and alienation. The incredibly effective opening chapter that I'd still point to as an instructive example of how to get an audience invested in your protagonist before using that hook to slowly reel them into what would otherwise be an overwhelming, complicated scifi or fantasy world.

Honestly, it was the absence of that second thing that gave me the most trouble getting into his following webseries "Pact" and "Twig."

Anyway, Wildbow's most recent work, "Pale," has gotten positive reviews even from otherwise disgruntled former Wildbow fans. And hey, it's been quite a while since I stopped following Wildbow's work, so I'm very willing to believe that it's improved in that time.

What I know about "Pale" is that it's set in the same world as "Pact," which is one of the serials that I just couldn't get into back in the early 2010's. Pale doesn't use any of the same characters or locations, though, and it's supposedly written so that you don't need to have read Pact to understand it. From what little I read of Pact, the setting is Wildbow's take on your classic dark urban fantasy with a secret underworld of wizards and vampires and stuff, so Pale is going to be playing with those kinds of elements.

So, let's start the prologue. Wildbow has historically been fine with his full texts being quoted, so I'll be doing that here while providing a link to Pale's wordpress.

Prologue: Blood Run Cold

“Louise’s eyes welled with moisture as an animal cry shook her house, and she found herself shivering as it died away. She shivered in a very different way when she wiped at one eye and her fingertips came away crimson with blood.

It’s the hallucinations, she told herself. She winced and held a hand to her lower back as she rose to a standing position, blinking the blood out of her eyes. Has to be.”

Hah, well this is some deja vu! Girl waking up, bleeding from the eyes, tormented by horrific hallucinations that probably aren't actually hallucinations, this could totally be an alternate "Katalepsis" opening.

“Again, the cry echoed through the town of Kennet, not a dog, not a wolf, nor coyote. It echoed as though it came from far away, bouncing off of the nearby mountains, but it had a volume better suiting something just outside of Louise’s home.”

This is a difficult sound for me to imagine. I guess sort of like one of those godawful leafblowers that you can hear from all the way across the neighborhood, but somehow you can't tell which direction.

Only, like, a dog.

...goddamnit now I'm picturing Pochita, but with leafblower instead of chainsaw.

“The doctors said I might see or hear things, she reminded herself. When the body’s in rough enough shape, the brain starts to go too. It was a strange mix of emotions, feeling her heart race at the same time she felt at peace. She had been bracing herself for this since months ago.

She hobbled over to her kitchen, found her pills, and checked that the compartmentalized box with sections for each day of the week was in order. She hadn’t taken too many or done something wrong.

Disappointing. It would have been nice to have a simple, tidy explanation.

Thirty-five and having to double check my medications in the same way a woman twice my age might.

Her thoughts were disturbed by bloody tears dripping down onto the plastic pill separator and her kitchen counter. She tore off a paper towel from the roll and wiped it, and saw the blood streak, bleeding into the paper.

Too real. She would have expected things to add up less if this was fake, for the paper towel to wipe away the blood and then to have nothing on it, or for it to turn into something else. The only weirdness was that her eyes didn’t really sting enough. Shouldn’t blood in the eyes sting?”

Hmm. Sounds like the mental illness Louise may or may not actually be suffering from followed in the wake of some kind of physical trauma. Both from the whole "when the body is damaged, the brain follows" thing, and because she thinks bleeding from the eyes is a thing that realistically could happen to her even though it seemingly hasn't before.

Wildbow generally is pretty sparse with physical descriptions, but here he's being particularly so (at least, for a third person piece), and it feels deliberate. Like drawing out the mystery of how damaged Louise' body actually is.

“It was disconcerting, doubts bouncing around in her head at the same time she was calm and prepared for the worst. She had been warned about these hallucinations. Until tonight, they had been limited to fleeting shadows resembling shadowy monkeys or rodents in the corner of her vision, each of them darting away before she could meet them with her eyes.

Her cigarettes were by her pills. A sticky note was stuck to the carton, a note to herself scrawled on it: One a night!

Might as well, while I’m up, she thought, and her thoughts had a tremble to them in the same way her voice might, if she were to try to speak. Feeling that tremble, she had to fight for a moment to keep the strangeness in her head divorced from her heart and her feelings.”

I should leave a note like that to myself on the freezer when I have cookies in there.

The hallucinations like shadowy animals at the corner of her vision continue to be very Katalepsis.

“She tapped the carton against the counter until a cigarette slid through the opening, placed the carton beneath the plastic pill separator, and grabbed her lighter.

She lit her cigarette with one hand while using the other to let herself out onto her front porch. She had to twist a bit to keep the wind from outside from extinguishing her lighter, and she felt a pain in her side like she’d been stabbed. The first time she had felt pain like that, it had dropped her to her knees. Now it was everyday.

The air was chilly and the wind blew directly in her face, forcing her to close her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw that the moon was bleeding.

The smoke from her first puff of her cigarette and the fog of her frozen breath mingled in the night air. The moon hung heavy in the sky, and blood welled out along the edges where it met the sky, heaviest toward the bottom, with trickles periodically running down the face of it, changing the light it reflected to a dull red. A thin trickle stabbed down to earth from the bottom-most portion of the moon.”

— \

Ohhhhhh there we go now! False alarm, she wasn't bleeding from her eyes or imagining it. It was just some of the drippings from the moon soaking through the roof and happening to leak onto her face and napkin.

“Louise’s eyes traced the path of that trickle, and she saw a beast atop one of the forested hills. It was canid, red furred, and barely visible in the dark, against the backdrop of the mountain behind it. It was tall enough and massive enough that its furred belly traced the treetops. The blood from the moon met the creature’s head, ran between and around its pale eyes, down a throat with a heavy fur ruff, and down long, thin legs, out of sight.

Its back was hunched, its tail hanging straight down. That cry earlier-

Almost as if it were completing the thought for her, it raised its head, and it howled. It was so far away, but the mournful cry was still loud enough it made her worry the windows would rattle or make something break.

That was the same noise as before. As it carried on, Louise’s eyes welled with moisture once more, with blood instead of tears. Sympathy made her heart ache, while other pains erupted across her body. That spot at her lower back, off to one side, was the worst, a pain that had become too familiar in the last year.

Joints ached, her head pounded, and she found she couldn’t breathe or connect her thoughts.

When the pain subsided, Louise found herself doubled over. Bloody tears joined the still-burning cigarette on her front porch. Grabbing the railing at the boundary of her porch to steady herself, she scuffed the cigarette out with the toe of her boot, smearing the drips of blood around in the process.”

That is a really, really big dog.

...goddamnit, now I'm thinking of Katalepsis yet again, imagining the giant horizon-sized blood-dog scratching itself and sending Heather, Evelyn, and a bunch of xenomorph-fleas flying across the landscape.

That unfortunate goofiness on my own end aside, though, this is a really evocative image. This spectral hound creature so big it stands on the horizon and its head reaches the sky above you. Howling. Being bled on by the moon.

Anyway, she's mentioned pain in her side a few times. Whatever happened to her that led to...this...it seems to have involved trauma in that general area.

I'm getting the impression Louise was hospitalized and bedridden for a long time, and this is shortly after she regained enough mobility to live at home again. Unfortunately, while she was in the hospital, a skyscraper-sized spectral wolf monster moved in next door.

“The thing was still out there. Each step it took seemed to be an effort. It had moved, and now it slowly made its way into the town. The moon remained directly above it.

Just a hallucination, she thought. I shouldn’t change what I’m doing or get anxious because of it. The doctors warned me.

Driven by impulse, she stepped off her front porch, and climbed into her car, wincing at the pain in her midsection. This wouldn’t be the first time she hadn’t listened to her doctors.

She pulled onto the lonely mountain road that saw perhaps one car an hour, each property separated by a few minutes of driving.

She chased the colossal beast, using the bleeding moon to keep track of it when the tall pine trees or the dips in the road put the great beast out of sight. For long stretches of her trip down the isolated road, only her headlights provided any illumination. For the other stretches, the fact the moon was tinted red cast the entire city in crimson hues.

It was eight in the evening, which meant most of the buildings in Kennet were closed. Below the mountain road, shops were dark, and half the lights across the main road through town were off. The gas station was the first lit building she came across, garish and bright in the dark. It was the first thing she’d seen since she’d stepped out onto her porch that had light strong enough to cut through the dull red glow of the bleeding moon above. There, she caught up with the beast, a creature so tall that the roof of the car blocked her view of everything above the bends in its long, thin legs. The blood that ran down the legs seemed to disappear into the darkness of the fur that grew darker lower down, to claws that were as black as anything she’d ever seen.”

Hmm. This "driven by impulse" thing isn't working for me. Especially if that impulse is compelling her to get into a car and start driving when she's just lost her footing in pain at least once in the last few minutes and she thinks she's hallucinating.

Actually, this decision of hers - more than anything else - is making me wonder if she actually is mentally ill, totally aside from whether or not the hallucinations are actually real. You'd have to be in some kind of altered state of consciousness to think driving is a good idea when you're in that condition.

Anyway, we have some scenery of her driving after the dog thing, and...I'm kind of disappointed. There's so much room for so much atmosphere and verbal picture-painting in this sequence, but what we get is just...perfunctory. Aside from the one line about the red moonlight falling against half of each building in the city, this prose all feels like it's just trying to rush passed the driving and just get to the next thing. The transition from forest to city was also really weirdly done, where it never says she enters or approaches the city, just suddenly starts describing how she's in it. Where are her house, the mountain road, the forest, etc, in relation to the city? How big is the city? How visible was it from the porch where she first started this sequence from? My imagination is kind of being batted around without a scaffolding to cling on to.

“Her catching up to the dog kinda reminds me of that scene in “The Mist” when the impossibly tall creature crosses the road right over the car. You can only see its legs from the side windows.

Just outside the gas station, lit by the fluorescent lights from inside and the neon red Mushie sign, teenagers were gathered around a car. They didn’t seem to care or notice as the beast’s leg touched ground in the middle of the empty road, foot shifting and clawed toes parting as the leg took more of the creature’s weight, then picked up again, almost disappearing in the midst of the dark sky. Their attention was consumed by the snacks they were parceling out between them.

She couldn’t put a name to the children, but she was pretty sure she could name the families one or two of them came from. Kennet was that sort of town. Five thousand residents, two schools, two gas stations, and a theater that closed for the summer months because they didn’t get enough customers.”

Oh, it's just a little town of five thousand. The word "city" had me picturing something much bigger. Well, I am starting to get a more specific mental image now, at least.

The first Kennet that I could find on google is a town in Scotland, but I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a real town called Kennet or just one that the author made up. So far I'm picturing this as being in the Colorado Rockies or a similar-looking region, but I could be completely off.

“She slowed as she caught up with the creature. This close to it, everything about the world seemed to have a red tint, even the light from her headlights. Fascination overrode her everyday pain.

She could hear it now. The huffing breaths, the low sounds it made in its throat. Even with windows up and a windshield in the way, that throat higher above her than any treetop.

All of this felt like a dream.

It’s a hallucination, Louise, she told herself, as she leaned into her steering wheel, craning her head to look up through the windshield. Frustrated, she leaned back, steered to the side of the road, and shifted the car to park. She paused to look in the rear-view mirror, and saw her face, her eyes wide, blood running thick from the lower eyelids to her chin. Some of the blood stained her shirt collar.”

Maybe this is deliberate to strengthen the sense of this being dreamlike or unreal, but the descriptions of Louise' pain and other physical sensations seem really understated. It's been a long time, but one thing I remember about Worm and the little I read of Pact is how tactile the prose was. Very sparse on the visual and auditory details, but lots of texture and sensation descriptions, both painful and otherwise. It's conspicuous by its absence here.

For that matter, can she even feel the wetness and warmth of the blood on her skin, or is she only seeing it in the mirror?

If I were in her place, I think I'd get out of the car and approach the teenagers. If I really was bleeding out the eyes, they'd probably react to that very quickly and obviously. But then, she could just be hallucinating them as well, along with the entire rest of this episode, so who even knows?

“She deliberated her next actions. She wasn’t wearing a winter jacket, because it hadn’t occurred to her in the moments between when she’d stepped off her porch and when she had started up her car. She was wearing boots, but that was because it was hell to keep her feet warm these days, more hell to bend down to pull the boots off. Endless health problems, and the boots offered better stability than her feet did. She took them off for bed and put them on after showering and drying her feet. That was it.

Underdressed for the weather as she was, she climbed out of the car, grunting at the pain in her back, shut and locked the door, and then followed the great beast on foot, leaning heavily into the railing that ran beside a set of concrete stairs. The stairs connected the straighter parts of the winding mountain road, so people in the town who wanted to travel up to the gas station on foot didn’t have to zig-zag their way up the lonely road. The fact the gas station was at the top would be why there was so much litter on either side of the staircase, including a half-full plastic bottle standing up on a stair that she nearly tripped over on her way down. She stopped herself mid-fall by catching the railing with both hands.

Embarrassing. It felt like yesterday that she had been one of those teenagers outside the gas station. Now she was a wreck, chasing a hallucination, and holding a railing with both hands because she was so infirm. Still only thirty-five.”

I'm starting to think "car crash." That, or some similar kind of motor vehicle accident.

Maybe she got shoved in a locker full of speeding SUV's.

“She looked back to see if anyone had seen her stumble, and she saw a tiny figure crouched at the top of the stairs.

Small, like a chimpanzee in size and posture, it was lit from behind by the gas station, its features obscured. The same sort of thing she had seen out of the corner of her eyes, in what she’d thought and hoped would be the full extent of her hallucinations.

It wasn’t alone. Now that she looked, she saw four in total. The original one, two in the bushes, and one taller than she was a few stairs down from her.

With the way the light struck them, they were mostly silhouettes, to the point she couldn’t tell where they were looking or what they were doing, but she had the impression they were watching her or reacting to her.

All together, according to some signal she couldn’t see or hear, they ran off, in the same direction the beast was traveling. Before she realized what she was doing, she joined them, following down the stairs, both hands on the railing, crossing an empty road, and hobbling past a restaurant that was loading stuff into the back door from a dilapidated van.

The restaurant employees stared at her, but they didn’t run up to exclaim about the blood on her face. One young woman raised a hand in greeting, which would have been nice if she didn’t lean over to say something to a colleague, the look in her eyes wary.

I must look like a crazy person.

Because I am a crazy person, now.”

The reaction of the restaurant staff makes me feel like the blood isn't real (or if it is, then it's invisible to most people for whatever reason). Their reaction seems appropriate for "person suddenly comes chasing after something that doesn't exist across the road" much more than it does for "person bleeding from the eyes."

Anyway, giant blood dog is attracting other spectral creatures toward its position. Throng of little goblin-type things, with a bigger goblin-type thing leading them.

I'm really getting annoyed by Louise' seemingly motiveless actions. She keeps doing this stuff for no reason that she or the story cares to articulate, and so far she's been doing thing after thing after thing without anything relatable in between.

“One of the small shadows disappeared beneath the van. Three seconds later, someone dropped something, eliciting a cascading series of crashes.

Louise’s heart pounded as she left the scene behind, feeling guilty somehow, but feeling even more that she should follow the beast. It was long-legged, huge, but slower and slower to move, as if it had to gather courage or strength to steady itself before it could take the next step. She was just slow. These companions of hers that stuck so close to the shadows quickly passed her and scampered ahead.

She and her hallucinated companions reached the heart of Kennet, where the houses were close enough together that people had to worry about neighbors, and there was actual separation between business and home.

The shadowy figures stopped there, remaining just outside of the light from the streetlamps. Still following them, still hobbling a bit, because her side hurt, she walked into their midst before pausing. Looking up at the swaying, struggling beast, she pressed on alone.

Streets were a maze, laid out because the houses had come first, individual cabins and fixtures that had been set up wherever was convenient, not far from the lake’s edge. The roads had come later, the planners doing their best.

The taller buildings made it hard to keep the creature in view as she kept up with it. It was too much walking for her side, and she shivered with the cold.

It’s going by the Arena. Or to the Arena.

The Kennet Arena or the K-A was like the gas stations, brightly lit at a time the rest of the town had wound down. Here, the parking lot was filled with parents talking to parents, kids talking to kids. A good number of those kids were wearing hockey uniforms. The building itself was one of the largest in town, next to the hospital, hosting a full-size hockey rink and gymnasium. In a town with so little to do, there was usually a practice or a game at the K-A. This might have been one of the last games of the season for the kids.

The beast placed one foot on the roof as it walked over the building. Louise stopped at the street, hesitating at the traffic coming out of the parking lot, which was moving too slowly to let her believe the road would be clear, and too fast for her to make her way across the street.

She saw people looking at her, and felt self conscious. She hadn’t showered today, she realized. She was disheveled, she wasn’t wearing a coat, and she was hunched over a bit, one hand perpetually at her lower back. If they saw the blood welling from her eyes, they might have assumed she had been in a car accident. They didn’t, averting their gaze instead.”

The nonchalance of the car accident possibility being raised makes me think that whatever happened to Louise, it wasn't that. The text would be treating that differently if it had such traumatic personal resonance for her, even if just by saying something cheeky about how "they were almost right" etc.

“.The great beast passed over the Arena, while she was trapped on the far side of the parking lot, feeling anxious.

It’s just a hallucination, remember? she thought. She was having trouble convincing herself.

”Louise!”

Her awareness of her present state made her cringe more than anything as she heard the familiar voice.

She walked a few feet over to get a better look at Lincoln, an old classmate, leaning out of his truck window. He was heavy, with a scraggly orange and gray beard, wearing a plaid shirt and a plaid hat with ear-flaps.”

An old classmate of hers. She's thirty-five, and his beard is graying.

Lincoln is not taking good care of himself.

The sudden, totally unceremonious introduction of another human character who talks is pretty abrupt at this point, after so much lonely dreamworld alienation. Kind of a jarring gear shift.

““Doing okay?” he asked. “Want a ride?”

”Nah,” she said, anxious. She looked over in the direction of the Arena, but the lights above the parking lot were bright and she couldn’t clearly see the beast on the far side. The moon- she looked up. Still bleeding. “No need, my car’s parked near the gas station.”

He was trying to look friendly, but he had an anxious look on his face as he looked at her. More anxious as the cars behind him began honking. “That’s a long way. You don’t have a coat on.”

Someone behind Lincoln honked, long and loud, which spared Louise from having to decide on a response. He was holding them up. Not that he could go far, with the way the road was clogged. She would have crossed, but it was two lanes, and cars were going around him.

”Never been very good at taking care of myself, you know that, Linc,” she told him, her voice artificially light and cheery, even as her heart was heavy. She was aware of the blood, the ‘hallucination’, that Lincoln wasn’t reacting to. “Listen, I saw an animal run this way. Dog or dog-like. It headed around the Arena. I’m just going to-“”

She's not relieved to get confirmation that the blood isn't real? Weird that it took several paragraphs after Lincoln not being able to see that before she reacted to it, and that it didn't incur more of a response from her in turn.

I do like how she had to draw on her hallucinations to come up with a quick excuse for what she's doing, though. Weird doglike animals were just the only other thing on her mind. This part is realistic and clever in how it's written and described.

“She was interrupted by a cry, long and loud, that felt like it could have knocked the snow from trees. Louise’s eyes were locked to Lincoln’s, and she held onto the fact that he wasn’t reacting, that he wasn’t bothered, that the cars around them were still honking, to keep from doubling over again.

She pressed a hand to her lower back.

”-me to come with?” he asked, the first part cut off by the tail end of the howl.

She shook her head, her eyes searching. The lights over the parking lot left deceptive spots in her vision, when she wanted to see through the darkness beyond. The honking continued, distracting.

The look he gave her was worried, pitying. This was the point she’d sunk to, now. If she’d once been one of those teenagers at the gas station, he could’ve been one of the others trading licorice for sour candies.

She saw a gap, started to cross, and a car honked. She stopped. It wasn’t a gap large enough for her to cross and continue to chase.

”Here, let me be an asshole. And if you get too cold, you get inside the Arena, okay?”

He steered his truck, inching into the other lane, so he blocked both lanes that led out of the Arena. The honking increased in intensity.”

Heh. Her trying to talk normally and affect nonchalance through the demon kaiju-wolf howls is sort of weirdly funny.

“Louise gave him a wave of thanks as she jogged across the road, an action that almost took her breath away with the pain it brought. She saw a glimpse of the worried look he was giving her. Then he momentarily squealed his wheels in his hurry to get moving again.

She fast-walked between parked cars, stopping and taking the long way around here and there when people opened doors to get into their vehicles. She wanted to get to the back of the Arena.

She first tried to go around the left of the building, but the traffic there made navigation too hard, with several minutes of waiting as she hoped for a break in the traffic there.

She walked to the doors, and peered through, but the crowds were too thick, too many parents, too many kids, the route through the building too winding, and too many others who might stop an unwashed, unhinged woman. Unsure, she walked around to the right side of the building, and found a path littered with the cigarette butts from a hundred smoke breaks, a bit of a squeeze between the building and the dense foliage there. She had to duck her head and shield her face from branches as she cut through.

Finally, she emerged in the back parking lot, and her first thought was that things were too bright, too white.

When she looked up at the moon, it was so bright compared to what it had been that her eyes hurt. No longer strange, no longer dripping.

The great beast was gone, and she felt lost, like a child that had seen her birthday come and go with nobody remembering. She didn’t know why and she couldn’t put it together in her head with the visions of blood.

It couldn’t have, wouldn’t have gone far, she hadn’t been delayed so long that it could have left.

Feeling unfulfilled and still heartbroken, the feeling of the howling still heavy in her chest, she walked this way and that through the parking lot behind the Arena, aimless. A few people who had taken the shitty parking spots furthest from the building got in their cars to leave, girls in teal or orange hockey jerseys piling into the back with big sports bags.

A group of twenty-something men were packing up from their game of hockey on the outdoor rink, including Tom and Arnold from the ski hills. They were roommates, sharing the house two minutes down the road from her. Back when she’d been healthier, she’d caught their runaway dog and brought it back to them. They’d been good neighbors ever since. Helpers when she’d needed a lot of help, putting up a rod in her shower, checking in.”

Heh, all these independent mentions of dogs or doglike things. I feel like this is the author deliberately playing into his reputation as a massive dog-lover and kinda lightly trolling his longtime readers.

Then again, rural communities do have a lot of dog-owners, and dogs are pretty important to a lot of rural lifestyles. So, maybe just a coincidence.

““Leaving already?” she called out, feeling very out of place.

”Hey, Louise,” Tom greeted her. He was dark haired, with the stubble kept even with a razor. “Ice is a mess. Everything’s thawing.”

”Yeah, too bad,” she said.

”Last outdoor skate of the season, I think.”

”I hope it was a good one.”

”Was alright. Need a ride?” he asked. His forehead creased in concern.

”Nah, thanks.” She waved him off.

At least he didn’t stop or insist.

She walked over to the rink, bounded by wooden boards that held up badly abused sheets of plexiglass that kept the pucks inbound.

Yeah, the ice was a mess.

Across the rink, she saw, there was a loose silhouette shape stained into the ice, matching a leg and paw of the great beast. It extended, she realized, into the trees at the back of the rink, and onto the mountain of snow that had been built up over months of the parking lot being plowed and the ice of two rinks being cleared off. It could well be the very last thing in Kennet to fully thaw. On that mountain of snow, if she walked around, she could see the general shape of the thing’s ear and muzzle. More of the stain extended across the outer perimeter of the parking lot.

All crimson. Blood.”

Wait, this is all during winter, with snow on the ground?

-____-

I just control-F'd for "ice," "snow," "white," and "frost." There was one single mention of there being snow on the trees during her conversation with Lincoln. On one hand, my bad for missing that. On the other, why is the story only mentioning this after she's already driven through the forest and the trees are behind her?

Even with this minimalistic description style, not mentioning there being snow until now is just...what?

You know, when I tried - very briefly - to read "Ward," I had this impression that Wildbow's prose had actually gotten weaker and less clear than it used to be, somehow. Like, you can look back at the early chapters of Worm and sure, it definitely looks like the unedited post-as-you-finish stream of text that it is. There are plenty of redundancies, questionable word choices, etc, and those have gotten less frequent as the author has grown in experience (and/or started doing more editing). The thing is, I don't recall even the clunkiest chapters of Worm ever making me do a double take and reread multiple paragraphs like this.

So, I don't think it was just my imagination when I took a look at Ward. Wildbow's writing has, at least in some specific ways, gotten worse instead of better. That's strange and unfortunate.

“She hugged her arms to her body, shivering, as she walked the length of it, around three-quarters of the parking lot’s perimeter. The red stain was thickest where the beast’s neck would have been. Blood was sinking into frozen ground and snow in a pool as large around as the rink was.”

Hmm. Bleeding from it's neck, mostly. The giant wolf has an open jugular vein. Or else it just happens to be dripping from there the most after its fur gets soaked by the moon bleeding on it.

“It was only now that she finally felt cold.

What had just happened? If this was a dream, was it supposed to symbolize something? Was she finally dying?

If it was something else, if it was actually important… she didn’t know who to turn to, who to ask.

The cars gradually emptied out of the parking lot. All but one of the lights shining down on the outdoor rink were turned off. There were only stragglers now. Girls talking while parents patiently waited. Parents talking while their children scuffed snow with the toes of their boots, skates hanging from their necks by laces that had been tied together.

She trembled, turning occasionally to try and find someone, or figure out where to go. She wiped at her cheek, and the blood had stopped flowing, starting to dry instead. It came away in flecks.

”Did you just get here?” A man’s voice.

”Yes.” A woman’s voice.

Louise turned her head to look. On the far side of the rink, standing between trees and the rink’s boundary, there were several people. Two women and a man, and two children. One of the children might have been humming or singing. It was hard to hear.

”We’re too late then,” the man said.

”Clearly,” said the woman standing by the rink. She was dressed well, with a nicer scarf and coat than most shops in Kennet sold, but she stood between the plexiglass and the trees, and a combination of scratches on the glass and the glaring reflection of the light above the rink obscured her from forehead to chin.

”What a mess, what do we do?” the other woman asked. Louise was pretty sure she’d seen her in town. Short, wide hips, maybe thirty. She had bleached blond hair underneath a toque, and the lights caught her eyes, making them seem too bright. Her expression was very serious. Worried.”

Glowing eyes, coldly serious expression, you only really start to feel the winter chill after she gets close to you...

Well, I was raised in a small forest town myself, and I had several neighbours like that. This is normal.

““We do what we have to,” the woman with the hidden face said. “Everything by the book.”

”By the book, our lives will be turned upside down,” the man said. He was… Louise couldn’t place the name. He worked at the tackle and hunting shop. Friendly, easygoing. Twenty-something, broad shouldered with a rounded jawline that made him look slightly overweight, even though he wasn’t. The short beard he’d cultivated to suggest a jawline didn’t really do the trick.

He went on, more agitated. “By the books we’d have to invite outsiders in to handle this, and in the best case scenario, I’m pretty darn sure they don’t leave after. Most likely case, we’re goners. Murder doesn’t get any passes.”

”Calm down,” the woman with the toque said, putting a hand on his arm. “Don’t panic.”

One of the children grabbed her sleeve, holding a finger to his lips. All went silent, but for the distant chatter of people and youths just outside the doors to the Arena, and the faint singing, which wasn’t one of the two children here. Louise looked and saw more children in the dark between the trees.”

Just casually tossing around the word "murder" where people can easily hear. Eh, I'd probably do the exact same. Most people will just think I'm being melodramatic about something, though the context here is pretty incriminating if there happens to be someone listening after all.

Swarm of elves suddenly closes in around them and shushes them. The reactions of the three human-looking entities aren't described, so I'm not sure if the elves are friends of theirs trying to protect them from something, or an enemy infiltration team taking them prisoner.

“All, child and adult, seemed to be looking at Louise now. The woman with the obscured face walked around her companions, her hands in her pockets, and stopped by a tree, her face blocked at first by their heads, and now by a low-hanging tree branch.”

I guess this lady has a "circumstances will conspire to never give you a clear line of sight to my face" power.

See, this kind of wackiness is what I never stopped loving about Wildbow. "Here's a girl who can turn dogs into Giger monsters for a few hours. Yes, specifically dogs, only dogs." "Here's a guy who you can see and hear just fine, but you can't perceive him as a threat no matter how many times he stabs you." "Here's another guy who can exist in two different timelines at once for a while and then decide which outcome he likes better." "Here's a different girl who can build a machine that can do absolutely anything, from warping space and time to transmuting elements into other elements to causing pimples in brown haired men between the ages of 35-38, but only if she designs it as a bomb."

I know that Hirohiko Araki got to this level of wild superpower creativity (if not further) in the later parts of JJBA, but it took him a long time to get there. It's a pretty rare talent.

Anyway. Looks like the human(ish) trio and the elf-goblin-monkey things are on the same team after all, and Louise got their attention by paying attention to them.

“.All were tense. Guarded.

”Do we know you?” the man asked.

Louise shook her head. “I know you work at Buckheed.”

”Yep,” he said. “You’re local?”

”Louise Bayer. I live up by Blue Gas.”

”I’m Matthew,” he said, and his smile was wide, friendly. He approached her. “You have blood…”

She touched her cheekbone. The blood was cold and entirely dry now. She brushed it off.

”Yeah,” he said. “You look frozen. Here…”

”You don’t have to-“ she told him, remembering the talk of murder, backing up. But he was already pulling off his coat. He held it out.”

I like how she only remembers the murder talk AFTER blurting out her name and address like a total idiot.

Maybe he used some kind of hypnosis thingy to make her disclose all that without realizing she was doing it? That would make sense. I wonder what she'll do when she realizes what she just said a minute ago.

Anyway, he sees the blood. And her reaction to THAT is pretty muted as well, honestly.

“She took it, if only to keep things friendly-ish. She winced as she reached out.

”Here,” he said. He held her hand through the coat, and she felt a note of panic as he led her away from the others, toward the center of the nearly empty lot. Uncomfortable and bewildered, she let him walk her away. It wasn’t like she could fight, in the condition she was in.

He helped her put on the coat as he continued leading her further away. “There.”

He backed up a few steps, his hands at his side. The look he gave his companions was anxious, but the look he gave her was kinder, set beneath eyebrows that were up and drawn together.

The fact he’d backed off, at least, helped keep this from feeling menacing.

The coat was warm. “Thank you. I’m… bewildered. I… you see that?”

She indicated the rink.

”I could try and make it all make sense for you, if you want,” he told her.

”Sure,” she said, hesitant. “That would be appreciated, hon.”

He nodded. “Tell me, are you one to lie? Never? Sometimes? Often? Do you know what I mean when I ask you that question?”

”I sure lie sometimes, more to myself than to others. You’re doing a bad job of making this all make sense with questions like that, Matthew.”

”Did you happen to bump your head? Brain tumor? Bad trip?”

”No, no, and no.”

”Early onset dementia?”

”I have diabetes. I had the warning signs, I ignored them for far too long, then I had full blown diabetes and I didn’t take care of myself after the diagnosis. Now my body has crapped out on me. Kidneys… I go to the hospital three times a week to get five hours of dialysis each time, and it’s not enough. Hurts like-“ she noted the children. “-fudge.””

Louise' reactions are still all over the place.

Anyway, one thing I remember from the beginning of Pact is that supernatural beings can't lie, except through omission or "exact words" fuckery, and that this extends at least somewhat to humans with magical ability. The fact that Louise doesn't have trouble lying suggests that she's something a bit out of the ordinary for a person who can see the wolf and blood and stuff.

Also, severe diabetes, not an accident. The pain in her sides is just from repeated dialysis. Ouch. The vague insinuations that her vision isn't great either go along with this, as does her feet constantly being cold. Okay, I probably should have been able to guess this from the hints that were given.

Aww, she won't swear around the "children" who are actually goblin-monkey-elves. Cute.

“The damn children weren’t talking, weren’t playing. They just stood here and there. None of them matched in the clothes they wore or the groups they came from, none reminded her of locals she’d seen, and none moved their lips, though the singing and humming in the background persisted. The words of the song were indistinct.

”That kidney problem, or the diabetes, does it mess with your head? Or did you come back from the very brink of death?” he asked, gently.

”No brink for me. But when your kidneys go, you can start seeing things,” she answered. She watched him carefully, and saw him nod, as if this somehow added up. “Are you going to tell me this is all in my head now, Matthew?”

”You could say anything any of us see or experience is in our heads. But no. Listen, bear with me, and I think I can make it worth your while, and I don’t say that lightly.”

”And the world will make sense again, Matthew?”

”About as much sense as it did before you started seeing these things. Tell me, you saw her? Big, red, scary?”

”Big, red, beneath a bleeding moon.”

”That would be it.”

”But not scary. Sad. The blood on my face… I cried, hearing it.”

”Something that big, in your face, you’re not equipped to handle it,” Matthew said, and his voice was gentle. “That’s why you had the bleeding.”

”It was real?” she asked, and her voice was barely a whisper.

”That’s a very tough question to answer and I’d worry answering it would just lead to many more questions.”

”Not doing a very good job of making this make sense to me, Matthew.””

So she actually was bleeding, but her blood becomes invisible as soon as it leaves her body?

Is her blood not going to act upon other materials after leaving her body? No weight, no slipperiness, etc?

Weeeeeeird.

““I know,” he said. “Trust me. How long did you follow it?”

”From the hills by the bigger ski lodge to here. I only lost sight of it for a minute or two.”

”You tracked it here?”

”Followed it. Sure.”

The women were talking behind Matthew. The one with the obscured face broke away from the conversation. He noticed Louise looking, and turned his head.

”We can’t tamper with the witnesses too much,” the woman with the hidden face spoke, raising her voice a bit as she made her approach. The course the woman took kept Matthew between Louise and her. Louise started to step to one side to get a better look at her, and a pain in her side made her look down.”

Oh that Hidden Face Woman with her face hiding powers.~

“Matthew raised his voice as he asked, “What are you thinking? I was thinking we could do things another way. Not by the rules others have set. Keep certain other authorities out of it. Handle all of the witnesses. See if we can’t cover this up.”

”No. That invites its own problems,” the woman said. She walked up behind him, and leaned over his shoulder to murmur something in his ear. His head turned, perpetually blocking the woman’s face.

Three times, at least three different ways that Louise couldn’t see the woman’s face. Louise hadn’t yet caught a glimpse of it. It made her nervous, and felt wrong.

The woman whispered to Matthew for a few moments.

”Yeah,” Matthew murmured, in response.

”What… what is this?” Louise asked, unnerved by the secrecy and the weirdness. “What are you?”

The woman turned, her back now to Louise, and walked away, toward the bloodstained rink, hands in her pockets. She spoke while walking away, her voice almost but not quite bearing an English accent, “The very young, the very old, and the infirm, can sometimes see what others are blind to. This can be very unlucky or very lucky, depending. The kind of luck that changes the direction of lives, or the unluck that ends them.””

It must be more than just age and injury, though. Otherwise there would be a LOT more people like Louise. I guess Madam Faceless is putting the emphasis on the word "sometimes." Rare occasions, a small percentage of very (un)lucky people within the young, old, or infirm demographics. Etc.

Anyway, this group is less hostile than I initially assumed, fortunately for Louise. I get the impression that No-Face would just as soon kill her for the sake of information control, but Matthew and the other lady seem to be a bit more compassionate or at least more hesitant to have to go through the trouble to cover up a disappearance.

““I’m happy to say you’re very lucky,” Matthew reassured Louise.

”I don’t… This doesn’t feel lucky,” Louise told him. Her hands clutched the front of the coat Matthew had given her, over her heart. “I feel… heartbroken?”

She had trouble articulating it, because she’d never experienced true heartbreak, but this was what she’d always imagined it would feel like.

”You’re right,” Matthew said. “This is far from lucky. This was and is a tragedy of the worst sort, the sort that hurts everyone, and you’re exactly right to feel the way you do. But you being here is very fortunate for you and for us.”

”Not necessarily us,” the woman with the hidden face said, her back still turned. She seemed to be studying the red stain from the side of the rink.”

The howling of the kaiju bloodwolf is a tragedy, not a threat. Seems like these people are trying to either protect it, or put the suffering creature out of its misery. Or maybe they're just on alert for fear of it attracting other, less harmless, supernatural creatures in its death throes.

That last one would actually be pretty interesting and unique. "An invisible magic whale just died nearby, and now we need to guard the town from the invisible magic sharks who will be swarming in for a feeding frenzy."

Louise being here is fortunate for her, and possibly for the others. Hmm. This can mean a lot of things. If I was correct in my "the dying wolf-thing is going to attract scavengers" inference, then it could be a question of people who can see the supernatural also being at greater risk of being eaten by it. So, if Louise stayed out in her house at the edge of town alone and unaware, her odds of being killed in her sleep by a passing "shark" would have been high. As for the "maybe also fortunate for us but not neccessarily," I suspect that Matthew either wants to keep everyone safe or thinks that Louise can help them somehow, whereas No-Face is irritated at having to babysit a squishy civilian during this stakeout.

Again, this is just my best guess ASSUMING that I was correct about what's going on with the doggo. If I wasn't correct about what's going on with the doggo, then the possibility space is just too big for me to make any guesses.

““The people who will look into this will be in need of those clues, and we’ll be desperate and in need of them,” Matthew said. “If my life partner is willing to oblige me, I’d like to offer you a deal. Edith?”

The woman with bleached blond hair and a toque took a few steps forward. “She’s in a lot of pain, Matthew. You’re too much a part of this to get involved, and you’re fragile.”

”I know. But she’s dying,” Matthew said.

”That obvious, huh?” Louise asked, and she couldn’t help but feel she was butting into a conversation, even though that conversation was about her.”

Let me guess, he's about to shake his head and say "We were talking about the doggo, Louise, stop being so self-centered."

“She wore a half-smile and she didn’t feel at all like smiling. The sadness she felt at finally hearing those words and admitting the reality out loud was a close cousin to the heartbreak of hearing the beast’s howl. Her eyes moistened, and as she wiped at one, the fluids proved clear. An actual tear this time.”

I guess not. Too bad, that would have been lolz.

““Okay,” Matthew said, smiling. “Here’s the deal, Louise. We’re going to send a person or some people your way, so don’t make yourself too hard to find, it’s important you’re there when they come. They’re going to ask you about tonight. Help them, answer any questions, point them in the right directions, and be honest. You’re going to remember every last detail you can, and I want you to go with the flow, act like it’s a day like any other.”

”Sure,” Louise said, dazed.

”Forget about us, okay? Then, outside of any meetings with us or any other person or people who ask you about it, forget about tonight and forget about… that thing you saw. Make it a total, comfortable amnesia that ends if you’re asked. In exchange, I will take some of your hurt, pain, and suffering, and I’ll give you more time.”

”I don’t… how?”

”All you have to do is say yes, and if you want me to help you out more, again, if my life partner doesn’t disagree, I’ll give you a bit of a kiss.”

”That’s fine,” Edith said.

Louise shook her head, bewildered. “I mean I don’t know if I can make myself forget that conveniently.”

”All you have to do is say yes, Louise. This is, barring any outside intervention, a good deal for you. Say yes.”

”Yes?”

”May I kiss you, Louise?” he asked. “There’s nothing romantic to it, but these things traditionally work better with a kiss than with the holding of a hand. Is that okay?”

”Yes?” she made it almost a question, again.

He touched the underside of her chin to raise her face, and then he kissed her. It had been a long time since she had been kissed, and a longer time since she had been kissed in a way that made her heart warm.”

I'd been thinking Matthew was the human magician and the two women were his demon friends, but that sort of pact he just made with Louise doesn't seem like something a human would do, or even be able to do. Maybe? I didn't read enough of Pact (and it was long enough ago) to know if this is how magic between humans works. Maybe it does.

I can see this leading up to Louise having an unrequited crush that will lead to friction with Matthew and his life partner. Maybe.

Anyway, this seems to be a very nice deal he's offering her. I don't see much room for fuckery and exploitation in how he worded it, either. Matt seems like he might actually be a really decent guy.

“That warmth was choked by a sudden hurt, black and bitter. The hurt leaped into her mouth, and it tasted like regurgitated bile, metallic tastes, salt, foul-tasting medications, and the stinging smell of her own body odor when she didn’t shower frequently enough. It filled her nose, and she twisted away.

He held her face, not letting her, his fingers gripping her chin to maintain the contact. The taste and smell dissipated. It was him who wrenched his face away, expression twisting. He hunched over.

Dizzy, bewildered, she swayed on the spot, watched as this man pressed one hand to his lower back.

”You’ve suffered a lot,” he said, grimacing. The woman he’d been with hurried to his side, supporting him.

”Yes. My own fault,” Louise answered, adrift in the moment, her heart pounding. She felt like she was floating.”

Ah, that disgustingness was the pain coming out and stimulating her taste buds on its way into him. I guess he'll have to feel it himself now, unless he has some way of ejecting it. Maybe by turning it into a fireball and shooting it at a monster or something.

Kind of reminds me of The Green Mile. That injury-energy that also attracted the swarms of little black spirit bugs to it.

Anyway, from his wording, it sounds like he's also doing something to actually suppress her memories of tonight unless she's interviewed about them by another magic-y person, and then she'll remember them only for the duration of said interview. That's a pretty nifty memory magic trick. Very scary one that could be used for incredibly evil purposes, too. Good thing Matt seems to be pretty responsible in how he uses his powers, at least so far.

“He grimaced, but the expression became more of a smile, “Why don’t you go home, Louise? Have a rest. It should be a good one. All of the stress and confusion of tonight should slip away as the memories do… and things will make sense again, if only because you don’t remember the things that don’t make sense even to us.”

”Yet, hopefully,” a woman by the rink added, her voice faint.

Louise looked around to get her bearings. She was standing in a half-lit, mostly empty parking lot behind the Arena with a stranger – one of the employees from Buckheed. It was disconcerting, things not adding up. She felt like music had been playing, and her ears now rang from the lack. The only noise was the rustle of wind.

”What’s next?” the stranger from Buckheed asked.

”We handle any other witnesses,” said his companion, a woman wearing a toque. “Talk to the others.”

Why was she here? Where was her coat? Her car?

This is like that moment when you’re dreaming and you realize that things don’t flow together or make sense, she told herself. I’m stuck in that prolonged moment. Instead of jolting awake, I’m being sucked deeper into the mire.”

Yup, memory suppression. Leaving her in an Inception scene-change-dissonance state of mind.

“It was the thought that connected everything, stirred her awake. She sighed, releasing a tension she hadn’t known she had been feeling. She opened her eyes.

She sat in her recliner, and a blanket was draped over her lap. The throw from the couch. Strange. She never used it while in her recliner, because she felt like an old woman whenever she did it. She gathered it up, and leaned forward, before wincing in anticipation-

No pain.

Every other morning, when she had forgotten she couldn’t move like she did before her health problems, the pain of sudden movements could leave her immobilized for minutes, breathing her way through it. Now… it hurt, still. It hurt as a dull and distant, small thing, but she was able to rise from her chair. She walked over to the counter where she kept the pills without hobbling or staggering, her expression clear.

Morning light shone in through the windows, and she felt better rested than she had in months.

She opened the pill container, and collected her pills for the morning. She filled a glass, downed the handful of pills, and then decided to take her daily cigarette early.

Out to the porch. She lit the cigarette, and stood out in the cold morning air, drawing in a full breath of smoke without any stabbing pain in her side. Today was a good day. A matter of minutes in and she knew it was going to be a better day than she’d had in years.”

Hot damn, Matt is good at what he does. Kennet's town wizard is a powerful one.

“A stamped-out cigarette sat at the edge of the porch. Had that been her? She bent down to pick it up, reveling in the fact she could do so without her knees buckling from the pain. She flicked it in the direction of her car, which she had parked sideways for some reason.”

Heh, he might have scrubbed her memories a little too thoroughly. All these little details that don't add up with her memories missing are going to make her suspicious, and possibly lead her to retrace her steps unprompted.

“.Her eyes found the horizon, searching treelines and the hilltops. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she found herself searching with intent and feeling disappointment when she didn’t find anything.”

...and he did miss a bit of a spot here, at least on the level of Louise' subconscious.

Maybe Matt isn't actually quite as good at this as I thought, heh. Still good, but not as good.

“She kept looking long after she’d finished her cigarette, stopping only when the tips of her ears and fingers started to feel the cold. She stretched, almost trying to provoke the pain she was so used to, and only felt a dull throb, like she was hurting from being punched a day ago.

Shower, she told herself. Then a walk. Get the blood flowing to those feet of yours.

After that, a cleanup. Her place was a mess, and she had a feeling some people would turn up at some point. It felt important that she be ready.

She couldn’t bring herself to go back indoors. She gave the mountains and hills one last glance, then another, then another. The looking felt wistful, with a faint sense of loss she couldn’t put her finger on.

A good quarter or half hour passed, and she spent that time outside. It was something of a relief when she saw the car come up the road, an excuse to break the spell. A truck she recognized. She stood from her seat on the stairs, her butt cold.

Tom and Arnold, together. They worked at the ski hills in winter and scraped by the rest of the year. She waved at them as they pulled into her driveway.”

The ski-slope sorcerers are here to do an investigation of their own! Time for those programmed instructions of Matt's to activate and bring back her memories for a little while.

““Louise, hey,” dark-haired Tom said, as soon as his door was open. He slammed the car door. “Everything okay?”

”I think so,” she said, and she smiled. “Why?”

Tom shook his head. “Had a bad feeling.”

”Kind of know what you mean,” she said.

”I mentioned it to Arn, he said he felt the same way.”

”My first thought was maybe something happened to you,” Arnold said. He had light brown skin, his mop of snowboarder hair highlighted with blond. “I remembered seeing you at the rink by the K-A last night. You, uh…”

”I’m fine, boys. Really, you’re sweethearts, but I’m fine.”

”That’s a relief,” Tom said. His forehead was still creased in worry. “I don’t know why I was so convinced something had happened. It’s like…”

The twenty year old trailed off. He looked back out over the town, toward the hills, and toward the Arena. Like her, he didn’t find what he was looking for. Arnold, too, looked worried.

”Come inside,” she told them. “Give me a hand with cleaning up, and I’ll pay you for the trouble. I’m expecting company sometime soon.””

Huh. Nevermind then! These are just more rando civilians who either had fainter impressions of what happened last night, or who had strong perceptions just like Louise and got flashy memory thing'd like she did.

Probably the second one. The fact that they'd come here, seemingly without a good reason, right when she's expecting the follow-up wizard interview, seems very deliberate. Matthew or someone like him gave these two boys instructions to come here and wait for interview with Louise as part of their own flashy-memory-thing pacts.

Well, hopefully the follow-up investigators actually will just interview the lot of them instead of blowing up the house while they're all inside it.

““You don’t have to pay us,” Tom said.

”I insist,” she said, opening the door to let them in. As they walked by her, she cast one last look out over the horizon before letting the door close behind her.

This was and is a tragedy of the worst sort. The sort that hurts everyone. The thought crossed her mind, in a voice that wasn’t hers.

Dutifully, she put that thought out of mind, as per the terms of the deal she no longer remembered making.”

And, that's the prologue.


That picked up a lot in the final third or so. The story itself is engaging and imagination-teasing. I do want to know what's going on with the tragic bleeding wolfzilla and why it had the local wizards and fairies so anxious. The seeming benevolence of said supernatural community (at least so far) also has a real charm to it, in part because of how surprising it is coming from an author with a well-earned reputation for grimdark. It reminds me of some 1970s-80's YA fantasy authors, like Eli Roth or Susan Cooper. My hometown's public library carried a lot of those when I was a kid, so this sort of vibe is a little nostalgic for me.

I just wish it was better written. The first one-third to one-half of this prologue especially was an absolute slog. I still am not sure how it managed to fill so much page space with essentially nothing. It's not like it was even purple-prosing about the spookiness of the winter woods or dwelling on the complexities of Louise' inner world or anything. I didn't start enjoying it until she met Matt and the others, and I certainly would have given up before then if I were reading this on my own. Even after that point, the prose is just...bland. The mystery and charm were good enough to shine through and make me feel things, but the writing style was still like a weight shackled to the story's ankle. It would also help if Louise had an actual personality.

Like I said before, the prose in Wildbow's earlier work wasn't as technically proficient or polished, but it also wasn't boring like this. What the heck happened?

Well, at least this prologue did have something that caught my interest, even if it took way too long to get to it. So, the next few chapters that I have in queue could continue to build on that. We'll see!