Loderunner

Part 1

This was the first of what I call “The big three”, three full transitions each lasting more than a month. Best as I can remember, this one happened sometime in late 2010, maybe 2011. This, more than the other two “big ones”, is a story that, ever since it happened, I felt needed to be told. Regardless of what one might interpret the story to really be about or where it might’ve really come from. It’s something that still emotionally effects me pretty deeply and that I think about often, like, almost daily.


Since this is so old now, even with how much I’ve ran it through my mind, the memories that are left are just scraps. Still those scraps are quite a lot. I’m ultimately writing this because, if I don’t, then I can’t truly admit to myself what happened and what I did. I expect literally no one to take it seriously. But regardless of how others interpret this or my reasons for writing it, I know that I’m being truthful in what I’m saying to the best of my ability and that’s all that matters.


This happened during a time where an absolute metric fuckton of extreme paranormal shit was happening to me on a daily and nightly basis, to the point where this event was actually just par for the course. Only more notable because it was the longest of its kind up to that point.


This write up is not going to read like a novel. It’s a combination of what generally happened with some specific memories thrown in. As well as explanations of how things worked, my thought processes, other “historically” significant or related stories, and a couple asides behind spoiler tags so they don’t clutter up the main body. I’ve done my best to keep things as chronologically accurate as possible.


So let’s begin.


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It was just a lucid dream in the beginning, I started in one of my relatives houses. A small bungalow. There was a lot of living and dead family members there in Alberta, Canada. I was in the family room sitting in a comfy chair with some young girl with long dark, probably brown, hair that I didn’t recognize in front of me.


I can’t remember exactly what she talked about with me, but she was kinda creepy. She told me her name was “Nadia”. She pricked me at some point. I wasn’t sure if what just happened had been physical or not because the flash of imagery that accompanied it was confusing. There was a tiny bleeding wound on my left arm, like from a needle, that had the faint feeling of energy that I assumed was hers. I asked her what the hell she just did and she said something to the effect that it was because she liked me or something but didn’t really tell. Other stuff too but I can’t really remember, in any case I got up and left the house rather quick.


I went outside by the chain link gate, feeling that the dream was slowly but surely sinking into a full transition. I could tell Echo was with me. I asked her what the hell that girl did to me. Echo said she could perform a scan and find out, but the dream was turning into a full transition and in the time it takes her to do the scan it will probably switch over, and I won’t be able to leave until it passes.

Show contentWho's Echo?:

“Echo” is a pseudonym like every other name I use for the people from my past. I’ve always had a feeling I shouldn’t use real names. Some people may have noticed that, unlike the other pseudonyms I’ve used up till this point, this one isn’t a colour. Which is because Echo is technically disembodied. She possesses or otherwise binds herself to objects capable of holding her, which is hindsight isn’t a lot. Usually my spirit body. She chooses to express as a female, i.e, making her “voice” sound feminine in my mind, but has no true form. She is capable of incarnation and did so (as a human) a couple times in the past involuntarily and didn’t like it. Feeling that, although the human body is very complex, it was one of the most limiting things she’d ever inhabited and it made her uncomfortable and kinda claustrophobic. So prefers to exist the way she is where she can jump around to many different things, controlling things indirectly, etc.

I was speechless that she knew that it was transitioning like that. It’s one thing for me to feel it, but when other people recognize it and tell me it’s almost scary. In hindsight this might’ve been the very first time that’d happened. I paused for a bit, weighing the options and risks, before telling her “Do it, scan it, find out what she did to me.” I figured it was better to know, in case this was something that would follow me home if I wake up. Arguably crazier things had already happened by that point in my life.


As Echo worked silently the dream did indeed become a full transition in the next minute or so. And when it passed the critical point where the tether disappeared I knew I was committed. I could tell I was in what I call my spirit body, Or at least one just like it. It seemed to have no magic. I had no vision problems, having peripheral vision as well as very vibrant colour vision. Because I’d lacked it for so long by that point it felt like looking through a fish eye lens. I wasn’t used to being able to look at one thing and also see all the other things around it at the same time. But this didn’t feel like a strain on my mind, it wasn’t like my brain had trouble processing it, it was just strange to “me”.

Show contentSpirit Body:

Despite what I call it its not spiritual at all. As best as I can tell it’s actually another physical body, just one that exists somewhere else and is totally different from my current physical one. It has a different skeletal frame, look and even muscle memory, instincts and reflexes. It’s the body that I consider “mine”. It has access to skills that my physical body doesn’t and vice versa. It even thinks and feels differently than my current body, having been honed for combat. Though, through a bleed through effect, the gap in personality and instincts between the two has narrowed considerably over the years. But my current body is incapable of utilizing the spirits muscle memory effectively due to a combination of age and fitness, but mostly being blind. Nonetheless its still there. It is outright superior to my current body and I miss it a lot.

One of the neighbours was mowing their lawn. Echo eventually said that what Nadia’d done was affecting the parts of my cells that recognized neural signals, changing them so that they would eventually no longer recognized mine, but instead hers. This effect was also very slowly spreading to adjacent cells. With that information I flooded the area with energy as best I could, trying to choke out hers and reverse the damage. As I did so the guy mowing his lawn just stopped. Standing there, not facing me, with his lawnmower still running.


Then he bent down and picked up, I don’t even remember what, and just ran at me with it. The door of my relative’s place opened and everyone who had been inside came running out at me too. I don’t remember much of this fight, just that I went through the gate and left it somewhat open to help funnel people through in a straight line so I could wedge them between the garage wall on my left and the car on my right. Trying to make sure I could deal with them one at a time rather than taking the chance they’d climb over the fence at random points and surround me even if it’d slow them down a bit.


I didn’t have to deal with them for more than a few seconds before other people came out from behind the car in the driveway and elsewhere and gunned everyone down. They were in full military gear of some type, wielding submachineguns as best as I could tell. After everyone was dead they asked me if I was okay. Some of them did a sweep of the area and the house while others talked to me. I can’t remember about what specifically, asking me questions about who I was and what happened I think. Whoever went in the house eventually came out saying ‘she’ wasn’t there and that maybe it’d been an apparition.


I remember them interviewing me inside of a vehicle, a van maybe, I just remember it being relatively dark inside. I don’t remember all the details of it but the gist was they, in general, wanted to know who I was and what happened. I don’t think I mentioned anything about this being a dream to them at the time but I might’ve. I think they took a blood sample from me.


As part of this they took me to meet some scientist guy working with them. I can’t remember why or if this was normal, I get the sense it wasn’t and it largely happened because of the earlier van interview. I remember fragments of the drive, so little I doubt they’re really memories. I think there may have been another blood test at some point but I have no specific memory of it. I do remember sitting across from him at his office desk as he asked me other questions and told me a lot more about the situation with Nadia. One thing he was surprised and suspicious about was that I was the first person they’d ever met who not only resisted Nadia’s virus, but was outright reversing it. Suspicious because he and the team that found me were part of a government branch solely dedicated to the military development of psionic abilities and I, someone who wasn’t part of their program, already showed more ability than most of their subjects. So who the fuck was I? I half bluffed something I’m not going to repeat here.


This is why I think there were two blood tests even if I can’t remember specifically, the virus’s effects could be picked up with one, and I would learn that blood tests would become very, very common. Two or more blood tests would allow them to compare on a timeline. Showing that the effects in the latter were weaker than the former. Thus telling them that I was beating the virus even if it was still there and spreading. Explaining his reaction above which I do still remember specifically.


I know that during at least one if not both of these interviews I tried to explain magic to them and how I was using it to cure myself. Something that in hindsight I’m not sure I should’ve done. But I also think if I hadn’t things would’ve gone badly for me, I think I explained it because I was trying to not get shot. Everything I knew about the Kruger Effect at that time said that dying in a full transition could lead to real death. But I had no idea what would happen afterwards given the situation. As far as I was concerned everything happening around me was real even if I knew I entered it from a dream.


At some point he either called someone on a phone or they called him. I don’t know if I was in the room while he was talking to them. Afterwards he informed me that people he reported to wanted me to fly out to a city in Georgia. It was implied that this was because of my ability to reverse the virus among other things. In hindsight I don’t think I had much ability to refuse had I said no. I remember very little of the flight beyond that I think I didn’t have a window seat and a little of one of the terminals.


I used to remember the exact city name and should’ve written it down or tried looking it up at the time to see if it was real but I didn’t. Now all I remember is that started with an “A” but wasn’t Atlanta, was one syllable longer, ‘weird’, and a name that sounds close is Albuquerque but I know that wasn’t it and obviously that’s not in Georgia. I decided near the end of writing this all up to finally go look at a list of cities in Georgia to see if anything jumped out or jogged my memory and found Alpharetta. I’m VERY sure that was the one. I remember thinking it was such a weird name for what you’d expect from Georgia, and remembered associating the name with “Alphaghetti” and “Alphabits” because it had that structure.


I’ve tried to piece together who told me what and when about the whole situation with Nadia but I just can’t. So instead of doling it out bit by bit like it really happened, I’m going to give you the full dump of what this whole thing was about.


Nadia was a test subject from a military research facility that was attempting, and from what it sounded like, largely failing, to weaponize psychic abilities. She had been initially found through either the foster care network or the homeless shelter network in America. Her routine blood work showed an increased level of a certain compound or enzyme or whatever that, behind the scenes, had been correlated with stronger latent psionic ability. Test subjects were then acquired one way or another and subjected to incredibly stressful testing utilizing various drugs and other factors in an attempt to force out latent abilities and/or strengthen preexisting ones. Nadia had taken to the treatments well, in that she manifested a lot more power than most if not all other subjects had, and could control it. Potentially their only success. She was currently 14 years old.


As part of the experiments, genetic testing and engineering was performed, eventually resulting in the cloning of her “brother”, Mikael. Mikael suffered from many medical conditions including albinism, Some form of progeria, and some form of catatonia or paralysis. However, uniquely, his psionic waves interrupted Nadia’s, shutting them down and removing all her abilities. Likewise hers interacted with his and relieved him of his catatonia/paralysis, allowing him to function more or less normally. This effect existed only when the two were physically close to each other, like less than ten meters. Mikael was officially referred to as “The Catalyst” and was listed as equipment rather than a test subject in their facility’s manifest. His use seemed largely to keep her in check as she grew more powerful. He was probably her only friend as she grew up. I can’t remember for sure, but it may have been Nadia that named him Mikael.


At some point Nadia discovered or developed the ability to infect people with a sort of psychic virus that, after a period ranging from hours to weeks from what I remember, allowed her to take over their bodies. Creating a sort of psychic “internet of things” made out of people. She was capable of seeing through their eyes, knowing what they know, manipulating them at will, setting them on autopilot, and channelling her own psychic abilities through them. Also capable of inducing hallucinations and delusions in the partially infected, as well as enforcing some control over their bodies based on what was infected and how badly. Somewhere in the area of 1 week to 1 month before I showed up (I don’t remember), she infected her escorts during a transfer between facilities and used them to escape.


Since then she’s been hiding out in various cities, slowly growing an army of unsuspecting drones. People who are infected are unaware of it, they are able to go about their daily life as if nothing’s happened until such time that Nadia decides she needs their body for something. This made it incredibly hard to tell who’s infected. Although pre symptomatic infection could be detected through blood tests. Her drone’s ability to channel at least some of her own abilities meant they were going around and infecting people as well. Anyone who was resistant to infection was immediately killed. She had been largely targeting police.


The world at large was unaware of this and there were no plans to reveal it to the public. This research, and the organization itself, was only tenuously connected to the US government. So far removed in terms of funding, oversight and everything else that they themselves argued that they really weren’t part of the government or military. They were essentially a sub project of a sub project of a sub organization sub contracted by contractors working on a project for another organization that did have oversight. As a result it wasn’t like they could just call up anyone with any actual influence in the government even if they wanted to. None of those people even knew they existed.


The team that found me were part of the remnants of the program tasked with finding and killing Nadia. Because of their dwindling resources they had been going around “recruiting” survivors resistant to the virus like me into their ranks. The problem was that, given her psychic links, it was feared that killing her body would not kill her. It would only give her an opportunity to shift herself to any of her slave bodies, making locating her again impossible. Therefore the goal was to find Mikael, assuming he was still alive, and then get him to her unharmed, wait for his energy to shut hers down, locking her into her body, then kill her. It was unknown if Mikael’s influence would affect any body other than her original and they weren’t about to take any chances.


Now back to the story.


I don’t remember too much of arriving in Georgia or anything like that. I know I met with someone else, some other researcher guy, who explained quite a bit of what I wrote above. My first night in that place was spent in one of their safe houses in the city. Though in hindsight I don’t know for sure if this was still in Alpharetta. I’ve contemplated looking on google maps and street view to see if I can spot any familiar locations like this. Assuming everything’s roughly the same that is. But I’m not sure that effort would be worth it. My eyes are pretty bad which would make it pretty hard and even if I did find things I doubt it would add anything important to this.


There were other civilians there, survivors they’d picked up like me. Sleeping was done in one large room with a whole bunch of simple cots laid out. So I went to sleep. I don’t think I had a dream, but, right at the end. An incredibly vivid, powerful image of Nadia flashed in front of me. It had a sort of weight to it, something more than just visual. I shot awake because of it.


I was still there. still in the cot room, time had passed normally as if I’d really been asleep there. I thought that even for a full transition this was lasting an incredibly long time. This had never happened before and I really didn’t like it. I didn’t even know what to make of it. There was a guy sitting on the edge of his cot near me just crying into his hands. I don’t remember much else of that day.


I remember doing a physics test one day, maybe that first day, with a cup of coffee. Liquid physics is something that dreams simply don’t get right ever so it’s one of my go to tests for full transitions. Turn on a tap, or in this case swirl a cup of coffee, and watch.


A lot of the rest is a blur to me as well. I, like the other recruits, got told we’d be going out on missions with the actual soldiers. We were handed weapons, and armour if they had any, and given pretty basic training on how it worked. I remember a little of my first mission. Mainly that I felt incredibly vulnerable without my magic. Basically, because of Georgia’s gun laws from what I remember being told, we could go out with assault rifles in public and this was perfectly legal and okay. Something I’ve since learned is actually true in some parts of America, though I didn’t look up the specifics for Georgia.


So we did. Nadia on the other hand typically had drones everywhere, usually armed with pistols and hidden in crowds of civilians. She’d activate them for surprise suicide attacks. Which naturally scattered most of the real civilians making it easier for us to figure out where the drones were. I was very stressed when this happened the first time. But I survived and I think I managed to take out one drone myself, or at least I fired at it. I pulled on the muscle memory and experience of my spirit body and soul respectively to get through those first few missions.

Show contentFeeding off memories:

In hindsight it kinda reminds me of one particular one shot incarnation I had that is very similar to this life in that it also had practically no magic and happened on an earth around the same time period. Though not this one, guaranteed. I was female and had a very, very terrible start to my life, ended up homeless as a young teen, and after a rape attempt I had all these images and feelings flood me that I didn’t understand even though they felt like memories. I remember giving into them because I was too suicidally depressed to care if they were real or not. Feeding off the memories of military training from fantastical places to teach myself how to shoot a pistol I’d stolen. Got involved in organized crime, died at around 26 essentially because I moved right instead of left. I remember when I originally remembered that life when I was a kid here, like 10. And uhhh, yeah, totally normal stuff for a 10 year old to be thinking about, right?

The place was run like a sort of zombie survivor camp. Which is kinda what it was when you think about it. A lot of what we did were supply runs which often involved going to grocery stores and buying things. Or attempting to anyways. The group did still have some supplies they could get from their organization but we had to supplement a lot ourselves. Vehicle use had a huge amount of rules attached to it, most of which I don’t remember. But in general it was incredibly restricted. Partly because of fuel but mostly due to security. Almost everything revolved around protecting our identities and the location of the safe house. All while trying to follow leads on Nadia, given this city was where she was last sighted.


As my energy got stronger one of the first things that developed was my energy sense, I could feel Nadia’s drones. All of them had the exact same energy signature which I assumed was hers. The drones all acted the same, they never spoke and never had any expression other than this single deadpan, bored sort of look on their faces. They were effectively robots.


I don’t remember how many missions I did before I felt my energy had gotten strong enough to use, probably 3 or 4 at least. But during one within the first two weeks I decided it was time to show what I could do with it because I knew it could help a lot. I figured asking permission would just get me told “no” because I was, of course, an untrained, inexperienced civilian as far as they were concerned and so I should just follow the orders of the trained, experienced soldiers. So instead I decided it’d be best just to demonstrate what I could do. Stupid and risky, but necessary as far as I was concerned. So one time when we were under fire I decided to break off from the group and dash towards an alley. Intending to come around the back/side of the drones and flank them. Using my energy to augment my speed and mobility by dumping it into my body as kinetic force. Bursting forward short distances as I was able. Someone yelled at me not to but I thought to myself that they’d thank me later.


I think I ran into at attempted flank from a couple drones coming down the same alley. But regardless I ended up flanking the drones behind cover. Shooting some and knifing others. Using my energy to give me a mobility and speed advantage for surprise and evasion. The details of this first fight are super fuzzy so that's all I can really remember. I don’t remember specifically anymore but I think I got simultaneously scolded and thanked for doing what I did. Starting what would become my new role in the group as the distraction/flanker as my energy got stronger.

Show contentWhat's bursting? What's magic?:

I’m only going to go into the basics of some of the magic because detail about how all this works is a book in and of itself. The short version is that joules are joules, physics doesn’t care where they came from. Likewise the short version of “bursting” or “dashing” is balling up a bunch of energy and then dumping it into your body all at once as kinetic force. Suddenly your body now just has that amount of kinetic energy and acts predictably. Resulting in me flying in sudden spurts and bursts in whatever direction I want. If you’ve ever seen videos of UFO’s accelerating to ridiculous speeds in microseconds and turning at right angles that’s pretty much what bursting looks like if you have enough energy for it. I would typically try to zigzag all over the place so no one could target me properly.

Standard practice went like this: As everyone else got into a defensive position, I would burst around, usually through an alley and come in from the side or behind. Or sometimes straight at the drones depending on distance, cover and other factors. As soon as my magic got strong enough for me to really move I ditched the rifle they’d given me and instead took only a pistol and about 6 knives out. I focused pretty much everything I had into speed and mobility, with a little set aside for shielding just in case. I wasn’t going to take a bullet if I didn’t have to. My job was to get in amongst the drones and cause chaos. Forcing the drones to make the choice between continuing to focus on the soldiers and get killed by me, or turn to target me and get shot by the soldiers who can now peek out of cover safely. I started referring to my energy as “Ectoplasma” half jokingly.


Echo constantly provided tactical support, helping with strategy and targeting, acting as a second pass on all of my senses. Paying attention to things that I couldn’t at the time. Doing things like highlighting things in my vision which in “the past” was said to be via stimulating my brain to create what was effectively a useful hallucination. Creating a sort of HUD for me. We’ve worked together a long time, I sometimes affectionately refer to her as “the little voice in my head that tells me to kill people.”

Show contentOther implementation of bursting:

The technique behind bursting can and was applied many different ways with little or no modification. Funnel energy into a knife blade and hold it there inert until it touches something, then it transfers like a static shock, resulting in cuts or stabs that are far “sharper” or more powerful than normal. Throw a knife with the energy tuned to a target energy and it will be incredibly accurate. Use it with your arms, wrists and a gun and let the energy magnetically pull them towards a target for easy, visionless aiming. Use energy to absorb the recoil too. Keep it in a tight but inert field around yourself or absorbed in the skin and provided you have enough if it concentrated per area it will deflect bullets. Getting a little more complex, wrap a bunch of partitioned energy around a chambered bullet, set a target for it, set some to nullify impact and orient to target when disturbed, set some to propel towards target, dump the remainder, if any, into target as raw force on disruption. Shoot a wall and have the bullet bounce back into a target’s head to get around their riot shield. Or you could get really, really good at billiards. You can go further and start chaining all this together but I’ve said enough.


As I was writing this section I couldn’t help but be reminded of something Dreamsoap said, that it’s really the skeptics who believe in magic. Because the mechanics underneath all of this are quite a lot more complicated than I’m making it sound. There is no effect that I know of that is literally as simple as snapping your fingers and things happen. Yes, technically, you can get it to that point. But much like with programming there’s a LOT going on to make it happen that you don’t see. As long as you have the energy and know how to apply it there is literally nothing you cannot do. I don’t care that sounds fantastical to someone, I know that it’s incredibly mundane. Magic at its core is just transferring energy to various things in various forms for various effects and that’s it.

The soldiers had a lot of stress because they were trying to balance a lot of scheduling and they did a pretty good job at it in my opinion. Scheduling rest and sleep time, who would go on what missions. In the beginning everyone was more or less lumped into one group. Soldiers and “recruits” together. For awhile we just couldn’t go look for Nadia, her drones were relentless and the civilians just couldn’t do the job. They honestly seemed like feinting goats half the time. The sheer difference in effectiveness between the soldiers and them was kind of astounding. This wasn’t true for everyone, some of them took to their roles rather well, but for the most part civilians had a very high casualty rate for their first few missions. There really wasn’t too much that I or anyone could do about it. But given they were forced into this it’s not surprising.


One guy, who I’ll call Jason because I don’t remember his name, did surprisingly well. He started to get to the point where he was practically one of the soldiers and he was a regular on missions. Then one day he died and I wasn’t very happy about it. He was either the guy who was crying on his cot that first day or someone we found early on and the crying guy was someone who died on their first outing. I don’t remember.


We had one if not two scientists who had been part of the program and escaped. If we had two, one of them died at one point. In any case, his job was to do daily blood tests on everyone including himself to check for signs of infection. He had his little area with lab equipment that only he knew how to use which kinda freaked me out because I always had in the back of my mind the idea that if he got infected it was possible that Nadia could make him hide it because no one else knew how to do the blood tests.


I, luckily, was able to purge other peoples infections and harden their systems against it the same way I did to myself. Which at some point gave me the idea to start developing a counter virus that I was going to call the Lyssa Virus that was meant to act as a sort of vaccine against Nadia’s virus and spread similar to how hers did. I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t go through with it but I know it was because I had determined that it had a decent chance of actually making things much worse but I can’t remember why.


In the beginning all we really could do was supply runs. Which were literally things like going to a grocery store. There was actually a lot of things that I didn’t realize are important supplies that make total sense when you think about it, a lot them were sanitation things. Like garbage bags, tampons for the girls, toilet paper, coffee, etc. It’s just stuff I’ve never really thought about so it’s kinda funny in hindsight. My idea of survival supplies were very limited to just food, water, shelter but obviously sanitation and organization are actually just as important.


If I remember correctly I was part of a group who’s list included a broom and I thought “ohhhhhh yeaaaaaahhhhhhhh.... sweeping’s a thing.” we picked up one of those flat ones with the rubbery bristles.


In terms of food it wasn’t like they’d necessarily buy ingredients because we didn’t really have a big kitchen half the time. We’d have, like, a microwave and a hotplate. The places we had for safe houses weren’t apartments, they were repurposed industrial or small office buildings. So we rarely if ever had even an oven from what I remember so a lot of food was boxed, premade stuff. Also I think for convenience and efficiency. Their money came from their organization. As did a lot of our military equipment. We, ironically, didn’t have to worry all that much about weapons and ammo because they had channels that they could use to get some of that to us. At least for awhile. We won some of our firefights literally because Nadia’s drones would have pistols and we’d have assault rifles. I know they did send us food, like MRE’s, but not very much or often from what I remember.


The next cohesive memory that I have is from that initial safe house. I got woken up by one of the soldiers at 2am and called into this little room they were using as an office. It had a simple desk with papers strewn about, a computer, a white landline phone and a desk lamp. The guy sitting at the desk got off the phone with someone. Basically they told me that some civilian out there had gone off their “pattern”. They had a system that could track and log GPS data from peoples cell phones even if the phone was off. From this they built a heuristic database that linked the phone (and other things) to the people who owned them which could track a persons typical movement patterns. This person, a young woman, was wandering in the direction of our safe house. alone at 2am. They confirmed it was her via the CCTV cameras in the city and facial recognition software. It really, really looked like it could be one of Nadia’s drones trying to locate the safe house.


Naturally they were all freaking out a bit about what to do about it. Saying the obvious solution was to kill her, I argued with them gong “Oh yeah just kill one of her drones that’s searching for us, that’s not going to be suspicious at all.” I told them that they especially can’t do it because Nadia’s been finding them through their own psychic waves. When they asked me how I knew that I said it’s because I’m doing the same thing. I could identify drones from their energy signature. Something they apparently didn’t realize, I had been shielding my energy so she couldn’t track me as easily. But rightfully they pointed out that they couldn’t just leave her alone to keep searching since she’d eventually find us. One guy ordered me to go kill the woman since I can cloak myself and I spat back at him “When the fuck did I agree to take orders from you?”


It really shouldn’t need to be said that, despite the situation I was in working with these people, I really didn’t like them. I found a lot of them to be very assholish. They seemed to have this attitude sometimes like they were just in charge and you had to deal with it. The one guy here routinely used intimidation tactics on people. From my perspective, I was helping them but I wasn’t and would never be one of them. I understood how severe and dangerous the situation was, but these people had been involved in some horrific shit. The only reason I was working with them and not Nadia is because they weren’t repeatedly trying to kill me or slowly enslaving the entire fucking planet. It was just the lesser of two evils.


We argued back and forth for a bit that it’s not as simple as just sending me out there. If that drone gets killed at all it’s enough reason for Nadia to think she was on the right track and send more. We contemplated just leaving it alone and hoping it wanders away. But since it could pick up peoples energy, it could detect people from a larger distance and through walls. So all it had to do was get close enough to start picking up that someone familiar is around. Killing it before it got anywhere near us was the only surefire way to be safe. But if it’s going to die it needed to look like something completely unrelated to us. I obviously had to be the one to do it since I was the only one who could mask their energy signature.


I dressed up as a homeless guy and tried to make it seem like a drunk mugging as I stabbed her to death, hoping Nadia would believe it. Being that close I could kinda feel how Nadia felt, getting the sense that she believed it but was a little surprised when it happened. In any case, a horde of drones never showed up so that kinda spoke for itself.


We got in a number of skirmishes with drones in public. I remember fights having three stages. The first was when there were a bunch of actual civilians around, Nadia would intersperse the drones among them, carrying concealed weapons, usually handguns. And use the crowd to launch an ambush on us if she identified us. Naturally causing a mass panic and chaos. The second stage was when all the real civilians had run away making it easier to pick out the drones. If the fighting lasted more than a few minutes after that, there would be a third stage which I thought of as the “smokey” stage. Thin wispy smoke, probably from all the gunfire, would permeate the area. If it lasted much beyond that a swat team would show up but that was rare.


I thought about whether the people that Nadia had taken over were still in their bodies somehow, I couldn’t feel anything but her energy, I knew it was possible they were still in there and her energy was just drowning out any signature they might’ve had. But I didn’t have any time to really worry about it. From my perspective it didn’t matter either way, they were trying to kill us, and that’s that mattered. In my mind they were already dead.


Over time as my abilities got stronger and stronger I started to be able to channel some of my energy through the knives to create a blade of energy on top of them, extending their range and cutting power dramatically. Using a method somewhat similar to what I did in the Mothers Day Incident except not something that I had to pull out on instinct in half a second or die but something that I had a decent amount of time to design, practice and refine. Using the blades of the knives as a mould to form the energy around to keep the overall blade shape. If you’re thinking of a lightsaber or beamsaber that’s pretty much what it was. Except it cut with condensed energy vibrating at ridiculous frequencies like a liquid chainsaw, not heat.


Generally I’d try to only generate the blade during a strike rather than just having it active all the time. Partly because it made countering hard since it was hard to tell when I’d strike and from what range. But also because they glowed blue and white which would make me stand out more than I wanted. There was a little risk in this since I needed the blade to be fully formed and solidified by the time I made contact and if it wasn’t the cut would be less effective. Whereas if I had a blade out already it’d be guaranteed to be completely solid.


I remember one time before entering a fight I uncharacteristically took out a couple knives and generated blades on them first. There were couple guys behind me and I couldn’t help but think that it probably looked kinda cool. Then I leapt off into the fray.


I remember trying to be very aware of my own patterns. Knowing that if I did the same things too many times Nadia would pick up on it and do something to counter me. So when I’d flank I would try to randomize my direction and method to a degree. Typically I would try to circle around the block, find an alley, and head in that way. But I would try to break left as much as right, even though my instinctual preference was right. Nadia would also try to send her own flankers and sometimes I’d run into them en route.


One time, when I broke right to head around the block. I headed down an alley like normal. This alley turned left, continued for a few meters and then exited into a sort of open plaza thing between buildings with a pedway on the other side. As I turned left down the shorter arm I could see maybe 2 drones who seemed to be waiting in the plaza, on the other end I think, which wasn’t much of a problem for me. But as I burst out from the mouth of the alley several more came into view all around me, I think 6 in total. All of them positioned into a very good concave formation spread far apart to surround me. One on the open pedway bridge, one on the stairs platform up to it, and the rest on ground level. They had all been hidden from sight by the narrow alley walls so that I could only see a couple of the drones until I got into the plaza and it was too late and I think their energy might’ve been lowered as well but I can’t remember. I’m incredibly sure that this was a deliberately placed ambush because it was so well designed.


When I remember what I did to get out of it I’m kind of amazed because I don’t think I could pull the same thing off today. What I remember was slowing my thoughts down and bursting in a zig zag pattern straight at one drone on the ground in front of me. One the first zig, which I think was to the left, I threw, I think, both of the knives I was holding. Targeting two different drones, intending to at least stagger them. Then, unholstering my pistol and another knife, zagged back to the right, shooting at someone else, I think one of the people on the pedway, and then slashing my main target. Killing or at least disabling them. All of which probably happened in the span of 2-3 seconds real time. Perceptually for me it was more like 10-15 seconds. I remember that opening set feeling so mentally taxing, really pushed me to my limit. Afterwards I more or less rinsed and repeated, staggering some people while taking down others to try to keep from having to deal with more than one or two at a time, until they were all gone. Heading up and across the pedway to the main force I was trying to flank in the first place. The pedway connected to a sort of open patio with a set of glass doors that went into the building the pedway connected to. I think I took out the person on the pedway last and then there was at least one more on that patio area.


A female drone armed with a pistol that I knew had the time to aim and get a shot off at me while I finished dealing with the last person. I could feel the kinetic energy of things so I knew that taking the hit while bursting straight for her would be more energy efficient than doing a second burst and that my shield could take it. it’d been strong enough for a few days now but I’d always refrained from doing this up to that point because instinct says that you shouldn’t let someone shoot you. But this time I made myself go with my logic and burst right at her. The round bounced harmlessly off the shield as I closed the distance, stabbing her in the left jugular and then again in the right side/kidney/lung area with my other hand.

Show contentReabsorption, efficiency, and decision making:

You have to keep in mind a burst means dumping enough energy into my body to propel what was probably 200lbs at at least 10-20 meters a second. Compare that to a whatever calibre pistol round that probably only weighs a few grams travelling at, I dunno, a few hundred meters a second and one of these things has a lot more energy behind it than the other. And this decision of “do I dodge or not” has to be made in a split second. And it matters because if you run out of energy or you overtax your body with it you are fucked because now you don’t have it if you really need it. For example, If you put everything into one move, and you miss, good luck dodging or blocking their counter. So you really need to be smart and use energy efficiently and sparingly.


The shield was more energy efficient not because I necessarily had to pay the energy cost of taking the hit from the bullet but because I likely had to pay no cost at all. See, the shield had to be both dense and hard enough to take the hit. Which it was. But if it’s dense and hard enough the bullet won’t actually chip off any of it’s energy because the bonds are too strong. Start thinking standard material tensile strength here. If the shield is strong enough the bullet would bounce off it completely and the energy cost to me for taking that hit would be effectively zero. Furthermore bursting can be made more efficient by reabsorbing the kinetic energy back into myself after I get wherever I wanna go which stops my motion because, of course, I don’t have any kinetic energy left in my body. Then I can reapply it to another burst. Meaning that I’m actually only paying the cost of wind resistance depending how skilled I am at reabsorption. Even so, the cost of that was still more than the cost of recharging the shield.

This moment is so memorable for me because it’s the first time during Loderunner that I went against my instincts like that. Same with the plaza area with the pedway because it was so intense, likely lasting less than a minute. I probably would’ve died if Echo wasn’t there. It’s one of the areas I’d be curious to look for on google maps, if it exists, and if this happened in Alpharetta because we did move cities a couple times but I can’t remember when or where anymore. I don’t know for sure but I think I got the sense at the time that that ambush was both the result of me becoming too predictable but also because Nadia and my’s talks were starting to not go so well.


I continued to fight Nadia’s virus, slowly but surely winning. It got worse before it got better, still spreading, just slower and slower until it started receding. Nadia would occasionally appear to me as an apparition, especially when I was alone. In hindsight she may have induced dreams too. I assumed it was via the infection. I don’t remember if I ever found out if anyone else could see her too. I don’t remember if I told anyone about it either. We’d talk about various things. Much like the history of Nadia and the whole situation, I no longer remember exactly when and in what talk we discussed what things let alone what was said word for word. So I’ll try to distill the gist of it here.


Nadia was typically very calm and confident. She constantly tried to get me on her side in one way or another, not wanting to harm me if she didn’t have to but having no problems killing me if I refused. Best as I remember she was surprised and disappointed that I was working with the blackops group. One time stating that “that’s not what you’re here for” or “that’s not why I brought you here” if I remember correctly. I told her the only reason I was working with them was because she was trying to kill me and they weren’t. I wasn’t allied with them, I didn’t even like them. She said that the only reason she was attacking me was because I was helping them and if I’d leave them she’d stop attacking me. She said she wanted revenge on them for what they did to her. I did try to say that I sympathized with her but I didn’t trust her, saying that she could just be trying to separate me from them so that I’d be easier to kill. She said she wouldn’t do that. But I pointed out that regardless of what she said she still could do that. Even if she was telling the truth and left me alone she could just keep possessing people after killing the blackops group and decide at any point afterwards to kill me and there’d be nothing I or anyone else could do about it. I’d need some kind of assurance if I was going to expose myself like that. I asked if she, for example, would be willing to stop possessing random people since they’re not part of her revenge. She said she wouldn’t. I chided her that she’s probably just mad because we’re something that actually poses a threat to her then.


She, understandably, had an immense amount of rage and hatred for the blackops group. But at the same time, over time, I remember feeling like she was haughty and narcissistic with a very condescending view of others in general. Something that went beyond her very justifiable feelings of vengeance. And it slowly made me start responding to her sarcastically, mocking her. Something she started doing back to me as well. Later she’d sometimes just show up to say things to the effect of ‘join me or die’ because ‘you’re never going to win anyways’. As much as that might sound very “villainy”, generic and even desperate on her end, it was pretty demoralized a couple times when things were really not going well for us and she seemed to know she was rubbing it in. I remember one of these being when I was leaving a building. I think we had been searching it maybe. She just appeared to the side of the open doorway leading outside as I was walking towards it and snarked something like that as I passed.


During one of these talks she tried asking or telling me something in an uncharacteristically sombre tone, very different to how she’d been up to that point, both in previous talks and even earlier on in that one. But because of how things had gone with her up to that point I just cut her off, snapping something sarcastic at her and it seemed like after that she never sounded like that again. I do very much wonder if during that one talk, had I not done that, if it would’ve been possible to maybe steer her towards a less violent solution like I’d been trying to do before. Because it seemed like maybe, just for that one little bit, she might’ve been open to it. And it’s something that still haunts me.


These talks seemed to more or less stop after I’d finally purged all traces of her virus from my system, which took quite awhile.


We eventually had enough recruits that we could have two full teams running at any given time with people also resting. Which sounds good until you remember how we were getting those recruits and what that meant. I was considered sort of a linchpin of all this but I couldn’t be run on both teams because I needed rest too. So for example they’d have situations where they needed to do scout runs and supply runs but they felt that I had to be there for both to ensure success. So they had to try to schedule it so that I could rest and that they wouldn’t run out of whatever supplies or lose their chance chasing up a lead or whatever. It was very difficult and stressful for them and I don’t blame them. I remember being tired and sore pretty much all the time even though I was also getting consistently stronger.


I remember lots of stress headaches. As I got stronger and stronger it became more obvious just how strategically important I was to them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it got to the point where they were only alive because of me. I was very stressed about trying to protect everyone but I also felt some pride about it too. Eventually they did a test run where they sent just veteran recruits led by maybe one or two soldiers out on a supply run without me. And it succeeded! After that they felt confident enough to start partitioning the teams so that I would almost exclusively work with a team of only soldiers chasing leads on Nadia. I think this was actually the second time they'd tried it, the first being maybe a week and a half or more earlier and got wiped out or close to it which scared them.


Over time Nadia developed a habit of taking drones, walking them into gun stores which she also controlled, arming them, and sending them at us. We know because we saw it happen at least once. I can’t remember if it was security camera footage that we’d gotten somehow or if it was watching a group enter a gun store and then come out magically heavily armed after, probably both. One of the bigger issues later on was she would take people in heavy riot armour and have them run at us holding live grenades, bear tackle someone to the ground and then explode.


Another cohesive memory happened on the way back to the safe house. at night. I was in a truck with a 52 year old retired cop who’s name may have been Bill. That’s what I’m gonna call him anyways. Because of my ability to sense Nadia’s drones at increasing distances I acted as sort of a radar system for vehicle convoys to make sure none were following us. Today some were and we were figuring out what to do about it. There was an overpass somewhat near our safe house that had had construction happening on it for the last couple days and they had these big, heavy triangular concrete barrier slab things set up around the site.


We figured we’d take that overpass and if the barricades were still there we’d set up an ambush because its late, no workers should be there, and it’s a good defensive position. On the way Bill and I had the radio on and the news report was about, well, us. Referring to us a a notorious gang that called themselves the “Loderunners” who were engaged in a war with a rival gang called the “Scorpios” or something like that. Bill laughed at that and when I asked why he said it’s a reference to something, a movie I think, “before my time.” And that’s how this experience got its name.


At the time I believed It was plainly obvious that Nadia has assimilated the anchors because we didn’t call ourselves anything let alone be a gang and it’s not like her drones were gang members although that’s what this report was directly claiming so I assumed this was propaganda put out to the still unassimilated public by her so they would inadvertently help her by calling in tips to the police and etc about us.


Sure enough, just on the other side of the peak of the overpass the barricades were still there and no one was around. The roads in general were just empty at least for the moment. It was a four lane overpass if I remember correctly and the two lanes going the other direction from us were under repair or something. So we parked our 2-3 vehicles on the other side to block the road for when Nadia’s vehicles came. When we stopped to get out, Bill put his hand on my shoulder and thanked me for helping them. Just in general, with everything.


We got out and went behind the barricades. Two vans loaded with drones appeared on the peak of the overpass not too long after and screeched to a stop. I remember how glaring their headlights were even though they pointed off to my left. Our group immediately started shooting them before they even had time to get drones out of the vans. One of the soldiers tapped me on my shoulder, silently indicating for me not to get involved. I assume he wanted Nadia to believe that I wasn’t with this group but regardless I obeyed. I ducked behind the barricades and just waited.


I remember listening and feeling the thunks of bullets hitting the barricade I was behind, it seemed far more like concealment than cover to me. Some of the thunks were much deeper than others, and I’d shuffle my body to parts that I hadn’t heard get hit yet or had previously had hits that sounded more shallow. We won and commandeered the somewhat shot up vans for ourselves. Now I can’t see one of those barricades in real life without remembering this ambush. It’s another place I’d be interested in looking up on google maps if I could.


I went on a number of scout missions. We’d get calls from other parts of the organization who would tell us various leads to check because of strange eyewitness reports or other things like that. Only one of which I remember in any decent detail anymore which was checking out a certain convenience store. We wouldn’t just roll up in front of one of these places and storm it. Our standard MO for this and many other missions including supply runs for the most part if I remember was to park something like 4-6 non-linear blocks away and walk to our destination(s) separately. The idea being to obfuscate everything from where we came from, where we were going, that we were even there, what we were doing, etc. This was no different. We didn’t even approach the store after we sighted it for I don’t even know how long. Probably an hour.


We encircled it in an incredibly wide arc. Behind it was an empty dirt field thing and a set of train tracks further off and one guy was there keeping an eye on the back. We’d, very slowly, get a little closer and a little closer. Constantly making sure that no one was in the windows and there were no visible traps or explosives. We tried not to act in any overtly suspicious way while doing all this which was difficult. Eventually we got to the front door and went inside very quickly, smoothly and quietly with guns drawn. I may have gone in first or at least was one of the first because I was a melee specialist and it was very close quarters in there so if there was any ambush I had a better chance of dealing with it compared to everyone else. There were no lights on or anything which made the place really creepy. There was dust in the air and the only light was the sunlight coming in through the door which had a window on it. There were a few items on the shelves from what I remember. The place wasn’t very big. I don’t remember if there was an ambush but it was very much on my mind. She wasn’t there, the place was totally deserted. It’s another place I’d be interested in looking up on google maps.


She wasn’t anywhere we ever looked. The only other two scout missions that I still remember were one apartment building where we thought she was in one of the suites on something that wasn’t the ground or top floor. The building wasn’t that tall, maybe 6 floors at most, very run down inside and out from what I remember. She wasn’t there though there may have been an apparition but I don’t remember anymore. I really hated that apartment but I don’t remember why. Maybe because it made me feel really vulnerable being inside it or an apparition. The last one I remember was this mission where they were like “here’s this address, we don’t even know what’s there, have fun.” and it was like a power substation by the river or lake or whatever with no real buildings in it. Just transformers and stuff. There were more than this I just don’t remember them enough to write down.


At some point we travelled west to another state chasing leads on Nadia, I’m pretty sure we had moved to another city in Georgia before this but I just can’t remember. I only remember this move. We crossed more than one state line but I cannot remember where we ended up. I keep thinking it was Utah but I just don’t know. We did pretty much the same things there. Some of the above may have happened there.

Part 2

It was there where an incredibly pivotal fight happened. I don’t remember the lead up to it but I know that two guys who may have been part of Nadia’s original escort that she’d possessed showed up somewhere and she either channelled a huge amount of her energy through them or they had that amount of energy themselves. One of them sprouted these fucking poltergeist tentacles and the other had a bubble shield. These things were plainly visible, they were clear like glass and stupidly powerful. I don’t remember for sure but I think the tentacle one used them to be mobile on the level that I was. I do know that I killed it first, but I just can’t remember if it even really attacked that much. It’s entirely possible that the reason I don’t remember is because I spent a huge amount of energy fighting it. Sudden, large drains of energy are very strongly correlated with memory loss for anything around the time of the drain. All I have is a sense that I think it may have been ridiculously fast like me. I do know that I had periods where I’d worry about Nadia coming out with something fast and melee specialized to counter me and I wonder if that was because of this guy.


The other guy didn’t have a weapon from what I remember. I could be wrong, I know he was dangerous but I can’t remember why. I do know that his shield was so fucking strong that nothing we had could pierce it. I’m pretty sure we could’ve shot him with an anti tank RPG and it wouldn’t’ve broken through. In fact, we may have actually done that because we did have one of those and I just don’t fully remember. Nadia showed up as an apparition during this fight which is how I learned for certain that her apparitions were not tied to me being infected. The infection was long gone by that point. Though with it being so hectic I still don’t know if other people could see her. She basically just showed up to mock us/me and she may have told us/me that these two were members of her original escort but I don’t remember.


The only thing that disrupted his shield at all was my energy. I remember slashing at it as a test and the shield would bubble kind of. It reminds me of the fizz from pop in the way that they appear and disappear really quick and move fast but bigger bubbles and with some long sparks like static shocks that were green and yellow I think. I remember I did a death from above burst right down at him intending to stab him right in the fucking neck and even that wasn’t enough to break through the shield. It shoved the energy blade right back into the knife until it was just the highly condensed sheath around the physical blade that was left. I put so much energy into that that if I hadn’t been protecting my body from the shock I would’ve shattered my arm guaranteed and possibly ripped it off.


I landed on his shield and just shoved my arm through it with raw force. Using my energy to “boil” his to break the surface tension and get my arm through. Shoving my knife right into the side of his neck. I’m pretty sure that this fight was the reason we left the cities entirely and lived in tents in the desert. Up until that point all of us could work as a team. But I was the only person who could deal with those two. On top of that there were just more and more and more drones all the time And Nadia was getting more brazen with them. Not caring, or maybe not needing, to hide her activities from the public anymore. The cities were just getting too dangerous overall. Those two appearing were the final straw I think.


We were out of ideas, Nadia could be anywhere, and as more and more people got possessed it was becoming harder to get any sort of reliable information. I suggested letting Echo loose to search for anything on Nadia’s whereabouts. I don’t remember if it was her idea or mine. It may actually have been the first time they’d even know Echo existed but something tells me it wasn’t. I think she’d handled the radio for me a few times in the past so they would’ve heard her voice and known she existed. That’s normally how it goes with us.


It was all we could really do. She could hop between people, searching their memories, scouring the internet, getting access to things she shouldn’t. Information analysis and retrieval is her thing. It was the best bet we had even if it meant me losing her tactical support, which had saved me more than once by that point. They agreed and we set up a regular check in interval with Echo at a nearby small town to come and update us on what she’d found.


I asked her if she was okay with it because this was kinda the worst case scenario for her given Nadia’s possession abilities. She told me she’d be fine and to worry about myself. I asked her about what happens if I end up somehow “leaving” while she’s not there. She more or less said that she was only there because I was there and that she could leave anytime, she wasn’t bound like I was. And then she was off.


In the meantime we really didn’t have much else to do other than wait and make sure no one found us. I figured, if those psionic drones were any indication of what we might have to deal with on a regular basis in the future, I needed a technique specifically designed to take them out. Though if Nadia had the ability to mass deploy drones like that, we were probably fucked. I was the only one who could deal with those shields so I needed something that could deal with them in one shot, open them up so that everyone else could hit them too.


I’d been able to boil his shield to stab him, sure. But my energy was discarded immediately and he would fight to stabilize his shield forcing me to keep expending energy to keep it boiling. I needed that shield to stay “boiled” for as long as possible. I worked on making my energy reactively bind to the energy of a shield instead of going inert so that it would keep a little of it in that unstable state until my target forcibly got rid of it. The idea was that it should dissolve the shield kinda like an acid.


I’d also gotten to the point where I felt like I could spare some energy for ranged attack. Up to that point I’d at most thrown a few short ranged energy arcs with my knives. Ranged attacks can be horrendously expensive techniques because once the energy is away, it’s gone. There’s no way to reabsorb anything most of the time.

Show contentRanged techniques, kinetic bolts and beams:

The two most basic forms of ranged attacks are kinetic bolts and beams. A bolt is basically balling up a bunch of energy and throwing it at someone as one package. A beam is more like hosing someone with a continuous stream of energy.


Bolts are obviously far less expensive than beams. Beams actually can just be a bolt that you release over time so it stretches out the energy. But generally speaking you can think of the energy costs as a single package for a bolt vs energy over time for a beam.


Bolts are constructed pretty much the same way as the blades are except they usually also have a membrane around them to help them stay together after you let go of them so they can actually hit a target and do damage at range. Ranged techniques are a lot hard for me to explain unless you already have some understanding of how to manipulate energy yourself. So much of magic in general just become feeling based. I have always tried very hard to understand the underlying mechanics behind what I do but after awhile it just seems way to complex to be able to explain to someone who’s never done it and expect them to understand. And like with everything there’s a billion different ways to do it so I don’t know what other explanation I can give.


Even though I didn’t originally intend on going into magic explanations in this write up I kinda have anyways because teaching this stuff is really what I want to do. If nothing else I hope people have noticed that everything builds off of each other to get more and more and more complex.

I decided I’d mix the acid energy I was working on with the bolt and make that my technique. I started designing a bolt with a “4 sided knot” core. Which was pretty advanced and ambitious for what I could do at the time in Loderunner. That core does this fancy thing I like to call “double induction” where the energy twists up and then grinds against itself in the middle and the way it ricochets stirs up the ambient or null energy of the universe because it can’t ricochet in 3d space anymore because that’s all covered so some of it instead ricochet’s on another axis. Some of that will stimulate the ambient energy, which then can get dragged into your flow of energy kinda like debris. Which means that you can use a lot less energy and still get a large effect. It’s one of the many, may efficiency hacks of magic. Though one that’s only really useful for simple techniques like kinetic beams and bolts since you have no direct control of that extra energy, it’s just along for the ride.


Each day I’d wake up in my tent, go out away from the camp, not so far away that they couldn’t see me, bu not so close that they were anywhere nearby, and trained. I preferred the lack of distraction. Working first on just getting the ball to form and stabilize. Then I spent a lot of time shooting it at rocks. It was a delicate balancing act. I had to use enough energy that I was actually working out for proper training but not so much energy that if we got attacked suddenly I was too exhausted to help out effectively. I also tried to be mindful of how much noise I was making because I was concerned that the echo of exploding rocks might somehow tip off Nadia to our location. There was really only one time that I launched a truly decent strength bolt just because I wanted to and blew up a rock.


I never named this technique. I never really needed to. It wasn’t complex enough in my mind to need one. To this day I just call it the “4 sided knot” technique. 

Show contentRituals, name, and the Salamanca:

As childish as this may sound the concept of yelling out the name of an attack while performing it is a real thing that really does happen and works. The reason is that names can act a mnemonic devices and since magic is all about the mind anything that helps you focus is good. So there really are verbal and somatic things that people will do to help them focus. But typically that’s only if something is complex enough that it requires that extra little bit of focus to get it done. It doesn’t have to be the name of the technique, but in my experience I tend to associate the incantation with the technique to the point that it, or some part of it, just becomes the name anyways.


There’s a whole lot of stuff involved in designing good incantations. Picking syllables that correspond to certain stages in the technique. Whether you use your native language, an existing foreign language or nonsense words. Whether you use words that are literal, metaphorical or unassociated with your technique. Whether you try to condense it into one or two words or have entire phrases or even poems or prayers. It all depends, not just on the technique itself, but on the person using it. It’s a very personal, emotional process. Rituals are meant to evoke some kind of emotion in the user because it’s that feeling that really casts the spell and defines what it is. Sometimes it feels like the techniques tell you their names.


Likewise with somatic components. Some of them have mechanical reasons for being the way they are depending what the technique is but others are pure ritual. With practice ritual of any type becomes unnecessary as techniques become instinctual. Though I find that if I’m really, really mad I will still do them for certain techniques. I feel pent up and horrible, like all the energy can’t get out, if I don’t.


What I really wish I could’ve developed is the Salamanca, a technique Gold taught me a long, long time ago. I actually have a pretty strong emotional attachment to it. She told me that when she originally developed it what it does and how it does it was considered simply impossible to do with energy. But then she did it and got a good deal of renown for it so I always feel kinda proud of that. She told me that the name comes from a certain mythology where the Salamanca was an evil, red “devouring serpent” which is very appropriate given what a Salamanca looks like, sounds like, and does to things it hits. I don’t know what culture this mythology comes from, it’s quite possible it doesn’t exist here, but that’s what it’s named after. I’ve also since learned that Salamanca is a city and province in Spain which somehow seems fitting. I won’t go into technical detail about the Salamanca because I think of it as a sort of trade or “family” secret.


I remember when Gold taught me the Salamanca I couldn’t do it because it was just too complex, so many things that had to be perfectly balanced in order for it to do what it does. So she split it into three techniques to help me learn it in stages. Naming the first two Midae and Somou respectively. And to this day if I’m really angry or I’m doing what I consider a fully charged Salamanca I will still say “Midae Somou Salamanca” because it’s just been ingrained in me for so long to do it that way that it’s just instinctual.

The desert was interesting. It wasn’t really sand it was a whole bunch of lose tan coloured rock with a distinct light reddish tint to it. There were also these shrubs everywhere, relatively short, hardy things that maybe got 4 feet tall from what was around us with small oval shaped waxy leaves. And clumps of this weird long grass. I have no idea what desert it was.


On our agreed upon interval, whatever it was, we’d go meet Echo on the outskirts of the nearest small town in this little shack that I think had a computer in it or something. She’d give me any information she had before heading out again. There was sometimes people walking around the sidewalks nearby, at first I remember thinking they were regular civilians, but over time I started feeling Nadia’s energy coming from them instead. They never noticed us, but those meetings were always a bit harrowing. We were pretty exposed out in the desert, if Nadia ever found out where we were it’d be very easy for her to mass a huge force to overwhelm us without any need to care about possible public reaction. Assuming there was much of a public left.


Eventually I felt my technique was good enough to use if I had to, though It wasn’t perfect by any means. I’d realized that the acid energy I was working on really didn’t need to be tied just to that technique, it was just a reactive energy that I could apply to literally anything, so I did. I worked on changing my habits so that all my energy had that reactive component. But I didn’t get much time for it.


After about 2 weeks in total Echo found out where Nadia was. To everyone’s surprise she was back at the facility where it all started. And Mikael was still there too. Up till this point we all assumed that she wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Mikael because of his ability to lock her down. But in hindsight I think it makes sense. He was probably the only friend she ever had, even if they couldn’t be in the same room together, or talk or anything, maybe she felt more comfortable just being there with him. Maybe feeling like she was protecting him. At the same time that facility was probably the best strategic location she could’ve ever chosen. Pretty much no one knew it even existed let alone where it was.


Echo downloaded the memories of the few people who did into me. There were only 6 people in the entire world who knew the location, two shifts of helicopter pilots, and 2 other people who were high ranking officials of some sort. Everyone else that worked there or visited was always brought in in a way that obscured the location. The facility was very isolated, Set inside what may have been an old rock quarry or something, I’m not sure. It was like someone punched a chunk of rock out of the ground. The walls were completely vertical if not a bit ragged. But it was also surprisingly small, the size of a large department store or small warehouse, like a Wal-mart. It looked like it could very well have been designed to study a single subject. I have trouble believing that this pit was dug for the sole purpose of housing this facility because it would’ve been such a massive, expensive project on its own that I just can’t see it happening. But you never know.


The facility itself was suspended like a hundred meters off the canyon floor on 4 or 6 stilts which had cross supports at regular intervals that kinda remind me of the plastic rings that hold six packs of pop together. Except metal and thicker. The facility overhang them. It had a helicopter pad and a single large multi level building that was in either an L or T configuration. The smaller section was not as tall as the larger. There was a catwalk leading from the landing pad to a main door on the side of the large section and around the perimeter. There were 3 or 4 massive pipe like struts going from the sides of the facility into the rock walls around it.


The facility was clearly designed to prevent whatever was in it from escaping. The only way in or out was by helicopter. On the canyon ridge there was a checkpoint with a tower. In hindsight it might’ve been an ATC tower. There was a barracks or other decently large building on the other side of the canyon. A simple dirt road ringed the whole thing. There were defensive positions set up with sandbags though this could’ve easily been Nadia’s doing.


I pointed the location out on a paper map for them I think, I really, really wish I could remember it because I’d love to see if it’s a real place on google maps. Though if it is it’s guaranteed to be one of those places that google has to black out so there’s no way to confirm it. It was in the same desert we were, from what I remember. Which was kinda lucky but at the same time I think that’s part of why we chose that place for our camp. Even though we didn’t know the exact location of the facility.


The commander guy called in the few assets their organization could send. We were going to attack the facility. But it was going to take a little time for them to get to us. In the meantime Echo went back out to gather more information. I can’t remember if that was her choice or mine. I keep thinking that she said that while she was out she’d stumbled on other info that she wanted to chase up but couldn’t because she had to come back for our meeting time. Either way she went out. Though on a much shorter meeting interval that included coming back early if she found anything. The commander guy said that if the assets arrive before she gets back we’re just going without her because time is of the essence. I’m pretty sure they sent a recon team to scout out whatever they could. Maybe that’s how I learned about the sandbags.


The plan was relatively simple, 3 teams. One attacked the garrison on the ridge around the facility. Another acted as a commando unit and tried to breach from another side, or at the very least make it appear that way. They did have rappelling equipment and a solid way of how to get to the facility using one of those support struts. The third group was just me. I was to be equipped exactly like everyone else this time, Which meant a rifle, pistol, only one knife, body armour, a US military desert camo uniform, and a radio with an earpiece, and these sorta nifty fingerless gloves. I don’t know if I didn’t get a helmet or if I just lost it at some point. The intent being that Nadia was supposed to think I was mixed in with all the other soldiers somewhere and if I looked like the rest of them its be hard for her to find me since she couldn’t do it via energy sense.


While she was busy doing that I’d actually be off on my own, infiltrating the facility from another strut opposite the one the commando unit would use. Right around the back of the facility, totally opposite to where the main attack would be. I was alone to maximize my cloaking ability for however long I could. She might not sense me but she’d sense anyone near me and once one of her drones see’s me the ruse fails. But also because unlike anyone else I was capable of scaling the rock walls and actually getting to the facility quickly and easily. My job was to deal with Nadia. Find Mikael, get him to her alive, shut down her abilities, and when they were all gone, kill her. Besides, I was probably the only person who even had a chance of surviving against her, so who else was going to do it?


I remember not liking having a rifle and debating with them about it which I think went something like this:


Me - A rifle and its ammo is just a bunch of extra bulk and weight for me which is why I stopped using them as soon as my magic got strong enough. Rifles are accurate, mid to long range weapons. I am never fighting at those ranges. I need something lighter and more responsive which is why all I ever have is knives and a pistol.


Them - This won’t be happening in a dense urban environment. This is a flat, wide open desert with no cover so you absolutely will be fighting at those ranges. and since we want you to be able to blend in with everyone else you need to have one anyways.


Either way, I ended up taking a rifle. 


Unfortunately, the assets arrived before Echo did. They weren’t very much, only a few vehicles and a bunch more infantry. I assume they just gathered up whoever and whatever was left of the organization and shipped them to us but I don’t know. I did get the commander to agree to wait one more day for her but after that came and went he said we were just going.


I don’t remember a huge amount of the very start. I know I was mixed in with everyone else and I spent a bit of time like that before slipping away on my own at some point as per the plan. I remember being on the dirt road around the ridge, trying to stay hidden and creep towards a my infiltration point overtop of one of the struts. I remember it being weirdly peaceful because I was alone and it was quieter than when I was still with everyone else. I think there was actually a cactus there somewhere, a really tall one. I only remember running into a couple drones which I mainly tried to hide from. Though I do remember fighting, and I think there was a sniper. I know I saw the barracks building in the distance and thought they might be there. I remember a large truck at some point. I think I masked my energy to make it feel like I was just some random soldier. I think, maybe, I either used up all my ammo or my rifle jammed or broke or something and I had to get rid of it.


I intended to get onto one of the massive supports connected to the facility. I started climbing down the wall, sticking to it with energy. But that made me feel really vulnerable and it was taking a long time so I decided to just drop the last 20-30 meters because I knew I could easily take the landing. I made my way towards the facility but someone spotted me halfway so so much for stealth. Totally exposed on the strut I just sprinted and dashed the rest of the way. It connected near the helicopter pad area. There were some drones on top and underneath it. I got hit twice with buckshot, at least partially, and I may have taken a couple other hits because of how frantic it was. But my shield had no problem absorbing it, though with a recharge necessary afterwards. I took them out, taking a revolver, shotgun, and AK47 type thing off them. Though not all at once. There was a bunch of fighting that happened but I just can’t remember it in detail.


I would constantly ping the environment, feeling for any drones. At some point during this I remember lowering my shield a bit because I thought it might help me sense better and then a bullet whizzed right over my head and I was like “wow, I almost died.” And put the shield back up. There was this strange flying golf cart thing. It didn’t look anything like a golf cart but I don’t know what else to compare it to. It had two large thrusters on the sides kind of in the middle/back and two smaller ones near the front, All pointing down and able to swivel quite a bit to let it hover. completely open with no roof. One guy controlled it and another did their best to shoot down at me. But the cab area thing was really bulky so he couldn’t get a shot at me when they were above me so it kinda backfired on them.


I used the rifle to put a few single rounds into one of the large thrusters. It started smoking and it seemed like it must’ve started losing power and the pilot tried compensating because it at first rolled up on that side like he was giving it power and then it just dropped to that side and the whole thing just fell out of sight. After a few seconds there was a ridiculously loud, echoing squealing metal noise which I’m assuming was them hitting the ground and possibly exploding. It was really not fun to hear. I eventually ended up with only a shotgun by the end.


It’s not like a game, when you pick up a gun you don’t magically get all the ammo they were carrying with it. You get whatever is left in it because trying to grab extra ammo off their body is an easy way to get shot.


I remember is running on the catwalk towards the door into the facility and someone coming out of it with another of those AK47 esque rifles when I was just a few meters away. My heart fucking stopped. If either of my feet had been touching the ground I would’ve instinctually frozen and probably stumbled to a stop and that would’ve been it. My shield was good, but it could only take a few of those rounds at best. It’d probably only take a second to shatter it under full auto. If I’d focused the shield it’d just exhaust me and prevent me from evading which would probably kill me anyways.


Luckily I was mid stride so my mind snapped out it before I hit the ground. I kept my momentum and ran sideways up the wall, using my energy to help, jumped, slowed my thoughts down, twisted my body till it was upside down to get myself completely out of his arc of fire, pretty much touched the shotgun to the back and top of his head with just my right hand as I flipped over him and pulled the trigger. He had a helmet on but it didn’t really matter. Then as the gun flung back as if it was going to smack me in the face I hugged it to my chest and went with the force, continuing the twist until I was upright again, landed in a crouch facing the same way I was when I was running, pumped the shotgun and stood up. It’s dumb but I really do love how this probably looked really fucking cool even though it wasn’t meant to be. In my mind I was just trying to get out of his aim as quickly and completely as possible and this was just how it happened.


A couple other drones tried coming out that door but they were easy prey. I grabbed one of their rifles to replace the shotgun before heading inside. It wasn’t as bright as I thought it’d be. I think the floor was linoleum tile or something. It all looked kinda beige in the dim, uneven light. There was a short hallway from the door to a T intersection with a slightly more open foyer type area connecting them all. No one was around. There wasn’t anything interesting down the left hall from what I remember, it was very short and just a dead end. At the very end of the right hall there was an open doorway on the left side. I don’t think it had any doors, it was just a hole in the wall. On the back wall of the foyer there was this little room that had a sort of half hexagonal window thing. It had a door which had a window in it, then on each side of the door the walls were angled and they each had a window. And inside was Mikael. Safe and sound amazingly. Sitting in a robust brown motorized wheelchair hooked up with an IV drip of who knows what. 


I have two memories around here that are really strange to me. One was of me walking down the hall and it was like some creature tackled me from the side. And then it was like it never happened. Another was of this guy seemingly coming in in some exosuit, killing some drones, then taking his helmet off and either shooting himself or getting shot as if Nadia had made him do it. These things, as best I can tell, never happened. I still don’t know what they were, illusions or something. It’d be easy to say that “oh it’s just dream weirdness because that’s all this could possibly be” but I don’t think so.



I scouted out the area quickly and felt Nadia’s energy coming very strongly from that door at the end of the hall. Mikael's chair had a remote control which I used to wheel him out of the room and along with me. Slow;y, with the rifle aimed in front of me in case anything jumped out.


The hallway was a little dark, a small stretch that didn’t have it’s own light. Seeming to rely on the light from near Mikael's room area and the light coming from that door where Nadia was. Her energy seemed to overflow out of it. At least enough for me to feel. I parked Mikael a good few meters from the doorway on the left wall. Far enough away that he should be spared any collateral damage from the fight that was surely about to happen and hopefully far enough that Nadia wouldn’t notice him. But close enough that when she was exhausted I could quickly grab him and get him inside to lock her down. It felt very ominous walking up to that door, her energy got stronger and stronger with each step. I really didn’t know what to expect when I turned the corner.


Which I did without my rifle aimed, I chided myself for that instantly because walking in all casual like that could’ve so easily gotten me killed. I think I was getting tired and just not thinking right. It was a large, open room, probably in the area of 30X30 meters. Lots of tables and chairs filled it, some of them wooden, some not. In the far left corner there was a smaller enclosed rectangular room. The long side running along the left wall maybe 4-5 meters There was a windowed door of a similar style to the one for Mikael’s room on the short side facing me. The place looked like a cafeteria and that corner area must’ve been where you got food. The ceiling seemed almost as high, with lights around the perimeter at around the midway mark. I think there were lights in the ceiling too, big round ones in the center, but it’s hard to remember.


Nadia was backed against the far wall in the middle. Her energy filled the whole room. Thick enough to distort the light in a large radius from her. On the walls and ceiling the light and shadow seemed to ripple slowly like I was underwater.


There was simply no question which of us had more raw power. It was just like her two psi drone’s, just exponentially more of it. She had this smug grin on her face. I remember thinking to myself that it started with us and it would end with us too even though that’s technically innacurate. This “dream” started with just her and I talking alone, and now her and I were alone again, for what was probably going to be the final confrontation. Certainly what I was intending to make the final one. Somehow it seemed fitting. My gun was going to be useless, even if I could hit her, killing her before wheeling Mikael in was out of the question, and I had very limited ammo, so I slung it on my back. Getting close to her her was going to be unfathomably dangerous, as her energy clearly got stronger the closer it was to her. Given that, even passively, it was strong enough to bend light up to halfway across the room towards me on the ceiling, I was going to have to keep my distance. With all the furniture in the room her strategy was pretty obvious. Or maybe there was no strategy and she just found herself cornered there.


In hindsight, I wonder if she anticipated that it would come down to a one on one between her and me. It wouldn’t surprise me, who else was going to even stand a chance? It looked like she set herself up to counter me specifically. I’d always been a nimble skirmisher, closing distances quickly and using hit and run tactics. I had no ranged capabilities of my own and used the environment to my advantage. That’s what she would’ve seen throughout our various engagements. So backing herself against the wall in a wide area with no cover and a lot of furniture between us that she could undoubtedly throw at me or otherwise manipulate for attack and defence was the perfect hard counter to me. Granted I suppose this would’ve countered anyone in our group. I don’t remember if we talked before getting started, it kinda feels like we did but I don’t remember anything we would’ve said. She was clearly in no rush to get started and neither was I but for different reasons.


I reminded myself of the convoluted parameters of this fight. Attack but not kill her, get Mikael in alive, shut her down, then kill her. Realizing that I was going to have to win an endurance match against someone vastly more powerful than me which really sucked. But I just had to do it somehow. I cringed a bit remembering how much I hated endurance matches.


It was time to test my technique for real. Nadia seemed very self assured, like she had nothing to worry about. I cupped my hands together at my hip, set up in a stance, and poured energy through the four sided knot in my mind. Just a small amount in case things didn’t go as planned.


I felt the twisted knot or energy grind against itself, ricocheting into and stimulating the ambient. Sweeping up some of it as debris to flow through the loop again. Grinding it all into a uniform energy at the core of the knot. Snowballing into a swirling ball in moments as the feedback loop pulled more and more and more ambient energy into the maelstrom. Until my mind couldn’t control my initial seed with any more precision, causing the ball to glow as the excess overflowed as bluish white light that rippled a bit like water.


Nadia, seemingly unconcerned, condensed a large glob of energy in the air above and to my left in front of me in response. Kind of like she was mocking me to say “mine’s bigger.” Which it was, a good two feet in diameter at least. Clear like glass, like the rest of what she had, but easily visible from the extreme light distortion. Though I could also sense it plainly. Then she let it fly at me, and I launched my bolt at it in response. It hit and injected itself into her glob, turning much of it into an opaque grey and melting it like an acid just like it was supposed to. Stopping it in it’s tracks as parts of it dripped onto the floor which I thought was interesting. I was a little disappointed, it didn’t have as much of an effect as I wanted as it didn’t consume the whole glob. Telling myself that two weeks of training clearly wasn’t enough time to work on it. Though Nadia appeared to be freaking out, waving her arms frantically, trying to control the glob and not understanding why she couldn’t it seemed. If it freaked her out that was good.


After a couple seconds I realized “Hey, she’s distracted” and tried dashing overtop of the tables right at her. Hoping I could knock her out or something and not have to go through with the endurance bullshit. Unfortunately she levitated a table into my path as a wall at the last second and I had to leap off of it back to my starting point. Maybe if I’d not been in the mindset that this was just going to be an endurance fight I would’ve noticed her distraction a couple seconds earlier and maybe actually gotten it to work. But I was just standing there watching her trying to be very conservative with my energy.


This next part was pretty frantic and so doesn’t have a play by play. She started picking up furniture with her energy and throwing it at me. I dodged it as best as I could. Always keeping an eye on what was landing behind me, certain she would try to make me dodge only to get trapped as she pulled it back at me. Though this didn’t happen. She seemed to have a range that she could grab things at, anything that went out the door seemed far beyond it, so I did my best to position myself so that things were more likely to go out the door. I knew Mikael would be safe where he was on the wall.


It was incredibly, incredibly difficult and stressful dodging all of it. As things broke they just turned into more ammo for her, but now pointier. Whenever I could I would throw a bolt at or slash one of her pieces as it passed, breaking it into tinier bits or disintegrating it. A suicidal move against someone more skilled than her, but she seemed to lack the “fine motor control” to grab things that were too small. Having to sort of sop items up in globs of energy instead. Once things got too small the glob she was picking them up with had more mass than what it was picking up. I figured if nothing else it might make it harder to control her energy with all that debris in it. I was also quite lucky that she couldn’t control multiple things at once from different directions. Again, her lack of control, or really. lack of experience prevented this. Largely hurling things one at a time, sometimes two.


As all of this was happening someone tried calling me on the radio wanting a status update. It was a very screechy, annoying distraction while I was trying to not get crushed by tables and I ignored them. And then they asked me again, annoyedly saying something along the lines of “Come on we know you’re okay we can see your vitals.” and I got very, very angry and took a brief moment to scream into the radio “I’M BUSY! RADIO SILENCE!” before turning the radio off. Like, I’m sorry, but what the fuck did you think I was doing? If you could see my vitals you could probably also see how stressed they were and probably inferred that I’m not ignoring you out of spite or childishness or something. Fucking hell.


Though in hindsight the guy was probably freaking out when I wasn’t responding. Probably thinking I had gotten taken over by Nadia or something, so I feel a little bad about it.


At this point Nadia was slowly running out of large objects to throw at me and was starting to get a lot more conservative with her ammo and careful with her aim. I noticed that she had a bleeding nose and realized she was indeed pretty stressed which was good. I just had to keep this going. I knew I had to pressure her soon so she felt like this was a stand up fight. Because if I didn’t go on the offensive and really make it count, she would realize that I wasn’t attacking her and would just sit back and wait, not getting more stressed, not using up her energy, not tiring herself out so I could bring Mikael in and finish this. It was a very scary prospect.


She threw a very heavy looking solid wood desk at me though. I dodged forward and to my left and glanced at it reflexively to make sure it wasn’t going to fly back at me as it splintered on the ground. Then I felt a shift of energy as I leapt forward and glanced back again to see the desk shrapnel flying at me. I was totally caught off guard in midair and barely managed to twist myself a little to avoid some of it before getting hit in the right side and thigh with the rest. The body armour was pretty much the only thing that saved me. Though the clothing got shredded and the armour got punctured. It was the first real hit I’d taken since I’d been in that world and it shocked me back to reality.


It made me remember what was even happening here and all the questions streamed in my mind in panic. How long have I been in here? What happens if I die in here? Will I ever wake up? What’s happening with my body? Do I even have a body to go back to anymore? Am I stuck here? Every day had started blending into the next and I’d lost track of time somewhere along the way. This place had become my reality and I hadn’t even realized it. Everything that had been going on distracted me, kept me focused on the situation around me and I slowly started to forget that this wasn’t my home. This wasn’t where I came from.


Nadia cackled, seemingly very happy and impressed with herself for finally hitting me. I think she clapped too. I came out of my shock, picked myself up from my crouch and reiterated to myself that I will kill her. The wounds didn’t seem too bad, nothing was broken, which was amazing and a testament to the amount of kinetic force I could absorb with my energy. I was bleeding but not too badly, she hadn’t quite taken a chunk out of me. Overall I was fine, my energy was already starting to heal me as best it could. I had thought for sure that the desk landed outside of her pickup range. At the time I thought that the reason she was able to grab it again was because I had been passively melting her energy around me, making it seem like I was outside her radius when I actually wasn’t. But now I think there’s a number of things that could’ve explained it, she could’ve just stretched her energy out subtly so I wouldn’t notice for one.


I’m not 100% sure how I got to the next part. So this next bit is a bit speculative. I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t’ve had to dodge the desk pieces again. They were still intact enough. But the next phase was me getting a little too close to Nadia on the the left side, closer to that cafeteria counter thing. She grabbed me with energy and held me in place, I did my best to resist it and melt it away, but then she just lifted me off the ground. I could still move a little if I melted my way through the energy. But she was trying to outright crush me like a grape and I was barely hanging on through it. I felt like i had no options left, this was the thing I’d been specifically trying to avoid. I melted my way through her energy to move my right arm until the rifle was pointed at her. Bracing my arm with energy to absorb the recoil. As I was aiming Nadia wrapped herself in a bubble of energy. Clear but thick enough to distort the light through it, at the edges it outright blocked light. It looked like thick glass.


I knew shooting her wouldn’t work, but being me, I tried it anyways. Hoping that she was overconfident in her shield or something. I squeezed off a three round burst. When they hit the shield it deformed a lot as it absorbed the impacts. It reminded me of those giant orange airbags that they launch people in. Then the gun was pulled out of my hand. I instinctually reached for it but my arm was already fully outstretched. My mind went blank in panic. All my redundancies were used up, I had no more fallbacks. I was just watching the gun slowly float towards her, barely managing to keep myself from being mashed into paste as it was. After what was probably a couple seconds of this even though it felt like forever I did the only thing that came to mind and overcharged myself. Slowly falling towards the ground as I melted my way through her grasp in desperation. I landed on my back harder than I thought I would. Rolled backwards onto my feet and slid back towards the door, skating on energy, to get out of her range as the gun finally got to her. I could feel that I’d injured myself with the overcharge and took note that I now had two things limiting my energy.


I watched her carefully to make sure I could time my dodges right. Darting off to my right as soon as she readied to fire she full autoed it as I ran diagonally up the wall. Sticking to and climbing it with energy from my feet. Keeping my eye on her as best as I could so I could burst ahead as she tried to adjust the lead in her aim. She condensed some of her energy to follow and presumably try to catch and hold me but I shot three bolts from my left had into it as I continued to climb. Straining to get them formed and fired as fast as possible. Reaching the other wall I jumped onto it, then leapt straight up to the ceiling, then back down over her aim, landing near the door where I started and sliding to a stop. By that point she was out of ammo, having just held the trigger down the whole time. She threw the gun down and we resumed our stalemate.


I don’t know what happened in between that and this next part but I don’t think it was much if anything. I needed her to feel pressured so that she didn’t realize I wasn’t trying to kill her. So I decided to do something incredibly aggressive and stupid. I burst to the right wall and then burst directly at her with a bunch of energy charged in my right hand. I stabbed through her shield with my fingers, injecting as much energy as I could into it, melting a large hole in it. Then I grabbed my pistol and aimed right at her. Had this been a stand up fight, this is probably where it would’ve ended. I also would’ve done something like it much sooner. I didn’t unholster my gun beforehand because I didn’t want to give her any chance of realizing what the strategy was before I did it. I figured it was worth the risk of the extra second or so it took to unholster the pistol.


She looked like she was completely freaking out. It was like she was trapped in her own shield, this little area that was maybe a little more than a meter in diameter. I felt tendrils of energy condensing and coming towards me from all sides. I needed her to feel like she’d narrowly avoided certain death but I couldn’t risk trying to even nick her. So I leapt back without even firing a shot to avoid getting caught again.


I don’t know how much longer this all went on for. My next memory is of another aggression attempt. I’d gotten myself back into the super dangerous 3-5 meter range. Then, to both my surprise and Nadia’s horror, Mikael walked up behind me. She started shrieking, I can’t remember if she was saying anything like for him to get away or not. She was crunched down holding her head though I don’t think it was because of pain. From the wild fluctuations in her energy it felt like she was desperately trying to hold onto her connection to her drones and the rest of her energy. In a few seconds it had condensed around her head in long opaque grey splinters, presumably pointing in the direction of some drone or another, ironically in a way it kinda looked like a crown, statue of liberty style. Until that started fading too and Mikael walked right up to her. I can’t remember if I’d already had the pistol unholstered or if I did it during all this but I was pointing it right at her. Waiting until her energy died out completely. I remember Mikael saying something like “It’s time to stop all this.” in a soft, consoling voice. Nadia was practically crying and responded “Mikael...[something something]” seemingly in, I don’t know, not really defiance, but certainly some sort of refusal. She was crying and her tone was sad. They said a couple things to each other but I couldn’t hear it.


Mikael was too close to my line of fire for my liking so I told him “Move out of the way kid!” but he ignored me, continuing to talk to Nadia. So I slowly walked in an arc to the left to give myself a clear shot. Nadia turned to me, I could feel her energy continue to weaken, I barely remember this conversation anymore, but I’ll try to give you what I have and the gist of it:


Nadia- “[Don’t remember]”


Me – “[Don’t remember]”


Nadia - “[something something] that’s why I control them!”


She was referring to why she was superior to humanity because of her abilities. It was was why she controlled them and not the other way around. As if no one else in the world could have abilities like her. Like she deserved to be in charge.


Me - “[Don’t be so hard on them/cut them some slack], all they need is a little imagination.”


My rebuttal, trying to point out that magic isn’t exclusive to her and I. Anyone can train it and learn it. It’s not special and can’t make you special.


Nadia - “That’s why I chose you because you UNDERSTAND THAT!”


Nadia – [Don’t remember]


This might’ve been where she said “that’s why I control them” and I’m just mixing it up. Otherwise she may have gone on about how superior she was or was supposed to be. To which I replied:


Me - “Nothing you’ve done... is all that impressive.”


Then she seemed to pause in shock for a short moment before shrieking something unintelligible as she moved forward. I shot her 3 times, once in the forehead, once in the upper chest on her left side, aiming for the heart, and then in her stomach as she was slumping against the wall, though I was aiming for her right lung.


Mikael spun around and angrily shouted “What are you doing!?” at me, to which I replied sharply


“You’re the catalyst, kid. [If we’d lost/if she’d killed] you, then where the fuck would we be?”


He froze for a moment then hung his head, his whole body really he seemed to understand. I felt a huge release of stress, it was finally all over. I sat against the wall a couple meters to the left of Nadia’s dead body. Mikael did the same on her right. As I was writing this up I can’t help but think that for some reason a picture of this looks like an album cover to me.


I asked Mikael if he hated me for killing his sister. He said he didn’t, explaining something about their history together, plans they’d made, Stating that she’d basically deviated from their “true” plans. When he said that I felt incredibly uneasy. I remember distinctly thinking “Ooooooohhhhhhhh this doesn’t sound good.” And just quietly listened as he talked about it. I wish I could remember any of the specific words, but during all this, though I’m not sure exactly when it started, I was feeling an energy signature that I didn’t recognize or understand. It gave me an uneasy feeling. All I remember about anything he said is that he explained how the two of them had talked about breaking out for a long time, and what they’d do when they did. His version of the plan was more benign than hers but not by much, though I don’t remember the details.


The energy disturbed me, at first I thought it was Nadia. Someone with her power could’ve been able to keep herself stable in death, and the purely physical damage from the bullets would do almost nothing to destabilize her soul. But, that didn’t feel right. It felt almost mechanical but it wasn’t. But it seemed like it lacked the dynamicness of living energy too. Nonetheless as Mikael was talking about all this I kept trying to analyze this energy. I eventually wondered if she’d merged with Mikael. I wondered if that was even possible. If it was then I needed to find out for sure. As Mikael was walking around he was slowly becoming more hobbled, having more difficulty moving. He looked like an old man. But I needed to know. If Nadia had found a way to merge herself with him, if she could retain her abilities while neutralizing the effects of Mikael’s psionic waves, I needed to deal with it as soon as possible.


I walked up to Mikael, who was leaning up against one of the few remaining wooden chairs on the right side of the room. I told him “You said you wanted to see your sister again right? Well... here’s your chance.” as I pointed the gun right at his face. I was purposefully cold about it. When someone is masking their energy signature to appear like someone they’re not they are putting some amount of strain on themselves during the process. If you stress that person out, get them angry, scared, whatever, it’s possible to make them momentarily lose control, causing their energy to, briefly, flinch back to its natural waveform. Causing a distinct break. When someone not faking their energy gets stressed their energy will fluctuate, but the waveform itself will remain the same throughout. That’s what I was looking for, the telltale breaks in the function. Though there are many caveats and exceptions. Things that can cause false readings.


He looked at me in shock for a couple seconds, then his face changed to anger, I felt a flash of anger as he started to snarl “You basta-” but I shot him before he could finish. His body fell over, shoving the chair aside a bit. But, I’d reacted more to the fact that I felt a flash, not the content of the flash. I didn’t know if any energy masking had happened. I was panicking a bit, I felt like I’d really screwed up. I second guessed the flash a few times, it could’ve been her getting angry that I’d found her out, but it could’ve also just been his own anger. I couldn’t tell. It took me a little bit to calm down. I think I rationalized it that ultimately it was better that he was dead regardless. Being alive would’ve almost certainly meant being used as a test subject again. And in that sense he was also too dangerous to be allowed to live, since he could be used to continue the research. I don’t know if that rationalization came right then or later, but at some point it happened.


I really wish Echo had been there with me. I wonder what she could’ve picked up from that strange energy or if she could’ve read Mikael’s flash better than me. She probably could’ve.


After this I felt a sharp, sudden pain in my chest. It made me cough violently for a few seconds. When I pulled my hand away there were speckles of blood on my glove, but that didn’t make any sense. The wound in my side wasn’t anywhere near severe enough to have caused that, and the pain was dead enter of my chest anyways. Then I felt the shell of energy keeping “me” in that body starting to dissolve and peel away. The same shell I feel in my physical body. It was like I’d never known it was there until this started happening because it was always there. I tried but I couldn't stop it or even really slow it down. I wondered if it had anything to do with shooting Mikael or maybe it was Nadia but it didn’t feel like it at all. It was just happening all on its own.


I clicked my radio back on and said that Nadia and Mikael were dead and that I probably wasn’t going to last much longer. Someone confirmed that all the drones they’d been fighting dropped and they weren’t the ones who did it.


Then one of the scientists butted in, asking if the catalyst was still alive. I repeated, sternly, that they’re both dead. He just responded “Oh” disappointedly. In my mind I was telling him to go fuck himself for his role in all of this. That at the end all he really cared about was the research. They told me that someone was on their way to me. I waited there for, I don’t know, a couple minutes probably before someone showed up. I was crunched over but still standing and had made my way to the doorway into the long hallway that was now filled with splintered wood and other debris. The shell was continuing to peel away and it wasn’t long before my own willpower was all that was keeping me in that body. But it was a losing battle. Slowly draining my energy, I would eventually run out, or get tired, or something. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me if I let go so I didn’t. I really wish Echo had been there.


I don’t remember what the guy first said to me, but I apologized stating that “This life was just a dream for me” Which he took to be metaphorical, I tried to clarify that “No, I mean, literally, this was a dream.” But he didn’t seem to get it. He saluted me and I was shocked. I had no idea how to respond to that, so I weakly saluted him back, and let my energy go, collapsing on the floor. I watched my body as I floated upwards rapidly, blacking out in a second or two. Then I woke up in bed back here like normal.


All of that had occurred in a single night.


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Part 3

One of the few things I was intent on recording immediately was the very last conversation I had with Nadia. Though the format I saved it in was incredibly stupid. I may still have it somewhere on a certain portable hard drive of mine I think. But I chose not to go looking for it when writing that part. Partly because I don’t really want to remember the conversation verbatim. I think I recorded some of our other talks too, but not too much else. I guess I didn’t feel the need. Plus, it was an ungodly amount of detail to try writing down. A book in and of itself. Hell, this a book. There was no way I’d have the time or energy to write it all down. This is what I could still remember after nearly 10 years, imagine what I remembered when it was still fresh.


I don’t think it’s hard to understand why this got classed in a league of its own. Nor should it be hard to understand why I was so reluctant to share it. At the time I tried convincing myself that it was, somehow, just a dream. My reasoning largely hinged on not being able to remember absolutely everything after I woke up, having woken up at all, it simply being “too crazy” to be real and things like that. Like I’ve said before I used to be a very hardcore skeptic.


The last thing that made me try denying it was that it was just wishful thinking and “too fantastical” to be true. Which was what my blanket denial of all the paranormal stuff in my life really hinged on back then. I would do this thing where I’d go with it while it was happening and treat it all as real and then go “oh well probably, somehow, someway that was all in my head” right afterwards. The idea that I could possibly know how to do anything like that, let alone have the personality and mental control to actually do it, was something I refused to consider. Backed up by my repeated failure to perform anything of that level out in the real world. So clearly it must all be in my head.


But I was ignoring all the very good evidence that I did have about having the knowledge, personality and mental control. All I really lacked was the raw power. Something that Crimson (not to be confused with Scarlet) got furious enough at me for to beat the shit out me, leaving a myriad of physical wounds while I was in the middle of my university library. A story I’ve told a number of times on here. Maybe I should just write it up as its own thing to go into full detail, but later. I was ignoring all the examples of the Kruger Effect, known shared dreams and projections between me and various people, though mainly Dreamsoap. Lots of childhood stuff, claims from spirits a decade or more earlier about things that would happen a decade or so after that which came true, all the stuff I’d accomplished with wind control and developing the Weaver System. Poltergeisting wasn’t even a thing yet let alone inducing shared dreams.


To me that level of denialism is why I don’t think there’s such a thing as a real skeptic. There’s just people arguing about what they want to be true. As if reality cares about what they want. I didn’t want my past to be true so I used whatever I could to say it wasn’t and ran away from it but it didn’t matter.


Over time I got more and more things that made it stupid to deny Loderunner. Dreamsoap pulling me out of my body a dozen times, other instances of full transitions of this level, reports from others about being spirited away that had similar characteristics to mine, my successes with poltergeisting and shared dreams, learning that there had been CIA funded research into psi in this reality, Learning the field of parapsychology even existed, etc. Though I understand why others won’t believe any of this story, it would be outright mentally retarded for me not to at this point. These days I do think it was exactly what it appeared to be. A 14 year old girl with powerful psionic abilities ripped me to her world and very, very nearly succeeded in conquering it. I highly suspect that Nadia pulled me out of my body the same way Dreamsoap later would. It would make the most sense given how it all started. Though I’ll never know for sure.


Whether this means there’s an equivalent research project going on in this reality I don’t know. Though quite frankly I’d be more surprised if there wasn’t one. Given what I, some blind university dropout has managed to accomplish, I don’t believe that people who’ve spent millions of dollars and more time than I’ve physically been alive researching psionic abilities really determined that it had “no weapons value” and stopped.


I always felt guilty about what happened with Mikael. And I never wanted Nadia to die either. I can’t see her as anything but a victim in the whole scenario. Her anger and hatred were completely understandable. Even her narcissism was, really. And despite everything she did I can’t fault her for it. I felt bad for telling her that nothing she’d done was special, though I know I did it because of how narcissistic she was. But really, this was someone who, without any training, under massive stress, probably with severe psychological trauma, figured out how to create a psychic virus AND automate the resulting drones. That is fucking impressive. That’s on top of the standard knowledge of how to condense energy.


The scary thing is that Nadia had all the necessary building blocks of knowledge to be able to condense her energy directly into self sustaining, automated constructs. Literally building robots out of her energy. And once you hit that its not too long before you go “wow that’s really expensive, why don’t I make things that produce energy and then other things to build the things for me?” and then you have an infinite production line. There is no conventional 21st century military in existence that could win against that once it got rolling. Period. She probably never thought of it but I bet she would’ve if she’d been left alone for long enough. Then it’d just be a matter of developing the necessary “fine motor skills” and that would’ve been it.


I hadn’t realized just how much this had been gnawing at me all this time until I started trying to write it up for PQ. It brought about a lot of sleepless nights over the months that I was slowly putting this together. I swung between feeling like I was totally responsible for what happened and that it was just a bad, unavoidable situation. Believing that I had opportunities to calm her down and reason with her better during our talks that I didn’t take or handle well. Then the other side of me would point out that literally the very first thing Nadia did was try to possess me, and then when that didn’t work she did nothing but try to kill me and everyone around me. So it’s hard to argue that its my fault. Still, it was hard not to think that I was at least partly to blame.


Loderunner happened while I was still fully in my previous mindset inherited directly from my soul. The most recent version of “me”. To me it’s the epitome of what I was back then. I was very cold, efficient and effective. I ran on guarantees. I didn’t used to be like that, I used to be a lot nicer. But after getting burned over and over from my and other’s mistakes I stopped focusing on helping people. You can only say “this time will be different” so many times before you realize its just a lie. Over time my thinking became more black and white, focusing only on what I knew for certain. I couldn’t guarantee that talking to Nadia would make her stop, but I could guarantee that killing her would, so that’s what I set as my goal. It was simple threat assessment. Likewise with the people she possessed. I didn’t know if they were still in their bodies, but I did know that they were trying to kill us. So I treated them as hostiles, deciding the hosts were already dead.


Even though I despised the scientists and military I was helping, helping them was the tactically better option. Nadia had the power to take out the whole world, they didn’t. If Nadia had agreed to stop possessing people and whatnot I would’ve had no problem trying to look for a better solution with her. But she refused. Don’t get me wrong, I think the choices I made were sound. It would be hilariously naive to think that I could’ve gotten through that without killing anyone in that scenario. But I still didn’t like it.


These days I think I might’ve done it differently, I would’ve put a lot more emphasis on trying to talk to Nadia and calm her down. I do believe what Nadia really wanted was a mentor or at least someone who understood what she was going through with her abilities. That was a common thread through all of our talks. Made most explicit in the very last one before I shot her. As was her admission for pulling me over for that purpose. I don’t at all believe that she should’ve died that way, not with the shitty life she had to live up to that point. She and Mikael deserved better. I started brainstorming about how I might’ve been able to resolve the situation without them dying or being captured.


But no matter how many simulations I ran I couldn’t find one where Nadia, Mikael, and I all survived. The fundamental problem was where we were. I needed to keep the two of them together so he could nullify her abilities. And I couldn’t leave them alone for fear that she’d either kill him or run away, regain her abilities, and then who knows. I couldn’t reasonably carry both of them at once and escape. We’d probably just get shot. Even if we didn’t and somehow got onto solid ground we were in the middle of a desert. Mikael had multiple severe medical conditions so even if we survived the desert and got to some town or whatever I had no way to keep him alive anyways. I’m not much of a healer, I’ve done practically no training for it, so I couldn’t use magic to help him much.


It would be easy to put out an amber alert or equivalent and claim I’d kidnapped them. Make up some bullshit story the public and local police would have no reason to doubt. Or just pursue us covertly like we did with Nadia. So on and so forth. Killing them like I did seemed like the best choice available. But I wouldn’t accept that. I was determined to come up with something that could’ve led to them being able to get free to live a better life while also not killing the whole planet in the process. It’s all well and good for people to have some idealistic notion of saving people or doing the “right” thing or however they spin it. But its another to have an actionable plan to make it happen. I started getting really depressed about it.


What really bothered me though is that I knew that if Green had been there instead of me he would’ve insisted that Nadia be saved. Probably from the very beginning. He would’ve empathized with her a lot, and he would’ve SOMEHOW(tm) made it happen. Probably in the dumbest most reckless and direct way possible, but it would work. He’s very people oriented that way. It would annoy me if he could do it but I couldn’t. Yes, that’s very petty but that’s a big part of the reason.


I wished Gold was still around so I could ask her opinion on all of it but more than a year ago at this point she said she was going to do an incarnation of her own somewhere. She didn’t say where but it’s almost certainly not here. She was nice enough to pull me into a shared dream at the time just to tell me that. I haven’t felt her energy since so I assume she’s either still doing it, too far away for me to detect, or both. People might think that of course, if only a year’s passed, she’s obviously still incarnated. But time doesn’t really work that way. Depending on where she went the difference in flow could mean a year here is 200 there and she’d already be long back.


Somehow through that desire I ended up re-remembering a very bizarre circumstance that Gold and I had to get ourselves out of. I don’t want to go into details, but it was far, far worse than what happened with Nadia. I got to learn a lot of Gold’s way of thinking during that which I’m tempted to call “stoicism++”. It’s not stoicism, stoicism’s solution to things generally boils down to “take it in the ass and smile”, Gold’s (and my) version is more about using your mental and emotional control to get what you want, focusing on what’s important in the moment. And it was remembering a very traumatic situation that she caused and outright mocked me for being angry about instead of focusing on what was important that helped somehow.


I decided to talk to some local spirits who were hanging around at the time since they were willing. They also decided to do some reiki on me which helped more than I thought it would. Eventually as I was going through the scenario for the billionth time I noticed something interesting in my memories. The light in the cafeteria got substantially darker the longer the fight went on. When I first walked in it was very bright, but by the end the little kiosk area in the back left corner was providing as much as half of the light. It was like lights were getting broken throughout the fight. Although I couldn’t remember this specifically, I would’ve been surprised if they didn’t.


Which sparked an idea, I could already stealth my energy, what if I’d broken all the lights and snuck up on her to put her to sleep? I started thinking about how I’d use energy to silence my footsteps, designed a technique to cloak myself fully. Then I had to think hard to design something that might’ve put her to sleep harmlessly. Which sparked ideas for a technique to feedback through her own energy to knock her out. Which then gave me ideas for a knockout virus that I could’ve deployed through any of her drones to feedback to her, cutting her off from the whole network, knocking her out, and tracking her location through the hops and memories. A much lower energy version of a knockout technique I would’ve used if I’d had much more energy during that. Not as good as the latter but something I could’ve used much earlier. Finally I had a path to a better resolution, even if it was far too late to use it. It meant that if I ever find myself in a situation like that again, I already have techniques and strategies ready to go in my mind to get me the outcome I want.


It would still not be perfect, but it would be much better than Loderunner. Remarkably, finding this solution wiped away all my regrets. Not just of Loderunner but many of my past life ones too. I’m not really sure why. Normally what happens is I will think of a solution like that and beat myself up for not thinking of it at the time. Making it a permanent stain on my psyche, vowing to overcome it by doing better next time because you can’t change the past. Hoping to drown out any mistakes with a string of successes so that I could feel like I made up for it. Which would inevitably incur more mistakes, which would add to the “penance” that I’d tell myself I needed to pay with more missions. In hindsight it was kind of like a gambling addiction. But that didn’t happen this time. I have worked for years in this life to get rid of that mindset, but the fact that it went away completely in one shot was strange. I credit those spirits for it. I don’t think they were entirely responsible, but their reiki clearly contributed.


In hindsight I think I should have used more information warfare tactics. I focused almost entirely on raw combat, which is odd for me. To be honest it makes me feel pretty sloppy. But at the same time I’m not really sure what good information warfare would’ve done against Nadia. I wasn’t really in a position to carry out anything that could’ve gotten something meaningful to happen. There’s no way we could’ve just explained the situation. No one would believe it. Maybe there’d be a way to do it but the amount of time it would take to get put into action would be more than long enough for Nadia to stop it I think. I think in the long run it would’ve amounted to a bunch of wasted effort. So maybe it’s okay that I didn’t focus on it. Still something nags at me that says there would’ve been a way to do it to at least make the situation less bad even though she could infect people.


I know I’ve always been sloppy in this life, well, more like rusty. I still find lots of things that I wish I’d done better or differently. I don’t feel regret but I do feel sad the more I find because I know its from rust. I think I felt that if I could just not have any mistakes then I wouldn’t feel sad about it after. But that’s not true, I feel sad because it was just a bad situation.


Loderunner is a historical example of a weakness I’m still working on. The only reason I was able to develop magic in it was because of the constant pressure from Nadia. Without something external that my mind recognizes as magical pushing me, I never really develop anything. That goes for this life too. The threat Nadia posed combined with the fact I might never return to my body or worse and just everything going on made it very easy for my mind to unlock and let me actually try. Or more accurately, based on my current training, it makes it easy for me to connect to myself or let myself in. I doubt I would’ve developed anything in this life if all the paranormal stuff, including possible alien fuckery, didn’t start barraging me non-stop in 2008.


These days, not just looking back at this but examining some of my recent near successes, I just think about how Gold said that magic is not a product of emotion, but mentality. And also to treat reality like a dream. It’s really true it seems, to a very annoying degree. Annoying because she’s always right, and with how much trouble I’ve been having with this its incredible to look back on the simulation she did and realize just how knowledgeable she actually is given she was able to illustrate that point pretty much perfectly in just one lesson.


But moreso it’s further cemented that she and others have been right about how I need to “accept myself” in order to get my magic back. As much as I’ve always known that’s true I’ve spent a long time trying to convince myself that it’s crazy to believe that any of the past life memories could possibly be true. I was afraid of becoming another crazy spiritualist like the ones I’ve met. I pushed it away because I needed proof before diving into the deep end like that. If I did and I was wrong, there’d be no going back. I wouldn’t be able to handle turning it off and so I’d just be crazy.


Which is why I think it’s so important for me to post Loderunner. This happened, I did it, I survived it. Not just Loderunner but many other things including my past. I need to finally admit that to myself. And I feel the only way to really, truly do that is to post it on here. Though I haven’t been on the site very much these days, largely because I’ve been working on this. I’ve learned definitively that accepting myself and my past is something I’d need to do regardless of whether I wanted to get magic or not.


I decided long ago that I would find a way to do something for Nadia. I don’t know what or if it will happen in this life, but somehow I’ll figure out a way to help her. Ideally I’d like to find her soul, or maybe one of her next incarnations, so that I could do something direct. I don’t want it to be just symbolic or “in memory of”.


While I was writing this up I started to think that maybe I should just make it a novel and say it’s fiction. I mean it’s not like anyone would ever believe it anyways, and it’s not a bad story. It’s got it’s own plot arcs and everything. Though to convert it into a novel would be an obscene amount of effort. I’d have to bullshit so much of it since I don’t remember anymore. And it wouldn’t make much sense without knowing all the other stuff around it.


Dreamsoap believes we should turn this entire life into its own story, which Loderunner would be just an arc in. I don’t disagree with her, this life has been simultaneously one of the least and most interesting we’ve had. It’d be easy to make it all about “what is reality” But as it stands that story doesn’t have an ending yet as far as I’m concerned. Right now it’s just sort of in limbo, I don’t have my magic and it’s uncertain if I ever will. But I’m not as against it as I was in the past when Yellow first had her idea to pass down the stories of our group’s various adventures, feeling like it could help younger generations learn things vicariously. Something that I know she has succeeded in because we’ve found some of her “projects”. Don’t ask me to name any, because I outright refuse to.


Our group has lots of stories like this because this is what we go out and do. I can’t call it a job because it’s not like we get paid. All they ever became after were campfire stories that we’d reminisce about. I can see why Yellow feels like that’s a waste. Still, I just can’t do it with Loderunner or anything else that has happened in this life yet. Maybe later. I feel like it would be disrespectful to Nadia and everyone else involved. I did my best to write this up as a dry, uncreative transcript because I refuse to have any of it sound cool.

But I do feel like I owe it to Yellow to at least try being a fiction writer. If nothing else I have a lot of “inspiration” to pull from that I highly doubt anyone else in the world has. There’s also a couple one-shot incarnations I wouldn’t mind trying to reconstruct into stories I guess. I mean, unless Yellow beats me to it. Besides I have no interest in getting any sort of normal job, nor do I care if I die as a result. Writing’s the closest thing I have to a sub passion.


Speaking of, though I admit I didn’t do too much research on it I couldn’t find any movies that match the name Loderunner. Granted the spelling is mine. I don’t know what time it was in that world but it looked roughly the same as here. I assume somewhere between 2010 and 2020. And since Bill or whatever his name was was between 52 and 58 that means the only things that could be percievably “before my time” would probably be somewhere between the 60’s and 90’s. I was 23 or 24 here at the time, I have no idea how old the Loderunner body was but it seemed in the same range. Same if it really was my spirit body since it’s modified so that it’s cells will constantly renew. Making it seem like it’s in its early 20’s. The two closest movies that I could think of are “Logan’s Run” and “Bladerunner.” I assume it’s only the name that matters, not the content. If anyone knows a closer match then leave it in the comments. It’s entirely possible that there is no “Loderunner” movie here though.


There’s a lot more I could say but I’m kinda exhausted from writing all this over the last few months. I won’t be surprised if I find errors or things I forgot to include after I post this. But I’d rather leave anything else for comments if anyone asks questions. Which I am of course completely open to.

[Laird]

That was quite a story. It actually reads like the semi-fleshed out details of a Hollywood blockbuster. I know you wrote that out of respect for Nadia you'd prefer it wasn't fictionalised but I reckon that if you wanted to you could sell it to a movie studio.

A few miscellaneous comments/questions (I might add more later):

You say that the full transition started out as a dream. This intrigues me given what it implies about ordinary dreams. Could any dream turn into a full transition? And are the ones that could always "real" for the other participants in the dream, even though they seem like "just dreams" to us? Or, in other words, does this imply that the "characters" in our ordinary dreams are real people?

Re the virus: did you get (and remember) any understanding of how Nadia created it? For example, did she do it with magic/psi or medical equipment or both?

Also, why did the first person (the neighbour with the lawnmower) attack you? Nadia had just infected you, so presumably she was hoping to turn you into a drone - wouldn't she then have preferred you alive not dead? Or was the idea that she drew you into her world deliberately to test/challenge you and your magical abilities, and that first attack was simply the start of the challenges?

Thanks for writing that all up - it's epic.

That was quite a story. It actually reads like the semi-fleshed out details of a Hollywood blockbuster. I know you wrote that out of respect for Nadia you'd prefer it wasn't fictionalised but I reckon that if you wanted to you could sell it to a movie studio.

Even if I did want to I wouldn't trust Hollywood with it.

You say that the full transition started out as a dream. This intrigues me given what it implies about ordinary dreams. Could any dream turn into a full transition? And are the ones that could always "real" for the other participants in the dream, even though they seem like "just dreams" to us? Or, in other words, does this imply that the "characters" in our ordinary dreams are real people?

I don't know if all dreams could turn into this or if dreams are always real or anything like that. There does seem to be some that are really just in your brain and then others that aren't but I don't know if all of them can switch over. That being said, one of the most important dreams I've ever had is the "nailmarks dreamgeist" which was something that I fully thought was just a dream and not even a lucid one that then turned out was actually me poltergeisting to dreamsoap and using magic to paralyse her via backtracing nerve impulses from her arm to the part of her brain sending them and then flooding that area with energy so no impulses could get out because I was kinda freaking out at the time. And as per the name it left physical nailmarks in her arm because I was gripping so hard at one point. It also scared me a lot and is one of the major events that has hampered my ability to use magic because I didn't mean to do any of that and it could've gone much worse presumably. Which made me wonder how many other times have things like this happened that I don't know of and made me really scared.
But it also proved that magic is completely possible because the same methods got the same result and its really perception that matters quite a lot. Or as Gold told me way back in 2009 or so, I needed to treat reality as a dream because magic works in dreams basically because I think it will. Something I thought was metaphorical at the time but now understand to be very literal. I suspect that there isn't any real difference between real life and full transitions at this point.

Re the virus: did you get (and remember) any understanding of how Nadia created it? For example, did she do it with magic/psi or medical equipment or both?

It was 100% psi, it was basically like a concentrated burst of Reiki As for how she figured it out, no idea. I wonder if she herself even knew because she could use this virus which required knowledge of how to program energy and make it relatively self sustaining and all that but then during our fight her ability to concentrate energy and control it seemed very lackluster. The skill levels didn't match up. But at the same time that was probably the only time she'd ever had to directly use her abilities in a fight and so she may not have been able to pull out her full skill because of it. For example a surgeon isn't going to be good in a knife fight just because they work with scalpels. There's a lot of extra mental and emotional stuff let alone stress happening in a fight that a surgeon doesn't normally have to deal with.

Also, why did the first person (the neighbour with the lawnmower) attack you? Nadia had just infected you, so presumably she was hoping to turn you into a drone - wouldn't she then have preferred you alive not dead? Or was the idea that she drew you into her world deliberately to test/challenge you and your magical abilities, and that first attack was simply the start of the challenges?

That was one of the first things we ended up talking about when she was asking me why I was with the blackops group and I was like "well gee I dunno maybe because you tried to possess and then kill me?" And she admitted that maybe it had been a bit of an overreaction out of fear or whatever when she felt me trying to purge the virus. She didn't have any master plan, this was "cat attacks dancing plant" level of reasoning on her part. That was how she reacted to everyone, if she couldn't posses you or you found out about what was going on she would immediately kill you.
I have no idea how much she really knew about my magic, for all I know it could've just been a vague inuitive sense that I knew things about it. She never really elaborated on all that. The single most illuminating thing she ever said about why she pulled me over was that one sentence at the very end when she said it's because I "understand that" which is part of why I still remember it so clearly. I can only really guess at what her motives were and how much she knew based on tone and body language and the types of things she would talk about. Which of course I don't remember in any real detail anymore.

Thanks for writing that all up - it's epic.

I don't recommend anyone glorify this or try to do it themselves, I handle it better only because I'm used to it from having done things like this so many times in the past. But that also completely destroyed me emotionally and is what's made this life especially difficult. And that's kinda why I've really struggled with Yellow's whole thing of wanting to share our various "adventures" in fictional form because I don't really like it being inevitably "coolified". Though she and everyone else, including Dreamsoap, maintain that it doesn't glorify it it it's actually really good to do because other people can learn vicariously from what we went through and they never need to know it's based on anything real. I've contemplated doing a thread talking about this, without ever mentioning any specific confirmed examples, because they went into a LOT of detail about their process and various considerations they had to make and how they'd prepackage "inspirations" to send to creators they'd select that they thought might do a good job and actually get the thing made and all that.

So it turns out Loderunner, or rather "Lode Runner" is a real thing after all, but its not a movie, its a n arcade game from 1983, completely within the predicted range of what I thought Bill could've feasibly both encountered and also thought was "before my time"

I found out because I was browsing the Debian repository one day to see what sort of free game stuff they have and ran across one called kgoldrunner who's description headline reads:

Lode Runner arcade game

Naturally this made me go "Wait...what...?"

So I did a little extra digging, and found the Wikipedia page on Lode Runner which placed the timeline squarely within the early to mid 80's. Which is completely conceivable that someone who was in their early 50's in 2010 could have or even would have encountered. Personally, even though my initial assumption was that Lode Runner was a movie reference, I'm counting this as yet another veridical component of this experience. What freaks me out the most though, is that the spelling is the same. I mean technically that's a minor detail, it's not like "Lode" is that special of a combination of letters. But still.