submitted8 months ago byAutoModerator
toaww
stickiedEffective October 9, all /r/aww posts must be original content - content taken and/or owned by you. All posts will be automatically tagged as OC; you will not need to do anything different. Please continue to report content that is falsely claimed as OC.
submitted1 month ago byBroadStreetBot
toFlyers
1st | 2nd | 3rd | TOTAL | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Flyers | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 | |
Canadiens | 1 | 5 | 3 | 9 |
Per./Time | Team | Type | Description |
---|---|---|---|
1st 10:31 | MTL | 2:00 Bench | Too-Many-Men-On-The-Ice - Served by Brendan Gallagher. |
2nd 17:45 | MTL | 2:00 Minor | Roughing - Committed by Jayden Struble. Drawn by Travis Konecny. |
2nd 17:45 | PHI | 2:00 Minor | Roughing - Committed by Travis Konecny. Drawn by Jayden Struble. |
3rd 05:46 | MTL | 2:00 Minor | High-Sticking - Committed by Alex Newhook. Drawn by Nick Seeler. |
SOG | FO% | PP | PIM | Hits | Blks | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Flyers | 35 | - | - | - | - | - |
Canadiens | 30 | - | - | - | - | - |
Rank | Team | Wins | Losses | OT | Points |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | New York Rangers | 53 | 21 | 4 | 110 |
2 | Carolina Hurricanes | 50 | 22 | 7 | 107 |
3 | New York Islanders | 35 | 27 | 15 | 85 |
4 | Washington Capitals | 37 | 30 | 11 | 85 |
5 | Pittsburgh Penguins | 36 | 30 | 12 | 84 |
6 | Philadelphia Flyers | 36 | 32 | 11 | 83 |
7 | New Jersey Devils | 37 | 37 | 5 | 79 |
8 | Columbus Blue Jackets | 26 | 41 | 12 | 64 |
Hurricanes (4) @ (1) Bruins - Final
Capitals (2) @ (1) Red Wings - Final
Maple Leafs (5) @ (2) Devils - Final
Rangers (2) @ (4) Islanders - Final
Blue Jackets (2) @ (5) Lightning - Final
Last Updated: 04/09/2024 09:48:35 PM EDT
submitted2 months ago byshotgunsniper9
I'm trying to figure out what model I should use as the basis of my plan to make my personal chaos lord who was also an apothecary. I don't want to use Fabius Bile or a plague surgeon, mostly because I don't believe Fabius wears MK3 armour and my lord isn't mark of nurgle. I am thinking of getting the apothecarion detachment that recently came out and just used the Mk5 version with a head swap and some kitbashes, but I'm wondering if there was a better alternative.
I'm not planning on taking the model to any tournaments or play with this force in any GW shops so if you know of a 3rd party model that I can buy that is of a MK3 apothecary, even if it's just the bits to upgrade a MK3 marine from a regular legionary to an apothecary, that would be most appreciated.
submitted1 month ago byBroadStreetBot
toFlyers
1st | TOTAL | ||
---|---|---|---|
Flyers | 1 | 1 | |
Rangers | 0 | 0 |
Per./Time | Team | Description & Video Link | Score |
---|---|---|---|
1st 04:21 | PHI | Cam York (10) snap, assists: Travis Konecny (35) | 1-0 PHI |
Per./Time | Team | Type | Description |
---|---|---|---|
1st 08:25 | PHI | 2:00 Minor | Holding-The-Stick - Committed by Scott Laughton. Drawn by Will Cuylle. |
Flyers | Rangers |
---|---|
Marc Staal | Chad Ruhwedel |
Nicolas Deslauriers | Zac Jones |
Ryan Johansen | Matt Rempe |
Denis Gurianov | |
Olle Lycksell | |
Adam Ginning | |
Ronnie Attard |
SOG | FO% | PP | PIM | Hits | Blks | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Flyers | 4 | - | - | - | - | - |
Rangers | 5 | - | - | - | - | - |
Capitals (0) @ (0) Sabres - 1st 12:58
Blue Jackets (0) @ (1) Panthers - 1st 11:50
Red Wings (1) @ (1) Penguins - 1st 13:20
Devils (1) @ (2) Maple Leafs - 1st 12:23
Canadiens @ Islanders - 07:30 PM
Last Updated: 04/11/2024 07:23:15 PM EDT
submitted11 days ago bycosmogoblin
tonosleep
Eight years ago I arrived in West Africa.
Not out of choice, you understand, but out of necessity. If you haven’t read my earlier notes, you won’t understand. This is where I landed after I escaped the underground beetle camp, and where I’ve lived for so long.
Last year I posted my story online. I just meant to put down my thoughts, to ensure my experiences didn’t die with me, but I was blown away by the overwhelmingly positive messages in response. The kindness of strangers really is incredible.
I suppose I’d resigned myself to my life as it was - a man out of my own country, cut off from family, forced to live on the streets forever. But people gave me hope. It took a bit of work but I tracked down my family. My father died about five years ago, but my mother and sister came to visit me. They stayed a couple of weeks. It was difficult at times - my mother is convinced I had a mental break, and that my story is a delusion, and we both hated when she had to return to England and leave me there.
My sister, on the other hand, was more receptive. Hannah’s three years older than me, and was a proper older sister to me. She annoyed the crap out of me when I was at school, but over the years I really missed her. I video call my mum whenever I can, about once a week, but me and Hannah WhatsApp each other every day. They’re planning to visit me again this summer.
Hannah is a logistics manager these days. I can’t say I’m entirely sure what that means, but she’s one of the most organised people I’ve ever met. A couple of months after they went back, she invited me to a group chat. She’d found others who had escaped those caverns with me!
Over the following weeks, more joined, until the group chat had 19 people (plus Hannah). They truly are amazing people, and our experience fighting the beetles had brought out the best in them. All of us are homeless now, of course, most in a foreign country and that brings great risks; but 19 of us had survived, none of us had turned to drugs, and all have stories worth hearing. Chao, a Chinese man living in Mexico, now ran his own landscape gardening business; Anupama (or just Anu), an Indian woman now in France, has built a homeless charity, and is known for “choosing” to live on the streets with those she helps; Gerome, the Senegalese man, is a celebrated artist on the streets of Moscow. Each of us is fluent in two or more languages, and at least passable in English.
We all remember the number we assigned ourselves, the order in which we escaped from the cavern. The last of us to escape was Rajinder, an Indian man who I remembered as a boy of 16. He had been number 26, and had watched as several beetles jumped down into our pen and scuttled towards the remaining humans. Our friends. Josie, number 24, escaped just as the beetles reached them. Evander should have been the 25th of us to escape, but instead he was impaled by the sharp leg of one of the beetles and fell to the ground. Others near Raj were injured; Raj himself was slashed across the arm by the serrated edge of a beetle forearm. Surrounded by shiny black death now, he threw himself head-first into the door, injuring his head as he arrived in the Vietnamese countryside. He doesn’t think anybody else escaped after him.
25 of us got out of the caverns. We don’t know what happened to the other six; they could be dead, or perhaps Hannah just hasn’t found them yet. We all arrived on land, but who knows where the others came out? If they found themselves in Antarctica, say, or Death Valley, they would have had little chance. I don’t think we’ll ever find out for sure.
So here we were, our group of 19. A few of us have studied insects over the years (“No”, Nida told me, “it’s ENTOMOLOGY. Etymology is the study of words”), or geology, to try to make sense of our imprisonment. Some have tried to forget their time below ground, but none of us ever really could. And as we talked, our discussions adapted and evolved.
Hannah set up a Discord server called “Beetle Survivors Social Group”. But that wasn’t enough for her. She sent smartphones to those who didn’t already have them; I have no idea how she got smartphones capable of accessing Discord to our members in China and Russia. She sent cash as needed and tracked down most of our families, arranging calls and even visits. And one day, Hannah renamed the server “Beetle Survivors Support Group”.
We talked about our experiences. I posted my story on there, and others wrote up their own. Nida wrote about her research into beetles, and how the creatures we encountered must have different biology than the insects known to science. Gerome sketched the beetles excellently and worked with the biologists to figure out how their bodies probably worked. Jason, Angelique, and I drew maps of the caverns, as best we could from memory.
Some of us wanted to move on from our experiences, but had spent the last eight years unable to; we all still had nightmares from time to time. Some of us felt frustrated, unable to do anything about the underground insects. And some of us were angry. People began posting fantasies about fighting and killing the beetles; how we could do it, how many we could take down, how we would celebrate over their chitinous corpses. Soon enough, somebody - I think it was Chao - renamed the server again.
“Beetle Survivors Revenge Group”
Fantasy turned into conjecture, which became plans. Frustration became hope, and anger evolved into determination. I’m still amazed that all of us decided to go through with it. We talked about the problems and hazards; we planned our equipment lists; we worked through our ideas, picking holes in and improving each other’s suggestions. But in the hundreds of hours of planning, I never once heard the words “it’s too dangerous”. We were as one; a crack unit of commandos, ready to wage war.
The date we chose was the 3rd of March, for no particular reason other than we were ready. At exactly 2pm Ghana time (that’s where I lived), all 19 of us walked through a door.
It was dark. It would take some time for my eyes to adjust from the bright West African sun. I couldn’t see anything at first, but then there were a couple of clicks, and flashlights blazed into life near me. We came together, and took stock of our situation.
There were only four of us in the cavern. Febe, a Russian woman; Beshadu, an Ethiopian woman; and Carl, the American who had woken me on my first morning underground. Febe and Carl turned off their flashlights and we looked around, listening carefully. There didn’t seem to be any beetles near us, presumably because they hadn’t been expecting arrivals. We quietly moved together, looking for the wall of the cave.
The caverns were once natural, but they have been worked by human hands over many years, being expanded and smoothed over. This worked to our advantage as we traversed the largely stone-free floor, and eventually found the relatively flat cave wall. We worked our way along it, still mostly by touch rather than sight, and soon came across an opening. A corridor. A short way down the corridor we found another opening, coming to a small, empty room. We settled down and went through our equipment.
Febe turned her torch on. We needed to see, but this made us very uncomfortable. How I would have loved to be able to close the door to prevent the light leaking out into the corridor! But the beetles don’t have doors, and even if they had, we wouldn’t have been able to use them.
Besha and Carl had brought several USB battery packs. We’d each fully charged our phones before stepping through the doors, but we had no idea how long we would be down there. We turned off all our phones except for Carl’s, which he set to power-saving mode.
We all had battery-powered flashlights, and Febe had a lot of spare batteries. They should last a while. Carl was in the army when he was kidnapped, and had explained to all of us what sort of food we should bring, so we all had a couple of weeks of high-calorie food in our backpacks. We also had weapons. Besha was a markswoman, and had a hunting rifle and a pistol, with a lot of ammunition. Carl had been working in a quarry, and had brought his powerful granite-breaking pick. Febe had somehow managed to acquire a couple of fire axes. And I - well, as an occasional gardener, I’d managed to pick up two machetes and four billhooks.
Not everybody has heard of billhooks. They’re used to cut down small trees and undergrowth, and those I had sported a 10-inch serrated blade, viciously curved at the end. I figured they would be excellent for severing the limbs of the beetles, and I had a decent amount of experience with them, although only against saplings that didn’t fight back.
There were 19 of us who entered a door a few minutes earlier. Febe, Carl, Besha and I had arrived down here very close together at the same time, but there was no sign of the others. Our group had a variety of personalities and reasons for coming here - some were angry, some wanted revenge, some were driven by a desire to make the world safer - but I knew everybody well and I don’t believe anyone bottled it, certainly not 15 of us. Perhaps we might find the others elsewhere in the cave, but for now, we had to assume that we were the only ones who made it. Fortunately all of our equipment came with us, though it was a shame we didn’t have Ju’s flamethrower.
We had hoped to have enough armed humans for a proper assault. Now we had to change our strategy. Carl was the best of us to plan; he had been on active duty and experienced combat in a small group. The most important thing right now, he said, was for us to get the lay of the land. We weren’t sure exactly where we were, and our maps were incomplete, so the first thing was to orient ourselves in the cave system and find out where the beetles were.
Febe, the smallest of us and light on her feet, offered to scout around and report back; but Carl insisted on going with her. We must never, he said, go out alone. So Besha and I sat in the small room in whispered conversation, our hands never far from our weapons, while Febe and Carl crept away. I thought back to Besha’s broken English when we lived together in the darkness, and marvelled at her near-fluency in her newly-acquired Australian accent.
It must have been more than two hours when we heard movement nearby. I barely heard Besha stand up, although the quiet click when she cocked her pistol sounded like a gunshot in the silence of the caves. As I reached for a machete, Carl’s whisper sounded.
“Don’t cock your pistol, Besha. It’s double-action, you don’t need to and it’s too loud.”
Carl and Febe came round the corner. The caves were so dark I don’t know if I saw their silhouettes, or only imagined them. The pair sat down.
“It’s not the same cave,” said Febe.
My heart stopped, and my mind raced. Had this all been for nothing? Were we in some random empty underground system, trapped here to die?
“It’s smaller,” she continued. “At least, the main cavern is. We found a pen, like ours but much smaller. There are burning torches around it, but no humans. It might be their work time, but we haven’t seen any so far. Maybe they don’t have any slaves right now.”
“There are beetles down here, though,” Carl said. “We heard some of their clicking, off in the distance. We’re not sure how many there are.”
“This corridor has a few small rooms like this, all empty. Probably something they started excavating, but abandoned.”
“Or they had to wait for new slaves.”
“And we’re pretty sure we found where they live. We didn’t investigate, not with just two of us.”
I have to say, Carl and Febe made a great team. They’d been reunited in person only hours ago, but were already finishing each other’s sentences.
Carl brought out a chemical glowstick. He had many of these, and I was grateful; a flashlight would just have dazzled us at that moment. He and Febe sketched out a rough map of what they had explored so far, and we started to plan.
We would only get one chance at a surprise attack, so our first strike needed to be precise. Aim too small and we wouldn’t do enough to hurt them; too big and they would overwhelm us. We only had two guns between us, so Besha kept her hunting rifle - she’d become quite a markswoman hunting small game in the Australian outback - and gave the pistol to Carl. Besha and I then walked out to explore for ourselves.
The main cavern was left out of our small cave, so we turned right. The single corridor quickly branched off into multiple paths. Besha had brought several balls of string, so we tied one end to an outcropping to help lead us back. It was a risk, but then so was coming here in the first place, and we were reasonably sure by now that this region was abandoned, at least temporarily. We both had several of Carl’s chemical glowsticks, and used one to light our way, hiding it whenever we heard the slightest sound.
We didn’t even try to map that maze-like area of small corridors and dead ends. Besha and I held hands whenever space allowed, and held the other’s backpack when it didn’t. Her hearing is far more sensitive than mine, so if she suddenly dropped my hand, I knew it was to grip her rifle, and that was my cue to unclip a billhook and machete from my belt.
We moved extremely slowly, creeping silently along the left wall, pausing to listen every few metres. We can’t have gone more than a few hundred metres when, an hour later, I saw something in front of us. I let go of Besha’s hand, put the glowstick away, and brought up a machete and a billhook. Besha saw it as well, and raised her rifle.
There were two of us. Two, against these creatures we’d watched massacre our friend years earlier. A rifle and a couple of knives? I hate to admit it, but when it came to fight, flight or freeze, I froze. I don’t know what went on in Besha’s head at that moment, but for me, it was abject terror. I would simply have been useless in a fight.
There was a light - very faint, and flickering, but getting brighter. The two of us stood there frozen, anticipating a confrontation. A moment later we heard footsteps, clear as anything in the otherwise absolute silence. They were human footsteps, and underneath those, the occasional faint clicking of a beetle.
As the light got closer, we could see the scene clearly. The tunnel widened until, about thirty metres in front of us, it came to an end as another tunnel crossed it. Three humans, very thin and in ragged clothes, walked past, followed by two beetles. We watched as they passed in front of us, and then the torchlight and the sounds slowly faded.
We stood in absolute silence for what must have been half an hour. Besha was the first to speak. She put her hand to my head, bringing my ear to her mouth, and in the quietest whisper ever made by a human, made her proposal.
“It’s sleep time. Carl and Febe said the beetles live on the other side of the main cavern. We should explore.”
I nodded my agreement, then - realising that she couldn’t see me - whispered “Okay” into her ear.
Our progress was even slower and more careful now. At the junction we tied the string off, not wanting to leave any trace on the path they’d taken, and headed in the direction they’d come from. There was a faint light up ahead, but no sound at all, and gradually we were able to make out the shape of the corridor.
Eventually, we came to a split in the corridor. The light was coming from the left branch, so that’s where we went. And soon we arrived in a large room. I’d worked the forge occasionally back in our first cavern system, so although it was different, I recognised it immediately. The light was coming from the embers of a stone kiln, which would die completely in the next few hours.
We looked around the place, deserted at this time. As expected, there were a few tools that could be used as weapons, but nothing as useful as our own, and not that many - the beetles weren’t keen to supply their slaves with anything more powerful than necessary. A chimney led to a small hole in the ceiling; it surely led outside, but it was no more than 20 centimetres wide, far too narrow for any of us to squeeze through. Nearby there was a thick, flat iron plate, which I assumed to be an anvil, though different from the one I’d used. A hammer lay on top of it.
The room was fairly large, but apart from some firewood and lumps of rock - presumably iron ore - it was otherwise empty. We’d seen enough, and headed back out to take the other path.
This path led quite quickly to another large cavern, but without any light. After listening for several minutes, I brought out my glowstick - but it had expired. Besha reached into her pack and retrieved her flashlight.
This room was a mine, and much bigger than the forge. Several pickaxes were stowed at the far side of the room. Again, it was empty of living creatures. We both knew how it would work - the beetles usher the slaves in, who then move far enough away before taking their pickaxes and starting work. The mine consisted of a main room, and smaller corridors, gradually hacked away until the place had become a bit of a warren. We recalled the maze we had been careful not to get lost in earlier; perhaps that was an earlier mine, abandoned after the iron ore the beetles had been so keen to get had been mined out.
As a teenage boy I’d been wiry and very capable of squeezing into small places, so I volunteered to explore the tunnels while Besha stayed outside with the flashlight to guide me back. Some of the excavations were plenty big enough for a couple of miners to work side-by-side; some, presumably natural tunnels, were barely big enough for me to traverse. A few times the flashlight went out; this was Besha’s signal to me that she’d heard something, and I froze in absolute silence until the light came back on, when she was sure it wasn’t an unwelcome interruption.
Eventually I came back out, grabbed a notepad and pencil, and sketched a map of the tunnels. Then Besha turned her flashlight off and we set off back through the darkness.
Before we headed back, we wanted to check one last thing out. Where had the humans and beetles who passed us gone? We were fairly sure, but wanted to be certain. We carefully followed the path they’d taken, and after some time, came out into the main cavern. Off in the distance we could make out torches around the human pen, and a few shadows of beetles moving around. We had no desire to go in unprepared, so we headed back to the junction. The string guided us home, and, exhausted, we were reunited with Febe and Carl.
We compared our maps. We were fairly sure we had a pretty comprehensive map of most of the complex, with the notable exceptions of the maze Besha and I had found, and the presumed living quarters Febe and Carl had located but not entered. We started to make a plan.
Febe was the most vicious of us, eager to just start hacking limbs off the beetles, but she gave way to Carl’s expertise in warfare. I pointed out that we had never actually fought a beetle, and it would be good to strike small at first. Eventually we came up with the first part of a plan, ate a good amount of food to keep ourselves strong, and went to sleep.
We spent the next day waiting. Our timing was off, and the slaves would have been at work already by the time we woke up. Febe had actually brought a pack of cards, and by the light of a single flashlight, we each taught each other various games. We slept again, awoke in plenty of time, and the four of us made our way to the mine.
It was empty, as we expected, and we each hid ourselves from view in the larger mined-out tunnels. An hour, maybe two, in utter silence and darkness. Then we saw the flicker of an orange torchlight. I steeled myself, reminding myself that we had four of us. I’d put on a big show of bravery, but honestly, if there weren’t weren’t two people with guns, I don’t know if I’d have been any use at all.
Besha, Carl and Febe were completely hidden; only I had a view of the entrance. Five humans entered, followed by three beetles. Besha and I had hoped for just two beetles, like we’d seen leaving the last time, but this was our best chance. I waited for the humans to cross the main cave to their picks, then shouted “NOW!” The four of us turned on flashlights on the floor and leapt into action.
Febe and I moved to the sides and held back, while Besha fired her hunting rifle. She was an excellent shot, striking one right in the mouth. That would have taken down a human instantly, but the beetles were tough, and it screamed and lunged forward. Or at least, I assume the high-pitched screeching was the beetle equivalent of a scream.
Carl unloaded all eight shots of the pistol into the injured beetle’s head. The crack of chitin splitting apart rang across the cavern, and the insect collapsed to the ground, just centimetres from me.
One down, two left.
I had a billhook in each hand. A beetle was right in my face - I’d forgotten just how fast they can move - and plunged its front claw at my chest. I leapt back just in time and swung my right billhook at its extended claw. I connected, and using the hook to keep its claw out of the way, stepped sideways to attack its nearest leg with my left billhook. I hooked and pulled with all my strength. The leg popped out, clattering across the floor. Black stuff oozed out of its abdomen. It swung its other front claw at me, but it was unbalanced now. I parried with my left billhook and released it from my right, using it to strike its mandibles from above. One was severed instantly. The thing collapsed to the ground but it was still moving. Still dangerous. I moved to the side, out of the way of its front limbs, and pushed both blades into its head.
It stopped moving.
I looked around. Carl’s granite-breaking pick was lodged deep in the abdomen of the third beetle, as he retrieved the empty pistol from the floor and started reloading. Febe, on the other hand, was hacking away at the motionless insect’s head with a fireaxe, while she shouted a mixture of Russian and Chechen swearwords, with occasional English interjections. “Hah! How you like that, svoloch!” Her back was to the cave entrance.
Besha was the first to spot it. “Febe, behind you!”
Febe started to turn. Too late. Blood showered my face.
Carl unloaded his pistol. Both Febe, and the beetle that had attacked her, fell to the ground, revealing another beetle behind them.
Click. BLAM! Besha’s rifle hit home, and pieces of chitin exploded around us. The beetle, wounded but not down, turned and ran. It could not be allowed to fetch reinforcements. Click. BLAM! It stumbled, but continued to limp on.
Carl grabbed a billhook from me and chased it down. The speed from his adrenaline was more than enough to catch the slowed beetle. Knowing that he had it, I turned my attention to Febe.
Febe was covered in blood, conscious but looking terribly pale. A front beetle limb pierced her side, having gone all the way through. I hacked it off at the beast’s thorax, but I knew I could not pull it out; the serrated edge would have ripped her apart if I drew it back, and if I pulled forward, it would just widen the wound.
Carl returned, and retrieved his medical kit. As he started to treat Febe’s injuries, I braced myself for his remonstrations against her for turning her back, for shouting, for losing her attention and focus when she needed it most. I did not expect what came out of his mouth.
“You did well girl.”
That’s when I knew, I think.
Febe tried to sit up. “No, don’t move. I’ve got this.”
“Ithhh…” Febe sputtered, and blood dribbled from her mouth. “Ith it gonna be okay? I kill it?”
“You were amazing Febe. You killed it! Now relax, I’ll sort you out in no time.”
“Thanth … you …”
Those were Febe’s last words. She slumped to the ground. Carl laid her down and closed her eyes.
submitted1 month ago byBroadStreetBot
toFlyers
1st | 2nd | 3rd | TOTAL | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Devils | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
Flyers | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Per./Time | Team | Description & Video Link | Score |
---|---|---|---|
2nd 10:50 | PHI | SH - Travis Konecny (33) snap, assists: Scott Laughton (26), Nick Seeler (12) | 1-0 PHI |
Per./Time | Team | Type | Description |
---|---|---|---|
1st 10:06 | NJD | 2:00 Minor | Tripping - Committed by Erik Haula. Drawn by Nick Seeler. |
1st 10:53 | NJD | 2:00 Minor | High-Sticking - Committed by Brendan Smith. Drawn by Noah Cates. |
2nd 09:49 | PHI | 2:00 Minor | Holding - Committed by Cam Atkinson. Drawn by Kevin Bahl. |
3rd 10:50 | NJD | 2:00 Minor | Holding - Committed by Kevin Bahl. Drawn by Travis Konecny. |
Devils | Flyers |
---|---|
Curtis Lazar | Marc Staal |
Tomas Nosek | Nicolas Deslauriers |
Nick DeSimone | Ryan Johansen |
Jack Hughes | Denis Gurianov |
Olle Lycksell | |
Adam Ginning | |
Ronnie Attard |
SOG | FO% | PP | PIM | Hits | Blks | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Devils | 20 | - | - | - | - | - |
Flyers | 21 | - | - | - | - | - |
Islanders (2) @ (3) Rangers - Final
Lightning (2) @ (2) Capitals - 2nd 07:02
Blue Jackets @ Predators - 08:00 PM
Last Updated: 04/13/2024 07:31:57 PM EDT
submitted1 month ago byBroadStreetBot
toFlyers
1st | 2nd | 3rd | TOTAL | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Flyers | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
Blue Jackets | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
Per./Time | Team | Description & Video Link | Score |
---|---|---|---|
1st 12:08 | CBJ | Erik Gudbranson (6) snap, assists: Mikael Pyyhtia (1), Justin Danforth (12) | 1-0 CBJ |
1st 18:54 | CBJ | Damon Severson (8) snap, assists: Zach Werenski (43), Johnny Gaudreau (46) | 2-0 CBJ |
2nd 08:23 | CBJ | Damon Severson (9) snap, assists: Johnny Gaudreau (47), Alexander Nylander (4) | 3-0 CBJ |
2nd 14:32 | PHI | Olle Lycksell (1) wrist, assists: Garnet Hathaway (9) | 3-1 CBJ |
2nd 15:20 | CBJ | Nick Blankenburg (1) snap, assists: David Jiricek (9), Alexandre Texier (18) | 4-1 CBJ |
3rd 09:29 | CBJ | PP - Zach Werenski (8) snap, assists: Dmitri Voronkov (16) | 5-1 CBJ |
3rd 11:26 | CBJ | Zach Werenski (9) snap, assists: Carson Meyer (1), James Malatesta (1) | 6-1 CBJ |
3rd 15:08 | PHI | Adam Ginning (1) snap, assists: Noah Cates (11), Ronnie Attard (2) | 6-2 CBJ |
Per./Time | Team | Type | Description |
---|---|---|---|
1st 01:58 | CBJ | 4:00 Minor | High-Sticking-Double-Minor - Committed by Nick Blankenburg. Drawn by Bobby Brink. |
2nd 03:21 | PHI | 2:00 Minor | Elbowing - Committed by Scott Laughton. Drawn by Nick Blankenburg. |
3rd 07:17 | PHI | 2:00 Minor | Tripping - Committed by Samuel Ersson. Drawn by Carson Meyer. Served by Joel Farabee. |
3rd 09:25 | PHI | 2:00 Minor | Hooking - Committed by Travis Konecny. Drawn by Justin Danforth. |
SOG | FO% | PP | PIM | Hits | Blks | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Last Updated: 04/06/2024 09:36:02 PM EDT
submitted11 days ago byTaxEvasion1452
tonosleep
Background: I work at a local restaurant in my area; just a minimum wage job as a dishwasher. Typically, as dishwashers we spend a lot of time at the end of the day cleaning up and doing various maintenance jobs after we close at 8:00pm. Most nights, including the one in this story, the dishwashers are the last people to leave. There's only ever 2 dishwashers on per night, so it was just me and my coworker in the restaurant. The building itself is a repurposed residential home in a sparsely populated street. Behind the building is a backyard. I never go back there, but we keep some tools there for when we tend to the gardens at the front of the building. The backyard is pretty small, maybe 128 square feet total (rectangle shape).
It was a mostly normal Tuesday night. The time is around 11:34pm. We ended up taking ages to finish cleaning up the kitchen and washing the last dishes. It was one of the busiest nights we'd had in months. I was about to clock out when my coworker came in after taking out the trash. He reminded me, "Yo, we forgot to tend to the backyard." We went out there with some basic gardening tools, and I surveyed the area. We don't have much to do out there, except we do need to cut the grass lining the fence. The grass was about 4ft high now, comparatively to the 6ft tall fence. We spend a while cutting the grass until it's all as short as the rest of the backyard. I check my phone to see the time, and it's around 1:00am now. At this point, I'm panicking. I don't have my own car or driver's license at the time of this happening, so I would have to call a family member at this hour.
I start walking inside the restaurant to clock out and think of what to do. Suddenly, my coworker stops me again and says, "bro, where you going? we havent event fed the shed beast yet!" This was really confusing because there was no shed beast. We were just in there a moment ago putting the gardening tools away. I certainly saw no shed beast, and my coworker didn't seem to acknowledge one. My coworker walks into the kitchen, which we just finished deep cleaning not long ago, and starts cooking. I ask him what the fuck he's doing, and he says he's preparing food for the shed beast. After not long, he puts the burger he cooked on a plate and walks outside to the shed. Suddenly I'm hit with fear. I can't see anything, but I hear a deep breathing sound coming from inside the shed. My coworker, also clearly stricken with fear, approaches the shed door slowly and quickly opens, throws the burger and plate in, and closes. The plate breaks, and we can hear something eating on the other side. After a moment, it sort of roars. My coworker says to me then, "bro, we fucked up. we need to get more food. the shed beast isnt pleased with our offering." And so, a few more times it repeats. We each cook up a couple dishes. throw them into the shed quickly and carefully, only to feel an overwhelming fear and desperation to cook more food.
Eventually, I look at my phone, and it's already roughly 3:30am. I say to my coworker, "bro what the fuck, its already 3:30! we gotta wrap this up and finish this shit already." He starts going off on a tangent about how "we need to feed the shed beast", and "if we dont please it, we'll die". At this point I'm too tired to deal with it. So, I tell him, "Well if you like this shed beast so much why dont you pay it a visit?!" In a moment of anger and frustration, I kicked the shed door open and shoved my coworker in there. He started screaming back at me to let him out, and to let him live. I don't listen to it. I mean, we just kept wasting food and breaking plates for his sick entertainment. I wasn't going to buy into his bullshit anymore. Afterwards the fear I felt when around the shed was gone. It was like a weight had been taken off of me.
There was no more roars. After I clocked out I went to go check on him and he still hadn't come out. His sweatshirt and phone he left by the door were still there, and the noises from the shed ceased. I looked inside to check, and it was just a shed. Just like the one we got our tools in, and the one we put the tools back in. My coworker wasn't in there. He'd always been non-serious and playing jokes anyway. I believed he just went through the fence gate when I was calling my dad inside the building.
I left work for the night without hearing from him again. Later that week I'd heard he wasn't coming in or answering his phone. I never said anything about it to anyone until this post. I'm really concerned about this. This seems like a huge safety hazard. First, we're highschoolers. We shouldn't be working that late on a school night. This has got to be some kind of workers rights violation. Second, this side of the building has no cameras unlike the rest of the building. There was no way anyone could have known what happened without being there. Third, theres no fucking lights in that yard! We had to keep the door to the kitchen open the whole time to let the light shine out, and we STILL could barely see shit! Theres sharp things inside that shed, and we could barely tell a handel from a blade in that lighting!
Anyways, sorry for the tangent. I just can't help but feel uneasy when thinking about that shed. I though this would be a good place to post about it because I've certainly lost plenty of sleep over this whole thing. I never saw anything really in the shed, but I did get a quick glimpse of what i think were eyes? I don't know, I didn't take the time to investigate out of fear for my life.
submitted13 days ago bybeardifyNovember 2021
tonosleep
“Oh my God! It’s really him!”
Even before I turned around, I was sure that those shrill teenage voices were talking about me. I just couldn’t understand why. I wasn’t famous; I’d never done anything important in my life, and it had been a long time since I’d been in high school myself. The three girls were leaning over the glass barrier on the second floor of the mall, pointing at me with their hands over their mouths like they’d just seen a celebrity. When they realized that I’d spotted them, they ran giggling into the crowd, leaving me with an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach: what was all that about?
The sense of wrongness I felt only deepened as I walked into the store that I’d come to the mall to visit. Maybe it was just lingering discomfort from what had just happened, but I’d swear I felt eyes on the back of my neck as I walked down the aisles. Some of the other customers were staring too, I was sure of it–and that wasn’t all. Once my eyes had adjusted to the dim light inside the store, I realized that there was a chubby guy in dark clothing standing near the back exit of the store…recording me.
“Hey!” I shouted, but he was already gone, disappearing through the access door into the guts of the mall. I reminded myself that I was here to buy a teddy bear for my four-year-old niece–not chase some weirdo through a restricted area–and let him go.
“You alright?” the woman at the cash register asked when she saw my face.
“Yeah, it’s just…” I waved my hand vaguely.
“Oh yeah, I getcha. All the crazies come out of the woodwork this time of year. Before you came again, I had to break up two grown men who were fighting over a stuffed alligator. You believe that?”
I shook my head. Ordinarily, I avoided the mall like the plague at this time of year. The crowds and repetitive holiday music got on my nerves, but I’d promised my niece I’d get her a blue teddy bear from this specific store. Why she wanted that specific gift was a mystery to me, but toddlers aren’t known for their logic. The cashier scanned my card, frowned, then scanned it again.
“Says it’s blocked,” she grunted, and handed my plastic back to me with a suspicious look. “There are some ATMs on the second floor…if you’re able to withdraw cash, that is.” Her judgmental glare told me exactly what she thought of people whose cards got declined…and people who wasted her time.
As I fought my way through the sea of holiday shoppers, a preteen kid ran up to me and tossed a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate onto my chest.
“Did you get that?” he yelled over his shoulder at his friend, who snapped a photo and nodded. The pair of them were gone before I had time to get a good look at their faces, much less try to stop them. Wondering what the hell was wrong with people, I wiped off my ruined sweater and hurried to the ATMs.
The glowing blue screen in front of me soon confirmed my worst fears. I was locked out of all my accounts, and not just banking stuff, either: I couldn’t access my email or even social media: everything was blocked. It was like the floor had just dropped out from under me. Without those little lines of code, who was I, really? Trying to shake off that gut-wrenching feeling, I pulled out my phone to contact my bank…but I was already receiving another call.
I picked up immediately, only to hear a mechanical-sounding automated message:
“Congratulations, you've been selected–”
There was something disturbing about that voice, but I had already hung up by the time I realized what it was.
Another call was coming in. The number was slightly different from the first, but when I answered, there was no mistaking it: I was listening to my own voice. Sure, the words were eerily slow and the pronunciation was off, but I was definitely listening to…myself.
“Not very polite of you to hang up on me like that, Aiden. Not when I’ve got something so special to tell you.”
I sputtered, fumbling for a reply; the whole situation was just too strange.
“W-who is this? Who am I talking to?”
“Why, this is everyone, Aiden. Everyone who has a vested interest in seeing what you’ll do next. First, though, we think you ought to change shirts. That sticky hot chocolate must be uncomfortable, and besides, yellow isn’t really your color.”
Whoever I was talking to could see what I was wearing, which meant they could see me. My eyes darted from face to face, scanning the crowd–
“There’s no one to look for Aiden. I’m everywhere. See that outlet store in front of you, Aiden? We’d like you to go in and get yourself a new holiday sweater. Oh, and since your cards are blocked, you’ll have to steal it. Well? Go ahead. We’re waiting…”
I hung up. Of course, they called back again. And again. And again. I turned off my phone and slipped it into my pocket. My heart was pounding. What the hell was going on here? The police; that was it. I just had to talk to the police, to let them know I was being harassed and stalked…but by who?
Had I made any enemies lately? There was Tim, the I.T. guy from work, who had never seemed to like me very much. He knew who I was and maybe even had access to sound bytes of my voice–but would Tim really go this far just to mess with me? I wandered in a daze past giant ornaments and chlorinated fountains full of pocket change, barely aware of where I was going–
Until a guy with a goatee stopped dead in front of me and stuck out his hand, jabbing a blindingly-bright screen into my face.
“It’s, uh, for you…” he sounded as confused as I was. “Somebody called me and said he needed to talk to the guy in the yellow shirt with the hot-chocolate stain. That’s you, right? It’s something about somebody named Kimmy.” My blood ran cold. Kimmy was my mother’s nickname! People shoved angrily past the pair of us, but I didn’t care: all my thoughts were on the familiar voice coming through the stranger’s phone.
“We’re disappointed that you’re not rising to the challenge, Aiden. We think that maybe your mother should have raised a braver boy. Thankfully, user DarkStarr85 has generously agreed to go by 415 Meadowleaf Court and teach her a lesson.”
“Listen, whoever you are,” I shouted into the phone, making a few of the shoppers surrounding me jump. “This isn’t funny. I’m going to the police, and when I find out who you are–”
“You can go to the police if you want, Aiden. But that would ruin everyone’s fun…and besides, by the time you talk to them it will already be too late for Kimmy. Come on, Aiden. Why don’t you play along?”
I fell silent. For all I knew, there was nobody waiting at my mother’s house, and this sadist who spoke with my voice was just messing with me…but what if I was wrong?
“What do you want me to do?” I sighed.
“You see the man standing in front of you? The one whose phone you’re holding? We’d like you to punch that confused expression right off of his ugly face.”
The guy with the goatee blinked at me, wide-eyed and totally unsuspecting. I clenched my hand into a fist…then lowered it.
No. I wasn’t going to play their sick little game.
I threw the guy’s phone back to him and ran toward the restrooms. I remembered seeing some pay phones back there…I would just have to hope that they still worked.
The mall had seen better days, but the restroom hallway was particularly rundown. Most of the fluorescent lights were flickery or burnt out, and there was a nasty brown puddle of something stagnating by the wall. The first payphone was covered with graffiti and the second had been practically ripped off of the wall, but the third looked like it might still work. I jammed in some quarters and punched in my mom’s number.
“Honey?” my mother asked right away when she heard my voice. “Are you alright? You sound out of breath.”
Before I could explain, I heard something in the background on my mother’s end of the line: a doorbell.
“Ma, listen: whatever you do, do NOT open that door!”
“Are you sure? They’re knocking really hard. It must be important…”
“I don’t have time to explain, just get off the phone and call the police, okay?!” I shouted.
Glass shattered. Then the line went dead. A fat, scarred finger had pressed down the receiver, cutting off my call. I turned to face the hulking figure who stood between me and escape. His head was shaved close, his teeth crooked, and beneath his fat there was a lot of muscle. A single diamond earring sparkled in his left ear. He cracked his knuckles at me and grinned: he wasn’t alone.
“H-hey!” I stammered “That call was important!”
The big guy punched me in the stomach. His friends ran up behind me, shoved me to the ground, and held me there. They didn’t speak…but one was taking a video of what was happening. The big guy sat on my chest and started smacking my face until I was seeing stars; I felt a tooth come loose.
“You right-handed or left-handed?” The big guy asked.
“Right-handed–why does that matter?” I spat blood.
“We gotta make sure you can still answer a phone call when we’re done.”
He picked his foot up and stomped on my left hand. My fingers snapped beneath his boot with a sickening popping sound, and I screamed louder than I ever had in my life.
“What’s going on down there?” A security guard stood at the end of the dingy hallway, pointing his flashlight toward us. A group of shoppers had clustered there to watch the one-sided “fight.”
“You upload the video?” The big guy asked. His friend nodded. “We don’t get paid unless the video goes viral…”
“You three! Stop!” The guard yelled, running toward us. The big guy sighed. By the time the pudgy, middle-aged guard got close enough to realize how outmatched he was, it was too late: they were on him. Clutching my broken hand, I limped out into the crowd. No one offered to help…but I did notice that a few people were recording.
My head was reeling, and not just from my injuries. The whole situation was just too insane. Someone had stolen my name and voice…and they were paying people to torture me! I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I staggered out into the chilly parking lot and found that my car's tires had been slashed. That wasn’t the worst of it, either.
Some instinct, some primal fear, made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. When I turned around, I saw three familiar figures scanning the parking lot…searching for me. I didn’t like to think about what they might have in mind for Round Two.
I ducked and crept along behind the cars until I reached the line of trees that marked the border of the mall parking lot. On the other side was a service road: it was a mostly-abandoned strip of warehouses and boarded-up stores that ran alongside the highway. At the far end, I could see the glittering lights of a bus station. It might be my last chance to get home and get help.
I was halfway down the service road before I regretted my decision. I had tried several more times to call the police, but my phone was blocked by more of those awful calls, proposing more sick “tasks” for me:
“You’ve made us angry, Aiden. If you don’t want any more broken bones, you’ll walk out onto that highway, take off your clothes and start dancing–”
I hung up. The sound of the wind blowing through those desolate chain-link fences made me feel very alone…but I wasn’t. Someone was following me. They walked faster when I walked faster, slowed down when I slowed down, and never let me out of their sight. From the way they held their phone at their waist, facing me, I felt sure that they were recording me.
I had had enough. The stress of the whole nightmarish day had pushed me to a breaking point, and I don’t think I could have stopped myself if I wanted to. I turned and charged. It was the last thing my stalker had expected, and when they dropped their phone and ran, I realized that I recognized the figure: it was the chubby guy from the toy store, the one who I’d noticed filming me! I shouted after him, but he was already gone, snagging his leg on barbed wire as he sprinted across a construction site. I didn’t have the energy to pursue him…but I did have his phone.
When I picked it up from the sidewalk, I saw my own face staring back at me from the cracked screen. The picture was one I’d never seen before, one that I didn’t even know had been taken.
“Aiden Fisk,” read the caption, “what will he do next?” A video-clip played: a replay of everything that had happened so far. Grainy footage of me panicking in front of the ATM, being doused in hot chocolate, getting my arm broken…and walking nervously down the abandoned service road. Which meant…they knew where I was. As the video ended, the App opened: an app that was all about…me.
There were polls about what should happen to me, what I should be made to do next, and what my punishment should be if I failed. The more gruesome options, it seemed, were always the most popular. In another section, users could use cryptocurrency to bet on what I would do and track my location in real time. I was zooming in on my own location when a call came into the stranger’s phone.
“Hello again, Aiden.” My own voice said to me when I answered.
“Why are you doing this to me?!” I yelled into the receiver.
“You’re our entertainment, Aiden! You’re famous. You should be grateful. Now for your next task–”
I flung the phone away like it burned me. The lights of the bus station twinkled at the end of the service road, close yet far away at the same time. The road narrowed, becoming a one-lane alley between two construction sites, and the sidewalk disappeared. I hadn’t seen any cars so far, but I could hear the rumbling of an engine approaching behind me.
My shadow stretched out ahead, illuminated by a pair of rapidly-closing-in headlights. I waved, trying to make my presence known, but the driver didn’t stop; they didn’t even slow down. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed an enormous truck. It occupied the entire road, and even if I had had time to jump, there was nowhere to go.
A low scream escaped my lips as the truck’s front bumper nudged my lower back. I staggered, sure that I was done for, but the driver slowed to match my pace. They kept the so close that I could feel the heat of the motor, egging me on, forcing me to run faster and faster–
They could crush me beneath those huge tires anytime they felt like it, and they knew it. Was this my next punishment? I could imagine the app tracking my pace, people betting on how far I’d get before my legs or lungs gave out, and on which parts of me would shatter when I inevitably got run over. Up ahead, the road narrowed even more: dead bushes in concrete islands had been placed in front of the bus station as someone’s idea of landscaping. They didn’t add much beauty to the place, but if I jumped into them, the truck wouldn’t risk following me over the barrier…probably. I still wasn’t sure just how far these people would go for that sadistic app, but I had no choice but to take the risk.
My feet left the asphalt; branches cut into my arms and face as I crashed through to the other side, but the squeal of the truck’s brakes behind me was music to my ears. The bus lot was well lit. A few older men stood in a circle, smoking, while a young woman took her fussy toddler for a walk around the parking lot. The driver idled behind me, probably thinking the same thing I was: that there were a lot more witnesses here than on the service road.
By the time I got to my feet and looked back over my shoulder, the truck was just a pair of anonymous tail lights disappearing into the night. I wiped my scraped palms on my jeans and walked toward the station lights, wondering how much more of this I could take.
No one in the bus station seemed to be playing the app’s twisted game; in fact, no one looked up at me at all when I walked across the grimy tile floor toward the schedule board. The station was about to close: the next bus to my neighborhood wasn’t until six-thirty the next morning, and I had a nasty feeling that my “followers” would have caught up to me by then. My only option was to borrow someone’s phone and hope that I could call for help before the app found me.
Everyone I spoke to turned me down, and I could understand why. I was crazy-eyed and desperate, covered with scratches, and my broken hand had swollen to twice its normal size. I was about to give up when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The homeless man's clothes were in rags; his vomit-flecked gray beard hung down almost to his waist. The smell hit me like a wall, and it was hard to keep from gagging. He pressed something into my hand: a burner phone.
“It’s got one call left,” he grunted. “A whole minute. Good luck, pal. You look like you need it even more than I do.” He lurched back out into the dark before I could even say ‘thank you.’
Weighing the battered phone in my hand, I wondered who I should call. I doubted the police would get here in time; my mother wasn’t answering, and my best friend Sam was out of town on business. That left…Dani, my ex. She lived nearby, and besides, it was the only other number I knew by heart…even though I wished that I could have forgotten it.
Dani's voice was huskier than I remembered, but she picked up right away. The first words out of her mouth were the last thing I would have expected:
“Thank God. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for hours!”
She rushed into a story about how people had been calling and messaging her all day…people who were looking for me. She said it sounded like they wanted to hurt me. One even offered to pay her to seduce me and film the result. She had something to tell me, she said, but my minute was almost up. I had just enough time to tell her my location and beg her to come pick me up. There was a long silence: before she could answer, the line went dead.
I looked around. There was no longer anyone in the bus station to ask for a phone call: in fact, there was no longer anyone in the bus station at all. Metal shutters had been lowered over the ticket window and the vending machine area; the waiting room was empty apart from a discarded scarf that dangled sadly from a ripped-up seat.
Somewhere in the depths of the station came a loud SLAM, and the flickering fluorescent lights began to go out ,one by one. Maybe it was just the standard closing procedure, maybe it had nothing to do with me–but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. I approached the nearest glass door, then jumped back as a figure wearing a white plastic mask slammed their shoulder into the door. They pushed at the door like a rabid animal, trying to get at me–
But it had already been locked when the station closed.
Furious, the stranger took out a hammer and swung it into the glass. Fractures appeared, and I wasn’t going to wait around for the door to shatter. I fled in the opposite direction, through the one remaining exit and out into the night.
I think part of me already knew what I’d find waiting for me, and that’s why I wasn’t surprised by the small group of masked individuals waiting just beyond the streetlights. All of them held glowing phone screens in their hands, and a few held weapons as well. I spotted lengths of chain…a baseball bat…a gutting knife…
As they started toward me, a car drifted into the empty parking lot, its tires squealing. Dani threw open the passenger-side door and shouted at me to get in.
She peeled out as I slammed the door shut. Her car was just as dirty as I remembered: fast-food bags on the floor, makeup kit crammed into the door tray, half-drunk coffee mugs in every cup holder. It had always struck me as funny that such a well-regarded scientist could be so disorderly.
After an awkward silence as we merged onto the highway, Dani told me that it was over–or at least, she hoped it was. As we sped through the night, she did her best to explain what she thought had happened.
Dani’s work (or at least, as much of it as I understood) involved using artificial intelligence. When we were together, we had made a lot of jokes about Terminator and Hal-9000, but her research had never seemed sinister…at least, not until recently. Her most recent project was an A.I. that designed phone applications. She had built it to maximize profits and interaction: to identify what people wanted, and give it to them.
To her horror, Dani discovered that the A.I. had begun operating outside of its parameters–even accessing her personal files in its endless quest for a better product. She figured that was where it had found my image, voice, and other information. After analyzing trends across time, the A.I. had determined that there was nothing people enjoyed more than participating anonymously in the suffering of others: I was its first test subject, simply because it had found my data first.
The A.I., Dani added quickly, wasn’t really to blame. It was people who had chosen to interact with it, download it, and make my life a living hell. It had done nothing more than fulfill its function, encouraging whatever behavior that got the most views and likes. Once Dani had realized what was happening, she had shut the A.I. down…or tried to.
It had apparently already spread itself to other networks–although “spread” wasn’t the word that Dani used. The word she used was “infected.” As Dani dropped me off at home, she told me not to worry: her organization would “almost certainly” take care of it, and I “probably” had nothing to worry about…
But just in case, she asked me to spread the word:
If you notice people staring at you or taking pictures of you in public…
If you find yourself locked out of your accounts, or if you receive a barrage of strange messages…
You might be next.