Bed Sizes For Single, Double, King, Queen and Super King ...

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Xant found himself holding on for dear life, his body crammed into a vehicle it clearly wasn’t designed for. His tail was squished between the tall seat and the frame of the machine, his legs too far apart for them to sit comfortably in the narrow footwell, so he was almost sideways in the forward-facing seat, but that also gave him a clear view of its pilot’s insane method of ‘driving’ the shaking contraption.
Jasmine didn’t even need to look where her feet and hands were going, moving them simultaneously to shift in and out of gear by instinct, all the while singing harsh, deep-throated songs at the top of her lungs.
Xant had been observing the human since her revival, and while she had had her ‘aggressive’ outbursts, brought on through stress and despair respectively, to see her exercise such aggression was fascinating. She was entranced, focused on some unknown ‘enemy’ and screaming her pent up emotions at ‘it’. Xant had never seen such emotional power simply blasted into the atmosphere without worry or consequence, but he couldn’t deny he was caught up in the triumph and relief the song gave her.
With practised ease, Jasmine stopped the car at the base of the enormous craft, then gleefully jumped out to climb atop the roof again. “Up here, Xant!” she called.
The doctor squirmed his way out of the car and stood on the ground, looking up at the human. She pointed to a small thin ladder welded to the side of the ship’s stern. “We need to climb that to get on board.”
Xant stared at her and then at the wide jump needed to cover that distance.
“Is this another attempt at humour?” The human did laugh, so he supposed he was right.
“Well, we could always wait for Rynard to throw you!” She smiled, making a hand motion of hefting a ball. “Like tossing a dwarf!” She giggled.
Xant for the first time questioned Jasmine’s intelligence.
“Perhaps we left you in stasis too long…”
He quickly examined the gap. It was going to be an extraordinary effort for him to climb atop the vehicle, let alone cross the divide with his physical ability alone. He tried to mimic Jasmine’s method of climbing on the car, but his hands and feet were not able to find the small gaps her narrower ones could find. In the end she had to pull him up, and felt the roof bow with his weight. From up top the distance to the ladder seemed even greater. “How exactly do you propose we climb the ladder from here?” he asked her, but Jasmine was still riding the exhilarating high of being ‘thunderstruck’.
“Like this!”
Without so much as a run-up Jasmine leapt towards the ladder and landed with precision, her elongated limbs showing an agility Xant had not considered during the physical examination. “Let me reframe the question,” he huffed. “How exactly do you expect me to climb the ladder from here?!” “Oh it’s not that far, it’s barely a jump!”
“Zenthi don’t ‘jump’.” “That offer for Rynard to throw you is still on the table.” Xant scoffed, took a deep breath and rationalised the situation.
He was in a military-grade suit, so while his weight and aerodynamics would be affected, his strength was increased and any fall damage negated through the armour and pain blocker chems. So, even if he fell, the only thing that would suffer would be his pride. Another uncomfortable thought peeked through the rationale.
He said he wanted to follow Jasmine. This would mean having to keep up with her. He couldn’t do that if he forever deliberated his shortcomings.
Xant inched closer to the edge of the car and Jasmine helpfully reached out to him, hanging precariously from the metal bars. “I’ll catch you!” She encouraged him. Her arms closing the distance boosted his confidence considerably, and he swayed his body back and forth, ready to leap. This would count as the most adventurous he had been in the steel suit, forever wary of Rynard’s warning of torn ligaments. Xant closed his eyes and pushed himself forward, the suit multiplying the force needed to get him across and almost smashing into the side of the yacht. Thankfully, Jasmine was able to correct her friend’s trajectory and guided his hands to the ladder’s sides, which he clung to for dear life. Jasmine gave a loud cheer. “You did it! Way to go, Xant!” And she patted his shoulder. “Now we just have to get to the top! Did you want to go first?”
Once again, he looked at the human as though she were lacking in common sense.
“How do I ‘go first’? You’re clearly ahead of me!” Jasmine could only smile as she maneuvered so only one hand and arm were on the ladder, her body swaying in the open air, unafraid of the drop below. “There you go! Now you’re clear. I’ll make sure you don’t fall!”
Xant shuddered, flattened his ears and forced himself to climb up the ladder. He could almost feel the thin aluminum bars being crushed under the strength of the suit, but one step at a time he climbed higher. The top was open, no hatch or easy step, so he had to scramble his way over and landed with a thud. By comparison, he heard Jasmine’s light footsteps make quick work of the ladder, and she was soon helping him up to his feet. “Careful,” she teased “you’ll scuff the deck!” “Scuff the what?...” “Take off your helmet, you’ll see things clearer!”
Warily, Xant let the locks of his helmet click and examined his surroundings. It was an ‘open air room’, the floor layered like in his office, multiple steps divided for different purposes, with a deep pit made of what looked like blue plastic as the focal point of the main room. Jasmine threw her arms open. “Welcome aboard, matey!” she announced. “Enjoy the pool deck!” “Pool? Was this filled with water-” Xant took a step closer but his ears were tickled by the sound underfoot. He had assumed the floor would have been of the same steel or plastics the ship was composed of but no, underneath him, the entire floor was made of wood. The doctor spluttered, reaching down to the floor to feel it. There was more wood here than he had seen in his entire lifetime, and humans used it for *flooring. *
“Ooh yeah, nothing beats a pristine hardwood deck, that’s why I told you not to scuff it.” Jasmine smiled, walking towards the glass doors. “Let’s check inside! I wonder if everything is still here?” Xant followed her. The whole building catered to a human’s sensibilities. He would be stepping into a truly alien environment.
And it was beautiful.
He was welcomed to a room detailed with wood and gold, whose glass windows shimmered even in the dim light. Displaced furniture, long couches and tables made of wood, extravagantly painted cloth with the shimmer of arvas pupa silk gathered dust, their beauty was comparable to imperial belongings. He ran a finger over the cushions and inspected the thin layer. “Phew! What a mess. Help me clean it up a bit…” Jasmine began lifting up an over turned chair, sliding it into a corner with an almost innate knowledge of where everything should go. The chairs, a long couch and two armchairs had all been pushed into the corner of the room the tables had slid to either end. Xant was almost too scared to touch anything. “What should I do?” he asked, afraid to risk any delicate work.
“We’ll start by dusting off the chairs, then I’ll tell you where they go, okay?”
“Alright...”
The chairs were covered in a soft cushiony material. Xant couldn't stop brushing his hand over them as he delicately placed the furniture, and was dismayed when he saw none of them had a hole for his tail.
“I’ll need help with this!” Jasmine called. The space beneath a large window was taken up by a long lounge, on which Jasmine promptly plonked herself. “Oh my god…I missed cushions.” She patted the space beside her. “Don't be shy! Take a load off!” “Just a moment.” Xant tapped his suit. He couldn't contain himself in steel any longer, the temptation to feel his new environment was too great. The suit splayed open and he was able to step out of it onto fluffy, soft carpet.
Xant lost himself rubbing his feet on the soft fibers. First wood, now fabric? It was obscene!
His own carpet was a precious momento, why would humans consider a laborious resource worth turning into a construction material?
“Is something wrong, Xant?”
“The floor, is this a common fixture?”
“The carpet? I mean, the owner was a madman to have white carpet on a boat, but if you can afford something like this you’re not cleaning it yourself.” Jasmine shrugged. “Carpet’s not uncommon, but generally going out of style because it's so hard to keep clean.”
Xant was both relieved and perplexed by the answer.
“So the reason it is not more common is maintenance?”
“Yeah, keeping carpet, let alone white carpet clean is a nightmare,” Jasmine explained, happy to be talking about the mundanity. “If you think the carpet is amazing you should try out the couch here!” Xant looked over the seat. It appeared all human furniture had a tall back support, with no consideration for large tails such as his own. He did spy a more accommodating stool, however, with the same cushiony substance on top.
“I think this might be more appropriate.” He flipped over the stool and sat, comfortably, very comfortably. He let his body relax as he took in more of the surroundings through naked eyes. There were still so many things thrown about. Cleaning against the wall next to his seat Xant spied an intricately carved container. It was rectangular, heavy and for whatever reason, had uniform, pyramid-shaped protrusions on the outside decorative surely, but the design made it difficult for him to hold. He had to be very careful picking it up.
Jasmine's eyes lit up when he inspected the object more closely, opening the stopper to sniff the contents within.
It smelled of disinfectant.
“Oh my god, yes!”
The human scrambled off the couch and started rummaging through the shelves in the lonely island bench.
“Jasmine?”
“Ah ha!” she cried triumphantly, pulling out another uniquely shaped bottle. “Now this is going to be great!” She skipped over to Xant, picking up more glass rectangles, handed him an empty one and placed his original find on the table. She poured out an amber liquid, a drop in his glass and a more substantial pour in hers.
“What is it?” Xant asked.
“Old enough to vote,” she giggled, then closed her eyes and took a small sip before exhaling and shivering pleasantly. “This is...well, I'm guessing it's older now, but aged whisky, a.k.a, human alcohol.”
Xant wrinkled up his nose.
“Is it supposed to be this colour?”
“Yes! When you drink it, you can taste the oak barrels and honey. But I know you guys use this for disinfectant, so, you get a drop if you're brave.”
“Considering what it does to your physiology, I doubt my own constitution can handle it.”
“Shame.” She shrugged and took another sip.
Xant couldn't taste it, but watched as Jasmine melted into relaxation.
“Ahhh, like drinking warm silk,” she described.
He took a sniff of the sample she gave him.
It was woody and sweet, but the second sniff burnt the inside of his nostrils. Xant graciously placed the ‘drink’ down, while Jasmine chuckled at his reaction.
“Yeah it’s not a drink for a first timer, I think it gets even more potent the longer it sits… and who knows how long we were floating out there.”
“By my best estimates, it could be anywhere between 10 to 1000 [quarters]. Calculating in the unexplored regions of the system, what is currently reachable by galactic council gates and the limit of stasis pods.” Xant informed her.
Jasmine sat quietly for a moment, staring into her glass, before she threw back her head and the drink in one go.
“Whoooo!” She coughed. “Okay, we've seen this room, what else is there to explore!” She swayed getting to her feet, but charged forward anyway. Xant followed close behind, in case she lost her footing, or incase the alcohol began interfering with her Freq control.
The hallways connecting the chambers were very narrow, almost too narrow for him, and all of them had such sharp ascents and descents. The human led inside to one of the many inner chambers, each one as tossed around as the last. There was an entire ‘library’ of paper books, another room dedicated to the act of ‘entertaining’, featuring a destroyed dataslate the size of an operating table, and smaller ‘bedrooms’ that appeared just to be filled with more cushiony furniture.
“And here is the master bedroom.” Jasmine pushed open the ornate wooden doors to reveal yet another spectacular room, almost as large as the entertainment deck, but was sparsely furnished, all Xant could see was that it contained a bed with tables either side, but the bed was nothing short of magnificent. The tapestry stretched across it was nothing short of breathtaking, where giant intertwining flowers embroidered with gold thread sprawled across its majesty. He’d never seen anything as intricate made from pure cloth, the designs were simply beautiful.
“You really like that bedspread, huh?” Jasmine questioned. Xant ran his hand over the quilt, picking it up and feeling the weight of it, wondering what it was like to not be mesmerised by it all.
“Are humans always surrounded by such beauty?” he asked.
The question caught her off guard, and she looked around the room.
“Not always, but, at the same time, this is closer to what it’s like on earth than either the station or the base.” She held her arms wide as she took lazy steps across the room.
“Windows, pictures and paint on the walls, bedsheets and pillows...we like ‘beautiful’ surroundings.” She fell backward onto the large bed, rolling on the blankets and looking up at Xant. “You’ve got no excuse not to feel what the bed is like.”
Xant sighed, took a deep breath and mimicked Jasmine’s actions, letting himself flop forward onto the bed.
It was fluffy and soft.
“I think the sheet’s a genuine 1000 thread count too. Maybe I could make a proper cape out of this, huh?”
“It is absolutely fascinating that humans sleep on such luxury.”
“The lucky ones sleep on such luxury! But I do appreciate bedsheets after going without for so long.”
Her attention was shortening by the moment, as she rolled off the most comfortable place in existence to peek around a door.
“The ensuite!!” she squealed. “Oh Xant, you have to see what a real bathroom looks like!”
If the master bedroom was the most comfortable place in the world, then the ensuite was the most ornate. Xant couldn’t even identify what half the items were in the room, but they apparently all pertained to the simple act of grooming.
Long, wide mirrors lined one entire side of the room, double marble basins and chrome taps sat beneath them. Frosted glass windows, a bath big enough to fit four and a bidet decorated with gold made up the rest of the fixtures. Jasmine once again began rummaging through the shelves, making happy noises with every new discovery.
“Xant, hold out your hand!”
The doctor reluctantly did so, and Jasmine placed a small white blob in it. “Smell it!!” she insisted, fever in her eyes.
He took a quick and wary sniff, but the burning sensation he expected never came.
A fresh and vibrant perfume filled his senses, a sweetness he’d never known.
“It's jasmine hand cream! This is what my namesake smells like!” She dotted her entire arms with the cream and rubbed it into her skin.
“A moisturizer?”
“Yes! And here’s shampoo and conditioner, for hair, moisturizer, face cream, body wash, exfoliant, oh god please, oh please let the water be running!”
She dived for the taps to the bath, wrenching the handle as hard and as fast as it would go, but to no avail.
“Noooo,” she sobbed, hanging her head. “S’pose it was too good to be true, the water in the tanks would be dry…”
Xant curiously looked over the bathtub and jasmine could feel his freq overflowing with curiosity.
“So humans clean themselves in still water?”
“Well, soaking in the tub is fun, it's not exclusively how we clean ourselves, the shower is better for that.”
“So what is the difference between a human shower and our own?”
Jasmine pulled a disgruntled face.
“It’s the difference between a warm gentle rain and a cold pressure hose!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I wonder if we could get it running again…?” She absent mindedly lifted up a wicker basket, finding a few clothes the previous owners had left behind. “So, what do you think?” she asked, lifting a floral summer dress up over her figure.
“The patterns are beautiful, but, is it a cape?”
“No, it’s a dress! Hmmm, but I’d have to lose a few kilos for it to fit.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Well, I’m a little bit bigger than the supermodel who stayed on this boat, but nothing a few weeks of exercise and diet couldn’t fix. Since there’s no junk food I really don’t have the excuse.”
“Are you not already in optimal condition?”
“Pfffft! No, god no.” She pulled at her stomach fat playfully. “Too much good food and junk food makes for chunky humans.”
“Junk food?”
Jasmine grinned ear to ear.
“Junk food, food that holds almost no nutritional value but is all about taste, glorious morsels of sugar, salt and colour dye.”
“There’s a chance sugar could be found aboard this vessel? We’d need to destroy it if there is any intact, its addictive nature can destroy a Sulins inhibition perminately.”
“Well if it’s going to be anywhere on the ship, it’ll be in the kitchen!”
They headed down to the bottom decks and stepped into a stainless steel wonderland. Jasmine was in her element, running her hand over the many pieces of specialised equipment as Xant watched on in wonder.
They found a perfectly polished kitchen, filled to the brim with human utensils, and all of it for the sole use of producing food. Jasmine lifted a book from the floor and brought it over to Xant.
“Here, this is what human food is supposed to look like.”
The graphical fidelity of the pictures was phenomenal, given that they weren’t on a computer screen, but the colours and shapes didn’t even seem similar to what he knew as ‘food’. He had seen sculptures that didn’t have dimensions nearly as interesting as those of the consumables depicted, and there was page after page of them, dish after dish, each one a work of art.
She showed him the variety of knives on display and the stupid amount of cutlery for eating said food. This was an entire industry to these people, the production and skill devoted to it was…
Garish.
Jasmine stood before a giant set of doors, her hands hovering over the handles.
“This is a refrigerator, we keep perishable goods inside… I wonder if anything is still…”
She jerked open the doors and they were both greeted with the foulest stench. The rotting and liquefied remains of meat and vegetables slopped onto the floor. Sealed inside the fridge, the smell had fermented to overpowering levels.
“Air!” Jasmine shouted as she scrambled past Xant. “I need air!”
They ran up several stairs to escape the toxic gas and were able to breathe a sigh of relief once above deck. They appeared to have come out the other side, more couches and pools littering the area Jasmine made her way across to get to the bow of the ship.
She walked to its peak, then climbed over the safety railing to hold the spearhead.
Puffing out her chest and throwing her arms open, she proclaimed for the entire engineering wing to hear,
“I’M ON A BOAT, I’M ON A BOAT! TAKE A GOOD HARD LOOK AT THE MOTHER FUCKING BOAT!”
An echo of uproarious laughter soon followed suit, a joke Xant wasn’t privy to, then Jasmine climbed back to join him.
“You know, I think I’m done for the moment. I need a break from all this excitement…”
She flopped herself down on one of the sunbeds, and Xant stood over her.
“Jasmine, I’ve been meaning to ask...”
“Go ahead?”
“All of this, it’s wonderful, but it’s nothing like the memory you shared with me. All this is pure opulence. Your memory was far more humble and comforting…”
“Well, that’s because this is a superyacht, and not a lower-income one bedroom apartment…” The human shrugged.
“So, what measure of wealth allows people to live such drastically different lives?”
“... I, dunno know, they're mostly owners of companies, corporations, kings, queens, people who run economies…”
“What expertise defines their worth to be that much more than yours?” Xant asked pointedly.
Jasmine faltered for an answer. While she could throw around words like investment portfolios and trust funds, she didn't actually understand the system as well as she would have liked.
“They study finance, have rich parents, inherited gold mines…luck, I guess? There’s many different ways to get there.”
“So, every human has the chance to attain this level of contribution credit?”
“No…”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Xant remarked, finally lying down beside her. Jasmine stared up at the steel enclosed ceiling, reflecting.
“No it’s not, but it’s getting better,” she replied. “Slowly but surely, it's getting better.”

##Wiki/Chapter list = First Chapter = Previous = Next

this hasn't happened for a while but I still have my questions...

So, this is gonna be a little long. When I was around 5 or 6 years old, I had a dream where I was sleeping in the attic of my old house. I woke up in that dream and felt chills, also had the urge to go and look out the attic window that was placed in the center of the wall. So I went and opened the window, pushed it up, and leaned forward with my head sticking out. Immediately surrounding my house was a barren cornfield, and beyond that a ring of trees. Probably about 200 meters to the left of my house was a neighbor's house, all black, just like the rest of my surroundings. The sky was blood red, but I can't remember if the stars were that icky Crayola yellow color or pitch black as well.
Looking to the left at my neighbor's house I saw what looked like a girl perched on the very end of their roof, hunched over so that her hands were between her feet as she rested there. I watched as she craned her neck and howled, but it didn't sound like any ordinary howl—it sounded like an Aztec death whistle (weird thing is, one thing that remains crystal clear in my memory is that, before that dream, I had never heard of an Aztec death whistle or the sounds it could make). Then, she whipped her head in my direction, her figure also pitch black, and I reeled back and slammed the window shut. I had grabbed a few knives from one of the dressers in my room and inched myself toward my bedroom door while still facing the window, which was directly across the room from the door. I managed to reach the knob, twist it, and speed into the hallway when my blind, deaf, and mute sister (I don't have a sister) was coming up the stairs to check up on me (the only thing in this dream that's the same as in real life is the outside structure of the house and the one portion of the attic room where the window is; everything else is different). Out of terror, I threw the knives at her without realizing right then that it was my sister instead of the girl...gory details aside, I killed her and heard her scream (which is odd since she was mute).
Another dream I had in particular a few years later had the same ghost girl. I "woke up" in the dream in a standing position, facing a beach with a lake so large you couldn't see land on the horizon. The sky was cloudy and gray, and directly ahead of me on this beach stood a house shaped like a square with a regular roof on top. The white paint on the outside was chipping especially toward the bottom of the house, which looked like a couple hightides managed to reach, flood, and ultimately rot. The same ghost girl from the first dream was standing to the left of the house and pointing at its front door, but instead of being pitch black I could see her wearing a nightgown while her hair was still black and covering her face (before anyone says I probably watched that one ring movie and saw her in my dream, no. This girl in my dreams is taller than my dad while hunched over). When I reached the front door and looked left, she was gone. I went inside the house and noticed the once beautiful dark green wallpaper that was now peeling off the walls due to flooding, and multiple chunks of wood from the floor had been scattered about.
The two separate staircases at one end of the room that both went up to the same indoor balcony were also rotting and nearly falling apart, but one was in better condition than the other, so I used that one to reach the balcony. This was where all the doors were lined up along the walls, but one all the way to the left caught my interest. When I opened this door I saw a stairwell made out of dark wood, and I climbed it till I reached a small space with just enough room to stand in front of another door. Upon opening this door I saw only the right wall of the room which was lined with a couple dressers and a plethora of stuffed animals on top; directly ahead of me was a window that showed the gray sky and seemingly endless lake.
As I stepped into the room and started looking to the left, I saw a queen-sized canopy bed with pink blankets, but...on the wall just to the left of that bed were streaks of blood that first started as one or two crimson handprints. I don't remember there being blood on the floor, but the streaks on the wall led me to the closet with its which was tucked just to the right of the bedroom door. An awful odor wafted from the slide doors of the closet while a pool of blood seeped from below. Trying my best to prepare for whatever was inside, I slid the doors open and was greeted with multiple severed body parts. Just like in the first dream, I inched backward in fear and made my way toward the door, but this time I saw a smaller version of the girl in the bedroom door. I could also see her face, but her eyes and mouth were stitched shut while she tried to tell me something. To this day I feel bad for the way I bolted for the window and burst through it, plummeting toward the water. Upon falling through the waves of the lake, the ground below seemed to utterly vanish while I was surrounded by bodies.
Then I had a few more dreams. One was about a vampire-ridden private academy where the same ghost girl hunted me down to the literal grave with an axe. Another dream was about my old house's basement serving as a mental facility where both the ghost girl and I were strapped down to some cots and she broke free and tore into my chest. Yet another dream was about a house where the rooms inside would switch around like a Rubik's cube, and I saw her in a yellow kitchen. Then one more dream (among many more) didn't show her, but my family and I were looking at houses for sale and a room that once belonged to a girl (the people selling the house said their daughter died and they didn't want to remove her belongings from the room so they just covered a lot of it with sheets) gave me the same exact feeling I would get from the ghost girl.
Now here's where things take an extremely eerie twist. It had been a while since I had these dreams about the girl, and life was pretty decent. One night, just as I was about to fall asleep, I was jolted wide awake with the feeling of sheer terror. I could literally feel a presence gathering in the space between the foot of my bed and my mirror that gave off unmistakable murderous vibes. It was one of those things where, as I laid there, there was zero doubt that not only was this the girl I had seen in my dreams but, in the waking world, the feeling was amplified and I could tell that this girl wasn't desperate to kill, but also not obligated to kill. It was almost like she was created to do so, but she did find pleasure(?) in it. You might think this is sleep paralysis, and I don't blame you, but here's the thing—I managed to move my hand to my forehead while hiding under my blanket and willed myself to sleep.
The next night a large shadow jumped out at me at the end of my hallway, but when I looked there was nothing. Then I literally saw her standing in the corner of a room, smiling at me, and I proceeded to walk away as if my feet had a mind of their own. I tried to do some research on whoever this person was, but the longer I looked for answers, the slower my internet connection became—every other wi-fi-reliant device in the home operated just fine besides my own. That night I took the picture, tore it in half, and burned one half and left the other to burn the next day, hoping that I had burned the half that had her face. Next morning I woke up nauseous and realized later that I still needed to burn the one portion of the picture I had left. Unfortunately for my eyes, I bent over and looked under the bed to see the very half of the picture I was desperately hoping I had burned.
Only once or twice after that day did I have a dream of a creature similar to her, and I keep getting the subtle feeling she'll be back again, and I need answers. What even is this creature? She easily stands at 6'2 or more hunched over. Her hands and feet, when I saw her irl, were coated in ashes while her nightgown (which only reached between her thighs or calves since it was so small on her) had gray splotches on it. I saw her face, too, and her nose looked like it had been cut off. Her eyelids looked as though they were burned off, and her lips were nowhere to be seen. She had razor sharp teeth that, when she smiled, revealed a pitch black space behind them.
One dream I had revealed a whole bunch of the same girl in the basement of a mansion. I also shared this dream with a friend (we were literally in the same dream the same night, but I can cover details on that later on I think). So I'm kind of scared...I may have "taken care" of one girl, but if that dream reveals multiple, couldn't there be more? I don't even know what I could have done at 5-6 years old to trigger a giant ghost girl with the howl of an Aztec death whistle. Answers are greatly welcomed.
P.S: I've also had a couple experiences besides this.

Please Don't

I smiled at myself in the mirror for the first time in months, but I didn’t want to.
There was absolutely no reason to be happy. My life was in shambles, reduced quite literally to a smoldering heap of charred wood and blackened concrete now twenty odd miles out of sight, but never out of mind. Everything I had, everyone left that I loved, burned to bitter ash.
It all started a few months ago. A promotion that came with a hefty bump in pay. I’d been working corporate law for a bank for years now, and my time to shine had finally come. Managed to ferret out a rather insidious clause in a massive loan deal. Saved the bank from potentially losing millions. With just how big that deal was, I figured my exceptional diligence was worth at least a raise. My boss agreed, and threw in the title of Senior Associate as well.
As the professional aspects of my life had just taken a large upswing, I saw no reason not to attend to other equally important facets. At the time my wife, Remi, and I were living in an upscale apartment near enough to the city’s center where we both worked. It was nice enough, though far from anything suitable for a family.
While we both agreed it was as good a time as any to start having kids, we were far from seeing eye-to-eye on where exactly we’d be raising them. Remi loved the city, and had been living the bohemian lifestyle of a successful metropolitan theatre actress long before we first met. I, on the other hand, longed for the suburban stylings of my childhood. Far, but not too far, away from the hustle of the city.
With a bit of persuasion, I won out in the end. Though, in fairness, credit goes to the house we were soon to be calling home. A gorgeous modernized Queen Anne revival, less than thirty minutes from the heart of downtown. Exactly the kind of house I used to dream about as a little girl.
Remi loved it just as much as I did, if not more. The mismatched steeped and gabled roof, the veranda with the twisted iron-wrought balustrade, the twinned turrets at odd ends – all of this, and more, resonated with that brazen eccentricity that burned so brightly within her. I watched in delight as her eyes sized-up each room the Realtor guided us through, her head already filled to burst with ideas regarding interior design.
We didn’t even look at any other houses, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell Remi on any other.
Surprising enough, the first figure the Realtor dropped on me was considerably lower than what I had lined up for my opening offer. A house this big, this uniquely beautiful, at a price low enough they might as well be giving it away. Obvious red flag, right?
Instinct honed over years of pouring over hundreds, if not thousands, of contractual agreements told me this was a mistake. There was a catch buried beneath the all but rabid excitement the Realtor struggled to contain as Remi voiced her continued adoration of the house. Before things spiraled entirely out of hand, I explained to both of them that nothing was final until I was certain there weren’t any snags waiting for us a few months after moving in.
I should’ve just trusted my gut, and resigned myself to a cramped life in the city.
A proper inspection was arranged, and the report came back clean. While that was handled, I did what I could to look into the life of the previous owner. The bank I worked for had handled the mortgage, and with a few favors called in, it wasn’t difficult to ascertain some facts about the property’s past and only slightly shady owner.
Really, it wasn’t all that interesting beyond a venture that failed spectacularly after his business partner passed on from a shockingly sudden heart attack. I presumed that’s what caused the guy to up and vanish a good decade prior, abandoning his home and defaulting on his loan. The bank had been sitting on the property since, despite every effort to unload it.
When we next met with the Realtor, I asked him about any other interest in the house. Sure, there had been a few potential buyers, though most just pulled out of the deal at the eleventh hour. At this point the bank was just looking to wash their hands of it without too much of a loss, hence the low asking price.
One that I was more than willing to pay, seeing how excited my wife still was about the whole prospect.
And that was that, at least for a few months. We moved in, Remi went berserk on the décor, and eventually we grew accustomed to our new schedules with the increased commute. It started turning sour the night of the cast party.
As I mentioned, my wife was a theatre actress. The theatre company she worked for had just concluded a long and arduous run of Twelfth Night, with Remi leading up the cast as Viola. The production’s director had inserted his own vision into the classic quite successfully, according to the local review, leading to a much larger number of performances.
When the final curtain fell, Remi volunteered our home for the last of their cast parties. They needed somewhere a bit more out of the way, as it were. While the production had largely been a roaring success, the toll for such an achievement came by a new strained relationship between the director and his troupe. We can leave the details of that at inflated egos, divas being divas, and plenty of shouting matches.
When said Director discovered he was not invited to this little soiree of ours, he made his feelings about that matter quite readily known. If only it had been a strongly worded text or email, perhaps everything would have been fine. No, instead, he had to show up at our house, more than slightly intoxicated, looking to start a fight with anyone that so much as looked at him funny.
A scuffle broke out, where in his blundering attempt at a row put his fist cleanly through a wall in the foyer. Luckily, Victor, one of the larger and more athletic members of the troupe, was able to subdue him until the police arrived. The evening’s festivities ultimately fell apart then and there, and the party disbanded before Remi and I had even finished squaring things with the patrol officer.
Exhausted, we let cleaning up fall to our future selves, and headed for bed. I awoke the next morning shortly before noon, not much more refreshed than the night prior, to find myself alone. Curious, as Remi was more apt to nurse a hangover beneath the covers than anywhere else. I glanced to the mirror through the bathroom’s open door to find it just as empty.
Down through the house, I eventually caught sight of her peering at the assaulted wall in the foyer. Perplexed, she gazed at the emptied abyss just beyond broken plaster with a frown. When I joined her, she simply commented that she thought the kitchen pantry was just opposite this wall. Quite certain of that myself as well, I went off down the hall to see if we could see through to the foyer from there, when she stopped me and explained she had already tried.
Shrugging, assuming it was just a gap between walls, I muttered my complaints about trying to find a contractor to restore it when Remi’s unbound curiosity took hold of her in full. Unable to do much beyond gawking at her as she reached her hand within the hole, my protests began shortly thereafter as she began tearing at the loosened plaster. She continued to ignore any and all complaints, not even paying heed to me until she had successfully revealed a doorframe where the wall had once been.
A creeping chill overtook me as I dared to look. Bared concrete walls scarcely revealed by the day’s light awaited us. Further within, I could make out the faintest outlines of uncarpeted stairs descending downward into the empty dark.
My gripes swiftly changed from Remi’s impromptu renovations to never remember seeing anything like this on the floor plans. We had a basement, one that we used quite regularly. One half of it containing a lounge and bar, while the other was dedicated to a home gym that doubled as rehearsal space for Remi during productions. My thoroughness in prying even the smallest detail from this house before we bought it, would not have permitted me to overlook something as big as an unfinished section of the house.
Again, my wife ignored my moaning complaints. Fascination had gripped her quite tightly, indeed, as she began her descent into the unknown, the modest light from her phone blazing the path ahead. Grumbling further to myself, I was not about to allow her to head down all by herself and quickly followed.
Each step below was just as sturdy as the last, bearing our weight without so much as a creak of the wood. It led us down to a cramped space, only a bit more than shoulder’s length. Shallow, barely a nook tucked away in casket of concrete. Honestly I was surprised we didn’t have to stoop down, what with how claustrophobic the space was.
We couldn’t miss what this strange little space kept secret. It sat, nestled within, leaned against the wall opposite, and covered in a sheet of dusty white. Attached by a small streak of blue masking tape was a piece of folded paper.
It was my curiosity that got the better us of this time, as I reached forth and easily pulled the paper free. Waving away the disturbed dust, I unfolded the crisp sheet, eager to see what forgotten memories could be inscribed on the inside. I was anything but pleasantly surprised.
Two simple words, written in heavy block text. Strong strokes of the pen that demanded your attention. There was no misunderstanding that they sought to infer grave caution.
PLEASE DON’T
Remi gasped ever so slightly when I showed it to her. Gooseflesh was already prickling up and down my neck and arms. We both took a step back and tried to make sense of it. If only our intense desire to know hadn’t blinded us from the fact that these words were telling us to go back the way we came, seal up the hole once and for all, and forget any of this had ever happened.
No. Instead, I reached for the sheet. I had to know.
Whatever was beneath was flat, but not all that thin. Heavy, too. My thoughts immediately turned to a framed picture, and was half expecting to find some highly unflattering portrait, perhaps of the prior owner or his family. When my fingers brushed the metal, ice-cold even beneath the sheet, I had a feeling it was going to be anything but that.
Careful, I began removing the sheet. Remi didn’t stop me. She was just as invested in what was beneath as I was at that point.
It was a mirror, and a beautiful one, at that. Probably an antique, given the elaborate frame of tarnished silver. One you would expect to find in some ritzy salon going for more money than glass and metal ought to cost.
Cooing excitedly, Remi was eager to have a proper look at it. I stepped out of the way as best I could, given the narrow space. When the reflection opened up to less of me, and more of the hidden passage, I seized as my heart leapt clear into my throat.
In the reflection, just over her shoulder, a figure lurked in the gloom behind my wife. I couldn’t make out much of them, but I was certain a wicked smile crossed their lips.
Shouting to Remi, we both turned to face the stranger, when I tugged a bit too hard on the sheet. Pinned as it was between the heavy frame and the wall, the exertion forced the mirror to spill forward, crashing into the ground with a piercing shatter.
There was no one behind Remi. The short passage was empty, and there had been no footfalls on the stairs leading up and out. Frantic, I checked every inch of the walls down there, pressing at the roughly set concrete all around us, finding not even the slightest crack anything, let alone a person, could slip into.
It didn’t stop there, either. With the sudden shock of the shadowy presence, combined with the rattling crash of glass, I tore through the whole house. I dragged Remi right behind me, dazed and confused as she was about the whole ordeal, ensuring she wasn’t out of sight while I confirmed we were alone in the house.
We were and, after I explained what was going on to her, Remi did her best to assure me it couldn’t have been anything more than just a trick of the light. I honestly believed her at the time. Knowing what I know now, I would’ve told her we weren’t going to spend another moment in that house. Though, I really doubt that would have changed anything significantly.
We spent the rest of that day doing nothing. Everything and anything could wait, as the jolt of the whole happenstance had thrown me through quite the loop. I hardly touched any of the wine Remi poured for me, and while we tried to watch some TV, it couldn’t keep my focus for very long at all. Every so often, I swear I could catch just the faintest shifting of movement out of the corner of my eye. Though, every time I looked, nothing was there.
Eventually I wore down, and fell asleep as we took in an episode of MASH near midnight. That seemed to be the end of it for a while. The next day, we cleaned up the broken glass without incident, passed the twisted remains of the mirror’s frame along to an interested friend of ours, and set about hiring a contractor to properly fill the gap. Before long, our life was back in order.
At least for a few weeks. After that, I found myself most days waking up in the middle of the night, tense and restless. It wasn’t nightmares, or the like, as I still cannot remember anything prior to suddenly bolting awake feeling as if my very life depended upon something I had forgotten to do. Our bedroom felt far too small on those nights. Far too small and far too strange, as if I had awakened in a different place and time altogether.
One night, it was simply too much. I felt feverish and stifled, like I couldn’t breathe properly from the heat bearing down upon me. Careful not to wake Remi, I headed down into the kitchen for a cool splash of water and maybe some ibuprofen. Even after a long gulp straight from the facet, the air in the house still felt far too stuffy, so I reached for the small window up above the sink.
Just my luck, the latch on it was acting up again. Nothing new, and I had been meaning to replace it for a while now. You really just needed to work at it a bit to have it open, something I was struggling to do in the dark. Flicking the nearby switch brought the small light in the alcove above the sink on, bathing that little slice of the kitchen in an orangey glow you can really only get in the dead of night.
With but a moment of working at the latch, I was able to pull the window free, letting in some much needed cool autumn air. With eyes closed I took in a few deep breaths, enjoying liberation from the oppressive heat that had been following me through the house.
Relishing it a beat longer, I then heard the familiar creak of the floorboards at the kitchen’s entry from the main hall. Figuring Remi had roused and found me missing, I apologized as I opened my eyes. An apology that was cut short.
The reflection on the partially opened window tried to convince me it was Remi. What I saw looking back at me was anyone but.
Eyes opened wide, crazed and unblinking. A half-curl of her lips twisted all vile and malicious. Something in her hand glinted viciously in the meager light. She crept closer and closer, the light now cast upon her. A blur of white knuckles streaked red as she clenched what looked like a shard of broken glass, now rising with horrific purpose.
In an instant, I whipped around, and found my wife looming in the hall beyond the archway. No smile, eyes barely open, now emptied hand trying to rub the sleep from them. She mumbled a few things asking if everything was all right, and I dismissed her concerns with a few shaky complaints about the unseasonal temperature.
She sympathized sweetly enough, with a promise to turn on the fan in our room. Promising, in turn, to be up shortly, I watched anxiously as she slowly vanished into the gloom of the darkened hall. I held my breath all up until I heard her soft tread on the stairs.
There was no explanation for what I had seen, nor for the dread now creeping up through me. Undeniably, it was her that I saw in the window’s reflection, never had I not been able to recall her likeness in perfect detail. All the same, never had I seen it so strikingly menacing at the same time.
Taking a moment longer to hopefully make sense of things, I tried and failed to convince myself it had been nothing but my imagination cranked up to the paranoid nightmare setting. I couldn’t even force myself to glance back to the window’s reflection, in fear that whatever I had seen still waited to further torment me.
Eventually I returned to our bedroom, though I had all but sprinted my way there. As I moved through the hall connecting the kitchen and foyer, I kept catching glimpse of quick movements from behind me in the glass of the picture frames we had hung there. There was no desire to stop and check, and I didn’t even chance a look over my shoulder, as my feet simply carried me faster, and faster.
Really shouldn’t be surprising to know I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I started to nod off, in that hazy moment as my eyes drooped ever so slowly closed, the ever so subtle shifting of the gloom would jolt me back awake like a slap in the face. In the worst of my sleep-starved condition, I could have sworn someone else was looking back at me every time I dared glance at the bathroom’s mirror.
I took the next day off from work when Remi caught me twice dozing off at breakfast, nearly planting my face messily into my oatmeal each time. With all those years at law school under my belt, I was no stranger to all-nighters, but the exhaustion that gripped me so tight that morning was something entirely different. Every part of me ached, begging for rest, as if the last day and a half had been ceaseless dedicated to running for my life.
With a bit of help from Remi, I laid myself down on the couch in our living room. She wanted to stay and enjoy the lazy morning with me, but a meeting with the theatre company regarding their next production required her attention in the city. She promised to be back as soon as she could, so long as I promised to stay right where I was at least until she returned.
Hazily, I can remember the kiss goodbye she gave me. A gentle and calming thing that helped ease my eyes closed, and allowed the darkness to settle evenly. The sweet and intimate scent of her perfume swirling about me, softly telling me it was okay to let go. So I did, for a few hours.
My parched throat eventually dragged me up and out from sleep’s embrace. A few hard swallows, followed a dry cough, and then I felt it. Just like the night before, everything was wrong.
The squirming heat was the first I noticed. It paired all too well with the sudden restlessness in my arms and legs. Pins and needles all up and down my body as my skin crawled in dread anticipation. The strong feeling of a presence nearby, just barely out of reach.
Shifting ever so slightly, I was mustering the courage just to take a single look over the back of the couch, when my gaze fell upon the TV. It hung on the wall across the room, just barely overhead. Muted light seeped in from beyond the curtains, handily revealing her reflection in the darkened glass.
Frozen in place, my eyes given the last of my liberties. Stricken by unknowable terror, I watched the murky shadow in the wide archway to the foyer slowly focus into familiar shapes. My entirety began to tremble when I recognized the lurking specter.
It was Remi, now drifting closer, and closer. Silent as a passing shadow, her figure and form failed to even shift in the slightest as she came to loom just behind the couch. She stopped there, grinning widely with sloppily painted lips. Her mascara ran in chaotic streaks down her cheeks.
In staggered, jerking motion, she lifted her hand as if doing so for the very first time. A faint shimmer of jagged and silvery light outlined the sharpness of the shard she clenched. Higher, it rose, impatiently enduring until that moment in which it could be gleefully sent plummeting down.
I could almost feel it scraping into my flesh, digging deeper and deeper, when I threw myself from the couch in a flurry. I remember shouting, but not if it was me, or whatever it was that wore my wife’s face. Landing hard on the floor below, just shy of bashing my head into the coffee table, I shuffled backwards, trying to put as much distance between myself and it as quickly as possible.
Snatching it off the nearby table, I held a sturdy, diminutive replica of The Thinker, poised ready to hurl the sculpture at the first sign of movement. As the moments slowly scrapped by, I realized I was gawking dumbfounded at an emptied room. I was utterly alone without even the slightest indication that someone else had been there.
Honestly, I don’t really know what happened next. My mind blanked, and I just went numb. Apparently I didn’t even notice when Remi, the real one, returned home sometime after sunset. She found me half-sprawled against the wall below the TV, still clenching tightly at The Thinker.
That look of concern she wore when she first found me turned to pungent unease when I tried to explain it all to her. How something lurked in this house, something that readily wore her face and wanted to hurt me. With a smile that shook too much, she tried to dismiss it all as just stress from work, and perhaps I was still adjusting to our new living arrangement.
Truly, then and there, I wanted to believe her. I fought so hard to accept that as reality that, after a few days, I thought it was a battle I had won. Sleep came easier, and I spent that time free from jumping at every flitting shadow. A bit of the paranoia still remained, that whatever was haunting me was simply biding its time, but even that lessened with a week’s passing.
I had been right. I should’ve listened to the creeping doubt that railed against everything being just fine. It had been waiting for the proper moment, and that time came the night Remi had invited some of the troupe over for a rehearsal.
Rather strange that I remember waking up that morning actually excited about the day’s events. Since my scare, I had cut a deal with my boss to allow me to work from home while I sorted this nonsense out. While I love… loved my wife to death, I was a bit starved for socializing, what with my temporary isolation.
That and they always let me watch them run their lines, and that was never not a good time.
Our agenda for the evening was a simple one. We’d start with a bit of catching up before they jumped right into their work. Then, while they were rattling the walls with boisterous recitations from Woyzeck, I would be in the kitchen fixing dinner for the lot of us.
It was all going according to plan until I realized I had forgotten to grab a few choice ingredients while out shopping. Stuff I was certain we had at home, but didn’t. I’d like to say it wasn’t all that big of a deal stepping out on our guests to hit the local supermarket, but it all started while I was gone.
Hard to think that was the case, though. I was in and out, and pulling back into our driveway in what felt like a blink of an eye. Felt far too short of a time for what went wrong to have actually gone wrong. Maybe it was because everything that happened after I put the car into park felt like another whole life lived.
I didn’t even notice anything amiss until after I had pulled the key from the ignition. There wasn’t any deep and ominous aura surrounding the house, no foreboding dread peeling off the walls like a bad paint job. It was a sudden and sharp pang of sheer terror that came with just a brief glance to the rearview mirror.
In the dim light provided only by the garage door motor, I could see them sitting in the backseat of the car, right next to the sack of groceries. No details, at least none I could determine, beyond an insidious and knowing grin. Whirling about in a frenzy, I found only the laden plastic bags sinking into the canvas seat.
I was alone, even though a shadow passing by the driver’s side mirror told me otherwise.
Throwing open the door, I scrambled into the house, the sole cause of my errand abandoned in the car. Desperate to calm my nerves, I feverishly reminded myself it was just my imagination gone awry yet again. Convinced being the company of Remi and the others would set my mind to ease, I strained my ears to hear where they might be in the house.
Still was the quiet that had settled over our home, but it was anything but peaceful.
That same sickly warmth returned to me then, as I crept toward the living room. It was where I had last seen the troupe before leaving, but was no more relieved to find it darkened and unoccupied. I didn’t go in, and you can be certain I didn’t even look toward where I knew the TV hung on the wall.
Backtracking to the kitchen is when I heard the crash. Straining wood stressed to shatter. Heavy footsteps on the tiled floor.
Victor, a well-familiar face from the theatre group came tearing around the corner. Running full pelt, he was panting exasperatedly, eyes full of fear that no soul should know. He didn’t see me, not at first, barreling right into me and sending the both of us sprawling to the floor.
Flailing viciously, the mere act of physical contact sent him into a howling fit of madness. Again and again, he cried out frantically, until I managed to put enough space between us for him to recognize me. Turns out, apparently mine was the last face he ever wanted to see again.
Every bit of him seized as recognition slowly crept into his eyes. He began repeatedly mouthing the word no before he actually spoke it, and when he did it came out choked, almost pleading. He kept screaming it as he crashed through the backdoor, and I still heard it persistently cried even as he faded into the darkness of the yard beyond.
As he fled like a man possessed I could only watch. I sat there shivering, not from the cool night air, but from the realization that perhaps my imagination was simply not acting up from stress. Only when I could no longer hear his panicked shrieks and frantic footfalls slamming against distant asphalt, did I notice the havoc wreaked in his retreat.
The door to the basement had been torn nearly clean off its hinges. It hung there, at an odd angle, seemingly beckoning me within and below in an unsettling, if not deranged, manner. I could only keep asking myself just what had sent Victor stark raving mad into the night.
In retrospect, I had to have known. As I crept down those stairs and through the lounge, part of me surely realized it. The constant questioning of it was simply a means to keep myself from spilling over the lip of the chasm of lunatic terror.
A short and rather narrow corridor was all that separated me from the home gym that doubled as Remi’s rehearsal space. Each step toward it just as tortuously difficult as the last. Only my own ragged breathing kept me company, as I slogged onward through the unseen mire of looming terror.
With a hard swallow, I crossed over the threshold. I still don’t think I fully understand what I saw waiting for me there.
Serenity and chaos, layered like oil and water.
I saw Remi, and the others, laying upon the floor. Were it not for their expressions of despicably intense fear carved into their faces, I would have assumed them merely resting. That is until I noticed their chests neither rose nor fell, their still opened eyes focused intently on nothing and everything.
And then it hit me. I was only seeing half of the picture. I looked deeper into the room, into the other half of the room that wasn’t actually there, but was all the same.
A common thing, really, to see gyms with mirrors, and ours was no exception. The entire far wall was lined with them, used for both perfecting form during workouts and refining poise while delivering soliloquies. What they showed now was nothing less than a nightmare.
Blood, so much blood. It wept and oozed from deep and jagged cuts and punctures all over their bodies. The floor was slick with it, pooling vivid crimson. Haphazardly, the walls were splashed in patterns screaming of violence.
Rushing over to my wife, I knelt aside her to see if there was anything I could yet do. Perhaps her wounds were not yet fatal. I could help her, I could help the others.
A fool’s errand ensnared in impossible insanity. Her flesh was already cold, though I couldn’t understand why. While the mirrors portrayed mutilation, Remi’s skin was unmarred beneath my fingertips. Not a single cut, not a single drop of blood spilled.
The same for all the others.
I don’t know how long I sat there, shifting my gaze frantically between these twinned worlds. I do remember my slipping grip on what remained of sanity as I tried to puzzle the how of it together. Desperately my rationale clung to the notion that this was all some sort of theatrical trick the others were playing on me.
At any moment, they would spring back to life, and we’d have a good laugh about it. I was so certain of this, it was relief I felt when I saw Remi began to stir. Relief that turned to abstract horror the moment I realized only her reflection rose up from the floor.
She stalked toward me from beyond the polished glass. Each movement a shuddering and disgusting convulsion. No small amount of effort was required to raise a deeply blood-stained hand to place against the invisible barrier that separated us.
Shuffling backward in shock, I tried so hard to look away. I pulled my knees to my chest, and buried my face therein. To no avail, as the other began pounding so fiercely upon the mirror I feared for the world that it would break.
With my attention secured once more, the mirror’s specter smiled cruelly as it painstakingly brought its unfamiliar hand towards its neck. Stuttered spasms allowed it to collect the blood still seeping from the unsightly gash carved in the throat.
Wet was the slap against the glass, as the hand began streaking gore into shapes that became letters that became a words. They still burn within my mind, clear as day, despite the heavy fog that obscures the rest of that night.
FOREVER YOURS
That was it – the final straw. The moment I realized what had been spelled out, I snapped. The last thing I can remember was the hurried sensation of falling backward into spiraling darkness. A cold embrace waiting for me as every part of me screamed.
I’m not sure how the fire was started, but I’m pretty sure it was me that set it. All I can remember is suddenly coming back to myself out in the street in front of our house. I sat shivering, absolutely reeking of gasoline and wrapped in a thick blanket, watching the fire crew douse the last smoldering embers that remained.
The bodies of Remi and the others were found, more or less. Classified under the messy spectrum of human remains until the dental records came back. I remember hearing homicide and arson being thrown around, but not in my direction. Like I said, I’m pretty sure I started the fire, but the police were extremely reluctant to accept it as confession. Too much evidence pointed away from me, or so my lawyer kept telling me, that they’d be hard pressed to make the charges stick.
So here I sit, months later. I haven’t really told anyone about what really happened. Too wild for anyone to actually believe. I’ve kept my mouth shut this long, and only one thing has made me change my mind on broaching the subject.
I smiled at myself in the mirror for the first time in months, but I didn’t want to.

Just got the Purple 4. Anyone want to share their experiences with the bed? Good or bad.

Made this account because I plan on posting updates on my experience with the bed months and years down the line. In the meantime, I wanted to post my initial impressions and see how others feel about their purchase.
This was our first experience buying a bed for ourselves. My partner and I spent a while researching beds that could accommodate our weights (290 lbs and 140 lbs) and sleep preferences. Initially, Purple wasn't even on our radar. The top considerations were TempurPedic, TheraPedic Medicoil HD, or some type of latex bed (most likely Arizona Premium).
We quickly scratched Tempur off the list as my partner didn't care for the feel of it and I was unable to find details on the densities of the foams used by Tempur. (As I understand it we were looking for memory foam with density greater than 5 lb/cu-ft, polyurethane greater than 2 lb/cu-ft, and latex greater than 28 ILD to support our heavier weight). I even contacted Tempur directly but received no response, not even a decline to comment.
While the Medicoil and latex beds seemed promising from a durability standpoint, we were unfortunately unable to test either of them since our local mattress stores carried neither.
As we tested other, available beds we were introduced to the Purple which we had pretty good first impressions with, but I was (and still am) skeptical of it considering it's a bed-in-a-box that I haven't heard much of outside of poor reviews for their original mattress. To be fair their original mattress, for those unaware, is of a different make than the Purple 2, 3, and 4. The original is a combination of their gel matrix and polyurethane foam while the latter versions utilize the gel matrix with a pocketed coil support layer. After extensive research we decided that we would be willing to pull the trigger on a Purple 3 or 4 as we didn't see too many poor reviews on those and their return policy / customer service seemed good to us.
In-store the mattress felt great--low motion transfer, low pressure on usually high-pressure spots, and a cool-to-the-touch feel. Despite the only difference between the 3 and the 4 being one extra inch of gel, the beds felt surprisingly different from each other. The 3 was firm by comparison and felt sort of like you were being "pushed upwards" from the mattress. The 4 had a more floaty sensation. My partner liked the 3 and I liked the 4. After lots of back-and-forth and testing, we settled on the 4 with the thought that it would be more supportive with the weight and more accommodating for side sleepers (which we mostly are).
This trip to the mattress store was also our first introduction to king-sized beds and adjustable bases. It was a quick and easy decision for us to upgrade from a queen to a king. The extra space is amazing. After testing some of the adjustables for a while, we were convinced one of those could help us with our sleep too (and potentially train us to become back sleepers). I didn't thoroughly research adjustables beforehand though, so time will tell if it was money well spent or if the base will become an $800 paperweight.
Fast forward to delivery, setup was mostly smooth but the mattress was a monster. I think I read somewhere that it was 140 or 200 lbs so it was not a fun chore trying to unravel that thing from its plastic. After it was set up, laying on it didn't feel exactly like the store but I think that's to be expected since it isn't broken in yet. Still, it felt very comfortable. We laid in bed for a good chunk of the day just enjoying it. My partner took a nap alone after I left and slept like a rock.
Unfortunately our sheets didn't arrive in time for the first couple nights, so we were resigned to protecting it with our mattress protector and an awkward combination of our old queen fitted sheet and a blanket. I should also mention that we don't sleep with a traditional top sheet or shared comforter. We usually have a fitted sheet below us and we each have our own comforter / blanket so we don't steal them from each other.
The mattress protector we got is (IIRC) the Malouf Sleep Tite tensile protector. I don't know much about mattress protectors but this one seems fine, if maybe a little small for the bed (it seems like the edges are creeping upward), but we'll see how it holds up.
Something that became immediately apparent to me after the first night of sleep was how different the motion transfer felt compared to the store. I woke up a lot overnight as we both kept tossing and turning. I could feel my partner's every little movement. It was aggravating. But after browsing similar issues from people online, one of the possibe causes was the kind of sheets we were using (which is something that never would have occurred to me). Apparently Purple recommends some sort of jersey-knit weave so the sheets have a bit of stretch to them and the bed can support you properly. Unfortunately I didn't know this before I ordered my sheets, so we have a set of percale 100% cottons arriving soon. Hopefully they'll be good enough for us.
Knowing this, the second night we tried ditching the queen sheet and laid down a thin quilt instead. I don't know if it made a difference motion transfer-wise because frankly we both slept like a rock. No tossing and turning to relieve pressure, no waking each other up. It was the best night of sleep I'd had in a long time. Back and side sleeping both felt comfortable and it was easy to transition between them (no sinking into the mattress). As for how cool the bed felt, it was great for a good portion of the night but in the morning I was pretty warm and had to kick off part of my blanket. I'm not quick to judge the cooling aspect yet though because we're not using our proper sheets.
I feel weird commenting on this but it's an important thing to consider when bed shopping, so here goes. First impressions of sex on the bed are great. Even though motion transfer seems to be minimal when sleeping, the bed still has bounce to it so it doesn't feel like you're fighting the bed during sex.
That's all I can really think of to say (although it feels I haven't satisfactorily said anything to be honest). So far, we're happy with this matress. My partner says they're happy we went with the 4 instead of the 3 as well. Granted, it is only the first two nights we've slept on the bed and even a stone slab probably feels fine with one night of use, so we'll have to see if it holds up to this first impression over time.
Unfortunately we haven't had an opportunity to test our adjustable base because it doesn't seem to be receiving power, so I can't comment on that.
In total we spent about $4500 on our king-size Purple 4, an adjustable base, and a mattress protector. It's a massive chunk of change for us but we're hoping it'll be worth it over the years.
EDIT 1: Here's an update after roughly a week of sleeping on the bed. We finally got our percale sheets in. They're great sheets, very soft and keep cool, but they're not the way to go if you get a Purple. The motion transfer is significantly worse as the sheets create that "drum-like" effect and are regularly tugging from beneath me.
Our first night on the new sheets was miserable. I don't think I'm overexagerrating when I say it was the worst night of sleep I've ever had. Lots of tossing and turning from both of us. Must've woken up at least 20 times. For what it's worth, if you and your partner are both lightweight I don't think you'll have a problem with motion transfer at all. Either way, I still recommend following Purple's guidance and getting a stretchy fitted sheet (something with spandex or a jersey knit sheet).
But thankfully that one bad night didn't become a trend, and the rest of the week has been mostly great in terms of sleep quality and comfort. The mattress feels very comfortable whether I'm sleeping on my side or my back. I never experienced any discomfort or the need to shift around (except when my neck was in pain due to my pillow).
We both think the mattress sleeps cool compared to our last mattress (which I believe was mostly polyurethane foam). I use just a wool blanket while my partner uses a thin comforter. It is currently winter so it's pretty cold outside but our thermostat is at roughly 65 degrees (though it feels warmer than that). We'll have to see how cool it feels when summer rolls around.
There's a great, relaxing feeling I get whenever I sit or lie down in this bed. I feel the temptation to just lie down and take a nap, and I'm not one for taking naps at all.
Unfortunately our adjustable base is still busted and I don't expect it to be fixed for a while (the warranty company is taking their sweet time getting back to me).
While Purple doesn't really have recommendations on rotating the mattress (they say you can if you want), we're going to rotate it regularly out of an abundance of precaution: once a week for the first three months, then once every three months after.
Like I said though, the first week is still basically first impressions. I read a post from another user here who was heavy and wore out the same mattress (the 4) within 10 months. I plan on posting updates months and years down the road (hopefully, if I remember). But for now, we're very happy with our purchase.
EDIT 2: Now that it's been 21 or so days (minimum time before I can elect to return the bed), I thought I'd post another update and also address some things I forgot to mention in my original post.
First, what I forgot to mention. The Purple does have a distinct smell to it when it first arrives. It was strong at first but most of it dissipated within a day of airing out the bedroom. The smell has lingered though, faintly. In my opinion it's not an unpleasant smell (I actually kind of like it) but I don't think my partner's even noticed. We may have to vent the room a bit more to see an improvement on the smell. We haven't opened windows since the first full day but we have had an air purifier running every night since and the smell remains.
Another thing I forgot to talk about was the mattress' edge support. While the Purple uses springs for the support layer and gel matrix for the comfort layer, the edges of the mattress are lined in polyurethane foam (probably about 2 or 3 inches thick from the edge if I remember right). I'm not really familiar with edge support or why it's important, but it feels solid at the moment. There's no sinking or slipping off the edge. I have concerns of it giving way eventually considering it's just foam, but maybe that concern is unwarranted since we won't be putting nearly as much weight-over-time on the edge compared to the actual mattress.
Since my last update, we've now put a new, stretchy fitted sheet on the bed (95% polyester, 5% spandex). We miss the cooling feel of the percale sheet, but this new sheet definitely allows us to feel the contours of the bed more and motion transfer is minimized, which is great for me. We've also added a headboard which was a welcome addition, as our pillows were slipping a bit between the wall and the edge of the bed. It now feels like a proper bed.
Our sleep quality has improved a lot over the course of the weeks. This last week in particular has been the best nights of sleep I can ever remember having.
On our old bed, I would (try to) sleep anywhere from 8 to 10 hours a night and still feel lethargic and sleepy in the morning and throughout the day. I thought it was because I was waking up multiple times in the middle of the night, but I've been having the same sleep interruptions with the new bed and not experiencing the same lethargy. In fact, we have a sun lamp set as a sort of silent alarm at 7:30. With the old mattress I would stay in bed until the lamp forced me up, but now I've actually been waking up naturally, about an hour or so before the lamp goes off. I've been getting less hours of sleep (roughly 6 to 8) and feel so much more refreshed than I was getting with 8 to 10 on the old mattress. I nearly forgot it was possible to wake up feeling so rested and ready for the day.
My partner also feels great and well-rested with the new mattress. On the old one, they tended to toss and turn constantly throughout the night. Now, they very rarely feel the need to shift positions (which has improved my sleep quality as well).
I should note though that I don't think the old mattress was solely to blame. We also had an Ikea bed frame (one with the under-bed storage drawers) that the mattress sat on. I never considered that the bed frame's slats could be an issue until we disassembled it and slept solely on the old mattress, flat on the ground, while we waited for the Purple to arrive. Even those nights felt like an improvement in sleep.
Regardless, we're very happy with our purchase three weeks in. Just remember to take my thoughts with a grain of salt because durability is important in a mattress too.
I'll probably stay silent on this account for a while and report back either when there's something new to report or enough time passes and we're still satisfied. Alternatively, if someone requests an update I'll try posting then too. Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps somewhat.

full sized mattress on queen size Nordli bed?

The Asain Escort

The phone wasn't even through its first ring when the woman on the receiving line picked up.
"Hello?" she greeted.
click
I hung up.
Pacing back and forth in my bedroom I try calming my nerves by utilizing breathing techniques I've learned from my many years in martial arts. "Could I really go through with this?" I thought to myself. It was just then that my phone began to ring; It was her.
"Hello?" I answered with a lack of confidence.
"Yes hello, are you wanting a meet?" she replied with slightly broken English. I paused for the briefest of moments, and whilst holding my breath I replied yes.
"Ok, what time you come?"
"How about 12:30pm?"
It was about 11:00 now, and I needed the time to gather my senses and clean myself up. She agreed and told me she would send her address via text about 30 minutes until the specified time.
"I'm really doing this." I confirmed with myself.
I spent the next hour getting ready; Shaving my genitals, taking a shower, etc. I put on loose comfortable clothing that can easily be removed, and after I was ready I drove over to the nearest ATM to withdraw the money needed for my visit. I spent the remaining minutes in the parking lot of the bank, waiting in anticipation for her text.
Vrm, Vrm
I received her address and quickly put it into Google Maps. It was only 21 minutes away! Following the GPS on my phone, I
put on some music and left the parking lot. As I got onto the highway butterflies began to swirl in my stomach from me imagining all things I'm wanting her to do to me.
With each exit I passed the city that I grew up in became unknown to me. Glancing down at my GPS every minute, paranoid I might miss the exit I have gotten off on countless times. As I got closer to my destination the GPS began to interrupt my music more and more frequently.
"In half a mile take exit 9. Then take the left most lane unto Gutermuth Blvd."
"In 300 hundred feet, turn right. Then your destination will be on the right."
Following the instructions to a "T" I pulled into my destination. It was a Holiday's Inn and from across the street was a Hooters and QT gas station. I backed up into a parking spot, swiped away Google Maps and texted her letting her know I had arrived. It was just then I received a call from her, informing me of the room number she was residing in.
I took the safety measure of hiding my wallet in my car; Making sure I only brought the cash we discussed to prevent the unlikely scenario of getting robbed on the way to her room.
I climbed the stairs of the hotel passing by one or two residents greeting them in a friendly non-suspicious manner. I was paranoid that they somehow knew I wasn't a resident, when most likely they didn't even think twice about me being there.
Finally I arrived just outside her room #344. This was it. Just beyond those doors is a sweet Asian woman, a stranger whom I've never met, that I'm going to pay in exchange for a sexual favor. All I do now is knock.
Clack, clack I swing the door knocker and wait.
Slowly the door opened with her peaking halfway behind it. Without saying anything she gestured for me to enter, to which I promptly followed.
The room was dim from tissue paper being used to reduce the light from the lamps. The queen sized bed had a simplistic flower pattern on the comforter with a towel laid on top. In front was your average everyday TV stand/desk with a pushed in chair that practically every hotel has.
The door was closed behind me and she slid the lock on for our privacy. I reached into my pocket and took out the cash I brought with me and extended out my hand for her to take.
"Oh, thank you!" she said in a quiet manner.
She walked away counting the bills, while I stood in silence unsure of what to do next. Not a moment after she put away the money she turned back towards me. She was wearing a blue see-through silk dress with matching fuzzy tassels draped over her barely hidden breasts. She stood only a foot away, while untying the back of her lingerie she motioned at my clothes.
"Ok hun, take clothes off now." she said with a delightful grin.
I begin removing my shirt and slide out of my sweatpants while watching her de-robe. When the ties were loose enough she perked up her shoulders and the dress fell straight to the floor revealing every inch of her now naked body.
She stood about 5'8 with long black silky hair and dark brown eyes. She had plump teardrop shaped breasts with dime sized areolas; porn star quality for sure I thought to myself. The rest of her body was slender with a subtle hourglass curve by the hips which perked her butt up nicely.
While my eyes continued to wander around her body she stepped closer and tugged on the front of my boxers reminding me I had yet to remove them. I did so promptly and she briefly cupped my now exposed balls and slid her hands from them to the underneath of my increasingly hard cock.
"Oh" her eyes widened, "So big!"
I don't claim to have the biggest dick, but from the few women I have been romantically involved with they seemed to be impressed with my size as well. So I felt that the woman's compliment was genuine and not some fluff talk to make me feel good.
Dick in hand she pulls me to the bed she had prepared. Using only the tips of her fingers from her free hand, she pushes my chest down while still having a firm grasp on my hard cock. Falling onto my back she kneels in between my legs and flips her hair to one side. From the base of my cock to the tip, she breaths hot air onto it while locking eye contact with me.
Sensually she glides her right hand up past my thigh and to my chest, all while giving light smooches to my hard shaft. With one prolonged kiss on the tip she envelops it whole with her lips and slides her mouth down to the base of my cock. Her mouth was as warm as an oven. Hot enough to make dough rise; or in this case my dick!
"Oh Jesus.." I let out in a moan. The woman giggled and proceeded to swirl her head up and down my cock while cupping my balls, lightly massaging them.
She sat back up unto her heels and reached over to the hotel night stand to take out a condom. In the mere seconds of her trying to open the package I reach my hand out to stop her.
"Uh n-no" I said, gesturing my hand for her to put it away. "I'm not here to have sex".
I was never planning on having sex with the young Asian woman in the first place. And with not knowing how many men have been with the woman, I wanted to avoid any chances of catching a virus.
"No?" she asked while putting away the condom back in the box "Just this"? Her hands found their way back to my genitals and she did a quick tug on my cock. I nodded and she began swirling the palm of her hand up and around my shaft like she was polishing a doorknob.
I wasn't planning on getting just a blowjob. I sought out this woman to help me release a painful desire of mine. A desire that I'm sure the many of you reading know of; Ballbusting.
I reached my hand down to meet hers and guided her fingers to my right testicle, to which she started to massage immediately. But without moving my hand away I press my fingers down on hers squeezing the ball with her. She stops and looks up at me in confusion, while I make a squeezing motion with my fist for a visual of what I wanted her to do.
She points down to my right ball and mimics the same squeezing motion as I did. A big grin stretches across my face and I nod in confirmation. Her face becomes red as a tomato and she giggles covering her mouth in disbelief.
Hesitantly she rubs the ball with more aggression, but still wasn't as hard as I was wanting. I clenched my fist again and shook it very subtly to show I wanted her to squeeze harder. Just then my head sinks back into the pillow as a knot begins to develop in the pit of my lower abdomen from my right testicle resisting the greater force the woman was now applying.
With a prolonged grip on the ball she fluctuates the amount of pressure she applies, trying to gage what I can or can't handle. During an instance of her further adding more pressure the ball slips through her fingers and escapes her grip.
"OoH!" I let out in a moan. With the sudden slip from my ball her fingers pinched the sack from the strength she was using. I looked back at her with a smile letting her know I was enjoying myself. The young woman covered her mouth and giggled once again.
Before continuing she got up from the bed and walked to the nightstand where her phone was. Grabbing it she walked back to sit down next to me and tapped through her phone until she found the Google Translate app.
"壊れますか?" she said, speaking Japanese into the phone. After a brief second she displayed the screen to me for the translation.
"Will it break?"
Us gentlemen who are experienced or at least familiar with this fetish know it takes a considerable amount of effort to damage a testicle, even more so to "break" one. Although they are a sensitive organ, they are surprisingly durable. With that said I wanted her to go about this with a carefree attitude and I answered her by cracking a smile and shrugging my shoulders in a very expressive manner.
A twisted grin stretched over the woman's face and she sat her phone down back on the nightstand. Her hands returned to my testicles and she began pulling on them stretching the sack out making it tight around my nuts. Then with her left hand she clenches a fist around the spermatic cords to prevent my balls from retreating. With her open right hand she proceeds to squeeze the balls into her palm using her fingers, twisting into them with amazing aggression.
She adapted the pattern of releasing pressure briefly for me to catch my breath only to try harder on the next prolonged squeeze. My hands were practically glued to my face rubbing it from the top of my head to the bottom of my chin. Writhing in pain from being completely at her mercy, and yet did nothing to intervene. The moans that escaped my breaths were an invitation-- nay a challenge for her to try harder.
I gave her instruction to focus on one ball instead of the two by tapping my left nut with my hand. With not a moment's hesitation she released my right nut and trapped the left making sure it was the only one exposed. Using the outer side of her index finger and thumb from her right hand she bares down on the helpless testicle like a vice!
Toes curling and body squirming my hands shoot out and grab the bed sheets beside me in an attempt to muscle through the pain pulsing from my nut. With no need for instruction she let's my left ball rest and mirrors the torment she had just put it through using my right one. She jumped back and forth between both balls, giving some time for one to recover while she crushed the other. Eventually my moans began to stutter from my shortness of breath and she released my balls from her deadly grip.
A sigh of relief is expelled from my mouth and the beautiful woman rubs my balls gently in a nurturing manner. Once again putting to practice those breathing techniques I learned, I raise my hands and give two thumbs up whilst letting out a soft chuckle. The woman laughed through her smile and began to stroke my cock, which was still hard despite what my nuts were just put through.
Her stroking fluctuated in speed and technique, with the occasional slurp of her tongue from the base of my dick to the tip; As if she was licking a melting popsicle in the middle of Summer.
Up and down she sucked thoroughly with brief moments of her choking herself by pushing my cock down her throat as far as it would allow. I was in bliss watching every second of her choosing to suck my dick rather than breathe. My staring caught her attention and she looked up at me for confirmation that I was enjoying myself. I smiled back at her and maliciously clacked my teeth together. Her eyes widened and without a moment's hesitation sunk her teeth into the base of my shaft.
Grinding her teeth back and forth she progressively works her way up to the tip. Once the summit was reached she switches to gnaw on the side of my cock, biting into it like she was eating Corn on the Cobb. With each chomp from her pearly whites my dick gets increasingly harder. At one point it felt like it was made of steel, and I believed for a moment she might break her teeth on it!
The woman's jaws released my cock and inspected it by tilting it around gazing at the deep engravings her teeth marks had left in it. The woman's eyes sparkled in awe and she looked at me with a prideful smile.
With her mind still fresh with a carnivorous nature I directed her attention back to my balls with a tap from my finger. Instinctively she clamped her jowls onto my right testicle causing a shock to shoot through my body paralyzing me almost instantly. My moans echoed throughout the room mimicking the wails of a restless mummy.
Gathering up my unattended left nut with her hand she pushes my balls into the back of her mouth where she proceeded to chew on them like bubblegum. Her molars chomped down on the balls as they squirm around trying to escape her deadly jaws.
"O-oH! Fuck!" I blurt out muscling through the pain. The woman continued to devour my balls like they were her last meal, and my mind was dreaded by the thought she might be a cannibal! Slowly the woman eased up and eventually ceased to bite. My scrotum was red and irritated with veins pulsing through. Small dots of blood were visible, no doubt caused from her canine teeth puncturing the skin.
With my dick miraculously still hard, she was pleased with the result and massaged my balls for a brief couple of minutes. Eventually leaning back onto her butt she kneaded my balls with her toes like a cat. Sometimes even stroking my cock with the soles of her feet. I wasn't ready to be done yet, but they sure as hell needed to rest up before we got back into it.
Interrupting the fantastic foot job I roll off the bed and stand up. She quickly followed my lead intrigued by what I was up to. I had her stand in front of me mere inches apart and made a kneeing motion with my leg. The woman clasped her fingers together in glee and positioned her leg comfortably in between mine. With a good thrust her knee smashed my balls into my pelvis, briefly knocking the wind out of me.
"Oof" I exclaimed, leaning my hands on her petite shoulders to steady myself. She reached out and tugged on my cock using it to pull me into her next knee strike. Despite being so close her aiming became a bit clumsy, sometimes hitting only just one nut or even missing completely.
Progressively she switched from using her knees to her feet. Standing on one leg with a knee raised she whipped her foot out smacking my tender testicles. I politely held my dick up for her so she could get a better visual on her target; I didn't want her missing these as she did with her knees. Soon she let out a flurry of kicks in a way that reminded me of Chun-Li from Street Fighter. With one final kick I bent over catching myself on my knees. I have never been forced to the ground from any of my Ballbusting experiences and I wasn't going to start today.
Swaying from side to side she watches me catch my breath. Women who have a whimsical attitude towards Ballbusting was always one of my biggest turn-ons, and from seeing that I knew I had to keep going. I had one more thing I wanted her to do, but wasn't sure if she would agree to it. I walked over to my phone and started to navigate to the internet.
"No honey, no recording." the woman replied trying to lower my hands. I showed her my screen which had Pornhub pulled up and a look of relief fell on the woman. I quickly searched for a video best demonstrating what I was wanting. After finding the video I slid the time mark to the exact spot I wanted and waved her over to see.
The video was of a beautiful Arabic woman shouting at a man in a stern tone. She was standing on a coffee table with the man on his knees. With a snap of her fingers and a dramatic point down, the man complies by putting his balls onto the table where the woman proceeds to step on them with the soles of her feet.
The Asian escort covered her mouth in disbelief and took a slight step back, looking into my eyes with horror. I raise my eyebrows and smile at the distraught woman letting her know with the gleam of my eyes that she had my full permission to engage in such an act. Hesitantly the woman backed up to the desk in the front of the room inspecting it and then glancing over at my junk.
I joined her at the desk and held my hand high for her to use as leverage onto the table. Taking my hand she puts one leg on the desk and hoists herself up. The once petite woman now stood above me a giant, with my head just above her knee. I placed my genitals out on the desk and looked up as she shook her hands at the side to help psych herself up for what we're about to do.
Reluctantly she picks up her leg and presses it down on my nuts, wedging them between the hard table and her soft foot. From the heel to the tips of the toes her foot rocked back and forth on my balls like a seesaw. The knot in my lower abdomen returned and I gasped in pain. Distributing
more of her weight on my nuts I clung to her thighs for safe haven. The cruel woman began twisting the ball of her foot into my testicles like she was squishing a bug. My balls struggled to hold up the weight of this petite mistress, being completely at her mercy.
"I can take more." I thought to myself, and with a pound of my fist I hit the table hard and looked up to her; A demand without words. The woman did as instructed and raised her foot up a few inches and slammed it back down on my testicles.
"oOh-!" my breath was taken away from me and my knees wanted to buckle. The woman stepped off of me in fear that she had hurt me, but just as quickly I grabbed her calf and brought her foot back down on my balls. She re-adjusted herself on the table to start using her opposite foot, and raised it a few inches up again. Repeatedly she stomped on my battered testicles, each one harder than the next.
Voice cracking and breath shaking I took every hit. Eventually the woman's technique grew sloppy, and with one dreaded blow, stomped her heel solely on my left nut causing the wood underneath it to creak. I yelped like a puppy and practically jumped a good foot into the air. Hopping away a wiggled my balls around to try and help ease the pain.
"Ooh-o-o-o-ooh.." I groaned trying to catch my breath.
"Sorry! Sorry!" the woman cried out jumping off the table to come to my aid.
"It's fine, I'm alright. Y-you got me by surprise is all."
I fall back onto the bed exhausted. She soon follows crawling beside me to rub my tender balls. I simply just point to my dick and she complies by taking it into her steamy mouth to finish me off. I don't try to make this blowjob last, I've been ready to blow since she first started to squeeze my nuts.
Through the sounds of my moans she starts to jack off my cock harder and faster using both hands like a shake weight. Positioning herself correctly she pushes her breasts together with her biceps and aims my dick at them.
"Oh SHIT!!"
I popped like a champagne cork and my cum shot onto her neck and tits, coating her like a Krispy Kreme glazed donut. She gave my dick a couple more tugs to ensure she drained me completely, eventually having the last drops seep down her hands.
She got up from the bed to wash up, and quickly after cleaned me up with some rags and a hot towel. I put on my clothes, slipped on my sandals and gathered up my keys and phone to leave. The woman met me at the door to open it for me and gave me a big hug on my way out.
"Bye honey! Hope to see you again!"
She most definitely will..

The transcript of *the* lecture. You know which one. (the 2 final paragraphs are in the comments because of stupid reddit character limit)

How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun? To stand one day in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life. The closest I ever came was over thirty years ago. On February 26, 1979, a solar eclipse passed directly over the city of Portland. I bought my bus tickets and found a place to stay. But in the end, I couldn’t get the time off work. Well, anyone who lives in Portland can tell you that the chances of catching the sun in February are pretty slim. And sure enough, the skies over the city that day were completely overcast. I wouldn’t have seen a thing. That work I couldn’t get out of was my first job out of college: A sales clerk at an old Radio Shack store in beautiful downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. On my very first day behind the counter, a delivery truck pulled up to the front of the store. They carried in a big carton, upon which was printed the legend TRS-80. It was our floor sample of the world’s first mass-market microcomputer. The TRS-80 Model I had a Z80 processor clocked at 1.7 megahertz, 4,096 bytes of memory, and a 64-character black-and-white text display. The only storage was a cassette recorder. All this could be yours for the low, low price of $599. This store I was working in had seen better days. At one time, it had been near the center of a thriving commercial district. But like so many other New England cities, the advent of shopping malls had, by the early ‘70s, turned it into a ghost town. Worcester’s solution to this problem was decisive, to say the least. The city’s elders apparently decided that if they couldn’t beat them, they would join them. And so several square blocks at the heart of the city were bulldozed into oblivion, destroying dozens of family businesses, including the site of a pharmacy once operated by my great-grandfather. In their place was erected a vast three-level shopping complex, with cinemas and a food court. When the dust settled, only a few forlorn blocks of the old Worcester remained standing. My Radio Shack store was in one of those blocks. Then, to add insult to injury, Radio Shack opened a brand-new location inside the shopping center, less than 500 feet from my store. So now patrons has a choice between a clean, well-lighted establishment with uniformed security and acres of convenient parking, or a shadowy hole in a seedy old office building next to an adult movie theater. Consequently, I had plenty of time to fool around with the new computer. I taught myself BASIC programming. Then I learned Z80 assembly. Both, of course, so that I could write games. I also created self-running animated demos which ran all night in the store window for the edification of the winos who peed in our doorway. Strangely enough, the few customers we had didn’t seem to be interested in our new computer, even after the 16K memory upgrade. In fact, most of the people who set off the buzzer on their way through the front door weren’t there to buy anything at all. They were there to exploit a free promotion which was the bane of Radio Shack employees for over forty years: The Battery of the Month Club. The idea of this promotion was simple. Customers got a little red card upon which was printed a square for each month. Twelve times a year, the lucky sales clerk got to punch out a square and give the customer one brand new triple-A, double-A, C, D or 9-volt battery. Of course, customers weren’t allowed to choose just any grade of battery. At the time of my employment, Radio Shack offered three different levels of battery excellence. First were the alkalines, powerful, long-lasting and expensive, hanging behind the counter like prescription medication in gold-embossed blister packs. These were most certainly not available through the Battery of the Month Club. Next were the high-end lead batteries, sturdy, dependable batteries, moderately priced, and prominently displayed near the front of the store. These were also not available through the Battery of the Month Club. Finally, at the bottom of the barrel, were the standard lead batteries. These were literally piled in barrels, cunningly located way at the back of the store, in a dark corner near the TV antennas. Remember TV antennas? Customers who came in looking for their free Battery of the Month had to walk the entire length of the premises, past the CB radios and stereo headphones and remote-controlled racing cars. Nothing would stop them. On the first day of every month, like clockwork, those customers come in waving their little red cards. I would look up from my programming and wave them to the back of the store. It didn’t matter that the batteries were only worth twenty-nine cents. It didn’t matter that most of them were already half dead. They came. They grabbed. And, as far as I can remember, not one of them ever paid for a damned thing. I was such a crappy salesman. I was young and foolish. I thought my education in game design was happening at the keyboard. I almost missed the lesson coming through the front door. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person fooling around with games on micros. All over the country, people like me were experimenting. Scott Adams was coding what would soon become the world’s first commercial adventure game. Remember adventure games? My future employer, Infocom, was being founded, along with other legendary companies like On-Line Systems, Sirius, Personal Software and SSI. Those were exciting times. Teenagers were making fortunes. Games were cheap and easy to build. The slate was clean. But in 1979, the biggest news in gaming had nothing to do with computers. § On the morning of the autumn equinox, September 20th, a new children’s picture book appeared in the stores of Great Britain. This picture book was rather peculiar. It consisted of 15 meticulously detailed color paintings, illustrating a slight, whimsical tale about a rabbit delivering a jewel to the moon. On the back jacket of the book was a color photograph of a real jewel shaped like a running rabbit, five inches long, fashioned of 18-karat gold, suspended with ornaments and bells, together with a sun and moon of blue quartz. According to the blurb underneath, this very jewel had been buried somewhere in England. Clues pointing to its location were concealed in the text and in the pictures of the book. The treasure would belong to whoever found it first. The book was called Masquerade. It was created by an eccentric little man with divergent eyes and a talent for mischief named Kit Williams. Within days, the first printing was sold out. And the Empire That Never Sleeps found itself in the grip of Rabbit Fever. Excited readers attacked the paintings with rulers, compasses and protractors. Magazine articles and TV specials dissected the clues, floated theories, and followed with keen delight the reckless exploits of the fanatics. One obscure park, unfortunately known by the nickname Rabbit Hill, was so riddled with holes excavated by misguided treasure seekers that the authorities had to erect signs assuring the public that no gold rabbits were to be found there. Some hunters ended up seeking psychological counseling for their obsession. The craze lept over the Atlantic Ocean and invaded America, France, Italy and Germany. It sold over a million copies in a few months, a record unrivalled by any children’s title until the advent of Harry Potter. Over 150,000 copies were sold in foreign translations, including 80,000 copies in Japanese, despite the fact that the puzzle was only solvable in English. It didn’t matter that the Masquerade jewel was only worth a few thousand dollars. Many seekers spent far more than that in their months of exploration and travel. It was the thrill of the chase. The possibility of being The One. Treasure hunts, secret messages and hidden things seem to exert an irresistible appeal. They’re fun to look for, and to talk about. And this fact of human psychology has been exploited in computer games since the earliest days. It finds expression in the hidden surprises we call Easter eggs. Atari’s Steven Wright is credited with coining this term in the first issue of Electronic Games magazine. The first Easter egg in a commercial computer game appeared in an early Atari 2600 cartridge called, simply enough, Adventure. By a sequence of unlikely movements and obscure manipulations, players could discover a secret room where the words “Created by Warren Robinet” appeared in flashing letters. Over the decades, Easter eggs and their evil twin, cheat codes, have become an industry within an industry. Entire magazines and Web sites are now devoted to their carefully orchestrated discovery and dissemination. They’re part of our toolkit, our basic vocabulary, the language of computer game design. Computer gamers may have been the first to refer to hidden surprises as Easter eggs, but we certainly weren’t the first to use them. Painters, composers and artists of every discipline have been hiding stuff in their works for centuries. The recent advent of VCRs and laserdisc players with freeze-frame capability exposed decades of secret Disney erotica. Thomas Kinkade, the self-appointed “Painter of Light,” amuses himself by hiding the letter N in his works. A number beside his signature indicates how many Ns are hidden in each painting. Picasso, Dali, Raphael, Poussin and dozens of other painters concealed all kinds of stuff in their paintings. A favorite trick was hiding portraits of themselves, their families, friends and fellow artists in crowd scenes. El Greco loved dogs. But the Catholic Church forbid him from including any in his sacred paintings. So he hid them, usually within the outlines of celestial clouds. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich chafed under the political censorship imposed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture. His symphonies and chamber works are loaded with hidden signatures and subversive subtexts which, had they been recognized, would have sent him to Siberia. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is filled with musical allusions to the rituals of the Freemasons, the ancient secret society of which he and his mentor Haydn were members. But the most famous purveyor of Easter eggs is that champion of the late Baroque, the ultimate musical nerd, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was a student of gematria, the art of assigning numeric values to letters of the alphabet: A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. By comparing, sequencing or otherwise manipulating these numbers, secret messages can be concealed. Bach took particular delight in the gematriacal numbers 14 and 41. 14 is the sum of the initials of his last name: B=2, A=1, C=3 and H=8. 41 is the sum of his expanded initials, J S BACH. These two numbers show up over and over again in Bach’s compositions. One of the better-known examples is his setting of the chorale “Vor deinen Thron.” The first line of the melody contains exactly 14 notes, and the entire melody from start to finish contains 41. Another of Bach’s favorite games was the puzzle canon. A canon is a melody that sounds good when you play it on top of itself, a little bit out of sync. “Freres Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” are familiar examples of simple, two-voice canons. But a canon can employ any number of voices. And you don’t have to play each voice the same way, either. You can change the octave, transpose the key, invert the pitch, play it backwards, or any combination. Finding melodies that make good multi-voice canons is a fussy and difficult art, of which Bach was an undisputed master. Now, in a puzzle canon, the composer specifies the basic melody and the number of voices, but not the relationship of the voices. The student has to figure out the position and key of each voice, and whether to perform them inverted and/or backwards. Bach wrote quite a number of puzzle canons. The most famous, BWV 1076, is part of a fascinating story. One of Bach’s students was a fellow by the name of Lorenz Mizler, founder of The Society of Musical Science. This elite, invitation-only institution devoted itself to the study of Pythagorean philosophy, and the union of music and mathematics. Its distinguished membership reads like a Who’s Who of German composers, including Handel, Telemann and eventually Mozart. Applicants for membership in the Society were required to submit an oil portrait of themselves, along with a specimen of original music. With nerdly efficiency, society member number 14 decided to combine these admission requirements into a single work. He sat for a portrait with Elias Haussmann, official artist at the court of Dresden. This portrait, which now hangs in the gallery of the Town Hall in Leipzig, is the only indisputably authentic image of Bach in existence. The Haussman portrait shows Bach dressed in a formal coat with exactly 14 buttons. In his hand is a sheet of music paper upon which is written a puzzle canon for six simultaneous voices. In 1974, a manuscript was discovered which proved that this canon was the thirteenth in a series of exactly 14 canons based on the ground theme of the famous Goldberg Variations. As if these musical gymnastics weren’t enough, Bach liked to hide messages in his compositions by assigning notes to the letters. His initials B-A-C-H correspond to the pitch sequence B-flat, A, C and B-natural in German letter notation. This theme makes its most memorable appearance in the last bars of his final composition, The Art of Fugue, published soon after his death in 1750. The word “fugue” comes from the Latin fuga, which means flight (as in running away). So the art of fugue is the art of flight, the art of taking a theme and running with it. Bach wrote hundreds of fugues, but none as sublime as this sequence of 14. In the last and most complicated fugue in the series, the first and second sections develop normally. This is followed by the B-A-C-H signature, and then suddenly, without any warning or structural justification, the fugue stops dead in its tracks. One of the composer’s 20 children, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, claimed that Bach died moments after those last few notes were written. This story is probably apocryphal. The Easter eggs in Bach’s music are a pleasant obscurity, known chiefly to professors and students of Baroque music. But in March of 2002, when this lecture was first delivered, those Easter eggs were the talk of the entire classical music industry. Sitting near the top of the classical music charts that month was a compact disc on the ECM label called Morimur. It is performed by the Hilliard choral ensemble together with a talented but, until then, little-known violinist, Christoph Poppen. The music on Morimur is based on a gematriacal analysis of Bach’s Partita in D Minor for solo violin. This analysis, by German professor Helga Thoene, assigns numeric values to the duration of notes, the number of bars, and the German letter notation of the Partita. In doing so, she claims to have discovered the complete text of several liturgical ceremonies encoded in the notes. The CD presents these hidden texts, superimposed over the original music. The result was strangely melancholy, dark, haunting, and very, very popular. Quite a few music critics attacked this disc. They didn’t buy Professor Thoene’s analysis, dismissing it as a combination of numerology and canny marketing. Their caution was not without basis. Numerology is a slippery slope down which many a fine mind has slid to its doom. Allow me to offer an amusing anecdote from my own experience. Back in the early ‘90s, before the Internet took off, one of the more popular online bulletin board systems was a service called Prodigy. I bought an account on Prodigy so I could join a fraternal interest group, and gossip with fellow members around the country. One day, a stranger appeared on our bulletin board. Right away, I knew we were in trouble. This fellow, whose name was Gary, began spouting all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense about worldwide conspiracies, secret societies and devil worship. At first we tried to be polite. We questioned his sources, corrected his histories, logically refuted his claims, and tried to behave in a civilized manner. But instead of soothing him, our attention only made him worse. His conspiratorial warnings became urgent, approaching hysteria. He began to threaten people who disagreed with him. To coin a phrase, Gary went All Upper Case. But his most urgent warnings weren’t about the gays, the Jews, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. According to Gary, the greatest enemy of mankind was Santa Claus. Gary claimed to possess a secret numerical formula that “proved” beyond a shadow of a doubt that Santa Claus was an avatar of the Antichrist. Intrigued, we pressed Gary to reveal his formula. In doing so, we walked right into his trap. We should have known he had a book to sell. I fell for it. I sent him the fifteen bucks. Less than a week later the book arrived. Above an ominous photograph of the Washington monument was emblazoned the title: 666: The Final Warning! Inside this privately printed 494-page monster, Gary reveals a simple gematriacal formula which he claims was developed by the ancient Sumerians. This formula assigns successive products of 6 to each letter of the alphabet: A=6, B=12, C=18, etc. Imagine my dismay when I applied this ancient formula to the name “Santa Claus,” and obtained the blasphemous sum of 666, the Biblical Number of the Beast! I went on Prodigy and reported to the stunned members of our interest group that Gary was right, after all. There could be no doubt that, according to the unimpeachable wisdom of ancient Sumeria, Santa Claus was the AntiChrist. I then went on to point out several other names which, when submitted to Gary’s formula, also produced the sum 666. Names like “Saint James,” “New York” and “New Mexico.” Soon the bulletin board was filled with discoveries like “computer,” “Boston tea” and, most sinister of all, “sing karaoke.” Gary left us alone after that. I got my $15 worth. But Gary is hardly the first person to connect secret codes to the Bible. People have been looking for Easter eggs in the Bible for hundreds of years. The Hebrew mystical tradition of kabbalah can be described as a gematriacal meditation on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. The advent of computers has made the application of numerology to the Bible fast and efficient. The latest spate of Bible-searching was instigated by a book published in 1998 by Michael Drosnin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. His book, The Bible Code, applied a skip-cypher, in which every nth character in a text is combined to form a message. By applying his skip-cypher to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, Drosnin claimed to have discovered predictions of World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and both Kennedys, the moon landing, Watergate, the Oklahoma City bombing, the election of Bill Clinton, the death of Princess Di and the comet that collided with Jupiter. He also found predictions of a giant earthquake in LA, a meteor hitting the earth, and nuclear armageddon, all scheduled to occur before the end of the last decade. The Bible Code spent many weeks on the bestseller lists, spawning several sequels and dozens of imitators. The Bible has certainly attracted its share of crackpots. But for the real hardcore egg hunters, nothing can rival the ingenuity, the tenacious scholarship, the stubborn zeal of those who seek the answer to the ultimate literary puzzle. A poisonous conundrum that has squandered fortunes, destroyed careers, and driven healthy, intelligent scholars to the brink of madness, and beyond. Who wrote Shakespeare?⁴ The essays and books devoted to the Shakespeare authorship problem are sufficient to fill a large library. Several such libraries actually exist. Not even a day-long tutorial, much less an hour lecture, can begin to do justice to this complex, bizarre and dangerously tantalizing story. Nevertheless, for the unacquainted, I will attempt to summarize the issue in a few paragraphs. The undisputed facts of Shakespeare’s life and career could be scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. We know for a fact that a man named William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in or around the village of Stratford-upon-Avon. We know that he had a wife and at least three children. We know he bought property in Stratford, was involved in several lawsuits with his neighbors, and died there in 1616, aged 52. We also know that during those same years, a man with a last name similar to Shakespeare worked as an actor on the London stage, eventually becoming co-owner of some of the theaters there. We also know that, about the same time, a number of most excellent poems and plays were published in London under the name Shakespeare. We do not know for a fact that the landowner in Stratford and the actor in London with a similar last name were one and the same man. We do not know for a fact that either man had anything to do with the poems and the plays. All we know is that those poems and plays have, in the four hundred years since their composition, come to be regarded as a pinnacle of Western culture. The works attributed to Shakespeare appear to have been written by a man or woman who knew something about just about everything. They’re filled with references to mythology and classic literature, games and sports, war and weapons of war, ships and sailing, the law and legal terminology, court etiquette, statesmanship, horticulture, music, astronomy, medicine, falconry and, of course, theater. Therein lies the problem. How could a farmer’s son of uncertain schooling from a mostly illiterate country village, a man of practically no account at all, wield such encyclopedic learning with so much eloquence and wit, so much wisdom and human understanding? For the first 150 years, nobody questioned the traditional history of the Bard. Then, in the late eighteenth century, Reverend James Wilmot, a distinguished scholar who lived just a few miles north of Stratford, decided to write a biography of the famous playwright. Dr. Wilmot believed that a man as well-educated as Shakespeare must have owned a fairly extensive library, despite the fact that not a single book or manuscript is mentioned in his will. Over the years, he speculated, some of those books must have found their way into local collections. And so the good Reverend Doctor scoured the British countryside, taking inventory of literally every bookshelf within 50 miles of Stratford. Not a single book from the library of William Shakespeare was discovered. Neither were there found any letters to, from or about Shakespeare. Furthermore, no references to the folklore, local sayings or distinctive dialect of the Stratford area could be found in any of Shakespeare’s writings. After four years of painstaking research, Dr. Wilmot concluded, to his own dismay, that only one person contemporary with Shakespeare of Stratford had ever demonstrated the wide-ranging education and expressive talent needed to compose those poems and plays. That man was the multilingual author, philosopher and statesman, inventor of the Scientific Method, Chancellor to the Courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James, Sir Francis Bacon. Dr. Wilmot never dared to publish his theory. But before he died he confided it to a friend, James Cowell, who, in 1805, repeated it to a meeting of the Ipswich Philosophical Society. The members of the society were suitably outraged, and the scandalous matter was quickly forgotten. Then in 1857, a lady from Stratford -- Stratford, Connecticut -- published a book called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. In this book, Miss Delia Bacon, no relation to Francis, claimed that the works of Shakespeare were written by a secret cabal of British nobility including Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney as well as Sir Francis Bacon. Delia Bacon’s book electrified the world of letters. Battle lines were drawn between the orthodox Stratfordians and the heretical Baconians. Literary societies and scholarly journals were formed to debate the evidence. Hundreds of pamphlets, newspaper articles and essays were published defending each side, and ridiculing the opposition with that self-aggrandizing viciousness peculiar to tenured academics. Armed with her explosive book, Delia Bacon journeyed to Stratford-upon-Avon and, unbelievably, obtained official permission to open Shakespeare’s grave. However, when the moment came to actually lift the stone, Delia’s self-doubt precipitated a catastrophic nervous breakdown. She later died penniless in a madhouse. Around 1888, things began to get a bit out of hand. U.S. Congressman Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota became interested in the Shakespeare controversy. One day, browsing through his facsimile copy of the First Folio of 1623, he noted that the word “bacon” appeared on page 53 of the Histories and also on page 53 of the Comedies. He also noted that Sir Francis Bacon had written extensively on the subject of cryptography. Donnelly began counting line and page numbers, adding and subtracting letters, drawing lines over sentences, circling words and crossing them out. The result was a complex and virtually incomprehensible algorithm which he claimed was invented by Bacon to hide secret messages inside the First Folio. The greatest Easter egg hunt in the history of Western civilization had begun. Here are just a couple of the sillier highlights. A doctor named Orville Owen of Detroit constructed a bizarre research tool he called the Wheel of Fortune. This wheel consisted of two giant wooden spools wrapped with a strip of canvas two feet wide and a thousand feet long. Onto this canvas he glued the separate pages of the complete works of Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Greene, Peele and Spenser, together with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. By cranking the spools back and forth, Dr. Owen could quickly zip across the pages in search of clues and cross-references. Employing a large team of secretaries and stenographers, Owen claimed to have uncovered a complete alternative history of Elizabethan England, as well as several entirely new Shakespeare plays and sonnets. Listen to this hidden verse, supposedly penned by the mighty Bard himself, which inspired Dr. Owen to build his Wheel of Fortune. Take your knife and cut all our books asunder And set the leaves on a great firm wheel Which rolls and rolls, and turning the fickle rolling wheel Throw your eyes upon Fortune That goddess blind, that stands upon a spherical stone that, turning and inconstant, rolls in restless variation. After publishing five thick volumes of this rubbish, Owen announced the discovery of an anagram indicating that Bacon’s original manuscripts were buried near Chepstow Castle on the river Wye. Owen spent the next fifteen years and thousands of dollars excavating the bed of the river with boat crews and high explosives. He died before anything was found. A fellow named Arensberg wrote an entire book based on the analysis of the significance of a suspicious crack in the tomb of Bacon’s mother. A ray of sanity finally appeared in 1957. To those familiar with the science of cryptology, the name William Friedman needs little introduction. During World War II , Colonel Friedman was the head of the US Army’s cryptoanalytic bureau. He is credited with cracking the Japanese Empire’s most sensitive cipher. After the war, the Colonel decided to apply his expertise to the study of the Shakespeare ciphers. He interviewed several of the experts in the field, and prepared a detailed scientific analysis, which he published under the title The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined. His conclusion? In a word, bunk. According to the standards of cryptologic science, not one of the hidden messages purportedly discovered in Shakespeare’s works was plausible. The rules used to extract these messages from the texts were non-rigorous, wildly subjective, and unrepeatable by anyone except the original decypherer. The people involved were not being dishonest. They were channeling their preconceptions. They were trapped in a labyrinth of delusion, mining order from chaos. “Angler[s] in a lake of darkness.” Lear III.6. You would think that Friedman’s cold and ruthless exposure would be enough to silence the heretics once and for all. Not a chance. The books and TV specials and Web sites and conferences and doctoral dissertations keep right on coming. I should point out that the Shakespeare authorship issue is not only the preoccupation of cranks and weirdos. A substantial number of respected authors and Shakespeareans have expressed serious doubts about the traditional origin of the plays. The list includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sam Clemens, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud. Living skeptics include the artistic director of the New Globe Theater, Mark Rylance; Michael York, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, and even that most revered and scholarly of contemporary Shakespearean actors, Keanu Reeves. The current leading candidate for the authorship is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a theory first proposed in 1920 by an English schoolmaster with the unfortunate name J. Thomas Looney. What is it about Bach, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare that inspires this intense scrutiny? Nobody’s looking for acrostics in Chaucer or Keats. There are no hit CDs of the secret chorales of Wagner or Beethoven. For the answer, we need to recognize the unique roles which the Bible and Shakespeare have played in the development of Western culture. No other single work of literature has influenced Modern English more than the translation of the Holy Bible published in 1611 under the auspices of King James I. The King James Bible exemplifies the meaning of the word classic. It has been called the noblest monument of English prose, the very greatest achievement of the English language. It has served as an inspiration for generations of poets, dramatists, musicians, politicians and orators. Countless people have learned to read by repeating the phrases in this, the only book their family possessed. Our constitutions and our laws have been profoundly shaped by its cadences and imagery. But even the glory of the King James Bible, compiled by a committee of 46 editors over the course of a decade, pales before the dazzling legacy of the Swan of Avon. The lowest estimate of Shakespeare’s working vocabulary is 15,000 words, more than three times that of the King James Bible, and twice the size of his nearest competitor, John Milton. His poems and plays were written without the aid of a dictionary or a thesaurus. They didn’t exist yet. It was all in his head. When Shakespeare had a thought for which Elizabethan English had no word, he invented one. The Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of everyday words and phrases which made their first appearance in the pages of the Bard. Addiction. Alligator. Assasination. Bedroom. Critic. Dawn. Design. Dialogue. Employer. Film. Glow. Gloomy. Gossip. Hint. Hurry. Investment. Lonely. Luggage. Manager. Switch. Torture. Transcendence. Wormhole. Zany. Hamlet alone contains nearly forty of these neologisms. Who today would have this audacity, this giddy exuberance of invention? Only one other English author even approaches Shakespeare’s facility for coining new words: Sir Francis Bacon. In the modern era, the record holder is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who, interestingly, also happens to be the second most quoted author in English, after Shakespeare. Everyone has been profoundly molded by the influence of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Like it or not, all of us peer at the world through the lenses of these great works. They are the primary source documents of modern English thought, the style guides of our minds. Contemplating these dazzling jewels of wisdom and eloquence gives rise to an extraordinary feeling. A potent, rare and precious emotion with the potential to completely upset your life. An emotion powerful enough to make a man abandon his wife and children, forfeit career and reputation, lay down his possessions and follow his heart without questioning. That sweet, sweet fusion of wonder and fear, irresistible attraction and soul-numbing dread known as awe. Awe is the Grail of artistic achievement. No other human emotion possesses such raw transformative power, and none is more difficult to evoke. Few and far between are the works of man that qualify as truly awesome. It is awe that convinces a rabbi to spend a lifetime decoding Yahweh from the Pentateuch. Awe that sends millions of visitors each year to the Pyramids of Giza, Guadalupe and Mecca. It was awe that drove poor Delia Bacon to her doom. Now, please don’t come away from this lecture thinking that the key to awesome game design is the installation of Easter eggs! Ordinary games, with their contrived Easter eggs and cheat codes, are like the Battery of the Month club. You have to trudge down to the back of the store to get what you really came for. If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them? Is our imagination so impoverished that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks to keep players interested in our games? Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous. The treasure is right there. One afternoon, I was sitting alone behind the counter at that old Radio Shack store. My boss had stepped out for some reason. An elderly woman walked through the front door. Like most of our customers, she was shabbily dressed. Probably on a fixed income. I assumed she was there for her free battery. But instead, she placed a portable radio on the counter. This radio came from the days when they boasted about the number of transitors inside on the case. It was completely wrapped in dirty white medical tape. The woman looked at me, and asked, “Can you fix this?” Slowly I unwrapped the medical tape, peeling away the layers until the back cover of the radio fell off, accompanied by a cloud of red dust. The interior of the radio was half eaten away by battery leakage and corrosion. I looked at the radio. I looked at the old woman. I looked back at the radio. I reached behind me, where the expensive alkaline batteries were hanging like prescription medication, and removed a gleaming nine-volt cell from its gold blister pack. Then I pulled a brand-new transistor radio from a box, installed the alkaline and helped the lady find her favorite station. No money changed hands. She left the store without saying a word. Awesome things are kind of like that. Bach offered his students very specific insight into the source of awe. In addition to B-A-C-H, two other sets of initials are also associated with Bach’s music. These initials are not hidden in the notes. Instead, they’re scrawled right across the top of his manuscripts for the whole world to see. The initials are SDG and JJ. SDG stands for the Latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “To the glory of God alone.” JJ stands for Jesu Juva, “Help me, Jesus.” Bach wrote all of his great masterpieces sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity.” He did not compose only to please his sponsors, or to win the approval of an audience. His work was his worship. Bach once wrote, “Music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul. Where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting.” The name of the power that moves you is not important. What is important is that you are moved. Awe is the foundation of religion. No other motivation can free you from the limits of personal achievement. Nothing else can teach you the Art of Flight. Computer games are barely forty years old. Only a few words in our basic vocabulary have been established. A whole dictionary is waiting to be coined. The slate is clean. Someday soon, perhaps even in our lifetime, a game design will appear that will flash across our culture like lightning. It will be easy to recognize. It will be generous, giddy with exuberant inventiveness. Scholars will pick it apart for decades, perhaps centuries. It will be something wonderful. Something terrifying. Something awe-full. A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference in London. My wife joined me, and we took a day off for some sightseeing. We decided to visit England’s second-biggest tourist attraction, Stratford-upon-Avon. It was cold and rainy when our train arrived. Luckily, most of the attractions are just a short walk from the station. We visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, a charming old house along the main street which attracts millions of pilgrims every year, despite the complete lack of any evidence of Shakespeare ever having lived there. We went past the school where Shakespeare learned to read and write, although no documents exist to prove his attendance. We visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the rustic country farm where his wife spent her childhood, although no record shows anyone by that name ever having living there. Finally we came to the one location undeniably associated with Shakespeare: Trinity Parish church, on the banks of the river Avon, where a man by that name is buried. This beautiful church is approached by a long walkway, between rows of ancient gravestones, shaded by tall trees. The entrance door is surprisingly tiny. No cameras are allowed inside. The interior is dark and quiet. Despite the presence of busloads of tourists, the atmosphere is hushed and respectful. A few people are seated in the pews, deep in prayer. An aisle leads up the center of the church. The left side of the altar is brightly illuminated. On the wall above is a famous bust of the Bard, quill in hand, gazing serenely at the crowd of pilgrims. On the floor beneath, surrounded by bouquets of flowers, at the very spot where Delia Bacon lost her mind, the gravestone of William Shakespeare bears this dire warning: Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here Blest be the man who spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones. Every year, three million pilgrims arrive from every nation on Earth to approach this stone and consider the likeness of a man whose body of work can only be described as awesome. By contrast, the right side of the altar is dark and featureless. Nobody of any consequence is buried there. The only point of interest is a wooden case, of simple design, carved of dark oak. Inside the case, sealed beneath a thick sheet of glass, lies a large open book. A plaque on the case identifies this book as a first edition of the King James Bible, published in 1611, when Shakespeare was forty-six. Not many pilgrims visit this side of the altar. Most of those that do simply glance at the book, read the plaque and move along. A few, more observant, note that the Bible happens to be opened to a page in the Old Testament: the Book of Psalms, chapter 46. No explanation is given for this particular choice of pages. For the initiated, none is necessary. If you are of inquisitive bent, if you are intrigued by English history and literature, if you value your peace of mind, cover your ears, now. In the year 1900, a scholar noticed something about the King James translation of Psalm 46. Something terrifying. Something wonderful. The 46th word from the beginning of Psalm 46 is “shake.” The 46th word from the end is “spear.” There are only two possibilities here. Either this is the finest coincidence ever recorded in the history of world literature. Or, it is not.

Another false report and another innocent victim got harassed.

Third Jump

Jumper: Sordahon Jump: Fallout New Vegas Race: Human Origin: Scientist Faction: Brotherhood of Steel Starting Location: Hidden Valley Perks: 1300
Essential Body Mod CP Conversion - 1200 CP(100 EP)
Retention - Free
You read blisteringly quickly and better yet you remember everything you read perfectly. Finally it seems as though things that you’ve read occur to you exactly when they would most be useful providing you with solutions to problems, handy tips and relevant facts to aid you in arguments.
Power Armor Training - Free
All Brotherhood members are taught in the use of Power Armor but on your body you can really make it sing. You move as one with the armor with no loss of dexterity and instinctively know how best to position yourself to protect any weakspots so that bullets simply glance off you as you charge around as an engine of destruction on the battlefield. Semper Invicta!
War Never Changes - Free
When you decide to mosey on to another setting you find that a familiar voice (Ron Perlman) begins speaking of your time wherever you were, the consequences of your actions for various groups and, without further meddling, something of the fate of individuals you had an impact on. You also get to watch a relevant slideshow as this happens.
Swift Learner - 1000 CP Discount
You learn extremely quickly and often gain seemingly irrelevant proficiencies while you train in other things. Practise with a gun and you’ll make a marksman in no time but you may also find yourself getting a little more skilled at talking to people. Get better at haggling and you may just find your machete arm to be a touch more deft at chopping. Maybe it’s a confidence thing.
High Times - 800 CP
An unfortunate fact of chems is that you develop a resistance to them over time and can’t quite feel the same kick you once did. Luckily for you narcotics are consistently both strong and extremely pleasant ensuring no bad trips, comedowns or accidental psycho-related murders.
Whiskey Rose - 700 CP
You remain as capable as ever and do not experience the negative effects of alcohol or drugs at all suffering no addictions or hangovers. You actually become slightly more durable when drunk as well making you marginally more capable in a bar brawl (or fire fight) when intoxicated.
Items:
Basic Gear - Free
Recon Armor + Laser Rifle
Doctor’s Bag - Free
A small doctor’s bag with basic medical equipment, the means to fix crippled limbs, and a supply of Med-X and stimpacks that replenishes daily and should be enough to cover at least a few people stepping on land mines.
Sierra Madre Vending Machine - 500 CP
A vending machine that can fabricate food, drinks, cigarettes, clothes, medicine, ammo and other supplies containing all known codes of the resort. Requires chips but comes with a hatch that provides a needlessly large stipend daily.
Euclid’s C-Finder - 200 CP
What looks like a kid’s toy laser pistol but is actually a rangerfinder connected to a satellite floating in space. Pulling the trigger will cause the massive orbital laser to blast the hell out of whatever you're pointing the gun at and this recharges every few seconds. Satellite is self maintaining and solar powered.
Companions:
Companion Import - 150 CP
Newly created companions and imports gain a history in this world, a Background and Faction of your choice (along with any freebies that come with these) as well as 600 Caps to spend as you like (although they cannot purchase further Companions). Canon characters purchased must be persuaded to come along with you and do not gain any Caps, a Background or a Faction.
Deathclaw Egg - 0 CP
Currently unhatched but will eventually grow into a Deathclaw so large and monstrous as to become a legend. Extremely fast and agile with 12 inch long razor sharp claws that go through power armour much as they go through everything else. Thinks you’re it’s mama so will follow your directions as best it can. Alternatively you may choose to have it grow into a deathclaw the size of a small dog that still somehow packs the punch of the fully grown variety.
Drawbacks:
Guardian of the Wastes - 200 CP +
You’re destined to have a lot of work come your way, unfortunately nobody else seems to get anything done so if your side is going to win a war you're going to be dealing with the enemy top brass (and half their army) personally and when ferals need exterminating or a lost caravan needs finding it’s going to be you doing it or no-one.
Ant Misbehavin’ - 100 CP +
Mutated insects are attracted to you (particularly the fleshy parts of you that they can eat). Walk through the wrong part of the desert and you’ll have a horde of giant fire-breathing ants chasing you halfway across the Mojave and if you veer into cazador country... well try not to veer into cazador country.
McCullum
Origin: Soldier Faction: Brotherhood of Steel Race: Human Perks:
Heave, Ho! - Free
You’re perceptive and accurate by nature making you a fair shot even with an unfamiliar firearm and you’ve got one hell of an arm on you. Whether a tomahawk, a javelin or a grenade you have a knack for throwing things ridiculously accurately and with a fair bit more distance than your strength should allow.
Power Armor Training - Free
All Brotherhood members are taught in the use of Power Armor but on your body you can really make it sing. You move as one with the armor with no loss of dexterity and instinctively know how best to position yourself to protect any weakspots so that bullets simply glance off you as you charge around as an engine of destruction on the battlefield. Semper Invicta!
Basic Gear - Free
Recon Armor + Laser Rifle
Big Iron - Free
Whether a Ranger Sequoia, a scoped hunting revolver, your lucky sidearm or something more mysterious this is a powerful revolver with a theme of your choice that packs a punch greater than it has any right to. This is like Ranger Sequoia but slightly different design to not be mistaken for it.
Power Armor - 500 CP
A fine suit of Power Armor with the design (and paint-job) of your choice, a level of protection greater than even a T-51B suit, a huge increase to your physical strength and a tesla drive improving energy based attacks. Comes with basic operational training if you do not take Power Armor Training. This is X-01 Power Armor like in Fallout 4.
Heavyweight Ordinancex2 - 200 CP
A really great gun of some sort. Whether energy or ballistic this is a unique, beautiful weapon which is simultaneously more lightweight and powerful and has a faster rate of fire. You may also choose the basic theme/design. Here are some suggestions: Plasma caster, gauss rifle, gatling laser, minigun, anti-materiel rifle, brush gun, combat shotgun. You also get a replenishing stock of various special ammunitions (explosive rounds, hollowpoints, etc.). This is Sprtel-Wood 9700(Gatling Laser) and YCS/186(Guass Rifle).
Sierra Madre Vending Machine - 0 CP
A vending machine that can fabricate food, drinks, cigarettes, clothes, medicine, ammo and other supplies containing all known codes of the resort. Requires chips but comes with a hatch that provides a needlessly large stipend daily.
Scenario:
OLD WORLD BLUES
There is an expression in the Wasteland: "Old World Blues". It refers to those so obsessed with the past they can't see the present, much less the future, for what it is.
Big MT, a research base before the war and now a legendary treasure trove of technology. “Controlled” by a group of think tanks (unique brain bots with the not entirely stable brains of brilliant pre-war scientists) called the Think Tank and Mobius their former colleague and current adversary (also a think tank). The Think Tank do not know it (currently running on the theory that there is no world outside Big MT) but many of their experiments and creations (cazadores and night stalkers chief among them) have escaped into the wastes and brought death and destruction with them. Your task is to fight your way through lobotomites, mini- deathclaws and robo-scorpions alike to either destroy the Think Tank and permanently stop any further threat their experiments pose to the Mojave or to reason with them and convince them to work together on your behalf for (hopefully) a brighter future.
Your time picking through the labs of Big MT have afforded you a certain way of thinking. As if possessed by the will of SCIENCE! itself you find yourself constantly coming up with scientific breakthroughs that you’re sure will work. Unfortunately, while potentially possible to turn to good, these ideas are always initially somewhere between pointless and horribly insane. You may not be able to cure diseases or invent tools that improve basic quality of life but the creation of new species of monstrous mutants or the invention of sapient neurotic sinks is now, not only possible, but downright easy. If removed you may also take your own brain in a jar as a companion. Don’t ask, it just works. You also get your own pet X-42 giant robo-scorpion that seems to run without an energy source.
Story Interlude:
The moment we both appeared in my warehouse, McCullum was quite stunned about such a place. He asked why it looked like a big warehouse that could be seen in docks but I replied I had no idea honestly, but told him I can change it later with sufficient WP. He just looked at me with a questioning expression.
It took some time to explain how all this worked but in the end he understood. He went around but commented how empty this place is when he noticed that I don’t have many things beside my tent that works as a barrack, which is a tent because it looked better for one person. I know I can make it a building like the military has if needed, and so I did. The tent vanished with my thought and a small building appeared, along with two beds and some basic furniture.
Next thing we did was to go to my medic bay area, which also had vending machine sized diagnostic tool for medical things.
It was supposed to scan McCullum and correct anything bad in his body, he stepped closer upon my explanation. I pushed the button and he was covered in light for a moment before the screen changed and various data started appearing. Seems like he is healthy and being Ekon for so long has removed all diseases he had as a human. No defects or any other problems detected, good.
With check up done we went back to the area near our new barrack. My seven day rest time automatically activated so we had time for him to get ready for our next jump and also to acquire some information relevant to the setting.
For now I told him to leave his sword and revolver in the barracks and to let us test both of our abilities, since we didn’t spar or anything during our journey throughout europe. Taking care to be near the medicine bay just in case. I showed him my power to spawn blood packs, which he found interesting but also inconceivable.
I gave him a good supply of them if he needed to drink. Next thing was comparing mastery over our powers.
As a 2nd generation ekon with 9 years of experience he managed to learn all ekon powers aside from the three ultimate attacks, while other powers weren’t maxed out. Seeing as he wasn’t like Mary, going on and slaughtering people and drinking blood like nothing, he merely approached her in power after 9 years. He also learned how to make 1 shadow clone, which seems like a limit that a normal vampire can make. His physical body is near peak human.
Meanwhile I by the time of final fight with Red Queen maxed out my powers as normal ekon, learning all powers, even ultimate ones, all due to fighting and evolution ability, which only worked to maxing out to game level. After that I had to train and use my capstone boosted less limits perk, which removed them all together.
After 9 more years of training my abilities went beyond those of even 1st gen ekon. My blood barrier became strong enough to easily handle attacks of skals and other creatures like sewer beasts. Even if I tried the same thing that cut off my arm back then wouldn’t work easily. I could hit myself three times at full power while it remained active, needing another weaker hit before it broke, tested after using someone else's weapons of course.
My shadow mist ability became about two times larger, now able to cover significant areas and damaging enemies swiftly and deadly. Invisibility power became very easy to use and now I could sustain it by using barely any stamina, even if sprinting. But not using super speed. I could also sustain it even if bumping into something or being attacked, but not when I myself attacked, seems it’s still beyond me.
I was also quite versatile in usage of my powers, not being a specialist like in the game, I could use both forms of powers combined if I so desired. Like a hard blood barrier and an exploding one, though this decreased power if used at the same time so I keeped to what I liked.
I didn’t figure out shooting homing blood spears but I could shoot them in quicker succession than normal, needing about 1s between use. I could also shoot several smaller ones each for different targets rather than three in a wedge.
My claws became one of my more used abilities in close combat now too, claws made of blood are capable of persisting while I strike for three blows instead of one like normal, can make it for both of my hands if needed even. They are also tougher than my saber is and more damaging.
Coagulation ability wasn’t trained as much as others but I can still use it easily enough for a bit longer than what is allowed.
Meanwhile my ultimate powers stayed relatively normal, I can handle using them more often though.
Other than that I am about double that of peak human in physical capability, my body mod didn’t stack at 100% with my ekon stats and ended up like this. Though I can feel I’m slowly growing in body strength, it’s quite a small boost.
So the next few days was spent on me feeding Geoffrey blood packs, while he can’t easily evolve like I can, he can train with limitless supply of blood, only being limited by stamina for shadow powers.
Between his training I also told him about my original world and my first jump. He was interested in a world without monsters, though he stopped calling ekons as such. Thankfully he came to terms with his powers.
Then I myself spent some time on choosing my next jump, which will be Fallout New Vegas and one of my favorite games. The reason for jumping there is due to amazing technology I could acquire and how it will help me when I decide to jump to Mass Effect. This came with a crash course on Fallout setting for Geoffrey so he could handle it more easily. His expression was amazing when I told him what kind of world this will be, but also sad on why it was as such, meaning nuclear apocalypse.
So without further rambling I started setting up the next jump.
I decided to be member of the Brotherhood of Steel as a scribe scientist, combining it with learning perks and 100 CP transferred to my body mod, which made me intelligent and gave me resistance to disease and toxins, which are something I hate and am not certain my new body will handle easily, which I made to look just like my Ekon one.
I got a few free perks for this origin even, mainly power armor training so that it’s as easy as breathing for me to move efficiently in it, quick learning perk, and something akin to the ending slideshow I saw in the game.
For the ones I bought was the ability to learn even faster, combined with my body mod and free perk I should be at least a genius in intellect… hopefully. In addition to not getting resistant to chems and immunity to bad things that could happen when I take them. This is crucial for getting various boosts I will get.
Next was the item section, free gear which is laser rifle and recon armor, not bad. A doctor bag with respawning supply of stimpaks, med-x and limb fixing package as well as basic medic tools. Very good.
The things I bought were two, Euclid’s C-Finder.which is a rangefinder for orbital laser cannon like Archimedes II, very powerful and useful for me, and also a cool asset. The other one is Sierra Madre Vending machine with replenishing supply of a large amount of chips. This will help me with supplies and my plan on giving it more blueprints, which should in theory work.
My next thing to do was getting companion import, I wanted to have McCullum as my friend in arms and a paladin of the brotherhood. So he became a soldier and a member of my faction there. I asked him what he wanted when he had break from training and he came up with these perks and items.
Basic gear just like me, free powerful revolver, which he imported from his own one, now upgraded tremendously. A set of X-01 power armor, keeping in mind that most people use T-45 or T-51 I wonder how it will work in the jump. We shall see.
He then bought two heavy weapons to fight against both armies and powerful singular enemies, with a unique gatling laser and unique gauss rifle. I doubt he will have trouble killing much of anything in Fallout.
He told me then there wasn’t much he needed so I persuaded him to buy us a second Vending Machine. He easily agreed after I explained to him how powerful of a tool it is, with two of them our options will expand even more.
Geoffrey was a bit troubled when I told him that I also want to buy a deathclaw egg, since after learning how much of a killing machine it can grow into he understood he was weaker than it, at least as he is now. But I assured him it will be friendly to us. Eventually he agreed.
Good thing we will get vending machines for food. I hope it hatches easily as I don’t have experience with such things.
Later on I saw I’m short on CP and had to take drawbacks, one will make mutated insects attack me, while other will make it similar to in game quests, meaning that it will fall to me and companions to deal with stuff and we will not get help in terms of people. I don’t really mind it as I intend to train my ekon powers away from curious eyes, same for Geoffrey.
Oh, wait. How do we hatch deathclaw as members of BoS? I think we will need to leave the egg in the warehouse for some time and then get some mission and hatch it. Hmm I can use my access key to sort of teleport so I could visit the egg even if inside the Hidden Valley. I will buy more of these keys to give to McCullum one too.
Just before the week of training and preparation is over I tell McCullum my plan and the scenario I have chosen. We will acquire advanced technology, weapons, armor, chems, robots maybe while trying to make Mojave a safer place, he agreed to that readily. I smiled and then explained I have chosen the scenario to be Old Worlds Blue, a super high tech facility with brilliant minds such as Think Tank and Mobius who I intend to make peace with and gather more technology, in addition to super powerful giant robo scorpion.
I told him it will be a dangerous battle ahead, at least to get to Mobius and we will need experience and plenty of tech to do it. I chose to start in BoS bunker instead of in Big Mt. since it would be too dangerous for now and I know how to get us teleported there, at least me, he can then step through the warehouse to help me. While I’m averse to getting lobotomized, it’s probably my only option for now, at least until I get smarter. Perhaps I will be able to avoid such a thing and other bad events from the plot.
For now we stood there as the countdown approached. My warehouse didn’t have a cleaning facility so we were dirty as ever, hopefully our new bodies will be clean.
Space Shattered after I initialised the jump.
Story:
In a blink I appeared in a metal room, it was my bedroom inside of Hidden Valley bunker. Geoffrey seems to also have appeared inside of his own. I wasn’t wearing my cloak and suit but scientist clothes that were basic clothing of scribes around here. Looking around the room it was similar in design to how I remembered from the game.
Still the sight of a big egg sitting peacefully on my bed startled me a bit. Thankfully there wasn’t any sort of camera system so I covered it quickly with my blanket and immediately opened the door to my warehouse to put the egg inside, I couldn’t teleport it as other things as it was alive.
Not wasting time I placed it only on my bed in the barrack and left before anyone would try to open the door to my room to talk with me and just a few seconds later I heard the door opening as I remede my bed sheets. McCullum has entered the room. I asked him how he was, having jumped the first time with me and he explained it was strange having another but the same body. Lack of his ekon powers in his new form surprised him. But he was also happy to lose that weakness, which was inability to eat or drink normal food. He has long since wished to taste it once again so we went to mess hall.
There I asked him what about the power armor he bought and it seems that it wasn’t in his room. Good thing as X-01 top tier pre war prototype appearing in a paladin room would be bizarre. I considered explaining that I made it or something but I doubt it would work here. Even more with his two top tier weapons. At least his revolver which he has won’t make others cast strange gazes at us.
I told him about the deathclaw egg and how it appeared near my bed and we agreed it would be dangerous to have someone stumble upon us having it. Could perhaps get us exiled or court martialed. With that said our new fake memories were certainly useful. We had pretty much most of what we needed to not stand out in the chapter. McCullum also had extensive knowledge of weapons and experience on using them and his power armor while I had a variety of subjects I was expert at regarding fallout technology. With my current level I inherently understand and would not have a problem creating power armor as long as I had schematics for it, and repairing armor and weapons is a breeze.
Making new weapons and armor is also possible if a long term subject, but still I’m not the best in the field. Based on my understanding Courier should be laying in his grave right about now as it’s night time. Big Mt. story should happen towards the mid or end of his journey, at least after Nipton and meeting Vulpes. So we have at the least a few days and at most months. I even with my current intellect have a worry about continuity of self so I do not intend to be teleported and lobotomized by the Think Tank so I will enter the area by conventional method, it should be possible as I know the rough location and that Elijah did it.
So the first thing to do would be to try to get some field mission to get outside. I don’t know how we can raise our deathclaw inside. Though currently we know that there are a few recon squads gathering information regarding the situation in the Mojave, we probably won’t get a mission. Due to this next week was spent reading through the BoS database for all technology I had access to, which was most actually.
We also had some time to check out weapons and armor we bought for the jump, and the deathclaw egg looked fine too, and didn't change in any way yet. The items were as impressive as I thought they would be. I have shot the armor with McCullum new weapons and it managed to endure quite a few shots even in the same place before melting or breaking off. Then I tried attacking it with my own powers but only managed to leave deep scratches with my claws, blood spears also made a few shallow holes.
On the other hand my Abyss ability managed to barely pierce the chest plate protecting the frame, it could probably injure a person inside more akin to a gunshot. It wasn’t able to lift it off the ground like it can with skals or humans though. Perhaps it can be strengthened. Later Geoffrey used his upgraded revolver to shoot my blood barrier. It managed to block one shot and broke after two. Next was shooting my arm, it hurt a bit but I regenerated in a moment.
Last test was him using Gauss Cannon and Gatling Laser to attack my blood barrier, of course aiming at the edge. Gauss pierced it like it wasn’t even there, Gatling took a few shots. Though considering both can eventually damage power armor I don’t feel bad. My next goal regarding mastering my power even more is blocking gauss cannon, which is probably the most powerful kinetic weapon in this desert. I also need to be able to do more damage with my claws and spear to power armored enemies, these roboscorpions will be tough as nails.
With not much else to do, McCullum was honing his skills with the basic gear he got like a laser rifle, which he was good already in using. I hoarded knowledge with my perfect memory. In due time I started to get some ideas in regards to how Sierra Madre Vending Machines work. We haven't yet tried them out because I want to leave it after we are in the field.
Then as the third week was starting I managed to give a convincing idea in regards to a field mission. Mine and Geoffrey's mission is to leave the bunker and deal with powder gangers that have set up a base of operations a few km from the base. Perfect opportunity. McCullum was to deal with fighting while I was to interrogate them and see if they know anything about technology nearby and information about the factions here.
So Geoffrey was allowed to take T-51 power armor and a minigun for this mission while I followed with my Recon armor and Laser Rifle. Obliterating them was easy enough, even with just the weapons we got. I also used a blood barrier which was quite visible, but provided me protection from their shitty pistols.
Once we killed most I used my mind control power to force questions out of the guy we left alive. Some useless info, news about some Courier saving Primm from raiders. We were pleasantly surprised he managed to arrive in Primm after so much time. Now we had a brief time to start our real operation here. I had McCullum patrol the surroundings while I took one of our vending machines outside to this place, while I could teleport it here, I didn’t want to have it break if it appeared in the air or something. Next I have uploaded several blueprints I managed to create during my two weeks on my personal computer and uploaded in holotape.
I have given it the ability to produce several different ammunition, frag, plasma and emp grenades among the combat ones, in addition to some chems like Jet I managed to get info on the components it is made of without having to reinvent the dung recipe someone remade.
Still the most important thing I got was a blueprint for a mister handy robot and mister gutsy robot, the basic ones. I was quite nervous if it was gonna work but by the evening we managed to make enough parts for one of each of them. By the dawn I have put the parts together and activated them using one of fusion cores I managed to get from the person in charge of supplies. I didn’t have time to make a blueprint for it yet but I will have to make one sometime later to return the two I took.
About 10am in the morning we were done with checking to see if it will work and proceed to activate them. I activated personality subroutine in both and they proclaimed their loyalty to me. I have given Geoffrey a secondary access so he could give them orders as long as they did not go against my own orders or intended to harm me.
We still had two days left to return as our mission duration was three generous days. The four of us left the Raider camp while I returned the vending machine to the warehouse. We went south from the camp and rushed to NCR correctional facility which was just a prison. By the time we arrived it was already afternoon.
The facility was quite empty, it seems that Courier has killed Powder Gangers inside. So we occupied it as our new base of operations. Geoffrey cleaned whatever scum had managed to hide in the basement of this place, which was also a few ghouls, a scary place indeed. I meanwhile took the building with the biggest space inside and set up my vending machine once again there. Also by using the door there I could later on teleport here if desired. Very cool.
My Mister Gutsy was instructed to stand guard outside the building door and watch out for hostels or anyone really. Mister handy was told to watch while I make parts for another batch of them and then make them a complete whole. He easily understood how it worked. I told him that his and the other one job is to make another 8 mister handies and teach them how it all works.
One mister handy to operate the vending machine, one to create more robots out of parts. I set up another machine at the other end so altogether four of them were to work on making new robots, while six of them were to clean the whole facility so it’s nice to look at. Once 10 of mister handy were in existence they were to switch to making mister gutsy and produce fifty of them. This is gonna take a while but I can’t easily secede from BoS without measure of power. I only really needed them for their knowledge.
Based on current estimates I will get four robots per day per vending machine. Generous supply of chips for raw materials also is within capacity, though really close to limit. Nonetheless I expect great results.
Mister Gutsy outside is also made supreme commander of my Mr. Gutsy army. I intend to upgrade him later if time allows. He is told to make 5 other Mr. Gutsy as his lieutenants and each of them will have 9 subordinates to call on. Their job is to secure the perimeter of the facility and protect it from harm at all cost.
Next I used computer present in the facility to create fusion core blueprint I needed for the rest of my free time, made a few and instructed my Mr. Handy to properly power up the other one i made but lacked power and do the same for every other robot. Which also pushed production to the limit. I took two fusion cores to return and with McCullum we traveled back to give our report.
Next two weeks I created blueprints and read through the database more. I had some responsibility but it was quite an easy job as a scribe, while McCullum was training younger members of the chapter.
Two weeks later I had created as many gutsies as the area of my base could hold, even the basement. I sent two of them to monitor the area around the place that the satellite was supposed to crash in case Old World Blues was to start from. Thankfully Courier did his quests in NCR outpost and passed through Nipton. It seems he is a good guy from the rumours I had heard.
As he slowly journeyed north I spent another month figuratively eating knowledge of the brotherhood. It was exceedingly vast but I had absorbed the majority already. My vending machines already had blueprints for all BoS armors and weapons, for a computer, foods of all kinds and medicine. I also managed to crack creation of power armors, the schematics were locked so I had to study T-51 that McCullum can use for training and his X-01 he trains on sometimes in the warehouse.
Speaking of warehouses, we have long since took the deathclaw egg away from it. Now it sits in one of the buildings at our base, with mister handy taking care of it, we of course uploaded knowledge regarding deathclaws and all around medicine so he can take relatively proper care. Biosigns detected through a device I made told me it will hatch within next month. I will probably need to make it go around the wasteland for experience and so his growth is not stunted. I hope he recognizes me as a master or parent of some kind properly. But I have little worry as my benefactor powers seem great.
I sometimes took McCullum on a stroll around our base, during the night of course as we were supposed to be in our rooms since he looked bored and was asking me how our plan was going to which I replied it was better than I realised it would be.

queen bed sheet size in inches video

A queen-sized flat sheet is 90 inches by 102 inches. This sheet size is designed to fit over a queen-sized mattress, which typically measures around 60 inches by 80 inches. A flat sheet is generally slightly larger than the mattress it is placed over. Bed Type: Fitted Sheet: Flat Sheet: Twin bed (99''x191'') 99x191x26: 180x260: Three Quarter (122''x191'') 122x191x26: 220x260: Full/Double Bed (137''x191'') 137x191x26: 220x260: Queen Size (60''x80'') 152x203x26: 265x280: Super Queen (66''x80'') 168x203x26: 265x280: King Size (76''x80'') 193x203x26: 280x290: California King (72''x84'') 183x213x26: 280x290 Standard Queen size bed sheets are 60 inches wide by 79.5 inches long. Even though they are the most common bed sheet sold anywhere in the world, you will find a lot of size variations. Some queen size mattresses are thicker than others and need bigger sheets. Your fitted sheet needs to be as close to your mattress size as possible to ensure that it will fit onto your mattress snugly. The pocket depth of fitted sheets may range from 10 inches (25 cm) to 18 inches (46 cm). Be sure to measure your mattress height before selecting a fitted sheet. A California queen bed is typically 60 inches wide and 84 inches long. For this specialty size, you’ll need to find fitted sheets that are 60 inches by 84 inches. The flat sheets and duvet cover can be the classic queen size. The queen size is a popular mattress choice that can meet your need for a comfortable, restful night’s sleep. I’s the ideal mattress size for most adults. The queen is one of the standard mattress sizes.Although specific dimensions can vary by brand, a typical queen-size bed measures 60 inches wide by 80 inches long. As you can see from the table below, the queen is considered a mid-level mattress size. Double Fitted Sheet Size: 137x203+40-50cm: 120x200+40cm: NA: 139x205+40cm: 137x190+38cm: Queen Fitted Sheet Size: 152x203+40-50cm: 160x200+40cm: 152x198+40cm: 155x205+40cm: 152x203+38cm: King Fitted Sheet Size: 180x203+40-50cm: 180x200+40cm: 183x198+40cm: 170x205+40cm: 198x203+38cm: Super King Fitted Sheet Size: 203x203+50cm: 200x200cm+40cm: NA: 185x205+40cm: 183x213+38cm Comparison of measurements for international bed sizes and mattress sizes with standard dimensions in feet and inches and metres (m) and centimetres (cm) for single, double, king, queen and super king size beds. American, UK, Australian and European sizes are all included. The queen size mattress has a dimension of 60 inch width by 80 inch height; Two adults can fit comfortably on a queen bed. This is the most commonly seen bed used in small master bedrooms and used mostly by couples. Queen size flat bed sheet size measurement – 92 -102 inch wide and 88-115 inch long (90 inch width by 100 inch length normally)

Bed Sizes For Single, Double, King, Queen and Super King ...

queen bed sheet size in inches

queen bed sheet size in inches - win

[Transcripts] Disparity- Chapter 7: In the Lap of Luxury

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