#alnst fan season round 6

[season39]

VERMILLION VS AURIEN

( Please select your preferred contestant . )

SONG :

VERMILLION & AURIEN : hanahaki syndrome

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[ Please secure perimeter and distribute guards to the stage afterwards . ]

[lookatmysillies]

YAEL PRE-ROUND 6 LORE: Part 1

Underwater

Prefacing this with summary & warnings! This is the first of what will probably be a 2 or 3 part series of Yael lore to lead up to his and Inna’s (@alien-til-i-stage) for Season 40. The narrative is nonlinear, so hopefully that clears up any confusion. TWs include: mentions of v*mit, s**cide attempt, drowning, near-death experiences, allusions to past surgery, needles/syringes, terminal illness, mild physical violence, mental illness, mentions of urine, death, dear god I hope that’s it anyway use your discretion writing below the cut

Drowning was peaceful.

There’s the initial few seconds of calm before the lungs start to burn, the chest begins to spasm and heave. The brain’s survival instincts kick in and begin to override any instructions to remain under, should the drowning be intentional, which in Yael’s case, was true. The pain becomes unbearable. Desperation flies in the face of logic; the mouth opens in a harsh, sucking gasp in a futile plea for air. Water rushes in instead and fills the mouth, nose, windpipe, pushes into the esophagus, invades the lungs. 

But then everything is quiet.

Quiet.

Never in Yael’s life had there ever been such quiet. Half-drowned and half-conscious, his body ceased its involuntary jerks and kicks, too weak to make any clawing attempts back to the living. The Anakt Garden river wasn’t deep–even the deepest point could be stood in, and it was still as glass. Drowning, even intentionally, was difficult. Yael had considered trying to knock himself unconscious in the water with a rock to prevent the struggle, but if he was found trying to do so, his attempts would be thwarted and he himself would be punished. So instead he flattened himself in the deepest point and gripped the wet, mossy floor as tightly as he could, facedown, and waited. Waited.

The green, brown, and blue began to blur and swim in his vision, flashes of colorful dots and lights failing to catch his waning attention. The ever-present roar of thought, feeling, fear, pain, confusion, anguish, pain, pain, pain–it all left with his last breath. Quiet. It was quiet. It was so safe.

Dying was the safest Yael had ever felt. Peaceful. Warm. Loved by something for the first time, something beyond, in the place he always dreamed of. Free.

This was his last thought before his body gave one last jerk and his eyes rolled in his head, feeling draining from his limbs and up to his neck, taking the colors away.

Free.

When the colors came back, they were green like the river.

His vision crawled back into his unseeing eyes, and the light, the color, was so violently bright and sudden that nausea seized him in an instant. He could feel so much, so much that he couldn’t feel much at all. The feeling of vomiting blended in with the screaming in his chest, the bones of his ribs crushed in at odd angles. He saw only one face, the green, the green–white, an eyepatch, green–...there were other figures, but their faces were covered in helmets. If the other children were watching, he didn’t see. He didn’t hear.

His muscles lacked control, and everything was so cold and wet, there was no way for him to pick out the sensation of water, spit, and bile slipping down his chin past the swell of his lower lip, or the brief heat of his bladder failing. He was spiraling.

He didn’t have any control over what happened to him.

Guardian Velji always called his lack of control defective.

Since he was a baby, he would wail over things unseen to anyone else. As a small child, he had night terrors, always wetting his pajama bottoms in the night, sometimes screaming until he lost his voice or passed out in his own sweat and urine. In the daytime, he was kept apart from his guardian’s other young pet human, a small girl with black hair and a sickly pallor who was often accompanied by an older pet human who acted as an orderly. Her name was Nina. The orderly’s was Zair.

Yael understood that Nina was defective, too, but in a different way than he was. Nina was always hooked up to strange machines. Clear tubes were always up her nostrils. Yael was a skinny child, but when he compared himself to her, he recognized that his bones didn’t protrude like hers did from her gray skin so awfully. 

Zair was tall and decidedly more graceful than the younger children. He always wore a white uniform from head to toe, and his hair, brown like Yael’s, was kept neatly cropped. He wasn’t tender with Yael like he was with little Nina, but he was attentive in ways Velji and his partners weren’t.

“Yael,” he would scold when he came to tidy his space in the mornings and check for anything Yael shouldn’t have. “You’ve made a mess of the bedding again. If Master knew how often I have to wash these things, he’d have you sleeping on the hard floor.” He would crouch to eye level with Yael and narrow his eyes at him, pinching his nose just hard enough to hurt a little. “Do you want that to happen?”

Yael just shook his head and murmured, “No. I’m sorry.”

That was usually about the time Zair gave it up. He huffed, tweaked his nose, and stood to hurriedly gather up the wet sheets and clothes.

“I won’t tell,” he would say. Then he left.

With Nina, his words weren’t so harsh. He always let her hold his hand when they walked together. When Nina started being moved around in a wheelchair, it was Zair who pushed it, and although she was mute, he talked to her almost constantly. Yael was sometimes caught staring at them, following them, watching them interact. Nina and Zair stared back. Zair approached him, turned him around by the shoulders, and nudged him off to go play by himself.

Ironically, he and Nina didn’t interact much at all until Nina and Zair stopped appearing around the facility at all. Yael tracked them back to Nina’s room of machines. The very machines he was sometimes hooked up to to take things out, to try and cure this strange rot inside of him, kept Nina safe and alive. He remembered finding this strange. Unfair, maybe.

Zair often shooed him out of the room. After a few times, he grew very cross with him and shoved him into the wall, telling him to get out and stay out and that she doesn’t need the stress, each harsh word punctuated by a sharp jab to the chest with his index finger. When Yael changed into his nightclothes that night, he spotted small red bruises on his chest. This too seemed unfair.

Despite the warnings, he sometimes snuck in when Zair was needed by Velji’s mistresses and sat on the foot of the bed. Nina was mostly asleep during these visits. A few times she was awake and stared right back at him with unsettlingly dark, empty eyes. He tried to see what was in there; what made her this way, as something inside of him had surely made him this way.

More out of curiosity than sympathy for her plight, he once touched her limp, unnaturally cold hand and carefully slotted his fingers in the spaces between hers like he’d seen Zair do with her. It didn’t feel as comforting as he imagined, just clammy and foreign. Something in him made him hold on regardless. Even when she woke and stared up at him, unblinking, he didn’t let go.

Yael was quiet, and she was silent, always. Maybe this was why they could communicate by looking and not speaking. During their brief and unsettling visits, her eyes began to tell him a lot of things he should’ve been too young to understand.

But he understood better than any words he’d ever been told.

So one time he watched from the doorway, just barely cracked open, as Zair administered her dose of medicine. At the first opportunity, he slipped into the room and opened the small drawer where he saw Zair put the key to the medicine cabinet, then unlocked the door and took out the vial with the orange cap. He stepped back to the machines and gripped the port where the medicine was administered. His eyes drifted to Nina’s increasingly sallow, haunted face.

She stared at him as he hooked up the medicine.

An overdose.

He held her hand for the second time until her eyes were wiped of thought or feeling. The feeling of her hand was even more unpleasant than last time. He’d thought it was cold before. He hadn’t had anything real to compare it to.

When Zair came back and found him, he struck him across the face, and Yael fell to the hard floor while Zair wailed and cried for help, shaking Nina’s corpse.

Yael sat up on the floor, hand cupping his stinging cheek, and watched. Inexplicably, for the first time in a long time, he began to cry.

“I didn’t kill her,” Yael insisted even as he was accused of such by Zair. “She was already dead. She wanted me to do it.”

Zair didn’t agree. Neither did Velji.

Yael was supposed to be euthanized that night. He was strapped down to the table and everything, arms bare for a needle to slide into without resistance. It could have been an hour or only a few minutes that he was waiting for the procedure.

It was surreal. That was the only way to describe it. He didn’t scream or try to fight his restraints. He didn’t yell at the ceiling for some hypothetical god to save him. The punishment didn’t make sense to him, but this was the extent of his upset: vague disturbance and that sneaking sense of injustice that prodded at the back of his mind.

When Zair arrived, Yael expected him to grab the key, open the cabinet, fill a syringe with liquid from one of the vials and stick it in his arm without further thought. Instead, Zair paused in the doorway, nothing more than a silhouette in the dark room Yael had been left to wait in. Then he stepped inside, crouched at the head of the table, and undid Yael’s restraints.

Yael looked at him, perplexed by this turn of events. Zair frowned.

“Well? Sit up.” Before Yael could do so, Zair set him upright with hands on his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” Yael asked.

Zair pinched the baby fat of his cheek, right where he’d hit him, making Yael grimace. “You’re leaving. I’ll give you a bag to put whatever you can fit in there inside. Get up.”

Again, before Yael could do it, Zair lifted him up by the armpits and set him on the ground, grabbing his hand like he never had before and hurriedly walking him to his room. Yael struggled to keep up, tripping alongside him.

“Leaving?” Yael stammered. “That’s not what Master wanted. Did–Did he change his mind?”

“He didn’t change his mind.” Zair shut the door behind them when they reached Yael’s quarters and shoved the plastic bag from the procedure room into his hands, beginning to collect some things Yael sometimes halfheartedly played with and shoving them inside. “I changed his mind. You’re leaving before he changes it back.”

Yael blinked, hand moving to fidget with the hem of a sleeve that wasn’t there. He was still in the tank top he was supposed to die in. “Do you forgive me?”

Zair took off his white orderly jacket and threw it over Yael’s shoulders. “No,” was all he said. 

Then, “Anything else you want?”

Yael peered down at the bag Zair had filled for him, again doing Yael’s task for him. He was too dazed by the last few hours’ roller coaster of events, he didn’t think he would remember even if he did want something else with him. “No.”

Without further deliberation, Zair snatched his hand up again and dragged him through the winding halls to the exit.

“Start walking,” he told Yael, his tone clipped. “The pod will find you when it gets here, but don’t wait here. Start walking.”

Yael looked back at the facility one last time. He took one shaky step forwards, unsure where he was even supposed to go. Two.

“Hey.”

Please don’t make me leave, he thought but didn’t say. Please don’t do this to me.

Instead he turned to look, silent like any lost child, silent like Nina.

Zair cuffed the sleeves of the orderly jacket so they didn’t hang down past Yael’s hands. He held onto his wrists, not his hands, when he said goodbye.

“I’m sorry,” is what he said. For the second time that day, Yael saw pure, unadulterated sorrow in this usually stoic older child’s face. Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.

“I wasn’t good enough to kill either one of you.”

So it is this that sticks with Yael when he’s picked up by the pod for Anakt Garden:

Death was a mercy. What he had given Nina was a mercy Zair could not bring himself to provide. Yael was not lucky to have escaped death that day.

Keeping him trapped in this existence was a selfish act, not for him, but for Zair.

Do you forgive me?

Yael stared out of the transport into the darkness, clutching the hem of his jacket.

No.

Tagging @paradisedisconcert because Can is… sort of mentioned. Not by name but he’s the “green” Yael sees when he’s pulled from the river and resuscitated, he’s just too out of it to know it’s him at the time. And the first tag isn’t working so @alien-til-i-stage once again - for the mention of Inna in my preface and for the fact that this part directly leads into the next part(s) which are heavily Inna and Macbeth centric!!

[ivanttakethis]

Before Round 5 - Tov’s Log

Rose (?) vs. Sai (?) -> ??? Win

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Cassio arrived home well after midnight.

They murmured a soft greeting and goodnight before retiring to their room.

Tov was still on the couch, trying in vain to process all of the events of Round 4.

She kept coming back to that image of Himei, covered in blood that wasn’t her own. The lost look in her eyes.

Her heart twisted painfully.

Tov needed to talk to her. She wouldn’t be able to sleep if she didn’t.

She turned off all the lights in the living room, quietly shut her bedroom door behind her, and punched in the number for Himei’s room phone.

She’d memorized the number off of a contestant call sheet Cassio left lying around.

Tov tried not to think about whether Cassio left the paper out on purpose or not as the line rang.

And rang.

And rang.

And rang.

Finally, a soft click.

“…Hello?” It was Himei.

But it also wasn’t Himei.

Her voice was too hollow, too flat and distant to be that of the friend Tov knew so well.

“Himei?”

“Tov?” Himei sounded surprised. “Are you still here?”

Tov frowned. “At the competition? No. I’m at home.”

“Oh…”

“Cassio brought me back here after my— incident at the end of Round 3. They wouldn’t let me come back for Round 4 to see you perform.” She continued.

Himei didn’t respond.

The only reason Tov knew that the line was still connected was because she could hear Himei’s uneven breathing.

Tov waited.

She was used to waiting out lulls in conversations. They never made her uncomfortable.

“I won.” Himei said blankly.

“I know.” Tov said. “I saw.”

“I… I won.” She still sounded far away, but not in space. In time.

She was stuck in a loop. Stuck back on that stage. Stuck reliving Min’s death over and over again.

Tov needed to break her out of it.

“Where’s Tallis?” She asked amidst another long stretch of dead air.

The silence stretched longer.

Himei shifted on the other end of the line, her voice no louder than a murmur, “He doesn’t think he’ll win his round.”

Tov closed her eyes and sighed.

“He will.”

He has to.

If Tallis died, part of Himei would die.

Part of Tov would die too.

She couldn’t patch them both back up.

When Tov opened her eyes again, her gaze was drawn to the window.

Azure, Moran, and Stasya’s constellations adorned the dark sky just outside.

Tov hadn’t had a chance to tell Himei about them yet. That gave her an idea.

“Can you see the stars from your room window?” She asked.

“Uh, yeah. I can.” Himei sounded caught off guard, but a little bit more like herself.

“I named some more constellations after our late classmates.”

“Stasya… and Moran.” She said, her voice tinged bittersweet.

“Azure too.” Tov added. “They’re up in the sky near ours. I can point them out to you, if you want?”

“Yeah,” Himei sniffed, “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Do you want to name one after Min too?”

She was quiet again, but only for a moment. “I think… I think she saved my life.”

“Me too.”

“She thanked me, but I never got the chance to thank her in return.”

“This could be your thank you.” Tov said.

“You’re right. I’ll try.” She can hear the small smile in Himei’s voice.

Tov turned fully to her window and set her eyes on the sky, “Remember, use the North Star as our guide…”

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This is basically End of Round 4 Part 2.

It spawned almost entirely out of my interpretation that Himei hallucinated seeing Tov after Round 4 in @lookatmysillies’s follow up log from Himei’s POV (so sorry if I misinterpreted what you wrote, my brain went straight to hallucination and would NOT let me go 😭)

Plus this gave me the chance to honor Min ( @starry-skiez ) since she saved Himei’s life, and therefore saved what remains of Tov’s sanity.

Himei and Tallis belong to @lookatmysillies and Min belongs to @starry-skiez.

Azure ( @azureitri ), Moran ( @geospiral ), and Stasya ( @billwasnot ) are also here haunting the narrative!

[lookatmysillies]

I’M ACTUALLY GOING TO SOB

[season39]

R O U N D 6

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VERMILLION VS AURIEN

S C O R E S :

VERMILLION — 54

AURIEN — 46

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VERMILLION W I N S

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— END OF ROUND —

( Stay tuned for the upcoming ROUND 7, coming ou—

———————————————————————————————————————————————————— [ ERROR :

POWER DOWN . ASSES CAUSE IMMEDIATELY . ]

[ SUBJECT 030718 IS HERE . SEND OUT GUARDS IMMEDIATE— ELI——TE S——JE—— 028——2 I——EDI——E—— . S—— —S T——IR W—AK P——NT ——— ] [ . . . ] ————————————————————————————————————————————————————

( Hint : Each one of these -> “ — “ is a space for a letter ! These, “ —— “ mean 2 letters ! Feel free to try to make out what’s wrote . )

[season39]

[ . . . ]

[ SYSTEMS BACK ONLINE :

CAUSE OF ERROR — [ UNKNOWN ]. ]

[ SUBJECT 030718 and 028812 HAVE ESCAPED . ]

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-> ( We cannot afford to post phone the bracket for them, and actively search for them at the time, but the stage security system and guidelines will be adjusted .

We have been too soft on the humans, and we apologize greatly for the inconveniences . We will not allow anymore of this . ) <-

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( Because of 028812’s disappearance and loss, 157329 ( VERMILLION ) will move up accordingly . )

— END OF ROUND —

( Stay tuned for the upcoming ROUND 7, coming out on :

[ 2024 . 8 . 11, 12 : 00 AM EST ] ! )

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DAIKI VS TALLIS

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[lookatmysillies]

Round 6: Eddy POV

Eddy's first thought when the contestants took the stage was how pretty they were.

The girl, Aurien, was more eye-catching than the night itself with her dark hair and equally endless eyes. A haunting sound erupted from her throat when she began to sing, and Eddy leaned so far over on the rooftop they perched at, binoculars in hand, that they almost toppled right over the edge. Just when Eddy thought to itself that she had to be the winner, the other contestant, the boy with the red hair, began his verse. And oh. Oh. He was beautiful too. His voice echoed around the stadium deeper than Aurien's, richer, maybe, and sent an excited shiver up Eddy's spine.

It had never seen a live Alien Stage performance before. Technically, it wasn't even here to watch, but how could it help itself? This was the most stunning thing Eddy had ever seen. The lights, the sounds, and the sights combined into a beautiful orchestra of music and color. The contestants sang of such devastation that Eddy could feel it in its skittering heart, pounding against its ribs.

Eddy had wondered in the past what their life might have been if they were pretty enough to be on a stage, too. They pondered what it would feel like to be on that stage dressed in a glittering outfit with a crowd cheering its name. It was too easy to imagine such a life now that it was right in front of Eddy's eyes. Would its classmates at Anakt Garden have liked it? Would they look at it with as much emotion as Aurien and Vermillion regarded one another with as they moved around the stage like a sweeping, swirling wind? It was hard not to wonder.

Eddy loved their own life. They loved Arol, who treated them with love and did his best to compensate for the loneliness Eddy dealt with. They loved Blob, their big Waygein who was getting too chubby from all the food Eddy fed him. They loved their job and they loved how important they were in their job.

But to live a life like that...

Well. It wasn't meant to be for someone like Eddy.

Eddy swept its gaze over the crowd once they reminded themselves of their purpose here. Solei. Eyes out for Solei. If Solei came, Eddy was to find them and take them alive. It would return Solei to their home, where they belonged and where Eddy never would.

A blare of sound nearly startled Eddy into dropping their binoculars. They jolted and snapped their head around. The flash of a red light. The whine of that sound again. The alarm.

A panicked voice spoke through the earpiece in Eddy's ear. Then it crackled and cut out.

Eddy's eyes widened. Was Solei actually here? Did they come back? Its employers had warned it that Solei was likely deranged from spending time on the run, that they could be dangerous. This was bad. This was bad.

The stage was where Aurien belonged. Why would Solei try to take that away from their friend?

They had to find Solei.

(Solei belongs to @solei-eclipse; Aurien belongs to @aurienneirua; Vermillion belongs to @subzeromoron)

[lookatmysillies]

THEY'RE SO CUTEEEE THE SILLIES THE PARALLELSSSS (they will fight to the death in 24 hours) THANK YOU SM FOR DRAWING THIS

R O U N D 7

soon.

@lookatmysillies !

click for better quality!

[lookatmysillies]

Round 6, Eddy POV - The Aftermath

Eddy’s vision was a blur.

“…infirmary! Contact its guardian!”

“What are those marks on its chest?”

“Does it matter if they’re gushing blood? Come on, we’re running out of time, AREPH will never let us live it down if this one dies.”

Lights. Color. Music. It had all faded to a dull, shiny spatter across their senses. Their hand twitched and reached out for something from the stretcher that was no longer there.

Blown pupils. A trembling frame.

The human had been very scared. Eddy wondered why they were so scared. It was just going to return them to safety. It was trying to help.

Wasn’t it?

Their fingers spasmed, and the outstretched arm fell back to the stretcher, a choked gurgling sound leaving their mouth.

One of the guards pulled their mask from their face to help them get air, and Eddy receded further into the hazy, swimming downpour of sensation around it, blocking out the brush of cool air against deformed flesh.

A new towering, skinny figure danced before their eyes with several sets of arms in eyes, shiny black skin stretched over its frame.

“Arol?” Eddy murmured, delirious. “Am I g’nna—g’nna be okay?”

One of the guards said, “…What did it say?”

Darkness settled over Eddy’s mind, and as warm and heavy as they felt, it was easy to fall into it.

For hours until they woke to spidery hands covering its sweaty forehead and bandaged, trembling chest in a loving apology, Eddy would know no more. Nothing but the mantra echoing in the back of their dreams.

Why were you

so

scared?

(If anyone couldn’t tell who the person in question is, it’s Solei, lmao. Solei belongs to @solei-eclipse. Thanks for a wild Round 6, guys)

[ivanttakethis]

Chronologically? We’re going into Round 16.

But emotionally? I’m still in Round 7.

[lookatmysillies]

this is late but..your other characters thoughts on r6.?

OHHH BOY ROUND 6. SOMEHOW NOT EVEN THE MOST DEVASTATING R6 OF ALL TIME DESPITE ALL THAT

Starting with Cas since he has a personal investment in this with his love for Aurien: When Aurien’s numbers starting dropping, Cas just froze up. He felt like he was watching it happen in slow motion, helpless to stop any of it. To him, that’s his baby sister out there and she’s dying. Once the lights go out and the shot rings out, he’s squeezing his eyes shut, hand over his mouth so he won’t scream. And then Auri and Solei are gone and he has no idea if she’s alive but is convinced she isn’t. After the round, he and Nyx find each other and just silently hug. AHHH.

As for my other S39-ers, Himei was shocked and probably becomes even more emotionally numb after that round. For Tallis, it was a stark reminder of what he’s about to face in his own round (and he’s certain he’s doomed to death, so he’s already anticipating this fate, dreading it). Understandably, he can’t stop thinking of his own impending doom after R6 and was up the whole rest of the night in his room’s bathroom swinging back and forth between anxiety attacks and waves of sickness.

[lookatmysillies]

MY GIRL IN FULL COLOR, I HAVE BEEN BLESSED

himei (@lookatmysillies) in a WIP im working on

[ivanttakethis]

so how is tov doing 😭😭

I have no fucking clue anon. So much happened that even I’m confused 😭😭

At this point it really depends on how much she was able to see on the broadcast, since Cassio made her stay home for Round 5 and Round 6.

There will be a Tov’s Log entry about this once I figure stuff out TRUST 🙏

[sotogalmo]

5 HOURS LEFT!

VERMILLION VS AURIEN

( Please select your preferred contestant . )

SONG :

VERMILLION & AURIEN : hanahaki syndrome

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[ Please secure perimeter and distribute guards to the stage afterwards . ]

[sotogalmo]

9 HOURS LEFT!

VERMILLION VS AURIEN

( Please select your preferred contestant . )

SONG :

VERMILLION & AURIEN : hanahaki syndrome

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[ Please secure perimeter and distribute guards to the stage afterwards . ]

[daiki1k]

Let them cook……

R O U N D 6

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VERMILLION VS AURIEN

S C O R E S :

VERMILLION — 54

AURIEN — 46

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VERMILLION W I N S

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— END OF ROUND —

( Stay tuned for the upcoming ROUND 7, coming ou—

———————————————————————————————————————————————————— [ ERROR :

POWER DOWN . ASSES CAUSE IMMEDIATELY . ]

[ SUBJECT 030718 IS HERE . SEND OUT GUARDS IMMEDIATE— ELI——TE S——JE—— 028——2 I——EDI——E—— . S—— —S T——IR W—AK P——NT ——— ] [ . . . ] ————————————————————————————————————————————————————

( Hint : Each one of these -> “ — “ is a space for a letter ! These, “ —— “ mean 2 letters ! Feel free to try to make out what’s wrote . )