#darkness falls 2003

[thedisneybarbie]

I have a list of all my favourite horror movies (might share them all cause why not) but I especially love early 00s horror and there seems to be a few that are my favourites:

The others

Cabin Fever

Jeepers Creepers and Jeepers creepers 2

Freddy Vs Jason

House of 1000 corpses

Saw 1-4

House of Wax

Final Destination 3

Dead Silence

Rob Zombie’s Halloween

Wrong Turn

Hatchet

Darkness falls

Monster Man

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

"REMEMBER, WHEN THE TOOTH FAIRY COMES, DON'T PEEK."

PIC(S) INFO: Mega spotlight on promo shots of the Tooth Fairy [closed mouth variant] six inch action figure, from "Movie Maniacs" Series 5, released by McFarlane Toys in September 2002.

BRAND: Movie Maniacs

GENRE: Movies & TV

PRODUCT TYPE: Action Figure

SERIES: Movie Maniacs Series 5

"This dark and twisted creature won’t exactly leave a quarter under your pillow. The title character from the upcoming Revolution Studios film, initially titled the "Tooth Fairy," now titled "Darkness Falls" and scheduled for a 2003 release."

-- MCFARLANE TOYS, c. fall 2002

Sources: www.pinterest.com/pin/521573200565392373, McFarlane Toys, & X.

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A vengeful spirit has taken the form of the Tooth Fairy to exact vengeance on the town that lynched her 150 years earlier. Her only opposition is the only child, now grown up, who has survived her before.

[joanofarc]

niagra falls, suburban knight (2003).

[andrewmoocow]

Yeah yeah, Jack Horner this and Jack Horner that, but I got a little challenge.

Let’s see Steven go up against any of these guys.

Child abuser, passes off genocide as a religious crusade, tyrannical dictator who persecutes anyone who doesn’t follow his rules, killed his own brother.

Known intergalactic criminal, successfully conquered the Earth in a dark future, NEARLY SUCCEEDED IN MULTIVERSAL GENOCIDE!

He is. What else can I say?

Killed a dog, killed the man who raised him, attempted to take over the world with an army of the undead, stole the body of the guy who still saw him as a brother despite his atrocities, attempted to rewrite reality to become a god.

Manipulated hundreds of people over the years to further his plans while driving them to insanity, built an entire throne out of petrified humans, brought about Armageddon by manipulating an emotionally-compromised child and caused a fandom to persecute said child for the crime.

Murdered Sonic in cold blood and used a crying young girl to unleash the fire demon within her so they could fuse and bring about the end of time.

Also attempted magical genocide, and regularly indulges in kidnapping newborn babies to turn into his minions.

Murders entire species for profit, destroyed an entire planet and everyone on it out of fear that they would betray him, massacred another species in search for immortality.

Plotted to destroy an entire galaxy just for fun.

And last but not least, hey, how did she get here? Eh, I’ll allow it.

Just the absolute worst, makes Eric Cartman look like Superman in comparison.

Yeah, let’s see Steven try to convince any of them to change.

[g4zdtechtv]

THE PILE PRESENTS: X-Play - Physics Engines 101 | 1/12/05

Science Rules.

[coffeeismycallsign]

The 90s and early 00’s English equestrian aesthetic was perfect. Hunter green breeches with tan patches, team polo shirts and that waterproof jacket with your barn logo you begged for. The GPA helmets with the center stripe, the original GR8 from Charles Owen, the fluffy sheepskin halters eq horses had for shows, dark saddles with light knee rolls and a fluffy pad. Sheepskin everywhere. Brass hardware and nameplate bracelets. The smell of Marygold spray. It is 2003 and the dark November 5pm creeps over my after school jumping lesson; my friends and I walk our horses out, counting the quarters we have to see if we can split some hot Cheetos from the vending machine while we wait for our parents to pick us up. Stained uggs replace our riding boots as we pack up to go. This is my Roman Empire.

[sunshinehxney]

Watching Darkness Falls👻👻

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

@ibenholt

ships with a degradation arc. ships where one character drags the other down to be just as disgusting and vile as they are. ships where the 'good' (read, less morally reprehensible) character resists at first but then lets themselves fall completely and totally once their initial hangups are overcome

[sugarcoated-lame]

Easy Like Sunday Morning | Joel Miller x Reader

pre-outbreak joel x reader

all of my works are 18+ only, minors dni!

Summary: You wake up before Joel and decide you want to take care of him.

or

giving 2003 pre-outbreak Joel some head on a sleepy Sunday morning

a/n: i was inspired by this post by the amazing @mrsmando 🤍 and her delicious joel thoughts that never fail to have me spiraling and swooning 🫠 if i had a nickel for every time i’ve written a joel fic about someone being woken up with some head, i’d have two nickels. which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice (sorry i had to lmfaoo). also this is probably the quickest thing i’ve ever written, so i’m sorry if it sucks!

wc: 2.8k

content warnings: no outbreak/pre-outbreak 2003 joel, kricket sucks at writing summaries we know this, smut, oral (m receiving), slightly rough oral, hair pulling, no physical description of reader except that her hair is long enough for joel to pull, pet names (darlin’, baby, sweetheart, pretty girl), no use of y/n, joel miller has a big dick because i said so, established relationship, somno (kinda? joel is like not really awake at the beginning of the smut), this is basically just smut :)

joel masterlist

dividers by @saradika-graphics 🤍

⋆ . ˚ ✩ comments, reblogs, and feedback are greatly appreciated! ⋆ . ˚ ✩

Lazy Sunday mornings have become your favorite in the weeks since you moved in with Joel.

Nowhere to be, neither one of you has to get up before the sun and go to work. No rushing around to make sure Sarah gets to school on time — just sleep. It’s the one day a week both you and Joel get a chance to sleep in, to wake naturally without the shrill ringing of alarms, and just relish being wrapped up in the comfort of each other’s presence.

Eyes still shut as you begin to stir, your mind is only just waking up and the first thing you feel is warmth.

Warmth of the bright, golden Texas sun shining through Joel’s — well, now your — bedroom window and behind your closed lids. Warmth from the plush, gray comforter draped just over your calves, where it had been kicked down in the night in an attempt to curb the relentless, sticky summer heat.

You find yourself cocooned by the furnace-like warmth that is Joel as he lies on his back beside you — a warmth that would probably be overwhelming if it wasn’t such a comfort to you.

Your cheek is pressed to his broad chest, the steady beating of his heart a calming rhythm beneath your ear. Your torso flush against his side, you have an arm wrapped snug around his middle, and a leg draped over both of his. You and Joel both lay almost bare, each clothed in nothing but your underwear after the previous night’s activities — hot skin on hot skin.

When you finally let your eyes flutter open to the bright, morning light, you look up to find Joel still fast asleep and take a moment to admire the peaceful expression on his handsome face.

Long lashes fanning over his cheeks, his brows free of the worried crease that often rests between them, plush pink lips parted as he lets out quiet little snores, his strong chest slowly rising and falling, up and down beneath your cheek with each calming breath. Tanned skin warm and glistening with a light sheen of sweat, dark chocolate locks especially curly due to the humid Texas heat, a few sweaty strands clinging to his forehead.

Seeing Joel laid out like this only reminds you of the way he looked last night — all flushed beneath you, cheeks pink, head thrown back and brown eyes clenched shut in bliss as you hovered above him. Pulling quiet, deep grunts from his parted lips as you rode him, his big hands on your hips, guiding your movements as you lifted yourself up and down on his cock.

The reminder of just how full you felt with him inside you — of how goddamn good he makes you feel — has dampness forming beneath the thin fabric of your panties, thighs attempting to clench shut in search of friction to quell the wave of slick that’s building between your legs, though they’re unable to do so with Joel’s thick thigh slotted between them.

And, though you know Joel is still resting so peacefully beside you, and that you should probably let him sleep in for once, you can’t help it when you feel the sudden and urgent need to kiss him. To feel your lips on his skin.

These lazy Sunday mornings with Joel are your favorite because you know he’s always so busy, always working hard, always so stressed. And, that despite it all, he always takes such good care of you.

So, you want to take this opportunity, when he doesn’t have to be up for work, or take Sarah to school — and you know it’s a couple hours before she’ll be waking up — and you want to do something nice for him. Take care of Joel for once. To make him feel good.

Lifting your head from Joel’s chest, you press your lips to where your cheek had just been. Beginning at his pec, and over his heart, tasting the salt of his sweat-damp skin as you work your way up the broad plane of his chest, dotting feather-light kisses up to the juncture of where his shoulder meets his neck.

You gently untangle yourself from his side, and Joel begins to stir just slightly as you softly mouth along the column of his throat and move to hover over him, your thighs straddling his hips and hands on the mattress on either side of him to hold yourself up.

He’s still mostly asleep, but you can already feel through the layers of both of your underwear that he’s beginning to harden beneath you, his body waking up faster than his brain, always so responsive to your touch.

You continue to kiss across Joel’s strong jaw, over the patchy hair that tickles your lips, dotting a trail of sweet kisses up his cheek and to the tip of his sharp nose, then back down to his mustache and over the corner of his lips.

He stirs again when your lush lips press against his own just once, not quite awake enough to kiss back just yet, but this time a soft hum of approval leaves him at the pleasant feeling.

With one more peck to his soft lips, you begin your descent back down Joel’s body, leaving behind another smattering of kisses in your wake.

From his Adam’s apple to the rounded bone of his shoulder, then back down to his chest. You know he’s a bit more awake when you feel him begin to stir again — his strong body shifting ever so slightly beneath yours, dick twitching against your core underneath the layers of cloth as you place a barely-there kiss to each of his nipples. Joel lets out a sleepy groan as your tongue darts out to lick at the sensitive skin before continuing on your way.

Shifting your body lower on the bed, your kisses become a bit more feverish, less soft as you work your way down Joel’s torso. Your hunger for him only growing as you get closer and closer to the bulge in his boxers, spurred on by the breathy little grunts and groans leaving his parted lips as his mind begins to catch up to the pleasure that his body is feeling.

Joel lets out a content sigh, head still resting on his pillow, eyes still shut and still about half asleep. Unsure if he’s dreaming when he feels you press a firm kiss to the skin just above his navel.

He’s quickly pulled out of that dream-like state, though — breath catching in his throat, jolting beneath you as your warm tongue darts out lick a broad stripe over his soft belly.

You can’t help but grin as you look up to see his face, those pretty brown eyes now open but still bleary with sleep, pillowy lips parted in a gasp, sweaty curls falling over his forehead as he shifts his focus towards you.

“Morning, baby.” You whisper into the quiet of your bedroom, your chin resting on Joel’s tummy as you gaze up at him sweetly.

Your smile only grows when he cards a hand over his tired face, groaning out a tired ‘fuck’.

Now that he’s awake — just barely — you press your lips to his belly one last time before heading lower. Fitting yourself between Joel’s thick thighs, you kiss along the fine hairs of his happy trail, then his hip bones, and you know he’s fully hard when your hands glide up his thighs to palm him over his black boxers.

Joel releases a throaty groan as you stroke him through the soft fabric, one of his large hands coming up to the side of your head. Calloused pads of his fingers running gently through your bed-mussed hair. “Please, darlin’.”

The use of the pet name combined with Joel’s sleepy, Texan morning voice actually makes you whimper, clenching your thighs as a new gush of arousal floods between them. Needy for him as your fingers move to his waistband, gingerly but quickly pulling down the black, cotton fabric and freeing his impressive length.

A quiet, raspy moan escapes Joel’s lips as you spit into your hand before wrapping it around his cock. He’s long and thick and heavy in your hand, your fingers hardly able to wrap around the girth of him, his tip an angry red and leaking pretty pearls of precum.

He lets out a quiet hiss as you begin to stroke up from the base, leaning down to kiss along his tip before kitten-licking at the slit, a pleased hum leaving you at the salty, heady taste of his arousal. Joel’s mind is still a bit hazy with sleep, but he swears he’s died and gone to heaven when you lick a hot stripe along the underside of his cock, tongue laving over the thick vein that runs along his shaft.

The hand in your hair tightens its grip when you oh-so-delicately take Joel into your mouth, emitting a pleased hum from you as you gently suckle on his tip. The vibration sends a jolt up his spine, cock twitching in your grasp as you continue to stroke up and down his length with increasing ease as your spits begins to coat his skin. Delicate fingers wrapped tight around him moving up and down to meet your lips as your tongue swirls around the bulbous head.

You take your time, enjoying Joel’s quiet, raspy moans, the whispered curses, and shallow breaths all falling from his lips as you slowly take him deeper and deeper into the warm cavern of your mouth.

When you’re about halfway down his length, you suck in your cheeks, lips tightening around him as you begin to suck with more fervor and Joel has to bite back a desperate moan as you bob up and down his length. His hips buck up of their own volition — the feeling of your warm, wet mouth wrapped around him is just too good — the two of you groaning in unison as the movement sends his cock further between your lips, the tip just grazing the back of your throat and causing you to gag around him.

“Fuck, m’sorry, baby.” Joel drawls, gently smoothing a hand over the crown of your head. He lifts you up his length just a little bit, just enough to gather your bearings.

You release him from your mouth with a wet pop. A string of saliva still connects the two of you between his swollen, red tip and your now swollen lips, and Joel thinks he’s a goner when you wrap a hand tight around his shaft, leaning back in to kitten-lick at his slit.

You smear delicate kisses all along his tip, then up and down every inch of his length, all the while gazing up at him with doe eyes before you bring him between your spit-slicked lips once again.

“So good for me. Always so good for me.”

His morning voice is deep — deeper than normal — and it has your eyes rolling back into your head as you whimper around him, tears collecting at your lash line from having just taken him so deep so abruptly. Nodding your head as much as you can with his cock still in your mouth, you let Joel know that you’re okay to keep going.

You want to please him. He deserves this. You want to make him feel good.

You know that Joel is getting close from the way he’s fighting himself to not buck his hips and fuck up into your mouth, the hand that’s not in your hair clinging to the gray sheets like a lifeline. His chest rapidly rising and falling as he tries his hardest to keep at least somewhat quiet — he knows that his daughter is sleeping right down the hall — biting back gravely grunts and groans that you so wish you could hear at full volume, his cock twitching against your tongue with every little move you make.

Taking a deep breath through your nose, you decide to take him as deep as you can go. Swallowing around him as his tip reaches into the depths of your throat, those tears are now spilling freely from your eyes as the coarse hairs at his base tickle your nose.

You suction your cheeks taut and lick along the underside of his shaft, the wet sounds of your sucking growing sloppy, Joel’s pubic hairs now shiny with your spit and his fingers are now pulling hard at your hair, the slight sting in your scalp a pleasurable one and only spurring you on.

A particularly harsh suck has Joel throwing his head back onto his pillow, sweaty curls falling like a halo around his pleasure-wrought features. Whiskey colored eyes squeezed shut in pleasure, nose scrunched, and lips parted in a quiet, guttural groan that lingers in the warm, sticky summer atmosphere of your shared bedroom.

“I’m— fuck!” He damn near whimpers when your free hands reaches out to caress his heavy balls, squeezing getnly as you continue to arduously suck and stroke his length, your hand and mouth working in tandem and meeting in the middle. “I’m close, sweetheart.”

You moan hungrily around him, the vibrations nearly sending Joel over the edge, the hand on your head now pushing you down onto his cock without hesitation – he knows you can take it. Hips thrusting up and chasing the velvety, wet warmth of your throat as you gag on him once more, drool spilling out the corners of your mouth all around him, the wet, sucking sounds filling the room obscene.

Joel practically growls when he feels your nails dig into the meat of his thigh, his chin dropping to his chest and he looks down to find you gazing back at him. Your cheeks hollowed, lips stretched around his aching cock, taking all of him like the good girl he knows you are. Your pretty, tear-filled eyes gazing up at him with so much love, and that’s what is his undoing.

You feel it when Joel’s whole body tenses beneath you, fireworks shooting up his spine as he starts to cum with a heavy groan that was lodged deep in his throat. You can’t help but moan around him as he fills your mouth, painting your throat with the hot, salty ropes of his release.

He mutters a string of broken moans, a mixture of curses and grunts of your name as you work him through it. The grip Joel has on your hair starts to lighten up — though, only a bit — but it’s enough for you to pull back on his length a bit to allow your hand to join your mouth in its ministrations. Slowly, but firmly, stroking him and sucking at his cock until you’re sure you’ve swallowed down every drop he has to give you, his stomach practically caving in by the time you’re done with him.

Until he’s reduced to shallow pants and hushed whimpers, Joel’s entire body shuddering as your lips lay one last kiss to his sensitive tip, and he drops an arm over his face, shielding his eyes from the now overwhelming light as he takes a few moments to catch his breath.

You let Joel take all the time he needs to recover, carefully tucking his softening length back into his black boxers.

It’s a few minutes before Joel uncovers his eyes, slowly blinking to adjust the the increasing brightness of the hot summer sun shining into the bedroom, and he’d swear you’re an angel, still nestled between his thighs. You’re busy littering the soft, tanned skin of his thighs and his belly in sweet little kisses and love bites when that deep, sleepy morning voices speaks up again.

“Well good mornin’ to you too, pretty girl.”

Before you can respond, two strong arms are pulling you up the bed — and up Joel’s body, a firm hand on the nape of your neck pulling you in so he can smash his lips to your puffy ones in a longing, appreciative kiss.

His deft hands then slide down your hips to grab your ass, squeezing at the soft flesh with a groan against your lips, before Joel is flipping the two of you over so he’s now the one hovering over you. A little yelp escapes you, but is quickly transformed into a stifled moan as his lips begin kissing a path down your body, now fully awake and more than ready to return the favor.

⋆ . ˚ ✩

⋆ . ˚ ✩

Thank you for reading!! x

[witchthewriter]

Poly141! | Mission Pixie Dust

Okay so... I was making up scenarios in my head as I was falling asleep last night and I made myself cry ... so I obviously had to share...

Poly141; the four men are your husbands and all deployed at the same time, leaving you home with your three kids at the beginning of the school holidays.

This turned out longer than I thought it would but I just had to write it out. I love Poly141 AND them being dads :')

Da = Johnny

Papa = John P.

Dad= Simon

Daddy = Kyle

School holidays had just started, and your three pups were buzzing as soon as they came home. Bags were thrown on the floor, school shoes unlaced and scattered around the shoe stand. They knew the rules, but first day of school holidays meant they were allowed to get a little wild.

Your oldest, Paesha, had just turned eight and her father was obvious. Thick curls, dark skin and warm brown eyes made it plain to see. But all your husbands loved her the same. In fact, she had a special bond with her Da (Johnny).

Malachai, your second, could have been any of the three other men's. Light brown hair, fair complection, and utterly/overly protective of his sisters. He had been born a year after Pae.

And your youngest, Felicity (known as Flick), had started her first year in big school. She was known for having exceptional blue eyes.

None of your husbands wanted a DNA test, they thought it useless because everyone treats the children with the same love, compassion and warmth.

Throwing your keys on the counter (Paesha picked them up and placed them on the hook). You rubbed the bridge of your nose and tried to quell the longing in your soul. You didn't know if it was worse when the kids were gone or with you. Being completely alone let the terrible thoughts attack but you didn't want your kids to miss out on having their fathers'.

Calming the oncoming tears, you turned around and asked, "who wants pizza for dinner?"

"YES!" Yelled Mal, a fist punched in the air. Paesha nodded her head enthusiastically while Flick did a little happy dance.

Paesha halted and squinted at you, "Not homemade right?"

After dinner arrived, the four of you sat on the large dark green couch. Your two ex-military dogs, Moth and Teddy, sat on either end of the lounge.

Turning onto the streaming service, you found the exact movie you were looking for. The 2003 version of Peter Pan.

With the lights off (except for the kitchen, the kids were still scared of too much darkness), you watched as one of your cats jumped into Pae's lap. Barnaby started purring instantly. His fluffy white tail settled around his body.

The seven of you settled in. Your four human babies snuggled up to their mama, smiles already on their faces.

When the movie had finished, your kids still wouldn't go to bed.

"Oh wait, I know why it isn't working - we don't have the pixie dust!" Flick pulled on your sleeve with a huge gap-toothed smile.

You had been watching as they jumped around the room. Lights flicked on, bodies flinging from one couch to another.

"I know! But ... we don't have any in the house..." You grumbled.

Paesha was staring dreamily at Peter Pan, a cheek resting against her face. "Where do we get some?" Her head turned slightly to look at you, her eyes nearly heart-shaped.

"Ugh-" god trying to keep childlike wonder alive was bloody difficult. Like a sign from the Universe, your phone started to ring.

All three kids ran over to it, knowing exactly who was calling at this time of night. Swiping the screen, four familiar faces popped up.

"Da! Papa! Dad! Daddy!" Smiling through the screen, the men had been just as eager to see their kids as their kids were to see them.

"Hello little munchkins, ya been good for mum?" Simon greeted first. His mask was off and no black could be found around his eyes. He never showed that side to the children.

"We're going to fly!" Flick chirped, her arms outstretched and running around.

"You're - what?" Price said with a slightly panicked face.

"But we need pixie dust," Malachai explained. Shaking his head like this was obvious information.

"I introduced them to the ... live action Peter Pan," you explained and a smile of regret grew on your tired face.

"Oh honey," Kyle replied, understanding the situation. He was the first of the men to.

"But we don't have any and we have to go buy more!" Pae said while leaning against you.

"Eh, pixie dust ...?" you heard Johnny mumble in the background.

"Oh! I have an idea!" You said with a faked expression, "why don't the Dada's get us the pixie dust!"

The chorus of cheers was heard throughout the house. Alerting the the tired Moth and Teddy.

Kyle shook his head. And Price's nose flared. Mum: 1 - Dads: 0.

"We'll bring back the goddamns finest," Simon said. You couldn't help but let out a small laugh.

"See! You heard Dad! Now get your butts' upstairs and in bed."

"Yes ma'am!" They said in unison (a nickname they'd heard their father's use one too many times.)

Once the kids were upstairs, your face dropped.

"I miss you guys," you whispered into the phone. The tears welling and spilling down your cheeks.

"We miss you too," John said, his words strangled with his feelings.

It was always hard to hang up.

It hurt.

But tonight's farewell felt like the hardest. You could just imagine how the scenario would've played out if their father's were there with them. With you.

'Can't always get what we want,' you thought bitterly.

"Not long now," Kyle said. You stared at his eyes and then his lips. God how much you wanted to kiss him.

"You better make sure you bring back some fucking pixie dust or there'll be a riot."

"Aye, Laswell definitely knows someone-" Johnny replied, giving you a wink. "Miss you gorgeous." He always tried to uplift the mood. And it nearly always worked.

You fought out of your misery, knowing the four soldiers couldn't bear to see you upset. And as they said their goodbyes, you said so in return.

"We love you, our precious wife. We'll all be together soon."

[zannolin]

peter pan (2003)'s portrayal of peter pan is so unhinged like. he can never die. but he can never live either. he'll never have to grow up. he'll never get to grow up. wendy could have convinced him to leave but what would have happened to neverland, which falls into a wintry darkness if he so much as leaves for a night, if he'd left for good? he has the world in the palm of his hand. it's a very small world. it would just as soon kill him to be sure he's paying it mind. everyone gets a satisfying ending except him. everyone changes except him. he's stagnant. he's constant. he's eternal. he's not a boy—he's a story. and sometimes that's the loneliest thing to be.

[intermundia]

SHOOT DAY 28: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2003 LOCATION: Stage 3 SET: Mustafar landing platform SCENES SHOT: 145pt (Padmé confronts Anakin on Mustafar and Obi-Wan arrives)

At 2:45, they're ready for close-ups of Hayden. Lucas discusses the tone with him. "This is Anakin's greatest moment; he's got all these new powers-everything is fine." "Anakin's just gone and killed his family, more or less, so I've done a deed that I thought would've weighed on me," Christensen would say the following day. "But George sees it as an outburst of almost accidental anger that Anakin then has to suffer the repercussions of for the rest of his life. Anakin thinks he's done the right thing in killing all the Jedi, so George wanted me to come to the scene with enthusiasm. Things are good. I'm the most powerful man in the universe and I'm going to be able to save Padmé."

Honestly I think what makes Hayden's performance as Anakin during the confrontation on Mustafar so compelling is that Hayden's instincts are to feel guilt and horror, from the deep revulsion of the good part of him that still lurks inside ('i just killed my family'), and Lucas's direction is to project confidence and enthusiasm out of self satisfaction ('what i did was definitely absolutely right, good, necessary, important').

As a result Hayden gives Anakin a palpable kind of tension in the eyes. He holds up a unsettling false front of willing self-deception, leaning into insane delusions of grandeur to avoid confronting the traumatic reality of what he did. That tension visibly snaps at the perception of betrayal, lashing out in the surge of accidental anger that would haunt Anakin for the rest of his life.

Hayden's acting in that moment, the huge swing of manic joy to a murderous scowl, really never gets the credit it deserves for actually being pretty subtle. It feels natural and seamless despite the high drama and unsubtle dialogue. I love the build up of that psychological tension as he falls into the dark and its explosive, deadly release, it's really perfect to me.

[videogamepolls]

Video Games Polls 1-Year Report

I've been running this blog for a full year and I've polled nearly 3,000 games, so I wanted to post an updated report with the top 10 games for each of the four options included in my polls, plus a couple other categories.

📊 General Stats

Games Polled: 2,864

Average Sample Size: 728

Games with 40%+ "yes" votes: 149 (5.2%)

🏆 Most Played

Games with the highest percentage of "Yes" votes:

The Dinosaur Game (2014, AKA Chrome Dino Game) - 93.9%

Pac-Man (1980) - 93.4%

Wii Sports (2006) - 87.7%

Tetris (1985) - 86.9%

3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet (1995) - 85.5%

Pokemon Go (2016) - 82.9%

Minecraft (2011) - 81.1%

Angry Birds (2009) - 80.1%

Stardew Valley (2016) - 79.3%

Space Invaders (1978) - 78.5%

🏆 Most Known But Not Played

Games with the highest percentage of "No" votes:

Raid: Shadow Legends (2018) - 85.8%

Final Fantasy XI (2002) - 82.1%

Far Cry (2004) - 79.3%

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018) - 78.3%

Far Cry 2 (2008) - 78.2%

Halo Infinite (2021) - 77.6%

Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999) - 75.4%

Final Fantasy V (1992) - 76.4%

Baldur's Gate (1998) - 76.1%

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) - 75.8%

🏆 Most Watched

Games with the highest percentage of "I watched someone play it" votes:

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017) - 54.2%

I Am Bread (2015) - 51.3%

Octodad: Dadliest Catch (2014) - 47.0%

Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach (2021) - 45.6%

Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning (2018) - 43.5%

Amanda the Adventurer (2023) - 42.5%

Phasmophobia (2020, Early Access) - 41.3%

P.T. (2014) - 41.0%

PowerWash Simulator (2022) - 40.4%

The Mortuary Assistant (2022) - 38.7%

🏆 Most Obscure

Games with the highest percentage of "I've never heard of it" votes:

Jessica's Uncomfortable Hanukkah Adventure (2023, Early Access) - 97.8%

Batty Zabella (2022) - 97.6%

Citampi Stories: Love & Life (2019) - 97.0%

Tears - 9, 10 (2002) - 97.0%

Just, Bearly (2018) - 96.9%

Anito: Defend a Land Enraged (2003) - 96.6%

That Damn Goat (2023) - 96.5%

Star Seeker in: The Secret of the Sorcerous Standoff (2020) - 96.4%

Cisini Stories: Girl Life RPG (2024) - 96.4%

Dear Substance of Kin (2019) - 96.3%

🏆 Most Balanced

Games with the most even spread of votes:

Human Fall Flat (2016) - 19.3% Yes | 28.5% No | 26.1% Watched | 26.1% Never Heard

Kerbal Space Program (2015) - 21.9% | 31.1% | 24.5% | 22.5%

The Henry Stickmin Collection (2020) - 19.3% | 29.2% | 22% | 29.5%

Ib (2012) - 24.1% | 26.8% | 19.2% | 29.9%

Superhot (2016) - 24.9% | 25.1% | 30.5% | 19.5%

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (2010) - 25.8% | 31.1% | 20% | 23.2%

Limbo (2010) - 30.2% | 28.7% | 23.9% | 17.1%

Wobble Dogs (2022) - 18% | 25.4% | 25.2% | 31.3%

Slay the Princess (2023) - 30.2% | 27.4% | 26.1% | 16.4%

Golf with Your Friends (2020) - 13.9% | 16.9% | 23.6% | 30.8%

🏆 Most Votes

Games with the most number of votes:

3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet (1995) - 11,773

Robot Unicorn Attack (2010) - 7,600

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) - 4,329

Flight Rising (2013) - 4,132

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004) - 4,053

Final Fantasy XV (2016) - 3,056

Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009) - 2,844

Dark Souls (2011) - 2,823

The Dinosaur Game (2014, AKA Chrome Dino Game) - 2,758

QWOP (2008) - 2,636

*I did not take most Pokémon games into consideration since I handle those polls a little differently.

Check out my results spreadsheet for an alphabetized list of all poll results plus some other stats, and in case anyone is interested in comparing results to past reports here are the links to my 6-month and 9-month posts.

[angelbarelywrites]

♡ good one | thomas hewitt x reader

♡ fandoms; Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003 + 2006)

♡ characters; Thomas Brown Hewitt

♡ reader; gender neutral

♡ cw; references to extreme violence, stockholm syndrome i suppose?, kidnapping

♡ notes; this was literally supposed to be porn but instead here’s some weird sappy stuff lol

anyways hopefully more fics soon, writers block and rehearsals have been a bitch and a half

•┈••✦ ❤ ✦••┈•

It was a wonder you were still alive. That’s what you thought about, sitting and fidgeting in the strange bedroom with your ankle shackled. Was shackled the right word if it was tied with rope? Whatever. It didn’t matter. You were fairly certain you’d fall prey to the crazy folks running around the place soon enough. The group you’d hitched a ride with was already long gone- one you’d watched get shot point blank by the bullshit sheriff. The others….well, you heard the chainsaw and the screaming. It was an easy conclusion to come to, especially after you saw the bloody smears on the hardwood downstairs.

You weren’t sure why you hadn’t been hacked into bits yet. You’d been indistinguishable from the others- just another wandering twenty-something with tight clothes and next to no money. The only thing you could think of was that gas station. Your companions had been such dicks to the lady at the counter- of course you apologized to her. She’d been just as kind in return, she even snuck a candy into your bag of sodas and snacks. She was the one who’d sent you that way, towards the farm house.

You stilled, train of thought lost as you heard footsteps. Heavy and slow- they were somehow more intimidating than any angry stomping could have been. You curled your legs up defensively, eyes trained on the door. The person stood there more than a second, silent and just as still as you were holding. If you hadn’t been listening so intently, you would have thought they turned and walked away. But then there was some quiet mumbling- a woman’s voice, maybe?- and the door creaked open.

“Go on Tommy dear- I found a good one for you.”

You’d never seen a man so tall- with shoulders so broad or arms and torso so solid. He was massive. He was terrifying. And he was attractive. Once your eyes unglued themselves from his figure you finally took in the rest. Dark, thick shoulder-length waves. A mask that seemed useless as any sort of medical device thanks to the open mouth. Eyes that were dark but not brown. Maybe blue, maybe gray..maybe just pure black. Like a shark’s. In other circumstances you'd be reduced to a puddle on floor over him. But the bloodstains on his shirt didn’t go unnoticed.

You watched him closely, and he watched you just as alertly, stalking forward like some jungle cat…No. Wait. That wasn’t right. He didn’t look scared, but he was cautious, keeping some distance. Maybe a better allegory would be he looked like he was trying to corner a feral kitten- not wanting you to swipe or dart away. As if doing either was possible. You were frozen with fear, though found the courage to lean back a bit as he stepped forward. He grunted softly and persisted, nearly trembling as he brushed a strand of hair from your face.

Love at first sight was a stupid fucking concept. That you’d always believe. Maybe something in you just broke that same moment, maybe you were just too exhausted to think even close to straight. Maybe both. But when you and this massive man locked eyes, there was an instant understanding. He was already yours- and more importantly, you’d be his. He just had to stake his claim.

“…you’re Tommy?” You practically whispered. He nodded quickly. You got a sense he didn’t speak much, but you told him your name in return and tried to think of anything to talk about to stall the inevitable. “…you killed those people?” You blurted for some godforsaken reason. He tensed, still hovering over you. “It’s okay.” You added quickly “I didn’t actually know them. They were kinda mean.”

He furrowed his brow just a bit and searched your face, for any signs that you were lying. Before he came to a conclusion, you gave a soft sigh, instinctively leaning into the hand that had raised your face to him. Something immediately softened about him, and he rubbed your cheek in awe. The sleepy giggle it caused seemed almost to startle him. It was like no one had ever been that soft with him. Maybe they hadn’t. “….this is your room right? Can we sleep?”

Tommy still seemed in shock but carefully nodded, undoing his apron and seeming at a loss of what to do next. He frowned a bit as he noticed your bindings and quickly undid the knot that kept you stuck there. His guard was down- you could try to run. But you didn’t want to. Doing so would only be tiring. You wanted to let go. So instead you smiled softly and simply opened your arms, letting him cuddle up with you. It took him a minute to get settled, and all the while treating you so delicately… like you were made of glass. He looked up at you, again searching your face in near confusion. He grunted in surprise as you pecked his forehead. His mama really did find him a good one.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

ON AN AUGUST night in 2003, a young woman who went by the name Paulina sank into the sofa of her modest, rented apartment, opened up her laptop, and began talking about sex with a man she’d recently met in a Yahoo chat group. His name was Stephen Bolen. His first communications had been terse, but he soon warmed to Paulina. It didn’t take long for both of them to begin to open up.

Paulina had told Bolen she lived in the Atlanta area, that she had a three-year-old daughter, that her daughter’s father was no longer in the picture. Soon, she was sharing more intimate details: what it was like growing up a skinny white girl in a rough neighborhood outside of D.C.; how her dad, a Marine, had died by suicide two weeks before she was born; how her mom had been emotionally and physically abusive, and had never really shown her love. How she’d had a sexual relationship with her stepfather.

Paulina would put her daughter to bed and then she and Bolen would chat throughout the night, over Yahoo and sometimes on the phone. The back-and-forth could feel like dating, but with an added element of danger and risk: Both Paulina and Bolen knew they were tiptoeing up to a line to see if they trusted each other enough to cross it. It could take a while to figure that out.

Eventually, Bolen asked Paulina to send pictures of her daughter, and she agreed to do so, though the ones she’d shared were chaste — the little girl clothed and her face turned away from the camera or obscured behind an untamable halo of blond curls. After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, to expand their illicit collections, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.

On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside Perimeter Mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. “Paulina?” he asked eagerly. She nodded. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists.

“Paulina” watched his face fall, his confusion giving way to distress as FBI agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.

[long read]

IF ONE WANTED to hide in plain sight, one could do no better than the tidy, suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Louis, where FBI Special Agent Nikki Badolato now resides. The well-tended, two-story homes are so pleasantly indistinct that I could hardly tell you what hers looks like, even if it were safe for me to do so, which it is not. Suffice to say that Midwestern comfort and conformity unspool around every gently winding curve. Here Badolato has raised her two children, a daughter who is now in college and a son who is a junior at a local high school. When planning a neighborhood scavenger hunt or tending the community garden, Badolato does not often mention her many years as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force, a joint effort between the feds and local law enforcement that targets some of the country’s most heinous crimes. Open a cabinet in her kitchen, however, and a government-issued Glock 42 can be found stowed away between the vitamins and mixing bowls.

On a sunny morning this past October, Badolato sat at her dining room table, scrapbooks and albums spread out before her on the dark wood. There was the acceptance letter she’d received from the bureau the spring of her senior year of high school, after a representative had shown up to administer a test in the typewriting room. “I chose to wear a red dress and red heels,” she says of her first day as an FBI mail clerk, two weeks after her 18th birthday. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess maybe I was trying to go in bold?” She pauses at a picture of herself on the gun range at Quantico almost 10 years later, her shoulders squared and her caramel hair pulled back into a ponytail as she fires off rounds. By then, she’d married a man she met just after high school, had a little girl, completed college at night, and been accepted into agent training in the heady days after 9/11. She’d seen her first dead body only a few weeks into the job, after the pursuit of a bank robber ended with a shootout in a Walmart. When Badolato got to the scene, the body was still warm, and the perp’s head was resting on a bag of cookies. “It was surreal,” she says. “How many times have you been in a Walmart and walked down Aisle 4, not really expecting there to be a dead person with his head lying on a bag of Chips Ahoy?”

Badolato wasn’t deterred. She felt like the bureau saved her, plucked her out of a shitty home life, and gave her prospects and purpose. As a new agent, she was intent on proving herself worthy. “My training agent told me, ‘You know, Nikki, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,’ ” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ ” She turned a few pages to show a picture of the 391 kilos of cocaine and 140 pounds of meth she’d recovered on a single raid during a stint with a cartel squad, then pointed out another in which she poses with a five-year-old child she’d rescued, the little girl’s hair cut short because the kidnapper had wanted her to look like a boy. But the keepsake she really wants to find is the card that Bolen’s wife had pressed into her hand at his sentencing, the one with the picture of their children — a blond girl of about three years and a tiny baby — and the words “These are the faces of the children you protect each day.” Bolen’s wife had been the only one she’d ever encountered who had lobbied for her husband to receive the maximum sentence. Some wives accused the FBI of planting evidence inside computers. Most seemed intent on clinging to their delusions. (Attempts to reach Bolen for comment were unsuccessful.)

“Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It is happening all the time.”

Which, Badolato has come to understand, is the way it goes with child trafficking and sexual abuse. She had invited me into her home — had agreed to speak on the record about her decades-long career working undercover — because when it comes to the crimes she’s spent her career fighting, she has had enough of the delusions people are under. She’s had enough of the way movies like Sound of Freedom both glamorize and trivialize the work she and her colleagues do, enough of the idea that swashbuckling white men burst through doors and rescue trafficked children with a Bible in one hand and a firearm in the other, enough of conspiracy theories about Hollywood and Washington that detract from the real root causes of why children are trafficked and abused. “Human trafficking is not the movie Pretty Woman — the girl doesn’t get the guy — and it’s not the movie Taken, where people are kidnapped in a foreign country and sold on the black market, or shipped in a container across the world,” one of the detectives who worked on Badolato’s task force tells me. “I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not what we’re seeing.”

What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.

Badolato started her career as an FBI agent in some of the earliest days that children could be bought, sold, and traded online. As the internet-porn industry mushroomed, its most lucrative branch turned out to be that of child sexual-abuse materials (the term “child pornography” is no longer used by those in the field, as it implies consent). And as demand for these images increased, so did the abuse that led to their creation.

In 2003, just a few months after Badolato graduated from Quantico, a Crimes Against Children squad was formed in the Atlanta office where she’d been stationed. By then, the FBI was starting to get a handle on the extent of the problem — if not exactly what to do about it. At a weeklong training in Baltimore, Badolato was given a tour of the darkest underbelly of fetish chat groups and then instructed to figure out how to infiltrate. “Everyone was a little nervous,” she explains of the directive. “It was a process, a direction that was new.” Agents were told that they would need to come up with a “persona” and a “story,” and that they would likely have to provide images of children to “prove” they had a minor on offer. They were also told that they could use images of their own children, if they were comfortable doing so (the FBI no longer endorses this policy).

Badolato’s unit with a kidnapping victim after her recovery in 2011. A Health and Human Services review found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that as many as 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked in the sex industry. 

Badolato developed “Paulina” based on her understanding that any persona would need to share most of her own backstory and traits. “That’s the only way you can really do undercover work,” Badolato says. “People can tell the sincerity in what you’re saying, so there has to be a level of genuineness, but then you just add this criminal element to it.” Most of the things Badolato had told Bolen were true: where she was from, her family background, the monstrousness of her mother, a woman who she says would pass out cigarettes and beers to Badolato’s 13-year-old friends in a state of manic permissiveness one minute and fly into a violent rage about a piece of lint on the floor the next. (Badolato’s mother declined to comment for this article, but a childhood friend corroborated Badolato’s account.) It was true that growing up in an unstable home with a string of stepdads, she had never really felt loved, true that she had divorced her first husband, true that she was raising their three-year-old daughter on her own. The only thing that wasn’t true was her tale of being molested, her initiation into the “lifestyle” — to use the chatroom parlance — that Paulina said she now wanted for her daughter. As Badolato had familiarized herself with the language and behaviors of the chatrooms, she’d honed that added criminal element, imagining what psychological conditions might believably lead a parent to traffic their own child and how those conditions could be grafted onto her real life story. She already had a history of abuse; it was not hard to extrapolate to a fictional stepfather who had seemed to provide a gentle counterpoint, showing her love and making her feel special when no one else had, even if others couldn’t understand. From there, it was easy to convince the chatroom participants that she shared their belief — or justification — that most people had it all wrong and that “child love” was natural, and could even be beneficial for the child.

Badolato estimates that she has arrested more than a thousand people; not one of those arrests has failed to end in a conviction. She didn’t know until she was in the thick of it that most agents refuse this sort of work, that most can’t even pretend to forge a relationship with someone looking to victimize a child. But she could. “Paulina,” she points out, is not a name she chose at random; it’s similar to her own mother’s name. Badolato says she had grown up learning to compartmentalize for the sake of her own emotional survival. She’d perfected the art of engaging with someone whose actions she couldn’t stand. Doing this work had felt like a way of taking her trauma and putting it to good use, of leveraging her past as a safeguard against her daughter’s and other children’s futures.

Of course there were moments that were hard to take — when suspects mentioned which brands of lubrication were best or whether or not a parent might hold a child down. There were times when she knew that even talking about these things was a turn-on for these men, times when the conversations made her nauseous, times when she’d lie awake all night or play back a recording and think, “Holy shit, I listened to this? I said these words?” But she kept faith in the mission. She reminded herself that the pictures she sent of her daughter — the beautiful, little girl sleeping in the next room — did not represent a real child on offer. “I was thinking, ‘If I send this obscure picture of my daughter and he acts on it, then he’s never going to harm my daughter or anybody else’s,’ ” Badolato says now. “I was presenting a fake girl to save a real one.”

KYLE PARKS SEEMED to think he could get away with anything. He seemed to think, for instance, that he could get away with running a brothel, a 1-900 sex line, and a housecleaning company out of the same Columbus, Ohio, office park and under the same oxy-moronic name, XXXREC and Hygiene Services. He seemed to think he could invite one young woman and five teenagers (four of whom he had only just met) on a road trip to Florida, but instead deposit them in two rooms of a Red Roof Inn in St. Charles, Missouri. When they piled out of the minivan — high on the drugs he’d given them — saw snow falling and asked to be taken home, he thought he could make a little money off them first. All it took was a few ads in Backpage — the Craigslist of sex advertisements — and men began showing up.

Even after things started going south for him, Parks couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t prevail. When someone alerted law enforcement as to what was going on, Parks (who, according to legal documents, had been out getting food when the police showed up) burst into the precinct the next morning looking to bail his “friend” out. When questioned about the 88 condoms found in the back of his van, he said they had been prescribed to him by a doctor. After being taken into custody, he protested that he was being set up. Most people would have cut their losses and pleaded guilty, but not Parks. He thought he could take his case to court and win.

And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that he might. Badolato knew that even the tightest cases could go sideways when put before 12 people who would inevitably enter the courtroom with a cinematic sense of what sex trafficking was supposed to be. In fact, it wasn’t just the jury that Badolato knew she would need to convince; it was also often the victims themselves, young people who had internalized the exact same misconceptions about trafficking that the jury had — along with any number of other judgments society had thrown their way — and who were loath to submit themselves to a courtroom full of more judgment.

Of all of Parks’ underage victims, the hardest to pin down had been a 17-year-old we’ll call Sierra. Once she returned to Columbus, Sierra seemed to basically disappear. Calls to her mother’s number went unanswered. When one of the other victims managed to track her down in December 2016, a month before the case was to go to trial, Sierra agreed to meet Badolato on a blighted Columbus block with a string of dilapidated homes, climbing into the bureau’s Chevy Malibu with matted hair, dirty clothes, and a wary expression.

By this time, Badolato had remarried, had a second child, relocated to St. Louis, and taken over as head of the Child Exploitation Joint Task Force, which had become one of the most productive FBI teams in the country in terms of arrests and convictions. Meanwhile, as the internet streamlined the process of buying or selling any good or service, trafficking had become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises, estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to bring in $150 billion globally and considered by many criminals to be a superior business model: If caught, the sentences were often lighter than those for peddling drugs; and unlike crack or heroin, the same product could be “used” again and again and again.

Badolato taught her team of 20 how to do the online undercover work she’d trailblazed in Atlanta, tracking the movements of child-abuse material through the online underworld and then prosecuting those who distributed and produced it. Her new squad also initiated her in the type of undercover work it had been doing before her arrival: covert sting operations in which a detective would pose as a john, set up a “date,” and then meet said date in a hotel room fitted out with hidden recording devices while, in the next room over, a taskforce team listened in, waiting for the code word that would let them know that enough evidence had been gathered for them to swoop in and shut the op down. This had proved a very effective technique for getting convictions, but Badolato’s arrival coincided with both a growing sentiment that consensual sex work had been over-criminalized and an increasing awareness that what looked like consensual sex work might actually be trafficking, no matter what the “date” professed in that hotel room.

Badolato has a tendency to say aloud the things she notices — about you, about others, about situations — observations that are not at all unkind but are perceptive enough that most people would keep them to themselves. She points out when someone deflects, and she has a sharp eye for defense mechanisms. She once casually mentions my tendency to mirror other people’s vocal and speech patterns. She is not shy about bringing up the emotional and physical abuse she says she experienced as a child, and she is quick to comment when someone is making excuses for someone else’s behavior. It was soon clear to her colleagues that Badolato brought a trauma-informed mentality to the work, a tendency to look beyond what someone was doing and instead try to parse why they were doing it. And she was relentless: While some squads did one or two trafficking sting ops a year, her team was doing four or five a month. In addition to the hotel rooms reserved for the john and the team, they would have a social worker set up in a third room, ready to offer services to the victims. They would have lookouts stationed to see who might be dropping the date off. If that date was found to be underage, the case was automatically classified as trafficking. But even if they weren’t, Badolato’s team was primed to get to the bottom of what was going on, to figure out whether they were being manipulated or coerced, and by whom.

“If I could put my hands on a pimp, that’s what I wanted,” says Jeff Roediger, a St. Louis county detective who was the “john” for many of Badolato’s sting ops and who makes clear that the team was not interested in policing voluntary sex work. “When I had those types of cases, and I knew they were being sincere with me, I wouldn’t book them,” he says. “It was all about talking to the girls. It’s not like in the movies where they come running to you. You know, ‘Thanks, you rescued me!’ It’s not like that. A lot of them try to bullshit you at first — ‘That’s my boyfriend, blah blah blah’— but once I talked to them for a while, they would become more forthcoming.”

Badolato’s unit was one of the first in the country to take on this “progressive and proactive” approach, as she puts it. Soon, St. Louis looked like a sex-trafficking capital — not because it was actually trafficking more victims than other cities but because the task force was so aggressively pursuing those cases, and classifying them as what they were. “I mean, I was working in vice for years,” says Roediger. “Back in the day, it was always ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution’ — until we started to figure it out a little bit, until we started digging a little deeper.”

Once they did, the task force found that roughly a third of the sex-trafficking victims they recovered were under the age of 17 — and they began to see the reach of the problem. Kids were being trafficked out of every hotel in the area, from the seediest roach motel to the fanciest Ritz-Carlton. They were being trafficked every time of day and by every socioeconomic group (“Before you go do brain surgery, you got to bust a nut real quick,” one underage victim told Badolato of her high-end clientele). Some of the victims were girls. Some were boys. Some were LGBTQ kids who’d been kicked out of their homes. Some were straight cis kids from the suburbs. “I tell people that I could probably name two or three [kids] in the school district they live in that have been trafficked,” Roediger says. “And they just can’t comprehend it.”

“If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work.”

There were kids who were about to age out of foster care (a particularly at-risk group, according to those who work in the field), kids who’d run away, kids who were being sold to pay their family’s rent, or to buy their family member’s drugs. There were kids who’d sit in the hotel room, backpack at their feet, dutifully working on their math homework while agents and social workers tried to figure out what to do with them. Was their home life safe enough that they could be returned to it? Would a residential program take them? Of all the imperfect options, which would make them least likely to be trafficked again?

The one common denominator was this: They all had a vulnerability that could be preyed upon. They all lacked a safety net — societal, familial, emotional, or some combination thereof — that might have broken their fall. Mostly, their stories weren’t dramatic; they were typical American tales of neglect, of abuse doled out casually, of a steady stream of letdowns by people and institutions who should have propped them up. Badolato found that she had a knack for getting them to talk about this, for getting them to open up to her. She didn’t look like an FBI agent — at least not what they’d imagined. She spoke softly, but with authority and a slight vocal fry. And she thinks that, at some level, they could probably sense that she’d once been a vulnerable kid too, that with only a few slightly different twists of fate, she could have become a trafficking victim herself — and that she knew it. “My trauma looks different than theirs, but it’s trauma nonetheless,” she says.

“And I think victims can feel that.”

AS THE TASK force learned more about the psychology of victims, they also learned more about the ways in which their vulnerability was being manipulated, and how those ways were evolving. It was known in law-enforcement circles that once a skilled trafficker set his or her sights on a vulnerable young person, they could be groomed in a matter of days: one day for an introduction, a day or two to make the victim feel special and cared for, and then the day when a “friend” comes over and he needs to be “cared for” as well. Sometimes violence was involved at that point; sometimes drug use was involved throughout. But emotional manipulation was the key element, which is why it was so easy for grooming to move online, for groomers to take advantage of the false senses of connection fostered on social media.

Of the victims who are not being trafficked by family members, the majority are being groomed in this way. “I would say that probably 75 percent of the initial grooming is happening online now,” says Cindy Malott, the director of U.S. Safe Programs at Crisis Aid International. “Recruiters used to have to work really, really hard to get access to kids, but now they’re practically sitting in a child’s bedroom. And kids put everything out there — what’s going on in their life, who they’re angry about, parents are going through a divorce, their insecurities about their body, about themselves, what they do, how they spend their time — so it’s like a gift to these predators.”

The ways to manipulate are legion: Get a kid to send a compromising photo, and she’ll do almost anything to keep you from sending it out to all her Facebook friends; find out a gay kid is still closeted, and the threat of outing him gives you incredible power. And predators aren’t just on Instagram and Snapchat; they lurk in the chat functions of Roblox, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto. “They’re everywhere,” says Malott. “People think, ‘Oh, I just got to keep my kids away from those porn sites, those horrible places.’ Well, no, predators are gonna go where the kids are.” And once there, they’re going to zero in on the kids who are most vulnerable.

That’s what got to Badolato. In her online undercover work, she’d plumbed the psychology of pedophiles, but now she wasn’t just dealing with suspects; she was spending time with victims and seeing the same vulnerabilities in them that the traffickers had seen: the instability or poverty, the addiction or mental health issues or abuse that had been normalized in their lives long before the traffickers entered them. Sometimes Badolato couldn’t help but feel that all the conspiracies and misconceptions weren’t just a distraction from the truth of trafficking but rather some sick attempt to let society off the hook for trying to solve the much more intractable problems at trafficking’s root.

“People would rather stick their head in the sand than address the real problem, because then you have to face and talk about the societal issues,” she says. “With a movie like Sound of Freedom, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is in a jungle in South America. This isn’t actually in [my neighborhood].’ You know? It’s easier for people to ignore the problem than deal with the issues on a societal level.”

BY THE TIME Badolato was sitting in that Chevy with Sierra, on that blighted Ohio block, she knew that the rate of revictimization for children who are trafficked was as high as 95 percent, according to FBI reports. She knew that 90 percent of sex-trafficking victims have a history of child sexual abuse, that more than 75 percent had lived in foster or adoptive care. She knew that she could arrest one perpetrator, and another would pop up in his place, that she could send one pimp to prison and the same victims would show up to stings some short time later, run by a different crew. She knew that testifying was a way for Sierra to psychologically push back against what had happened to her, and she was right: After the young woman took the stand on Jan. 10, 2017, Parks was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years; while testifying, Sierra had seemed to transform, to channel and embody a sort of empowerment. But Badolato also knew that once her testimony was over, Sierra would go back to that blighted block. She wondered how long that empowerment would last.

She also wondered about her own trajectory, her own ability to continue doing this work. The youngest trafficking victim she’d ever recovered from a sting op — an 11-year-old who’d been recruited through Facebook — had been returned to her family in a house that had no heat (Badolato had used an FBI slush fund to get it turned back on). One did not become immune to the human misery of such things. They compounded, became harder and harder to compartmentalize. “It’s just a combination of all of those years — and it’s all awful,” she says. “But there are particular moments that, for one reason or another, you can’t get out of your head. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to be exposed to that for so long and it not start changing who you are.”

One night, at a restaurant near where Badolato lives, I ask her whether she thinks children are being sex-trafficked right then, in that very moment, in just the mile or two radius around us. She’s quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed downward at her glass of wine. By the time she looks up, her whole body is trembling. “It’s happening right now,” she says quietly. “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are three or four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It’s not only when we think about it. It is happening all the time. And if I’m just sitting here, present, having dinner, not thinking about it, that means I’m ignoring a problem that I know is real.” Tears stream down her face.

“Many images have never left my mind,” she says. “It’s really hard to have worked your entire life in law enforcement with a lot of child crime victims and be at the end of your career looking at the situation where you realize you can only do so much to make a difference.” Badolato wipes back the tears with the palm of her hand and shudders her head, as if she can shake the thoughts away. “Damn,” she says. “Fuck. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I’m not the victim of this.” The veteran agent steels herself and repeats, “I am not the victim.”

THE HOUSE WHERE Korina Ellison says she was first sex-trafficked no longer exists. It once stood on an unassuming lot in a residential suburb of Portland, Oregon, that stumbles down to the banks of the Willamette River. Now, Ellison can’t quite bring the house’s features to mind. She was so young back then, maybe four or five. There is so much she’s repressed, or only pieced together after the fact. As a child, she wouldn’t have known what she now believes to be true: that her grandmother scored her drugs by offering up her youngest daughter, Ellison’s mom. Or that, once her mom was hooked on the meth cooked by the man who’d lived in that house, she’d known just what to do to get more. But Ellison does remember being inside the house, unclothed. She does remember how the man would touch her.

Her life unspooled from there. Her father died of a heroin overdose when she was six. Her mom lost custody for good. She bounced around foster care, then various residential institutions, then whatever shelter she could find. In the story she tells of how she was sex-trafficked again in her teenage years, there’s no moment of drama, no kidnapping, no clear coercion. There was just a random, rainy afternoon when she had no place to go and was alone in the street and a car pulled up. The man inside took her home with him, fed her, introduced her to his girlfriend. They took her shopping. They let her stay. When men showed up at the home to have sex with the woman, Ellison was invited to watch, but she wasn’t expected to participate — not at first, anyway. According to a statement Ellison later made to law enforcement, she just “realized that people aren’t going to take care of [me] for free.” Soon, the woman was posting Ellison’s services on Backpage — $150 for half an hour, $200 for a full one — and the trio were traveling the Midwest. For a long time, it didn’t even occur to Ellison, then 16, to leave. “Where would I have gone?” she asks. “I’d been missing for over a year. Nobody was looking for me.” When the man told her to call him “Daddy,” she complied.

That was more than a decade ago, near the beginning of Badolato’s tenure as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force. But by 2021, leaving it had seemed a necessary form of self-preservation. One of her last cases had gone well legally: The perp, a retired police officer from California who had produced child sex-abuse materials of three sisters in Manila, had pleaded guilty to such charges when he learned that Badolato had brought the girls to the states to testify against him. But the experience had been emotionally devastating for Badolato, who had wanted the sisters, then 16, 13, and 11, to have memories of the U.S that consisted of more than reliving their trauma in a courtroom. She took them shopping and to the zoo, invited them to her home to have dinner with her own family, saw them slowly start to open up and laugh and behave like the children they were. Then she’d had to put them on a flight back to Manila, back to the aunt who had allowed the man to abuse them and who Badolato had been unable to extradite. Fortunately, she says, their estranged father ended up intervening and taking custody of the girls, but that feeling of futility in the fight lingered.

“I stayed for a little bit longer after that trial, but it really was when I should have been able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Nikki, you’re done,’ ” Badolato had told me in St. Louis. “It became clear that I had been doing it too long.” She’d spend the last couple of years working national security, a position without the immediacy of child-exploitation work, but also without the heartache. “If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work. I just don’t,” she says.

And yet, here Badolato was in Portland, leading Ellison, now 30, up to her hotel room, telling her about all the announcements she’d heard in the Atlanta airport instructing travelers to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. “It’s like white noise in the background,” she says as Ellison settles into the sofa. “It’s a false sense of doing something to help.”

“Here’s the thing: Nobody knows what to look for,” Ellison agrees.

“And what about the victims who are in that airport, who are walking around and listening?” Badolato asks.

“I wouldn’t have even heard that announcement,” Ellison replies. “Because I didn’t feel like a victim. It goes a lot, lot, lot deeper than anybody realizes.”

That’s what she and Badolato both understand. That’s why they started talking eight months ago. Of all the teenage victims Badolato’s task force recovered, Ellison is one of the few who she knows has permanently extricated herself from being prostituted, though it took years for her to get to that point, years for her to see that what happened to her was not her fault but rather a fault in the system, a fault in many systems over the course of generations. Neither she nor Badolato can fix that.

Yet they can’t help feeling like there’s something they can fix — or at least try to. Under the umbrella of an organization she’s founded called Innocent Warriors, Badolato created a program for schools, instructing educators on the signs that might indicate a student is being trafficked and teaching kids how to avoid getting groomed online, which, she believes, is not about stranger danger but rather an awareness of subtle manipulation. Ellison has been working with trafficked youth through nonprofits like Children of the Night, the residential program where Badolato’s team sent her when she was 17. Together, they’ve been talking about having Ellison help train undercovers who are learning to do trafficking sting ops. They’ve also discussed starting a mentorship program in which children who are still being sex-trafficked are paired with young adults like Ellison who once were, providing a way for victims to begin to envision a different future for themselves and a path toward it even while being prostituted. Such a program may be retroactive rather than proactive, but it would capitalize on Badolato’s and Ellison’s experience and expertise — and it could help in the healing of mentors and mentees alike.

Badolato had traveled to Portland for the two to talk face-to-face about how the program might work. “You have to understand how they’ve been traumatized because sometimes, to a child, relating doesn’t sound like you’re relating. It sounds like you’re pointing out all the bad things in them,” says Ellison from the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder as she drives Badolato around to show her certain landmarks of her past after she’d left Children of the Night: the bridge she’d slept under for over a year after a boyfriend had gotten her hooked on heroin, the blocks downtown where she’d bounced between a children’s shelter and the needle exchange. It had taken a prison sentence for her to finally break her addiction and commit to a different kind of life, though that evolution had had less to do with not having access to drugs than with seeing her own mother cycle in and out of the same facility — like looking into her own future and witnessing how bleak it would be. Maybe, she thought, she could provide the inverse of that for kids in Innocent Warriors. Maybe she could reverse engineer her own escape.

“I just want to make it very clear that if you were a victim, you are a victim, and just to not have any shame in that,” she tells Badolato as they drive through Portland’s misty streets.

“What I anticipate and hope is that then we get survivors that are like, ‘They get it,’ ” Badolato replies. “And that it opens up doors to help, for people to recognize that there are people who get what’s really going on.”

“It took a really long time for me,” Ellison says of coming to terms with her own victimhood.

“It’s like reworking your thought process about some of those things,” Badolato agrees. “And that’s hard, and it happens slowly over time, and it looks different for everybody.”

Ellison grips the wheel tightly. “The truth does matter. It does. The truth is the fucking truth. And it’s been empowering to be able to talk about it because that’s another way that I’ve realized, like, ‘Man, I was a victim,’ is re-going over all of this. Because when it happens so many times, you do blame yourself. It’s a lot easier to just continue to live in a lie than believe that you were lied to.”

Still, Ellison and Badolato agree that the impressionability that makes children vulnerable is also what makes them open to guidance and mentorship if a relationship of trust can be established. “What do you think a parent does? They groom you. I’d been waiting to be guided and groomed,” Ellison says.

It’s been instructive to see that potential from another perspective, as a mother doing the guiding. As the afternoon wears on, Ellison stops to pick up her then-15-month-old son, who was being watched by a social-worker friend. She buckles the little boy into his car seat, ruffles his hair, and passes him a bottle. He grins widely and begins removing his shoes and socks, throwing them gleefully onto the floor of the car and then kicking his tiny feet in time with the music as Ellison glances back at him and smiles. “Kids are so perfect,” she says.

The last stop of the day is the large plot of land where the drug dealer’s house once stood. Now, it’s been turned into a playground, with brightly-colored jungle gyms, a covered picnic area, and a large lawn, where a couple leisurely walks their dog. Ellison and Badolato climb down from the car and stand at the park’s edge, as Ellison’s son toddles around the grass, oblivious to what had transpired in that very spot. There is some form of poetic justice in the land being earmarked for children’s enjoyment, but neither woman voices it. Mostly, they’re quiet. Night is falling, the air growing cooler, and the gray sky fading into dusk.

“You would never think a park could hide what it used to be,” Ellison says at last. And yet it did. Driving off with Badolato at her side and her son babbling happily in the back seat, Ellison glances in the rear-view mirror, but only for a moment. Badolato keeps her eyes fixed only on the road ahead.