#girls ghosts and meathooks

[marypsue]

There are two ways my original characters get named:

So the character who inspired her has the first name Jade, so I tried out some rock/crystal/semiprecious stone names, and I got to Amber, which reminded me of Amber Riley, and I liked 'Riley' better as a first name. Also, her mom's last name is Jones and her dad's last name is Graham, as a wink and a nod to the author of the character who inspired her, but she uses the last name Loomis, which she chose, because the character who inspired her also chose her own name, although that was her first name. And the last name Loomis is a reference to both Halloween and Scream, two iconic slasher movies, and this whole story is about meta slasher horror, and also Dr. Loomis in the Halloween series is, if sometimes a little intense, mostly on the side of the angels, but Billy Loomis in Scream is a villain, and the central tension of this story is about whether its protagonists are heroes or villains and what makes the difference anyway -

That's just their name.

[folieadeuxserver]

Announcing Ten Days of Horror, Folie à Deux’s first quarterly event! We’ll be hosting a ten-day horror fest for Hannibal and HEU creators, running from October 22nd through October 31st.

The fest is open to all creators, ships, and mediums! We have no minimum requirements and only ask that you adhere to each day's general theme. How you interpret that theme and whether or not you use our subprompts is up to you! You don’t have to create something for each day, but you’re welcome to do so if you so choose.

When you post your work, please tag us and use #HannibalHorror! The fest is also running on our twitter and discord server, and we have an Ao3 collection as well.

While the goal is to post your fill on the day for which it was created, you're welcome to post late fills at any time.

You can find each day’s information and unabridged prompts below!

Day 1 (10/22): Creature Feature Calling all monster lovers! today we celebrate them all – from reanimated corpses to undiscovered species, there’s a little something for everyone.

things that go bump in the night / the monster under the bed / transformation / vampires & werewolves / trapped with the monster / an imaginary friend / the living dead / a cold, wet hand / doppelgänger / the glint of inhuman eyes

Day 2 (10/23): Bathed in Blood It would be remiss not to pay tribute to the grosser, gorier side of horror, so today is all about the blood and guts! Splatterpunk, torture, graphic violence... show us your nastiest creations!

torture porn / body horror / uncanny valley / mutilation / a slow and sickening mutation / parasites / medical horror / blood & gore / revenge / an excess of bodily fluids

Day 3 (10/24): The Twilight Zone Today’s prompts are an ode to sci-fi horror! Pay homage to classics like Frankenstein and Alien, or try out your own twist on a well-loved subgenre.

outer space / a hostile new world / technology taken too far / eldritch abominations / a parallel universe / alien species / trapped in a time loop / an unsanctioned experiment / something beneath the ice / mother nature’s revenge

Day 4 (10/25): Born This Way Today we honor the human monsters, which are sometimes the scariest of them all. Killer horror, psychological horror, slashers... Show us something horrifying and all too real.

cults / the final girl / the dark side of the human psyche / institutional horror / descending into insanity / governments & corporations / abuse of power / obsession / indoctrination / hierarchies of oppression / paranoia

Day 5 (10/26): Instruments of Torture Today’s theme honors the many weapons, torture devices, and other horrific implements spanning the horror genre!

nail bat / an improvised weapon / chainsaw / crucifix / wooden stake / shards of glass / a bloody kitchen knife / needle / meathook / whip

Day 6 (10/27): Welcome to the Funhouse Today’s theme centers around the funnier and more absurd side of horror! Comedy horror, camp, black comedy – the opportunities are endless.

splatstick / absurd phobia / parody / the horror-movie stoner / ridiculous deaths / accidental transformation / black comedy cannibalism / bumbling slasher / fuck and die / a lack of self preservation

Day 7 (10/28): Once Upon a Time Today’s theme is Dark fantasy! Bring out your Grimms-style fairytales, mythical creatures, or just a touch of magic.

fairytale gone wrong / the gods are not kind / a darker timeline / black magic / the chosen one / evil overlord / a sumptuous feast / necromancy / cursed kingdoms / forsaken

Day 8 (10/29): Occult Activity Today’s theme is all about supernatural horror! show us your paranormal investigators, your exorcisms, your folk horror AUs or characters with psychic powers.

possession / the old gods / ghosts & hauntings / an accidental summoning / cursed object / an unconventional priest / sacrifice / dreams bleeding into reality / psychic powers / the veil between the worlds

Day 9 (10/30): A Dark & Stormy Night Today’s prompts center around the impact of setting. Whether atmospheric horror, gothic horror, ecological horror, or another genre, location matters!

snowed in / sun-drenched horror / gothic horror / the purgatory of white picket fences / a house with a history / an unexplored cavern / the bottom of the sea / a town you can’t seem to leave / a condemned building / apocalyptic horror

Day 10 (10/31): Insatiable Appetites Today is all about erotic and sensual horror. Blur the line between fear and desire, arousal and repulsion, or show us flat-out sexual horror.

the sensuality of violence / oviposition / teratophilia / tentacles / succubus/incubus / wound fucking / the need to consume / hunger / traumatic insemination

[itsbenedict]

Two-Faced Jewel: Session 7

A half-elf conwoman (and the moth tasked with keeping her out of trouble) travel the Jewel in search of, uh, whatever a fashionable accessory is pointing them at. [Campaign log]

Last time, Saelhen and Looseleaf continued their scouring of the evil torture wizard's evil torture tower for clues as to the identity of the murderer terrorizing the towns of Barley and Wheat. They found a bunch of mysterious documents of ominous character, but they've yet to check out the tower's hidden basement- and the ne'er-do-well lurking within...

The basement doesn't immediately contain any horrors, unless you're the type to get the jibblies from a messy room. There's dirty dishes (recently used), empty beer bottles from a Zeishus Brewery, and discarded clothes everywhere. It's very lived-in, and whoever lives-in here doesn't seem like they were expecting visitors.

Saelhen takes a look at the desk nearest the stairs, next to a well-used recliner and a recently-extinguished candle. She gets a nat 20 on her Investigation, and finds that the desk has been rotated to face the wall, concealing a drawer that doesn't look like it's been opened in some time, judging by the cobwebs.

What's inside is mainly more of the sort of thing they found on the sixth floor- technical notes on neurology and pain magic. With the critical success, she's able to piece together that the odd numbers on the abrasive letter found upstairs were some sort of pain measurements the letter-writer was providing to Lumiere.

They also find a less academic, more personal note, expressing frustration with his own research.

"Why would the Burnscreamer's rituals require Abyssal? Even a god like him shouldn't have any connection to the demons- what is he playing at?" "If I could just correct the sigil, I could bypass so much of this nonsense..."

Saelhen then gets a nat 1 on her Religion roll to know what that means, and assumes the Burnscreamer is the frontman for a metal band her dad likes.

As they search the rest of the room, they notice- at the bottom of the central shaft- a circular basin in the stone floor. It's stained red, but it's dry- not as much blood as you'd expect to see given the carnage on the sixth floor, so it seems like it's been recently emptied or cleaned out.

Oyobi, meanwhile, checks the locked door by the stairs, and finds it... cold? I wonder what that means vis-a-vis-

The extremely sneaky +9 Stealth person hiding braced against the walls of the central shaft fucks up right about then, and slips a little, letting out an involuntary "Gh- shit!", alerting the party to his presence.

Saelhen tries to chase after this person by parkouring off those same walls, gets a 9, and faceplants in the blood basin, leaving the issue to the party member who has wings. As the hider flees through one of the doors in the shaft, Looseleaf uses her darkvision and 24 Investigation roll to pick out the right door and give chase.

(Meanwhile, the rest of the party heads up the stairs normally- and Saelhen orders Orluthe to bust down the front door, so they can go outside and catch anyone trying to escape by rappelling down the side of the building. This turns out to be unnecessary, because when Looseleaf detected that the front door was magic and assumed it was a trap, this was incorrect.)

Benedict I. (GM): ("who knows what kind of trap could be on this magic door? better go up and through the window into the room full of traps, instead") (i was laughing so hard) (it's just an automatic door!) Looseleaf: Honestly, the people in town oversold this place. They made it sound like such a deathtrap and really it was just a bunch of spiky bots. And knives. And comfy pillows. Benedict I. (GM): Well, when they were there, there was a living evil torture wizard actively trying to take them prisoner and torture them.

Looseleaf botches her Investigation roll to search the torture lab she emerges in, but... that doesn't stop her from just checking each and every possible hiding place one by one, manually. She alights upon the correct solution swiftly- checking inside the broken remains of the iron maiden.

bBenedict I. (GM): Anyway, Looseleaf, inside the corpse of the iron maiden, you find. A rather heavy man, performing a downright heroic feat of contortionism to suspend himself inside the door without getting impaled on the spikes. Arnie: "Uh." "Can you pretend you never saw me?" Looseleaf: "That depends on what you're doing here, I guess. Who are you and what are you doing here?" Saelhen du Fishercrown: oh that is a nervous man Arnie: "No one. Nothing. I'm, uh, supposed to be like, dead, probably." "So I'm not here." "Yeah?"

Arnie Zeishus is the deadbeat husband of Cassie, the innkeeper from Barley, who fled town a while back. He explains that after fleeing his responsibilities in Barley, he tried to set up shop in Wheat running a brewery, but got in trouble flouting the brewing regulations of the Ecumene of Harmony. So after getting arrested there and breaking out of prison, he decided to sneak into the torture wizard's tower and lay low as a squatter in the guy's basement. He figured he might get caught and tortured, but it couldn't be worse than what the townspeople wanted to do to him.

Except, as luck would have it, the torture wizard was already dead when he arrived! So he's been making a home of the place with Lumiere's old animated housekeepers, using the torture wizard's fearsome reputation as a way to keep anyone from tracking him down and making him do stuff like clean up a distillery explosion or pay child support or what have you.

On the other hand, someone has been sneaking around his tower doing something sinister on the sixth floor that results in blood pouring down into the basin periodically, and he's stressed out of his mind wondering who the hell is doing that and how he's supposed to avoid getting caught and/or killed by them.

(He notes that the "KEEP SHOUTING" sign was his attempt to get intruders to at least give themselves away by making noise, after they were clearly ignoring the "KEEP OUT" sign he put up.)

Looseleaf also takes the time to ask if Arnie here knows anything about someone named Choss.

Arnie: He looks surprised. "You know Choss?" Looseleaf: "Let's say that Choss is a figure of importance in this investigation." "Anything you could tell us about how they arrived in town and what they did in town would be appreciated." Arnie: He shrugs. "Choss was there before I was- she's a real weirdo." "Knows how to party, but- gotta say, her stuff's a little too strong for me." "A crazy high at first, but it gets- whoof, intense." Looseleaf: "She's an apothecary of some kind?" Arnie: He laughs. "You could say that. She's got herself a little drug lab in town, always smells like burning. Don't know how she gets away with it- some of that stuff's gotta be illegal." Saelhen du Fishercrown: "And how old is she, approximately?" Arnie: "Eh? She's- hard to tell with lizardfolk, s'not like you can read the wrinkles..." Looseleaf: Ah, of course. Lizardfolk. Saelhen du Fishercrown: yep Arnie: "Seems youngish, though? Party girl through and through." "Just, uh, if she offers you a blend, don't take it unless you're ready to spend the next hour feelin' like fire ants are chewin' their way out of your skin." He shudders a little. Looseleaf: "Hm. Sounds painful." Arnie: "You have no idea," he laughs.

They also inquire about the locked freezer room- and why Arnie would hide out here, in dangerous torture tower, rather than just running off to a city, which is a little weird that he didn't do. Arnie claims there's just groceries in there, and no stolen wine bottles whatsoever, he certainly isn't a thief and he definitely hasn't been lying low out here because if he goes to a city some old pals from Thunderbrush might find him and want him dead, no sir! He would never ever commit a crime, ["wink wink" in hand-signed Thieves' Cant].

Saelhen du Fishercrown: "Of course. I can't imagine we have any thieves here." [Nudge nudge.] Looseleaf: "In the meantime, Mr. Zeishus, you mentioned having done something that.. makes going anywhere where you might meet someone from Thunderbrush a dangerous thing?" Arnie: He fidgets. "Uh, well..." "I, I try to leave all that behind me." "You just... don't want to get involved with the ghost dryad mafia. Just a tip."

He drops a little bit of exposition about something that may be coming up- apparently, Thunderbrush used to have these huge skyscraper-sized trees, but they got chopped down in some sort of war or raid a while back, and now the Stumps are ruled by the necromancer ghost dryads of those trees who used the last vestiges of their power to cheat death. Apparently Arnie was strongarmed into doing crimes for various ghost dryad mafiosos and made too many enemies, so he fled to Barley to shake the heat.

Looseleaf also comes to a realization regarding some hints dropped earlier in the townsfolks' tragic backstories:

Looseleaf: (actually, wait, i just realized: choss is probably chitch's daughter, the timelines there line up perfectly and maybe this whole dragonborn business is a total red herring we invented for ourselves) (what the shit, lumiere, you kidnap a guy's daughter and raise them as your own child? that's fucked.)

Looseleaf occupies this Arnie guy by interrogating him about these things, while Saelhen slips downstairs to try to pick the lock to the freezer room.

Eventually, after a bunch of failed rolls and more small talk from Looseleaf to keep Arnie occupied, Saelhen pops open the lock. Inside, she finds a fairly large and frigid room. There are meathooks hanging from the ceiling, empty. There are shelves lining the edges full of frozen food.

And to her right, there's another door- this one out of place with the rest of the construction, made of a strange stone shot through with rivulets of glowing orange. There's a symbol on a stone circle embedded in the door:

Before she checks that out, though, she checks the darkened back of the room- which contains some tubs filled with ice.

And those tubs have corpses in them, with the four-pointed wounds.

It is not especially likely that Arnie had no idea these were here, in a room he claims to use to store groceries and has the key to.

Looseleaf, meanwhile, attempts to read Arnie's spirit to determine his alignment and general intentions. His Deception beats her Insight, but what she does manage to get is...

Arnie is afraid. He is filled to bursting with terror and desperation more intense than you've ever felt from anyone before. And the fear does not seem directed at you.

Meanwhile, Saelhen tries to get that door open. What's the deal with that thing, huh? There's no handle, so... she has the bright idea of slapping her mysterious god icon bracer (the one that when previously slapped against a magic thing opened a pit to infinite bats) against it, see what happens. And I get very excited, because ohohoho, I didn't expect that, I had to think through the ramifications of doing that, and...

...then I work through those ramifications, and what I realize is that, as far as the players would know, the end result is just that the door slides open, and nothing else of note occurs.

Saelhen du Fishercrown: "Why am I even here I just wanted to help a nice little girl show up her dipshit inquisitor mom now I'm in a pain room investigating pain machines..." Looseleaf: (looseleaf warned you about getting involved in the case, she warned you dog)

There's also a bunch of weird machines, and more of Lumiere's notes, which Saelhen goes and nabs as many of as she can. Then she beats feet immediately, not wanting to spend any longer than necessary in the hell lab. The problem is, she doesn't want to leave any sign she was in there, so...

Saelhen du Fishercrown: Does tapping the exposed bit of stone with the bracer again close the secret hell door? Benedict I. (GM): Nope. Saelhen du Fishercrown: hmm. poking it with her finger? Benedict I. (GM): Ouch. Nope. Saelhen du Fishercrown: physically pulling the stone upwards while muttering "fuck fuck fuck ow ow ow"? Benedict I. (GM): Oh, hm, yeah, that would work. At first there's no effect, but as you continue to pull and the pain gets worse and worse... Roll me a Constitution save. Saelhen du Fishercrown: 16 CONSTITUTION SAVE (3) Benedict I. (GM): That'll do it! Your pain feeds the door, and, satisfied, the mouth closes. Looseleaf: How extremely concerning!

Cool!

So Saelhen goes back upstairs, the party secretly confers and exchanges information, and... something has to be done about Arnie.

His expression changes, suddenly.

Arnie: "You don't know what you're talking about." "This doesn't have to happen."

Looseleaf continues to try to offer help to this guy, inferring that he's being forced to do someone else's dirty work. She rolls a 20 on Persuasion! So... what happens following them cornering and exposing the culprit is not the rolling of initiative. Still, though...

Arnie: Arnie... backs up a step. "You're morons." "You have no idea." "You're talking like you can help me?" "That's impossible. No one can help me." "I- I'm fucking cursed, dammit!" Looseleaf: is he? i have magic sense, he is clearly not actually magically cursed, right Arnie: "What are you clowns going to do about it? Nothing!" "What are you going to do, kill a dragon?" Saelhen du Fishercrown: "You are entangled here. If Looseleaf says so, then I trust her intuition and her investigative prowess. This doesn't necessarily mean you're entangled in such a way that there is no way out for you." Saelhen shrugs. "Theoretically, the device on my arm is responsible for drowning a small city in vampiric monsters from beyond the stars. And yet there was a way out of that, and a genuine silver lining into the bargain." "I want you to understand that I am absolutely sincere when I say: There is always a way out." Arnie: "That's- there's no way! There's only one way out!" "He'll free me from the curse if I do what he says, and that's the only way!" Looseleaf: ...That is not how dragon-curses work at all. Benedict I. (GM): Not as far as you're aware, no. Doesn't seem like anyone's told Arnie.

They continue to try to convince him that there's hope, that he doesn't need to do what the dragon says, that they can help him. And Arnie just keeps pushing back, refusing to acknowledge any of it, weeping and shouting and doing whatever he can to avoid believing that he didn't have to do any of that, that there was any other way- because if there was, he'd be a monster, right?

Meanwhile, Vayen... is standing a ways away and staring at them all, as usual... but this time, he's smiling. No one here has ever seen Vayen smile before. He looks like his birthday came early. And as they're on the verge of a breakthrough...

Arnie: "Fucking- you don't think I know that?" "I know that! I know he's manipulating me!" "But what else do I do?" Vayen: "You could kill yourself," Vayen suggests. Looseleaf: "Vayen what the FUCK?" Arnie: "What the fuck- shut up, asshole!" "I'm not dying! Not here, not nowhere!" Saelhen du Fishercrown: "...Vayen, you are placing a remarkable number of ticks in the 'leave you at the side of the road' column." Vayen: Vayen shrugs. "It's the most reliable way to neutralize a dragon's curse." "It's the sensible thing to do, if you don't want to cause collateral damage."

It's as though he deliberately picked the one thing to say to ensure that this argument would keep happening, and not reach a friendly resolution. The hell is his problem?

Still, the party keeps trying to talk this guy down.

Saelhen du Fishercrown: "And -- Arnie, surely you don't think the dragon would hunt you down? Dragons don't go out of their way to punish us; they just use us to accomplish whatever it is they're planning. He'll make it someone else's problem." "I know the type. Arnie, it wouldn't care enough to hunt you down. What seems like a personal connection, like it caring about you -- if it tries that at all -- it's just an implement. It's a way of getting you to do what it wants. Go to ground effectively, and it won't bother to spare the effort." Arnie: "What are you, talking like some kinda dragonologist? The hell do you know about dragons?" Saelhen du Fishercrown: "...I am not a dragonologist, no," admits Saelhen. Looseleaf: "...Are you a dragonologist?" Arnie: "Of course it could hunt me down! Damn thing's got magic items out the ass and it flies faster than I can run!" "As soon as it saw me going somewhere it didn't tell me to, I'd get turned into a midnight snack!" "And then I go to ground, and the curse kicks in, and I end up dead or worse anyway. Sounds great." "Or, I stay here, gut a few self-righteous fucks who treated me like dirt for a while, and maybe the thing keeps its end of the bargain and lets me go!"

Yeah, that's a confession, and like, not one that makes him look great. Still, given this guy's weirdly high rolls on physical stuff, and his apparent aptitude for murdering people, they're not super sure they want to fight this guy- on top of just, not exactly wanting to fight this guy.

What are they going to do? They have to come up with a plan- and their plan has to take less than three weeks to pull off, since Arnie only has six corpses left in the bathtubs, and the dragon wants two corpses a week to prove he's still doing the job.

(And is it even worth going to all that trouble just to protect this guy from the consequences of his actions?)

Next time: a plan is hatched, and the party gets back on the road.

[doomedandstoned]

Meet Corey G. Lewis, The Dude Who’s Bringing Grunge Back

~By Jamie LaRose~

Art by Ben House

With the new album sinking into our consciousness, 'Deathspiration' (2018) by The Misery Men invokes the necessity to dig a bit deeper into the creative processes behind its craft. I had the chance to follow-up with Corey G. Lewis, mastermind of the music, and take a glimpse at the band's evolution as portrayed by sound. Deathspiration was recorded and mixed by Steve Jones of Ancient Warlocks at Big Sound Productions in Seattle, and features Jones as drummer.

Deathspiration by The Misery Men

Deathspiration by The Misery Men

The intro track is reminiscent of reflections, leading into a blasting presence of a second track. This album seems to tell a diverse story, can you explain some of the inspiration behind Deathspiration?

Well the intro track is sort of an homage to Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack. I’m also really into Dylan Carlson and EARTH. Before I discovered Earth, I’d always described The Misery Men as, Western Doom Noir. That’s evolved into me describing it as Stone Drone. Nevertheless it’s reminiscent of the space between the notes, and the chaos that occurs. The song Sughrue is about C.W. Sughrue, a character from the book Last Good Kiss by the late great James Crumley, also an old friend. Sughrue is a Private Dick that goes off looking for missing woman. “Like a train” barreling down the highway, from Montana to Mexico.

Oh, most importantly, the inspiration behind Deathspiration is the evolution of me as a human. The cathartic shedding of skin. "Harnessing the Darkness" and riding the waves. Sometimes I feel we might be desperate to reach death, to know the truths, while we attempt to be inspired to live life, as we pass through all the adversity, and perspiring blood, sweat, and tears in these moments of our existence.

Deathspiration by The Misery Men

Do you have any secrets of sound to share? What types of techniques present The Misery Men persona?

My secret sound really is simplicity, and the ghost of Leo Fender haunting my amp. I run a 70’s Music Man 112 RP 65-watt amp with an EV bass speaker, through a 2x12 THD Cab, with a phaser pedal, and a Little Big Muff. A wall of fuzz, that is grizzly, meaty, and punchy. I don’t really try to be the tone guy, but I get more compliments about my tone than anything else.

Deathspiration by The Misery Men

"Night Creeps In" presents itself to me as the vertex of the Deathspiration story, it feels ritualistic and defining. Are there any rituals you perform while in the writing process?

This song in particular was written after a girl I was dating for only a week, told me she was going to kill herself. It was pretty heavy, and at the time she texted me, I was walking past Lone Fir Cemetery and wrote her, “sometimes the night creeps in, looking wretched weak and thin. Smiling with its meathook grin.” It was a very heavy experience. When I wrote this song about seven years ago, I was just really getting deep into Dax Riggs of Acid Bath. He’s definitely had a big impact on my music writing since moving to Portland.

Deathspiration by The Misery Men

Aside from the release of Deathspiration, are there any other exciting current happenings with The Misery Men?

We played at Dante’s not long ago with Chris Newman Deluxe Combo. Chris is quintessential to the Portland rock scene and to the whole Pacific Northwest in general. He is famous for his band Napalm Beach, who released their first album in 1981. Without Napalm Beach, The Wipers, and Dead Moon, well Seattle “Grunge” just wouldn’t sound the same. We might all still be playing Hair Metal!

Officially, Deathspiration has been out since last December, but this week it will launch on all digital platforms worldwide. This fall around September or October, expect a new two-part album to drop digitally, recorded by Witch Mountain and The Skull’s own Rob Wrong! It’ll feature 3-4 different local bass players and a couple local drummers, all guitars and vocals have been recorded, and bass/drums will be done by July/August. So far, we've got interest from bass players Billy Anderson (yes, the famous Sleep producer), Matt Howl (Mammoth Salmon), Wayne Boucher (Troll), and Jaden Mcginiss (Legendary Peavy owner, Doorman, Boudicca). All of this will be recorded in Rob’s basement, the same basement Elliott Smith practiced in.

I decided that my second album needed to be done sooner than later, after the 1st was seven years in the making. Deathspiration was recorded in Seattle with Ancient Warlocks drummer Steve Jones, I’m very happy with the way it turned out, it was analog with no filters, no frills, just my raw intensity. The second though I feel needs to be done here in Portland, it is after all according to Greg Sage, DoomTown. Unlike the first one, it’ll be all digital, but still raw and real, capturing my live performance sound. I’m also likely going to have a variety of drummers on the album playing different songs, perhaps even some legendary Portland drummers!

This week I begin practicing with a new drummer for two upcoming gigs. On Saturday, July 6th, we'll be playing with Chronoclops and Stereo Creeps from Seattle at Misdemeanor Meadows in Portland. It's a free show. Then on Friday, July 26th, The Misery Men will be rocking Gil's Speakeasy for a $5 show that includes The Sleer and Breath. I'm Working on gigs for August on through the Fall.

Do you have any memories of childhood that are notably similar to your current state of mind? What type of things about your childhood self were spot-on about who you become? What was your favorite toy?

I knew I’d always wanted to be a Rock n’ Roller or an actor in films. Like pretty much as long as I could remember. I dressed up almost every Halloween as a Punk Rocker in the '80s. My first concert of grand scale was Poison and Warrant 1989, in Bozeman, Montana -- I was in 5th grade. That show changed my life. I also dug rocks in my grandparent’s backyard, but not for pleasure -- my grandfather took advantage of child labor! I’m a rocker through and through. I think I’ve followed my dreams pretty spot on.

Favorite toys were probably GI Joe’s, Star Wars, or my SEGA Genesis. I also built wood swords from fence posts and painted them with finger nail polish as a kid. Think I may have accidentally got high!

What was the moment when you could feel music has become a part of your life? How has writing music helped you, and those around you?

Well, ever since I could remember music was a part of my life. Listening to my mom’s old tapes and records as a kid really impacted me. I was always surrounded by music, my grandparents owned a Rock n’ Roll bar I’m the ‘60s, '70s, and '80s, called The Wrangler Bar in Livingston, MT. It’s featured in the film Rancho Deluxe about some wild young cattle rustlers, starring Jeff Bridges, and Sam Waterson. There’s a scene with Jimmy Buffett playing "Livingston Saturday Night" while Jeff and Sam play Pong. I’ve played that same machine as a kid! There was always a jukebox, I loved playing Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City," Joan Jett's "I Love Rock n’ Roll," Ozzy's "Bark at the Moon," Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and "Hell Is For Children," and Billy Squire's "The Stroke"!

In 7th and 8th grades, I really was into The Doors, The Beatles, Hendrix, and I was in a English class for kids who couldn’t really focus on reading Lord Of The Rings. In this class our teacher would have us listen to our favorite music at home, then with the feelings we got, write our own poetry. I often listened to Hendrix, especially Axis: Bold As Love and Electric LadyLand, so there were plenty of references to fantasy in my early lyrics. This really helped me learn to become a lyricist, and take an interest in poetry. Most importantly, it gave me an outlet. Around the same time, I got heavy into Henry Rollins. When I saw the video for "Liar" with Hank all painted red, I thought, “I wanna be that guy!” I bought Get in The Van and it became my Bible. All the while I was into Nirvana, Alice In Chains, and Soundgarden.

Is there a way to describe when you feel most productive or most relaxed? How is your state of mind best explained while writing music?

I’m most productive when I feel inspired. Or when the Sun is out and I’m well rested. I like the Sun, except in extreme heat, then I wanna murder the Sun. I was born at night, so I’m a Moon child. I definitely get more inspired and productive writing at night. A few years ago when I was reworking an old song that turned out to be Harness The Darkness, I took a wee bit of LSD or mushrooms -- I’m more of a microdose kind of guy -- found myself going down some deep wormholes to connect a lot of dots that would go on to make up the six verses of the song, that I eventually dropped into four, because it was the most exhausting song to play! I’m a Beatnik kid. I got into the Beat style of writing early on. So, letting the stream of consciousness come flowing out seems to work well for me. I can keep a pretty decent rhyme or off rhyme too.

What is the most peculiar thing that anyone has ever said to you?

Hmmmm. Can you keep a secret? From experience, always tell them no, because sometimes people will lay some heavy shit on you, and maybe you didn’t want to be that person to carry their burden. I’m not a Priest, or a therapist, sometimes it’s fine to listen to friends, but there’s some things you can’t unhear or unsee!

Do you have a message for the universe?

I call it the "Megaverse," as coined by quantum physicist Leonard Susskind -- but my message is to be real, be compassionate, be loving, be forgiving, be understanding, be courageous, be ever evolving, and in the words of E.T.: “Beeeeee Gooooooddd.”

The Great Misery Men Giveaway!

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[allcheatscodes]

ride to hell retribution pc

http://allcheatscodes.com/ride-to-hell-retribution-pc/

ride to hell retribution pc

Ride to Hell: Retribution cheats & more for PC (PC)

Cheats

Unlockables

Hints

Easter Eggs

Glitches

Guides

Achievements

Get the updated and latest Ride to Hell: Retribution cheats, unlockables, codes, hints, Easter eggs, glitches, tricks, tips, hacks, downloads, achievements, guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and more for PC (PC). AllCheatsCodes.com has all the codes you need to win every game you play!

Use the links above or scroll down to see all the PC cheats we have available for Ride to Hell: Retribution.

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Genre: Action, Third-Person 3D Action Developer: Eutechnyx Ltd. Publisher: Deep Silver ESRB Rating: Mature Release Date: June 26, 2013

Hints

Currently we have no tips for Ride to Hell: Retribution yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Cheats

Currently we have no cheats or codes for Ride to Hell: Retribution yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Unlockables

Currently we have no unlockables for Ride to Hell: Retribution yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Easter eggs

Currently we have no easter eggs for Ride to Hell: Retribution yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Glitches

Currently we have no glitches for Ride to Hell: Retribution yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Guides

Currently we have no guides or FAQs for Ride to Hell: Retribution yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Achievements

Steam Achievements

Complete all other achievements. – To Hell and Back

Defeat 10 Devil’s Hand enemies. – Gang Wars

Defeat 500 Devil’s Hand enemies. – Master of Massacre

Perform a Rage Attack on foot. – Anger Management

Perform 10 Rage Attacks on bike. – Road Rage

Perform a kill with every type of melee weapon. – Hands On

Get 3 A Grades at the gun range. – Target Practice

Kill 50 enemies with Headshots. – Lead Heads

Perform a Dirty Fighting Technique attack. – Taking the Initiative

Perform an S Grade Wheelie. – Wheelie Good

Perform an S Grade Jump. – Get Some Air

Perform an S Grade Powerslide. – Slide It In

Perform 10 S Grade Wheelies. – Wheelie God

Jump a total of 1000 feet. – Flying High

Perform 10 S Grade Powerslides. – Slip and Slide

Purchase 5 Weapons. – Lock & Load

Save a girl. – Mr. Nice Guy

Save every girl being harassed. – Ladies Man

Purchase all the Manuals. – Bookworm

Sell one of every drug type. – My Prescription

Collect a Playing Card. – Card Shark

Collect all the cards in the red deck. – Card Collector RED

Collect all the cards in the blue deck. – Card Collector BLUE

Unlock all Bike Paints. – Painting the Town

Unlock all Bike Artwork. – Art Appreciation

Unlock all Bike Parts. – Sweet Ride

Complete the opening sequence. – Unfinished Business

Defeat Anvil. – The Bigger They Are.

Defeat Colt. – Killing Cowboys

Defeat Meathook. – Right Hook For Meathook

Defeat Greasy Steve. – Explosive Endings

Defeat Triple 6. – Carpenter

Defeat King Dick. – Holy Ghost

Defeat Pretty Boy. – Pretty No More

Defeat Caesar. – Bloody Retribution

Complete the game on the Easy Rider difficulty setting. – Easy Rider

Complete the game on the Badass Biker difficulty setting. – Badass Biker

Complete the game on the One Percenter difficulty setting. – One Percenter

[marypsue]

me writing two characters who are ideologically opposed and also implied to be in an ongoing prank war with each other: yeah this is a fun vitriolic rivalry to have going on between two background characters

me, typing up what I'd written some months later: oh. these two are fucking.

[marypsue]

Meet Ben

Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks // Meet Riley

There was no ki ki ki, ma ma ma. That was the second thing Ben realised. No tempo-twisting piano line. No children’s voices raised in a creepy nursery rhyme. No violin strings shrieking, no synth echoing. No distinctive music at all.

It felt kind of like a rip-off.

He didn’t hurt anymore. That had been the first thing he’d realised. His face, his gut – the blinding, burning pain was gone. Ben couldn’t feel the injuries he’d been so sure would kill him, anymore.

He couldn’t feel much of anything, anymore.

The rain sheeting down through the trees all around didn’t chill him. He was barely aware of the drops battering his shoulders, soaking through his cutoff jean vest and favourite tee shirt – the one with the skull with a dagger through its eye sockets and a snake twisting around both lovingly hand-painted on the front – and plastering his carefully-teased tangle of bleached curls to his face and neck. The moaning wind seemed to blow right through him, without leaving any trace of its passing.

What he did feel, more strongly than anything physical, was almost a compulsion to start walking.

His feet didn’t start to hurt, as he trodded steadily and seemingly endlessly through the pitch-black woods, the lashing rain. His legs didn’t get tired. Every step felt as inevitable, as mechanical as the last. The woods and the rain didn’t grow any lighter, but he never had any doubts about where he was going. And the farther he went, the more he recognised the patch of forest he was trudging through. The more certain he was of his destination.

When the leak of light around the ill-fitted old wooden garage door gleamed yellowly between the trees, it only confirmed what he already knew.

The girl spooked when he stepped through the side door of the old garage, whirling to look directly at him. But there was something about the way she stared at the open door, banging in the wind, that told Ben she wasn’t seeing him even before she let out a nervous laugh. “Shit. Must’ve blown open.”

The boy left her side, hurrying past Ben to pull the side door shut on the wild night outside. He gave the handle two good tugs, the swollen wood shrieking against the frame as it jerked into place. Then he turned back toward the girl, a leering smile crossing his clean-cut, handsome face. “There. Now we won’t have any more interruptions.”

The girl returned his smile with a knowing one of her own, leaning back against the big rectangular shape standing under the canvas tarp in the middle of the garage, fingers brushing long, sleek brown hair back from the revealing neckline of the pretty sundress she wore. “Promise?”

The boy chuckled, a little, like he couldn’t believe his luck. “Not unless you want them to.”

The girl screwed up her face at him in a teasing frown, and then turned to pull the tarp down and reveal –

In the low yellow light of the single bulb dangling by its chain from the ceiling, Ben’s beloved 1966 VW van-turned-camper gleamed dustily. The skirls of airbrushed flame pouring from the open maw of the red dragon curled along its side door seemed to actually glow.

“Oh, my god,” the girl laughed, and the boy smacked the flat of one hand against her shoulder.

There was a too-familiar mocking note in his voice as he told her, “You just don’t appreciate fine art.”

“Hey,” Ben said, or tried to say. There was something strange about the word, a strange way it stuck in his throat, a thickness, a blurriness, in the way the sound fell on the air.

Both the girl and the boy ignored him like he wasn’t there.

“I appreciate a warm, dry place where neither of our parents are going to walk in,” the girl said, tugging on the handle of the sliding side door.

“How much you wanna bet this baby comes fully equipped with a mattress in the back?”

“I am not lying down naked on a mattress that mice have been colonising for the last thirty years.”

“Hey,” Ben tried again, even though it was strangely more difficult this time. “That’s mine.”

“Don’t try smoking anything you find back there, either,” the girl scolded, even as one of the boy’s hands found her waist, the other tugging up the hem of her skirt to reveal a smooth, tan expanse of thigh. “It’ll have lost its potency. If you’re lucky.”

“Like whatever loser drove this even smoked decent weed,” the boy said, dismissively, leaning down to kiss the girl’s neck.

A flash of the old familiar anger flared in Ben’s chest at the old familiar insult. The long gash that had slashed his stomach, the broken hinges of his jaw, pulsed with a sudden, blinding agony, swift enough to nearly knock him to his knees.

“ ‘Whatever loser’? You seriously don’t know the story?”

“The story? What is this, the first five minutes of a horror movie?”

The girl spun to face the boy, letting him pin her up against the side of Ben’s van. “This garage is on what used to be old Grover Adams’ land. They say this was Ben Adams’ van.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “It is.”

Something was wrong. Beyond the way his words were coming out like he was trying to scream through Jell-o. Beyond the way the girl and the boy were still ignoring him like he wasn’t there. Beyond the way what he’d sworn were killing injuries, shattering his body, seemed to have vanished, leaving no trace of themselves or the blood that had ruined his favourite shirt, soaked the acid-wash of his jeans, splattered the dirty white of his beat-up Chuck Taylors. Beyond the way he could have sworn he’d been soaked to the skin from the rain still hammering the garage’s uninsulated wooden walls a minute ago, but now, looking down at himself, he was dry. Beyond the way that everything seemed to be on the other side of a thick sheet of plastic, keeping him from touching anything, feeling anything.

Why was his van so dusty? What had the girl been talking about, mice have been colonising for the last thirty years?

Where were his grandfather’s tools?

Whose things were these, the lawn forks and rakes and mower and snow shovels and sledgehammer and axe leaning up against the walls? What was that thing, with its bulky head of orange plastic and long arm ending in a black semicircle like a sheath? Who were these kids, who he’d never seen walking Holmwood High’s hallowed halls? Why were they here?

What did that girl mean, the story?

But it all suddenly seemed vague and unimportant when the boy looked uneasily up at the dark window of Ben’s van and asked, “Ben Adams? The Silent Killer?”

And when the girl nodded yes.

The wall of rage, the answering stabs of pain, rose through Ben like a tidal wave, washing him away. A part of him was dizzily amazed at how quickly, how thoroughly, it took him over, burned through the curious mechanical numbness that had driven him here, steadily through the woods, without feeling the cold or fatigue or what must remain of his injuries. Amazed, and a little afraid.

But mostly. Mostly, he was just furious.

It had been going on for as long as he could remember. As long as he and his family had lived in Holmwood. It had started before he’d been old enough to understand why, the other kids on the playground shunning him with hostile looks or taunting him with their parents’ judgments. Disgraceful trailer trash Cora Adams and her loser boyfriend’s bastard son had never been popular in Holmwood’s more rarefied circles, even before she’d run off with that vacuum cleaner salesman and the loser boyfriend had skipped town not ten days later, dumping the kid on Cora’s father.

Not that it was Ben’s parents’ fault alone that nobody liked him. Oh, no, the other kids had always made that abundantly clear. It was just their parents who hated him for who and what his mother and father were. Their wretched offspring hated him for much more important reasons, like how he dressed weird and out of date, or read too many comic books, or the wrong kind of comic books, or too many books, or the wrong kind of books, or looked at girls, or didn’t look at girls, or didn’t kill worms on the sidewalk after a rain, or did kill ants with a magnifying glass, or did, or said, or didn’t say, or didn’t do…

Oh, Ben had eventually found his own friends, outcasts and rejects just like himself, but it had been a hard-won victory. And nobody – especially not the well-dressed, well-heeled country club set like these two currently necking up against his van – had ever deigned to give him the chance to forget it.

And all of them – the kids and their parents both – all of them had just loved having him around to blame for all of their problems. They’d decided he was a delinquent, a bad seed, a loser before he’d ever had a chance to prove otherwise. They’d made up their minds about him, in the total absence of any evidence, and nothing he’d said or done had ever, ever convinced anyone of the truth. Sex, violence, drugs, rock and roll music in their good, Christian, God-fearing, Reagan-voting community? Must be that Adams brat. God knew he’d been behind every corrupt and corrupting thing that’d come into their community since before he was even born. God knew that he was the source of every evil, the font from which all bad things flow. Ben was pretty sure that some of the old bitches who ran the Sunday school were genuinely convinced he was the actual, literal Antichrist.

So maybe he’d played into it, a little. Maybe he’d taken whatever he could get, and delighted in pissing them all off with spooky clothes and loud music and – gasp – tabletop games. Maybe he’d flaunted his corrupting influence on their precious, not-really-so-innocent youth.

But. That they’d really gone so far – that they really thought he could – that they’d actually decided he could have done all of those awful, awful things to poor Leigh? To Grant, to one of his own best friends –

Even after Ben had died trying to protect people from the actual killer –

They’d decided it was him.

The spring he’d been thirteen, Ben had snuck into the theatre with a couple of other boys to watch Friday the 13th. Afterward, the others hadn’t been able to shut up about the split-second glimpse of Jeannine Taylor’s bare breasts. But for Ben, the movie had been a revelation in more ways than just the hormonal.

He felt, now, strangely like he had when the camera had put him behind Mrs. Voorhees’ eyes. Watching the camp counselors she planned to slaughter going innocently about their lives, kissing and laughing and joking around with each other without the faintest idea of the doom that dogged their every step, growing ever closer. In the theatre, part of him had wanted to call out to those kids, to warn them. But they weren’t real. They were there on the screen, a world away from him, unable to hear even if he screamed at the top of his lungs. And he was here, trapped behind the killer’s eyes, grateful it was impossible to warn the kids because he was half-sick with anticipation to see what horrible thing might happen to them next. Unable to change a thing that happened, to choose what ‘he’ did, to stop the hand that he saw as if it was his own from raising the hunting knife –

It wasn’t a hunting knife, this time, though.

And, unlike in the theatre, unlike out in the woods, Ben could feel the satiny varnish under his fingers as his hand closed over the contoured handle of the axe.

They’d all decided for him that he was a Satan-worshipping, drug-dealing, delinquent sex fiend destined for an early grave. And now they’d decided he was a killer.

Well. Fine.

He’d be the best damned killer Holmwood, Indiana had ever seen.

The girl gave a little shriek, pushing the boy off of her so she could leap away from the van when its engine suddenly roared to life. Its headlights blared on, casting Ben’s shadow, sharp and black and looming, across the garage door behind him. He couldn’t see it, standing facing the girl and the boy she was now clinging to in frozen terror, but he knew it was there.

Just like he knew the axe’s silhouette was rising in the shadow behind him as he hoisted it in both hands.

The stereo in the van burst to life, a screech of static resolving into the heavy, plodding, ominous guitar of Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. The only thought that managed to make it through the red fog filling Ben’s thoughts, as the boy pulled the girl back away from Ben and the girl opened her mouth to scream, was that there, at last, finally, was the music.

There was a shriek.

It took the sudden lash of rain against his back and the howl of wind tearing at his hair for Ben to realise it hadn’t come from the girl, but from the rusty sliding mechanism of the big garage door behind him.

He turned, slowly, the axe still raised.

And stopped, the rage draining out of him and swirling away into the puddle of rainwater now growing on the cracked concrete at his feet.

The girl standing framed in the movie-screen rectangle of the garage door, finely haloed by the way the headlights’ glow caught the splash of raindrops striking off her cornrowed hair and sweatshirt-clad shoulders, couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her dark eyes flicked up to the axe Ben was still holding up, now starting to feel a little foolish, but she didn’t shrink back the way the other girl had. Instead, her eyes darted past Ben’s shoulder toward where the other girl and the boy must still be standing, and she jabbed her chin in a direction that Ben thought was toward the side door. A second later, he could hear the slap of shoes against concrete and the squeal of swollen wood against wood. They were forcing the side door open.

His hands squeezed, reflexively, against the handle of the axe.

That strange almost-compulsion, the sense that he should be following the kids even now bursting out through the side door and into the wild night, lodged restlessly between his lungs. But this time, Ben stood his ground. The feeling faded as he lowered the axe, staring at the thing the girl framed in the garage door was holding.

She took a step forward, into the shelter of the garage’s roof, as he let the axe slip between his fingers and clatter to the floor. As he reached out, instead, for his axe.

The van’s stereo hissed into static silence as the girl handed the guitar over to Ben, who took it almost reverently. Unlike his tee shirt, unlike his own body, it still showed all the scars of the battle they’d been through together. The neck was cracked almost to the headstock and snapped right in two near the body, hanging limply and pathetically by the two unbroken strings. The sleek black varnish of the body, as solid and satin-smooth under his fingers as the axe handle had been, was gouged right down to the pale wood beneath where it had briefly stopped the knife that had ended Grant’s life – and ultimately Ben’s, too. Holding it, as the girl stepped back and left it in his hands, Ben felt a tremor pass through him, like he’d always imagined an earthquake must feel.

The van’s headlights died, behind him, its engine sputtering out into silence.

“It is yours, right?” the girl in front of him said, her big, almost almond-shaped eyes fixed on his face. Studying him. Seeing him. “Ben?”

Ben turned his eyes back down to the pathetic corpse of his beloved Stratocaster.

The nod came slow and heavy. But it felt, for the first time since he’d realised he was awake in the woods and didn’t hurt anymore, like something he’d chosen to do.

“Hi, Ben,” the girl said, softly. Ben could still feel her eyes on his face. “I’m Riley.”

[marypsue]

meta slasher story you say 👀

[from this meme]

I do say!

This one was what I was calling Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks before I settled on a title for it. The seed of an idea for this one was 'I really want Jade Daniels (from Stephen Graham Jones' Indian Lake Trilogy) and Eddie Munson to be best friends, I don't care that there's thirty years between them and one of them is dead', and then it spiralled out of all control when I tried to give it a plot, and I had to file the serial numbers off to give it a chance to breathe on its own in the world.

The premise: Riley Loomis (she changed it from Jones because Riley Jones is wanted in connection with twenty-eight murders, and also missing, presumed dead, and also she's always had a soft spot for both Halloween and Scream) and her best friend, Ben Adams, who happens to be dead, hunt slashers. It's personal: Riley and Ben both witnessed the events of a slasher movie start playing out in their hometowns, both tried to stop it, and both ended up only taking the blame (although Riley was the only one who walked away alive). When Ben rose as a ghost, thirty years from the date of his death, Riley was the first person who found him, and may have stopped him from turning slasher himself. Now, they travel around, living on the margins, following urban legends, weird news stories, and unusual murders, trying to help save other people from their fates. Or...just save people from getting splattered into bloody chunks. Either or.

They've got a system, they've got it down to a science...but their most recent case is throwing a wrench in the works. Nothing's going the way they expect, from a slasher who won't stay dead, to a final girl who seems a little too invested in the 'rules' of slasher horror, to deaths that call into question whether the tragic massacre that destroyed Riley's life and the series of murders that ended up claiming Ben's, even thirty years apart, were really as unconnected as they seem. And whether Riley really managed to save him from turning slasher, after all.

The tropes are alive, and they are hungry...

[marypsue]

Meet Riley

Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks // Meet Ben

Angelica was a bitch.

Riley flung herself flat onto the smooth, hard surface of the roller rink, not a second too soon. The blade flashed as it swept through the air above her, where moments before, her neck had been. Any slower, and she would’ve ended up like Pamela Voorhees.

Overhead, there was a screech of rage and frustration, and a flutter of ruffled skirts and long blond ringlets as Angelica’s momentum carried her past.

Riley allowed herself a split second to catch her breath, before jerking herself back onto her feet. She crouched for a moment, poised on her toes, listening to the sound of mocking, girlish laughter as it echoed around the emptiness of the abandoned roller rink. Trying to pinpoint, from the sound, where Angelica was now.

“Ben!” Riley shouted, when she thought the laughter was down by the farther end of the rink. “Now!”

There was a beat. A split second of suspension. Riley held her breath.

And then, on cue, the mirrored disco ball overhead, for the second time in forty years, began to turn. Newly dusted that afternoon, it caught flecks of coloured light as the spotlights around it all chunked on, and threw those lights back all over the rink, dancing in disorienting skirls and spirals over its emptiness.

There was a ghastly moan, a long, slow winding-up noise that quickly resolved itself into music. The dulcet harmonies of ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ washed through the vast, empty space, echoes adding sinister offkey harmonics as it went.

“Come on,” Riley muttered to herself, as she sprinted for the edge of the rink, dashing through the break in the barrier meant to keep the skaters from crashing into pedestrians and skidding under the table built into a booth along the opposite wall. “Come on, you know you want to, take the bait, come on…”

Angelica’s story, like most of them, was tragic. Unlike the eponymous heroine of ‘Dancing Queen’, she’d never made it to seventeen. At her sweet-sixteenth birthday party, at this very roller rink, she’d been leaning over to blow out the candles on her cake when one of her long blonde curls had fallen forward into the flame. It hadn’t taken more than a minute or two for the fire to spread to her brand-new party dress. Before her horrified friends and family could do anything to save her, she was dead. Burned to death right before their very eyes.

The rink, the story went, had closed the next year, after a string of mysterious accidents that had people staying away in droves, convinced it was haunted by Angelica’s vengeful ghost. And so it had sat, empty and abandoned, nearly killing people every time someone tried to start it up or renovate it again, for forty long years. Until a roller derby team had decided it’d make the perfect place to get some practice away from the possibility of prying, spying eyes.

It had been hard as hell to sniff out the truth behind this particular story. Usually, when they had to do with a specific person, a full name attached itself to the tale – even if it wasn’t the whole story, or even the wrong name altogether. But ‘Angelica’ had no last name. So Riley and Ben – all right, mostly Riley – had gotten to comb through the newspaper archives at the local library, the medical records at the hospital, the municipal records at City Hall. The death records at the morgue.

What they’d found wasn’t exactly surprising, for anyone who knew anything about slashers.

The roller rink hadn’t been plagued by a vengeful ghost. And the accidents hadn’t been so mysterious. All the rink had really been plagued by was shoddy wiring, which had started three fires before the city had issued a demand that the owner either fix the problems or shut the place down. Obviously, from the state the rink was in now, the owner had picked the path of least resistance – and expense.

And ‘Angelica’, the poor girl from the story who’d died tragically at the tender age of sixteen, didn’t exist. Or, at least, hadn’t existed before the story had sprung up around her. But Angela “Angie” Werner, who’d been badly burned in one of those electrical fires while attending a birthday party and confined to hospital for six months in 1978 while her skin grafts healed, did.

And, more than that, she was definitely still alive.

If, that was, you could call what someone became when they went full slasher ‘alive’. Which Riley very much doubted.

That was what she was counting on, as she crouched beneath the table, peering out at the empty rink surface dazzling under the disco lights. That Angie wasn’t just borrowing the ‘Angelica’ legend as a convenient cover for slicing and dicing her way through a random unfortunate roller derby team. That the story had found an Angelica-shaped focus to fix itself onto. That it had taken over.

If Angie was just a run-of-the-mill serial killer, then this wasn’t going to work. And that was the best Riley could hope for.

But then, it wouldn’t be the first time in her life that Riley’d caused the death of a regular person.

The song bounced through another chorus, Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s vocals imploring Riley to see that girl, warning her to watch that scene. But even with her eyes peeled, scanning not only the rink but the gutted arcade behind her, the empty skate rental counter to her right, the plastic sheeting hiding what had once been the concession to her left, Riley couldn’t see so much as a swirl of a Gunne Sax skirt. Angelica’s mocking laughter seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

At least that meant she was still around there somewhere, though. Riley still had her full attention.

The thing about slashers that Riley’d found, through years of extensive research sitting in front of a glowing blue screen in a darkened room watching corn-syrup blood fountain out of latex wounds, was that you didn’t get them out of random meaningless tragedies. The Angelica story was a good story. It’d stuck around. But it wasn’t the whole story. Couldn’t be. There had to be a single act of thoughtless human cruelty. There always was.

The trouble with a story like the Angelica story, though, was that it had a tendency to overwrite the truth. Sometimes literally. People – even people who’d been there, people who should know better – misremembered, took details or elements from the story instead of relying on their own experience. Often without even realising they’d done it.

And, sometimes, people didn’t like the way the truth made them look very much.

Angie Werner had been at a birthday party when the fire that had ruined her life and set her on the path to slasher-dom had started. But what the many and varied written records didn’t say was that she hadn’t been invited. Had been the only one in her class who hadn’t been invited, actually. The roller rink was a public place. Angie had crashed.

And the birthday girl and her friends had responded by locking Angie in the supply closet where the fire had started.

That was why Angie had been so badly burned. Why she’d needed to stay in the hospital for so long. The closet had been full of cleaning chemicals, many of them flammable. The only door had been jammed with a chair from the outside.

None of the written records had told Riley that. Neither had the woman whose birthday party it had been, when Riley managed to track her down. It hadn’t surprised Riley to discover that she was the mother of the captain of the roller derby team Angelica had started going after. It hadn’t surprised Riley at all.

Slashers were predictable. If you knew what you were looking for.

The person who’d told Riley the truth, in the end, was a former janitor for the roller rink. The man who’d freed Angie from the flaming closet and stopped the whole building from burning to the ground. As a reward for his heroism, a few months later when the city issued its edict to the roller rink’s owner and the rink had been shut down, he’d been put out of work.

He’d been a red herring, for a very short while. Injustice, after all, bred slashers like rot bred mushrooms.

But he’d also given Riley the missing piece of the puzzle.

The former janitor had tried to keep up with Angie, through her long and grueling recovery and beyond. Had made sure to check in, now and again, to see how she was doing and what progress she was making. He was the one to tell Riley how bad the scarring had been, when Angie’d finally been released.

And the one to tell Riley about how Angie had simply dropped off the map, not long after she’d left the hospital.

“Her parents transferred her to another school,” the old man had told Riley, sounding wistful. “Can’t say as I blame ‘em. I sent birthday cards for a couple years, but after she’d’ve graduated, they started coming back.”

Riley had wasted too much time, trying to track Angie down. Two teenaged girls and the man who’d been the birthday girl’s boyfriend back in ’78 were already dead by the time she put two and two together.

There’d been a few attempts, over the last forty years, to reopen the roller rink, or to renovate it for some other use. They’d all failed after a string of dangerous accidents on the worksite – accidents that might not have been accidents. But Angie Werner had survived her injuries. There wasn’t really a ghost.

Which meant that living, breathing Angie had to be somewhere close by. And had to have her own reasons for not wanting the roller rink disturbed.

Riley had a hunch that she knew why. And what she and Ben had found behind the walls of the rink’s old office, when they’d broken in that afternoon, had just confirmed it.

Instead of trying to move on with her life, Angie had come back. Had spent some thirty-odd years squatting in the abandoned building that was the site of the worst moments of her life, driving away everyone who might have forced her out. Waiting.

Riley’d known Angie must be there. Because Riley herself had briefly done something similar, once. Out at one of the unused summer cabins on Clear Lake.

A shadow of a sound, the faintest flicker of motion, snapped Riley’s attention back to the present. She wasn’t sure, as she looked all around her, what exactly it had been. It took a moment to be able to tell, with the shifting disco lights making everything seem to swirl and sway. But the translucent sheet of thick plastic hanging in front of the old concession was drifting, ever so gently, back and forth.

Riley shifted, adjusting her crouch so she could spring quickly and easily out from beneath the table. Her eyes never left the swaying curtain as her hands sought out and closed over the thing she’d left prepped and waiting for her under this table, that afternoon.

The music swelled to a final crescendo. The disco lights glittered and flashed. Riley’s gaze bounced from the curtain hiding the concession to the centre of the rink, back and forth and back again.

The song clicked into quiet. The eerie dance of the lights, in the silence, made the whole cavernous room feel like it was underwater.

Angelica didn’t appear.

Riley did one last sweep of the room, before cautiously inching up to the edge of the table, keeping a wary eye out as she dragged the thing she’d stashed along after her. The plastic sheeting covering the concession had fallen back into stillness. Other than the spots of coloured light, nothing moved.

Riley leaned forward, sticking her head out from under the table, to push herself to her feet –

Bony fingers scrabbled at the top of her head at the same time as the minor chords of ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ sliced into the silence.

Riley, for the second time that night, flung herself forward out of reach, burning the bottom of her chin against the nubbly carpet. An enraged screech from above told her Angelica was none too happy about not being able to get a handful of Riley’s tight, cornrowed braids.

Gripping her prize close to her chest, Riley rolled, just barely in enough time to dodge the long, slender serrated cake knife that sliced down toward the carpet where, a moment before, her unprotected back had been. And, lying there, looking up, she got her first really good look at the slasher called Angelica.

The overwhelming impression Riley’d gotten before this had been of dusky-pink-striped ruffles and long blonde curls. It hadn’t exactly been wrong. The dress Angelica was wearing, high-collared and long-sleeved with a Victorian-revival V-shaped ruffle at the shoulders and trimmed with off-white lace, could have come straight out of a 1970s Jessica McClintock catalogue. If it weren’t for the unladylike way Angelica was crouched on the tabletop. And the rusty stains of blood.

The hair streaming down on either side of Angelica’s face was indeed thick and wheat-gold and coiling into gentle ringlets, where it wasn’t lopped bluntly off to cover her forehead.

It was also, now that Riley was looking, obviously fake.

And behind the clear plastic gloss of a cheap ‘beauty’ mask, fixed and expressionless, the eyeholes outlined with garish blue shadow and thick black lines representing lashes, the lips painted on in an unnatural red, the face that stared back at Riley was bubbled and shiny like melted candle wax and contorted with a mindless, obsessive rage.

Angelica’s clear, bright blue eyes met Riley’s, and widened as she raised the knife again.

And Riley, lying on the floor at an awkward angle, all but helpless, breathed a sigh of relief.

Those blue eyes narrowed, drifting warily from Riley’s face down to the thing Riley was clutching to her chest.

They went wide again when they landed on the chainsaw.

And then Angelica was jerked backwards. A strangled noise erupted from her throat, the ravaged skin of her face suddenly squashed against the mask she wore as its elastic strap was yanked, hard, away from the back of her head. The arm waving the cake knife flailed up, stabbing wildly and randomly out around and behind her, her rage momentarily fixating off of Riley and onto whoever had managed to get behind her without her noticing.

The grainy graveyard glimmer that picked out Ben’s outline, the same green as the northern lights, slowly filled in behind her. With the hand not pinning Angelica by the strap of her mask, Ben threw Riley the horns.

Riley threw them back, and then scrambled up to her feet, keeping the chainsaw clutched close.

The twang of the mask’s elastic slipping through Ben’s insubstantial fingers and back into place was barely audible over the almost-frantic chorus of the song. Riley backed away from the table, toward the rink, bracing her stance so she could get a better grip on the chainsaw. One that wouldn’t see it ripping her own face off if she tried to start it up.

“Angie?” she tried.

In answer, Angelica slowly rose to her feet in a rustle of skirts, standing on top of the table, gripping the cake knife.

“Angie Werner,” Riley tried, again. One hand rested on the chainsaw’s pull-cord, a finger on the dead-man’s switch. Ready to press. Ready to pull. “I know what happened to you. They shouldn’t have done it. I know.”

Raised up to her full height, towering above Riley from the tabletop, washed in the shifting underwater lights from the disco ball, Angelica was still and silent. She cut an imposing figure, even with all her girlish ruffles. The bloodstains that splashed her skirt looked almost black in the blue circles that spiralled past. Half in shadow, her mask hid the scars almost completely.

“I get it. You want somebody to pay for what they did. You want justice,” Riley tried. “But this isn’t it. Those kids had nothing to do with it. You don’t have to -”

Wherever her little speech would have gone next, Riley didn’t have to find out.

This time, Angelica was silent as death as she flew forward, hair and ruffles streaming, gleaming knife raised.

Riley slammed the dead-man’s switch flat to the handle of the chainsaw and yanked the pull-cord.

The chainsaw sputtered, choked, and died.

Riley had to throw herself backwards, swinging the chainsaw’s motionless blade up between herself and Angelica’s knife, to avoid doing the same.

“I thought we gassed this thing up!” Riley screamed, partly at Ben, mostly out of terror, as she tried to keep her footing. Angelica didn’t give her a moment to breathe, grabbing the chainsaw by the blade like she wouldn’t notice if she lost a few fingers and slicing at Riley with the knife gripped in her other hand. Riley tried to duck under one slashing stroke, and slammed backwards into the low wall separating the rink’s surface from the rest of the building. For a moment, it punched the breath out of her.

The cake knife flashed pink in the disco lights, and Riley jerked sideways, tugging the chainsaw out of Angelica’s grip. Riley wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t for the wall behind her to suddenly vanish, leaving her stumbling out onto the rink’s smooth surface. The soles of her high-tops squeaked deafeningly in the echoing emptiness of the rink, audible even over the Swedish voices demanding that she not go wasting her emotions.

When Riley looked up, Angelica was gone.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” Riley hissed between her teeth, hurrying back two steps before she realised she was in all likelihood hurrying straight backwards into a knife and spun around, chainsaw held out in front of her like a talisman. But Angelica wasn’t there either. This time, there wasn’t even the mocking laughter to help keep track of her. Only the disco lights, shivering and shifting in Riley’s peripheral vision, making her jump and whip around more than once.

She was a sitting duck, as she inched her way closer to the centre of the rink, and Riley knew it.

The chainsaw’s engine choked, again, as she tried for a second time to get it started. It died with a pathetic little cough, the chain giving a tiny death rattle as it tried and failed to make a complete rotation. Riley gave the thing a shake, unable to look down and try to see what was wrong with it without taking her attention off of the hundreds of different places Angelica could jumpscare out of at her.

In a split second of relative quiet before the minor chords of the song’s chorus whirled back up into their frenzy, something caught Riley’s ear. Something that sounded like the rasping whisper of polyester on polyester.

She looked up.

In a slasher movie, what happened next would have happened in slow motion. The disco ball, glittering out its magnificent swan song, descending from the ceiling like a Robert Englund Phantom of the Opera chandelier, exploding into a million bits of scattered light against the floor barely an inch from Riley’s scrambling feet. Angelica, descending in its wake like the wrath of disco incarnate, hair and ruffles fluttering, knife raised and ready to plunge into Riley’s vulnerable flesh.

Angelica, realising halfway through her descent that, while she was still dropping, her mask no longer was.

Angelica’s blue eyes, revealed fully in their scarred setting, widening with fear.

The chainsaw, finally, roaring to life in Riley’s hands.

Real life, of course, wasn’t a slasher movie. Riley barely even knew what was happening until it was over.

The fountain of blood that exploded out of Angelica when the chainsaw carved up through her ribcage and out through her collarbone seemed weirdly glittery, in the now-steady coloured spotlights.

The thump when what was left of her fell to the rink’s surface, into the remains of the disco ball, was disgustingly soggy.

The clear plastic mask she’d worn hung suspended in midair for another few seconds or so, before it drifted down to hover, instead, somewhere around waist height. The outline of Ben took shape holding it in one hand, and then filled in with the rest of him. Against the shadows left after the demise of the disco ball, he looked brighter, clearer than he often did, especially in daylight. Almost solid.

He raised the mask, giving it a cheeky wave, and grinned at Riley.

Riley killed the chainsaw’s motor, and reached up to wipe trickling blood off her forehead with the back of one hand. “That second song was the wrong era of ABBA.”

Ben fixed Riley with a wide-eyed, disbelieving stare, before gesturing down at himself, snarling a short, crunchy electric-guitar riff out the curled-up side of his mouth. Riley, who was starting to become an expert in how to read him, took it to mean something along the lines of Do I look like I listen to ABBA?

It wasn’t actually funny. The laugh that bubbled up out of Riley was mostly just relief.

“We gotta get out of here,” she said, when she trusted her voice again. “Before anybody starts asking questions.”

Ben gave the mask another little wave, like he was holding up something Riley’d forgotten, and Riley rolled her eyes.

“Obviously after we burn that.” She didn’t want to let her gaze track down to what was left of Angelica, the insides of her chest now open to the air, those perfect curls tangled around her face, those blue eyes wide and glassy in a final, fatal surprise. Riley’s eyes went there anyway, without her input. The pang that shot through her wasn’t entirely horror, or even disgust.

All Angie Werner’d wanted was some kind of justice, in a world that’d seemed determined not to give it to her. Riley could understand, all too well, how that felt.

“After we burn that,” she repeated, a little louder, not taking her eyes off the wreckage. “We don’t want Angelica coming back.”

[marypsue]

Well, the gleefully gruesome slasher horror of Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks has taken a weird turn into a transcript of an in-universe true crime podcast and a sympathetic look at what happens to the people left behind after the final shot of the final girl standing bloody and triumphant over the (totally-not-actually-dead) slasher. I was expecting to end up writing one of these things.

[marypsue]

I was tagged by the lovely and talented @rocketnebulas!

RULES: Post the last sentence you wrote (fanfic / original / anything) and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence.

The last sentence I actually wrote was for Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks, the one where two misunderstood loners, only one of whom is alive, fight horror movie slashers while trying not to become them:

"I'm not as much of a guitar player as the guy who taught me, but I think I'm getting pretty good."

That's 21 words, so I'll tag...@seiya234, @daddygrandpaandthebeaver, @queerpyracy, @gretchensinister, @tejoxys, @bixxelated, @amethystunarmed, @marzipanandminutiae, @scribefindegil, @astriiformes, @aquitainequeen, @forthegothicheroine, @titleleaf, @definitely-not-a-bug, @mickeymagpie, and. Hm. Anyone else who writes and would like to take a crack at it, I guess.

[marypsue]

4, 25, and 32 from the writer question meme?

[from this meme]

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral?

I don't know that there are any single words, out of context, that make me feral, but I'm always a sucker for a good 'susurrus'.

25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story?

I don't know if this is exactly what's meant by this question, but, when I'm picturing Ben Adams from Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks, I'm picturing William Katt's Tommy Ross from Brian de Palma's Carrie, just dressed like an 80s metalhead.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

Oh, boy, hard question. There are a number, but I'm going to give this one to Labyrinth's "You have no power over me", simply because it's informed so much of my approach to writing.

[marypsue]

what are your OCs favorite colors? did any of them have animals phases as kids?

(You can do whatever OCs you like but I was particularly thinking about Avery and Tiffany and perhaps a ghost and friend, if you are sharing that one)

:3 :3 :3 Thank you very much for enabling me.

Avery DiAngelo [the protagonist of Fearleading Squad] will stop wearing black when they invent a darker colour. She'll tell you she never had an animal phase as a kid. Her best friend Courtney, who remembers her porcelain unicorn collection, would beg to differ.

Tiffany Bright [the antagonist of Fearleading Squad] is never seen not wearing something bright red. One can extrapolate that it's her favourite colour. She was a fanatical horse girl until [redacted] [redacted] [redacted].

Riley Loomis (Riley Jones is presumed dead) [from Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks] wouldn't say that she has a favourite colour. But she's spent enough time around heavy-handed slasher symbolism to be deeply wary of anything red. She's not much of an animal person, although she did used to feed the stray orange tabby cat who lived under her and her mother's trailer until it disappeared one winter.

And Ben Adams [also from Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks] has never spent much time contemplating his favourite colour. He also never really had an animal phase, although there were a brief few months in elementary school when he was obsessed with tigers, before moving on to dinosaurs.

[marypsue]

On an entirely unrelated note, I am now a chapter deep into Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks, and I'm excited about other people getting to meet these characters.

[marypsue]

Just realised that the fake sorority name I made up for Girls, Ghosts, and Meathooks has the initials S-T-D and I didn't even do it on purpose.

[marypsue]

@scribefindegil said:

What's the story idea Mary?

Thank you for enabling me, Scribe.

So I started out with "I need Jade Daniels from My Heart Is A Chainsaw and Eddie Munson from Stranger Things to meet and be friends, I don't care if there's forty years between them and only one of them is alive". And some absolutely incredible human being who I appreciate immeasurably (that sounds sarcastic in text but it's entirely sincere) left a comment about imagining a whole 'verse where they go around together, a girl and a ghost, stopping slasher movie happenings in a monster-of-the-week format.

This was an excellent idea and I can picture it really clearly as an animated Scooby-Doo Mystery Inc.-style show but just, like, exponentially gorier. Unfortunately my animation skills are nonexistent. Fortunately, my writing skills are not.

So. With the serial numbers filed down-to-off, it's a story about a girl and a ghost, a lightly-traumatised horror movie buff and a metalhead who is quite literally stuck in the 80s (when he was murdered). Two misunderstood loners who both saw slasher-movie happenings going on in their hometowns, tried to stop it, and ended up just getting pinned with the blame. Neither of them have learned anything from this experience, and both of them are determined to keep anybody else from ending up in their position. The fact that most people can only see one of them, and the other one can only communicate in EVPs, radio noise, and electric guitar sounds, are only minor obstacles.

A more major obstacle is the fact that their latest case isn't going according to script. They've managed to track down a likely candidate for final girl and done their best to prep her, but something about this round of murders is hitting just a little too close to home for comfort. All this time, the girl and the ghost have been assuming that they were both just unlucky, that the only connection between their situations was how things played out for themselves. But now it's starting to look like there's something bigger going on. That something is behind, not just this slasher, not just the slashers that made the girl a wanted woman and the ghost a ghost, but every slasher-movie scenario they've interrupted or thwarted or smothered in the cradle (or barely escaped from without managing to save anyone else). That something more powerful and more intelligent and more alive than either of them ever bargained for is out there, making sure that the slasher-movie story plays itself out, over, and over, and over, again.

And like, whatever that something is, it might just be in love with the concept of a final girl. And like this final girl might just love it back. Or just love having it in love with her. Either way, she's feeding it.

So now the girl and the ghost have to find a way to kill an entire narrative structure, and also a girl who is destined by the narrative to survive, without actually becoming the slasher-movie villains they were cast as to begin with. After all, 'misunderstood loner, persecuted to death for crimes they were blamed for due to prejudice' is a classic slasher backstory...

Do I need another story idea? No.

Do I have another story idea? Oh fuck yes.