#water filtration bag

[visionfilter]

StainlessSteel Water Filter Bag

"Discover the power of pure water with our Stainless Steel Water Filtration Bag on Tumblr. Engineered for excellence, it efficiently filters impurities, delivering crystal-clear results every time. Embrace sustainability and health with our premium water filtration solution. #StainlessSteelWaterFilter #PureWater #SustainableLiving"

[poojagblog-blog]

The global Industrial Filtration Market is expected to reach USD 47.1billion by 2029 from USD 37.1 billion in 2024 at a CAGR of 4.9% during the forecast period according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™. The rigorous environmental regulations imposed by governments worldwide require industries to adopt filtration solutions to mitigate pollution and ensure compliance. This regulatory pressure creates a universal demand for filtration technologies across various sectors.

[mageofminge]

do you guys ever have nightmares about getting a fish tank only for the fish to die within the day you get it due to some really horrible and also easy to avoid errors?

[hikercarl]

Best Lightweight Hiking Gear for Long-Distance Trails

Discover our top picks for lightweight hiking gear that'll make your long-distance trail adventures a breeze. Pack smart, travel light, and enjoy the journey!

Long-distance hikes and backpacking trips need special gear to be comfortable and fun. This article will show you the best lightweight hiking equipment. We’ll cover backpacks, shelters, cooking essentials, and clothing to help you pack light. Whether you’re tackling the Appalachian Trail or exploring the Rocky Mountains, we’ve got you covered. Our top picks for lightweight backpacking gear will…

[aquasnails]

Lubao Bags: Enhance Your Shrimp Tank with Nature's Filtration

🦐 Discover Lubao Bags: The Ultimate Solution for Pristine Shrimp Tanks! 🌿 Enhance water quality, promote shrimp health, and create an aquatic paradise. Dive in now! #ShrimpTank #NaturalFiltration 🌊

Maintaining optimal water conditions in a shrimp tank is crucial for the health and well-being of these delicate creatures. While traditional filtration systems have their merits, nature often provides the most effective solutions. Enter Lubao Bags – an innovative concept that harnesses the power of natural filtration to create an ideal environment for your shrimp. In this article, we will…

[rottenpumpkin13]

all the soldiers plus cloud get stuck on the soldier floor because the elevator breaks how does everyone react

Sephiroth: Calm, cool, collected, the picture of professional composure. Can he do anything about the situation? No. Will freaking out solve anything? Also no. He's sitting cross-legged on the floor, meditating, reaching a state of transcendent peace, all is well. The chaos around him might as well be happening in another dimension.

Sephiroth, after discovering that Professor Hojo is also on the 49th floor: Attempting to use the window as an escape route while Lazard and Angeal hold him back, calculating the probability of surviving a 49-story fall versus spending one more minute in the same vicinity as Hojo.

Angeal: Not worried at all. The 49th level has showers, a kitchen, a fully stocked fridge in the break room and enough rations to survive a small apocalypse. He's treating this literal hostage situation like it's a luxury camping retreat. Has apparently been preparing for this exact scenario his entire career, with his office resembling a doomsday prepper's paradise. There's medical kits, pillows, blankets, emergency flares, three different types of water filtration systems, and what appears to be a small herb garden. Has produced his guitar and is insisting everyone share their feelings around his makeshift "campfire" (a desk lamp turned sideways).

Zack: Full blown freakout. He's mildly claustrophobic and the idea of being stuck anywhere sends him into crisis mode. He's banging on the elevator doors screaming "LET ME OUT!" while trying to pry them open. He's holding up posters to the windows with "S.O.S." written in various sizes and colors. Attempting to flag down pigeons as potential messengers. Keeps trying to send morse code with the office lights to passing helicopters, despite it being broad daylight. Had to be physically restrained from attempting to punch through the elevator doors with his "face first" strategy. He's drafting his will and doing stress-induced squats in the corner, and Angeal has to physically hold him down while another SOLDIER assists him with paper bag breathing. Has already gone through the office's entire supply of paper bags.

Genesis: Freaking out like Zack but with 300% more determination. He is a free man, a SOLDIER of destiny, and no mechanical malfunction shall imprison his spirit. He has maps of the ventilation system complete with annotations and escape routes. He's rounded up a group of Seconds who are either brave or just really bad at saying no. He's going to prison break this bitch with style. Last anyone sees Genesis, he's disappearing into the vents like a determined raccoon in a red leather coat.

Genesis, after falling through a weakened section of the ventilation system and crashing through the ceiling panel: Breaks his wrist.

Cloud: He's not even there anymore. He managed to pry open the door to the stairwell an hour ago and is currently in his bunk in the barracks, chilling.

[mochinomnoms]

Silly scenario, but imagine something goes wrong in Alchemy, which results in Riddle getting turned into a fish, specifically a goldfish like a legit goldfish, not a merman. If Floyd were to find out, depending on his mood, he would either laugh or annoyed that his goldfishy quite literally turned into a goldfish. Now imagine Floyd carrying goldfish Riddle around the campus in a small tank. This was funnier in my head, I swear.

I'm so sorry, Riddle, because Floyd has the impulsive decision-making of a 2-year-old who just discovered free will.

He's dropping Riddle into his mouth and just barely registers, “oh wait, I probably shouldn't eat him lol” before spitting him back into the bowl.

If you wanted to take it on a much sweeter, shipping note, this would be a great opportunity for Floyd to show a much softer side to Riddle. I'm assuming that Riddle is still very sentient and aware in this new form, but maybe the others aren't aware of that.

This includes Floyd, for plot purposes of course, as he takes to carrying Riddle in a little baggy. Riddle's not happy, as he's been snatched from Trey and Cater's very dependable hands and is now being jostled around in this stupid eel's hands.

Imagine his surprise when Floyd, upon entering an unfamiliar part of Octavinelle, carefully drops him in a pleasantly cool, refreshing tank. It's a freshwater one, too, which doesn't match the rest of the waters surrounding the dorm. It takes a moment for him to realize that it's probably one of Jade's terrariums, perhaps gifted to Floyd, if the random knick-knacks like a small bouncy ball and a still wrapped lollipop were any indicator.

I suppose he could be fascinated with freshwater marine life, being from the sea. Still, it's much more well-kept than I'd expect from Floyd, of all people.

There's a few other small freshwater fish swimming in the small tank as well. They looked remarkably healthy and lovely, despite being mostly gray and silver. The filtration system looked expensive too, was this all really Floyd's doing?

“Floyd, did you really put Riddle into my tank?” Ah, never mind, this makes more sense. “I thought I told you after the last time, stop added things into my tank. And when did you add that candy?”

Riddle had never heard Jade speak in such an irritated tone, it reminded him of how Cater would speak with his older sisters on the phone. Siblings don't always get along, he supposes.

“Aw it's fine, the little guys love my decorations! And besides,” Floyd leaned down to stare at Riddle with his bi-colored eyes. They looked quite pretty, he'd hate to admit.

“I gotta take care of my Riddle!” Huh, Floyd never, if ever, called him by his actual name. “Sea Turtle and Seabream probably would've kept him in that stupid bag until he turned back. That's no good!”

Riddle watched as Floyd rested his head on his arms, gazing at him with an expression he'd rather not name as Riddle swam around in the water. He had to admit, the water against his scales felt quite nice, Riddle wondered if being in a merform would be the same?

“And I gotta make sure he likes the water, that way he'll agree to move into our home after we get married.”

WHAT

Riddle was glad that he couldn't do more to express himself other than fan and flutter his fins and gills, as he's sure Floyd would rub his sudden embarrassment in his face.

“Please, you have to confess for that to even happen.” Jade scoffed as he reached his hand in to pick out the toys and trash Floyd had left in the tank. “And that's if you get him to not hate your guts.”

“Jaaaaaaade! You're being meeeeean!” Floyd turned back around to wrap his arms around his brother's waist, letting himself become deadweight for Jade to drag as he tried to walk to the trashcan by his desk.

“You can't say nothing! You're in the same boat with your mate!”

“I am most certainly not!” Jade's huff was almost amusing, if not unsettling coming from him. “My darling is just shy, I need to be careful—”

“You're a scared little bitch is what you are.”

Riddle watched as Floyd immediately ran out of the room, Jade following right after him. He thinks he could make out sounds of crashing, but it was muffled from the water and glass. It took all but of a few minutes for a disheveled Floyd with a blood nose to zoom back into the room, nearly smacking against the tank as he fell to his knees.

“Sorry Little Goldfishie, didn't mean to leave ya alone. I'll stay with ya for a while until you turn back into my Riddle. 'Kay?”

Perhaps delusional lovesickness ran in the Leech family. Perhaps Riddle was also a bit delusional, as the fond look in Floyd's eyes didn't completely turn him off.

[pumpsoul-oct123]

The Importance of Preparedness: 10 Essential Items for Your Survival Kit

1. Water and Water Filtration

What to Include:

Water: At least one gallon per person per day for at least three days.

Water Filtration System: Portable water filters or purification tablets to ensure you can make any water source potable.

2. Non-Perishable Food

What to Include:

Canned Goods: Fruits, vegetables, and ready-to-eat meals.

Dry Goods: Rice, pasta, cereals, and protein bars.

Specialty Items: Baby formula, pet food, and items for dietary restrictions.

3. First Aid Kit

What to Include:

Basic Supplies: Bandages, antiseptic wipes, adhesive tape, and scissors.

Medications: Pain relievers, antihistamines, and any prescription medications.

Specialized Tools: Tweezers, a digital thermometer, and a CPR mask.

4. Emergency Lighting and Power

What to Include:

Flashlights and Batteries: LED flashlights with extra batteries.

Solar-Powered Lights: Solar lanterns and portable solar chargers for electronic devices.

Hand-Crank Radio: A multi-function radio that can receive weather updates and charge your phone.

5. Shelter and Warmth

What to Include:

Emergency Blankets: Thermal blankets or sleeping bags.

Tarp and Duct Tape: For creating makeshift shelters.

Warm Clothing: Hats, gloves, and extra layers of clothing.

6. Personal Hygiene Items

What to Include:

Sanitation Supplies: Wet wipes, hand sanitizer, and biodegradable soap.

Toiletries: Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and feminine hygiene products.

Waste Bags: Plastic bags for disposing of waste safely.

7. Important Documents

What to Include:

Identification: Copies of passports, driver’s licenses, and Social Security cards.

Medical Information: Health insurance cards, medical records, and prescriptions.

Financial Information: Bank account details, credit card information, and insurance policies.

8. Tools and Supplies

Why It’s Essential: Having the right tools can make a significant difference in an emergency, allowing you to perform necessary repairs, signal for help, or navigate your surroundings.

What to Include:

Multi-Tool: A versatile tool that includes pliers, a knife, and screwdrivers.

Whistle: For signaling for help.

Maps and Compass: Local maps and a compass for navigation if GPS is unavailable.

9. Communication Devices

What to Include:

Cell Phone and Charger: An extra charger or power bank.

Two-Way Radios: Battery-powered radios for communication if cell service is down.

Emergency Contact List: A written list of important phone numbers.

10. Personal Protection Equipment

What to Include:

Face Masks: N95 respirators or other protective masks.

Gloves: Durable work gloves for handling debris.

Protective Clothing: Long-sleeved shirts and pants to protect against exposure.

[possibilistfanfiction]

What’s in your kit? I have everything i need but just interested in case I’m not as prepared as i should be. I don’t have pets.

i grew up in highkey wildfire country in the rockies so i always make a Too Prepared™️ kit & a lot of it i already have due to climbing/backpacking, i don’t think we actually need anything this robust bc we’d just evac south down the pch if it made it to us BUT if u want to know an overkill list lol:

- all our meds (lol)

- 8 gallons of water (1 gallon/day/person + 2 for our dog) + a water filtration kit

- lots of easy to eat non perishable foods including snacks we genuinely like lol

- change of clothes (i always have a pair of trail running shoes & hiking boots in the car, but that’s the footwear i’d choose + i’d bring camp slippers bc i am ~spoiled~)

- some basic hygiene wipes & a bathroom kit, deodorant, toothpaste tabs & floss

- multipurpose tool (i have a nice swiss army knife guy)

- headlamp & flashlight

- human + pet first aid kit

- contacts / glasses if needed

- fire blanket

- sleeping bag (or warm blanket) in the car

- $200 cash (however much u feel comfortable bringing)

- IDs, important documents (birth certificates, passports, ss cards)

- portable charger + electronics

- i have a garmin watch + sat gps, my dog also has a sat gps tracker on her collar (NO shock function just fyi) - not necessary but if you do have something like that, it’s great to bring

- a bunch of stuff for our dog (food etc)

- extra 5 gal of gas in the car, extra windshield wipers & wiper fluid, jack & spare tire

—> i have a lot of this in a small 22L backpack that just lives in my closet but i would transfer it to a 35L backpacking one & bring the small one along to split a load if needed

some optional but nice stuff:

- walkie talkies

- camp stove (i wouldn’t necessarily bring this along our route now probably but it’s nice to have at home at least if u want to heat up food / water & the power goes out!)

- tbh i would probably at this point bring my climbing rope & a grigri on the .1% chance i needed to rappel lol it would be SICK

- battery power portable dvd player & dvds, books

[poojagblog-blog]

/PRNewswire/ -- Industrial Filtration Market is expected to reach USD 47.1 billion by 2029 from USD 37.1 billion in 2024 at a CAGR of 4.9% during the forecast period according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™.

[joy-haver]

Let’s talk a little bit about hurricanes!

Let’s discuss where the danger lies, individual preparedness, community preparedness, and mutual aid efforts around these storms and their aftermaths.

To start, the thing to remember about hurricanes is this: It’s not one disaster. It’s hundreds of different disasters at once.

Hurricanes have their own massive winds. They also spawn tornadoes. Hurricanes bring storm surges like tsunamis, but they also bring heavy rains, swelled rivers, broken dams. The vectors for flooding are multitudinous.

With any disaster, the danger isn’t always direct. While many people die die in the immediate storm, often the deaths continue to accumulate for months after. This is because people don’t just go on living just because the storm is over. All of us have lives that are dependent on infrastructure. Medical infrastructure, food infrastructure, social infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, electrical infrastructure. When any of these fails it can put strain on the rest. People go hungry, go lonely, their disabilities go untreated, injuries are more likely in the wreckage, they die of infection and disease and suicide because it seems so hopeless. So many become homeless, displaced, losing everything. And often there is nothing in the way of aid.

And bigotry can often exacerbate. white supremacist groups and police become vigilantes, killing those who scavenge the wreckage. Even in milder hurricanes, police violence and violence from store proprietors increases. Disabled people are often pushed out of hospitals to die at home. People are euthanized.

Hurricanes exacerbate the worst parts of the system of domination.

But they also bring out the best in communities and people who believe in caring for one another.

After every hurricane, tens of thousands of volunteers go out in their airboats to save people from the floods. People prepare food, develop water filtration. People open their homes to those who have fled, those who often have lost everything. These volunteer armies of aid workers are from all accross the south east, from many paths of life and from every conceivable part of the political spectrum. On the flat boats of the Cajun Navy, in their supply lines, you will see maga hats standing next to anarchist abolitionists, both concerned primarily with how they will get an old woman both just met her medicine. Months and years after the storm you will see flocks of children flittering like bees around stripped down homes, helping to remove what is tainted and rebuild towards home again, and they will be working aside those same people who helped in the immediate aftermath.

Even when government aid does come in, it is not the government that manages all of it. They pass off many of the resources the mutual aid organizations for distribution.

The environmental cleanup, the saving, the feeding, the rebuilding; the vast majority of the work is done by everyday people. That can include you.

So, What Do We Do?

1. Individual and household preparedness.

The biggest step is preparedness. A pound of cure is nice, but it is better served with an ounce of prevention.

Individual Preparedness begins with risk evaluation.

Ask yourself these questions;

-what is the likelihood of my home flooding? Has it flooded before? How much could it flood if it did? Do I have sand bags or flood walls to prevent minor floodwaters? Do I have roof access in high floodwaters?

-what is my evacuation plan? Do I have friends in a safer area (away from coasts, outside of a flood plane)? Do I have transportation to their? If not, how can I find other people that do?

-how long can I live without power? Do I have life saving medical equipment that needs power? If so, who do I know with a generator?

-how much water do I have stored? What vessels around my house can hold water? (Remember, you can always use less than drinkable water to flush toilets).

-how much non perishable food do I have stored? How would I cook it without electricity? How much cooking fuel do I have access to? How would I continue to cook and wash dishes if I had limited access to water?

-What would keep me going if I lost everything I own? What motivations to live and keep going could I hold onto?

-do I have home insurance? Do I have pictures of the things inside my house stored on the could or a third party location incase I need to make a claim?

-where are my important documents stored? Are they safe incase of a flood, or the house falling down?

-how acclimated am I to the heat? Have I been spending enough time outside? Will a loss of air conditioning make me unable to function? Do I have a plan to get cool if that happens?

2. Community preparedness

Of course, individual preparedness is not enough, nor is it the most efficient. Survival and rebuilding comes from communities working together. So how do we do that?

Let’s talk a bit about skills you can have, and skills you can look for in your community, that might come in handy in a hurricane or post hurricane disaster.

-airboat and pirogue navigation! This is how you save lives. Flat bottom boats you can get people into.

-food storage and preservation. Networking with folks who doing canning, save beans, store large amounts of rice, gather nuts, dehydrate greens and fruits. These folks will often provide much of the food before outside aid arrives, and after it dries up.

-outdoor cooking!

-water purification. This is huge. Clean water is the hardest thing to come by. Having water purification tablets and devices, or knowing how to make your own, can save hundreds of peoples lives.

-cautious eyes. Everyone needs help spotting downed power lines in these environments.

-ham radio enthusiasts. These folks can be the lifeblood of rescue operations, resource distribution, and medical assistance. This is probably the most under utilized skill in disaster response and management

-construction. This is huge. Rebuilding requires many many volunteers. The wonderful thing tho, is you can just show up and learn most of the time.

- cleaning. Mold is a huge problem post hurricane.

-first aid!!!!

-physical strength. Many frail old people need to be carried out.

-a strong sense that flood water is dangerous. This might not seem like a skill. It is. Being willing to instill this sense of fear and respect in others will save lives.

-networking. This is huuuge. Somone has to connect all the rednecks and Cajuns and gays and aid organizations and churches and restaurants and whatever else. None of this works without relationships. Knowing people, building trust ahead of time. Being the person they come to with their resources.

-grant writing. Get that government money into the community.

3. Resource evaluation

Skills to offer your community are very important, but that’s not all we have. We have access to other resources, and if we leverage those right, those too can save lives.

Community preparedness begins with resource evaluation, and needs evaluation.

Here are some resources you might have, and how you can use them.

-a safe home, high off of flood zones. You can be an evacuation destination.

-a generator. You can be the place with power that people flee to to save their medications, or to use medical equipment, or simply to keep from having a heat stroke

-a large pot and propane burner. You can be the person who cooks for masses of displaced people. Or you can let someone else use it and cook.

-flat bottom boats. You can save people, or let others use them to.

-construction equipment and supplies. You can bring these in after a disaster to help.

-access to large buildings with generators. If you are the janitor at the stadium, you can open the gates to that high ground. If you are the secretary of the church, you can unlock the doors of shelter.

-contacts with people in nearby cities who have been through this before, and have their own resources. Hurricanes are terrible, but they don’t hit the whole south at once. We can take turns saving each other

- a pool full of water people can use to flush toilets.

- storage of food.

-space others can store any items listed

-access to lots of sunscreen, insect repellents, and mosquito nets

-access to soap, detergent, toothbrushes, toothpastes, menstrual products, and deodorant. Specifically go for free and clear soaps, dial gold, and dawn. They all have different applications.

-an excess of phone chargers. Phones are lifelines. They are one of the most important things you can have.

-an excess of medicines. Rationing and saving prescriptions might save your life or others.

-first aid equipment

4. need’s assessment.

All of this is great, but to make best use of it, it’s best to know ahead of time where resources will be needed, and who might need the most help.

Begin learning this by focusing on these things.

-do you know the people who live around you? Do you know who’s old and alone, and might need to be checked on in a storm? Do you know who is disabled? Do you know who lives at the bottom of your hill by the flooding creek, and who lives at the top where it’s safest? These questions can save lives!

-do you know who might need help evacuating? If you plan to evacuate, do they know you could take them with you?

-do you know who needs access to generators for life saving equipment?

-do you know who is too poor to afford to be prepared?

-do you know who might need help putting sand bags around their home?

-do you know which mutual aid and charity organizations might need help connecting to local communities?

Thank you for reading!

Stay safe out there, and help as often as you can, while still keeping yourself stable enough to help again later. Right now many homes are flooded in Florida, power is out in Georgia, and a dam broke near Asheville.

Volunteer : https://stability.org/default.aspx

Donate : https://nonprofit.resilia.com/donate/

https://nonprofit.resilia.com/donate/

[palestinegenocide]

Israel blocks entry of vital medical machines and ventilators

CNN has reported that Israeli forces have set up “arbitrary and contradictory criteria” regarding what items are allowed to enter Gaza, blocking the delivery of anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators, and water filtration systems.

“Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits,” the report added.

Since 2007, Israel’s blockade over the Gaza Strip barred Palestinians, at varying periods, from importing products such as cumin, soft drinks, shaving cream, instant coffee, and cookies. Other items include wheelchairs, footballs, lentils, and tomato paste. At the time, Palestinians circumvented these draconian bans through the use of underground tunnels, which were mainly used for commercial purposes.

UN officials and humanitarian organizations have been warning of a famine in the Gaza Strip, enabled by Israeli forces’ siege and shooting at Palestinians gathering near aid trucks, seeking to get a share of the food.

Wafa news agency reported that since Thursday, Israeli forces shot and killed Palestinians waiting for aid to arrive at the Nabulsi roundabout, dong so twice in less than 48 hours, west of Gaza City. At least 117 people were killed and hundreds were injured.

[andmaybegayer]

I'm thinking of getting one of those robot vacuums, but don't know how to start picking the right one. Do you have opinions on the matter? Do you like yours, and if so, what model is it?

I have a Xiaomi S10 EU, which is a midrange model that I think is now discontinued in favour of the S20? Xiaomi does a pretty good job with their designs, my family have various Xiaomi models that all work fine. Roborock is another brand I've heard good things about, and they're an offshoot of Xiaomi and seem to be where a lot of design innovation is so presumably that's a good sign. I assume iRobot is still making Roombas but I've never used a Roomba.

(The craziest new stuff from Roborock includes a robot arm for picking up and moving small objects out of the way? Crazy, you can now teach stabby to thrust!)

A few notes

1) They work best if you can keep your floor clear and generally free of small objects, and obviously don't navigate stairs and steps well. My apartment has very little stuff on the floor, and all my cables and wires are tucked into corners and along skirtings. If your wife has filled your house with chintz you may have a hard time getting a robot around on the floor.

Robovacs love to eat bag straps and shoelaces and charging cords, so if you tend to have those laying around on the floor and don't have the wherewithal to clear them up, you'll probably spend a lot of time untangling things from the brush.

2) They can handle most area rugs, but not all, e.g. it handles my thin cotton living room rug with short tassels without an issue but I have to move my thick kitchen floor mat out of the way or it'll eat the longer, thicker tassels. You can mark areas as no-vacuum zones if this isn't your bag.

3) Definitely spring for one with at least LiDAR, which you can see by the little stick-up lighthouse module on the top that houses the LiDAR module. Without LiDAR the robot has to just bump around semi-randomly to navigate, which is slow and inaccurate. It can build a map but the map is very poor and it barely knows where it is.

With LiDAR it knows exactly where it is, because it knows where it isn't. The very newest and most expensive bots do away with rotary LiDAR and just use forward looking cameras and 3D depth sensors to do VSLAM but if you're going for that price range from a big manufacturer you'll probably be fine. Most companies list their sensors on their site, but they often use weird names so it can be hard to tell.

(see above, with and without a LiDAR tower. Some very new models can retract the LiDAR tower to go under low furniture.)

4) You can cover a lot of house without needing the self-emptying base stations even if you run it regularly, I'd say probably around 200m² in a fairly ordinary dust environment. In my 50m² apartment I run it at least every weekday and empty out the integrated dust container once a week and that's usually fine, and I don't have any particular air filtration running, but I do keep the windows mostly closed when I can.

5) Speaking of maintenance, I don't use the mop feature on mine but it does keep your floors cleaner while requiring more attention to be paid to water levels. I'm actually going to try using mine more now and see how that goes. This is one thing where I think the stations might make sense even for a pretty small apartment. My brother uses the mop feature on his all the time and he likes it.

6) General maintenance: not that much! It'll buzz you on your phone when it thinks a component has hit end of life but so far I don't think anyone is using DRM to force you to use first-party parts or making you throw away things that are working, you can just manually reset the timers, although so far when the warnings do come up I tend to agree that it's time to replace a part.

You have to empty out the dust and change the water, and if it eats something you might spend a few minutes detangling the rotating brushes. The brushes will get knotted with hair and need cleaning every couple weeks to months depending on how much hair and how long it is, but most models come with a little knife tool for cutting the hair. Never tried the models that advertise that they don't get tangled.

7) Bonus nerd shit you probably shouldn't do. If you really do not want your Robovac connecting to the cloud, there's some work on developing self-hosted management servers that you can point a rooted robot at, and of course you can root your vacuum cleaner, because it's just an embedded Linux box on wheels. The open source management server software is called Valetudo.

[kathbunny]

A vague lil apocalypse au for RWD I'm gonna do a bit of for fun! This isn't my body horror/Eldtrich apocalypse from Discord, but it might get some elements of it if I decide it's fun.

This just establishes what everyone is up to!

Future parts will not be under the main two rwd tags like with my other writings to avoid flooding the tags!

CW: dead body, blood, injury

Kyana had made it to the top of the office building! Her cloth mask was starting to get uncomfortable from sweat and from panting, but she had still made it higher than she had on any other building. She felt pretty lucky to be finding one where the way up to the roof was so intact.

There was also quite a bit on the roof. Primarily, what looked to be a wrecked homemade water filtration system with a skeleton half hung over it, surrounded by planter boxes with already dead plants. Creepy! Kyana deemed to just walk quickly to the other side of the roof.

The sun was almost all the way down, and soon the sickly colored sky would become that beautiful dark blue and be full of more stars than she could ever count.

-

VR-LA stumbled across the sands, doing his best to rip the fabric of his scarf to make bandages without stopping. He frantically wrapped the wound on his chest with it, his heartbeat in his ears as he saw how much blood he had already lost. Once it dried, his shirt would be stuck to his skin, likely his pants too.

He stumbled slightly, vision blurring and making his almost lose hold of his attempted wrappings. He kept trying and kept moving, even as he tripped or felt his head start to pound with pain.

-

Dani dragged her tool box off the shelf, awkwardly adjusting her gloves as she tucked it under her arm. Her boots thunked against the concrete ground of Oto's definitely-not-stolen bunker as she walked to the exit, forcing the doors to open despite the rust as she went to fix the old rain water collection system yet again.

It was oddly cold, despite how bright the sun seemed in the pale blueish green of the sky. It almost tempted Dani back into the bunker to retrieve her coat, but she resisted as she thought about the lecture it'd surely get her for opening and closing the door so much. She walked through the sand towards their rain collectors, immediately recognizing the problem the second she was facing them.

There was a man face flat in a fallen barrel, actively bleeding, and also a lot of sand in the tarps. The sand would be very annoying when she got to it later.

-

Finbar finished braiding Elyse's hair, opening his mouth to tell her only to stop as he realized she had fallen asleep against him, her bowl still in her lap. He gently took the bowl from her, setting it down by the fire and taking her into his arms. Coriander followed after them, ignoring the bowl despite the food scraps.

He brought her to their tent, placing her within on her sleeping bag. He slowly removed her boots so they wouldn't make her uncomfortable, and then removed her jacket so the zipper wouldn't press into her skin when she inevitably rolled onto her stomach as she slept. He unzipped the sleeping bag to put her inside carefully, zipping it back in.

Coriander sat next to her, as vigilant of a guard as any good girl could be. Finbar gave her a few pats, leaving her in the tent with Elyse to go clean their campsite before he joined them.

-

Vhas wadded through the river slowly, trying not to disturb the fish too much as he got slowly closer to where a few were eating, a smirk on his face. He stood still once he was close enough, letting the majority that had darted away in response start to return.

He had his eyes on the biggest fish, knowing all the meals it'd give him and all the useful bones it had. He readied his hands, watching as it slowly returned to resume eating. He waited longer after that, letting himself become just another weird thing in the water to the fish.

And he grabbed the fish! It trashed, but Vhas thinks he got a pretty good hold on- and it immediately slipped out of his hands. Vhas frantically tried to grab it again, accidentally smacking it back up into the air. During its second attempt at returning from the air to the water, it lands on Vhas's face, sending him falling backwards and it back into the river to dart away to safety.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Canadian Miracle

"The Canadian Miracle" is a short story published today by @tordotcom; it's set in the world of The Lost Cause, my forthcoming @torbooks novel.

I'm serializing it on my podcast! Here's part one.

Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.

— Fred Rogers (1986)

It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud.

— Bing Crosby (1927)

I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration.

Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future.

I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the backs of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain.

“I’m Alisha,” I said.

“Elnora,” she said. She was taller than me and had to bend a little to whisper in my ear. “You take care of yourself, okay? You go out there trying to help everyone who needs it, you’re going to need help, too. I’ve seen it.”

“I’ve seen it, too,” I said. “Thank you. I hope you don’t mind if I give you the same advice.”

She made a comical angry face and then smiled. She looked exhausted. “That’s all right, I probably need to hear it.”

My fellow Blue Helmets had been squeezing past us, trudging down the staircase with their own bags. I shouldered mine and joined them. Elnora waved at me as I left, then bent to her next patient.

I stepped out into the wet, heavy air of the Mississippi afternoon, the languid breeze scented with sewage, rot, and smoke. My clothes were immediately saturated with water sucked out of the ambient humidity, and I could feel myself pitting out. Squinting, fumbling for my sunglasses, it took me a moment to spot the group of angry men standing by the hospital entrance. Red hats, open-carry AR-15s. It was the local Maga Club. On closer inspection, a few of them were women, and while they skewed older, there was a smattering of young adults, and, heartbreakingly, a good number of small kids, holding signs demanding foreign agitators out of mississippi!

Bekka, a Cree woman from Saskatchewan who’d been my seat buddy on the helicopter ride, leaned in. “Straight outta central casting.”

At first, I thought she was right. Weather-beaten, white, unhealthy in that way poor Americans are, lacking access to basic preventative care. They looked so angry. Plus, the guns. But there was something else there, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until I spotted a sign being held aloft by a heavyset, middle-aged guy with wraparound shades and a sweat-sheened face: our lives matter too.

I knew he meant it in a gross way, but I couldn’t argue with it.

Read the rest on Tor.com, or listen to it on my podcast!

[duffyyy911]

𝙰 𝙻𝚒𝚗𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝙱𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚔: 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛 3 - 𝙼𝚞𝚛𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚝

Summary: Instead of sleeping like a normal person, the detective decides to go to the Sump and then hang out with a homeless man. Content Warnings: Physical violence. Mentions of alcohol. Mentions of smoking. If he existed in League, I'd blame Ronald Reagan. Word Count: 7.6k Author's Notes: Finally at chapter 3. I know this is a reader x Lest fic, so sorry we had to do without for today and it almost killed me. Here's your plot contrivance chapter lmfao. Proofread by: @madschiavelique @6selkie

Masterlist: Here

Even if it weren’t the middle of the night on the surface, the lowest levels of the Sump would still be shrouded in pitch blackness. No amount of sunlight could reach this far down, past the levels of Zaun and its crumbling infrastructure all the way to the bottom levels that collected Zaun’s runoff. What was once another district, far gone and far forgotten, had been reduced to the shattered ruins of bygone prosperity. Just a chasm of collapsed buildings that toppled down the face of the fissure and interweaving between each other, arching over your head like predatory teeth. You could barely see more than ten feet in front of you, even with the bright mining lamp you had picked up in the boundary markets before you made the descent. Heaps of cans, bags of trash, glass dust, faded shells of tools and machinery crumpled under your boots as you scaled through the mass. 

You felt like you were wading through a river of lost time and ill begotten memories. Like the remnants of an entire century lay in dormant sleep under your feet. The dripping echoes of running water bounced around the walls of the fissure, trickling down and pooling between the masses of junk. Sometimes on the higher levels of the fissures, the rain pouring from the topside would find its way down and trickle through cracks in the roofs of homes or spill in and pool up in the markets. But down here, the rain never made it. The sound of running water was a collection of runoff and liquids trapped beneath the surface, never having the sunlight to evaporate. Nothing lived down here, not even the rats.

Along with your hand lamp, you had scored a shoddy filtration mask. It was bulky, its filtration ports were unnaturally heavy around your mouth and the strain in your neck from keeping your head upright was starting to wear on you. The thin visor that ran up from the mouthpiece and over your face fogged up in the hot condensation of the deep. You hated wearing the thing, but you weren’t about to get any number of the diseases or poisoning one could find by breathing in the Gray down here. You wiped away the droplets of condensation from the mask, your filthy fingers smearing wet grime against the flexible plastic. 

You scanned your lamp around to what was in front of you, but all you could see was more heaps of junk and shells of collapsed buildings. You inched forward, your light shining against the knob of a door still in its frame. From what you could see, it was an entire segment of a wall that had fallen down the chasm and tore itself from its structure, wedging itself between rock. You gripped the knob and gave it a twist, pushing against the doors mangled hinges until it gave way and opened up. You almost fell right through and tumbled into another pile of refuse, but you caught yourself by hanging onto the knob. You looked up, finding yourself before a wider opening in the depths where the faint light of the upper slums shone down into the dark and illuminated the area like an imitation of moonlight. 

You could see the outline of the factory Aquil had told you about. An industrial behemoth of a structure built tall against the rock, like it had always been there and had just been waiting for you. From what you could visualize in the dim light, it looked as if a rockslide broke free of the fissure and caved in on part of the tall squarish structure, crushing brick and stone and collapsing the back half of the building. You felt another crunch beneath your foot, and you looked down to see the shards of glass and filament of a lightbulb beneath the tread of your boot. This had to be the factory where the meeting was going to take place, there were no other options. It felt like the complex was the only thing left standing at the bottom, like it was trapped in time.

You trod past the crumple remnants of a chain link fence surrounding the building, taking careful steps not to skewer your foot on mangled wire. You approached the heavy doors of the entrance to the structure, taking a moment to look up at the partially standing smoke stacks towering above your head from over the roof. This was the place. It was almost midnight, five minutes if your watch was correct when you checked it. You wanted to light a cigarette while you waited, you were desperate for a smoke. But there was no way you were taking this mask off. Not for a million dollars.

“Psst.” You hear a faint muffled voice echo out from the dark around you, like the hiss of a piston. You spun about, flaring your lamp’s light wildly from the fright.

“Come out.” You commanded with a robotic voice, the filters of your mask crackling as your breath passed through. You flashed the lamp light at a pyramid of huge iron spools standing in a stack far to your right. The light illuminated strands of dirty blond hair and reflected off the glass of another mask. Someone was hiding behind the crates, and doing a very poor job at that. “Don’t make me walk to you.” You warned again.

The familiar thin frame and blue jumpsuited body of Aquil slowly rose up from his hiding spot. You couldn’t see his face from behind his banged up gas mask, but you took the notion that he looked just as much of a little rat man as he did when you interrogated him. He slowly raised his hands up, taking careful steps as he approached you. “Don’t shoot, man.” He asked in a hushed tone. “I got the machine, it’s inside. You’re early, man.”

“It’s none of your concern how early I am.” You aimed the light to the ground and away from his face. “And why’d you put it inside already? Are you setting me up?” You took a stride towards him, grabbing your dusty hands around the lip of his collar.

“No, no, man! It’s like heavy and shit, man. I couldn’t just keep holding it out here,” Aquil begged, cowering as he wormed in your grip. “No tricks, I swear man!”

“How is this going down then?” You let him go slowly, almost dropping him to the ground as you did. “Are they expecting just you? Or should I just follow you in.” You looked to the front set of doors to the factory, still and motionless in the ages it has spent down here.

“No, man, they’re expecting just me. They see you, and they won’t even show up.” Aquil rubbed his hands together a bit, very rodent-like as you had made note of before. “There’s old vents in this place, man. Like some kind of hvac that’s been gutted or something. It’s real wide in there, you could just crawl in.”

“Yeah, so I can trip the wire to a grenade trap, right?”

“Where the hell would I even get a grenade, man!” Aquil stammered. He was telling the truth from what you could tell. You must have really scared him enough to pull this off, because the little rat looked like he was about to piss himself. You let out a slow sigh, looking back to the rusted doors.

“Fine. Just do the trade. And remember, I’ll be watching you.”

You walked through the empty and dark halls of the factory, its insides barren and gutted from decades of scavs passing through. You glide your fingers across the rough surface of the degraded walls, the stone and concrete slowly breaking down after decades of ruination. Nothing remained besides the machinery too heavy to lift and anything that was too useless to steal. Sopping wet sheets of paper sprawled across the teal tile flooring, the remnants of ransacked offices and disregarded ledgers. The first doorway you found in the long, dark hall was left open, its door taken off and away some time ago. You walked into a bare square room, shining your light around the darkened place carefully. 

The entire room was gutted like the rest of the factory, but an overturned desk hid itself away in the corner. On the wall above it, just a bit over halfway up, you saw a grate to what you could only assume was the ventilation system. You stood up on the old desk carefully, and shined your light down it. Aquil was telling the truth and that the shafts were wider than usual, not huge but spacious enough to just barely fit an adult body. You could definitely slip in, but where you’d go was another matter. You reckoned if you took two right turns and then a left, and so long as you were going up in elevation, you’d end up just above the factory floor. There was only the front half of the building left after the remnants of the rockslide you saw earlier, so if you took a wrong turn you’d eventually end up outside again anyway. 

You pulled off the vent cover, then wormed your way into the vents, dragging yourself up bit by bit until you had entered into the tunnel fully. If the outside of the factory was filthy, the inside of these vents were downright disgusting. You felt like you were crawling through an ocean of dust and ash, your mind begged for a shower that was nowhere in sight. You were pretty sure you just brushed past the corpse of some small animal, but you weren’t about to back up and check either. You had to see this through, it was your only lead, and if this fell out, then you were back to square one. You eventually crawled up a slope in the shafts, rising in elevation before the tunnel leveled out again. You came to a stop before another ventilation grate beneath you, and you made your camp there.

The factory floor was as dark as the rest of the place, but your time in the low light shifted your sight and you could make out the faint outlines of objects. Conveyor lines, the large fitting machines, soggy cardboard boxes of half-built light bulbs spilling off the lines and across the smooth stone floor. And there was the machine, the one Aquil had said he was building. You couldn’t make out its features, just its outline, rectangular with a wide heavy base and the shape of some kind of tubes or piping sticking out its top like the silhouette of a cathedra. You got glimpses of it as you watched Aquil nervously amble about the floor and shine his flashlight around. You waited for a moment in silence, your only company being the hiss of the filters. After a while that seemed like hours on end, the sounds of rusted doors opening echoed through the hollow factory one after another. Aquil spun about nervously, but eventually turned to face the back entrance of the floor. 

Two men, unidentifiable in feature in the dark, moseyed in through the open archway at the back of the floor, one that seemed like it went back out into the Sump. You couldn’t see their faces at all, just the shape of their frames and their heights. One was a very tall figure, lean but not skinny. He barely made noise as he walked about, pacing around the perimeter of the factory floor. Like he could sneak up on anybody at any time. The other was larger in frame, and you weren’t sure if he was well built or heavy, but you could hear that one walk from a mile away. He waddled with a weird tilt when he walked, like one of his legs was bummed. He rasped like an old accordion through his mask, like he was constantly out of breath and could never catch it. These two were the ones picking up the machine, and if you could find out where they came from then you could follow the paper trail.

“The machine’s here, man.” Aquil patted the outline of the device he had constructed with a nervous shake. “Followed the instructions to a T, man. It’s all accounted for, I even tested it.”

“Very good.” The heavier man coughed out. His voice was muffled and crackled in the filters, but he had a strange accent. The kind of thick accent you could find from the people living in the lower slums of the fissures. His voice was deep, not naturally but more as if his throat was scarred. “Where’s the sample, then?” He looked about.

“I.. Uh.” Aquil stammered. He didn’t have the sample because you had it. You held your breath, piercing daggers into the back of Aquils head as you watched him without blinking. He better not sell you out. “I don’t have it anymore, man.”

“What? You took it all?”

“Uh. Yeah, man. Sorry, shit was tempting.”

The heavier man said nothing in return besides the rasping of his mask, looking about at the darkness inside the factory floor. He looked at the taller man, who turned back to him and nodded. The taller man walked forward and picked up the device with relative ease, like it barely weighed anything at all. 

“Your help is appreciated. But you won’t be paid because of that.” The heavy man rasped out.

“But!” Aquil squeaked, then paused when it looked like the man had given him a glare. “No, that’s like fine and shit, man. Take it.” He backed off. Aquil watched the men take the machine in silence as they went back through the passage they entered through. It would have been as simple as that, you were planning to interrogate Aquil about who they were once they left. But he just had to open his big mouth. “Tell Lenare she’s like welcome and shit, man. It was hard to make.”

The men stopped in place, like they froze when they heard that name. They looked at each other for a brief moment, silently communicating. The taller man holding the machine stepped forward into the shadow, though you heard no footsteps of him walking away. The heavier set man turned about and approached Aquil once more. “Where’d you learn that name?” He wheezed. “How do you know Lenare?”

“The prints, man. The way I built it, it looked like it plugged into one of them golems and shit. I figured it was Lenare who wanted this built, man. It was no problem.” Aquil stammered out.

The heavy man looked at him in pure silence, like he was mulling something over. The man began to reach behind his back and to his beltline as Aquil kept stuttering on.

“I mean. Like it’s smart and stuff, man. Like it’s really ingenious, I would be willing to work on it-”

The shot rang out like the crack of a whip, bouncing off the thick walls of the factory and rumbling through the thin sheet metal of the ventilation system. You blinked, processing what had just transpired. The man had taken out a pistol and put a bullet right into Aquils head. The pittering sound of blood splat against the concrete before his body even dropped. You felt a bad taste in your mouth, a tangy metallic hue like you had swallowed a coin. Aquil’s body crumpled to the floor with a heavy thud like a ragdoll, his genius being reduced to nothing but a gaping hole and a fine red mist. You felt your stomach churn as your mind caught up with what you witnessed. You felt like you were going to puke in your mask, and you struggled to keep it down so you didn’t have to take it off and breathe in the Gray. 

“You should have shut up.” The man put his pistol back into his beltline, taking a moment to stare at Aquil’s still body laid out on the ground.

“Come on, we don’t have the time to do this shit!” The taller man called back through the door. He had a far fairer voice, like the accent of an upper city dweller that had faded after years away from home.

“Sorry, my finger must have slipped.” The heavier man called back and hurried to join his partner at the door. “We’re still meeting up at the same location?”

“Yeah, same place.”

“Let’s drop it off and head somewhere fun. I’ve had enough of dealing with this for today.” The heavier man began to leave, leaving your line of sight through the entrance. “I need a drink.”

“Man, they couldn’t pull you off black cat with a pry bar you sick fuck.” The taller man laughed deeply as they exited.

The still silence of the bottom of the slump returned. Nothing but quiet and the ring of the shot echoed in your ears as you watched from your hovel in the vent. You weren’t sure how to react. You’ve seen people die before, anybody growing up in the underground has. It was just a way of life. You could count the times you saw chem gang members shooting each other up on the district blocks with both hands. But you haven’t seen something like that. That was cold. Instantaneous. The man shot Aquil like he was screwing off a lid to a bottle just to get to the water. Like it was just a thing he did and he didn’t think anything about it. You hissed out a silent sob, just one. Your nose ran a bit and you could feel the faint emerging of tears from the corners of your eyes. You took a wounded, jagged breath in, pushing the feelings down until they went away completely. You steeled yourself, closing your heart off to it. You didn’t even know Aquil. Hell, you didn’t even like him. But to be shot like that? Left here? You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. You couldn’t even take his body. You wondered if he had family. Yet, you could do nothing to reconcile any of this. You just had to go.

You had no lead anymore. This whole plan had been botched far worse than you were expecting. You almost wished Aquil had ratted you out, then you could have at least made a quick escape and he would have fled. But you didn’t. You just watched. You took a moment to wipe the condensation from your mask again. You weren’t even sure what to report back with. The man had mentioned getting a drink, and a black cat. You wracked your brain for any kind of answer to what he was talking about. A drink. A black cat. There was a bar up on the Entresol level called the Black Cat. It was a joint frequented by chem gangs. You had to salvage this. You had to find that lead. You weren’t going home until you did.

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It had taken you hours to climb out of the Sump. It was hard walking back to the upper levels, your legs felt so weak that you could have collapsed on any step. That ill feeling at the bottom of your stomach never left, like you had swallowed a bag of stones. Even now, while sitting on a damp bench in the Blacklanes, your hands couldn’t stop shaking. Your fingers trembled as you brought up your lit cigarette and inhaled deeply from it. You held the intake, feeling the smoke stirring in your lungs before you exhaled it all steadily through your nose. You looked around the dark lane running between the tall Commercia Hall buildings from your spot near some makeshift stalls in the market square. Your eyes felt stiff from minutes on end staring at the ground, lost in thought. You couldn’t peel your thoughts away from what happened. The sound. The taste. Watching a body fall like that. You’ve seen too much harshness in the underground, you’ve suffered through just as much. But not something like that.

You watched the ripples in your styrofoam cup of cheap coffee as you tried to keep a steady hand to take another sip. No matter how much you washed your mouth out with the bitter black drink you couldn’t remove that metallic taste. It just wouldn’t leave you, like it was atomically flashed onto your tongue. You dumped the cup out on the ground beside you, the splattering of the coffee only reminding you of what you saw. You looked back to the torch and filter mask laying on the table you sat upon. You decided it was best if you just left them there, somebody else would swipe them by dawn and take them to sell. You got up, dusting the vent grime off your faded jeans only to notice more had transferred onto your filth covered hands. You began walking down the empty lane of the Boundary market, passing by the doors to the steel shack commercial halls that were locked up tight for the night. The street was purely empty, not a soul in sight besides yourself, and you planned to keep it that way.

You noticed a small faucet sticking out of the wall by one of the doors to the halls, a water pipe for merchants to draw from. You took a moment to kneel down and twist the stiff faucet valve. Ice cold water came rushing out onto the stone pathway, splashing your bent knee. You quickly scrubbed your hands thoroughly, as if washing off the grime would somehow make you clean again. You couldn’t forget, though. You hadn’t given yourself time to even think about it, not by a long shot. You cupped your hands to collect some of the icy water before raising it to your face to wash it too. The chill on your skin mixing with half of the cup of coffee you had just poured out kept you wired in the early morning. 

As you were twisting off the valve, you heard the scuffle of many shoes scrape against the rough pathway stone. You looked about, then down the lane in the direction you were heading in. A small gang of hooded ruffians were making their way towards a display window for one of the many halls. One took a brick from the street and tossed it through the glass, shattering it. The rest were quick to hop in through the now open space and start looting what was out on display. It was a strange sight to you, like watching termites eat away wood at lighting speed. They came as quick as they left, fleeing away from your direction with armfuls of mechanical junk and novelty devices. Like rats scattering from a pantry with their latest hauls. You dried off your hands with a series of flicks, then stuffed them into your jean pockets to warm back up. You slowly approached the storefront curiously, minding the huge jagged sheets of shattered glass as you looked in through the store window. 

Not much was left from the shop, but the few things left behind gave you an impression it was a store for novelty gear-wound devices. A few wind up cymbal monkey toys lay in a row, toppled like dominoes. A cube like object held another shard of glass up, a common puzzle toy that you remembered from your childhood. In the center amongst the pulverised shards, a gun-like tool had been crushed by one of the delinquents when they hopped up. You picked it up, inspecting the thing. It was an entirely cylindrical device, save for the handle and trigger, made of what was most likely brass. You carefully looked down the wide circular barrel, spying the sheen of what looked to be a barbed hook. Was this some kind of grappling gun or something, you wondered? You took aim with it, pointing it at the unscathed display window directly adjacent from the looted one. You pulled the trigger slowly, but the gun refused to fire, only clicking dryly. You considered tossing it back in the wreckage, but a little idea that you should hang onto it wormed its way into your brain, and you did so by stuffing it under your beltline. You flared your shirt a bit, covering the handle up so nobody would notice you had it at first glance.

You continued your walk down the lane before the path split into a cross intersection. To your right, a large road opened up to a chain of equally packed storefronts. All the lights were off, retaining the stillness of the night. Save for one, whose foggy glow pushed through green stained glass and cast faint rays onto the street. A low hanging sign was perched above the door in the shape of a walking stylized cat painted black. This was the bar. You took a moment to cut your nerves, shaking your head rapidly to get back into a train of thought. You were out of leads, but you weren’t going to accept that. If those men said they were going to the black cat, then this was the only place they had to be. And if they went here, then one of the patrons surely would be able to identify them. Hell, you couldn’t even identify them with it being so dark in that factory. But you knew the way they talked, the way they walked. That was enough for you, you could bullshit the rest just like everything you did when you were in way over your head.

You opened the door of the bar, heading in with a steady head. The cold night air in the underground began to mix with a stuffy warmness flowing out of the quiet room. You could hear the hum off a small heater as you squinted your eyes to adjust to the orange brightness of the interior. The hum was accompanied by faint music, a sappy slow dance song played quietly from the speakers hooked to the corners of the room. You shut the door behind you carefully and took a silent look around the room. It was as usual as most dive bars you’ve frequented. Unfinished wood board floors, open space with a high ceiling. An overly decorated bar with an absolutely bored tender behind it flipping through a magazine as he leaned against the sill. Booths chaining along the walls with vagrants face first into the tables, fast asleep. Two men played pool at the table to the far side of the room, you standing between the bar and them as they gave you shifty looks before going back to their game. The one thing you noticed between everyone you could see is that they all wore the same type of leather jacket sporting a blue armband. These were chem gang members, that was no doubt. You stepped carefully across the bar floor and approached the sill, walking past an older looking man sitting on one of the stools. He didn’t wear any of the insignia the others were wearing, just a raggedy parka jacket. He had to be over six and a half feet tall from the way he hunched over as he sipped from a low glass. Yet he gave you no glance or look as you passed him by to the sill.

“What do you want?” The scruffy bartender asked your order in a monotone voice as he flipped another page in his magazine lazily, not even glancing up at you. 

“Uh.” You blinked as your thoughts trailed back into numbness. “Just whiskey, I guess.” You pulled yourself back from distraction, then leaned up against the sill of the bar. 

The tender straightened up, then pulled a dusty bottle of brown whiskey from the shelf behind him. He was obviously giving you the cheap stuff without asking, which means he’ll probably charge you the price of something better. You didn’t care, though. The last thing you needed to worry about right now was money. That was a first.

You watched him slowly pour your drink into a short glass. As he passed it over, you leaned in close to ask him something. “Hey.” You cleared your throat, then gave a glance back to the men playing pool behind you. “I heard that someone here knows where to score some Jitter.”

The bartender blinked passively at you without even a flex in his expression. He passed the glass slowly over to you as its bottom dragged against the dry wood of the bar. “I think you’re mistaken.” A sadistic smirk crossed his lips, complementing the tenders' deep sleep deprived eyes. If he was charging you extra just for a drink, then he most definitely wasn’t about to tell you anything useful. “Just drink your drink, buddy.”

“No, seriously.” You leaned in further. You took the glass in your hand and quickly downed the whiskey, ignoring the burn without any problem because of your wracked nerves. “Look, I’m not a mark or anything. Just help a guy out, y’know?”

“Go back across the river, Piltie.” One of the men playing pool called to you as he eavesdropped in on your conversation. He was tall, but lanky. A Chirean punk with shortish black hair. His buddy was just as shifty looking as he was, who was snickering away as he putted the cue ball.

You look at him from over your shoulder, giving him a disgusted sneer like the fact he even spoke to you was a crime. It was becoming apparent that all three believed you were an enforcer or at least a small-time beat cop. “Look, man. Just help me out? It’s kind of urgent.” You fibbed as you turned back to the bartender. You didn’t pull off the desperate junkie look, but your next plan was to flash some actual cash that could change his tune.

“Just go home.” The bartender rolled his eyes, turning back to put the bottle back on the shelf.

“I just-” You paused your sentence when you felt the tight grip of a hand on your shoulder pull you back and spin you around. The man heckling you from before had gotten straight in your face, grabbing you by the lapel of your jacket as he pressed your back into the smooth lip of the bar sill. You could smell the cheap beer on his breath, and the faint stain of too many cigarillos wafting from his dirty jacket.

“Daz. No.” The tender pointed at him without much effort to break the confrontation up. “Not in my bar, take it outside.”

“You fucking enforcers come in here thinking you can just walk in and say ‘one drug please’ and just get handed it? Fuck off back across the river, pony boy.” He looked at you, then to the tender as he kept a hold of you. “Are you just going to let trash like this walk in here?”

You could handle being called any name in the book. But being mistaken for someone from Piltover? That would not fly, no, not for a second. “I’m not a goddamn Piltie, get out of my face before you regret it.” Your hands wrapped around the wrist of Daz, slowly but surely forcing him to let you go as you struggled against his strength. 

“Fuck you.” He practically spat in your face, reaffirming his grip on your collar. You glanced at his buddy, who was sitting back on the edge of the pool table and snickering as he did before. You look between them, then at the bartender, then back to the guy grabbing at you. You really weren’t in the mood for any of this shit and if you knew anything it was to not let some smartmouth think he owns the place. You reel your head back and smash your forehead straight into Daz’s battish nose. You could hear the crunch of what little bone there was breaking as you connected. Daz stumbled back in a daze, letting you go and bringing a hand up to his now bleeding crumpled nose in disbelief.

“I said take it outside!” The bartender barked at both of you, throwing a finger to the door. It was too late for any of that, though. You knew the minute you did what you just did, it’ll be all over in a flash. One move was all you got, maybe two, but it had to be quick.

Daz closed his bloody fingers into a fist and reeled back for a swing at you. You ducked under the right hook in one smooth motion as his fist just barely grazed your hair. As you straightened back up, you moved forward to grab him and to throw him to the floor. He brought down his elbow to plant it into your back, so you quickly changed your intention mid-motion and opted for a swift punch into his gut while his guard was up. Daz let out a low heaving wheeze, as the punch had knocked the wind far out of him. He stumbled back, knocking into the large greying man who was sitting quietly on his stool, not even looking at the fight unfold next to him. Daz caught himself on the bar before he fell completely over, and in the process he elbowed the strangers drink and spilled the whole glass. 

“You’re dead!” Daz’s buddy called out to you as he strode towards you from the pool table, wielding a cue like a baseball bat in preparation to wrap it around your head. You looked to Daz, who had just pulled himself back up onto his feet, then to the other guy approaching you. One you could handle, but two? On good days you could hold your own, but you hadn’t the energy to keep up with it tonight. 

Just as Daz surged forward to grapple with you, the large man he had bumped into finally stood up after staying perfectly still. Before Daz could even cross the gap between the both of you, the taller man brought his fist down. In one swing, Daz was suckerpunched straight into the back of his head as he surged forward, knocked clean out. As he collapsed at your feet, his buddy wielding the pool cue stopped in his tracks at the sight. 

Before any of the recent events came a truly ravenous crescendo, the singular ring of gunfire cracked and billowed through the room. You flinched hard, your eyes twitching in reaction but not peeling away from the man in front of you. The larger man whose beer you had spilled before now stood over Daz, who was still reeling on the harsh floorboards. You glanced away from the man wielding the pool cue, who took a few slow steps back as he nervously returned the cue to the table without turning away. Your eyes flicked back to the tender behind the bar, who had took stance and fired a scrappy but intimidating pipe revolver at the ceiling only a moment ago. He glanced at you with a stern furrow in his bushy brow, the tip of his tongue gracing his lips as he decided what to say. From behind you, you could hear the patrons asleep at the booths begin to shift and wake up after the still ringing shot, all giving the bartender the half-present attention that was demanded.

“First off.” He spoke up, raising his voice so even the still half-asleep could hear him. “You.” he pointed to you with the end of his revolver as if it were his finger. “Get the fuck out of my bar, you’re banned. And you.” The barrel flicked to the tall older man who had knocked Daz clean out on the floor. “You’re on thin ice, go home. The rest of you, pay tab. We’re closed.” 

The man didn’t say a word in response, he only took his coat and headed towards the door. You watched your unlikely ally leave, then looked to the friend who was about to jump in. He gave you an equally mean glare back, but you cut the exchange short as you too went for the exit. The tender had just walked around the bar by the time you had reached the door you had walked in through. 

“That’s enough shit flinging from you two. Take him home.” You heard the tender mutter to Daz’s friend as they pulled him to his feet. “The backdoor.”

As you returned to the cool crispness of night in the fissures, you stopped to think for a moment before taking another foot beyond the sidewalk. You shut the loose wood of the old door behind you and you hear the fair click of its latch as your eyes drift down the street, looking for somewhere to nest as you thought. The factory was your only lead. Besides that, it was this jitter stuff that Lest had told you about. With those two options now completely gone, you were beginning to think that this whole adventure had fallen through before the interesting part had even begun. And what were you going to report back with? ‘Oh hey, I know I only had one lead but I saw its brain being blown out the back of its head so I went to a bar but not to drink or anything!’ yeah, that’d really be a great excuse. 

Jitter. If the Jitter was being produced, then the machine Aquil had been working on couldn’t have been the only one. If it was, then it wouldn’t have been distributed this quickly. Aquil mentioned that the machine looked like it connected to something, something he described as ‘golems.’ Then he also mentioned a Lenare, who he may have thought was the one to order something like this. But you have no idea who this Lenare person was either. Yet given all the other information, a workable theory is that whoever this person actually is, had to be a machinist of some kind. You were hoping to find a source to the jitter here, or at least any identification on the man who shot Aquil. Yet fist fighting and then being banned ruled out interrogating any of the men in the booths.

“You’re not even going to offer me a light?” You heard a coarse but hollow-ish voice speak to you from over your shoulder. 

You turned about, snapping from your deep trance in thought and pulling yourself back to the land of the living. Behind you was that man from before, the one whose beer you had spilled by shoving that chem ganger. Your first observation was entirely right, because the guy was definitely over six and a half feet tall. He wore a grey-tan truckers cap, whose logo had cracked and fractured off from what looked like years of wear. It fitted to a scruffy head of dry gray hair that he tied into a shoddy bun at the base of his nape. He wore a frayed wool red-black mackinaw under his jacket and his cigarette hole burned denim jeans were kept up by two thin leather overall straps. Because of how fast the recent events had occurred, you really never stopped to get a proper look at the fellow. He held a long cigarette between his lips as he sparked a cheap lighter that just refused to light.

“What?” You blinked, then looked at his cigarette. “For you? Sorry.” You shake your head with a sheepish smirk as you slinked your hands into your jacket pockets to warm up.

“You know, you make a horrible plainclothes.” The man coughed before putting his bad light back and rooting around in his back pocket for what would assumedly be a second one. “You don’t look like shit enough to pass as a jitter addict, but props for effort.”

“I’m not a-” You paused yourself before explaining something you shouldn’t even have had to explain. “Look, if you want me to pay for your drink it’s a bit too late.” 

“I mean, if you’re offering.” The older man harrumphed, then finally retrieved a second lighter from his pocket before taking a not-so-steady moment to light his cigarette. “I was wondering if you were still looking.”

You paused with confusion, looking up the street then back down it. You wondered if this was just another joke and if it would be best if you just went home instead. “Looking for what?” You feigned ignorance.

“For drugs, idiot!” The man laughed with a wheeze like a muddy whistle. “You really are a shitty enforcer.”

“Why does everyone think I’m a cop!”

“Because your eyes are too shifty! You look around like you’re a little kid trying not to get into trouble. Plus you don’t walk right, and you talk like you have somewhere to be. Chem addicts have nowhere to be, besides taking chems I suppose.”

“Says you.” You scoffed. The stranger didn’t look all too impressive either, to be fair. Though the answer to the question of how to properly define and identify a Zaunite is a difficult one to find in all truthfulness. “You- You..” You stammered, trying to come up with any kind of comeback that went beyond the scope of playground taunting. 

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” You paused again. Who? “Who even are you?”

“Ronk.” The man stated, squinting one eye as he let his cigarette roll to the corner of his wide lippy smile. You could mistake this man for anybody else in the underground, not even identify him in a crowd. This might be exactly who you were looking for. Not somebody with any power or know-how, but somebody on the street long enough to have learned a thing or two. Or even seen a thing or two. “What about you?” He nodded.

“Ronk?” You asked with amusement. Who names their child Ronk? Was this ancient dinosaur even a child once? He looked like he sprouted from the ground that way and started drinking the remnants of the bottoms of beer cans and eating old cigarette butts for sustenance. “That can’t be your real name, can it?” You stifled a laugh.

The man thought about it for a moment, taking a short bit to mull it over and shift the way he stood. He returned his lighter to his pocket, gave his cigarette a puff, then nodded slowly as his half-lucid stare returned to you. “Dave. That’s my real name.”

“Keep Ronk, I’d say.” You chuckled. You began to pace a bit as you stood in front of the closed bar past midnight in the Entresol. You ought to be heading home to try and catch the sleep that would never come, but standing out in the cold with some random bar fish who helped you out in a bar fight might as well be just as good a use of your time. “If you thought I was a cop, why do you want to sell me drugs so badly?”

“I said that you were a bad cop, not that you were a cop.”

“You’re going in circles now.”

“What I mean.” Ronk cleared his throat, then spat coarsely on the ground next to his dirt crusted work boots. “Is that if you were really an enforcer? This whole block would be shut down for just that little stunt.”

“So?” You shrugged.

“So. We’re still here. And that asshole in there currently isn’t getting a perp walk and a one way ticket to Stillwater. So you’re not a cop.”

“Wow. You’ve got such a sharp eye we could switch jobs.” You remarked sarcastically as you absentmindedly redid the buttons on your faded jacket. “I can spend twelve hours a day drinking, and you can go crawl around in shit and mud and do whatever the hells that was in there.” You articulated as you paced.

“Detective, then?”

“What?” You spun about on your heel again to face him. You had been in such a nervous spin about what you were going to do, you hadn’t noticed that you were beginning to pace circles around the scruffy man as you two conversed beneath a stark street lamp.

“You’re a detective, then. Not a cop, but still the same kind of bullshit.”

“If you say so.” You gave him another respective glance. “So?”

“So.”

“So, are you going to sell me Jitter or what?” You spoke up. Conversing with Ronk felt like you were being sucked down into a grain silo but instead of suffocating, your brain cells were being eaten one by one.

“Right, right. You still owe me a drink, though.”

“I told you. I don’t have any money, old man. No lighter, no coins, nothing.” You fibbed turning out your coat pockets. You had money, plenty wadded up in the wallet in your pants pocket, but you weren’t about to set your budget and have him meet it. For all you knew, you were being sized up and that tomorrow afternoon you were going to end up being mugged in some out of the way alley.

Ronk stopped to think for a moment in his increasingly usual old man way. He ashed his cigarette into the open breeze, then looked back and forth up the street with a whiny pensive hum. 

“I reckon you could owe it. I know a better place that’s still open. You follow me, pay for my drink, I give you that information. Everybody is happy.” He breezed past your mention of no money, it was an obvious lie.

“This better not be a trick. Or a mistake.” You huffed.

“What? Are you scared of having a good time?” Ronk motioned up the street to where you came from, then began to slowly hobble down the street and away from you. He gave you an encouraging motion for you to follow, then continued walking. You were out of leads, and it was this or go home and feel worse about it.

“Not this early.”

𝙽𝚎𝚡𝚝 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛

𝙿𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛

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