Yeah, he got mad. Course he got mad, what the fuck do you think happened? Hold a gun up to the kid and tell him he's got a head start, little fuck decides now's the time for another pissing contest. Haha! Ha! Yeah, fuckin' laugh about it, shit's just so funny, like you're such a man that this shit d...

((Julian Avery continued from Riddles of Monsters)) The boat got smaller and smaller in the horizon, letting those mean old waves bully it a little more and a little more. Godspeed, you tiny little dot in the deep blue sea. Godspeed to you and your precious cargo, all the little boys and girls lucky...

Words of encouragement, huh. She didn't feel all that encouraged. Felt like in the ocean on a gray cloudy way, waves kicking her around back and forth and back and forth and paddle just to stay above the salt and the spray, everything with the colors washed out and in slow motion and it felt weird t...

Maybe that was what she needed. A shape in sable armor to chase everything pretty away, to gently close her eyes and tell her nothing would be alright. Nothing would ever be alright. So here was Aaron again, bearing the bad news but keeping his chin up like such a good soldier. And it didn't even ma...

She let the hope grow small and dim, she let the hope fade out and get quieter, she let it drift away without saying goodbye. She didn't really mind. She would probably mind later, some faroff point in the future where things were maybe different, maybe better, and she'd start looking for it and it'...

Maybe if she replayed it in her head again, she'd figure out the hole in the logic and she'd get a great big smile across her face and she'd speak up and tell them why, false alarm, it was actually a miracle after all. Yeah? Maybe. So here goes. It was a player. It couldn't be a rescue. The patrol b...

((Charlie DuClare continued from No Such Thing as a Perfect Plan)) She'd liked this world better when there were people in it. You could walk so far now and not meet another soul. You could keep going in a straight line, any direction you wanted, till you got lost in the stillness and you had to sto...

So many words, back and forth and back and forth, so many words said and none of them said to her. And so she started to feel smaller, and smaller, until she was hardly there at all. This was a mistake. This had been a huge, huge mistake. This wasn't how it went at all. Open arms, open hearts, tell ...

Something stirred, something twitched, something snapped, and all of a sudden the sweet scared quiet girl on the edge of the group was mad . What happens when Charlie DuClare gets mad? Well okay we know about this, we've seen this all before. Pictures flash by- shouting and kicking and pointing fing...

((Charlie DuClare continued from House of the Rising Sun)) Charlie. Charlie. Where did you go. Where did you run off to. We looked all over for you. We were scared to death for you. We thought something might have happened to you. And we missed you. We missed you. We missed you. Too much to hope for...

Man's reach exceeds his grasp. Someone wise and famous had said that once. It was probably, uh, Shakespeare seemed like a good bet, unless it was one of those things where you think it was Shakespeare but really it was just some douchebag who wrote a play in the 1920's and now nobody even remembers ...

This is not over this is not over this is not a fuckup you can fix this. A lesser businessman wouldn't be able to fix this! They would fuck up here, they would back down like maybe they'd admit to everything and say they were sorry. Back down? That would be cowardice. Backing down when you haven't e...

A ha. A hahahahahahaha. Ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YES. Good lord good fucking Christ holy shit this was the best. This- unbelievable. There was this section of Jeremy's mind, all fenced in and a sign with big red letters labeling it WILDEST DREAMS, and Jeremy was knocking the ...

Aww, shucks, Jeremy wasn't a saint! At least... he didn't think of himself as one? It was... maybe an idea worth investigating? But something told Jeremy he'd come up empty-handed if he thought about that too hard. Probably some clause somewhere saying you're disqualified from sainthood if you've ri...

Something didn't... didn't... add up. It wasn't like Jeremy was expecting to fail or anything? No, no, it wasn't that at all. Jeremy was awesome and he was fully aware of being awesome so it was perfectly within reason to expect that he'd close a deal with Rosa (and if you're walking into a deal and...