Dead Dog's Tale

I chose this rural fortification in Marsing, Idaho, for the privacy it offered and the particular energy it exuded. The walls were a canvas of messy graffiti tags, quickly scrawled upside-down pentagrams, and sloppy spellings of "Satan" alongside the ubiquitous "666." Holes were kicked and punched in the walls, and the shattered glass from broken windows and beer bottles crunched beneath my boots. My intuition was correct. This space was steeped in a rich history of emotional angst, pangs of helplessness, and unfettered rage—the exact flavor of mana I required. But I wanted more. My familiar spirits whispered that the prime location was yet to be discovered. The upper floor needed to be tactically unsound. While this was a lonely place, the flickering candlelight visible from the windows could still pique the curiosity of uninvited guests. Who or what roamed the Idaho farmlands in the pitch of night was not the equation I was here to explore. However, cocking b...

I won my black belt in Judo at 14 during a Batsugun.  A Judo Batsugun is when a tournament's competitors line up, from the lowest-ranked white belt to the top-ranked black belt. The lowest-ranked white belt steps out on the mat and challenges the second-lowest-ranked white belt. The contest winner challenges the next Judoka, and so on until the highest-ranking black belt is called out. I was third in line from the beginning. That night, I took my black belt off the highest-ranking black belt under 18 in Southern California.  Later, I discovered it's partly what got me noticed by some interesting people, and my name was "highlighted." I was 17 in the mid-1990s when an organization recruited me to hinder the advance of MS-13, looking to gain footholds in rural areas of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, & Montana. They would train males 15 to 16 years old and "seed" them in small Podunk towns in the Pacific Northwest. These seedlings recruited members, primarily o...

Surprised, I opened my eyes to find myself standing. My gaze was fixed on a vast crystal blue sky. A soft, icy breeze coiling around the hilltop conveyed the morning cold. I began shivering and asking myself how I got here when a glint of silver caught my attention. I looked over my shoulder to see a bright metal disc with a mirror polish, gigantic in proportion, hanging silently above me. Upon my realization, I was suddenly seized with a terrific force. Some invisible vice locked itself around my whole body; the air crushed from my lungs as it gripped me ever tighter against my consent. A loud metallic click resounded as I strained against what bound me and reverberated inside my brain. The disk and I began to interface. A deluge of images flooded my mental processes. I was a human particulate futtering between states of consciousness and dissolving in equal parts terror and astonishment.  Amidst the churning ocean of digital chatter I was drowning in, a single directive emerged, ...