Face The Strange - Chapter 11/11: Home For Halloween (and Author's Notes) free porn video

FACE THE STRANGE by Crazy Baron Chapter 11: Home for Halloween I had been prepared--or had desperately tried to prepare myself--to face absolutely anything when the interdimensional elevator arrived at my preordained destination. Regardless, what I saw caught me by surprise. On the other side lay my city apartment. I was looking at the living room, albeit from an unusual angle; my sofa was on the right, together with the lone armchair. The dining table and my desk, the latter saddled with a messy stack of papers and the computer monitor, mouse and keyboard, were in front of me. Sunlight was flowing in through the window, whose curtains were pulled back. The other room and everything in it seemed not only real, but also precisely how I had left it when I had made the fateful decision to visit my family on Halloween. Even so, I hesitated to step out of the elevator cabin. Was the room perhaps an illusion? By this point, I had come across enough outlandish things to doubt my senses in the most mundane of situations, and these circumstances could hardly be described as such. The doors were wide open, waiting for me to exit the cab. It dawned on me that I had spent nearly as much time wondering at the view as the ride from the transcendental hotel had lasted, and I was abruptly gripped by the fear that if I didn't do anything soon, the elevator might leave with me still aboard. Not wasting another second, I stepped into the room. The floor supported my weight, I noted with relief. It was not a visual deception, and I was not hurtling down some bottomless shaft. The air inside the room was a little stale, and it carried the typical smell of a living space that hasn't been thoroughly cleaned or properly ventilated for a while. Either the enigmatic superbeings had taken excessive pains to create an incredibly faithful reproduction of my apartment, or I had actually found my way back there. I turned around and was immediately treated to a freakish spectacle. The elevator, its doors and doorframe, it seemed, were set into one of the inner walls of my apartment as though they had always been there, never mind that the wall itself was less than one foot thick. The car of the elevator simply should not have fit inside of it. Even as I gazed at them, the doors closed, and then they and the frame disappeared. The wall was solid and unbroken again, with not so much as a hint that anything out of the ordinary had happened only seconds before. In disbelief, I reached out and pressed my hand against its surface, but I felt nothing unusual whatsoever. The latter observation essentially applied to the apartment as a whole. It was as though I had never been away. A spare t-shirt was draped over one of the four chairs around the dinner table, and piles of miscellaneous papers littered the desk, with a black mechanical pencil lying on top of the tallest stack. A few small dust bunnies huddled in a corner of the room as proof of my laissez-faire attitude towards cleaning. The desktop computer was on and running the word processor. Its window showed the fruits of two weeks' worth of work for my upcoming peer- reviewed article: a grand total of three paragraphs of disjointed, unpolished text. The last line, describing a questionable least squares fit of a quadratic function to a set of hopelessly scattered data points, ended mid-sentence. I took a peek out of the window next. The world there was wholly oblivious to the fact that my friends and I had saved it from Angronok's clutches. The sun was shining through scattered, wispy white clouds, and the buildings and streets were the same as ever. Cars were parked along the curb, a handful of them were moving on the street, and people were strolling on the sidewalk, going about their business. All in all, it was an entirely typical view for the noon of an ordinary working day in late fall, as seen from my fourth-floor apartment. No vampire, demon or hellgod was in sight. Finally, I walked over to the couch and sat down, my limbs rigid and brain reeling from the excitement and tension, which were slowly ebbing now. Like rest of the objects in the apartment, the couch thankfully exhibited no signs of dissolving under close scrutiny, nor did it collapse under my bulk. At any rate, I stayed almost perfectly still for several minutes, just in case my sensory faculties were being fooled or something bizarre had yet to occur. I retained a measure of caution, and it was accompanied once more by awe, but this time at the commonplace, not the outlandish. Everything was quiet. The room remained unchanged and the pieces of furniture stood in their proper places. My body was the same old masculine form in which I had existed entirely normally until my adventure had begun so many strange days and nights ago, in another age and different life, as it seemed. Gradually, the notion that my tribulations might be over at long last started to become clear to me. I could relax and let my guard down. No monsters would jump out of the closet, and no dimensional portals would suddenly open and hurtle me off to imaginary lands where I would have to fight for my survival and watch my every step. It was an indescribable relief, something that was nearly too good to be true. Right on the heels of this thought came another, one that I hadn't expected. To my amazement, I was experiencing a pang of gloom and faint sadness. The emotion was so puzzling and incongruent with what I should have felt at the happy (if tentative) conclusion of the whole skinsuit and demon slaying affair that I was slow to discover the obvious reason for it. Returning to the humdrum rut of my work at the University was admittedly an uninspiring prospect, but what truly weighed on me was the realization that my ties with the interesting, colorful and friendly people whom I had met on my journey would be cut forever. I would never see any of them again. I could not go to a bar and have a beer with Gunner Bill; Joyce Summers would not make breakfast for me and dispense warm motherly love and advice on the side. No one as groovy and far out as Cinnamon would cross paths with me, nor would I have a chance to learn the presumably tragic details of Becky's personal history and the identity of her lost soulmate. Even if these individuals had been mere figments of my imagination, I genuinely missed them already. I was about to lie down on the couch and find out if I was able to take a short nap when I heard my cell phone ring. It gave me a start, and I jumped to my feet and scanned the environment with my eyes until common sense kicked in and overcame the primitive reaction. There was no supernatural danger here, I told myself in something of a shame. The ring tone of the phone was not a harbinger of demon assault. Relearning how to live normally and adjusting to my old routine after the alternate realities, time jumps and transformations might be much more difficult than I had assumed. I picked up the phone from the table and pressed the answer button. "Mike Caldwell." "Hi, Mike," my sister's voice greeted me. "I didn't wake you up, did I?" "What?" "I asked if I woke you up," she repeated. "It's only eleven twenty a.m., so I figured you could still be asleep." "Uh... No, I wasn't sleeping," I stammered. "No." "You kind of sound like you were," Kate remarked. "Anyway, Mom and I want to know if you're coming home for Halloween." "Halloween?" I blurted out in bafflement. "Wasn't that weeks ago?" She laughed out loud at this. "Alright, now I know for certain I drove you out of bed, or maybe you're drunk. But to answer your question, Halloween's this weekend. Are you?" "Am I what?" "Oh jeez. Coming home! Are you coming home, Mike?" "Well... I guess. I don't have anything particularly important or urgent to do here for the next couple of days, so why not." "That's great! Can we expect you today or tomorrow?" "I'll try to make it today." "Okay, excellent. See you soon, bro. Bye!" "Bye, Kate." I put the phone down on the table, but even before Kate had ended the call, I had reached a firm decision to leave for Greensville as soon as possible. I reasoned that what I needed the most was the company of family and friends, together with peaceful, welcoming surroundings. These would be perfect to get me started on my road to mental recovery. I popped into the kitchen to check if everything was in order there. The sink was empty of dishes and all the electric devices were off, I noted, but a large cup of cold coffee sat on the counter next to the coffee machine. My system didn't yet demand its daily fix badly enough to motivate me to drink the stagnant liquid, so I poured it into the sink and hurriedly washed the cup. I also made a point to empty the kitchen trash can and take the bag out. My preparations for leaving had gotten off to a good start, and I pressed on with determination. I marched into the bedroom, pulled out two old sports bags from the closet and stuffed a selection of clean spare clothes into them. I gave very brief consideration to stopping by my shared office at the campus to pick up my laptop but decided against it. The whole idea of my trip was to get away from work, not to bring it along, and it was in any case unlikely that I'd make much progress with the article or the dissertation over the next couple of days. Thus, I only needed to get dressed, put my wallet, keys and cell phone in my pockets, and I was set. My car was parked a hundred yards or so down the street. As was my habit whenever I was staying in the city and about to get in the vehicle, I did a quick walk-around in order to check it for overt indications of vandalism. The concern over the car would every once in a while motivate me to find out about safer places to keep it in, but I always had to face a disappointment since a rented spot in a nearby gated parking lot or a garage was financially out of my reach. However, the car had once more fortunately avoided the attention of criminal elements during the time it had spent alone. I opened the rear door, threw the luggage in and then sat on the driver's seat. I put the keys in ignition, started the engine and negotiated my trusty mount carefully out of the unusually tight spot between an SUV in front and an old Chevrolet behind me. In my thoughts, I sent a mild curse in the direction of the two thoughtless fellow drivers, but this small hurdle hardly dampened my improving mood. I proceeded to navigate out of the city with laid-back confidence. It was noontime, and so there were no traffic jams to slow me down appreciably. In any case, I was happy when the urban area was left behind and I was again driving across the countryside on the interstate. Even though I carried my problems with me in a very real sense, my mind equated escaping the densely built and busy city with escaping my inner chaos. I could breathe more easily in these wide open spaces and find rest in the sleepy, tiny hometown of mine. To make the relatively short journey more pleasant, I turned on the stereo and set it to play the MP3s on the memory stick in random order. The car was running smoothly, the weather was fine, and I had the kind of entertainment that I liked. The shadow of the past was receding and losing its power over me. Yet it was by no means entirely gone. After all, nothing out of the ordinary had happened the last time this day had taken place in my life until the moment I had arrived in Greensville and Kate had broken the news that she and her friends would arrange a Halloween party. My conversation with the Amanda Elkins entity aside, there was in fact no guarantee that those events, and the mess that followed, would not repeat. Although I had a clear, simple route ahead of me and no rational reason to deviate from it, some odd impulse nonetheless soon began to distract me. The detour would be significant, and it would add more than half an hour to my ETA. There was nothing interesting to see at that location; there couldn't be. For once, the perverse logic of my inter-reality escapades and common sense were in agreement over something, and both were telling me to continue driving towards Greensville. Of course, I ignored them. I took an exit ramp thirty miles further down the road and promptly found myself in the familiar maze of small towns and country roads. While I had rarely been in these parts, I knew the basic lay of the land well enough not to get lost and enjoy the trip as an impromptu, not-too-exciting adventure. No monster, human villain or spacetime distortion was chasing me, and I had no fixed schedule to keep to, so I was free to tarry if I wanted. The sun had passed its highest point in the sky when the park, officially County Roadside Park Commemorating John B. Gatch, came into view from behind a curve. Its attraction had been irresistible to me. I didn't expect to find anything out of the ordinary here, but it felt absolutely necessary to pay the park a visit. The parking lot was empty when I pulled up and stepped out of the car. As I had no intention to wander off, however, I left the keys in and the doors unlocked and merely stood in the lot, inhaling the fresh air and letting the sun shine on my face. The so-called camping area with its weather-beaten tables and the map stand was deserted. Around me was the solitude of a forest waiting for the next winter to come, silent apart from the light wind that was whispering in the treetops. This atmosphere alone was well worth the drive from the city, in my opinion. Right here, on this spot, my transformed cousin Scott had stolen the skinsuit antidote bottle and run into the woods. He had been a clone of Dawn Summers and happy with his new body and gender; I had been in the form of her big sister Buffy and decidedly discontented. I had gone after him, as had Jake in his Willow guise. We had encountered a hideous large humanoid demon deeper in the forest, and soon after that, an interdimensional portal. Then Larry alias Faith had appeared, I had jumped into the portal, exited it in Sunnydale, slain several vampires, fought the demons at the ritual site, plunged into darkness, awoken in... The tale was laughable in its absurdity, but it had once been real to me. I had lived through it and done my best to survive, and eventually triumphed. The uncertainties, fears, horrors, bouts of depression, flashes of joy and moments of love had all been genuine. They would always stay with me, even if the whole journey had been a hallucination. Again, I was touched by a strange melancholy. None of my friends with whom I had shared the ups and downs of our adventure would remember it now in any case. The memory would only live on in my mind. The gateway to the horrifying, lovely and wonderful other worlds was forever closed. It was simultaneously an immeasurable reassurance and an incalculable loss. These conflicting emotions continued to vie for dominance when I eventually got back in the car and resumed my drive, lost in my thoughts. I had no clue as to how I was supposed to feel: happy or sad, confident or scared. On one hand, the reality changes might not have been over, and on the other, they might not have existed to begin with and I had simply lost my sanity, either temporarily or permanently. Or maybe these alternatives were actually one and the same and there was no such thing as objective truth. I switched the stereo off for the rest of my trip so I could better concentrate on the vexing metaphysical problem. As it happened, I barely noticed before I was inside the borders of Greensville. I had covered the intervening miles virtually automatically, without wasting much conscious brain capacity on driving. It was not as if I were any closer to figuring out the actual nature and meaning of my experiences, but at least I had gotten home--and this was home, in more than one sense of the word--without further incidents. I turned onto my parents' driveway and parked the car neatly in a corner of the turnaround in front of the house, making sure it wouldn't block the access to the garage. I collected my belongings from the back seat, locked up and made my way briskly to the front door of the house. Last time, Kate had almost hit me in the face with the door, albeit unintentionally. I remembered this little episode and stopped well clear on the porch, smiling to myself. Sure enough, the door flung open and she came out. She walked up to me and pulled me into a warm hug straight away, foregoing even saying hello first. "Good to have you home, Mike," she said against my shoulder. "Good to be home," I responded. "So, what's up? How are you doing?" She let go of me a little hesitantly. "As well as can be expected, more or less," she said, looking down. "It takes time to get over something that... painful. You understand." "Of course." "I would be lying if I said I'm not bitter or that I wish him the best, but life goes on. I'll survive." "I'm happy for you," I said. "You're way better off without that asshole. As soon as you get back on your feet, the world is yours again and you'll meet other people." "I should have listened to you. You never liked him and you warned me about him." "I did. I pretty much hated him ever since I laid my eyes on him. To tell you the truth, I'd gladly kill the shitbag if that made you happy and if I knew I wouldn't get caught. He deserves it." "Maybe, but you certainly don't deserve the consequences there'd be for you if you murdered him." "Speaking of that," I said and smiled, "I know this guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. If we invested a couple of grand, they'd be willing to---" "Come on!" she admonished me and let out a little laugh. "I appreciate you trying to lift my spirits, but let's leave your hypothetical contacts to the underworld out of consideration, okay?" "Who says they're hypothetical?" I pretended to protest but chuckled myself at my own joke. We had had this conversation about Kate's jerk of an ex-husband and their short-lived marriage once before. The words spoken were nearly identical, as were our reactions and emotions. I had an unmistakable feeling that we both were actors in a stage play. We were giving another performance after the opening night, following the gist of what the director had told us and delivering our lines with a dose of ad- libbing. "Now that you're here," Kate said, "I'm even inclined to believe what you said about things getting better. They just might. Welcome home, big bro." I shed my jacket and then repeated my routine of taking the two sports bags to my old room and unpacking the spare clothes I had brought. As I put the pile of shirts and boxers on the bed, a vivid recollection of having a girl's wet dream while sleeping there resurfaced. If it had happened, the night in question had been both a decade and a third in the past and several days in the future. The bed was neatly made, and apparently no one had slept in it for a while. There was a temptation to let my thoughts dwell on the strangeness of all this, but I pushed it determinedly to the side and headed downstairs. The more I would immerse myself in ordinary, unstressful life, the better. I would process the weird memories little by little in good time. "Coffee?" Kate offered as I sat down at the dinner table. Well aware of my caffeine addiction, she had undoubtedly loaded the coffee maker as soon as she had learned that I would be coming home that day, and the machine was busy at work on the counter. "Please," I said. "I haven't had any today--and this time I mean it." "What?" "Uh, never mind. I was just trying to be funny." "Figures, what with your sense of humor. Anyway, here's your cup." "Thanks a bunch. Where are the folks, by the way?" "They're out, shopping for groceries. They should be back in an hour." A carton of milk was waiting for me on the table. In no time, I was enjoying the coffee as I liked it best, that is, hot and with milk but no sugar. "Fill me in, will you," I asked my sister. "How is the old town?" "There's nothing interesting," she responded after pouring herself a cup and taking a seat opposite to me. "I've been here for five days. Took some time off. My boss was very understanding about the... whole thing." "I'm happy to hear he had the decency to cut you some slack. What about Mom and Dad?" "More than anything else, they're just glad that the nightmare is over and the dude is out of the picture. They insisted that I stay for as long as I can and rest, but I've been doing some minor remote work whenever I feel up to it. I'm going back to the city in a week or two, but right now I want us to be together as a family." "I see." "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I'm just talking about me." "No, it's alright. I understand." "You wanted to know how they are doing, right? Well, I'd say they're fine, for the most part. Mom has some of those back pains, and they flare up a bit every once in a while, but she keeps telling me it's not serious." "She always claims that." "I know, and I've sort of come to doubt her. Aside from that, they seem fine and in good spirits. They were excited when I told them you were coming." "Were they really? I tend to get the impression that they'd be more pleased if I stayed in the city and actually worked to get my dissertation done." "Oh, they're not that badly out of touch," she corrected me with a little laugh. "They realize that getting your PhD takes a lot of time and effort. It's not something you can simply do by going to a couple of lectures." "And the same goes for finding a worthwhile job afterwards." "Don't worry," she encouraged me. "You'll come out on top in the end. I'm positive of that." "Let's hope so. Well, be that as it may, at least we can spend this Halloween together and worry about the rest of our lives later." "Yeah." Suddenly, I felt apprehension flood over me. The watershed, the precise point in time when the madness had started, was at hand right now. When we had gotten to this moment, my coffee had turned into tea without warning or explanation, and then Kate had mentioned the roleplaying Halloween party. Everything before that had been normal, most things after that had been decidedly bizarre. I couldn't take the tension for long, and so I broke the silence. "About Halloween," I said, doing my utmost to keep my anxiety from showing. "Do you have anything specific in mind?" "As in going to a party?" Kate reacted and chuckled. "Where did this extroverted mood of yours come from?" I glanced at the mug. The drink in it was plainly coffee, exactly as it was supposed to be. I let out a muted sigh of relief and broke into a small smile. With any luck, this settled the issue. The earlier events would not happen again and I was not stuck in a time loop. "I was curious, that's all," I clarified at length. "Okay," she said. "I'm afraid the answer is no. I don't really feel like going out and having fun. It's still a bit too soon for me. I thought we could just be at home, basically. What do you say, Mike?" "Sounds perfect," I replied. "Count me in." "I'm not trying to tie you down, though," Kate went on to add in an apologetic tone. "If you've made plans to see your friends, it goes without saying you're free to do that. You don't have to commiserate with me all day, every day. Besides, it's not like we must remain indoors and wait for the cabin fever to strike. I'm not that depressed anymore. We can go out if you want to." "No, honestly, I don't have anything planned. My buddies don't even know I'm here for the weekend. The whole trip was completely a spur-of- the-moment kind of thing." Kate took a sip of her coffee. "On a somewhat related topic," she continued, "Mom saw Jake White yesterday. From what he told her, he's probably going to get a new job in Chesterton soon, and he's staying at his uncle's until he finds an apartment closer to the factory." "That's great to hear. I'm really happy for him." "Yeah, so am I. It's about time he got steady employment and income. He's been drifting around for years, and that's shameful waste of potential, to be frank. He's a good, warm-hearted guy deep down and he has the brains for pretty much anything, if he only put his capacity to proper use and generally persisted in whatever he's doing. He's the same age as you, isn't he?" "Nine months younger, to be accurate." "You should give him a call and maybe invite him over. It's been years since he last dropped by." "That's not a bad idea." "By the way," she spoke up and got on her feet. "I almost forgot. I've got something for you." "What is it?" Kate skipped to the counter and picked up a postcard. Not wasting a second, she brought it to the table and handed it to me. "Here. This was in the mailbox yesterday." "Who is it from?" I inquired. "Why wasn't it delivered to my own address?" "Beats me. There's no stamp or postmark, so I don't think it was actually sent by mail." The card featured a picture of a beach with golden yellow sand, an ocean and the sun shining high in the bright blue sky. A number of people were sunbathing on the sand or swimming in the swells, and there were a couple of colorful dots further out in the background, scarcely recognizable as surfers. I was mildly bemused by the card, wondering who could have sent it, until I flipped it over and read the writing on the backside: Thanks for everything and see you around! XOXOXO FAITH My jaw dropped instantly. This was not possible; Faith belonged firmly to the other side of the line that separated the everyday world from the magical and fantastical one. She had no business crossing over--not anymore. And despite everything, I was holding in my hand the proof that she could do exactly that. Chances were she had actually been in this town and put the card into my parents' mailbox by herself. I spent a small eternity staring at the card and the writing, completely dumbfounded and attempting in vain to find a more reasonable explanation, but my mind was blank. Ironically enough, an inoffensive piece of cardboard had given me perhaps the biggest shock of an entire day chock full of occurrences that could undermine whole schools of thought and demolish basic tenets of science. Kate was observing my reactions closely. Eager to coax answers out of me as to the mysterious female who had written the card, and also sensing a prime opportunity to tease me, she had a mischievous grin on her face and a glint of keen interest in her eyes. "Who's Faith?" she asked me at last, unable to contain her mounting curiosity any longer. "Is there a girl in your life I don't know about? Spill, bro! Now!" "That's... a funny story," I responded. The worst of the mental jolt was already wearing off--I was no stranger to unexplained things like it, thanks to what I had endured--and in any case, I had to tell Kate something. She would never have stopped pestering me otherwise. "Not to mention a long one. And weird." "I've got time. So, who is she?" "It's not that easy to explain." "Take a shot at it, anyway." "Well, Faith is just..." "Yeah?" "Faith's an old friend," I said and drew my lips into an understated, knowing little smile. ***** Author's Notes for Not Very Nice People & Face the Strange This story, or story part, concludes the trilogy that began with Life Out of Joint. In a sense, it can also be considered the end result of about 17 years of brainstorming, writing, editing, deleting, rewriting, giving up, starting again, re-rewriting, proofreading and uploading while anxiously waiting for what the reviewers will have to say. From another point of view, none of this or the previous part--Not Very Nice People--existed in any shape or form before the fall of 2018. It was then, while I was putting the finishing touches on Life Out of Joint, that it occurred to me that the tale of the first part could, perhaps even should actually continue. I jotted down some notes about a possible outline for a sequel but didn't seriously think of expanding it into a proper story at first, definitely not any time soon. Life Out of Joint was my first published piece on Fictionmania, or actually anywhere in this genre. I was happily surprised by the extraordinarily warm welcome it received, and that convinced me to start working on the continuation in earnest. I received a major extra dose of encouragement, and the project accordingly gained in urgency, after I had uploaded the final chapter of the first part. The readers had in general enjoyed the story but strongly disliked the ambiguous ending, with many expressing hope that I would continue the tale. So, I hammered away at the keyboard, spending a good portion of both my personal free time and expensive office hours in 2019 on Not Very Nice People and Face the Strange. (Just don't reveal that to my boss, please!) And, finally, here we are. Was this worth the wait (for you) and the trouble (for me and you)? My aim was that it would be, but I will let you, the readers, judge whether I succeeded or not. Truth be told, writing the second and third parts of the trilogy did feel more like a job than a hobby on many occasions, and at times I even waited anxiously for the day when the last words of the last sentence would fall in place. However, as I was eventually getting there--somewhere around the end of Chapter 10 of Face the Strange, if not a bit earlier--I suddenly found myself in a somewhat melancholic mood. My laborious but fun journey with the characters was finally coming to an end, and I would have to leave them and move on. They had grown on me to quite an extent. In fact, I think Mike and company still have some adventure left in them, but my plans are not entirely clear in that respect as of this writing. The reception of this story will of course play a significant role in determining their fate. If the readers are not interested anymore, then it's better for me to concentrate on other things. While I have at least tried to take what constructive criticism I have received into account (or rather, what criticism I received before it was too late to make major changes to the plot), I haven't made a conscious effort to tailor the story to fit anyone's tastes and likes in particular, except my own. In fact, the whole trilogy might well be titled "What Crazy Baron Thinks an Engaging TG-Themed Story Should Be Like: An Attempt". I wanted it to convey the main character's sense of wonder, awe and puzzlement as his experience grows ever more bizarre and deliver an interesting, surprising and even occasionally amusing ride, without underestimating the intelligence of my audience. For this reason, I often went for ambiguity and subtle hints instead of overt explanations, keeping plot twists, the backgrounds of some of the characters and other things open to interpretation. We are seeing Mike's strange adventure and the various different realities and worlds through his eyes, and given that he cannot possibly know and understand everything going on around him even when it might make sense in a wider context, apparently out-of-place, discordant or illogical elements are what we should expect. It is a plain fact of life that this kind of approach and style does not appeal to everyone, no matter how well it is done. Together with the complex plot, it could be regarded as a calculated risk on my part that may or may not have paid off, depending on the taste of the reader. In addition, the immense length of these three pieces has probably dissuaded many people from ever starting them in the first place and maybe also alienated some of the previous readers. I really have no excuses and will simply acknowledge that a more competent author would have done a better job--but, then again, that always holds true for everything. On a related note, I am aware that my audience might possibly have liked to see a "cleaner" conclusion than the one presented here, that is, every loose end firmly tied up and any remaining questions answered. Nevertheless, I decided not to aim specifically for that. Available time and keeping the story from growing into an even more stupendous length were considerations, but the most important point, in my opinion, is that some things are better left to the imagination of the reader. Should there be additional stories set in this universe, I'll have plenty of uncharted, or scantily charted, territory to explore. I wrote in Author's Notes for Life Out of Joint that the reader should absolutely not confuse me with Mike Caldwell the character. To reiterate, Mike is in many respects based on me, but he is not the same person as the real me; he is not meant to be a self-insertion, idealized or otherwise. That statement is basically still valid, but in all honesty, I must admit the relationship between him and me might at this point be closer than I previously let on. Some of that definitely has to do with the lengthy writing process. I traveled with Mike almost constantly for over a full year, incessantly trying to get inside his head, so it's probably inevitable that we have come to resemble one another more and more over the course of time. One other point perhaps bears repeating in this context. Any political views and ideas expressed by the characters don't necessarily coincide with mine, and even when they do, they are not intended as an advertisement. As a rule, I full-heartedly loathe stories with overt brow-beating messages, blatant allegories or virtue signaling, and I want to spare my readers of anything of that sort. I'm happy to leave education (or brainwashing, as the case may be) through fiction to others and offer just harmless entertainment for my part. In closing, I would again like to extend my gratitude to anyone who read this story and persisted with it to the end. It's been fun for me, and I sincerely hope that it was fun for you as well. ***** P.S. At the risk of repeating myself, I would once more like to ask anyone who has read the story to be so kind as to post a review. I very much appreciate all feedback, positive as well as negative (provided, of course, that the latter kind is civil and has a point). Given that a piece of work like this tends to attract a somewhat limited audience to begin with, any comments I may receive are that much more valuable.