This girl woke up at 7 am to read... She is now very sleepy.
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Summary:
Seventeen-year-old Sasha, desperate to save her best friend Xavier from more heartache, creates a social media trap for his ex-girlfriend with the hopes of exposing her cheating ways, but Sasha's plan takes a dangerous turn that dramatically changes the course of everyone's life.
McConnell pitied him, deep down. He also hated his personality. But most of all, he was honestly… kind of scared. Not because of what Blackwood was capable of, Madeus, no. McConnell could easily beat Blackwood in a physical conflict. The problem was that he didn’t know or like what Blackwood mentally did to those around him.
Caelan McConnell, a Curse Written in Cards
Blackwood is showing his nasty side. His hungry side. And McConnell doesn’t like it.
Instruments picked up the seismic waves more than 10,000 miles away—but bizarrely, nobody felt them.
The low frequency seismic waves weren’t caused by an earthquake. “A submarine eruption could produce these low rumblings, but evidence for such an event has yet to materialize.” It’s still a mystery!
On the morning of November 11, just before 9:30 UT, a mysterious rumble rolled around the world.
The seismic waves began roughly 15 miles off the shores of Mayotte, a French island sandwiched between Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. The waves buzzed across Africa, ringing sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They traversed vast oceans, humming across Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii nearly 11,000 miles away.
“These waves didn't just zip by; they rang for more than 20 minutes. And yet, it seems, no human felt them.”
“They're too nice; they're too perfect to be nature”, Anthony Lomax, an independent seismology consultant
Only one person noticed the odd signal on the U.S. Geological Survey's real-time seismogram displays. An earthquake enthusiast who uses the handle @matarikipax saw the curious zigzags and posted images of them to Twitter. That small action kicked off another ripple of sorts, as researchers around the world attempted to suss out the source of the waves. Was it a meteor strike? A submarine volcano eruption? An ancient sea monster rising from the deep?
“I don't think I've seen anything like it,” says Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University who specializes in unusual earthquakes.
However, there was no big earthquake kicking off the recent slow waves. Adding to the weirdness, Mayotte's mystery waves are what scientists call monochromatic. Most earthquakes send out waves with a slew of different frequencies, but Mayotte's signal was a clean zigzag dominated by one type of wave that took a steady 17 seconds to repeat.
So what is actually causing the super-slow vibrations at Mayotte? A submarine eruption could produce these low rumblings, but evidence for such an event has yet to materialize.
“It's like a music instrument,” says Jean-Paul Ampuero, a seismologist at the Université Côte d'Azur in France. “The notes of a music instrument—whether it's grave or very pitchy—depends on the size of the instrument.”
When Arthur is four, his mother and father explain that they are different from other people.
His father, Tristan Kingsmen, is a human, with two arms, two legs, and an ever warm body. He has sandy blonde and brown hair with dark brown eyes and works as a special policeman for people who are different, like Arthur and his Mama.
His mother, Clara, is not. Clara is a Naga, with two arms, a cold body, and a long scaly tail that extends from her waist down. She has auburn hair and pretty amber eyes and her scales are the same color as her hair. She met his Daddy at work and fell in love.
Arthur is cold and has a tail too, and they tell him that is why he can't go out an play with the other kids in his neighborhood. He is too young to truly understand why, but he listens to them, and stays inside and plays with the special sitters that watch him during the day.
Arthur is six when his mother first gives him his talisman.
“You need it to live with humans,” she tells him. “Most think snakes are scary, so they don't like people like us. Understand?” He doesn't but he wears it every time he leaves the house, just like she told him to. She wants him to get get in the habit of carrying it everywhere with him.
His parents intend to send him to a human school, since their education system is much more thorough and expansive than what's offered for “special” people. They want their little boy to live his life to the fullest, and to choose his future based on what he likes most, over what is simply offered to him.
It's the first time Arthur's allowed to go out and play at the park down the road, so he's happy.
When he's nine, Arthur gets his first glimpse of how mean other kids can be. Specifically the human kids.
A group of boys from his class find a little garden snake in the bushes at school, and take turns picking it up and poking at it with sticks. Only Arthur can hear it yelling for them to stop and to leave it alone. He tries to get them to stop, they don't listen to him and even start trying to pick on him for not being “tough enough” to handle a snake.
Then a group of older kids show up, hit a few of the younger boys, and kill the snake by stomping on it's head.
The boys and Arthur start crying and a teacher shows up and scolds the older boys for hitting other kids, and the younger boys for playing with the “dangerous” snake. Arthur is the only one crying for the snake that just wanted to be left alone.
The incident stays with him.
Arthur is eleven, his parents pass away.
His Uncle Lance is visiting them and is left watching Arthur when a sudden call comes in and both his parents have to leave. He's amazed by his Uncle, who works as a Mechanic. Arthur loves machines and computers, so it's easy for the two to bond.
Lance is in the middle of telling him about something funny his Dad did when they were kids, when one of his Dad's coworker's comes in, his face grim. Uncle Lance tries to keep him from hearing by sending him upstairs, but Arthur hides at the top and hears the officer tell his uncle that his mom and dad died trying to contain a group of anti-cryptid extremists when they attacked one of the hidden markets for “special people”.
It's only when Arthur bursts into tears later that evening that Lance discovers the boy had eavesdropped on the conversation. Comforting people has never been a strong suite for Lance, but for his nephew, he certainly tries. It marks the start of a long difficult period for both their lives.
With no other living family, Arthur is sent to live with his Uncle. His uncle's home town of Tempo is out in the desert, so Arthur knows his chances of being left in the cold are rather low.
At thirteen, Arthur meets and interesting boy in his middle school.
Arthur has always been shy and rather quiet, which lead to him being bullied in his new school. Part way into winter, which was much colder than Arthur had expected of a desert town, he is suffering from the kind of lethargy and chills that all Nagas have to deal with. His sluggish reactions and dulled reflexes have made him a easier target than usual, and very few people tended to stand up to bullies. Which was why he was surprised when someone from one of his classes rescued him, and chased away the kids who thought they'd “have some fun” with him.
The boy's name was Lewis Pepper (who was technically older than him by a couple months), a very tall and strong boy from his grade with a love of the color mauve and Alpacas. And a powerful dislike for bullies of any kind. The boy was very kind, helping Arthur to the nurse's office, collecting his scattered things, and reporting the bullies to the teachers. The clearest thing he remembered of the whole ordeal was that Lewis was very warm, both his manner and his body.
Later, when Lewis approached him for tutoring in math and science, Arthur instantly agreed intending to pay the other boy back for his kindness. He meets Lewis' family when he goes over after school to their restaurant, Pepper Paradiso. He quickly find that finds that he likes them. Mr. Pepper is bouncy and nice to talk to and his sweets are really good, Mrs. Pepper is scary but very kind, and Lewis' three little sisters are curious and excitable.
He surprises them all when he ends up bonding with the eldest daughter, Cayenne, after she tries to scare him by putting her pet snake on his shoulder.
It's the start of a wonderful friendship.
When Arthur is fifteen, the two join a paranormal club.
Lewis joins because he loved the supernatural. The monsters, the ghosts, the cryptids, the myths and stories, it all fascinated the purple haired boy. The sense of mystery and adventure was like a drug for him. Arthur joined for his friend, and for the technology. It amazed him how the human-made devices could detect things that even cryptids like him could miss.
Heading the club was a blue-haired girl named Vivi Yukino, she was three years older than them but she had a boundless kind of energy that made the whole club come alive. Everything about her reminds Arthur of a clear, sunny day, from her clothes to her bright smile. She draws both boys to her, her brightness and open acceptance call to Lewis, and her honest appreciation of his tech and hard work call to Arthur. Even when the other club-members leave, the three stay together.
When Vivi first introduces her dog Mystery, Arthur is nervous. He knows dogs sometimes attack snakes, and he's worried about how the canine will react to him. His worry is misplaced, and finds he enjoys the little dog's company. He can sense that there's more to Mystery than Vivi thinks and he can tell the “dog” feels the same way about him, but they come to an unspoken truce to not call each other out. Personally, Arthur thinks Mystery enjoys having someone who takes him seriously and often talks to the dog about things that worry him.
High school turns out to be a pretty good experience for Arthur.
Arthur is eighteen when Vivi suggests they form a paranormal hunting group.
Vivi has already earned her degree in Mythology, using online classes to help speed up the process. Since Lewis and Arthur still needed money to get their degrees, she suggested they take a year off to save up money and the paranormal cases would be a way for them to earn extra cash, in addition to the jobs they already had.
“And it would be something we could all do together,” She says sunnily, beaming at them. But there was no denying the hopefulness in her tone. It's all she needs to make both boys cave in and agree.
The work is more stressful than Arthur would like, but the relief and thanks of their costumers make it all worth while. Very few of the cases involve real ghosts or cryptids, but being a detective is fun and all the machines and tricks the crooks use are cool and he tends to take a moment to interrogate the culprits about how they built their tricks. He keeps an entire folder on his computer about the stuff he learns and he vows to use it for good whenever he can. Vivi approves of his plan and helps him take notes for it.
As time goes on, they all enjoy the work so much that both boys take their college classes online so they can keep working on cases. Arthur uses the money he saved from taking online classes to buy a van for the group, and paints their logo onto the side of it as a surprise for his friends. They all love it.
When Vivi and Lewis start dating the next year, all Arthur can say is “It's about time.”
Arthur is twenty when he realizes he's fallen for both his friends.
They accept all his flaws, applaud his skills, and generally make the Naga feel warm and safe and loved. But Lewis and Vivi are dating each other and humans generally don't agree with relationships involving more than two people. They've all play-flirted with each other (as close friends sometimes do), but he doesn't think either views him in that way. His heart starts to clench painfully whenever he sees the couple cuddle and kiss.
It's only made harder by the knowledge that neither are aware of what Arthur really is. Memories of how humans dislike snakes, the (false) rumors of what Nagas are really like, and the general disdain of beings that aren't human keep him silent. The only one he tells of his worry and feelings is Mystery. He doesn't even tell his uncle. He can tell the not-dog is sympathetic to him, but he can't help wishing the canine would drop his “pet” act long enough to give Arthur advice about it.
He knows they love the paranormal, but would his friends really be okay with what he was?
Arthur is twenty-one is when everything goes wrong.
His strange mix of fear and love had started to create a rift between Arthur and his friends, though only he and Mystery seem to notice.
They stop by a creepy, glowing cave that was (once-upon-a-time) a tourist attraction that Vivi heard about and go in to explore. But the next thing Arthur remembers is waking up in a hospital a week later with his arm gone, his best friend missing, his other friend unable to remember their missing member, and him suddenly suffering from an unexplainable case of cynophobia.
He hates it, the hospital is too cold and it's taking far too long for him to heal. He hates the prosthetics the doctors have shown him. They're all too clunky and awkward and why hasn't anyone used the cool tech he's seen during their cases to make something better yet? He starts making plans for a better limb, and the doctor are excited by what he shows them and say that if it works they'll help him get grants for the limbs.
Vivi's memory worries him, because it's like someone went through her head and systematically removed every memory that related to Lewis. She's mostly okay, and the memory loss doesn't seem to've changed her, but he still worries.
His fear of Mystery hurts, because the not-dog had become his confident and comfort through the years and now he had trouble just being in the same room as the canine.
But it's Lewis' disappearance that bothers him the most. He feels terrible every time the Peppers (who had become like extended family to him) would come to visit him, and wants his friend/crush to come home. And he can't go back to the cave to look for the taller boy, because he hadn't been paying attention during the drive and couldn't remember where the cave was.
By the time he's released, Arthur's plans for the prosthetic are complete, and he's sworn to find Lewis and bring him back. Even if it takes the rest of his life.
