A late night letter to the void that is the internet:
I’m sad, but I guess getting better? I’m alone but I guess my own company isn’t so bad. She could use a bit of work on her conversation but at least she isn’t so mean anymore.
SO I’M GONNA TELL YOU A STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED TO ME TODAY because I think I accidentally made friends with a benevolent trickster god/fey animal/werewolf???
backstory: I have been afraid of dogs since I was in first grade and two of my classmates both independently got hospitalized for dog bite injuries within a week of each other. ever since, I have been attempting to get over this fear. it’s going pretty solid lately. it helps that at my bus stop, there’s a large and fenced in property with a dog that is afraid of humans. he’s a gorgeous german shepherd?? who I have taken a few sneaky photos of and always manages to look angelic.
so this pup is scared of humans and I’m scared of dogs. but for months we see each other every day. and we nudge closer and closer. and one day I’m feeling brave and pick up a stick and hold it out to the fence and this good good doggo gennnntly takes it between his teeth and runs off with it. since then it’s been a game we play every day and this buddy’s tail starts wagging when I come down the street towards the bus stop and frankly it adds life to these brittle old bones of mine.
today however was the reckoning… I was a bit distracted by school stress when I came down the street, and so I take a moment for myself and when I look back up, the puppy is GONE. I look around the yard, seeing if he’s behind a tree, then see him leaving the yard and merrily skipping down the sidewalk, where he suddenly stops. I ask my group chat for advice.
trick question by the time the answer comes I’m already walkin towards him. he’s sitting still, tail wagging. right in front of him on the ground, with no one in sight? a $20 bill.
I slooowly bend down and pick up the money and a nearby stick. put the money in my pocket. put the stick out to my doggo friend who gently takes it as always. and then awkwardly I kinda “well, thanks for the money! you should get home now, my bus is coming and your person won’t like you being out of the yard.”
and just like that. the dog just trots back to the yard happy as a clam and slips in through the gaping wide bars of the fence. meanwhile, three high schoolers on the way to school are staring at me and laughing but like. okay what am I supposed to do, not thank this blessing dog. I actually tell him thanks once again for good measure before the bus comes.
so basically my fear of at least one dog is cured, my curiosity is piqued (coincidence? maybe. smart dog? perhaps. but this is the same city I got cursed in and the same city I wandered into a fey subway sandwich shop in so), and I got 20 bucks. so reblog for money dog? I guess?
Waitwaitwait… can I hear about that fey subway sandwich shop, please?
okay okay so a little under a year ago now I was craving a sandwich. I went to my normal downtown subway, but it turned out it was buy one get one free day so it was crowded. after some thought, I remembered that there was another subway almost exactly across the street. same franchise, different location, very close to the one I go to and yet I’d never been. I decide to go see if it’s as swamped as my normal one.
I walk in and it’s as good as dead. there’s two people in line in front of me, four people behind the counter, and two employees wandering the store. it’s gorgeous. clean as anything. a fireplace with a burning fire (nice as it’s the dead of winter in pennsylvania at this point), and smooth jazz playing softly on the speakers. it’s huge. there are armchairs. the windows have curtains and a lovely view of downtown. it’s immediately the kind of place you could stay forever but I have a bus to catch in like half an hour so I walk up and get in line.
as I do, I see the first two behind the counter employees. one looks dead. one looks angry. the dead one… and I call her this because she literally looks zombified. not normal min wage worker dead but like her brain was removed dead… asks what she can get for me and I place my normal order. it begins to go down the line. it gets to the second person, the angry one, who says with the most INTENSE STARE to Dead Eyed Girl, “if we all had to come in and we don’t get busy, I’m burning down the city.”
Dead Eyed Girl, eyes still dead, says “Except for this store, of course.”
“Of course not, we can’t burn down this store.”
Dead Eyed Girl literally echoes “We can’t burn down this store.”
this is when I start to go from curious to a little freaked out. angry one takes my subs out of the toaster and begins to put veggies on it, then shoves it over to the person at the register who is, according to the logs I looked up to make sure I remember this accurately, remarkable for one reason… I was paying attention to EVERYTHING and yet I can’t remember what they looked like at all. I pay and I get my sandwiches and my drink cup and go to fill my drink up.
standing near the drink machine at this point are two more terrified looking employees who are talking quietly to themselves. I fill my cup up with sprite and am about to put a lid on it when one says “oh. that machine… doesn’t work.” note: at this point I have the drink already and it looks and smells right. “here, let me go replace that for you. don’t drink that! one second!”
he looks TERRIFIED as he goes to the cooler and pulls out three bottles of sprite and looks TERRIFIED as he holds them out to me asking, terrified, “here, is that enough?”
and so I just “yeah… thank you?” as he takes my cup and gives me the bottles. it’s more sprite than I paid for.
I sit down as far from the counter as I can and begin to eat. my first toasted sandwich? cold. according to my phone I’ve been in here for five minutes only. I didn’t see the customers who were in here when I entered leave. nobody else has come in. I’d planned to get out my laptop and wait here out of the cold for the bus, but even as I eat the sandwich time seems slow so I just devour it and leave. it’s not even been ten minutes since I came in. just take my second (cold) sandwich and my bottles of sprite and book it.
and I ask around about this subway. everyone I know says it’s perfectly normal and they’ve been there several times and it’s fine! and sure enough when I work up the courage to go back in two weeks later, the fireplace is not operational (in fact it’s blocked off), the music is staticky and pop, there’s no armchairs, and it’s not very clean at all. is there a possibility they cleaned it up for the event and redecorated in two weeks? yes. is it more likely that I wandered into the fey realm for a bit? perhaps.
I didn’t drink the sprite I didn’t pay for.
Damn.
Had a thing like that happen with a hobby shop once.
I had thought the place was closed and gutted, but saw to my delight that it was open and occupied while driving by one day. Of course, I had to stop in.
This place is immaculate, although something about some of the displays seemed slightly off.
A guy there was making custom dice. I commissioned one from him and he made it on the spot. Damn beautiful thing, and the luckiest die I own (not weighted, just super lucky… for me… and basically cursed for anyone else).
We had a very in-depth conversation about the presentation of fey in various contemporary novels while he made the die. I paid him (plus extra, cause I loved the work he was doing), browsed, bought some MTG cards, and left a couple of dollars in a donation box as I walked out the door (I think it was for supplying dice and other ttrpg stuff to local schools or something and I thought it was a very worthy cause).
One of the employees said something like “pretty decent for a person” to dice guy, and he replied something like, “yeah, I gave him a good one.”
I realized after I got home that the displays for the current set hadn’t had any letters on them that I could recognize, but my ADHD brain had parsed something on them as writing that said “Magic the Gathering” anyway and moved on (and I don’t mean, like, it was Arabic or Chinese or something. I mean nothing, in hindsight, even resembled writing).
The cards practically show up at the top of my deck when I call them, and the die is, again, fabulously lucky, but only for me.
Tried to bring a friend to the shop literally two days later and it was back to being abandoned and gutted. My friend didnt believe that there had really been a store there, although he has since admitted that those cards and that custom d20 are weirdly good for me… and only for me.
Honestly, I’m super glad not to be the only one to have had such a word experience, and glad to have a better explanation for it than “that time i lost my mind and somehow came out of it with physical items that appear to be more or less +1 ebchanted.”
Name of the die is Fafnir, btw. He named it, not me.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
so he calls me up and he’s like, “i need my cfo” and i’m like, i just, i mean this is exhausting, you know, like, we are never getting back together like, ever
