School Jokes: Funny Teacher Jokes and School Jokes for ...

Throwaway because it'll be easy to find my real identity.
In 2008 I was involved in a Federal lawsuit when my rural Texas High School tried to suspend me for wearing a shirt supporting then democratic hopeful John Edwards. (Hindsight is 20/20). They said it was a violation of the dress code, which was only ever selectively enforced. My parents had my back and agreed that it was, to quote my very white dad " redneck cracker nonsense".
I'll never forget during the initial meeting when my principal called in a school board member. He said that if I got suspended I would probably get kicked off the football team, and that could hurt me getting into college. It didn't matter, I was a miserable player and a smart kid so it wasn't gonna be what took me to college. But the slimy fake concern as he tried to leverage my future against my speech is something I'll never forget.
Anyway as the case goes on the squeeze gets tighter.
First they have the football coaches try to get me to drop it, having the football coach's talk about how my " selfishness" means that they can't wear Fellowship of Christian Athlete shirts anymore, trying to embarrass me in front of the team. I'm a fat kid who openly plays Magic the gathering in highschool, hit me with your best shot i have no shame.
Next they host a meeting with all the teachers telling them I'm a "problem" and that they need to keep an eye on me in case I "slip up". I found this out years after the fact when I bumped into my English teacher at a friends wedding.
Finally, they just start pulling in students from my classes to get them to say bad stuff about me. I was a class clown so this turns into every single dirty joke, rude comment, or loud fart i ever made getting reported to school administration. Which then leads to this awful little toady vice principal calling me and my parents in and reading them back in front of my mother. That one stung. My parents still knew it was bullshit but who wants their locker room jokes aired in front of their mom.
They used this as pretext to expel me for 6 weeks, citing "inappropriate sexual conduct". They shove me into the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program, and i am fucking steaming. The Program is basically where they warehouse kids with emotional problems they can't handle, you just sit in a room in a refurbished insane asylum and can't do anything but read or use the computer for monitored educational purposes. You also get booted from extracurriculars while you're in there. I know at this point they want me to make a scene so they can punish me further, so I do the exact opposite.
I channel all my rage and new free time into my school work, doing homework I would usually ignore because I knew I could ace the test. Now I'm doing both and my GPA is climbing. I start looking into scholarships and find a bunch that are really interested in political activism and guess who now knows a little bit about that, I apply and rip my school a new asshole in every one. Then, i work with my dad and we find an attorney who will take our case pro bono, which means while the school bleeds fees it doesn't cost us anything to keep it in court. I spent those weeks like a monk, motivated entirely by spite, doing everything i could to make their bullshit work for me.
I got out, got back on all my teams, and ended up applying for a prestigious honors program at my dream school. Not only did I get in but I got way more financial support than I thought I would. Eventually we lost the case, but the school had to abolish the dress code anyway because they couldn't afford to get sued over it again. I don't like the idea that a school lost money but man they made the choice they could have backed down whenever. Now I've graduated law school, am taking the bar in two weeks, and already have a job investigating government corruption. I'm getting paid to be a pain in the ass of petty authority, and it's pretty sweet.
Edit: Thanks for all the awards. To the many people who have expressed concerns about my Dox, it would be more or less impossible for me to talk about this story without doxxing myself. I have no other social media, and i'm completely comfortable being linked to this story. Therefore, i am largely unconcerned with the information being out there. I'd rather share the story than live in fear of some truly motivated maniac committed to targeting me.

I worked as a babysitter while studying and I loved it. My babysitter-child was 4 years old at the time. We always went to a nice playground and she would play with other children from the neighbourhood there. One day a woman came and talked directly to her and said that she’s not allowed to play here anymore because it’s „only for little children“ and she’s not little. She should go to another playground really far away because that’s for children her age. I was super angry and came to her and explained her that this playground is for all children and not only babies. There is no sign that only babies can play here and there are some pretty high climbing frames that could not be for babies. She screamed at me (how young and dumb I am, how I’m talking to her, she will call the police and her lawyer) and every time we would see each other at the playground it was a ridiculous bad atmosphere.
I‘m now not a student anymore and work in a school as a teacher. I saw this mother inside the building (and she saw me!) and told my two friends/colleagues about this incident and how I hope to not have her child because she probably will get a lawyer (it was a joke). One of my colleagues (who is married to the principal) said that she was here for a job interview. It made it worse but I didn’t say anything. Later she told me trusting that she told the story to her husband (/our principal) and that he did had a bad feeling from the start and didn’t hired her.
Yesterday she came to our school and she went straight to the teachers-room and banged on the door. She said she knows that I’m the reason she didn’t get the job and that she recognised my face. She was escorted out of the building.
But I don’t know - it’s true that I told the story but not with this intention? And I think people can have bad days and do some dumb stuff in the past. And I don’t know if she really needs the job and although for me she doesn’t seem like a good teacher I feel like I’m not the one who can decide that after only seeing her on a playground?
EDIT: sorry for spelling mistakes I’m from Europe and English is not my first language.

is anyone else completely done? i just need to vent. k obv the title is a joke (kind of, not really) but the shit 99% of us seniors are going through this year is BRUTAL.
-First of all, the quadmesters have us completing TWO MF COURSES in about 2 MONTHS. do I need to say more? i literally constantly have to stay up at night to finish all of the assignments given. + i have to teach myself the content because i can’t learn this shit that fast. we’re literally having to finish a whole unit in a week rather than a month, for two courses. on top of that unfortunately teachers don’t know that we have a life outside of school (shocker I know) like jobs, applying for scholarships and completing supp apps 🙂
-we gotta be in one course for 3 fcking hours
-we can’t go out, or enjoy the last year of hs. senior year is already stressful bc of uni applications but it makes it even harder when we can’t live life regularly.
-a lot of us didn’t try in grade 11 because we were told “grade 11 marks don’t matter!1” but surprise mf now they do! well not all, but some. and it’s screwing a lot of people over (like me 🙂). for example my grade 11 english mark wasn’t all that high, but now i have it in quad 4 so they’re gonna use my gr 11 mark instead which is gonna lower my average, and may effect the chances of me getting in my desired program woohoo 🙂
but wait... there’s more! 🙂
-teachers are skipping a lot of the content in courses which is also gonna screw us over in our first year of uni since we aren’t learning shit properly woohoo 🙂
but wait... there’s more! 🙂
-there’s still FOUR MORE MONTHS OF THIS SHIT LEFT AND THE DAYS ARE GOING BY PAINFULLY SLOW + MOST OF US ARE BEGINNING TO FEEL EXTREMELY UNMOTIVATED
y’all have anything else to add on the list?
EDIT: adding on to the list from ur comments below
-NO MF PROM AND NO MF GRAD WE GRADUATING ON ZOOM 😍
-THE MIGRAINES WE ENDURE FROM STARING AT OUR SCREENS FOR 8 HOURS A DAY 🤩
-Isolation :(
-(a lot) of Guidance counselors aren’t helping students
-we gotta turn on our mf cameras & mics at 8am, and some students just don’t have a good home environment for that.
-cancellation of clubs/sports, things that make us happy and are important for many students mental health

I don't believe I'm wrong but some of the other moms have told me to apologize.
Im Nigerian American & had some problems when it came to my name .I went to school here & struggled with people making fun of it. This isn't my name but say my name was Morenike. Many people would say More Nike. It’s Moe-Ren-Knee-Keh. It means Ive found someone to spoil. Its a girl name that fathers/grandparents give. Nigeria is a patriarchal society so having a name that celebrates a female is great but people make it into a joke.
Hubs had it worse. He's Asian & in college, there was a mass hiring program for this company so the top 30 students in his school applied & 'normal' names got call backs but him & all the brown/black kids were rejected even though they made up the top 10.
Due to that we gave our kids 'easy' names that could blend in. Dumb but we were young. Not real names but ex. twin girls named Erin & Kesí. Erin aka Oluwapamilerin which means God has caused me to laugh & Kesi aka Mokesioluwa which means I cried unto God.
The issue starts last year, my kids joined this club soccer team. There was a mom(S), a beautiful blonde but then she’d open her mouth & ‘ain’t you finna’ & ‘gurl periodt’ & ‘don’t make me beat yo’ ass’ would come out.
I went to a very inner city school growing up. Like my hs ranked in the bottom ten in the state for the last 25 yrs, inner city. I grew up with hood white people & have no problem with her speaking like that but it didn’t feel real.
I started asking questions & S grew up in the richest town in the county. Dad’s a judge turned law prof & mom’s a director at a hospital. S went to private schools & owns her own business. A week later a Latinx mom (L) joined & S's hoodness doubled. So I ‘rocked the boat’
She tried to pretend like that was how she talked. She tried to play it off but L agreed. All the moms were quiet but knew what we were saying. S was using inner city slangs & minority vernacular english as a persona.
Last month, the coaches threw a Rona friendly lunch & made a slideshow of the kids.
That’s when S struck.
“I never knew you were one of those moms who think their kid becomes special because they take a normal name & spell it… Uniquely. That’s pretty white right?” She points at Kesí whose name is spelled with an accent mark & K.
The kids have only their surname on their jersey so Im guessing she thought Kesi’s name was Casey or K.C
I told her she was a moron for assuming things. I told her Kesi’s full name & called her out for trying me just because she was so keen on using proverbial black face to make up for the fact that she didn’t have a personality.
She cried & S’s friends are saying I’ve been a mean girl since I joined.
Kesi’s name is Nigerian but S was sorta right since I was trying to make Kesi’s name easier. I didn’t want to make it a ‘white’ name but it could be seen as that & I may be an AH then?

Hey guys! I am new to this subreddit and I hope that everyone is doing okay. I wanted to talk about this for the longest time and what better way to share it with other people who may have had a similar upbringing as I did. I'm not sure in the direction I want to go with this so it might just be a shitshow lmao but here we go.
I am 21 years old now and this happened when I was 14 right about to go into high school. I'm Hmong and from the midwest so there is a relatively decent Asian community from the state that I am from. I feel like my school was unique since I grew up just outside the metropolitan area, so my school was very white and suburban but still had a handful of minority and hood kids. This particular incident happened when I was at gym class. I cannot remember what game we were playing but I was just minding my own business and talking with some friends. During the game, this white kid (let's name him Billy) starts cracking up some "jokes". He starts with some very lighthearted things at me like "oh look, it's short round from Indiana Jones" which made me genuinely laugh since kids in my grade used to joke around and dish stuff back. The game goes on and he's talking over and over and over. He starts to cross a line where I wouldn't say that they're jokes anymore. I'm talking about stuff like "My grandfather was killing your ancestors in 'nam" "Speak English, Oh china boy don't speak Engrish? So duh sorry". This is all happening in front of the substitute teacher btw. She's standing there watching the game and there is no way that she could have not heard it. Five minutes of this same banter goes on and I could tell most of the other students were uncomfortable and a handful of Billy and his friends were laughing. At this point, I am absolutely livid. He is turned around talking to his group of friends and I give him a hard shove from behind. Billy is much bigger than me so he falls down but not hard enough to be injured. He turned around and starts saying shit like "Woah! it's just a joke man" and all of his friends back up. I start screaming at his fucking face and he looks absolutely stunned. I can't remember all of what I said because I was so pissed off at the moment but I remember telling him that if he doesn't shut up, I would cave his fucking face in. In reality, I probably would have lost the fight but I think he was so shook being cussed out bad by a skinny Asian kid, he didn't know what to do. I keep screaming at him and saying every cuss word in the book when the substitute teacher yells at me "Hey! there's no room for that language here!". I stop and snap back at her saying "Did you hear the stuff that he was saying?" and she replies with "I don't care what he was saying, there is no excuse to use that language in this setting. Whatever he said, just ignore it." Think about this. She was ANGRIER about the fact that I'm disrupting the class by calling out and cussing out this ignorant prick, than Billy going on a racist tirade against me. I feel like this experience is so prevalent among my Asian brothers and sisters, particularly ones who grew up in more suburban areas. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the "it's just a joke" excuse. The substitute teacher is like how mainstream media reacts when us Asian-Americans speak our voice on subjects that affect us culturally. It's taken as a joke and sometimes by other POC sadly. I was never the same after this incident and it opened my eyes to racism and how angry it made me felt. If you made it this far, thank you for reading!

I found the guide in a book store that was closing down. Most books were 50% to 75% off, even the old and ordinarily expensive leather-bound tomes kept behind glass in the rearmost section of the store. I hadn’t gone in with any particular book in mind; I’d simply meant to browse, and pick a few books up with the twenty dollars I had reserved for the occasion. I crossed row after row, pulling, inspecting, and returning several volumes; nothing too interesting that I hadn’t already read, owned, or planned to own in some other, more preferable fashion. There were other shoppers, most appearing to be casual readers or first-year students—there is a college not far from the bookstore.
The shop-owner and his assistant were visibly melancholy, so I smiled warmly upon arriving and made efforts not to cross their paths; I’m terrible at consoling people, and figured that my plentiful patronage of the store would be better than any fumbling words I could offer. I made a few rounds of the store—it wasn’t a large place by any means—before finally settling on a few horror collections—Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft, Bierce, Stoker—and some books on Eastern mythology and mysticism.
Satisfied with my haul, I made my way towards the registers at the front, but stopped short when I saw the assistant wheeling out a cart on which sat some particularly old looking books—the single pricing sign listing them all as being 90% off. Immediately attracted by the discount alone, I asked her if I could take a look at the books, and she happily obliged. She left me with the cart and went over towards a group of shoppers down an aisle.
Most were first or second editions of books by authors I hadn’t much interest in—but whose values were inarguable—and I felt sorry that the owners hadn’t the means or time to sell these books more appropriately priced. My eyes scanned the withered and warped spines, reading the titles with a casual literary appreciation, but finding nothing of relevance to my somewhat specific interests. I had almost left the cart when I spotted, on the second steel shelf, a book that seemed of an extremely advanced aged; armored in dust, with the spinal lettering faded, ashen.
I withdrew it carefully, so that the row in which it had sat did not totter. The book was averagely sized, though oddly heavy, and as I had initially observed, was of an age much older than its leatherbound companions. Upon brushing away the dust, I saw with no small shock that the title read: “How to Survive the Harrowing of 2021.” The lettering, once relieved of its ashen coating, glimmered faintly in gold, and was styled in a pseudo-cursive that flowed beautifully across the faded crimson cover. There were no other designs or markings on the book, front or back; only that bizarre title, whose message seemed an impossible thing considering the book’s obvious age.
No authorship had been assigned to the book either, and this immediately inspired the idea that the book itself was some sort of joke, a thing made to appear severely aged; a novelty that would’ve assuredly been a hit to younger readers if the store had had time to market it. I had no doubts that other copies sat in a box somewhere in the store, never to be sold as intended.
I was about to open the book, where I expected to find fittingly contemporary messages of hope, faith, determination, and positive thinking, but phrased archaically; styled anachronistically. But before I could crack open that expertly aged guide, I felt a sudden sensation of foreboding; an ominous and vague prescience which not only stopped my hand, but removed it from the book’s surface. Through no conscious thought of my own had I withdrawn my hand from the cover, and yet the compulsion had been immediate and incontestable. A fear mounted within me, swelling almost to the point of actual dread, and I considered unceremoniously tossing the book onto the cart and leaving.
But some other impetus, equally powerful, impelled me to not only hold onto the book, but purchase it.
I stood there for a while, and the baleful apprehension which had entered my mind faded away, and a curiosity—morbid, if not scholarly—took its place. I added the book to the bundle in my basket and took my haul to the front. Surprisingly, the sum amounted to only seventeen dollars, and I happily allocated the change to the tip jar at the register. The owner thanked me gratefully, as if I’d thrown in double the amount I’d brought, and wished me a happy new year. I bid him the same farewell, and left the store pleasantly encumbered with new literature.
It was a nice day, cold but not uncomfortably so, and sunlight fell plentifully upon the world. I decided to sit in a nearby coffee shop and read, rather than go home to my stuffy apartment to do the same. I walked down the sidewalk, contemplating which book to begin first. Looking back, I now think that I had always planned on reading the strangest book first; that guide which I had believed to be a fake, a bookstore’s joke. Perhaps if I’d read anything else, I might’ve avoided the horror which was born from the pages of that truly decrepit and sinister tome.
I sat at a table nearest the window for optimal sunlight, ordered a cup of Earl Grey tea, a freshly baked Oatmeal cookie—just one, they were quite large—and laid the contents of my bag out onto the table. I went through the “performance” of considering each book, but my mind had already decided upon the 2021 survival guide. I stacked the other books nearby to my left, cleared a space to my right for my food and drink, and placed the book immediately before me. In the brief time that had elapsed, I’d forgotten the intense feeling of apprehension that had come to me when I first considered opening the book. When I reached for the crimson cover, the feeling again returned, albeit to a lesser extent. But this time, curiosity prevailed, and I endured the unsettling sensation and gently opened the book.
I was taken back by what I saw on the very first page. There were lines upon lines of tiny strange runes, scribed in letters that seemed entirely alien to human language. The writing—I am sure that these letters had not been mechanically printed—was done in a deep red ink; absolutely sanguine against the thick and time-yellowed paper. The spacing, placement, and script were all immaculate; despite my certainty that a hand—of some nature—had written the words, I was nonetheless amazed at the impeccable penmanship of the author.
My eyes scanned this first page several times and yet I could intimate nothing of what it said, so I flipped it, and was again shown a language entirely unrecognizable. There were no hints or clues as to the meanings of any of the words, and, after flipping to the very end of the book, no cipher was found with which I might’ve decrypted them. I flipped the pages at random, finding only that odd, unfathomable language, written beautifully, and yet eerily, upon the sallow pages.
My order arrived and I set the book aside, not wanting to stain it, which despite its age was in a decent condition within. My fruitless scrutiny of its contents had changed my mind entirely in regards to its nature. I had abandoned my belief of its literary duplicity; there was no way that anyone—certainly not a small-scale bookstore owner—would've gone through the efforts necessary to create such a thing for the purpose of novelty. The language, though unreadable, seemed to be an inhumanly real one, in a way that is inexpressible. The color and feel of the pages were indistinguishable from the pages of other incredibly old books, and the smell was similarly genuine.
I ate and drank absorbed in thoughtlessness; thinking neither of the book nor its enigmatic language, but vexed by an undefinable impression imparted to me by the book. A similar sensation, though to a much less unnerving degree, might be the apprehension one feels as a child on the day in which school report cards are mailed; confident that your grades aren’t abysmal, but nonetheless fearing that some unforeseen or miscalculated grade still might appear and evoke the ire of your parents. I felt that I was for the moment safe, but that certain actions—or certain knowledge to be obtained later—would place me in the way of some terrible yet unforeseeable harm.
Once I had finished my meal, I returned my attention to the book, this time determined to uncover some meaning or message from its previously inscrutable contents.
Minutes passed, I finished my tea and ordered another—this time getting an infusion of lemongrass, citrus herbs, and ginger, among other things—and really scanned the pages; but my efforts were pointless, the pages yielded nothing to any interpretation I tried to force.
I was about to give up, when a woman entered the coffee shop and immediately passed by my table, which I had chosen due to its proximity to the front windows. She’d glanced down, and in my natural shyness I had averted my gaze. My eyes fell upon the pages, and for a moment—a brief yet clarifying moment—I found some sense in the words. Nothing that I could really reproduce in my own thoughts and language, but there’d been for a moment a glimmer of...readability. Instinctively—through an instinct I hadn’t understood—my attention returned to the woman, who’d suddenly worn an expression of confusion intermingled with intense interest.
Meeting my eyes, she asked what I was reading, and I admitted that I wasn’t exactly sure. I noticed the logo on the plastic bag she’d been carrying, and pointed out that I had bought the book from the very same bookstore; but that it was written in a language totally unfamiliar to me. Her curiosity piqued, she glanced at the chair beside me, and I nodded—granting her permission to join me. One of the café's staff came and took her order, and once that I was done, I slid the book towards her so that she could comfortably read it.
Initially, I had watched her face as her eyes crawled over the pages. Confusion and excitement illumined her green eyes, and her mouth twitched; as if the lips were attempting to read along, but hadn’t any basis upon which to form the unreadable words. A few seconds of this passed, and she sighed in defeat. I laughed, commenting on my own inability to decipher a single word of the thing.
It wasn’t until I had glanced back at the book that the sudden sensation of literacy returned. For a moment, my eyes and her eyes had rested upon the same line, and I realized—in both excitement and horror—that the script was readable when looked at by two persons. She must’ve intimated the same, because she turned to me, eyes wide with the very same emotions that I’d felt. We said nothing to each other, but my hand involuntarily turned the pages until it reached the beginning of the book, and my index finger came to rest on the book’s first line.
The moment our eyes landed on that first word, it was transformed from its alien text into English, or some interpretation simultaneously readable to us. I cannot earnestly say it was actually English upon the page. My mind reeled at the idea; the concept that the text was only readable by two readers, or by one in possession of four—at least four—eyes! Uncovering the secret of that once impassible barrier was exciting, pride-inducing, and yet I felt that I had finally arrived at that moment for which I had earlier felt such apprehension and ominousness.
I suppressed the rising terror mentally, and even physically with a few sips of tea, and once she had seemed to do the same for herself, we began reading the previously unreadable book.
The enigma unlocked before our eyes. The words shifted, re-formed, were unmade as if by some cryptographic sense inborn within us. Comprehension came immediately, as if we were reading any ordinary book. We read in tandem, effortlessly trailing the lines of script without one falling behind or pushing forward. Our eyes and minds were locked together, our thoughts fused in some tether of previously undiscovered hyper-cognition. We read as one, interpreted as one, thought as one, and the sensation was absolutely incredible—though entirely indescribable; at least in the language with which I compose this account.
Pages flew by, and I’m sure that to onlookers we might’ve appeared very strange; our heads practically touching, our eyes moving along with equal pacing, as if choreographed. In what couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, we had reached the middle of the thick book, and by this time I had felt the indefatigable return of that monstrous horror. The things we’d read up to that point were nightmarish, unrepeatable; and though our eyes had easily discerned the words and our minds clearly understood the meanings, our human mouths had been woefully inadequate for the vocalization of the ultra-alien text.
It took a considerable effort to do so, but I pried my eyes away from the words, and they immediately resumed their inscrutable arrangement and forms in the corners of my eye. My reading partner sighed, exhaustion and terror clear upon her face. I glanced around, not really to see if we’d been watched, but just to keep my eyes away from the frightful book for a while. No one had seemed to notice our strange captivation. I turned to her, and saw that tears had begun to form in her eyes. I felt a similar deluge swelling within the ducts of my own, but tried to keep them at bay, if only to appear comfortably composed to her. The things we had read, the things the book had foretold, were appalling; things no human being, regardless of how black-hearted, would ever wish upon the species to which he belonged; the only world he knew to be home.
And there was still another half to read through.
She looked at the book, then to me; her eyes clouded with tears, the once vibrant light dimmed by a potent, insuppressible terror. Despite my own feelings, I wanted—almost yearned—to continue on, to read the rest of that darkly prescient tome. But with each page, the horror detailed therein had grown, worsened, and I knew that the trend would continue with each subsequent page. Conceding to her unspoken plea, I closed the book and set it on a table beside me. She smiled, and nodded to me with a gratitude that was almost spiritual in fervency.
Together, in silence, we finished our tea; both of our minds struggling to reconcile the abysmal predictions of that baleful book with the relative normalcy of our present world.
In a testimony to the weird unreality—or the chilling hyper-reality—of the event, I discerned a sliver of crimson light from the book. My heart seemed to irreversibly contract, my chest felt tight and hot, as I realized that the glowing line was a supernatural bookmark, keeping the place where we’d left off. I did not point this out to my partner, who had regained a bit of her composure and sanity. Instead, hiding as best as possible my distress, I packed up my things, and left that wicked book in a chair tucked beneath the table.
I will not repeat in detail anything I read. I will not subject anyone to the horrific prophecies, the diabolical incidents, the cosmically inimical afflictions to the human race described in those sanguine-runed pages. I will only give this instruction, this warning, and pray that it will be sufficient to prepare us for the coming storm—if the book is to be believed.
This woman and I—whom I have now befriended, as people who’ve shared a traumatic incident are often bonded—needed to read the book together, to decipher its abominable contents. Similarly, if we are to survive the coming year, we—humanity as a whole—must band together; intellectually, emotionally, perhaps even spiritually; or else we cannot hope combat the horrors which will descend upon us from the unmapped tracts of sidereal space; which will emerge from the molten depths of our own planet; and, quite possibly, arise from among our own allegedly human ranks...
Our strength must be communal.

So I (18f) started uni in Sep 2020. I have 3 other roommates.
One of them (S-18f) is from Nigeria. She has a pretty strong Nigerian accent.
For some reason, she thinks it's funny to mock mine. I have a speech impediment which makes me confuse/mess up me saying the letter 'b'. On top of that, I have a very strong northern Yorkshire accent and I often speak with AAVE (been informed it's Multi- cultural London English) or Pakistani slang. This is hilarious to S and whenever I speak, she echoes my words with a super put on, chavvy accent. Hell, the first time we met, she asked where I'm from (our uni mostly has overseas students) and when I said the uk, she literally goes 'OIII IT'S CHEWSDAY INIT BRUV'. I tried to look past it, but it's really bothering me as I literally can't say anything without her taking the piss. I've dealt with her 'jokes' since the first day of school in September.
Today I snapped. We were playing a game that requires speech and it was my turn. As soon as I started talking, S started with her bullshit. I slammed the cards down and went off. I said that it's not funny to mock someone for their accent and it doesn't make her cool. I also said 'oh it's chewsday is it? You can't even say Tuesday- 'Two-wesday' (that's how she pronounces it). Learn how to say it properly before making a classist stereotype the backbone of your shitty joke.'
Everyone went silent and S went to her room. I will admit, I felt proud of myself for finally standing up to someone, but also bad because I found out she was crying. I tried apologising to her but she wasn't having it and i didn't want to force it. I spoke to my other roommates and they were split, too.
This whole situation sucks because I really wanted to get along with S. She seems cool when I'm not talking.
AITA?
EDIT: so people are fixated on the fact that I use slang so I'm here to clear some stuff up.

1. I am white Maori but I grew up in an area with black people and Pakistani people so I naturally picked up slang.
2. S wasn't making fun of me using slang, she was making fun of my northern accent
3. I realise AAVE might have been the wrong term, but that's what I've heard my black friends say so I thought that was the correct term. * I've been informed the correct term is 'Multi- cultural London English' Thanks for the people who said that.*
4. I don't see how I'm the asshole for using slang? If u/ventthrowawayz would kindly explain, that would be much appreciated.

EDIT 2: According to u/animatorenby I'm racist?? Because (and I quote) 'considering the fact that england r*ped and pillaged the whole WORLD, is not even close to mocking an African accent' and for 'calling her classist for an accent joke nobody even KNOWS is "rooted in classism" '. Which on that last point, the chavvy accent is thought to be a lower class thing. Everyone in England who isn't in the top 1% knows this. If you say 'chav' to someone, they instantly think of the working class, council house 'chewsday' person. It is a classist joke. Also, apprantly I can't talk in slang because it's racist. Lets hope they don't say any of the following: “lit,” “woke,” “bae,” “ratchet,” “sis,” “slay, “hella, “ or “basic,”, “straight up,” “on fleek,” “I feel you,” or “turn up,” because if you do, you're a racist.
I'm aware that they're most probably a troll trying to get a reaction, but I wanted to educate people on the points they made, specifically the classism part.

My idea for an Union of Latin American States
Hi everybody, just a disclaimer, this is a personal project that goes beyond maps, but i would like to share it with you all, i hope you like it
If you want more lore just ask, thank you all.
These are common questions that you might have:

1. This is just not feasible

Well, yeah, I did not want to make an idealistic scenario neither a fully realistic one. This is just a thought experiment, and is asking If for some reason the entire continent united ¿How such a behemoth would work and how would we like it to be?

1. ¿How federal is this Union?

It is barely a state, is a loose confederation, state governments have almost as much autonomy as the countries of the EU, with some exceptions; environment, defense, public service, education and healthcare where federal institutions have the last words.

1. ¿What are these reserve things?

These are fully functional states carve out of existing states for their immense ecological and strategic importance. People here have more liberties than the rest of the federation. They barely pay income and added value taxes, receive a basic income (Like in Alaska) and preferential treatment, but in contrast have to follow really strict environmental rules and regulations and heavy penalties for pollution.

1. ¿¿¡¡¡WHAT DID YOU DO TO MEXICO AND BRAZIL!!!??

Sorry Brazil and Mexico-Sama you are too big (sorry for that cringy otaku joke)
But yeah, is sad but Brazil would have 1/3 and Mexico 1/6 of the population. Those countries would be underrepresented in Congress if they are considered just one state and overrepresented if each State (Alagoas, Chiapas etc.) would be considered equal to Colombia or Argentina for example, so I choose a middle path. The idea is that any state has more than 50 million people (1/12 of the Union). I chose to cluster states vaguely trying to follow regional sentiments, in the case of Brazil I choose the regions.

1. ¿Where does the Anfictionic City name come from?

It was the name of the meeting proposed by Bolívar and Miranda to create a United states of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. It also sounds good both in english, Spanish and Portuguese.

1. ¿How is the territorial organization?

📷
The Union is divided into federal entities: States, Federal reserve states, the Federal Capital and Federal dependencies.
Federal dependencies are either almost uninhabited islands or Antartica.
States are divided in provinces and metropolitan regions. Each province has no more than 1/1200 of the population, roughly half a million people and Metropolitan regions are the same as provinces but could be way bigger and are created surrounding a big city. If a city expands further than its municipal limits, it passes more and more functions to the province that gradually becomes a metropolitan government and its municipalities become Wards or localities.
Provinces also work as school and hospital districts.
Municipalities have a ten-level-tier-system that considers population, wealth, services and other variables to decide the budget that receive from the province, the state and the Union. Municipalities level three and four have a lot less bureaucracy, few public employees and citizens have a more direct participation in local regulations, school curriculum and budget creation for example.
Municipalities over Tier Three have a mayor and a municipal council where the number of members depend on the population. The smallest municipalities (level one and two) have a communitarian system where there is only a Community Board of ten elected members that collectively realize all government functions, local decisions are taken by direct democracy meetings called Local Assemblies that are realized the last saturday of every month.
The name of the municipality change according to their level:
📷
The same happens with municipalities in reserve states, but sectors are ruled by Commissariats that are part of the State Guard.
Municipalities have to belong to a province, but could choose in a referendum to change which one they belong.
Federal reserve-states have a different system. The territory is divided into organized and unorganized territory. The former is divided in Sectors and the later in municipalities that only include the urban and suburban territory, every four years the limits are actualized by a technical agency. Sectors are almost uninhabited and as such do not really have a local government, they are ruled directly from the State.
¿How is the government?
The division of power is pretty normal for a semi presidential republic, but there are some caveats. The executive is divided in three (or two and a half if you want).
The president is elected by a single transferable vote (STV), she/he should be both the winner both in the Union and in at least 15 of the federal entities. There is an informal truce that assures that there should be a president from either the Brazilian or Mexican, most presidents come from small states, such as Costa Rica or Uruguay while the Prime minister generally comes from the most populous states, like Aztlan or Nordeste.
The prime minister is the president of the party or the coalition that holds the majority of the House of Representatives. Is accompanied by a Cabinet that is chosen by the House of Representatives. The Prime Minister is also the Chief of Government.
The Secretary General is a particular character, is not elected, but is designated by a Federal Public Service Exam and an absurdly strict interview process that assures political neutrality because it is a life-time position. The SG have the function of assuring cooperation and breaking controversy and discussions between the President and the Prime Minister and among states and as such, it has the power to overrule the decision of any other institution.
It has to live an ascetic life, It should NEVER express personal opinions on media, hold any real estate or financial activities so it does not have any moral interference. Is supposed to be approved by all parties and states and be as impartial as humanly possible. They are generally older jurists that have made a life-long career in public service with any scandal or misbehavior during its life.
The legislative branch is divided in two houses. The Upper House is the Senate, where the amount of seats is one for every million people. Senators are elected federally, all citizens of every state could elect different senators from any place of the Union. This house is supposed to represent the popular vote.
The Lower House is the House of Representatives, where the representatives of every federal entity are calculated by adding 20% to the number of millions of inhabitants plus three representatives. Every Federal entity has one or two houses depending on the state constitution. The Upper house has a state-wide representation while the lower one is a province-based representation. States have governors, state-reserves have commissioners (Or lieutenant governor) and the Federal Capital have a Mayor-governor and local mayor for every locality.
Provinces only have a provincial assembly composed of representatives from every municipality, a state representative and other ethnic or civil society representatives specified by the state. The same with metropolitan regions. The Province Representative is the Mayor of the municipality that is the capital of the province.
¿What is the state guard?
Is a civil defense institution that keeps public order and the rule of law and directly confronts guerrilla groups, drug lords, paramilitaries and generally everything that police is not really able to do. They also fulfill the functions of police in reserve-states, where they have a special name. In Patagonia they are called the Austral Guard (Guardia Austral) and in Amazonia the Anauê (That means Brother in Tupí). They are a state and not a federal entity and as such, have a lot of autonomy in their internal organisation.
The Austral Guard is known for using horses in their daily routines and by using a well known uniform (Like the mounted police in Canada), that consist in a light blue beret and poncho, with a Southern Cross in the back and military gear. The Anauê is generally divided in different ethnicities and groups, hence, they use different uniforms that generally mix European and native iconography.
¿And what about the armed forces?
Is pretty average, there is an army, a navy and an air force, all of them only act in external defense because the internal control is done by the State Guard. There are three other minor bodies. The first one is the Environmental Task Force that has the responsibility of controlling deforestation, illegal hunting and other activities that hinders the natural resources, that are considered property of the Union and not individual states. At the end is the Antarctic Task force, that is composed of a collection of all of the other bodies and have the function of protecting Latin American Antartica from foreign intervention, they also have a scientific body.
The last one and the most controversial is the Agency of Security and Intelligence (Asein) that is the intelligence institution for both internal and external missions. They are considered something close to a secret police. This organ should be a civil one and restrained by the Defense ministry, but in reality, works like part of the armed forces and have actually spied, kidnap and even torture party members, specially those of Lusitania and Freedom and Revolution.
Most of its members came from the various intelligence services and even paramilitaries of each country. The DAS in Colombia, the SEBIN of Venezuela, the Cuban Secret Police, the AAA of Argentina and even some former FBI and CIA from Puerto Rico. There are also many internal conflicts of various ideological factions but all of the federal governments have ignored their mistakes because they have been able to eliminate, sometimes brutally, any irredentist movement and foreing intervention.
¿So what about Antarctica?
Is a federal dependency with a special legal regime. Other countries do not recognize the claim and directly accuse the Union of violations to the Antarctic treaty, and those claims are actually true. The geopolitical strategy consist in hitting the first blow and be more prepared than other countries for the year when the Antarctic treaty end and the Union could take control of their Antarctic resources faster than the rest of the world, that is why the Union spends millions of Pesos-Reales in keeping Puerto Esperanza afloat.
¿How does education work?
Most schools are public, but are not free. Every parent receives a coupon of certain value for every child and most schools do not charge more than that amount, but those schools of high quality are able to charge a little bit more. This coupon system was implemented in order to reduce cost while increasing coverage. It also forces schools to compete for increasing the averages of their students in Federal Standardized Exams while giving reasonable prices. A similar system is used in public universities.
There are private schools and universities, but tend to exist to provide a service to a specific demographic, such as those of a specific religion or ideology. These schools have more autonomy to choose their curriculum.
There are four basic periods. Nursery, that takes care of young children until they have 7 years, Primaries, from first to fifth grade, highschool, from sixth to tenth grade and Technical, that are three years where the students choose a technical specialisation, generally is a preparation for university, such as pre-legal, pre-engineering, although many students prefer vocational training, such as mechanics or programming. Each period has a Federal Standardized Exam that is realized by the Ministry of Education without the intervention of schools.
Federal Exams are a big deal because they help students to access better schools. These schools are ranked not just by a simple average, but also with the amount of students over a certain grade or capacity. This forces schools not to just help good students to become even better, but to help the worst student to reach the rest of their classes, reducing the inequality of quality of the education in schools.
The Union has both Spanish and Portuguese as official languages, and as such, every student has to take a Minimal proficiency test in either of them to graduate, this tends to be easy because both languages are taught parallely since first grade. Teachers put reading lists that include both hispanic and lusitanian authors trying to create a narrative of united history and culture. Media is also really bilingual and lusitanians are strongly eager to defend their right to receive public services in their language.
All public documents have to be translated to both official languages. States and provinces have also official languages, but could choose to translate services to those languages. For example, Quechua is an official language in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, Guaraní is official in Paraguay, Maya in Yucatán, Nahuatl in Aztlán, Welsh in certain provinces of Patagonia, German in parts of Sul, etc.
Many public schools have courses in other languages, Chinese, Hindi and Hebrew in Anfictionic City, Japanese in Perú, Lebanese in Granada, Korean in Guatemala and Paraguay and Mapundung in both Chile and Patagonia.
In general terms, education not only looks for technical learning, but the creation of compromised citizens and the creation of an unified identity and sense of national pride. Different states change the curriculum to be closer to what states want, for example, religious or moral elements in Costa Rica and Peru or localized elements, such as biology and botanic classes in Amazonía and international economy in Anfictionic City.
The education in the union has some influence from the German and Japanese model. Nursery and Primary have a strong focus on civic duties. Toddlers are expected to learn respect for their elderlies, tolerance, acceptance to people of other states, basic house chores, study habits while in the primary, childrens are taught both the history of all of the Federation and not only their rights but their duties to the Union.
During highschool and technical they also receive education about the political system, their means of participation and the importance of the National service. This consists in a duty that every citizen has to fulfill in order to become a citizen, vote, be a public servant etc. It could be civil or military. Civil service is one year and a half and the military just ten months. Every public institution, civil society organisation or private entity with a community mision upload their job vacancies in a federal database where students could choose theirs, based in their studies and aptitudes, the CS is generally paid and could be reduced to fourteen months or even less if is served outside of the home state of the student.
This service is considered the transition to real adulthood for many, is the first time that a student is outside of home, receiving a wage, living on their own. It also fulfills a more important function, it gives every single student of the Union important job experience and a close relation between technical schools and the market to reduce unemployment.
Military service usually is really scarce and only those with great physical aptitudes and any health problems are accepted. It could be fulfilled in any of the branches of the armed forces or in the national guard. Families in the Reserve states tend to have great pride in having one or more sons or daughters in their national guards, which are considered an important cultural pillar of these regions.

Hello  this will be very long and confusing but bear with me. English is also not my first language so I appologies for any mistakes.
I am (19F) currently studying in uk but not for long I guess.
Quick back story, I came to the UK a few years ago to attend high school in preparation for uni. During that time I signed up for a charity to donate my blood cells for leukaemia patients if found compatible.
I never told my family because the possibility that I will actually be compatible was one in a million. Or so I thought.
I got into uni early last year as an international student, then I was emailed late last year and informed that I was a possible match for a patient, and that they would like to test me to be sure I'm compatible before proceeding.
This sparked a small riot since my parents thought what I wanted to do was diabolical and against my religion ,(I can't remember what was quoted).
 But most importantly they argue that if I'm paying for uni, accomondation and NHS services, I shouldn't be giving my blood for free to anyone I don't know in the name of charity. I ignored them and got tested to see if I was compatible which I am. upon hearing this everything became worse. My family members are irate to say the least. They told me if I go through with this they will cut me off financially. Their explanation is that, since I want to waste my time doing charity instead of focusing on my studies then I have enough and don't need their resources. Also, this will show that I am  disrespectful to them and their beliefs and don't want help. I thought it was a joke but since I'm living with a family member here in uk(that's how they know what's going on) she explained that it's difficult for everyone back home due to the pandemic and my studies cost the most so if I give them a reason to say they are wasting their money. Then they will cut me off. To save the money and that they are already thinking of it.
With a 20 houweek work  limit on my visa and no accommodation if I go through with the donation, when I get cut off I'm screwed for at least a few years. So my options are, listen to my family and live with the guilt that someone I could've saved died. Or ruin my life to save their life. Both options are shity imo and I'll  feel like shit with whatever choice I make.
 I could go back to my country and study but it will still be difficult without support. The education quality is vastly different as it is a developing country and lastly it isn't easy trying to study engineering as a woman in even the most well regarded universities there. So what should I do.
(edit): we are a pretty close family so right now I'm currently living with a relative who reports back to the others because why not. (edit2): I have to travel for two days to a different city to donate I cant sneak out. They will definitely know what's up.

Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

Everyone has the right to consent to what they put in their body, food included. Just about all of them declined to consume this. Clearly, the cast doesn't have particularly sophisticated palates but that's none of her business and adding crickets for shock value certainly doesn't do anything to level up their sophistication.
I was glad to see a female physician finally represented in the housewives franchise rather than wife of physician, it's just unfortunate it's her. The constant self aggrandizement and jokes belittling the intelligence of others makes her and her fellow physicians look bad. I have no love for Cameron, but she nailed it when she called her out on making fun of her vocabulary. Medical school was full of people like this, who take pleasure in the the personal failings of others because it reaffirms their feelings of superiority. Ultimately this type of person is nobody's friend.
And trying to judge Kary's mastery of English when Kary learned as a teenager and Tiffany learned as a child, is ridiculous. Any college level biology student would know that in order to become fluent in a second language you need to learn as a child - not a teenager - and that it increases with difficulty as you age. Acting like they overcame similar challenges in learning English is quite simply a falsehood. Kary had almost no chance of true fluency at her age.

Disclaimer: I want to make it clear to you that this happened in the year 2016. What our town have never told the world, and if they have—the world have kept it silent. I’ve been advised to talk about my experience but sitting here on my laptop and just typing is so much better.
I want someone out there to know what happened to me and my friends. I want to tell someone, and you guys seem like the best people to pour my life out to.
-
The average human being is supposed to sneeze four times a day. According to Google at least.
Obviously test results aren’t always completely scientifically accurate, but that’s the most recent estimate.
I, however, at sixteen years of age, had managed to bypass that statistic by a mile. I wasn’t the first and certainly wouldn’t be the last. But it was rather the circumstances surrounding me that made my case a lot more interesting. Though it wasn’t anything to be proud of.
I’d sneezed nearly fourteen times in a row in the space of a few minutes and after desperately trying to stifle spluttered cough attacks attacking my chest, I was pretty sure I was dying. Fourteen sneezes wasn’t too serious. In fact, there was a Guinness world record achievement for eighty two sneezes, held by eighteen year old Lana Seldom from Germany. Forced of course. Though the thing was, I wasn’t just sneezing. To put it simply, my body felt like it was on fire. My limbs were numb. Every sneeze felt closer to projecting my lungs from my bloody lips. Bloody because every sneeze was agonizing, violently shaking my trembling body with every sternutation.
Whatever the hell was happening to me, it wasn’t your average sickness.
It wasn’t normal. And for the first time in my life, I wondered if I really was dying.
If that was it. The light at the end of the tunnel. I didn’t know what dying felt like. I was practically a kid, I didn’t even have a driver’s license. I was, however, pretty damn sure that normal people weren’t supposed to sneeze themselves to death. Because that would be fucking hilarious. It would be the bizarre, totally not-funny plot of an Adam Sandler movie that got shoved on Netflix, or my ten year old self’s feverish nightmares. Because that wasn’t how you were supposed to die. It was either a heart attack, or a brain haemorrhage. Especially so young. I didn’t understand why it was my time.
My life, or I guess my normal life ended, stumbling down some dead-end street on the south side of our little town. I should probably say our town isn’t very well known. We’re small, small enough to be forgotten. There are about 1500 of us, and everyone knows everyone’s business. Our high school had around 100 kids.
I was scared. I was more scared than I had ever been in my life. My steps were stumbled, and I could barely hold myself. Every movement meant more coughing, more spluttering, my hands over my nose getting wetter with stark red. That’s what I called it, anyway. Red. I didn’t want to call it what it really was, because then I would be admitting to myself that I was bleeding out; that every orifice was bleeding out, and there was so much fucking red, and it was everywhere. It was on my clothes and the tips of my fingers. I could feel it dribbling down my chin, and wet on my lips. So much fucking red, and I wasn’t ready to accept it. I wasn’t ready to come to terms that my body, for whatever reason, was rejecting me.
It didn’t make sense, I remember saying over and over again, muttering it to myself.
Though it kind of did. I was just in a fuck load of denial.
The truth was, in the back of my mind, I’d been expecting it.
I wasn’t the first one with symptoms. I had already seen them hours before, and I’d ignored it.
My first instinct was to call my father. He would know what to do, surely. Dad always knew what to do.
Slipping trembling hands into my pockets I grasped for my phone, and at that same moment something trickled from my nose. Something wet and warm snaking down my skin, tainting me, painting me like my body was its canvas.
It reminded me of earlier on in the afternoon. When everything had been reasonably normal. For me at least. I had been sitting a few seats behind another student in AP English. Clara Mayer. She was one of the popular girls, someone who stood out among the crowd. Clara had short blonde hair and wore pastel colours, like she was a walking Instagram edit. The girl had worn a flower crown every day that week, and I remember staring hard at it, wondering if the thing weaved through her curls would attract bugs. The flower crown on that particular day looked odd; blooming white roses that looked pretty, sure, but clashed with the blood pouring from her nose and pooling between pale fingers pressed over her mouth and nose, it made her look almost angelic. It was childish innocence placed on the head of a dying girl.
I thought it was a nose-bleed.
So did Clara, maybe. She had grabbed a tissue from her bag and pressed it to her nose, hunching over further.
I continued to ignore her. I thought about other things; the weekend that was coming up and having no friends to spend it with. Oh well. There was always The Sims, if my father wasn’t using my laptop to gamble away child support.
I thought a lot of things that afternoon. Most of which were nothing to do with school, or Clara, or my dissipating classmates. I didn’t notice the empty chairs dotted around me. I wanted to remain ignorant. I wanted to ignore Clara’s stifled coughing that she was trying to hide, hunched over her textbook, which wasn’t open. I wanted to ignore the cuffs of her cardigan sleeves splashed red, and her small body quivering in her chair, her hands flexing and then curling into fists.
And then I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I couldn’t push it into the back of my head.
Clara was coughing. Violently. She was well aware that there was something wrong with her. Maybe she was in shock, staring at her hands, which were splattered red. There was so much red, and the girl was frozen in her seat.
“Miss Mayer,” Mr Carlson who had his back turned to the class, cleared his own throat. “I suggest you pay a visit to the nurses office, young lady. If you’re ill, you shouldn’t have come to school in the first place.”
After a moments silence, Clara had stood up and wiped her hands on her dress, which wasn’t a good idea. She was still coughing, spluttering and staggering, like her body was refusing to hold her weight. I had watched her dart to the door in single strides, her expression twisted with determination. She knew what coughing again would entail.
“Excuse me.” Clara had whispered to the teacher, and then the class, before yanking open the door and slipping through. I could hear her coughing all the way down the hall. I could hear her laboured breaths, her struggles to suck in oxygen—
And I’d forgotten all about her.
The class had continued. Mr Carlson had yelled at Becca Jason for being late, and the remainder of us had laughed nervously at the class clown’s jokes. I don’t think any of us wanted to believe that Clara was sick.
That Clara was dying.
And approximately three hours later, I had it.
Whatever the fuck it was, it worked fast.
I was in a daze, blinking through feathered vision, trying to find my father’s number on my phone. But everything was a blur. Nothing made sense in the mind fog, and I was drowning in it.
“Ror?”
I teared up at the nickname my dad gave me. But it was slurred and wrong. I knew what was wrong with him automatically, but I felt too sick to be angry. Too sick to be fucking disappointed that he had once again failed to be a father. I imagined my dad knelt on our bathroom floor, his forehead stuck to the cool plastic toilet seat. In one hand was his battered phone, and in the other was half a bottle of whisky. I had taken a deep breath to steel myself, to stop myself shouting, because this was why mom left! I wanted to cry. Instead though, I gripped my phone tighter and prayed he was lucid.
“Dad.” I said softly. “Dad, there’s something wrong with me.”
There was a pause, before a shuffling sound. “What are you talking about, Rory? What’s up?” He gurgled a laugh. “Are you feeling sniffly? I’ve got some pain killers in my jacket. I don’t know how strong they are though.”
Sniffly. I wanted to laugh. I tried not to, but it came out explosively, before turning into a cough which nearly took me to my knees. More blood ran. I could taste it. Rusty coins on my tongue.
“Jesus!” Dad hissed. “Rory McCann, what did I tell you about smoking, huh? You’re heading for an early grave!”
Well, yeah. I kind of was. Biting back a sarcastic retort, I shook my head. In front of me, the sky was a funny colour. I don’t know if it was my vision, or a dense darkness had started to envelope the horizon. It almost looked like it was alive, moving through the air.
Turning my attention back to my phone, I shook my head. “No, dad. I’m sick. Like, really sick.”
Before he could speak, I cut in with a hiss. “Clara Mayer. She had some kind of sickness, and I think I’ve caught it.”
“What?” I couldn’t tell if dad was amused or freaked out. “Like a stomach virus? What have you got? some kind of cough?”
I didn’t answer for a moment. My tongue was tied. I didn’t know what to say.
“Rory.” The way dad was saying my name was making me tear up. “Boy, where are you?”
I struggled to reply. “On the other side of town,” I said, recognising the street. My whole childhood had been whizzing down the road on my bike, squealing with delight, before flipping over my handlebars and skinning my knees. I knew exactly where I was. I followed the moving cloud of black which was swallowing up the sun. “I’m near Jonah’s house.”
My first initial reaction was to go straight to Jonah’s house. It was just down the road, barely five minutes away. Jonah had been my best friend until freshman year, when he had traded video games for varsity. I held a grudge ever since, but if I was dying, if I really was fucking dying, then I didn’t want my last memory of him a petty argument that should have been resolved years ago. Both of us were stubborn. I wanted to go to him, obviously. But not in that state.
I just wanted my dad.
“Dad.” I spoke slowly, careful not to incite another coughing fit. “Dad, I need you to come and get me.”
There was no reply for a second, and for one awful moment, I thought he’d ended the call. But then his voice was coming through, prickly with static. “Stay where you are, okay? I’ll break out Black Betty.”
I’d nodded, even when I knew my dad couldn’t see it. Before I could make a fool of myself even more, crying out to him and pressing him to get there quicker, I ended the call.
There was a bench on the sidewalk, and I collapsed into it, struggling to hold back another sneeze that I knew would bring more blood. There was something inside me setting my insides on fire, but I was still shivering. I was freezing cold, wrapping my arms around myself. I kept stealing glances to the darkening sky and wondering why it was so dark. I don’t know how long I sat on that bench.
It was long enough for the sky to quickly turn a strange shade of black, a shade I wasn’t sure existed. There was no moon. No stars.
Because it was still daytime. It was 4:00PM on a warm July day.
“Rory McCann?”
The voice startled me after what felt like hours of staring at cracks in the sidewalk. There were two men standing over me, both of them dressed head to toe in black, both of them wearing visors. Looking them up and down I was already suspicious. They weren’t part of the sheriff’s department. I stared at them stupidly before one of them cleared their throat. There was an authority to his tone, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the fact that the sky was dark when it was still daytime, and the two of them barely batted an eyelid.
“Rory McCann?” the man repeated. His voice muffled by the visor.
“You’re authorized to come with us.”
I shook my head, swiping at my bloody nose.
“No.” my voice was weak. “No, my dad’s coming to get me.”
“That won’t be possible.” The other man said. “We are required to bring in children infected with N7.”
“No.” my voice was shaking. I had no idea what N7 was, and I didn’t want to know.
“I told you. My dad is coming—” I trailed off when it sort of hit me, like a weight to the chest.
My father had contacted them.
Of course he had. He didn't want to deal with it on his own. I could have cried.
With that clear, I stood up. “I don’t need your help.”
One of the men reached into his pocket and my stomach flipped over.
But the man didn’t pull out a gun or a taser.
Instead, he pulled out a light-bulb.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Mr McCann,” the man holding the light-bulb cleared his throat. Very professional.
“We’ve been led to believe that you are infected with N7.” He gestured to the bulb with a jerk of his head. “At 9AM this morning, a leak was reported from the West Country power plant. Whatever it is that has escaped appears to be infecting people under the age of eighteen."
My head started spinning.
Clara. Her father worked at the plant.
But I refused to believe whatever N7 was would be detected through a light bulb.
I blinked at the two men. My nose was bleeding again, but I didn’t swipe it. Opening my mouth to sputter questions, I was interrupted by a yell.
There was someone being dragged down the sidewalk. As they got closer, I realized it was a kid being apprehended by the same men in black. The kid had a gangly figure, dark red hair a scruffy mess on top of his head. Jonah.
As the three of them got closer, I realized Jonah was in the same state as me. His skin was white. Really white. The blood painting his face contrasted perfectly to the white. My friend was crying. I’d never seen him cry, and I’d known him since kindergarten. But there he was, stumbling over himself, coughing and spluttering, blood pooling from his nose and mouth.
Jonah was infected too.
“Rory?” Jonah hissed, his eyes widening, when his assailants forced him in front of me. I didn’t like the way they manhandled him, pinning his arms behind his back. Like he was an animal. “You’re sick too?”
I didn’t reply. There was too much information, and it wasn’t going in. I was staring at the light bulb still in the man’s hands. He held it delicately. “Boys, it’s a simple test. Touch the bulb.”
Jonah, unsurprisingly, laughed. He always laughed at the worst times. Though the situation was pretty obscene.
“You want us to touch a lightbulb?” Jonah spluttered out another cough.
“That’s correct,” the man said. “Of the little research we’ve managed to gather, N7 shows up in an infected child through electricity.”
“N7?” Jonah repeated, echoing my thoughts. “What the hell is that?”
The man ignored him. “Touch it, Mr West. You are testing my patience.”
I had found myself entranced by what the men were telling me. It sounded like bullshit. All of it. But I’d still watched Jonah lifting the tip of his bloody finger hesitantly, before pressing it against the glass bulb. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen. Though something did happen. I saw the spark before Jonah did, because he was coughing again, his whole body shuddering. The bulb seemed to struggle for a moment, before lighting up and illuminating every face in pulsing white light, Jonah included, exposing every freckle dotting his nose and cheeks. It was beautiful. It was so fucking beautiful.
That was the last beautiful thing I ever saw.
Because Jonah was still coughing.
His eyes were sizzling with light, with something alive, something teeming around his iris, and he was still coughing. He was still spluttering, and blood was pooling in his hands.
“That’s fucking cool.” Jonah said, his lips stretched into a wide smile. But his eyes were too bright.
The bulb was still sizzling.
Hastily, Jonah removed his finger, and then he looked at me. I don’t know what he was going to say. I feel like maybe it was wow. Something like that. I waited for him to stop coughing, but he didn’t. The men holding him abruptly let him go, but I barely noticed. The guy who was holding the bulb dropped it, and I failed to realise what was happening. I wondered if the others were ahead of me in time, because the bulb was hitting the ground and smashing into millions of pieces.
I felt warm arms wrapping themselves around me and pulling me back.
Something hit me. Warm and wet, and red. So fucking red. I felt it like paint, covering me. I felt the weight of it hit me in the face. I felt him, and yet, in my mind, I could still see Jonah’s lips twisted into that fucking smile that I loved.
I don’t know how long I stood there for. I was coughing again, but my body was ahead of my brain.
In my mind, I was still standing in front of Jonah, and he was illuminated in that light that had ignited the bulb. The men that had been holding me were yelling, and I was being shoved back.
One of the men pulled out a large clear bag and started shovelling the remains of my best friend inside. He didn’t look like Jonah anymore.
He was a puddle of red on the sidewalk.
Strong arms pulled me back before I could start screaming. “Sir.” One of the men was yelling into a walkie-talkie. “Sir, I’ve got McCann and West.”
“Affirmative,” a voice crackled on the other end. “Are they intact?”
“McCann is. West succumbed a few minutes ago, but we’re positive the remodelling is in progress.”
The men’s words were like spider-tongue. I was frozen, staring at the smear of red that had been my best friend. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or the fever eating me up inside, but I could have sworn the pieces of my friend covering the tarmac had began to wriggle and squirm, like insects crawling over each other. I was screaming. I don’t think I’d stopped screaming since Jonah had popped. More people arrived, and muffled voices behind visors were telling me to stay calm, telling me to stop screaming.
But I couldn’t stay calm. I couldn't stop fucking screaming.
My best friend had exploded.
And something was putting him back together.

I'M BAAAAAAACK! My apologies for the long hiatus, but after coming up on a year in quarantine, a busy work schedule, and an attempted government coup the only things I could handle this month were Bridgerton and baked goods. Let's move away from European royals, shall we?
King Jigme Khesar Instagram: https://ww.instagram.com/kingjigmekhesa
Queen Jetsun Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queenjetsunpema/
King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck (1929 - 1972)
Known as the Father of modern Bhutan, he was enthroned in 1952. He established the country’s first National Assembly, abolished slavery and serfdom, and separated the judiciary from the executive branch of government. He encouraged relationships with other countries, with India becoming Bhutan’s primary source of financial and technical assistance.
At the same time, he focused on preserving Bhutanese culture. During his rule, Bhutan established a national museum, a national library, and national archives. Prior to his efforts, Bhutan was so remote that its first roads were paved only in the 1960s, and the first outsiders did not enter the country until the 70s.
King Jigme Singye Wangchuck (b. 1955)
He studied in India and England and was made Crown Prince in 1972.
One of the major focuses of his reign was rural development throughout Bhutan, hoping to enhance the livelihoods and income of his rural people.
He is also famous for implementing what is known as the GNH, or Gross National Happiness Index. The concept implies that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards notions of progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing. During his reign, health services, safe drinking water, and better nutrition led to an increase in average life-span and lower morbidity. He established the Royal Institute of Health Sciences to train health workers to meet the nation’s extreme lack of qualified healthcare professionals. He worked with India to establish the first international flights out of Bhutan, and vastly expanded Bhutan’s electrical network.
More on the GNH:
The Bhutanese take happiness very seriously. Despite the fact that Bhutan is one of the least developed countries in Asia, the government still prioritizes Gross National Happiness (GNH) rather than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as it clearly understands that being richer does not mean being happier. GNH was coined by Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan in 1972 as he wanted to develop the nation's economy in a sustainable way. Unlike GDP, GNH stresses the importance of living harmony with nature and traditional values. It has four pillars: sustainable and equitable socio-economic development, environmental conservation, preservation and promotion of culture, and good governance. The United Nations introduced this idea in 2011, encouraging its member nations to follow the example of Bhutan, and called happiness a "fundamental human goal".
In 1974, he introduced the first tourism policy of “High-value, low-volume” that still exists today.
Like his father, he also strived to preserve major local languages, knowledge, beliefs, customs, skills, trades, and institutions.
Abdication:
He chose to abdicate in favor of his son in 2006.
“The crown prince has much to learn about the responsibilities that go with ruling the country,” the king said. “I have decided to step down so that the new king will be able to gather experience before the parliamentary elections in 2008.”
Marriage:
The King has four wives, all of whom are sisters. He is said to live in a small, simply furnished house and visits his four wives in their separate residences. From an article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/10/31/the-king-and-i-and-i-and-i-and-i/6098d789-d4f7-4ca6-ae84-049d32cdb82f/

The minister, displaying a keen sense of the king's desire for privacy, delicately avoided several basic questions about the royal house. Acknowledging western sensitivities, however, he pointed out that marriage to sisters and polygamy are not uncommon in Bhutanese society.
"Marriage to sisters is a very common practice. The king's grandfather married two sisters. It also happens among common people. There is a lot of justification, even for economic reasons," he said.

He publicly formalized his marriage to the four sisters in 1988 with a national wedding ceremony, however announced at the time he had actually wed them in private 9 years earlier. The 4 sisters are direct descendants of Shabdunb Nagawang Namgyal, the most revered figure in the history of the nation. He has 10 children.
King Jigme Shesar Namgyel Wangchuck (b. 1980)
The eldest son of the King by his third wife, he became King in 2008 at age 26. At that time he was the youngest monarch in the world. He attended high school in the United States, later attending Oxford.
As King, he has continued the democratization of Bhutan, and focuses on education, business, and civil service for his people.
Perhaps his biggest and most important work is Kidu, a tradition based on the rule in Bhutanese culture that the King’s sacred duty is to care for his people. Several Kidu schemes are designed to help certain groups of people, like students who can’t afford education, the elderly, or the disabled. Citizens apply for kidu through a government agency, but can also appeal to the King directly on his numerous road trips across the country. (I think this is basically government assistance, but would love for someone to educate us).
Marriage:
He announced his engagement to Bhutanese citizen Jetsun Pema in 2011 and married her that same year. She was 21 years old.
A few quotes from their engagement:
"People might think that my queen should be highly educated, beautiful and best of the best," he said, with a huge smile on his face.
"Jetsun Pema is a kind hearted girl who is very supportive and whom I can trust. I don't know what my people will say about her, but I find her complete with all the qualities a woman needs to have."
“But it doesn’t matter when you get married as long as it is to the right person.
“I am certain I am married to the right person.”
‘She is a wonderful human being, intelligent,’ the king told reporters. ‘She and I share one big thing in common: a love and passion for art.’
They’ve stated that they first met at a public picnic when she was just 7 years old, he 17. He claims that as a joke he “proposed” to the young girl, saying when she “grows up he would like to marry her if they were both still single”. The King is said to be incredibly in love with his wife. Although polygamy is allowed in Bhutan, he has publicly stated he will never marry another woman. They are known for their public displays of affection, including publicly kissing one another on the cheek and holding hands, something that is incredibly unusual in Bhutanese culture.
The wedding: http://orderofsplendor.blogspot.com/2011/10/wedding-wednesday-royal-wedding-in.html
Watch their love story/wedding (this is a weird video FYI but roll with it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fgh5cmV1Zg
Pictures: https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2011/oct/13/bhutan-royal-wedding-in-pictures
(PS they are both VERY GOOD LOOKING)
They have two children:

• Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck (b. 2016)
• Jigme Ugyen Wangchuck (b. 2020)

The couple choose to reside in a modest cottage where they are known to invite members of the public in for tea.
See the King give a speech in English here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voGHG8p9NLI
Queen Jetsun (b. 1990)
Educated in Bhutan and India, she attended university at Regent’s College in London, studying International Relations, Psychology, and Art History. Her father is a commercial airline pilot and her mother is a descendant of one of Bhutan’s oldest noble families. At the time of her marriage she was the world’s youngest reigning Queen.
She is fluent in Dzongkha, the official language of Bhutan, English, and Hindi. See her speaking English here (around the 1:00 mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxcRsxRIbAc
An article on Jetsun: https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/celebrity-travel/bhutan-queen-jetsun-youngest-on-earth
Another: https://www.drukasia.com/bhutan/queen-of-bhutan-pema-jetsun/
So, Bhutan?
Tucked between China and India, Bhutan is a tiny country with a population of approximately 800,000. There are no traffic lights, tobacco, hunting, and fishing are illegal, and all employees must wear traditional clothing during work hours. A Buddhist country, monasteries abound. Archery is the national sport and its citizens are obsessed with their King and Queen.
Bhutan is roughly the size of the US state of Maryland, and its population is about the size of Seattle, Washington, USA.
To avoid overcrowding from tourism, Bhutan requires that you book your visit through a Bhutanese tour operator. Adopting a tourism policy of “high value, low impact”, tourists must spend a minimum daily amount of money ($250 USD) to visit the country. The rate includes all accommodations, meals, transportation, services of guides and porters, and cultural programs.
Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tmullen/2018/02/27/why-bhutan-is-still-out-of-this-world/?sh=42e7009744be
More on their tourism: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/visiting-bhutan/index.html#:~:text=(CNN)%20%E2%80%94%20Bhutan's%20strategy%20of,accommodations%2C%20food%20and%20guide%20service%20%E2%80%94%20Bhutan's%20strategy%20of,accommodations%2C%20food%20and%20guide%20service).
More: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/bhutans-limit-tourists-promotion-happiness-has-made-top-place/
Photos of Bhutan: https://www.lostwithpurpose.com/bhutan-photos/
The Dragon King
Bhutan is known as the Drukyul, which translates as “The Land of the Thunder Dragon”. It earned the nickname because of the fierce storms that often roll in from the Himalayas. As such, the Kings of Bhutan are known as the Druk Gyalpo, or the Dragon King. The Bhutanese people call themselves the Drukpa, meaning “Dragon people”.
William and Kate of the Himalaya’s…. And err…. The real William and Kate too
Because of their age, glamour, and popularity the King and Queen are known as the “William and Kate of the Himalayas”, so how fun is it that W&K visited them in 2016?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/04/14/kate-middleton-and-prince-william-in-bhutan-meet-the-himalayas-will-and-kate/?sh=41edc0b72525
https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/14/asia/royal-visit-william-kate-bhutan/index.html
Clothing in Bhutan:
Bhutan has worked hard to maintain its traditional way of dress, and most of its citizens dress in this way daily. The color of your clothing denotes your rank. There’s a lot to it, so read about it here:
https://dailybhutan.com/article/the-different-types-of-ceremonial-scarves-in-bhutan
Fun Fact:
In 2013, one of the Queen’s older sisters married one of the King’s brothers. And then in 2020 the half sister of the King married the younger brother of the Queen. Imagine THAT family dynamic?
And the final, and in my opinion best, fun fact:
If you visit Bhutan, you’re gonna see a lot of penis art. SAY WHAT? Bhutanese believe the “scandalous” yet integral image aids in fertility, offers protection from evil and dispels malicious gossip.
They are painted on homes, or carved in wood, installed above doorways and under eaves to ward off evil, including one of its most insidious human forms, gossip. They are worn on necklaces, installed in granaries and in fields as a kind of scarecrow. They are used by masked jesters in religious festivals and at one temple near here in Lobesa as a blessing of fertility.
https://explorepartsunknown.com/bhutan/photo-essay-bhutans-phallic-art/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/world/asia/bhutan-phallus-commercialization-tourism.htmlhttps://www.pri.org/stories/2011-01-04/wanderlust-penis-worship-bhutan
Honestly guys, Bhutan sounds awesome.

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“Governess Mistriva!” Major Amilita startled and stood from her office's desk chair. It was on risers to accommodate her height- even by Shil’vati standards the woman was gigantic and crossed eight foot and change, with attractive broad shoulders and a squared frame that made the uniform look 'as it was supposed to.'
“Major, I thought I’d come here to introduce myself in person. Surely you wouldn’t mind if I take an active interest in my sector’s law enforcement?”
“Not at all, would you like a drink? Please have a seat.” The Major gestured to the bottle of scotch that was waiting on her desk and gestured for Lieutenant Goshen to fetch another glass from the cupboard downstairs. The old colonial house they'd occupied was situated in the state's oldest town and their occupation of these buildings sent a message, but it also came with other perks such as a fully stocked cellar.
“No, I don’t partake, but thank you.” The Matronly Mistriva did, however, take the offered seat. The Major studied her. In strong contrast to most Noblewomen, Mistriva was considered very short and her build was neglected through decades of the administrative desk work that had made her a thorn in the side of most of her fellow nobles. The Governess was busy examining the craftsmanship that had gone into the antique wooden chair, studying its ornate details and spent a moment in contemplation. Handcrafted items were the domain of proper highborn noblewomen with exquisite goods, yet here they could live as if they were regents of a noble house.
“Do you know why I’m here?” The Governess asked after the moment’s pause.
The Major’s brow threatened to sweat, but she forced herself to stay calm. It couldn’t be about a lack of action on the missing boys- that report had only landed on her desk only an hour ago and was marked 'low priority.' “I’m afraid you’ll have to inform me, I didn’t expect your visit. It’s been mostly quiet here, and I’m just entering a call with General Zylkyn.”
“That’s precisely why I’m here, Major Amilita. The departing Governess has told me that everything is fine and quiet. I am here to get a more accurate assessment, a Second Opinion, as the locals may say. Based on recent events, those same locals seem to not share our former Governess’s opinion that all ought to be quiet, and I am trying to find out why that has changed.”
Amilita gulped now. “I admit there have been incidents, but they have thankfully been largely unsuccessful. Up until now we have relied on what I believe the humans call an ‘olive branch’ approach. Insistence that the war is over and that now is the time for peace. Once we stopped walking around everywhere in armour, it helped shake the illusion that these rebels are peddling- that it’s an occupation.” She took a deep breath. “Additionally, patrols are not pulling up anything useful.” Over a thousand patrols and not a single incident of terrorism uncovered as a result. She then took a deep breath. That ought to play popular with what some called the Commoner's Champion. She'd made a whole career out of pushing more legislation for equal rights of the conquered and to abolish the line between noble and commoner. It was little wonder she was here, given Earth was the latest acquisition. Her nose had no doubt sniffed trouble. Amilita didn't want to guess how much the noblewoman had paid to get a posting on Earth. It couldn't have been cheap.
“In the name of keeping the peace I have also mandated that anyone caught pursuing or unrequited flirting with a man wearing a ring is to be punished severely and to offer personal apologies to the aggrieved and spouse, as would a high noblewoman caught flirting with the Empress’s husband.” The new Governess didn’t balk, and waved a hand for the Major to continue. “The actions have made me somewhat unpopular, but the sergeants have kept resentment low. It’s also having effects- overall incidents are down, morale is overall up as the Marines have started being able to go on leave. I’ve also worked with your predecessor to push more cooperative attempts, joint ventures, and kept the locals engaged with our operations in minor but important ways. We rely less on overt propaganda, and prefer more subliminal messages, as well, and have enjoyed good popular support in polls. It is therefore my belief that this bomb was an act of desperation by insurgents to remain relevant." She left out that she felt that it was the same group. "Intelligence suggests do not enjoy widespread nor numerous support.” Not naming your sources was a convenient way of saying 'I want it to be true.' The Major had implemented the policy after a jilted housewife had taken a shotgun to the face of one of the marines in revenge for luring her husband away. Her revenge had lasted about a half second before she was vaporised on the spot by the fallen marine's squadmates. The husband later killed himself, and it had taken a lot of hard work to bring relations in that town back down to a tolerable level.
“My predecessor and I are of a similar mind on the subject of the treatment of Humans. They are sentients and their wishes must be respected in this.” the Governess nodded as if to say she agreed with the Major's outlook.
Before the Governess could continue, General Zylkyn coughed into the microphone to announce her entry into the virtual meeting and that she’d heard enough to finally participate in the conversation. “Their odd birthing ratios, however, are definitely causing some oddities in their behaviour. Humans are very sexually forward, and it may be confusing for our marines. Hello, Mistriva.”
“And a good evening to you, General Zylkyn. I was unsure you would retain your command after that disastrous campaign against the Roaches." The Governess put her fingers steepled, and gave a little glint of mischief.
The General did not rise to the obvious bait and did not deign to answer, but kept her arms crossed. Major Amilita started speaking before the General could think of something offensive to say. "Their oddly even birth ratio is not limited to the human species. Most creatures on earth have an even distribution of male and female. Many mate for life, though I understand that varies slightly depending upon mate selection. There’s some interesting journals, but nothing concrete. I still find enforcing apologies for any breach of their monogamy has been best at resolving tensions before incidents occur.” She had prepared for that exact objection after hearing it a dozen times from angry officers and non-coms who refused to apologise for advancing forward on an unwanted tryst.
“Do you have difficulties with mutinies or soldiers acting against these orders? Anything that you feel results in fewer civilian deaths and attacks on our soldiers has my permission to proceed without approval from my office, but we’re not here to discuss your successes, but rather the situation as it is developing now.”
“I’ve encouraged the Marines to see it more as flattering that they are as noblewomen, and remind them that they are here to do a job. If they talk back, I show them the statistics in the other districts. It is not fear of death that causes them to apologise and obey, but rather the loss of certain privileges. The relatively good relations we have in this sector have made it a posting with a reputation where one can take off their armour, and go for a walk without fear. Provided they mind their manners and we are to behave as guests and not conquerors.”
“Bold words from someone who smashed the armed forces in the region. You are very much a conqueror,” General Zylkyn said.
“That was the easy part, ma’am. The hard part is as others are learning: Holding the territory we have taken. We don’t want a repeat of the Roaches, nor do we want to turn all of Earth into what’s happening down in Maryland.” The General blanched a little. Being a part of General Staff meant she had friends stationed down there and Major Amilita had just rubbed it in her face. This was not a good meeting for the General, and the Major felt she'd regret it.
“I see. What if I was to mandate such orders be instituted throughout the state and suggest it globally at the Governess's conference?” Mistriva inquired mildly.
“I would be honoured you think so highly of my orders, but I’m unsure how well instituting such a policy would work once relations have soured as badly as they have in areas such as Maryland. It may go some way toward repairing relations if not quite to vacuum-tight, then at least to where they’re not continually venting oxygen straight into the main core. I can't speak for their efficacy outside a zone that is already designated 'green.' I worry that in contentious areas that humans are unlikely to read our new policies as anything except a fear-response and a retreat. Humans may be comparatively weak, but they were the apex predator of this planet and they will view our action as such.”
“So you advise against your own policy?” The General sniped back. The Major didn't blanche but did meet the General's eyes. “Additionally, what new tactics are you employing to counteract this insurgency? I hope you brought more than olive branches?”
“I'm arguing to implement it openly where prudent and where relations are already in a good position. If compliance is an issue then remind the Marines that it’s to get things to the level of comfort we have here, where they can walk around without worrying about rifle fire from a bush, and they’ll be cooperative." That was a mighty big incentive. "I’ve also added a few books of local flavour to a reading list for the sector, which helps patrols spot anomalous or suspicious behaviour, and excuse things we think of as suspicious, but really aren’t. Arrests are down across the sector, but so is insurgent activity on average.” The Major segued the conversation to the insurgency. “That said, our Marines did just suffer casualties for the first time in over a month, and the most in a single incident since the invasion ended. It seems we do have a cell local to the northernmost sector of the state, and it is refining its tactics. We're intensifying patrols and surveillance, but for now they have also been very careful to escape detection. It's a rare but deadly combination to be both dedicated to effective insurgency, while also disciplined to avoid detection. It's my hope that the increased scrutiny will assist. I'm hoping your office might set aside some budget for some stronger propaganda in that particular area- enough for more advertisements and a tip hotline.”
"That's a good start," the Governess said. "I'll see to it."
General Zylkyn finally added: "As much as I want Humanity to join us en masse, I will admit that we cannot tolerate these bombings. They target both Shil’vati and Human alike."
"Yes, and I wish to stress that in my upcoming speeches," The General agreed. At last, all three Shil'vati were on the same page.
“Then proceed, Major, I’ll leave you two ladies to it. I think next time I might take you up on an offer of a drink, but I do prefer tea.”
“Of course, ma’am. I’ll requisition some tea for your next visit.”
As soon as Governess Mistriva walked out, Major Amilita turned to face the screen. She signalled Lieutenant Goshen that it was now okay to bring in the folder with the bombing information’s initial findings and reports.
“They’re growing bolder,” General Zilkyn said. The Major felt dismay welling up in her chest. Was she losing control of the situation? Would this get even worse?
“I know. While we’ve been reaping the benefits of keeping a loose hand, we also cannot let this festering wound worsen. Lieutenant Goshen, I want you to find anyone involved with the bombing.”
“Had we taken sufficiently stern steps initially, there’s a chance we could have prevented this,” General Zylkyn glowered at Major Amilita.
Amilita didn’t commit career suicide and refrained from pointing out that carpet bombing a woods filled with recreational joggers just to nab two children would have erased months of goodwill in the county, permanently for many. “I’ll put the local police departments and their forensics on the case. It may mean a few may be reluctant to assist us in catching humans. If they are, my lieutenant will be able to sort out who then can and cannot be relied on and will prune the police accordingly to weed out loyalists.”
“No, Major, that last part won’t be necessary,” the General said, her smouldering eyes now calm. Amilita looked over to her with something approaching hope. General Zylkyn sounded like she had a plan.
“Ma’am?”
“I want you to keep tabs on any with sympathies toward this rebellion that you do find on the force. See who they talk to and what they say, first. Pulling out a weed by its leaf only ensures its immediate return- a fact I recently learned when attending a gardening session with the locals as part of a Public Relations event. Do you know what else I learned?”
“Ma’am?” Major Amilita repeated herself unsure of what the point was.
“They trim their grass so that they can maintain an excellent field of vision. It brings them calm. But, if you ask the grass, they do not like to be trimmed. They emit a signal, chemical in nature, and it warns the other grasses to send their nutrients to the roots. If you detain the officers who are known by those around them to have sympathies to these terrorist bombers, then what signal will be sent? Imagine for a moment, if grasses could form resentment over their neighbours being cut down instead of simply hiding. We may need their work to be accurate when it comes to apprehending these bombers, but I do recommend that it be us who take them in. Apparently police have a weak spot for little girls and almost refuse to hold them in suspicion.” The Major considered a moment that under the surface, the Bleeding Heart Governess had a strong counterweight in the General’s cold pragmatism, and leaned back in her chair, enjoying the surprisingly supple springiness of the wooden beams behind and how they supported her weight.
“Has the survivor of the bombing said anything at all?”
“No, she says she has no recollection of the event itself.”
General Zylkyn’s frown deepened. “Of course. Give her my sympathies when she wakes. Best of luck in your hunt.”
As soon as the call ended, Lieutenant Goshen got a call from the General. "I don't care what our Governess and the Major say. Do whatever you have to. Shake any tree, drown that private again to jog her memory of the ones who bombed her vehicle. Do whatever it takes. I want these people found and when they are, they will pay for what they have done. This will not become another Maryland. Don't make me call the Interior in."
​
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BONUS CHAPTER
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School was convened in the Gym for a ‘surprise announcement.’ Several Aliens stood in attendance, along with bureaucrats with too-wide smiles and cheap suits.
“Who’s that?” I nudged George and asked.
“It’s the Governess. Apparently the old governess was just here to warm the seat.”
Most of the ‘people’ accompanying her didn’t seem to be people at all. Their eyes were lenses, skin of a metal sheen, and their necks were a pair of beams. Their movements were off, too, but they moved with precision. Their bodies bristled with what I imagined to be weapons- their limbs and joints had little lines coming out of them that looked like barrels, and a status symbol light. “Cyborgs or robots, I’d bet,” George pointed.
“-and to memorialise this important day, our esteemed Governess, Madame Mistriva has made an unexpected but welcome visit!” Our Principal expected a ton of applause, and got it. That was disappointing for us, but I did see a few people refraining. I tried to remember names or at least their faces. Our little social outcast group was growing. Just George and I shared a class but apparently the other two were making some in-roads with other students.
“Thank you, I realise we are on a schedule so I will be brief,” The Governess smiled. “This has been one of my favourite postings to date, I must say. Human beings are wonderful, and I am more than happy to work to bridge the gap between our cultures, and to learn more of yours. To that end, I have commenced the pilot of the exchange program here at Talay Middle School. It is my hope that you will be as warm to the Scion of House Fel’lya as you have been to me, and continue to be exemplary to all. The eyes of the world are upon this, and I know you will do everyone proud.”
It sort of sank in right about then that while this might have been page five or six news to us, it was considerably more important to the newsreels across the stars. The incorporation of a new planet probably wasn’t too unusual to an empire that bragged about having ‘thousands of worlds,’ but Earth had seemed to attract a fair amount of ‘fans.’ I hadn't made up my mind about where the balance of that weighed- ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but for now, ruled in on ‘it is what you make of it.’ Out of the extra attention, perhaps I could get the newsreels to take sympathy on the human plight. It would require careful finesse and was something I firmly catalogued into the ‘worry about later’ category.
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts and tired from going to Lucky’s Tavern last night that I missed the rest of the speech until the applause hit. I made the motions of clapping but came up short on each clap. Let the applause be a little quieter. Let them have to plug in audio from some sports match, if they needed- I hoped that it would get someone asking why they had to do it at all. This was our world, after all, not theirs, and it never would be, so long as we drew breath. Last night at Lucky’s had only reinforced that notion. There I’d met Scott and demonstrated the basic detonator concept, and written out a grocery list of materials I needed to make more powerful explosives. It was more of a wish list than anything reasonable, but the adults had huddled around it and made sure I was fully included even though I wasn’t nearly old enough to sit at the bar legally. Lucky’s was the kind of sketchy place that wouldn’t raise a fuss. I was so lost in recounting the events of the night, again, that I’d temporarily blanked out.
The young girl had come up to the podium by the time I came to. She was in some ways closer to Human than Alien in some of the ways I might have normally used to mark one. She wasn’t much taller than I, nor had her tusks grown in- yet she was also a darker shade of purple. She took to the stage and waved, introducing herself. She didn’t wear the form-hugging combat armour, instead opting for human clothing, albeit a little bit baggy, as if pulled from the Men’s rack at the GAP.
“Hi, I’m Natalie.” She used a human name. Interesting. The girl struggled with staying close to the microphone and almost dropped it before recovering quickly and starting over, rocking to her feet and then back onto her heels, then twisting side to side slightly. “I’m from Mar Sara originally, but I’m happy to be joining you all for school here. I hope you’re looking forward to meeting me as much as I am to meeting you.” Her English was perfect, and even unaccented. I wondered if she had an implant of some sort, or if she’d just practiced like hell. I was struggling with my Shil’vati. Reading was easier for me to decipher than speaking, and I wondered idly if it was as hard for them to pick up English as theirs was for us. I was tuning the radio to pick up Shil’vati language transmissions while I worked on bombs. I’d picked up enough of the conversational trade-dialect that was common among their Navy and civilian trade fleets. It had all the irregulars clipped out and was more forgiving on their use of tenses. It was almost artificial, like someone had done to English what had created Esperanto. Comparatively, the Nobles used a far “higher” language. If the trade-Shil’vati language I was learning was analogous to simplified English with all its letters in all-caps and spaced carefully for ease of understanding, then the Nobles spoke in cursive.
​
Later that day, I hopped off the bus a few stops early and took a walk along the path with the marshes, then came up to the bridge Vaughn had bombed. They had demolished the remainder of the bridge, Environmental Studies be Damned, and had already replaced it with one of their own design. The new one shared that strange, metallic sheen that their vessels and vehicles had. They’d put a rough, fused material over top of it. The angles were all harsh and sharp, but rounded out to smooth joints on the underside, and seemed to be made of the same kind of strange metallic sheen that went onto their ships.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and I jerked to the side in surprise. Or at least I tried to. The hand held me fast. I yelped as they squeezed down. With a glance over my shoulder I saw a marine staring down at me. They had a half-helmet on, with the facemask peeled back.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” She asked in Shil’vati.
“School is released for today.” It was the closest I could get in Shil’vati to ‘it’s after 2:45, we don’t have to be in school.’
She looked surprised I’d answered her in Shil’vati and relaxed her grip slightly. I twisted free and she released me instead of tightening back down. My heartbeat hammered quickly.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking at the new bridge. I heard it was different to our bridges.”
She glared at him, and he met her gaze. There was something to that gaze that set her hackles on edge, but also tickled her interest. After a few seconds, she broke contact. “Alright. Hand me your ID and wait over there for a minute.” The taller marine pointed against the shopping centre’s wall. The two exchanged a few words. I missed the first half but closed my eyes to try and listen. I doubted I could get away by running, but it was worth a shot.
“...just a little suspicious?” The taller one was saying.
“Do you want to take in a little boy for questioning?” The shorter one seemed to be irritated.
The taller Marine responded with something too low for me to pick up, then the shorter, louder marine responded: “Why does command say it was a pair of girls if they didn’t give us any facial patterns to go off of? Kids look kind of the same.”
“What do you mean?” She rocked her head in a body language expression I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t guess what it meant. Maybe the shorter one was from a backwater.
“I forgot that you’re new here. During the war, most of the soldiers we fought were men.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. That war was a little hard for me to fight sometimes. Sometimes I still hear the screams.”
“Yeah your [indecipherable] aside- How old were they? This isn’t something Command is going to hear. ‘Yeah we’re on the lookout for two tall guerilla girls, but here’s this school boy I found unescorted.’ I’m sure that will go over well.”
“I thought the school boys wore uniforms.” The taller marine was probably giving me a second glance.
“I’m just saying-”
“And then if you want to go grab the family’s son and explain later to his family that you didn’t do anything untoward? Come on, a cute kid like that, a Marine, gone for several hours? You don’t want that kind of trouble. I remember when interior snagged a family’s only son back on Tion Prime for ‘interrogation.’ Interior thought they were untouchable, the whole outfit got kicked off the planet, and they didn’t even have proof. Look, you see this? That [indecipherable] right here- yeah. Look, just trying to keep you out of trouble.” We had connections? What sort of connections? What did I even know about my parents’ work since the invasion? Dad was a biologist until he got home. Like Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde with the potion, he then turned into a sleepy drunk and was asleep in his armchair by eight which had a pretty hard effect on his social life. Mom was a psychologist who helped run the small town council’s minutes. My sister was in boarding school. Surely none of this counted to amount for anything of consequence.
I’d missed some of the exchange while I was occupied with my thoughts. It didn’t look like I was going to be arrested and interrogated at least. “Oh shut up and lick my cunt if you’re going to wag that tongue so much.” I didn’t learn ‘cunt’ from the radio, but by proud tradition the first thing any middle schooler learns in any language is how to say rude things.
There was a moment of silence. “Still, isn’t he cute?”
“Don’t be gross, he’s still way too young. Give it a couple years and then I’ll be bringing him into the station for interrogation, suspicious or not!” She was joking, but it still got my hackles up. “Alright, running the ID against anything else we’ve got on file...nope. All clean. Come on, we can blow off some steam at the bar. I know a place where you’ll have a good time, rookie.” I heard them turn their boots and I opened my eyes again, looking up at them as they towered over me.
I held my hand out. “Am I free to go?”
“Yeah,” the marine reviewed whatever was on her omni-pad. “Have a good day, citizen,” she placed it back in my hand and they both watched me go.