Lean in

I don’t know much.  I barely went to school.  It’s a miracle I can read.  I educate myself as much as I can.  That’s not worth much.   

One thing I do know is that when something scares the shit out of me I the best thing for me to deal with it is to go right back at it.  I don’t how it works for other people, but that’s how it is for me.  I was scared of Eterno and I folded up and hid instead of going right at him.  Look how that turned out.  I’m scared of Stella’s mom and she’s probably murdering someone right now.   

There’s no way the Redacted City Council didn’t sick that monster on me.   So they have a wizard on their side.  Maybe Merlin lied and he can do magic.  Maybe they have someone else stashed away.  Maybe it’s Darla and they have her on a leash now.  They have someone. 

It’s the only explanation.   

A guy in the comments said that the creature that attacked me is an Alû, a Middle Eastern torture demon.  When I look it up on Wikipedia an Alû is described as a being with no mouth at all. A bunch of video games have it as a giant mouth monster.   

Fucking video games and Wikipedia, that’s where I get information from now.

It worked though because it made me think.  I remembered seeing a picture of Royale and some of his band of gentlemen adventurers and the back said something about a Middle Eastern demon.  I found the picture in Royale’s trunk and I found it online too.  Says it was taken in Crimea in 1855 by Roger Fenton.   

I didn’t know they had photography then. 

Royale talked about the incident in his journals.  Russia was fighting a war against a bunch of other countries over the same place Russia still fights wars about.  Royale and his friends were there stop some Russian mystics who were doing something bad.  His notes are full of magic jargon I don’t understand.  There was necromancy involved and it was bad.

That’s all I’m clear on.  

They had their final showdown in Sevastopol where the evil Russians were deprived of a magic rock they were using to do their bad shit. 

It’s an old picture but I am sure now that the rock in that picture is the same one that I destroyed.  The one that Gary used to murder the Swede and his men.