Podcasts about Omigod

Quaranteam – Book 1: Part 8 Like Dying and Going To Heaven.. Based on a post by CorruptingPower, in 25 parts. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels. As Sarah was turning around, catching Emily's tiny British form in her arms, lifting her up, spinning her around. "Omigod, Emily!" she said, suddenly hugging her tightly. "I'm totally dead, aren't I? Life is never this fucking good to me. It always goes to shit somehow. Are you really real, bitch?" Emily giggled, infectious and warm, her voice posh within an inch of its life. "I am absolutely here for all of it, Sares!" She gasped, and then begin to giggle even more. "No way!" There was something about a posh English accent and the way it sounded saying a long O sound that sent delicious chills up Andy's spine. She'd just turned thirty less than a few months ago, but still had a very vibrant youthful exuberance to her. He knew there were angry, jealous men all across the world hating him right now who had grown up watching Emily Stevens grow up on film. She had begun starring in movies just barely in her teens where she'd played the book smart love interest of the protagonist of a series of sci fi bounty hunting school movies called "The Dagger Academy." After those, she'd gone on to try a number of various arthouse roles, trying to shake being forever associated with the role of Dahlia Hairtrigger, but she hadn't had the best of luck. "Are you serious, Sares?" she said, while the large redhead continued to bearhug her. "We're together forever? And we're really going to get paired up with your Mister Big?" "Mister Big?" Andy said, his eyebrows raising high. "Oh, hasn't she told you yet?" Emily giggled, that laugh forcing him to smile, no matter how much he felt off guard. "You're at the top of her List." "List?" Sarah put Emily down and turned to look at him, her face having gone nearly as red as her hair. "Gosh, fuck me, how do I even say this?" she said, looking down at her feet suddenly, as if trying to look at him while talking was making it even more complicated. "Em, can you tell him? I'm fucking scared now, that it's gonna freak him out or some shit." Emily's deep blue eyes twinkled. She was wearing a big blue DKNY t shirt over a pair of capri pants, a bright diamond bracelet on one wrist, a silver teardrop pendant hanging down from her neck. Her skin was pale like alabaster, her blonde hair hanging just past her shoulders in wavy blonde curls, her lips bright red with freshly put on lipstick. "I'll tell him, but we're fine, Sares, we're fine we're fine we're fine we're fine. Trust me on this! Em knows best." Emily squeezed Sarah's hand in her own, walking back over to Andy, almost leading Sarah along behind her, like she was a naughty child with her hand caught in the cookie jar. "Most people have a hall pass list, you know," she said, her voice again doing that thing with the O sound that sent goosebumps along his skin. "It's supposed to be a list of people you can fuck at any time, and your partner just gives it a wave." She had a coy smile on her face, as she brought Sarah back within reach of Andy. "Well, you are the top person on Sarah's list, Andy Rook, or should I say, Mr. Blake Conrad?" "You're, you're a fan of my writing?" Andy said, almost unable to bring himself to force the words from his mouth. "My writing? The Druid Gunslinger books?" "Tell him about OmegaCon, Sares," Emily said, nudging the much taller girl in the ribs. Emily was nearly a foot shorter than Sarah, and while both were fit, Emily was slender like a ballerina, while Sarah almost seemed more like an Amazon warrior. There were rumors that Sarah had been in consideration for the Wonder Woman role, but that her tendency to swear and be adorkably awkward at press junkets had kept her out of the role. "If you won't tell him, I will," she teased. "Oh fuckbeans, you totally would, wouldn't you, bitch?" Sarah hissed, closing her eyes, wringing her hands together. "So I was totally at your fucking panel at OmegaCon last year, in September." "I highly doubt that," Andy said. "I can't imagine an actress like you wouldn't have turned every head in the room the minute she walked in. I would've definitely remembered." "I was,” she mumbled before Emily prodded her again, a wide impish grin on Emily's adorable English face. "I was in costume, okay? Emily and I wanted to be able to just walk around the convention like normal people, so we were cosplaying so nobody would recognize us. I was in a Chewbacca costume, and I got up in the Q&A line and asked you if you ever imagined actors when you were writing your fiction." "No!" Andy said, gasping suddenly. "See, I told you he'd fucking hate me, Emily?" Sarah said, looking like she was about to cry. "And you said you totally imagined actors for every fucking character you'd ever written, like casting them and everything or whatever. And then you said,” "I said I'd always sort of seen Christian Kane playing the Gunslinger himself." She nodded. "Do you remember what else you said?" Andy tilted his head, struggling to remember whatever else he might have said, but he'd done half a dozen conventions last year, and many of the Q&A sessions blended together. "I don't. Oh god, I'm so sorry, what did I say?" "You said that you'd imagined Olivia Munn playing Doctor Erika Shirow and, and Sarah Washington, I mean, me, playing Layla Heartseye, the Elven barbarian queen," Sarah said. "We spent three days at the convention in costume, but had to leave early right after your panel finished," Emily said, "because she took me back to our hotel room after that and masturbated for nearly an entire hour, thinking about you saying that. She still has the video of you answering her question on her phone. I was recording your answer for her. I was dressed as Greedo, by the by." Emily pulled Sarah in even closer. "She's been trying to get her agent and your agent to set up a meeting for a year now, so she could talk to you about the book rights, and if she could play Layla Heartseye, but I've always thought she was really just doing it so she could get into your pants." "One of us definitely needs to fire our agent then," he muttered. "No way in hell I'd have turned down that meeting." "Wait, are you two, together?" Aisling said, pointing at the two actresses. "We are," Emily said, beaming proudly, "but we both enjoy more than a bit of cock as well, so we're known to dally outside of each other." "I thought you were with that director," Andy said to Sarah. "Dennis Jacobson." "That was totally over fucking years ago," Sarah said, still unable to lift her head up, her eyes fixated on Andy's feet. "And I thought you were with that soccer player," Andy said to Emily. "Georgie Stewart." Emily waved her hand in the air at him, her smile unwavering in its million watt intensity. "That was done with long ago. I did go on a couple of dates with Jeff DeHavelin last year, but it turns out, he is utterly prudish, and that I simply cannot abide by. He doesn't even go down on partners! How do people like that even live today? But now we're going to be with you for the rest of our lives, so that doesn't matter!" She clapped her hands together excitedly, as the limo driver set the last of Emily's four suitcases on the porch. "I, for one, couldn't be more excited! How about you, Mr. Rook? Or may I call you Andy?" Aisling was struggling not to erupt into a fit of giggles, but it was getting harder and harder for her to contain it all in, as she was mostly just shaking, threatening to burst out before she finally forced the words out of his mouth. "Tell her, Andy!" The words were a struggle, the laughter seeping into all of them. "You've gotta fucking tell her." Andy sighed, realizing there wasn't anything that could embarrass him at this point. "Sarah," he said, smoothing his fingertip along her chin, forcing her to tilt her head up and look at him. "You're number one on my list." "No fucking way. You're fucking making fun of me, aren't you?" Sarah, her blue eyes welled up with tears, as if she'd thought Andy was actually going to send her away. He leaned in and kissed her, trying to put as much emotion into it as she had when she'd kissed him earlier. "Number. One. With a bullet. Sarah. Washington." "He's not kidding," Erin groaned. "Ever since he saw you twelve years ago in that movie where you were a quirky airline co pilot. I'm his ex girlfriend. Believe me, I know. He watched that movie like a dozen times in the theater." "You saw 'Airway Mishaps'?" she whispered, wrapping her arms around him again, but still extremely shy. "That's super fucked up. Nobody fucking saw that movie." "You got nominated for an Oscar for it, Sares," Emily said, smoothing one of her hands along Sarah's back.. "That means tens, maybe even hundreds of people saw it." Niko giggled a little at Emily's teasing. "And I'm sure he's too old to be a fan of the Dagger Academy movies, so I'll just have to make him fall for me the old fashioned way." Niko cleared her throat, devilish amusement on her face, and Andy glared over his shoulder at her. Oh, how he wanted to bend her over his knee right now and paddle her ass red. "Omigod, I'm on your list too?" Emily said, giggling all over, blushing herself this time. "I had no idea! I assumed you were far too old to grow up with the Dagger Academy films." "He fell for you in 'The Last Graverobber,' where you played that heiress," Aisling said. "Although he did eventually watch the Dagger Academy movies after that. He'd never seen them before last Christmas, although we rewatched them together a few months ago. He said it was still a little strange seeing you so young in the first one. So while he didn't grow up on them, he's familiar with your work. You're number three on his list." "Who's number two?" Emily said, putting her hands on her hips in mock annoyance. "Alice Karteaux," Andy said. "I mean, after 'Winding Bullets,' anyone who isn't aroused by her isn't anyone I want to know." "Oh, that's totally fine," Sarah said, her hands starting to slide along Andy's back. "She's on Emily's list as well, so the slut can't say shit about you wanting to bang her." "Well, you're not on my list, Andy," Emily said, "but that doesn't mean I'm not going to fuck your brains out, all the while having my best girl by my side. So let's get to it." "What, now?" Andy said. "I'm not sure she's going to let go of you until you do, babe," Emily said, taking one of his hands in hers. "She's read every book you've written a dozen bloody times. She even found that silly porn story you wrote on the internet under a pen name earlier this year." "You read that? You found that?" Sarah nodded, finally getting her tears under control. "I recognized the sentence structure." "My, sentence structure?" "It's a very distinct sentence structure," she giggled. "Plus, like, there's a fuckton of swearing, and you have that in all your writing." "Not that much," he laughed. "Oh shut the fuck up already," Sarah said, smiling against his neck. "Take the win." "Okay, look, why don't you two go upstairs and get settled in the master bedroom, and I'll be up in just a little bit, and we can see about getting you two imprinted, since you both seem to want that," Andy said. "I apparently need to talk to Mr. Watkins briefly, so head up and I'll be along in just a few." "Okay," Emily said, trying to pull Sarah from her grasp on Andy. "C'mon, Sares, let's go upstairs." "Can I kiss him one more time before we go?" "It's going to be just a few minutes, babes." "Please?" Emily rolled her eyes, smiling. "Fine. One more kiss." Sarah locked lips with him once more, and Andy could feel her nipples hard as rocks pressed against his collarbone through the blouse. Eventually she pulled back and away from him, although her arms were the last thing to release him. "Don't keep us waiting long, okay?" she said to him. "You owe us at least two good fuckings. One good fucking for me, and one good fucking for her. Because we are not getting out of that bed until we get fuh uh uh uh ucked. Got it?" Emily started pushing her into the house, rolling her light blue eyes. "He's got it, Sares, now let's gooooooo." She was about to head into the house, then turned back, darted over to Andy, threw her arm around his neck and kissed him fiercely, grinding her hips against him before she pulled back, giving him a saucy little wink, slapping his ass on the way back. "I couldn't bear the thought that you might've thought that I didn't want this just as much as she does. Don't dilly dally or we'll start without you." She gave him a playful little wave and then skipped into the house. Andy turned to glance over at Aisling and Niko, who were gossiping between themselves. "They're gonna be so much fun, aren't they?" Ash said to Niko. "I didn't talk that much to Sarah, but I've spent quite a bit of time chatting with Emily, and she is a hoot," Niko said. "I kinda love her." "Oh, I'm sure you'll get your chance." Andy turned to see Watkins standing at the bottom of the stairs, so he walked down to meet him, even as he saw Watkins' limo driver loading Erin's bag into the limo. Erin had apparently gotten into the limo at some point while he'd been talking with Emily and Sarah. "Careful with that one," Andy said, his voice quiet enough that the conversation was just between the two of them. "I'm not saying she's a gold digger but,” "But she ain't messin' with no broke," Watkins said, laughing a little bit. "I hear you. I think she'll be alright, though. She'll have her own little staff to boss around. Maybe having her own private fiefdom will tamp down her more destructive urges." "For your sake I hope so." "So, we have one more matter to discuss I'm afraid, Andrew." Watkins sighed, shaking his head a little. "I'm afraid I can't bring you Deborah Barnes, and for that I'm truly sorry. My son, it seems, imprinted her while I was at the poker game. I can't tell you how furious I am with him." "Hey, it's okay, Nathaniel," Andy said, almost a touch relieved. "This is already a lot of women to keep track of, so I'm not angry about having one less." Watkins shook his head. "Except that I can't let my son go unpunished for this kind of transgression. If the damn kid doesn't learn that he can't go around doing whatever he wants, that's exactly what he's going to do, so what I'm going to do is have him bring the next woman assigned to him over here and have him give her to you." "Nathaniel," Andy tried to interrupt, "that's really not  " "It absolutely is, Andrew. He's nearly eighteen, and if he doesn't learn now, then when?" It was clear Watkins was violently unhappy with his son over all of this. "His refusal to follow agreements doesn't just reflect on him; it, more importantly, reflects upon me, and once the other men in this community find out, if I haven't come down hard on the boy, they're going to think I'm soft. I cannot abide that." "How would they even know?" "Because! Because, Andrew!" Watkins said, throwing his hands up into the air. "Because he likes to strut around town like he earned my wealth, not me! All it would take it for one of our little poker friends to see Deborah with him and they'll know something is amiss and the gossip will start. I'm going to get ahead of this, and will tell our fellow players all about it before they find out inadvertently. Later this week, my son is going to be delivered a girl he has been lusted after for nearly a year now, and then he's going to have to immediately march her over here and present her to you, as means of apology." Andy sighed, trying to figure out what to say next and failing a few times before finally deciding to stop resisting. It was clear Watkins mind was made up. "Is the lady going to be okay with this? I'm sure she'd much rather have a teenage boy instead of, well, me." "She'll probably be relieved, if I'm honest, Andrew," Watkins said, lowering his voice a bit. "She was Benny's AP Trigonometry tutor last year, and has been helping him with remote tutoring this year for AP Calculus. She was supposed to be a freshman at Stanford this year, but what with the campus closed down, they haven't started classes up, so she'll be going next year when they reopen. I think my son may have hit on her a few times, but she'd declined his advances, so you taking her in is in her best interests, as well as yours and mine. I suppose the people on the base thought they were doing me a favor by assigning her to my son, knowing his lusts for her. They weren't, and hopefully this will discourage them from helping my son any in an attempt to broker favor with me. My son will have something both for you and for her with him as well when they show up Friday, on the 6th." "Okay, well, if she doesn't want to be with him, we can see if she wants to be with me instead." "She will, Andrew," Watkins said, a hint of amusement in his voice. "She likes older men. She hit on me once during The Before Times, but back then I believed I was a one woman kind of man, and I didn't want to hurt my son's feelings. She is, quite beautiful, and obviously very smart. She likes intelligent, strong willed, dependable men. She might be initially fooled, as I was, by the appearance of meekness you can give off on first impression, but I'll tell her in the car ride over that you're not a man to be underestimated. Covington's made that mistake. I have as well. I won't let my son do the same." He tilted his head to one side. "I suppose it would be too much of me to ask for you to make him , watch as you imprinted her?" "God yes! Nathan! Jesus, how can you even suggest such a thing?" Watkins sniffed, clearly disappointed. "Fine, fine. Then I insist you open and read the envelopes that Benny, that's my son's name, will be bringing with him when he shows up on Friday. Make sure he stands there as you tell him exactly what's in them." "What is in them?" "A little bit more punishment for him, and a little more compensation for you," he said. "I won't let you refuse me this, so you'll just have to abide by it, but once you accept the envelopes and Hannah, that's the girl's name, once you accept all of that, I will consider the boy's debt paid in full. I'm sure he's going to bitch and moan about it, but the little brat is lucky I didn't just throw him out on his ear, out of both the family and New Eden. But he is my only son. Maybe I've simply been too lenient in the past, and it is time for him to get the stick instead of the carrot." "Family's a bitch," Andy said. "Indeed it can be." "Nate, I want to leave!" Erin said, poking her head out of the back of the limo. "Can we go now?" "I've made a horrible mistake bringing her into my house, haven't I?" Watkins said, giving Andy a pained smile. "Give her her own wing of your mansion and some staff to boss around, like you said you were going to, and you'll probably be fine," Andy said, shaking the man's hand. "Just don't let her think she's in charge of the rest of your wives. Give her an inch and she'll take every mile she can." "You're too good for this place, Andrew," Watkins said, returning the shake. "May this nest of vipers never break your noble spirit." "You say that," Andy laughed, "but I've got to go upstairs and fuck two people off People Magazine's Top 100 Most Beautiful People list at the same time after we're done here, so if this is a nest of vipers, I gotta tell you, they spared no expense on the gilding." Watkins laughed with him, heading towards the limo. "I'll see you on Friday, then. I'll bring Benny and Hannah over myself, just to make sure he doesn't try and screw this up too." "They never would've worked together anyway," Andy said, as Watkins stopped at the limo and looked back. "Benny and Hannah? People would've been making horrible Japanese steakhouse jokes at their expense non stop their entire lives." "God, you're right," Watkin said, a wide smile on his face. "I can't believe I didn't even think of it before now." He started to get into the back of the limo, sitting down next to Erin, shaking his head. "Benihana's. Fuck me." And then he closed the door and the limo drove off. That left Andy with Niko and Aisling, who had been watching the whole time. "I live the weirdest life on the planet," Andy said to them, walking back up the stairs. It looked like each of the girls had taken one suitcase with them, but left three more each on the patio. "Guess I'd better haul these in." He started to move towards the suitcases, but Aisling had stood up already and stepped in between him and them. "Nah, we got it, Starfucker," she said, pushing him by the chest. "You've gotta go lock in those two beauties before they run off." "Yeah," Niko said, moving to stand next to Aisling, blocking Andy's path to the suitcases, leaving only the door inside the mansion as his exit. "I wanna a turn in the sack with Emily, but you need to make her part of the family first." "Someone's got a crush, I think," Ash said, nudging Niko in the ribs. "Are you kidding?" Niko said. "Seeing her in that fourth Dagger Academy movie, 'Castle of Galaxies,' when she was in that evening gown for the school ball,” She shook her head, a little embarrassed smile on her face. "Well, that's when I realized I was bi." "Maybe if you ask her really nicely, she'll wear the gown for you, love," Ash said to Niko, who visibly shuddered with excitement, playing out the moment in her head. "Go on, go!" Niko said to him. "We'll crash in another room for the night if we have to, so you damn well better not come out of that room until both of those girls are imprinted, or I will beat the living shit out of you." "Yes ma'am, 2nd Lieutenant Red Wolf," Andy said, mocking a salute, which made her smack him on the shoulder. "God, I hope I don't get performance anxiety." "You're not the third guy in 'History Of The World Part I,' Andy," Niko said. "He is a eunuch," Aisling said, acting out the bit. "He is a eunuch," Niko said, continuing it. "He is Dead," the two girls said together, collapsing into a fit of giggles. "Now go in there and give those two beauties the best fucking orgasms of their lives," Aisling said, grabbing one of his belt loops on his jeans, yanking him towards the doorway. "How did I ever get so lucky?" he said, kissing Niko, then Aisling. "By being the best damn man any of us have ever met," Niko said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I love hearing you say that. I'm sure it's not true, but thanks." "It is," Ash said, "but we're not gonna stand here all night stroking your ego. If you don't go upstairs and fuck those two lucky bitches senseless right now, I'm going to have Niko kick your ass." "Okay! Okay!" Andy laughed. "I'm going, I'm going!" He hadn't been entirely joking about the possibility of having trouble getting it up, not because he didn't want to, but because he still considered himself way below their league. Each step through the hallway, up the stairs and down the other hallway were slightly plagued with nervousness. But all that of that was dropping away with each step, as he remembered that kiss from Sarah, how intense and inviting it had been, and that minx like smile of Emily's, toying and yet also welcoming, maybe even laced with a hint of thankfulness. A few hours ago, he'd been terrified that he'd end up striking an adversarial relationship with these two supremely talented actresses, and now he was worried that he'd not live up to their expectations. Their expectations. Of him. The life he lived was not meant to be believed. As he got to the door to the bedroom, he cocked his head, finding the door closed, something rather uncommon in the house. He'd never felt the need to close the master bedroom door before now, so he thought this might even be the first time he'd seen the door actually closed. He was about to knock on the door, his hand raised, about to rap his knuckles on the wood, when he looked at his own hand quizzically. "The hell am I doing?" he muttered to himself and then moved to open the door. There, on the bed, were Sarah and Emily. They were locked in a kiss, Emily sitting on Sarah's lap, the tiny girl's hands tugging ever so slightly on the unbraided portion of Sarah's red locks, their lips pressed together heatedly, making out as though they hadn't even heard him enter. They'd also changed clothes since he'd seen them just a little bit ago. Both girls were dressed in white Oxford button up shirts, violet and purple neckties loose but still hanging around their necks, black skirts that hung down to the middle of their thighs, black thigh high stockings with violet and purple trim at the top of them clinging to their legs. They looked a little like British private school uniforms, but Andy knew that specific color code of trims. They were Dagger Academy uniforms. The Dagger Academy movies had been oddly huge successes, following five different students growing up through several years of a bounty hunter college, set in a land "across the stars." The first one had been expected to do alright, but the five lead actors, one of which was Emily, had all been so winningly charming, that audiences had looked past the sometimes clunky special effects and fallen in love with the story. From the time she was thirteen until she was twenty three, Emily had starred in six Dagger Academy movies, and all said and done, they'd grossed over a billion dollars. He was more than a little surprised she was wearing the school outfit from it now. He'd figured she'd never want to even think about those films again, considering how much of her life they had eaten up. "Oh, Professor Rook," Emily said, looking over her shoulder at him, still grinding a little bit against Sarah. "Miss Heartseye and I seem to have been bitten by a, what was it?" She nudged Sarah. Sarah giggled a little, licking her lips, her blue eyes fixated on him like she wanted to eat him alive. "By a roxtreaux beast," she purred. "It's so fucking hard to think straight right now, Professor." Andy's eyes widened a little bit. She hadn't been kidding. She actually had found that story he'd written early on in the pandemic, months before even Aisling had come into his life. After about two months of quarantine, Andy had gotten frustrated with trying to work on another Druid Gunslinger novel, and had decided what the hell, to write a bit of porn fanfic, just to flex his writing skills, something to take his mind off of the whole lockdown. He'd written a bit of fanfic set in the Dagger Academy series, sometime after the last movie, when Dahlia Hairtrigger's boyfriend had died heroically saving the galaxy, leaving her to go her last year at the Dagger Academy alone. He'd introduced a new friend to Dahlia, a woman named Raven Doomeye, but he'd clearly described the character very much like how Sarah actually looked. In the fanfic, the two bounty hunter students had been out on a wild hunt after a target, who'd sicced a herd of wild roxtreaux on them. The roxtreaux, as he'd written it, disarmed their prey by injecting them with an aphrodisiac venom that fogged their minds with lust. It had mostly been an excuse to write a bit of porn using a handful of his favorite actresses, starting off as a lesbian scene between Hairtrigger and Doomeye until a member of the school faculty, Professor Deathwhisper, came to save them. Deathwhisper was an invented character as well, and he'd modeled her after Alice Karteaux. He'd thought about introducing a male proxy for himself in the story, but decided just to let it lie as it did, posting it to some random corner of the internet under some silly name he'd made up. He'd never expected anyone to actually read it. It seemed like both Emily and Sarah had read it, but read that story very well, because they had the details down to a tee, even going to far as to have Emily's shirt with a jagged rip just above her waist on one side, a rip in Sarah's left stocking just above the ankle, both the places where the roxtreaux had bitten them in the story. Emily turned on Sarah's lap, her back to her girlfriend's chest, rolling her hips in his direction, that skirt still concealing most of her legs from him. "You have to help us, Professor," Emily whimpered. "I don't want to die here on this desolate rock, before I've even finished school." She raked her nails along the back of Sarah's neck, her other hand smoothing along one of her own thighs, tugging a little on that skirt, as if she was torn between trying to pull it down or up. "But I feel so very strange, like parts of my body are on fire. My naughty parts especially." "Well, Miss Hairtrigger, the only antidote to roxtreaux venom is to ride it out," Andy said, stepping into the room, closing the door behind him. He tried to affect a British accent, but immediately abandoned it, deciding just to stick to his own voice. "Vigorous exercise will help, as it encourages the body to fight off the neurotoxins." Emily nodded, her face a contorted mix of fear and lust. "Just tell us what to do and we'll do it, Professor. Whatever it is! You're our only hope." "Just remain there for the moment, and I'll begin administering some treatment," he said, moving to the edge of the bed, sliding down onto his knees, as he made sure both Sarah and Emily had their legs spread, his hands slowly pushing up Emily's skirt, revealing that alabaster flesh of her thighs before exposing that she hadn't put on panties, a small brownish triangle of curls atop her dripping wet cunt. A lesser man might've thought Emily dyed her blonde locks, but Andy knew better, himself a blonde (when he wasn't shaving his head, which was almost never these days) with brown pubic hair. "Remember, whatever you feel, it's perfectly natural," he said, as he lowered his lips down to flick his tongue along her snatch. "Oh. OH. OH my!" she groaned, her hips pushing up towards his face, as he sunk two fingers inside of her cunt, his tongue continuing to draw shapes along her clit. "Fuck, Professor! You're, quite the cunning linguist!" Andy almost wanted to groan at the pun, but decided instead to focus on the work in front of him. When Emily had said her last boyfriend hadn't gone down on her, Andy had almost taken offense to that, and decided it was going to be the first thing he did with her. He could feel her body squirming and writhing against his face, her hands moving to hold onto his head. Her whole body erupted in a quick spasm when he dragged the soft hairs of his goatee across her clit, her thighs clamping on his ears for a moment. She kept him pinned there for several seconds before she relaxed a little bit, whimpering in tiny little chipmunk squeaks. "Fuck, sir, that was amazing," her British tinged voice purred at him. "I've never cum so quick before. You're very good at that,” He looked up from between her thighs, noticing that somewhere in the middle of it, Sarah had unbuttoned Emily's shirt, opening it, although the tie still remained dangling around her neck, resting between her small, pert tits. Emily brought a hand up, folding an arm across her chest, a touch self consciously. "They aren't as large as they should be, sir, I know," she said, looking down. He couldn't tell if she was still playing a part, or was genuine nervous about how he might look at her body. He wanted to put that to rest as quickly as possible. Andy stood up, moving in closer, lifting Emily's chin up, turning her eyes back to his, as he pressed a kiss to her lips, letting her taste herself on his face. "You are perfect exactly as you are," he said, "both of you." He moved to one side and leaned in to kiss Sarah, as he felt Emily's hands unbuttoning his jeans. "Any man who's told you that you need bigger tits can come tell me, and I will beat him to a pulp before of your very eyes, or fall trying." "Can we have more, sir?" Emily asked. "Of you?" Sarah nodded enthusiastically. "I fucking want some too. My brain's on fucking fire." "Alright, but let me tell you this," Andy said, trying to weave his knowledge about the vaccine into the storyline they were playing out. "Whoever goes first in getting a dose of serum will be completely unable to help the other when it comes to her turn. Once you get your dose, you will, ah, go into a healing coma, which will burn the last of the neurotoxin from your system. You two are such close friends, you should decide who you want to get dosed first, and whom you want to go second." He took a step back and Emily slid off Sarah's lap, moving down onto her knees in front of him, before she pulled the giant redhead down to join her. They made such a contrast, the blonde and the redhead, the pixie and the amazon, but the one commonality they shared was that utter adoration they had for him in their eyes. Emily tugged his baggy jeans and boxers down to his knees, letting his thick cock spring free and slap Sarah in the face, causing the redhead to giggle fiercely, her nose scrunching up in amusement. "Quite the weapon you wield, professor," Emily said, reaching up to give his fat cock a soft stroke, moving it to keep it away from Sarah's lips. "I heard a rumor from a member of the faculty, Professor Red Wolf, sir. About the very first taste of the serum. Is it true? Let's find out!" she said with a giggle. At that, Emily held onto his cock by the base with one hand, her other hand moving to grab Sarah's head, pushing the redhead's mouth onto his shaft, that large dollop of precum dripping onto Sarah's tongue as soon as her lips enveloped his cock. The minute that precum hit her tongue, Sarah's hands clamped onto his hips, and her body immediately began vibrating like she'd just been hooked up to a car battery, her blue eyes rolling back into her head as a gurgling moan chirped in staccato bursts of sound that buzzed along his cock, her lips refusing to give even a millimeter of space between them and him. After several seconds, Sarah's breathing resumed a more normal rhythm and she forced her blue eyes open once more, looking up at him, tears at the edges of them, as she slowly pulled her head back to let her lips pop off his cock. "Oh. My. Fucking. God," she whispered. "What the fuck was that, Emily? What the fuck just fucking happened? How did that make me cum so fucking hard? I'm still fucking shaking. What the literal fuck?" Emily giggled again. "Oh my god, it's true, it's actually fucking true. Let me have my first taste," she said, cradling his balls with one hand, stroking his shaft with the other, coaxing another droplet of precum to the tip of his cock. As soon as that milky white pearl emerged, she pushed her mouth over the head of his cock, not taking it deep, mostly just keeping the first few inches past her lips as her tongue swiped along the tip of his cock, gathering up that taste. As soon as her tongue lashed along that dollop, he felt her tiny body lock up, her finely manicured fingernails sinking hard into his ass, her eyes looking up at him, almost in deification, worshiping the sight of him while the orgasm shredded through her, Sarah looking on, somewhere between concern, fascination and jealousy. "Is it, is it always like this?" Sarah asked him, as Emily finally started to come down from her initial taste, both women now primed to him. "The first orgasm is always the strongest," Andy said to her, his hand stroking along the top of her head, as she turned to look up at him. "Other than the imprinting orgasm, which all the girls have described as something unlike anything they've ever encountered. But I think Ash told me that all of her orgasms now are about ten times stronger than they were in the Before Times. Niko and Lauren both said that was about right. Niko's said a number of times that she never knew what cumming was like before me." He chuckled softly. "I wish I could say I was that good, but I think it's mostly the vaccine." "Less men, better orgasms, the new world has so much to offer women,” Emily moaned, reaching over to unbutton Sarah's shirt. Neither girl had put on a bra, and Andy was a little surprised that Sarah's tits were plumper than he'd thought, rounder and fuller with large aerolas and stiff pink nipples standing at attention. She'd never done a nude scene before. Neither of them had. And now, here they both were, in a half state of undress. "Sares, do you want to go first?" "Totally, but I don't fucking know if I can, Emily," Sarah said to her. "But I think I fucking have to, I think I have to fucking go first, so I'm fucking locked in, so I can't back down. I'm just fucking scared I won't be good enough for him, that he won't fucking love me like I fucking love him. He's, like, my fucking hero, as a writer." Andy wanted to point out that both of the women were already completely locked in now, having gotten a taste of his semen to prime them for imprinting, but was afraid that might make things even more awkward for them, so he kept quiet. "It's okay, Sares, it's fine, it's fine, it's absolutely fine," Emily said to Sarah. "I'll be with you the entire time. Here, I know what we can do." She stood up again, pulling Sarah to her feet with her. The two of them moved around Andy's body, turning him around so his back was towards the bed, then Emily pushed him sharply, forcing him to fall onto the bed face up. "Climb on top of him." "Emily, I'm, I'm not fucking sure,” Emily stepped in behind her and slipped one of her hands up and under Sarah's skirt, rubbing her hand against the redhead's cunt beneath the fabric, obscured from Andy's view. "Sares, you are literally drenching my hand right now. You nearly fingered yourself until your hand dropped off after that time at the convention, and now, here he is, the man you wanted, and he's told you, quite explicitly, that he wants to fuck you. Now get out of your own way and climb atop that cock of his. This is your favorite dream. Look at him." Her other hand reached up and grabbed Sarah's hair, forcing her to look at him, while Emily carried on, her posh English accent almost making her seem even more dominating. "He wants you, you daft bitch. He's probably jerked off thinking about you, haven't you, Andy?" Andy reddened a little bit, then nodded. "More than a few times." "You see?" Emily's grip in Sarah's hair loosened a little bit, and Andy could see the lust building up behind Sarah's dark blue eyes, rising up to meet the levels of love already present there. "I'll do you one better. I'm going to give you to the count of five to get on top of the love of your life, and if you don't, I'm going to fuck him first, a fact I will surely lord over you for the rest of all our days." "Oh my fucking god, you totally would, wouldn't you, you bitch? The number one person on my 'I Wanna Fuck So Bad' list, and you'd totally fuck them before me, wouldn't you? I so fucking hate you right now!" "Five,” "You know I'd totally hate you, like, forever and longer." "Four,” "Four?! It was just, like, five, only a second ago." "Three,” "Oh no you fucking don't," Sarah said, tugging Emily's hand out from under her skirt. "You can have him after I've fucked him. He's mine first." Sarah slowly peeled away from Emily and moved one knee up on one side of Andy's thighs, bringing the other up to straddle him, leaning over him, her heavy tits swinging beneath her, her eyes holding on his face. "That's okay, isn't it, Andy?" she said, bending down to kiss him. "That I want to be here?" She kissed him again. "With you?" Again, only longer. "That I love you?" She wriggled her hips, and he could feel her reaching down beneath her skirt to grab his cock, rubbing the tip of it along her cunt. "That I wanna fuck you?" Emily peeled off her shirt, but left the tie hanging loose around her neck, as she crawled up on the bed alongside Andy, turning his head one side so she could take a turn kissing him. "That we want to fuck you," she said. "For ever and ever,” "That's totally okay, right?" Sarah said, turning his eyes back to her. "Because if it's not, then, well,” she said, pausing for a second, breaking eye contact for a moment before their eyes met again, resolve hardening behind them, "then I guess it's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission." Her hips slammed down on top of his, punching his cock deep into her drenched cunt, a sluttish moan bubbling up from her throat. "'Cause momma's gotta fucking eat. Fuck, you feel too fucking good. Shit, I'm fucking cumming already, shit shit shit shit shit Shit Shit!" Sarah's fingernails raked hard against his chest, not quite deep enough to draw blood, but enough to raise red lines of tender flesh, visible through the dark thatch of blonde curls on his chest. Her eyes watered up as she trembled atop of him, her head thrashing about to make those coppery curls swipe back and forth like a matador's cape in the wind. For several seconds, she just stayed there, impaled on his cock, vibrating in quivers, until finally the sensations eased up and she leaned forward, Emily reaching to wipe the tears from Sarah's eyes. "You okay Sares?" "This is the greatest fucking day of my life," she whimpered, her voice tiny and dumbstruck. "But I need more. I want more." She looked down at Andy, then leaned in to kiss him. "I need to feel more than just that oh so fat cock of yours inside me. You know what I fucking need, don't you?" Her lips kept returning to his in between every sentence. "I need you to pump a hot load of jizz right inside of my cute little fuckhole." This time she lifted her head up and kissed Emily right in front of his eyes, their tongues tangling up, until Emily tilted her head a little, and leaned them both down, until all three of them were kissing in one big mess, a weave of tongues and lips. Sarah started to grind her hips on his lap, finally leaning back until she sat upright, and Andy could place his hands on her body, one on her hip, the other over one of those round tits of hers, feeling her nipple hard as a rock against his palm. "Tell me I'm pretty," she pleaded to him. "You're fucking gorgeous," he told her. "Tell me I'm smart." "Brilliant, witty and charming." "Tell me that it's okay that I'm a big dork." "I love the fact that you're a big dork." She bit her bottom lip nervously, glancing over at Emily, who nodded to her with that coy smile of hers. "Tell me I'm your big dork." "You're my big dork," Andy laughed. "Again," Sarah said, starting to ride him harder, her ass smacking down on the tops of his thighs each time she bucked into him. "You're my big dork." "What am I?" Emily squeezed his shoulder, nibbling on his ear, her teeth tugging on his earlobe. "Say it. She wants to hear it. Cum in her tight little cunt and say it." Sarah's rhythm was frantic now, her cunt clamping and squeezing on his cock, trying to get that release from him, her hair a complete mess now, the braids having partially come undone, threatening to spill everywhere, her hands on his chest making her arms press her tits together, as if presenting them for him to see, her deep dark blue eyes never once looking away from him, imploring him, as if she wanted something she couldn't bear to ask for. The image was so erotic, Andy knew he couldn't resist, not that he wanted to. So when he felt that tightening up in his body, his hands grabbed onto her hips and held her down, his cock impaled hilt deep inside of her snatch beneath that skirt, as his green eyes held her gaze, while he said "You're mine." At that last word, his balls drew up and his cock blasted Sarah's snatch so full of cum, he was certain he could feel it dripping out onto his balls, seven or eight squirts of heavy cream inside of her, her eyes immediately rolling back in her skull, as she flopped atop of him like someone had just flipped a switch inside of her and turned her off. Andy barely had time to pull his head to one side so that Sarah's face fell safely into the pillow, her tits mashed against his chest, as she started mumbling "imprinting" over and over against into the pillow. "Oh my god," Emily whispered into his ear, "that is the hottest fucking thing that I have ever seen with my own eyes." Emily reached up and brushed part of Sarah's hair out of her face for her, seeing her muttering. "How long is she going to do that?" "For a couple of minutes," Andy said, slowly moving to roll Sarah off him, laying her down on the side of him opposite of Emily. The skirt had hiked up and he could see a small landing strip of copper curls above her snatch, so he tugged the skirt back down for her. "Then she'll just fall very still. She'll wake up in about twelve to sixteen hours." "That's all it takes?" Emily said. "Now she's just permanently bonded to you forever?" "Well, not forever, I'm sure," Andy said, as Emily moved him so that each of them were laying on their sides facing each other. He must've looked a little nervous, because Emily took one of his hands in hers and interlaced his bulky fingers with her slender ones. "I'm sure once we're out of this crisis, science will come up with some sort of solution so that people aren't quite so chemically dependent on each other, but for the time being, yeah, she's bonded to me, and she'll need to absorb some of my cum once every couple of weeks." "That won't be a problem," Emily giggled. "She's a wildcat. I swear to God, she might even be a nymphomaniac, not that you'll mind, although you're going to have to go with us on movie shoots from now on. We'll work it all out, I'm certain." She leaned in and pressed a tiny kiss on his nose. "Ready for me yet?" "I don't think you've met a man in your entire life who's been ready for you," he said, which made her laugh in amusement. "Me included. You're really sure you're okay with all of this?" "Can I tell you a secret?" she said, that impish smile widening on her face a little bit. "I sort of help set all this up." Andy narrowed his eyes. "I don't know how that's even possible." "When Sarah and I arrived on the base two weeks ago, we were put in a sort of group quarantine, and were mostly only allow to see people who had already been vaccinated and were with partners, a few staff members aside. Sarah was very nervous that someone would find out we were together, so we just acted like acquaintances, actors who didn't know each other but knew of each other," Emily said, not letting him pull his hand away, in fact bringing it to rest on her chest, just above her heart. "So while Sarah was having panic attacks and thinking our lives were over, I got to know some of the people who were on guard duty for us." "Niko,” Andy groaned, grinning in spite of himself. "Well, yes, Niko, but not just Niko," Emily said. "Also, I met one of Mister Covington's family, Rachel. And so I hatched a plan." "I don't understand why you even needed to," Andy said. "They partner you women up with men you want to be with, don't they?" "Is that what they've told you?" she gasped. "No! Oh my god, no! No, that's not it at all, Andrew. I mean, it might have started that way, but since the foundation of New Eden, any woman that a man wants and asks for is brought here and imprinted, to be part of his new family. Maybe that's not true for all of the women, but it most certainly is for some of us! Did, did you really not know that? Have you truly not asked for anyone specific?" "I didn't even know that I could, not that I think I would. Why wouldn't Niko tell me that?" "Maybe she doesn't even know," Emily said. "We were told not to talk about the process at all, to anyone. But I'm a little busybody, so I poked around a bit, and Rachel told me a lot more than I think she intended to. I also talked to Niko about the various men who were in the community already. She said she really didn't know that many of them, other than her partner and his friends, so I asked her to tell me about them." "Oh lord,” "Once I found out you were, well, you, and that Niko had such a high opinion of you , you really should marry all of your girls, Andrew, but my God, would Niko especially do literally anything for you , I decided that I had to get Sarah into your family, no matter what. I knew how she felt about you, and if she'd found out you were here and she couldn't fuck you, well, it might've sent her into an uncontrollable spiral of depression, and I would not allow that to happen. She's had struggles with depression much of her life, and her love for you is deeper than the Pacific. If I could get myself into your family as well, all the better, but if Sarah and I simply lived in the same town, even with different male partners, we could still be together regularly enough, so I had to ensure she made her way to you, and that was the bare minimum of what I would accept." "What did you do?" "So Rachel controls the distribution process at the vaccination center. She determines how women are sent to their partners and at what speed. She is also, like, the biggest Dagger Academy fan, thank god for that. I got all of this done with just a few autographs and a few selfies with her. I don't like trading in on my fame, but I decided that just this one time, I would bend my moral compass, to ensure that Sarah and I weren't miserable." "What does that mean?" "It means, I convinced Rachel to send out women in batches of two, because the other thing Rachel had told me was that her partner, that prick Covington, liked to gamble with women, so I made sure that he would see this as an opportunity to hold one of his poker games, and that both Sarah and I would be available as prizes in them. Niko said you'd never been invited to one before, so I also needed to make sure there was a reason for you to get involved." "Christ, if I'd have known you and Sarah were in it, I might have gone in on that alone." "Oh, bless Andrew, but no, you wouldn't have," Emily said, kissing his nose. "You're too scrupulous. Niko made it exceptionally clear to me that you saw your partners as people not property, another part of the reason I so wanted to ensure Sarah made her way to you. But that meant convincing you that you were rescuing someone, and hoping you would also give in to temptation when it was presented to you on a silver platter. So when they started vaccinating us all with the inoculation, I bumped that doctor, Charlotte, and made her accidentally inject herself. That meant she had to get partnered up with someone within a few weeks, and I knew that Charlotte wouldn't leave her daughter behind. I also knew that Charlotte was a friend of Niko's, and that Rachel had been told by Covington to watch out for a mother daughter pairing he could get his hands on, that sick fuck." "This is like some kind of fucking heist movie!" Andy said in amazement. "What I didn't know was that Charlotte was so heartbroken over the death of her husband, that she wouldn't care who she was assigned to. I had wanted Charlotte to be assigned to you and her daughter to be assigned to Covington, so you would feel the need to rescue her daughter and when you did, you would likely also take Sarah and I." "What the hell happened?" "Rachel got them both assigned to Covington instead, but thankfully, Niko decided on her own that she was going to make sure you were at that card game to rescue both of them, because she and the Doctor had become work friends. Niko convinced Rachel that you were a great cardplayer, and also made sure that one of their usual players dropped out. She's quite clever, your girl. I also put a bug in her ear that if she thought you were such a wonderful man, maybe you should consider trying to get Sarah as well." "You didn't mention yourself?" "I didn't want to overtax you, but I hoped that maybe I might be pretty enough to pull your eye." "Every woman here is prett

Quaranteam – Book 1: Part 7 The ramifications of Covington's poker game play out.. Based on a post by CorruptingPower, in 25 parts. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels. Chapter 19 The decision was made that whoever was dealing would sit out for those five hands and simply focus on the dealing. They also drew cards for seating order, lowest card dealing first, highest card starting with the big blind and the second highest being the small blind. Andy drew low card, which didn't bother him at all. It would be a chance to watch the others without having to divide his attention between his cards and his opponents. "So I can't help but notice that you said even the last place person takes home a woman," Andy said as he took his seat in the dealer's chair, "but your count doesn't have someone for sixth place. So which is it?" While he started to deal cards out to the players, Covington sighed, nodding. "I know, Andrew, I know. There is, in fact, a thirteenth girl in the pool, but I don't think anyone would want to take her over the other lovely women we have presented." He grabbed his phone from his pocket, tapping it to load up a picture. "She arrived on my doorstep last week, but when I told her what was expected of being part of my house, she refused. So I locked her up and she's been stewing, but even in her sexual frenzy, she's still refusing me, so I will give her as a prize to the person who comes in last." "Any woman in the pool should be in the pool, if you ask me," Andy said, dealing the last card. The man passed his phone over to Andy, a photograph of her on the screen. "If you insist, Andrew, then I suppose that will be fine. She is an athlete of some kind, and was supposed to be going to the Olympic Games, so she is quite fit, but she is extremely willful and stubborn, so she may be more trouble than she's worth." Once the cards were out, Andrew picked up the man's phone and looked down at the picture, recognizing her immediately. "Yeah, that's Piper Brown," Andy said. "She's a member of the woman's volleyball team. Hell, I think she won a gold medal in the last Olympics." He passed the phone over to Watkins, who looked and then passed the phone down the line, so everyone could get a look at her. A muscular, toned brunette with a stern look in the photograph, it was a marked change of how she often seemed in interviews, where she seemed warm and inviting. She looked like she wanted to beat the shit out of whoever was taking the picture, and the room she was in seemed spartan at best, barely more than a closet. "She definitely goes into the pool if you don't want her." "Agreed," Watkins said. "I'd likely take her over several of the other women on offer." "Even with her being a pain in the ass?" Covington asked. "Not all of us have such draconian house rules as you, Artie." Covington shrugged, then glanced at his hole cards. "Then into the pool she goes, I suppose. Check." The thing about televised poker is that many viewers don't realize is that the show is almost always a collection of highlights over a longer event, and that about sixty percent of poker hands have little to no action, other than the two players who have blinds in the pool debating which of them has the less crappy hand. Over the first five hands, only about a few thousand in chips changed hands, and Andy's first read felt like it was going to stand. Covington and Watkins were good card players, Vikovic played loose, Jacobson played tight and Haunton was an "any two'll do" kind of player, who was going to throw money into the pot on pretty much any hand with his tells written large across his face. After the fifth hand, Andy moved from the dealer's seat to his own chair and Covington moved to sit down at the dealer's seat. His first hand out, Andy drew Jack Ten suited in hearts, so he decided to stick around in the hand, since he was already the big blind. "Raise, one thousand." It was a bet designed to scare off anyone who didn't have a decent hand, but to Andy's amusement, all four other players decided they wanted to see a flop, so everyone called him. He was a little surprised to see Jacobson staying in, but he suspected the table might just be collectively testing the new guy. With the pot right, Covington deal out the three cards of the flop, nine of spades, seven of hearts and the queen of hearts. That gave Andy both an open ended straight draw and a flush draw, although he didn't have either the king or ace of hearts, so that made him a little nervous, but he decided he wanted to take the measure of his opponents, so he pushed another two thousand into the pot. Haunton and Jacobson both stayed in, but Watkins and Vikovic both folded, leaving three people in the game. The next card, the turn, did absolutely nothing to the board, a 2 of clubs. Technically, Andy was holding nothing, but he felt like his odds were decent to make something out of it at the river, and he wanted to come out guns blazing. So he decided to trap, and checked. Jacobson also checked, but Haunton thought he smelled weakness, so he added another thousand to the pot, a string bet designed to just pull a little more money out of what he thought was opponents in a weak position. Andy suspected the man was holding top pair, or maybe three queens if he was lucky, but he thought that Haunton would've thrown a lot more into the pot if he'd flopped trips, so Andy called, and Jacobson decided to fold, leaving just the two of them in the pot. The final card, the river, flopped and Andy felt the smile he was stifling behind his eyes. The King of Diamonds. He'd made his straight, and there wasn't a flush on the board. The worst he could do was split the pot. And Andy knew exactly what Haunton was going to do, so Andy simply checked. Haunton figured he had Andy on the ropes, so he pushed five thousand into the pot, and Andy smirked a little bit, and raised another five thousand in return. Haunton flinched visibly, but at this point, decided he was pot committed and clearly wanted to know whether or not Andy was bluffing, so after a minute or so of deliberation, he called. "Straight, king high," Andy said, flipping over the cards. Haunton flipped over the cards, even though he didn't have to, revealing that he'd stayed in with two pair, queens and kings. "Damn, you got me, new fish." The stack of chips was pushed over in Andy's direction, and Andy nodded. He'd just taken nearly twenty percent of Haunton's stack on the first hand. It might have been too strong an opening, but sometimes you just had to play the cards as they laid. For the next hour or so, players took turns mostly slowly redistributing the chips, although towards the end of the hour, Haunton made a very bad odds call, and went all in on two pair against Covington, who had limped into the pot and flopped trip deuces. Because Haunton had figured his two pair was rock solid, he groaned when Covington turned up his cards and took Haunton out of the game. Without so much as missed a beat, Haunton immediately said "Rebuy." A note was made and another stack of chips was brought forth and put in front of him. "Last place tonight's like not even playing at all, so might as well give it another go. Besides, I want to at least finish third one of these nights." He was next in line for small blind, so counted out the amount needed. "I wouldn't bank on that, the way you're playing," Andy said to him. "You need to learn how to evaluate your hand better, and stop making such loose wagers." "Shh," Covington said to him. "Nobody likes being told how to play better, Andrew." "Speak for yourself, Artie," Watkins said. "The minute you stop moving forward, you might as well be dead. Any tips for me, Andy?" he asked with a glimmer in his eye. "Yeah," Andy said, counting out his big blind. "Quit playing with your food so much. It's unbecoming. You had the mayor dead to rights two hands ago and everyone at the table knew it, and you still spent at least a minute's worth of all our time making a show out of it before you called him" Watkins, who was taking a turn at dealer, chuckled. "I see your point, although I do need to take my fun here and there when I can." "Fun has no place is business or poker," Vikovic said, glancing at his hole cards before matching the big blind. "I'm in." Covington and Jacobson stayed in, and Haunton, sensing an opportunity, raised on small blind, the value of the pot, a move Andy didn't think the mayor was capable of. All the players were sitting on decent hands, but at least half of them were hoping to go fishing, wanting to see a flop for a chance to pick up a decent sized pot. Now that the pot had grown, however, it was time to see who was going to stick around when the price went up. Andy glanced at his hole cards for the first time. When he was the big blind, he never bothered looking at his cards until the action came to him, mostly so that there was no possible way to give anything away to his opponents. He peeked at the two cards and found pocket cowboys waiting for him, two kings. So Andy matched the bet and said "Call." Vikovic matched the bet, to no one's surprise, as did Covington, but Jacobson folded, clearly having a questionable hand that only got more questionable with this much money in the pot. Andy put him on a low set of suited connectors, maybe a 7 8 or so. Watkins, as the dealer, was out of the hand. One of the other reasons Andy had suggested that they each take turns as dealer was that it would cut into bad streaks, giving players who were on tilt a moment to deescalate their frustrations and get their head back in the game. The flop hit, and Andy was a little annoyed by it. Three of hearts, eight of diamonds, jack of spades. The fact that it was a rainbow flop meant that anyone hoping to get a flush was seeing their odds rapidly dwindling, needing the next two cards to be of the same suit (and to be holding two of that suit) to hit. It also wasn't great for a straight, although Andy could see Haunton or Vikovic staying in with a nine ten suited, which would leave them sitting on an open ended straight draw. There was also the chance that one of the other men was sitting on fishhooks (a pair of jacks) and had just flopped a set, but neither Vikovic or Haunton seemed visibly excited enough to have done that. Covington was still a pain in the ass to read. Haunton decided to play it cool. "Check." Andy saw no reason to turn up the heat, so he followed. "Check." "Raise 2k," Vikovic said. "Call," said Covington. "Call," said Haunton. "Call," said Andy. It was a value bet, adding to the pot, but certainly not causing him to get scared, as Andy felt like he was still sitting on top hand. All of the chips were pushed into the center, and then Watkins flipped over the turn card. "King of Hearts." Andy did his best to keep his expression as neutral as possible, although on the inside, he was doing cartwheels. He'd just hit a set, and now he felt like he was definitely the best hand on the board. He wasn't first to act, though. "Check," Haunton said. "Check," Andy repeated. He could've bet here, but the best thing to do was to let someone else make the first stab at the pot. He suspected either Vikovic or Covington would try and push a large bet in, fronting as if they were sitting on a pair of kings, or maybe a king and a jack. Best to let them make the first move and then come in to take it from them. "Raise 20k," Vikovic said. There it was. Someone clearly trying to buy the pot, hoping he could bluff strength into players who were displaying weakness. "Fold," Covington said, tossing his cards to the dealer. That brought the action to Haunton, who had literally just rebought his way into the game a few minutes ago. The mayor thought for a long moment before he pushed the entire stack forward. "All in." Andy sighed for a moment, and looked again at the board, making sure he had a solid read on it. If he called Haunton and lost, the mayor would more than double up if just one player called him and lost. Vikovic had made a big push, but Andy was almost certain he couldn't wait to fold, just to get away from this disaster of a hand before it got worse for him. Which meant Andy would be taking in about 80k if he took down the hand. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that Haunton had being playing cool when he'd flopped trip jacks, and in doing so, had bought Andy enough daylight to see the king to make his own set for next to nothing. It felt like a long wait, but eventually Andy spoke. "Call." "Too rich for me," Vikovic said, mucking his cards even as Andy was speaking. "I fold." "Shouldn't have tried to buy the pot," the mayor said, laughing as he turned over his cards. It wasn't a pair of jacks, but a jack and a king, giving him two pair. "Two pair. Nervous yet, new fish?" Andy smirked. "A little, but not that much," he said, flipping over his pair of kings. Haunton immediately got up from the table, tossing his hands into the air. "C'mon, you gotta be kidding me! Come on, jack! Come on, jack!" "Odds aren't good for you, Mr. Mayor," Covington said. "Enough discussion!" Vikovic said. "Give us a river." Andy was a deadlock. Haunton was wrong. If a jack came up, he would still win the pot, as it would simply give both men a full house, and Andy's would still be better. Haunton was drawing dead, and he simply didn't see that. When the last card was flipped, it was the six of diamonds, not changing the board at all anyway. "Fuck!" the mayor shouted, before getting up from the table. "I should've bet on the flop." "It wouldn't have mattered," Andy said as he pulled the mound of chips his direction. "I was still holding top pair at that point. I would've called you." "Take a few minutes and go get a drink, James," Covington said to the mayor. "As for the rest of you, we have ourselves a new chip leader. And thankfully, his streak will be interrupted now by a turn at the dealer's seat." Andy grinned. "Sure, give me just a minute to get my chips sorted and stacked." All said and done, Andy was clearly well ahead, sitting on a little over 225k of the 650k chips in play. Covington was in second, with 145k, Watkins in third at 120k, Jacobson at 90k and Vikovic at the bottom with 70k. Over the next five hands, Covington did very well for himself, knocking out Vikovic, who rebought in, bringing the chip pool up to 700k, moving himself within spitting distance of Andy's pool. And just after Vikovic bought back in, it was time to change dealers again, and Andy moved out of the dealer's seat, and Covington moved to take it. "I thought you said not to buy back, Vikovic," Andy said, moving back to his stack of chips. "It's what you call a value bet, yes?" Vikovic said. "In fifth place, I would simply have one woman. I can get one woman. And last pick is of no desire to anyone. So if I go home empty handed tonight? Is okay. I take my stab at glory." Two hands later, Andy made a big bluff and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, costing him 40k, but he immediately turned it around, and the following hand busted Jacobson out. Jacobson declined to rebuy, happy to go home with someone rather than empty handed. On Covington's last hand as dealer, Vikovic decided to make a last stand, and Watkins called him on it, knocking Vikovic out in fourth. "With only three of us left in the game, might I make a suggestion?" Covington said. "At this point, I think we should simply rotate between the three eliminated players as dealers, while the three of us remain in the game at all times. Is that acceptable to everyone?" "Sure," Watkin said, "the more action the better." The mayor sighed, bringing his glass of scotch over to the dealer's chair, sitting down. "Yeah, okay. No offense, Rook, but I hope Artie busts you hard." Andy shrugged. "Can't make friends with everyone." He was thirsty, but he would be damned if he was going to make the girl behind the bar do an ounce of work on his behalf. "So c'mon, let's get some cards out." Around ten thirty, Andy was starting to get nervous. He'd dropped down to third place after a couple of unlucky river cards in a row. Then Watkins went all in on Andy. Andy clearly couldn't cover the spread, but Andy called, and Covington decided to get out of the way instead of making a side pot. Thankfully, when the cards were turned over, Andy held the better hand, and the river finally flowed his direction. That doubled him up and put him back in the game. Watkins confidence was shaken, and over the next hour, he never really recovered, playing a bit too reckless and loose. Once Andy and Covington smelled weakness, the two honed in, taking turns chipping away at him until finally Watkins went all in, and just before midnight, Andy took him down. "You want to rebuy?" Covington asked him. Watkins laughed, shaking his head. "Taking three from the pool is more than enough for me. You two titans have fun duking it out." "You ready for this, Andrew?" "Don't you worry, Arthur," Andy said. "Let's see who hits felt first." With only two players, they were always going to be trading turns between little blind and big blind. As soon as Covington looked at his hole cards, he immediately called "All in." Andy smirked a little, not having even looked at his own cards yet. He'd suspected Covington would've tried something like this, just constantly firing at the blinds, trying to chip them away, using his big stack to bully Andy's weaker stack. He glanced at his cards, then nodded. "Okay. Call." Covington blanched. He turned over his cards, revealing Jack eight, not even suited. He'd expected Andy to just back off and let him chip away a set of blinds, and was not happy that Andy hadn't done so, growing even more frustrated when Andy flipped over a pair of nines. "How do you start with a pocket pair?" "Maybe it's a hint you shouldn't go so aggressive right out the gate," Andy replied as Watkins dealt out the flop. As soon as the cards were upturned, Andy could practically feel the anger boiling out of Covington. Andy had flopped the nuts, a six and the other two nines. At that point, it was a formality of just dealing out the last two cards, as Andy was guaranteed the winning hand with four of a kind. Right out of the gate, Andy had doubled up. As the next hand was being dealt out, Covington hadn't even seen his cards and immediately said "All in." He was fully on tilt, and wanted to try and reclaim his confidence. He didn't even look at his two hole cards, simply staring Andy down, practically daring him to get into the hand. Andy knew the stakes were a great deal higher on this hand, and so he took the time to look at his hole cards, a slight laugh escaping his lips. He couldn't try and read his opponent so he had to decide if his hand was good enough for the risk. And the two cards he had were affectionately known as Big Slick, Ace King suited, this time in spades. It wasn't a pair, but playing against two random cards, his odds were good. "Sure, let's dance. Call." "You don't respect me, do you, Andrew?" Andy grinned, giving a little shrug. "You didn't even look at your cards, Arthur. How am I supposed to respect that? If you aren't going to respect your opponent, why should he respect you in turn? And you're just firing into the pot, hoping that you can buy a few blinds to chip away at my stack. But you have no idea what's under there. And I've got Big Slick." He flipped over his cards. "How about you?" Covington was turning almost scarlet red with anger, and turned over his cards, revealing just a six of spades and a three of hearts. "This is ridiculous." "Artie," Vikovic said, "you didn't even look at your cards. What are you thinking?" "I'm thinking this shitstain has been a pain in my ass all night long and I wanted to bury him." "And that's the problem, Arthur," Watkins said, putting out three cards for the flop. "You aren't thinking about the cards and you're thinking about your opponent." The first card on the flop was the six of hearts, giving Covington a pair and a moment's hope, but the second card immediately dashed that, revealing the Ace of Hearts. The third card, a ten of clubs, didn't affect the board at all. With the turn came the three of spades, putting Covington back in the lead for a moment, with two pair, until the last card came out, the King of Hearts, pairing Andy up to two pair as well. Covington practically snarled as he counted out the chips, pushing them over, his stack now a quarter the size of Andy's. "You've got more luck than a goddamn leprechaun, Rook." Watkins stood up, and Jacobson sat down to take a turn at dealer, washing the cards through he Shufflemaster again. Typically the break as the dealer changed was enough to let a player cool off, but Covington was still off balance as they started up again. When the next set of two cards were dealt, Andy was back on the small blinds, and so was the first to act. He'd glanced at his cards and said, "Call." Covington was gunshy now, and simply said "Check," as he was desperate to see a flop and get more information. The flop came down Ace of Hearts, seven of spades, three of clubs. Immediately, Covington said "All in." Andy stopped and did the math in his head. "Yeah, okay. Call." "Two pair," Covington said, flipping over the Ace of Spades and the three of hearts with an angry gusto. "Take that, you lowbrow piece of shit! Time for me to get my money back." Andy shook his head with a wry smile. "Not so fast, Arthur." Andy turned over his hole cards, the seven of hearts and the seven of clubs. "I like my odds here." "Another goddamn pocket pair! This is ridiculous!" "I probably would've folded if you'd bet at the blinds, but you let me see a flop for cheap, so midlevel pocket pair seemed okay." Jacobson turned over the turn card, and Covington immediately let out an undignified cheer, as the three of diamonds. "Yes! Full house! Suck it! Give me my money!" "He still has a few outs, Artie," the mayor warned. Andy was actually leading, but Jacobson just couldn't see it. He was sitting on a full house, sevens over threes, and Jacobson was sitting on threes over aces, which was the lower hand. Players tended to get wound up, so they often refused to think about everything, but Watkins had that knowing smile, so Andy knew he had spotted Jacobson's error as well. Jacobson needed either another three or another ace to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. "No! I refuse to believe I'm going to get blown out by some random river card!" "So show us river already," Vikovic said. And Jacobson placed down the last card with a thump that resounded throughout the room like a clap of thunder. The seven of diamonds. That meant that Covington had a full house, threes over aces, but Andy's four of a kind had blown it out of the water. "The absolute luck on you," Covington growled. Andy had gone from 110k to 220k to 440k, making him the chip leader now. He could, if he wanted, use Covington's own tactics against him. But Andy liked to play smart. On the other hand, Covington was so tilted now, he could probably be goaded into a sloppy play. And if Andy could get Covington to go all in again, he'd be down to the felt and this stupid game would be over. Maybe, just maybe, it was worth the risk. It seemed like the time to goad the millionaire a little more, just to see if Andy could completely tilt him. "Maybe we should see how strong my luck's running right now then, huh?" Andy said as new hole cards slid in front of him. "Tell you want, Artie." He figured this singular use of the man's nickname would give him even more of a severe nudge. Andy had been calling him Arthur all night long, but now, the nickname Artie sounded condescending as fuck. "I'll look at one, just one, of my two hole cards here, and if it's higher than a eight, I'll go all in without even looking at the other card. How about that?" "You do whatever you want, boy, and I'll show you how a real man plays cards." Covington was blind with rage, and there was a carelessness flaring up behind his eyes, as Andy lifted up one of the hole cards to peek under at it. "Okay," Andy said. "All in." "You're bluffing!" Covington said, slamming his fist on the table hard enough to knock the stacks of chips loose. "Call!" "Now Artie," Andy said, smug grin on his face, "are you sure that  " "I Said Call Goddamn It!" Andy flipped over the one card he'd looked at, the Ace of Hearts, but left the other card face down, as Covington flipped over his cards. The man had looked at them this time, and was sitting on a pair of sixes. "Aren't you going to turn over your other card?" Andy shrugged, that sly smile on his face. "In a minute. Let's see the flop." The flop came down six seven ace, giving Covington a set, while Andy was sitting on a pair of aces. The turn was next, a deuce, no help to anyone, and the river, well, the river was the two of hearts. Looking at the board, Andy's odds weren't great, but he wasn't out either. The seven and the six on the board were both hearts, which meant Andy needed his other hole card to be another heart. "It's Schrödinger's hole card now," Andy said, tapping his fingers lighly along the felt. "Maybe I've got a winning card, and you're out, or maybe you've got me dead to rights and have doubled up back into the lead. What you've gotta ask yourself is, do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?" The grin on his face was broad, as he gave the man his best Clint Eastwood impression. Vikovic was the one who finally made the move. He leaned across the table and grabbed the last card, the one Andy had never even touched, and flipped it over. There in all her glory... ...was the Queen of Hearts. Andy had made his flush. "Son of bitch," Vikovic said, letting out a low appreciative whistle. "You want to rebuy, Artie?" "Fuck that! This guy is on a streak. I'm out. Game's over!" "Are you sure, Artie?" Andy said. "The! Game! Is! Over!" Covington fumed. The older man stood up, inhaling a long breath before letting it out slowly, trying to regain his composure. "Alright, let's sort out the winnings. Andrew, you have seven picks from the pool and get to pick first, as is your right as the winner." "Alright, let's see," Andy said, as all the men moved back into the parlor with the videowall they'd been in before. He'd hoped just to win with no rebuys from anyone, as it would've made his decisions simple, but seven, seven was a lot of women for any one man to handle. The thirteen faces sprung to life on the big wall, as Andy looked over them carefully. "Alright, I suppose I'd better just pick then. Charlotte Varma, Asha Varma, Piper Brown, Emily Stevens,” "Damn," Jacobson grumbled. "Oh hush. If he hadn't taken her, I certainly would've," Covington said to him. "Sarah Washington, Sheridan Smith and,” Andy looked over the wall of faces, trying to decide who else he would pull from this den of vipers, and yet, he just couldn't bring himself to care about rescuing his ex Erin. It was a sea of beautiful faces, but none of them evoked any stronger reaction than another, so he was forced to read the small text beneath each of them, sorting out people he wouldn't want to spend long periods of time with. He was a little tempted to give his seventh pick to Covington, but couldn't bear to let anyone decent be bound to the loathsome toad. There were a couple of Republicans he nixed immediately. Andy was a lifelong Democrat, and anyone who'd still identify as a Republican after the last three years of madness wasn't anyone he wanted to let into his home and family. A few others struck him as from far too wealthy of families, the sorts of people who would do much better with Covington and his ilk. But there was one, Deborah Barnes, a blonde veterinarian from Los Gatos, originally from Kansas, and she seemed warm and caring in the notes about her. ", and Deborah Barnes, I guess." "Erin Donegal was originally one of yours," Covington said. "Don't you want to take her back?" Andy shook his head. "I would've sent her back to the base if it weren't for this little game of yours. If you want her, you can have her. She doesn't like my writing, and anyone who doesn't like my writing isn't welcome in my house." "If you don't want her, I won't take her either," Covington sniffed. "I'll take Janice Flowers, Eloise Childs and Teresa Kenzington." "I'll take her then," Watkins said. "Donegal and Nina Choi." That left Jacobson with Ariel Smith, since Vikovic and Haunton had both rebought in, and left with nothing. Andy sighed. "So how do we relocate them?" "A car will arrive tomorrow to pick everyone up and drive them to their new locations, although you're welcome to take the Varmas and Miss Brown with you tonight, since they're here, and you are as well. Tomorrow afternoon, everyone will have what's coming to them. You may need to tend to Miss Brown's needs before you leave, however, Andrew," Covington said. "She's in quite the state. I'll have the other two meet you upstairs by your car when you're done with Miss Brown." "Can you send my partner, Niko, down to meet me? I'm strong, but carrying an unconscious Olympic athlete up some stairs by myself is probably more than I'm capable of." "Of course. Let me go get her. Veronica, would you take Mr. Rook over to Miss Brown's room please?" The servant brought Andy out of the parlor and took him to wait outside of a room where the door was clearly locked. She unlocked the door, but didn't open it. "You may wish to wait for your partner, Master Rook. The woman in there, she's not well," she said to him, a look of concern on her face. "Ah, here's your woman now." Andy turned around and Covington was escorting Niko down to meet him. "Here you go, Miss Red Wolf. You two should be strong enough to carry Miss Brown out when you're done with her. You know the way back?" "I do," Niko said to him. "Thanks." Both Covington and Veronica walked up the stairs, leaving Andy and Niko alone together outside of the door, neither quite bringing themselves to open it yet. "So you won?" she finally said to him. "First place. Seven women. It's going to be a trial." "Maybe you could donate one of them to Eric or Phil if it scares you that much," she said with a laugh. "So are Charlotte and her daughter behind this door?" "No no, they'll be upstairs waiting for us at the car after we're done here. There were actually thirteen girls in the pool, not twelve. This is the thirteenth. Her name's Piper Brown." "Wait, that cute volleyball player with the little pregame warm up dance who went viral a few years back? That Piper Brown?" "The very same." "Well let's go get her. Why's she down here?" Niko started to reach for the door, but Andy put his hand on it. "She's been here for over a week, so she's pretty heavily in the throes of need right now," Andy said, not letting her open the door yet. "Covington said she'd be in quite the state, so I'd need to imprint her here, and you'll have to help me carry her upstairs afterwards." Niko's face fell. "Jesus, what a fucking asshole," she sighed. "A whole week of waiting for imprinting after she's been vaccinated? She must be out of her fucking mind with need by now. Okay, we'll let's get to it, stud." Andy shot her a disappointed look before he lifted his hand and opened the door. The room was poorly lit, a handful of lights on their lowest setting, as Andy and Niko stepped into the room, closing the door behind them. On the far side of the room, sitting in chair, looking almost catatonic, was Piper. She was naked, sitting in an armchair, her brunette hair draped over her tits, a vacant look on her face. She was muscular, in far better shape than Andy or Niko. It almost looked like she was drooling on herself from across the room. "God, is she dead?" Niko whispered to him as they started to walk over to her. "Ms. Brown?" Andy said. "Piper? I'm Andy Rook. I'm here to take you away from here." Suddenly, Piper's head whipped and her blue eyes focused on Andy with a terrifying intensity. Before Andy could even react, she lunged out of the chair and raced over towards him. Niko tried to step forward to slow her down, but Piper shoved her out of the way sharply. As soon as she was at Andy, she pushed him back to the wall with an irresistible strength, forcing his back against the surface before she dropped down to her knees. "It's okay, Piper," Andy said to her, but the woman seemed completely oblivious to his words. She practically ripped his pants open and immediately brought her mouth around his cock. Andy wasn't hard, but Piper's tongue was demanding, even as Niko moved back to her feet and walked over to him "God, was I that bad?" Niko said, her hand reaching down to stroke Piper's hair reassuringly. "You were at least verbal," Andy said, as he felt Piper's mouth humming on his cock, making it swell. "I feel a little bad, taking advantage of her like this." Niko shook her head, leaning in to kiss Andy. "This girl's got a need and you need to fill it, Andy. Just let her have it, and we can go. Besides,” Niko giggled, nuzzling against his neck. "It's kinda hot, the way she's just feasting on you, cavewoman style." "Yeah, well, it's hard to keep an erection with the stink of this room. I think they kept her trapped in here all week." "But she's good at sucking cock, isn't she?" "She's certainly voracious." "Don't hold back, then," Niko said, taking one of his hands in hers, trying to reassure him. "No need to be all gallant for this time. You can save that for the first time she'll actually remember." It didn't take long, and sure enough, a minute or two later, Andy was firing a blast of cum down her throat, which was when the strangest thing happened. Piper didn't suddenly slump over. No, instead, after she swallowed his hot sperm, she tugged him away from the wall and pushed him down to the floor, not so much as a droplet of spunk escaping her lips. "What the hell?" Andy exclaimed in shock. "Why isn't she imprinting?" "Fuck, I hope she's not stuck like this because he waited too long!" Niko said, trying not to panic. "Maybe you didn't have a big enough load?" "When the fuck has that ever mattered before?" Piper's wild eyes still darted left and right, but as soon as she had pushed Andy onto the floor on his back, she crawled over him, her hand tugging on his cock once more, as she straddled him. "I think she definitely wants more, Andy," Niko laughed. "Hit her again." "I dunno if I can give an encore this soon, Niko!" Andy whispered. Piper cut him off, shoving her lips against his in what had to be the most primal kiss he'd ever encountered, almost like she was claiming him instead of the reverse, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth, her athletic body keeping him in place. Niko moved behind Piper and snaked one hand around the Olympian's waist, moving to rub her fingertips against the brunette's cunt, a small triangle of pubes above it, as Niko started stroking the girl's clit. "I don't think she's going to give you a choice, Andy." Niko smirked, her other hand reaching to tweak one of Piper's stiff nipples, finding the bud as hard as a rock, eliciting a groan from the athlete, who was dragging the head of Andy's cock across her snatch. Within a moment, he was stiff enough for her to slam her weight down onto him, forcing his cock deep into her cunt, finding it drenched and achingly warm. Andy didn't so much do anything as provide a dildo for the woman to ride upon, her hips bouncing in his lap, her lips attached to his, refusing to let go, even while she fucked him. After a few minutes, Andy felt a familiar tingling in his balls, and as Piper squirmed and wriggled down on him, he fired a load of cum against the back of her twat. This time, it seemed, it was enough to take, and the toned woman spasmed in one sharp and violent quake before slumping deathly atop of him, murmuring "imprinting" over and over again, so quietly Andy could barely even hear it. He more felt her lips moving than heard her, as her face was buried in the nape of his neck, his body pinned underneath her. "A little help, please?" Andy said, and Niko only laughed that much harder. Chapter 20 After Niko helped Andy get Piper off of him, they scrounged around the room before they simply gave up and put Andy's jacket on her. There wasn't any clothing in the room, not even a bedsheet. Just a bucket in the corner, filled with excrement. She wasn't difficult for them to carry, although neither of them had much experience carrying an unconscious person before. Once they got her up to the car, Andy regretted that they had brought the roadster. The vehicle did have four seats, but the back seat was very cramped, and they were going to have to lay Piper over people's laps, because he refused to put her in the trunk, even if she was unconscious. Waiting at the car was Dr. Charlotte Varma and her daughter Asha. "Thank you for saving us from this, Niko," Charlotte said to her, the woman's accent definitely French. She was dressed in a long flowing summer dress, with a jacket thrown on over it, billowy fabric over her womanly figure, her long blonde hair swept back behind her ears, hanging down to the middle of her back. She looked less like a doctor and more like a hippie, but she had a warm smile that put him at ease. "And you, Mr. Rook." "Please," he said, "call me Andy." He unlocked the car, then popped the trunk to load Charlotte's suitcase into it, followed by Asha's and Piper's, which one of Covington's servants had clearly brought up while Andy was tending to the athlete's needs. "Let's get out of here, and we can talk on the way over to the house." As Asha got in the backseat, she bumped fists with Niko. "Thanks, Neeks," Asha said, her accent definitely British, despite her exotic looking features. Her long wavy black hair was drawn back into a ponytail that barely hung past the nape of her neck, the tie high on her head, her skin several shades darker than her mother's. She wore black knee high leather boots, black pantyhose, a black leather skirt that was playfully short and a purple silk shirt that was still tight enough on her that he could the outline of her lacy bra through the material. It was also cut high enough to show some midriff, including a little silver musical note belly piercing. "Good looking out." They laid Piper atop of their lap before Niko got into the front passenger's seat and Andy got into the driver's seat. Before, the driveway had been a showroom of deluxe and expensive cars, but now everyone else had already gone home. The house's external lights were still on, but it was clear that Covington had already gone to bed, so it was with no fanfare that Andy slowly drove the electric car off the property, heading back towards his place. It was approaching one AM and as Andy felt the cool breeze blowing across his shaved head, he definitely regretted bringing the Roadster. "So this is your old man, Neeks?" Asha asked. "And he's gonna be my old man too? A'ight, I can get wit' tha'." Asha's accent was mostly British, but Andy could hear hints of her mother's French accent, as well as what he imagined was probably hints of her late father's Indian accent. Niko had told him that the Varmas had only moved to the US a year ago from London, and that Charlotte's late husband had died in one of the first fatalities to the virus. "You'll like Andy, Asha," Niko said to her. "He's the best man I've ever met." "He's also sitting right here," Andy said with a soft laugh. "I wanted to talk to you about this, Niko," Charlotte said. "I am very thankful that you did rescue us, but I think it is rather unbecoming for a woman to share her lover with her daughter, don't you?" Andy let out a soft sigh of relief, speaking before Niko did. "Absolutely. If you would rather, Dr. Varma, I could talk to one of my friends and see if they might be a better home for your daughter, so you might avoid that situation." "Oh. Ah. Oh. Yes, I think you've misunderstood me, Mr. Rook," Charlotte said, a hint of embarrassment on her face. "I think my daughter should definitely stay in your company, but I'm not attracted to white men. Not to be ungrateful, but I was hoping maybe I could be paired up with your friend Mr. Pak. He's always seemed like a very nice man. Very strong and muscular." She giggled a little, a sound almost uncharacteristic of a woman in her early forties. "And gossip is that he is quite well endowed." "I can't speak to that part, but I'm sure Phil wouldn't mind," Niko said. "Andy or I can give him a call in the morning and arrange it." "I might have to owe Phil a favor or something," Andy said, "but that's okay. He can just put it on my tab. I probably owe him only a couple hundred at this point." "Wait," Asha said, just picking up on Andy's misunderstanding, "what's wrong wit' me that you don't want me?" It was Andy's turn to blush. "That isn't what I meant to say." Niko smirked, reaching back to pat Asha on one of her thighs. "He's afraid either he's too old for you, or you're too young for him. I love Andy to death, but he's a little insecure from time to time." Asha reached one of her hands forward, curving her arm around the seat to smooth her fingertips along Andy's chest through his shirt. "I'm old enough to know better, but too young to give a fuck, luv," she purred. "In fact, if my mum wasn't in this car, I'd give you a bit of the ol' road head so I didn't have to wait until I got home." "Don't let my presence stop you, Asha," Charlotte said, a warm smile on her lips. "I feel that need in my belly quite fiercely so I imagine it is rather remarkable in yours, seeing as it affects younger women more quickly. If you want to go after Andrew right now, I don't see why not. This community is extremely open about its sexuality." Asha's eyes widened a little, her deep tan skin darkening with red, as if she wasn't sure which she was more embarrassed by, being called out by her mother or backing down in front of her mother. After a moment, though, it was clear the hunger inside of her won out, as she moved Piper's unconscious form to sit up, then laid her back down on the seat behind her, as she started to worm her way between the seats, as Andy slowed the card down, bringing it to a stop at a local streetlight that had turned red. "You have to kiss him first, Asha," Niko said to her. "Otherwise he's not gonna let ya." "I haven't said I'm going to let her anyway," Andy said, defensively. Niko reached over and patted his thigh, a playful smirk on her lips. "Oh, you are, Andy. I know you too well. And I know Asha. She's a voracious little slut when she wants to be. And she's gotten jealous from all the stories I've been telling her when she's been around to visit her mom." Before he could reply, Asha turned his head and pressed her lips against his hungrily. She tasted of cinnamon and spice, as her tongue insisted on visiting the inside of his mouth before they parted the kiss. "I'm not sure you want to do this now, Asha," Andy said. "I just fucked poor Piper back there a little bit ago, and she hasn't bathed in a week. My cock probably smells of dirty cunt." Asha smirked at him, sliding her hand down to unbutton his jeans. "Then your newest teenage fucktoy had better clean i' off for you, sir," she purred, kissing at his neck. "Eyes on the road, and don't go too fast now." Andy thought she was kidding, but as the light turned green, she stopped and nodded for him to go, even as she was drawing the zipper down. As soon as he started the Tesla in motion again, Asha's lean fingers reached into his pants, pulling out his cock, stroking it slowly. "See, if I do this now, then you can't reconsider," she said, her fingers moving along his shaft. "You can't get in your own head about it, you can't be worried if I may be too young, too wild, too out of control, too feral. So I will get i' out of your head by giving you the best damn head of your life. It'll be fine." She slipped her head down and wrapped her lips around the tip of his cock, letting her tongue slather over it slowly, as a sultry, wanton moan poured from her throat over his cock. "No turning back now, hon," Niko purred at him. "She's gotten a taste of you. She's gonna latch down like a leech until you give her what she's owed." Her hand brushed along Asha's ponytail, pushing her head down a bit more. "She's a Rookie, through and through." "Oh god," Andy groaned, shaking his head. "You've got a nickname for yourselves. Next thing you'll be unionizing." "We already have, dear," Niko giggled. "We're Local Amalgamated Cocksuckers, Chapter 69." Andy rolled his eyes, turning the card at a stop sign, heading into the section of New Eden that housed his mansion. It was growing increasingly hard to focus, as Asha bobbed her head in his lap, pushing and pulling her face along his cock, her tongue lashing over every inch of it as she hummed, her fingernails sinking into his inner thighs. "Who is it she reminds me, Charlotte?" Niko asked, looking back over her shoulder. "A lot of people say she looks like a younger version of one of the people who was on Great British Bake Off." Niko nodded. "That's who it was. How's it going, Andy? Need me to take the wheel?" "You, ah, you might have to," he said. "I don't know how long I can keep my head clear." Asha popped her head off his cock and turned her brown eyes up to look at him. "Then don't, daddy," she moaned at him. "Let me have wha' I want. Let me have that cum in my belly. Claim me. I wanna feel the best orgasm of my life." She looked back down and pushed her mouth onto his cock once more, forcing it as deep as she could into her throat, humming on it, and finally he just couldn't resist, and fired a load of cum into her mouth. Her whole body thrashed, but as she pulled her head up and off his cock, she swallowed that load, laying her head down against his thighs, his softening cock laying across her nose, as the girl began to murmur "imprinting" quietly for a few moments before falling still. Niko helped him ease the car to a stop long enough for him slide Asha back into the back seat once more, two slumped girls braced against one another as Charlotte tried to keep them from falling over too much. Then Andy tucked his cock away, tugged up his jeans and started the vehicle moving forward once more. "I appreciate you being understanding about this, Andy," Charlotte said to him. "I didn't know how to tell Niko that you weren't my type without risking the chances that you wouldn't try and extract us from Mr. Covington's household." "Not gonna lie," Niko said. "I don't enjoy being lied to, Charlotte. But I still would've tried to get you out even if you'd told me in advance." "And I am sorry about that, Niko, but I simply couldn't risk it. You've met Covington. You can only imagine what kinds of depravity he would've subjected myself and my daughter to." Charlotte shivered, the thoughts searing her brain for a moment. "It's extremely unpleasant even to think about it." The car reached the gate, and Niko pushed the button to open make it open. Unlike many of the other homes in New Eden, Andy couldn't stand the thought of having security on the premises. Even the idea of an automatic gate wasn't pleasant, but it had come with the home, and he'd wanted to avoid kicking up a fuss until he was better settled. As he brought the car up the driveway, he saw Aisling was sitting on the front porch in her pajamas, a blanket pulled around her, keeping her warm from the cool November air. Andy brought the car to stop by the front door, as Niko hopped out and moved over to Ash, giving her a hug. "Did the good guys win?" Aisling asked. Niko nodded, holding Ash in the hug for a long moment before pulling away. "Andy got them out safely. Charlotte's not going to stay with us, though." "Oh no!" Aisling said. "Why not?" "She's not into me," Andy said as he hopped out of the car, leaving the door open so Charlotte could slide out, leaving the two unconscious girls in the back seat for the moment. "Had to happen sooner or later," he chuckled, "and frankly, I'm surprised it took this long." "Her loss then," Aisling giggled, moving over to the car, peering in the back seat at the slumped forms of Piper and Asha. "Looks like you got two hot young things to add anyway." She cocked her head to one side, looking at Piper for a second. "Why do I know her?" "Imagine her doing a little wiggle dance before she goes to play volleyball." Ash narrowed her eyes for a second, then those blues widened suddenly as she gasped, bringing her fingertips to her lips. "Shut up! What is even happening!" Andy popped the trunk and pulled out Charlotte's suitcase, then Asha's, carrying them into the house before coming back out. "I'm gonna need a hand hauling them into the house, though." Ash nodded. "Where are we going to put them? In the master bedroom?" Andy shook his head. "We've got plenty of extra bedrooms upstairs, and Piper was nearly catatonic before I imprinted her, so the last thing I want is her waking up surrounded by tons of unfamiliar people. We'll let her have a bedroom to herself, although I think you should probably give her a shower quick before you put her into a bed." Niko nodded, helping Aisling pick Piper up. "Good idea. She really is pretty ripe right now. C'mon Ash, let's go hose her down." The two women lugged Piper into the house, leaving Andy with Charlotte and Asha. "If you can give me a hand, you and your daughter can crash for the night in one of the spare bedrooms and in the morning, I'll give Phil a call, and we'll get him over for you to join his family." Charlotte leaned in and kissed his cheek. "Thank you, Andy. You and Niko will be good for Asha. Don't judge her too harshly. She's still young and that means she can tend to be reckless. She'll love you with all her heart, but she's going to have moments of sadness about her father, so please be understanding about her mood swings." "I'll do my best," he told her, as the two moved to scoop up Asha. She was light enough and small that Andy was able to carry her on his own. "That's all anyone can ask." After getting Charlotte and Asha squared away in one bedroom, Andy headed in to check on Aisling and Niko, who were sliding Piper into a bed in one of the bedrooms no one was using. When they'd moved into the mansion, Andy had told all the girls that if they wanted to claim one of the bedrooms as their own, they should do so. Ash had insisted she never wanted to sleep anywhere Andy wasn't, and Niko and Lauren had agreed, although Niko had converted one of the bedrooms into an office space that all three of the girls shared. But that still left several bedrooms that were decorated, and Andy checked four of them before he found them, as they pulled the sheets up over Piper's unconscious body. "Everything go okay?" he asked them, as they headed towards the door. "Sure, no problem, but she definitely needed to be hosed

What's left to say after "Omigod"? A lot, apparently! This week on T&B, Jared's filling in for C and we opinions: PUCE is gross. MOONING is unadvisable. And this administration is totally COUP COUP.

We're back everyone! Happy Wednesday and thank you for your patience... this winter has hit us extra hard. So. Many. Things! Filling in for Lauren (who had car troubles, but lives) is Natalie! Karen deep dives a newer (but almost 20 years old) musical - Legally Blonde! Get in touch! @downstageleftpc downstageleftpc@gmail.com downstageleftpodcast.com

Dating Rulesby  musicankane - listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.Galina gave him a look, "Are you asking me out on a date?"Jake blushed, "Well I mean, no...maybe?"She laughed, "Jake I'm literally leaking your sperm out of my twat right now, I think you should be well beyond being nervous around me." She sat herself in his lap and put her arms around him. "You are very sweet, and very good in bed. But I can't date you, I kind of already have a boyfriend so..."Jake looked at her, "You came over to fuck me when you have a boyfriend?" He couldn't believe it, but then his mind went to that party at GGK with Rachel. What is with these girls and boyfriends but not really giving a shit.  "I promised you I would, and it was worth it." She explained. "Didn't you like fucking me?""Well yeah but what about your boyfriend?"She shrugged dismissively. "He's been ignoring me a bit lately and I was getting horny, you give me a chance to get some relief myself and it was worth it. I think I came three times, but it might have been more my head was spinning for a bit there." She kissed him gently and got off of him. "Jake don't worry about it, all will be well you are bound to find a girl especially with how word has gotten around GGK and other places on campus. Trust me someone might just fall into your lap and onto your dick before you even realize it's happening."Jake smiled at her weakly, "Well that's actually a bit reassuring actually. Thank you."Galina waved, "No problem, and remember I'm down. I gotta go now though I still have to finish an assignment before tomorrow afternoon. Goodnight Jake." She said, heading out his door."Night." He said to himself.Alexis had been incredibly bummed that Jake told her there was no D&D game for an unknown length of time. She'd really wanted to play it again, but more importantly than that she wanted to use it as an excuse to see him again. She felt terrible that even after she'd texted him, he didn't continue the conversation. Just a "no" and a little explaination, then nothing. No "how are you", no "what's up", nothing.It was her fault though, she couldn't really be upset with him. She had every chance to be with him, every chance to just forget her own stupid desire to join some fucking club and persue something meaningful with a guy who was great. Instead she just used him and chased him into the arms or any girl willing. And thanks to her, there were a lot of willing girls.Soon word about Jake would get around campus beyond the walls of Gamma Gamma Kappa sorority. Jake had been seen at the party and he visibly didn't fit in, which meant that rumors would spread especially when and if he was seen with other GGK girls on campus. Once that happened he would be fighting girls off with a stick and she would have no shot because he would long since have no reason to even remember her name.It would e all her fucking fault too.She sat with her textbook open where she was supposed to be doing her reading assignments, but all she could think about was Jake. She kept glancing at the phone every time it buzzed, but it was always just the GGK group chat and never the name she wanted to see.Alexis had thought about texting him again to see if he just wanted to fuck or something. After the party she had remained vigilant on her birth control and according to the doctor and the medication she was perfectly safe to get filled with sperm as much as she wanted. While the idea of just being a booty call for him didn't excite her all that much, it would be a way to remain in his life and on his mind. So it could be at least better than nothing.If Jake had the pick of whomever he wanted, why would he ever pick her though? If he met his needs with other girls whom hadn't seemingly discarded him after they'd used him, why wouldn't he just be with them instead?Alexis heard the door open behind her and she glanced back to see Galina walk in. "Hey Alexis I'm back." She said."Oh hey, what's up?" Alexis asked turned toward her room mate. "You rushed out of here in a hurry, what was that about?" She then saw Galina's state, hair fucked up, skin glistening with sweat, face rosy and flush. "Oh did Joshua summon you for a little romp in the sack?"Galina looked down at herself, and shrugged, "Umm yeah. Yeah he did."As if on queue her phone began to ring and from her seat Alexis could see Josh's face appear on Galina's screen. Galina put up a finger for Alexis and frowned, "Hey baby? No, not tonight. I told you I have a assignment to get done. I know it's early but I don't want my grades to slip barely two weeks into the semester. No...just jerk yourself off then Josh, I'm not pussy you get to just summon whenever you want. No Josh, fuck off." She spat and hung up on him.Alexis raised an eyebrow. "Was that Josh? What, did he want a round two already?" She asked.Galina gave her a blank look, "What?"Alexis gestured to her, "You look like someone fucked your knees weak. If you didn't just come from Josh, who did you rush off to..." Alexis paused and it began to click in her head. "No!"Galina frowned and pouted, "I'm sorry Alexis, I promised him."Alexis jerked to her feet, "Jake?" She screamed, "Really? Of all people, why him?""Well that's a stupid question. What are you so mad about anyway Alexis. He fucked Niece, Rachel, you, me, at this rate he'll be the first guy in history to fuck every active GGK member in a single semester, fuck once other girls on campus learn about him he'll run through everyone that so much as smiles at him."Alexis huffed, "But you know I want him.""Sucks to suck Alexis, you fucked him up. You could have left the party at any time that night to go to him and you didn't. You didn't chase him and he feels used. At least if you are going to use a guy at least have the decency to give him a nice send-off instead of ghosting him like a piece of shit." Galina insisted."Oh fuck you Gal."Galina smiled, "Too late, Jake already did that and my legs are literally dripping in his nut. So I'm gonna shower and you can kiss my ass." She blew Alexis a kiss, turned away and slapped her ass before darting into the bathroom.Alexis growled in a rage and flopped into her chair. She didn't know what made her more angry, the fact that Galina had done what she'd done, or the fact that Alexis knew Galina was right. Who was she kidding? Galina was right, Alexis had fucked up. She spun to the desk and slammed her text book shut, there was no way she was going to get any reading done tonight so fuck it.Alexis sat at the desk and grabbed her phone, flipping it to Jake's number she brought up the text screen and started to type frantically. Before she finished her text she growled in frustration and erased it, then hit the call button she would call him that would be better than just a text. She disconnected the call before it could even ring. No! She couldn't, god what was wrong with her?Jumping out of her seat she slipped into her shoes and ran out the door.Jake showered and washed himself completely clean, feeling really refreshed thanks to Galina. His body wasn't literally shaking with the desperation to bust a nut, and he finally felt relaxed for the first time in several days. He came out of the bathroom, rubbing a towel on his head to get his hair as dry as he could before he climbed into bed. He hated sleeping on a wet pillow.He had also used some baby wipes to clean the little bit of post-coital drip that leaked from Galina before she'd gotten off the bed. He remember the stain that Niece had left behind with him and he learned to clean up after sex so that you didn't roll into a surprise wet spot, or even worst find a dried cum stain randomly in your favorite sleeping spot.He put on a pair of nylon basketball shorts and nothing else to climb into bed with. Jake wasn't big on sleeping naked, so just a pair of shorts was the way to go for him. He never slept in a shirt because it would always wake him up as it would twist or ball up on him uncomfortably. Tossing back the sheet he started to climb into bed when knocking came to the door.It was almost 10pm, who would be showing up this late? He wondered if it was a GGK girl coming to surprise him or something like that, but he doubt it...well maybe?He opened the door and there was Alexis wearing nothing but a pair of extremely short pink shorts which the bottom of her ass stuck out of, and a white thin tank up that not only showcases her cleavage but also allowed him to clearly see her nipples through the thin fabric. Luckily it was dark because there is no way she'd just walk through campus like this. He found himself once again blown away by how fucking incredible her body was. Looking at her like this, it was hard to stay mad at her."Alexis?" He asked looking her up and down, "What are you doing here?"She smiled weakly and shrugged, "I...I just want to talk, can I come in?"Jake sighed and leaned against the door. "Alexis I don't know if that's such a good idea."Alexis frowned, "Please Jake, five minutes?"He pressed his lips firmly together, then nodded and let her push past him into the room. Shutting the door he didn't follow her into the dorm and instead leaned back against the now closed door. "Okay so?" He began.Alexis glanced around the room, not really seeing anything but just trying to find the words to say, something that she could say to even begin to make this right. "Jake I'm sorry, I want you to know that I am unbelievably sorry, beyond anything I've ever been sorry for in my entire life."Jake shrugged, "Sorry about what Alexis? You got everything you wanted."Alexis shook her head, "I didn't get you.""Me?" He spat. "Alexis you Had me, but you were too busy using me for your fucking club!" He held up a finger, "Not once mind you, that first time i mostly understood even though it upset me, I could at least understand, but then you did it again! When you picked me that night I thought that was it, you're in and then we could be normal and together. But no I was ushered out the door without a goodbye and silence for a fucking Week!"Alexis was frowning and hanging her head, "I fucked up. I know." She said weakly.Jake smacked his hand on the door, "Yeah, look Alexis I think you are an amazing girl too focus on social bullshit that means fucking nothing. And it's fucking shitty that you chose that over an actual relationship. You think those bitches care about you? They don't, Galina came over to fuck me tonight at the drop of a fucking hat because they only care about social standing and partying, not you. None of them could give a fuck whether you joined or not, and your place could be taken by just about anyone!"Alexis said nothing and let him just dig into her. Everything he said was right and she knew it. She had been shallow and she'd been greedy even. "I just hoped that...I just thought that I might be able to patch things up with us. If not exclusive or in a relationship at all at least...friends?"Jake shook his head, "Friends? Alexis I can't be friends with you. You were the girl of my dreams, my fantasies, when I was with you I thought I was dreaming. I can't be friends with you, because I'll always look at you and want you more than you could ever know, but I can't trust you to not destroy my heart."Alexis was crying, tears rolling down her cheeks."Now I'm going to take Niece's advice, I'm going to sow my oats and take advantage of life here the best I can." He sighed and opened the door. "I think you should just go."Alexis looked at him, her eyes wet, tears dripping off her chin. "I'm sorry." She cried gently.Jake nodded, "Yeah me too." He told her and gestured her out the door.The next few days were rough for him. Jake didn't like the confrontation with Alexis because it felt final, and it didn't sit well at all with him but he knew it had to be done. He didn't want to be hurt or rejected and Alexis made him feel both. Whether she intended it or not, he felt like this pain would ultimately be for the best.At least with sex he could make it just that. Though there was a part of him that really didn't want JUST the sex. He really wanted to date someone, hang out, study together, maybe game, other shit couples did. As cool as it was that he could have someone beautiful almost whenever at this point, he didn't like it as much as he thought he would.Once he'd gotten over the hump of the, well it wasn't really a breakup because they hadn't actually been together in the first place, but whatever it was it was done. Once that was through with he began to get his shit back on the track to mostly normal. School work, gaming, reading, the normal things in his life. Though he did keep an eye out for other things to do on campus that were a bit more of the social type of activity.There was going to be another party next weekend that actually wasn't being held at GGK. Instead, Delta Sigma Phi, was throwing their Lacrosse Bash. It was a tradition that was supposed to help guarantee the team's success in the coming year and it was a party that was held under a truce with GGK in which GGk would not have a party for the entire week leading up to the DSP party. That way by the time the DSP party rolled around, people would be desperate for a chance to cut loose.While the party wasn't open to everyone on campus, it was far more open than something GGK would throw. They were free with the invites so long as a DSP member vouched for you at the door. The problem was Jake didn't know anyone who pledged DSP, he wasn't into sports and didn't really know anyone that was.So he reached out to the only person he knew who had connections to everything on campus.Hey Niece I have a question, do you know anyone at DSP? He wrote her.Niece got back to him quickly, it was amazing how fast girls could reply sometimes. Of course I do, why?Well I'm trying to take your advice and branch out my social circle a bit more, I know they got a party coming up and I was hoping you might know a way I could get an invite.I'm so proud of you! Don't worry about it, consider yourself invited I will take care of it.Jake smiled at the text. It really paid to have connections. Thanks I owe you one.You owe me nothing. Happy to help. I'll see you there.You're going?I'm Queen Bitch, I am everywhere, never forget that. Followed with a smiley emojiHe never would. It made him feel good to know people, especially people as powerful as Niece. Niece seemed to be able to make anything and everything happen that she wanted, and having her on his side was probably the best possible ally to have.The next step now that he was good to party was to change his look. Something about his nerdy haircut and his Star Wars T-shirts was just not going to cut it. First thing he did was went to a proper barbar shop and got a cut. He told the barber that he was trying to look good for a party and the guy patted him on the shoulder, "I got you bud."Jake walked out with a high fade and short spikey hair that made him look totally different than his usual slicked back and kind of greesy look. He'd wondered how those girls could even stand to look at him before, this haircut alone made him look a hundred percent better. A hairstyle was only the first step though, he needed new clothes and he was lost with what to get or even what would be cool. But he knew someone who might.Rachel are you free by chance this afternoon?Again she was so fast to reply it amazed him. I could be, why you wanna fuck?Always, but that's not what I need. I'm gonna go to a party at DSP this weekend and I want to not look like a twat. I was wondering if you would be down to go clothes shopping with me?Omigod, omigod, omigod! Yes! Fuck Yes!Well she seemed eager. They set up a time to meet up at a nearby mall and Rachel showed up with a frightening smile on her face. She smiled even wider somehow when she saw his new hair. "Oh look at how sexy you look. What has gotten into you?" She asked.Jake shrugged, "Niece suggested I branch out, so I'm trying to shake up the look a bit and do that." He did a spin for her, "You like?"

Dating Rulesby  musicankane - listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.Galina gave him a look, "Are you asking me out on a date?"Jake blushed, "Well I mean, no...maybe?"She laughed, "Jake I'm literally leaking your sperm out of my twat right now, I think you should be well beyond being nervous around me." She sat herself in his lap and put her arms around him. "You are very sweet, and very good in bed. But I can't date you, I kind of already have a boyfriend so..."Jake looked at her, "You came over to fuck me when you have a boyfriend?" He couldn't believe it, but then his mind went to that party at GGK with Rachel. What is with these girls and boyfriends but not really giving a shit.  "I promised you I would, and it was worth it." She explained. "Didn't you like fucking me?""Well yeah but what about your boyfriend?"She shrugged dismissively. "He's been ignoring me a bit lately and I was getting horny, you give me a chance to get some relief myself and it was worth it. I think I came three times, but it might have been more my head was spinning for a bit there." She kissed him gently and got off of him. "Jake don't worry about it, all will be well you are bound to find a girl especially with how word has gotten around GGK and other places on campus. Trust me someone might just fall into your lap and onto your dick before you even realize it's happening."Jake smiled at her weakly, "Well that's actually a bit reassuring actually. Thank you."Galina waved, "No problem, and remember I'm down. I gotta go now though I still have to finish an assignment before tomorrow afternoon. Goodnight Jake." She said, heading out his door."Night." He said to himself.Alexis had been incredibly bummed that Jake told her there was no D&D game for an unknown length of time. She'd really wanted to play it again, but more importantly than that she wanted to use it as an excuse to see him again. She felt terrible that even after she'd texted him, he didn't continue the conversation. Just a "no" and a little explaination, then nothing. No "how are you", no "what's up", nothing.It was her fault though, she couldn't really be upset with him. She had every chance to be with him, every chance to just forget her own stupid desire to join some fucking club and persue something meaningful with a guy who was great. Instead she just used him and chased him into the arms or any girl willing. And thanks to her, there were a lot of willing girls.Soon word about Jake would get around campus beyond the walls of Gamma Gamma Kappa sorority. Jake had been seen at the party and he visibly didn't fit in, which meant that rumors would spread especially when and if he was seen with other GGK girls on campus. Once that happened he would be fighting girls off with a stick and she would have no shot because he would long since have no reason to even remember her name.It would e all her fucking fault too.She sat with her textbook open where she was supposed to be doing her reading assignments, but all she could think about was Jake. She kept glancing at the phone every time it buzzed, but it was always just the GGK group chat and never the name she wanted to see.Alexis had thought about texting him again to see if he just wanted to fuck or something. After the party she had remained vigilant on her birth control and according to the doctor and the medication she was perfectly safe to get filled with sperm as much as she wanted. While the idea of just being a booty call for him didn't excite her all that much, it would be a way to remain in his life and on his mind. So it could be at least better than nothing.If Jake had the pick of whomever he wanted, why would he ever pick her though? If he met his needs with other girls whom hadn't seemingly discarded him after they'd used him, why wouldn't he just be with them instead?Alexis heard the door open behind her and she glanced back to see Galina walk in. "Hey Alexis I'm back." She said."Oh hey, what's up?" Alexis asked turned toward her room mate. "You rushed out of here in a hurry, what was that about?" She then saw Galina's state, hair fucked up, skin glistening with sweat, face rosy and flush. "Oh did Joshua summon you for a little romp in the sack?"Galina looked down at herself, and shrugged, "Umm yeah. Yeah he did."As if on queue her phone began to ring and from her seat Alexis could see Josh's face appear on Galina's screen. Galina put up a finger for Alexis and frowned, "Hey baby? No, not tonight. I told you I have a assignment to get done. I know it's early but I don't want my grades to slip barely two weeks into the semester. No...just jerk yourself off then Josh, I'm not pussy you get to just summon whenever you want. No Josh, fuck off." She spat and hung up on him.Alexis raised an eyebrow. "Was that Josh? What, did he want a round two already?" She asked.Galina gave her a blank look, "What?"Alexis gestured to her, "You look like someone fucked your knees weak. If you didn't just come from Josh, who did you rush off to..." Alexis paused and it began to click in her head. "No!"Galina frowned and pouted, "I'm sorry Alexis, I promised him."Alexis jerked to her feet, "Jake?" She screamed, "Really? Of all people, why him?""Well that's a stupid question. What are you so mad about anyway Alexis. He fucked Niece, Rachel, you, me, at this rate he'll be the first guy in history to fuck every active GGK member in a single semester, fuck once other girls on campus learn about him he'll run through everyone that so much as smiles at him."Alexis huffed, "But you know I want him.""Sucks to suck Alexis, you fucked him up. You could have left the party at any time that night to go to him and you didn't. You didn't chase him and he feels used. At least if you are going to use a guy at least have the decency to give him a nice send-off instead of ghosting him like a piece of shit." Galina insisted."Oh fuck you Gal."Galina smiled, "Too late, Jake already did that and my legs are literally dripping in his nut. So I'm gonna shower and you can kiss my ass." She blew Alexis a kiss, turned away and slapped her ass before darting into the bathroom.Alexis growled in a rage and flopped into her chair. She didn't know what made her more angry, the fact that Galina had done what she'd done, or the fact that Alexis knew Galina was right. Who was she kidding? Galina was right, Alexis had fucked up. She spun to the desk and slammed her text book shut, there was no way she was going to get any reading done tonight so fuck it.Alexis sat at the desk and grabbed her phone, flipping it to Jake's number she brought up the text screen and started to type frantically. Before she finished her text she growled in frustration and erased it, then hit the call button she would call him that would be better than just a text. She disconnected the call before it could even ring. No! She couldn't, god what was wrong with her?Jumping out of her seat she slipped into her shoes and ran out the door.Jake showered and washed himself completely clean, feeling really refreshed thanks to Galina. His body wasn't literally shaking with the desperation to bust a nut, and he finally felt relaxed for the first time in several days. He came out of the bathroom, rubbing a towel on his head to get his hair as dry as he could before he climbed into bed. He hated sleeping on a wet pillow.He had also used some baby wipes to clean the little bit of post-coital drip that leaked from Galina before she'd gotten off the bed. He remember the stain that Niece had left behind with him and he learned to clean up after sex so that you didn't roll into a surprise wet spot, or even worst find a dried cum stain randomly in your favorite sleeping spot.He put on a pair of nylon basketball shorts and nothing else to climb into bed with. Jake wasn't big on sleeping naked, so just a pair of shorts was the way to go for him. He never slept in a shirt because it would always wake him up as it would twist or ball up on him uncomfortably. Tossing back the sheet he started to climb into bed when knocking came to the door.It was almost 10pm, who would be showing up this late? He wondered if it was a GGK girl coming to surprise him or something like that, but he doubt it...well maybe?He opened the door and there was Alexis wearing nothing but a pair of extremely short pink shorts which the bottom of her ass stuck out of, and a white thin tank up that not only showcases her cleavage but also allowed him to clearly see her nipples through the thin fabric. Luckily it was dark because there is no way she'd just walk through campus like this. He found himself once again blown away by how fucking incredible her body was. Looking at her like this, it was hard to stay mad at her."Alexis?" He asked looking her up and down, "What are you doing here?"She smiled weakly and shrugged, "I...I just want to talk, can I come in?"Jake sighed and leaned against the door. "Alexis I don't know if that's such a good idea."Alexis frowned, "Please Jake, five minutes?"He pressed his lips firmly together, then nodded and let her push past him into the room. Shutting the door he didn't follow her into the dorm and instead leaned back against the now closed door. "Okay so?" He began.Alexis glanced around the room, not really seeing anything but just trying to find the words to say, something that she could say to even begin to make this right. "Jake I'm sorry, I want you to know that I am unbelievably sorry, beyond anything I've ever been sorry for in my entire life."Jake shrugged, "Sorry about what Alexis? You got everything you wanted."Alexis shook her head, "I didn't get you.""Me?" He spat. "Alexis you Had me, but you were too busy using me for your fucking club!" He held up a finger, "Not once mind you, that first time i mostly understood even though it upset me, I could at least understand, but then you did it again! When you picked me that night I thought that was it, you're in and then we could be normal and together. But no I was ushered out the door without a goodbye and silence for a fucking Week!"Alexis was frowning and hanging her head, "I fucked up. I know." She said weakly.Jake smacked his hand on the door, "Yeah, look Alexis I think you are an amazing girl too focus on social bullshit that means fucking nothing. And it's fucking shitty that you chose that over an actual relationship. You think those bitches care about you? They don't, Galina came over to fuck me tonight at the drop of a fucking hat because they only care about social standing and partying, not you. None of them could give a fuck whether you joined or not, and your place could be taken by just about anyone!"Alexis said nothing and let him just dig into her. Everything he said was right and she knew it. She had been shallow and she'd been greedy even. "I just hoped that...I just thought that I might be able to patch things up with us. If not exclusive or in a relationship at all at least...friends?"Jake shook his head, "Friends? Alexis I can't be friends with you. You were the girl of my dreams, my fantasies, when I was with you I thought I was dreaming. I can't be friends with you, because I'll always look at you and want you more than you could ever know, but I can't trust you to not destroy my heart."Alexis was crying, tears rolling down her cheeks."Now I'm going to take Niece's advice, I'm going to sow my oats and take advantage of life here the best I can." He sighed and opened the door. "I think you should just go."Alexis looked at him, her eyes wet, tears dripping off her chin. "I'm sorry." She cried gently.Jake nodded, "Yeah me too." He told her and gestured her out the door.The next few days were rough for him. Jake didn't like the confrontation with Alexis because it felt final, and it didn't sit well at all with him but he knew it had to be done. He didn't want to be hurt or rejected and Alexis made him feel both. Whether she intended it or not, he felt like this pain would ultimately be for the best.At least with sex he could make it just that. Though there was a part of him that really didn't want JUST the sex. He really wanted to date someone, hang out, study together, maybe game, other shit couples did. As cool as it was that he could have someone beautiful almost whenever at this point, he didn't like it as much as he thought he would.Once he'd gotten over the hump of the, well it wasn't really a breakup because they hadn't actually been together in the first place, but whatever it was it was done. Once that was through with he began to get his shit back on the track to mostly normal. School work, gaming, reading, the normal things in his life. Though he did keep an eye out for other things to do on campus that were a bit more of the social type of activity.There was going to be another party next weekend that actually wasn't being held at GGK. Instead, Delta Sigma Phi, was throwing their Lacrosse Bash. It was a tradition that was supposed to help guarantee the team's success in the coming year and it was a party that was held under a truce with GGK in which GGk would not have a party for the entire week leading up to the DSP party. That way by the time the DSP party rolled around, people would be desperate for a chance to cut loose.While the party wasn't open to everyone on campus, it was far more open than something GGK would throw. They were free with the invites so long as a DSP member vouched for you at the door. The problem was Jake didn't know anyone who pledged DSP, he wasn't into sports and didn't really know anyone that was.So he reached out to the only person he knew who had connections to everything on campus.Hey Niece I have a question, do you know anyone at DSP? He wrote her.Niece got back to him quickly, it was amazing how fast girls could reply sometimes. Of course I do, why?Well I'm trying to take your advice and branch out my social circle a bit more, I know they got a party coming up and I was hoping you might know a way I could get an invite.I'm so proud of you! Don't worry about it, consider yourself invited I will take care of it.Jake smiled at the text. It really paid to have connections. Thanks I owe you one.You owe me nothing. Happy to help. I'll see you there.You're going?I'm Queen Bitch, I am everywhere, never forget that. Followed with a smiley emojiHe never would. It made him feel good to know people, especially people as powerful as Niece. Niece seemed to be able to make anything and everything happen that she wanted, and having her on his side was probably the best possible ally to have.The next step now that he was good to party was to change his look. Something about his nerdy haircut and his Star Wars T-shirts was just not going to cut it. First thing he did was went to a proper barbar shop and got a cut. He told the barber that he was trying to look good for a party and the guy patted him on the shoulder, "I got you bud."Jake walked out with a high fade and short spikey hair that made him look totally different than his usual slicked back and kind of greesy look. He'd wondered how those girls could even stand to look at him before, this haircut alone made him look a hundred percent better. A hairstyle was only the first step though, he needed new clothes and he was lost with what to get or even what would be cool. But he knew someone who might.Rachel are you free by chance this afternoon?Again she was so fast to reply it amazed him. I could be, why you wanna fuck?Always, but that's not what I need. I'm gonna go to a party at DSP this weekend and I want to not look like a twat. I was wondering if you would be down to go clothes shopping with me?Omigod, omigod, omigod! Yes! Fuck Yes!Well she seemed eager. They set up a time to meet up at a nearby mall and Rachel showed up with a frightening smile on her face. She smiled even wider somehow when she saw his new hair. "Oh look at how sexy you look. What has gotten into you?" She asked.Jake shrugged, "Niece suggested I branch out, so I'm trying to shake up the look a bit and do that." He did a spin for her, "You like?"She nodded and reached up to run her finger through his spikes. "I do, it looks much cleaner. Good job dude.""Ok but now I need clothes so....try to keep the price reasonable?" He asked.She clapped her hands, "Oh this is going to be so much fun."It wasn't fun, it sucked. It was the suckiest thing to ever suck. Rachel had a fucking blast, throwing all manner of shirts, slacks, pants, ties, shoes, whatever the fuck at him. And he had to try on every single thing. Try it on, come out so she could see, spin for her, go back put on something else, repeat. It was awful and it took HOURS. She never got tired, like a little Energizer Bunny or something.Finally at the end of all of it Jake had a selection of shirts, pants, and a new pair of shoes to wear to social spaces that would help him fit in with the crowd a bit more. Which he was thankful for, but god he wondered how other people handled shopping with their girlfriends or whatever. Rachel was insane.As they were leaving Rachel grabbed his hand, "So there you are, you are gonna look very handsome and people will love you."Jake nodded, "Hey thanks for this, it was....""Torture?" She finished."Kinda. A little bit." He confessed.She slapped his arm and pushed him away. "So who you taking to the party?"Jake looked at her, "What do you mean, why would I be bringing anybody?""I thought you and Alexis were...""No!" He cut her off, "No Alexis and I are not anything. I...she hurt me and I told her I couldn't really handle it."Rachel looked up at him, she was such a petite girl he hadn't realized how small she was even when she'd been riding him at the party. The memory of her revenge fucking him in front of her boyfriend had sent a tingle running through him. "That sucks I'm sorry, I thought you guys would be cute."Jake shrugged, "I would have traded all the sex with everyone for just her. I thought she liked me and maybe she did a bit. But in the end she wanted GGK more so I wish her well but I can't forgive that."Rachel put her arms around him and just hugged him, her head turned and rested against his chest. "I'm sorry, I broke up with Kyle too after that night. So I understand the bummer a failed relationship can be."He hugged her back and smiled, "It's alright, I'm free in a way. You know, booty call freely or whatever. Which is something I never thought I would have the option to do based off my previous social status and skills."Rachel chuckled softly and patted him on the chest, "Well there you go, how many booty calls have you had so far? Been through all of GGK yet?"Jake shook his head, "Nah, just one. It's weird because she told me to call or text or whatever, but it feels weird just summoning someone for sex and not actually have any interaction with them beyond that. But I was really desperate when I called her."Rachel smirked, "Anyone I know?""Of course. You're GGK.""Fair enough, who?""You really want to know?"She just smiled, "Gossip is king.""I don't know if I should tell you then.""Oh come on, don't be a cock tease." She pleaded.He sighed, "Galina."Rachel froze and stared at him in shock, "Holy fuck. You are a cold blooded motherfucker."He gave he a confused look, "What are you talking about?"She put a hand over her mouth, "You didn't know did you?"Jake just looked at her, was she fucking with him. "Rachel, what?"She grimaced, "Galina is Alexis' roommate."Jake's eyes went wide. "No!"She nodded and shrugged, "Yeah."Jake sighed, "Well fuck me.""You want to?" She asked, smirking."Stop it."She giggled. "Hey you were already done with Alexis anyway so it's not THAT big of a deal." She held up her fingers pinched just a little bit apart, "Maybe a little fucked up, but you didn't know so it's not like you did it on purpose or anything."Jake slapped his forehead, "I think Alexis knew anyway."Rachel looked at him quizzically."Well, that night I was getting into bed and Alexis showed up basically asked us to be together and was really upset." He explained, "She must have figured it out, or Galina told her, or something and she came over as I was going to bed. That's when we had our, I guess our final discussion and I haven't heard from her since. I am gonna feel bad about doing anything with Galina again though."Rachel hugged him again, "I know it sucks, I'm sorry." She stepped back and smiled softly, "I'd actually like to ask you out, but I'm also enjoying being single for the first time in a long time. But hey I have an idea." She said cheerfully, "Let's make a deal. If you and I are both still technically single by the end of the semester, then we date."Jake smiled at her, "Sure Rachel that sounds good. Think you can handle dating a dork like me though?"She waved him off dismissively, "How hard can it be, suck your dick while you play video games and make a couple sandwiches?"He laughed, "Okay deal then. But exercise your jaw so you're in shape for that when the time comes."She elbowed him, "Ha, Ha, big dick joke, I get it."The day before the party, Jake was sitting at the library looking through a text book for a economics class. It wasn't an economics book though, it was a business management book so it wasn't a required textbook, but it did have some extra information that applied to the E-con class and Jake wanted to have that extra information.He was at his favorite spot in the back of the library. There was a small corner in the back of the Biology section that didn't get a lot of use as Biology and the related sciences were not popular majors at this school. While Jake didn't understand why, he didn't mind it either because it let him have this little spot all to himself where he could study without the light noise of the library, things like people turned pages or the sounds of pens rubbing on paper, or the click of laptop keyboards typing away.Jake was reading and making notes, lost to the world around him when he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Excuse me?"He jerked and the girl who'd spoken yelped back startled. "Oh sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."She was a beautiful girl with caramel skin, flawless features, long dark hair, wearing a yellow summer dress that hung to just above her knees but clung to her tight little frame beautifully. Jake blinked at her in confusion, taken aback by her beauty. He'd thought she would be easily fit in as a GGK girl but he had never seen her there before. That didn't mean anything, but it meant she was a new face to him.He blinked and shook his head, "No, no problem I get in my head a bit when reading."She smiled at him as if embarrassed. "Yeah sorry, I was wondering if you might be able to him me."Jake sat back in his seat, "I mean it depends, what is it you need?"She blushed, "This is going to sound really stupid, and really out of nowhere." She paused and set a couple of books on the table. A quick glance told Jake they were human anatomy and biology books. An actual biology major? At this school? She was a rare breed indeed. "I need someone's opinions on my life drawings."Jake was confused, "Your what now?"She opened one of her books and pulled out a couple of pages of what appeared to be thick drawing paper. She clutched them to her chest and smiled awkwardly, "Okay this might be a little strange, please don't freak out on me. You see I'm in a life drawing class and sometimes we draw people in the nude, but I totally suck at the..." She cleared her throat softly, "fun parts."Jake raised an eyebrow. "Fun parts.""Well..." She took a quick look around and made sure nobody was looking, then took one of the pages from her chest and set it before him. It was a bunch of drawings of dicks, all kinds of dicks, all kinds of shapes, just dicks everywhere. Jake jerked his gaze away and up at her, her face contorted in embarrassment.He flipped the page over, "What the heck? What am I supposed to help with?"She sat down across from them and tapped the books. "I have a test coming up with a live male model and I have to draw his..." she paused and glanced around then leans forward to whisper, "penis." Then she gestured towards the sheet she'd given him. "But I suck dick and drawing dicks. I've tried copying the images in like anatomy books but the pictures are always too small or not detailed enough so I have to like, fill in the shafts in my head and it isn't working, look." She pointed at her sheet.Jake flipped the page over to have another look, and she was right. They were clearly dicks, but not great dicks. The basic shape was ok enough, but there was only minor shading for detail in the shafts. Some of her shapes were awfully creative to, dicks didn't work like bendy straws. But he didn't understand how he was supposed to help.He flipped the page back over and shook his head, "I mean I see what you're talking about, but I'm not sure exactly how I'm to help."She chewed her lip. "I uh, I was hoping you'd maybe model for me?" She winced as she said it completely embarrassed. "I know it's a weird thing to ask. You don't know me and I don't know you, but I'd pay you if you want. I just didn't want to ask someone I knew because it would be too awkward to draw someone that I knew."Jake looked at her with wide eyes. "You want me to, what pose naked for you?"She shrugged, "If it makes you more comfortable you wouldn't have to be naked, I just need your...bottom parts.""Yo I don't know about that, did GGK send you to me or something?"She frowned in confusion, "Who?"He shook his head, "Never mind. Look I don't know if I'm comfortable with someone just drawing my dick.""I understand." She said dejected, "I don't blame you, I have an art room key the door would be locked and nobody could walk in. It'd be totally private, and I would only be drawing your...thing. So nobody would know it was you. And now I'm realizing how creepy I'm being."She reached out and took her drawing page back, stuffing it back into one of the textbooks. "I'm sorry I bothered you." She said.Jake looked at her and thought for a second. Weird as it was to have someone just approach him for his dick, it wasn't like it was the first time that happened, nor would it be the first time he would just whip his dick out for a girl he barely knew the name of. She wasn't even trying to fuck him, maybe."Wait." He called to her as she started away. She spun back toward him, "I'll help you if you want. I got time and I suppose there is no harm in helping out."She rushed back over with a huge smile, "Really? You will?"Jake nodded, "I have had a bit of recent experience with new people seeing my...you know never mind maybe it'll be fun or something I don't know." He told her."Oh god, I can't thank you enough." She set her stuff back onto the table and reached into her bra through the top of her dress. She pulled out a folding piece of green paper and said, "Here, please take this. Can you meet me in art room 405 in like an hour?"Jake took the paper and nodded, "Okay 4 0 5, one hour. Let me wrap up here and I'll head over."She wiggled her hands in excitement and smiled, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much, I can't tell you how much this is going to help me. Thank you."She darted away and Jake glanced down at the paper in his hand. He blinked when he realized she'd handed him a hundred dollar bill. She had actually paid for his help, by much more than he really expected. "Well I can't back out now." He muttered to himself.To be continued, by  musicankane for Literotica

Dating Rulesby  musicankane - listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.Galina gave him a look, “Are you asking me out on a date?”Jake blushed, “Well I mean, no…maybe?”She laughed, “Jake I’m literally leaking your sperm out of my twat right now, I think you should be well beyond being nervous around me.” She sat herself in his lap and put her arms around him. “You are very sweet, and very good in bed. But I can’t date you, I kind of already have a boyfriend so…”Jake looked at her, “You came over to fuck me when you have a boyfriend?” He couldn’t believe it, but then his mind went to that party at GGK with Rachel. What is with these girls and boyfriends but not really giving a shit.  “I promised you I would, and it was worth it.” She explained. “Didn’t you like fucking me?”“Well yeah but what about your boyfriend?”She shrugged dismissively. “He’s been ignoring me a bit lately and I was getting horny, you give me a chance to get some relief myself and it was worth it. I think I came three times, but it might have been more my head was spinning for a bit there.” She kissed him gently and got off of him. “Jake don’t worry about it, all will be well you are bound to find a girl especially with how word has gotten around GGK and other places on campus. Trust me someone might just fall into your lap and onto your dick before you even realize it’s happening.”Jake smiled at her weakly, “Well that’s actually a bit reassuring actually. Thank you.”Galina waved, “No problem, and remember I’m down. I gotta go now though I still have to finish an assignment before tomorrow afternoon. Goodnight Jake.” She said, heading out his door.“Night.” He said to himself.Alexis had been incredibly bummed that Jake told her there was no D&D game for an unknown length of time. She’d really wanted to play it again, but more importantly than that she wanted to use it as an excuse to see him again. She felt terrible that even after she’d texted him, he didn’t continue the conversation. Just a “no” and a little explaination, then nothing. No “how are you”, no “what’s up”, nothing.It was her fault though, she couldn’t really be upset with him. She had every chance to be with him, every chance to just forget her own stupid desire to join some fucking club and persue something meaningful with a guy who was great. Instead she just used him and chased him into the arms or any girl willing. And thanks to her, there were a lot of willing girls.Soon word about Jake would get around campus beyond the walls of Gamma Gamma Kappa sorority. Jake had been seen at the party and he visibly didn’t fit in, which meant that rumors would spread especially when and if he was seen with other GGK girls on campus. Once that happened he would be fighting girls off with a stick and she would have no shot because he would long since have no reason to even remember her name.It would e all her fucking fault too.She sat with her textbook open where she was supposed to be doing her reading assignments, but all she could think about was Jake. She kept glancing at the phone every time it buzzed, but it was always just the GGK group chat and never the name she wanted to see.Alexis had thought about texting him again to see if he just wanted to fuck or something. After the party she had remained vigilant on her birth control and according to the doctor and the medication she was perfectly safe to get filled with sperm as much as she wanted. While the idea of just being a booty call for him didn’t excite her all that much, it would be a way to remain in his life and on his mind. So it could be at least better than nothing.If Jake had the pick of whomever he wanted, why would he ever pick her though? If he met his needs with other girls whom hadn’t seemingly discarded him after they’d used him, why wouldn’t he just be with them instead?Alexis heard the door open behind her and she glanced back to see Galina walk in. “Hey Alexis I’m back.” She said.“Oh hey, what’s up?” Alexis asked turned toward her room mate. “You rushed out of here in a hurry, what was that about?” She then saw Galina’s state, hair fucked up, skin glistening with sweat, face rosy and flush. “Oh did Joshua summon you for a little romp in the sack?”Galina looked down at herself, and shrugged, “Umm yeah. Yeah he did.”As if on queue her phone began to ring and from her seat Alexis could see Josh’s face appear on Galina’s screen. Galina put up a finger for Alexis and frowned, “Hey baby? No, not tonight. I told you I have a assignment to get done. I know it’s early but I don’t want my grades to slip barely two weeks into the semester. No…just jerk yourself off then Josh, I’m not pussy you get to just summon whenever you want. No Josh, fuck off.” She spat and hung up on him.Alexis raised an eyebrow. “Was that Josh? What, did he want a round two already?” She asked.Galina gave her a blank look, “What?”Alexis gestured to her, “You look like someone fucked your knees weak. If you didn’t just come from Josh, who did you rush off to…” Alexis paused and it began to click in her head. “No!”Galina frowned and pouted, “I’m sorry Alexis, I promised him.”Alexis jerked to her feet, “Jake?” She screamed, “Really? Of all people, why him?”“Well that’s a stupid question. What are you so mad about anyway Alexis. He fucked Niece, Rachel, you, me, at this rate he’ll be the first guy in history to fuck every active GGK member in a single semester, fuck once other girls on campus learn about him he’ll run through everyone that so much as smiles at him.”Alexis huffed, “But you know I want him.”“Sucks to suck Alexis, you fucked him up. You could have left the party at any time that night to go to him and you didn’t. You didn’t chase him and he feels used. At least if you are going to use a guy at least have the decency to give him a nice send-off instead of ghosting him like a piece of shit.” Galina insisted.“Oh fuck you Gal.”Galina smiled, “Too late, Jake already did that and my legs are literally dripping in his nut. So I’m gonna shower and you can kiss my ass.” She blew Alexis a kiss, turned away and slapped her ass before darting into the bathroom.Alexis growled in a rage and flopped into her chair. She didn’t know what made her more angry, the fact that Galina had done what she’d done, or the fact that Alexis knew Galina was right. Who was she kidding? Galina was right, Alexis had fucked up. She spun to the desk and slammed her text book shut, there was no way she was going to get any reading done tonight so fuck it.Alexis sat at the desk and grabbed her phone, flipping it to Jake’s number she brought up the text screen and started to type frantically. Before she finished her text she growled in frustration and erased it, then hit the call button she would call him that would be better than just a text. She disconnected the call before it could even ring. No! She couldn’t, god what was wrong with her?Jumping out of her seat she slipped into her shoes and ran out the door.Jake showered and washed himself completely clean, feeling really refreshed thanks to Galina. His body wasn’t literally shaking with the desperation to bust a nut, and he finally felt relaxed for the first time in several days. He came out of the bathroom, rubbing a towel on his head to get his hair as dry as he could before he climbed into bed. He hated sleeping on a wet pillow.He had also used some baby wipes to clean the little bit of post-coital drip that leaked from Galina before she’d gotten off the bed. He remember the stain that Niece had left behind with him and he learned to clean up after sex so that you didn’t roll into a surprise wet spot, or even worst find a dried cum stain randomly in your favorite sleeping spot.He put on a pair of nylon basketball shorts and nothing else to climb into bed with. Jake wasn’t big on sleeping naked, so just a pair of shorts was the way to go for him. He never slept in a shirt because it would always wake him up as it would twist or ball up on him uncomfortably. Tossing back the sheet he started to climb into bed when knocking came to the door.It was almost 10pm, who would be showing up this late? He wondered if it was a GGK girl coming to surprise him or something like that, but he doubt it…well maybe?He opened the door and there was Alexis wearing nothing but a pair of extremely short pink shorts which the bottom of her ass stuck out of, and a white thin tank up that not only showcases her cleavage but also allowed him to clearly see her nipples through the thin fabric. Luckily it was dark because there is no way she’d just walk through campus like this. He found himself once again blown away by how fucking incredible her body was. Looking at her like this, it was hard to stay mad at her.“Alexis?” He asked looking her up and down, “What are you doing here?”She smiled weakly and shrugged, “I…I just want to talk, can I come in?”Jake sighed and leaned against the door. “Alexis I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”Alexis frowned, “Please Jake, five minutes?”He pressed his lips firmly together, then nodded and let her push past him into the room. Shutting the door he didn’t follow her into the dorm and instead leaned back against the now closed door. “Okay so?” He began.Alexis glanced around the room, not really seeing anything but just trying to find the words to say, something that she could say to even begin to make this right. “Jake I’m sorry, I want you to know that I am unbelievably sorry, beyond anything I’ve ever been sorry for in my entire life.”Jake shrugged, “Sorry about what Alexis? You got everything you wanted.”Alexis shook her head, “I didn’t get you.”“Me?” He spat. “Alexis you Had me, but you were too busy using me for your fucking club!” He held up a finger, “Not once mind you, that first time i mostly understood even though it upset me, I could at least understand, but then you did it again! When you picked me that night I thought that was it, you’re in and then we could be normal and together. But no I was ushered out the door without a goodbye and silence for a fucking Week!”Alexis was frowning and hanging her head, “I fucked up. I know.” She said weakly.Jake smacked his hand on the door, “Yeah, look Alexis I think you are an amazing girl too focus on social bullshit that means fucking nothing. And it’s fucking shitty that you chose that over an actual relationship. You think those bitches care about you? They don’t, Galina came over to fuck me tonight at the drop of a fucking hat because they only care about social standing and partying, not you. None of them could give a fuck whether you joined or not, and your place could be taken by just about anyone!”Alexis said nothing and let him just dig into her. Everything he said was right and she knew it. She had been shallow and she’d been greedy even. “I just hoped that…I just thought that I might be able to patch things up with us. If not exclusive or in a relationship at all at least…friends?”Jake shook his head, “Friends? Alexis I can’t be friends with you. You were the girl of my dreams, my fantasies, when I was with you I thought I was dreaming. I can’t be friends with you, because I’ll always look at you and want you more than you could ever know, but I can’t trust you to not destroy my heart.”Alexis was crying, tears rolling down her cheeks.“Now I’m going to take Niece’s advice, I’m going to sow my oats and take advantage of life here the best I can.” He sighed and opened the door. “I think you should just go.”Alexis looked at him, her eyes wet, tears dripping off her chin. “I’m sorry.” She cried gently.Jake nodded, “Yeah me too.” He told her and gestured her out the door.The next few days were rough for him. Jake didn’t like the confrontation with Alexis because it felt final, and it didn’t sit well at all with him but he knew it had to be done. He didn’t want to be hurt or rejected and Alexis made him feel both. Whether she intended it or not, he felt like this pain would ultimately be for the best.At least with sex he could make it just that. Though there was a part of him that really didn’t want JUST the sex. He really wanted to date someone, hang out, study together, maybe game, other shit couples did. As cool as it was that he could have someone beautiful almost whenever at this point, he didn’t like it as much as he thought he would.Once he’d gotten over the hump of the, well it wasn’t really a breakup because they hadn’t actually been together in the first place, but whatever it was it was done. Once that was through with he began to get his shit back on the track to mostly normal. School work, gaming, reading, the normal things in his life. Though he did keep an eye out for other things to do on campus that were a bit more of the social type of activity.There was going to be another party next weekend that actually wasn’t being held at GGK. Instead, Delta Sigma Phi, was throwing their Lacrosse Bash. It was a tradition that was supposed to help guarantee the team’s success in the coming year and it was a party that was held under a truce with GGK in which GGk would not have a party for the entire week leading up to the DSP party. That way by the time the DSP party rolled around, people would be desperate for a chance to cut loose.While the party wasn’t open to everyone on campus, it was far more open than something GGK would throw. They were free with the invites so long as a DSP member vouched for you at the door. The problem was Jake didn’t know anyone who pledged DSP, he wasn’t into sports and didn’t really know anyone that was.So he reached out to the only person he knew who had connections to everything on campus.Hey Niece I have a question, do you know anyone at DSP? He wrote her.Niece got back to him quickly, it was amazing how fast girls could reply sometimes. Of course I do, why?Well I’m trying to take your advice and branch out my social circle a bit more, I know they got a party coming up and I was hoping you might know a way I could get an invite.I’m so proud of you! Don’t worry about it, consider yourself invited I will take care of it.Jake smiled at the text. It really paid to have connections. Thanks I owe you one.You owe me nothing. Happy to help. I’ll see you there.You’re going?I’m Queen Bitch, I am everywhere, never forget that. Followed with a smiley emojiHe never would. It made him feel good to know people, especially people as powerful as Niece. Niece seemed to be able to make anything and everything happen that she wanted, and having her on his side was probably the best possible ally to have.The next step now that he was good to party was to change his look. Something about his nerdy haircut and his Star Wars T-shirts was just not going to cut it. First thing he did was went to a proper barbar shop and got a cut. He told the barber that he was trying to look good for a party and the guy patted him on the shoulder, “I got you bud.”Jake walked out with a high fade and short spikey hair that made him look totally different than his usual slicked back and kind of greesy look. He’d wondered how those girls could even stand to look at him before, this haircut alone made him look a hundred percent better. A hairstyle was only the first step though, he needed new clothes and he was lost with what to get or even what would be cool. But he knew someone who might.Rachel are you free by chance this afternoon?Again she was so fast to reply it amazed him. I could be, why you wanna fuck?Always, but that’s not what I need. I’m gonna go to a party at DSP this weekend and I want to not look like a twat. I was wondering if you would be down to go clothes shopping with me?Omigod, omigod, omigod! Yes! Fuck Yes!Well she seemed eager. They set up a time to meet up at a nearby mall and Rachel showed up with a frightening smile on her face. She smiled even wider somehow when she saw his new hair. “Oh look at how sexy you look. What has gotten into you?” She asked.Jake shrugged, “Niece suggested I branch out, so I’m trying to shake up the look a bit and do that.” He did a spin for her, “You like?”She nodded and reached up to run her finger through his spikes. “I do, it looks much cleaner. Good job dude.”“Ok but now I need clothes so….try to keep the price reasonable?” He asked.She clapped her hands, “Oh this is going to be so much fun.”It wasn’t fun, it sucked. It was the suckiest thing to ever suck. Rachel had a fucking blast, throwing all manner of shirts, slacks, pants, ties, shoes, whatever the fuck at him. And he had to try on every single thing. Try it on, come out so she could see, spin for her, go back put on something else, repeat. It was awful and it took HOURS. She never got tired, like a little Energizer Bunny or something.Finally at the end of all of it Jake had a selection of shirts, pants, and a new pair of shoes to wear to social spaces that would help him fit in with the crowd a bit more. Which he was thankful for, but god he wondered how other people handled shopping with their girlfriends or whatever. Rachel was insane.As they were leaving Rachel grabbed his hand, “So there you are, you are gonna look very handsome and people will love you.”Jake nodded, “Hey thanks for this, it was….”“Torture?” She finished.“Kinda. A little bit.” He confessed.She slapped his arm and pushed him away. “So who you taking to the party?”Jake looked at her, “What do you mean, why would I be bringing anybody?”“I thought you and Alexis were…”“No!” He cut her off, “No Alexis and I are not anything. I…she hurt me and I told her I couldn’t really handle it.”Rachel looked up at him, she was such a petite girl he hadn’t realized how small she was even when she’d been riding him at the party. The memory of her revenge fucking him in front of her boyfriend had sent a tingle running through him. “That sucks I’m sorry, I thought you guys wou

Y'all better Bend and Snap for this latest addition to From The Top!, cause it takes a lot of blonde ambition to dive into Legally Blonde: The Musical, and Mary and Steven have the peroxide and toner ready. Listen in to LIFE IS BUT A SONG Podcast with Jon Reilly, to hear other talking points with our longtime friend of the Pod. Go show some support! Spotify EPISODE LINK HERE Legally Blonde The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Spotify Legally Blonde the Musical (Original Cast Recording) [Recorded Live at the Savoy Theatre, London] - Spotify Legally Blonde The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Apple Music Legally Blonde The Musical (Original London Cast Recording) - Apple Music Legally Blonde Original Cast Album - YouTube Legally Blonde Full Show MTV Broadcast If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :)  It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! ⁠⁠Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠INSTAGRAM⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist⁠⁠⁠ - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist “Omigod You Guys” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Ensemble “Serious” - Elle and Warner “Daughter of Delta Nu” - Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Ensemble “What You Want (Part 1)” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, Kate, Elle's Dad, Elle's Mom, Grandmaster Chad, and Ensemble “What You Want (Part 2)” - Elle, Ensemble “The Harvard Variations” - Emmett, Aaron, Enid, Padamadan, and Harvard Students “Blood in the Water” - Callahan and Ensemble “Positive” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Greek Chorus “Ireland” - Paulette “Ireland - Reprise” - Paulette “Serious - Reprise” - Elle and Warner “Chip on My Shoulder” - Elle, Emmett, Greek Chorus, and Company “So Much Better” - Elle, Greek Chorus, and Company “Whipped Into Shape” - Brooke, Callahan, and Company “Delta Nu Nu Nu” - Brooke and Elle “Take It Like A Man” - Elle, Emmett, and Salespeople “Bend and Snap” - Elle, Paulette, Serena, Margot, Pilar, Bend and Snap Guys, and Salon Folks “Gay or European?” - Elle, Callahan, Emmett, Brooke, Vivienne, Warner, Enid, Judge, Nikos, Carlos, and Company “Legally Blonde” - Elle and Emmett “Legally Blonde - Remix” - Vivienne, Elle, Enid, Brooke, Mr. Woods, Mrs. Woods, and Company “Scene of the Crime” - Elle, Judge, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Company “Find My Way/Finale” - Elle, Paulette, Emmett, and Company

Cat Bohannon says for far too long the story of human evolution has ignored the female body. Her new book offers a sweeping revision of human history. It's an urgent and necessary corrective that will forever change your understanding of birth and why it's more difficult for humans than virtually any other animal species on the planet.  Her best-selling book is called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and we're talking all about it in this episode.    Transcript   BLAIR HODGES: When Cat Bohannan was working on her PhD, she noticed something was missing from the story she usually heard about human evolution. Specifically, women are missing. That seemed like a pretty big oversight. So she tracked down the most cutting edge research and pulled it together into a fascinating new book. Cat is here to talk about it. It's called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Since we're taking a new look at families, gender and sex on the show, I thought, what better place to begin than the place where we all begin at birth? Let's look at how that messy dangerous, incredible process came to be. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm your host Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   INSPIRED BY SCI-FI (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: Cat Bohannon joins us. We're talking about the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Cat, welcome to Family Proclamations. CAT BOHANNON: Hey, thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: You bet. I'm thrilled about this. This is this is such a good book. Your introduction suggests the idea for it was conceived in a movie theater or after you had just seen a movie prequel to Alien. I didn't see that coming. Talk about how the book started. CAT BOHANNON: Right, so as a person who is femme-presenting, as a person who identifies as a woman, I have many triggering moments for where I might want to talk about the body and its relation to our lives. However, there was this one kind of crystallizing bit. I'm a big sci-fi fan, big Kubrick fan, big Ridley Scott fan, so I'm gonna go, when they come out, I'm gonna go. Now, this is a prequel to Alien, so you know going into this film that whatever characters you meet, it's not gonna go well for them. You just accept it in that kind of sadistic way as an audience of these things, like this is—yeah, you know where it's going. But in this case, what happened is the main character has been impregnated, effectively, with a vicious alien squid, as you do. And she's sort of shambling in a desperate state, and she arrives in this crashed spaceship at a MedPod. So it's like surgery in a box, you know, that's the idea. And she asked the computer for a cesarean. I think she actually says something like, “CESAREAN!”, you know, but she wants help with her situation, her tentacled situation. And the MedPod says, “I'm sorry, this MedPod is calibrated for male patients only.” And I hear in the row exactly behind me, a woman say, “Who does that?” Exactly. Who does that? Who sends a multi-trillion dollar expedition into space? Right? Presumably that's the, maybe it costs more and doesn't make sure that the medical equipment works on women, right? And it turns out us. Yeah, it's us. We're the ones who do that. Right now, in every single hospital, It's a problem. BLAIR HODGES: So your book is looking at the “male norm” problem. You're looking at how, and not just in medical science, but I think in the ways anthropology has worked, a lot of sociological studies, studies of medicine—they assume the male body as the norm and then proceed from there. There are practical reasons for this that you talk about in the book, with medicine trials, for example, where you want a body that isn't maybe going to experience a lot of hormonal flux over the course of the study, or that isn't going to be pregnant or something. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And so women get left out of scientific conversations a lot, not just in medicine but also in the history of evolution. Your book wants to address that gap. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, absolutely. And you can see it even in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they're inventing the first tool, right? And they're banging a bone on the ground that they use to beat the crap out of a guy. The camera tracks it, the bone goes up into the air and turns into a spaceship. This is the classic idea of tool triumphalism—that where we come from is male bodies doing what we stereotypically associate with male body stuff, like beating the crap out of people. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: And there's no females in that scene. Where are they? Are they behind a hill having the babies? Like how—this is where evolution works, people. These are the bodies that make the babies, that make the babies that make the babies, right? And it's absolutely true that in the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and where we come from, we often erase the idea of femininity. We often erase the presence of females as this kind of insignificant side character. But in biology, particularly in mammals, it's often quite the reverse. Things that drive mutations in female bodies, biologically female bodies, are often major drivers for the trajectory of that species because the outcome of our reproductive lives is strongly, strongly tied to the health of the bodies of the female. BLAIR HODGES: I love how you framed this: You invite us to think about our bodies as a collection of things that evolved at different times for different reasons. And you're looking especially at how female bodies have evolved. So breasts themselves have a heritage; milk has a heritage; ovaries have a heritage; senses have a heritage. And instead of one singular female that we'll look back to as our origin—like the biblical Eve, for example—you say there are actually a lot of different Eves. Because you're looking at the origins of all of these different parts of the body. CAT BOHANNON: Yep, absolutely. I mean, when you look in the mirror, what you see, if you're a sighted person is—well, it's a mix, right? It's actually the photons bouncing off of that mirror surface, which have already bounced off the surface of your body and then eventually find their way to your retinas. And that's all the technical features of how your eyeballs do what they do if you have eyeballs that do that. But it's also inevitably embedded in cultural understandings. And it's also embedded in an idea of time. That you begin at a certain point, your body arrives through—well actually through a very wet passage usually, into the world and so you are you. But actually, the body itself is a continuation of many processes that work very chaotically and intricately together that started a very long time ago. And your intestines are effectively way older than even your upright pelvis. Your pelvis is way older than your encephalized brain. So what you're looking at in the mirror is almost like, this might be too lyric, but it's almost like a point in a stream of light blasting out backwards from you and out forwards in front of you, because what you are isn't so much a thing, but something that is happening.   MORGIE AND THE MILK (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: And you take us way back in time. 200 million years ago is when you take us, back to the first Eve. This is the “milk” mom, the mammal who kind of brought milk here. You describe her, you call her Morgie, and she's sort of this little weasel mouse. Tell us a little bit about Morgie. CAT BOHANNON: Morgie's fun. We nicknamed her Morgie because the Smithsonian did that before I did, thank you very much. She is an exemplar genus. There are many species of morganucodon, but they're often nicknamed Morgie in the community of paleo folk. And they are this lovely little kind of weasel rat bitch. She's great. She's only about the size of a field mouse. She is presumed to be burrowing. So she lives in little holes in the ground. BLAIR HODGES: The drawing is so cute, by the way, that you have in there. CAT BOHANNON: Isn't she wonderful? I hired this amazing illustrator. And as you'll see in the book and duly cited, she was very, very talented and we worked together. She wanted to have portraits of all the Eves. And I was like, yeah, let's do portraits of all the Eves. But she's coming from a Catholic background, my mother's Catholic too, so she wanted to do them like Saint cards, where you have the iconography in the center, but then all in the periphery around the side, you have all of these symbolic things. So you have a picture of Morgie, which is the real Madonna, thank you. But she doesn't have nipples. She's sweating drops of milk out of her milk patches on her belly. And she has these weird little pups sipping from it. Anyway, this is a podcast. You can look at it for yourselves when you get the book. But it's a beautiful, beautiful portrait. And the reason I picked Morgie as the start is, what people often forget is that, okay, yeah, we know we're mammals. You might've heard that even in high school bio. You're like, okay, homo sapiens, mammals, right? But what's not often talked about is, one of the many characteristic traits that make us mammals are deeply tied to how we reproduce, which is to say are deeply tied to the female sex of a species. And Morgie is this moment roughly when we think, okay, here's where we start lactating. Here's where we start making milk. And that becomes a key part of how we continue the development of our offspring after they exit the womb. And the funny thing about milk, of course, is that we're still laying eggs while we're first making milk, right? So we are egg-laying weird weasels, which is Morgie, in our little burrow, under the feet of dinosaurs, but also that we start lactating before we have nipples. When we often, for those of us who have breasts— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I didn't know this. CAT BOHANNON:  I know, isn't it wild? I also learned this on my journey in the research. So when we look in the mirror, we think, oh, breasts, these things, where do they come from? And we think of them as a sexual trait. We think of them as a thing that is meant to signal attractiveness to our partners. But the thing is, is that exactly—But we may not even parse that, “Oh, are we talking about the shape? Are we talking about the fat? Are we talking about the—" And it's like, whoa, no, the origin of lactation is before you even have a nipple, that you actually are just sweating this thing out from modified endocrine glands out of your skin through your hair. And in fact, the duck-billed platypus, which is often modeled as a kind of weird monitoring basal mammal, she doesn't have nipples either. Her pups through their weird little bills are slurping the milk off the bottom of her belly through these milk patches. So that's where these things come from. BLAIR HODGES: I had no idea. And also that milk wasn't just for nutrition, but also a way to sort of protect the eggs, right? So Morgie was laying eggs and then milk would be produced to help the eggs, rather than just feed the babies? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So for a lot of egg layers—not hard shell, not like a chicken, but a softer leathery shell, there are many species that make leathery eggs, yeah? The trick is, is when you're on land, you need to keep them moist. You can't have them dry out while that offspring is continuing to develop in there. So a lot of egg layers, it's kind of gross, but they secrete this kind of egg-moistening goo that also has a lot of useful anti-fungal and antibacterial properties. Because of course you also don't want the eggs to be overrun like old bread. You want it to both be wet but not moldy. Wet but not infested with parasites, right? BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Sure. CAT BOHANNON: And so, yeah, the best model I've seen for the evolution of milk is actually derived from that original egg-moistening goo. Which is of course incredibly gross to think about, but more likely the origin of lactation. BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about the mechanics of the nipples themselves. So we do get to a nipple, evolutionarily we do develop these nipples. CAT BOHANNON: We do. I got two. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I do too! CAT BOHANNON: Some people have more. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: I mean, mine would be a little bit trickier to get to milk from, but you do point out in the book that some male folks can lactate, given the right exercises and the right stimulation, et cetera. But with the nipple— CAT BOHANNON: And the right hormonal cocktail, usually. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. But with the nipple, it wasn't so straightforward. So even today, babies—it's not this natural, you know, it can be tough to get babies to latch. So it's like the odds were still stacked against us. Even though we developed a nipple. It's this dance that a breastfeeder and a baby have to do to figure out how to still transfer that food across. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and some species seem to be a little bit better at that, what we often call latching than others. My son was terrible at it. Absolutely just mangled my chest wall in ways that alarmed even the nurses. They're like, “oh God, here's a pump.” It's okay, eventually, whatever, I didn't have a moral goal for it. Luckily, I was able to not be embedded in that debate that many women do in the way we punish ourselves. “Oh, I wasn't able to lactate well enough!” But yeah, come on, it's fine. I mean, and when you think of it from a biological perspective, when you think about it in that evolutionary frame, in many ways, the mammalian chest wall, our bodies know how to make milk better than babies know how to latch. It's an older trait, right? But there are many really, really cool traits about the latching when it does work, because milk is what's called a co-produced biological product. That means the mother and the offspring are actually making it together. Not simply because when you suckle, when an offspring suckles, that means you arrive at that letdown reflex—because we're not carrying a sloshing cup of milk around in our boobs no matter how big they are. This isn't a Ziploc bag in there, right? This is actually like maybe a couple tablespoons at a time if you're lucky when you're lactating. But no, the suckling actually triggers the milk glands to kick up production, and that's what starts the whole process rolling. But the more important thing there, for the latching—because once you have that vacuum-like seal, once the kid's mouth latches on, forms the seal like a weird lamprey, and sucks that relatively giant nipple into its mouth, well now actually you've created something of a tide. Because as the child suckles, it's creating a vacuum while it sucks its cheeks in. And that's to suck the milk down as it's coming. But the tongue's moving back and forth, which moves the focus of the vacuum back and forth, which creates a tide, like a wave on the shore, of milk over the top and under the bottom. The baby's spit is sucked back up into the nipple because that's how undertow works, it's just physics! Which is gross and invasive to think about as a person who's done it. But it's true that the spit is then drawn up into the whole lining of the tubing of the breast where it's read like some weird ancient code. BLAIR HODGES: Right! CAT BOHANNON: And the mother's immune system is responding. All sorts of different sensors are responding and changing the content of the milk to suit. So if the kid's sick, then you get more immunoagents coming down that nipple to help the kid fight off the infection. And a bunch of hormonal stuff and ratios of proteins to sugar. We make our milk to suit, given what we're effectively, anciently reading in the kid's spit. Now that said, breast pumps are awesome. Your kid will be fine if you're not able to do this, okay? You know, modern technology is beautiful, “Fed is best.” But if you are getting the latching, then that's what's actually happening. BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of thing your book is chock full of. So many times people are going to run into things they may have never heard of that are just unreal. You also talk about how the breast can be dangerous business too. I mean, evolution has trade-offs. Breast cancer, for example, is so common with women. So you can benefit the baby, but having the ability to produce this milk and do this thing through the breasts also increases a risk to the breast-haver as well. You talk about such trade-offs throughout the book. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and I'll also offer that male bodies and men and trans women are also all capable of getting breast cancer. We all actually have mammary tissue, but male typical bodies tend to have way less of it. And mammary tissue, because it's so dynamically responsive to hormonal signaling, is just one of those places in the body that's more vulnerable to the processes that can drive cancer. And BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm. Cells going haywire. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, exactly. So it's still something absolutely that non-binary folk and gender queer folk of all types should pay attention to. If something's bugging you in your body, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there are so many footnotes that have that caveat of like, by the way, talk to your doctor just in case. CAT BOHANNON: Well, it's so important.   DONNA AND THE WOMB (16:27)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next Eve, this is Donna. And this is a chapter about the womb. Donna emerged after a catastrophic cataclysm, whatever killed off the dinosaurs. There was this little weasel type animal that made it through all that destruction. This is 60 million some odd years ago, and you point to her as a reason why so many women today have periods. Let's talk about Donna. CAT BOHANNON: Donna, which is, I nicknamed her Donna, of course, Protungulatum Donnae, but Donna's easier. It's cuter to call her Donna. So she is an ancestor of the modern placental womb. Now we only have one womb. Many mammals still have two because they're evolved, of course, from the shell gland of our former egg layers. And the reason we have one, we're not entirely sure why, but we know the mechanism is that you have these two organs that are merging into one and producing that kind of, in our case, pear-shaped thing, but many, many women and girls are still born with a uterus that has a little dent in the top. Very common. Some even have a whole fibrous divide down the middle. Some are even still born with two uteri, less common, but happens, and two cervixes and two vaginas to match. CAT BOHANNON: So the easiest way to remember the difference between us and marsupials is: marsupials pouch, us no pouch. But also marsupials: two or more vaginas, which is fun, and us only the one. But the thing the reason to think about that isn't simply that it's cute and weird and fun imagining all of the things you might do with an extra vagina—all of which I'm sure are for the good, but that it's really talking about, at what point in development is that offspring coming out of that maternal body, and how much of development is finished outside of the womb, in or out of a pouch or a burrow or what have you. So this is the moment we start going down the path towards our somewhat catastrophic human reproductive system that is long derived from early, early mammals just after that cataclysm, which knocked out almost all the dinosaurs except for a few disgruntled birds, right? That's what's left of them. Your house sparrow. But what we have now is, we have this really patently crazy thing where instead of laying eggs like a sensible creature, we effectively hot dock them into our bodies within a uterus and then transform, not simply the uterus, but the entire body into this kind of eggshell slash meat factory of a burrow. Because our body is now effectively the burrow for that phase of development. In marsupials, it comes out like the size of a jelly bean, comes out a lot sooner, finishing out most of that development in the pouch and then elsewhere. For us, we're finishing a lot of the development inside our bodies, which has all kinds of knock-on effects. BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite parts of the book that just blew me away was the illustration—I think it's on page 76—of the female pelvic anatomy. What we usually see is the uterus, and it's stretched out and it looks kind of like hip bones. It looks like our hips, like the ovaries are stretched out, the tubes are. And you show, no, it's actually sort of just like balled and smooshed up in there all together— CAT BOHANNON: Totally. BLAIR HODGES: —which I mean, I have never seen this illustration before! I've always seen that other illustration where it's all laid out. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. So a lot of us learn—if we're lucky enough to have something like sex ed. Sadly, not all of us do, but for those of us who are able to have that be part of our education, it's kind of like a T shape, like a capital letter T, where you have that uterus and the vag in the middle, and then you have those fallopian tubes extending out to the side with two little grapes, you know, near the fringy bits, right, which are the ovaries. But the body doesn't have all this extra room in it. It's not like stretching out its arms. It's all kind of smooshed up in there. Which means that I've had the very real and very common experience of having had a transvaginal ultrasound, where they're like trying to image my ovaries and they can't find one. Because for whatever reason, the path of that ultrasound beam is being blocked by a part of the bowel or the uterus itself, or just, something's in the way and the ovary's hiding.  And I was very alarmed at this moment, partially because I had a large thing inside my vagina and I was trying to maintain a conversation. It's rough. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also like, this person's telling me they can't find one of my ovaries. I'm like, “Well where the hell is it?” Like, did I lose an ovary? Like what? You know? And no, actually it's just that everything is very smushed in there, which is part of why ovarian cysts can hurt so much for people who have them. Because you have that radiating signal of irritation hitting many different organs in that area, right? And so it can be kind of hard to pinpoint what you're feeling exactly. You just know it hurts or that it's like pressure, right? And it's different person to person. It's also unfortunately why ovarian cancer is so very dangerous. People who have these biologically female bodies, we kind of get used to aches and pains down there. It's kind of a weird common sensation, for fluctuations over a menstrual cycle, to have some kind of achy bits, some kind of bloated bits, some kind of “what was that sharp pain, I don't know, it went away, cool,” right? So in the early stages of ovarian cancer, it's often the case that a patient may not be fully aware that what's happening might be new. Now that's not to have your listeners be terrified. If something's bothering you, again, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it is absolutely why it's so dangerous, because of course, given that it's so smushed against everything in there, it's not hard to metastasize. You're right up against the bowel. You're very close to the liver. You're in the mix in there. BLAIR HODGES: It's packed in there! And you talk about how bonkers this is, and how many people who have gone through pregnancy have said, like, “What the hell is this?!” [laughs] Like, why do I have to do this? CAT BOHANNON: Fair! Fair question. Yes. Somewhere in our very deep sci-fi future, if we don't blow ourselves up first—which given the news today seems very close to happening, thanks—but assuming we survive the insanity that is human culture and conflict, there is a future in which there is a truly external womb. Which would have to be effectively an entire synthesized female body, right? Because it's not just, it's also your immune system, it's your respiration, it's many things. But assuming in the very deep, many hundreds of years in the future that this happens, it immediately changes everything. Because of course, then it immediately becomes unethical to ever ask a female to do this dangerous thing. She may still choose, but it becomes unethical to ask, because there's truly an alternative. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: Anyway, so there's a thought experiment for you in our future sci-fi. But yeah, it is nuts. It's nuts that we make babies the way we do. Our pregnancies and our births and our postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to dangerous complications that can and do cripple and or kill mother, child or both. And that's true compared to almost any other primate except for squirrel monkeys, and we feel sorry for them. But that's true for almost any other mammal. We suck at this! We're actually bad at reproduction, which seems counterintuitive because there are eight billion of us. But it's true. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And we see you trying to theorize as to why that is. Like, we're so bad at reproduction, but we're also so highly successful, one might even say an invasive species in a way. CAT BOHANNON: Right. BLAIR HODGES: We've spread out everywhere. How did that happen if we're so bad at reproduction and it's such a costly and dangerous thing to do? CAT BOHANNON: Well, it took all of our very classic hominin resources to pull it off. We had to be super social and super clever problem solvers who are good at thinking about the world as a tool user. Which is to say, tool use is about behavior. So it's not like a paleoanthropologist actually gives a damn about this rock that someone used to cut something, right? The stone axes are not the thing they care about. They care about what they can infer about the behavior of its user. All paleoanthropologists are deeply behaviorists. What that means is, if all tool use is essentially overcoming a limitation of your body in order to achieve a goal in your given environment and using some manipulation of your behavior to do that, well, our most important invention, if we suck at reproduction, was gynecology. Lucy—and I'm not the first to say this—Lucy the australopithecine, 3.2 million years ago, had a freakin' midwife. And habilis after her had even more reproductive workarounds, as did erectus, all the way up to homo sapiens. We were manipulating our fertility patterns through behavior. And that's a huge upgrade. Now you don't have to wait around for your uterus to evolve to a thing that's less deadly—because, of course, you could also just go extinct. There's that. That's an option in evolution. You could also just not exist when you have bad reproduction. But if you can work around it behaviorally, if you can have midwives—we're one of the only species that regularly helps each other give birth. If you can manipulate your fertility patterns to up or down regulate your fertility too, because in any given environment, it might be better to cluster your births earlier in your reproductive life and then care for your sort of “useless” babies—I love my kid, but they're useless, right? For a long period of time, right? Like in your given environment, given your food supply, maybe that's a good plan. Or maybe things are more seasonal, or maybe it's actually there's not a lot of food at all and you need to stretch that sh*t out. You need to actually have them every four to six years or so, which is what chimpanzees do, which is what some known human communities do. So you have to think about how we choose to have babies and what we do to manipulate our fertility, including medicinally, including behaviorally, in the space of medical practices, as something that's adapting this buggy and fault-prone thing that is human reproduction to suit our different environments and lifestyles. And that starts not a few hundred years ago, not just in the deep history of racism and eugenics sadly in modern gynecology, but actually millions of years ago. BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And you're inviting us to think again about tools. So you talked about that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the tool is this bone that's a weapon, and we think about the rise of humanity as being tied to this type of tool. You're inviting people to re-envision that and say, actually, the tool of gynecology—which would have involved our own hands as tools—would have been such a crucial turning point for who we are as a species or who we could become. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: Because I think you even say, we “seized the means of reproduction,” or something at that point, which is a great pun. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, yes, and meant to be, because I too am a nerd. Yes, we do. We do indeed seize the means of actual freakin' reproduction and get our hands on the levers that are controlling not only our reproductive destiny, but then effectively our destiny as a species.   PURGI AND HUMAN SENSE PERCEPTION (27:29)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Cat Bohannon and she's a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. We're talking about her book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It's a brand new book, and it's a fabulous book. The next part I wanted to talk about was perception. And you say you got thinking about whether men and women perceive the world in different ways. And you got thinking about this as a college student working as a nude model at the local art school. And when students would take a break, you'd kind of wander through and check out how people were seeing you, how they were drawing you. And you noticed, invariably often, the men would be drawing your breasts too big. You're like, those aren't mine. But then as the weeks went by, they would get closer to normal size. Like something was changing in how they initially saw you, how they were drawing you. And so you wondered, like, are they seeing things differently than me? Is perception different? CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. BLAIR HODGES: Now, the danger in this question is falling into the trap of “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” right? Essentializing gender. CAT BOHANNON: Yyyuuup. BLAIR HODGES: So we'll keep that in mind as you talk about perception and what you found in this chapter. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, so there were some genderqueer folk in the art classes where I was a professional naked person, which was my job at the time. But for the most part, they were cis folk with a variety of sexualities. So I would just point out that in these rooms, there of course was diversity, and there was racial diversity too. However, the most obvious variable, you know, if you want to call it that, was simply that the male presenting folk who were almost universally cis, were drawing my boobs too big. Now, they're not small. I'm like a 34D. It's a problem. The straps dig into my shoulders. I know that I am not a small-breasted person for good and ill, but it's more that there's just the skill of literally, proportionally, how big are these knockers you're putting on this figure drawing. And the females, the women, the femmes, were not doing that. And it wasn't the case then—And it was happening semester after semester in multiple classes. So this is not a scientific study that I'm basing this on. This is an anecdote. But like, it was a thing. And I asked some other people who had been models and they were like, “Oh yeah, they always do that.” And I was asking them, what do you think it is? And they usually said something like, “Eh, it's just porn. Whatever, they get over it. It's fine. They just don't know how to not see porn when they see naked female bodies,” right? Although this was the late 90s and early aughts, so it was before the massive proliferation of internet porn, but whatever. It was a thing, is what I'm saying. It was a freakin' thing that was fairly consistent. And so I had to ask myself, like, do they literally look larger to them? You know? Is this a cultural thing? Is this gender mess? Is this just sexism? Is it just, you know, that soup of that thing where it's complicated? Or is there something physiological going on? And so for that, I take us back to the dawn of primates. Not in the “men are from Mars, women from Venus” way, but actually when were we actually weird little proto monkeys in a tree? And can that tell us anything about why they draw my boobs too big? And it's a journey. I go through quite a lot because there's a lot that goes into the evolution of the sensory array. The nose, the eyes, the ears. So there's a lot to work with there and it doesn't always come back to my naked self. The central reason why, as best as I could tell, they were drawing them too large is that they were literally fixating on them. So when your eye looks out on the world, it's doing a mixture of things. It's doing a mixture of saccades, which are these twitchy little movements. Your eyes are doing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, that you don't even notice. And fixations, which means they're landing on one spot and staying there for a period before they move around again. And there does seem to be in the lab notable sex differences in how male saccade versus fixation patterns seem to work. Again, mostly these subjects are cis men. So there's your caveat, right? But one of the famous things about male versus female facial perception that classically in the psychological literature, cis women seem to be better at remembering faces—and these are sighted people of course—than cis men. And it seems to be, after doing some eye tracking studies with some careful cameras, that what's happening is that male eyes seem to focus more centrally on the center of the face, almost kind of around the tip and bridge of the nose, like that center zone. Whereas female typical eyes are doing fixations through all of the major points of facial features, eyes, nose, cheekbones, chin, up again, all around, all around, all around. BLAIR HODGES: Huh. CAT BOHANNON: Which is to say it may be the case that it's not that—you know, the stereotype women are more social, we're just better at remembering people because we're all kind of emotionally mushy or some sh*t, right? No. It's actually that where you fixate is giving you more signal for your long-term memory. And so if you're getting a broader range of information to dump into long-term memory, just literally what your eyes are doing may be helping you do that, right? Which is not about a psychology thing, it's a physiology thing. And in the boys' cases, I think they were quite literally fixating more on my breasts. Now, why they were doing that may well be cultural— BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: They don't have them for the most part. And you know they're 18 years old, people. I was naked in front of 18-year-old boys, so I have no more nightmares, right? But like, that's new. That's not in our culture. That's not a thing they've seen a lot in the social setting as opposed to an intimate setting, right? So you know, literally it's looming large in their mind and over the course of the semester as they get used to it—right? So it's both what their eyes are doing, but it's also cultural. BLAIR HODGES: Right, and this is where—and you point this out as well sometimes, especially in the footnotes—where studies on trans folks are going to shed a lot more light on this— CAT BOHANNON: Oh yeah. BLAIR HODGES: —where we can probably get a better sense of where culture fits in, where expectations fit in versus physiology. And we're still so early in scientific endeavors of thinking about trans perception— CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely we are. BLAIR HODGES: It's just huge questions to explore, so much more to explore there than we know. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be great.   THE NOSE (33:38)   BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! This also talks about—So our eyes, our nose, and our ears are in this chapter. The nose, it was really cool to learn about how our faces flattened out over time, which made smell—We're not as great smelling like as we used to be. Our faces are flat. We don't have this big organ in there that does a lot of good smell stuff. And a lot of these changes happened when we were up in the trees, to our eyes and ears, that point to what seem to be some sex-based differences. Give us some examples of these sex based differences in smell, in sight, in sound, that still carry through today that are kind of throwbacks to this time when we were swinging from the trees, or I guess really just kind of crawling around in the trees. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, we didn't have those brachiated shoulders yet. So swinging less so. But no, this is a kind of classic story of how we got the so-called monkey face. Even a kid can kind of draw a monkey face on a piece of paper. You got the big ears, got that kind of flat face, two forward-facing binocular stereoscopic eyes. Like we know what that looks like, but that's a very big change from something like a weasel or a mouse, right? Where you have that elongated snout, you have eyes a little bit more to the side. Right, and most of the people who talk about the evolution of primates do talk about how this came about. If a face is a sensory array, it's not just what we use to smile at each other. It's where we're hanging our primary sensors of the eyes, the nose, and the ears, and how we position them on our head is very much shaping how we perceive our environment. So the move up into the trees is a very different environment from the ground, especially from burrowing. There are many different ways in which we have to process the world differently. When it comes to the nose, one of the things that's interesting about human beings is we lost what's called the vomeronasal organ. In a lot of mammals, the perception of pheromones, you know, smells that usually the opposite sex put out that we innately strongly react to, which in a mouse is incredibly a dominant part of their perceptive lives. For us, we don't have it. We evolved away from it. We actually still have a teeny tiny little passage. It's like at the bottom of our sinuses, but it ends in kind of a—it hits a wall. It's not much going on there. Human beings don't seem to have a whole lot of pheromone perception left. But what we do have is a whole bunch of cisgender women who are a lot better at smelling stuff than males are. And we're not entirely sure we know why it is. But it is absolutely true classically in olfaction that female subjects are going to be better at detecting scents that are faint in a room. That's a concentration thing. You only need a little whiff, you know, whereas a male typical might need a stronger dose. We're better at discerning between different kinds of scents and we're better at recognizing it quickly. So we're literally smelling more finely than males are. But it's not because we have more receptors, actually. And in fact, our noses, our nostrils sucking in that air are smaller than most males in fact. No, the big difference actually seems to be in the olfactory bulb itself. This is the part of the brain that processes smell information. Yeah. And the cells are more tightly packed with more of them, even controlling for body size, in a female typical brain than in a male. And that just means it is transmitting that signal more quickly and more widely and more effectively, and then sending a stronger signal out to other parts of the brain. So we're literally wired differently. Don't entirely know why. And we're not really sure if that's a tree problem or if it's just like a sex pheromone problem that's a leftover. Not really sure.   THE EARS (37:19)   BLAIR HODGES: Not only not only our smell is discussed in this chapter, but our hearing is as well. You say that probably the most important differences between sex as pertains to hearing here—volume and pitch, women tend to hear better in higher pitches, they retain hearing better with age. What are the differences that stood out to you in a male typical versus a female typical body when it comes to our hearing? CAT BOHANNON: Uh, this was kind of wild for me. So I'd often heard the story, and maybe you have too, that female ears, human female ears, are better tuned to higher pitches that often correspond to baby cries, right? Men and women can hear the same pitches for most of our early lives, but we're more tuned in to the pitches that are associated with the pitches that babies usually use when they cry. To me, this was kind of an annoying story. Once again, I seem to be hardwired to make babies. And as a feminist, I'm like, “ugh.” But it's true, so it's fine. It's a long-evolved thing. But the more interesting thing in that story for me was that most cis men start losing the upper range of their hearing starting at age 25. Now it's a gradual slope. Guys in their thirties don't need a hearing aid necessarily if they're normally hearing people, right? But you do have this slope of decline that's just, it's like a band filter. It's just cutting off the top end of your range, every year a little bit more, down, down, until you arrive in your fifties. And the thing is, female voices, female typical cis women's voices are a little bit higher pitched and our overtones on our voices, the full timbre of our voice, it really extends up to the top end of human hearing. So what happens is quite literally starting age 25, cis men aren't hearing women's voices very well and the older they get, the worse it gets, until finally in their fifties or so, quite without realizing it, a lot of men, a lot of cis men, our voices, our female voices sound thin, a little bit tinny, harder to pick out, and may well be boosted by a hearing aid. Right? So that totally changes some of how I understand the dynamic of a boardroom. Now, it doesn't explain why a sexist man cares about what a woman says less. It doesn't say that. That's just sexism. BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it does say that literally he might be having trouble hearing you without realizing he is. BLAIR HODGES: And again, as you discuss, all of these interesting things throughout the chapter of perception—and I don't remember if we mentioned Purgi is the name of this Eve, 60-some-odd-million years ago. CAT BOHANNON: Purgatorius, yes! BLAIR HODGES: Yes, ancestor of the primates. So if people want to learn even more about these kind of things about our nose, our eyes, our ears—Purgi's chapter is the place to go. We're talking with Cat Bohannon about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. You can also check out some of Cat's essays and poems. They've appeared in Scientific American, Mind Science Magazine, The Best American Non-required Reading, and other places. She lives with her family in Seattle but is currently touring to talk about this new book called Eve.   ARDI AND THE LEGS (40:21)   Let's talk about the legs. So we talked a little bit about being up in the trees already. But at some point, we came down, this is about four and a half-ish million years ago, we decided to stand upright. And that had some big implications for differently sexed bodies. Let's talk about some of those. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know that we decided to do much of anything, at least in the sense of conscious choice— BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Maybe had to. CAT BOHANNON: We didn't choose, I mean, to modify our pelvic arrangement. Although some individual choices happen along the way. So yeah, one of the big things in a shift for the human evolution pattern is that we mistakenly believed for a while that our ancestors were knuckle walkers, like chimps or gorillas, and then we stood upright. You remember that old diorama, that old, you know, you got the knuckle walking— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's classic. CAT BOHANNON: —and then you eventually stand up and then there's jokes about it, eventually you're like sitting typing on the computer at the far right. You know? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, all hunched over, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. And so that kind of meme kind of has been around, but actually we were never knuckle walkers, none of our ancestors were, none of our Eves certainly. We were just hanging out in trees and then on the ground a bit more and eventually walking. The thing about walking is that what you really need to be able to do besides just having a spine absorb more pressure than it would otherwise—that's why we have an S-shaped lower back to help distribute that force over our bodies without crippling us. But also, what we needed to be able to do was endure. In other words, the story of walking and bipedalism is an endurance story. A primatologist once told me that there is no safe place to be in a room with a chimpanzee. There's no possibility that you are in a safe space because they are incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and can be incredibly violent. They will rip off your face—sometimes, literally, hopefully not, and they'll do it really, really fast. So the idea that we got faster when we became upright is actually wrong. What did happen, however, is that if a chimp does attack you, not long after all of that incredible violence and speed and running away more than likely, because that's mostly going to happen if the chimp's scared, you know, they're going to want to go eat a mango under a tree somewhere. They're not keeping it up for a long period of time. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: What we can do is we can walk all freakin' day. Very few animals have the kind of metabolic capability of doing such a thing. Because it's not simply what your muscles can do. It's how your muscles are utilizing what's called the substrate. Utilizing local energy resources, and when those run out, tapping into other resources—usually in our case from fat. So that's why we're able to walk from point A to B for hours and hours, whereas a chimpanzee can't do that sh*t, right? So the interesting thing about sex differences here is that, we know that female bodies in human bodies are slightly better at endurance by many different measures. So untrained bodies—bodies that haven't been trying to do this, in other words, haven't been working out in the gym—your classic female body does have slightly less muscle mass, but that isn't the big story. The bigger story is that when you do a deep tissue biopsy, female typical skeletal muscles have a little bit more of what's called slow twitch muscle. You might have heard, that's an endurance muscle. That's a type of tissue that's better at doing things for a long period of time, as opposed to fast twitches, which is what lets you be a sprinter, which is what lets you really have explosive strength. There does seem to be that sex difference, I mean, between male bodies—typical, average, I mean—and female bodies, just in terms of what those muscles seem to be geared for, right? And it's tricky, right? Most of us aren't ultra marathoners, for many reasons, most of them psychological! Uh, some of them financial actually, right? But most of us aren't going to do those extreme tests of endurance. But once you get up to those extreme lengths, actually, female runners, tend to not only match or beat male runners in those races, but actually tend to outpace them over time. Which is to say there may be something about the female body that, in long feats of endurance, is slightly better at this. Very slightly better at tapping into a second wind. And so if that's the case, then it's curious that usually how we tell the story about becoming upright is all about some sh*t that we assume guys were doing. Usually it's around hunting. The idea that we were running down big game, you've probably read some popular science books about that, that we evolved to run, right? BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: And sort of. Maybe. But it's a little bit weird, one, to assume that the males were the ones doing that. Two: We were upright way before we were hunting big game. Like Ardipithecus is the Eve I use in the legs chapter— BLAIR HODGES: Yes, Ardi! CAT BOHANNON: And you know, this is a very, very—Ardi, she's wonderful, recently discovered, wonderful, wonderful fossil. She was upright well before big game was a big part of our food strategies. So like we were actually doing stuff on two legs way before it was a matter of running anything down.   CRAFTING SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES (45:23)   BLAIR HODGES: And this is where it seems tricky for researchers to pin down is, we're dealing with these huge lengths of time, and we're dealing with a pretty limited record. CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: And we see you piecing the story together in ways that challenge the conventional narrative. And you've got the evidence there—just as much evidence and sometimes more than what the typical narrative tells us, which is, like you said, we started walking upright because males were hunting and running after game or whatever. And you're like, “Well, actually, there's all this other evidence that shows there's probably other stuff going on.” And looking at today's bodies gives us some ideas about the bodies of the past as well. So you mentioned the different sort of muscle things that female bodies tend to have. Now would that definitely be something that developed through evolution rather than through, like, boys getting played with more or something in their youth than girls do, or roughhousing with boys versus girls, or something like that? CAT BOHANNON: You know, it's hard to say. I think that's a smart question. I think of the studies that I was using, that I was wielding—juggling even, in the legs chapter—those were all done on adult bodies, in part because there are ethics around doing a deep tissue biopsy in an infant. You know, like what is consent there? Why would a—you know, and also the occasion; why it might happen and what's the clinical setting. Like there are many ways into a scientific study, but adult consent and informed consent's a big one, right? BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: So yeah, I don't think those were pediatric studies, and I think it's smart. I think it's smart to say that when we do studies on adult bodies, there have been whole lived lives and whole lived childhoods up to that point. That's absolutely true, and that plays into some of the issues we talk about later in the book too. So I don't know, I don't know. I do know that at least when there have been cellular studies of metabolism in human muscle cells, XX cells seem to be slightly better at utilizing multiple substrates, which is to say multiple energy sources—tapping into that second wind when the local sugar runs out is usually how we tell that story, yeah?—than XY cells, right? So it does seem to be true at the cellular level and not just types of tissue. But you're absolutely right that I don't know how much childhood is gonna play into that adult musculoskeletal system, at least not from the research I've seen. BLAIR HODGES: And you also say that going upright was harder on female bodies. Can you give me an example of why that would be? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So, for one thing, relaxin. Relaxin is this thing that is floating around in the bloodstream of both male and female bodies, but it is slightly more dominant in female typical bodies. Again, I'm always here talking about “biological females,” usually pre-menopause here, okay? Just to put a pin in that so we know what we're talking about. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay. CAT BOHANNON: Relaxin is a thing that during pregnancy loosens the ligaments and the support structures around, not only the hip bones and the pelvic structure to help it widen and carry that additional load, but of course also to widen our very narrow birth canal, which is a problem! BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also, even when we're not pregnant, it tends to make the fixtures of the joints a little looser. It actually has to do with a vascular response around the joints, so I won't get too technical with you. But basically what it does is it makes a typical female body a bit more flexible, you know. Now this is part of why our feet expand when we are pregnant. It's not simply fluid retention, but for female bodies that become pregnant, it's also that these higher doses of relaxin are loosening the ligaments that are binding all of those foot bones together. So they literally get wider, and sometimes a little bit longer, which is very freaky when you think about it. And, uh, it doesn't always quite go back—I can tell you—afterwards, many women gain as much as a whole shoe size during pregnancy— BLAIR HODGES: Wow. CAT BOHANNON: —and then just retain that, which sucks for buying new shoes, but there you go. You have greater concerns when you're in your postpartum period, I could say, um, yeah. But it also means that we're especially prone to lower back pain, possibly because of some instability there in the lower back. Especially going through pregnancy and back again, that can make you more vulnerable too, because it does a lot to the curvature of the spine. Right? So in other words, being upright with this extra relaxin in your bloodstream can make you a little more vulnerable to certain kinds of bone and muscle related pains than it would be if you were a totally sensible four-legged creature who isn't doing this crazy thing, because basically we used to be like tables with four legs and now we're standing on two of the legs of the table and our body is still kind of catching up. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. Yeah, and you're bearing that extra weight of a pregnancy, too, on that back. And so the common lower back pain is a remnant of this decision—or not “decision” as you pointed out, but this evolutionary move of going upright, exactly, right. CAT BOHANNON: Accident. Yeah.   PREGNANCY AND THE BRAIN (50:06)   BLAIR HODGES:  That's not the only change that women undergo during pregnancy, these physical changes you talked about—the joints, the feet. But also the brain undergoes changes similar to what happens to the brain during puberty. You describe it almost like a second sort of puberty. There's so much development and change happening in the actual brain that it's like a second puberty for women who become pregnant? CAT BOHANNON: It's like an extra transition in a life cycle. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Okay, right. CAT BOHANNON: So in biology, you have these classic, maybe you've seen, developmental trajectories in the life cycle. It usually looks like a circle with arrows around it. You see like an egg and then a juvenile—like in insects, you'll have like a larva and then you have a chrysalis and then you have a butterfly. For mammals, we do this too. And we say, what are the developmental phases? What are the phases of this life cycle? And one of the interesting things, at least when it comes to how the human brain seems to go through this life cycle—because there are changes in our incredibly plastic, very malleable human brain that shift and actually have very notable physiological changes at each of these major transitions. So in puberty, there's actually an incredible rewiring and developmental thing that happens all throughout the teens. Can be very challenging, can make you more vulnerable to certain kinds of mental illness, actually, and then not suffer as much when you come into your twenties. There are outcomes, in other words, from what's going down in there. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Schizophrenia will often emerge around that time, for example, and a little bit later for women than men, right? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely so. And one of the cutting-edge things in research there is whether or not the brain development during puberty is in any way affecting that trajectory. Both men and women—and by this I mean males and females—are prone to schizophrenia, right? Schizophrenia, it's a strongly genetically related thing, but we're not entirely sure what all the triggers are. What we do know is that males and females both get it. But what happens is that males are diagnosed sooner. And very obviously so, they move into psychosis. Whereas females have a slightly different symptomology, slightly different path towards diagnosis. And then they have, and are diagnosed later in their twenties. Now some of that's a diagnosis bias in that— BLAIR HODGES: Sure. How signs are read by society or whatever. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, which is a cultural thing and sometimes a sexist thing. There are just, there are complications there. There are confounds. However, it may also be the case, that because the pubertal shift is sort of long and slow in humans, we actually start many of the features of our puberty sooner and then take longer to complete them in female bodies. Whereas for males, it hits you later and it hits you like a truck. It just hits you like a ton of bricks. It's just, um, it, that's just, it's just faster and a bit harder, if you will, because you're condensing that into a later point. And interestingly, even in rodents actually—though what you might call a puberty isn't exactly the same as what we do—they likewise in the female have a sort of longer period of going through it than the male. So it might just be a basic mammalian thing. But the effect in the human brain is that you have this longer and slightly…Subtle isn't the right word but you have this longer period of brain development that's dealing with the hormones of puberty, that has a slightly different slope while that brain's developing, whereas in the male brain, it's shorter, it's more impacted, it might be a bit rougher, you know. So in a brain that's already prone to psychosis—this is where the research, some branches of research are going, you know—is that a factor? Are there physiological shifts in sex differences in puberty that make those brains differently vulnerable to different kinds of mental illness? BLAIR HODGES: And so female brains are undergoing these changes during puberty. But then later during pregnancy, as we were talking about, there's also more shifts. And this is literally like stuff sort of moving around. Is this like neurons kind of remapping and different things? Like what's actually happening up there? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell is this wet lump of tissue in our heads that we center the self in? Good question, good question! Neuroscience would like to know. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: No, it's true. Well, a pregnant female's brain—and by this I mean human now, actually shrinks in the third trimester, like significantly so, which is alarming. Like is the baby actually eating my brain? Good question! No one's really sure quite why this is happening. BLAIR HODGES: Mom brain! CAT BOHANNON: I know, actual mom brain, it turns out, is hella real. Yeah, in the stereotypical sense. So yeah, some of it actually, interestingly, doesn't seem to be a loss of neurons. It's not a loss of cells necessarily from what little they've been able to see in various studies. It seems to be more a loss of—There is a rewiring. There is a kind of clear, you know, snipping out a bunch of connections in your existing neural network, which in some ways may make room for new pathways. So one of the big arguments for why our brains develop so long during that pubertal period—which is very unlike other primates, right? We really have this huge period of social learning in our childhoods and then our adolescence—is that we have deep social learning to do. We have really complex social societies, and we're constantly having to map them and learn not just new things to do with ourselves, but new ways to be in different social environments, especially as we shift around through different social environments. So in that case, when you think about what's happening in the last trimester of pregnancy, and then in the postpartum recovery period, this is someone who is having major social shift. Now the story in the sciences is usually told that, oh, this is helping her better bond with her baby, her really, really vulnerable baby, who's so very useless, can't even hold up its head. You know, so like, wow, so this is all about that bonding. And it's true that some of the regions that show some of that shrinkage, if you will—which sounds like a bad thing, but is actually allowing for more pathways to form. That's the argument that's usually made about it— BLAIR HODGES: Okay. CAT BOHANNON: —have to do with social bonding and reading social cues, and so it's a sociality story. One of the things that I say in the book is that, must we again render the mother invisible? Maybe it's not all about the baby. Maybe she matters too. Because actually one of the big things that happens in a social species like ours when we give birth and come into motherhood, especially for the first time, is that we are learning new ways to be. We're learning how to differently map our social environment and new relationships with different sorts of people, and who's going to be most helpful in this new feature in my life. And who of my old friends are like, maybe not gonna help out with the kids so much. Just, you know, we love them, but that's not their strength. You know, in other words, and how to ask for things that you need, and when to learn new social rules. Which is to say, I suspect some of the brain changes that are happening there are not simply about bonding with the baby, but are about being able to read the room once you have one. Which I assume is a long-evolved trait that is just repurposed in the human. This is probably happening in chimps to a degree. It's more like, “Okay now that you're human, let's repurpose this trait in your hyper social environment.” Does that make sense? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it does. CAT BOHANNON: Okay.   WHAT MAKES A WOMAN (57:16)   BLAIR HODGES: And time and time again, we see this in your book where you'll take the mainstream story about why a particular biological thing is happening—so mom brain, for example, which is that maybe people might encounter forgetfulness or feeling scattered or like ADHD type symptoms or whatever—and saying, “Oh, this is happening because they're doing this for baby.” And you're saying, “Okay, like, sure. But also, what if it's also this?” CAT BOHANNON: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: Because those type of questions are what are driving scientific outcomes and the theories that we have about it. So your book, again and again, is saying, well, what about this as well? Or what about this instead? So we're just sort of getting a different point of view. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And I think with a lot of these questions, it's hard to just say, this is the definitive answer. And you do write with a level of humility there. But you're really opening up possibilities that can change the way we the way we interact with people who aren't parents, or people who are. Because you're also not saying, “Look, in order to be a perfect woman, you need to go through this change in your brain or else you're an unfulfilled woman!” CAT BOHANNON: Oh, god no. No no no no no. BLAIR HODGES: Right. So you're speaking to a lot of different experiences. CAT BOHANNON: You know, I think this is true for all women. We people who have uteri are not merely vessels for babies. Even in an evolutionary sense, because we are a hyper-social species in interdependent complex social environments and cultures. Which is to say, it is not a woman's destiny to freaking give birth. It is a woman's destiny to survive as best as she can, just like any other organism. You know what I mean? And it's also true that there are many, many ways to contribute to the wellbeing of a group, even in a biological sense, even in an ancient ancestral sense, besides simply producing more babies. And that's sometimes the confusion when we talk about the book. Some people have been confused thinking, “Are you saying that women are the way they are—you know, cis women—because it's our destiny to have babies?” And I'm like, “No!” It's more that the way we have babies is really crap, and many, many features in our bodies have evolved to withstand it. If this is a thing that hopefully you choose to do and isn't forced upon you, hopefully you have some long-evolved traits to make it suck less. It's more like that, more like that. BLAIR HODGES: And so, women who don't undergo that or have the same kind of like brain changes, it doesn't mean that their brains are somehow lesser than or whatever, they're just suited for different things. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: And this is also where trans identities come into play as well. You don't have to be this “biologically sexed”—let alone intersex folks as well, where there's not this sort of binary that exists there—but that trans women can experience the world as women, as trans women especially, even though they may not be able to physically carry a pregnancy. Because I think one of the reasons people who are sort of anti-t

We cover a lot of topics, so I'm just gonna make a list:   Talking about oppressive heat like the old farts we are! Omigod your toenails are so grody! The joys of smoking! What we've done live on video! Jalapeno dangers! Sudden Benny Hill memories! Our Flag Means Death is back, and so is Joni Mitchell!   Promo: Octoberpod https://www.octoberpodvhs.com/   (Want to swap show promos? Email us!)   We love you for listening! Please take a moment to rate and review us, and earn a STICKER! (Everyone loves stickers!) And please subscribe or add us to your favorites list on your favorite platform so you never miss a show! And share us with your cool friends, not the lame ones.    Questions? Comments? Complaints?    Write to us at PitneyAndAmelia@gmail.com!  Tweet at us at @bitchenboutique! https://twitter.com/bitchenboutique Stay up to date by liking our Facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/Pitney-Amelias-Bitchen-Boutique-1082838478590821/    If you want to be supportive without a lot of stuff cluttering your feed, follow us on Instagram at @pitneyandamelia! https://www.instagram.com/pitneyandamelia/ And if you're feeling generous, buy yourself a little something at our merch shop and help to support our show! (Turn off that Content Filter to see the "uncensored" stuff!)  https://www.teepublic.com/stores/bitchen-boutique?ref_id=30433&utm_campaign=30433&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=Bitchen%2BBoutique   Who the heck are Pitney and Amelia? A gay guy and his fat friend talking about everything! We've got over 30 years of stories to share about stuff we love, stuff that annoys us, people we've known, places we've been, and things we've seen. Geeky, silly, and always opinionated. NAMES ARE CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY!      We may be awful, but we're right!    Here, queer, and in your ear. Every other Friday.     The Bitchen Boutique is all about mental health and openness and honesty and if you're in crisis and in the US, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.  And if you just need some friends, you've got two right here.     LGBTQIA+ | Comedy | Pop Culture | Fandom | Horror | Spirituality | Mental Health #OFMD2 #OurFlagMeansDeath #OFMD #JoniMitchell    #LGBTQIAplus  #Comedy #PopCulture #Fandom  #Horror  #Spirituality #MentalHealth

Omigod you guys! Broadway legend and OBC Galinda standby Laura Bell Bundy is on the pod! Not only is she on the pod, she's in her dressing room! No, seriously, LBB had the boys giggling, gasping and clutching their pearls while she was getting ready for a performance of The Cottage. Listen in! Plus, the boys get Sentimental about Lilli Cooper, Britney Spears, Natalie Portman and the lyrics to “Giddy On Up.”- - - - -Looking for a way to support the pod? Join us in the Green Circle, our paid Patreon subscription. Subscribers get perks like bonus episodes, a spot on our Instagram Close Friends and extended, Editor's cut versions of each new episode. Join the Green Circle today.Looking for a no cost way to support the pod? Give us a great rating and review on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. Your handprint will be on our hearts forever.If you're looking to get in touch, find us on Instagram, Twitter (or X or whatever), TikTok and Threads at @sentmenpod. Or you can shoot us an email at sentmenpod@theatrely.com.

OMIGOD! On this episode of Harrytales, Harry sits down with Ellen Marlow, the Brilliant actress that portrayed Claire Lyons in the cult classic chick flick, The Clique (2008). Ellen spills ALL the Pretty Committee tea, including what it was like to film the movie, THAT egg scene, wether a Clique reboot us un the works, and MORE! So much more. Listen uppe here! Follow Ellen: Instagram: @ellenmarlow Tik Tok: @ellenmarlow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexis Loiselle is a musical theatre actress. She just recently got the chance to join to tour the country on the national tour of the hit Broadway musical, Legally Blonde. This was her first time hitting the road, and it was a magical experience for her to see places she never thought she would have the chance to travel to. In the show, Losielle was in the ensemble and understudied the roles of both Brooke Wyndham and Vivienne Kingston. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jayme-starr/support

Today's episode is hosted by Karl. He is joined by Shir Tamari, Head of Research at Wiz. Shir tells us how he conquered over 700 Counter-Strike 1.6 servers when he was just a kid in Israel and how his team at Wiz discovered major cloud vulnerabilities like the ChaosDB and the OMIGOD exploits.

Omigod you guys! This week, Quincy and Kevin are joined by Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer to chat about cut songs from Legally Blonde (you know the one), coming back home to Beetlejuice and the craziest onstage mishap story the boys have ever heard. It's the new year, besties – let's get Sentimental.

Sometimes "reality" TV takes it one step too far.  Sometimes two steps.  Sometimes a flying leap. WARNING:  IMPLIED VIOLENCE AND TORTURE Written and Produced by Julie Hoverson Cast List Announcer  - Frankenvox Alison - Beverly Poole Bart - Michael Faigenblum Carl - Mike Campbell Debbie - E. Vickery Ms. Sheldon - Sharon Delong Tanya - Tanja Milojevic Mom - Shayla Conrad-Simms Dad - Reynaud LeBoeuf Son - Eli Nilsson Fred - Joel Harvey Bob - Glen Hallstrom Helen - Helen Edwards June - Shelbi McIntyre Kathy - Kim Poole Additional Voices - Russell Gold; Julie Hoverson Music by Brian Bochicchio (Seraphic Panoply) Show theme:  Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Brett Coulstock   "What kind of a place is it? Why it's right here, right now, can't you tell?" ************************************************************************ IDIOT BOX Cast: [Opening credits - Olivia] TV Announcer Alison, chipper Bart, sullen Carl, upbeat, hearty Debbie, nervous, angry underneath Ms. Sheldon, executive producer Tanya, in the sound booth Family - mom, dad, teenage son Bar - Fred, Bob, Helen Dorm - June, Kathy OLIVIA     Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's right here, right now, can't you tell?  MUSIC SOUND     THEME MUSIC ANNOUNCER    last week, in the record-breaking debut of The Box, we were introduced to our four contestants: ALISON    [chipper] I'm Alison, from Santa Monica.  Hi, mom! CARL    [hearty] Carl, from Atlanta - home of the Cartoon Channel!!  DEBBIE    [nervous] Debbie, from Salem.  Uh, Oregon.  [quickly] Salem Oregon. BART    [sullen] Bart, Minneapolis [disgusted sigh]. ANNOUNCER    The rules are on the screen now for all you viewers out there, to cover the formalities.  They are also available on our website at [spelled out superfast] w-w-w-dot-s-k-i-n-n-e-r-i-d-i-o-t-b-o-x-dot-com.  AMB    FAMILY LIVING ROOM SOUND    CHIPS EATEN FROM BAG ANNOUNCER    [TV] And after this brief message, we'll show you the results of last week's voting. SOUND    CLICK OF REMOTE SOUND    POPCORN POPPING IN MICROWAVE MOM    [off] You better not have turned that off, hun! SOUND    MICROWAVE DINGS DAD    Just muted.  Sick of all these ads for freaking erectile dysfunction.  If anything's going to give a guy man-trouble, it's having to watch all those damn ads. SOUND    POURING POPCORN INTO BOWL SON    Ew, dad.  T-M-I. MOM    [coming in, munching popcorn] The one I hate is that smiling guy.  His wife just looks so scared all the time.  Almost as creepy as the King. SON    Am I adopted?  Please say yes. DAD    Ooops, back on! ANNOUNCER    [TV]  Did everyone vote? MOM    I certainly did! SON    Mom?  [disgusted noise] Why? ANNOUNCER    [TV] The voting is closed, the tabulations have been made, and the scores are coming up on the screen now. MOM    [over the announcer] Why not?  I want that nice young girl - the blonde - to win.  She's very wholesome. ANNOUNCER    [TV] And it looks like today Alison has been selected!  MOM    [satisfied] There! ANNOUNCER    We have Alison in the studio now - let's see how she takes it. SOUND     LIGHT MUSIC, ON THE TV SEGUES INTO REALITY ANNOUNCER    Hello Alison!  Say hi to everyone!  ALISON    Hi!  Hi mom!  Dad! ANNOUNCER    How's the first week been treating you? ALISON    This place is great! ANNOUNCER    Throughout the show, we'll be showing some of the fun you four have been having.  Now, why don't you tell me what you think of your new friends? ALISON    Oh, wow - everyone's really great.  ANNOUNCER    Don't you find Bart a bit... isolated? ALISON    He's just self-contained.  I'm sure he's a good guy, he just doesn't open up real easily. ANNOUNCER    And Debbie? ALISON    She's shy - a lot like my sister.  Hi Vickie!! ANNOUNCER    [chuckles] That's great. ALISON    And Carl - well, he's a blast.  He's always thinking up great stuff to do. ANNOUNCER    Yesterday you had sole access to the Dairy Dan Amusement park. ALISON    Oh, man - that was awesome!  They closed the gates and we got to ride all the rides all day long - no lines, no crowds!  Woo! ANNOUNCER    You've been chosen. ALISON    Woo!  [stumbles] I - What?  What? SOUND    CONTROL BOOTH ANNOUNCER    [TV]  Please step into the box. ALISON    [TV - gasp, then steels herself]  Right.  [somewhat bitter] Thanks America. SHELDON That's the shot - tight in on 2, now 3 - yes! Keep her face centered until she shuts the door. TANYA    Got it. SHELDON Okay, keep the volume low on that. It's early yet - don't want to wear out the viewers... SOUND    [TV] ELECTRIC SHOCK NOISE, SOMEWHAT BRIEF ALISON    [TV - short scream] ANNOUNCER    [TV] We'll be right back after the break to find out what today's challenge will be. AMB    DORM ROOM JUNE    Omigod!  Omigod!  Did you see that? KATHY    [distracted] Hmm?  No but I sure heard it - did they just do what I think they did? JUNE    They just shocked the crap out of the blonde chick! KATHY    Was there actually crap? JUNE    [duh] She was in the box.  Shh.  It's coming back on. SOUND    TV TURNS UP ANNOUNCER    [TV] We'll be right back with more of The Box after these messages. SOUND    SOUND DOWN AGAIN JUNE    I hate when they do that. KATHY    Shock someone? JUNE    No, have the logo come up and make you think the show is back on. KATHY    Yeah, that's much worse. JUNE    You know what I mean!  It was totally mean that they shocked her - she's the one who got the most votes! KATHY    Isn't that what everyone was voting for? JUNE    No!  At least, I don't think so - I mean, I thought it was voting for who would win something cool.  I ...voted for her. KATHY    You actually voted? JUNE    On the website, yeah. KATHY    Of course there's a website.  Maybe you should read the fine print. JUNE    Oh, oh!  It's back on!  Jeez, look at her poor hair! SOUND    TV UP ANNOUNCER    [TV] Back to the interview room, to hear from Alison. ANNOUNCER    [real] Before we go on, I need to point out, this is the only time you can choose to leave the show.  Are you prepared to stay? ALISON    [gulps, then quiet]  Yes.  [clears her throat, louder]  Yes.  [very shaky] That wasn't so bad. ANNOUNCER    Excellent.  Now I believe you recently graduated from college, Alison.  What did you get your degree in? AMB    BAR ALISON    [TV]  I'm a liberal arts major, with a minor in art history. FRED    So she's unemployed, eh? ANNOUNCER    [TV]  And you are engaged to be married? BOB    Too bad.  All the cute ones are taken.  Even with that weird hairdo. SOUND    TV SWITCHED TO SPORTS FRED    Hey, we were watching that! HELEN    Why?  It's awful, letting them mess with people on TV like that! FRED    [scornful] It's not real.  BOB    Course it is - it even has a website! HELEN    Puh-leez.  Lots of things have websites that aren't real. BOB    Name one. HELEN    Pamela Anderson's boobs. FRED    She got you there, pal. BOB    C'mon - just switch it back long enough to see what today's challenge is?  Please? HELEN    Ya big softie, you. SOUND    TV CHANGES BACK ANNOUNCER    [TV] Carl, you got the second most votes this week - Do you have anything to say to the viewers at home?  Obviously you're doing something right, to get so many votes. CARL    [TV]  I think it's just my sunny personality, Bob.  People like winners, and I am a winner. AMB    LIVING ROOM SON    Weiner. MOM    Language! SON    [dismissive noise] Doesn't that dipstick know that most votes gets zapped? DAD    Maybe he doesn't - they might not tell THEM everything, either.  Makes sense.  Why else would they be so excited? SON    But that sucks!  That sucks big time!  Here they are, trying to be all cool and get people to vote for them, and they're like masterminding their own torture or something. DAD    It's just a game,  No one really gets hurt. MOM    Well, I was kind of upset that Alicia-- SON    Alison. MOM    Yes, that she got shocked.  I didn't know that voting for her would do that.  I kind of feel bad now. SON    Well, don't vote for her next time. MOM    I certainly won't! ANNOUNCER    [on TV] Well, we've spoken to two of our four contestants, and the voting is open for the halftime winner.  Go on line now or text to-- SOUND    TV MUTES, AMB/DORM SOUND    COMPUTER KEYS KATHY    What are you doing? JUNE    Voting. KATHY    Vicious much? JUNE    No! I - I just don't want her to have to get shocked again.  Damn!  It only lets me choose one of those two - not the other guy. KATHY    So you want to see him get shocked? JUNE    Well, no, but I like him the least. KATHY    Just cause you don't think he's cute. SOUND    ONE LAST KEY JUNE    Um, there. KATHY    So who'd you vote for? JUNE    The guy - the nice one - of course.  I like him, too, but I don't want her to get shocked again. SOUND    TV UP AGAIN ANNOUNCER    [TV] Regular text messaging fees apply.  And now‑‑ SOUND    OMINOUS MUSIC ROLLS IN ANNOUNCER    [TV, ominous] The moment in the spotlight.  Will it be Alison or Carl?  The voting closes in three minutes, so hurry up and make your vote count - if the lines are overloaded, make sure and try back - but be quick.   [normal] While we wait, let's watch some clips from the preliminary interviews with the other two contestants. MUSIC ANNOUNCER    [TV] And what are you studying? DEBBIE    [TV] I'm - um - a poli sci major. FRED    So she's gonna end up unemployed too. BOB    Whatever happened to good old trade schools? FRED    They're still around - just the trades aren't.  You seen any cobblers in the U.S. of A recently?  Nope.  It's all farmed out to Pakistan and Koala Lumper. HELEN    Lumpur. FRED    Sez you. HELEN    I can turn it off, you know. BOB    Yeah - see now Helen here's got a job that can't be farmed out - long as there's guys like us, there's always gonna be bars, eh? FRED    Until they invent a mixology robot. BOB    Hey, the lights are flashing on the screen, must be something important. SOUND    TV TURNED UP. SOUND    OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFIES ANNOUNCER    [TV; evil "suspense" pacing]  And the one who got the most halftime votes.  Will it be Alison, our stoic liberal arts major? JUNE    Yes, yes - come on come on!!! ANNOUNCER    [TV] Or Carl, who tutors children with learning disabilities. MOM    Oh, that's awful! SON    Awful? That he works with retarded kids? MOM    [almost a whisper] That I voted for him. ANNOUNCER    [TV] And the one who got the most votes in the 8-minute half-time poll was-- SOUND    HEAVY DRUMBEAT ANNOUNCER    [TV] Was-- SOUND    HEAVY DRUMBEAT KATHY    Look at how much she's sweating! JUNE    You'd sweat too if you just got shocked! ANNOUNCER    [TV] is -Carl! JUNE    Whew! KATHY    Shh.  Let's see what happens. ANNOUNCER    [TV] This means that at the end of tonight's show, Carl will be up against the second half winner in a showdown to see who gets a million dollars sent to the charity of their choice. HELEN    Waitaminute - she gets shocked and he gets a chance to win big bucks?  That's so not fair! FRED    That's the way it is.  Women always getting the short stick. HELEN    Especially when they're dating you, eh? BOB    [laughs, tried to stop] FRED    Yeah, yeah - you can joke now, but I'll give you 70-30 odds that the other winner is that other guy. BOB    The grouch? FRED    Yup.  Is it a bet? BOB    Fifty bucks? FRED    Whoah, whoah!  Let's not get carried away here, now. MUSIC - OPENING THEME, PLAYS FOR A MOMENT ANNOUNCER    Entering week five of The Box, you can see the ratings posted for our four contenders.  [hushed] Last week, it looked as though Debbie had finally broken-- DEBBIE    [TV] I hate it!  I hate you all! You can all just go and-- SOUND    LONG SERIES OF BLEEPED WORDS SOUND    ZAPPING AND SCREAMING UNDER NEXT LINE ANNOUNCER    But after her trip to the box, she refused to cry off. DEBBIE    [TV] [breathing heavily and gulping] No [gasp] way! [gasp]  You don't [gasp] get rid of me [long shaky breath] that easily. [sob] ANNOUNCER    And now, a new week - and what was this week's challenge? STUDIO AUDIENCE Fasting! ANNOUNCER    Yes, fasting.  Whoever could go the longest without eating even a single bite of food got a free pass this week‑‑ ANNOUNCER    [TV] --and we'll find out who managed that in just a moment - after a few words from our sponsors. SOUND    CLICK, SOUND OFF JUNE    [urging] C'mon Debbie! KATHY    Debbie?  Hah.  She's got no body fat to start with.  Bart has a much better chance of surviving-- JUNE    Don't say that!  You just like him cause you know I don't! KATHY    I root for the underdog.  It's a principal. And no one likes that poor bastard. JUNE    If no one likes him, how come Debbie's the one always getting shocked, huh?  [almost a sob] Huh? ANNOUNCER    [TV]  Let's bring our four contestants out on stage to hear who's going to be free and clear for another week.  Alison-- SOUND    MUSIC UP, DOOR OPENS, SHAKY FOOTSTEPS ANNOUNCER    [real] Alison, how are you feeling? ALISON    [trying to be perky] Not too bad.  I made it almost three whole days on nothing but water.  ANNOUNCER    But then you lost it? ALISON    [heavy sigh] Yeah, I had to give in and get something.  [resigned] I figured fine - just put me in the box.  At least that eventually ends.  ANNOUNCER    Thank you, Alison.  Now go over to the isolation booth while we talk with each of your friends. ALISON    [venomous] Friends?  Hah! ANNOUNCER    [TV, confidential] She needs to learn to be careful about trading today's pain for tomorrow's - what she doesn't know is we've [ramping up] turned the voltage up another notch! AUDIENCE    [TV, CHEERS] HELEN    This just keeps getting worse.  It has to be against the law. BOB    Oh, come on.  They signed waivers, didn't they?  Plus, it's all fake - like wrestling.  Seriously.  Even if they did do this stuff, they have to have doctors and all on staff - make sure no one really gets hurt. SOUND    UNWRAPPING AND OPENING A FORTUNE COOKIE FRED    Hey, listen to this - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." BOB    Figures the Chinese would think of that first. FRED    Nah.  The Chinese didn't make that up. HELEN    Then who did say it? FRED    [immediate] Thomas Jefferson. BOB    I don't think so. FRED    Yeah?  And who do you think it was? BOB    Some Greek philosopher or other.  [idea] Julius Caesar! HELEN    You guys make your bet, I'll call Jonesy on the next commercial and he can google it. SOUND    TV TURNS UP ANNOUNCER    [TV]  So Bart, you made it the longest without eating - you have any special tips for the viewers out there on how you did it? BART    [real] Huh? ANNOUNCER    Any tips?  We'll give you a minute - these moments of uncertainty are just further proof that our show is live and unedited.  While Bart ponders this, I'll recap - Alison gave into her craven need for food first, followed by Carl and Debbie - in a virtual photo finish, where Debbie held out for one millisecond longer than Carl.  Good going Debbie! BART    I hate you. ANNOUNCER    Hmm?  What's that? BART    I hate you and all you stand for.  ANNOUNCER    Do I hear an opt-out coming?  For those of you just tuning in, during this episode and this episode alone, any of our four contestants can opt out at any time - not just immediately following a trip into the Box.  So Bart, are you-- SOUND    A BEEP TRIES TO CUT HIM OFF ON THE FIRST WORD BART    Fuck you!  You can't get rid of me that easily.  BART    [TV] I don't care how many times you drug me and try to get me to bow down to the corporate machine!  You and all you people at home - you are sadistic bastards, but I'm here for the long haul - And when I finish, whether I win or not, I will be traveling around the country demanding the pound of flesh each and every one of you bastards owe me!!! KATHY    For god's sake, turn it off. JUNE    No, he's making a valid point.  We shouldn't be party to this. KATHY    The very act of watching it validates it. JUNE    No.  I'm only doing this to bear witness. KATHY    The advertisers don't care.  They just want to you to watch. JUNE    Well, I won't vote any more. KATHY    Then you can't complain when your favorite gets zapped. JUNE    [upset] Oh hell! ANNOUNCER    [TV]  Well, that was very enlightening.  Before you out there start emailing and phoning - please refer to clause 42 slash 8 slash F, subsection I-I-I, paragraph y, where it sets out the game's rules covering mental illness or defect.  Thank you, and good night! SOUND    TV TURNED OFF HELEN    Anyone checked out the big pools? FRED    What do you mean? HELEN    There's huge bets all over the place - everyone guessing who's gonna last the longest. BOB    Well, no one's washed out yet. FRED    They're a tough bunch of kids, but I bet I could make it on that show.  Age does bring wisdom. BOB    To who? FRED    You're too young to remember this, but I was a P-O-W in nam [rhymes with "ham"].  I been through it all.  Torture, deprivation, brain washing. HELEN    They sure got yours squeaky clean. SOUND    DRINKS WHOLE BEER DOWN. BOB    Ahhh. MUSIC    ANNOUNCER    This week, week 9 of The Box, we might just lose a second contestant.  ANNOUNCER     [TV] Alison, you've spent three days in this jacuzzi - brought to us courtesy of Big Joe's cut-rate pools and spas.  Now, people might think this was fun, but of course, you can't fall asleep or you might drown!  ALISON    [TV, parched, delirious]  You suck, Bob. FRED    Friend of yours? BOB    You wish. ALISON     [TV]  Get me out. ANNOUNCER    [TV] You do know that whomever leaves their jacuzzi first goes directly into the box? ALISON     [TV] No!  I want out!  OUT!  I can't - you can't make me stay here! JUNE    They can't, can they? KATHY     How much you wanna bet she signed something that says they can? JUNE    That's illegal! KATHY    Being stupid and greedy?  Nah.  They'd run out of prisons.  Unless you subscribe to the idea that our whole world is a prison. JUNE    [very upset] Don't talk like that - look at that poor girl!  They're just dragging her across the stage! KATHY    Wow.  I wouldn't'a thought it would take three guys to handle her, after all the crap she's been through. ALISON    [TV - screaming weakly and struggling] ANNOUNCER    [TV] It is understood, under the rules, that the clemency episode has run out and, once again, the only time you can opt out is right after a session in the box-- SON    If she's all wet, wouldn't that make the shock worse? DAD    At least her hair doesn't end up all weird since they shaved her head after that challenge last week-- SON    Three weeks ago. DAD    Really?  Anyway, they probably compensate somehow. MOM    Are you sure? DAD    [unsure] Well... They can't really hurt her - that would be... ANNOUNCER    [TV]     Oh, and - I've just got a word from the producer!  We've got a three minute vote - so grab your phones!  ANNOUNCER    [real] Now this will cost one dollar per vote, so make yours count!  Dial the studio number and hit 1 if you want us to let Allison forfeit and leave now, push 2 if you think we should hold her to the rules.  And voting opens [beat, then TV] Now! SHELDON Start the positive counter. TANYA    On it.  Running. NARRATOR     [TV] The positive votes will tally right here on the corner of the screen, and if, after the vote closes, there are more positive than negative votes, Alison will  immediately leave the studio - damper but wiser... BOB    Man, I wish I was in Vegas. FRED    Nah - you know what's going to happen.  The odd's'll be crap. HELEN    Course.  They'll let her go. FRED    You gotta lotta faith in people, babe.  Nah.  I'll give you 10 to 1 she's gonna ride the lightning. BOB     [incredulous] "Ride the lightning?" FRED    You know - old sparky. The electric chair?  Man where have you been? BOB    Considering no one's been executed in an electric chair in this state for - um - help me out Helen-- HELEN    50 years. BOB    50 years. FRED    Really? HELEN    How the hell'm I supposed to know? BOB    Well, whatever - a long time.  HELEN    Actually, I think this state always hanged people. FRED    Hung. BOB    The countdown! 5 - 4 - JUNE    3-2- MOM    [almost breathless] One. ANNOUNCER    [TV]  All votes are in, and as you can see, we had a regular landslide of support for our dear friend Allison here.  we have 4 million six hundred seventy two thousand, three hundred and forty-two votes for clemency.  Good for you everyone!  We'll show the other side, right after this-- SOUND    TV OFF DAD    No way! MOM    You can't    ! SON    I won't watch any more of this.  This is brutal. MOM    [angry] Don't you dare!  How can we not ... find out? SON    No. MOM    Just until they announce it - we don't have to watch ...if she... SON    Gets it? SOUND    REMOTE THROWN ONTO TABLE SON    You do what you want.  I'll be in the garage. SOUND    [after a moment] TV CLICKS ON COMMERCIAL    [something] KATHY    I bet the commercials for this cost top dollar.  Like superbowl ads. JUNE    How can you just be so snarky - that girl could die! KATHY    Nah.  They can't do that.  It would be illegal. JUNE    Not normally, but remember when that guy had a stroke on "Danger Island" last year?  The family sued, but the waiver made it perfectly legit.  KATHY    And that wasn't even that exciting. ANNOUNCER    [on TV]  For those just tuning in, we have perky little Allison in the Box, awaiting your verdict.  [continues under] Does she take the next shock, or have you tipped toward clemency for this poor girl? SHELDON Give them the split picture. TANYA    Before and after? SHELDON Uh-huh. [grim] Show them what they did. ANNOUNCER    [on TV] The negative votes have been tallied.  SOUND    DRUM ROLL, OMINOUS MUSIC ANNOUNCER    [ON TV] And we had 4 million six hundred seventy two thousand, three hundred and forty-two votes to let her go.  BOB    I'm still saying they'll let her off.  FRED    Nope.  You already lost that twenty, pal. HELEN    Shh! ANNOUNCER    [TV] The negative count is seven million three hundred-- SOUND    TV OFF KATHY    Did you vote? JUNE    Yes.  [beat]  Twenty times. KATHY    [shrug] You can't beat the bastards. JUNE    But if everyone just voted a few more times... KATHY    Three million more times. JUNE    How can people be so horrible? SOUND    [NEXT DOOR TV] SCREAMING PEOPLE    [laughing] SOUND    POUNDING ON WALL JUNE    [yelling at them] How can you be so horrible?? KATHY    They're drunk.  Didn't you see the sign? JUNE    [half a sob] Sign? KATHY    The one that said "come to gary's room, get drunk and watch The Box"? JUNE    [down] No. KATHY    Look, turn it on.  You'll see she's not dead or anything, then you'll feel better. JUNE    But what if she's not?  I mean, what if she is?  I mean-- KATHY    [sigh] Then you'll know. SOUND    [beat, then] TV TURNS ON SOUND    [on TV] AMBULANCE SIRENS JUNE    [sob] MOM    [sob] Her poor parents! DAD    Don't worry so much - she's not dead. MOM    She was for 43 seconds. DAD    That doesn't even count these days - happens all the time on House. MOM    [very upset] But this is real! SOUND    [on tv] MUSIC UP ANNOUNCER    [tv]  And we'll be checking in with Allison as soon as she regains consciousness to confirm her wish to opt out.  For now, the game comes down to Bart and Carl.  ANNOUNCER    Don't forget - no matter what happens, the game's big final episode is in two weeks.  SOUND    CAMERA OFF SHELDON Nicely done. ANNOUNCER    It's really wearing me thin. SHELDON Almost over. And after today's vote, there's no way the station can afford to cancel us. ANNOUNCER    [sigh, then grudging] Two more shows.  SHELDON [with meaning] And then we announce the results. MUSIC - OPENING THEME, PLAYS FOR A MOMENT AMB     NOISY BAR BOB    [ordering] Another one. FRED    Packed tonight. SOUND    DRINK SET DOWN HELEN    It's the finale. FRED    [tired] Oh, yeah.  That. BOB    Bottom's up! HELEN    Slow down, or I'm gonna have to pour you into a cab. SOUND    CAR KEYS SLAPPED ONTO THE BAR, SCOOPED UP SOUND    GLASS SET DOWN HARD BOB    Ahhh. CROWD    ROAR OF EXCITEMENT HELEN    Hold on!  I'll get it. SOUND    TV SOUND UP MUSIC    FANFARE ANNOUNCER    It's the night we've all been waiting for.  The night the final results are announced.  And we will have an ultimate winner.  Let's recap what the winner will walk away with.  SOUND    VOLUME DOWN SOUND    DOOR OPENS KATHY    Oh, you're not watching that, are you?  [sneer] I thought you decided it wasn't worth it! JUNE    [shell shocked] I can't not watch!  I have to know! KATHY    Look, let's go to the library or something. JUNE    No!  I would die of suspense! KATHY    It's not-- SOUND    TV VOLUME COMES UP KATHY    [sigh] I'm not staying. SOUND    DOOR CLOSES ANNOUNCER    And the contest comes down to our two finalists, Bart and Carl.  They have endured amazing hardship to make it this far.  Do you have anything you want to say to the people at home, Bart? BART    You still suck and you always will.  Every single one of you!  Every person who just sits by and supports this shit! ANNOUNCER    [still jovial]  And yet, you have continued to play our sick little games - as you call them - despite being offered chance after chance to leave. BART    Hah!  I don't plan to fucking let you win, you scumbags! ANNOUNCER    Well said.  And you, Carl, do you have anything for the audience? CARL    [mumbles] ANNOUNCER    Speak up? CARL    [vague, reciting] We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.  Sitting by lone sea-- lone sea....  the sea.  The sea.  See see oh playmate, come out and play with me.... [fades out] ANNOUNCER    There you have it, folks.  And now we go to our man in the street interviewer, Tanya.  Take it away! TANYA    Thank you.  I'm in a major metropolitan center here, asking people on the street what they think of the Box. ANNOUNCER    If they're outside right now, instead of glued to their sets, they must not think much of it. BOTH    [fake laugh] SOUND    TV OFF SOUND    EATING MOM    What?  Don't you dare! DAD    Hey, we were watching that! SON    Are you enjoying this? MOM    Enjoying? DAD    What do you mean? SON    All this shit they've put those people through!  You can barely tell them apart now, after they've been starved and had their heads shaved.  They look like concentration camp victims! MOM    But - but this is the last show! DAD    What does it matter if we watch or don't watch? SOUND    THROWING DOWN A REMOTE SON    Do what you want.  I'll just hope for a six-car pileup.  Maybe you'll trade up. SOUND    DOOR OPENS AND SHUT SOUND    REMOTE TAKEN, TV ON ANNOUNCER    And for tonight, the big surprise is-- SOUND    DRUM ROLL, OMINOUS MUSIC ANNOUNCER    Two boxes! SOUND    CANNED CHEERING ANNOUNCER    One for each of you.  While we get them all set, here's a word from our sponsor! AMB    BAR CROWD    Buzzing "two boxes?" BOB    [slurry] Whaddaya think they've got up their shleeves? FRED    They're gonna kill one of those boys. HELEN    [confidential] I heard that girl Allison is in a private clinic, barely alive. FRED    Where'd you--? HELEN    Internet.  BOB    [sarcastic]  Yeah.  Then it's probably true. SOMEONE    Turn it up! HELEN    Got it! SOUND    TV UP ANNOUNCER    And now.  The moment of truth!  All the votes have been tallied.  As you can see, we have Bart over here in the red box-- SOUND    CANNED APPLAUSE ANNOUNCER    [tv] --and Carl over there in the blue. SHELDON close up on Bart, camera 2. Yeah, baby, clench that jaw.  Now cut to that trickle of sweat on Carl's face.  Nice. TANYA    Back to the announcer? SHELDON One more second, and - yes! ANNOUNCER    [tv] And now, with the votes tallied, we will find out who you out there have selected as the big winner, and who has to take the big penalty.  ANNOUNCER    [real] But first, we caught each of our contestants here on secret camera last night.  Let's see what they were doing on the penultimate night. SOUND    QUICK JAB OF STATIC VOICE    [tv] ...need to get out now.  You don't understand what they have planned for tomorrow.  It's so much worse! AMB    BAR BOB    Who the hell izzat? BART    [TV] [scoff] Worse?  Worse how? HELEN    Don't know.  FRED    Look at that announcer fellow - he's surprised too.  HELEN    [half a chuckle]  Serves him right. ANNOUNCER    [tv] Sorry - we should have screened that clip before playing it.  Let's go over to Carl's shot. CARL    [tv] Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall--[cuts out suddenly] ANNOUNCER    [tv] And that's all the time we have for that.  And now the moment of truth.  Carl or Bart?  You held their fate in your hands. SOUND    COMMERCIAL COMES ON UNDER MOM    [coming in]  Where's Kyle?  Have you seen Kyle? DAD    [mesmerized]  He'll be back.  Just ... went out to a friend's house.  Probably. MOM    You should turn that off and find him! DAD    We can look in ten minutes just as easily as we can look now! MOM    This is our son! DAD    It's almost over! SOUND    OMINOUS MUSIC ON TV ANNOUNCER    [tv] And now.  The final countdown. MOM    Five minutes. SOUND    SHE SITS ANNOUNCER     [tv]  This has been quite a journey for everyone - and we would like to thank you all for your support and participation. BOB    Support?  I'd shoot that stupid bastard if I had a chance.  And a gun. HELEN    You're not the only one, but a lot of people paid a lot of money into that damn show. ANNOUNCER    [tv] --making us the highest rated network series ever-- FRED    yeah, and even WE count for ratings, since we happen to be watching it. BOB    [steaming into an alcoholic rage] Then let's not watch it! SOUND    SLAMS GLASS ON BAR, LIQUID SLOSHES FRED    Calm down, pal. BOB    No! Is this what our world has come to?  This crap?? SOUND    THROWS BEER GLASS AT TV, TV DIES, BUT OTHER SET PLAYS ON IN THE BACKGROUND CROWD    [Shocked silence] FRED    Great, one down, only seven hundred million TV sets to go. HELEN    I'll put it on your tab. CROWD     [chatter begins again] ANNOUNCER    [tv] --will definitely be returning for a second season, starting next fall-- SOUND    DOOR OPENS ANNOUNCER    [tv] --and we're looking at celebrity contestants.  TANYA    [tv]  That will be a whole new ballgame. KATHY    Sorry, didn't know it was still on. JUNE    [distraught] Stay.  Please. KATHY    Ugh.  Why? JUNE    Because I don't think I'll make it otherwise. KATHY    Make what? ANNOUNCER    [tv] And now for the final outcome.  MOM    Yes? DAD    About time. ANNOUNCER    [tv]  the final results. FRED    Don't call the police.  I'll get him home. HELEN    Yeah.  This time. ANNOUNCER    [tv] What we've all been working toward. JUNE    [crying] Can't they just say it? TV, MUSIC SWELLS, THEN CUTS OUT SUDDENLY JUNE    What? HELEN    Shit, must have blown the circuit. DAD    The electricity's still on! KATHY    Is there something wrong with your TV? MOM    No!  It's practically new! FRED    Come on.  Quitting time, pal. SOUND    TEST PATTERN NOISE, THEN MUSIC SUDDENLY CUTS BACK IN ANNOUNCER    Thank you all for participating in our experiment.  MOM    [gasp] ANNOUNCER    As you can see, all of our actors are in perfect health. JUNE    [sob]  How could they--? KATHY    Bastards. ANNOUNCER    We would love to hear your reactions to this show.  Please feel free to leave us a message at www-dot- SOUND    TV SWITCHES OFF HELEN     [last call voice] Allright.  That's it. CLOSER   [NOTE:  George Santayana, author of the quote.]

Mia returns for our first episode on opposite coasts (Omigod, guys. THE SADNESS.) to talk about some new MCU disappointment, history of the AIDS crisis, and Emily's new obsession: Stranger Things. Specifically how Stranger Things is getting their depiction of teenaged homosexuality in 1986 sadly, truly, right. Join us for some good ol' fashioned salt mining, giggling about the shared braincell of Steve and Robin's epic friendship, and a long and winding list of all the reasons Will Byers is too good for the world he inhabits. Book Rec: All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks Fics: How your heart beats when you run for cover by fragilethings i need you closer, and you're not even an inch away by esperastra Video Killed the Radio Star by DiscoSuperFly Support the podcast: Make a monthly contribution via Anchor Support via PayPal, Ko-fi, or our Amazon affiliate link Sign up for email updates / new episode announcements Follow on social: Tumblr Instagram Facebook Twitter Credits: I Ship It by Not Literally Cover image by our silent, smart (and don't forget sexy) producer, Jeremy Jeziorski. Some of the links we use are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission if you use them. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ishipitpod/support

"What you want is ME!" Omigod you guys! We're talking LEGALLY BLONDE! The musical that was doubted, praised, maligned, then praised again! Breakdown alum Abby Goldfarb (HARMONY, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF) comes back to discuss with Matt all things Law school, high belting, and female power! It's fun, funny and Matt NEVER shuts up. BEND AND SNAP KIDS!

House Armed Services chair calls national security software, systems 'too vulnerable' Microsoft Office 365 AutoSave can assist cloud ransomware attacks OMIGOD! There's more to OMIGOD Thanks to today's episode sponsor, Datadog Watch Datadog's on-demand webinar for a 30-minute discussion on driving DevSecOps best practices in the enterprise with CTO Cormac Brady. Over the course of his 20+ year career at Thomson Reuters, Cormac consistently built bridges between technical teams—and in the process helped teams achieve superior results and earned himself senior leadership positions. Cormac shares stories and leadership lessons that are applicable to any enterprise technical leader looking to help their firm build and operate services in an increasingly competitive and treacherous digital economy. Watch now at datadoghq.com/ciso/ For the stories behind the headlines, head to CISOseries.com.

Omigod. No, your eyes aren't deceiving you, here's an actual episode with dating advice from a podcast allegedly about dating culture. Shocking, huh?Joel and Naomi talk about date ideas in the metro-Phoenix area, breaking it down into categories that should be helpful for even non-Phoenicians to plan dates around. Some of these could be good first date suggestions, but most are things you would probably enjoy more with an SO you've been together with for a while. Most of these will probably appeal to our demo, the 20 to 40 crowd - don't complain to us for the lack of liver-spot clinic recommendations or whatever else the old folks are into these days.  We launched a Google Places Map in May that keeps track of all of these places and many many more. If you subscribe to our Patreon for just $5/month, you can access that, episodes ahead of time, bts material, and occasionally merch.  We strongly urge our listeners to support the work of Planned Parenthood by donating here. For the indefinite future all Patreon donations will go to them, NARAL, or other orgs doing good work across the nation.Interested in starting your own podcast? Check out our Buzzsprout link to get a $20 giftcard for signing up to host through them. If you're interested but not sold on the merits of the platform, give us a holler and we'll talk about why we chose and continue to use it. Support the show

Get on your bikes and join us this week to talk about stamina, local actress Nicole, and Thickness as we take you through E3: Omigod, She Threw Us Under The Bus

What can it mean when a man knows the exact date and time he's going to die?  And what does THAT mean to the people he hires to save him? Cast List Rena - Julie Hoverson Matilda - Kate Waterous Fred Quarry - Carl Cubbedge "Bud" - Anthony D.P. Mann (Horror Etc. Podcast) Infernique - Julia Belyea Ma - Angela Kirby Music by:  Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Brett Coulstock "What kind of a place is it? Why it's a bar parking lot, can't you tell?" ************************************************ FORCE MAJEURE Cast: [Opening credits - Olivia] Rena Matilda Fred Quarry, fat male comedian Beelzebud Infernique Ma OLIVIA     Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's a parking lot of a low life honky tonk, can't you tell?  MUSIC SOUND     DISTANT TRAFFIC, MUFFLED VERY LOUD MUSIC SOUND    DOOR SLAMS OPEN, MUSIC GETS LOUDER, SOUND OF A FIGHT SOUND    DOOR SLAMS, FOOTSTEPS SET OUT ACROSS PARKING LOT SOUND    DOOR QUICKLY OPENS AND SHUTS, SECOND PAIR OF FEET SCUTTLE AFTER FIRST QUARRY    [coming on]  Come on!  I'm sorry about that!  I really needed to know if you're as good as you're hyped up to be. RENA    [Snort]  QUARRY     I - I need some help here!  there's no place else I can turn.  RENA    [low uninflected growl] Bite me. SOUND    DOOT_DOOT OF CAR DOOR REMOTE SOUND    QUARRY'S FEET STOP QUARRY    I - I'm about to be murdered. SOUND    RENA'S FOOTSTEPS HESITATE JUST A SECOND, THEN CONTINUE. SOUND    CAR DOOR YANKED OPEN SOUND    QUARRY'S FEET NERVOUSLY DASH FORWARD QUARRY    No one will take me seriously - my agent, my wife.  Certainly not the police. RENA    [quiet] Big surprise. SOUND     THE CAR SQUEAKS AS SHE CLIMBS IN. QUARRY    [beginning to squeal] I'm desperate here!  Can't you just listen?  SOUND    DOOR SLAMS QUARRY    [squeaks as the door almost catches him] SOUND    RUSTLE OF PAPER QUARRY    I've got money!  If this isn't enough, I'll write you a bigger one!  Whatever you want! SOUND    CHECK SLAPPED FLAT AGAINST THE WINDOW SOUND    INSIDE THE CAR, NO NIGHT NOISES.  QUARRY'S VOICE IS VERY MUTED QUARRY    Anything! RENA    [sighs] SOUND    BUTTON PUSHED, WINDOW COMES DOWN, PAPER SNATCHED RENA    Get in. SOUND    THE DOOR LOCKS CLICK. MUSIC    JAZZ, UP AND THEN UNDER AS IT PLAYS ON THE CAR STEREO. SOUND    STARTS DRIVING AS THEY TALK RENA    What if this guy that's got you wee-ing yourself gets you while I'm out looking for him? QUARRY    He's...he's not gonna kill me 'til Saturday. RENA    He sent an itinerary? QUARRY    [very evasive]  It was all in the note. RENA    [skeptical]  But you believe him? QUARRY    Where are we going? RENA    We're just going.  [beat]  Why's he after you? QUARRY    Why?  I mean why does anyone do something wacko?  He probably just wants to be famous. RENA    And killing you would make him famous. QUARRY    [duh] Well, yeah. RENA    Why? QUARRY    Don't you - you don't... know who I am?  I'm Fred Quarry!  I told you that back in the bar. RENA    I was a little busy fighting off your thug.  QUARRY    The Fred Quarry - you know, with the sitcom, and the late night talk show? RENA    I don't watch much. QUARRY    I was on the cover of T.V. Guide twice last year - don'tcha shop at supermarkets? RENA    [still flat] Oh, THAT Fred Quarry. QUARRY    That's what I've been saying.  I'm famous.  Even you must have heard someone say- [catchphrase>] "No!  Reeeeally?" RENA    No.  Really. MUSIC SOUND    COMPUTER NOISES [MAT] CLEANING A GUN [RENA] MATILDA    You buy it? RENA    He's hiding something.  MATILDA    Most people are. RENA    Not me. MATILDA    But you're a robot. [beat]  Oh, come on. RENA    It wasn't funny when when we were kids, and it's not funny now. MATILDA    [sigh] Fine.  What now? RENA    You find anything on Quarry? MATILDA    He's actually pretty clean, for a hollywood bigshot.  Meteoric rise to fame, starring roles, gonna be roasted on comedy central. RENA    If this guy doesn't roast him first. SOUND    SLAPS THE SLIDE BACK INTO THE GUN MUSIC AMB    CAFE QUARRY    Nothing? RENA    Nothing. Your guy's in the wind. Invisible. QUARRY    [dreadful revelation] Of course... RENA    What? QUARRY    He... well... [gasp, then panicking] Oh crap!  Oh CRAP! SOUND    TRYING TO SQUEEZE OUT OF THE BOOTH AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE SOUND    DOOR OPENS, BELL JINGLES RENA    What's up? QUARRY    He said not until Saturday!!! RENA    [calm and dangerous] He won't do anything here. QUARRY    You don't know that!  Shit shit SHIT shit shit. RENA    I won't let anything happen - we have an agreement-- QUARRY    [squeals] SOUND    HE FALLS OUT ONTO THE FLOOR SOUND    FEET WALK UP AND STOP RENA    Are you supposed to be someone famous too?  Or just a goomba hit man? BUD    [affable] What could my pal here be telling you?  He's a little sensitive, ya know?  A little... over-imaginative.  All good entertainers are.  [dangerous] Arentcha? QUARRY    [mumbled] Go away. BUD    [tsks]  You're just undignified on the floor like that. SOUND    CHAIR PULLS UP, BUD SITS BUD    Want a hand? QUARRY    [squeal] SOUND    TRYING TO SCUTTLE AWAY RENA    What are your plans? BUD    Plans?  Just breakfast here with friends. SOUND    MENU FLAPS BUD    [pretending to read] What's good here? RENA    For Fred. BUD    Him?  They gotta low-cal menu?  RENA    I mean-- BUD    [exasperated sigh] Look sweetheart, drop this.  Whatever Fred here's told you, it ain't like that at all.  [serious] This ain't a game you can win. QUARRY    [whining]  You said Saturday.  You shouldn't be here. RENA    What is it, then? BUD    [chuckles]  Ask your boy about his contract. QUARRY    [high whine] MUSIC MATILDA    And then he just left? RENA    Yup.  But he dropped this. SOUND    SLAP OF PLASTIC CARD ON TABLE MATILDA    Oh, please - how transparent.  Either he's an idiot or he's setting up a meet. RENA    Too early to tell. MATILDA    [musing] But he didn't deny anything.  Hmm.  Did I get everything on the description? SOUND    COMPUTER KEYS MATILDA    [reading]  5'6, narrow face, dark hair - slightly receding, crooked teeth, wiry, but looks tough? RENA    Yup. MATILDA    Looks something like this? RENA    [leans in]  Yeah.  Not the guy, but that same kind of look. MATILDA    Great.  So we're hunting Steve Buscemi in a pale green leisure suit. MUSIC SOUND    HOTEL KEY CARD, DOOR OPENS SURREPTITIOUSLY SOUND    QUIET FOOTSTEPS SOUND    LIGHT SWITCH BUD    Hiya. RENA    [disgusted noise, then resigned]  My sister says-- BUD    [chuckles] Yeah?  Well, I ain't an idiot.  C'mon in. RENA    [disturbed, suspicious] Yeah. SOUND    DOOR SHUTS BUD    You wanna drink?  The mini-bar ain't world class, but... it's on me. RENA    I wouldn't drink anything "on you." BUD    [ouch noise] Brass tacks, then.  You want to know why you should drop whiny boy's case?  Try this. SOUND    FLIPS OUT BUSINESS CARD RENA    "Beelzebud - Recruitment - F-M-C"? SOUND    FLASH FLAME RENA    [gasps, blows on fingers] Beelze-what?  BUD    Just call me Bud.  I hate being mistaken for that other guy.  It's not like I'm Joe Estevez.  [beat]  Frank Stallone? RENA    [she's not getting the joke] Nice card.  Flashpaper? BUD    [disgusted sigh]  All right-- [voice begins to change]  How plain do I have to make this?  Tell your sister [raises his voice] or is she listening right now? RENA    [gasp] MATILDA    [filter, quiet] What the--? BUD    [still raised] Get on the internet and look up demons.  [voice very demonic]  There's a particularly good Web site at www dot legion dot H-E-L, but I'm not sure you can access it.  [coming back to normal] It ain't exactly ... user friendly.  And god knows it ain't Vista compatible. RENA    [flat, unbelieving] You're a demon? BUD    [sigh] Whaddaya want, horns?  That's such a drag - always having to fix my hair again once I get done showing off.  RENA    Yeah, that's a lot of grease to reapply. BUD    [long intake of breath, then sucks his teeth]  I like you.  You don't scare.  [beat] You guess my interest in Freddy boy yet?  How bout you phone a friend - eh, sis? MATILDA    [filter, getting it] A contract. RENA    A contract...? BUD    Bingo.  I held up my end, and now he wants to welsh.  So who's really in the wrong?  'Sides, there's nothing you can do - I get his life.  One way or another, Quarry's gonna die.  He might slip in the shower, choke on a herringbone, or have a turtle drop out of the freakin' sky on his head - but he will die.  I don't even gotta be there. MUSIC SOUND    POUNDING ON A DOOR QUARRY    [squeak] SOUND    CHAIN LOCK OFF, STARTS TO OPEN DOOR, BUT IT SLAMS OPEN ON HIM QUARRY    [Starts to scream, is muffled] SOUND    DOOR SLAMS SOUND    BODY UP AGAINST WALL RENA    I believe this is yours. SOUND    BUNCH OF PAPER FLIPPED OUT ALL OVER FLOOR QUARRY    [squinched up] You said you don't give refunds. RENA    I'm making an exception.  You're lucky I don't feel like breaking my "I don't beat the crap out of my employers" rule, too. SOUND    CRUMPLING MONEY QUARRY    [crying piteously] Look at me - oodles of money, married to a supermodel, top of the world - and it's all ashes. RENA    You made your own bed. QUARRY    [getting a bit tough]  So I don't wanna die - is that so wrong? RENA    Everyone dies. QUARRY    But me - I'm gonna die day after tomorrow!!!  And you won't even help!  RENA    Does the word "demon" ring a bell? QUARRY    Wouldya have believed me?  I don't think so. RENA    [mocking his catchphrase] No.  Reeeeally? MUSIC SOUND    DRIVING IN A CAR MATILDA    [on filter]  Too bad.  He is Fred Quarry. RENA    I still don't care.  He's a weasely little shmuck. MATILDA    Too bad you didn't keep the check - once he's dead, that signature'll be worth big bucks. RENA    Oh, please. MATILDA    I have the soul of a collector. RENA    And the taste of a crazy cat lady. MATILDA    [huffy] I have never tasted a crazy cat lady in my life. RENA    [snort, almost a chuckle] MUSIC SOUND    SNORING [rena] SOUND    PHONE RINGS SOUND    FUMBLING FOR PHONE, PICKS UP RENA    [barely awake] What? BUD    [filter] Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eh? RENA    Yup.  Thanks for calling. SOUND    STARTS TO FUMBLE PHONE BACK BUD    [filter, getting smaller] Wait-wait-wait!  Should I call back after you have some coffee?  Lithium? RENA    [sigh]  Speak. BUD    [filter] This ain't exactly something I wanna discuss over the phone. RENA    Where? MUSIC SOUND    PARK AMB SOUND    FEET ON GRAVEL RENA    So? BUD    Your sister on the line?  RENA    Yeah.  BUD    Where? RENA    Where what?   She's at our office. BUD    She always is, isn't she?  She don't get out much.  I mean where's the mike? RENA    Does it matter? BUD    I don't like being bugged. RENA    I can always leave. BUD    No, no.  Well, if she's gonna be part of this deeply personal conversation - introduce us, wouldja? RENA    Matilda.  Bud.  Happy? BUD    Thrilled.  And you? RENA    I'm thrilled too. BUD    Your name.  You know mine. RENA    I've already forgotten it. BUD    Bud. RENA    Rena.   You're lucky I'm not charging by the minute. BUD    Fine.  I gotta trade for ya - I leave your boy sucking air, and you do something for me. RENA    He's not my boy.  BUD    Well.... see if you can get back on the payroll, and take him for as much as you can get.  [sigh] I wouldn't even consider any of this but you don't strike me like someone who's gonna laugh me out. MATILDA    [filter, quiet]  Wow, finally your lack of a sense of humor actually comes in handy. BUD    [uncomfortable] See, I ain't had a date in a really long time-- RENA    Not interested. SOUND    STARTS TO WALK AWAY.  MATILDA    [filter, quiet]  I might be.  I loved Fargo. BUD    [demonic voice] LISTEN. SOUND    FEET STOP BUD    No offense to you, sweet cheeks, but dating a human is like having a freaking hamster for a pet.  Cute and cuddly, but the relationship has the lifespan of about a week.  [lighter]  Besides that wheel just gets on your freakin' nerves.  [laughs] RENA     That "funny". How's that working for you? BUD    I'm an acquired taste.  So... [long breath] I spotted another demon.  A real looker.  Last night at a club.  Dark hair, sleek body...  RENA    Do I look like a yenta? BUD    [urgent] Find out who she is and get me a date. RENA    A... date? BUD    Yeah, a date - I don't mean you gotta guarantee "va-va-voom" or nothing, just get her to go out with me.  If I can't take it from there, well... that's my problem. RENA    And Quarry goes free. BUD    Well... Instead of death, I can settle for total ruination.  People come back from worse every day.  Look at Rob Lowe.  Marion Barry? MATILDA    I'll call Fred! MUSIC SOUND    OUTSIDE, APPROACHING A NIGHTCLUB RENA    [musing] Goblin and the Trolls - Delightful.  Bad sixties rehash or cheez metal? MATILDA    Give me a second. RENA    It was rhetorical. MATILDA    Cheez. RENA    What? MATILDA    The band.  They sound like Gwar without the bodily fluids. RENA    Woo.  This better work.  How do I turn it on? SOUND    BOX OPENS; CHIMEY HUM, MUTED - GETS LOUDER AS SHE GOES THROUGH THE DOOR.  MUSIC IS PLAYING MATILDA    Dunno - Bud just said that crystal would lead you to--  Oh, jeez. RENA    What? SOUND    CHIMEY THING GETS LOUDER. MATILDA    Feedback.  Call when you turn it off. SOUND    MATILDA OUT RENA    Oh, goody. MUSIC MUSIC MUTES WITH THE SHUTTING OF A DOOR SOUND    SINK RUNS, THEN STOPS. SOUND    LIPSTICK OPENS. SOUND    PAPER TOWELS RENA    [very uncomfortable] Hi. INFERNIQUE    It's not your color. RENA    No, I-- INFERNIQUE    Weren't you asking to borrow my lipstick? RENA    No, I-- INFERNIQUE    Then... [smacks lips] No, I'm not into chicks. RENA    No!  I-- INFERNIQUE    [sigh] What, then? RENA    [fumbling, flustered]  This is going to sound... well, like something out of junior high school. INFERNIQUE    Dissection? RENA    I have a sort of a ...friend who wants me to tell you that he thinks you're ... attractive - and he wants me to - he wants to ... ask you out. INFERNIQUE    And he's what ... shy? RENA    No, he's one of - your kind.  He saw you here last night-- INFERNIQUE    That iguana in the leisure suit?  I don't think so. SOUND    BUSINESS CARD SLAPPED ONTO COUNTER RENA    Just in case, here's my-- SOUND    BODY SLAMMED UP AGAINST WALL RENA     [gasp] INFERNIQUE    [suddenly intense] Don't try to set me up, bait.  I happen to be honest.  If you're some kind of half-ass demon-hunter, you can bite me, [demonic whisper] and I don't mean in the nice way.  SOUND    MUSIC STARTS SOUND    BODY SLAMMED BACK INTO WALL INFERNIQUE    Gotta go, sweetheart - my boys are on. MUSIC SOUND    CAR DOOR SLAMS SHUT, SMACK TO STEERING WHEEL RENA    I hate bitches.  SOUND    PUNCHING BUTTONS ON A CELLPHONE RENA    Especially DEMON bitches. BUD    I take it the date's off? SOUND    PHONE FALLS TO FLOOR, STILL RINGING RENA    [completely surprised]  What the crap?  How'd you get into my-- BUD    "Demon"? RENA    Right.  That.  MATILDA    [filter] What's up?  Hang up your phone. RENA    It's on the floor.  Yes, she wouldn't go for it.  BUD    Figures.  Classy deme like that.  [sigh]  It was worth a try.  I owe you something. RENA    No thanks. BUD    Nonsense.  I always pay up.  How about a new car or something? RENA    Answer some questions. BUD    If I can - some things man ain't meant to know. RENA    This demon bitch said she's "honest"?  BUD    So? RENA    The way she said it, it seems like it meant something ... more. BUD    [trying to decide] Hmm.  Yeah, you can know that.  Ok, I think your basic problem here is that you're thinking demons are the enemies of god, right? RENA    Go on. BUD    See, what you're forgetting is that in a big business, the janitors work for the same boss as the executives.  Get me? MATILDA    [filter] Interesting. RENA    No. BUD    God made folks able to choose right from wrong.  He wants 'em to choose, right, sure, but if wrong ain't enticing, it ain't a fair test.  MATILDA    [filter] Makes sense. BUD     So, you get a bunch of mooks like me running around tempting people.  If they're good clean folks who would rather do the right thing, then they just don't take us up on it.  Otherwise... MATILDA    [filter] Sort of like if chocolate tasted like celery, we'd all be a size 8. RENA    Matilda says-- BUD    Skip the replay - I can hear her. RENA    So, "Honest"? BUD    Right, um.  We have rules.  We don't lie to make a deal - we omit everything under the sun, but can't tell an actual untruth.  We can only offer stuff, in return for... stuff.  We can't threaten folks - you know, say something like "if you don't sign, we'll kill your dog", y'know?  [joking] And it's murder if you pull out the red-hot pokers. MATILDA    [filter] So why hasn't he - sorry, why haven't you - tried to tempt us? BUD    You're not my type.  Uh, no offense - my department is fat male comedians.  You may have seen some of my work. MATILDA    [filter] Really?  Like John Belushi?  John Candy?  [ghoulish] Fatty Arbuckle?  BUD    Far be it from me to name names, but let's just say how else would Tommy Boy and Black Sheep both get made? MATILDA    [filter] Wow.  So what do you... do? BUD    Actually, not much.  I mean, the way I roll is I don't make talentless gobs into stars - much easier to scout the ones who actually have what it takes but no luck, catch 'em at a low point, and scoop them and their haagen dasz up like sand on the beach.  Do a little work - pretty much like any other agent - and reap the rewards. RENA    You're a shit. BUD    Pretty much like any other agent.  RENA    Your percentage is a little high. BUD    Look, babe.  It's my job.  It may be a crap job, but I'm good at it.  Always in the black.  And you don't want to run over on these kinds of projects - the accounting department - whew!  I mean, you wanna see bureacracy, go to hell. MATILDA    [filter]  But you could - decide not to kill Quarry? BUD    Well, it seems like a wash now, but yeah - I gotta little discretion.  Won't be a gold star on my record, but I stay ahead enough - basically he'd be a small loss, like losing money for a tax writeoff.  MUSIC SOUND    RUSTLE OF PAPER, EATING NOISES SOUND    TV, COMPUTER, PLAYS IN BG MATILDA    [around food]  Hold on, um, here-- SOUND    REMOTE CLICKS, T.V. SOUND UP QUARRY    [on T.V.]  No, Reeeally? SOUND    [on T.V.]  MUSIC CUTS TO COMMERCIAL, SOUND DOWN RENA    He's still an idiot. MATILDA    You don't feel sorry for him?  At all? RENA    Right.  Next I can feel sorry for the chain smoker who's going through cancer and the gangbanger who gets caught in a drive by.  Let's just help everyone. MATILDA    [tsks] SOUND    KNOCKING AT THE DOOR RENA    Got it. SOUND    CREAK OF CHAIR, FOOTSTEPS, LITTLE METAL PEEPHOLE DOOR RENA    What? QUARRY    [outside] Can we talk? RENA    [disgusted sigh, calls over her shoulder]  Incoming! SOUND    SEVERAL LOCKS UNLOCK, DOOR OPENS QUARRY    [coming in] I brought someone to talk to you.  Maybe it'll help. MA    [old and feeble] Hi. RENA    I thought she was a supermodel. QUARRY    Huh?  MA    You're thinking of Divana, his wife.  I'm his mother. MATILDA    Is that--?  [laughs]  No, Reeeally? QUARRY    [disconcerted] Uh, who's that? RENA    My sister.  She's a big fan. MA    [quiet] Oh. QUARRY    You stay here, ma, and talk to this nice lady, I'll go sign an autograph or something. MA    Um. [quietly] So, you're a friend of Fred's? RENA    No.  MA    Oh, uh - Fred's such a nice boy.  He paid off my mortgage. RENA    Good for you. MA    And he even bought me a new hip.   You should really help with whatever-- MATILDA    [from off] Oh my god!  Is that Mamma Farnaby?  Bring her on over! MA    [losing the cutesy old lady]  Oh, Crap. SOUND    FOOTSTEPS, KICKING A BAG ASIDE RENA    You know her? QUARRY    [mumbled]  She's my... mom. MATILDA    She plays his mother on the show. MA    I tried. MATILDA    Come on over, I gotta get your autograph too! MUSIC SOUND    CAR DOOR CLOSES, KEYS INTO IGNITION RENA    [talking to Mat] Yes, I got them.  Um-hmm, The frosted kind, not the glazed-- INFERNIQUE    [pointed sigh] RENA    Oh, I should have mentioned the black-eyed bitch in the back seat.  Why are you here? INFERNIQUE    To make a deal. RENA    How'd you find me? INFERIQUE    You left me your card. RENA    Funny how that connects up to catching me in the car at the grocery store. INFERNIQUE    I'm here to make a deal.  A one time offer. RENA    Deal? INFERNIQUE    I will go to [disgusted] karaoke, or miniature golf, or whatever appeals to your... [slur] friend.  But you have to do something for me. RENA    I'm listening? INFERNIQUE    I've run a bit over budget for my "current project".  You do understand what I'm talking about? RENA    I've got the basics.  Hell.  Bureaucracy.  Budgets. INFERNIQUE    Good.  My current client is the "singer" for that ...band.  RENA    I'm sorry. INFERNIQUE    And I need someone to kill him. RENA    [beat, but still even] Isn't that... cheating?  INFERNIQUE    Don't ask.  Don't tell.  MUSIC SOUND    LOCKS UNLOCK, DOOR OPENS, FOOTSTEPS [laughter] SOUND    TV PAUSES RENA    [coming in] They only had a dozen-- oh. MATILDA    [off] There won't be enough to go around. QUARRY    [off] What'dja bring? MA    [off] I'm off grains anyway. SOUND    FEET RENA    I take it you weren't on the cans the whole time I was gone? MATILDA    [sharp]  What?  You said you got the frosted ones, then hung up. RENA    Shit.  Get your ears on.  I'll step outside. QUARRY    [eager] We could - you know - leave. MA    I do have a rolfing session at 5. MATILDA    Oh, all right.  Come back sometime, ya hear? SOUND    FOOTSTEPS MATILDA    [calling]  Bye!  Thanx again for hanging out! MA    Bye, dear. MATILDA    Give me one, willya? RENA    [beat] She means you. QUARRY    Right. [deep breath, then in character] No, Reeeaally? MATILDA     [laughs delightedly]  Yay! SOUND    DOOR SHUTS, BUT PEEPHOLE DOOR OPENS RENA    [talking loudly]  It was that demon chick.  MATILDA    [both quiet and on filter] You don't have to yell. RENA    She said if I killed her "client", she would get Bud to let Quarrie off. MATILDA    You shouldn't-- RENA    Yeah, that singer with the band.  I just don't think I can do that.  Even for ten times the money.  I'm just... not a killer. MATILDA    [quiet]  But you are a conniving bitch. RENA    I guess I can think about it, but your pal's time is nearly up.  [overly dramatic sigh]  MATILDA    How will you get him there? RENA    I suppose it can't hurt to go and see the band tonight.  See what the vic's like. MATILDA    [chuckles evilly]  I suppose it can't. SOUND    A MOMENT, THEN LITTLE METAL DOOR SHUTS RENA    Did he give you a new check? MUSIC AMB    BACK ALLEY INFERNIQUE    Goblin's not dead yet. RENA    [gasp, slightly irritated] You really need to stop doing that. INFERNIQUE    It's part of my charm.  Ask your little "friend." RENA    You said that as long as Goblin's dead by midnight, you'll-- INFERNIQUE    Must I say it again?  "go out with that... fellow." RENA    Bud. INFERNIQUE    [as if it's offal]  Bud. RENA    Right.  Thanks. INFERNIQUE    See you later.  [slowly sounding demonic] Don't jerk me around.  You wouldn't like to see me angry.  RENA    [unruffled]  Yeah.  Betcha get ugly.  I'll be inside. SOUND    STEPS, DOOR OPENS BUD    Was that wise? RENA    Promising a dead goblin? BUD    Uh, no - pissing her off.  [avid] Not that she ain't seriously hot when she lets the red out, but-- RENA    It's fine.  And you'll be in the black. MATILDA    [on radio]  Though I'll bet he'd rather be "in the red" ... at least if she's steamy enough... BUD    Hah!  You gotta dirty mind, babe. RENA    Darn.  And all I got was looks. SOUND    3 GUN SHOTS BUD    What the--? RENA    Hold on.  [waits a second] BUD    [whispered] I don't hear nothing. RENA    Ok.  He's coming. BUD    What? RENA    Had to make sure there weren't any more. BUD    What--? SOUND    DOOR SLAMS OPEN QUARRY    [under his breath] Omigod! Omigod! Omigod! RENA    Over here. QUARRY    What? BUD    [realizing]  Oh?  Oh!  That's beautiful! QUARRY    I gotta get out of here! RENA    No. QUARRY    What? RENA    Do you have your story? QUARRY    Story? RENA    Play the crazy card. QUARRY    Crazy - Look, ask him-- no, I'll ask him-- [yelling off]  Am I out?  I mean, are we square? BUD    [smug] We'll know in just a sec, won't we? RENA    Fred, focus.  Crazy talk. QUARRY    Why? RENA    You're gonna get caught. QUARRY    No!  I mean - why? BUD    She's right.  About a surprising lot of things, Freddy babe.  You can't walk away free and clear, but-- INFERNIQUE    He's dead.  [mock sympathy] Before you could even get in there.  Too bad about that. QUARRY    [long squeal] Noooo! BUD    Ah, crap. RENA    [calm] I never said I was going to kill him. INFERNIQUE    You-- RENA    I specified "as long as he's dead by midnight--" and you agreed. MATILDA    [on radio]  You want a playback on that?  For your records, maybe? INDERNIQUE    Blast you! BUD    You can blast me, babe.  But... you know you gotta come through.  For her. INFERNIQUE    [long hissing breath as she decides]  Fine!  But you may just rue this day later. BUD    Freddy there will. QUARRY    I'm just tickled there is a later. BUD    Oh, yeah.  You're clear.  [to Inf]  Shall we?  I know this cute little place where they make the best lobster calzone.  Mwa! [to Fred] Make sure your check doesn't bounce.  Those chicks'll fuck you up. RENA    Yup. QUARRY    Cash it quick. RENA    Now for the crazy talk. MUSIC TV NEWS    --Remanded for psychiatric evaluation after he broke down on the stand and claimed that the devil demanded he kill or be killed. MATILDA    Tsk.  They should be nicer to that poor boy. RENA    Why? MATILDA    The rest of the news is all politicians and disasters.  RENA    So? MATILDA    He's a rarity. RENA    A celebrity criminal? MATILDA    Someone actually telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. RENA    [almost a chuckle] CLOSER

Parce que… c'est l'épisode 0x112! Préambule Shameless plug COVID-19 4 au 6 avril 2022 - Québec Numérique - SéQCure 2022 4 au 8 avril 2022 - Québec Numérique - Semaine numériqc Notes Communications du CSNM : CVE-2021-38647 - Guide des mises à jour de sécurité - Microsoft - Vulnérabilité d'exécution de code à distance dans Open Management Infrastructure Conseils supplémentaires concernant les vulnérabilités OMI dans les extensions de gestion des machines virtuelles Azure – Centre de réponse de sécurité Microsoft Conseils du Centre de sécurité Azure : Utilisation d'ASC pour rechercher des machines affectées par des vulnérabilités OMI dans azure VM Management Extensions - Microsoft Tech Community Détections sentinelles : Azure-Sentinel/NetworkConnectiontoOMIPorts.yaml at master · Azure/Azure-Sentinel · GitHub (en) Azure-Sentinel/OMIGODVulnerableMachines.yaml at master · Azure/Azure-Sentinel · GitHub (en) Azure-Sentinel/SCXExecuteRunAsProviders.yml at master · Azure/Azure-Sentinel (github.com) [mis à jour le 24 septembre 2021] Logiciels et outils : GitHub - microsoft/SCXcore : fournisseur multiplateforme System Center pour Operations Manager GitHub - microsoft/Build-omi : Générer des projets requis pour OMI (Open Management Infrastructure) Environnements de laboratoire de recherche : Azure-Sentinel2Go/grocery-list/Linux/demos/CVE-2021-38647-OMI at master · OTRF/Azure-Sentinel2Go (github.com) Débat public sur les attaques dans la nature : chris doman sur Twitter: « :loudspeaker: OMIGOD (CVE-2021-38647) est maintenant en exploitation active :loudspeaker: Nous avons jeté un coup d'œil à l'un des premiers échantillons - oui, c'est Mirai! Si vous exécutez Linux sur Azure, vérifiez si OMI est installé Andrew Morris sur Twitter : « La vulnérabilité Azure « OHMIGOD » (CVE-2021-38647) augmente un peu. ~ 10 IP exploitant de manière opportuniste le vuln sur Internet ce matin, ~ 80 maintenant. Tags disponibles pour tous les utilisateurs et clients GN maintenant. GNQL: cve:CVE-2021-38647 Kevin Beaumont sur Twitter: « Oh Mirai a corrigé leur binaire, il prend maintenant en charge l'exploitation correcte d'OMIGOD. Étant donné que Mirai peut entrer dans les réseaux et se propager latéralement via plusieurs vulns, cela pourrait être problématique. Collaborateurs Nicolas-Loïc Fortin Franck Desert Crédits Montage audio par Intrasecure inc Locaux virtuels par Zoom

About ShirShir Tamari is the Head of Research of Wiz, the cloud security company. He is an experienced security and technology researcher specializing in vulnerability research and practical hacking. In the past, he served as a consultant to a variety of security companies in the fields of research, development and product.About SagiSagi Tzadik is a security researcher in the Wiz Research Team. Sagi specializes in research and exploitation of web applications vulnerabilities, as well as network security and protocols. He is also a Game-Hacking and Reverse-Engineering enthusiast.About NirNir Ohfeld is a security researcher from Israel. Nir currently does cloud-related security research at Wiz. Nir specializes in the exploitation of web applications, application security and in finding vulnerabilities in complex high-level systems.Links: Wiz: https://www.wiz.io Cloud CVE Slack channel: https://cloud-cve-db.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-y38smqmo-V~d4hEr_stQErVCNx1OkMA Wiz Blog: https://wiz.io/blog Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiz_io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. One of the joyful parts of working with cloud computing is that you get to put a whole lot of things you don't want to deal with onto the shoulders of the cloud provider you're doing business with—or cloud providers as the case may be, if you fallen down the multi-cloud well. One of those things is often significant aspects of security. And that's great, right, until it isn't. Today, I'm joined by not one guest, but rather three coming to us from Wiz, which I originally started off believing was, oh, it's a small cybersecurity research group. But they're far more than that. Thank you for joining me, and could you please introduce yourself?Shir: Yes, thank you, Corey. My name is Shir, Shir Tamari. I lead the security research team at Wiz. I working in the company for the past year. I'm working with these two nice teammates.Nir: Hi, my name is Nir Ohfield,. I'm a security researcher at the Wiz research team. I've also been working for the Wiz research team for the last year. And yeah.Sagi: I'm Sagi, Sagi Tzadik. I also work for the Wiz research team for the last six months.Corey: I want to thank you for joining me. You folks really burst onto the scene earlier this year, when I suddenly started seeing your name come up an awful lot. And it brought me back to my childhood where there was an electronics store called Nobody Beats the Wiz. It was more or less a version of Fry's on a different coast, and they went out of business and oh, good. We're going back in time. And suddenly it felt like I was going back in time in a different light because you had a number of high profile vulnerabilities that you had discovered, specifically in the realm of Microsoft Azure. The two that leap to mind the most readily for me are ChaosDB and the OMIGOD exploits. There was a third as well, but why don't you tell me, in your own words, what it is that you discovered and how that played out?Shir: We, sort of, found the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure. We did report multiple vulnerabilities also in GCP, and AWS. We had multiple vulnerabilities in AWS [unintelligible 00:02:42] cross-account. It was a cross-account access to other tenants; it just was much less severe than the ChaosDB vulnerability that we will speak on more later. And a both we've present in Blackhat in Vegas in [unintelligible 00:02:56]. So, we do a lot of research. You mentioned that we have a third one. Which one did you refer to?Corey: That's a good question because you had the I want to say it was called as Azurescape, and you're doing a fantastic job with branding a number of your different vulnerabilities, but there's also, once you started reporting this, a lot of other research started coming out as well from other folks. And I confess, a lot of it sort of flowed together and been very hard to disambiguate, is this a systemic problem; is this, effectively, a whole bunch of people piling on now that their attention is being drawn somewhere; or something else? Because you've come out with an awful lot of research in a short period of time.Shir: Yeah, we had a lot of good research in the past year. It's a [unintelligible 00:03:36] mention Azurecape was actually found by a very good researcher in Palo Also. And… do you remember his name?Sagi: No, I can't recall his name is.Corey: Yeah, they came out of unit 42 as I recall, their cybersecurity division. Every tech company out there seems to have some sort of security research division these days. What I think is, sort of, interesting is that to my understanding, you were founded, first and foremost, as a security company. You're not doing this as an ancillary to selling something else like a firewall, or, effectively, you're an ad comp—an ad tech company like Google, we you're launching Project Zero. You are first and foremost aimed at this type of problem.Shir: Yes. Wiz is not just a small research company. It's actually pretty big company with over 200 employees. And the purpose of this product is a cloud security suite that provides [unintelligible 00:04:26] scanning capabilities in order to find risks in cloud environments. And the research team is a very small group. We are [unintelligible 00:04:35] researchers.We have multiple responsibilities. Our first responsibility is to find risks in cloud environments: It could be misconfigurations, it could be vulnerabilities in libraries, in software, and we add those findings and the patterns we discover to the product in order to protect our customers, and to allow them for new risks. Our second responsibility is also to do a community research where we research everyone vulnerabilities in public products and cloud providers, and we share our findings with the cloud providers, then also with the community to make the cloud more secure.Corey: I can't shake the feeling that if there weren't folks doing this sort of research and shining a light on what it is that the cloud providers are doing, if they were to discover these things at all, they would very quietly, effectively, fix it in the background and never breathe a word of it in public. I like the approach that you're taking as far as dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the daylight, but I also have to imagine that probably doesn't win you a whole lot of friends at the company that you're focusing on at any given point in time. Because whenever you talk to a company about a security issue, it seems like the first thing they're concerned about is, “Okay, how do we wind up spinning this or making sure that we minimize the reputational damage?” And then there's a secondary reaction of, “Oh, and how do we protect our customers? But mostly, how do we avoid looking bad as a result?” And I feel like that's an artifact of corporate culture these days. But it feels like the relationship has got to be somewhat interesting to navigate from your perspective.Shir: So, once we found a vulnerability and we discuss it with the vendor, okay, first, I will mention that most cloud providers have a bug bounty program where they encourage researchers to find vulnerabilities and to discover new security threats. And all of them, as a public disclosure, [unintelligible 00:06:29] program will researchers are welcome and get safe harbor, you know, where the disclosure vulnerabilities. And I think it's, like, common interest, both for customers, but for researchers, and the cloud providers to know about those vulnerabilities, to mitigate it down. And we do believe that sometimes cloud providors does resolve and mitigate vulnerabilities behind the scenes, and we know—we don't know for sure, but—I don't know about everything, but just by the vulnerabilities that we find, we assume that there is much more of them that we never heard about. And this is something that we believe needs to be changed in the industry.Cloud providers should be more transparent, they should show more information about the result vulnerabilities. Definitely when a customer data was accessible, or where it was at risk, or at possible risk. And this is actually—it's something that we actually trying to change in the industry. We have a community and, like, innovative community. It's like an initiative that we try to collect, we opened a Slack channel called the Cloud CVE, and we try to invite as much people as we can that concern about cloud's vulnerabilities, in order to make a change in the industry, and to assist cloud providers, or to convince cloud providers to be more transparent, to enumerate cloud vulnerabilities so they have an identifier just, like cloud CVE, like a CVE, and to make the cloud more protected and more transparent customers.Corey: The thing that really took me aback by so much of what you found is that we've become relatively accustomed to a few patterns over the past 15 to 20 years. For example, we're used to, “Oh, this piece of software you run on your desktop has a horrible flaw. Great.” Or this thing you run in your data center, same story; patch, patch, patch, patch patch. That's great.But there was always the sense that these were the sorts of things that were sort of normal, but the cloud providers were on top of things, where they were effectively living up to their side of the shared responsibility bargain. And that whenever you wound up getting breached, for whatever reason—like in the AWS world, where oh, you wound up losing a bunch of customer data because you had an open S3 bucket? Well, yeah, that's not really something you can hang super effectively around the neck of the cloud provider, given that you're the one that misconfigured that. But what was so striking about what you found with both of the vulnerabilities that we're talking about today, the customer could have done everything absolutely correctly from the beginning and still had their data exposed. And that feels like it's something relatively new in the world of cloud service providers.Is this something that's been going on for a while and we're just now shining a light on it? Have I just missed a bunch of interesting news stories where the clouds have—“Oh, yeah, by the way, people, we periodically have to go in and drag people out of our cloud control plane because oops-a-doozy, someone got in there again with the squirrels,” or is this something that is new?Shir: So, we do see an history other cases where probability [unintelligible 00:09:31] has disclosed vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure itself. There was only few, and usually, it was—the research was conducted by independent researchers. And I don't think it had such an impact, like ChaosDB, which allowed [cross-system 00:09:51] access to databases of other customers, which was a huge case. And so if it wasn't a big story, so most people will not hear about it. And also, independent researchers usually don't have the back that we have here in Wiz.We have a funding, we have the marketing division that help us to get coverage with reporters, who make sure to make—if it's a big story, we make sure that other people will hear about it. And I believe that in most bug bounty programs where independent researchers find vulnerabilities, usually they more care about the bounty than the aftereffect of stopping the vulnerability, sharing it with the community. Usually also, independent [unintelligible 00:10:32] usually share the findings with the research community. And the research community is relatively small to the IT community. So, it is new, but it's not that new.There was some events back in history, [unintelligible 00:10:46] similar vulnerabilities. So, I think that one of the points here is that everyone makes a mistake. You can find bugs which affected mostly, as you mentioned previously, this software that you installed on your desktop has bugs and you need to patch it, but in the case of cloud providers, when they make mistakes, when they introduce bugs to the service, it affects all of their customers. And this is something that we should think about. So, mistakes that are being made by cloud providers have a lot of impact regarding their customers.Corey: Yeah. It's not a story of you misconfigured, your company's SAN, so you're the one that was responsible for a data breach. It's suddenly, you're misconfiguring everyone's SAN simultaneously. It's the sheer scale and scope of what it is that they've done. And—Shir: Yeah, exactly.Corey: —I'm definitely on board with that. But the stuff I've seen in the past, from cloud providers—AWS, primarily, since that is admittedly where I tend to focus most of my time and energy—has been privilege escalation style stuff, where, okay, if you assign some users at your company—or wherever—access to this managed IAM policy, well, they'll have suddenly have access to things that go beyond the scope of that. And that's not good, let's be very clear on that, but it is a bit different between that and oh, by the way, suddenly, someone in another company that has no relationship established with you at all can suddenly rummage through your data that you're storing in Cosmos DB, their managed database offering. That's the thing to me that I think was the big head-turning aspect of this, not just for me, but for a number of folks I've spoken to, in financial services, in government, in a bunch of environments where data privacy is not optional in the same way that it is when, you know, you're running a social media for pets app.Nir: [laugh]. Yeah, but the thing is, that until the publication of ChaosDB, no one ever heard about the [unintelligible 00:12:40] data tampering in any cloud providers. Meaning maybe in six months, you can see a similar vulnerabilities in other cloud providers that maybe other security research groups find. So yeah, so Azure was maybe the first, but we don't think they will be the last.Shir: Yes. And also, when we do the community research, it is very important to us to take big targets. We enjoy the research. One day, the research will be challenging and we want to do something that it was new and great, so we always put a very big targets. To actually find vulnerability in the infrastructure of the cloud provider, it was very challenging for us.When didn't came ChaosDB by that; we actually found it by mistake. But now we think actively that this is our next goal is to find vulnerabilities in the infrastructure and not just vulnerabilities that affect only the—vulnerabilities within the account itself, like [unintelligible 00:13:32] or bad scoped policies that affects only one account.Corey: That seems to be the transformative angle that you don't see nearly as much in existing studies around vulnerabilities in this space. It's always the, “Oh, no. We could have gotten breached by those people across the hallway from us in our company,” as opposed to folks on the other side of the planet. And that is, I guess, sort of the scary thing. What has also been interesting to me, and you obviously have more experience with this than I do, but I have a hard time envisioning that, for example, AWS, having a vulnerability like this and not immediately swinging into disaster firefighting mode, sending their security execs on a six month speaking tour to explain what happened, how it got there, all of the steps that they're taking to remediate this, but Azure published a blog post explaining this in relatively minor detail: Here are the mitigations you need to take, and as far as I can tell, then they sort of washed their hands of the whole thing and have enthusiastically begun saying absolutely nothing since.And that I have learned is sort of fairly typical for Microsoft, and has been for a while, where they just don't talk about these things when it arises. Does that match your experience? Is this something that you find that is common when a large company winds up being, effectively, embarrassed about their security architecture, or is this something that is unique to Microsoft tends to approach these things?Shir: I would say in general, we really like the Microsoft MSRC team. The group in Microsoft that's responsible for handling vulnerabilities, and I think it's like the security division inside Microsoft, MSRC. So, we have a really good relationship and we had really good time working with them. They're real professionals, they take our findings very seriously. I can tell that in the ChaosDB incident, they didn't plan to publish a blog post, and they did that after the story got a lot of attention.So, I'm looking at a PR team, and I have no idea out there decide stuff and what is their strategy, but as I mentioned earlier, we believe that there is much more cloud vulnerabilities that we never heard of, and it should change; they should publish more.Nir: It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft acted really quick on this vulnerability and took it very seriously. They issued the fix in less than 48 hours. They were very transparent in the entire procedure, and we had multiple teams meeting with them. The entire experience was pretty positive with each of the vulnerability we've ever reported to Microsoft.Sagi: So, it's really nice working with the guys that are responsible for security, but regarding PR, I agree that they should have posted more information regarding this incident.Corey: The thing that I found interesting about this, and I've seen aspects of it before, but never this strongly is, I was watching for, I guess, what I would call just general shittiness, for lack of a better term, from the other providers doing a happy dance of, “Aha, we're better than you are,” and I saw none of that. Because when I started talking to people in some depth at this at other companies, the immediate response—not just AWS, to be clear—has been no, no, you have to understand, this is not good for anyone because this effectively winds up giving fuel to the slow-burning fire of folks who are pulling the, “See, I told you the cloud wasn't secure.” And now the enterprise groundhog sees that shadow and we get six more years of building data centers instead of going to the cloud. So, there's no one in the cloud space who's happy with this kind of revelation and this type of vulnerability. My question for you is given that you are security researchers, which means you are generally cynical and pessimistic about almost everything technological, if you're like most of the folks in that space that I've spent time with, is going with cloud the wrong answer? Should people be building their own data centers out? Should they continue to be going on this full cloud direction? I mean, what can they do if everything's on fire and terrible all the time?Shir: So, I think that there is a trade-off when you embrace the cloud. On one hand, you get the fastest deployment times, and a good scalability regarding your infrastructure, but on the other end, when there is a security vulnerability in the cloud provider, you are immediately affected. But it is worth mentioning that the security teams or the cloud providers are doing extremely good job. Most likely, they are going to patch the vulnerability faster than it would have been patched in on-premise environment. And it's good that you have them working for you.And once the vulnerability is mitigated—depends on the vulnerability but in the case of ChaosDB—when the vulnerability was mitigated on Microsoft's end, and it was mitigated completely. No one else could have exploited after the mitigated it once. Yes, it's also good to mention that the cloud provides organization and companies a lot of security features, [unintelligible 00:18:34] I want to say security features, I would say, it provides a lot of tooling that helps security. The option to have one interface, like one API to control all of my devices, to get visibility to all of my servers, to enforce policies very easily, it's much more secure than on-premise environments, where there is usually a big mess, a lot of vendors.Because the power was in the on-prem, the power was on the user, so the user had a lot of options. Usually used many types of software, many types of hardware, it's really hard to mitigate the software vulnerability in on-prem environments. It's really helped to get the visibility. And the cloud provides a lot of security, like, a good aspects, and in my opinion, moving to the cloud for most organization would be a more secure choice than remain on-premise, unless you have a very, very small on-prem environment.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: The challenge I keep running into is that—and this is sort of probably the worst of all possible reasons to go with cloud, but let's face it, when us-east-1 recently took an outage and basically broke a decent swath of the internet, a lot of companies were impacted, but they didn't see their names in the headlines; it was all about Amazon's outage. There's a certain value when a cloud provider takes an outage or a security breach, that the headlines screaming about it are about the provider, not about you and your company as a customer of that provider. Is that something that you're seeing manifest across the industry? Is that an unhealthy way to think about it? Because it feels almost like it's cheating in a way. It's, “Yeah, we had a security problem, but so did the entire internet, so it's okay.”Nir: So, I think that if there would be evidence that these kind of vulnerabilities were exploited while disclosure, then you wouldn't see headlines of companies, shouting in the headlines. But in the case of the us reporting the vulnerabilities prior to anyone exploiting them, results in nowhere a company showing up in the headlines. I think it's a slightly different situation than an outage.Shir: Yeah, but also, when one big provider have an outage or a breach, so usually, the customers will think it's out of my responsibility. I mean, it's bad; my data has been leaked, but what can I do? I think it's very easy for most people to forgive companies [unintelligible 00:21:11]. I mean, you know what, it's just not my area. So, maybe I'm not answer that into that. [laugh].Corey: No, no, it's very fair. The challenge I have, as a customer of all of these providers, to be honest, is that a lot of the ways that the breach investigations are worded of, “We have seen no evidence that this has been exploited.” Okay, that simultaneously covers the two very different use cases of, “We have pored through our exhaustive audit logs and validated that no one has done this particular thing in this particular way,” but it also covers the use case, “Of, hey, we learned we should probably be logging things, but we have no evidence that anything was exploited.” Having worked with these providers at scale, my gut impression is that they do in fact, have fairly detailed logs of who's doing what and where. Would you agree with that assessment, or do you find that you tend to encounter logging and analysis gaps as you find these exploits?Shir: We don't really know. Usually when—I mean, ChaosDB scenario, we got access to a Jupyter Notebook. And from the Jupyter Notebook, we continued to another internal services. And we—nobody stopped us. Nobody—we expected an email, like—Corey: “Whatcha doing over there, buddy?”Shir: Yeah. “Please stop doing that, and we're investigating you.” And we didn't get any. And also, we don't really know if they monitor it or not. I can tell from my technical background that logging so many environments, it's hard.And when you do decide to log all these events, you need to decide what to log. For example, if I have a database, a managed database, do I log all the queries that customers run? It's too much. If I have an HTTP application—a managed HTTP application—do I save all the access logs, like all the requests? And if so, what will be the retention time? For how long?We believe that it's very challenging on the cloud provider side, but it just an assumption. And doing the discussion with Microsoft, the didn't disclose any, like, scenarios they had with logging. They do mention that they're [unintelligible 00:23:26] viewing the logs and searching to see if someone exploited this vulnerability before we disclosed it. Maybe someone discovered before we did. But they told us they didn't find anything.Corey: One last area I'd love to discuss with you before we call it an episode is that it's easy to view Wiz through the lens of, “Oh, we just go out and find vulnerabilities here and there, and we make companies feel embarrassed—rightfully so—for the things that they do.” But a little digging shows that you've been around for a little over a year as a publicly known entity, and during that time, you've raised $600 million in funding, which is basically like what in the world is your pitch deck where you show up to investors and your slides are just, like, copies of their emails, and you read them to them?[laugh]I mean, on some level, it seems like that is a… as-, astounding amount of money to raise in a short period of time. But I've also done a little bit of digging, and to be clear, I do not believe that you have an extortion-based business model, which is a good thing. You're building something very interesting that does in-depth analysis of cloud workloads, and I think it's got an awful lot of promise. How does the vulnerability research that you do tie into that larger platform, other than, let's be honest, some spectacularly effective marketing.Sagi: Specifically in the ChaosDB vulnerability, we were actually not looking for a vulnerability in the cloud service providers. We were originally looking for common misconfigurations that our customers can make when they set up their Cosmos DB accounts, so that our product will be able to alert our customers regarding such misconfigurations. And then we went to the Azure portal and started to enable all of the features that Cosmos DB has to offer, and when we enabled enough features, we noticed some feature that could be vulnerable, and we started digging into it. And we ended up finding ChaosDB.But our original work was to try and find misconfigurations that our customers can make in order to protect them and not to find a vulnerability in the [CSP 00:25:31]. This was just, like, a byproduct of this research.Shir: Yes. There is, as I mentioned earlier, our main responsibility is to add a little security rist content to the product, to help customers to find new security risks in their environment. As you mentioned, like, the escalation possibilities within cloud accounts, and bad scoped policies, and many other security risks that are in the cloud area. And also, we are a very small team inside a big company, so most of the company, they are doing heavy [unintelligible 00:26:06] and talk with customers, they understand the risks, they understand the market, what the needs for tomorrow, and maybe we are well known for our vulnerabilities, but it just a very small part of the company.Corey: On some level, it says wonderful things about your product, and also terrifying things from different perspectives of, “Oh, yeah, we found one of the worst cloud breaches in years by accident,” as opposed to actively going in trying to find the thing that has basically put you on the global map of awareness around these things. Because there a lot of security companies out there doing different things. In fact, go to RSA, and you'll see basically 12 companies that just repeated over and over and over with different names and different brandings, and they're all selling some kind of firewall. This is something actively different because everyone can tell beautiful pictures with slides and whatnot, and the corporate buzzwords. You're one of those companies that actually did something meaningful, and it felt almost like a proof of concept. On some level, the fact that you weren't actively looking for it is kind of an amazing testament for the product itself.Shir: Yeah. We actually used the product in the beginning, in order to overview our own environment, and what is the most common services we use. In order—and we usually we mix this information with our product managers, know to understand what customers use and what products and services we need to research in order to bring value to the product.Sagi: Yeah, so the reason we chose to research Cosmos DB was that, we found that a lot of our Azure customers are using Cosmos DB on their production environments, and we wanted to add mitigations for common misconfigurations to our product in order to protect our customers.Nir: Yeah, the same goes with our other research, like OMIGOD, where we've seen that there is a excessive amount of [unintelligible 00:27:56] installations in an Azure environment, and it raised our [laugh] it raised our attention, and then found this vulnerability. It's mostly, like, popularity-guided research. [laugh].Shir: Yeah. And also [unintelligible 00:28:11] mention that maybe we find vulnerabilities by accident, but the service, we are doing vulnerability itself for the past ten years, and even more. So, we are very professional and this is what we do, and this is what we like to do. And we came skilled to the [crosstalk 00:28:25].Corey: It really is neat to see, just because every other security tool that I've looked at in recent memory tells you the same stuff. It's the same problem you see in the AWS billing space that I live in. Everyone says, “Oh, we can find these inactive instances that could be right-sized.” Great, because everyone's dealing with the same data. It's the security stuff is no different. “Hey, this S3 bucket is open.” Yes, it's a public web server. Please stop waking me up at two in the morning about it. It's there by design.But it goes back and forth with the same stuff just presented differently. This is one of the first truly novel things I've seen in ages. If nothing else, you convince me to kick the tires on it, and see what kind of horrifying things I can learn about my own environments with it.Shir: Yeah, you should. [laugh]. Let's poke [unintelligible 00:29:13].[laugh].Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about the research you're up to and the things that you find interesting, where can they find you all?Shir: Most of our publication—I mean, all of our publications are under the Wiz, which is wiz.io/blog, and people can read all of our research. Just today we are announcing a new one, so feel free to go and read there. And they also feel free to approach us on Twitter, the service, we have a Twitter account. We are open for, like, messages. Just send us a message.Corey: And we will certainly put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:29:49]. Shir, Sagi, Nir, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.Shir: Thank you.Sagi: Thank you.Nir: Thank you much.Shir: It was very fun. Yeah.Corey: This has been Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry insulting comment from someone else's account.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

For what turns out to be the 300th Power Line podcast as well as the last episode of 2021, we decided to revert to full three-whisky mode with a live audience on Zoom, and an extended conversation with historian Richard Samuelson about the left’s distorted and impoverished understanding of democracy. Steve had his usual Islay peat bombs and Lucretia polished off a bottle of Glenfiddich, while Richard, who is under quarantine with an actual case of the Omigod variant, had a soothing toddy. In between recalling what the Founders thought about democracy (and especially John Adams’s contributions, since Richard is an Adams expert), Steve offered up his lexicon of what certain terms mean for liberals: Populism: When the wrong person or cause wins a free election. (Think Brexit and Trump.) Racism: Any opposition to the agenda of the left. Democracy: When the left gets what it wants. This explains the left’s tantrums when they don’t get what they want, and their demands to change the rules until they do. Richard also reviews for listeners the defects of the stage play Hamilton, even as it is coming under fresh attack from the left.

In this latest “rapid roundtable” on multiple topics via Clubhouse, Kim TallBear (professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta) and Brock Pitawanakwat (Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University) join host/producer Rick Harp to discuss: the postponement of an Indigenous papal visit due to Omicron; how to support those reeling personally and professionally due to their defraudment by pretendians; the University of Saskatchewan formally asks a Métis political organization to vet the identity of applicants for Métis-specific jobs at the U of S; and their thoughts on the most recent MEDIA INDIGENA deep dive, "Trust, Truth and Treaties." >> CREDITS: 'Microship' by CavalloPazzo (CC BY-SA 4.0)

With Omicron being discovered in South Africa and spreading across the world, the fear mongering over the new COVID-19 variant has already begun. What once was considered conspiracy theory is now less speculation and more of a reality. Deborah Tavares and Elana Freeland make sense of the nonsense and open more eyes to this global control agenda at play.http://parabnormalradio.com/2021/12/04/ep-465-omigod-deborah-tavares-elana-freeland/

-- Omigod, Omicron -- Maybe inflation isn't transitory? -- The best bad news in ages -- Does reputation matter? -- What's in a name? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We are about two years into the Covid-19 pandemic and there's a new variant in town - Omicron. While virologists and governments are researching more about Omicron, how should retail investors like ourselves plan for our investments following this new development? Will news of this new variant start a market sell-off? Should we double down on big pharma? What does this mean for your recovery play in the market? Find out how Omicron can affect your investments in this special episode. Get our show notes at https://thefinancialcoconut.com/tfc118  For all other links mentioned, or to discover more from the team at The Financial Coconut (including all our other shows), go to https://linktr.ee/thefinancialcoconut  --- The Financial Coconut started out as a reaction to online fake gurus who are propagating over simplified get rich quick programs. A Podcast that grew out of a desire to share best practices regarding personal finance turned into a network of content championing this idea of “Creating a life you love, while managing your finances well”.

This month we review new blogs from Tenable's Security Response Team on a vulnerability in Atlassian's Confluence Server, review what made cybersecurity say “OMIGOD” and look at another light load of patches from Microsoft. We also look at new research - commissioned by Tenable and conducted by Forrester - on remote working statistics, and look at technology investment and attack trends which were discovered.Show References:Atlassian Confluence OGNL Injection Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild Critical Flaw Leaves Azure Linux VMs Vulnerable to Remote Code Execution Microsoft's September 2021 Patch Tuesday Addresses 60 CVEs Tenable and Forrester cyber risk reportFollow along for more from Tenable Research:Subscribe to the blogFollow Tenable's Zero Day team on Medium

When eccentric recluse Simon Strong, who lives in a perpetually chilled state, vanishes (leaving some rather suspicious remains behind), his only known associate—a teenage delivery girl—is interviewed by the police! Cast List Amber Sorensen - Krystal Baker Simon Strong - Joel Harvey Det. Phyllis Jermyn - Julie Hoverson Det. Howard Upton - Reynaud LeBoeuf Music:  Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Recorded with the assistance of Ryan Hirst of Neohoodoo Studio Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Photo:  (courtesy of Stock Xchange.com) "What kind of a place is it? Why it's a police station, can't you tell?" ******************************************** Chillin' This didn't actually begin with me choosing to adapt another Lovecraft story (in this case "Cool Air").  Frankly, I really liked the 1999 short film, and have a soft spot for the version made for Night Gallery back in the 70s, so I never really considered Cool Air as a priority for adaptation - it had already been done well.  Plus it was kind of low hanging fruit - one of the simpler, more straightforward stories to adapt. Previous to this, I had produced Within the Walls of Eryx, and even before that, while studying screenwriting, I had practiced adaptation by playing with The Thing on the Doorstep, turning it into an hour-long screenplay that I eventually re-wrote into an episode of 19 Nocturne Boulevard. Nope, this started when my niece Krystal and I went to see the film Juno. We enjoyed the movie, and leaving it I decided I wanted to write a sassy teenage character, and started clicking through plots in my head that I could slap her into.  The irony of sticking a character HPL would undoubtedly loathe into one of his stories did not escape me, and when "Cool Air" crossed my mind, it basically started to write itself. I hammered out the script in less than a week and sent it to Krystal and asked if Amber sounded reasonably authentic, since Krystal was right about that age herself.  Her response was "Could I please play her?"  She did, and did a great job.  I really love working with and encouraging kids in the arts. Sig and Laurie (mentioned in the story as Amber's folks, but in reality my own dad and stepmom) came to watch the recording session with Krystal and be supportive, and Laurie at least can be heard in the bloopers in the end.  I also owe great thanks to my friend Robyn who helped with the punk rock details.  She knows rock history back and forth and I knew I just needed the right comment or two to make the character really pop.  The story adaptation is extremely loose - in the original, a writer moves into a flat below a doctor who keeps his rooms unnaturally cold, and finds out that the doc has maintained his life, long past standard death, by keeping himself perpetually chilled, presumably at least in part to prevent decay. Rather than going the doctor/science route for my version, I went with magic and reanimation.  I did work a little hint into the story that Simon might be considering some further hocus pocus to preserve himself, but which might involve harming Amber, and he decides he can't.  On the other hand, Amber's slightly guilty concern about having her backpack possibly searched and her disregard for the missing "spooky books" might just indicate that she's not quite ready to let go yet. The original story "Cool Air" is also notable in that a female character is actually quoted as speaking - the landlady of the flats.  Of course, this is only so she can be a terrible ethnic stereotype, but at least she actually talks, and may be the only female in all of HPL's major works who does.  Stay tuned at the end of this for a short clip of the German version of Chillin' (retitled "Eiskalt") from Contendo Media!!! ******************************************** CHILLIN' Cast: Olivia (host) Amber Sorensen (16), punky teen Simon Strong (60s), aged punk rocker Det. Howard Upton (30s), tough cop Det. Phyllis Jermyn (30s), nice cop Bouncers OLIVIA     Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's a police station, can't you tell?  MUSIC    MODERN COP DRAMA STING SOUND    THUNK OF TAPE RECORDER TURNING ON.  AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM - WHIR OF TAPE RECORDER.  OCCASIONAL SCUFFLE OF CHAIRS UPTON    Name? AMBER    [mocking] Sorensen. Amber.  S-O-R-E-N-S-E-N.  O-N is Norwegian. UPTON    What? AMBER    [said a million times] O-N is Norwegian, E-N is Danish. UPTON    So you're Danish? AMBER     [disgusted noise] Do I sound Danish?  Uch.  Like my great great great great great was.  UPTON    Then why--? JERMYN    I understand.  My name gets misspelled all the time.  Let's move on.  Present are detectives Howard Upton and Phyllis Jermyn [pronounced "german", pause] J-E-R-M-Y-N, and Amber Sorensen, with an E-N.  UPTON    Age? AMBER    I have the right to remain silent.  I have the right to an attorney.  If I cannot afford one, one will be ... assigned?  Allotted?  I should know this - I watch enough Law and Order.  UPTON    [sigh] We don't read witnesses their rights.  That's for suspects.  Age? AMBER    [sullen] You got my I.D.  What does it say? UPTON    Hmm.  You don't look 21. JERMYN    [sympathetic] You really don't. AMBER    Fine.  So it's a fake - I want to speak to the D.A., like trade my information in return for a slide on the bogus I.D., can I‑‑?? SOUND    PHONE BEEP UPTON    Oh, turn that off.  Not just silent, either.  Off. SOUND    PHONE BEING TURNED OFF JERMYN    We're really not interested in prosecuting you.  We just want to know about Simon Strong. UPTON    The alleged Simon Strong.  AMBER    Dude.  He was the full meal deal, you know.  I watched videos of his band, from like before I was born, and it was totally him. UPTON    Then who was the deceased? AMBER    Like I said, it was him.  What?  Do you ride the short bus? UPTON    It couldn't be him, because you said you spoke with him recently, and-- JERMYN    [cutting him off]  Let's start at the beginning.  How did you meet Mr. Strong? AMBER    [miserable]  He hates being called Mister.  [deep breath, blasé lies]  I was making a delivery-- MUSIC   SFX    HEAVY METAL/PUNK MUSIC FADES INTO THE BACKGROUND, AMBER BECOMES VOICE OVER. AMBER [v.o.]    --of, some box or other.  I got inside, took the wrong turn-- SFX    MUSIC IS MUFFLED BY DISTANCE, BUT CLEARLY LOUD SOUND    AMBER'S HEAVY BREATHING UP CLOSE - SOUNDS LIKE ECSTASY, BUT IT'S JUST PANIC AND EXERTION. AMBER    Oh, shit! AMBER [v.o]    I was supposed to go to the manager's office-- SOUND    HEAVY FOOTSTEPS APPROACH AT A RUN SOUND    AMBER'S BREATHING QUICKENS.  HER FOOTSTEPS TAKE OFF QUICKLY. BOUNCER    [off] Get back here, dogmeat! AMBER [v.o]    And I just knocked on the wrong door. SOUND     HEAVY FEET ARE DISTANT, BUT APPROACHING.  SOUND    AMBER'S FEET GET CLOSE. SOUND    SLAM OF BODY AGAINST DOOR.  POUNDING ON DOOR AMBER    Let me in!  They're after me!!!  Please!  SOUND     POUNDING CONTINUES.  HEAVY FEET GET CLOSER AMBER    Please!  I - I'm having a heart attack!  Let me in or I'll totally die! SOUND    SLIDING DOOR OPENS AMBER    Whoa! SOUND    STUMBLING STEPS FORWARD, BODY FALLS, SLIDING DOOR SHUTS.  SFX    MUSIC CUTS OUT COMPLETELY. AMBER    Oh.  Shit.  Look, I'm-- SOUND    SCUTTLING ACROSS WOOD FLOOR SIMON     [filtered, mechanical sounding]  Look into the camera please. AMBER    Camera--?  Oh.  [shivers slightly]  SOUND    A COUPLE OF HESITANT FOOTSTEPS AMBER    Hi!  Look, can you just tell me how to get out of here?  There's no need for -- SIMON    [filter] What was that about a heart attack? AMBER    Oh, that.  That was - that was bullshit.  [joking]  I had it removed - years ago.   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM [CUTS IN SUDDENLY] UPTON    Was your relationship with this Mister Strong, sexual? AMBER    Ew!!!  He was like my great grandad's age - like, even older than you! JERMYN    [coughs away a laugh]  You say you made the delivery and just happened to "make friends" with Strong?  Everyone else says he was a complete recluse.  Didn't like people. AMBER    Nah.  He liked people, but he was really sick.  I mean, like ill, not deviant. SIMON    [on filter]  Step through. SOUND    DOOR SLIDES OPEN MUSIC   AMBIANCE     COOL ROOM - THE HUM OF A HEAVY FREEZER UNIT AMBER    [gasps at the cold]  Whoa!  Um, can I just go?  I promise not to try any -- SIMON    [unfiltered, but rough and almost a whisper]  What WERE you trying? AMBER    I ... really just wanted to hear the band, but your guys caught me.  I mean, I assume since you're here, they're yours-- SIMON    I own the club, yes.  AMBER    [after a slight silence]  Okay, is it just me or is your heater broken?  [brr noise] SIMON    [dry chuckle]  AMBER    [noticing something] Dude!  SOUND    A COUPLE OF EXCITED FOOTSTEPS AMBER    Can you watch, like, the whole entire club from here? SFX    ELECTRIC WHEELCHAIR SHIFTS SIMON    [disinterested] I can-- AMBER    Omigod!  Do you have sound?  Is there a button? SIMON    --but it gets boring after a while.  AMBER    They're totally bumping uglies in the bathroom, right there!  Look!  Look! SOUND    SWITCH AMBER    [annoyed]  Hey! MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM CUTS IN UPTON    Sick?  What kind of disease did he have, Ebola?  The state of that body-- JERMYN    We really shouldn't go into that yet, Howie. AMBER    What time is it? UPTON    What?  Why? AMBER    Just asking.  You made me turn my phone off.  I have a curfew.  JERMYN    Would you like us to call home for you? AMBER    [shrug]  Nah.  UPTON    And your parents, they approved of all this? AMBER    My folks are...  Cool.  They don't care-- UPTON    Like they don't mind that hair cut? AMBER    Sig and Laurie let me do dumb stuff cause they know I won't do anything stupid.  UPTON    Like spending all your time hanging out in a bar? AMBER    It's a club.  And, for a rocker, Simon was pretty uptight about underage boozing and ...stuff.  UPTON    [leaps on it] Stuff?  What kind of stuff? AMBER    What?  Stuff.  Just ... stuff.  Dude, you need to switch to decaf.  Or valium. UPTON    Did you ever see this man with any illegal substances? AMBER    Well, he had all kinds of medications - being sick and all, and I [sounding mock sorry]  I guess I forgot to look them all up in the handy dandy book of all things illegal.  UPTON    I thought prescription pills were the latest thing these days.  AMBER    Only with the kind of freak whose parents go to shrinks and who have time to sit around and stare at carpet lint.  I got better things to do. JERMYN    Like what? AMBER    Plus it's dangerous.  You know what viagra can do to--  What? JERMYN     What kinds of things do you like to do? AMBER    I-- like music, I write. I function as a higher organism. UPTON    She means what do you plan to do with your life, Amber Sorensen with an E-N? JERMYN    Actually I was just-- AMBER    What do you want, a mission statement and a business plan?  Dude, I'm 16.  UPTON    I knew what I wanted to do at 16. AMBER    [muttered] But your ass is so tight it whistles.  JERMYN     [tries not to snicker] UPTON    Hmm? AMBER    [louder] I bet your dad was a cop. UPTON    So? AMBER    Nothing.  Just you seem like maybe you grew up with it.  UPTON    Are you gonna follow in your folks' footsteps? AMBER    [flat and sarcastic] Oh, yeah.  Weddings are my life. JERMYN    We don't want to keep you here all night - curfew, and all that.  What was wrong with your friend? AMBER    Simon said he had some kind of wasting thing -- MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COOL ROOM SIMON    Munoz syndrome.  I have to carefully regulate my body temperature. AMBER    So you're, like, Mr. Freeze?  Not exactly Ahh-nold, there, string bean. SIMON    And I have to avoid excitement.  AMBER    [pause]  That's a hint, eh?  Can I at least get out without going through the American Gladiators? SOUND    SLIDING DOOR OPENS AMBER    Thanks.  Hey, if you get completely bored or anything, my I-M is-- SIMON    No. AMBER    Um, ok.  You just seem kinda lonely. SOUND    HER SLOW FOOTSTEPS SFX    WHEELCHAIR SHIFTS AGAIN SIMON    Perhaps you could come back tomorrow, during the day.  I could use someone to run errands for me.  The pay would be reasonable.  AMBER    Could I watch the band? SIMON    You could watch from here, but you'd have to dress warmly-- AMBER    I'll bring a parka! MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM UPTON    Are you adopted? AMBER    [flabbergasted] What?  Whoa!  I think there are some low-flying non sequeters in here.  Did you see where that came from? JERMYN    Uh... no. UPTON    You call your parents [checks notes] um, Sig and Laurie. AMBER    Doh, everyone does.  [slow and condescending] Those are their names, Billy. UPTON    Most kids your age still call their folks mom and dad. AMBER    Maybe most kids your age.  Most of us would rather be cremated.  [shrugs] mm.  Except to their face.  The folks still like to think we're all the same little rugrats they knew and love.  [snort] UPTON    So you make a point of lying to your folks? AMBER    There's that non-sequeter again.  You should really get a bug zapper. JERMYN    You probably think of it as "humoring them" rather than lying. UPTON    Two faced is two faced. AMBER    If you can't be two-faced, you shoulda found a better one to be stuck with. UPTON    Look here-- AMBER    I bet you never get to play good cop.  UPTON    What? JERMYN    Howie, maybe we should take a break.  Get some water.  UPTON    [growl] I'm fine. JERMYN    Would you get me some?  Amber? AMBER    Uh, sure. UPTON    [annoyed noise]  SOUND    STOMPS OUT, DOOR SLAMS AMBER    Wow.  Where do I get one? JERMYN    Don't be fooled - I'm not always the good cop. AMBER    Oh? JERMYN    You say you don't do drugs.  We could test you-- AMBER    [disgusted noise] pssh. JERMYN    --and go through your backpack-- AMBER    [worried] Huh? JERMYN    But I'm going to trust you on that, because you walked right past one of our drug dogs on the way in, and I don't think you're the type to get caught in a stupid lie. AMBER    [thinks, then] You think I'll get caught in a smart one? JERMYN    Let's just agree that I won't underestimate you, and you do me the same favor. MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COLD ROOM SOUND    DOOR SLIDES OPEN SIMON    You can leave it there. SOUND    FOOTSTEPS AMBER    Hey.  Wassup? SOUND    WHIR OF WHEELCHAIR TURNING SIMON    [annoyed] What? AMBER    Just making conversation. SIMON    "Wassup" isn't conversation. AMBER     It is if you answer.  Besides, with most of my friends, I-M-H-O, O-M-G, L-O-L is conversation.  Wassup is practically a monolog. SIMON    [snort, then painful noise, trying not to cough]  Well.  [dismissive] Now that that's settled-- AMBER    [overly casual] If you want me to go, just say.  [shrug] I got stuff to do. SOUND    a MOMENT, then FOOTSTEPS GO AWAY SIMON    [calling] You... you wanted to watch the band? MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM SOUND    DOOR OPENS, FOOTSTEPS UPTON    Your water. SOUND    WATER BOTTLES GET SLAMMED DOWN, ONE BY ONE JERMYN    Thank you. Howie. UPTON    [makes disgruntled noises] AMBER    Yeah.  Cheers, Howie. UPTON    [disgusted noise] Huh.  AMBER    Look, my parents actually like me to use their names - makes them feel like they're helping me assert my personhood or something.  I do it to humor them. UPTON    Fine. UPTON    [trying to sound unconcerned] We need a physical description of the alleged Mr. Strong. AMBER    Watch a video of Madness Machine on Youtube.  Then figure older.  A bunch older.  UPTON    How very...specific.  How tall was he? AMBER    That's kind of a pickle.  I never saw him stand up - he was always in his bumper car. UPTON    What? JERMYN    The mechanized wheelchair. AMBER    He had to avoid exerting himself  [thinking]  OK, so imagine classic Simon, then really thin - like even more than heroin-chic, maybe almost to starving third world skinny. JERMYN    Could it have been faked?  Perhaps something in the way he dressed? AMBER    Doubtful, Phyllis.  He usually kicked it in jams.  Not much to hide behind.  UPTON    Speak English. AMBER    [sounding british-ish]  The subject in question had a strong tendency to desport himself in capacious yet abbreviated trousers, much as those the predominant choice of American surfboard riders lean toward. JERMYN    [Snicker] UPTON    You mean he wore shorts.  In that cold? MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COLD ROOM SIMON    If it bothers you, I could put something else on. AMBER    Yeah, 'cuz like you're so tasty, Bubba-Ho-Tep, that I'm gonna totally jump on you if you keep wheeling around half-naked like that.  [beat]  Nah - it's kinda creepy, but I'll adjust.  Like having a weird uncle. SIMON    [wheezy laugh]  AMBER    But a cool one.  I mean - not just [brr], but cool. SIMON    I must be, since you're neglecting your social whirl to spend time here in this arctic wasteland.  AMBER    Oh, yeah - I have to sneak out the window to get away from the endless line of bimboons waiting to take me to the prom. SIMON    Bimboon?  AMBER    It's like someone in a boy band,  The guy equivalent of a bimbo.  SIMON    [laughs]  MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM UPTON    He scooted around in a wheelchair, wearing shorts, and you didn't think that was odd? AMBER    Duh.  Of course. UPTON    But you never told anyone about him? AMBER    He'd'a been pissed.  Plus people woulda thought - you know - creepy stuff. UPTON    What if he decided to try something? AMBER    Beep beep.  I can outrun a wheelchair.  At least as far as the stairs. UPTON    And what if he could really get up? AMBER    I doubt it, Billy.  He didn't have any little blue pills. UPTON    [flustered] I didn't--  I meant get up and walk. AMBER    Yeah you did.  You're the one who's all worried he's gonna go perv on me. UPTON    If you were my daughter-- AMBER    Get out of the way of the door.  One of us would probably be dead. MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COLD ROOM AMBER    The bottles - it's all for your illness, right?  Like the meth lab in the bathroom? SIMON    [shocked]  It's not a--! AMBER    Doh, yeah.  I was kidding.  So is it a big secret experiment thing?  SIMON    I - I keep tracking down recipes for preparations and elixirs that ... that might help me.  Some seem to work for a little while, but nothing ... lasts. MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM JERMYN    [snap] Howie.  Did you have any more questions? UPTON    What about his hair? AMBER    [snapped back] What?  It looked pretty much the same. UPTON    A-ha!  Too clever for his own good. AMBER    Not every guy over 50 needs canned hair, Billy. UPTON    And this guy claimed to be THE Simon Strong. AMBER    I already told you he was.  I didn't even know who that was that first time, cause like I'd never heard of him before, but soon as I could, I googled him and voy-la! UPTON    Vwa-la. AMBER    [whispered] Beep Beep. UPTON    What? JERMYN    For the record, Simon Strong was the lead singer and songwriter for a punk band called Madness Machine in the mid to late 1970s.  AMBER    American punk band. UPTON    Who cares? AMBER    [earnest] It's important - British punk was British punk and American punk was-- JERMYN    But you'd never heard of this band before you met Strong? AMBER    [sigh]  Pre-cisely.  Funny sort of six degrees thing, though - once I saw the band name, it clicked, 'cuz my grandad had one of their albums in his LP collection.  Serious.  How's that for whoo-OO-oo [spooky noise]? UPTON    [disbelieving snort] Your grandpa listened to punk? AMBER    Duh.  He willed his tattoos to science.  Stay back from the door, Billy. JERMYN    You said you met Mr. Strong --? AMBER    Halloween night.  That's why they had such a cool band in the house. JERMYN    About nine months, then.  And how often did you see him? AMBER    Most days.  I did his shopping and stuff and stopped in for a chat.  MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COOL ROOM SIMON    Are you a retard?  The Sex Pistols were totally the Monkees of punk.  They were a made band.  Their manager put them together. AMBER    [teasing] I suppose you met him too? SIMON    Once.  How much respect can you have for a guy who also created Bow Wow Wow? AMBER    Bow Wow What? SIMON    You must ride the short bus.  Beep beep, Billy, don't stand in the way of the door.  [wheezy chuckle]  The Ramones, now, they were the real thing.  They lived punk. AMBER    You're pretty feisty for an old crip who's s'posed to keep frosty. SIMON    [dry chuckle] MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM JERMYN    When our people searched the "residence" over the club, they found a number of, um - unusual items. AMBER    Like? JERMYN    The enormous refrigeration unit that apparently kept the place fairly, um-- UPTON    Meat locker-ish.  AMBER    [wry]  So he was cool.  So? UPTON    According to electric company records, he was using enough energy to be frozen.  AMBER    And?  What, didn't he pay his bill?  It's his business what he does with his juice. UPTON    There are a lot of things you can do with that much juice.  Things, for instance, that the narcotics squad would be very interested in.  AMBER    [exasperated] Beep beep. UPTON    I am getting really sick of-- JERMYN    Amber.  Can you shed any light on the occult paraphernalia he apparently collected? AMBER    It's not like I had the run of the place.  We'd just hang in the main room - where all the video consoles are.  He talked about some old books, though. JERMYN    Did you ever see anyone else with him?  Did he talk about other visitors? AMBER     Oh, heck no.  He didn't like people to see how sick he was, but like, since I already knew, he had somebody to talk to, right? AMBIANCE    COOL ROOM SOUND    DOOR SLIDES SHUT AMBER    Hey!  SIMON    [anxious] You're late. AMBER    [aping his wiped out voice] "Hi Amber, so glad to see you." SIMON    I was exp-- [slight chuckle, sigh]  I am.  Yes. AMBER    You worried about me or your [singsong] Special Delivery!? SIMON    It's here? AMBER    No, it's a phone book I wrapped up and sent the long way, let's see, through - wow.  Egypt and London?  That's tight! SIMON    Open it, please. AMBER    'kay. SOUND    PAPER UNWRAPS FROM LARGE BOOK. AMBER    Oh, jeez - you got so ripped off. SIMON    What do you mean? AMBER    This is such a gag gift.  It's like from that movie - "I'll swallow your soul!  I'll swallow your soul!" SIMON    Give it here.  [pause]  Ah.  No, this is the real thing.  The dark jewel of any occult collection. AMBER     [sniffing] Ok, so it smells older than Bruce Campbell, but still -- SIMON    I need to be alone.  Come back next Wednesday. MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM AMBER    He did burn incense and drink weird stuff.  I figured it was alternative medicine, or maybe Kabbalah - that's all the rage with the red carpet crowd, right? UPTON    Did he ever say what was wrong with him? AMBER    Mun-yoes syn-drome, Billy. UPTON    Stop calling-- JERMYN    But what is Munoz syndrome?  Did you ever, say, Google it? AMBER    Well, yeeah.  There were a couple - but they had longer names, and were like degenerative eye diseases, so I figured, you know, that wasn't it. UPTON    Did you ever ask him? AMBER    Well, right off I asked if it was catching, and he said no, so I figured that's all I care about, and if wants to talk about it he'll say. MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COOL ROOM SIMON    Munoz syndrome is extremely rare.  I contracted it almost thirty years ago-- AMBER    Ooh!  Let me guess.  When you [reporter voice] "vanished from the public eye"! SIMON    Where--? AMBER     Wikipedia.  Shh.  I'm shushing. SIMON    My band was in New Orleans, when this came on.  Normal medicine couldn't help, so I turned to the uh, folk practitioners. AMBER    Like Voodoo?  No wonder you're buying all creepy books and incense. SIMON    It's a lot more serious than movie voodoo, but that's close.  AMBER    And the cold? SIMON    It slows my metabolism.  AMBER      Mine too - Brr. SFX    THE HUM OF THE FREEZER DIPS FOR A MOMENT SIMON    [gasps and holds his breath until the power returns] AMBER    Wha--? SIMON    [very tense]  The wiring's getting old.  AMBER    So get a new fridge. SIMON    No, the building's wiring.  Between music and lights and all, it carries quite a load. AMBER    You should move, then - and before summer.  Seriously. SIMON    How can I go anywhere?  I have to stay a constant level. AMBER    I dunno.  [thinking]  Hey, ice cream truck - I once saw this movie where they were carting a corpse around in the back-- SIMON    [strong]  No.  No.  Tomorrow, maybe you could look at generators.  MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM JERMYN    But he was well off - according to the IRS. AMBER    He spent a buttload on his creepy books and exotic bags of dirt and stuff.  [catching herself]  Or, that's what he told me.  UPTON    And he trusted you to carry around these expensive packages? AMBER    I didn't know what they were.  I'd probably have freaked and got all paranoid.  He said other people were after them, too. UPTON    [eager] Other people?  Do you think they might have taken the books after Strong disappeared? AMBER    Tscha.  He didn't disappear.  He's dead.  Beep Beep. UPTON    [takes in an angry breath] JERMYN    Ok, let's go back-- UPTON     No, let's talk about this.  You're saying that the corpse you discovered in that - what you call "the cold room" - was the person you knew as Simon Strong. AMBER    It had to be. UPTON    Then pray explain to me how it could be that that body had been dead for well over a decade? AMBER    [shrug, statement]  You're wrong. UPTON    So all our experts are wrong.  And you know better. AMBER    [trying] Your experts obviously aren't familiar with Munoz Syndrome.  That's all. UPTON     Right.  So you know better.  You know what I think? JERMYN    [warning]  Howie... UPTON    No, Phyl.  Not this time.  I'm getting tired of this little girl, trying to live in a dream world.  She needs a dose of harsh reality. AMBER    [hysterical laughter]  Harsh reality?  [can't stop laughing]  You don't have a clue how harsh reality can get.  [breaks down into tears] MUSIC   AMBIANCE    COLD ROOM SIMON    Turn the thermostat down a bit, would you? AMBER    Down?  Dude, my eyeballs are already icing over.  SIMON    [pause] Maybe you shouldn't come here any more. AMBER    [upset]  What?  [beat, then blasé]  And lose the school credit I'm getting for looking after the elderly and infirm?  Uh-uh. SIMON    [slight wheezing laugh, turns into cough, then deep breath]  I... I probably won't last much longer. AMBER    No way!  You're fine!  Well, not fine, but‑‑ SIMON    It's been coming for a long time.  And the elixirs aren't working any more.  Nothing is working. AMBER    The book can't--? SIMON    I thought there would be things I could ...bring myself to do, but it's not worth it. AMBER    It's always worth living. SIMON    When I'm gone, take it and burn it.  Promise? AMBER    If you can't use it, sell it!  Use the money to get more colder.  You'll be fine. SIMON    No.  SFX    POWER DIP, THEN HUM RETURNS SIMON    [long shaky breath]  I always think it will be the last one.  AMBER    I'LL buy you a generator. SIMON    Have you seen the gas prices recently?  Cooling takes too much energy - even if you get one, I won't be able to afford the gasoline.  MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM AMBER    [still breathing in little gasps, coming down from a crying jag] SOUND    WATER BOTTLE OPENED JERMYN    Drink. SOUND    PLASTIC BOTTLE SET ON TABLE UPTON    [annoyed] Are you through?  AMBER    [cough, sniff] UPTON    So, here's what I think is going on.  This guy has been trying to establish himself as Simon Strong, famous recluse and mysterious celebrity. AMBER    That's too dumb even for the short bus. UPTON    Oh, yeah?  Dumb to the tune of half a mil a year.  Between the club, which the real Strong did purchase in December of 1979, and the royalties on his old music - particularly the musical um, chunks, or segments-- JERMYN    Riffs. UPTON    Yes, whatever, that people used in their own-- JERMYN    Sampled. UPTON    [deep annoyed sigh] During the 80s and 90s-- [waits, but there is no interjection] --he had pots of money rolling in. AMBER    Which he spent on books and crud.  I told you. UPTON     Kid, no one spends that much on books.  Did you ever actually see these books, or did you just bring him book-shaped packages? AMBER    [silent for a beat]  No, I guess I never actually saw them. UPTON    I say he's been salting it away, staying around long enough to move everything to the Caymans and then - Voy-la - take a powder. AMBER    But the body-- JERMYN    [sadly] WAS the real Simon Strong.  Dental records have confirmed it.  But Amber, he'd been dead for a very long time.  UPTON    Which explains the cold.  The fake didn't want the - uh - deceased stinking up the place. AMBER    [muttered] Yeah, easier to freeze the whole place, than just pack a corpse in a chest freezer. JERMYN    Are you up to telling us how you discovered the body? AMBER    [very subdued] Sure.  I got to the club, and everything was dark.  I freaked-- Well, I got really worried, and ran up to his room.  The body was just... there... and it was... JERMYN    --In an advanced state of decomposition. AMBER    Yeah, that. MUSIC   SFX    NO SOUND OF FRIDGE, JUST DISTANT STREET NOISES.  SOUND    DOOR SLIDES OPEN WITH DIFFICULTY. AMBER     [Grunts] Dammit, open!  damm---it [squeaks through]  Simon!  Simon?  [almost chokes] What is-- oh jeez! SOUND    HESITANT FOOTSTEPS SOUND    SQUISHY MOVEMENT NOISE AMBER    What the he-e-e-ll? SIMON    [Almost inaudible]  Turn off the flashlight.  SOUND    CLICK FLASHLIGHT OFF AMBER    I'll get you some ice, I'll --- SIMON    Damage is done.  Don't go.  I wasn't sure if I wanted you here or not -- for this. AMBER    Can I--?  Do you need--? SIMON    Don't... touch me.  Please.  Just listen.  Listen!  Take the books and burn them.  I need to know you will. AMBER    Yeah, sure. SIMON    I- I've willed the club to you.  Don't get your hopes up, the police aren't going to .... [trails off]  AMBER    Simon!  [breaking down] I don't want you to die.  You can't die! [etc., sobbing] SIMON    This isn't -- I... haven't... been living...  for a long time.  Let me go. AMBER    No! SIMON    Shh!  AMBER    [controls herself] Shushing. [gasp] SIMON    In 1977, I O.D.ed on heroin and, [gasping cough] -- I... died.  It was never reported because a local Bocor brought me back... AMBER    [small voice]  Like a zombie? SIMON    [sigh, not quite a chuckle]  I knew you'd understand. AMBER    But we can do it again, right?  Bring you back? SIMON    [dying, trailing off]  Beep Beep.  Get out of the way of the door, Billy.... AMBER    [sobs] MUSIC   AMBIANCE    INTERVIEW ROOM AMBER    Guess I'm glad it ain't him - the ... borscht.  But he was cool.  For an old dude. UPTON    If he contacts you in any way-- AMBER    [dryly sarcastic] Oh, sure.  I'll be right on the phone to you. UPTON    Do you understand the meaning of accessory to fraud?  Harboring a fugitive, maybe? AMBER    Well, I do watch a lot of TV.  Besides, it's not like I'm getting anything out of it. UPTON    The club has been transferred into your name, Amber Sorensen with an E-N.  The heirs of the real Simon Strong will probably contest it. AMBER    Pff.  Don't care.  Are we done? JERMYN    You'll have to wait a few minutes while your statement is typed up.  Once you sign it, you're good to go. AMBER     Sure.  Hey, did your CSI guys really not find any books or anything at the scene? JERMYN    Nothing of any importance.  UPTON    And no clue to his offshore account. AMBER    Hmm.  Oh well.  [grunts with effort] SOUND    CREAK OF LIFTING A HEAVY BACKPACK ONTO HER BACK JERMYN    You going to be OK without a coat?  It's a bit chilly out tonight. SOUND    DOOR OPENS.  SFX    OFFICE NOISE.  SOUND     COUPLE FOOTSTEPS AMBER    Really?  [laughs]  Nah.  I'm cool. SOUND    FOOTSTEPS LEAVE. MUSIC    MODERN COP THEME, FADE OUT CLOSER OLIVIA    Now that you know how to find us, you'll have to come back.  Maybe next week?  Don't be a stranger - we have enough of those already...   ********************************************

Cloud Security News this week - 22 September 2021 AWS, Google Cloud and Azure have all been busy last few weeks fixing and patching Vulnerabilities. In addition to Azure's OMIGOD flaws which we covered in last week's episode, Google Cloud reported that some of their load balancers were routing to an Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) enabled Backend Service which could have been vulnerable to an untrusted party. Google Cloud have confirmed that this issue has been resolved. Rhino Security Labs have discovered a vulnerability in AWS WorkSpaces, amazon's virtual desktop. Exploiting this vulnerability allows commands to be executed if a victim opens a malicious WorkSpaces URI from their browser. Rhino reported the vulnerability to Amazon and it was promptly patched. Attackers have begun to exploit critical Microsoft Azure vulnerabilities that were reported in last week's episode. The OMIGOD flaws, discovered by the Wiz Research Team have since been patched by microsoft. New data indicates that attackers are scanning the Web for Azure Linux virtual machines that are vulnerable. If successful, an attacker could become root on a remote machine. For organisations and enterprises cloud is about improved flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. For cybercriminals, Cloud is an environment filled with poorly secured enterprise data, applications, and online assets. IBM in their recently released Security X-Force Cloud Threat Landscape Report highlight increased attacker interest in the thriving black market for stolen credentials used to access enterprise accounts and resources on public cloud platforms. IBM X-Force discovered about 30,000 cloud credentials potentially available for sale on Dark Web and Prices for these credentials ranged from a few dollars to more than $15,000 per credential, based on the level of access and the amount of credit associated with an account. Report available here Episode Show Notes on Cloud Security Podcast Website. Podcast Twitter - Cloud Security Podcast (@CloudSecPod) If you want to watch videos of this LIVE STREAMED episode and past episodes, check out: - Cloud Security Podcast: - Cloud Security Academy:

Bu hafta Kerem Kocaer ve Murat Lostar, FBI'ın #Kaseya saldırısının şifre çözme anahtarını, saldırıdan kısa bir süre sonra elde ettiği halde üç hafta boyunca paylaşmamasını ve #Microsoft Azure Linux sanal makinelerine yüklenen OMI aracında yer alan güvenlik açıklarını yorumluyor. Görüntülü yayına youtube.com/siberingunlugu adresi üzerinden ulaşabilirsiniz. Keyifli dinlemeler! #siberingunlugu

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases OpenSearch and EKS Anywhere, Google Cloud is now available in the Toronto region, and Microsoft deals with two critical security issues.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights

Le fournisseur de sécurité cloud, Wiz, a trouvé plusieures failles dans Azure, la plateforme cloud de Microsoft. Situées dans le service OMI, elles ont été regroupées sous l'appellation de OMIGOD. Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

En este programa de CiberAfterWork tratamos uno de los temas que más preocupa a los ciudadanos, sobre todo a los que son usuarios habituales de redes sociales. Para abordar este tema contamos con Josep Albors Director de Investigación y Concienciación de ESET España. En nuestro apartado de noticias hablamos sobre las vulnerabilidades descubiertas en varios productos de Apple, como siempre la recomendación frente a estos fallos es actualizar. Otra noticia que nos llamó la atención es un fallo que afecta a unos routers que suelen ser utilizados por VirginMedia, entre otros proveedores de acceso a Internet Además, como en anteriores programas, los especialistas de Netskope nos acercaron la Píldora SASE. Ese nuevo paradigma que proveyendo de seguridad desde la nube, esta revolucionando la forma de entender la seguridad para los usuarios y empresas. En esta ocasión nos acompañó Samuel Bonete, Regional Sales Manager de Netskope. Samu compartió con todos nosotros una vulnerabilidad que esta dando mucho que hablar en el mundo de la ciberseguridad y que afecta a servidores que están en la nube de Azure. La vulnerabilidad se conoce como OMIGOD! Y es que con sólo modificar una petición web enviada a un servidor Linux en la cloud de Azure, permite a un atacante ejecutar comandos en las mismas. Con nuestro invitado y amigo Josep Albors hablamos de los ataques que sufren las cuentas de redes sociales a diario, entre estos ataques destacan el secuestro de las cuentas o la suplantación de identidad. Twitter: @ciberafterwork Instagram @ciberafterwork +info: https://psaneme.com/ Píldora SASE: https://www.netskope.com/ https://www.wiz.io/blog/secret-agent-exposes-azure-customers-to-unauthorized-code-execution Noticias: https://unaaldia.hispasec.com/2021/09/vulnerabilidad-zero-day-zero-click-efectiva-contra-apple-ios-macos-y-watchos.html https://unaaldia.hispasec.com/2021/09/vulnerabilidad-en-virgin-media-expone-a-usuarios-con-vpn.html

Los especialistas de Netskope nos acercaron la Píldora SASE. Ese nuevo paradigma que proveyendo de seguridad desde la nube, esta revolucionando la forma de entender la seguridad para los usuarios y empresas. En esta ocasión nos acompañó Samuel Bonete, Regional Sales Manager de Netskope. Samu compartió con todos nosotros una vulnerabilidad que esta dando mucho que hablar en el mundo de la ciberseguridad y que afecta a servidores que están en la nube de Azure. La vulnerabilidad se conoce como OMIGOD! Y es que con sólo modificar una petición web enviada a un servidor Linux en la cloud de Azure, permite a un atacante ejecutar comandos en las mismas. Twitter: @ciberafterwork Instagram @ciberafterwork +info: https://psaneme.com/ Píldora SASE: https://www.netskope.com/ https://www.wiz.io/blog/secret-agent-exposes-azure-customers-to-unauthorized-code-execution

Links: WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job: https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/17/microsoft_manual_omigod_fixes/ Travis CI flaw exposed secrets of thousands of open source projects: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/travis-ci-flaw-exposed-secrets-for-thousands-of-open-source-projects/ How to Build Strong Security Guardrails in the AWS Cloud With Minimal Effort: https://markn.ca/2021/how-to-build-strong-security-guardrails-in-the-aws-cloud-with-minimal-effort/ Introduction to OWASP Top 10 2021: https://owasp.org/Top10/ AWS SIGv4 and SIGv4A: https://shufflesharding.com/posts/aws-sigv4-and-sigv4a Inside Figma: getting out of the (secure) shell: https://www.figma.com/blog/inside-figma-getting-out-of-the-secure-shell/ AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS WAF rate-based rules: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/09/aws-firewall-manager-waf-rate-based-rules/ How to automate incident response to security events with AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-automate-incident-response-to-security-events-with-aws-systems-manager-incident-manager/ New Standard Contractual Clauses now part of the AWS GDPR Data Processing Addendum for customers: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/new-standard-contractual-clauses-now-part-of-the-aws-gdpr-data-processing-addendum-for-customers/ Protect your remote workforce by using a managed DNS firewall and network firewall: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/protect-your-remote-workforce-by-using-a-managed-dns-firewall-and-network-firewall/ AWS Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-security-hub-automated-response-and-remediation Checkov: https://github.com/bridgecrewio/checkov TranscriptCorey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it's nobody in particular's job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst Canary. This might take a little bit to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org, in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, or anything else like that that you can generate in various parts of your environment, wherever you want them to live. It gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example, and the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use them. It's an awesome approach to detecting breaches. I've used something similar for years myself before I found them. Check them out. But wait, there's more because they also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of: canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment and manage them centrally. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files that it presents on a fake file store, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, instead you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached the very hard way. So, check it out. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I am so glad I found them. I love it.” Again, those URLs are canarytokens.org and canary.tools. And the first one is free because of course it is. The second one is enterprise-y. You'll know which one of those you fall into. Take a look. I'm a big fan. More to come from Thinkst Canary weeks ahead.Corey: Oh, for th—this is the third episode of the Last Week in AWS slash AMB: Security Edition, and instead of buying a sponsorship like a reasonable company, Microsoft Azure is once again forcing me to talk about their cloud instead, via completely blowing it when it comes to security. Again. Not only did they silently install an agent onto virtual machines in Azure that add a handful of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities, it's also apparently your job to fix it for them. I have to confess, I take Azure a lot less seriously than I did a month ago.Now, let's dive in here. Speaking of terrible things, it's honestly difficult for me to imagine a company screwing the pooch harder than TravisCI did this month. They had a bug that started leaking private credentials into public build logs; this is bad. They fixed it; this is good. And then only begrudgingly disclosed it in a buried release with remarkably little public messaging; this is unfathomable. At this point, if you're using TravisCI, get the hell off of it. Mistakes happen to every vendor. The ones that try to hide their mistakes are absolutely not companies you can trust.If you put up a slide deck and accompanying notes entitled How to Build Strong Security Guardrails in the AWS Cloud With Minimal Effort, I'm probably going to take a look at it because strong guardrails are important and minimal effort is critical if you expect it to actually get done. If you're also my longtime friend Mark Nunnikhoven, then I'm going to default to treating it as gospel because Mark frankly does not miss when it comes to AWS concepts explained in an easily approachable way. Security has got to be aligned with the way engineers work within your environment. Remember, it's not that hard to spin up a new AWS account on someone's corporate credit card; you absolutely do not want to incentivize that behavior.Corey: I periodically say the OWASP Top 10, which is a list of the most critical security risks for applications on the web, has not meaningfully changed in ten years. Well, apparently it just did. It's worth reviewing the changes; broken configurations top the list. The Open Web Application Security Project—OWASP—is a foundation that's remained surprisingly free of capture by security vendors. It's a good starting point to frame your risk exposure and what to think about.AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer Colm MacCárthaigh has an article on AWS's new signing protocol, along with the differences between AWS SIGv4 and SIGv4A. As a quick primer, all requests to AWS are signed for authentication reasons. The new SIGv4A isn't region-locked—and the recent release of the S3 Multi-Region Access Points is why it makes it a bit of a problem—there's no key exchange, and it's more computationally expensive. You don't really need to know the details as a practitioner, but you should be aware that AWS very much does put stupendous thought into this, and they sweat the details something fierce. This is why we trust cloud providers like AWS, and Google Cloud, and absolutely not Azure.Figma has a great post up, talking about how they stopped using SSH via bastion host and started using Systems Manager Session Manager instead. Bad name, wonderful service. More to the point, what I like about this post isn't just the, “Here's how the technology works,” parts, but also dives into the nuts and bolts of how they handled the migration without stopping work for folks. Communicating changes like this is tricky; don't lose sight of that.Now, from the mouth of AWS horse itself, let's dive in. AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS WAF rate-based rules. This is pretty awesome if for no other reason than it's aware both of multiple regions as well as multiple accounts.An awful lot of security services that are both first and third-party alike tend to go for addressing only one of those at best. Anything that lets you manage things centrally in a holistic way when it comes to security is generally going to be a win, but you also don't want a giant single point of failure. It's a bit of a balancing act, but that's why our field needs us. It's why they pay us.How to automate incident response to security events with AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager. And I'm genuinely torn on this. I like automation, but it strikes me as a way to end up automating the responses to fairly common things rather than addressing the actual cause so you get fewer false alarms. You really don't want the security pager going off frequently, if for no other reason than you'll be training the people carrying it to ignore it.Announcer: Have you implemented industry best practices for securely accessing SSH servers, databases, or Kubernetes? It takes time and expertise to set up. Teleport makes it easy. It is an identity-aware access proxy that brings automatically expiring credentials for everything you need, including role-based access controls, access requests, and the audit log. It helps prevent data exfiltration and helps implement PCI and FedRAMP compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open-source and a pleasure to use. Download Teleport at goteleport.com. That's goteleport.com.Corey: AWS is harping about its New Standard Contractual Clauses now part of the AWS GDPR Data Processing Addendum for customers, blah, blah, blah—look, if you have compliance obligations, here's what you do. Check the documents in AWS Artifact, reach out to your account manager for additional resources, and whatever you do, do not attempt to YOLO it yourself from first principles. AWS has piles and piles of documents ready and waiting to satisfy regulators and auditors alike. I tried to do it myself once, and a financial institution attempted to set up a tour of us-east-one. Trust me when I say you don't want to go down that path.Protect your remote workforce by using a managed DNS firewall and network firewall. Look, the post can safely be discarded; it's chock full of complexity lurking deep in the weeds, but I bring it up instead so that you think for a moment about the threat model of a remote workforce, read as most of them these days. Does having a DNS firewall protect against threats that they're likely to encounter? Does a network firewall make sense in a zero-trust world? Consider those things in the context of your environment rather than in the context of a company that has things it needs to sell you. Good decisions are rarely sourced from vendors.A couple of tools as well. Automating response and remediation is one of those delicate balances. The unimaginatively named AWS Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation GitHub repo has ways to handle this but it's going to be super easy to automate away things that really shouldn't be automated. You are definitely going to want to think through edge and corner cases.And lastly, I tripped over checkov last week. It analyzes your Terraform slash CloudFormation slash whatever configurations for various misconfigurations. It caught a couple of things that I've been ignoring for a while, and while it missed another couple of problems in my environment, it's definitely going to be something I integrate into my deployment pipelines in the future, once I have deployment pipelines. That's checkov—C-H-E-C-K-O-V—open-source projects. Take a look. I'm a fan.And that's what happened to the world of AWS security last week. Enjoy not having to care about the rest of it.Corey: I have been your host, Corey Quinn, and if you remember nothing else, it's that when you don't get what you want, you get experience instead. Let my experience guide you with the things you need to know in the AWS security world, so you can get back to doing your actual job. Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Editionwith the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—and be sure to sign up for the Last Week in AWS newsletter at lastweekinaws.com.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

This week on the podcast we discuss the recently patched zero-click vulnerability in iOS, macOS and WatchOS that researchers at TheCitizen Lab discovered while investigating NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. After that, we cover a vulnerability in the OMI Agent that comes automatically installed on all Azure Linux virtual machines. We finish by covering Microsoft's latest efforts to kill passwords for good.

A scarily exploitable hole in Microsoft open source code. A simpler take on delivery scams. A Face ID bypass hack, patched for the initial release of iOS 15. And how not to get locked in a cabling closet. Coder? Use Sophos Intelix yourself for free: https://sophos.com/intelix With Paul Ducklin and Doug Aamoth. Original music by Edith Mudge Got questions/suggestions/stories to share? Email tips@sophos.com Twitter @NakedSecurity Instagram @NakedSecurity

On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's security news, including: BlackMatter is back in the USA's critical supply chain The FBI and friends apparently got up in REvil's business The Azure OMI thing is totally the disaster we were expecting Much, much more Brett Winterford is this week's sponsor guest. These days Brett is a senior director of cybersecurity strategy at Okta, but the reason you might recognise his name is because he took a year off working for vendors to be our newsletter author – he was the founding editor of the Seriously Risky Business newsletter. He'll be along to talk about legacy auth and why vendors should have deprecation policies. Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that's your thing. Show notes Ransomware gang strikes Iowa agriculture business New Cooperative, the latest hack on food supply chain After Biden Warning, Hackers Define ‘Critical' as They See Fit - Bloomberg Customer Care Giant TTEC Hit By Ransomware – Krebs on Security Opinion | America Is Being Held for Ransom. It Needs to Fight Back. - The New York Times (4) Patrick Gray on Twitter: "Achievement unlocked: The Risky Biz release the hounds doctrine has now been condemned by gg. https://t.co/6W9uHwHLyl" / Twitter FBI held back ransomware decryption key from businesses to run operation targeting hackers - The Washington Post Biden administration to target ransomware attacks by cracking down on crypto payments - The Washington Post The battle between the U.S. and ransomware hackers is escalating DDoS botnets, cryptominers target Azure systems after OMIGOD exploit goes public - The Record by Recorded Future Microsoft fixes OMIGOD bugs in secret Azure app - The Record by Recorded Future Why Government and Military Sites Are Hosting Porn and Viagra Ads Report: China-linked hackers take aim at Times of India and a biometric bonanza - The Record by Recorded Future (5) Andrew Roth on Twitter: "Apple and Google have deleted the @navalny app from their store as Duma elections begin, bowing to pressure from the government. Russians can't find the app in their store, it still works outside of country. https://t.co/CtTf0ZushW" / Twitter Exclusive: An American Company Fears Its Windows Hacks Helped India Spy On China And Pakistan Former NSA Hacker Describes Being Recruited for UAE Spy Program - by Kim Zetter - Zero Day Key security agencies split over whether to sanction a Huawei spinoff, Honor, by placing it on a Commerce blacklist - The Washington Post 106 Italian mafia members arrested for SIM swapping, BEC scams, phishing - The Record by Recorded Future Man who bribed AT&T employees to install malware on the company's network gets 12 years in prison - The Record by Recorded Future Supply chain attacks against the open source ecosystem soar by 650% – report | The Daily Swig Google announces partnership to review security of open source software projects | The Daily Swig Researcher discloses iPhone lock screen bypass on iOS 15 launch day - The Record by Recorded Future Google will extend Permission Auto-Reset feature to older Android versions - The Record by Recorded Future Malware samples found trying to hack Windows from its Linux subsystem - The Record by Recorded Future AMD CPU driver bug can break KASLR, expose passwords - The Record by Recorded Future Microsoft to let users completely remove account passwords and go passwordless - The Record by Recorded Future Auditing your Okta org for Legacy Authentication | Okta Security

A scarily exploitable hole in Microsoft open source code. A simpler take on delivery scams. A Face ID bypass hack, patched for the initial release of iOS 15. And how not to get locked in a cabling closet. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/omigod-an-exploitable-hole https://sophos.com/intelix https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/back-to-basics-as-courier-scammers-skip-fake-fees https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/ios-15-includes-face-id-fix With Paul Ducklin and Doug Aamoth. Original music by Edith Mudge (https://www.edithmudge.com) Got questions/suggestions/stories to share? Email: tips@sophos.com Twitter: NakedSecurity (https://twitter.com/nakedsecurity) Instagram: NakedSecurity (https://instagram.com/nakedsecurity)

Cloud Security News this week - 22 September 2021 AWS, Google Cloud and Azure have all been busy last few weeks fixing and patching Vulnerabilities. In addition to Azure's OMIGOD flaws which we covered in last week's episode, Google Cloud reported that some of their load balancers were routing to an Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) enabled Backend Service which could have been vulnerable to an untrusted party. Google Cloud have confirmed that this issue has been resolved. Rhino Security Labs have discovered a vulnerability in AWS WorkSpaces, amazon's virtual desktop. Exploiting this vulnerability allows commands to be executed if a victim opens a malicious WorkSpaces URI from their browser. Rhino reported the vulnerability to Amazon and it was promptly patched. Attackers have begun to exploit critical Microsoft Azure vulnerabilities that were reported in last week's episode. The OMIGOD flaws, discovered by the Wiz Research Team have since been patched by microsoft. New data indicates that attackers are scanning the Web for Azure Linux virtual machines that are vulnerable. If successful, an attacker could become root on a remote machine. For organisations and enterprises cloud is about improved flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. For cybercriminals, Cloud is an environment filled with poorly secured enterprise data, applications, and online assets. IBM in their recently released Security X-Force Cloud Threat Landscape Report highlight increased attacker interest in the thriving black market for stolen credentials used to access enterprise accounts and resources on public cloud platforms. IBM X-Force discovered about 30,000 cloud credentials potentially available for sale on Dark Web and Prices for these credentials ranged from a few dollars to more than $15,000 per credential, based on the level of access and the amount of credit associated with an account. Report available here Episode Show Notes on Cloud Security Podcast Website. Podcast Twitter - Cloud Security Podcast (@CloudSecPod) If you want to watch videos of this LIVE STREAMED episode and past episodes, check out: - Cloud Security Podcast: - Cloud Security Academy:

This Week in the Security News: Cosa Nostra, Amazon AI, Healthcare Apps, OSTIF, OMIGOD, IOS 15, Thailand, and Time Crystals! All this and the triumphant return of Jason Wood for Expert Commentary!   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn151 Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes!

This week in the AppSec News, Mike and John talk: RCE in Azure OMI, punching a hole in iMessage BlastDoor, Travis CI exposes sensitive environment variables, keeping code ownership accurate, deploying security as a product, IoT Device Criteria (aka nutrition labels), & more!   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw166 Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes!

This week in the AppSec News, Mike and John talk: RCE in Azure OMI, punching a hole in iMessage BlastDoor, Travis CI exposes sensitive environment variables, keeping code ownership accurate, deploying security as a product, IoT Device Criteria (aka nutrition labels), & more!   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw166 Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/aswfor all the latest episodes!

This Week in the Security News: Cosa Nostra, Amazon AI, Healthcare Apps, OSTIF, OMIGOD, IOS 15, Thailand, and Time Crystals! All this and the triumphant return of Jason Wood for Expert Commentary!   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn151 Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swnfor all the latest episodes!   Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly

Omigod, you guys! The High Court of Culture welcomes Judge Sabrina Treacy, a self-proclaimed Bougie Brunch Black, former Math Enthusiast of the Year, and a TOMMY Award Winner! Sabrina joins Nick and Jess to discuss the high stakes of high school casting drama and the scam that is AP courses, the higher stakes of DaBaby calling out JoJo Siwa, and the even higher stakes of Chris Harrison's “time off” from Bachelor Nation. Sabrina is a judge who knows her facts and isn't afraid to whip out the key evidence to deliver her verdicts, and the court thanks her for it! The Tits are tasty (#ParisLasagna, anyone?) and Tat Time gets testy. Can't get enough of Sabrina like us? Follow her on Twitter @sabs_jt and be sure to check out her Twitter news column with The Court's very own Nick Reit, coming soon!

Happy Holidays from your favorite ho-hoe-hoes! This episode we have special guest, assistant to the stars aka Cara And DeJa, and Cara's hubby Christopher! We get festive and discuss allll things Christmas and figure out why the gays love Christmas, the worst Christmas song, why Mariah shaded J-HUD, and the Grinch's p*nis.... yup.

In this episode, Zoe and Bianca discuss a musical that we desperately need revived: Legally Blonde. Stay tuned for our dream cast ideas and how we think this mid-2000's masterpiece could be updated to the 2020's. Links Follow the Pod! https://www.instagram.com/beyondbalcony/ https://twitter.com/beyondbalcony @beyondbalcony Email beyondbalcony@gmail.com Or us! Zoe Rodriguez https://www.instagram.com/zo_rod/ @zo_rod Bianca Akbiyik https://www.instagram.com/_bonkaisthename/ @_bonkaisthename Alex Newell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPHozetSxUM Ashley Park https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC4Lgod9Hmo Curtain Call Good Morning, World! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWGqSbR0Y4U&list=PL_iaCQXcK0Q4r-nVQNrCUilwXOkGp0mFV Good Evening, World! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpjhSClOF0U&list=PLfuWu_9IeKiT4PYdIe8fyWOmMNf1OZOMU