Podcasts about Percy

In this podcast episode, fangirl Jillian and her husband Tyler recap Maxton Hall Season 2 Episode 5 “Deceptive Lightness" - the most dramatic episode yet! From Mortimer's explosive return and the shocking phone reveal to Ruby's Oxford dreams being threatened, this episode is packed with twists, romance, and our favorite themed event yet. We unpack James' family chaos, Percy's backstory hints, the scholarship fallout, and the magical Midsummer Night's Dream party.Buy our merch: ⁠https://www.etsy.com/shop/PreviouslyOnTeenTV⁠Follow Previously On Teen TV on Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/previouslyon_teentv/Follow Previously On Teen TV on TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@previouslyon_teentv⁠⁠Subscribe to our YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe2lgvvZGKMrQ8v24FmDdWQ?sub_confirmation=1⁠

DJ and Mayuri (Not The Droids and Spiced Volumes podcast) join Aureo and Sophia to discuss the hirings and firings of the Defense Against the Dark Arts professors in the Harry Potter series. We discuss the impact of Voldemort's curse on the subject and the results as seen through Harry's eyes. Join the discussion on our website In this episode: Harry should have been a DADA teacher It's a swing to go from Muggle Studies to DADA Everyone just learns about trolls How does Voldemort's jinx of the DADA position work? Did the Marauders have better DADA professors? Auror training could have included a year as a DADA professor Quirell would have lost his job either way Dumbledore should not be the headmaster Resources: The Schemes Behind the Spite: Why Voldemort Really Jinxed the DADA Job by Sophia Pub's Jukebox: Mad-Eye Moody by Percy and the Prefects Contact: Website: https://threebroomstickspod.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/threebroomstickspod/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/threebroomstickspodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/threebroompod Email: 3broomstickspod@gmail.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/3broomsticks 

This week we dive into four solid grow topics you'll actually use in your everyday grow. First up, we talk about how to make proper cannabis salves at home. Then we look at the best grow tents on the market right now and what makes one worth your money. We also get into defoliation, when to do it, how much to take, and how not to butcher your plants. And to finish the show, we walk you through building a pest-proof grow room. Also of course we cover this week listener mail. As always, join us on Percy's Grow Room if you want to learn more, get help with your grow, or hang out with thousands of growers just like you. Join our community here:

Dave Percy | 10-26-2025 | 2025 Missions Conference - Session #3 by TABC

Bishop Tony Percy says being grateful for literally everything in life is a recipe for greatness – spiritual magnanimity. Jesus is the epitome of gratitude

This week, Percy and Nick sit down to discuss the politics of games and the different ways that TTRPGs have engaged with leftist and antifascist themes with a special guest: scholar of analog games PB Berge. You can see more work by our guest PB Berge at https://persephone.blue/ and https://gravesnail.itch.io/. You can read PB and Percy's recent co-authored article in the Analog Game Studies journal! Dungeons and Drama Nerds is produced by Percival Hornak and Nicholas Orvis, and this episode was mixed and edited by Percival Hornak. Our core ensemble are Todd Brian Backus, Jovane Caamano, Anthony Sertel Dean, Christopher Diercksen, Ben Ferber, Kory Flores, Mieko Gavia, Tess Huth, Romana Isabella, Jon Jon Johnson, CJ Linton, C. “Meaks” Meaker, Leo Mock, Dex Phan, and Tristan B. Willis.  Our game of Wythe Marschall's Stillfleet features Christopher Diercksen as Geshra Veedle, Kory Flores as Peanut, Mieko Gavia as Kyrannis, Jon Jon Johnson as Private Taps, special guest Wythe Marschall as Cherric Shaddams, and Ben Ferber as the GM. If you'd like to help us continue exploring the intersections of theatre and tabletop roleplaying games, consider leaving us a review on your podcast app of choice or supporting us - and getting access to our patron-only bonus content - at patreon.com/dungeonsanddramanerds. You can find our social media and website links, including our cast bios, at the linktree in our show notes. And be sure to tune in soon for another episode of Dungeons and Drama Nerds!

MEDUSA BACKSTORY & THE MOTHER OF MONSTERS!! Percy Jackson and the Olympians Full Series Reaction Watch Along: ⁠  / thereelrejects  ⁠ Start your online business with a $1 per-month trial when you visit ⁠https://www.shopify.com/rejects⁠ Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) Movie Reaction: ⁠   • PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: The Lightni...  ⁠ Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013) Movie Reaction: ⁠   • PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS (2013) MOVI...  ⁠ Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! ⁠https://www.rejectnationshop.com/⁠ Percy Jackson Reaction, Recap, Commentary, Analysis, Breakdown & Spoiler Review! Greg Alba & Tara Erickson react to Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Episodes 3 & 4) — the next thrilling chapter in Disney+'s faithful adaptation of Rick Riordan's beloved fantasy series. These episodes dive deeper into Percy's quest, expanding the world of Greek mythology with new monsters, major character introductions, and the escalating mystery behind Zeus' stolen master bolt. The series stars Walker Scobell (The Adam Project, Secret Headquarters) as Percy Jackson, who fully steps into his role as Poseidon's son while learning what it truly means to be a hero. Leah Sava Jeffries (Beast, Empire) shines as the brilliant and determined Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena, while Aryan Simhadri (Cheaper by the Dozen, Spin) brings heart and comedy as Grover Underwood, Percy's satyr protector and best friend. Episodes 3 & 4 cover “We Visit the Garden Gnome Emporium” and “I Plunge to My Death,” introducing iconic characters and quests from the book, including: Medusa, reimagined in a powerful performance by Jessica Parker Kennedy (The Flash, Black Sails), as the trio confronts their first major monster; The gateway arch battle, featuring Percy's first major solo showdown and one of the most famous sequences in the entire saga; Growing tension between the gods as Percy begins to understand why he is at the center of a brewing divine war; & Deepening friendship dynamics among the trio as Annabeth and Percy clash, bond, and learn to trust each other. Follow Tara Erickson: Youtube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TaraErickson⁠ Instagram: ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/taraerickson/⁠ Twitter: ⁠ https://twitter.com/thetaraerickson⁠ Intense Suspense by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...⁠ Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! ⁠https://www.rejectnationshop.com/⁠ Follow Us On Socials:  Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/⁠  Tik-Tok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@reelrejects?lang=en⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/reelrejects⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/⁠ Music Used In Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠ Happy Alley by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...⁠ POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit⁠ https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo⁠ and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en⁠ Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.⁠ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO:⁠ https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects⁠ Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/⁠ INSTAGRAM: ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/⁠ TWITTER:  ⁠https://twitter.com/thereelrejects⁠ Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/⁠ TWITTER:  ⁠https://twitter.com/thegregalba⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dave Percy | 10-26-2025 | 2025 Missions Conference - Session #2 by TABC

Dave Percy | 10-25-2025 | 2025 Missions Conference - Session #1 by TABC

Send me a message!Learn how to recognize and speak with Red-style communicators — the fast, direct, and results-driven people you meet in daily life. In this episode, Percy breaks down simple Social English strategies for talking to someone who wants clear answers, quick decisions, and confident energy. Perfect for English learners who want to understand American communication styles in casual, everyday situations.日本語速くて、直接的で、結果を重視する「赤タイプ」の話し方をわかりやすく解説します。日常生活でよく出会う赤タイプの人と、どのようにシンプルで自然なソーシャル英語で話せばよいかをパーシーが紹介します。アメリカ人のカジュアルなコミュニケーションスタイルを理解したい英語学習者に最適のエピソードです。Support the show

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling (1997) vs The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (2005)

We follow Sister Anastazja in the months and days before our investigators landed in Nanaimo. Meanwhile our investigators prove to be unexpectedly adept at tracking drunken miners.Dick feels like poopEmery is as stealthy as night itselfDaina and Percy bond over claustrophobiaSister Anastazja enters the mysteryAnd Sean hits a new record of saying "GODAMMIT" at his players.

The party reconsiles with the events of the Seance until Mr Dunsmuir shows up personally to task them with a case.Dick is now ball bearing. Percy looks for a mysterious packageElofe chooses her name. Emery gets a giiiiiiiirlfrriiiend, not really, maybe, it's classified.

Percy Hayes, an early leader in Vancouver's Divine Love movement with his soulmate Phyllis, tells us that if we haven't yet, we can develop a truly personal relationship with God, and experience God as a personal friend, confidant, and healer.  Go to divinelovesanctuary.ca to learn more about God's Divine Love. Or visit facebook.com/divinelovesanctuaryfoundation/live for previous circle recordings or soul-truth.ca and new-birth.net to browse transcripts of previous messages.

This week, Casper and Vanessa explore the theme of Mercy in Chapter 30 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! They discuss Harry's unforgivable curse, Percy's return, and Slughorn's options! Throughout the episode we consider the question: what is the cost of mercy?Thank you to Thulasi for this week's voicemail! Next week we're reading Chapter 31, The Battle of Hogwarts, through the theme of Freedom.Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is a Not Sorry ProductionFind us at our website | Follow us on Instagram--It's two sickles to join S.P.E.W., and only five dollars to join our Patreon for extra content every week! Please consider helping us fill our Gringotts vault so we can continue to make this show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bishop Tony Percy says we are to live a life of prayer and work – Ora et Labora. Notice what is going on here: Work of the heart, work of the hands. We worship God during times of personal and communal prayer. We worship God during times of manual and intellectual work

GETTING CAUGHT UP BEFORE SEASON 2!! Percy Jackson and the Olympians Full Series Reaction Watch Along: ⁠  / thereelrejects  ⁠ Download PrizePicks today at ⁠https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/RE...⁠ & use code REJECTS to get $50 instantly when you play $5! Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) Movie Reaction: ⁠   • PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: The Lightni...  ⁠ Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013) Movie Reaction: ⁠   • PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS (2013) MOVI...  ⁠ Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! ⁠https://www.rejectnationshop.com/⁠ Percy Jackson Reaction, Recap, Commentary, Analysis, Breakdown & Spoiler Review! Greg Alba & Tara Erickson dive into the Disney+ adaptation of Rick Riordan's bestselling series Percy Jackson and the Olympians as we follow Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell), Annabeth Chase (Leah Jeffries), and Grover Underwood (Aryan Simhadri) through the opening episodes: “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher” and “I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom.” We revisit every major moment — Percy's discovery that he's a demigod, the attack from Mrs. Dodds / the Fury (Alecto), the Minotaur battle, Sally Jackson's disappearance, Grover revealing his true identity as a satyr, Percy's arrival at Camp Half-Blood, his first encounter with Chiron, Mr. D, the centaurs, the cabins, the Capture-the-Flag scene, and the emerging threat from the gods of Olympus. We also highlight the iconic creatures and monsters featured in Episodes 1 & 2: Fury (Alecto), Minotaur, Hellhound tease, and hints of Olympus rising. We break down changes from the books, character dynamics, early foreshadowing for the Lightning Thief arc, how this adaptation sets up Percy Jackson Season 2, and why Disney+ is treating this series as a major tentpole. Whether you're searching for Percy Jackson Disney Plus reaction, Percy Jackson episodes explained, Minotaur fight breakdown, or Percy Jackson Season 2 predictions, this video covers mythology, monsters, friendships, powers, and every big moment from the first two episodes. Follow Tara Erickson: Youtube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TaraErickson⁠ Instagram: ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/taraerickson/⁠ Twitter: ⁠ https://twitter.com/thetaraerickson⁠ Intense Suspense by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...⁠ Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! ⁠https://www.rejectnationshop.com/⁠ Follow Us On Socials:  Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/⁠  Tik-Tok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@reelrejects?lang=en⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/reelrejects⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/⁠ Music Used In Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠ Happy Alley by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...⁠ POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit⁠ https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo⁠ and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en⁠ Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.⁠ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO:⁠ https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects⁠ Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/⁠ INSTAGRAM: ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/⁠ TWITTER:  ⁠https://twitter.com/thereelrejects⁠ Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/⁠ TWITTER:  ⁠https://twitter.com/thegregalba⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GETTING CAUGHT UP BEFORE SEASON 2!! Percy Jackson and the Olympians Full Series Reaction Watch Along:   / thereelrejects   Download PrizePicks today at https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/RE... & use code REJECTS to get $50 instantly when you play $5! Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) Movie Reaction:    • PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: The Lightni...   Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013) Movie Reaction:    • PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS (2013) MOVI...   Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! https://www.rejectnationshop.com/ Percy Jackson Reaction, Recap, Commentary, Analysis, Breakdown & Spoiler Review! Greg Alba & Tara Erickson dive into the Disney+ adaptation of Rick Riordan's bestselling series Percy Jackson and the Olympians as we follow Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell), Annabeth Chase (Leah Jeffries), and Grover Underwood (Aryan Simhadri) through the opening episodes: “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher” and “I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom.” We revisit every major moment — Percy's discovery that he's a demigod, the attack from Mrs. Dodds / the Fury (Alecto), the Minotaur battle, Sally Jackson's disappearance, Grover revealing his true identity as a satyr, Percy's arrival at Camp Half-Blood, his first encounter with Chiron, Mr. D, the centaurs, the cabins, the Capture-the-Flag scene, and the emerging threat from the gods of Olympus. We also highlight the iconic creatures and monsters featured in Episodes 1 & 2: Fury (Alecto), Minotaur, Hellhound tease, and hints of Olympus rising. We break down changes from the books, character dynamics, early foreshadowing for the Lightning Thief arc, how this adaptation sets up Percy Jackson Season 2, and why Disney+ is treating this series as a major tentpole. Whether you're searching for Percy Jackson Disney Plus reaction, Percy Jackson episodes explained, Minotaur fight breakdown, or Percy Jackson Season 2 predictions, this video covers mythology, monsters, friendships, powers, and every big moment from the first two episodes. Follow Tara Erickson: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaraErickson Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/taraerickson/ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/thetaraerickson Intense Suspense by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! https://www.rejectnationshop.com/ Follow Us On Socials:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/  Tik-Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@reelrejects?lang=en Twitter: https://x.com/reelrejects Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ Music Used In Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Happy Alley by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor: https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO: https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thereelrejects Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thegregalba Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An Angel For Bishop: Part 3 Willows tortured past exposes itself. In 4 parts, based on a post by BurntRedstone. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Once they were both clean they were breathing hard and standing facing each other. The moment he leaned towards her lips she surged forward to press hers against his. His tongue slipped forward to brush against hers and suddenly she was sucking at his tongue. His hands came up and cupped her breasts and he gently took her nipples between his thumb and finger, feeling the little gold barbells and rings dangle from them. Willow gasped into his mouth and he felt Willow's legs buckle a little. She was beginning to make those needy yips as she rolled her hips. She tugged, but he jolted back. "Willow, I don't have any condoms and I doubt Percy had the decency to put you on the pill. We can't." "I can't get pregnant," was all she said as she tugged at him. "What?" he gasped, as it was difficult holding a conversation with her. "The doctor made sure I couldn't have babies so it's okay," she said in a matter of fact tone. His head was spinning. He was still incredibly worked up and wanted to take Willow right now, but she'd just dropped a bomb from her past in his lap and his mind was reeling with the implications of her words. "Please! I need it!" she whined as he continued to hold her off while he tried to get his head back in the game. Willow dropped to her knees in one movement. First her lips were sliding, then her nose was buried against his stomach. He could feel her swallowing but he couldn't feel her breathing so he pulled back until he heard her gasp.  Willow got to her feet then turned around and put her hands against the shower wall, pushing her ass back. She rubbed him up and down her crack a few times. Dan grabbed her hips and Willow sighed. She was surprisingly tight and he couldn't get over how amazing she felt. Willow was moaning loudly and bearing down with her joyous cries she was loving every second. He could not exploit her vulnerable mental state, but knew that rejection was beyond her capacity to tolerate. So he continued to caress her and gently show her that she was precious and respected. The feeling of real love was enough to set her body into what seemed like multiple waves of ecstasy. Somehow Dan had found an amazing tool of therapy for this sexually abused woman. He pulled her back to stand upright. This sensation and her cries of joy triggered him. For good measure he gave her neck a gentle kiss and felt her trigger off again. He held her exhausted body suspended between his arm circling her chest and his other arm around her hip. She leaned back against his chest and her breath came out in deep gasps. Once their breathing had returned to normal Dan set her feet back on the floor. He looked at her and said "We need to talk about what you said about the doctor. I need to hear the whole story, but later." He tenderly washed between her legs. Then he shampooed and conditioned her hair once more. God he loved running his fingers through her hair and from the way she moaned and purred he knew she loved it too. He washed his hair, rinsed off, and turned the water off. They stepped out and dried off with their thick towels together. He replaced her bandages once more with dry ones. They padded into his bedroom and Dan remembered her clothes should be ready in the dryer. He quickly collected them and brought them back to her. He inspected the garments and saw the jeans were largely undamaged though there were some grease stains on the lower legs he suspected came from riding the motorcycle. Her shirt had a tear where the branch had pierced her shoulder. He could probably fix it but it wouldn't be pretty. He flipped it over and for the first time noticed the faded word across the back. It said 'Bitch'. He frowned. That asshole probably made her wear it. He wouldn't let her wear this again. He ripped it in two between his hands. He looked up and saw Willow staring at him wide eyed. "Sorry, the shirt had a word on it that doesn't belong on you. You won't be wearing clothes like that with me. You deserve better," he said. She smiled shyly at him. He saw she was struggling to get the bikini top on. Now that he was an 'expert' he showed her how to tie the lower string first under her tits (while struggling to keep his hands off of them), spin the knot around to the back, and pull the cups up, tying the top strings behind her neck. With his hands behind her neck, feeling her damp but now much smoother hair caressing his hands he saw she was looking into his eyes. He leaned forward and kissed her lips tenderly. He just wanted to feel her amazing lips on his as her kiss was so sweet. Willow's eyes closed and she swayed a little when he pulled back. His heart hurt she was so lovely. How anyone could hurt someone so beautiful was beyond him. He pulled her into a hug and squeezed her body against his, wanting to protect her with his strength and relishing the intimacy. Her arms wrapped around his chest and he felt her shiver. He pulled back and looked at her questioningly. He saw tears sliding down her cheeks. "What's wrong?" he asked gently. "I've never felt like this before," she whispered and hiccupped. "I feel so safe in your arms." She clung to him and pressed her face against his neck. He squeezed her to him again, feeling her tremble against him. They stood like that for a while. Once her trembling calmed he stepped back and gave her a smile which she returned. Her eyes glowed and she seemed as relaxed as he'd ever seen her. Chapter 3 Dan gave Willow a tour of the 'log cabin' which was more accurately described as a log mansion. He was rather proud of the building as it showcased his engineering expertise. The building was all on one level and followed the natural contours of the hillside in a serpentine curve with a magnificent view of the surrounding mountains, or in this case the blizzard which continued to rage into its second day. Under the gleaming hardwood flooring the entire structure was built on a poured concrete base with in-floor heating courtesy of a complex network of piping linked to the hot springs and an even more complex computer control system. The power needed to support the electronics and the rest of the house was fed by a huge series of batteries stored in an underground bunker built into the hillside. This array was on a constant trickle feed from multiple sources. Wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal, and even a small hydro turbine generator tapping into an underground river they discovered during construction. All said, they had energy to spare. Beyond the amazing array of technology he'd built into the mansion the building contained all the comforts you could ask for. There was a huge living room with a large stone fireplace surrounded by deep comfy couches and facing a panoramic view of the mountainside. A large deck started on the northern side of the house and wrapped around to the western side to create a huge, two level socializing area in front of the living and dining room windows. Behind the living room built into the mountain was a large home theatre with stadium seating for twelve, three rows of four comfy recliners. Next to the living room was a large dining room with a massive polished slab of shiny hardwood for a table and seating for twelve. The next room was the kitchen which Willow was familiar with. There was an enormous pantry off the kitchen and a second door which led to the communications/control center for the house which doubled as a safe room. The table in the kitchen sat six and there was a deck accessible by a door next to the table. Exiting from the other side of the kitchen was a corridor which had the laundry room on one side, a utility room on the other, and continued on to the five big guest bedrooms each having a small seating area and a dedicated full washroom. The final bedroom was the master which had an enormous washroom suite, a walk-in closet, and a decent sized office. On the uphill side of the building at this point was the garage, a concrete and steel bunker built right into the mountainside. It was deep and wide enough for eight vehicles and at its far end was a complete metal and wood working workshop with all the required tools for maintaining the house. The roof deck of the garage was the home for communication dishes, a large greenhouse with a pool area again heated by the hot spring. There was interior access to the pool area by a spiral staircase in the garage. When Dan led Willow back to the kitchen she was looking a little overwhelmed. "So... you're rich?" she asked quietly. "Rich?" he replied in surprise. Then he smiled and said "I designed and built the home but it's not mine. I just live in it during the winter months when no one else is here. The home is owned by the Noskov family from Russia. They are... incredibly rich, and generous. I was unofficially adopted by the Noskov's when I... helped get them out of a hot zone in Iraq during the war. They let me build them this house and I get to live in it. They also set me up with a... trust fund I guess you'd call it. When I need something I can tap into it. I don't think I'm rich but I'm pretty comfortable. I mean I have my engineering degree and the stuff I learned building this house has set me up in a very lucrative business of designing custom energy systems for people wanting to live off the grid. I have patents pending on several of the components and their designs. There is also a waiting list of customers wanting me to design for their specific environments. I can do most of that right from here. All that brings in a good income... huh, maybe I am rich or at least have the potential to be!" he smiled at the delight in Willow's eyes. Dan busied himself making some herbal tea. It still wasn't time for dinner yet but a snack would be good. He wanted to ensure Willow started taking in the calories she needed to get back to a healthy weight. He dropped some bread slices in the toaster and pulled out the peanut butter. He poured the tea and sweetened it for Willow. He spread the peanut butter on toast watching it melt. Then he stopped. Dan was pissed at himself again but he kept that anger inside so he wouldn't spook Willow. He just made an assumption that might have been really bad for her. "Willow, are you allergic to anything? Like nuts?" he asked. "I don't think so," she replied. "Have you eaten peanut butter before? Do you like it?" Dan asked. "Yes, I love peanut butter but I've never had it on toast," she said. Dan shook off the tremble that crept up his back. He needed to know more about her to prevent something like this from happening again. He saw the notepad was still on the table. He carried the herbal teas to the table then brought Willow her peanut butter toast. She looked at him when she saw he didn't have any toast in front of him. "You need the calories. I'll wait for dinner," he said with a smile. Willow carefully picked up her toast and took a small bite. When the warm peanut butter hit her tongue a broad smile spread across her face. "I LOVE peanut butter toast!" she gushed. She took a few more bites. He grinned at her delight and picked up the notepad. After a sip of his tea he looked at Willow and asked "I hope you don't mind but I'd like to see how much more of your history we can fill in." She continued to munch on the toast and sip at the tea but gave him a nod. "Do you recall the name of the man Percy, uh, took you from?" He still felt weird saying that. "Herman Denk. He was a doctor. He gave me my new tits and fixed me so I couldn't make babies or have a period." she said. Dan's stomach clenched. She said it like it was nothing but Dan was grateful to Percy for having killed the bastard who butchered Willow for his own needs and enjoyment. He took a deep breath and wrote down the Doctor's name and the approximate year he died. "Do you recall how long you lived with Herman? How many winters or summers?" he asked her next. Willow looked confused then sad. "Herman lived in Las Vegas and I stayed inside in my room most of the time when he wasn't taking me out to parties. I don't remember how long that was but I think I stayed with him the longest. Before we moved to Las Vegas we were in Florida. That's where he poisoned and killed Officer Warren Greggs and took me from him. Officer Greggs used his handcuffs on me a lot and beat me because I wasn't worthy of having sex with him. That's where these scars came from." She showed him the rough white ridges encircling both of her wrists. Obviously the cuffs had done some serious damage to her skin at that time as the scar tissue was extensive. "He kept me chained in a room in his basement. When I got sick Officer Greggs brought Herman to fix me. We moved to Las Vegas after Officer Greggs was dead." Dan was feeling a little queasy but while Willow was feeling talkative he'd get the information from her. As long as he had names and knew they had died he could find their obituaries and work out a timeline from that. He jotted down some notes and nodded at Willow to continue. "Madam Tallia was my Mistress before Officer Greggs took me from her. She lived in a big old house in Georgia. She was angry a lot. She had been hurt in a car accident and she lost her eye. She wore a fancy eye patch but her mouth was so cruel. She told me I looked just like the bitch who destroyed her beauty. She would tie me up and burn my arms and legs with her cigarettes." Willow pointed out a few of the older circular scars running up her arms. "She told me that she was saving my face for later. I was always terrified that she was going to burn my face. Officer Greggs was at one of her parties. He found me tied up in my bedroom and put me in the trunk of his car. He told me he burned Mistress Tallia's house down with her inside." Willow took a long sip of her tea to moisten her throat as she was unaccustomed to talking for so long. "Mistress Tallia got me from Mr. Bill who brought me to one of her parties. Mistress Tallia called him Buffalo Bill because she said he was from that 'miserable place'. She told me that she wasn't going to give me back to Mr. Bill. She told me she gave him poisoned heroin so he wouldn't come back to get me the morning after the party and he didn't so I guess he's dead. When I was with Mr. Bill we moved around a lot and we lived out of his car. I don't remember his last name. Sometimes he gave me drugs and I would forget things. He loaned me out to people who gave him drugs and took me to lots of sex parties. I think Mr. Bill bought me from my mom's boyfriend when she died." Willow's voice ran out at that point. It was the longest Dan had ever heard her speak and while the subject matter was horrific to him, he was so glad that he got her story. He could work with this. "Do you remember your mom's name?" he asked gently. She thought about it then shook her head sadly. "Do you remember how old you were when your mom died?" he asked. Willow sat quietly for a minute thinking. "I remember... a tenth birthday party. I think it was shortly after that when some men came to the house looking for mom's boyfriend. I was playing outside but I heard them yelling 'where is he'. When they left I went inside and she was dead. When her boyfriend got home he took me with him in the car and we drove away. He met Mr. Bill at a truck stop on the highway and sold me to him." Dan sat looking at Willow. He couldn't breathe. His chest felt tight. Her mother was murdered when she was 10 and she was immediately sold off into the sex trade and slavery? How could that not screw you up? He opened his arms and Willow was immediately curled up on his lap and in his arms. They sat like that for quite a while, just holding each other and rocking gently. It gave Dan time to think. Dan felt completely inadequate for the task of healing Willow. He knew he could love her and was surprised that he was already starting to feel that way towards her. He reminded himself that they'd only met the day before and there'd been a lot of intense emotion involved in that short time. Before he started throwing words like love around he needed to get some perspective. Difficult to get when her soft body was clinging to him. Based on her account she'd been held captive by five people and had been raped and tortured multiple times by them and raped by many others starting from a very early age. Now she was with him. Was she better off? He'd already had sex with her, multiple times in the very short time he'd known her. And he'd killed for her as they had. He was willing to grant that in his case at least it really had been kill or be killed and her life was at risk at the time. That said it was easy for him to see how similar he was to previous 'masters'. God, his skin crawled when he thought of himself in those terms. Maybe that was the difference? He didn't want to be her master. He wanted her to be a whole person. He wasn't sure that was going to be possible considering her past. But he knew he would do what he could to help her regain as much as she could. He felt so protective of her! He wasn't clear where that came from but it certainly didn't seem harmful to her so he felt okay about letting her see that. The first thing he could do to help her was get her identity back. With the information he had an investigator should be able to connect the dots to get back to the start. Then he could get her birth certificate, then a passport, an identity. Maybe it was just his paranoia but he wanted a discreet investigation. There had been at least one police officer involved in her abduction and Percy's gang was not going to be too friendly to someone who killed one of their members. He was again over his head but he knew someone that could help. "I could stay here all day holding you but I need to make a call and send a note. I have to report Percy's death to the police or things could get messy. And I have to contact Andrei Noskov, the man who owns this house, to ask a favor. I thought we'd cook up a frozen pizza for dinner tonight. Can I ask you to go to the walk-in freezer in the garage and pick one out? They're on the rack to the left and there should be a supreme on top but any will do." She stood and headed off to the garage. Dan walked into the communications room and checked the signal strength. The storm seemed to be winding down but it still had the potential for affecting the line of sight antenna. He'd prefer not to use the satellite phone to contact the police as he wasn't sure how long he'd be on the line. He used the PC to dial up the nearest state police station and waited for someone to answer. He heard some weird stuttering on the line so he knew his connection was fairly weak. When someone finally answered he asked for Officer Benson or Officer Duncan as he'd met them and his instincts said they were okay. Not the best gauge but it was what he had. Benson was gone for the day but Duncan was just coming on shift so Dan was put through to his desk. "Officer Duncan." He sounded tired. "Hello, my name's Dan Bishop. I live at the Noskov Estate off Mountain Road 23 up on Peacemill Peak. I need to report a traffic accident, a shooting, and a fatality." "Sorry, Mr. Bishop, this seems to be a bad line. Did you say a fatality?" Officer Duncan asked. "Yes, a fatality. Sorry about the poor connection. The line of sight towers up here on the mountain are having some trouble with the storm." "Can you give me the details before we lose our connection?" the officer asked. The connection must have sounded worse on his end. "Sure. I was driving back to the house yesterday when that storm hit. I was just about back to the house when I noticed someone hung up on one of the trees hanging over the edge of the cliff. I stopped and went to see if I could help. There was a trike motorcycle on a ledge 50 feet down and a badly injured man. He'd gone through the guardrail. I tried to climb up to the woman stuck in the tree but the man woke up and started shooting at us. He shot at me and then he hit the woman twice. Once in the arm and once on the side of her helmet. I had to drop the broken guardrail on him to stop him from shooting her. He fell to the bottom of the gorge with his motorcycle. He's dead. Did you get all that?" There was silence for a bit and Dan thought he'd lost the connection when Officer Duncan's voice came back on. "Yeah, I got it. Is there any access to that gorge?" "I don't think so. It's very narrow and the river in it is pretty wild most of the year. I have a buddy with a Sikorsky cargo helicopter that might be able to lower someone with a line from above but it would be a long hairy ride down. Anyway, I can send you the GPS coordinates. I had the entire area mapped when we were building this place." "What about the woman?" Officer Duncan asked. "I got her back to the house before she froze to death and patched her wounds which appear to be pretty minor. She's suffering from malnutrition and her weight is very low. She may have some memory loss as she has been unable to recall her name. She did remember the name of the man she was with. Percy Jackson. From the marking I saw on his jacket I think he may have been a member of a motorcycle gang, maybe the Blood Brothers. I have no idea what he was doing trying to drive his bike up this mountain road in a snow storm. Makes no sense to me." "Damn, that complicates things considerably. The Feds are going to want in on this. When can you come in for a statement?" the officer asked. "In about four months," Dan replied. "What?" came the shocked reply. "Sorry, but the mountain road is closed for the season. It will remain blocked with snow until the spring. We're completely snowed in. I can get extra supplies air dropped in but us getting out is up to Mother Nature," he explained. "OK, but I can reach you at this number?" "As long as the storms aren't interfering with the connection, yes," Dan answered. "Thank you Mr. Bishop. I'll be contacting you once I find out how the Feds want to handle this." After signing off Dan looked over to see Willow standing in the doorway watching him. He gave her a smile which she returned. "I just have to send a note to Andrei to fill him in. Can you come over here a minute?" She approached him and sat on his lap when he indicated he wanted her to sit. He turned on the webcam on the PC and they posed for a quick snapshot. Then he asked her to look into the camera and took a close up of just her face. "I'm going to send these along to Andrei. The family is going to be very curious about you and Andrei will need the close up for his investigator. I'm going to ask him to have them do some discreet searches based on the information you gave me. One thing you should know, as Andrei is a Russian national, all of my communications with him are very likely monitored by Homeland Security. I'm not worried about it but I just wanted you to know as well. Okay?" he asked. Willow nodded at him with wide eyes. He just smiled at her with wonder at how good she made him feel. He gently pulled her face down to his and kissed her tenderly. She moaned a little and hugged him fiercely. After he returned her hug he had her stand again so he could prepare the email for Andrei. Willow sat on the floor beside his chair and rested her head on his thigh. He was going to protest but she looked so content he turned back to the keyboard. Once he had described the events of the past two days (omitting the racy bits) and included the chronology he'd gotten from Willow he completed the note to Andrei, attached the images and sent it off. He turned back to Willow and ran his fingers through her hair. He felt her purr in pleasure at his touch. He tucked a tablet PC under his arm, helped lift Willow to her feet then they walked back into the kitchen. Dan started the oven, slid the pizza inside, and set the timer. Dan took her hand and they walked into the living room. They sat together on one of the sofas and snuggled under a blanket while they waited for the pizza. "Speaking of comfortable..." he smiled and continued "I think we'd better order you some clothes and other items you may need." Willow looked out the window at the continuing blizzard and back at him. "How?" was all she could say. Dan smiled at her and pulled a tablet PC from under the blanket. "Through the magic of the Internet!" he said with a flourish. All he got for his theatrics was a puzzled expression. "Okay, I'll let you in on the secret. We order stuff and get it delivered to my buddy Wally's place. Then he delivers it by air drop in the meadow just past the small forest to the east of the house. Wally's a pilot and enjoys the challenge of precision payload delivery. I'll set up the target and he drops the delivery bundle on it. If he's within 3 feet of the target I owe him a beer. If not, he owes me one." Willow was still looking at him like he was a little nuts so he just flipped on the tablet and proceeded to load up the webpage for an online clothing retailer. First he had to figure out her size. He found the help page and saw how he needed to determine her measurements. He gave Willow the tablet and rushed off to the workshop where he grabbed a cloth tape measure. Granted it had a one hundred foot spool and was used for more industrial purposes but it would work. He grabbed the pencil and pad on the way back to Willow and asked her to stand. Using the tape measure he recorded her measurements on the pad and Willow had a good giggle at how flustered Dan got when he had to measure her for a bra. Now that he had the details out of the way Dan took Willow through the webpages where she could see the clothes. Dan watched her face to see if she liked any of the clothes but when she didn't react to any of them he started to suspect she didn't realize what they were doing. "Willow, do you understand I want to buy you some clothes? Have you ever gone shopping for clothes?" he asked. She glanced at him and shook her head. "So people just brought you clothes and you wore them whether you liked them or not?" he asked. She nodded but had a puzzled look on her face. "OK, I'd like you to try imagining yourself in one of the outfits you see on this page and let me know which one you think might look good on you and be nice to have." Willow looked at the models on the page and turned her eyes back to him. "Which ones do you like?" she asked. That stopped him short. He realized that she couldn't make this kind of decision. She'd been basically a living dress up doll for quite possibly most of her life and only wore clothes at the whim of her 'masters' to please them. Well, he wasn't going to make her feel bad about it now. He turned his eyes back to the page and studied what the models were wearing. He finally clued in that he had no idea how to dress a woman. Guys were easy; undershirt, shirt, underwear, pants, socks and you're done. Mixing and matching? Please. He needed help. Female help. He heard a chirping and realized he had an incoming call on the PC. He got up again and hustled into the communications room. Willow was right behind him. He sat and she sunk to kneel next to his chair. He suppressed his annoyance as her reaction might just be an automatic reaction for her. He'd talk to her about it later. Dan answered the call and Kira Noskov's face appeared on the screen. At her elbow was her youngest daughter, Katya. The picture was choppy as the signal was weak but that didn't diminish the brilliance of the woman's smile as she greeted him. "Hello Daniel! We received your message and I wanted to call you immediately to congratulate you two! You make a beautiful couple! I've been telling you for years to find yourself a woman. You've finally taken my advice!" she laughed. Dan realized that Kira read more into the photo he'd sent of Willow sitting on his lap than he'd intended. He looked down at Willow and saw the smile on her face and knew he couldn't try to explain it now. "Thank you Kira! And hello Katya!" "Svetlana is crying, DanDan. She is not happy," Katya said, using her pet name for him. Kira looked pained then apologetic. "Not to worry Daniel, Svetlana has been holding onto her hero worship too long. She will grow from this and her tears will dry." Dan's expression froze and twitched as he realized he'd fucked up again and hurt the young girl unintentionally. He knew she'd had a crush on him. They had a strong bond from what they'd gone through together. "Oh god, I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt her." His PTSD surfaced with a series of twitches. Kira's voice grew firm, "Daniel, stop this. You are not responsible for Svetlana's happiness or tears." She turned to Katya and said something quietly to the girl who vanished out of the frame. Willow got worried at Dan's stricken expression so she stood and took his face in her hands and turned his face to hers so she could look into his eyes. He was slightly dazed but his eyes came back into focus when they were looking into the vibrant green depths of Willow's eyes. He heaved a sigh and came back to the present. Kira witnessed the transformation with a satisfied smile on her face. There were tears in the corners of her eyes as she saw her friend pulled back from an attack. She was convinced that this young woman was just the medicine her Daniel had been missing all of these years. She didn't approve of his self-imposed solitude but he hadn't listen to her protests. She didn't know anything else about this woman but she was good for him, this much she knew. Svetlana appeared in the picture and took in the shaken expression on Dan's face and the beautiful woman holding him. Her jealousy flared terribly to see another woman touching Dan. She'd vowed she'd marry him so many years ago when he'd saved her and her family. But she couldn't bear the thought that she'd caused him pain. Above all else she knew the scars he carried from that day and how long he'd struggled with them. "Da, Daniel! I am so pleased to see you looking well! Please know that I am well and happy for you! Do not worry about me! I have many friends here and many boyfriends- I mean many who would like to be my boyfriend!" she corrected herself before her mother could protest. She looked at the annoyed expression on her mother's face then gave Daniel one more forced smile and left the picture." Kira came back into the picture. "If there is anything we can do Daniel please let us know." Dan pulled himself together and looked at Willow with gratitude. "First off, I'd like to introduce you officially to Willow." Willow smiled uncertainly at the screen but Kira graciously took the conversation from there. "Hello Willow! My name is Kira. I am so pleased to meet you!" Uncertain what to do as she'd never spoken to anyone over a computer before much less been allowed to speak without permission Willow just nodded her head towards the screen. Dan rubbed her back and felt her jump slightly at his touch then she climbed up and snuggled on his lap. Dan was uncomfortable with such a display in front of Kira but couldn't scold her for the damage that might do. Kira seemed to be enjoying his blush as she wore a big grin on her face. Then he thought of something. "There is one thing I would like to ask of you actually. I have no clothes for Willow here at the house and we're snowed in. I was going to order some online and have Wally airdrop them but I have no idea what to order. I've never had to buy women's clothes before and Willow hasn't ever chosen her own clothes. If I gave you the credentials for my online account could I ask you to shop for the clothes she'll need for the next 4 months?" "That I can do! Send me her measurements and I will place the order," Kira said with a smile. "Thank you so much! Please speak to Svetlana for me! You know I think the world of her, and Irina and Katya! I would never do anything to hurt them!" he blurted and glanced awkwardly at the blond curled on his lap. Kira made placating gestures. "They know you do and they all love you for it. Some a little too strongly. Not to worry Daniel. Because they love you they understand. I will speak with you soon as will Andrei. Goodbye, Willow!" and she disconnected. To Be Continued in part 4, based on a post by BurntRedstone for Literotica

An Angel For Bishop: Part 3 Willows tortured past exposes itself. In 4 parts, based on a post by BurntRedstone. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Once they were both clean they were breathing hard and standing facing each other. The moment he leaned towards her lips she surged forward to press hers against his. His tongue slipped forward to brush against hers and suddenly she was sucking at his tongue. His hands came up and cupped her breasts and he gently took her nipples between his thumb and finger, feeling the little gold barbells and rings dangle from them. Willow gasped into his mouth and he felt Willow's legs buckle a little. She was beginning to make those needy yips as she rolled her hips. She tugged, but he jolted back. "Willow, I don't have any condoms and I doubt Percy had the decency to put you on the pill. We can't." "I can't get pregnant," was all she said as she tugged at him. "What?" he gasped, as it was difficult holding a conversation with her. "The doctor made sure I couldn't have babies so it's okay," she said in a matter of fact tone. His head was spinning. He was still incredibly worked up and wanted to take Willow right now, but she'd just dropped a bomb from her past in his lap and his mind was reeling with the implications of her words. "Please! I need it!" she whined as he continued to hold her off while he tried to get his head back in the game. Willow dropped to her knees in one movement. First her lips were sliding, then her nose was buried against his stomach. He could feel her swallowing but he couldn't feel her breathing so he pulled back until he heard her gasp.  Willow got to her feet then turned around and put her hands against the shower wall, pushing her ass back. She rubbed him up and down her crack a few times. Dan grabbed her hips and Willow sighed. She was surprisingly tight and he couldn't get over how amazing she felt. Willow was moaning loudly and bearing down with her joyous cries she was loving every second. He could not exploit her vulnerable mental state, but knew that rejection was beyond her capacity to tolerate. So he continued to caress her and gently show her that she was precious and respected. The feeling of real love was enough to set her body into what seemed like multiple waves of ecstasy. Somehow Dan had found an amazing tool of therapy for this sexually abused woman. He pulled her back to stand upright. This sensation and her cries of joy triggered him. For good measure he gave her neck a gentle kiss and felt her trigger off again. He held her exhausted body suspended between his arm circling her chest and his other arm around her hip. She leaned back against his chest and her breath came out in deep gasps. Once their breathing had returned to normal Dan set her feet back on the floor. He looked at her and said "We need to talk about what you said about the doctor. I need to hear the whole story, but later." He tenderly washed between her legs. Then he shampooed and conditioned her hair once more. God he loved running his fingers through her hair and from the way she moaned and purred he knew she loved it too. He washed his hair, rinsed off, and turned the water off. They stepped out and dried off with their thick towels together. He replaced her bandages once more with dry ones. They padded into his bedroom and Dan remembered her clothes should be ready in the dryer. He quickly collected them and brought them back to her. He inspected the garments and saw the jeans were largely undamaged though there were some grease stains on the lower legs he suspected came from riding the motorcycle. Her shirt had a tear where the branch had pierced her shoulder. He could probably fix it but it wouldn't be pretty. He flipped it over and for the first time noticed the faded word across the back. It said 'Bitch'. He frowned. That asshole probably made her wear it. He wouldn't let her wear this again. He ripped it in two between his hands. He looked up and saw Willow staring at him wide eyed. "Sorry, the shirt had a word on it that doesn't belong on you. You won't be wearing clothes like that with me. You deserve better," he said. She smiled shyly at him. He saw she was struggling to get the bikini top on. Now that he was an 'expert' he showed her how to tie the lower string first under her tits (while struggling to keep his hands off of them), spin the knot around to the back, and pull the cups up, tying the top strings behind her neck. With his hands behind her neck, feeling her damp but now much smoother hair caressing his hands he saw she was looking into his eyes. He leaned forward and kissed her lips tenderly. He just wanted to feel her amazing lips on his as her kiss was so sweet. Willow's eyes closed and she swayed a little when he pulled back. His heart hurt she was so lovely. How anyone could hurt someone so beautiful was beyond him. He pulled her into a hug and squeezed her body against his, wanting to protect her with his strength and relishing the intimacy. Her arms wrapped around his chest and he felt her shiver. He pulled back and looked at her questioningly. He saw tears sliding down her cheeks. "What's wrong?" he asked gently. "I've never felt like this before," she whispered and hiccupped. "I feel so safe in your arms." She clung to him and pressed her face against his neck. He squeezed her to him again, feeling her tremble against him. They stood like that for a while. Once her trembling calmed he stepped back and gave her a smile which she returned. Her eyes glowed and she seemed as relaxed as he'd ever seen her. Chapter 3 Dan gave Willow a tour of the 'log cabin' which was more accurately described as a log mansion. He was rather proud of the building as it showcased his engineering expertise. The building was all on one level and followed the natural contours of the hillside in a serpentine curve with a magnificent view of the surrounding mountains, or in this case the blizzard which continued to rage into its second day. Under the gleaming hardwood flooring the entire structure was built on a poured concrete base with in-floor heating courtesy of a complex network of piping linked to the hot springs and an even more complex computer control system. The power needed to support the electronics and the rest of the house was fed by a huge series of batteries stored in an underground bunker built into the hillside. This array was on a constant trickle feed from multiple sources. Wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal, and even a small hydro turbine generator tapping into an underground river they discovered during construction. All said, they had energy to spare. Beyond the amazing array of technology he'd built into the mansion the building contained all the comforts you could ask for. There was a huge living room with a large stone fireplace surrounded by deep comfy couches and facing a panoramic view of the mountainside. A large deck started on the northern side of the house and wrapped around to the western side to create a huge, two level socializing area in front of the living and dining room windows. Behind the living room built into the mountain was a large home theatre with stadium seating for twelve, three rows of four comfy recliners. Next to the living room was a large dining room with a massive polished slab of shiny hardwood for a table and seating for twelve. The next room was the kitchen which Willow was familiar with. There was an enormous pantry off the kitchen and a second door which led to the communications/control center for the house which doubled as a safe room. The table in the kitchen sat six and there was a deck accessible by a door next to the table. Exiting from the other side of the kitchen was a corridor which had the laundry room on one side, a utility room on the other, and continued on to the five big guest bedrooms each having a small seating area and a dedicated full washroom. The final bedroom was the master which had an enormous washroom suite, a walk-in closet, and a decent sized office. On the uphill side of the building at this point was the garage, a concrete and steel bunker built right into the mountainside. It was deep and wide enough for eight vehicles and at its far end was a complete metal and wood working workshop with all the required tools for maintaining the house. The roof deck of the garage was the home for communication dishes, a large greenhouse with a pool area again heated by the hot spring. There was interior access to the pool area by a spiral staircase in the garage. When Dan led Willow back to the kitchen she was looking a little overwhelmed. "So... you're rich?" she asked quietly. "Rich?" he replied in surprise. Then he smiled and said "I designed and built the home but it's not mine. I just live in it during the winter months when no one else is here. The home is owned by the Noskov family from Russia. They are... incredibly rich, and generous. I was unofficially adopted by the Noskov's when I... helped get them out of a hot zone in Iraq during the war. They let me build them this house and I get to live in it. They also set me up with a... trust fund I guess you'd call it. When I need something I can tap into it. I don't think I'm rich but I'm pretty comfortable. I mean I have my engineering degree and the stuff I learned building this house has set me up in a very lucrative business of designing custom energy systems for people wanting to live off the grid. I have patents pending on several of the components and their designs. There is also a waiting list of customers wanting me to design for their specific environments. I can do most of that right from here. All that brings in a good income... huh, maybe I am rich or at least have the potential to be!" he smiled at the delight in Willow's eyes. Dan busied himself making some herbal tea. It still wasn't time for dinner yet but a snack would be good. He wanted to ensure Willow started taking in the calories she needed to get back to a healthy weight. He dropped some bread slices in the toaster and pulled out the peanut butter. He poured the tea and sweetened it for Willow. He spread the peanut butter on toast watching it melt. Then he stopped. Dan was pissed at himself again but he kept that anger inside so he wouldn't spook Willow. He just made an assumption that might have been really bad for her. "Willow, are you allergic to anything? Like nuts?" he asked. "I don't think so," she replied. "Have you eaten peanut butter before? Do you like it?" Dan asked. "Yes, I love peanut butter but I've never had it on toast," she said. Dan shook off the tremble that crept up his back. He needed to know more about her to prevent something like this from happening again. He saw the notepad was still on the table. He carried the herbal teas to the table then brought Willow her peanut butter toast. She looked at him when she saw he didn't have any toast in front of him. "You need the calories. I'll wait for dinner," he said with a smile. Willow carefully picked up her toast and took a small bite. When the warm peanut butter hit her tongue a broad smile spread across her face. "I LOVE peanut butter toast!" she gushed. She took a few more bites. He grinned at her delight and picked up the notepad. After a sip of his tea he looked at Willow and asked "I hope you don't mind but I'd like to see how much more of your history we can fill in." She continued to munch on the toast and sip at the tea but gave him a nod. "Do you recall the name of the man Percy, uh, took you from?" He still felt weird saying that. "Herman Denk. He was a doctor. He gave me my new tits and fixed me so I couldn't make babies or have a period." she said. Dan's stomach clenched. She said it like it was nothing but Dan was grateful to Percy for having killed the bastard who butchered Willow for his own needs and enjoyment. He took a deep breath and wrote down the Doctor's name and the approximate year he died. "Do you recall how long you lived with Herman? How many winters or summers?" he asked her next. Willow looked confused then sad. "Herman lived in Las Vegas and I stayed inside in my room most of the time when he wasn't taking me out to parties. I don't remember how long that was but I think I stayed with him the longest. Before we moved to Las Vegas we were in Florida. That's where he poisoned and killed Officer Warren Greggs and took me from him. Officer Greggs used his handcuffs on me a lot and beat me because I wasn't worthy of having sex with him. That's where these scars came from." She showed him the rough white ridges encircling both of her wrists. Obviously the cuffs had done some serious damage to her skin at that time as the scar tissue was extensive. "He kept me chained in a room in his basement. When I got sick Officer Greggs brought Herman to fix me. We moved to Las Vegas after Officer Greggs was dead." Dan was feeling a little queasy but while Willow was feeling talkative he'd get the information from her. As long as he had names and knew they had died he could find their obituaries and work out a timeline from that. He jotted down some notes and nodded at Willow to continue. "Madam Tallia was my Mistress before Officer Greggs took me from her. She lived in a big old house in Georgia. She was angry a lot. She had been hurt in a car accident and she lost her eye. She wore a fancy eye patch but her mouth was so cruel. She told me I looked just like the bitch who destroyed her beauty. She would tie me up and burn my arms and legs with her cigarettes." Willow pointed out a few of the older circular scars running up her arms. "She told me that she was saving my face for later. I was always terrified that she was going to burn my face. Officer Greggs was at one of her parties. He found me tied up in my bedroom and put me in the trunk of his car. He told me he burned Mistress Tallia's house down with her inside." Willow took a long sip of her tea to moisten her throat as she was unaccustomed to talking for so long. "Mistress Tallia got me from Mr. Bill who brought me to one of her parties. Mistress Tallia called him Buffalo Bill because she said he was from that 'miserable place'. She told me that she wasn't going to give me back to Mr. Bill. She told me she gave him poisoned heroin so he wouldn't come back to get me the morning after the party and he didn't so I guess he's dead. When I was with Mr. Bill we moved around a lot and we lived out of his car. I don't remember his last name. Sometimes he gave me drugs and I would forget things. He loaned me out to people who gave him drugs and took me to lots of sex parties. I think Mr. Bill bought me from my mom's boyfriend when she died." Willow's voice ran out at that point. It was the longest Dan had ever heard her speak and while the subject matter was horrific to him, he was so glad that he got her story. He could work with this. "Do you remember your mom's name?" he asked gently. She thought about it then shook her head sadly. "Do you remember how old you were when your mom died?" he asked. Willow sat quietly for a minute thinking. "I remember... a tenth birthday party. I think it was shortly after that when some men came to the house looking for mom's boyfriend. I was playing outside but I heard them yelling 'where is he'. When they left I went inside and she was dead. When her boyfriend got home he took me with him in the car and we drove away. He met Mr. Bill at a truck stop on the highway and sold me to him." Dan sat looking at Willow. He couldn't breathe. His chest felt tight. Her mother was murdered when she was 10 and she was immediately sold off into the sex trade and slavery? How could that not screw you up? He opened his arms and Willow was immediately curled up on his lap and in his arms. They sat like that for quite a while, just holding each other and rocking gently. It gave Dan time to think. Dan felt completely inadequate for the task of healing Willow. He knew he could love her and was surprised that he was already starting to feel that way towards her. He reminded himself that they'd only met the day before and there'd been a lot of intense emotion involved in that short time. Before he started throwing words like love around he needed to get some perspective. Difficult to get when her soft body was clinging to him. Based on her account she'd been held captive by five people and had been raped and tortured multiple times by them and raped by many others starting from a very early age. Now she was with him. Was she better off? He'd already had sex with her, multiple times in the very short time he'd known her. And he'd killed for her as they had. He was willing to grant that in his case at least it really had been kill or be killed and her life was at risk at the time. That said it was easy for him to see how similar he was to previous 'masters'. God, his skin crawled when he thought of himself in those terms. Maybe that was the difference? He didn't want to be her master. He wanted her to be a whole person. He wasn't sure that was going to be possible considering her past. But he knew he would do what he could to help her regain as much as she could. He felt so protective of her! He wasn't clear where that came from but it certainly didn't seem harmful to her so he felt okay about letting her see that. The first thing he could do to help her was get her identity back. With the information he had an investigator should be able to connect the dots to get back to the start. Then he could get her birth certificate, then a passport, an identity. Maybe it was just his paranoia but he wanted a discreet investigation. There had been at least one police officer involved in her abduction and Percy's gang was not going to be too friendly to someone who killed one of their members. He was again over his head but he knew someone that could help. "I could stay here all day holding you but I need to make a call and send a note. I have to report Percy's death to the police or things could get messy. And I have to contact Andrei Noskov, the man who owns this house, to ask a favor. I thought we'd cook up a frozen pizza for dinner tonight. Can I ask you to go to the walk-in freezer in the garage and pick one out? They're on the rack to the left and there should be a supreme on top but any will do." She stood and headed off to the garage. Dan walked into the communications room and checked the signal strength. The storm seemed to be winding down but it still had the potential for affecting the line of sight antenna. He'd prefer not to use the satellite phone to contact the police as he wasn't sure how long he'd be on the line. He used the PC to dial up the nearest state police station and waited for someone to answer. He heard some weird stuttering on the line so he knew his connection was fairly weak. When someone finally answered he asked for Officer Benson or Officer Duncan as he'd met them and his instincts said they were okay. Not the best gauge but it was what he had. Benson was gone for the day but Duncan was just coming on shift so Dan was put through to his desk. "Officer Duncan." He sounded tired. "Hello, my name's Dan Bishop. I live at the Noskov Estate off Mountain Road 23 up on Peacemill Peak. I need to report a traffic accident, a shooting, and a fatality." "Sorry, Mr. Bishop, this seems to be a bad line. Did you say a fatality?" Officer Duncan asked. "Yes, a fatality. Sorry about the poor connection. The line of sight towers up here on the mountain are having some trouble with the storm." "Can you give me the details before we lose our connection?" the officer asked. The connection must have sounded worse on his end. "Sure. I was driving back to the house yesterday when that storm hit. I was just about back to the house when I noticed someone hung up on one of the trees hanging over the edge of the cliff. I stopped and went to see if I could help. There was a trike motorcycle on a ledge 50 feet down and a badly injured man. He'd gone through the guardrail. I tried to climb up to the woman stuck in the tree but the man woke up and started shooting at us. He shot at me and then he hit the woman twice. Once in the arm and once on the side of her helmet. I had to drop the broken guardrail on him to stop him from shooting her. He fell to the bottom of the gorge with his motorcycle. He's dead. Did you get all that?" There was silence for a bit and Dan thought he'd lost the connection when Officer Duncan's voice came back on. "Yeah, I got it. Is there any access to that gorge?" "I don't think so. It's very narrow and the river in it is pretty wild most of the year. I have a buddy with a Sikorsky cargo helicopter that might be able to lower someone with a line from above but it would be a long hairy ride down. Anyway, I can send you the GPS coordinates. I had the entire area mapped when we were building this place." "What about the woman?" Officer Duncan asked. "I got her back to the house before she froze to death and patched her wounds which appear to be pretty minor. She's suffering from malnutrition and her weight is very low. She may have some memory loss as she has been unable to recall her name. She did remember the name of the man she was with. Percy Jackson. From the marking I saw on his jacket I think he may have been a member of a motorcycle gang, maybe the Blood Brothers. I have no idea what he was doing trying to drive his bike up this mountain road in a snow storm. Makes no sense to me." "Damn, that complicates things considerably. The Feds are going to want in on this. When can you come in for a statement?" the officer asked. "In about four months," Dan replied. "What?" came the shocked reply. "Sorry, but the mountain road is closed for the season. It will remain blocked with snow until the spring. We're completely snowed in. I can get extra supplies air dropped in but us getting out is up to Mother Nature," he explained. "OK, but I can reach you at this number?" "As long as the storms aren't interfering with the connection, yes," Dan answered. "Thank you Mr. Bishop. I'll be contacting you once I find out how the Feds want to handle this." After signing off Dan looked over to see Willow standing in the doorway watching him. He gave her a smile which she returned. "I just have to send a note to Andrei to fill him in. Can you come over here a minute?" She approached him and sat on his lap when he indicated he wanted her to sit. He turned on the webcam on the PC and they posed for a quick snapshot. Then he asked her to look into the camera and took a close up of just her face. "I'm going to send these along to Andrei. The family is going to be very curious about you and Andrei will need the close up for his investigator. I'm going to ask him to have them do some discreet searches based on the information you gave me. One thing you should know, as Andrei is a Russian national, all of my communications with him are very likely monitored by Homeland Security. I'm not worried about it but I just wanted you to know as well. Okay?" he asked. Willow nodded at him with wide eyes. He just smiled at her with wonder at how good she made him feel. He gently pulled her face down to his and kissed her tenderly. She moaned a little and hugged him fiercely. After he returned her hug he had her stand again so he could prepare the email for Andrei. Willow sat on the floor beside his chair and rested her head on his thigh. He was going to protest but she looked so content he turned back to the keyboard. Once he had described the events of the past two days (omitting the racy bits) and included the chronology he'd gotten from Willow he completed the note to Andrei, attached the images and sent it off. He turned back to Willow and ran his fingers through her hair. He felt her purr in pleasure at his touch. He tucked a tablet PC under his arm, helped lift Willow to her feet then they walked back into the kitchen. Dan started the oven, slid the pizza inside, and set the timer. Dan took her hand and they walked into the living room. They sat together on one of the sofas and snuggled under a blanket while they waited for the pizza. "Speaking of comfortable..." he smiled and continued "I think we'd better order you some clothes and other items you may need." Willow looked out the window at the continuing blizzard and back at him. "How?" was all she could say. Dan smiled at her and pulled a tablet PC from under the blanket. "Through the magic of the Internet!" he said with a flourish. All he got for his theatrics was a puzzled expression. "Okay, I'll let you in on the secret. We order stuff and get it delivered to my buddy Wally's place. Then he delivers it by air drop in the meadow just past the small forest to the east of the house. Wally's a pilot and enjoys the challenge of precision payload delivery. I'll set up the target and he drops the delivery bundle on it. If he's within 3 feet of the target I owe him a beer. If not, he owes me one." Willow was still looking at him like he was a little nuts so he just flipped on the tablet and proceeded to load up the webpage for an online clothing retailer. First he had to figure out her size. He found the help page and saw how he needed to determine her measurements. He gave Willow the tablet and rushed off to the workshop where he grabbed a cloth tape measure. Granted it had a one hundred foot spool and was used for more industrial purposes but it would work. He grabbed the pencil and pad on the way back to Willow and asked her to stand. Using the tape measure he recorded her measurements on the pad and Willow had a good giggle at how flustered Dan got when he had to measure her for a bra. Now that he had the details out of the way Dan took Willow through the webpages where she could see the clothes. Dan watched her face to see if she liked any of the clothes but when she didn't react to any of them he started to suspect she didn't realize what they were doing. "Willow, do you understand I want to buy you some clothes? Have you ever gone shopping for clothes?" he asked. She glanced at him and shook her head. "So people just brought you clothes and you wore them whether you liked them or not?" he asked. She nodded but had a puzzled look on her face. "OK, I'd like you to try imagining yourself in one of the outfits you see on this page and let me know which one you think might look good on you and be nice to have." Willow looked at the models on the page and turned her eyes back to him. "Which ones do you like?" she asked. That stopped him short. He realized that she couldn't make this kind of decision. She'd been basically a living dress up doll for quite possibly most of her life and only wore clothes at the whim of her 'masters' to please them. Well, he wasn't going to make her feel bad about it now. He turned his eyes back to the page and studied what the models were wearing. He finally clued in that he had no idea how to dress a woman. Guys were easy; undershirt, shirt, underwear, pants, socks and you're done. Mixing and matching? Please. He needed help. Female help. He heard a chirping and realized he had an incoming call on the PC. He got up again and hustled into the communications room. Willow was right behind him. He sat and she sunk to kneel next to his chair. He suppressed his annoyance as her reaction might just be an automatic reaction for her. He'd talk to her about it later. Dan answered the call and Kira Noskov's face appeared on the screen. At her elbow was her youngest daughter, Katya. The picture was choppy as the signal was weak but that didn't diminish the brilliance of the woman's smile as she greeted him. "Hello Daniel! We received your message and I wanted to call you immediately to congratulate you two! You make a beautiful couple! I've been telling you for years to find yourself a woman. You've finally taken my advice!" she laughed. Dan realized that Kira read more into the photo he'd sent of Willow sitting on his lap than he'd intended. He looked down at Willow and saw the smile on her face and knew he couldn't try to explain it now. "Thank you Kira! And hello Katya!" "Svetlana is crying, DanDan. She is not happy," Katya said, using her pet name for him. Kira looked pained then apologetic. "Not to worry Daniel, Svetlana has been holding onto her hero worship too long. She will grow from this and her tears will dry." Dan's expression froze and twitched as he realized he'd fucked up again and hurt the young girl unintentionally. He knew she'd had a crush on him. They had a strong bond from what they'd gone through together. "Oh god, I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt her." His PTSD surfaced with a series of twitches. Kira's voice grew firm, "Daniel, stop this. You are not responsible for Svetlana's happiness or tears." She turned to Katya and said something quietly to the girl who vanished out of the frame. Willow got worried at Dan's stricken expression so she stood and took his face in her hands and turned his face to hers so she could look into his eyes. He was slightly dazed but his eyes came back into focus when they were looking into the vibrant green depths of Willow's eyes. He heaved a sigh and came back to the present. Kira witnessed the transformation with a satisfied smile on her face. There were tears in the corners of her eyes as she saw her friend pulled back from an attack. She was convinced that this young woman was just the medicine her Daniel had been missing all of these years. She didn't approve of his self-imposed solitude but he hadn't listen to her protests. She didn't know anything else about this woman but she was good for him, this much she knew. Svetlana appeared in the picture and took in the shaken expression on Dan's face and the beautiful woman holding him. Her jealousy flared terribly to see another woman touching Dan. She'd vowed she'd marry him so many years ago when he'd saved her and her family. But she couldn't bear the thought that she'd caused him pain. Above all else she knew the scars he carried from that day and how long he'd struggled with them. "Da, Daniel! I am so pleased to see you looking well! Please know that I am well and happy for you! Do not worry about me! I have many friends here and many boyfriends- I mean many who would like to be my boyfriend!" she corrected herself before her mother could protest. She looked at the annoyed expression on her mother's face then gave Daniel one more forced smile and left the picture." Kira came back into the picture. "If there is anything we can do Daniel please let us know." Dan pulled himself together and looked at Willow with gratitude. "First off, I'd like to introduce you officially to Willow." Willow smiled uncertainly at the screen but Kira graciously took the conversation from there. "Hello Willow! My name is Kira. I am so pleased to meet you!" Uncertain what to do as she'd never spoken to anyone over a computer before much less been allowed to speak without permission Willow just nodded her head towards the screen. Dan rubbed her back and felt her jump slightly at his touch then she climbed up and snuggled on his lap. Dan was uncomfortable with such a display in front of Kira but couldn't scold her for the damage that might do. Kira seemed to be enjoying his blush as she wore a big grin on her face. Then he thought of something. "There is one thing I would like to ask of you actually. I have no clothes for Willow here at the house and we're snowed in. I was going to order some online and have Wally airdrop them but I have no idea what to order. I've never had to buy women's clothes before and Willow hasn't ever chosen her own clothes. If I gave you the credentials for my online account could I ask you to shop for the clothes she'll need for the next 4 months?" "That I can do! Send me her measurements and I will place the order," Kira said with a smile. "Thank you so much! Please speak to Svetlana for me! You know I think the world of her, and Irina and Katya! I would never do anything to hurt them!" he blurted and glanced awkwardly at the blond curled on his lap. Kira made placating gestures. "They know you do and they all love you for it. Some a little too strongly. Not to worry Daniel. Because they love you they understand. I will speak with you soon as will Andrei. Goodbye, Willow!" and she disconnected. To Be Continued in part 4, based on a post by BurntRedstone for Literotica

Our takes in this episode were frankly, all correct. While many things may have changed, we still have the same adoration for the Sea of Monsters. We listen to our past selves crash out over the anatomy of a hydra. We talk about Clarisse, and if there should be the dead army of confederate soldiers on the show. Percy gets turned into a guinea pig, and we discuss female villains. Timestamps:Old episode begins: 11:30Ch 10 New Commentary: 20:09, 27:55Ch 11 New Commentary: 34:22, 38:17, 46:00, 52:50Ch 12 New Commentary: 1:08:07, 1:16:46⚡️Lightning Bolt Questions : 1:23:00Links:SUPPORT US ON PATREON: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/camphalfpod?fan_landing=true⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SUPPORT US ON KO-FI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ko-fi.com/camphalfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SEND US AN AUDIO MESSAGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.speakpipe.com/Camphalfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠JOIN OUR DISCORD: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/gzHYsUbdgr⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MERCH: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.zazzle.com/store/camphalfpod

An Angel For Bishop: Part 2 Willows most serious injuries are in her psychie. In 4 parts, based on a post by BurntRedstone. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Willow let go of Dan Bishop s sleeve and he left her in the bathroom so she could shower in privacy. He quickly gathered up new clothes for her. He got one of his tight t-shirts that would likely be a little big on her but might be tight enough to assist with supporting her breasts. Another pair of draw string track pants, socks, and another flannel shirt to cover up her amazing tits. Gah! He had to stop thinking about her that way! He set the new clothes on the edge of the counter by the door without entering the room. He heard the water running and the sounds of movement so she seemed to have that under control. He walked to the guest bedroom and added the clothes she'd been wearing yesterday to the laundry bag. He brought the load to the small laundry room and dropped all of the dirty closed into the washer with the soap. He'd turn it on when she was done with her shower. Dan inspected the leather jacket and riding chaps Willow had been wearing. They couldn't go into the wash but he could clean them by hand and mend the torn jacket. He set them aside for later. He walked back into his bedroom and listened to hear if she was done. There was an odd noise warbling under the sound of the falling water. "Willow?" he called out. When he got no response he took a deep breath and cautiously looked in the door. She was on the floor of the shower on her side curled in a ball. Thinking she'd fallen in the shower Dan rushed into the bathroom and stepped into the stall fully clothed. He bent down and called out her name in fear. "Willow! Are you Okay? Did you fall?" He saw she was sobbing and shaking. The water was quite hot so she couldn't be cold. Willow suddenly became aware that Dan was crouching over her. She quickly turned to him and flung her arms over his shoulders and squeezed her face against his neck. Dan fell back onto his ass when she landed on him. Her wonderful breasts were pressed up against his wet shirt and she kissed his throat feverishly. She moved her hands to his chest and began to frantically unbutton his shirt. She was making strange little vulnerable sounds like yelps. Amongst these noises he made out the occasional words, "Please!", "I'll be good!", "Let me stay!", and "Love me!" Dan was stunned and tried to get his thoughts back into order. The surreal nature of the situation, the physical onslaught of her touches and kisses and cries combined with the hiss from the water hitting the tiles in the shower triggered a flashback to his time in the war. He froze as bullets ripped past him through the blowing sand. He had to get to the house. He felt the bullet pass through his calf and yet he ran on. He felt, lips on his? He came out of his thoughts panting with reaction, his eyes wild, searching for the shooters but seeing only his shower stall and the beautiful naked woman kneeling before him, holding his head between her hands. Her eyes were full of worry. She released his head as he looked down at himself and realized he was dressed and soaking wet. His back was pressed into the corner of the shower stall and he couldn't remember how he got there. Dan put his head in his hands and rubbed them vigorously back and forth over his scalp, as if pushing the memories back into their hidden spots in his brain so he could function again. "Look, I'm sorry about that. I, uh, I'm dealing with some things that happened to me as well. In a war. A long time ago. I'm still not good around people," he said gruffly. Dan pushed himself up, using the wall to steady himself as his body was still trembling. He put his hands on the wall and leaned his head under the hot water to let it run over his neck. He felt soft hands gently pull at his wet shirt from behind so, one arm at a time, he reached back so she could remove it from his shoulders. Once the wet shirt was gone he felt those soft lips kissing the twitching muscles of his shoulders and her incredibly soft breasts pressing against his back. This was enough to distract him from feeling her hands undoing the button on his jeans and sliding the zipper down. His mind was awash in the sensation of her soft skin rubbing against the tight muscles of his back. He felt the hard points of her nipples slowly drag down his back but he didn't notice his jeans and underwear were dropping at the same rate. When she had him step out of his pants he came to the realization that he was naked with her in the shower but his weakened state limited his protest to a weak growl. Slowly her nipples slid their way up his back. His cock was now fully erect and hard as iron. He hadn't felt a woman's touch in... too many years. When her slender fingers reached around his body and slid over his hot flesh, a deep moan was tugged from his soul. Willow cooed in delight as she discovered by touch that Dan was not small. All the while she was leaning her tits against his back and gently kissing his neck and shoulders. "No... Willow, please. Stah, stop please. We can't... I can't do this to you..." Dan pleaded as his body shook with reaction from his attack and from the building passion. On hearing Dan's words Willow became more desperate to bring him to release and began to stroke him faster. She leaned in to nibble on his ear and she began to repeat her earlier pleas. The vocal expression of her desperate need for him, pushed him over the brink. Dan's release was sudden and intense. Throughout the surges, her hands continued to milk. It took all of his strength to remain on his feet. He leaned more heavily against the wall. Next, Dan felt Willow's hands running over his back and he smelled the clean scent of the soap she was using to clean his body. She started at the back of his neck and worked downwards. Soon a good lather was washing from his densely muscled back under the hot spray. She marveled at the strength in his powerful arm as she worked her way down the right limb which was braced against the wall in front of him. This finally brought her into his view and she smiled shyly at him from beneath her wet bangs as she briskly lathered up his arm. She worked the soap into his armpit and then she slipped under his right arm and began to wash his chest. Again, she started at his neck, just under his chin, and worked her way downwards. She briefly stopped with her hands on his hips and she stared down at his semi-rigid flesh. Then she moved on to his left arm starting from the pit and working towards his hand. She dipped under his left arm and ran her soapy hands over his ass. They didn't even pause before she soaped deeply between his ass cheeks all the way from his furry pelvis to the top of his ass. Dan's eyes shot open and he looked over his shoulder at her. She spared him a quick nervous glance like she might be expecting punishment for touching him there. Her hands slowed and paused on his hips as she stole worried glances at his face. Unsure what to do, Dan turned his face back to the wall and her hands resumed cleaning his legs all the way down to his feet. Again, Willow moved to his front to wash his legs. He looked down to see her kneeling at his feet, her face was even with his slowly growing erection. She quickly and gently washed his wood, then worked down the front of his legs. She stood up between his arms and placed her hands on his shoulders. Gently pushing him back she allowed the descending water to rinse the soap from the front side of his body. Her hands followed the water down his arms then worked their way down his chest chasing the soap as it rinsed away. She knelt again and ran her hands down his legs. Dan's eyes closed once more and a wave of contentment rushed over him. When her hot, wet mouth caused him to gasp loudly and his muscles clenched over his entire body. His eyes snapped open to see her shining green eyes staring up at him in worship. With his muscles all locked up he couldn't move. His jaw worked but he was only able to make croaking sounds as he watched her luscious lips stretch open. Soon her nose was pressed against his stomach. Still her eyes remained locked on his. He could see her begin to turn red as her airway was blocked. He tried to pull back but her hands grabbed his ass cheeks. Her eyes grew desperate and Dan grabbed her head between his hands and pushed her off. After she had taken a deep gasp of air, she struggled to resume her affections. He stepped back away from her until he was leaning against the wall of the shower. She followed on her knees and lunged forward. Dan was managing to hold her at bay so she began to bob her head up and down rapidly. He groaned and felt his arms weakening. Her tongue was slithering around and he could feel himself rapidly approaching. "Willow, god! Stop! Willow, please!" he gasped as his arms finally gave out. It was too much for Dan and he felt the boiling rush for release. "Willow! Stop, I'm, he strained against her almost overpowering passion. She took him once more. His body curled in over her and his hands rested gently on her head. Willow swallowed as quickly as she could. When he was finished she lovingly cleaned him; her eyes never leaving his face. When Dan's eyes finally opened he saw she was still sitting between his feet, biting her lower lip, her eyes on his; searching for approval, for acceptance. He reached down with both hands and gently touched her face. He indicated he wanted her to stand so she rose to her feet in front of him. She was almost vibrating with need. He leaned forward and kissed her deeply, his tongue sinking into her mouth to chase hers. He realized that he could taste himself in her mouth but shrugged it off as a new experience. She must have picked up on his surprise and she froze. No one had ever been this intimate with her. It was rare that she was kissed at all; and she'd gotten a beating once for having 'cum-breath' as she'd forgotten to rinse her mouth out with whisky directly afterwards, as her master required. Once her surprise wore off Dan felt her arms wrapping around his broad chest and her mouth became more insistent on his. Dan suddenly pulled away from the kiss and smiled at her. He turned Willow around and placed her palms against the wall, the stance he'd had while she washed him. Then he took the soap and the loofa and worked up a good lather on it. He began to run the loofa over her body, scrubbing off the funk she'd accumulated from her days on the road with that abusive bastard. Her skin pinked up under his tender but thorough scrubbing. He used caution around the two bandaged wounds (they'd need replacing after this). Dan followed the same pattern she used on him as he worked his way around her body. By the time he was sure she was clean, he was kneeling at her feet, her pinkness telling him she was more than a little excited. He wanted to return the favor and show his appreciation for her so he dipped his head forward to press a kiss against her hot skin. Willow jumped and gasped. Her hands automatically went to his head and he felt her fingers slide through his wet hair. Her touch was too light like she was unsure what to do. He looked up into her eyes and he could see she was stunned he was doing this. He guessed that no one had ever thought her pleasure and carressing mattered. It was going to be a new experience for her. Good! He slipped a little lower, running his tongue in circles across the smooth flesh of her navel. He licked into  her indentation and gently ran his tongue around the soft flesh. He could hear Willow's breath coming out in little pants. Her hands continued to slide behind his head as if to pull his mouth tighter against her tummy, then they'd pull away as she realized what she was doing. She moaned deeply as he did this. Willow's hands were where they should be, locked tightly in his hair at the back of his head. A deep gasp rushed from her body. Soon she was convulsing and pulling his head tightly against her, crushing his lips against her. She yipped in pleasure as her body throbbed in bliss. He could feel her legs beginning to give out so he stood and wrapped her up in his arms, holding her trembling body against his. Her chin rested on his shoulder and her breath rushed out against his neck as she panted in recovery from her orgasm, from just the gentle caress of a man, under the endlessly hot shower.. When he felt Willow's legs steady under her Dan reached behind her and poured out a large drop of shampoo in his palm. He dripped a little in his other hand then massaged it deeply into her scalp. He rubbed his fingers from her forehead back to the base of her neck. He gathered up her long hair and poured a little more shampoo into the platinum locks. He rubbed them together until thick suds coated each strand. Once he was sure he had thoroughly cleaned her hair, he tipped her head back to get the cascade of water to fall on her hair. He ran his fingers from the top of her head through her hair all the way down her back to rinse out the shampoo. He did this motion several times to ensure the shampoo was gone, slipping in a little scalp massage as he went. While he ran his fingers through her long hair he watched her face and for the first time he could see she was completely relaxed. Her eyes were closed, her forehead was smooth, and her brows were relaxed. Her full lips turned up at their ends in a small, contented smile. Her hands rested on his shoulders and her breasts pressed gently against his chest. Some conditioner would be good considering how dry her hair felt when he'd pulled off the helmet yesterday- God! Had it only been yesterday? He froze briefly. Again, he felt a flash of how surreal it was to be standing naked in a shower with a woman he'd just met yesterday. He didn't do that. Ever. And they'd had sex! She was obviously damaged by her previous treatment and on top of that history he had sex with her. The guilt was hooking its claws in deep. He shook himself. She still needed the conditioner in her hair. He grabbed a dollop and worked it through her hair, again making sure each strand received treatment. As he rinsed it away he could swear he heard Willow purr. He stared at her and realized with a start that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever laid eyes on. She was also troubled, vulnerable and he'd done something inexcusable. He blushed with shame and stepped from the shower. As he dried off he kept Willow in the corner of his eye to make sure she was okay. He saw her catch his embarrassed expression and read his body language. Her tiny smile dropped from her face. God, he was such an ass! She was so vulnerable and he'd taken advantage and left her feeling bad. Now she was confused and her unstable anxiety had returned. She turned off the water and stepped out to dry off. Her body was trembling. Dan stepped out into his bedroom and quickly pulled on some clothes. In her inattention Willow accidentally rubbed the towel across her bandage. She hissed with pain. Dan returned from his bedroom. He felt a little better now that he had a layer of clothing between himself and Willow. He heard her make a painful noise and saw her tug the towel from the bandage on her shoulder. The adhesive had succumbed to the steam, water, and soap in the shower. He needed to change the dressing on her wounds. That was something he could do for her that was positive. Getting her dressed would also help settle his mind. He stepped forward and carefully examined the wound under the flap of the loose gauze and tape bandage. He carefully removed the remaining tape and saw that she was already beginning to heal nicely. She'd have yet another set of scars to add to the host already found across her back, her arms, and some on her legs. "Willow, please hang on a second. I'm going to put fresh bandages on your wounds" he said. He left the room and returned with fresh gauze and tape. He quickly covered the two areas and then pointed to the clothes he'd set on the counter for her. "Please get dressed and meet me back in the kitchen when you're ready." After stopping by to start the laundry Dan walked into the kitchen and put a notepad and pen on the kitchen table. Then he pulled out a couple of glasses, the tin of digestive biscuits, and the milk. He filled the two glasses and put some of the cookies on a plate. Once the snack was on the table and the milk was back in the fridge Willow hurried into the kitchen. He could see her nervousness was back. He growled at himself for being so stupid and hurting her in her state. She mistook his growling as displeasure in her and dropped to her knees at his feet. "NO!" he barked then instantly cursed himself as she flinched in preparation for being struck. "No, Willow please! I'm mad at myself not you. I wasn't yelling at you. God, I'm royally fucking this up," he sighed. He pulled her gently to her feet and moved her to sit at the kitchen table next to him. She kept her eyes on the table until she saw the milk and cookies. Her face froze as she seemed to be recalling something. Dan slid one of the glasses over to her and offered her the plate. She misunderstood and took the plate from his hand. Showing more patience than he'd had earlier he took the plate back and demonstrated being offered a plate of cookies and taking one from it. He tried again and this time Willow took only one. It was little things like the cookie plate and the number of healed scars she had which gave Dan the suspicion that she'd been relatively isolated, perhaps captive, for a good portion of her life. She did recognize cookies and milk so that might be something? Maybe? He wanted to get her talking so he could find out some clues about her past. Maybe get back to her actual name. Maybe he should start by telling her something about himself. Tell her why he was such a hot mess that she'd be better off avoiding. Maybe if she saw that it would help her get on her own two feet. "Look, you saw me react badly this morning, I mean the flashback when I first got in the shower. I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, and sometimes I get flashbacks. I haven't had one in a few months so this one really took me by surprise. They can get bad. Sometimes violent. That's why I live alone in this big house. I- I'm not good to be around," he was frowning at the kitchen table as he said this. "I don't trust what I'll say or what I might do. What we did in the shower, I am so sorry I took advantage of you. You deserve better and-" Willow started to make sounds of protest but Dan raised his hand and she immediately stopped. He didn't see her flinch but he went on. "If I can, I want to help you but I need to know more about you to do that. Maybe we could start from the guy you were with when I found you. What was his name?" "Jackson," she whispered, as if speaking his name might invoke his vengeful spirit. "Was that his last name?" She nodded. "Do you know his first name? Do you recall hearing anyone say it?" he asked. Willow thought for a minute and recalled how he'd cut a man's gut open for teasing him about his name. What was it? Ah. "Percy." "Percy Jackson. Good!" Dan wrote down the current year then the name next to it. He was building a time line for Willow. "How long were you with Percy?" Willow seemed to be having trouble with measuring time. She shook her head sadly. She seemed like she really wanted to help as when she couldn't answer his questions she grew a little more anxious. Dan thought for a moment. "Do you recall how many winters you spent with him?" Her eyes lit up, as he'd found a way to ask the question in a way that she could relate to. "Three." Dan subtracted three from the current year and wrote that year down. "Very good!" he said and smiled at her. Her face lit up at his praise. While he loved to see her smile Dan began to feel a little uneasy about her reactions. "How did you meet Percy?" "He killed my previous master and took me. I belonged to him." Dan looked up sharply, the dots finally connecting in his mind. "Oh god," he whispered "and I killed Percy and took you." Willow's face split into a beautiful smile that lit up the room. Dan finally understood that this was what she'd been waiting for him to declare! His ownership of her! She reached for his hands but stopped when she saw him draw back in shock. Confusion crossed her face then a deep sadness. "But you don't want me." She looked at the scars visible on her arms and a tear trickled down her cheek. "It's okay. I'm hideous and worthless. I'm sorry." She seemed to shrink in on herself. Her despair snapped Dan from his shock. "Willow! Oh my god Willow, you are not hideous! How can you think you're hideous? You are the most beautiful creature- Woman, woman I have ever seen. You take my breath away and I can't think straight when I look at you! Worthless? I'm not worthy of You!" he almost shouted at her. "But you don't want me?" she whispered in a tiny girl voice her hands clenched in her lap, her eyes down, and tears trickling down her cheeks. "Of course I WANT YOU! But- but you're a beautiful woman not a... toy to be stolen, shared, or traded around. I didn't win you from that asshole! I didn't kill him so I could steal you for my own. I killed him because he was going to kill you and you deserve to live and he didn't. Yes, I rescued you but not so you could belong to me but so you could have your own life and make those decisions for yourself." Dan was shaking in reaction by this point. Recalling how he'd killed Percy had put him at risk for another attack. He could feel it coming on. He started to gasp and the room went sideways. He was pinned down under the truck and he could smell the gas from the ruptured gas tank. Bullets thunked and pinged into the trucks body panels above his head. He knew he had to move but back was the only direction and something under the truck was snagging on his jacket. He had dust in his nostrils and could taste the grit... and feel softness pressing against his face. It smelled so good, like home. As his surroundings came back into focus he realized he was under the kitchen table with Willow. He was in a fetal position with his head pillowed on her lap, her hands running gently through his hair. Once the shaking in his muscles subsided he pulled himself slowly to a seated position on the kitchen floor. She slid out from under the table and knelt before him looking in his face with a strange mix of worry and desire. "You see, I- I'm messed up pretty bad. I'm not worthy of you," he rasped. She grabbed his face and looked deeply into his eyes, the boldest gesture he'd seen her make so far. He felt himself getting lost in her emerald gaze. "I decide? I choose to belong to you!" Willow said, eyes wide, fearing punishment for her actions, fearing further rejection, but desperately pushing through it. Dan looked at her blankly as her words sank in. He was conflicted and emotions swept across his face. He was amazed she wanted anything to do with him after she'd been exposed to his condition. That precious feeling was hope. He was also so proud of her for being so direct and for her bravery. Still, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Choosing to belong TO someone? Belonging WITH someone he could understand. Maybe she just chose the wrong word but he didn't think so. He really was out of his depths here. Her agitation was growing. He could see panic seeping into her eyes. He wanted to help her. God he wanted that SO much! Allowing her to become completely submissive to him was wrong but she was having a mental break of her own. She needed him, someone, to take on that role for her. He was hardly in any condition to be nursing her mental state when his own was so broken. It seemed to be the lesser of the evils he faced. He held out his arms and she was immediately in them, clinging to his chest and crying. He wasn't sure if they were tears of joy or not but they were certainly some kind of release. Soon she calmed down and snuggled against him. They sat there holding each other. Dan realized how much he missed this. Just physical contact with another human being. He could feel it centering him. Bringing him into the now. Gurgle! Dan realized that noise came from Willow's tummy. She was hungry! She was hiding her face but he was sure she was ashamed or frightened. God, her reactions were so reversed. He gently lifted her chin with his finger until he could see her beautiful eyes. "Let's get you some lunch, okay?" he said gently with a smile. She nodded slightly and returned his smile with one of her own. On impulse he kissed her forehead. She gasped then squeezed him harder rubbing her face against his chest. He guessed she hadn't received too many gestures of affection in her past. "We're going to have to get off the floor to make lunch, Willow," he said with a chuckle. She released him and sprung to her feet. She helped him up as well then followed him over to the pantry. When he realized she was sticking so close he snorted then turned to face her. "Willow, why don't you have a seat at the kitchen table and help yourself to a few cookies and a glass of milk? We need to get some weight back on you. I'm just going to get some cans of soup to heat up for lunch." She dropped her eyes but he saw the little smile on her mouth as she headed back to the table. Dan went into the pantry and did a quick assessment of his inventory then estimated what the impact of having a second mouth to feed was going to have on his stock. Including the contents of the freezer in the garage, he would have had enough for four months if it was just him. Now he was looking at dropping that to two or two and a half months. Not good. He was going to have to ask Wally to do an airdrop in the meadow to the east of the cabin. Considering his new guest arrived with no clothes or supplies for her womanly needs, an air drop would have been necessary anyway. He'd have to work out a new list of requirements and contact Wally. Carrying two cans of soup with him he re-entered the kitchen and noticed the plate of cookies was empty as was her glass of milk. His glass was still full and the cookie he'd place on his plate was still there. He smiled at Willow and said "You can have my cookie and drink that milk if you like." She smiled and plucked the cookie off his plate and had it chewed and swallowed in the time it took him to get back to the counter, all of four steps away. She sipped at the milk slower while she watched him move around the kitchen. After a short period he brought two bowls of thick beef and vegetable soup to the table. He went back for spoons and also brought back some hard cheese and bread to soak up the soup. Warning her that the soup was hot he demonstrated how to eat it safely. He had no idea if that was necessary but she watched him carefully and emulated his exact motions until she was eating along with him. "Willow, if you start feeling full, stop eating and we will package it up for later. You don't want to give your stomach too much to deal with. Okay?" She nodded at him and put her spoon down after just two more scoops. She dunked her last piece of bread into the bowl then pushed the soaked bread into her mouth. He could tell she was stuffed and she had a sleepy look on her face. Dan had hoped they'd be able to return to building her timeline but she was obviously struggling to remain awake. He gathered up the bowls and put hers in a sealed container in the fridge for later. He cleared the rest of the table and put the dishes in the sink. He walked back to the table and watched Willows head bob and she slipped into and out of sleep sitting in her chair. He went down on one knee and scooped her up into his arms, her head resting on his shoulder. She immediately snuggled in with a purr. He carried her to the guest room and tucked her into the bed and gave her forehead another kiss. He walked back to the kitchen and did the dishes. When he was done he felt a little weary himself. It had been quite a trying 24 hours. Thinking about that he realized he was going to have to contact the police to let them know what had happened. He thought he'd speak with Willow first and maybe figure out her true name so he'd have something helpful to tell the police. OK, he found himself fighting to keep his eyes open as well so he might as well take a nap too. He walked back to his bedroom and on the way glanced in at Willow who seemed to be sleeping peacefully. He reached his bed and pulled back the quilt and top sheet and dropped himself in. He set his alarm for 2 hours then covered himself and allowed sleep to pull him under. It felt like only moments later that he heard the gentle chimes of his alarm waking him up. He was sweating under the quilt and then realized he wasn't alone under the blankets. Willow had snuck into his bed while he slept and had curled up against his chest. He reached out and turned off the alarm. He looked down and saw Willow's eyes peaking up at him, seeming to gauge if he was going to punish her. He pushed off the quilt to let some of the heat out and sat up. He realized that they were both going to need to shower again as sweat stained their clothes. He'd have to change the sheets too. Her eyes never left his face as she waited for him to indicate if he was upset with her. He looked at her lovely green eyes and tenderly pushed a strand of her blond hair from her face. She melted against his touch and the tension left her body. "We're a little sweaty and stinky, so we should get cleaned up," he said. Willow immediately got out of bed and began taking her clothes off. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled shyly at his awestruck expression. "Uh, I meant separately." She dropped her eyes and bit her lower lip. He could see her confidence had taken another hit. She was so bloody fragile. Even when he was trying to think of her he somehow messed up and hurt her. "It's okay, we can shower together but just for cleaning up this time, okay?" he said. Her eyes flashed back to him and for the first time he saw an impish smile on her lips. Sighing he pulled the sheets off of the bed, picked up her clothes and felt her reaching around his back to unbutton his shirt. She made quick work of those then pulled the knot loose on his track pants. She dropped them and his underwear to his feet and he stepped free of them. She placed them on the pile of laundry and he carried it out to the laundry room. It felt a little odd walking around nude but it wasn't like he had any neighbors. He moved her clothes from the washer to the dryer and got it started. He loaded the rest of the dirty laundry and prepared it for later. When he got back to the bedroom he could hear the shower going. Ah! Maybe she took the initiative to have her shower first? He looked into the bathroom and nope, she was standing by the glass wall with a smile on her face. He walked in and she entered the stall. She had prepared the temperature he realized as he stepped into the warm spray after her. She immediately set to scrubbing his back and of course, the feeling of her hands running over his body had the expected effect. Willow was standing in front of him, having cleaned every other surface of his body. Her eyes were on his erection and she was beginning to breathe a little fast. She glanced at his eyes looking for permission to touch it. Instead Dan took the soap from her and lathered up his hands. He proceeded to soap her body as she had done for him only this time he used his hands instead of the loofa. She seemed to far prefer being washed in this way. His touch was soft but firm and he made sure she was well cleaned. He tried to remain clinical in his technique but her sighs and coos as his hands touched her soft flesh were an incredible distraction and his cock wasn't buying the act at all. It remained stiff as iron throughout the entire exercise. To Be Continued in part 3, based on a post by BurntRedstone for Literotica

An Angel For Bishop: Part 2 Willows most serious injuries are in her psychie. In 4 parts, based on a post by BurntRedstone. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. Willow let go of Dan Bishop s sleeve and he left her in the bathroom so she could shower in privacy. He quickly gathered up new clothes for her. He got one of his tight t-shirts that would likely be a little big on her but might be tight enough to assist with supporting her breasts. Another pair of draw string track pants, socks, and another flannel shirt to cover up her amazing tits. Gah! He had to stop thinking about her that way! He set the new clothes on the edge of the counter by the door without entering the room. He heard the water running and the sounds of movement so she seemed to have that under control. He walked to the guest bedroom and added the clothes she'd been wearing yesterday to the laundry bag. He brought the load to the small laundry room and dropped all of the dirty closed into the washer with the soap. He'd turn it on when she was done with her shower. Dan inspected the leather jacket and riding chaps Willow had been wearing. They couldn't go into the wash but he could clean them by hand and mend the torn jacket. He set them aside for later. He walked back into his bedroom and listened to hear if she was done. There was an odd noise warbling under the sound of the falling water. "Willow?" he called out. When he got no response he took a deep breath and cautiously looked in the door. She was on the floor of the shower on her side curled in a ball. Thinking she'd fallen in the shower Dan rushed into the bathroom and stepped into the stall fully clothed. He bent down and called out her name in fear. "Willow! Are you Okay? Did you fall?" He saw she was sobbing and shaking. The water was quite hot so she couldn't be cold. Willow suddenly became aware that Dan was crouching over her. She quickly turned to him and flung her arms over his shoulders and squeezed her face against his neck. Dan fell back onto his ass when she landed on him. Her wonderful breasts were pressed up against his wet shirt and she kissed his throat feverishly. She moved her hands to his chest and began to frantically unbutton his shirt. She was making strange little vulnerable sounds like yelps. Amongst these noises he made out the occasional words, "Please!", "I'll be good!", "Let me stay!", and "Love me!" Dan was stunned and tried to get his thoughts back into order. The surreal nature of the situation, the physical onslaught of her touches and kisses and cries combined with the hiss from the water hitting the tiles in the shower triggered a flashback to his time in the war. He froze as bullets ripped past him through the blowing sand. He had to get to the house. He felt the bullet pass through his calf and yet he ran on. He felt, lips on his? He came out of his thoughts panting with reaction, his eyes wild, searching for the shooters but seeing only his shower stall and the beautiful naked woman kneeling before him, holding his head between her hands. Her eyes were full of worry. She released his head as he looked down at himself and realized he was dressed and soaking wet. His back was pressed into the corner of the shower stall and he couldn't remember how he got there. Dan put his head in his hands and rubbed them vigorously back and forth over his scalp, as if pushing the memories back into their hidden spots in his brain so he could function again. "Look, I'm sorry about that. I, uh, I'm dealing with some things that happened to me as well. In a war. A long time ago. I'm still not good around people," he said gruffly. Dan pushed himself up, using the wall to steady himself as his body was still trembling. He put his hands on the wall and leaned his head under the hot water to let it run over his neck. He felt soft hands gently pull at his wet shirt from behind so, one arm at a time, he reached back so she could remove it from his shoulders. Once the wet shirt was gone he felt those soft lips kissing the twitching muscles of his shoulders and her incredibly soft breasts pressing against his back. This was enough to distract him from feeling her hands undoing the button on his jeans and sliding the zipper down. His mind was awash in the sensation of her soft skin rubbing against the tight muscles of his back. He felt the hard points of her nipples slowly drag down his back but he didn't notice his jeans and underwear were dropping at the same rate. When she had him step out of his pants he came to the realization that he was naked with her in the shower but his weakened state limited his protest to a weak growl. Slowly her nipples slid their way up his back. His cock was now fully erect and hard as iron. He hadn't felt a woman's touch in... too many years. When her slender fingers reached around his body and slid over his hot flesh, a deep moan was tugged from his soul. Willow cooed in delight as she discovered by touch that Dan was not small. All the while she was leaning her tits against his back and gently kissing his neck and shoulders. "No... Willow, please. Stah, stop please. We can't... I can't do this to you..." Dan pleaded as his body shook with reaction from his attack and from the building passion. On hearing Dan's words Willow became more desperate to bring him to release and began to stroke him faster. She leaned in to nibble on his ear and she began to repeat her earlier pleas. The vocal expression of her desperate need for him, pushed him over the brink. Dan's release was sudden and intense. Throughout the surges, her hands continued to milk. It took all of his strength to remain on his feet. He leaned more heavily against the wall. Next, Dan felt Willow's hands running over his back and he smelled the clean scent of the soap she was using to clean his body. She started at the back of his neck and worked downwards. Soon a good lather was washing from his densely muscled back under the hot spray. She marveled at the strength in his powerful arm as she worked her way down the right limb which was braced against the wall in front of him. This finally brought her into his view and she smiled shyly at him from beneath her wet bangs as she briskly lathered up his arm. She worked the soap into his armpit and then she slipped under his right arm and began to wash his chest. Again, she started at his neck, just under his chin, and worked her way downwards. She briefly stopped with her hands on his hips and she stared down at his semi-rigid flesh. Then she moved on to his left arm starting from the pit and working towards his hand. She dipped under his left arm and ran her soapy hands over his ass. They didn't even pause before she soaped deeply between his ass cheeks all the way from his furry pelvis to the top of his ass. Dan's eyes shot open and he looked over his shoulder at her. She spared him a quick nervous glance like she might be expecting punishment for touching him there. Her hands slowed and paused on his hips as she stole worried glances at his face. Unsure what to do, Dan turned his face back to the wall and her hands resumed cleaning his legs all the way down to his feet. Again, Willow moved to his front to wash his legs. He looked down to see her kneeling at his feet, her face was even with his slowly growing erection. She quickly and gently washed his wood, then worked down the front of his legs. She stood up between his arms and placed her hands on his shoulders. Gently pushing him back she allowed the descending water to rinse the soap from the front side of his body. Her hands followed the water down his arms then worked their way down his chest chasing the soap as it rinsed away. She knelt again and ran her hands down his legs. Dan's eyes closed once more and a wave of contentment rushed over him. When her hot, wet mouth caused him to gasp loudly and his muscles clenched over his entire body. His eyes snapped open to see her shining green eyes staring up at him in worship. With his muscles all locked up he couldn't move. His jaw worked but he was only able to make croaking sounds as he watched her luscious lips stretch open. Soon her nose was pressed against his stomach. Still her eyes remained locked on his. He could see her begin to turn red as her airway was blocked. He tried to pull back but her hands grabbed his ass cheeks. Her eyes grew desperate and Dan grabbed her head between his hands and pushed her off. After she had taken a deep gasp of air, she struggled to resume her affections. He stepped back away from her until he was leaning against the wall of the shower. She followed on her knees and lunged forward. Dan was managing to hold her at bay so she began to bob her head up and down rapidly. He groaned and felt his arms weakening. Her tongue was slithering around and he could feel himself rapidly approaching. "Willow, god! Stop! Willow, please!" he gasped as his arms finally gave out. It was too much for Dan and he felt the boiling rush for release. "Willow! Stop, I'm, he strained against her almost overpowering passion. She took him once more. His body curled in over her and his hands rested gently on her head. Willow swallowed as quickly as she could. When he was finished she lovingly cleaned him; her eyes never leaving his face. When Dan's eyes finally opened he saw she was still sitting between his feet, biting her lower lip, her eyes on his; searching for approval, for acceptance. He reached down with both hands and gently touched her face. He indicated he wanted her to stand so she rose to her feet in front of him. She was almost vibrating with need. He leaned forward and kissed her deeply, his tongue sinking into her mouth to chase hers. He realized that he could taste himself in her mouth but shrugged it off as a new experience. She must have picked up on his surprise and she froze. No one had ever been this intimate with her. It was rare that she was kissed at all; and she'd gotten a beating once for having 'cum-breath' as she'd forgotten to rinse her mouth out with whisky directly afterwards, as her master required. Once her surprise wore off Dan felt her arms wrapping around his broad chest and her mouth became more insistent on his. Dan suddenly pulled away from the kiss and smiled at her. He turned Willow around and placed her palms against the wall, the stance he'd had while she washed him. Then he took the soap and the loofa and worked up a good lather on it. He began to run the loofa over her body, scrubbing off the funk she'd accumulated from her days on the road with that abusive bastard. Her skin pinked up under his tender but thorough scrubbing. He used caution around the two bandaged wounds (they'd need replacing after this). Dan followed the same pattern she used on him as he worked his way around her body. By the time he was sure she was clean, he was kneeling at her feet, her pinkness telling him she was more than a little excited. He wanted to return the favor and show his appreciation for her so he dipped his head forward to press a kiss against her hot skin. Willow jumped and gasped. Her hands automatically went to his head and he felt her fingers slide through his wet hair. Her touch was too light like she was unsure what to do. He looked up into her eyes and he could see she was stunned he was doing this. He guessed that no one had ever thought her pleasure and carressing mattered. It was going to be a new experience for her. Good! He slipped a little lower, running his tongue in circles across the smooth flesh of her navel. He licked into  her indentation and gently ran his tongue around the soft flesh. He could hear Willow's breath coming out in little pants. Her hands continued to slide behind his head as if to pull his mouth tighter against her tummy, then they'd pull away as she realized what she was doing. She moaned deeply as he did this. Willow's hands were where they should be, locked tightly in his hair at the back of his head. A deep gasp rushed from her body. Soon she was convulsing and pulling his head tightly against her, crushing his lips against her. She yipped in pleasure as her body throbbed in bliss. He could feel her legs beginning to give out so he stood and wrapped her up in his arms, holding her trembling body against his. Her chin rested on his shoulder and her breath rushed out against his neck as she panted in recovery from her orgasm, from just the gentle caress of a man, under the endlessly hot shower.. When he felt Willow's legs steady under her Dan reached behind her and poured out a large drop of shampoo in his palm. He dripped a little in his other hand then massaged it deeply into her scalp. He rubbed his fingers from her forehead back to the base of her neck. He gathered up her long hair and poured a little more shampoo into the platinum locks. He rubbed them together until thick suds coated each strand. Once he was sure he had thoroughly cleaned her hair, he tipped her head back to get the cascade of water to fall on her hair. He ran his fingers from the top of her head through her hair all the way down her back to rinse out the shampoo. He did this motion several times to ensure the shampoo was gone, slipping in a little scalp massage as he went. While he ran his fingers through her long hair he watched her face and for the first time he could see she was completely relaxed. Her eyes were closed, her forehead was smooth, and her brows were relaxed. Her full lips turned up at their ends in a small, contented smile. Her hands rested on his shoulders and her breasts pressed gently against his chest. Some conditioner would be good considering how dry her hair felt when he'd pulled off the helmet yesterday- God! Had it only been yesterday? He froze briefly. Again, he felt a flash of how surreal it was to be standing naked in a shower with a woman he'd just met yesterday. He didn't do that. Ever. And they'd had sex! She was obviously damaged by her previous treatment and on top of that history he had sex with her. The guilt was hooking its claws in deep. He shook himself. She still needed the conditioner in her hair. He grabbed a dollop and worked it through her hair, again making sure each strand received treatment. As he rinsed it away he could swear he heard Willow purr. He stared at her and realized with a start that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever laid eyes on. She was also troubled, vulnerable and he'd done something inexcusable. He blushed with shame and stepped from the shower. As he dried off he kept Willow in the corner of his eye to make sure she was okay. He saw her catch his embarrassed expression and read his body language. Her tiny smile dropped from her face. God, he was such an ass! She was so vulnerable and he'd taken advantage and left her feeling bad. Now she was confused and her unstable anxiety had returned. She turned off the water and stepped out to dry off. Her body was trembling. Dan stepped out into his bedroom and quickly pulled on some clothes. In her inattention Willow accidentally rubbed the towel across her bandage. She hissed with pain. Dan returned from his bedroom. He felt a little better now that he had a layer of clothing between himself and Willow. He heard her make a painful noise and saw her tug the towel from the bandage on her shoulder. The adhesive had succumbed to the steam, water, and soap in the shower. He needed to change the dressing on her wounds. That was something he could do for her that was positive. Getting her dressed would also help settle his mind. He stepped forward and carefully examined the wound under the flap of the loose gauze and tape bandage. He carefully removed the remaining tape and saw that she was already beginning to heal nicely. She'd have yet another set of scars to add to the host already found across her back, her arms, and some on her legs. "Willow, please hang on a second. I'm going to put fresh bandages on your wounds" he said. He left the room and returned with fresh gauze and tape. He quickly covered the two areas and then pointed to the clothes he'd set on the counter for her. "Please get dressed and meet me back in the kitchen when you're ready." After stopping by to start the laundry Dan walked into the kitchen and put a notepad and pen on the kitchen table. Then he pulled out a couple of glasses, the tin of digestive biscuits, and the milk. He filled the two glasses and put some of the cookies on a plate. Once the snack was on the table and the milk was back in the fridge Willow hurried into the kitchen. He could see her nervousness was back. He growled at himself for being so stupid and hurting her in her state. She mistook his growling as displeasure in her and dropped to her knees at his feet. "NO!" he barked then instantly cursed himself as she flinched in preparation for being struck. "No, Willow please! I'm mad at myself not you. I wasn't yelling at you. God, I'm royally fucking this up," he sighed. He pulled her gently to her feet and moved her to sit at the kitchen table next to him. She kept her eyes on the table until she saw the milk and cookies. Her face froze as she seemed to be recalling something. Dan slid one of the glasses over to her and offered her the plate. She misunderstood and took the plate from his hand. Showing more patience than he'd had earlier he took the plate back and demonstrated being offered a plate of cookies and taking one from it. He tried again and this time Willow took only one. It was little things like the cookie plate and the number of healed scars she had which gave Dan the suspicion that she'd been relatively isolated, perhaps captive, for a good portion of her life. She did recognize cookies and milk so that might be something? Maybe? He wanted to get her talking so he could find out some clues about her past. Maybe get back to her actual name. Maybe he should start by telling her something about himself. Tell her why he was such a hot mess that she'd be better off avoiding. Maybe if she saw that it would help her get on her own two feet. "Look, you saw me react badly this morning, I mean the flashback when I first got in the shower. I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, and sometimes I get flashbacks. I haven't had one in a few months so this one really took me by surprise. They can get bad. Sometimes violent. That's why I live alone in this big house. I- I'm not good to be around," he was frowning at the kitchen table as he said this. "I don't trust what I'll say or what I might do. What we did in the shower, I am so sorry I took advantage of you. You deserve better and-" Willow started to make sounds of protest but Dan raised his hand and she immediately stopped. He didn't see her flinch but he went on. "If I can, I want to help you but I need to know more about you to do that. Maybe we could start from the guy you were with when I found you. What was his name?" "Jackson," she whispered, as if speaking his name might invoke his vengeful spirit. "Was that his last name?" She nodded. "Do you know his first name? Do you recall hearing anyone say it?" he asked. Willow thought for a minute and recalled how he'd cut a man's gut open for teasing him about his name. What was it? Ah. "Percy." "Percy Jackson. Good!" Dan wrote down the current year then the name next to it. He was building a time line for Willow. "How long were you with Percy?" Willow seemed to be having trouble with measuring time. She shook her head sadly. She seemed like she really wanted to help as when she couldn't answer his questions she grew a little more anxious. Dan thought for a moment. "Do you recall how many winters you spent with him?" Her eyes lit up, as he'd found a way to ask the question in a way that she could relate to. "Three." Dan subtracted three from the current year and wrote that year down. "Very good!" he said and smiled at her. Her face lit up at his praise. While he loved to see her smile Dan began to feel a little uneasy about her reactions. "How did you meet Percy?" "He killed my previous master and took me. I belonged to him." Dan looked up sharply, the dots finally connecting in his mind. "Oh god," he whispered "and I killed Percy and took you." Willow's face split into a beautiful smile that lit up the room. Dan finally understood that this was what she'd been waiting for him to declare! His ownership of her! She reached for his hands but stopped when she saw him draw back in shock. Confusion crossed her face then a deep sadness. "But you don't want me." She looked at the scars visible on her arms and a tear trickled down her cheek. "It's okay. I'm hideous and worthless. I'm sorry." She seemed to shrink in on herself. Her despair snapped Dan from his shock. "Willow! Oh my god Willow, you are not hideous! How can you think you're hideous? You are the most beautiful creature- Woman, woman I have ever seen. You take my breath away and I can't think straight when I look at you! Worthless? I'm not worthy of You!" he almost shouted at her. "But you don't want me?" she whispered in a tiny girl voice her hands clenched in her lap, her eyes down, and tears trickling down her cheeks. "Of course I WANT YOU! But- but you're a beautiful woman not a... toy to be stolen, shared, or traded around. I didn't win you from that asshole! I didn't kill him so I could steal you for my own. I killed him because he was going to kill you and you deserve to live and he didn't. Yes, I rescued you but not so you could belong to me but so you could have your own life and make those decisions for yourself." Dan was shaking in reaction by this point. Recalling how he'd killed Percy had put him at risk for another attack. He could feel it coming on. He started to gasp and the room went sideways. He was pinned down under the truck and he could smell the gas from the ruptured gas tank. Bullets thunked and pinged into the trucks body panels above his head. He knew he had to move but back was the only direction and something under the truck was snagging on his jacket. He had dust in his nostrils and could taste the grit... and feel softness pressing against his face. It smelled so good, like home. As his surroundings came back into focus he realized he was under the kitchen table with Willow. He was in a fetal position with his head pillowed on her lap, her hands running gently through his hair. Once the shaking in his muscles subsided he pulled himself slowly to a seated position on the kitchen floor. She slid out from under the table and knelt before him looking in his face with a strange mix of worry and desire. "You see, I- I'm messed up pretty bad. I'm not worthy of you," he rasped. She grabbed his face and looked deeply into his eyes, the boldest gesture he'd seen her make so far. He felt himself getting lost in her emerald gaze. "I decide? I choose to belong to you!" Willow said, eyes wide, fearing punishment for her actions, fearing further rejection, but desperately pushing through it. Dan looked at her blankly as her words sank in. He was conflicted and emotions swept across his face. He was amazed she wanted anything to do with him after she'd been exposed to his condition. That precious feeling was hope. He was also so proud of her for being so direct and for her bravery. Still, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Choosing to belong TO someone? Belonging WITH someone he could understand. Maybe she just chose the wrong word but he didn't think so. He really was out of his depths here. Her agitation was growing. He could see panic seeping into her eyes. He wanted to help her. God he wanted that SO much! Allowing her to become completely submissive to him was wrong but she was having a mental break of her own. She needed him, someone, to take on that role for her. He was hardly in any condition to be nursing her mental state when his own was so broken. It seemed to be the lesser of the evils he faced. He held out his arms and she was immediately in them, clinging to his chest and crying. He wasn't sure if they were tears of joy or not but they were certainly some kind of release. Soon she calmed down and snuggled against him. They sat there holding each other. Dan realized how much he missed this. Just physical contact with another human being. He could feel it centering him. Bringing him into the now. Gurgle! Dan realized that noise came from Willow's tummy. She was hungry! She was hiding her face but he was sure she was ashamed or frightened. God, her reactions were so reversed. He gently lifted her chin with his finger until he could see her beautiful eyes. "Let's get you some lunch, okay?" he said gently with a smile. She nodded slightly and returned his smile with one of her own. On impulse he kissed her forehead. She gasped then squeezed him harder rubbing her face against his chest. He guessed she hadn't received too many gestures of affection in her past. "We're going to have to get off the floor to make lunch, Willow," he said with a chuckle. She released him and sprung to her feet. She helped him up as well then followed him over to the pantry. When he realized she was sticking so close he snorted then turned to face her. "Willow, why don't you have a seat at the kitchen table and help yourself to a few cookies and a glass of milk? We need to get some weight back on you. I'm just going to get some cans of soup to heat up for lunch." She dropped her eyes but he saw the little smile on her mouth as she headed back to the table. Dan went into the pantry and did a quick assessment of his inventory then estimated what the impact of having a second mouth to feed was going to have on his stock. Including the contents of the freezer in the garage, he would have had enough for four months if it was just him. Now he was looking at dropping that to two or two and a half months. Not good. He was going to have to ask Wally to do an airdrop in the meadow to the east of the cabin. Considering his new guest arrived with no clothes or supplies for her womanly needs, an air drop would have been necessary anyway. He'd have to work out a new list of requirements and contact Wally. Carrying two cans of soup with him he re-entered the kitchen and noticed the plate of cookies was empty as was her glass of milk. His glass was still full and the cookie he'd place on his plate was still there. He smiled at Willow and said "You can have my cookie and drink that milk if you like." She smiled and plucked the cookie off his plate and had it chewed and swallowed in the time it took him to get back to the counter, all of four steps away. She sipped at the milk slower while she watched him move around the kitchen. After a short period he brought two bowls of thick beef and vegetable soup to the table. He went back for spoons and also brought back some hard cheese and bread to soak up the soup. Warning her that the soup was hot he demonstrated how to eat it safely. He had no idea if that was necessary but she watched him carefully and emulated his exact motions until she was eating along with him. "Willow, if you start feeling full, stop eating and we will package it up for later. You don't want to give your stomach too much to deal with. Okay?" She nodded at him and put her spoon down after just two more scoops. She dunked her last piece of bread into the bowl then pushed the soaked bread into her mouth. He could tell she was stuffed and she had a sleepy look on her face. Dan had hoped they'd be able to return to building her timeline but she was obviously struggling to remain awake. He gathered up the bowls and put hers in a sealed container in the fridge for later. He cleared the rest of the table and put the dishes in the sink. He walked back to the table and watched Willows head bob and she slipped into and out of sleep sitting in her chair. He went down on one knee and scooped her up into his arms, her head resting on his shoulder. She immediately snuggled in with a purr. He carried her to the guest room and tucked her into the bed and gave her forehead another kiss. He walked back to the kitchen and did the dishes. When he was done he felt a little weary himself. It had been quite a trying 24 hours. Thinking about that he realized he was going to have to contact the police to let them know what had happened. He thought he'd speak with Willow first and maybe figure out her true name so he'd have something helpful to tell the police. OK, he found himself fighting to keep his eyes open as well so he might as well take a nap too. He walked back to his bedroom and on the way glanced in at Willow who seemed to be sleeping peacefully. He reached his bed and pulled back the quilt and top sheet and dropped himself in. He set his alarm for 2 hours then covered himself and allowed sleep to pull him under. It felt like only moments later that he heard the gentle chimes of his alarm waking him up. He was sweating under the quilt and then realized he wasn't alone under the blankets. Willow had snuck into his bed while he slept and had curled up against his chest. He reached out and turned off the alarm. He looked down and saw Willow's eyes peaking up at him, seeming to gauge if he was going to punish her. He pushed off the quilt to let some of the heat out and sat up. He realized that they were both going to need to shower again as sweat stained their clothes. He'd have to change the sheets too. Her eyes never left his face as she waited for him to indicate if he was upset with her. He looked at her lovely green eyes and tenderly pushed a strand of her blond hair from her face. She melted against his touch and the tension left her body. "We're a little sweaty and stinky, so we should get cleaned up," he said. Willow immediately got out of bed and began taking her clothes off. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled shyly at his awestruck expression. "Uh, I meant separately." She dropped her eyes and bit her lower lip. He could see her confidence had taken another hit. She was so bloody fragile. Even when he was trying to think of her he somehow messed up and hurt her. "It's okay, we can shower together but just for cleaning up this time, okay?" he said. Her eyes flashed back to him and for the first time he saw an impish smile on her lips. Sighing he pulled the sheets off of the bed, picked up her clothes and felt her reaching around his back to unbutton his shirt. She made quick work of those then pulled the knot loose on his track pants. She dropped them and his underwear to his feet and he stepped free of them. She placed them on the pile of laundry and he carried it out to the laundry room. It felt a little odd walking around nude but it wasn't like he had any neighbors. He moved her clothes from the washer to the dryer and got it started. He loaded the rest of the dirty laundry and prepared it for later. When he got back to the bedroom he could hear the shower going. Ah! Maybe she took the initiative to have her shower first? He looked into the bathroom and nope, she was standing by the glass wall with a smile on her face. He walked in and she entered the stall. She had prepared the temperature he realized as he stepped into the warm spray after her. She immediately set to scrubbing his back and of course, the feeling of her hands running over his body had the expected effect. Willow was standing in front of him, having cleaned every other surface of his body. Her eyes were on his erection and she was beginning to breathe a little fast. She glanced at his eyes looking for permission to touch it. Instead Dan took the soap from her and lathered up his hands. He proceeded to soap her body as she had done for him only this time he used his hands instead of the loofa. She seemed to far prefer being washed in this way. His touch was soft but firm and he made sure she was well cleaned. He tried to remain clinical in his technique but her sighs and coos as his hands touched her soft flesh were an incredible distraction and his cock wasn't buying the act at all. It remained stiff as iron throughout the entire exercise. To Be Continued in part 3, based on a post by BurntRedstone for Literotica

Linktree: ⁠https://linktr.ee/Analytic⁠Join The Normandy For Additional Bonus Audio And Visual Content For All Things Nme+! Join Here: ⁠https://ow.ly/msoH50WCu0K⁠Analytic Dreamz dives deep into the official trailer for Percy Jackson & the Olympians Season 2 in this Notorious Mass Effect segment. After Camp Half-Blood's magical border shatters, Percy Jackson launches a high-stakes quest across the Sea of Monsters to rescue Grover and secure the Golden Fleece—the only artifact capable of saving the camp. Joined by Annabeth Chase, Clarisse La Rue, and his cyclops half-brother Tyson, Percy races to thwart Luke Castellan, Titan Kronos, and their plot to destroy Olympus. Analytic Dreamz analyzes key trailer moments, character arcs, mythological ties, and Disney+ production upgrades. Season 2 premieres December 10 with a two-episode drop on Disney+ and Hulu, followed by weekly Wednesday releases. Essential listening for Percy Jackson fans, Riordanverse enthusiasts, and fantasy adventure seekers. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/analytic-dreamz-notorious-mass-effect/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Our resident manga experts Dani and Percy come to discuss their favorite manga, from the first manga they every picked up to the ones they're keeping tabs on right now.  Titles recommended:  One-Punch Man One Piece Skip Beat! Kitchen Princess Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun Soul Eater Tinker Bell's Secret Miss Not-So-Sidekick The Boy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Boy At All Sakamoto Days A Man and His Cat Library Wars Absolute Boyfriend Full Metal Alchemist

Bishop Tony Percy says that St Paul reminds us that we are God's temple and that His Spirit lives within us. St Carlo Acutis echoes this truth, saying we are all “born originals but die as photocopies,” calling us, like the saints, to embrace our God-given uniqueness and live as true temples of the Holy Spirit

Have you ever wondered where video games come from? Join Anna, Leo, and Percy the mouse as they press start on a journey through history. They'll uncover the origins of the first home video game console and dive into the dazzling world of arcades. But, they'll have to think of their feet because on this mission, they'll be playing a game of their own. Get your controllers ready, Young Historians, and push play for our next adventure! About Honest History Honest History creates award-winning books, magazines, and this show for young historians across the world. Our mission is to inspire kids to create a positive impact on history themselves. Learn more at honesthistory.co and @honesthistory. Credits This episode was narrated by Nikki Bon and JoAnn Schinderle, written by Heidi Coburn, and produced by Robot Pirate Media. Original theme music was written and recorded by Michael Dayvid. More Enjoy this episode? Share with your friends and don't forget to rate and review. See you next time!

Harry's thinking he had known Percy for four years, had stayed in his house during the summers, yet now, Percy thought him 'unbalanced and possibly violent'? That was a feeling that was really powerful in the fandom during the first disbelief of TERFpocalypse. That vertigo when you realize that somebody has made you into a monster in their head, even though they had human connection with you that went back quite a way. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit hpafter2020.com.

This episode uncovers the beginnings of our Spongebob is Percy Jackson lore. Percy meets Hermes, gets his quest, and discovers Luke's new evil lair. We miss how dramatic Luke was as a villain, and theorize about how that will play out in the show. We still are not fans of cruise ships. Some things never change... Timestamps: Old episode begins: 3:45Chapter 7 Commentary: 16:08, 28:00, 36:52Chapter 8 Commentary: 44:40, 49:03, 55:09Chapter 9 Commentary: 108:10Lightning Bolt Questions: 1:14:05Links:SUPPORT US ON PATREON: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/camphalfpod?fan_landing=true⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SUPPORT US ON KO-FI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ko-fi.com/camphalfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SEND US AN AUDIO MESSAGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.speakpipe.com/Camphalfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠JOIN OUR DISCORD: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/gzHYsUbdgr⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MERCH: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.zazzle.com/store/camphalfpod

Bishop Tony Percy says the reason people don't become saints is because they refuse to be themselves. But how? Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God's children, and that is what we are. Be Christ. Be ourselves

Carol talks to the film director and cast of Nine PBS's "Percy Green: Man of ACTION" in a post-screening Q&A about the creation of the film, activism, and more questions about their most memorable demonstrations portrayed in the film. Nine PBS's "Percy Green: Man of ACTION" takes an in-depth look at St. Louis civil rights leader Percy Green, whose activism, from scaling the Gateway Arch to leading modern-day protests, has defined a lifetime of resistance. Download the PBS app to watch the film or visit www.ninepbs.org/percy-green-man-of-action. - What were your thoughts on this discussion? Let us know at ninepbs.org/listenstlouis.

What does it take to keep your voice—and your purpose—strong through every season of life? In this episode of Unstoppable Mindset, I sit down with my friend Bill Ratner, one of Hollywood's most recognized voice actors, best known as Flint from GI Joe. Bill's voice has carried him through radio, animation, and narration, but what stands out most is how he's used that same voice to serve others through storytelling, teaching, and grief counseling. Together, we explore the heart behind his work—from bringing animated heroes to life to standing on The Moth stage and helping people find healing through poetry. Bill shares lessons from his own journey, including losing both parents early, finding family in unexpected places, and discovering how creative expression can rebuild what life breaks down. We also reflect on 9/11, preparedness, and the quiet confidence that comes from trusting your training—whether you're a first responder, a performer, or just navigating the unknown. This conversation isn't just about performance; it's about presence. It's about using your story, your craft, and your compassion to keep moving forward—unstoppable, one voice at a time. Highlights: 00:31 – Hear the Flint voice and what it takes to bring animated characters to life. 06:57 – Learn why an uneven college path still led to a lifelong acting career. 11:50 – Understand how GI Joe became a team and a toy phenomenon that shaped culture. 15:58 – See how comics and cartoons boosted classroom literacy when used well. 17:06 – Pick up simple ways parents can spark reading through shared stories. 19:29 – Discover how early, honest conversations about death can model resilience. 24:09 – Learn to critique ads and media like a pro to sharpen your own performance. 36:19 – Follow the pivot from radio to voiceover and why specialization pays. 47:48 – Hear practical editing approaches and accessible tools that keep shows tight. 49:38 – Learn how The Moth builds storytelling chops through timed, judged practice. 55:21 – See how poetry—and poetry therapy—support grief work with students. 59:39 – Take notes on memoir writing, emotional management, and one-person shows. About the Guest: Bill Ratner is one of America's best known voice actors and author of poetry collections Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake (Slow Lightning Lit 2024,) Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press 2021,) To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press 2021,) and the non-fiction book Parenting For The Digital Age: The Truth Behind Media's Effect On Children and What To Do About It (Familius Books 2014.) He is a 9-time winner of the Moth StorySLAM, 2-time winner of Best of The Hollywood Fringe Extension Award for Solo Performance, Best of the Net Poetry Nominee 2023 (Lascaux Review,) and New Millennium "America One Year From Now" Writing Award Finalist. His writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press,) Missouri Review (audio,) Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Feminine Collective, and other journals. He is the voice of "Flint" in the TV cartoon G.I. Joe, "Donnell Udina" in the computer game Mass Effect, the voice of Air Disasters on Smithsonian Channel, NewsNation, and network TV affiliates across the country. He is a committee chair for his union, SAG-AFTRA, teaches Voiceovers for SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Media Awareness for Los Angeles Unified School District, and is a trained grief counsellor. Member: Actors Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild-AFTRA, National Storytelling Network • https://billratner.com • @billratner Ways to connect with Bill: https://soundcloud.com/bill-ratner https://www.instagram.com/billratner/ https://twitter.com/billratner https://www.threads.net/@billratner https://billratner.tumblr.com https://www.youtube.com/@billratner/videos https://www.facebook.com/billratner.voiceover.author https://bsky.app/profile/bilorat.bsky.social About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well on a gracious hello to you, wherever you may be, I am your host. Mike hingson, and you are listening to unstoppable mindset. Today, we get to have a voice actor, person, Bill Ratner, who you want to know who Bill Radnor is, go back and watch the old GI Joe cartoons and listen to the voice of Flint.   Bill Ratner ** 01:42 All right. Lady Jay, you better get your battle gear on, because Cobra is on their way. And I can't bring up the Lacher threat weapon system. We got to get out of here. Yo, Joe,   Michael Hingson ** 01:52 there you go. I rest my case Well, Bill, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Bill Ratner ** 02:00 We can't rest now. Michael, we've just begun. No, we've just begun.   Michael Hingson ** 02:04 We got to keep going here. Well, I'm really glad that you're here. Bill is another person who we inveigled to get on unstoppable mindset with the help of Walden Hughes. And so that means we can talk about Walden all we want today. Bill just saying, oh goodness. And I got a lot to say. Let me tell you perfect, perfect. Bring it on. So we are really grateful to Walden, although I hope he's not listening. We don't want to give him a big head. But no, seriously, we're really grateful. Ah, good point.   Bill Ratner ** 02:38 But his posture, oddly enough, is perfect.   Michael Hingson ** 02:40 Well, there you go. What do you do? He practiced. Well, anyway, we're glad you're here. Tell us about the early bill, growing up and all that stuff. It's always fun to start a good beginning.   Bill Ratner ** 02:54 Well, I was a very lucky little boy. I was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1947 to two lovely people, professionals, both with master's degree out at University of Chicago. My mother was a social worker. My father had an MBA in business. He was managing editor of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. So I had the joy of living in a better home and living in a garden.   Michael Hingson ** 03:21 My mother. How long were you in Des Moines?   Bill Ratner ** 03:24 Five and a half years left before my sixth birthday. My dad got a fancy job at an ad agency in Minneapolis, and had a big brother named Pete and big handsome, curly haired boy with green eyes. And moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was was brought up there.   Michael Hingson ** 03:45 Wow. So you went to school there and and chased the girls and all that stuff.   Bill Ratner ** 03:54 I went to school there at Blake School for Boys in Hopkins, Minnesota. Couldn't chase the girls day school, but the girls we are allowed to dance with certainly not chase. Michael was at woodhue dancing school, the Northrop girls from Northrop girls school and the Blake boys were put together in eighth grade and taught the Cha Cha Cha, the waltz, the Charleston, and we danced together, and the girls wore white gloves, and we sniffed their perfume, and we all learned how to be lovers when we were 45   Michael Hingson ** 04:37 There you are. Well, as long as you learned at some point, that's a good start.   Bill Ratner ** 04:44 It's a weird generation. Michael,   Michael Hingson ** 04:46 I've been to Des Moines before. I was born in Chicago, but moved out to California when I was five, but I did some work with the National Federation of the Blind in the mid 19. 1970s 1976 into 1978 so spent time at the Iowa Commission for the Blind in Des Moines, which became a top agency for the Blind in well, the late 50s into the to the 60s and so on. So   Bill Ratner ** 05:15 both my parents are from Chicago. My father from the south side of Chicago, 44th and Kenzie, which was a Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish, Ukrainian neighborhood. And my mother from Glencoe, which was a middle class suburb above Northwestern University in Evanston.   Michael Hingson ** 05:34 I Where were you born? 57th and union, north, south side, no, South   Bill Ratner ** 05:42 57th union is that? Is that west of Kenzie?   Michael Hingson ** 05:46 You know, I don't remember the geography well enough to know, but I know that it was, I think, Mount Sinai Hospital where I was born. But it was, it's, it's, it's a pretty tough neighborhood today. So I understand,   Bill Ratner ** 06:00 yeah, yeah, my it was tough, then it's tough now,   Michael Hingson ** 06:03 yeah, I think it's tougher, supposedly, than it was. But we lived there for five years, and then we we moved to California, and I remember some things about Chicago. I remember walking down to the local candy store most days, and had no problem doing that. My parents were told they should shut me away at a home somewhere, because no blind child could ever grow up to amount to anything. And my parents said, You guys are you're totally wrong. And they brought me up with that attitude. So, you   Bill Ratner ** 06:32 know who said that the school says school so that   Michael Hingson ** 06:35 doctors doctors when they discovered I was blind with the   Bill Ratner ** 06:38 kid, goodness gracious, horrified.   Michael Hingson ** 06:44 Well, my parents said absolutely not, and they brought me up, and they actually worked with other parents of premature kids who became blind, and when kindergarten started in for us in in the age of four, they actually had a special kindergarten class for blind kids at the Perry School, which is where I went. And so I did that for a year, learn braille and some other things. Then we moved to California, but yeah, and I go back to Chicago every so often. And when I do nowadays, they I one of my favorite places to migrate in Chicago is Garrett Popcorn.   Bill Ratner ** 07:21 Ah, yes, with caramel corn, regular corn, the   Michael Hingson ** 07:25 Chicago blend, which is a mixture, yeah, the Chicago blend is cheese corn, well, as it is with caramel corn, and they put much other mozzarella on it as well. It's really good.   Bill Ratner ** 07:39 Yeah, so we're on the air. Michael, what do you call your what do you call your program? Here I am your new friend, and I can't even announce your program because I don't know   Michael Hingson ** 07:48 the name, unstoppable mindset. This   Bill Ratner ** 07:51 is unstoppable mindset.   Michael Hingson ** 07:56 We're back. Well, we're back already. We're fast. So you, you, you moved off elsewhere, out of Des Moines and all that. And where did you go to college?   Bill Ratner ** 08:09 Well, this is like, why did you this is, this is a bit like talking about the Vietnam War. Looking back on my college career is like looking back on the Vietnam War series, a series of delusions and defeats. By the time I the time i for college, by the time I was applying for college, I was an orphan, orphan, having been born to fabulous parents who died too young of natural causes. So my grades in high school were my mediocre. I couldn't get into the Ivy Leagues. I got into the big 10 schools. My stepmother said, you're going to Michigan State in East Lansing because your cousin Eddie became a successful realtor. And Michigan State was known as mu u it was the most successful, largest agriculture college and university in the country. Kids from South Asia, China, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, South America all over the world came to Michigan State to study agricultural sciences, children of rich farmers all over the world and middle class farmers all over the world, and a huge police science department. Part of the campus was fenced off, and the young cadets, 1819, 20 years old, would practice on the rest of the student body, uniformed with hats and all right, excuse me, young man, we're just going to get some pizza at eight o'clock on Friday night. Stand against your car. Hands in your car. I said, Are you guys practicing again? Shut up and spread your legs. So that was that was Michigan State, and even though both my parents had master's degrees, I just found all the diversions available in the 1960s to be too interesting, and was not invited. Return after my sophomore year, and in order to flunk out of a big 10 University, and they're fine universities, all of them, you have to be either really determined or not so smart, not really capable of doing that level of study in undergraduate school. And I'd like to think that I was determined. I used to show up for my exams with a little blue book, and the only thing I would write is due to lack of knowledge, I am unable to complete this exam, sign Bill ranter and get up early and hand it in and go off. And so what was, what was left for a young man like that was the theater I'd seen the great Zero Mostel when I was 14 years old and on stage live, he looked just like my father, and he was funny, and if I Were a rich man, and that's the grade zero must tell. Yeah, and it took about five, no, it took about six, seven years to percolate inside my bread and my brain. In high school, I didn't want to do theater. The cheerleaders and guys who I had didn't happen to be friends with or doing theater. I took my girlfriends to see plays, but when I was 21 I started acting, and I've been an actor ever since. I'm a committee chair on the screen actors guild in Hollywood and Screen Actors Guild AFTRA, and work as a voice actor and collect my pensions and God bless the union.   Michael Hingson ** 11:44 Well, hey, as long as it works and you're making progress, you know you're still with it, right?   Bill Ratner ** 11:53 That's the that's the point. There's no accounting for taste in my business. Michael, you work for a few different broadcast entities at my age. And it's, you know, it's younger people. It's 18 to 3418 years to 34 years old is the ideal demographic for advertisers, Ford, Motor Company, Dove soap, Betty, Crocker, cake mixes and cereals, every conceivable product that sold online or sold on television and radio. This is my this is my meat, and I don't work for religion. However, if a religious organization calls, I call and say, I I'm not, not qualified or not have my divinity degree in order to sell your church to the public?   Michael Hingson ** 12:46 Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I can understand that. But you, you obviously do a lot, and as we talked about, you were Flint and GI Joe, which is kind of cool.   Bill Ratner ** 13:01 Flynn GI Joe was very cool. Hasbro Corporation, which was based in Providence, Rhode Island, had a huge success with GI Joe, the figure. The figure was about 11 and a half inches tall, like a Barbie, and was at first, was introduced to the public after the Korean War. There is a comic book that was that was also published about GI Joe. He was an individual figure. He was a figure, a sort of mythic cartoon figure during World War Two, GI Joe, generic American soldier, fighting man and but the Vietnam war dragged on for a long time, and the American buying public or buying kids toys got tired of GI Joe, got tired of a military figure in their household and stopped buying. And when Nixon ended the Vietnam War, or allotted to finish in 1974 Hasbro was in the tank. It's got its stock was cheap, and executives are getting nervous. And then came the Great George Lucas in Star Wars, who shrank all these action figures down from 11 and a half inches to three and a half inches, and went to China and had Chinese game and toy makers make Star Wars toys, and began to earn billions and billions dollars. And so Hasbro said, let's turn GI Joe into into a team. And the team began with flint and Lady J and Scarlett and Duke and Destro and cover commander, and grew to 85 different characters, because Hasbro and the toy maker partners could create 85 different sets of toys and action figures. So I was actor in this show and had a good time, and also a purveyor of a billion dollar industry of American toys. And the good news about these toys is I was at a conference where we signed autographs the voice actors, and we have supper with fans and so on. And I was sitting next to a 30 year old kid and his parents. And this kid was so knowledgeable about pop culture and every conceivable children's show and animated show that had ever been on the screen or on television. I turned to his mother and sort of being a wise acre, said, So ma'am, how do you feel about your 30 year old still playing with GI Joe action figures? And she said, Well, he and I both teach English in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania school system, and last year, the literacy level of my ninth graders was 50% 50% of those kids could not read in ninth grade. So I asked the principal if I could borrow my son's GI Joe, action figures, comic books and VHS tapes, recordings of the shows from TV. And he said, Sure, whatever you want to try. And so she did, and she played the video tapes, and these kids were thrilled. They'd never seen a GI Joe cartoon in class before. Passed out the comic books, let him read comics. And then she said, Okay, you guys. And passed out notebooks and pens and pencils, and said, I want you guys to make up some some shows, some GI Joe shows. And so they said, Yeah, we're ready. All right, Cobra, you better get into the barber shop, because the barber bill is no longer there and the fire engines are in the way. And wait a minute, there's a dog in the street. And so they're making this up, using their imagination, doing their schoolwork, by coming up with scenarios, imaginary fam fan fiction for GI Joe and she raised the literacy level in her classroom by 50% that year, by the end of that year, so, so that was the only story that I've ever heard about the sort of the efficacy of GI Joe, other than, you know, kids play with them. Do they? Are they shooting each other all the time? I certainly hope not. I hope not. Are they using the action figures? Do they strip their guns off and put them in a little, you know, stub over by the side and and have them do physical battle with each other, or have them hump the woods, or have them climb the stairs, or have them search the trees. Who knows what kids do? Same with same with girls and and Barbies. Barbie has been a source of fun and creativity for lots of girls, and the source of of worry and bother to a lot of parents as   Michael Hingson ** 17:54 well. Well, at the same time, though, when kids start to react and relate to some of these things. It's, it's pretty cool. I mean, look what's happened with the whole Harry Potter movement and craze. Harry Potter has probably done more in the last 20 or 25 years to promote reading for kids than most anything else, and   Bill Ratner ** 18:17 that's because it's such a good series of books. I read them to my daughters, yeah. And the quality of writing. She was a brilliant writer, not only just the stories and the storytelling, which is fun to watch in the movies, and you know, it's great for a parent to read. If there are any parents listening, I don't care how old your kids are. I don't care if they're 15. Offer to read to them. The 15 year old might, of course, say mom, but anybody younger than that might say either, all right, fine, which is, which means you better do it or read, read a book. To me, sure, it's fun for the parent, fun for the kid, and it makes the child a completely different kind of thinker and worker and earner.   Michael Hingson ** 19:05 Well, also the people who they got to read the books for the recordings Stephen Fry and in the US here, Jim Dale did such an incredible job as well. I've, I've read the whole Harry Potter series more than once, because I just enjoy them, and I enjoy listening to the the voices. They do such a good job. Yeah. And of course, for me, one of the interesting stories that I know about Jim Dale reading Harry Potter was since it was published by Scholastic he was actually scheduled to do a reading from one of the Harry from the new Harry Potter book that was coming out in 2001 on September 11, he was going to be at Scholastic reading. And of course, that didn't happen because of of everything that did occur. So I don't know whether I'm. I'm assuming at some point a little bit later, he did, but still he was scheduled to be there and read. But it they are there. They've done so much to help promote reading, and a lot of those kinds of cartoons and so on. Have done some of that, which is, which is pretty good. So it's good to, you know, to see that continue to happen. Well, so you've written several books on poetry and so on, and I know that you you've mentioned more than once grief and loss. How come those words keep coming up?   Bill Ratner ** 20:40 Well, I had an unusual childhood. Again. I mentioned earlier how, what a lucky kid I was. My parents were happy, educated, good people, not abusers. You know, I don't have a I don't have horror stories to tell about my mother or my father, until my mother grew sick with breast cancer and and it took about a year and a half or two years to die when I was seven years old. The good news is, because she was a sensitive, educated social worker, as she was actually dying, she arranged a death counseling session with me and my older brother and the Unitarian minister who was also a death counselor, and whom she was seeing to talk about, you know, what it was like to be dying of breast cancer with two young kids. And at this session, which was sort of surprised me, I was second grade, came home from school. In the living room was my mother and my brother looking a little nervous, and Dr Carl storm from the Unitarian Church, and she said, you know, Dr storm from church, but he's also my therapist. And we talk about my illness and how I feel, and we talk about how much I love you boys, and talk about how I worry about Daddy. And this is what one does when one is in crisis. That was a moment that was not traumatic for me. It's a moment I recalled hundreds of times, and one that has been a guiding light through my life. My mother's death was very difficult for my older brother, who was 13 who grew up in World War Two without without my father, it was just him and my mother when he was off in the Pacific fighting in World War Two. And then I was born after the war. And the loss of a mother in a family is like the bottom dropping out of a family. But luckily, my dad met a woman he worked with a highly placed advertising executive, which was unusual for a female in the 1950s and she became our stepmother a year later, and we had some very lovely, warm family years with her extended family and our extended family and all of us together until my brother got sick, came down with kidney disease a couple of years before kidney dialysis was invented, and a couple of years before kidney transplants were done, died at 19. Had been the captain of the swimming team at our high school, but did a year in college out in California and died on Halloween of 1960 my father was 51 years old. His eldest son had died. He had lost his wife six years earlier. He was working too hard in the advertising industry, successful man and dropped out of a heart attack 14th birthday. Gosh, I found him unconscious on the floor of our master bathroom in our house. So my life changed. I My life has taught me many, many things. It's taught me how the defense system works in trauma. It's taught me the resilience of a child. It's taught me the kindness of strangers. It's taught me the sadness of loss.   Michael Hingson ** 24:09 Well, you, you seem to come through all of it pretty well. Well, thank you. A question behind that, just an observation, but, but you do seem to, you know, obviously, cope with all of it and do pretty well. So you, you've always liked to be involved in acting and so on. How did you actually end up deciding to be a voice actor?   Bill Ratner ** 24:39 Well, my dad, after he was managing editor of Better Homes and Gardens magazine in Des Moines for Meredith publishing, got offered a fancy job as executive vice president of the flower and mix division for Campbell within advertising and later at General Mills Corporation. From Betty Crocker brand, and would bring me to work all the time, and would sit with me, and we'd watch the wonderful old westerns that were on prime time television, rawhide and Gunsmoke and the Virginian and sure   Michael Hingson ** 25:15 and all those. Yeah, during   Bill Ratner ** 25:17 the commercials, my father would make fun of the commercials. Oh, look at that guy. And number one, son, that's lousy acting. Number two, listen to that copy. It's the dumbest ad copy I've ever seen. The jingles and and then he would say, No, that's a good commercial, right there. And he wasn't always negative. He would he was just a good critic of advertising. So at a very young age, starting, you know, when we watch television, I think the first television ever, he bought us when I was five years old, I was around one of the most educated, active, funny, animated television critics I could hope to have in my life as a 56789, 1011, 12 year old. And so when I was 12, I became one of the founding members of the Brotherhood of radio stations with my friends John Waterhouse and John Barstow and Steve gray and Bill Connors in South Minneapolis. I named my five watt night kit am transmitter after my sixth grade teacher, Bob close this is wclo stereo radio. And when I was in sixth grade, I built myself a switch box, and I had a turntable and I had an intercom, and I wired my house for sound, as did all the other boys in the in the B, O, R, S, and that's brotherhood of radio stations. And we were guests on each other's shows, and we were obsessed, and we would go to the shopping malls whenever a local DJ was making an appearance and torture him and ask him dumb questions and listen obsessively to American am radio. And at the time for am radio, not FM like today, or internet on your little radio tuner, all the big old grandma and grandpa radios, the wooden ones, were AM, for amplitude modulated. You could get stations at night, once the sun went down and the later it got, the ionosphere would lift and the am radio signals would bounce higher and farther. And in Minneapolis, at age six and seven, I was able to to listen to stations out of Mexico and Texas and Chicago, and was absolutely fascinated with with what was being put out. And I would, I would switch my brother when I was about eight years old, gave me a transistor radio, which I hid under my bed covers. And at night, would turn on and listen for, who knows, hours at a time, and just tuning the dial and tuning the dial from country to rock and roll to hit parade to news to commercials to to agric agriculture reports to cow crossings in Kansas and grain harvesting and cheese making in Wisconsin, and on and on and on that made up the great medium of radio that was handing its power and its business over to television, just as I was growing As a child. Fast, fascinating transition   Michael Hingson ** 28:18 and well, but as it was transitioning, how did that affect you?   Bill Ratner ** 28:26 It made television the romantic, exciting, dynamic medium. It made radio seem a little limited and antiquated, and although I listened for environment and wasn't able to drag a television set under my covers. Yeah, and television became memorable with with everything from actual world war two battle footage being shown because there wasn't enough programming to 1930s Warner Brothers gangster movies with James Cagney, Edward G   Michael Hingson ** 29:01 Robinson and yeah   Bill Ratner ** 29:02 to all the sitcoms, Leave It to Beaver and television cartoons and on and on and on. And the most memorable elements to me were the personalities, and some of whom were invisible. Five years old, I was watching a Kids program after school, after kindergarten. We'll be back with more funny puppets, marionettes after this message and the first words that came on from an invisible voice of this D baritone voice, this commercial message will be 60 seconds long, Chrysler Dodge for 1954 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I watched hypnotized, hypnotized as a 1953 dodge drove across the screen with a happy family of four waving out the window. And at the end of the commercial, I ran into the kitchen said, Mom, mom, I know what a minute. Is, and it was said, it had suddenly come into my brain in one of those very rare and memorable moments in a person's life where your brain actually speaks to you in its own private language and says, Here is something very new and very true, that 60 seconds is in fact a minute. When someone says, See you in five minutes, they mean five times that, five times as long as that. Chrysler commercial, five times 60. That's 300 seconds. And she said, Did you learn it that that on T in kindergarten? And I said, No, I learned it from kangaroo Bob on TV, his announcer, oh, kangaroo Bob, no, but this guy was invisible. And so at five years of age, I was aware of the existence of the practice of the sound, of the magic of the seemingly unlimited access to facts, figures, products, brand names that these voices had and would say on the air in This sort of majestic, patriarchal way,   Michael Hingson ** 31:21 and just think 20 years later, then you had James Earl Jones,   Bill Ratner ** 31:26 the great dame. James Earl Jones, father was a star on stage at that time the 1950s James Earl Jones came of age in the 60s and became Broadway and off Broadway star.   Michael Hingson ** 31:38 I got to see him in Othello. He was playing Othello. What a powerful performance. It was   Bill Ratner ** 31:43 wonderful performer. Yeah, yeah. I got to see him as Big Daddy in Canada, Hot Tin Roof, ah, live and in person, he got front row seats for me and my family.   Michael Hingson ** 31:53 Yeah, we weren't in the front row, but we saw it. We saw it on on Broadway,   Bill Ratner ** 31:58 the closest I ever got to James Earl Jones. He and I had the same voice over agent, woman named Rita vinari of southern Barth and benare company. And I came into the agency to audition for Doritos, and I hear this magnificent voice coming from behind a closed voiceover booth, saying, with a with a Spanish accent, Doritos. I thought that's James Earl Jones. Why is he saying burritos? And he came out, and he bowed to me, nodded and smiled, and I said, hello and and the agent probably in the booth and shut the door. And she said, I said, that was James Earl Jones. What a voice. What she said, Oh, he's such a nice man. And she said, but I couldn't. I was too embarrassed. I was too afraid to stop him from saying, Doritos. And it turns out he didn't get the gig. So it is some other voice actor got it because he didn't say, had he said Doritos with the agent froze it froze up. That was as close as I ever got to did you get the gig? Oh goodness no,   Michael Hingson ** 33:01 no, you didn't, huh? Oh, well, well, yeah. I mean, it was a very, it was, it was wonderful. It was James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer played Iago. Oh, goodness, oh, I know. What a what a combination. Well, so you, you did a lot of voiceover stuff. What did you do regarding radio moving forward? Or did you just go completely out of that and you were in TV? Or did you have any opportunity   Bill Ratner ** 33:33 for me to go back at age 15, my brother and father, who were big supporters of my radio. My dad would read my W, C, l, o, newsletter and need an initial, an excellent journalism son and my brother would bring his teenage friends up. He'd play the elderly brothers, man, you got an Elvis record, and I did. And you know, they were, they were big supporters for me as a 13 year old, but when I turned 14, and had lost my brother and my father, I lost my enthusiasm and put all of my radio equipment in a box intended to play with it later. Never, ever, ever did again. And when I was about 30 years old and I'd done years of acting in the theater, having a great time doing fun plays and small theaters in Minneapolis and South Dakota and and Oakland, California and San Francisco. I needed money, so I looked in the want ads and saw a job for telephone sales, and I thought, Well, I used to love the telephone. I used to make phony phone calls to people all the time. Used to call funeral homes. Hi Carson, funeral I help you. Yes, I'm calling to tell you that you have a you have a dark green slate tile. Roof, isn't that correct? Yes. Well, there's, there's a corpse on your roof. Lady for goodness sake, bring it down and we laugh and we record it and and so I thought, Well, gee, I used to have a lot of fun with the phone. And so I called the number of telephone sales and got hired to sell magazine subscriptions and dinner tickets to Union dinners and all kinds of things. And then I saw a new job at a radio station, suburban radio station out in Walnut Creek, California, a lovely Metro BART train ride. And so I got on the BART train, rode out there and walked in for the interview, and was told I was going to be selling small advertising packages on radio for the station on the phone. And so I called barber shops and beauty shops and gas stations in the area, and one guy picked up the phone and said, Wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you on the radio right now? And I said, No, I'm just I'm in the sales room. Well, maybe you should be. And he slams the phone on me. He didn't want to talk to me anymore. It wasn't interested in buying advertising. I thought, gee. And I told somebody at the station, and they said, Well, you want to be in the radio? And he went, Yeah, I was on the radio when I was 13. And it just so happened that an older fellow was retiring from the 10am to 2pm slot. K I S King, kiss 99 and KD FM, Pittsburgh, California. And it was a beautiful music station. It was a music station. Remember, old enough will remember music that used to play in elevators that was like violin music, the Percy faith orchestra playing a Rolling Stone song here in the elevator. Yes, well, that's exactly what we played. And it would have been harder to get a job at the local rock stations because, you know, they were popular places. And so I applied for the job, and   Michael Hingson ** 37:06 could have lost your voice a lot sooner, and it would have been a lot harder if you had had to do Wolfman Jack. But that's another story.   Bill Ratner ** 37:13 Yeah, I used to listen to Wolf Man Jack. I worked in a studio in Hollywood. He became a studio. Yeah, big time.   Michael Hingson ** 37:22 Anyway, so you you got to work at the muzack station, got   Bill Ratner ** 37:27 to work at the muzack station, and I was moving to Los Angeles to go to a bigger market, to attempt to penetrate a bigger broadcast market. And one of the sales guys, a very nice guy named Ralph pizzella said, Well, when you get to La you should study with a friend of mine down to pie Troy, he teaches voiceovers. I said, What are voice overs? He said, You know that CVS Pharmacy commercial just carted up and did 75 tags, available in San Fernando, available in San Clemente, available in Los Angeles, available in Pasadena. And I said, Yeah. He said, Well, you didn't get paid any extra. You got paid your $165 a week. The guy who did that commercial for the ad agency got paid probably 300 bucks, plus extra for the tags, that's voiceovers. And I thought, why? There's an idea, what a concept. So he gave me the name and number of old friend acquaintance of his who he'd known in radio, named Don DiPietro, alias Johnny rabbit, who worked for the Dick Clark organization, had a big rock and roll station there. He'd come to LA was doing voiceovers and teaching voiceover classes in a little second story storefront out of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. So I signed up for his class, and he was an experienced guy, and he liked me, and we all had fun, and I realized I was beginning to study like an actor at 1818, who goes to New York or goes to Los Angeles or Chicago or Atlanta or St Louis to act in the big theaters, and starts acting classes and realizes, oh my goodness, these people are truly professionals. I don't know how to do what they do. And so for six years, I took voice over classes, probably 4050, nights a year, and from disc jockeys, from ex show hosts, from actors, from animated cartoon voices, and put enough time in to get a degree in neurology in medical school. And worked my way up in radio in Los Angeles and had a morning show, a lovely show with a wonderful news man named Phil Reed, and we talked about things and reviewed movies and and played a lot of music. And then I realized, wait a minute, I'm earning three times the money in voiceovers as I am on the radio, and I have to get up at 430 in the morning to be on the radio. Uh, and a wonderful guy who was Johnny Carson's staff announcer named Jack angel said, You're not still on radio, are you? And I said, Well, yeah, I'm working in the morning. And Ka big, get out of there. Man, quit. Quit. And I thought, well, how can I quit? I've always wanted to be a radio announcer. And then there was another wonderful guy on the old am station, kmpc, sweet Dick Whittington. Whittington, right? And he said at a seminar that I went to at a union voice over training class, when you wake up at four in the morning and you swing your legs over the bed and your shoes hit the floor, and you put your head in your hands, and you say to yourself, I don't want to do this anymore. That's when you quit radio. Well, that hadn't happened to me. I was just getting up early to write some comedy segments and on and on and on, and then I was driving around town all day doing auditions and rented an ex girlfriend's second bedroom so that I could nap by myself during the day, when I had an hour in and I would as I would fall asleep, I'd picture myself every single day I'm in a dark voiceover studio, a microphone Is before me, a music stand is before the microphone, and on it is a piece of paper with advertising copy on it. On the other side of the large piece of glass of the recording booth are three individuals, my employers, I begin to read, and somehow the text leaps off the page, streams into my eyes, letter for letter, word for word, into a part of my back brain that I don't understand and can't describe. It is processed in my semi conscious mind with the help of voice over training and hope and faith, and comes out my mouth, goes into the microphone, is recorded in the digital recorder, and those three men, like little monkeys, lean forward and say, Wow, how do you do that? That was my daily creative visualization. Michael, that was my daily fantasy. And I had learned that from from Dale Carnegie, and I had learned that from Olympic athletes on NBC TV in the 60s and 70s, when the announcer would say, this young man you're seeing practicing his high jump is actually standing there. He's standing stationary, and the bouncing of the head is he's actually rehearsing in his mind running and running and leaping over the seven feet two inch bar and falling into the sawdust. And now he's doing it again, and you could just barely see the man nodding his head on camera at the exact rhythm that he would be running the 25 yards toward the high bar and leaping, and he raised his head up during the imaginary lead that he was visualizing, and then he actually jumped the seven foot two inches. That's how I learned about creative visualization from NBC sports on TV.   Michael Hingson ** 43:23 Channel Four in Los Angeles. There you go. Well, so you you broke into voice over, and that's what you did.   Bill Ratner ** 43:38 That's what I did, darn it, I ain't stopping now, there's a wonderful old actor named Bill Irwin. There two Bill Irwin's one is a younger actor in his 50s or 60s, a brilliant actor from Broadway to film and TV. There's an older William Irwin. They also named Bill Irwin, who's probably in his 90s now. And I went to a premiere of a film, and he was always showing up in these films as The senile stock broker who answers the phone upside down, or the senile board member who always asks inappropriate questions. And I went up to him and I said, you know, I see you in everything, man. I'm 85 years old. Some friends and associates of mine tell me I should slow down. I only got cast in movies and TV when I was 65 I ain't slowing down. If I tried to slow down at 85 I'd have to stop That's my philosophy. My hero is the great Don Pardo, the late great   Michael Hingson ** 44:42 for Saturday Night Live and Jeopardy   Bill Ratner ** 44:45 lives starring Bill Murray, Gilder Radner, and   Michael Hingson ** 44:49 he died for Jeopardy before that,   Bill Ratner ** 44:52 yeah, died at 92 with I picture him, whether it probably not, with a microphone and. His hand in his in his soundproof booth, in his in his garage, and I believe he lived in Arizona, although the show was aired and taped in New York, New York, right where he worked for for decades as a successful announcer. So that's the story.   Michael Hingson ** 45:16 Michael. Well, you know, I miss, very frankly, some of the the the days of radio back in the 60s and 70s and so on. We had, in LA what you mentioned, Dick Whittington, Dick whittinghill on kmpc, Gary Owens, you know, so many people who were such wonderful announcers and doing some wonderful things, and radio just isn't the same anymore. It's gone. It's   Bill Ratner ** 45:47 gone to Tiktok and YouTube. And the truth is, I'm not gonna whine about Tiktok or YouTube, because some of the most creative moments on camera are being done on Tiktok and YouTube by young quote influencers who hire themselves out to advertisers, everything from lipstick. You know,   Speaker 1 ** 46:09 when I went to a party last night was just wild and but this makeup look, watch me apply this lip remover and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no, I have no lip.   Bill Ratner ** 46:20 You know, these are the people with the voices. These are the new voices. And then, of course, the faces. And so I would really advise before, before people who, in fact, use the internet. If you use the internet, you can't complain if you use the internet, if you go to Facebook or Instagram, or you get collect your email or Google, this or that, which most of us do, it's handy. You can't complain about tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. You can't complain about tick tock or YouTube, because it's what the younger generation is using, and it's what the younger generation advertisers and advertising executives and creators and musicians and actors are using to parade before us, as Gary Owens did, as Marlon Brando did, as Sarah Bernhardt did in the 19 so as all as you do, Michael, you're a parader. You're the head of the parade. You've been in on your own float for years. I read your your bio. I don't even know why you want to waste a minute talking to me for goodness sakes.   Michael Hingson ** 47:26 You know, the one thing about podcasts that I like over radio, and I did radio at kuci for seven years when I was in school, what I really like about podcasts is they're not and this is also would be true for Tiktok and YouTube. Primarily Tiktok, I would would say it isn't as structured. So if we don't finish in 60 minutes, and we finish in 61 minutes, no one's gonna shoot us.   Bill Ratner ** 47:53 Well, I beg to differ with you. Now. I'm gonna start a fight with you. Michael, yeah, we need conflict in this script. Is that it The Tick Tock is very structured. Six. No,   Michael Hingson ** 48:03 no, I understand that. I'm talking about podcasts,   Bill Ratner ** 48:07 though, but there's a problem. We gotta Tone It Up. We gotta pick it up. We gotta there's a lot of and I listen to what are otherwise really bright, wonderful personalities on screen, celebrities who have podcasts and the car sucks, and then I had meatballs for dinner, haha. And you know what my wife said? Why? You know? And there's just too much of that. And,   Michael Hingson ** 48:32 oh, I understand, yeah. I mean, it's like, like anything, but I'm just saying that's one of the reasons I love podcasting. So it's my way of continuing what I used to do in radio and having a lot of fun doing it   Bill Ratner ** 48:43 all right, let me ask you. Let me ask you a technical and editorial question. Let me ask you an artistic question. An artist, can you edit this podcast? Yeah. Are you? Do you plan to Nope.   Michael Hingson ** 48:56 I think conversations are conversations, but there is a but, I mean,   Bill Ratner ** 49:01 there have been starts and stops and I answer a question, and there's a long pause, and then, yeah, we can do you edit that stuff   Michael Hingson ** 49:08 out. We do, we do, edit some of that out. And I have somebody that that that does a lot of it, because I'm doing more podcasts, and also I travel and speak, but I can edit. There's a program called Reaper, which is really a very sophisticated   Bill Ratner ** 49:26 close up spaces. You   Michael Hingson ** 49:28 can close up spaces with it, yes, but the neat thing about Reaper is that somebody has written scripts to make it incredibly accessible for blind people using screen readers.   Bill Ratner ** 49:40 What does it do? What does it do? Give me the elevator pitch.   Michael Hingson ** 49:46 You've seen some of the the programs that people use, like computer vision and other things to do editing of videos and so on. Yeah.   Bill Ratner ** 49:55 Yeah. Even Apple. Apple edit. What is it called? Apple? Garage Band. No, that's audio. What's that   Michael Hingson ** 50:03 audio? Oh,   Bill Ratner ** 50:06 quick time is quick   Michael Hingson ** 50:07 time. But whether it's video or audio, the point is that Reaper allows me to do all of that. I can edit audio. I can insert, I can remove pauses. I can do anything with Reaper that anyone else can do editing audio, because it's been made completely accessible.   Bill Ratner ** 50:27 That's great. That's good. That's nice. Oh, it is. It's cool.   Michael Hingson ** 50:31 So so if I want, I can edit this and just have my questions and then silence when you're talking.   Bill Ratner ** 50:38 That might be best. Ladies and gentlemen, here's Bill Ratner,   Michael Hingson ** 50:46 yep, exactly, exactly. Now you have won the moth stories. Slam, what? Tell me about my story. Slam, you've won it nine times.   Bill Ratner ** 51:00 The Moth was started by a writer, a novelist who had lived in the South and moved to New York City, successful novelist named George Dawes green. And the inception of the moth, which many people listening are familiar with from the Moth Radio Hour. It was, I believe, either late 90s or early 2000s when he'd been in New York for a while and was was publishing as a fiction writer, and threw a party, and decided, instead of going to one of these dumb, boring parties or the same drinks being served and same cigarettes being smoked out in the veranda and the same orders. I'm going to ask people to bring a five minute story, a personal story, nature, a true story. You don't have to have one to get into the party, but I encourage you to. And so you know, the 3040, 50 people showed up, many of whom had stories, and they had a few drinks, and they had hors d'oeuvres. And then he said, Okay, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats. It's time for and then I picked names out of a hat, and person after person after person stood up in a very unusual setting, which was almost never done at parties. You How often do you see that happen? Suddenly, the room falls silent, and someone with permission being having been asked by the host to tell a personal story, some funny, some tragic, some complex, some embarrassing, some racy, some wild, some action filled. And afterward, the feedback he got from his friends was, this is the most amazing experience I've ever had in my life. And someone said, you need to do this. And he said, Well, you people left a lot of cigarette butts and beer cans around my apartment. And they said, well, let's do it at a coffee shop. Let's do it at a church basement. So slowly but surely, the moth storytelling, story slams, which were designed after the old poetry slams in the 50s and 60s, where they were judged contests like, like a dance contest. Everybody's familiar with dance contests? Well, there were, then came poetry contests with people singing and, you know, and singing and really energetically, really reading. There then came storytelling contests with people standing on a stage before a silent audience, telling a hopefully interesting, riveting story, beginning middle, end in five minutes. And so a coffee house was found. A monthly calendar was set up. Then came the internet. Then it was so popular standing room only that they had to open yet another and another, and today, some 20 years later, 20 some years later, from Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California to Minneapolis, Minnesota to New York City to Los Angeles. There are moth story slams available on online for you to schedule yourself to go live and in person at the moth.org as in the moth with wings. Friend of mine, I was in New York. He said, You can't believe it. This writer guy, a writer friend of mine who I had read, kind of an avant garde, strange, funny writer was was hosting something called the moth in New York, and we were texting each other. He said, Well, I want to go. The theme was show business. I was going to talk to my Uncle Bobby, who was the bell boy. And I Love Lucy. I'll tell a story. And I texted him that day. He said, Oh man, I'm so sorry. I had the day wrong. It's next week. Next week, I'm going to be back home. And so he said, Well, I think there's a moth in Los Angeles. So about 15 years ago, I searched it down and what? Went to a small Korean barbecue that had a tiny little stage that originally was for Korean musicians, and it was now being used for everything from stand up comedy to evenings of rock and roll to now moth storytelling once a month. And I think the theme was first time. And so I got up and told a silly story and didn't win first prize. They have judges that volunteer judges a table of three judges scoring, you like, at a swim meet or a track beat or, you know, and our gymnastics meet. So this is all sort of familiar territory for everybody, except it's storytelling and not high jumping or pull ups. And I kept going back. I was addicted to it. I would write a story and I'd memorize it, and I'd show up and try to make it four minutes and 50 seconds and try to make it sound like I was really telling a story and not reading from a script. And wish I wasn't, because I would throw the script away, and I knew the stories well enough. And then they created a radio show. And then I began to win slams and compete in the grand slams. And then I started submitting these 750 word, you know, two and a half page stories. Literary magazines got a few published and found a whole new way to spend my time and not make much   Michael Hingson ** 56:25 money. Then you went into poetry.   Bill Ratner ** 56:29 Then I got so bored with my prose writing that I took a poetry course from a wonderful guy in LA called Jack grapes, who had been an actor and a football player and come to Hollywood and did some TV, episodics and and some some episodic TV, and taught poetry. It was a poet in the schools, and I took his class of adults and got a poem published. And thought, wait a minute, these aren't even 750 words. They're like 75 words. I mean, you could write a 10,000 word poem if you want, but some people have, yeah, and it was complex, and there was so much to read and so much to learn and so much that was interesting and odd. And a daughter of a friend of mine is a poet, said, Mommy, are you going to read me one of those little word movies before I go to sleep?   Michael Hingson ** 57:23 A little word movie, word movie out of the   Bill Ratner ** 57:27 mouths of babes. Yeah, and so, so and I perform. You know, last night, I was in Orange County at a organization called ugly mug Cafe, and a bunch of us poets read from an anthology that was published, and we sold our books, and heard other young poets who were absolutely marvelous and and it's, you know, it's not for everybody, but it's one of the things I do.   Michael Hingson ** 57:54 Well, you sent me pictures of book covers, so they're going to be in the show notes. And I hope people will will go out and get them   Bill Ratner ** 58:01 cool. One of the one of the things that I did with poetry, in addition to wanting to get published and wanting to read before people, is wanting to see if there is a way. Because poetry was, was very satisfying, emotionally to me, intellectually very challenging and satisfying at times. And emotionally challenging and very satisfying at times, writing about things personal, writing about nature, writing about friends, writing about stories that I received some training from the National Association for poetry therapy. Poetry therapy is being used like art therapy, right? And have conducted some sessions and and participated in many and ended up working with eighth graders of kids who had lost someone to death in the past year of their lives. This is before covid in the public schools in Los Angeles. And so there's a lot of that kind of work that is being done by constable people, by writers, by poets, by playwrights,   Michael Hingson ** 59:09 and you became a grief counselor,   Bill Ratner ** 59:13 yes, and don't do that full time, because I do voiceovers full time, right? Write poetry and a grand. Am an active grandparent, but I do the occasional poetry session around around grief poetry.   Michael Hingson ** 59:31 So you're a grandparent, so you've had kids and all that. Yes, sir, well, that's is your wife still with us? Yes?   Bill Ratner ** 59:40 Oh, great, yeah, she's an artist and an art educator. Well, that   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 so the two of you can criticize each other's works, then, just   Bill Ratner ** 59:52 saying, we're actually pretty kind to each other. I Yeah, we have a lot of we have a lot of outside criticism. Them. So, yeah, you don't need to do it internally. We don't rely on it. What do you think of this although, although, more than occasionally, each of us will say, What do you think of this poem, honey? Or what do you think of this painting, honey? And my the favorite, favorite thing that my wife says that always thrills me and makes me very happy to be with her is, I'll come down and she's beginning a new work of a new piece of art for an exhibition somewhere. I'll say, what? Tell me about what's, what's going on with that, and she'll go, you know, I have no idea, but it'll tell me what to do.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:33 Yeah, it's, it's like a lot of authors talk about the fact that their characters write the stories right, which, which makes a lot of sense. So with all that you've done, are you writing a memoir? By any chance, I   Bill Ratner ** 1:00:46 am writing a memoir, and writing has been interesting. I've been doing it for many years. I got it was my graduate thesis from University of California Riverside Palm Desert.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:57 My wife was a UC Riverside graduate. Oh, hi. Well, they   Bill Ratner ** 1:01:01 have a low residency program where you go for 10 days in January, 10 days in June. The rest of it's online, which a lot of universities are doing, low residency programs for people who work and I got an MFA in creative writing nonfiction, had a book called parenting for the digital age, the truth about media's effect on children. And was halfway through it, the publisher liked it, but they said you got to double the length. So I went back to school to try to figure out how to double the length. And was was able to do it, and decided to move on to personal memoir and personal storytelling, such as goes on at the moth but a little more personal than that. Some of the material that I was reading in the memoir section of a bookstore was very, very personal and was very helpful to read about people who've gone through particular issues in their childhood. Mine not being physical abuse or sexual abuse, mine being death and loss, which is different. And so that became a focus of my graduate thesis, and many people were urging me to write a memoir. Someone said, you need to do a one man show. So I entered the Hollywood fringe and did a one man show and got good reviews and had a good time and did another one man show the next year and and so on. So But writing memoir as anybody knows, and they're probably listeners who are either taking memoir courses online or who may be actively writing memoirs or short memoir pieces, as everybody knows it, can put you through moods from absolutely ecstatic, oh my gosh, I got this done. I got this story told, and someone liked it, to oh my gosh, I'm so depressed I don't understand why. Oh, wait a minute, I was writing about such and such today. Yeah. So that's the challenge for the memoir is for the personal storyteller, it's also, you know, and it's more of a challenge than it is for the reader, unless it's bad writing and the reader can't stand that. For me as a reader, I'm fascinated by people's difficult stories, if they're well   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:24 told well, I know that when in 2002 I was advised to write a book about the World Trade Center experiences and all, and it took eight years to kind of pull it all together. And then I met a woman who actually I collaborated with, Susie Florey, and we wrote thunder dog. And her agent became my agent, who loved the proposal that we sent and actually got a contract within a week. So thunder dog came out in 2011 was a New York Times bestseller, and very blessed by that, and we're working toward the day that it will become a movie still, but it'll happen. And then I wrote a children's version of it, well, not a children's version of the book, but a children's book about me growing up in Roselle, growing up the guide dog who was with me in the World Trade Center, and that's been on Amazon. We self published it. Then last year, we published a new book called Live like a guide dog, which is all about controlling fear and teaching people lessons that I learned prior to September 11. That helped me focus and remain calm.   Bill Ratner ** 1:04:23 What happened to you on September 11,   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:27 I was in the World Trade Center. I worked on the 78th floor of Tower One.   Bill Ratner ** 1:04:32 And what happened? I mean, what happened to you?   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:36 Um, nothing that day. I mean, well, I got out. How did you get out? Down the stairs? That was the only way to go. So, so the real story is not doing it, but why it worked. And the real issue is that I spent a lot of time when I first went into the World Trade Center, learning all I could about what to do in an emergency, talking to police, port authorities. Security people, emergency preparedness people, and also just walking around the world trade center and learning the whole place, because I ran an office for a company, and I wasn't going to rely on someone else to, like, lead me around if we're going to go to lunch somewhere and take people out before we negotiated contracts. So I needed to know all of that, and I learned all I could, also realizing that if there ever was an emergency, I might be the only one in the office, or we might be in an area where people couldn't read the signs to know what to do anyway. And so I had to take the responsibility of learning all that, which I did. And then when the planes hit 18 floors above us on the other side of the building, we get we had some guests in the office. Got them out, and then another colleague, who was in from our corporate office, and I and my guide dog, Roselle, went to the stairs, and we started down. And   Bill Ratner ** 1:05:54 so, so what floor did the plane strike?   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:58 It struck and the NOR and the North Tower, between floors 93 and 99 so I just say 96 okay, and you were 20 floors down, 78 floors 78 so we were 18 floors below, and   Bill Ratner ** 1:06:09 at the moment of impact, what did you think?   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:13 Had no idea we heard a muffled kind of explosion, because the plane hit on the other side of the building, 18 floors above us. There was no way to know what was going on. Did you feel? Did you feel? Oh, the building literally tipped, probably about 20 feet. It kept tipping. And then we actually said goodbye to each other, and then the building came back upright. And then we went,   Bill Ratner ** 1:06:34 really you so you thought you were going to die?   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:38 David, my colleague who was with me, as I said, he was from our California office, and he was there to help with some seminars we were going to be doing. We actually were saying goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78 floor plunge to the street, when the building stopped tipping and it came back. Designed to do that by the architect. It was designed to do that, which is the point, the point.   Bill Ratner ** 1:07:02 Goodness, gracious. And then did you know how to get to the stairway?   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:04 Oh, absolutely. And did you do it with your friend? Yeah, the first thing we did, the first thing we did is I got him to get we had some guests, and I said, get him to the stairs. Don't let him take the elevators, because I knew he had seen fire above us, but that's all we knew. And but I said, don't take the elevators. Don't let them take elevators. Get them to the stairs and then come back and we'll leave. So he did all that, and then he came back, and we went to the stairs and started down.   Bill Ratner ** 1:07:33 Wow. Could you smell anything?   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:36 We smelled burning jet fuel fumes on the way down. And that's how we figured out an airplane must have hit the building, but we had no idea what happened. We didn't know what happened until the until both towers had collapsed, and I actually talked to my wife, and she's the one who told us how to aircraft have been crashed into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth, at that time, was still missing over Pennsylvania. Wow. So you'll have to go pick up a copy of thunder dog. Goodness. Good. Thunder dog. The name of the book is Thunder dog, and the book I wrote last year is called Live like a guide dog. It's le

En 1925, l'explorateur britannique Percy Fawcett s'enfonce dans la jungle amazonienne à la recherche d'une cité perdue qu'il appelle Z. On ne le reverra jamais. Un siècle plus tard, le mystère demeure : mythe romantique d'un aventurier disparu, ou intuition visionnaire d'un monde oublié sous la forêt ? Mention légales : Vos données de connexion, dont votre adresse IP, sont traités par Radio Classique, responsable de traitement, sur la base de son intérêt légitime, par l'intermédiaire de son sous-traitant Ausha, à des fins de réalisation de statistiques agréées et de lutte contre la fraude. Ces données sont supprimées en temps réel pour la finalité statistique et sous cinq mois à compter de la collecte à des fins de lutte contre la fraude. Pour plus d'informations sur les traitements réalisés par Radio Classique et exercer vos droits, consultez notre Politique de confidentialité.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

En 1925, l'explorateur britannique Percy Fawcett s'enfonce dans la jungle amazonienne à la recherche d'une cité perdue qu'il appelle Z. On ne le reverra jamais. Un siècle plus tard, le mystère demeure : mythe romantique d'un aventurier disparu, ou intuition visionnaire d'un monde oublié sous la forêt ?Mention légales : Vos données de connexion, dont votre adresse IP, sont traités par Radio Classique, responsable de traitement, sur la base de son intérêt légitime, par l'intermédiaire de son sous-traitant Ausha, à des fins de réalisation de statistiques agréées et de lutte contre la fraude. Ces données sont supprimées en temps réel pour la finalité statistique et sous cinq mois à compter de la collecte à des fins de lutte contre la fraude. Pour plus d'informations sur les traitements réalisés par Radio Classique et exercer vos droits, consultez notre Politique de confidentialité.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Bishop Tony Percy says this week's Gospel begs two questions: am I humble and what is humility? The pharisee deceives himself, being self-enclosed, living in his own echo chamber. While the tax-collector knows his limits: God, be merciful to me, a sinner

Nick and Percy sit down with ensemble member Christopher Diercksen to talk about different methods of creating characters in TTRPGs and how those methods affect the kinds of storytelling each game affords.  Dungeons and Drama Nerds is produced by Percival Hornak and Nicholas Orvis, and this episode was mixed and edited by Percival Hornak. Our core ensemble are Todd Brian Backus, Jovane Caamano, Anthony Sertel Dean, Christopher Diercksen, Ben Ferber, Kory Flores, Mieko Gavia, Tess Huth, Romana Isabella, Jon Jon Johnson, CJ Linton, C. “Meaks” Meaker, Leo Mock, Dex Phan, and Tristan B. Willis.  Our game of Wythe Marschall's Stillfleet features Christopher Diercksen as Geshra Veedle, Kory Flores as Peanut, Mieko Gavia as Kyrannis, Jon Jon Johnson as Private Taps, special guest Wythe Marschall as Cherric Shaddams, and Ben Ferber as the GM. If you'd like to help us continue exploring the intersections of theatre and tabletop roleplaying games, consider leaving us a review on your podcast app of choice or supporting us - and getting access to our patron-only bonus content - at patreon.com/dungeonsanddramanerds. You can find our social media and website links, including our cast bios, at the linktree in our show notes. And be sure to tune in soon for another episode of Dungeons and Drama Nerds!

O Lala! (In RVA) gets spooky with a special Halloween edition featuring author and journalist Catherine Baab — whose book Poe for Your Problems turned Edgar Allan Poe into an unlikely self-help icon. Now she's back at it with her upcoming project, Gothic Glow-Up: Mary Shelley's Guide to Stitching Yourself Back Together.We talk Frankenstein, free love, grief, genius, and the surprisingly messy (and sexy?) lives of 19th-century writers. It's brains, bangers, and a whole lot of gothic gossip — perfect for a cozy October listen.Then, Big Voodoo Daddy drops his “Big Daddy Topic” — the eerie origins of trick-or-treating and the world's weirdest Halloween traditions (yes, some countries hide their knives

Jeffrey Eisenberg and I were looking though a pair of antique doors at Austin Auction Gallery when I saw a remarkable oil painting on the wall behind them and whispered in wonder, “Ozymandias.”The auction catalog described the painting as, “Arabian horse and handler with Egyptian sphinx, signed lower right Maksymilian Novak-Zemplinski (Polish, b.1974), dated 2000.”But I knew that painting for what it was. I've loved “Ozymandias” since the 9th grade.You remember it, don't you? Bryan Cranston read that famous poem in the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” The title of the episode was “Ozymandias,” and TV Guide picked it as “the best television episode of the 21st century.” It was also the only episode of a TV show ever to achieve a perfect 10-out-of-10 rating on IMDb with over 200,000 votes, putting it at the number one spot for the most highly rated television episode ever:I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal, these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.When I returned home from the auction, I spent a delightful 90 minutes tracking down all the bits and pieces of how that poem came to exist.It was in 1817 that Percy Bysshe Shelley and his poet friend, Horace Smith read the news that the carved head of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II had been removed from its tomb at Thebes by an Italian adventurer and that it would soon be traveling to Britain.Shelly suggested to Smith that each of them should write a poem about it and title each of their poems “Ozymandias,” the Greek name for Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.Look at the poem as it appeared in newspaper on that day in 1818, and you will see that Percy Bysshe Shelley signed it, “Glirastes.” He did it as an inside joke intended only for his wife, Mary Shelley, who, incidentally, published her famous novel “Frankenstein” that same year.Mary often signed her letters to Percy as “your affectionate dormouse.” So Percy combined “Gliridae” (Latin for dormouse) with “Erastes” (Greek for lover) to create “Glirastes,” (meaning “lover of dormice.”)So now you know how Google's second-most-often-searched poem came to be published without anyone in London suspecting that it had been written on a bet with a friend by one of the most famous poets on earth who chose to sign it with a pseudonym as an inside joke to his wife.Did you know that I became an ad writer only because it was impossible to support myself as a poet?Now that you know that, you will not be surprised that Indy Beagle has collected Google's Top 20 Poems for you to read in the rabbit hole. Indy also found the Horace Smith version of Ozymandias, and added it at the end of the Google's Top 20 list.To enter the rabbit hole, all you have to do is click the image that appears at the top of today's Monday Morning Memo. You'll find this memo archived as “Looking Though Antique Doors,” the Monday Morning Memo for October 20th, 2025.This is the Google Top 20 List:“The Road Not...

Not even Halloween can stop us from talking about Thomas the Tank Engine.Halloween stream: https://www.twitch.tv/bleepinplayEmail questions and comments to: Bleepyouplaying@gmail.comSupport us: Patreon.com/whatthebleepWatch us play games https://www.youtube.com/@Bleepyouplaying

PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS is a live action fantasy series on Disney Plus, based on a book series for teenagers. In Episodes Three to Eight, Percy and his two friends embark on a dangerous quest from New York to California. A thief has stolen Zeus' Master Bolt and framed the crime on the god Poseidon, Percy's father. Percy must retrieve the stolen magical weapon and clear his father's name. Eventually, Percy and his heroic demigod friends discover that an ancient menace is plotting his revenge against the Olympian gods. Can the heroes prevent a war between Zeus and Poseidon?

Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy by Poets & Writers

The party return with their nets of loot as well as some golden bones in desperate need of some "Percy-ing" Can't wait for Part 2 of each episode? Join our Patreon to get early access EVERY week (+ a few other bonuses)! www.patreon.com/HighRollers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ _______________ Boost your Charisma with some HR merch! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://highrollersdnd.teemill.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Add official High Rollers Minis to your TTRPG collection here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://only-games.co/collections/high-rollers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bless your table with the Clever Toad Dice Set: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dispeldice.com/collections/high-rollers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enhance your bath time experience with the official Altheya themed DiceBombs at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://geekyclean.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.highrollersdnd.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for all the latest HR News! Love the podcast? Give us a glittering 5 star review! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-rollers-dnd/id1401508198?see-all=reviews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound, TCT Adventures (Solasta: Crown of the Magisters), Monument Studios and Jolene Khor! Check out Jolene Khor and all her wonderful work on High Rollers on Spotify: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/1WX3ICiTmf4GpHwImnQMs6⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For centuries, tales have been told about a mysterious creature, hiding beneath the dark water of Loch Ness. The question is: are the stories true? Is the giant creature real? Join Anna, Leo, and Percy the mouse as they travel to Scotland to explore one of history's most popular legends. From ancient sightings to famous hoaxes, we'll uncover the true story of the Loch Ness Monster, also known as “Nessie.”  About Honest History Honest History creates award-winning books, magazines, and this show for young historians across the world. Our mission is to inspire kids to create a positive impact on history themselves. Learn more at honesthistory.co and @honesthistory. Credits This episode was narrated by Nikki Bon and JoAnn Schinderle, written by Heidi Coburn, and produced by Robot Pirate Media. Original theme music was written and recorded by Michael Dayvid. More Enjoy this episode? Share with your friends and don't forget to rate and review. See you next time!

Mary's husband died tragically. She kept a literal piece of him for the rest of her life.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-stories-with-seth-andrews--5621867/support.

Today we're doing something a little different, we sit down with long-time forum member Toploader! He's been part of Percy's Grow Room for nearly five years, and recently told us that he never used cannabis at all until he was 60 years old! Now, not only does he use cannabis, but he also grows plenty of his own. Join us to hear more about Toploader's story. Why he decided to grow his own cannabis, and what it was like trying cannabis for the very first time. Spoiler alert: it was a very heavy edibles dose, so it wasn't quite what he expected! It's a great interview, and we'd love to do more like it. If you've got a good story to tell, feel free to get in touch and we might be able to get you on the show too! Contact me through any of the links below:

Percy and Nick sit down to chat with Wythe Marschall, designer of Stillfleet and founder of Stillfleet Studio, about politics, science fiction, and, of course, games. Dungeons and Drama Nerds is produced by Percival Hornak and Nicholas Orvis, and this episode was mixed and edited by Percival Hornak. Our core ensemble are Todd Brian Backus, Jovane Caamano, Anthony Sertel Dean, Christopher Diercksen, Ben Ferber, Kory Flores, Mieko Gavia, Tess Huth, Romana Isabella, Jon Jon Johnson, CJ Linton, C. “Meaks” Meaker, Leo Mock, Dex Phan, and Tristan B. Willis.  Our game of Wythe Marschall's Stillfleet features Christopher Diercksen as Geshra Veedle, Kory Flores as Peanut, Mieko Gavia as Kyrannis, Jon Jon Johnson as Private Taps, special guest Wythe Marschall as Cherric Shaddams, and Ben Ferber as the GM. If you'd like to help us continue exploring the intersections of theatre and tabletop roleplaying games, consider leaving us a review on your podcast app of choice or supporting us - and getting access to our patron-only bonus content - at patreon.com/dungeonsanddramanerds. You can find our social media and website links, including our cast bios, at the linktree in our show notes. And be sure to tune in soon for another episode of Dungeons and Drama Nerds!

Percy faces off with his old man, Valerie takes to the streets, and Riot interrupts a meal. The theme of tonight's episode is Vassals.(To avoid spoilers, content warnings are listed at the end of this episode description).The bonus story that goes with this episode is ‘Local Guide', and is available for Hallowoods patrons on the show's Patreon, along with behind-the-scenes, exclusive merchandise, and more! Because the show runs without ads or sponsors, we rely on support from fans to guarantee the survival of this LGBTQ+ horror podcast.Hello From The Hallowoods is written and produced by William A. Wellman, a queer horror author. You can visit their website for more information! The transcript for this episode is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Website. Click here to read!You can also find Hello From The Hallowoods on social media! The show is on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @thehallowoods. If you'd like to connect with other fans of the show, there's even a fan-run Discord Server!Music for this episode was used under license from Artlist.com. The soundtracks featured were: ‘Rhea', by Yehezkel Raz,‘Morning Sunbeams', by Yehezkel Raz,‘The Last Road Trip', by Tommy H. Brandon,‘Lost', by Lars Bork Anderson,‘Quantum', by ANBR, ‘From the Depths', by Jeremy Chontow,‘Cello Concerto No. 1', by Nick Keller,‘Five Sense Prison', by Roie Shpigler, ‘Candle in the Dark', by Tommy H. Brandon,‘A Touch of Dream', by Max H, ‘Waiting', by Laurel Violet,‘A Moon Walk', by Yehezkel Raz,‘The Sacred Union', by Shahead Mostafafar, ‘Infernos Laissez Vibrer', by Yehezkel Raz,‘Dawn', by Eva Tiedemann, ‘Hrim Hjarta', by Blackbard,‘Prophecy,' by Matthias Forster,‘The Creation of All Things', by Doug Kaufman,‘For the Broken Hearted', by Yehezkel Raz,‘Don't Look Back', by Dani Dahani,‘Uncharted Lands', by Romeo,‘Titan', by Yehezkel Raz,‘Space Sauce', by Buynker Buster,‘Effoliation', by SEA,‘Shimmering Light', by Sparrow Tree,‘Peace', by Roie Shpigler,‘Rhea', by Yehezkel Raz,And ‘Farewell', by Maya Belsitzman and Matan EphratContent warnings for this episode include: Abuse (Percy's childhood), Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Transphobia, Homophobia, Gun Mention, Strangulation/suffocation, Misgendering, Static (including sfx), Emotional Manipulation, Stabbing, Drowning, Body horror, Bugs, Consumption of Inedible Materials (Oswald Biggs Botulus), Religious Violence, Child Sacrifice, Sounds of Chewing, Character Death Walter Pensive Groundskeeping shirts and hoodies are available now at DFTBA:https://www.hellofromthehallowoods.com/shop

In this episode, we hear a call from Newbridge Ratmen Centerfielder, Percy Hobart! (Originally Aired June 24th, 2015)New to the Best Show? Check out Best Show Bests, the greatest hits of The Best Show, every Friday in your podcast app!The Best Show is celebrating 25 years with a live show extravaganza for the ages. Coming to NYC, Philly, LA, and Chicago this Fall!Tickets go on General Sale Friday July 18th at 10am local timeSat 10/11 - Brooklyn - Bell House ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/300062ED179148EC⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mon 10/13 - Philly - Union Transfer⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.axs.com/events/1052919/the-best-show-tickets?skin=uniontransfer⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Wed 10/15 - LA - Lodge Room⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.lodgeroomhlp.com/shows/best-show-25th-anniversary-at-lodge-room⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tues 10/21 - Chicago - Thalia Hall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.ticketweb.com/event/best-show-25th-anniversary-at-thalia-hall-tickets/13876034?pl=thalia3⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SUPPORT THE BEST SHOW ON PATREON! WEEKLY BONUS EPISODES & VIDEO EPISODES!https://www.patreon.com/TheBestShowWATCH THE BEST SHOW LIVE EVERY TUESDAY NIGHT 6PM PT ON TWITCHhttps://www.twitch.tv/bestshow4lifeFOLLOW THE BEST SHOW:https://twitter.com/bestshow4lifehttps://instagram.com/bestshow4lifehttps://tiktok.com/@bestshow4lifehttps://www.youtube.com/bestshow4lifeTHE BEST SHOW IS A FOREVER DOG PODCASThttps://thebestshow.nethttps://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/the-best-showSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

To the surprise of most, Percy Jackson 2010 actually got a sequel in 2013's in Sea of Monsters. Sure the originally director didn't come back or a bunch of the original actors including horse Pierce Brosnan but the core trio of Percy, Percy's friend and Percy's another friend. This time they're on a quest for the Golden Fleece which they're going to use to heal a tree that makes a forcefield that used to be a girl. And Luke's back if you remember him! Thanks for watching our Caravan Of Garbage reviewSUBSCRIBE HERE ►► http://goo.gl/pQ39jNHelp support the show and get early episodes ► https://bigsandwich.co/Patreon ► https://patreon.com/mrsundaymoviesJames' Twitter ► http://twitter.com/mrsundaymoviesMaso's Twitter ► http://twitter.com/wikipediabrownPatreon ► https://patreon.com/mrsundaymoviesT-Shirts/Merch ► https://www.teepublic.com/stores/mr-sunday-movies The Weekly Planet iTunes ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-weekly-planet/id718158767?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 The Weekly Planet Direct Download ► https://play.acast.com/s/theweeklyplanetAmazon Affiliate Link ► https://amzn.to/2nc12P4 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.