Silencing Scoville: How I beat a corporate-sponsored cyberbully (and what I learned)

This story starts about 16 years ago, when an individual named Richard Morton Scoville came up with an idea. As a man in his fifth decade of life with no stable address, he depended on overlapping businesses of extorting money through libel and distributing spam on the archaic system known as usenet, and that led to many usenet users criticizing him as a spammer, a libeler and extortionist. He figured out (most likely with the help of one or more far more skilled spammers) that he could manipulate search results for anyone’s name by mentioning them in an excessive number of posts on a network of interconnected usenet archives dominated be Google Groups, directly owned by the search engine giant. He further chose to make sexually explicit and abusive comments about his critics (invariably other men) while pretending to accuse them of committing and being convicted of sex crimes against children. These claims promptly dominated search results for their names, with the clear further threat of being seen by prospective employers. Google magnified the abuse by arbitrarily demanding court orders at his victims’ expense and then ignoring them, allowing Scoville to post much of his content with Google/ Gmail accounts set up in his victims’ own names, and increasingly ignoring Google Groups itself as obsolete and unprofitable.

From all evidence at hand, he did this not in the expectation that police would act on his claims, but only to deprive his victims of employment and income, which even actual sex offenders would have a legal right to. In this regard, he had only one actual success. In 2011, he was actually driven out of one of the forums on Google Groups after a user who had previously posted about disability issues made so many posts exposing him as a fraud and a criminal that the “group” was shut down. He promptly singled out the same individual for abuse over a self-disclosed diagnosis of Asperger’s/ Autism Spectrum Disorder, and By the middle of the year, he escalated to harassing a nationally known organization for the disabled that had given services to the victim, solely over a single comment made using their equipment.  The result was that the victim was released from a nominally paid position that had never come close to providing sustainable income, without being given the opportunity to consult with a lawyer or those who had set up the job. This did not stop Scoville from continuing to make abusive posts against the organization along with the original victim, until Google reversed its policies and began removing his content from Google Groups on demand in 2018.

That victim was me, and as of the time of this writing, I have spent five years working for three employers in an industry once considered unsuitable due to my disability. During that time, I have also removed the vast majority of Scoville’s attacks against me, after personally reporting Scoville and his enablers at Google and other companies to multiple law enforcement agencies but without spending anything on legal action. Many people have encouraged me to tell my story, so I have now assembled my “lessons” from beating a cyberstalker.

1          Nobody will EVER ask (unless you mention it).

The most central reality of cyberstalking is that stalkers depend on stigma and prejudice to do the real harm for them, especially in the work force, and Scoville may well be the most egregious case. But judging from my own experience and the accounts of other victims, this was always a largely empty threat. In particular, there has been literally no instance when I or anyone else who has given an account was questioned about Scoville’s claims in the course of an actual job application. I am inclined to attribute this to two things. First, there is already enough robust anti-discrimination legislation in place, including provisions in sex offender registration laws, that it will almost always be a greater risk for an employer to act on an anonymous accusation than to hire the accused party anyway. Second, those using the internet to make accusations without substance have always been in the role of the boy who cried wolf; the louder and more often they make their claims, the more they will be ignored. If anything, returning to the first point, they have made it harder for an employer to identify and act on a substantiated allegation, a fact that should be prominently raised to anyone who might still defend their actions as “free speech”.

The one advantage stalkers do have is that they can stir up paranoia, especially when they are able to identify a current employer- exactly the circumstance reported by every one of Scoville’s victims who faced questions from an employer. The core reality here, particularly for men, is that even “proactive” measures like a prepared debunking are defensive at best, and the accused will always be at a psychological disadvantage. I may never have been asked about Scoville or even being let go from my old job in an interview, but there were plenty of times I went into one more prepared to disprove his claims than to justify myself as a good fit for that job. With this mentality in place, anyone chosen and trained to pick up subtleties of personality and behavior is very likely to pick up “something” off, and the foreseeable outcomes are worse for a victim than if a stalker’s defamatory claims are openly acknowledged.

I will mention here one more thing I have noticed. Cyberstalkers of all types have a history of singling out people in the broadly “non-profit” sphere, such as schools, government agencies, charities and the performing arts. Based on my own experiences, I have no doubt this is a matter of tactical reasoning. To begin with, organizations outside the “private” sphere are more likely to continue practices that are outmoded or flatly illegal in current conditions. Since they are directly dependent on public money, they are also genuinely vulnerable to public outcry and scandal. Finally, even groups that are “liberal” in aims and ideology tend to have a conservative internal culture, especially when it comes to sexuality. The implication is that stalkers are already focusing on the most vulnerable elements of the workforce, and even then, they are “winning” barely if at all.

2           All bullying is sexual.

This is as good a point as any to make the usual disclaimer: Women are much more vulnerable to all forms of sexual abuse and harassment. However, many of the same patterns and attitudes can readily be documented between preteen and adolescent boys. Long before encountering Scoville, I saw schoolboys of the 1980s seemingly become obsessed with who was “gay” while it was still a matter of teasing to “like” a girl. While Scoville was by then well into his 40s, what can be known of his thoughts and attitudes are indistinguishable from a ten-year-old of ca 1990. In his puerile repertoire, all women (invariably family of male victims) are diseased “sluts” and “whores” while all men other than himself are ineffectual “fags” first and supposedly threatening “pedophiles” second, because in the pre-adolescent variety of homophobia even orthodox heterosexuality is degraded and dangerous. The only times Scoville rose above preoccupation with other men’s sexuality was singling me out over my disability. However, he did not in any way diminish his de-masculinizing language, always insinuating that my disability proves I am weak and he is strong, because homophobic bullying has never been about sexual orientation but sexualized dominance.

What remains unsaid is that men are vulnerable in ways that women are not, especially in the often male-dominated online world. The bizarre “Pizzagate” rumor cycle (about which I have a vast body of unpublished research) has been a quintessential illustration of this, literally set off by a strangely enthusiastic reference to cheese. The most unfortunate part is that the outwardly liberal will say that being called “gay” does no harm because people like themselves do not see it as an insult, all while ignoring countless strata of stereotypes that outwardly liberal media have canonized. The trap is that victims are made to feel accountable not just for trying to defend themselves but for feeling threatened.  I heard any number of variations of the warning not to respond to Scoville’s abuse because nobody would really ask about his lies, including by representatives of my original employer after they had done just that. There may not be easy answers to how to change perceptions of masculinity and sexual orientation, but acknowledging that a man is not obliged to answer another man’s anonymous and openly biased speculations about his sexual behavior would still be making progress.

3         There is no way to be a “good” victim.

Another issue where men can be at a greater disadvantage than women is the expected response of victim. For all the conflicted and contradictory ideals around female “victimhood”, girls and women are at least taught and expected to follow the minimal guidelines of self-preservation: Avoid a threatening individual, get to a place of safety, and call for help. For men, on the other hand, the expectation remains either to “ignore it” or “fight back”. For Scoville’s victims, this was nothing less than a vicious Catch 22. Scoville never hesitated to continue attacking someone who did nothing to respond, with his most sustained and grotesque campaign being against the family of a man who rarely if ever posted in usenet. At the same time, victims who posted proofs of their innocence and complained about Google’s refusal to act against him were regularly criticized by regular usenet users. And when I actually posted enough content linking to my legitimate material appear ahead of Scoville’s lies, I ended up facing worse repercussions than anyone else.

This is a major reason I have not shared my story much earlier, and I still find it difficult to answer why I took the actions I did. The commonsense answer was always to leave the sites that tolerated Scoville to be discredited and destroyed by his behavior, and come back when I had a job that provided enough money for legal action or at least financial security against his retaliation. What everyone giving this advice ignored was that Scoville had already committed himself to keeping me from that goal with unlimited support from a company with more billions than I had hundreds. Even other victims would not acknowledge the full magnitude of malice in his actions and intent, literally repeating the same lies thousands of times for just a chance to deprive innocent people of the employment, income and physical safety that actual criminals have a legal right to. To me, he was and is like a man who points a gun and pulls the trigger without knowing it is empty. Saying he can be “ignored” because he is supposedly unable to do harm would under any other circumstance be dismissed as wildly irresponsible.

4         Stalkers are lazy.

This is something where a generalization must start with a qualifier: Obviously, stalkers can be terrifyingly persistent and determined, as seen with Scoville. But their behavior is always a matter of “harder, not smarter”, usually exacerbated by a counterintuitive lack of creativity. The conventional stalker is aggressive in outward behavior, but inwardly unwilling or unable to make the step to genuine adaptation. Cyberstalkers take this paradox toward total passivity, posting insults and lies in hopes of tricking or frightening others into penalizing the victim. Search-engine spammers like Scoville are the laziest of all. Rather than try to present his libels directly to an audience, he floods minor forums (where legitimate users are invariably well aware of his identity and intent) just so someone else might happen on them in search results, perhaps years later. In fact, he does the last part so well that I observed posts 7, 8 or even 10 years old on the first page of search results. At that point, anyone who saw them as intended might just as soon wonder if the original target was even still alive, on the whole a backfire rather than a success.

The deeper reality is that it takes a stalker very little effort to do great harm. In Scoville’s case, he has long since descended into a kind of terroristic incompetence, freely mixing the information of victims, their families and unrelated third parties so that the threat of harm extends far beyond the primary “target”. Yet, I have personally seen nearly inexplicable oversights far beyond his usual tactics. Just for example, his most persistent and pointless act of harassment against me has been linking to and reposting a photo of myself placed under copyright by my former publisher that he put on the openly criminal Pirate Bay site with an added abusive and sexual caption. (Of course, he has done the same thing on the same site with images of other victims’ children.) Because of this abuse, I long refused to circulate this or any other image of myself, and I was especially concerned when I was “tagged” in photos on the social media profile of another non-profit group I am involved with. However, years have gone by without the slightest hint that Scoville is aware of any image except the one he had already posted. At this point, of course, his principle motive in using the image he has chosen is undoubtedly that I have long since rightfully and legally prohibited him and Pirate Bay from displaying it in the manner he chose, and he still wants to insinuate that my rights (including the copyright for two books handled by my old publisher) are somehow made invalid by my disability. Even so, his failure to use the opportunity to attack another organization as he did my former employer can only mean that he never cared enough to learn anything  about me.

5           It will always be about money.

For me, being stalked was simply one part of being disabled and chronically unemployed, but in my experience, the two remain inseparable. After being run out of my first job, I spent just short of three and a half years trying to find other work, with so little success I might have made more money staying at home. Weeks, months and years went by with increasingly perfunctory applications and a bare handful of interviews, while the social services bureaucracy shuffled me between coaches and contractors until rumblings began that I might be cut off entirely.  Meanwhile, anytime it crossed my mind to check, Google search results for my name that anyone looking at my resume could easily find shoved Scoville’s lies right in my face. And if I reached out to Google, or other websites hosting Scoville’s content, or even police, I was always met with the same demeaningly impossible demand that I go to court to make them stop Scoville from breaking the law.

The flip side to this is that getting steady work has vastly improved my ability to counter Scoville’s abuse. To begin with, during my nominal first job, my income after expenses was so upside down that I still had more “net” money from book sales than my paychecks, which made the petty infringement of my photo and some other inconsequential material a more “real” threat than anything Scoville said about me. Once I had a job with substantial income, I paid off literally all of my debts in a ludicrously short time, and soon began saving far more money than I had any idea how to spend. At that point, I finally began reaching out to lawyers, except I quickly found that people were no longer hassling me for “court orders” just to obey the law. Even when I have been on the brink of either hiring a lawyer or demanding the police arrest somebody, someone has backed down. Just in the developments leading up to this essay, I told my story to a lawyer while considering legal action over the inclusion of Scoville’s posts in a supposed “sex offender archive” on a site called The Dirty Phonebook, possibly the most flatly immoral of any I have dealt with including Pirate Bay. The lawyer didn’t take my case, but as of the writing of this essay, the only posted attack not taken down was one which jumbled my name and another person’s information so incompetently that the administrators instead publicly denied that it refers to me at all. A week after posting, I am revising this essay because even that is now gone, leaving nothing left by Scoville but an attack on another victim, and after another week, that too has disappeared. Apparently, even scum of this order have no desire to side with Scoville.

6     Things will never be the same.

All of this brings things back to where I am now, and I still have trouble really answering how I got here and what I have learned. Most of what I could say are anecdotes. I finished a master’s degree a year and a half before I got a job. I and my counselors spent years trying to find a job that wouldn’t require a lot of social interaction because of my autism diagnosis, and now I have spent five years in jobs where I literally talk to people full time. I spent almost two years in my first real job traveling hours each way without trying to apply elsewhere, then left my second job after I was offered another. But if there is a “turning point”’ I could point out then or now, it’s this: In my third year out of work when I finally took full control of writing my own (still pitiful) resume, and as a minor part of that process, I cut out the one and only thing that could lead someone to Scoville’s garbage. The easy moral is that it was all like Dumbo’s feather. Scoville’s attacks were never a threat, but only a worthless trick nobody else would have noticed on their own; taking charge of my own life was all that ever really mattered; and the completely stupid part is, I really did get the job. 

What I still can’t convey is just how terrible it was to go through this. My most coherent memories of the time between when I rewrote my resume and when I got my real first job are watching Pacific Rim, listening to “2 AM”, and knowing that I would very shortly be kicked off social services and out of any running for the workforce. It was also about that time that I stopped writing, not because I didn’t want to but because everything I tried writing ended at a few endlessly revised pages. One of the last things I finished before this personal dark age was a Hunger Games “fan fiction” about one Schuyler Grey that I conceived simply to portray disorganized psychosis. I thought about it often enough in the time that followed to recognize that I have a lot more issues on that vein than I or anyone else had admitted, and there were plenty of times when I expected Schuyler’s parting words to be my tombstone. One other thing that stays in my mind thinking of that time is Reese’s story/ monologue from The Terminator: “We were that close to going out forever…”

I am sure plenty of people reading this will be questioning why I have gone to the trouble of dealing with Scoville at all. The fact is, I have never had any desire to take action against him, in no small part because the only ones who ever said I should were representatives of Google and other entities that hosted and promoted in first place.  It would be easy to say I have continued the fight to change the culture that would let him even pretend to have power over others. I could give all the rational and inspiring high notes about never being threatened by Scoville's lies, which are for the most part verbatim what I heard from the beginning from people who mostly told me not to respond to him at all. The reality is that even with a stable career, I still find Scoville a threat and a source of stress simply because at least one site opposed to silencing him still exists, and he is still trying to make his lies appear under my name. Just in the time I have spent writing this essay and now revising it, a series of attacks (complete with the photo) made over a period of a month have been removed, from a Google-hosted blog that still has not been taken from him, and Google is refusing to remove several. At this point, my strongest reaction is anger that I ever felt a need to do anything about Scoville, while the line I think of is from the (terrible) movie From Dusk Til Dawn: “Are you such a loser you don’t know when you’ve won?” Maybe this will pay for all, maybe someone else will finally back down, maybe Scoville himself will finally realize, at a minimum, just how little of his life he has left to waste.

If anything good comes out of writing this, it will be taking one more area of my life back. I have been trying to write again, more often, and not too long ago finished the first entirely complete adventure of a character I created twenty years ago. As for the present work, I hope to get it where it will be seen by those who need it, and anyone who intends to use it for good purpose is welcome to pass it on. As for those who still are where I started, maybe my story won’t help you get where you want to be, but you can at least take heart in this: If you can make it, things will get easier, and nobody else can stop you.

Fiction: Xmas With Exotroopers Demo!

Back for Christmas with a fiction post from way back. Here's the opening/ demo for Christmas With Exotroopers, part of my longest running and least read series. It featured an evil Slavic wind god, genocidal nutcrackers, an angel based on a snail, and this, fair warning, possibly the most gorey scene I've written.

Though the principles of the combat exoskeleton were well-known, there was a persistent belief that the angled-slab armor of the exotrooper corps of Serbia, known to the Serbs as hercegs. “lords of blood” to their enemies, and to the wider world as “finbacks”, did not cover human beings but robots, or at least some unwholesome combination of the two. And the most feared of the exotroopers, a neo-Nazi ex-convict known as Zaratustra or Zed, had discoursed that there might be some truth to it.  Yes, the exotroopers were men, wholly separate from their mechanized armor.  But on another level, the human and the armor were in symbiosis.  Each of them customized the armor to his personality and preferred tactics, in Zed's own case welding a crown of rebar rods to his helmet to mark his status as commander.  Over time, the exotroopers had spent more and more time in their armor.  And for Zed in particular, the armor was a part of him even in his dreams. 

Zed found himself standing in the frame of a door knocked halfway off its hinges, with a festive Christmas wreath still hanging askew upon it.  At his feet is a fat man with a long, white beard in an unmistakeable red suit, still feebly clutching at his spilled intestines.  Beyond a short hallway, he could see a living room, decorated for Christmas and now smeared with blood and semi-solid fecal matter.  A man's decapitated corpse slumped on the hearth, and what remained of a woman was mixed with crushed gifts and the splintered ruin of a Christmas tree.  From behind the counter of an adjoining kitchen came the steady crunching of bone.

Zaratustra crouched to look Santa Claus in the eye.  “Let me guess,” he said.  “A little girl wanted a hippopotamus for Christmas...”

He snapped the dying man's neck, and drew a 12-gauge sidearm as he stood up.  In the kitchen, a huge, half-seen shape splintered cabinets as it wheeled about.  An enormous head reared momentarily into view, tossing blood-stained shreds of a frilly pink dress into a bowl of egg nog. As Zed took aim, hindquarters the size of whole turkeys pushed into view, and then ejected a literally staggering spray of excrement straight at his helmet.  He fired twice, virtually blind, at the hulking yet low-slung shape that smashed through one corner of the counter as it burst out of the kitchen.  Then he kicked, and his lashing foot met the ivory and bone of the bull hippo's swinging jaw...

“Zed! Lieutenant Zed!” The voice that drew Zed out of sleep was Zotgjakt, aka the Albanak, the only Albanian in Serbia's exotrooper corps and the only finback whom Zed might consider a close friend. “The Lieutenant is here for a briefing!”  And Zed lowered his foot, which he used to prop himself up in the closet while he slept, and replaced his outer helmet, which was crowned with pieces of rebar.  Within seconds, he was battle-ready.

Retrobots Revisited: Tomy Rascal Robot and others

Because this is going to be a toy blog if it goes anywhere at all, here’s another toy related post. This one got started at the Y*utube channel That Junkman. In the course of unboxing a delivery from a fan, the eponymous Junkman showed a small windup robot included with several vintage Star Wars figures. I and several other commenters immediately recognized it as a moderately famous Tomy windup toy, sold as the Rascal Robot. It just happened I already have several specimens, including one I had played with as a kid at my grandparents’ house. Here are a few more photos of my mini collection:

In my prior research, the featured bot was made and sold in the late 70s and most likely into the early 80s by Tomy, a prolific manufacturer of windup toys and electronics. At least some were sold on action figure-style cards, which bear the name Rascal Robot. The design was clearly modelled on Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, and closely resembled Tomy’s remote control Omnibot. The toy came in a range of colors, mainly in solid silver or gold bodies seen here. Somewhat rarer variants feature decals on the chest and in some cases painted eyes. In more recent years, the design was included in a line of Tomy toys re issued by Z Windups, resulting in the middle specimen featured here. As can be seen, the reissue is substantially larger than the original. The manufacturer also made the extra effort to make the arms spin.


Of course, this was all part of a longer journey for me. I have many memories of seeing or playing with Tomy windups in my childhood, including an unsettling sighting of what I eventually identified as their “Strolling Bowling” game. However, I never seemed to get any of them for myself, and all the windup toys I have that I know I didn’t acquire as a teen or adult are happy meal toys or more obscure brands. As for the “Rascal” bot I played with, it’s the silver one featured here, finally given to me by my grandmother around the time I started college. I loved the little thing, though I found the arms wouldn’t twist more than a few degrees (those of the gold bot a acquired much later twist 360 without difficulty) and I long believed it was entirely broken. In a possible minor “Mandela effect”, I tried winding it up while taking photos for this essay,  and was completely surprised to find it worked.

Along the way, I caught wind of a few more Tomy bots. I purchased one, pictured above with a couple more windups, that I knew had to be a Tomy creation at the long-vanished local comic book store. This one turned out to be known as the Acrobot, and I figured out that the arms were part of an action gimmick: If it is fallen or knocked down, the long arms will push it upright, as long as they are lined up with each other. Later still, I found online photos of a third bot, with an overall shape that suggests a cross between Robbie and the “Lost in Space” robot. Unfortunately, while there are enough recent pictures from collectors to indicate that it was sold in the US, my own intermittent research has failed to locate a specimen for sale, or even a report of one being purchased in ebay or other competitive markets. The only collector to give an account of acquiring one simply states that it was purchased for a few dollars at a local shop.


All in all, I don’t have much to add about these bots. Tomy windups may never have had the prominence of brand name action figures like Star Wars and Transformers, but they were a major part of the toy market for many years. The fact that many people still remember them is all the more impressive given that they were marketed for and to younger kids who had little or no idea who was making them. If you have any around, it will definitely be worth your while to hold onto them. And double check if you have a tall robot with long arms and a bubble on top, because it just might be a collector’s Holy Grail.


Links

That Junkman video featuring Rascal robot (ca 3:30)

Collectors’ Weekly review with pics of the 3rd bot

The Old Robots website, dedicated to 1980s robot toys by Tomy and others

Giant Robot Review: Anime-style robot/ space-jet???

One of the reasons I decided to try blogging again is that I have been taking and posting pictures of new and vintage toys I have collected, and gotten enough encouragement to consider trying to be a toy blogger. This flagship entry is for a specimen I acquired just today at the somewhat notorious discount store Tuesday Morning. It was the only one of its kind in sight, and priced $5.99. After determining that similar items were going for over $20 (but not a lot more) online, I bought it and took it home.

The item in question was sold with the name “Power Driven”, apparently for the figure only. Casual research failed to identify an English name for the toy line, but showed that the toy was made or at least marketed by a company called Polyfect, known for importing Transformers clones and knockoffs of moderate quality and general sturdiness. While unequivocally advertised as a transforming robot, the look of the specimen was rather different, more akin to Voltron or the now semi-obscure Shogun Warriors credited with introducing the giant/ transforming robot toy concept. I purchased it, brought it home, and then opened the package to assess the transformation, “alt mode” and overall quality.

It quickly became apparent that the ability to transform was a secondary consideration at best, in the tradition of the Shogun Warriors. The robot looked kinda cool, the alt mode looked like a kinda space-jet-thingy with clunky bits sticking out (though still marginally better than the Shogun Warriors). The more subtle details were all against it. A number of components are awkward in either mode, especially ludicrously oversized “shoulder pads” that provide the only concealment of the stumpy arms in the alt mode. Several of the steps are counterintuitive, and fiddly enough to break the thing if done wrong. Two red plastic pieces on the feet that look like stickers were cracked straight out of the package. Finally, the two halves of the space-jet simply do not fit. Still, the thing is solid enough that there is little risk of coming apart during casual handing, and the robot mode is interesting enough to make up the shortcomings of the alt mode.


What is most interesting about an item like this is that such things are still being made. In a time when far too many “real” Transformers are too expensive and complicated to consider giving to kids, this has the right balance of durability and complexity to have value both for responsible older kids and the adult collector. And even at online prices it is no more expensive than many “name brand” items. If you can find it, you could certainly do worse than a quirky mid-sized giant robot like this.

Fiction: Trails Part 7, an Evil Possum adventure

A youngling calls out at the sound of scrabbling from beneath the floor of the ruined holy site: "Tio! Tio?" Then a hook lodges in the edge of the hole in the floor, and the youngling falls silent. A powerful hand follows, then the high brow and short snout of Archididelphis invicta rise into view. The creature hauls itself up, only to drop to all fours, or three. The youngling toddles over, almost level with the warrior's piercing eyes. "Tio?" it says. The warrior only shakes his head, and as he rises to his knees, the youngling begins to cry. Only then does No-Hands throw back his head and drop his jaw, and a bloodcurdling yet infinitely mournful scream rings up and down the eroded passages of the plateau.

It was the hook No-Hands bore in place of his right hand that saved his life. As his foe slammed into him, he snared the attacker's upper jaw like a fish, pulling a pair of long fangs back from his throat. It bought time enough to drop his empty broomhandle pistol and draw a revolver in its place. He fired twice, and the enemy that had left him with a boot and a sawed off shotgun in place of his right leg tore free with a backward leap and a spray of blood. He fired twice more at the creature as it bounded toward daylight, and in all likelihood a drop of several hundred meters. Then it was gone, leaving only a trail of blood behind.

No-Hands reloaded the chambers of his revolver as he approached the end of the pipe. A quick and cautious glance confirmed that it opened onto empty air. He raised the revolver and leaned forward. That was when his foe swung down from above and kicked him in the chest with both feet. The force was enough to knock the gun from his hand as he went sprawling back. He raised his head to see the silhouette of his foe drawing a crossbow as it dropped down. At the same moment, No-Hands' hook reached the drawstring that ran down to the shotgun. Two simultaneous blasts ripped through the sole of the boot, sending No-Hands sliding back, and the foe flipped from vertical to horizontal before slamming down on the surface of the pipe.

No-Hands had to use the hook for leverage to pull himself to his feet. He hobbled toward the body of the foe, certainly no longer a threat. A glance told him all he needed to know. . It had been not much more than a juvenile, undoubtedly the other reason No-Hands had survived. The teeth, the snout, the absent tail, and what remained of the brow... all a match for his own, even more than the skull in the crypt. The foe he hunted is another male Archididelphis invicta.

"While A. invicta is certainly long gone from any civilized lands, enough known and likely mentions of their race persist among the lore of the lower orders that it remains possible, even likely, that a few yet survive in the deepest wastes and wildernesses of the world. None can envy their fate, however, as despite their clearly considerable intellect, they are solitary by nature and hostile to intrusion under almost all circumstances, perhaps even more so to their own kind than to other races..."
No-Hands read the passage once more, written by the first learned creature to describe his race. He dropped it into the fire in the sanctum of the holy place, to join the rest of the sheaf of papers he saved from the wreck of his vehicle. The quarry remained in the chamber beneath the holy place, next to the bones of what was undoubtedly his mother.

It took the night and another day to make his way back to his basecamp, only slightly hindered by the tiny youngling he carried. Only one matter remained, and he waited until well after nightfall to do it. In two more days, he would be in the foothills of the mountains to the west, where a petty governor begged for help against a bandit chief that terrorized the villages under his charge from a mountain fortress that had once been a pillbox of the vanished Giants.

As the sun rose on the third day, the back door of the shack at the edge of the town opened slowly and carefully. There lay the youngling, curled up in sleep, and beside it, an untouched pot of 30 silver coins.

Fiction: Trails Part 6, an Evil Possum adventure

"...He killed them all," a voice says. Only then does he become aware of light, and the hazy silhouettes of figures looking down at him. "The P'ums killed the villagers, no question about that, but he got out and killed them. Damn if I know what he is, but he killed them all, with no hands..."

No-Hands blinked once and then shot bolt upright. He lay in a pool of light beneath the same hole in the ancient church floor he had fallen down. From above there came a youngling's squealing cry, interspersed with the plaintive call, "Tio? Tio!" He raised his broomhandle carbine, and found the detachable stock broken. He removed what remained, and rested the weapon on the stump of his right forearm to steady his aim.

As for where he lay, it was cylindrical and made of brick. It had probably begun as a cistern or septic tank (it momentarily amused him that even a holy place needed such things), but had long since been repurposed as a crypt for the far smaller races of rodents. Most of the remains had clearly piled up where they had dropped, in quantities great enough that it was no longer clear how much deeper the original bottom lay. He scrambled upright, on one bare foot and a boot that covered the muzzle of a shotgun where his right leg had been, untroubled by what he stood upon apart from the fact that it was shifting under his weight. But it was evident that some had been given a more dignified burial, mostly in openings in the walls where a brick had gone missing.

He quickly identified a dozen remains that were clearly recent, enough that their flesh and hides were sufficiently intact to judge the cause of death. At least four had been killed by crossbow projectiles, including the most recent, whose features matched a photograph of the explorer whose journal had led him here. But two more had the visible marks of a snake bite, and a third was frozen in spasms commonly induced by a particularly toxic berry. A fourth had a crushed skull and fractured spine that could only have been caused by a great fall. A fifth had been killed by a bullet from the back. His own weapon lay beside him, smashed beyond use or repair.

"It would have been better to leave them where they lay," No-Hands said, peering into deeper darkness ahead. "These creatures are just intelligent enough for curiosity, and a vanished man stirs them up more than a dead one. Taking the child here was entirely foolish."

He kept the gun trained on a particular patch of dark while he used the hook to reach inside another alcove. "And what is this?" With his hook, he held up a skull in the light, larger both in total size and evident brain volume. The high brow, short snout and serated teeth were all nearly identical to his own features, though noticeably more gracile- a perfect match for a female of the species Archididelphis invicta. A crossbow bolt still protruded from one eye socket.

A hiss came from the dark. then retreating footsteps from a pipe that stretched toward the end of the holy place. No-Hands followed, still holding his fire, not because he held the site in great regard but because it was undoubtedly the only thing that kept his foe from turning at bay immediately. He sped up at the sight of light ahead, only to freeze as he realised the pipe must emerge in the face of a cliff they had both climbed to reach the holy place. He dropped to a crouch and fired a volley down an intersecting passage, only to be struck in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt from the right. He swiveled at bay and emptied the magazine at a shape that came not running but flying straight into his chest.

Fiction: Trails Part 5, an Evil Possum Adventure

The building bears the symbol of a cross, known as a symbol of truce and sanctuary. It is clear that those who were here gave neither. A half dozen bodies litter the steps and entryway, and more can be seen within. Flames flicker from inside, but the blaze has not yet taken hold. A push of a foot opens the door. Two of the mouselike creatures lie on the very threshold, one large and one small, riddled by multiple projectiles and many more ragged wounds from edged weapons. Then something breaks the silence: speech, unmuted and growing nearer, and with it, laughter. There is a single low snarl, followed by a jingle of a chain as No-Hands leaps up to the roof.

No-Hands held the carbine at ready as he entered the ruin through a half-fallen archway six times his height. He froze at the sound of a strange, almost buzzing voice behind him: "Leave 't b'hind or leave thiss plaze, creature of blude." He looked over his shoulder and beheld a large owl, perched in the shade of what remained of one corner. Its gaze was baleful yet disinterested. Beneath it, a group of quail foraged, wary but unhurried.

"If you would tell me what to do," the marsupial answered, "then tell me what you eat." As he turned away, there was a hooting that quickly rose to a crescendo of manic laughter. When he looked back, the bird had taken to the air, its silhouette briefly visible against a lowering sun as dull and red as the rocks of the plateau. No-Hands sneered, but slung the carbine over his shoulder as he approached the altar, carefully avoiding a spot where the dirt was far too fresh.

The far end of the ruin was almost intact, with not only the standing facade but portions of the walls and even a pair of supports for the long-vanished roof. Still, the original altar was long gone. In its place was a rough but carefully constructed sanctuary big enough for a small group. Soot and blackened rock marked where fires had been lit, though it was evident the last had been decades earlier at least. On the inside of the facade where the residue was thickest, a silhouette had been scraped away, of a profile much like No-Hands, with the mane bristling like a mohawk and the lower jaw dropped almost 90 degrees.

More creatures gathered around the altar, including another group of quail, a pair of boney rabbits, a handful of small rodents, and a single old and fattened snake. None had ventured into the sanctum. No-Hands stooped to peer inside. He drew back with an expression of consternation. Hanging from his hook by a pair of suspenders was a small child of the townfolk's kind, alive and seemingly unconcerned. His facial muscles contracted in a grimace as the youngling poked his nose in curiosity. "Tio," it said.

No-Hands set down the child and drew back at a sound from just beyond the sanctum. His own mane shot up in spiky bristles, and his jaw dropped as if unhinged as he roared. He tracked the motion more than the form of a creature that dropped down from above, crossing from one end of the facade almost halfway to the other with each terrific leap. A chorus of cries rose up when he raised his weapon, but he held his fire. Finally, he lined up his scope with the still indistinct shape, only to have his view blocked by a hurtling chunk of rubble. He lowered his weapon just as it struck him in the chest, knocking off his feet and into the patck of earth he had avoided before. It caved in immediately, and his roar echoed up as he dropped into the darkness below.