Welcome to another Backstage extravaganza! Have you, perhaps, been to the Calamity gift shop, the Odds ‘n’ Endings Boutique? Yes? No? It’s not your ordinary kind of gift shop. The Proprietor is no ordinary kind of shop clerk. And the wares are not your ordinary gift shop fare. Everything is quite magical, and all of it is exceptionally dangerous.

Kind of makes you want to go check it out even more, doesn’t it?

If you haven’t, visit the attraction titled 🔪 Treachery in the Alley, which features an item acquired from the Boutique. You’ll get the idea. When you have done that, you’ll have a better idea of the challenges Mr. Ferguson and his tiny community may face when the truth of his own acquiistion comes to light, in 👺 Scarecrow.

This is but an introduction, however, and not the full story, which I expect will be released before the year is out. Keep an eye on Under Construction in later editions for more details.

Everything else is here for your displeasure and enjoyment. The vampires may have found a way into the ship in A Vampire’s Vengeance; Awareness, or a severe lack of it, plays an important role in this edition’s classic horror feature, The Scarf of the Beloved; and the group finds a place to hunker down as they await the plane’s arrival in Bus Driver.

^{As a final thought, I want to point out that not a single word of this edition—nor any prior—whether expository or narrative (read: editorial content or stories) has been written with the use of AI. I now feel it entirely necessary to state this fact since AI has become prevalent in a number of ways across society, and I want to reassure you, my dearest guest, that what you consume here is all dreamed up by a human—me—and created by hand, the old fashioned way. Enjoy it as you like, though if you are inclined to attempt to feed my work to any AI model or platform, then I curse you with coffee that will always be either not hot enough, or not cold enough, nothing but red lights when you are in a hurry, and as miserable a death as can be called down upon you. If you don’t feed my work to AI, you can ignore all of that.}

Let’s get into it →

This week was spent more in ideation and project management than actual writing. More of the foundational knowledge for the Conglomerate was notated. A new task system is in the process of being implemented. I really am doing my very best to write write write while becoming better organized. This publication is quite a bit of work on its own, let alone the myriad of projects in the works, thus the importance of organization! And the improvement of such a system, as the tenuous foundation is not enough to support the growing worlds and universes which will eventually exist in the Calamity. So, please bear with me! The Conglomerate is coming, and I hope to produce Treachery in the Alley, Scarecrow, and Body Count—all Odds ‘n’ Endings tales, mind you—in the very near future.