John Richards

John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-24 06:27:42 -

The Decaying Lineage of Oakhaven Plantation
Act I — The House The house stood at the end of a dirt road that had not been graded in twenty years, surrounded by magnolia trees whose roots had cracked the driveway into a mosaic of concrete and weeds. It was a two-story structure of white columns and gray siding, the columns peeling like sunburnt skin, the siding rotting at the edges where the paint had given up trying to hold on. Silas...

0 Comments 0 Shares 4 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-24 14:37:27 -

The Rust Belt
The machine in the back of the shop had been broken for three weeks. It was a used press brake, bought from a man in Toledo who claimed it had been sitting in a warehouse since 1978 and had never been used. Danny knew better. He had seen the rust on the hydraulic lines. He had seen the way the control panel flickered like a dying heartbeat. But he had bought it anyway, because the monthly...

0 Comments 0 Shares 5 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-22 06:48:44 -

The Starlight Detective
The jazz band played something fast and desperate in the corner booth of The Gilded Cage, and I nursed my third whiskey while watching the door. The place smelled of gin and expensive perfume and the particular brand of loneliness that only exists in cities where everyone is surrounded by millions of people but knows exactly one person who truly matters. My name is Nicholas Callahan. I used to...

0 Comments 0 Shares 6 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-28 19:58:27 -

The Pattern in the Mind
The experiment was supposed to be simple. Present a subject with a constructed memory—specific, detailed, emotionally charged but not traumatic—and then use fMRI to observe how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves it. The hypothesis was that the hippocampus would treat the false memory with the same neural machinery as a real one, confirming what Marcus Webb had been arguing in papers and...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Literature
2026-06-01 21:38:51 -

The Echoes of the Bight
(Nigerian Igbo Variation) The village of Umuofia was a place of red earth and ancient whispers, where the spirits of the ancestors resided in the rustle of the iroko trees. Okonkwo was a man of iron and silence, a warrior whose reputation was built on the strength of his arm and the rigidity of his adherence to the clan's laws. He believed that the only way to survive in a world of chaos was to...

0 Comments 0 Shares 4 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Literature
2026-06-02 22:09:29 -

The Quiet Heroism of Dust
(Noble Grim Variation) The settlement of Hope's End was a collection of rusted shipping containers and plastic tarps, clinging to the edge of a salt flat that stretched infinitely in every direction. There was no green here, no birds, only the relentless wind that carried the grit of a dead world into every pore of the skin. Silas was the settlement's water-gatherer. It was a thankless,...

0 Comments 0 Shares 6 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-30 13:41:01 -

The Cage of Two Faces
The mirror in the Beaumont townhouse was the first thing Isabelle de Montclair noticed when she arrived on Rue de Varenne. It was a full-length piece, framed in curved Art Nouveau silver, and it showed her face with an accuracy that felt almost cruel. Twenty-five years old, pale, dark-haired, with eyes that held a question she had spent her entire life avoiding. She had come to Paris at the...

0 Comments 0 Shares 9 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-29 17:50:56 -

The Light of Collective Dawn
Patrick O'Brien was nineteen when he found the books, and he was already tired of being tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Brooklyn in 1923 was a city of cities — or at least it felt like that to Pat, walking home from the docks after a ten-hour shift carrying crates that weighed more than he did. The apartment on Willow Street smelled of boiled cabbage and his mother's lavender...

0 Comments 0 Shares 5 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-25 10:17:18 -

The Engineer
The Engineer's Last Shift The numbers on the ionosphere monitor were wrong. Mike Callahan knew this the way a mechanic knows an engine is misfiring—by sound, by feel, by twenty-two years of knowing exactly what every machine in the Brooklyn coal plant was supposed to do. The monitor sat in the corner of the control room, a World War II-era device that had been installed to track atmospheric...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-24 18:04:32 -

The House That Remembered
The Thorne estate sat on a hill in the Mississippi delta, surrounded by live oaks that looked like they were holding their breath. Bell Thorne was twenty-six and the last person with the deed, which was not the same thing as having the means to keep what the deed described. The house was falling apart. The roof leaked in seventeen places that Bell had marked with chalk X's on the ceiling of the...

0 Comments 0 Shares 5 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Games
2026-05-25 18:08:18 -

The Keeper of the Blackwood Wilds
The wind across the Blackwood moors did not blow so much as it hunted, finding every gap in Angus MacAllister's coat, every weakness in the stone walls of the house that had been his family's for three hundred years. He stood at the window of the library, watching fog roll down from the peaks like a slow tide, and wondered whether the dead were happier in their certainty than the living were in...

0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
John Richards added blog Other
2026-05-22 17:42:34 -

OXYGEN LEDGER
OXYGEN LEDGER The pressure gauge on Valve Four dropped from forty-two to zero in exactly four minutes. Jack Torren watched it the way a man watches a heart monitor. He was in the underground maintenance sector of the Erebos-7 colony, a concrete bunker buried three levels beneath the asteroid's surface, surrounded by pipes that carried oxygen from the recyclers to the dome above. The sector had...

0 Comments 0 Shares 6 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!