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This content is produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and written by Brian Joseph Johns. There is no Shhhh! Digital Media in New York that has anything to do with this Shhhh! Digital Media in Canada, not to mention I've never been to New York. There is no one named "Andrew Lima" or "Michael Jacks" that has anything to do with this company or its content. This content (with the exception of the story Moving On) is not created at Heyworth House and I've never worked as a security guard in my life. If I had, I would have worn red coveralls and a red beret and had the key in my right hand.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Tales Of The Sanctum: The Era Of The Spellbound - Episode 2: Friend And Foe Alike (First Draft Finished May 21, 2025 3:00 PM EST) - Written by Brian Joseph Johns

[Spellbound - Siouxie And The Banshees]


Do you like enigmatic characters, engrossing story, magic and the ever atemporal weave?

Play Baldur's Gate 3 [On Steam]


Chapters

  1. Play On Words
  2. Blindness To Sight
  3. Assembly
  4. A Walk In The Park (coming soon)

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I'd like to point out that it was the incredible Gary Sinese Foundation that brought the issue of Veteran's rights to my attention. I've always had little respect for those who'd forget the great contribution made by those who've risked life and limb to defend those values that so many of us espouse. Perhaps the true measure of one's principles are by that for which they'd risk their life.

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In all truth, there's a good chance that thanks to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herbert George Wells, Jules Verne, Dr. Seuss, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Pierre Burton (for The Secret World Of Og and his ground breaking interview of Bruce Lee) that all of us are literate. Actually that goes back much farther to the Phoenecians and their first 22 character system of symbols. Literacy is important. Really it is. Literally. It allows us to approach our employer at the end of the week (with a big club) and ask: where my money?! Math important too. It help us count our thirteen fingers and toes.


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Shhhh! Digital Media

Brian Joseph Johns



Tales Of The Sanctum

The Era Of The Spellbound - Episode 2: Friend And Foe Alike


A Play On Words

May 19, "Year 13"
Halliford School Assembly Hall
Shepperton, London, England


Neville and Wes sat sixth from the front, to the far left of the assembly hall benches. Students of all shapes and sizes surrounded them in front, back and right, each similarly engaged though not all were doing the same. Some were listening to music while others were socializing before the arrival of the summer break. Some were simply reading while others were quickly writing, perhaps their notes for the remainder of the exams, for this was the end of Year 13 for all in the hall.

"There's one on right! Quick! Get him mate!" Neville urged Wes, using the joy pad in attempt to back away from the advancing boss.

"I'll hold him off while you heal... Hurry!" Wes responded, clicking the joy pad frantically with his fingers.



"What on Aerth are you doing?" asked Nelony, who'd appeared beside them, leaning against the back of the bench after the long hike from her locker on the other side of the school.
"Its Nintendo 3DS. We're playing Final Fantasy Explorers... Quick get back over here! He's almost done and I'm down to like a scribble of health!" Wes answered Nelony, then returning to their game, gnashing buttons in attempt to take down the boss.

"Are you guys playing together?" she asked them, somewhat perplexed by the devices.




"We are playing together, because there are no 'I's in us or 'we'," Wes responded, thinking he was clever.

"That's because there's two of them... get it mate?" Neville responded, thinking he'd been clever.

"No. I don't. Do you mean your character in the game has two eyes?" Nelony responded, still confused by the game as much so as Neville's quip, for she knew little about gaming, let alone handhelds or consoles.

"No! I mean like the Nintendo Wii!  There's two "i"s in Wii," Neville replied to her, explaining his joke.

"Don't mind Nev. He's getting kickbacks from Nintendo now..." Wes replied to Nelony, buttons clicking.

"YES!!!" Neville stood from his place on the bench, his hands in the air in victory.

"What happened?" asked Nelony when Neville had finally returned to his seat.

"We just took down like one of the hardest bosses!" Neville replied, a fountain of crystals erupting from the remains of the deceased boss.

"Slide over and give the girl a seat," Wes said to Neville, pushing to the right as far as he could before colliding with another student.

"Where's Shaela?" asked Neville, sliding over as close to Wes as he could tolerate.

"She's on her way. She forgot her notes," Nelony replied as she sat down beside them, wearing a new plant necklace.



Blindness To Sight

May 19, "Year 13"
Halliford School Assembly Hall
Shepperton, London, England


Yes, I know Shaela seems to be holding her makeup a little bit different,
but everything Shaela does is a little bit different.


Shaela stood in front of the mirror, leaning in close as she touched up her lipstick, lining the bottom of her lip precisely after which she examined the eye shadow beneath her brows.
She then pressed her lips together and checked that they were even before replacing her kit in her purse. She then placed the ear buds back in her ears and hit play on her iPod, turning around to leave the bathroom before the assembly started.

As she was about to take her first step, she heard a voice from behind her.




"yoooou bare the sigil..." the voice was hollow and wispy, trailing off into infinity.

She quickly turned around and was met only by her own reflection in the mirror. She looked around, then removed the ear buds from her ears, ensuring that it wasn't embedded in her industrial goth playlist.

"Must have been the shadows..." she said, shrugging her shoulders then turning around to leave again.



"yooou have knowledge of shadows..." this time the voice emanated from everywhere, still hollow and dark.

She quickly turned, trying to catch whoever it was off guard and jumped back when her eyes met the mirror.

Instead of her own reflection, there was a pocket of the deepest darkness she'd ever seen on the other side of the mirror, its silhouette accenting the shadows in the bathroom, while the bright places had grown in their contrast.

She shook her head and in that instant, the phantasm was no longer there, replaced by her reflection once again.

Her heart had picked up pace and she felt the first tinges of fear, as if she were being watched. 

Followed.

She turned and ran for the door, bolting through it without looking, stepping directly into a doorway of darkness of the same enveloping depth.
She screamed as she felt herself falling, hoping that she was still at home in bed, in the midst of a nightmare when her feet suddenly found purchase on stable ground. She suddenly realized that she hadn't been falling at all, but that the wind had somehow tricked her into believing, despite the fact that she could not see a thing.




"a clue for you... there is blindness only in complete darkness or complete light..." the voice returned once again, this time sounding not hollow and lost, but enriching and encouraging.

Shaela pondered the words, staving off the tinges of fear that gripped her, when she realized that the darkness was her.




"that's it... recall the light..." the voice advised her, trailing off into the reaches of the unknown.

She closed her eyes, and concentrated, recalling a trip to a country farm with her father. She was a little girl, running through a field, trying to keep up with him as he tried to corale one of the horses back towards the barn.

She laughed as she watched him chase the beast, which only seemed to be playing with him. It paused long enough to let him get close, and then when he was in reach of the horse's mane, the beast would trot off with barely a slight effort to avoid the tall and imposing man.

On this particular occasion, he'd reached for the horse, which then began to run, twisting away from his grip before he'd established it. Of course by that time, he was off balance and had struggled to recover, running frantically in the hopes his legs would catch up with his upper body. 

Instead, he slipped in a patch of long flattened grass (where one of the other younger horses had chosen to bed down for a short rest earlier) and fell flat on his bottom, much to Shaela's amusement and delight. She laughed at him as he sat there on his petute, he too snickering at the outcome.

"...dad?" Shaela reached out to her father only to find herself once again in the darkness.

This time however, something had changed.

Her eyes slowly adjusted as the contrast of the darkness within and the light of her memory filled her vision, and though the darkness still remained, she could see within perfectly, as if it were day.

She was in another place not familiar to her. It looked neither like the Aerth, nor the lands of any novel or movie she'd imagined or seen. She saw the world around her as varying shades of darkness and light, and off into the distance where mountains lined the horizon, spiky and jagged. 

A dark foliage and bedding lined the surface upon which she walked, though it did not grow from the ground, but rather from a fluffy ball the size of an apple, a half foot above it, reaching downward into it from the air. As she stepped forward, it spread to avoid her step, leaving her a path into the unknown.

She then heard something growling, her fear instinctually peaking at that moment, for she knew that she was no longer alone, and that she'd become prey.

A thing out of the darkest horrors bigger than a horse arose from the dark turf, the kind of which would have sent Lovecraft himself screaming as he ran, perhaps stopping just long enough to admire it before fleeing again. Its head was like that of a large snake, wide and flat, but as it elevated itself from the turf, its head split in two, moving about along a pair of long necks, and Shaela realized that this beast was not one, but two, intertwined. Like some kind of co-dependent life form, it was clearly curious and mostly likely hungry to try her flesh.




It began slowly at first in her direction, picking up pace as it moved along six serpentine legs each with a long sharp spike at its end.
Shaela stood rooted in fear, when something in her screamed at her to run, which she did.

She turned daring not to look back at the advancing horror behind her, but by her sixth step she could already feel its tendrils brushing her back. She pushed herself, turning her head ever so slightly just in time to see that the two headed thing was coming at her from both sides. At that point, she knew it was over and yet she still kept running.

It bore down upon her and when its teeth had barely pierced her school uniform, something of immense ferocity, even more frightful than the two headed thing that pursued her moved the air around her as it leapt, landing nearby.

She closed her eyes and huddled her arms to her chest, bracing herself for the pain that preceded the afterlife.

But it never came.
She waited and waited and waited, and when she'd worked up the courage to open her eyes, she took a peek.

She turned to see what had happened to her pursuer and found that the horror was no longer there. 

Instead, there was something large and dangerous that had already covered a great distance as it moved away from her. The deceased two headed monster dangled lifelessly from its jaws as the beast that had hunted it disappeared into the darkness.

Shaela suddenly found herself nauseous, and as she watched the beast depart with its meal, she backed up, tripping over one of the strange plants and falling flat on her rump in the hall outside of the bathroom doorway.

She found herself suddenly blinded in the light and as her eyes once again adjusted, she recognized the empty hallway of the school. She quickly got to her feet and picked up her purse and her knapsack, and then ran as fast as she could for the assembly hall.

Assembly

May 19, "Year 13"
Halliford School Assembly Hall
Shepperton, London, England


Shaela came running through the assembly hall doors, slowing to a stop when she saw the crowd gathered within, finding herself calmed by the presence of so many people. A very rare thing for such a young woman who enjoyed her solitude.

She looked aft and fore and side to side until she spotted Nelony's familiar blonde hair, seated beside a tall fellow and a shorter one. She stepped quickly over to the benches where the familiar faces of her friends were situated, finding that there was barely enough room for her to be seated.

"Slide down! I just had an experience...!" Shaela said to Nelony, who looked up to her with a look of concern.

"Let me guess, you couldn't find your notes? Fret not, 'cause I can photocopy mine and share them with you," Nelony smiled, already going through her knapsack looking for her notes.

"No. That's not what I meant... Nev? Wes? Could you push down a wee bit for a lady?" Shaela corrected Nelony and then pried the two young men for space on the bench.

"Sure thing, Shaela," Wes put down his Nintendo and turned to the large rotund boy sitting next to him.

"Look mate. Could you just push down a bit please?" asked Wes of the boy, who turned to face Wes with a look of disgust.

"You think with my weight that real estate comes at a premium do ya? Can't do!" he responded with a thick Scottish accent.

Wes turned to Shaela and shrugged his shoulders, as if she'd asked him to achieve the impossible.

Shaela folded her arms impatiently.

Wes thought carefully about how he could solve the situation, looking out of the side of his eyes at the rotund boy, suddenly noticing that he had an expensive collection of pens in his breast pocket.

Wes went into his bag and found his writing utensil bag and dug through it until he found a folding felt-covered box. He opened it and within was an expensive pen that had been gifted to him by his father for his grades in math and computers. He turned to the boy once again, and tapped on his shoulder.

"Look mate, this is reeeally important. If you can coax the rest of the bench to move down, I'll give you this pen. It cost my da more than a few quid," Wes offered, holding up the elaborately embossed pen.

The rotund boy looked at it, squinting for a moment and then took it from Wes' hand, examining it closely before he answered.

"That's a fine one it is. Deal!" he responded, turning to the people sitting to the right of him and coaxing them down the bench.

"Come on ya lot! Make way or make for the door!" he urged them all to shift down by not one space, but two.

Wes and Neville quickly took up the slack and Nelony followed suit, sliding down a couple places for Shaela, who then sat beside her, pushing close enough to discuss her previous experience.

"I just had another... how can I say it? It was like that time with the supply teacher. When he tried to take Wes... but horrific... I was in another world..." Shaela explained to Nelony frantically.

"Where?" asked Nelony, now very concerned.

"I don't know. It was like a world made of shadows..." Shaela answered her.

"No, I mean where did this happen?" Nelony elaborated on her question.

"Just outside of the bathroom near my locker. It was like a doorway into another world!" Shaela exclaimed, drawing Neville's and Wes' attention.

"Look, could you keep it down!" Neville exclaimed to Nelony, trying desperately to signal her, pointing to the front of the assembly hall.

"Are you a complete chad! Shaela just had a traumatic experience again!" Nelony stood for effect, suddenly realizing that the occupants of the entire assembly hall were staring at her.

As she looked to her left, a woman with long flowing black hair and a stylish pink dress sat in the space beside Shaela at the end of the bench. She looked to Nelony and just like Neville had, pointed to the front of the room, a look of cautious amusement on her face.

"And who are you to take our seat?" Nelony suddenly felt defensive, addressing the new arrival, who this time gestured to the front of the hall, nodding her head in its direction.

Nelony turned to the front of the assembly hall to see the school Principal standing at the podium, the spot light on him as he peered over the rim of his bifocals at Nelony.

"Are we interrupting your meeting, Miss Ardbloem?" Mr. Boseford looked to her as the rest of the auditorium sat silently watching her.

The stage fright hit her like a wall. She tried to speak but found herself unable to form any words.

That was when the young Japanese woman who'd sat beside her stood and spoke up:

"I'm so sorry Mr. Boseford, it was my fault. They were expecting another friend when I sat in their place. Being the good friends they are, they tried to coax me to move. What can I say, I'm difficult sometimes," Mila spoke, projecting her soft and quiet little voice remarkably well.

"I suggest that you both sit down and remain quiet so we can start this assembly," Mr. Boseman urged the two women with a serious tone.

The two of them sat down, Shaela between them, who leaned over to Nelony.

"That went pretty well... all considered," Shaela said to her quietly.

"No thanks to you," Nelony responded.

Mila, leaned over towards Shaela and passed her a pile of four hand painted origami blossoms.

"One for each of your friends. You see? Just like mine," Mila tapped to the one pinned to her dress.

Shaela looked to Mila, and then to Nelony, passing the other three to her. She put it on her shirt and gave the other two in Neville and Wes' direction, who smiled and nodded at her.

"Thank you," Mila said to them.

"Whatever for? We should be thanking you," Shaela responded to the soft spoken woman.

"For preventing me from being a liar. I'm Mila Ren Dubel, and I would say that at this moment, we're going to become good friends," Mila smiled to them.




They thought about it, and then understood what she'd meant by her offering.

"Looks like our friend did arrive," Nelony smiled from the other side of Shaela, the four of them quietly exchanging names with each other as the assembly began.

Despite it being their first time meeting, there was something strangely familiar about Mila.

"First of all, I'd like to congratulate you for all of your dedication and studious effort, for it is my hope that you will be proceeding to the next phase of your education," Mr. Boseford read from a speech he'd carefully prepared the evening before, looking through the thick lenses of his bifocals and then at his audience occasionally.

"In order to ensure the provision that your education has provided thus far, we have taken further steps to give you the tools you'll need to succeed with your post secondary studies. We met with many of your parents in person during the last school exhibition, and those with whom we did not meet, we spoke with over the phone. Suffice it to say that they are in agreement with our new strategy, which I will be unveiling today, and likely much to your dismay," Mr. Boseman snickered at the final statement in his delivery.

"Effective July 11, of this year of 2011, you will be required to report to this school for our pre-post secondary program, and this applies to each one of you that will be attending a college, university or other post secondary program," Mr. Boseford was all smiles as he finished, while the entire assembly hall was filled with groans of disapproval.


A Walk In The Park


The eleven o'clock sun rode high in the sky, lighting the way and warming the world around them. There were trees lining the park and an immense field on either side of the path where children were playing and a multitude of dog owners were there with their pups. Despite the fact that they'd just received the worst news that one could before the arrival of the summer holidays, nature and the weather hadn't let them down as much so as their school.

"Well that pretty much settles it. I'm convinced that in his previous life, that Principal Boseford was a Prison Warden, and that we've been sentenced to life in school," Neville remarked, kicking a small stone down the path in the park on their way in the direction of the nearby Ferris Meadow Lake.

"Its not that bad. I mean we'll be ready for what's to come, think of it that way," Nelony responded, trying to find the positive in the situation as a bird landed on her shoulder and began tweeting happily.

Mila seemed a little shocked at first, and then amused.

"Don't worry. That happens far too often with nature girl here..." Shaela remarked sarcastically, assuring Mila that she would eventually get used to it.

"True enough, but its such a shame that we won't be able to enjoy the great outdoors and wonder of the wildlife within its breath taking midst..." Neville spoke purposefully so dramatically, knowing Nelony well enough that he knew which buttons to press and when.

Nelony suddenly realized that she'd lose almost 200 hours of her enjoyment of nature, not to mention her participation in groups trying to help protect and preserve it.

"If you put it that way, that conniving sniveling bifocal fixated sadistic man for taking away our time to enjoy the out of doors!" the bird on Nelony's shoulder squawked once and then flew off into the trees, dropping a turd on Neville's head before it left.

Mila looked to Shaela:

"That too?" she asked.

"No. That's only the third time," Shaela replied as the others laughed while watching Neville brush the bird guano from his hair.

"What about what happened to you Shaela? Outside the bathroom?" Nelony prodded Shaela's shoulder.

"With that glum news I almost forgot. I guess that's another positive in Mr. Boseford's favour, damn him," Shaela responded.

"You mean something happened to you? Are you alright?" Wes quickly replied, leaving Neville's side and making his way over to Shaela.

"Yes. I'm fine. I had an experience... like the one we had with Mr. Norbid..." as the name left Shaela's lips, the others found themselves smitten with chills as they recalled that day in the class a year earlier.

"Now I'm lost. Are you experiencing difficulties around school?" asked Mila, a bit confused by their conversation.

"Mila, you really picked the wrong group of people to have as your new friends..." Neville offered in the jest of dark humour.

"Oh, its not that bad..." Nelony responded, once again experiencing intense shivers as she thought about their experience with Mr. Norbid.

"We've been experiencing situations of an extra-sensory nature..." Shaela took the time to explain to Mila.

"You mean like hauntings?" asked Mila, now very curious about their so-called 'experiences'.

"It goes a bit further than that..." Wes added, not willing to go beyond that in his response.

"Tell us what happened to you Shaela, and perhaps we can all, including Mila, learn a bit more," Nelony suggested.

"Oh... alright. I was in the bathroom doing my makeup... I'm high maintenance Mila by the way... when I heard strange voices coming from the mirror. I thought it was my music, as I was listening to an old Nitzer Ebb track, but when I left the bathroom, I fell through a doorway to another world..." Shaela explained to them.

"Sounds to me like you've been into your parents' liquor cabinet..." the words had left Neville's enthusiastic mouth before he could stop them.

Shaela's face became intense for a moment, but then she merely smirked in response to Neville's quip. 

"What kind of world?" Nelony asked, intensely curious now to hear the rest of what had happened to her.

"A shadow world of complete darkness. I couldn't see a thing, and then the same voices that I heard earlier, taught me how to see in the shadows... and that's when it came at me..." Shaela continued, staring into the distance as a large dog came running at her.

It stood its ground, barking furiously at her, causing Wes to step in front of her before its owner arrived and grabbed the dog by the collar and took it away, scolding it.

"Come on Brutus! That's enough out of ya!" the owner said as he hauled the dog away.

"The dog was upset about something... not you Shaela, but something around you..." Nelony explained to her.

"What are you now? A dog psychiatrist?" Neville couldn't let the opportunity go.

"I could be..." Nelony responded in her own defense.

"Maybe Mila's right? We might be haunted. Maybe we shouldn't be talking about this. It might be drawing the ire of whatever it is?" Wes suggested to them as they looked back to the dog and its owner, both of whom had mysteriously disappeared.

"Have all of you been having these experiences?" asked Mila.

"So far, I'm the only one who's been spared. I think its a guilty conscience if you ask me. I'd bet the lot of them took a few too many cookies from the cookie jar..." Neville felt liberated from the doom and gloom.

"So its just you three so far?" Mila confirmed.

"So far. We swore never to speak about this... but obviously in light of our new friendship, we've already broken that rule," Shaela remarked, looking to Mila, though not attempting to to provoke her to guilt on the issue.

"That's very odd, because when I touched down here in Shepperton, at Heathrow, I had some of the most profoundly horrific nightmares I've ever had since losing my family... Sorry, I don't want to burden you..." Mila explained her experiences, withdrawing when she'd realized that she might have said too much.

"You too?" Shaela replied, looking to the shorter lady.

"Shaela lost the people closest to her," Nelony explained to Mila.

"My mother first. She died when I was three. My father raised me until I was eleven, when he died. I was in the care of my aunt up until I was sixteen, when I was given access to the inheritance. I repurchased the very same small home where my mother, father and I used to live, and continued on from there by myself," Shaela explained her losses to Mila, perhaps another kindred lady.

"I'm so sorry for your loss. I know what its like to lose the people closest to you. I lost mine in an air liner crash. Both of them, a year ago," Mila offered a bit of herself and her life to them.

"I'm sorry Mila. Looks like we both really had a difficult time out of the starting gate, doesn't it?" Shaela replied, having found someone who might understand her better than anyone.

"When I was on my way to the home I bought here in Shepperton, someone from Inspired Art International drove me..." Mila continued her story.

"Wait a second, aren't they a promoter of high value art?" asked Wes, having a bit of knowledge on the matter.

"Yes. They are. I have a few friends there, and so they arranged to have somebody come pick me up from the airport and get me safely to my new home, where we're going right now. Anyway, I fell asleep during the ride, and had the most vivid nightmare I've ever had. It was almost real, too real," Mila explained to them.

"Maybe there's some sort of connection between these experiences? Between us?" Nelony suggested to them.

"Maybe, or maybe its because as Mila said, that you're all haunted. Anyway, we're close to the lake and I don't see a single apartment building anywhere that could Mila's home. Only this large beast of a beach front property on Ferris Meadow Lake," Neville pointed to a large home on the lakefront, bracketed by trees on either side.

"That's my home," Mila replied with grace and modesty.

"That's where you live?" Wes shook his head in disbelief.

"Its quaint, isn't it?" Mila smiled, admiring her home as the approached the front lawn.

"That's the understatement of the year. You could fit ten of my parents' apartment in there," Neville replied.

"You're wealthy I take it? Inheritance? Insurance settlement?" Shaela asked, knowing that aspect of what she'd experienced all too well.

"No. My parents made a reasonable income, but they were never wealthy. I earned my fortune shortly before their death," Mila explained as they walked up the front steps to the double doors outside of her home.

"How?" asked Wes.

Mila unlocked the front door and invited her new friends into her home and closed the door behind them, grabbing a set of slippers from the closet for each of them to wear.

"Are you from Japan?" asked Wes again, immediately recognizing the custom.

"No. I'm from Canada. My mother was Japanese. My father was Austrian, possibly with a bit of Belgian too. My mother made us wear slippers as was the custom where she was from, and she kept the household that way, and followed many other Japanese customs as well. I'm carrying on the family tradition you could say," Mila had already removed her shoes and stepped into her slippers, after which she waited for them.

She took them on a tour of her home, most of the walls within containing one lonely painting, often tucked away from the center, as if some form of asymetrical abstaction. Some of the paintings were profoundly surreal, vibrant with colour, and screaming existentially, while others, specifically her water colours and sumi-e brush were sparse, faded and withdrawn. Perhaps as lonely as the walls upon which she'd placed them. 

When she'd finished the tour, they grabbed their shoes again, and went out the back to the deck, whose stairs descended down to the lake and connected to a dock where one could swim or just sit and enjoy the surrounding scenery.

She stepped back indoors and returned with a platter of food for them, and a few cold drinks for them to enjoy under the summer sun.

"So how did you make your fortune?" asked Wes of Mila.

"One of my paintings back in Canada caught the attention of a talent scout from Inspired Art International. They offered to pay me an exhorbitant sum of money for it, in fact, so much, that it essentially made us very wealthy. They then offered to show my paintings in one of their tours, and sold many more for similar sums, and that's pretty much how I accrued my wealth, after they took their fees," Mila explained to them, using her chopsticks to secure her next sushi roll, which she then gently placed in her mouth.

"Its a horrible feeling, knowing that it all comes down to there being a price tag on everything, even the lives of those you love the most. I received an insurance settlement and then when I was of age, an inheritance, but I'd give it all to have my parents back," Shaela said to them in a sombre moment of reflection.

"So would I. But I'm here right now with my new friends, and so I'd better make the most of it. You're welcome to come here any time, and if you need a place to stay for a night, I've lots of space," Mila offered them.

"Its not haunted, is it?" Neville put on a purposely scary face for them, which caused them to laugh, lightening the mood a bit.

"No, but maybe we can try to figure out what it is around here that seems to be making itself known to us..." Mila suggested.

"Maybe its over with? Maybe if we just ignore it? That might be the solution?" Nelony suggested.

"I don't know about you, but I don't think it will be long before it makes itself known to us again..." Shaela added her own perspective as they looked out across the waters of Ferris Meadow Lake.

Inside of Mila's home, and from within the worlds depicted in a number of her paintings, motion stirred and things that were never alive, became animated, peering out from behing the glass secured behind the each frame, one such painting being that of her parents standing side by side, as they reached in the direction of the viewer, not quite able to gain a grip to free themselves from their fate.


To be continued... Tales Of The Sanctum: Era of the Spellbound - Episode 3: Ghosts Of A Distant Future

Credits and attribution:

Artwork: Amy Wong, Wendy Pusey, Ghastly, Birdman, Brian Joseph Johns, Daz3D, Unreal Engine...

Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, Borderline Obsession...

DeepSeek AI for suggestions on exercises to improve aspects of describing scene and settings with a more sensory focused grammar.

InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.

Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.

Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.

Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui) and the alma mater of Jinn Hua's own specialized variation thereof, https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen)

Special thanks to Aitrepreneur, Mickmumpitz, Hugging Face and the YouTube educational content producers, including those catering to the AI content production pipeline and of course AlphaSignal.

Shi Heng Yi Shaolin Training For Self Mastery

Jesse Enkamp: Karate Nerd

Sensei Rokas: Martial Arts Journey

Iaido: Train For Katana Mastery Like Samurai

Special thanks to Bandcamp

Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.

This content is entirely produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701 under the Shhhh! Digital Media banner.

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