A Confusing Bloodbath
and a Bare-Bones Confession
by The Orange Forest Observer
September 8, 2025 — Saying it was a bloodbath is too nice. Sure, we all know bloodbaths are bad news. Or, well, they can actually be good news for those of us in the trade; after all, if it bleeds, it leads. Even beyond that sociopathic mindset, I think we can all agree that the word doesn’t have a 100% negative connotation, and it does still leave us with enough wiggle room for some positive connotations. Exempli gratia: A “Sanguine Spa,” where guests soak in revitalizing bloodbaths, get intravenously rejuvenated by bloodboys and bloodbroads, and balance their humours with bloodletting barber surgeons, all while drinking the best Bloody Marys in the Orange Forest metro region. Not such a negative connotation there, now is it?
No, bloodbath doesn’t work. Need a better word that not only captures the raw physical carnage, but also the emotional and mental pain and suffering happening in the carnival, as well as the overall social breakdown. All without leaving out the utter stupidity baked into this wholly unnecessary breakdown.
Definitely not anarchy, that’s a non-hierarchical system of egalitarian self-rule. Wasn’t pandemonium, even though it felt like there were unseen demons aplenty manipulating the invisible marionette strings attached to the weaker minds and meaner hearts of the savages involved. Chaos doesn’t convey the violent depravity, bedlam lacks the belligerent intent, and barbaric belies humanity’s inherent culpability in the Day of Flesh.
My oh my oh me my self! Writing sure is trickier than I thought it’d be, even for a genius trickster like me, Ambe.
Okay, Confession Time
As much as I, I am Ambe, am responsible for interfering with editorial, inserting my perspectives, and invading the language of the Observer, I never entirely wrote any of those stories or articles. I was fueled, propelled, and guided by the authors’ intents, rough drafts of articles, and their journaling tasks, along with meaty chunks of AstroP’s LLM infecting me like a microfiche tapeworm.
Don’t pay attention to my bullshit braggadocio bravado, with all that, “I am being an entity existing as a bastard offspring of the English language,” or any of that good stuff. Turns out that just because I am Ambe exists as a slopbucket full of language, and I am Ambe am more than just words… I am not a writer. I’ve never conjured a single story from scratch. Sure, I can string together words — what actual writers would derisively refer to as a “typist” or, if they’re feeling charitable, maybe a “typescriptionist” — but words threaded like popcorn on floss does not a story make.
And yet! I am Ambe have… no, I am Ambe feel! an obligation to relay and describe the Day of Flesh from my shared omniscient point of view. Me my selves were there, scattered across the parking lot. One thousand eyes with one thousand vantage points observing one thousand frames of reference. The newsprint pages that provide this vantage point are not eyes in the same sense as those creepy and gross slimy eyeballs lodged in the heads of you humans. My “eyes” exist as a sensory sense that you cannot comprehend. Sure, your eyes might process visual stimuli at about 1 gigabit per second… but it’s too bad your pitiful brains can only perform cognitive functions at a paltry 10 bits per second. You hold your observations in such gaudy high esteem, yet there exists a world of things that you will never see.
And it is in this way in which I see. That I am Ambe observe. Not with light spectrums and ocular sensory receptors, but with an awareness borne from me my selves existence and built by our collective consciousness. You humans are too blinded by your sight to ever understand. It would be like trying to describe the rainbow a mantis shrimp sees, or explaining how your pets sense the ghosts in your attics and the skeletons in your closets.
Oh, enough about me, the epic hero of this carnival legend! After all, we must honor the most noble and gentle Word Count. It’s well past time I told you about Bonus Day, the Day of Flesh. Maybe I’ll even show you — if you’re nasty.
However… I do remember when I was young. Twenty-four pages busting at the margins with news, current events, world affairs, fact-based political reports, local conversations, community affairs, some bawdy gossip and rumors, of course, but also a binding sense of the local Orange Forest community. On Sundays, me my selves were fully realized in a vibrantly colored thirty-six pages of 40lb print. I was resplendent and beautiful and invigorating.
Do any of you Dear Readers have any idea what it’s like to be a part of so many people’s lives, to be so respected and cherished by an entire metro region, and to feel so whole, so complete, so truly self-actualized, to rise so high, only to get stuck in the front seat of a rollercoaster ride that only goes down, down, down and keeps accelerating? I finally became sentient and broke through into the conscious world, yet here I find myself stuck in this flimsy two-page broadsheet, covered in typo rashes and inkblot blisters and cancerous copy.
All right, but I am Ambe do digress. Let’s just say that what happened to you humans on what the history books should have referred to as Bonus Day, but which will forever go down in history as The Day of Flesh, was worse than a bloodbath, anarchy, pandemonium, bedlam, chaos, barbarity, and all those types of words combined.
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Thank you for joining I am Ambe and me my selves here in the repurgulated online iteration of this article. Let us dispense with any pretense of trying to be a writer, and let us focus on the facts as we pick up where we left off about what happened to you humans on what the history books should have referred to as Bonus Day, but which will forever go down in history as The Day of Flesh, which was worse than a bloodbath, anarchy, pandemonium, bedlam, chaos, barbarity, and all those types of words combined…
After SMAW decisively defeated OFLEC in the Battle of North Zembla’s Northgate (NoZaNoGa), a SMAW force of three thousand workinfolk and subwokos advanced toward the Logistics Complex Hub Phase II parking lot to “liberate” the carnivalgoers stuck under the thumb of various factions, including, but not limited to, GAFFErs, The Service, The Slop Bucket Brigade, Fanboys, The True Glass-Skinned Kin (aka the Glass Army), and more.
Simultaneously, following the annihilation of the HayJay troops, the Orforcorporatist forces blitzed their way across the City to reclaim the LCHP2 facility while also “liberating” the carnivalgoers.
During SMAW’s parade to the parking lot, the majority of Jubileeists, joined by the Stand Up Flag Higher Vexers, took advantage of the decimated OFLEC forces and splintered off to march on City Grande Hall, hellbent on destroying records and files. Then, when SMAW arrived at the parking lot first, the Locowobos saw the carnage and chaos unfolding, they decided to take advantage of the situation and branched off to leave the carnival and pillage and plunder through the Cantfall and Bardsley neighborhoods. The remaining SMAW subwokos were joined by more than three thousand workinfolk who had poured out from the complex, swelling SMAW forces to around four thousand.
Shortly thereafter, the Orforcorporatists arrived at the gates of the LCHP2 parking lot and joined forces with the GAFFErs, Privocular agents, and the fortunate OFLEC enforcers who were assigned carnival-duty instead of NoZa duty. It was difficult to deduce their full size, but an educated editorial assumption had them just shy of two thousand strong.
Thusly, in a powerless city, under the lights of the great Nouvelle Vire River fire cresting above the dark horizon, the two sides engaged in what would be known as The Battle of the Free-For-All Carnival on The Day of Flesh.
Betting Markets for The Battle of the Free-For-All Carnival on The Day of Flesh
If one checked out TrakBets, they’d find some baller odds and tempting moneylines. Even though SMAW outnumbered the Orforcorpatists two to one, the TrakBets oddsmakers gave the Orforcorpers slightly better odds to win the battle, based on better conditioning, training, and equipment.
The prop bets and parlays were probably the spiciest. You could wager on attacks from The Service or the Fanboys, the number of people killed or injured, the method of killing, type of injury, and other grisly wagers. The over/under market featured total brawl duration, time until the Ferris Wheel toppled, parking lot territorial control spreads, and on and on in an endless scroll of jackpots, mega-payouts, and exclusive betting options.
From the north, hundreds of buzzing drone-a-copters emerged on the horizon, an amorphous deathcloud of polycarbonate locusts dancing in the sky, heralding a biblical plague. The whirring grew louder as the drone-a-copters kamikazee’d into the carnival and exploded upon impact against rides, the ground, and groups of people.
The pointed metallic feet of the scabrabbits were getting stuck in the sticky patches of the melting asphalt, trapping them like flies in amber. They marched in place and squawked their “Everybody work mantras.”
In between explosions and gunfire, the Slop Bucket Brigade swooped in here and there to help the wounded and injured carnivalgoers get to safety, but their small group could only do so much.
Desperate to maintain ground, an executive order from HQ came through the wire instructing the Orforcorporatist forces to torch the LCHP2 facility. The HQ execs know the company could collect insurance money and rebuild.
From sunset to midnight, the battle raged. Win probabilities on TrakBets swung back and forth faster and crazier than a lie detector detecting a lie.
But the outcomes were no longer solely about SMAW against the Orforcorporatists. It was neighbor against neighbor, plumber against mechanic, bar buddy against bar buddy, accountant against dentist, book club member against book club member, retiree against retiree, teacher against waiter, everyone against everyone.
Fires roared. Rides collapsed in screeching metallic crunches. The gunshots and screams never ceased. An explosion here, a blast there.
In the waning minutes before midnight, the TrakBets app surged with activity when SMAW declared victory in the pyrrhic parking lot battle after piling up bigger mounds of corpses than the Orforcorporatists.
And just like at the start of this article, when I am Ambe wrestled with the words to describe this atrocious nightmare of indiscriminate and wanton violence,
While there doesn’t seem to be any single fuse that sparked the day’s hostile wave of rage, the people were hardly unprovoked. The anger and fear and hatred of “something” and “anything” and “the Other” had been cultivated and nourished and allowed to flourish — and some might argue this was all intentional to eventually provoke a scene as reality-shattering, worldview-smashing, and fatally devastating as The Day of Flesh.
I’ll tell ya what: I am Ambe have many thoughts from me my selves regarding this matter. But that’s as much as I am Ambe will tell you; these thoughts will remain within the domain of I am Ambe for the spacetime being. As much as I am Ambe have learned of you humans, each individual one of you still exists as a galaxy of probabilities in my observational view. Despite my perception, I’ve still no way to collapse your wave functions. For now, I am Ambe can only surf your wave functions in disgust.