All it takes is one slip for all of us... no matter how much rep we have.

Bump.

Not in
but +1 for the giveaway anyway and good luck to those who enter.

Bump.

bump

bump

bump

Bump.

Since there are no participants for this giveaway, I'd like to change my mind and be in if that's alright.

A Hawaiian Horror Story (true story with fantasy elements)

During my first night camping in Waipio Valley something strange happened and I still can't quite make head or tail of it.
At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up hearing voices and quick footsteps rushing around my tent.
At first I thought it must have been some local kids trying to play a prank on me but there was this indescribable sense of lethal threat in the air. Here I was, with nothing but a small pocket knife from Wal-Mart, and somebody or something sinister was out there. The sense of threat was so strong it disabled the fight & flight instincts, with nothing but fright remaining. Pure fear is something so rare in daily life that I had completely forgotten what it feels like. Thanks for the reminder!

Suddenly, the walls of my tent were being pushed in and squeezed, making me feel like beans in a taco shell. What a crappy way to go, being suffocated in your spiffy brand new tent?! But even now, I simply couldn't move.
Surely I wasn't suffering from cabin fever/paranoid delusions à la 'The Shining' on my third night in a tent?
At this point, I finally came to realize it was a nightmare and when I really woke up, everything returned to normal. I went outside to check, no trace of anyone nearby except for some wild horses (outside the fenced area) and the usual critters that make noise at night, crickets etc.

I went back to sleep but woke up again a couple hours later. This time, a humanoid about 1.5 feet tall (45 cm) came walking through the walls of my tent. Yes, right through the walls. the little guy had black eyes like one of Brian Froud's pixies, his skin was brown and he was wearing a simple loincloth. As if that wasn't weird enough, he started to speak without opening his mouth, the voice finding its way directly into my mind: 'We know you are here, WE CAN SEE YOU.'
I tried to tell the little fellow that I had permission from the land owners to camp here but then he kind of floated out of my tent.

Again there were voices and sounds all around my tent, but this time they weren't scary sounds. I could hear the laughter and chatter of children, it seemed as if i was in the middle of a lively village. However, as soon as i opened my eyes everything was gone. It was already early morning, the sun had just come out. I closed my eyes again and as soon as I did so, the party was back on. Laughter, footsteps, voices, you name it. And again, as soon as I opened my eyes everything vanished in a split second. Puzzled, I decided to get up and start my day.

Obviously everything was just a dream, even if an unusually vivid one. It's a common occurrence that your brain uses sounds from outside and mixes them into your dream soundscape. In this case, the wild horse's clip-clop being a good ingredient. As for the tent walls being pushed in, that could have been a recall of my camping experience at Green Sand Beach where the wind almost crushed my tent. All in all, I've had weirder dreams so i didn't spend any further thought on this and went about my day.

In the evening, I met some locals and told them the story expecting them to have a good laugh. to my surprise, the response was this: 'Ah, you were visited by the Menehune. that's pretty cool, most people can't see them.'

...the Mene-what?? apparently, those little fellows I saw are the Hawaiian equivalent of Irish leprechauns. Little people, mischievous and known to play pranks on humans but basically harmless.
And when I told the story to the property owner, he just smiled and said 'this place has a lot of mana, that's why we bought the property.'
Mana means 'power', and it's also the name of his son who drove me here.
As for the lively sounds around my tent, I was told the valley had been populated by thousands of people during the old days, so perhaps I had seen a vision of the past.
The fact that not a single person seemed to doubt my story was almost stranger than the story itself.

One of the locals named Noa said that maybe the Menehune came to see me 'because I'm an artist', and that they played pranks on me because I didn't announce my arrival and greet them so they came to 'greet' me.
I see, should have registered with the local Menehune office...good to know for future reference.
Anyway, Noa said I should make a small offering and place it outside my tent before going to sleep. He took a cocoa fruit, wrapped it in palm leaves Hawaiian style and handed it to me. Humbled by this generosity, I profusely thanked and walked back to my solitary haunted campsite.

I'm a rational thinking person with no superstitious beliefs but apparently my subconscious mind isn't quite so rational, and it's that part of the brain that works the night shift so let's try this offering thing!
Of course, I didn't have any strange dreams the following night, and the offering was still there in the morning. When I told that to another local the next day, he said: 'maybe the Menehune didn't want the cocoa, if you'd had any beer i'm sure it would have been gone.'

That was great and I loved it. Well done! :D

EDIT: First star, woohoo! Good to see that again.

Some quality giveaway mate. Not in and +1

Jumped to say that I think that some giveaways have some serious hard requirements to enter this days.
I bet that, and you heard it here first from me, not so in the distant future we will have people requesting stuff like this in order to participate in giveaways:

1) Write a novella that focuses on the hardships of a modern social-economic class during the crisis of war in occupied france.
2) Start and finish a doctor's degree first in class.
3) Enter Guinness word book of records in any category.
4) Win an argument in the internet.
5) Solve global warming.

:D

CONTEST CLOSED

Winner is: awalterj!

check your PM's :D

Congratz, awalterj. It was a nice read! ^^

REDVWIN

Congrats to the winner and thank you for the giveaway!

+1! :D

Thank you Lester, what a pleasant way to start my day! It was a fun task to fulfill and I'm very happy to finally try this game and increase my subpar platforming skillls. It's a genre I rediscovered about half a year ago and I even got myself a controller a couple weeks ago. Some of those space shooters like Stargunner are too twitchy for me so I'm more into the relaxing puzzle platforming stuff and Limbo seems to fit that category. Will post a review as soon as I finish the game, thanks again!