Sorry... It seems that no matter how hard I try to make everything right, I'm only making things worse. Nothing is working as it supposed to be, and I'm just ruining my stories and the audience's experience, destroying the channel. I don't want to admit that I'm defeated by AI-generated crap, but reality is bitter and unforgiving... This channel seemed to me as on of the ways to my dream, but it looks like I was way too optimistic and tried to jump over my head... Sorry.

sub pls

And also, a carrier of the super lethal and super virulent disease. The story would even shorter for everyone there.

It depends on where and how the nine year old was brought up. For a city kid you’d likely be right but even granting that there are exceptions. For a country kid the odds are far better. I was raised in Southern California but by rednecks. At age nine I could safely build and tend a smokeless fire, build a shelter and find edible plants and clean water. I knew how to identify and avoid predators, how to build snares and fishing equipment from what grew in the forest, how to clean and cook what I caught. Those same rednecks taught their girls the same skills. Not all learned and practiced equally well of course but all of us were as near to self-sufficient as they could make us. That was long before “preppers” were a thing- I’m 71. It was just how kids were taught back then, and still are in lots of places around this world. When you don’t have modern technology to support you, having our oldest technologies stored in your head is a huge advantage.

@@nikheinNow I’m confused. What does “zero carriers” refer to? Zero chances taken on someone being a carrier, or that non-carriers exist? Did the girl confuse what she had heard with her not being a carrier?

@@markfergerson2145 I guess that's my bad. I should have gone more into the details and left the initial term "index case" in, but I felt that this story should be short and sharp without detailed explanations. The idea is that the father and the girl are carriers of the pathogen but are not sick themselves.

I listened to the story twice before reading these comments. I initially thought that the dust in their ship had been the tiny mosquito thing from the ending, which was bringing the disease. With your stories, you never know- I even considered the possibility that they WERE the mosquitoes/ disease and were pretending to be human, etc etc.

Two more chapters and I will release first big chunk of series compiled together )

Ouch, sorry. I thought I made it low enough... Was OK when I was testing ( My bad.

Thank you!!!

Ergh.... ALL stories on my channel are written by me ) The only thing that changed is narration (and not for all stories yet).

Welcome back, Val.. and you too Nik. The noir style does not have to be limited to classic inner city Private Eye stories. You’re demonstrating that here. This American fan of the Western genre thinks you did pretty good with this one. I can see Clint Eastwood playing Val in the film but his accent and command of Russian syntax (well, to be real, the writers command of Russian syntax) didn’t do him any favors in Firefox. I have never thought to ask if the noir style has any popularity in Slavic countries. From the outside it would seem a good match for the (probably propaganda based) Slavic fatalism. On the other hand fatalism is the conviction that things will go to hell, while noir assumes that things have already gone to hell and can never get better. I’m thinking of the extreme embodied by the character Rohrshach in the Watchmen. Val isn’t quite that far gone. He proved that by pulling a happy ending for the girls out of disaster.

@@markfergerson2145 As always, thank you for the comment! First, I liked your mention of the good ol' Clint, though I stole the juicy phrases for Val from Lee van Cliff's character, Angel Eyes. For me, it was a sort of game within the game-to make this guy not as bad as he was in the movie. Speaking of the popularity of noir in the Slavic countries. It's hard to tell. (by the way, Estonia is not a Slavic country, but after 50 years within the USSR it's pretty complicated now). In a way, you could call it popular, but that's mostly post-soviet popularity because before, it was barely ever translated, with very few exceptions. It's an interesting question, by the way. Worth exploring more. As for the Val, there's one thing I want to mention. He is not just a tired P.I. working on some cases to support his income. He is also a veteran and former prisoner of war with (probably) heavy PTSD problems. And the world he is living in is not that bright either, something like Europe right after WW2 - still bearing a lot of scars from the catastrophe. The same goes for my Backwater Station series, by the way, and all this Human-Ullerian conflict metaverse.

There is ) Here www.youtube.com/@-bibliolab