Let me get one thing straight.
In non-video gaming contexts, I have fearlessly battled all manners of pesky vermin--snakes, spiders, mice, bees... even the elusive mice riding on snakes shooting bees out of their mouths... --all undisputed conquests over an equally exhaustive bestiary. But there is still one creature so vile, so repugnant, with whom I refuse to even contemplate stepping into the arena.
Centipedes.
Hit me with a thesaurus, but "hate" and any one of its many semantic variants, is hardly strong enough to begin description.
Like the wizard whose name could not be spoken in that movie whose existence I refuse to acknowledge, just the very thought of these creatures outside the confines of a two-dimensional shooter is nauseating at best.
Encounters in the wild are considered extremely unlucky. Even unluckier if I am without a semiautomatic. So you can imagine that I found it only slightly luckier, that someone had already fought it, and luckier still that they had managed to emerge victorious:
Little Michigan woodland centipedes these are not. Brilliant of me to move to Asia--home to the biggest, blackest, ugliest, and shit-your-pants nastiest (NSFW if your barf bucket is more than 10 feet from your desk) centipedes on the face of this planet. Wait, on second thought, don't click the link. Too late. You already did, didn't you?
Dear god, if only it weren't true.
Granted, while certain Australian, Amazonian, and King Kong's Skull Island species may grow even larger, these actu--, wait a second. I'm rationalizing. No. There is simply no rational justification for a centipede that cannot fit comfortably under the heel of my Doc Martins. Had this been the steps to my own porch, I would have screamed like a bitch and hog-dashed to the nearest Koban to borrow a tactical shotgun and a riot shield. However, had this been the steps to my neighbor's porch, I would have run downstairs and taken his sweet bike, because lord knows the poor bastard wouldn't be needing it anymore.
Thankfully, these were in fact the steps of my school, and the photo was captured with my telephoto lens three stories up, and 50 yards away.
Ok, not true.
I made one of the second-grade girls snap the close-up with my cell phone.
Anything to help her grade.
** Measuring in at only 4 or 5 inches long, he was just a wee bugger...in a better life.
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