Termination Shock is a new role-playing game from Greg Stolsey, chronicling your adventures as an ordinary human rescued from hellish war by disorganized aliens.

What will you do as a refugee and a strange Cosmos?

Cling to your past?

Or find a purpose among inscrutable aliens.

Will you just get by?

Or will you redefine humanity in the eyes of a million extraterrestrials?

The choice is yours in this new tabletop game on Kickstarter now. The State Board, Bodd, episode 658, Beatrix released by Shane Unk Garrity. Oh, Hello and welcome to Escape Pod your weekly science fiction podcast.

I'm Vivia, your host for this episode.

Our story this week is Beatrix released by Shannon K. Garrity.

This is an Escape Pot Original.

Shannon Kay Garrity is a writer and artist best known for the web comics Narbononic and Skin Horse.

Her prose fiction has appeared in publications including Strange Horizons, Light Speed,

Travel Cast, and The Unidentified Flying Objects anthologies.

She lives in Berkeley with a cat and two men of varying sizes.

Your narrator is Catherine Inskip.

Catherine is assistant editor for Cast of Wonders. is the universe with worlds of her own. You can find her stories at Motherboard,

Cast of Wonders, The Dune Steve, and other magazines. Now get ready to dust off your taxonomy skills, because it's story time.

Beatrix released by Shannon K. Garrity, narrated by Catherine Innskip.

The lichen in the cupboard has at last begun to sing. It sings in two-part harmony, Belcanto, a saying

a faultless duet with itself. What a strange and lovely fairy.

I am convinced more and more that my earlier theory was correct,

that the lichen is a bipartate organism comprising both fungus and an algae or bacterium.

...