Barovia does not kill you all at once.
It lets the mountain do the arguing.

Sessions Twenty Four and Twenty Five began with the kind of fragile optimism that only survives when everyone is too tired to argue with it. We had stew at the Wizards of Wine. We had candles. We had a plan. Urihorn had no shadow, having traded it for a mist-token in one of Barovia’s quiet, transactional horrors. Nobody liked that, but nobody said no. That is how corruption enters a party. It doesn’t knock. It waits for exhaustion.

Urihorn returned from the woods riding a mountain lion. Not summoned. Bonded. As if nature itself had decided he was still worth something. We left the winery and headed for Mount Ghakis, following a Tarokka prophecy that had been gnawing at us for weeks. The Amber Temple waited above the clouds. So did whatever it takes from you.

At Tsolenka Pass, we found green fire burning in a gatehouse, an unnatural barrier that incinerated anything that touched it. Beyond it stood a lonely tower and a narrow bridge swallowed by fog. It looked like a checkpoint designed by something that hates hope.

Two vrocks descended from the sky. Vulture demons with wings like funeral banners. Their screams stole our breath. Their spores stole our bodies. The fight was brutal and fast and unfair.

Traxidor, our cleric, fell.

No speech. No miracle. Just a body on cold stone while the wind kept moving.

We cremated him in the green flame because there was nowhere else to put the dead on a mountain that eats people.

We turned back.

On the road to Barovia Village, we tried to save a young woman being taken to Castle Ravenloft. We attacked the guards. We cut her loose. And then the cart ran downhill. Too fast. Too heavy. It went off the road and took her with it. Good intentions do not stop physics in Barovia.

In the village, we found water instead of wine and a new companion, Perlan Goodshadow, a monk with sense enough to listen when the world tells you it is dangerous. We lied to Ismark about his sister Ireena because telling him the truth would have killed him faster than Strahd ever could.

He insisted we return to Vallaki.

The guards wouldn’t let us in, so we climbed the walls like criminals, because that is what heroes become here. We slipped into Lady Wachter’s estate through the basement and were met by rising skeletons. We destroyed them quickly. Not because we were strong. Because we were changed.

Behind a rotating wall, we found a hidden chamber. Five chairs. A pentagram. A room waiting for a meeting we were not meant to attend.

Barovia keeps receipts.
And we are starting to owe it things.

That is where these sessions ended. Not with victory. With a door opening into something patient and hungry.

And the worst part is that none of us is surprised anymore.

I didn’t come to Meshtastic with a plan.

I bought a cheap purple device off Etsy for about fifty-five dollars because I’d heard the word a few times and vaguely understood it meant LoRa mesh messaging. I wasn’t a prepper. I’m not a ham. I didn’t have a scenario in mind. The buy-in was low enough that curiosity won.

I live on the 8th floor in Arlington Heights, with windows facing southeast. From that height, there’s a clear line of sight over a golf course and across low-rise terrain toward the Gaylord MGM. That’s not a metaphor or a thought experiment. It’s just geography. If you’re going to put a radio somewhere, elevation and openness matter.

So I plugged it in and turned it on.

At first, it behaved like a gadget. I paired it with my phone. Sent a few test messages. Watched nodes appear and disappear. It worked, which was reassuring, but nothing about it felt consequential. Traffic was sparse. Most activity looked like people checking in, not routing through.

I left it on.

That turned out to matter more than anything I did deliberately.

Over time, it became clear that Meshtastic doesn’t reward interaction. It rewards presence. Nodes that come and go don’t contribute much beyond their own visibility. Nodes that stay up quietly start to matter in ways that aren’t obvious from the app.

Eventually, I changed the device role from node to router. Not out of altruism, but because the device was stationary, wall-powered, and well-placed. Letting it sleep made no sense. A sleeping radio with good placement is just wasted capacity.

That’s where the friction started.

Router mode changes how the device behaves. Power management becomes aggressive. Bluetooth access becomes opportunistic instead of persistent. From the phone’s perspective, it feels unreliable. From the network’s perspective, it’s doing exactly what it should.

There was a stretch where Bluetooth access felt broken. It wasn’t. The control plane was sleeping while the radio stayed active. Once I connected over USB and adjusted the settings with that in mind, the behavior made sense. Deep sleep off. Bluetooth given more patience. The display left on, because power wasn’t scarce.

Once that was done, the device became boring.

And boring is the goal.

Around the same time, the local Arlington / MeshDC area started showing more consistent LongFast traffic. More ACKs. More multi-hop messages. Nodes sticking around instead of flickering in and out. Not because of anything I personally changed, but because more devices were staying online, placed well, and allowed to just exist.

I chose the handle ABRA. Originally short for Abraham. That felt too personal. Now it’s Abracadabra, which fits better. I connected the node to MQTT so it appears on the global map, which is still quietly astonishing. A little purple radio in a window, visible via the modern web, routing messages it doesn’t need to read.

Most of the coordination, discussion, and culture happens elsewhere anyway. Discord. Reddit. The meta layer. The mesh itself just moves packets.

What I learned wasn’t radio theory or emergency planning. It was simpler.

Meshtastic works best when you stop treating nodes like personal devices and start treating them like infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn’t demand attention. It needs uptime, placement, and restraint.

I didn’t set out to build anything. I just left something on in a good place.

Everything else followed.

This episode of The Chris Abraham Show is an unscripted, exploratory monologue that circles a single question from multiple angles: what happens to large war-oriented systems when they no longer have an obvious external war to fight?

Rather than arguing for or against specific policies, this episode looks at structure, scale, and inertia. For much of modern American history, war has functioned not only as foreign policy but as an organizing principle for labor, industry, logistics, and federal spending. The Global War on Terror normalized enormous budgets, standing emergency authorities, and sprawling institutional ecosystems that extended far beyond the battlefield. Those systems trained people, built careers, created regional dependencies, and locked in expectations about what “normal” government capacity looks like.

As external wars become harder to sustain politically and strategically, the question is not whether those systems disappear, but where they go. In this episode, immigration enforcement is examined not primarily as a moral or partisan issue, but as a systems problem. At scale, mass deportation and detention require transportation networks, facilities, staffing, courts, legal processing, medical care, procurement, and coordination across multiple layers of government. Structurally, it begins to resemble other national mobilization efforts the United States has undertaken during periods of crisis.

The episode introduces the idea of a “deportation industrial complex” to describe the interlocking public and private systems that emerge around large-scale enforcement. This is not presented as a conspiracy or a claim of intent, but as an observation about how large bureaucratic systems behave once they are built. Any apparatus of that size creates economic, political, and institutional incentives for its own continuation, much like the prison system or defense contracting before it.

From there, the conversation turns to the concept of a Domestic War on Terror, or DWOT, as a descriptive framework rather than a declared policy. The logic that governed the Global War on Terror did not vanish when foreign interventions slowed. It internalized. Categories of risk, emergency elasticity, and extraordinary authorities begin to operate inside national borders, often framed as administrative rather than military. The machinery remains largely the same; the theater changes.

The episode also explores how protest, resistance, and public opposition interact with enforcement systems. Rather than assuming resistance always slows expansion, it looks at how visibility and escalation can sometimes become part of the feedback loop that sustains additional capacity. This dynamic is discussed without assigning blame, focusing instead on how systems respond to pressure.

Throughout the episode, real-time statistical queries are used to contextualize fear, risk, and public perception, not to reach definitive conclusions but to illustrate how narratives form around numbers.

This is not a call to action or a warning. It is an attempt to describe a recurring pattern in American governance: large systems tend to persist, normalize, and adapt rather than shut down. Temporary measures become permanent. Emergency budgets become baselines.

Recorded as Season 10, Episode 2 of The Chris Abraham Show, this episode is intentionally exploratory and reflective, meant to be heard as a thinking-out-loud session rather than a polished argument.