HYPER ALERT ×2000 DO OR DESTRUCTION NOW IS THE TIME FOR FATE REVALATIONS DESTINY SUPER PUZZLE COMPILATION

The short version

We—Lily Zone and Zoë Sparks, a mid-30s trans woman couple who work as Nuovo-award-winning independent game developers, plus our very sweet middle-aged cat Big Boy—are looking for a short-term place to stay, mainly in the Pittsburgh area, by April 1st, 2026, and ideally a bit sooner, while we search for more permanent housing. We’re willing to pay $300/week and we’ll be looking for more permanent housing full-time. The situation we’re in right now is highly unusual and demanding and securing short-term lodging as soon as we can would help us immensely. If you’re interested, please contact us right away via email at zoe@spinnylights.net or on Bluesky via @sp1nnylights.bsky.social (DMs are open).

For more permanent housing, we’re seeking to rent a 1-bedroom apartment or similar (we’d consider living with roommates, in a co-op, etc.), with rent in the $800–$1,100 range, in the Pittsburgh area, ideally in close walking distance to essential shops. We can pay several months of the lease up front if desired (probably up to 6) and we have someone who’s willing to co-sign. If you know of a good opportunity, please let us know via the above.

Because Zoë has a neurological condition that makes driving risky, and Lily doesn’t know how to drive, we also could really use help moving our stuff. If you live in the area, have a car or truck, and want to give us a hand when the time comes, please get in touch as well. We don’t have that much here, but it might take a few trips in a normal-sized sedan; we’re planning to put most of it in our storage unit and take only the essentials to wherever we’re staying. We’d be willing to pay $100 or take you out to dinner afterwards.

Regarding areas outside of Pittsburgh: We’re not dead-set on staying here; rents have skyrocketed, and without a corresponding increase in housing quality. Many of the people we used to know here have left (or we might not need to post something like this). If you’re in another locale and are interested in any of the above, the most significant hurdle we face in order to move a farther distance are that Zoë has health insurance through Medicaid via a provider local to the area, and rather complicated healthcare needs that might be a challenge to arrange quickly even with health insurance (and prohibitively expensive without it). We also would need to figure out a way to move everything we have, most of which is in a storage unit. If you’re interested and have ideas for how we could clear those hurdles, feel free to get in touch.

A bit about us

Hi! We’re Lily Zone and Zoë Sparks, and this is our cat Big Boy as well.

We (Lily and Zoë) met in 2015, fell in love, moved in together, and formed a game development partnership that we’ve kept up ever since. Our best-known games include Crypt Underworld, Crypt Worlds GOLD (Lily made the original edition of Crypt Worlds in 2013), Memory Card (which won the 2022 Nuovo award), ~Song of Homunculus~ (which won runner up the same year), The Virtual Museum of Dead Wifery, and Gilgamesh II. We’ve also done over 50 freelance projects for other developers and the general public, including the aquarium scene in Yodak’s Melting Encyclopedia and graphics and audio work for some upcoming games that we have to keep under wraps right now.

Other than that, Lily has decades of experience as a visual artist in both analog and digital media, and Zoë is a classically-trained composer. We do writing and design for our games together. Zoë also loves mathematics and computer programming; Lily is something of a “Film Buff”. When we’re not discussing game ideas, we like to talk together about history, politics, philosophy, psychology, literature, and biology.

What we’re looking for

At minimum, we don’t really need more than a couple of couches, a place to put a card table with our computers, and internet access, but of course we’d like to be able to sleep in a bed together and it would be nice to have our own room, if those are things you can provide. We can’t afford to be too picky though right now. Zoë has frequent migraines, so it’s good if she can go somewhere dark and quiet or she’ll be having a pretty hard time when they happen; she has medication for them but they’re challenging to completely control.

Other than that, we have a cat named Big Boy. He’s a very sweet cat that loves to snuggle and doesn’t bite or scratch, and has been living with us since 2017 through all kinds of thick and thin. He can be a little skittish around people he doesn’t know at first and tends to stay close to us. Around other cats, he’s generally friendly as long as they’re friendly (he grew up a stray in a cat-heavy neighborhood in Philly and seems to have had the full amount of amount of time with his mother and litter, so he’s pretty well cat-socialized; he came out of nowhere in that neighborhood and decided we were his people). We’ll bring toys and a scratching post for him so we can keep him from going at your furniture—he likes to shred cardboard cat scratchers more than anything else. He’s very, very, very cute, also, so you’ll get to experience that if we stay with you.

What’s going on

Lily’s corner

we’re lily and zoe, a trans woman couple who’ve been together more than ten years- we’ve been through all sorts of escapades together, but we are facing possibly the largest emergency we’ve ever experienced, and after more than two months of apartment hunting we’re at a loss what to do.

our lease is up on apr 1st. we’ve been busting ass but every option we’ve pursued has hit a dead end- even without a car i’ve pushed myself to tour as many places as i can, from apartment finders and social media groups, but pittsburgh is all slumlords and high rents now. even trying to apply to the cheapest places the applications have been out of control, they want 10 years residential history, your cats weight, this impossible feeling process just so you can get turned down anyway after you’ve spent 100 bucks applying. we’ve even considered just staying in an extended stay america as a last ditch effort but most of them won’t accept cats or are way out of town unfortunately.

now not being able to find housing has been hard enough, but right as i was about to start applying places a couple weeks ago, our landlord decided to start a totally pointless and cruelly punitive eviction against us just to spite us. i want to state, in pennsylvania even if the hearing goes in your favor, it’s never expunged from your record. neither of us has ever been evicted, or ever had legal trouble- but we’re worried it’ll be almost impossible to find anywhere that will accept us despite the hearing going in our favor. now, she’s decided to move back in only a week before our lease is up, to harass us and the other couple living here. she has only been here one other time, and it was absolute hell. i could write a whole book about her misdeeds but more than anything i just want us to be able to get out, and get back to working on our art projects. we are so desperate to get out before she does anything else, and i will be eternally grateful if any one can help.

Zoë’s corner

As you might imagine with our sort of livelihood, our lives together have been quite an adventure, and the situation we’re in right now is no exception.

On the one hand, we’re in the last week of a year lease, renting a bedroom in a larger house, that has been a constant source of unbelievable stress for us. One of the other tenants here, a really sweet guy whom we became friends with, felt so bad about our experience here that two weeks ago he and his mom surprised us with a us a significant and deeply touching amount of financial help in finding a better place to live.

On the other hand, the source of our intense stress has not relented and in fact is more intense then ever right now, to the point that we’ve had to divide our efforts. Lily has been trying to find a new place for us to live while I’ve has been trying to help us weather the existing storms. Sadly, we haven’t found a place in the last week that seems worth comitting to, and although we’ve managed to get through the recent hazards okay, more loom on the horizon. At this point it’s vital that we simply do a great job cleaning up after ourselves here and get out as fast as possible, both for the sake of fending off another serious threat in the near future and coping with one that’s just began.

It’s incredibly sink-or-swim; whatever happens between now and the end of the month will determine if our lives end up a complete train wreck for the time being, or we end up in a nice living situation where we can finally relax after so many months of heartstopping stress and have enough room to move in our lives that we can finally focus on a new large-scale game. That’s why we’re urgently looking for short-term lodging we can use to buy ourselves more time to search for longer-term housing—we want to both make the best of the help we’ve been given and manage to come out okay from everything happening right now.

Some recent events give a good microcosm of what our experience has been like living here. On March 11th, we received notice of an eviction hearing our landlord filed against us, with a claim that we owe over two thousand dollars in unpaid rent. Sounds bad, right? Well, the initial hearing was two days ago, and I wrote a point-by-point description of what happened on the same day. Here’s my account, very lightly edited:

The hearing was exciting and rather demanding. Another landlord [our landlord] knows showed up in her stead, a tough-looking guy with something of a Yinzer accent. He first tried to argue that we were far behind on rent and needed to be evicted before the next month came around or it would get too expensive. I immediately showed our records of timely rent payments for the entire duration of the lease, while pointing out that our lease is ending at the end of this month. The magistrate, a grandfatherly fellow with a white lampshade moustache, was a bit shocked by this (“What do you mean? It ends this month?”).

[Our landlord]’s representative guy then backpedaled and said that actually the amount was about utilities. The magistrate turned to me and asked if we really were that behind on utility payments, and I said, “There is a longstanding dispute between us over the amount. The plaintiff has never shown evidence to us that we owe that amount.” The magistrate turned to [our landlord]’s rep and asked him how much he thought we owed precisely, and he stammered a bit and then quoted an amount over a thousand dollars less than [our landlord] was asking for, followed by “or something.” The magistrate glared at him and said, “You can’t just guesstimate. This is a court of law.”

I then continued: “Beyond that, the plaintiff sent us this letter,” and showed a letter [our landlord] sent promising to drop the claim and not pursue legal action against us if we move out on time and leave the house in good shape. The magistrate read it in a state of deeper shock (“She signed and dated it…Feb. 26th??” to which I said “I have no idea why we’re here.”)

[Our landlord]’s rep then claimed that we had never communicated with [our landlord] about whether or not we’re moving out, which her proposal of us, thereby making it invalid. I showed records of conversations I’d had with [our landlord] about that and the letter specifically (once last week, once at the beginning of the month literally five days before she filed against us) and about when we’re moving out in general as far back as last September.

At this point her rep was stammering about how he didn’t know about any of this and was red in the face, and after the magistrate finished looking at my evidence he turned to [our landlord]’s rep and said, “So, if they satisfy these conditions you’ll withdraw?” Her rep said, “Yeah…yeah, we’ll withdraw…” and then immediately left the courtroom.

The magistrate turned to us and said that we should return [next month] with evidence that we’ve held up our side of [our landlord]’s proposal. I asked what evidence he would expect and he said, “Photos, a short video, that sort of thing.” He added, “That is, if you think they’ll contest it,” and I said, “I have no idea what they’ll do.” He chuckled a bit, I wrote down the date and time, and then we went on our way.

I’m really glad I had a sense of the right evidence to bring today, or we might have been in serious trouble. I get the feeling it would’ve been quite possible to fully sink their case that day on the basis of the lack of evidence on their side, but using the letter to resolve the proceedings seemed more predictable and efficient and I wanted to hold onto my momentum and control of the room. I wasn’t expecting the magistrate to ask us to come back though; I thought he might just dismiss the case right away because it was filed prematurely per the letter.

Still, I feel like we could be in a much worse position then we are. At this point we mainly just have to move out well and document that thoroughly, which I would always strive to do anyway.

If you’re curious, the reason we spoke with our landlord about when we were moving out back in last September was because she told us then that she wanted to sell the house right away and ordered us to leave “ASAP” in the middle of our lease with vague, nonspecific eviction threats. At the time, I was having migraines daily, with strong light and sound sensitivity and preceded by auras which had gotten sometimes severe enough to make it dangerous for me to drive (total unconsciousness, delirium, hemiparesis, obscured vision…resolving in 5–20 minutes typically but hazards for any amount of time while driving). Lily doesn’t know how to drive, so we would have had a hard time complying with our landlord’s demand to leave immediately even if we thought it was reasonable. We also had moved half a year prior and had been really happy about having at least another half a year before we had to do it again.

Our landlord has never forgiven us for not leaving then and has conducted a never-ending campaign of warfare against us ever since. We’ve never encountered a person before that would make such a pointed, week-by-week effort of trying to get at us in one way or another, like a hobby. When I mentioned to her recently that her eviction case against us was not only interfering hugely with our efforts to find a new place and leave but also spuriously tarnishing our otherwise-perfect record, she replied, “You had eight months to move out.”

Thankfully, I finally got to see a neurologist about a month ago, who put me on a new medication that’s actually started helping to bring the frequency of my migraines down some again (her old medication had stopped doing much earlier this year). I’m still having them quite often, but not quite so often that it’s forboding for me to ever go outside, so really in the nick of time we’re comparitively more capable of moving now (although driving is still an issue).

Anyway, that’s part of what’s going on at the moment. Another issue is that our landlord just arrived to move into the house! As Lily said, it was harrowing the one other time she visited, but on top of that we have an active legal case with her regarding the house, we know she’s remarkably dishonest, and we’re in a rather captive and thus vulnerable position. The sooner we can completely remove our things and leave with our responsibilities met, the better. We’re also both genuinely terrified of her on a personal level. As Lily said, we could write a book on her misdeeds, but right now we’re just trying to escape.

Epilogue

Heavy thunder just sounded, and a deluge has begun outside. Everything feels highly spooky here. Still, we are hopeful that maybe our long tribulations are coming to an end; perhaps the rain has arrived to start washing them away. We would be touched if you wanted to be part of that.