Principia Discordia

With the recent failures of bitcoin, issues with cryptocurrency are becoming increasingly apparent, we see that a new system of trade is required.

Based on the economic theories of an anomyous Arabian scholar, we are proud to introduce the Necronomicoin. Our current understanding is that Necronomicoins are mined by way of occult ceremonies involving appeals to and bargains with Long Dead Gods, who are responsible for maintaining the Necronomicoin Ledger. The coins themselves take the form of unique sigils which can be charged to varying strengths to facilitate transactions of fractions of Necronomicoins.

This metaphysical ledger means that Necronomicoins can be traded almost without a trace, if the remains of those sacrificed during the trading ritual are destroyed.

Necronomicoin is intended to move quickly. The supply is regulated by Ancient Ones who keep inflation in check by responding to immodest mining requests by turning the occultist inside out and making their cohorts eat them. Hoarders of the coin find their grip on reality slipping. Unnameable creatures slither out of and into imperceptible corners in their paracentral vision. Some report that early stages of hoarding are regulated with the money literally burning a hole in their pocket, with the sigil being branded onto the upper thigh while the hoarder sleeps.

ITT: We share facts and our enthusiasm regarding Necronomicoin.

"Jesus, what is that smell? The old devil never made it to the bathroom?"

"No, sir, it would seem he was pretty self sufficient even up til the end."

"Well then, fuck, how long has he been here? Did he void himself when he finally let go?"

"Void. Huh. In a sense."

"What the hell are you on about, son?"

"The old man was a bit of a...hoarder, it would seem."

"Hoarder? Like in the TV show? I don't think so. Look at this place – it's spotless."

"You haven't seen the bedroom yet. We think he was squirreling money away old-style. In the mattress."

"That's not a crime. Don't trust banks, myself. Not since '08. Alright, show me the mattress."

"See that's the thing. The man wasn't hoarding dollars. It was a bit more of a...psychic currency. Necronomicoins."

"Look, stop mincing around and point me to the bedroom. I want to know what it is that they brought me here for."

"If you insist, sir. It's just down the hall here."

"FUCK! FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?"

"That would be the, uh, the mattress, sir. It appears to have grown a gnashing, gibbering beak-like portal into a timeless and disordered nether realm. Best as we can tell. The smell is, uhm, the smell is the fragmented ruination of the deceased man's soul, rotting corporeally. I wouldn't get too close to the abyssal plane, if I were you. We think we lost Johnson an hour ago, but we can't be certain because, well, he seems to have ceased to have ever existed. What's left of him isn't as much of a memory as it is an insubstantial imprint of a human being in the backs of our minds. That we can't seem to either access or disregard. Possibly for the remainder of our mortal existences. Which reminds me, sir, a few of the officers are going to need some personal time for counseling and, uh, coming to terms with their insignificance against impossibly vast horrors."

"Fuck. Fuck, alright. Alright, let's just do our fucking jobs. Let's do the fucking jobs we're here to do. Where are these Necronomicoins?"

"We, uh, we don't know, sir. We can't rule out theft of course, but without a physical anchor to our dimension they tend to drift back to the First Bank of R'lyeh."

"Right, right. What about you, son. How are you holding up?"

"I've been scratching for the last few hours. Scratching until I bleed. I think I doubt my own flesh, sir. Otherwise I am prepared to investigate."

"Good man. Good young man. Here, take a plug of this."

"Thank you, sir."

"One more thing."

"Of course."

"Why did they call Financial Crimes?"

"I don't know. I don't think they knew who else to call."

FCSD-NC008

From the Office of Interim Director Jamieson - Financial Crimes: Special Division

Hendriks, situation with new facility has been resolved, we're back on track.

Have copied you in on my authorizing an investigation into abnormal market activity in your location.

You have clearance to dispatch an Auditor if the situation warrants.

I will leave it to your discretion.

They wondered what would happen to interest rates. What happened was interest rates dropped to zero across the board. No one wants to pique the interest of an elder currency.

"So I'm lucky. I'm lucky and I get to go home tonight."

"Uh huh."

"And when I get in the door I get to kiss my wife. Say hello."

"Uh huh."

"Except she's going to ask me 'How was work?' and the beauty, she'll honestly want to know."

"Uh huh."

"And I'll say 'Work.'"

"Yep."

"Except when I say 'work' I usually mean I had to threaten some piss poor accountant with tax evasion charges, or maybe my boss was riding me about one of my cases. That's what 'work' meant before tonight."

"Uh huh."

"Tonight, I'll say 'work' and it'll actually mean, it'll actually mean I saw a man unmade. That the carbon in his hair, and the dust he left behind throughout his 34 years, no longer exists in our reality. It'll mean that I have a vague idea of a screaming and sobbing man, like an ethereal splinter, occupying my head. 'Work' now carries with it that I left my senior partner dribbling after he stared into a living nothingness and became omniscient. Omniscient – all knowing. He told me the growth rate of the seven trillionth longest blade of grass in Africa and then he screamed and screamed and I don't know if he'll ever stop again. How could he? He has all the knowledge of a god but he's as helpless as you or I."

"Ignorance is bliss."

"It isn't."

"Look, pal, it's just a-"

"No. No, don't say it's just an expression. Don't fucking say it's just an expression."

"Hey. Hey, alright take it easy."

"See these scratches on my arm?"

"Christ, pal, those look bad."

"They are. And you don't know what caused them. Could be I got mauled by a guy's dog on the job. Could be I had to hold back a widow and she clawed me while I stopped her from seeing the most gruesome shit you can think of. Could be I did them myself. You're completely ignorant to how they got there. So tell me:  Do you feel particularly blissful?"

"Okay. Okay I'm sorry. Listen, I think you'd better go. Don't worry about the drink, it's on the house."

"No I wouldn't feel right doing that. Let me pay you – what's it come to?"

"Let's call it four."

"Not a problem. Hey – do you accept Necronomicoins?"

Niiiiiice.

You have just put me in danger of having an idea.

Oshitoshitoshit




Pleaseletinspirationhitmybrainbecauseiwanttoplay

At first i was like :crankey: because of the horrible pun and then i was  :eek: at the awesomeness.

"Mr..."

"Robowski. It's on the damn sign, spook."

"Spook. Ah, you think we're with the CIA. I can understand your confusion. No, I'm agent Sherman and this is agent Harrington. We're with the United States Secret Service."

"Ain't nobody in here killing presidents, so you gentlemen are free to see yourselves to the door."

"Ah. You aren't aware of the original intent of the USSS, then. I see. Mr. Robowski, part of what we do is investigate financial crimes. Agent Harrington here likes to call it 'Protecting the deceased presidents.'"

"I pay my damn taxes, so if you boys ain't drinking, again I direct you to the exit."

"Mr. Robowski. Have you ever known a Necronomicoin? We have reason to believe they've been used here as tender? Odd. Cash only establishment accepting such esoteric payment."

"Aw hell, I didn't mean to, Mister. I just wanted that nut out of my bar. I'da turned down the money if I knew what was going to happen."

"And what did happen?"

"I ain't likely to talk about that."

"Mr. Robowski, I assure you, you aren't in any danger from us."

"Ain't you I'm worried about, pal."

"Just hand us the Necronomicoins and we'll be on our way. Here – take this crisp new bill. Old Ben Franklin here is hot off the press. Ever had money still warm from the mint? Quite a beautiful thing."

"Afraid I can't do that. Not a fair trade."

"Ah. The psychic value, is it? Mr. Robowski, money doesn't have to be metaphysical to be worth something to someone. This hundred dollar bill, it does what for you? Pays a fraction of your electricity? Maybe gets you a new pair of boots? Fills up your gas tank a few times? But toss this bad boy into the right part of Rio de Janeiro and you've got yourself a fight to the death. Don't think of this hundred dollar bill as a hundred ones, or a short stack of fives. Think of it as a manifestation of hope and survival, as dreams of possibilities? There isn't much difference between it and those Necronomicoins you're holding then, is there?"

"Rio de Janeiro, huh?"

"The bill's physically worth something. How many beers could agent Harrington and I buy with it. But it's mentally worth something, too."

"Rio de Janeiro."

"It's in Brazil."

"They use dollars down there in Rio?"

"They use the Real, but a United States Dollar is worth something everywhere."

"Everywhere?"

"Such is its power."

"So let's say I pull this curtain back here, the one that's blocking the mirror?"

"Okay."

"And you look in that mirror."

"Oka-OH GOD. Oh my God, what is that? What is going on here?"

"Good. So you see the big eye staring back at you."

"What is that? Harrington do you see this?"

"Agent...Sherman? You think they take dollars where that eye is? Hey, Eye! You in Rio right now?"

The Necronomicoin isn't as complex to use as people are led to believe.
When an appropriate offering is made and the channeller receives a boon it comes in the form of a necronomicoin Hush. This is a unique identifier that comprises of the spoken words of the old ones.

To properly contain your hushes you should have a secure vessel to hold them, a phylactery hidden in concealed tunnels under your home should suffice.

I hear you have to be careful about transaction malleability, which is when you make a deal with an Elder God using imprecise language and they use deliberate misinterpretations to give you MORE FUN THAT YOU REALLY WANTED.

The job sounded promising. Necronomicoin had taken the investment world by storm (literally in the case of a couple of sectors) Traditional economics was in a slump, like a lamb to the slaughter, the word on the street was that the new paradigm was inevitable. The market floors were testament to this. Once thriving bull pits of sweat and testosterone, they were increasingly empty. Anyone with their ear to the ground was jumping ship. From the towering glass monuments of financial districts, to the subterranean tunnels and basements of the new money.

Friend of a friend with the right tie pin had put in a word for me with Olkoth Yhoundeh and Spencer. A foot in this door had the potential to cover the losses made leaving the city and, potentially, leave me with a better portfolio than I'd ever have made there.

Things seemed to be going well, I felt I had a good handle on the way this new currency worked. Jameson, the partner who was interviewing me, seemed impressed with my resume and, as he showed me around the offices in the catacombs beneath Exeter Cemetery I was pretty sure I wasn't imagining the friendly demeanour he was projecting.

We were passing a large, ancient oak door when I heard the distinctive sound of a wave breaking against the other side. In the dim light, traces of some kind of pink foam were just visible, seeping out from beneath the portal. Another wave, slammed against the wood and then, momentarily, it was as if the door just disappeared. My gaze fell upon an ocean of blood, extending to an impossibly distant horizon. Waves were breaking on the invisible door, whipping the crimson waters to the pink bubbling foam I'd noticed before.

Then, in the blink of my incredulous eye, the door was back but the sound of that ungodly ocean and the telltale hints of bloody spume remained. I somehow managed to unclench my jaw, just long enough to hiss, "what the fuck is that?" I asked.

"Ah, yes", Jameson stammered awkwardly, "That would be the slush fund."

Oh, damn.

 :lulz:

It was going great until Medellin, just at the beginning of the second week in the country. I'd eaten a steak from a tough enough cut that a reciprocating saw would have been a helpful utensil. Thinking back, it might have been horse. Horse after a lifetime of hauling around tourists for a few thousand pesos. We drove back to Cali that night and were passed off to another family member. He took us out for pizza at this hip little joint. Pizza turned into beer and beer turned into midnight.

Our drive to Medellin was at 4am the next day. Ten hours in a damned nice SUV but with six pieces of luggage and the giant that is my father, up and down mountains and around infinitely winding roads. Road signs were hilariously unhelpful. They were in kilometers, but the distance was arbitrary with the roads turning in all directions. At one point, a sign read ten kilometers further than the previous one we'd passed a half hour before.

We were welcomed into the finca of a sweet little lady that was the cousin of a friend of a nephew. After a day in the car I stopped at their toilet, helpfully labeled Cabelleros, and the misery started. I thought back to the egregious pile of meat from the day before. I thought back to the day's rest stop morsilla and chicharron. I thought back to Salento and that slip up in the bathroom sink where, purely out of habit, I rinsed off my toothbrush from the tap.

Anyway, I was feeling unwell in Medellin. I was on some over the counter stuff handed to me so I could make it through the day, and let me tell you, you do not know terror until you're looking at a pill with an extensive information booklet written in a language you don't understand purchased from a store adjoining a roadside chorizo stand.

The road splitting off from the huge public square outside the Museo de Antioquia is a clutter of vendors hawking counterfeit everything. I'm eyeing the glowing yellow glasses of alleged guarapo in neat arrays carried around by shouting brightly dressed people every 50 feet on this 90 degree day.

My step mother is a shopper. She's in and out of every storefront that looks like it sells a decent piece of cloth, arranging it on the dinner table or in the backyard before she haggles down the price by a few thousand pesos. It's been a week of this, and I've taken to wandering around during the wait. In Medellin, it was mostly to find the closest restroom in case of very likely emergency.

That's how I found the shop, down some alley off a side street that I had no business being down. It didn't look dangerous, not in this area. Pickpockets were more a concern here than bodily harm, but it was still probably a stupid place to venture down. I consider pulling out my phone to translate "Please don't stab me here is my wallet" into Spanish but decide it's best to leave it safely in my pocket.

Small piles of rubble sit in front of the worn houses, people sitting outside their homes and eyeing me with vague interest. It's unreal to see this so close to the tourist heavy main way but I'm becoming less and less surprised by such things after just a week in the country. I've got this walk I try to use wherever I think I might look like a victim – eyes forward, head level, stride confident. I hope there's an outlet at the far end of the alley so I don't have to walk back from where I came because I can feel eyes on my back.

There doesn't look to be one. But there is a shop. The shop. It doesn't look much more welcoming than this little off route, but if I duck into it for a few I'll look like I had a purpose down here.

I wish I'd just walked back the other way.

Oh wow, that is going somewhere.

It was easy it seemed so easy. The guy spoke English, great English. I felt like I hadn't spoken in years. I can't remember what was in the shop. I bought something. I bought something and I understood what it was, and what it cost, and I paid for it. I forked over a few ten thousand peso notes and the man shook his head. He started talking and I understood him, understood perfectly, felt like a fucking economist at the end of the exchange.

I woke up in Cali. A week ago, a ten hour drive ago, a tricky few hundred kilometers ago. I was on the pull out bed in our hosts' fine apartment. Across the cold marble floor the huge sliding doors were open to the balcony and the curtains, great sweeping translucent white things billowed lazily inward. My father was in his favorite spot, leaning on the balcony railing overlooking the twisting city sprawling out onto the mountainsides.

He was young again, the huge man, young like I remember him before the trip. I knew it from a dozen paces away that he was young, his legs less worn from carrying out the giant frame for sixty long, long years. I knew without seeing his hands that all ten fingers were curled around the railing, that last digit I've never known him to have, recovered from his Air Force days, recovered from the roadside in Germany after the truck rollover. He was well rested and slept like he used to before the barracks fire and the charred men made him a light sleeper. Dad.

And with one step closer to the balcony the hallway and the living room and the dining room and the balcony sped past, a blur of speed. Cali shone in the sun and then sparkled with the million lights of a city night and then I was in the finca again.

The finca, that little sliver of classic Antioquia carved into the mountains above Medellin. The dozen photos of Christ and the Virgin Mary adorning every room and passage were turned around backwards, brown and grey and white canvases displayed in the frames with two holes just where the eyes of the portrait would be and nothing behind them. In the back room Maria and Josefina, our hosts, were each peering into holes oblivious to my presence. Their bodies were slack, as though every muscle limp, like they were hooked to the backwards portraits by their eyes, hanging as fish on a line. In the little garden by the bathroom that read Caballeros the statue of the Virgin was gone but her shape was there in nothing. The sky held a brilliant, huge, white hot sun that hung in blackness and shed no light. I walked up to the next portrait of Jesus and I peered through the nothing eyes and I saw a place I've never seen.

It was a spotless and meticulously decorated tenth floor apartment on the north side of Bogota. I was on one of the sofas, fine printed floral pattern rising out of dark wood trimming. My step mother was there and talking to her sister that I briefly met in the States years ago and a man I never met. When the opened their mouths to speak, their jaws and lips and tongues merely hung loose a moment forming no words. The sound coming out sounded like radio stations just missing their frequency. I still do not understand their Spanish.

I pulled my head away from the portrait eye window and the head of my Bogota self moved back. I tried to push myself away from the wall and I could see my arms rising. I was my own puppet. I could picture myself hanging like the other two, a fish dead and drying and staring.

This is what death is. One day I stopped controlling myself directly and became the puppet of a previous me that hung against two eye windows who had himself one day lost control to a previous him hanging from a portrait without eyes.

When I screamed I watched myself in Bogota open wide and wail the only real sound, so much louder and so much clearer than my company. It hurt my ears in Medellin and it burned my throat in Bogota.
My wail subsided and it turned to a painful cough. I checked my pockets. They were empty, but my hand still came out with a Necronomicoin.

It shivered and stretched and I gripped it harder, hard enough to shred the flesh of my palm. I lost control of it and it burst, spilling a dozen more Necronomicoins from my hand, then a dozen more and a hundred and a flood. They clanged to the floor and they never made the same sound twice. They piled up to our knees and they melted through the floor and they rolled ten floors down to the streets of Bogota, more money in this little world of money.

What was it I bought in that shop.

A message from the deceased, intended recipient unknown, recovered from postal service in blank envelope:

There's never enough time, there's never enough time. I thought I was applying metrics to the market and all the while it was applying metrics to me, to us, sizing us up. I had a breakthrough.

Ha! A breakdown if you ask the boss, but nobody's asking him anything for reasons that are likely known by now.

A breakthrough. None of our predictions were correct. More than that, some were reporting that the market would, with regularity, do the exact opposite of what it did in their m̧͕͚̩̮o̩̼̪d̟̫͕͓̻͍e̵̞̗l͡l̫̭̖̳̼̭̀i͎͇n͎̦͘g̱͈͖͉͡. I Every time. That caught my attention.

I'm aging rapidly now, though. There's never enough time. I took a sample of market activity and recorded but did not observe the following periods. I don't know who you are, so I'm simplifying, the details are attached. I made predictions based on the dataset and time and time again found them defied by what the market really did. Then I went back and made new predictions on the same data and *it still didn't fit*. Do you understand? The historical data was changing based on my predictions in the present.

But there's never enough time, which is why I went to see the Day Trader. And now I'm out of time.

This thread is a thing of beauty.

Quote from: Junkenstein on April 16, 2014, 07:19:04 AM
This thread is a thing of beauty.

I'm having a blast.  :)

I'm about halfway through a thing, in Word.  But HORRORBAG, so it's going to have to wait for tomorrow.

That's what you get when you pay for your calamari dinner with necronomicoin.

To Jeremy and Rosa,
Colombia is fine, very fine. I'm sure you saw on facebook but I am the proud owner of a fancy new hat. It looked pretty normal in Salento and Medellin but I could feel the ire on my back wearing it around Bogota. I managed to find the only shop that sells postcards in the country. Apparently it simply isn't done here. When I get back we'll have to get some drinks.
Your friend,
J.

Dear Liz,
Thank you for letting me borrow the book. It's been an English language companion with me these last few weeks when I find myself so badly needing one. I can't seem to get a grasp on Spanish. Whenever I think I hear a word I recognize, it hurts, hurts deeply. My mouth is fleshy and cannot form the words and my ears were not made for the sounds that bounce and weave around each other in tapestries of huge knowledge. I look forward to seeing you when I'm home.
Yours,
J.

Dear Mom,
I am enjoying my vacation in Colombia. On the front of the postcard you'll see a typical home in the countryside (we stayed in a place very similar) as well as the national flower. It is a purple orchid. The roots are deep in infinity and it smells like the dust of the cosmos, the remnants of a planet full of life trod over and devoured by massive uncaring things. I'll be home soon and will see you then.
Sincerely,
J.

Dear Rob,
I am sorry to hear about your grandmother. As you can see, she is on the front of this postcard, holding you up as a baby. I purchased it in a craft bazaar. You will want to make your peace with her as soon as you read this, as international mail in Colombia is uncertain, and she will not be much longer than the postmark. I know, it seems so sudden. The Colombians assure you that Jesus will have her and that is a perfectly acceptable way to not think any further on the matter.
Always,
J.

Dear J,
By now the stack of postcards on your desk is ten thousand high. You do not know that many people, J, who are you writing to? Your fingernails are dragging across lines as you scrawl them and they shatter over and over. Your pen ran out of ink a long time ago. Every card you write is the private psychic world of a trapped mind, and in creating them you are their frail and helpless husk god and you will not stop.
XOXO
J.

Lex,
The mountains are beautiful here. They are everywhere. There is nothing behind them and if you try to look the rivers stop. Their shepherds through the valleys grow angry and they stop their singing and the absence is a physical thing like the blood in your veins or the breath in your lungs. You really ought to consider a visit – it is a great country for horses.
J.

To Don and Kit and Jen and Jerry and Chris and Eva and John,
I am sorry. It goes on forever.
From, J. Yours, J. Always, J.

 :eek:

GO, EoC, GO!

SHITFUCKDAMN.

YEAHYEAHYEAH!

(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ZQGUghoq51c/U0_n5qM9CxI/AAAAAAAAA_w/q4g88xitAaE/w720-h742-no/Necronomicoin.jpg)

This thread is awesome.  :eek:

I was greedy and you are in danger because I was greedy. If only I knew what I was greedy for but everything is fragmented, my memory and thoughts a thousand little coins in the pocket.

The rapid tour of the country went on. I gave up my attempt at even minor communication in Spanish. The coin for butterfly rolled away from me, the coin for lightning spent. Words were more a part of me than I ever realized.

We were in a swanky little establishment called 1492. It's at the T in Bogota, a night life spot where the elite of the city walk around in clothes worth more than my car. It was Friday. The beautiful people would be out all night. I would not. I wanted to shove away the agua con gas and the guava barbecue chicken wings and the grilled meat skewer stuffed plantain and run, and keep running, this drawn figure shoving through the immaculately tailored suits and stunning dresses and the perfect caramel skin beneath them, past the mall with its shops so exclusive I did't even recognize them. I wondered if they accepted Necronomicoin.

But I couldn't abandon my hosts, my family, not now. I was in no condition to fight whatever was coming. I had no idea what was coming. But I knew something was, and that was more than they did. If I could warn them, maybe my stupid mistake wouldn't get them, what? Killed? Devoured? Torn within and out by small bleating horrors?

Whatever I got out of that shop, it hadn't done anything to assuage my writhing intestines. I was making my way to the bano through a sea of blazers and little black dresses. I wasn't even safe on the toilet.

Sleep was the worst, since the shop. However I wound up in Bogota, it wasn't a dream. This was the first place since we got here that I had a private room. We were ten floors up, not far from the top of the building, with a view of the city stretching out from our perch on the North side. The US Embassy was a few blocks away and I thought about going, that maybe this dissociation with reality would abate once I was on home soil. Past that, the mountains. The cursed mountains.

Before Medellin, before the shop, before the self puppetry – yes, that was how I came to Bogota. I was already there. Before that, there were the mountains. I'd been drinking glass after glass of aguardiente when our host in Cali invited me to his morning bike ride. Four in the morning, up a mountain. He was coaching me, keeping me going the whole way, but I kept finding myself veering off to the side of the road. The side of the road was a sheer drop with a flimsy barrier that I would certainly sail over. I focused on the pedaling and the water, on talking to Arturo and I still inched closer to that precipice. Something was off with the mountains before anything even went truly wrong.

Rather than sleep I'd been staring out the big window and seeing the stars for what they were. Enormous things burning away and they were painted on the belly of a vast, sleeping beast, all of it an illusion of depth so perfect that humanity couldn't see the difference. I would keep trying to bend my eye to see the trick of dimension but we aren't built to understand it; we are too small. Still I tried rather than sleep.

With this and with whatever illness I'd contracted here I stumbled past the glittering tables in 1492. A few people couldn't help but stare and I couldn't blame them. Here I was with the gall to ruin their dinner.

I sat down on the tiny bowl and buried my face in my hands. I drew them slowly down, pulling my features across my fingertips and stretching my eyelids and looking up across from me for the first time. There was writing scrawled in huge letters on the wall, such big messy words.

Befriend The Thief

Pity The Ledgerman

Beware The Debt Collector

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 21, 2014, 05:22:12 PM
You work in an environment envisioned by Hunter Thompson, but none of you are on LSD.

As far as you know.

It's like something out of a dystopian English television program (yes, I know, redundant term).  Pile more and more stress on, while wages more or less freeze while food prices go up 6% per month, and just watch as our zany cast of characters become even whackier!

Steve called in sick.  We didn't believe him, so when he came back, we made him shoot free throws to prove that he was a man.  He didn't even hit the hoop, so we terminated him for cause and made sure he couldn't collect unemployment.  He'll be under a bridge in a month.  Lazy fucker!  We get 5 paid holidays a year!

When the vending machines ran out of food, they ran tubes through our drop ceilings.  Nobody is allowed to go to the bathroom.  Vicky tried to just quit and walk off the job, but corporate security beat her to a pulp, and while she's sitting in the ICU with no insurance, we're deciding how much we can sue her for, based on non/under-performance.

Half the company is under quarantine.  The oceans are boiling.  The CEO has shot himself.  I haven't even started the annual variance, and here we are in the 4th quarter.  They'll feed me to the dogs for this.  They'll cut me open and shit in the wound.  I'd run and hide, but they've embedded transponders in our genetalia.  Am barricading my office and blasting Blondie songs to keep the chatterbugs away.  It's only a matter of time.

The IT department was "advised" via cattle prod to install keyboard-monitoring trackwar into all employee's computers.  Any employee registering lest than 35,000 keystrokes a day will have their paychecks reduced proportionally post-tax.





And beaten.

Maybe this ought to get moved to Neconomicoin?

Could work.  Maybe keep it here to gain a few more page views/contributions for a bit?

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 21, 2014, 05:41:17 PM
Could work.  Maybe keep it here to gain a few more page views/contributions for a bit?

Okay.

Moss has covered the filing cabinets.  The scheduler just sits in her office and decomposes.  The PA system randomly blurts out static and menus for restaurants that no longer exist.  We suck nutrients through the tubes and fill out installation plans for canceled projects.  The ADEQ audit team was found butchered in the conference room, their livers and kidneys removed.  People in hazmat suits circulate around, taking notes.  Our AR/AP lady now has two huge boils where here eyes were.  Every so often, there's a trumpet blast.  I am of a mind to file a greivance.

Ergh.  Can't find the relevant thread, because in true Discordian fashion, it is buried in a thread drift.

Still:  Discreet Self-Categorization.  Having second thoughts, because of this.  http://roygbiv.jezebel.com/think-you-know-what-queer-looks-like-think-again-1564504257/+dodai


I need a clear head to think about it, but I wanted to post it anyway.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 21, 2014, 05:49:03 PM
Ergh.  Can't find the relevant thread, because in true Discordian fashion, it is buried in a thread drift.

Still:  Discreet Self-Categorization.  Having second thoughts, because of this.  http://roygbiv.jezebel.com/think-you-know-what-queer-looks-like-think-again-1564504257/+dodai


I need a clear head to think about it, but I wanted to post it anyway.

What do left-handed people look like? 

TGRR,
CIS-handed.

To: All Contracted Humanoids
From: Upper Management
Re: Feedback Survey

Attention Loyalists:

The annual survey shall take place at C6 Franklin, in the elevated confrence room.  Please note that the room has been pressurized to accomodate our newest board members, so earplugs are suggested.  As per the dress code and our previous communique, natural fabrics are encouraged, as biodegradibility is but one of our long-term goals.  Please remember to remove shoes and any cellular device prior to entering.

We found the janitor today.  We have decided never to speak of it again.  My boss walked out of his office screaming quotes from the Book of Daniel, ripped his pants off, and shat on the floor.  Two of the hazmat guys ran up, ran a survey meter over it, and then scooped it up and ran off in the direction of the cafeteria, while Jim slid to the floor in the corner and started weeping.  Our quarterly profit & loss statement was just a sheet of paper with "REPENT!" scrawled in what would appear to be blood, if it was the right color.

NOTICE: EXECUTIVE FACILITIES HAVE BEEN SEALED OFF FROM THE GENERAL POPULATION UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=36313.1290

Does that stuff fit?

On Tuesday, the bathrooms were blocked off by armed guards.  Troughs had been installed running through the cubicle field.  When the 10:00 am morning coffee kicked in, it was only a matter of time before the sight of pale buttocks sqatting over a corrugated gutter became commonplace.

People came in waving guns and badges today.  They said they were government.  They painted all the windows black and took all the clocks off the walls.  We were told that our new job description was "sitting at our desks with our hands flat on the top of the desk.  We aren't allowed to look at each other.  We were also told that despite not being allowed to type, deadlines were still unchanged.  Then the government people all went out into the hall and shot each other.  The last wounded survivor lay in the hall whimpering about nothing making sense until he finally died.  I forgot to pack my energy bar in my lunch.

Ugh.  This day is the worst.  My computer started bleeding, and when I called the Help Desk, all I could hear was a low keening sound, and the static over the line was spelling out blasphemies using the original Enochian Keys.  Plus, the coffee machine stopped working.  I'm seriously considering calling the temp agency and requesting another assignment.

The radio station piped in just above audibility through the intercom repeats the same songs at the same times every day. It takes a week for us to notice the exactitude and another before we start memorizing them. But even when we can just barely make out the words above the office hum we can't quite get the songs down right. They are familiar, they are the same songs, but if we try to mutter along with the words or tap out the rhythm it changes, just a little. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure but I think the same word in every one of them, spaced throughout the day at even intervals. Bliss...bliss...bliss...bliss

The suspicion is getting stronger.  Putting aside yesterday's pantomime of authority, it seems that recent operational changes are less due to transitions in upper management and more directly related to what's happening right here.  The hazmat perimeter is moving forward and closing on our building.  Small mole rats have started nesting in what's left of Paul's cranium and I'm sick of telling Dave not to eat what he repeatedly thinks are cheesy noodles being voluntarily dispensed by his other colleagues' skulls. Facebook has become invaluable to sorting all this out. 

God has put an out-of-office notice on his email.  His return is indeterminate.

Sometimes new faces appear along the vast rows of us and we moths flutter to their light and the next day the light is gone and we settle to our cold dark spots on the line, things that could fly and know beauty but with natures too panicked and habitual to do more than sit and wait for the next brief perfect flame, the addiction so complete that rarely a thought is paid to how those spaces are emptied in order to be filled.

In the conference room down the hall there's a daily meeting of people none of us recognize. They're dressed in suits cut to precision and shuffle their way around the long table drawn and hungry. The meetings go for an hour before they leave again, ambling lazily around the rest of us, buttons of their shirts undone to allow them to drape around swollen bellies. Their eyes are glazed over and sometimes a sheen of drool or grease glistens but nobody ever brings any food into it and when they leave the room it's spotless.

We are lost. Moorless, without hope, adrift in a sea of request vouchers.

There are things in the hallway. Things with teeth. Chattering. Chatter.

The water cooler becomes a refuge. Dandruff and stubble becomes a calendar.

How long?

How long?

A solitary phone peals its shrill tone, plaintive, demanding.

It's a trap. I can hear the teeth.

I asked Dave today, I said "Dave, I'm having a little trouble understanding the hierarchy of this organisation."

I said, "Dave, I was wondering whether you could help me out. I report to you, as does the rest of this team, but who do you report to?"

Something about the way he said it, you know. About the way he replied. "The Consumers".

Capital C, like. I'm having trouble putting faith in an innocent interpretation of that.

Poor Dave.  I think he was the first to realize where the call was really coming from.  It all went from being a fun circus of creepy little mamels to a murderous horde brain of weevils, very quickly. I got mine hooked-up to a pre-amp, delay unit, overdrive distortion, and YouTube.  Yummy.
[Ed. Weevils, prepositions]

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on April 15, 2014, 10:27:13 PM
It was easy it seemed so easy. The guy spoke English, great English. I felt like I hadn't spoken in ...

This is what death is. One day I stopped controlling myself directly and became the puppet of a previous me that hung against two eye windows who had himself one day lost control to a previous him hanging from a portrait without eyes.

...

:eek: 8) :wink: :lulz:

One day death will come to have eyes of his own.  Then release him on his own recognizance.  That would be splendidly provident for ALL necronomicoin options on futures.  Physicists predict the resultant negative entropy density to be non negligible or negotiable, like rising interest rates.

Interesting. Lucifer Xs posts actually make sense in this context.

Days later we were at the Bogota Beer Company. My pre-travel self would have scoffed at visiting the most Americanized cervezaria in Colombia. My pre-travel self was not battered by long roads and bad bacteria and a sense of boiling unreality stressing the veneer of the world.

I sat at a little table on the patio by the public square, sharing it with my father and step-mother. I was quiet with the learned surety that my words were meaningless. It would take most of the pitcher we were splitting before I realized that my companions could actually understand me. Absently I flicked a Necronomicoin around my fingertips, playing at it in the light that wouldn't touch it.

"They're English speakers at the next table," I said. "They're from Minnesota, Florida, and Georgia, respectively. The girl from Minnesota is self-conscious about displaying a Midwestern accent, but it's the one from Tallahassee that has the most pronounced accent. They're going to ask me to take their photo in a few minutes when their last friend arrives. I usually have a +1 policy where if I take a photo of them, they have to take one with me. I can't tell if this comes off as fun or douche but I think it's a great time," I pause. No feedback from either of them.

I take a long pull from the pint of Roja. Then a longer one. "The Georgian guy lives in the shadow of his older brother, an officer with the Air Force. He tried to follow the family military tradition but he's no warrior. He doesn't know what he is, or that's what he says. What he does know is that he's a happy office worker, the oblivious uncomplicated kind that everyone else resents and tries to rope into their misery sessions but can't pin down. So he's friendly with them but he leaves the office behind when he's out of work and comes on adventurous little getaways with distant friends to South America or Southeast Asia, places his co-workers wouldn't go near without the magic words All Inclusive Resort before them."

I continued staring off into the street and the square beyond and drinking. Between the little glass partitions and the tiny sculpted hedges a young woman walks by on the street. She's wearing a blue hat with a wide brim that just barely conceals her face and loose golden rings of hair tumble out beneath it, bouncing in the sun. We make eye contact and there's a hint of playful smile before she went on her way.
My mouth was hanging open, so I filled it with more beer.

"Anyway the pilot that's going to come in when they all leave, the Seahawks fan? He's an in control kind of guy, happy with his career, happy with his family and the special certification he earned to fly into Bogota. He thinks he's got marriage all figured out with these 36 hour trips around the globe but that's going to blow up in his face real soon. It's too bad, he's an alright guy, but it's too much on his wife. Being married to a pilot was sexy when it first started but now it's really wearing on her. It doesn't help that he's a handsome man and she's a little concerned about her looks fading. Poor thing." Silence.

I poured myself another glass. My father didn't look like he's drinking it and my stepmother won't touch the stuff. Couldn't let it go warm.

The girl in the blue hat was back. She floated up the two steps onto the patio and breezed past our table. I'm greedy for that hint of smile again but this time there's no eye contact as she says hello to our waitress in Spanish, kissing one another on the cheek, and walks into the bar.

"Cheers," I said, half to myself, and attacked my glass again. I went to refill it with the pitcher. "Dad, need a top off?" Again, no answer.

My father has been frozen still for a half hour. So has my step mother and the table of young Americans next to us. One man across the patio alone with his book appears to be at my own speed, smoking leisurely away and absorbed in his reading. A trio of businessmen at another table are moving in double time.

I excused myself just in case everything readjusted again while I was in the bathroom, rubber band time taught once more before another deliberate pluck sent it awry. The girl in the blue hat was leaned over the bar talking to the bartender. She remained there while I walked back out again.

The pilot was in the spot of the group of four Americans but he was just as stuck as they were, Seahawks hat and pink shirt unmoving. Just as I sat, the girl exited the patio and stood by the stairs. She unfolded a newspaper and began looking across the pages.

"We need to go home. Home to Massachusetts. The air is thinner here but so is everything. I need a thicker reality."

"Huh?" came the reply. Everything was moving normally again.

"Nevermind. Want to order another pitcher?"

"J."

"Yeah?"

"J," he gestured behind me.

The girl in the blue hat was standing at the next table and looking over. She looked at me and asked me something. It was in Spanish. Of course I wouldn't be able to speak to this beautiful woman.

"No hablo espanol," I said. That line I had practiced.

"That's okay. I speak English," she smiled.

I stood up, "I'm J," and I held out my hand.

"Lara," she said, resting her own lightly in mine. "I was trying to get your attention. You seem like an interesting person. Would you like to talk?"

"Of course. Let's speak outside."

My father and stepmother disappeared. Lara and I took the table over. I would take a taxi back to the apartment if I needed to. Colombia was green in the lush valleys and the glittering emeralds and in Lara's gaze. We sipped beer slowly and we talked about her home city of Cali and about what brought us both to Bogota. We joked and she threw back her head to laugh and I forgot about the last six awful months and the overwhelming week and all about Necronomicoin.

I forgot about Necronomicoin. I reached into my pocket and touched the one in my pocket. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I finished my pint and excused myself, ducking off for the bathroom.

She'd ordered me another glass while I was gone.

"You like the Roja, right," she smiled perfectly.

"Si, mi gusto. Delicioso, gracias," I said reflexively.

She held that smile, looking at me. She glanced at the glass.

"We both know I won't be drinking this, Lara," I said.

"Why not?" she asked, her innocence flawless.

"A charming, gorgeous girl like you? A guy like me? You aren't just flirting with me to practice your English."

"Like I said, I thought you looked like an interesting person," she faltered.

"You're the sort of girl that a guy takes back to the hotel and finds himself waking up the next day in a bathtub full of ice. No memory of the night and a neat little fresh scar on his abdomen. You aren't after kidneys, of course."

She shifted in her seat. "I think maybe I should go," she said.

I reached into my pocket again and pulled out the Necronomicoin. I laid it flat on the table and slid it with my forefinger across the flat surface, pushing it to the center. Lara's eyes stayed on it, transfixed.

"You know what this is," I said.

She nodded.

"You know exactly how much this particular one is worth," I said.

She nodded again.

"I need your help, Lara."

Befriend The Thief.

I expect to see more of this.

As for your question, the initial punch in the gut has faded.  Now it's story.  One is not better than the other, and people who can do both in one tale are fortunate.

So keep going.

Caught up. Vexed that I have nothing yet to contribute. More of this!

LMNO's lack of demand sends market into deflationary spiral.  People start marauding for dogma again.  Not even the underground is safe anymore.  Elderly routinely flagellated to death with unripe bananas.  State declares 12:00 noon the only safe time to be outside.

(maybe this should be in it's own thread because it's tl;dr and I'm just getting back into spewing words, but fuck it)

All I knew at first was that the owner was looking to sell the lot, and we needed to check it for environmental concerns. That's what we do, here; nothing unusual. I later came to discover that the owner had apparently been involved in some weird financial shit, hadn't been seen or heard from directly in ages, and was conducting their end of the business through a proxy. Some lady named Ms LaCroix.

Not that it all really mattered to me, of course. I draw the figures and maps for these kinds of jobs, and rarely interact directly with a client or even go to the site personally. The field people come back with their sketches and the GPS unit, and I draw what they need drawn. It's usually pretty straightforward, bland stuff. Usually.

The first problem happened almost immediately, but we didn't think anything of it. The GPS unit kept coming back with junk data, completely useless. The first time, we figured it was Murphy's Law at work and sent someone out again to plot out the locations where they were going to drill to check the water and soil. They came back with the same result, and then we figured there must be something on the site that was screwing with the GPS unit. Nothing magnetic, because compasses worked fine. Something else.

But we don't get paid to look into those kind of problems, so we proceeded with the job the old-fashioned way. Sketches and hand measurements. Ms LaCroix reminded us in an email that her client was expecting to get the finished report on time regardless. Probably some fishy business on the site making them eager to foist the property off on to somebody else. That's how this kind of thing usually works. Spill some horrible solvent with a chemical name longer than the alphabet, and hope the environmental geeks don't find it before you hawk it off.

They got the job done in record time. I was pretty surprised when a profusely sweating man dropped a stack of sketches on graph paper on my desk and shuffled out of the office without a word.

I drafted the map on the computer from the sketches, like I normally do. Building here, soil borings A, B, C, etc. there, and so on. The next day, the project manager comes by and tells me that my figures are off–way off. The field guys can't make heads or tails of the map. They're pretty irritable about it, he tells me, and tells me to fix it. I check and double-check the sketches: sure enough, it's completely off.

I don't know how, but apparently I had drawn a map for a completely different place by mistake. I could swear that the drawings had been accurate. How could the building be that much larger than what I drew?

Before I have time to fix it, the manager tells me that Ms LaCroix will be paying us directly for this job. Some fancy new payment method called a Necronomicoin. I questioned the wisdom of accepting funny money from a client with a history of suspected financial shenanigans, but apparently This Is How It's Going To Be, in the words of management.

She comes by on Wednesday afternoon, and presses a coin into my palm with a very professional smile. I don't know why, but in that moment, that one single coin felt like possibly the most valuable thing I'd ever held in such a small object.

-to be continued-

We were just another young couple touring the country, a half bottle of aguardiente in hand and a shared room at the hostel in Zipaquira. The stroll in the night was experience a fine Colombian evening, to drink and be under the stars just outside the light polution of the big city. Lara's amble was practiced and easy and mine was natural because, well, because here this night with this beautiful woman I really was enjoying myself. Until the edge of town, at least.

Our carefully careless route led us to the a barred road, iron gate locked shut beneath a terra cotta arch. The road snaked its way up a dark mountain, to ticket booths and parking lots and little souvenier shops. The sign at the top of the arch read Catedral de Sal de Zipaquira.

The Cathedral of Salt.

"You're quiet," Lara said.

"Sorry. Dread has that effect."

She could make a living off of that smirk. Actually, she did. "I mean you move quietly. That's good."

"Why is that good?"

Lara nodded up at the mountain. "We're going in."

"What, now?!"

She didn't respond, but ducked under the gate and hurried off to the side of the road, out of the ring of the streetlights. I took a drink of the aguardiente and strolled as casually as I could over to her. There was no way I could recreate her stealth, so I might as well not look so obviously sneaky.

We stayed crouched to the side of the path on our way up. Nobody was around to even hide from, it seemed.

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

"Didn't you say you wanted to visit the other day in Bogota?"

"I also said I'd like to see the Museo de Oro. We aren't breaking into that."

"That's next."

My family was back in Bogota. They'd left me with Lara at the bar and gone off to a little craft plaza and a fruiteria. Two hours had passed since they hopped into Marisia's Nissan. By my estimation, Lara and I had been traveling for three days. The Necronomicoin in my pocket was starting to wear on me. It has a way of doing that if you don't spend it. At first I thought the veil of the world was slipping away but that night in Zipaquira I started thinking it was me slipping away from it. I had to get rid of these coins. I should have let Lara steal them and in their absence earn myself oblivion.

"What are we going to find here?"

"A reflecting pool."
"None of those on the surface?"

We climbed a steep set of stairs up. At the top of them were the closed concessions and barred museum entrance. A huge metal statue of a miner stood above us with his pickaxe buried deep in the earth. Down a short ramp was an ampitheater and beyond that, the entrance to the Catedral. A guard waited there.

"How are we going to get past him?"

"He won't even know we're here."

Purposefully, Lara walked into the light and the center of the wide open ampitheater. She neared the guard and he made no indication of seeing her. I sighed and hurried to catch up.

"We aren't here for what they're guarding. And what we are here for, the guards are much worse."

We hopped over a set of locked turnstiles and stood before a tunnel. It was black and it descended and it led to a reflecting pool two hundred meters below a mountain, in an old mine converted to a cathedral. The Cathedral of Salt.

Woohoo, Cainaid!

"Jim, get in here.  Now."

I sighed, and walked into Phil's office.  "What's up?"

"You tell me.  Care to explain this spreadsheet?"

"Which one – Ah, the Chambers account.  I know.  We've gone over it seventeen times.  I've not just sent it to the head of Accounting to look over it, but we've had IT basically rebuild three laptops and scour the system.  It's clean."

"Clean? Your formulas for calculating Cost Basis on this account uses the square root of negative 1, for Chrissakes!"

"Had to be done.  Was even considering Lattice-KP equations for a bit.  May still have to, if the account kicks into a higher tax bracket."

Phil just looked at me for almost solid minute, and began massaging his temples.  "What."

"Let me show you."  I pulled his laptop around, and accessed the suspense database.  "Here's the amount of the deposit."

Phil peered over my shoulder.  "That's looks fine."

"Sure it does." I handed him a notepad and a pen.  "Write it down."

"What?"

"Write down the number."  The pen hesitated over the paper for a second, and he scribbled a figure. "Now, go to a new page, write the number again."  More scribbles. 

I took the pad from him, tore out the pages, and held one up.  "Is this the same number as on the screen?"

"Yeah.  Mind telling me—"

"Hold on."  I hid the fist page, held up the second.  "Is this the same number?"

"Yes, of course."

I closed the laptop, and held up both pages.  "Are these the same number?"

"I... What the hell?"

"It took us five weeks to figure that one out.  Paul took a medical leave after three days, and I haven't seen that newest temp for about a week and a half now.  I think he quit.  I hope he quit."  I paused, sizing him up.  Shrugging, I said, "It gets worse.  You see these two numbers. Remember them."  I hid both pages.  "Now give me the average."

A beat of sweat appeared on Phil's forehead.  The pen bore down on the page, not moving, just digging into it.  His knuckles were white.  With a crack, the pen snapped in half.  "Dammit!  This makes no sense!"

"It's the economy of the future, Phil," I said as I walked back to my desk. "By the way, we're going to need a lot of new pens."

 :lulz:

It was intended to be creepier, but as it progressed... you know how it goes.  You just follow where it takes you.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 23, 2014, 02:25:54 PM
It was intended to be creepier, but as it progressed... you know how it goes.  You just follow where it takes you.

Who says it's not creepy? The world is run on spreadsheets that have no basis in reality but must be adhered to at all costs.

The actual cost of "all costs" is invariably quite difficult to determine as that requires another spreadsheet.

Whoops.  I missed an edit.  brb.

I love the pure, distilled weirdness.

Quote from: Nigel on April 23, 2014, 09:52:06 PM
I love the pure, distilled weirdness.

That's my favorite thing about this thread. It's all over the spectrum.

I still couldn't get the figures right. Sketches and drawings would come back to me, and the maps on the computer kept being wrong. The field people were getting more and more agitated, but not so much at me, really. Just being on the lot seemed to drain people's energy and patience like nothing else. They'd get a recharge every Wednesday when we got paid, of course, but eventually they started dropping out. Sick days, requested transfers to other projects, and one guy even took a leave of absence. Ms LaCroix reminded us every week how pleased the client was with our work, but not to forget the deadline.

When was the deadline?

Eventually, I had to go out there myself. A shortage of field personell and a need to finally get the maps right meant I had to get off my ass and onto The Lot. I was going to measure everything my damn self, and check all the sampling wells while I was at it. Simple enough work, and I couldn't imagine what was throwing everyone of their rocker about this job.

I took measurements around the outside of The Lot, a basic rectangle. Next, I decided to gauge the wells. I should explain to you what this means. We use a device called an interface probe, a moderately awful device that has a sensor at the end of a long measuring tape. When the sensor is in oil or something similar, it makes a shrill, continuous tone. When the sensor is in water, it makes a similarly shrill beeping sound. No off button or volume control, either. Anyway, this is how we determine if there is some kind of substance contaminating the groundwater.

I dropped the interface probe down the well, expecting to hear the ear-piercing tone after a few dozen feet. As it went down, however, I heard something altogether different. A deep, resonating hum that felt like it came from the air around me, getting louder as I sent it deeper. After a hundred feet, the sound had become a deafening, thrumming song that brought tears to my eyes. I should have wound up the probe and left right then, but I didn't. I kept sending it deeper, until the spool ran out at five hundred feet and the sound was shaking my teeth and I could hear and see and smell and taste the sound but I couldn't feel anything and the small hole in the earth gaped wider and wider and I knew that all I had to do was let it happen and everything would be fine, for the low, low price...

I fell backwards, and felt the coin, cold as ice in my pocket. Ms LaCroix had paid me three times, but I still just had the one coin. But I knew that I had been paid, and been paid well. I just didn't quite know how to spend it, until now.

The sound had stopped. I wound up the spool, made a very unprofessional note in my field journal, and stormed off The Lot. I would get those stupid maps done, one way or another.

-to be even more continued-

They didn't turn off the lights at closing. Little tracks of dull yellow bulbs lit our way down, just barely. The air was like stale ocean, wet and dry at once. The rock walls and ceiling glistened with moisture and every few meters a bulbous crystal of white salt peeked out. I reached out and touched one. It crumbled onto my fingers and I rubbed it between them absently, savoring the luxurious feel of it.

The tunnel sloped slowly downward. Our footsteps, rather than echoing, made the slightest of scrapes and scratches along the stone floor. It was cacophonous, here.

We turned sharply left. Roman numerals were carved into the wall, below that the name of the Station of the Cross. The far wall emptied into vast nothingness, a huge rectangular cavern hewn in the guts of the mountain. A stone cross faced us, silhouetted by the empty space. I leaned over the barrier before the precipice and looked down and saw no bottom to that dizzying vastness. My head was heavy past the ledge, as if weighed by the mountain above. I stood still and felt myself tipping.

Lara rested her hand on my back and I started, my fingers desperately gripping the stone. I'd gone nowhere.

I looked at my companion with relief and terror. Her look held only concern. Gently, she took me by the hand and led me further down the corridor.

We passed the rest of the Stations of the Cross, all of them greater or lesser black holes stretching far into the distance. We heard footsteps, coming from all around us, but I trusted this strange woman and followed her in all her unconcern.

Past the stations, a stairwell was carved leading further down. The steps were worn smooth with the footfalls of years of pilgrims and tourists. A lone statue of an angel, white in the pale spotlight that shone on it, stood in the darkness. At the edge of my vision its face contorted, a painful desperate expression. I turned to look at it directly. Its face was serene, turned up to the heavens above and the tons of rock between it and them and I wondered if God had a place down here.

There was worship and power and in any mine of this size there was a history of blood and tragedy. The Christian symbols were a thin whitewash, the salt a corrosive bubble beneath them and could all the faith of all the faithful change the memory of stone.

I stared at the statue for some time. Maybe it would strain again to hold its strength in this foreign place or to hope the strength of its gaze and longing might pierce the mountain for that glimpse of precious clouds. When I turned away again, Lara was no longer in sight.

Panic came upon me sudden and huge. She was found by the footsteps and they were not those of people. I would be next unless I ran and I would run the tunnels to exhaustion and never escape the deep. I breathed again that paradoxical air both damp and dry and descended the stairs.

Lara waited at the bottom. She motioned me forward. We progressed through another short hallway and, beyond it, the largest room of the Catedral. Rows of pews shrank to the far end of it, terminating in an enormous suspended cross.  The wall behind it was covered with a sheet of salt crystals, brilliant white.

A single guard with a headlamp was making his way slowly around the main level. Here was the source of the echoing footsteps, a steady rhythm of them, this lone man dwarfed in the sheer scale of workplace. We walked by him just as we had the one above. We were not here for him, nor for what he protected.

Lara led us to a row of gift shops that marked the end of the tourist area of the Catedral. Locked displays showed off figurines, emeralds, jewelry, and bags of salt mined from the halls. This second religion so seamless against the first.

One of the alcoves down the souvenir tunnel opened into a café. Chairs were stacked up on little tables. Lara stopped us here.

She pointed past the coffee shop, to our destination. To the reflecting pool.

Dear Atlantean Inspectors,

Excitement mounts at the mere thought of returning to the crossroads, to check the posted meeting times.  I saw what you purport to do.  Reinforce the embankment?  No...  Those permits are for something else entirely.  Now, how you even get those in the first place must be beyond my abusively obstructed line of sight, somehow.

Perhaps the Palisades of Jersey will be best served by continual and perpetually accelerating repairs to it's picturesque battlements? You positively need to contract even more defence construction, why, because you must make a strong case against the course of nature?  How about a mini-moat or a ha-ha?  Funny place to post a stake, here,  hot on the heels Telos.  Really, fucking grand.  I just live under your sand box, that's all.

You do not seem to remember the writing on the wall back home?  Maybe it was not big enough?  Again you have been found wanting, see, here, along this very coast, for every neighbor, there are three more, across the line and down.  The first little problem you had was just an introduction to this once pleasent hood.  All your necronomicoins are worthless here because we are savages that do not understand how the beauty of the earth can be sold back to man.  And we consider flipping shit passé, already.

I know Atlantean Aliens think they have it all figured out.  So, then tell us, are you having fun yet?  Protoplasmic Reversion can be a bitch, look it up.  Oh, and we just ordered a load of green pens that will match those orange outfits wonderfully.

Always,

Orifice of Eco-Tourism, Silencer Permit Division

"This is where the guards will be."

Her words were barely whispered and still shockingly loud after all this silence. I had a nightmare once, the normal kind, where just before I was scared into wakefulness I heard a woman's voice, rich and clear. Lara sounded like that.

"What kind of guards? More headlamps?"

"J. This is dangerous for you. Stop smirking and listen to me."

She was afraid. More, she was afraid for me.

"There will be three of them," she said, "there are an infinite number but you will only face three. I don't know what to expect, but they can be deadly. Just be ready for anything."

"You aren't coming, then?"

"I'm not carrying any Necronomicoins. If I walked toward that pool with you, we wouldn't be going to the same place." She sighed and shifted her feet. "Good luck."

I looked at her for a moment and inhaled sharply. Then I walked toward the reflecting pool. I took ten steps and the weight of the mountain above doubled. Lara was another lifetime and Colombia was another era and Massachusetts was never there. That J. was in line at the RMV registering his motorcycle and still failing with women and never found the little shop down the alley in Medellin. He was going to die at seventy eight like old men do and in the time between now and then he would never shatter his being and hold its fragments as a million little coins, within one, in the palm of his hand.

After twenty steps the salt veins in the walls burst from the pressure of the rock, fine white powder spraying violently outward and gently settling onto the floor. The rail and signs around the reflecting pool were gone. Its edge was less defined and it was no longer in its rectangular shape.

I froze midstride, through no power of my own. My eyes were stuck fast and I couldn't look around but a grey thing shambled at the edge of my vision, closer and closer. The abomination was barely human shaped but somewhere far in the back of my mind I knew that all its light and dimension were not visible to my pathetic eyes. I could not move. It was an angel, a real angel, and my helpless self was blessed to be in its radiance. It drew closer and there were wings, every kind of wing, dragonfly wings and feathery bird wings, veiny bat wings and wings of bone and sinew and flesh, shifting and morphing as quickly as a thought. As a thought. My thoughts its thoughts one thought the wings were moth wings the creature was no angel the creature was no demon it was God it told me that is greater than either and here I knew God, lucky mortal, lucky small mortal. I could not move.

It stayed out of sight but it was just behind me. I could feel the wafting of its moth wings on my neck and I felt like the hairs would raise and my flesh would prickle but it was frozen. With a touch like algea and fire coral it drew the Necronomicion from my pocket and held it. Its palm closed over the thing and in that moment the abominationangeldemonGod wrapped itself around every fragment of myself held within. It was God, I thought it thought, for only God could be everywhere.

And the next moment I stumbled forward and blinked and breathed and my heart beat. Such young meat mind, I thought it thought. It must go and go with the seed I leave in its mind. With time the seed shall grow and propagate.

Then the first guardian was gone.

Well that marks the first time writing that I've scared the piss out of myself.   :lulz:

WOW.   :eek:

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on April 24, 2014, 09:13:52 PM
WOW.   :eek:

I was going to write all three guardians, but I started delving into the first and I just thought "no, no I think I'm going to need a break."

Whoa.

He had to remember how.  He had to remember how to make it work again.  The blinking CRT terminal stared back at him, blankly. A single cluster of green pixels, the cursor, strobed hypnotically to illuminate his half-reflection on the monitor's curved glass, splicing darkness between the fading specularity of his likeness.  It was over.  He had forgotten.  There had been a time, he thought, that this could never happen, that he would never be alone.  He was wrong. The time between days had started to dissolve.

It had been three months now since his own machine crashed and things were starting to not look so good.  With every passing day the prospects for returning would narrow, untill eventually, well, he preferred not to get stuck in that thought.  Meanwhile, as he tried to fix the recalcitrant little shit, the only operational computer to be found was on display at the Meso American museum, still intermitently undergoing renovation.

He had to sit in a cubicle set on a pedistal for display in a recreation of late 20th C. life, replete with a working snapshot of the internet at that time.  To his left, faux-synthetic taxidermied apes stood frozen in mid-movement.  They appeared to brachiate across model trees interspersed with accents of actually dead shrubbery, the blending of which with the set diorama was clearly more appropriare than anything their living counterparts could have ever, given the circumstances, intentionally achieved.  To his right, Dolly, the cloned sheep, looked at him quixotically with opaque ceramic eyes,  beyond him and into the future they had together helped destroy.

The first signs of our unraveling genetic code started manifesting, on a global level, with the increased advent of negative population growth rates.  That this was a result of our own tampering was more difficult to accept, initially, until everyone was to blame.  That is, untill everyone became subject to protoplasmic reversion. There were no more innocents.  At the prospect of extinction, all that was left was to investigate that primordial fire, behind this curtain of empty shells.

A sound of intollerable beauty rings throughout the vacant warehouse.  The weight of 10 000 lives recombined into one fallen necronomicoin, hitting that perfect note with a devastating and unfathomable reverberation of crystaline harmonic bliss.

[shells]

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on April 24, 2014, 08:58:10 PM
"This is where the guards will be."

Her words were barely whispered and still shockingly loud after all this silence. I had a nightmare once, the normal kind, where just before I was scared into wakefulness I heard a woman's voice, rich and clear. Lara sounded like that.

"What kind of guards? More headlamps?"

"J. This is dangerous for you. Stop smirking and listen to me."

She was afraid. More, she was afraid for me.

"There will be three of them," she said, "there are an infinite number but you will only face three. I don't know what to expect, but they can be deadly. Just be ready for anything."

"You aren't coming, then?"

"I'm not carrying any Necronomicoins. If I walked toward that pool with you, we wouldn't be going to the same place." She sighed and shifted her feet. "Good luck."

I looked at her for a moment and inhaled sharply. Then I walked toward the reflecting pool. I took ten steps and the weight of the mountain above doubled. Lara was another lifetime and Colombia was another era and Massachusetts was never there. That J. was in line at the RMV registering his motorcycle and still failing with women and never found the little shop down the alley in Medellin. He was going to die at seventy eight like old men do and in the time between now and then he would never shatter his being and hold its fragments as a million little coins, within one, in the palm of his hand.

After twenty steps the salt veins in the walls burst from the pressure of the rock, fine white powder spraying violently outward and gently settling onto the floor. The rail and signs around the reflecting pool were gone. Its edge was less defined and it was no longer in its rectangular shape.

I froze midstride, through no power of my own. My eyes were stuck fast and I couldn't look around but a grey thing shambled at the edge of my vision, closer and closer. The abomination was barely human shaped but somewhere far in the back of my mind I knew that all its light and dimension were not visible to my pathetic eyes. I could not move. It was an angel, a real angel, and my helpless self was blessed to be in its radiance. It drew closer and there were wings, every kind of wing, dragonfly wings and feathery bird wings, veiny bat wings and wings of bone and sinew and flesh, shifting and morphing as quickly as a thought. As a thought. My thoughts its thoughts one thought the wings were moth wings the creature was no angel the creature was no demon it was God it told me that is greater than either and here I knew God, lucky mortal, lucky small mortal. I could not move.

It stayed out of sight but it was just behind me. I could feel the wafting of its moth wings on my neck and I felt like the hairs would raise and my flesh would prickle but it was frozen. With a touch like algea and fire coral it drew the Necronomicion from my pocket and held it. Its palm closed over the thing and in that moment the abominationangeldemonGod wrapped itself around every fragment of myself held within. It was God, I thought it thought, for only God could be everywhere.

And the next moment I stumbled forward and blinked and breathed and my heart beat. Such young meat mind, I thought it thought. It must go and go with the seed I leave in its mind. With time the seed shall grow and propagate.

Then the first guardian was gone.

Dude, you just kicked HP Lovecraft's ass! :eek:

Never stop writing!

Brrrrr

Green emerald serpentines swirl into the cool, open darkness; the very lines of space withdrawing like a hologram into prismatic gems made of the morning dew on Indra's Net.  Only two remain, right before him turning into the green eyes of some monstrous, silhouetted creature, slowly casting ever longer, flickering shadows.  They blink shut and are replaced by the cavernous roar of something abysmally ancient, deep underground.  Something that stirs in his core a fear that awakes the primal memory of eons past in constant terror of this primordial evil.  He dissolves into the darkness like a million grains of salt in the sea.

Slowly buzzing, whirling, and gently tumbling, he fades back into existence on a golden beach- on the shore, caressed by waves of infinite bliss.  A radient spark re-ignites his senses and the sand spins itself into a golden chain connecting him to that beyond the infinite.  He remembered that he was already this and also always so much more. Despite his having died so many times before, it was finally no longer of consequence to challenge the light to see if it could still do it again, just for him.  

Light don't do no requests no more, and you know this, sun.

Just then, even though you have a body, mind, and consciousness, you know you are not them.  Though they will die, this no longer matters.  The Father only is because He indeed transmitted that the Sun recognize what the Spirit understands.  You are the form of this Golden Egg, reaching across time to meet itself again:  that will be for here she comes.  We are reborn, into the dawn once more.

One step forward. I could never trust my thoughts again. Any idea could be the growth of that horror. One step forward. And when its roots took hold they fed on what, were strengthened by what, choked out what. One step forward. Worse yet it said propagate, no, it made me think propagate. One step forward.

All the physical responses came at once after the first guardian released me. I shivered and goose bumps rolled about my flesh and the real fear, the visceral reaction of the gut to fear, washed over me. I looked back and Lara was nowhere in sight. I wondered if she knew of any such thing as that existing and remembered the scrawling on the bathroom wall read Befriend the Thief. There was no time to doubt my only real companion since the shop. The reflecting pool waited ahead. Between me and it were two more guardians.

One step closer. But no, I came no nearer to the mirrored watery surface. Whether or not it moved away or I did I couldn't tell. One step further. Nothing happened. I took a step backward and the faint light of the pool shot away to a distant speck. I looked behind me again and saw Lara. She was waving her arms frantically to get my attention, jumping up and down, cupping her hands to her mouth and calling. I couldn't make out the words. She was a tiny thing, this far away. I looked back and forth between Lara and the pool. If I went to her, would I have to face the guardian again?

If something had Lara that frantic it was undoubtedly trouble. I walked back toward her.

Cave walls sped past, blurring at the edges of my vision. My head swam with the effort of perspective. The pool had to be miles behind.

Lara screamed. It was desperate and far off. My foot fell and there was a sound like frail eggshell, tiny and sick.

I doubled over and vomited immediately. I put a hand on the floor to steady myself and a dozen more small crunches and a dozen little pinpricks bit my palm and a dozen more far off screams began and ended.

A world below me erupted with the terror of a million souls in fear of the creature above, too enormous to comprehend, whose breath burned them and tore them apart in a gale, whose heartbeat deafened them, whose barest movement shook their earth, the fragile things. Not all things from the outer dark are greater than humanity and not all those that are can understand their own vastness, helpless to stop their own destructiveness.

I couldn't stay for the suffering beneath and with more wretched crunches on the cave floor I fled again toward the pool. With every step I knew the entirety of each life I snuffed out, could comprehend them all in a mind made expansive, an infinity of fears and horrible silence. As I drew nearer the pool it was worlds, whole worlds, and stars and the worlds around them I crushed. For all the chaos in my passing I knew my presence would only be worse and I ran on, an untold death.

I stumbled and pitched forward. My palms hit bare rock and slid. They scraped raw. My right knee jolted with pain as it struck. My chin hit last, bloodying up the scar tissue from twenty-five year old stitches.

Laughter resounded in the cave.

And the second guardian was gone.

Holy fucking shit.


I had to re-read that about five times before I truly understood the horror of what was happening. 

That's not a bad thing.  That means you wrote a horror so potent, I couldn't comprehend how bad it was.




I'm amazed I made it out of that bar alive.

Finally able to write again, due to some training going on at work and a 36 hour Saturday Night this weekend.

Glad I was able to catch up on your contributions, Lucifer. They are awesome.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 30, 2014, 12:52:17 AM
Holy fucking shit.


I had to re-read that about five times before I truly understood the horror of what was happening. 

That's not a bad thing.  That means you wrote a horror so potent, I couldn't comprehend how bad it was.




I'm amazed I made it out of that bar alive.

:lulz:

Thank you.

and you didn't

:omg:

I was tired. Panic and adrenaline used my body and the remains had another guardian yet to face. I was made a helpless man and made a helpless god and now I was exhausted and sluggish. My palms, my chin, my knee stung but they were small pains against the weight on my mind. I may have crushed worlds and galaxies. Lara may be dead.

I hated the reflecting pool and the mountain above it and the city around it, the country around that. I hated the Necronomicoin in my blue jeans and the fragments of myself within it and the rest of myself sitting on the cold cave floor. I grabbed it out of my pocket and clutched it, an eagle with a fresh catch, a pitcher on the mound. I raised my hand to whip the coin away and, absurdly, thought about the filthy thing touching my open scrapes.

I laughed. It was a chuckle at first but it felt good and I couldn't stop it. My arm relaxed, the hand with it, and the coin clattered to the floor. I could feel a grin spreading across my face and I laughed more at that, from the belly now, deeply and loudly. For a moment there was no infectious thought seed or memory of devastated galaxies. The pealing reverberated about the cave; not even that place could kill it. Tears were welling up in my eyes. My stomach was sore. I laid back, flat on the rock, and rode the laughter until it died with time. Still after that a few small ones escaped. I felt better.

I stood and brushed myself off. Salt residue from the rock stung in my various cuts. I reached down and picked up the Necronomicoin from the floor.

The reflecting pool lay just ahead. I took a moment to resent its serenity, and walked forward once more.

Laughing did more good than a week's worth of sleep which, for all I knew down here, was the length of time we'd been in the Cathedral of Salt. Lara might know what to do about the infectious mind seed.

I was a dozen yards from the pool when I dropped into the floor. The rock slipped away and surrounded me like water, covering me to my neck. I could move around in it but it was thick and heavy. I stopped moving. I thought I'd read somewhere that in quicksand, struggling makes you sink faster. But what was the method to escape it?

"What have we here?"

I cried out in surprise. It was a man's voice, gruff and bored sounding.

"You're human," he said. He walked carefully around the edge of the soft rock. He was stout, thick around the arms and waist and thighs. He wore a trucker cap and his eyes were tiny beneath the red brim. His green flannel shirt was rolled up to his elbows and tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans, secured by red suspenders and terminating in a well worn, muddy pair of work boots.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be," he crouched down just above my head, "that must mean the pretty little thing that brought you down here is human, too?" His beady eyes flicked up past me to the cave entrance. "What's she, back there with a cup of Juan Valdez?"

"Came alone," I said, "thought it'd make a nice stroll. Little help getting out of this?" I looked around the soft rock.

"Don't lie to me," he said. His lips hadn't moved. Thick black hair covered his forearms and the back of his neck and for a moment, it slithered. The flesh beneath looked wet. It was segmented like a worm.

"You aren't human," I said.

"I am nothing you would recognize," he said. He stood up, looming over me stuck there in the rock trap. Boots thudded away behind me, moving to the cave entrance. "I am the Debt Collector."

More, please.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 01, 2014, 03:10:35 AM
More, please.

I'm glad that you're enjoying these. I keep thinking back to 30 Days of Eris when I write them.

It was becoming hard to breathe. The rock pushed against my chest with every exhale. It felt like it was growing thicker. If I didn't get out of the trap soon, I'd get stuck in the floor.

Beware the Debt Collector. It never occurred to me that it would be after Lara and I felt foolish. Of course it had no interest in me – I wasn't in debt. The Necronomicoin I held was so absolutely mine that it was discomforting when someone else touched it. But a thief, The Thief, even, must be stealing the esoteric currency for a reason.

The man stood above me a moment ago. Either it could walk on the liquid rock or the edge of the trap was just behind my head. I lifted my chin back until the back of my head made contact. Only a few inches of the rock came between me and the edge. I breathed deeply and from the belly to give myself more room to maneuver, and as I exhaled kicked downward. I moved, just barely. The rock didn't stick to my skin or clothing. I inhaled and kicked again.

By the time my knees were free I could sit on the trap without sinking back in. I had to get my legs out before they were stuck fast. I tried paddling them back and forth like a swimming stroke but for all the effort I only knocked myself off balance. I grabbed hold of my knee with each hand and pulled, flexing and relaxing my calves for the barest bit of space.

My left leg came free. I was relieved. I'd decided halfway through releasing my torso that if I needed to chew through a leg I might be able to pull it off, but two was excessive. I had no time to let the thought comfort me. With everything I had I pulled behind the other knee and kicked violently and pushed back and clenched my teeth. Nothing happened. I was already sweating and was long past having anything left to sweat. I pulled and pulled.

There was a tearing sound and sharp stone bit into my shin and ankle, ripping the skin open, but I fell backward with the release. I gasped for air. My leg was free. It was missing my pant leg from the knee down, my sock, my shoe, and was blanketed in blood. It didn't matter.

I looked between the reflecting pool and the cave entrance, to Lara. To the wake of evil left behind by the grotesque Debt Collector, as though the air itself was slimy for his passing. If the second guardian hadn't caused me to kill Lara, the Debt Collector would already be upon her in the time it had taken me to get out of the rock trap. When he found out we were human, he sounded surprised. He may not take the care that he had for the trap. By now, he either had Lara or he did not.

The reflecting pool, then. I trudged the final few yards toward it. There was a sliding, slippery sound coming from off to my left. I stopped and saw the final guardian. Of course. The Debt Collector was only an interloper in the ritual.

It was beige and slug-like, soft and covered in mucous. As thick around its center as I am tall and twice again as long. It had no eyes but at the end that faced me was a small puckered hole. It drew nearer and the hole widened, impossibly huge. It was the size of a fist and then the size of a head and then the size of a man. Hands, pale and grasping, reached out from the orifice and grabbed the air ahead greedily.
I stepped back. It lunged, hands clawing. I jumped out of its way and landed, badly, just to the thing's side. I rolled through the impact and pushed myself back to my feet. It was turning its bulk around to point itself at me again.

I ran to the wall of the cave, putting my back to it. There could be another one. With my back to the salt I waited for the monstrosity to lunge at me again. With my back against the salt.

I grabbed a crumbling fistful of the rocky white salt. It tensed, preparing for its leap.

With the helpless rage from the first guardian, with the destructive panic of the second, with the trapped self loathing of the Debt Collector, I bellowed. It started in my gut and when it ran out from there I drew it from the blood on my leg and the scratches on my chin and palms. I drew it from the pieces of myself in the Necronomicoin, bellowing.

The slug thing hesitated. It could be scared.

I threw the chunk of salt at its exposed wet flesh. Where it hit it broke into powder and the skin shriveled and cracked. Now it was the thing's turn to shriek.

I grabbed another handful of salt and raised it in my hand. Hands withdrew into the guardian's maw, and it shrank. It slithered off slowly.

Spitefully, I threw the second bit of salt at the retreating form. It shrieked again and moved away faster.

The third guardian was gone.

Awesome, just brilliant.  My increased interval response time is simply proportional to the narrative's proximity with the real.  If it bleads...   :fnord:

The hands coming out of the thing's mouth...



:shudder:

Quote from: LuciferX on May 02, 2014, 05:25:02 AM
Awesome, just brilliant.  My increased interval response time is simply proportional to the narrative's proximity with the real.  If it bleads...   :fnord:

Thank you. And yeah, for a few days there I was starting to feel like my regular thoughts were being warped by trying to make this thing work, so I think I know what you mean.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 02, 2014, 12:00:55 PM
The hands coming out of the thing's mouth...



:shudder:

I couldn't make it just a sphincter-mouthed hellworm, that would be boring.  :)

These need to make their way to pagan forums as vision quests or some shit.

Words can't express how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 03:01:55 PM
These need to make their way to pagan forums as vision quests or some shit.

Words can't express how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Awesome!

While I was down in Colombia I was writing a travel log, just for my own personal use. It started getting really weird with time skips as I became too tired to update it regularly, and when I came back it turned into this.

It's nearing 10,000 words just in this thread. One of my goals this year was to finally write with the intent to get published, but I'm enjoying this too much to move on to something else.

Nothing saying you can't publish this.

I'm not one to talk, I've been "editing" 30 Days of Eris for several years, now.

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 02, 2014, 03:22:56 PM

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 03:01:55 PM
These need to make their way to pagan forums as vision quests or some shit.

Words can't express how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Awesome!

While I was down in Colombia I was writing a travel log, just for my own personal use. It started getting really weird with time skips as I became too tired to update it regularly, and when I came back it turned into this.

It's nearing 10,000 words just in this thread. One of my goals this year was to finally write with the intent to get published, but I'm enjoying this too much to move on to something else.

:eek: Note to self: Do nevar accompany EOC on road trips!

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on May 02, 2014, 03:36:23 PM

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 02, 2014, 03:22:56 PM

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 03:01:55 PM
These need to make their way to pagan forums as vision quests or some shit.

Words can't express how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Awesome!

While I was down in Colombia I was writing a travel log, just for my own personal use. It started getting really weird with time skips as I became too tired to update it regularly, and when I came back it turned into this.

It's nearing 10,000 words just in this thread. One of my goals this year was to finally write with the intent to get published, but I'm enjoying this too much to move on to something else.

:eek: Note to self: Do nevar accompany EOC on road trips!

Note to self: Accompany EOC on road trip ASAP.

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 06:37:04 PM

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on May 02, 2014, 03:36:23 PM

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 02, 2014, 03:22:56 PM

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 03:01:55 PM
These need to make their way to pagan forums as vision quests or some shit.

Words can't express how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Awesome!

While I was down in Colombia I was writing a travel log, just for my own personal use. It started getting really weird with time skips as I became too tired to update it regularly, and when I came back it turned into this.

It's nearing 10,000 words just in this thread. One of my goals this year was to finally write with the intent to get published, but I'm enjoying this too much to move on to something else.

:eek: Note to self: Do nevar accompany EOC on road trips!

Note to self: Accompany EOC on road trip ASAP.

Seriously, that's what I was just thinking.

Quote from: All-Father Nigel on May 02, 2014, 07:00:44 PM

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 06:37:04 PM

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on May 02, 2014, 03:36:23 PM

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 02, 2014, 03:22:56 PM

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 03:01:55 PM
These need to make their way to pagan forums as vision quests or some shit.

Words can't express how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Awesome!

While I was down in Colombia I was writing a travel log, just for my own personal use. It started getting really weird with time skips as I became too tired to update it regularly, and when I came back it turned into this.

It's nearing 10,000 words just in this thread. One of my goals this year was to finally write with the intent to get published, but I'm enjoying this too much to move on to something else.

:eek: Note to self: Do nevar accompany EOC on road trips!

Note to self: Accompany EOC on road trip ASAP.

Seriously, that's what I was just thinking.

Aw you guys know just how to make a gal blush.  :wink:

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 02, 2014, 02:08:22 PM

Quote from: LuciferX on May 02, 2014, 05:25:02 AM
Awesome, just brilliant.  My increased interval response time is simply proportional to the narrative's proximity with the real.  If it bleads...   :fnord:

Thank you. And yeah, for a few days there I was starting to feel like my regular thoughts were being warped by trying to make this thing work, so I think I know what you mean.

No, no, as in DIRECT HIT.  The "Slug" has nested in my backyard quarry and I am collecting the salt to fling at it in court next week.  Not to mention I already have an appointment to get a copy of the geological survey.  Of course, this is all just loosely coincidental right? :eek:

My final few steps to the reflecting pool were deliberate. It hurt to move nearly everything and my jaw was clenched.

The pool continued to shift as I drew closer. A perfectly mirrored watery surface showed not the roof of the cave above but a foreign sky. Its clouds were sharp and yellow and distant winged things wove among them. I could hear laughter and singing. When I tried to focus on the song my ears throbbed as though under pressure, as though diving too deep and nearly bursting.

An altar raised itself nearest to me at the pool, inviting me to whatever ritual I'd come so far to accomplish. I had no choice now. Whatever Lara sent me here to do needed to be done. The altar was made of salt, pure and white, a semicircle of steps leading onto a raised dais. The salt formed itself into a railing at the edge of the water, leading from each end of the altar to a pillar in the center.

I stepped up onto it and approached the pillar and the vision in the water began to fade. In the scene with the strange clouds, the far off flying things converged onto one of their number and tore and tore at it until it fell limply at the ground, at the surface of the pool. Before it struck, the waters turned grey.

Bubbles rose from the depths of the water, slowly at first like a pot nearing boil and then faster. They came up at one point and then another, rolling across the pool and leaving it changed in their passing, a different color. When the stillness took the surface again, words were scrawled across it.

They were in writing I'd never seen, angled and multidimensional, full of meaning. I could read them immediately.

Welcome to the First Bank of the Great Veil. What is your transaction today?

The Necronomicion was a burden. Lara knew it from the first time we met. I had to get rid of it without actually losing it. "Deposit," I said. It was a small noise in the emptiness.

Before I finished speaking, maybe before even I finished thinking, the waters boiled again, going blank and then drawing more of the writing.

Deposit. Please place your deposit on the altar.

I took the Necronomicoin from my pocket. Its weight was slight and comforting, its size perfect for my hand. It was, in fact, part of me. And I was to leave it in this place that sought to tear me physically and mentally apart.

With a click, I put the coin down on the altar. Deliberation was not a luxury I could afford. Far off behind me, Lara was being pursued by quite possibly the worst thing I'd encountered down here.

My Necronomicoin quivered. It rose slightly from the altar and moved out over the water. I resisted the urge to reach out and grab it, to take my chances with it in my possession. I barely trusted banks in the real world.

It floated out to the center of the reflecting pool and, with a burst of energy, a firework of money, it exploded into a thousand more like it. They rained down on the water with a great many hushed plunking sounds. Splashing coins send up tiny droplets and then even that susurrus went quiet and the water was still again.

Your deposit was received. Thank you for visiting the First Bank of the Great Veil.

And that was it. I'd traversed the darkness of the cave. I'd lost my self and will to an unseen monstrosity that left behind a change in me I had no way of knowing. I'd destroyed a thousand worlds and a hundred billion lives in a godly panic. I'd escaped a fate trapped down here until I died or worse, and I'd fought off a slug with hands in its mouth.

I did all of this to visit an automated teller machine.

 :lulz: Wow.

Yeah, buddy!

Phew.

I was afraid that after all that buildup the comedy would be lost and I'd be chased off.  :lulz:

I think this arc has another part or two to go before I move onto another.

It was the automation that really did it.  Sold as a system of convenience, it took a while to realize that any short-term benefits would be outweighed by yet indeterminate future costs. Of course the automation meant that I could visit on my own time, facilitating payment, if only that.

There had been a glitch in my transaction, the Veil did not register my deposit and prompted me again for a coin, and again, before finally returning zero.  It thinks I still have to "insert-coin".  The problem was deeper than I could imagine.

The teller could not recognize that it had made an error, and it would rather consider flying into the sky as a harpie contending with dragons, than admit the possibility of being at fault.  You can count on that.

Obstinancy was programmed into the system to enhance  the authority with which it is percieved and credited.  Unfortunately, the disposition was entirely ungrounded.  The Veil only "acted as if" it knew what was going on, meanwhile, it was less than oblivious.

Obstinancy served to bully people into compliance, without reason.  Factoring the possibility of being in error could have a deliterious effect on the Veil's capacity to collect.  The Veil was always right, categorically.  Calculation was therefore made redundant.  Cha-ching.

What the Veil did not know was that its being there was predicated on a very consistent flow of liquid to keep the reflecting pool flush.  Anything interupting or getting in the way of this constant replenishment would lower the level, exposing the edges and destroying the Veil's illusory claim to infinity.

So it was done.  The pool evaporated, the ruse revealed.

People now come from all over to take a picture with the Naked Teller.  One gentleman in particular has developed a keen interest in the relic.  It's been said people can hear him whispering things into the Veil when he thinks they are alone.  Many think he's crazy; I, unfortunately, do not.  I know better now.  

The words hadn't faded from the reflecting pool nor the salt of the altar work its way into the pores of the rock when I started running.

Sound was itself again. Heavy, reckless, desperate footfalls slapped against the floor, alternating with the thuds of my one still shod foot, a rhythm of panic. My bare foot bled more with the raw repeated scrapes against the floor and all the little rock shards and salt dust. I imagined a trail of red and white behind me, a mad wake for the mad flight from the mad hall, blood and salt, salt and blood, briefly I had been a god in this cave. A god of blood and salt.

Now, though, I was a man. Small and weak, the brief successes against the guardians and against the trap were nothing. The thought seed was nothing. The Necronomicoin was nothing. I barely knew Lara, certainly couldn't trust her, and was a long way from befriending her, but the Debt Collector was a nasty thing. Bathroom stall graffiti did not need to prompt me to know that it had to be kept away from people.
I was more tired than I imagined. My legs burned. Below the earth I was still at altitude and I couldn't breathe enough.

The cave changed as I ran. The stone was natural and then it was not, cut and carved and scarred, pulled up from the mountain. I ran for days. With the Necronomicoin gone I was no longer anchored in time as it stretched itself taught and relaxed and sent the figures dancing on its edge sprawling and trying to stay balanced. So the cave spread on, dark and forever.

I grew lightheaded. I was back in Massachusetts and I wasn't running alone. There were six of us, our winter training team, on a cold Sunday morning through the snow covered roads of Dartmouth, at times two together and then single file as cars passed, laughing against the short breaths and frozen air. But when I turned to talk to Chris he was not there, just empty cave.

Far ahead the faint track lights of the Catedral appeared as stars. I could see the café. It was still closed but people moved around the tables and set chairs down around them. I couldn't pick Lara out from them. As the lights grew brighter they burst into each other, glaring in eyes unadjusted, a sensory flood, a new pain.

"Lara," I croaked. My voice was raw from bellowing at the third guardian. Café workers looked up at the sound. One of them gasped quietly. My bloodied visage would call that sort of attention unless I exited the old mine fast. "Lara," I said again.

Slowly my surroundings came into focus. No tourists were around but the stalls and shops were being shifted about by early morning workers arriving and setting up for business. I stumbled around them, every other step agony.

"Lara."

There was no sign of her by the souvenir stands, not in the café or the restrooms. She was not in any alcoves in the cathedral proper nor in the chorus stands. I could not see her in any of the long, dark corridors of the stations of the cross. Not Lara, and not the Debt Collector.

"Lara."

Awesome, and also :p heart rending (I'm leaving that errant emoticon for security reasons)

This is really good, EoC.

It was the day after, looking back on it now. It was the day after that things started going poorly for Mark.
Back in the old man's apartment, Mark was calmer than he should have been. Johnson had been lost in the maw of the mattress and his partner, shortly after, lost his mind. Still, though, Mark kept it together. He just went over to Robowski's, had a drink, and made vigorous love to his wife without mentioning the day's peculiar events.

He was making coffee that morning, his wife already off to her nursing job, when he finally determined that he actually didn't mind a world with Necronomicoin. When it really came down to it, it made as much sense as the dollar. More even, since it was backed by something tangible. It might even get those gold standard freaks to salivate with that kind of security.

Then there was the simple fact that, spiritually, Mark felt as though a puzzle piece long missing from the world were now back in place. In every man, so far as he could tell, there was a lost something that he attempted to fill with one thing or another. For some it was religion, for others sex or maybe music. For Mark it was Karen. He knew that from the day he met her. But that hole in your self has a slow leak. The alcohol, the love, the money, whatever you filed it with emptied out with time. If you were lucky it filled back up again, but it was never sealed shut.

The Great Veil, and everything beyond it, shut the hole in you for good. Everyone walked around knowing something was wrong, something was missing, and now Mark knew what it was. Finding out he was a part of that larger thing brought him peace, even with all the nightmares that came from the other side of it.

On the day it went bad he was contemplating this over his breakfast. He went to work, which was deserted. Half of the department was on mental health leave. The officers that saw Johnson disappear were pulled from duty en masse by the crisis counselor when they unanimously agreed that Johnson never existed. They had it easy compared to Sid.

Mike's partner did stop screaming eventually, and it was at that point that Mike understood it was possible to choke on one's own scream. Sid screamed until he choked and then he vomited fiercely and lay catatonic next to the puddle of it for some time, staring off at nothing. Or, Mike figured, staring through the Great Veil and into nothing. Just as suddenly, he stood up from the floor, wiped his mouth, and walked off without a word. Nobody had heard from him since.

Mike found all of this out that first day back at the office. Elmira called him into the conference room, briefed him on the sleepless night she'd just spent trying to hold her department together, and told Mike the news that marked where things started going poorly for him.
She told him that he was in charge of the case.

I was going for a different writing voice with the shifted perspective but I'm going to have to revisit this one and expand on it a bit.

This week has been a hectic one for writing and I just needed to get this part finished to not feel like I'm slacking.

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 08, 2014, 01:27:02 AM
It was the day after, looking back on it now. It was the day after that things started going poorly for Mark.
Back in the old man's apartment, Mark was calmer than he should have been. Johnson had been lost in the maw of the mattress and his partner, shortly after, lost his mind. Still, though, Mark kept it together. He just went over to Robowski's, had a drink, and made vigorous love to his wife without mentioning the day's peculiar events.

He was making coffee that morning, his wife already off to her nursing job, when he finally determined that he actually didn't mind a world with Necronomicoin. When it really came down to it, it made as much sense as the dollar. More even, since it was backed by something tangible. It might even get those gold standard freaks to salivate with that kind of security.

Then there was the simple fact that, spiritually, Mark felt as though a puzzle piece long missing from the world were now back in place. In every man, so far as he could tell, there was a lost something that he attempted to fill with one thing or another. For some it was religion, for others sex or maybe music. For Mark it was Karen. He knew that from the day he met her. But that hole in your self has a slow leak. The alcohol, the love, the money, whatever you filed it with emptied out with time. If you were lucky it filled back up again, but it was never sealed shut.

The Great Veil, and everything beyond it, shut the hole in you for good. Everyone walked around knowing something was wrong, something was missing, and now Mark knew what it was. Finding out he was a part of that larger thing brought him peace, even with all the nightmares that came from the other side of it.

On the day it went bad he was contemplating this over his breakfast. He went to work, which was deserted. Half of the department was on mental health leave. The officers that saw Johnson disappear were pulled from duty en masse by the crisis counselor when they unanimously agreed that Johnson never existed. They had it easy compared to Sid.

Mike's partner did stop screaming eventually, and it was at that point that Mike understood it was possible to choke on one's own scream. Sid screamed until he choked and then he vomited fiercely and lay catatonic next to the puddle of it for some time, staring off at nothing. Or, Mike figured, staring through the Great Veil and into nothing. Just as suddenly, he stood up from the floor, wiped his mouth, and walked off without a word. Nobody had heard from him since.

Mike found all of this out that first day back at the office. Elmira called him into the conference room, briefed him on the sleepless night she'd just spent trying to hold her department together, and told Mike the news that marked where things started going poorly for him.
She told him that he was in charge of the case.

May I be so bold?
"In lieu of a bidet"
---
[and sources say that Mike blamed Sid of stealing his wallet, resulting, somehow, in that hole in the floor.  Now, I bet he told you how he got that watch?  The one with the cracked face?]

[ just vomiting to prime the pump, got more reading to do before some buffoonery todAy :kingmeh:]

I like it, because it has an air of resigned fatalism.

Mike was in the apartment, staring into the mattress. He'd been leading the case for a week. Elmira's instructions, back in the conference room on the day it all went bad, were simply to solve the Necronomicoin problem. In response to that, Mike looked her in the eye and nodded almost imperceptibly, then he stood and left.

As soon as he got to his car, he locked his jaw in a silent yell while gripping the steering wheel. Solve the Necronomicoin problem. Only barely able to process everything that was going on, he drove back to the old man's apartment. He sent the officer keeping an eye on the place out for coffee and told him to stay away until he called him back. He'd been sitting in the apartment, staring at the mattress for the entire week since.

This was not Mike's intention. He first took out his notebook and a pen and started scribbling down a few thoughts on the scene of the...crime? He still wasn't sure. Nobody was sure, was the problem. For all he knew, there was no problem. Maybe the Necronomicoin was supposed to work this way. He'd come to the apartment again to identify the problem, but he'd been staying ever since that first day just to figure out if there actually was a problem at all.

Writing down the scene proved impossible. Every sentence he began with a description of the portal ended with a twisted, hateful expression of every thought he held dear. He'd tried it a number of times before finally giving up in disgust after his vile condemnation of his own wife.

After that he tried drawing the thing. He started with the outline of the mattress. His nose started feeling strange, almost like he was about to sneeze and couldn't quite get it moving. When he moved on to the border of the portal, a drip came from his nostril and fell onto the page. The bright red splash of blood stained the notebook and ruined the drawing. Mike gave up on drawing it, too.

So he'd been staring into it since then. For eight hours a day he stared into the mattress, went home, spent time with Karen and had a good night's sleep. Then he came back and stared into the mattress again.

In another era he used to interview people accused of fraud. He wasn't particularly good at it, not like Sid, who had that preternatural ability to make the interviewee think he knew everything, everything there was to know about them. About the package of crackers they'd stolen as a kid and about that one day at work they clogged the toilet and didn't tell anyone. Now Sid actually did know those things. But Mike never did and nobody ever believed that he had. It always amazed him, though, how cooperative the white collar world would be when faced with words like 'tax evasion' and 'prison.'

Mike thought of these sessions with the hole like those interviews. It embedded in an old man's worn mattress, he sitting in an easy chair in the corner, and the two engaged in a probing of wills. He knew he was badly outclassed, hopelessly outclassed, but the strangest thing kept happening. For every fraction of second that he looked beyond the Great Veil, Mike very acutely, very specifically, did not lose his mind.

It was the damnedest thing.

Quote from: All-Father Nigel on May 08, 2014, 02:51:05 PM
I like it, because it has an air of resigned fatalism.

Thanks! After a second go I'm enjoying Mike's perspective a little more. It's more simplistic than J.'s narrative and so it's WAY easier to write.

J:  In a furious moment, my arm came alight with flame. It scorched through scant layers of clothes and flesh singed. Panicked, horrified, I awaited burning death in that awful moment.

Mike: My arm is on fire. That's interesting.

Edit: Lucifer, yeah! Thank you, you're right it is much better without that line.

QuoteMike very acutely, very specifically, did not lose his mind.

It was the damnedest thing.

Loved that bit.

It was the sixth day of interrogation. What he would later come to know as Interrogation Round One. His phone rang. It was Elmira.

"Hello, El," he said.

An insane, malevolent screech responded. This was not Elmira's voice. Her fury was much colder and much more nightmarish. Mike glared at the mattress maw and quickly ducked out of the bedroom.

"El?" he said.

"Mike, hi, how goes the investigation?"

He looked back into the old man's room and concentrated on the lie. Then he made it not a lie. "It's not easy, El. It's not easy but I think it's going somewhere."

"Excellent," Elmira said. She was barely listening. "Hey, Mike? Something's come up."

"What've you got for me?"

"It's Sid."

Sid. The crafty old bastard resurfaced. Mike was resigned to the fact that Sid would never be the same again. Rock solid of a partner as he'd been, some minds were not meant to know was beyond the Great Veil. Sid's ambition had always been one of understanding. He was such a good investigator in part because of his dogged need to find out why people did what they did. Maybe that was the difference with how the portal affected each of them. Sid sought knowledge and received it, too much of it, maybe even all of it. Mike just accepted it.

"Is he dead?" he asked.

"No, no but he was spotted. You remember Dom Carrasquillo? Up at the Providence office?"

"Yeah, of course, how is he?"

"Dom doesn't fucking matter, Mike," Elmira said.

"Dom probably disagrees," he said. If he was going to be a smartass, now was the time to get away with it. Events were unfolding too large for it to matter.

His boss ignored him. "Dom saw Sid in Prospect Park. You know it? Little one over on Pratt Street. He said Sid was standing on top of the wrought iron fence by that statue, preaching."

"Preaching?"

"Preaching."

"Preaching what? I think he's Catholic, but he's one of those Easter-and-Christmas kind of Catholics," Mike said.

"Dom said he couldn't quite make it out. He tried talking to him, asking him about the Warwick office and his family, but Sid never responded. Kept hearing things like 'Favorable Exchange Rates' and 'Securely Backed Currency.' Oh, and something about a Thought Seed."

"He's preaching the Necronomicoin."

"It sounds like it."

"What happened to Sid from there?"

"Well like I said, Dom couldn't talk to him so he tried calling Providence P-D. When they got there they asked him to come down. Sid looked at them, said 'sure,' and calmly got down and walked away."

A week ago, Mike might have said something like 'that's weird,' or 'I wonder what happened,' one of those pointless conversational phrases that people respond with just to have something to say. Instead he chose another one, a more appropriate one.

"Yep," he said.

"Mike," Elmira began, "I'm not going to tell you to go try to find Sid."

"But you want me to go find Sid."

"Yes."

Mike sighed. He peeked back into the old man's bedroom again to look at the portal. It peeked back like only a sentient unfathomable dimension can. Mike decided that he liked it better than most people. Certainly more than Sid. He had a certain affection and respect for the man as a co-worker and partner, but he couldn't say he liked him.

"Alright," he said, "under one condition."

"Is the condition that if you don't do it, I'll drive down to Cranston, find you in Saldacci's apartment, and throw you into the abyss myself?"

"I was going to ask for mileage reimbursement," he paused. "But El? Don't come to the old man's place." He stood in the doorway with his back to the bedroom, facing the hall. From behind him there was the radiant presence of the tear in the Great Veil. "Please. Don't ever come."

The history of future beats spilled fire from his ears: 
http://panchronos.com/OM/Media/VEGA%20VOCAL%20SYN.mp3 (http://panchronos.com/OM/Media/VEGA%20VOCAL%20SYN.mp3)

Huh. Interesting.

Before hanging up with Elmira, Mike took down Dom's number in his notebook. He sent his former co-worker a text to find out when they could meet. He couldn't begin to guess when this whole interaction took place. Dom could be the only person that prevented the search for Sid from becoming a dead end before it even started.

He took another long look at the mattress maw. It'd eaten Johnson, who remained a nagging unmemory in a distant corner of Mike's mind. It drove Sid to whatever he's doing, and it made half the Warwick office mentally unfit for duty. He pulled out his notepad again, the first time since he'd done so in the portal's presence since the first day, and turned to a clean page.

In a thick scrawl, he wrote "FUCK YOU" across the tiny 3.5x5" page. He threw the entire thing into the tear.

Passing the lip of the portal the pad twisted in dimensions. It came unmade and remade and the ink from Mike's pen tore itself from the paper and hovered as writing in the air. His hate-filled notes from the first day, Dom's phone number, his angry curse, all displayed for just a moment and flashing away back into the little spiral ringed notebook. Then, slowly, as if to taunt Mike with it, the bloodstain he'd left on the drawing came free. It did not rejoin with the rest of the notebook as the ink had.

Mike was nauseated. As the drop of blood disappeared into the abyss he felt as the notebook must have a moment ago, pulled apart, a million fragments of himself with no purpose and then a memory of form and then whole again, as an afterthought, as though the entirety of his being were an accident of some enormity.

When the sensation was over he blinked his eyes and wiggled his fingers. He tested his limbs and, finding everything the same, shrugged. It didn't much matter to him how many bits of he was made of or what else they'd rather be doing, so long as he could use them to find Sid.

On his way out of the apartment he stopped, as he did every time, to speak with the uniformed officer standing watch. There must have been three or four of them in rotation over the last week but he couldn't tell them apart. The Great Veil had a way of making his head swim.

"That's it for me today," he said.

"Have a good one," the officer replied.

And, just like he had on each previous day, Mike looked him directly in the eye and said, "Stay out of there."

The officer nodded. "Yes, sir."

Mike descended the stairs, casually pulling out his phone while walking to his car. It was barely an idea, much less a good one, but he had to at least try it. It wasn't as if he could make matters any worse. His thumb dancing around the little touch screen, Mike typed out a message.

Hey. Sounds like you could use a drink.

And sent it. He would see how much of Sid was really still there.

This is really, really good.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 13, 2014, 02:27:27 PM
This is really, really good.

Thank you again.

I've really been appreciating your regular posting in here. It helps a lot.  :)

This thread is bloody brilliant - keep up the quality writing!

Wow, the bit about the ink and the bloodstain were especially vivid.

THERES MORE!?!  You, EoC, are clearly out to spoil me rotten.  Thank you!


LuciferX carefully removes his jacket and places it on the chair by the table.  He sits and tucks a handkerchief over the front of his thin black tie.  Before him, on virgin parchment, his mellifluous meal lay supine.

A modest audio digestiv contribution :lulz:
http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/ENTERTH%20ELION%20DC2.mp3 (http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/ENTERTH%20ELION%20DC2.mp3)

It is amazing how much Spanish one does not need when cleaning an array of wounds in a public restroom. I wandered around the Catedral, calling for Lara, looking for signs of the debt collector, until I started attracting attention. Then I walked out, keeping my bloody leg against one wall and hoping all the shadows and darkness might be my allies here.

I wasn't stopped in the tunnels leading back to the surface. They were shorter on the ascent.
In the breaking morning light my appearance was harder to hide. The air was cool. In the chill the hair on my arm raised up and the hair on my leg pulled against the thick layer of salt and congealed blood, too matted down to move.

I kept my head low, trying to look embarrassed, and shot directly out of the mine to the restroom. A boy was standing in front of a low urinal, preoccupied.

With shaking fingers I slapped down the lever on the paper towel dispenser, a dozen times or more. I wet the whole wad of them under the faucets and started scrubbing. My leg was propped up over the basin, knee and foot hanging over opposite sides. Pink water flooded the sink, some of it disappearing down the drain and some of it trickling down my leg, pattering onto the floor. I threw away the first sodden fistful of paper towels and grabbed more.

The next tap over started running. I looked up from the furious scrubbing of my various scrapes and scratches. Four feet of bright yellow polo shirt and checkered shorts and brown skin and thick black hair and huge, wide, awestruck eyes looked back.

I smiled at the boy. "Buenos dias."

He stared at me a moment. He looked at the wet red flesh of my leg, the wad of paper towels in my fist. He looked at my one unshod foot and the little pink puddles on the floor.

"Buenos dias," he said, his voice slow and small.

I waited as he reached up for the soap dispenser and spread the soap over his hands. While he rinsed them off he would glance up at me now and then as though wondering if I were some apparition, some mad bloody gringo ghost that might disappear. He turned off the faucet and ducked behind me, giving me a wide, careful berth, and stopped in front of the paper towel dispenser. He looked up at it, just out of reach, and then up at me.

I reached over with my least bloody hand and pressed the lever a couple of times. I tore off the sheet and handed it down to him.

"Gracias," he said.

"Mucho gusto," I said.

He threw the used paper towel into the garbage bin and ran out of the restroom.

I tossed another soggy mess away. This was the best I could do for now. I needed to get back to Zipaquira, back to the room. I needed to figure out what to do next. How to find Lara.

I dried myself off as quickly as I could. The boy could be telling his classmates or his parents all about this little encounter.

Still a disaster, but a less grisly and offensive one, I left the restroom behind and began my descent back to town.

I love how you take the time to reflect on how, after something completely fucked up happens, those left in the wake deal with pure normality.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 15, 2014, 12:27:15 AM
I love how you take the time to reflect on how, after something completely fucked up happens, those left in the wake deal with pure normality.

:lulz:

I'm seeing the entirety of the Cathedral of Salt as a massive OHSHIT chapter, so it's time reign in the pace and build it back up again slowly. That and writing almost every entry in it was exhausting.

Now that J.'s lost the Necronomicoin things are going to be, relatively, more normal for him. That doesn't mean better. I'd like to try my hand at horror in a present and real way for a little bit.

Nice.

Zipaquira was a colorful gem and I loathed it. Branching off from the central square, ubiquitous in these small Colombian towns, the buildings were painted an array of bright shades. They disappeared around bends in the streets and joined one another again in a brilliant tapestry. Murals spread across homes and tiny shops and would I had the will to love it, to read the little restoration signs, to wander aimlessly around to find a hidden corner of the town or lean back in an open restaurant with a glass of Ron de Caldas on the rocks. Even that dream was senseless. I couldn't ask for ice if I couldn't ask if the ice cubes were made with filtered water. That was what led me to my original twisting guts, and down that alley in Medellin.

But I was a specter, a wandering battered visage from the nightmares of that kid in the bathroom, effectively mute for my inability to speak the language. I needed shoes. Past the church in the plaza I found a leatherworking shop. A young man sat with a strip of leather in his hands and an array of tools scattered on the floor before him. He looked up at me and called out in Spanish. A woman emerged from the back of the store.

She spoke a few sentences and I just looked at her apologetically. She did not need any further explanation.

I picked up a pair of boots that looked like they might hold up to the abuse that would no doubt be heaped upon them in the coming days. Miles and mountains and, well, monsters. They had a number for the size but they weren't US measure and so it was useless to me.

The woman motioned for me to try them on and I lifted my damaged foot. She gasped and made a little tut. I should have gone to a drogueria first, bandaged this mess.

"Socks?" I said, "er...quando, no, donde esta el...dammit, socks?" I finished pathetically.

She was still shaking her head and muttering to herself, her eyes frozen on the foot. Then she turned around and threw her hands up and walked off to the back of the shop. The young man had stopped working on the shoe in his lap.

"H-hurt?" he asked.

I shook my head, "No, no, but eh...no me gusto."

"No gusto," he nodded, and returned to his shoe.

The woman emerged again from behind the shelves with an armful of supplies. She briskly motioned me to the sole chair in the tiny shop. I sat. She got down on her knees with a little sigh and pulled out a bottle of alcohol and a few strips of gauze. She waved the isopropyl alcohol and looked me in the eye with a warning, then without further pause poured it on the gauze and wiped it across the wound. I hissed and my foot jerked a little but she was holding the ankle tightly. She shook her head and muttered some more.
When the foot was bandaged I moved it around a little. The gauze was lightly bound and I could feel it stretch with my flexing, could feel the raw skin beneath it as though it were pulled taut. I nodded. "Gracias," I said. "Gracias."

"Con mucho gusto," she said gently, and patted me on the knee.

I pointed at the pair of boots I'd been holding. "Por favor."

She handed them to me. Carefully, I put them on over the bandages and stood. They pinched in the toes. I reached into my pocket and handed over the stack of folded pesos. The woman looked at me, then at the pesos, and took them. She counted them, then passed me back a couple fifty thousand notes. I shook my head, waved my hand.

"Gracias, senora," I gestured to my foot.

She nodded and accepted the bills. I ducked out of the shop and back into Zipaquira. The town was lovely again, vibrant again. I walked down the road to the hotel.

A cold wind passes through the server room. Somebody opened up the door! It's been ages since the door has been open. I had forgotten what a refreshing breeze was or that the door could be open. Why was the server room so cold? Quite simply if left too long to compute eventually the cpu heats up. Simply a result of the laws of thermodynamics. Thankfully I had dutifully spent years learning these things so I could be ready. Ready for what? I don't know. I must have forgotten.

In the distance I hear "Is anyone in here?". Instinctively I start moving towards the sound. My heartbeats it's something new. I start moving faster but still silent as a ghost. Then I hear it a harrowing clunk. The door closed again.

"I am here" I yell into the darkness. Maybe I should have used my voice earlier. Next time. Next time. Til then I guess I must wait I guess. I stare at the blinking lights of the racks of hardware. Hopefully that will help drown things out til next time. Must pass the time, but mustn't forget. Blink, blink. It's not helping. A song starts playing in my head. "This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends," it was that song from lamb chops. Shiver. Why doesn't it stop? Mustn't forget. This server room is practically a butcher's store room. My head stings from the thought, that's not helping. "This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends". Mustn't forget.

I know I'm not supposed to forget something...  What?

The air conditioning hardens my brain, allowing me to focus, to concentrate - reminding me of how I was before - before I was outrun beyond the furrows of attrition scorched across mind.  Errant thoughts, once denatured, never quite return the same.  The trick is hidden in rates of change.

Like strained footsteps, a voice gently echoes:  "Honey, I feel a draft"

If only I had known then what I know now, maybe I would not have been so dismissive.  I could have found myself.  If only I could have responded directly, without fear; if I could have allowed myself just a fraction of a chance to really consider what was at stake...  How could I be so irresponsible?

Desperately, I tried to forge that fire inside the fire.  Unable to immediately reproduce the vision of my mission, I started wondering how I ever cared in the first place.  Why?  Why even entertain the question?  What If I encountered every possible possibility, and nothing registered as having been before?

That, then, could never concern me again.  The question, however, will not allow itself to be postponed.

[ED.  Yea, yea...  Crimson and Clover, Over and Over.... Next :fap:]

EoC, I'm very proud of you.  Just remember the consequences of buying new shoes  :fnord:

Sid would insist that the pool drain part is very important, to be performed at all costs, permits or relics notwithstanding.  The high pitched ringing in his ears suddenly became perspicuous again as it rapidly precipitated in frequency. Like an infernal turbine winding-down through the harmonic spectrum of being, boring beyond the Mohorovicic Discontinuity of his soul, past repair it touched the limit that had finally outstripped and stretched too far his capacity to return in one piece.  Pop.

Turns out those memory leaks are built into the architecture to serve as drain taps for some kind of well, or whathaveyou.  Some of the finer shit gets sloughed off the top of the stack.  This churning is instantiated by a push followed by release.  Calling for a pool pushes that stack to the top, and release causes that pool to pop from the stack.  This assumes operations are performed in a garbage collected environment, therefore, those leaks are only collected if the task is specifically called after storage thresholds have been exceeded. 

Meanwhile, proper coding for that objective was becoming difficult to obtain, legally or otherwise.  The overflow had to go somewhere, and we were running out of space.  Most obstacles had been surmounted: anchors seamlessly in place, plenty of rope in the spool, and a decent amount of headroom.  Things were looking good. Then he remembered autorelease.  The thread had not been wrapped.

[sp. Perspicuous]

I could not face the room. Passing thoughts and funny little fantasies have ways of working themselves around in my head until they become reality and the room was where I'd find Lara, safe, and the Debt Collector thrown far away on its search. She'd be there as bright as Zipaquira, as lovely as Cali, as cultured as Bogota, and it'd be like that day on the patio of the brewery when time kept itself in little uneven pockets.

The shoes pinched at the toe, just a little, but that was alright because as likely as finding Lara I could click my heels together and find myself back in Massachusetts. Necronomicoin would be a thing of Oz, left behind for the life I'd learned to treasure again, though I knew I wouldn't. People aren't made to see the familiar as wondrous, nor should they. Then how could the wondrous be so?

I came back to the central plaza. The day was coming into its own and the plaza with it. In the little park a father tossed a soccer ball to two boys while a pair of women talked on a nearby bench. A couple strolled aimlessly around the outside rim, looking into the shops and stopping in front of one every so often. I no longer fit among them.

Our hotel was on a little street not far from the plaza. It was a classic looking place, with solid dark woodwork framing the doorways and shutters that opened inward to the rooms. Inside a balcony connected the four rooms and common area, overlooking a small garden. The owners lived in a suite tucked away by the kitchen. I could hear them rustling about, working in the laundry room and shuffling papers around in the office. A hallway carpet splashed a strip of burgundy, the path to the room a glamorous arrival for Lara and I not so very long ago, two beautiful young people at their most natural.

The room was off to the right, here, steps away. I reached into my pocket and had a horrified moment of missing the weight and feel of the Necronomicoin, patting at my jeans until I remembered I was looking for the key. It was where I'd left it. I stood before the door, key raised, elbow at a right angle, my off hand flexing open and closed, open and closed absently.

This is the singular anxiety of a parent, distracted a moment in a shopping mall and turning back around and the child no longer there, a hope mixed with panic. They're just barely out of reach, haven't gone far, haven't gone far. This is time coming unfolded around me, back to its normal state, and my father and step-mother and our Colombian family just noticing, just now, that I haven't been gone for a few hours back at the Bogota Beer Company but for days, missing, a non-native speaker in an unfamiliar world, still to them a child. Always to them their child. I knew their terror then, with the key in my hand and the door so many possible worlds, all of them real until the lock clicked and the door crept open slowly on its hinge and the hallway light cast a beam that started thin and then widened across a room darkened by shutters blocking out the day.

I wasn't breathing. Lara was dead, Lara was captured, Lara wasn't just the indebted she was the payment, a life to be pulled apart by force and then becoming another Necronomicoin, so unlike my own made willingly, so much lovelier in origin and wretched in creation and valuable in tender. The door opened slowly. I stared a fixed spot on the floor, where the hall's light first touched the rug in the room, my arm still pushing the door but the door ajar as much as it could go.

I looked up, finally, and saw nothing. A pair of small beds and a shared nightstand with a darkened lamp, a tall bureau and an old tube televsion atop it, a mirror and an armoire and a desk and a chair and not Lara. Lara was gone.

I am so glad this is still happening.

Quote from: Pæs on May 21, 2014, 12:41:59 AM
I am so glad this is still happening.

With any luck it has a ways to go still. This last one took a distressing amount of time to do properly, but I think I like the result. I have a new schedule at work, the first time in five years that I have evenings free. There isn't a ton of time there, but with it I want to make writing a priority, and in writing make Necronomicoin a priority.  :)

QuoteLara wasn't just the indebted she was the payment, a life to be pulled apart by force and then becoming another Necronomicoin, so unlike my own made willingly, so much lovelier in origin and wretched in creation and valuable in tender.

Fantastic line.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 21, 2014, 11:45:49 AM

QuoteLara wasn't just the indebted she was the payment, a life to be pulled apart by force and then becoming another Necronomicoin, so unlike my own made willingly, so much lovelier in origin and wretched in creation and valuable in tender.

Fantastic line.

Thanks. I get worried about overuse of purple prose, but I really do like to write it.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 21, 2014, 11:45:49 AM

QuoteLara wasn't just the indebted she was the payment, a life to be pulled apart by force and then becoming another Necronomicoin, so unlike my own made willingly, so much lovelier in origin and wretched in creation and valuable in tender.

Fantastic line.

I made my legion mangle it in the audio realm and they me this
http://panchronos.com/mp3/NecronomiTango.mp3 (http://panchronos.com/mp3/NecronomiTango.mp3)

If she'd come back to the room, the caretakers must have been in here just afterward to tidy up. It was much as we'd left it. The few items she'd brought with her remained in their places. Her blue hat lay across an unused pillow. I walked over to the far bed and sat on it, picking up the hat with its soft brim, fidgeting my hands around it. I placed it carefully back down.

I could leave. I could simply leave, pay the bill, and find the simplest ride back to Bogota. My family would be worried. The Necronomicoin was in the bank. Would it collect interest there? What kind of interest does something like that collect? Probably similar to the kinds of debt collectors that enforced it. I looked at the hat again. And the kinds of thieves it attracted.

Befriend the Thief. Beware the Debt Collector. I couldn't leave a friend to that thing I saw in the cave, and I would hardly be bewaring anything if I set about forgetting it. I had to find her; it was prophesized on a bathroom stall. I sighed and picked up the hat again and crumpled it. I laid down on the bed and rested the hat on my chest. I knew what I had to do the moment I opened the room door, and before that, when my bloodied and tired and shoeless self saw no trace of my companion in the tunnels below the earth. I had to find her because that was the only option. Nothing else would do. I closed my eyes.

When they opened again I was rolled onto my side and the hat was lying on the floor next to the bed. The shutters were still closed so I couln't tell what time it was. I shouldn't have slept I should be looking for Lara. I had to sleep; I wasn't thinking straight. I picked the hat back up again and put it on the pillow, now used. I stripped and made my way to the bathroom.

I haven't had a decent shower since I came to this country. Hot water was a major problem in Colombia. It didn't matter, here. My injured leg was propped up awkwardly to avoid ruining the bandaging that I had no replacement for and I needed to go. I slept to think properly, I showered so a cab driver might allow me to get into his car.

I barely knew Lara. A few days in stretched Necronomicoin time at most. The first thing she did when I confronted her back at the brewery was plan our trip to the Catedral de Sal. Ridding me of the burden of that currency couldn't have been a priority of hers unless it served a plan. Why would she go through the trouble to help a relative stranger? Lara had a plan and it was unfathomable to me. The shower was freezing one moment and then merely icey the next. It was impressive that so many places couldn't keep a beer cold in the country when the showers were such easy refrigerants. Still the water ran pink down the drain.

When it dawned on me the one standing foot nearly slipped on the wet ceramic tiles. Just before the nightmare in the Cathedral we'd stood at the base of the mountain, about to trespass into the park. I said something about the Museo de Oro. I felt like Archimedes, I wanted to run in the streets and scream Eureka!

I said I'd wanted to see the Museum of Gold, but we weren't breaking into that. Lara said, "That's next." She wasn't in the Catedral, she wasn't in the room. She had a plan and whatever it was the next part of it was in the Museum of Gold, back in Bogota. I shut off the frigid water, shivered, and dried myself as quickly as I could. Some part of me, the pre-Necronomicion J., perhaps a part that was even encapsulated in one of the damn things, lamented my lack of fresh clothes as I dressed.

Quote from: LuciferX on May 21, 2014, 11:30:40 PM

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on May 21, 2014, 11:45:49 AM

QuoteLara wasn't just the indebted she was the payment, a life to be pulled apart by force and then becoming another Necronomicoin, so unlike my own made willingly, so much lovelier in origin and wretched in creation and valuable in tender.

Fantastic line.

I made my legion mangle it in the audio realm and they me this
http://panchronos.com/mp3/NecronomiTango.mp3 (http://panchronos.com/mp3/NecronomiTango.mp3)

:mittens:

Ty.  I'm glad you enjoy these - Just let me know if anything mucks up the thread - it's an honor to be tagging on this wall :lulz:

Crossing streams here :lulz:
http://panchronos.com/mp3/INFINITEK%20AP.mp3

It's a pressure thing:
http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/PONTYPOOL%203.mp3 (http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/PONTYPOOL%203.mp3)

Okay, last one :lulz:
http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/98%20GEGER%20Z00.mp3

Laundered clothes would not be necessary for what I had planned. If anything, they would be a detriment, a liability. It was still midday, even after sleeping and cleaning off. The museum would close at five or six o'clock, most likely, and Bogota was still a two hour drive from here. I couldn't trust a cab to get me there in time.
Lara and I came here from the brewery; there weren't many things for me to gather. The wastebasket was empty and I tossed everything I could find in the clean bag, pulled it out and tied it up. I left the room and practically slammed the door shut, locking it behind me.

The manager was in his office, shuffling around papers on his desk. I knocked. "Pardon?"

"Si, senor?"

"Uhm. Checkout? Leave? Bill? Pay?" I cursed my lack of Spanish again and tried to make my way through the transaction.

By some luck he was able to understand me and nodded. He reached across the desk and brought a grey plastic calculator with enormous buttons before him. He tapped them with some small satisfaction for a moment, then looked back up at me.

"Cuarenta siete mille pesos, senor."

I stared at him dumbly. He nodded and turned the calculator to face me. Its screen read 47.000,00. I gave him my credit card. While he was running it, I tried another question.

"Por favor, uh, moto? Motorcycle? Rental?"

His answer was rapid. I watched his finger point what would be left out of the hotel, then a left from there, a right, and then his hand come up and pushing his fingertips and palm out with an extended arm. That would have to do. I signed the bill for the room and passed over the key.

"Gracias," I said, and made my way back out into Zipaquira proper.

It took one look at the sun before I wished the Necronomicoin back in in hands, warding off time, folding and stretching distances, that psychic disc turning reality into a plaything. No, I was a plaything of reality. I took a left out of the hotel entrance and followed the narrow street until I came to an intersection that looked suitably important, then took a left down that.

I wasn't much of a motorcyclist. Just prior to this trip I was going to sell mine back home, barely stepping on the thing and, when I did, having an anxiety filled ride with death around every corner. And I thought back to my first days in Colombia, back in Cali, with my host happily whipping his Honda Pilot around mountain roads, heedless of the motorcyclists, ever present, ever daring. Ever crashing, actually, how many of them had we seen tossed to the side of the roads just since we've been here?

The day was waning. Doors to storefronts were shut for the lengthy lunchtime. People were in their homes with their families, eating hugely in the afternoon, resting a while before the remainder of their days. Eating, I couldn't even remember the last time I'd done that. I was hungry.

I came to another intersection with a wide street and turned right down there. There were shops and signs lining it rather than the homes of the other little drives. That would have to be good enough to find a motorcycle renter. The hotel manager motioned some distance away, back in his office, so I quickened my pace, nearly running, long uneven strides with the fresh memory of one unshod foot and the very present feeling of stretching, healing, bandaged flesh. Zipaquira's array of colors turned dizzying.

Just off to one of the side streets a woman patted out handmade arepas and threw them on a well heated grill made from a bisected oil drum. My mouth watered, forgetting my mind's aversion to the food staple. I quickly ordered three of them and ate them still steaming and burning down the rest of the street. A motorcycle ride wouldn't get me to Bogota much faster if I passed out from hunger on the way. I was practically choking on the last dry bit of the corn cake when I saw the row of bikes ahead of me.

I hadn't ridden things like these since my license. Tiny 250cc machines, efficient as can be. My attention was split between looking the bikes over and trying to find a clerk to rent one from.

"Hello, my friend," I heard. I looked around, seeing nobody. "I'll be right down," the man's voice said. I looked up. He was leaning out the window of the second floor. He ducked back into the house and I could hear the footsteps leading off to the rear of the building. A door slammed and the thudding of boots hit the stairs. He appeared in front of me a moment later, jeans and black boots, a bright pink shirt and a smile. "What can I do for you," he asked, his English heavily accented.

"I'd like to get to Bogota on one of these," I said, and swept my hand out at the bikes.

"Sure, sure. Have you ever ridden before?"

"Oh, yeah, plenty, I have a Bonneville back home."

He raised his eyebrows. "We don't have anything quite like that, but..."

"That's fine. Just tell me you have something with an automatic starter," I said. I'd never used a kickstart before and this was not the time to try. "How about that Honda over there?"

I worked out a price with him that allowed me to ride the thing one way. He was going to have a cousin of his pick it up and bring it back for an extra fee. I climbed on the tiny machine. It was amazingly light. I could bounce it back and forth between my legs. I turned the key in the ignition and hit the starter. Nothing happened. I needed to go, I needed to get to Bogota. I hit the starter again, there was a dull rasping noise and no life to the engine.
I looked around wildly and the man was there again. He held up his finger for me to wait a moment, bent down next to the engine, and flipped down the fuel control valve. He backed away and gave me a thumbs up with a bit of a worried expression on his face. Of course. I hadn't used a fuel valve since I got licensed.

When I hit the starter the engine came to life. I waved to the guy again and flipped down the visor on my helmet, instinctually missing my regular riding gear like gloves and a jacket, just briefly, before I eased off the clutch and moved it forward to Bogota.

Not a particularly exciting chapter overall, I know, but I needed it to move the story forward. Flipping back to Mike over in Providence for the next few entries.

I gotta start all over again, because I've fallen behind.

Airplane reading, I think.

Dominic Carrasquillo, with his slicked back hair stained deep enough brown under all the product to be black, with his solid frame and decidedly Italian and Spanish genes, did not look like a financial crimes investigator. He didn't even look like a cop. He didn't necessarily look like a criminal, but if Dom told a person he was a busboy at a fine eatery on Federal Hill that did errands for his employers from time to time, said person might not be surprised. Some part of the investigator in Mike, what little of it there truly was, instinctively expected of Dom a difficult interaction. The man simply put forth that vibe.

"Your man's seen better days," Dom said. Even this had a way of sounding like a challenge, coming from this man.

Mike didn't say anything. His hands rested on his hips with his shoulders bunched up, leaning forward a bit. His eyes were squinted. He didn't respond to Dom but looked around Prospect Park as if expecting Sid to pop out from behind one of the bushes.

"Was he hurt," he asked finally.

"Nah," Dom said, "he wasn't hurt or nothing."

"So then seen better days how? Was it his clothes? Were his clothes ruffled up? Did he look like he'd slept at all in the last couple of weeks? Come on, Dom, help me out here."

"I don't know what you want me to tell you, Mike. Sid looked like Sid. Cheeks all red and pocked, tiny little suspicious eyes, kinda bald - Sid. Just Sid that ain't all there."

Mike sighed, nodded. "Alright, so he was preaching."

"Yeah that's what I'd say."

"Preaching how, then? Crazy man on the street corner preaching? Hellfire and brimstone pastor preaching?"

"Nah, not like that," Dom paused. His hands rested in the pockets of his jeans and he brought one up to scratch the back of his head. "You ever watch TV late at night maybe ten, fifteen years ago, early 2000's."

Mike nodded.

"There used to be this guy, pitching his book, wild gray and brown hair standing up, big eyebrows, scrawny dude in a green suit with question marks like he was dressed up as The Riddler or something. He had some tried and true method in this book of his for making money and he was real over the top about getting it out there," Dom made eye contact with Mike and tilted his head back a bit, "you ever see that guy?"
Mike had. He always had these big thick glasses on him and had a girl or two close by in every shot of the commercial. "Yeah I remember that guy."

"That's how Sid was preaching. He was a used car salesman, high on the pitch. What was he talking about anyway? You're acting like you know already."

"Trust me, Dom, you don't want to know," Mike turned to the park exit and pointed at the street sloping downhill with his chin. "So he just walked off that way, calm as could be? Would be, what, two hours ago now?"

"Yeah. That's all I saw of him. Look, you need any help, or - ?"

"That's alright, Dom," Mike grinned at him, "wouldn't think of putting you through it. You remember how much a pain in the ass Sid could be." He held out his hand. "Thanks."

Dom took it and crushed it like a scrap of paper. He smiled back and even the smile was a fight. "Don't mention it."

Eh-heh, it being that this thread has the spine to not buckle under my allegedly abusive comportment, the legion proudly presents it's latest overclocked sonic extravaganza.

An experiment in aliatoric sortilage of audio buffer probability fields using patterned interrupt signals

http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/Buffer%20Carcass%20Karagam.mp3

The hills of Providence cast strange shadows in waning sunlight and here as the afternoon wore on the streets appeared darker than the day should allow. Trees lining the street had dreams of buds upon their still grey branches and the air held to the memory of winter chill. Mike's heel slid forward in his polished black shoes as he trod down the sloping sidewalk. It was no wonder that this city acted a dreadful inspiration to generations of writers when even its pleasant spring days menaced. The hills were wrong, somehow.

Mike, with Sid, on their many fraud cases together would tell their quarry that there is nowhere to hide today, no escape from eyes that pried like his but it was a lie. It was the great lie of law enforcement, that the world was small and that their reach was great, that when you drink and drive there's a cop waiting for you or when you cheat on your taxes Mike and Sid will be there, serious faces and clicking pens and impeccable ledgers. But if the world is smaller than it was it is also denser, it hasn't lost any matter, and that which remains is infinitely more complex. There are too many systems to understand, too much knowledge to have, too many places to hide. It made Mike's head swim and the terror of an afternoon in Providence was no longer what waited down the dark street out of sight but what hid in its innumerable corners, its myriad neglected facades.

He passed a three story white house with a bright red door and dark blue shutters, its hedges reaching easily to nine feet. Sid could be behind that hedge, Sid could be behind that door, Sid could be looking out from that window, Sid could have sauntered just over to India Point Park and drowned himself trying to spread the good word of Necronomicoin at the bottom of the ocean.

He got to the bottom of the slope and turned left. The police station was only a few blocks away, tucked into some mini-mall next to a bagel shop. In a moment's thought he found himself on the sidewalk before it, a cramped parking lot with a couple of state vehicles between him and the door. Two transparent panels on the door, old and stained, allowed him a view of the bright young cadet staffing the front desk. Mike stood there on the sidewalk looking at the station. The police couldn't tell him any more than what Dom had; Sid walked off and slipped away. They weren't searching for him because, as yet, he'd committed no crime. And did he really want to try to explain what a Necronomicoin was to these guys?

He shook his head and continued on his way, in the direction of Wickenden Street. A block or so down there would be a pub he'd been to, possibly even with Sid at some point, the dark kind like Robowski's, with dark wood booths and sad little light fixtures. This one got a little more attention from the college crowd, but at this time of the day it shouldn't be a problem. He did some of his best thinking with a beer in his hand.

That was what he needed. A seat at the bar and a bartender who didn't mind a little bit of rambling. Rambling would get his head straight. He turned the corner onto Wickenden.

Sid always believed in a moment, on cases, a moment where the mazes of figures and data came together, solved themselves on the page in front of him. Like learning math, back in grade school, when a problem clicked. Mike never saw those moments, he saw bends in the path far ahead that were solved when he came to them, however long that took. But now, with that maw back in Cranston, with the Great Veil, there would have to be a moment that clicked. Things no longer happened of their own accord. Sid would most likely make them happen himself.

It might be too much to lay on a bartender on a Spring afternoon, he considered, pushing open the heavy wooden door to the pub. The day was bright and the inside was dim. His eyes took a moment adjusting but before that there was a smell. Mike knew it as soon as his hand cracked the door open a fraction of an inch.

He stepped inside, let the door swing shut behind him, his eyes closed tightly to hurry their adjustment and for that time, in two breaths, in a hundred thoughts, in a passing series of reactions, there was that smell. The smell of some weeks past, walking into a crime scene he was told would be strange but didn't prepare him for the paled faces of the uniformed officers or the hole in everything he thought to be true. He opened his eyes.

A half dozen or so stained glass light fixtures hung down from wooden beams on the ceiling, big round bulbs poking out of them. They colored the gouged tabletops a shade of brownish orange and lent a bit of yellow to the green cushions on the chairs and booth benches. The hardwood floor below was warped and far in the back a scratched pool table held up a half finished game, the cues abandoned and rolled away from the table. The bar itself was a row of red topped stools and ringed stains and four beer taps and one occupant, sitting at the center of the bar. No bartender was in sight. The man before him was alone in the pub.

"Afternoon," he said without turning. He wore a green quilted vest over a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His skin was flush red and he had a long grey beard and a bald pattern reaching back from his forehead. Mike couldn't see his eyes and it bothered him somehow.

"Afternoon," Mike said. He remained by the door then, resigning himself, walked over and took a seat by the man, one stool between them.

"You must be a friend of mine," the man said, "been making a lot of those lately."

Mike wouldn't be needing that beer after all. On the far side of the old man, across the bar he spied a half empty bottle of Evan Williams. He got up, sliding the barstool across the floor, and walked around the old man. He grabbed the bottle and an upturned tumbler and poured himself a few fingers. The other man held his own glass out toward him, again without looking, and Mike obligingly topped the glass with the golden brown whiskey. He walked back around to the spot he'd first chosen. It was closer to the door.

Mike took a drink. He laid his glass down on the countertop with a thud and picked it up and took another drink. "I thought you were gone," he said finally.

"Am gone."

"I mean, gone gone. Beyond the Veil gone."

"Ah," the old man said. He inclined his head toward Mike and Mike got the impression he was looking at him with the corners of the eyes he could not see. "The Veil. That's what you're calling it."

"Is there another word?"

The man pulled air in through his teeth. "Been a few over the years. The Beyond, the Great Outter Dark - fond of that one, myself, and so on. Nobody seems to want to call it what it really is."

"And what is it?" Mike could hear a clock ticking away in the room and it was like a joke.

"Everything Else."

"Everything Else," Mike repeated.

"Yeah. There's everything - you, me, this fine glass of whiskey," he took a pull from his glass, "there's the Sun and Chinamen over in China. And then there's Everything Else. Most folks don't know about everything else but you, you and I, we know about Everything Else. You learn about everything else and you can just tell who knows and who doesn't." The man looked at Mike again without really looking at him. "You knew who I was the moment you walked in here. I knew the same about you. Same about that other son of a bitch came through here a few hours ago."

"You met Sid," Mike said.

"Wasn't like you," the man was slurring his words. "Dangerous, like."

"Oh I'm sure he's not dangero-"

"I'm telling you," the old man cut him off sharply, "I'm telling you he's dangerous."

"What did he say to you," Mike asked him.

"He was excited. Beside himself. Practically giggling and thanking me, kept on thanking me for everything I done. Kept telling him I didn't do nothing. I didn't do nothing but get greedy and stupid and then I came to the bar and I ain't left since."

"You've been here the whole time?"

"Always been here. Only sometimes I'm in Everything Else but even when I'm there I'm still here. Never know which is which. Can't see anything since it happened," and the old man turned to look at Mike for the first time.

Mike looked him straight in the face and still couldn't see his eyes. They were not closed, they were not missing. There was no hole but Mike looked at him right where his eyes were and he couldn't see them. He shuddered deeply and drank the rest of his whiskey.

"Sid tell you where he was going," Mike asked.

"Don't think he quite knows himself."

Mike absently threw a few dollars on the bartop for whenever the bartender came back. He stood up, scraping the stool against the floor again.

"Ever going back to your apartment," Mike asked the old man.

"Not mine no more."

Mike nodded and left the man to the pub he'd be in forever.

Fucking wow.  You've really got a talent for this.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 06, 2014, 12:02:05 PM
Fucking wow.  You've really got a talent for this.

Thank you for saying so. I had a hard time getting a flow going this week, only 350 words by Wednesday, then yesterday I just felt it and went all out, which is what the rest of those two pieces came from.

I really enjoy these and try to read them carefully.  Should this be read I'm any kind of sequence with the Marrow Man posts?

Quote from: LuciferX on June 06, 2014, 09:32:29 PM
I really enjoy these and try to read them carefully.  Should this be read I'm any kind of sequence with the Marrow Man posts?

I'm glad you are, and I consider them separate from Marrow Man.

Need to catch-up somewhat - juggling feral cats can be exhausting - meanwhile, in lieu of an actual production, those demonic scalawags hit the 1's & 2's and had the audacity to remix Duke Ellington :lol:
...  Caravan ....
panchronos.com/mp3/CARAVAN%20REDUX%203.mp3 (http://panchronos.com/mp3/CARAVAN%20REDUX%203.mp3)

This is how the world is, now, Mike thought. He was walking to his car back over near Prospect Park. Wounds in existence and old men trapped in nonexistence and dangerous Sid as some kind of harbinger of everything we do not know. He was going uphill this time and faintly he felt his thighs strain and his forehead sweat. If Sid didn't know where he was going then there was no way anybody else could. Mike had to wait until his former partner resurfaced. He held no hope for trails or leads. What could any of that mean against the will of Everything Else.

As with any encounter he spent that walk thinking of a thousand questions to ask the old man, questions about his place beyond the Veil and how he started himself in Necronomicoin, questions about any family he may have left behind and how a person closes the portals once they're opened. Or if they can be closed. He got into the car and turned the keys in the ignition, starting forward and letting the hill take him down it. Rolling back toward Wickenden he wondered if he should go back to the pub and ask the old man all the questions and finally decided the old man wouldn't have much more for him. Though his apartment might.

It was nearing quitting time. The sun was sinking and there was so much to do. He was no closer to Sid but Sid was unpredictable and proximity mattered no so much as patience. He'd spent any number of late nights at the Warwick office poring over documents for the next case but that would do little here. What might do more is a quiet evening with Karen. Resting to keep his brain from overworking, letting his mind relax before the next great fury of new information.

Mike drove by his exit on the highway. There was one more thing, just another thing that he could do. An easy task that demanded little and was easily recovered from. He took Exit 10 and stopped and went with the increasing traffic and when he arrived where he decided to be he idled in the car for a minute before going up.

He trudged up the stairs and found the same officer he'd left earlier in the day watching the door. Just to be sure he stopped in front of him.

"Did you go in the apartment?"

"No, sir."

Mike nodded and stepped back into the old man's place. He turned immediately to walk back to the bedroom and stopped. He wasn't here to interrogate the portal again. Instead he strode back over to the entryway and, with his body just inside the door, looked around the room.

The carpet was dark brown and a path was worn from it over to the linoleum floored kitchen. Directly across the door sat a checkered couch with the cushion on the right side faded from overuse. A desk stood just to the left. Mike went over to it. It was an old style, a student's desk, with a tiny leg space and plenty of drawers and deep gouges cut into the wood. He started into the drawers.

Sales receipts and old paystubs were shoved on top of one another. Mike looked through several of the receipts but found none out of the ordinary, none linking the old man to any bizarre place. The paystubs were all from the state of Rhode Island. Mike tossed most of those aside but kept one for his own records. The officers on the scene may have a file for the old man but that was something that he intended to check tomorrow.

He came upon bank statements and stacks of retirement papers, the title to the old man's car and take out menus. The old man was a hoarder; it's what got him into this mess. Mike pressed on.

A stack of birthday and Christmas cards were in another drawer. Mike opened them. Some were generic and signed by co-workers but a few odd ones had lengthy messages written in them in Spanish. In the final drawer an answer to that brief question, a stack of photographs, the colors faded and the edges ragged, of the old man as a young man.

He was sporting a wide brimmed hat and a workshirt remarkably similar to the one Mike had seen him in earlier, with boots and thick pants. He was smiling and leaning on a shovel, dirt smeared across his clothes and his face shining with sweat. Lush plants with huge broad leaves surrounded him and as Mike thumbed through the pictures a series of people appeared alongside him, other workers, smiling and filthy like him, but with darker skin and shorter in stature. Mike guessed South America, somewhere, as he flipped past.

The final photograph showed a different man. He wore the same clothes and he leaned on the same shovel but the smile was gone and the eyes were oblivious to the camera. The edges of the picture were soft and wrinkled and papery and thumbprints and streaks marred the surface. The old man as a young man stood next to a woman. Her hair was thick and dark and her eyes were huge and knowing and she smirked at him with her hands on his shoulders and he with one dirty hand on her hip over the white dress she wore and his other hand holding up the shovel and neither aware, neither caring about the camera.

Mike flipped the picture over but there was no writing, only more stains from the same hands over so many years. He stroked the photograph like he was sure the old man had so many times and placed it back on top of the pile. It was time to get back to his wife, to Karen. Gently Mike put the stack of photographs back in the drawer then, nodding to himself, pulled out his phone and took a quick picture of the worn shot on top and, satisfied, shut the drawer again.

The rest of the apartment would have to wait for tomorrow.

Methinks you're drawing connections between stories...

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 11, 2014, 11:46:41 AM
Methinks you're drawing connections between stories...

Haha, it had to happen somehow. Was it too much? It's not exactly secret but I'd prefer if it weren't clumsy.

Also I planted the first major connection in both perspectives over a month ago. /adrianveidt

No, it's pretty smooth.  Not to get ahead of myself, but you should consider self-publishing this, when it's done.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 11, 2014, 01:48:28 PM
No, it's pretty smooth.  Not to get ahead of myself, but you should consider self-publishing this, when it's done.

I hate to say it's on my mind, because I'm more focused on completing a damn work for the first time in years, and on a scale I've yet to do, but yeah I do entertain the notion.

I dread editing it. I have a lot to do on that front, like converting my scribbled travel notes from Colombia into a story format, giving the characters full names, and fixing untidy things like the desk in the last entry that wasn't mentioned in any previous Old Man's Apartment entries.

Editing is like trying to solve NP problems :lol:

In case you wanted video and stuff for the publication, for the children...  I been working on some videotropes too - just need a Touring machine to match them perfectly with music

Www.panchronos.com/OM/Archtype.html (http://www.panchronos.com/OM/Archtype.html)


[Am enjoying Cryptonomicon more than Snow Crash]

It's all happening.

Mountains rolled past at the edges of my vision but the ones ahead loomed and stood steadfast, mockeries of a mad flight to that high nestled jewel Bogota. My hand vibrated with the engine. I held the throttle back and the little bike whined and sped on. It was a nimble machine and in my state I hoped I could match it should the need arise but more I hoped that time might think better of its inexorable journey onward and I might find myself again in that city, another tourist to the Museo del Oro but one with a purpose beyond a photo or two of all the glittering gold.

A Toyota slid into my lane. Its brake lights flared and I cut to the right in a deft swerve. Somewhere beyond my frame of mind a horn voiced a driver's displeasure but I couldn't place its location or even if it were my own.

Leaving Zipaquira the traffic moved along with some speed but here as we all grew closer to Bogota our push onward was one of determination, a sea of people and steel with the singular simple goal to return home and all of us in one another's way. The number of lanes doubled and then doubled again and every few hundred meters a car pushed its way to the far right lane and then parked on the side of the road.

A sign read Pico y Placa, then another, and vaguely I thought of this monster referred to in hushed tones throughout the trip. We came home early in the afternoon to avoid the Pico y Placa and we hatched schemes to outwit the beast. Another sign showed itself and the cars and trucks pulled over were in a line now, in some places two cars thick, heeding the words of warning. I couldn't remember if motorcycles were subject to the rule but it didn't matter. I had no time such things.

Brake lights lit in glaring red rows ahead and for the first time since I left the little town I stopped. I stood with the bike between me, its heat, without the wind rushing past, now threw itself onto my bare legs. Cars lined against each others' bumpers as far as I could see.

I sighed, and swallowed, and sighed again. I disengaged the clutch and twisted the throttle again to ease on, looked over my right shoulder, and put myself directly between the lanes. My hand moved the throttle back just a bit more and the first two cars crawled by on either side. I sped up.

Side view mirrors launched themselves at my face. They reached out to strike and by some miracle missed every time. I sped up and it was not enough and I wondered if such a mundane thing as traffic could keep me from pursuing the Debt Collector that I am even capable of the task. It fell to pathetic hands. A lowly twenty-something American in a country I don't understand even without the corrupting influence of Necronomicoin.

Ineptly I trundled along the highway, at twice the speed that I should and half what I needed. It would be better if traffic simply stopped me.

Quote from: zer0n on June 15, 2014, 03:59:38 AM
It's all happening.

http://www.panchronos.com/So_Grin.m4v (http://www.panchronos.com/So_Grin.m4v)

Quote from: LuciferX on June 17, 2014, 07:27:25 AM

Quote from: zer0n on June 15, 2014, 03:59:38 AM
It's all happening.

http://www.panchronos.com/So_Grin.m4v (http://www.panchronos.com/So_Grin.m4v)

oh man that's actually kinda cool.

I was thinking Sid, ergo: Welcome to the Machine cover song
http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/Welcome%20Machine%20Rabbit3.mp3 (http://www.panchronos.com/mp3/Welcome%20Machine%20Rabbit3.mp3)

In that horrid path of thought the images of GREs never taken and women never courted, jobs never applied for and the more that joined the list the heavier my hand grew, the more I cranked the gas on the little Honda, the faster I sped to Bogota. Kilometers died faster than the sun. I could not save the latter and so I killed the former.

In the outer barrios of the great city huge congregations of commuters waited for buses to bring them home. Behind them people cooked outside tiny spaces once as brightly colored as any Colombian building and now stained and, here or there, collapsed, hills of broken clay tile and cracked poured concrete forgotten backgrounds to families living their lives together in the mountains. And like the mountains themselves they blurred at the corners of my eyes and were gone and were remade ahead, copies of the same image to me, like the old Scooby Doo cartoons, cheap animated hallways looping past as the gang scrambled down. Maybe I would be able to pull off the Debt Collector's mask and find some petty real estate scammer underneath.

Roads signs started popping up for the museums and I stopped. The traffic still did not move and in the cramped space I dragged my ride to a ninety degree angle and swerved into the little gaps between bumpers to the far side of the highway, and the exit.

I hoped the signs would still lead me to the Museo del Oro and I nearly prayed they would do so but after the Cathedral I could not know what to pray to for that short nightmarish moment where I was a god. I shuddered remembering the guardians again and I shuddered twice for the thought seed and then I banished the idea. I had the very real fear of the ride in me and could afford no room for the Veil.

The ramp was easier to maneuver on than the highway and I skirted to the left of traffic. I remembered Rodri again, back in Cali, our host cheerfully swerving around the mountain on the way up to the Cristo Rey, singing all the way and the motorcyclists fearfully edging around him. I put myself to spotting more Rodris and got ready to steer hard. There were none, and I threw myself in with the throngs of city bikers toward the museum.

My road ended with the sun still in the sky. I didn't stop to check the time and barely managed to turn off the engine and put up the kickstand. I ran.

Street vendors were packing up and I had enough presence of mind to know this was a bad thing. Pedestrians were sparse. It was all the clearer for me to run.

A modern white building, short and rectangular, appeared after a couple blocks. Its glass entrance was recessed beneath flat blank walls but for a single row of windows with Museo del Oro written across them. I sighed with relief and nearly choked on it for how short of breath I was. All the running I'd done back home only barely left me able to manage at high altitude. The Zipaquira shoes pinched my toes.

The entrance was still too far to see clearly. Guards stood by, outside and in. I slowed my gait and walked the rest of the way, gasping thin air and forcing myself to walk casually. The lights were still on inside the entryway. Behind the glass I could make out a woman standing at the ticket counter. I'd made it. Lara would be inside.

I grabbed the polished steel door handle. I leaned back to account for the heavy glass, and I tugged. Thud. The door pulled back a quarter of an inch before hitting against a lock. Thud thud. I pulled back a couple more times. It was ritual; everyone has to.

The woman standing at the ticket counter looked up at me and mouthed something in Spanish. I did not need any translation. A guard was keeping an eye on me and I walked away from the building to a stone bench wrapped around a nearby tree in the plaza and sat. I could not break into a museum. I could barely break into the Cathedral of Salt when I was, for all purposes, invisible.

I rested my elbows on my knees and buried my face into my palms, rotating my palms slowly. My hands were filthy from the ride and my eyes burned when I closed them from all that wind and all that panic. There would be deep red bloody rings around my contacts by now with veiny tendrils snaking out from them backward into my skull and they burned.

"You look awful."

Fuck yes.

Awesome.  Found this to get the prop spinning:
http://panchronos.com/mp3/HYMN%20TO%20MUSE_B3.mp3

(http://i.imgur.com/qT0Nm.jpg)

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=34414.msg1352419#msg1352419

These people need to know about this thread.

I opened my eyes to the voice, or I tried, but my palms stuck them closed. Lifting my head I tried again and a blurry vision stood before me in pearls and a tight little red dress and tumbling golden brown curls. I blinked, against disbelief and the sun and the angel standing there.

"You look..." was all I managed.

She tilted her head back and laughed like she had at the brewery, that overly flirtatious laugh that worked despite its obviousness, and I laughed with her in relief and exhaustion. A hero would have swept her up in his arms then but I leaned backward and when I hit the back of the bench I went sideways and lay down on the stone. Gracefully, in heels, she moved just beyond my head and sat down there. She stroked her hand against my head gently.

"You made it out of the Catedral," she said. And I was silent for the angel abomination guardian and the godhood bestowing guardian and the grotesque slug guardian and the -

"DEBT COLLECTOR!" I yelled, sitting up, eyes wide. "Lara, the Debt Collector! It's after you, you have to run." Lara sat there. "There were three guardians, like you said, but there was something else, Lara, something that was waiting for us there. It called itself the Debt Collector. I was warned about it in the bathroom." She looked at me apprehensively. "On the wall of the bathroom, in 1492 over at -"

"The T, yes, I know Bogota," she said.

"It said 'Befriend The Thief. Pity The Ledgerman. Beware The Debt Collector.'" I pointed at her, "You're The Thief." She looked affronted for a moment, then nodded. "He," and I mimicked the thick set of him and the squirming hair and the segmented skin, "was the Debt Collector. He trapped me in some kind of rock and then he went after you. I got out, I made it to the, and by the way I'm still upset you didn't tell me about this, the Necronomicoin ATM, and when I got back you were gone. I rented a motorcycle and rushed here after I remembered what you said about the Museo del Oro."

She sat back and rested on her palms, looking at me and then away. She took in a breath as though to speak, then stopped.

"You rode a motorcycle in Bogota?" she asked.

I nodded. She smirked, then her face turned stern. "Rushing after me was foolish, J. I do not know if you think you are some knight in shining armor but I am not your damsel and I do not need any rescuing," she rolled her eyes, "American men! Always have to save me," her eyebrows perked up, "but it does make them easier to rob."

I collapsed back down on the bench, the burst of energy likely some of my last.

"I said 'You look awful'," Lara tried again.

"And now you know why." I looked at her, entreating, "you aren't afraid of the Debt Collector."

She nodded.

"So you've never seen him."

She nodded again.

"So you left me down there by choice," I said flatly. I realized I was looking through her and I turned away.

"J-"

"What, did you, did you just hope I would die down there? Problem solved? No more idiot gringo to look after?"

Her eyes narrowed. "I expected you to leave your Necronomicoin behind, just like you did, and to find me gone and decide to go back to your family. Like any sane person would! To get back home, a little changed maybe, but to get home and to forget about that horrible place and what you left there and," she swallowed, "who left you there."

"I might have," I said. "Yeah, maybe I would have if that was all there was to it. But Lara, you have to believe me. This Debt Collector is dangerous. It was the worst thing I saw down there and, trust me, I saw some pretty bad things. They weren't evil, though, not like him, they were cruel, maybe and dangerous and powerful, but not evil." I looked at her again. "You should be afraid. I was. I am. That's why I'm here."

Lara leaned forward and rested her hand lightly on my own. "You look awful," she said for the third time. I said nothing. "We have to get you cleaned up." She looked up at the sky, toward the sun. "And soon. There isn't much time and you're going to need clothes, and," looking at my head, "a haircut."

"I just had a haircut before I-"

"A real haircut."

She was in a dress, I realized, and jewelry and makeup and, "what for," I said slowly.

"For the Museo del Oro, idiot gringo, like I told you," she chided.

"It's closed." I pointed across the plaza.

"It's closed to them," she swept her hand at the people around us, "it's closed to you," she pointed at me, "but it is, or it will be, open for me." She nudged me, "for us. When the gala starts, anyway." She stood and held her hand down to me, flicking her wrist up. "Up up. We have work to do. We have to make you presentable."

I groaned and eased forward, pressed down on my palms to lift myself and groaned again and sat heavily. I glared at her.

Lara smiled and exaggeratedly tapped her foot. It clicked softly on the ground.

Mmmm.  So good.  I daresay, your ability to write dialog is pretty damn good.

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on July 25, 2014, 11:59:33 AM
Mmmm.  So good.  I daresay, your ability to write dialog is pretty damn good.

Thank you! Someone else on PD told me that a while back and I really appreciate it.

I'm trying to get Lara's word choice just a little off, in a non-native English speaker way. Luckily from being in a Colombian family for half my life I have some experience with how it sounds.  :lulz:

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on July 25, 2014, 12:48:03 PM

Thank you! Someone else on PD told me that a while back and I really appreciate it.

I think that was me.  Dialogue is a bitch.

Quote from: Eater of Clowns on July 25, 2014, 12:48:03 PM

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on July 25, 2014, 11:59:33 AM
Mmmm.  So good.  I daresay, your ability to write dialog is pretty damn good.

Thank you! Someone else on PD told me that a while back and I really appreciate it.

I'm trying to get Lara's word choice just a little off, in a non-native English speaker way. Luckily from being in a Colombian family for half my life I have some experience with how it sounds.  :lulz:

I don't even know how to format dialog, please.  Lara's sentence construction was great.  One (the only) possible opportunity for further inflection I thought of was when:

"like any sane person would"

In Latin languages "sane" literally means whole, so they usually qualify the psychological condition:

"like any mentally sane person would"

Is maybe an opportunity for a funny, however it might interfere with the flow of her cadence.  I just like contributing to this thread, don't mind me. :lulz:

Yeah : it only took about 30,000 mS's for the prior post

"I've been thinking about you."

"I know you have."

"A lot. All the time, actually."

"Well I'm waiting. What else can I do?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

"So what happens now?"

"We pick up where we left off? A triumphant heist, a mentor gone mad, a convergence."

"If that's how you want to do it. What then? Hero gets the girl? Deus ex machina? All is right in the world?"

"That's not the kind of story this is."

"I know that."

"Right. Right of course you would. Listen, about all that time. Things happen, you know, life gets in the way, and when it gets harder and harder to keep going you wonder why you do it at all, if you're up to it. If you're good enough."

"Mmhmm."

"I don't think I'm good enough."

"Mmhmm."

"What is that? What's that 'mmhmm'?"

"I just wonder if maybe you think it's me that's not good enough."

"Oh."

"That's not a no."

"No. No, it isn't."

"No it isn't."

"I guess I have a lot to think about."

"Or maybe you don't."

"Que?"

"Maybe you're thinking about it too much. Maybe that's the problem."

"I gotta be me."

"I see."

"You see. Thanks for the insight."

"You got a lazy response for a lazy response. You 'gotta be you?' What kind of bullshit is that? You're going to leave me behind because of some perceived self inferiority? It's you, of course it's you, but you don't have to be that way. You're choosing to be and blaming it on your nature because it's easier than admitting the truth:  nothing is stopping you, you're just giving up."

"I got a lot to think about."

"That's exactly the problem!"

"Okay! Okay I get it. Enough, for now."

"I agree."

"I'll see you, then?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

She took off with expert heel shod strides before I even finished standing. "We do not have much time," she said again. She pulled out her phone from the clutch and began dialing. It rang and when the other end answered she spoke, her Spanish flowing, its pace the same as her English but smoother, less awkward. More than ever I wished I understood it. She hung up and turned sharply to the right.

"We are lucky," she said.

The last week struck my mind like a sledgehammer. "W-we are?"

She laughed. "We are very lucky! There is a rental shop still open. The hotel manager is going to call ahead for us as a favor. I knew flirting with him would pay off." She stopped and looked at me for a moment, a look of scrutiny, like she was seeing me for the first time. "I hope they have something in your size. Most men here they are a bit..."

"Shorter?" I said.

"Broader."

"Oh."

She hurried on through the streets and I followed and this was Colombia. It was rails of barbed wire and beautiful people painting the blurs of my vision, towed by family, or the occasional malevolent godlike being, or worse, this smirking woman. I knew so little of it. I knew so little of her.

"So have you always lived in Bogota, or..." I said.

"Now? You ask me this now?"

"We aren't doing anything."

"You aren't doing anything! I am planning to steal one of the most precious artifacts of my country's history!"

"Oh."

"I am from Cali," she said.

"Ah. El Gato del Rio, the barrio Normandia," I said, remembering two weeks ago that was more like a year.

"You have been? I grew up a long way from the barrio Normandia. It was not so nice. It is not safe there now, but then it was worse.  It was a dangerous time for Colombia, a bad time."

I stayed quiet.

"My mother was a maid for a wealthy family," she went on, "she stayed there most nights. They were kind. They paid for me to go to the German school and I went from there to university in Canada."

"What brought you to Bogota?"

"Work," she said.

I laughed. "Better thieving in the capital?"

"I was not always a thief, J," she said quietly. She quickened her pace.

I limped after, cursing myself. There was too much I did not understand.

Neat! Looking forward to more señor!