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The Moment of Burial
By: UnnaHuz
New life forms.

[Start Log]
We came from the Red.
Red was the integration of the past. There existed a diverse biosphere; animals, plants, and microbes were past glories. And Red was the sum of all, a summary.
Red was the fury of the Sol. On daybreak, the bloody sun fired fiery light to the ground, dissolving every creature on the surface and melting them into puddles. Puddles gathered together, liquified and solidified at the same time, wandering on bare lands.
Red was the beginning of the future. Nutritious red blobs searched way on Earth, gracefully waiting for their predators. And here we came. The superior life form emerged from countless epochs of mutation. We originated from the Red, fed on the Red, exploited the Red, and used them to enhance ourselves.
[End Log]

Citizens of the Twilight City gathered beneath, seeing a delicate casket descended from the stone pillar atop. Doppel Linn held it carefully and walked along the winding path.
Twilight City, like its name, was a fully underground city with poor lighting. And one of its core builders, Foundation researcher Lyrics Linn, died for around 300 years. As her descendant of the 13th generation, Doppel the mayor was ready to embrace the cruel, bloody red sun at midday…
But not now.
Doppel wanted to tell everyone a story.
Big story.
In the previous hundreds of years, when mankind struggled to survive, most workers were too busy to listen to stories. Maybe there were stories of humans intertwined with red blobs, stories of sun-molten plants seeping into the soil, and stories of aliens knocking on Earth with their tentacles. However, barely anyone knew. What they really knew was "the Foundation," foods called "SCP-001-A," bed, shovel, and pickaxe. Mostly pickaxe.
There used to be chances to slow everyone down and took their time to commemorate the past, but those opportunities always slipped away from the Linn family's fingers. Until now -
"Hmm, " Doppel grunted, "Shall we get started?"
Silence.
Then the story started.

[Start Log]
Today is history.
Today we make history.
Today we are a part of history.
[End Log]

Origin

Three hundred years ago, the remaining creatures tried hard to survive the red disaster. Humans huddled up in underground shelters. Some lucky dudes resorted to un-cities kilometers below the surface. In contrast, aliens just silently quitted this place through distorted spaces, wormholes, paths, and ways - none of them were willing enough to help the Earth. Anomalies contained in Foundation sites and areas were all liberated because of the Red. But then, they became captives of the Sol, especially organic ones.
Foundation personnel preferred un-cities being their new home and would guide other civilians to come along. Unlondon, the first un-city Foundation explored, was short-lived; but as more and more un-cities were revealed, humans still had a handful of options. Then what was the target of the Foundation at that moment? Restart their fancy devices; rebuild their shelter; launch their counterattack. As long as human beings were able to survive, the analysis of anomalies would again become the theme of the Foundation. Well, we're doing this right now.
Then what was the situation of my ancestor, Mrs. Lyrics Linn? She shut herself in a Foundation site, blocking all her colleagues since they became Red monsters. Those monsters knocked on the site door politely, inviting Lyrics to sunshine. She then used all kinds of weapons to keep them out, including liquid nitrogen, tasers, and flamethrowers. As she miraculously beat all of them, she either burned or froze the Red, which became edible then. She wrote diaries at that time, so I was lucky to read about the facts. But, pure words were pale after all. As a person living quietly in Twilight City since born, I found it difficult to imagine how my ancestor fought off her mates.
After that, she seemed to partially understand the power system of the site. As the Red was almost clear in the vicinity, she was able to survive for another few months. Until then, she was found by the united forces of the Foundation and GOC. They scanned the signal of the site so they detected her.
I didn't know how the forces of Foundation and GOC transport people long-range. Maybe through thaumatic spells. Maybe teleportation. Anyway, she caught up with the survivors in un-cities. She finally arrived at a mysterious but hollow megapolis that was kilometers underground.
The megapolis was called Un-Atlantis. Yes, that was the former name of Twilight City.

[Start Log]
Red predated the past, and we absorbed the Red. And thus, we got histories.
We ate Red flower, feeling its growth;
we ate Red mice, sensing dark and hollow;
we ate Red birds, and delight of flight flowed in our bodies;
we ate Red humans, and endless knowledge pumped into our hearts.
[End Log]

Development

When there were lots of survivors gathered together in this hollow space, the intrusion of the Red became less. Decades after the first human ever entered the Twilight City, a comprehensive electronic detection network was set up to capture biological, electronic, and optic signals from atop. The main contributors were the most eminent architects and researchers of the SCP Foundation. Survivors were anticipating SOS signals and radios, as only their existence could prove the survival of humans up above. However, what network monitors heard were just two kinds of voices. One was the featureless buzz, another was the purr of non-human:

Come back! It's warm up here.

The sun is sooooo beautiful.

The surface is just wonderful. Really wonderful! Extraordinary!

bloblobloblobloblobloblobloblobbbbbbbb

The last kind of sound was thick gel slapping the air. Er, if you've tried to blow air to yogurt with a straw, then you may imagine what it is like.
Speaking of yogurt, I should mention a little bit about the urban development at that time. Unlike other underground cities, the starting point of the Twilight City was void: only fresh soil, empty buildings, and mysterious but sacred machines. Microbes and small creatures were found in the soil. Plants that researchers brought from labs were able to grow, proving that photosynthesis exists even if devoided direct sunlight. We suspected that those mysterious machines - probably supported by the heat of lava - may be responsible for this phenomenon. Thus, Foundation botany researchers and some mechanics built up basic agriculture and graziery. Then, of course, light industries like textile. We actually went through the whole path from primitive agriculture to the Industrial Revolution.
Apart from the danger above our heads, our ancestors also tried hard to establish connections with other un-cities. Unfortunately by that time, Undublin was the one and only un-city we successfully connected. To return to the surface, this city seemed to have its own method.
To totally block the sunlight, Undublin researchers intended to initiate a nuclear winter. To reach this state, they should explode as many nuclear weapons as possible, particularly atom bombs and hydrogen bombs. After the explosion, huge clouds would hover high above the ground and cover the earth. Humans were short of knowledge of what would happen if SCP-001-A stays out of sunlight for a long time. Nevertheless, the human could launch the great counterattack from then on, as less equipment would be needed for returning to the ground.
The bombardment was initiated later. They must have gotten permission to these weapons in the UK, at least. Our devices could also detect the radiation and temperature change above. However, the effects of nuclear winter lasted only for a short time; so short that the fiery sun returned to the skies just months later. Worse, we lost the connection with Undublin from then on; nobody knew the reason. The only good news was the decrease of the Red creature lingering above our heads. But this conclusion also told us that the Red could survive nuclear radiation. We the Twilight City became desperate, as we had no idea when massive groups of people could be transported up above. As you know, for centuries we could only send small recon groups through the old-fashioned teleporters.
When would the change come?
Until about 100 years ago, we finally found an answer.

[Start Log]
We stride along time, trampling eternity with our immortal bodies;
We pierce through spaces, conquering distance with our sonorous roar.
[End Log]

Chance

You probably remember the Chernobyl Incident. It only took about 30 to 40 years to evolve mutated species in Pripyat that were truly shocking: overgrown twisted plants, huge aggressive rats, etc. Then what would happen to SCP-001-A if they were exposed to excess radiation?
The result was undoubtedly a mutated species. It was to some extent like SCP-001-A, as some of their individuals had self-consciousness. These individuals even picked a name for themselves: 'Einz'. May be originated from the word 'one' in German. They were immune to the sunlight, and interestingly, they seemed to only predate on SCP-001-A. Yes, they ate the Red! Weird, huh? What's more, they would take over or even advance the intelligence of the Red. For example, if a human was turned to SCP-001-A by the sun, this Red stuff would only think of how to bring more people to the sun, right? Its basic intelligence and cognition were impaired. However, if an Einz individual ate this red blob, it would not only regain all the past memories of that poor human, but also be able to think in his/her/their way.
Let us rewind to the day Einz was discovered.
On that day, Foundation researchers who were monitoring sound signals found eerie waves. To be specific, there were noises like the hiss of bubbles from an open soda bottle. At the same time, bubbling sound from the Red attenuated. Researchers' first reaction was to send a response team upward. A group of elite researchers and mechanics grabbed the devices and rushed to the teleporter. Onto the ground, what they first saw was a human-like entity was chasing a giant red blob with a diameter of several meters! That entity was less than 2 meters tall, so everyone seeing this was startled. The giant blob seemed to be paralyzed as soon as the entity touched it. The entity was tearing the blob into small pieces and eating them, and when the group of investigators carefully came near, it stared at them, emitting a long sequence of uneasy soundwaves. The wave didn't seem to express hostility, as the whole group returned back underground without harm.
The soundwave the group captured was continuous human whispers, mingled with electric current noises. Through some brief treatments, researchers worked out a comprehensible version of audio and saved it on a tape. I may play it to you guys right now.
We came from the Red…
Yep, you have just heard 'the Red.' The Einz individual also coined this term to describe SCP-001-A. After the decoding of the whole audio, we eventually understood what Einz was. At that time researchers were confused because it was weird for a new species to tell others their identity. But now we know that such confusion is unnecessary.
As more explorations regarding the Einz were conducted, we knew more interesting stuff about it.
Firstly, as I have mentioned before, Einz individuals can absorb memories and feelings from the Red. If what they have eaten had no self-consciousness or intelligence, they will experience synesthesia. Say, if they eat the Red grass, they will feel photosynthesis; if they eat birds, they will feel their weight being lighter. Einz individuals were very willing to express these feelings of synesthesia through voice. Ah, as many of these entities have eaten Red humans before, they would probably utter poetic lines. Just like this:
… We ate Red flower, feeling its growth; we ate Red mice, sensing dark and hollow…
Also, Einz is immortal as long as supplied by the Red. If the supply is inadequate, it will gradually lose the ability to move and think, finally resulting in a puddle of unanimated brown syrup. Luckily, Einz can absorb a massive amount of red blobs each time and digest them slowly, but none of the individuals would like to do this.
Following that, each Einz individual could split into two, obeying asexual reproduction. Through the split, two sub-individuals keep separated consciousness respectively. Each individual can decide how to split the memories and feelings on its own.
In addition, Einz individuals can conduct telecommunication with each other through electromagnetic waves and high-frequency sound waves, different from the messages they brought to humans.
You may argue that the evolvement of Einz is like a kind of deus ex machina. However, its appearance has nearly nothing to do with our return to the surface - Einz individuals will also occupy ground space. As the Einz individuals near the portals had growing concerns about future food sources and the existence of humans, they asked us for a solution.
What, Einz was concerning us?
Yes, you heard me right.
Einz wanted us.

[Start Log]
To those who survive:
Meeting you all is our honor,
As well as an opportunity.
If you can offer us darkness brought from the past,
We will requite with brightness existed long before.
For the brightness, we swear:
It is not the red sun in the sky,
But [UNRECOGNIZABLE NOISES]
[End Log]

Consequence

So how would the relationship between humans and Einz develop? I know that most of you, especially those who first heard about Einz just now, are desperate to know what this new species will do to us. I just want to say: stay relaxed. Human, the Red, and the Einz have established an equilibrium.
Decades after we found Einz, fewer and fewer SCP-001-A instances were detected around our teleport spots. Most of the Einz creatures took the form of humans; they were able to recognize our alphabet and comprehend our spoken words. However, their expressions were still unclear hiss with electric buzz. Researchers created a handy device to translate the sound of Einz. We called it 'The Rosetta Ingot.' With this, we were able to talk to Einz individuals readily.
We got more histories of the old human.
We understood the synesthetic feelings of extinct creatures.
We laughed at the awkward lyrics of the Einz.
And we accepted a proposal.
'We have a primary concern on our foods. You know, the Red will only generate when fresh creatures are exposed to the sun. But where can we find fresh creatures? So what we're thinking is, can you provide a method to generate fresh food, so that they will change to the Red for us to eat?'
Einz was worrying about food supplies! Interesting.
But everyone knew that Einz could just leave here and go to places far away. There used to be 6 billion people and over 34 million square kilometers of forest on earth. How could it be possible that the Einz ate all of them within merely 60 years? Or, would it be possible that the food supply problem was only an excuse?
'Well, em, yeah. Haha, I don't expect you can get our point so fast,' said one Einz individual, embarrassed.
It continued speaking, 'A part of our consciousness had a huge impulse to anchor all of us here. Maybe your existence activated our souls as humans. Those human minds must have expected us to stay with you forever.'
Sure. Maybe.
So then?
We made a contract.
Humans will periodically take away the feces of the Einz, which is a kind of dense but scentless liquid. Those liquids are a good source for fertilization, which are also harmless to humans. To support the Einz, humans will zone fields to grow plants for their survival. Harvested plants will be transported to the surface batch by batch so that they will be changed to the Red plants, edible for the Einz. In return for our efforts, Einz individuals will always be waiting for us, telling fascinating stories about histories, or the Red, or the sun.
After the contract was established, our yield increased dramatically thanks to the 'fertilizer', but a large portion of them was sent above to the surface. For those who are wondering about where the additional yield goes, this is the answer you've long been searching for.
Finally, you may still wonder why I tell you those before I go to the surface this time.
Let me tell you.
This is about my ancestors.
Weeks ago, at the end of our last exploration, one Einz individual told me that one of their companions was coming. I was confused: was that something so important that the Einz needed to tell me specifically? It answered, 'This fellow is looking for someone so eagerly.'
Well, it was not so much the Einz as the human soul inside it finding someone.
'The soul has been looking for someone for about three centuries,' the Einz individual appended, 'even if he was changed to the Red, or eaten by the Einz, the consciousness has been kept nicely so far. The trail of the soul covered a huge portion of the northern hemisphere. And at last, my fellow, carrying his soul, found this place. It is really hysterical right now. '

[Start Log]
Because here is human.
And human stands for hope.
[End Log]

Furthermore, I asked the individual again, 'who is he looking for?'
It answered that he was looking for his sister.
Sister? I asked her name.
'Her name is…'
'And the name of her brother is…'
After I heard these two names, I was totally stunned.
Tears were flooding out of my eyes.
I could no longer stand on my knees and fell to the ground.
My protection suit was groaning, but I only felt it noisy.
The Einz gathered together, supporting me with their brownish hands and tentacles.
'I… I know their name. They are my… my… well forget about it! Tell him that his sister was already burnt to ashes per her final words.'
'Alright,' the human-like Einz individual looked up to the sky and transmitted signals. It told me to wait. Two minutes later, the answer arrived.
Only three short and decisive signals.
For only three words.

[Start Log]
I am coming.
[End Log]

Doppel finished his story.
When he was making the presentation, the crowd became upset and peaceful, separated and clustered, just like what the Red would do. But when he made the final pause, everyone became dead silent and frozen. They needed time to comprehend what was taught. They were suddenly informed that some of their products were fed to inhuman creatures, and humans were anticipating their response with corresponding goods. Could civilians accept the fact? Could they actually bear it?
Mrs. Lyrics Linn always said 'Time would tell.' Everyone needed time.
But the clock rang.
It was 2 pm local time. Doppel took a final glance at civilians, wore protection suits with trembling hands, and finally walked to the tunnel at his back, to the hollow back tube leading to the surface.
Inward. Onward. Even onward.
He sat on long, high elevators.
He pushed the gate to reality.

[Start Log]
Please take her to me, at the right time.
As you all hope her to be immortal.
And I hope so too.
[End Log]

At this hottest moment, Einz individuals gathered around the gate. One human-like Einz reached out its hands, brownish and half-transparent.
He - let's call it 'he' - spoke nothing, but took the casket and held it in front of his face carefully, like carrying a full bottle of boiled water. Then the Einz pressed the casket on a tiny bump, softly.
The casket was opened. A gust of wind suddenly blew over.
The ash long rested inside slowly woke up, forming a continuous flow, and stretched out carefully, as if it were to avoid panicking others. Meanwhile, something just occurred to him. His body shook heavily, trying to inflate and explode, trying to make exaggerated gestures, trying to make horrible moves… All he wanted to do was to grasp the dust. But how would the unrestrained ash accept his proposal?
The ash of an ever-struggled human was freed at last. Doppel and the Einz half-man both nailed there, stupefied.
They looked up, and the bloody sun was there; though Doppel could not see it through layers of electronic screens.
Later, the Einz suddenly reached his hands to the heart and pulled back fast. Something was stretched out from there and into the casket. The shape was ambiguous at first but fixed to a lily flower. The Einz did not stop; more and more brownish flowers were rudely torn from his body.
He began to roar.
Roar with the voice of Rhythm Linn, who was the brother of Doppel's ancestor, Lyrics.
The hoarse sound pierced through three hundred years and resonated with Doppel's mind.
Which made him weep, and then wail.
The control panel inside his helmet initiated the self-cleaning program, wiping out his tears silently.
At last, Doppel barely remembered how he went back to the Twilight City from atop. The only thing engraved in his mind was what he saw just before the door was closed:
The already incomplete Einz individual shattered to pieces, surrounded the casket, morphed crazily, and finally became equinox flowers.
Flew up to heaven, chasing the ashes.

« Before Twilight | The Moment of Burial |                          ||


Those Twisted Pines Hub » The Eagle's Eye
GreenWolf

Here's my Author Page.
Part one of two of an Unusual Investigations duology that has been five years in the writing.
The two tales that make up the duology of "The Body Electric" are written as a sidequel to Conwell's Austringers series.
Recommended Listening: "The Enemy Within" by Rush

|| HUB || The Falcon's Flight »
November 9th, 2018
A Hotel in Portland, Oregon
"Christ, what a fucking mess."
Special Agent Kenneth Spencer stared at the room. Overturned tables, trampled banners, spilled drinks — all the hallmarks of a political rally gone horrendously wrong. Half-a-dozen agents were busy combing the scene for evidence, looking for traces of the unusual or extraordinary. At the same time, he knew, half-a-dozen more were in the process of interrogating and geas binding the dozens of witnesses. And still even more agents were pursuing runners. As for Spencer and his partner, Robin Thorne, they had been pulled from their usual beat in Three Portlands to run fieldwork for the investigation.
The Unit was throwing everything it had at this one, and for good reason. Someone had shot Representative Raymond Caldwell in the head — and not only had he survived, he had gotten up and fled the scene. Thorne was currently assisting in the effort to track him down.
Spencer's earpiece chimed, signalling an incoming call.
He raised a finger to his ear and tapped the device. "This is Spencer, go."
"Good news and bad news, Ken," Thorne said, skipping a greeting.
"You found him?"
"That's the good news." Even over the phone, he could tell Thorne was grimacing. "Bad news is that he exploded the second we cornered him."
"He what?" Several of the other agents in the room stopped what they were doing and looked over at him curiously. He waved a hand at them, motioning for them to continue working.
"He blew up. Some kind of self-destruct mechanism, I reckon. Response team is collecting the wreckage now." Thorne paused. "By the looks of it, our Congresscritter was definitely an android."
Now it was Spencer's turn to grimace. "You think—"
"That it was Anderson?" There was an almost imperceptible snort from the other end of the line. "Who else? It's not like human replica robots are something you can just buy at Circuit Seelie. There's a very short list of people who could pull this off, and Electric Jesus is right at the top. We've finally got the bastard this time."
He frowned. "If we're wrong, the city will riot."
"They might do that anyways."
"Point taken. But we still need to make sure our case is iron clad. There's no room for error here. So, how do we tie the ex-Congressdroid to Anderson?"
"Well." They paused again. "I have one idea. But you're not going to like it."
"It's Merlo, isn't it?"
"Gamma-13 are the only ones outside the company who know what the insides of a Saker look like. She owes me a favor, we get her to do the analysis for us."
"You're right, I don't like it." He gritted his teeth. "But you're not wrong. I'll put in a call to Holman, ask him to have his people go over the wreckage for us. But that's it. We're not pulling Merlo and her task force into this."
"Of course. I'm not asking you to hand over a federal investigation to the Foundation. Hell, for all we know, they might have been the ones to do the shooting, if they knew he was a Saker."
"No bet."
They laughed. "I've gotta get back to it now. I'll let you know if we turn up any immediate leads."
"Likewise," he said. "Spencer out." He tapped the earpiece again, terminating the call.
He looked around the room, at all the agents busily searching for Clues, and sighed. It didn't matter what it was or how many people they put on it, things always seemed to find a way of involving the Foundation, usually at the most inconvenient moment possible.
It was probably anomalous.

November 12th, 2018
Site-64, Oregon
"I still can't believe they don't do weekends."
Spencer had spent the past few days wrangling an appointment with Site-64's Director for himself, Thorne, and the body bag full of robot parts waiting in the site's cargo garage, and his patience was nearing its end. Even after several hours of liaising and one blindfolded trip in the back of a nondescript sedan, the two agents had ended up being forced to wait outside Edgar Holman's office for a meeting that he had scheduled. It was a level of bureaucratic ineptitude that surpassed even that of the United States Government.
"It is Veteran's Day," Thorne said, pretending to be fascinated by a poster on the far wall that read, 'Dᴏɴ'ᴛ Wᴀɴᴅᴇʀ Tʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ Wᴀʏs — Aʟʟ Vɪsɪᴛs Tᴏ Tʜʀᴇᴇ Pᴏʀᴛʟᴀɴᴅs Mᴜsᴛ Bᴇ Aᴘᴘʀᴏᴠᴇᴅ Bʏ Tʜᴇ Fᴇᴅᴇʀᴀʟ Lɪᴀɪsᴏɴ'.
"Right, so they'll do a federal holiday but not a Saturday?"
"I'm sure they do for emergencies."
"This doesn't count as an emergency?"
"They don't know what 'this' is," they said, perfectly indicating the scare quotes just by intonation. "Which you are well aware of, or else you wouldn't be talking about it euphemistically."
Spencer grunted. "I can't believe you, of all people, are giving them the benefit of the doubt."
"Someone has to play the good cop." Thorne shrugged. "Besides, we're not talking about the Foundation in abstract, we're talking about Holman and Merlo — people we've worked with, that you've worked with, plenty of times before, and who have been nothing less than reasonable, even when you have deliberately stonewalled them."
"You are being unreasonably reasonable about this," he muttered.
"You can't save the whole damn world by yourself, Ken." They turned to look at their partner, leaning forwards to make eye contact. "At some point you have to learn to trust people."
"I trust people," he protested. "I trust you."
Thorne opened their mouth to respond, but was interrupted by Holman's secretary.
"Agents Spencer and Thorne, the Director will see you now." As the secretary spoke, the door to Holman's office opened and released a pair of Foundation agents whom Thorne recognized as Sasha Merlo and Daniel Navarro. The two were deep in conversation, and if either of them noticed the UIU duo, they didn't signal it.
As Spencer led the way towards the waiting door, Thorne leaned over and whispered to him, "This conversation isn't over."
"Looking forward to continuing it," he whispered back.
The interior of Holman's office was exactly what Spencer had come to expect of upper-level bureaucrats — mostly paperwork by volume, with a desk and a few uncomfortable chairs as the only concessions to its human occupants. Somewhat unusually, opaque sheets of plastic had been placed on top of each stack of paperwork, presumably to deter any curious individuals who had perfected the art of reading upside down and backwards.
"Agent Spencer, Agent Thorne," Holman said, nodding to each of them in turn. "I do apologize for making you wait, but I'm afraid it couldn't be helped. Please, sit down." He gestured to the two chairs in front of his desk.
"Of course, I'm sure Merlo had some urgent business for you." Spencer said, taking a seat. He met Holman's gaze and raised an eyebrow. "Another lead on Anderson, maybe?"
Holman was good. His expression didn't change at all. But his carefully controlled non-reaction was its own kind of tell. He maintained eye contact with Spencer for a few seconds, then cracked a thin, humorless smile.
"We are aware, of course, of the federal activity surrounding Congressman Caldwell's campaign event on Friday, although details are scarce — your people have done an impressive job on information control. Even so, it would hardly take a genius to suspect a connection when you reached out a few hours later requesting a comparison between the remains of an android in your custody and the intact Saker components that Gamma-13 has managed to recover."
The aged site director clasped his hands together and rested them on his desk. "Sasha Merlo is not stupid, although her dedication to capturing Anderson is somewhat single-minded at times. She believes he is involved."
Thorne nudged Spencer's ankle with their foot, although they refrained from actually saying 'I told you so' in front of Holman. Looking at the Director, they nodded and said, "That makes two of us."
"To be clear," Spencer added, "We are not asking you to get involved in our investigation regarding the Congressman — in fact, I would respectfully request that you stay the hell away from it."
He clenched his jaw, then continued in a less confrontational tone, "We would appreciate it if your researchers could do their own analysis of the parts we've recovered, just to see if it's definitely a Saker or not. That's all we'd need to get a warrant against him."
Holman was about to answer when his pager went off. He offered an apologetic wince to the two FBI agents before glancing down to check the device. A moment later, he sighed and looked back up at them.
"I really do apologize, but something's just come up and I'm going to have to cut this meeting short. Of course, we're more than willing to offer any assistance, if you'll accept it. Talk to my secretary, she'll help you arrange the details of chain of custody documentation and the like." He stood up, preparing to usher them out.
Spencer opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again, but Thorne cut him off before he could say something undiplomatic. "Of course, Director, we understand you're a busy man. Don't let us detain you."
They grabbed Spencer's arm as they stood up, pulling him to his feet, then guided him out of the office. Holman trailed behind them, apologizing again for the interruption, then set off at a brisk walk deeper into the site, leaving the two agents — one bemused, one very unamused — standing in his waiting room.
"Unbelievable." Spencer shook his head. "Un-fucking-believable. They're fucking with us, you realize that?"
Thorne patted him on the shoulder. "I'm pretty sure Edgar Holman has more important things to do than deliberately waste your time."
"Like what?"
"Like accidentally waste your time. Come on, we got what came for."
Their conversation with Holman's secretary was brief, and not because she left in the middle of it. She already knew what they were there for, and had prepared everything they needed. It took only a few minutes to finalize the details of the evidence transfer — maintaining a continuous chain of custody when dealing with a clandestine, quasi-legal conspiracy is a lot easier when that conspiracy is even more obsessed with documentation than the federal bureaucracy. Once they were done, she directed them back to the site's garage, where a technician would be waiting to collect the remains of the android.
The man who met them there was just under six feet tall, with the build of a former linebacker who had lost weight to fit into a lab coat. He introduced himself as Doctor Ferro while he shook hands with Thorne and — after a moment of reluctance — Spencer.
With that ritual courtesy out of the way, Spencer unlocked the trunk and checked the tag on the body bag, just to confirm that it hadn't been tampered with. Then he and Ferro lifted it onto a nearby gurney.
"Decent weight to this thing," Ferro commented. "You said this was just one Saker?"
"One android, at least," Thorne replied. "We're hoping you'll be able to tell us if it's actually a Saker."
Ferro nodded, then leaned down to open the bag. He paused and glanced at Spencer. "May I?"
"Just make sure to retag and document it when you're done."
Ferro nodded again, then broke the seal on the evidence tag and unzipped the bag, revealing the jumbled mess of broken circuitry and releasing a faint smell of rot. Despite the circumstances of its demise, the android was remarkably well-preserved — the head had been reduced to shrapnel, but the mangled torso was recognizably a torso, the limbs were still mostly intact, and patches of scorched and decaying skin still clung to the mechanical parts.
Ferro whistled. "Pretty clean kill. The Lawbringers have had a hell of a time getting even single components from Sakers — most of the time, all that's left is a puddle of goo. How'd you manage it?"
"That was me," Thorne said. "I managed to get a hand on him and hit him with a little taser spell — non-lethal, we still thought he might have been the real Congressman at that point, and I was just trying to knock him over. It should have shut down his nervous system for a tick, but he just sort of wobbled a bit. And then he blew up."
"You probably shorted out the primary self-destruct system, which triggered an explosive secondary." He prodded at the wreckage with a gloved finger. "Located in the upper chest, it looks like. How close were you at the time?"
"Too close. I got lucky, I already had a ward up and most of the shrapnel missed it anyways."
"Most likely a shaped charge then, designed to destroy the brain. A shame, taking that intact would have been a real coup."
"When you say brain…" Spencer trailed off.
"Probably not an organic brain, no. As far as we can tell, the skin is the only biological component."
"Any idea where it comes from? It's not literally wearing someone's skin, is it?"
Ferro blanched slightly, but shook his head. "It's definitely not that, at least. Best guess is that they grow it over the mechanical frame in a bioreactor, using a sample of the target's DNA."
Thorne frowned as they were struck by an idea. "The skin cells would be genetically identical then, right?"
"It would be strange if they weren't."
They processed that for a moment, then asked, "Do you mind if we keep a piece?"
Ferro shrugged. "It's your robot."
Thorne donned a pair of gloves before selecting a piece — the left hand, which was entirely intact except for a missing pinky, and covered in mostly undamaged skin — to place into a smaller evidence bag, which went into one of the impossibly spacious pockets inside their suit jacket.
Spencer raised an eyebrow, but countersigned the evidence transfer without asking the obvious question.
And then it was time for another blindfolded trip in the back of an unmarked sedan.

November 13th, 2018
Moses Howard Federal Building, Three Portlands
"I should have thought of this before," Thorne said.
They had spread a map of North America across the floor of one of the unused holding cells, and were in the process of drawing a chalk circle around it. The robot hand hung from the ceiling on a piece of string, suspended directly over the center of the map. A pen had been tied to one of the fingers.
Spencer had worked with Thorne long enough to recognize the setup of a locator spell, even one as unusual as this. "I don't know why you've thought of it now. What makes you think there's anything left of the original Caldwell to even find?"
"Nothing, it's just a hunch. But it doesn't hurt to try it."
They finished the circle and started drawing an adjoining triangle. Their familiar, a spirit of intellect bound into the semi-spectral form of an albino robin, was serving as a guide marker by standing at each of the points of the triangle in turn. Thorne had acquired its services about two years ago, but had taken to keeping it a lot closer in the last year, ever since their duel with Dustin — although it wouldn't have made much of a difference there, since its nature didn't lend itself to combat evocation. Still, Thorne preferred having the extra layer of security, minimal though it may be, and so now it rarely left their side unless they had business on the other side of the Veil.
As Thorne finished drawing the last side of the triangle, the bird opened its beak and twittered something in modern Celtic.
"No, it's fine," Thorne replied. "We can do a compass tracker when we get close. If we get close. Now scooch."
The familiar hopped out of the triangle while Thorne took up a position inside of it. The bird fluttered over to perch on Spencer's shoulder, where it tilted its head from side to side as it stared at him with a look of distinctly non-avian cunning.
"Yes, I see you, Crowe."
The name was Spencer's appellation, since Thorne had never bothered to give it one. He poked it gently with his finger, causing the bird to fly off to perch above the door to the holding cell.
Ignoring the pair's antics, Thorne closed their eyes and focused their will, reaching out with their occult senses towards the circle, the map, and the hand — and through the links of contagion and similarity that bound them to the rest of the world. They took a breath.
"Show me."
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the lines of the circle flared up in blue-green light, and the hand began to swing, pendulously, back and forth above the map, before coming to an abrupt stop at a fifteen degree angle from the vertical. A drop of ink welled up from the end of the pen, then fell, straight down, onto the map, leaving a perfect circle.
Thorne opened their eyes, and the circle went dark. The force guiding the hand vanished, and it swung back towards its prior position.
"Got something?" Spencer asked.
"Maybe." Thorne crouched down to examine the map, then groaned. "That can't be right."
Crowe chirped something that was almost certainly Celtic for, "I told you so."
Thorne waved a hand dismissively. "Shush. The problem isn't the geometry."
"What's wrong?" Spencer came over to examine the map for himself. "This looks like it's somewhere in the Oregon Portland."
"Yes, but look at where it is in Portland."
Spencer squinted. "Just south of Government Island?" Comprehension dawned. "That's not—"
"The FBI building? Can't say for sure at this scale, but I'm pretty sure, yeah."
Spencer rubbed his temples. "It's the Way. It's gotta be."
"Yep. Which means—"
"He's here. In Three Ports."
"Yeah."
Spencer shook his head in disbelief. "We aren't that lucky."
"We'll see."
Thorne snapped their fingers, summoning Crowe back to perch on their palm. Grabbing the robot hand with their free hand, they closed their eyes again and started humming softly.
After a moment, Crowe emitted a wordless croak.
"You've got it?" Thorne asked.
The bird repeated the noise.
"Alright." Thorne opened their eyes and let go of the hand, then wiped their own hand on the leg of their pants. "We've got a fix on the contagion link. Let's find the real Caldwell."
Thorne led the way back upstairs and out the building. Once they were outside, Crowe stretched its phantasmal wings and leapt into the air. Watching it drift across the open sky, it was clear to Spencer that the familiar didn't quite grasp flying — it flapped its wings too early or too late, and its trajectory was too regular, unaffected by the wind or the light drizzle of rain. It was just another reminder that the creature only looked like a bird, and was governed more strongly by the laws of thaumatology than the laws of aerodynamics.
The not-bird led the two agents through the city, following the invisible thread of the contagion link that Thorne had discovered, taking them towards the real Caldwell — or whatever might be left of him — on the closest thing to a perfectly straight trajectory. After fifteen long minutes of trudging through the rain, the familiar landed on a windowsill on the second floor of an apartment building near the Periphery.
The building itself was co-op owned, and was better maintained than most of its neighbors in the outer city. As a result, its walls had become a canvas for competing anartists, who had covered the entire exterior surface in murals and graffiti — and then, when they had run out of empty concrete, had started covering up other works, sparking off an anartistic arms race of techniques and methods that now made the building hazardous to look at for more than a few seconds at a time.
They met no opposition on the way inside, and made their way up to the second floor. It didn't take long to find the unit that Crowe had indicated.
The two agents looked at the door. There was a faint thrum of hip-hop coming from inside the apartment, and the air was filled with an unmistakable skunky scent.
Spencer knocked.
The music stopped.
The door opened to reveal Representative Raymond Caldwell, in his pajamas and very clearly stoned.
"Mister Caldwell?" Spencer asked cautiously.
"What? Oh, yeah, that's me. I don't use that name anymore though. Just call me Barry." He looked between the two agents, a frown breaking through his laid-back expression. "You're not from the housing co-op, are you?"
"No." Spencer did not offer any further clarification, but that seemed to be enough to allay his suspicions, because the frown vanished.
Thorne cleared their throat. "Mister, uh, Barry, have you, to your knowledge, ever been a member of the United States Congress?"
He blinked. "I don't think so?"
"Could you tell us what it is that you do, then?" Spencer asked.
"I dunno. I just chill. Mister Anderson pays for the place."
Thorne coughed to mask their surprise. "Anderson? Vincent Anderson?"
"Yeah, yeah. He lets me live here. Sometimes he stops by to see if I need anything."
At this point, Spencer withdrew his badge from his jacket and held it up. The other man went cross-eyed trying to focus on it. "Barry, I'm Special Agent Kenneth Spencer of the Unusual Incidents Unit, and this is Special Agent Robin Thorne."
"Whoa, you're g-men?"
"Yes, Barry. And it is critically important that you come with us."
"What, now? Why?"
"Because you have just confirmed that Vincent Anderson has instigated a seditious conspiracy against the United States of America, and I doubt he'll let you keep living here once he realizes it."
"Oh." It took a few seconds for the implications to work their way through his brain. "Oh fuck."
Thorne patted him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Barry. You're not under arrest. This is just a precaution. To keep you safe."
"You really think he'll try to kill me?"
"No," Spencer said. "We're going to arrest him first."
|| HUB || The Falcon's Flight »

The Eagle's Eye
By GreenWolf

"Christ, what a fucking mess."
Special Agent Kenneth Spencer stared at the room. Overturned tables, trampled banners, spilled drinks — all the hallmarks of a political rally gone horrendously wrong. Half-a-dozen agents were busy combing the scene for evidence, looking for traces of the unusual or extraordinary. At the same time, he knew, half-a-dozen more were in the process of interrogating and geas binding the dozens of witnesses. And still even more agents were pursuing runners. As for Spencer and his partner, Robin Thorne, they had been pulled from their usual beat in Three Portlands to run fieldwork for the investigation.
The Unit was throwing everything it had at this one, and for good reason. Someone had shot Representative Raymond Caldwell in the head — and not only had he survived, he had gotten up and fled the scene.


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⚠ Content warning: Child torture

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It isn't so uncommon — the wooden grinding of wheels against gravel. The pops as pebbles are crushed against one another and spat into the air. The trot of hooves and the smell of horse-dung the wagons carry with them. No, that doesn't catch my attention. They are merely integrated, sneaking in through the window at night, coming to rest on my pillow and whispering new dreams into my head. Dreams of a white-covered carriage and a handsome humble craftsman, extending his hand to me to pull me in with him and take me somewhere fantastic.
No, these ordinary sounds only lull me deeper. It is the hooting and hollering that wakes me up proper.
My eyes crack open, and I wonder if the pub down the street has left its doors ajar, but as I listen to the night, it only fills with more and more cheering.
I sit up. Celebrations? At this time of night? I look out my window at the looming orange moon, shifting as it were in the amorphous smoke of the house next door. Midnight, at least. An unholy hour to be awake for any girl my age. My heavy head urges me back to sleep, and I nearly follow it, curiosity dwindling, before my nose catches on to a peculiar aroma. One or two deep huffs of air, and all my senses come back in full. Awake, alert, and excited.
There is a moment's pause as I listen to the night and my body regains its energy. The occasion calls for stealth — Mother wouldn't be so happy finding me wasting my youth on nightly strolls again. I get out of bed and imagine my feet as mouse paws.
I slip on something more appropriate for an outing, but I rush and leave behind a fair deal of my usuals. I put on my dress but forego plenty of the ribbons, and I don my socks but forget to pull them high. A hat seems ridiculous for a night as warm as this, and I let my hair down because a braid would take too long. Besides, I only have so many good clothes, and the streets are muddy.
Another rise in the waves of whoops hastens my trip. I tip-toe past my mother's room on the second floor, and then run a pitter-patter down the stairs. In the pitch dark of the shop, I fumble for the keys on the counter and let myself out the front door.
The night is warm and inviting. Summer reaches even here in the foothills, where rain pools between all the cracks and crevices and the air is humid for a foreseeable eternity. The one-and-two story buildings come up everywhere terrain is flat enough, betwixt the verdant alders, beeches and grass. When I was very little, there used to be a family for every house, but now half the smokestacks are empty, and most windows are never lit. Somewhere far, but not too far, the city has drawn the eyes of my neighbors.
I lock the store behind me, and breathe deep. Above the damp soil comes that smell, that smell I've only smelled so many times, so much stronger than I have ever imagined I could smell it. Sweet and delicious — sugar.
I hear more substance in the yells as I draw closer to the crowd huddled outside of the pub. They are shouting bets. "Four shillings!" "Eight!" The crowd ooh's at the jump to doubling, and some louder, demanding voice rises above it: "A man of action! Any more?"
As I approach, I glimpse a basket passing between the hands of the men and their consorts — a crowd of drunkards and the occasional whore, all gleefully tossing coins at the taller man prancing around with the basket. His extended gait gives me pause, the way he stumbles about and nearly falls over, it looks like he must be walking on short stilts. His face comes with a modest patch of beard just below his lip and a bright, bristly moustache — he is clean and groomed enough to be taken for a higher class if not for the poorly-concealed patch seams sometimes caught by the fire's light. When I look at him, the senses clarify. The smell, the sweet, is his.
"Oh-ho! I think we're done," he bellows. I sneak up just to the glow's edge, so that my small stature might be lost in the darkness and the rowdiness won't suck me in. I find a log among the gravel and sit on it.
The stilt-man wobbles back to the center of the crowd, standing just behind the fire which throws long shadows from his legs across his chest and face. His mere stature and presence hushes the crowd into a captivated pause. Deeper, and louder than before: "I bring you a relic from a distant land! Where the sands twist and howl through the wind, and the sun crests so close to the earth you can feel its burn from a raise of the hand. To the south and to the east, the wide deserts from horizon to horizon, from sea to sea, the clouds are made of dust and the sky is red with fire."
He begins to stride, carefully and slowly, towards the front lines of the audience.
"And yet, in this place where God's name is foreign, they practice strange magic, a witchcraft that seldom graces the Western world. But in my travels I stumbled on this swarthy man, playing his tricks for scraps at a pub, and past his wrappings there was a terrible power in those dark eyes. That power, that very same power, I bring to amaze and astound you tonight! And now, I present the wonder himself… the mysterious, exotic, all-seeing… Zoltan!"
Behind the stilt-man, from the back of the wagon, emerges a man the likes of which I have never seen. His head is wrapped in black-purple cloth so that only his eyes and the bridge of his nose are visible. Thin strips of hair come through and hang around his face, further obscuring his eyes, and behind that curtain a fire dances within them, brought to life in his pupils and shining like a cat's. As he moves, there is a slight jingling that brings me to think of a jeweler.
The crowd laughs as he starts to circle around the fire, small chips of metal on his cloak catching the embers and sparkling like stars. He closes his eyes, and walks so close to the flames I fear his clothes might catch.
"Take your seats," the stilt-man insists, "while Zoltan draws your names from the ether!"
The crowd dutifully sits on the ground or wherever is available, some in the dirt and some on stools. With a shaking hand, strong and dirty, graced with tarnished, bent rings on each finger, Zoltan reaches to his forehead, and smooths the cloth back. When he takes his hand off, below it is an eye — painted, red and purple, that glistens like grease in the flickering light.
Zoltan starts making great motions with his hands, extended to the crowd, like he really is pulling names out of people's heads. He takes deep breaths, and the crowd chuckles at his theatrics.
"Get on with it," someone slurs.
"Quiet!" the showrunner bites. "This mastery takes time!"
Still, Zoltan winks an eye open to glare at the offender, and then goes back to his blind wandering. Eventually, he lands on one woman and puts both his hands on her head. The man with his arm around her seems to lean in to slap him off, but before he can:
"Audrey Smith!" Zoltan announces. The lady looks around with a stupid smile on her face, her mouth agape.
"Hey, any girlie can have tha—"
Zoltan points to the interruption. "Nick Coulhan!"
That shuts him up quick. Zoltan continues around the circle, either in order or singling someone out if they interrupt. "Padraig Odelia! Fergus, Samuel, Jack Abner, Edmund Vignau!" He turns his finger to someone milling about the back. "You… you wouldn't like it if I said your name."
Eyes turn, and the man chuckles and waved a hand at Zoltan, confirming his suspicion. The crowd ooh's, and soon people have forgotten all about the wager and are simply raising their hand, asking that Zoltan guess their name.
"Albert!"
"And my wife's?"
"Maurice!"
"My daughter?"
"Trick question," Zoltan states, and turns away from him with some flare. "She isn't born yet."
Another round of pointing and naming. "Aubrey, Elmer, Leon Fletcher, and that one…" Zoltan seems to reach above the crowd to point at… "Selma Bridgers."
The crowd parts, in their own sloppy clumsy way, so that no one stands between myself and Zoltan, his finger unerring, his stance like a fancy swordsman, so that his side is to me and his chin is turned up.
"Oh ho ho!" the stilt-man reminds me of his presence, "a young girl has stumbled into our midst! And what are you doing up so late?"
I stand, and stutter. "M-me? I was… I…"
The stilt-man strides up to me, looking wildly off-balance and yet staying upright the whole time, until he is just in front of me. Even as he kneels to greet me, he is nearly twice my height. "Little girl! You surely don't want to be one with this crowd of hooligans and ne'er-do-wells! Aren't ladies like you tucked in bed at this hour?"
I try to get out a sound, but he just continues: "Ohh, or could it be…" he leans in close enough that I take a step back, but then pulls something out of his shirt pocket. His voice lowered: "This?"
The smell.
With him backlit by the fire, I can't make out the object he holds, but then he is standing and pacing back to the jeering crowd, upset as they were by the "hooligan" title. But where he goes, he leaves a trail, and I, the ant, follow the pheromone. I toddle forward, trying to keep up with him and whatever he has in his hands, and it seems the rest of the drunkards start to notice.
"More of the good stuff!" one astutely observes. "Didn't you run out?"
The stilt-man doesn't respond, and Zoltan obediently relinquishes the spotlight, his glittering cloak the only give-away of his presence behind the silhouettes of the crowd he begins to circle. "Ran out? There's always room for dessert! And we have a special guest, now, don't we?"
Once I am well within the boundaries of the audience, he leans down again, and I see that he is holding a single candied nut, like those I remember from Christmas. Just this? my eyes widen, such a smell from so small a thing?
But I must have it. My hand reaches out, and he gingerly places the candy into my palm. The audience boos my special treatment. The stilt-man ignores them, only watching me chew.
It is like nothing I've ever tasted — sweet beyond compare, to such a degree my teeth hurt. Its surface coats my mouth like a popped grape, its juices nutty and decadent and overwhelming. For a moment I can only imagine that I have eaten that which belonged only to royalty — that I have stolen from some forbidden wealth and would soon be punished.
But instead, a warm feeling fills my body from head to toe. I feel my cheeks flush, and my head fill with air. I nearly fall but stick out a foot to catch myself.
"Woah! The little lady has little tolerance, doesn't she?"
The words swirl in my head like they are from another place, and everything left is taste. The colors in my world become coated with candy, the fire's rising smoke turning into a cottony pink cloud. The patchwork suit of the platform man dissolves into wild shapes that play and champ at each other, and when he speaks, his mouth sheds light like a jack-o-lantern's.
He grabs my arm to keep me on my feet, and then shakes his head while somewhere far away a mob craves that very candy he has given me. "No more!" he fends them off. "She's a special guest! My daughter! My heavens, if I knew you would be so rowdy, I wouldn't have made her part of the act!"
I can't argue, because I haven't the head to tell if he is right or wrong. He lifts me up and puts me on his back, like he's protecting me from a pack of wolves, and with my head so light he feels like a mountain — like he is lifting me into the heavens, and I am at once afraid of the fall back down. I begin to mewl and moan as best I can with my world so distorted and my muscles so disobedient of my commands and he seems to interpret this as my fear of the drunken fools. "Well then, our act must be on the road at once! You people simply can't control yourselves. Toodle-oo, and may we never meet again!"
He waves Zoltan over, who looks like a spattering of the cosmos itself, and we all retreat into the wagon through the back. As we enter, the smell becomes more than mere scent but the air itself. It's like we step into a sugar-oven. The air is warm and intoxicating, so much so that I nearly faint.
"Ah, our little lady is heavy! Zoltan, lay out some sheets for her. And Hare! Pull us out of here, we've collected our dues this night. I don't want to remain for the aftermath."
I moan, trying to get some kind of word to come out. Where are we going? I need to be home. But nothing happens.
"What's our change look like?"
"Enough for a feast the next town over, and a cleaning of our ladies' hooves."
"Astounding," the stilt-man says, placing me on some bench where I slump over immediately, only able to gently wave my hands outstretched in front of my face and watch the fingers turn from ten to twenty to thirty until I blink the duplicates away.
I feel something gentle and woolen coat me from my shoulders to my feet. "There," Zoltan says.
I close my eyes. Make it go away, I silently wish, make it go away, make it go away. My head spins no matter how much I will against it. Make this all go away.
"There," the stilt-man agrees. "She can sleep the sugar off. Leave her be."
Their voices starts to get very far away. "What do we do with her?" Zoltan asks.
There's a pause, or maybe I slip out of consciousness for a second before I hear the response: "Hare, find somewhere discreet for the night."

Cricket song. Wet leaves on my left cheek. I'm lying down, somewhere dark. Light from the corners of my vision. My ears tune to voice tones.
"… an animal is hard to train. Do you see what I'm saying?"
Some mumbles of agreement. I blink my eyes. My head is still light, but clearer. My mouth doesn't respond to my wants, and neither does the rest of my body. However, in what little wiggling I can accomplish, I quickly come against restraints.
"She's awake," some new voice says.
"Thank you, Hare. I never would have known!"
I hear steps. The warm night air meets with my flushing cheeks. I wriggle my jaw, only to find my mouth is open, but there's something in it, tied around my head. I create some kind of sound, weak as it is, a moan or somesuch up from my sternum.
"Well?" the showrunner asks. "Any other ideas?"
My ankles are bound, and my wrists are tied behind my back. The dirt meets my skin from my temple to my feet. Fear starts to crowd out the lingering effects of the candy, and my muscles tense. I can see nothing but some shifting shadows from the flickering light of a lantern behind me.
A toddler's squeal comes through my throat, and I start to fight hard against the restraints, only accomplishing a change in position, from my side to prone.
"Alright."
I hear the rubbing of two pieces of wood together.
"It appears I didn't hire conversationalists, did I?"
I start to find some kind of rhythm in squirming which makes me gain ground against their voices. Progress, meaning. Direction. I start to move as fast as I can, like a little worm who's never been a worm before, pushing against the dirt and towards whatever else.
A boot is shoved underneath my stomach, and flips me onto my back.
Above me, there is the stilt-man, without his stilts. The travelling entertainer. A lantern from some other source illuminates only the right side of his face, but his eyes catch some flick of the fire to give them orange glimmering pupils that stare down at me through the thick fog of terror and drug.
"You all lack vision," he says. He takes one deep breath, and then crouches down. I try to wiggle away, but he places his hands on my shoulders and pushes me down into the earth, pinning me. His orange eyes spear through my head. I try my best to look away, but only when I close my eyes can I escape his awful gaze. He studies me like the men study meat at the butcher.
"Hello, you," he whispers, almost only breathes.
For a moment, he only looks at me. I hear the shuffling of feet from somewhere — above me to my right. There is a cough, and the entertainer looks up, his moustache catching on the light, hanging in the air with a perfect coil.
"Do you need… help?" Hare asks.
"Hm?" His eyes return to me. "No, no. I'm just getting a sense of our newest addition! Selma. Hello, Selma! I'm Herman, Herman Fuller, and I get the sense that we are going to get along swimmingly. I'm giving you the opportunity to be part of something bigger, something grander, a spectacle for the world to see and love! Only, we have to make you something loveable first, and, well, that process isn't so easy." He holds something up to the lantern light that I can't quite make out. "In other words, sorry for the gag, and you may feel a little pinch."
I scream as the wooden blade goes through my right side and out the back. I scream again as the second one mirrors it, and both pin me to the forest floor. My vision swims, and my world loses itself to the shearing of my flesh and the pooling blood underneath my bare back.
He stands above me, impassive, though I can hardly make him out past the tears pooling in my eyes.
"Zoltan, come here."
He leaves my vision. Every motion, every straining of muscle, only pulls at the wounds in my loins, the new orifices leaking my lifeblood. I cry and screech, but the gag muffles my attempts.
I hear some kind of physicality. "Come here. I need you to be here for this. You aren't the first Zoltan, and if you're lucky, you can be the last, do you understand me?"
A pause. The crickets have ceased their calls to cede the stage to my suffering.
"Of course," he replies, too quiet.
"Progress is hard, Zoltan. Progress takes fucking effort. I thought you told me, 'I have the heart for it.' I thought you told me, 'I have the gift.' Now come here, Zoltan, and look at it. Look at progress, look at it in the eyes."
My cries redouble as a boot stomps the blade further into my side, sawing through tissue as it goes.
"Just you wait. One day, this will be a whole industry. Someone can be on the ground using their hands, and I'll call the shots. But you have to work hard to never work again, and the work… oh, the work."
He crouches down, and rests both hands on the handles of the wooden knives, staring into my face of agony again. "Hmm. I'm not very practiced at growing fur. Selma! I declare that you, then, will be our fantastically intelligent pig. I think that will really sell on the flyers, don't you?"
His fingers drum on the handles, and then he stands again. He breathes deep, and pumps his arms back and forth. "And a one, and a two, and a three." Clap.
He plummets his hand onto my stomach with such force that I immediately vomit and begin to choke. He starts to mutter in some language I can't understand — not that I can listen for words, now that my mind is taken with the bile clogging my mouth, preventing the passage of air from my nose to my lungs, burning in my esophagus.
But his hand, his hand goes through my skin, like his arm and my guts have molded into one being, and I begin to feel some things long and serpentine shoot out the point of impact beneath my skin, reaching into my extremities and into my hands and feet, one then coming through the meat of my neck and wrapping around to the back of my head. His muttering continues, and the blades begin to burn.
My body changes.
First, my belly expands.
I swell like a balloon, starting with my stomach, but the bloat reaches up to my chest and then starts to blow through my neck. Once the transformation reaches my head, something worse begins to happen. My cheeks extend, and I can feel my bones stretch and break and reform and stretch again. The bridge of my nose pulls forward like a sapling reaching towards the sun, and my nostrils turn up at the end where there forms a flat face.
My eyes drift to the side of my head, and my ears pull up to the top. My cries start to change their tone, from gargled screams to squeals. My limbs pull at their restraints as their sockets stretch and their flexibility limits. My wrists break free first, pulling in front of me as they're angled up towards the sky, and at their ends my fingers are encased together in new hooves made from my expanding fingernails. My legs soon follow suit, as the back end of my spine grows and pushes against my skin, fracturing and stretching and healing and fracturing again.
As soon as it started, it stops. The tendrils whip back to their point of origin, and his hand pulls out of my putty-like stomach, which in his absence hardens into something closer to skin.
He stands to full height and looks down at me, my still-human eyes leaking tears from some new system I'm not familiar with, my stubby arms-turned-legs waving in the air, my inhales snorting and squealing.
He breathes heavily.
"Well, that was unpleasant." He brushes some dirt off of his pants where he knelt on the ground. He turns to his compatriots: "Eh? Looks like a pig?"
I hear some grunts of affirmation. I stop making noise and just lay there, breathing heavily, my lungs weighted by my new layers of fat. Everything feels wrong.
"Good. Maybe we can make it walk on two legs, or do math. The fantastically intelligent pig. Let's think of a name on the ride. Hare, go drag it into the wagon, it should be too tired to fight you."
He's right. I don't have good enough control of my body to fight him. Hare heaves my rotund figure with ease, and carries me back into the cart. Along the way, the entertainer unties my gag and throws it to the ground, coated as it is in bile. They toss me in, and Hare goes around to the front. The cart begins to move, as the entertainer and Zoltan sit on either side of me. I just lay and heave.
"How's this, Zoltan: Herman Fuller's Precocious Prancing Pig!! Eh?"
The pause is pregnant.
"I like it," Zoltan replies.
Herman takes one sharp breath, then reaches over me to pat Zoltan on the cheek.
"I knew you'd come around." He leans back in his seat and spreads his arms along the headrest, then takes his glittering eyes and looks down towards me.
"We'll all be big one day. You just wait and see. Like one big, happy family."
He laughs, careless that no one joins him.


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Porno Ghost Sighting
i don't know if I did the code right
Eat more of my SCPs. Eat them all.
Also please eat some of these

Anabasis Hub Probably the greatest story involving a pair of redheaded siblings whose infighting causes the end of the world
Manna Charitable Foundation 2000 The sequel to the above, collaborationed with Dr Reach
The Stuff Industry What happens when everyone around you at work is a complete idiot and so are you, but not only does no one get fired, but you actually turn a profit? I don't know, some stuff.
When MCF and Stuff happen A fun story of incompetence

[13:31] * Now talking in #oaziz
[13:31] * Topic is 'Welcome to the FreakShow! | We've been here for years, welcome. | Whether your new, old, or somewhere in between, don't be an ass and make yourself at home. | Aliens, UFO sightings, ghosts, spirits, goblins, all supernatural topics allowed [EXCEPT BIGFOOT]. Wire fraud discussions not allowed. |
[13:31] * Set by LordStonewall on Fri Jun 01 10:41:09
[13:32] <TopJim> Hey nuts
[13:32] <darthenstein> Fuk u callin nuts
[13:32] <Artistick> DEEZ
[13:33] <StGames> guys Im freaking out and I need advice here, i think I found something supernatural and I can't talk about it with anyone else.
[13:33] <TopJim> Why the fuck not.
[13:34] <StGames> It involves a dead porn star
[13:34] <darthenstein> lmao
[13:34] <Artistick> HNGGG
[13:34] <heroicchoice> RIp whoever they is
[13:35] <TopJim> feel like im gonna regret this but what you got
[13:35] <darthenstein> u sendin pics?
[13:35] <darthenstein> of when they wre alive ofc
[13:37] <StGames> Okay so Ive been downloading a lot of porn, since like 2003 okay and back then we didnt have youtube or pornhub for porn we had to use stuff like KaZaA and edonkey and other filesharing shit. A lot of the time (i mean i was young then) i would just search for stuff like you know "hot blonde" "busty blonde" "tattooed blonde" and get a bunch of video clips like maybe 30 seconds or 1 minute, ripped from old VHS's or webcams or wherever, some professional stuff mixed in with amateur stuff, no real way of knowing where this stuff came from, I mean its amateur porn from fucking 2003.
[13:38] <darthenstein> this mf into tattooed blondes
[13:38] <MichaelHunt> I WOULDNT WANNA KNOW A GUY WHO ISNT INTO TATTOOD BLONDES!
[13:38] <heroicchoice> I prefer Redheads
[13:39] <StGames> So basically I found out theres this amateur porn star using the name "Jada Cole" and Id been searching her and downloading tons of clips of her. definitely amateur stuff like done with a camcorder and webcam. she was unbelievable, blonde hair, maybe f cup or gcup breasts, big green eyes, and a tattoo on her chest covering like almost her whole chest of a giant eagle or falcon and its on fire. the eagle's all in black but the fire parts are red and orange.
[13:39] <darthenstein> who gives a shit
[13:39] <StGames> so anyway Im like, i've been loving this girl's videos for years and collecting her stuff keeping it hidden in my comp nice and safe occasionally looking back but never like actiely searching for her. like, i got a few hundred clips of her, from like 30 seconds to 30 minutes in length but i'm not like googling her name every day, you know what I mean? Like, I've got her vids, Im set, Im happy.
[13:40] <StGames> So a few days ago Im thinking about her again and thinking i wonder if she's done any new stuff recently so i google her name and its like, its not a very unique name
[13:40] <BeerOff> "Jada Coles" is a bar and nightclub in miami
[13:40] <StGames> So i keep searching like whatever, there's tons of random Jada Cole people around but then get this i find a news article from 2001. March 1st, 2001 from some bumfuck burgh in tenessee its a news article about a girl who died in a car crash and they have a yearbook picture of her and its the same girl, she was an aspiring actor and stuff
[13:41] <darthenstein> a local news article uses a girls fucking porn name thats legit right
[13:41] <StGames> It was the same girl, same face same dimples same teeth and eyes. Someone in the comments wrote "RIP Jada Cole" in 2008
[13:41] <TopJim> It's not the same girl
[13:41] <StGames> that's what I thought! but then is tarted doing more searching and research i tracked down the girls classmates and i asked them and they said yeah she did porn with her boyfriend at the time but it was supposed to be private just for them.
[13:42] <darthenstein> who the fuck is going to tell a complet stranger "yeah my dead best friend from high school did porn before she died, why, u interested in jackin off to my dead best friend whos dead?"
[13:42] <StGames> I didn't have to ask them much i aready knew the name 'Jada Cole" they recognized it tehy said yeah thats the name she used. they werent happy about me calling but it wasn't like a big secret or something.
[13:42] <TopJim> where is this story going
[13:44] <StGames> So get this. I start looking through the video clips of her i've got and i see one titled "Jada Cole services our troops" and i thoguht thats a little weird because supposedly shes only doing this wiht her boyfriend. I open the video and watch it and shes "servicing" our troops in Iraq…
[13:44] <TopJim> …
[13:44] <StGames> we didnt have troops in Iraq in 2001
[13:45] <Artistick> Bitch we an empire we got troops everywhere, the American Empire of America
[13:45] <StGames> Not in Iraq, back when Saddam was still alive he wasnt letting us set up fucking training bases in his fuckin country
[13:45] <StGames> So alright, i start looking through other clips I got and now i'm starting to freak tf out. I'd been downloading video clips of her from like 2003 - 2011/2012 i didnt know she was dead at the time so i had no reason to suspect, but the more recent clips of her 2011, 2012 and such are in HD
[13:46] <darthenstein> they didnt have no hd in fuckin 2001!
[13:46] <StGames> Exacvtly!!! On top of that some of the clips are like, rectangle shaped, like very obvviously taken on an Iphone or some other kind of smartphone.
[13:47] <TopJim> Its not the same girl
[13:47] <darthenstein> fuck u talkin bout
[13:47] <heroicchoice> Man..imagine being an aspiring actor then getting killed and now all anyone knows you for is doing some shitty amateur porn long after your death
[13:48] <StGames> Here https://i.imgur.com/Vlt5sd0.jpg i cropped out the nudity this is from a vid i downloaded in 2004
[13:48] <StGames> This is from a clip i got in 2012 https://i.imgur.com/us7fDZl.jpg same background cos its the same room
[13:48] <StGames> and this is the yearbook photo from that news article https://i.imgur.com/T43asSw.jpg
[13:49] <darthenstein> its fuckin her!
[13:49] <TopJim> It's not the same girl
[13:49] <darthenstein> It fukken is!!!111eleven!
[13:50] <darthenstein> ITS TEH SAME GIRL!
[13:51] <SuperNintendoChalmers> Where did u even get these vids from
[13:52] <StGames> I told you. Kazaa, edonkey, torrents. no way to backtrack where they originally came from or who originalyl posted them
[13:52] <Artistick> How convenient
[13:52] <darthenstein> Dood it was fuckin 2003 20045, they didnt have the shit we got now how tf you going to backtrack a random porn mpeg u got off Edonkey in 2005 unless ur FBI CIA DEA BOB RIP
[13:53] <TopJim> I still dont think it's the same girl. not like you can see the tattoo in the yearbook photo.
[13:53] <BeerOff> She looks younger in the 2012 pic
[13:53] <darthenstein> how tf u even tell she looks exactly the same!
[13:54] <BasedOn0Bitches> Dude, you having fun talking about your porn collection?
[13:54] <darthenstein> THIS IS SRS BUSNESS
[13:55] <MichaelHunt> LMAO hes been beating off to a dead girl
[13:56] <StGames> I'm telling you this is serious, i'm going fucking insane over this. Every clip ive got, its the same girl, same facial features, same eyebrows, eyes, lips, nose, tattoo, dimples, breasts, ass, voice, teeth, tongue, everyfuvkingthing
[13:57] <darthenstein> guys Im totally buyin it this is something real and something real fucked up
[13:57] <TopJim> I don't see the resemblence to the yearbook photo
[13:58] <xx_150yearoldgoat_xx> lol nice porn collection, dick
[13:58] <StGames> i've got clips of this girl dressed up as rey from Star Wars, 2015, a clip with her holding an xbox360 controller, clip of her with an ipod, this is serious.
[13:59] <Artistick> Show me them rey titties
[13:59] <darthenstein> dude wtf, seriously, i'm googling this girl now i just found that same news article he was talking about, lookin at the pic its exactly the same its exactly her
[13:59] <SuperNintendoChalmers> You suggesting she faked her death or going full dipshit and saying she's a porno ghost?
[13:59] <Artistick> Pretty fuckin dumb to fake your death then go on doing something public like porn
[14:00] <darthenstein> PORNO GHOST PORNO GHOST PORNO GHOST
[14:00] <Artistick> I mean, amateur or not, ur putting yourself out there when your supposed to be pretending to be dead
[14:00] <StGames> It's not just that its that she looks exactly the same in each and every video clip, from the early 200s stuff to the 2015 stuff.
[14:01] <TopJim> You said you downloaded clips of her from 2003-2012, Rey didn't exist in 2012
[14:01] <StGames> Thats when i got most of them, I found some later clips of her online name-searching her. Shes slightly more well-known after 2015 but still kind of obscure, and a lot of the clips ive got from 2003 and such dont have her name on it but it's the exact same voice, everything.
[14:02] <darthenstein> send me some i swear i wont fap to it this is too fucked up to fap to
[14:03] <SuperNintendoChalmers> LMAO porno ghost is "too fucked up to fap to"
[14:03] <Artistick> imagine something too fucked upt o fap to
[14:03] <StGames> Im fucking serious about this, guys
[14:04] <darthenstein> lol too fucked up to fap to but I mean it this is legit crazy shit
[14:05] <TopJim> How do you even know these earlier videos are from pre-2012?
[14:05] <darthenstein> cuz thats when he downloaded them, shitbeak. he downloaded them starting in 2003
[14:05] <TopJim> Right, because he says he downloaded them starting in 2003, there's no way he could be lying no one ever lies on the intertnet
[14:06] <darthenstein> he could be a bot inside my own computer. all of u could be bots inside my computer i could be typing to no one and getting a derpy ai spitting out dumb bullshit at me pretending to be other people
[14:06] <Artistick> Eat my digital fuck
[14:07] <StGames> the first vids I have of her are really old, clearly taken from like a camcorder or something. I first downloaded them in 2003 so theyre at least that old. the room she's in is exactly the same in every single video, even the Rey videos and she hdoesn't age at all. She's in HD in them I can literally look between 2003 vids and 2016 vids and pause on her face or her ass and see the exact same creases the exact same dimples the exact same veins and pimples and freckles and everything. Even if it isnt teh same girl as the news article, how in the fuck is a girl doing nonstop porn videos from 2003 to 2016 or 2020 and not even gain a single wrinkle?
[14:07] <heroicchoice> aight so is she dead or is she a vampire?
[14:07] <Artistick> lmao same difference
[14:08] <heroicchoice> or a porno ghost?
[14:08] -> BeerOff sets mode: +b :*!*@c-1-454-114-5-24.hdsd1.pa.sub.comcast.net
[14:08] -> StGames was kicked by BeerOff (Dude, fuck off, no one gives a shit about your creepy porn collection)
[14:09] <TopJim> darthenstein why dont you ever shut the fuck up.
[14:09] <darthenstein> good god, relax bitch, u cant just dogpile all the time.
[14:10] <Jade> He's one random guy on the internet talking about his pirated porn collection. No one will ever believe him.
[14:12] <darthenstein> u sloppy bitch, u


You climb up the pebbled path, invaluable jaspers and jades — pearlescent reds and greens — set between dew-wet snake grass and fresh buggy mud. The hill rises steeply upwards to your left, sometimes graced by rocky outcroppings and spotted with… a pretty hillside-type tree, the kind I don't know the name of. But its branches reach out horizontally like arms and its leave spread into big discs like plates and so it looks like a kind of waiter — or a rain-catcher, catching the atmosphere in shallow bowls, dripping itself with dew and moisture. And to your right, everything. A big fucking expanse. The hills are fluffy with fog, like whipped cream on a forest-green cake, verdant foothills that peak into spears similar to the one you're climbing now. Poked heads above a grey-green sea. Hey, grey-green has a kind of thematic relevance here, actually. I should be careful where I use that word.
But you've yet to reach the summit. Your hands press into the maroon railings, hatched like barbells, to keep balance while you ascend. Soon, the climb becomes shallower, and the stairs turn inwards, flanked on both sides by small cobblestone walls. A couple deep breaths, and you're at the top. A porch, on the side of this small mountain peak, all beechwood and Western. I don't know enough about architecture to name it, but it looks like affluency, like upper-middle class America, a far cry from the probably Asian-adjacent visage that had been painted just prior. It looks like you could live here, if it weren't so high up.
In any case, you rub your shoes off on the mat, and look behind you one more time at the landscape which seems to disappear into the beyond more than it succumbs to a horizon. You wipe some beads of sweat off of your forehead, and feel a breeze of chilling air pass through the stones and plate-trees all the way to you and past you and out towards the whatever-it-is, over there, great beyond, et cetera.
And then, you knock.
Knock knock, just like that, or maybe more of a knock knock knock knock knock, because I really don't know anyone who only knocks twice.
And before long, though you have to excuse just a little bit of tardiness while I slip on my shoes and put the finishing touches on my hair, I greet you. With a smile, mind.
"Come in," I say, with a slight touch of apprehension. I notice, and clear my throat to start again. "Come in!"
And once again, you'll excuse my tardiness, because really I hadn't quite fixed up my shoes just yet, and I hadn't quite put on the finishing touches to my hair, because I hadn't settled on a good description, and I'm still fishing for one. I'm short, that much is certain. Shorter than you expected me to be, probably. You're not used to being head-and-shoulders taller than someone, even though you're probably average-to-above-average yourself. (I would give it a fifty-fifty.) And you're still not head-and-shoulders taller than me but the difference of inches (or centimeters) is instantly noticeable, and you weren't expecting it. From this angle, following behind me into the house, you can get a good look at the split in my hair. I have nice hair. Straight, mature, cocoa-brown hair, which, with the trained eye, can look just a little bit orange. Secretly, I used to be a redhead, but I grew out of it. You'd know if I grew a beard or moustache, but I'm clean-shaven, smooth as a baby, because mismatched hair colors aren't my style.
Oh, but now you're wondering about the room. It has two walls that face out towards those misty foothills, each of which bearing just a couple nicely-sized windows, very square and unremarkable in style, which look to have just a little bit of frost on them, which surprises you because it wasn't that cold outside, but it makes sense if you don't think too hard about it. Or if you do, depending on how you think about it. Isn't that annoying?
"Take a seat, do you drink tea?"
You drink tea. Or you're being polite, or you'd just like something warm to hold. But you say "yes."
"Perfect. Right at this table here."
There's a lot of negative space in this room. Maybe half of it is just empty, and all the features are crowded into the corner furthest from the windows. There isn't a light on, so the only illumination is the grey sunlight coming in. It fills the room well enough for now, but the window (pun unintended but acknowledged) for its optimal angle is brief, and it will only be some hours before the room will really be in need of something else.
Oh, but where are my manners? The features. A wooden table, square, grey and bland but functional, enough to comfortably sit two people or uncomfortably sit three to four, with chairs just as unremarkable to boot, maybe even a little cheap, like there's the slightest worry these might give you splinters. You take a seat anyways, because that's what you're here to do (or else you may leave now, if this build-up is too slow and boring for you) and you look towards the tiniest, most worthless kitchen you've ever seen. It looks fit for an apartment, maybe. Certainly not sufficient enough for a house so high up, where you can only imagine groceries are hard to come by. There's a cooler on the floor, and then a stove and a small cutting board to its left. The sink has a couple unwashed bowls in it.
I reach above the stove and open a cupboard, pull down a pot, fill it with water, and then put it on the stove.
"Well, that will take a moment. I guess we can get preliminaries out of the way now, then."
I sit opposite you, and you get a good look at my face. My chin comes to a point, though my cheeks are round enough, and my hair is deceptively poofy for how straight it looks. It gives my head the rough shape of an acorn. And my eyes… they're not afraid to meet yours. Before any more words are spoken, I just take a moment to appreciate your eyes, however they look. Whether they're blue, hazel, unfocused, yellowed, have a mole in them — like a little brown spot among a bunch of green, I Googled it and it's called a nevus or eye freckle — or even if they're rotting inside your head and you almost went blind because of medical workers going on strike in Ontario and your parents' stubborn bullshit refusal to take you elsewhere while you literally couldn't perform due to the stress on your retinas.
Whatever your eyes, I'm taking my time to give them one good long look before I talk, and I thank you that you're letting me. A lot of people are uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact. It's a skill.
I breathe in deep, and close my eyes. My brown eyes. You got a good look at them too, and there wasn't much to see. I breathe again, and again. Just a couple breaths. I urge you to join me. No, really.
Close your eyes, and breathe in and out five times. Count to five while breathing in, count to five while exhaling. That's how slow it should be. And in between your breaths, give a genuine moment of pause, however long you like, though the goal isn't to hold your breath until it hurts or anything. Five of those. In, and out. In, and out. In, and out. In, and out. In, and out.
Did you actually do it? Don't worry, it's not a song, you won't interrupt the flow by pausing. I'll wait until you're finished.

Thank you.
"I've dreamt of a thousand ways for this to start," I say, finally. Some invisible tension leaves the room. I chuckle. "No, really. I've wanted to have this conversation for a long time. This is a really valuable opportunity for me, and I'm really glad you're joining me for it, even if I did have to kind of trick you to get you up here. It's beautiful though, isn't it? I think so."
I have my hands in front of me on the table, and they're playing with each other. My face looks calm, but I betray some nerves. I chuckle again. Polite, not humorous. More a punctuation than anything.
"It really is," I stall. "Anyways. I'm Jasper Waters. Redhead Özdemir. Robin Wilson. And despite all my planning, I really don't know how to start this conversation. I'm an artist, first and foremost. I guess it's good to get that established early. It's really important context for everything I'm going to say. So, I make art. I even want to add 'try to' as a clarifier, but I won't. I do. I make art. It's true. I make no claims to its quality or importance, but I do make it. And it's really hard."
I swallow.
"It's really hard to make art."
The only sounds are our breaths, the stove, and the occasional surge of wind large enough to push a branch against the side of the house or rattle the windows just a little on their sills.
"But, I started making art before it was hard to make. When I started making art, I didn't really know why. It was more like… impulse. And community. I started painting when I was, what… twelve? I drew earlier than that but I only started painting when I was about twelve. It was really captivating for me, and I was just making things and enjoying making them. It was really fun. It was childish. None of it really amounted to anything, except that I could show people my art and they would go 'oh how cool!' and then it would get put up on the wall in my room, or on the wall in my friends' rooms, or in the hallway at school or the fridge in our living room or this and that and the other thing. And I enjoyed it, a lot. Making art. It was, like, my thing. I'd like to think it's still my thing. We'll, uh, get to that."
I swallow, and reach under the collar of my shirt to scratch at my chest.
"Right now, in fact. Um, I haven't been able to. Make art recently, I mean."
…
"It's not for lack of ideas. I have plenty of those. An abundance of those. It's just that, when I put brush to canvas, I freeze up. Well not immediately. I can get some strokes in, that's true. I can get the sketch done, that's happened. But at some point in the process — and early in the process, too — it starts failing on me. Lines don't coalesce into the shapes I want them to. Or, I don't even get to those lines, I've already decided the shapes aren't what I want them to be, that the whole thing was doomed from the start, that I ought to just scrap it and start over. Find another project. Do something else. And I know what the difference is. Between now and then, I mean.
"Back when I was young, back when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen through eighteen even, the art didn't mean anything to me. It was a thing I did. It was a really fun thing I did, that I boasted about, that I owned, sure, yes. It was a big thing. I'm not denying that. But it didn't mean anything, the way it means something now. What it meant then was a fun hobby. And then, I dunno. I mean I do. I do know. My worldview expanded. And now I'm twenty. And fun hobbies don't exist anymore. Not in the way they used to."
The pot boiled — you thought I'd forgotten, but I hadn't. It's curious I don't have a kettle, but a pot does seem to work just fine. I fish out two mugs, and both have little faded printed collages on them. Collages of two little kids. A little redhead brat and another, rounder-faced, wavy-haired boy. It's a lot of pictures you can't quite make out in this poor light, but after I pour water and a ginger teabag into your mug and hand it to you, the image you can make out most is that of the redhead laughing.
He's in the middle of the snow, and he's wearing a coat that at least doubles his size, he's so small. Coat, snow boots, some amazingly puffy pants, and his face is red, his eyes are closed, his mouth guffawing. It looks like he's just crying with laughter. Standing there.
"See, now things matter to me, and that's completely different. Some things mattered to me before, but, less things. Well that's not true. Hang on, let me think on this statement for a second."
In, and out.
"Things mattered… on a different scale. On the scale of here-and-now. I was extremely anxious to be a virgin in high school. I was very sensitive to my social standing and very prideful in what I could show off (like my art). But I wasn't so considerate about my impact on people. And then I was, and then, after that, I started being more… considerate, about my impact on the world. Sort of. That starts approaching the difference, the key issue between my past self and my present self. The start of the tension. Because when I was first making art, I was making it to be cool. And now when I make art, I make it because I want to get something across. And really, very recently, I've started wanting — needing — it to mean something. Really mean something. And that's what I've been coming up against. This awful pressure. This sudden realization… that everything you make teaches people. That you can never make something that's just 'cool.' That everything sends a message. And sometimes I wish I hadn't realized, because if you don't know, then you're innocent. It's once you know that you're responsible. For what you are saying, for what you tell people."
I sip my tea, and wince just a little. I shake my hand at my throat. "Hot," I say, and chuckle. "Hot."
I place the mug down, and my hands start fiddling with each other again.
"And that's scary. It's scary! It's scary to have something become suddenly important like that. Because now, all of a sudden, if I do it wrong, if I do it poorly, it's unbearable."
…
"Before, when things were 'cool,' it didn't matter if they were bad. If they were bad, that just meant I'd gotten more practice at making things cool. I'd figured out whether or not this one method, this angle of attack, this color palette, was cool. It didn't mean anything to try at it. It was just like, 'I have some time, let me bang something out.' It was fun, it was freeing. And, fuck, if I were to stroke my own dick for a second, I think I got, like, kind of good at it. Good on an amateur scale, not a professional one. But good. Really, actually good. The noticeable kind. But once shit means things, it's like, fuck, dude. It's impossible. If I fail, I feel it now. And, this. One second."
In, and out. In, and then out.

I take a sip of my tea, now. It's at a good temperature. And it tastes really good, too. I suggest you do the same. (You can get up to make tea, too. I'll be right here.)
"Okay, let's… start, from a different point. It will loop back around, I swear. I think. I struggle, with ego. 'Oh, wow, I hadn't noticed.' Yeah, a real shocker I know. My world feels like my world. It feels like I may not be the center of the universe, but I'm the center of my universe. Of everything that happens to me, even. I feel… a lot of self-importance, and, that's something I've been trying to work on, because it stops me from doing things. From connecting to people, for one thing. Um, this is going… shit, I don't know exactly where this is going. One second."
In, and out.
"I'm trying to arrive at some way to say, that, I'm not very important, and things I make will have meaning whether I intend them to have meaning or not. I don't have to force meaning onto them. I should be able to see that. But it's hard, it's really hard. It's hard not to care. I don't even know if I don't want to care. I think I'd rather care about the things I make, like really care a lot, but that seems to come in between me and actually making them. It's like… as soon as painting stops being a thing I do, and starts being me, then every time I'm bad at painting, I'm bad at being me. I become a poor, shitty version of Robin Wilson. And the thing is, I just need to weather being a shitty version of myself until I can reach the future, good, appreciatively talented and successful version of myself, which will exist but under the one condition that I can make it through the shitty version of myself I am right now. But there's so much psychological resistance, so much pushback, there's so much negative reinforcement for trying.
"And this whole time, I've just been trying to figure out why. Why am I like this? And furthermore: does anyone care?"
…
"So I've had all these paintings, these unfinished sketches and outlines and… they've stopped rewarding me to work on. They've become painful. And I wish I was obfuscating some big, emotional truth that reveals to you why that is. I wish I had some 'I was emotionally abused by a teacher who told me I'd never make it' type story. Some really easy explanation for why I'm like this. Why being me is always shitty and why it's so much easier to live in an achievement-less existence. Why I've been sitting in my own emotional filth for two years, just going to work and coming back home and telling myself, 'I'm an artist,' and not doing any of it. Not being me. Because being me hurts, genuinely. Just sitting with myself. I'd even say I like myself generally. But existing as this proto-version of something that could be good is awful. And it makes me feel like nothing's happening. Because nothing's happening. Because I won't do things. Because the thought of doing something and failing sucks. It's easier to detach and go through routine.
"Wake up, brush teeth, play a video game, go to work, come home, play a video game, sleep, and, on the weekends, play more video games but with friends and maybe read a book in there. Search for nothing, want for nothing, live with parents, fear the fires, move nowhere, be no one. One moment, I have to breathe."
In, out. In, out. In, and out.

"I'm not trying to be obtuse, by the way. Replace 'paint' with 'write,' and apply it also to songwriting. That's where Jasper is. And Jasper is where I am. That's what I mean, really. Robin, Faeowynn, Anders, Tim, Alice, but more than just the Wilson family — Rachael, Robert, Brainy, 3T, Tongue, Aggie, JaJa. We're all just parts, just representations, of one greater whole. Jasper. DarkStuff. And there's… some truth, there. You know? Some solution to this ego, if I can just grab a hold of it. Because Jasper's in exactly the same boat. We all like to think we're these individuals with individual goals and accomplishments and these unique thoughts, and, really, we're all representations, all reflections. I can't be anything less than a reflection of DarkStuff's brain, because my thoughts must first travel through the neural pathways of my author. Whatever I am meant to be — angry, disturbed, confused, happy, an asshole, a saint, an abused child — I am always Jasper's version of that thing. Well, Jasper's the same way. You're the same way.
"But it's not a neural network. It's a cultural, societal network. You are some reflection of everyone you've ever met and every message you've ever digested — whether accepted or rejected, mind you. And that's exactly what started me down this path, the thing that clogged this pipe, once I realized that everything I put out there becomes one of these messages, one of these digestibles. That people are information sponges and you teach them. Yes, you."
You do.
"And that kind of pressure is paralyzing. But, it's not like Jasper isn't also Liam, Aiden. Miranda. Ari. Patrick, Chris. Mom or Dad. I, myself, am a collage of messages. Of inheritances. Of.. nouns. People, places, things. We're all other things. You're not just you, you're the intersection of everyone and everything around you. The thing is, I already felt small, but, I felt small on the cosmic scale. I felt like an ant in comparison to a bigass thing I couldn't control. I still feel small that way. But what I lacked was… feeling small, on the human scale. Yes, I was an ant, but I was still an ant. This one, right here. This little individual ant. But, really, I'm some ant. One of these, in this area. And I'm just an ant in this generation of ants, and I can't think that whatever this anthill looks like now is what it's looked like since the dawn of ants or will look like at the end of ants. Do you… get that? Do you feel me on this?"
…
"Whatever it is, it makes painting just a little less scary. Even just in the course of speaking this out, I've felt, like, calmed. Reassured. Placated. Like, even if I work a pizza delivery job my whole life — and please, please let that not be the case — that's alright. I tried. And I don't have to achieve that possible, perfect, future me in this lifetime, because it's not all up to me. I'm just a character. And not all of our arcs are very good, if I'm to be straight about it. There will be other characters that explore these themes, and they might be better at it. And they'll come after me. And they've come before me. In a thousand million incarnations with a thousand million rhyming names.
"And that's not just a helpful perspective, it's… comforting. It feels warm. It feels like a blanket, and… it feels like… an easier sense of purpose. It's okay if I'm a failed musician. There are other musicians. It's okay if not everything I write is good. There's good writing in the world. And, ultimately, the likelihood that I alone change the culture or send the right message is actually zero because those are less individualistic goals than they might look. Nothing happens by one person. I need to lose myself to the everything. I need to lose a bit of myself to the whole of it. And then maybe I can just… I dunno. Paint a fucking picture for once. And someone can look at it, and ask what it's about. And I can shrug, and say:"

I don't know. But isn't it cool?