Tale title is from "Fire and Rain" by James Taylor. The content is me working through some things. Apologies.

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F.A.Q.

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WARNING:
THIS TALE'S CONTENT INCLUDES SELF-HARM.

The wind was the weird part. He'd fallen before but never from this high. The wind was strong up here, but he felt at peace anyway. But that moment ended as quickly as it had begun. Everything suddenly cut to black.
A slight hum from the radiators along the walls began abruptly. The bright glare of the overhead light illuminated the table between the two men at the center of the otherwise dark room. The air was stale, with a soft acrid scent.
One of the two, Mr. Leeland, wore a tweed suit with a checkered bow-tie. Mr. Leeland carefully placed his notebook and pen on the table in front of him, taking an additional moment to straighten them before opening his notebook. He looked over his glasses at the man across the table and picked up his pen.
The other man wore a fairly ostentatious piece of silver and ruby jewelry around his neck. He looked like he was maybe 40 or 50 years old and slightly overweight. Dr. Shaw closed his eyes and was suddenly somewhere else. The top of the building was pleasant and comforting and cool and… he opened his eyes. There was no longer any wind. No comfort. Just a disapproving stare from the man across the table.
Mr. Leeland raised his pen and pointed it at Dr. Shaw. "We've needed to have a conversation for a long time, Shaw."
Dr. Shaw curled his lip into a half-smile and nodded. "Ok," he said.
Mr. Leeland wrote something quickly into his notepad. "Let's talk about your first attempt."

The problem, of course, was time. He'd been able to keep himself busy. Keep his mind on other things. Forget the problems. But here he was, alone in his apartment, the power out. The world feeling like it was closing in on him. And worst of all, alone with his own thoughts.
He was technically on vacation. If he'd been able to go to work, maybe things would've gone differently. Maybe he'd be distracted just long enough to avoid what happened next. Which, by the way, was patently ridiculous.
No one ever tells you about the logistics of trying it with a shotgun. A pistol is a simpler proposition. Some pump-action shotguns are pretty easy to manage. But this was a long single barreled twelve gauge. Shaw couldn't get his head around the incongruity between how simple he thought it'd be to how complex it was.
There were a lot of thoughts going through his head. The sound would be unmistakable. Someone would probably find him pretty quickly. The mess he'd make on the wall behind him would be considerable. Should he do it in a bathtub instead? But then wouldn't that just destroy a wall or the tub itself and cause the same problem?
Maybe no one would find him until his vacation was over. Someone at work would ask "Hey, have you seen Shaw today?" and no one would think anything of it until a few more days passed and he didn't pick up the phone. Then they'd send someone. Then they'd find him and then…
But he couldn't fucking figure it. His arms just weren't quite long enough to reach the trigger, no matter how far he shoved the barrel down his throat. He unloaded the shotgun and took off his shoes.
He cocked it, placed the barrel in his mouth and tried to pull the trigger with his toe. Click. It would work. But how was he gonna look afterwards? Did it matter?
He decided there was no way to avoid a mess and just sat on his couch. He loaded the shotgun. He got into an awkward position. Everything cut to black.

"Is it fair to call them attempts?" Dr. Shaw asked with a bit of mischief in his eye.
Mr. Leeland rolled his eyes. "How would you describe them?" he asked.
"Well," Shaw said. "the body dies but I don't, so I dunno."
"As much as I enjoy a good deflection, let's stay on topic. That wasn't the first time."
Dr. Shaw nodded, and then put his head down on the table. "Fine. The first time then."

Dr. Shaw wasn't sobbing. The gin bottle in front of him was half empty, and the pill bottle was full. He picked the smaller bottle up in his hand and flipped it end over end. It was tiny in his new hands but still familiar somehow. There was a comfort in seeing his name there on the prescription, even if this body didn't need them. He was younger now. His knee was uninjured. His life was over.
He'd seen the body. The funeral they'd held this morning was small and simple. A few of his friends were there, a few of his friends weren't. Suzanne was there. She was sobbing. She needed to pace herself. He fought the urge to comfort her at the time. He fought the urge to raise himself up from this low place and find her right now. He had to let his wife go. It was kinder.
She might even manage move on in a few months. Maybe start dating again. And then he'd truly have the last vestiges of his life stripped away. Truly lose himself.
He took another swig from the bottle. He cracked open the smaller bottle and poured the pills down his throat. Then he drank some more gin to wash down the pain. The pills stuck to the insides of his mouth, gagging him on the way down. He forced himself through it and kept the gin handy in case anything tried to come back up.
He scrolled through the pictures on his phone and finally let himself go. He sobbed when he got to the wedding pictures. He got sick to his stomach when he got to the honeymoon. He was staring at a picture of her when everything just kind of faded.

"You know what your problem is Shaw?" Leeland said as he turned a page in his notebook.
Shaw shrugged. "I never get what I want?"
"No. You think that necklace is the only thing tethering you to the world."
"If you're here to feed me some bullshit about the power of friendship then…"
"Fuck off." Leeland cut in. "What do you think happens to the folk you work with?"
Shaw blinked. "What?"
"It's not about you. You get it into your head that the only person that cares is you. But you touch a dozen lives a day. What do they think?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know." Leeland laughed. "Fine. Then let's talk about the first time then. The real first time."

Elias Shaw smiled. Three floors up and everything felt so simple. Summer was coming. His high-school graduation was just a couple months away. It was simple, right? Just take a step forward and fall into nothing. No one left to care. No one left at all. He took a half step, his foot hanging over the edge.
Then he fell forward.
The wind was the weird part. He'd fallen before but never from this high. The wind was strong up here, but he felt at peace anyway.
He woke up on the pavement surrounded by the people who cared about him. Paramedics. His mother. His girlfriend? How'd Suzanne get here? His left leg felt numb. He groggily looked down and saw the bone sticking out of the skin. He passed out again.
He woke up to her crying in the corner of his hospital room. Sobbing really. She never knew how to pace herself when it came to tears.
He looked around. Everything that bothered him was softer somehow. The lights in the room were brighter. The world was different.
But nothing had really changed. He just couldn't see it from where he was before.

You are not alone. If you're having thoughts of self-harm, please call the suicide prevention hotline. It's completely confidential, and available to all.
Talk to someone:
1-800-273-8255


« Crossroads | Idea - Ideal - Ideology | Back to The Coldest War Hub »

The gunshots are fewer, oddly distant. Inside the tower he is underwater.
The American, with the camera, has a head-start. The elevator lights stop at the fourth floor. James runs for the stairs.
By the third flight his head is swimming. Something in the bonfire smoke, the man said. What man? James can't focus.
The fourth floor is open, partition walls not yet installed. Wires and tubing dangle from the ceiling. A silhouette pushes at the window. Holding a gun.
James yelps. The American turns the gun on James, growling. He crouches, and starts to run, when it happens.
Sensation drops away, subsumed in an overwhelming vision. A monumental work of art, sequential canvases, larger and larger, arranged as a tunnel. Lurid pinks, cut with black ribbons. He can hear the screeching of violins, part of the installation.
Then he is back in the tower. James blinks, trying to regain equilibrium. The American is slumped against a wall, breathing heavily.
For a moment, they lock eyes. Between them, an abandoned radio spits a volley of jazz drumming. The American flinches, then raises the pistol again. James ducks back into the stairwell.
Upwards makes no sense, yet up he goes. His pulse pounds in his ears. James hears the agent crash through the door below.
"Why are you running?" calls the American. "You came for the camera, so come get it. You'll get a bullet either which way."
James is cold sweat and searing lungs. The floors he passes barely register.
He tries to concentrate, to think logically. The steps echoing from below are deliberate, but a composed hunter does not shout threats. In any case, James is not a salient target. The American is off-kilter, thrown by Belen's arrival, by the tower itself. James needs to take advantage.
The next time, when knowledge hits him, it is less overpowering. With sudden comprehension, he receives an entire religious faith all at once. James understands the path of the chosen people, drawn from banality into a paradise of perfect pain. An eternity of suffering as an escape from life without meaning. The hope that agony will provoke a greater consciousness, or a communion with such a consciousness. As the feeling passes, James wonders. This is not a creed he has ever heard of.
At the fifteenth floor he slows, breathing heavily. Far below, he sees a shape he recognises - the camera! At the last second he jerks back. The stairwell flashes white.
"You idiot!" yells James. "You'll bring down the building." The idea of concrete cannot be load-bearing.
Below, the agent yells something back. He is too far to hear clearly. James pauses, then the gun booms. A bullet fizzes up the stairwell.
James has a revelation of eternity, the circle of reincarnation and the debt owed by predator to prey. He ignores it, urging himself to run again. His mouth is parched, and his legs burn. Upwards still, with no more reason than to keep the American here. The thought comes of its own accord: keep him on Foundation turf. He can't stop this man by thinking like a soldier or a spy.
On the eighteenth floor, James stops in shock. There is another man here. Or almost here: at the edges, in peripheral vision, he seems insubstantial. He is familiar, but James can't place him. Looking up at his tanned face, James sees wisdom and kindness. The man smiles warmly, and recognition hits.
"Varela?" James gapes, blinking.
The smile grows. "Mister Bradshaw, good to see you."
"But how can - ?" And then James understands: about this place, about the camera, and Varela connecting them.
"Yes," replies Varela to James' reaction. "I had not expected it. This place is important - that is why we built the tower here. But it is more than I realised; it holds pure ideas of many kinds. We guessed that were capturing the ideas lost before they were thought. I see now that this place also contains some ideas that once were real."
James is about to ask one of his hundreds of questions, but Varela looks up sharply. "We have no time to discuss. The American is coming."
James' stomach twists in familiar panic. There is another feeling too, as if something in the tower watches him.
"How do you know?" he asks.
"When it happened, and I became up here, I could feel everything in the tower, all at once. You, him, are easier to feel. Heavier." The older man glances anxiously over James' shoulder. "You must not let him reveal this place."
"I can't fight him," says James. "But with you - perhaps we can think like the Foundation."
The sense of being observed is palpable. It bristles. James shivers.
"He is on the floor below," urges Varela. "We must be quick."
James' idea does not come from the tower. It is his own.
"You said you can feel everything here, yes? All the ideas? Can you find something for me?"
Varela looks defeated. "There are dangerous ideas, certainly, but to find one thought in all of this? It would take too long. I have only been here minutes, and there is so much."
Undaunted, James speaks louder, to an unseen audience. "Who could do it, if not you? The stories cannot be wrong. You are Agustin Varela. A leader of the people. A man SIDE wants dead. You can find the idea that will stop this man from killing more people."
The air around them buzzes. James feels hesitation. Suspicion.
He presses on. "Do you know how I got here? On a motorcycle - a Harley-Davidson UL 1947. It was given to me by a man named Miguel Lopez. He gave me his son's prize possession because of you. Because he believed in you, and he knew I wanted to help you."
The tension pulls drum-tight, then abruptly slackens. Varela is about to speak, but stops. James turns.
The American strides up the stairs towards them, gun trained. Seeing Varela, he stops, confused.
"I thought I killed you already."
With a crack, a bullet passes through Varela, ricocheting from the wall. James ducks.
The American laughs. "Well of all the … that's what this place is! That's why I keep having brainwaves that aren't mine."
James rises slowly. The American stares.
"You didn't know before, did you, son? You were just running, and once again you led me somewhere wonderful. All these unformed thoughts. Think of the possibilities." His eyes are lost in reverie, but the gun is fixed on James.
Varela says, "This place is where possibilities die. It is a graveyard for ideas."
The agent looks at the researcher like he has forgotten he was there. "That's where you're wrong. This is a place full of perfect things. It's a garden of ideas. And we can harvest them, and put them to use."
James needs two things. More time, and distraction. The American must not reach the logical conclusion.
"You heard - you heard the teacher. This is Foundation property. It is not for you." James sounds bolder than he feels.
"Maybe you didn't notice, but we took all your goddamn property." The American waves the camera at James. "The agency will see the potential of this building, of the ideas here, just like the Foundation. They're the same damn outfit, at the end of the day."
"They are nothing the same," says Varela.
"Why don't you ask your colleague about that? You and me, son, we both seen what this camera does. We both used it."
The air thickens once more. James can hear his blood in his ears. "I only used it so we could contain the anomaly. So it need never be used again. You used it to kill innocent men."
"And women and children - and will again, if necessary." The American is almost shouting.
Varela says nothing. James must do this alone. He takes a step forward. The stairwell light flickers.
"How can you look at this building, this impossible power, and see only a weapon?"
"What's the point in having power if you just lock it up?" yells the American, red-faced.
"Better locked up than used irrationally," James says.
"You think this is irrational?" The American's gun arm drops with his exasperation. "I mean, shit, maybe we ain't the same. All my actions serve a greater purpose. I believe in the righteousness of my cause, in its purity. You don't believe in anything. You don't even believe in yourself!"
Before James can do anything, the black hole of the gun muzzle aims at his chest again. The American's hand tenses. The air sizzles.
James gazes into the American's eyes. He speaks slowly. "I don't believe that the world is the dominion of any one ideology. I don't believe that power is the only thing worth seeking."
Heat seeps slowly into James' voice, ringing in the heart of the tower. "I don't believe in purity, or perfection. The search for understanding is flawed, doomed to fail, but I believe in it. And I believe in my fellow searchers; I believe in us working together to keep the world safe. I believe in protection!"
"Who will protect you, then?" the American snarls.
"From you? I think they might."
The American follows James' gaze. A swirling shadow has risen behind him: multitudes are contained in it. Faces coalesce, arms stretch out and dissipate. Hundreds of men, women, young and old, emerge and fade in its roiling surface. A thousand ideas in a single form. Unmade things, remembering their former reality. Remembering who unmade them. All of the eyes staring, all of the hands reaching, toward the American.
He screams. Lunging, the shadow wraps the American in arms of smoke. The gun barks. Neither hands nor bullet touch their targets. An idea cannot wound or be wounded.
The American is unharmed. His shout turns to growling laughter. Then a figure appears, taking form at the edge of the flowing shape. A young man. Perhaps a student? He looks James in the eye. The American is about to speak. The young man leans forward, and whispers in the American's ear.
The American's head tips backward. His knees buckle. James can see blood leak from his nose. His body crashes to the floor, the camera beneath it.
Shadow subsumes the idea of a young man. The last coiling remnants of the disappeared ones watch, and then evaporate.
All is still.
Finally, James pulls his eyes from the body. There is a man here with him. A man he knows - yes, a researcher from the Foundation. He observes James with kindness.
"There is not much time," the researcher says. "But there is only a little more to discuss. What will you do with the camera?"
James considers. "I was sent to recover it."
"Were you?" The researcher's smile is wry.
"Yes, I was told - " Suddenly it is clear. "I was told to recover it, but that's not why the Foundation sent me. They sent me to help one of their own. A fellow searcher."
Something feels misplaced. He can see the outline of the stairwell through the man's torso. James remembers a fire, and a flash. He feels a rush of shame.
"I'm sorry. I failed."
The grin never wavers. "No. You have only failed if your journey ends now. Not if you begin another."
"But what will happen to you?" asks James.
"Who I am - who I was - may be lost. But the stories will survive. In the end, our stories are all we leave behind." The man still smiles. James can no longer tell the colour of his eyes. "Stay here. Write your own story."
Taken aback, James sputters, "How? I can't lead these people."
"They already have a leader. What they need is a navigator. Someone to help them chart the unknown waters of this tower. Join their voyage, James. Set them the right course." This man knows him; James is not sure how.
"But - "
"What is there for you, back in America? The Foundation is needed here, now. Where do you belong?" The man is familiar, but only faintly.
Silent for a long time, finally, slowly, James nods. The figure with him nods back. James can't see its face.
There is the shape of a person. There is a silhouette. A shadow. A blur.
James is alone.
Later, James descends. He holds a broken camera. It is dawn, the sky lightening to straw yellow above the trees. The crossroads is quiet. Belén sits with Aurelio, Jacinta, some of the others. James watches from the base of the tower, at the threshold.
And then, he sets out.


I can't stand this world.
It's hopelessly arrogant, and hopelessly immature, and being aware of that makes me hate how I feel even more, but I can't stand the world I live in one bit.
Ever since I was a child, I was drawn to escapism, drawn to fiction. It wasn't that my circumstances were particularly bad or anything; I was just one of those kids that liked reading. Just an innocent little kid, sitting down and reading fun fantastic out of this world adventures.
It was that which irrecoverably broke me.
How could I love the normal after seeing the abnormal? How could I accept this reality after seeing what it wasn't and never could be? How could I be content with a world revealed as so boring in comparison to others?
Youthful egocentrism at its finest of course, wanting to be special, wanting to believe you're the protagonist of your own story. I couldn't bear it, just being a normal nameless person among many, trapped in a suffocating mass. I wanted to be special. I wanted to be so badly.
But I never got past it as most people do.
As I grew up I delved even deeper, sought even further, turned my eyes away from reality even more. I searched for the magic and the fantasy and the supernatural that had enthralled me so in this world. I was desperate, still am desperate, to believe that there's more to this world than meets my eye. I looked into cryptids, hauntings, the paranormal, conspiracy theories, anything and everything.
Funny isn't it, how virtually all of that has fizzled away in a world where so many people now have a video camera on hand at near all times? No more cryptid pictures, no more grainy pictures of ghosts, no more sightings of anything now that it's easier than ever to find. Conspiracy theories invariably mired in error and bigotry, and any and all rituals or potions doing not a single damn thing.
The world we see is the world we see, and there isn't anything else.
That's what I'm afraid of the most, and that shouldn't matter.
It's a world with unspeakable and profound beauty, stunning sunsets, gorgeous vistas, life dwelling in the depths beyond our imagination, the sheer simple wonder of love and friendship and daily existence. There's always more to see and to learn and to discover.
And yet, I can't stand it one bit.
Magic isn't real. Monsters aren't real. Fantasy isn't real.
I am normal. I will always be normal. An unremarkable person that will live, die, and be forgotten just like so many others.
I can't bear it.
There are those who still believe, even if only because they're afraid. You've got folks like those on Parawatch, sharing stories of the abnormal not with irony but with conviction. I lurked there for a time, reading, wanting to believe. But not a single member has found something substantive.
False hope is even more painful than true despair.
So many painful possibilities exist. That I can't see the supernatural because of the doubts I can't dispel. That it exists in all its glory, but I am condemned to never bear witness to it. That I have seen it, but been made to forget.
And, of course, that it is real, and I will find it, but because I truly am just a pitifully small unremarkable human being, all that will happen is a swift death.
Because that's just how reality is.
I am not a main character, not a hero or a villain. I am not a side character. I'm not so much as someone the protagonists of this world ever see. I live and die off screen, not even appearing in the background.
I want to see it though, even if I die. To know for a single moment that there is more to reality, that we don't all conform to this fucking normalcy, that there is something beyond what man sees, what the laws of physics and nature say, that there are aberrations and abominations and anomalies without a care for how the world is supposed to be. To know there is something more, further, out there.
I want to see it.
I want to see it.
I want to see it.
But more than anything, I fear that there's nothing to see.


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Doctor Cornelius Wondertainment checked over the design documents one last time. His lips curled up in a smile as he worked over every detail of his new toy. The investors had said it may be his biggest seller yet and revolutionize their product line. Better yet, if he started now he'd be done in time for the Christmas rush! It truly was a shame it would never reach mass market. The toymaker looked out his window with a serene smile on his face as thick smoke appeared on Wonderworld's horizon and far off fires stained the sky scarlet.
"Well…" The Simple Toymaker said, speaking to no one in particular as he was alone in his office. "I suppose I'll just go out with a bang."

Cornelius helped load the last heavy crate into the last truck in the last warehouse in Wonderworld. The truck's back door closed and it pulled away, driving through a glittering Way that shut behind it in a flash of blue light. A loud bang rang out from somewhere far away and the lights of the recently emptied building flickered. Cornelius sighed and turned around. Feeling nostalgic, he looked around the massive warehouse for a few moments before walking outside into the gloom of red, smoke-filled skies
Wonderworld was as colorful and whimsical as ever, despite the doom awaiting it in mere hours. The buildings came in so many gravity-defying varieties that a normal man would have struggled to simply navigate the purple sidewalk, though Cornelius had no trouble making his way through. The ground shook as something massive approached on the horizon and a particularly fragile glass building shattered into a trillion shards that fell to the ground in a heap. Cornelius walked past the wreckage, up to a woman in a cyan business suit standing next to an abandoned, bird-house shaped office building. She was the last person in the city, other than the Toymaker himself.
"Is the vest ready?" Cornelius asked.
"Yep! It's on your desk." The woman tried to sound cheerful but didn't seem to be able to pull it off.
"Excellent, that's exactly what I wanted to hear! You're promoted and getting a raise." Another crash came and the ground shook under their feat. "Two raises!" Cornelius tapped an app on his phone and a Way leading to a grassy field with a bustling modern city on the horizon opened next to the woman. She hesitated.
"You… Sure you can't come, sir?" She asked him. Cornelius shook his head.
"No, no, no. I'm sorry. You see Mr. Khahrahk is here for me and me alone, so only I can lure him out of hiding. We may never get another opportunity like this. Not to mention I promised Isabel the company and since I don't actually age this is the only way she'll ever get her hands on it. And besides," Cornelius gave a wide smile "I always wanted to go out with a bang." The woman nodded but still seemed reluctant to leave.
"Well… you're the CEO so what you say goes. But I honestly don't know how we'll do this without you." Cornelius laughed.
"Isabel has all my good traits and none of my bad ones." He explained. "She'll do fine. And besides, every company faces hardships from time to time whether they're recessions, poor business decisions or assaults from the personification of suffering and violence. Business is business, you adapt or you die."
"I guess…"
"Please go, this will be easier if I know everyone else made it out and I don't know how much longer the Ways will be stable." She stepped through the portal which closed behind her, leaving Cornelius alone under a red sky. Far, far above him dark shapes appeared, just faintly visible behind Wonderworld's artificial moon.

Cornelius walked down a pastel-colored street as the world shook around him. The General Beeps were doing a good job holding the line against the Scarlet Horde, but even they had their limits. Cornelius was wearing a bulky violet overcoat along with his famous top hat. Plaster rained down on him as his cane clicked on the sidewalk. He waved hello and called out greetings to his friends who lived there. They all were dead or had fled, but Cornelius still wanted to do it, for old time's sake. He walked under a pink arch and down some fractured stairs, as the tremors got closer. He stepped past an alley with a deactivated street light, then saw the gates of Wonderworld and the fires burning all around it. And beyond that, he glimpsed the twisted, inhuman Scarlet Horde stretching across the horizon.
"Lower the shield, and have my General Beeps evacuate if they're still able." Cornelius whispered into his cell phone. There was a mechanical noise as the shield went down, allowing Cornelius to walk out into the recently created wasteland. The smell of fire and burnt electronics hit him as soon as he stepped out of the borders of Wonderworld. Ash fell on him coating him in a thin layer of grey and a wave of brutal heat struck him. Cornelius took a deep breath. Then he walked forward with a smile on his face, his cane tapping away on the broken stones.
When the Horde saw the shield break, they ran or flew or slithered or shambled faster, rushing forward in a frenzied mob of nightmares. They braced themselves expecting a final massive counterattack of everything in Wonderworld's arsenal, or at least Cornelius piloting a giant death robot or at least something. Because of this, great was their surprise when instead they simply saw Dr. Wondertainment himself practically skipping down the remains of a road next to a mostly melted "Welcome To Wonderworld" sign and waving hello. The horde came to a sudden stop, practically tripping over each other in confusion as Cornelius walked right into the midst of them. He found himself surrounded on all sides by tentacles, claws, burning red eyes, and worse as he stepped confidently into the midst of the Horde. Some nightmares struck at him but were repelled by his personal shield. Most just stared in confusion.
"Hello, good sir." Cornelius said shaking the thorned tentacle of one monster.
"You as well, fine miss." He said as he stepped around a mobile mass of human body parts. He continued walking deeper into hell, and the monstrous servants of the Scarlet King backed up in confusion. Speaking of which…
"Hey, did any of you see the King?" Cornelius yelled out, trying to make himself heard over the gibbering coming from the Horde. "Where's the Scarlet King?" Cornelius scanned the crowd but didn't see him.
"Is he here? Can someone send for him? We have some things we must discuss before he kills me and all that unpleasantness." Nothing spoke, he did hear some growls though.
"Did you hear me? I need to see the king." Cornelius felt a sickness creep over him. The sky turned redder, the earth shook and the small amount of unburnt foilage around Wonderworld yellowed and died as the Scarlet King appeared hovering over the Horde. He wasn't as big as Cornelius had expected, being only seven feet tall. He had the same bipedal body shape as a human but the similarities ended there. His skin was the black color of a burnt corpse, his hands were gnarled claws, he was anorexically thin and two great antlers swept behind his head. He had no facial features other than many, many glowing eyes and he wore a blood-red military uniform the front of which was covered in medals and rank markers. Red light glowed around him, which was so bright several nightmares were near blinded and shied away raising their arms or tentacles to block it.
"Cornelius?" The Scarlet King said, while landing on the broken ground in front of the toymaker.
"Yes, that is me! Good to see you again, old friend." Cornelius's left hand was clutched in a fist. The Scarlet King tried to read his mind but was rebuffed by his psychic defenses.
"… What is this? You know that I'm here to kill you." The Scarlet King asked. The various nightmares surrounding them drew slightly closer.
"Oh, it's fine, my dear. What's a little murder between close friends? I just wanted to congratulate you." Cornelius turned around and swept his arm out at the Horde. "I'm impressed how far you've come from such humble beginnings. I should have known that you'd put me out of business one day." Cornelius laughed. The Scarlet King took a confused step towards him but Cornelius jumped back bumping into a slug-like horror then jumped another direction.
"I guess there's nothing left to say except job well done!" Cornelius gave a quick bow at the waist while wiping slime off his coat with the back of his hand. "I am perfectly fine with this outcome. I lived the life I always wanted and have a daughter who can carry the torch when I'm gone! What more could a man-shaped anomalous capitalistic entity ask for?"
"What are you saying, Cornelius?" The Scarlet King stared at him. "Even you can't stop what's coming." He pointed a finger up towards the sky. The dark shapes above them were getting closer, having passed the orbit of the moon. "Unless…"
"Now, having lived my dream, I am well prepared to retire, except that actually I still have one wish for my life that I have never been able to complete. Until now." The Scarlet King raised his hand and dark objects as vast as skyscrapers, mountains, planets drew nearer, slowly spiraling down towards Wonderworld.
"When I was a child I told my father I had two dreams: to be CEO of a morally ambiguous capitalist construct…" Cornelius's life flashed before his eyes. At least he assumed it was his life. Even he didn't know where he was actually from anymore, given how often the Horror Writers changed everything about him. The Scarlet King noticed a small motion as Cornelius moved his thumb revealing a detonator in his hand. From the burning black throat of The Scarlet King that had swallowed the souls of the greatest heroes in the worlds came two words that shook earth and heaven alike, and could have killed normal men.
"Oh shit."
"… And to go out with a bang." The Scarlet King reached for the toymaker's throat, but Cornelius slammed the button on his detonator triggering the thirteen modified Little Big Banger Pocket Editions sewn into his vest. The Scarlet King, who was suddenly struck by the incredibly powerful desire to be literally anywhere else in the multiverse, disappeared just as the space around Cornelius collapsed into a singularity. Immense horrors as vast as worlds swooped down only to be vaporized by the edge of a newly birthed universe. Wonderworld, Cornelius and the Horde alike were obliterated near instantly as the new universe materialized then inflated to infinity. In 800 million years, sapient life would evolve in the new young galaxies. None of them would ever know Dr. Wondertainment's name.

In the Abyss outside the multiverse, the Scarlet King floated and observed the birth of a new reality. He watched the process for some time before turning to leave in disinterest. The loss of the Horde was unfortunate but survivable, and he had other things to deal with at the time. Now that Cornelius was dead, he knew his next step. He raised his hand, and a sickly glowing Way out of the Abyss opened before him. The Scarlet King stepped through in search of Isabel, and the Way slammed closed behind.


June 8th, 2018
Dear Journal,
Part of the new management's plan for this summer camp is that we have to write a weekly journal — but no one else has to read it, and that's the greatest fucking news I've fucking heard all fucking day. They won't fucking know I'm saying FUCK all the fucking time in it. (And, this is already getting silly. Was that their plan all along? Make rebelliousness seem boring? …fuck.)
Anyway! I'm in the AP language arts classes back home, so I might as well make use of my time here and actually write something coherent (new favorite word!) about what's going on here at Elijah's Heart Bible Camp.
First things first — my name is Jacquan Dalton, age 12. I like running track, saying FUCK, and writing poetry and stuff. I live in Athens Ohio. My mom and dad are big into Jesus and stuff so they put me here in this stupid camp for the summer instead of letting me look at internet porn. (Brought my laptop. I AM UNSTOPPABLE!)
But it's been three days since I've been here, and there hasn't really been anything Jesusy. Some kinda "under new management" bullshit — instead of the Pentecostal preacher that was supposed to be the boss around here, we get this long haired Johnny Depp looking guy named Mr. Geoff Lundgren. (am I spelling that right?) Keeps saying we should just call him "Mr. Geoff." He says he bought out the camp to use "an ingenious new method of immersing children in the true meaning of the Gospel." (copied that off the new brochure)
I mean, not that I'm complaining or nothing — he daily prayers we were supposed to do are all "just do good, and God will see it." So mainly we just F U C K around (yep, getting boring) and play video games. For now, anyway.
Only thing is, this Mr. Geoff guy is giving me some seriously bad vibes. I'm hoping that's because he's a supervillain or something.
Haven't made any friends in my cabin yet. Don't mind. All my best friends are back in Athens anyway — this place is down by Logan, and damn near everyone's from West Virginia. And I'm the only black kid here, too. Feels like no one wants to talk to me — they keep giving me the side eye. Of course, this means I wouldn't have wanted to get to know them anyway. Convenient!
…introvert. New new favorite word.

June 15, 2018
Dear Journal,
I'm remembering this one movie I saw a while ago when I was a kid, something my dad liked. Kindergarten Cop. I think it had that "GET TO ZE CHOPPAH" guy in it. Anyway, the cop guy (who is now teaching kindergarten) finally gets the kids to chill by making them march in line with a whistle and stuff.
Point being, I'm pretty sure this is how Mr. Geoff sees himself, and we're now on the receiving end of all the "VON, TOO, ZREE, FOAH, VON, TOO, ZREE, FOAH" bullshit from the movie. And it's just him running the place, along with a few tall guys for "security." He fired all the camp counselors, too! The last day I saw them, some of them were even crying.
Our main activities involve this thing Mr. Geoff calls "the Gauntlet." It's an obstacle course — but can you even call it that? There weren't any things to jump over or ropes or pits or bridges — it's this old parking lot next to the campsite. Mr. Geoff spray-painted a some red squares and shit (Is that even legal?) that we're told we shouldn't step into. The only things that aren't painted on are a few traffic cones. Kind of a shitty obstacle course, but he says Jesus really, really, really wants us to know how to run the fastest from the starting circle to the finish circle.
I'm really hoping this is all adding up to some secret lesson at the end. Or maybe I'm missing something.
But you know what? I'm on the track team back home. I might as well make the best of this. Besides, he's saying whoever can do the fastest time in three weeks from now gets a special prize. BRING IT ON!!

June 22, 2018
Dear Journal,
This is getting weird, and it was already weird before. Mr. Geoff keeps lecturing us about the obstacle course. He's giving us diagrams to study with, and quizzing us on their names. (I thought this was summer?)
And yes, they have names. The cones are "the watchmen" — if you come within five feet of one of them, you lose the run. The big blue cone at the finish circle is "Mr. Fred," and in order finish the run, you can't just go up to the cone — you gotta say "Big G sends his regards" real loud and clear. Otherwise, you lose the run. The big red rectangle running through the parking lot is the "high-speed rail." If you step in it even once, you lose the gauntlet. Mr. Geoff even keeps saying it's dangerous. Like, it could literally kill you. (Literally — new favorite word.)
Lose the run three times, and you get sent home. Like, straight-up expelled. And it's happened to at least 20 of the kids here already! They didn't seem too shook up about it, though. What's the point of staying here if it's not making any damn sense?
Maybe if I weren't feeling competitive, I'd do some hopscotch in the hi-speed rail and take the next bus home. I know my parents are strict and all that — but even they'd understand that this isn't what they signed me up for.
But I've got the fastest time so far! My track coach back home would never let me hear the end of it if I backed down now. Not when I've got such a good thing going. And I'm too curious about this prize that Mr. Geoff keeps talking about.
(If it's under 20 dollars or something, I'm gonna be sooooooo pissed. Bonus anger if it's one of those "virtue is its own reward" kinda things.)

June 29th, 2018
Dear Journal,
It's getting quiet. There are only five kids left at the camp (including me). I'm alone in my cabin. Everyone else has failed the runs. Phones keep ringing from inside Mr. Geoff's trailer — I think the losing kids' parents are starting to get suspicious.
And if that weren't enough, a new part of the gauntlet has been added — the "Jesus Bag." It's this weird black plastic bag that's about the size of a mini fridge. And it's HEAVY! Weighs as much as my red nose pittie back at home. We gotta carry the Jesus Bag the whole way to the Mr. Fred cone, and once we say the whole "Big G sends his regards" thingy we gotta drop the bag off to him, but not set it down too hard.
We lost 13 runners in one day once the Jesus Bag was introduced.
I'm so confused. I asked Mr. Geoff about why the Jesus Bag is even a thing. Usually he just avoids my questions and goes "you'll find out soon enough, kiddo!" or "the Lord wants you to be patient, and to find the answers for yourself!" This time, he actually gave me an answer: the bag is based on a passage in Matthew 17.
I've been reading Matthew 17 all night, and I can't find anything about big heavy bags.
I stepped in the high-speed rail zone twice already, and I'm getting nervous. The last runs to decide the winner are next week. Perhaps the prize is gonna be a coherent explanation of all this — in which case, I'm gonna win this if it kills me.

July 6th, 2018
I don't know what to say.
I'm back home, sitting in my room. Trying to forget. I can't tell anyone what happened — not like they'd believe me. But if I don't get what I've seen out of my head, it'll rot in there and stink me up like old eggs in a fridge.
This stupid journal's as fitting a place as any to get it out. On that note…
Dear Journal,
I was the last one standing. Mr. Geoff came out onto the course with this beaming smile, telling me I was finally ready. That what I was gonna do would make the Lord very happy.
Apparently, up until today, we hadn't been using the real Jesus Bag. He gave me the real thing — it was made out of this weird material, I wanna say… metal-plastic? Is that a thing? Whatever. It felt like the kinda stuff old-timey records were made out of, but also like aluminum cans.
I asked Mr. Geoff what was in it. He told me: "Part of growing up is knowing that you can't know every secret there is to know." I was really starting to get sick of this dude.
So I went to the starting circle, did some stretching, and slung the bag over my shoulder like I was Santa Claus.
I'm about to start running, but Mr. Geoff stopped me. He says, "Before we get started, I need you to know something: whatever you see in the next few seconds, the most important thing is that you stick to what you've learned from the Gauntlet. When you meet Mr. Fred, he will give you another Jesus Bag, and you need to hold onto it with your life. Are you ready?"
I nodded.
"On your mark," he said.
I squatted into my starting stance.
"Get set," he said
I took a deep breath.
"Drink this," he said. I almost started running — usually you expect to hear "GO!" by then. But he gives me this Dixie cup of this… medicine? I downed it real quick. WORST. SHIT. Tasted like nacho cheese sauce smoothied with hair.
I gagged on the shit, and got a real bad headache all of a sudden. My eyes felt like they were being squeezed and I started to see black shadows all over the place. I yelled. It really hurt. I shut my eyes super tight. A nasty cold wind surrounded me. I could suddenly hear a bunch of people's voices. Laughing. Music on mall speakers.
"Stick to the plan!" said Mr. Geoff. He was next to me a few minutes ago, but now it sounded like he was on the other side of the camp. "Now, GO!"
I opened my eyes —
I froze. Most important run of the summer, and I couldn't do anything but stare.
I wasn't in the camp anymore. This was a huge mall. I looked up at all the floors — at least a hundred, like, indoor skyscrapers? — and I felt empty, like this whole place was a giant and I was about to be stepped on. I could make out that the mall had a skylight — and the sky was green.
None of the shops were anything I could recognize. People were dressed in all sorts of new fashions I hadn't seen before. This was some Jetsons shit. There was this poster hanging from one of the balconies, this military dude with a stupid mustache giving a thumbs-up — "President Niang Says: Littering is for Striders! Keep the Mall of Old Ohio Heavenly!"
And they were all staring at me.
From where the watchman cones were (in my world), there were these… knights, I wanna say? Heavy white armor, gas masks, huge guns under their arms. One caught sight of me, pointed at me, went "HEY! YOU!" in this really loud robot voice that damn near made me piss my pants —
I dropped the Jesus Bag and bolted. Fuck the gauntlet, fuck the prize, fuck everything — this was too weird.
That being said, I probably should have remembered where the high-speed rail was — then I wouldn't have run onto the tracks, just as a train was pulling into the Old Ohio Mall station.
Bam.
Everything went black. Not sure how long I was out for.
I woke up in an office chair. The room around me looked like some kind of… okay, you know Men in Black? The first one, before it got all complicated. The base from that movie — except there were more of those knight guys.
There's a desk in front of me with some papers — one of them has a map of the world. But the names are all different — Baltimore, where my Grandma lives, that's "Drysedge." New York City was "Nordestra Prime." South America was just this big empty field called "Strider Defense Array," whatever that means. The State of Ohio was just a state-sized Mall.
All sorts of new words and ideas were being thrown at me at once, and all I could think about was how much I wanted to grab the old Jesus Bag and give Mr. Geoff a concussion with it.
Finally, someone else showed up at the other side of the desk — shook my hand, introduced herself as "Commandant Helen Cahill of the Three Moons Initiative." I told her as much as I knew about the situation. I could tell she was trying really hard to explain to me what was going on, and I appreciated the effort. It still didn't help at all.
BUT! I was able to get these four facts out of it:

I was knocked unconscious by the train while my guts splattered all over the place — but my body put itself back together because, uh, that's just the way things are in this place?? I dunno.
"Mr. Geoff Lundgren" is not his real name, and this isn't the first camp he's used for his operations.
I had been tricked into doing something called "cross-reality smuggling through an oral interstitialization agent". I'm not sure what that means, but the Jesus Bag was filled with crystal meth. Tons of it.
I wasn't in trouble at all, and the information I gave the Commandant could be used to put a stop to the whole thing.

That last one was nice, at least. The Commandant made me sign a contract saying I wouldn't divulge anything of what I saw there to anyone else, in exchange for "Guaranteed Class-SS Postmortem Elysial Reservations". (As if I needed another ambiguous prize to think about.) Not like telling anyone would do much good — who would believe me?
As soon as I signed, there was a flash of light — and I was back in my room, at home. My parents were panicking downstairs — they saw some kind of news report that I was missing, and Mr. Geoff was dead from a gunshot wound — from the sky, apparently.
…look, I'll be honest. I'm still not sure what to make of all this. Part of me wants to find more answers about what I saw. But an even bigger part of me just wants to keep living my life. I mean, up until the whole Mr. Geoff bullshit, I had a good living-a-normal-life streak going — why give up from a little loss like that?
So, fuck this journal. I'm gonna enjoy my summer.
…
…
…
…
(…"Corbenic." New favorite word.)


The first time I met her, it was by chance.
“Ah…that sounds like something you want to ask her about.” Those words changed everything. I needed a translation, and fast—and apparently, she was the one who could make it happen.
A room number was placed in my hand, and with my notebook under one arm I made my way to it.
 I flashed my credentials, made my way inside, and found myself in a completely empty room. There was a bed. A desk. A table with a flower vase. A second room beyond the doorway was lit by a kitchen lamp.
“Hello?” I called.
“Sorry,” came the reply. The voice was cheerful, lovely, calm. A young woman, with a voice that reminded me of a strawberry milkshake. “I'm in the other room…What do you need?”
“I was told you might help me translate some Latin,” I called back. “And possibly identify its source—”
“Oh, of course, go ahead, read it out. It's not infohazardous, is it?”
“No, it's been cleared.” I pulled open the notebook. “Apparuit mortuus est mortuus; et apparuit animam viventem…” I read the passage clearly into the open air. I swore I could hear the sound of high heels clicking on the linoleum floor in the kitchen.
“Oh, that's a terrible translation,” the voice replied with a laugh. “Sounds like someone ran it through an online translator from Italian to English to Latin. I say Italian—” she added, and her voice seemed clearer for some reason, “because the original was in Italian. It's Commedia and Canzoniere. The Divine Comedy by Dante.”
“That's amazing,” I said, scribbling it in my notes. “Thank you so much.”
“Oh, is that all?” She sounded disappointed. “Well, it was nice meeting you. What was your name again?”
“Larsen,” I said, closing the notebook. “Daniel Larsen. And you?”
“Oh, I'm nobody special,” came the reply. “It was nice meeting you, Dr. Larsen.”
The first time I left, I was in a hurry to get back to work.

The second time I met her, it was intentional.
It was months later. I ended up with a new thing requiring translation. I wasn't sure if the mystery woman spoke the language, but it was worth a try. As I approached the door I stopped. When I'd first visited, I was new. I'd never seen a Euclid-class humanoid containment cell before, so to me it looked more like a heavy office door. Or maybe I wasn't paying enough attention. Now, though, I knew what it was, so I took out my phone and opened the database. SCP-126. I read the file.
I was therefore more cautious when I entered the containment cell. “Hello?” I asked.
“Daniel!” there was the voice, smooth as silk. “Been some time. Can I help you with anything?”
That voice. So bubbly, and filled with unbidden excitement at having a visitor. I couldn't help but smile.
“Y-yeah, actually,” I said, setting a paper on the desk. “What do you make of this?”
I could sense her movement through the room. It wasn't just the soft sound of footsteps on the carpet. It was a presence, which I didn't pick up with any sense, but felt somewhere deep in my psyche. “Oh wow. Not a lot of people speak Pontic Greek.”
“Do you?”
I was sure she was rolling her eyes. “Of course,” she said, and laughed. “Do you have a pen? I can write down a translation.”
I remembered the containment file's warning that SCP-126 could not manipulate physical items despite wanting to be helpful. “Oh that's okay,” I said, opening my notebook. “I'll just jot it here.”
SCP-126 read out a translation, and I thanked her for her kindness. And then…I decided to stay a bit.
We sat (or rather, I sat—she was incapable of sitting but her voice seemed to be next to me nonetheless) on the couch and we discussed languages. When she learned I worked for the office of the Historian, she was intrigued, and we spent over an hour discussing the old paperwork the Foundation had in its archives.
When I left, I was sad to go.

The third time I met her, it was not technically allowed.
I had nothing to translate. Instead, I showed up only wanting to talk. My credentials allowed me in, sure, but I really should have had a better reason than wanting to see her again. Okay, see is perhaps not the right word.
“I was hoping you would come by again, I had such a great time with you.” From the source of her voice I think she was sitting on the desk. I imagined she was playfully swinging her legs just above the floor.
“Me too!” I took what I had brought out of the folders and set them on the desk next to where I thought she might be.
“Oh my god!” I heard her drop off the desk onto the carpet beside me. “Are those—”
“17th century,” I said. “I'm cataloguing a few of these drawings from an archive the Foundation's had for a while. I was able to check them out for a bit. So they can't stay, but—”
“They're wonderful.” She paused. “Ok, not trynna be weird, but I'mma hug you now.”
When I left, I was smiling.

The last time I met her, I got caught.
I had brought flowers. I had no idea if she could smell them, but it seemed that she had a full range of senses so it was worth a shot.
I had no sooner stepped into her containment cell and called out to her, that a black bag was thrown over my head. And I swear…I swear before her living room dissolved into darkness, I saw her. Her perfect hair. Her deep eyes, like the ocean. Her expression, of fear and surprise.
The last word I heard her say was my name.


Three Portlands
Augur-Haruspex

The End Is Nigh

THREE PORTLANDS
FRIDAY, 13 MARCH, 2020
$3.25/£2.50/₿3.5e-5

AUSTRALIAN RULES DRAG RACING

AUSTRALIANS RULE AT DRAG RACING

Sports Correspondent (Unofficial) Sofia Haugen

It turns out Australians really like ACDC. Or "Akka Dakka", as my local guide called them.

SYDNEY, NSW — If motor sports were sexual partners I have had, drag racing would be my high school boyfriend, Glen Robertson, on prom night: disappointing, over far too fast, and one of the critical tipping points that pushed me from milquetoast bisexuality into full-on lesbianism. You might think that the analogy got away from me at the end; you would be wrong. You see, I grew up in a small, shitty town in eastern Washington, and the only thing for a teen to do other than smoking meth and getting pregnant was watching the guys who spent all their time and money fixing up classic muscle cars cruise up and down Main Street. One of these guys was not, in fact, a guy; her name was Kylie, and she was exactly the smoking hot butch mechanic that phrase conjures in your mind. I broke up with Glen approximately eighteen hours after he ruined my corsage with his premature ejaculation, and three hours after that I found myself in the backseat of Kylie's car, having an orgasm-induced out-of-body experience.
Kylie and I broke up when I went to college—amicably, and we still hook up on occasion when I'm visiting home while single—but my lust for the sport never abated. Unfortunately, normal drag racing, however sexy the drivers or fast the cars, still doesn't do it for me. This came up while my editor and I were getting absolutely hammered in one of Portlands' seedier dive bars. We were discussing our more annoying kinks in between shots of Ultimate Wormwood Princess Death Bastard Seven, a Japanese absinthe so potent it's banned in every U.S. state and most Canadian provinces; my editor was about to launch into a forty-minute monologue on why he commissions fetish art of dragons fucking trucks1 when a friendly cyborg saved our collective sanity score by interrupting to inform me—in an absolutely impenetrable accent, which may have been Glaswegian by way of Reykjavík—that in Australia, they do drag racing the same way they do football: suddenly, violently, and all over the place.
I was intrigued, of course, and pressed him for more. He told me of a land far across the Pacific, a land of billabongs and bunyips and bogans, where the ocean is warm and the beer is warmer; the home of the one and only Australian Drag Racing Association, a league for whom such petty concerns as physics, secrecy, and morality were the trifles of lesser minds. I had to go see it; anything lesser would be a betrayal not only of the Journalist's Oath, but of my own younger self, experiencing erotognosis in a modified Hyundai. The next morning, neither my editor nor I remembered any of this, of course, but I had thought ahead, and recorded the entire conversation on my J. Jonah Jameson Junior Journalist tape recorder2. Since my editor had given verbal permission that night, I didn't even need to ask before I took the company card out of his wallet (he had passed out on my couch, as usual) and hopped out into PDX to grab the next flight to Oz3.
I landed in Sydney on the second day of a two-day hangover, having spent the first half of the 15-hour flight dry heaving into a series of airsickness bags. The young Canadian couple seated next to me graciously shared some of their emergency poutine with me, a gesture so thoughtful and appreciated that it almost made me reconsider my intense, irrational hatred of the Quebecois; but as we landed, they pulled out matching fleur-de-lis rosaries, and their bastard-French prayers to their false Catholic god reminded me of their true nature. I cursed them with boils as we filed off the plane. (In spirit only, of course. If I end up on the no-fly list, I want it to be for something more exciting than unlicensed witchcraft on a commercial airline.)

Brenda. Ain't she a beaut?

I used a cheeky little chameleon charm to skip customs, because I had an extra bottle of Ultimate Wormwood Princess Death Bastard Seven tucked away in my carry-on and in Australia that stuff is legally classified as a chemical weapon. Finally, I emerged from the airport into the bright Australian sun, and met my contact in the ADRA4, a gentleman who goes by the nom de sport "Three-Thong". I asked him the origin of his name, and he explained that it referred to his preferred racing gear: "two thongs on my feet, one thong on my junk." Mercifully, when I met him, he was wearing pants. Well, those zip-off cargo shorts with one of the bottoms unzipped and the other still on. Mostly pants. He picked me up in a trashy old "Ute"—sort of a hybrid pickup truck/sedan thing that I don't think exists anywhere else (for good reason, the things are hideous). The make and model was, I shit you not, the "Subaru Brumby"; TT calls her "Brenda". We drove off, thrash metal blasting on the sound system, headed straight for the track.
The closest ADRA track to Sydney is Two Blackbutts, an extradimensional space accessible from both Blackbutt, NSW, and Blackbutt, Queensland. Those of you who live in the best goddamn city out of the world might think that this is a little on the nose, maybe an upside-down-world copy of our favorite Anglo-American miniverse; but names have always had power, and dimensions like ThreePorts are more common than you'd think5. Apparently they had to shut it down for a bit because of a Yowie6 infestation, but they cleared them out by introducing cane toads—which has always worked really well for Australians, and could never be a problem in the future.
By the time we got to Blackbutt, we were both stoned out of our gourds. TT had a whole jar full of these massive blunts, as thick around as your middle finger and almost as long, and we'd been passing them back and forth the whole way down from Sydney. I think we blazed through four or five of them in like an hour and a half, and of course we kept the windows rolled up, so there was just this pungent, sticky fog enveloping us and coating our mucous membranes with THC every time we inhaled. Don't worry, Brenda took care of the driving, and she only had a few hits7. Anyway, we drove out to this clump of woods behind a suburban strip-mall, and collapsed out of the doors in a puff of smoke, and took a quick nap there on the grass, just for an hour or two, until a few more of TT's mates showed up and it was time to actually head through to the track.
To get through to Two Blackbutts, you need to build a ring of eucalyptus branches around whatever you want to transport, and then set it on fire8. Since eucalyptus burns very easily, and the Way doesn't care if you soak it in gasoline first, the only limit to how much you can transport is the size of the ring. By the time we actually set the fire—we'd moved into a parking lot, don't worry—there were about a dozen people and almost as many cars packed into a ring made from two full trunkloads of branches. I was still pretty stoned, so I didn't even notice when we'd made the transition—I think I was back in Brenda taking another nap, but I'm not really sure. When I regained awareness, we were at the track, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of trees.

Two Blackbutts drag strip. The guy on the left is named "Zeffo"; I really hope that's not a slur.

The first few races were, unfortunately, for mundane cars. A little bit of an amuse douche, or whatever it is they call that first little bite in fancy restaurants that they don't let you take the whole plate of no matter how tasty it is. I wasn't really paying attention to these, partly because—as I've mentioned—regular drag racing just doesn't do it for me any more, and partly because the airplane chicken parm took its revenge and forced me to spend a solid twenty minutes in a portapotty, contemplating homicide. But I survived my bowel movement (as did everyone else), and returned to the stands just in time for the real attraction to start.
One of the first racers to actually use magic was my boy Three-Thong. He had, as promised, stripped down to his flip-flops-and-panties ensemble—plus driving gloves and a helmet, for safety—and I could now see the reason for his near-nudity. Every square inch, or centimeter, I guess, of his skin, other than his face, was covered in some kind of intricate magical tattoo. I asked him about them afterwards. “Yeah, well, I got them up in Thailand. This monk bloke'll do ‘em for free, but ya gotta swear, like, a vow to give something up. So like, this whole arm, that's Macca's. For my back I swore off lager. And then he made me swear off all other booze to do my, uh, unit, said I had kind of cheated with just lager. Left leg was Warcraft. It's like I'm wearing full kevlar, yeah? Totally impenetrable. Still gotta worry about internal injuries and all that, but it's not like race gear would stop those. And, uh, I don't wear clothes because I don't wanna ruin my trousers and shit, yeah? Thongs are cheap.” Hardcore.
You'll probably be surprised to hear that TT's dragster is good old Brenda. Inside that ugly old ute, TT has installed a custom five-cylinder Abramelin-Ulam turbine, capable of converting infernal resonances into pure kinetic energy at a remarkable degree of efficiency. To start her up, TT has to summon a demon into the containment vessel at the heart of the engine. I took a demonology class back in school9, but his methods were like nothing taught in the hallowed halls of Deer; they mostly consisted of swearing, kicking things, and occasionally poking at parts of the engine with a set of lead and silver wrenches. Eventually the engine had been subdued to TT's satisfaction, and he tossed a live chicken under the hood and slammed it closed. There was a horrible meat-sound and a puff of feathers; and then the thing roared to life, spitting black fire from the tailpipe and stinking up the whole track with sulfurous fumes.
His opponent was an enigma in black leather. From her carbon-fiber helmet to her steel-toed boots, not an inch of skin was exposed—except for the tips of her fingers, peeking out from her fingerless driving gloves. She rolled up in a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, its tasteful lavender exterior concealing an interior upholstered in Lisa Frank-esque rainbow cheetah print with gold snakeskin accents10. As soon as she stepped out of the car, I couldn't take my gay little eyes off her. I won't go into my thoughts in detail, but suffice it to say they were graphic, and she kept the fingerless gloves on. I was interrupted from my reverie by the announcer, introducing the race and the drivers: "And in the infernal category! On the right, driving a classic sport ute, you know him, you love him, it's THREEEEEE-THOOOOOOONG." The applause was almost deafening. My boy TT was a clear hero of the people. "And on the left, a newcomer to our fair shores! Hailing from the far-off exotic land of Northern England, driving a 1970 'Cuda, THE ROOKIEEEEEE!"

I forgot to actually take a picture of Rookie's car but this one is pretty similar.

The crowd cheered for this "Rookie" almost as loudly as for Three-Thong; either she had a reputation here already, or they were just in an excitable mood brought on by fast cars and free beer. The racers waved to the crowd and climbed back into their cars, starting another round of cheering, and then started their engines. Well, TT's engine was already started. So Rookie started her engine. And by "started her engine" I mean that she stabbed a syringe into her arm and mainlined some sort of effervescent orange liquid, and then open-palm-slammed a cassette into the tape deck. The opening riff of Motley Crüe's "Dr. Feelgood" blasted out the windows, and the car transformed.
Starting from the driver's door, a ripple moved across the surface, transforming the glossy metal into rough scales. Horns burst outward from the headlights, curling upwards until they stabbed into the hood and drew blood. The grille parted, revealing a gangrenous maw filled with jagged teeth; a warty tongue squirmed between them, dripping motor oil spittle onto the track below. The tires were black bone; the bumper was grey chitin; and inside, ensconced in something that now more resembled a liver than a seat, was the Rookie, eyes glowing the same orange of the demon-drug now running through her—and the car's—veins. Never seen anything that sexy in my goddamn life, I tell you what. Anyway, once the transformation was complete, the announcer did the standard "on your marks, get set, go" deal, and then they were off.
The race, from start to finish, took about thirteen seconds. Most of this next section is gonna be from a bunch of phone videos and eyewitness accounts (see? I'm a real reporter!) that I gathered after the fact. I missed most of it because I was planted by the starting line, and I couldn't follow them down the track because I'm slow as hell and my psychic remote viewing abilities were on the fritz because of all the weed. And because I don't have any psychic remote viewing abilities. As far as I can tell11. Strap in your seat belts (or don't, I'm not your mom. I hope.) and get ready for some HARDCORE RACING ACTION.
Both racers roared past the starting line, spitting black flames and sulfurous yellow smoke from their tailpipes. Neither had a clear lead, and it only took about a second and a half for them both to resort to outright sabotage. Three-Thong took out a blowpipe from who-knows-where, and shot a dart at near-supersonic speed toward the Rookie's open window; she caught it, blew him a kiss, and then stabbed it into her own neck. As far as anyone could tell, this just made her go faster—some funky drug interaction with whatever other crap was already in her system. In response, the Rookie drew some big fuck-off hand cannon, and just started blasting at Three-Thong. He deflected the shots with his palm before they could damage Brenda's bodywork, and started casting some sort of hex. The track in front of the Rookie started undulating as if there were worms beneath its skin, and someone's phone camera even captured a tentacle beginning to rise from the asphalt, but the Rookie's car leapt up and levitated about half a meter above the ground and TT gave up on his spell. And that was when the Rookie pulled out the rocket launcher.

This is the last car picture, I promise. It's Pommy Pete's James Bond car. Very swanky.

She slapped the cruise control button—probably unnecessary, given the amount of track left, but a good dramatic flourish—and leaned out the window, firing a singe rocket-propelled grenade basically point-blank at TT's hood. Brenda's engine was reduced to a smoking wreck, and with the Rookie leading by about a quarter car-length it seemed like the race was over; but Three-Thong still had some secrets tucked up his eponymous underpants. From a bag on his passenger seat—my bag, in fact—he pulled out a bottle of nothing less than Ultimate Wormwood Princess Death Bastard Seven, and poured it into a small funnel hidden in the center console. Then he hit a very sexy red button that I hadn't been allowed to touch on our drive down here, and a massive rocket engine lifted up from Brenda's truck bed. A cocktail of liquid oxygen, illegally potent absinthe, and black lamb's blood surged through the rocket's ignition chamber, and Brenda put on one last burst of speed as the racers neared the finish line. It was a close one, and everyone held their breath as the cars skidded to a halt, leaving burning trails of rubber and bone on the asphalt; but the photo finish showed Brenda's cattle-catcher cross the line a hair's breadth ahead of the Rookie's insectile bumper.
The Rookie was a gracious loser, and once the drugs had been flushed from her system she extracted herself from her slowly recovering car and shook Three-Thong's hand. In hindsight, the handshake lingered for a little longer than was strictly necessary, and there was quite a lot of suggestive eye contact; but I was too distracted by visions of fingerless gloves dancing through my head to notice. I briefly introduced myself to the Rookie, and she agreed to a quick interview later—I did specify "in private" with a wink, but I think she was looking away and didn't notice my attempt at innuendo. Any alternative would require me to re-evaluate my assessment of my own incredible lesbian charisma, and my ego is far too fragile for that sort of self-reflection12. Anyway, after the track was cleaned up for the next race, I went in search of her for the promised interview—and found her, behind a row of port-a-potties.
There, parked next to the Rookie's magnificent set of wheels, was Brenda, rocking back and forth suggestively. Her windows had been mirrored, some sort of privacy charm no doubt, but every so often, the charm would be briefly disrupted by a hand pressing up against it. Some of the hands were covered in mystic tattoos; and others wore black leather fingerless gloves. I spent the rest of the day moping, and got a ride out from another racer, "Pommy Pete", who spoke in an upper-class British accent so crisp it had to be fake. Pete drove an Aston Martin, which had originally been owned "by the real James Bond, not the one from the films". I didn't believe him, of course, but it did have an ejector seat, so who's to say?
Pete took me on a breakneck tour of Australian Rules drag strips, and the wonders we saw there could fill a whole newspaper's worth of sports columns: a ghost-powered bone-wagon howling through the streets of Perth, circa 1881; an actual phoenix bursting out of a crashed Pontiac Firebird and turning a hundred-meter circle of salt flats to black glass; a race between a pair of identical twin cyborgs, the winner choosing a piece of remaining flesh from the loser as a trophy. But, despite my protestations, there is a limited amount of space dedicated to the noble art of sports journalism in each issue of the Augur-Haruspex13, so I can't fit it all here. Further episodes of Sofia Goes Down Under can be found on my secret blog, which is only visible from public library computers during prime-numbered days.

Footnotes
1. Editor's Note: Every time I threaten to remove this sentence, Sofia comes into my house and steals one of my socks. So I've decided to just own it. Yes, I think that there is nothing more erotic than a giant flying lizard engaging in sexual relations with a diesel-powered American pickup truck. Neither I nor my psychologist has any clue where this fetish came from; my theory is witchcraft, or possibly sorcery.
2. An officially licensed Marvel product cancelled halfway through production when the Taiwanese factory making them was found to be a front for a massive heroin-smuggling operation; I own three out of the sixty-five that were not seized and destroyed by INTERPOL.
3. Editor's Note: It was my personal card, not the company card, and Sofia's real lucky that I'm such a merciful god.
4. I had a three-hour layover in LAX, and I used that time well. It turns out that Aussie drag racers are very active on Void, and that I actually have fans among them. Believe me, I was as surprised as you are; I assume that you all are using these articles to wrap take-out, or perhaps for papier-mache.
5. Like the mime-infested catacombs of Paris, Texas, which connect to the ones in France if you go deep enough; or the Other London Bridge, which connects the Londons in Ontario and England with 8837 London, a hollow asteroid with a thriving arts scene; or, of course, Alexander's Mausoleum, the burial place of the original himbo himself, accessible from any city named Alexandria (why do you think he kept naming things after himself? it wasn't just because of his massive, throbbing ego).
6. Three-Thong's explanation: "You know Bigfoot, yeah? Imagine if Bigfoot was just, like, a real mean c*nt."
7. Editor's Note: For legal reasons, the Augur-Haruspex cannot endorse operating a motor vehicle while under the influence, or operating under the influence while a motor vehicle.
8. Yes, I know the optics of setting a bunch of stuff on fire in Australia are not the best right now. But this was in like, last April. I'm not good with deadlines and I'll be damned if I make any edits because of a massive climate catastrophe.
9. I didn't pass, because I spent like, 60% of every class trying to flirt with Ash, one of the hot goth demonology majors. Her full name was, no joke, "Ashtaroth Ragnarök Anti-Christiansen"; apparently she was abandoned in the woods of Norway as a baby, where she was found and raised by a black metal band who were there to shoot a music video. She wore corpse paint to class. Or maybe her face just looked like that.
10. She stole it, I later learned, from an exotic animal dealer—the upholstery was made from real rainbow cheetah.
11. Like with demonology, I did take a parapsychology class back at Deer. Unlike with demonology, I actually passed it, despite my utter lack of talent. It was graded on a curve, and I was the only one who didn't get failed out for cheating; everyone else accidentally formed some sort of gestalt mind-meld during the final and had the exact same answers on the test. Guess I'm just lucky like that.
12. Editor's Note: I have known Sofia for just over four years now, since she was a student journalist at Deer. In that time, I have seen her get dumped six times, ghosted an additional eight, and turned down by no less than two dozen women. Whenever this fact is pointed out to her, she claims it's because of an ancient Sapphic death-curse placed upon her by a vengeful spectre.
13. Editor's Note: This rule was put into place because of Sofia's tendency to send us novel-length fanfiction about women's soccer teams and long lists of horse-racing results that she claimed were from alternate universes but I'm pretty sure she made up to fuck with us. I mean, who would name a horse "Cryptofascist Spinal-Monster"?


The Lunch Special at Salmon Brick

written by

JackalRelated

« UIU File: 2018-479 │ COMING SOON »


Milk on his legs, White up to just under his armpits, and Dark filled the rest.
Thunk Thunk. Thunk Thunk.
For ten years Theo had been locked in the facility, where the cool air and constant thunk thunk of the condenser keeping his room well below freezing. He had always hated the cold, but it wasn't like he had a choice anymore. Every movement was another second on that careless timer that was his body; the slightest touch of friction rubbed off almost-skin that would never grow back. When he looked closely at his joints, he could see the deep grooves that his limbs made when they sheared the tiniest bits.
All it had taken was one crazed man with one crazed idea. His thick white beard and friendly face promised Nothing but wild Adventure!, and the capital A in that sentence struck stars in Theo's ten-year-old eyes. Not long after, he went into the machine of Wonder, and that was when the Foundation found him. Bullets and bombs and things he didn't recognize flew with abandon, and his new captors had emerged victorious. If they had been only a few hours quicker, he would still be alive and free. Instead, his organs had been replaced with chocolate, and his home with this freezer. He hated the cold.
Thunk Thunk. Thunk Thunk.
It took Theo a while for the reality of the situation to set in. Thoughts of infinite food and free chocolate raced through his young mind until a doctor with wrinkled eyes explained everything. His organs and eyes and brain and every inch in between had changed, now various flavors of edible chocolate. But they would never grow back. This was all the chocolate he had. The Foundation had tried ways to repair him, but they could do little more than postpone the inevitable moment when Theo imagined his body would snap itself apart under the pressure. They advised him to move as little as possible, and it was hell for a young boy.
They treated Theo well enough, considering the situation. Access to television, video games, books, and the internet kept him busy on most days. Plenty of researchers and doctors came in to chat, and he learned more than he should have about the other people locked in with him. People who could cast spells, or turn into wolves, or survive almost anything, all had their own room in this dark gray building. Theo's only claim to fame was that he would die without his freezer. SCP, they always called him by a number. That was the worst part.
Thunk Thunk. Thunk Thunk.
About a year in, Theo had brought up the idea of a cold suit. Like Mr. Freeze! he had said. He thought himself so clever for coming up with it and had already begun thinking of his new superperson name. ChocoLad was the only one he liked, so much that he even asked for colored pencils to design his outfit. Unfortunately, when he told the doctor in charge of his “condition” of his brilliant solution, Theo could see the regret and sadness in her eyes, even though her mouth promised a distant chance at a possibility. Deep down, Theo wasn't surprised, though he still wished for a miracle.
The realization that Theo would never, truly never, go home finally set in. There was no solution, at least not one these doctors could find. That night, and for weeks afterward, he paced around his tiny freezer until that sorry doctor returned and insisted he stop. For the next nine years, he would sit and count the Thunks as he dreamed of warm beaches.
Thunk Thunk. Thunk Thun-kakakakakaka
Theo roused from his sleep quickly—yet carefully, out of habit—at the strange noise coming from the walls. That wasn't normal. He stood from his deceptively comfortable bed and walked closer to the large box in the room's corner that made up the bulk of his freezer's machinery. The problem was clear immediately: the familiar waves of cold air that should have been coming out were not. Nothing came through but that odd sound. Theo leaned in, hoping to clear it up, and could barely make out tiny breaks in the noise, filled with sharp cracks.
He recognized what it was. That day ten years ago came back to him, and he wondered whether the invaders were here to help or harm him. Would it even matter? They would just move him to another freezer and ignore him until he broke apart like a doll.
Theo stood and began to move to the door, but paused when he saw what he left behind. A white handprint lay splattered on the box, messy and dripping down to the ground below. He looked at his feet and found that the same splattering footsteps made a path all the way to where he stood. A teasing poke on his arm revealed a softness that shouldn't have been there. The room was warmer than it should have been, had the cooling systems just shut off, and Theo was feeling the effect of the heat as his limbs slid together. A quick glance at his bed revealed spots of melted white and dark dotting the sheets.
As carefully as he could, he stepped over to the door to his room and peeked through the square glass window into the hallway outside. A red alarm glowed over the unlit area, showing a dark brown figure about a dozen feet from his door. Theo didn't recognize it, but he had no time to be picky. He shouted as loud as he could manage, his vocal cords creating a slick bubbly noise that could barely be considered words, and he even risked a single bang on the glass to get its attention.
It wasn't enough. The thick walls built to keep Theo safe were his downfall, as his rapidly deteriorating mouth wasn't strong enough to call through. He tried a few more times in vain, but still the figure never moved. Another messy splotch on the door was all he had to show for it.
Theo was running out of options. He tried the handle, on the far-off chance that it would be unlocked, but was unsurprised when the door failed to move. There was no phone or intercom system inside and he desperately searched for another escape. But there wasn't one. Ten years he had spent wanting to be free, and he had long since considered every slim chance.
Theo knew the more he moved, the quicker he would fall apart, leaving him with few choices. He wondered what it would feel like if he melted away. There was still feeling in his body, even though it was all chocolate, so would he still think as a puddle? The thought scared him.
All options exhausted, he limped to his bed, now acutely aware of an intense heat coming from everywhere around him. His life was no longer his own to save. Even if someone turned his freezer back on, he had lost too much precious chocolate already. He imagined that sorry doctor having to scoop up his remains and toss it in the trashcan, crying because she never built his cold suit. He imagined that old man forced to go through his own machine and stand in the sun to melt away, so he too would know how it felt.
Hatred boiled up as the temperature grew faster than it should have, but Theo tried to cool his emotions as best as he could. Blaming others in what could be his final moments wouldn't get him anything. Happy thoughts, Theo tried to say out loud, but all he uttered was a meaningless gargle. It didn't matter.
Theo brought his feet up onto his soft bed, barely feeling some part of his milk chocolate shear to the ground in a dirty plop, and leaned back onto his pillow. He imagined the mattress beneath him was warm sand and the distant cracking noise some flighty birds. The soft lights above him were the sun hugging him with its friendly rays, and the walls instead the ocean. Thankfully, he felt no pain, and he finally felt no freezing cold.
For the first time in years, Theo felt warm.


Friendly warning that this article contains mentions of abuse, mental disorders, self image issues, and other topics on the same scale. Please read with caution!

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd

Hey y'all! I'm using this post to introduce a project I've been working on for awhile. I've always really really loved baking, and I have finally opened my own sweet shop!
Desserts are my very favorite thing in the world. Down here in the south, we've got tons of bakeries. But my shop is like no other. Allow the beauty to bring you to another world of excitement!
I've even compiled a list of my favorite items to share with y'all as a treat!

Sprinkle Deco Cake

My sprinkle deco cake comes in eight flavors, but the outside is always the same. So much frosting and sprinkles you'll forget there's even cake inside! All my taste testers said it was spectacular. I like to think when the sprinkles hit your tummy, you feel the true power the sugar holds. Sugar is magical. The type of things you find delicious really tell about your character. My husband doesn't really like bright colors, so chocolate is his thing. I used to really like chocolate, but my taste buds started arguing with it. When I was little, me and my family would spend entire days just making chocolate EVERYTHING. Those were good times. Hopefully my cake can bring you back to good times!

PoppyPops

Each different flavor holds its own magic. Like strawberry brings out the perfectionist inside of you. Especially when it comes to love! With love, things have to all work together. If your love isn't perfect, you have to turn to your love and listen to what they have to say. Remember that you are always the problem. Eat a strawberry PoppyPop to control yourself. Remember, we're always here to help.
Lemon will bring out inner happiness and optimism, helping to ward away negative energy. I made one for my sister when we were a bit younger. She was hurting very bad. I wanted to help her, but I wasn't sure what to do. She was so lost within herself that I thought I would lose her. I told myself it was my fault. But then it came to me. Lemon could heal. I could be the angel I needed to be! Lemon is a nice flavor. It is also very personal to me. I had one as well. For a moment I thought I was wrong for trying to help. Everything was very confusing. I felt so many different things at once. But the lemon warded off the negative shit, so I highly recommend. I eat these things all the time! They really keep me happy in times of trouble. In fact, I don't get troubled anymore! Be sure to pick one up!
The rest of the flavors and their helpful tastes will be shared at the grand opening of my shop! Don't miss it!

SugarButtons

Don't let their looks fool you! My SugarButtons are perfectly edible! They are all white chocolate in a variety of different colors and shapes. These go great with any outfit! They aren't plastic, but give the same nutrients. It's like they were never even in your stomach! The more you eat, the better you'll look. You'll be a fashion model in no time. My friend Angel actually helped me with the concept. It's her dream to be a model. To get the right body, she'd diet. She even went to the hospital to finish off the look, though she said they didn't quite get the statement she was trying to make. Anyways, make sure to pick up a bag!

MiteMice

These guys are my babies. I am SO proud of them! Aren't they adorable? I know, almost too cute to eat. But trust me, you'll want to. Now over here at my sweet shop, I'm all about healthy living. I cook for my husband a lot, and it's always a lot of food. I get worried about weight, so I know others must as well. But these little honeys are the perfect dessert after a large meal. They'll scavenge around and pick up the fat from any recent meal so you don't gain it. I've personally had seventeen of these things. So I can eat all I want without having to worry about gaining weight. My husband LOVES these things. He's never tried them, but it's his favorite thing of mine that I've made.

✧༝┉┉┉┉┉˚*❋ ❋ ❋*˚┉┉┉┉┉༝✧

Alrighty! That's all I'll be sharing with you for today. Have a good one, and don't forget to check out my shop when it opens! Updates will be posted on my JustGirlyThings profile page! - <3

Comments

MelanieChuterxo Wednesday, February 3rd
I cannot get enough of this cake lol, thanks for letting me test girl!

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: MelanieChuterxo
Of course! Memories are a sweet thing I think. This cake takes me back to when I had a lot of cake. I even had posters of cake on my wall lol. I think my love for it pulled into the item! Oh and do make sure you can get enough lol. A big enough purchase comes with four free MiteMice! That reminds me! I need to add that to the poster!

Madelineaboxofcandy Wednesday, February 3rd
Strawberry has always been a favorite flavor in many things for me. I remember when you made these for us a bit back when you were still testing out your recipes. I was feeling really down, so I had a few of these cause KeeLee I think??? suggested it. Aaron LOVES them. He's probably been begging you to death for these things since Valentine's Day is coming up soon. Those purple blotches on my skin FINALLY started to clear up. You know, that weird condition that I talked about that would act up when I talked around Aaron? You've really uplifted my life. Thank you, Ella.

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Madelineaboxofcandy
That's the goal with these treats. To help others ♥*♡∞:｡.｡

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
LOL Ella don't share my story. A girl's got to keep her secrets, lmao. And don't take credit, those things were totally my idea. Or I guess yours too. (｡☉︵ ಠ╬)

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
I just wanted to since it was so inspirational to me!

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Ellasweettreat09
Lol that's cute

Coraofthesea Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
Lol what is that supposed to mean?

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Coraofthesea , Ellasweettreat09
I wasn't talking to you Cora (╬ Ò ‸ Ó)
Ella, you on?

Coraofthesea Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
I was talking to you! Aren't girls supposed to have manners? :<

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Coraofthesea
I do have manners! Plus isn't it rude to speak when not spoken to? You're the freak, so you don't get to coach me on manners

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
@Coraofthesea , @Ellasweettreat09
Ella are you gonna answer me or just eat more of those little parasites you made
good choice if so cause you're so overweight
Ben thinks so too he told me
and Cora your a freak I don't know why KeeLee wanted to help you ↑_(ΦwΦ;)Ψ

Coraofthesea Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
What? Of course KeeLee would help me she helps everyone

Coraofthesea Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
There are horrible forces in the world that make people 'freaks' but people like KeeLee are here to help

Coraofthesea Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
Angel please answer me

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Coraofthesea
Shut up ms "Landon" lol that was funny

LandonOfTheLand Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
My trauma is not a joke! Don't make fun of me!
I was scared, and alone. I felt like no one got me. I wanted to be confident with myself but I couldn't. No one was there for me. But this place was! It always was. Right?

LandonOfTheLand Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
wait
I'm confused
why does this keep happening

LandonOfTheLand Wednesday, February 3rd
Can someone please help me
and I don't mean ban me I actually want help
all this leaves a really bad taste in my mouth please

Angelinwings Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: LandonOfTheLand
Looks like you should have called an Angel ଘ(੭ΦwΦ)Ψ━ ☆ﾟ.*･ ✧ :-✧･ :*✧･ﾟ* *: .・-　✧*:･ﾟ✧.・゜-: ✧

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
LOL you're SO right! I'm up to 28 mice, I'm so proud of myself

JessJessJessie Wednesday, February 3rd
I like the purple PoppyPops :)
Ella, are you okay? im always here if you need me

KeeLee Wednesday, February 3rd
I've had some of your cake. It's amazing, Ella. I think this sweet shop is wonderful.

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: KeeLee
Thanks! I've really gotten back into the swing of eating a lot since I've had so much taste testing to do lol.

KeeLee Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
You've been eating your MiteMice, right?

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: KeeLee
Yep! I even saw one run through my arm the other day, so glad they're working!

KeeLee Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
Perfect. Oh and make sure to keep up stock on those PoppyPops. Especially the lemon. Cora tells me she's been craving them.

Ellasweettreat09 Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: KeeLee
Oh I have too. The other night I was stuck on the floor and apparently my feelings were spilling everywhere lol! One of my mice brought me some of those lemon pops and I felt SO much better.

KeeLee Wednesday, February 3rd
In response to: Angelinwings
That's what I like to hear! Keep doing what you need to, dear. Stay perfect for me.


~Unknown~

Barefoot and cold she ran through the halls, the cries of children echoing against the clanking of the metal machinery. An abomination of flesh and gears the Factory ground forwards. With only the tattered rags on her back and a burning desire to escape she forged on.

~The Coinmaster~

The Coinmaster strolled carefully along the gangway, his shiny black shoes meticulously placed to avoid any element of grime. A cane clacked against the rusty metal floor. He was the gear that oiled the machine: the man of finances.
Casting a cursory eye over the machines below he thought about recent profits, up from last quarter, could be improved. He had spoken to The Investor recently to talk about possibly funding a new site in Europe. The days were looking up for the Factory, the business was booming and production even more so.
He relished the raw tang of the smoke in the air. The Factory was coming back.

~Unknown~

Glancing furtively at the Foreman atop the floating walkways, she slowly edged across the rusted metal pipe. The grunting and cries of pain masking the noises she made, she opened the hatch and slipped inside. Running through the twists and turns she came to another grate, it was quiet here, too quiet in fact. She peered down into the room and almost cried out in shock, before covering her mouth tightly. At the desk, It sat, a twisted amalgamation of prosthetics, flesh and something Else, the one they called The Slaver. Here was the being that ruined her life; a seemingly friendly man at first, offering jobs to the poor and in need.
Well, her parents would never have another job now. She was only 8 when her father was torn apart by the very machine he maintained and worked with. Her mother was whipped away soon after her arrival. She itched to confront the beast but that would be suicide. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she crawled on. The beating heart of the Factory echoing around her like a prison of noise.

~The Coinmaster~

The Coinmaster sat on a chair brought by a worker; he enjoyed working to the sound of labour productivity. It allowed him to think about the intricacies of the factory. The cost of repairs was next on his list, and God knows they needed to be done. The alchemic molecular printers have needed a clean and fix for a while, he mused. That could wait whilst they get production of all goods up and running again. The Investor wouldn't be happy to halt production this soon, perhaps that should be scheduled for a months time. Next up, he looked at the page labelled "Personnel Requirements" and chuckled. Tearing it apart, as usual, he threw it over the balcony like confetti raining down onto the men below, the white and black slips quickly turning red and being crushed beneath the press of bodies.
He savoured the image, his appetite for profit growing as ideas came tumbling into his head.

~Unknown~

She watched as paper rained down on the conveyor. The creaking of the gears and grunts from the workers at odds with the cheery disposition she saw on the posters when she was younger. Hearing the sound of shoes above her head, she froze, petrified by the steady beat of the foreman's boots as they plodded along the gridded metal. Letting out her breath slowly she peeked out the grate. Seeing nothing she grabbed the pipe to her right and climbed it slowly, constantly checking down the corridor for any further movement.

~The Coinmaster~

Watching the girl climb from afar, The Coinmaster cocked his head. An interruption? He thought. How fascinating, it'd help alleviate the monotony of the finance sheets. He rose with an unnatural grin, the scent of sweat and fear reaching his nose.
He strode forward, dropping down silently to the gantry below.

~Unknown~

Carefully climbing onto the railing she looked towards freedom, towards an escape. Metal double doors at the end of the gantry lay open. A whole world beyond.
A cold, clammy hand clamped onto her shoulder, gentle yet forceful, her muscles tensing up. "Where do you think you're going, little worker?" said a stern voice from behind her. She cried out pitifully, trying to wrench the hand away. "That won't do, we can't have our future workers wandering off…". She flailed out, one of her fists connecting with the nose of the Creature making a cracking noise, but the hand stayed firm. Turning around, she saw him lick his lips.

~The Coinmaster~

With the crack of his cane, the child fell to the ground whimpering; it wasn't as amusing as The Coinmaster hoped. Perhaps it would serve as an example to the others; seeing this punishment might improve their productivity, he thought idly. He considered putting the girl up to display above the machinery, to prove a point, but it didn't seem necessary.
The grinding of the factory floor below was beginning to get on his nerves; it was probably time to return to his office upstairs. He could talk to The Investor from there about the cost of the new planned location.

~Unknown~

Her head hurt, all she wanted to do was sleep…

~The Coinmaster~

Licking the blood from his lips, The Coinmaster grinned. Gesturing to a nearby Foreman to pick up the small foetal body, he looked across the factory floor. He could almost taste the sweat of the workers and the grease of the pistons; it was delicious. He savoured the moment as he walked off, the image of the child burnt into his memory.

The Factory is progress.

The Factory is innovation.

And the Factory is hungry.