#but i know if you search pandora hearts official art it WILL give you official art from the manga/anime so. yass

[sulfurousdreamscapes]

It was the morning I was going to get the bow. Made from the wood from the Tha'syl forest, it would be the first bow I would use in my whole life that wasn’t a hand-me-down. The entire previous night, the song of the Cleric had been ringing in my ears. I went to sleep humming it, and I woke up humming it. I’d heard it only once before, when we made camp, on our quest to retrieve the goblet of the elven queen. And yet, it had remained lodged in my head like a fly in a spider’s web. I’d devoured it, and now it was a part of me: every note, every sound, every plucked string of the harp, every beat of the drum.

“I don’t really know if I’m ready for this,” I said, kneeling before my mentor, the old elf Dorannir. He conferred the bow to me, and I didn’t really have much choice in accepting it.

“You’ll never be ready for it if you keep wondering,” he said, “I spent a good deal on having this made, just for you. You deserve it, more than anyone else I know.”

“Even more than Tele'zica?” I asked. The very name made his face drop, and I fell sorry for bringing her up. “You know I would rather not have to think of her,” he said. I nodded and apologised. I felt the bow in my hands. I drew the string and fired at a blob of goo jumping around near the trees. It died instantly. Satisfied, I retrieved the arrow, and also some of the gold the blob had left behind.

I had an MP3 of the song. Yeah, that was a different era—YouTube was too unknown, and you didn’t have Spotify or Pandora to stream songs from. Back then, you searched high and low on the Internet for songs. And this song, from the MMO? Oh, it was rare. I found it on a file sharing tracker: a private one. It was like my little treasure. I played it over and over again. That probably explains my obsession with it.

Dorannir had been moved by the song too. Or well, that’s what I called him most of the time, but his screen name was Sugi49. The 49 stood for the year the People’s Republic of China was founded. He’d admitted that he’d had questionable taste in screen names as a kid. Any way, he had some video editing program, and he was working on a video for the song. It would have lyrics, and graphics and even animations and stuff. I think you kids call it ‘lyrics video’ nowadays.

“I know what you’re wishing,” I said to him over MSN Messenger, “You wish Tele'zica was here to hear the song.”

“Yeah,” he replied. He sent a nudge, which shook the entire chat window around. He knew I hated that.

I knew the full lyrics to the song by now, and I’d sung it a few times. Sugi49 wanted to hear me sing it, but my voice was too terrible for that.

I played the recording back. My microphone was terrible, and it picked up a lot of noise. All in all, it sounded like my voice was coming out of a shoddy radio. With a beating heart, I searched online for a host to upload it on (again, you have to remember that this was a time before Google Drive, Vocaroo, Dropbox and all these fancy services). I didn’t find one, so I told Sugi49 that I’m going to send it over MSN Messenger. And I did. And on my speed, it was going to take four hours to send one audio file. I sighed.

“It’s not really very good, and the microphone is bad too, so like, don’t judge it too much, okay?” I said.

Sugi49 lol’d. “I just hope neither of us have a disconnect. Then we’ll have start the transfer all over again,” he said. Ugh, I thought—disconnects are the worst.

I spent the next hour reading the MMO’s official forums. It was our own little community. A little hidey-hole from the rest of the world. I say this in retrospect, of course. Back then, it was just there—just so obvious, that I never even questioned it being there for me. I wouldn’t have used the term ‘escapist fantasy’ then because it just sounds so patronising. Like I’m a fucking child who needs escapist play to feel good about myself.

And then, on another lazy refresh, I saw the thread. It was Dorannir’s thread about the lyric video he’d made. “What the fuck?” I said to him over messenger, “You didn’t show me first?”

“Surprise!” he replied.

The video had been uploaded to this new video uploading site that was starting to pick up popularity. It was like Photobucket for videos, you could say. They called it… YouTube.

I started playing the video, and it took ages to buffer. I decided to leave it on buffer and left the computer. I helped mum cook, and she was glad about that, for once. I was glad I could make mum happy. Even though she’s a bitch most of the time.

When I returned, I hit play on the video. The video wasn’t really special, you have to understand. It was actually quite bad in comparison to what gets made today. But Sugi49 had poured his everything into it. It was full of effects. There were images from the game: wallpapers from the official site, key art, concept art, loading screens, even a screenshot or two. Sugi49 had used almost every transition and every effect available in his program. There was that old-timey-movie effect, there was the black-and-white, there was the shredder transition.

The song was ethereal, and Sugi49 had used imagery from outside the game, too. Clouds, forlorn-looking elven girls, full moons shining over the sea. There was an album cover, too. The band was Nightwish. He loved them, but I only got into metal much later.

And of course the video stopped buffering midway through. So much for waiting an hour for it to load.

Sugi49’s video blew up on the forum. No one had really made a lyrics video for this specific song from this specific MMO before, so it proved to be really popular, and a lot of players with internet connections far better than mine praised him for his effort and how cool the video was and asked him if he was going to make more.

He didn’t talk to me much that day. Of course he didn’t. He was too busy talking to people on the forum and answering private messages. He didn’t even show up in the game. I tried playing a bit myself, using my new bow, but I couldn’t bring myself to hum the song anymore. I didn’t even like being a Cleric class and using the bow. I wanted to punch the Cleric ‘Sister’ who sings the song in the game. It’s a stupid song.

I asked Sugi49 on Messenger if he listened to my recording. He said my connection dropped during the transfer and it was interrupted. I started the transfer again. Meanwhile, an anime episode I had on download finally completed downloading, so I hit play. As a side, I feel like the long downloads from back then really meant something. When you’ve had to spend days for an episode, weeks for a series, a month or two for a game, you start to treat them as something special. It’s almost like spending money on entertainment, except not.

I left a comment in the forum. “Nice video, Dorannir,” it said. Nice and simple. He never thanked me for it. Fine, I thought. I’ll just listen to J-Pop and anime themes. Fucking Sailor Moon cared more for me than Sugi49.

I didn’t really know what came over me to hate Sugi49’s popularity. It was like he’d been torn away from me. He’d become famous and now he probably didn’t care about little ol’ me. It was so stupid, but I couldn’t shake it off. Mum asked if I’ll help her cook. I told her I’m not feeling up to it. She said something passive aggressive. I sniped back. We argued. Also, fuck Sugi49.

In the evening, I asked him if he’d listened to my recording. He said he hadn’t. Then he checked, to make sure. Nope, the file download had stalled at 42% for some reason, and it wasn’t moving beyond that. We waited half an hour to be sure, and then cancelled the transfer. “This is never going to work,” I typed, and deleted a sad face emoticon before sending the message.

“Prolly not,” he said.

“Enjoying your new-found popularity?” I asked.

“Yeah sure, why not,” he replied.

“Well, there are people who don’t enjoy popularity, you know. Or like, there’s impostor syndrome, if you’ve heard of that,” I said.

“Ugh, so many PMs,” he said, “I give up answering all of them. Brb, gonna get some lunch.”

I played the recording of my voice again. And again. My own ugly voice singing to myself. I wanted to get on a boat, ride out into the middle of the ocean, and drown the damn recording. I’d let it sink to the bottom of the ocean floor only after I was sure it was dead. Unfortunately, digital data cannot be drowned.

That, and I’m scared shitless of open bodies of water.

Call it prophecy, call it a vision from the future, call it what you will. I realised how little all of this matters. I won't be playing this game forever. It's not even particularly huge, so it's almost likely going to be shut down at some point. Will Sugi49 and I still be friends then? Will the forums continue? Probably not the latter—those will be shut down with the game. The roleplays, the fanfiction, the discussion threads and polls, all gone. All the comments praising Dorannir and his mighty lyrics video would disappear into the aether of the internet, only to be resurrected in some Internet Archive page—if anyone cares to look.

It made me sad.

I messaged Sugi49. "Sorry," I said. "What for?" he said almost immediately. "I don't know, just sorry, I guess," I said. He sensed that I was having a pretty profound time right now, so he chose to accept the apology.

"Can you upload that audio to YouTube?" he asked me. He helped me put the audio into a video container with a basic title screen and a graphic of the game. It was kinda cool. I set it for upload, and sighed, almost certain that my connection was going to drop, or the upload was going to stall, or someone was going to bomb my house, or I was going to die in a flood, or something.

I went around looking at some fanart. and that's when I got a message from an excited Sugi49. "You won't believe what just happened," he said. I disagreed, but never mind. "Tele'zica just messaged me. She said the video is great. She's alive! I don't believe this," he said.

The irony is that he definitely didn't believe this, but I did. I mean, why the hell would I care enough to not believe it.

"What did she say?" I offered some interest.

"Nothing, just 'great video'," he said, but soon after added, "She's asking me how I am and stuff now. She's really back."

"Good for you," I typed, and deleted it without sending.The upload was working, so I just stared at the progress bar for a while. It moved really, really slow.

Somewhere in the game, in a forest where monsters once roamed, I sat down next to the campfire. "It's nice to be alone," I typed in the local chat. There was nobody around. Just me, and the chat box. There will be a time when even I won't be here. And the chat box won't be here. We'll only remember it by screenshots—old photographs proving that it once existed, and that it displayed people's messages.

Everything passes? The bow I have, that Dorannir spent so much gold on. The graphics and sounds here. All gone, but still tormenting me in my memories.

So what happened then? No, my YouTube video upload failed. And then at one point, my computer broke and I had to get the hard drive formatted, so I lost both the audio of me singing and the video I'd made out of it. Sugi49 and I stopped talking daily, then weekly, then monthly, and now we barely say hi.

Nearly a decade later, his lyrics video is still up on YouTube, although the comments have stopped trickling in. I can always revisit that—until YouTube is gone too, I guess.

This post was delayed due to technical issues.

Today’s throwback story is about a really tall tower.