#making me feel like a disjointed point floating in the void of reality

[misophoria]

the threads in my tapestry have been weaved through poison and still carry residues

[boreothegoldfinch]

chapter 11 paragraph viii

Inside the parking garage, which vibrated depressingly with olive-green light, there were a number of empty spaces in the long-term area despite the Full sign. As we nosed into the space a man in a sports coat lounging against a white Range Rover threw his cigarette in a spit of orange cinders and walked toward the car. His receding hairline, his tinted aviators and his taut military torso gave him the wind-whipped look of an ex-pilot, a man who monitored delicate instruments at some test site in the Urals. “Victor,” he said, when we got out of the car, crushing my hand in his. Gyuri and Boris received a thump on the back. After terse preliminaries in Russian, a baby-faced curly-headed teenager climbed out of the driver’s seat and was greeted, by Boris, with a slap on the cheek and a jaunty seven note whistle: On the Good Ship Lollipop. “This is Shirley T,” he said to me, rumpling the corkscrew curls. “Shirley Temple. We all call him that—why? Can you guess?”—laughing as the kid, unable to help it, smiled in embarrassment, displaying deep dimples. “Do not be deceived by looks,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “Shirley looks like baby but he has as much onions as any of us here.” Politely, Shirley nodded at me—did he speak English? it didn’t seem so— and opened the back door of the Range Rover for us and the three of us climbed in—Boris, Gyuri, and me—while Victor Cherry sat up front and talked to us from the passenger seat. “This should be easy,” he said to me formally as we pulled out of the garage and back out onto the Overtoom. “Straightforward pawn.” Up close his face was broad and knowing, with a small prim mouth and a wry alertness that made me feel somewhat less agitated about the logic of the evening, or the lack of it: the car changes, the lack of direction and information, the nightmare foreignness. “We are doing Sascha a favor and because of that? He is going to behave nice to us.” Long low buildings. Disjointed lights. There was a sense that it wasn’t happening, that it was happening to someone who wasn’t me. “Because can Sascha walk in bank and get a loan on the painting?” Victor was saying, pedantically. “No. Can Sascha walk in a pawn shop and get a loan on the painting? No. Can Sascha due to circumstances of theft go to any of his usual connections from Horst and get a loan on the painting? No. Therefore Sascha is extremely glad of the appearance of mystery American—you—who I have hooked him up with.” “Sascha shoots heroin the way that you and I breathe,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “One stitch of money and he is out buying big load of drugs like clockwork.” Victor Cherry adjusted his glasses. “Exactly. He is not art lover and he is not particular. He is utilizing picture like high interest credit card or so he thinks. Investment for you—cash for him. You front him the money—you hold the painting as security—he buys schmeck, keeps half, steps on the rest and sells it, and returns with double your money in one month to pick up the painting. And if? In one month he does not return with double your money? The painting is yours. Like I said. Simple pawn.”

“Except not so simple—” Boris stretched, and yawned—“because when you vanish? and bank draft is bad? What can he do? If he runs to Horst and calls for help on this one he will have his neck broken for him.” “I am glad they have changed the meeting place so many times. It is a little bit ridiculous. But it helps because today is Friday,” said Victor, taking off his aviators and polishing them on his shirt. “I made them think you were backing out. Because they kept cancelling and changing the plan—you did not even arrive until today, but they do not know that—because they kept changing the plan I told them you were tired and nervous of sitting around Amsterdam with suitcase of green waiting to hear from them, you’d rebanked your moneys and were flying back to U.S. They did not like to hear that. So—” he nodded at the bag—“here it is the weekend, and banks are closed, and you are bringing what cash you have, and—well, they have been talking to me plenty, lots of time on the phone and I have met with them once already down in a bar in the Red Light, but they have agreed to bring the painting and make the exchange tonight without prior meeting of you, because I have told them your plane leaves tomorrow, and because they have fucked around on their end it is bank draft for the balance or nothing. Which —well, they did not like, but they accepted as proper explanation for bank draft. Makes things easier.” “Much easier,” said Boris. “I was not sure how bank draft was going to go over. Better if they think the bank draft is their own fault for dicking around.” “What’s the place?” “Lunchcafe.” He pronounced it as one word. “De Paarse Koe.” “That means ‘the Purple Cow’ in Dutch,” said Boris helpfully. “Hippie place. Close to the Red Light.” Long lonely street—shut-up hardware stores, stacks of brick by the side of the road, all of it important and hyper-significant somehow even though it was speeding by in the dark much too fast to see. “Food is so awful,” said Boris. “Sprouts and some hard old wheat toast. You would think hot girls go there but is just old gray-head women and fat.” “Why there?” “Because quiet street in the evening,” said Victor Cherry. “Lunchcafe is closed, after hours, but because semi-public nothing will get out of control, see?” Everywhere: strangeness. Without noticing it I’d left reality and crossed the border into some no-man’s-land where nothing made sense. Dreaminess, fragmentation. Rolled wire and piles of rubble with the plastic sheeting blown to the side. Boris was speaking to Victor in Russian; and when he realized I was looking at him, he turned to me. “We are only saying, Sascha is in Frankfurt tonight,” he said, “hosting party at a restaurant for some friend of his just got out of jail, and we are all of us confirmed on this from three different sources, Shirley too. He thinks he is being smart, staying out of town. If it gets back to Horst what has happened here tonight he wants to be able to throw up his hands and say, ‘Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.’ ” “You,” said Victor to me, “you are based in New York. I have said you are an art dealer, arrested for forgery, and now run an operation like Horst’s— much smaller scale in terms of paintings, much larger in terms of money.” “Horst—God bless him,” said Boris. “Horst would be the richest man in New York except he gives it all away, every cent. Always has. Supports many many persons besides himself.” “Bad for business.” “Yes. But he enjoys company.” “Junkie philanthropist, ha,” said Victor. He pronounced it philanthropist. “Good they die off time to time or who knows how many schmeckheads crammed in that dump with him. Anyway—less you say in there, the better. They will not be expecting polite conversation. This is all business. It will be fast. Give him the bank draft, Borya.” Boris said something sharp in Ukrainian. “No, he should produce it himself. It should be from his hand.” Both bank draft, and deposit slip, were printed with the words Farruco Frantisek, Citizen Bank Anguilla, which only increased the sense of dream trajectory, a

track speeding up too fast to slow down. “Farruco Frantisek? I’m him?” Under the circumstances it felt like a meaningful question—as if I might be somehow disembodied or at least had passed beyond a certain horizon where I was freed of basic facts like identity. “I did not choose the name. I had to take what I could get.” “I’m supposed to introduce myself as this?” There was something wrong with the paper, which was too flimsy, and the fact that the slips said Citizen Bank and not Citizen’s Bank made them look all wrong. “No, Cherry will introduce you.”

Farruco Frantisek. Silently I tried the name out, turned my tongue around it. Even though it was a hard name to remember, it was just strong and foreign enough to carry the lost-in-space hyperdensity of the black streets, tram tracks, more cobblestones and neon angels—back in the old city now, historic and unknowable, canals and bicycle racks and Christmas lights shaking on the dark water. “When were you going to tell him?” Victor Cherry was asking Boris. “He needs to know what his name is.” “Well now he knows.” Unknown streets, incomprehensible turns, anonymous distances. I’d stopped even trying to read the street signs or keep track of where we were. Of everything around me—of all I could see—the only point of reference was the moon, riding high above the clouds, which though bright and full seemed weirdly unstable somehow, void of gravity, not the pure anchoring moon of the desert but more like a party trick that might pop out at a conjurer’s wink or else float away into the darkness and out of sight.

[ofphcenixes]

( ooc note about why i am the absolute worst ! )

this is such a random note i know, and admittedly i’ve spent the entire day composing this. so if it’s a little disjointed or illogical, i want to apologise in advance ! however i have included this nice gif of luke - it doesn’t have anything to do with the post, just thought it would make it more appealing dkjfgdf. admittedly this is going to be a bit of a Long Boi™, but it is kinda.... relevant if you’ve ever tried to write/plot with me, or are wondering what’s going on with nate. behold, all your answers are below ! i’ll put a tldr at the bottom plus a nifty little vine compilation for anyone that reads this but, please don’t feel pressured to do so ! ya girl is just a Mess dkfjgd. 

the first thing i want to address is the elephant in the room; nathaniel ballantyne. i know a lot of people are curious about his fate, his place in the plot drop, why he vanished so much earlier than everyone else. is he actually guilty ? is he a martyr ? is he a red herring ? well, here’s the tea on mr nathaniel ballantyne: 

he is on indefinite hiatus. 

a lot of people probably wonder why. i will get into the specifics of the why in a little bit (when i said this was a Long Boi i was not kidding lmfao), but basically... he’s a very difficult character to write. i am not a veteran rper, and in all honesty, i can count on my hands the amount of rps i’ve been in. and there are only 5 characters i’ve ever written about and cared enough to remember. one of those is nate. for those of you that know him, he is a strange and eccentric character. entirely up his own ass at times, pretentious as hell. but he, to me, was a character i grew attached to. he was different from people i normally write, and despite how abstract he was, he was.... realistic to me. my deep rooted attachment to him is why it took me so long to see how hard it was for me to write replies with him, to understand the guilt i felt any time i plotted or wrote with him, and the fact he was so mentally taxing it would take five times as much time to write a reply for him than it would any other character. but the sad truth is, even though i only felt guilt related to him, even though i haven’t had muse for him honestly for months now, i kept him. because i love him, even if he isn’t loved by many others. and so part of the reason he is now where he is is the simple fact that i know he didn’t mesh with the group, and that’s okay ! he was a very difficult character to reply to, and now that he is gone, i feel that burden of guilt lifting already.

as for his plot related departure, the truth is i didn’t have the heart to kill him off, hence why he kinda is just out there in a weird in between space dkjfgdf. and ( as i’ll explain below ) if my life ever does even out at any point, i really want to bring him back should there be space for him. so this indefinite hiatus was made for many reasons, and it absolutely broke my heart to have to get to this point. i love nate, and i am going to miss him. and i hope that in due time, i will have the capacity to bring him back soon ! but in case i don’t, i just want everyone to know that i appreciate every second i spent writing with you all on nate, and that the time and effort people poured into him means the world to me. and i’m so, so sorry to the people who are disappointed in me for this, because i know there are probably a few. i have let so many of you down, and honestly this is a burden i am going to carry for a very long time. i am going to message people tomorrow when i am more Coherent so, i promise to do my best to atone for this kgdf.

but to segue into that a little more ( oh look, another elephant in the room ! what is this, dumbo 2: electric boogaloo ), as an admin, i know there are expectations we are supposed to meet. examples we should set. precedents we have to lay down. 

and i know i have disappointed every single one of you in this rp. 

from my slow ( to non-existent ) dash activity, for the anxiety that has left me unable to reply to dms or reply in the main group chat, to even the fear of godmodding in ask memes on a thursday. i know this seems perfectly illogical to most, and again, i completely understand the disappointment that so many of you feel towards me. and it’s that very disappointment which djkgdf ironically has made it harder for me to get on and be the admin that you all deserve. 

the real difficult thing about all of this is, i love veritas. and for those of you who were in veritas 1, would know that this is not who i usually am. this experience is not representative of the person i want to be, nor the rper that i usually present myself as. but as to avoid going into too triggering content and bothering you all with tmi details about my life problems lmfao, please rest assured that these past few months have been. absolutely brutal for me. from almost losing my opa to illness, from ongoing family issues and expectations, being kicked out of home among a list of other shit, my mental health has been as low as gfkdgdf it has ever been in my life tbh, and it’s been the hardest thing in the world to get on. all my attentions with veritas has been in the main, as the main is a very taxing job ( as you know, we are very plot centric ! ) and i would more often than not get so worn out with being an admin, my characters fell by the wayside. not to mention, as sort of dkfgjdf touched on before, i have massive anxiety when it comes to messaging people. why ? i don’t know. especially as i have wanted to plot with all of you extensively and deeply since we opened, and reading every single app made my heart beat a little faster with joy. i am so honoured to be an admin here, and each and every one of you are such an incredible writer and person that i can’t help but feel overwhelmed and guitlty about how much i have let you all down. especially for those who sent me dms that i either forgot about or never replied to because i got so anxious, i feel so guilty every day about it all and i just wish i could go back in time and change it. 

and the reality is, if i wasn’t an admin and co-creator of this group, i probably would have dropped out a long time ago, give the space to someone worthy, and i wouldn’t be filled with so much guilt. but the truth is, i am a selfish person dgdgdf. veritas has been that sort of dkfgjdf good, steady thing in my life that i looked forward to, and i couldn’t bear the thought of losing that. each and every one of you create the fabric that is this amazing atmosphere, and even though i’m less seen and heard compared to most others in this group, being part of veritas gives me a sense of belonging. and in a strange sense, a home. yes, i know i was selfish, and yes, i should have handled things much better than i did. but you all need to know from the bottom of my heart how sorry i am for everything that has transpired. ):

but i think the worst part of it all is that, my beautiful co-admin maaria, and my best friend. among letting you all down, i know i have let her down the most. and i just want to take my soapbox moment for a second here and really put light into how much maaria has done for this group. especially when my own life has been in shambles, and knowing she’s going through her own problems, she always provides for you all. she is always here, always online, always around to make you laugh or smile. she provides for all of us, and is honestly a miracle worker. i don’t think i will ever deserve her forgiveness for everything, but i hope she knows how loved she is, and i hope you all show her your sentiments too ! she is the heart of veritas, and fdjg she means the world to me, and i just really want her to know that.

but that was. a lot of emotions and obviously i haven’t talked about everything in my life ( i do not want to bore you and honestly i don’t wanna make y’all sad dkfjghdkfjgdfgdf ) none of this really means anything if things aren’t going to change. so get ready for some Bullet Point Action because here is my proposal: 

nEw SkElEtOn: although nate is on hiatus and sorta just gonna, float out there in the void of time, and even though i really want to bring him back soon i don’t know if/when i will, i have felt immense guilt for hoarding his spot in this rp for someone who could be more active. hence, a solution: a new skeleton ! as i am not comfortable with nate’s skeleton being open, we have created a new skeleton with connections to all nate’s old connections, which should hit the main very soon ! 

new discord: this is probably unnecessary but dfkgjdfg i have a lot of anxiety about discord. when i get a new message i’m always like ??? AAH A GHOST. idk why. and because of that, i skip a message once, and now there are so many unanswered messages i have a heart attack every time i open my app. so, to prevent that, i am going to make a new discord account ! ( lilacrps #i forgot the number lmao ). i will be adding everyone as Friends and if you’ve ever sent me something i never responded to, or for some odd reason you wanna talk to me, a human mess, please know now that with a fresh slate i will ensure i can reply to you. i am not gonna let my anxiety win this time. 

schedule: part of my issue is that i dfkjgdf always felt pressure to do everything all the time and then when i couldn’t, i fell under pressure. so dkfgjdf i am now having designated plotting and reply days ! so even though i hope to be far more active in both regards, i just need people to understand things won’t be instant, but i am holding myself accountable not only for myself, but for the rp - as that is what an admin should do.

this got super long and i highly doubt anyone is actually gonna read this lmao BUT. the main point is - i love every single one of you all so much, and i can’t apologise enough for how much i have let you all down. i know we all feel it, and i’m more than happy to accept my flaws and how blatant they’ve been in the past few months. so this is my pledge to every single one of you that i promise to do better (and if i don’t, you can kick me out dkjfgdf). 

TLDR: I have been a terrible admin and friend, and I’m here to say sorry. With a new discord and personal plotting schedule, things are going to change. 

If I can’t cure my depression, maybe I can cure yours.

[theninjamouse]

Ok I did my waiting! 12 years of it

SO I will put my thoughts and theories under a cut. They’re probably going to be disjointed and all over the place but I’ve got to at least get some of my thoughts down. And these are just thoughts that will probably change once I play the game again and see other’s theories. But here we go!

Holy crap. HOLY FREAKING CRAP. Of all things I was expecting, this wasn’t it. 

First things first, in the beginning when that ‘voice’ is talking to us, I’m fairly sure that it’s Gaster. Or at least, some part of Gaster. The track that plays during this intro bit is called ANOTHER HIM

Another version of Gaster than the one we know? This would make sense, seeing that he was shattered across time and space. This piece that has reached out to us is just a piece, another piece of HIM

And I bet if you speed it up, it will be Gaster’s theme, or some version of it. It sounds way too similar not to be

Allowing us to create a vessel and then throwing it away of course shocked me. But it does make sense in a way. Maybe it’s a sign of showing us that whatever happens is out of our control at this point. We don’t get a say in what happens next. 

It’s already been pointed out that so many of the names and places we’ve seen are anagrams of the orginal game. Kris= Frisk, Deltarune=Undertale, Ralsei=Asriel and so on. 

Now a theory that @little-red-gingersnap talked about was maybe this place is something that Gaster created for himself in the Void. That would explain the familiarity of some of the characters and the hidden monster behind the bars who claimed that they were the one that was free. 

When we first fell down, there was much more of a Void type feeling to the place. Darkness, pieces of rock and stuff just floating off in the distance. Like the place we fell into was only half formed. But as we went further in the world solidified. It became more ‘real’. And there were no more flickering glitches right on the edge of the screen.

But of course after seeing the ending scene of the game I have to shift my thinking a bit. It’s possible that this world was created by Chara using one of the Souls they gained after bringing back a genocide world. You notice that there are no other humans around. And when you visit the monster in the hospital, he talks about how his daughter is scared of humans under the bed, which leads me to believe that humans are no longer around, save for Kris. 

So what if this is a timeline where Chara was successful in destroying humanity and claiming the surface for monsters? 

When we return to the school, I couldn’t help but notice that there were several toys and such lying around, like the chessboard, that reflected the puzzles and mazes we came across in this Dark kingdom. The whole thing almost plays like a regular game that a child would dream up. Falling into a hidden kingdom, traveling with found companions to defeat an evil king? 

It could be that Kris or Chara or even Gaster just created this story line for fun. A way to pass time. 

I need to play the game again now that I’ve had some time to process and really look for those hidden signs and secrets that Toby likes to hide

Now, as for being back up on the surface. I, of course, wanted to find Grillby. 

And he wasn’t there. But you know what was? 

 His bar. And unlike the other places up there, like the diner or the police station, this one is almost identical to the one underground. And I can’t help but notice that the ‘S is the exact same and that it almost looks like the rest of the writing has been painted over. 

Why is that? Why is this ONE PLACE so close to the original? And where is Grillby? There’s an obvious poke at him:

But the guy himself is nowhere to be found. 

As for the other differences, those have been touched on already by others. Undyne and Alphys not knowing each other, Gerson being freaking DEAD and everything else. It’s weird, it’s almost a little unsettling. And I think that’s a clear sign that whatever this is, it’s not the world of Undertale we know. An alternate timeline? A fake reality created by Gaster or Chara? 

What the heck is up with the creepy red door covered by vines? The entrance to the Underground? Is that where all the humans are? Does it lead back to the Void? 

All I know is I am absolutely pumped and a little terrified to see what comes next. 

[thezeekrecord]

GAGEGN ch6

[index/summary]

REPORT: Regarding G.Freeman and his involvement with the resonance cascade, and his influence of reality

When you’re thrown into an entirely new situation, you don’t normally begin to ask questions such as, “what did I eat for breakfast this morning?”, “what elementary school did I go to?”, or “if I can’t remember these things, or anything else prior to the minute I stepped into work this morning, does that mean this world is fake?” You just focus on the dangers at hand. The aliens and soldiers coming at you, the people you want to protect who put themselves in danger time and time again, the puzzles you have to solve—all these things take priority. You don’t have time to question your existence when your life is on the line.

So that’s all Gordon Freeman focused on when the resonance cascade hit—at first, at least. Little questions began to creep up, questions that made his head hurt when he thought about it a little too hard. Why was there music nobody else could hear? What was causing Dr. Coomer to mistake barnacles for ropes over and over again? Why was it that, whenever his colleagues definitely died, they would always reappear completely healthy? The good news was, he rarely had time to really dwell on these questions. He just pushed on relentlessly, because that’s what you do. You push on and on, you try over and over, you keep moving until the world decides it’s time for you to stop. And when you stop, you dream of a completely empty void where you can’t move or speak or even breathe, because you have no body with which to move, and there’s no air with which to breathe.

That’s perfectly normal.

Something very fortunate for Gordon was how shockingly resilient he was. He was capable of withstanding an absurd amount of pain—it sucked, sure, but he fell from massive distances and only had to lie there for a moment before he’d be back on his feet. The bad news was, when you have such a high pain tolerance, sometimes you barely even recognize when you’re getting hit. There would be points when he could hear gunfire and he’d turn around, only to realize he was the one getting shot at, and then the pain would hit. That was also normal, though; sometimes your body just takes a minute to catch up. You have to recognize that you should be in pain for your brain to process it, right? That’s normal. And he’d take it over being in debilitating pain, given their current circumstances.

At least, that’s how it was for a while. Benry and Bubby had been acting so strangely, and now were urging him to enter a room in the most suspicious way possible. As the lights clicked off around him, leaving him in total darkness, Gordon felt a sharp pain against the back of his head. He let out a grunt as he stumbled forward, just in time for the sensation of a knee slamming into his stomach, knocking the air from his lungs. He collapsed to the ground, trying desperately to take out one of his weapons, but was stopped by a pair of hands that wrenched his arms roughly behind him. He could hear the voices of the others, Tommy so whole-heartedly terrified for his safety while Bubby and Benry cheered for Gordon’s downfall, and Dr. Coomer only characteristically commenting something about Playcoins. Not that any of them could truly understand, Gordon caught himself thinking. He withstood a few more hard hits helplessly, any attempted movement sluggish and weak. Like the particles of reality were thickening around him, slowing him down and restraining him. He tried one last time to pull away from his captors as he saw a brief glint in the corner of his eye—something shiny catching in what little light there was left in the room—then...

The worst, sharp, agonizingly white hot pain Gordon had ever experienced in his entire life, slicing through skin, tendons, bone—he let out a strangled scream, burning nausea rising in his stomach until he could taste stomach acids. It had never been this bad. Not once in his whole life had he experienced pain this way. This pain rattled him to his very core, it tore at his mind like the knife was glowing hot and dissecting his brain. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He choked back vomit as he heard the remains of his arm drop to the floor, completely severed from his body. His head began spinning as his captors roughly took hold of him, only barely processing what his friends—no, the ones who had betrayed him—said as they left the room in a hurry, allowing him to be dragged away by soldiers.

Something was wrong.

Well, clearly—he’d just been betrayed by people he’d been nothing but helpful to. He’d saved their lives more times than he could count, and this was how they treated him? For however furious he was about that, though, that wasn’t it.

It was that pain he’d been in. It was so different from all the other pain he’d ever experienced. It wasn’t even just physical—it had scarred his mind, left him with an ever pervasive sense of wrongness that nagged at him the rest of their journey. When you shake a box, you can get a sense of what might be inside—so when his entire reality was shaken around him, he finally came to notice a presence in his head that understood everything; but despite his efforts in little moments of downtime, he couldn’t quite tap into it.

Sometimes it would slip out, though. Dr. Coomer seemed to understand what was going on much more than he did, and when he asked Gordon such a simple, heart-wrenching question, that part of Gordon took over.

“None of this is real, is it?” Dr. Coomer asked, stood in front of his passport.

“...No.” Gordon replied automatically. So sympathetically, so honest. Like a parent who can only nod when confronted by their child who figured out the true fate of their beloved pet. Absolutely no point in lying for their own protection, anymore.

It had come from his own mouth, but Gordon wasn’t sure why he said it. And he wished he hadn’t. So, he did what anyone else in his position would do: he pushed it out of his mind and forgot about it.

It hadn’t been an easy journey, by any means. Gordon had been close to death so many times he lost count, and as they reached the end of their journey, he really felt like they were on the verge of their entire world unraveling around them. Gordon and the others finished off the ultimate showdown against Benry, though, only barely making it out by the skin of their teeth, but they made it. Everything was going to be okay, Gordon thought for a moment as Benry’s massive form floated above them in a blinding light that slowly enveloped them, wiping away the entire world they had just occupied.

And Gordon’s efforts were rewarded with an invitation—no, a threat—to show up at Tommy’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

Gordon sat sideways on one of the chairs in a sea of empty tables as strange electronic music played, staring off in the distance as everyone else enjoyed the party. He looked down at the sharp angles of his hands. They felt like they were miles away from him, his consciousness slowly drifting away until he’d fade directly out of his body. He could see and hear everything just fine, physically, and yet there was a harsh disconnect, like he was in Bubby’s tube, a thick layer of something keeping him away from everything else.

“Mr. Freeman?”

Gordon looked up, eyes struggling to focus on Tommy. Tommy pulled up a chair beside him, fiddling with a Beyblade in his hands. “Are you doing okay?” He asked gently.

“Wh...yeah, of course.” Gordon replied hastily. “Why wouldn’t I be? We just beat Benry, it’s your birthday, everything’s alright now. You should go enjoy it.”

“Well, yeah, but you should enjoy it too, Mr. Freeman.” Tommy insisted. “Come on, you should come dance with us!”

“Uhh...maybe later.” Gordon said, trying to sound genuine. “I think I’m just gonna sit here for a few. I’m really tired after...you know, everything that just happened.”

“...Alright.” Tommy muttered, standing up. There was something in his eyes—something he wanted to say, but must have been thinking better of. He turned slowly back to his father, who was sat on a bench and watching Tommy expectantly as he approached him.

Gordon looked back in front of him. God, he was exhausted. Maybe life would make more sense after he managed to get a full, good night’s sleep in a real bed, in real pajamas. Sleep deprivation did a lot to people’s heads, right? That was probably why he was feeling so...disjointed.

Gordon sat through the rest of the birthday party in relative silence, watching everyone else have a good time. He wanted to find it charming, how everyone else finally got a chance to sit down and relax in what seemed to be true safety, but his brain was stretched thin by a pair of uncaring hands, a rubber band threatening to snap at any second. They’d just been through hell. They’d just killed someone who turned massive and overpowered, only barely making it out by the seat of their pants. Reality probably wasn’t what it seemed, and did any of them care? Did they have the capacity to care?

Who the fuck is Gordon Freeman?

****

“Gordon Freeman is...an interesting, very powerful, subject.” Tommy’s father looked pointedly at Mr. Freeman sitting alone at one of the tables.

“Yeah. He’s...he’s the player.” Tommy replied, brow furrowed. “I know that already.”

“Not necessarily.” Tommy’s father said, turning back to look at Tommy. “He’s more of a...puppet, if you will. He is now facing a—difficult, crisis, that will greatly affect all of us.”

Tommy frowned, looking down at his hands. “...Well, we’re all gonna disappear soon, anyway—right?”

Tommy’s father was quiet for a long moment. “Possibly.”

“Umm...can I ask you something? Before we go?” Tommy asked.

“Go right ahead, Tommy.”

“That was you who—who got me my job at Black Mesa.” Tommy said. He had intended it to be a prodding question, but it came out as a statement instead, and his father simply nodded. “So—you...you’ve been around all along, you uhh—you knew where I was. Why didn’t you raise me, then?”

Tommy’s father raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Well, I am a very...busy, man, Tommy. I have intergalactic matters to handle.”

“Intergalactic?” Tommy echoed in disbelief.

“Yes, Tommy, of course. Don’t tell me you never realized.”

Well. This might as well happen, Tommy thought as he looked back at Mr. Freeman. He might as well realize his father was an alien after everything, right when he was about to disappear forever. If he weren’t trying so hard not to fall into despair about his upcoming demise, he might have pushed it further with his father, asking him more questions about his conception and why he was left behind. As it was now, though, he didn’t think he had the energy to care too much.

With a short sigh, Tommy turned to his dad again. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Hmmm?”

“What the fuck happened with Benry? Do you—do you know?”

Tommy’s father took in a sharp breath that turned out to be a strange sigh. “The one you know as Benry, is, an anomaly I cannot fully understand. I may have been the, catalyst, in what...brought him to be, but—I have the feeling you are closer to the answer, than I am.”

Tommy frowned. That wasn’t a satisfying answer at all, but again, it was hard to be too caught up in the details when he was about to die soon.

“We don’t have...very much time left. You ought to enjoy your, party, Tommy.” Tommy’s father said with something close to a smile. “I did this all for you.”

Tommy pressed his lips into a thin line and nodded. “Okay. Thanks, uhhh...” Tommy paused. He didn’t even know this man’s name, and he most certainly wasn’t going to call him Dad. He finally stood, glancing to his friends. Sunkist was here, enjoying herself in a new environment. Mr. Freeman was still staring into space alone, and Bubby and Dr. Coomer were currently dancing hand-in-hand. Maybe he’d try one more time to corral Mr. Freeman, get him to have fun in their final moments like everyone else. He wouldn’t want anyone to be alone and moping at a time like this. Tommy put on as convincing a smile as he could muster when he turned back to his father. “...Thanks.”

****

Ksshh. “Hello? Testing, testing...is...is this thing on?”

If there were any eyes left to open, one might have seen a pair open curiously, searching for the general direction of the friendly, grandfatherly voice reverberating into nothingness—never reaching anyone’s ears, because there were no ears left to hear him.

“Ah! Hello, Gordon!”

Oh. Gordon Freeman. Someone had existed, once, by that name. Had heard that phrase countless times, always reaffirming, always a reminder that Gordon Freeman was the one speaking, the one being referred to. Not anyone else. Not an unseen pair of eyes watching, an unseen pair of hands puppeting the man they spoke to like a marionette.

As if sensing these facts that were ringing out into what little reality there was left, rapidly dissipating like echoes, the one who was still firmly Dr. Harold Pontiff Coomer spoke again. “I’m...a-assuming that’s your real name...you wouldn’t lie to us. Would you?”

No. Of course not. It wasn’t anything insidious like that; it was a half truth, something that really didn’t need to be made known to the NPCs, because—

“Well...you finally did it! You survived the resonance cascade! You brought us all to hell and back, alive! You made it to the ultimate birthday bash at the end of the world! You beat the video game!”

Oh, so he wasn’t talking to Gordon. He was talking to the unseen puppeteer. He made polite, friendly, desperate pleas to not be forgotten by the puppeteer. If Gordon Freeman still existed, if he had a stomach, it would be churning at the thought of leaving Dr. Harold P. Coomer and all his other friends behind.

As the sound of a phone clicking into place echoed into the final remnants of reality, the very last particles of what could be considered something even faintly existing were starting to fade. But the faint concept of a man feeling sick at the idea of his friends disappearing forever flashed harshly in the void like lightning, zapping across the final flecks of reality. It burst into a cascade of colors, hardening into structures that began to build themselves before the man’s very eyes—which had blinked once, twice, three times, practically willing themselves into existence. He watched reality spark to life, piece by piece, forming around him at the center of an entirely new universe.

Gordon Freeman could shape it to his will, take hold and make it his own

if only he knew how to reach out.

Gordon woke up again in Chuck E. Cheese, lying flat on his back with his hands on his stomach. He stared up at the fluorescent lights that burned into his eyes, listening to the sounds of the others waking up as one of the employees urged them to leave. Yes, they should leave, he thought. But he didn’t move an inch. There was a disconnect in his brain—he could feel his body from head to toe, he could blink, he could breathe; but he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out how to willingly move his body.

Dr. Coomer knelt down beside him, placing a comforting hand to his shoulder. “Come along, Gordon, we’d better leave this fine establishment.” He said gently.

Gordon blinked. He took a deep breath, then twitched a finger on his left hand. He closed his eyes tightly, slowly lifting one hand to his head as he pushed himself up onto his elbow with the other. Bit by bit, movement by tiny movement, Gordon stood, looking around at the restaurant carefully. Had everything always been this...bright? This sharp? Smooth? Real?

Gordon instinctively took a headcount. Benry was dead, Darnold hadn’t showed up, and Tommy’s dad seemed to have disappeared—good, Gordon thought—leaving him only with Bubby, Tommy, and Dr. Coomer. A manageable group. They ushered him out of the restaurant, doors pointedly locking behind them as they stood in the cool night air. Gordon pinched the bridge of his nose as he tried to get his thoughts together.

“I...guess I can take you guys to my place for now.” He suggested, throat distinctly uncomfortable in an unfamiliar way as he spoke. “Jesus Christ, my head hurts.”

“I would love to see your house, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer replied kindly.

Gordon began looking around, trying to get his bearings on where the hell they were when a sound echoed from around the corner of the building. It was a quiet chittering, something that immediately brought to mind small, sharp legs ending in claws, flinging themselves directly at his face, trying to latch on and take control. Gordon took in a sharp breath, whirling around and lifting his hand to summon his crowbar. He closed his fist, making a clicking motion, but nothing appeared.

Wait, why would that summon his crowbar? He couldn’t just summon a crowbar. Gordon looked down at his hands.

“Where the fuck is my crowbar?” He murmured to himself.

Something round stepped out from around the corner. Gordon took a long step back, clicking on the flashlight in the HEV suit to shine on their assailant; revealing something decidedly not a headcrab. It was fluffy, mostly non-threatening—just a raccoon. Gordon let out a relieved sigh, clicking the flashlight back off and turning back around to investigate their surroundings before a sharp pain shot through his head. He pressed his hands to his temples, trying to alleviate the pain a little with a quiet grunt.

“Are you alright, Mr. Freeman?” Tommy asked gently. “Maybe you should get some sleep.”

Gordon shut his eyes, feeling the strong, comforting arm of Dr. Coomer around his shoulders. “I agree, Gordon, we should get you home. Where do you live? We can take a taxi!”

Gordon struggled big time giving the taxi driver directions to his apartment. He didn’t remember his address, and he didn’t have any sort of identification on him that had his address printed on it—oh god, he was probably going to have to make a trip to the DMV to replace his ID if he left his wallet at Black Mesa—so he did his best to give the driver shitty landmarks. It’s near a gas station, the one with the bear statue in front I think? It’s tall, it’s probably near a street called Terry Avenue. Eventually, the well-seasoned driver got them to the parking lot, and once Dr. Coomer graciously paid the driver, Gordon directed them up to what he was pretty sure must have been the correct floor, then what was probably the right door. Remembering he had no keys, he knocked and prayed.

Gordon didn’t recognize the person at the door immediately, leaving him to wonder if he’d gone to the wrong door—but he looked back at him with recognition in his eyes.

“Gordon! Holy shit!” The person blurted out. “You were gone for so long, I thought you died.”

“I—yeah, sorry about that.” Gordon replied awkwardly. Now that he was talking, Gordon was beginning to remember: although Gordon normally dropped Joshua off at a daycare center before work, sometimes he expected to be working particularly long into the evening after the daycare closed, thus requiring a babysitter. And his usual go-to was an old college friend. Damn, did he really have friends outside Black Mesa? Gordon suddenly wondered. “I can pay you back for the extra time.”

“What? Pay me? Did you hit your head or something?” His friend asked, jabbing him playfully with his elbow. “Josh was worried about you, dude.”

“Aww, poor guy.” Gordon murmured. “He asleep now?”

“Yeah, he went down about an hour ago.”

“So...uh, listen, I’ll...talk to you later about everything, but for now, I just need to get to bed.” Gordon went on, frowning apologetically at him. “We just went through a lot.”

He looked past Gordon, at his new group of friends. “...Yeah, seems like it. Sure, just call me later, I guess.”

“Of course. Thanks, man, really.”

Eventually, the babysitter was on his way, and Gordon led the group quietly into the apartment. He poked his head into Joshua’s room, relaxing a little at the sight of his son—he was sound asleep with his head on the wrong end of the bed, blankets tangled around him—and quietly shut the door to let him rest. He could say hi in the morning, he reminded himself. He helped the science team get settled in the living room, Tommy volunteering to take the mat he rolled out on the floor while Dr. Coomer and Bubby settled right up against each other on the pullout couch. Gordon sighed as he tried fruitlessly to get the HEV suit to unlock.

“Man, how am I supposed to take this thing off?” Gordon whispered in exasperation.

Tommy was on his feet in an instant, circling around Gordon to help examine the suit. It took quite some struggling, shoving things into ports in the back until they heard a satisfying clunk, and the suit finally unlatched around Gordon’s body; he was able to take it apart piece by piece with Tommy’s help until he was left only in the skin-tight jumpsuit always worn underneath the HEV suit. With a deep sigh of relief, Gordon collected the pieces of the HEV suit and dropped them in the kitchen near the garbage, to be disposed of later.

“Thanks, man.” Gordon said quietly to Tommy, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“Mr. Freeman, what about your hand?” Tommy asked, indicating to Gordon’s new hand.

“Oh. Yeah.” Gordon lifted his new prosthetic for Tommy to see fully, styled exactly like the HEV suit. “Uhh, your dad sorta gave this to me. It’s not part of the suit or anything, I guess it’s just my hand, now.”

Tommy didn’t say anything, just quietly examined the hand.

“You guys need anything else?” Gordon asked, turning to Bubby and Dr. Coomer.

“I need you to let me fucking sleep.” Bubby grumbled from the pullout couch.

Bubby’s tone was harsh, but it was hard to take him seriously with Dr. Coomer nestled comfortably right up against him. Gordon almost called them cute, only deciding against it when he realized Bubby may bite his head off if he did. “Yeah, alright. G’night, guys.”

Gordon stopped at Joshua’s door as he headed for his room, opening it quietly to check on him again. He stepped inside this time, kneeling down at the edge of his bed. Gently, doing his very best not to wake him, Gordon placed his hand on his small chest, feeling it rise and fall as he breathed.

He could see him, he could hear him, feel him—so he had to be real, Gordon asserted to himself.

Gordon left Joshua alone after that, closing the door as quietly as possible behind him and heading back to his own room. He didn’t even have the energy to bother changing into proper pajamas; as far as he was concerned, the jumpsuit was ten times more comfortable than the HEV suit, therefore suitable to sleep in. So he dropped face-down into his bed, nestling comfortably into his blankets. Oh, god, he hadn’t been this comfortable since...

Well...

Gordon couldn’t recall.

****

It was the deepest night of sleep Gordon had ever gotten in his life, but he didn’t necessarily reap the benefits of it. When he woke to the sounds of Joshua stomping around and shouting at his house guests—Josh was never shy, after all, Gordon recalled—he felt like he must have flatlined at some point in the night, and was only just barely starting to come back to life. In fact, he was starting to wonder if he’d ever properly slept at all in Black Mesa before his bedroom door burst open.

“Daddy!!” Josh screamed in excitement, climbing up on to Gordon’s bed and smacking his chest several times. Gordon winced—even a couple years after top surgery, his chest was still fairly sensitive, after all.

“Hey, bud.” Gordon greeted with a sleepy smile. He pushed himself up on one elbow, pulling Joshua in for a hug with the other. “Sorry I was gone for so long.”

“There’s people here.” Joshua garbled—it was barely coherent in the way toddlers speak, but Gordon could understand just fine.

“Yeah, those are my friends. They’re gonna be staying with us for a little bit.” Gordon explained, pulling away from him to stand and briefly change into pajamas. “Did you wake them up?”

“No.”

Gordon snickered, shaking his head as he heard the others now talking outside. Gordon scooped up Joshua in his arms and headed out to join the group. Tommy had already figured out the locations of all the items needed to make a pot of coffee, sitting at the kitchen table with his chin rested in his hands and eyes closed as he waited. Bubby was just now finding the remote, still wrapped up in Dr. Coomer’s arms as he turned on Gordon’s TV.

“Hey, guys.” Gordon greeted with a yawn. “Sorry about Josh.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Freeman.” Tommy replied groggily.

“Your boy is very cute, Gordon.” Dr. Coomer chimed in, though he sounded like he was only just barely awake.

Gordon headed into the kitchen, trying to recall the general elements of it in order to pull together a decent breakfast for the group. Joshua leaned over in Gordon’s arm, slapping the propeller on Tommy’s hat clumsily to get it to spin. Tommy looked up, smiling at Joshua.

“Oh, yeah, Josh. This is Tommy.” Gordon introduced. “Say hi to Tommy, Josh.”

Joshua didn’t say hi. Instead, he pulled Tommy’s hat right off his head to inspect it closer.

“What—Josh, give that back!” Gordon scolded.

Tommy laughed, shaking his head. “That’s—that’s okay, Mr. Freeman, I don’t mind.”

“Actually, do you mind holding onto him for a few?” Gordon asked. “I don’t remember what the hell I’ve got going on in here.”

Tommy nodded and held out his arms, accepting Joshua carefully. Gordon turned back to the kitchen, assessing what he had to offer.

He needed to go grocery shopping. All he had for breakfast was frozen waffles.

Gordon slowly, painstakingly tried to get them decently cooked for the group, but something was horribly wrong with his toaster. God, he really lived like this? A mostly empty fridge and pantry, a half broken toaster, all in an apartment an hour away from Black Mesa? How was he always making sure Joshua was taken care of like this? He wondered guiltily as he set the plates out for the group and sat down.

“Are you alright, Gordon?” Dr. Coomer asked between bites of his food. “Are you not having any?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” Gordon sighed, stealing a small piece off of Joshua’s plate to munch on. “I’m just tired. I’ll eat properly later.”

“Mr. Freeman?” Tommy said, pushing his plate aside to rest his head in his hands again as he looked at Gordon.

“Yeah, Tommy?”

“Do you...feel any different?” He prodded. “Like, existentially?”

Gordon blinked. “...Huh?”

Tommy didn’t elaborate—he didn’t seem like he had the words to make himself any clearer.

“Uhhh...I mean, I don’t know.” Gordon said, running his fingers through his hair. “I’ve been feeling weird ever since we beat Benry, but like I said, I think I’m just tired.”

Tommy took a long, contemplative sip of his coffee before he spoke again. “Mr. Freeman, you...you acknowledged that, like, none of what was going on in Black Mesa was real. Do you remember that?”

Gordon stared down at a spot on the table—it looked like paint that didn’t quite get scrubbed off after Joshua must have been set loose with acrylics—as everything immediately began to feel distant again. If he closed his eyes, he could’ve sworn he was floating in that void again, not sat at his shitty kitchen table with his friends and son.

“I...” Gordon started, then stopped. After a pause, he finally glanced up at Tommy. “I guess so.”

“So...does it feel different now? At all?”

Gordon didn’t know how to answer that. He opened his mouth to give him any response, even just to acknowledge that he heard him, but nothing came out, so he closed it again.

“...Tommy, perhaps we should leave Gordon be for a moment.” Gordon barely registered Dr. Coomer suggesting gently.

Gordon simply sat there for a while as the rest of the group proceeded with breakfast. He felt that strange disconnect again in his head—just like at Tommy’s birthday party, he might as well have been separated from the world by a thick layer of glass. When he distantly noticed Joshua trying to get his attention, he glanced up at him, just in time to watch Dr. Coomer scoop him up lovingly in his arms. Gordon smiled slightly at the sight, Dr. Coomer easily matching Joshua’s high energy by tossing him in the air and catching him several times. He could get used to this, Gordon thought. After however long it had been in Black Mesa, spending almost every possible moment in fear, it was nice to enjoy moments of domesticity like this with his strange new friends.

A loud ringing sound from behind Gordon nearly made him jump directly out of his skin. Everyone had jumped in surprise, in fact, and now stared at the phone, collectively breathing out a sigh of relief when they realized there was no danger. Gordon tried to shake the static from his head as he stood and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Ah, Dr. Freeman. It’s good to hear you made it home.” A familiar voice greeted. Where had he heard that voice, again?

“Dr. Breen?” Gordon suddenly asked, speaking before his brain even caught up. He hadn’t ever talked to him directly—he’d only heard his voice in recorded memos he sent out across the facility.

“Yes, it’s me.” Dr. Breen replied. “I’m calling to get a few things settled with you after...well, the incident at Black Mesa. Regrettably, we’re no longer going to be in operation anymore.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” Gordon scoffed.

“Now, I’m not officially aware of what would have caused the incident.” Dr. Breen continued. “The information I could gather could be quite damning, if I wanted it to be, however...well, let’s just say there’s someone very high up who is invested in ensuring your stability after everything that’s happened.”

Gordon paused for a long moment. “...What? What the hell does that mean?”

“How much would you estimate it would take for you to keep quiet about everything that happened in Black Mesa?” Dr. Breen asked.

“...What, like, money-wise?”

“What else would I be referring to?”

Gordon was quiet for a moment, looking around at his sad, sad apartment, then locking eyes with his son, still held in Dr. Coomer’s arms. “...Is a billion too much?”

“Yes, Gordon. A billion is too much.”

Gordon couldn’t help but snicker a little.

“Dr. Freeman, take this seriously, won’t you? I don’t have all day.”

“Fuck, I don’t know, I feel like I’ve never had more in my account than like, a couple thousand at my absolute highest point.” Gordon prattled. “Uhhh...300 thousand?”

“Consider it done.” Dr. Breen replied as Gordon heard paper shuffling on the other end. “Now—”

“Wait, really? Is it too late to ask for more?”

“Yes, it’s too late. I’ll be sending you some paperwork in the mail to fill out, and you may expect a call similar in nature from one of my contacts with the department of defense as well. Now, am I wrong to assume Bubby is with you?”

Gordon glanced over at Bubby uneasily, who immediately tensed at the eye contact. “...Why do you ask?”

“Enough with the suspicion, Dr. Freeman, it’s not like I have anywhere to put him.” Dr. Breen said dismissively. “I’m just going to help him get settled into society. Would you let me talk to him, please?”

Gordon held up the phone as Dr. Breen talked, looking at Bubby with raised eyebrows. Bubby crossed his arms uncomfortably as he thought it over, Dr. Coomer giving him a comforting pat on the shoulder. It was such a kind, familiar touch, and Bubby’s shoulders immediately relaxed a little bit. Finally, Bubby nodded, and Gordon handed over the phone.

Everyone else in the room got a turn to talk to Dr. Breen, wrapping up loose ends and receiving promises of money. Gordon finally took Joshua back from Dr. Coomer, looking around at his apartment as the others talked. Three hundred thousand dollars—he could buy a new house with that kind of money, right? But that money would probably start dry up fast between the cost of the house and getting settled in. He might need to get another job to support Joshua properly. Or...

Once everyone was done, Gordon hung up the phone and sat down in front of his friends with an exhausted sigh. “You guys wanna rob a bank?”

[previous | next]

[thegooddoctorsthoughts]

Tale Of The ClockTower: Shame and Fear

​I wandered those long-forgotten halls for countless hours, buried deep within the bed bedrock which The Clocktower stood upon. I awoke down here and had a rough idea of where I was but it had been a long time since I walked across these polished obsidian floors. The low drum of machinery, the heavy taste of iron in the air and smell of rust and blood filling my lungs. The Heart was down here somewhere, lost even to me. If you put your ear to the ground and listened you could hear the rhythm of it beating coming up through the warm black stone which this place was carved out of. When I first set foot here I could hear it beating wherever I went but now well over a decade later it could only be heard here. This whole world moved to its rhythm. The waves lapping against the shoreline, the ticking of the countless clocks, the drum of machinery, the sway of the trees, it all played a part in the shattered symphony which this world sang, all in rhythm to something which I could never hope to describe with words. It’s not something you can express with words, not with artistry, it’s something experienced when you see the passion well up in my eyes and reality itself settles into the harmony of it all, this infinite machine of our universe hums along with the beat of a thing old and shattered. At certain times, when things are quiet and all lies still you can hear the faint memory of the symphony made whole, it’s wondrous beauty and perfect shining through and order reigns, perfect is not simply heard but felt, experienced.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, I wandered until I could find some part of the machinery which I could discern the function of in the larger whole and with that follow it’s function all the way back to the upper levels of The Clocktower. While I could find pieces I recognized the function of I couldn’t quite place myself within the Tower as a whole. It’s easy to tell the size and shape of a gear or pulls by size, guess at what it should be used for but then put thousands of them together and you’ve got a much harder time to see what it’s doing and where it is feeding energy, fuel or fluid into. You could follow a pipe of coolant or fuel for hours and wind up back at the same place without realizing it until the third or fourth loop. This machine is its own map, you need only know how to read it, you’re never lost if you can find one gear exchange or valve system you can understand, once you have that you can extrapolate the function of the entire local area and suddenly you know precisely where you should be going. Uncountable trillions of tiny processes going on, interacting with each other and creating a machine unlike anything seen on earth, a colossus of complexity and titan of technicality. A mind of metal and gears forming the foundation of this little world I call my own.

I was somewhere deep within the core of this place, much of the machinery was old and twisted here, worn down but functional in its own contorted way. These were the mechanisms which turned the shattered, discordant and chaotic energy of The Heart into the more useful forms of energy which flowed through the gears, exerted pressure on the pipes and pulleys and just kept this whole place turning. I was on the outer limits of logic and reason, the deeper I went into these contorted passageways the less likely I would be to catch my bearings and the more lost I would become. These twisted gears marked the boundary of feasible machinery, this is where space and time wrapped themselves so tightly around each other they split asunder and unraveled. Reason and purpose became on and the same, impossible mechanisms and geometry made things work even if all logic and reason suggested it was impossible. For some reason, I could no longer help myself and wandered deeper and deeper into this twisted abomination which made up the deepest and most esoteric aspects of my mind. These were the fundamental parts of me, the broken and disjointed parts which once fit together and ran with such wonderous efficiency that it was harmony, beauty, art, and music all rolled into a singular mechanical construct. However, over years of pain and trauma, of being shattered and reconstructed these pieces of me had mutated and twisted into aberrations, as fundamental as quarks and gluons, however how they all interacted and contorted them in terrible things.

Down here you could see the horror of it all, what it takes to turn something pure and beautiful into a mechanistic engine of war. The machinery bent and strained with the pain that turned a hopeful young boy who was too innocent and naive to recognize or understand what was being done to him. Gravity began to become knotted around itself like a set of loose headphones, time fractured from one second to the next as some gear span at unfathomable speeds and other turned with such lethargic movements you could have mistaken them for having stopped. I wasn’t afraid of this place, it did not put me on edge, instead, it intrigued me. These were the parts of myself which defined who I was and were far too nebulous and abstract to apply some kind of logic, everything was built from these things and the logic used to force them to cooperate with one and other again was so warped and twisted that it could no longer explain itself, there was no mathematical proof to these things, to The Heart, these simply were and attempting to understand them an undertaking done over a lifetime not an afternoon.

Some of them I had grown to grasp, the control panel and the Clocktower as a whole were manifestations of my thought processes, their mechanistic nature, and the domination of logic over-abstraction and emotions. Everywhere symbolism and understanding blurred together to ensure that even if in the future I may not understand a thing I could come back to a period in time I felt like I did and express it in a way that I would understand and could recapture that feeling. This whole place and all of the stories within it was the manifestation of me learning to understand myself and come to terms with what it meant to be a human being and not some tool, weapon or machine. Even now this is me trying to put into words some kind of feeling that I can’t quite say myself, not in the conventional sense, so I tell a story of a man wandering through twisted hallways of mental machinery in search of the collection of the fundamental parts of himself. Lost behind a haze of alcohol and being emotionally compromised, not drunk but drinking to be lost enough to find that thing again, because we cannot go in search of these things, only stumble across them.

A drink appeared in my right hand and a cigarette in between my fingers on the left, a mix of vodka, triple sec and lemonade with menthol vogue cigarette smoke filling my lungs. I so desperately wished to keep going, to delve deeper I drank, halfway enabling myself but also knowing that this would end here if I didn’t. The memory of it stuck out in my mind, its cracked surface and the sound of blood dripping from it onto the stained oaken floorboards. I couldn’t quite remember what it looked like, I remembered its sheen almost like glass, the cracks running through its surface and the rivulets of blood running through them, the dripping sound as they reach a perfect four-sided point at its base as it floated above the ground. I heard its song distant and shattered, a single instrument floating there encased in some crystalline material humming with the shattered symphony of reality, playing the half-remembered song which the entire universe played along to, sang out a hymn for Goldilocks. It was not beautiful nor was it something hideous, it was me at my most basic, me at my most fundamental, a twisted, tired, shattered old thing which was rarely found and seen in its totality, only half-remembered fragments of it remaining in the minds of those who had once seen it in all its majestic glory. I took another drink and slowly felt my anxiety began to lift and reason wander away from me, a haze descending and madness setting in.

Metal and stone gave way to crystal and glass, as the machinery almost began to vanish its crystalline makeup reflected against the floor, walls, and ceiling of glass. Direction lost all frame of reference and I simply wandered deeper into the markerless, directionless white clear void in search of a lost thing. My shoes clacked against the glass but I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going, I just kept going, in the vain hope, I might be lucky and stumble across it. I wandered and drank a little more, not really desperate to see it anymore, now just tipsy enough to know I probably wouldn’t stop until I reach where I wanted to be. Had I used this as an excuse to drink? Had I needed to be drunk to wander this far? I didn’t really know and I didn’t really care. I had the will finally to go in search of myself again, having finally the vaguest idea of who I am again, having finally felt like I was myself again, after being asleep for what felt like years I was finally awake and ready to live again.

There was no machinery now, just the empty white void and the glass pathway beneath me, no frames of reference left, only the discordant void between emotion and logic, the endless bottomless chasm between chaos and order. I had loved before and will love again, but I had ignored, suppressed and forgotten some part of me that for the longest time I was ashamed of, that I knew was problematic and would inevitably make things more difficult should I attempt to accept and live with, but a taste of that happiness had given me a taste for what loving that part of myself was like and now I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I took a long drag and felt the smoke sit heavy inside of me for a moment, stopping and closing my eyes embracing the harmony of this place, as music and machinery met in the void and flowed through me. My heart thundered in my chest along with the beat of it all and I cried, I wept but was not sad, or angry or anything, I was at peace in this place. I exhaled and darkness came down around me like curtains.

There was a quiet and distant joy here, no waves or ticking, no music or anything of the sort, simply a quiet and distant thing. I had found where I was going and waited for a moment, my eyes closed out of fear of losing this moment, of opening them and finding myself lost again among the machine or those warped hallways. For a moment I stood there frozen, waiting for something to strike me awake, into movement again. A single heartbeat shook me to action again and I took a deep breath, opening my eyes and finally for the first time in years I saw it in all its horrifying glory. I lifted my hand and took one last drink, downing the remaining half of the glass and threw it aside, there was no shattering sound, it simply vanished, it was no longer needed. I took a step forward and the ancient floorboards creaked beneath my weight.

A towering monolith of glass and clockwork, stone, wood, and steel stood before me. A four-sided pyramid of dark grey stone sat anchoring it to the floor and floating about a foot above it a two meter tall perfect geometric shape, tall and thin. At its core sat the violin which had started me down this path many moons ago, blood wept from its strings and bled out through the cracks which riddled its exterior. Seen clearly beneath the crystal which made up much of its structure. I stood there looking up at it and felt the music flow through me, felt the song it cried through its crystalline prison, as its discordant notes strained against the steel bands which wrapped its exterior keeping its shattered form stable and in one piece. Various pieces of glass floated a few inches away from where they had off broken and been dislodged from the main body. Clockwork turned away inside, floating like they were suspended in water, both warped images projected onto the exterior and floating objects trapped within the confines of a warped prison designed to keep a man from destroying a war machine. This was the design of a twisted and aberrant God, of a past I could no longer answer to, of decisions I once made and the force of will forged of steel used to justify those actions. Here stood the horrible things I had done imprisoned and kept in check by the fear and trauma which resulted in having to choose the lesser of two evils.

I stepped forward and placed my hand against its warm, hard exterior for a moment, halfway expecting to feel something, but nothing came. The bands kept the whole thing from unraveling but at the same time only allowed a certain amount of energy to be expended at any given moment in time, they acted as a kind of emotional capacitor, ensuring the whole system wasn’t overloaded. I fell forward and pressed my forehead to the glass with a dull thunk, and head those notes a tiny bit clearer. I didn’t know what to do, it frustrated me that I needed to be lost to reach there, that I needed to be in some altered state of mind to face this. I slammed my fist into the glass and a crack went through the entire body of the monolith and a tiny sliver of glass lodged itself in the side of my hand.

A rush of emotions flooded through me, and for a fraction of a second, it all came flooding back, every moment of anger, sadness, joy, hatred, love, apathy and confusion all rushed through me. I remembered what it was like to be ALIVE, to live and breathe, the be hurt and feel joy, to break down and cry, to scream at the sky in rage and to lay there in the grass weeping in agony begging for the pain to go away. A pulse of light filled the darkness and like oil in water faded colors began to dissipate throughout the blackness. I fell to my knees in shock and in all honesty, I don’t have the words to describe the emotion which I felt. I knelt there for a while not really understanding what that was. I don’t know how long I knelt there for, trying to bring myself back to reality, trying so desperately to return to my senses, not fighting, there was nothing violent or truly active about what I was doing, like coming down from a high it was a slow and gradual thing.

I felt her place her hands on my shoulders and raise me to my feet. I looked her in the eye and she smiled back at my daze look, soft, warm and happy like she had been waiting for the moment for a long time. A pair of sapphire eyes stared back at me with depth like the ocean and a kind of brightness that would poison the souls of men, a warm and happy smile that would light stars in the night sky and a voice like a velvet bow across the strings of the universe. I snapped back in that moment of seeing her and suddenly everything rushing back clicked into place and I made sense of why it was I was so desperately searching for this place. “I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry but this is me letting go. This is me saying that I get to finally forgive myself and be happy with who I am, not just with you but with everyone. I love you and always will, but I simply must let go of you and us my dear. I get to be happy, I don’t have to feel guilty anymore, I don’t have to feel ashamed anymore.” She placed a finger to my lips, she did not say a word, but I knew she understood, she knew that the guilt I felt was misplaced but couldn’t convince me, it was up to me to do that. She put her arms around me and her warmth rushed through me. For the first time in years, I heard her speak, I remembered her voice and I wept tears of joy “It’s okay dearest, be free, you are not the lost little angry boy I once found.”

She vanished and I span on my heel, my fist colliding with the glassy exterior of the monolith, the entire thing crumbled against the force of my fist colliding with it. The steel banding buckled and quickly came asunder. Hundreds of tiny slivers of glass ripped through me, the stasis which kept it all in check had finally given out and with it, a lifetime of pain, suffering, joy, laughter and so much more flooded over me. I was at peace, I felt it all fall away and a tension that had built within me for nearly a decade all unfurled and a weight unimaginable was lifted.

I stood there on the beachside with the bloody violin in my hands as its music ran through me, as my fingers bled and I wept without care. I heard the waves and the machinery all as if it were right beside me. It all played together into a single song, millions of tiny instruments singing out into the universe as I wept and screamed into the curious mix of twilight and morning sky. Joy, sadness, anger, apathy, and peace all washed over me in equal measure as I played properly for the first time in forever. As the shattered symphony of reality flowed through me and I heard it completely in all its majesty, as life and death, chaos and order, harmony and discord all came together in perfection to play a song for the wonderous nature of reality as a hymn for Goldilock sang through every fiber of my being and somewhere in the universe a tiny being wept by the oceanside as all was right and he felt at peace for the first time in forever, as he was no longer afraid of who or what he was.

Harmony descended upon that beach and I collapsed in a heap, weeping and smiling. A drink sitting by my right side and a cigarette between my fingers on the left. The form of someone I barely knew but whose soul rang with the same poetry as mine beside me. The two of us sat there for a while, not saying anything. Watching the waves lap against the shoreline, as the moon reflected across the water of the cove, and I was happy for a moment. I was not ashamed or afraid of who I was and she saw the beauty in the simplicity of it all. Quiet and alone a moth and a budding immortal sat by the beach and watched something beautiful.

[thetickingmonolith]

Tale Of The ClockTower: Shame and Fear

​I wandered those long-forgotten halls for countless hours, buried deep within the bed bedrock which The Clocktower stood upon. I awoke down here and had a rough idea of where I was but it had been a long time since I walked across these polished obsidian floors. The low drum of machinery, the heavy taste of iron in the air and smell of rust and blood filling my lungs. The Heart was down here somewhere, lost even to me. If you put your ear to the ground and listened you could hear the rhythm of it beating coming up through the warm black stone which this place was carved out of. When I first set foot here I could hear it beating wherever I went but now well over a decade later it could only be heard here. This whole world moved to its rhythm. The waves lapping against the shoreline, the ticking of the countless clocks, the drum of machinery, the sway of the trees, it all played a part in the shattered symphony which this world sang, all in rhythm to something which I could never hope to describe with words. It’s not something you can express with words, not with artistry, it’s something experienced when you see the passion well up in my eyes and reality itself settles into the harmony of it all, this infinite machine of our universe hums along with the beat of a thing old and shattered. At certain times, when things are quiet and all lies still you can hear the faint memory of the symphony made whole, it’s wondrous beauty and perfect shining through and order reigns, perfect is not simply heard but felt, experienced.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, I wandered until I could find some part of the machinery which I could discern the function of in the larger whole and with that follow it’s function all the way back to the upper levels of The Clocktower. While I could find pieces I recognized the function of I couldn’t quite place myself within the Tower as a whole. It’s easy to tell the size and shape of a gear or pulls by size, guess at what it should be used for but then put thousands of them together and you’ve got a much harder time to see what it’s doing and where it is feeding energy, fuel or fluid into. You could follow a pipe of coolant or fuel for hours and wind up back at the same place without realizing it until the third or fourth loop. This machine is its own map, you need only know how to read it, you’re never lost if you can find one gear exchange or valve system you can understand, once you have that you can extrapolate the function of the entire local area and suddenly you know precisely where you should be going. Uncountable trillions of tiny processes going on, interacting with each other and creating a machine unlike anything seen on earth, a colossus of complexity and titan of technicality. A mind of metal and gears forming the foundation of this little world I call my own.

I was somewhere deep within the core of this place, much of the machinery was old and twisted here, worn down but functional in its own contorted way. These were the mechanisms which turned the shattered, discordant and chaotic energy of The Heart into the more useful forms of energy which flowed through the gears, exerted pressure on the pipes and pulleys and just kept this whole place turning. I was on the outer limits of logic and reason, the deeper I went into these contorted passageways the less likely I would be to catch my bearings and the more lost I would become. These twisted gears marked the boundary of feasible machinery, this is where space and time wrapped themselves so tightly around each other they split asunder and unraveled. Reason and purpose became on and the same, impossible mechanisms and geometry made things work even if all logic and reason suggested it was impossible. For some reason, I could no longer help myself and wandered deeper and deeper into this twisted abomination which made up the deepest and most esoteric aspects of my mind. These were the fundamental parts of me, the broken and disjointed parts which once fit together and ran with such wonderous efficiency that it was harmony, beauty, art, and music all rolled into a singular mechanical construct. However, over years of pain and trauma, of being shattered and reconstructed these pieces of me had mutated and twisted into aberrations, as fundamental as quarks and gluons, however how they all interacted and contorted them in terrible things.

Down here you could see the horror of it all, what it takes to turn something pure and beautiful into a mechanistic engine of war. The machinery bent and strained with the pain that turned a hopeful young boy who was too innocent and naive to recognize or understand what was being done to him. Gravity began to become knotted around itself like a set of loose headphones, time fractured from one second to the next as some gear span at unfathomable speeds and other turned with such lethargic movements you could have mistaken them for having stopped. I wasn’t afraid of this place, it did not put me on edge, instead, it intrigued me. These were the parts of myself which defined who I was and were far too nebulous and abstract to apply some kind of logic, everything was built from these things and the logic used to force them to cooperate with one and other again was so warped and twisted that it could no longer explain itself, there was no mathematical proof to these things, to The Heart, these simply were and attempting to understand them an undertaking done over a lifetime not an afternoon.

Some of them I had grown to grasp, the control panel and the Clocktower as a whole were manifestations of my thought processes, their mechanistic nature, and the domination of logic over-abstraction and emotions. Everywhere symbolism and understanding blurred together to ensure that even if in the future I may not understand a thing I could come back to a period in time I felt like I did and express it in a way that I would understand and could recapture that feeling. This whole place and all of the stories within it was the manifestation of me learning to understand myself and come to terms with what it meant to be a human being and not some tool, weapon or machine. Even now this is me trying to put into words some kind of feeling that I can’t quite say myself, not in the conventional sense, so I tell a story of a man wandering through twisted hallways of mental machinery in search of the collection of the fundamental parts of himself. Lost behind a haze of alcohol and being emotionally compromised, not drunk but drinking to be lost enough to find that thing again, because we cannot go in search of these things, only stumble across them.

A drink appeared in my right hand and a cigarette in between my fingers on the left, a mix of vodka, triple sec and lemonade with menthol vogue cigarette smoke filling my lungs. I so desperately wished to keep going, to delve deeper I drank, halfway enabling myself but also knowing that this would end here if I didn’t. The memory of it stuck out in my mind, its cracked surface and the sound of blood dripping from it onto the stained oaken floorboards. I couldn’t quite remember what it looked like, I remembered its sheen almost like glass, the cracks running through its surface and the rivulets of blood running through them, the dripping sound as they reach a perfect four-sided point at its base as it floated above the ground. I heard its song distant and shattered, a single instrument floating there encased in some crystalline material humming with the shattered symphony of reality, playing the half-remembered song which the entire universe played along to, sang out a hymn for Goldilocks. It was not beautiful nor was it something hideous, it was me at my most basic, me at my most fundamental, a twisted, tired, shattered old thing which was rarely found and seen in its totality, only half-remembered fragments of it remaining in the minds of those who had once seen it in all its majestic glory. I took another drink and slowly felt my anxiety began to lift and reason wander away from me, a haze descending and madness setting in.

Metal and stone gave way to crystal and glass, as the machinery almost began to vanish its crystalline makeup reflected against the floor, walls, and ceiling of glass. Direction lost all frame of reference and I simply wandered deeper into the markerless, directionless white clear void in search of a lost thing. My shoes clacked against the glass but I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going, I just kept going, in the vain hope, I might be lucky and stumble across it. I wandered and drank a little more, not really desperate to see it anymore, now just tipsy enough to know I probably wouldn’t stop until I reach where I wanted to be. Had I used this as an excuse to drink? Had I needed to be drunk to wander this far? I didn’t really know and I didn’t really care. I had the will finally to go in search of myself again, having finally the vaguest idea of who I am again, having finally felt like I was myself again, after being asleep for what felt like years I was finally awake and ready to live again.

There was no machinery now, just the empty white void and the glass pathway beneath me, no frames of reference left, only the discordant void between emotion and logic, the endless bottomless chasm between chaos and order. I had loved before and will love again, but I had ignored, suppressed and forgotten some part of me that for the longest time I was ashamed of, that I knew was problematic and would inevitably make things more difficult should I attempt to accept and live with, but a taste of that happiness had given me a taste for what loving that part of myself was like and now I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I took a long drag and felt the smoke sit heavy inside of me for a moment, stopping and closing my eyes embracing the harmony of this place, as music and machinery met in the void and flowed through me. My heart thundered in my chest along with the beat of it all and I cried, I wept but was not sad, or angry or anything, I was at peace in this place. I exhaled and darkness came down around me like curtains.

There was a quiet and distant joy here, no waves or ticking, no music or anything of the sort, simply a quiet and distant thing. I had found where I was going and waited for a moment, my eyes closed out of fear of losing this moment, of opening them and finding myself lost again among the machine or those warped hallways. For a moment I stood there frozen, waiting for something to strike me awake, into movement again. A single heartbeat shook me to action again and I took a deep breath, opening my eyes and finally for the first time in years I saw it in all its horrifying glory. I lifted my hand and took one last drink, downing the remaining half of the glass and threw it aside, there was no shattering sound, it simply vanished, it was no longer needed. I took a step forward and the ancient floorboards creaked beneath my weight.

A towering monolith of glass and clockwork, stone, wood, and steel stood before me. A four-sided pyramid of dark grey stone sat anchoring it to the floor and floating about a foot above it a two meter tall perfect geometric shape, tall and thin. At its core sat the violin which had started me down this path many moons ago, blood wept from its strings and bled out through the cracks which riddled its exterior. Seen clearly beneath the crystal which made up much of its structure. I stood there looking up at it and felt the music flow through me, felt the song it cried through its crystalline prison, as its discordant notes strained against the steel bands which wrapped its exterior keeping its shattered form stable and in one piece. Various pieces of glass floated a few inches away from where they had off broken and been dislodged from the main body. Clockwork turned away inside, floating like they were suspended in water, both warped images projected onto the exterior and floating objects trapped within the confines of a warped prison designed to keep a man from destroying a war machine. This was the design of a twisted and aberrant God, of a past I could no longer answer to, of decisions I once made and the force of will forged of steel used to justify those actions. Here stood the horrible things I had done imprisoned and kept in check by the fear and trauma which resulted in having to choose the lesser of two evils.

I stepped forward and placed my hand against its warm, hard exterior for a moment, halfway expecting to feel something, but nothing came. The bands kept the whole thing from unraveling but at the same time only allowed a certain amount of energy to be expended at any given moment in time, they acted as a kind of emotional capacitor, ensuring the whole system wasn’t overloaded. I fell forward and pressed my forehead to the glass with a dull thunk, and head those notes a tiny bit clearer. I didn’t know what to do, it frustrated me that I needed to be lost to reach there, that I needed to be in some altered state of mind to face this. I slammed my fist into the glass and a crack went through the entire body of the monolith and a tiny sliver of glass lodged itself in the side of my hand.

A rush of emotions flooded through me, and for a fraction of a second, it all came flooding back, every moment of anger, sadness, joy, hatred, love, apathy and confusion all rushed through me. I remembered what it was like to be ALIVE, to live and breathe, the be hurt and feel joy, to break down and cry, to scream at the sky in rage and to lay there in the grass weeping in agony begging for the pain to go away. A pulse of light filled the darkness and like oil in water faded colors began to dissipate throughout the blackness. I fell to my knees in shock and in all honesty, I don’t have the words to describe the emotion which I felt. I knelt there for a while not really understanding what that was. I don’t know how long I knelt there for, trying to bring myself back to reality, trying so desperately to return to my senses, not fighting, there was nothing violent or truly active about what I was doing, like coming down from a high it was a slow and gradual thing.

I felt her place her hands on my shoulders and raise me to my feet. I looked her in the eye and she smiled back at my daze look, soft, warm and happy like she had been waiting for the moment for a long time. A pair of sapphire eyes stared back at me with depth like the ocean and a kind of brightness that would poison the souls of men, a warm and happy smile that would light stars in the night sky and a voice like a velvet bow across the strings of the universe. I snapped back in that moment of seeing her and suddenly everything rushing back clicked into place and I made sense of why it was I was so desperately searching for this place. “I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry but this is me letting go. This is me saying that I get to finally forgive myself and be happy with who I am, not just with you but with everyone. I love you and always will, but I simply must let go of you and us my dear. I get to be happy, I don’t have to feel guilty anymore, I don’t have to feel ashamed anymore.” She placed a finger to my lips, she did not say a word, but I knew she understood, she knew that the guilt I felt was misplaced but couldn’t convince me, it was up to me to do that. She put her arms around me and her warmth rushed through me. For the first time in years, I heard her speak, I remembered her voice and I wept tears of joy “It’s okay dearest, be free, you are not the lost little angry boy I once found.”

She vanished and I span on my heel, my fist colliding with the glassy exterior of the monolith, the entire thing crumbled against the force of my fist colliding with it. The steel banding buckled and quickly came asunder. Hundreds of tiny slivers of glass ripped through me, the stasis which kept it all in check had finally given out and with it, a lifetime of pain, suffering, joy, laughter and so much more flooded over me. I was at peace, I felt it all fall away and a tension that had built within me for nearly a decade all unfurled and a weight unimaginable was lifted.

I stood there on the beachside with the bloody violin in my hands as its music ran through me, as my fingers bled and I wept without care. I heard the waves and the machinery all as if it were right beside me. It all played together into a single song, millions of tiny instruments singing out into the universe as I wept and screamed into the curious mix of twilight and morning sky. Joy, sadness, anger, apathy, and peace all washed over me in equal measure as I played properly for the first time in forever. As the shattered symphony of reality flowed through me and I heard it completely in all its majesty, as life and death, chaos and order, harmony and discord all came together in perfection to play a song for the wonderous nature of reality as a hymn for Goldilock sang through every fiber of my being and somewhere in the universe a tiny being wept by the oceanside as all was right and he felt at peace for the first time in forever, as he was no longer afraid of who or what he was.

Harmony descended upon that beach and I collapsed in a heap, weeping and smiling. A drink sitting by my right side and a cigarette between my fingers on the left. The form of someone I barely knew but whose soul rang with the same poetry as mine beside me. The two of us sat there for a while, not saying anything. Watching the waves lap against the shoreline, as the moon reflected across the water of the cove, and I was happy for a moment. I was not ashamed or afraid of who I was and she saw the beauty in the simplicity of it all. Quiet and alone a moth and a budding immortal sat by the beach and watched something beautiful.