!!!story backup!!!

“BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR WORLD?”

****

1
Video game ending screen

Morgan got to the ending. She had finished the video game. Now she would know all that came after.

The world ended. Or did it? The world-ending event had happened, and the screen was black, but, the dialogue text was still appearing. In the beginning was the word, and so too did the word persist after the end, indicating the continuation of life. In the darkness, the characters she had grown so close to, who had felt so real to her, were speaking to her. Speaking to *her*. Saying things kinda like...

"Somehow we made it!"
"Yeah, we're all okay now!"
“Thanks, MORGAN!”
"Phew, that was scary!
"But we're all right now. We're all here."
"Yes, we're all here. We're together and it's going to be all right now."
"But I wonder..."
"Yeah, I wonder..."
"What about you, MORGAN?"
"Goodness me, what about MORGAN indeed."
"We're going to be okay, MORGAN, but what about you?"
"Yeah, will you be okay? Don't worry about us! You saved us! We're happy! Our world is fine!"
"But..."
"Morgan..."
"But what..."
"What about..."
"Yeah, but what about your..."
"But what about your world?"

The darkness lifted. All the characters were shown in a world restored, one even better than before. They shared little joyful moments with each other. They honored the sacrifices made by the protagonists and gave them the place of comfort and belonging that the ultra-powerful ragamuffin misfits had never known. It was suggested that they, and all who came after them in the history of the world, lived in joy for generations that could never be numbered.

Morgan would have to look up this part of the ending on Viddyou later. As soon as she read that question she'd been jarred out of her gaming reverie, she had shoved her handheld gaming device away from her to the corner of her rumpled bed, bowling away a small pile of trash. Morgan tensed, and began letting out a series of increasingly manic, aggravated exhalations. Because the game had made her think about something that is not very fun to think about.

She thought about the message. The didactic intent of the author was becoming clear. The uncomfortable demand made by the culmination of these little scripted character dialogues, these themes and arcs and missions of these coded fictional amalgamations, which she had come to so cherish over the course of sporadic hours of progression culminating unto an eight minute ending sequence plus credits.

Now fretful thoughts and frightful visions were swarming her. The unknowable abyss of the future, and what the atrocious past promised that it might be, the Gordian complexity of resolving an unthinkable rat’s nest of tangled contradictions.

Yeah, what about it.

What about her.

What ABOUT her world.

Morgan wasn't some plucky kid who obtained the ultimate powers of a cosmic warrior and defeated the evil empire. She didn't have any legendary weapons or killing techniques. Neither were her friends. She was some stupid depressed woman who was alone in her room a lot playing video games or fielding tech support calls or both. Her world was rusted-out and capsizing into the void and she was just some dumb barnacle latched onto the side of it.

And you know what, she continued on in her low-level freakout state, you know what?! Stubby fingers clutching her scalp through ill-kempt tangles, rolling around on her prohibitively cluttered bed and squirming, you know what, most of the time she didn't even think about it or care. The burning of the ancient dead was boiling the seas and would drown all the fragile life clinging to land, but she still went to the convenience store late at night and gorged on fatty syrupy snacks and still went to the Dollar Myrmidon and bought her recreational tussin to drive herself out of her unbearable mind and she still hyperfocused on her petty problems and woes and still spent the occasional day or two in an inescapable mire of mesmerizing media or a sinkhole of online socialization. It was like millennia of her species predicting the end of the world had numbed her to the possibility of permanent species death.

When she thought she had calmed down, she picked up her handheld gaming device once again. But the battery had died, and in the darkness of the screen she spotted her face. And maybe a more charitable pair of eyes would have viewed her more kindly, but in her frayed emotional state Morgan saw a ridiculous too-wide and too-round face, hair limp from days worth of grease, skin marred in places by the dark smudges of day-and-a-half old ruined makeup remnants, sullen lower lip sunken and eyes downcast, pitiable, a living caricature of sorrow, and just the kind of loser who plays games about saving the world while the real world is ending.

God. Fucking stupid game. Conscientious asshole who created it. What about her world? Well it was fucking screwed wasn't it? Human action was destroying it, and all political power to change it had been claimed by amoral plunderers, and there was a fucking, stupid video game (it had honestly been really fun and beautiful, and she had loved it, and it meant everything to her), stupid video game telling her to worry about it.

Fuck it. She took a deep draught from the tussin, nearly gagged and washed it down with a tallboy can of raspberry Golfguy Sweetdrink. The conniptions were finally beginning to subside. The cracks in the window blinds admitted a little sunset orange into the room, and her evening mood was coming on. She would lose herself in childish, gothic sorrow for the next half hour or so and drearily assail herself with visions of death and loss, she would swim in the deep, lightless brine of her own helplessness. Then inebriation would set in and she could play the merry fool to her roommates and pretend like nothing was ever wrong.

With that question in the back of her mind, all the time...

"But what about your world?"

****

2
Wierd name having person

There were three roommates thus far. There was Morgan, there was Patience, and there was Serpent Tina. Her name really was Serpent Tina. Just her first name, too, but the rest of her name was pretty boring and unremarkable. Her mother, ever stubborn, ever inscrutable, gave her the name and insisted on it when the birth registrar gave her a hard time about it. Out of all her family, Serpent Tina only loved and was close to her momma, and she had always stood by the name.

When kids and yes, of course adults made fun of her at school, and she’d won and lost her share of fights over it, still she insisted that you had to say the full name, you had to say Serpent Tina. “You have to say Serpent Tina!”, she demanded of her new friends, Morgan and Patience, back in high school when they first started hanging out and tried to call her just Tina. And so they did, they always said her entire four syllable first name, even up to the present day, when they had been cohabiting and comingling for years.

She was Serpent Tina and was proud to be Serpent Tina. She had real serpents, too, she kept a couple of real life snakes at home like she had since she was a child. There was a rough green snake, Lesley Gore, and a ball python, Chavela Vargas. Serpent Tina was just getting off night shift, and normally went straight home to, among other things, see to her daughters’ needs and admire them (Chavela Vargas enjoyed being held and carried around, Lesley Gore stressed from minimal handling and preferred to be admired from afar) but tonight would be different.

A normal night might have gone like this:

Serpent Tina punches out, gives a noncommital mumble and dismissive bye-bye wave, and egresses from the greasy miasma of the kitchen into the dining area. She passes by the crowd of customers, taking fleeting note of little sensory cues from indistinct sources: flared pores, reddened skin, piercing laughter, pungent spray deodorant, things like that. Then, pretty much every time she passes along the same old path, she glimpses her dark, squat figure in the reflection of the polished glass of the restaurant's absurd windowpane walls. She hops into her filthy old green hatchback and turns it on so the abrasive music plays and the A/C blows on her just so. Then Serpent Tina makes the short, slender fingers of her left hand into a little semicircle and does a thumb flicking motion with her right, brings her right hand a few inches in front of her left and holds it there for a second. After which she pulls it back, brings her left hand's nearly circled fingers to her lips. And then she's smoking that imaginary blunt.

Fwwwwwppphhhhh...

And she holds it...

And releases.

She does this for a couple of minutes, flicking through nonsense on her phone all the while, sending her friends greetings, and links and little jokes, finding stuff that grosses her out or makes her angry and cajoling her friends to share in the indignity. This is the bare minimum to trick herself into feeling calm after a shift. When she finally can imagine she's relaxed, she tosses her phone into the faded grey cushion of the front passenger seat, bouncing it slightly and sending a shower of crumbs, hair and miscellaneous grit--"scrim", as Morgan has been known to call it--an inch or so into the air, unnoticed by the fictitiously stoned Serpent Tina.

After this she drives a thankfully short distance home, gets inside, baths up and spends some time with her snakes and her friends or gets under the glow of her laptop or something. Maybe gets for-real stoned. Typical nighttime stuff. Days and nights pass by quick and easy and are forgotten like last week’s daydreams.

But on this particular night, the night when Morgan completed the video game, engaged in self-harming drug use behaviors, and confided in her friend Patience while under the benevolent gaze of one Benjamin Heck, Serpent Tina got up to the “driving” step in her post-shift routine, and then did something different. She had been deviating from her typical flow of days and nights more and more often lately, and tonight would prove to be the widest digression yet.

On the main road, through an all but ceaseless progression of gas stations and chain restaurants and aggressive advertisements, shadows cast by the passing of incandescent orange lights undulate and recede across Serpent Tina's face in rapid succession. Serpent Tina sings along atonally with the voice rising above the fuzzing and blaring coming from her car stereo, and occasionally she is jerked out of her musical reverie by the tension-inducing appearance of a white Dodge Charger's grill in her rearview mirror. All the cops in town had been bought white Dodge Chargers, and, as if the standard degree of inexorable fear wasn’t enough, she had ample additional reasons to feel nervous around them tonight.

As she began taking lefts and rights onto narrowing side roads, the dancing patterns of shade on her face began looming larger and larger, eventually disappearing altogether. Her destination was nestled in a place with a number of abandoned houses and no streetlights, and the occasional porch light or window glow did precious little to break the oncoming darkness.

Serpent Tina had been having the weirdest urges lately, you see. A renowned homebody who typically eschewed anything outside the boundary of her locked bedroom door when not absolutely necessary, for the past few years she had done little except go to work and come home. But she'd started getting these cravings. Jumpy feelings inside her that would prod her mind with visions of a certain place for a while... and she'd feel a strange need to be there, to feel the mood of that place inside her gut. To sate this need, she had started taking longer and more frequent detours on her way to and from work. At 2 o'clock she might find herself hanging out behind the Dollar Myrmidon, at 11 o'clock she might cross the nearby state line and go sit in a truck stop bathroom, she might wake up early one morning and take a little hike down to an old empty drainage pipe. Whatever it took.

She felt a /calling/ from these places, and felt a powerful emptiness in her that could only be filled when she called back to it, or pressed herself against a wall of the location, or rubbed a bit of the scrim of that location on her body... A security guard had caught her one time rubbing crumbled drywall on her torso from the floor of an abandoned Extremely TeleGood Electronics and More Store and been rendered temporarily speechless.

The weird thing was that she wasn't embarrassed or concerned about her behavior. Serpent Tina had two things going for her: good luck and a believing heart, and somehow she knew that there was something fortunate about even the weird experiences her urges were driving her towards. When the itch came, it needed scratching, and being somewhere ruined, somewhere empty or somewhere you're not supposed to be left her feeling fulfilled.

And that believing heart of hers was sure thrumming tonight. It thumped with the excitement and delicious tension that comes just before something truly miraculous breaks its way into your life. It pounded away with reckless abandon, so much so that Serpent Tina whacked her chest with a fist a few times, to calm her ticker down like she was a geriatric with a heart condition.

The place was made of brick that had been painted over completely yellow some time in the past, creating a weird, plasticky look over the surface of the short, spare, filthy building. There were no lights anywhere nearby, but Serpent Tina's adjusted eyes could see it okay by the reflected city glow from the purple-clouded skies.

Serpent Tina grabbed her phone, stubbed out that imaginary blunt, and exited. The balmy night air fogged up her glasses but felt nice on her skin. She strode purposefully over to the back hatch and popped it. She slipped a long, flowy black dress over her shorts and her work polo, looking for a second like she was graduating. The dress had a hood, which she pulled up, and no longer looked like she was graduating. An olive messenger bag with some anime pins held some items she felt necessary: flashlight, chalk, glass orb, snake cameo medallion, analog camera in case her electronics were interfered with. Ear plugs in case of banshee. Leather holsters and straps. Bear spray in case of human.

A glock, in case of particularly persistent and dangerous human.

She didn’t really know if the unlicensed firearm would protect her or put her in greater danger, but something inside her demanded that she not proceed with these adventures without stunning power and stopping power in some convenient thigh holsters.

Serpent Tina knew by now that people pay security guards to make sure that no old buildings nor anything that’s in them ever get used, but she also knew that the further out you got from people with money, the less likely they were to bother. She found that the front door was chained and padlocked, just like she’d felt it would, but she also had a strong feeling that there was an already broken window around back that she could hoist herself into, and she was right about this.

She produced her flashlight, flicked it on and slowly swept its beam across the surface of the room she was in, which appeared to be an office of some sort. The floor was covered in scrim, and a mixture of left behind things--paper and binders and ledgers with mold and mildew that suggested their age, upturned tables and broken chairs, a rotted, splintering desk, a bookshelf in flinders, a bulletin board with a mingling of fine-print safety regulations and shouty, big-font declarations of workplace policy, a very old and very busted CRT monitor... and the typical cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans and little liquor sample bottles that suggested more recent habitation.

She tiptoed her way through the mess, and stepped through the doorway, over the long-since-unhinged door.

The other room was much larger than the office, and seemingly sparser, possessing fewer fixtures of furniture and appliances in a wider space. A well-scavenged storage room, perhaps? Serpent Tina’s hand involuntarily moved toward her holstered bear spray... At length, however, the roving beam of light revealed that this room possessed a great deal of something in quantities that even the ruined office could not compare to, and that was scrim.

Serpent Tina started to feel very weird. The craving in the pit of her stomach was growing ravenous. She’d felt weird place-cravings sometimes, but never this powerful, never this compelling. She began quaking.

The flashlight swept an increasingly jittery and frantic path back and forth, back and forth over the scrim, the scattered boxes torn largely to shreds, the tracked-in dirt and crumbled drywall, ancient cigarette ash, and flakes of rust and clumps of dust and...

God she was hungry. And she... she needed a bath. Yeah. Yeah. Serpent Tina needed a bath, that was right.

Swept away by her manic, alien urges, Serpent Tina tossed her flashlight aside and hurled herself to the cold, hard floor, sweeping up handfuls and armfuls of scrim, grabbing greedily at it, rubbing it all over her body, rinsing her hair filthy with it, smearing it everywhere it could be smeared and rolling in it, and when she was well and covered she began to eat. Yes, she didn’t fail to eat when she was hungry, she snatched up gobs of the plentiful scrim and consumed it in great mawfuls, more than she thought her stomach could ever contain, got down on hands and knees and vacuumed it up, snorted it, and the delirium of bathing and feeding, bathing and feeding consumed her utterly, her awareness dimmed, and the floor came up to meet her...

***
3
Wow, magic

VOICE: hey!
VOICE: HEY!
VOICE: human! weird dirty human!
VOICE: just what do you think youre doing here?
VOICE: time to wake up, weirdo!
VOICE: hey!
VOICE: listen!
VOICE: WAKE UP!

::Slap slap slap. Slap slap slap. Tiny slaps on SERPENT TINA’s cheeks, enough to sting just barely, jostle her out of her swoon::

SERPENT TINA: Huh... Whuh...
VOICE: cmon! you are in BIG trouble if you dont wake up!
SERPENT TINA: OK, momma...
VOICE: momma?!?!
VOICE: wh, what are you thinking?!
VOICE: i’m a lot of things but your momma sure isn’t one of them!
SERPENT TINA: Wh...

::SERPENT TINA’s eyes reluctantly flutter open. A tiny human face with a purple neon glow to it and little chartreuse orbs for eyes is inches away from her and scowling. SERPENT TINA takes a second to process this sensory input and attempts to react rationally::

SERPENT TINA: AAAAHHHH!!!!
NEON FACE: shh!!
SERPENT TINA: AAAAHHHH!!!!
NEON FACE: shut up!! do you WANT him to find you?!
SERPENT TINA: AAAAHHHH!!!!
NEON FACE: oh, for the love of titania...

::The tiny neon faced creature gives one final, decisive swat across SERPENT TINA’s cheek. The shock subsides, and SERPENT TINA is able to pull herself off the ground a little and reconnect with her surroundings. She realizes a couple of things: she is filthy, her stomach hurts horribly, there is a tiny winged humanoid, radiating lime and violet light as it flits about her, leaving an effervescent trail of sparks behind as she goes to and fro. She recalls that she came to an abandoned building because she got a weird feeling and started eatings hells of floor grit. What on earth was happening to her?::

STRANGE CREATURE: ok, lets get a couple things straight because we havent got much time and weve got a lot to cover!
STRANGE CREATURE: first things first
STRANGE CREATURE: yeah, im real!
STRANGE CREATURE: my names lucky fairy!
STRANGE CREATURE: im a gosh dang fairy!
SERPENT TINA: Oog... oh, okay...

::The shock from the profound realization that the world was something greater than the mundane, and that fantastical mysteries had always been lurking just out of eyesight waiting to be discovered, was somewhat dampened by SERPENT TINA’s profound desire to throw up everything in her stomach::

LUCKY FAIRY: darn right it’s okay
LUCKY FAIRY: what’s NOT okay, grimy unusual human--
SERPENT TINA: Uhh, it’s Serpent Tina, actually...
LUCKY FAIRY: whatever!!
LUCKY FAIRY: what’s NOT okay, miss dirty snaketini, is that you just got beckoned by a Calling
LUCKY FAIRY: one of the most ferocious, bad ass, no good rough boys this side of the membrane of incorporeality got his hook in your lip and has been reeling you in for oberon knows how long
LUCKY FAIRY: hes had you visiting his power spots and i guess eating his floor grit for months, hasnt he?
SERPENT TINA: Yeah. Yeah! I’ve been having like, the weirdest urges...
SERPENT TINA: I kind of thought that something magical would happen if I just accepted it and went with the flow...
LUCKY FAIRY: oh yeah, theres sure some magic in your life now
LUCKY FAIRY: things are gonna be real magical when the demon finds you and eats your soul and turns it into cosmic energy and star stuff!
SERPENT TINA: To be fair, that does sound pretty magical...
LUCKY FAIRY: regardless!!
LUCKY FAIRY: weve got, probably not nearly enough time to get you ready to face the abyssal horror that has baited you here
LUCKY FAIRY: first things first. you gotta realize that you’re full of magic power!
LUCKY FAIRY: everybody is, but youre really brimming with it!
SERPENT TINA: I’m... magical?
SERPENT TINA: Then I wasn’t just fantasizing for nothing?
SERPENT TINA: I really HAVE been a witch this entire time?
LUCKY FAIRY: yep, thats about the size of it!
LUCKY FAIRY: i doubt you would have been lured by a Calling if you weren’t
SERPENT TINA: Then this crystal orb that i brought w--
LUCKY FAIRY: nope, thats a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with real magic!
SERPENT TINA: Oh, well, still...!!
SERPENT TINA: Golly!!
SERPENT TINA: I’m a real witch, just like some of my favorite characters in fictional works such as Majo no Takkyuubin, Homestuck, Little Witch Academia, the Soulsborne series, Ogre Battle 64, Grimgrimoire, etc...
SERPENT TINA: This is a dream come trWHRGHBRBLBRGH

::SERPENT TINA, still severely sickened, empties the contents of her stomach all over the nasty ground that she just ate a bunch of::

LUCKY FAIRY: aw sick!
LUCKY FAIRY: well i guess this can fit into our first lesson
LUCKY FAIRY: you see, tina--
SERPENT TINA: Uh, actually it’s Serpent Tina...
LUCKY FAIRY: you see, serpent tina!
LUCKY FAIRY: the fundament of magic...
LUCKY FAIRY: is change!
LUCKY FAIRY: and change... can be anything!
LUCKY FAIRY: it can be the power... to heal!
LUCKY FAIRY: and the first basis of healing...
LUCKY FAIRY: is to heal thyself!

::LUCKY FAIRY looks pretty smug while she is explaining all this. She is really reveling in the chance to have a captive audience::

SERPENT TINA: Ugh... okay, so what do I...
LUCKY FAIRY: glad you asked!
LUCKY FAIRY: the short answer is... whatever feels magical!
SERPENT TINA: Huh...
LUCKY FAIRY: the long answer, is that a witch’s conviction and willpower is what draws her magic out and makes it capable of acting as an influence to change the world at large. how you do this doesnt ultimately matter, but magic has often been associated with process and ritual because process and ritual are how we erode mental barriers to a complete connection with our essential selves and the force of will that emanates from them!
SERPENT TINA: Bleaurgh...

::LUCKY FAIRY is a little miffed that her lucid and stylish presentation is being wasted on a delirious sick woman::

LUCKY FAIRY: are you hearing any of this, serpent tina?
LUCKY FAIRY: i promise that you are ***LITERALLY*** going to die if you dont learn this stuff quick!
SERPENT TINA: S’fine just... tell me how to make the hurting stop...
LUCKY FAIRY: huff! okay. do you have like... an idea of what magic looks like?
LUCKY FAIRY: like how its supposed to be done?
SERPENT TINA: Yeah I s’pose...
LUCKY FAIRY: then, do it!
LUCKY FAIRY: and, focus on the concept of you healing and the poisons being purged from your body while youre doing it
LUCKY FAIRY: better do it hastily, or you might die before the scrimlord even gets a chance to kill you!
SERPENT TINA: Ok... bluh... I got this...

::SERPENT TINA rolls to her side, and rummages through her bag. She pulls out a little stick of chalk, and unsteadily drags herself a few feet forward on the floor. Despite her ungainly posture, she manages to trace a passable circle on the ground. In the center of it, she roughly sketches a pattern of interlocking squiggles and gives them crude snake heads. Then SERPENT TINA drops the calk and collapses prone in the center of the chalk circle::

SERPENT TINA: Please...
SERPENT TINA: I don’t wanna die here.
SERPENT TINA: Please.

::For a second, nothing happens, and LUCKY FAIRY looks on in concern. But just when she moves forward to intervene, SERPENT TINA is engulfed in a pillar of strobing rainbow disco light. Really flashy stuff. In a radius extending even slightly outside the circle, the scrim disappears completely, as does SERPENT TINA’s nearby pile of vomit. Through the light show, LUCKY FAIRY sees SERPENT TINA stagger to her knees, then unsteadily pull herself to her feet, and then stand straight, with her feet firmly grounded. SERPENT TINA looks over her shoulder and meets LUCKY FAIRY’s gaze, with an untroubled, placid expression. The lights soon subside::

LUCKY FAIRY: wow hey.
LUCKY FAIRY: not bad!
SERPENT TINA: Pretty good, right?

***

4
Everlasting patience

Patience was sitting on the couch, with her posture straight as her parents taught her, with her spindly legs folded neatly beneath her as she’d been taught in school. The TV was on, but just as background noise. She wasn't paying attention to Ben Heck or the detailed electronics repair process he was demonstrating for the viewers. Patience had her neck tilted just slightly so that her eyes could roam this way and that over the patterns of the wood panelling behind the television. Normally she’d feel an urge to be doing something, put her dextrous hands to good use, but Patience was experiencing a rare feeling of waywardness lost as she was in her dim reverie.

Patience wasn’t actually patient, not by nature anyway. Patience wasn’t actually named Patience, either. Her mother loved flowers, and named her after impatiens, but Impatiens is a weird name that no one has and Patience took to lying about her real name to protect herself from damning accusations of strangeness.

That was a long time ago, when Patience had been an impetuous child. A lot had happened since then. As her life changed, she engaged in a bitter struggle over many years to, to control her impulsive nature, to artificially alter her destined personality type, to forge an organized person out of a lacksadaisical brat. And the terrible, beautiful thing about it, is that it worked, and she was transformed into something unrecognizable, but the simply terrible thing about it is that it still wasn’t enough.

Outside her bubble of meticulous time management, her ardently enforced grids and lists that wrought stability to her life and to a lesser extent the microcosm of her life with her closest friends, havoc ran freely, untrammeled. And Patience knew her brain was born foolish, was born from that havoc and that her brain sought to turn always to its capricious, self-defeating roots.

She knew that her brain hung in the balance, and that the essential chaos governing nature could visit harm upon her again as remorselessly as it had done in the past. But Patience knew her struggle was noble. Her steadfast efforts secured a little place to live, a budget with a little room for entertainment, some free time to develop herself or commune with others. Her vigilance was the glue that held her friends together, even after many years which occasionally brought bitter strife and often gut-wrenching awkwardness.

Time was not her master. Neither were her desires. Neither was money. Time was just a resource, to be rationed out according to principles of proper planning. Her desires were to be critically evaluated and prioritized according to her needs and means. And even in an economy which frequently attempted small, sanctioned acts of robbery against her, Patience could jealously guard her purse strings and adjust her scheduling and her wants to suit the situation, all for the sake of preserving her happy cohabitation with her two best friends.

At this point in her life, Patience had long been at peace with the fact that she had consciously and artificially molded herself into a competent person and that her friends had done this with markedly less success and commitment than her. In-bubble stuff was more or less running smoothly. What Patience was fretting and fidgeting over at the moment, was her world.

Yeah, what about it...

Patience was much less likely than the morose Morgan or that distracted daydreamer Serpent Tina to lose herself in emotive flights of fancy over the extinction of sentience and the entropic march towards the doom of final stillness. It's not that she didn't feel the same way about this, just that her emotions felt like another element among many elements to put into its proper place in the process of dealing with a large circumstantial mess. And that was sort of how she viewed it. The looming end of the world that could be confronted with just some organizing and coordination and structure. An issue that can be resolved by planning and labor just like, a messy house or broken machine can.

She wasn't wrong, and she knew she wasn't, but she also correctly surmised that there was more that she wasn't seeing... and reflecting on these troubling uncontrolled elements too much always caused the first inklings of despair to creep in...

But before she could sink any further into the shallow end of melancholy mental murk, a sudden heavy flop on the other side of the couch startled Patience out of her reverie. She turned around and met heavily dilated ice blue eyes, and a black-smeared pair of lips which parted slightly as if struck by a sudden awe...

MORGAN: mm... pashenche...

Oh, lordy. Was she really... Yep. She was deep into her cups. Her uh. Little throwaway plastic cups that have measuring lines on the side and get almost too gross and sticky to use from the first time that you drink from them.

MORGAN: paschensh... patience... hey... am i still...
MORGAN: am i still an alive strong thing
MORGAN: uhhhffff
MORGAN: patience

::PATIENCE skewed her head and observed MORGAN's state. It wasn't just the drugs. Her friend, usually bacchanalian by this point in her syrup consumption, seemed lethargic and distraught::

PATIENCE: Yes. You are alive, Morgan, and oh so strong, and still very much a thing.

::MORGAN pushed herself up a little, shaking herself to try and awaken herself, so that she could look into PATIENCE's staid sepia eyes with a bit of intent in her gaze::

MORGAN: dont pascheronize... patronize... me. im having a very bad Crisis and i need you're comforts
PATIENCE: Oh. I could sort of tell. You don't seem your usual ebullient, comically wasted nighttime self.
PATIENCE: Why? What’s put you into this state of crisis?
MORGAN: its like... ok... a video game
PATIENCE: You’re in a crisis because of a video game?
MORGAN: no no... i mean yesh but... but what about... 'but what about my world', right
PATIENCE: Your world?
MORGAN: yeah your world...
MORGAN: like or uhh
MORGAN: ourrrr... world?
MORGAN: what about our World pantience
MORGAN: ittttssszzzz FUCKED

::MORGAN performed a wide sweeping gesture with her arm as if to emphasize this alarming truth, and ended up smacking the back of the couch::

PATIENCE: Fucked. Hmm. Ok. I think I see what you're getting at here...
PATIENCE: Oh, hey, that’s a quote from that one game, right?
PATIENCE: “Furusato”? That’s such a classic.
MORGAN: yeah furusato 3 we all know its a classic game whose title means hometown and it carries deeply nostalgic connotaschience
MORGAN: connotations
MORGAN: and also thats not what im actually having an extremely minor flip out session about!!!!
PATIENCE: Right, right.

::PATIENCE shifted in her seat, moving her body sideways and extracting her folded knees, so that she could stretch her legs out on the couch and look towards MORGAN a little more directly. She wasn't expecting a scintillating intellectual conversation with MORGAN being the way she was right now, but there was something warm and comforting about having her nearby with the same sort of worries and cares on her mind::

PATIENCE: So your worries stem from the fact that, certain world-historical forces are careening our biosphere off the path of stability and threatening human extinction? The capitalist impulse to maximize profit and therefore resource expenditure being one of them, with consequent environmental catastrophes with climate change primary among them, and other concomitant factors such as the real possibility of nuclear winter should the flimsy stability of imperialist "world order" be threatened? All of which lead to the possibility that the anthropocene extinction event might be the final, irrecoverable extinction event for our planet?
PATIENCE: That sort of thing?

::MORGAN throws up her hands theatrically, as if to express, "Yeah that's what I'm sayin' here!"::

MORGAN: yes thats enzantly
MORGAN: exactly
MORGAN: what i am talking about!!! we are FUCKED
MORGAN: and its noooot
MORGAN: its not faaaaair
MORGAN: ughhhhh
PATIENCE: Hm. Okay.
PATIENCE: I think I can help you with this. And maybe help myself, too.

::PATIENCE folds her hands, glances down at them, and then looks back up at MORGAN, this time offering the delicate curve of a gentle, magnanimous smile::

PATIENCE: Please understand, I'm right here with you. I think about this sort of thing all the time, Morgan...
MORGAN: yeah? i figured maybe it was too
MORGAN: squishy
MORGAN: for you
MORGAN: like apocalypse is soft science and your some hard physics shit
MORGAN: like maybe the end of all things is as banal to you as fuckin
MORGAN: uhhhhhh
MORGAN: categorizing all the different types of laundries that there are
PATIENCE: Not at all. My composed bearing is, if anything, itself an emotional reaction to the situations that I face.
PATIENCE: Including this situation.
PATIENCE: You may find that the yawnsome grunt work that has become my trademark could be the determining factor in preventing the scenario you so dread.
PATIENCE: Supposing I posit an alternative course of events to the ones you outline here.
PATIENCE: Wherein a different set of choices are made.
PATIENCE: Where bold collective steps are taken to mitigate climate change, ensure responsible stewardship of our planet's resources, thwart the imperialist grip on our planet and obviate the need for and the physical presence of nuclear weapons...
PATIENCE: These might seem somewhat obvious, but they are plausible steps to be taken, aren't they?
PATIENCE: And in such a scenario, our species survival might be guaranteed indefinitely, mightn't it?
PATIENCE: Our coastal cities might become underwater ruins, and this is tragic, but we have land left to build on, don’t we?
PATIENCE: Our species might be dying off, but we can thwart that which kills us, even if that thing comes from us, and we can intervene to assure an ecological balance that guarantees our basic needs and reasonable desires, can’t we?

::MORGAN seems to express discomfort with this barrage of rhetorical questions, and stares down at her own hands, softly clenching and unclenching them, fidgeting with her stubby fingers in anxious silence. When PATIENCE finishes with a flourish that betrays a faint smugness she didn’t want to believe she was capable of, MORGAN glances back up at her with a dubious frown::

MORGAN: nooo
MORGAN: ok
MORGAN: like i mean
MORGAN: youre not Wrong per say
MORGAN: but like it cannot be all so simple like your saying
MORGAN: this bold collective steps you speak of are like
MORGAN: not little actions of cleaning or uh. object motion that your hands can do to fix a problem
MORGAN: the moving parts are not like metal car bits or whatever
MORGAN: theyre people
MORGAN: how can we move them when other forces and there own whims of desire are jerking them this way and that
MORGAN: we have no power over them thats greater than like
MORGAN: fuckin
MORGAN: uhhhh
MORGAN: profit motive or patriarchy or racism or the threat of lost survival
MORGAN: so how can you act like its all basically solved except for the fricking doing anything part

::MORGAN's expression is distraught, her posture cloistered and defensive, and PATIENCE can see that MORGAN's sincere feelings have well overridden the toxic high she was previously enthralled by::

PATIENCE: I... I know that, Morgan. I just wanted to...
PATIENCE: Speak in terms of what's possible, you know?
PATIENCE: Maybe I don’t exactly know the key to regulating human behavior all by myself...
PATIENCE: But, just because we can't do this all on our own, doesn't mean...

::MORGAN's hands clench tightly, and her jaw clenches a little too. PATIENCE is taken aback::

MORGAN: doesnt mean what!!!
MORGAN: we cant do it so we just pray that peoples enforced ignorance disappears on its own?
MORGAN: hope that maybe things get so bad that people just take up arms spontaneously?
MORGAN: so we just give up and wait for future generations that will already be dead to pick up our slack!!!
PATIENCE: No. That's not--
MORGAN: and you know i feel like thatd be even WORSE somehow
MORGAN: if we come up with some lazy half-measure for temporary survival
MORGAN: like really meager survival
MORGAN: b/c who knows what spontaneous form that could take
MORGAN: maybe we just fix global whatever and thats it
MORGAN: and human life just continues indefinitely the way it is
MORGAN: with all the abuse and killing and domination and--
PATIENCE: That's not what I'm saying. And don't accuse me of saying that.
PATIENCE: Because you should know me better than that and you should know that...
PATIENCE: That my optimism isn't something so lightly taken.
PATIENCE: And that my moral convictions are every bit as substantial and impassioned as yours.

::Now MORGAN's expression has softened again, and an overhanging guilt creeps in. There is a slight scowl in PATIENCE's expression, but this is slowly dissipating as she recognizes the contrition on her friend’s face::

PATIENCE: If we want to succeed, we can't let panic take us.
PATIENCE: We need to remember that people have come before us, and faced desperation and catastrophe in their own lives.
PATIENCE: And that against all odds, some of our predecessors were able to secure victory.
PATIENCE: This didn't happen in a day... Or even in a matter of a few years.
PATIENCE: They bided their time. Transmitted their message. Looked for opportunities to band together and act.
PATIENCE: We must heed their example, mustn't we?
PATIENCE: We need to fight our own personal battles, prepare ourselves, and seize opportunities when they arise.
PATIENCE: I don't know exactly how it will look... You criticize me correctly in this regard.
PATIENCE: But I know we'll spot that chance when it appears, and that we could have a hand in changing everything.

::PATIENCE now regards MORGAN serenely, her lips drawn up into a gentle smile that even shows some teeth. MORGAN still looks a little lost, a little guilty from earlier... she's looking down and rubbing her hands with lingering anxiety... but PATIENCE feels no accusatory ire, simply admires MORGAN's passion, and her depth of feeling, and her desire to bring an end to that which must be ended::

MORGAN: ok yeah
MORGAN: i geuss even ppl standing at the end of the world have to like
MORGAN: live our lives and continue growing as ppl tho
MORGAN: im like
MORGAN: rly sorry patience
MORGAN: i think you stopped me in like the beginning stages of a bigass meltdown
PATIENCE: Maybe so. But I don't feel inclined to judge you.
PATIENCE: We share the same emotions on this topic. I simply want to show you another, more constructive way of handling them.
MORGAN: ok yea
MORGAN: ill keep on like
MORGAN: honing my shit and studying the good stuff
MORGAN: when the time really comes well fight for our world side by side yeah

::PATIENCE, sincere in her feelings but a little unaccustomed to physical displays of emotion, clumsily pats MORGAN's arm, like "attagirl!" MORGAN's anxious frown has given way to a calm smile and she replies to this gesture with her own unique form of gratitude, grabbing PATIENCE by the hand exactly the way Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers do when they greet each other in Predator (1987). PATIENCE responds to this unique affectionate bodily expression with appreciative surprise::

PATIENCE: Yeah. We will. We absolutely will.
PATIENCE: Now, seeing as we aren't going to change the world in the course of one night...
PATIENCE: Would you like to spend some time with me instead of stumbling back to your chamber of sulking?
PATIENCE: I've got Ben Heck on...
MORGAN: yea
MORGAN: i would extremely like to do that, yes
MORGAN: that guy is so good at saying stuff about electronics
PATIENCE: Extremely so.

The evening progresses, and though the question's been posed, "But what about your world?" has yet to be fully answered. Life would have to go on in the meantime. Patience would be there for Morgan, and Morgan for Patience, and Serpent Tina had to come home from night shift at some point.

More distantly, another friend, unbeknownst to herself or any of the roommates, was waiting to appear... to guide them in their fearful uncertainty and to have her wounds salved in exchange, to serve as a final piece in their jigsaw, the mortar that binds their mosaic. But for now, two special friends would enjoy the magic of the night together, here on the precipice of the end of the world.

****

5
The battle of combat

The sickening stomach load that had debilitated Serpent Tina was gone, by ritual, by belief and by sheer force of will. But another insidious poison was still festering inside her. The Calling would continue drawing Serpent Tina to the Scrimlord’s power spots, sapping her will and disgracing her with foul debris, it would continue doing so until the caller was killed.

SERPENT TINA: So, um. First of all, thank you!!
SERPENT TINA: You really helped me out of a bind. I don’t think I’d still be here if it wasn’t for you, Lucky Fairy.
LUCKY FAIRY: aw, shucks! cmon.
LUCKY FAIRY: i just happened to be passing through, yknow!
LUCKY FAIRY: what kind of demi-benevolent spirit of zephyr and caprice would i be if i didnt help out a fallen sister.
SERPENT TINA: Well, maybe it was normal for you, but it means a lot to me.
SERPENT TINA: I do kinda wanna ask, though...
SERPENT TINA: Since I’m new at all this magic stuff, right?
LUCKY FAIRY: right...
SERPENT TINA: How do I do the murder magic? How do I straight up kill a dude?
LUCKY FAIRY: jeez, don’t ask me!!
LUCKY FAIRY: i can help you out with your minor cantrips, dude, but that shit is MAJOR arcana
LUCKY FAIRY: you have to be REALLY resolved, and REALLY attuned, if you wanna, yknow
LUCKY FAIRY: mystically murk a dude
LUCKY FAIRY: like, no offense, and im SUPER happy that you appreciated my assistance
LUCKY FAIRY: but we’re probably both gonna die now that we’ve been in his domain for this long
SERPENT TINA: Mm... I dunno. I was kinda scared at first, but weirdly I feel like...
SERPENT TINA: Like I totally GOT this, yknow?
SERPENT TINA: I feel *amped*, Lucky Fairy.
LUCKY FAIRY: sure, sure, whatever, you know better than i do, right
SERPENT TINA: I’m serious! Wait and see.
SERPENT TINA: If you can’t teach me the world’s most secret, esoteric, amazing and cool murder magic, can you at least lead me to it... him? it?
LUCKY FAIRY: ooookaaaay. i mean we might as well get this over with
LUCKY FAIRY: stick close behind, okay?
SERPENT TINA: Mmm hmm!

Serpent Tina makes the OK hand. Lucky Fairy sighs as though she finds being in mortal danger to be a huge hassle, and makes a beckoning gesture in kind. Serpent Tina stumbles across more floor dreck as Lucky Fairy flits to the opposite corner of the room. A rusted out door is to the right, and an entryway to some stairs is to the left; the sprite does midair hops towards the stairs and leads her newfound witch upward. Serpent Tina sticks close to the wall, watchful yet strangely tranquil inside, somehow confident that in the impending moment that necessitates action, she will not falter. The stairs lead out to a workshop area vaguely lit by reflected light bouncing off the violet underbellies of low-hanging clouds.

Lucky Fairy glances this way and that, wary of ambush even though she knows the Scrimlord never really roams from his main haunt. When she’s sure the coast is clear, she leads Serpent Tina on a winding path past... lathes? Belt sanders? Whatever these machines used to do, in their ruined, unkempt state they wouldn’t be doing a lot of it anymore.

The jostling and rattling of a nearby door immediately exorcised any uninformed speculation on the function of dead machinery from the minds of the newly formed party of two. With an expresssion of shaky terror, Lucky Fairy pointed towards an extremely dirty and rusty looking elevator door at the end of the hallway. The witch nodded curtly and stepped forward toward the elevator door. She pressed the “down” button, and...

LUCKY FAIRY: hey, don’t be stupid! you think the scrimlord is paying the power bill here?!
SERPENT TINA: Whoops. Uhh...

The door was now vibrating much harder. Something inside was sure hammering away at it. Serpent Tina clenched and opened her hands... then held them up and slipped her fingers backways in the crack of the elevator and began to pull them apart.

LUCKY FAIRY: holy shit! she’s goin’ for it!

She was goin’ for it. Serpent Tina might have been a homebody, might have been a sheltered dweeb for as long as she could remember, but it was not for no reason that her gains were well regarded on the www.swoleotaku.com community forums. The door yielded to her show of determination and brawn.

A reddish-brown streak came screaming out of the now-opened elevator, whacking Serpent Tina on the left side of her abdomen and zooming past her. Lucky Fairy dodged just in time and the shape doubled back, and came to an abrupt halt behind a wheezing Serpent Tina.

VOICE: kehehehe! whatsit idiot! for you to came in my fucken piece like this! very dangerest of stupid!
SERPENT TINA: Wh.

She turned around. It was this little red devil looking thing, maybe ten inches tall at most, with a big tengu nose, a shitty goatee, a massive widow’s peak... Was this it?

SERPENT TINA: Is this it?
LUCKY FAIRY: serpent tina! watch out!!

The scrimlord tried ramming Serpent Tina again. This time, she easily sidestepped it.

SCRIMLORD: wily kit! snicky trick!
SERPENT TINA: So you really ARE it? The Scrimlord, some kind of fearsome filth-demon who has been mind controlling me into hanging out in drainage ditches and recreationally eating grime that probably would have given me tetanus or botulism if I weren’t extremely magical? You’re like... a little baby imp.
LUCKY FAIRY: don’t underestimate him because he’s small. his magic is no joke!
SCRIMLORD: yea! t’was everything deed of mine! yon golpin whistbasket! yon mazen fretbairn!
SERPENT TINA: Can you please talk normal?
SCRIMLORD: Oh, sorry.
SCRIMLORD: Yes, I am the Scrimlord.
SCRIMLORD: Filth is a sign of decay. I, who preside over a subdomain of it, act as a herald for the greater harbingers of entropy, of endings, of final ruination.
SCRIMLORD: I thought to make of you a fine and hearty meal, child of Lilith, but your resolve has earned my admiration.
SCRIMLORD: Before I consume you, I offer you the opportunity for succor. For salvation.
SCRIMLORD: Witch, become my thrall. Spread crumbs and bits and grit over the world. Entice roaches. Convey mold into lungs. Pave the way for the high executives of pestilence and death.
SCRIMLORD: Accept this kindness, and I will only eat your stupid trespassing friend.
LUCKY FAIRY: HEY!
SERPENT TINA: Hmm, okay...
LUCKY FAIRY: You’re not seriously considering it?!
SERPENT TINA: Hush, hush. So you hail from some extradimensional territory...
SCRIMLORD: Yes, the Extraplane.
SERPENT TINA: And you work for some executives there.
SCRIMLORD: Yes. Very high tier fellows.
SERPENT TINA: And you want me to become a thrall, which is another word for slave, and do some sort of vaguely evil grunt work for you.
SCRIMLORD: Uh huh.
SERPENT TINA: Hmm... well...

She reaches downward and begins hiking her robes up. Lucky Fairy gets an expression of shock, the Scrimlord of lascivious surprise.

SERPENT TINA: Wow, I hate you so much! Fuck you!

In an instant, Serpent Tina rams the point of her shoe up to the smooth crotch of the lesser imp. Smooth or not, The Scrimlord nevertheless reaches between his legs and howls in agony. From her thigh holster she produces the bear spray and sprays all but the whole bottle into his eyes and open, screaming mouth. In his pain, the Scrimlord is beginning to sink out of the air, but Serpent Tina snatches him up in midair, whacks him against the wall, and hammers him with her clenched fist about a dozen times.

The bloodied and blinded imp screeches and wrenches itself from Serpent Tina’s grasp. It flutters away, ramming haphazardly into walls. Lucky Fairy catches up with him and prods his shoulder with a discarded nail. His screams redouble, and the Scrimlord bursts through a window, wailing into the night. Serpent Tina rushes to the window and fires the glock at him a couple of times. She is just that pissed off and serious. But none of the bullets hit, and soon the sound of his voice is small and distant and disappears altogether.

LUCKY FAIRY: holy shit!
SERPENT TINA: I know, right.

****

6
Story story

It was deep, deep into the night. Morgan had spent all of it with Patience, just being in the presence of Patience.

Her mood would shift from confused to wildly jubilant and back again, her body would move strangely and at weird angles, and there was something she couldn’t get enough of. What couldn’t she get enough of. It was hard to think, she’d excused herself “to go to bed” awkwardly just before she started peaking, because it was too embarrassing to be how she was even though Patience knew how she was and now she was peaking... how come it was so embarrassing to be around Patience when she liked her so much... something about a satisfying weird sweetness, like a vinegar candy sweetness, with like, uh, uh... a tinge...

the piercing fixation of her stained darkwood irises, the affectation of her being herself that was also her just being herself, certain curvatures of her cheekbones and dimples and her, her form...

Had she run away from, god the words were hard, god she’d drank too much, had she run away from the sweetness and tinge? Was her tincture of citrus-vinegar-acid-acrid-placidness too... uhh...

Morgan couldn’t allow this rickety train of thought to proceed to its destination. That route was closed, the engineer was inebriated and the whole enterprise was below safety regulation standards. She tried to lose herself in another reverie, tried to just be normal-high and not feel a picture-perfect watery reflection, a calm, clear vision of Patience’s face, tried...

She would write. Yes. This was the thing to do when she was so high she could barely move and was on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake.

Morgan loved to write, after all. Somehow, despite their somewhat disparate spheres of interest, all of the roommates loved to write, and none of them ever showed any other roommate any little thing that they wrote.

Morgan felt her stuff was too weird because she intentionally slathered it with layers of irony and inscrutability, which wasn’t helped by her perpetual insobriety. She wasn’t sure if it was a defense mechanism or what, but she was ashamed to genuinely love the works she penned, and always kept them at arm’s length.

Still she wrote them.

She wrote:

****

7
outsider entities

a curse, MY curse, the ONLY curse, that can only be cured, by, a “profiterole frittata”, consuming a “profiterole frittata”, but the curse cannot be cured, by the name of the Frittata which is false, and the Profiterole which is a concoction, of lies, made by a man to joke with you with,

i eat it. i, the Curse-Seer, i the Fortune-Teller, eat it to see the curse uncured, i eat the frittata and feel the profiterole on my tongue. and i lay back and close my eyes and visions assail me through the luminous shapes undulating on the insides of my eyelids, and i see,

a feeling, of feeling’s negation, a thought about a thought that contains a contradiction, a solvent, a dissolving agent, which alone can reconcile feeling and feelings negation and a thought within a thought nested which contains a contradiction withinn itself, Bismuth-Angled-Radiant, tessellated godling, name of “CHIRAL NEMATIC LIQUID CRYSTAL BEING”,

a Gelly-Boy in cadet blue, piece of painful cleaning with real vitamin-E lipids, and remember the big ones are his eyes not lipids, stringent isopropyl-stenching creature of no fealty, falsely impartial consultant, the Artifice of Cleansing Truth that burns away the skin and must be kept away from eyes and never ingested, name of “SEUDLEUM BROBLEM BERSON”,

when you have, yes a Craving, yes a Compelling, yes a Calling, thats the, lets call him “SCRIMLORD” calling, wanting you to eat the scrim, the scrimlord who was born a misfigured little fucked up goblin because one time one guy on a cocaine high said “SCRIMLORD”,

the itching is Gnawing, the twingeing is Gnawing, the insufferable pain is real Gnawing, from him who buurows throught our Skin outward, him who winks gnawingly and drinks gneedily, name of “SENSUALCOUPONDUDE”,

a dangerous and consuming guilt, that says its sorry for being dangerous and sorry for being consuming, and is austere charcoal crags that climbs itself, and is its own dirty bongwater tears, congealed and lumpy from years of presence like amber, that is weak and sorrowful beyond all imagining and voids itself of all involvement save that which is done to it, which is called by name “ANYBODY DAYTIME PERSON LESSON”, the unthinkable, grandiose, “ANYBODY DAYTIME PERSON LESSON” in ruins, ashambles,

o, ruminated multitude which the Universe and Outside-Itself regurgitate back and forth through itselves ad nauseum unceasingly, parce guedalum parce-gue pom parcenip, the uncountable and definitionally meaningless, the shadowed and afflicted, the shrouded afflictors,

and Thereso, Fromwith, Which’ve’nt Thoughever, even though you are too high and you are fucked up and stupid you must remember that they are all people. you are describing people and the good and evil that they do. you are describing the Curse of Bondage and the Chained Gods magic wish that breaks all bindings. Morgan. you fucking retarded syrup drinker. i would not to forget i mean said not to forget but you even forgot about rasa.

sorry you have to caps it, and do a comma, RASA TABOOLA,

rasa im sorry rasa. i love you rasa. rasa. rasa, i forget you rasa. you are my sister rasa. serpent tina misses you most of all but we are all dying here without your presence. you are everything that makes sense and is good and we need you to rush back to us. rasa rasa rasa rasa rasa rasa ras rassssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssdfghjmmnbgfdsefggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg”

Morgan fell asleep on her keyboard while writing this. By the time she woke up, the sun was high, Serpent Tina was finally home, and Morgan read this thing she wrote and was like,

“man that sucks!”

****

Rasa 1
What about her world

So there's our world, of course. Located in our very own universe and all that. And there's only the one universe, naturally. Nothing parallel or alternate to speak of outside the realms of human imagination.

Many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics? How ‘bout the hardly-any-worlds interpretation, bucko.

Yep. If it's not in our universe, then it's not in ANY universe. Instead, it's in a boundless, timeless expanse called the Extraplane. Now, it so happens that, not unlike our world, this overflow dimension has some inhabitants. And fortune would have it that the Extraplane had one very special inhabitant whose existence and whose deeds would cause cataclysms and miracles on our world.

But she was no deity. She was no destroyer demon. She was just a woman. Her name was Rasa Taboola. Rasa, like “blank slate”, and Taboola, a company which specialized in online targeted advertising that caught eyes and occasional clicks via appalling displays of body horror.

Rasa was born to human parents, but she was snatched away from them almost as soon as she was born by a for-profit NGO located in the Extraplane, known as the Calabash Foundation for an Empty Canvas, or "Seefeck". The organization was founded by a legendary eccentric infinitrillionaire, Don Calabash, on the principle that history is a baggage, an inherent limitation which prevents a future of truly unbounded potential. It was Don's ambition to disrupt the influence of history on future outcomes and keep the flow of oncoming events seeded with the infinitely possible, stoking the fires of innovation throughout the realms of the causal. Seefeck enjoyed a beloved reputation among Calabash’s peers as a highly disruptive startup, although it had sort of always existed.

Thus is the organization that kidnapped Rasa and raised her from infancy.

In certain ways, the ultra-impersonal Seefeck was very diverse in its higher practices. So the science men--a term broadly applied to anyone who is a man and had magical, spiritual or scientific power worth kidnappin--the science men tasked with raising Rasa had many ways of interpreting her existence through the lens of the already known. classic means of viewing her was as a Mother Mary, or a Magdalene, or perhaps Jezebel. To some she was Guan Yin, Izanami or she cold be Rangda in chains, Eris or Persephone, or maybe a sworn virgin or a vestal virgin or Branwen or Nuliayuk or a doomed Calliope. But in truth, this Wikipedia mishmash of mythological and pop culture bullshit was a means for these men to imbue with wonder their banal existence as thralls for one austere, suffocating corporation among many.

It also allowed them to compensate for a complete inability to comprehend the entire terrifying scope of Rasa Taboola's existence.

She was nothing more or less than Rasa Taboola. None of these weaksauce mythological approximations could truly describe her, nothing existed to compare exactly to what she was.

Rasa Taboola was the Conduit.

As if it wasn't already screamingly obvious by the hackneyed moniker meaning "blank slate" which Mr. Calabash gave her shortly after her arrival at Seefeck HQ, Rasa was a woman who had been stripped of nearly all vestiges of her identity for the sake of fulfilling her assigned purpose. She could think and feel like you or I can, sure, but with her trapped in a medium with no one to express those thoughts and emotions to, that didn't count for a whole heck of a lot. She had a body but her facial features had been bevelled away entirely and her skin had been drained of pigment completely. This left her face a yawning emptiness, her alabaster skin like a posing dummy, hairless, blemishless, featureless.

So in case it wasn't already clear, Rasa Taboola was a living sprite template.

Incidentally, the trademarked alteration to the spelling of her would-be last name, was because of an ill-fated joint marketing venture with the aforementioned company of native advertising junk pushers known as Taboola. Don had worked it out with Taboola's people that he would name the conduit after Taboola as part of a wider sponsorship effort. Later, Don killed the deal after remembering that, being an entity of the Extraplane, Seefeck technically had limitless dollars and a temporal corporation had nothing to offer them. But the name stuck, and the namesake of cultural sewage sellers Rasa would remain.

What does it mean that Rasa Taboola is the Conduit? Don Calabash ripped the idea off Lois Lowry's "The Giver" with shocking disregard for ownership of ideas, but he was pretty unashamed about this, figuring that the concept deserved more than use as an ultra-lame allegory in an even dumber fusion of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451.

Kinda like the titular character in those books, the Conduit would serve as a living repository for of the past, a knower and channeler for everything that had happened in history. But instead of serving as an exclusive database for historical knowledge, for vaguely defined leadership to draw vaguely defined historical lessons from, the Conduit would serve a unique purpose in keeping with the ultimate aims of Seefeck and its hellbent CEO.

By absorbing, and personally comprehending, every single event that had ever happened so far, Rasa Taboola the Conduit served as a sort of highest of all priestesses, fulfilling an arduous ceremonial role that had real and substantial magical effects across the entirety of existence. By seeing it, by knowing it, by understanding the course of all events come before not just on the level of personal experience but in all aspects, in all nuance and detail from all perspectives, the Conduit miraculously allowed history to pass into irrelevance.

Now, history passing into irrelevance is not the same as historical erasure. That's been tried, and it only partially works as a tool of rulership, and it doesn't work at all for enabling Calabash's obsession with breaking the chain of causality and making all things possible. When the process is complete, everything will be more or less remembered, archived, recorded for posterity or survives in some kind of way, such as it has always been. The sacrifice of Rasa Taboola serves the far more esoteric function of sapping the past of its burdensome circumstantial weight, draining it of meaning, rendering it causally inert in the minds of any who observe it. She becomes living history, and living history gets thrown in a closet to be forgotten about.

So, as it shall be to those in the temporal world, what’s past is past. The important thing is now, and even moreso the future. To those that inhabit our universe, no future occurrence will be impossible, be it ever so wonderful.

(Does it seem like maybe there’s a flaw with this plan? History binds us to a grave legacy of brutality and suffering, and natural causality has many cruelties that it visits upon is irrespective of our desires or our best efforts. It’s true that if anything is possible, then all the best things are possible, but, it’s also just as possible for existence itself to be the 100% infinite unlimited worst possible torture ever zone for all its inhabitants, isn’t it?

But Calabash is insane and fixated and wealthy to the point where no one can tell him "no", so of course none of this shit matters to him.)

Can we truly understand the Conduit's existence by such detached methods of scholarly inquiry? Surely not. It is one thing to know superficially that something is “bad”, but it is quite another to know it till you feel it, to try your hardest to feel what she felt by knowing all that she's seen. So let us put it another way. Really dig in and comprehend what it means to know everything, to see everything, even the worst things, the very worst things.

The art of categorization is to select for sets based on criteria. By choosing a set of traits to define by and determining which items in the set meet the criteria, discrete object groupings are created. Various related events through the timeline can be corralled off together and the universe can be viewed in terms of sameness and difference from within and without the group. Essentially, all “like” historical events can be corraled together and viewed as a single object.

With enough cognitive power, even the most complex, esoteric and wide-ranging objects can be singled out and analyzed. And we can best understand the plight of Rasa by taking a look at some of the objects that she was made to know in their completeness as discrete categories and as a cacophony of the whole.

Have you ever felt, oh, let’s say anxiety? If you're like me, you've probably felt a lot of it. But it’s not so bad, save for those with truly pathological outgrowths of it. For Rasa, though, anxiety, "all of the anxiety", is a single object throughout time. She knows every feeling felt by every person who ever felt “anxiety” at any point, including the very most pathologically anxious.

Ever felt sad or lonely, ever been scared for your health and safety, maybe even wish you could die because you were so messed up? She knows just what it was like for you. She's not you. It didn't happen to her, she didn’t “live through it”. But she knows every single bit of what it was like and it grieves her. She knows the entire object of sadness and the entire object of loneliness and she knows every nook and cranny of our thoughts and deeds, all the consequences of things we've done, all the things we've had happen to us. There are so many objects of knowledge and understanding that were coerced into her brain by the will of a force that controls her life completely.

What have you seen online? A lot of things, right. Weird things, right? Bad things, maybe? She saw everything you saw and what you were like when you were seeing it. She knows what life was like for all the women and men that you saw on that screen in more detail than the deepest searching and intimately communicating biographer ever could. She knows what's wrong with everything that’s happened to us, but we are so far away and so deaf to anything she says to us.

Oh, the things she’s seen, the things she’s remembered. The things she saw say so much to her about what we are like and she has has so much love and so much compassion for us but still, she’s embarrassed by us, and appalled at us, and angry at us, and maybe for no reason angry at herself for being anything like us. So deeply humiliated and enraged at our indifference to the suffering of others even as we suffer ourselves. So incensed by the manic desire that our society has ingrained in us to take ownership over the lives of others and make them instruments of our personal fulfillment even as they experience hell through it. She's so ashamed, and she wants so much more for us than that. She is frustrated and she is heartbroken.

Those who took advantage of someone who was helpless before their power. Another object, and one with so many unspeakably horrible nuances. You can guess them, but you don’t know them. Did you hurt someone vulnerable just because you could? Did you hurt, threaten or incapacitate to gain something, even just an evil satisfaction? Even stuck in the unthinkably cruel clutches of Seefeck, Rasa Taboola does not simply sit around and cry bitter tears all the time. No. Her fury is real and implacable. Her love for all of us is not unconditional.

Those who fucked someone, fucked someone desperate because they had a little money or a lot of money and they knew that money is the only thing keeping her or him (probably her) from the baying of hunger, from drowning in the well of misery, from exposure to the withering and brutal elements, from untreatable sickliness, from her death, her immiseration. From separation with the ones she loves the most, from their death, their immiseration...

She knows, you know. If people hadn’t kept doing it then she wouldn’t have had to know everything about it, exhaustively down to the smallest detail.

Did they have even an inkling of that reality when they did it? Did they know and simply not care? Does ignorance of Rasa’s suffering excuse? Does ignorance of their victim’s suffering excuse? Maybe it was just a hit to “relieve tension” and what’s the big deal, maybe those people were scum and needed killing, maybe it’s their fault for falling for the scam in the first place, maybe they need to work harder and be less lazy. Maybe it was just a dance or date with something extra and what’s the big deal she needed the money didn’t she.

If you go beyond the point of no return, Rasa hates you. You deserve it. You deserve to die. And she would kill you if she could, if she could do more than sit there, trapped at Seefeck, trapped and simply seeing, and simply knowing.

Obviously she's miserable in her helpless anger, waning to dull frustration, waxing to apoplexy. But shouldn't she be like that? I mean, can you imagine? No, you literally can't imagine. That's the fucking problem!!!!! But...

but you could at least try.

You could at least try.

No one could tolerate such horrors. No one. But she’s still alive, isn’t she? Don’t take your attention away from her feelings. Don’t you dare. Becase there’s more to know. Because she’s witnessed much more than our long human history of interpersonal atrocities.

There's the whole deal with nature, isn’t there? With all that she knows, she was pretty much there when the little animals first evolved into being, when life started getting strange and the sea began to grow little maws and life began to eat itself and we started growing sensors and feeling pain and so many of us living creatures started bringing each other to the most fearful ends. All of the teeth in the Cambrian ocean that were not just for show. All the ways that a blade can ruin a body, the ways that pain can gnarl a mind, all our enmities and sicknesses of cruelty, and also everything up to the very most Pollyanna of our hopeful and sincere aspirations for something better...

Rasa Taboola was, the Conduit was, made to know them, each and every one, all categories, all events, all objects and instances up to the bleeding edge of the moment where Don Calabash's temporal body resides. She was a little bit of Santa Claus without the presents, God without the powers, the Book of Life without Saint Peter, and not unlike Laplace's Demon but like in a million times worse of a mood all the time.

And here's the other thing about it...

Her process of coming to know everything about reality up to this point was long, it was awful, and it was, in fact, one of the literal worst things ever. During her neverending captivity, which is happening and has always already happened, she doesn't get strapped down or restrained or anything, but she’s forced to spend all her time on a surgical table kind of thing, and she just can't leave despite nothing physically keeping her there. Only her paralyzing misery and woe keeps her from getting up and leaving. What, do you think she’s being melodramatic? What the fuck would you do, bigshot?

And these various science men from different points in the timeline come in, right, and feed her these various notions and give her all kinds of potions and substances and they draw these sigils on and around here, and they put these electrodes on her head and just wreck her brain up with all these horrible pieces of information at once.

And jesus, she didn't even get to know the whole thing all at once. No, getting current up to everything that happened by this year was an arduous 20 year process where the science men put her through all of this complete bullshit and she went through life knowing some of everything and most of it was completely awful and none of it made any sense in conjunction with what she was experiencing.

Given nothing like a schedule, at any seemingly safe moment this terrible process could start happening again, every second up until her 20th birthday, which is what Don Calabash called it, or her 20th adoption year, which is what the science men who were sanctimonious enough to talk at her called it, or her 20th anniversary of being fucking kidnapped, which is what she thought of.

And here’s another thing. Maybe the final thing, until anyone’s ready to start knowing about her story proper, because her story sure doesn’t end on a shitty gurney being utilized as emotional sacrifice, as some kind of psychic wrecking ball for causality outside the Extraplane. Right, so like...

Some of the experiences she knew of, and perhaps had exaggerated in her memory based on the influence of many fictional representations and misrepresentations, suggested that this kind of cosmic-scale psychological torment should destroy her brain 100% and leave her a gibbering, mentally vacant shell. Up to her 20th anniversary of being fucking kidnapped, Rasa was just constantly hoping and praying for the knowledge that would leave her completely shitless, become so completely insane that none of this awful and all-too-real knowledge could reach her.

But no matter what happened.

No matter how bad things got.

Rasa Taboola could not go insane.

Rasa Taboola could not leave reality.

Part of it was that she was getting the knowledge, and there was some stuff in there that helped her cope. But, part of it was also that her life was not completely like Lois Lowry's book The Giver, which she hated, and she incidentally was aware that a bunch of weird abortion groups had latched onto its hamfisted shock imagery of infanticide. Because, unlike the boy in The Giver, whose name I forget but she would know, she did not 'experience' the memory of these events firsthand. She did not at any point in her twenty year torture-tutelage experience anything except that which she really experienced, although the knowledge she received deeply distorted her connection to reality.

She had been spared a litany of physical traumas that she knew every little thing about, although she had seen more psychologically traumatizing things than she could ever relate. Don Calabash, and Don Calabash’s army of stolen spirits of male scientists numbered among them more than a slim majority of creeps and violent psychos, but the unthinkable punishments awaiting anyone who interfered with the experiment in any way safeguarded her from physical abuse, at least while the ritual of two decades was taking place.

The periods in between knowledge implantations were spent vacillating between stunned horror at the memories that were not really hers and long stretches of catatonic boredom in between.

Torment, and boredom, agony and listlessness, constant confinement...

It was really bad.

It was unthinkable. It was one of the worst things ever.

But not enough to make her go insane. Not enough to free her.

She was still here...

But she wouldn’t be forever.

Rasa Taboola, knew everything about the past, but her future was still unwritten.

****