to: all; blog post 01

[stations]

Hey, everybody. My name's Jack, and I think I should probably start this thing out with an apology and a warning.

This is probably going to get long, and I can almost guarantee most of you won't find it interesting at all. To be perfectly transparent, I think it's a pretty safe bet that if you have even the slightest disinterest in reading stories that are completely irrelevant to you, you're going to want to go ahead and magically mute this message. Seriously, this is about to be the definition of 'too long, didn't read'. Sorry for cluttering your heads-up display, I'm not really sure of a better way to make this thing opt-in.

This post is intended for people who are bored, or curious, or maybe just really, really desperate for something to read while sitting on the toilet.

Back home, I used to run a blog. For those of you from worlds that don't have blogs, it's basically like a diary or a journal entry that you post in a public space for strangers to read, and then make really judgmental comments about. I'm not selling the premise very well, but trust me when I say there's something reassuring about putting your story into the public domain. Writers probably get different things out of it, but for me, it's nice to have a sort of "reality check-point". For reasons I won't bore you with, there are times in my life where I question my memories, or the nature of my reality. Having other people in the world who can remember something with me, or who can shed some light on what happened, has literally saved my life once or twice. It was my therapist's idea. Sort of.

The thing is, my blog posts aren't actually about me exactly. They're about the truly bizarre, absolutely balls-out insane things that happen around me, or things that I get to see, whether I like it or not. Usually not.

Lately, it's mostly been the latter.

I think most (if not all) of us have been granted gifts by the singularity. I'm pretty sure mine have just been taking little things that already happened to me back home and amping them up about a thousand times. I've been seeing people's memories. I don't have a lot of control over it, it just sort of... happens. A lot of the time they're boring, inane things. People brushing their teeth, eating, waiting in line, stuff like that. One truly horrific memory of somebody beating somebody else half to death with what looked like a Hitachi magic wand, but I didn't see who exactly that one came from and I think I'm happier not knowing. Those aren't the ones I want to talk about, though.

Today, I want to talk about the ocean.



I've accidentally swallowed two memories lately that are nautical-ish. I don't think they're related, but maybe? There seems (sea-ms?) to be a lot of sea-related stuff going on, so who knows.

The first one is the story of a turtle. You guys might have seen him aboard that involuntary cruise we were all made to go on for Christmas. They called him Admiral Chuck, and frankly, he was fucking adorable. I would die for that turtle. I might just be biased, though, because I watched him get swept away from his home. Apparently my memory-thing also works on turtles, so that was a fun revelation.

One minute I was standing aboard the deck of the ship, and the next, I was him. I was the turtle. It was a simpler life, a simpler mindset, and I was happy. I lived in a city with my turtle family, and all I really needed for everything to be perfect was a ripe, juicy tomato.

And then... the storms came. I was on the streets at the time, making my way to where I knew my family would be: a quaint little garden with a nice gardener who always gave us those sweet, sweet tomatoes when the rain started coming down. It went from a drizzle to a downpour fast. I'm talking, cats and fucking dogs, buy the supplies for milk sandwiches, batten down the hatches holy fucking shit somebody build an ark levels of rain. The streets started to flood, and they didn't stop. I couldn't move fast enough. I don't give a shit about that old story about the rabbit racing the tortoise, that story was made of lies. At that moment, I would've happily been a rabbit just to get to my family in time.

But I didn't. The flooding was too much, the current was too strong. Before I could get to higher ground, it caught me, and it swept me out to sea.

The city was gone. Drowned. My family was gone, and I was alone.

That's all I got. I don't know what happened to Admiral Chuck after that, how he was found, or what happened to his family. Just that they were there, and then they weren't. I totally didn't cry after I saw it, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

The second memory is from a little bit before that.

It only lasted a second, but it felt like longer. For a few days, I was Rhy, and I was in hell. Not literal hell, no, I've seen that place once and it tottally sucked. It felt like hell, though, if hell was a beach. I think it might've been in the Horizon.

Back home, I'd only been to the beach once before. My best friend Jerry - some of you may know him, he's in Solvunn now - kidnapped me for an involuntary (but much-needed) vacation after we stopped a demigod from taking over our town with a bunch of brainwashed sleeper agent plant clones.

Wow, I just realized that's kind of a recurring theme in my life.
The involuntary vacations thing, I mean, not the brainwashed sleeper agent clones. That was more of a one-time thing, thank the Dark God.

Anyway, the beach we went to was at the tail end of a four-day drive to the west coast. It was sunny, it was warm. It was full of sand, tourists, and not nearly enough sunblock to keep my pasty ass from looking like a cartoon lobster by the time we left. I'm telling you this so you can picture whatever the exact opposite of that looks like. That's where I was stranded. Rather, that's where Rhy was stranded. It was desolate, it was emptier than a Mormon strip club on a Sunday. Everything about it felt... wrong.

Well, it wasn't entirely empty, I guess.

There were corpses fucking everywhere.

The more time I spent there, the more I began to deteriorate. I started hearing whispers, and I'm not sure if they were from me, or from Rhy, or from the beach itself — they were gentle at first, but undeniably insidious.

You deserve this.
You deserve to be here.
You belong here.
Fuck you.

Wait, what? I thought. Hold on a second.

That last one didn't sound like the beach. It sounded almost exactly like a girl I went to high school with. Southern, feminine, and super angry. Like, Carrie Underwood in that song about her boyfriend cheating on her.

"Hello? Is somebody there?" I (Rhy) called out into the distant, crashing waves of absolute nothing, feeling a little crazy about talking to the wind — but fuck it, right? What's there to lose? It's not like anyone's around to see (sea?).

The longer it went with no response, the more dread I felt — until finally, that voice broke through the relentless oceanic ASMR again. It called back, "Can you hear me?"

I'm not sure which of the two of us it was, but I swear to god I almost wept. I will never judge Carrie Underwood fans again. She's a queen and she was right to key that asshole's car.

"I can hear you," Rhy (I) said. "Keep talking. Please. Where are you?"

It was a question that never actually got a satisfactory answer. All around us was emptiness. It was like a perpetual sandy void, as empty as Donald Trump's soul, and as barren as his hairline. No matter where we walked, where we looked, or where we angled, we couldn't see another living soul. So how could we still hear her?

"I don't know where I am," said the voice, "It's like, a desert with a pink sky, and a thing in the sky that hums."

It's been a minute since I've visited a desert, but the last I checked, they don't usually come with oceans attached to them. Wherever we were, it clearly wasn't the same landscape. How in the hell could we hear each other?

I had no idea, and I'm pretty sure Rhy didn't either — but on the bright side, having somebody to talk to probably kept him from picking one of those random dead bodies to name Wilson. That probably would've been a little more morbid than carrying around a Volleyball.

We worked together as best we could through our universal separation. It felt like shouting through the walls of a boarded up house, it felt like being trapped in two separate but neighboring jail cells in the Horizon. Not-Carrie Underwood talked me (Rhy) through building a fire to help shake off the frigid waterside winds, and she even managed to send us a sweater — somehow. I've given up on trying to wrap my head around that one.

Eventually, though, she said something really interesting.

"Rhy. A few months ago. With the nightmares. Did you... did you try to come to the Horizon back then? Did you see somewhere else for a second?"

The answer came to mind instantly, and it was alarmingly appropriate.

"Y-yes. I saw something. Just a glimpse. I saw an ocean. A boat. Did you see something too?"

"Yeah, a few times. Always the same place. A field, at night. The grass was long. And there were two statues. Of people, but no one I know. They were connected by all these glowin', red threads. And every time, they were in different positions, but I never saw 'em move. And there was an Arcana in the sky. The Magician, I had to look it up later. I don't even know if I know anyone with that sign."

The memory ended shortly after that.

I don't know what any of it means, or if it means anything at all. I don't know if any of it is related. I don't even know for sure if all of it was real. I just know it was weird, and it seems like there might be a common theme that maybe somebody smarter than me can decipher.

I also know that thanks to my condition, I have a hard enough time keeping my own memories straight. I'm not entirely sure how to balance other people's memories into the equation on top of it, but a friend of mine recently got me a present for Christmas. It was a journal. Leather-bound and blue, with my Arcana on the cover — the moon. He left a note with it.

For when you run out of books again, to write your own stories.

It made me think about my blog. About how the entire purpose of the first one was to help me keep my reality straight when it seemed like my memories were starting to fall apart. So I guess this is me, keeping things straight again.

Anyway, I have a sudden, weird craving for tomatoes so I'm gonna go try and find one.

Thanks for reading, if you did. I hope somebody finds it interesting, or enlightening, or it at least helped pass the time. Let me know.

-GasStationJack.

( note: thank you to Lena for submitting this memory! anyone can read the original thread here. if you have any submissions for jack's next blog post, please hit me up on his blog submissions page, I'm constantly on the lookout for new things for him to blog about. as always, threadjacking is totally cool here as long as the other players involved are cool with it too. hit me at paingravy for anything. )

Comments

[ordinar]

[He did not, in fact, get through the whole wall of text. (Literally a wall, as that's where it has popped up.) Not because he's bored, but because he starts getting upset.]

You can't just share people's memories with everybody. That's a huge invasion of privacy.

[stations]

Don't worry, I haven't gotten any of yours.

Unless yours was the Hitachi magic wand one, I guess.

[ordinar]

Stay the fuck away from my memories.

[outwear]

Hi, Jack. I'm Sam.
This was a good read.
I hope we'll see more.

If it matters at all,
I think your friend's right.

And I could also go for a tomato.

[stations]

Hi, Sam. Thank you, I appreciate that.

Hey, um. Quick question.
Is your text... raining?

[outwear]

Yes.
I don't know what it means either.

action, in the horizon cause i do what i want

[princessvegas]

[ Julie's immediate inclination toward this absurd screed covering the entire tabletop is to turn off the network in her mind. But she first skims it, just to make sure that she's not ignoring someone in distress or whatever. Or someone having a mental break that should be pointed out to proper, more suitable people to deal with.

Stupidly enough, it's the mention of Carrie Underwood that catches her attention first. Simply out of surprise that there would be a namedrop she's so familiar with. Julie backtracks and reads more carefully.

The more she reads, the more she feels heat build behind her eyes. Anger, yes, but also fear and anxiety. This person is spitting out information about her that she has only ever shared with Rhy, the statues and the strings. Running his fucking mouth about things that only she can do, her unrivaled connection to the Horizon.

All it takes is one person, just one, to recognize how different she is when it comes to this. Different in the way she can manipulate the Horizon, how it works for her in ways that it doesn't for anyone else. It's not a far stretch from that to the fact that she also has a unique connection to the Singularity. One person to discover it and then tell everyone else.

Doesn't this jackass understand that people have nearly been killed for less?

Luckily, he signs his name, and being in a fantasy world that doesn't know what gasoline in means there's only one fucking gas station Julie knows of.

Which is why, shortly after the message goes out, she stalks her way across the Horizon, a furious blur of bright pink hair in a gold club dress. She's carrying a shotgun, which she knows is an idle threat on a psychic plane, but she's too upset to think about that. She stomps up to the gas station next to Kyle's tower -- she can't believe she helped buy a Christmas present for the fuck who's invading her privacy like this. If it's empty, she'll stay there until it's not.

Either way, Jack will find himself face-to-face with her soon enough. She's angry enough to make Carrie Underwood seem reasonable. ]

Who the fuck do you think you are?

[stations]

( Jack, the poor dumb idiot that he is, has absolutely no concept of what Julie could be concerned about. He doesn't even know who she is, doesn't remember her name mentioned in passing in those blurry but intense memories, and so he's completely and utterly clueless about what's going on when she bursts into his domain.

It's not empty. He's behind the counter like he usually is when he's working, buried in a book he's already read a dozen times.

And then, like a whirlwind, there she is.

He blinks at the question. Glances down to the nametag pinned to his chest — the only uniform required in the employee handbook — to make sure it's still there. It is.

He gestures to it vaguely. )

Um. Jack.

( Perfectly polite, if somewhat confused. It's not a smartass answer, he's being utterly sincere. )

[princessvegas]

[ There is a long moment where she thinks about shooting him just for the answer. Not because she thinks he's being a dick, but because it's so literal that it becomes irritating on its own. She doesn't shoot.

But she does aim at his face. ]

Well, Jack, you get your kicks airin' people's laundry out for everyone to see? [ Her voice is furious, accusatory. ] Tryin' to get folks caught out?

[ I've given up on trying to wrap my head around that one, he'd said, and while this Jack is very clearly a moron, there are enough people who will be able to put two and two together that he'd broadcasted to. That she can not only manipulate the Horizon in ways that other people can't, she can do it when she shouldn't even be able to.

This fuck even pointed her out by accent. He might as well have broadcasted her name, too. ]

[magicalarchaeologist]

Jack, I have to echo Wilhelm, it is not appropriate to share people's private memories in the public like this. Unless you were given permission from everyone involved.

[stations]

Do you think I should go back and change the names or something? Can you even edit something after you've sent it? I'm not sure how that works.

[magicalarchaeologist]

I don't think it is possible for you to fix it now, but I have no idea how this works in the first place. It is something you should remember for the future and I think unless Rhy and this woman have said otherwise, you owe them an apology for sharing their personal experience.

[politicians]

[ elrond mostly skims it, though his curiosity wants him to do more. he would love to hear those stories, but once he grasped the source of it, he knew it was unethical.

still. ]

You possess quite a painful gift.

[stations]

It's not ideal, that's for sure.

[politicians]

It never is.

Where did you gain such an ability?

dm/private

[ushiri]

I don't know why I never thought to shove you into a Thornean official during the dinners...

∞ private

[stations]

Why would you want to do that?

( Look, he'll... put it together if you give him a minute, it's just that espionage and his potential for it is nowhere near the top of his mind. )

[unwings]

Would you prefer our comments to be judgmental?

Hell is not a beach. After recent renovation, it's a never-ending queue.

[stations]

No, thank you. I've reached my judgmental comment quota. I already owe two people an apology, and maybe also a turtle?

I'm pretty sure the version of real hell I saw was more like the inside of a cage, surrounded by the eternal hellish screams of tormented damned souls being tortured on racks. Or, like, something really similar to that. Nobody was really waiting in line.

[londonbound]

[ It's a lot of text at once, and it is a bit distracting. He's curious, though, so Rhy takes the time to read it. The part about the turtle, at least, he finds quite interesting.

But then it just keeps going, and he sees his name.

His experience, parts of which he never shared with anyone besides Kell -- and Julie, considering she was there.

For a long minute or two, he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't even read it fully, discomfort rising as he skims to the end, then back up, until the words dissipate. It brings everything back so starkly, he can almost feel the cold again, numbing his fingertips.

More text appears, more distractions. Some people whose writing he recognizes.

Eventually, he speaks up too. ]

You need to learn to control your new gifts. And your tongue.

[ ...or mind-writing urges, as it were. ]

[stations]

Somebody pointed out to me that this was probably an invasion of your privacy, and generally kind of a dick move.

I'm sorry. I didn't think about it before I wrote this.

Also, for what it's worth, Julie showed up and threatened to shoot me in the face, like, a lot.

[marlbro]

oh sweet, nice job getting the old blog back up!! i mean, it being a mind blog and all now is a little more intense I guess but you know what, i'm proud of you

BTW it's fuckin AWESOME you got to be a turtle!! I can't believe you didn't tell me!!! :(

[stations]

Thanks, Jerry

It didn't feel particularly awesome, trust me.

[blackeyedprince]

Stay away from my brother, you sick asshole.

[stations]

Okay