Mirrors and Madness

I saw myself move in the mirror today. He turned left when I turned right, or at least he turned to my left while I turned to my right, seeing as it gets ambiguous when the other person moving is also me. It was for only the briefest of seconds that I didn't really noticed until I'd looked away, and by then it was back to normal when I glanced back. But I moved.

He was there, or the mess He's making was there, seeing as I didn't see Him. If I'm starting to witness myself making two separate decisions simultaneously like that, then I think we're in trouble - even if it was such a small one. We've moved on again, and this time I have no idea where we're going. Away from home, and that forsaken, blood-stained hotel that we ran to, that's for sure.

I don't think it can be stopped. I've been looking at everything He's doing, all this "dimensional bleeding" insanity, all the frenzy He's inspiring in His Touched, all the people crumbling under the pressure, all the death and destruction and anger. And I'm scared. I'll be honest about that. I'm scared, because I know we can't beat Him, Ben and I. I'm in too deep to be standing and fighting without losing it all, and all that leaves is running. But I have a new plan, one that doesn't involve feats I cannot accomplish. One with layer after layer of redundancy and contingency as standard. One that I can't share. They're watching the blog - He's watching the blog, in a roundabout enough way.

But when we're safe, when I've worked my magic, when everything has failed, time and time again - and I find myself still alive, having planned for it all - then you'll know. When Ben and I are safe, I'll tell you all how I did it, because by then it won't even matter.

Sorry, But I Got Bored

This is fun, watching everybody play with this new computer. I just wish I could see the hardware, review whatever databases it's using to operate and have a poke around in the programming for whatever it's running to do all this. It seems fascinatingly complex, for a text-based operating system. It looks like it can even interpret poorly spelled and ambiguously phrased input, which is remarkable to say the least. It's at very least a marvel of software engineering, just on account of the kind of things you could do with a computer and some software like that. I might consider stepping over a body or two if it got my hands on this thing and see what the actual interface is like, I'll be honest.

But that's not important. It did give me an idea, though. I thought maybe I could run a couple of scenarios by it to determine our next course of action. It would just help if I knew how the decision making processes worked and if they were trustworthy. To be honest, I don't have a lot of faith in it, seeing as it looks a little like it confused Ben and I while analyzing us, thinking I'm more stable than Ben. It's not like that damn music might sway my vote for stability past his more intelligent horror in His presence.

I'm not really supposed to be blogging, but the scars are definitely sufficiently scabbed and healing that as long as I keep from typing too fast or hard nothing will be any worse off than when I started. They're definitely not going to tear open if I'm gentle, so Ben will just have to deal. Plus, it's just too much fun trying to decide what I should ask the thing next, or if maybe talking to it might not be a good idea. Now that I think about it, it definitely not one where everybody can see you asking it about your plans while a small subset of everybody really wouldn't mind spoiling them. I can hardly ask the thing where Ben and I should go hide right out in public, now can I? Then again, I wonder if perhaps I can send in requests for calculations or analysis by email. If only I knew how it worked.

Ben's an insy whinsy bit of a fool, and he's apparently incapable of listenning either. And I know I'm not supposed to be typing because it's bad for my stitches and healing in general, but I'm too drunk for it to hurt so it's aokay.

And so, without further adeu, I bring you the unmolested rendition of the last three halves of my newest piece of work, inspired by this increasingly shit situatiuon we find ourselves in:


Minstrel's cut her own face off
The Jester's noose draws tight
Old Zerosage returns from death
To stalk us in the night

And who the fuck is nocturne, eh?
And what the fuck's his game?
Through Reach the Boss has trolled us all
Consequences never be the same

Robert might'bve been the chance
But we all know how that ends
So let's just watch him find His name
So we can all get fucked again!

Oh poetry, oh noetry
Shout bingo, wont you dear!?
For while we drink and while I sign
Old He "that is" draws near

Oh yes, He comes to screw my plans
My theories effing A
And if it keeps right at this rate
I give myself a day!

And I can't give yo uthe rest of it because it doesn't count as forshadowing if you don't get the proportions right or just plain spell it out either, and my plan's not going to work unless i can get the story perfect and perfect stories don't spell shit out first they foreshadow. It has to fit, and that is too damned hard to do, I'll have you know. Too damned hard. I've had to cut back sooooooooooooooo much and now it's like the contingency to the contingency to the contingency to the backup plan's backup plan.

And yoiu know why? It's not your fault or anything, but there's not enough room with everybody else crowding about, and all the heroics get watered down and instead of Zeke Stramn getting enough sapce to save us all he end up getting relegated Mystic instead and instead of the dearest Sage fo Nothing sacrificing himself to end it all, we all work enough magic with our heads to make the whole thing piontless because you won't give him enough room to work with. Hell, if they can't do it, fricken pillars of awesomethat they are then I sure as hell won't be able to beat Him, will I? So contingency F-7 and a half or something. That one might work. There's room enough for half a plan.

And I just have to say sorry to past me for skipping out on your promise and posting up something that could possible be misconstrued as poetry if you squint and ignore the fact it's a drinking song. It's how drunk me rolls, and anyway I have a better plan than you so stuff it we're running with it!

Sigh

Drew's drunk. Like, singing drunk. I just got a call from him looking for a lift back from the bar he's at all of three doors down from the hotel we're staying in, which I guess means he's also stupid drunk. He also thinks he's successfully hung up the phone because I can still hear him leading whoever the hell he's drinking with in song now that he's realized he's practically next door and thinks I'm no longer listening.

It's about the blogs, I think. Actually, it's so damn morbid it can't be about anything but the blogs, which I guess is why nobody else knows the words and is just kind of slurring along with him in the background. Here's the current verse as it comes through the speaker -

Michael's cut his own face off
The jester's noose draws tight
(Something about 'zerosage' I didn't quite get)
To stalk us in the night

Anyway. I have no idea who Michael is, but then I don't read every blog Drew follows and I'm not all that up to date on all of them as it is. But I'm heading off on a tangent there and I've decided I don't really want to complain as much as I did when he first called. It's more funny than annoying now. So on that note, I think I'm going to go get him before he uses up all of his credit or sings something stupid that sounds enough like an insult to start a fight with somebody he didn't even know was listening.

Moving On

Obviously we're no longer at the beach. We actually left the day after the last post, but we've been on the move or in places we didn't want it to be common knowledge we were in since we left, so I apologize for the lack of updates. We've visited Melbourne during our little stint of radio silence, because the days are getting awful cold all of a sudden ("that would be Autumn", shouts Drew from the bathroom as I read this back) and we needed to replace some old clothes so we don't, you know, freeze. All in all it was a pretty good trip, considering the fact there are 'old friends' of Drew's living there more or less permanently.

The only problem was the fact Myer is filled - and I do mean filled - with faceless white manikins, a good portion of which are wearing suits. Because, you know, faceless dudes in suits are in right now. Drew, of course, found the whole thing to be hilarious, but I am literally never shopping there again unless my life depends on it. I think I jumped every time I turned around, and it wasn't so much scary or horrifying as it was just plain annoying after the third or fourth time.

But apart from that, we're not doing a lot except driving somewhere I won't mention so we're not ambushed once we get there, in the vain hope we will be able to replenish our dwindling cash once we do. We're down to what we have left in our wallets, which is admittedly more than I'd usually carry in my wallet but at the same time not enough to survive for all that long. Well, I'm driving, all Andrew is doing is making mess in every hotel room we find on the way.

Case in point. He took this yesterday, when I told him to start packing up so we could leave, which I suspect is the only reason you get to see it because he immediately decided he needed to take photos so the internet could also know how much crap he's compiled on the job over the years. He then spent the next ten minutes artfully arranging his shit so it would look good but still have that 'authentic messiness' to it, all the while conveniently preventing himself from doing any actual packing and still allowing him to keep reading while he did it. Also he may have wanted me to omit that fact, but he wasn't forcibly elected to the position of sole blog poster so he's just going to have to deal with me undermining every attempt of his to impress you lot from now on.

But yeah. That's basically all Drew's been doing since the incident, for anybody curious as to how you go about spending your time when you're not supposed to be lifting anything heavier than a page lest your tear out a stitch. I get to do all the heavy lifting, and the driving, and the packing, and I don't see him volunteering for Laundromat duty anytime soon either, so I'll probably end up doing that, too. Although I suppose that's better than having to help him wash himself. Thank god for waterproof bandage guards, is all I can say.

The Beach

Everybody stares at Drew's arms. Like, everybody, and it's really not helping the mood when everybody we meet either treats us with suspicion or pity. He's also moping around like a little girl all the time, so overall this road trip is starting to suck. Not that we're still on the road at the moment, since petrol is far too expensive to justify not hanging around for a couple of days.

We're at the beach for now, because I guess Mum used to take us all the time when we were young and we have nowhere to go anyway. Drew feels like being nostalgic now he can't use the laptop for much of anything, which I guess is a better response than the anxiety and moodiness I was expecting. He's been doing a lot of reading lately, going over all of the stuff we got back from the cops now I spend more time on the laptop than him. Which is kinda alright, I guess. He's not supposed to be doing anything that involves frequent arm and wrist movements, but he seems to insist on adding more nonsense theories whenever he thinks I'm not looking, and that involves writing - which is bad.

The beach is nice, though, since Drew can't go anywhere near the sand for fear of getting it under his bandages. Some time apart has been pretty awesome, if I'm going to be honest. I missed the kid while he was away, but living with each other isn't exactly conducive to getting along all the time, especially in the situation we find ourselves in. Plus I haven't been swimming since Drew showed up at my house, so that's nice too, even if Autumn isn't exactly the perfect time to be out there for it.

So I guess everything's cool, apart from nightmares all the time, the dwindling amount of money we have and nowhere to go nor anybody to go to. But we push on. Stiff upper lip and all that.

Sorry to keep you waiting

But since my idiot brother took the advice that alcohol would defeat rampant paranoia and general directionless terror to heart, it seems I'm still in charge of telling everybody what happened.

We stayed in one place too long again, and I've finally realised what I was so stupidly missing that meant The New Girl was always catching up with us. The Operator Symbol skews the time it takes for whatever part of Him that directs her to find us, and I'm incapable of drawing one without bringing Him down upon us. But that's another story.

We were both asleep, right at about five am where it overlaps for a couple of hours before Ben gets up at seven or so, when The New Girl kicked the door to our room in - which is, incidentally, the first point I've found in favour of staying in more expensive hotels. Ben was a whole lot closer to awake than I was, and jumped right up, but he tells me she just pushed him aside and into a wall and lunged at me. Needless to say, I wasn't quite capable of getting from half-awake to defending myself quick enough, and she had a knife of her own. I was tangled up in the sheets, and she was absolutely insane and I couldn't get my blade to flick out without getting stabbed in the eye or something.

I don't know how long we fought, but there was so much blood all over me, and my arms felt like they were being torn apart. Eventually she wasn't even using the knife. She just tore at the cuts until her hands were covered with blood and I was starting to feel lightheaded from struggling so much and losing all that blood. And then she stopped, and for a moment I thought maybe she'd proved a point about how her threats were real and was leaving.

But then I felt it. I felt Him coming. I struggled out of the tangle of sheets, bleeding everywhere as I got to my feet and saw my brother writhing around on the floor in apparent agony, which I'm told was a result of a rather underhanded kick to a rather vulnerable area, if you catch my drift.

She was drawing The Operator Symbol from my blood, laughing maniacally as she did. It was a full on, completely deranged slasher flick laugh like you've never heard before, and it was all made worse by that paradoxical feeling of creeping dread and growing calm that meant He was coming. The symbol she was drawing wasn't very big, and it was awfully streaky, but it was obvious what it was and that's apparently enough.

I tried to stop her, but the sheets were all over the ground and I was bleeding everywhere and woozy as shit from the blood loss and I fell over like the useless idiot I am. And then she collapsed right in front of me and started groaning in agony like she always does when He shows up. And He was just there. He was so tall, towering above the three of us lying there in various states of agony and He was in my head and all I could see was Ben dying, over and over again. The blood all over me was his, not mine and I was responsible or I hadn't tried hard enough to save him or he'd killed himself because of me. The pain was gone from my arms and the wounds weren't real anymore but there was just so much agony. I couldn't breathe. My heart wanted to escape my chest and there was something shifting in the back of my head.

And then there was bliss. Pure, unadulterated bliss. I couldn't hear my brother shouting at me to run, I couldn't see him scramble across the bed to try to pick me up and get me away from that thing that is He, I couldn't feel the agony of countless open wounds all over my arms. I could hear the singing, though, the beautiful choir of souls caught in rapture. I could see Him, though, towering over us all from His seat on high. I could feel the loving warmth radiating from His heart to envelope the world. I just wanted to go home, back to those warm, loving arms.

I don't know how long it took for me to come back to myself, but I do know the first thing I did was vomit, and since I hadn't eaten for ages because I'd been alseep, it was mostly just stomach acid - and that shit burns. I mean, I still want to throw up.

He hadn't even noticed I'd vomited all over the floor of the car, he was that caught up in himself. I scared the hell out of him when I called his name, though, because apparently I'd been ranting and raving about the light of my God and a whole score of other crazy shit while he'd tried to get me away, and then once he'd gotten me into the car and done his best with my first aid kit in the boot and actually escaped the damned hotel I just fainted.

So once we'd figured out I probably wasn't going to die from the blood loss, on account of the fact I was awake again, we went back to the hotel and got all of our shit out of the room before we ran into another fiasco with the cops all over us again and cleared the hell out of there. We're getting the hell out of the state before we head to a hospital though, because as much as the bandages stop the bleeding and the neurofen kills some of the pain, I think I need stitches if these cuts are ever going to heal. Like, badly.

That took far too long and I need to change my bandages again because I'm bleeding everywhere. On that note, Ben'll probably be in charge of updating from now on, because writing fucking hurts.

I think I'm going to vomit

In like so many wyas. My hands are shaking and I've lost so much blood. We had to change hotels and everything, and all that blood all allvoer our room means the cops will be onto us something major. But thats why we use my cards buecase I'm smart like that and I don't have a house anymore.

And all this typings making me bleed again. I'll let Ben tyep this shit up.