It worked

Sidekick's dead. There's a tree where his stomach used to be.

Not so sure about James - he wasn't too visibly hurt so he might have just been unconscious. Didn't check too hard for a pulse because I had to get out of there before He showed up.

By the way, crashed the car (if you missed that). I think I might've bruised 90% of my body and I can no longer turn my head to the left at will. Picked a car where I was the only one with an airbag and thought I was being smart making sure it didn't hit me in the nose. Not so much. Otherwise I'm more or less good.

Left the laptop in the bag with all our clothes to give it some bounce, so it's fine. I'll be seeing my brother soon. It should only take a few days on trains and such to get there.

Going now. They're closing soon anyway, but I'm being overly cautious for the moment and I already feel like I've been staying in one place too long. I'll sleep tomorrow morning on the train, I guess.

Can you believe I used to love the night, after I'd gotten over 'those terrible dreams' and before all this went down? It's almost funny now.

I figured out why we're on this trip

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned the phone network before, but suffice to say James invented a number substitution code and a phone-based network that allows His Servants in positions of authority and responsibility (be they Touched, Taken or simply Servants) to keep in contact and get the low-down on colleagues passing through their care, and this whole trip is basically one long enrolment/update program for all of Australia to make sure it's still working okay.

I guess before he met me and went off the edge his paranoia really paid off, because the whole thing is as close to foolproof as I could’ve imagined.

Basically, if somebody is trying to crack the code, stealing a phone book from one of us isn’t going to help you at all, since everybody uses their own phone number (and one or two supplementary numbers containing any numbers their own doesn’t have) as a key. They keep the real ones in their head and write the code ones in their phone book, along with everybody else’s numbers which are also in code. Because everybody can remember two or three phone numbers without having to write them down, this all means there is no written key to steal, which leaves you with something in the order of 3628800 possible combinations you’d need to try to crack one number that can’t even hold all of the code in the best case scenario. Better yet, even if somebody gets sloppy and does write down the key numbers to allow a faster conversion, you still don’t know which key numbers correspond to which code numbers.

We also don’t substitute for the area codes in the landlines or the 04 in the mobile numbers, because that’d just give away some of the substitutions to anybody with half a brain. Oh, and for anybody who doesn’t live in Australia and thus cannot make sense of the previous sentence, an Australian mobile number starts with 04 and then has eight other digits (so, for example, would look like 04 123 456 78), while the typical landline starts with a zero and then a number corresponding to the state the phone is found in and would look something like this (01) 1234 5678, with the second digit in the brackets changing for each state.

It’s not a perfect system, by all means, because it relies on people doing what they’re told to keep keys separate from the coded numbers, but it’s as close as they come, considering the people being told to do it are almost universally wired to be obedient and find solving codes is almost second nature to them. It’s also not a perfect system because most of the numbers are for phones that have been destroyed, lost or are flat for 99% of the year, but it’s as close as we can get. I will admit being unable to contact people more often than not when I try to make a call, but when a colleague shows up with the number of the place he last stayed and I do manage to get through and am told he’ll try to kill me if I say the word ‘banana’, well, it really pays off.

And yes, that was a hypothetical example. I’ve never met anyone who would’ve killed me for saying ‘banana’. That’s just absurd.

Anyway. I’ve started writing up a synopsis of the past week or so and everything that’s happened (which is so, so much), but it’s nowhere near finished and is going to have to wait because I have to go (my laptop’s finished charging and that was all the time James was willing to give me here on the Internet). 

See you all soon, hopefully, and sorry about the hurried and half done post and the boring content. It's about 4:00 am in the morning right now and it all kinda ran away on me.

Thank Heisenberg

So I'm stationary at the moment, staying in a hotel 'somewhere' with the boys (that's James and the sidekick he insisted on bringing). We're a little busy so I've not had time to write anything up and I'm not sure how much I'll get done at the moment, but I'm giving it a shot while I can. I'll not be telling you where I am, because that would make my blog title redundant and we really can't have that. :P

I can't tell you how happy I am to be in a hotel at the moment. I'm about fed up with sleeping on trains and breaking into the homes of vacationing families for shelter. Which is incidentally how I got my camera. Sleeping on trains, that is, not breaking and entering. We try our best to leave no evidence of our presence wherever we stay to keep the cops from looking into anything, and that means sleeping on the couch or the floor and not stealing, amongst other things. I'm told somebody left their handbag on the train and that Sidekick (that's how I'll be referring to the third member of my travelling party for the duration of our travelling) was only trying to be helpful when he took it, but I was asleep for the whole thing so I can't really comment. I'd guess he just stole it, but then James has never been one for lying about crimes he or our associates have committed against the Blind.

Regardless, I now own a pretty damn good digital camera, and a new cord to charge it from my laptop only cost me twenty bucks. So that covers Acquisitions, and being that Sidekick was nice enough to do my job for me on this occasion I kind of got that day off. Insofar as Administration goes, there's been about a million and one petty little squabbles that I'm sure everybody experiences while travelling, so I'll not bore you all with tales of choosing where to eat and feeling paranoid every time a cop drives past. Actually, that only happened twice, so I'm not sure it really warrants an 'every time'.

News for the new year (sorry if this all seems a little disjointed, I'm kind of doing more than one thing at a time here) is that my brother's on a trip to Europe, doing some European whirl tour or something. He only saw fit to inform me he's spent the new year in London the day after it happened, though, so I'm a little worried that he's no longer keeping me up to date with everything he does. I'm not sure if he's just grown bored of telling me everything he does or if there's some other influence here making him decide to tell me less, but it really worries me that he just didn't bother telling me. It would be just like the boss to somehow stop my brother sending emails before He makes a move, or it could just be that Ben's given up on my still being alive, despite being so sure he'd know if I'd died.

I'm worried. My brother's off on the other side of the world and he didn't even bother telling me. This is so obviously the time for everything to go to hell. I'm going to skip the subterfuge for a moment and just say it outright, because as long as I don't explicitly state what may be happening then I'm pretty sure He wont notice. James was so sure there would be an opportunity that would be perfect, and right now I'm in a situation that is precisely the opposite. I'm terrified tomorrow I'm going to wake up and there won't be an email from my brother, but I'm also terrified that there will be, and it won't be about how cold but awesome London apparently is.

Man, this is so not how my blog post was going to go. I was planning on writing about the two Touched we've been meeting with yesterday and today in the city, writing up their profile like I said I would. They're nice guys once you look past this whole mess. They're part of the lucky few, living the whole double life thing. They've got jobs and everything. It's steady enough for them that they've given me about two thousand dollars for the bank account, which is great because it's been slowly ticking down towards nothing lately and a nice boost like this is exactly what I needed to keep everyone fed for the next few months. I think it's only the two of them in the whole city, too, which is a bit different to back home with the six of us. They're certain it's only them living permanently (which is not something I can say with certainty about our little clan) but they do get more colleagues passing through than I do.

Anyway, this was going to go on, but I kind of need to go. James wants to go out tonight to try and find a passer-by our two new friends mentioned visited them a few days ago who apparently sleeps on the trains, and he's getting antsy that I'm taking up valuable search time.

Not a lot of time, all is well

So travelling with two insane cultists isn't all that fun, but I will have a nice little story or two for you all if we're lucky enough to stop somewhere that has Internet long enough for me to write something substantial up. Also, I've gotten my hands on a proper camera (it's one of the nice little stories I'll have for you all), so you might all be lucky enough to get photographs of anything I figure is important in the future. Though you will all have to deal with a lack of fingers in the shots. Sorry to dissapoint anyone.

You'll love this one, Broeckchen

So I wake up Christmas morning and all my colleagues are already awake, sitting in a semicircle around my bed watching me sleep. Just so everybody knows, that's not normal behaviour amongst Touched, although sometimes when they get too Taken they will just sit there and stare at people for a while, so I guess you could say it's like a very, very extreme version of normal behaviour.

Naturally, once I noticed them all sitting there I assumed they were going to kill me and flew upright in a panic, ready to defend myself to the death. Turns out they just wanted to wish me a Merry Christmas and give me some presents. So yeah, kinda awkward. Unsurprisingly, it was apparently James' idea to do so in such a manner, and he's also at least obliquely responsible for the presents I got. Or the present I got and the present I'm meant to pass on. Or the Christmas cards. I'm not really sure what they're meant to be.