The Abyss Gazes Also (Fanfic)

The Abyss Gazes Also 

Or: A Summoner Has Disconnected

 One of the purple team's Summoners had a nosebleed or something during the initial summoning, that was the only possible explanation for the hold up.

 The three Champions were confined to the rune-inscribed 'fountain' platform, held in place by glowing white light while they waited for the match to begin. No amount of urging from their Summoners could force them out of place, even an inch. Even if they succeeded, that was against the rules; they'd lose by default.

 All six of them were, understandably, rather bored.

 She wondered idly what was running through Twitch and Alistar's minds - She generally didn't look that deep into Nocturne's, because She rather valued Her sanity. They worked well together, but He hated Her as He did all Summoners, and His mind was a treacherous, warped thing that had only become more horrible over His many eons of existence.

 "I remember you," His words came anyway, blood on black velvet, piercing the still quiet of the minutes before the match.

 She felt Her own physical eyes close, then open again. The statement had come as a bit of a surprise. "I would hope you did ...?" Honestly, she'd wondered - outside of a match, how well did the Champions remember the events that transpired within? She had trouble distinguishing which actions She performed and which the Champion did - She of course usually provided the will, intent, and a good deal of the magic, while the Champion generally provided the force and skill, but ....

 "From before all this," He sent the sensation of disembodied hands dragging his bladed arms down, forcing Him to kneel despite His obvious lack of legs, before the image shifted. "You had such vivid nightmares as a child," He murmured.

 She stilled, feeling the blood drain from Her skin. The world was dark for a moment. Intellectually, She knew this was still one of His abilities. Nocturne disrupted the enemy Summoners' link, cutting them off from each other, from their wards, from their minions, leaving them alone with their Champions - She'd commanded Him to use the ability enough times to know its effects. That didn't make the whispered, "All alone ..." any less chilling, however, especially as there was nowhere to run, no way.

 This shouldn't be possible. There were restrictions, there were rules, the match hadn't even begun. But it was a direct link between Summoner and Summoned. They meshed together completely, two halves of a whole, their minds completely open to one another. It was the only way the spell could work.

 Green tile, she remembered dully, staring up at the metal grating in the ceiling. The walls had been green tile. Six people, six ordinary people, seated on hard benches, chatting with each other while they waited for the experiment to begin, and none of them could sense what was wrong but her, with her tiny pinch of magic. None of them could see the white smoke billowing out of the grate, none of them could hear the hiss of air passing through a too-small opening.

 Neiomi Kohen half-hugged herself, shaking, a low moan dragged unwillingly from her own throat. There was a whispered laugh in the back of her mind, but she couldn't discern where it came from, nor why it was important.

The blonde woman was the first to start screaming. She was older than Neiomi by a few years, and Neiomi knew from their earlier conversation that she'd had three children. The test subjects were to be paid a modest sum of money for participating in this experimental "treatment," and the blonde had needed every clipped copper penny she could get to make ends meet. The whites of her eyes turned red as blood vessels popped, her skin bubbling up from underneath, melting. She clawed at her own face with fingers that had lost their flesh, becoming mere bone. They popped apart, sticking into the gooey mess where her cheeks had been.

Neiomi had done her very best to not inhale the smoke, flattening herself against the wall and covering her mouth and nose with her hands. She had a minute or two to watch the changes as they were wrought on the other test subjects before the fire began consuming her own flesh.

It was magic, seeping in through her pores, filling every inch of her small frame. She knew how to heal, and so, as the magic began to kill her body piece by piece, she took it in, warping it from its initial purpose, growing new muscle in place of the old, new skin to cover that. It was an agony her young mind had never known, could never have imagined, but she remained focused - the alternative was death.

When they finally came to review the results of their tampering, only a handful of minutes later, she was the only person left who was even remotely human - the rest were sticky, reddish puddles smeared across the walls and floor. Even their bones had liquefied.

She saw a man with a gas mask standing over her, and heard a faint, "This one's alive!"

And then ... and then ....

A gray-robed Summoner stood over her fallen form, waving something that smelled absolutely foul under her nose. "Your match is about to begin," he said quietly. "You lost the link with your Champion - are you well enough to cast?"

"... what?" Summoner, Champion? She hadn't - it all came rushing back, with the force of an angry battering ram, pulsing at the back of her skull.

The Summoner shook his head, gently pulling her off the ground since she didn't have the presence of mind to do that for herself. He checked the back of her head with his hand, and the pain flared white-hot.

"I'm all right, I'm all right - " She felt a new tingle of magic - the man was doing some sort of spell.

His kindly, gray-green eyes pierced her, and she fell silent. "I'm getting a healer to look over you. No casting until we know how bad it is - your friends will have to make do." He glanced at the other two Summoners, who were too deep in their respective links to know exactly what had happened.

"But ...."

The older, more powerful Summoner raised an eyebrow, showing her the blood on his hand. "No 'buts.' You hit your head ... apparently."

Any possible protest died in her throat.

She imagined she could hear Nocturne's soft laughter tingling at the back of her mind.

That, too, was impossible.

Headache

Brain is dull and headachey and dammit I think I've caught a thing. Sick.

No post today I think. So many damn typos, thank you backspace key.

Bleargh.

"Real" Encounters With Mysticism

The melody of mermaids
keeps me awake at night
The eyes of starlit heavens
following me secretly

So I'm going to preface this post with the admission that I - like so many others in this world - was very, very stupid as a child. So that's out of the way. Now, I've hinted obliquely and outright stated most of the content in this post in other places on this blog, as well (yes that's me, yes I know what I'm saying, writing backwards isn't that hard until e starts looking like it's supposed to be ɘ).

TL;DR: Jibber-jabber about crazy metaphysical stuff. Wall of text inbound, though there are pictures at the end.
Let's get started. Alpha, hon, you'll probably want to stop reading about here. (I know, you don't use that name anymore.)

Tarot

So some of my first experiences with any kind of mystical, magical stuff, other than the rites and rituals associated with organized religion, came from tarot cards. Innocent, easy tarot cards. Even hardcore anti-pagan Christians will sometimes get a tarot reading, or their horoscope did. It varies from case to case.

I tend to have about a 75% accuracy, I'd ... wager, anyway, though I'm horrible at answering questions with it. But then, that's partly the kind of spread I prefer - the standard Celtic Cross 10-card spread seems to generally assess the entire situation and give a full breakdown of the entire life, up to the moment in question. Mom is better, and that's part of the reason I never have her do a reading on me.

There are such stories there.

Nowadays I do a simple one-card draw almost every day, for general guidance. Since getting obsessed with the Slender Man mythos I tend to draw the Nine of Swords with alarming regularity - which is kind of fitting: this is the card of fear and nightmares.

When I was younger, I had a tarot reading at a local Renaissance fair, done at cost from a professional. My question was fairly simple: what is my power/strength/ability?

I have a tendency to attract cards from the Major Arcana. Of the entire spread, I only remember one of the cards now, and that one The Magician. The answer, as the tarot reader interpereted it, was that my power was the ability to change others' perception - to effectively appear how I want to other people.

The "Spirit" and the Rain

So this next bit is going to be from the gullible mind of an impressionable, sensitive child. Take it for what it is.

I've known Alpha most of my life, though we've only really met face to face the one time. At one point (I was in college, I remember), he got caught up in this ... pseudo-cult thing. It was headed by a girl who I spoke to once over the Internet and then never again, really. He's since stopped talking to her, and he requested not to talk about it with him ever again. She was rather persuasive, and they had this belief that he was some sort of angel-knight to protect her. (Emphasis on the first part.) She was some kind of figurehead magic-woman. I'm fuzzy on the details, partly because he didn't really talk about it much to me at the time, other than to suggest I was supposed to be some kind of seer, and powerful besides.

He wanted a taste of power, of better control, himself, and told me he had contacted a dark creature in order to get the training he wanted. (He gave it a specific name, but I don't remember.)

This is all relevant to a couple of specific incidents. One: he challenged me to try and develop the power he believed I had and use it.

He did this ... well, let me transcribe the conversation as well as I remember it.

Him: "I want you to picture someone. Anyone, really."

Me: "All right I've got something ... " It was a man-boy, a teenager or young adult, maybe, with dark hair and a denim jacket, seen from behind. Like a photograph.

Him: "All right. Now what I want you to do is I want you to make it rain. The [spirit] will know if you're successful. If you don't manage it within three days, that person, whoever it is, will die."

Me: "What."

In all honesty, in perfect honesty, I didn't care about the boy/man. I should have, but I didn't. It was an affront to my pride that he thought I couldn't accomplish this impossibility he presented me with, that there was some kind of condition for failure in this agreement. So I set out to do it, without the first inkling of how I should begin.

I'm fairly confident I did it wrong.

I'll admit, I was angry, a little, and prideful, and stubborn.

I took what I knew of how storms were born, how water is drug up from the river (and other bodies of water, but seriously, I live right on a river) to the clouds, gathering there until it becomes too heavy and falls. I took that knowledge, and I tried to force it along, to grow a storm as organically as possible. I had a pad of paper, and I like to draw, I focused my will through that, scratching dark circles with an ink pen onto the paper, representative of the storm's mass. From above, all storms make spirals, so I made spirals, concentric rings made up entirely of smaller rings, ink like water.

And then I focused all my will, and ... nothing happened.

A great big nothing, no storm clouds blocked the sky, though it was humid and there were some clouds. They just weren't right.

I kept at it, persistent.

It rained, a light sprinkle from an almost clear sky. Not enough to be serious, but enough to let me know I did something.

Maybe.

For the next week or so after whatever-I-did, I was laid low with some kind of illness, Mother Nature's fond "Fuck you," for tampering with her. I'm given to understand that whatever it was I did, I probably shouldn't have tried it.

Or, y'know, I could be crazy and caught a weird summer flu.

About Cat

This was actually when I met Alpha's friend Cat.

Cat and I talked over the internet, after the incident. She suggested that I'm a new soul, with only a couple of reincarnations to my name. She didn't like what I told her about the [spirit], or about Alpha's bargain.

She also said I had a dark green aura which ... might be a difference in perception, or she might be a manipulative bitch, I'll get to that in a minute. At the time, I had this belief that I had a black soul, black energy and that there was something horribly, terribly wrong with me. She also suggested that the [spirit] took advantage of me while I was working my 'spell,' that it ripped a chunk out of me, but she was going to heal it. I felt a weird, stabbing pain/tingle on my arm for the duration of her 'healing.' It was weird.

Energy Flow

The second major experience that I had with this kind of mysticism, before Alpha got out of it and I stopped really thinking about it much, came one night after a series of bad decisions. It was before talking with Cat, but after the rain incident.

Alpha was operating under the belief he was some kind of angel or higher-plane spirit, coloring his soul a brilliant white in contrast to my 'black.'

He said that he was able to change how his 'soul' felt and appeared, and that I should try it, since I was supposed to be this 'seer.' But that I wasn't supposed to try to imitate his energy, since he was an angel and that wouldn't work at all, with consequences.

You can probably imagine how that suggestion went.

I tried to mimic what I felt when I reached for my dear friend's energy, but I never quite succeeded. I determined that the issue was one of proximity - he was too distant, and the power I was reaching for was too vague and indistinct.

So I formed a lance of mental energy, with barbs in it, and I pierced the core of that fiery ball, telling myself I'd take only a small bit, for comparison.

Well, to my perception anyway, I succeeded well enough at bringing it closer, to examine it.

Now, this wouldn't be something I'd list here if there weren't at least a little evidence something happened, so this is that: while I was 'examining' my trophy, Alpha asked me what the hell I just did, saying that it hurt and he had no idea I was capable of anything like that and to never, ever do it again because it hurt.

But since I had a chunk anyway, I figured I'd try the other forbidden thing, to warp my energy to cause it to read like his.

My own power rolled under my examination, thrashing and twisting, never settled or still as I focused, fighting it to make it clean, a ball of milky white, rather than the black waters I normally envisioned. I burned off a lot of my black 'ball' of energy trying to perform this transmutation, but I succeeded ... for a moment or two, anyway.

Predictably, I got sick and nothing else came of it.

Aura Picture

I mentioned also that I was going to cover the 'aura color' a bit more thoroughly, and so I shall.

After college, I went to this psychic convention Mom had been invited to. It was in a small room, and I had a buzzing in my head, like all eyes were on me, picking at me and trying to make me give up my secrets. Among other things I looked into there, there was a little photo booth thing.

It took pictures of auras. Now, I've always believed in auras. People give off energy, especially electrical energy (which is how your iPhone works, by the way - capacitative touchscreens work off of the electrical energy and heat your fingers give off, not pressure. That's why it's nearly impossible to purse-dial with a touchscreen). A cloud of imperceptible energy surrounding everyine is plausible to me, because of that.

There've been studies on this matter - the aura is part of why amputees have phantom limb pains, in theory. An aura-reading machine took a picture of the aura of a leaf that had been cut in half before - and after - it was cut in half. The leaf retained its full-sized aura after the cutting.

Another important thing to note is that the pictures were all different. There were about six taken of different people, lying on the table by the machine's booth. Some were less intense in color, some more intense in color, with all kinds of different swirling hues overlaying the image of the person captured underneath. It was about $10 to get a picture taken with an interperetation attached, and mine didn't match anyone else's either. I think the woman doing the pictures was a little surprised at how intense it was.

The Aura Picture - exactly as it is in real life, more or less.

My computer doesn't know my scanner anymore, so I took a picture of it -

it's so glossy I can see a reflection of my phone and my thumb.

Most of the other pictures I saw were less intense, and I remember them with a lot more greens and blues and such.

The color interperetations attached to the image follow:

Center: orange, creative, artistic
My left: yellow; sunny, exhilaration

My right: red, force of will.


(My) Left side: Future Influences; yellow


Your future is bound to be thought provoking. Like the rising sun, yellow brings warmth. Yellows are representative of the intellect. Each shade or tint of yellow expresses a type of function, ability, or expression of the intellect, from the craftiness of a mustard yellow to the high thought of a golden yellow. You approach the future with a sense of excitement and joy.


Center: orange represents energy with mental direction. You are ALIVE, artistic, perceptive, creative. Constructive self-expression is important to you.


(My) Right side: Expressed Energy; red


You work hard at what you do. Intensity of experience and fulness of living. Conquest, energy-expanding, you put the energy out. The world sees you as alive, outgoing, sexual, and powerful.


Other colors:


Violet: intuition, art, creativity, supernatural abilities, faith, imagination, incorporeality, reticence, mysteriousness.
Lavender: mysticism, magic, profundity, obsession, intolerance
(I can't tell the difference between violet and lavender. I'm sure there is one, but I can't, so I threw them both in.)



White: developed intellectuality, spirituality, vision of God, higher consciousness, dreaming, energy build-up, pain.

So that's interesting, and seems fairly accurate, too.

Assuming Cat wasn't entirely full of crap - which is a huge factor to consider - my only theory as to why she thought 'dark green' goes thus: A) these things change. The first half of the machine reading was 'incoming' or 'future' energy, after all.

As for B) ...

The original aura picture, with inverted colors.

Sure it's mostly blue, but there's some dark green there.

Remember to ignore that top spot - it's a

reflection from the overhead light.

Independence Day (pseudo-freewrite)

Or: Happy LET'S BLOW SHIT UP Day

(My god! It's full of BOOM, HEADSHOT!)

Writing this on Saturday because I'll probably be out on Monday. Bit bouncy. There's a ringing in my ears that won't go away and I don't know why but LA DI DA I'M IGNORING IT NOW. (I've been shaking a bit hands are shaking cold every so often the last couple of days too because I don't know with a fluttering rapid heartbeat.) Writing this entire post as it comes to me out of order and then putting the bits into order because that's what you do.

We develop a holiday to celebrate our freedoms and then we restrict it and limit it. Hilarious. It isn't legal to set off fireworks in Iowa, funfact.

Most people don't care about that and do it anyway at all hours of the night for about a week in either direction of the holiday. Also a funfact.

You can purchase them right across state lines legally, however. Third funfact.

I'll be doing so and then setting them off immediately (rather than bringing them home.) Because that is actually legal. Don't drink, but seriously, it's a holiday for legalized set things on fire and then they explode. Who doesn't enjoy that? Fact: setting things on fire is FUN.

Guns don't kill people, it's that ... funny noise they make. BANG BANG BOOM RATATATA -

A wild Ratata has appeared!

GO: HARBINGER OF DOOM!

Harbinger of Doom used Splash!

The attack was not very effective.

Goddamn you, Magikarp power.

I had a thought and then I lost it and it was wonderful.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

It occurs to me I haven't transcribed any of my freewrites in a while and it is problematic to do so now since the markerboard I used the last couple was used for other things (read: I wiped off all the writing and put new writing down.) Only problematic in that it's pretty hard to make out everything I wrote. But I have it on my phone so there's that too.

I need caffeine so badly oh my god.

Caffeine is a form of self-medication - and also the fountain of youth - and it helps to focus when you are unfocused and you should drink it therefore when you are unfocused or tired or - you know I bet nobody else can see how jittery you are or how much energy you have except for the fact that your leg keeps doing that bouncing thing and it's probably really annoying and your typing is really, really LOUD and it keeps Mom up at night and you're a horrible daughter.

I saw a bunny again today and it stood very very still and I froze and I crept up on it but it knew I was there and I knew it was there and we staaaaaaaaared at each other and then I took a couple of pictures I have so many bunny pictures because the BUNNIES ARE INVADING.

Must acquire holy hand grenade.

They're actually really friendly but I will never again own one as a pet because they kick and they bite and my five-year-old-self remembers them as being savage escape artists. Bunnies aren't really domesticated prey animals. Also fun.

Oh so I read all of Records of an Impossibility today and yesterday and followed it. Guy seems crazy, but what do I know? At least he admits to it. Plus it's good interesting reading for stimulating the brain places which require further stimulation. Braaaaaaaaaaains.

THE ZOMBIES ARE COMING.

On that note Wednesday's post is going to cover real (or maybe not) experiences with actual mysticism. That'll be fun.

My senses capture me~

Star (Wind's Nocturne)

Wishing on a dream that seems far-off
Hoping it will come today
Into the starlit night
Foolish dreamers turn their gaze
Waiting on a shooting star
But -
What if that star is not to come?
Will their dreams fade to nothing?
When the horizon darkens most
We all need to believe there is hope.
Is an angel watching closely over me?
Can there be a guiding light I've yet to see?
I wish, then, for a chance to see
Now all I need
Is my star to come ....

Heard this song first waaaaaaaaay back when, uploaded somewhere else, in this here video (which isn't mine):

Monkeys And Sharp Things

Or: WHEE OVERKILL.

So I've been playing this game at work lately, because it's relatively fun and strategy makes my brain parts happy.

I just ...

It seems like it is very, very excessive to use cannons to pop balloons. For that matter, it seems unwise to give the monkeys the cannons. In order to pop the balloons. I guess eventually they start throwing WAR BLIMPS at you, and then there's a bit of rationale behind it, because, y'know, cannon vs. blimp, all right. (Though I wouldn't imagine it would take five hundred hits of anything to take out a low-hanging blimp. How are the blimps constrained to just the linear path anyway?)

Ah well. There's something hypnotic about watching five or six hundred sun-god monkeys annihilating everything on their path with their laser beam eyeballs, missile launches blacking out the sun, stealth bomber monkeys, etc.

What it is:

A pretty standard tower defense game wherein the towers are all - or at least mostly - monkey owned, monkey operated, and also monkeys. With darts and high explosives. The creeps are all b(al)loons of various sizes, progressing through various mazes at ever-increasing densities, to the point where you might actually realistically need cannonfire to annihilate the onslaught - in part because they start unleashing the aforementioned blimps, filled to bursting with the bloons. The latest iteration includes premium (paid-for) powerups and an RPG-style level-up system. Grab the (free) cannon upgrade when you can; it is incredibly, incredibly helpful. (Goddamn Black Bloons.)

Where to play it:

http://ninjakiwi.com/Games/Tower-Defense/

"Gifted" is the Term

Or: Intellectually Gifted, Socially Cursed

They call it 'giftedness.'

It's a capacity for learning more effectively than those who would otherwise be considered your peers. It's a curiousity and a hunger for new knowledge, and an inability to be fully contented with incomplete or inaccurate answers. It's a talent for nearly every single thing you try, to the extent that there are so many options you become paralyzed with indecision.

It's not really just a gift, but also a curse. Being more intelligent marks you as different - and being different is generally considered a bad thing. Using the larger vocabulary you're 'gifted' with leads to a lot of blank stares. The same goes for any of the knowledge or trivia you've picked up along the way. People just don't care, and a lot of times they'll mock you for caring.

The standards are all higher. I remember as a child, I was actually embarrassed of my "A's" because nobody else really seemed to get them, and I did not have to try for them. A "C" was almost devastating because ... well, it's like getting an "F" if you generally get "C's." I never once actually got an "F" - the closest I ever received was a single "D" throughout my entire K-11 1/2 education (there was a bit of a dispute in my Senior year and I ended up graduating early to resolve it). In standardized testing, the one outlier among an otherwise nearly flawless score was in math - and even that, at about half the rate of my other abilities, was still an "average." My perception remains to this day that I am very, very bad at math, despite at least half of all other people being worse.

In a lot of cases, I tend to think, "I'm not really good at this, everyone else just sucks."

Mom has a funny story: after my first day of kindergarten, I came home and complained that I already knew everything they were trying to teach me. This didn't abate until I reached college. I never learned to study, or had to work to overcome challenges - which meant that in college, I actually started to get the C's, D's, and F's that I often overheard other people talking about, because I never had to work for anything. Even working my hardest, I was disorganized and frustrated with everything, because suddenly, things became hard. I couldn't read during classes like I tended to do as a kid, because I had to actually think about what I was being presented.

Giftedness also leads to social isolation - especially if anybody knows about it. In grade school, when I was first ... let's call it 'diagnosed,' what they did to determine this status was to pull a number of students out of their normal classes and put them through a battery of tests. I remember one of the tests involved a bunch of lines on a paper, and you were supposed to make pictures out of them. I drew some books. Even that early on, I indulged in too much escapism.

From there on, they continued to rip about six of us out of our normal curriculum in order to try and educate us at a level above and beyond our peers ... the problem was, it was ill-organized, ill-directed, and they didn't really try to teach us anything advanced, just different things than everyone else learned. I had a shaky foundation in my normal classes because I missed about half of the content. I was able to overcome what this did to my actual scholastic performance, but I wonder sometimes how well.

One of the other kids actually asked me for one of these noisemakers that I'd gotten - little packets of gunpowder that made a loud snapping noise when tossed on the ground. I gave it to him under the assumption he wouldn't do anything too terribly stupid with it. He got caught using them in the boy's restroom, and I got in trouble for 'taking advantage of someone less intelligent.'

I remember when we moved into the city, it wasn't a terribly large change for me, because honestly, I didn'thave that many close friends. There were two or three people I associated with, but they weren't really friends. The one person I would have considered a friend who could think on my level (some six or seven years older than I was, who made the wise decision to deliberately fail the talented and gifted testing) made it his life's ambition to get away from the small town and the psychic leeches that made up his family. I wonder where he ended up sometimes. He was the one who introduced me to the wider world of the internet, and online games, for that matter.

I don't really know what the point to writing this all was. Just needed to get it out of my system, I think.

Whoops

Meant to post this earlier today but I'm actually developing a workload.
Trying out post by email, too. See how it goes.
Sleepy.
Oh, this is another M$ paint doodle.

98 Posts, 2 Status Updates

Wow, so I made it this far without skipping an update. (Although technically I think 'Announcement' means this isn't really 100 "real" updates.)

And then I need to skip an update.

My motherboard decided that it is breaking up with my hard drive, in the sense that they're no longer on speaking terms.

I'm ... just a little bit devastated.

Writing from Mom's computer.

My baby. T_T