1 ⚙️

[callbacks]

[Remember that one Spectre randomly accosting people for interviews on fuck all? Looks like some teenage D-bag in shades actually saw fit to entertain her questions. Oh dear. The brief interview doesn't get nearly as much unreal air as li'l Miss Invidia of poisonous fame, but it's playing here and there today. The brief clip might not merit any attention at all, except...]

...local establishment you think more Invidians should know about?

[The kid lights up suddenly without actually smiling, rising up a little on the balls of his feet with his hands still jammed in his pockets.]

Shit, dawgs, you have no idea. You got yourselves a national--or, like--at least a municipal treasure sitting like a bereft and sack-clothed widow at the corner of Ignored and Abandoned. You assholes don't know what you're missing. It's a downright indignation, the lack of patronage enjoyed by this magnificently unironic piece of shit business modeling. Hold on to your asses because I'mma need you to get 'em parked pronto-mundo in the chairs at Mr. Dudeguy's BBQ and Foot Massage-While-You-Wait.

[He takes a breath, and it's at this point the interviewer really should have moved on, but it's too late. It's always already too late.]

Got a long-standing nation in my imagination
All staycationing in line at the bee-bee-queue,
Awaitin' pork and grilled onions while Granny get her bunions
Caressed lovingly in the hands of a master in toe-fu,
By which I mean podia-shiatsu-jutsu-fu,
Though you could probably order tofu, too, I mean, I ain't the boss of you
If that's the shit you want to order smoked and spice-rubbed for you.
Uh, anyway,
All I'm sayin' is it's the sweetest jerk-and-rub of a release
Your mortal soul can experience post-cease.

[...Did he just--]

You know, if that's how you feel about it. Anyway, yeah. Check it. Cat does a sweet kebab.

[In any case, business is now booming at BBQ and Foot Massage-While-U-Wait. Lines are out the door and around the block. A full street away, a hunched, furtive-looking blond is bargaining in desperate, hissed tones with a seller of hoodies.]

Please, no, I'm begging--no. I can't give you the sunglasses, I'm on a strictly no shades-trades platform. Can't you just--holy shit.

[Sensing someone looking at him, he stiffens and turns away further. He will ollie off this entire layer if he has to, Jesus.]

Comments

[callbacks]

TBH, you're buttressing a pretty damn strong case for me to traipse off like a plucky but brainless ingenue with a strange adult clown to an as-yet undisclosed location. Is it the circus.

[schardynfreude]

We're mostly holed up in some of the apartments while those poisoned recover, but there's a nice house further up than here that several of us are calling home at the moment.

If you're feeling a deep and unrelenting sense that something is extremely wrong, it's because the mechanism for allowing those dead to reincarnate is busted, and if you agree to it, you'll get powers to fight monsters that were once souls stuck here too long so you can help us fix it and get Purgatory flowing the way it apparently is supposed to again.

The young lady in charge of this city does not, in fact, want to reincarnate.

And I have noted your clown comment. [*Chiron will remember that.]

[callbacks]

Uh, sorry if that's not your line. Not that I'm knocking the profession, clowning's an ancient tradition that's attracted a kind of cultish reverence in some circles. But maybe those circles are not your circles and you just dress like you do because of. Reasons.

...

They're some slick shoes.

[schardynfreude]

Not everyone has the same sense of fashion as what is available here.

But the shoes are nice. And the patterns are, hm, familiar and pleasing.

In any event, we're not clowns. We're...hm...we transform into new appearances, can perform magic and superhuman feats, and are the only ones capable of fighting monsters. [does eos have anime and if so would he know what anime is, questions I never thought I'd be asking myself]

[callbacks]

Holy shit, you're anime.

[schardynfreude]

I'm...animated?

[callbacks]

Yes. No. Well, none of us are. I just meant... you know Saturday morning cartoons?

[schardynfreude]

Oh. Superheroes and such? Yes, something like that. I'd show you, but I would rather not draw any undue attention.

[callbacks]

[Breathed like a prayer:] Anime is real...

[Anyway. No. There are important things what got said. He shakes his head and looks away, finding some spot of sidewalk to the side to fixate on.]

You're right. It doesn't feel right for shit to be stopped up like this. Can't say I'm hype to hop into combat with messed-up monster souls, but... I mean, if that's what it takes to get things working again. [Shrug.] Maybe. I don't know. Guess I don't have anything better to do.

[schardynfreude]

...You're going to get along with some of the girls just fine with an attitude like that. [Not sarcasm! Several of them basically went 'I have nothing better to do' as their reasoning. So.]

What moniker have you been supplied with? I awoke with a title of Your Majesty, but that...has felt less like a true name, so now I currently go by Chiron.

[callbacks]

It's just Clocks. That's what I remember.

Is there a way to feel underdressed but, like, with your fake ghost handle.

[schardynfreude]

We have someone who woke up with the name Pariah, and another who's Kingslayer. I think you're fine.

[callbacks]

Does that get weird if you're Your Majesty. Isn't that a king thing.

[schardynfreude]

We've certainly acknowledged the weirdness factor there, yes.

[callbacks]

Okay, as long as it's been there on the table where everyone's seen it. Do you prefer one over the other? I don't personally have a problem with Your Majesty, kind of rolls off the tongue in a way I can't place and have no desire to examine whatsoever.

[schardynfreude]

Chiron will do just fine. Fewer syllables. Makes other people more comfortable.

You'll also find memories coming back to you as you go, so that feeling of something you can't place and have no desire to examine will keep happening, unfortunately.

[callbacks]

Huh.

[...Clocks actually doesn't look too jazzed about that. Hard to read these things off him in a first conversation, but there's a sense he's stepped back a bit to absorb this information.]

[schardynfreude]

It isn't always unpleasant. I've remembered positive things before. But that sensation of thinking you should know something when you don't...is disconcerting.

[callbacks]

Yyyeah, but.

[Slowly and uneasily, he shifts his weight before finally just shaking his head.]

I don't know. Seems like it might cause problems later on. I get that this place is a nonfunctional piece of shit right now, but if it weren't, wouldn't forgetting... kind of be the point?

[schardynfreude]

Hm. The idea at least seems to be working past one's sins, and I am less than entirely clear on what that means. Forgetting seems...antithetical to the idea, if you don't even remember your sins to begin with. But then at the end, yes, one would forget simply to be reborn anew.

[callbacks]

Forgive and forget, right? What if we already worked past a bunch of it and that's why we remember fuck all? No telling how long we were here before the big Self-Awareness socked us in the ghost jaw.

[schardynfreude]

It's as you so colorfully put it. No way to tell. This level seems to have some semblance of a day/night cycle, but I very much doubt it's an accurate representation of the flow of time, if it does in fact flow.

[callbacks]

It doesn't.

[Clocks' own certainty on that front takes him by surprise. He pauses, then says more slowly:]

It... shouldn't? Not in the way that we...

[With no memories to back it up, the attempt to explain quickly peters out.]

Uh, can we forget I said anything. Seems my ass got it in mind to play at farting out vowels and consonants in a saddening facsimile of coherent speech and I ended up talking out of it.

[schardynfreude]

You know something, yet you do not know how or why you know it to be so and thus cannot adequately explain how you are so certain.

I wish I could say you get used to that.

[callbacks]

I get the feeling 'know' is a strong word to apply to anything that falls out of my untimely departed face, but thanks for the general vote of 'yeah dude I get you.' Whether I get used to it or not, at least I'm not, like. Completely alone with the rapidly splintering ability of language to convey the bullshit I'm experiencing here.