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slimyscrivener · 6 years

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Sugar Syrup Summoning Pt3

Our neophyte summoner attempts to explain the internet to a demon. Some looks are exchanged, an evening comes to a close.

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As much as looking my demon in the face was daunting, having her stand behind me was in a whole different world of weird. Her body sounded slick, every simple shift or twitch of her body lingered at the edge of being audible. As I sat ensconced within my faux-leather office chair I could hear the sound of her breathing. A far away sound, like the sloshing of a distant bathtub. Once or twice she made as though to lean her arms on the chair back but stopped herself midway and instead placed her hooves awkwardly on her hips.

When the computer finished booting up from sleep mode she leaned in.

Her breath smelled of coffee, and her body gave off the aroma of sweet mushrooms. I felt myself getting hot around the cheeks again but for entirely more embarrassing reasons. She smelled like ooze, like slime on warm flesh, and if pressed I’m not sure I could accurately describe what that even meant in words without blushing madly. It made my brain feel foggy as though trying to peer through a car window on a humid day. My hesitation as I stared at the peak of her muzzle leaning past me became noticeable and she angled her head to look at me.

“It’s very colourful.” She said, the scent of coffee was a mundane detail I could cling to and I nodded in response.

“Yes, I like my, uh. My backdrop.” Which was a dull thing to say that the demon probably wouldn’t understand so I rounded to the task.

“Anyway, it’s sort of like a- a box of functions. I mean, it can do all kinds of things. The computer I mean.”

I opened up my word processor and starting to type at random.

“This would let me write up something and then I can have it printed over there.” I indicated my bulky old printer in the corner with a backward thrust of a thumb.

“Oh!” She exclaimed, a hooved hand gripping the plush side of my chair. A breath caught in my chest as she cheerfully continued.

“We have something like that in the offices, it’s a bit finicky for me though. I prefer something like this that stays put.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, neither the idea that demons had offices nor the concept of a computer that didn’t stay put. I felt my head swim at the idea that demons has computers IN their offices. She didn’t seem apt to explain, leaving me adrift in rapidly devolving thought, so I tried to carry on.

“Right, uh…” A deep breath in, then released.

“So, the net.”

Popping open my web browser, I preferred Narwhale-lite because Narwhale-premium takes up too much system resources and also because poverty, I navigated to my media feed.

“This…” I said, scrolling slowly, “is sort of an example. It’s a feed, uh, it’s a list of things my friends have said or news articles. People share them on the net and they get passed around. And my feed sort of aggregates all of that stuff for me so I can read it in one place. And the net is… like this huge collective storage space of information that keeps changing and evolving. I guess, and there’s people that manipulate it and use it for communication too.”

I turned to look at Lilwanyu, wondering if ‘aggregates’ was a confusing way to phrase it, or if that absolutely terrible explanation of the internet was just a mess, but she seemed rapt by the images on the screen. Eyes blinked, some wandered reading while others widened in some expression I could hardly ken.

She said, in a breathy murmur, “how fascinating..! And do you set it to your exact specifications for the information you want to collect? How much of your activity does it aggregate for other people using this same function? Does it only collect from events that are shared or does it do so by some other process?”

Lost for words, I had to think a moment. She’d grasped the concept faster than I had assumed she might, and even used the same terminology I had used back at me with surprising deftness. I needed to amend my explanation and get more technical before I accidentally started giving her the wrong idea.

When I clicked the mouse I found that I had gone a bit sweaty and wiped it down with the hem of my shirt before I continued.

“Y- yes. I mean, people have to put things on the net before they can be collected, and it only collects the stuff that I put up there too. I have my preferences set up for what it will share publicly and privately, and what it will show me from other people and sites.”

“Interesting…” She breathed, and I wondered if the demon hadn’t gotten… excited? I had the impression that she was gripping the seat more tightly, it had begun to list to the side ever so slightly. I realized it was leaning me in closer to her as she stooped in to look at the screen more closely. I had to actively scoot myself against the other arm rest to stop myself from physically touching her.

Though, for a moment, I wondered what it might feel like. Was she covered in soft, peach plush fur? Or perhaps it was slimy, as slick as its texture seemed to imply? I found myself staring at her arm where it curled out from under her shawl. Without thinking I followed the shape of it up to her hand, to the muzzle resting upon her palm. Most of her eyes were on the computer, but one was fixed firmly upon me. Its pupil was a thick band, like a goat’s eye, with a sclera of yellow like aging parchment. As I stared back at it, the pupil began to dilate.

It grew until it filled all available space within its socket. Ink black and shimmering like oil, as I watched it began to ooze at the corners, overflowing down the lines of her face. My mouth went dry, I felt breath pass over lips hanging open, but I couldn’t bear to look away. Oil slime tears bled into other eyes, and their pupils slowly turned to gaze at me. One by one, until my vision was filled with a field of eyes that shined like bubbles upon a darkened sea.

In my chest, my heart had started to quake, ribs were aching as though its beat sought escape from the cage of my bones. Something inside me was wanting, I’d never needed something so badly, but I couldn’t give the need a shape. It was formless, oozing around the edges. The eyes upon me did not judge, they were waiting.

Expectant.

I blinked.

“I had no idea humans had such tools.”

Her words jarred me so hard I slapped the mouse on the desktop with an awkward plastic clack.

If she noticed she didn’t mention it, continuing to chat as though the last thousand years of mutual staring had never occurred.

“This is quite sophisticated. Can you find information not aggregated by this function specifically?”

Nodding my way out of some distractingly slimy thoughts, I went through the motions of showing her a variety of my bookmarks without speaking. Going through news and cooking sites then segwaying into forums and webcomics. When she started to ask direct questions I mustered the will to speak, though it came out in a hoarse squeak at first. I wanted to call it a feeling of numbness but that was incorrect. My skin was buzzing, like an electric chill. I felt more exhausted than anything else, though her quiet cadence and curiosity began to sooth the sensation. More questions as I went, some of which I was unable to answer, she was exceptionally keen and quite interested in the technology of it. Eventually I asked if she wanted to mess around with it for a while.

“Oh..! May I?” She said, sudden excitement making her yank the chair ever so slightly. I yipped, jumping in my seat, causing it to spin and face her directly. Her arm moved with the chair and she turned with it so that the two of us were face to face.

The intent look that she gave me made my head swim. I wasn’t certain if I was ready to have her full attention again, especially after that previous… whatever it was. Just, being so close to her made me feel so vulnerable, in a indescribable way. I never considered a demon being disarmingly sincere, but that was the best way I could describe it, when she looked at me I could tell she was looking directly into me. In a person I would be hard pressed to understand this kind of behavior, these looks she gave me. In a demon, I was distressingly without a clue. It had a simultaneous, ‘this demon wants to eat me’, and, ‘this demon wants to eat me’ sort of feeling.

“Y....” I stammered, awkwardly attempting to casually lean back in the seat, “Y-yes..? Sure I’ll uh, I’ll set up a guest user account for you since you’re going to be-”

A thought struck me, sudden enough to break through a new bout of brain fog, and I sat up again.

“Wait. How long are you going to be here?”

Some eyes started to glance about the room, the middlemost one stared up at the ceiling. While she thought on it I quickly put together another account for her and logged myself out, giving myself something to do that wasn’t staring my demon in the face.

“Well”, she said, “I presume it will have to do with how long it takes me to satisfy your request?”

“I guess I should make up the couch?” I frowned, standing up from the computer and gesturing at the seat. “Here, the password is just your name backwards.”

As she settled into the chair, curling her tail around her hips and bringing her legs up to perch on the seat, I continued to think out loud.

“I guess you can use the other room. I haven’t had a chance to fill it yet. There’s just a mattress though, she took the box spring.”

It had been a fraught sort of parting when my last roommate left.

“That will be fine.” Lilwanyu responded, her voice having a distant quality as she henpecked the keyboard. Luckily the mouse was well suited to a three fingered hand and she picked up on that quickly enough. Then again, she was also writing and speaking just fine in English, now that I thought of it.

I watched her for a few minutes, a thought slowly creeping up on me. Was this an incredibly terrible idea? Turning a demon loose on the internet with unrestricted access to what had apparently, to her, been unknown technology? Even if it was, I really had no means to stop her from doing so. Again the thought of binding her came to mind, particularly the part where I hadn’t done so.

A feeling like a snowball traveling downhill was picking up speed. Lights turning on in my head. I felt panic beginning to build.

“H-hey…” I tried to effect a casual tone and only succeeded in a nonchalant squeak.

“S-so, what are you uh, looking up th-there..?”

“Humans”, came the distracted response. I had the strangest feeling of being just a little hurt that she hadn’t spared a single eye to look at me as she said it.

“Oh, haha. Well...” No more words were forthcoming and I shut my mouth.

I watched her read wikipedia articles in silence for a few minutes before I realized that at this point I was a host, she was a guest and, there were certain expected behaviors.

“I’m going to go make up your bed, alright? You, I mean you sleep, right?”

A few eyes turned to look at me as she responded.

“Yes I do”, she said, “thank you.”

It was fast, this change from being terrified at her attention to being relieved. I hadn’t actually spoken with anyone, outside of cash register canned responses, in months...

Had it really been months?

Hesitating, each step out of the room followed by a glance back at the great horse monster using my computer, I went out into the living room. Staring up at the popcorn ceiling, standing there in the center of a carpet that crunched under foot, it almost felt like a normal night once she wasn’t in view anymore. But the apartment felt less empty, even just knowing she was there out of sight. It was a nice feeling. Screwing my heel up against the fabric, listening to the crisp sound, I glanced down.

The rug’s texture felt as though it had been badly burned, but it looked relatively the same as before. I rubbed the toe of my slipper on it and watched fibres flake off in tiny bits. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used it as a ritual ground, but the concentric circles seemed like a good idea at the time. Wouldn’t the unbroken circles have been a good binding for a demon? Or did the process of the summoning destroy them somehow in a way I couldn’t have foreseen?

There were also several stubs of candle melted into my carpet, the landlord will be furious if I can’t scrape that out, and an overturned offering dish. It looked as though it had toppled over when Lilwanyu appeared and its contents released onto the ground. I stooped to look and feel the carpet but, there was no trace of the liquid. Originally, I had been using honey and a variety of morbid ingredients but tonight I had the inspiration to just dump out a bottle of simple syrup, like what you’d use for cocktails. Just that, some blood of course, and the other thing.

‘The other thing’ I eventually found under the sofa, a perfect orb of selenite. At least I assumed it was perfect, that’s what the ebay seller had assured me. Presently when II picked it up I felt an electric jolt that made every muscle in my arm spasm. Dropping it with a yelp, it rolled sedately back under the couch. I clutched my smarting hand to my chest and stared at the sofa.

“Whatever. Just… just stay there I guess.” I mumbled.

Standing, I went through the motions of making the mattress into a bed. My only spare sheets were cast offs from a nearby hospice, run through a washing machine and several bleach baths. It was still cheaper than buying new bed linens. In the process of fitting sheets and locating comforters I felt exhaustion creep in to replace the adrenaline of the last few hours. When I walked back into my room the sight of the demon hardly stirred the sleep that had begun to fog my mind.

I let her know the bed was ready and muzzily explained how to put the computer into sleep mode when she was done. As I finished Lilwanyu turned in the chair to look at me.

“Thank you, I won’t be a bother while you’re sleeping will I?” Genuine concern, so many eyes watching me, so tired.

Shaking my head and waving a hand casually I responded.

“Naw, I sleep like a rock when I actually get to sleep. Having someone around makes it easier.”

“Oh.” She said, “then, goodnight to… ”

The demon did something strange:

she blushed.

The flesh of her cheeks and neck blossomed in purple hues as her expression flashed through frightened, to anxious, and then settled into exasperation.

“I’m so sorry, I never asked for your name.” She said, from her tone I thought at first she was angry at me, but I recognized it as disappointment in herself. Ah yes, I am very well accustomed to that feeling.

She hadn’t asked, I realized, and I had never bothered to give it to her. Wow. It has been a long time since I’ve talked to anyone I guess.

I laughed to assuage her feelings. Trying to sooth the emotions of a demon..! What a strange day.

I said, “it’s Alice.”

As an afterthought I added, “She. Earth.”

Lilwanyu nodded, then with a smile she said, “goodnight Alice. Tomorrow we shall begin fulfilling your wish.”

My heart abruptly throbbed in my chest at the sight of her teeth, at just the bare sliver that showed when the demon smiled. I couldn’t put together a response to her assertion so instead I simply said goodnight and rolled up into bed.

With covers over head I calmed my heart back down, luckily the weight of sleep was there to make the work easier. I amused myself by thinking how absurd it was to be napping as a demon was busily polluting my search history with things like “humans, how to talk to them” and “how do humans make friends.”

As I fell asleep, “Humans, top recipes”, came to mind as well but in the half conscious mind of an exhausted young woman it really didn’t bother me that much. Honestly, it would have been a lot easier to just ask her to eat me, that would have solved all of my problems pretty nicely regardless of her interpretation.

…

Oh.

Damn.

#trans protagonist #demon summoning #demon #short fiction

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cosmicycle · 7 years

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3: The word glitch refers to an unpredictable irregularity in a system—digital and analogue alike. Explore the creative possibilities of glitch.

So with a glitch, i like to think of glitches like in the matrix, when you experience a Déjà Vu moment where you swear something just happened to you, and often i see flashes whilst asleep of just an image that later appears in my day and i take a second to just collect myself as i feel like I’ve hacked a system or something. And then in relevance to this assignment it got me thinking of how in the world it can be thought of a system, like when your heart just starts beating really fast for no reason or when your body twitches for no reason at all, when something abnormal happens and you can’t explain why, but it’s brief and normally doesn’t do much harm, but with technology i was thinking in terms of cameras and how a picture sometime ends up looking ‘in motion’ when the shutter speed is slowed down, and how in panoramas when you move when your not supposed to and it ends up being fragmented and ‘glitchy’. i was also going to try and edit the code to photos to glitch them, like that one artist, but i know nothing about code and it didnt end up working at all, but i did have a panorama setting on my phone and tried to get a ‘glitch’ in the panoramas by moving alot here is the first one:

I focused on my hand and moved it alot while taking the panorama and i ended up dropping my phone midway through the shot and it showed a offset photo as it lost the horizontal alignment which i thought was quite fitting.

Heres the next one i did:

I waved my hand in front of my face for this which made, sort of like a fan, i actually quite liked how its so fragmented and how some of my fingers are cut off and how my ring is only visible in some of the bits, and how its so choppy with the hand on the right.

I also thought of pulling out a page of paper whilst it was printing to get the words to drag whilst they were in mid-print, but when i tried it on my printer, i found that it was hard to do, i ended up typing a full page of this message:

Here is a page of text, this text is meaningless and is therefore not worth your time or effort to read this, yet here you are. The only thing I have to say about this page of text is that it is meaningless and is therefore not worth your time or effort to read this, yet here you are. Another thing I have to say about this page of text is that it is meaningless and is therefore not worth your time or effort to read this, yet here you are.

i pasted the last sentence in until it covered the page and then tried to catch the paper in mid-print, which ended up with me having to turn off the printer and then try and fish the paper back out, i got two successful results of this before the ink was sealed and i was able to smudge the ink:

i smudged it alot whilst playing around with it but liked how some words were still legible, heres a second attempt:

so with this i had to half dismantle the printer to fish out this piece of paper since it was so far along the printing process i couldn’t just get it out from the paper tray, i found that the ink was still able to be smudged, before it was extruded through the printing tray, so i played around with blurring out some of the words, but i liked how i was able to ‘control’ the glitch that happened. and i might explore ‘controlled’ gltiches in a way which, you’re able to change the outcome, but you dont know how exactly it will happen, kind of thing.

#ADAD1002 #experiments #Assessment 1

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