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thegoldenreport · 3 years

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MIND BENT

Pretending to be someone else is easy, especially when you’ve been doing it your whole life. Amber-Eye 098 is an top tier imitation artist from the Southern Moon district, who has almost twelve years of experience under her belt in deceiving the general public for fun.

She recently sat down with Golden Report executives to share one such experience - how she managed to infiltrate Jatty’s Candy Cave and impersonate the titular owner, while remaining undetected for three months.

If the name of “Jatty’s Candy Cave” doesn’t ring a bell for you or stir up a primordial urge to vomit, we highly recommend an appointment with your local re-education services to rectify the issue. But in the mean time, we’ll ask you a very simple question, what’s really in their candy?

Or to put it in a different way...

Are you meant to be seeing the buzzing, glitching, oozing shadow that stands in the corner of your room at all times?

…

AE098: Whenever I approach a new character, I choose to look first at their environment. Their people. You can tell a lot about how a person is supposed to act just by looking at their people.

Jatty’s Candy Cave, for example, is housed in a very elaborate sewer system underneath the inner city of West Logos. Jatty doesn’t voluntarily share this information, but somehow makes sure her customers spread it like the plague. She wants to be known far and wide, yet continues to stay hidden. Chosen isolation perhaps as a method of retaining control? A walking contradiction nonetheless.

Sending several camera flies into the underground system confirmed she didn’t work alone. A personal assistant named Rael followed her every beck and call. Visuals showed him to be a funny little man who changed his aesthetic and vocal inflection on the daily. Though tended to favor anything revolving around a space or astronaut theme. It was a good thing I wasn’t stealing his identity.

Jatty, on the other hand, donned an a-line purple skirt, skin tight black turtle neck, dark green combat boots (which just so happened to be the same shade as her nefarious chemical ingredient, zeroX), and a pair of velvet back gloves that extended her fingers into claws.

Unlike Rael, she wore this suit on the regular and showed no signs of switching it up. Which of course made things ridiculously convenient for my costumes associate. She does such a sublime job at matching garments down to the very fabric and shade. I had nothing but confidence in her work.

I remember spending long evenings in her sewing shop, top floor of the special ops building. Trying on the boots and pacing around the floor. Feeling out the walk of, shall we say...a potential murderer? An ill advised chemistry enthusiast? Mad science extraordinaire? I wouldn’t know for sure until I became her.

Everything is a performance. Everyone has a good side. Everyone loves to act for the camera that isn’t even there. You may be wondering why we even go through the trouble of full body espionage if we already send in a hundred camera flies to wire tap the place. To that I say again, everything is a performance. The name of the game is not just tearing down the curtain, but walking backstage. The one place a camera refuses to go.

Further audiovisual input revealed her voice to be low and musky, like she constantly had to be clearing her throat (of her own toxins, perhaps?). We had vocal modifier pills that could mimic this effect. And her walk was always brisk in comparison to the slower moving factory workers. She was a being in motion, a blur that could not stop for more than a few moments at a time. And it wasn’t just an urgency to it, but a nervousness, a real fear. I was excited to discover more.

In the days leading up to my deployment, special operatives performed what we like to call a body snatch. Methodically extracted in such a way that Jatty would not even think to deny leaving with us. We offered an opportunity, intentionally vague, but sweet enough to seal the deal. Or that’s how it started.

In reality, we slipped a sleeping agent into her water glass, while discussing terms in the late hours of the evening. I’m not entirely sure where they took her, but by that point, I was ready.

MEETINGS

This is the word I would use to describe my first month in character. I remember the night I slipped into her office chair, torn faux leather at a cherry red mahogany desk. I remember the stickiness of said office chair. I remember pouring through her journals, her agenda books, her middle school science books. She was a being on the move, constantly meeting with someone. But for what?

One such meeting that stook out to me was with a blue deer handler, and only in my second week of deployment. I had read about this particular blue deer. And the sweet nectarine like flavor of it’s blood. Our conversation was brief, speaking about his latest harvest for the factory. He had come across a surplus, could give more this month than before. I was immediately suspicious. Could this blood contain the hallucinogenic properties I had heard about?

Unfortunately, the answer was no. Can confirm. I tried it myself.

It was however the main component of almost all their candy’s flavor profile. But I couldn’t have cared less about the flavor.

CHEMICALS

My second month felt the most comfortable. No one had yet raised a suspicious eye towards me, save for a few factory workers who I quickly disposed of, as per my training. I had gotten used to the endless walking. Learning to digest informative material while on the go. Like all those mad scribbles in her middle school science textbook. Keeping all conversations either short or long depending on what the situation called for.

I had internalized every type of candy we made in the Cave. The pipes hissed. The air smelled like swamp water. The work room was a mental prison of blood, sweat, and flickering lights. It was here that I learned the ingredients. That I tasted the fruit for the first time. Although I was pretty good at pretending I had done it many times.

She must have built up a tolerance to the drugs they use if she does this on the regular.

The candy I tried was called Vox. A lime green sucker that slowly turns into goo as it melts in your mouth. The color is deceptive. One might expect it to taste like an apple or even a lime. It tasted like salted butter.

This particular candy among many others contained a key ingredient known as zeroX: an opaque, thick, dark green almost black liquid at room temperature. Meant to be highly addictive. Meant to simulate an adrenaline rush. Meant to make the whole body shiver. The eyes dilate. The palms sweat. You feel like an imposter in your own skin. You believe that the voices on the radio are talking directly to you. The paranoia crawls deep into your brain, filling the space behind your eyes.

But you don’t hallucinate.

Can confirm, as I locked myself in the chief office and rode out it’s side effects on the wave of a panic attack.

SECRETS

In the middle of month 3, we received a mysterious package from a tall man in a black trench coat. My assistant Rael brought it to me at my desk, during one of the few times I had felt comfortable sitting down. He seemed to know exactly what it was. And assumed I also knew.

It was a black box, no seams or openings, no buttons or lights or switches. The only thing of note was a silver etching of an eye marked out with an X. It was a symbol that made me shudder. I had seen it all over the textbook. I had seen it plastered on every police car and above every government building. It’s a symbol you should all know. That was the first secret.

Our own leaders were in on it. Turning a blind eye.

That was the beginning of the crack in my facade. That little pause. That miniscule choke before my answer. I noticed a glimmer of something in Rael’s eyes. Confusion. Doubt. Suspicion. Patrons not trained in this artform might miss a cue like that, but I knew I had to begin my extraction.

A week later, I exposed my taste to zeroC. One of two chemicals they used as zeroX was designated for hard candy and zeroC for soft. Only five percent of their production contained soft candy. They don’t talk about zeroC. They mix it under tables or in dark corners of the room where the light doesn’t touch them. Which leads to the second secret.

The black box was zeroC, ground up like powder to be mixed with the syrup.

I had been reading about this less popular ingredient written upside down between the lines of Jatty’s incredibly weathered textbook. Similar to the effects of LSD or DMT, but extremely more potent and infinitely more long lasting. Made with the same blood of that fantastical blue deer.

I was fearing the inevitable. My weekly tasting of the newest batch. I could not fake it. All the workers lined up to stare at me at I sat before their production table and consumed their poison. There are some things you simply cannot fake before that many eyes.

I felt the sweet juice explode in my mouth as the candy’s skin broke between my teeth. I swallowed with all the confidence of returning to my office to take a shot of my emergency counteractive medicine.

I immediately started to cry. A side effect I was not expecting. The emotion swallowed me as they all stared. Some perplexed. Some, dare I say, satisfied? I stumbled through the hallways. Rael chasing after me with a clipboard. I didn’t turn to look at him. Escaped to my office, shut the door, and locked it. Which brings me to the third and final secret.

I had been fooling no one. They knew.

Sitting behind the cherry stained mahogany desk was the real Jatty, holding the shattered remains of the syringe, which contained my antidote. Ice blue eyes magnified by the chemicals coursing through my body. Her glare pierced through my skull. I don’t know if she escaped, if I was set up, or if my extraction was on short notice. My supervisors have neglected to tell me.

But as I was there with knees buckled and tunnel vision, I saw the black shadow of a hand appear on her shoulder and she whispered.

Don’t forget this. You people have no control.

I blacked out after that. My supervisors came to collect me after some time. I felt their arms wrapped around me as they dragged me out, slipping in and out of consciousness. Unable to process the shocking and also very strange things I was hearing.

Something about not keeping the deal. Something about craving orange juice. Another thing about an early return. And another thing about wombats in space.

I was in recovery for three weeks afterwards while our physicians on hand constructed an antidote. The hallucinations have stopped, but the paranoia is still palpable. They offered me a mind wipe pill, asked me if I wanted to forget.

I told them it was impossible.

#the golden report #issue two #unreality #paranoia #drugs #original #storytelling #hallucination #delusion #let me ask you this #is this the kind of exposure you wanted?#jatty's candy cave

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