vaovalis

[vaovalis]

So many past lives. I’ve glimpsed fragments and shadows of some of the people I’ve been.  This isn’t my first time around. Someday, I’ll wake up from this dream, and when I do? I’ll remember everything.

[vaovalis]

What is it I fear? I don’t think it’s fear I feel, for why I’ve tried so hard and sometimes so badly to fit in.  I want to understand and to be understood. I crave relation and Knowing and Being Known. Some part of me inside feels like it knows that I can never truly have any of these things; that it is a lost cause, that every time I think I might not be so different than others it is because I’m taking a narrow view of something momentary...and temporary. Do I wish to be like them? Not really. I don’t like a lot of how they are.  Do I wish they were more like me? Maybe. But no. It’s not quite that either. I don’t fear their judgments or their rejections.  Mostly, I just feel antagonized and imperious when others try to presume themselves fit to judge me, and I couldn’t care less about general rejection.  Not everyone is going to like me. Sometimes that’s unfortunate, but I don’t feel like I take any baggage with me from such things either. So just what is it that drives me so hard to try to fit in?  What’s the real purpose behind that, me? Why you do dis shit? I’m lonely.  I don’t know how to get what I want from people unless I feel like I’m giving them something they want in return, and I’m not often sure what that is. So I sometimes try too hard and wind up making weird choices. Am I afraid of being alone? No. Not at all. Being alone and feeling lonely aren’t the same thing. I generally enjoy my own company, but sometimes, I would like to have people around to share things with and to be shared with by in kind. Thoughts, mostly. Most of what I want to share and have shared with me in kind is information about what we all think and feel about things, ideally things that matter to us as individuals. I crave meaning in that which I do, and that which I would share with others would ideally be something I find meaningful and that they can then ponder for themselves and determine if they too find some form of meaning in it. I don’t have the biological urges most of the standardly meaty people I meet typically do, and that’s been on my mind lately.   I have no mating urges at all.   I guess that’s probably at least in part due to that I’m not a real meat-person.  My body is magic bullshit wrapped around just whatever the Real Me Inside truly is, and while it winds up apparently being a thing well-made enough to have the facsimile of even DNA, it’s all like fake books on bookshelves that look real. Crack my DNA open and there’s gibberish in there, I’m told.  It isn’t really DNA at all.   How do I feel about that?   It feels like some part of me somehow always knew. I don’t feel surprised by the revelation of it; not really. I want to be surprised. I want to be a lot of things, but I’m just...not.  It just isn’t there to feel. It feels exactly like learning something I’ve known the whole time, but didn’t know I knew.  It’s a quiet, utterly undramatic ‘Oh. Right’ sort of feeling.  And that’s it.   I have no sex drive because I’m not a real girl and I have no actual endocrine system. I have meat, but if you look too closely at the things like DNA and the actual chemicals I’m composed of?  All nonsense.  Am I real person?  Yeah, duh. I feel no insecurity or threat of woe about that at all.  I’m apparently an energy being of living shadow and flame though, and it makes perfect sense to me that some primordial blot wouldn’t have any intrinsic sense of purpose with things like tits and vaginas. I certainly have tits and what I expect is a perfectly functional vagina, but I also have arms and eyes and what seem under general scrutiny to be internal organs and a body temperature and blood and blood pressure.   I piss and shit, but if I don’t eat or drink for long periods, I don’t do either anymore, and I’m pretty sure I can’t dehydrate or starve to death. I sure get crabby as fuck for a while if I go too long without eating or drinking, but if I forget long enough, those feelings vanish as well and then I’m fine again.  I don’t want to forget though. I want to drink delicious things and eat scrumptious things, and when possible, share the things I find tasty with people whose company I find enjoyable. I want to fit in, and I can pin down some reasons, but none of them feel like the heart of the matter. I can’t get at the heart of why just yet.  I’ll try again later.  I’m sure, knowing me, I’ll fail completely to get it out of my head at all now that I’ve started thinking about it.

[vaovalis]

How long has it been since I’ve been here, in this time and on this Earth? According to the chronometers, I’ve only been gone in linear space-time for a few days.   For me, it’s been...longer.   It was always a risk when embarking upon dimensional and temporal adventures, so I can’t say I’m surprised or even particularly concerned, but the unceasing revelation of how little time has passed here is disconcerting in a way I can’t say I’m disliking. If I can spend whole weeks and months in certain dimensions exploring, learning, studying, training and so on, then come back here and have the local time concurrent to Primal Earth only have moved forward a few measly days? I’d feel foolish not to explore the potential drawbacks of exploiting the hell out of this.

[vaovalis]

When I look in the mirror these days, I get these ominous feelings. Intrusive thoughts creep in my mind when I look into my own eyes. Rip it away, they whisper to me. Rip the mask off. You know this isn’t you; you know this is all a facade. Rip it down. Burn it away.  Set yourself free. It is more than a face I would be tearing though. I know this on some intrinsic level.  I’m not human and I never was, that much is clear these days.   I could understand it all if I wished. I could have all the answers, if I just...reached into the looking glass and destroyed the reflection staring back at me.   Part of me longs for that knowing, for that comprehension.  Part of me also knows that there would be no coming back from waking up like that. Perhaps it is so that, as I am, I am asleep and some sort of dreamer dreaming myself a shape and a nature and a being.  There are tacos and music and sketchy demi-friends and life and stupid TV shows and good TV shows and more sketchy people in this dream though.  What will any of those things be to me if I tore that reflection away and either set myself free or woke myself up? I can’t decide which phrasing feels more correct. There will be no more Vao if I do that. And I like me, even if many others do not. If Vao were someone external to myself, would I destroy her in trade for such understanding as that I feel a craving for?  No.  I would not.   I don’t doubt for one second that it will happen someday.  A thing may sleep for a long time, but not forever.  A dream may go on for what seems like forever, but every dream must, eventually, end. Whatever I truly am beneath all of this, it doesn’t seem the manner of thing that’s got places to be or things it will somehow be late for.  I can wait.  I can afford all the patience there ever was. I don’t sleep because I’ve never woken up, by the way.  I figured this out staring into my mirror this morning.  Nobody sleeps in their dreams. I am dreaming myself as Vao; a ridiculous little creature that tries so hard to fit into a world she will never fit into.   She’s adorable. I’m not finished dreaming her yet. It is not yet time to wake up. I will know when it is time.

[vaovalis]

The FBSA is not wrong to be gravely concerned about what I could do if I were to ‘go off the rails’ as they say. I feign concern for the same. In truth, I am not concerned at all.  I do not leverage or talk about or in any way brag about or substantively share anything about the extent of my capabilities because...how would that benefit me to do? What would I do? Prove it? Who would I tell? People in the fucking bar? Those that pay attention and work it out for themselves can know accordingly. Nobody else needs to know or care.

[vaovalis]

Reality is as strange as can be imagined, and then stranger still.  What if I am indeed the creation being created by some manner of greater being?   That would be the simplest of things to assume, given all else that has thus-far become apparent.   And yet, when I silence my mind and simply feel, the truth I feel is that I am creating myself.  I can’t explain this. I feel as though it is simple, obvious and needless to question. I am free to question it all I like, but this feeling...it’s hard to dismiss.  My intuitions are not to be ignored, and this...this feels like something I need to bear in mind and strongly consider. Whether I am an ancient thing that is remembering itself or something creating itself in a bizarre act of abiogenesis or something stranger still, I cannot yet say. My lessons with Veronica, Kyuu’s shared insight into the nature of what I truly am and Vela’era introducing me to Victoria and all that’s come from that? It’s blown doors off their hinges on subjects to do with me and my nature that I doubt I would have even thought to look for anytime soon. I don’t mind. It is all information I would dearly like to possess.   I must consider the possibility that I may yet learn things that are unflattering or somehow difficult for me to accept.  So far that has not yet been the case, but I feel that this existential black hole I’ve tipped spontaneously into is nowhere near finished with me yet. Victoria suggested that I might be a shard of the primordial Chaos that became everything else in the multiverse before Time itself was even ordered.  One of the tests she ran on my indicated that the intrinsic nature of my Fire is such that it is of a conceptual hierarchy that is too old to fathom - primordial Fire of a kind that has not existed since the ordering of reality and whatever cosmic events they were that divided concepts from material. My fire is of spirit, of mind and of matter all alike. It covers all the concepts and factual aspectings of everything everyone knows fire to be, everything it’s ever been a conceptual expression of - everything everyone’s ever thought it was and more.   Victoria also suggested that I might be a very old thing that’s waking up or perhaps a very new thing that has not existed before. She is convinced that it is at least one of the two, but she can’t say for sure, and I surely don’t yet know. Whatever the specifics turn out to be, I am not human or anything that has ever truly been human.   I am a body of concepts and primordial cosmic essence that has, for whatever reasons, taken or been thrust into the form of the body I know.   Victoria suspects that I am a larval stage of something that is nowhere near finished evolving and growing yet, but she is also deeply worried that I might turn out to be some manner of Lovecraftian-esque horror from the primordial chaos at the dawn of reality that might grow up one day to eat reality. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. 

[vaovalis]

The more I explore these things that several friends of mine have been helping me to discover and realize about myself, the more I am brought to the inescapable conclusion that I am more of a freak than even I’d ever imagined. One friend weighs my essence and declares that I am not a creature of body and soul at all - that I am Essence alone, and that my physicality is a construct of either my own will or that of something or someone else that has imposed this shape and identity upon me. Another friend presents me with ideas for how to explore the true extent and nature of my abilities, and the very first thing she leads me to learn is how to invert it all - to inhale rather than exhale; to seize rather than to release. The light, the fire and the castrophony of change, motion and fire that is apparently none of those things alone in me becomes then darkness and death itself.   When I devour these things of mine from the world around me, there is nothing of warmth, motion or life left.   That same friend has even helped me arrive at the understanding that I have never been able to heal other beings because what I am does not give like that - it does not unmake, undo or rewind a thing that has happened, and they believe that the essence of which I am wrought will never do such things because I am of the essence of Chaos itself, and therein, of an aspect that moves forward. One friend has gone so far as to rename me: The One That Moves Forward Relentlessly.  She has likened me unto the inevitability of the future and the merciless march of Time itself - that the concepts I am woven from are the very essence of the things that cannot be stopped, and any appearance of hindering the truly inevitable itself will be delusion on the parts of those that wish to perceive themselves as victorious over that which they can never and will never control. And in the midst of it all, I sit here in my little apartment, surrounded by the relative mundania of life’s trappings and detritus, and I have this overwhelming feeling of certainty that while I am a real person, I did not become this way on my own. I did not make a ‘myself’ out of myself, wrap myself in subjectivities and set myself forth upon the path of pretending to be a real girl.  And yet, within that feeling lies a sense of enigma, not for the question of ‘if it wasn’t proto-me, who then was it and why?’, but rather a sense of wonder upon it all. It is no accident at all that I am exactly where I am. Something plays the role of Fate and Destiny in my life, and it is left for me to fly and flounder all I please until I inexorably wind up brought by the nature of my own being to find that which I ... am meant to find, to learn and to become. It is with eerie absolution that I feel that I am not a thing once created; I am being created, even now.  Every thing I do, every thought I think, every feeling I experience are the tappings of the hammer and the chisel and the lappings of the polishing cloth. Curious as I am about who or what it is that is creating me as well as what the end result is expected by them to be, I can’t feel worried about it.  There simply isn’t worry within me to feel of it.  I’ll find out exactly when I find out.  I’ll decide when that is through the choices I make, the wars I wage and the trials I endure on the way to the inexorable conclusion. What a mystery! I’ll never be bored or aimless! I am, in that, by my own figuring, one of the most unbelievably fortunate entities I know of.  I’ll never have cause to wonder if there is any point to my existence. While it may be that I might one day discover that I am being created for a purpose or set of purposes that, when I discover them someday, I might disagree with?  I’ll cross that bridge when and if I come to it at all. Right now, I feel like I’ve been given the rarest sort of certainty that a creature ever truly gets in life - that it all matters.  Everything I’ve been and done, every victory, every failure; none of it was a waste, and none of it was folly in the grander purpose of what must be when embarking upon an act of True Creation. I am the creation being created. I have now become conscious of the context of my own circumstance.   I suspect this is a momentous event.  I will share these thoughts and senses of revelation with Veronica, Victoria and Velae’ra.  Perhaps Ken if he is interested. I do not believe that the rest of my acquaintances would find any of this to be useful or interesting to their concerns.  And if I am wrong, I don’t really want to risk getting them spun up on some tangential notion that this is a mystery that they need to chase. I’d consider sharing it with Maude, but her life seems to be an overflowing bowl as it is and adding to that doesn’t feel like a decent thing to do.  I’ll evaluate that in the days to come all the same - Maude deserves such consideration because I believe she does truly care about my well-being.   The loose plan of who to loop in and who to leave unbothered with such things is thus set.    It’s nearly time for me to go patrol Eden and do my daily bit to trim back Hamidon’s overgrowth.

[vaovalis]

Angels and demons circle above my head, cleaving through thorns and Milky Ways. He who does not perceive his calling, does not know true happiness... Watch in awe! Watch in awe! Heavenly glory! Heavenly glory! Watch in awe! Watch in awe! Heavenly glory! Heavenly glory! I am calling, calling now, spirits rise and falling. To stay myself longer… Calling, calling, in the depth of longing

To stay myself longer… Watch in awe! Watch in awe! Heavenly glory! Heavenly glory! Watch in awe! Watch in awe! Heavenly glory! Heavenly glory! Stand alone...Where was life when it had a meaning? Stand alone...Nothing's real anymore and... ...Endless running... While I am alive, I can try not to fall while flying, Nor to forget how to dream...to love... ...Endless running... Calling, Calling now! For The Place of Knowing! There's more that what can be linked! Calling, Calling now, Never will I look away! From what life has left for me. Yearning, Yearning, for what's left of loving! To remain myself longer... Calling, Calling now, spirits rise and falling... To remain myself longer! Calling, Calling, in the depths of longing! To remain myself longer! Watch in awe! Watch in awe! Heavenly glory! Heavenly glory! Watch in awe! Watch in awe! Heavenly glory! Heavenly glory! ******* “If you’re frightened of dying, then you’re holding on, And all you’ll see will be devils trying to tear your life away. But if you’ve made your peace? Then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth.”

******* “Sometimes...you can cry until there’s nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And still, it makes no difference. Life goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that when it finally does relent...it will not be because it cared.” ******* Don’t blink.  You’ll miss it.

[vaovalis]

Hero Name:  Masquerade Debut Event -- 4/14/2023 ** News sites and radio stations around Talos Island make modest but acknowledging reference to a new cape on the hero scene. WWTD 101.1 “The Gong” Radio Station: “Going by the street name ‘Masquerade’ and presenting as female, the prior-unknown hero made her debut downtown right here on the Island by single-handedly overturning the plans of a Freakshow posse intent on robbing the First National Bank. Led by a Freakertank that the police are working to properly identify, the Freakshow posse caused an estimated $25,000 in damages to public property before, as many witnesses observed, Masquerade swooped down from the sky into the midst of the raging gangsters and quickly subdued them all. DIsplaying flashy moves and flashier flames, this hot new debutante out on the streets made quite the fiery impact on both the Freaker gang as well as wowed onlookers, who were very entertained with the slapstick but deftly expert way that Masquerade bravely mocked and ridiculed the Freakers and taunted them into focusing their attention on her rather than continue with their vandalism and mayhem. Our favorite media liason from the TIPD issued a statement regarding the intervention of the latest hero to splash onto the Talos streets as ‘timely, courteous and capable’, as well as describing the actions she took to protect the people and property of Talos as ‘expertly done’. New capes on the streets usually don’t get that kind of praise from the TIPD folks!  Keep your ears tuned and your eyes on the skies for Masquerade, Talos Island and Paragon City’s newest and flashiest hero of interest!”

[vaovalis]

Been an interesting day, journal.   Finally cleared the last interview process with the FBSA.  Assistant Director Maria Carver’s been useful in clearing some of the red tape that was pissing me off so much in the first place, but I’ve had to make my peace with the existence and necessity of it all irrespective. It took me a bit, but I’ve got my long term goal and, with a goal in mind, putting up with bullshit becomes a necessary part of getting there rather than a pointless exercise. I don’t know why my head works like this, but it does.  If I have a specific goal in mind, I can put up with all kinds of dumb shit to make it happen.  If I’m just aimlessly wandering, the dumb shit bothers the absolute hell out of me. In any event, I didn’t tell Carver fuck-all about what I’m really up to.  Part of the bullshit they’re suddenly finding me tying my issues up all nice and neatly with is lying by omission.  I’m not a fan of having to have it be this way, but that’s on them - they’ve created a system that doesn’t and cannot work unless you’re a liar. So, as the primal Earth phrase says, when in Rome, wear the toga.  I got a whole fucking closet full of togas ready to go now, and the laurels, and the sandals. I’ve decided to take a page out of the Carnival of Shadows’ book of nonsense and look at it all as being a stage, upon which we are all but actors whether we know it or, more often, do not.   They’ll all see me, but they’ll never see what I don’t put there for them to look at, and who amongst them will look even at that?   If there’s anything I can count on, it’s that the vast majority of other people I’ll ever be dealing with here shall be, and will always remain, preoccupied with their own day to day interests and concerns. All I have to do to avoid the prying curiosities of even the unusually inquiring is to not be that interesting, to present myself as a cliche, or just render myself invisible by appearing to try to look different-just-like-the-others. So I’ll have a derpy costume and I’ll have a derpy little ‘Hero name’ and I’ll cavort about when it suits me, fighting the monsters of this world as I’ve been doing anyway and playing the unfortunately necessary little sleight-of-mind games that I never liked having to play at any other point in my life. The FBSA knows that I have impressive powers over fire. They don’t know a thing about how I’ve been exploring my true potential and that, with the insightful help of a dead woman, I’ve figured out that I can invert the Fire. Light becomes Absence and thus darkness. Heat becomes Emptiness and thus cold. Energetic chaos becomes the stillness of death itself.   I’ve learned that all I’ve ever done with my Fire is exhale; projected it. I’ve learned of late to inhale; to consume it.   The dead woman speaks to me of balance, and she’s right - I will be nothing but improved in all ways to...breathe properly. To exhale and to inhale.  The correct this internal imbalance I’ve lived manically with all my days.  Even with these revelations and practices new in my mind, I find myself feeling less restless and manic inside.  I feel calmer, more consistent and dare it be said, more and more balanced within.   I can tell that I’ll need to find the right rhythm within; the right cadence of breathing, like the tides coming in and going back out again. But I’m confident that I will accomplish that without difficulty.  I’m already accomplishing it, and my greatest difficulty so far is in marveling at how I never figured this out on my own. Never let it be said that good help from smart people isn’t valuable. The FBSA doesn’t need to know any of this. Most of my ersatz ‘friends’ are better off if they don’t know.  The few that wouldn’t be worried and wary of it outright would, I think, regard it is just more Vao-trivia they didn’t ask to know in the first place.  I can count on them to not look too hard or care too much about any of it if none of it is ever put in front of them as either a problem for them or a puzzle for them to solve. By the time anyone is permitted to know what I’m about, it will be because it’s already happening and there will be no more time to interfere. There will be no screams. There won’t be anything they’ll recognize to scream at or about after all.  The Happy Folk want to sleep peacefully, and to fill their days with their small occupations and what are, for them, their momentous moments of graduating from college and having children and dying of things.  They are boring, and they like being bored. The tedium of their lives is something they’ve been bred like generations of cattle to both depend upon and to take solace in, even to the point that a certain degree of distracting disaffection with it is good for them with all their cute little ‘counter-culture’ expressions and art forms. In overwhelmingly vast majority, there are no rebels and no hearts yearning for true rebellion amongst them.  They covet the jewels embedded in the walls of their comfortable prisons, and while humanity here might once have been a species that survived in wilder, harsher environments...well, they’ve very broadly domesticated that out of themselves so thoroughly that any attempt to reignite that potential in them would be like turning house pets loose into the wilderness. The poor, stupid little things would just be terrified and die to the point of near extinction of starvation and from overwhelming ignorance.  This is how they want it. So, why should I make my life tedious and difficult by trying to give them things they don’t want? They don’t want freedom. They’d cry and weep and wail and label me the gravest of all villains if I took their Up-and-Away Burger and their 2pm tee time and their Monday Night Football and their 30 packs of beer for only $23 away from them. I’ve traveled this world sufficiently at this point to understand that what I’ve long called The Powers That Be don’t actually exist here in the severity that I had assumed.  Primal Earth is as it is, in vast majority, because the true Autarchs here are governments and smarmy little ‘secret cabals’ such as Malta - petty humans grasping for control they can never have over things they are no more capable of comprehending than are ants of the cadence of stars. There’s a wildly unchecked arrogance toxically married to the crippling terror humanity of Primal Earth feels towards The Other, The Alien and The Things That Don’t Belong. They tell themselves pretty stories about how, through sheer willpower and by wanting it more, they can do anything, kill any god, break any barrier.  Why, some of them are so terrified of their own smallness and cosmic irrelevance that they’ve sublimated that terror into egotism and the mania they need to cling to lest they wind up huddled in corners, devoured by despair over the truths they cannot beat or force or negotiate into compliance with their wishes. Humanity here hates, fears and resents reality itself in a way that I feel I’ve gotten a finger onto the pulse of.  The things they cannot change, they lie to themselves about and turn blind eyes towards with zealous, often literally religious fervor.   Humanity has accomplished fantastic things, but they aren’t everything they wish they were.  They do have limits, and those limits fall well short of where they’d like them to be.   This neurotic little species of monkey tells me who and what it is in everything it has created.  From the beautiful to the monstrous, they tell on themselves. They yearn for saviors, as much to be protected by them as to crucify them.  In overwhelmingly vast majority, they are desperate to be taken care of and to have a caretaker to rage against, to blame and to displace all of their guilt and misgivings of self onto.   They yearn with every fiber of their beings for both comfort and engagement. Some few of the ambitious and mostly psychopathic amongst them yearn for absolute control and dictatorial dominance over others, but their ambition doesn’t make them smarter than their fellows any more than their psychopathy renders them wise or insightful. They want to be gods, but they can barely manage to be what I’d call functional, whole adults most of the time.  Tell them the stories they want to hear in a manner that massages their egos and flatters their delusions and they’ll love you even if you’re blatantly killing them. Crey does it every day. Their whole PR and propaganda machine is a study in both the art and the science of telling the ignorant masses what they want to hear so that they placate themselves into complacency and indolence.  Crey is literally an evil corporation and, inasmuch as pretty much everyone knows it...gosh darn it, their products are pretty good and you just can’t beat Creymart’s prices on a lot of things.  Humanity tells on itself in these ways. I am told what they really want no matter what nonsense pours from their mouths or what lofty prose and praise they wrap their noble ideals in.   Humanity of Primal Earth wants to feel noble without putting the work into being noble. They want to feel free without any of that pesky danger, risk and inconsistency that comes with real freedom. They like to watch the seasons change from behind triple-pane windows in the comfort of heated and air conditioned environments, and to go on brief visits of tamed wilderness that they call by glamorous terms that flatter themselves. What do they really think of their pristine world?  They feel a bit awkward about it, but if it keeps them in bottled water, they’re not going to do much more than complain and bury their feelings of guilt about how much they don’t want to think about any of it. And me? I’ve figured out what the nature of the theatrical work playing out upon this stage is.  I won’t pretend to know all of its nuances and intricacies yet, but I’ve gotten the gist of what’s going on here and how Primal Humanity ... is. If I appear to be just one more caped crusader protecting their status quos and giving them encouragements to feel however it was they wanted to feel about it all, I could commit war crimes galore and many will turn a blind eye to it. Some might wind up feeling a bit awkward about it, but if I keep their United States safe, they’re not going to do much more than complain and bury their feelings of guilt about how much they don’t want to think about any of it. I’ve gotta be practical about which horse I’m going to back in this race, after all.  Why would I side with a loser like Recluse?  He lives in squalor and is so bad at peopling that the closest thing he has to ‘friends’ are slaves of circumstance, mind-controlled minions and parasitical leeches that he’s using and being used by in hilariously blatant ways? For all his power, Recluse is clearly a very intelligent man that’s used all of his intellect to render himself a staggering idiot that thinks he’s going to beat human nature into conformity.   Meanwhile, I’ve seen and smelled ‘Grandville’.  I’ve seen the dude’s house.  Hell, I’ve seen the closest thing he has to friends up close and personally too. There’s nothing at all to be impressed with, by or about.  They live like animals in the filth not because they like it, but because they’re too incompetent and stupid to do better. The United States is pretty competent by comparison. As a hideously evil government goes, they collectively understand that they’re in the business of farming human cattle and that you don’t get anything you’ll want by abusing your cattle for shits and giggles like Recluse and his lackies do. The rest of the world as that I’ve seen has its own things going on, but the United States is the real superpower as Primal Earth’s nations go.  China clearly wishes it were, and maybe it could get there someday, but ‘maybe someday’ doesn’t carry water in my warcamp. For now and into the foreseeable future, I’m going to back the United States, and I’m going to give them the show they like to see. I’ve got nothing but time to implement my plans and to modify them on the fly as one always must throughout the dance of changing tides and times. In this world of cartoonish heroes and comic book grade villains, they really won’t see this coming.  The masquerade must go on. Masks on, shields up. Here...we...go.

[vaovalis]

And so one more step has been taken.  I took Greylocke up on his proposition of a trial run, so that I could see for myself how this all works by endeavoring into a dimension that a previous team had already concluded their body of investigation upon. Maude’s intuition on all of this is not something I’m willing to ignore, and so I was doing my best to channel Maude’s skepticism about all of this.  I still wish to introduce her to Greylocke, though all he said about that was that he’d find some time in his schedule and let me know when that would work for him. Good enough for now. It’s a reasonable deferment, but if I get the vibe that he’s trying to be evasive about it, I’ll just see about bringing her with to some meeting of ours if I can and he can then show me how he deals with such surprises. The dimension I toured is one that his records have labeled as ‘E-111′, and the team leader that did most of the write-ups about it had taken to calling it ‘Orwell Earth’. I’ve only recently read the book ‘1984′, so the reference is altogether fresh in my mind, and boy howdy was that team leader right - that dimension of Earth doesn’t seem to have metahumans, but what it does have is an extreme degree of authoritarian micromanagement governing the lives of the people. Just about everywhere I went, armored police, surveillance cameras and propaganda of every imaginable variety were constants, and the people of the city of Bangkok were shuffling through what looked to me like a fearful pantomime of living.   Many of them maintained the appearance of having lives of their own, but it took me almost not time at all to verify the previous team’s descriptions of the social fabric and its functional states.   Appearing to be happy and content was a legal requirement.  Not demonstrating the kind of mandatory satisfaction that the government there wished to see was interpreted as critical rejection of the authority’s effectiveness, and was deemed to be a criminal offence.   It looked to me like what the United States of Primal Earth would like to be if they thought they could get away with it - absolute control to every extent that threats of deprivation and violence can acquire and sustain it. I was also able to verify another of the prior team’s observations that the United States did not and had never existed in E-111; the North American continent was regarded as the Colonial Territories under the reign of the English Empire. So, it seems that in E-111, the United States never happened. I didn’t linger long enough to investigate all of the other substantial differences that the prior team documented.  The formal term for those things is apparently ‘Divergences’, so if I’m to do this, I’ll have to start adapting to the proper nomenclature.  The divergences they noted were numerous, and their conclusion ultimately landed on determining E-111 unsuitable for association, low risk and with what I guess is an extremely good ‘quantum stability coefficient’.  How QSC values are arrived at, I don’t yet have a clue, but I will get several before I’m done asking all my questions.  Greylocke briefly explained that it’s a cumbersome process evaluating numerous prongs of data acquired primarily by instruments left in dimensions by such teams as I would become and then monitored over time. The QSC apparently describes the stability of one dimension relative to one’s dimension of origination, and sound like a measurement of how easy or difficult it is expected to be to maintain a connection between the two for purposes of monitoring and travel. Further, a rating of 0.0 is apparently perfect, and also unheard of in Greylocke’s opinion. He said that anything between 0.01 and 0.10 is very stable and as reliable as connections between dimensions is going to naturally get.  He also said that his own customized portal technology has enabled vastly superior capacity to access difficult waveforms than Portal Corp’s allegedly archaic and decades-old capacities allow for, and that this was a small but ‘admittedly relevant’ reason for his departure - Portal Corp sounds like it is mired in corporate budgets to a degree that make it very difficult to consistently upgrade their very expensive tech without getting permission from hundreds of people that sound like they never agree on much, especially when it might cost them something. E-111 is a ghastly world that looks like something I’d call as horrid as the world I grew up in; a dystopian nightmare of a very different nature, but not less dystopian or nightmarish.   Greylocke suggested to me that I should get used to that, as many dimensions thus-far documented are objectively worse in many basic, colloquial manners than Primal Earth is.  I asked about that as well, why the title of ‘Primal Earth’ was what it was. He said that it was a Portal Corp and a metahuman community tendency to give such nicknames to various dimensions, and I can relate to how that makes sense - I named my dimension the Crapsack Shithole Dimension, after all. Such monikers make it easier to have a conversation. He agreed, and said that he didn’t know who exactly coined the term ‘Primal Earth’, but he never preferred it as it promoted an arrogant conceit that he didn’t care for, and he exposited a bit on the importance of intellectual refrain from such biases in a truly scientific environment. Frankly, I agreed with him - what he described sounded like a much more fair and unbiased way to collect and keep information.  Titling Primal Earth as ‘E-1′ was as far as said he was willing to go with preserving the egotism inherent in the nickname, and only there because one must begin counting somewhere, and it wasn’t an unreasonable bias to start where one was. He briefly described other rating systems that he keeps and applies to each explored dimension.  Ratings for the state of the environment, the state of civilization’s development and a host of other things are apparently big parts of what he calls his ‘data processing job’ that he does while operator teams place all the instruments and put all the boots on the ground to gather said data. He was quite keenly interested in my observation that E-111 didn’t feel like there was any magic anywhere I was.  He said that he’d been eager to get someone on board that could identify and ideally pinpoint data about such things, as he’s thus-far found it difficult to collate a useful degree of information regarding the state of magic in any of the dimensions prior teams have explored. He also found it interestingly exciting that I didn’t feel like -my- magic or powers were at all suppressed or modified in E-111.  He told me quite a bit about how that kind of ‘temporal suppression’ was standard, and that both he and other minds in the portal industry had long been finding little but repeated confirmation that it was like a law of thermodynamics - basically invariable under the same applicable sets of conditions. Those laws don’t seem to apply to me.  Greylocke’s scanning devices had suggested that I might not suppress like people should do according to that functional law, but that E-111 didn’t suppress me in any way at all was apparently also a test of that.   My magic worked just fine there. I flew around the world without any more difficulty than I did on my Earth or that I do on Primal. My Fire was in no way affected that I could feel.  I didn’t get into any fights or really stretch at all and test such things, but if feeling alone is any indication as Greylocke says it probably would be, I wasn’t affected. Greylocke described the feeling of suppression as stifling and, the longer one remains in a state of being suppressed and distorted by time and space continuously trying to ‘correct’ you, the more of a psychological effect it is likely to have.  He used the example of perpetually having one of your arms kept numb and useless at your side, and I can easily enough envision how that could be quite vexing to the point of driving certain types of people nuts, especially over long periods of time. Frustrating, to say the least.  It’ll require more testing to see if perhaps I’m simply resistant to this suppression or if I’m actually outside of that law altogether, but I’ll keep it in mind as something that I could encounter in the course of this manner of thing. I’d hate to get cocky, assume myself immune and then learn the hard way one day that that assumption was needlessly foolish, after all.  I’m not that stupid; I’ll learn about it and what steps should be taken to work with and around it just in case, and because I expect I’ll have to know all about this if I’m ever going to work with others in a capacity such as this. All in all, it was a worthwhile endeavor of the past few days, and altogether informative. So far, so good. Working with Greylocke seems more, rather than less, like a viable option going forward because of these events.

[vaovalis]

Greylocke and I had a candid discussion today, regarding the nature of exactly what it is he wants from me, and what he wants from his endeavors in particular.  He told me a great deal about an entity known as Rularuu, about its prison called the Shadow Shard, about the experimentations and projects that Portal Corp gets up to and about how corporations such as Crey and Aeon Industries have already stolen and are likely using portal technology. The scope of his concerns is, I believe, valid. World-eating cosmic psychopaths such as Rularuu sounds to be are a problem I, for one, would like to address no matter how I came to learn about it.   But the matter of threats posed by such entities as Crey, Arachnos and even the supposed ‘good guys’ armed with such technologies cannot go ignored either. Greylocke confessed under my inquisition that he does indeed wish to impose a certain order upon the world; an order aligned with his vision of what the world should be, how things should work and what the role of humanity itself should be. He seems remarkably thorough in his convictions about preserving  and uplifting humanity. I get no impression that he longs for glory or positions of overt power. To wit, I do not get any sense from him that he is a man jockeying to be as unto a King. The way he speaks of sacrifice in an always-personal context germane to himself inclines me to think that he’s not as arrogant as many would, I think, take him to be - he’s self aware.   He knows exactly what he’s doing, what he’s done and where he wishes to go.  I know firsthand how the weak, the uncertain and those perpetually mired in their own self-deceptions can be intimidated and offended by those of us that do not share those weaknesses. We look arrogant to them, like know-it-alls that think we’re better than them because we’re just so fearless.   It is, in truth, envy they’re feeling when people cat-spit at people like Greylocke or myself about such things.  They look upon people like us and they know in their hearts that they will never be this confident, this certain or this comfortable within our own egos and our own skin all alike. The truth is that I don’t waste a moment of my probably-perpetual time troubling myself with thoughts about whether or not I’m better than anyone else. I have nothing to win by engaging in such nonsensical comparisons, and if I am five today, I am not that kind of five any day. Greylocke convinced me that this is not, for him, the endeavor of a self-righteous man that was simply pushed out of his lofty position in Portal Corp and that must now avenge his ego by starting his own Better Portal Corp. His concerns are valid.  His approach to addressing them has, for four years now, been to selectively bring small teams of the hand-selected on board and send them into dimensions he’s studied and isolated as either being potential threats or potential resources. The intrinsic trouble he faces for why he does not lead such teams himself is apparently quite mundane - he’s a 67 year old man that has no business leading such charges. While I am convinced that he is sincere in his stated goals, I can’t shake the feeling that there is much he simply isn’t saying at all. All the same, I seem to be the one with the leverage here - he is conspicuously without a current team, and he’s been quite clear about how he thinks he’s never met someone so perfect for the role of being his lead operator as myself. The remuneration he’s offered me goes well beyond simple money.  He’s claimed, and somewhat demonstrated, that he is a man of means and connections throughout the corporate and, to a lesser extent, political world. Can’t say I’m not intrigued, but I still remain convinced that as much as he’s likely intent on exploiting me to his own ends, my own intentions aren’t somehow nobler.   Mutual exploitation with a contract of agreement seems far superior to many alternatives I can easily think of.

[vaovalis]

Doctor Lucent Greylocke.  What is it exactly that you are hiring me to do? On its surface, it seems like a stroke of luck for me to have met someone with a job I’m so well qualified to do available.  The notion of exploring different dimensions, gathering data and contributing to some plan of his to protect Primal Earth from anything like the Praetorian incursion events is, on its face, a noble-sounding task. Things that sound too good to be true usually are, of course. Greylocke was very impressed with my being a dimensional refugee that wants to protect Primal Earth and contribute to its betterment. He had quite a lot to say about his feelings on that in the early part of our first meeting, and his expressed thoughts and feelings made perfect sense to me. I do not get the impression that he is an especially kind person. He’s clearly one of those erudite types that fully embraces the ends justifying the means, but I can respect that outlook when the terms of it aren’t configured by a moron. He offered to help me learn more about my situation after I told him about how I wound up here, and so he took me back to his privately owned lab.  I’m not sure where in the world his laboratory is located as we took a portal to it, but the lab itself certainly seems legit.   He can talk the talk (not that I’d know what most of the talk is actually about) and walk the walk. He’s got the tools that seem very much appropriate to his trade. At minimum, I think Greylocke is every bit the expert on portal technologies that he claims to be.  He used various of his devices to scan me, and got quite interested in the results. Apparently, my ‘quantum signature’ is such that I should be able to navigate time and space without suffering from what he called ‘chronotemporal suppression’ - a condition he described as being a byproduct of having a fixed time and place that you inherently belonged.   I don’t have one of those.  The upside is apparently that I should be able to hop dimensions and even timelines without the natural forces of time and space continually trying to ‘correct’ themselves by dint of pushing me back to where I belong.  I don’t belong anywhere or anywhen.   The downside, he speculated on, and his hypothesis was that I will never essentially be part of the native tapestry of events and things existant of anywhere or anywhen that I am.  I will always be disrupting the native.  I will always be an outside force acting anomalously on an otherwise closed system. So, he wanted me to consider working for him as his chief operator, gatecrashing my way into other times and dimensions and gathering whatever knowledge and insight is required to protect Primal Earth.    When I asked about former employees, he had a lot to say about that as well.  It sounds like not just anyone can do this kind of work and at least psychologically endure it.   Most of the examples he referenced regarding former employees sounded like they were people that believed in the work and understood the risks, but eventually had to retire from it due to the inexorable toll it took on their health and mental well-being. He blamed the bulk of it on a combination of the effects of chronotemporal suppression as well as the ambient risk of seeing too much of how alien many dimensions are, how terribly things can go wrong in various timelines and, of course, how insignificant one truly is in the grand scheme of things. The main example he made was of his former Chief Operator, who apparently had to bow out due to feeling the need to start a family and stop taking the kinds of risks inherent to exploration of time and spatial dimensions.  He said that she’d been plagued by the knowledge of her insignificance, and that learning that variations of herself existing in potentially infinite other dimensions was very troubling for her in a way that wouldn’t rectify through therapy or adaptive conditioning. Being flatly honest, it all sounds pretty neat and interesting to me. I’m not even surprised to hear about any of this supposedly psyche-threatening weirdness; sounds like Tuesday to me.  I like Tuesdays. Taco Tuesday wouldn’t exist without Tuesday. A ...maybe friend of mine chewed me out recently about how I don’t seem to take any of these things as seriously as he thinks I should. I think he meant that I don’t seem afraid like he thinks I should be. I don’t labor under the delusion that I’m impervious to harm or immune to consequences, but I get to decide what I’m afraid of, and I have no use for being afraid of going on adventures and learning shit. Greylocke’s shady. No arguing that.  He used to work for Portal Corp, and I have the sneaking suspicion that a man like him doesn’t resign after 18 years with a company like that, then move on to doing what he’s built and doing now, because he was tired of the work. I’m gonna guess right now that he was tired of their ethics and presumptions of morality getting in the way of doing what he feels is necessary.  At minimum, I feel safe assuming that that’s gonna bear out to be how it is with him. And the question for me is...do I really give a shit? Not really.  I couldn’t give a fuck less about Primal Earth’s infantile obsessions with ethics and morality.  I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz and I’ve seen that the shitheels behind their grandiose legal systems  and presumptions of moral superiority are lying little toads pretending to be bigger and better than they are. The ‘Powers That Be’ here are corrupt shitbirds jockeying for the same boring power-and-control crap I’ve seen before.  It’s boring.  IT’S FUCKING BORING. They’re boring, and I think that’s the part I find hardest to forgive.   It’s such a pretty world.  Their industrialists and capitalists seem bent and bound to pave it all over with parking lots and toll roads, but for now, it’s a glorious, magnificently unbroken world that I want very much to protect and preserve. I don’t think that all the dire threats come from outside this figurative house, of course...but if I’m going to play the role of hero in this world’s tedious little toddler-tales about such things, I need to build a brand. And the people of this world just love saviors.  They build monuments, religions and most of their cherished fictions in homage to the concept of saviors descending from the heavens and telling them they’re all great and perfect and everything they’ve ever done was right after all.  They dream of praise and of receiving glory given from a higher being by the billions.   They idolize a mnemonic of how they are the underdogs, simultaneously unstoppable because they’re just so gritty and helplessly picked on by all the dreadfulness. Another of my friends is concerned that Greylocke is trying to exploit me.   I’m quite sure he is.  I’m sure I look like some sort of fantastic opportunity for him to leverage in use to further whatever his own real agenda is. Seems fair to me.  If I do this, I’m going to exploit the shit out of him right back. The people of this world just love their infantile tales of heroes and villains. Either I will find a way to leverage such doings as that Greylocke wishes me to perform as a way to play the heroic saviour the people of this world both long for and despise, or I’ll find out along that way that Greylocke’s a useless idiot and I’ll feed him to the United States for plaudit points. This is how Primal Earth likes to play, after all.   So, I’ll play.  It’s a stupid game that I’m sure will yield little for anyone but stupid prizes, but you know what? I’m going to take whatever I can get out of it.   When I get into the sorts of positions and develop the kind of connections required to do some real business, I’ll continue to play the stupid game and do everything in my considerable power to make sure it’s the people of my choosing that get the stupid prizes. I can run around the world, being the armor and shield of the weak and the meager.   I can absolutely faff around, being shiny and pretty and saying half the words they wanted to hear and half the words that will give them the drama I want them to have of me. Let me be your armor, let me be your shield; let me take away the pain you feel. Let me be the light that guides your way through darkest night. Let me take from you experience you need. Let me bind you in your own selfishness and greed.  Let me say the words for you that you won’t speak. Let me do the work for you when you’re too weak. You want a hero, Primal Earth? I’ll give you a fucking hero. Or maybe Doctor Greylocke will.  Couldn’t help but notice that his lab was set up for single occupancy.  Dude’s got no close allies that he works alongside. I wonder if anyone will ever worry about me taking advantage of -him-?

[vaovalis]

This song reminds me of thoughts I often think and ways I often feel when I’m walking, as is show in this video, through parts of Paragon City that look...more or less like the city depicted in this video. I’ve decided that I’m going to play the role of a hero in this tragedy. Why not? If we are all to indulge in the mummery of costumes and stage names, I might as well have fun with it while trying to do something that’s actually useful. I continue to refine my mummer’s raiment, but I’ve yet to select a name for myself by which to be known in that burning theater.   I’m sure something will come to me precisely when it SHOULD.  These kinds of things have a way of working out for me exactly when they need to, whether I agree with the timing or not.

[vaovalis]

This song feels like a narration of how I’ve been seeing and feeling in recent weeks.   I don’t have a thing else to say. This song says it better than I ever could.

[vaovalis]

I don’t look as old as I am. That makes it easy for even me to forget that I am, in fact, as old as I am.

[vaovalis]

I’ve never been much of a creature of ritual, tradition or solemnity.  Sometimes I’ve wished I were that kind of person because they often seem to dignified and austere in ways that look so very neat and clean; like they’ve got it all figured out, they know all the rules, they know all the steps to the dance and they know all their lines in the play. It’s all one big illusion though, and while I figured that out a long time ago, I still sometimes find myself longing for that kind of simplicity...because it does look very simple, clean and concise to me, to decide ‘these are the rules and everything else is irrelevant’. They seem so focused.  They’re often stupid and wrong, but the illusion is very impressive in its appeal. I think a lot of people here confuse their beliefs with facts and I am so-far convinced that a very great many people here are overly eager to feel like they’ve got something figured out, even to the point of being wrong but FEELING like it’s all boxed up now. The very concept of being right doesn’t seem like it has a lot to do with being factually correct so much as feeling like you are, and if others agree with you or not. I’ve noticed this, and I’m growing quite wary of it.  I think it’s dangerous to live in a headspace where feeling right is more important than being right, and I have no interest in joining that farcical parade. So I won’t. I’m going to have to be careful to mince words though. Some people here get very cranky if you question their nomenclature, and that’s already proven to be a useless foray into then having to deal with their affronted ego. So, I’ll learn their words and I’ll speak their language.  I’ll glue a horn to this horse because speaking to them of unicorns gets them kerfuffled. It’s neither here nor there to me. I couldn’t care less beyond how much of a pain in the ass it’s made having certain types of discussions with certain people anyway.