...Make Us

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...Make Us, by Devin Raposo a High Sun, Shallow Stream story [[(see more stories)|http://devinraposo.com/highsunshallowstream.html]] [[Begin.->opening]] [[Credits]] <<set $endings to 0>>

<<set $choice to "">>Well, shit. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Who’d've guessed that living out your inner truth for all this knotted-up, shriveled corpse of a city to see would prove too much for the boots in charge? <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The problem: members of the very respectable Býltavü Incarceral Gendarmerie are on their way to the fourth floor, room 423 of Revakor Apartment Complex. Your apartment. And they're not looking to join you for supper. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The crime? Praying the Heesh’nk to Sidquar’tha as an officer of the gendarmerie in the wrong company. Company you'd trusted. You'd gotten it in your head that one day the two of you might ditch these dusty streets of Florana, Tibil's capital, for good. Maybe settle down in Vernaise, where words can flow freely like a river. [[Guess it was just you.->choice 1]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

<<if visited() is 1>>You stare at your closet in contemplation of what to do about this situation. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You knew this day would come and so prepared a bug-out bag for just the occasion: a few slices of shortbread, canteen for water, a bag of vegan trail mix, Applied Mathematique & Other Topics, Vol. 3, 2nd Ed., a spliff, moleskin, medium bandages; and a banged-up chain with keys to places you’d long forgotten the addresses to. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> But none of it will matter all that much if they gun you down on the way out. And this place ain't much of an armory, so you'll have to make due with whatcha got. Do you choose: <<if not visited("1") or not visited("2") or not visited("3")>>''[[a loudspeaker,]]''<<else>>[[a loudspeaker,]]<</if>> <<if not visited("4") or not visited("5") or not visited("6")>>''[[a selection of paints,]]''<<else>>[[a selection of paints,]]<</if>> <<if not visited("7") or not visited("8") or not visited("9")>>''[[or...the rocketball?]]''<<else>>[[or...the rocketball?]]<</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><<else>>You stare at your closet in contemplation of what to do about this situation. You knew this day would come and so prepared a bug-out bag for just the occasion: a few slices of shortbread, canteen for water, a bag of vegan trail mix, Applied Mathematique & Other Topics, Vol. 3, 2nd Ed., a spliff, moleskin, medium bandages; and a banged-up chain with keys to places you’d long forgotten the addresses to. But none of it will matter all that much if they gun you down on the way out. And this place ain't much of an armory, so you'll have to make due with whatcha got. Do you choose: <<if not visited("1") or not visited("2") or not visited("3")>>''[[a loudspeaker,]]''<<else>>[[a loudspeaker,]]<</if>> <<if not visited("4") or not visited("5") or not visited("6")>>''[[a selection of paints,]]''<<else>>[[a selection of paints,]]<</if>> <<if not visited("7") or not visited("8") or not visited("9")>>''[[or...the rocketball?]]''<<else>>[[or...the rocketball?]]<</if>><</if>>

Goin' loud, then. Good choice. Now to pick something else to go with it. Do you choose: <<if not visited("1")>>''[[a palm ‘puter,|remember][$choice to "1"]]''<<else>>[[a palm ‘puter,|remember][$choice to "1"]]<</if>> <<if not visited("2")>>''[[an eleven metre length of auxiliary cable|remember][$choice to "2"]]''<<else>>[[an eleven metre length of auxiliary cable|remember][$choice to "2"]]<</if>> <<if not visited("3")>>''[[or Mr. Micro.|remember][$choice to "3"]]''<<else>>[[or Mr. Micro.|remember][$choice to "3"]]<</if>>

Volume that would pierce the cartilage of the hardest skull reverberates throughout subspace, so loud that muffles of the old ragtime staple playing through the loudspeaker perched on a stool in a solitary confinement room could be made out through even the most robust soundproof laminate. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The day before, you'd overheard your coworkers regale wanton tales of their most morbid vices played out on the innocent folks they'd supposedly sworn to protect, and on company time to boot. It made this new brand of torture by tunes make a whole lot more sense in retrospect. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You'd come here on your day off to air dirty laundry, but the members of the gendarme from the 45th Precinct saturating the panopticonic room had all clocked back in along with you. They all sat in their swivel chairs snacking on expensive takeout, watching slackjawed as a cigar thief had his brain musically drilled out by this state-of-the-art loudspeaker. All this ado made it hard to get the word out about their secrets...in secret. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The palm ‘puter you’d pickpocketed from a geeko booked on confidential data proliferation charges would prove a useful tool; it looked just like a flipphone, so you were inconspicuous. You headed to the bathroom where it was safe. Using a packet interference program procured from the down ‘net on the palm 'puter, you scanned for and linked up with the loudspeaker’s wireless freq, and rerouted the audio output to a different loudspeaker you'd hid in the Floranian commons. You cleared your throat and read aloud into a microphone dongle names, badge numbers, addresses, and associated crimes of these mongrel gendarmes: lurid sex dungeons, bank account numbers for their cash laundering shelters, names of pets they'd abused; that sort of thing. Subterfuge at its finest. They didn't know what hit 'em. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Impressed by its build quality, you decided to steal and repurpose it, change its fate. As the fascist blood cult realized what was being communicated of their sordid secret lives to an audience of all of Florana once recordings of the misdeeds got out, you slipped in undetected and nabbed the loudspeaker. Proud of yourself, you decided to cash in some PTO, take the week off. Upon your return a week later, a whole new crew had swapped out what seemed to you at the time like bad apples. Turns out the whole entire system was [[busted, head to toe.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

The mission was simple: steal a certain lapis lazuli from the Museum de Wisé. Found amidst the flotsam and jetsam lost by tempestuous winds to the bed of the Bleached Sea, legend tells of wisemen staring into the cerulean faces of this fabled gem to enrich theirselves with the multiplicative answers to life’s meaning; as life is understood to mean many different things to many different people, any one book or ideological adherent with one simple answer to The Question could never suffice, so it requires an angular object of insight to ever hope to grok. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> For this, the wireless loudspeaker had become the lure; the 3-1/4” 16-guage 4.5 m speaker cable jacked from an electronix wholesale shop the weapon. Together with your black leather mitts and a pair of thermogoggles, you’re a lean, mean, choke-out machine. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> In a pitchblack display room, you press play on the speaker and the loudest, kitschiest disco music ever put to tape cuts through the darkness like warm butter. Frazzled museum security cover their ears to try and save their hearing from the blistering bass. They lunge their arms forward, feeling through the umbra by sound alone to try and thwart the cacophonous noise. Beguiled and lost, they shared a final memory of cold wire, crushed larynxes, [[and the shrewd dark all about.]] <</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

The loudspeaker and Mr. Micro are able to output at diametrically opposed frequencies. The larger of the two can make it down to 0.53823948 Hz. Mr. Micro, on the other hand, is a whole different story. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Thought at first to be born from the molten fires which spew out the seething fissures of Malthusia, Mr. Micro is a speaker of seemingly supranatural ability; it can output at frequencies thought audible only to the angels above and shaitans below. In reality, it was assembled in a lab somewhere as a prototype which never quite found a path to market. Its creators estimated it could output at up to 9378 Hz, though the constraints of modern tek's telemetric capabilities could never prove adequate enough to properly measure Mr. Micro's sonic contours. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Not that one could test the device out even if they really wanted to; Mr. Micro is so small that not even the most sophisticated microscope in the world is capable of visually capturing it. It's unknown whether it was built this way or shrunk when exposed to the elements. As such, no ordinary human being has ever actually laid eyes on Mr. Micro. There are those that say its arcane pitch of the whitest noise tortured them while they lied awake in bed or partook in a particularly lengthy drive. Supposed first-hand accounts of these happenings range from a shrill ringing lasting hours, others mere seconds. And if this capricious device truly is capable of making itself known of its own volition, then it must carry in its subatomic wirings and sauderings some form of sentience. To get around it must walk as we, and so it must have a proper name as we: Mr. Micro. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The loudspeaker, on the other hand, is just really very loud. Unreasonably so. So loud in fact that it too never got a chance at large-scale manufacturing after it output at such a voluminous magnitude that it shattered the windows of cars and buildings within a 40 km radius of its public demonstration at a convention in Tibil. And here's the kicker: //it's never not that way//. You actually can't lower its volume. It's like a bomb in that way, and so now it's come to be known as, simply, The Speaker. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The Speaker and Mr. Micro together became objects of folkloric import to the nation of Tibil, though nobody can agree why. It's said that a terrifying thing will happen if one deigns to play the speaker at its lowest frequency concurrently with Mr. Micro outputting at its highest, though of course it can't be proven. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> When one day you awoke with a searing headache having had the living shit kicked out of you in a backalley tussle with the dregs of Florana's worst, perhaps as part of its skeevy trickery Mr. Micro decided to reveal itself to in a form visible only to you, vibrantly illuminated at the terminus [[of a sunbeam's ray.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

An artist. Well then. Now to pick something to go with it. Do you choose: <<if not visited("4")>>''[[a sheaf of loose-leaf paper,|remember][$choice to "4"]]''<<else>>[[a sheaf of loose-leaf paper,|remember][$choice to "4"]]<</if>> <<if not visited("5")>>''[[a skateboard,|remember][$choice to "5"]]''<<else>>[[a skateboard,|remember][$choice to "5"]]<</if>> <<if not visited("6")>>''[[or an uninflated balloon.|remember][$choice to "6"]]''<<else>>[[or an uninflated balloon.|remember][$choice to "6"]]<</if>>

This really the time for sports? Nonetheless, now to pick something to go with it. Do you choose: <<if not visited("7")>>''[[a lectern missing a leg.|remember][$choice to "7"]]''<<else>>[[a lectern missing a leg.|remember][$choice to "7"]]<</if>> <<if not visited("8")>>''[[a bag of spoiled mangoes.|remember][$choice to "8"]]''<<else>>[[a bag of spoiled mangoes.|remember][$choice to "8"]]<</if>> <<if not visited("9")>>''[[or the last rotary phone in existence.|remember][$choice to "9"]]''<<else>>[[or the last rotary phone in existence.|remember][$choice to "9"]]<</if>>

Good thing your landlord left the door to his quarters ajar the other night in a drunken stupor; you knew bugging his surveillance dek would work in your favor somehow. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You place the speaker on your desk chair and roll into the crevice beneath the cot, lying in wait. In mere minutes, a male gendarme bulldozes down your door with a battering ram like a bull’s horns. The crew storm in, picking apart the place like blood-crazed lycanthropes, steely-eyed vultures to rotting carrion. It’s not too long before one of the imbeciles notices the conspicuous speaker staring voidly in the entryway’s direction. She deserves some sort of acting award for the perfectly dense, mealy-mouthed toothy visage she shoves right into the oblong speaker’s diaphragm. Play? Click. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The window vibrates; esoteric ur-texts fall off shelves and splay prostrated on the vamps of combat boots worn vainly by the beguiled gendarmerie. Even the speaker were so surprised by the audacity of the almost voluminous waves jettisoned from its coil that it sputters, clips, and burrows into the tattered fabric of the desk chair from the sheer force of nature, applying a bit of torque to the chair's rotor in the process. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> But the noise doesn’t faze you; you live dat life, son. You roll out from beneath the bed like a direct-to-TV moviespy, your clattering teeth the only distractive balm from the sheer adrenaline-rush. You decide these guys and gals in blue have suffered enough, they bleeding out their ears and vomiting their boweled innards onto the miasmatic carpet; you switch off the booming speaker, mercifully sparing them death by earbleed or humiliation. Distracted, you spot an opening. You dart out the door, slingbag sleek and [[airy across your shoulder.->end]]<<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

You've made $endings <<if $endings === 1>>successful getaway<<else>>successful getaways<</if>> of 9 possible. <<if $endings === 9>>Thanks for playing. Please look forward to more High Sun, Shallow Stream stories to come. [[Want to revisit one?->opening]]<<else>>[[See more?->choice 1]]<</if>>

Today, though, you hit the mute button. There’ll be time enough for rockin’ when you’re old, but tonight you thought you’d rather just go dancing. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> With a glance of brimstone and mirth, you stare at the entryway door to your room as the gendarmerie sirens keen, piercing through the gloaming firmament on their way to the Revakor Apartment Complex; an idea is brewing. You break into another tenant’s room to hide in, waiting for the gendarmerie to pass you by in the hallway. Using the loudspeaker as if a rock, you stealthily knock out the individual heading up the rear and tie their wrists together with the wire. Time for the gendarmerie to get The Message. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Perhaps it should say: "<<cyclinglink "GET FUCKED, SCUM!" "MEET ME AT THE INTERSECTION OF FUCK AND YOU!" "COPPERS IS GRASS, I TRAMPLE YE!">>". Using the loose remainder of the speaker cable, you affix a leaf of paper upon which The Message were hastily scrawled onto the offender’s chest. You place the body somewhere the gendarmerie will surely run into it upon their departure. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You make sure to treat yourself to the most sonorous of bass-bumpin’ jams blasting from the wireless loudspeaker as you hotwire your racist neighbor’s SUV and boom-bap your off-road way toward Vernaise, shaking and shimmying over the scree and peat of anterior pastoral ways, heading toward [[a new future.->end]]<<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

The gendarmerie’s armored squad vehicles approached your apartment complex one by one, as if they were preparing bulwarks and ramparts atop floating fortresses in preparation for the burgeoning war on Zsulton. Some men, some women, all with families, but all signed up for this work of their own volition. They are pawns playing out the Býltavü Incarceral Gendarmerie's grand strategy. Having been one of them, naively thinking that you might be the one to inspire proactive, positive change in your fellow officer, you understand how it could happen to you, too. But a wretched foundation can’t withstand the weight of good intentions—these flying buttresses and ionic pillars supporting this sprawling fortification were always rotten at the base. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Mr. Micro today is feeling quite timid and solemn, and so it’s chosen not to reveal itself to you. But you can feel its surging, thrashing weight jostling the room's energy to and fro. You sense its nervous energy staring directly at The Speaker which rests densely atop a stack of books on the ancient Sid’quarthan rites, there only to spite your zealotic assailants. Mr. Micro hasn't failed you yet, and today it radiates a fury unlike any you've felt from it. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You know not what will happen once both speakers output at the absolute fringe of their respective capabilities, but you do know that you won't be sticking around to find out. You don’t mind leaving the speakers behind as they're serving you better than they could any other way; plus it keeps the load light for the trip to Vernaise, that treasure trove of seemingly boundless potential. A chance at a new, more open life. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> In your older years, you’ve heard tell of the mysterious 423rd room on the fourth floor of the Revakor Apartment Complex, where no one dares go. Some say it’s barricaded off, quarantined away from any future tenants. Others say it’s no longer there, and to that some say they’re just [[not looking hard enough.->end]] <<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

Were it just any clip of parchment you wouldn’t feel so compelled to bring it along on your getaway trip. Noy, this paper is special. Each sheet carries with it a unique story, despite not having been scrawled or scribbled upon. Each sheet feels unique to the touch: the minute floating point aberrations in a page's thickness when compared to the next which in the mathematique of the Sid’quartha can signify a universe of difference, or that same sheet's position on the stack altering the amount of light it will absorb into its face; these sorts of things and much more all contribute to one sheet of paper's particular position along the great cosmic gradient. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Yet in the grand tradition of the sky above, the grass below, and the earth and wind all around, such idiosyncrasies are paltry. It’s the stories we bring to each individual blank page which matter most, whether or not they’re written down; what matters most, you know, is that an experience be remembered be written of, as what is a story yet to marinate in the mind? <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You purchased this paper fair and square from a local vendor in exchange for a jackdaw which sings of faraway lands in its sleep and a silver, glittering pike which stood out to you [[in a brook someplace else.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

Your radical, tubular, very awesome and cool days of being someone hip and in line with the interests of the youth are sadly far behind you. But on those days when the sun’s orangey hue saturates the sky with a particular gradient which reminds you of a fateful day with an old friend, and the shoreline of Tungsten Beach recedes a particular distance, and a cool, gentle breeze perforates your skin and ameliorates the subcutaneous stresses of the hustle and bustle of the work day... <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> ...then and only then are you consumed by the urge to don your rocketball cap seventy-five degrees off-kilter with your tattered black jeans and a pair of boat shoes whose soles, like your own soul, can’t quite decide whether or not to hang on. And then you're reminded that you're not that young anymore, a bitter sense splashing over you like a tidal wave. You choose to wait till nightfall to go out and shred some raw gnar. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Like Meghna Price you burst upward into an ollie, like Dwight Knickerson you bust and scrape your knee; like Corleone von Gutenstein III’s rambunctious nephew the family tried to hide from the public eye you hit a grind on a beechwood picnic table, like Salty Sammy the Big No-Whammy you crash and burn in [[spectacular, public fashion.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

Shriveled and shrill, the never once-inflated and rather sad excuse for a balloon was found sordid and pale pitched in a street gutter. It was a monument to neglect, found at a street fiesta from back when the people of Tibil still found things worth celebrating. In its desolation and dereliction you felt something of an absurd kinship with the balloon. You had to keep it; only you were capable of seeing its true worth. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> In reality, taking morbid comfort in the everpresent leech of a thought seeded into your mind by a life harshly lived that life is ultimately meaningless was your only reason for keeping the balloon around. In grasping a tangible understanding that nothing could ever truly matter, you feel a grating sense of obsequiousness to your own cloying ego. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The balloon has heretofore sat hanging on a dresser knob, never to know the dignity of utility in the Tibillian capital of Florana; that is, [[until now.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

Luckily, a gendarme is generally really quite stupid, hence their choice of occupation; against the likes of one of them, even something as unassuming as a sheaf of paper can make a lethal weapon. You mix together the most crimson reds, the deepest blues, and the sunniest yellows to synthesize a shade of black seen only by the witches of Chernwick. You choose the bottommost leaf from the pack for being by far the most weathered due to prolonged contact with your desk, and with the physical dexterity of a swordslinger mixed with the computational wizardry of a polymath you paint a computationally symmetrical black rectangle onto the piece of paper. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You catch yourself losing yourself in the captivating darkness of the pigment, partially in reaction to a ludicrous bout of self-pride at just how authentic your black rectangle with your black paint looks. But time is of the essence, so you hastily scribe an adulterating cyan ‘432’ (as opposed to your actual room number, 423) over the black to throw the gendarmerie off your trail, if only temporarily. You blow on your masterpiece to give it a quick drydown, cut a square out whilst taking care not to contaminate the paint, and throw some tape over the back to stick it on your front door. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You hear the pittering of their footsteps as they confusedly dart through your hallway to weed you out for your impiety. But you've bought yourself a bit of time, so you make it a point to carefully reseal each of the paint bottles and wash off your brushes, packing them away gently so as to try and retain some semblance of artistry in preservation of your [[tools of the trade.->end]] <<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

It came time to act out a future comedy classic you've been writing in your head for years now. For years you’d been kicking yourself for not having had the gall or gumption to try it out in public. Today's your time to shine. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The skateboard was set in the place where all skateboards should be set: right in front of the door so some unsuspecting nitwit waif will slip, trip, or zip across the cheap ceramic flooring, smashing face first into any and everything Balclavian physics will allow for. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> But slapstick isn’t complete without a secret special sauce to spice up the scenario; you coat the polycarbonate wheels of the skateboard with a kaleidoscopic smorgasbord of different colored paints such that the “scene of the crime” will be inexorably contaminated with pigment. You use whatever paint is left over to fill up a pail for good measure and leave it balanced atop your door ajar. You volley an already malfunctioning monitor through the glass panes of the apartment window, and toss aside the leftover mullions constricting you to this doomed place. Hopping through the window, within minutes you've caught a cab and hit the road with only a vision and a dream, your legacy painted on the flooring and walls [[in vivid technicolour.->end]] <<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

To be a balloon taking first flight! What it would mean to the heart and the soul to float up through the fortified skies, to break free of the chains that bind one to the putrid seas, the mangy streets, the wilting flowers which mottle humanity’s festering domain...to inflate, to expand not merely in girth but in ambition...what would it mean? <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Such lofty, heady questions will have to wait for some other time, dear balloon. In the meantime, gorge on this stream of pastel pigments; taste the CMYK, sample the RGB’s, envelope yourself in all manner of HSL’s and HSV’s to your heart’s content. Enjoy the succulence of the extravagant colorscape while you can; for don’t you hear that? The wailing of their sirens escalates in magnitude, their armaments and artilleries straddle their sides with a threatening compensatory gaze as they lurch out the posteriors of their armored trucks and vans; and it shall be your most venerable position amongst our ranks to deliver unto them globules upon globules of paint like a tempest of hellfire. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Flung from the ramparts of this acropolis of a room, thou shalt serve the Grand Cause by reducing the friction of their vainful strides, by blinding their eyesockets with your extravagant innards, by distracting them with thine grace; this, dear friend, shall be a legacy so elevated in stature they shall chant its heralded tale in the dystopias and promised lands of the morrow, so vast its influence that even they of the antediluvian cities of gold and they of the legendary wars of yesteryear shall quiver in awe of your utterly [[glorious stature.->end]] <<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

Býltavü; the defining religion of Tibil. Its debilitating influence seems to ceaselessly expand as if a mushroom cloud. It's a religion you're all too familiar with: ever the iconoclast, you’ve devoted yourself to the grassroots repression and utter annihilation of its malignant tyranny. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Such is devotion to the Sid’quarthan ideal: a divine symmetry uniting the biological, the spiritual, the endocrine and the pulmonary—or rather, a oneness of all and for all. It is a religion built on the foundations of kindness and empathy, on a realization that the absence of one must by necessity mean the absence of every. Býltavü, conversely, is a diametrically-opposed realization of human enlightenment, they of the self, they who conflate physical prowess with high-minded idealism, revering their scantily clad übermenschen prick boy as they do. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> And you never fucked with that kinda thing. So one Thursday evening while a milquetoast, unseasoned chicken breast, plain white bread-ass papal motherfucker by the name of who-can-say ran his bloodless liturgy back for the wantonly self-possessed at the supposed “True” Býltavü Inner-Orthodoxy Church, you waltzed in all willy-nilly and took both the proverbial and literal axe to the lectern he stood on and let out a gravelly shriek for the true Sid’quarthan heavens and all the archangels of the two moons above [[to hear.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

You really had meant to eat at least one of them since a taciturn, slightly lethargic hooded bedouin-type shoved an entire burlap sack's worth of the then well-ripened drupes into your calloused hands. There, in the midst of a crowded bazaar at noon on a Saturday, you quickly observed that each were the right color, the right shape, and just the right firmness of the sort you’d remembered gorging on in your youth; those fabled fruits it is said which quenched the thirst and hunger of the primordial souls whom crossed the Daneiish Desert thousands of years ago to discover what at first became the Po’tunk duchy, now the West Nilan region of Kinesh. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Yes, those mangoes at first glance had everything going for them. But it was something the strange hooded figure had said which unnerved you. And for a person bit with the wanderlust bug at such a young age, with as many stories as you’ve added to your rolodex...it takes a special sort, let’s say. As you grabbed hold of the burlap sack and struggled to catch your footing, they caught hold of you mid-lurch and whispered the words you’ll carry with you till you're five meters below: <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> “Take each bite as if a key to the oneiric, where no birds fly and the waters taste of raisins one day and cutlery the next.” <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> You were used to arcane puzzlings by the drunken idiots and lecherous sewer urchins lining the streets of Florana. But [[this was different.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

It is said in some hidden corners of Tibil that true communication occurs when the mind's eye collides with another’s. Mirrored back into their gaze, you recognize and fixate on the thoughts which are shared; such is how a connection is formed, and through shared experience shall it congeal or dissolve into mist. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The innovations of wireless communication notwithstanding, it’s this understanding building within the Tibillian collective unconscious which obsoleted and in some radical cases even outlawed the rotary phone. Young children regarded their unsleek, circly greebles with a reviled disdain fit for the kings of the eldritch, while the swindlers and hoaxers of the world recognized in these arcane phylacteries lucrative black market opportunities to upsell more worthless tchotchkes on world-weary geriatrics as tended to be their MO. Young guttersnipes, gun to their heads couldn’t hope to parse out how to operate one, nor could the curio’s target demo recall any phone numbers who would bother picking up, and so the usage of them faded away like ice caps. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> The beginning of the end for the humble rotary telefone came when an elected official, the esteemed Veronika Shields Esq., known for her expertise in both the prosecution and confectionary sciences, was strangled by the widow of a wrongly-convicted man using a mangled coil fiberline. Rotary phones then were piled up into mounded dunes by law enforcement from all of Kinesh, doused in kerosene, and torched in public displays. These conflagrations in particular boosted morale for the charlatan neanderthals who walk the streets of Florana, pinning the city to the viles of its past and stymieing its future. All the firey rabble-rousing offered up a keen distraction for you to snatch up one of the cherry-red rotary phones from the bedlam, motivated to rescue it from its dour fate by the enchanting prospect of [[big profits.]]<</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

And then you took the thing with, you beautiful bastard! All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t stunt your prideful stride away from the luminous apse of the Býltavü Inner-Orthodoxy Church, tugging along that garish stand; nor could they ever have any hope of possibly stunting //on// you. What then, have you chosen to do with it up until this fateful point in your life? Make imprudent poses with it on the steps of government fortifications for photo-ops to further some arcane agenda in hopes of revving up an anti-fascist revolution? Burn pieces of it for kindling? …Step on it as a stool, perhaps as a very //metaphorical// clamber up and over the forces of oppression? <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> ...Nope, you keep it around for target practice. Right, then. Dents and nicks line its brutalist wooden sharp corners, clear signs as any of collision with your rocketball. And with the gendarmerie marching in formation up to the door of your apartment in a matter of mere minutes, the best you can think to do with the lectern is prop it up against the door so as to slow their inevitable reign of horrible terrors, if only for a little bit. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Though in retrospect, as you careen down interstate 397 in a hotboxed truck, tracing a sinuous line from trampling over the sidegrasses onto the outroad and back to the main road headed more or less in the general direction of the fabled nation-town of Vernaise, you think to yourself and smile: were some devout gendarme to, say, break the door down too hard and splinter their consecrated lectern into spiritless morsels about the shaitanic marble tiling that lines your room, it may according to Býltavü holy law make a sacrilegious felon out of a careless victim. Windswept hair all up in your façade can’t conceal your grin at the thought of it, your vision obscured enough to not notice your rocketball bouncing behind you on the hoods of [[unlucky travelers.->end]]<<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

The bedouin’s words clued you into the idea that a lone dreamscape pulsates throughout the strandy, undulating tendrils comprising the innards of each of the mangoes. For days you were at once consumed and petrified not by the notion that their assertion might be true, as you’d seen far stranger things amongst this plane; more piercing was the fear that someone else might discover this delectable sack of opportunity and pry it from your frailing hands when there's coin to be made. The thought froze your capability to consider any forward course of action involving the mangoes; you also knew that cutting mangoes gets messy quick, so in your closet they’ve stayed. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> And, oh, how they’ve rotted and decayed in the interim. You don’t feel too bad about leaving the burlap sack behind conspicuously in the midst of your apartment bedroom for the gendarmerie to stumble upon, with only the rocketball with a smiley face scribbled upon its leathery skin stuffing the orifice of the sack to conceal the lurid putridity of the vagrant fruits; the landscapes within can remain as distant dreams for all you care. How could any non-building or inverted mountain crest or levitating peaty fen ever square up to the mind’s inventions? After all, it’s within where a space is truly created. Soon enough, the gendarmerie will be finding their own inner places to try in vain to insulate the senses from the odorous gift you’ve left [[in your stead.->end]]<<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>>

The last rotary phone in existence, apparently, in your possession. And now, a crime they wouldn’t hesitate to burn you at the stake for. And also, a rocketball, a fine purveyor of the most intense and extreme feats of physical prowess. Upon first glance, you struggle to concept how the two might come together in such a way so as to thwart the gendarmerie’s attempt to capture you, to bury you alive for publicly exalting the Sid’quarthan way of life. After all, the receiver’s too dull to use as a weapon, and the ball too deflated to do much more than (albeit amusingly) distract a beefed-up bootlicker. What, then? <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Well, if there’s anything a gendarme hates more than a rocketball with no bounce and a bauble banned for its myriad murderous properties sitting aside each other on a spinning desk chair as one big happy family, you haven’t heard of it yet. You pick the receiver off the hook and settle it in such a way that it appears as if the rocketball is engaged in deep, contemplative conversation with a friend from faraway; or maybe in communion with the phone itself, linked together in cultish deference to the sublime tether that chains the here to the Never There, only when x looks to y while holding z. <<linkreplace "->" t8n>> Petrified, a pack of gendarmes stand in your doorway, oblivious to your absence or the window you’ve escaped through. Lost in stupefaction, they walk nakedly toward the dim light, never reaching, [[never ceasing.->end]] <<if visited() is 1>><<set $endings += 1>><</if>><</linkreplace>><</linkreplace>>

Seeing these two next to each other takes you back... <<link "->" $choice>><</link>>