forrest

The deer had to be grazing only fifteen yards away for I could see the tranquility in its eyes. It was a doe; no antlers. With silence and slow, I lifted the butt of Dad’s ancient lever-action rifle to my jawline and held breath while my index finger crept around the grip of the wood and quietly inched toward the trigger guard; trembling. I winked my left eye shut as my right focused into scope, and I could see the beast’s tranquility even clearer now. It wasn’t grazing; it was standing, perusing nature, and it bat lashes as it slowly lowered its slender head toward a solitary leaf on a sapling; nipping it most delicately off the hardwood. The scope revealed the doe’s spiky velvet, an uncommon trait; perfect for my induction ceremony. Dad would be very proud.

I first learned of Counter-Strike within the pages of a PC gaming magazine in Autumn Y2K; it was depicted as a realistic first-person shooter with a focus on multiplayer and teamwork. And although derived from Valve’s Half-Life, it lacked the science fiction aspects that attracted the taped-glasses demographic and appealed more to my audience: southern boys who dreamed of monster trucks and machine guns and mounted deer heads. I wanted Counter-Strike more than anything; especially after my friends at school started playing, but my Dad didn’t see the appeal and wanted me to focus on the three G’s: girls, grades, and guns – and football. But we made a compromise: if I made all B’s in school that year, he would buy me a Dell PC and a copy of Counter-Strike. Needless to say, I studied real hard, and I got those B’s.

As I watched the doe chew leaves from the hardwood, I thought about what Dad told me years ago: “the best way to kill a deer is to shoot ’em while they’re standin’ with one side of their body facin’ ya; that way, ya aim true an’ make every shot count. Ya gotta be quick but silent an’ steady as a rock; that’s the key to bringin’ home the bag, son.” He would say while chewing tobacco as naturally as the doe chewed leaves, “this ‘ere is called a broadside shot an’ it’s the quickest way to kill a deer, son – ya know, they’re still livin’ animals and we don’t want ‘em sufferin’ too bad.”

Counter-Strike is a simple premise wrapped in layers of deep first-person-shooter mechanics; two sides – terrorists and counter-terrorists – firefight across everyday terrain with objectives such as bomb defusal and hostage rescue. The game oozes realism, as each gun is derived from a real world model and handles as one would expect; holding down left-click to rapid-fire – or ‘spraying’ – decreases your accuracy, while firing in short bursts – or ‘tapping’ – keeps your aim steady; holding the ctrl-key to crouch increases precision even further which mirrors the real world firing technique of kneeling with your rear knee placed on the ground and your other leg supporting the elbow of your forward arm. All weapons benefit from these precision mechanics, but the AWP benefits most; the AWP is a sniper rifle that kills in one shot – the drawback being that it requires a reload after being fired.

When I used the AWP – which was always – I pictured my opponent as deer and recalled what Dad told me about the broadside shot, and this advice carried me to Counter-Strike stardom. I became so proficient with the AWP that my friends called me “The AWP King” and I joined local tournaments full of confidence and verve.

Mesmerized – I continued to peer through the looking glass. The doe basked in stray beams piercing the canopy layer, only breaking posture to pluck leaves off the hardwood. My thoughts veered to the ancient rifle that trembled lightly in my hands, passed down from grandfather to father to son in The Ritual of the Hunt. I wondered to myself; did Dad tremble too? Did he hesitate before shooting his first deer? Why was I hesitating at all? To stop the trembling, I took a note from Counter-Strike and held the crtl-key to crouch; my right knee crunched into dry leaves as my left supported my forward arm while I readjusted the ancient rifle. I winked and peered through the looking glass once more, but this time the doe’s magnified eyes were staring back at me.

For our first local tournament, we faced a team composed of kids from our middle school. The winners of the tournament would win brand new gaming PCs. It was hosted at a local LAN Gaming Center called the Arena; a dark warehouse overflowing with computers jam-packed with the most popular computer games of 2001. The ambiance was shadow and fluorescent, like that of a jellyfish in the darkest recesses of the oceans. The Arena was the natural habitat of stoners, outcasts, and those who played Everquest and Doom; a place where both hardcore nerds and potential school shooters mingled freely as there was a surprising amount of overlap in their interests. My team pushed through this unholy union and started discussing strategies for the upcoming digital gunfights when the opposing team walked in; their leader was wheelchair-bound with thick glasses, greasy hair, and a band-tee for a group I had never heard of. My teammate Ryan – an older boy who had been held back several grades and expelled for attacking other students at least twice – pointed at the kid in the wheelchair and called him the f-slur of the homosexual variety and we laughed like a wicked pack of hyenas gyred around a human baby. An Arena employee heard this slur-slinging and gave us a warning, but we shrugged it off because we talked like this all the time – it made us feel superior when someone got offended.

*ancient violence consumes the LAN tournament

The tournament was not going well. The other team seemed to read our minds; we would go B and they would go A; we would go A and they would go B; we would try to camp at spawn but they would flashbang us into confusion and clean up in the aftermath; we would try to rush early but they would anticipate this and trap us in a pincer formation. And to top it off, the disabled boy was far more skilled with the AWP than I – his trigger finger was always seconds faster than mine. We lost the tournament and we were embarrassed, but we masked this embarrassment with the foulest language possible. We slung slurs like bullets at a drunken bar fight in a Wild West saloon.

The slur-slinging culminated in whirlwind-heat-and-flash as Ryan stood up and accused the disabled boy of cheating. I turned to face the altercation, but before I could do anything, Ryan grabbed the disabled boy by his long hair and was screaming slurs at him. Ryan then pulled the disabled boy’s hair with such force that it tornadoed him onto the floor and left a clump of bloody mess in Ryan’s clenched fist. He then started kicking the disabled boy in the gut, “this is what you get for cheating, you gimp fa—!” he shouted on repeat.

Horrified, I leapt in and grabbed Ryan from behind, but he was much stronger than myself and pushed me to the floor. Four Arena employees then jumped in and dragged Ryan off the disabled boy, who was moaning meekly between invocations of “mom” gurgled in spittle and hemoglobin.

The police were called, and an ambulance showed up just as the disabled boy’s mom arrived to pick up her mangled son. There was an exodus as the boy was wheeled out on a stretcher, mumbling incoherently. I watched as the mom hurried to her son’s side with tears swelling in her eyes. She turned to Ryan, who was being escorted by two police officers, and instead of screaming obscenities at him, she started to sob uncontrollably. I knew then that, even though Ryan had attacked the boy, I was just as much at fault as he was. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I had dehumanized that boy into a stretcher.

The doe was unmoving, as if stunned by the glare of an ancient violence. I lifted my vision to catch a glimpse of her beyond the glass, but there was no illusion; she stared in confusion, as if asking a single question – “why?” I shifted my vision to the glass once more, expanding her forehead into a perfect target just when two small fawns emerged from the nearby brush. The fawns obscured my view as they nuzzled into their mother, but the doe remained resolute in her questioning. The fawns, noticing their mother’s focus, turned to me, and then they too stood resolute – questioning my ancient violence.

I thought to myself: “Three heads to hang on the wall. Dad would be proud.” But as I looked into the eyes of the fawn, I remembered the boy at the Arena. And as I looked at the doe, I remembered the mother sobbing. I remembered the violence, and just as I remembered this ancient violence, the fawns nuzzled their mother’s velvet head and she nuzzled back, and then they turned with a skip and trotted slowly into the wood, as if there was nothing to be afraid of – as if I was one with nature itself.

My finger eased off the ancient trigger of the ancient rifle, and I slung the ancient violence over my shoulder as I walked back to camp.

---

(Originally published 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #CounterStrike #Fiction #Ethics

I remember it as if it were last night. My cat – a strapping lad of gray shorthair named Digit – jumped through the open ground-floor apartment window onto my lap while I was sitting on the couch playing computer games with my roommate. The window was open not only to allow Digit free passage outside but also to filter the tobacco smoke that stained our lungs and jaundiced the light-colored walls. My roommate and I had Dreamcast controllers in hand and lit cigarettes dangling from our mouths and subtle glowers on our faces as we sat brand-new-to-adulthood and transfixed by the massive widescreen firing off psychedelic lightshows. The blues of hadoukens and the purples of reppukens flashed about inside puffs of cigarette smoke like ball lightning within the clouds of an alien planet. And although the room was loud, there was silence between us, for we were engaged in the digital-equivalent of a samurai honor duel and we were both great pretenders; pretending like we were engaged in just another friendly game of Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast; when, in reality, there was an intense clash of personalities playing out between the sounds of button mashing and pixelated fighters yelling the names of their ridiculous special-attacks and Satoshi Ise’s electro-infused drum-and-bass stage music.

Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 was originally developed and released by Capcom in August 2000 for the arcades; it was later released on Dreamcast in North America on November 8th, 2000. The origin story – the myth – is that the magazine Arcadia featured a cover with both The King of Fighters ‘98 and Street Fighter Alpha 3 titles a little too close together and readers misread this thinking it was “KOF vs. SF”; when this imaginary game didn’t manifest, fans of both series went unhinged with hate mail and thus: Capcom vs. SNK was born – or something. And while it wasn’t the first crossover between Capcom and SNK, it was the first to reach a wide audience outside of Japan, as the previous title – SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium – was only released for the Neo Geo Pocket Color; a handheld console that was poorly adopted in the West where Street Fighter and Pokemon infected the minds of young computer gamers like brain-eating amoebas. An updated version of this game, Capcom vs. SNK Pro, was released a year later – and the concept was so popular that it would eventually spawn a sequel, Capcom vs. SNK 2, which built upon the hip-hop back-alley beat-down eclecticism of Millennium Fight 2000 and further reinforced Capcom and SNK as the premier 2D-fighting game developers.

My roommate and I were on our centesimal round of Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 and I had not won a single match. I played Iori and Sakura; he played Ken and Yuri. I must have smoked half-a-pack of cigarettes because I was getting my ass handed to me on a very dirty ashtray. I persisted in total silence with a look of unbothered determination on my face; this faux-stoicism belied the fact that I was a raging storm inside. I could have stopped playing; I could have called it quits after the nth loss; but something like pride compelled me to keep going, and as I kept going, my playing got worse and the hole grew deeper until it was quickly approaching Hell. My roommate’s faux-stoicism was much simpler; with every knock-out: his confidence grew and his gamer-cred multiplied, and he would always have this over me because computer games were very serious back then and he dared not speak a word lest the fisticuffs escape the television-set and stain the shag carpet with blood. The digital-equivalent of the samurai honor duel was about to end in seppuku.

Capcom vs. SNK was revolutionary as it combined characters from rival developers and introduced the lesser-known SNK fighting games to a wider western audience initially put off by SNK’s realistic-yet-very-anime art style, especially when compared to Capcom’s more western-palatable cartoon-like aesthetics. Both art styles exist in this game, with characters drawn in either style depending on which “groove” was selected before character-selection. The crossover makes perfect sense as SNK’s fighting games were directly inspired by Capcom; SNK’s Fatal Fury: King of Fighters was designed by Takashi Nishiyama, the director of Street Fighter, and was envisioned as a spiritual successor to that game. The two companies often parodied each other; Dan from Street Fighter, a parody of Ryo from SNK’s Art of Fighting, who himself was a homage to Capcom’s Ryu. And while Dan may not be in Millennium Fight 2000, the game does include a roster of over 20 characters from each series. As with most 2D fighters, the controls are obtuse to newbies but intuitive to those familiar with the genre; players are encouraged to use an arcade stick or learn to slide their thumb in circles, half circles, and quarter circles on very-small-directional-pads to execute special-attacks. Both series use this input method so there’s nothing to learn coming from one or the other; thus, combining Capcom and SNK characters into a single game was a no-brainer.

*Iori rushes Ken in the digital equivalent of a samurai honor duel

Patience and practice of the key fundamentals are important with all 2D-fighting games and this is especially true for Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000; its 4-button control scheme, lack of true combos, and smaller skill list compared to the series it pulled from, make mastering the key fundamentals – footsies, blocking, looking for openings, and punishing – extremely important. You could master all a character’s inputs, learn all their moves and perform them perfectly, but if you didn’t time these moves correctly or space them out properly, you would fail every time. For example, Iori Yagami – my main character of choice in most SNK titles – has a super-special-attack called “Ura 108 Shiki: Ya Sakazuki” which can stun and heavily damage the opponent, but it’s blockable so throwing it out in a battle without respect to the opponent’s actions will result in the opponent blocking the attack and punishing you. In fact, one could bait these types of attacks and punish them with a simple low kick, and entire matches could be won doing this.

Even the most fancy quarter-circle-back-half-circle-forward-punch special-attack won’t save you if the opponent sees it coming

And that was why I failed to win a single match that dark night on that alien planet. I knew the cool moves but I didn’t know how to properly use them. I would fire a burning projectile, but my roommate would jump-kick over it. I would use a rush-down attack but my opponent would only block and punish me with a low-kick. I was bound for the floor. I realized what was happening early on but I couldn’t adapt to it because I was too focused on quarter-circle back and quarter-circle forward and getting those flashy special-attack kills. My roommate patiently punished every attack with normal punches and kicks while I was performing complicated inputs for cool-points from the gamer gods who never answered my prayers.

Several hours passed in silence. We both had to work in the morning and at a certain point it became too irresponsible to continue getting my ass beat. I said something like, “I have to get some sleep” and my roommate nodded and we went our separate ways without another word between us. We both knew what happened.

When the door closed behind him, only the miasma of angst and an embarrassed man-child were left behind. I stood silently as the Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 title screen flashed before my eyes, and my hands were trembling, feeling a wail building up inside me. My failures replayed over and over again in my head; over fifty rounds and no wins; my opponent didn’t perform a single special attack but still managed to defeat me. And all my quarter-circle forwards and half-circle backs only resulted in a full-blown quarter-circle meltdown. The Dreamcast controller I was holding dropped to the floor, and I fell to my knees with my face buried in my hands. As I was doing this, my roommate walked in to grab the lighter he left on the couch but, upon seeing my crumpled form, immediately turned around and left the room.

We never played Capcom vs. SNK again.

---

(Originally published on 4/8/2024)

#ComputerGames #Autobiographical #CapcomVsSNK

I: HERE BE DRAGONS – Endless

“I wouldst call thee foolish… But thou art mortal. Thou cannot go against thy nature, no more than a fish could walketh upon the firmament.”

–Fou-Lu

Eager explorers would find all manner of beasts illustrated on ancient maps – the most common of these beasts were Dragons. “Here Be Dragons,” the cartographers of antiquity would say before they inked fire-breathers upon lands that many explored but never returned from. These Dragons served as a warning to esurient explorers who wished to make a name for themselves, and the warning was clear: be careful what you wish for because you just might wake a sleeping Dragon.

The explorers in this story were called They Who Pass.

They Who Pass were like You and I, and they toil and torment amidst their short lives. Their primeval instincts reached for something more, and they sought it out like infants drawn to forbidden doors; magic of fire, water, air, and earth – but these things brought only momentary mirth, for they coveted even more; and through their toil and torment, they found They Who Endure.

They Who Endure were Endless and Dragon and Godlike, and in their realm they took weird form and played like summer children without a care in their cosmic voids. But the mortals became proud and esurient, and in their insatiable-wanting they spun dark rituals to pluck the Endless from their places of old.

But the mortals’ profane incantations were flawed, and in their enochian attempt to summon the Yorae Dragon – the mightiest of all Endless – they sundered the Dragon God in twain and voided his halves through time and space.

The first-half was named Fou-Lu – Yin to Yang. He was incomplete, but his power was immeasurable. Fou-Lu took the form of a snowy-haired youth. He had a cold emerald gaze and he draped himself in royal colors. He was stoic and determined with a quietus in his wake that beget respect from all around him. Fou-Lu was loved and feared by all.

The second-half was named Ryu – Yang to Yin. He was incomplete and six-hundred-years late. Ryu was weak but bursting with potential; a blank slate. Ryu took the form of an ocean-haired youth. He had a gaze like the clear waters on a secret beach and he draped himself in the garb of the everyman. He was buoyant, boundless and spread hope to all those around him. Ryu was loved and revered by all.

*Fou-Lu stands before (forgotten promise)

During Fou-Lu’s time, the mortal tribes waged perpetual war through magic and steel. The sensible ones prayed to Fou-Lu to bring about a world with no suffering – a utopia. Fou-Lu heard their pleas and, through his great power and charisma, forged the violent tribes into an Empire.

Thus, Fou-Lu became the First Emperor of the Fou Empire. And he made a promise of peace to his people, and his people made the same promise back to him.

However, the unification was a strain on Fou-Lu, for he was incomplete. Drained, Fou-Lu fell into a deep slumber; if at first he dreamt of utopia, his dreams soon piped into chaos; as the mortals, without Fou-Lu’s guidance, slowly returned to their wicked ways, and this darkness crept into Fou-Lu’s hibernation, hexing the sleeping god’s slumber.

They Who Pass became proud and esurient once more – or maybe they always were.

II: INTERLUDE – Swan Song

“I see thy memories of thy journeys with the mortals as clearly as if they were mine own.”

–Fou-Lu

This is the part where we take a breather.

If you made it past all the amateur, cringe-inducing attempts at prose-poetry, then – other than deserving praise – you are giving me far too much credit as a writer and should probably stop before disappointment sets in. But if you insist on this folly, I want to take this swan song interlude to talk about my personal history with Breath of Fire IV and discuss some of its more literal aspects.

This is the part where – if you have played Breath of Fire IV – I will now be either confirming your personal biases or shattering them to the point where you leave a comment like, “well, actually, Breath of Fire combat is completely different from Dragon Quest because you get to pick who attacks first and also the song you said that uses a sitar actually uses a tanpura,” while never engaging with the real meat of the essay – and to those commenters: I thank you for keeping me on-point with my fact-checking game.

It would be easy to say that the Breath of Fire series is Capcom’s answer to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and in many ways that is not entirely incorrect. Each game features turn-based combat and a diverse cast of unique characters ranging from anthropomorphic animals to angst-ridden teenagers and they all take place in whimsical fantasy realms full of swords-and-sorcery and sometimes-science-fiction; and, most importantly, they are all role-playing games made by Japanese developers. The Breath of Fire series, however, showed up late to the party; it took six years to manifest after the original Final Fantasy in 1987, which itself was inspired by Dragon Quest, both of which firmly cemented the role-playing genre into the cultural milieu of Japan and, eventually, the world. But instead of pulling-a-Gary by reciting the entire history of the genre – which would be even more boring than the essay you are reading right now – you can simply look it up yourself or watch a video on the subject; in fact, you may be able to find a video created by this same publication.^#1

To be honest with all zero of our readers, I have moved beyond caring about reciting historical facts about stuff-and-things; not only does it feel encyclopedic, but also feels fraudulent. I wasn’t there so the best I can do is pretend to know things based on hand-me-downs and telephone-games. And Wikipedia is available to anyone with an internet connection.

I prefer to focus on what a psychologist may be asking me in ten years’ time, that being: “… and how does that make you feel?” And my feelings for Breath of Fire IV span over a decade and cannot be contained within a Wikipedia article or even within the words you are reading now – my feelings are immeasurable and timeless.

*spin in a ring of past – I dive through (memories) that are locked around thee^#2

When I first played Breath of Fire IV, I was in a very weird place. I lived in a rented apartment with two other people, one of whom was my ex-girlfriend, and the other was my best friend. I was addicted to prescription Adderall and worked until midnight at a call center five-days-a-week. I would get home from troubleshooting cheap coffee makers over the phone, pop some amphetamine salts, and play computer games while listening to shoegaze music until I got tired – and getting-tired was hard to do on the prescription version of very-hard-drugs. All the while I would smoke half a pack of cigarettes in the house thus staining the walls yellow with nicotine and angst.

I didn’t care and at the time: nobody cared. Best friends turned to enemies and girlfriends to ex-girlfriends and clean homes to dumpy homes and happy children to failed adults and this-rules to this-fucking-sucks and Yin to Yang and debit-cards to overdraft fees. We retreated into our rooms and listened for footsteps outside the door so that we could time our bathroom-and-kitchen-excursions perfectly as to avoid crossing paths with each other because we lived together for too long and our quirks were just too much and we were tired of talking or even seeing one another. We were also on drugs and perpetually fucked up.

It was always “why don’t you take out the trash?” and “why don’t you clean your room?” and “stop punching holes in the wall” and “your dog shit in the living room again” and “you owe me three months’ rent” and “why did you kick my door down?” and “clean the dishes after you make dinner” and “why didn’t you tell me your toilet was leaking?” and “there’s a bedsheet over the doorway because I can’t afford a new door” and “why do we suddenly owe the water company two thousand dollars?” and “stop having loud sex with your boyfriend in the living room” and smoking weed every waking hour of the day.

We moved out of our parents’ homes too quickly and the universe tried its damndest to make us responsible adults, but like fitting the big triangle-piece into the eye socket of a rigored corpse, it was not happening and we continued to decay and maggots were starting to show up.

If the experience taught me anything, it was that you should never rent an apartment with your best friend, and you should certainly neverever rent an apartment with a girl who cheated on you twice but promised that they were a “changed person and it was just a weird time in my life and I will neverever do it again and I love you so much baby.”

Neverever.

During this epoch of weirdness, on a whim, I decided to play Breath of Fire IV – which had been given to me by an old high school acquaintance. The jewel case glistened like a ray of hope amongst the grime of the apartment and I was instantly transfixed. Looking back, I wasn’t sure if it was the Adderall or the chronic or the game itself or all-of-the-above – but, all those years ago, it seemed like Breath of Fire IV was the best game I had ever played.

I needed to be sure so I booted up Breath of Fire IV in the here-and-now and quickly discovered that I had to be married to the wind and the rain and the dark^#3 to fully appreciate this beautiful heart attack of a computer game – and it just so happened that my thirty-third anniversary to the wind and the rain and the dark was just around the corner.

*2D-3D alchemical diorama and (dark below)

Breath of Fire IV is a blend of three-dimensional environments and two-dimensional sprites that should not work together yet these competing styles fit like Yin and Yang and create a diorama-effect that is both dream-like and beautiful; and, like the in-game city of Astana, this beauty belies a hidden darkness, highlighted by the three-sixty camera that lends itself to secrets-around-every-corner. The sprites within this windy diorama are hand-drawn and shaded to perfection by those whose only philosophy in life is pure pixel poetry. The music, a heroic mix of Western-influenced string and wind instruments,^#4 Eastern-tinged drum-and-bass complete with sitar and chanting,^#5 and jazz billowing with bells and breeze,^#6 places Breath of Fire IV firmly between SaGa Frontier 2 and Final Fantasy VIII in terms of Greatest-Computer-Game-Soundtracks-Ever-Made. And the animation, lo! – the animation; the characters move with such elegant wind-up and execution that every input has a hair-raising excitement baked-in that never gets stale – both in and out of battle.

The disparate elements of Breath of Fire IV combine into a computer game so spellbinding that one would be forgiven for thinking that some sort of Ancient Computer Game God crafted it from pure dreamstuff and raw thunderbolts.

But the Ancient God of Computer Games skimped on the actual gameplay, as Breath of Fire IV does little to expand on the standard turn-based combat of its contemporaries besides turning every character into a monster-magic-learning Blue Mage^#7 and incorporating a turn-management style that allows any party member to attack in any given order on any given turn. And although complete with fancy combo attacks and flashy Dragon cutscenes that are satisfying if not a bit derivative of Neo-Bahamut-Does-The-Laser-Again,^#8 Breath of Fire IV combat still feels a little too close to the simplicity of Dragon Quest to provide any significant strategic depth. Furthermore, the inclusion of constant, repetitive mini-games undermines some of the game’s more exciting moments – especially when those mini-games determine the strength of your main character’s Dragon forms; a game design decision that only seems like a good idea after consecutive head bonks and morphine treatment.

In short, Breath of Fire IV is a devastatingly beautiful nightmare game that is – like all computer games – a little bit repetitive in the best ways possible but also verily beyond words and, being released two months after the death of the PlayStation, is truly a swan song for both the console and my leaving a really bad situation whilst being over two thousand dollars in debt to the Brunswick Water and Sewer Commission.

III: HERE BE DRAGONS – Hex

“A weapon so powerful… that simply using it dost place them in jeopardy? Verily… their folly is greater than even I hadst thought.”

–Fou-Lu

The Fou Empire, without its founder, deteriorated into violent psychosis – or what might be called: the normal human condition.

Those Who Pass believed that they knew the slumbering god’s secrets and they bickered endlessly on the minutiae of things until one man took up a sword and declared himself the next Emperor of the Fou Empire. Through jingoism and jazz, the second Emperor of the Fou Empire came to power, and then the third, and the fourth, and so on; with each succession, the Fou Empire fell further from Fou-Lu’s utopian ideal.

Soniel – the 13th Emperor of the Fou Empire – was an esurient, cowardly man who cared only for his own desires. During Soniel’s era, he launched many efforts to conquer the nations of the Eastern continent: Wyndia, Ludia, and Worrent. To this end, he assembled a sinister team of sorcerers and scientists to develop the most nightmarish weapon ever devised. The Carronade, a gigantic cannon erected in the middle of the vibrant city of Astana.

Astana was second only to the capital city of Chedo in terms of beauty; built from jade, splashed with koi ponds, and fortified by Dragon-adorned walls. Astana’s beauty belied a profound ugliness underneath its foundation – the bloodstained torture chambers of the Carronade.

The Carronade – run by the wicked geneticist Yuna – was powered by people; the emotional suffering and psychic torment of real, fleshy people.

*a sacrifice – with loves and hates and passions just like mine^#9 – stamped for (death)

The Carronade fired a malefic Hex from the accumulated psychic torment of its sacrificial lambs. The Hex not only caused immediate destruction but also left a fallout of extrasensory terror radiating outward for miles from the blast zone. Like Nuclear Yinyang without the Yin and the Yang and just the godawful smell of human flesh and screaming.

The Fou Empire made liberal use of the Carronade against their enemies, and the Eastern nations – historically opposed to the Fou Empire – rallied together in a shaky union against this terrible weapon, but the Carronade was too powerful and the Eastern nations had no choice but to declare a ceasefire as they negotiated terms of surrender with their Hexers.

However, the Fou Empire had a problem; the main drawback of the Carronade was that the ammunition – the human meat – was fragile, weak, and perished easily; but what if the sacrifice was like the Endless – what if the ammunition was immortal?

Chief Geneticist Yuna had already considered this problem and had been toiling away on a secret solution; he had formulated a way to create his own Endless – his own They Who Endure. But much like the summoning of the Yorae Dragon from bygone days, the ritual was flawed and painful and required a person with great resolve, a strong heart, and an intense emotional connection to the Fou Empire’s greatest enemies.

Princess Elina of Wyndia would be the perfect specimen. Her love would be turned into a nuclear bomb.

Yuna had Princess Elina kidnapped, transported to Astana, and forced into the bowels of its bloody underworld. The Princess was taken beyond the torture chamber, through the sewers, and into Yuna’s laboratory. And she was violated.

Princess Elina writhed in pain as her body was mutilated through surgery and sorcery.

*heart of darkness (if you love me – kill me)

The ritual changed Princess Elina’s body in profound ways. Her organs grew so large that they burst from her stomach and she became a heaping pile. She possessed the guts of giants without the skin to contain them. Her bowels grew so quickly that she was placed in a bed with a hole extending into the sewers, allowing her intestinal kudzu to slop through the hole and grow unfettered. She turned the sewers into an ocean of blood and pus and intestinal juices crashing like the waves of a heinous storm.

Yuna, in his mad science, created his own Dragon, but he did not heed the cartographer’s warning; he ventured into dangerous territory and now the real Dragons were coming.

IV: INTERLUDE – Re: Swan Song

“The mortals art ignorant, prideful animals… they doth lie to one another… their folly is immeasurable.”

–Fou-Lu

Let us take another breather.

If you are still with us, you have been reading about torture and women being transformed into sperm-whale-sized-organ-farms-that-power-gigantic-death-cannons for almost two thousand words. By this point, you are likely wondering why the imagery for all the body-horror-stuff was so much more vivid than the rest of the writing, and you may be thinking to yourself, “this author needs professional help.”

And that is a risk I continue to take every time I write one of these essays. I like writing about evil-nasty-weird stuff and sometimes I like to think real hard about that stuff too.^#10 But there’s always a greater point to be made; surely, I am not just writing about bloated women to get off, right?

I suppose you will have to keep reading to find out.

During our last swan song interlude, we talked about many things – I even gave some gameplay-related opinions that veered into the lane of negativity, but worry not, dear zero-readers, for those gripes were minor, as gameplay – like life – is what you make it,^#11 and besides: Breath of Fire IV has the best fishing mini-game of any Japanese role-playing game ever; with over ten unique fishing spots, thirty different types of fish to catch, a plethora of bait and tackle options, and a very serious technique system centered around reeling in your fishing line in time with the beat of the background music.

*Ryu, fishing for (friendship)

During my time with Breath of Fire IV, I did a lot of fishing. And during this fishing, I did a lot of thinking. I took a lot of notes. I was going to write the best essay anyone ever wrote about Breath of Fire IV. It was going to be deep and interesting. I was going to make surprising connections and uncover real Dragons along the way, and I would get so much praise that I would win an award or something. Here Be Dragons or: NUCLEAR YINYANG was going to be a real page-turner.

But when I started writing, I couldn’t put my thoughts in order, and this mess came out – was it writer’s block? No – I don’t think so. I realized that – like Vegeta to Goku and Fou-Lu to Ryu and Gary to Ash and Yin to Yang and Tanuki to Kitsune – I needed a rival.

Without a rival, I rust in complacency. Without a rival, there’s nothing worth competing with. Without a rival, there’s nothing worth comparing myself to. Without a rival, I am lost – I write paragraphs in which the last word of every sentence rhymes, and it is very-very-not-good.

Without a rival, I describe things as “very-very-not-good.”

There was once another writer for this publication. This other writer published several brilliant essays. This other writer was my best friend since high school; the same best friend I shared that apartment with all those years ago; the same apartment I played Breath of Fire IV in for the first time; the same apartment I stained the walls yellow with nicotine and angst.

This other writer is gone now.

We got into an argument. We got into several arguments, but our final argument was different; it was calm and matter-of-fact, honest and hurtful, and there was a clear winner and a clear loser. There was a hex upon me; I was envious of his writing ability – always had been. He told me that he enjoyed one of my essays and I told him to stop lying to me. He would praise my writing and I would not believe him because his work was just so much better than mine; so much cleaner, the connections were more profound, and the subject matter was far more well-researched than anything I had ever written. When he told me that my writing was “good,” I felt like a young student being placated by a master.

I hated my own writing, and I hated my writing even more after reading his.

*battle with (cursed souls)

I stopped reading his work entirely because the envy became too much to bear and I became acutely aware of how pathetic I was and this awareness beget a great melancholy and I just wanted it to stop. People were dying in air raids across the oceans and I was sulking over a computer games blog with zero to two readers.

I was happier when I ignored him, but I would continue to compete with his specter, and, from that, I became an incrementally better writer, but I could never match his output – and we both knew that. I refused to believe that he would like my writing; there was no way in Hell that he thought my writing was even-remotely-decent when he was churning out beautiful prose at such a high level. My writing was childish in comparison and surely we both knew that.

This publication started as a fun hobby – how did it become so serious? Was it me? Was it my fault?

It was.

When I brought this up to him, he insisted that I was wrong. He insisted that my writing was better than his own and that I inspired him. But I never believed him; how could such a gifted writer be inspired by me – an absolute amateur? This contradiction became a mind virus that was resistant to any treatment. I believed my best friend was a liar, and the more he insisted otherwise, the more reinforced my beliefs became.

I told him that he was a liar – over and over again. I turned on the gas and struck the match but my insecurities were fireproof and it only burned our friendship to ashes.

The ouroboros raged on until our final argument, in which I told him, “I release you now – go away.” To which he responded “fucking Zarathustra type shit” and logged off. And then he was gone. He deleted all his writing and he blocked me everywhere and he vanished into the digital void and he was gone.

My psychic angst over this could power a Carronade.

If I begged you – would you come back? If you came back – would this just happen again?

I need you – not because I produce garbage without you, but because … I like you.

I don’t know if I learned my lesson. I don’t even know if I’m wrong about you. I do know, however, that if this essay is my swan song … it is worthless without you here to read it.

V: NUCLEAR YINYANG – Awakening

“Thou sayest thou wert waiting for us? Thou knowest of us and what we are then? … And knowing this, thou wouldst greet us with malice in thine heart and thine blade in hand?”

–Fou-Lu

Six-hundred years later, a Dragon descended into a dark world by way of a bright star. And when the fire died and the dust settled, there was only The Boy. In some versions of the story, The Boy was named Ryu – in others, The Boy was Yang, but in all versions: The Boy was You. He stood tabula rasa with his junk hanging out. And there was a smile on his face that said “everything is going to be alright” without saying anything at all; for he was mute and his actions spoke louder than words.

The Boy was a great favorite, and his naivety found him tagalong with a band of mortals searching for a missing friend. This was The Boy’s Bildungsroman. He witnessed the horrors of the Hex; the endless bloodshed of war; and all the suffering mortals inflicted upon each other for sport. He witnessed the tears of parents when their children perished from the Hex. He witnessed innocence and love and Yin and Yang and then he witnessed it snuffed out. Above all else, he witnessed moments of fleeting joy and these moments were made all the more precious by their very transience.

Clary-sage, daylily, and sundrop – they burst and bloom and then they’re gone. And there is beauty in this.

That is what The Boy learned.

But one thing stood out to The Boy – the greed of only a handful of powerful people was all it took to fire a Hex into a playground or turn a princess into pandemonium.

Children died in distant crossfire while those responsible turned a blind-eye and this upset The Boy.

But what should be done about those who crush the flowers underneath their heels? The Boy did not know the answer to this question, for he was incomplete – and so, he sought out his other half.

*presenting the (impressionable boy)

The Boy’s other half had just woke from a six-hundred-year slumber.

Fou-Lu intended to merge with his other half and take his place, once again, on the throne of the Fou Empire. The promise would be fulfilled – forever. To this end, Fou-Lu set his sights on the capital city of Chedo – there, he would take his place as God Emperor once more while he awaited The Boy.

Fou-Lu expected a festival in his honor but what he found was another awakening – a wizard and a legion of soldiers greeted him with malice in their hearts and blades in their hands. Mortals who propped themselves up as Gods while claiming that Gods were no longer needed had marked Fou-Lu for death. And during Fou-Lu’s slumber, these mortals devised ways to slay the Endless and make their own.

The mortals had forgotten the promise.

The wizard was strong, and Fou-Lu was forced to retreat into the skies, but this was anticipated and – summoning a great winged beast – the wizard sent Fou-Lu plummeting into the ground below.

Witnessing the crash, a peasant woman named Mami found the injured Fou-Lu and took him into her home. Mami’s beauty unfolded like the petals of a tulip and she was as gentle as the spring breeze. Fou-Lu lived with Mami for many moons and they became inseparable. Mami loved all things and, over time, she loved Fou-Lu most of all; and when they paired, she was filled with his divine energy.

During this time, Fou-Lu tended the fields; worked the hoe, shoveled dirt, and felt the transient joy of mortal life. But, like all things transient, it would not last.

A villager – jealous of Mami and Fou-Lu’s relationship – informed the Empire of Fou-Lu’s location. And soon, the wizard arrived with malice once more. Mami’s home was promptly surrounded by soldiers. Mami pleaded to the wizard that she was just a simple farmer but the wizard was not a fool and he could feel Fou-Lu’s divine presence within her.

Mami could not stand to see her love harmed, thus she barricaded the home and begged Fou-Lu to escape through the back. Thus, Fou-Lu was at a crossroads – his lover or the promise? If there were a third option, he did not consider it.

The wizard spelled his way through the flimsy barricade and the Dragon was nowhere to be seen. The wizard looked down at Mami, who was kneebound and sobbing, and – feeling the Dragon energy radiating from her – he grinned a wicked grin.

“This one will make a perfect sacrifice for the Carronade.”

Thus, her love would turn into a nuclear bomb. And the target was Fou-Lu.

*(love bombs) will sing you to sleep and you will dream of them^#12

Fou-Lu’s decision weighed heavily upon him but he was resolute to return to Chedo and fulfill the promise. They Who Pass were selfish and lazy and greedy,^#13 but he knew they could not go against their nature, no more than a fish could walketh upon the firmament. The mortals needed the guidance of a God to set them on the right course; this much was clear to Fou-Lu – until a malefic Hex fell upon him.

Nearing Chedo, a purple haze like a cloud of death descended upon Fou-Lu with the force of a small supernova and he was bound for the floor^#14 much like the bloody vomit that erupted from his mouth.

Then it hit him, from the sky; something like an acorn or a fallen star. Fou-Lu picked the fallen star from the ground and a manic fit of laughter possessed him like one of the heinous spirits floating upon the caustic winds of the Hex. It was not a fallen star or an acorn – it was Mami’s earring.

Fou-Lu realized then that the mortals used Mami’s love as a nuclear bomb and his uncontrollable laughter belied a wicked epiphany; he understood now that the mortals’ depravity knew no limits. The mortals were monstrous and the only help a God could give them was swift annihilation.

Fou-Lu survived the Hex, and filled with epiphany, arrived in Chedo like a black hole ready to devour the universe. He laid waste to the guards, who were powerless to stop him, and beheaded the traitorous Emperor Soniel without hesitation in a scene deemed too gory for North American audiences.^#15 Fou-Lu took the fallen crown from the Emperor’s severed head and placed it upon his own without a word.

In his first act as Emperor, Fou-Lu annihilated the capital city of Chedo. He did not discriminate between man, woman, or child. They were all found guilty. Fou-Lu would fulfill the promise the only way he believed possible – mortal liquidation.

VI: NUCLEAR YINYANG – Annihilation

“A dragon ’tis force of nature unto itself.”

–Fou-Lu

Chedo was once the bustling capital of the Fou Empire with a population of roughly one million. The buildings were adorned with jade, but their supports and foundation were built from wood-and-paper and thus highly combustible. Chedo was one of the Fou Empire’s largest ports, home to a massive concentration of wooden ships used for both trade and warfare. National highways and checkpoints ran through the city and merchants lined every street corner.

When the mystic fire fell upon Chedo, the galleons burned and the homes were reduced to ashes and the once carefree children who played in the streets were charred to black. Those who managed to escape the initial horror were chased by Fou-Lu’s faithful beast – A-Tur – and eaten alive. And this was only a fraction of Fou-Lu’s power – next, he would annihilate Astana, and then Pauk, then Sonne. His nuclear Yin would consume the mortal world and only silence would be left behind.

Chedo became the perfect kindling for a bonfire of human corpses.

We are finally here. I have been editing this essay for far too long, and it is still overwrought with exposition and cliché, but we have finally arrived at the good stuff.

Dear loyal zero-readers, are you ready?

When I wrote “Chedo” up there – I really meant Japan’s port town of Kobe; specifically, Kobe on March 16th and 17th of 1945: The United States firebombing of Kobe during World War II. In fact, most of that first paragraph was plagiarized from Wikipedia only with the city names swapped out.^#16

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was The United States of America’s Mami moment, and their love and rage and sorrow became a fiery rain of death upon their foes.

U.S. intel suggested that Kobe’s wood-and-paper housing would make the perfect kindling for a reckoning and the immolation of civilians would cause great psychological harm to Japan’s collective psyche. Thus, the firebombing of Kobe was a deliberate attack upon Japanese civilians by The United States of America, and over 8,000 people died, and more than 650,000 homes were destroyed.^#17 There was a pretense that Kobe was a military town, but the firebombs did not discriminate between man, woman, soldier, civilian, or child.

The United States of America became The United States of Don’t Mess With Us Or We’ll Commit War Crimes On You And Face No Consequences.

*(no marigolds in the promised land) there’s a hole in the ground where they used to grow^#18

During World War II, hundreds of air raids targeting Japanese civilians were carried out by the United States. Many of these air raids were conducted by the U.S. 20th Air Force under the command of General Curtis LeMay. Targets were selected based on both military significance and psychological impact to the Japanese people, driven by LeMay’s personal war philosophy that saw no difference between a civilian and an armed soldier.

“There are no innocent civilians. It is their government, and you are fighting a people; you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”

–General Curtis Emerson LeMay^#19

To General Curtis LeMay, if Japan were a human body, innocent civilians were part of its nervous system – its lifeblood – and killing these civilians damaged Japan just as much as killing any soldier. Everything and everyone within the Japanese islands were military by proxy. If a child died in an air raid, that was one less future worker; one less future kamikaze pilot; one less future miner to mine the coal to power the war machine; and most importantly: one less future avenger. LeMay dehumanized his opponent; he saw Japan as a country to be defeated, not a collection of human beings with families and loves and hates and passions just like his own. One has to wonder if this outlook not only protected him cognitively from dissonance but also from a great sorrow – but this would be a generous interpretation of his barbarity.

Humans may be the most intelligent animal on Earth, but – like the city of Astana – this intelligence hides a terrible truth: the vast mental gymnasium of genocidal justifications. The Carronade is being packed every day.

Days before the Kobe firebombing, the United States carried out the most devastating air raid in human history. On March 9th and 10th, 1945, the United States Army Air Force conducted “Operation Meetinghouse,” now known by the Japanese as the “Great Tokyo Air Raid”; a fleet of over 300 B-29 bombers swooped Hitchcockian over Tokyo, dropping over 1,500 tons of incendiaries, including half a million cylinders of napalm and white phosphorus which ignited instantly upon contact with oxygen, turning idyllic Totoro countrysides into Biblical revelation; and aided by a dry spell and windy weather conditions, the hellfire turned into a massive firestorm that sucked mortals into heinous flame tornadoes like light into a black hole. The firestorm destroyed over 15 square miles of Tokyo’s busiest civilian sectors, which were – like Kobe – largely constructed with wood-and-paper. The inferno did not discriminate between man, woman, and child as it uprooted and burned ancient family trees and scattered their ashes upon the sparking winds. At least 80,000 people died.^#20

But America’s Mami moment was not over. In August, they sent their two strongest warriors to the islands of Japan: Little Boy and Fat Man.

On August 6th, 1945, The United States of America dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima – killing upwards of 120,000 people; three days later, they dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki – killing an additional 80,000 people.^#21

The lucky ones near the immediate blast zone disintegrated instantly. Those further away found their vision go dark as their forehead-skin melted into their eye sockets and their hair sizzled little holes into their skulls and when they went to scream nothing came out because the melted-skin-putty sealed over their mouths. Those miles away from the blast who looked into the bright light had the color stolen from their eyes leaving nothing but white orbs and pain. The fallout left a Hex on the land that produced boils and growths full of cancer and caused babies to be born like crippled Cerberus flailing in torment before the light was stolen from their eyes in nuclear retrograde.

The torture was enough to power an infinite amount of Carronades.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was the United States of America’s Mami moment; our love for those who died and the subsequent sorrow and outrage coalesced into a raging firestorm that engulfed Japan.

Their love became a nuclear bomb – two of them.

*(counting seconds before we turn to ash)^#22

Japan surrendered after the U.S. dropped the second bomb – but at what cost? The common argument is “more people would have died if the bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Japan would not surrender otherwise,” but this was a trolley problem with uncertain variables being solved by people who could not possibly know what the future held. And even so, would more soldiers have died if the war raged on – or more civilians?

And even if it were true – what of the ethical implications?

Soldiers signed up for the job and they knew what they were getting into, but children are born tabula rasa into a country not of their choosing and they grow up in this country without much say or means to leave. What ethical framework do we have to conjure up to justify killing those who are not actively fighting against us? It seems Curtis LeMay already solved this ethical dilemma, but if my neighbor killed my wife, does that provide the justification necessary to kill them, their children, and the rest of their family? On a micro-level, this solves nothing and lands me in prison for life; on a macro-level, it’s genocide, and there are no repercussions as long as you are aligned with the world’s leading superpower.

And before you accuse this essay of being anti-American propaganda: it wasn’t just the United States; everyone was doing it during World War II. The world was at war, and innocent bystanders were caught in the middle. Japan, The United States of America, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Soviet Union; the list goes on. The entire world’s hands were drenched in innocent blood, but some nations were devastatingly more effective at killing innocent people than others.

And the worst part is – it’s still happening. We don’t seem to learn from history, instead: we come up with better excuses for repeating it. Excuses like, “well those kids live in a terrorist city so I don’t care if they get burned alive.”

There are wars going on right now that beget great cycles of violence. Innocent people are bombed for acts carried out by governments or terrorists within their borders. These innocent people are killed either for psychological or strategic effect, and there are those who applaud these killings for vengeance, claimed-necessity, or otherwise. Some even assert their respect for the lives of children in peaceful nations but withhold their respect for children in terrorist-aligned nations while defining terrorism by their own convenient terms; these terms usually include something like “if you kill innocent people, you are a terrorist” while ignoring the innocent people killed in the pursuit of defeating these terrorists. And when these double standards are called out, they resort to playing the adult-baby version of “well they attacked us first” which devolves into a game of historical one-upmanship that could be argued into pre-homosapien missing-link levels of retroactive blame games, also known as: incredibly fucking stupid.

And again, do we choose where we are born? Do we choose our borders? If I am born within the borders of a government that you have deemed “evil” or “terrorist” – is my life forfeit? And if the answer is yes, then why? Is it because we believe that this is the unfortunate reality of war – bystanders will be caught in the crossfire and it sucks but this is necessary to eliminate “the bad guys?” Or rather, are we killing potential avengers? And if so – isn’t the act of killing anyone creating more potential avengers? And if so, when does it stop? Is the logic such that we kill everyone regardless of association because six-degrees-of-separation leads to six-degrees-of-avenger? If we channel our inner Fou-Lu, will the silence bring eternal peace – or will it just happen again?

Holy wars rage on to this day without a resolution in sight. Some say the solution is bombing the opponent into oblivion – mother and child be damned. But the holy war still rages on decade after decade. What has the slaughter of innocent people achieved other than fueling the hatred of the opposing side? Have we met our goals? Why do the back and forth bombings continue? What even is the goal? Do we even know who cast the first stone and does it even matter?

Meanwhile, angry people in powerful positions pretend to solve trolley problems with very uncertain variables, and individuals like General Curtis LeMay use semantics to deflect criticism and deem those making the criticism as leftist hippie scum, sometimes even claiming that those who disagree are just as bad as the enemy themselves.

Killing children is not a partisan issue. Killing children is evil. It doesn’t matter if you’re killing them in your basement or if you’re bombing them from thousands of miles away. The child could have just been birthed from the womb of a full-blown terrorist; it doesn’t matter who the child’s parents are, where they were born, what they look like, or anything else you might be able to come up with. Killing children is and will always be: EVIL.

Let this be a warning, if you find yourself on the side of dead babies – reach deep inside yourself and feel around for the heart; you might notice it missing, but there may still be time to find it.

VII: NUCLEAR YINYANG – Conclusion

“Maybe so…”

–Ryu

In Chinese philosophy, Yin and Yang represent the dualistic nature of existence. These two forces are interconnected and complementary, and one cannot exist on its own without the presence of the other. Within Yin, there should always be Yang; and within Yang, there should always be Yin; thus representing the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. The Yinyang symbol itself is of rotational and inverted symmetry; it can be flipped and still look the same without consideration to its contrasting colors.

When Ryu reached the ruins of Chedo and confronted Fou-Lu in his castle, they were Yin and Yang completely. And both had come to different conclusions about the nature of the world and the mortals who existed within it.

It was as simple and as complicated as darkness and light.

Fou-Lu embodied Yin: darkness, cold, quiet, and passivity. When Fou-Lu awoke from his slumber, he found that his people had forgotten the promise; they warred and killed each other for sport. And just when Fou-Lu started to understand the mortals, they stole Fou-Lu’s love and turned her into a nuclear bomb against him. Fou-Lu was driven mad by the realization that mortals were ignorant, prideful, esurient animals that caused untold suffering on each other; he had wasted so much time trying to tame them. Allowing mortals to exist would only facilitate the perpetuation of suffering. The solution was simple: kill them all.

Ryu embodied Yang: lightness, warmth, noise, and activity. When Ryu awoke naked and cold he was greeted by smiling mortals and, although they were capable of extreme cruelty, he saw the goodness in their hearts. Even when he came across an orphanage filled with children who were victims of the Hex, or witnessed Princess Elina transformed into a tortured immortal to power the Carronade; he saw these incidents as the actions of a small group of corrupt people, which did not reflect all mortals. Ryu observed misguided mortals exploiting powers they should never have possessed in the first place.

However, Ryu remained tabula rasa – he did not know how to solve the problem.

*(yin and yang) collide

Fou-Lu held out his hand and told Ryu what he had seen. He told Ryu about the men who forged philosophies of war that turned children into soldiers. He told Ryu of the Princess turned pandemonium. He told Ryu of the sycophantic babblings of those who justified the murder of civilians based on border alone. He told Ryu of the Hex that was dropped upon the mortals’ own. He told Ryu of Mami.

Fou-Lu reached into Ryu’s mind and begged him for understanding; he told Ryu that the mortals were unfit for their favor and must perish.

And for the first time, Ryu is no longer mute. Tabula rasa no more; he is ready to make a decision. Ryu – you – can respond with Yin or Yang.

Selecting “Maybe so…” turns your love into a nuclear bomb. Yin and Yang merge, with Yin becoming the dominant force. Fou-Lu, now complete, turns to the party of mortals who had accompanied you on your journey and obliterates them in a flash. He then unleashes his atomic fury upon the rest of the world.

The cartographers who told us “Here Be Dragons” are obliterated by those very same Dragons, and there is finally silence – maybe some would even call this “peace.”

You may ask, “what about the other option? What if I choose Yang instead of Yin?”

Well, you have to play Breath of Fire IV to find out for yourself.

---

Footnotes

#1. https://youtu.be/4kFv4FQbQ-Y

#2. https://youtu.be/HSGwL5wORJY

#3. https://youtu.be/mNa3jELy_ew

#4. https://youtu.be/6WdibZ37hdw

#5. https://youtu.be/TCSAqplG8Jg

#6. https://youtu.be/YzS2qrlgmxk

#7. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Blue_Mage

#8. https://youtu.be/sysuCAIEp3E

#9. https://youtu.be/dfXqxjMkyQ4

#10. https://oncomputer.games/2023/10/29/sengoku-rance-and-radical-empathy/

#11. https://youtu.be/l3VqAsMXE7o

#12. https://youtu.be/sFEKRKwRXug

#13. https://youtu.be/Qf3qVBF8dpo

#14. https://youtu.be/E2Oe5YKhzCE

#15. https://youtu.be/JHmBa3BVVCA

#16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Kobe_in_World_War_II

#17. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bombing-kobe/

#18. https://youtu.be/Q7kA5qDOUHE

#19. https://libquotes.com/curtis-lemay/quote/lbi2b1e

#20. https://www.britannica.com/event/Bombing-of-Tokyo

#21. https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

#22. https://youtu.be/W6tL_W_JPlM

---

(Originally published on 3/20/2024)

#ComputerGames #BreathOfFireIV #Ethics #Autobiographical

o lover of light trapped, radiating, dying moth, was it worth it?

#poetry

forever trying for the perfect one-liner to make me famous

#poetry

scrolling characters into reverse waterfalls dehydrate the muse

#poetry

I: Et in Arcadia Ego

“The passing of time, and all of its crimes, is making me sad again.” – Rubber Ring by The Smiths, Louder Than Bombs (1987)^#1

I.I: Summer in Arcadia

Betwixt red maple and palm sat Arcadian youth transfixed by dancing light.

Two boys sat on a small bed and another on the floor nearby. They were crammed in a tiny porch remodeled into a makeshift bedroom; the walls were windows and a sliding glass door revealed the living room while a patio door revealed the backyard and anything even resembling glass was covered by thick blackout curtains. The sun set, but the room was kept aglow by the epileptic flashing of a gray Magnavox cathode-ray tube actively working hypnotism upon the boys. Wires sprawled across the room like laser trip-mines while sounds of fiction and war – consecutive booming, warp and whoosh, ringing shrapnel, and screaming, both human and extraterrestrial – were occasionally drowned out by the uncontrollable laughter and expletive-ridden taunting of Arcadian youth.

All was well because school was out forever, and the extra-large thin-crust pepperoni pizza had just arrived. The boys had just torn into a new case of Diet Cherry Coke, and the only thing that mattered in that tiny pocket of the universe was dual-wielding pop and Xbox controllers, and, of course, the score in the Halo 2 deathmatch playing out on split-screens reflected in the eyes of Arcadian youth.

When the blue splashed into view and the guitar rang out like an engine’s rev before a Slash solo,^#2 every teenage trouble melted away like ice on a warm summer day and the boys were transfixed and true. The boys would then proceed to argue over who received the prestigious title of player-one; a luxury typically afforded to the home team, which bestowed the advantage of a larger screen-slice for the cutthroat deathmatches so seriously considered by these Arcadian youth.

Lockout was the go-to fan-favorite map: a blue-gray maze of open steel pathways mysteriously suspended midair. Lockout devolved into a race of who-gets-the-shotgun-and-sword-first, culminating in one player dominating the match by camping the central gravity-lift for easy kills – a tactic the boys called “hoarding the power weapons,” which was ridiculed severely, yet the lust for winning was so strong that they continued to do it despite the shame.

Ivory Tower was another popular choice, a tropical multi-leveled indoor jungle park with plenty of places to play hide-and-seek; the game-mode of choice was something the boys called “GoldenEye,” in which shields would be disabled and only magnums could be used; this resulted in a one-shot-instant-kill playstyle that relied on reaction-time and skill rather than hoarding power weapons. GoldenEye was very serious business often used to settle insipid disputes and one of the boys would usually end up stomping home in a huff afterwards.

Every flaw; every virtue; every vulnerability; every strength; every weakness – all would be revealed when dancing light reflected in the eyes of Arcadian youth.

*Lockout on the cathode-ray tube.

When the last slice of pizza was eaten and the bodies stopped respawning, and the boys got bored, they sneaked out of the backyard gate and walked to the neighborhood pool – which had closed hours ago. They swam chaotic before the neighbors called the police for noise ordinance violations, and when the police arrived, all they found were unused towels and a green shirt adorned with the words “The Smiths” – the only evidence left behind at the scene of the crime of Arcadian youth.

This was summer break in Arcadia between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. This was before cigarettes, before drugs, before alcohol, before nine-to-five, and before bills.

This was my time in Arcadia – my golden years.

I.II: The Arcadian Tribunal

Miles was a local youth of Arcadia and he was exalted.

Miles, also known as TauntButton, was younger than your not-so-humble narrator by only months. He lived three yards behind my grandma’s Arcadian summer-home. We met when I was ten years old; I ventured to the fishing pond behind grandma’s house and there he was sitting on a big rock with his tackle box: fishing.^#3 I asked if he wanted to play Super Smash Bros. and it was instant kinship.

Miles was of average height and had hair like a sifting pan full of gold with most of the dirt filtered out. His favorite song was “Helicopter” by Bloc Party.^#4 He was the most popular boy within a fifty-mile radius and seemed to be friends with the entire county and then-some. Lithe and handsome, Miles was built like a triathlon wonderkin. He could run up a tree without his hands and dunk a basketball with such force that the ball would burst at the seams. Late at night, when we played cops-and-robbers with the other neighborhood youth, Miles would hide in tall trees and never be found; I would lambaste this behavior, but he kept doing it out of pure contrarianism. He was charming and defiant in his own way. He had type-2 diabetes – the doctors said it was genetic – and he would prick himself with an insulin pen every few hours to charge up like a Sangheili energy shield; we would joke that he was shooting up heroin and this was peak comedy when sneaking-the-joke on those not-in-the-know.

Miles had a keen interest in computer games, but his parents were strict on the when-and-what; his mom wouldn’t let him play Super Smash Bros. because she believed it gave him nightmares; so he used my grandma’s house as a safe haven from his parents’ prying eyes. Miles’ parents would go on to claim that I corrupted him with rebellion and computer games, but our relationship was much deeper than that. I was different from his neighborhood friends, who were more interested in sports tournaments and fishing, and I was exotic by virtue of being a cynical nerd full of computer game and anime knowledge. I had just enough charm to be intriguing instead of creepy.

Miles was practical, outdoorsy, and naive but very curious. I was isolated, reclusive, cynical, and a know-it-all-while-knowing-very-little. Miles and I were opposite and magnetic, but we had one thing in common: we were contrary to the core, very competitive, and, most importantly, we were obsessed with each other.

*Arcadian fishing pond.

The third of the Arcadian Tribunal was Matt, also known as SupaSmallSlice.

Matt’s house shared a yard with my grandma’s summer home, a fact unknown until Miles and I stumbled upon him at the pond; he was fishing by himself, and – just like Miles – I asked him if he wanted to play computer games and it was instant kinship.

Matt was different; he was far less youthful than the rest of us, being four years older. Matt’s old age combined with his adamantine meekness gelled into a predatory aura that neither Miles nor myself picked up on immediately. Our youthful naivety paid off because Matt’s predatory aura never materialized into anything other than a very tall, slightly awkward-looking older boy just sort of standing there silently waiting for you to tell him what to do. Being alone with Matt was like playing host to a forever-bored-and-undecided person that would not leave because they were too coy to speak up; this was the primary reason I strived never to be alone with him.

Matt was the ultimate third wheel, someone for Miles and I to direct our adolescent rage and mockery toward. Whenever we wanted a third player in a computer game, we would get his attention by throwing rocks at his upstairs windows because we were scared of his father – a short, bulging man with a toad-like face that possessed the charisma of a goblin – opening the front door and killing us. Miles and I would secretly team up against Matt in Halo 2, and if Matt noticed, his meekness prevented him from telling us. If the tables turned and Miles or Myself teamed up with Matt: it was a good sign that some deeply extrasensory interpersonal angst was bubbling up in Arcadia.

Miles and I were unfair and cruel to Matt; we never treated him with the respect he deserved, something I regret because we were Matt’s only friends. Matt introduced us to Japanese Role-Playing Games, starting with Final Fantasy VIII, which threw us down a path of geekdom that we still travel to this day. Matt was always nice and polite and would do anything we asked of him; drive us to Wendy’s late at night or to the computer game store or the movie theater. Matt was forever eager to please, and perhaps this was due to the eldritch weirdness which prevented him from making friends his own age.

To these Arcadian youth, Matt was a sideshow, a freak, a weirdo; but he was our friend. And after years of friendship, my aunt – who eventually moved into my grandma’s home – would frequently ask Matt to babysit her teenage son.

And that completed the Arcadian Tribunal: Miles, Matt, and Myself.

But there was a fourth Arcadian youth, my aunt’s teenage son; my cousin.

Jake.

II: Et in Arcadia Insciens

“Drowning here in summer’s cauldron.” – Summer’s Cauldron by XTC, Skylarking (1986)^#5

II.I: Jake, Pongo, and Perdita

His life up until this point had been Pongo and Perdita, and when it flashed before his eyes he remained instinctual and unawares.

Every Tuesday night betwixt red maple and palm, Matt babysat Jake at my grandma’s Arcadian summer home. My aunt had just divorced and moved in with my grandma, bringing along her son, Jake; and since I only lived there during summers and Jake was now a permanent resident, my room was given to Jake, and I was moved to the porch. The porch had recently been remodeled into a makeshift bedroom, now covered in blackout curtains and the epileptic flashing of a Magnavox cathode-ray tube and the sounds of The Smiths’ “Louder Than Bombs” and occasionally John Mayer’s “Room for Squares” and The Strokes’ “Is This It?”

My aunt didn’t trust me to watch Jake, so she chose Matt instead – the older and more outwardly mature of the Arcadian Tribunal – and he was paid handsomely for his services. Miles and I sat in front of the Magnavox transfixed by dancing light while Matt was off making sure Jake wasn’t hurting himself with kitchen utensils or breaking glass on his head or smearing feces on the walls or urinating in grandma’s bed or wandering outside into oncoming traffic or removing his dirty diaper before hiding it somewhere that wouldn’t be discovered until weeks after it had permanently stunkified the house – which was already stunkified and only getting more stunkified by the day. The sounds of clapping, screaming, banging on the walls, and door slamming were cacophonous during these babysitting sessions as Jake made it clear he did not like being away from his mama.

The doctors said Jake was autistic; they said he had always been this way, but his mom insisted otherwise: “He was a normal baby before the vaccines – he was even saying words like ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ before those damn shots.”

Explaining Jake through vaccine conspiracy was easier to process than the truth, and in the end: it doesn’t even matter.^#6 Jake was Jake; he yelled, moaned, clapped, and enjoyed watching Disney films – and only Disney films – on repeat. There was nothing behind his eyes except complacency and primal rage in cycles, and if you handed him an Xbox controller, he would likely swing it – hard – into your face before clapping loudly and wandering off. Jake couldn’t speak a word, yet he was older than me by a year, incredibly handsome with a distinct pudginess to his face, blue-eyes-to-die-for, and dark waves of hair. Jake was the apple of many eyes – until he started screaming and taking his diaper off.

Jake was Arcadian and kin but impossible to connect with. The thought often crossed my mind: in an alternate universe, Jake would have been hoarding power weapons with us on Lockout, but instead: One Hundred and One Dalmatians one hundred and one times and counting.

*Pongo, Perdita, and pups transfixed by dancing light.

Jake lived in Arcadia unawares – but, maybe, we all did.

One thing was certain: this was it for Jake – all he would ever know. I accepted this about Jake; Miles accepted it; Matt accepted it. This acceptance brought us closer together. We were comfortable being around someone who smeared feces on walls; acceptance of this mental handicap was the measure-of-a-man in our Arcadia. The Arcadian Tribunal protected Jake; we loved Jake and he was exalted. And if Jake was too much for a person to handle: that person had a ways to go before they were allowed into our Arcadia – they were not even willing to step through the front door to begin with.

And on the topic of front doors …

II.II: Diaper Pyre

Jake would often open the front door and wander around lost in Arcadia, and because of this: his mom installed a second door ahead of the front door. The second door’s knob was installed backward, the locking mechanism was on the outside facing the elements, preventing Jake from unlocking the door from the inside and thus escaping into the Arcadian wilds. The Trick Door – as we would come to call it – would require some arm-contortionism to lock from the outside after you had already entered the home but before the door fully closed; this was followed by a quick twist on the doorknob from the inside to make sure it locked properly. This Trick Door Lock Procedure was a crucial courtesy when entering the home; a life-or-death version of taking your shoes off.

One warm Arcadian summer night, my aunt and grandma left the house – dancing – and Matt was babysitting Jake. Miles and I were tagging along, playing Halo 2, until Jake started slapping himself on the legs and moaning as a wet gurgling emanated from his lower half.

This was a portent; the warm summer night was about to become much warmer.

Jake had diarrhea – bad diarrhea – and it would not stop. Jake was flowing foul for what seemed like forever; diaper after diaper after diaper of filth. We started to panic as the three of us repeatedly exited the front door to dispose of diapers in the garbage and the trash cans were nearing maximum capacity and the smell – my god, the smell.

The Arcadian Tribunal was defeated – we didn’t know what to do.

Fifteen years old and full of foolish ideas: I suggested we burn the diapers in the backyard. This idea was met with great fanfare; like most jaded millennials, we had pyromaniacal urges that were waiting to be fulfilled, and this was the perfect excuse to fulfill them. We secured a lighter and some gasoline from the backyard and this was how we started down the path of flame.

We piled the dung-drenched Depends^#7 atop stray wood, poured gasoline all over, and tossed a burning piece of paper onto the uncontained pile of incredibly stupid ideas. The diapers burst into flames like the flared farts of a burning man. Stool flavored shit smoke escaped the confines of the backyard and spread a putridity so potent that it was a pox upon the entire neighborhood.

*Jackals and grunts huddle around bonfire of questionable origin.

The diapers burned in effigy to our intoxicating Arcadian innocence but, like youth, they didn’t burn for long; the gasoline and wood did most of the burning, and we quickly learned that diapers are mostly fireproof – most of the fecal matter burned away, the absorbent turned to mush, and the outer material had charred to black. We ended up exactly where we started, only now with a big ball of rancid goop.

Crickets and crackling were the only sounds penetrating the now-much-warmer Arcadian summer night.

Until Miles spoke up: “Where’s Jake?”

II.III: Wandering Around Lost

There was a boy drowning in emotions beyond his understanding; water filled his lungs while he flailed wildly in the ankle-deep waters of a kiddie pool.

I could see a nervous smile forming on Matt’s face – it dawned on him that he had defaulted on babysitting duties in pursuit of pyromania and he was visibly distraught behind his eldritch weirdness. “I’ll go check on him,” Matt said as he stood from his chair and made a beeline for the patio door.

My mind was preoccupied with figuring out how to explain the rat-king of warm diaper goop to my grandma and aunt, but also with Miles’ simple question repeating in my mind. And due to a certain incident involving girls in middle school, I had developed a sixth sense for calamity that was often way-off-the-mark,^#8 but I was feeling it now and it felt like bullseye. The gastrointestinal black hole, reminiscent of a trust-fall with someone you wouldn’t trust at all, grew as I watched Miles prod charred fecal matter with a stick. The feeling of doom grew so strong that I stood up and followed Matt into the house to check on Jake myself.

As I entered the back porch, Halo 2 was idling on the campaign section we had left idle in favor of pyrotechnics and a soldier kept repeating, “At this rate, we’re never gonna win this war!” and this transfixed me briefly until Matt approached me with a look of Holy Terror painted across his face. He said two words: “Jake’s gone.”

My transfixation broken – “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

Matt’s timbre trembled in barely-contained panic, “The door’s unlocked. I checked everywhere.”

My aunt’s worst fear was becoming reality; Jake was wandering around lost in the Arcadian wilds. My eyes grew wide at the very thought, “Who was the last to go out the front door?” My teenage brain instantly jumped to the blame-game as to proactively deflect punishment from myself when my aunt arrived home and realized her son was missing.

Then Miles walked in – looking smooth as always – only to see us standing there arguing about who left the door unlocked. “What’s up?” Miles said, only to be met with the faces of the might-as-well-be-dead. “Jake’s gone, isn’t he?” He said without a shred of fear in his voice, “well he couldn’t have made it far, let’s go look for him.”

My aunt and grandma wouldn’t get home for another hour, so maybe we could fix this before anyone noticed – maybe we could find Jake ourselves.

We wouldn’t bother to check the neighborhood pool because it was locked at eight o’clock and would require Jake to climb over a fence to get in – something he couldn’t do. And it was doubtful that Jake would get hit by a car, as it was late and there weren’t many cars out at this time of night. The worst possibility was that Jake fell into the pond and drowned, but the pond was shallow, and if he had fallen in, we should be able to drag him out before he hurt himself – if the neighborhood crocodile didn’t get to him first.

We decided to take a three-pronged approach. Miles would check the fishing pond; if Jake fell in, Miles was the most well equipped to get him out. Matt would rev up his Toyota Celica and drive every side-street and cul-de-sac; if Jake was wandering the roads, Matt would find him. I would go through a side-path near the house that led to a playground; Jake loved going there so maybe he wandered there instinctively.

*Night; Arbiter searches the Arcadian fishing pond; clubhouse and pool seen in the distance.

But it was hopeless – each path was a dead end, and Jake was nowhere to be found.

The Arcadian Tribunal came full circle and regrouped betwixt red maple and palm; defeated and dejected. The soldier on the Magnavox repeated the words, “At this rate, we’re never gonna win this war!” before I forcefully silenced him by kicking the power button on the Xbox – the games were over, and my aunt would be home any minute now, and then my life would be over too. I would be banished from Arcadia forever.

Matt suggested we call the police. The police would illuminate Arcadia with flashlights and find the missing boy within minutes but then our paradise would crumble and the game would truly be over.

As if living in a ‘90s slasher-film, I decided for us: we would not be calling the police, at least not yet. “I’m going to check the pool,” I said after a round of thoughtful pacing – my words were deflated and blue but belayed a sense of seriousness that was rare in these parts of Arcadia.

“Matt, stay here – if they get home before us, try to keep them distracted; say Jake’s asleep in his room or something.” I said as I scoured for a flashlight in a nearby cabinet. Matt’s eldritch awkwardness would deflect any suspicion as it made him impossible to read even when lying, and he was immediately amiable – as always.

“Miles, come with me; I’m going to need you to jump the fence and unlock the gate.” Miles was contrary as usual, “What’s the point? The gate’s locked – no way Jake could climb that fence.” I found the flashlight then glared at him with a graveness he had never seen from me before, and as I made my way toward the patio door, Miles followed suit without a word.

Spontaneously, the plan had taken form, and I strode out of the backyard with a feigned confidence so convincing that I appeared like the leader of an Arcadian Battle Regiment or: The Arcadian Youth League.

Miles and I had to travel through four yards, around the rim of the fishing pond, and over a fence to get to the clubhouse pool. I flicked on my flashlight as we crept through the verdant alley between my grandma’s house and Matt’s house. A black cat ran from one bush to the next. It looked like Chips, my grandma’s rescue, but I couldn’t be sure. Through our creeping, we made it beyond the second yard, but the third house had an open yard with a dog pacing back and forth. I took a gamble and bolted across the edge. The yard was on the border of the fishing pond, and I was so focused on not falling into the water that my foot snagged a root, and my flashlight went flying into the air, and my face went headfirst into the dog’s dominion.

Miles yelled something out as he caught up with me and grabbed at my shirt, but it was too late; the dog had arrived. There was no barking, no snarling, only wetness on my cheek followed by a thick layer of slobber. The dog was licking my face and wagging their tail. I got to my knees and cupped the dog’s head in my hands; it looked like a Golden Retriever in the summer moonlight, and I pet the dog’s head before nudging them away. The dog sauntered off into a nearby shadow and returned with something thick in their mouth – a bone? No, it was my flashlight; the glass was broken, and the switch was in the off position, but it still turned on when flicked, albeit with the flashlight equivalent of a whimper: a flicker. I pointed the cone of light at the dog – a Golden Retriever, confirmed – and then to Miles, who was standing there with a blank look on his face: “Are you the dog whisperer or something?”

*Jake’s home in Arcadia.

We took the incident with the dog as a sign of good fortune and crept with newfound confidence through the final yard. We made it to the clubhouse and walked toward the pool courtyard gate. I felt a nudge on my leg and looked down; it was the dog. They followed us. I patted the dog on the head and gave them a “Good dog” and then placed my hand on the top of the gate. “Alright, Miles, go ahead and –” I paused as the gate slowly opened with just a gentle touch.

Miles and I looked at each other, our eyes widening in revelation. Someone forgot to lock the gate – just like we forgot to lock the Trick Door.

All three of us rushed into the poolside courtyard and looked around frantically. I circled the edge of the pool, shining my flashlight into the water, but there was nothing except pennies and pool toys. Then the dog raised their wet nose to the sky and sniffed with purpose before bolting off into a corner of the courtyard consumed by dense shadow.

Miles and I followed the dog with purpose. The flashlight was dimming but still caused shadows to shiver and flee with some hesitation. Once we got close enough, we saw the dog standing on the edge of a kiddie pool, extending their head over the water as if signaling at something with their nose. I pointed my flashlight beyond the dog’s snout, and that’s when I saw it.

Jake’s body; floating; eyes closed and moonward. He was naked, and a diaper was floating near his head. The leaked contents of the diaper contaminated the waters around him. There was a gloom in the gravity so powerful that it stopped the Earth’s rotation.

The dog whimpered. Miles was staring at the frozen Earth beneath him. There were no words. He slowly removed his phone from his pocket and handed it to me – “you do it.” Neither of us knew CPR, so it was the only option. I nodded solemnly and started dialing the three numbers we had been avoiding this whole time.

But just then, there was a cough. I stopped dialing and looked over to Miles. “Are you fucking with me?” I glowered. But no, there was another cough, the sound of disturbed waters, and a moan like the moan of a boy obsessed with Pongo and Perdita. I swung the flashlight toward the kiddie pool, and there he was in all his naked glory.

He clapped loudly while walking circles in the ankle-deep waters of the kiddie pool, and his manhood swung wild like the wind. Jake was alive. Miles and I turned to each other, both stupefied, and we started laughing louder than we had ever laughed before.

When the laughter stopped, I grabbed Jake’s wrist and led him out of the courtyard. Before exiting through the gate, Miles turned to me and said, “hey, where did that dog go?”

The dog was gone, and as we returned home through the yards of Arcadia, the Golden Retriever was nowhere to be found.

III. Mea Aurea Annos

“The only thing true is nothing can last.” – My Golden Years by The Lemon Twigs, A Dream Is All We Know (2024)^#9

Betwixt red maple and palm sits a man in his thirties incensed by dancing light.

When I decided to replay Halo 2 in January of 2024, it was because I wanted to prove to Miles – and my younger self – that I could beat the game on Legendary difficulty – something I was never able to do during My Time in Arcadia. And when the marine in Chapter 1 said, “standard formation – little bastards up front, big ones in back”,^#10 I knew I was in for a ride, and for a moment, I was sixteen again.

I soon found out that Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty is an ouroboros affair of trial-and-error and pure rage. Every encounter is death, and every respawn only takes you a centimeter closer to victory. If it had bonfires, character builds, and a third-person perspective, it would be Dark Souls – just far more frustrating and tedious and just not fun at all. Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty is only two weapons – the Plasma Pistol and the Battle Rifle – because everything else is a pea-shooter that doesn’t do sufficient shield damage; without the Plasma Pistol, every enemy turns into a minute-long bullet-sponge demonspawn that actively casts hair-loss magic on the player through the monitor; and since the Plasma Pistol can’t actually kill anything, the Battle Rifle has to be on swap to finish the job. Halo 2 on Legendary is why male-pattern baldness exists. Halo 2 on Legendary is why I pray for early onset Alzheimer’s so I can forget about all the time I wasted charging up Plasma Pistols and game-overing to grunts because every enemy has perfect aim and the jackals – my god – the jackals.

Alzheimer’s – that’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Just forgetting. Arcadia, lost…

If I were a masochist, I would consider Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty to be the greatest computer game of all time.

I did complete Halo 2 on Legendary, but I had no fun doing it – so why did I actually do it?

The truth is: when I decided to replay Halo 2 in January of 2024, it was because I wanted to be on the porch-turned-bedroom in front of the Magnavox. I wanted to hear my autistic cousin clapping and groaning behind the sounds of warp and whoosh. I wanted Miles and Matt to walk through my office door and sit down next to me as if no time had passed at all. I wanted to see the fishing pond through the eyes of sixteen-years-old. I wanted to return to Arcadia – my golden years.

It’s not just me – I see it everywhere. The computer game community, especially, is full of people just like me, obsessed with their youth – ignoring the present.

Nostalgia trespasses our minds like children with flashlights; highlighting the good, leaving the bad covered in shadow. So many of my preferences are formed from nostalgia’s sweet embrace, and I can point to the exact moment that I am trying to recreate each time. The existence of this essay is evidence of the fact that I am obsessed with the past; I could have written about my daughter, or my son, or my wife, but no – it’s not nostalgic enough yet. They say midlife crisis kicks in between the ages of forty and sixty, but it feels like I have a midlife crisis every day. And every time I try to recreate these treasured experiences, the magic becomes less potent – the feeling slips further away, and the thing is a little more bastardized than it once was.

My childhood is wandering around lost, and I am in the dark with a dying flashlight looking for Jake.

*Master Chief overlooks fading Arcadia.

Miles went to college for mechanical engineering. He works in an automobile factory now. Occasionally, I still play computer games with him online, and we talk on Discord. He’s still into anime and computer games – maybe because of my influence. We live multiple states apart, and our friendship isn’t nearly as strong, but every time we talk, one of the stories in this essay inevitably comes up. I went to his wedding back in 2018. I don’t think his wife has ever liked me.

Matt moved back in with his parents; the same house in the same room with the same window we used to throw rocks at. Matt hasn’t changed much, if anything: his weirdness is even more eldritch than ever before. He’s gone from ultra-fit to mirroring his father to somewhere in-between, and he’s still as meek as ever. It seems like I’m still his only friend, as every time I visit my grandma’s house, he’s up there in his room. I’m not scared of his dad anymore. I walk right in and go upstairs, and there’s Matt: sitting in front of a few computer monitors playing old episodes of Quantum Leap while peculiar new-age music plays softly in the background and incense form a thick smoke throughout the room. It’s all very Lovecraftian, but my aunt still trusts him enough to let him drive my grandma to her ballroom dancing every Tuesday night.

My grandma can’t drive anymore – she has Alzheimer’s disease now.

And Jake, he still lives in Arcadia unawares. Clapping, moaning, taking his diaper off, and watching Pongo and Perdita. But one day, he too will change just like the rest of us. The doctors say his condition will only get worse – he’ll start forgetting; one day, he won’t even know who his mama is. But that’s not so different from everyone else – is it? Alzheimer’s: Arcadia just slipping away.

Some say the only thing true is nothing can last; everything fades away and nothing is forever. If the only thing true is nothing can last – then maybe we should treat every year like our golden years; maybe we should live in the moment.

This essay exists not only to wallow in nostalgia, but also to chronicle my life – in case I forget.

This essay will function as a Golden Retriever in the dark.

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Footnotes:

#1. https://youtu.be/GG1ZYByvfqQ #2. https://youtu.be/4bMoHIllZOc #3. https://oncomputer.games/2023/04/25/tactics-ogre-reborn-ruminations-on-resentment-regret-and-retribution/ #4. https://youtu.be/2R6S5CJWlco #5. https://youtu.be/3DRUnkkjkds #6. https://youtu.be/eVTXPUF4Oz4 #7. https://www.depend.com/en-us/incontinence-products/protection-with-tabs #8. https://onpopmusic.com/2023/11/26/no-disc-1998-seatbelts/ #9. https://youtu.be/jnylB5ylyw4 #10. https://halo.bungie.org/misc/h2dialogue/marines/cairo_littlebastards.mp3

—

(Originally published on 2/11/2024)

#ComputerGames #Autobiographical #Halo2

I: Vivec as Computer Game – Toonami’s Official Review – Contextualizing Soul Sickness

“I watch. I wonder. I build. I tear down. Am I a god? As surely as any are.” ― Sotha Sil

In the beginning there were four Gods Among Men and Mer: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, Vivec, and Dagoth Ur; five if YOU are considered: the reader, the player, the Nerevarine, the everything, or the fool. For the benefit of the potential Nerevarine, we will cover – in some short detail – the computer game in which they will be participating: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind; a computer game designed to be as hostile to new players as mechanically possible, with role-playing systems that require forty-page manuals to be understood resulting in the first twenty-hours of play being slow crawls across all-brown-landscape and visibly striking rats yet missing-with-whoosh because easily-frangible-character-building and hidden-dice-rolls that do not belong in role-playing-games-that-are-actually-action-games are all working against you and the manual was much too long to hold your smartphone-addled attention span much like every article in this publication.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a bait and switch of counterintuitive yet highly ambitious narrative and gameplay structures handcrafted by a team hellbent on creating the most immersive computer game experience to ever grace the post-Y2K world; a herculean effort manifesting as the blueprint for all Bethesda games to date, including – as of 2024 – Starfield. The team behind Morrowind included the now renowned Todd “It Just Works” Howard on leadership duties,^#1 batshit insane Michael “I’m Going to Shoot You” Kirkbride on pens and papers,^#2 and ex-professional composer Jeremy “I Didn’t Rape Those Women” Soule on strings^#3; a tribunal of talent lifted by a team of equally talented developers too long to list here.^#4

Morrowind is dualistic in every sense of the word, combining the stats and skills and dice rolls and massive-open-world and pseudo-action-combat and first-person-perspective of 1996s The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall with postmodern ideations such as “Just Walking Around for Hours Thinking About CHIM and Looking at Giant Insects and Sunsets and Stuff” and forever-getting-lost and reading-books-in-game and a one-of-a-kind setting complete with lore so complicated that it can only be described in 950,000 words. Morrowind’s marriage of old and new results in a computer game with one foot in the past and one foot in the future and a third foot six-feet-deep in the grave and a fourth foot approaching timeless resplendence simply by creative-virtue of being Super Mario and Doom and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and Frank Herbert’s Dune simultaneously; a polymelia of contradictions and every duality known to Men and Mer that rivals the true nature of Vivec: miserable-merriment that is uniquely-derivative and violently-nonviolent and excitingly-boring and genuinely-fake and supersmart-superstupid and you get the point that there is no point.

Duality persists as Morrowind is the hardest-computer-game-ever and also a complete-clown-show because you broke everything within the first hour using alchemical exploits so simple that it is astounding they made it out of playtesting. The presence of a generous difficulty-slider is tacit admittance of the Bethesda team’s dedication to a balancing philosophy of “who actually gives a fuck” with the clear implication being to turn the difficulty to zero at the start of the game because you-definitely-did-not-build-your-character-properly-and-keep-getting-brained-by-bandits to maxing it out three hours later because you are now levitating at over one-hundred-miles-per-hour slaughtering every enemy in one hit after drinking fifty potions and some skooma. It is no secret that Morrowind is not balanced but it has no reason to be because it is a single-player computer game about vibes.

*hardest clown-show nightmare daydream rat Toonami Vivec or: Morrowind

Morrowind’s duality leaks into the material realm where two types of people compete in a never-ending tug-of-war between “this is the most boring shit I have ever played and I keep dying to rats” and “this is the greatest computer game ever conceived and I am also really smart.” This love-it-or-hate-it dualism is demonstrated in Toonami’s 2002 review of Morrowind in which TOM and SARA argue over the merits of walking around for days to reach objectives – granted: SARA was playing the game wrong – and combat tedium ad nauseam captured in less than two-minutes between Goku going Super Saiyan 3 and Skechers advertisements.

SARA: There’s a main quest where you’re some sort of savior, but there are also 400 mini quests … and the continent you’re on is so huge, it will literally take days to get somewhere if your character’s on foot.

TOM: What fun is that?

SARA: That’s not the point … It’s an incredibly realistic and detailed world!

TOM: Is the fighting fun, at least? Because that looks really boring.

SARA: Well, not really … and it will take so long to finish the game that you might not care to finish it.

TOM: I don’t care right now.

―Toonami: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game Review^#5

Morrowind’s dedication to freedom and character building – or breaking, depending on your perspective – creates a freeform experience opposite the typical 2000s computer game where clear objectives are just a quest-marker away; however, clear objectives do exist if the Nereverine cares enough to read paragraphs of maze-like directions and books littering every corner of the world. Still, Morrowind will not force the player to care about any of this; instead, one has to want to care and carefully maintain that care over hundreds of hours of playtime which is nigh-impossible for the average person – like reading a novel in full or turning off the iPhone – because we are living in an age of Soul Sickness so profound.

To fully explain the main themes of this essay while making it relevant to computer games – the supposed topic of this publication – some context is required; and while I will do no justice to the worldbuilding and lore of Morrowind – which was conceived by extraterrestrials-on-space-dope and can only be truly experienced firsthand – I intend only to provide the necessary background to supplement some serious psychic shit later on.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is set on the island of Vvardenfell located in the Tamerelic province of Morrowind. Vvardenfell is an isle of isles linked by giant mushrooms that the Mario brothers would be envious of, storms of stinging-red-dust, cities made from giant dead crabs, too-much-brown, and a big volcano – the Red Mountain – smack dab in the middle of it all. The Dunmer, or the Dark Elves, populate the province but are open to outsiders – which they call “outlanders” – as long as these outlanders follow the Dunmer customs of unbridled capitalism, sanctioned slavery, foul murder syndicates, and – the primary custom – honoring the Tribunal; a triumvirate of Living Gods: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, and Vivec – ALMSIVI.

These Living Gods of Men and Mer once walked amongst the people of Morrowind: curing the sick, creating life, and halting meteors in their tracks but now, in the 427th year of the 3rd era, they lock themselves in grand temples situated within sprawling eponymous cities. The Tribunal’s reclusiveness coincides with an ill wind of sick blowing from the Red Mountain and the erection of a gigantic containment fence surrounding the source of the blight; the fence is powered by the souls of dead Dunmer and appropriately dubbed “The Ghostfence” and its power has waned over the last hundred years and now the blight-storms spread a Soul Sickness so profound that the population turns weak and stupid and violent in that order.

*Dunmer ferryman covering his face from the Soul Sickness

Amidst the intrigue, whispers of Dagoth Ur – the Devil or the Enemy or the Mad God – staging a return, coupled with the prophetic auguries heralding the reincarnation of the ancient hero Nerevar – the Nerevarine or the YOU or the fool – ignites strife and zealous persecution across all of Morrowind. Dagoth Ur, dwelling within the Red Mountain, is the source of this Soul Sickness, using the blight to fashion an army of unquestioning adherents – zombies both philosophical and physical – intent on seizing dominion over all of Tamriel. The intricacies of Dagoth Ur’s motivations are told in cryptic text that do not require full explanation here; what does warrant emphasis, however, is Dagoth Ur’s utilization of a divine relic left behind from the time of creation – the still beating heart of the bona fide god Lorkhan – to secure immortality for himself and fuel the Soul Sickness; consequently, this divine artifact also powers ALMSIVI and Dagoth Ur’s meddling with the heart has resulted in a waning of the Tribunal’s power and has returned ALMSIVI to mortal status; these events culminate in the Tribunal’s seclusion and using the leftover scraps of their fraudulent power to maintain the Ghostfence lest their divinity be called into question by the faithful.

For the people of Tamriel: there exist no Living Gods, merely Living Lies; and Toonami, in its boundless wisdom, bestowed upon The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind a solid eight out of ten – so let’s go with that.

II: The Magician – SI – Binding Daedra One-By-One

“Curiosity is an odd thing. It is a bright path surrounded by brambles.” ― Sotha Sil

The Magician toils deep in thrones of weird clockwork nestled within recesses of Oblivion far from violence and vicious and verve; binding demons that plague the souls of Men and Mer; stopping to think when lemniscate dominoes fall back upon their source. The question: Does the body rule the mind or the mind rule the body? And the ability to ask it, like a nascent flash that produces perfect works; this spark that molds sodium ash cannot be captured in bottles of glass. And yet we pretend.

The Magician is The Intellect; the creator of steel and rope and wheel and press and compass and battery and lamp and fabricant and Wi-Fi and phone. The Magician manipulates the material world for the betterment of Men and Mer but the true nature of the material remains unknown to us. And yet we pretend.

But the Clockwork God does not pretend.

Of course, we speak of the SI in ALMSIVI: Sotha Sil; the Clockwork King of the Three in One who made pacts with Daedra to stop their mortal-meddling and gave counsel to all in the ways of sorcery, craft, and philosophy. The Father of Mysteries truly loved his people most, for he not only provided the knowledge to craft as he crafts but also crafted invention after invention solely for the betterment of Men and Mer. He observed the divine Heart of Lorkhan and engineered it backwards for harmony on Nirn.

*a shrine dedicated to the Inspiration of Craft and Sorcery

Sotha Sil represents The Intellect and Creation, and the deep introspection that comes with those two things, which only result in True Love For All except oneself. The Tinkerer’s ascension to Godhood was accompanied by a profound sadness, as he knew the means of his own divinity and deemed himself unfit; divine only by time and circumstance or what mortals, who do not understand how the dominoes fall, would call luck. And he does not pretend otherwise.

Sotha Sil is the force that drives Men and Mer to create hulking apartment complexes that house humans into the heavens and sodium lights that illuminate midnight walks and tubes filled with wires that send information across continents and automobiles powered by dead dinosaurs that drive over four hundred miles without stopping and mechanical birds that travel across great oceans and automated death machines that provide food en masse and free encyclopedias that offer all the answers and liquid-crystal displays beamed with information from satellites-on-high that keep us entertained and vaccines crafted from pathogens that save millions of lives and computer games that immerse you in other worlds and very-weird-waves carrying signals that keep us jacked-in and assembly lines of robotic arms to ensure this keeps going and going and going much like this run-on sentence.

Sotha Sil is why on computer games exists and we exist immortal in our creations which are the new Gods of Men and Mer.

Soon we will sit back and relax forever and the data proclaims it good; since the industrial revolution: abject poverty is the lowest it has ever been^#6 and literacy rates have skyrocketed^#7 and average life expectancy has doubled^#8 and access to healthcare has increased across the planet^#9 and the Daedra are being bound one-by-one.

All the while: Wikipedia provides the answers. Netflix provides the entertainment. And Bethesda provides The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

But something is missing; something is profoundly wrong.

III: The Belt Test – The Enemy – The Soul Sickness Is in the Wi-Fi

“But beneath Red Mountain, Dagoth Ur had survived. And even as the light of our bold new world shined ever more brightly, beneath Red Mountain, the darkness gathered, a darkness that was close kin to the bright light that Sotha Sil coaxed from the Heart of Lorkhan.” — Vivec

Nirn. 427th year, 3rd Era. A red dust blows through Vvardenfell, spreading a Soul Sickness so profound that it turns all who breathe it into mindless thralls of The Enemy, Dagoth Ur.

Earth. December 9th, 2023. My daughter is testing for her green belt at Premier School for Martial Arts off the spur near Walmart and the Mormon-owned Crumbl Cookie that will not make coffee-cookies due to conflicts of faith.^#10 The dojo teaches Krav Maga and kickboxing and forces my young daughter to log off Roblox and socialize with children who exist beyond the glass.

My daughter is judged by the head karate instructor, David, through a series of trials: sprinting and push-ups and sit-ups and forms and sparring and grab escapes. I watch intently as my daughter spars with another young girl. In my pocket, a balding man clad in a black turtleneck taunts me – nay, society – from the grave, his parting gift to the world: the smartphone, like the nicotinic urge to nail one in the coffin but with no foreign chemicals required. I resist for this special occasion but the calling is ever present.

The challenger throws an uppercut that crunches into my daughter’s jaw and topples her instantly. I burst and rush to the edge of the mat, but my daughter signals me away; she has recovered and, just like that, she is back up and sparring more aggressively than she has ever sparred before. Her cross connects twice and her jab thrice and the instructor calls it and she passes the trial.

A short frumpy boy has crumbled like a Mormon cookie in the corner; he is holding back serious tears. I did not see what happened but it was significant. Earlier, I saw this boy and his father – an equally frumpy man hiding baldness behind a backwards cap – which I noted like Sherlock Holmes would note the solar system: mostly irrelevant but filed somewhere in there. I considered the frumpy boy’s potential waterworks and turned my attention toward his father who was sitting on a bench nearby with one leg propped up on his knee and one hand resting pontifical on his chin and his face all aglow with blue electrolight. He was pretending to be hyper focused on something very important but the black-turtleneck-man had taken the father completely and he was being sucked into the rectangular glow.

*Pictured: Dagoth Ur and his thrall

My brave little one was first in line when it came time for the final trial: grab escapes. A senior student – red belt or higher – tasked with grabbing each child from behind in a bear-hug, playing a kidnapper role, and the children must free themselves from the hold. My daughter and I had practiced escaping this grab but the instructors added something new without notice: lifting the children off their feet, as a kidnapper would likely do before shoving kids into ice-cream-trucks-full-of-bones.

My daughter stepped up and closed her eyes; the instructor wrapped his strong arms around my daughter’s waist and she did all the steps correctly: stomp on the attacker’s foot and slam the attacker’s hands and twist her body as she pushed. But when the instructor started lifting her off the ground, she became visibly startled and looked out to me for guidance. I gave her a thumbs up and flailed my arms as a hint and she got the point because she started convulsing wildly in the instructor’s arms. The instructor could not contain her and dropped her to the mat and she passed the final trial. My daughter walked proudly to the end of the mat and sat herself down criss-cross applesauce and beaming.

Next up was the frumpy boy. He stepped meekly to the middle of the mat with a confused smile on his face that indicated a blankness so profound that one immediately knew this boy was raised on a diet of locked-doors and Nickelodeon. The boy gulped so obviously it was audible as the instructor wrapped their arms around the boy’s waist. The boy clumsily attempted a foot stomp and missed; he tried to punch into the attacker’s clasped hands but ended up hitting himself in the crotch, which was followed by a cross-eyed-and-painful expression lighting up the boy’s face like the glow on his father’s visage when I looked over to him, expecting – naively – for some sort of fatherly reaction. There was nothing. The instructor then lifted the frumpy boy off his feet into the air; the boy swung back and forth like a fish who had given up on escaping the hook, just sort of swinging there with that confused Nickelodeon-smile still painting his face. The boy was not on the verge of tears like before but, instead, what appeared to be the edge of transcendence due to sensory overload and unfathomable humiliation; the boy turned off entirely, and I thought to myself, ‘that’s certainly one way to achieve CHIM.’

The embarrassment could have been a mist in the room so I looked over to the boy’s father, but nothing had changed; the father never once looked up from his weird-little-square. The instructors saw me staring at the father and only shook their heads, not at me but with me; they felt it too. The father was physically there but his mind was elsewhere and I wanted to know where in elsewhere he was; it must have been the light of heaven illuminating his face as what else could tear a man away from his child? Curiosity got the better of me and – trying my hardest to seem cool and natural – I stood up and walked toward the father’s bench to catch a glimpse of the source of illumination on his face and that’s when I saw it. It was just an anime gambling game. Honkai: Star Rail, or something.

This guy was swiping through busty cartoon women while his son was getting his ass beat.

The locals of Vvardenfell call those afflicted by the Soul Sickness “dreamers” or “ash slaves,” but on Earth, we just call them “bad parents.” But that’s too easy; there’s something much worse going on here.

Sotha Sil has imbibed us with The Intellect to create, and collectively, we have done so; we have created so much good and the numbers are going up and the Daedra are being bound one-by-one. But the entertainment overload that we have created – naively in our pursuit of happiness – is too much for our mortal brains to handle. Things that were once novelty are now so easily accessible that they have become mundane and we are bored. We must find the new novelty to flip into the mundane and we are never satisfied. These weird-little-squares that beam digital information into our brains destroy our attention spans^#11 and this futile recursive search for endless novelty sucks the light from our eyes and replaces it artificial. The cubes connect us in the digital-social and we crave endless attention and entertainment because we are just so bored; we endlessly compare ourselves to people who do not even know we exist and we are left feeling empty and alone and never-measuring-up.^#12 We ignore our families because time is immaterial when Looking at Phones and that potential novelty is just one swipe away and The Intellect is fading fast.

The Soul Sickness is in the Wi-Fi and we are all slowly but surely becoming slaves of Dagoth Ur.

III: The MySpace – VI – The Liar

“Vivec craves radical freedom – the death of all limits and restrictions. He wishes to be all things at all times. Every race, every gender, every hero, both divine and finite… but in the end, he can only be Vivec.” — Sotha Sil

The World Wide Web of Mephala – or The Internet – became available to Men and Mer in 1991. Digital God of Everythings. The spinner’s web of data originally connected through telephone lines with ear-splitting screeches, like those of long-tailed cliff-racers during mating season, but now the Digital God exists all around us within invisible-and-very-weird-waves.

The Internet was The Tinkerer’s greatest invention, linking all Men and Mer, and information flowed like never before: scientific research, theflatearthsociety.org, financial records, pictures of feet, job opportunities, snuff videos, epic literature, scat porn, and so much more. This massive interconnected computer network not only allows us to share factual information but also complete falsehoods and, perhaps the most prolific of all its mystical powers, the ability for anyone to become anything as long as someone else is willing to believe it.

Thus is the duality of The Internet: truth and fraud, wholesome and profane, modern and postmodern; miserable-merriment that is uniquely-derivative and violently-nonviolent and excitingly-boring and genuinely-fake and supersmart-superstupid or: Vivec.

And on August 1, 2023, The Tinkerer bestowed upon us the MySpace.

MySpace was birthed from the Womb of Good Intentions on August 1, 2003, and has been the worst thing to happen to humanity ever since. OK – maybe not the worst thing,^#13 but certainly up there for the amount of psychic shit it has unleashed upon Men and Mer. MySpace spun off into a legion of horribles forever altering how we interact with each other: Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and the legion continues to multiply to this very day. This legion is collectively known as ‘Social Media’ and, in true Vivecian fashion, is just as antisocial as it is social; in fact, it is the most antisocial thing in existence and the number one spreader of Soul Sickness across the realms.

On Social Media, identity rules all; you can be a seventy-two-year-old-eighteen-year-old and a man-mer-woman-cat-tanuki-hybrid-time-traveler and a nazi-white-nationalist-communist-truck-driver-otaku, and labels are very important. Identity is everything, and you will find an audience who sees your labels as High Truth; and thus it is perpetuated. You might argue, in your postmodern way, that this is truth – for what is truth, really? – but when the morning sun captures your eyes and the crust you rubbed-out turns into dust that clogs your air-filter, what are you really? Is the true YOU the you-when-none-are-watching or, maybe, the culmination of all the tales you tell – truthful or nay?

I can only speak from experience; having lived both before and during the MySpace singularity; and before MySpace, people seemed happier and more productive and you would get punched in the face for obvious falsehoods – but now, you are celebrated because no one can tell what’s real anymore; and sometimes: that’s OK, but other times: it’s anorexia.

During a brief period in the early 2000s, sixth-grade, I was an anorexic ‘scenester’ who wore skinny jeans and only listened to ‘screamo’ and ‘hardcore’ bands. I was obsessed with micro-internet-celebrities like Jeffree Star and bands with gorgeous frontmen like Davey Havok, and I wanted to be a MySpace celebrity. For this brief period, this was my counterculture; my rebellion; my everything.

Armed with a Dell Dimension-something-or-other and a massive teenage ego, I submerged myself in pure psychic shit, comparing myself to all my fake internet friends who had cool haircuts and very small wrists, and I wanted to be just like them. I had to be thin and beautiful. My self-worth was linked to the number of friends displayed on my MySpace profile and the number of likes and tags I received, and it was never enough. I projected the image of an all-natural boy-beauty when, in actuality, it was all a trick of light and concealer. In MySpace photos, I had skin as fair as a bishonen, but in reality, my face was a disturbed hill of fire ants. My selfies displayed the grand-and-intoxicating-innocence of someone with very-interesting-things-going-on, but in reality, I was playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live twelve hours a day between furiously clicking the refresh button in Internet Explorer and not eating and passing out when I stood up. I was a fraud or: a normal teenage kid whose identity was everything, and the internet allowed me to be whatever I wanted to be as long as I could trick my audience into believing the lie. I had a small following of scenester-faithful who egged me on and I fed on their praise – not unlike the Magic Hermaphrodite, Vivec.

*Vivec has reached CHIM and escaped the browser – or have they?

Vivec floats crossed and lotus, penning poetic tales of his divine birth, heroic exploits, supreme intellect, and boundless wisdom. He proclaims herself everything at once; a God and Goddess simultaneously. He proclaims himself Zen. But what Vivec won’t tell you is that he murdered his best friend, Nerevar, for just a taste of this divine power and lost it thousands of years later when his foul murder caught up with him; he also won’t tell you that he’s using a simple levitation spell – easily purchased at the local Mage’s Guild – to float lotus for those he deems worthy to visit him. Vivec is an egomaniac; she is a fraud; she is everything-fake-zen. She is the type of fraud that will tell you she is a fraud as tricky evidence that she is, in fact, not a fraud. Vivec claims to be outside-of-reality and aware-of-absolutely-everything – he calls this CHIM, the secret syllable of royalty – but he sits tangible within his temple behind a level-100 lock.

We are all little Vivecs; great pretenders.

Sixth-grade-me persists in the mortal soul and social media has highlighted the Soul Sickness more than anything else. I could provide links to profiles and videos and horror-stories numbering thousands but you – the reader – have seen it all. You know; we all know. You have seen goblins masquerading as angels on YouTube. You have swiped through hundreds of photos of some equally-fraudulent-loser wishing you were them because they seem to have everything-figured-out and really-big-numbers. In our pursuit of validation we are twerking on TikTok for hearts. There are ten-year-olds twerking on TikTok. There are fifty-year-olds twerking on TikTok. There are parents watching ten-year-olds twerk on TikTok while their children are locked in their rooms twerking on TikTok.

Sixth-grade-me is no longer a cautionary tale – it is the tale.

Sotha Sil, in his love for all, created what he thought was a benevolent tool; Dagoth Ur co-opted this tool to spread the Soul Sickness, and in our desire to be little Vivecs, we have succumbed to the Soul Sickness hardcore like MySpace in 2004.

But what is the root cause? The ALM in ALMSIVI holds the key.

IV: Give Me Validation or – ALM – Will Kill You

“She believes her tales implicitly. As does everyone else. Her capacity for deception appears limitless. She sows lies like a master gardener sows seeds, and the harvest of trust and adulation is breathtaking in scope.” — Sotha Sil

She lifts her phone to the heavens, enables the front-facing camera, and sucks her cheeks in for the angles; she believes no one knows she does the-cheek-thing but has no awareness of her own transparency. She tells Alexa to play her favorite song – “Never Lose Me” by Flo Milli^#14 – as she presses the record button. She starts singing along and cafunes her own bright-red locks as if seducing herself while the weird-little-square captures her in all her sucked-cheek autosexual glory. She cannot lip sync worth a damn but has no awareness of her own failures and believes her tales implicitly. When the recording is done, she sits on the couch with her face buried in glow and fiddles with the lighting and filters to remove the blemishes from her face, adds some cool-shaky-camera-effects to the ending, and then hits publish. This ritual takes one hour, forty-eight minutes, and she does this three times a day. She is twenty-three-years-old and lives with her parents.

Her forty-thousand-plus followers instantly engage with hearts and comments abound. She has never once received a negative comment, and she is a social-media-goddess who believes her tales implicitly.

“the baddest for sure!!”

“how you can’t get over your ex when there’s females like this out there??”

“omg girl ur inspirational”

“single? cuz i hit”

“Your moms fosho invited to the cookout.”

“wish you were my sis!”

“babe that hair got me sweatin!!”

For the first time ever, her video has gone viral, and she is in heaven for a brief moment; but then something new happens: the negativity starts flowing in. The negative comments are few in number, but for every negative comment, one hundred positive comments are mentally discarded, and she is malding and breaking.

“Basic white girl check”

“Somewhere a Dad is shaking his head”

“This girl be in prison in 3 years”

“pretty face but no”

“girl sucking her cheeks in like looking like an alien”

“i saw mcdonald’s was hiring”

Under the bed in the master bedroom, in the lockbox with the 1111-passcode; that’s where dad keeps the gun. Her family is out at work, and she, despite no one being home except herself, creeps slowly to the master bedroom door and places her hand on the doorknob. There is not a single tear in her eye, only the endless nagging of how she looks like an alien and how she needs to go work at McDonald’s and how she has a pretty face but no.

She believed her tales implicitly but didn’t realize that her own belief hinged on the belief of randoms online – and still doesn’t – and now she is shattered. Her validation: lost. She puts in the very-irresponsible-passcode and removes the gun from the lockbox with a trembling hand.

She props up her phone on the bookshelf, enables the front-facing camera, and does not suck her cheeks this time. She tells Alexa to play her brother’s favorite song – “You Gone Die” by Viper^#15 – as she presses the record button. She lifts her father’s handgun into the air in front of her and says, “To all you haters out there, I’m going to find you and,” then starts screaming Viper’s lyrics at the phone, “YOU GONE DIE!”

She had an inkling as to who one of the negative commenters was: an ex-boyfriend from college.

Forty-eight hours later, she is sitting in a jail cell, telling her cellmate how she was a goddess on social media. Her cellmate looks at her with an insidious twinkle in her eye and a grin on her lips. The Hater’s Prophecy Fulfilled three years early.

*Almalexia records a sick new viral TikTok

ALM, Almalexia, Ayem, Mother Morrowind, Healing Mother, and the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three in One resides secluded in her temple in Mournhold in the city of Almalexia. Long ago, when she was filled with the Heart of Lorkhan’s full power, she was compassionate and walked amongst her people, healing the sick and protecting the poor and the weak. She received endless praise and worship for her kindness; known as the “Goddess of Love” among the Dunmer, but this love was contingent upon power and praise, and she was only truly the Goddess of Loving Herself.

Upon the return of Dagoth Ur and his Soul Sickness, Almalexia’s power waned, as did all the Tribunal’s power, and Almalexia was consumed with madness, for her power to heal was gone and she feared, with all her being, of being perceived as a fraud by her faithful. She feared that her carefully crafted image of Loving Mother of All would be destroyed and her people would forsake her, and she could not live with this.

When the Nerevarine – the player, the YOU – returned to Mournhold, Almalexia saw this as the perfect opportunity to regain the faith that was wavering amongst her people – who realized that their goddess had become reclusive and no longer walked the streets healing and loving her people. Ayem used the Nerevarine, sowing lies to manipulate the Nerevarine into spreading a sandstorm across Mournhold – just so she could cause it to subside later on to regain her people’s trust. She then tasked the Nerevarine with gathering a ring of teleportation from a Lich – under the pretense that this Lich was planning an attack on the city – and then used this ring to teleport into Sotha Sil’s Clockwork City and unleash The Tinkerer’s fabricant creations upon her own city; she did this to scare her people and appear as a savior when she stopped the attack; not only would this bolster her faithful but also show that she was the one true divine of Morrowind and that her peers – Sotha Sil and Vivec – had gone mad; and to that end, she blamed the fabricant attack on Sotha Sil.

Many died in every stage of her plan, and she did not care. Almalexia lost her power and feared her subjects would stop validating her. The fear she imposed upon her people through trickery and lies, she felt, would drive them back to her; her validation would be regained. And there could be no other gods to steal this validation from her. Her vanity and obsession with identity, obscured from onlookers and stable when she had power, drove her to madness when that power was taken away and her divinity was questioned.

Almalexia’s final task for the Nerevarine was to travel to Sotha Sil’s Clockwork City and confront the Tinkerer for his supposed involvement in the fabricant attack on Mournhold. The Nerevarine does as they are told, and ALM teleports the Nerevarine to the Clockwork City. The Nerevarine fights through hundreds of fabricants and solves all of The Magician’s clockwork puzzles, and finally, they arrive in Sotha Sil’s chamber. They see Sotha Sil hooked into his Clockwork City through machinery and wires, and they walk up to him and he’s non-responsive and cold, and that’s when the Nerevarine realizes:

Sotha Sil is dead.

Almalexia, using the teleportation ring secured by the Nerevarine, appears behind the Nerevarine with a blade of blue flame, intending to wrap up all her loose ends. She speaks to the Nerevarine of her motivations, of her vanity, of how she used the Nerevarine to secure the ring and enter the Clockwork City to kill Sotha Sil. Afterwards, the Nerevarine and Almalexia do battle and Almalexia – in her weakened state – is slain.

Almalexia, in her vanity and endless search for validation, tricked us all; the Soul Sickness feeds on this need for validation, and as a result, we have unwittingly killed The Intellect. We are stagnating. We are twerking for hearts on TikTok.

V: Sotha Sil is Dead – CONCLUSION – Soul Sickness Redux

“He spoke not a word when he died, not a whisper. Even in death he mocked me with his silence!” ― Almalexia

In the beginning, there were four Gods Among Men and Mer: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, Vivec, and Dagoth Ur; five if YOU are considered: the reader, the player, the Nerevarine, the everything, or the fool. And by the end of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, there are none; you have slain Almalexia in her search for validation, accidentally enabled the murder of Sotha Sil and his Intellect, cut down Dagoth Ur and his Soul Sickness, and murdered Vivec in his obsession with identity just because you wanted to; then, you saved the game one last time and turned the computer off, and with that, YOU have left the world of Nirn; the world of Distraction.

And that’s all well-and-good for the world of Nirn; the inhabitants of Tamriel will have other problems later on, and perhaps we will return one day to solve those problems; in the meantime, we have a lot of problems right here on Earth.

How can we ever hope to solve war, hunger, rights issues both human and non-human, and a slew of societal problems if identity, validation, immense obsession with the self, and phones are all we care about? These things power each other in a hamster-wheel of such high speeds that our figurative skin and muscles are being ripped off, and we are skeletons that care about nothing else than numbers-go-up on graphical interfaces made of 1s and 0s. We exist in stagnation and are on the 24th iteration of the iPhone; we think we are so smart, but we are repackaged mimicry and violence and vicious and verve.

The Internet was a psychic-atom-bomb that claimed the souls of billions, and the poison radiation left behind slowly melted its own creator. We are coasting on the death of Sotha Sil; the death of The Intellect; we don’t even know when it died; it just slowly withered away within the last thirty years while we were too busy being obsessed with ourselves to notice The Intellect crumbling like a Mormon cookie in the corner of the room.

When The Internet was created, we expected the right information to be perpetuated into the collective human consciousness, and we were dead wrong; so much so that we are trying to shoot up pizza joints because Hillary Clinton is part of a pedophilia ring that meets in their basement, but in reality, it was all a massive 4chan misinformation campaign.^#16 We are echo-chambered into extreme falsehood and our brains are dripping out of our noses.

The Intellect created the tools of its own destruction, and now we are Looking at Phones while little Timmy gets his ass beaten. We are turning weak and stupid and violent in that order.

*Almalexia in War Mask of Validation wants you to kill The Intellect

And, as I’m sure you have already concluded: this essay is peak hypocrisy. When we pull back the curtain, I am exactly the same as the people I am criticizing. I post, sometimes ten times a day, on my Mastodon social media account; my writing, favorite music, day-to-day observations, takes on computer games, and my hyper-inflated ego are all on display for the world to see, and for what: likes? Nay, validation.

Have I really grown beyond sixth-grade me? I may no longer be anorexic, but has my validation criteria simply changed – become more sophisticated? Instead of wanting to be validated as skinny and beautiful, I want to be validated as a brilliant writer full of ultra-unique thoughts and insightful opinions and wisdom overflowing.

I am always bored, always distracted, and always stupid. I played a computer game for two hundred hours when I could have been doing literally-anything-else – which would have been far more productive – all to write an essay about how society sucks while simultaneously being a major part of the problem because I am suffering from the very same Soul Sickness as everyone else.

Almalexia is calling us to kill Sotha Sil, and we have answered her call unwittingly. We pretend to be Gods online when we are just ordinary people suffering from peak Soul Sickness no different than the father at the Belt Test.

The new Gods Among Men and Mer are phone, identity, validation, and social media; and Sotha Sil is dead, and with this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. We must restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world we have created.

Good news: if you read this far, then you are much better off than most; however, the first step in restoring the weave of fate is to log off and put the phone down – but do we have the power to do so?

---

Footnotes:

#1. https://youtu.be/S6ZOuv9sTcY?si=jzkrcXGomL4ShSxb

#2. https://i.imgur.com/6K0rwC7.png

#3. http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/calling-out

#4. https://www.mobygames.com/game/6280/the-elder-scrolls-iii-morrowind/credits/windows/

#5. https://youtu.be/7qqpB6uq8X0?si=yuxgO5T0E1t0RrKX

#6. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute

#7. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-world-population

#8. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

#9. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthcare-access-and-quality-index?time=2015 #10. https://www.reddit.com/user/crumblceo/

#11. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

#12. https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(17)30016-8/fulltext

#13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

#14. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=P8Am-QTUQes

#15. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=m3CEeSuTthw

#16. https://www.newsweek.com/pizza-gate-sex-trafficking-children-john-podesta-fake-news-comet-ping-pong-528207

---

(Originally published on 1/27/2024)

#ComputerGames #Ethics #Morrowind

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

---

    The contrast of the sky was tuned to the highest setting, and a filter of glittering blue like the waters of Old Earth accented all things. The watermark stamped upon the skybox was obscured by gold ultraviolet, which was blinding to the eyes but upon second thought felt like nothing at all.

    A young woman—hair like fresh rust, skin like that of a white sheet discolored by the faintest of coffee stains, all draped in white robes trimmed with gold—crossed a dirt path leading to a small bridge resembling something out of a fairy tale, complete with hung lanterns of curled wood and wax longing for fire; the bridge hung suspended over a brook teeming with yellow-spotted trout bouncing above the bubbles to gulp skeeter bugs off the water’s surface. The shade from the tree canopy obscured the dithering of atoms like pixels vibrating at a frequency only slightly uncomfortable to the human eye.

    The young woman paused at the middle of the bridge; she observed the stream as if it were something she had never seen before. She saw fishermen far down the bank, but everything beyond faded into a thick fog. A curious wrinkle scrunched her freckled face before she banished it with a shrug and pushed onward down the path. Her arms held books across her chest as her dark messenger bag spit a trail of paper in her wake, only for that trail to vanish moments later.

    A serene grove gradually rendered into the young woman’s view. The grove surrounded a marbled institute of higher learning; untouched narcissus, daisy, and poppy sprouted along the path leading to the foyer, itself shadowed by the ancient wood of laurel, sycamore, and cypress. Everything was immune to filth and decay. Deer trotted in the distance and simply faded away. Gorgeous youth buried their heads in thick tomes between secretive scribblings in little notebooks that rested upon chiseled tables placed symmetrically around the courtyard; the courtyard itself enclosed by white columns taller than the trees they stood with in solidarity. Beyond the novices’ soft chatter was only the cooing of doves and the pecking of woodpeckers and the occasional caw of massive ravens which perched atop the columns, watching for something edible to drop, but there was no food in this place. None at all.

    As the young woman walked through the courtyard toward the massive double doors adorned with engravings of lions, eagles, bears, and lion-like bears and bear-like lions and lion-like-bear-like eagles and at least a few horned horses, she overheard a small circle of students:

    “Hope she’s not in my class today.”     “Doesn’t know when to shut up.”     “Ellie’s pretty much a textbook know-it-all.”     “She acts Star Touched when we all know she lives in a complex.”     “Tragic, really.”     “So funny how she tries to hide it too.”     “What’s she even doing here?”     “Wasting her time.”     “Who would pick that nose for their sim?”     “Right? I wonder what she actually looks like.”

    Ellie hid her vexation poorly behind the turning up of her jagged hook nose and the uncontrollable tip twitch of her oddly pointed ears. Besides casting an emerald glare at the circle of students as she passed and accidentally catching the stare of one golden-haired young man, she swallowed her pride and pushed through the entrance of the grand hall with only a few sheets of loose paper spiraling in the displaced space behind her.

    A decorative stone plaque trimmed with gold hung on the marbled wall facing the entrance; it was impossible to miss. Engraved were the words “The Polytechnic of Chrysame – Founded by Chrysame of Thessaly – 43AH,” and below that was an electronic marquee with the words “LATTICE 8 – BLOCK 12” scrolling in lurid green from right to left.

    Ellie’s footsteps echoed throughout the halls before she settled upon a pair of double doors, at which she stopped to gather herself. She ran her hands through her hair, parting her bangs to the left (her left) as she liked to do, before placing her carried books on the floor nearby and rummaging through her bag. The bag seemed lighter than before, and she worried for a moment that her thirty-thousand-word essay had been lost to the insensate winds that blew through this place, but she realized that her fears were misplaced as she removed a solitary paper from the depths of the bag. She relieved anxious pressure from her lips as she held the paper to her nose, reading the only visible words:

    An Exegesis on Hecatinium: Disentangling the Quantum Genesis of Hecatinium Within a Pseudo-Anarcho-Capitalist Milieu and Its Multifaceted Sociopolitical, Ethical, and Psychosensual Consequences on the Population of a Dying Planet and Those Above It

    Upon reading the title, Ellie’s lips curled into a smile that revealed a full set of lightly-yellowed teeth. Then a subtle nod, as if validating herself. She had forgotten all about her floor books.

    Ellie pushed through the double doors and entered a lecture hall composed of layers upon layers of seats that extended into a fog unto itself. Sunbeams, like pillars of heaven, shone through massive open-air apertures. There was no visible ceiling; only a hazy cloud alongside the occasional zipping of small birds as if their nests were built far above within the massive hall. Soft birdsongs filled the room. Down a steep flight of steps, a gray-haired man stood before a whiteboard the size of an Old Earth tennis court. The man was flicking his wrist here and there, which swirled color and text across the board like little tornadoes of educational material that appeared incomprehensible upon first glance but were instantly understood by Ellie—due to her cerebrum implant—who patiently waited for the man to finish what she assumed to be a file query through a lesson plan folder. The man was so calm and serene in his electric dalliance that a small titmouse of tufted gray fur landed upon his shoulder and began pecking softly at his tangled wiry barely locks.

    An impatient minute passed before Ellie cleared her throat and broke the elderly man’s serenity. “Socrates?”

    The man turned to Ellie, his youth wrinkled beyond recognition, and his chestnut-colored eyes analyzed Ellie up and down in a who-are-you kind of way before something snapped a smile onto his face. “Ah, Ellie. Just the young woman I wanted to see. And don’t call me by my title; Mr. Telas is fine. There’s no need for all the honorifics.”

    Ellie gave one of those faux smiles that produced artificial dimples, none of her teeth showed. “Why did you want to see me, Soc–” She cleared her throat, “Mr. Telas.”

    “It’s about your paper.”

    “What about it?” Ellie fidgeted. “And why do I have to hand it in in person? I’ve already sent you the file. And it seems you’ve already read it!” Ellie held up the single paper she had removed from her bag earlier, lightly waving it.

    “The same reason you carry bags and books upon your simulacrum; we could simply store those away in a database to be drawn upon later, but that would defeat the purpose. Writing the paper is but one part of the ritual; handing in the paper—in person, on time—is another. This was the way of the Ancients, and this is the way now. It is a matter of punctuality and responsibility, key traits needed for those seeking higher office.”

    Ellie considered objecting to the “higher office” bit but decided against it because Socrates was correct: she did want to run for higher office; she had made this clear many times to anyone who would listen to her. She felt a deep-seated corruption in all parts of society, even in the beautiful bird that picked at Socrates’ hair; there was something unnatural about it—about everything—something fake; she could feel it in her bones; the beauty was superficial, a cover for something nasty; and to answer the students’ question from earlier: she didn’t choose this sim; the sim looked identical to her. She had nothing to hide; in fact, she was morally opposed to having something to hide at all. Fixing the world started with the truth. Transparency is the first step. This is what Ellie believed.

    Socrates’ wise response reminded Ellie that she had left her books outside the hall, near the double doors, and furthermore prompted her to recall why she continued to call Mr. Telas by his Polytechnic title of Socrates—which was officially granted by the Thessalonian Council for his decades of service in the field of higher learning, combined with an intelligence quotient that was far to the right of the bell curve. She respected him not because of his official rank or numbers on a graph but because of his ability to turn stubborn questioning into little proverbs that pierced right to the heart of things. Socrates could part storm clouds, revealing the gods behind them—even when those gods were questions themselves.

    “You also assume that I read your paper. I have not. I could not get past the title.”

    Shocked at how stoically this line had been delivered, Ellie snapped back, respectfully incensed: “How do you mean? The title perfectly sums up the entire paper!”

    “So does ‘Hecatinium's Effect on Society,’ or a number of shorter titles that do not exude the sense that the author has her head up her own rear end.”

    Socrates' mouth curled like that of a child who had just swiped a credit chip, only to reveal the chip to the victim and give it back to them—just to prove they could do it.

    Ellie’s face flushed red; her nose and ears could have been billowing dragon’s breath.

    “Appearances are important, Ellie. First impressions matter. You can write the most astute essay that has ever graced the planet Thessaly, but if the title comes off so high-minded, you will be viewed as pretentious regardless of the content of the essay. Frankly, the title is off-putting. You are an incredibly gifted young woman with one of the most analytical minds I have had the pleasure to teach, but none of this matters if you cannot get through to people. The truth is, the average person is not like you or I. If you want to connect with a wider audience, you have to meet them at their level; you must be willing to put aside your ego. It is all about rhetoric, young Ellie.”

    Socrates lifted his finger to his nose and closed his eyes, a note flashed upon the whiteboard: “Incorporate rhetoric into next week’s lesson plan.”

    The figurative dragon’s breath from Ellie’s nose and ears turned to a thin haze, then to wisps, then to nothing; it must have been the compliment that Socrates snuck into his miniature lecture. “You make a good point. I’ll change the—”

    “I fibbed somewhat. The title should indeed be reworked, but I did read your essay—What kind of teacher would I be if I hadn’t?—and it was quite well written, particularly the analysis of the origin of hecatinium and its initial discovery, the surrounding mystery, and the corporations that perished in the resource wars that followed. However, considering the reality of our current situation—namely, the Thessalonian Triumvirate, which you’re undoubtedly aware of from the basic primaries that have been processed through your cerebrum implant—is a collective of three corporations that have agreed to share the planet’s supply of hecatinium and abide by the rule of a central higher authority. This arrangement was made out of the necessity to continue the cycle of demand and innovation that would otherwise stagnate without competition; given this fact, your conclusion of—as you put it—‘logically, the first corporation to secure the supply of hecatinium would dominate the market, drive all competition to ruin, and turn the planet into their own personal playground,’ comes under some scrutiny.”

    Socrates paused for a moment to cast a chestnut glare at the now-squirming Ellie. His lips furrowed into a cracked line, like a seasoned warrior having confidently thrown the gauntlet. To hide his subtle pride, Socrates contrived other things to do, flicking his wrist toward the board once more. With each flick, the name of a different corporation and logo flashed: HypnoSims, a blue silhouette of an abstracted person with the letter “H” imposed over the face—which the neurotypical mind might flip-flop between seeing as a long pair of eyes and the letter itself—all enclosed in an otherwise voidant sphere; Aides Animatronics, a series of gears colored pink, green, and black casting shadows the color of oil as they turned slowly like the hour hand of an ancient clock; TatNos Heavy Industries, a royal purple surrounding a deep maroon helmet that could double as an ancient computer’s power button.

    The corporate colors played psychedelics across Ellie’s face as she let her professor have his little moment before composing herself: “I would say that the war for hecatinium is not yet over. We’re in the cold war stage.”

    Socrates stopped, and the swirl of colors stopped with him. His stoicism faded, replaced by a twinkling in his old eyes.

    Ellie matched the aggression of Socrates' initial critique. “There may be three corporations now, but there won’t be for much longer. Besides, they already function as a single governmental body under the guise of the Thessalonian Triumvirate, and they even share a council and a military! And I would also argue that this so-called ‘necessity to continue the cycle of demand and innovation’ is a false necessity—a manufactured demand, a self-inflicted need for innovation imposed only to drive profits for those Star Touched above the planet. What’s more surprising is that someone such as yourself would use such matter-of-fact language! And then I would end my rebuttal with one final question for you: are you trolling me right now?”

    Ellie’s youthful flourish prompted a chuckle from Socrates that morphed into a weak cough. The old professor then walked up to Ellie and placed a hand on her bony shoulder. “Well done. Well done. Class starts in five. Go now, take a seat.”

    Ellie placed the solitary paper on Socrates' massive lectern with verve. “Does that mean I passed the assignment?”

    Socrates only smiled his wrinkled smile before turning his attention back to the whiteboard, twirling pixels once more.

---

    Before Ellie could take a seat, she needed to gather the books she had forgotten outside the lecture hall, so she headed up the stairs and out the double doors, passing dozens of robed students along the way. She backtracked her steps but found nothing; her books were gone. A sigh pouted from her thin lips. “There’s no way I was talking to Socrates for more than twenty minutes,” she mumbled to herself as she narrowed her eyes, observing every possible checkered tile of marble flooring. She winced at the absurd prospect of having to fork over another week’s worth of credits to repurchase the books, which were just copy-pasted data from one database to another. She closed her eyes for one meditative moment, then exhaled what she imagined was all the negativity in her body. Ellie resigned herself.

    “Looking for these?” A young man appeared from around the corner of a nearby hall. He was alone. He was holding a stack of books. His eyes were icy, his hair golden, his jaw immaculate, and his glare wretched. It was the same young man she had accidentally locked eyes with earlier. “Did you think they despawned or something?” he scoffed. “I’ll give them back.”

    “You’ll give them back, but …” Ellie’s scrunched hook indicated visible annoyance.

    “Show me what you really look like under that sim.”

    “This is what I really look like, Arc. Maybe you should show me what you really look like? A sim trying to be that handsome must be hiding some real ugliness underneath.”

    A flame sparked in Arc’s eyes; simultaneously, the books he held erupted into a blaze of blues and reds; ashes spilled through the space between Arc’s fingers, scattering through the stale air. “You will call me by my proper name—Archon—as do all the Complexers.” The flame lingered in Arc’s hand for a moment before he flung it at Ellie with a snap of his fingers; the flame bounced and fizzled off a pellucid emerald barrier. The barrier then dissolved into digitized dust, revealing Ellie with outstretched hands; her cheeks flushed; her eyebrows attack mode.

    Ellie’s voice was soft, but there was a storm brewing underneath. “Not only was that entirely pointless,” she moved a hand behind her back as she spoke, “but it also cost me two weeks’ worth of credits.” She clenched her hidden fist, and a pair of emerald tethers whipped from the floor beneath Arc, wrapping around both of his legs.

    “You forgot about my hands,” Arc grinned; but as he went to raise those forgotten hands, two more emerald wires whisked from the ceiling, locking his arms in place. Ellie then motioned her index finger in the air, and the tethers stretched themselves, lifting Arc’s body, pushing him against the ceiling, and tugging at his limbs.

    Robed students gathered around.

    “What did you think would happen – using hecatomes here? What are you – 12? Star Touched Idiot, more like.” Ellie brushed red hair out of her eyes but the red of anger was still deep in her speckled cheeks. She no longer needed to maintain the tethers as they now seemed to have a mind of their own; swirling and squeezing Arc’s appendages. The young man made no sound, he was blank, either too incensed or too stunned to react. “You Star Touched are all the same. This is what happens when you throw credits around and cheat to pass all your classes. You don’t learn anything. You can do your little basic hecatome parlor tricks, but you will never compare to someone who has actually practiced and studied for hundreds—thousands—of hours.” Ellie was grandstanding, losing herself in the moment as she talked up at Arc’s body, which was more like a ceiling fan at this point. “All you did today was reveal how envious and angry you are – but I can’t imagine why, considering you’re up in one of those starships and I’m down here in a complex.”

    Ellie paused for theatrics, then flashed a toothy grin. “How’s the view now?”

    Before she had time to react, something crashed into Ellie’s back, disrupting her focus. The emerald tethers vanished, and so did Arc’s body. Ellie toppled to the floor and wrestled to turn over. As she did, she found herself staring up at Arc, who was no longer on the ceiling but on top of her. How? Ellie’s grin had transferred to Arc, but the grin was now dripping with saliva and murder. He held Ellie down with his left hand while lifting his right into the air before slamming it down toward Ellie’s face. Ellie caught the blow in her palm, her hand glowing with the same emerald green from the barrier before, as if the color itself was empowering her grip. Arc’s hands flared with a mixture of blue and red in turn. A duel of colors was playing out before a gathering of students.

    “Submit!” Arc screamed as he pushed his full weight onto Ellie; their fingers interlocked; their colors mixing into a bright white.

    Ellie twisted and slipped out of Arc’s unstable hold. As she got to her feet, she immediately extended both arms and stretched her palms, and as she did this, a semitransparent emerald box surrounded her. The barrier threw greens onto the marble walls, which reflected onto all around, accenting the faces of the onlookers who were cheering for both of the combatants. And although Arc was standing directly in front of her, Ellie looked around as if checking for any other Arcs she should be worried about.

    “What was that? An ersatz proxy? I’m impressed. Did you buy that one too?” Ellie rushed her speech as she tried to mentally compose herself whilst maintaining the barrier.

    “You’re not the only one who seriously practices hecatomes,” Arc’s words flared like the fires he was accustomed to throwing.

    “Whatever.” Ellie said between bated breathing.

    “Do you want to know why I practice?”

    “Whatever.”

    “It’s because I hate you.”

    “Whatever.”

    “And everyone else down there too. You shouldn’t even be here.”

    “Whatever.”

    “You hate us too—I can hear it in your voice. You hate the rich snooty Star Touched just as I hate the poor little Complexers. We’re the same, Ellie. Just reversed. The only difference is that I’m willing to admit it.”

    Arc’s critique caused Ellie’s nose to twitch, but she pretended to ignore the irritant with another detached, “Whatever.”

    This feigned indifference enraged Arc. He shrieked, and as he did so, a pillar of flame erupted from his palms. He directed the flames toward Ellie; the fire wrapped around the emerald barrier; swirling vortices; vicious rumblings; the emerald cracked down the middle but still held. Sparks flickered and bounced meters away. The surrounding students, who had once been cheering, fell silent, backed off, dispersed into the lecture hall.

    Ellie was obscured behind the blinding yellow mixture of hecatonic reds and greens, which hid her visible trembling as she felt the barrier begin to give way.

    “That’s enough!” The flame vanished as Socrates' voice echoed throughout the hall, leaving nothing but a translucent emerald box with Ellie inside it.

    The emerald barrier dispersed into particles as Ellie lowered her hands. As her vision cleared, she saw Arc immobilized on his knees beneath the frail figure of Socrates, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and had the young man’s ear in a grip that must have been stronger than the pull of a black hole. “Class started three minutes ago, and you’re out here causing fires without even a proper Hoplite Decree!” The old professor’s voice was tinged with a mixture of amusement and disgust, a unique combo that Ellie had only had the privilege of hearing once before. “You will pay for the books, Arc—and you will take a deduction in both standing and grade.”

    “I could pay for thousands of those books, and my father—” Arc let out a pitiful yelp as he felt his ear twist even further. (Socrates must have turned off the pain dampeners, Ellie thought.)

    Socrates then turned his focus to Ellie. “And you indulged the fool. For shame. I expected better. Your standing will be impacted as well.”

    “What? That’s not fair! He started—”

    “He started it?” Socrates completed the sentence as he loosened the twist on Arc’s ear. “It matters not.”

    Socrates shook his head and then vanished through the double doors.

---

    “Today we are going to skip hecatome practice. We already saw enough of that earlier in the hall. Instead, I want all of you to imagine for a moment: Imagine that there is a child; the child is standing on the edge of a pool of water; the child cannot swim; the child slips, falls into the pool, and starts flailing their arms and screaming until water fills their mouth and they become nearly submerged. The child is drowning. You are standing nearby watching this scene unfold. You have a choice: save the child or leave them to drown. Of course, you choose to save the child. You reach for the child, grab them by the arm, and pull them to safety; the child is grateful, hugs you, and says they'll never forget your kindness. The child gives you their name; it is saved in your implant; you don't overwrite it. Twenty years later, you're watching a news holo; the anchor begins recounting the crimes of a recently captured serial murderer: twenty-nine victims. They say the name of the murderer: it's the name of the child you saved twenty years earlier. It suddenly dawns on you that you had saved one life in exchange for twenty-nine. Did you do the right thing? How could you have known? Was saving the child a positive or negative moral act? Does it matter? Note these questions down, as we will come back to them later on.”

    The lecture hall went silent minus the faint chirping of distant birds.

    “Now, I want you to imagine a second scenario: you just left your residence to attend to some chores. The type of chore doesn't matter, just imagine for a moment that you are doing this. A man stops you; he appears to be carrying a package; he asks if you know the address of a certain neighbor—we'll call that neighbor Zed—and you just so happen to know where Zed lives. You have two options: tell the truth or lie—well, maybe three options, including walking away silently, but I would consider this tantamount to lying. Being an honest person, you decide to tell the truth and give the man Zed's address. The man thanks you and you both go on your way. An hour later, on your way back from your chores, you pass Zed's residence. The Thessalonian Guard has surrounded the front portcullis; there are civilian onlookers some distance away and you ask one of them what's going on; they say that someone broke into Zed's house, killed Zed and his entire family, and the killer is now holed up in the residence threatening to detonate an explosive if they are not allowed to walk free. It dawns on you that this must have been the man you gave Zed's address to. An innocent gesture of honesty cost the lives of an entire family. Should you have lied? Did telling the truth result in this terrible massacre? You slink away into your residence, curl up on your bed, and cry yourself to sleep—a somewhat dramatic flourish, but the point remains. I hope you're taking notes.”

    Chirping. Rustling. Scribbling.

    “I have just presented two examples of key ethical dilemmas that arise when trying to determine which normative system of ethics one ought to follow; which cuts to the heart of today's lesson. I want to examine the ancient system of ethics so aptly titled utilitarianism; from utility. Utilitarianism is the doctrine that an action is morally righteous only if that action maximizes the overall well-being of the majority. There are many branches of utilitarianism, but the most important branches are 'rule utilitarianism' and 'act utilitarianism.' 'Rule utilitarianism' dictates that firm rules should be followed, and these firm rules should benefit the majority; in the 'save a drowning child' example, a rule utilitarian may say that we should always save a drowning child because it typically results in greater well-being for the majority, because if you were drowning you would want someone to save you in turn and so on; however, it fails to account for the possibility that the child could grow up to be a mass murderer; similarly, a rule utilitarian may say that you should never lie because honesty typically produces good outcomes—and, after all, you would not want to be lied to yourself—but this fails to account for those who would use the truth to do great harm, such as kill Zed and his family. Alternatively, followers of 'act utilitarianism' believe that a person's actions are morally righteous only if those actions produce the best possible results in that specific situation; this allows for a bending of the rules, for example, you could lie to the man who asked for Zed's address if you suspected that the man was a killer, or you could refuse to save the drowning child if you knew they would grow up to be a murderer—but that begs the question, how would you possibly know that at the time? And here lies the crux of the problem with the utilitarian system of ethics: we cannot know the future. Please ponder on these questions for a moment before we move on.”

    There was a pause—twenty seconds at least—before Socrates pointed to a student in the far back of the hall. A gentle spotlight highlighted a young woman with august locks and sleepy eyes. “Ginese, which system do you subscribe to?” Socrates' voice was magnified to the perfect volume for everyone to hear, and this magnification switched between speakers.

    Surprised, Ginese shot up, rubbed her eyes, wiped drool from her mouth, and mumbled, “Wait—what?”

    Socrates shook his head. “Leave my hall. Return once you’ve had some rest.”

    Ginese gathered her things and vanished.

    Socrates then pointed to Arc. “Which system would you pick, young man?”

    Arc was prepared with his wits about him. “Just going by basic math, it seems most logical to support a rule-utilitarian system. This would—theoretically—maximize well-being most efficiently, even if we had to make some sacrifices along the way. I think this is proven out in our current society, as we’ve seen what happens when we integrate Complexers into Star Touched spaces—” Arc stopped for a moment, turning his attention to Ellie, who sat two layers away. Ellie knew where this was headed, and as such, her ire was already aroused and her eyes were already rolling. Arc continued, “Complexers like Ellie are violent and can’t integrate, causing a ripple effect in Star Touched society that cannot be cured without excising the cancer with fire. The utilitarian rule should be obvious: total and complete segregation.”

    Socrates then pointed to Ellie, “your rebuttal?”

    “Everyone saw it. He attacked me first. If he’s trying to say that we shouldn’t abide by violent people, then we shouldn’t abide by Arc.” Faint snickering bubbled up throughout the hall. Then there was a brief pause. Birds danced and sang high above the fog.

    Ellie continued with eyes like daggers pointing at Arc, “Nonsense aside, we have rules for a reason—law and order must be maintained—but sometimes we have to break those rules; otherwise, we’ll let ourselves get trampled by those who will use the rules to their advantage or just break them outright. No rule is a one-size-fits-all solution. We do not have to be constrained by one rigid ethical system; we should be able to adapt as the situation calls for it.” Ellie paused before slipping in a sneaky, “and that’s why my standing should not be impacted; I was only defending myself.”

    There was a brief silence before it was broken by a bluebird landing on the back of Ellie’s seat. Twee, twee. Ellie turned her body to catch a glimpse, but a loud cough from Socrates frightened the bird, which fluttered off and faded away.

    “Excellent discussion.” Socrates stroked his chin. “And you’re right, Ellie. Your standing shouldn’t be impacted.” This prompted a groan from Arc, which could be heard throughout the hall even without magnification.

    Socrates flicked his wrist, and the board was suddenly consumed by black lettering that outlined a lengthy assignment. “This week, I would like you to complete two essays; the first on which utilitarian system of ethics you think leads to the most positive outcomes, and the second being being being being being being being being be be be be be be being being be be be be—”

    Ellie was taking a note on the assignment when the repetition started. She stopped and looked up to process what was happening. Socrates' mouth was moving and his wrist was flicking again and again. She turned to observe the students, who were all in various stages of repeating their own last actions. A nearby bird seemed to be teleporting from one side of the room to the other with a recurring hum. The combination of all the repeated sounds built into a cacophonous hurricane of noise that grew exponentially louder with every passing moment until Ellie couldn’t take it anymore; she could feel a pressure swelling inside her head, vibrating her brainstem as if the cerebrum implant could erupt silicon shards into the gooey gray matter of her brain at any moment. She worried that her head would explode from the inside out.

    “Not again,” Ellie groaned as she flipped her left hand and tapped her palm six times in an odd rhythmic pattern; the final tap brought complete silence and total darkness. It was as if all human senses had been turned off. After a moment of nothing, bright green text faded into view:

    “You can now safely eject.”

    And underneath that, in a slightly smaller font:

    “HypnoSims is dedicated to our customers’ user experience. As such, if this was a wrongful eject or there was a problem with your simulacrum—please think or say ‘bug report’ to bring up the bug report menu. If you would like to speak to an AI representative, please think or say ‘Allison,’ ‘Alex,’ ‘Pluto,’ ‘Garfield,’ or ‘Random’ depending on preference. If you would like to report a crime, please think or say ‘Thessalonian Guard.’”

---

    Ellie raised both hands to either side of her head, gripping the smooth headset that covered her eyes and nose and wrapped around her skull. She used her thumbs to press two buttons on either side of the device, which sent a tingle down her spine as the HypnoConnector disconnected from the port in the back of her neck. The wire, which had sent packets of data directly into her brain via the HypnoSim Implant grafted into her cerebrum at birth, now dangled from the headset.

    As Ellie lifted the headset over her head, the void slid from her vision as if a child were removing a disc from an Old Earth View-Master. She opened her eyes—her biological eyes—and took a good long look at the steel-gray ceiling directly above her. She was lying on her back, on a bed. She let out a deep yawn as she stretched out her lanky appendages.

    Ellie’s room was a small ten by twelve, clean but messy, with one door and no windows, gunmetal walls, creeping rust from the corners where the walls and ceiling converged, a single faux-porcelain sink with a spotted mirror, and the place pulsed soft blue like a deep-sea jellyfish dying; there were band posters taped on each wall with names ranging from The Phantoms to Haruko and the Fools to Rectal Debaser; Old Earth computer monitors waterfalling text lined the walls; keyboards and wires seemed to grow out of the floor; and the only place to sit was on a spring-exposed mattress that rested on synthetic-wood pallets.

    “The HyperNet must be down again,” Ellie thought as she swung up on her bed and turned to the keyboard nearest her. She clicked a few keys which prompted a three-dimensional bump-mapped projection to consume the space between the bed and the farthest wall.

    The projection was a holographic bird's-eye view of a vast desert that could moonlight as a wasteland. The title “Thessaly” marked the top left of the three-dimensional space. The hologram zoomed out to reveal a number of massive black superstructures throughout the desert; megaliths yearning for the stars but never quite reaching them; encircling these megaliths were mechanical gray obelisks like the swords of titans stabbed deep into the earth. The projection drew a blue circle around one of these megaliths, with an arrow extending from the megalith to the words “Complex 42.” Additional information then poured in underneath:

    // Date: Gamelion 8, AH386 // Complex Status Module Version: CreditlessV7.4 // Main Power: Down // Resolution Status: Aides Repair Automatons Dispatched // TatNos Security Sphere The Sphere That Protects-And-Serves You And Only You 2483C // Current Status: Auxiliary Power 98% // HyperNet Status: Down // Probable Cause: Ash Storm W/ High Radiation (Source: Unknown) // Hecatonic Shield Holding At 75% // Neutron Wave Performing New Hit Single “StarLoveNovaKill” Live Gamelion-24 9 PM Floor-46 // Range Of Incident: Entire Northern Hemisphere // Incident Start Time: 8:43 PM // Estimated End Time: 12:35 AM // Show Your Lover You Care With The HS-Affection Add-On Free 30-Day Trial // NOTE: All Air Vents Have Been Locked For Complex Residents’ Safety. Secondary Air Reserves On. Please Do Not Leave The Complex Until The Incident Has Been Marked As Resolved // HS 24/7 Complex Status Monitoring // Have You Heard About The New Aides Auto-Cat? Fully Programmable W/ Free HS Auto-Animal App: Recreating Your Favorite Pets One Earth Animal At A Time Only 1773C Or Three Payments Of 591C //

    Ellie clicked three keys on the keyboard; the hologram vanished. “Maybe an Auto-Cat wouldn’t be so bad,” she thought as she sat up and made her way to the sink. She peered into her own emerald eyes, which were accented with deep bags like those of the Old Earth raccoons that she had only seen in the HyperNet. Her rust-colored hair was frizzy all over, and her freckled skin was ghostly pale. She looked identical to her simulacrum, only more haggard. She twisted the handle of the faucet to splash some water on her face, but the sink only produced a weak stream of light brown liquid, which then turned into a slow drip and eventually nothing at all. “Water’s not working either,” she mumbled as she went to the corner of the room and started digging through a loose bag of metal tools.

    As Ellie was digging and tossing tools to her side, she heard the metal door clang and footsteps behind her. The rasp of an elderly woman rang out, “Elpis? What are you doing? You know the HyperNet is out again? The holos keep playing that warning message. I don’t like it. Scares me. Lenny next door says there’s some sort of freak radiation storm going on out there.” No response, only the clinking of metal mixed with the rustling of cloth. “Elpis, what are you doing? Talk to me.”

    Ellie continued to rummage through the tool bag as she replied in a tone that could only be described as single-minded dismissiveness, “Damn storms kicked me out of Polytechnic again.” After another moment of sifting through the bag, she pulled out a crowbar-sized metal spanner with DIY cranks and levers and switches of all sorts welded upon it. “I’m going to fix the HyperNet, Gigi. All I have to do is route the auxiliary power into the third-floor modem facility. Then I’ll jack back into school and find out what that second essay is about.” Ellie stood confidently, one hand resting upon the curve of her hip, the other waving the oversized spanner.

    Concern was threaded through the ancient tapestry that was Gigi’s face; Ellie sensed this and placed a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Gigi. It’s not a big thing. I did this during the last ash storm—remember?”

    Gigi shook her head. She couldn't remember. She couldn’t remember much at all.

    Ellie flashed a toothy smile meant to inspire confidence and then strutted out of the bedroom carrying her spanner. She walked through the living room—which was also gunmetal-chic and only a few feet wider than her bedroom, yet more claustrophobic due to the bare-necessities kitchen in the far corner—and grabbed a dark messenger bag hanging from a hook by the heavy-metal portcullis that doubled as the front door, slinging the bag around her shoulder; she then grabbed a pair of black-lensed circular glasses from the kitchen counter and hurriedly pushed them over her bent nose using her index finger.

    Before turning the key that would seal the portcullis, Ellie poked her head through the archway, “I’ll be home soon! Don’t wait up for me! I love you!”

    And then she was gone.

---

Chapter 2

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#TheEgg #Fiction

Five o’clock, morning dew, and the fireball rises like a wizard’s cantrip ricocheting off the wild wind. Fully clothed in rip-worn blues and whites earth-stained from angling adventures of days gone by, I fish my tackle box of seen-better-days from behind the sliding screen that is my makeshift closet. Tiptoeing through the house so as not to wake Big Sis from her sickly sleeps, I head straight to the cupboard to collect my lunchbox generously filled to the brim with Mom’s perfectly wrapped rice balls. I sneak a quick bite off the largest ball; it’s luscious, as usual, and crumbles out of control when placed back into the metal box for future snacking.

I tiptoe silently towards the front door, where my trusty companion awaits: the child-sized fishing rod propped against the thin wooden wall of the flimsy shack we lovingly call home. The tatami mat below creaks loudly, but it wasn’t me this time; it was Mom: “Up early again to catch the Guardian Fish?” I nod vehemently, grab my pole with Sisyphusian determination, bear hug Mom, and close the front door behind me as I exit into God’s great and bountiful gift: nature.

I’m going to catch that Guardian Fish and rip its guts out.

When Mom told me Big Sis was sick and could only be cured by eating the innards of the Guardian Fish, it all clicked for me. This is my calling. I love to fish; to sit on the side of my chosen stream, cast my line, and contemplate the nature all around me as I wait for a bite; crickets chirping, fish splooshing once calm waters, bees bumbling buzzed-up flowers, limbs creak-cracking as squirrels play their tree games – the ecosystem: God’s great and bountiful gift.

And how do I fit into it all? God’s gift cares for me, provides for me, as long as I do my part; I catch the fish, I eat the fish – bones and all. The fish, with their hearty charred flesh and soup-flavoring bonemeal, sustains me and my entire village; no different than how the fish is sustained by smaller fish and the lion is sustained on the elk’s bloody, mangled carcass. I am not above it, merely momentarily on top.

I am the ecosystem.

So when Mom told me that Big Sis was sick and that I needed to catch the Guardian Fish, I took up the challenge with the determination of the dung beetle I observed while waiting for a tug on my fishing line this morning. The dung beetle was rolling its precious dung up an incline, which, from their perspective, must have been a very steep hill but appeared to me as an impressive anthill teeming with fire ants. The little ones were creeping all over the beetle, slowly but surely consuming it as hundreds of little ants injected their acid into its protective shell; yet, the beetle persisted.

*our hero; one with nature

“That is one determined dung beetle,” I thought as my line suddenly became taut and my nose twitched and my ears perked up. A bite!

Instantaneously flipping my baseball cap into serious-mode: backwards, I jolted up like a reverse thunderbolt and took on a sumo stance before clasping both hands on the grip of my fishing pole and pulling back with all my might. The line became tighter and tighter before reaching critical tension – a fierce tug of war then played out between myself and my submerged prey. “This one’s tough – maybe it’s the Guardian Fish!” I thought as I gave some slack on the line in an attempt to tire the great beast; Dad taught me well, and the fish immediately stopped tugging the line. “Now’s my chance!” I reeled in and pulled back as hard as I could, and… snap!

The line broke; my bait lost along with the hook now forever destined to be impaled in the fish’s mouth – a grizzly fate for a fish, trailing blood through water, attracting all manner of deep-water predators more deadly than the predator it was lucky enough to escape from – me.

Searching through my tackle box and suddenly I see: I’m out of bait. I have all manner of hooks but no bait. Then it dawns on me, Dad always said, “The perfect predator must be resourceful.” So, I look to the anthill; the ants had not yet managed to penetrate the dung beetle’s carapace of iron will, but the beetle’s body was obscured now: merely a moving ball of ants, likely in excruciating pain – I know! I’ll put it out of its misery!

I carefully pick up the dung beetle with two fingers, put it up to my lips and blow real hard; most of the ants go wild on the wind and I wipe the stragglers off with a few swipes of my index finger. The beetle’s legs continue to move, like when I used to hold my old dog over the tub before bath time – habitual movement, already paddling and still climbing up that hill.

Quickly, so as not to cause too much Suffering, I take my fishing hook and thrust it into the beetle’s soft white underbelly; it takes some small amount of force before I’m met with a satisfying crunch, what sounds like a sudden release of pressure, and a hydraulic stream of brown goo splashing upon the tips of my fingers.

The brown of the beetle drips down the hook as I sit down on the soft soil of the riverbank; lodging the grip of my pole into the dirt, as to keep it in place for a moment while I opened my metal lunchbox to take another bite – or three – of the crumbled rice ball from hours ago. But before I can take a bite, I hear something from behind me, a short huff of air, a low growl, and the pop of a jaw. My body stiffens and I freeze for a moment, a chill running through the entirety of my nervous system.

More big huffs, this time closer. It felt like another hour had passed in this terror-stricken state but in reality: only seconds. Dad always taught me to swallow my fear and deal with life head-on. So I take a big gulp of false-courage and twist my neck and I see it: fur so-brown-its-black fills my vision as my eyes creep upward, now staring directly into the hungry eyes of a brown bear intent on flesh, fish flesh or otherwise – me.

I must save Big Sis, even if it takes a miracle; and if God were a fish, He’d be the Guardian Fish. I’m fishing for God. This brown bear is not going to stop me.

The bear, with a demonic glint in its eyes, lifts its gigantic paws and quickly lunges at me. I think of my sister, and suddenly great courage is bestowed upon me from on high. I clumsily dash to the right, falling and rolling a few times on the verdant riverbank before catching my balance, one foot on the ground, one knee too. I remember the dung beetle; its determination. I grin to myself as I gather a clump of dirt in my right hand. The bear turns to me with surprising haste for such a big thing and starts at me once again. I throw the dirt into the beast’s face, halting it for a moment as it snarls loudly out of pure annoyance.

I take this opening to rush the bear head-on, ramming into its furry stomach before raising my fist and punching it right between its momentarily dirt-addled eyes. The bear flinches with a quick jerk of its head and then growls differently this time, a roar of pure malice; animal language more transparent than humans’, but I don’t care: I launch another punch into its stomach with my entire being; the bear counters, but I’m lithe, ducking and weaving so well that I catch only the tip of its longest claw on my shoulder, ripping my shirt and drawing a swirl of blood through the air.

I don’t feel a thing.

Determined to finish this, I push the full weight of my small body into the bear, which falls over with me into the grass below. I take my hands and put them around the bear’s neck, squeezing as hard as I can. The bear flails its claws wildly before settling on its signature attack: the bear hug; driving all ten of its claws into my back as if to absorb my very lifeforce. It must have missed my vitals because I was unfazed, and this only served to motivate me further.

I think about all the bears my Dad must have killed in his time as the River King. I must make him proud. I must save Big Sis, so I dig desperately into the bear’s neck, find the hard part – the windpipe, I hope – and squeeze as tightly as I possibly can. The bear intensifies its own squeeze in kind and I feel every inch of my clothes become wet with blood. I start screaming viciously as the fog starts to settle in; my vision blurs, my head fills with clouds.

Is this it?

Just then, God must have intervened: the bear’s grip loosens, and its growl becomes less murderous and more miserable before settling into a light gurgle. My face fills with foam as the bear tries, pathetically and in vain, to snap its great teeth into my face. Filled with a contradictory mixture of indignant courage, fear, and adrenaline, I loosen my grip on the bear’s neck and go all-in on its terrible visage, slamming the beast’s face repeatedly with my clenched fists; blood erupts like a primordial volcano with each blow. After what feels like minutes, I am crimson covered completely in bear blood.

Rolling off the beast onto the vermilion – once green – grass, I stare up at the clouds above, gasping for air.

My vision goes in and out as I lay splayed out on the riverbank. I hear crickets chirping, fish splooshing, bees bumbling, and limbs creak-cracking as squirrels play their tree games. I am reminded that I am still alive, and just as that revelation hits me, I feel a drip of liquid hit my cheek from on high – rain?

I open my eyes and the brown of the bear obscures my view once again. I hear – feel – the vibrations of the bear’s low, guttural growl. The beast is above me, looking down on its prey, a mixture of saliva and blood dripping from its mouth and onto my face.

Suddenly, it dawns on me: I never stood a chance.

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(Originally published on 11/19/2023)

#Fiction #LegendOfTheRiverKing