Slightly Slouched.

Anonymous asked: you. are. SO. awesome. can we get married? please??

Whooooooo iiiiissss thiiiiiiiis?

Okay people. We’re gettin’ to some meat, here. Get ready for the THUNDER. Or, rather, for an excessively long section with some real plot progression that might stick around. So yeah. Here it is. First, of course, a link to all the past segments:

OLD SHIT:

http://slightlyslouched.tumblr.com/post/13761744906/content-with-the-content-master-post

NEW SHIT:

It is strange where the mind will wander in a crisis. Most which are most pressing may seem to recede, and that which comes to the forefront may have no bearing on the situation. For example, one day a pair of attractive young vulcanologists were busy doing intensive field research in an active volcano, both to validate how awesome they had told all their friends their career choice was and because magma got them both a little aroused even if they didn’t like talking about it so they just had crazy sweaty exploding hell-furnace sex and acted like it was no big thing.  

Their libidos were tweaked well into the red-zone on this particular day, but just as the good-looking pair of Hephaestus-forge analysts were about to get to some serious molten-rock makin’ out, the active volcano did that thing active volcanoes do where they are all self-impressed and just explode because they think it’s funny or something.

So naturally there are blistering streams of flesh-melting-ly hot liquid stone coursing down the slopes, and the dynamic action-adventure rugged science duo were sprinting down the side of the mount-cano, boulders tumbling all around them and the camera doing an awful lot of sharp pans to give the impression of frenetic-ness and speed.

And then suddenly, the male stopped, and his female companion stopped and turned around and shouted:

“Hurry up, the lava will make us dead!”

Maybe it was a little more clever than that, but the half of the couple with the sharper jaw-line and five-o-clock shadow just smirked and used the line which he had come up with while running, and stopped solely so he could use:

“Well, I would lava to, but-”

And then they were both crushed to death by a boulder.

So there’s honestly just absolutely no accounting for what a person might think in a stressful situation.

Wait. Why was I telling you this again?

Oh yes. I went through all of that ridiculous nonsense because as he clung with aching fingers to a great stone wall, a thick sheet of impudent paper clutched in those same fingers, Darius had a thought which made very little sense. Eyes stinging with the wind, Darius suddenly felt a strange gush of relief, as though some great cosmic narrator-type being had finally finished haphazardly shifting its attentions around and would instead focus solely on him for a time.

Of course, this relief was quickly replaced by a more situationally appropriate acute terror, because Darius was of course clinging to the side of a goddamn cliff.

But then Darius’s thought once more went to a very strange place, and he suddenly considered his role as a protagonist of a story.

What, he asked himself, would the protagonist of any good fantasy or adventure novel do in this situation? He considered his own question for a moment. Well, they would get down to business, is what they would do. They would scuttle-clutch their way around this in no time, a little scared, but courageous. They would get down to the bottom of whatever is going on here.

Darius was inspired by his thoughts. He knew what was to be done if he was to be like the great heroes of stories, and he knew how to do it. He knew that a hero would make his way around that wall.

However, since Darius prided himself on non-conformity, he opted instead to cry a little and scream obscenities into the void. He sniffled. The wind blew at him like it thought it was funny that he was being such a little sissy about this whole thing. Darius was pretty sure that, as it whistled over the small pocks in the rock-face, he heard the wind say, “you’re a pussy.” Like, 80% sure he heard that.

So, finally, irritated that the wind would be so uncouth, Darius stuffed the small piece of paper which had ordered him out here into his pocket and ever-so-slowly began to creep around the wall, whining and bitching as he went. He found that there were handholds, like the one which had initially saved his life, set into the stone, not far enough apart that it was impossible or genuinely perilous to keep moving, but far enough to seriously test his resolve. In fact, almost perfectly the distance which would require him to face his fear a little bit, and perhaps grow a bit, almost as though the shaper of this world was intending to mold Darius into a more suitable hero…

But that seems very trite and cliche, so it’s quite fortunate that he subverted this attempt by, every time he was forced to make a small leap to a handhold, sobbing and screaming like so:

“FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.”

Darius was not very articulate when it came to cursing, but he got his point across.

He was forced to keep his face tightly pulled into the rock itself, for fear that any inclination towards the emptiness would lead him there entirely. About eighty strangled swear-sobbing leaps later, Darius arrived, face raw from tears and being dragged against a cliff-face. The place at which he arrived was a small stretch for about 5 feet where the wall receded from the ledge, leaving a circular platform about two-and-a-half feet in radius on which for Darius to curl up and bleat his scared little body-wrenching weeps. Finally, his hyperventilation calmed down, and he wiped his bleary eyes to find that, hovering in space about six feet out and a foot down from his ledge, was a chunk of flat stone slightly smaller than Darius’s platform. This stone, in contrast to the painful purple of the cliff, was regular stone-gray, and it bobbed lightly in place. Darius then noticed that there were more discs like the first, each floating the same distance away from the last that the first one floated from where he lay: Six feet over, one foot down. They formed something like a long stone pathway, which lead, after about forty platforms later, to a larger chunk of floating stone. On this larger, concluding hunk, there was a ledge like the one on which Darius now sat, and a black hole the shape of a doorway. Darius thought two things about this little pathway of stone.

1.) They looked kinda like inner-tubes floating in a pool.

2.) It looked like someone expected him to jump to them, like this was some damn video game.

“P’ffft. No way in hell I’m doing that shit. This ain’t no damn video game.” He scoffed. He leaned back against the wall, legs splayed before him, sat thinking for a moment. Then, in a short, stupid fit of curiosity, he pulled the thick piece of paper he had received in the theatre from his pocket. He wanted to see, he reasoned to himself, if it had learned some better manners. It was blank as he first looked, but soon text began to type its way across the page.

Better manners? Fuck you.

Obviously, no. It had not.

“Who are you, and why are you such a dick?” Darius barked.

How about we use our polite voice, asshole?

Darius blinked once. Blinked again.

“Who are you, and why are you such a dick?” Darius barked.

Okay, fuck it, whatever. Short answer: I am your God. Long answer: You don’t get a long answer because you are a stupid douchebag who’s messing up the story, so fuck you.

“Well, that tells me a whole lot, thanks mister,” Darius rolled his eyes in the general direction of where he thought God would be, which was mainly up and kind of around, “But, if you’re God, then why did you put me here? What story And what’s with the cliff? I hate heights.”

The reasons for which you were placed here are innumerable and inscrutable. A mortal mind could not handle the opacity of their transcendent purity. As for the “story,” it is part of an intricate spatial-temporal construct, once again, impenetrable by the pitiful likes of your mind.

Wow, and people call me a pretentious asshole, Darius thought.

I heard that.

Good. And you used “opacity” wrong, dickshit.

Shut up. Your inability to understand my elevated vocabulary aside, it is not your place to question what I have you do. It is your place, however, to do it, and not complain. However, if you must have an explanation, know that your knowledge of your situation would cause a cascade of revelations which would shatter the foundations of this world.

“Why would I even care about that? This isn’t my world, in case you hadn’t noticed, this is just some random, awful place you stuck me. The only thing I would care about is if it would destroy where I came from, where all the people I know and love are and where I live and…” Darius twisted his face in thought. “Actually, I don’t think I would care if that place was destroyed. Why don’t I care?”

Because you’re a dick.

“Oh my god I hate you so much.”

Well, you asked. In truth, however, that is only half of the reason. Well. Three-eighths of the reason, give or take a sixteenth. Now, boy, get up and just hop on down those platforms, and make sure to be real heroic and impressive while you do it.

“You have stuck me in the middle of bullshit fucking nowhere, told me basically nothing, insulted me, and nearly killed me. Why in sweet fuck do you think I would jump down those platforms?” Then, Darius thought:

Oh god, because he’s going to do the dissolvey thingy again.

Because I’m going to do the dissolvey thingy again.

***

Holy shit, you guys, I am so very, very sorry I took so very long to post this shit. I’m just a dumb stupid idiot who gets quickly occupied and distracted. Nevertheless, here’s the next bit. It’s shorter, not very good, but the bit AFTER this is gonna be AWESOME.

MASTER POST WITH ALL THE OLD BITS ‘N’ PIECES:

http://slightlyslouched.tumblr.com/post/13761744906/content-with-the-content-master-post

NEW STUFFS:

“Yo, J-DOOOOOOOOOOOG. Dog. J. Dog. Bro. Wait up, man, damn you walk fast.”

Experiencing a twinge of regret that there was not enough of a crowd in this hallway to lose his pursuer, Jeremy slowed his pace and waited to be accosted.

“What d’you want, Kent.” Kent stormed up and slapped Jeremy heartily on the shoulder, grinning in that semi-charming way that imbeciles grin when they aren’t aware that they are being imbeciles, which is all the time.

“What’s uuuup, man? How you think you did on that test? I guarantee I flunked that shit. Biology? More like B.S.ology, right?”

Kent was not aware, but Biology was one of Jeremy’s best subjects, and Jeremy was quite good at every subject. But, having witnessed the torment to which the more intelligent of the school were subjected, Jeremy kept his high-B average to his damn self, thank you very much. So he tended to respond in kind to questions like the one Kent was asking him.

“Yeah, totally bro, I’m gettin’ a D at BEST. Mr. Kurt is a dickhead, that asshole can’t teach science for shit, no wonder we can’t take his tests.” This response had the added benefit of being mostly accurate: Mr. Kurt was, in fact, a dickhead. He was forty-five years old, didn’t know the science unless he was reading it from the book, and, to their distaste, constantly hitting on his female students. It was only due to a personal interest in and proficiency for science that Jeremy managed A’s. Regardless of veracity, this response seemingly placated Jeremy’s cloying hanger-on.

“Wisdom man, wisdom. Hey, you goin’ to Burnim’s party tonight? Shit’s gonna be off the goddamn chain.”

“I dunno, dude. I’m kind of tired, I’m not sure I wanna get fucked up. And getting fucked up’s basically all that happens at those parties.”

“Well, then,” Kent said with what was probably meant to be a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, “We’ll just have to get you fucked down, yeah?

Jeremy stopped walking. Jeremy looked Kent dead in the eye.

“Kent.”

Kent was now looking a little concerned. Even dimwits can taste danger in the air.

“Yeah?”

“What the fuck was that even supposed to mean? That means fucking nothing.”

Kent, in his struggle to find words to explain what he thought was going to be a flawless witticism, seemed to be attempting to throw up several frogs. Jeremy looked on, amused, for several moments before growing bored and ending the conversation.

“Well, whatever dude, we’ll see what happens. I’ll text you later.”

Leaving Kent in the splattered mess that was his train of thought, Jeremy strolled down the hallway, out of the school, into his car, and drove home.  

His mother awaited him in the kitchen, a just-got-home snack of cheese and apples already set out on a plate for him. Ever since they’d had enough money - essentially, ever since she had married Brent - she always made certain that he was well provided for. Unfortunately for him, she severely mischaracterized how hungry a teenage boy could be, and he ended up getting stuffed far fuller than wanted.

But he knew it made her happy that she could provide, so as he walked in the house he grabbed the plate, kissed her on the cheek, told her he loved her, and hustled up the stairs. The wall up the staircase was covered in family portraits that Jeremy’s mother had insisted upon having taken when she married Brent. This amused Jeremy, because instead of making them seem like a family, it just made Brent stick out. He was a great guy, and Jeremy had nothing against him, but he was whiter than mayonnaise on Wonder Bread, and framed by Jeremy and his mother, it could not have been more apparent.

Jeremy spun into his room, dumped all the apples into his rabbit’s cage, and flopped sincerely onto his bed. His room was a mess, books laid face-down on the floor, papers strewn all about, clothes wherever they had happened to fall. It was effectively a nest, and that was how he liked it.

He drew his phone from his pocket, preparing to send out a slew of texts in an attempt to determine whether or not it was socially mandated to attend the party tonight, when his cell phone did that disconcerting thing that happens sometimes when you pick up your phone and it immediately vibrates, like it’s been waiting for you.  There was no sender for the message, and the text itself was strangely formatted:

To the Truthseer:

By opening this message, you have accepted. Prepare. You will be taken when you do not expect it.

Regards,

[              ]

Anonymous asked: HI RYAN WHAT IS UP WITH YOU?????????

NOT MUCH ANONYMOUS WHAT IS UP WITH YOOOOOOOOUUUUU?!

I will be posting a biiiiiiiiiiiig update for the update after next. Like, way bigger than any of the others so far. Probably worth at least two of them, if not more. Lots of cool plot stuff and junk and yeah. 

PREPARE.

Probably like a day or two until the next thing you see, though. It won’t be the big one. That will be after that. But it’s still quite good. 

Like I said, sorry about that last bit being more expository than amusing. This one will be better, I promise. Well. I don’t promise, that would be too much. I giggled while writing it, at least. Also, this one is like 400-500 words longer than a lot of the others. I’m not sure why.

HEY HERE’S THE OLD SHIT:

http://slightlyslouched.tumblr.com/post/13761744906/content-with-the-content-master-post

ANNNNNNND HERE’S THE NEW SHIT:

Pissed and uncomfortable, Carolyn hacked through yet another dense clump of the electric-yellow tendrils. The vine-y nuisances tangled their way over both the walls and floor of this dank lavender hell-hole of a cave, but occasionally they were audacious enough to spindle from floor to ceiling in thick webs, almost totally blocking passage. Luckily, Carolyn was well familiar with the core principles of the Thug-Lyfe™, and so had, upon being abruptly and disorientingly deposited in this trans-blue stone labyrinth, promptly fashioned an excellent shiv from one of the jagged black spikes that protruded from every surface like so many stalagmites.

It had been been a fairly typical day for her, despite how novel the first day of a new school year is typically supposed to be for students. Her routine for that portion of the calendar given over to academics had been set for a long time, and she did not plan to vary it for this new day: Wake up, shower, dress in whatever is not covered in dirt, trudge to school, wander for a bit, end up in empty classroom, suddenly everything goes dark, now the classroom is in a purple cave which is well lit despite there being no light sources, hear creepily jaunty medieval-court music in the distance followed by clown laughter, fashion weapon…hold on. I rather lost the handle on that list.

Nonetheless, the teleportation had occurred, the music and laughter had been heard, and the shank had been crafted. Unnerved by the deadness of sound in the cave Carolyn eschewed exploration or conjecture and instead just hustled it forward so she could get right the fuck out of there.

“I am going to get right the fuck out of here,” she murmured to herself, handily validating my assessment of her motives. No, it’s not cheating just because I’m the one telling the story, bugger off.

The tunnels were all the same color as the cave in which she had arrived, a sharp purple that seared the eyes. They were about four feet wide and six and a half feet tall, tall enough to stand upright but low enough to cause a creeping claustrophobia. The tight quarters were made worse by the sharp protrusions, ragged flat blades and crooked spires of black stone that jutted out, waiting for you to stumble. It was from one of these that Carolyn had made her blade, ten inches long and as willing to cut the hand that held it as to cut what that hand wanted. Though she used it to clear her path, she thought of it as a weapon.

She had come to several splits and forks (though no spoons), all of which occurred rather abruptly and which were dark and curvy about twenty feet in, making them quite mysterious and presenting many of what may have been a tough decision for a woman less volatile. But Carolyn had thwarted their rogue-ish aspirations of confusion by simply stamping down whichever corridor was most aligned with her current trajectory. She gave not one fig for these games. Not even one.

Like, here’s this big ol’ pile of figs, and you’re like, “I wonder who could give me one of these for these totally enigmatic and righteously head-gamey tunnel-shenanigans I’ve got here.” And Carolyn is like, not there. She’s way off in the fuckin’ distance. And she ain’t givin’ you even ONE of those goddamn figs. Ain’t got figs to give, cuz all the figs is here, and she ain’t. She’s elsewhere, engaging in NON-FIG-GIVING-related endeavors.

What’s that?

You bet she doesn’t get asked on many dates?

…fuck you.

So Carolyn, notably devoid of any fruit-products of the Ficus carica, sliced through yet another cluster of slick yellow fibers and found herself near a corner. Around this corner, warm light flickered as though from a fire, and impish shadows danced on the opposite wall. There echoed around a swell of chattering noises, a clamor of high-pitched chirps and clicks.

Carolyn crept up, and, even though she had always made fun of characters in books and movies for peeking slowly around corners because everyone on the other side can totally see your head before your eyes are around anyway, she peeked slowly around the corner.

The hallway around the corner opened into a relatively roomy space, the ceiling lifting from its previously oppressive level to a comfortable twenty feet, the walls opening to at least fifty. Across the cavern was a hole in the wall which was connected to a tunnel very much like the one in which Carolyn now crouched. About ten feet up was a ring of televisions, each at least fifty inches across, that totally encircled the space, casting flickering light through the chamber.

And, dancing all about, were at least one hundred gremlins.

Or at least, something like gremlins. Each about two feet tall, they were more like small puppets, humanoid, but proportioned less to scale and more like characters in a children’s show, with large heads half the size of the rest of their bodies. On top of these massive noggins were perched two ears, dog-like but seemingly un-furred. Everything about the gremlins was pure white in color, the only break in the seamless achromaticity being the two ink-black dots of their eyes and the sharp black smirks that were their mouths.

About half of the swarm of tiny monsters were capering about a large bonfire that crackled in a recess in the floor, chattering and chirping and squeaking and apparently enjoying themselves immensely. The rest of the gremlins were scattered about, some tussling with one another, some animatedly clicking and chattering to each other, and a large number stood, unmoving, gazing up silently at the enormous screens with their mouths hung open. Carolyn glanced up at the screens to see what they could possibly be so fascinated by, only to discover that they showed no more than an incomprehensible stream of flashing and crackling colors and shapes, flickering by too quickly to see a picture even if there was one.

Most people would have taken this time to sit back, probably in fear or astonishment, try to come up with a plan, or perhaps backtrack and take another of the forks. Because, clearly, this was not one of the correct forks to take. Most people would have backed away slowly, careful not to attract the attention of the swarm of miniature creatures, and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

So Carolyn sat back, in astonishment, and pulled out her tobacco and rolling papers to begin rolling herself a cigarette. She always found that rolling calmed her down, and let her focus. So as she rolled, she worked on a plan. The cigarette was halfway to her mouth and Carolyn was halfway to a very clever plan when she realised that she was not, in fact, “most people.” She was Carolyn Ma-Fuckin-Rie Erickson, and therefore was not going to waste time being apprehensive or planning or any of that bullshit. So she popped the cigarette in her mouth, lit it with her ever-handy lighter, one deep inhale, and as she blew the smoke out through her nostrils stomped around the corner with her plan now totally forgotten.

“Hey.”

The tiny demons paid her no attention. That irritated her.

“I said, Hey.”

Once again, no response from the thrall of minuscule terrors.

“FUCKING HEY, GODDAMNIT.”

Every tiny white head slowly turned to face her. The dancing stopped, the fighting stopped, the talking stopped. The room grew silent. One gremlin slapped the head of another who was still focused on a television. Every beady eye was on Carolyn.

“What the fuck’s up, you crazy little fuckers?”

A moment more of silence.

Some number of days/hours later, Carolyn would recount what then ensued like so:

“…and that was when I got fucking bum-rushed by like a thousand pasty little squawking assholes.”

But don’t worry, the next one is hi-fuckin’-larious.

This story, man. Whenever I write for this, I keep thinking, “Woah, I just wrote a thousand words!” Then I think, “Yes, but five hundred of those were in a paragraph-length analogy involving giant sweaty men used to describe how irritable your character was. You don’t get point for that.”

For your sake, because I am such a swell guy, I am updating not quite so far apart this time. Go me! I am awesome.

The Place To Go, For To Find Old Installments:

http://slightlyslouched.tumblr.com/post/13761744906/content-with-the-content-master-post

Here be Narrative:

The French Club had finally agreed that, although it was tempting to go for the World Record for “Least Interesting Club Meeting Ever,” it was time to escape the interminable and pointless pseudo-bureaucratic banter that came from discussing French Club. The freshmen had long since devised several methods both for offing themselves and for stealthy egress, both as solutions to the soul-deadening boredom. Two sophomores were discussing Pokemon in a corner and paying the meeting no attention at all, and two more had excused themselves to the “bathroom” to make out, fooling no one. Fifty percent of the rest of the members were catatonic, a further forty percent were kind of half-listening, and the remaining ten percent were the officers, “Officers” here meaning, “Self-important control freaks who only became officers to put the office on College Applications.” These officers had run through the itinerary for the remaining 6 days of school three times now. It had become painfully clear that it was time for the meeting to end.

There was a small scramble as the meeting was dismissed while every non-officer fled for their sanity, leaving the officers themselves to begin their slow trickle out. It was not too long before the only person left in the room was Helena, still sorting through her color-coded folders and cross-referencing her various agendas and itineraries, making certain that not a single event had been missed.

The last folder placed precisely into its designated backpack-zone, Helena straightened and stretched her back. Grey light, unusually cool for this time of year, shone through the window, serving only to make the silence of the classroom a little more unpleasant.

Helena pulled a cell phone from her pocket, flicked it open to check the time, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the meeting had taken ten less minutes than she had budgeted for it. Free-time, for Helena Xiao, was rarer than unicorns and far more coveted, and she flopped blissfully down into a chair to do something she rarely had the opportunity to do: nothing at all.

Helena woke up. She didn’t know how she’d fallen asleep, or when. As she blinked the sleep away, she found that she was now sitting behind the teacher’s desk. She also discovered that all the chairs in the room had been stacked into towers of four, these towers now lining the walls. The desks were gone, her backpack was nowhere to be found. Her mind still hazy from sleep, Helena shook her head, expecting the strange scene to shift and to find herself back sy the desk where she’d fallen asleep, nothing changed. But nothing re-became un-changed, and, irritated with the resilience of the peculiarities, Helena stood up and walked around the desk.

There was something strange about the blackboard, though she could not quite tell what it was. However, the sense of something being wrong niggled at her brain until she realised with a start that her school had not blackboards, but white, dry-erase boards. She approached it quickly but cautiously and found that the entire surface had been thickly covered in black dry-erase ink, curiously devoid of smudges and gaps. That is, no gaps save for a three-by-three inch square in the very center of the board.

Helena walked up to the board, and leaned into the blank patch until her nose nearly touched the surface. The sides of the patch were perfectly straight, the angles exact, no marks of erasure or smudging to be seen. Inside this small section of free space was a small note, printed in neat, square letters that were perfectly spaced and aligned and uniform. It was writing too perfect for human hand, so perfect it looked as though it had been stamped rather than written. It read as follows:

To the Luckcaller:

By reading this note, you have accepted. Prepare. You will be taken when you do not expect it.

Regards,

[              ] 

Helena squinted at the impeccably formed message for a moment. In a rush of inexplicable adrenaline a fierce rage came over her, and without thought she slashed at the note, in the process both smearing it beyond legibility and covering her hand with black ink.

In the next moment, the fury was gone, and she was left wondering why she’d done that. Helena sighed heavily, rubbed her hand on her white shirt, swore when she discovered she’d stained the shirt, and spun around. She blinked for a moment, too astonished to process that she’d just found all the chairs back where they’d been when she fell asleep, the desks returned, her backpack perched where she’d left it.

Every sense set on edge and alight with fear, she slunk over to the chair she’d fallen asleep in, which was shifted as though someone had just gotten up. Leaning down, she felt the seat. It was warm. A bolt of apprehension pulsed through her, and she whirled back around.

The board was the same as it had been before she struck it, message renewed and intact. She clutched at her shirt, but found ink neither there, nor on her hand.

Helena would have taken this time to be more frightened than she ever had been before, but in a sudden burst of anxiety she checked her phone, and found she was five minutes late to be heading home in time for dinner, which was absolutely mandatory. She flew from the classroom and out of the building, and thought again of that day not even once.

Until the first day of her senior year.

Anonymous asked: how many followers do you have?

Like thirty something? I dunno, not many, I don’t post much or anything very good.

Sorry about the delay, I am teh busies and also stupid and suck. NOW, I realise that this is getting pretty intimidating to start reading for people who may want to start it up now, but I promise it’s not too bad. If you read the parts in order, it’s really got quite a coherent framework and internal logic that will keep it making sense.

I intend to change that in the future, but that’s how it is now. 

Also, I know that I am tag-whoring but screw you, eh, I do what I want. 

MASTER POST, WHERE YOU CAN READ THE PAST JUNK:

http://slightlyslouched.tumblr.com/post/13761744906/content-with-the-content-master-post

NOW THE GOOD STUFF:

I would like to take this opportunity to explain a little bit. So far, we have encountered four main characters. We have opened the books of their lives in two different spots along the timeline: Two, Darius and Carolyn, we met on May the 28th, three months prior to the opening of our story. The other two, Helena and Jeremy, were then met on this quarter-year anniversary of our first character introductions. We will now be looking at these same four characters, but removed from their introduction timeline by three months. In other words, those we met earlier we will see as school opens, and those whose back-stories we skipped we will see on that day three months earlier.

Then we’ll settle into a more traditional narrative organization.

For a chapter or two.

Then I’ll probably fuck with it again.

Present-me is sort of half-sorry for Future-me probably going to have done that.

***

Darius woke up when he accidentally rolled off the stage, into the orchestra pit. Because he had opted not to sleep the night before the first day of his Junior year, he had gone for a walk and a smoke and an energy drink. He had ended up at the school, and found that the janitors had once again left the back door open, allowing him access to the theatre. Darius had seized this opportunity, as he had often before, to enter the theatre and smoke alone on the stage and think about how badass he was for doing just that.

But then, as he was just polishing off the last of his heavily caffeinated beverage, preparing to emerge, brilliant and oh-so-hip into the school from the theatre, like a beautiful butterfly emerging from a chrysalis that smelled like cheap tobacco, he had suddenly fallen asleep.

That, of course, ended with the aforementioned unintentional endeavor he made, unconscious, for lower altitudes.

Rubbing his nose and swearing, Darius picked himself up and pulled his cell-phone out to check the time. He clicked it on, glanced at the screen, and then put it back in his pocket. He then found that he had done that thing where you look at the time and then look away and then discover you only sort of glanced but didn’t comprehend the time so you still have no idea what time it is. And so out the cell-phone came again, and as he looked at its glowing face, Darius discovered why he hadn’t understood it. The time read, simply, thus:

NOW 

Though it occurred to Darius that this was not of much help, he was still mildly hazy from sleep, and therefore did not discern precisely how peculiar it was, as well. He grunted with irritation, blew a strand of sleep-messy hair from his face, and stomped up the theatre aisle for the doors. Arriving, Darius wrenched the door open and burst through.

Darius had a habit of slamming doors. He had developed this tendency because he engaged regularly in small, furious spats with his family, and he was not tremendously clever. The rest of his family was tremendously clever, and they liked to fire off white-hot quips mid-debate that infuriated Darius to the point where he would have to leave the argument. This fury, combined with a lack of comebacks, meant his only possible action was to slam the door as heavily as possible to demonstrate his contempt and, paradoxically, apathy. This occurred so often that he compulsively slammed every door he passed through, holding tight to the handle so he could whip it closed with his full power.

It is fortunate that this was Darius’s wont, for had it not been, he would have had nothing with which to pull himself back to safety when he stormed out of the theatre and into an abyss.

Muscles in his arm complained as he heaved himself back onto the minuscule ledge just outside the doorway. His heart tattooed a litany of swear words in Morse Code in his chest, and his eyes bugged nearly out of his head as he took in his surroundings.

He was perched on a little rocky strip, about a foot and a half from doorway to edge. The material of the ledge was a dark royal blue that glowed ever so faintly, pulsing with a strange energy. The strip on which he stood continued out of sight to his right, and looking up and to the right, Darius saw that the face of the cliff continued up as far as he could see. To his left, a wall of the same width rose at a perfect 90 degree angle, then started tapering down at the top of the doorway until it was flush with the rest of the face.

And, of course, there was what lay beyond the cliff face. Blackness, thick and unrelenting. It seemed almost plush, almost soft, but yielded no traces of anything but void. It was a consuming vacuum.

“Fucking. Hell.”

Darius spun right the hell around and went right the hell back into the theatre. He scurried his skinny-jean-clad ass right the hell down the aisles and popped right the hell up onto the stage, and then he curled right the hell up into a little ball and tried to go back to sleep.

His attempts at slumber were ruined, however, when a low hum began, ringing through the large, empty auditorium. Darius sat up warily, unhappy that something else peculiar was surely about to happen. The sound grew, building and swelling, until it resonated through Darius’s chest. From each corner of the theatre, a beam of light shot, these four golden spears intersecting at the precise middle of the open area, creating a brilliantly white and painfully bright ragged orb of energy. Then, in an instant, both the light and humming stopped with a light “pop”, and where the ball of light had once been a small square of paper fell, riding the air currents lazily down, flipping and turning until it came to rest softly on the one seat in the audience that was, for some reason, down.

Tentatively, Darius rose and padded down into the sea of seats, and drew close to the piece of paper. It was about five inches square, thick and creamy, like fine office stationery. And right in the center there were six words and one punctuation mark, deep black and set into the paper like they had been typed with a typewriter:

What the fuck are you doing?

Sinking into the seat from which he had just taken the paper, Darius look at the slip in bewilderment. He had just been treated to a rather spectacular light-and-sound show, culminating in the spontaneous generation of a little card that was, rather rudely, interrogating him. He looked up, at the ceiling in general rather than a particular point, and squinted in consternation.

“What do you mean what am I doing?”

What do you think? The whole thing where you aren’t out scrabbling around that cliff like you’re supposed to.

“Why in sweet fuck would I be doing that? Have you seen the drop out there? Swift plunge into uncertain, black eternity. Shit’s imposing. And who the hell are you, anyway, and how do you have the right to say what I’m supposed to do?”

Listen, I don’t have to deal with this. You’re going out there, and you are going to heroically cling-caper your way around that cliff, because I damn well said you would. Also, because I’m going to start dissolving the theatre.

“Dissolving the…what?” And then Darius understood what the angrily insistent piece of paper was saying, because, starting at the far end, the theatre began crumbling away into that same blackness that lay just beyond the threshold, whole yards of space eaten away in seconds. The emptiness was fast approaching the place where Darius sat.

Leaping up, Darius flailed his way wildly over the backs of the seats, eventually tumbling humorously face-first into an aisle. Up he sprung, and, as he tugged his stylishly-sagged leg-wear up as hard as his could into his crotch, his terrified chicken-legs carried him swiftly to the door.

As he held the handle with his right hand he flew over the threshold, swinging around to his right, where his face became forcefully well-acquainted with the wall. His full visage stinging, he became suddenly aware that under his left hand there was a small handle, set into the rough blue stone. He grasped it as though his life depended on it, which was a good call, because his life did depend on it, for a moment later the theatre door itself, and with it his handhold, popped out of existence.

So there Darius stood, face-first into a cliff wall overlooking an eternal abyss, a sharp breeze gusting directly down from the heavens to cut into his face, rocks cutting into the rubber soles of his trendy canvas shoes, and the meanest wedgie this side of wherever-he-was cutting quite impudently into his crotch-flesh. His lips parted, and between his pearly-teeth escaped one concise yet brilliantly astute observation:

“Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit.”