false faces

we wore our masks in public today. we rarely do. usually we save those for the mountebank club or the night shop. except for theodore zodiac. theodore zodiac is a moron. (and so wonderfully fun to play.)

but yes. we wore our masks. it was... strangely liberating. masks are false, but so often faces act as masks, and masks as faces. i think oscar wilde or someone else much smarter than myself said something to that effect. i'm sure you've heard all this trite before, however, and so i will skip it.

for now. don't think you've been saved for long. asher lyall always gets what he wants. (i am smiling as i write this. smiling in a scurrilous and untrustworthy manner. hide your valuables; hide your thoughts. i take either one as freely as the other.)

i played asher lyall. i love playing asher lyall. i relate to him so much, you see, and that is why i have chosen to play asher lyall on this blog. that is why i have chosen to take on his name and mannerisms with my interactions with you, my dear readers.

i do get so wonderfully off-track sometimes. my apologies. i'm sure you're very curious as to why we wore our masks, and what this third facade is, that is neither mountebank club nor night shop.

...i was considering leaving it a secret, but dear god, this blog has got to get somewhere eventually. and it isn't as if mountebank club policy is too strict as to the third facade, or to its activities, so i suppose i'll fess up.

the third facade is called the switchblade symphony, courtesy of an arc agent called ash who is quite well-known within their ranks and is fond of giving our kind various fun nicknames. (ash is not to be confused with yours truly, mind you. i came first. i've always been here.)

we wore our masks for a very particular reason. you see, the night shop has had a bit of an influx of dolls lately. of the odder variety, if you catch my drift. now, the night shop tries to be polite to all our customers, but we were very worried as to what the wooden woman might have been planning. so we wore our masks, and we became the switchblade symphony for a little while, and we learned what there was to learn.

it would seem woody is in a turf war of sorts with angel face. or rather, their goons are. i have no doubt in my mind that the bastards in question couldn't be less interested in their minions' activities.

i do hope nothing... drastic happens.

otherworld

day and night are separate things. this is very obvious. on a more visceral level, it is also very obvious that they are wholly separate, experiences more distinct from one another than... than day and night.

(nailed it.)

the night shop at day is called the mountebank club, and either one can become the third facade. the third facade is utilitarian, not temporal.

some people like to break the rules, though. like people who get jet-lagged. fuck those people. they aren't experiencing nature the way god intended, and must stay on the ground until they can learn to obey.

uh. not sure what that was. sorry.

anyways, liminal spaces are tangentially related to this idea. essentially, a liminal space is somewhere between two areas. this is not very interesting in itself. in practice, though, the term tends to refer to spooky sorts of stuff. for example, a time which is very late⁠—say, perhaps, 4:17 a.m.⁠—can be considered a liminal space, because it isn't quite day or night. also, as noted, it is spooky, particularly as the number 417 has associations with a certain joseph steward in the circles in which our sort run.

i crack up every time i see that number in any other context, if i'm being perfectly honest here.

desert of the real

despite how fancy this post title sounds, it's a matrix reference. i think that was a reference to something else. i forget.

anyways, i watched the matrix last night. they were playing it on tv. i see a lot of weird and often shitty tv, because of how late i stay up.

oh, yeah, and something more interesting happened. this fucking... game show. it was hosted by someone who very closely resembled our patron saint, jack of all. also known as jack the smith, jack the ripper, and jack the ass. (i'm allowed to call you that, right, jack? cool. just checking.)

i think it was let's make a deal. fucking figures. instead of the stupid junk items, though, people who screwed the pooch... i don't actually know what happened to them, but they didn't look too happy.

tower goddamn tv. why does it want me to watch it so badly?

invisibility is invincibility

we struck at midnight. we are night owls, as you may have guessed, and the cover of dark makes it easier to do our job. we destroyed them utterly.

they were a minor group, mind you. they called themselves the snowfall. they said they were the servants of the prince of permafrost. apparently many had personally encountered the cold boy, their master, and were warped by the experience. it didn't really matter either way, though. you see, we were led by adam weiss. i do not trust adam weiss. he is a deceitful bastard.

of course, i don't trust anyone. (i'm not allowed to.)

adam weiss is good at his job, and that scares me, because adam weiss is the most unassuming of us all, but whenever we plan a heist or a strike of some sort, we know who will be playing adam weiss. none of us know his real name, or his real face, but his services are invaluable. we would be remiss to let me, for example, play adam weiss. it would be a major misstep.

that would be a good song name. "major misstep." maybe it would be about a man named major misstep, who is a very shitty army major, and eventually gets overthrown by his soldiers, and maybe eaten alive. it would be a twelve-part, three-hour progressive rock epic about the dangers of war and unrestrained power.

...that got off-track.

i am not your friend

i, the narrator of this little tale, am not your friend. i'm hardly even your ally.

or, who knows, maybe we are friends. are you my friend? you seem pleasant. let's get drinks. let's be pals.

but no. let's get serious. we're not friends. meetings at the mountebank club (for that is what the night shop is, before it gets dark) are not friendly. we are drunken, cynical little shits, and those of us who can't process alcohol manage to fake the mean drunk act well enough.

we compliment one another, sure, but if i were to read one of my many pseudo-philosophical ramblings about illusion and reality, they would praise me for my poem about the woods. if i were to read a short story about a man whose girlfriend is killed by a man with birds inside him, they would praise me for my exploration of survivor's guilt. (hmmm. i feel like i got that one from somewhere.)

my point is, you are not my friend, and i am not yours.

after hours

we had an interesting customer today. he said his name was triptolemus, and that he needed a gun. he also said to tell him if i saw any puppets of the human variety. i said we at the night shop make sure our customers stay in one piece. (for as long as they're our customers, anyways. wink, wink.)

the guy was clearly an angel. he had this look in his eyes that felt... driven. also, the chthonic nickname and the tattoo of two triangles overlapping were pretty much dead giveaways. but hey. eyes. those are cool too, i guess.

dude was real tall, by the way. real thin, too. i gave him some extra food, along with the gun.

oh, yeah, the gun. that's probably the main thing, huh? well, anyways, that happened. he asked me for a gun, along with the declined request, and i gave it to him. we at the night shop like to ask for unusual things sometimes. (no, we're not some sort of weird reverse prostitutes who make people have sex with us in exchange for equipment and information. get your head out of the gutter.) i figured money would do this time, though.

well, more like i gave him a reduced price. i didn't ask for his firstborn, or whatever. just his name.

apparently his real name is—

secret.

that's what it is.

i wouldn't rat on a customer.

(you can't see, but i'm winking right as i write this. it is a wink of utmost mischief and schadenfreude.)

introductions

my name is asher lyall. i am not the only asher lyall, and i am not always asher lyall, but i am asher lyall. i am a member of the night shop. we are not the only night shop, and we are not always the night shop, but we are the night shop.

or perhaps none of that is true. perhaps the mask of asher lyall or the facade of the night shop is more important than the fact that i am sometimes alan roach, and alan roach is sometimes asher lyall, and that the night shop is sometimes the mountebank club, and the mountebank club is sometimes the third facade, the secret facade.

perhaps keeping up appearances is the important thing. who could say for certain? certainly not i.