once upon

i met a... colleague of sorts last night.

i was rude to him, i'll admit. had to be. that's just what the mask of alan roach demands, you see. poe, if you're reading this, my sincerest apologies.

poe. that's his name. the name he uses online, and around people he doesn't trust in person. smart guy. or paranoid.

or both.

not like they don't go hand in hand when you're living in the world of the fears, eh? yeah, i think he's both. he's clearly got some sort of anxiety disorder. he keeps it under wraps enough to be a sarcastic little prick, though. 

what a lovely, lovable fellow.

oh, and his friend, eric. he's fantastic. he's got a tragic backstory. which, apparently, justifies being a bit of a reckless asshole, which he is, from the sounds of it.

it looks like our friend poe wrote about this encounter too. here's a link.

my, i've not put my medium to much use before, have i? no, i really haven't. other than the comments. what would i do without you... ah... incredibly likeable commenters? probably die of the sadness.

something like that.

death lashes out

you ever have a fever dream?

once, i was terribly sick. i had come down with a fever, you see. (whether an ominous figure in a black cloak and a corvine mask had anything to do with this is, as far as i'm concerned, totally irrelevant. probably.) i dreamed of angel face. he had a halo of light, wings of light.

this was all, mind you, before my meeting with jack. even before my forays into the occult.

make of that what you will.

warping me

i just realized i'm, what, twelve posts in? and haven't actually described a meeting involving everyone's favorite mountebanks. that's... weird, right? that feels weird.

anyways.

idris is the most stable of our masks, so whoever plays him tends to get stuck with actually running meetings. we rarely have a set theme for our meetings, but this time, we did. idris announced that last meeting, so we had time to write our respective pieces accordingly. the theme was control.

how fitting.

my piece was a short one, a poem, to be exact. it reads as such:

"if we were to have total control over ourselves,
we would find ourselves to be living hells,
for correlation of all the contents of the mind
leads one horrors indeed to find."

they praised me for my examination of the concept of the transmigration of the soul.

princess of puppets

i met another interesting customer today. said her name was clara, that she was being groomed to become a puppet. the princess of puppets. the host-to-be of the wooden girl's twisted consciousness. fucking splendid.

she said she needed food. this was pretty obvious; she looked half-starved. i asked her, privately, if she needed any weaponry or anything like that. she said the wooden girl and the puppets—including, apparently, her own mother, though her father is absentee, from the sounds of it—didn't let her keep weapons on her. smart, but a bit of a shame, in my eyes.

not that i'm implying anything as to my stance on woody's kind here. no, no, of course not.

i pitied clara enough to help her out for free. also, it doesn't hurt that she closely resembled a lost kitten, and was younger than me by a good deal, going by appearances. i might be a bastard, but i'm a bastard with paternal instincts.

i'm as surprised as you are.

eyes on me

ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

me neither.

knowledge is power

and power corrupts.

once, you know, i met the one who steals memories. surprisingly, though, he didn't steal mine. i guess it has to happen eventually, right? a blogger involved with the higher-ups who meets the blind man and isn't affected?

no, he took someone else's memories, i think. i'm not sure whose.

do you suppose it gets tiresome eventually? i mean, only a few people are gifted with the blind man's memories, so i assume he's got a lot to himself. so very much human knowledge, emotions, opinions...

that's a lot of bullshit to deal with.

actually, come to think of it, that's the only supernatural encounter i ever had in person, prior to joining the night shop. the other, as you may have suspected, was jack. though i guess i've only mentioned his being the god patron saint boss of our kind, what, twice now? so, i wouldn't really blame you if you forgot.

see, i've been interested in magic since i was very young. first stage magic, then the occult. when i met jack, well, you can guess how that went down. pretty quickly, i struck a deal, and now i know things that have... proved useful.

i'm just waiting for things to go south. they always do when you make a deal with jack.

:)

new year's

ah, fuck. i forgot to do a new year's post in time. accordingly, my new year's resolution is to remember new year's next year.

actually, i do have one, even though new year's resolutions are bullshit. it's to stop making new year's resolutions.

god, i'm a card.

anyways, much as i'd like to waste your time some more, there's something i'd like to say here. you see, dear reader, last night i dreamed of dolls on strings. doing their dances. i loathe ominous dreams like that. real subtle, woody. real fucking subtle.

but i suppose it's nice to have a sort of confirmation that woody herself has her fingers in the fight with angel face. see, the human dolls i'd mentioned earlier had been of the willing variety, not the puppet sort, so i'd been working under the assumption that they were acting independently from their mistress. guess not.

what a bunch of losers. the mountebank club doesn't even know which of us is jack of all. of course, that's assuming that old rumor about him secretly being a member is even true. meanwhile, willing dolls are just as subservient to the puppet in charge as the ones who are literally under mind control. it's pathetic.

anyways, that's assuming that woody showed up in my dreams because she wanted to confirm her role in the little war her pawns are part of. hell, maybe she wasn't even doing it herself. maybe it was the grotesque dream, or the dying many, or my own brain.

god only knows.