howling tower, hungry tunnels

i did it.

i saved poe, eric, and clara. i have no idea how. well, the stealth i've honed as a mountebank, plus a touch of my magic, a dollop of fairy dust, and just a hint of dumb luck, but you get what i mean.

and then i heard footsteps.

i didn't know whose, at the time. but i had my suspicions. things got cleared up a bit when jack showed up. he wasn't wearing quite the same outfit as he was when i first met him, but he was instantly recognizable. for one thing, he showed up out of nowhere, for another, he introduced himself as jack, and for a third, he was wearing a red glove. still, this time around, he was wearing a nice suit, rather than the ratty old coat he'd worn to our first meeting. i'd gotten an... evil first impression of him, so to speak, but at the time, my suspicion of him was allayed. now, though, my blood ran cold anew.

for one thing, his suit was still clean, despite the circumstances. for another... well. jack.

"hey." that's what he said to me. "hey." what a loser.
"hello, sir," i replied. i think i managed not to sneer.
"what might you be doing down here?" he asked. "surely you didn't get lost." he laughed at his own joke.
"i'm doing what i'm doing."
"which is?"
"what needs to be done."
"you've learned from the master himself. myself, i should say." jack almost seemed impressed.
"yes, well. you've been such a good boss, haven't you?" i snarled.
fire, real fire, danced in his eyes. he seemed angry now. he closed his eyes, and the fire vanished. a cigarette appeared in his gloved hand and a lighter in the other. "calms my nerves," he explained before coughing.
"what are you here for, anyways?"
"for what i'm here for. since uselessness seems to be today's theme," he added. "but, nah," he said, staring me down with the eye he wasn't closing, "i've got something to tell you."
"which is?"
"your deal. it's gone south."
"already?"
he took another puff and said, "going, i should say."
"you mean to tell me what i'm doing right now, what i did by my own will, this decision i made to save them—it was your idea?"
"was your joining the mountebank club my idea?"
my fists were clenched, but i didn't hit him. just stared at him angrily for a few seconds.
"yeah. that's what i thought."

jack pulled a golden coin from his pocket. he showed it to me; it was the same coin he'd shown me when we first met. he had done a coin trick of some sort. i hardly remember what now.

the coin had his own face on one side, though it was different this time, to reflect the appearance he was using now, and it had the symbol of the mountebanks on the other. when the coin touched the skin on jack's bare hand, it burned away to ash.

jack continued speaking. "so, yes. to answer your unspoken question, in getting you to join the mountebanks, i ruined your life. big surprise, eh? big plot twist?"
i said nothing.
"yeah... not much of one, is it, really? this is more of a character study, your story. not a mystery, not even really a thriller, or an action novel. just a guy living out his sad little life and writing it down for the benefit of us all."
"something like that," i muttered.
"oh," jack said suddenly, "i nearly forgot." he pulled out the same coin he'd shown me earlier. it was burnt slightly, but otherwise undamaged. "keep this. it's a good luck charm." he leaned in close and whispered into my ear, "you'll need it." he pulled back and said, "the mountebanks are coming. are you ready? or will you perish, a fox cornered by wolves for stealing their food? think on it, little fox. think long and hard."

then he walked into the wall and disappeared.

i am alone, now.

my terrible mistake

a meeting was held to determine my fate. the mountebanks determined we should try to better relations between the puppets and timberwolves. we wouldn't want two groups of our customers to hate each other. after all, in that might lead to them taking sides against us. that would be bad for business.

perhaps unsurprisingly, that's been in the talks for a while now. i think, though, that my mistake inadvertently urged them on.

i've decided, meanwhile, to take a... different course of action. see, clara came in again last night. she was visibly distraught. evidently, she and several other puppets recently kidnapped eric and a man whose name i won't reveal but who sounded like poe, as the former is an arc agent and the latter is working with one.

i've got a lot of sympathy for clara's plight, you understand, and eric and poe grew on me in the little time i knew them. and i'm getting a bit sick and tired of the mountebank club, as a whole.

damn shame. i'm guessing the other mountebanks wouldn't want me interfering with the puppets. that would be bad for business. so, ah, i'm gonna have to do things on my own.

you can guess the rest.

help help help

adam weiss doesn't just handle our attacks, you know. he handles a bit more than just that. he ensures things. ensures the safety of our little club.

he chewed me out.

fair enough, i suppose. i handled that whole henrietta situation pretty damn horribly. apparently, and this sounds rather familiar now that i think about it, i told triptolemus and zagreus that henrietta died. got killed, inadvertently, in the fight we had with the snowfall a few months back. (members of the snowfall had the occasional partnership with other people that work for the big guys, see. according to me the other day, this included a particular puppet.)

when triptolemus and zagreus looked into things, they found out pretty quick that henrietta is still alive, and now triptolemus is mad. wonderful.

(adam weiss said nothing on the matter of zagreus. i suppose zagreus doesn't much care what happens, does he? he's got no interest in the goings-on of his fellows. can't say i blame him. can't say i don't relate, either.)

that reminds me...

i don't recall if i lied, or just concealed the truth, but there's something i didn't quite explain too thoroughly. see, i was poor when i met jack, and my interest in the idea of gaining real magic was partially monetary as well as personal. he was very convincing in displaying his magic to me. he did every trick i could think of, common or otherwise. unless he had time to practice and set up a trick where he pulled an entire book out of thin air, anyways.

what i'm getting at is, getting signed off to the theater troupe of the gambling ghost was his idea, not mine.

lions prowling among men, wolves in sheep's clothing. those are the phrases. that's what they tell you, what they remind you. what they never let you forget until the day you die. what they never let you stop thinking of until your soul belongs to the lonesome one some call lazarus.

lions and people, wolves and sheep. predators and prey, devourers and meat. but lions and wolves? we need to eat.

light and dark

it's so strange to me how people insist on differentiating things. this is rock and that is pop, this is music and that is noise, this is noise and that is motion, this is motion and that is heat. it's all the same when you get right down to it, yeah? even such basic concepts as darkness are ultimately shams. darkness is just the perceived absence of light. hardly much to get worked up about, yet you'll hear people say they're afraid of the dark, like it's some sort of entity in its own right. or you'll hear people talking about being people, and not just collections of smaller organisms, which, in turn, are collections of cells. it's all just a matter of opinion, yes?

i think that line of thinking is tearing me to parts inside. but i can't refute it, as much as i'd like to abandon it. i just can't see a way to deny the truth.

what's even the point? deluding myself because reality makes my head hurt and my heart hurt worse... what a sham that would be.

what a magnificent little sham.

underworld

i met a man named zagreus today. he was accompanied by triptolemus. zagreus looked crazed, but not in quite the same way that triptolemus did, and always does, for that matter. no, he looked more scared than driven or obsessive. like someone who didn't really want to be in the circumstances he was in.

how... familiar.

zagreus seemed like he could've been a hippie if he were born back in the sixties. he certainly rocked a pretty nice beard. long hair, too.

sadly, he was instead born in a time and a place in which his long hair and incredible beard were put to waste, scorned, as it were, by fate itself. he's an angel, like his boss triptolemus, but unlike triptolemus, he isn't in it for fun, or out of loyalty to angel face. no, zagreus just wants to get out, and the other angels know it. he used to work for arc, those buzzkills with the badges, but he got bored of that pretty quick.

the only other agent zagreus really liked too well was named xander. i think xander is just about the only reason zagreus stuck around. actually, i'm reasonably certain erotic friend fiction was written about the two of them. people who knew them personally said zagreus was just protective of him, like an older brother but less annoying.

(not that i'd know anything about having siblings, myself. giles and uncle markus are just about the only family i've ever had, and i've never had a problem with them. it's just a shame i completely abandoned them and haven't kept in contact. i do wonder what giles is up to nowadays. i wonder if he smiles when he thinks of me, or just frowns. i wonder if he thinks of me at all.)

when xander got killed, and zagreus got sucked into angel face's private world for a hot sec, he got it in his head to become an angel. i can't say i blame him. other than the pull the world of bliss has on people's minds, zagreus just didn't see any reason to stick around once xander was gone.

unfortunately, angel face himself was the one who killed his partner in the first place and angels are a bunch of stupid cowards.

if you're curious about how much i know involving all the juicy gossip related to everyone’s favorite batman wannabes, well... trust me, there's more where that came from. those guys really need to learn to keep their mouths shut.

(as i write this, i am smiling ominously. as if you needed to be told.)

anyways, zagreus and triptolemus came in to the night shop a few hours ago. they wanted information on a puppet by the name of henrietta. she matched the description clara gave of her mother, and they share a surname. i connected the dots pretty quick, though in the context of the turf war, i was also pretty quick to realize why they needed information on her.

i was in a bit of a tight spot. i bluffed. i forget what i said, but i plan to keep my eye on those two. i'm not really certain as to clara's circumstances, but it sounded like she was in a pretty tight spot as-is, and i wouldn't want to inadvertently make things worse for her.

...i should really remember what i told them. tangled webs are easier to keep separate when the spider weaving can see them clearly, after all.

er. oops.

one night

i had a couple good friends, once. before i got myself involved in all this fucking bullshit. in fact, i was pretty well liked back in middle school. i was a bit of a class clown, strange as that might sound. in high school, my friend group changed a bit. the friends you make as a class clown aren't the friends you keep as an obsessor over the esoteric, as it happens.

my best friend, the only one i kept in the transition from middle school to high school, was named giles. he was my age, and had a grandpa on his mom's side named markus. when markus learned i was interested in magic, his eyes lit up. he was a stage magician, see, though i was always convinced he had real powers too.

he liked to give us demonstrations of his tricks, and he'd explain all of them. except for one.

that one was the star of the show, he said. no point in demystifying it. it would just weaken it. i always thought that excuse was a little cheap. if that was the case, why explain the rest? a magician never reveals his secrets, indeed.

the trick... it's a little difficult to explain, but the short story is that he seemed to disappear and reappear. no trapdoors, no doubles, it all took place at giles' house. it was the only trick that wasn't small enough to be faked easily in such an environment. and it was the one trick he refused to explain.

kids aren't as dumb as they look. (sorry, kids.) i think i had the right idea when i suspected markus of being a real magician. i couldn't prove it, i don't think, but it feels right.

giles was pretty different. he liked magic as much as anyone would, sure, but he didn't care about it quite like i did. when i was interested in stage magic, he thought of it all as trickery, and that's fair, because it's true. but that doesn't make it any less real. certainly, it's just as real as the kind of esotericism i indulged in as a teenager, which he never outright derided, but seemed to treat with a sort of silent... confusion, really. (i guess it's really all about appearances. stage magic is flashy. occultism is sketchy, quite deliberately so. it's an art form whose main practitioners are brooding teenagers and the occasional stuffy guy from the 1800s. it's only natural that the kinds of effects they produce, both in terms of real output and in terms of impression on the audience, are pretty different.)

other than that one sticking point, giles and i were close. we'd known each other for so long, it would be hard not to develop some sort of sentiment towards one another. in our case, we started off as friends, and eventually, we realized we had feelings for each other. but that... it scared me, i think.

i don't play well with others.

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.