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.

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.