Words

 Words, like people
Can be stressed.
About what, I do not know.
But we all worry about something. 

Color

 Color
Dancing brightly
On a lovely painting
Joy to every one of my senses
Painter

The Daily Life of a Human

    I'm not entirely sure what Lady Greaves does with her time. She's always off "making deals", whatever that's supposed to mean. As far as I can tell, my job consists of telling people to wait for her, getting them water and other drinks, then watching as they leave in frustration. 

    I'm glad I'm not a nightmare, but sometimes I wish that I wasn't a human either. 

    Fortunately I'm extremely lucky, for a human that is. Back when I was living with my parents, we'd get books every time the book store was open, and it was always open if we were walking past that way. A nightmare was supposed to test me to see if I could make it as a nightmare myself, but thankfully they never showed up. I'm supposed to be on watch for customers, but they never show up when I need a nap, so I sleep in the waiting area. 

   When I'm not asleep and there are no customers around, I'm supposed to be filing papers. Business has been so slow lately that I don't have many papers to file. To pass the time I've been reading the books that Milady keeps in the back room. They're all business, but it's better than being bored. Recently I ran out of books to read, but I found a trick to stop from being bored all the time.

   It goes something like this; if I wait an hour and a customer doesn't show up, I go for a walk in the city. When I find a store I want to shop at, I stop and buy something for myself. When I return, a customer shows up shortly afterwards, and they usually have a request that I can manage, like making an appointment to be seen by Milady. 

   Unfortunately, even the luckiest humans run out of luck eventually, and after three months of working at a job I can't seem to get the hang off, Milady fires me and starts looking for another assistant. 

Musings:

- I wish I knew how to find another job

- I wish I knew how to find the temple when I'm awake

        - I wish I had somebody who loved me. 

Life is a Package of Top Ramen

    I was in fifth grade when I first learned the trick of breaking up uncooked packages of Top Ramen, putting them in a Ziploc bag, mixing in the seasoning packet, shaking it up, and eating it like a bag of chips. I fell in love with that method, and did it countless times over the years. Over time, my taste in ramen packets went from "any package works" to "only the spicy flavors" until I eventually came to the conclusion that the only flavor of ramen I was willing to eat this way was Picante Beef.

     This decision was partly influenced by the fact that it was the only spicy flavor I could find at local grocery stores. Over the years spicy flavors of ramen went away and only the bland flavors remained. Eventually, I couldn't even find Picante Beef anywhere.

    I was devastated. Not because I loved Picante Beef, most of the time I thought it was too salty or too spicy or too overly soy sauce tasting. I was sad because about one out of every twenty ramen packages I got tasted Perfect. Just spicy enough to be interesting, not overly salty, with enough soy sauce flavor to set everything off perfectly. Basically, I didn't like eating Top ramen, what I liked was playing the Top Ramen lottery in hopes of a slightly less mediocre experience. 

    I've said before that I don't think we should go back to "normal", meaning I don't think we should aim to go back to the world before the pandemic. I know the present sucks, but I think most of us have forgotten that for ninety percent of the worlds population (at least) before really sucked too. The only reason we want to go back so badly is that there are a lot experiences you can't have anymore, or at least not easily. Flash games are gone, social media's worse, it's impossible to escape from work, the earth will soon be uninhabitable due to climate change, I can't blame people who want to go back.

    But I think that most of what we view as "good" about the past is like the packages of Picante Beef Top Ramen I used to eat dry like a bag of chips. Not great most of the time, not even objectively good, but sometimes you got to have a truly wonderful experience and you would hold onto that forever. Over time, the successes would outweigh the failures even if you failed more often then you succeeded. In the end, the experience wasn't all that good. That's why, even though I badly miss flash games, I don't think you could pay me to spend all day playing them the way I used to. And even if you can technically buy bulk packages of Picante Beef Top Ramen off of Amazon, I don't think I'll ever eat it again.  

The Shadow Leader

     I come from a proud tradition of lawyers. When my family isn't creating order, we're deciding what the old order means. That's what my father told me when I was a boy. He taught me everything I know about handing out justice. He was so good at his job that every human hated him. Someday I hope I can say the same. 

    I have no interesting history to share. My family is quite proud of being the most boring people in Estellia. I wouldn't have become the god of Shadows otherwise. 

Fears and worries

     I hurt.

     I always knew there would be a moment when I would have to face the truth; the old world is gone and we're not going to get it back. That moment hit yesterday. I can't stop crying and I don't know how to talk to anyone about what I'm feeling. 

    I've had this suspicion for a while that we're seeing the truth, specifically the truth that I see. I'll be honest, I didn't want it to be true. I can handle the thought of being a con artist, being despised by history as a worthless scammer, but when I picture a world that sees the Infinite for what it is, I don't see any happy endings. 

    The Infinite is why I believe we should fight global warming. I don't think we'll win, but whatever we learn in our failure will be valuable knowledge should we need to build a strong Dreamworld. My feelings on environmentalism are a little mixed honestly, but if it keeps people fighting for a better world, then I'm all for it. 

   Lately, however, I keep asking myself the same question, a question I can't possibly answer.

   What if we're too late? What if our world is doomed? How much longer do we really have? 

Souls of the Infinite

 Words.
Stories.
Meaningless and empty.
Time that seemed to stand still
Now rushing towards oblivion.

How?
Why?
What should I do?
What can we do in the face of the end?

In the darkness I hear them screaming.
The ones the Infinite has consumed.
I can't save them.
No one can.

Everything is ending.
A world that was mine
Falling apart
Into dust.

Ashes to ashes.
Dust to dust.
Who'd have thought we'd live to see it?

In the darkness I plead 
For someone to hear me,
For moonlight to guide me,
For a god to save me.

In the darkness I see people banging on the walls
Of the glass house their trapped in,
Begging for those still living in the world
To help them before it's too late.

In the darkness
All I can do is dream 
Of a world that might survive.
A world where all of us are safe
From the sins that consumed us. 

In the darkness 
I seek the laws of physics,
The lines pushing and pulling us apart,
Looking for the moment we fell into nothingness.
Looking for the moment where it all went wrong.

The hardest part about all this isn't that it's over,
It's that knowing that if they could hear you
Maybe you wouldn't have to die. 

    I never wanted things to got back to "normal". Not the normal of pre-pandemic life. I wanted things to change, to get better. But I always thought that I would be able to picture what our future would look like, who would be there, what I would see. 

    Now I don't know anymore. 

   You ever think about the evil empires in science fiction. Those guys had to build infrastructure to transport goods and services across thousands of lightyears, deal with climate crises in multiple planets, and fend off multiple rebels. But they kept going for hundreds of years.

   It's probably a bad sign that I've started to view the villains in Star Wars as a source of hope.

The Magic Necklace

    To humans, so long as something means a lot to you, it's considered to be valuable. Most of us have to little that we cherish everything, even if a nightmare wouldn't think it was worth anything. 

   I was five when I went to my first and only fair. It wasn't in the Fairy lands, so there weren't an rides, but there were two games if I can remember correctly, and everyone in town tried to put on a show. Work was rare, money was rarer, but we had a good time. There was music, which I loved, and people shouting, which I didn't. There was also a strange women selling knickknacks on a blanket. She didn't have much, only about twelve things in total, but it was still more stuff than I'd ever seen in one place. I stared for a long time, then asked to purchase the one piece of jewelry she had.

   "This thing?" She asked, "It's not valuable at all."

    "I want it." Was all I said to her. I begged my mother to buy it for me. She was a weaver who got commissions from nightmares from time to time, so unlike most of the people I knew, we had the money to buy special things. She refused to buy it until the seller said that she would trade it for a penny. My mother told me when we got home that I'd need to work extra hard to make up for the money she spent getting it for me.  

 I know it's nothing special. It's not even made of diamond or rubies, or even glass. Over time, though, it started to become magical. At first, I just used it as a weapon against Nightmares when I was asleep. Nightmares have a lot of resistances, but humans take damage from anything. Fortunately, beneath their power, all nightmares are human. So long as I remembered that, I was able to hurt them with my necklace. 

   I used it on every nightmare I could, even before I'd figured that out. I'd learned that if a Nightmare caught you, you'd get trapped in one of their illusions, and I was terrified of them. It took me longer than it should have to notice that most of them were very similar. 

  I got better and better at using my necklace, so I worried less about being trapped by Nightmares. Then I figured out that even inside of an illusion, I could use my necklace to attack Nightmares. That made things much easier for me.

    Then one evening my mother told me she wanted me to buy me something at the general store. I didn't want to, since it was late and I was tired, but she was insistent. The man who owned the general store never slept, since he was human, but he didn't keep regular store hours. So few people bought anything from him that there wasn't much point to it. This late, he was almost never open, and I knew that you had to wait until he showed up. 

     To my surprise, he was at his shop. I don't remember what he told me exactly, but I know he'd planned on being somewhere and it fell through, so he decided to man the shop on a whim, even though nobody came by at night. I bought what I needed (I honestly don't remember what it was) and left. When I got home, I said to my necklace, "The seller was wrong about you, you really are a magic necklace."