#CALAMITY is a secret organization that takes care of strange phenomena in the world. think of monsters. ghosts. stuff like that

[ruvviks]

3, 9, and 29 for Jackie

1, 15, and 23 for Caleb

Thank you!!

team alpha asks!

1) What’s their closet like? Do they have a lot of clothes or just a few staples?

answered here!

15) What does their desk space look like? Is it messy or organized?

caleb is very organized! he hates having stuff in the way on his desk so he mostly puts things in the drawers; top drawer is for pens and pencils and stuff like that, middle drawer is for papers and documents, and bottom drawer is for any miscellaneous things that he may need at his desk but as soon as he never uses it he moves it to his bedroom instead :]

the most he will have on his desk is just his pc setup, a fake plant or two, a small digital clock with details on the day of the week and the temperature outside, and a notebook and pen for quick note taking!

23) Can they keep a secret?

caleb is very good at keeping secrets. he always takes it very seriously no matter how small and he won't ever talk to someone else about it, even if it may be smart to do so. he's not always the best when it comes to giving advice, but he is very reliable and you won't have to worry about him spilling your secrets to other people

3) What is one thing they really wish they could say to someone? Who? Why can’t they?

jackie sometimes wishes he could still talk to his family, even though he can't remember them. when you join CALAMITY it's a very important decision you make and you have to dedicate your entire life to it; this is why it's required for you to wipe memories of your previous life, so you don't have any attachments :( it's necessary and all CALAMITY employees understand why, but many of them still end up wondering what their life was like before CALAMITY

during the procedure, you can choose between just having your memories wiped but still being aware of the procedure having been used on you, or also having your memories wiped of the procedure in which case you won't even remember having your memories wiped. jackie chose the first option, to still have some sort of connection to his past life; when you choose to have all memories wiped, you'll of course still wonder about if you have any family and the like, but it won't be a priority in your head because you can't remember WHY you can't remember. if that makes sense. jackie would still often wonder because he can remember the procedure and all that

9) What is their most useful skill?

jackie is a medic! well, a scientist in general but he mostly does analytical work and research in the lab, so his most useful field skill would be his medical knowledge and ability to patch people up :] comes in very handy when team alpha is on a case because there's always someone who ends up getting injured

29) Do they take their coffee/tea in a fun mug? If so, what is it?

yes! jackie has a whole collection of fun mugs that all look like a fruit :] his favorite mug is his strawberry mug!

[stantoncassandra]

Published Art Essay

Tourniquet

Scene I: Finding L

I found you. Took me weeks, hours at a time. I figure you’d been anticipating my internal arrival because when I finally forced my way through the dark static blizzard, between imprinted afterburn of what I’d been seeing, the shadowed neon canvas parted like a white rip. Your eyes met me; sought me. As a child, I felt soothed by the movement still present in the dark after shutting my eyes. When you see a thing only you can see it’s as if the universe has a secret for you, like you’ll be okay because you’re here for a special reason. Of course, the sensation is simply blood pooling into my thin eyelids. I long for the strange hope that, like death, there would still always be something swimming beyond the permanent darkness. I do not have time for belief anymore. Death is fine, it hasn’t stopped me from finding you in its clammy palm of calamity. You sit there cross-legged. One of you sits. Dozens of you dance around the terrain in a frenzied symphony of body, but I long for stillness; stillness weighted enough to be envied by the silent hunter who waits patiently before ripping into its fruit. I am not sure what I am physically doing. I left my body limp somewhere hazy. A messy afterthought of an olive-skinned stocky figure lies in a room. I beat mindfulness into myself with a dull-headed hatchet. I search the taste of my recollection. I don’t risk the thought of another room. Being here takes everything. I am gulping the synesthetic taste of late noon on the gritty wallpaper of your basement. I didn’t break-in, I had a key cut hours before you died. I am violating your space. I am saying all of this to you without speaking. Longing is a language. I am certainly the shadow wrapping itself around all of you, not letting you go in any dimension. Our memories together are the thorns on a syndicated timeline. I pluck a thorn from the body my mind has made for me. A memory ensues.

Scene II: Barren Circus

When away from a person too long we experience corrosion. Whether the memory becomes corrosive or the details corrode incorrectly remains unknown. We visited a traveling circus in Alamosa; accidentally. Or maybe it came to visit us. There’d only been one act, a slew of similar people whose similarities made them not so human at all. I looked over at you often to protect you or read your reactions, whichever intention seemed more intentional. You never gave much away in the way of fear or excitement just constant straining inquisition. You said they reminded you of tourniquets, I told you you were thinking of the wrong word. You said you didn’t care, the word sounded exactly how you thought it should for what you saw, which was this: dozens of performers glittering the plain and plugging any blank space the eye searched for on the horizon. Ashen mountain backdrops gave an infinite stage effect. A barren, formless, full landscape of grandiose squalor due to the frantic static meddlesome motion of them. “Semi-organic apocalyptic phenomena,” I could hear you whispering all sorts of incomprehensible descriptions to my left. You with your words took a hotel painting and projected Basquiat all over the unhappening landscape. You were not wrong about the odd feeling they provoked. Contortionists put it mildly, acrobats from hell, they didn’t say a single word or burp up a goddamn sound while they twisted around for us, only us. Why wasn’t anyone else around that day? Their bodies played intimate Tetris together, I couldn’t look away, the completion felt satisfying, but I never admitted so to you. Instead, I feigned uncomfortable. The thought of you finding any satisfaction in their prickly postures meant another entity was pulling you away from me. Their springy motions were bizarre, the majority were smiling to themselves. Some looked critically at the others. This helped, knowing their eerie act had breaks in the execution. The way their garment wrapped around their bodies reminded me of artifacts on a sailboat we took out, just the two of us; a white beacon against the beastly Cerulean sea. You kept us afloat.

(We touch mouths somewhere)

Scene III: Evolving Ocean

I hear myself feeling this. My body jerks distantly in response, a tug in my chest and trousers. You still remain seated in front of me. This place is more familiar now. Another you I see from the corner of my vision drops its tongue to the ashen ground. A thorny vine takes its place. I allow myself to be taken for a moment: I fear you so deliciously. I want to eat your expressions from a depthless cereal bowl. I pleasure myself daily for drawing your face in the sand, remembering, finding your face in the marble veins of my shower, ripping a hole in the mattress where you slept. What’s an echo without the source? You’re always contradicting our pasts, so misdirection makes you my sole soul consumption. Locked into you, a freckled foe offering me a gift to husk hands-free in exchange for simple sanity. My mind has an ongoing affair with right and wrong. Avoidance places itself at the tip of that trismic palace we used to call home. I lied. I can’t say I’ve avoided a single inch between the whole passing of yes to no. You do not sit any longer. A pressure I can’t see is pressing onto you. Surrounded by leaping constant leaping, you now lay as still as the atmosphere allows. Your leaping is your longing. The twitches pull grafts of your flesh away. I’m losing you in this mind. You exist as time does in the loop of impossible roving. Magnets pulse behind your vision; features twitch with stagnant anoxia. The tongue is writing in the ash now. You’re begging me to remember our time at sea, so I do, and you pull yourself back into focus and speak inside out.

L: Evolution is a maxim. 

Me: I don’t know what that means.

L: Ev -olution- Ev -eryone- (ev) Something and everything has to apply to everyone. 

The vessel we rented was called Apocalypse, No! which you liked very much. I recall ruffling your hair as we walked towards the beached boat that just kissed the waterline. You didn’t like that very much. You walked ahead after confirming times with our Thai tour guide. You were a renegade trying to exsanguinate lightyears of evolutionary dilution by going about your ways in such obvious dissociative behavior. My mistake was seeing you as my novelty. At one point on the ship you read me something you’d written. The magic wouldn’t stop, minutes prior we’d seen a whale in the far distance, such a dark far-cry sounded so many miles away. Your words seemed the source of its pain.

Enigmatic loss becomes the sun

Animals fall dead in a consolatory clap

A wash of sanity sirenic at last. 

Beautiful suffocation blossoms grand singularity 

Enigmatic loss, a fortified wash to a quiet world. 

Your dark hair pooled in my lap while we floated aimlessly. When you slept the world had time to be without scrutiny. I don’t want to be in this memory any longer, why have you put me here?

Scene IV: Four Walls

The only way to find you is to swallow either side of symmetry. Fucking the life out of contradiction with the one state of being it cannot exist within; emptiness. I wonder where you sleep, nest or web. The only real difference between the two is life and death. Webs are mid-air traps spun for death’s sustenance. Nests are nourishing proof we’re all collectors. We collect materials for comfort, for new life. I prefer stolen comforts. I see you crowding yourself. I see your faces glitching with repetitive velocities, like a bullet shrouded in cotton pegging the sides, resuscitating truths. There is only your movement or stillness. I am violating the gray maggoted coils in my skull by forcing myself to stay just a bit longer. I am distantly evolved to simply get me through the day. This day is the pinhole I strain my whole being against wishing my two eyes could evolve to one in order to focus better. The smell of the oceanic air followed me back to this squandered present place. I slink from the memory of our sailing while rolling my eyes around to reset. I stay wrapped in your unempirical flicker. You stay folded in the mind desert around me. I spoke with a specialist about losing you. They suggested meditation. I would’ve taken sailing advice from the middle of the black ocean, from a tide trying to swallow my sails. I don’t trust professionals but such simple advice from a decorated person made me giddy. Triumphant deterioration of self. I release the grip. Strain is replaced by paresthesia. There is no loss. There is hard work. The days between my finding you will shrink into seconds. This is the only way to love, at either pole of perfection and destruction. You make feats of my dreams but not tonight. I feel a caressing between my shoulder blades and remove myself from the restraints, then the room, then your house. I walk into the night, picturing white rips opening the tight night. Sleep is soft, tempting, and terribly asking. Meditation is following something with your eyes while they’re closed. Forced meditation is being. Being without is living with death.