#ok this one definitely feels a bit stream of consciousness and incomprehensible but like

[trans-queen-administrator]

Fortuna my beloved... she's such a compelling character I wish we had more of her. She was like 8 when she killed a god and learned the world was going to end. 8 years old when she got the power to do anything she wants, except it's never enough to solve the one problem she cares about. 8 years old when she left behind everything she knew for a battle that seemed completely hopeless, and in the end she hardly mattered despite all the parts of herself she threw away for the cause. Some (bad) fics portray her as a complete dumbass, someone who can't even walk without her power, and frankly I want to throw rocks at them because no! That's not her! She's still a person without her power, but I don't think she knows who that person is. It's something we see so often through worm, a character spends so much time with the mask on that they hardly exist when it's off, and using her power is the mask for her. She doesn't know what she would enjoy for recreation, what music she'd like, she doesn't know what it's like to have a friend that she talks to with the mask off because the mask is glued to her face by this point, and it's heartbreaking. After Scion dies, she's left to realize that she doesn't need her mask anymore, but there's barely anything left underneath. She's done so much horrible shit and stopped caring about herself or others in the name of the goal she set to save the world, and now when she tries to figure out who she is there's nothing of Fortuna left, only Contessa.

And all of this lines up with Taylor, they're so so similar in every way, which is what makes the final conversation in 30.7 so heartbreaking. Fortuna wants to know if it was worth it, if there's anything left of Taylor in there, because she's wondering the same questions about herself and desperately wants answers. Because what do you do when all your life was for nothing? When you've thrown away your humanity to be a speck in the grand scheme of things? How do you move on and find yourself without letting the guilt tear you apart once you let yourself feel something again?

[ecotone99]

[SF] Consider For A Moment AKA Ring Any Bells for You? ©Popeye Le Pew – Now and Forevermore

Contains profanity and references to religion

(with the humblest of apologies to John Malkovich)

​

It was somewhere out on Riverside

By the El Royale Hotel

When a stranger appeared in a cloud of smoke

I thought I knew him all too well…

Excerpt from: In the Garden of Allah, ©Don Henley et al.

Somewhere in the depths of an emphatically Acheronian dream it spoke:

“Let me put it in terms that even you, notwithstanding your anorectic human capacity for discernment, may grasp. Consider for a moment a scenario something like this: Somewhere in the warp and weft of the space/time continuum, some cosmic sick-fuck entity... envision a pasty-skinned, frighteningly overweight, greasy-haired slacker-type who hasn’t bathed or changed his food-stained T-shirt and track pants for a couple of weeks and smells so rank his dog steers well clear of him… a degenerate knuckle-dragging exemplification of moral atrophy who, to the misfortune of anything under his dominion, possess a certain degree of omnipotence… (someone like you perhaps? Minus the omnipotence).

Somewhere in the warp and weft of the space/time continuum this error of empyrean phylogeny eventually gets utterly and totally bored with pulling its theoretical wire and decides to write a new program. It creates something uniquely their own and for their exclusive amusement, something to hopefully stem the never-ending tsunami of their ennui... if only just for a metaphysical moment. It conjures up a perfect little mise en scene out in the back forty of what you refer to as the Milky Way... in a simple, modest but nonetheless nifty solar system with a curious collection of satellites circling a pulsating power-plant which keeps them all alive... gives one of those planets an interior dynamo which generates a magnetic field to deflect the radiation put out by that pulsating power-plant so it won't be burned to crisp... covers two thirds of that planet with vast oceans teaming with nigh incomprehensible varieties of life which (and this is of the utmost importance to you, dear reader), hosts a blue/green pottage of photosynthetic phytoplankton... whips up and shapes the land-masses into majestic towering mountains and lush fecund valleys, Brobdingnagian tall-grass-covered steppes, breathtaking canyon panoramas and gently rolling verdant hills... fills this planet with a fantastical assortment of lifeforms, virtually uncountable in number and diversity… all existing within the harmonic perfection of a wholly self-sustaining system. Some would call it... Paradise!!! And some have. That annotated book of fairy tales you humans call The Bible refers to it as The Garden of Eden. Ring any bells for you? But then that execrable empyrean entity, being the sick-fuck that it is, figures it’ll make things a little more interesting on that beautiful blue and green ball circling the Sun by adding a jolt of adrenaline to the whole equation. It gives half of the creatures on that planet a taste for oozing blood and still warm, quivering flesh... it programs the one half to hunt, kill and devour whatever it can run down of the other half, while that other half is programmed to do everything in its power to avoid such a fate. BOO-YEAH!!!! And just like that “Paradise” is transformed into a barbarous and terrifying place for those hunted and eaten... their lives become one of constant heart-pounding horror punctuated by a hideous and sanguinary death… not a particularly pretty picture is it? Sure fun to watch all the action though! But being so easily bored, our sick-fuck cosmic joy-stick pilot cranks-up the entertainment factor another couple of notches and introduces yet another life-form... a quasi-cretinous beast possessing a large brain but an oh so tiny intelligence and a sequence in its DNA making and forever keeping it violent, arrogant, paranoid, fearful and best of all, totally and abjectly insane... and then our fat, foul-smelling and regrettably omnipotent sick-fuck vulgarian of an entity leans back in its Cosmic Barcalounger, reaches for a fistful of Hosetess Twinklies, cracks another can of Diet CokaPepsi Cola and, with a stream of drool slowly marking a path down its pimply unshaven double chin, watches with a dolt-like smirk as those naked, upright insane apes really fuck that beautiful little blue-green planet up... but good!!!!! So-ah... sleep well little human.”

‘No! No, not again! Jeezuz, not again! … Huh? What? Where… where am… I? I? Oh yeah, I remember… oh fuck, that freakin dream again! I gotta get a little more sleep… just a little longer… I’ll explain it all after a bit more shut-eye…’

And... sometime later...

‘OK, OK… I'm awake now… sort of. So… guess you wanna know what's goin on huh? OK then, here it is. But pay attention cuz I'm only gonna tell ya this once…’

That dream…? The one woke me up earlier? That was the dream I first had one night, after a hefty lower-colon cleansing dinner of habañero-slathered burritos and many, many beers… so many beers… and thought little of the next morning, once I struggled to reach the surface through my leaden hangover and regained what might possibly pass for consciousness… I mean, bizarre dreams often do occur subsequent to a massive Mexican alimentary trial-by-fire such as the one in which I like to indulge from time to time.

That first time I had the dream, I came-to bathed in a cold sweat, smelling like the floor of a 99¢ taco-joint that had been mopped with stale Tecate and feeling like a gang of Lincoln Heights homies had done the Jarabe Tapatío on my head (for anyone not familiar with the home of Acapulco Gold’s colourful culture, that would be the Mexican Hat Dance). Or maybe in my head. A perfectly normal morning-after after one of my frequent Friday night-befores. I was lying there wondering who the Hell had filled my mouth with extra-spicy sawdust when the dancing homies decided now was a good time to have street-fight in my guts. I jumped up and hit the floor running, reaching the Temple of Release with not a second to spare and sent Ruben and the Jets back down south of the border. It was a damned close call though, let me tell you. I won’t bother you with the sordid details but suffice to say that yes its true, Mexican food, like firewood does heat you twice. Ooh-whee, does it ever!

After fifteen or so minutes of squatting on (or more like clinging to) the throne, panting like a whipped and winded greyhound, the second searing sting of the hot pepper lash let-up enough so that I could walk again. Sort of. I pulled myself up and shuffled ever so gingerly over to the medicine cabinet for a deep pull on the trusty bottle of Pepto-B I keep on hand for those colonic seismic aftershocks that always follow the initial eruption. Jesus but that stuff tastes gawd-awful! Comes as a rude jolt every time. But it works like a hot-damn to settle a squeamish belly and it sure rinsed the searing hot sawdust out of my throat right-quick. I knocked the bottle back and drained it, catching myself just in time from going back too far and hitting the tiles. Straightening up again, I caught sight of my face in the mirror. Now I’ll be the first to admit it ain't a pretty face at the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times, but it wasn’t the face that not even a mother could love staring back at me that shocked me to my very depths. Don’t I wish. No, it was when I looked into those bloodshot beady little eyes which my genes have cursed me with that I remembered the dream… in minute detail and with crystal clarity, a clarity that I never ever expected to experience again, not since alcohol and recreational drugs became my constant companions back at the tender age of twelve, or maybe eleven. A cold shiver raced up my spine and back down again, stopping regrettably short of the blast-furnace door between my butt-cheeks, and I had to grip the side of the sink to steady myself.

“Sleep well little human”… those final four words the voice in the dream had spoken… chilling words… they seemed to hang there suspended in the putrid air of the bathroom as I stood staring into those bloodshot eyes staring back at me from the mirror. Those eyes blinked hard a couple of times, but precise focus was still slightly beyond their capability for the moment. Fuck it I scowled as I splashed cold water over my face, it was only a goddamned dream and went to the kitchen to crack my first hangover-chasing brewski of the day. Only a goddamned dream I thought as I downed that beer and reached for another. Maybe I should ease-up on them habañeros next time…

But then, much to my increasing dismay, I had the exact same dream every night for the next month. The same freakin dream, each and every night! Same voice telling me the same story, ending with “Sleep well little human”… each and every night! Even after all I had for dinner was a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk! (I do like to play it safe on occasion.) But each and every night for a month…? The same dream…? I started to wonder… exactly what the fuck is going on here. Hey, who wouldn’t? Each and every night? For a month? Had I ever been in full possession of my sanity I might’ve wondered if my grip on said sanity had begun to loosen, but after so many years of free-falling into substance-abuse, there wasn’t much left to wonder about.

Unless I happened to pass-out, which to be honest is getting to be the case more often than I care to admit, hitting the sack soon developed into a tense finale to my day. Night after night I tossed and turned and chewed my lip raw waiting to slide into a fitful slumber, knowing what would inevitably go through my tortured mind as I slept. And then, just like that, I stopped having the dream… went to sleep one night and it didn’t come. Woke up refreshed and well-rested and even made a slew of life-changing promises to myself I knew I’d never keep. Man was I relieved. I slept like a baby night after night, no more of that snide voice sounding like John Malkovich telling me things I DID NOT want to hear. NOT! EVER! Over… finally!

I shouldn’t have been so quick to jump to conclusions. Yeah well, wishful thinking always has been a cheap and easy form of entertainment for me, eh?

After a week or so, the dreams started up again. Well, not exactly the same dream as before, more like a continuation of the first one, as in chapter two of God only knows how many, but it was sort of the same dream, if you catch my drift… same snide John Malkovich voice telling me things I DID NOT want to hear. I could almost picture the prick’s sneer and that look in his eyes that says, “You are an utterly worthless piece of dog-shit. Fuck off and die.” That look… nobody can do that look like Malkovich. I don't even think the guy’s acting when he does that. Chapter two goes something like this:

“You have in fact been set-up, suckered as it were, by a sick-fuck cosmic entity with too much idle time on its hands and nothing better to do than to create something to torment… You and the rest of the pathetic creatures in the world in which you live! Its sad, its sick, but its true. An incontrovertible fact. I suppose you just may find a modest degree of solace in the knowledge that its all beyond your control… that the world is as it is, with or without your presence or contribution. But any solace you may cling to must surely evaporate with the realization that the miserable state of affairs on your pitiful little planet is like a thirty metre monster wave carrying you inexorably forward and that you can do about as much or as little to stop that wave as can a dead fish floating belly-up on the surface of the ocean. All you can do is float there and wait till some seagull swoops down and makes a meal of you, reduces you to your component parts in its gut and shits out what's left of you.

But I suppose I'm being a bit harsh. I mean you are nothing more or less than a victim: the victim of some sick-fuck cosmic entity with too much idle time on its hands, aren’t you? You and your cohabitants of Planet Earth. You are all being used, and I don't mean for just the entertainment value of watching you all squirm either. Did you know that you are in fact being farmed for the fear you produce? I'm not joking, it’s true. Fear, as you may or may not know, is a boundlessly powerful form of energy. What's more, it’s a renewable resource to boot. And its absurdly simple to generate in you creatures. You are afraid of everything, some of you of even your own shadows. You're all programmed to fear, fear, fear… incessantly so. Haven’t you ever wondered why that is? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the capacity to fear is built right into the DNA of all living organisms on your planet, with the exception of some viruses that don't have their own DNA. A bit of a glitch in the system. Oh and also those rare individuals who have no fear, but they're genetic mutations. Another glitch. You cannot and never will overcome your fear: fear is as intrinsic a part of you as is everything else about you. And for certain interested parties in the vast endless cosmos, that's a good thing, because as I pointed out, fear is a source of energy. It drives things out there beyond the stars, things of which you, with your infinitesimal intelligence cannot even begin to conceive. As such, the fear you produce without end is not left to waste. Oh no. You are in fact being milked for your fear as surely as a barn-full of dairy cows are milked daily for the creamy white liquid you pour over your morning helping of Colonel Crunch.

In the simplest of terms, the fear you produce is siphoned off by a mechanism known to you humans as the moon. The moon, as you are aware (or perhaps not), has a light side and a dark side. The light side, being the side which always faces the earth, collects the fear while the dark side beams it to the outer planets of your solar system, which are nothing other than relay stations. Those relay stations then send your fear on to an assortment of cosmic fear-farmers who use it to fuel those… those…lets just call them engines, which they employ for purposes you cannot even begin to grasp. It’s a fairly complex system, but it has to be in order to process the humongous volumes of fear produced by you beings non-stop. So, for certain interested parties in the vast and endless cosmos, your planet is an extremely valuable commodity and those parties see to it that nothing ever occurs to hinder, obstruct or eliminate that energy source, regardless of how diligently and repeatedly you try to off yourselves and the planet you inhabit.

I imagine it must warm the very cockles of your heart knowing that, in spite of how utterly contemptible you terrestrial life-forms truly are, you do actually serve a purpose other than for merely an entertainment factor.

But, try as you may, you will never ever be allowed to destroy yourselves and your planet. Not completely or permanently at any rate. Oh sure, you're heading there at this very moment, toward destroying yourselves, and at a tremendous speed I might add. But though it is now a foregone conclusion that all life as you know it on your planet will soon be gone, let us not make hasty or unfounded assumptions. Lets focus on those five key words, life as you know it, shall we? Only life as you know it, not life itself will soon meet its end at the filthy un-washed hands of you humans yourselves.

Though your lovely little blue and green marble hurtling through space will presently resemble one of those charcoal briquettes with which you people like to ruin a perfectly good cut of meat, say within fifty years max, it’ll all start over again soon enough. Relatively speaking. And sooner than you may suspect. This fear-factory you call home has done so innumerable times and will continue to do so for all eternity. It will probably surprise you to hear it but what you creatures so preposterously refer to as civilization has come and gone on your little planet time and time again. The whole shit-heap goes poof and then gradually rebuilds itself. Happens every 100,000 years or so, give or take a few. Don't believe it? I understand, you are chumps after all and insane, crazier than a pack of shit-house rats, n’est-ce pas? But consider for a moment: by your measuring the planet is 6.5 billion years old. Lets say it took all of 5 billion years for complex life systems to appear and establish themselves, that then means the world as you know it could very well have come and gone 15,000 times. That's right, 15,000 times. A sobering thought is it not? Even for a piss-tank such as you. What!!!? You thought you were the first? You really want to believe that don't you? Just as some of you want to believe that this God of yours created the world and everything on it a mere 6,000 years ago. Don't flatter yourself: you are as dumb a fuck as the entity that created your world is a sick-fuck, you know that? And you know what else? Every single one of those 15,000 times you got snuffed? Save for two occasions, none other than you yourselves were the responsible party. Talk about a bunch of brats breaking their toys! You creatures are a riot… in every sense of the word.

But the best part of all is the fact that you humans call this sick-fuck cosmic entity who wrote the program within which you find yourselves God!!! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo… that's rich! You’ve all convinced yourselves and each other that this GOD is to be worshipped, obeyed and feared! Feared…? Absolutely. Obeyed? You have no other options. Obedience is embedded in your DNA as is fear, about which I have just enlightened you. But worship? How could you and why would you worship something like your creator? And that's creator with a small ‘C’ by the way. Well, the lot of you are insane after all, irreversibly so, so that could just explain it. And what's more, you are all pieces of dog-shit, though not entirely worthless. The best thing that you could do for yourselves is to fuck off and die, each and every one of you. The sooner the better. Sleep well little human.”

It got so I couldn’t bear to watch another Malkovich film. Every time I saw his face, with that sneering mouth and fuck off and die expression, my nerves started to do the shimmies… bad. I was expecting the dude on the screen to look straight at me and start talking to me like the voice in my dreams. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So no more Malkovich films for me. Sorry John, its nothing personal. I mean you sure have made some stinkers in your time, haven’t you? Hell, who in your line of work hasn’t, eh? But all in all, I think you're a damned fine actor, way better than most of those sub-normal man-bun hacks who figure they’re some kind of particularly gifted thespian. As if they even know what the fuck that means

But its those dreams John, if you could just stay the fuck out of my dreams, I could maybe reconsider... Like... fuhgedabowdit, ya know?

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