Eye spy with my little "I"
Sep. 18th, 2008 03:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonContinued from an earlier, if not almost forgotten, chapter
Hide in plain sight: Adam is not so much invisible as he is non-existent. Vanishing between the strobes of gray light flickering from a dying street lamp, he appears to any stray eyes that might pass by as nothing more than a life size drawing of himself floating along the wall of a place long forgotten.
Adam's got the hood of his old black sweat jacket pulled up. Shadows fall thick across his face, blotting out the eyes and draining down the edges of his cheeks to create a restless death's-head. Floating within the darkness pooled over his stare - a bank of raw white stars drift slowly, burning with an almost indolent brillance, each one glistening from the alignment of impossible constellations.
Adam pulls a red permanent marker out of his Hoodie side pocket, uncaps it and proceeds to draw on the back of his right hand a crude oval that envelopes a large dot. As an after thought he adds a series of wiggly lines to emanate around the curves. He recaps the marker, pockets it, blows on the ink and slaps his right hand over his eyes.
The red ink begins to soak into his skin with a terrible itch. He ignores it and pushes back the irritation with a picture of the EYE in his head. The ink sizzles now, searing itself into his hand with a raw heat that releases wisps of burgundy smoke and the stench of burnt flesh wafting into the air. Then, just when the pain starts crawling its way towards intolerable... the EYE comes to life with a burst of crimson luminescence, its disk pupil shifting left to right anxiously trying to soak in the field of vision that has opened before it, blinking its form in and out of a flat solid red line before settling in on the old factory sulking quietly across the street.
The brick walls of the building before him dissolve, the EYE incinerating any barrier between himself and the vision of his true will. Entire levels vanish - rusted girders and molded dry wall eaten away by the agency of an invisible corrosive, doors distengrated from the center out as the 'EYE' crawls its way through the factory until it reaches the center and looks down. The vision of the floor below burns beneath the gaze, revealing the five sorry bastards he was looking for waiting down deep in the in the bottom storage cellar.
"I seeeee you" Adam sing-songs to himself with malicious glee.
Adam matches names to faces. He recognizes Mistress Drown right off the bat. No surprise. They have what you might call a 'casual history' together. Fond memories of the word made wound, the damage dance they shared in her dungeon on nights where they had nowhere else to go. She's put on a little weight since they last danced together a few years back. She wears the weight well. Give's her velocity a little mass to get behind, he figures.
Not that it changes anything as far as he's concerned.
Next up is some tall, skinny white guy with the ash gray hair and a real Tom Wolfe suit. He's not sure who he's supposed to be. The EYE zooms in with a thought and settles over the strangers chest. The Eye incinerates the outfit beneath his gaze - the tie first, followed by the immaculate white vest, black satin button up and thick mane of peppered chest hairs to reveal the Seal of the Nimbus Lodge tatooed in aging Navy Blue over his heart. Adam figures he's most likely one of the Lodge's elaborately named Knights if he's here representing. Nothing to be overly concerned about he figures.
The EYE pulls back and resettles on the young woman looking up at the ceiling with a distracted curiosity. She's good, Adam reckons, realizing that she senses him watching her... even if only on an intuitive level. He checks her out: She's got this whole 'Suicide Girl' thing working for her - the jet black bob, the Tammy Faye bleeding mascara, the scuffed up steel toe boots, the Riot Coven gang-inks coiling around her arms with fluid Chinese dragons - but looking down at her looking back up at him - he recognizes a sharp, familiar coldness in her stare. It's the same stare that drove him here tonight. In a sickening moment of awareness Adam realizes she's not only good... she's going to be trouble.
The Riot Witch is distracted from Adam by some kid, thirteen, fourteen at best by his guess. The kid's all into the Riot Witch. He doesn't have to hear the words to know he's trying to mack on her. He practically doesn't need his eyes to see she's having none of it. It takes him a second watching the muted banter between the two before he realizes it's Dent. Another casual history... this one no where near as fun though. Whenever Adam had business on the scarier parts of Hunter Boulevard (hint: all of them), he would have to pay a cut off his take to the 13th Street Disciples for the privelge of working there cop free and free of harm... and every time he had to cough up the take to the Disciples executive accountant down on Auburn, there'd be Dent, eyeball-fucking him from the back of his crew, working himself up into some bullshit grudge.
Adam Thinks: Why is it every other time a magickian meets another magickian in this town it turns into a pissing contest? Well, whatever...
Adam is about to break contact when he remembers there's supposed to be five of them.
He looks around again.
Gets nothing.
Then Adam cycles through the frequencies of the EYE: Kirlian, Astral, Chakra, God Form layers of the four magickians below him flicker one after the other, the shells of their souls peeling one by one until he reaches the edges of the spectrum within the sub-fictional realm. Here the faint ghosts of who we used to pretend to be can be seen still floating around our innate sense of self in a slight haze, fluctuating in an after-aura of residual identity that never truly escapes out of the mud of ego.
It is in the realm of this apocryphal Bardo that Adam see's the fifth representive, briefly, as a figure that constantly floats at the edges of vision. It only lasts a moment, but the moment of dreams and recollections, where Adam catches a wide grin of clenched teeth glaring at him suddenly, the lips stretch out to wrap around the cheeks where their edges rest under the ears, the gate of the grin widens across the horizon of his sight, opens, an arrow head tipped tongue snakes out lasciviously... Adam tries to force the EYE to look away. It's a no-go. Time jams. The EYE locks in on the unending moment. Adam squirms his will to break free, a flat insect trapped on its back kicking at nothing. Finally he hears a voice washing in over a wave of raw static that has crashed across the shores of his thoughts
"Helllllooohhhhh Adammmmm Lassssst", it breathes just over the white noise, "Don't worrrrr-y... I-won't-spoil-your Ssssurrrrrprise!"
The moment ends, drips off his awareness and splatters in a head rush of delayed time catching up with him in a sudden bull rush. Adam pulls his hand off his face on reflex. The 'real world' floods over his vision with a nausea splash.
"Shit" he snorts dismissively, allowing a Camel tucked tight in the corner of a well practiced sneer to light itself up.
Good news/Bad News.
Worst first: He'd been spotted.
Good news next: In the process he had spotted the missing piece, the fifth member unaccounted for, their ace had peeked up out of the valley of the sleeve to wink knowingly at him in defiance.
It doesn't take but a moment for him to put the apparition together. He was dealing with an Ambient.
An "Ambient" is just another word for a magickian who has willed himself to become unreal. Think a reverse-engineered tulpa if you will, only instead of a life being summoned out of an idea, it is instead cast irretrivably into it. A process of physical and mental reduction. A parasitic astral body called down to devour the adept until they have become little more than a ghost, a sentinent idea, a veil of light concealing nothing.
Most of the sad fuck's just end up fading out of reality all together. Erasing their names written in the dust of memory and becoming that which they were before they were born.
But there were those who lingered to become something else: Monsters under the bed. Noisy hauntings. Snatches of something wrong moving in the corner of the eye. Dream beasts stepping in and out of reality to attach themselves to bad trips. Some downloading themselves telepathically into the minds of schizophrenics where they incubate and mate with the voices in their heads.
Some become much worse. Some become Murder Magickians for the Zero Temple.
Another complication but not a strong enough one for him to step away from the game.
'Time to get this show on the road' as his Old Man used to say.
Adam unzips his hoodie and retrieves a bundled towel, well stained and stinking vaguely of rotten meat and formaldyhde.
He unwraps the towel slowly, revealing a gray-green severed hand clenched into a rigor-mortis tight fist: The Hand of Glory.
To be precise a Hand of Glory - given to him by Carlos the Chameleon up in Philly way back in the day when he was initiated into Carlos' drug-ring/coven.
He fishes out a thin candle from his hoodie pocket (one specially given to him by Sarah K. for the occasion), slides it between the glass fragile grip of the Hand and imagines a small flame to ignite off its wick.
The Candle bursts into life but the purple flame casts no light, no shadow, no heat.
Cold goosebumps run up his arms. He swore to himself he would never use it again after the last time...
... but then this wouldn't be the first promise Adam's broken. To himself and anyone else who might be dumb enough to believe his own bullshit.
Adam closes his eyes and holds the hand before him like a flashlight.
Breathes deep and unfolds himself into the city around him.
Origami in reverse.
A childs letter slipped into an envelope addressed to God. He flattens into a unconvincing projection of himself, a brittle ghost dispersed by a sudden gust whipped around the buildings corner. Adam slips into the Dream Current of the city - the streets becomes rivers with waters of memory, the dreary buildings of Gallows Town light with the irridescent glow of condensed time, the constant roar of an electrical wind shivers through his nervous system. Above, the sky burns with the colors of fresh wounds. Over Midtown he can see the familiar sight of the cloud sized phosphorescent beings known to the iniated few as Luxavores (transdiemensional creatures that resemble massive jellyfish and primarily feed off the unique energy generated by heavily populated cities through a thinning membrane separating their reality from ours). Cold lightning flashes through the bottom of their translucent bells and translate into 'heat lightning' over the sklyines. He watches the creatures floating ominously, tethered to the spires and towers by their mile long tentacles that wrap around the building and vanish into the artifical ley-lines generated by the Terminus Power Grid.
It is the last thing Adam see's before he fades out of existence.
*****
Hide in plain sight: Adam is not so much invisible as he is non-existent. Vanishing between the strobes of gray light flickering from a dying street lamp, he appears to any stray eyes that might pass by as nothing more than a life size drawing of himself floating along the wall of a place long forgotten.
Adam's got the hood of his old black sweat jacket pulled up. Shadows fall thick across his face, blotting out the eyes and draining down the edges of his cheeks to create a restless death's-head. Floating within the darkness pooled over his stare - a bank of raw white stars drift slowly, burning with an almost indolent brillance, each one glistening from the alignment of impossible constellations.
Adam pulls a red permanent marker out of his Hoodie side pocket, uncaps it and proceeds to draw on the back of his right hand a crude oval that envelopes a large dot. As an after thought he adds a series of wiggly lines to emanate around the curves. He recaps the marker, pockets it, blows on the ink and slaps his right hand over his eyes.
The red ink begins to soak into his skin with a terrible itch. He ignores it and pushes back the irritation with a picture of the EYE in his head. The ink sizzles now, searing itself into his hand with a raw heat that releases wisps of burgundy smoke and the stench of burnt flesh wafting into the air. Then, just when the pain starts crawling its way towards intolerable... the EYE comes to life with a burst of crimson luminescence, its disk pupil shifting left to right anxiously trying to soak in the field of vision that has opened before it, blinking its form in and out of a flat solid red line before settling in on the old factory sulking quietly across the street.
The brick walls of the building before him dissolve, the EYE incinerating any barrier between himself and the vision of his true will. Entire levels vanish - rusted girders and molded dry wall eaten away by the agency of an invisible corrosive, doors distengrated from the center out as the 'EYE' crawls its way through the factory until it reaches the center and looks down. The vision of the floor below burns beneath the gaze, revealing the five sorry bastards he was looking for waiting down deep in the in the bottom storage cellar.
"I seeeee you" Adam sing-songs to himself with malicious glee.
Adam matches names to faces. He recognizes Mistress Drown right off the bat. No surprise. They have what you might call a 'casual history' together. Fond memories of the word made wound, the damage dance they shared in her dungeon on nights where they had nowhere else to go. She's put on a little weight since they last danced together a few years back. She wears the weight well. Give's her velocity a little mass to get behind, he figures.
Not that it changes anything as far as he's concerned.
Next up is some tall, skinny white guy with the ash gray hair and a real Tom Wolfe suit. He's not sure who he's supposed to be. The EYE zooms in with a thought and settles over the strangers chest. The Eye incinerates the outfit beneath his gaze - the tie first, followed by the immaculate white vest, black satin button up and thick mane of peppered chest hairs to reveal the Seal of the Nimbus Lodge tatooed in aging Navy Blue over his heart. Adam figures he's most likely one of the Lodge's elaborately named Knights if he's here representing. Nothing to be overly concerned about he figures.
The EYE pulls back and resettles on the young woman looking up at the ceiling with a distracted curiosity. She's good, Adam reckons, realizing that she senses him watching her... even if only on an intuitive level. He checks her out: She's got this whole 'Suicide Girl' thing working for her - the jet black bob, the Tammy Faye bleeding mascara, the scuffed up steel toe boots, the Riot Coven gang-inks coiling around her arms with fluid Chinese dragons - but looking down at her looking back up at him - he recognizes a sharp, familiar coldness in her stare. It's the same stare that drove him here tonight. In a sickening moment of awareness Adam realizes she's not only good... she's going to be trouble.
The Riot Witch is distracted from Adam by some kid, thirteen, fourteen at best by his guess. The kid's all into the Riot Witch. He doesn't have to hear the words to know he's trying to mack on her. He practically doesn't need his eyes to see she's having none of it. It takes him a second watching the muted banter between the two before he realizes it's Dent. Another casual history... this one no where near as fun though. Whenever Adam had business on the scarier parts of Hunter Boulevard (hint: all of them), he would have to pay a cut off his take to the 13th Street Disciples for the privelge of working there cop free and free of harm... and every time he had to cough up the take to the Disciples executive accountant down on Auburn, there'd be Dent, eyeball-fucking him from the back of his crew, working himself up into some bullshit grudge.
Adam Thinks: Why is it every other time a magickian meets another magickian in this town it turns into a pissing contest? Well, whatever...
Adam is about to break contact when he remembers there's supposed to be five of them.
He looks around again.
Gets nothing.
Then Adam cycles through the frequencies of the EYE: Kirlian, Astral, Chakra, God Form layers of the four magickians below him flicker one after the other, the shells of their souls peeling one by one until he reaches the edges of the spectrum within the sub-fictional realm. Here the faint ghosts of who we used to pretend to be can be seen still floating around our innate sense of self in a slight haze, fluctuating in an after-aura of residual identity that never truly escapes out of the mud of ego.
It is in the realm of this apocryphal Bardo that Adam see's the fifth representive, briefly, as a figure that constantly floats at the edges of vision. It only lasts a moment, but the moment of dreams and recollections, where Adam catches a wide grin of clenched teeth glaring at him suddenly, the lips stretch out to wrap around the cheeks where their edges rest under the ears, the gate of the grin widens across the horizon of his sight, opens, an arrow head tipped tongue snakes out lasciviously... Adam tries to force the EYE to look away. It's a no-go. Time jams. The EYE locks in on the unending moment. Adam squirms his will to break free, a flat insect trapped on its back kicking at nothing. Finally he hears a voice washing in over a wave of raw static that has crashed across the shores of his thoughts
"Helllllooohhhhh Adammmmm Lassssst", it breathes just over the white noise, "Don't worrrrr-y... I-won't-spoil-your Ssssurrrrrprise!"
The moment ends, drips off his awareness and splatters in a head rush of delayed time catching up with him in a sudden bull rush. Adam pulls his hand off his face on reflex. The 'real world' floods over his vision with a nausea splash.
"Shit" he snorts dismissively, allowing a Camel tucked tight in the corner of a well practiced sneer to light itself up.
Good news/Bad News.
Worst first: He'd been spotted.
Good news next: In the process he had spotted the missing piece, the fifth member unaccounted for, their ace had peeked up out of the valley of the sleeve to wink knowingly at him in defiance.
It doesn't take but a moment for him to put the apparition together. He was dealing with an Ambient.
An "Ambient" is just another word for a magickian who has willed himself to become unreal. Think a reverse-engineered tulpa if you will, only instead of a life being summoned out of an idea, it is instead cast irretrivably into it. A process of physical and mental reduction. A parasitic astral body called down to devour the adept until they have become little more than a ghost, a sentinent idea, a veil of light concealing nothing.
Most of the sad fuck's just end up fading out of reality all together. Erasing their names written in the dust of memory and becoming that which they were before they were born.
But there were those who lingered to become something else: Monsters under the bed. Noisy hauntings. Snatches of something wrong moving in the corner of the eye. Dream beasts stepping in and out of reality to attach themselves to bad trips. Some downloading themselves telepathically into the minds of schizophrenics where they incubate and mate with the voices in their heads.
Some become much worse. Some become Murder Magickians for the Zero Temple.
Another complication but not a strong enough one for him to step away from the game.
'Time to get this show on the road' as his Old Man used to say.
Adam unzips his hoodie and retrieves a bundled towel, well stained and stinking vaguely of rotten meat and formaldyhde.
He unwraps the towel slowly, revealing a gray-green severed hand clenched into a rigor-mortis tight fist: The Hand of Glory.
To be precise a Hand of Glory - given to him by Carlos the Chameleon up in Philly way back in the day when he was initiated into Carlos' drug-ring/coven.
He fishes out a thin candle from his hoodie pocket (one specially given to him by Sarah K. for the occasion), slides it between the glass fragile grip of the Hand and imagines a small flame to ignite off its wick.
The Candle bursts into life but the purple flame casts no light, no shadow, no heat.
Cold goosebumps run up his arms. He swore to himself he would never use it again after the last time...
... but then this wouldn't be the first promise Adam's broken. To himself and anyone else who might be dumb enough to believe his own bullshit.
Adam closes his eyes and holds the hand before him like a flashlight.
Breathes deep and unfolds himself into the city around him.
Origami in reverse.
A childs letter slipped into an envelope addressed to God. He flattens into a unconvincing projection of himself, a brittle ghost dispersed by a sudden gust whipped around the buildings corner. Adam slips into the Dream Current of the city - the streets becomes rivers with waters of memory, the dreary buildings of Gallows Town light with the irridescent glow of condensed time, the constant roar of an electrical wind shivers through his nervous system. Above, the sky burns with the colors of fresh wounds. Over Midtown he can see the familiar sight of the cloud sized phosphorescent beings known to the iniated few as Luxavores (transdiemensional creatures that resemble massive jellyfish and primarily feed off the unique energy generated by heavily populated cities through a thinning membrane separating their reality from ours). Cold lightning flashes through the bottom of their translucent bells and translate into 'heat lightning' over the sklyines. He watches the creatures floating ominously, tethered to the spires and towers by their mile long tentacles that wrap around the building and vanish into the artifical ley-lines generated by the Terminus Power Grid.
It is the last thing Adam see's before he fades out of existence.