[Archive] Apollonian Sphere

I'm not sure where I was going with this one, honestly. Another from 2015.

---


...
Is this thing on? Hm, yup, allright, I see the tape goin'. Can't tell these damn little buttons from each other anymore.

Guess I'll just start in on it then.

Thinking back, I find it hard to believe that it was a coincidence. We only went to the moon once, just once, and they found the sphere then- what if they had landed beside a different crater? What then? Maybe, I think there are others. Maybe there was one in every crater. Maybe. But Apollo brought back just the one. That said, it isn't as though we needed more. But lord-in-heaven, what else could be up there waiting?

Any larger and it wouldn't have fit. Also fortunate was the object's weight. A large sphere, bigger than ah... a beach ball, I suppose. Its an odd size, and there isn't a good frame of reference, but it was a bit more than a meter in diameter. Brass, at first glace. That was how Armstrong described it. A giant brass ball, featureless, but for a dusting of regolith, with a fine patina, and glossy enough to reflect the astronaut in fine, if distorted detail as he brushed the dust off it's glassy surface with his glove. That day was filled with new experiences for humanity, but somehow... seeing that thing on the video footage, hearing Armstrong's voice describing it... It hit us all in central command so much harder than even those first iconic words of his. "One small step" indeed. Something else had been there before us, and that was both awe inspiring and terrifying.

As I said, the sphere was light. Strangely light, even for being on the moon. As though it were a hollow shell of aluminum, but tapping it, he said it did not feel hollow. Sonar tests back here on earth confirmed it was... whatever it was, through and through. I remember Aldrin called it the Moon Ball, but some how, giving it a whimsical name never seemed to do it justice. Most of us just referred to it as the Sphere, if that wasn't ominous enough.

The Sphere's peculiar, astonishing properties did not end with it's composition. We ran several careful tests on it, but it was when we hooked up two leads to its surface and applied a current that we began getting the strange results. It was a complex process of discovery, though a mostly tedious one, and I won't get into it, but the end result was that we began to discover that this Sphere was some manner of computing device.

Understand, back then, 'computer' was not yet the household term it is today. But even in the contemporary sense, this thing was not like any computer in the traditional sense. First of all, supplied with a problem, the processing time was instantaneous. It seemed to have infinite internal memory, though there was no real interface, so accessing any of this memory directly eluded us. Rather, once we uncovered the language on which it operated, we could posit to the Sphere basic questions and it would present an output. This language was, on the surface, a sort of binary. But it was more complex than this. The Sphere seemed to be capable of subdividing problems infinitely, creating sub-binary languages for each sub-process, if that makes any sense. I recall McConnell calling it a fractal-binary, whatever that means.

I am not doing this justice, but the main point is that we were able to deduce that it was accomplishing its computing power through instantaneous, infinitely complex subdivision of any basic quandary worded to it. And then it broke.

Now, understand, I mean 'broke' as in, it literally cracked. Its functionality was not harmed at all. But breaking, in this case, is a very peculiar thing. We on the research team had had us a long debate about whether or not it would be wise to attempt to open the Sphere up. After all, we had only vague guesses as to what its insides looked like. It was clearly a powerful tool, but could more be learned from an autopsy than through non-invasive testing? I imagine any team unlucky enough to examine a captured extraterrestrial would have to make the same decision. But we couldn't decide. Coincidence again worked in our favor. Though I suppose it would be less pretentious to simply call it an accident. We'd been very dainty in our handling of the thing- and rightly so, I suppose, seeing as all it took was a radio bumped from its shelf by a careless shoulder to crack the thing open.

Again, I use a euphemism for precisely the manner in which the Sphere 'broke.' As I said, it was not hollow, and so it did not split like an egg. Rather it was as though the outer surface was a delicate membrane, like a soap bubble, and when the radio struck its surface, this bubble burst. Visually, for a few moments, its appearance remained unchanged. And then it was like it was crumbling, but in a way I can give no context to describe. The sphere quickly fell into a pile. The pile consisted of four large spheres, roughly somewhat larger than a basket ball each of them. And then many smaller spheres of varying sizes, the largest of these about baseball sized. The smaller the spheres were, the more of them were present in the pile, down to hundreds of marble sized orbs, and millions perhaps like grains of sand, and an uncountable number presumably making up dust that comprised the finest substrata produced from the Sphere's 'breaking'. I have no reason to doubt that there was no end, either, to how small the spheres were, grains finer than the finest dust. Perhaps even atom sized, and smaller. I'd bet you that all of us that were in the lab that day still today have little bitty dust-spheres stuck in our lungs. Whatever the sphere was made of, it was not traditional matter, and had no atomic structure to speak of.

Following that even, we broke other of the lesser spheres as well, and the result was identical to the first breaking, only scaled down. You see, we found that each of the spheres operated identically to the first, initial Mother sphere. Even the grain sized specks showed no discernible difference. And why should they? If each was composed of an infinite number of smaller layers... well, infinity divided by two is still infinity.

But breaking the sphere was important you see. One sphere alone could solve only basic problems, because only one simple thing could be asked of it at a time- even if it was processed instantaneously, it provided little use for more complex questions. This is why we constructed the network. Keeping the spheres separate, yet linked electrically to one another, we were able to create simple circuits based around the phenomenal properties of each Sphere sub-unit. This allowed for complex problem solving, logic gates, loops, everything. All of it instantaneous.

The perplexing properties of the Sphere... we formed a sort of explanation for how it functioned. A working model anyway. It was paradoxical, you see. The properties of a Sphere on the whole could be explained if you assumed that each of the smaller spheres making it up were a network of resistors or capacitors. Going down a layer further, we could imagine that the network of spheres inside each of those resistor or capacitor spheres could result in that sphere's properties as a resistor or capacitor. And you can keep on going down the rabbit hole this way, infinitely.

[Archive] Suitors of the Giant

Another short story from around 2015, this one was mainly a device to explore the difficulties of first-contact with aliens.

---

They didn't come here for us. The Suitors' home world had developed as a satellite of a gas giant not unlike our Jupiter, and they arrived in our solar system looking for a world similar to their own- for the purposes of colonization as far as we know. They must have been surprised to see the night-side of our little gem sparkling down here a few light-minutes away. Its interesting, you know? They say the conditions on earth, our peaceful little plot of space, are only the way they are because of Jupiter, the giant protecting us from many of the asteroids or comets that might otherwise barrage our little planet. That, apparently, is what makes a giant's moon as common of a place as it is for life to form, or so they told us. They'd never seen another planet quite like ours before. The Suitors could never meet us face to face- at least not in the flesh anyway. They required a very different atmosphere than us. They needed oxygen, of course, but far less, and much more moisture in the air.

I remember the day of first contact in a dreamlike way. Their approach was not boastful or offensive, but cautious. They watched us for several months, hiding around dead Jupiter in their reflection-less ship. We would later learn that the Suitors had only ever made contact with one other race, and that it had resulted in a grave loss on their part, though they would never discuss with us the event in any detail, only that it had happened quite some time ago. I'm happy, to think about it, that we did not scare them off. To watch most of our fictional depictions of first-contact, you'd think we were convinced that aliens had the single minded goal of conquering our measly little planet, and I suppose you could speculate that we were projecting, right? I mean, to look at human history, we have a long history of subjugating one another, it's only fair to assume we'd extrapolate that out into space, right? But we had matured, I think, by that point. I like to think we had. At any rate, it seems they were understanding, if only because we shared so much in common with them.

They had a name for themselves, though the exact wording escapes me. Something a bit silly and self-referential like our own 'Man-the-Wise' you know. I guess that must be standarad. At any rate, language doesn't work the same for them. To hear them 'talk' to each other... theres alot of touching, and then it sounds like a dolphin and a crab trying to have a conversation. As I said, dispite apperances, we really do have alot in common with them.

They evolved, like us, from a per-sentient brachiating creature that moved down to the ground and developed tools, had manipulating appendages and big brains. They spread out, conquered their planet, fought among themselves for space, resources, religion, and developed complex societies, and finally graduated out to the stars- a step we had only barely flirted with at that point.

It was funny actually- funny to me, I mean, I'm not sure if they have comedy- anyway, it was funny, they seemed surprised, actually, that we had space ships at all. To them, I like to imagine, it must have been as if they sailed into shore in a nuclear submarine, and found that the native children had some-how cobbled together a functioning sail boat. We couldn't cross oceans, but we were, in fact, mariners.

Anyway, I'm getting side tracked, I was talking about first contact. I've mentioned where we were similar, but the differences are what matter at first. Unfortunately, there really isn't any way to say 'we come in peace' to a civilization utterly foreign to your own, evolutionary parallels not-withstanding.

The Suitors were pretty clever though. They had intercepted just a little bit of our media, apparently, and had some how figured out just enough of our body language from it to send their message. The clip they played was from an old western- it was just people waving to one another. That's it. A few looped clips of people waving to one another. Like, holy shit, right? If they had that, they must have seen other stuff, like war films, or pornography, right? Maybe they were just... hedging their bets?

Anyway, in case you're wondering, no one thought it was a joke- we would have, sure, but they sent it while orbiting right up above us in the atmosphere- that said, I'm sure Russia was still convinced America was fucking with them or something, but yeah.

I know as much as I do only because I was part of the little team slapped together to figure out what to do. I know what you're thinking, and it was just like in a movie. You don't seriously think the American government has some sort of 'alien-contact-team' on hand do you? And no, the world didn't just turn to the United States to figure it out on their own- as nice as it might have been to present a unified front to the Suitors, there was no way anybody was going to get along with each other with so little time to prepare. To the Suitor's credit, they ultimately ended up making contact with every nation that wanted to speak with them- but as it turned out we were the first to legitimately try and communicate. I hear China tried to send them some sort of message, but it just isn't that simple. They needed some kind of baseline for human communication before anybody could talk to anybody, in the traditional sense.

So they had us. They didn't scramble us from across the nation, the Government just grabbed what they had laying around in arms reach. We were all from D.C. There were a handful of biologists and astronomers, a few generals and senators, the vice president (the president herself was squirreled away somewhere in case they nuked us I guess) and me, a linguist. An interpreter, specificaly- not my ideal career parth, but thats life for you.

I felt a bit like an afterthought, the lot of them were all pretty strong personalities, so I stayed quiet for awhile. A good bit of time was devoted to just trying to interpret the message they'd sent us. We had it all there in front of us, the video message playing on repeat, and a smattering of photographs of their ship spread out on the table. I remember thinking 'holy crap, this is actually happening' and it was pretty surreal. Anyway, one of the generals was convinced it was a trick. Like, they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security or something by sending us footage of cowboys waving at each other. From a human perspective, it makes sense- it was pretty easy to imagine the message like, as being ironic, or something, but as far as I could figure they knew exactly what they were doing.

They didn't send us pictures of themselves- they look a bit like octopuses, by the way- and they didn't try to talk to us in their language, which would be barely audible to us, much less intelligible. It was their attempt at a baseline greeting, no implications. Just 'Hello'. The senators were mostly concerned with what they wanted. After all, they had to want something otherwise they would have either never shown up, or would have obliterated us on sight, due to us being a huge threat, I guess? They were freaked out- I can't blame them for being a bit scared, but seriously, right? The vice president didn't talk a whole lot. He'd actually been an astronaut when he was younger, and I could tell all of this was really blowing his mind. Well, it was blowing all of our minds, but yeah. He just sat there, feet up, examining those photographs of the ship.

The ship was really a beautiful thing. It wasn't a saucer, lets get that horse shit out of the way. It was dark, very non-reflective, and faceted like a stealth bomber. It had some sort of symmetry to it, but there was no way of telling which end was the front. it was just like a big black cut gemstone. Not a lot to discern about them from that, other than how totaly alien they were to us.

So I started forming a plan. We were the home team, so the onus was on us to try to talk to them. Learning their language would come later. But first things first, we needed to say 'hi' back, right? After everybody had talked, discussed, worried, yelled, blustered, etc. etc. I took the floor, and did my damnedest to pretend to know what I was talking about. No one really had a better idea than mine- but the scientists at least seemed to be on board with me, and we formulated our response. It was pretty simple, just a video of us waving at the screen. We wanted to let them know they'd gotten something right.

---

The politicians ended up taking a back seat. They figured there wasn't a lot they could do until we could actually communicate with the suitors. The biologists were waiting- or perhaps salivating for a picture of them, and the generals and the astronomers were busy discussing the ship. That really left me to figure out the whole language barrier thing. I guess that's why I was there, right?

First of all, the only way we had of communicating with them at the time was with video clips. It was weird, but I made due. I had to go in with a few assumptions. One, that they understood the concept of written language. Two, that they would understand the gesture of my hand pointing at something. I didn't have a lot to go on, but I figured that if they could pilot a space ship across the galaxy and send us a video of some fuckoffs waving at each other, they could probably figure out my primitive monkey gesturing and scribbles. So I got some note-cards and a pen, and started taking pictures. I started with the basics.

Pointing at my self, labeled 'HUMAN'
picture of the earth, labeled 'EARTH'
picture of the sun,
picture of....

I kinda drew a blank after that. There was a lot of earth stuff they'd need a bit more context for first. So I looked at what they'd already seen.

Picture of dudes waving: 'GREETING'
picture of their own space ship: 'SPACESHIP'

and then I did some numbers too. And I compiled all that into a video and then sent it off to them.

And then we waited. We only waited for a few hours, before they responded. And what a beautiful response it was, let me tell you.

"GREETING HUMAN GREETING SPACESHIP GREETING EARTH GREETING [photo of what we're pretty sure is their home planet] GREETING [picture of a group of Suitors] GREETING"

There you have it in all its glory.
They'd re-cobbled my slideshow into that order and added a few images of their own. The committee about had a fit. The astronomers started to drool over the picture of their planet, and the biologists flipped out over the picture of honest-to-god aliens. Let me tell you by the way, they look weird. Like, I was expecting little green dudes or something, to be perfectly honest. It was hard to determine scale at the time, but they were a bit larger than ourselves. Very centralized body plan. Several long appendages in a ring- uh... kinda shaped like a witches hat, right? They had this long bit that went back into a kangaroo-tail like shape, and then the 'brim' was folded up with the legs coming off of it. On their tops they had two big empty looking eyes, and on the underside they had a couple orifices and another pair of little focused eyes, along with another slender pair of appendages. They wore coverings on all of their arms and legs, and some had markings around their uh... faces. The stuff on the underside. Anyway, yeah, weird looking. The inside of their ship- we determined that's where the photo was taken- looked remarkably similar to the inside of one of our space stations. Wires and gadgets all over the place.

---

That's as far as I got. The plan was for the main character to give a bit more backstory about herself, and I had a part planned later where the Suitors showed humanity the secrets of space travel or something. 

Basically, this project got totally shelved after the movie 'Arrival' came out, because they essentially took a similar concept to this story and made it ten times better, haha. Its a great movie, you should absolutely watch it.

[Archive] sword_axe.exe

This is a short story I never finished, started sometime in 2015

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One corrupted class file. That was all it took.

In the world of virtual realities, time was not a meaningful concept on a global scale. That is to say, time is a variable thing, depending upon where you find yourself. Everybody knows that 'time is an illusion' as they say, but practically, one can apply this truism to the way the human brain interprets the flow of time. This is the reason behind why a boring task can seem to last an eternity and something fun can seem to fly by, even if both take the same empirical amount of time. This is also the reason why, as a child, the future seems like a distant, far away thing, but as an adult, the years may seem to slip through your fingers in comparison. The human mind's experience of time is governed by the release of chemicals. This was easily exploited when we began to electronically uplift the humble mind.

Immersion into netspace is intermediated by the Plug. The plug is sort of digital expansion pack to the brain. One of its main functions is regulating the experience of time- first of all, it is important that every individual in the same server are proceeding at the same rate-of-experience. Without that, there would be metal lag, and communication and interaction would be impractical. Second, this is important because, as it turns out, your typical mind processes at a snails pace. Its no fault of its own, of course. Neurons can only function so quickly. In this way, the Plug is a bit like overclocking the brain- and though that sounds dangerous, its actually quite natural. The mind does it all the time when it is dreaming. Diving frees your brain from having to manage an entire body. Allowing the Plug to manage sensory input allows for more efficient information processing, using digital neurons in tandem with flesh.

Anyway, this is important to understand, in order to fully grasp The Queue. Diving into a particular server requires quite a bit of synchronization. This process is completely automated of course, but between having to do several hundred regulatory confirmation requests and agreements, and confirmation reports of those requests, for the sake of redundancy, between the server and the local host, and then the process of syncing, credentials checking, so on and so forth... the process can take years. Subjective years, of course. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you've got to understand, the system all this runs on... its global. there has to be several degrees of communication between varying levels of technological advancement. And then, because your mind technicaly classifies as an uploaded consciousness for legal reasons, when you dive into a server that exists physically in another country, you're effectively crossing a border, so customs has to get involved. And then, remember, you're dealing with human minds here. People, not just packets of data. Redundancy is important. So its a culmination of all these things, technological considerations, politics, bureaucracy.... years. Again, subjective years, but its still years.

So, what does this mean? It means when you lay down in bed, and you plug yourself in, you can expect a wait of ten or twenty minutes before you're dropped into the server you dialed into. And then, if you want to leave, or transfer to a different server, you can expect a wait of ten or twenty years before your exit sequence begins. If the server is particularly busy- or if you're in a particularly high-experience-rate server, the wait can be closer to fifty subjective years. A smart player puts their name in the Queue the moment they drop in.

Understand, there are other options. A local server can have much more reasonable Queue times, but unless you're lucky enough to live in China, the local servers are most likely to either be garbage, or constantly full. At least that's my experience. Understand, this whole "years" thing isn't too daunting when you remember we're only talking about time measured in minutes or hours in the real world. A body could drop in for a decade of adventure after breakfast, and be done and awake in time for lunch. You know, its funny, politicians used to worry that with the advent of immersive virtual realities, society would grind to a halt. Quite the contrary. When you've just finished several decades of living in a fantasy world, waking up and doing some manual labor for twelve hours is no big deal. Also, maintaining connections with other people in the real world is more important than ever. Its important to carefully schedule dive times if you want to play with your friends. Otherwise, you might end up dropped into a server several years ahead of your buddy and have to sit around twiddling your thumbs. Let me tell you, its a pain in the ass.

Anyway, all this stuff is fascinating, but let me get back to the real story. Corrupted class files. Specifically one corrupted class file.

The server was an older one. Not extraordinarily old, but old enough that it still had a fairly simplistic way of handling various base game-play extractions. Really, from the players perspective, this sort of thing is immaterial. The human brain already parses things into categories and hierarchies; many of the older game systems took advantage of this to streamline the way they handle user experience. Anyway, it was old, based somewhere in Ukraine I think. It was odd though, I recall, because it was a pretty big server, several million player slots, and yet, it always had a really low player count. That said two things to me right off the bat. Either there were some odd game rules that didn't interest the majority of players, or it was corrupted somehow. We hear all sorts of ghost stories about corrupted servers- servers run by mind hackers that trick you into half a century of data mining, or something else more perverse, but in reality, there are hundreds of watchdog groups that flag those sorts of things before they even get off the ground. There wasn't a whole lot of info floating arround about it, and I'll be honest. I was curious.

Lots of old servers handle weapon types as abstractions to help it calculate the way NPCs use weaponry, and to predict typical usage patterns for players. Physics calculations have to be pretty complicated to be believable, and immersion is important in these kinds of worlds- in case I didn't mention, this was a medieval class server. Typical ren-faire shit. Castles, dragons, killing ogres, etc. etc. Its a popular trope. I was like, why not right? I hadn't done any good old swordplay in a long time. I'd spent a couple centuries in a combat world last weekend, and it was still pretty fresh in my mind, using a sword. Ah, I love swords. That ring of steel on steel, the finesse of combat. Kiddie servers hold your hand and make you a master swordsman automatically, but the hardcore servers, those put you in direct control. I lived for it, for awhile.

So I drop. It was immediately obvious that this was gonna be a long haul. Dropping in alone took a solid hour. I decided to to spend the time fooling around in the server's physics sim sandbox, which I downloaded. A nice little empty white space to dip into this particular world nice and easy. It had an odd feel to it. Older worlds usually do, especially when you've been playing somewhere more modern for awhile, but it wasn't really noteworthy. The directory had some items to spawn in to play around with- naturally I went to drop in a sword to practice with. Strange, I thought, as I flicked through the folder labeled weapons. Axes, hammers, a bow with arrows, a flail, a whip... notice anything missing? No swords. Not even a dagger. I was so confused. What a weird oversight. Was it some sort of joke? I decided the sim must have simply been slapped together. I spent the rest of the wait playing solitaire.

I've been here for twenty years. I'll still be here in another twenty, though I queued the very moment the drop went through. I spent the first fifteen with a boy I met on my third day in, Yatcha. Beautiful Romanian boy.... likely young enough to be my son, but he never told me and I never asked- I just have a bit of a sense for it. At any rate, it makes very little difference here. I could have been a ninety-year-old man, and it wouldn't have mattered to him. In netspace, you are the person you present yourself as. Why would flesh matter in a place where minds meet? In meatspace, I'm a forty-year-old advertising illustrator. I have dark wiry hair, my breasts have never had a shape that you might describe as perky and my stomach has been battling for the last twenty years with my bottom for which could sport the most unattractive species of curvature. But I'm in good enough shape, so I rarely give my appearance much thought. In here- the server is called aлекссвіт23, but the world is called Archicoria by the locals- in here, I'm short, slight, sharp featured, but not serious in the eyes, fair haired and slim fingered. I'd have been an elf, if the world allowed it, but this place was human only.

By Yatcha's estimation, this server had hosted a kind of peaceful game at one point. There was only one large city, with several little shires around the countryside, but beyond that was seemingly endless woods and mountains. Perhaps it was a frontier game- in other words, survival based, not combat based. As a result, aside from tools like axes and hammers, and hunting utilities like bows and arrows, there was no combat weaponry built into the game engine initially. Combat related classes would have been put into secondary engine components- as even if you wouldn't encounter a sword in typical game play, a thoroughly fleshed out physics system would still let you forge one if you were so inclined- but none of the engines main routines were tied into those combat weapon classes....

And so, one little corrupted class file- namely the one for swords, and sword type weapons- left the server otherwise intact. Typically, a file like that would be much more integral, and tied to several other routines. For instance, a typical hack-n-slash style game might spawn hordes of enemies for a player to encounter, decked out in armor and weaponry. And if one of those needed to spawn in with sword-in-hand, if the sword-class file was shot, the whole system could come to a screeching halt. But the only enemies here are mindless monsters. And there are no crypts or dungeons to loot that might hold swords in their proceduraly generated chests. It was all a very peculiar situation. Some kid, presumably named Alex- or Aлекс I suppose- must have cobbled together a standard class combat server from a survival template- and then apparently abandoned it.

I've never really understood the appeal of those sorts of 'frontier' style worlds. There's only so many times you can build a cabin, raise a barn, grow a farm.... Its listless. Yatcha and I did all that- his company made it much more pleasant. Fun even, in the beginning, but that may have been more about the sex than the cabin building. Anyway since he dropped out I haven't let anyone else get quite so close to me. I work better on my own anyway.

---

I never wrote more past this point. This was meant as a sort of prologue/re-write. I'd previously written a bit more in this world, which follows below. 

Prior to this point, the setting wasn't a virtual reality, but some sort of fantasy world with either a political or magical reasoning for the lack of swords.

---

It was unlike any axe I'd ever seen. Long in the blades, the handle growing thin between them, but short and sturdy at the grip. As I hefted the weapon, I then understood the purpose of the iron cross bar right above the grip; thin as the blades were, this 'guard' would protect your fingers when fighting. Most peculiar, but surely quite functional. At the top, the corners of the two blades curved inwards slightly. Only, slightly of course. Truly this tool flirted with the forbidden. If they had curved inwards any further, one might be deceived into imagining a a singular point present at the tool's top. The thought unsettled me. I have never laid eyes on a 'sword', Lords forbid, but the thought did cross my mind that this axe was designed to resemble one.

Scandalous, yes, but the letter of the law was met. The axe's owner examined his shoes closely the whole time that I held his blades in my hands. As I returned it to him, he nodded calmly, but I could see the sweat running down over his temples. There was no doubt in my mind that he knew precisely what it was he carried.
The traveler slipped the peculiar axe into a specially designed sleeve hanging from his belt, and then pulled his cloak tight around him to conceal it once more. We shared a glance.

"I've never seen another axe quite like that one, stranger" I said to him, quietly.

"Neither had I, to be honest" He shifted uncomfortably "It is not mine. I'm delivering it for my master to a man here in town" His eyes shifted uncomfortably from side to side, and his voice lowered slightly more- I leaned in slightly to listen as he spoke, glancing down again at his waist, the long form of the blades in their pouch forming an odd shape under his cloak, as though he were carrying a baton "This man... the instructions were so strange, if it had not been for such a large sum that he paid, ah..." The man cleared his throat.

"And he asked it to be delivered?" I questioned him gently- the more we spoke, the more uncomfortable the man seemed to become, fidgeting as he was. I scarcely doubt I could be blamed for my curiosity, though.

"Ah, y-yes, he uhm... he, my master's client, uh, he ordered it by courier, you see. Very odd! A hefty sum, and very precise instructions y-you see" His hand fell down to his side, resting on that short handle "He also requested it to be delivered at night, ah... to avoid attention, I would imagine" The man- I should rather say the lad, for, recalling him now, I remember him being very slight in build, and soft in the face, though I had not noticed at first, with his hood and the flickering light- anyway, he gave me a very nervous look. I looked back at him plainly.

"Yes" I spoke, clearing the slight pause "I imagine a thing like that would have the town talking." He gulped slightly, and then his brow raised, and he reached into his cloak, as if remembering something. The boy produced a single gold coin. He awkwardly pressed it into my hand, and then looked back up to meet my gaze. I could only raise an eyebrow and accept it- I'm not one to gossip, but if I were, I scarcely doubt a single coin would buy me off. At any rate, he nodded, seeming further relaxed.
I sighed, and took a step back "Alright then. I'd advise you to keep that thing hidden. And stay out of trouble." He nodded and scurried off into the city. I stretched a bit, and sat back down at my guard post beside the gate.

I could only shake my head. If Teorick had been on duty that night, the boy might have found himself in a cell tonight. That axe was... suspicious. But I don't like to cause a fuss, you see. So what if the blades were long and thin? An axe can only chop, and with no true point, that tool certainly couldn't stab. I can only imagine that delivery of his was to a very wealthy eccentric.

***

For a moment there, I seriously thought I was going to soil my self. Dreams of skinning that idiot Yarden alive spun through my head. He'd specifically said there'd be no one watching that gate on Feastday night! If that blessed bastard of a guard hadn't been half drunk, I'm certain I'd have greeted the dawn from the hangman's noose. That isn't to say that I don't think the little tale I wove wasn't adequate- it is simply that there aren't a great many situations where a good look at my weapon wouldn't raise quite a many suspicions.

After darting around the corner, I took a deep sigh of relief- a quiet one though, of course. I pulled my hood back, and un-stuffed my hair out from the back of my cloak. You know, its funny, I used to hate being mistaken for a boy. Lords bless my lack of curves. I sat down, and pulled out my map to review my game plan- and to calm my nerves. After all, I'd just flirted with the first of many a myriad way in which this scheme of mine could come crashing down on top of me. I slipped my hair back into my cloak, and donned my hood again, after catching my breath- I couldn't dally too much. Long night ahead of me then. I could feel Wyrmtongue shifting a bit under my cloak as I slipped through the empty alleyway- I'd need to adjust it's sheath, it still didn't sit quite right, though I'd adjusted the straps several times that night already. Still, better for it to loose easily than risk it catching. 

[Land of Nog] Chullvobje the Night Thief

   This may be my final journal entry. So sure am I of my imminent death. There is a beast outside my tent, even now as I scrawl these words. I could hear the wails of agony of my traveling party as it slaughtered them one by one. I am suredly alone now. Alone in this monstrous land. I snuck a glance outside, but in the darkness of the new moon, I could make out little. I sit here wrapt in fear, praying for for the sounds of my faltering breath to make it naught passed these terrible thin canvass walls.

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   I was awoke this morning to the sound of a gunshot. It appears that I passed out from fear last night, my weak constitution gaining the upper-hand as it sometimes does. My traveling party, to my elation, had not been murdered one by one in the night as I had thought.

   The scene outside my tent was a grisly one. The remains of the monster lay strewn between our tents. The smell was indescribable. Apparently, dear Bertrand had experienced the same nightmare last night as had I, so certain was he of the deaths of myself and the others. However, with courage that I do not possess, he had exited his tent, and killed the terrorsome creature stalking us.

   As it was, the beast had not been stalking us at all. Rather it had come to slay our horses. Only one of the mares fell, drained of all its fluids, looking as though its body had baked in an oven for hours. Skin and bones alone lay heaped in a sorrowful pile.

The shape of the creature itself was troublesome to discern, though I was able to puzzle out some of its description from picking through the fowl wreckage.

- Though larger than a horse in volume, the weight of the creature's remains could not have been more than that of a man.

- It was overall insect like in appearance, with long, spindle legs, and a terrible needle like beak. Presumably, it used this to drain the poor horse of its life blood.

- The analogy to a mosquito would not be out of place, though the creature bore no wings, and between vellum-like sheets of chitin was a coating of thick greasy hair. The texture reminded me of wolfs-pelt.

- Though little remained of the creature's head in particular (dear Bertrand is as true a shot as ever) I was none the less able to determine that it possessed a single horrid eye, gazing out above the long needle of its mouth-parts.

- Our often wheedle-some guide, though frequently unreliable, informed us in a hushed voice that his people told legends of a blood-sucking creature. This beast was said to stand ten feet tall, and bore night-terrors to shepherds as it stole from their flock. His people call this beast Chullvobje, the night thief.

[Land of Nog] Hnrógh and his Books

Probably going to re-write this one later. It ended up really long-winded and dry
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   On my long journey, I had the fortune to spend a needful rest at a small inn. It went by the name of Thrûmonn's, though I could not, for the life of me, find any man named 'Thrûmonn', nor any indication that there had ever been one. The name simply was. The inn was located far into the Zygomish Highlands, at a cross roads, in the shadow of Mount Blemish, which stood as bone-gray monolith to the east. In my mind I was convinced that it was watching me, the mountain that is, as though it were some great barren skull looming in the distance. It was a relief to be indoors, out of its gaze.

   My time at the inn was that of mundanity-- inns, it seems, are all very nearly the same, no matter where one goes. And so, as there is very little of note to say about the experience, I will write on the matter in brevity. Perhaps the only article of note was my encounter with a foul-tempered beast of corpulent proportions and foul temperament.

   As I did not speak the tongue of these people (although the language of coin has so-far proven universal in most situations) I never was able to ascertain whether the beast was employed by the inn, or was a guest such as myself. Perhaps he was even the proprietor. (Through he was no 'Thrûmonn'-- he seemed to answer to the name 'Hnrógh', though, only when it was pronounced with care. I have a suspicion that this name bares a similar sound to a vulgar word in the language of this land's people)

   I will describe this beast for you, so that you, as I, can first experience his strange countenance before learning of his prickle-some mood. The inn had a large back lounge, which one could access by passing through a pair of heavy hanging curtains. The curtains were there, presumably, to contain the thick hazy air of the lounge, clouded by the scent of opium, hashish, and tobacco. However, the smell was not the first thing I noticed-- sitting right beside the door was Hnrógh, his large body impossible to ignore. He was easily as big around as a dinner table. He had no distinction between head and body- indeed, perhaps one could say that he was only a very large head. Around the base of his thick, pear-shaped mass were several bearded mouths, each one with a slightly different scowl. His graying beards were twisted and braided near their ends, adorned with small beads. Between the  cracked lips of his several mouths were held the pipe of a hookah- save for one mouth (which is the one he used to admonish me later).

   At my first glance, it seemed ot me that he was wearing above his mouths a thick glittering belt of gemstones. Only as I looked closer did I see that this belt was one of eyes, not jewels. Each eye seemed to be a different shade, though all were either blue or gray-- incidentally, the same color as his wrinkled flesh.. Above these multitudes of glassy eyes sprouted dozens of long, sinuous arms- or perhaps you would call the tentacles, like that of a sea creature. These limbs did different things each. Some would pick through baskets of dried meats placed nearby. Some would change out coals on the hookas. But many simply hung idly in the air, occasionally reaching down to turn the page on one of the many books that sat in a great circle around this beast. And he seemed to be reading all of the, all at once, as his eyes darted back and forth over the pages.

   It was my love of books that overcame my revulsion, and urged me to approach the hyper-literate monstrosity. I bashfully attempted to introduce myself to this creature. When I was ignored, I realized with embarrassment that the creature almost certainly did not speak my language. I tried instead to communicate through gestures, moving my arms about and pantomiming. When this too got me no-where, I considered that perhaps the creature could not see me. The books were not far from its eyes. Perhaps it was simply near-sighted and deaf. It was then, when I took a single step closer, that all the myriad of eyes turned to look directly at me. It was as though I had unknowingly crossed some sort of invisible barrier to its attention. Before I had a chance to speak, Hnrógh's single unoccupied mouth opened, and (in my own language, without a hint of an accent) said "Go away."

   Over the course of my stay at Thrûmonn's, I spent a great deal of time watching the beast-- from a small distance, of course. Never once did I see him move from his spot by the door. The staff would dutifully refill his baskets of dried meats, hookah, and skeins of wine. One morning, very early, it was only I and Hnrógh in the lounge (even then, he would still ignore me) and a young servant came in to bring a new basket of food. A stray pillow had fallen from the pile on which the creature sat, and the servant tripped, flinging the basket onto Hnrógh, and falling herself onto one of his books. Enraged, the beast snarled curses in a foreign tongue, and began to beat at the servant girl with several of his long arms until she fled sobbing.

   Occasionally, he would finish with a book, and set it in a stack near the pillar beside him, and retrieve a new book from a similar stack. In the evening, a servant would take away the finished books, and bring out several new ones. Each time they would speak to him, presumably to ascertain what he wished to read next (this is how I inferred his name, by the way). His responses were always as curt and brief as I assume he could manage. Curious one evening, I followed this servant in his retreat. He took the stack of literature down a narrow flight of stairs, and through a narrower hallway, which let out into an enormous library. The ceiling was low, but the rows of books stretched back far from the doorway I'd entered through. There were plush chairs set up here and there. I found my manservant in one of them, book in hand-- it seemed he had found this treasure before I-- in part, no doubt, because of my obsession with the beast above. I asked him then, as the thought occurred to me, why that dreadful, many-eyed monster didn't hide himself away down here, considering his love of books, and hatred of company.

The answer my manservant gave was quite apparent in hindsight: Hnrógh simply couldn't have fit through the narrow hallway or staircase.

[Land of Nog] The Yodeling Yolbum

My friend Nick and I have been discussing collaborating on a project. I'll write blerbs about weird monsters, and he'll make illustrations. Here's my first attempt; we may be doing something else instead, we'll see. The idea is that each of these posts will be like a chapter from a travelogue from some noble adventurer, or a traveling merchant, like Marco Polo. I'm setting these in the Land of Nog, which is basically a loose fantasy setting that takes place on the face of an incredibly large, incredibly slow moving giant.

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   In my travels through the land of Nog, it foremost stands out in my recollection that never a single night were we at peace from the haunting howls of the Yolbum. Each supper, precisely following sunset would the caterwaul begin—first as a single lone yodel, then followed by a cacophony. Early on our journey, it was a mystery to us, as to where these beasts—whom we presumed to be most fearsome—were hiding, as our first leg took us through the vast expanse of the Face Waste. Nary a tree nor hill stood to conceal their forms, and yet looking out across the pocked earth, one could see nothing, even if the sound seemed to come from only a stone’s toss away.

   It was one night, and, at this point, the yodeling had begun to wane from wondrous to irksome, that I set out, determined to find my first Yolbum, and harangue it for it and its kin’s assault on my ears each night. Thoroughly I sought, late into the night. It was only by high moon, by my count, when I had all but given up, that my foot caught on a hole on the ground. Easy enough to miss, looking out over the uneven ground—even then one could walk right by and mistake it for another of the Waste’s many craterous divots—yet, certainly large enough to twist an ankle of a blundering oaf such as myself. Luckily, I merely scuffed my traveling vest as I fell to the ground.

   On a hunch, I scurried away from the hole, and lay down close to the ground to watch the opening, certain that it would reveal to me my quarry. And indeed it did, only perhaps an hour later. The yodels had waned, for a time, as they sometimes did, only to start up again suddenly with full force. As I listened closely, I could hear the sound approaching, like a reversed echo, until a call sounded from one Yolbum not a mile away. Then, out from the hole before me slithered a long, sinuous creature. Like a worm, and fleshy pink, it unspooled itself into a great pile of flesh on the earth around its den. Along one side, the creature split, all the way down its hairless length, opening up a long, horrible mouth, filled with small blunt teeth, and it bellowed its ponderous howl into the night.

   In a foolish attempt to gain further insight, I stood, and uncovered my torch. The moment the light touched its hideous body, the creature recoiled, slithering its bulk instantly back down into the dark burrow.

Further investigation has revealed this:

- Each Yolbum to emerge from a given hole is a different individual. I speculate they have a vast network of tunnels under the earth.

- My manservant speculated that they consume the earth itself, but whatever they eat, there is, as yet, no explanation for the lack of apparent leavings that must follow.

- Each yodel is subtly different from the last. Either each creature has a unique call, or the ululations of a given call are random. In a letter from my dear wife, she fancied that they were singing lullabies to one another in their strange language, and each song was a unique composition.

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Additional information 

Catching Up with an Old Friend

Been catching up with my friend from middle school, Nick Talbert. He's a self taught artist and graphic designer. He's got some cool shit, I'll plug his various accounts here at the bottom of this post if you want to check him out.

I met Nick in middle school, back in 2001. I'd been home-schooled up until the 5th grade. My parents were military, and had planned on having a bunch of kids, so homeschooling made sense, as the alternative would have been forcing me to get accustomed to new schools every time we moved (if you don't know, the military tends to ship its people around every few years)

As it turns out, all they had was me, and when it became clear they weren't going to have to move, they stuck me into the little Catholic grade school down the road from our house.
Now, when I say little, I mean little. Our 5th grade class was fifteen kids, including myself, and over the years until high-school we'd lose about one or more of that number each year. Nick himself left either near the end of 5th grade or at the beginning of 6th, I don't remember.

Still, he was basically the first friend I made in middle-school, and we've kept up off and on over the years. We mainly bonded over the fact that we both loved to draw. We spent most of our time in class (when we should have been taking notes or doing other things) drawing monsters and comic books.

In middle-school, I had this idea of making a big book full of monsters and their descriptions, sort of a sillier Magical Beasts and Where to find Them, and I would doodle a monster and leave room on the page to go back and fill in details about it. Except I very rarely followed through with that last part. I didn't really enjoy writing back then; I had atrocious hand writing and worse spelling.

Nick, however, followed suit, drawing his own monsters, except he would actually write out the descriptions of them.

In college, when I was going through some of my old stuff, I came across my monstrous manifesto, only the actual title I'd given it as a kid was "The Tomb [Tome] of Creatures", and boy. It was a tome alright. Basically, my methodology had been: fill up a note-book with school notes and doodles of monsters interspersed, and then, at the end of the year, tear out all the stupid useless notes and keep the pages with doodles.

These skeletal notebooks were then stitched loosely together by duck-taping backs to covers, ultimately forming this big shambling masterpiece. It was, however, totally falling to pieces, even from the get-go, and so when I re-discovered it, I took out the pages and rebound them into a three-ring binder, putting some of the more well-worn pages into plastic slips.

In going through this archeological dig, I discovered that, for reasons unknown, I had a handful of pages from Nick's parallel work, which he'd titled "The Monster Jaboree [Jamboree]". I really don't know why I had them. I think he gave them to me for some unknown purpose before he left our class.

At any rate, with Nick's permission I've compiled these ten pages of his into an imgur album, which you can find here. The descriptions are often quite witty and humorous, more so coming from a ten year old. Heres a selected quote:

"[Twin Snakes] find it easy to sniff humans out to find Blood. They also have x-ray vision to see through humans or anything else. So if you live near one of these don't plan to live anymore."

It's well worth a read-- I've transcribed the writing from each of the pages, as the poor photo quality makes it difficult to read on the images themselves. At some point, I'll scan in and make an album of higher quality images of these and other doodles of my own.

Having a collection of old sketches has been a cherished thing in my life, over the years. There's something about the creativity of childhood that makes for the perfect inspiration later on in life, once your mind has cemented into certain ways of thinking, and I'm always glad I've held on to this stuff all this time.

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My friend Nick Talbert has a healthy social media presence, but he doesn't have nearly enough followers, so get in on the ground floor while you still can!

- Nick's Instagram
- Nick's tumblr
- Nick's deviantART

And, if you're interested in commissioning him for design work,
- Nick's fiverr