S2E12: Tcinti

Meagan comes face to face with the tobacco spirits and struggles to learn their language.

CAST
Kyla Valenti: Meagan
Dominick Vilgiate: Jacob
Christopher Fox: Tobacco
Timothy Vilgiate: Eggplant, Pepper, The Great High Waters
Jareth Spirio: Colonel Imes

PRODUCTION
Written and edited by Timothy Vilgiate
Mandola, bowed glockenspiel, (some) bowed cymbals, bowed sheet metal by Timothy Vilgiate
First half recorded at UCCS Radio by Timothy Vilgiate, and by Christopher Fox from Kansas City. Second half recorded by Kyla Valenti in Michigan.
Ending Song: Titles and Cue Cards by A Bad Night For a Hero/C.j. Hackett
Season 2 artwork by Jesse Robertson

SOUND EFFECTS (From Freesound)
Car Window Down  by digifishmusic
Metal Farm Gate in Wales by earwicker23
Creature Breath by Jacobalcook
Tobacco cough by FreqMan
01543 flying dragon by Robinhood 76
METAL Screech by metrostock99
Muffled Distant Explosion by Nenad Simic
Collision Reverb by Qubodup
Bowed_hihat4 and Bowed_hihat1 by carthach
Sweep-Cymbal by hannagreen
Ambiance Idling Car by 1san
car door slam by theshaggyfreak

Trembling, we left the house, heading towards the woods. The language was difficult to grasp, it  eludes me, but deep within the packets of outwardly innocuous gum looms something great and powerful. My hands began to vibrate as I held onto the package. What little of the plant remained in that box locks into something greater, something universal. This was it. This is it. Is. Is. Is.  Somewhere in here is the key to defeating the white flowers, and saving the world. As vast as it seemed, it is difficult to understand—all of my attempts to learn the language held within result in evasion—I hear the faintest sounds of screeching and moaning, like whales. The more I press into it, the more noise it seems to make. I am making it upset.
    “Meagan, are you okay?”
I look at him. “Yeah—I'm--”, I start to say before my jaw clamps shut. A sensation glides up my back, a feeling like a ceramic mug rubbing against skin through thick winter clothing—it's a dull warmth, a slightly sickening electricity creeping up my spine—all at once, all pasts and presents and futures that my mind can fathom tie themselves into a single transcendental moment, unfixed in time. My thoughts, my impressions, my feelings, my ideas, my attachments all come into full view, peeling themselves apart like hundreds of overlapping transparent frames to reveal themselves as separate, interdependent components. I grow increasingly aware of every sensation in my body of which I might have been otherwise unconscious; the beating of my heart or the churning of my stomach no longer feel like distant actions from my conscious mind, but instead become felt as intimately connected with every aspect of my thinking and feeling brain.
    I glance at my brother, and my heart starts to palpitate with fear. He is trying to speak to me, but I can't hear what he's saying. I study him closely and see a faint white screen intervening between us, a gossamer curtain encircling and caging me. I trace it upwards until I see the curtain stretching on for what seems like miles into the sky—it glows with a gentle light, trembling in the wind like a jellyfish drifting in a current. All at once, the world outside disappears, and my feet lift off the ground. I rise, and I rise, and I rise, until eventually—I remembered I wasn't rising at all, but falling, careening down what looked like a blank white elevator shaft with five transluscent sides. At the base, a great white flower spins in hypnotic circles, waiting for me. Tcinti.

    Shooting through the white flower, I feel my body crumble into a tiny sphere, emerging from the dirt in the shape of a tiny sprout. I grow sinnewy legs and arms, my face warps around in the shape of a flower bud until it comes unfurled, and I grow, and grow, and bloom, until I, as a plant, uproot my feet and peel off my damp green skin to reveal a person trapped within, covered in goop. Towering hundreds of feet above my head, I see him, Tcinti, a massive humanoid plant. Two collosal leaves flow behind him like wings as he stands regally between immense hills, hills pockmarked with ancient, burned out settlements with faint candles in their asymmetric windows. Smoke that smells like honey and burning hickory drifts from the cities and between Tcinti's terrible wooden teeth. The air around us feels humid and smokey—the sensation I had felt passing over me now covers my whole body—I feel like I could have been laying face upwards in a pool, looking at some kind of strange, apocalyptic hallucination. Tcinti flaps its wings, and their awesome wind flings me to the ground--the trees around us shiver. I kneel, almost knowing without words that I need to kneel—but I cannot take my eyes away from Tcinti. I cannot stop looking. He lands in front of me, shaking the ground. [heavy footsteps] Tcinti's eyes, shaped like long white flowers, extend from his skull as search lights. They dance around the valley in which we found ourselves. When they pass over me they grant me a brief, momentary glimpse into another world, a world just like this one—his eyes, though apparently solid objects, grow or shrink exactly like the beams of flashlights. Trying to understand them, how they work, how he works, how any of this works, makes the English part of my brain crumble until it succumbs to stupefied and overstimulated awe. As he approaches I begin to study his hands, if that is indeed what they are—long bushels with hundreds of squirming flowers, each one pouring out dense smoke. Kneeling down to get a closer look at me, his mouth opens and from within it comes the sounds of gnarled, crumbling steel.
    A seething and primal anger comes from Tcinti as he rises back up into the sky. I struggle to learn his language; my efforts to do so seem to confuse him. There is none of the easy chaos I experience with English, only a strange and foreign order, tonalities that span dimensions in  sounds, smells and colors as much as syllables. He reaches down and his thousands of fingers wrap themselves around me, pulling me upwards to inspect me more carefully. My lungs fill with tobacco smoke and I start coughing. I do not stop coughing. I can not stop coughing. His searchlight eyes weave their way around my head, and my legs, and my arms. “You are not one of the tricksters. But you are not a pure mushroom. Identify yourself, spirit, or be devoured.”
        “My name is Meagan, I was--”
    “Meagan...? And who taught you to speak the language of the tricksters? Or that of us, the Almighty?”
        “I—I was blessed by the pure mushrooms when they sacrificed themselves to banish the Beyond from the fourth world! They gave me--”
    “The gift of language. Ha. Of course. But the Pure Mushrooms gave the gift of language to the bald monkeys a long, long time ago. How did you learn to speak these other languages? They are not for the bald monkeys to know.”
        “The mushrooms! The mushrooms did it to me! They—the Beyond came into the fourth world again—a couple days ago actually. And now I--”
    “Ha. Well. Your story amuses me. It seems that if the Pure Mushrooms were to have chosen you they would have warned you about the Tricksters, warned you not to speak or speak of their wicked language. Especially not in the presence of the almighty. Now tell me the truth, or suffer the consequences of your dark allegiances.”
        “The—the tricksters—the white flowers—they've attacked my friend. And I've tried to use the gift of language to get him out, but I can't. I talked to my ancestor and she told me to ask you for help.”
    “I see. The tricksters have attacked your friend. And why did his healers not bring him to me? Are the healers of your “people” so unpracticed as to not know to do such a thing immediately?”
        “Well—the thing is—I'm sorry. I'm having trouble trying to explain it.”
    “Don't worry. You're doing fine for a beginner. Your accent is good too. Just keep working on your tones. But it is difficult fathom the stupidity that now meets my ears. Continue with your attempted, feeble explanation.”
        “See, whatever attacked my friend, it was another person. A witch, I guess, you could say. He communed with the tricksters just as a hole opened in the Beyond, loosening him from time and binding him to their power forever. He attacked my friend, since my friend has the powers of the...the...Old One? And he's used my friends brain to kill--”
            “Silence young [sounds of screeching metal and thunder]. The bald monkey does not lie.”

    A raging wind tears through the sky; it parts the clouds of lingering smoke and makes the towering figure who now holds me in his palm flinch. Immediately, the one who had greeted me kneels before an even larger creature, the same in appearance, but tall enough that I could not see nor fathom the top of him. “Master.”
    “I have heard of the warlock about whom she speaks. He is wicked, wishing to topple all nations and worlds across this universe and to make them his slaves. Permit her to enter the fortress and to speak on behalf of her people, this nation of Meagan as she calls it.”
        “Please forgive me.”
    “No forgiveness is needed. It is wise to be always on your guard for the work of the enemy. They have tried many similar devices, some even stranger that what you have just seen. Go now and sing to the great high waters.”
        “Yes, master.”
He sets me down, and I am left alone before the giant, whose search light eyes peer down like tiny stars from the distance and grow ever closer.

    My feet lift off of the ground, up into his eyes—I rise, and I rise, and I rise, until the white of his eyes was all I could see, and I forgot I was rising at all, or rather, I started to feel the center of gravity shift until it seemed like I'd started falling, plummeting into the ground and being reborn again as a flower. “What is your name?”
    “Meagan—its. My people are...”
        “You have taken the name of your people. Interesting. The Bald Monkeys never cease to amaze me with their eccentricities. My name is [sounds of roaring, screams, and explosions].”
All around me stretch thick tile walls, made of impeccably smooth black stone with tiny glistening crystals concealed within. The smell of smoke now permeates the air—rising up into the vaulted ceiling of an infinite castle. Slightly shorter, but still larger than most houses, the Tobacco creature faces me to welcome me into the Fortress of the Almighty Ones—the beating heart of an interdimensional kingdom--  To speak the language of tobacco was to enter into this home, to be part of a universal conversation, to be connected with the present moment in all of its multiplicities, to forget the past and the future and become sharpened like a sword against spiritual darkness, to pour with radioactive smoke, to drown out the passing of time like an avalanche, rendering it still, sacred, and tightly held in Tcinti's icy grip.
    My stomach shakes as I stumble through the world, my feet take step upon step almost against my will. Tcinti gestures here and there, pointing out monuments and buildings that line our strange path—he refers to a spiral spike driven into the earth miles high, lined with branches and dizzy flowers to tell me about the time the Beyond drowned an entire continent; he points to the jagged textures of a frozen, asymmetrical splash of water and says that they hold the epic poem of a time before the tricksters and the almighty became enemies; he stops at an empty field marked by a single dusty stone and he tells me without speaking of the many who have died there. “This warlock who attacks your friend, he has chosen an unwise ally. The Tricksters are a fallen nation—long having abandoned protection of the earth in pursuit of control over the universe. Much of the second dimension and the first six realms of the third dimension have already fallen to them, except for those domains protected by our fortress. Your friend, if he has been blessed by the Old One, would make a useful tool for them to take the fourth world, and to extend their reach into the fifth. This warlock probably imagines that he is the one in control. He is not. But now that you have their language, they will be able to see into your mind. You must let us remove it from you before we can go further.”
    “No!”, my lips shout against my will, giving voice to something conceealed inside me “Don't!”
        “You have revealed yourself, trickster.” Rapidly, the ground beneath my feet rises in tiny whirlwinds and clings to me—I see suddenly that this is not earth at all, but that I am walking on a surface made of gases and smoke. A screaming erupts from a remote corner of my mind as the Tobacco spirit extends his hand towards me. Row upon row of long white flowers open wide—the smoke overtakes me—I become the smoke—I drift into atoms.
    I am walking down a pathway. I do not remember being reassembled. I only remember turning into gas, and then—my memory skips immediately to this place. He continues his sentence as though there is no lapse in the conversation and it only occurs to me as strange when I think about it in English—the Tobacco language knows that this conversations had always been happening, if only on another level of reality. We walk across the surface of a road made of gases, in a city made of swirls of smoke and bizarre organic forms “...is forbidden beyond the gate. To learn the language of the Almighty, one cannot know the language of the Tricksters.”, I sniff—the air smells strongly of uncured tobacco, fresh peppers, and eggplants—Creatures with strange forms peer from behind clouds and dendrite forests and study me—they have not seen a human in this dimension for quite some time. My hands tremble, as do my stomach, and my head—my heart flutters and my skin grows clammy. Vines ooze from my pores, and smoke comes from my mouth, in what rapidly becomes a spectacle to the awestruck, foreign plants. A new language enters my brain. “Perhaps one day there will be peace, and the tricksters will swear off their evil war. But until then, there can be no peace.”
    My legs stretch, and my body balloons until the once gigantic city seems to be of normal size and proportions—the illogical and surreal cityscape with its gaseous clouds and spindley dendrites, now make perfect sense to me. Ah yes--I say—that colossal, broken ladder rotating around itself, supported by clouds of deep blue smoke, is where you go to buy...I guess the English word is food? The spheres that are colored like adobe and hover over the city in neat rows, they vaporize the souls of the dying and convert them into music. The twisting dragons and expanding glass palaces are places for [sounds of metal gears, screeching, static]. It all makes perfect sense. “We will give you our language, so long as you swear to uphold our laws.” The language grows upwards in tiers, and I am at once conscious of my body in the outer fortress, as well as the entrance hall, and even in the real world. My brother leads my shivering body to Cameron's porch, where he'd grown increasingly worried that he needed to do something.  I sit on the porch while Cameron improvises on his piano, and mumble in incoherent growls, chattering at the sky. I look afraid to him, I am sure, but I do not know why. I could move myself from within here and comfort him, but I do not wish to.  “Our laws are as follows. To care for and protect every level of the Earth. To sing to the sacred waters of the upper sky to keep them free from dark spirits. To kill only those who are impudent or tricksters. To not reveal the location of our fortress. Do you accept?”
   
    The violence of the language that I learn feels in its own way more exacting than anything I have ever experienced. It seems dangerous to invite into my own mind—but I remember John. Without me, he and the rest of the world, will die. “Yes.”, I nod. “Very well. Meagan of the Monkey Nation of Meagan, I declare you servant and slave of the Almighty, soldier of the nighshade, bearer of our language against the Trickster and their Warlock.”

    The tobacco spirit reaches into a fountain filled with a thick sap, and presses it against my head. My body dissolves once again, and any connection I held to conscious reality becomes dreamlike, felt on hundreds of layers. An ecstatic and protective rage fills the deepest corners of my soul, as smoke pours skyward. The city seems to sing, to cheer, although it outwardly has lost interest in what we are doing. Within myself, there now appear other worlds, which cascade inward like a nesting doll until they reach a level so small it can be barely imagined. These people, I understand they are under siege. They do not so much believe their laws as they cling to them, as they look to them for some kind of weak sense of stability amidst this war to keep the city and the cities inside of the city afloat inspite of the constant threat. I feel ashamed to have spoken the language of tricksters, to have brought it shamelessly into their world. Humbled, I hang my head, and my physical body far away on some distant shell of reality begins to cry, loudly yet indifferent to its own crying—it drops the tiny packet of nicotine gum to the ground. Without speaking, the tobacco spirit turns for us to leave. The miraculously strange city, with its immense stone sky and thundering aggression, fades past us building by building, the road seeming to grow wider as I shrunk down, falling back through my shells until I slide from the porch onto the ground.
    “...Meagan?”
        “It works. Worked? It worked? Working? Ing? Fuck man.”
    “Do you need me to take you back? It's almost five am. I have to work in an hour.”
Turning myself over, I nodded. “Are you okay?”, he asked as he helped me to my feet. The world here, in the English language, felt like a dream. The tobacco language still expanded in my brain, filling it with a pulsing hot intensity. “Yes. I am.”, standing up, I vomitted up the contents of my stomach and collapsed again to the ground. My legs felt like jello. So did my hands. My brother helped me up again. “Come on. You're gonna be fine.” Despite outward appearances, I was ready for battle. I had been inserted into a war, one which had lasted for eons, spanning across dimensions. This war would not be fought with guns, or bombs, and it wouldn't take place on a battlefield, but it would be fought with and in my own mind. An invisible smoke poured from my nostrils. I was ready.

----

[in the car]
Jacob: So I guess you can like...see drugs or something? Or talk to them?
Meagan: Languages. I see their languages.
J: Huh. [pause] What's it like?
M: What's what like?
J: You know, seeing languages.
M: Depends on the language.
J: What did Tobacco look like?
M: [long pause] Big.
J: Yeah?
M: Bigger than a building. With hundreds white flowers for hands that could turn into cannons. He lived in...a city I guess. (Narrates: I didn't know how to explain it. These things were awfully hard to explain)
J: And uhm...what about...
M: Are you gonna ask me about meth?
J: Erm. Yeah. Meth.
M: Well, I don't know. If I close my eyes and I try to hear its language, I end up in this big field of grass. And there's something in the grass, but I can't see it. It's like a bunch of bugs, you can tell its bugs, even if you can't see it—the grass brushes against you and you feel--
J: Oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
M: What?
J: Police.
M: (narrates) I opened my eyes and looked behind us. Six cars with bright flashing lights tailed us down the highway. Jacob pulled over, trembling. Armed soldiers emerged, surrounding the car—the road had been blocked off up ahead. A man toting an automatic rifle knocked on the window. “Hello?”
    “Out of the car. Now. Both of you.”


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