S2E13: The Death of Meagan

Caught off guard by Meagan's decision to seek the help of tobacco, Ryan scrambles to stop his younger self before its too late, no matter the cost.

Features content that may be disturbing for some listeners. Trigger warning for anyone who has recently lost a family member or been affected, directly or indirectly, by drug abuse/overdose.

CAST
Timmy Vilgiate: John, "John"
Sophie Doss: Sapphire
C.j. Hackett: Ryan, the Fisherman
Kyla Valenti: Meagan
Jareth Spirio: Colonel Imes
Dominick Vilgiate: Jacob

PRODUCTION
Produced and Written by Timmy Vilgiate. Recorded in Colorado Springs, CO by Timmy, and Houghton, MI by Kyla Valenti.
Music by Timmy Vilgiate.
End Credits song: Crimson by C.j. Hackett/The Yeti (iamtheyeti.bandcamp.com) recorded in collaboration with Timmy Vilgiate (timmyvilgiate.bandcamp.com).

SOUND EFFECTS (all from Freesound[.]org)
Flame ignition by hykenfreak
Bottle, Breaking by cmusounddesign
Fire Crackle and Flames 002 by FractalStudios
Beer,Bottle,Drag,Cement,Resonant by jaimage
room-tone hallway small by klankbeeld
Distant_gunfire_01 by CGEffex
Distant_gunfire_02 by CGEffex
Distant_gunfire_03 by CGEffex
distant explosion by reznik_Krkovick
Domstraat gil by borQue
Water_Flood_enhanced by KevinT1001
rescue sounds by cognito perceptu
distant fire truck by whoagoody
tumble_downstairs_a by malexmedia
Smashing head on wall by pfranzen
Hitting in a Face florianreichelt
Long_scream by plagasul
Electric Zap - Electricity by Wakerone
Electric Zap - Electricity 2 by Wakerone
Battering ram banging on a door by schots
Scream NO – Man by guamorims
Crowd Screaming, A by InspectorJ
panic by Erdie
human male scream small crowd panic fear by JohnsonBrandE
Real M16 (shot) by Carmelomike
ghost_sounds by fishwithfeathers
psycho scream 1 by FreqMan
Multiple Female Sceams by megmcduffee
Sounds recorded in Decatur Georgia by microdac
Ambiance_Suburbian Forest by lzmraul
Forest01 by Erdie
Flames by juskiddink
Flames 1 by shastrocks

Newest episode, automatically posted to this blog.

As she emerged from the end of the tunnel, Sapphire dashed up the hill and into the open air, letting out a joyous shout that echoed across the hills. I trailed behind her, lackadaisically. Carlos followed, eyeing the tall electric fences, and wondering if I'd try to stop him from running away. His hair stood on end as the moonlight shined down on him, the night sky filling him with wonder. He was free. “You can fly away tomorrow, when we've killed Ryan, and we're safe.”, I tried to say. He looked at me, puzzled by the strange words appearing in his head. I showed him a picture of what he was contemplating, and said, softly “Not a'ora. Manana.” Vaguely comprehending, he grimaced, and nodded, turning to walk in private through the field. Sapphire, who had been staring at a tree, looked over at me.
“It's so beautiful out here.”
    “I know.”
The moonlight painted her eyes into gemstones, and casted the crisscrossing shadows of pine needles over her skin. She smiled, her teeth glowing with an unearthly sheen. “Fuck. We're in a time loop.”, I frowned. “A what?”
    “This already happened.”
Sapphire slowly remembered it—all of it lined up exactly the way it had before—the thought unnerved her.
    “Bingo! Hey! We got a winner here! Come on stage to collect your prize”, panted a disheveled Ryan, covered in his own blood. “Hey guys”, he caught his breath, leaning over his knees, “Okay, so—new plan. Uhm...Remember how I said we needed to be flexible? Is this that timeline? Whatever. Anyway...Oh fuck. Ow.”
    “What happened?”, both of us asked at once. “Long story short”, panted Ryan, “Two hours from now we are fucked. Meagan-- [sigh] and you guys really needed to watch her, by the way, but you know what, whatever—Meagan snuck out of the compound to go find tobacco, and tobacco is a total racist asshole, so he—he made her forget the scopolamine language and—okay. I don't have time to explain because we are really, really pushing it here. Okay. So. Sapphire. Carlos. CARLOS? Where the actual fuck is Carlos? Were you guys not watching him?”
        “No, were we supposed to?”, asked Sapphire.
Ryan threw up his hands in frustration, dragging them down his face. “We're all gonna die, we're all gonna die, we're all gonna die...Okay. No. No we're not. I'll find Carlos. Okay. Deep breathing. Deep breathing. Everyone calm down. CALM THE FUCK DOWN. Alright. So. John. Sapphire. Carlos. CARLOS? CARLOS? Oh yeah. Right. He's missing. You two. John and Sapphire. You two are the lucky winners of a once in a lifetime vacation to Forks, WA circa 2006. In two hours, I will need you both to go back, find me, and follow me into the house. It's going to be very, very dangerous. Anyway, when you hear me give you the secret code word, which, because of your inability to follow specific instructions, is going to be the very discreet word “SUCK”, you are going to, as the word would imply, SUCK my mind into your consciousness. Hopefully, I can get Meagan safely to your hospital room, and keep the Fisherman out of Dr. Whitebalm's head. Meagan will pull us all into the tobacco language, which, I mean, everything goes blank after that happens, so I think that means I die. If we get it right. And seriously, you two, you are not going to fuck this up. I have been alive for five hundred trillion years. I have watched all the porn on the internet. I have killed Hitler 37 times. Do you know how boring it is to be immortal? I made dinosaurs attack New York once, just out of sheer boredom. I'm not even kidding. I still have five hundred sextillion years before I die, so if you fuck this up for me, I swear to God....[laughs] GOD. Thats funny....anyway. I swear, I will...well...just don't. Fuck. It. up. Please. This is the only timeline we have left. If this goes, we lose the Crystal Pepsi universe. We lose the Dinosaur God universe. We lose the Donald Trump Becomes President of Mexico Universe. All of them. Every last ridiculous universe there is to lose.”
    “If I—If I help you—what's going to happen to me? Will I just...go back to haunting my prison cell?”
    “Well...I mean, on the bright side, at least you'll eventually die when you run out of emotions and shit, right? That’s gotta be a plus.”

    Sapphire and I exchanged a troubled look and our hands started to drift back together. Just moments ago, it seemed that we had been waiting for the sunrise, promising each other our funerals, trembling in anticipation for the next days battle. Sapphire glimmered with a defiance, which rose from a place I knew not how to locate or define—strange enough, I found it echoing back from me, a spark unleashed by the collision of dead and living, of past and present, of death and life—ineffable as all beautiful things inevitably become at the asymptote of their expression. It may have been the only timeline we had left, but in spite of any doubt or worry I felt no fear that it was the best timeline—the infinite simultaneous motion of components across planes and axes had aligned itself by the slimmest of margins, if only for an instant.
    “Well.”, I muttered, gulping, “Are you ready?”
        “We don't really have a choice, it doesn't sound like.”
“No, I mean, you have a lot of other choices. About 14 million, six hundred and…six? seven? I don’t know. Counting is hard. But basically, they're just all wrong. All of them.”
        “What happens if this doesn't work?”
    “I think that...”
        “No, I want to hear it from this asshole. No offense.”
“It was called for. Uhm. Well. John, can you let me show her? Sorry.” “What do you-- (whacks him in the face)” “Okay, you shut your eyes too.”
    Taking control of my brain and my powers, Ryan opened my eyes, instructing Sapphire to do the same. The two of us saw as one organism from a dissociated third person perspective—colors that looked like melting hurricanes drifted across our eyes like tiny films. Our heads leaned back and we were immersed into another world—a galaxy filled with shattered planets, a universe filled with holes that gushed energy from the Beyond, slowly distorting and degrading the laws of physics. The Fisherman's spirit, feeding on this energy, grew ever larger, becoming an immense smoldering nebula of white flowers and decomposing eyes. Down below, armies of ghosts, drawn from all sentient beings, toiled senselessly on the smoldering remains of cities and civilizations— living in woulds without light, soaked in blood, worlds filled with war and suffering put on for the amusement of its conqueror—it had become a spoiled multiverse, quarantined by others, spoken of with terror and dread and sorrow and nostalgia by its refugees.
    Ryan produced the illusion of water and splashed it in both of our faces simultaneously, unmerging us and making both of us jolt awake. Sapphire grit her teeth, disgusted. “I'm ready.”, she spat, holding back tears. Ryan gave us both a thumbs-up, “Okay! Great. Well. Then...lets hurry it up then.”, he lined us up carefully with his hands, “Wait for it...wait for it...”, he turned around, dramatically, until he thrust forward with his hands and revealed to each of us illusory gold stickers, “Here are some gold stars for both of you. I'm all about positive reinforcement.” Ryan grabbed both of our hands, and shut his eyes to concentrate. I started to feel my body lose its existential consistency, dissolving in patches like pits of weak sandstone blown away by the wind—I could not move—though I could think, and wonder and imagine, I was completely paralyzed. Finding his target eleven years in the past, Ryan nodded, smiling, and opened his eyes. They expanded over us like a blanket and blotted out any light—his body fell down, inanimate, through planes of existence neither of us knew how to define, a black underworld devoid of light or sound—the two of us were peeled from our places like stamps, curling up and losing any sense of our own shape—a thousand petaled white flower made of thousands of sheets of graph paper flickered below us, spinning like a tornado—as we descended into it, the graph paper revealed a flickering, stop motion animation of the days events in intricate mechanical pencil drawings—we saw ourselves emerging into the night air, exchanging words in the forest, waiting for the sunrise with our hands clasped together—Ryan shouted at us with a furiously drawn speech bubble “Don't fuck this up”--the last thing we saw as we reached the base of the funnel.
    The first thing to come back was our spines. They painfully rolled out vertabrae by vertabrae like a cracking whip, before the skin stretched around our body and we were pumped full of our organs, then returned our senses, then our presence of mind. In tact, somewhat, we drifted gently down into the sky, dangling from invisible parachutes. A city appeared below us, nestled amongs hills and tall, dense forest, with a stream babbling through it. “It's so beautiful”, she whispered, reaching back for my hand, doing her best to hide her fear of death , strange as it was for a ghost to have. Real death, that is. Total death. The loss of the moon, the loss of the stars, the loss of forests and deserts and van rides and songs and a hundred things I never wanted to tell her the world was already slowly losing. Our feet gently kissed the ground and we found ourselves in the middle of a strange forest neither of us had ever seen.
    Up overhead, the two of us saw a bright flash of light, which exploded slowly over the sky, slow enough that we could see, emerging from it, a smoking silver capsule covered with white alien letters. Briefly, a crack had been torn into the universe, exposing the Beyond to the open air, before some strange technology sewed it back together. Far ahead, we saw a bloodshot eyed teenager, stumbling through the woods and mouthing gibberish at the sky. Once he saw the light, he started screaming. “This is him?”
    “This is him.”


Episode 11B—The Horizon
    Dr. Whitebalm sat beside me, across the room from Colonel Imes. Colonel Imes was not particularly gruntled. My nighttime shopping errand had instead left him rather disgruntled. Though I imagined it might gruntle him if he understood the truth, the truth required that I identify my strange mushroom powers, likely ending in my living out the rest of my days as a weapon of some kind. Perhaps more critically, though, and more pressing at that exact moment was the issue of the white flowers.
    “I wanted to see my brother.”, I half-whined, “Please, I was just worried sick about him.”
“And that's understandable. What I don't understand is why you felt the need to  leave without telling anyone where the hell you were going. Especially the day after someone attacked two of our scientists. It's just not safe. In fact, I'd venture to say its pretty damn stupid.”
    “I didn't think about it.”
“Look. The safety of this base is my number one priority. You sneaking off, forcing us to use half of our security detail to track you down, it puts everyone here at risk. Not to mention you telling your brother about what you've seen here. I could have you put in--”, the colonel stopped talking, as the sounds of screams echoed through the hallways. Thin green vines spread from underneath the sills of the door, and crawled up over the walls and the furniture. Dr. Whitebalm saw them and moved back up against the wall. I tried to pull them into the Tobacco language, but the vines pulled against my brain—around my feet, the vines burned, but I could not extend the language more than a few inches past my face. The vines entered into the colonels nose and ears and eyes, wrapping themselves around his mind and injecting the presence of the white flowers. I struggled against them, trying with all my might to twist the white flowers away from them.
   
    Colonel Imes reached to his side for a gun. Trembling he started to raise it towards me—as he did, I rapidly reversed languages, catching the vines—extensions of John's mind-- off balance—we all plummeted into the silence—the screams outside in the hallway became like muffled underwater voices—Dr. Whitebalm and the colonel fell into unconsciousness and slumped back in their chairs. The gun dropped from the colonels hands onto the desk. And I like...totally stopped giving a fuck. I picked up the gun, cause like...why not? Like—fuck this. The silence tugged at my shoulders and started to bring me into a twilight world—as the base shook with the roars of angry ghosts and the...I don't know. Like..the...ugh. Colonel Imes opened his eyes at me and started smiling. Oh. Dammit. The fucking white flowers. They probably...[yawns]...probably I'm gonna get killed. It sounds like someones knocking on the door? Or slamming it? They're trying to break it. I sat down on the desk, trying to insist to myself that I start to give a fuck. But I gave no fucks. Exactly no fucks were to be given about whatever the...I twisted myself out of the language of silence, and into the mushroom language. Ghosts slammed against the door, screaming and roaring in incoherent voices. An unconscious instinct in my hands caused them to lift from the desk and fill with dancing rings of purple lightning.
    I rose to my feet, drowsy and still half-drunk still from the silence—the door ripped from its hinges and I jumped out of the way. As the ghosts crowded into the room, I held out my hands, and watched rays of lightning scatter through the air—the psychic electricity tore through the first few ghosts and made them dissolve with screams of pain—I nervously stood up, and just as I did the lights in the building went dead. The colonel, still in a drunk and half-sleeping haze, chuckled under his breath through the darkness, his brain swimming with the white flowers. Unsure of myself, I inched towards the doorway. Sounds of skittering ghosts echoed through the hallways, mixed with the intermittent screams of distant base personnel and scattered gun fire.
    I saw the suspicious faces of ghosts circle around me, their transluscent and decomposing forms barely visible through the darkness. Hands still pulsing with purple lightning, I made my way down the hallway—the ghosts parted like an angry sea as I did so. A pair of footsteps from the end of the hall. At first I thought they were an echo, but no. Another person. He towed a bottle of vodka in between two drunken, sweat covered fingers, and, coming close enough to see me, stopped in the middle of the hallway. He took a long gulp of the drink—the alcohol inside of his blood had now built up and was getting ready to burst. His chest and arms lit on fire, along with his hair and face—the darkness of the corridor retreated from the bright blue light. I tried to strategize. Any attempt to move him into the silence could paralyze me for God only knows how long. The purple lightning, I knew, would not do a physical human any harm—not before he could burn me alive. But perhaps tobacco could free him. Concentrating as hard as I could, I bend the contours of the world; the ghosts evaporate on contact with the Tobacco language—my nose and mouth pour out dense invisible smoke. Bobby coughs, his body starting to itch. John resists my efforts to wrench control of Bobby, who lets the flames on his body die down so he can take another long drink of vodka. Holding it back, and on the verge of unconsciousness, Bobby holds the liquid in his mouth. Almost paralyzed with fear, I prepare myself to dodge. He spits the vodka out in a brilliant geyser of blue flames, igniting his whole body—I dive to the side and narrowly avoid incineration. As Bobby creeps down the hallway, his feat leave tiny puddles of blue fire. Coming closer to me, he starts to take another sip of the drink. Before he can, I spring up, and dive towards him, knocking the bottle to the ground. Enraged, Bobby pulls back his fist, which ignites as he prepares to punch me across the face.

    Almost instinctively, I feel myself pull backwards, into an inner reality—suddenly, Bobby freezes—my retreat inwards pulls intensely against Johns grip over his mind. Disoriented, Bobby feels a sickening feeling in his stomach, and he reaches back against the wall for balance. John tries to reassert his hold over Bobby—I retreat again into the tobacco language—now aware of and acting on three levels of reality at once, the intense tug-of-war between forces makes Bobby erupt into a blood-curdling scream. His flames die and he collapses back against the wall, in a pool of sweat, hyperaware of every sensation in his body, the slow decay in all of his organs brought about by his so-called powers, the memories of everything that had led him back to the bottle time and time and time again. Time coalesces into a single present, where nothing exists but the exact moment he has collapsed into. In a state nearing sensory overload, John withdraws from his mind—I pull Bobby into one final level of the tobacco language—he passes out—the alcohol seeps from his pores and out over the ground as his organs begin to slowly regenerate themselves
    Darkness. All around. No source of light penetrates the halls of the deep underground military base. Only screams, and the worried faces of ghosts. Out of nowhere, there comes a hard punch to my stomach. I retreat from the tobacco language, and see, in a beshroomed half-light, the face of my brother, who towered over me with a malevolent scowl on his face. Standing up, I stumbled backwards, trying to think of what could be used to stop him. John held a firm grip on his mind, magnified by the white flowers, who even now sort through his brain, dividing his personality across timelines to break his will to resist. Bright purple lightning wrapped around my hand and between my finger tips. I held it up at him. He chuckled—a single bolt did little more than briefly sting John's consciousness, like the bite of a tiny red ant on someones hand. My brother kept walking towards me—John smiled as he realized how much I didn't want to hurt him. I prepared to retreat into the tobacco language, but again John had managed to place a siege around my brain, locking me in place. Jacob slowly forced me backwards into the unseeable darkness, as an army of ghosts grew behind us. I fired more and more bolts of energy towards him—his eyes twitched—enraged, John forced my brothers fist into the sky, and plunged it into the concrete wall. The cold, jagged edges of the cement tore into his knuckles, cracking the bones. My brother, unphased, maintained a bloodthirsty eye contact and continued creeping towards me.
    “John, please, stop it!”
Jacob laughed, and slammed his fist against the wall once again. He held up his mangled hand, which hung in a deformed and bleeding mess. I pushed towards the alcohol language, catching John somewhat off guard. He began to stumble—his brain becomes more muted—John's powers begin to lose traction—there was little left to hold onto. John tried to force me out—only to face the same obstacle. My brother, drunkenly, teetered in and out of consciousness. Freed from Johns assaults, I flung Jacob and I into the tobacco language, driving us into level upon level of reality until John can no longer control him, and then back into English. “Thank you...”, he winces with pain.

    Just then, my brother lifts into the air—he kicks to try and escape John's telekinetic hold. A crackling sound comes from inside of his spine—he screams in pain. A faint giggling, from the tricksters, echoes down the hallway—a line of smoky white flowers appear from the darkness, slicing through John's telekinetic powers. A field rich with a delirious chaos expands into the air. My brother collapses to the ground in a heap. “Jacob!”, I exclaim, “Jacob are you okay?”

Episode 11C

    The first thing to come back was our spines, painfully rolling out vertabrae by vertabrae like a cracking whip. The skin stretched around our body and was pumped full of our organs, then our senses, then our presence of mind, and we drifted gently down into the sky, dangling from invisible parachutes. A city appeared below us, nestled amongst hills and tall, dense forest, a stream babbling through it. “It's so beautiful”, Sapphire whispered as she reached back for my hand, doing her best to hide her fear, strange as it was for a ghost, to fear death. But this was real death. Total death. The loss of the moon, the loss of the stars, the loss of forests and deserts and van rides and second chances and a hundred things I never wanted to tell her the world was already starting to lose. Our feet gently kissed the ground and we found ourselves in the middle of the woods.
    Up overhead, the two of us saw a bright flash of light, exploding slowly over the sky, slow enough that we could see. A smoking silver capsule covered with alien white letters emerged from it. Briefly, a crack had been torn into the universe, exposing the Beyond to the open air, before some strange technology sewed it back together. Far ahead, we saw a bloodshot eyed teenager stumble through the woods, mouthing gibberish at the sky. Once he saw the light, he started screaming. “This is him?”
    “This is him.”
The teenager's heart pounded, as he saw emerging from the forest a zombified mass of people, all of whom looked exactly like him, only decayed, old and decrepid. The zombies brushed past us, stalking towards him slowly. He bolted away, and time around him became slower and slower. His vision started to blur—he appeared in his room with no memory of how he got there, no recollection of taking a drug, no recollection of any of the things he'd seen. And then he saw the note, scribbled on blue graph paper that started to wave and wobble, as his vision grew more and more detached from his physical body. “YOU'RE TRIPPING BRO”, it said, “IT'LL ALL BE OVER SOON. DON'T WORRY.” His heart, once racing, now slowed so that its beats, and his entire body, were imperceptible—all around him, everything froze still—cars stopped in the streets. His mom froze halfway through taking her keys from the ignition. He could move at a normal speed, in his mind, but everything around him was impossibly slow. His mind drifted from the time to which it had once been anchored like a boat torn away by a rising storm surge—the house around him folded from three dimensions, into four, into five, into six, into seven, until it stretched into an infinite tesseract representing thousands of simultaneous mirrored realities. Sapphire and I hid behind the door, knowing that we were the only versions of ourselves who had made it to this point.

________

    “My back...my back...I can't...oh my god!”, he screams in pain and tries to straighten himself against the wall, shivering. “Go. Go. Go.”, mutters Jacob through terrified breaths. I wish I knew a language to ease his pain—but I do not. “I'll come back for you.”, I mutter to him, “I promise.” I turn around, looking back and forth for the way to the hospital wing. To the left? Yes! That must be it, I think. I charge off, completely certain that...well no. Wait. I think this...this hallway was the one behind the hospital wing. So—it's—it must be the other way. I run back. Dammit. No this is wrong. This is all--

    “It's a THREE WAY INTERSECTION.”, shouts a voice—the voice of the teenager. I seeth with anger, and look for him. A tiny, nonsensical array of blue and white lines, forming a thousand pointed star, hovers an interdeterminate distance away from me. I hold up my hand—it blooms with white flowers and prepares to fire. “Wait! No! I'm—I'm the good Ryan! I'm here to help you. Trust me! Trust me please.” The white flowers extend closer to the shape, making it wrinkle and burn. “OW OH MY GOD! FUCK! JUST LISTEN TO ME FOR A SECOND! Okay. Thank you. Holy shit. That...oh my god. Thank you. Now. Take two steps back. One more. Big steps, big steps I mean, one more. Okay. Good. This hallway—this hallway right here. Now...okay. I need you to switch out of the tobacco language for...just a second.”
    “No.”
        “Please, please. I swear you can trust me. Listen. My name is Ryan. I was a teenager in 2006. A...space probe, I guess, crashed outside of my house, and tore a hole into the Beyond. Now I'm not tethered to time. The Ryan who keeps trying to kill you, he's only...like...3 trillion years old. I'm about...uhm. 8...Quintillion? That sounds about right. Anyway. I managed to hold John back before he could kill your brother. That's the best I can do for now. I can try to keep him and Dr. Whitebalm out of reach for the other Ryan while you go look for John. Sound good?”
    “Tcinti said you couldn't be trusted. You're just a puppet of the white flowers.”
        “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tobacco plants are racist assholes. It's like...you know...someday, I hope that the rest of the nightshades learn to judge less by the amount of atropine in a plants leaf cells and more by the content of their character, but the solanaceous Martin Luther King Jr. still seems a little ways off. But did you know that the Brugmansia trees actually once saved Atlantis? Before the volcano, at least. They also played a really big role in inventing like six religions, crystal Pepsi, and removing a century old curse from the Chicago cubs. But no, obviously the first time that a cosmic entity tells you a stereotype they have of a plant they've been fighting for six thousand years, you're just gonna believe them, because...I'm sorry. I'm getting carried away. Just...maybe Tcinti should check his fucking privilege.”
    “You anger Tcinti with your insolence spirit.”, my mouth said against my will, as my hand raised towards the strange thousand pointed star. I didn't want to kill him. But a part of me deep inside of my mind told me that I had to—I pulled away from Tobacco and into the mushroom language. The star came closer, although how much closer I could not say. It didn't really seem to move actually, it just sort of grew from being there, to being more there. “There we go. Okay...”, a cold and clammy hand wrapped around my own. I looked to my left. A ghost, studied me reluctantly.
    “Ola, como estas?”, he asked.
I searched through his brain, quickly learning at least the grammar of Spanish—my mind quickly dug up enough of the three years of Spanish I took in high school to answer.
    “Bien, y tu?”
        “Confudido. Aquella estrella no habla espanol, entonces, yo no se que esta passando. Estoy solo le seguindo. Sabe se estamos en el infierno?” “Confused, that there star doesn't speak spanish, so I don't know myself what's going on. I’m only it following. You know if we're in hell?”
    “Lo siento, amigo. No estamos en ele infierno. Estamos lutando algumas flores blancos que controlan el tiempo.” “I'm sorry friend. Not are we in hell. We're fighting some flowers, white ones, that control time.”
        “Mierda.”“Shit.”
“This is Carlos.”, Ryan introduced us, “Carlos is going to lead you to the hospital. He can see in the dark better than you can. Or...can you explain that to him?” I shifted into Spanish, which did not appear so much different from the english except for the organization of my thoughts. “La estrella dice que necesitas ayudarme encontrar el hospital.” “The star says that you need to help me find the hospital.”
    “Estas herido?” “Are you hurt?”
“No. Las flores blancas mantienen a mi amigo John prisionero allí. Necesito rescatarlo con tobacco.” “No. The white flowers keep my friend John a prisoner there. I need to rescue him with tobacco.”
    “No entiendo este maldito lugar. Pinche lo, supongo. Creio que no tengo eleccion. Me voy a casa cuando está hecho, bien?” “I don't understand this wicked place. Fuck it, suppose. I think I do not have a choice. I am going to home when its done, good?”
        “Esta bien” “That's fine.”
“Don't switch into the tobacco language until John kills Carlos. Otherwise you'll kill him before you can use him as a human shield.”
        “La estrella dice que...” “The star says that...”
“Don't translate that.”
        “Deberemos apurarnos.” “We should hurry.”
“Yeah, that sounded better. I don't know what you said, but sure. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna make sure Dr. Whitebalm doesn't wake up and turn this place into cherynobyl.”
        “Thank you.”, I said, in nervous and stammering English.”
“Don't mention it. I'm so fucking ready to die. Do you know how long two hundred trillion years is? It's a really long time. Hurry up though, seriously.”
   
_______
    Ryan's hands trembled, as he began to sketch the room in which he sat on a fresh sheet of graph paper, from an exterior perspective—Sapphire and I, hiding behind the door, became known to him. He fumed with an intense rage. Now able to see into his mind through my own, Sapphire grew more and more frightened—before us, there materialized the wispy form of one of Ryan's projections, slowly being sketched together in pencil. “Suck.”, I heard a voice say to me. “John. You have to get in there.”, whispered Sapphire. I looked into the doorway, to see Ryan grinning sadistically back at us. “I--” “Do it!” “I don't want him to kill you.” Sapphire reached down for my hand. “You know what to do if he does.” “SUCK!”, shouted Ryan even louder, “For the love of the universe and all that is in it, you have got five seconds to get in there, and SUCK HIS FUCKING MIND FROM HIS BODY.”

________

    Carlos took my by the hand politely and led me down the dark, snaking hallway. The building chattered with rampaging ghosts, faint screams and gun fire. Carlos said nothing—I felt bad about using him as a human shield—I felt equally bad about being called a racist by a magic floating star. Our footsteps launched echoes into the murky abyss, which returned back to us like the sounds of far away cannons. Though we still walked within range of Ryan's protective field, I could feel his powers start to grow dim. As they did, a deep chill and a supernatural tension emanated from the stairway—signifying an army of ghosts waiting to attack. They marched forward, trying to remain silent, letting us become filled with slowly building dread from within. We turned left down a hallway, and the feeling grew stronger. The smell of the hospital entered my nose—the forcefield began to wear exceedingly thin, pushed back with every instant by a much larger interdimensional force. Letting go of Carlos' hand, I switched into the mushroom language—I could see tiny vines reaching out for me, ready to pull me upwards and rip me limb from limb. We looked out from what felt like the most tenuous cocoon of safety into it, seeing the enraged faces of hyperventilating ghosts. My hands filled with purple lightning and I reached out for them—the lightning bent backwards around the corners of the forcefield in which we found ourselves. Hyperventilating, I tried to think of the languages that I knew. But the only one that I could imagine having any effect on John's powers was his own language—I slid into the language of the old one—an interdimensional trading language—rapidly, my own mind fanned out in a web—though I could not understand the thoughts I read, I could see flickers of light and color and sound—slowly it occurred to me that Carlos...Carlos...was wondering if the ghosts were preparing to tear him limb from limb—or maybe he was in...a maze? A maze I guess? He keeps thinking about a maze and then he thinks the color red very loudly.

    I knew not what this language could do—but I decided to try to use it anyway. I stepped out of the field of protection—the earth underneath hummed with the roots of something massive and ancient, speaking the language had welcomed me into a telepathic field, projected by undiscovered fungi deep underground, the morning glories growing in the forest above, the mold growing on some blades of grass, a rare species of bat nesting in the cave. John searched through my mind, only to find it exactly like his—the ghosts prepared to march on us and suddenly, inexplicably, the network took control of me—my hands lit up with a murky, gelatin like substance with a transparent, oily sheen—it lapped up in tongues—on contact with the strange substance, the ghosts melted—eyes drooped down into their skulls, their faces started to drip, and they turned to puddles that quickly evaporated. The army retreated—instead, John manifested himself before me, in the form of a ghost with bright glowing eyes. “You could be a God, Meagan. Why don't you stop trying to fight us and join us”, he said. My feet lifted off the floor—the opal fire lashed out at him—as soon as part of him would melt, it would regenerate. I felt a sharp pain in my skull, and in my legs—I tried to resist his efforts to see into my mind—he was too powerful—I became rapidly overwhelmed—He started to pull me in—until Carlos, charging from the darkness, ran into him, wrapping his arms around him. I fell down to the ground as he lost concentration. The vines, all around me at this point, meander and retreat, as John focused his energy on this strange renegade ghost. Had the master not taught him?
   
    As John prepared to kill Carlos, I seize my opporunity and switch into the tobacco language, pulling both of them with me. Both of them, as projections of an unseen mind, rapidly combust. I am alone in an empty hallway—a silent hallway—I can see John's hospital room, it's door open. Scientists slump on the ground throughout the corridor, their minds dripping with ghosts that quickly evaporate as they near the tobacco language. Suddenly, unseen hands wrap themselves around me—I lift off the ground—paralyzed—a force unlike anything I can comprehend enters my brain and digs into it with sharp claws—I hear John's voice press in on me from every side. “We will give you a final chance.”, it says. My arms move forward, against my will. John pulls on my index finger, making it shoot with sharp pain—the bones inside slowly seperate and grind against each other. [cries out] I retreat into another level of reality, another version of this same hallway—John's powers stretch into it, sprouting from the ground in blue vines, and they wrap themselves around me. “You have the oppurtunity to become a god, a god in a world without death, without suffering, without starvation, without any laws but your own.” I start walking, as the vines reach around me and lift me up once again. Outside, my middle finger starts to twist. Another level of reality—I am closer to the hospital room.

    John loses focus on the objects in the outer realm as he enters the second level of Tobacco. The vines grow again from the ground in the inner world, repeating the process, “But when I kill you, and your soul begins to leave your body, we will make you our slave—you will serve us for eternity.” I dive into another level and continue walking, now only five feet from the door—the world I originated from now seems impossibly high above me—pain shoots through my hands on multiple levels as the bones in my hands are crushed and my wrists pulled from their sockets. I can feel my veins wrapping tight around every limb—a pressure grows in my head. “You can't win. You can run into the tobacco language all you want Meagan. But you don't understand...you don't understand what he's taught me. He's taught me not to run, Meagan.” The objects in the first level of reality no longer hover—John begins to lose the ability to pull at my hands as I drop into one level, and then another, and then another. His mind begins to burn with the growing feeling of tobacco.

    Outside, in the first level of the world, I fall to the ground, and bolt towards the door, my hands and arms deeply bruised and aching. Wincing, I open the door, and see John, sitting up in his hospital bed, a look of intense concentration spread across his face. In the levels upon levels of tobacco stretching below my feet, John tortures me—I am aware of it across all dimensions, aching in every part of my body. “You think this hurts Meagan? Wait until you've been through ten thousand years of it. Now listen. I'm telling you for the last time. You either join us...or you...”
    “Die.”, I command as I pull John's physical brain into the tobacco language—at once his mind recoils, losing all sense of time, becoming locked into a single, infinite present—the language of white flowers melts down—his eyes shoot open and grow bloodshot, his stomach churns and he starts to convulse.

____

    My eyes met Ryan's. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming nausea, as time, memory, and all of the timelines through which his mind had wandered collapsed in on him, hitting him in waves that felt like automobile accidents, one by one. His stomach churned, and his mouth filled with a peppery burning—all of his nerves, one by one, lit up with sensation and feeling. As the timelines collapsed back into one another, swimming pools worth of lukewarm beer, mixed with vomit, bile and blood, gushed from the doors and windows of the downstairs of the house, running into the streets, making the people outside scream in terror. Inside of the house and from various buildings in the town, sheets of graph paper, illustrated with glimpses of different realities, began to fly through the air in a collossal blizzard, as his trillions and trillions of years of memories collapsed in on themselves.  He stumbled from the desk, screaming in pain, no longer able to think or feel anything but the horror of infinite time collapsing in on itself, thousands of warring realities cascading into another like a battlefield that stretched on for millenia. “Ryan?”, called his mother, “Ryan, what the hell is going on?”
    “Mom!”, he bellowed. I watched as he fell down the stairs. “I—I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!”, he cried. “What did you do to yourself? What's wrong? Baby! What's wrong!”
    “I'm sorry...I'm sorry...”, he whispered, suddenly quiet, looking around the blood soaked room with a faint smile, and a tear rolling down his face. “Ryan!”, she slapped him across the face, trying to revive him as he leaned back, “Talk to me! What did you do? Baby! Baby, please. Don't go. Don't go now. This can't...be...”, she reached for her cellphone, “Hello? Hello? Yes. Yes. I know...I know you're getting calls about that, I know...it's coming from my house...my son...he's...I don't know...he looks like he took some drugs? I need to get him to the hospital! Please...please....I don't know what drugs he would have taken. I don't...I don't know. There's beer cans everywhere and...drawings of...”, she looked down, seeing a picture of herself strangled in front of her car door, “I don't know...I don't know...Please...thank you! Thank you.”
As she emerged from the end of the tunnel, Sapphire dashed up the hill and into the open air, letting out a joyous shout that echoed across the hills. I trailed behind her, lackadaisically. Carlos followed, eyeing the tall electric fences, and wondering if I'd try to stop him from running away. His hair stood on end as the moonlight shined down on him, the night sky filling him with wonder. He was free. “You can fly away tomorrow, when we've killed Ryan, and we're safe.”, I tried to say. He looked at me, puzzled by the strange words appearing in his head. I showed him a picture of what he was contemplating, and said, softly “Not a'ora. Manana.” Vaguely comprehending, he grimaced, and nodded, turning to walk in private through the field. Sapphire, who had been staring at a tree, looked over at me.
“It's so beautiful out here.”
    “I know.”
The moonlight painted her eyes into gemstones, and casted the crisscrossing shadows of pine needles over her skin. She smiled, her teeth glowing with an unearthly sheen. “Fuck. We're in a time loop.”, I frowned. “A what?”
    “This already happened.”
Sapphire slowly remembered it—all of it lined up exactly the way it had before—the thought unnerved her.
    “Bingo! Hey! We got a winner here! Come on stage to collect your prize”, panted a disheveled Ryan, covered in his own blood. “Hey guys”, he caught his breath, leaning over his knees, “Okay, so—new plan. Uhm...Remember how I said we needed to be flexible? Is this that timeline? Whatever. Anyway...Oh fuck. Ow.”
    “What happened?”, both of us asked at once. “Long story short”, panted Ryan, “Two hours from now we are fucked. Meagan-- [sigh] and you guys really needed to watch her, by the way, but you know what, whatever—Meagan snuck out of the compound to go find tobacco, and tobacco is a total racist asshole, so he—he made her forget the scopolamine language and—okay. I don't have time to explain because we are really, really pushing it here. Okay. So. Sapphire. Carlos. CARLOS? Where the actual fuck is Carlos? Were you guys not watching him?”
        “No, were we supposed to?”, asked Sapphire.
Ryan threw up his hands in frustration, dragging them down his face. “We're all gonna die, we're all gonna die, we're all gonna die...Okay. No. No we're not. I'll find Carlos. Okay. Deep breathing. Deep breathing. Everyone calm down. CALM THE FUCK DOWN. Alright. So. John. Sapphire. Carlos. CARLOS? CARLOS? Oh yeah. Right. He's missing. You two. John and Sapphire. You two are the lucky winners of a once in a lifetime vacation to Forks, WA circa 2006. In two hours, I will need you both to go back, find me, and follow me into the house. It's going to be very, very dangerous. Anyway, when you hear me give you the secret code word, which, because of your inability to follow specific instructions, is going to be the very discreet word “SUCK”, you are going to, as the word would imply, SUCK my mind into your consciousness. Hopefully, I can get Meagan safely to your hospital room, and keep the Fisherman out of Dr. Whitebalm's head. Meagan will pull us all into the tobacco language, which, I mean, everything goes blank after that happens, so I think that means I die. If we get it right. And seriously, you two, you are not going to fuck this up. I have been alive for five hundred trillion years. I have watched all the porn on the internet. I have killed Hitler 37 times. Do you know how boring it is to be immortal? I made dinosaurs attack New York once, just out of sheer boredom. I'm not even kidding. I still have five hundred sextillion years before I die, so if you fuck this up for me, I swear to God....[laughs] GOD. Thats funny....anyway. I swear, I will...well...just don't. Fuck. It. up. Please. This is the only timeline we have left. If this goes, we lose the Crystal Pepsi universe. We lose the Dinosaur God universe. We lose the Donald Trump Becomes President of Mexico Universe. All of them. Every last ridiculous universe there is to lose.”
    “If I—If I help you—what's going to happen to me? Will I just...go back to haunting my prison cell?”
    “Well...I mean, on the bright side, at least you'll eventually die when you run out of emotions and shit, right? That’s gotta be a plus.”

    Sapphire and I exchanged a troubled look and our hands started to drift back together. Just moments ago, it seemed that we had been waiting for the sunrise, promising each other our funerals, trembling in anticipation for the next days battle. Sapphire glimmered with a defiance, which rose from a place I knew not how to locate or define—strange enough, I found it echoing back from me, a spark unleashed by the collision of dead and living, of past and present, of death and life—ineffable as all beautiful things inevitably become at the asymptote of their expression. It may have been the only timeline we had left, but in spite of any doubt or worry I felt no fear that it was the best timeline—the infinite simultaneous motion of components across planes and axes had aligned itself by the slimmest of margins, if only for an instant.
    “Well.”, I muttered, gulping, “Are you ready?”
        “We don't really have a choice, it doesn't sound like.”
“No, I mean, you have a lot of other choices. About 14 million, six hundred and…six? seven? I don’t know. Counting is hard. But basically, they're just all wrong. All of them.”
        “What happens if this doesn't work?”
    “I think that...”
        “No, I want to hear it from this asshole. No offense.”
“It was called for. Uhm. Well. John, can you let me show her? Sorry.” “What do you-- (whacks him in the face)” “Okay, you shut your eyes too.”
    Taking control of my brain and my powers, Ryan opened my eyes, instructing Sapphire to do the same. The two of us saw as one organism from a dissociated third person perspective—colors that looked like melting hurricanes drifted across our eyes like tiny films. Our heads leaned back and we were immersed into another world—a galaxy filled with shattered planets, a universe filled with holes that gushed energy from the Beyond, slowly distorting and degrading the laws of physics. The Fisherman's spirit, feeding on this energy, grew ever larger, becoming an immense smoldering nebula of white flowers and decomposing eyes. Down below, armies of ghosts, drawn from all sentient beings, toiled senselessly on the smoldering remains of cities and civilizations— living in woulds without light, soaked in blood, worlds filled with war and suffering put on for the amusement of its conqueror—it had become a spoiled multiverse, quarantined by others, spoken of with terror and dread and sorrow and nostalgia by its refugees.
    Ryan produced the illusion of water and splashed it in both of our faces simultaneously, unmerging us and making both of us jolt awake. Sapphire grit her teeth, disgusted. “I'm ready.”, she spat, holding back tears. Ryan gave us both a thumbs-up, “Okay! Great. Well. Then...lets hurry it up then.”, he lined us up carefully with his hands, “Wait for it...wait for it...”, he turned around, dramatically, until he thrust forward with his hands and revealed to each of us illusory gold stickers, “Here are some gold stars for both of you. I'm all about positive reinforcement.” Ryan grabbed both of our hands, and shut his eyes to concentrate. I started to feel my body lose its existential consistency, dissolving in patches like pits of weak sandstone blown away by the wind—I could not move—though I could think, and wonder and imagine, I was completely paralyzed. Finding his target eleven years in the past, Ryan nodded, smiling, and opened his eyes. They expanded over us like a blanket and blotted out any light—his body fell down, inanimate, through planes of existence neither of us knew how to define, a black underworld devoid of light or sound—the two of us were peeled from our places like stamps, curling up and losing any sense of our own shape—a thousand petaled white flower made of thousands of sheets of graph paper flickered below us, spinning like a tornado—as we descended into it, the graph paper revealed a flickering, stop motion animation of the days events in intricate mechanical pencil drawings—we saw ourselves emerging into the night air, exchanging words in the forest, waiting for the sunrise with our hands clasped together—Ryan shouted at us with a furiously drawn speech bubble “Don't fuck this up”--the last thing we saw as we reached the base of the funnel.
    The first thing to come back was our spines. They painfully rolled out vertabrae by vertabrae like a cracking whip, before the skin stretched around our body and we were pumped full of our organs, then returned our senses, then our presence of mind. In tact, somewhat, we drifted gently down into the sky, dangling from invisible parachutes. A city appeared below us, nestled amongs hills and tall, dense forest, with a stream babbling through it. “It's so beautiful”, she whispered, reaching back for my hand, doing her best to hide her fear of death , strange as it was for a ghost to have. Real death, that is. Total death. The loss of the moon, the loss of the stars, the loss of forests and deserts and van rides and songs and a hundred things I never wanted to tell her the world was already slowly losing. Our feet gently kissed the ground and we found ourselves in the middle of a strange forest neither of us had ever seen.
    Up overhead, the two of us saw a bright flash of light, which exploded slowly over the sky, slow enough that we could see, emerging from it, a smoking silver capsule covered with white alien letters. Briefly, a crack had been torn into the universe, exposing the Beyond to the open air, before some strange technology sewed it back together. Far ahead, we saw a bloodshot eyed teenager, stumbling through the woods and mouthing gibberish at the sky. Once he saw the light, he started screaming. “This is him?”
    “This is him.”


Episode 11B—The Horizon
    Dr. Whitebalm sat beside me, across the room from Colonel Imes. Colonel Imes was not particularly gruntled. My nighttime shopping errand had instead left him rather disgruntled. Though I imagined it might gruntle him if he understood the truth, the truth required that I identify my strange mushroom powers, likely ending in my living out the rest of my days as a weapon of some kind. Perhaps more critically, though, and more pressing at that exact moment was the issue of the white flowers.
    “I wanted to see my brother.”, I half-whined, “Please, I was just worried sick about him.”
“And that's understandable. What I don't understand is why you felt the need to  leave without telling anyone where the hell you were going. Especially the day after someone attacked two of our scientists. It's just not safe. In fact, I'd venture to say its pretty damn stupid.”
    “I didn't think about it.”
“Look. The safety of this base is my number one priority. You sneaking off, forcing us to use half of our security detail to track you down, it puts everyone here at risk. Not to mention you telling your brother about what you've seen here. I could have you put in--”, the colonel stopped talking, as the sounds of screams echoed through the hallways. Thin green vines spread from underneath the sills of the door, and crawled up over the walls and the furniture. Dr. Whitebalm saw them and moved back up against the wall. I tried to pull them into the Tobacco language, but the vines pulled against my brain—around my feet, the vines burned, but I could not extend the language more than a few inches past my face. The vines entered into the colonels nose and ears and eyes, wrapping themselves around his mind and injecting the presence of the white flowers. I struggled against them, trying with all my might to twist the white flowers away from them.
   
    Colonel Imes reached to his side for a gun. Trembling he started to raise it towards me—as he did, I rapidly reversed languages, catching the vines—extensions of John's mind-- off balance—we all plummeted into the silence—the screams outside in the hallway became like muffled underwater voices—Dr. Whitebalm and the colonel fell into unconsciousness and slumped back in their chairs. The gun dropped from the colonels hands onto the desk. And I like...totally stopped giving a fuck. I picked up the gun, cause like...why not? Like—fuck this. The silence tugged at my shoulders and started to bring me into a twilight world—as the base shook with the roars of angry ghosts and the...I don't know. Like..the...ugh. Colonel Imes opened his eyes at me and started smiling. Oh. Dammit. The fucking white flowers. They probably...[yawns]...probably I'm gonna get killed. It sounds like someones knocking on the door? Or slamming it? They're trying to break it. I sat down on the desk, trying to insist to myself that I start to give a fuck. But I gave no fucks. Exactly no fucks were to be given about whatever the...I twisted myself out of the language of silence, and into the mushroom language. Ghosts slammed against the door, screaming and roaring in incoherent voices. An unconscious instinct in my hands caused them to lift from the desk and fill with dancing rings of purple lightning.
    I rose to my feet, drowsy and still half-drunk still from the silence—the door ripped from its hinges and I jumped out of the way. As the ghosts crowded into the room, I held out my hands, and watched rays of lightning scatter through the air—the psychic electricity tore through the first few ghosts and made them dissolve with screams of pain—I nervously stood up, and just as I did the lights in the building went dead. The colonel, still in a drunk and half-sleeping haze, chuckled under his breath through the darkness, his brain swimming with the white flowers. Unsure of myself, I inched towards the doorway. Sounds of skittering ghosts echoed through the hallways, mixed with the intermittent screams of distant base personnel and scattered gun fire.
    I saw the suspicious faces of ghosts circle around me, their transluscent and decomposing forms barely visible through the darkness. Hands still pulsing with purple lightning, I made my way down the hallway—the ghosts parted like an angry sea as I did so. A pair of footsteps from the end of the hall. At first I thought they were an echo, but no. Another person. He towed a bottle of vodka in between two drunken, sweat covered fingers, and, coming close enough to see me, stopped in the middle of the hallway. He took a long gulp of the drink—the alcohol inside of his blood had now built up and was getting ready to burst. His chest and arms lit on fire, along with his hair and face—the darkness of the corridor retreated from the bright blue light. I tried to strategize. Any attempt to move him into the silence could paralyze me for God only knows how long. The purple lightning, I knew, would not do a physical human any harm—not before he could burn me alive. But perhaps tobacco could free him. Concentrating as hard as I could, I bend the contours of the world; the ghosts evaporate on contact with the Tobacco language—my nose and mouth pour out dense invisible smoke. Bobby coughs, his body starting to itch. John resists my efforts to wrench control of Bobby, who lets the flames on his body die down so he can take another long drink of vodka. Holding it back, and on the verge of unconsciousness, Bobby holds the liquid in his mouth. Almost paralyzed with fear, I prepare myself to dodge. He spits the vodka out in a brilliant geyser of blue flames, igniting his whole body—I dive to the side and narrowly avoid incineration. As Bobby creeps down the hallway, his feat leave tiny puddles of blue fire. Coming closer to me, he starts to take another sip of the drink. Before he can, I spring up, and dive towards him, knocking the bottle to the ground. Enraged, Bobby pulls back his fist, which ignites as he prepares to punch me across the face.

    Almost instinctively, I feel myself pull backwards, into an inner reality—suddenly, Bobby freezes—my retreat inwards pulls intensely against Johns grip over his mind. Disoriented, Bobby feels a sickening feeling in his stomach, and he reaches back against the wall for balance. John tries to reassert his hold over Bobby—I retreat again into the tobacco language—now aware of and acting on three levels of reality at once, the intense tug-of-war between forces makes Bobby erupt into a blood-curdling scream. His flames die and he collapses back against the wall, in a pool of sweat, hyperaware of every sensation in his body, the slow decay in all of his organs brought about by his so-called powers, the memories of everything that had led him back to the bottle time and time and time again. Time coalesces into a single present, where nothing exists but the exact moment he has collapsed into. In a state nearing sensory overload, John withdraws from his mind—I pull Bobby into one final level of the tobacco language—he passes out—the alcohol seeps from his pores and out over the ground as his organs begin to slowly regenerate themselves
    Darkness. All around. No source of light penetrates the halls of the deep underground military base. Only screams, and the worried faces of ghosts. Out of nowhere, there comes a hard punch to my stomach. I retreat from the tobacco language, and see, in a beshroomed half-light, the face of my brother, who towered over me with a malevolent scowl on his face. Standing up, I stumbled backwards, trying to think of what could be used to stop him. John held a firm grip on his mind, magnified by the white flowers, who even now sort through his brain, dividing his personality across timelines to break his will to resist. Bright purple lightning wrapped around my hand and between my finger tips. I held it up at him. He chuckled—a single bolt did little more than briefly sting John's consciousness, like the bite of a tiny red ant on someones hand. My brother kept walking towards me—John smiled as he realized how much I didn't want to hurt him. I prepared to retreat into the tobacco language, but again John had managed to place a siege around my brain, locking me in place. Jacob slowly forced me backwards into the unseeable darkness, as an army of ghosts grew behind us. I fired more and more bolts of energy towards him—his eyes twitched—enraged, John forced my brothers fist into the sky, and plunged it into the concrete wall. The cold, jagged edges of the cement tore into his knuckles, cracking the bones. My brother, unphased, maintained a bloodthirsty eye contact and continued creeping towards me.
    “John, please, stop it!”
Jacob laughed, and slammed his fist against the wall once again. He held up his mangled hand, which hung in a deformed and bleeding mess. I pushed towards the alcohol language, catching John somewhat off guard. He began to stumble—his brain becomes more muted—John's powers begin to lose traction—there was little left to hold onto. John tried to force me out—only to face the same obstacle. My brother, drunkenly, teetered in and out of consciousness. Freed from Johns assaults, I flung Jacob and I into the tobacco language, driving us into level upon level of reality until John can no longer control him, and then back into English. “Thank you...”, he winces with pain.

    Just then, my brother lifts into the air—he kicks to try and escape John's telekinetic hold. A crackling sound comes from inside of his spine—he screams in pain. A faint giggling, from the tricksters, echoes down the hallway—a line of smoky white flowers appear from the darkness, slicing through John's telekinetic powers. A field rich with a delirious chaos expands into the air. My brother collapses to the ground in a heap. “Jacob!”, I exclaim, “Jacob are you okay?”

Episode 11C

    The first thing to come back was our spines, painfully rolling out vertabrae by vertabrae like a cracking whip. The skin stretched around our body and was pumped full of our organs, then our senses, then our presence of mind, and we drifted gently down into the sky, dangling from invisible parachutes. A city appeared below us, nestled amongst hills and tall, dense forest, a stream babbling through it. “It's so beautiful”, Sapphire whispered as she reached back for my hand, doing her best to hide her fear, strange as it was for a ghost, to fear death. But this was real death. Total death. The loss of the moon, the loss of the stars, the loss of forests and deserts and van rides and second chances and a hundred things I never wanted to tell her the world was already starting to lose. Our feet gently kissed the ground and we found ourselves in the middle of the woods.
    Up overhead, the two of us saw a bright flash of light, exploding slowly over the sky, slow enough that we could see. A smoking silver capsule covered with alien white letters emerged from it. Briefly, a crack had been torn into the universe, exposing the Beyond to the open air, before some strange technology sewed it back together. Far ahead, we saw a bloodshot eyed teenager stumble through the woods, mouthing gibberish at the sky. Once he saw the light, he started screaming. “This is him?”
    “This is him.”
The teenager's heart pounded, as he saw emerging from the forest a zombified mass of people, all of whom looked exactly like him, only decayed, old and decrepid. The zombies brushed past us, stalking towards him slowly. He bolted away, and time around him became slower and slower. His vision started to blur—he appeared in his room with no memory of how he got there, no recollection of taking a drug, no recollection of any of the things he'd seen. And then he saw the note, scribbled on blue graph paper that started to wave and wobble, as his vision grew more and more detached from his physical body. “YOU'RE TRIPPING BRO”, it said, “IT'LL ALL BE OVER SOON. DON'T WORRY.” His heart, once racing, now slowed so that its beats, and his entire body, were imperceptible—all around him, everything froze still—cars stopped in the streets. His mom froze halfway through taking her keys from the ignition. He could move at a normal speed, in his mind, but everything around him was impossibly slow. His mind drifted from the time to which it had once been anchored like a boat torn away by a rising storm surge—the house around him folded from three dimensions, into four, into five, into six, into seven, until it stretched into an infinite tesseract representing thousands of simultaneous mirrored realities. Sapphire and I hid behind the door, knowing that we were the only versions of ourselves who had made it to this point.

________

    “My back...my back...I can't...oh my god!”, he screams in pain and tries to straighten himself against the wall, shivering. “Go. Go. Go.”, mutters Jacob through terrified breaths. I wish I knew a language to ease his pain—but I do not. “I'll come back for you.”, I mutter to him, “I promise.” I turn around, looking back and forth for the way to the hospital wing. To the left? Yes! That must be it, I think. I charge off, completely certain that...well no. Wait. I think this...this hallway was the one behind the hospital wing. So—it's—it must be the other way. I run back. Dammit. No this is wrong. This is all--

    “It's a THREE WAY INTERSECTION.”, shouts a voice—the voice of the teenager. I seeth with anger, and look for him. A tiny, nonsensical array of blue and white lines, forming a thousand pointed star, hovers an interdeterminate distance away from me. I hold up my hand—it blooms with white flowers and prepares to fire. “Wait! No! I'm—I'm the good Ryan! I'm here to help you. Trust me! Trust me please.” The white flowers extend closer to the shape, making it wrinkle and burn. “OW OH MY GOD! FUCK! JUST LISTEN TO ME FOR A SECOND! Okay. Thank you. Holy shit. That...oh my god. Thank you. Now. Take two steps back. One more. Big steps, big steps I mean, one more. Okay. Good. This hallway—this hallway right here. Now...okay. I need you to switch out of the tobacco language for...just a second.”
    “No.”
        “Please, please. I swear you can trust me. Listen. My name is Ryan. I was a teenager in 2006. A...space probe, I guess, crashed outside of my house, and tore a hole into the Beyond. Now I'm not tethered to time. The Ryan who keeps trying to kill you, he's only...like...3 trillion years old. I'm about...uhm. 8...Quintillion? That sounds about right. Anyway. I managed to hold John back before he could kill your brother. That's the best I can do for now. I can try to keep him and Dr. Whitebalm out of reach for the other Ryan while you go look for John. Sound good?”
    “Tcinti said you couldn't be trusted. You're just a puppet of the white flowers.”
        “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tobacco plants are racist assholes. It's like...you know...someday, I hope that the rest of the nightshades learn to judge less by the amount of atropine in a plants leaf cells and more by the content of their character, but the solanaceous Martin Luther King Jr. still seems a little ways off. But did you know that the Brugmansia trees actually once saved Atlantis? Before the volcano, at least. They also played a really big role in inventing like six religions, crystal Pepsi, and removing a century old curse from the Chicago cubs. But no, obviously the first time that a cosmic entity tells you a stereotype they have of a plant they've been fighting for six thousand years, you're just gonna believe them, because...I'm sorry. I'm getting carried away. Just...maybe Tcinti should check his fucking privilege.”
    “You anger Tcinti with your insolence spirit.”, my mouth said against my will, as my hand raised towards the strange thousand pointed star. I didn't want to kill him. But a part of me deep inside of my mind told me that I had to—I pulled away from Tobacco and into the mushroom language. The star came closer, although how much closer I could not say. It didn't really seem to move actually, it just sort of grew from being there, to being more there. “There we go. Okay...”, a cold and clammy hand wrapped around my own. I looked to my left. A ghost, studied me reluctantly.
    “Ola, como estas?”, he asked.
I searched through his brain, quickly learning at least the grammar of Spanish—my mind quickly dug up enough of the three years of Spanish I took in high school to answer.
    “Bien, y tu?”
        “Confudido. Aquella estrella no habla espanol, entonces, yo no se que esta passando. Estoy solo le seguindo. Sabe se estamos en el infierno?” “Confused, that there star doesn't speak spanish, so I don't know myself what's going on. I’m only it following. You know if we're in hell?”
    “Lo siento, amigo. No estamos en ele infierno. Estamos lutando algumas flores blancos que controlan el tiempo.” “I'm sorry friend. Not are we in hell. We're fighting some flowers, white ones, that control time.”
        “Mierda.”“Shit.”
“This is Carlos.”, Ryan introduced us, “Carlos is going to lead you to the hospital. He can see in the dark better than you can. Or...can you explain that to him?” I shifted into Spanish, which did not appear so much different from the english except for the organization of my thoughts. “La estrella dice que necesitas ayudarme encontrar el hospital.” “The star says that you need to help me find the hospital.”
    “Estas herido?” “Are you hurt?”
“No. Las flores blancas mantienen a mi amigo John prisionero allí. Necesito rescatarlo con tobacco.” “No. The white flowers keep my friend John a prisoner there. I need to rescue him with tobacco.”
    “No entiendo este maldito lugar. Pinche lo, supongo. Creio que no tengo eleccion. Me voy a casa cuando está hecho, bien?” “I don't understand this wicked place. Fuck it, suppose. I think I do not have a choice. I am going to home when its done, good?”
        “Esta bien” “That's fine.”
“Don't switch into the tobacco language until John kills Carlos. Otherwise you'll kill him before you can use him as a human shield.”
        “La estrella dice que...” “The star says that...”
“Don't translate that.”
        “Deberemos apurarnos.” “We should hurry.”
“Yeah, that sounded better. I don't know what you said, but sure. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna make sure Dr. Whitebalm doesn't wake up and turn this place into cherynobyl.”
        “Thank you.”, I said, in nervous and stammering English.”
“Don't mention it. I'm so fucking ready to die. Do you know how long two hundred trillion years is? It's a really long time. Hurry up though, seriously.”
   
_______
    Ryan's hands trembled, as he began to sketch the room in which he sat on a fresh sheet of graph paper, from an exterior perspective—Sapphire and I, hiding behind the door, became known to him. He fumed with an intense rage. Now able to see into his mind through my own, Sapphire grew more and more frightened—before us, there materialized the wispy form of one of Ryan's projections, slowly being sketched together in pencil. “Suck.”, I heard a voice say to me. “John. You have to get in there.”, whispered Sapphire. I looked into the doorway, to see Ryan grinning sadistically back at us. “I--” “Do it!” “I don't want him to kill you.” Sapphire reached down for my hand. “You know what to do if he does.” “SUCK!”, shouted Ryan even louder, “For the love of the universe and all that is in it, you have got five seconds to get in there, and SUCK HIS FUCKING MIND FROM HIS BODY.”

________

    Carlos took my by the hand politely and led me down the dark, snaking hallway. The building chattered with rampaging ghosts, faint screams and gun fire. Carlos said nothing—I felt bad about using him as a human shield—I felt equally bad about being called a racist by a magic floating star. Our footsteps launched echoes into the murky abyss, which returned back to us like the sounds of far away cannons. Though we still walked within range of Ryan's protective field, I could feel his powers start to grow dim. As they did, a deep chill and a supernatural tension emanated from the stairway—signifying an army of ghosts waiting to attack. They marched forward, trying to remain silent, letting us become filled with slowly building dread from within. We turned left down a hallway, and the feeling grew stronger. The smell of the hospital entered my nose—the forcefield began to wear exceedingly thin, pushed back with every instant by a much larger interdimensional force. Letting go of Carlos' hand, I switched into the mushroom language—I could see tiny vines reaching out for me, ready to pull me upwards and rip me limb from limb. We looked out from what felt like the most tenuous cocoon of safety into it, seeing the enraged faces of hyperventilating ghosts. My hands filled with purple lightning and I reached out for them—the lightning bent backwards around the corners of the forcefield in which we found ourselves. Hyperventilating, I tried to think of the languages that I knew. But the only one that I could imagine having any effect on John's powers was his own language—I slid into the language of the old one—an interdimensional trading language—rapidly, my own mind fanned out in a web—though I could not understand the thoughts I read, I could see flickers of light and color and sound—slowly it occurred to me that Carlos...Carlos...was wondering if the ghosts were preparing to tear him limb from limb—or maybe he was in...a maze? A maze I guess? He keeps thinking about a maze and then he thinks the color red very loudly.

    I knew not what this language could do—but I decided to try to use it anyway. I stepped out of the field of protection—the earth underneath hummed with the roots of something massive and ancient, speaking the language had welcomed me into a telepathic field, projected by undiscovered fungi deep underground, the morning glories growing in the forest above, the mold growing on some blades of grass, a rare species of bat nesting in the cave. John searched through my mind, only to find it exactly like his—the ghosts prepared to march on us and suddenly, inexplicably, the network took control of me—my hands lit up with a murky, gelatin like substance with a transparent, oily sheen—it lapped up in tongues—on contact with the strange substance, the ghosts melted—eyes drooped down into their skulls, their faces started to drip, and they turned to puddles that quickly evaporated. The army retreated—instead, John manifested himself before me, in the form of a ghost with bright glowing eyes. “You could be a God, Meagan. Why don't you stop trying to fight us and join us”, he said. My feet lifted off the floor—the opal fire lashed out at him—as soon as part of him would melt, it would regenerate. I felt a sharp pain in my skull, and in my legs—I tried to resist his efforts to see into my mind—he was too powerful—I became rapidly overwhelmed—He started to pull me in—until Carlos, charging from the darkness, ran into him, wrapping his arms around him. I fell down to the ground as he lost concentration. The vines, all around me at this point, meander and retreat, as John focused his energy on this strange renegade ghost. Had the master not taught him?
   
    As John prepared to kill Carlos, I seize my opporunity and switch into the tobacco language, pulling both of them with me. Both of them, as projections of an unseen mind, rapidly combust. I am alone in an empty hallway—a silent hallway—I can see John's hospital room, it's door open. Scientists slump on the ground throughout the corridor, their minds dripping with ghosts that quickly evaporate as they near the tobacco language. Suddenly, unseen hands wrap themselves around me—I lift off the ground—paralyzed—a force unlike anything I can comprehend enters my brain and digs into it with sharp claws—I hear John's voice press in on me from every side. “We will give you a final chance.”, it says. My arms move forward, against my will. John pulls on my index finger, making it shoot with sharp pain—the bones inside slowly seperate and grind against each other. [cries out] I retreat into another level of reality, another version of this same hallway—John's powers stretch into it, sprouting from the ground in blue vines, and they wrap themselves around me. “You have the oppurtunity to become a god, a god in a world without death, without suffering, without starvation, without any laws but your own.” I start walking, as the vines reach around me and lift me up once again. Outside, my middle finger starts to twist. Another level of reality—I am closer to the hospital room.

    John loses focus on the objects in the outer realm as he enters the second level of Tobacco. The vines grow again from the ground in the inner world, repeating the process, “But when I kill you, and your soul begins to leave your body, we will make you our slave—you will serve us for eternity.” I dive into another level and continue walking, now only five feet from the door—the world I originated from now seems impossibly high above me—pain shoots through my hands on multiple levels as the bones in my hands are crushed and my wrists pulled from their sockets. I can feel my veins wrapping tight around every limb—a pressure grows in my head. “You can't win. You can run into the tobacco language all you want Meagan. But you don't understand...you don't understand what he's taught me. He's taught me not to run, Meagan.” The objects in the first level of reality no longer hover—John begins to lose the ability to pull at my hands as I drop into one level, and then another, and then another. His mind begins to burn with the growing feeling of tobacco.

    Outside, in the first level of the world, I fall to the ground, and bolt towards the door, my hands and arms deeply bruised and aching. Wincing, I open the door, and see John, sitting up in his hospital bed, a look of intense concentration spread across his face. In the levels upon levels of tobacco stretching below my feet, John tortures me—I am aware of it across all dimensions, aching in every part of my body. “You think this hurts Meagan? Wait until you've been through ten thousand years of it. Now listen. I'm telling you for the last time. You either join us...or you...”
    “Die.”, I command as I pull John's physical brain into the tobacco language—at once his mind recoils, losing all sense of time, becoming locked into a single, infinite present—the language of white flowers melts down—his eyes shoot open and grow bloodshot, his stomach churns and he starts to convulse.

____

    My eyes met Ryan's. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming nausea, as time, memory, and all of the timelines through which his mind had wandered collapsed in on him, hitting him in waves that felt like automobile accidents, one by one. His stomach churned, and his mouth filled with a peppery burning—all of his nerves, one by one, lit up with sensation and feeling. As the timelines collapsed back into one another, swimming pools worth of lukewarm beer, mixed with vomit, bile and blood, gushed from the doors and windows of the downstairs of the house, running into the streets, making the people outside scream in terror. Inside of the house and from various buildings in the town, sheets of graph paper, illustrated with glimpses of different realities, began to fly through the air in a collossal blizzard, as his trillions and trillions of years of memories collapsed in on themselves.  He stumbled from the desk, screaming in pain, no longer able to think or feel anything but the horror of infinite time collapsing in on itself, thousands of warring realities cascading into another like a battlefield that stretched on for millenia. “Ryan?”, called his mother, “Ryan, what the hell is going on?”
    “Mom!”, he bellowed. I watched as he fell down the stairs. “I—I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!”, he cried. “What did you do to yourself? What's wrong? Baby! What's wrong!”
    “I'm sorry...I'm sorry...”, he whispered, suddenly quiet, looking around the blood soaked room with a faint smile, and a tear rolling down his face. “Ryan!”, she slapped him across the face, trying to revive him as he leaned back, “Talk to me! What did you do? Baby! Baby, please. Don't go. Don't go now. This can't...be...”, she reached for her cellphone, “Hello? Hello? Yes. Yes. I know...I know you're getting calls about that, I know...it's coming from my house...my son...he's...I don't know...he looks like he took some drugs? I need to get him to the hospital! Please...please....I don't know what drugs he would have taken. I don't...I don't know. There's beer cans everywhere and...drawings of...”, she looked down, seeing a picture of herself strangled in front of her car door, “I don't know...I don't know...Please...thank you! Thank you.”

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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