maybe i'm just tired

[RobertMason]

The Bug House was a rundown tenement in a rotting neighborhood. It was one of those places which had always been there. When Marie had been given her leviathan, it had been there. It had been there when the oldest Captain at that time, Blessing, had been made a Captain. And when the oldest Captain at that time, Fiddler Street, had become a Captain.

But then, Blessing had been twenty-one when the Redlight had made Its offer to Marie. Captains don't generally have a long life expectancy. Fiddler Street had become a Captain exactly two decades ago. The Bug House could have been in its current state for twenty-five years, and Marie wouldn't know just from the stories that circulate. The information was there, if she'd wanted to find out, but it wasn't important enough.

What was important was what the Bug House was: a place for the local unsavory sort to indulge. It was as good as a palace for the k'k't'k, who were quite the hedonists. Let their host bodies experience the negative side effects of taking so many drugs that their blood was practically enough to get high off of. It was no problem. A k'k't could just hollow a space in another person's head.

They did not like being interrupted from their indulgence, least of all by the local Captains.

"Move," growled Marie, staring into the man standing in front of her.

K'k't'k spoke far faster than any human would have and she was barely able to keep up usually, but this one spoke slowly. Patronizingly. "This is not a place for Captains." Beneath the clothes of its host body crawled dozens of a soulless, mindless variety of k'k't. Their movement became more agitated, but there was nothing which they could do to her. Her leviathan would process the venom. "I suggest that you leave, Blue St—"

There was a revolver in her hand before she even thought for it— her leviathan had anticipated her reaction to the k'k't. By the time she noticed the weight of the gun in her hand, the k'k't host was sprawled on the ground, riddled with bullet holes.

"Don't call me Blue Star! Du nus Blue Star thaft'ft na!" she screamed.

Marie turned her gaze to the other k'k't'k in the room. Some of them were trying to edge out slowly and make an escape. She hadn't killed the k'k't who had blocked her way but she had certainly mangled its host body, and that was an inconvenience which none of them wanted to deal with. Besides which, she might aim for the head this time.

Part of Marie's left hand reshaped itself, reaching to the ground without a need for her to bend down. It impaled one of the k'k't'k crawling out from beneath the host's clothes, and then retracted and brought the creature back up. 

"That one new to the city?"

He was, another k'k't answered. That one thought that he could take on the entire world. Of course, they all felt like that when they were on drugs like that.

"I wouldn't know." Marie adjusted her mouth to accommodate the k'k't she'd impaled, just barely too large to fit in normally, and bit down. The pain from the spines failed entirely to dissuade her from continuing to chew. The venom tasted something like butter. Her leviathan stirred inside her and processed it cleanly before there was a chance for the venom to harm her.

The other k'k't wanted to know what she was here for,  and then it looked past her at the body which was lying a few feet behind her.

She chewed for a couple more seconds, then swallowed. "Someone is looking for me. They have a picture of me, but that could have been taken at any point, I'm sure. I tried to break into his mind, though. All I could see was some sort of symbol. I can't remember what it was. It keeps slipping through my fingers."

The k'k't didn't know what she was talking about.

"Kings and yellow signs. Do you know anything about that?"

It didn't.

"Were you aware that there was someone looking for me specifically?"

Yes, but that wasn't too extraordinary. It was something hardly worth mentioning.

"Am I a unique case then? They're not going after any of the other Captains so far as you're aware."

The k'k't hadn't heard of anything.

"You'll be keeping me aware of things, I trust."

Of course it would. Of course it would.

Marie crushed a k'k't underfoot as she walked away, but it was probably no more intelligent than the one she'd eaten.

[RobertMason]

Arglbargl... I can't remember a single thing from yesterday...

/wonders if anyone has noticed the lack of updates



Marie was in a small room which would have been white had its sole source of illumination not been a small candle with a bright red glow. The edges of the room were just beyond the edge of the light, and sank into darkness.

Suddenly there was a table, and the candle was now mounted on the table, although there were no shadows cast.

Marie stood by the table, and only then realized that she had been sitting in the corner. She did not remember moving.

She waited.

The raven appeared. Finally.


"You're late," she muttered.

"Well excuse me for being late," the raven said. "It's not like I haven't got anywhere better to go."

The candle wavered in its light, and in the corner, her leviathan unfurled from out of itself. It slunk toward her like a wolf or great serpent. It almost flowed from place to place.

"This is a dream," Marie responded. "You don't have anywhere better to go. You don't have anywhere to go at all."

The raven glared at the Captain.

"Well!? Out with it!" Marie snapped her fingers. "I only get dragged into these dreams when I've got something important to tell myself."

"If the little girl were so intelligent, then she'd be able to figure it out herself, wouldn't she?"

"I have. And now it's time for me to tell me what I found out."

"Sunflower seeds. There are rats in Liverpool. Blue is blue."

"Of course," Marie said, completely understanding absolutely everything.

Then she woke up, and she wished that she would stop having dreams that pretended to have deep and special significance.

[Aggie]

Arglbargl... I can't remember a single thing from yesterday...

/wonders if anyone has noticed the lack of updates

/totally did

....incidentally, you pre-empted the bit of feedback I would of given when you hit your lag - which was to throw in a gratuitous 'creature' encounter; nothing particularly dangerous to the protagonist, but an introductory glimpse to the reader of OOH, MONSTERZ! (I've been well conditioned by movies, fantasy books and video games to expect this ).  The k'k't'k served nicely.

[RobertMason]

Transcript Three

MARIE GRAYSON: Thanks for waiting.
SHEILA THURGOOD: I'm surprised that you still came this week. In consideration of... of London, I would have expected you to call this week off. I've had a few people actually schedule in additional sessions with me, but I would have thought that you would prefer to have a week without bothering with me.
MG: Yeah. I almost didn't come in, but I've come to enjoy the luxury of a routine. If I'm going to have to keep coming back here, then I should just come in this week, too. I don't want to deal with coming in for two weeks, then canceling, then coming back, then... No. That's why I called in. I wanted to make sure that you would be here. I didn't want to need to track you down and knock on your front door until you let me in.
ST: Would you have actually done that if I hadn't been here?
MG: Maybe. (MG pauses) It depends on how I was feeling at the time, I guess. Probably not. I have a lot of things which I need to do. It would have been irritating, but I would have dealt with it.
ST: Is there anything which you would like to talk about? Would you prefer that we not bring up—
MG: I don't care. It makes me think of Gabby.
ST: Who?
MG: Gabby Sparks. She... (MG pauses) Sort of curvy, sort of overweight, a bit... She's on the edge there, you know? Red hair, brown eyes. She liked bright colors, cats, funny books, and movies. Especially the ones with really bad jokes. She owned a cat. The cat's name was Gabby, too.
ST: Where is she now?
MG: Gone. Just... You know. Not around anymore. (MG pauses). Dead. (MG pauses). C-car accident. Car accident. Two years ago. Don't bother rifling around for the papers. I don't know anybody who really thinks about her anymore. We met in the Cadet Corps when... Oh, it must have been when I was twelve, nearly thirteen. I had been a Captain for a few months already by then. She had fast hands, disassembling her guns. We were partners for a lot of things. Then I found out that she was a reader, and it all went downhill from there. We talked a lot. She was a better friend than I was. She really should have tried to be less so.
ST: What do you mean?
MG: She had a tendency to overextend herself. She would get involved in matters she didn't need to get involved with. Because she was my friend, and that's what friends do, apparently. (MG snorts) Even John knew better than to mess with some things. Of course, he ended up poorly, too.
ST: What about your other friends?
MG: What other friends? (MG chuckles) Forgive me if I find myself irritated by everyone. These are the future soldiers of our country? Don't think that I'm under the delusion my generation is significantly worse off than the last, either. No wonder we're losing the war, when we're turning out people like this. (pause) It's not like my line of work is exactly conducive to maintaining friendships, anyways. The only reason I had anything going on with Gabby is because she was just so stubborn. She was steel. Not at all like John. He could barely work up the nerve to talk to me. I nearly had to smack him in the head before he would finally make a move. Of course, he had, ah, he had some fire once we went past that hurdle, even if he was still helpless with so much as talking to any other girls.
ST: If you dislike everyone else, how did you develop a relationship with Gabby and John? It couldn't have been sheer stubbornness that cemented it with Gabby; you still had to reciprocate at some point, or she would have just been an unwanted tagalong who you could never get rid of. But you called her a friend.
MG: She would listen, and she was a reader. Good with her hands. (MG laughs quietly) Poor Gabby. Heh. It was just easier to accept her. Whatever she wanted, she wouldn't stop until she got it. Even when it came to me. I learned how to develop some tolerance to it. It passed the time, let me keep my mind off of other things. I admit that it was kind of nice. I was able to separate my life into these little categories, and here was Gabby, who would put up with everything I was having trouble with, and she'd just sit there and never talk, for hours and hours if she needed to. She'd just listen. Then she has to muck it all up, and mash all those categories together. Nosy little girl had to go and start investigating, and she—
(silence)
ST: Marie?
MG: Nothing. It's nothing. Let's talk about something else.
ST: We were briefly—
MG: Not London. (MG sighs) Something else.
ST: What else have you been doing this week?
MG: Looking around. Going on Patrol. The usual. School is going along steadily. I am looking forward to it being over, in a way, but there's still some general apprehensiveness. It's been my one constant since... Really, it's been the only thing I could count on since I was twelve. Russians in Portugal, bombs in London, even if this latest was a lot bigger, messages from Mr. Messenger, and school is still going on. Until the end of July, that is.
ST: Confused about what you'll be doing after?
MG: Not at all. I'll be putting more time into Patrol. Maybe it'll be good for me. I'll have more time to sleep. I'll be able to shift my schedule around so that it doesn't take so much out of me. Maybe I'll be able to spend more time with my family.
ST: Really?
MG: No, not really. (MG sighs) What am I supposed to do with them? Come on. Tell me, doctor. There's no way that we can relate to each other on anything. Absolutely anything. They wonder where I go all the time, and they're getting frustrated by the vague not-really-answers, but they're just sort of... sort of resigned to it, by now. We exist well enough together. We get by.
ST: Wouldn't you like to do more? That is, wouldn't you like to have a closer relationship with your family?
MG: Sure, I'd like to, but will I? Can I? What are we going to be doing, if we start talking all the time? It's easier for them, anyways. I'm one less child that they have to worry about. Do you know that I haven't stepped outside the limits of this city for years? Since I was eleven. It just wasn't ever a concern at first. I didn't have a particular interest in going outside Chicago. It was able to grab my attention pretty well. But then I become a Captain, and... and the idea makes me sick.
ST: Nauseous?
MG: Yes. I want to get out of this city, but I don't, I don't, I just want to stay here, it's so nice and the streets are... I know these streets like the back of my hand. In five years I've come to know this city as well as anyone who ever helped to build it. There's something about it. It's...
ST: It's familiar.
MG: And it's mine. Mine to keep safe. I can't forget my job. I've got to keep the city safe. I think that it's my leviathan.
ST: You think that Chicago is your leviathan?
MG: No, no. This feeling of sickness I get. I think that my leviathan does it. To keep me here. To keep me focused on my job. I get all jittery just at the thought of leaving this city. It's home. It's my turf. It's mine. Outside, past this city, that's as alien to me as another planet is. Maybe even more alien. I've got a strange suspicion that I would have been more at home at Yuggoth, if it wasn't uninhabitable and desolate now, than at, say, Detroit. I think it's because of my leviathan.
ST: How?
MG: Leviathans are... They have something about the mind. I don't want to say that they're telepathic or anything like that, because that doesn't quite give the proper feeling. They are able to touch the mind, however. They can touch your thoughts, flip through them, tear them out, rewrite them, detect them, taste them. Some can do it better than others. It's mostly a matter of skill, not integral talent.
ST: So then why do you think that your... that your leviathan would do that to you?
MG: Because it's my job to protect this city.
ST: Yes. You've said that before.
MG: No, I don't think you really understand what I mean. When I was twelve years old, I was wandering around at night and because I didn't look both ways, and it was dark out and it was raining, so the other guy couldn't see very clearly, and so I was hit by a car. I knew that I was an idiot, then. I was going to die, and it was all my fault. The guy who hit me didn't even slow down. He was just going to hope that it was something which wasn't human, so that his conscience wouldn't sting him. And then, The Redlight appeared to me.
ST: What did?
MG: It had the decency to not put on the sparkling starlight and shining hope show for me. It came to me in the form which It preferred, and while I was lying there on the round, bleeding to death on the inside, I had the fortune to behold a tall man with hands the color of gray ash, and there was a thin but constant trail of blood running from Its empty eye sockets. It spoke to me with a voice like broken glass being scratched across a blackboard, and It told me that It was a god.
(short silence)
ST: Marie?
(sharp inhalation)
MG: The Redlight told me that It was fond of the city of Chicago. It was tied to this city in a way which I could only begin to understand, It said, once I was older. But It was not always awake. It had to sleep for great periods of time. So It had need of a champion, someone to keep Chicago safe until It could reawaken.
ST: You.
MG: My life would be restored if I would consent. I had two souls, but one of those was an extra, no more important than a second kidney, It said, and It would remove that redundant soul and place a little fragment of Itself where my second soul had been. The leviathan became part of me, and within seconds I could feel it repairing the damage. It flowed through my body and made me whole again. At least physically. Of course, The Redlight wasn't telling the exact truth.
ST: What did It lie about?
(MG laughs)
MG: To be more exact, It just left out some important information. Like why Chicago was so important.
ST: And why is it?
MG: Leviathans feed on many things, from emotions to thoughts, from creative inspiration to the marrow of thieves, but principal among their favored foods is the simple soul. The Redlight likes souls, too. The younger, the better. Don't bother looking in the old records for mysterious patterns of disappearances. The Redlight wouldn't let Itself be noticed. It only preyed on the children who had already gone missing from home. Every twelve years, It would wake up and slake Its thirst, and then It would search for a little girl with whom to replace Its last Captain. Because It kills the old one, you see. When the fragment of a Prince spends long enough away, it begins to conceive of itself as a separate entity, and it won't subordinate itself to the original Prince. There's a reason why the rare one-in-a-thousand Captain who makes it to the age of twenty-five usually becomes a solitaire. The Redlight decided to take care of the problem before it became a problem.
ST: There's... You think that you're going to die in seven years?
MG: Hm? Oh, yes. The math's right enough, but no, I don't think I'll die in seven years. I'm going to die far sooner than that. In the city of Chicago, only two Captains have lived past the age of twenty, since the turn of the century. We die young. We die violently. We die so very violently, and when it's all done, if you ever even have a corpse to look at, you see only the last few marks, because it was only that last few seconds which was enough to kill us, and we healed everything else. You never notice anything. Why do you think I'm glad that there's this distance in my family? Do you think that it'll hurt them as much, to know that I'm dead, if I've been as good as, for the past few years?
ST: I think that you're hurting them right now, Marie.
MG: They're used to it.
ST: Even Zelia?
(silence)
MG: What time is it?
ST: Already?
MG: What time is it!?
(ST sighs)
ST: We have forty minutes left.
MG: I want to cancel today. The news about London has wracked my nerves and is bringing up horrible, horrible memories. Gabby's mother was from Liverpool. Now I'm thinking about her. All the—
ST: No.
MG: Excuse me?
ST: You were perfectly fine, Marie, just a minute ago. You were perfectly fine, and you called me specifically to make sure that I wouldn't leave, and that I would still be here. If bringing up Zelia is causing some problems, then... You can't leave every time that something bad is brought up. Aren't we going to need to work through these things if we want to change anything? You can't help yourself by avoiding anything which troubles you.
MG: I don't need help. That's what you don't get. I'm perfectly sane. It's not my fault that leviathans don't exactly broadcast their existence to the world at large. Forgive me for the inconvenient fact that they realize pretty well that the eating is better when world's priority isn't killing them, because yes, it's hard, but they can be killed. And forgive me for the fact that people like you don't even let yourselves realize that you saw one. Do you realize how stupid you can sound, when you start spouting the story which your mind is feeding you so that you don't have to deal with the fact that this girl's knife just vanished before your eyes, and no amount of patting her down is going to find it for you, and you just saw her empty eye socket fill up, right as you were fugging looking at her. And you don't even notice. Damn you!
ST: If we're that blind, then how did you see?
MG: Because I didn't have any reason to see past it. I was dying. Besides, I didn't even really realize that it wasn't a hallucination until after the fact. But there are... there are times that people notice. There always are. But you need to have a reason to see it, and not see past it and explain it away. Or alternately you need to not have a reason to see it past it. Most people have too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former. Most people don't have any at all of the former. Void, Lovecraft had written his tenth story, and spent years hearing stories, before he could finally... finally see, because he was never forced to, and it took him so long before he could finally get rid of... He was obsessed with not seeing the things he was writing about. He was obsessed with not having firm, physical evidence right in front of him. He could deal with knowing that things like this existed, but he didn't want to see how there were things like this in his city. Then he finally convinced himself to see, and he knew that it had been a horrible, bad idea, but he couldn't go back. Even if he managed to start explaining things away again, he wouldn't have been able to really, truly convince himself that what he had seen before had all been false. No matter how much he told himself, he would know. So he didn't bother to try and delude himself again, and the stress eventually killed him. Bravo, Lovecraft. Bravo.
ST: You've brought up Lovecraft a few times before. People were telling him about the things you're telling me?
MG: Not the exact things, but yes. About leviathans, and buried cities, and crazy-as-the-angels aliens, and regular people who were even crazier. He wrote the stories down. He never did any investigating of his own. He spent far too long either not wanting to see any of it for himself or, later on, not wanting to see anything more than what he was already seeing. So he just wrote the stories down. It's not a good idea to regard him as a particularly credible source. Above all, he just wanted to write stories which would finally bring him success. If it didn't make for a good story, then he ignored it and made up something which was more interesting. And forget about Derleth. Anything true which of his is a lucky guess, or ripped from talks with Lovecraft.
ST: Did you read him before you became a Captain?
MG: No. Maybe I would have known better, if I had. I wouldn't have told The Redlight anything different, though.
ST: Why not?
MG: I had been hit by a car, and I was dying. There was... There were other people. To live for. I didn't...
(silence)
ST: Marie?
MG: Can we change the subject?
ST: You won't be helping yourself at all if you keep on doing this.
MG: Then it's a good thing that I don't need any help, isn't it?
ST: Alright then. You're still staying, though.
MG: I'll leave if I want to.
ST: True. There's nothing which I can do to stop you from leaving.
(ST pauses)
MG: Well? Are you not going to go?
ST: I said that I don't need to stay here. I can go if I want. Are you really this incapable of hearing what I'm saying?
MG: There's only so much of that sort of attitude which I'll be taking from you.
ST: You keep on saying that.
MG: You haven't hit the point where I'm calling a stop to it.
ST: Will I ever?
MG: Have you eaten dinner with your family this week?
ST: Stop bringing up my family today.
MG: I see. Are you sleeping well? Did you have one of those dreams about The Redlight lately?
ST: Not for a few weeks. I've had other dreams, though. They're always the same, whenever I can remember my dreams. The same three different kinds of dreams. Last night, I dreamed that I was in a white room with a red candle on a desk. My leviathan wasn't part of me. It was like it was cast off, like some Captains do, but I wasn't missing an entire half of my body, like you do when you, you know, cast off an entire half of your body. I was still... whole. There was a raven.
ST: A raven on a writing desk?
MG: I find it hard to imagine that I actually managed to never connect that, in all the years that I've been having that dream. I've got a vague sense of disappointment in myself now. Not that it means anything, of course.
ST: Why are you so sure?
MG: Because that's what the dream is about. I'm dreaming that I'm dreaming lucidly, that I'm aware of the dream, even though I'm never aware of the fact that, like always, I'm still dreaming normally, I'm still just a puppet with my strings being pulled by my subconscious, and the only difference is that I'm dreaming that I'm aware that I'm dreaming. But I'm not. I still get pulled along the same way, and even if the script changes from dream to dream, the same damn formula is always the same. It never changes.
ST: Is there anything else which happens in this dream?
MG: The raven tells me things. Nonsense things. "Sunflower seeds. There are rats in Liverpool. Blue is blue." That's what the raven told me last night. I thought once that my leviathan, or something else, was trying to tell me something. But it doesn't mean a damn thing. It never does. It never does.
ST: Didn't you say that Gabby's mother came from Liverpool? And your middle name is Blue, isn't it? You are who you are?
MG: Wonderful, doctor. Simply astonishing. Except that you forget that just if something happens to be cobbled together with half-relevant facts from my life, it doesn't mean that it actually means anything. I have been having this dream for years, and it took until I was fifteen for me to realize that they have absolutely no meaning, whether coming from my leviathan or my subconscious or something else entirely.
ST: It hurts, though.

[RobertMason]

MG: It's irritating is what it is. It's fugging frustrating. Suddenly, everything all makes sense, and I understand it all, and I just know, and it's like I'm looking down from the throne of God and it all makes sense, it all makes sense, and I know everything, and then I wake up, and everything is gone again and I don't know a single thing.
ST: You know who you are, Marie. You know where you stand.
MG: Really? Where do I stand?
ST: Chicago, or so you claim. It seems to me that it's very clear who you are. You just doubt yourself too much. You worry about not being human, or losing your humanity, when you're really a very fine specimen of humanity.
MG: Such a wonderful endorsement of the species, doctor.
ST: Something has made you old before your time. If we go with your side of events, then it's the fact that on a regular basis you have to get into bloody and agonizing fights. Something like this... I don't know. It wouldn't be unlikely for you to be suffering from battle fatigue. Even if we don't follow your view, though, it's still plain to see that you're having to deal with more responsibility than you should. You've been dealing with it for a long time. Your generation is worse than mine, but not in the way that you think. There were battles raging when I was your age, but the war was entirely different back then. You're all having to grow up fast.
MG: Then good riddance to the old way, although I must say that my peers aren't doing too well with the "growing up" thing. They may have missed that part.
ST: Even if you've never had to kill a single person in your life, you're still treading on a very dangerous and unstable ground, mentally. Everyone in your generation is. There isn't a single one of you who hasn't grown up knowing that the Bolsheviks might be fighting on this continent in your lifetime. You don't even realize how strange that concept should be to you. The last time we had to deal with an invasion on our soil was in 1913 when von Gartenlaube struck New Jersey, and there wasn't a single other campaign in the past two centuries which was as botched as that one. How long has it been since we've had a serious invasion? It's not something which any of us really had to deal with, and then all of a sudden you're all thinking that it's completely reasonable to spend two weeks in the Cadet Corps learning about thermonuclear weapons and their effects, just so that you know what to do if there's an attack on American soil and the Automatic Activation laws kicks in, and all of a sudden every child sixteen and over is a member of the military, and they've already had just as much training as an officer would have had back in the Great War. The sheer fact that you are anything resembling sane, let alone as sane as you are, is a complete miracle, Marie. It should be every single child in your school who should be seeing someone on a weekly basis, not just you.
MG: In that case, I'll step aside so that you can help the more needy of us. Holy Spirit knows that they need to get along with the growing up. I'm not broken, besides.
ST: Perhaps not, but you've been worn down. Part of it is our fault. I hope that we'll be able to fix things, so that by the time that your sister is your age, we'll all have a better handle on making sure that you get to grow up at least somewhat normally.
MG: I seriously doubt that my sister will ever be my age.
ST: Why?
MG: The Redlight is due to wake up in seven years. How old is she going to be? Twelve, of course. How old is the perfect age for either The Redlight's snack or brand-new replacement Captain? Twelve, of course. Eleven would do, too, and there are a lot of thirteen-year-olds who would serve well, but that's pushing it, and anyways, while twelve might not specifically be any better than eleven, it's still as good as or better than anything else, and most Captains are made when they're about twelve years old. And unlike every other leviathan in this city, The Redlight knows who I really am, even knows right where I live, because It knew me before I was a Captain, and do you honestly think that It won't take this golden opportunity to hurt me? How can I be of any use in a fight if I can't even muster up the will to keep on moving. Either she'll be eaten or, more likely, The Redlight will appoint her as my replacement.
ST: That's what you're most worried about, out of everything.
(pause)
MG: If I don't keep moving forward, I can't keep Zelia safe from all the rest of this. I have to keep Chicago safe, because that's my job. But... (MG sighs) She trusts her big sister to keep her safe from everything in the dark, and she doesn't even know that there are things that she actually needs to be kept safe from. I could manage better if she would just stop caring. She's like Gabby.
ST: You don't handle it well when other people are depending on you.
MG: No. I'm going to fail, and I'm going to fail in a big way. It's only a matter of time. There was a Captain, back when The Redlight made Its offer. I don't remember what her name was. She died less than a month later. She was twenty years old. That I do know. It was so extraordinary. It was the biggest piece of news among those who knew about the Captains, because she was so old for a Captain. When she died, the new oldest Captain— and I do remember who she was, she was The Blaze or something— was only seventeen years old. It was like she was one of those women who lived to be one-hundred-and-twenty years old despite not knowing the difference between water and booze, and having so much of the latter that you could be a drunken mess by sipping their blood.
ST: You... You think that you're going to die in a year, don't you?
MG: Not in exactly a year, but yes. I don't really see my chances as being all that good. I'm just trying to move fast and move forward and never stop long enough to... to stop at all. If I don't keep moving, I'll definitely get killed. The only chance I have is in moving too fast for me to notice that I should be dead. If I ever reach twenty, I'll suddenly look back at my life and wonder where all the time went, because it'll feel just like yesterday that I was talking to you in this room. Every month something new happens. Something bad. Something new is just now starting up. Sure, I'll have it done with in a few weeks at the latest, I'm sure, but by the time that I'm done with it, I'll have just enough time to almost, almost, almost catch my breath before I have to start running again and race to stop the next trouble that's sprouting up.
ST: What would happen if you stopped? Do you think that Chicago would be destroyed?
(silence)
MG: No. No. (MG pauses) But there are all these little things. They would build up. Chicago wouldn't be destroyed. Most leviathans are smart enough to not burn the fields they hunt in, and the few that do try to do that sort of thing are outnumbered quite enough by the ones who will work to keep the dining room clean. There was only one time, since I became a Captain, that something nasty happened to the extent that Chicago would have been destroyed, and that problem solved itself almost before I was able to do anything about it. I was like the cavalry riding in only to find that the battle had ended an hour ago, but hey, thanks for showing up anyways, now maybe you could help us hunt down the stragglers so that you can say that you were actually useful today?
ST: Then why can't you stop?
MG: Because Chicago wouldn't be as nice as it is right now. It wouldn't be as safe. Those gleaming white towers would be a mockery and a lie. There would be nothing grand or imperial or majestic here except on the very surface of things. It would be rotting from the inside out. There's a leviathan I like to call Hobo-Eater, and before I came along it thought that children's souls were delicious. Instead, the homeless have a few neighborhoods that they don't ever go through if they know what's best for them, because it and I worked out a deal. If I hadn't stopped it, the Horror Artist would still be working. Local gangs of this or that stripe would still be kidnapping people and funneling them to the me-deg. Even if I weren't here, there's still a wonderful chance that you would never be affected by a leviathan or anything else. But you shouldn't think that just because of that, there wouldn't be a lot more going on. In every way, this city would be worse, and only a few statistics here or there could possibly give you the hint that something was terribly wrong with the way that things were going.
ST: So not quite destroyed, but—
MG: But it may as well be.
ST: You can't slow down, though? Why not just go after the most important threats? Aren't there other Captains in this city?
MG: Can't trust them. Not at all. Even if another Captain is completely trustworthy today, her leviathan, if it had a mind to, may have managed to total control of her body by tomorrow. So you can't even try to cultivate trust. The only time that you can trust a Captain is when what you're trying to do is in line with what her Prince wants done. I can trust Violet Child to not stab me in the back when we're trying to deal with something which wants to hurt the McCaffrey family, because her Prince is like one of those historians who would absolutely murder to get a chance to watch a family as it changes and grows over the course of centuries, except that her Prince is, well, a Prince, and so it actually can do that. Her sole duty is to keep the family safe and secure, but even so, even when I'm helping with that, who is to say that it might not be decided that I'll later be a threat, so why not kill me once I'm done helping?  So even when our interests coincide, there's still danger.
ST: What about the others? Is everyone possessed of such unique interests as... Violet Child's Prince?
MG: Minister Rufous' wanted to see what would happen if you made a little girl into a Captain without telling her anything about what sort of world she was going to be dealing with from that point on, or even what was about to happen to her at the hands of this monster that had just appeared in front of her. Pepperidge... just watches everything, and never does anything so long as she's free to watch. We've had Princes who wanted the Dreamlands patrolled, or for certain artifacts to be protected, or for there to be someone to kill a specific person every month. The Messenger to Him in the Gulf was given the job of entertaining his Prince and he must have figured out how to keep a Prince entertained because he's been doing it for longer than people discovered how to work bronze. Yes, they're all like Violet Child's, and we all live short, violent lives, because even when it's as simple as "Watch everything of interest," there are going to be leviathans who just want a Captain to eat, and there are going to be Princes who just want to muck up the plans of another Prince because of some minor incident two hundred thousand years ago. I'm impressed with Pepperidge, though. I've seen her tear apart things with her bare hands that were the size of a truck. Pepperidge handles things well for a girl who just, well, stands there and watches stuff happen.
ST: Have you ever considered writing this down? Submitting this to magazines?
MG: Because of course it's all ludicrous and maybe I would realize that if I started putting everything I experienced into a fictional format?
ST: No. It would just give you something to do, and so long as you were able to string words together well enough and could put up with the initial rejections, you would stand a good chance of getting accepted in the end. You certainly have the ideas down, whether you get them from the real world or inside your head. According to you, that's what Lovecraft did. Why not do it yourself? Regardless of your mental state, having a creative outlet would be useful for you.
MG: That's a wonderful suggestion, but really, no. I don't have the time. Maybe once I don't have school anymore. Of course, there's nothing more likely than me sleeping for twelve hours a day for the first two weeks after I've graduated. I have a lot of sleep to catch up on.
ST: I'm sure that you do. You said that you had three dreams that were recurring, but you've only brought up the dream about The Redlight, and about the raven in the room.
MG: The third one is nonsense, too. I'm suddenly in a long, white hall without any idea of how I got there or why I'm there in the first place, and of course I never recall that I've been here in previous dreams, because you never realize that you're in a dream unless you're lucky and you're not me. I start walking forward, just going on and on, and it feels like I've been walking in the hall for hours, even though I'm still not tired. Just walking on and on. I'm in my usual dress, I'm in my boots and I have my coat and my gloves and I have my second face on, which is completely strange. Why am I up like this? I only have my second face on when I'm working actively. Am I on Patrol? I have no idea.
ST: What's your second face?
MG: The mask that my leviathan makes when I'm working. It would make for a sorry story indeed if I beat down a leviathan only for it to track me down and kill me in my sleep because it knows what I look like, now wouldn't it? But it's not just a mask. I see through it. I feel it. Like I always do with anything my leviathan makes. I'm in a circular room, once I get to the end of the hall. Then there's a vending machine from out of nowhere. It's not there and then it's there, and it's always been there.
ST: And then what do you do?

[RobertMason]

MG: I take out some change, out of my pocket, and I buy a candy bar. Chocolate. Very tasty. I can never taste things well in my dreams. Never could, even before The Redlight came. But I can taste this chocolate. Richer than what it's like in real life, even. Very tasty, all the time, although the brand is different, sometimes. Usually it's a Hershey. Very rich. There's the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, all through the hallway and in that room.
ST: Cigarette smoke?
MG: I wouldn't have the faintest clue as to why I'm wandering around underground in a— it's underground, too. I know that. I don't know how I know that, but when I'm walking through, I just know that I'm in a basement hallway or something like that. And I don't know why I'm wandering around or wearing my second face down there, but it's the best of my dreams.
ST: Because it's not particularly bad like your other two recurring dreams?
MG: There is that, certainly, but that's not all of it. There's the chocolate. I don't think I've had more than a bar in total for two or three years. I give most of it to Zelia whenever I get any. I only take a square for myself.
ST: Chocolate isn't all that expensive Marie.
MG: But it still costs money. Chocolate is a luxury. I'm not going to buy it. Not even for Zelia. She can get better things with what my money can buy. The only chocolate I get is scavenged or gifted to me. If it's a whole bar, I'll give all but a square of it to Zelia. Most of the time, though, it's already partially eaten. I use that when I deal with the k'k't'k.
ST: The what?
MG: They're little bug things. Imagine something like a spider and a sea urchin. Something like that. They root around in your head and pump your blood full of preservatives to make you last longer. Depraved, all of them. Pleasure addicts. They can choose what sensations they take from their host, you see. Only Captains in the universe who can get anything out of drugs.
ST: You mentioned drugs before, and said that they wouldn't work on you. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?
MG: Our leviathans work all the time to keep us healthy. When we're hurt, they flow into our wounds and knit them back together by pure reflex. When there's a foreign organism in our bodies, like a germ, the leviathan kills it. Even if a cut remained open for a long time somehow, it'll never get infected. I've never had so much as a cold or sick stomach since I became a Captain. There isn't even the helpful bacteria that most people have in their bodies, but luckily for me, my leviathan takes over their duties, too. Poisons get taken in by the leviathan instead of my body and get processed faster than the poison can work. Unfortunately, all this is as natural for the leviathan as breathing. Not only does it do this without thinking, but you can't even keep it from doing this. I've tried. We've all tried. I've tried the hardest alcohols ever to rest on this world, and I've never gotten more than a momentary buzz, and I can't even get that off of the ordinary faire. Cigarettes are worthless and don't have any kick to them. By the time I was fourteen I had injected every possible uplifting or dulling substance into my system, and I had never gotten anything at all.
ST: Why would you do that?
MG: Because just like every other Captain, I reached the point where I couldn't manage well enough on my own, and I was desperate enough to try things that never worked, not today, not yesterday, not a million years ago. Our leviathans just process it too quickly. But I was starting to snap and I wanted something to replace the Wake.
ST: The Wake?
(MG sighs)
MG: Leviathans all have a little bit of psychic talent in them, although that isn't really the right way to put it. English doesn't have a great way of expressing it, though. It's not like we've ever had a pressing need to describe what the leviathans do with the mind. Even "fleshchanging" doesn't work neatly when it comes to what it's describing, and that's the best description of anything related to the leviathans. "Soul" has baggage, too. But you don't know any languages which aren't human, so we have to go with what we've got. Let's just say that leviathans all have a very basic ability to actively affect the mind and that some are able to do more with it than others.
ST: And the Wake is related to this?
MG: Yes. (MG pauses) It is the absolute most effective, most twisted idea ever to come out of any Prince's mind. It's a carrot-and-stick deal, you see, except that they don't even need to use the stick; withholding the carrot can be bad enough for us. You see, it... it...
(silence)
ST: Marie? (ST pauses) Marie?
MG: I-it... It makes us happy. It takes the little part of our brain that registers pleasure, and it turns it up all the way. You c-cannot possibly imagine how good it feels. It's like chocolate and a broken arm and blood and cigarette smoke and sex and the rush of the fight and the cool down from after, when you're standing there, and the other thing is dead, and you won, you won, and it's sleeping and then waking up and you didn't have any dreams at all, and it's a day where nothing bad happens, and it's all of that, and it's better, and I wanted, I want something to replace that, because I don't like it, because I want it so much. Even right now, thinking about it, I want it. When I can feel the Wake, it's all great, and that's just the side effects. That's the fugging afterglow. The leviathan only touches our mind for a second and we can't even begin to conceive just how good that feels, and everything we call the Wake is just the last few traces of it.
ST: Are you okay Marie?
(MG laughs)
MG: Of course I'm not okay, doctor! Oh... I... I think that I need to go. Can I go, doctor? I'm feeling very tired right now. I think that it might be best if I took a little bit of a lie-down and took some rest.
ST: We can pick up next week if that is alright with you, Marie. I expect you to be here, however.
MG: O-of course.
ST: Well, it's not like we had all that much time left anyways. Only... Wow. Less than ten minutes. No problem, Marie.
MG: Thank you.
(pause)
ST: W-wait! Marie!
MG: Yes?
ST: How are you getting home?
(pause)
MG: I— Bus. I'm taking the bus.
(ST sighs)
ST: Are you sure that you don't want someone to go with you?
MG: Sure. I'm sure. I'll be alright. I just want to go home and get some rest. You have other people to talk to anyways.
ST: You'll call me if you have any problems, okay?
MG: Sure. Whatever. Goodbye, doctor.
ST: Goodbye.

End of Transcript Three.



The yuggoth was already there when Marie climbed to the top of the tower, wearing her second face. It was sitting at the edge, looking out at Lake Michigan. "Perched" might have been a better word, for there was something vaguely avian in the yuggoth's posture.

Marie had not been lying when she said that the yuggothr looked like dragons with limbless lobsters for heads. It had six limbs which served equally well as arms or legs, resting on the lowest pair of them, which were folded down, and from the back of its serpentine body sprouted an equal number of wings, currently collapsed against its body like a pink cloak. Despite appearances, the being was closer to a fungus than an animal, in terms of the taxonomic kingdoms of Earth, but of course it was truly neither, and didn't even have a similar biochemistry.

"Hey Snowman," she called. The nickname was one which she had used for it for four years now, although even after she gave it a name, a few months would pass before she gave up trying to alter her vocal chords so that she could pronounce its name. For its part, Snowman used a different means of producing sound, and so could offer no advice on the matter. Fleshchanging did not come with a how-to manual, and finer manipulations needed some know-how behind them.

"You're early."

"And the hour is late," she responded. "Got the drink?" she asked as she walked toward it.

It held up a white bottle for a second without looking back at her. "Vathic liquor. Did you bring the cigarettes?"

"Yeah." The wings on Snowman's left side opened up and lifted away long enough for Marie to sit down next to the yuggoth, and then they settled down on top of her. It was a good protection from the wind.

Marie leaned into Snowman. Her legs dangled over the side of the building. She lit a cigarette and took a short draw. "How old's the liquor?"

"Older than I am."

"Courtesy of Messenger?"

"Indeed."

"He's a bastard. And give that here."

"He is." Marie traded the cigarette for the liquor. It was far stronger than she was used to, and had a faint aftertaste reminiscent of fresh milk. Vathic liquor was like that. It was nearly able to give her a buzz but, alas, her leviathan processed the alcohol too quickly and too well, as always.

"What did you call me for?" She took her turn at the cigarette, then handed it back. She rested a hand on Snowman's tail.

"We're leaving. Temporarily, I hope. This is a nice world." It exhaled slowly, breathing out a cloud of smoke.

"All of you?"

"Yes."

"When will you be gone?"

"I will depart in three weeks. I will be among the last to go."

She sighed. "I wouldn't have thought that The Not To Be Named One would mess with you here."


"It is not involved with this matter, although some of the more paranoid of my peers would differ." For a yuggoth to call another one paranoid was truly something, considering how much of a right they had to be so. Snowman drank from the bottle of Vathic liquor. "This, in fact, has to do with the matter you are investigating. We detected its presences shortly before we heard that you were looking for information about it."

"What is it?" Marie asked. She took the cigarette back.

Snowman gestured out toward the waters.

Marie did not see anything. Perhaps there was just not enough light. Snowman had better eyesight than her.

Something seemed to resolve in the distance.

The cigarette dropped from her lips and fell many stories down to the streets below. She did not feel anything as Snowman reached into her pocket in order to retrieve the rest of the cigarettes.

The architecture was bizarre, as if someone had crossed the Victorian style with a Hercules beetle. It was spindly, almost like a dead tree; spires rose everywhere, haphazardly, and some had branches on the side or smaller towers on top of them. It was spider-like. It was hazy and the details were impossible to make out.

Snowman stuck a lit cigarette in Marie's mouth. She spoke again. "There should not be a city there."

"Yes."

"It's too close. The shore on the other side of the lake should be further away than that. It is further away than that."

"Yes," Snowman agreed again.

"It's not an illusion, is it?"

"It is."

"Oh. Good. I sense something to be added to that statement, however. Thus, keep your mouth shut for a second." She took two swallows of the liquor and her leviathan healed the damage it did to the lining of her esophagus. "Okay. You can continue."

Snowman stole the cigarette from her mouth and took a breath through it before finishing. "It will become real if it is not stopped."

"Bad?"

Snowman nodded. "It is a parasite nightmare, now nestled deep in the Dreamlands of this world. It will draw the souls of this world and consume the collective subconscious mind of every being here, leaving its victims mad."

It took a gulp of liquor, then continued. "All that remains of the Dreamlands of Yuggoth are contained in the minded in the minds of those who survived the destruction of that world. As some of us are here, some of those fragments can be found here as well. We are leaving so that the nightmare cannot reach through these fragments in order to grasp every other remnant of our Dreamlands."

Marie continued to stare at the city. "What can we— what can I do to stop this?"

"We delivered ourselves to the service of Him Who Is Not To Be Named in order to beat it back. This is why the two have such a close association in the minds of our people, and those among us who are prone to weaving tales of conspiracies think that one serves the other. The theory did not arise until after we departed from Its service, however, and is merely an attempt to link together the two most terrible pieces of our history. To hear them tell the tale, every single misfortune suffered by Yuggoth and its peoples was at the hands of Him Who Is Not To Be Named."

Snowman looked up at the moon, then resumed talking. "Putting this world in the service of The Not To Be Named One, or any other Prince, is not strictly necessary. It was for us, but at the time that Yuggoth was visited by the parasite nightmare, we were only just beginning to transform our three moons into something more habitable; yuggothr as a species in general knew little, almost nothing, about the Princes and other species which dwelled beyond our star system, and to make matters worse the only ones who knew of the parasite nightmare were collaborating with it. You may be less advanced, but the Princes are more active on this world, and you have the foreknowledge which I am granting you. This is the address of a man who can explain things in a clearer manner than perhaps I can. He is human, after all."

Marie took the paper she was offered, memorized the address, and put it in her coat. "Anything else you can tell me, in case this guy dies before I meet him?"

Snowman nodded. "Going to the Dreamlands will do very little for you. The parasite nightmare cannot come if it is not called but so long as it is still being called, it cannot be stopped. The only way to keep it from becoming real is for you to break the connection on this side, as it will be folly to go to the city itself, but the connection will be in the waking world, not the Dreamlands. Remember, however, that someone has been making preparations for its coming for many years now. Furthermore, they would appear to be in Chicago, based on the fact that it is from this city that we may see the city of the parasite nightmare."

"Is that all?"

"That is all. Ibsen Wilde will be able to explain more to you. He would know the situation as it pertains to this world. I and my peers have no such awareness of your unique circumstances."

"Thank you."

There was silence for a little while, but then Snowman began to speak again, and tell a story which another had given to it recently. It and Marie talked further, to distract themselves from the city across the lake, in whose direction they pointedly did not look again. They talked for a long time, until the liquor had been drunk to the last drop and the last cigarette had been used to a stub, and then they parted ways.

The winds had been cold that night, but from beneath its wing, she was kept quite warm.

[RobertMason]

SHEILA THURGOOD— Marie was freezing up frequently today. There is a connection in her mind, I believe, between Gabby and Zelia. She draws a few comparisons between them, and where Gabby is already dead, Marie expects Zelia to be dead in a matter of years as well, and not too far off from when Gabby died.

This sense of imminent death is something which I've noticed to be cropping up often with her. She thinks that she'll be dead in a year. None of these other Captains of whom she speaks have lived very long. Marie has talked about the Russians a couple of times, I believe, and she's even talked about the heat death of the universe. Inevitability is a very big concern with her, it seems. Or not so much a concern as it is a matter which she's aware of. If it's inevitable, there's no point in her being concerned about it, she thinks. She's simply aware of it, and keeps pressing forward, so that what's inevitable happens tomorrow, instead of today.

I don't think that she's at risk of killing herself, at least.

I was being completely truthful when I said that she could be considered to be suffering from battle fatigue. I haven't focused much on the possibility, but there isn't very much doubt in my mind that, if I pressed the issue and looked in the right places, I would be able to see all the signs. She strikes me, however, as the sort of person who would try to keep them hidden, and do a very good job of it, too.

I have refrained from doing this so far because I don't want to let anything between Marie and I slip to anyone else, and I'm afraid that if I started involving other people, they might get some clues, but... I don't even want her parents involved in this right now, especially because I think that she'll do better if she isn't getting watched like a hawk at home, and I know well enough that even if they manage to check themselves, the idea that... They might not even notice it, but the atmosphere at home might change dramatically. It took me four hours to convince them to give Marie room and to not press her at all, not just not too hard, but at all. I don't think that any good is going to come out of Marie being assaulted all the time, especially when it seems that she spends so little time at home already.
I don't know what to make of this Wake which she's talking about. Is it, really, a drug?

I really, really have no idea where to go with this. I've only had the trouble of dealing with such a... If she's delusional and is believing everything that she says... I really, really don't want to... I'm going to go along with this for a few more weeks. Then I'll figure out what I'm going to do. I hope to the Holy Spirit that she's just toying around with me and using metaphors and trying to talk to me by working around the real matter at hand with stories.

I can handle this is she's really believing all of this, but honestly, it's just... It is a little disconcerting whenever I have to deal with a situation like this. She sounds so rational. I just... hate it when it's like that, when you wouldn't be able to tell that they were delusional, if you knew nothing about the world contrary to what they were talking about.

I can still manage, though. I just hope that this isn't what I'm dealing with.

I might have to have a talk with her parents, however. I really don't know. It's an option, though. I'll keep it in reserve. It doesn't need to be now.

Her sister is a very big vulnerability. If something happened just by accident, I can't begin to imagine any possible manner in which Marie would act, which wouldn't be catastrophic. I have a very bad feeling that I'm going to find hard evidence that everything that keeps Marie held together is made up of Zelia.

I'm going to make sure to talk about that notebook which she's always bringing. She's written in it a few times while we've been together. Maybe there's something about it which might help. That's the main thing. I have to work out everybody in their own situation. She appears to be well enough, or at least stable enough, that I can still spend a few weeks trying to learn as much as I can, and testing out different approaches, before I have to actually go with something.

I might have her tell me more of these other Captains. Maybe I can figure out if they relate to actual people and, if so, try to get in contact with them.

She's got an explanation for everything, though. That's the most interesting part of it. If it weren't for the fact that it was all so obviously wrong, she would have convinced me of it all by now. Every little loose thread I pick at has an explanation.

(ST laughs)

She took London better than I expected. It brought up some bad associations however, it seems. But still...

It looks like I'm stopping just in time. Marie may have been doing well enough, but otherwise I'm quickly losing open spots in my schedule.

[RobertMason]

"M-Marie?"

"Yes? Oh." Marie shook her head and walked over to the window. She shut it, then walked to April and took her into a tight embrace. "I didn't expect you, little cousin. Shouldn't you be asleep?"

April finally tore her eyes away from the window, satisfied that it wouldn't suddenly open up, and that the outside was firmly Outside. "I woke up."

Marie laughed. "I figured that, little cousin of mine."

"I had a dream and it woke me up. Then I heard the w-wind from your room."

Still holding onto the girl, scarcely two years older than Zelia, Marie ruffled her hair. "Would you like to talk about your dream?"

"It's okay. Can I stay with you?"

Marie smiled broadly, and walked her cousin over to her bed. "Sure." She slipped in first, and April sat down on her lap.

"What are you reading?"

Marie showed her, then: "Schumbaumer. The Library in Morning. First in the series. I've been meaning to get to it for a long time."

"Is it good?"

"Would I be reading it if it wasn't? Are you doubting my taste, April?"

The girl looked up at her older cousin and smiled. "What's it about?"

"Interspecies romance.

"Romance," came the expected grumble. "I thought that you didn't like romance."

"I don't like badly-written trite stuff that isn't worth the paper it's printed on. This, however, is a good story." It was obvious, from the look on her face, that April was about to demand a different story. "It also takes place on another world. Venus, in fact."

"Are you sure that it's good? I don't want a stupid bad romance story. I think that your brain is melting. You never liked romances before."

"This is Schumbaumer. Schumbaumer could write the kinds of romantic tales which are not fit for young ladies' eyes and which do not include a speck of plot, and I would still read them." Marie poked her cousin in the forehead. "Now do you want me to read, or do you want me to do everything but read? There are only so many hours in the day, April."

"Read!" April commanded, in that imperial tone which only young children and megalomaniacal adults are able to master.

Marie did so, and it was only half a chapter before April was yawning, another chapter before she was asleep, and two more chapters before Marie was finally able to follow her.

There may have been, before she fell asleep, the idle thought that she should, in fact, see if Schumbaumer did by any chance write any such plotless stories. Out of simple curiosity, she would have quickly assured young April.

End of Interlude Three



If you've been reading along, but haven't commented so far, I'd love to hear what you think so far, especially if you've got any theories about what's going on now, and what'll be happening in the future. I'm hoping to try to give certain impressions, but of my Betas, one got all the spoilers ahead of time (I had to tell somebody, to make sure that they didn't suck) and the other isn't very much of a WMG type.

[RobertMason]

Transcript Four
SHEILA THURGOOD: Hello Marie. Are you doing better?
MARIE GRAYSON: Hello. (pause) I suppose so. Certainly, things couldn't... No, they could be worse. Which is good. That they aren't as bad as they could be, that is.
ST: Are you okay?
(pause)
MG: I could be better. I'm just a little distracted, I think.
ST: Distracted by what?
MG: I... Work. (MG chuckles) Needing to find out some information. I'm having some trouble getting it, though, and people aren't being... How should I put it? Helpful. I think I might have to knock some heads together before I get anywhere. Metaphorically, of course. Somebody seems to be putting a bad word out about me.
ST: What are you writing?
MG: Just things. Nonsense.
ST: Could I take a look at it, please?
(pause)
MG: Sure. There isn't anything for you to make sense of.
ST: What are these? Did you come up with these symbols by yourself?
MG: No. I don't really know what they mean. I mean, I can understand them, but it's like Reading a book and understanding what it's getting across, without actually knowing the meaning behind any of the individual words or letters. There are some symbols there which I've gotten a general sense of, because of where they keep on popping up and how they seem to be used, but I haven't ever bothered with actually trying to figure it out.
ST: So do you just copy this down from somewhere else? I've never seen anything like this.
MG: Sometimes I wake up and I've been writing this down. Or I catch a flash of it when I'm working on something else. Like when I'm talking to you.
ST: Does this happen often to you, Marie?
MG: Every now and then. (pause) I've used five or six notebooks, but they're all small like that one. Then some scrap paper. It comes and goes every now and then. Just random flashes of inspiration. I don't always know what it all means.
ST: What about when you do know what it— (pages flipping rapidly) There are some very good pictures here.
MG: It's not me. I'm... (MG sighs) Little sketches from inside my leviathan's head. I can only draw that well when I'm not thinking about it. I think that my leviathan guides my hand. I certainly can't do much better than stick figures with some shading. I think that they're memories, or at least thoughts, bleeding over into my mind.
ST: From your leviathan?
MG: You see how messed-up all the proportions are in this picture? And the way that everything curves over to the left, and then the fuzziness over here, and way that it almost looks like everyone is, I don't know, bulging inward or something? So that's not exactly how a leviathan might perceive the world, but all I had was a pencil and a piece of paper. This isn't so much exactly how it perceives things, I think, so much as it is a sort of representation; the world looks utterly different to my leviathan.
ST: How do you think that the world looks to it?
(silence)
MG: I think that there are a lot of shadows. I think that everything is, I don't know, thumping. Like the world has a heartbeat.
ST: Why?
MG: Sometimes I get these things in my head, and I can't really understand them, but those are the traces I'm left with once it's over.
ST: By things do you mean other levia—
MG: No. Feelings or sensations or, I don't know, temporary hallucinations or something? Like when I wake up and the pencil is in my hand, and I see that I've written nonsense Pnakotic down for three pages in my notebook, and drawn some sort of... some sort of... sketch? Graph? Something. Whatever.
ST: How long has this been happening?
MG: Since I was twelve, of course. Since I was visited by The Redlight.
ST: Why do you think that The Redlight chose you, Marie?
(silence)
MG: I don't know. I really don't know. There was my age, certainly; if the girl is too young, then she's just going to get killed by the transplant, but if she's too old, then her body isn't going to accept it. It's like getting a bad organ, or a transfusion of the wrong type of blood. The soul and the body are very connected to each other, and if you start playing around with things like that without being careful, then you won't end up... right. But right before puberty, the body is already getting ready to start some changes. It can deal better with the stress of getting a leviathan. You can do it later, if you want, but you're going to need to do the equivalent of tearing out the engine in your car and all of those other mechanical pieces and replacing half of them. If the leviathan is going to stay for more than a little while, that is. But if it isn't just a short-term possession of the body, then the leviathan is going to need to yank out all these random pieces and... it's like performing a lobotomy on the soul. If you're going to make a Captain, then the things which you need to do in order to keep the body from dying or rejecting the leviathan, if you aren't doing it before puberty, are going to waste the point. You want personal initiative in a Captain, for example. If you just wanted a body-suit to walk around in, then you would just take a random person.
ST: It was just your age, then?
MG: Maybe it was also the fact that I was dying at the moment, so I was not really in a position to say no. Even if I did, I could just be taken by The Redlight then, like It did with a dozen other children that season. Really, though, it was just random chance. I don't think that there's any of us, actually, who could have affected their chances of becoming a Captain, besides changing their age or being born boys.
ST: I was wondering if we might be able to talk about some of the other Captains, actually. How many are there in Chicago?
MG: Twenty or thirty maybe? Well, I guess that depends on who you're talking about, actually. I mean, there are more than just human Captains in this city. There's maybe sixty yuggothr in Chicago and they're all Captains. Maybe thirty more k'k't Captains. Captains from other species, too. It adds up. But humans? Twenty or thirty, I think. I only know fourteen, fifteen really well. Paragon, I only know her by reputation. She might be dead, actually, but there have been a few lulls in the past, and she might just be lying low right now. There are some others. You can usually count on a Captain to last at least a year. It's almost like some sort of metaphysical inertia or something. Then about a year passes, and we start to slow down and really realize what we're doing, and often enough we get killed then, before we realize that we need to keep moving quickly. If you want to make money gambling, put money down that a Captain will die in her second year. Slightly better than fifty-fifty odds. Maybe sixty-forty.
ST: Do you gamble?
MG: Eh. Sometimes. Sometimes at school. Or with the occasional other Captain. We can't really, eh, trust each other with... big things, but there's maybe a handful of Captains who I feel almost safe sitting down with, to chat. Share stories. Play cards with for a little bit. Mainly it's because they're all littler than me.
ST: Younger than you, you mean?
MG: Yes. Experience is pretty important in this job. I'm seventeen, which means that I'm basically like an old grandmother here. I know tricks that they've only heard of and, even more importantly, I have been performing those tricks for so long that they're second nature to me. If Mercy Wheel suddenly figures out something new, I haven't suddenly lost my advantage there. Half of this stuff is all in your... in your head. Have you ever gone to pick something up and you thought that it was lighter than it really was, but you picked it up anyways, because you didn't realize that you should have been telling yourself that it was too heavy? Or just learning something by rote. Like with the guns. You can learn how to disassemble it, but it'll take time before your hands move without you even directing them. Gabby got into that mode pretty quickly. She would have been a poor Captain, though. She would have been one of those Captains who dies in her second year. If they make it past their second year, though, there's good odds that they'll live another two. Once they've gotten past that little hurdle, they're conditioned well enough. You don't need to think so much about what you're doing. You just need to know what you want to do, and your body will do it. It's all become instinct to you.
ST: You don't really trust them, then. You just think that you can beat them in a fight, so you feel safe about settling down in front of them.
MG: I would say that that's about right. I might use their information as a place to start looking, if I need to figure something out and I'm all out of other roads to go down. I certainly don't lose anything at that point, even if the information is bad. Actively depending on them, though? I can't keep my eyes forward on the people who I know are trying to kill me and at the same time keep an extra eye on the Captain who said she would help me, and might actually help me, but might also be working with the other side. She doesn't even need to betray me, even. All she needs is to suddenly get an idea about how to do things better, right when we're in the middle of something, and then we're both dead because either she goes along with it, and it gets us killed, or we have to stop and argue about how that idea isn't worth a carcass on the road, and then we die.
ST: You don't depend on anyone in a poker game, though.
MG: No. It's easier to do things like this. It's safer. We can talk sometimes. We're amicable often enough, although there are a few Captains who I don't think I'll be getting along with very well, the next time that I see them. It's just that there's a line between trusting them and being able to depend on them, and then just being friendly. I don't instantly think that I have to kill a Captain, the moment I see her. I'm ready to do it at any moment if it turns out that I have to, though.
ST: How do you contact them? Or are the poker games spur of the moment affairs that occur whenever you happen to meet and happen to be in the mood for a poker game?
(ST chuckles)
MG: Don't you laugh, doctor. That's happened on a couple of occasions.
(MG yawns)
ST: Tired?
MG: Only a little bit. I'm completely fine. Honest. I'm... (pause) I'm just going to walk around the room right now. I just need to be up right now. That's more than enough. Mmm... We have our haunts, and other channels. You can figure out how to get the word to a Captain, if you want to. There's a box at a post office around North Lawndale that Seventy-Two uses. Violet Child checks the Behcets' mail everyday, so there's another Captain who can be contacted with a letter. Knife Errant has this... (MG yawns) this little street down in the Down Shires that she frequents.
ST: What about—
MG: You're thinking about contacting someone, aren't you?
ST: Marie, I—
MG: Don't finish that. Let's both be able to believe that I'm just being overly suspicious or whatever it is, and that you really aren't going to do something insane like contact another Captain. I can't vouch for their sanity, doctor. Now, I'll admit that I haven't developed an emotional attachment to you, so there's no problem there, but I have certainly developed the ability to tolerate you, and it would be very inconvenient and frustrating for me if you were to get killed by a Captain, and I got saddled with a brand-new therapist. Especially because everyone will probably think that I killed you. I could break out of a prison if I needed to, but... (MG sighs) It's the same reasoning behind why I'm talking to you each week in the first place. It's so much easier to just do it.
ST: I'm flattered by how much I and the rest of this all means to you, Marie. I won't try to contact any of them.
MG: Thank you.
ST: What about you? How do they contact you?
(silence)
MG: Messages on the walls, most often. That's how most of us do it, really. Chicago is a big city, but I can move through it all in a decent amount of time as I go through my Patrols.
ST: And you just meet each other to talk?
MG: Why not? Yeah, they're all... Well, they're Captains, but there's something that we can't get from anyone else. Just being able to sit down for a few minutes or stand or whatever is kind of relaxing. You can't be too relaxed, since then one of the other Captains might stab you in the back and get to skinning you— that's what Kelly Jelly did to three other Captains. It was back in oh-four, turn of the century. Generations ago, for a Captain, but we still talk about it every now and then. That was nasty, what she did.
ST: I can only imagine.
(MG laughs)
MG: You're not doing a very good job of imagining it. I can tell you that. Oh, you think that you know what it must have been like, but you don't really understand what Kelly Jelly was doing. She skinned Captains. You don't understand what that means for Captains. (MG chuckles) Kelly Jelly... You can tell that most of us use the same fugging names that we came up with when we were twelve, can't you? Of course, the newspapers aren't all too much better either, are they? They'll come up with some sort of pun or rhyme like "Hillerman the Killer Man" or some sort of piece of crap like that and run with it. (MG sighs) We regenerate pretty quickly. You have to remember that. They say that once the other Captains figured out what Kelly Jelly was doing, and tracked her down, she had something like a hundred skins in that tenement, and only eleven of them weren't from those three Captains.
(long silence)
MG: Oh, and now you're getting it, aren't you? (MG laughs) I see the look on your face now. Before you were just "Oh my, that sounds so awful." Now you're really feeling what she did. It took hours to kill her, it said, even with eight Captains going at her. She just wouldn't die. That's one of the biggest dangers you're up against, if you're fighting a Captain who just snapped like Kelly Jelly did. You're fighting them and you're fighting them and you're hurting them so badly, and you keep on breaking their bones and tearing them apart, and you can be beating them with their own arm that you just ripped off a minute ago, and they just won't die, because they don't get it. They don't get it.
ST: They don't get what?
MG: That they should be lying down and dying. They just keep on going like some sort of train, a-chugging and a-chugging along, WOO-WOO, and they don't stop. There isn't anything left in their mind to tell them that they've been beaten and that they're exhausted and that by no standard, human or Captain, should they still be capable of moving, because they have just gotten the piss knocked out of them for six hours, and after that sort of fight they do not have the right to keep marching on and slicing people up as if she's in a butcher's shop and it's her, standing all alone, against a Damned army of possessed, man-eating, fugging cows.
ST: What?
MG: I don't know. She was outnumbered, six against one, and Kelly Jelly still killed two Captains before she died. I'm not counting the three she killed before that, either. And they don't have the right to smile like that. You don't get to smile like that, after the only reason you have a jaw is that you regenerated it completely, because twenty seconds ago somebody tore it off of you.
ST: You're talking as if you saw her smile.
MG: No. No... I've seen other people go like Kelly Jelly did. Not nearly as bad, of course, or else we would be talking about, say, Amber Green in the hushed tones instead, nowadays, because then we're not just telling each other stories about way back when, but bringing up the memories everybody's got from four years ago, but I can still get the chills from thinking about them even now, and they... They had snapped, but they were still around, in a certain manner of speaking. Kelly Jelly was one of those who jumped into the pit of madness and turned out to have jumped into the one that was bottomless. There are Captains who just can't deal with things and... We're all crazy.
ST: What do you mean?
MG: We are all messed up. All the Captains. We're just the sort of crazy that manages to function well in polite society. Do you know what I mean?
ST: Probably better than you realize.
(MG laughs)
MG: So there are regular old Captains. Insane. They can just cover it up. Then there are the ones who can't cover it up anymore. Like Amber Green. One day she started thinking that everyone was a leviathan, and she was screaming about how she could feel it moving under her skin, and how it wouldn't stop shrieking in her ears, even when she was trying to sleep. She killed twenty people before Minister Rufous and Seventy-Two threw her into a brick wall. I came onto the scene just in time to hear some more of her screaming, and then we killed her. Mercy, really.
ST: Who's Seventy-Two?
MG: Just another Captain. Minister Rufous and Seventy-Two are always together. Always have been, since... (pause) two years ago? Something like that. Seventy-Two was barely halfway through that pivotal second year, herself, and then this little girl comes along onto the scene, turned into a Captain without even knowing what she was sharing her body with. Her Prince wants to know how something like that will turn out, like I told you last week. I had my own problems to deal with, and only paid enough attention to the new girl to bet Knife Errant two dollars that she wouldn't last a month. Seventy-Two picked her up, though, and they've saved each other's life a couple of times. (MG yawns) I think that they're sleeping together.



Despite being the author, I'm not entirely sure if they are or not, myself. Marie's conclusion actually speaks a lot more about herself than Rufus and 7-2.

[RobertMason]

ST: Why do you say that?
MG: Madwomen that they are, they probably trust each other. Minister Rufous doesn't have any family. She doesn't even bother to conceal her face. We all know that she's just some homeless girl we probably all saw a number of times before all of a sudden she was one of us and we were making bets on how long she's going to last, and how she would die. I'll get my two dollars back, with an extra five in the bargain, if she gets eaten by a leviathan.
ST: You're being quite callous about this.
MG: Why shouldn't I have been? For that matter, why shouldn't I be right now? I had my own problems to deal with, like I said before. Captains don't die all the time, but that's just because there isn't enough of us to die all the fugging time, and we're plain hard to kill to begin with. The oldest human Captain who hasn't turned into a Solitaire is still Knife Errant, though, and she's nearly nineteen. We die fast. Minister Rufous and Seventy-Two are going at it like there's no tomorrow. I guarantee it. People always seem to turn to jumping into bed whenever they think that they're going to die. Every day, we think that we might die this day or the next, and their hormones are kicking in at this stage in their lives, bless their Sapphic little hearts, and they trust each other, and they understand what they're each going through. Frankly, I'm surprised that they get out of bed longer to do anything than go to the bathroom and grab a bite to eat.
(ST laughs)
ST: I only have what you're providing me, to go by, but put like that, perhaps you have a point.
MG: Of course I have a fugging point. I'm utterly right. (pause) Kind of jealous, too, but that isn't the—
ST: Jealous? (pause) I can see that. Yes.
MG: Still isn't the point.
ST: Why, though?
MG: Isn't it obvious?
ST: No, actually. There are many reasons why you might be jealous, and it might be any or all of them. You could be jealous of the fact that in each other, they have a partner who can defend herself. Or it might be as far removed from Captainship as possible, and be the simple fact that this particular kind of relationship would be frowned on in society, but given the way that they live their lives, it isn't like there's anyone to make trouble because of it in the first place.
(MG laughs)
MG: Believe me, doctor, the last thing I'm ever going to be concerned with is the opinion of other people in this world. (pause) It's the trust, and the knowledge. If they manage to not get killed by something else, then their trust in each other is going to get one of them killed. I can't help but almost wish that I could be a little bit less rational and cautious about this, though. Holy fugging spirit of (cursing becomes unintelligible, goes on for twelve seconds).
ST: What?
MG: Fugging self-revelation, or whatever it is that you want to call it. Epiphany. Whatever. I'm talking to you because my stupid side has blindsided my cautious side, and gotten me to talk to you about all of this because, Holy Spirit spare my fugging foolish soul, I'm that hungry for someone who I can trust to talk about everything with, without having to worry about, well, anything. (MG sighs) My stupid side lucked out on this one, though. You couldn't kill me even if you tried. I don't think that you could even manage to hit me before I broke the arm you were trying to strike me with. Maybe I'll recommend that the other Captains get therapists. Only to the ones that aren't likely to snap violently to their therapists, of course.
ST: That's a very odd way of giving a compliment. It sounds alright, but I can't help but feel that there's something there that I should be offended by. Thank you anyways.
MG: This Kelly Jelly story isn't exaggeration. Every Captain older than me has told me the story, and even Crow Militant, who thought that somehow I hadn't heard the story even though she was three years my junior, and each time there's been something different. The story I told you, however, was told to me by a Captain who was in Chicago all that time ago.
ST: I thought that you said that Captains didn't— was she a Solitaire?
MG: Lucky, lucky, Doctor Thurgood, you are correct, but no doubt you got it through the wrong line of thinking. For one thing, the way you were saying that, it sounds like you were thinking that being a Solitaire affects your life expectancy. Which is does, actually, but in a very negative fashion. I've been talking about human Captains, though, when I have been talking about things like how long we can expect to live, and the right age to turn one of us into a Captain. K'k't'k, for example, can become Captains at less than a year old.
ST: This Captain wasn't human?
MG: Yuggoth. Captain for two centuries. Solitaire, like the rest of them. It didn't fight Kelly Jelly, because it didn't care about this sort of thing, but it felt that the story was interesting, and got it straight from the mind of one of the Captains who survived the fight. Now, it might have been stretching the truth, but I don't think that it was. (pause) Knife Errant reminds me of the stories about Kelly Jelly. Right down to the fondness for cutting implements. I'm keeping an eye on her.
ST: Do you seriously think that she might turn out to be like Kelly Jelly?
MG: Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. She doesn't skin people, at least. She's a terror to small animals, though. Still, that is rather standard faire when it comes to us Captains. If she starts to get out of line and we find out that she's been targeting bystanders, then we'll have to step in. For most of us, there would be the worry that either by accident or because she figured out their identities and wanted to hurt us for some reason, she would take someone we cared about. For everyone else, there would be the worry that once she progressed to regular people, it wouldn't be too long before she progressed to Captains. And it wouldn't take too long, either. Kelly Jelly only killed a few people before she started killing Captains. Right now, though, Knife Errant seems to have it under control, to put it as such. According to rumor, she's on the honor roll at some fancy Catholic school, not a single black mark on her record. She just likes cutting things open. I can't blame her, really. It's one of the easiest ways to lose your sanity as a Captain, and when you're bound to lose it somehow, it's one of the best. What's better than learning to love your job, after all? (pause) No doubt, you're going to disregard my warnings and try to contact a Captain, so do not, for the love of the Holy Spirit, do anything that involves Knife Errant.
ST: I promise, Marie. You have nothing to worry about.
MG: If you so much as hear the words "Knife" or "Errant," or even "error," on the slight chance that they were referring to Knife Errant but decided to use only the second word and accidentally got the second syllable wrong, turn and run. Or just run, if there's someplace you can run to without turning. Do not deal with Knife Errant.
ST: I thought that you said that she wasn't doing anything to people.
MG: Right now. You might be the first she kills. (pause) Besides, she might see you as a threat. To her , or her job, or to all of us. There's a difference between a bystander and an ordinary, flesh-and-blood-with-nothing-extraordinary-added human who, despite that, is still wrapped up in our world and doing things that affect us.
ST: What is her job?
MG: Protecting some old book. I don't know the name. She stabbed me in the— (MG laughs) She stabbed me in the liver when I asked her about the name. She's very protective of it. She knows that I don't care about the stupid book, and she won't even tell me the title, just to make sure that I don't accidentally let it slip to someone else that she has that particular book, in fear that the knowledge might eventually make its way to the ears of someone who is looking for the book. Plus, I don't want the book now, but I might think differently once I know what it is.  Or someone might take the title from my mind.
ST: I don't think that we've ever had a conversation like this before, Marie. We have less than thirty minutes left, and you haven't asked about the time yet.
MG: You're growing on me, I suspect.
ST: What have you been doing this week? Are you doing well?
MG: As well as I can be doing, Doctor Thurgood. You asked me how I was doing already, though.
ST: I did. Hm. Well, you haven't told me what you have been doing, just how well you've been doing.
MG: I've started up a new book this week. I suspect that April will be making me read it to her now that I've already read some of it to her. Even though she absolutely abhors "pathetic flat romances." I love the dear. I really do. But I do think that I may have been a slightly bad influence on her. I should have explained that what is bad is a love story which is pathetic and stale, and that love stories are not by definition pathetic and stale, even if this may be hard to tell at first. Still, it takes place on Venus, and she's an absolute victim for anything that's taking place in some far-away location that isn't here, like Middle-Earth or China or even Alaska. (pause) I am suddenly interested in seeing if anyone has written any contemporary fiction in Alaska. I am much more of a science fiction girl, but Alaska suddenly interests me.
ST: Why?
MG: I don't know. Perhaps my mind realizes that I haven't been making the teenage girl's quota for random decisions which made for no reason at all. Still, I will have to check it out and see if anyone has written anything worth reading. Well, once I'm done reading this book. And the two books after it. If I'm still alive, then I'll look into Alaska.
ST: Have you ever been to Alaska?
MG: No.
ST: Very militarized, and very cold. I would be hard-pressed to say which one was more so. The people are very hardy, however. Very beautiful, too. You should visit there if you ever happen to leave Chicago, although I believe that you'll need to clear it ahead of time. They don't like people visiting without warning.
MG: You've been there, then?
ST: Twice, for a few weeks each time. I may go back again in a couple of years.
MG: Try not to die of frostbite or leviathan when you go.
ST: I shall endeavor to do my best, Marie. By that time, however, you will be clear of any need to take sessions with me. I would hardly think that you'd have cause for concern.
MG: By that time, I'll be dead, too. Still, I've taken a bit of a liking to you. There's no sense to you getting eaten unnecessarily.
ST: But if it is necessary, then it's all alright?
MG: Of course. That's why it's called "necessary," doctor. You don't cry about necessary costs.
ST: I suppose not.
(pause)
MG: An acquaintance of mine is leaving soon. (pause) I'm not surprised.
ST: They always leave in the end?
MG: Yes. I always thought that it would outlive me. I suppose that it is, really. It just won't be staying in Chicago.
ST: Why are you saying "it"?
MG: Yuggothr don't have genders. There isn't any other term to use, so far as I'm aware.
ST: Why is your acquaintance leaving?
MG: Chicago is turning unfriendly. More unfriendly than usual. There are some problems cropping up. Maybe I'll be able to fix them. Maybe not. I'm going to be taking to someone in a few days about it, to try to learn more. I would have gone two days ago, when I first got his address, but.... (MG sighs) The rest of the city doesn't stop moving just because there's something important for me to do, no matter how much I'd like for it to at least slow down. Things almost seem to speed up at times like this, actually, but that's probably just because I'm having to handle more things at once.
ST: What's happening?
MG: Something's coming. I don't really know what it is. The yuggothr are calling it one thing, but they have this, this insane way of looking at things. That's what yuggothr do. That's what nonhumans do. That's what humans do, but we're human, so we don't notice the insane way that we look at things. It made sense when I was talking to it before, but it's just nagging at my mind and nagging and nagging... I don't know. It still makes sense in a way. There's just these little things that... (MG sighs)
ST: What doesn't make sense?
MG: I don't know. It's just one of those things that... It's bigger than I've been told. I knew that already, I suppose. That's why I'm going to be talking to this other guy. Ibsen something something. I don't remember his name. It's on the paper that the yuggoth gave to me. Maybe it will all rest easier in my mind once I'm done talking to him.
ST: What did the yuggoth tell you?
MG: It's nothing, it's nothing. There's somebody looking for me now. That happens on occasion. He was strange. He acted like a leviathan was riding him, but he was clean. There was something which had messed up his head, though. Touched by a leviathan, then, not ridden by one. I couldn't get anything out of him. He had a picture of me. Not me, exactly, but how I look when I'm active. He had a picture. All black and white. He was showing it to everyone as we were leaving school. I should have looked around, some, and figured out where else he had been showing it, if he was planning on showing it anywhere else, if he had narrowed me down to that area or had he just moved there from the last area he was searching in... I'm off my fugging... I should have done all of that already. I slipped up. Disoriented. I was expecting to find all that in his mind, but instead everything is just fuzzy. Yellow. Fugging yellow.
ST: What about yellow?
MG: It's all I can remember from his head. There was some sort of symbol there. I can't remember what it looked like. Just that it was yellow.
ST: Anything like the symbols in your notebook?
MG: Maybe. I don't think so, but there is that whole "I can't remember what it looked like" part of this. Of course, I'm hardly an expert on the Pnakotic script. Maybe it's part of it, but I'm just not familiar with it.
ST: Yellow symbols. Amber Green. Violet Child. Minister Rufous. Colors are common with Captains.
MG: Yes.
ST: Is there something about leviathans, or something else related to Captains, that causes this?
MG: I don't know. I really, really don't know. (MG chuckles) You forgot that my mother named me "Blue." Marie Blue Grayson. Was I marked for this from birth? Did my mother somehow have a premonition of what was in store for me when she named me? When The Redlight was out and stalking about the city, in the year of my birth, did It sniff me out, decide to choose little girl who was born out so far away from Chicago? My aunt lived here, back then. Did It somehow notice that she'd get involved withy my uncle, trace his bloodline over to me, decide to cast me as some sort of prodigal daughter of Chicago, though I'd never lived here before? Even though I wasn't born yet? (pause) Maybe it's just coincidence. Amber Green. Violet Child. Minister Rufous. Sure. But there's Seventy-Two, and Crow Militant. The Blaze. Wreathe. Pepperidge and Mercy Wheel and Pinewood and Kelly Jelly. Yoko. Knife Errant. (MG sighs) Who knows? Maybe there isn't even any relation between leviathans and colors. Maybe there is, but that my middle name is a color is what's the coincidence. I'm certainly not going to say that the Bolsheviks are run by leviathans, just because they're Red. I start trying to read too much into a random mess and I start to see a pattern, and then I'm spending all my time trying to figure out the meaning behind what that fugging stupid raven says.
ST: You're probably right.
MG: It's a coincidence of this sort or that sort, or it's not a coincidence at all. It seems to me that there's only three possibilities, and I accounted for them all. Of course I'm right. When you say it's this or this or this, and those are the only things it can be, then of course you're right. The world is either flat, or it's round. I'm— Holy Spirit, why am I going on about this?
ST: What are you going to do in the next few years, Marie?
MG: Die, obviously. Maybe sooner than I expected.
(ST sighs)
ST: Humor me, Marie.
MG: Alright.
(silence)

[Aggie]

Jonesin' for an update - but I'll be incommunicado for the next week here, anyways.  I'm sure there will be some when I return.

No clue on what's to transpire, really - if a story is simple / heavily foreshadowed enough to let me guess what's next, it's not interesting to me (that being said, I generally don't try to figure out what's next - if I'm right it's boring and if I'm wrong it's pointless).  This is interesting.

[RobertMason]

ST: I'm waiting.
MG: I'm thinking. (pause) Find somebody to replace John. It's not the Wake, but it can distract me for a little bit, and I'm, aheh, touchy as can be once I come down from the Wake anyhow. Having somebody else was a relief for those times. Then die.
ST: Marie...
(ST sighs)
MG: I'm going to be killed by The Redlight if I manage to live five years, doctor. There's no getting around that. Forgive me if my plans are somewhat sketchy before that point, because besides the intense unlikelihood of my living past this year anyways, there's no point to doing anything besides just supporting myself and producing a surplus and contributing to the family whenever possible. And after five years, I'm definitely dead. The Messenger to Him in the Gulf is a Prince-killer. A few of the yuggothr are Prince-killers, but none of the ones on this world. Princes don't die easily, and The Redlight isn't going to be convinced to just let me be, live and let live.
ST: Then let's pretend, Marie, that you somehow manage to live more than five years. The Redlight isn't a problem anymore. What will you do then?
MG: I have no fugging idea, doctor. You're asking a caveman to consider how he's going to travel to Neptune. He doesn't even know what Neptune is.
ST: Then think on it, will you? Next week you can tell me what you've come up with.
(MG sighs)
MG: And what's the point?
ST: The point is to give you a reason to live more than five years. I don't like having patients who don't have any idea what they're going to do in the future because they're convinced that they'll be dead soon. Even if they're suffering from fatal diseases, I still do what I can to convince them to figure out what they want to do past the time that they're supposed to be dead. It gives them something to aim for. You're more likely to let yourself die if you feel that everything is settled and that maybe it's just for the best if you would simply lay down and go to sleep.
MG: I'm not going to kill myself, Doctor Thurgood.
ST: I'm not saying that you will. You keep on saying that it's mental things that are most important in a fight between leviathans or Captains, and that if you want to heal yourself, you have to have a reason to want to heal yourself.
(MG sighs)
MG: Fine. I'll think of some stuff and tell you next week. Can we drop it for now?
ST: Yes. How is life at home right now?
MG: It's as fine as it could ever be, doctor. Zelia helped me make breakfast for everyone four days ago. I'm wondering if I should make a tradition of it to give her another thing to cling onto once I'm gone. Like the boots. But maybe it'll just keep the wound raw for longer, to give her yet another thing to remember her dead sister by. She might prefer to simply forget all about me and let go and move on.
ST: She certainly wouldn't, Marie.
(pause)
MG: You're right. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be the best decision for her to make. She's five, anyways. It should be easy for her to forget me. I shouldn't make it harder on her.
ST: Didn't you wish that you remembered more of your grandmother?
MG: No. Why should I want to? Why should I care about her? I don't remember anything but her funeral. There's no attachment there. It would be best for her.
ST: There is a difference, I think, between not remembering much about your dead grandmother, and not remembering much about your dead sister.
MG: When she's thirty years old and has only the faintest memories of me, how will she be hurting from not knowing more about me? She'll probably have forgotten everything by then, in fact.
ST: What's your biggest problem, Marie?
MG: Excuse me?
ST: What's your biggest problem? What is it that, more than anything else, holds you back?
MG: People, maybe. I could do more if I weren't so worried about some people. Or about not being a person. But it's justified. I'm growing distant from regular people. Half of the time when I'm eating dinner with my family, I drag a book to the table. It's just easier to not talk to them and pretend that they're alright because at least I'm eating dinner with them. (MG sighs) People are almost an abstract concept. People are important. Sure. But I can have trouble deciding why this person in particular is important. And I'm too flashy.
ST: What do you mean?
MG: I'm showy in a fight. I can jump out from the shadows and ambush as well as the next person. But I can't keep up the stealth approach. After that first blow I'm in the open, I'm throwing fire, I'm moving at my target in a beeline, I'm not bothering at all to keep myself hidden. Most of the time, this works. The full-out open approach makes me a bit more excited, and that's almost as important as anything else in a battle. But when I have to go at it stealthily, past the first blow, I just cant' get it together well. Me and complicated tactics don't exactly mix well, either. I've lost plenty of limbs for both problems.
ST: You mentioned the Dreamlands last week. How does that place work?
MG: A lot like Lovecraft said, actually. I have to wonder if he was a dreamer. Maybe that was how he became involved in all of this in the first place. You can tell that he had a very different relationship with the Dream Cycle stories than with the rest of them. There really are cats there. One probably affected the other. I've been there on a couple of occasions. I don't really deal with it much. There are other Captains who I leave that job to. Mercy Wheel practically lives there. The last time I went there was to deal with the me-deg. All Dreamlands have their similarities. You can navigate them all pretty well once you've figured out a few.
ST: There are others?
MG: Every world has one. I've never tried to find out why. Mercy Wheel probably knows, but I don't often talk to her. The yuggothr know it all very well. They're very concerned about their own Dreamlands, you see. It's all split up and torn apart and divided between all of these other Dreamlands, from what I understand. It's because their world doesn't really exist anymore. The me-deg figured out how to cross from Dreamlands to Dreamlands by using the yuggoth portions of them as bridges. I don't think that they bother with ordinary star travel anymore.
ST: Do the yuggothr try to stop the me-deg?
MG: No. The way that the yuggothr see it, and I can see where they're coming from, and they're right, even if it meant that I had to deal with some unnecessary trouble at one point, is that if the me-deg depend on the Dreamlands of the yuggothr, then the me-deg will be more than willing to help out if the yuggothr are endangered, because if the yuggothr go, so do their Dreamlands. It's worked, too. The yuggothr can trust the me-deg pretty closely, and without me even considering them to be insane for it. I might have to deal with the Dreamlands again soon.
ST: Why?
MG: There's something acting up, and it has ends in both this world and in our Dreamlands. Supposedly, everything will go just fine if I fix the problem on this end, but I know pretty well how things like that go. No doubt I'll be spending more time than I'd like— which would be any time at all— in the Dreamlands before long. The yuggothr say that the Dreamlands are some sort of collective subconscious Jungian-sounding nonsense like that. I'm pretty sure that this is one of those cases where someone is trying to explain things in a language which wasn't designed to be used to explain those things. It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to someone in, I don't know, whatever it is that Eskimos speak. (pause) I've got some things to do. Is it time to go yet?
ST: Looks like it. Don't forget to come up with what you're going to be doing with your life six years from now and past that.
(MG sighs)
MG: I won't. Goodbye, doctor.
ST: Good— Marie?
MG: Yes?
ST: Do you mind if I borrow the notebook?
(pause)
MG: Sure. Why not.
ST: Thank you.
MG: Goodbye, Doctor Thurgood.
ST: Goodbye, Marie.

End of Transcript Four

[RobertMason]

Interlude Four

"Marie? Are you there?"

Howard snapped his fingers in front of his sister's face, and she finally reacted.

"Oh. Yes. I just went out of it for a minute. Sorry. I was distracted."

"You're getting distracted a lot lately," Howard said.

"Yeah." Marie yawned.

"Are you getting enough sleep?"

"Never getting enough sleep, Howard. You should know that already."

"Why do you push yourself so hard?"

"Got to, Howard."

"Look at your grades, Marie. They're good. You could forget about all of your homework until the end of the semester and the school year, and you would still do good."

"I still have other business to take care of."

"But you'll be able to sleep a bit more if you just forget about the homework. It's not important anymore. You can get by without it. Get some sleep, Marie."



SHEILA THURGOOD— She's being a lot more open with me these past two weeks. I think that it's safe to consider this to be a permanent change. Marie is getting used to this, and as she said, she's been wanting to talk like this for a long while. I can't hurt her, like a Captain can, and from her point of view I'm coming into this situation already thinking that she's crazy, so it doesn't matter what she says. Her family and friends, however, are an entirely different story.
She's getting stuck to the routine of coming in and talking to me. She admitted as much last week. I don't think that I will need to worry about what I will have to do if she suddenly decides to stop coming.

Next week, I want to see if we can talk more about how things are going at home. We started to get to that, but then the discussion was steered off to other things before we were able to talk about much more than Zelia. I let myself get distracted, it seems. Something she said prompted me to ask a question, and then all of a sudden we were going off along an entirely different path, and then we moved on to another different path, and before I noticed where the time had gone, it was nearly up and there was no point to keeping her. There were only a few minutes left.

She didn't ask about the time. I'm still surprised by that. It makes me optimistic.

This notebook of hers is very interesting. The symbols... The best way to describe them is that they're collections of chicken-scratch lines and dots. It looks like she was writing it from right to left. There isn't any indentation for paragraphs to judge that by, but you can line things up perfectly on the right side, as if that were where she had started each line, while the left side has peaks and ditches, although they're very small.

I'm spending some time just flipping through the pages and looking at the writing and the pictures.  There is this strange-looking insect that she has several pictures of, as if it were from an anatomy book, or a collection of pictures from after a dissection. It doesn't seem like it is one of those... those... (sound of paper moving) k'k't things that she mentions frequently.

Marie appears to mention yuggoth, k'k't, and me-deg most often. There have been a couple of mentions of other species, but she has never given much information about them.

I think that I may need to reassert my footing, so to speak. I noticed, during my last session with her, that I was slipping almost into believing what she was saying. There wasn't a time when I actually thought that what she was saying was true, but I was just going along with her stories so readily. There wasn't any hesitation in my mind. It just flowed so smoothly, and...

(silence)

I am going to try to find some of these other Captains she has mentioned. That, more than anything else, proves just how badly I need to change my mindset. I am telling myself that I am simply trying to close off and disprove something which she has said, or that I am hoping that, while much of what she says about Captains is metaphorical, there are at least other people who she interacts with and who she can contact in the manner that she told me.

That doesn't change the fact that I am still trying to talk with these other Captains she has spoken about.

She didn't give me very much information, however. There are post offices in the general area of North Lawndale. I can scout those out and decide things from there. Maybe the place to put a letter will seem obvious to me, once I have looked at it. I can always ask the workers, too. If there really is a girl who is regularly checking the mail she's getting there, then they should know. Violet Child also seems like a possibility. There can only be so many Behcets in this city, after all. I do not think that it is a very common name.

From there, I don't know what I will do. (pause) I'll keep in mind what she said about Knife Errant, however, and be ready for something unexpected if I even hear the letters in her name. If these other girls that Marie is talking about really do exist, then regardless of the leviathans or anything else, it's safe to assume— not simply for playing the odds, but for matters of prudence and caution— that they are just as... shaky as Marie.

I don't like the story about Kelly Jelly. It's unsettling, and not for the obvious reasons. There's just something about the idea that this story was resting in Marie's head, whether she was told it by another person or came up with it on her own.

Next week I want to talk about her life, years from now. I don't remember if I said that yet.



It was half past eight in the evening, and Marie was walking along the edge of the sidewalk. She was wearing her second face, and a segment of her leviathan was wrapping tightly around her torso, hardened enough that there wasn't likely to be a knife manufacturer anywhere who could make something sharp and strong enough to pierce it. Marie moved slowly, for she never trusted this part of town, with the inhuman crowd that it tended to attract, and it was more important to keep her wits about her as she made to her destination than it was to get there quickly.

{Should we wrack/tear Wilde?}

The concrete was cracked, weeds were growing everywhere, and the few working streetlamps were flickering every few minutes.

All of a sudden, a girl came falling down as if out from the sky, landing at Marie's side, rolling and quickly recovering. The girl dusted herself off as she stood, and then made up the few feet of distance which had grown between herself and Marie in that time. Besides the goggles strapped to her forehead, the only other piece of clothing she had was a pair of drainpipe jeans, but she was tightly-wrapped from foot to neck with flesh-colored bandages which, in the sense that they were part of the girl's leviathan, were in fact not simply flesh-colored but actual flesh.

Marie stuck her hands in her pockets, and looked at the girl out from the corner of her eye. Something about the girl made it hard to look at her face directly, and she thought that it was sufficient to keep her identity hidden.

"What brings this little two-chit bad news to my attention, huh? Don't you have someone else to bother at this time of night, Wreathe?"

Stupid girl. Marie could force herself to look if she wanted to, and she had, on two occasions. There were other things in this city that could do it, too. Marie didn't tell the young girl about it, though.

"Word got 'round about how you're on the scrounge for something. Word is that something big is happening."

"That so?" muttered Marie, and she turned left into an alley. "What's that got to do with lil' bad news coming and bothering me?"

"You're the oldest out of all of us, Nameless." An old joke, that name, and one which Marie didn't much like. But she had a bad habit of beating people who called her Blue Star, and she hadn't really taken the name Star-Eyed Girl; it was just a way of referring to her. "There isn't any other Captain in Chicago older than you who hasn't gone solitaire and rejected her Prince."

"Did Knife Errant die without me knowing about it?"

Wreathe smiled. "Knife Errant's a pretentious bitch. None of us like her. You help us, sometimes, and you're straight honest with us. You're... You're like a big sister to all of us, sometimes."

"Won't keep me from killing you little chits," Marie said, and she leaned back against the wall. A streetlamp flickered out, and it didn't come flicker back in.

"That's what I'm talking about," Wreathe said, and she laughed. Then she stopped, suddenly. "If there's something big going around... I've talked to some other Captains. There's at least a dozen of us who'll take your lead, do whatever you say. Even Minister Rufous and Seventy-Twelve."

Marie blinked. "You sure about that? I tore off Minister's arms last year. Holy Spirit knows that I wouldn't quickly forget about getting my arms ripped off."

"We're Captains. We just fix ourselves right up and jump back into the fray. I talked to her myself, Nameless," Wreathe assured her.

Marie thought about it for a few seconds. Then she answered: "No."

"What?"

"I don't trust you lot. Any of you. Not with this. You seem to forget that we have conflicts of interest."

"My Prince can go to the Void, Marie. If something's going to be affecting this city or, Spirit forbid, this whole country, I don't care what my Prince wants. I'm going to keep it from happening."

"You sleep with leviathans, Wreathe. Leviathans," Marie snarled. "That puts you firmly in my Do-Not-Trust books, do you understand me?"

"You have Do-Not-Trust books? As in, books in the plural? That's a lot of people you don't trust. How big are these books?" Wreathe smirked. "Can't help it. Regular folk just don't do it for me, you know?"

"You're too young."

"Almost fifteen!" protested Wreathe.

"Exactly! You've got no right to be bored of men already. Certainly got no right to be bored of humans already."

Wreathe snorted. "So just because I get my jollies off with leviathans, you don't trust me?"

"Hell, girl, I have got more reasons than that. But you want number one, there it is. Intimacy with a leviathan, it's just going to mess with your head."

"Of course I'm going to take advice from you, Nameless. After all, it's not like you—" Wreathe stopped, suddenly. There was nothing good which would come out of finishing that comment. It didn't matter what Marie had or hadn't done. Even if she'd never done it, Wreathe knew that she'd turn into something nasty at the mere insinuation.

Wreathe's moments of stupidity were youthful indiscretions and lapses of thinking. On the balance, she was a bright girl. A pity, then, that the odds were extremely likely that she would never live long enough to reach past the age where she was vulnerable to youthful indiscretions.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, but Marie didn't respond, in a way that suggested that the matter simply wouldn't be referred to anymore, not that she was too angry to respond.

"Got a light?" Wreathe asked a second later. It was completely unnecessary, since she was perfectly capable of lighting up a cigarette with the tip of her tongue, but Marie dug a hand into a pocket and tossed a lighter at the other girl a moment later. Marie rarely had a need for a lighter, herself, but it was best to be prepared.
Wreathe nodded in thanks and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, removing two and handing one to Marie before sliding the rest into the back pocket of her jeans. She held the lighter out for Marie, applied her own to the lighter, and then handed it back to Marie.

The cigarettes were useless, really. Their leviathans were processing the tobacco before their bodies even noticed that there was anything entering the system, and it was impossible to get even the slightest sensation. But the cigarettes weren't being used for that. It was for the same reason that Marie handed over her lighter, when Wreathe's tongue would have worked just as well: this was something communal, between the two of them, something to share.

A lot of Captains smoked together or knocked back the hardest drinks that they could when they exchanged pleasantries (although at least alcohol also had a taste).
"I'm serious you know," Marie said, and she exhaled slowly, watching the smoke curl outside her mouth. "You keep on walking this path, and one of us is going to fall hard."

"It'll be me," Wreathe said.

"Excuse me?"

"When it comes down to fighting, you're going to kill me. I like you too much."

"Oh, so I don't like you at all, is that it?" Marie raised an eyebrow. "I'm cold and heartless, am I?"

Wreathe shook her head. "Might be that you love more than any of the rest of us possibly could. It's just that you've got something pulling you along. You're going to live, and there be nothing that's going to keep you from staying alive. You're going to live for ten million years and more, because that's what you do: You live. No matter what happens to anyone else, you live."

Marie laughed. "Fug off. I'm going to die when I'm twenty-four, and you know that well as I do. Or did you forget what my Prince does to His old Captains after waking up?"

Fifteen minutes passed before Wreathe spoke again. "Promise that you'll kill me if my head goes south?"

"Promise," Marie said, and the other girl smiled.

Wreathe dropped the stub of her cigarette onto the ground, and ran toward the dumpster further down the alley. She jumped onto it, leapt backwards, and managed to grab a hold on the bottom of the fire escape before she flipped up, feet landing on the edge, and then propelled herself with her hands, disappearing feet-first through a broken window.

Marie watched the window for another minute before she turned back to the street and resumed her business as she thought about how short a time ago it seemed to have been, back when she could almost have trusted Wreathe with something like this. But getting too close to a leviathan could have damaging— compromising— consequences.



[/b]A/N[/b] I don't need to explain to anyone why it's a Bad Idea for Wreathe to be shagging mind-rapey shapeshifting horrors, even if they do have tentacles, do I? I did have to take a few minutes to elaborate on the matter, and its consequences, with one of my Betas, a long while back, but you folks seem more, well, sane.

[RobertMason]

Still wearing her second face, and with Wreathe still on her mind, Marie knocked twice on the door, hitting it hard both times, then stood back. Thirty seconds later, it was opened, and by one of the most terrible-looking humans she had seen who were still humans, and not leviathan-ridden or the suits of k'k't'k. Deep wrinkles were carved into his dry, scarred face, and what little hair was on his head was a gray bordering on white. Bite marks littered his skin and three of the fingers of his right hand, which was outstretched in the manner of one who was expecting a handshake, appeared to be attached solely by a thick red thread. She did not shake his hand, partially out of a worry that, were she to do so, his fingers would fall off.

"Ahaha." It was just as much an inhalation as it was a laugh. "You must be the Star-Eyed Girl. The yuggoth said that you hwould be coming by sometime. I admit that I hhad expected you earlier."

"Ibsen Pentland Wilde, I presume."

"Ahaha, of course."

"You look half-dead, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Only hhalf?" Ibsen grinned, revealing many ivory teeth, and even more which were simply missing. "That's certainly, ahaha, an improvement over being completely dead, isn't it? Not a pleasant experience, not a pleasant experience. Come inside girl." He turned and Marie followed him into his house. Almost instantly they entered a room covered wall to wall with bookshelves, every inch of them crammed full of books, stacks of bound papers, and various knickknacks.

"Are you a collector, Ibsen?"

"Yes. Ahaha, yes. You could fancy me a Lovecraft actually, except that I actually investigate of my own accord and do not rely simply on the accounts of passers-by such as, well, such as myself."

"You spoke to Lovecraft?" Marie looked him over. One of his eyes, she noticed, neither moved nor blinked, but simply stared forward as if it were made of glass, not flesh, even though it was most plainly the latter. "You certainly look old enough to have done it. I can give you that."

"Ahaha. Also another difference is that I did not publish any of my own stories, but it is not for those that you are hhere, is it? It is the King in Yellow, in hwhich you are interested." He gave another half-toothless smile. "Come, come. Into the kitchen."

There was barely any difference between the kitchen and the last room. Stacks of thirty books each rested on the icebox, and the small table at which he probably ate was covered with maps and loose scraps of papers. "I am terribly disorganized at times. Ahaha. Oh, hhere hwe are, Captain." He pulled out a thin book from one of the many shelves, and offered it to her, holding it in both of his hands.

"The King in Yellow," she read. She did not take it. She was not so foolish as to take any object which happened to be offered to her by someone she did not know, without explanation as to what it was.

"It is a play, Star-Eyed Girl. Written by Robert W. Chambers."

"I never heard of it. Not very common, is it?"

"Ahaha, more and less common than you hwould think. Ahaha. This play hwas notorious. Infamous," Ibsen hissed. "It hwas written in the hwaning decade of the nineteenth century, and it hwas banned in country after country. To possess a copy hwas to be sentenced to years in prison."

"Why?"

"Even hwithout reading it, it hwas realized that it presented, ahaha, a grave danger to society. It hholds inside itself keys, Captain. Keys to unlock the mind, to open up the eye inside so that the King in Yellow Hhimself can be glimpsed in all his hwonder, terrible hwonder."

"I don't recall Chambers writing any such play, though, and I'm pretty well-read with him."

"Ahaha. That is because this play never existed hhere in this world."

"Excuse me?"

"The yuggothr fear the city hwhich rests on the hwater, and they are right to do so. But they do not know it as it truly is. Some of hwhat the yuggoth told you hwas conjecture accepted as surely as if it were proven fact. The city is named Carcosa, and it is the sum total of a hhundred thousand shattered timelines. Hworlds hwhich never hwere, hwhich never could be, all part of that faintly glimmering city. This play as it exists hhere in this book comes from such a hworld, conceived there and then conceived hhere, in minds sufficiently broken enough that the truth of things hheld little sway over them, and they hwere free to glimpse hworlds hwhich hweren't, and Carcosa itself. This is the first step to the assault hwhich Carcosa brings to bear against us. The hwish for Carcosa's potential is born in the minds of those who hwill call it, and their desire calls forth first the play, so that they can properly call it forth."

"What will it do to us?"

"It hwill tear this hworld apart, shredding our entire hhistory to ribbons and stitching the pieces into itself. Ahaha. Hwe hwill not likely come out of the experience... hwell."

"What is the King in Yellow, then?"

Ibsen's eyes seemed to take on a glow for just the shortest of moments. "Nothing less than the city itself, Captain. Gaze into Hhis eyes, and you hwill see everything. It is a terrible thing to be in the hhands of a living god. The Princes quake before Hhim."

"The yuggoth I spoke to said that Him Who Is Not To Be Named was able to hold off the city."

"Ahaha. Even you, Captain, can hhold off Carcosa. But if the King in Yellow hhas Hhis opportunity to hwalk freely in this hworld, then there is no longer a chance for you. Carcosa forms now, but it is not yet hhere, and so Hhe is not yet hhere."

"I was told to stop the call on this side."

Ibsen nodded. "The Imperial Dynasty of America." He grinned.

"I never heard of it. Some sort of secret society which has been running the country ever since it was founded?"

"Ahaha! Not at all, not at all, Captain! Rather, it is something hwhich is not, hwhich those who call Carcosa hwhish to be true. Of the myriad hworlds and possible hwhich are the city Carcosa, there is one hwhere the true ruling dynasty lies, a royal family, ruling openly, not secretly, hwith inhhuman blood flowing through their veins, claiming, ahaha, their origins to rest in the Hhyades. In Carcosa, all things are true, and all they must do, to make this hworld match to their desires, is call that city, and draw forth the Imperial Dynasty of America."

"Why?"

Ibsen Wilde closed his one functional eye. "Everything leads up to the future."

"Can you explain more?"

He pushed the book into her hands. "Inside this book is a sign which you hwill not be able to see. It is this sign by hwhich the King in Yellow rules. It is this sign by hwhich Hhis servants command."

"There was someone who was looking for me last week. I broke into his mind and—"

Ibsen opened his good eye and nodded. "They are not useful for many things. To see the Yellow Sign is to cored out entirely with nothing to replace hwhat hhas been removed. They are like broken slaves, unable to think except straight ahhead. They crave direction. They need to be commanded, not just because they hhunger for it but because they are so useless hwithout it. The Yellow Sign hwill protect their secrets from you, however. Though their field agents lack initiative and self-determination, they do not stop, and they do not understand self-preservation, and no more effort is required than to sketch out the Yellow Sign and display it."

"I forgot what it looked like the instant I left his mind. Why?"

"Your leviathan protects you from more than just poisons of the body. It vanquishes the symbol before it can take root in your mind. They do not like competition. They do not like the Yellow Sign."

"The ones who are trying to do this, are they Captains? Is that how they can write the Yellow Sign without falling victim to it?"

Ibsen shook his head. "Any Captain would be completely unable to draw out the Yellow Sign, because she hwould not be able to remember hwhat it looked like." He laughed. "The Yellow Sign hhas no pull on the dead, Captain.

"So you really are dead, aren't you?"

"Ahaha. Again and again, many times over. I killed my death. I am free." Ibsen leaned forward. He stared at Marie. "I look forward to seeing hhow you fare against your own death."

"I'll be back if I need anything else."



The girl's eyes are bright. She is slimly built, and her hair reaches down to her shoulders. She looks like she is wearing something almost like a faintly glowing chain mail; her gloves are of some loose and light substance which is not leather. She is very pale, and she is frozen in this moment, caught off-guard. Marie's hands are around her neck, and the girl is being strangled.

This is not the first time that Marie had found herself strangling a thirteen-year-old girl. It is, actually, the fourth time. It is, however, the first time that she has found herself strangling such a girl (or any Captain, for that matter) without fully knowing why.

She is strangling the girl in order to cut off her oxygen, in order to wear away at the girl. She is doing this because the girl is trying to kill her. But she does not know why the girl is trying to kill her, and so she does not, in the end, really know why she is strangling the girl.

The shock is gone and the girl reacts, kicking Marie in the stomach and twisting out of her hands. She spins as she moves away from Marie's reach, and there is the barest hint of a smile on her face. There's more sadness there, though. Disappointment, more exactly. Marie is well-used to that look.

But that doesn't matter at all to Marie right now. There is blood music playing in her ears, pounding ruthlessly in her head like a war chant. The beat is going on, making a rhythm for her to fight by. Her clothes have been soaked with a neutralizing solution and her leviathan is currently filtering her bodily fluids, changing them. Marie has been stabbed ninety-seven times since this girl attacked twelve minutes ago, and she has been hurt in countless other ways. So it is not unreasonable at all that she is sweating rabidly now, and her skin is coated with a viscous corrosive.

"Chorale sword!" the girl calls out, and she is charging Marie as her left arm shifts and molds itself and extends as it becomes a long saber. It's absolutely pathetic, but Marie is too far-gone to care about correcting the girl.

Marie's hands are black gauntlets when she punches the girl. Spikes sprout and dig into the flesh. She leaps up as the girl swings the saber, and rips the gauntlets out as she moves past the girl's head. She turns and punches the girl's back with both gauntlets, forcing the spikes in deep. They change, becoming barbed, and it is with a muffled yelp that the girl tears away.

The blade swings past Marie's head, flying close to her ears, and she can hear a trace of song as it does so. It is unfamiliar, but it is unmistakably music. All it does is fuel her, adding symphonies and the voices of a hundred songsters to the blood-music playing in her head.

No, it also angers her. But she was angry already. Someone is trying to kill her, after all. And the anger is fuel, too.

Marie is breathing heavily. Her breath is laced with enough caustic moisture that she could burn faces with a kiss. Burning fluid is nearly pouring off of her.

She's still moving. She's always moving— leaping, swerving, getting as close as she can so that she can strike again and again. She lets the girl impale her on the saber so that she can get close enough, and she doesn't care that she's moving along the length of the blade when she smashes the girl's windpipe.

It's a temporary thing, of course. All the damage is. The Captains always heal themselves as quickly as they're hurt. They're wearing each other down, though.

Then the girl says something. Marie doesn't know what it is, but she recognizes two of the words. Those words make her furious. Furious enough to pause, just for an instant, because she cannot imagine where the girl heard that name, when she was so obviously new, when she could not have been in the city or else been a Captain for more than a month, for Marie would have heard of her operating before now, and here she is, already picking a fight with this Captain, out of all of them, for a reason that Marie can't even begin to speculate at, and she says that.

Who told her that name? is what runs through Marie's head for the barest fraction of a second. It's the music, it's the words, it's the sword, it's everything about this girl, and then she says the name, and she loses control for the barest fraction of a second.

Everything changes. The girl knows more than she had let on. She moves faster and hits harder. She sings something, beneath her breath, and it disrupts Marie's concentration. The blood-music is growing erratic. The pounding in her head is just a little bit more unsteady. She flows into the new rhythm almost without thinking about it but she doesn't adjust as quickly as she should.

Marie steps away. She slams a boot into the girl's chest hard enough that she breaks rib bones, and then only a few breaths later she's twenty feet away. She's catching her breath. That's all she needs. She just needs a second to reorient herself.

The girl probably doesn't even know that she's a mockery. The girl may as well be a walking corpse. It was all there, scratching at Marie the whole time, but it wasn't until the girl spoke that it finally snapped her.

And then she speaks again.

"You were great, years ago. You were wonderful. Then... then you got hurt." The girl looks up, at Marie. "It didn't have to happen like that. It shouldn't have. The world can be fixed. The King in Yellow can fix it. He can fix you, too."

Someone might have been tempted. Marie didn't deal in fools' promises.  "The King in Yellow." There wasn't anything in Marie which needed fixing, anyways.
"Yes." The girl smiles. "I want you to be happy again. I want you to be right and good and just again."

Then the girl walks down an alley, and she is gone by the time that Marie runs after her.

But the girl's face wasn't concealed, and Marie feels sure that it was her real face. She is enraged, though calming down now that the girl is gone. Calming down.

She will think about the girl later. She's liable to do something horrendously damaging to the environment around her if she thinks more on the girl before she is completely calm again.

This was very specifically targeted at her. Everything about the girl was targeted at her. She never would have been so disturbing, so infuriating, for any other Captain.

End of Interlude Four



I would greatly appreciate any thoughts so far and, especially, feedback on the first real fight in the story thus far. 

[Aggie]

Where's the story?

I apologize for the lack of constructive literary criticism; I haven't caught much I think needs drastic improvement.  I'm a technical writer, not a creative one, so I'm out of my element. 

As a reader, I like it.