#73: Sketchbook

06/28/19

Something happened. Something big happened.

I was just tossing a backpack together. I'm going to be homeless and I am not even resisting this because I have no control over this life I live. I never have. I am just a vessel for something else, perpetual victim of whatever war Zanark and Chameleon are fighting. Despite my best efforts I have not once had an impact on this hellish series of events. I just watch them over and over and over and I can do nothing right.

So I heard the doorbell ring. Gave me chills, didn't get why at the time. I open the door and I see this. This is a sketchbook I saw once before in the possession of Jake Ramsay. His DeviantArt doesn't exist anymore but he featured these images on there. Now, MUCH worse for wear, it finds itself in my possession.

I will be posting the pictures of it on the imgur I established recently. I will also be carrying the sketchbook with me and trying to understand it's secrets the best I can. As I will be struggling to survive I will likely update this blog infrequently, but Twitter should be easy enough to update with free WiFi and a phone charger. Just bear with me. I'll be busy.

http://imgur.com/gallery/S3V0tj0

This is my analysis of the sketchbook. There are parts I still don't understand, like the "package" and 10-31-15. And there's one part that I wanted to think about before I spoke up. Jake drew Anna and Kendra on either side of me in his sketchbook. Anna was in tears with a water motif and Kendra was laughing so hard she was crying with a fire background.

There is no way I told him about them because, up until I passed between iterations and met her, I had no idea what Kendra's physical appearance was. This implies that Jake had encountered them, or Madrik had led Jake to them, in some manner. It implies there is connective tissue between our world's, which has been a recurring theme. It is the same way Chameleon moves between Figments when he possesses them. If I could access them, maybe find Kendra, maybe help Ben, even. But I haven't seen the door since I got out of that dark realm and watched Gwen die. Something to note.

In other news the job I was supposed to get kind of screwed me over. The situation was the same; the help wanted sign was outside the store. I got a little impatient when I got no call after applying and Friday rolled around. They finally told me when I called back on Saturday that the sign was just to gather applications in case somebody quit and they actually had all positions filled currently. They said qualified candidates with experience were typically considered but I wasn't what they were looking for. YOU'RE A GAS STATION CORNER STORE! YOU AREN'T THAT EXCLUSIVE!! I honestly got so irritated by the situation that I forgot the deeper implications of it.

There have been differences between this iteration of reality and the last one. Not all of them had any relation to myself. Ben quit drinking and smoking. He's got a car. He's doing well for himself. This is a result of Mammoth dying early into the story. He's never said it before but I think Mammoth had a severe negative impact on his battle with substances over the years. He is also on good terms with his parents. That makes sense too. I remember him getting kicked out of his parents house due to mounting drama centered around none other than Casey West and her boyfriend Jake. Their exclusion from Ben's life likely means that Ben was at least able to keep living at home long enough to get on his feet properly. He's still being tortured by Chameleon in ways but I think he's also at an advantage when it comes to coping mechanisms.

As for me, I have created some if not all of my own misfortunes during this second draft. Ali vanishing like that though... no warnings, no climactic events at the end of a countdown, just life as normal minus one girl, that was not of my doing in any form and it has bearings on my life now. She was the one who protected me when I was cast out to the wolves by Darek. She came to my rescue countless times that I don't remember and now she is gone. Nobody is here to save me from homelessness. Nobody can guard me from my own deepening addictions.

I don't even know if I want to get into this next part, but...transparency is a blessing so let me not hesitate. I met up with someone recently. He was hanging out with Ali's weed guy who I guess is now my weed guy. I guess I looked miserable and he wanted to get my mind off my troubles. Didn't ask me too much about my situation, just brought me back to his apartment, offered me some cocaine, and the rest is history. I had never tried coke before, but it felt like home. Everything felt...right. it was amazing. There's a voice inside that could be Darek or Chameleon or ADDICT telling me to just get money, get lots of cash any way possible, and snort cocaine until I am dead. It doesn't matter anyway, the voice says. You'll come back. You might even forget. You should definitely consider how much fun you could have if you just forget about false concepts like family and morality. It is all fake. Every moment of your life has been a lie. Solipsism is law for you, Mathew Monaco. You think therefore you are. You are therefore you deserve. And if you deserve something...take it. There's no reason to keep obeying the little voice inside telling you to care. Let go. Let your emotions out and let me in. I'll nestle into the empty space all your rage and all your fear took up. We will become one. We will be together forever. I'll see you soon. You'll see it all when you realize what he has done. What we have done. See you all real soon.

#72: Investigations, Revelations, and Assassinations

06/09/19

I have a lot to catch you up on and so little time.

I think this happens every time. The veil comes up and we get all this info thrown at our fragile little minds at once and we just get overwhelmed.

There's a lot to go over and I don't really have the heart to give you the dramatic play by plays of Gwen's dismemberment. Suffice it to say I've alluded in tweets and stuff that she died. She is gone from The Outer Layer. As far as I can tell her death was a very permanent thing and it had a bit of an effect on the realm.

I left off just as Kendra cut Gwen in half. It was supposed to be a big epic scene that I poured all my talent into to communicate the visceral nature of the scene or the way the ripples of inverted color echoed across the sky like when Broly transforms for the first time in the original movie. But I'm fucking done putting effort into this so you get the cliff notes version.

The fire from the flaming sword cauterized her bisection so it wasn't extremely messy, but it still looked nasty to see half a girl laying against the tree, her legs twitching uselessly nearby and her entrails congregating beneath her, her only admirers. I watched in fascination as she and Kendra began talking.

"You bitch." She spat at Kendra. She sounded like she was in shock the way her eyes darted everywhere at once. "You tried to kill me."

"And you tried to kill them." Kendra motioned towards me and Anna. For her part Anna was staring mostly into space. Her gaze took the scene in but no life sparked in her eyes. Seeing it made me think of a body with the life slowly leaving it. I briefly registered how strange it was that Anna's eyes looked dead and hollow while Gwen, the half a body lying nearby, stared at Kendra with fierce liveliness.

"If you think that this shell means anything to me, to that," her eyes darted to the dark cloud overhead, "then you're a fool."

"As long as she has the will to live," Anna said beside me, "her immortal soul will not leave her body. The energy lingers stubbornly in that way."

Kendra slowly sauntered over to Gwen lying on the ground in clear anguish. Each step her hips swayed and she seemed as comfortable as one would in their bedroom. She knelt over the severed body, her long flame frosted hairs inches from Gwen's pale face.

"Yes, it is true that you will not die because I've wounded you, sweet thing, but you're still connected to that cursed cloud up there. And it's connected to Chameleon." The flames of her sword flared up as Kendra lifted her head pridefully to look down upon the fallen foe. The blade's tip tickled Gwen's throat. "So I want you to deliver a message for me."

The whole thing happened all at once. The blade sunk in and flashed a golden orange that blinded all of us watching. Gwen screamed a horrifying bloodcurdling yelp that I won't be surprised to hear again in my darkest nightmares. She clawed at her throat but lasted only a few seconds before her convulsions became involuntary. Blood poured from every hole on her face and her wings turned from an eggshell white to a shriveled grey.

It was more than that though. A devilish energy poured off of her as she did this. The blade shimmered and swayed becoming less of a metal instrument and more of a conductor for the demons inside them to dance. A sick black silhouette of an abominable humanoid overlaid itself upon Kendra. Wave after wave of unimaginable evils flew across the environment. Envy, lust, shame, desperation, wrath, narcissism, apathy, cruelty, chaos, disorder and darkness intertwined holding hands with a deep unsettling eldritch madness, an elder one's eye just taking notice and as it's impossible gaze settled upon me the whole world went red and everything fell away and

"Mat? Mat!"

(I didn't mean to write this part like this. It was supposed to be a quick synopsis. I remember I started writing the paragraph and then...hearing Anna's voice breaking me out of my weird fugue state. I feel as if she is somewhere in there, behind this all, motivating me to write.)

I looked up to see Kendra dismissing her weapon to some extradimensional plane. The environment seemed stable enough. No technicolor acid trips or overwhelming madness riding the wind. Gwen's body lay motionless. The eyes were glossed over, no soul behind them at all. It was like looking through a window into an empty house.

"She was never the one I wanted to kill. She was just a means to an end." Kendra spat on the ground. "I used her connection to Chameleon to make her realize quickly that staying alive meant writhing agony." She smiled sweetly like she had not just violently and brutally slaughtered someone's soul.

Suddenly a violent wind swirled through the clearing, centering around Gwen's corpse. The dark cloud formed into a funnel and touched down on the ground, a vicious tornado of storm clouds flashing lightning wildly. As soon as the gust connected with the ground we all fell back on our behinds and watched in surprise as the cloud lowered itself into the cone, colliding with the ground, like liquid escaping a funnel, until the last of it vanished and Gwen's body, both halves, were gone with it.

What I managed to learn from talking with Kendra and Anna before awakening was that Gwen was a conduit for Chameleon inside my mind. Kendra explained in her usual just-cryptic-enough manner how Chameleon and the dark cloud were like two parts of a Venn diagram. Where Gwen existed is the intersection between them. The dark cloud was supposed to be the depression that had plagued me all my life. Gwen was Chameleon's way to use it to try and thwart the greatest boon to my survival.

Alice.

Now there's a whole can of worms I'm not ready to open. We did talk about her a bit. I'll keep that information private though. I have a lot more to get to.

Entry #72 is Darek cursing out my viewers and blaming them for Kendra's death. Sorry about him, by the way. I obviously don't think it's your fault. In fact, until this, I thought you were Figments too and Darek was giving me social media access to demonstrate how even my audience is fake. So this entry was a big game changer for me. Darek is not just angry; he is panicked. Whatever happened to Ali, to Kendra, it wasn't supposed to occur. This gives me flashback vibes to what happened to Casey that last lifetime. The only difference is I got to watch on the sidelines while it happened. So I guess you exist and you were the key to saving her somehow that I didn't know about.

Another thing about that entry, there are pictures uploaded to my imgur that I had not put there. They're related to view counters and analytics in order to show readers that he knew he was getting attention. Explains why the statistics page for this blog was open on the computer that morning. There are, intermingled with them, several images of what appears to be a wiki site viewed on a mobile phone containing the mad ravings of Rob Airheart.

That's another thing I didn't really want to mention but knew I would have to. The cops came on Friday to inform us that Rob Airheart was found dead in his efficiency, hanging from a noose. One of the cops mentioned a knife in his back and the other one shushed him like I wasn't supposed to know. I didn't question. I'm so numb from everything. All I can think is how fake they are. They're all simulated. They're all hallucinated. It's so clear now. I understand. I have a couple leads I'm looking into. Let me just get my alabi straight so I can continue to access a keyboard.