From: kjc@aramis.rutgers.edu (Kelly J. Cooper) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: Jameson W. Walker, Part something-or-another Keywords: free time! I'm back! Lunatic fringe ... Message-ID: Date: 8 Dec 92 03:42:57 GMT "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -Philip K. Dick "I had too much to dream last night..." -The Electric Prunes Jameson W. Walker, Part Five-point-oh-seven-two-fold-8-mach-three _________________________________________________________________ ...Kind of... Jameson had been standing in front of the Inn, indecisive, for a long time. It occurred to her to wonder why she was there, which led her off on a tangent of why we are all here, but she recovered quickly and wondered why she was occupying this particular space at this particular time. She had been trying to decide something. What had it been? She retraced events slowly, but they kept getting confused. Things she was sure she had done yesterday seemed to her not yet done. And she was looking for ... That was it! She was looking for someone. Who. Er, who? She wanted to give, no get rid of ... something. She looked down. Her right hand clenched a scrap of leather, stringing together a set of juggling clubs. She had wanted to give these back. To whom? The clowns. The juggler! A rather tall gentleman named ... named ... ah! Drummer the Magnificent. She had been trying to decide which way to go to find Drummer! Yes. Feeling relieved, she relaxed her shoulders slightly, only to tense up again a moment later. Still, which way to go? It seemed she was stuck. And at that moment, she noticed that something had been niggling quietly at her unconscious, pushing to become a thought for quite some time. As she focused on it, the idea abruptly surfaced, blossoming through her mind and she became aware of the fact that she was riding the slipstream. Time was being tortured and wrapped about itself. Some twisting of power, a playing of probability against? Along with? Beside/through/interdimensionally over all possible futures, causing here and now to be also yesterday, tomorrow & several days to come. A step that was not a step could bring her forward, back. Or even the sliding sideways place of being/not-being. She looked around. People brushed by her, large crowds pressing through the streets of a busy city. Feet bare, leather clad, silk slippered, iron shod, rubber wrapped and hard booted quietly shuffled, clunked and padded on the cobblestones. They were there, but not there. She couldn't touch them. It occurred to her that none of them touched her, despite the press of the crowd. And they were indistinct. But only in places. Her mind wondered if it was hallucinating and she filed the thought for careful consideration. She could see through that man's shield to the woman beside him, but his shoulders above and legs below the shield were solid. The woman's head looked faded, softened, the features unclear. A horse trotted by, only three hooves ringing on the pavement. A pale child looked at Jameson, eyes wide. She must look like a ghost to him as well. Things began to shimmer. For a moment, she thought her vision doubled, then realized it was a layering of perceptions. She was seeing two distinct time flows overlapping each other. The world shimmered again, and there were three layers. Again. And again. She began to lose track. It was very odd. In one layer, a group of elementals attacked the Inn. One of them walked through her. She felt nothing. In another layer a tremendous creature vaguely resembling a pig with Hollywood make-up on its face appeared, floating above Generica casting a shadow across nearly a third of the city. It blinked at her for a moment, belched horrendously and was gone. Another layer was a nauseating feeling of horror, pain, exhaustion, anger, frustration, and loss all wrapped in something faintly familiar, like a smell from an early memory or a dimly recalled texture of something awful, something frightening that the thought tendril, the child's finger, the tunnel of memories, found repellent. A tapped out feeling of post-battle stress combined with the high adrenaline energy of people fighting for their lives mingled with ... something. A consciousness, a malignance ... a horror ... an emotional vortex of... <><><><> ANGERGFRUSTRATIONWEAKNESSKILLKILLKILLKILLHATEMANGLECONFUSIONLOSSDIFFERE NCEKILLKILLKILLMAIMCRUSHSQUEEZESLAMBAMTHANKYOUMAAMDEATHDESTROYBURNBREAK RIPSLASHRENDTEARSHREDBLOWNBURSTEXPLODEDESTROYDESTROYDESTROYKILLKILLKILL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sto qoi((Q^(*&! zbyh apoa!@@# o2*$&zxnqwe,\ aljHO!@7(*&971 laj aslk alq qoiw (&%IU pYf ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,amd <><><><> ragged breath. Hers. And she, looking past the small mental explosion that shot across all the layers for a few, agonizing moments only to receed blessedly back into the undercurrent of babbling, could see ... Layers upon layers of not just time, but also space. An android crying. Children laughing, holding hands & dancing in a circle. Glowing feathers, paint and bits of bone and skin, stuck with red clay and blood to the skin of a shaman. A bear sat back on its haunches and howled, then heaved forward and took off at a run. Puddles of blood from a red rain storm. Candles blown out in a darkened church. A headless man crumpling to the floor. An orgy raged, anger inseparable from lust. Everything was sacred. Nothing was sacred. The raw screaming of a terrified infant ripped across the nerves like metal on stone. Lightning flashed and struck a man, who began to glow and convulse. The air tore, opening a view to something completely unrecognizable, utterly alien. Jameson's mind absorbed the vision. The sky turned purple, then a deep blue, then green, orange, yellow, red, purple, blue, green, orange, yellow, red, cycling faster and faster until the sky looked like a miasma of colors. Now a nightmare rainbow, now a sinkhole, muddy and dark. Twisting, funneling, dragging clouds into the dark, heaving chaos. For a brief, breathless moment she saw a man riding a bicycle through all the strangeness. His eyes were full of wonder and behind him trailed a clowd of flowers and swirling colors. Then he was gone and the screaming and wailing, like a family of banshees, whirled around and around and around, coming from all directions at once and crashing over Jameson in battering waves, the babbling insane gibbering of the private thoughts culled from several dimensions full of people, full of ... things -- mental notes, inner screams, mind blocks, telempathic communique -- all growing more wild, becoming the crazed shrieking of asylum inmates and directly contrasting against the shambling pedestrian traffic Jameson could still see, faintly, through the gauzy layers of quivering madness. The screaming reached a fever pitch, where it should no longer be in the audible range, and yet continued rising, growing, swelling, shredding, burning, all hallowe'en orange and chimney red and making Jameson wonder if her ears were bleeding, until there was suddenly nothing. Nothing. An abrupt, roaring, cotton-filled silence almost more deafening than the noise had been. And in that echoing void of numbness came the first vision, the first post-apocalyptic image. Eyes. Dead eyes in a living body. And Jameson remembered the last time she died. "as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending;" -e.e.cummings "somewhere i have never travelled" *** ADMIN: Folks, this is a personal perception of someone who does not have the same constraints on her reality as most people do. It isn't meant to impinge upon what's going on, it's just character development, ya see? *** --------------------------------------------------------------------- Kelly J. Cooper \ Splash. Tragically Hip Waif \ Comments appreciated. ...individual at large... \ kjc@cs.rutgers.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------