Crier

So this 4AM I was flailing out of bed to you know as it happens vomit blood, don’t look at me like that, you some kind of aristocrat who sleeps through hyperefficient daynight cycles in your Gulfstream G666 Fluidless Sheen, I bet you’ve never even seen yourself in the mirror on account of a complete lack of pours, you’re sandpaper in a tan suit, you’re a Miami highway migraine, you’re some atavist Atacama where the heavens shine so clarified no life strains beneath them tormented, and while on the whole I don’t recommend the experience, there was yet this pleasantly delirious moment where you’re dripping over a sink lightheaded maundering like “Splinters of throbbing light. Blood trickles from your nose. You’re promising too much. Causality grates against your nervous system. Put yourself in the path of entropy any longer, and you will be destroyed. This world is but a shell. Pressure shivers it from within.” Nodding to yourself gently holding the hair back by the curled wrist, yeah but everything’s a shell, it’s all a shell game, shell corporals holding shell corporals holding shell corporals holding back your hair so you know it doesn’t the blood.

Wildeyed mycologies exquisitate our subterranean jumblescape to alluring lithographs of “Toxins that erode the lungs, destroy the nerves, rot the flesh in an instant. A battlefield covered in skeletons covered in pink foam.” Worldbuilding iridises its inscrutable stains, “These aren’t all my lichen. Most are feral, or wildtype. Semiotic mimics”, which could mutate to gutterpunk jabberwocky which darksparkles the sludge too smooth, selfsame, sludge sprawling, but the prose does hazard its splatters to graffiti, it is I assure you always nice to have something to say, “They evolved to maximize attention. They emulate written speech: warnings, prayers, infographics. There are thriving colonies in the upperworld now, cultivated at shrines,” here you’re going oh god oh no is this lore but luckily we’re saved by the swerve to luminosity for the sake of it “plastered apotropaic over airship hulls. People like them.” That final plunk of throwaway candour keeps the theatrics easy, which is good until it goes all glib in teenspeak dissipations of its own moments: “sounds really peak for suffering and subjugation honestly”. Rather the purpose of making it look effortless is to emphasize all the effort. When the “grossbeautifulvile” overlap glitches too hard towards any one axis, the “fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic” glistens decay harshly to “A shit graveyard.” And in such climes the game wanders always on the edge of shitpost, which is sometimes charming, “ever at Your service! cya” and manytimes not so much, “A grub cat masturbates on a pile of scrap integument. Half-formed larvae squirm on its back, a few scattering off into the discarded chitin and sinew.”

When it does maintain composition, this magic of having something to say while expending most of our energy revelling largely in the raw pleasure of saying still must be balanced against the other tendency, for it all of course to mean if you squint. We get the hatchmarked sidesketch of the spiritual thrum: “The subworld is a repository for disavowed projects. The toys that some upper power threw down in disgust. Or the things that crawled from the corpses of those toys. If you seek influence, learn their ecologies.” This, counterposed against an overworld ordered by Commerce Torture, we make all the requisite rounds, “Most of them work the soil to produce food. Or in mines to produce matter for manufacture. Their bodies are destroyed by the toil, captives of obligation. Above them, a handful reaping the produce. A chain stretching absolute up to the sovran” assembles us right and ready for the Porpentine revolutionary lashout, final slimergences wheresoever “A different evolution obtains” in the overlooked margins, since “Scientiffs know not our screwing-algorithms”, demiurge unchained here we go, but then some random uh oh cuts you out to a cutaway ending, congrats you’re leftover limbs to be surgered, congrats uh well it turns out there were too many limbs actually, congrats you can’t feel your limbs on account of lichen, congrats you uh just kind of chose a boring option so let’s end the game anyway, go back to the beginning if you want the true ending, but then the fulcrum I found isn’t so much a climax as a thesis statement: “Sovran Absolack: But of course you do. It was the face of history as an unbreakable fortress.” The pleasure of this austere surprise is dampened a bit by “Absolack”, but you know maybe the real vengeance was all the friends we made along the way, “haven’t done much killing lately though… don’t really miss it or anything. just chilling in the catacombs here”.

And that’s fine! Vibing’s how you get the vibes, what are you a JRPG protag here to Masamune God, relax, the whole point of being exiled is to leave your troubles behind. “You wait. Small sounds take place in the dark. Is that a real glint of light? Or the prisoner’s cinema, a visual trick of your pareidoliac mind?” Stop fretting that you can’t get a grasp on anything and give yourself over to the paresthesia’s pleasures.