What Is This?: In the wake of several dark RRs, Dex the character left the House Of Strange Dimensions to vanished. Dex the writer then penned a story/essay of sorts on the various aspects and undersides of Subreality from the POV of his missing avatar. He sent pieces of it to other writers and asked them to write stories introducing each piece. This is the result...

Warning: disturbing imagery and mature themes. But worth being disturbed. ;)

Walkabout

by Dex & various

Part Two -- Messages In The Sea
By Bayeux

I found it by chance just before sunset, walking along the shore of the purple ocean and swinging my shoes in one hand. Strange birds wheeled the orange sky, chattering noisily as they looked for a final morsel of food before the light died. It was the beach that every romantic couple had ever walked across, where every long-lost lover had ever made love amongst the crashing waves, sand in the odd orifice be damned. I was out there because I liked the sound of the sea.

A glint in the dying sunlight caught my eye as I avoided a beached jellyfish. Curious, and conscious of the weight of convention that rested upon my shoulders, I went to look. There, half-buried in the white sands, was a bottle. With a cork in it. Of course.

I held it up against the fading light. It was deep blue and nearly opaque, but I could see something inside it. I put my shoes down and twisted off the cork, then spent several minutes trying to extract the leathery contents. Finally I gave up, lay the bottle against the ground, found a small rock, and smashed the narrow neck.

I cut myself on the jagged edges while pulling out the message, too. I wonder why that never happens in the movies.

I pulled out...well, at first I had assumed it to be paper, but it turned out to be the tanned hide of some kind of animal. It was thin and fragile, and covered with writing. It didn't look like it had been written in ink, but nor did it look like blood. It was not signed. Somehow, it didn't need to be.

I unrolled it and began to read.

They don't have a name. As a generic form of primal savage, they don't need one. They are every headhunter and jungle guide to grace the depths of an Indiana Jones or Relic Hunter fic. The homogeneous body painting and piercings only enforce the fact that they are mostly written by people who have no clue of the reality of these people. They are misused, maltreated, and very hungry. When I saw the giant iron cauldron, it wasn't a far leap of logic to the next step of my ordeal.

Writers love cliches. The reason they are cliches is because we love them. Their overuse by such creative types generates and nurtures them. The third son is now unable to fail the mission his two older brothers perished during. Eyes meeting across a crowded room are an obvious prelude to a starcrossed romance. And million to one chances always pan out.

Cliches are elements of natural law in a place like Subreality. Every cliff has a tree jutting out at an angle "just so" as to provide a handhold or break for a falling person. And there was always enough small rocks to troll off and plunge a sickeningly long way to a stream or bottom as the hero hangs from their grip.

Cliches are the spikes that shoot up out of plots, and those run through Subreality like thick arteries of creativity. Hit enough cliches, and you'll be sucked along the flow like so much chaff in the wind. Slaying dragons with black arrows, eyes meeting across a crowded room, and halfway to hell on a train, without a second chance or a watch to unwind.

I'm up to my eyebrows in onions and carrots before the tramp wonders up and asks if I can spare a dime for a fellow American down on his luck. He's almost three minutes late. I'm shocked.

There is a flow to the universe, especially in solipsistic realities. Currents of creativity in the sea of ideas that dominate us. Writing in a dense mindset, locked into the plots of a thousand years previous. Innovation is a rare bird in a genre of derivative inventiveness.

In those flows exist worlds of already written and desperate-to-be-rewritten plots, ideas and characters. They are as tangible as any construct in Subreality, just more insidious. It's like being sucked into an invisible current that totally takes you over.

Few people seem to understand the draw of a plot. It's like a black hole in the fabric of Subreality, gaping and swallowing. It doesn't care for characters or dreams or intentions. It just pulls you down into the crushing depths of the story lines and shoots you out along it until you're finished, one way or another. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those who don't understand stories are doomed to relive them. It's a simple rule.

I suppose that's why I can be so blase about being the main course on a cannibal free for all. Any moment now a female hero on a well-placed vine and a barely-fitting leopard-skin bikini is going to rescue me from the pot. I can hear her footsteps in the jungle behind the music and chanting. About bloody time, too.

So that's where he went. I had wondered. Out of sight, out of mind, out of reach.

There will be more of these, I'm sure of it. Maybe not as messages in a bottle, but as something. And people will find them. They won't be able to help themselves.

I tucked the scrawled commentary into my pocket, pick up my shoes, and set off. I'll show it to someone, and they will show it to someone else, and eventually the word will get round. Maybe I'll give it to the Times. Maybe I won't. But either way, the message will be passed.

Truths always are.

[next part]

back to Dex's stories | Miscellaneous archive | comicfic.net