Day 06: Confidence bird, and psychic rando

futureccapeAnother’s fluid voice marked its braille on my torpidscraller’s journal. A strange mind made its invasive way into the safest part of my expression, violating my sense of safetey, and so, my freedom to express myself confidently and without judgement. Maybe everything you read from now on will be biased to avoid revealing too many details about myself, just because he was reading. And writing.

I dont’ care about your life. I am just ecstatic that there is another here.

Another what?

Another man from the Age of Griltrak.

Oh boy, this was going to be complicated. How was i to tell him that the Age of Griltrak was, from my perspective and that of my rightful time, an age so far in the future that we gave it the absurd name “Age of Griltrak” because it sounded so plausibly sci-fi.

Well, you won’t have to explain it to me. We’re linked by the torpidscraller

Right. WHere are you?

I’m right here, inside this hawk. i had lain dormant for who knows how long, but my shame-based technology recently got an influx of embarasson quanta, permitting my deterministic filter to activate itself, which it knew it would do anyway at that point.

Naturally. So where is the hawkman going?

Nowhere basically. According to my neuro-link, the hawkman is now basically talking to himself on the inside of his branial dome. Here, let me patch you through. DOnt’ worry, he won’t be able to hear us. Listen

–amazing, theough. I look amazing! Look, you have put on a little weight, sure, but that’s natural at your age. Why are you letting this get to you! Come on, Scraw-Clyde! You are an amazing Daniel-Dave-hawk, you felled Kravellion, you smote Deaugur, you are allowed to age gracefully. Ugh, this is stupid. I know it rationally, but i can’t make myself FEEL it. Mark was right. I have SUCH an external locus of self schema.

Just a lot of that crap. It’s amazing though, for me. My meters are really flipping out.

It’s amazing for you, i suppose. But what about me?

Hold on, just a few more levels and… there. Hold on tight

With that the bird exploded in a sneeze of feathers and animal pieces. I had no time to see the amazingly beautiful thing that happened behind me, which i knew was amazingly beautiful because i received a text about it, because i was busy falling. Down, i went, down, saying “ooooo” most of the time. I prayed to Rivas. I prayed to Ben, and all the Clay-Lads from the bagel-boys afterlife, but despite all of that, the ground ominously magnified itself in my field of vision. I took stock of my inventory, listing it in my head.

Time lute, check. Splunders, check. Large shimmering cyber-integrated supercolliding tempero-deterministic mechadronium encased time traveller’s suit holding on to my torso and preventing me from dying, check. Yep, i basically had all the three things one needs to not fall to their death after the bird they were victim of exploded.

Using my power of reason, i concluded that I would soon be landing safely on the ground, and was partly right. Enough that the difference doesn’t matter. But suffice it to say, i was wrong on one of those counts. I’ll leave it to you to figure it out. Technically, you’ll be able to tell by what i say next. As i dangled from the tree (see what i mean? I’m giving you a lot of hints here. Most of what i’m writing is a HUGE hint to the answer to the question “what events transpired on your adventure through time to save the moon?” *spoiler alert* THESE ONES), i inhaled deeply and soaked it all in. The dense jungle air, the interminable drone of animal and insect sounds, the sheer vibrancy of the life forms, all capitulated before my irritation at nature. Fortunately, behind me the fellow time traveller was seeing to getting me down, so i could check one item off my list of peaves.

“Are you alright?” he asked, verbal styles.

“Yes,” the handsome one replied. “Why the sound chats now?”

“We are no longer connected by the emovac.”

“Oh. Naturally.” that’s it, play it cool. YOU TOTALly understand what he;s talking about. TOTALLY.

“My jump in energy demonstrates that you dont’ know what ‘m talking about. Here’s the simple answer, for, when did you say you were from?”

“The year of Mal’kabir’s second magnateship, Celbris the 94th.”

“Here’s the simple answer for primitives then. Essentially, we were both gaining strength from the shame and self-doubt of another. You were gaining, well, what technology were you powering?”

“Uhm.. None.”

“You were just gaining personal satisfaction by creating shame and confusion in an otherwise proud and attractive creature?”

“I was also drawing status from it,” i stated feebly.

“Well, for survival, i was drawing his negative self image into my suit in order to return from my dormancy within his abdomen. So, we were both psychic vampires feasting off the same emo corpse.”

“All i did was insult him a little to throw ihm off balance and give me the upper hand! You blew him up!”

“Technically, my suit calculated that it was inevitable that the hawkman began to self-harm, and act out by experimenting with alcohol and fog-eggs. At that point, he was already dead, so the suit blew him up. It only does what is fated. You … you DO have deterministic technology in your age, right? It was invented during the year of Mal’kabir’s second magnateship.”

“If it was, i’m not aware of it.”

“Sore spot eh? My energy levels just jumped. What shames you about my mentioning knowledge of your time. Poor student?”

“No. I have amnesia, of a sort.”

‘Of what sort.”

“Of the probably very good sort. I assume. I mean, i’m not the sort of person to have a low class, generic, mainstream amnesia, like all the sheep out there in the world, just buying everything to dull the pain of their stupid lives. I probably have some kind of cool goth amnesia.”

‘Are you a goth?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You’re probably better off.”

Ah, a joke. A classic joke, so old in my time that this time-man just demonstrated clearly his total lameness. And yet, something about his lameness intrigued me.

“If something about my apparant lameness intrigues you, it should, for there is a mystery about it that i am not going to spoil until it’s more necessary to the adventure.”

Nice.

“Well, either way, when two people suck out another person’s self esteem, and feast on it, they share thoughts. Just like when two vampires suck out amazing discounts at the same mall.”
That analogy was to great analogies as classic wing-hockey was to the first rains of the bird-rink’s internal biosphere.

“Now, let’s get you back to your time.”

But like two bedroom home with 2 full bathrooms, one en suite, my splunders had other plans…

to be continued