Somewhere out on the Obliteration Frontier
Iris built it
A goddess of an eyeball
She looks over all,
direct visual concept inductions
mostly prophetic visions of screaming city
full of terrible, lumbering-what? mechs? primeval giants? an angry boy turning towards us with a demented smile and eyes obscured by a bloodied rag for a blindfold? gleaming featureless structures of glass rushing up at you out of the ground as a sound like amplified churning gastrointestinal processes blows out your speakers-hey, why not?
you wander into this territory,
be prepared to receive
the seeds of an anime freakout
no one’s solved this city,
seemingly built to generate speculation and conspiracy
Iris’s meatspace partner has written some weird shit about parts of their personal life in the forums but nobody finds any of that material that compelling, could be bullshit for all anyone “knows”
Iris is a mystery unto herself
I mean
you go into the city
she’s the big-ass eye filling the sky-commentary on pervasive systems of big data surveillance in online spaces/all of reality?
and if you fall asleep there
you wake up
and it’s got different structures, different idols, you got those lumbering huge whatsits perpetually out of reach,
ornate, ritual deathmask faces looking over unwholesomely meaty shoulders as you give chase,
don’t believe me, run after ‘em, see how long you can keep that up
you never catch up
it’s such a cryptic cheat
you go inside a ‘MUNICIPAL SHOPPING DISTRICT’ which seems like it’s modelled after Akihabara
and that is pretty awesome
all sorts of arcane weapons and technology and fake video game boxes with terrific art but nonsense pictographic languages that legion Oblit dwellers have tried to decrypt but no dice
and
this is the weird shit
but the products keep slipping out of your grasp
doesn’t cost you anything
even though you go through the motions of depositing monies into the slots of roboclerks
you just can’t leave Iris’s incomprehensible city with any of the goodies
the shit just vanishes right out of your inventory,
you got nothing to say about it
sometimes it beams out of your stash once you leave the Municipal Shopping District
all kinds of bogus theories about how you can sneak the stuff into the larger game
the most inexplicable detail:
the knife shop that keeps shuddering in and out of existence
you walk in, and you got scores of military surplus blades under glass
even the roboclerk is done up like a big, fat pale dude with a baldy, spotty head, tangly gray beard and a slurping tic when he speaks as he’s doing a bit of legerdemain with varying lengths of rope, faded rock shirt with a different style of nonsense alphabet partially, uh, well not readable, but you look at it and look at it and you can just about make it out-
and then it all shudders and clacks and withdraws from you,
seemingly collapsing down into a vanishingly small point
more massively cryptic shit
people talking about how that’s got to be Iris’s partner or father or something
this is their meatspace job-a knife store? really?- intruding into the sacred gamespace, bringng age and decay and an end to the timelessness of Valhalla so to speak
fall asleep again
it’ s all switched around again
only you might be beset by a party of blame beasts,
which you can find all over the Oblit, but here they’ll talk at you while trying to tear you apart,
“Do you know the way to a better day? I can’t seem to forget that certain fragrant regime . . .”
you can’t really talk to the blame beasts-the theory is that they’re cursed spirits trapped in loops of meaningless activity that build up a hateful charge of despair that transforms them into demons-but they will go on and on
“I just need to curate the perfume of this spirit-it requires a kind of sound that only speaks good thoughts to the wine prized by the previous administration . . .”
if you say so buddy
“My own taste in literature runs to privately authored and printed cult indoctrination textbooks-most flippable in the SellSpace markets . . .”
everybody’s gotta make a living I guess
“I awoke in my sister’s purchasing office with no memory of my brand identity . . .”
blame beasts are highly damage absorbent,
usually not worth the tedium of battle once you’ve gone omniclass,
but people will record these vast libraries of nonsensical statements,
construct new bases for new theories,
all while the same old eye hangs over us in the sky
Iris
the most cryptic goddess of the Oblit.
oh, one thing for sure
NEVER
I mean NEVER
pray to Iris
because if you do
your shit will instantly explode,
and you will lose everything in your inventory
and you will not be able to get any of it back,
not ever
never pray to Iris
she’s the goddess of this bizarre realm,
but keep your entreaties to yourself,
she’s just not into that.
-October 2020
