This entry has been stamped with the signet of editing.

This is a story I will continue until told to stop.

Want to download the whole thing in one Document and one lesser document? <<— Here you go.

Please refrain from stealing it etc etc.

Chapter One

---

Kemuri is a very heady drink.

To drink any amount of it in the ordinary manner is dangerous and right out, and it would have been scrapped as a confectionary error if not for how easily it forms bubbles. It is served, thus, in a decanter with a decorated puffer attached, making the contraption look like an overgrown perfume bottle. When pumped, the simple machine dispenses small to medium orbs into the air. This is how shots of kemuri are taken—not in shot glasses. Not unless one is really, really curious about what chalk octopi look like and doesn't mind hiccuping sprays of bubbles into the faces of those across from them. Some don’t. In any case, what happens if one drinks a pint of it is a subject of chain letters and eerie transmissions.

How the hell one catches and consumes one of these bubbles is up to them, but circa 2041, it was stylish to try and catch them on one's tongue in a suggestive manner or to try and copy the personal techniques of the famous. The son of the Seligrine emperor could reportedly inhale one through his cigarette; no had figured out how. However consumed, the results were the same: a quick, subtle ghost of a hallucination before the eyes along with the degree of inebriation associated with a pint of beer. In Norf, this little vision is known as le petit spectre. According to superstition, this effect gives a glimpse into one's future, and though science would disagree, it is said to have predicted the deaths of kings.

The drink comes in several flavors, all indeterminate, but different colors: transparent, pink, blue, deep red, white, inky black. Glow-in-the-dark is highly expensive and coveted but slightly radioactive. Use sparingly.

Unsurprisingly, it was illegal in the Snofflands around 2041 on the grounds that a superstitious drinker who, well intoxicated, saw too eerie a spectre too easily became a berserker. Banned after that incident in the Iosethep museum with the fireworks.

And yet.

The west Snofflands were the world’s capital of its use, with Iosethep the capital of that, as it teemed with the base of its consumers: those below the law and those above it.

On the three hundred sixtieth day of the year, above and below shared a decanter of kemuri in a dark bar.

Lux Langley II, Archduke of the country, was a man who could go out in disguise as himself. The public knew the archduke as pinprick mirror shades set close to his eyes—in fact, round shapes dominated him, for a body with its fat so rigidly hidden. On the outside of his tunic, he wore his new girdle for the first time, one size larger than the last. They never looked good on him. Waist forced into the perfectly round frame, he appeared almost too three dimensional with the rest of his clothes on, which similarly pulled his surfaces unnaturally tight, like a doll's rigid skin. Where its constriction failed to extend past his hips, he looked confusingly female; his rough voice had confused Aubrey London at the door, who had also seen the aristocrat’s blackened lips. Were it not for the shades, Aubrey would have perceived something sweet light up in Lux’s eyes for that second of confusion. Lux lived for those seconds in which he was neither a man nor a woman.

He would only have had to take everything off to become unrecognizable—a small-featured dirty blonde head on a slightly overfed and distinctly male body. It got a lot of looks, but received coldly, bare lips pursed.

Here, though, all teeth.

Aubrey dwarfed him across the table, the sharply dressed face of Iosethep’s bohemian underground. The two were on equal footing alone, but Aubrey met Lux as a conduit tonight, speaking for something more powerful than royalty.

Lux traced a finger back and forth on the glassy table, which matched the one-way mirrors that glazed the outer walls of the bar. “You’ve got it upstairs, then—hell of an expenditure, even for me.” Especially to hide. If word of this venture met the public, he had been promised a fate unspeakable. He glowered over his shades. “I don’t like immersives.”

“The interface is downstairs,” Aubrey corrected, sounding like one talking in his sleep. He blinked a speck of white powder out of his eye. The pale man took great pains to hide the shadows of his insomnia, which was three years old, named Demetrius, could already name all of his father’s girlfriends—the Numerian, the dancer, the witch, the man—and found new ways to get downstairs faster than Aubrey could add more locks.

Gods help the poor bastard to offer Aubrey a cure.

It happened. It had happened just the night before, knocking the meeting with Lux forward a day when the child's powdery hair had appeared just below the edge of their table and matter-of-factly observed that the guy over there waving the pointy thing did not like him. Lux had spent most of the timeslot under a chair to avoid becoming collateral damage. He had fit—Aubrey had made him.

Aubrey ended sharply, in too reprimanding a tone. “And the Fates wish to speak to you in person. As I’ve told you before.”

“Shut up!” Lux snapped a medium sized bubble that had been floating above the decanter between his teeth. He did not hold himself back, having never learned politeness. Taught, but never learned. His chest swelled once, then he licked his lips—the bubble had sprayed them. “I am not here for…for…” The spectre staggered his voice, emerging out of a hole in the air.

Aubrey clasped his hands on top of the table, looking at the airspace before Lux’s startled face and waiting patiently, fingers clasped beneath his nose; it was blank to him, but his imagination was more than capable of filling it in.

The hallucinated smoke rounded into the shape of a crying baby’s head, mouth growing wider, wider…until it eclipsed the head backwards, bursting the vision. Blast; as always. Lux scowled. He did not want children.

Aubrey’s head remained where the baby’s had been, staring at a shape he had fashioned there with his own mind. His bleach-white hair, parted between his eyes, fell where the baby had had none, and his whitish lips curled smugly. Aubrey, Lux had heard, did not see symbols on the drink; he saw worlds. He had pulled the design of this very bar out of a vision from a single orb.

As the artist had intended, Lux did not feel he had escaped the subconscious when he shifted his eyes around the room. Metal bent as metal shouldn’t, and the cogs of another age circled in the shadows. The metal enclosed him in his very chair, making a twisting design beneath him that he could feel even through his excessive clothing. The rate of his breath increased, not temporarily.

“I am not here,” Lux finally spat, “for you.”

“Which is why the consequences for your conduct I’ll leave to the Fates if you keep it up,” said Aubrey, his basso voice rolling through his pasty face, which looked to have risen off of his skull like bread dough, or perhaps squeezed out of the rigid tube of his neck brace. A tiny, suspiciously tinted bottle that hung around it on a string fell out of his collar as he leaned closer to Lux and lowered his voice. “Are your people really going to be here to clean up your mess?” On the last word, his eyes jerked in the direction of the far corner, where a figure in a crinkling, filmy cloak bent over his table as if in sleep. As if. That wasn’t a red wine spill seeping through his hair. “That is a dead man, not even taken lightly here. Your blood gives you no privilege to do that.”

“’E cut me in the line.”

“Far from an acceptable reason to kill—“

“’E cut me in the line,” Lux protested, raising his voice in confusion only.

Ah, the Langleys, who had never had a concept of the unacceptable…Aubrey, with no delicacy in his hand, caught a bubble on the tip of his paper napkin, which it soaked into upon bursting. He sucked the napkin loudly and lay it back down on the table wetter with saliva—he had used this one several times now. For a moment, his eyes wandered through something Lux could never wander through in his dreams, and when his eyes met the noble’s again, he had figured him out. “From here, I could hear your aide protesting through your wires…last night was difficult enough.” He wrinkled his nose at the memory.

“Tomita’s loud,” Lux said, “but he’ll come." Lux was careful to stretch the truth about his subordinate's punctuality. Mister Tomita was the worst, bound to Lux only by his own honor, his family's reputation for turning out only the best of warrior servants. Without his last name, he would have fled long ago, like all the rest. Please show up. Please oh please oh please. People like you are so boring when you die... "Not acceptable...ha, you think that bitch last night would've been less dead if your staff hadn't been there to pry you off him?"

Aubrey straightened up and tucked the bottle away again. “The immersive will be administered with one intravenous needle.”

Lux flinched, which Aubrey paused and savored. No Langley had ever taken a needle peacefully. The man liked seeing him intimidated, and to confirm it, he fanned a decanted bubble Lux’s way with two fingers, flirtatiously. I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask you to—gulp. Air and all; it hurt going down.

Lux was not ready for the spectre, which, influenced by Aubrey’s instructions coming through his ears, made a crude map of the interface.

Aubrey rumbled, “It goes in the arm, like a doctor’s.”

A smoky needle dove for Lux’s flesh, and he could not stop himself from jerking his arm away.

“If you know enough of immersives to be afraid of them, you know the user must be as suggestible as possible. The drug takes twenty-four hours to expel; have one of your aides drive you home. Well-tolerated, too, or else there wouldn’t be those who keep it flowing through them constantly before their interfaces…heh. It interests me, too, Mr. Langley, what would compel a person to render themselves so perfectly helpless.”

There was a warning in Aubrey’s voice. Jovial, even titillated, but a warning about the Fates. Damn; Lux had too much fear to keep in as it was. Had none of the urban legends about the “witches in the wires” exaggerated the power of the Fates? The spectre formed something looming and vague, just beyond Lux’s comprehension. He could form no better words than “It’s ‘Your Grace’.”

It was a good thing kemuri wasn’t a drink that could go up one’s nose with laughter. Hidden behind the spectre, Aubrey repressed a guffaw. Lux was the least graceful thing in the world. The night before, he had tried to jump into the fight for fun, swinging in on a ceiling lamp without the slightest idea of why it was going on. Aubrey had tossed him back out with one hand. Tonight, Lux had killed that poor sap with a stranger’s half-full bottle and dropped it on the floor to shatter once bloodied.

Lux demanded, tense, “I am Archduke. You will call me ‘Your Grace’!”

“Yes, Your Grace, but you must let the Fates call you whatever they want. As for the rest of the interface, the funds you provided me allowed me to upgrade to a sort with electrodes in place of needles for the head, arranged in a line, as tape.”

A rectangle dotted with the electrodes, dripping with wires, opened up before Lux. He hiccupped, rocking a little bit.

“The two attachments that resemble a ball cut in two—“

Hung on wires, they unfolded from the far side of the tape.

“—place over your eyes.”

They placed themselves over his eyes, enclosing them in the opaque smoke of the hallucination. His shades did not hinder it; they were of another world. Lux heard someone yelp; it might have been himself.

“By then, you will not be capable of starting the machine yourself. We will take these actions in the order I described to give me power over the switches.”

Smoky threads crossed in his eyes as nonexistent switches were thrown, warping, bending themselves into a dimension that the bar merely mocked, the true dreams of Aubrey.

“I will guide you to the dwelling of the Fates.”

Looping themselves overhead, they would have sprawled thousands of the archduke’s skyscraper, and what they did to a man…Aubrey was smiling somewhere, watching Lux’s eyes like a show. Aubrey was violating his mind.

“I am ready!” The shades cleared, and Lux found himself standing, heaving with anger.

Aubrey’s smile sank back into the face from whence it had come. “The Fates would not take kindly to that tone. Sit back down.”

Lux was already facing powerlessness before the Fates. He would not be helpless at the hands of this common mortal. “You told me what to do. Show me to where you keep the immersive.”

“You’ll stand?” Aubrey nodded. “If you must.”

Instead of standing himself, Aubrey wrenched the right arm of his chair upward, slightly off of the piece of furniture. The arm was a switch, and Lux was knocked back into his own chair by the jolt of starting machinery; both chairs began to descend through the floor.

edited 1st Dec '11 8:49:39 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Keep writing!

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

FUCK YEAH AFGN THAT WAS AWESOME.

(nods in approval)

Maybe.

Some writing.

As with the previous story, interesting viewpoints on power and tyranny.

Only thing in particular I noticed:

Your flavor of free indirect discourse is interesting, but I think this specific line could be cut; the surrounding scene gets it across well enough.

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku

Interesting. I thought that was one of the best lines at characterizing Lux. It wrapped up a whole lot of character traits in one easily-grasped package. It warned me that this man could do anything — that he operates outside normal social limits.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Right, but I think the rest of the piece gets that across strongly enough without spelling it out explicitly. Particularly the surrounding sentences; that he had no concept of the unacceptable can be derived from the fact that someone tells him something extreme is not acceptable, and he replies with confusion, so it's redundant.

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku

@Madrugada/Haven: Someone understood what I was saying! Maybe the people who say I write word salad aren't always right!

Seriously, someone saying they understood what I wrote is one of the best things that can be said to me. I do get the word salad complaint all the time. You should've seen how my professor's question marks in the margins of Machine Elves reproduced toward the end.

edited 25th Dec '09 10:15:07 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

This entry has been approved by the M6 Department of Editing.

Hai guyz next installment. Tell me when it gets bad, okay? Because the ending being a sudden [and this is where they couldn't stand it anymore] notice would actually fit right in.

---

Lux pulled both of his legs onto his seat and wrapped his arms around them, paranoid of catching them in the hole in the floor. What would fill that in…there. Up there. As his hair brushed against the floor’s tile, he looked up at another square of floor descending from the floor above. For this reason, no one stared at the disappearing patrons; no one stared any more than they would at an elevator. Who was coming down from above he was unable to see; he wondered if they had been expecting their descent more than he had his. “What the fuck?”

A flat hum from the dark expanse below muted the sounds of Aubrey coolly crossing his legs and lighting a cigarette, which filled the screened off elevator shaft through which they descended with bluish smoke. The crosshatched screen came between them and the floor below, where tables and chairs were replaced by a hive of dancers that undulated to no rhythm, only the hum.

Aubrey raised his voice slightly to speak over the sound. “White noise.” He thought Lux had expressed surprise at his patrons dancing to static. “After two, they will be naked.” He took a long drag and blinded Lux with sapphire. “We are going below.”

Lux half listened, squinting through the smoke at the faraway floor—the elevator moved slowly, and he preferred crowded spaces from above. Specifically, spitting on them from above. “Heh—“ The woman below didn’t even notice.

With the white noise enclosing them in a soundproof wall, Aubrey, for the first time, referred to the Fates by another name. “My friends are the future, Mr. Langley, and they have entrusted me to protect them. The M6 surround us and are fixated on them. The dears do not know the revolution they’re trying to stop.” Though the same height as Lux, Aubrey looked down at him. The Snofflandish intelligence agency saturated Iosethep because of the Langleys and the reproducing time bombs they had been for centuries. “As an authority in this country, if you had a sense of justice or reputation at all, I would have denied you their existence when you first sought us out. I have…retired…two agents who came too close. I am ready to assassinate you with my own hands, and if you kill me, my cryonic tank will become a centerpiece on this dance floor in anticipation of when we are all Fates. I have nothing to fear.” He gestured to a circular indentation below—but not far below anymore. “We will face each other again in their domain; come and remind yourself whenever you wish, but do not expect to be well-received.”

Aubrey tossed his cigarette out of the shaft, and its trail of blue ended in a tangle of grappling admirers.

“Remember why I am your friend, Mister Langley—“ he said as they passed the floor and entered a silent abyss, the colored beam from the club’s lights all that illuminated them. “—because I am not afraid of you. Eliminate me and you will find me quite irreplaceable.”

Lux, who had been examining and touching the floor tiles on the way past them, finally looked at Aubrey. The abyss smelled metallic, like factory air that had escaped the packaging of something enormous. “What was that all?”

Aubrey did not bother with the speech again, only cracked his knuckles threateningly and bared his shark-sized teeth. Lux got the message.

In a minute, they gently touched down on the floor, two patrons in two chairs in a bar that did not exist, with no table, no one to wait on them—ever. Lux stood too quickly to notice that his legs were shaking until they made him stumble. It was the needle. “Where is it?”

"In front of us." Like the real aristocrat of the two, Aubrey stood more gracefully. The two were close enough in height to look each other straight in the eye, but standing, Aubrey’s uncontained weight made Lux look breakable. “Light.”

Overhead fluorescent lights, most functioning, unveiled a vast, empty storeroom that had once had a function in the bar’s construction—empty but for something deserving of a lot more fanfare.

Lux laughed out loud. “Hot damn!”

“Only what you paid for, Your Grace.” Aubrey shared a sly smile with himself. The kid was sure going to be funny when he saw that shiny new console blown ceiling-high right after he disconnected—he would be funny even without the drug that would still be strong in his veins. This little escapade would leave footprints, and footprints had to be covered.

---

Next time: cyberspace.

edited 4th Apr '10 2:10:04 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Effff I wish I could change the thread title to "AFGNCAAP's Serial Thing" or "If this is at the top of the forum it might mean that AFGNCAAP added something to it and I'm running out of title spac"

Some writing.

This is working.

Swapped the title for you.

edited 30th Dec '09 11:45:45 AM by FastEddie

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

wow, wow, WOW, WOW, I just read the first installment, i love it.

I mean, i consider myself pretty good, but not publishing-worthy, this is publishing-worthy. After you're done typing the thing here you should see if someone'll publish it.

If you want me, i am still here. ElTheDaze@yahoo.com

It would have to be some publisher who is way different from the types I've seen before, with whom this self-indulgent chaos would never fly. See this line graph? This is what may to happen to the quality as the piece lengthens and mistakes accumulate: [1]◊ And see this one? This represents the progression of the sanity of the plot mapped out in my head presently: [2]

I'm just not used to being told I'm okay; it hasn't happened in a while.

More tonight, maybe.

edited 30th Dec '09 5:10:33 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Affy: Don't down yourself, that is really good, although i agree you'd need a nontraditional publisher. Are Penguincave Books still around?

If you want me, i am still here. ElTheDaze@yahoo.com

I'm going to write a little bit more tonight (hopefully), but in the meantime, I tried out a new drawing style on Mr. London,◊ who is apparently every Bond villain ever (I know; not the greatest scan). If I don't draw him now, it's going to be very, very difficult later.

And if you want a picture of what it's like outside the current setting, here's an art piece I did not do: [1]

@Daisy: It is a self-publishing thing? Because I don't like getting mocked, and people who do that get mocked. It's widely believed (at leas ton the internet) that if you're good enough to get published, someone will accept you, and those who accept themselves are called deluded wannabes who will maybe sell two copies to their mom and dad. I'm not confident enough to face my dishonesty yet, and I get shit writing grades for a reason.

edited 31st Dec '09 4:46:49 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

As it stands now, I don't think it's publish-ready. It's still got a lot of rough spots and while I think it's supposed to be something between linear storytelling and stream of consciousness, right now there are spots where it's simply confusing. Frustratingly confusing. But I think that you might consider starting to research agents and publishing houses to get an idea of which one's could be a good fit. Don't self-publish in the condition it's in now.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I'm not publishing it at all and never said I would, ever, ever, ever. Why? Because it's not stream-of-consciousness, and if it looks that way, it has greater problems than a few passages. Please let me know about where it's confusing. This always happens, and I am so sick of it.

Everyone: I'll do anything to fix it, and if that still doesn't help, maybe writing isn't for me, which a lot of feedback has pointed to lately. This piece is the crazy way it is because it is me giving up—burning out colorfully if I must burn out, but if it has any potential to be anything, I don't want to. Usually, no one sees my work before it is done; that has been the rule since I started writing up until this last ditch effort. It's not for publishing; it's to either end the writing stage of my life or to save it, depending on what happens having breached that last taboo. I've been thinking about this dilemma for months now, a hard decision with one option—open up everything. Anyone can tell me if I need to edit something, even, and I'll let you see it change right in front of you. I am going cold turkey on secrecy and seeing what happens when I face that one fear I haven't faced yet.

I'm not at a researching stage. I'm just looking for an answer the only way I know how.

edited 31st Dec '09 7:04:41 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I was responding to Daze about the publishing.

Don't give up — there's definitely quality there. The characterizations are intriguing, and your world is fascinating to me. (I particularly like the bubble intoxicant — the idea of sitting around a table catching a bubble when you felt like it is an incredible — social — thing — like a hookah, but more so.)

If you're just letting this spill out, that explains the parts I find confusing, which are usually trying to sort out either who is speaking or who is reacting. But that's the kind of thing that clean-up and polishing is for. The sense I get is that this world is just boiling inside of you, and bubbling out onto the paper. Take a page from NaWriMo but without the deadline, and just let it spill out right now, catch it now and worry about polishing it later. It doesn't have to be perfect from the very beginning although I know that you've said that you're a perfectionist, so letting it spill out in rough form goes against everything you expect of yourself. That's part of the reason my comments are much more about what I like and what I think works rather than "this is wrong" or "that could be better"; you don't need to have it taken apart looking for what's wrong right now, you need to hear what's right. The idea is right. The characters are right. The setting is right. Those are the important things at this stage.

Affy, I'm not a writer, so I cannot look at this and respond to it as a writer. I'm a reader. I'm looking at it as reader, and as a reader — there's a story here that I want to read when it's finished. There are characters I want to know about and a world I want to see. And as a reader, I'm honored that you're letting me experience it in it's rough form.

If I sound like a flippin' cheerleader, that's because I'm being one.

edited 31st Dec '09 7:28:35 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Sorry about the rant. I have been keeping this inside/putting off dealing with it for a long time.

I'll go over the mechanics of each chapter after I finish it, particularly who is speaking, etc. If you prefer to see it after I do that for each, that's a good way to do it. Certainly clearer. But of course the rough form is for everyone to see—It's something I've never done before, but this is a tougher writing issue than I've ever dealt with before. Responses from people as readers are exactly what I'm taking the risk for. Thanks.

edited 31st Dec '09 7:33:09 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

No, keep putting up the roughs. It's apparently good for you to push yourself that way (or at least, it's something you feel you need to do right now — which is the same thing, really). One of the reasons I hang out in Writer's Block is because I like seeing things change and become ... wholer, I guess. And don't worry about the rant. Those need to spill out too, sometimes, and here is the best place for it.

edited 31st Dec '09 7:40:19 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

What I meant was continuing to put up the roughs, but then going back and editing the posts at the end of each chapter so one can watch it change if they wish to go back. Maybe I should go edit in a chapter indicator right now, as this is the first. Yeah; I'll do that. Also, give it a title. No; too soon for a title.

Thank you. I've been waiting to hear that from somebody, and I'm really, really glad you connect with it.

edited 31st Dec '09 7:57:37 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Aubrey London stared at this post, and it edited itself.

If not for a small power outage, this would have appeared a lot sooner. Fuck that guy.

---

The machine looked like a dentist’s chair, but meaner. Before immersives, the number of screens on the top-of-the-line machines had inflated to ten, sometimes twenty, but this had one. Auxiliary, rising from the base like an extra arm with its keyboard for Aubrey’s use alone. This was the only old part; he had attached it to others. The keys were, though, matte, little used.

Lux’s hands had nothing but the arms of the chair. He sat down and put fingernail holes in them before he could be told to.

“Well.” Aubrey knelt to take something out of the recently opened boxes beneath the chair.

Lux heard plastic clicking and feared the worst. “Do it last,” he demanded. “I don’t want to see it.”

“A common sentiment.” Aubrey stood and clamped a set of titanium jaws around Lux’s arm at the elbow. “It must come first—you will understand—but you won’t see. The needle is inside, pressurized. You will feel a sting.”

“Fuck you—“ Lux strangled his voice for fear of someone hearing upstairs. His arm rolled over as he tried to bend it, but the device held it straight like a splint. An attached tube wrapped around it, clear and empty. The rest of his body had turned to snakes.

Aubrey flipped open a small plate on top, uncovering a button. “Scream if you must, Your Grace. What a peculiar trend white noise is—to dance to it. I wouldn’t have introduced it to them if I didn’t need it, and I introduced it the same week the Fates built their palace in the wires. Add it up yourself—no sound leaves this chamber.” A laugh dissipated silently behind his face, and he triggered the injection.

Dark color leapt into the tube, and Lux felt a bee sting his arm. A bee. An insect. An angry insect inside that cuff that would die now…he took it without a sound.

Color returned to his vision as his panic subsided, and he recognized the shade of blue that filled the tube he had haplessly wound around himself from the skin of another Iosethep noble. Baron Hans Lyon, that skinny dog who always said he would attend the Maison des Lords in person but always showed up floating over a projector, cobalt exterior flickering. Lux had only seen him once, the time he had invited himself into the Langley skyscraper during a power outage and without a hello or even a “please don’t kill me”, skipped right to getting drunk. Against all history, Lux hadn’t had him diced. It was a power outage; he’d joined the Baron and been disappointed with the lack of conversation—the physical world was but so many intermissions to Hans. He was a Blue Man, one of the people Aubrey wondered about, one who lived in an immersive to the extent that its drug had stained his skin. In technological centers such as Iosethep, they parted crowds in the right districts. Their color was the mark of a hacker or similar adept like a salamander’s spots warn of venom. In their domain, between the wires, they wore the name proudly as forces of coded nature. The Fates had been Blue Men once, before…Lux’s mind was wandering.

His extremities tingled, the last bit of feeling left in his body as its sensations were washed out, leaving it a blank slate on which the computer could etch its own. Aubrey had already taped the electrodes to his head and now stood right over his face with the eyepieces in one hand. He removed Lux’s shades. Lux couldn’t move to prevent it and no longer cared.

Aubrey gave him one last stare, right through Lux’s unimposing little grey eyes with his blue one…and something Lux had not noticed upstairs under the dimmer light, one blacked out iris. Fluorescent lighting couldn’t dull him. “You will never find another me. You will be alone,” he said.

Lux's brain absorbed the words involuntarily...suggestible...his mind was the artist's medium again. That was why he'd done the injection first. Viscous blue liquid buried Lux's fury when the tingling peaked on the top of his head. The disappearance of one of Aubrey's hands suggested that it combed through his hair sympathetically.

“I want to see you on your best behavior, Mr. Langley.”

The little wired cups came down, and Lux went blind.

edited 4th Apr '10 2:31:13 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I think I want to draw someone else, as I can only get better at it. Choose anyone who has come up so far. Anyone.

Some writing.

This one was really interesting. The same dynamic change I noticed between this and Machine Elves is getting stronger—I'm curious to see how Lux will attempt to reestablish his control in his relationship with Aubrey.

I think the main critique I could make is that you're overusing ellipses. I'd suggest taking out all of them except the one before "Lux's mind was wandering"; it's a nice effect there but otherwise it's a bit distracting.

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku