A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

Again, I am weak to connections I have made. I have been seeing something, just in the corner of my eye, the peripherals of vision in my reality. It was something of a blip or something distant, a tear in the reality. It had to be her, or Kara, or Fyntn, or Barc. All I knew was that I could not have it appear to me. So I was at the device again, ready to fight the interference in my reality with what little creationism I could muster. “He’s back,” Kara’s voice near me said. She was holding me in her arms, the child I was. With a wave of my hand, I floated away from her and into the air of the library. “Shit! Hold him down!” “Jack?” Lila’s voice asked, flying up next to me. I blinked to put her into a bubble of air, which she popped due to still having a sort of creationism herself. “We’re trying to help you!” Before I knew it, the metal circlet was on my head again, thoughts revealed. #I can’t be here,# I thought. #Why am I back here again?# “Relax,” Mr. Barcode soothed, while flying h...

I have been told about my birth many times, and though the tales vary person to person, each upholds the basic theme of an unending conflict between two empires. From my first breath of dry, hot air, I was allied to one side, while wrapped in cloth of the other’s banner. I don’t believe that was when my story began, but to my family, and my affiliation, that day was the moment of great victory and pride. My first cry was drowned out by a cheer over the endless armies of red. Though they both carried that crimson banner, it was the emblems upon them that differed two proud empires. Ours was the golden scorpion, and theirs, the black wasp. We were the two factions that have been at war spanning uncounted millennia, always finding new ways to hurt each other instead of reaching a peace. It wasn’t until me that the cracked earth stopped running red with blood, but more on that later. “Amidst the glorious battle,” my dad bellowed to men gathered around us. “I felt the pain of my child arriv...

That wasn’t just one story,” Lila said the second I formed up in the untethered space. “It was like five separate stories that intertwined.” “Well,” I said. “That’s what most stories are. What do you think of secondary characters otherwise? Do they just serve the purpose of the main? Don’t they have their own paths that led them to interact with the lead?” Lila rubbed her temples in thought. It was a lot to understand that each tethered story she put together had dozens cast off from the central one. Those were often left untold. “That’s crazy,” she said. “You mean each of the other ones had other stories in it, but never tethered because the thread stitched together the main’s story?” “If you want to think of it that way, yes,” I said. “But it’s ok, Lila. Those stories are often omitted. Like the drunk man in the samurai story. Didn’t he seem like a small character for Dokuto? All he did was ask whether he had a family. They talked for a brief moment, but what if the old man had a ful...