This is where I post regular updates as to what I am going through in Mysteria
I haven't really beeen into journaling in the past, but it's lonely and weird out here and I feel like I need a place to record my thoughts.
This morning, (if you could even call it morning.) I woke up in pitch-black darkness, soaked in thick mud with heavy rain pouring down around me. I could see faint outlines of mountains in the distance lit by the occasional bolt of lightning. I tried to stand, but pain tore through my entire body. I feel for my foot. It's definitely not in the correct place for a foot to be. From what I could feel, it was severely twisted at a horrifying angle. Wincing,I looked around for the Theseus, but it is too dark to see. Trying not to cry from the pain, I crawled on my hands and knees, feeling every squelch as my body sank into the deep, briny muck. Some gets in my mouth, it was gritty and salty and tasted like dirt. I spluttered, giving in to tears. In that moment, it felt hopeless. I was going to die here, wasn't I.
Then I felt it, solid ground. A rock. It was jagged and sharp, but I managed to drag myself on top of it, letting the rain wash the wads of viscous silt out of my clothes and hair. After a while, I gritted my teeth and tried to get my ankle back in it's socket. In the brief flashes of lightning, I could make out its sillouhette, It wasn't pretty. I tried to set it with my hands, but that only made the pain far worse. Looking for something I could use as leverage, I crawled farther up the rocks. A faint light glimmered from up ahead, I couldn't make it out, was it the Theseus? At this point, my foot has started to go numb. Every motion I made was agonizing, but I finally made it to the light, it was a cave of sorts, a narrow crevice in the rock. The light was coming from a massive formation of glowing crystals within the cave itself. At that moment, I didn't really stop to take in just how beautiful that place was. All I cared about was fixing my foot. Quickly, I wedged it between two heavy rocks and leaned my entire body weight backwards, trying to pull it back into place. I screamed. This had already been the worst pain I had felt in my life, but at that moment, between the pain and the sickening crunch that it made, I almost thought I had ripped my foot clean off. I hadn't however, that maneuver had actually worked. The pain was still horrible, but nowhere near the hellish levels of torment I had been in as I was pulling it.
I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and leaned back against the stone walls of the grotto. Right at my eye level, there was an odd, palmlike plant (plant?), bearing several sweet-smelling round fruits. I had been too distracted by my pain to think about food, but the sudden hunger I felt in that moment consumed me. I didn't care what those fruits were, I needed them. One by one, I ripped all six of the bulbous, aqua colored growths off of the plant and I may have entered a bit of a rabid fruit frenzy. Covered in dark purple juices with the consistency of egg whites, I curled up in the corner farthest from the entrance of the cave and fell asleep, the waking world twisting and whirling into the shapes of slumber.
What happened next is a bit fuzzy, but this is what I remember to the best of my capacity. My skin was glowing in a color that the human eye shouldn't be able to see. Certain parts of my body also felt incredibly heavy. My head, my hands, my foot, still throbbing from earlier. I tried to get up, but it is as if those parts of me were made of lead. Laying on my back I stared up at the ceiling. Was it always alive? Tiny bugs pulse and merge in and out of each other. The ceiling is made of them. The whole world is made of them. I am made of them. I love my bugs. I stood up to try and pet the bugs on the ceiling. The parts of my body that were heavy before are not now, bits of them floating away in tiny cubes of wonderful ceiling bugs. My heart sank as I realize that I would never be able to reach the ceiling bugs. They grew farther away for every step I took towards them. I could not take another step towards them. There was something grabbing my ankle. I was grabbing my ankle, but it was not me. I was the bugs. My ankle was the ceiling. She let go and began to cry. I come down from the ceiling to comfort her. Someone is comforting me. Someone is holding me close.
"Hey! I don't know who you are, but listen to me." a male voice rung out "Focus on who you are. Focus on what it was like before!"
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. "I am Sanity Mandel. I am a human being. I am in a cave, tripping on weird fruit." I repeated under my breath, almost like a chant.
"Yes! You are Sanity Mandel. You are a human being. You are going to be okay" The voice replied, the comforting presence holding me closer.
I clung to the presence, hugging it tight, it felt like another person. "But I don't feel okay" I sobbed.
"I will make sure you are okay. Just focus on my voice."
I looked through my tears to see where the voice is coming from. There is a fatherly man sitting next to me with an arm around me, holding me steady. He had curly ginger hair and a long beard. He was also slightly translucent, like a ghost from some cheesy, low budget horror film.
"Who are you?" I asked
"My name is Hal, and you are the first person who has been able to hear me in years"
"Long story short,I used to be a human, just like you." He explained, "I came here from a place called Lake Clearwater. Some local researchers figured out a way to activate a portal they found in some ruins by the shore."
"Believe it or not," I said, "My uncle is one of those researchers assigned to that project."
Hal nods, "So anyways,me and a couple of other local idiots decided it would be fun to see what was on the other side of that thing for ourselves. Well, we sure did. At first it was all fun and games, we were laughing and messing around and altogether just having a good time. Then I briefly left the group to take a piss, and when I came back, they were gone. I searched the surrounding area for hours, no trace of either of them. I then assumed that maybe they had headed back to the portal, but when I went back to the area where I thought the portal was, It was gone too. I was stuck here."
"Those next few days were hell. I'm pretty sure that if that thing, Delulu, hadn't come to save me, I would have died right there and then."
"Delulu?" I asked.
"She was a strange one, with a long, yet emaciated, serpentine tail, a head like the skull of a horse, and oh so many charms and amulets hanging off of every inch of her body." He continued, "When I thought I would starve to death, she held me in her bony embrace and fed me something, maybe milk, maybe blood. Whatever it was, it was enough to keep me alive. I never could understand the rattling, jittering clicks in which she spoke, but somehow I felt an overpowering sense that she loved me and wanted me to survive, though whether she loved me like a pet, a child , or even a partner eluded me at the time. I know now that she only thought of me as livestock, like a pig being fattened for the slaughter."
"Despite all logic and sense though, I felt safer with her than with any of the other entities. I remember that we would often go to a narrow, dark place in the mountains together, we would use these crystals,"He gestured to the walls of the grotto" to enter an altered state of conciousness. When I ate them, I felt like I could forget that I was alone in the dark with no way home. On roughly the twentieth trip to the dark, narrow place, something was different. As I entered the familiar sensation of the crystal's effects, I felt her hand on my shoulder, then another hand, and another. They covered me and were pulling me in. I felt the sickly warm sensation of something breating down the back of my neck. I look up to call for help. Delulu is nowhere to be seen. She abandoned me. I hear voices from the mass that is holding me down, 'Not yett. Not yett. We need hiim. We neeeed youu. Free us.' A horrid crunching, wailing sound emenates from the thing she left me with, and slowly and painfully, as if the hands are being dragged off of me against their will, whatever it is lets go. The moment I am free from its grasp, I make a run for it. The thin crack at the entrance of the cavern scrapes against me, but I manage to make it out."
"I searched long and far for Delulu. Did she mean to abandon me? Part of me hoped I could find her again. I was getting so very hungry without her there. Without her, I felt completely alone, worthless, lost. I had relied on her for so long and now, I felt empty. In my despair, I once again sought out the crystals. Maybe they could dull the pain again, as they had back then. Then, I found this place. In my own stupidity, I took a much larger and brighter crystal than I had ever used before, crushed it up and mixed it with water, then I drank it. In that moment, crying, giving in to the darkest parts of myself, I wished that I never existed, That I could disappear. And I did."
As we talk over the next few hours, I realize that the effects of whatever I ate are wearing off, Hal has faded into a reflection on the surface of the glittering formations on the grotto walls. I can still hear him, but now he is behind glass, muffled, his spectre no longer inhabiting the physical space before me. Using a rock from the ground, I break off a platelike chunk of the crystal from the cave wall, bringing Hal's reflection with me. I note that the psychedelic patterns I had been seeing in my vision had solidified somehow, like geometric engravings in the cavern walls. I ran my hands over the patterns, fascinated by the well-defined grooves. Light reflected off of them in through the cave entrance. It had stopped raining. My foot still hurt, but at least now I had a friend.
Looking outside the grotto I had spent the night in, I wondered, for a moment, if I had actually made it back home. At first glance, it looked like the shores of Lake Clearwater where I had spent my childhood. Looking closer though, I could see that the sand was polka-dotted with shallow, circular pools. It looked like how a child who had never seen tidepools before might imagine them, round divots in the sand and stone, filled with water and teeming with life. I spend a while transfixed, watching the unfamiliar shapes of unclassified life dart and squirm in the blue water. How blue and clear that water was, it was the sort you would only find on a postcard and rarely on a real beach. Looking up, the sky was a pale green, with wispy clouds lazily drifting on a wayward breeze.
A point in the distance caught my attention, smoke was rising from a site in the direction the distant, rolling mountains that held this place, the side opposite the sea. It took me a long time to get there. The sun rose and set multiple times in what felt like irregular intervals, The terrain itself wasn't very hard to manage, it was mostly wet sand, with sparse patches of gravel, stone, or mud. The distance however, put quite the strain on my already tired body, made worse by the lingering pain in my ankle. By the time I was nearing the point of interest, I was completely mentally and physicaly drained, I had been talking to Hal on the way, but even with his companionship, I felt myself begin to slip into panic and despair once again.
Those feelings instantly abated when I finally saw what I had been searching for. The Theseus-class research vessel I had "borrowed" earlier lay on its side on an outcropping of hexagonal basalt stones, a few pieces appeared to be missing, but overall, it seemed fine. The engine was still running, surprisingly, hence the smoke. I approached the wreckage carefully, trying to avoid stepping on the jagged debris that surrounded the crash site. I peered inside. The cabin of the boatlike vehicle was full of overturned furnishings and scattered papers. Everything that could have fallen over did during the impact. I rifle through the overturned objects searching for anything that could help me survive, when suddenly a furry shape hisses and flings itself at my face. It was my cat. How could I have forgotten about Schrodinger! I had been so focused on my own survival that I hadn't even remembered that I had brought him with me when I had tried to run from the research base. I hold him close. I cried for a while.
Once I was done with my tearful cat reunion, I worked my way to the upper cabin, where the steering controls were located. I try to initiate a reboot. The monitors and screens throught the cabin flicker to life, even though a few are smashed or cracked. The Theseus is working... sort of. As of the writing of this log, the vehicle is still sideways, which leaves me typing this in a very awkward position. Tomorrow, or at least, after I sleep for a bit (thankfully the Theseus's hammocks are still functional sideways lol) I intend to try and get the cargo hold open. maybe there's an instruction manual on how to fix this thing in there.