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When I first died I had to chooses:
1. Think things through
2. Figure out where you are
I think I chose #1:
I chose Think it through and got the following:
I tried to remember who I was
I stew in my negativity
I then remember the following scene:
AFTER THIS I FAILED HUNDREDS OF GUESS ON MY NAME FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS OR HWO EVER LONG IT BEEN. WHAT IS MY name. Bjorn is attack kme houhc
1. Think things through
2. Figure out where you are
I think I chose #1:
- Spoiler:
Realizing that nothing is coming from your current line of attack, you try another approach.
You wonder whether or not you might be having a particularly morbid nightmare, but the tried and true method of pinching your arm tells you that you are very much awake. Even so, dream or not, a lingering feeling of dread and loss in the pit of your stomach seems to confirm your thoughts. Perhaps your little exclamation from earlier was simply your subconscious stating the truth.
You decide to put aside your thoughts on the matter for now: while anyone else would be screaming their head off upon realizing that they're dead, you find yourself strangely at peace with yourself. Such a display of coolheadedness might have just been your mind's coping strategy for such a major revelation. Either way, you figure, maybe delving into your feelings about your apparent passing isn’t the best plan of action here.
You pause for a bit as something crosses your mind.
"Is... this the Great Beyond?"
It would certainly make sense. A strange new environment and the unshakable feeling that you've kicked the bucket? All of this lines up with you having passed onto the afterlife. However, your new surroundings don't appear to reflect any interpretation of the afterlife that you know about: the entire place seems completely devoid of... anything. Not even another person in sight.
You figure that this could be some sort of purgatory or transitory limbo between your previous life and the next -- it seems the part, at least -- but in truth, you have no idea where you are, and there are no signs spelling out your current location.
Maybe it would do you good to explore a bit to keep your mind off things.
What is your next step?
Explore
Think things through
I chose Think it through and got the following:
- Spoiler:
- Realizing that nothing is coming from your current line of attack, you try another approach.
Instead of barging into god knows where, you figure that the smart course of action is to make a plan. After a few awkward moments, you manage to contort your body into a sitting position. You hold out your hand and begin to lay down the facts about your situation that you definitely know.
One, you have no idea where you are. A cursory examination of your surroundings reveals nothing but a formless, whiteless expanse all around you. In a way, you feel as if you’re an astronaut trapped in the throes of space, given your hovering position in mid-air (mid-space?) You suppose earlier you had confirmed the existence of a floor, only to have said floor disappear almost instantly. Either way, the only adjectives you can think of to describe your current predicament are white … and white… and a little lonely.
Two, you're dead. Even though you appear perfectly healthy, you can feel the touch of death against your neck, coursing through your veins and arteries and pumped through your heart. Whatever forces that led you here had the decency to clothe you in nothing but a white shirt and pants, but even underneath your clothes, your skin retains no blemishes or marks. Despite how alive you feel, though, you can't shake off the stench of death hanging over your body like a cloud, as if you took a trip through a morgue and death clung to your body on your way out.
You curl your lips at this seemingly paradoxical situation. Instinctively, you press your fingers against your wrist: sure enough, you feel a faint pulse, undeniable proof that blood still courses through your body.
... So why do you feel like you've kicked the bucket? Bitten the dust? Breathed your last?
You pinch the bridge of your nose in frustration. Of course trying to answer questions only spawns more questions. Whatever else could you have possibly expected?
If you're dead, you should remember how you died, right? If you have memories of being injured or dying or anything that could lead to death, that’s a pretty good sign that you're dead for real and that maybe your pulse and your lack of injuries is because you're actually in the afterlife. If you don't have any, you're just having the worst dream of your life. The thought of being in the afterlife sends a shiver down your spine, but you chase away those thoughts.
You clench your fists as you try to remember how you died, combing through your mind for any clues, anything that could give you some answers in this mess. As you search desperately through your memories, you discover something much, much worse than any answer that you could have possibly come across.
A bead of sweat trickles down your forehead...
Who were you, again?
1. Try to remember who you are
2. Explore
I tried to remember who I was
- Spoiler:
- Who… are you?
You marvel for a moment at the simplicity of this question before you realize you don’t really know. You’re not even sure of what your occupation or title is. You’re…
You pause for a second, hoping that some random epiphany will come to you and you’ll be able to rattle off your autobiography, but nothing of the sort comes. Instead, waves of nausea roll over you as you stare blankly into the distance.
You run your left hand through your hair, as if hoping that the sheer action of raking your fingers through your hair would prompt the sprouting of spontaneous memories. Despite your utmost hopes, you have no such luck. It almost feels like a fog has descended on your mind, blocking out anything pertinent… to, well, you. And the thought of that terrifies you.
You remember what a birthday symbolizes, but you can’t remember inviting friends over for a party. You remember what “work” is and you can name off a few jobs, but you don’t remember if you’ve ever held one or not. You can imagine an elaborate, picturesque scene of a lake with a few ducks complete with a few folks sitting around the beach, but you struggle to place yourself in one of their shoes, replace one of their blank faces with yours. Is this scene one of your memories? Or is it not really yours to begin with?
You wonder, briefly, whether people are mourning you back in the world of the living. Then again, maybe it was better if no one really mourned you. After all, you can’t think of anyone who would. It wouldn’t be fair, you figure, if people were to put effort into remembering you when you yourself couldn’t remember them. The irony makes you laugh dryly, but your facial expression isn’t happy in the slightest. Just an unrelenting emptiness in the depths of your soul.
Heck, you don’t even remember your name. The one thing that gave your life a meaning, made you a full-fledged individual instead of some footnote in the annals of history, the one moniker that allowed people to keep you in their hearts. Without a name to go on, you might as well be nothing.
If only you could remember what it was…
You feel like things could be a lot better.
What is your next step?
Stew in your negativity
Explore
I stew in my negativity
- Spoiler:
- DEATH
Time passes, and you find yourself lurching through the white expanse, barely summoning the energy to move. Apathy consumes much of your days nowadays, your curiosity and urgency to discover more about your situation drained since your haunting realization. After all, what was the point of trying to investigate your circumstances when you don’t even know your name?
It was fitting, you thought to yourself, that you were dead (and even though you couldn’t remember how you died, if you were even dead, you still felt this to be the truth). After all, you felt like a ghost: decapitated from whatever had connected you to the land of the living by virtue of your amnesia, destined to float in an endless bland purgatory for the rest of your days. You supposed your current surroundings were quite accurate to how you felt.
Nothing.
The one thing that punctuated these long stretches of monotony in your mind was your repeated attempts to dream. You quickly found out that you didn’t appear to fatigue at all in this world, and that sleep wasn’t a necessity. Yet you forced yourself constantly to go to sleep to mixed results, closing your eyes and stilling your breath in an attempt to fool your brain to fall asleep. At first, you had told yourself that doing this was just your brute-forced attempt to get your body back into some sort of regular rhythm, anything that mimicked the normalcy that had been pulled out from under your feet.
Eventually though, that façade quickly fell apart, and you were forced to acknowledge that you were trying to sleep in order to dream, in an attempt to make your subconscious mind reveal the memories that you had long craved. You had prayed and hoped that your dreams would be the window to your soul, your self, you¬ – but despite your best efforts, you still remember nothing. And dreaming… well, that didn’t turn out well.
After god knows how long, you take a look at your hands, stretching them out and laying them against your knees with the palms facing upward. A little pale, but otherwise looking quite alive. You grimace at the sight: how ironic that you appear to be thriving when your heart and soul know that you’re dead.
You rub the bottom of your neck, your fingers tracing the crook of your jaw and settling down against your collarbone. So this was death, huh. A white purgatory with absolutely nothing in it, endless and barren for miles and miles. You figure that it could be a lot worse – at least you weren’t burning alive in some sort of endless torture. A small saving grace.
You gaze into the distance and muse your makeshift peace with your situation. Even though apathy had drained you of most of your motivation, there still existed some sense of longing in your chest: that you had unfinished business, a small voice that kept insisting that you absolutely had to go back to wherever you came from. You had come to the conclusion that such thoughts were just vestiges of ill-founded hope and urgency, irrational and wrong. After all, you didn’t even know where you had come from. You didn’t know what business you had to do. You still didn’t remember your name.
That’s okay, you think to yourself as you close your eyes.
And then you hear a very familiar rush.
What is your next step?
Remember.
I then remember the following scene:
- Spoiler:
- DEATH
You find yourself in a long, warmly lit foyer, light shining down from above and bathing you and everything else in a light yellow glow. As you acclimatize to this sudden change, you take a long sweeping glance of your surroundings. The walls of the foyer are filled with all sorts of pictures: across one wall, aged photographs snake up and around several wooden columns, creating a makeshift timeline. Beyond that, a receptionist sits behind a desk reading the paper.
The other wall is filled with one specific kind of photograph: portraits. You don't recognize any of the subjects, though you feel like some of them seem quite familiar. One in particular – a rosy-cheeked man smiling jovially for the camera – jumps out at you, but you find yourself filled with contempt at his face.
A faint scratch, scratch fills the air and you turn around, locking your eyes on someone else in the foyer. Your companion turns out to be a middle-aged individual deep in work, their glasses hanging on the bridge of their nose, sitting on one of the benches lining the foyer. Documents in neat, clipped stacks sit around them, like a makeshift castle made out of paper. The sight of another person slightly freaks you out after such a long isolation, but you puff out your chest and swallow your fear. This wasn't the time to shiver in your boots (not that you were wearing any); this was your best chance for answers. For example, the most pressing one: where the hell are you?
"Hello?" you say to your companion, but they don't respond. Instead, more furious writing fills the air. You furrow your brow and repeat your words, but once again silence is your only reply. Intent on digging something up, you lean in to see what could possibly be stealing this person’s attention away from you.
"MAYORAL APPLICATION" reads the form that they’re furiously writing on, big bold letters screaming out from the top of the page. You blink. Mayoral applications? This guy was clearly shooting for high office.
Noting that the individual doesn't seem to be registering your presence anyways, you flip through one of the stack of documents. It's a package of newspaper clippings and assorted notes: clearly this person had come to city hall prepared. A quick glance through the paperwork reveals the hallmarks of a tumultuous government of a town gripped in a reign of terror, an ineffectual mayor whose best defense was hiding in their office and pretending the hell outside didn’t exist. In your chest, a discontent begins to rumble: this mayor felt more like a fearful king than a real leader.
What an asshole, you mutter to yourself. As you continue pouring over the clippings, you notice that your companion had etched in notes in red pen next to the clippings, and you found yourself agreeing with their rage in red. “Coward – what would the masses think”, writes one message. “Change the narrative here,” says another. “The protagonist always wins.” The rest of the clippings read similarly (with the occasional election promise), and you smile at your companion: now here was someone who knew what was doing. A real champion. The hero that the town deserved.
Your companion ignores you further. That’s okay, you think. You’ll just admire from afar.
Out of the corner of your eye, you spot a small novel buried under the wads of paper. It’s a paperback, and a tiny one, with someone’s name in large, bold font plastered on the cover. You glance at your companion: were they an avid reader? It would certainly explain all the writing references…
You pick up the book and thumb through it a bit. It’s a crime thriller of exceptional quality, and you find yourself admiring the author for their work. Their use of word, their command of prose… All in all, truly exceptional. Every sentence packing a punch, no words minced.
Curious as to the author of this work, you flip to the inside cover and spot the author’s photograph. It's the spitting image of your companion, giving a knowing smirk to the camera. The short description describes your companion as a particularly prolific author, having won several writing awards for their novels. A wave of reverence washes over you: now this was the kind of guy you could get behind – not only did they have a good head on their shoulders, but they were this good of an author? If they’d look up from their form for more than a second and actually acknowledged your existence, you’d have probably given them some sort of congratulatory fist-bump. You’d vote for them in a heartbeat. Good on them for taking the chance to run for mayor when the incumbent had clearly fumbled.
You linger for a moment on the photograph, though you can’t really figure out why. For some reason, even though you’ve already matched up the author to the individual next to you. Have you seen them before? Your memory’s too foggy…
You glance up and your eyes meet a miniature model of a small town, encased in a glass box against one of the foyer walls. The glass box isn’t particularly reflective by any means, but you can clearly see a face – your face, in fact. In the absence of any mirrors in the whiteness, your memories of your own face, along with any other memories of your life, had slipped from your mind. But the face in the reflection looking back, your face …
It’s the same as your companion’s.
You awaken.
What is your next step?
Come to a realization
- Spoiler:
- DEATH
It’s all coming back to you now, like a torrential flood of memories. Images in your head suddenly pop up with faces you recognize, shaking hands and endless crowds...
You gaze into the whiteness and remember who you are. Once upon a time, you fancied yourself a writer, penning novels. Crime thrillers, actually: you had chosen the genre both out of the potential competition (didn’t all of the best authors write crime novels? Christie? Grisham? Patterson?), and an inner excitement about the subject. You loved the tense buildup between the always plucky hero and their adversaries, the slow burn that only mysteries could provide, the games of cat and mouse that could be drawn out with the power of word like no other medium could.
Wasn’t the book you had at city hall… the first one you wrote…? As memories fill the gaps in your head, you vaguely recall bringing it with you that day, as a makeshift good luck charm, though you also recall that flaunting your popularity got you nowhere with the city clerk.
And then… the murders. Bloody, gory, worse than anything you could have drawn up in fiction. You hoped that things would turn out better, that like the stories you penned someone would step up to the plate and knock down all the villains. Instead, you encountered a media too cowed into fear to report anything of substance, an ineffective police force putting up walls of excuses centered on budget cuts. And who was in the middle of it all? A mayor who thought it was more just to hide in their office, pretending any of the problems that circled the town didn’t exist. A coward and a snake.
In anger, you submitted your mayoral application, used your popularity to boost your campaign. Critics called you ruthless, taking advantage of a town in pain for a campaign based off nothing but hot air and opportunism. But you knew what the people really thought. To them, you were the scruffy underdog who was going to take on the big ones and win, restoring order in the process. The Pied Piper of the town, with a magic pen ready to lead the populace into prosperity. Sure, it sounded a little cheesy – teamwork and friendship and a town banding together to fight a huge evil were well-worn tropes – but people bought it.
And in a way, maybe you wanted to be the hero, both the puppet and the master, controlling the town and leading it to victory. You’d spelled out your plan, determined your plot, just like the thrillers you’d grown so accustomed to writing. Wham! Thrust the opponent’s weaknesses into relief, drum up those polling numbers. Bang! Hug a few babies, really make the character seem relatable to the general public, humanize them, make them three-dimensional. Then, at the climax…
You would win.
You would… win.
…
But of course, your story was left unfinished. Along with the memories coming back to you, one particularly dark one bubbles up to the surface: your death. Shot dead, bullet to the head, in your very own home. You’re not sure who did you in, but you wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone from the mayor’s side, fearful that you were gaining too much ground. And so your tale of heroism ended, prematurely snuffed out by an unknown assailant. The thought of it is enough to deflate your mood, and you find your previous excitement gone.
The whiteness suddenly shudders and begins to coalesce, forming colours and shapes that swirl in front of you. Within moments, an effigy of your very opponent stands before you, their face frozen in that saccharine smile, the same one hanging from the walls of city hall. From your perspective, the mayor’s expression almost seems like a gloat, as if to say “You’ve lost. Give it up.”
Was this… an illusion? A mirage? Or really the mayor?
Either way, that face – that smugness – sets a fire in your belly.
“I… will win,” you snarl between gritted teeth before standing up to face the image of your opponent. As you raise your body to its full height, locking your eyes with theirs, you begin a furious speech to no audience but the unmoving statue in front of you.
In every great story, the hero always wins. It may take years and a shitload of luck, but the hero always finds a way. The hero won’t hesitate to strike down anyone who lets evil run rampant, who fancies themselves content with a town shattered by murders. And –
You pause ever so slightly.
– Even if the hero falls, someone will always rise up in their place, ready to take on their cause. You’re already ascended beyond hero and become a martyr for your cause, embodying a vision that far outstrips anything that the mayor’s ever done. Your supporters rally around your name, internalizing your hope, championing your cause for a better vision of the world. And even if you’ve been written out of the story, the narrative you’ve written lives on, one of opportunity and peace.
“And…” you press your fingers against the mayor’s chest, though the mayor doesn’t flinch, “… your days are numbered. In the end, only one person can win and save our town. That’s the hero, the protagonist, the one everyone cheers on. And it.”
“Will.”
“Be.”
“Me.”
As if on cue, the mayor’s image fades away, and you find yourself brimming with confidence, an energy drowning out the feeling death buzzing from within you.
And that’s not all.
You think -- no, you're pretty sure that you know your name. After all that just happened, you definitely know it. You just have to think a little harder...
What is your next step?
Explore
AFTER THIS I FAILED HUNDREDS OF GUESS ON MY NAME FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS OR HWO EVER LONG IT BEEN. WHAT IS MY name. Bjorn is attack kme houhc
![distortion [THE END] - Page 49 0dZrth9](https://i.imgur.com/0dZrth9.png)
![distortion [THE END] - Page 49 ZT4k8rL](https://i.imgur.com/ZT4k8rL.png)
