but can we hope for salvation from the flood?
No cure for Blotchman's plague
As the hospitals run out of supplies, the first mattress camps are hastily constructed.
Through all that you've read, the world's still been gnashing its rabid teeth; iron jaws stay clenched as the courtyard floors go Partisan-red, paint-red in the wake of the trials and their forgone executions.
But, something's stirring that no one's quite so sure about. The parade's drums have just started marching to a faster beat, while the calliope's blasting with its speakers blown out, and isn't that a forest fire, just on the horizon? There's something burning, it's burning, it's burning, and you can't quite make out its silhouette in all that smoke. You have to do something, but the flashing lights won't let you see through the magenta haze.
you're out of control and you love it.
“You're out of control and you know it.”
Thick shoulders press up against your own, you can't breathe, you can't breathe, and the streets are lined with taped-down empty garbage bags, the store fronts all have garlands on the doors, and over there they're filling up the flatbed trucks with mattresses. A charcoal cloud hangs throatache low and a tin voice tells you to just give in, to just give in, to let them have their way.
“or, does it feel really, really, really bad?”
“doesn't it feel good?”
You can't keep track of it anymore... and you can't quite figure out why it all went so wrong,Ꮰ but you won't dare stop now.ಓ There has to be a way out... there has to be an answer, right?
Ꮰ oh, I'm dirty now.
ಓ ...after all this, you're still coming, aren't you?
Oh, no ... We're going to do whatever we want to you .
“You can't do this to me! This isn't real, none of this is real!”
Alex Muto, torn apart by the crowds
The crowds outside the housing blocks are desperate for a martyr. Alex Muto is dragged into the streets and publicly assassinated. His dying words (hoarse and blood-shrilled) fall on the gristle-hungry mob's dead ears.
before the rain...
By now, the disparate timelines, branching storylines, and recursive structures have become too complex to reconcile with one another.
The audience is not able to make sense of it.
Default finds himself staring into the new dimension, but cannot make sense of it.
The threads become too tangled to unravel, and the author is no longer make sense of it.
Outside your window, the tide waters rise, and rise, and rise. For in all this mess, there can be no reconciliation; the currents cannot merge without the cliff walls breaking down. The absence of truth is revealed, the fake-out climax crown is placed upon the head, and the voltage is cranked high. A flash of red lights up the sky, the clouds crumble, and the rains all fall at once.
And from the campaigns,
from the camps,
from the glues,
from the bad dreams,
from the monuments,
from the controversy,
from the gutters,
and from the fallout,
...it all comes pouring out, and in, and it's all washed away by...
...the flood.
As the narrative, in all its pageantry, is swept up in the flood and is lost beneath its red, the long-forgotten astronaut, James Killjoy watches from up high in his Tin Utopia. His left hand still holds (what is now) the only remaining copy of The Fearful Frontier.
we hope you've enjoyed this piece of media, brought to you by...
Goodbye Strangers: V.H.Z.