Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Complicating matters are the archives on which any good investigation must rely. February 1882 is long enough ago that most of the surviving newspapers and broadsheets are long since vanished, but some do remain.

The Hopewell Tribune and the Hopewell Democrat both agree with the Detroit and Chciago papers. But the smaller Cascadia Post and the Cascadia Gazette (which would not merge into the Post-Gazette until 1911) disagree, as does the smaller Deerton Herald.

While the possibility of fraud exists, the oddity is present in both the physical back issues that have been uncovered as well as microfilmed copies. As the latter was handled by three different microfilming companies, including University Microforms out of Ann Arbor, this seems unlikely.

But the fact remains that all three newspapers contain an issue, with happenings and other mundane information, from February 30, 1882.

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“JIPI-san.”

Kenji “JIPI” Yamasaki smiled. “Let me guess,” he said with a soft voice and light backcountry Hokkaido accent. “You are a Musjido fan?”

“Yes I am, JIPI-san,” said Mitsuko. “I grew up with it. Mother bought it for my older brother and it was mine when he tired of it. I credit that machine for helping me to become a databasse programmer.”

“Come in, come in,” said Yamasaki. “I always enjoy visitors, and I am always happy to talk about video games.”

The apartment was clean, if sparsely furnished. Original artwork from Musjido video games and posters decorted the walls, but most of the acoutrements were analog, save for an old Amiga humming in a corner. Someone–a daughter or son, perhaps–was watching a game show on a television in one of the bedrooms.

Mitsuko took a seat at the small kitchen table while Yamasaki made tea. His back was stooped and his fingers curled in from arthritis, but he still moved quickly and spoke clearly. For a man of 90, he seemed in excellent shape.

“You were one of the oldest people working at Musjido, weren’t you?” Mitsuko asked once the tea had brewed and was steeping in front of her.

Yamasaki lowered himself into the hard chair with a grunt. “Yes, I was in my late 50s when I started with them. Bunch of young kids, they always called me ‘grandfather.’ But I loved it all the same.”

Mitsuko leaned forward. “What was it about programming for video games that attracted you, JIPI-san?”

The old man clutched at his cup. “The order,” he said. “Absolute order. Everything in its place, everything following directions. Even the music I wrote. Sawtoothed sine waves without any ambiguity in their bits.”

“Order?” said Mitsuko.

“Order,” repeated Yamasaki.

Mitsuko reached into her backpack. “It is funny that you mention this, JIPI-san,” she said, “as it segues into the reason for my visit.” She removed a manila folder and laid it on the tabletop.

“What is this?” said Yamasaki.

“Something I discovered in my database work,” said Mitsuko. “I wonder if you’re familiar with the story of Kiyoshi Yamaguchi, the Beast of Borneo, who inherited command of a battallion when his superior was killed and orchestrated the massacre of 2000 Dutch prisoners of war and their families.”

Yamasaki said nothing.

“When asked why he did it–before he fled and disappeared, naturally–Yamaguchi was asked why he did it. ‘Order,’ he said. ‘Beasts of the old order, there was no place for them in the new.'”

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CORVUS the Renaissance Plague Doctor
Real Name: Connor Hofstadter

Corvus is manic and energetic, which is not a good match with his delicate mask and its tendency to imapir his breathing. He believes himself to be silent but is in fact quite noisy. He’s also extremely opinionated, even hypocritical, about the others’ costumes.

SQUIDS the Clown
Real Name: Emilee Verde

Squids is depressed, sarcastic, and deeply introverted–exactly the opposite of what one would expect from a classic clown but exactly what one would expect from a post-Joker clown. She wants to be more outgoing and friendly and wears the makeup to that end, but is nevertheless deeply ribbed for attempting a disguise that seems so done-to-death.

BUCKEROO the Cowpoke
Real Name: Bruno Rodriguez

Buckeroo is not a gaucho, and not a vaquero, despite being called such. He’s quick to point out the historical, cultural, and literary context for his disguise and hates being associated with the modern glitzy Texas cowboy. Trying desperately to learn how to ride despite a total lack of balance and poise.

JANGLE the Pirate
Real Name: Marcus Washington Jr.

Jangle chose his name completely independent of the fried chicken chain and the famous dancer, trying to evoke the jingling sound of his many flashy pirate acoutrements. This does not stop people from making the latter assumption and looking at him askance. He is also in the fencing club.

SUZUKI the Ninja
Real Name: Annabelle Li

Suzuki is Chinese and her grandparents speak Cantonese at home. Her disguise tends to confuse people because they mistake her for a Japanese nisei, which she is quick to dismiss. As for the traditional animosity between China and Japan, she insists that her disguise is based on the ideal of a ninja, not the way they actually behaved.

GREAVES the Knight
Real Name: Lakshmi Gupta

If Suzuki disguize confuses people, Greaves’s outright bamboozles them. She simply insists that she has an affinity for the knights of fantasy lore, with their sparkling armor and cruciform swords, and that this is in no way incompatible with her Bengali heritage. Perhaps the most proficient of the group, she is an SCA member and can swordfight and ride with a reasonable degree of skill.

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In time, the Dirge became aware of the need to present itself in a favorable light when dealing with outsiders.

It therefore acquired a magnificent embroidered robe, spun from the finest burial shrouds and grave goods.Gold and silver from raided tombs provided the materials to craft a pair of glittering metal gauntlets and greaves.

Finally, it created a mask to conceal its hideous “head” from the world. Adapted from the death mask of an emperor long since dust, it was fine-featured and porcelain, with sunken eyes and a neutral, regal expression. Naturally, the Dirge spoke from the various mouths scattered about its form, making the mouth purely decorative in that respect, but the mask did reduce its field of vision to two eyes.

When the Dirge was seen in its finery, that meant that it was relatively safe to approach, at least from a position of strength. Plenty died and had their corpses absorbed into its writhing flesh despite this, but only those who had at least somewhat earned that ire.

But woe to those who saw the towering form of bubbling and running necrotic flesh unveiled. For that was when the Dirge hunted, and that was when a hundred dead eyes looked out in all directions from every crevasse of its body.

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They said it was tradition.

He said it was superstition.

Neighbors watched, sullen and withdrawn, as the Stokes boy painted over the curved symbol on his family’s barn, one that had been there since it had been raised.

His father had carefully repainted it every year, but the Stokes boy was fresh from ag school and knew better.

Two weeks later they found him dead in the paddock. Someting had trampled him to death. The coroner’s report said horses or cows, but the neighbors knew what was a hoof print and what wasn’t.

The day after the wake, the youngest Stokes was up on a ladder, painting the symbol from memory.

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At least his dad doesn’t get to hear it, he became deaf after a rainbowmine exploded near his trench during the second and a half world war! LEST WE FORGET.

Those were dark days. Many gumdrop unicorns came back maimed and hornless from rainbombs. Luckily, he survived, but at what cost. AT WHAT COST?

Why do we keep up with this mayhem?

The war is still going on, in those countries that nobody dares to pronounce. Like MOLISE. But we don’t care, we turn a blind eye. All for our own egotistical profit. Who cares if we’re not going to see rainbows crossng our clear blue skies anymore? All they care about is their black gold: the licorice mines.

You can see a thousand of documentaries on the black market behind those precious goods. Some say its worth sky-rocketed after the first and a half war exploded, creating an ever growing popular demand due to the relevancy of the news. But why do we keep mining it? The government lies, but what can that business of baboons hide from us? Especially when it pollutes our environment so?

We do know the reason: if we don’t, somebody else will, and we can’t let that happen.

Sustainable red licorice has been available for decades, and it doesn’t taste like butt either. Yet, no research progress has been made it that field. NOT EVEN A LITTLE. It’s as if they were trying to milk everything they could from the black kind only to finally destroy our ecosystem.

They’re beasts. BEASTS I TELL YOU. AND YET WE PAY THEM. RUN OUR BUBBLECARS ON THEIR BLACK EVIL. USE IT IN RAINBOW GENERATORS.

It has to stop.

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The Conclave was a special meeting of the Great Council called every ten years. It was attended by the delegates, or the sons of the old delegates, and it was there that birds were added or expelled.

Only the largest and hardiest birds were represented, and only those native to the area. Thus, the great ostriches and emus were not represented, though the Council did seek their advice on occasion. At this meeting, the Council consisted of an owl, a crow, a hawk, a vulture, a gull, a heron, and a goose. Smaller birds were assigned a Council member; the sparrows were represented by the crow and the ducks by the goose, for example.

At this Conclave, a motion was introduced through the crow to expel the hawk from the council. The reasoning was that, since the hawk tended to eat its fellow birds, it exercised undue influence and could not be controlled.

The hawk natrually protested that this was a transparent attempt by its prey to avoid predation and undermine the natural order. The owl agreed, noting that it too often took other birds as meals, though not with the frequency of hawks. Fearing that its omnivorous habits would be impinged, the gull joined them.

However, the crow was in favor despite its own wide-ranging diet, and the goose and heron concurred. As they ate mostly non-birds, they saw nothing wrong with the hawk’s demotion and argued that it could be ably represented by the owl.

This left only the vulture, who had long held a reputation as a crafty negotiator. Weighing the alternatives, he declared that he did not care one way or the other, since birds who died of natural causes were his only avian prey. He therefore, instead, declared that he would vote for whoever offered him the finest gift.

The others insisted that this was quite unprecedented, but the vulture would not relent. It was his nature to seek profit where he could, he argued, and this was no exception.

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At 21:37 local time, on June 3, 2016, a radio array in Argentina suddenly received an unscheduled high-frequency burst transmission. The array was primarily used for researchers communicating with geosynchronous satellites to run experiments, so it was equipped to handle the sudden flood of information, if only barely. It took two blown fuses, a backup generator, and the local intranet server #2 with it when it arrived, 11.2 terrabytes of data.

The data was raw, and in a format that none of the staff there was prepared to decode. Thinking that it might have been an accidental data dump from a military satellite, they contacted NATO and surrendered the information in return for assistance in rebuilding their facility.

Of interest are the two following events, presented without commentary:

First: the Argentine facility never ran again. No matter how many parts were replaced, no matter how many times repairs were made, any channel through which the data had passed never worked again. Even a 100% re-install with factory sealed parts made no difference. It eventually had to be abandoned, and none of the installed parts would ever work when reinstalled elsewhere. Even the drives that had housed the data failed as soon as the transfer had been made.

Second: After eighteen months of work, NATO was able to decode the transmission. They had devoted considerable resources to it under the assumption that it was a Chinese high military code, but in that they were disappointed. The transmission was not traceable back to any orbiting satellite, nor did its trajectory indicate any nearby origin. Translated, the message read:

“You see, they say that every single star in the sky is a wish somebody made…human beings are so pitiful. They fill the simple reality of their world with poetry and false promises. They think WE are the ones taking their sanity away, but the truth is that we’re only completing the job that they started when they first began to dream.”

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10/22: First signs of activity. Laboratory power grid flickers at 10:27:38 GMT.

10/23: Janitor notices that Mechanical Room 127A has been sealed from the inside.

10/24: After janitor and security are unable to access the room, a call is placed to the DoD.

10/25: DoD operatives arrive and attempt to open door with breaching rounds and explosives. Both attempts fail with casualties.

10/26: Analysis of the door indicates that the steel has been replaced by a metallic crystal lattice structure of unknown composition. The process appears to be akin to fossilization and did not alter the color or texture of the door.

10/27: Subsequent analysis indicates that the entirety of Mechanical Room 127A has been replaced by the unknown metallic crystal lattice. All surrounding walls and floors have been “fossilized” in this way to a distance of .0777 meters–exactly the width of the door. The facility is evecuated and further tests are conducted remotely.

10/28: At 10:27:38 GMT, a second power surge occurs. Subsequent testing reveals that the affected area has grown in all directions by .0777 meters.

11/03: A third expansion of .0777 meters occurs, again at exactly 10:27:38 GMT. This is the final such event observed to date.

11/29-12/19: After the expansion of the “fossilized” area is completed, the facility is condemned. All non-“fossilized” material is removed, and the remaining area–Mechanical Room 127A and .1554 meters of surrounding building–is sealed in airtight foam for transport.

12/20: Mechanical Room 127A is removed for study. The laboratory is compensated and construction of a new building elsewhere is authorized.

Notes: The contents of Mechanical Room 127A are currently unknown, as all attempts to cut into it have failed. The only option that has not been explored is a thermonuclear detonation, which has been rejected on practical grounds.

Nothing in the building or janitorial records indicate anything amiss int the area, which had undergone a routine inspection six months earlier. Previously used to house mechanical pumps and parts of the building’s air conditioning units, it had been rendered redundant by renovations and the pipes cut and sealed. Reports indicate that it had been used for temporary storage and as an occasional smoking room for janitors.

A personnel search after the incident revealed that a single building occupant was unaccounted for. The DoD has redacted all personal information about this individual pending a thorough investigation. Though it is likely they were trapped in or responsible for the incident, the individual’s security clearence and education seem incompatible with the latter theory.

No audible communication or response to taps has ever been recorded from within Mechanical Room 127A, nor have any further incidents occurred.

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“I’m a lich, technically,” said Gerald. “An undead abomination sustained by sheer force of will along with necromantic spells from beyond the ken of sanity.”

“Yes, and I’m a wight,” said Geraldine. “Not technically undead but not fully alive, capable of draining life energy at a touch and using it to sustain my horrific existence.”

“They say opposites attract,” laughed Gerald.

“Yes, the horrors of my existence beyond the veil exactly cancel out those of Gerald’s,” Geraldine added. “Why, Madison and Powell look almost human aside from the paleness and fangs.”

“There was some trouble with the families at first,” said Gerald. “But we’re raising the children as vampires. It’s a good compromise for everyone involved.”

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