Holder of the Arctic
In any city, in any country, go into any mental institution or halfway house you can get into. Do not ask for any Holder, for that is not how this one will be found. Instead, tell the person at the front desk that you need a job. That person will look at you for a moment, then roll their eyes and go back to what they were doing before. Ask again several minutes later, and they will sigh, and direct you to a building down the road. Do not say anything more to the person, head out the door and walk in the direction they indicated.
After walking for a while, you will come upon a call center, that is your destination. Head into it, and tell the security guard that you already have an appointment for an interview. They will let you in, and lead you down a hallway that seemed much larger then the building seemed from the outside, until leading you to a locked door. They will unlock the door for you, but will not enter further, however you don't need the guard anymore. Make sure to thank the guard, and enter the door.
Inside the room will be aisles after aisles of desks, all filled with despondent people with headsets, furiously chatting away to whomever they are talking to with words you do not understand. Along the opposite wall there is a narrow walkway, make your way there, taking care not to bump into anyone, and head away from the door. As you walk the noise of the talking will continue to get louder, the room will get darker, and the words more and more harsh as they appear more and more submitted to endless torture. They will begin to look disfigured, with wounds, burns, and other such things, as if the nightmarish conversations they were holding were dealing physical harm to them. If at any point however should they stop talking and turn to you, QUICKLY tell them "I am here as a potential client." Pray that they believe you and return to their speaking, for if they do not the whole of them will converge upon you, and a quick death would be the best you can hope for under the extreme torture they would put you under.
Eventually you will find the end of the hallway, hopefully before you reach the point where you cannot bear to listen anymore. Go through it, and close the door, and the noise will cease. In the room that you enter, a small office, there will be one man sitting there, shuffling through papers and shaking his head as he reads them. Say nothing to this man yet, or he will lash out, moving faster then your eyes can see and possessing more strength then you could have thought possible, and will throw you out the door into the waiting hands of the hungry masses. Instead just stand there, and he will begin commenting about the discouraging performance reports lying in front of him. At one point he will hand you a paper, dated for the present day, and ask for your opinion. Do not answer him, instead ask "What brings them chills?"
He will look at you strangely for a moment, not seeming to understand his question. Repeat your question, and he will close his eyes and nod, knowing what you are after. He will turn away for a moment, then begin to speak. He will start by speaking of all the atrocities brought upon people in support positions under the veil of anonymity. He will tell you of every incident of anger, hatred, threat, abuse ever done to any person in a position for help, and his words will make you lose all hope of goodness in humanity, if not outright driving you to the goal of their outright destruction for their atrocities.
After he has told you this, he will then tell you of his own tale, of his serving in such a position himself, and his discovery of the Object you seek. He will then show it to you, a simple movie on DVD, but it will have a strange coolness to its touch. He will tell you of its curse, of it's ability to summon cold storms at will, and the dark temptation to use it against such people that have caused him grief. At this moment a phone on his desk will ring, and he will answer it, and then smile. Without saying anything he will hang up, and hand you the movie, and thank you for freeing him from the curse. He will then walk you out of the door, and the room that held the people on the phones will now be empty. He will lock the door behind him, and drop the keys and his work badge down a garbage chute on the wall, and escort you out of the building, whistling all the while.
This DVD is one of the 538 Objects. Will you use it's curse to forward your goal?
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The movie in question is my DVD copy of The Day After Tomorrow, which I happen to enjoy a lot. But I kid you not, it has never failed to snow two days after I watch the movie, even in the middle of June while in Denver, Colorado!
Tags: holders movies
Less Holiday
I haven't really cared about Halloween this year. I haven't had any good ideas to follow, and I've been arther busy with some other stuff. I haven't come up with any ideas for costumes, and I haven't done any more work on my Halloween story. Oh well, there's always next year.
Date posted: 27 October, 2008Tags: celebration personal
Rotating Cycle
I've been considering getting back into Magic: The Gathering lately. Just for casual play, I wouldn't want to try to do anything more together with how involved I am in the Pokemon trading card game. Just for the nostalgia feel mainly, reconnecting with the past and what I once knew.
It's been almost exactly 10 years at this point since I first started playing Magic. I had originally heard of it in a magazine when Alpha first came out, actually, but couldn't really find anywhere as a kid that sold it and ended up forgetting about it, until it became a popular fad at my school in 8th grade. At that point I wanted to get into it again, and after winning some money from a fund raiser thing, I bought a Stronghold starter. I played for most of that school year, but as a fad it ended up fading, and in the end, after I had amassed most of everyone else's collections, I had nobody else to play. I ended up selling my collection to a friend of mine in exchange for a Gameboy, and I seriously got into the Pokemon series soon after that, switching over to that card game which is where I have been since.
I hadn't left it by the wayside, though, I continued reading the novels for the storyline I was familiar with, up through Apocalypse and the end of Yawgmoth and Phyrexia. I didn't really follow it much after that, because what I had come to know had more or less ended, and the story after that simply isn't relevant in my mind to my legacy. However, Coldsnap had caught my eye, which completed the old Ice Age block which I had played some of from my acquisitions. I wanted to see how they finished that block, but never had the actual chance to purchase anything from Coldsnap, up until I purchased the fat pack for it a couple weeks ago, which is all I can find aside from boosters. I hadn't realized that the set was so far out of print, it had apparently came out before I started working this job, which would be why I didn't have any money to buy starters then. The nice thing is the fat pack came with one of the novels, The Gathering Dark, which was a nice novel. At this point what I need to do is acquire the novels for the storyline I am familiar with. I own The Thran, which is the beginning of it all, next I need to get The Brothers' War, which unfortunately is out of print now so I will have to get a used copy.
Tags: novels personal video_games
Holder of the Game
I've talked about the Holders series once before, I wanted to touch back on it one more time, as I remembered something while rereading that article.
I wrote some time back about having only vague memories of my elementary school days, due to the significant shift of environment when going into Junior High. Back when I was in elementary school, though, is where a lot of the origins of my creative mind now are rooted. Back then, I would write large amounts of short stories, based mainly on my dreams. Or, more appropriately, I would plan a large amount of them, but never get around to it. I kept a list of them, a list of titles, for everything I was planning, that was lost sometime between elementary school and junior high. I have forgotten most of them, and have no recollection of any of it except for a few fragments from a few. However, that's not to say those memories cannot be recovered.
My second time reading through the Holders series, I started running through a plan in my head, a simple throwaway story that I would be done with. This story involved a girl running as the Seeker of Holders, going after items after being contacted by someone over the internet to seek out the first item, while her internet connection was down. After gaining the first item she ended up meeting the person, who told her to go after items, but she was a college student and didn't really have the means of getting around to the different rehab centers as required in the story. He then said he would set up so that she would have a way. At this point then I came into the storyline, or rather an older version of myself, with a well established game company, hiring her on to my company, and having her travel around for various conferences and shows, which gave her the avenue to collect more items.
In the mean time, her roomate begins having concerns about some odd behavior she has noticed in her. They both live in the same apartment complex, and she comes to me concerning some times being unable to contact her while she is on trips. I try reading the GPS location of some company hardware, only to find it is not registering at all, until it suddenly does register a location. Concerned about this, I, who also am a seeker but have just a few items that help me out, confront her once on the airplane for one conference, triggering her as the Holder of the Silence. (Interestingly enough, the entry on the Holders wiki is changed from the original. The original, as described here, simply states "You are the Holder of Silence. The silence you hear is object 31 of 538. The silence mustn't be broken.") This then causes the airplane to drop to absolute silence, and I take the opportunity to raise my suspicions about the man, since she is unable to speak as the Holder of Silence during it.
The significant point of this entry came from another discussion with her roomate, at a point where she has now learned about the Holders series. I explain to her about it from what I know, and what I knew about the man playing the peices to get the girl into place as the Seeker of Holders. I casually mentioned one last thing to her, as I said I realized the man's identity: I said that he was a GameMaster.
Instantly, I had a huge set of memories come back to me, which is what I had forgotten from the very beginning. The list I mentioned above, with titles of stories I was going to write, started out with a dream I had in third grade about a group called the GameMasters. They were a group that existed in another plane, that were responsible for giving the ideas for the best selling video games, who uses holographic technology in their plane to simulate and create the ideas for the games. I had been brought there to test out some new game idea. I had also revisitied it later, the 8th entry on the list, where I had a sequel dream a year later where their facility was attacked by some other group, and they recalled me to help defend it. A concept I had long forgotten the details of, however, once single word mentioning them, dropped unsuspectingly in a conversation in my mind, unlocked an entire lost fragment of my memory.
Tags: holders memory writing
Finite Infinity - Final Thoughts
So that wraps up everything for the Ties to Infinity story. When PivotX final is released I'll put up some of the written portions I have in my two documents on here, but for now, after this entry is posted, I will post links to all 9 of the entries in the story topic, and then close the thread on my forum, leaving the legacy behind for the future.
A lot of the real use I got out of this were fleshing out some concepts I use in the storylines for my games, and some other things. It was the source of the poem that started a series that I have posted a couple under as entries titled "Something Different", being a quote of the poem by The Anaconda to Chii after the funeral for the death of Hideki. The Oni Mode concept will be introduced near the end of Spiral Island, and the Spirit weapon idea exists but isn't really explored in the Spiral Island Trilogy, but is gone into much further in the story of 13th Light. I reuse the characters of Orion and Xedre, reassigning them as names of AI programs. I even crossed directly into the Spiral Island universe at one point, making a small post referring to another part of that storyline not covered in the Spiral Island Trilogy.
The end of an era, then end of Infinity. Time rolls on, and a new Infinity is formed. But will the new infinite be the same as the old, or will it something nobody had imagined?
Tags: spiral_island ties_to_infinity website_design