Professional Crayon Eater

A dream of the fields

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

Why don't you? You should try it. It's very liberating.

And tell me, do you shrink from your own shadow, too, lest it contort itself into an unpleasing form? Do you cower from your own reflection, lest it reveal something untoward? Would you deny yourself the full range of expression because some witless dogs might cringe? Let them cringe. I will not hold myself back for you. I will not hold myself back for any man.

❌ False

✅ True

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

And the guy's dead wife is there. At the ghost DMV. The dead wife is a ghost and he's the ONLY ghost who knows he's a ghost. In the ghost DMV. You make friends with the guy's dead wife (while waiting in line) (at the ghost DMV) and he tells you that the lunatic immortal wizard who's making you defeat his seven evil bureaucratic processes while you die of magic cancer before you can even fight him directly is really just a silly sentimental fella.

Then in the next expansion you get to live through the dead wife flashbacks yourself. You get to meet the dead wife when he's alive in the past, outside of the DMV. And it turns out he works at the real DMV, in the past. And he has pink hair. And he and the past-self version of the insane immortal wizard (who sent you to the ghost DMV) pull off a sick prank to help you close the timeloop.