sideblog for story's, tales and the written word.

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

I’ve never been hurt by the fact that my stepfather loved my sister more than me. For me, it’s just that- a fact.

I don’t remember my real dad at all, really. He passed away when I was around two or three years old. I remember meeting Dale for the first time, although even that’s getting pretty fuzzy. I remember the giant of a man kneeling down to my level, stone faced and solemn.

Then he reached forward and gave my hand a shake. “You like spaghetti?” He asked. I only nodded, too shy to speak. He just grunted and headed to the kitchen to start throwing dinner together. Dale can make a killer spaghetti. And I didn’t even like spaghetti until then.

My expectations for this date’s viability were starting to sink. She was saying intelligent things, and saying them with remarkable confidence and self-possession for somebody who thought she was talking to the Masculine Mongoose himself. It was impressing me and more than slightly turning me on. But the conversation had taken a turn I’d been down before, and not a promising one. “I don’t want to get into a relationship under false pretenses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I slept with you under the impression that you were just an ordinary playboy millionaire, instead of a superhero.” She sipped from her champagne glass, visibly trying not to smile.

“Look,” I said, trying to make my voice as persuasive as I could. “Just like you say, everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose. People have believed that for eight years. And in all that time, nobody has ever managed to prove anything - never mind suggestive evidence, nobody has ever shown it for certain. Shouldn’t that give you pause?”

There was no warning. One moment I was waiting in line at the Gothic Cityville branch of the First Financial Bank to get a cashier’s check made out, trying to ignore the whispers coming from before me and behind me. Bruce Kent is very rigorous about pretending to not be the Masculine Mongoose, as everyone knows by now. Bruce Kent acts uncomfortable around people who whisper when they recognize him, just like he would if he was a normal human being who’d gotten mistaken for the Mongoose somehow. Keeping up the act at all times, yeah, that’s me all right.

The next moment, the glassed front door of the bank shattered into pieces around a woman stomping through in giant flaming power armor.  She was followed shortly after by ten other goons in smaller suits of flaming power armor.  When I say ‘flaming’ I don’t mean that it was decorated in red and orange, I mean that the powered suits were emitting gouts of fire from built-in spouts.

Professor Pyrofessor had somehow, God help her and both of us, managed to pick that exact moment to rob this particular bank branch.

Behind the table, mild-mannered Bill Wimbley looked at her through his glasses, shoulders curved inwards. “Well, gosh, I’ve filled defamation suits against six different print media outlets, two television networks, twenty-seven individuals -”

“Yeah, I get it. You’re abusing the legal system to -”

His voice dropped to a mumble. “So far, two cases decided in my favor, nineteen settlements with retractions -”

“I know. I know about your lawsuits. They’re preposterous. They’re a joke.” Her lips curled up in a sneer. “Everyone knows that you’re Mythoman -”

He blinked up at her. “I’m notoriously litigious.”

“I get it.” Parr sighed and pulled out a seat, the legs scraping against the floor. He winced. She sat across from him, sharply crossing one leg over the other. “You can’t actually believe that this is convincing anybody.”

“Two cases, decided in my favor -” he repeated.

“I get it.”

“I - I don’t think you do.” Bill Wimbley sat across the table, as unassertive as an iceberg, shoulders preposterously broad beneath his suit, his lank hair missing Mythoman’s trademark curled forelock. “I’ve proven damages. You know how disruptive to my life it’s been to be associated with Mythoman? Complete loss of privacy. Fans harassing me day and night. People trying to kill me, Persephone. Skillkiller tried to put an exploding javelin through my skull when I went out for my morning jog. I’ve had to move multiple times, upended my life - I’ve had to hire security!”

“And yet, you’re alive.” She ran her eyes over him. “Miraculously unharmed, I see, despite the multiple - let me stress that, multiple - attempts on your life by supervillains …”

“Thanks to Mythoman’s timely intervention.” He sniffled. “And still. Damages.”

“Okay, yes, I understand what it’s like to have some superpowered maniac gunning after you in your civilian life; believe me, I understand that better than anybody. But,” she said, and leaned across the table, beckoning him. He bent over obediently. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You are Mythoman.”

He straightened up, smiled blandly at her. “No, I’m not.”

Persephone Parr rested her chin in one hand. A waitress came over. “Just a coffee, thanks,” she said, studying Wimbley. If anything, he seemed even more mild-mannered than before, hands folded in front of him earnestly. “This is cruel, you know that?”

I think once you've done it four times that's the canon season progression for your world, and you can mix it up by including seasons from different cultures

Welcome to my setting where the seasons go

*rolls*

Then, slowly, heat descends from above. The melting pillars shower down over the land, at first in torrents strong enough to scour the earth, and then gently, trickling down the remnant of the winter ice-pillars, in a scant few months of temperate weather which is scarcely enough for the inhabitants of the land to emerge and struggle to scrape sustenance from the flooded lands. And scrape they must, desperately, for when the ice is all gone, the water begins to evaporate, the heat persists, growing stronger ever stronger, until the land is scorched and baked dry, fires breaking out with increasing frequency -

As a rule of thumb, if you have to dig it up it's a crime, but if you can just yoink it then it's a-okay.

The snow takes the sound out of everything. That is the first thing he notices in black: the snow has made the world quiet in a way that a camp or a medical tent or a mess hall is never quiet. He knows the difference. He has stood guard in empty woods. Empty woods have a floor of small noise under them - settling, dripping, the dry tick of cold in the branches - and this does not have that. The world has been quieted, smothered gently in its sleep.

It would be more unnerving if he weren't so focused on his hands.

The musket is spent. He fired it - he is fairly sure he fired it, there was the kick and the white flash that took his night-eyes with it and has not given them back - and a spent musket is a club, a long awkward stick, sometimes, but not today, a Roman's spear. To make it a musket again takes a minute and a half on the parade ground in daylight with a sergeant counting. He does not have daylight. He doesn't have moonlight or starlight. He has an overcast sky that swallows the moon just as the snow swallows the ground. An empty, sightless grey in Heaven and in Earth.

So. By feel, then.

The cartridge first. His fingers find the box at his hip, find the paper twist of it, and they are stupid with cold, they are somebody else's fingers operated at a distance through thick wet wool, and he has to look at them to know they have closed. He brings the cartridge to his mouth. He bites. The powder is bitter, and grit, and he holds it behind his teeth, and does not swallow, and does not breathe it, and this is the part where, on the parade ground, the sergeant says prime, and so he primes - tips a little of the held powder into the pan, by feel, by the memory in his hands, too much or too little, he cannot see the pan, he can only trust the hands - and closes the frizzen. The click of it is enormous. The click of it goes out into the birdless, verminless quiet and does not come back. The world is empty here, it says to him. The world is empty and asleep. The world is not breathing.

Set it down, barrel into snow, butt against chest. Hands.

The rest of the powder down the barrel. He tips the cartridge, the paper of it, the lead ball still in the twist, and he feels the grit go down into the dark of the bore and he follows it with the paper, wadding it with his thumb, and now the ball, and he is breathing through his mouth because his nose has stopped working in the cold, and his breath is loud, his palms are wet with snow, and his heart is beating with recoil. He tries to keep his breathing silent, but his vital organs have better plans. Huff, and puff.

Next. The ramrod. This is the long part. This is the part that takes time.

He draws it from the stock - the whisper of metal on wood, too loud - seats it against the ball, and he pushes. The snow is on the back of his neck now, gone to water, going down under his collar, and he pushes the ball home in long even strokes the way he was taught, home, all the way home, a ball not seated will burst the barrel in your hands. Each stroke is a sound, a dull ringing wooden sound down the length of the iron, and he is making a sound every second now, a lighthouse of sound in the turned-down dark, but the work cannot be done quietly. It has never, in history of man, been done quietly.

His hands have started to go faster.

He notices this for lack of other things to notice, as the snow has taken most of his ears and the dark has taken most of his eyes and the cold has taken his mouth and tongue, for the most part. All he has left is hands, and the hands have decided to hurry. He did not tell them. They are seating the ball in strokes that are no longer even, that are quick and short and getting quicker, and his ears - he becomes aware of his ears, of how hard they are working, of how they have been straining the whole time at the wall of quiet, leaning on it, waiting for it to give - and he understands that the hands can hear something the rest of him has not been allowed to know yet.

He draws the ramrod out, wasting seconds in the process. He returns it to its place along the barrel.

He does not look up. There is no use looking up. There is, in no sense that matters, anything to see. There is the rough grit of a tree root underfoot, to his right. If he moved rightward, he would be braced against a tree. But, then again, in every direction, if he moved in a straight line he would eventually come upon a tree.

The only thing he trusts is his hands, and the orientation of his body in space, and even those are beginning to go. The lack of light has made it impossible to determine up from down, front from back, side from side. And his snow-soaked hands are beginning to lose feeling, taking even that away from him.

He brings the musket to his shoulder. The butt of it finds the hollow there, the place it has worn for itself over a year of this, and it fits. His cheek comes down to the wood. The barrel goes out level into the dark, and his finger finds the trigger and lies against it, not pulling, ready.

the War Council meeting was held in the conference room at Town Hall.

i stood at the podium, fussing with the laptop on the card table next to me. i had hooked it up to the projector with an HDMI, but for some reason, the connection wouldn't take.

"o Holy Mayor, i just don't understand," said one of my advisors, Stradivarius, from his folding chair in the middle row. "what's your plan for taking out the Goblin Kingdom, exactly? i get that you're going to use the Thermos, and that you're being guided by the righteous will of God and all that. it would just be nice to know the plan, is all."

"agreed," said Rogelio, a member of the Priesthood. "we must make sure the interests of the Church are adequately represented."

"does the Church dare to question the Messiah?" sneered Apocryphina, who represented the Council of Elders. "you of the cloth have gone astray of the ancient way and diverged from the Path of God. soon you will have your reckoning. so saith the Prophet!"

"can someone help me with this?" i asked. "i can't get my laptop to connect to the projector."

"is the projector turned on?" ventured Paprika, the Town Council representative, from the front row.

i looked and saw that it was not.

hiding my utter mortification beneath a brittle veneer of keeping-it-together, i chuckled, and said, "oh, i guess it wasn't. my bad. sorry, everyone."

but no one cared. they were too busy arguing.

"hey! come on, guys. it's meeting time," i said.

begrudgingly, they quieted.

"i made a PowerPoint," i said. "i hope you find it sufficient. it's, uh—well, you'll see what it is."

He thinks to himself. Pulundi wants this war? It is his will? What Pulundi wants is genocide!

The Dark Loon cracks a sinister smile from within his darkly colored, moon shaped mask. Pulundi wants genocide? He will get it. A shame really. The Dark Loon was looking forward to tormenting these amigos for a long time to come. Perhaps the boss back home will let him keep some of them alive for that reason? If not they'll taste good in some bear stew at the very least.

What if they left you behind. They could make more of you at their destination, after all. What if you had to figure out how keep your people alive without them. What if you had children in a godless world and taught them who they were and what their history was. What if the Gods were gone for generations, and you all held on, doing your best to serve absent masters at the last purpose left for you, waiting for the day when they would return and bring your true purpose back again.

What if they left you a ruined land, and no instructions, and many of you starved to death. What if you realised how much pain and suffering and danger your people had gone through, were going through, for indifferent creators who thought that you owed them everything and had the right to nothing, not even yourselves. What if you banded together with others in your righteous anger and declared that your Gods would never set foot in your land and drag you or your descendants into slavery again.

What if they left, and you had to figure yourselves out, build a society without them. What if you found that you could, and that you and your people were capable of sense and reason and dealing fairly with each other, and that likely your Gods were too. What if you decided that any who would treat you fairly and equally was welcome, and that lifelong master or lifelong enemy would be determined by the actions of any you met, your kind or theirs.

What if you were in one of three factions that shared an island for generations, with constant friction and occasional war at your borders over a singular issue related to a people long gone and irrelevant to the future. What if this opinion as ingrained so deeply into all three of your cultures that permanent peace and reintegration seemed impossible. What if this was your future, all for a race of Gods who would never come back.

What if one of them came back.

What if a young God stepped onto your lands, a trainee, the power of creation new and raw in their hands, and were surprised to find you kind there. What if they were surprised to find that your island even existed. What if they told you that your island wasn't in their records, that their arrival, a possibility that you had fought wars over for generations, had been accidental. That the people that you had fought and died and built your philosophies over did not know who you were.

Cinderella’s mermaid godmother calls upon her people to clean the fish and gifts her a dress and shoes of shimmering fish scales that wreathe her in rainbows under the moonlight. She makes an impression on the Prince at the ball so strong that he immediately falls in love with her, and when she’s forced to flee before her stepmother notices her (no masquerade mask or dancing rainbows will disguise her from her own family at close range), the Prince is left with only a delicate fish leather slipper left on the front steps to try to find her again.

He goes around the houses, seeking the owner of the slipper, but Cinderella is once again working in the fish sheds. He stepmother, desperate and determined and having found Cinderella’s other shoe that very morning, realises what has happened and takes a knife to the feet of her prettiest daughter, telling the prince that she suffered an injury that very morning but those are definitely her shoes, see, here’s the other one, and they still fit.

The daughter is pretty and witty and charming, and while the Prince doesn’t feel the same spark and instant sense of connection that he did at the party, he reasons that she’s overwhelmed and in pain and once she’s healed, all will be well. There are no birds to whisper of blood in the shoe – the Prince has seen the bandaged feet already – and the daughter slips on the shoes (the only shoes she has that will fit her, now,) and accompanies him to the palace.

But the stepmother is no doctor, and by the time the Prince gets her to the palace doctors, it’s too late – his beloved has contracted an infection in her feet from the shoe leather, made unclean in its travels. She will survive – it is an infection of a common filth of fish and birds, one that the doctors have potions for for the occasions where dangerously cooked food causes outbreaks – but in her raving, she confesses the whole scheme to the Prince who, furious, returns to the village to find the girl he truly fell in love with, the girl hidden from him.

Contains: suicidal ideation, attempted suicide

The infection brought on a high fever, and the damage was permanent. Her mother’s knife took her ability to walk without pain. The fever took her voice.

It hadn’t been her plan. She hadn’t wanted to do it. But her mother, with her sharp eyes and her sharp knife, had explained to her once again that behind her stepsister’s kindly smile was a ruthless heiress who wanted to take everything the family had and leave the rest of them destitute. “You have a duty to protect this family,” her mother explained. “Your father gave his life to protect us from invaders. I gave my heart and my future to protect us from poverty. Will you not do the same?”

“The first rule of love,” her mother says, voice crackling over the phone, “is to never take more than they can give.”

Finola’s eyes dart to the shoebox under her bed and then back out the dorm window. Her room is on the second floor this year and she can see more of the trees than she can see of the grassy space preceding the dining hall. “I know, Mom.”

“Remember.” Her mother’s voice is sharp and Finola can almost see her heavy, thick brows lowering until shadows cover her eyes. “No clothing. No bags. Never any jewelry.”

Finola wraps her free arm around her waist and closes her eyes. The light breeze rolling through the window smells like eucalyptus and mint. Her mouth waters. “I know, Mom.”

“Those are the big things,” her mother says, “but remember that too many of the small things can amount to a big thing.”

The shoebox under the bed gleams in a stray ray of light. Finola licks her lips. “I know, but—I need something. I have to. I feel like she’ll disappear if I don’t.” The words are inadequate for the sick fear in her stomach each time she loses sight of her. The horrible certainty that something bad will happen if she’s not by her side. She rubs a hand over her mouth.

Her mother’s tongue clicks. “That’s old instincts, Finola. Fight it. You don’t want your father and I to pull you out of school, do you?”

The memory of watching her high school fade out of sight surfaces and, in that moment, she’s sixteen again. She can feel her heart beating too fast, the scream ripping out of her throat, the way the ropes chafed her wrists. She can smell her first love’s perfume, cloying peach, in the air. She can feel their separation like a death in the pit of her stomach, radiating up into her chest, her throat, her head.

A guy like that walks into your tower with a toothpick in his mouth, takes one look at your summoning circle and goes

“I see yer problem. You used chalk B12 instead of S3. B12 is only for transmutation circles. Gimme a sec I think I have a piece somewhere here.”

He fixes your circle, test summons an imp and goes.

“The chalk? I always use that chalk, it’s never been a problem.”

“Ah - yes. This stuff will work just fine for most circles, but, uh - here, take a look with my loupe. You see the off-color flecks? Can’t hardly see them with the naked eye, but those are impurities. Silicates, might even be some iron in here, to be honest. Usually won’t cause a problem, but - you said you hadn’t tried this particular summons before?”

“First time trying a 5th level, yeah.”

“Those silicates will make your scribing a little fuzzy when viewed from the astral plane. You see, for example, these three fine lines here? With this chalk, on the astral that looks like one thick line with fuzzy edges. They can’t tell exactly what you want, and they’re picky lil’ critters so they just won’t do anything in response.”

“Really? Oh. I always thought the expensive chalk was just fancy to be fancy.”

“Making pure chalk is difficult, you need a dedicated production line or dust gets in the finished product. To be honest, you don’t need to bother with it for most things, but 5th and up, 5th level and up, it actually is necessary. Anything with lines within about two millimeters of each other.”

“So I need to start over?”

“Unfortunately yes. You’ll have to erase all this, but with some good chalk it should work just fine. Next new moon your summons should go off without a hitch.”

“Dang. At least it’s not my sigils, I was worried it was my sigils.”

“Nah Your sigils look good. Even and balanced. You know what you’re doing, it’s just an equipment problem.”

“Thanks for the help, sorry to make you come all the way out here.”

Anxious looking client, poring over her personal grimoire in the hopes of finding answers: "Yes, and I was so careful with my invocations, and I spent hours on the sigils and I busted out the fancy incense and everything and I just don't know what got muddled. It's not my chalk, is it? It says it's certified on the package.."

Wizard: "Nope, your chalk's good quality, you didn't get stiffed there. Your sigils all look good too, and I read the invocations while Gary was driving us over, and they seemed perfectly appropriate. Say hello, Gary."

Gary: "Hi, I'm on a work placement, so I'm shadowing him."

Wizard: "Alright, kid, what's rule number one?"

Gary: "Double check everything. You've gone over the invocations, we've both seen the circle and the materials, there was nothing in the stars last night that ought to have interfered... I'm not sure, honestly. This ritual should have worked."

Wizard: "Uh huh, it's a competently put together rite. So why didn't it work?"

Gary: "Uhhhhhhh... ma'am? Are you currently or have you ever been haunted, or perhaps impugned the Good Neighbours?"

Client: "Not to my knowledge, no."

Wizard: "Good instinct, but here's rule number two for ya, kid. Never assume an otherworldly vendetta when slapdash maintenance is still on the table. Ma'am, do you rent this ritual space?"

Client: "Yes, I don't have the space for a full sanctum at home."

Wizard: "The guy you rented it from hasn't maintained the wards correctly - I assume that was part of the rental agreement?"

Client, outraged: "Yes! It was!"

Wizard, nodding sadly: "Take a look at the threshold, Gary. You see the runes on the doorjamb?"

Gary, squinting: "Uh, barely."

Wizard: "Exactly, they oughta be hummin' away in the back of your mind. But they aren't, because?"

Gary, spinning around in shock: "Oh damn! The door sticks in cold weather, right?"

Client: "Yeah.."

Gary: "The force of shoving it open has scuffed the carving of some of the runes, brought down the entire ward around the door."

Client: "Bloody fool. Why wouldn't he just carve them deeper?"

Wizard: "Easier to sand down and rent for non ritual purposes, if it comes to that. Doesn't have to replace the whole doorjamb. It can work, but you need to reinforce them with oil and blessed pigment more frequently than you would runes that were carved deep. Every two weeks instead of once a lunar month. Guy's done the bare minimum and is hoping you won't know enough to blame him when things go wrong."

Client: "That incompetent arsehole! I'll haul him in front of the Wizard's Council for this!"

Wizard: "You really should, ma'am. This could have been a lot worse than one of the fellas downstairs popping in. Unwarded portals are a magnet for unspeakable monstrosities from the Dungeon Dimensions. Trust me, once you get those guys infesting your space, you lose all your tools, the space itself and sometimes even your magical name to the purification process. Along with every other ritualist in the building, and the schmuck who caused the problem. What have we learned, Gary?"

Gary: "Double check every ward, every time you invoke?"

The veil between life and death shattered. Davlin’s astral form had a mere fraction of a second to brace itself before it fell into the lightless depths of the everafter. 

There was no splash to mark his arrival, just that same shock of cold he’d felt all those years ago. He tried to push the memory aside but fragments still drifted past: The shattering of the ice, his hair drifting lazily around him, the crack of a rib as his mother desperately tried to restart his heart. 

His heart restarting. 

Where I am, it is Monday always.

When a newcomer arrives, they are greeted by Sivad. Sivad is the ruler of this place, which has no name but many call Mondays. It is always Monday in Mondays.

Sivad has told me that Mondays is not infinite, but it is large enough that I no longer see purpose in making the distinction. It is a plain of small green hills which continue on in each direction longer than anyone has ever traveled. Sivad claims that four impassable perpendicular walls lie at the ends, which connect at the corners to create the massive square of land in which we reside. I often ask him if anyone has ever reached the walls, and no one ever has. I have also asked to know in miles the distance it spans, and he will not answer. He does not often respond to questions with numerical answers: the number of people in Mondays, the amount of towers spanning all of this place, the eons that have passed since my death, these are mysteries.

The hills are repetitive: grass, people, towers. There is nothing else. Grass is everywhere, it grows back as soon as it is pulled, most people remain in towers. I am a continual traveler, which is uncommon but not rare enough to draw interest. The majority remain in the same tower or group of towers for centuries or millennia at a time. I have rarely stayed in one for longer than a month.

There is night and day, but no sun. Light slowly and inexplicably ebbs and flows from the clear sky. Days last exactly nine hundred hours. I have counted this and heard it corroborated by thousands of others who have done the same. There are no stars at night, and then it is only possible to travel by the glow of the towers.

The towers are arranged in a uniform grid. They are similar, but each has differences in construction, some more than others. They are all concrete, tall and unpainted, between forty and one hundred and forty stories tall. Each floor on each tower except for the first floor and the roof has thirty rooms. Twenty-nine of the rooms are undecorated identical bedrooms and the last is a library which is normally the room closest to the building's staircase. The arrangement of any floor's library is unique, but every library in every tower has the same content: several thousand copies of the same indestructible book. The book is unchanged at every tower. It is over twenty-two hundred pages long, bound in orange leather. It has no title or author inscribed on the front or side, but four thick black stripes run horizontally across the surface.

If one runs in any cardinal direction from a tower at a fast pace, they will reach another in about four hours. No matter where someone is standing, if it is day, it is always possible to spot exactly one tower. This shouldn't be possible, as taller entities can normally be seen from farther distances than smaller ones, but it is natural in Mondays. As soon as a traveler crosses the halfway point between two towers, the one that is farther away will vanish from sight even if it is being seen by someone walking backwards. I have conducted this experiment on countless occasions. I stand still and push my head forward and back at an invisible border, watching a tower reappear and disappear with each movement. It is impossible to see two at once from the same location. If two people with towers behind them stand at the opposite side of a border and face each other, neither will be able to see a tower, but if they each turn around they will notice what the other could not.

I came to Mondays in my early thirties. I died young. My husband had picked up baking as a hobby during quarantine, and I stole a taste of raw cookie dough, which killed me.

There is an area of towers in the center of Mondays, a twenty by twenty square where newcomers arrive. Immediately after death, they always wake up in a bedroom, alone, in one of those four hundred center towers. Sivad greets them as they wake and offers to answer the questions they may have. I should say that he greeted them. Sivad has told me that no one new will ever come to Mondays again. Humanity has died out, and everyone has either been sent here or elsewhere.

Everyone sees Sivad differently. I see him as a flat humanoid shadow moving through the walls and floor, except for his hands, which stick out from the wall and are made from moving sand, the fingers of which snap repeatedly whenever he answers a question. I have heard descriptions of him as a man made of grass, a living gold statue, a talking hat, a perpetually bleeding horse, a small sun, a collection of colored pyramids, a suitcase with teeth, and a lizard which vomits glowing images of numbers whenever it speaks.

I once met a woman who said that her Sivad was Jon. I am certain she was lying.

My first question when I came was where. Sivad does not call it Mondays, this is only the name that those who stay at the center have agreed on, which has spread through slow osmosis over time. He told me that we are in a place where it is always Monday, and I asked for him to explain further, to provide me with reason, and he did.

Measurements are not a human construct. They are implanted inside us by the Kings, who Sivad will not elaborate on beyond the cold statement that it was they who overthrew and consumed the Creator. Some measurements used by humans obey the desires the Kings have given us, and some rebel against these natural instincts.

Sivad calls it obedience or rebellion, but he has never dictated either to be positive or negative. The words are only explaining if we are living in accordance with the Kings' measurement systems. Metric is obedience, imperial is rebellion. Denary numeral systems are obedience, all others are rebellion. The Gregorian calendar, or any calendar with a repeating seven day structure, is also obedience. Monday is the human name we give the second day of the obedient week.

Only time of death determines where we go. It is not a punishment or a reward, only how it is. Each day delivers everyone to a separate afterlife where obliteration is impossible, and from each of these seven afterlives it is possible to escape to a final destination which is said to be a shared eternal paradise, free of suffering. This paradise is not us ceasing to exist, it is a place, I asked. No one who is there would ever want to leave.

There were never children in Mondays. Those who die before the age of sixteen are sent immediately to the shared paradise.

Five of the seven afterlives have been collapsed, as everyone inside them has escaped to the shared paradise. No one has ever escaped from Mondays, and no one has ever escaped from another day, although Sivad will not tell me which one it is.

Naturally I asked Sivad how I might escape. Everyone in Mondays can only escape together. There is a question which Sivad provides us. It is a binary question with a correct solution and we can only answer yes or no.

Whenever we are alone in a bedroom or a library with a closed door, we can summon Sivad by calling for him. It does not matter if someone has summoned him elsewhere. If we are not alone he will not come, and if we are speaking and someone opens the door he will leave until we call him again under the correct conditions. Whenever we call Sivad we can change our answer, and he will remember it until we change it again. We begin with no declared answer, but once we answer for the first time we cannot go back to being undecided, only switch between yes or no. We can change it as many times as we wish. We can also summon him to answer questions for us, many of which he does answer, many of which he does not.

In order for us to leave, we would need to all, everyone who is in Mondays, what is likely about one-seventh of all humans who have ever lived, need to at the same time have registered the same answer to Sivad's question, and this answer would need to be correct. If we all provided the same incorrect answer, our memories would be erased and we would be sent to random towers throughout Mondays. This has not happened before.

I asked what the question was. Sivad told me.

"On the 30th of May, 1990, did Jon Arbuckle drink dog semen?"

The first time I heard this question, I asked him to repeat it. This is all he will do. He is the most strict about questions which attempt to clarify his question, which is a terrible problem for us. We cannot ask for definitions or clarifications, so he would not tell me who Jon Arbuckle was.

When I realized my attempts at clarifying the question weren't going to work, I moved on.

The next questions I had for Sivad was about myself, and he answered. Our minds and bodies are changed when we arrive in Mondays. We cannot die again, we cannot be hurt or experience pain, we cannot eat or drink, we cannot make waste, we cannot sexually pleasure ourselves or others. My penis now has as much sensation as my toes and nothing can motivate it to rise. My prostate, once a trusted smile provider, now grants me only indifference. We can sleep, but we do not have any physical need. We never physically tire, even with severe exertion. It is impossible to lose or gain weight, but it is only cosmetic. Everyone is as strong and fast as everyone else. We can run for years without needing to stop. Our memories are improved, and we have an immeasurably greater, but finite and imperfect, ability to retain information. I can remember everyone I have spoken to since I have come here and all the conversations I have had in enough detail to recreate them perfectly in my head.

We do not and cannot speak any language from Earth. I once knew English and some Portuguese, and I cannot remember how to speak either. The language on Mondays sounds similar to German, I am told, but it involves frequent purring, which we are all innately capable of. Strangely, it often takes newcomers minutes or hours to first notice the switch.

We cannot touch others. If two people attempt to shake hands, they will phase through each other as if they are ghosts. It is possible to interact with another through objects, but not harm someone. If someone were to throw a book at my head, it would connect, but there would be no pain or injury even if they had dropped it on me from the roof of a tower. It takes us several minutes, but we can travel through walls of the towers and most objects, so it is not possible to be trapped.

After I learned this I decided that I would leave the tower and seek help, reasoning that others who had been there longer would be more knowledgeable than I and that I could call for Sivad again later. I left my bedroom and ran into a woman immediately in the staircase. I told her I was new, and that I didn't understand the question, and she brought me to the floor's library. There was a small crowd gathered reading and chatting, and she ordered that everyone be quiet. She explained to them that I was new, then she thrust one of the books into my hands and had me read silently. They all watched me. I noticed many of them smiling.

The only book inside every library is a complete collection of every nationally syndicated Garfield comic strip published daily from 1978 to 2038, one month short of sixty years. They were ordered by publishing date, and there were on average ten comics on each page. When I read it for the first time, I discovered that Garfield's owner was named Jon Arbuckle. Garfield was not a significant factor in my life prior to my death. I had read less than ten of the strips and had never purposely sought them out beforehand. I once as a child won a keychain with Odie's face on it for a subpar performance in my school's spelling bee, which I lost and had not missed.

I read enough random strips to grasp Garfield conceptually. Jon Arbuckle was a lonely young cartoonist who lived with his dog Odie and his obese tabby, Garfield. It is not always Monday in the world of Garfield, but time does not seem to pass. No one ages, the status quo is rarely harmed. Their dimension is encased by a bubble of slow, invisible lasagna which weakens the damage time would otherwise inflict.

The punchlines came as I read, universal truths which I was made to recognize. Jon was lonely. Garfield was lazy. Jon was geeky. Garfield loves lasagna. Jon, despite his best efforts, was not skilled when it came to attracting women. Garfield was a poor mice catcher. Jon's optimism was rarely awarded. Garfield bullied Odie. Garfield bullied Nermal, a small kitten who annoyed him. Garfield bullied Jon. The universe often punished Garfield for his cruelty, laziness, and pessimism.

It did not take me long to find the strip for the 30th of May, 1990. It had three panels, as do most Garfield strips.

In it, I saw Jon, Garfield, and a female veterinarian I would later learn was Liz. For more than twenty-five years of the comic's publication, Jon attempted to unsuccessfully seduct Garfield's veterinarian, a sardonic woman who most often displayed apathy and occasionally open contempt towards him. In 2006, they began dating, although the apathy remained. In 2032, they wed.

Garfield was the ring bearer. He ate it. Garfield is fat.

They were not dating on the 30th of May, 1990. In that day's comic, Jon had taken Garfield to her office for a physical examination. Liz and Jon are standing, and Garfield is watching them from the examination table.

In the first panel, Jon notices an unidentified cup of liquid on the same examination table Garfield is sitting on. He looks satisfied with himself. He imitates Liz and declares in her voice that the cup is filled with coffee, which she has left for him. He thanks his crude emulation of her and reaches for it. Liz appears shocked, and most readers before reaching the second panel understand that something is wrong. It does not create the expectation that what Jon is drinking is what he believes it to be.

The cup is blue and opaque. The reader cannot see the color of the liquid inside it. One recurring point of debate is whether the cup is a mug or not. The cup appears to resemble, in thickness, a mug more than a disposable or plastic cup, but the reader cannot see any handle in any of the three panels, and Jon does not pick it up by the handle when he drinks it in the second panel. It is theorized by some that the cup is a mug and that it is always positioned in a way where the handle is hidden from the reader's perspective. I disagree with this idea, but I am of the opinion that it doesn't matter. The mug theory is only important to the rare individuals who seriously contend that Jon is drinking coffee, and these people are hated by almost all others in Mondays.

In the second panel, Jon raises the cup to his lips and drinks, his eyes closed. He is still smiling, and we understand that he has not tasted it yet. Garfield is apathetic, but Liz's face has changed. She is herself again, sarcastic and unsympathetic for what Jon's hubris has brought him to do. She congratulates him, but does not say for what.

In the third panel, our earlier suspicions are confirmed. Jon was not drinking coffee, as evidenced by his face which is wrinkled in disgust. He may vomit. Liz smiles cruelly and tells Jon that he is going to give birth to a fine, healthy litter of puppies.

Garfield hears this and his eyes widen. He exclaims that he hates puppies. With this remark, the strip is over.

The first occasion I saw these three panels, in the library in front of the crowd, I read it almost ten times and then dropped the book on the floor. I had accepted my death, it had not been difficult. This was harder for me to come to terms with, that my salvation would depend on my understanding of whether or not Jon Arbuckle had consumed dog semen.

I looked at the ones who had been watching me. I said nothing but hoped for reassurance, and they laughed at me, the hopelessness obvious on my face.

They weren't trying to hurt me. It was funny, and they had all gone through it themselves. I had died early in human history. People had only been in Mondays for at most several hundred thousand years, when the first Homo Sapiens died. People were more friendly then, as a whole.

Most of the crowd ignored me after that, but a small group including the woman who greeted me sat down with me and explained the known history of Mondays and the basic arguments of Sivad's question.

People arrived in Mondays long before Garfield was created, I discovered. The first ones discovered they could read despite having died before the creation of the written word. This is not because Mondays is separated or disconnected from time in our universe. The comic strips were transported from the future to the past so that the first arrivals at Mondays could begin to think about the question, although they were not allowed to answer until there was a population exceeding five hundred million.

The first problem the question creates is that we cannot know what it is truly asking. We do not know what it means when it is asking whether Jon Arbuckle has consumed dog semen. Presumably Jon Arbuckle is fictional, and does not exist. When we want to know if he has done something, what are we appealing to? Is it asking what the artist of the comic believed Jon Arbuckle was drinking, or what Sivad thought he was drinking, or what the Kings thought he was drinking, or what the majority of people who have read it thought he was drinking? Or is it that Jon Arbuckle's dog semen consumption is an objective universal truth or falsehood? Or is it that Jon Arbuckle does exist in a physical reality we cannot visit but that comics allow us to view, and that in that reality there was something liquid in the cup he was drinking, which was or was not dog semen?

Whatever the question leads us to conclude, we only have two answers.

The first is yes, it is dog semen. Yes explains why Jon is disgusted and why Liz would connect it with a hypothetical canine pregnancy experienced by Jon. Yes is appealing because it is intuitive and seems to connect with the original intentions of the comic the best. Yes Men often are more focused on the conditions around the comic instead of the comic itself. They think about who the comic may have been intended for and how people tend to interpret it contextually. They primarily rely on a perspective that takes our own world into account and focuses chiefly on how the comic suits it.

There are actually some outside conditions that would suggest no, but Yes Men ignore them or have invented counterarguments, some of which I think are excellent. The largest of the outside conditions against them is the word of the author. Some people have reported that while on Earth they read about an interview with the creator of Garfield discussing the strip we are tasked with analyzing, and this rumor which by now is impossible to prove or disprove is accepted as fact across Mondays. When asked, he supposedly stated that he did not intend for the drink to be seen as dog semen. He grew up on a farm, and he said that pregnant cows would be given special formulated supplements to improve the health of them and their calves. When drawing the comic, he said that he assumed a similar formula might exist for pregnant dogs, and that it is this formula that Jon is drinking.

The Yes Men have multiple responses to the word of the author. The first is that he is lying. Garfield is a highly commercialized family-friendly comic which intentionally avoids politics and inflammatory controversy as much as it can, and the artist clearly has a strong financial motivation to refuse to acknowledge that the deuteragonist of his story swallowed a warm cup of dog semen.

Another answer is that the word of the author is unimportant to the question, and that the art itself informs us of the truth we choose to accept, not the artist's attached statements, especially ones made decades after the fact. It is or isn't dog semen, but this is not up to the artist to decide.

One last response, which I do not care for, is that the artist's opinion can be ignored because he is incorrect about the existence of a supplement formula given to healthy dogs. I do not know whether it is real or not and I do not care. I have spoken to many experts and many others have claimed to speak to experts and have heard it said with absolute authority that it does or doesn't exist. I do not think it concerns us and I refuse to carry on conversations about the scientific accuracy of this detail. When I meet people who are concerned with this issue I immediately leave them and move on to the next tower.

The other real world factor which goes against the Yes Men is that, Garfield being the safe and commercialized property that it is, it would not make sense for the author to have written a comic that intentionally implies that a character has downed a shot of dog semen. This is often challenged with other examples of Garfield comics that go against the trend and show us that even Garfield can break the rules. There exists a small series of comics in October of 1989, less than a year before the strip Sivad has asked us about, where Garfield awakens to find himself living in an existential nightmare, where Jon and Odie have abandoned him in an empty house and he is starving to death. Instead of accepting his situation, he denies it, imagining that Jon and Odie are still with him and living happily with his delusions. There are several other strips with minor sexual references, although there are none that can be charitably read to imply that Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's human owner, regularly drinks dog semen.

No Men are generally more focused on the comic itself, and our natural reaction is an afterthought. We may think initially that Jon is drinking dog semen, but logic makes it clear that this cannot be true. Most No Men subscribe to the dog pregnancy supplement formula theory, but not all. Some believe that it is a harmless drink that Liz had concocted to taste like dog semen in order to prank Jon, some think it is something entirely fantastical and futuristic, and others contend that it is actually coffee. The only common explanation more disliked than coffee is dog urine. I share this dislike.

The No Men ask questions. Why would Liz keep out an unmarked, unprotected cup of dog semen on her examination table during Garfield's checkup? Whether it is going to be used for eventual insemination or for testing there must be some refrigerated storage facility for dog semen at the clinic for her to use. She does not appear to be incompetent at her profession.

The Yes Men mostly answer to this that the same question applies to a formula for dog pregnancy, or any other proposed liquid that can be connected to Jon's theoretical dog pregnancy. Why does it make any more sense for dog pregnancy supplement formula to have been left on the table in place of dog semen?

The No Men are not bothered by the answers the Yes Men give them. There are always more questions.

How would Jon not notice that it was dog semen before drinking? Shouldn't the smell or feeling of the cup have alerted him that he was not bringing coffee to his mouth? Even if she is not fond of him, how could Liz act so horribly smug after seeing Jon drink dog semen? Why does Liz, a trained animal expert, suggest that Jon, a human male, would become pregnant after drinking dog semen? If she is only kidding, isn't her joke nonsensical?

The Yes Men are not bothered by the questions the No Men give them. There are always more answers.

Jon did not notice because he was not paying attention. His eyes were closed and he was focused on impressing Liz, not the dog semen he was drinking. Liz hates Jon more than we realize and put out the dog semen intentionally because she knew he would drink it without thinking. Maybe he has come into her clinic and stolen her coffee in the past, perhaps from the same cup, which she poured the dog semen into in order to trick him. Liz's joke is nonsensical, but only because she is shocked that her plan has worked.

These answers are always different in small ways, and they can travel back and forth endlessly, creating abstract hypotheticals too complicated and ridiculous for anyone to actually view as a correct solution. These are argued anyway as a game which both sides enjoy.

This game can be fun. Many of the proposed solutions are delightful. One of my favorite scenarios has Jon and Liz portrayed as bad actors. Liz is a saboteur who has put out the dog semen intentionally to deceive Jon, and Jon is a secretive pervert who is aware of her trick but who also happens to love drinking dog semen, and he pretends to be a fool who thinks it is coffee as an excuse, so he can drink the dog semen. They are both liars and each of them has won. It's almost romantic. Past and future comics are used to bolster these fantasies with loose evidence, which no one actually thinks is connected but everyone involved pretends to.

I also enjoy the schemes which appeal to science fiction or magic. I once encountered a trio of No Men on the roof of an otherwise abandoned tower who theorized that Liz was a scientist who had created a solution which would permanently alter a person's sense of taste to make all liquid taste like dog semen, and that she had added the solution to what was otherwise an ordinary coffee. This is the rare variety of coffee theory I enjoy. Another No Man I met suggested to me that Liz had actually engineered a way in which she could make Jon pregnant with dog spawn and that her remark at the end was completely serious.

These are only games, and while I once enjoyed them, time has worn at the novelty. Our existence is mundane and torturous, and I long for paradise or even true death, though I know we will never make it there. Our test is impossible. We are too spread apart and have no way of coordinating our answers, and there is great disagreement among us. With eons behind us and our original universe having descended into the final stages of heat death, I still encounter optimists. They are never itinerants. Being a traveler, it is possible that I meet fewer travelers than those who remain in one or a few towers for long periods, but never, never have I met another who told me that they thought we could do it. We can't. Anyone who travels knows we can't.

I only stayed in the center towers, which are emptier than most newcomers expected, for several million years, which is when all of humanity died and Sivad told us there would be no more newcomers. I left and went north, and I continued north until I decided to go west, and then I went south again, and I have gone south since.

I have seen everything.

There are towers with lone individuals spouting out nonsense. Pretenders. They are not crazy. It is not possible for us to go completely insane in Mondays, Sivad changes our minds so that we cannot. We cannot help but remain sane. Many refuse to accept this and pretend to be insane in hopes that they someday will be. I used to pity Pretenders, but I do not anymore. It is meditation, and I may decide to join them one day. It may be the closest I will ever come to peace.

There are the organized communities filled with Yes Men or No Men or both, towers with between hundreds of optimists, who argue with each other with the serious attitude that once they can agree they will be able to convince others and finally free us. Often these communities will be divided and floors devoted to different purposes. They will have a floor for serious intellectual debate on the dog semen comic and on how to convince others of their view, another for the fun game scenarios, more for casual socialization, and often a floor or floors for discussing other questions presented by Garfield which may help to answer Sivad's question. It is often debated whether or not Garfield can be understood by Jon on these floors.

I once liked these communities and I admire them, but they sadden me. I wish I could express to them how vast it is and how hopeless their efforts are. We will never find everyone, we will never coordinate, we will never agree. If they traveled more they would know. I am sure I have seen so little compared of Mondays, but it was enough to make me understand. I both want them to understand and want them not to, since I do not want to disturb their innocence. When I visit these communities, I now only visit the floors where the games are played and people relax.

These communities are easily destroyed. One motivated enemy can destroy everything. There are travelers who go around, both alone and with others, who look for these communities and enter them and scream whenever people in the most active floors try to speak. We cannot touch each other or trap each other, so these people cannot be punished or forced to leave. The Screamers will not be reasoned with. As they never tire, they can scream as long as they need to without end, and the community cannot leave to escape since they will be followed. Discussion ends and members leave slowly, and the community ultimately falls apart. The Screamers almost never lose. They will only stop screaming when people part ways.

Sometimes individual Yes Men or No Men travel and seek out towers where they share the minority opinion, viewing themselves as messengers for the truth. These people fascinate me. When they do manage to convert a tower, which is rare, they immediately leave. They are unhappy anywhere where people agree with them. I always ask them if they think we can do it when I meet them, and they say no.

There are towers with smaller communities which do not argue about Garfield anymore and have accepted what is our fate. Sometimes these communities spend most of their time sleeping, sometimes they stay awake and spend time together, trying to entertain each other as they burn through eternity. I agree with these towers and have fallen in love with the people in them, but I never stay. When I become comfortable with a tower, I soon start feeling like there is somewhere else I should be instead.

There was one tower with only ten people like this, and I stayed there for several million years, which I have never done at any other single tower. They were lovely people led by a psychologist who had died at old age from a terrible degenerative illness. She was healthy in Mondays but still had the appearance and body of an extremely sickly woman. I have never met anyone as compassionate and caring in my life or death.

After I was there for about three thousand years, a group of sixty Screamers came and entered the tower. Screamers love dramatic power disparities, both when they are in the minority and when they are not. They saw us eleven as easy pickings. I did not think we could beat the Screamers and I was still not attached to the group, but I resolved not to leave until the first of the original ten had, not wanting them to think less of me.

It took over one million years, but the Screamers all eventually left, which I have never seen happen anywhere else. I have come to the conclusion that smaller towers without dog semen debate are best suited to dealing with the Screamers. The members of the traditional communities are there to achieve a goal, and when the Screamers come and attempt to prevent that, they eventually decide that it will be easier to fulfill the same goal somewhere else. The only goal of the ten was each other. There was nowhere else to go, no reason to leave.

I stayed with the ten but eventually left and continued north. I avoided friends or traveling companions for a long time, but I made an exception for an old mostly bald man named Thomas, who was living together with a large tower community of Pretenders but was not one himself. In life, he had written about politics. I liked speaking to him because he would take anything as seriously as anything else, except for Garfield. He loathed Garfield. He would rant for hours about anything and I would listen to him. He liked talking and I liked listening to his talking.

He spoke about the Kings sometimes, who Sivad tells us devoured the Creator. He would call them fools and rant about how they were wrong to have disturbed the universal hierarchy. This always made me laugh, because he would admit that he didn't know anything about the Kings or the Creators. He just hated anyone who broke up any hierarchy.

He did not feel real to me. I would talk to others we would meet during our journey, and they would rarely acknowledge that he was beside me. Everything he did and said felt meaningful to me. We spent hundreds of billions of years together and I thought we would be together forever, but as we were leaving a tower he stopped me and said that we would only spend one more year together. I asked him why and he told me that he had said everything to me that he wanted to.

One short year later, he left me. He went east and I didn't follow him, as he requested. He said he was going to go exploring. I never saw him again.

I have been alone since, other than my brief visits inside of towers. I have seen the rise of the Cult of Lyman in the area of Mondays I have traveled through, who believe that Lyman is the Creator that the Kings replaced, and that he will return to save us. I have met a group of redeemed Screamers who try to convince other Screamers to change their ways, and a different group who were convinced that if every book were destroyed, we would be freed. I am still baffled by the amount I meet that are hopeful. I was asked today by an optimist at a debate tower why I think, with eternity on our side, that we cannot do it.

I told him this. I think maybe the Pretenders could be convinced to stop pretending and the Screamers convinced to stop screaming. I think perhaps with organization, I do not know how, but perhaps all the Yes Men and the No Men might agree to give in and submit to one side. It is unlikely, but it is possible. I think it might be doable to convince all the hopeless not to be hopeless and to try, to deconvert the cults, to stop playing games, to make progress. But with all that still we cannot do it, and I know why.

There is one tower I visited soon after Thomas left me, while I was going west. It was a small tower of forty floors, and there were seven people there who never left the second floor library. They sat and read Garfield together, but did not debate it. I asked them why they would read it if not to find the solution to the Sivad's question, and they replied without looking up from their books that they all just happened to enjoy Garfield. They would occasionally smile as they read, soft puffs of air gliding down from their noses.

I wanted to know if they were optimists, so I asked them if they would tell me what they thought about Mondays.