Re: "What does your ParaSect look like?"
On the fate of the serpent
The night of ephemeral strangles, simultaneous suffocation and still placidity; contrast and complement the disquietude of the serpent’s soul.
Lifetimes ago did he dream, derive meaning in contentment with his own perception? Perhaps lifetimes ago, but the errand and urgency of the silence pushed his thirst for truth past the rational into compulsory lust for a reality beyond the comprehension of those in sunlight who lived and fought for the fulfillment of their truths, content not knowing and unlikely to hold idle curiosity on the absolute nature of the world.
The serpent now hastened across the Midway, an expense of monotonous green given character only by the moonlight, with singular determination to place an elusive period on a month long search through Parasitical (as the school of thought was denoted) riddles encrypted in the pop media of Japan’s search for identity in the neoliberal world stage the cloistered nation was thrust upon following the conclusion of World War II. It had seemed an unusual selection for P.S. to weave its latest round of riddles into, but the serpent witnessed through a whirlwind binge tour of watershed animations and comics the struggle to reconcile dynamic clashes of thought and perspective in a nuclear shadow of competing generations and national dispositions.
The Answer held close to his chest, the messenger and seeker’s longest march continued. The only certainty of the forthcoming encounter was a conclusion, and despite the servitude of the mind to unweaving the dense riddles of the parasite, the soul harbored secret hope of a gentle sunrise to shatter the eternal night. Doubt and faith dictated the ebb and flow of the serpent’s gait; his whole being crying out for and shrinking back in terror from the meeting that awaited.
At last the serpent came to Mansueto: doors parted ways before anticipation, the ebb vanished, the flow erupted.
The ovular single room of Mansueto’s ground level floor was cleared of its normal long tables and chairs, lacking the interaction-starved students who would usually populate it at the hour. The time on the serpent’s wrist read just 9:10, yet the hours since the discovery and petition for the meeting he filed earlier in the evening stretched on for days.
In the center of the empty library a reticulite stood, her white mask reflecting the moonlight seeping through Harper’s domed ceiling. Off from the mask the moonlight reflected further, filling the room with an otherwordly white glow that seemed to come from the monkish figure, a crimson singularity of small stature expanding to fill the space with a surreal presence. The time, the anxiety, the urgency, the riddles. None of it seemed to matter. Here was one who had surrendered his humanity, unraveled the nature of the parasite, looking to the serpent with eclipsed pits of judgement, the serpent who still understood nothing.
“The Answer,” the serpent spoke up, “Emiya’s emotive state and his earnest desire to bring the naively impossible to light. People are ideologues; the dream becomes reality as fantasy overtakes knowledge, as superstition trumps the scientific. Is that it?”
The serpent had read well, read thoroughly, annotating and chronicling nearly two dozen artifacts of Far Eastern pop culture a fellow serpent had steered it in the direction of. Thematic links between the works made the clear penultimate summation of their commentary a chapter of Kinoko Nasu’s Fate/Stay Night, a computer game novel hybrid, of all things.
The parasite certainly had eclectic taste.
An eternity passed in an instant. Then:
Deliberate steps by the reticulite displaced the moonlight washing the room, space and time seemed to coexist with the reticulite rather than influence her as she advanced towards the society’s latest novice.
The reticulite stopped mere inches from the serpent’s face. Tension. The serpent licked its lips in vain attempt to restore moisture to his panic; he could deal with reticulites for a lifetime and never cease to feel the weight of P.S.’s legacy exuding from behind the mask.
Before the serpent adjusted to the immense gravity based inches from his nose, the reticulite grabbed his hand. The monk was cold, freezing: pricking the skin and curiosity of the serpent, who’s hand was dragged to the monk’s white mask, carefully hooked around its edge, and prompted to peel it off.
The serpent, in silence, allowed the reticulite to guide his hand.
The mask fell off easily as if it was never affixed to the monk’s face to begin with. There underneath it was beauty: the aesthetic sensibility of the muses paled in comparison to the purity of form overwhelming the serpent’s senses. Was this the nature of understanding, the liberty of giving one’s whole self to the parasite? The beauty drew closer, until it left a kiss, a promise, a brush with sublimity on the lips of the serpent.
Come the rise of the sun, the serpent rolled from his dorm bed and shuffled back to his desk, unceremoniously opening an unabridged copy of The Arabian Nights. This was the fate of the serpent: a literary mind forever in pursuit of the parasite’s truth, unveiling the secrets of the society’s realities one work at a time.
And an artist’s soul, sustained by a lingering kiss. He pressed onward.
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