work in progress

A portrait I drew on MLK weekend, Septima Poinsette Clark.

“We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.” —S. P. Clark 

Insightful and pertinent words.

Re: the authors note on beloved- You canNOT say that you saw a girl so pretty you fainted and not tell us the story. Come on! Please 🥺(from @neil-kumiko)

be the violet

you are a young college drop out of twenty carrying around a mound of student debt and and an undiagnosed heart condition.

(This condition is called POTS, aka Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome aka Stand Up Fall Down Disease

What this means is that your body is unequipped to handle any disruption to its homeostasis without having a very petulant fit, dropping your blood pressure into the abyss, and removing all the blood from your brain. this is, as i'm sure you've guessed, not good. I'm sure you can see where this is going.)

so off you fuck to find someone willing to hire your squirrelly barely-medicated ass, and you wind up working in a Store, which we will call, for the sake of anonymity, Gollar Deneral. Gollar Deneral does not require any references nor physical aptitude confirmation, which sucks for them because they just hired the modern equivalent of a tight-laced victorian maiden with consumption

you are a cashier in this store (tho at Gollar Deneral, as I'm sure you are aware, that means you are an "everything" at this store). you are also autistic, and hate every brain-melting hell-screaming minute of this exercise in human restraint. to conserve even one or two of the veritable cutlery drawer of spoons it takes to do this job, you do not make eye contact unless strictly necessary

this will be your undoing

things that count as "disruption of homeostasis" to your shoddy meatsuit are what other bodies would describe as 'piddly little bitch tasks.' moving too quickly from one position to another, falling asleep too quickly, any amount of sweating or heat. this includes rapid increases in your heart BPM

you greet the customer but do not look at her. you finish scanning her items, briefly glance up for your customary microsecond of eye contact, and-

the room

starts

spinning

This, as you know, being me, is the alarm that POTS helpfully sets off seconds before disaster. "Sit down immediately!" says POTS, in the language of blacking out and your tongue going numb

Flutter flutter, says your heart, which in this body is a category five hurricane of an emergency

you see, this woman who has stopped at the register, is the most beautiful woman you've ever seen. her hair is obsidian black and shot through with dark browns and silvers, making it look like a three dimension river of soil, an Oread in the flesh. Her skin is the warm gold-brown of patina-ed oak wood, and she's wearing a matching leggings + coat + hat combo in dark purple wool, looking like she stepping out of a fairytale.

And you, since you are me, are very, very gay.

she furrows her brows at your sudden slack jawed silence, because the thing about not having blood in your brain is that your brain does not work when there's no blood in it

"Are you okay?" she says, setting her bare hand on your arm.

Congrats!

You are now unconscious.

When you are done doing your very impressive washed-up-jellyfish impression on the floor behind the counter and come to, your boss is already standing over you, having called an ambulance for your gay ass before you rejoined the landing of the living.

And the Night Angel, the Mountain Siren, she slumps in relief ("a kind heart! truly the most perfect woman to ever live!" says the part of your brain that has become a blithering moron in the face of pretty girl) and smiles (soft!! benevolent!! moonstruck in her light you are!)

"I'm so glad you're okay."

She does not wait for you to respond before leaving, which is good, because you almost fainted again there, just a little, and now you're revisiting the problem with brains and lack of blood again, you know how it is.

requested crossover

“I’m a therapist and keep this poster in my waiting room, apparently it’s saved a few lives.”

I don’t like the phrase “a cry for help.” I just don’t like how it sounds. When somebody says to me, “I’m thinking about suicide. I have a plan: I just need a reason not to do it,” the last thing I see is helplessness.

I think your depression has been beating you up for years. It’s called you ugly, and stupid, and pathetic, and a failure, for so long that you’ve forgotten that it’s wrong. You don’t see any good in yourself, and you don’t have any hope.

But still here you are: you’ve come over to me, banged on my door and said, “HEY! Staying alive is REALLY HARD right now! Just give me something to fight with! I don’t care if it’s a stick! Give me a stick and I can stay alive!”

How is that helpless? I think that’s incredible. You’re like a marine: trapped for years behind enemy lines. Your gun has been taken away, you’re out of ammo, you’re malnourished, and you’ve probably caught some kind of jungle virus that’s making you hallucinate giant spiders.

And you’re still just going, “GIVE ME A STICK. I’M NOT DYING OUT HERE.” “A cry for help” makes it sound like I’m supposed to take pity on you, but you don’t need my pity. This isn’t pathetic. This is the will to survive. This is how humans lived long enough to become the dominant species.

With NO hope, running on NOTHING, you’re ready to cut through a hundred miles of hostile jungle with nothing but a stick, if that’s what it takes to get to safety.

All I’m doing is handing out sticks.

‘WHY ARE YOU SO LAZY?’

But you’re not lazy. Lazy is when you shrug things off because you can’t summon up the give-a-damn. When you’re curled up tight in your chair at your desk, alone and grey and desperately wishing that you had your life in order, that you did all those things you had to do, that it didn’t feel like breaking rocks just to feed and clothe yourself and get some sleep, that’s not lazy.

People don’t understand. You tell them “It’s hard.” They tell you “No it isn’t, you’re just lazy.”

You start to wonder if they’re right.

is breaking those rocks easy for everyone else? Are they that much stronger than you?

They don’t look like they’re struggling.

“Just try harder,” they say. But you’re trying. It’s not working.

Breaking boulders in your path until you’re spent isn’t lazy. And you do it day after day after day.

You’re not lazy. Most people don’t have those rocks to break. They don’t even know what it’s like to have to break rocks to get things done. They don’t understand how hard you have to work, and how hopeless you can feel, when you try and fail to do what they do so easily. Things are harder for you. They really are. And if those people had to deal with your problems, they wouldn’t be doing any better.

Like this is a trope we’re all fairly familiar with at this point; some secret government organization formed to monitor, contain and research all kinds of weird shit and keep it secret from the public. Also they may or may not have kinda gone totally rogue somewhere along the way and might now answer only to themselves at this point in a ‘who watches the watchers?’ commentary on the need for oversight.

But the more you find out about the Federal Bureau of Control, the more it becomes clear they just so utterly past ANY of that by the time the game begins. And have been for basically the last fifty some odd years.

Like here is a basic overview of the FBC that you learn within the first thirty or so minutes of the game: They are a secret government organization dedicated to the containment, cataloguing and research of supernatural artifacts and events. They are headquartered in what they call ‘The Oldest House’, a tall, imposing yet utterly nondescript building in the middle of New York City that is literally impossible for anyone to enter or even notice unless they already know about it. And the interior of the building is actually a twisting extradimensional labyrinth that also opens up to other dimensions/realities and might actually be the World Tree Yggdrasil. It also kind of hates any technology made in the last twenty years. And apparently Number 2 Pencils.

Oh, and the FBC doesn’t really report to the US Government. They report to a floating, inverted black pyramid that exists in a space outside of known reality that might also be the collective human subconscious. The pyramid is colloquially referred to as ‘The Board’ and they are an extradimensional entity/group of entities that appoints the Director of the FBC via the use of a physics-defying geometric gun called ‘The Service Weapon’ that is probably Excalibur/Mjolnir/every other legendary weapon in human myth. They also speak in word-salads and probably know they are in a video game.

See, back in 1964 when the FBC first discovered The Oldest House, they basically decided ‘WOW, this place is cool! Let’s make it our new headquarters!’ and promptly moved in. This was also when the current Director at the time found the Service Weapon within The Oldest House, made contact with/was chosen by The Board and from the point on the FBC really hasn’t answered to the US Government anymore.

Also, the Government basically doesn’t even know the Bureau even EXISTS anymore. Remember how The Oldest House has this kind of ‘Perception Filter’ that prevents almost anyone from entering it or even noticing it, which is how basically nobody can find it despite the fact that it is right in the middle of New York City? Well, after they moved in and became effective ‘residents’ of the house, this filter started applying to the FBC itself. They basically CAN’T be noticed or remembered at this point by anyone who isn’t part of the organization. The reason this secret organization can operate entirely off the grid and can’t be tracked is because they literally have freaky extradimensional reality-warping covering their tracks.

This is what I meant when I said that the FBC is just so far GONE. At this point, the FBC is itself a crazy, supernatural thing in and of itself.

Other fun details about the FBC include:

The Bureau facilities in The Oldest House are not powered by coal, oil or nuclear power. No, instead the lights are kept on by a former director who went a tad power-mad and lost control of his pyrokinesis, so the Bureau locked him up in a giant ‘Sarcophagus Containment’ unit and now use him as a power-generator.  He also sometimes talks through the waste-disposal furnace to try and get people to bring him human sacrifices.

The maintenance sector of the FBC includes an area called the ‘Black Rock Quarry’. The so called ‘black rock’ is an extra-dimensional mineral that, among other things, blocks and dampens supernatural effects and abilities. Needless to say, the Bureau mines the stuff extensively. Now, despite being within The Oldest House, the Black Rock Quarry is an open-top quarry. To space.

One of the ways Bureau personnel get around is via pull-strings that show up all over The Oldest House. Pull a string three times and you are transported to the Oceanview Motel, a quaint little motel that probably exists outside of known reality because no one has ever been able to actually go or see outside the motel. Once you’re there, you just ring the bell on the front desk three times, do some random task and procure a room key. The key opens a door, but only one with an inverted black pyramid. From there, you pull another string and are transported back to somewhere else in The Oldest House. So basically a rather convoluted teleportation system. There are also doors with other symbols that probably go to other realities, but the Bureau hasn’t figured out how to open them. Though one does seem to lead to a void of malevolent darkness that feeds off human creativity and is currently holding one Alan Wake.