We Do WHAT In The Shadows!? - Ep. 22 (Journal)

Welcome to Bonetel Philadelphia! Any time of year, you can find an early grave here! Loki writes a nice little entry about his new employee of the month, Barry Galdi.

Its name is not Miriam Liquid. The wet mass of worm-like stuff cannot be named using a human mouth. It takes Loki on a journey so far he ends up surprisingly close.

Content warning: Profanity, violence, sexual stuff

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Special thanks:

Tim Hutchings for designing this awesome game,

Epidemicsound for additional episode music

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome to your worst nightmare, another RPG actual play podcast. Solitude, a journaling RPG podcast, is just me in a room, not to brag, with a journal, a solo RPG, and some damn good coffee. I play to see what happens in the story, right in my fictional journal, and you get to hang out next to me by the fire. My name is Auri. Welcome. I hope you enjoy our time together. This episode is a dramatic journal entry reading for the prompts we got to in the previous episode. Some things might have changed a little bit from the decisions made in the episode, since I've had a bit of time to collect my thoughts and write stuff down. This is Solitude. We do what in the shadows. Such a lovely place. Any time of year you can find it here. I should put pen to paper and conjure up a song about this place. No, who'd ever want to sing about a rundown hotel located in a specific geological place? No one. I've been in a marvellous mood lately. I haven't to worry, hey. I believe that the value of any given day rests upon the manner of its bestartment. Here now, future me, the secrets to a balanced breakfast of the body and mind that shall imbue you with a spirit most veritably jolly. First, shall you awake from your slumber and have a good hearty stretch of the limbs? Legs, arms, penis, or the female flappy bits, uh whatever they're called. The flaggy waggies? The woblobs? Old Scrooge's purse? I don't think they have actually named them yet. In any case, I find a good wiggle and tug per appendage brings my body to the required limbeness to greet the evening's demands. Then on to the second part of my routine: loosening up one's mind. In my experience, daily affirmations are a requirement to keep my inner garden a tranquil delight. Repeat after me. I am beautiful. Go on, say it. I am strong. I am perfectly adequate at bookkeeping. I am productive. I am great at business. I am hungry. No, no, don't repeat that last one. I just happen to be hungry. Third and last. I remember someone teaching me long ago that most people warm up just their body and mind and wholly forget to train their social cues. Just a few pleases and thank yous go a long way. To top it off, I like to throw in a few seductive winks and a pair of finger crossbows at the mirror. That ought to do the trick. Just for me, at least. And I don't even cast a mirror image. And with that, we are ready to tackle the mythical beast known to most as Monday. My new protege, Barry Galdi. What can I say? Words don't do her professionalism enough justice. So instead I will try some emotional grunts of acknowledgement. Wawa. Yowza! Boo boo boo boo! Fow Meow. Who is guarding the gates of heaven? If such a miracle worker has sneaked into the mortal realm, she cleans, even saves on money by making her own soap. She cooks, hunts the rats herself, deworms, and cleans them up. And doesn't go too heavy on the salt either. She's marvelous at keeping watch at the desk. Both eyes open for 10 hours straight! It's amazing! She lets loose a drop of water from a cup every five minutes, so her eyeballs don't crust shut. It fills me with pride to be able to offer employment to someone less fortunate. She's an orphan in the fourth generation. She lost both of her parents before she was even born. She truly is the best worker a humble business owner such as myself could hope for. Work 16-hour days, no pay, no holidays, no benefits, no complaints. Just the other evening, we were at the marketplace to receive a shipment of pillows. I thought me and Socrates would be able to lift them up easy. They're pillows, they practically weigh nothing. Well, I started lifting, and Socrates was giving me shit about my technique. Well, you know, he says he only asks questions, but what an attitude. He said something about me lifting with my back instead of my legs, and started to sound an awful lot like a certain protein-crazed monastery in Austria. Socrates turned out to be more of a nuisance than an assistance. Lovely fellow, but he's all talk. Didn't lift a finger. Possibly because of the whole being just a head thing. But still, use your neck, man. Well, anyhow, we called Barry up to the task. I put Socrates' head in a wheelbarrow with some rocks and a coat over them, and introduced him as my buddy. Rocrates. I know, I panicked. What can I say? Yeah, that was my buddy Rocrates, just having a good lie down after a long day at war against the British. And Barry believed me. She always does. She's like the loyal dog I never had. Until now. She just flexed her muscles and picked the crates right up, hoisted and stacked them upon her back, and she was ready to go. Outstanding devotion. Sooner than you can say Bone Tell Philadelphia, we were back, and the new pillows were installed, again by none other than Barry Galdi, employee of the month, I wager. Every morning as I go to bed, Barry is there behind my door. She tells little stories where I'm the main guy, a hero, a handsome prince slaying a dragon, a righteous pirate who robs from the rich and gives to the poor. Once, by chance, she told a story where I was a former sportsman vampire who built a team of international super talents and challenged an old priest and his ninja friend to a match for the British crown. I mean talk about a near miss. Towards the end of the story, I fall into slumber, waking every now and then as I hear the moistening droplets sizzle on her arid eyeballs. What a find. She respects me. She loves me. I will take care of her like a lioness takes care of her young. I will protect her from the horrors of the night. That includes me and old Socrates, by the way, I spell Socrates with a you Mary shall never witness what goes mump in the night. At most she'll witness things that go tippity tap in the early evening. She shall remain innocent, lest her soul be also lost to the inferno of evil, where my right hand was forgot Loki Skeleton two hundred and twenty three years old. Prompt forty part two shards of the looking glass july seventeen eighty A month ago I had an experience an epiphany, rather. My business was growing at a steady pace. Did I sometimes enjoy my customers more than I should have? Yes. Did they struggle? Yes. Would I do it again? Oh hot daddy glaced in chocolate, yes. But there was one customer a thing that changed everything. Miriam Liquid. But that was not its name, though. As it signed its name in the registry with the pointy tip of its inky tentacle, I could see its true name. It eludes my mind. Like a mirage, it dissolves as soon as I attempt to focus my full attention upon it. But it was entirely foreign and terrible. Not Bulgarian. Worse. Words whispered in between the fractions of perceivable time. It promised to entertain my most hidden fancies, to provide salt for my most bland meal of an immigrant's life. I asked, and it delivered. There is now a Bone Tell Philadelphia in Boston and New York as well, with locations being planned in the south also. Oh how silly of me. The name is entirely misleading for franchising purposes. How about Bone Tell Philadelphia of Boston? Yes, yes. And then Bone Tell Philadelphia of Boston now in New York. My hotel empire will grow, I will become rich and well respected. I shall receive honored guests from all over, they will spend the night at my grand vault ceiling to rooms. I will offer them a seven course dinner, and we will have a vigorous discussion about the arts and fashion. Then they'll ask me to perform a song, and first I'll decline but then soon give in and play and sing for them while they look, while they admire, while they love me. I feel as though I belong in court, wearing fine silken garments, velvety capes, a hat with an ostrich feather then I will be happy. I am a sculpture shaped by hands that have long since been shattered by the insurmountable weight of time. Yet I remain. To exist is to be perceived. All this glamour comes with a dark price I'm afraid might dim the sparkle of even the most beautiful diamond. Me. I agreed to pay it in full. It's funny I remember being so adamant about resisting Pope Glutius Maximus and his dark reign of terror. But then I simply cannot recall why. What I'm trying to say is perhaps the Pope is not wrong in his ways. Why should we, the denizens of sin, bow to those who shiver merely by its mention? Human beings are but children. At times they are quite amicable companions, like a dog or a house cat, but sometimes the mother must take the children's toys away, and the owner must tighten the leash. I have agreed upon delivering over the next hundred years a thousand vampire young to Miriam Liquid. Miriam Liquid, Miriam Liquid! Every time I announce that name out loud, I hear the echoes of an infinite hiss inside my mind. Like falling into the liquid silver surface of a looking glass, and hearing it shatter but not break into pieces. Reality folding and unfolding all around me in a realm where the pressure of distant clouds crush my bones inside out. A month ago, when it came to the bone tell, Barigaldi was luckily asleep. That pure-hearted pup might not have survived the encounter. Socrates was in his room debating himself on the topic of pizza toppings. Meanwhile, in its room, Miriam Liquid showed me how to succeed in my business venture, and have everyone love and praise me. It took me on a spiritual journey to show me what I had already seen, teach me what I already knew, tap into the grand subconscious of the entire universe itself, and drink from it deeply. I was like a mosquito hatchling smelling blood for the first time. I wanted to travel deeper into the world between worlds, the word between words, the space between Miriam liquid, which squirmed its way around my limbs and bound me in the infinite emptiness between zero and one. I opened my eyes and I felt the sun on my skin. It scorched my outer layers, and they fell on the ground like burnt potato peelings. It was sunlight in the Apennines. I don't remember ever being there, but I knew it. I felt the burn so familiar now searing my exposed flesh. The sun wrote the name Father Augusto in the flesh of my right arm. Then it caught fire, writing everywhere. Angelique, Rene, Garibaldi, dozens of names made holes in my body and the pain took over me. I gazed into the mirror that was the sky and saw a final name being scratched by the sun's terrifyingly sharp race into my skull. Elise de la Croix. A name like the Italian sun. Familiar, comforting, and destroying me. I opened my eyes under the sea. Music faint, muffled. A puffer fish was plucking on an eel. The lowest pizzicato you ever heard. The fish began to inflate, and I felt my skinless body inflate with it. Soon I was twice as big, thrice, thrice! Then a blast! As my body's limits gave way and let my mind free to wander and fill the infinite shape of the universe. I was both pufferfish and eel, water and air, predator and predatee. We we and hoo-ha. I was a perfect circle, looping in on itself to create an endless one surfaced object called Cosmos. But this was a mirror. So instead of Cosmos, I was Sumsok, a twisted, reversed, obverse perversion of all things. So I let myself be. I felt the distant stars of the night sky as my fingertips. The great Apennine mountains were stubble on my chin. And the abyssal depths of the ocean ravines were mere cracks between my toes. The universe perfected, perverted. Outside was inside and inside had become outside. This was me. Then a terrifying crack. Like the spine of a frail grandmother attempting a double backflip into the pool. The sky teared open, and nothingness started creeping in. At first one nothing, then two, three, five, seven thousands, millions of nothing filled space with nothing. The something. Was corrupted. Space had been filled with nothing. Something had no more room in the universe. A vampire is nothing devouring something. I opened my eyes and I was looking at the mirror in Miriam Liquid's room. I did not see myself, for vampires cast no reflection in a mirror. A fact that makes doing one's own makeup a fucking nightmare. But now I understood. I don't cast an image in the mirror because I am the mirror, the obverse being. A thing reversed. I looked at the writhing mass that was doctor Liquid. It had a doctorate from Harvard in sociology. My body shook as I crumbled down to my knees. I coughed my supper onto the already stained hardwood floor. This everything I had just experienced had been inside of me all this time. I have the knowledge. I have the skills. This is the price one has to pay to understand business. And boy do I understand it now. I shall master it. Liquid will have the work as it requested. It is a feat entirely in the realm of possibility, for as my chain of bone tails spread out into this new world, the traces of those changed will lead to me less and less, until that trail is hidden under a thick red sea of blood. I have not seen Doctor Liquid since. I still feel it squirming in my mind in the uncharted space between one thought and another. Unseen, but not beyond my senses. I have a feeling I will see her in a hundred years, when I have completed my part of our deal. Hey, that's a good name for a guidebook to business if I ever decide to write one. The Part of the Deal Loki Skeletonson two hundred and twenty-six years old. Thanks for listening, folks. My name is Aura Itamaki, and Solitude is my personal project. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You can follow Solitude on Instagram at SolotudeShow, and if you got something to say, drop a message, drop a comment. Also, please rate and review the show so people can find it a little bit easier. Also, please tell a friend. It would be awesome if more people found the show. Additional episode music and sound effects, courtesy of epidemic sound, theme song by me. Thanks again for listening, everybody. See ya next week. Bye!