"Tales of Allesteur and Beyond" part 1
Mar. 6th, 2003 02:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zesty_pintoa meatball in the middle of a crowded high school hallway... or a man walking around in a giant penguin comstume. or a boy who sings everything he tries to say but is incredibly tone deaf.. or a boy who lives in a place where when you order an ice cream cone you get a complimentary fish stick... or someone who gets lost in ther back pack and the avdentures they go thru to get out.. random enough? - [~HopelessRomanticMe~]
Weird. Really, really, REALLY weird. So damn weird you'd wonder what the fuck I was talking about. You wouldn't even assume it, either: you'd probably just think it was the middle of nowhere, in some podunk world, but it is also the most strange, fearsome, and damn exciting pieces of nowhere that I have ever had the chance to live within. Hear me out and you’ll understand why.
Okay, let me explain the situation here. I woke up with a dream about drums, I’m surrounded by a pack of organized criminal raccoons, and the only thing stopping them from attacking me is a vial of godly element in my pack.
Yeah, I didn’t think you’d believe me either, but it’s fucking true, damn it! Maybe you deserve some explanations…
I was like you folks a few years back. I lived my life in Manhattan, the busiest place you could ever cramp yuppies, gays, rappers, and assholes; all into one little plot of land. Most of the normal people didn’t even live in that city; they commuted from the other parts of New York. My parents missed the normal bus though, because we lived in one of the high-rise apartments downtown, which made sense since they had “post-yuppie” written all over each other. Since they made a huge ass sum of money, they decided to retire by traveling around the world. To make sure it felt like an actual retirement, though, they ditched their only son while giving him a small allowance to do whatever the hell he wants. Most kids think I’ve got it made, but it’s not as hot as you think, especially when you try to explain sick notes for absence at school and can’t cook since you’d have enough trouble making cereal.
Of course, to make my life even more difficult, they also decided to drop me somewhere outside of New York. I wish I could tell you where they dropped me, but I know as much about this place as you do. “Allesteur,” some Midwest town in the middle of a Midwest nowhere is where they left me. You know, those towns that are so boring that all the kids over there do is either thump bibles, thump each other, or spend their lives O.D.ing on whatever bullshit drug they can find. They said it was where my grandpa came from; the one from my dad’s side. They didn’t say that my grandpa died a week before I came here, or the fact that he disowned my dad. To put it short, it’s no Soho.
The kids here are all from wealthy retired families, all of them living in this place like it was something out of Palm Springs, except with more secrecy. I guess you could say that they’re not like the people you’d normally expect to see in the Midwest, but you’re not likely to find people like this anywhere else either. The kids here are all talented, brilliant… and goddamn eccentric. How can I say this? One of the kids I go to school with mumbles Stock Market quotes on the dot like he was connected to the Exchange; in French class, he mumbles the index for the French Stock Market! Another spends half his time at home devising fusion formulas and the other half in school playing basketball. Even my best friend here is some sort of marksman nut. I’ve watched her hit pennies on their flat side from half a mile away. Hell, this place can be creepy.
One of the creepiest things around here though are the animals. I don’t mean you have to worry about wolves or coyotes, I mean that there are unions where the animals have some sort of part in this community. You’d think it was some part of a tree hugger’s scheme to make people eat less meat, but it’s true, and if you don’t believe in it, then you’re bound to get into a huge world of pain because the animals here get pissed about equal rights, especially raccoons, who seem to be the least recognized of them all.
The day this whole thing started was on a Monday. I had one of the most messed up dreams I ever had in the longest damn time. Traveling through a backpack, I ended up trudging through a vat of milk and textbooks. My back was really heavy because I was carrying this thick liquid metal that weighed a ton. The more I walked into it, though, the worse it got. Before I knew it, I was starting to see the milk go up to my neck, but not before I saw that thousands of eyes were watching me before I woke up.
Hey, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What the fuck is wrong with you, mentioning bullshit like this?” I’ll tell you to shut up, this has more meaning than you could believe for some incident that I could not even begin to describe.
The time when I woke up was 5:30AM; thirty minutes earlier than the alarm, but it wasn’t just the dream that woke me up totally: someone was bashing metal against metal outside. I thought it was just the early morning training from the medieval geek brothers that lived next door from me but still, waking up at 5:30 is a major bitch, especially when I went outside to get the paper only to realize it was a raccoon breaking my mailbox with a ball-peen hammer. I almost kicked it if he didn’t seem so angry, so I just cursed at it a bit and got ready for school.
I came to school about 20 minutes earlier than usual so there weren’t that many people there even though it didn’t matter too much considering everyone I saw there was too busy trying to dig through paper. All through the school hall, there were fliers all over the damn hall, all over the lockers, and even all over the floor; some of them even stuck onto my shoes, all of them for the Church of the New Element.
I never told you about them did I? You would have been better off not knowing them. The Church of the New Element is a group of bible pushers that believe that god intentionally meant to make us out of noble particles. They consider Selenium to be the holiest element in the periodic table since its reactivity makes them think it was involved with the big bang and some other crap. Yeah, exactly, they’re fundamentalist morons.
Anyway, after brushing through the hundreds of fliers while finding my locker, Steve came and helped me. He was the guy that talked in binary code.
“001110011011101111101010100001?” –it doesn’t sound like this. He actually sounds like a modem when it’s logged onto a phone line, but this is the closest to what he says that I can think of. As you can imagine, it took some getting used to just to understand what he was saying. Basically though, he just asked me if I saw his locker in the mess.
“Nah, though thanks for helping me look for mine.”
“111000101101111100.” Anytime. Like I said, it takes some getting used to. Are you ready for the exam today?
“It’s today?!”
“1” Yup.
“Damn it, this sucks to an extreme, I didn’t study at all for it.”
“1010101” Ha ha ha!
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Don’t expect me to show you any sympathy when the cafeteria lady serves you fish sticks for dessert again.”
“0010000111011001!”I asked for ice cream!
At this time, Andy came in. Remember the scary marksman I was telling you about before? Voila, Andy. I guess if she wasn’t a modern-day Annie Oakley meets the Terminator, she’s probably one of the most sane people in this school.
“Hey guys,” She said through her gas mask. Okay, so she doesn’t seem that sane to you folks when I say it, but trust me, she’s pretty sane.
“Gas practice at the Range?” Expensive schools have whatever they want, including firing ranges.
“Yup, wanted to get some early practice while I was ahead.” She turned to Steve “Heya Steve.”
“01111.”
She turned back to me, “Elementalists are getting pretty testy these days if they’re putting this much effort into trying to get us to join.” She then got really excited through her gas mask “Hey, want me to test out the new flamethrower I got? It’s an old World War I design from Germany.”
“Errr, didn’t Dr. Steinberg say they were thirty pounds or so?”
“What, you think I can’t carry it because I’m a girl?” Anyone who has spent some part of their life with Andy will know that if you challenge her because of her sex, then you will be severely pummeled limb from limb.
“No, no!” The rule was you try to make amends within five seconds or else you get the living shit beat out of you “I just think that seems like a lot of effort… besides, won’t the fire alarms go off from the smell of napalm?”
She laughed her usual laugh “Silly, I don’t use napalm! They’ve got some environmentally friendly combustible now: almost no carbon monoxide emissions or anything!” She snickered her maniacal laugh “See, they even have different colored ones too! I’ve got green and orange.”
“001000101?” Does it really matter that much?
“Shhh…!” Steve quieted a bit. I knew Andy was annoyed at us a bit even though understanding Steve is like trying to understand what a fruitfly would think if it was attacked by a flying banana and trying to figure out what Andy was thinking underneath her gas mask was like trying to read War and Peace through Braille. She gave us her somewhat perturbed look through the shadow of the darkened gas mask before continuing.
“Anyway, what are you both doing up at this time anyway? I can understand the athletes, but I can’t understand why Steve or you, Drew.” I didn’t want to tell my name out since you didn’t need to know until now. I’m trying to be as actual to this as possible for you and yeah, this is the first time you ever get to know my name. No, no more introductions on me, I already spent half a fucking page giving you introductions, okay?
“1110111001010001011011000100001101101101111011000000011011011110110100110111010001.” Raccoons came into my yard and started to dig into my house. I wouldn’t have minded it too much if they were not doing it with power tools. About that time, the Wilsons came out and started to threaten them by screaming loudly with shotguns, so they ran off. I don’t mind it too much, but my mom was not happy at all.
Andy turned to me “What’d he say?”
“Yeah? I had a raccoon outside my yard destroying my mailbox early this morning.”
“Uhhh, Drew, what’s he saying?” Shut up, my response time is terrible, okay?
“We both got our houses wrecked by raccoons.”
“Yeah? How bad was the damage?”
“One of them destroyed my mailbox with a ball-peen hammer, Steve got his yard dug out by raccoons with power tools.”
“Damn lagomorphs. They didn’t touch my house.” She said it not out of relief but because she wanted the target practice. Many animals have learned that there are some houses to avoid, and Andy’s was one of them.
“1100111101011101?” Are they actually lagomorphs? I thought they were something else.
“Don’t look at me, I got a C in Biology.”
“Anyway… so you wanna see my flamethrower?”
“0” God no!
“No way.”
“Oh fine.” She was kind of disappointed since she always loved to show us her “toys.” “I’ll see you guys at lunch then?”
“1” Sure.
“Yeah, see ya Andy.”
She hauled her fifty pound framepack of books and military equipment away to the gym as we watched her.
“1101110110001011011010101” She scares the shit out of me. How do you do it?
“What?”
“010101011010111110” Talk with her, of course.
“Eh, it’s not that hard.”
Steve took a long stare off at her before replying, “11111100010110101011110110000110101?” So… all people in New York had firearms ready to use?
“Oh, shut up,” I playfully slapped his shoulder and he almost jumped back instantly.
“1” Y-yes sir.
More to come in due time, just typing it as it goes along.
Weird. Really, really, REALLY weird. So damn weird you'd wonder what the fuck I was talking about. You wouldn't even assume it, either: you'd probably just think it was the middle of nowhere, in some podunk world, but it is also the most strange, fearsome, and damn exciting pieces of nowhere that I have ever had the chance to live within. Hear me out and you’ll understand why.
Okay, let me explain the situation here. I woke up with a dream about drums, I’m surrounded by a pack of organized criminal raccoons, and the only thing stopping them from attacking me is a vial of godly element in my pack.
Yeah, I didn’t think you’d believe me either, but it’s fucking true, damn it! Maybe you deserve some explanations…
I was like you folks a few years back. I lived my life in Manhattan, the busiest place you could ever cramp yuppies, gays, rappers, and assholes; all into one little plot of land. Most of the normal people didn’t even live in that city; they commuted from the other parts of New York. My parents missed the normal bus though, because we lived in one of the high-rise apartments downtown, which made sense since they had “post-yuppie” written all over each other. Since they made a huge ass sum of money, they decided to retire by traveling around the world. To make sure it felt like an actual retirement, though, they ditched their only son while giving him a small allowance to do whatever the hell he wants. Most kids think I’ve got it made, but it’s not as hot as you think, especially when you try to explain sick notes for absence at school and can’t cook since you’d have enough trouble making cereal.
Of course, to make my life even more difficult, they also decided to drop me somewhere outside of New York. I wish I could tell you where they dropped me, but I know as much about this place as you do. “Allesteur,” some Midwest town in the middle of a Midwest nowhere is where they left me. You know, those towns that are so boring that all the kids over there do is either thump bibles, thump each other, or spend their lives O.D.ing on whatever bullshit drug they can find. They said it was where my grandpa came from; the one from my dad’s side. They didn’t say that my grandpa died a week before I came here, or the fact that he disowned my dad. To put it short, it’s no Soho.
The kids here are all from wealthy retired families, all of them living in this place like it was something out of Palm Springs, except with more secrecy. I guess you could say that they’re not like the people you’d normally expect to see in the Midwest, but you’re not likely to find people like this anywhere else either. The kids here are all talented, brilliant… and goddamn eccentric. How can I say this? One of the kids I go to school with mumbles Stock Market quotes on the dot like he was connected to the Exchange; in French class, he mumbles the index for the French Stock Market! Another spends half his time at home devising fusion formulas and the other half in school playing basketball. Even my best friend here is some sort of marksman nut. I’ve watched her hit pennies on their flat side from half a mile away. Hell, this place can be creepy.
One of the creepiest things around here though are the animals. I don’t mean you have to worry about wolves or coyotes, I mean that there are unions where the animals have some sort of part in this community. You’d think it was some part of a tree hugger’s scheme to make people eat less meat, but it’s true, and if you don’t believe in it, then you’re bound to get into a huge world of pain because the animals here get pissed about equal rights, especially raccoons, who seem to be the least recognized of them all.
The day this whole thing started was on a Monday. I had one of the most messed up dreams I ever had in the longest damn time. Traveling through a backpack, I ended up trudging through a vat of milk and textbooks. My back was really heavy because I was carrying this thick liquid metal that weighed a ton. The more I walked into it, though, the worse it got. Before I knew it, I was starting to see the milk go up to my neck, but not before I saw that thousands of eyes were watching me before I woke up.
Hey, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What the fuck is wrong with you, mentioning bullshit like this?” I’ll tell you to shut up, this has more meaning than you could believe for some incident that I could not even begin to describe.
The time when I woke up was 5:30AM; thirty minutes earlier than the alarm, but it wasn’t just the dream that woke me up totally: someone was bashing metal against metal outside. I thought it was just the early morning training from the medieval geek brothers that lived next door from me but still, waking up at 5:30 is a major bitch, especially when I went outside to get the paper only to realize it was a raccoon breaking my mailbox with a ball-peen hammer. I almost kicked it if he didn’t seem so angry, so I just cursed at it a bit and got ready for school.
I came to school about 20 minutes earlier than usual so there weren’t that many people there even though it didn’t matter too much considering everyone I saw there was too busy trying to dig through paper. All through the school hall, there were fliers all over the damn hall, all over the lockers, and even all over the floor; some of them even stuck onto my shoes, all of them for the Church of the New Element.
I never told you about them did I? You would have been better off not knowing them. The Church of the New Element is a group of bible pushers that believe that god intentionally meant to make us out of noble particles. They consider Selenium to be the holiest element in the periodic table since its reactivity makes them think it was involved with the big bang and some other crap. Yeah, exactly, they’re fundamentalist morons.
Anyway, after brushing through the hundreds of fliers while finding my locker, Steve came and helped me. He was the guy that talked in binary code.
“001110011011101111101010100001?” –it doesn’t sound like this. He actually sounds like a modem when it’s logged onto a phone line, but this is the closest to what he says that I can think of. As you can imagine, it took some getting used to just to understand what he was saying. Basically though, he just asked me if I saw his locker in the mess.
“Nah, though thanks for helping me look for mine.”
“111000101101111100.” Anytime. Like I said, it takes some getting used to. Are you ready for the exam today?
“It’s today?!”
“1” Yup.
“Damn it, this sucks to an extreme, I didn’t study at all for it.”
“1010101” Ha ha ha!
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Don’t expect me to show you any sympathy when the cafeteria lady serves you fish sticks for dessert again.”
“0010000111011001!”I asked for ice cream!
At this time, Andy came in. Remember the scary marksman I was telling you about before? Voila, Andy. I guess if she wasn’t a modern-day Annie Oakley meets the Terminator, she’s probably one of the most sane people in this school.
“Hey guys,” She said through her gas mask. Okay, so she doesn’t seem that sane to you folks when I say it, but trust me, she’s pretty sane.
“Gas practice at the Range?” Expensive schools have whatever they want, including firing ranges.
“Yup, wanted to get some early practice while I was ahead.” She turned to Steve “Heya Steve.”
“01111.”
She turned back to me, “Elementalists are getting pretty testy these days if they’re putting this much effort into trying to get us to join.” She then got really excited through her gas mask “Hey, want me to test out the new flamethrower I got? It’s an old World War I design from Germany.”
“Errr, didn’t Dr. Steinberg say they were thirty pounds or so?”
“What, you think I can’t carry it because I’m a girl?” Anyone who has spent some part of their life with Andy will know that if you challenge her because of her sex, then you will be severely pummeled limb from limb.
“No, no!” The rule was you try to make amends within five seconds or else you get the living shit beat out of you “I just think that seems like a lot of effort… besides, won’t the fire alarms go off from the smell of napalm?”
She laughed her usual laugh “Silly, I don’t use napalm! They’ve got some environmentally friendly combustible now: almost no carbon monoxide emissions or anything!” She snickered her maniacal laugh “See, they even have different colored ones too! I’ve got green and orange.”
“001000101?” Does it really matter that much?
“Shhh…!” Steve quieted a bit. I knew Andy was annoyed at us a bit even though understanding Steve is like trying to understand what a fruitfly would think if it was attacked by a flying banana and trying to figure out what Andy was thinking underneath her gas mask was like trying to read War and Peace through Braille. She gave us her somewhat perturbed look through the shadow of the darkened gas mask before continuing.
“Anyway, what are you both doing up at this time anyway? I can understand the athletes, but I can’t understand why Steve or you, Drew.” I didn’t want to tell my name out since you didn’t need to know until now. I’m trying to be as actual to this as possible for you and yeah, this is the first time you ever get to know my name. No, no more introductions on me, I already spent half a fucking page giving you introductions, okay?
“1110111001010001011011000100001101101101111011000000011011011110110100110111010001.” Raccoons came into my yard and started to dig into my house. I wouldn’t have minded it too much if they were not doing it with power tools. About that time, the Wilsons came out and started to threaten them by screaming loudly with shotguns, so they ran off. I don’t mind it too much, but my mom was not happy at all.
Andy turned to me “What’d he say?”
“Yeah? I had a raccoon outside my yard destroying my mailbox early this morning.”
“Uhhh, Drew, what’s he saying?” Shut up, my response time is terrible, okay?
“We both got our houses wrecked by raccoons.”
“Yeah? How bad was the damage?”
“One of them destroyed my mailbox with a ball-peen hammer, Steve got his yard dug out by raccoons with power tools.”
“Damn lagomorphs. They didn’t touch my house.” She said it not out of relief but because she wanted the target practice. Many animals have learned that there are some houses to avoid, and Andy’s was one of them.
“1100111101011101?” Are they actually lagomorphs? I thought they were something else.
“Don’t look at me, I got a C in Biology.”
“Anyway… so you wanna see my flamethrower?”
“0” God no!
“No way.”
“Oh fine.” She was kind of disappointed since she always loved to show us her “toys.” “I’ll see you guys at lunch then?”
“1” Sure.
“Yeah, see ya Andy.”
She hauled her fifty pound framepack of books and military equipment away to the gym as we watched her.
“1101110110001011011010101” She scares the shit out of me. How do you do it?
“What?”
“010101011010111110” Talk with her, of course.
“Eh, it’s not that hard.”
Steve took a long stare off at her before replying, “11111100010110101011110110000110101?” So… all people in New York had firearms ready to use?
“Oh, shut up,” I playfully slapped his shoulder and he almost jumped back instantly.
“1” Y-yes sir.
More to come in due time, just typing it as it goes along.
