Episode 58 - Meet

(Music fades in)

  Welcome back to the podcast. To this adventure, as it were.

Or I guess, it’s not really an adventure. This is just a podcast, after all, one about a walk down memory lane. About my past, a past that happens to be a bit rocky at places, yes, but was also predominantly online. In any form, really. In this podcast, we journey–if that’s even the right word–into online spaces that don’t really exist anymore. You were never there, I’m assuming. So few people were, and because of that, you are left to listen to my disjointed and poorly explained memories and stories. Which I can’t imagine is a great time.

So maybe there was some relief that this season was something different, that we were diving into Lost Media and all of its implications. Or some of its implications. I think we’ve lost some of the points. We might have gotten a little bit distracted. But that was inevitable I suppose.

(Music ends and new music fades in)

  But okay, I guess we can get back to that point. Lost Media is the sort of thing that rubs us the wrong way. Or it can. There are some times when we only grieve what is lost and feel that sadness but understand why it happened and how it wasn’t so much anyone’s fault but the way things were. The first couple seasons of Doctor Who come to mind, but you could also think of any of the super old movies back from when Hollywood first started. The film itself was needed to make more, to tell more stories. There was something like a shortage of critical supplies at many points throughout media’s history, and the various industries couldn’t have survived without cannibalizing themselves in this way. And so, everything we have now was only made possible by those sacrifices. And nothing is telling us that they weren’t sacrifices, so we get to keep our hurt in the space this media would have gone. 

  But there are times when things like this aren’t inevitable. It’s not that the DVDs stopped being produced because no one could produce DVDs. It was more like no one thought people wanted them anyway, and the sales weren’t great. And that lack of purchases made those DVDs rare finds today, but they can still be found and then their contents taken off of them and made available on the wider internet. That could happen. It often happens, but there’s no guarantee it will, but the odds improve as interest does. Everyone wants to be a hero, after all.

  Physical media used to be that saving grace. It was a defense against that potential loss. It was almost like an insurance policy. Copies of a show or a movie were dispersed out amongst individuals who would always act independently of each other. Every keeper would have to agree to destroy what they had. Or accidentally lose it somehow. But the odds of that were slim. So things survived against what might have felt like overwhelming odds.

  But we don’t have physical media anymore. We don’t have that protection. So a battle that was once an almost guaranteed victory is now almost a guaranteed loss.

  Because who can destroy things now? One person with file access? Who has enough jurisdiction to make their word binding. That’s all it takes anymore. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

We’re at the rising action part of the episode, when Jade’s pulled into the show’s conflict and starts to work towards its resolution or the solution to whatever problem she’s decided she’s going to help with. The problem she discovered and was then recruited into helping with, that is. But I always liked to think she chose to help. I still like to think she had that degree of agency because what’s the alternative, right? I ask that, but I don’t want the answer. I don’t want to think of it, even when it comes to answering that question. 

But regardless, maybe you’re relieved. Maybe it feels like we’re getting somewhere now. Maybe you want to know what those bottles were about. And the younger lady (but not super young lady_ who took them with some degree of care, who then locked eyes with Jade. After all, if Jade just wandered into the world then no one should know who she is.No one could have been excited to see her. And if no one really notices or reacts to her when she’s there, then she clearly didn’t stand out in a way that should be concerning. She didn’t draw attention to herself. 

So it had to be something woman, right? Something that set her apart and made Jade a person of interest to her.

That was a part of the rising action. Or I think it’s fair to call it that. I think it fits underneath that umbrella. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

The rising action is what comes after we’ve gotten to know the world and all the pieces involved. One of those pieces was a problem or something that needed to be addressed, and that’s the part of the world we’re leaning into. That’s the narrative thread or road we will be going down. Things are getting more tense, problems are growing or maybe we’re finding different layers to the problem. 

  Either way, we have something to do, and we have reasons to do it that gnaw at the back of our minds. We have a push, a compulsion, and the like. There are stakes, a reason we need things to work out, but we also know where our limits are. We know the math might not come out in our favor. But we have to push on anyway. The only way out is through. 

  Or so I tell myself. Maybe there’s another way, one that actually has a better outcome. But I don’t even know anymore. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

  I will admit that I don’t share your enthusiasm for the next stage of the story. Or rather, when you listen to this I might not. When I was writing this, I didn’t. When I was recording or editing… Who even knows? Well, in theory, the voice you’re listening to knows. I could go through and add those thoughts in real time. Adlib a bit, but I’m not going to. Something, something... I don’t know. Insert some thoughts about not liking the math or the risk that the math won’t go into my favor once I have more data points, you know the story. Or maybe it’s not the math I’m thinking about, and that distribution of things is really something else. 

  It’s statistics, really, I think. But statistics are a part of math, a science within that world, if you will.

  And it’s the part of that world I hate the most. 

  After all, statistics tell stories, you could say. It shows us an undercurrent of the world around us that we might not have known otherwise. It’s a narrative told in a different language. We don’t always speak that language, but there are times when the chart or graph we’re looking at can serve as a great translator or intermediary. That’s when we have to see the entirety of our situation. Whether or not we wanted to. 

  And I usually don’t want to. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

  The woman locked eyes onto Jade, and by some instinct, the small girl returned the gesture. And I think it was more instinctual because there’s something in us that tells us to respond in a situation like that, when we are being engaged in conversation, or just visually, we instinctively react and return the gesture until our minds can correct us and force us to disengage. It might be too late at that point, of course. Maybe we’ve somehow committed to that course of action, or we at least think we did. Maybe we just think we’re stuck. 

  But maybe we’re not stuck.  Maybe there’s something more we can do. Maybe there’s an action we can take or a road we can go down. Maybe there’s more to do, and we just didn’t see it. But I guess that raises questions about why we didn't see it. Personally, I’m inclined to think I just didn’t look hard enough, but your situation is definitively very different from mine. So you’ll have to be the judge of your own case. Good luck with that, by the way. It can be very hard work, but I’m sure you already know that. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

  “Hello,” the woman said.

  And you might be wondering why I know that. If my memory is as bad as I’ve been saying it is then why did that detail stick? “Hello” can just be a filler word. That’s what many greetings are, or that’s what I’m inclined to view them as. Even if you don’t agree, how many “hello”s do you remember across your life, in television or otherwise. How often do they stick out in your mind?

  I know the answer. Not often.

  If one does, it’s likely because there was something odd or very specific about the interaction. Maybe it was someone you wanted to see or really didn’t want to see. Maybe the timing wasn’t great. Maybe you weren’t in a good mood or in a good outfit. Maybe that person hit the second syllable with too much emphasis or not enough emphasis. Or maybe it was something with that person’s voice or accent.

  This instance would likely fall into that latter category. It was the way the woman spoke that stuck with me. It was the way my young mind couldn’t fully understand or explain what was wrong with the way she spoke but somehow still knew something was wrong with the way she spoke. Her voice didn’t sound… right. 

  And that’s not a good descriptor, but that’s how we always say it, isn’t it? That’s the wording we use to explain our unease because often, no one around us wants to really understand why it is we feel uneasy. No one really cares about that feeling. The opposite might be true, in fact, and they have a clear preference to not know about your ill feelings at all. Negative feelings make people around you uncomfortable by design, and while that discomfort is meant to make you want to act to fix the circumstances that caused the feeling or comfort those who share in it, more often than not, we run from it entirely. We don’t want to deal with it. And that might be understandable, especially when you don’t think about the effect that might have on someone else, like the person who is trying to reach out for help. 

  In this case, I don’t know how to fully explain what was wrong with that woman’s voice. And that’s not great because that’s kind of a key part of this memory, of this episode. Maybe even of the whole show depending on what theories you want to make. But I can say that it felt unnatural, but it didn’t necessarily sound unnatural. And that’s why no one else reacted to it. No one in the world of the show paid her any mind. To them, there wasn’t a problem. And to Jade, there wasn’t a problem, either. She didn’t flinch or recoil from the voice at all. She was fine, but I wasn’t. 

  I did flinch and recoil from that voice. I hated it. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

  It sounded thick, like a sticky thickness, and there was something about the way she hit certain consonants. There was almost a purr underneath her voice, but it wasn’t like a cat’s purr. It wasn’t that sweet little hum of affection but something that pricked at the ear as it entered. It embedded itself against the eardrum where it stayed and forced itself to be known. 

  But why did it need to be known? That’s the obvious question. Why was it so determined to get your attention? What was that woman planning? Why did she need to ensnare you, or really anyone, or everyone, like that?

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

The world around Jade–or the world that Jade landed into–was full of different people with a plethora of their own motives and their own stories. They had their own work to do, their own paths to walk, and their own goals to work towards. In this way, this world felt fully developed. It felt fully formed and more immersive. 

  Which is great from a storytelling perspective. It’s honestly kind of impressive, really, but is that the sort of length you need to go for a kid’s show? Doesn’t that seem like a lot?

Or maybe I’m just being difficult. But when I think of a kid’s show, yes, there might be background characters who stand out, jokes that get perpetuated that the viewers then carry with them into adulthood, but that feels different than what this show did. It feels… less than what this show had, even though that was all the show really needed in the first place. You needed the existence of a world and not all the layers we seem to see. 

Like, I can remember people whispering about different things, about courts, laws, and donations. The building of something in the library. And look, libraries are great. Talk to your kids about how great libraries are and how funding them can make them even greater. But that’s not what this was. Those comments weren’t direct. They weren’t meant to teach. They were faint, and they were interspersed with other comments that just didn’t matter. They weren’t a part of the adventure we, as the audience, were meant to be focused on. They were just there.

  Or maybe they were hints, you want to say, given all the easter egg hunting we do in our modern media landscape. That makes sense. It’s a habit that is a very hard thing for us to get away from now. And so, I understand why I must make this argument, even if I’m not entirely thrilled to be doing so.

  But no, I don’t think these whispers were some sort of lore drops, some hints at what the world was like or some future mystery that the show runners never fully got to explore because of the show’s cancellation. That simply wouldn’t have made sense. 

  Jade never revisited a world. Once she left it–once she started walking again and somehow ended up back where she started–she never went back. She never looked back. Her departure was a one-way street. Her walking as a whole only ever had one singular direction. Much like time, she proceeded forward with little to no thought to the past and certainly no way to get back there. Even if she could somehow control her teleportation, her actions had left that world far different than when she had first found it. 

  And I would guess there’s some metaphor in there about not being able to revisit the past. But we aren’t talking about that. Not right now, anyway. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

  The woman’s motives are at the forefront of my mind. And maybe they are for you as well. It’s been the sort of question that constantly comes up. From episode to episode, we’ve had to sit here and interrogate these placeholder figures for answers we aren’t really likely to ever get. First, it was a fun thing to do. But now, it’s the sort of question we can’t ignore. It’s always going to be there, waiting for a chance to be relevant. And that chance, technically, is now. 

  Also, Jade’s going to be assisting her. Spoiler alert. But that’s the part that maybe I should be more clear about from the get go. The woman looks at Jade, she engages with Jade, and she effectively recruits Jade for whatever this endeavor is. So there’s that side of it as well. This endeavor is central to the plot, so introducing this woman’s motives is some way of understanding it. 

  But okay, let me paint this picture for you. We know, at this point, the woman is holding this bottle in her hands, right? It’s a mixture pulled together by someone old and skilled who is operating in an open market. Nothing wrong on that front. And the woman doesn’t have a dark cloak on or a hood over her face to hide herself. She’s also out in the open. And she sees this young girl. Her eyes lock onto her, but her expression doesn’t really change. She doesn’t smirk. She doesn’t let on that there’s some sort of scheme at play. She just kneels down. 

  “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  You could see why that stuck in my mind, why it was odd. Because as far as I knew, this girl and that woman had never met before. That would have been an impossibility. This wasn’t Jade’s world. There was no way their paths crossed.

  But Jade stepped forward, walking with the same determination to the woman. And the woman met her with an outstretched hand. 

(Music gradually fades out)

  Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, produced, performed, and edited by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show, please leave a review, tell a friend, or post about it on some mysterious online forum. You do you.