Episode 3 - Metaphors

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Welcome back. To recap, last week, I told you more about the Funhouse Hallway, a point and click adventure game based entirely around mysterious lines written in the second person. I also told you a bit about how I remember online mysteries working, accuracy of that aside. And I told you about the line that first brought Aishi and I together. After all, we were the only two who had gotten it. And maybe, it was assumed, if we could figure out our common connection, we could figure out what it meant. And who knows where we, on The Forum, could take from there.

But if you think I’m going to tell you what that line means, well, I would have to know before I could, wouldn’t I? And maybe I don’t.

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            Aishi and I didn’t just talk about the Funhouse Hallway, even when we were dealing this mini mystery. We couldn’t. We couldn’t leave it at that. Or I couldn’t. Once again, I really don’t know about her…

            But to keep it general, for so many of us who played that game and were on The Forum, we didn’t just stumble upon it. No normal, well-adjusted person would fall into that particular corner of the internet and stay. Never mind stay after the first time the game takes your computer out.

            First, you had to go looking for it, and then you had to be inclined to see it as some sort of haven, despite all of its faults. For it to be escape, you had to be running from something a lot worse. The problem is… what were you running from? Because there are some things that can be outrun, and that thing in your rearview mirror might not be one of them.

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            And this isn’t just speculation. The Wizard, for example, could spend hours rambling on his divorce if somebody got him started. And what’s even worse is he genuinely did have a lot to say. There are bad divorces, and then there’s his. There weren’t any kids involved, thankfully, just assets. Assets that were very valuable and that his wife had earned, technically. His band hadn’t taken off yet. But it was going to. Of course, we wouldn’t know that. We hadn’t heard any of their good stuff. Or that’s what he kept telling us.

            But someone else on The Forum had actually attended one of his concerts, and they had very different opinions.

            And this was our fearless leader, kind of. He wasn’t a moderator like what you see on Discord or a similar service. He was something very different.

            When I joined The Forum, he had been there for about eight months. And that was a point of pride. He was the longest serving presence on The Forum, and he was one of the most devout players of The Funhouse Hallway. I don’t even know if you could consider him a player anymore. He was more like a PhD level expert. Or a hero, I guess I would have said, and at the time, I wouldn’t have been alone in that. Yes, it was the hyperbole drafted by a child or relative child, but a bunch of us thought way. But for the Wizard, there were two sides of him. And we only got the other side when his facade started to slip.

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            He was great at decoding The Funhouse Hallway. I won’t take that from him, but he was doing it while the rest of his life was falling apart if it was ever held together. If you didn’t know about any of that, you thought he was this… grand hero. That’s how he presented himself, but sometimes the façade would slip. And then you saw the real world man.

            And I use “saw” loosely. Those were all things he said and little more. And the only thing that could be verified was that he did have a band that wasn’t that great. Beyond that, who’s to say that anything he told us was the truth?

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            If you follow me on Twitter, you probably follow me on the Oracle of Dusk account that goes by the handle @oracleofdusk. And you know, having a dedicated Twitter account for your show is not a bad idea. In fact, it’s probably a necessity. But that is if you do it right. I didn’t. Or don’t. And now I feel like my online presence is root in that account, which would mean it’s technically based on a lie. And before you jump to my defense, it’s an accidental lie. Because what should have been a way to get attention for podcast has become a place where I can vent my thoughts as me but by a different name.

            Some of those tweets might make sense for Delphi. Like anything discussing exhaustion, and hey, you would expect Delphi to have a job, right? It doesn’t need to be explicitly said if it’s not a part of the story, which it isn’t really. But I don’t leave it there. I mean, I tweet about my cats on that account. Delphi doesn’t have a cat in the canon of the story. Or she hasn’t mentioned one. Never mind two.

            Maybe at this point, I need to just claim that account as my own. Or do something. But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.

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            April 5th

            Quote. “The room is dark. The man is crying. You are crying too.” End quote. (Pause) I cry a lot. I don’t tell Aishi. She thinks crying means something else. Rain. Water. Purification? Like baptism. Water cleans.

            But water also destroys. Water does a lot of things. Water is busy.

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            My least favorite social media site is Facebook. Yes, the ethics and behavior of that company are super sketchy, and that should be the reason why I don’t like using it, but my reason is a bit more selfish than that. Really, I just hate how all the people who knew me across all the different phases of my life are now digitally co-existing. I mean, how is that not a recipe for disaster?

            I’m not making any sense, though, am I? To put it simply, there are just versions of myself that I’m not happy with. So I stopped being them. Generally, they were a lot more passive. I let people mistreat me, and that’s what I don’t like. And at the risk of sounding any more complicit than I just did, they are still on my Facebook friends list. It’s not even that I’m worried about the fallout that could come with deleting them. I just don’t delete.

            And it’s not like I post on their anyway. I don’t even know what I could.

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            April 6th.

            The plan is for more people to go the same route Aishi and I did. Water cleans. So if we go that way, we might be able to see without the mirrors.

            First step. Forward. “Your eyes are greatly uneven.”

            Left. “Your feet are cold. The ground is soft. You were sinking. But you are no longer.”

            Right diagonally forward. “You are shivering. You hear a clicking in the distance. One, two, three. Then it stops.”

            Forward. “The clicking is gone. You see your mouth moving. It is whispering something. The woman lingers. You do not speak aloud.”

            Forward. “Your hand is very small. It is shaking. The object in it is very heavy.”

            Left. “You see nothing.”

            Right. “You still see nothing. Your eyes are closed.”

            Left.

            Forward.

            Left diagonal.

            Right diagonal. Right diagonal. Right diagonal.

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            “Your eyes are closed” was another pinnacle line. For some people, when they saw a prompt about seeing nothing, they would assume they had reached a dead end and would restart the game. After all, so much of it was based on prompts. So what would the lack of one mean?

            Not everyone did this. Some of us would always push on until the game crashed. And it turned out to be a surprisingly divisive issue. Up until this new theory surrounding water came up. Nobody jumped camps or anything, but our habit of continuing until the absolute end gained a bit of credibility.

            As for the issue of time, we just had to keep playing. We had to keep pouring ourselves into the game to get the prompt and see what came after. And most of us, if not all of us, were very willing to do that.

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            Do you want to know what I was running from? Everything that’s on Facebook now, I guess. And a lot more. I had just entered high school at the time, and while that doesn’t go well for a lot of people, I feel like most people at least get something like a new start. I didn’t have that. I never had, and I moved a lot.

            It was a new place, but school records followed me. And it didn’t help that the school pinned so many of my problems to their suspicious that I was on the autism spectrum. There’s nothing wrong with being on the spectrum, but there is something difficult about being in the in-between space at a time when diagnosing ASD wasn’t all that great. It’s the maybe yes, maybe no while the very real issues of your life are getting shelved and ignored because hey, it might just be this thing that isn’t technically our problem anyway.

            It wasn’t the condition. It was the people and the way they wanted to utilize my reality.

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            Aishi was the one who pointed out the potential symbolism surrounding water. I asked her how she knew. She said her family was religious. Water, baptism, cleansing. You can see the connections even if I didn’t lay it out properly.

            But that, for me looking back, raises a different question. Because I always assumed that Aishi was my age. But I wouldn’t have thought about that. Then again, I was inclined to think that fire was purification. Melting defections or sins away, you know? Isn’t that a symbol in S.E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders? Or that’s how I remember it.

            So maybe there’s a chance she was my age. But her school had read a different book. I don’t know. But when I was typing out her username for this show—Aishi44713—I started to wonder if the 44 wasn’t her age. And then wouldn’t that would make 713 her birthday, maybe? July 13th. The 194th day in the Gregorian calendar.

            You know, Wikipedia actually has an entry for the day. Complete with all the notable events that have happened across history, all the significant births, and all the noteworthy deaths. There’s a lot of each of those. Then again, there are only 365 days in the Gregorian calendar. Significance to a day is pretty much guaranteed.

            But should I be concerned that in 2002, I was talking to a maybe 44 year old? Probably, but I don’t know if that was her actual age. If she used that username everywhere without altering it, then either she was a couple years older than 44 or too lazy to change it or 44 really wasn’t her age at all.

            At the time, I probably should have been savy enough to ask her. I should have asked her a lot of things, but I wasn’t really good at being online.

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            There was this online game that was kind of this flash in the pan when I was little older. It’s not like The Funhouse Hallway. It was a legitimate multiple player online game with hotel in the title. I played it for a couple days before I lost interest. It was the sort of game that only really worked if you made friends or had friends willing to go on it.

            This was two years after my time in The Forum. Aishi was still a part of my life. So I could have asked her to jump on. But I didn’t. Instead I tried it out on my own. I explored the world for a bit. And after a couple hours, someone finally struck up a conversation with me.

            ASL, they prompted me. Age, Sex, Location.

            Side note, for a while I thought it was age, state, location. Because that apparently made sense to me. But it doesn’t actually.

            I didn’t engage in that conversation, though. I just back-sassed him. In my mind, safe conversation online meant disclosing nothing. Be an enigma. Which would have the added benefit of making it more likely people will like you. And now I am reluctant to try online conversation at all.

            If I had asked Aishi anything directly, what would she have said?

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            I asked Aishi what if the man and you are just sad.

            She told me that we all get sad from time to time. It’s not a special state. It’s normal. It can be assumed. What happens after is what’s important.

(Pause) In numerology, 44 is called “The Master Healer.” And I am not even going to pretend I understand any of that. Because… looking at Aishi’s handle the way that I did, cutting it like I did was already a fairly arbitrary decision on my part.

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            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 donate to the show’s Ko-Fi account.