Entry 1 Page.1
When I got started I first built a little base. So that all who live in the astral would know that I, Tara the best person to ever exist, existed here.
I made a little boundary circle out of clothes so that I don’t float away. It is sad to see so many of my beautiful clothes used like a salt circle.
The clothes themselves are grouped together by color with each color representing a slice of my home. The blue meditation, purple sleep, orange work, yellow exercise, and the leftovers are my chillax division.
In order to not go crazy from all this isolation I need structure and sadly exercise the bane of my existence. But by whatever divine machination it is, the facts are that if a human doesn't move around enough it'll turn into a depressed, motivationless mess. So I have to move and separate work from rest, and rest often. After all, you don’t work well if all you do is work.
But in terms of experiments I can’t think of anything so first I’ll start with observational studies. Or in my case just plain looking at the Astral and seeing what I figure out.
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Entry 2 Page.13
I am writing this entry with the most piercing headache I have ever received in this oh-so-pitiful mortal life of mine. It feels like someone pierced my brain with a needle and like that needle is constantly jiggling.
It all started when I was looking at the clouds, just looking at the damn things, and all of a sudden while I was just trying to see what a cloud of red was doing. I squinted and imagined unpeeling all the layers of colors. Then I could start to see the sparking, glistening, sheen of pure emotion and thought, that was underneath the surface.
I could just intrinsically understand that this cloud is communicating anger, the impotent anger of being crushed by another's heel, always yearning to burst out but always murdered by fear.
I could feel the minds of thousands collectively experiencing the very same feeling that's being told to me.
I’ve figured out that if I squint at them and attempt to “unpeel” them, I can understand the exact emotion and the thought that the emotion was birthed from in perfect clarity.
It’s so exhilarating to be able to see the true thoughts and emotions of others. People are so often a puzzle with blank faces that still expects you to understand it, and these clouds essentially throw their emotions at me, so simple so perfect.
And there is so much to learn too, like the fact that larger cloud's emotions are usually really vague, and reading them hurts a lot more. But they stick around for longer so you can experience the feeling again and understand more than you could before unlike smaller ones. I know I should avoid them but their emotions are the most fascinating. The ideas and thoughts behind them so much older, and thus more complex, as they interacted with the other blooms around them.
One cloud that I saw had this strange ethereal feeling that I call untethered, it felt like a calm surety brought with faith, confidence while remaining humble, ethereal and far, yet close enough to help. It floated away, yet while it was here it brought me beauty, and that is enough.
This field is fascinating but for me to continue to do this I need a baseline.
What I’m going to do is essentially compile the colors and their respective emotions, in order to hopefully understand more of the landscape of the Astral.
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Entry 3 Page.55
Okay I’ve written down each of the colors and their respective emotions although obviously not all of them. Frankly, I can't find an edge to the Astral Plane. This makes sense of course considering that we use it for FTL travel and if it wasn't at least the size of the universe, which is infinite, then it couldn't be used for FTL travel. And with the sheer size of the available sample I of course could not note down them all.
Red:
Red clouds usually express either anger or passion, but those two are not necessarily far apart.
Orange:
Orange clouds always give me such peculiar emotions they usually have something to do with uniqueness or exploration, but they are breathtakingly beautiful
Yellow:
Yellow clouds all are expressions of joy, but that happiness can get incredibly complicated, from the joy of invention to the happiness experienced in waiting for something to arrive.
Blue:
Blue is a mixed bag with it containing a breadth of terrible emotions like sadness, along with neutral emotions like calm, and good ones like wonder.
Purple:
Purple finds itself in one of two ways. August personage, and feelings of majesty and importance, and another far more common option of Fear, oh so many types of fear. In fact, I’ve gotten so tired of just getting variations of fear that I just don’t unpeel purple clouds anymore. At least the ones that don't feel majestic those are usually far more complex. Good gods, I sound like one of those pretentious wine connoisseurs that I never bothered to listen to considering I don't take advice from idiots, or drink.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Pink
Pink embodies love, worship, desire, and teasing, but it also has quite a cruel and twisted side of it with poisonous sickly envy to be found in pinks corner. You can tell when it's going to be a bad emotion with pink because they always look curdled.
Green
Green is quite the contrary color because it holds both the emotions of new growth and steady tradition. In fact, any feeling you find in green you’ll also find it’s opposite here from loud disgust to quiet beauty. Even for the more vague emotions like freedom, and authority. And goddamn was authority terrible to unpeel, it was so vague yet so large it felt like a mountain resting on my chest.
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There is a myriad of other smaller subsections of emotions of color but these are the main ones, and the ones I’ve most often seen. Other emotions don't have enough data for me to pin them down so these will be the main categories for documentation.
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Entry 4 Page.70
One thing I’ve noticed while cataloging emotions, is that time here, simply put is weird.
There is no need to do anything here. I don't need to eat, sleep, or drink, my nails don’t grow, my hair doesn’t get oily, and I don’t need to piss, shower, or brush my hair. I could just leave all those alone, it would be so easy.
I don’t because that is how you slip into the abyss but at the end of the day, there are no markers of time. I sleep but I have no idea how long or when I do so. It feels like that old torture called solitary confinement just an endless sea of nothingness.
I stared at the clouds across the expanse for what seemed like hours but I didn’t feel the slightest bit tired while reading for 5 minutes makes my eyes droop into the oblivion of sleep.
It’s honestly quite maddening to have no idea when anything is happening. Stevens' watch stopped as soon as we entered the Astral. So I have absolutely no idea how much time passes no matter what I do.
My best time-measurement device right now is 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, and so on in and I hate it. It's so unstable, and unusable that every time I utter it I want to slit the throat of whoever invented it.
I tried to track time by how many times I slept but I failed due to a simple reason. The real time between sleep was so different that I might as well have not written it down. At this point, I hope that I am mad because if I am not then the laws of time, time! are different in the astral plane. And if that is true I fear that even if I escape I might not be able to escape to my time.
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Entry 5 Pg.75
After my existential crisis in an attempt to understand the Astral plane better, I’ve been searching Astral on Steven’s databases.
I managed to dual monitor my watch and the laptop and then turn off the watch's screen to get access to that sweet, sweet, screen larger than my wrist.
Although I couldn’t find much about the Astral itself I did manage to access all the records of all those who came into a portal and never came out. 4 humans, one alien diplomat, and 1 metric ton of poor lab animals were tossed through a portal.
I looked through all the humans and there was nothing special, just ordinary people, government officials, a microbiologist, an interior decorator, and a diplomat.
The article detailing their background didn’t find any common factor between them, so there isn’t much to know.
But that article does make me fear that I'll be on one too. My entire life scrutinized by a bunch of strangers all my failures, and my fears and hopes stared at by millions.
I wonder what my two word title will be, I don't have a job right now, so failed entrepreneur?
Anyway, my research on the humans didn't amount to much but the alien diplomat Tra’jaka however is quite interesting. Due to the fact that its species is essentially large brains that control a bunch of mindless drones, they give birth asexually. Tra’jaka would be able to cover a wide radius of the Astral considering his abilities and is thus the easiest sentient being to find.
Looking for a single human would take pretty goddamn long but the lair of a disembodied brain spread over kilometers would be much easier.
Especially since asexual reproduction means that for all I know they could have made a society before I even got here!
But sentient beings weren’t the only things that have fallen into the Astral, over the years our scientists in order to understand the Astral have thrown trillions of animals into the Astral, considering just how many animals have been shoved in and out of the Astral there have been many who have not gone out.
Specifically, lots of bunnies, mice, and ants have been put into the Astral.
The bunnies and mice are probably doomed since they are alone. But due to the sheer monumental volume of ants poured into portals. Innumerable ants have gone to the Astral together including hundreds of ant queens.
The people might be dead but I’ll eat my non-existent hat if those ants are dead.
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Entry 6 Pg.101
I’ve been noticing that as time goes on motes of red and purple seem to be heading in my direction.
Most die before reaching me but the ones that do reach me seem to poof out of existence.
I have absolutely no idea what happens to them.
I don't feel their emotion just by touching them, and they don’t seem to have done anything.
But I’m worried, and oh so afraid that they are doing something, something terrible that I just can’t see. The fear makes my eyes itch and my ribs ache, the motes are EVERYWHERE.
In stranger news, my meditation corner is somehow way more still than the other pieces of my base. For some reason, I can't discern it is just way easier to stop moving there. Like literally I don’t mean that it feels easier to stop there, it literally takes less time to stop moving there than in other places.
In my workstation, it usually takes around 30 Mississippi's to create equilibrium so that I don’t slowly float into my barrier. In my corner, it takes 5.
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Entry 7 Pg.128
WOOP WOOP BABY. Okay, I’m frantically scribbling this down because guess what. I heard some echoes today!
I was outside my base floating around singing show tunes due to a fit of boredom, and I heard echoes not from my back but rather forward in the meditation slice.
That means that there are other objects other than me in the Astral Plane.
For all I know, I Tara, a regular joe schmo could be the one to make first contact with an Astral society. The echo has so many possibilities it could be useful items, monsters, cotton candy, anything!
I’m not done to my satisfaction with the observational studies but soon I will explore this new plane. For now, I know it's not as empty as I thought and that I can find hope in this Astral Plane
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Entry 8 Pg.152
Okay, I’m freaking the fuck out.
Although that might be because of the motes too.
I have noted that my emotions have become more.
My anger is no longer a floating whimsy easily calmed, but rather a raging storm, wonder allows me to stare at clouds for longer lengths of time than my previous self would have dreamed, my fear makes me collapse in terror.
I feel that maybe I have absorbed the emotions that I have touched, taken in those minds Joy, Dread, and Hope.
I have noticed other things, my eyes, when I squint I see farther, deeper, clearer.
I have been living in this soup of emotion for god knows how long, can I know that I am human? No other eyes can be used as my mirrors, only cold metal.
But I can reassure myself these feelings are flimsy because I am human, there is no evidence otherwise, and any conclusions brought by emotions should be held in contempt.
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Entry 9 Page.171
I have notice-
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“Wait a goddamn minute, how the hell am I on page 171 this is an 80-page notebook!”