System Notification

Adequate relics have been borrowed from the other departments for emphasis.

The chamber was decked with a mixture of game boards and relics.

However, it did have one main attraction:

On the left, a protective figure coddled its king, knights, rooks and towers. I presumed it was a ‘she’. The person was of a livid red color. She had a generous bosom. Her hair was worth the length of three feet.

Opposite to the protective figure sat a cold, calculating figure. He must have had a good combination of lean, white muscle, and combustive, red muscle, for he held a claymore with his right hand. The sword was plunged into the ground. The tower cleaved to the room’s center, relentless. The rook’s motion was more intricate, like water. It was like a spin-wheel, crystalline water dragging at its edges.

The knights held their swords straight. Their eyes gazed across visors. They wore full-body armor. For the queen, she was dressed in a similar manner, and held a polearm. A polearm was a close combat weapon, that constituted of a long wooden shaft, with the main fighting part of the weapon fixed to one of the polearm’s ends. This fighting part was a naked blade.

The polearm was surrounded by a mold, about to crack.

As a romantic museum-shopper in that instant, I got to the center of the chamber.

Prometheus’s dices

Although no historical evidence exists that Prometheus, the fire-giver, used to gamble, the Ancients of Arvald decided to commemorate Prometheus’s choice of giving fire to mankind by naming the object ‘dice’ after him.

One dice was black. The other dice was white. Both had red dots and six sides.

I figured at least they weren’t icosahedrons. Icosahedrons were polyhedrons – some manner of geometric shape – with twenty faces. By comparison, one dice had six faces. That said, I was pretty sure I would forget what icosahedron meant, soon as I had remembered it now.

What did Prometheus’s dices mean? Was it something about courage or foolhardiness? Most likely, if I were foolhardy enough to drink an absurd amount of alcohol, I would die.

I observed some mindmapping lines spreading from the dices. To the right, a bloody transfiguration of a chalice was imprinted on a stone slate, with a man in the background. The man cleaved a cloud, revealing a mountain’s summit, to a group of people, who imagined a troll behind the clouds.

There were old coin tokens. There was a wooden balance, to weigh objects against one fixed weight. There was an old rake, entrenched in a wooden, square pot of soil. The pot had a much smaller, squared base. An old, crumbling dagger lay easternmost of the room.

To the left, a baby looked at his mother, from her lap. There was a stone comb, encased in glass. Necklaces of teeth and elemental cores stood out for their vividness. The cores shone in the colors of red, brown, light gray and cobalt blue. One peculiar thing was an object shaped like a human heart, connected to blood vesicles of plastic – it resounded and beat, like an actual live heart.

Aside from tic-tac-toe and spin the wheel, there wasn’t much I understood of the games displayed. There were medieval slices of paper that looked like tarot cards.

I continued into the next room.

I saw more classy relics. There were chained watches, with the size and weight of eggs. I saw a steam engine. I couldn’t tell where the heck its boiler was. I saw a cylinder, with a chimney-like cylinder to its front, probably to get the gas out, and a wheel on top.

Couldn’t guess its use for my life.

I saw large radios. I saw big computers. By the same token, I saw cowboy-wear. These were black mufflers, to filter out the desert sand, a shirt, and a brown cowboy jacket. The jacket strings hanging loose on the back, and at the cuffs.

There were some traditional instruments, like old lumps of flutes, mingled with wooden harmonicas. Then came the paintings. One of them was Starry Night, by Van Gogh. Starry Night depicted the moon’s crescent to the right, with a tree on the left. The tree vied for the sky like a pointy seaweed. The night sky went from dashes of dark blue, to a cobalt color. The blue paled out further to welcome the mountains.

Underneath the mountains, came the village. There was a single pointy bastion, for the village’s part. This pointy bastion was much shorter than the tree vying for the sky. North-east, there were arrays of trees, looking like shrubs; rotund upon rotund trees followed in lines.

‘This tree does not look like a pine tree’, I thought to myself.

Then, I witnessed the deformities of ‘Guernica’. I compared it to ‘The Scream’. I skipped over to depictions of Pyro transfiguration, and geo transfiguration. ‘Who the heck eats rocks?’ I thought. I considered it and remembered the apple that soldier at the war memorial had held.

I saw the first print book of slime recipes. There was also a gramophone. Listed beside it were musics like ‘Four Seasons’, ‘Ode de joye’ and Chopin’s ‘Winter Wind’.

In the room, there was an inscription. It glowed blue.

Museum inscription

Reality and fiction are co-dependent inflationary and deflationary objects. Reality is practice for fiction. Fiction is practice for reality. Faith can only exist between these two tensions. Faith transfigures.

Below the inscription, I found another copy of the ‘Old Book’. The color of the book’s cover was a dusky that conveyed history. Light emanated from its corners and gaps.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Beside it, there was a book title ‘My first adventure in The Catacombs: A Dark Souls fanfiction’.

This reminded me of the catacombs of Drakensang Online, and the purple, gowned priests sending their orbs over. The name of the author of ‘My first adventure in The Catacombs: A Dark Souls fanfiction’ was Newbie.

That was interesting. Withstanding the uncertainty principles of phenomena, I was sure Newbie would have a blast of a time in The Catacombs. I personally hadn’t been beyond the lever for opening the passage. Pushing skeletons at the stairs’ side, in that starting cave was fun though.

Right. That was fun. Rolling Prometheus’s dices, if but like Sisyphus, was fun. For reference, Sisyphus could be considered a hardworking ant – perhaps. In my mind, this endeavor announced finding the proof-of-concept.

Fiction respected reality enough to mention it. Reality respected fiction enough to mention it. That too had its grievances, its mutual envy. It was the same result for disbelievers. There was no middle ground.

Existence was vain enough. It was all practice and transfigurations. Influence was surpassed or short-lived, like anything at all. That was the limitation of a non-equation. That was perhaps the limitation of faith.

I entered the next room. I saw golden chalices and crowns, golden plates and coins, and golden chains and bracelets. ‘Golden plates and coins’, I thought. ‘Okay, that’s my biology mentor’s advice about golden plates keeping less bacteria alive, and entailing less or no food contamination.’

I looked at the window. It was raining.

The rain brought back a few memories. Where I lived, a football pitch would often become a swimming pool, with floods. The road to its side was on elevated ground, which was good. We lived close to some hills.

I rummaged through my thoughts, but did not proceed further. I thought I saw something pass across the window. The object or being – whichever it was – was gone before I could get a proper eyeful. I thought it was a trick of my imagination. I looked ahead instead.

I saw a white gem. It shone like a prism. I took it in my hands. A roar resounded throughout the room. That shook me up. There was no need to struggle. I kept quiet. A projection of a dragon appeared. As I looked closer, it appeared to be labeled ‘Smaug’. I observed the dragon well. It was a downsized version of Smaug from the Lord of the Rings series.

"Androids don’t dream of sheep!" Smaug said. The dragon’s yellow eye slits widened. Smaug blasted his flames at me. I got burned. There was no health damage. I gave Smaug a thumbs-up. Fearing depressive effects from the flames, I took leave.

The next room had urban legends. These were far-fetched, as far-fetched could be.

The room was darker, and much bigger. I saw dullahans – headless horse-riders. With a red sash around their torsos, they seemed valiant. A spooky skeletal head floated about each of them. One dullahan missed a head. The eyes dug deep into the skulls. The lips were curled up to reveal the teeth. The noses were uncoordinated, dehydrated ornaments. The skin was thin and lean.

I chose and studied one dullahan head. "Boo!" went the head, after a while. The eyes widened. The creature was sickly, like the old person it was. I ignored the head. It was kind of weird though. These creatures looked realistic. "Vounce Ayy ghet out of hierr, I’l’rh khill you!"

One dullahan head said something in a squeaky voice to me. I could not understand him. He sounded like a broken wheel. His face was drained of blood, all things said.

I saw a sequence of a ghost chasing a man. Strobe lights froze the ghost’s movements, each time they appeared. The man ran. The man screamed. The man thrashed and fell. He got up, and ran. He fell, and crawled. The ghost prepared to kill him, with a sickle that glinted with silver at its tip. It smelled of iron. The strobe lights went out. I breathed.

The strobe lights went on, and blinked with madness. The ghost yapped jaws that seemed like those of a shark in my direction. It was stuck in the strobe lights. The ghost knocked and rapped at the light prison. As I moved, the ghost’s eyes followed me. Dude, did I need to go to a haunted house?

The effect felt surreal, for the strobe lights were a sterile white, than red.

There were more homely legends, like of the good samaritan who came to drop a gift during your birthday – though it might have been a stalker. I could see the pictures of unidentified flying objects. There were signs on field crops, holographic projections and memories, and old clips of UFOs. Maybe I should tune out.

There was also the legend that something nice would occur if you walked away from the Northern city gates, into the city, with your eyes closed during sunset.

There was a painting of dracula, the vampire, perhaps of similar tastes to that of Reynolds. I saw Baba Yaga, an unknown witch. There was a mysterious computer virus, that would impersonate you, given enough time. There was a cursed book, with pictures upon pictures of demented faces, meant to play upon your fantasies. The legend of a movie that did not exist came up.

Gremlins of our imagination. A girl with a teddy bear waited, inside a photograph. As I looked, she lifted her head. Her eyes shone a blinding white. I saw a hand creeping upon my neck. I looked to my left. I saw the same girl, her eyes hollowed out. She strained her neck to her left, as she looked at me.

On a screen, there were aliens, as in the movie ‘aliens versus predator’, watching a man slowly fall into a black hole. His crew could not see him, from their screen-record and panicked. One alien extended its hands and brought a bloody heart from a chimpanzee inside a cage. It ate the heart and tapped a button on the alien spaceship.

The man froze up. He got parsed into sections. He became faceless, a device stuck to him. This device revealed fleshy oozes. His whole body became mashed meat.

I checked out of the room.

This one was about science-fiction.

I wondered if I should say a prayer to this space. Heck, I did not even do that to my desk, back in my apartment. Best was to work the objectives out, than the incense.

Notably, in this section, I found this segment:

"In 1898, Robert Goddard was inspired by H.G. Wells’s science-fiction novel ‘War of the Worlds’. Shortly, he dreamed of constructing a space-flight machine. His ambition bloomed in October 19 of 1899, when he considered the possibility of flying a rocket to Mars. (Lehman & co., n.d.)

Jules Verne was history, to an extent.

I saw space models, dedicated to Tom Clancy. There were no cryogenically aged exuberances, nor sleep capsule set-ups though. Bad joke, all things considered.

For Virtual Reality, there was a game called ‘Legendary Moonlight Sculptor’. That said, it was not the same as Augmented Reality. I thought of the ghost with the shark teeth back in the room of urban legends.

I looked at Weed, the character of the ‘Legendary Moonlight Sculptor’. His in-game avatar was in front of me. He had his smug face on. On the other side of the room, I saw Weed, in his real persona. Next to him, there was a mirror. To the other side of the mirror, the laws of physics changed; the governing principles remained the same.

Further ahead, I saw a picture of Nikolas Tesla on my left. Some unrealized blueprints came up. There were notes on telepathy as well.

Another room brought forth another theme. It was that of blatant conspiracies about the world, all written in fiction. Dystopia. Among them, was the recognizable, real-world author, Dan Brown.

For me, there was something intellectually fun about him, about the Harry Potter series, about the Inheritance Cycle and about Artemis Fowl – even the Pendragon series. The latter had The Pilgrims of Rayne. Anagrams. The derivation process of a puzzle for our delight.

For example, the anagram of Erewhon was Nowhere.

Derivation, and linguistics.

There were movies and tv series, one title being ‘The Black mirror’. I wasn’t sure what it was about. I saw a woman with a green-blue skin, and some folks on separate mirror shards.

"User Command: The Great city – Beginner’s map." I expanded the map to view [The Royal Lucretius]. It was a smooth model.

What would be the place where your perceptions and your perceptual beliefs meet?

The Royal Lucretius’s map was open-source. I did not expect this kind of laxness from an institute. From its indications, I could see there was a final sequence to the art section, before I could complete the first tour.

I saw a grasshopper creaking at the door. It was red in color.