“Holy shit, hot shot! Did you just blow a blue fire fart in the face of a god?”

I was looking out the windows of the car, trying to see where the Tall-man was. Not-me, of course, was staring back at me every time something dark enough caused there to be a reflection. He was cackling. If he kept this form much longer, I was tempted to begin thinking of him as Not-Kaye.

"I don't understand," I said. "Why did you tell me to run?"

"Well," Not-me said, "I didn't expect you to go look it in the eye out the window. If you could have gotten far enough away fast enough, it might not have been able to find you."

"What?" Remembering how fast the creature was and that it could appear and disappear, this didn't make any sense. "You said run as far as I can as fast as I can, so of course I went and called Cece," I said to Not-me.

I was having a conversation with him over the roar of the vehicle. I didn't have to speak loud for Not-me to hear. And the vehicle was roaring so loud that I'm sure a full volume conversation couldn’t have been heard by Cece anyway. I didn't want to try and explain who I was talking to right now. Not that I was embarrassed, but I felt an urgency to try and figure out where the Tall-man had gone.

I couldn't see him behind the car. He hadn't reappeared after I'd thrown the blue fire at him. I heard his voice, but he hadn't spoken again. And we had already made it onto the freeway and were zipping nicely towards a speedy getaway.

"And that was a god," I said.

"Some people think of them that way," Not-me said. "Me, I think it's more of an overseer. Still, it sounds catchy to say that you blew a blue fire fart into the face of a god," Not-me said again.

"Uh-huh. And that's how you decide what to tell me. Look, I'm trying to make sense of this. If he can appear and disappear wherever he wants, why was he chasing me? Why didn't he just catch me once I looked him in the face and he knew where I was, like you said?"

"Alright. He can appear and disappear, but he's not teleporting. He's not magic, like a genie in a show. He's a creature, and he exists. He can merely step onto a different plane. Look, you know about quantum computing, right?"

"Sort of," I said.

"It's sort of like this. Think about it this way. There is another plane of existence. And humans have a foot in the door, so to speak. Their brains are very effective transceivers and receivers for things on that plane. And every now and then, when some mamba slaps you with a gift, you get the ability to see things on that plane very clearly, unless they're deliberately masking their presence from you."

"Huh. So, everything I'm seeing was already existing around me, but now that I can see it, I'm having more interactions with it," I said. "So when he disappeared, he was still there?" I asked.

"Yeah, kid, he was still there. He stood there. And he was waiting. Look, it's not like he's got an express jet on the other side. He still has to physically move. Think about it this way. He turns invisible. Stop thinking about other dimensions and different planes of existence. He turned invisible, alright? And when you were running from him, he was chasing you. He could have caught you, yes, but you need to understand the rules of his game. He only takes children. That's why he hangs around schools. He's the Tall-man.

“But the rules are, you've got to play with him before he can take you. So... he was playing tag with you and once you were properly scared enough then he would be able to get you in your panicky gibbering state to agree to something that you shouldn't. Once you did, he would have the ability to take you.

“If he wanted to interact with your physical body, he would need a human that serves him to do his will. He can't reach out and snatch you. You weren't in danger of being eaten by that head. He wanted you to think it.

“So, he was broadcasting hard that thought into your transceiver receiver and accompanying that thought, you were experiencing the emotion. You felt certain, I'm willing to bet, that if he got you, you were gone. Gone forever. There was no coming back. So you had to run.

“Eventually, he would have chased you until you were to the point where you were so inside that feeling that he was transferring to you that you would have agreed to something when he spoke it because it would have seemed logical. Get it?

“He needs your brain to line up and agree before he can do anything to you. If he can't do that to you, then he's got to go get somebody whose brain he's already got enough control of that he can do his will, and then he's going to send that person after you. That's why he likes to use minions like a heart attack or cancer or suicidal ideation. Those are much more useful for walking around and getting people to agree with him.

“The Tall-man has to fill a quota. He needs people to agree to a temporary emotional hit, over a ‘futile’ longer term goal. He doesn't really get anything out of killing someone, that’s a quota for a higher up. So instead, he wants people to work for him."

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"Why does he want luck?" I said.

"It's life to these creatures, kid. They lost their supply chain, just like I said. And if they don't have any of this luck, then they're not going to be able to continue existing."

"And they need people to give it up willingly?" I said.

"Yes. And the hard part is many people are willing to give luck to these things and they have no idea what they're doing."

"I thought I was the only luck vampire," I said.

"Yeah, you're the only luck vampire, but you don't have to do any kind of fancy runic magic in order to give luck to one of these creatures. All you have to do is begin believing the things that it tells you. To think they are your own thoughts. Look at it this way: like your head is a house. And if you give ownership of that house to an overseer like that, then the owner of the house has your permission to step in and take things that are in that house because you've ceded ownership rights. You match that thing's thinking and feeling state so much that it can step in and take whatever it wants from you."

"Huh," I said, mulling this over. "So... the overseers can take luck from somebody's brain who is in close enough alignment with their thinking patterns, and they use gang members, thugs, and mouse gremlins in order to try and coerce people into agreeing with their thinking?"

"Yeah, kid, that's basically it. Think about it this way: they're running little kingdoms all over the place. As soon as we cross the city limits, we're probably going to be outside the Tall-man's kingdom. He has to respect human drawn borders because human drawn borders reflect where belief stops and so you'll experience this driving across country. Anytime you go into a city or a state, once you enter that state the people will all have subtly different attitudes because they have all been worked on slowly and subtly over time by whoever runs the region.

“So there are usually regional overseers, city overseers, and the rest are run by minions. The regional will be much bigger than the city. You'll find this all over the world. They set themselves up with their little kingdoms so they can harvest from humans.

“They don't really care very much for you, and they don't care if you die. That's why they like to use diseases to do their dirty work. You notice that the disease rate is on the rise? Well, the population is increasing and there's a war going on for territory. The reason he won't leave his region is because the overseer outside the city limits will not have given him permission to operate in its territory.

“Think of them as feuding drug lords. That's a great way to look at it. If the mob, the mafia, or the old feudalistic, tribalistic system of the Dark Ages was still in play, but being run by creatures that you couldn't see, that's a basic metaphor for what's going on."

"I'm having trouble understanding," I said. "So they need luck. Humans naturally generate luck, which I don't anymore. They can harvest it when people's thinking is in agreement with theirs. And so they harvest from the people. But what are the minions doing? What do the diseases get out of it?"

"Ah, good question. So something like that heart attack that you saw, it needs luck to exist as well. And despite having the power to kill a human, it does not have the ability to take luck when it kills. Again, it has to be given. So, the Overseer gives luck to its minions."

"Alright, but I'm still not getting how the thinking is influenced. I was in some sort of Lovecraftian cultish mad fever dream when that thing was pursuing me. But how does that agree with its thinking?"

"No, that was just scare tactics and showmanship. Its thinking is a more subtle thing. It wants your mind to match its mind and its mind is a twisted up place. So in order to do that, this thing sends its minions out to try and use their ability to broadcast to get people to agree with what people like to label intrusive thoughts.

“See, if you have an intrusive thought, chances are there is a minion somewhere nearby broadcasting a piece of Big Bad's mental set. If you take that intrusive thought and you then own that as if it belongs to you, you are building a mental structure in which your thinking begins to come more into alignment with the overseer."

"Huh," I said, trying to process. This was a lot of information at once.

"So, all intrusive thoughts are these coercive broadcasts in order to try and make our thinking align with the overseer?"

"Well, not all of them, kid. Some people are broadcasting accidentally, and if you're sensitive, you'll pick it up. The plane that thought exists on is a weird place. Things get muddled up and bounce around. But just because not every thought you encounter is your own, doesn't mean every thought you encounter belongs on that plane. Your brain naturally generates its own thoughts, and sometimes you pick up the thoughts of the people around you, and sometimes the thoughts that are being offered up to you are fishing lures. Sometimes there's not an entity directly near you. All it has to do is tie a thought to a little thread of luck. That's the power it needs to enter the human mind.

“The trouble with tying a thought to a thread of luck is it then becomes tainted. You can begin watching for this in people's auras, where you see something that they're experiencing. Fear, shame, anger, rage, anxiety—all these are lines of thinking that tend to come from tainted threads of luck. The luck will give the person a little bit of an energy boost and make them feel good for a time, but it comes at a price.”

I thought about this. “So, if I had accepted the deal with the Tall-man,” I said, “which I had not been tempted to do, there would have been an underhanded price for all his promises?”

“You bet your ass, there would have been. He always tacks on a cost, so he gets more than he gives.

“And for some reason, when these creatures tie the thoughts to the luck and dangle them out as bait, they become poison for the human body. So it may feel good, but it's effectively like lacing what would have been a clean drug with something deadly like bleach. Some of the things that people experience are mere unintended consequences of the thought process that was laced with the luck, introducing a thinking set to the human frame that will tear it apart.”

"How did you learn all this?" I asked.

"Years of intensive study and lots of mistakes," Not-me said.

"So, what happens if someone takes the bait?" I said. "They accept the thought, like you said, as their own and they get a little boost of luck.”

“That's the beginning of recruitment, kid," Not-me said.

“The interesting thing about these intrusive thoughts laced with luck is that enough of them in a single individual turns into sort of a weed, where if someone comes into enough of an alignment that they form one of them knots of luck that you described, then that, if they are all laced together with the same line of thinking, will begin generating luck, but tainted. And this luck will dangle as bait. Every time there's a loose cord, it will dangle and offer as a thread of interaction.

“And so the thought process becomes a self-germinating issue, where you actually need fewer workers than you would expect to manage a field of humanity who are generating enough of this thinking. The overseer comes in and harvests any luck that isn't tainted and rewards the successful seed spreaders with a little pick-me-up boost.”

"So it's like a multi-level marketing system," I said.

Not-me snorted, and then began to laugh. He cackled. "Yeah, it is, kid. You know what? Shit, I never thought about it like that. The whole fucking scheme is like a multi-level marketing system, where all of humanity is being recruited."

"This is horrible," I said. "I thought you said there was a divine. What's going on with that?"

"Oh, that's a different deal altogether. The divine is also in a war."

"How can the divine be at war? Wouldn’t they just win?"

"It’s far more complicated. It's big, but like I said, but it's not Magic Genie shit. It's beings that exist on another plane, okay? I don’t know everything. You know what? Let's drop this. I think we're far enough away that we're safe. You probably need to have a conversation with Cece and get her to slow the hell down before she kills you, before you're ready for your loop to reset."

I looked over at Cece. She had appeared not to be paying me any attention, but she slowed down and looked at me. “Alright, spill,” she said, “what was chasing you and who are you talking to in the glass?”

**