”Okay then, tell us about this memory of the land...”

“We are a manifestation of this place. This place exists, but we do not. Despite everything connected to the world and the sameness of substances, we might still be a mirage, a hallucination experienced by this location. Why else there is nobody here, but us? Not even birds fly...”

“There are ants though...”

“Are there though…?”

*

“So you want to hear of the Esoteric Institute…?” The young woman gave a sigh and kept staring at the sky. “Technically speaking, the full name is Balto-German Esoteric Institute of the Yuryev University. One could say the history of the Institute began when a group of local Balto-German landowning nobles who were interested in esoteric knowledge and alternative interpretations of the Bible, started to meet and discuss the topics in the old von Schwann manor. Reportedly there they created some of the first true rituals they had, by combining their collective knowledge. And the first rituals were really about looking for a direction.

“According to the legends, at the time of that same ritual, the evening sky had suddenly, yet imperceptibly become dark, not permitting light from any heavenly body, no stars, not even moon. So that the people outside at the time could not see even 2 steps in front of them. According to the stories, a bolt of lightning suddenly crossed the sky and hit a hilltop tree in the forest.

“The next day when the villagers gathered to take a look, it was discovered that the mound the tree had been on, was actually a pile of rubble from some ancient stone building. A building which, according to the features suggested by the more intact pieces, was either immensely older or immensely newer than the country folk who were living here or had lived here since a thousand years. Because they had no skill, time nor sense of style to try and cut granite field stones into megaliths with six sides and then build walls with them. Or hexagonal hallways much taller and wider than a human being.”

“Six-sided hallways?” a girl asked. “For what purpose?”

Mariann looked at the girl. Her shirt was red, too red for her sensibilities. And it was the only thing he could pay attention to before turning her face towards the sun.

“The purpose could be clearer if one were to consider that the hallways were not built by humans. This is the conclusion the men themselves reached when they descended into the structure for the first time and found a massive six-sided room, along with a low altar stone about a few fathoms across. In the end it was supposed it was a sacrificial room. And the whole structure had been some peculiar abandoned temple.”

“During one prayer which was held there afterwards, a land-owning lord, whose name is still hidden in the fog of history, slipped on the floor covered in sacrificial blood and fell, hitting his head on the altar stone. He died on the spot and his blood mixed with the rest, becoming part of the rites. This had opened up another hallway which was illuminated by strange stones on the walls, emitting pure natural daylight. What else transpired in there, I cannot say, but only 3 men returned out of 8, covered in blood from head to toe, von Schwann among them, and gave an order to seal the temple.”

“During the next 25 years, these three men spared no time or effort to collect money in secret and in public and direct it towards building the Institute, right on top of the remains of the temple.

By the end of the century, the main building, the observatory and the medical faculty were complete. Of course, at the time the medical faculty also filled in for the faculties of biology and zoology. In 1795, the year of completion on the main work, the head and the chief ideologist of the Institute, von Schwann, at the time over 80 years of age, had a grand portrait painted of himself, which still exists in the Institute.

Reportedly he presented the artist with a list of 36 features to be present in the artwork. He also demanded that the artist knew them by heart and burned the list. It is not known, what the requirements were, except for one. Near the left upper edge, a blue planet with a deep blue spot and a pale ring was supposed to be painted. Von Schwann had called this heavenly body Trans-Uranus.”

“Trans-Uranus? You mean Neptune?” a young man asked.

“It means...” Mariann pushed herself away from the vehicle she was leaning on. “...Trans-Uranus. Uranus was discovered in 1781 by Herschel and Neptune by Le Verrier in 1846. Von Schwann had already mentioned earlier that Uranus was the ‘wrong planet’, as it was discovered in his lifetime.

“What do you mean by ‘wrong’?” a girl asked.

This girl did not have a striking red shirt. What luck. Mariann smiled to herself, she had not seen her before, perhaps it was her first time to come and listen to the stories she was telling.

“This, I think, is up to each of you personally to interpret. I’m just telling you about the history as I have heard it and read it. And having tried to put together stories of different people.

“On that same year, after the portrait was ready, the final consecration of the portrait and the building took place. This carried on in the deepest catacomb of the institute, which had the ceiling of the old temple as its floor. Huge six-cornered tiles put together with such a precision that not even a strand of hair could fit between them.”

“Again, it is unknown what transpired, but when the servant went to wake the honored man, she only found an untouched bedroom. The man was gone and extensive searching over the following days and weeks yielded no results. Also, all the clothing was still present which mostly excluded the option that the man was taking an impromptu trip. The two other old lords were also submitted to interrogations. According to their account, they returned from the catacombs together and only parted in the main hallway. In the end, no suspicion that the two men were involved in their colleague’s disappearance were ever found nor proven.

“The village and the library are full of books with stories about three drops of blood on his pillow, black cats and ravens roaming around in the building and finding their way into the henceforth locked von Schwann private quarters on multiple occasions.

“Of course, I have my doubts regarding all of this.”

“What doubt?” a tall slender young man asked, as he leaned against the body of the car, heated by direct sunlight. “That his mates killed him after all?”

“No, not that.” The young woman in black gazed at the young man, as if looking through him. “Those two other nobles also went missing within a year of von Schwann. One disappeared on a very public fox-hunting trip with many honorable nobles participating. It is said he disappeared within few minutes while riding a horse. The other disappeared from a moving mail carriage mid-trip.

“The peculiar aspect is, that the sleeping clothes of the von Schwann, those very same that he had worn when participating in the secret rite with the other two, were later found on the floor made of six-sided tiles, in the lowest section of the catacombs. Same happened with the other two, they disappeared without a trace, yet left behind all their clothes. As if having called into Heaven by God.”

“Judgment Day.” Somebody said.

“Yes, or rather Judgment Day for those three.” The girl in black paused for a moment. “The are also other interesting aspects. Between the disappearance of each of the two other companions there was a period of 51 days. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And the right planet was supposed to be discovered 25 years after his death. Also BS, right?” She smiled. “But. 20 years after von Schwann’s disappearance, in 1815, an error was found on the monument erected in his commemoration, nobody had noticed the error apparently for decades. On the monument, the year of his death was marked as 1821, six years into the future at that point.”

“And that would match the man’s own prediction.” The young man noted. “Never mind that at the time he would have been nearing 110 years in age.”

“Wait!” The girl in red shirt exclaimed. “does this mean that somebody made an error? Or somebody had some secret instructions? Or did he really live to be that old?”

“Does it really matter?” Mariann asked. “With that story?” She paused once more. “The Institute continued with its activities, the basement hall with the alien floor was walled off. The Institute began collecting all manner of esoteric and mystic literature. Books of the Dead from different cultures around the world, magical texts. Every book mentioned by famous horror writers.”

“So a Necronomicon is a real book?”

“Not with that particular name, but yes. You think that the books horror writers speak of are pieces literary and artistic fiction? It is forgotten history, just like the Institute. History and religions burnt away on orders from the Ruler. Which people have later refused to try to raise back into acceptable discourse, knowing what kind of trouble that would bring. What kind of wounds of history would be torn open and the kind of devilish dedicated secret societies would be resurrected.”

Mariann turned, looking at a row of high tension masts running across the fields in the distance.

“Humankind has always tried to think beyond their vision. Plato said it out loud first, but the desire is much older than that. However, what lies beyond the thought? In reality, the same thing that lies sleeping under the walls of the Institute. Legends, nothingness, the unknowable, alien. There lies the thing we are unable to name, that which we are unable to think, unable to see as anything of importance.” She fell silent again for a period.

“New faculties were established by the Institute, new libraries. Catacombs under the buildings became almost a required element of design. Libraries were named after colors. The Lords Manor of the von Schwann family went fully to the Institute and became the Faculty of Ancient Magic.

“At the end of the century, a young woman with phenomenal abilities and knowledge became the leader of the Institute. She vehemently believed and claimed that she was a descendant of the lost Heinrich von Schwann. She is the one who burnt down the Red Hall in the winter of 1896. She first lit it up on the 24th, but it was extinguished. Then, 4 days later, the second fire took place.”

“Why did she set it on fire?” A girl asked. “An accident?”

“I would say madness.” The young man replied.

“A ritual.” Mariann said. “It was part of a ritual. The Red Hall was a central library for black magic. The strongest sacrifice in black magic is not innocent blood or children’s blood or intercourse on the altar with an animal, consecrated person, corpse, homosexual or an intersexual person. The strongest offering is the knowledge itself and the life and soul of the participant. That is because no mage would want to give up or lose any of those things, because then they also lose all chances for self-interest. If the driving force behind the ritual is something other than enjoyment from the result of the ritual, be it profit to oneself or harm to somebody else, it is much more difficult and burdensome to keep oneself focused on the rite… it will look almost like meditations.

“There are also other curious aspects.” Mariann continued. “Up until her very hour of death, the woman claimed that she did not immolate herself, but self-combusted, and that was what was pre-ordained to happen. That she used her burning flesh to ignite the library. The fire burned away most of the books on the shelves, but left the wooden shelves themselves untouched. Likewise untouched were the fireplace full of crumpled papers and even the oil paintings on the walls. The only volumes unaffected by the fire were later discovered to have been bound in human skin.”

“The second fire occurred 4 days later. This time everything that could burn, did burn, however this time as well, the fire was limited to the Red Hall. At the same time the young priestess herself also burnt to death right in her hospital bed. This happened under the eyes of both witnesses and medical personnel who later said that even when writhing and screaming in pain she still managed to cry out that this was a sign that her sacrifice had been noted and accepted.”

“And what did she want to achieve with this?” the young man asked. “What did she achieve?”

“She achieved that the Institute and it’s research would be recognized and taken seriously. The institute became almost a university, where people engaged in looking for solutions and academic research into various fields decades ahead of their time and thus forbidden by mainstream science. Even the Substation was built, to research propagation on radio waves in the atmosphere, it was directly subjugated to the physics faculty.”

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

“It was also clear that something in the air of the building had changed. Something people could not put their finger to. The hallways grew darker, the minds of the people heavier. The Red Hall became the Black Hall and the Black Hall became a forbidden place of worship, eventually walled off entirely.”

“By the beginning of World War I, the Institute had become an important place of research into history. Nobody was stopped by the name, nor by the fact that most research was done via alternative theories. By the thirties, the German Ahnenerbe had their own department here. The Institute was reportedly one of the most important secret targets to capture in the German Ostkrieg. During the three years of German occupation, a lot of changes and expansions were made to the Institute.”

“The Black Hall, which had been closed off for nearly 40 years was again opened up and it became one of the most important room for rituals. This was discovered when most of the mystics invited here all over the world fell into coma, when first entering the room. The von Schwann prayer room was also excavated along with the six-sided chamber below it. Reportedly they also pressed deeper into the ruins and the hexagonal corridors with those strange light-emitting stones.”

“What ensued is again unknown. But two human skeletons were recovered. The Institute employees were not allowed nearby, even Estonian Legion and Waffen SS soldiers were barred from entry, instead the place was taken over by the Schwartze Sonne special division of Ahnenerbe. In the end though, all research was ceased, mostly due to the mounting human losses. Both the basement chamber and the hallways behind it were again walled shut.”

“In 1944 a lone precision bomb run occurred, causing the destruction of the medical department, the observatory and part of the main building. To everybody’s surprise no person was killed or even injured, and the main building remained mostly intact. But the Zoology department which lied underground in its entirety, was completely destroyed and buried. The other subterranean subjects were subjected to the same fate. After the war, deportations and mass executions, the Russians finally rediscovered why they had in their hands and started to rebuild. But it was already too late.”

“And the secret underground chamber?” somebody asked.

“Has become a legend at this point.” the young woman in black replied. “The Russians looked for it but never managed to discover it. It was not directly accessible, but through the Physics department, though secret trap doors and tunnels. Most of it was destroyed during the bomb run. The only things surviving the Physics department were the infinitely complicated wall and floor clocks. It is probably still somewhere below, waiting until it is re-excavated.”

“And the Von Schwann manor?”

“The manor still survives.” Mariann said. “Some villager lives there along with his family. They moved there some time in the seventies. In 1939 when the German nobles finally left when being recalled by Hitler, the building was left empty. The Soviet soldiers did some marauding but in the end, after some strange deaths, it was left abandoned. Possibly, there is still something evil in the air.

“The family of the villager has not been seen out in the open for a long time. And nobody is allowed in the house, not even nearby. On the other hand, his fields are alive and the cattle healthy. Possibly they only place around here the Russians did not manage to contaminate.”

“Contaminate?”

“Yeah.” the girl sighed. “A thing occurred, again in the 1970s. People tried to grow potatoes near the forest. Also here, where we are now, on the territory of the old airfield. But the ground was poisoned. The plants, the grass under the power lines, everything living is dead, I cannot even hazard a guess how it has survived. There are no insects here, no mice, no animals want to come here.

“In any case, most of the potato plants died. Both here and by the forest. And those that did not die, grew into the most wonderful and beautiful plants people had ever seen, spreading their sweet smell far and wide.

“When harvest arrived the wild hogs came to dig them up and eat them. Those that did, died there and then, before even managing to leave the rows of potato plants. The only thing discovered in the ground were little black bulbs, which although fragrant and sweet, were poisonous to such a level that the carcasses of the hogs were avoided both maggots and other carrion species animal, plant and fungi. A couple of village children who picked the black bulbs and tried tasting them also died on the spot, the poison acted within minutes.

“Of course the real trouble arrived, when it was discovered that the same effect was occurring in private gardens. One plot in the dacha district was effected so severely that suddenly all grass died off and something way more poisonous replaced it. The owner thought nothing of it and mowed the grass with his electric push mower as usual, but when he touched the cut grass with his bare hands, he too fell ill and died, much like the hogs and the children.

“Finally the specialists from the nearby Agroprom took samples and notified the people that it would be better to not consume any plant or animal products grown here, as the rocket fuels and chemical weapons’ runoff has seeped into the ground, entered natural processes and was accumulating into the plants.

“Army corps dispatched to burn away everything contaminated… well, they did not fare well. Most also died within minutes as the rudimentary gas masks could not stop the contaminants. The objective was achieved only when special division in white encounter suits and their own oxygen supply was brought in to take care of it. The marked down the danger areas with red aerosol paint and returned for several years to take samples of the areas.”

“Nothing special really,” Mariann smiled. “Just the darkest scenario coming to pass for once.”

*

“As the older people tell it, somewhere in the South there is a lost town.” The young woman said. “Which exists, but where one cannot go to. Where no road goes. Somewhere there there are also domes in the forest, where aircraft built by the Russians in cooperation with the sky people have landed.”

“The missile bases.” A young man said. “with underground silos.”

“Originally, yes.” The girl in black said. “But man is powerful. When there are enough people believing that something exists, then very strange things may occur. Like god. Like the black Volga. Even this vehicle here might be some kind of godly presence, a collective invention, matter born by the power of thought. When enough people believe in flying apparati, they will no doubt make an appearance.”

“Like Greem Bell?” somebody asked.

“Just like Greem Bell.” Mariann said. “If to use the magic of words, then this base here will become something entirely different than it is now. The world will no longer be the world. This base here will no longer be this base. And the Four-Eyed Ones will start appearing during broad daylight.”

“Have you ever happened to be near this place during nighttime?” She asked. “It is all illuminated in bright light with no source. Creatures in silver encounter suits mess around with liquid nitrogen. Soldiers in dark uniforms guard the perimeter with automatic weapons. This has been the nighttime horror story of a few curious spectators and many of the people who have decided to gather berries and mushrooms in the night using a flashlight, but end up in Luiga with a story no medical professional considers as sane. From behind the trees, one could see a huge cloud of smoke and the rays of light penetrating it. Almost magical.”

“And these stories were going around already back in the thirties. Even earlier, far before anybody had mentioned any flying saucers, which seem to be a fad brought along by popular movies, much like the crop circles. Of course back then they said that these night time events were but employees and scientists of the Balto-German Esoteric institute of the University of Yuryev. Sometimes they are blamed for those events even these days. It seems to me that what is told of their actions and equipment also follows all the fads.”

“Was it not also located in that nameless Southern Town?” the girl in the red shirt asked.

“Yep.” Mariann replied, stretching her arms on the hot roof of the car. “...a mental asylum and the institute in the same town. Actually the holy trinity - the Institute, mental asylum and the church were what made a town out a village. At least on the map.”

“Wait! There is one thing I do not get.” The girl in a red shirt continued. “You say that nobody can get to that town, nobody can find the town, yet it exists and you know sufficiently about it to tell us. Which is it then? Inaccessible and unfindable or is it a tall tale you are telling us?”

“Both.” Mariann smiled. “One cannot be sure whether it is a tall tale, as one cannot be sure it is not. The place a person starts to go towards is never the place they arrive at. This is true not only in the philosophical sense.”

“The Southern Town one can get to. It is located on the map, just enter the name into the GPS and get going. You can leave the same way, no problems. But the Nameless Town I speak of, there one cannot come and go as easily. In a certain sense, that world lies above or below ours. One cannot go there, but one can find themselves there. It is a dreamworld, so to say. Sometimes one can get there, sometimes one can get out. Sometimes it is in phase with the rest of the world, sometimes it is not. It is a hard thing to prove, however. In a certain sense, to get there, you would already have to be there.”

“Are those youths in their Volga governed by the same principles?” another girl asked.

“Provided it has any truth in it at all.” The other one commented.

“With the youths in the Volga, there is an altogether strange thing to it.” Mariann said. “the story tells us how they reached the Southern Town and one of them was left behind before they arrived. At the same time, there is also another story how a group of teens ran their Volga off the road into a ditch and they all died. You can believe that either is true. Or that both are true simultaneously. Maybe this makes it easier to understand the duality of it all.”

*

“Cigarette cutter? Who’s that? Never heard of him.”

“The Cigarette Cutter aka Teet Metsla.” Mariann lit up cigarette. “An EMT who went crazy. He thought that he could teach the young people better than the character of Dr Tobacco as played by a drunkard actor on stage. He was born some time in 1962 or 63. He did not get into the medical school so he became an EMT. His time of killing was during 92 and 93, when he abducted and vivisected 37 young people. It was purposefully kept from public eye. At first he tried to do twice as much as Dahmer but then I guess he started to like it. Maybe the taste of humans flesh pickled in vinegar also played a part.

“Metsla had a simple idea. At first he just killed the patients in the trauma department of the hospital. Later however he purchased an old disused ambulance and started to abduct teens. Calculating the numbers if his victims was fairly easy. Each one had one more cigarette burn on their face than the previous one.

“Reportedly he was motivated by an idea of a play his old classmate had had. Teet tied up his victims and dragged them here. Do you see those three birch trees with darkened trunks?” She pointed at a cluster of birch trees standing before a background of coniferous plants. “That is where Teet’s Kitchen of Hell lies, where he cut the flesh from young girls and later fed it back to them after searing it on a stone pad. Not far from there stood a padlocked refrigerator where his culinary delights were stored. It may still be around.”

“Did they ever get him?” A girl asked.

“Of course they did.” Mariann said. “Usually psychopaths cannot sense fear or that their action may incur unfavorable consequences.”

“And what is he doing now?” a young man asked.

“Reportedly he is painting butterflies in a fairytale land in a mental asylum named after Juhan Luiga. Butterflies over the Devil’s Bog.”

“Isn’t the true Devil’s Bog located a few kilometers away from here?” a young man with gray eyes asked. Marianne had not bothered to remember his name.

“The modern understanding of the Devil’s Bog, yes. But the old Devil’s Bog was right here, in this place, before it was filled it with all the construction material. Why else would this area be about 2 to 3 meters above the surrounding swamp forests?”

“And you think it was abandoned because of the location?”

“Why else?” Said the girl in black. “All kinds of non-existing generals and officials the young soldiers reportedly conjured up. The dead who returned. Three meter tall four-eyed ghosts and a lot of weird lights in the sky. Never mind the few young soldiers pulled inside out. And all this before Teet was even out of his diapers.”

“Somebody said that there had been a leak of first stage rocket fuel and that’s why...” The young man explained.

“The base here was built in the fifties. By 1961 it was in use, by 1969 it was a fenced off storage are where no soldier dared to come alone and without a light source. Go figure.

“The leak of the first stage rocket fuel was also a stupid accident the young soldiers had caused. Reportedly they were chasing American infiltrators. Alone and in a closed perimeter. After this happened the nuclear missiles were quietly removed.

“The Devil’s Bog can be considered a fictional being or the Moving Lake. The old Devil’s Bog was here. The bog itself was here. Fairy lights and ghosts of Russian soldiers. Older locals do not dare to come here even in daylight, for them it is almost like an Exclusion Zone, full of unseen dangers. For them, the Devil’s Bog is still here. Activities Teet engaged in and his little birch cluster being named Kitchen from Hell probably reinforced the understanding.”

“The Soviet armed forced had an idea to build a missile base here. They did, and then things started to happen. The Devil’s Bog however decided to leave this place, both spiritually and physically. The young people come here to party and break things and nothing mystical has happened thus far. At the same time, on the other side of the Kitchen from Hell lies the area young people these days consider the Devil’s Bog while older people call it Hell’s Ballroom. An area bordered by the forest on the horizon which ever since 1963 has grown more and more boggy as years go by. And these days almost looks like the old Devil’s Bog.

“There is one other story told of, of course. That the place where no people of our generation dare to step into, the new Devil’s Bog, was once, before becoming a bog, before being the Hell’s Ballroom and long before the military bases were built, a fertile farmland. Where the Metsla farm lied.”

“Farm of the Cigarette Cutter?” somebody asked.

“The farm of his grandparents. The old people can tell a tale that on a fall solstice in 1963, soldiers patrolling the perimeter fence of the base suddenly heard a baby’s cry. They followed the cries to a distance far greater than the cried could possibly have reached, but in the end they found an abandoned baby boy sitting in the smoldering ruins of an old farm house.”

“Teet?”

“The old folk keeps thinking so. The fact is that the place is special, more special than the forest in America where the youngsters were hit across the head with a shovel by a forest ranger.”

“You mean the Blair witch movie?”

“Yes, that one.” Mariann said. “Here, not only the stories are special. How else could an incurable cold-blooded killer for fun, as soon has he gets far enough from the Kitchen from Hell, turn into a grownup with the mind of a young child, who draws butterflies, the Sun and flowers in Devil’s Bog while trying to escape in panic from anybody who carries the smell of the Devil’s Bog. It is uncanny how he can tell who and when has visited the bog, and is especially sensitive to people who have visited the place within 8 days of visiting him.”

“Does this carry any relevance?”

A retired police detective who had been involved with the case, explained to me that the final victim of Teet’s was actually the penultimate. There was a girl who managed to escape while being forced to eat herself and disappeared into the night time forest. After waiting for a few days, Teet took his next victim, but the girl had made it back to the civilization. Six days later he found the girl in the hospital. He abducted her and took her to his Kitchen and had killed her just before the police along with the Defense League arrived. All they could was to look at the girls when final drops of blood left her.”

“And the Crazy Woods?”

“That’s further away. Behind Luiga. Honestly, if you look at the map, its is like a progressive line of places one would want to go less and less as one travels further North-West.”

She crouched down on the patch of gravel and stated to draw on the ground with her finger.

“If we were to fly from South in the North-North-Westerly direction, first there is the Back Forest. Reportedly nobody wants to go there because the forest is filled with fighting vehicles contaminated with extremely high levels of radiation. People speak of a line of human skeletons which demarcates an area of instantly deadly levels of radiation.”

“Moving onward, there is is the base for land forces, and an old R12 missile base. The surrounding area is mined, which is the reason the area is called the Forbidden Forest. They say that the forest is full of bomb craters and there’s even a forgotten church. Right beside the motorized battalion base there is the new R12 base with 4 silos. Underneath all that, there should be the old Devil’s Bog. Further up North West there are the new Devil’s Bog and then the Death Fields with the poisoned sweet-smelling crops. Up that, another forest, and then the von Schwann lands, the manor house and the old park. Beyond those lie the Crazy Woods. They say that some of the patients who escaped from Luiga still live there. In fact, they have made contributions to the population in the hospital.”

“People got so frightened that they develop crippling post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“If only it were so… do you know what happens if lobotomy is used as a method of attack?” The girl in black grinned. “Beyond Luiga and the Crazy Woods, the Agroprom lies. From then on, things get progressively worse.”

-”And in the east?”

“I have no idea.” Mariann smiled, looking over the small circle of people who had come along with her. “My knowledge is not limitless. North-East, East and South East lie the Unknown Lands. No road goes there, there is only the railroad cutting across it, and a desecrated cemetery on the corner of it. Nobody wants to go there. The most people are willing to do, is to look at it with binoculars.”

*

”How do you even know all this?”

The girl in black took a seat on the rear deck of the black car, with her feet on the plastic bumper.

“That is a very good question. I heard most of it from my grandfather who lived nearby… until some local guy came to visit him with a shotgun. But those stories may not be the truth. It may just be something encoded in my mind. A defensive mechanism to not awaken from a dream of not existing. The truth may be that we ourselves are meta-beings, a gathering of imaginary particles. And of course the fact that Teet Metsla is my father.”