Early in my illumination, during the beginnings of the 23 Apples of Eris cabal, I had a spontaneous hallucination of walking through the endless plains of Limbo.
I wandered the dusty, blasted landscape for what felt like Aeons. Then, through the blowing dust and sand, I saw a glimmer of light. Neon red characters winked at me through the howling storm. As I approached I began to make out other details. The still unreadable baleful red characters were hugged in two curves of eerie blue. The winds died for the 23rd time that hour and a tingle ran up my hominid spine at what the calm revealed.
Squatting on the desolate plains of Limbo, a single building stands intact. A wide low rectangle of dark glossy stone which the eye slides across like it wants to look somewhere else. At least, ‘rectangular’ was the only word my feeble monkey brain cold conjure to describe the structure. The corners of the object were the most disconcerting, refusing to be statically observed, forcing your gaze back to the mind killing landscape while they resumed their non-Euclidian folding unobserved.
Remembering what had originally caught my attention I calmed my panicked glancing about. Yes! There, on the front the the building. What? No… that’s not possible….
I crept closer, a hundred warnings from a hundred Mythos tales shouting from the back of my mind. At last my cautious approach delivered me just out of arm’s reach from the thing.
Affixed at convenient eye level, and next to a large door that appeared to be covered in strange leather and brass studs, a cheerful, neon red-and-blue ‘Open’ sign flickered at me in the way that only well used neon can.
Mind blown, the robot consciousness takes over. I feel as if I float above my body, watching numbly as it opens the door with a simple push. I watch as I walk stiffly through the opening into the waiting tendrils of mist beyond the open portal. My perspective follows, floating towards the impossible entrance. Out of the corner of my eye I notice the great studded leather door begins to swing closed. For a second I wonder if it will close before my mind enters the space beyond, leaving me disembodied and stranded among the sands of nowhere. I panic. Time seems to slow, the door creeping across the last foot of space like a shadow across a sundial. The adrenaline hits my system like a cop tasing a 12 year old girl, I scream, flailing and running forward until my throat feels like it will bleed.
Before I can realize that a bleeding throat means I still have a meat-sack to inhabit, something tough, wet, and fishy smelling hits me square in the face so hard I fly backward. I black out as my head slams onto the hard ground.
I wake, head afire, eyes screwed closed against any light. I hear horrible wet slithering sounds. Then, as if in response a gruff older man’s voice. “Y’ think he’ll come to?” More brief wet sounds. My head feels like it is wrapped in cotton and my eyelids won’t respond to my will, only twitching briefly. Suddenly, a thought that is most definitely not mine presses against my still fuzzy mind. This is very difficult to put into word-symbols after the fact, please bear with me. It was as if a giant tentacle the texture of a cat’s tongue wrapped itself around my mind. I felt a dizzying lurch of movement and in my minds eye catch glimpses of strange underwater architecture towering over beds of seaweed all lit in an otherworldy green glow. The rush of motion stops and I.. I… imagine I guess is the word, a huge luminous orb set into rolling folds of green algae covered flesh towering before me. The mottled patterns across the surface shift slightly and I realize that this immense eye is looking me up and down.
Forcing every part of my mind that is trying to convince me that just giving up and going insane would be easiest and most logical thing to do to shut the hell up, I realize that I can still feel my eyelids pressed tightly together. I snap them open and blink into dingy overhead light.
Standing before me are two large figures. The first my sight slides off of, like trying to focus on the corners of the building. The second is a large, muscled older man with a grizzled beard and an eyepatch. He wears a stained brown apron and is cleaning a large glass mug with a dingy towel and stares at the first figure. I notice a name-tag on the apron. It says
Hello my name is…
WOTAN:BARTENDER.
Suddenly the first figure shifts and the wet slithering sound returns. At the same time, another sand-paper textured alien thought pierces my mind, projecting words which I know aren’t mine, yet feel like lead hitting granite blocks when they appear:
HE’LL BE FINE. POOR SUCKA JUST NEEDS A DRINK.
My mind scrabbles looking for a detail on the second figure that I can focus my gaze on. After maddening glimpses of folded wings, terrible claws, writhing tentacles, and barnacle covered… wait.. was that an elbow? a knee? …my gaze locks onto a familiar rectangular shape. A name tag:
Hello my name is…
C’THULHU:BOUNCER
I pass the fuck out. Again.
Luckily, when I next awake there is a drink in my hand and Wotan is passing me a blunt.
on