#chip city

[inyuns]

chip city classic cookie pngs pt. 1

[mildly-interesting-menu]

Chip City Chocolate Chip Cretzel

[ted-undead]

chapter 1

"The cat died this morning."

"Which?"

"Zero. The little one-eyed thing." Malachi held up a polythene bag.

"That's a shame."

"They used to feed it." The sound of the bag falling onto tile was thick and fleshy. "They used to pity it."

"Pity gets boring after a while, I guess."

"I guess." He eyes stuck to its place on the floor. "Should we burn it?"

"Maybe some other time."

"Are you busy now?" No answer. "Shiloh?"

"You can pack it with the luggage." He didn't look up from his desk. "I think it's time to go."

——

There existed three fundamental constants in Malachi Tenin's life.

First, that the botanical drawings in his book, the one he found in that horrid place, were the closest he would ever get to seeing a real flower. They were white, but not the kind he knew, that fluorescent which left the iron of blood in his mouth. A soft, live, white. There was orange, too. Only heelies ever wore orange, and that was on their hats. The book said it was orange. He didn't know if he'd known that word before. He might've just called it red. There were so many words he was missing. The book was hard to read.

Second, that Shiloh Kaner was the best man in the known world—or, at least, this side of the wallpaper sky. He was only nineteen, and spent his younger years rigging roulette games, hiding underneath closed tables with alligator clips, a keypad, and a thumb-sized magnet. Just to annoy them. Not to win any of the tokens. The kids had figured out those were pointless many years ago. Adults are not so quick to learn. What do they win at the end of the day? A sandwich? Shiloh had made sure to keep Malachi away from recruiters and croupiers; he might've fallen for their stories, before, when he was young and upset and wanted to feel important. He was important now, certainly.

Third, that no matter what he does, what pacifying traits he buys—yellow hair, broader shoulders, a sharper jaw, a few more inches of height—nothing will stop the tremors in his hands and the defect of his speech. This fault, not born of anxiety, nor anything solvable, will follow him for the rest of his life. There is a dissonance in him, now, and it grows every night he lives with his new name and new face. Oh, and the spectacles, his sunshades, he can never take off. At least they look cool. Bile churns his stomach constantly; that's to be expected, though.

Malachi, barely nineteen, is a dead man walking.

He's known for a few months, now. Watching the twitch in his fingers grow ever more erratic. He hasn't told Shiloh yet. They haven't finished fixing things.

He wasn't meant to live this long, either. No kids from the chip city were ever meant to make it to a meaningful age. He doesn't know why they don't just put them down when they're born. Maybe that's too much effort. It's easiest to let the kids kill themselves. Or to wait until they die. Like Zero.

Shiloh's travel case was one of those seemingly endless purses which unfolded to nearly his height, stuffed to the brim with clothes rolled into compact capsules, two tool kits, sixteen packets of jerky—kind unspecified—and bandages upon bandages upon bandages. And an extra pair of shades.

Malachi packed five dresses, three trousers, a rain jacket, four packages of cheese and meat, and two books: Nalekha Khes'kala, a historical compendium, and Wildlife of the Countryside as per Wenlock Squire.

Zero would’ve liked where they were going.

Poor Zero.

He packed him with the rest of his things.

[sprinklesharkie]

teddi fetti cookies from chip city is me as a cookie

[quarkmaster]

Circuit city

  Seung Ho Henrik Holmberg

[ted-undead]

OC ask game: 4, 21, 32, 42, 47, 50

if ur feelin up to it >:)

i'm always up to it. i'll answer these for devil's witness cause. i like him. he makes me sad.

4. There were no means of photography when he left Khes'kala. He doesn't imagine he would be very good at it. None of his memories feel like pictures. They swirl and fuzz around the edges until all faces are obscured and the color of the wall is all he remembers. Something doesn't want him to remember.

He paints. He's the only person in the chip city who cares enough to paint. He used to be better. Something's not right anymore. Ask him to paint a chair; he'd see a sliver of space cutting through one of the back's dowels and obsess, scrutinize, repaint and repaint until the break in the wood was larger than the chair itself. Seeing the big picture is hard. Something doesn't want him to.

21. Everything is his fault. He will find a way to make it his fault. If something goes wrong, it could certainly never be Miss Kavida. The wonderful Miss Kavida, who saved him. It's his fault. It's his fault she's dead.

32. He was sent away because he couldn't stop imagining things. His mind makes objects glow and haze and that awful creature is always there--maybe He used to be a figment of his imagination, but He's real now, he's sure of it.

The others at the asylum just saw him as a smart-mouthed little boy. He was persuasive. Rejection happened. He'd circle back. He'd fix it. You'd believe him, this time. He was an algorithm, finely tuned. But that was then. He was going to get himself out of there. He's not supposed to be in an asylum. There's nothing wrong with him. Despite what they tell him. He's smart. Smart enough that it doesn't matter if he's crazy. They have to take him. The observatory needs him. They'll save him.

42. His mind is a sieve, now. He remembers his childhood with stunning clarity; his observatory days with Raina and Miss Kavida, tinkering with glasswork with Scura late into the night. He was younger than all of them. It's why Raina got a dog after he left. Porridge. He should've been more like Porridge.

He really is a dog. He'd do anything Miss Kavida asked. He doesn't remember how the days pass anymore, only the bits she's in. Everything else blurs together. She saved him. He voices his opinion, of course, but she dissents and... he forgets what he had thought before. Before her. It doesn't really matter, does it? She must be right. He has a good idea every now and then, sure, but if he were that smart, then he'd be Chair One, not her. He works the mail room. That's all he really needs to worry about. Didn't he used to be smart?

47. Maybe if he were a woman things would be different. No woman he's ever met has sinned quite like he has. Maybe He would leave him alone if he were one. Instead of whatever body this is. He can barely look at it. He's seen Miss Kavida's bare body. Entered it, though it made him sick. She's effortless. Any man would aspire to be her. Right? Maybe he'd call himself Is'tani. His own name makes him sick. He refuses to speak it. He'd have liked to be Is'tani, in another life.

He'd go home. The cardinals are a sign he never should have left. He loved Beone. He loved Kalax, too. The observatory was a second home. He'd go back. See Herona'me. He'd remember him, right? It was his job to remember. Maybe he could fix what he's forgotten. Absolve him.

50. The creature has only wanted one thing from him. Twenty years, He never touched him, but he knew what He wanted. There is a right way to atone for things. He can't remember what he did. Why He hates him. Everything is so fuzzy. He's useless. Miss Kavida doesn't even love him. He's an old-ways man with no place in a prison city like this. It's too good for him. It's grown beyond him. These people know more about the world than he ever thought was possible. Does invention really happen so fast? Or is time, for him, too slow? Is he being left behind?

The Devil's Witness Journals, marked One through Three, were found after the refurnishing of the mail room following the mail clerk's death. Also removed from the room were the body, the rope, and the letter of apology.

[ted-undead]

chapter 3

Malachi had been pacing in silence for a few minutes, eyes fixed to the floor. The small office had the only bathroom in the little shack where they had set up shop, and the only mirror, but the glass sat just outside the tiled room, hung a few inches above the wooden floor. 

They both took turns preening in front of their stretched reflections every morning, watching their combs squeeze and bulge with every movement through their hair. He’d pull his into spikes, fixing them in place as he’d asked for it to be when he bought the hair. Shiloh would part his dense coils with a lock-pick’s precision. He didn’t buy a style from any shop; he left his friend that small vice, but denied it for himself. He liked to come up with something new to do every morning, occupying his hands as he recited to himself the information memorized the night before. There was a lot he needed to know about travel. 

Malachi had his own subjects to study, makeshift fields of expertise for children the who never saw the inside of a school. Yet before the warped glass, hands hugging his elbows, he remembered none of it. 

Long fingers moved to his neck, and they squeezed, tracing chords of wiry muscle and jutting-out bones that forced copper skin to stretch over them in sandy stripes. He glanced at the mirror, a participant in his anxiety, then back to the gnarl in the board below his feet. His speech began like the middle of a conversation.

“Well, of course it’s about the trip! When is it not? Everything's always about the trip, that’s the whole— it’s everything! We can’t keep going on like this. I said I wanted to leave, but everything’s going to be different, different and- and weird, and– I know!” He threw his hands down. “I know I've never been scared of things being different before." He faltered, lips pulling tight. "So– so what's the problem, huh, why am I..?”

He met his own eyes. His eyes? Did he always look like that? How long have those been his eyes? His head spun. “I’ve been looking at those papers. You know the scans of them, they're up on the screen downstairs. I’ve been looking at them. Sometimes I just sit in here and I look at them, on my…” He pawed for the word in the air. “You know what I mean. I thought it was fiction, at first. I thought, there’s no way any place like that exists. They must’ve misfiled it with the real records. But- but it is real. A fantasy land. What we imagined? We weren’t even close.”

He gasped, losing his new breaths far too quickly. "Divergent evolution. That's– that's what my book calls it. Two populations keep going on by themselves until they're totally different species. They never interact, can't communicate. They become unrecognizable."

In the heavy silence, his eyes were swallowed by a color black and hollow.

“They won’t recognize me, my species, and I’m going to get there, and I’m going to be her again, and I won’t recognize me either. I can't do it.” 

He looked up as if the figure in the mirror had particularly offended him. "I haven’t got any bugs!” He squinted at the shifting colors under his glasses. Whose green eyes were reprimanding him with such ferocity? Were his eyes green?

Trembling where he stood, he took a green handkerchief from the crook of his shirt collar. Shaking out its wrinkles, he broke from his stupor to run it under the faucet. The cloth pressed, damp and frigid, against his feverish cheeks. “Come on, I know I had a bug, but I fixed it, see? Look at me! No more errors, not anymore. I’m fixed.”

Throat seizing at the heat that wouldn’t leave his face, he swallowed with a grimace. His hands were held up to the mirror, a fist squeezed around the handkerchief, nails dug into his palms. He stared at them with fixated curiosity, the excess wetness slipping to his elbow in freshwater tears. He didn’t remember filing his nails. How were they so trim? “It’s like giving me a transplant heart, then ripping it straight outta my chest cavity. You expect me to keep breathing?”

“But I have to go,” he mumbled, voice breaking. “Believe me. What, am I supposed to send Shiloh out by himself? What if he– what if it’s worse out there? My books could be wrong now, it could be barbaric, or- or a wasteland! Imagine that: they do some weird forest magic on him, and he comes back and he hasn’t got any bones?” He scrubbed his kerchief over his neck, twitching from misfired nerves. “Bones, he needs those. Plus, it’s my mess. There’s no integrity—integrity, that’s something they don’t have—there’s no integrity in making him go in my place.”

Despite the confidence of the words, they sounded utterly defeated, as if integrity was the worst thing to come out of all this. Maybe that’s why they had it so easy, Kavida and them; they had nothing to make them sick with guilt, no code that could make them stop in a mirror and consider, for any fraction of time, that perhaps a suffocating greed had swallowed them. “Shouldn’t have dragged him into this. My mess.” That same suffocation he felt every time he put head to pillow.

“I'll manage. I always manage.” His eyes sparkled with gold tresses. His shoulders rolled back, straightening him. “I spent fifteen years like that before. A couple months won’t kill me." The statement was barely honest. "I'm good at it, it’s not hard. A kind of fun, really.” Why did he say that? “I don't want to, but I don't want all this nonsense going on either. A trade-off's fair, isn't it? It's like a costume party. Always wearing some sort of costume… Oh, I'll need a new name, I suppose. And I'll have to talk to some—" He cut off with a yelp, nape going cold. "I did forget!”

"This is why I talk, because I don't remember anything, I just– I just wait for the words to fall out of my mouth, you remind me of everything,” he rambled, his pacing beginning again. Knuckles pressed into the hollows of his cheeks to stifle the rising upset. "Don't remember a lick unless I'm talking, waiting for something to come loose. I don't even know half this stuff until I'm saying it, and I've gotta write it all down once I do. I don't remember knowing it before. Does that make sense?" He looked at the mirror again. "Never mind. Shouldn’t bother. This is stupid."

He shook the cobwebs from his head. "External contact. We need an external contact. Why don't we know anyone. Okay. Wenlock Squire says the best way to introduce a new species to your garden is to bring native soil so– so it doesn't bolt. But, to keep certain plants alive, they need a trellis to guide their growth so they don't fall— don't tangle on themselves. We need a trellis."

He swiped a thin notebook off the desk, rolling the accompanying pencil between his thumb and forefinger before beginning to write below a previous set of lines. "Qualities of a trellis: sturdy, but not bulky. Breathable. Appropriately shaped. We can't have an ivy trellis if we're really beans. Upward movement. Vertical… something." He squinted. It was getting harder to read his own handwriting. He could never remember what it was he wrote, anyway. "Why does no one out there want to talk to us?" He shook his head clear. "No, I know, it's obvious. But still. We're dying. You'd think someone'd… do something." 

His head felt so very heavy. "Gotta talk to Shiloh. Gotta… gotta talk to him." He stood, the familiar sound of his bones clicking back into place snapping his mind into his body. “Stupid, stupid. All worked up about fish fry and forgetting– okay, I gotta go, see you.” 

He turned, grasping the doorknob with a new intensity and swinging it open. “I’ll have to finish my list– oh!” He shouted at the thunk of the door smacking his friend in the head. “Shy! Oh, are you– what are you doing?”

Shiloh just laughed, more sheepish than apologetic. Slinking away from the door, hand pressed to his browbone, he looked like the perfect picture of a rogue. “You’d been in there for a while. Was just making sure you didn’t, uh, die or something. I hear that happens.”

"Dude." Malachi pushed his shoulder. “Haven't we talked about this? The whole eavesdropping thing?"

Shiloh’s words were jolted by his stumble into the nearer-than-he-remembered railing. “Is it so-o much of a problem to worry when someone’s pacing around a room, talking to himself, for fifteen minutes?”

“It’s how I get my feelings out, alright? I can’t give you gibberish, I need to make sure it all comes out right.” With a pout, he added, "And I wasn't pacing. By the end."

“Yeah, gibberish, that's all you ever talk," Shiloh muttered. “Beans, really? Have you totally lost it?”

“Would you be surprised?”

The words rang in the silence until Shiloh finally put his hands on his friend’s shoulders. “No,” he said, soft, “and I'm not blaming you. But I’m telling you, you need to take it easy. Your stutter's gotten worse and you can hardly finish a sentence nowadays. Man, I know you think it looks bad, but I don’t care. You know I don't. Just let me handle some stuff, alright? Look, look at me, c’mon, I’m not dumb. I know something's bothering you. If it’s about your eyes—”

“It’s not about my eyes,” he scowled, but it was weak and halfhearted.

“Fine. Then if it’s about… the trip.” Shiloh paused, waiting for him to jump to correct him. “If it’s about that, you can talk to me.”

“You won’t even say it,” Malachi groused, pulling away to head back downstairs. “You won’t even– how’m I supposed to talk about it if you can’t even get it together to say it! You know it's not about the trip, you know it's trip-adjacent, so you– you say that like it means something.”

Shiloh winced, but followed dutifully. “Look, you know I just don’t get it. I don’t wanna call you the wrong thing, doesn't mean I think there's anything wrong with you. I want to understand you better, honest. But if you’d ever just talk to me about it–”

“You wouldn’t get it!”

“Don’t be a child, and stop interrupting me. This is what I’m talking about. Your brain’s not right, you’ve got a bug. The conversational part of your brain's all fried.”

His glasses slipped down his nose with the force of his head shaking. "It wasn’t even that serious, okay? The bugs are all gone. We fixed them. We fixed everything, no more errors.”

Shiloh covered his face. “Fine. Y’know what? I'm not gonna argue with you. But right now, this?” He grabbed the boy’s elbow, turning him back. He knocked Malachi’s forehead with the back of his hand and gestured to his glittering eyes. “Yeah, not buying it. So tell me what’s wrong.”

"Why do you always think it's about my eyes? I feel fine, okay, I don't know why you care so much." The tightness of his throat had made his voice high in pitch, but it was starting to quell. "It doesn't even hurt so bad anymore, it doesn't."

"Hey, I asked you a question." The boy stilled, slow to catch up. Carefully, he wiped his face.

“She's no different from me, I know. No one’s told me anything to the contrary, I know. But how am I supposed to act the same when I’m her? We're hardly the same person! No one ever listened to m– to her, they only listen to Malachi. I'm supposed to give that up?"

“No one’s asking you to give anything up, okay? I promise.” He patted his friend’s shoulder with a grounding force. “You don’t have to keep the persona any longer than you have to. You can go right back to being Malachi, I don’t care what you look like.”

He nodded, sniffling. "I'm just nervous. I think. It's going away, now, I can't feel it so much." He pressed his thumb to his chest. "Like it's gone to my bones instead of my heart. So it's… less."

Shiloh nudged Malachi’s cheek, pulling him into a final bout of tense eye contact. "I just need you to tell me—honestly—that you're okay. Or that you're gonna be okay if we do this."

He nodded. "I'll– okay. Okay. Okay–" He hit his temple with the heel of his palm. "Yes, I'll be fine. I just need to get dressed, and then, uh, yeah, I'll meet you outside. You can talk to the heelies, right?"

"I know the plan. You got everything else ready?"

He covered his face. "I forgot to map the exit route."

Shiloh peeled the fingers away from his face. "We did that last night. Remember?"

He paused, staring at him with scrunched brows, until the words and memories lined up in his head with a nearly audible click. "Oh. We did. You're right."

"There you go. See? Everything's okay." He patted his shoulder. "C'mon. I don't know about you, but I really need a vacation." He smiled.

"No, there's another thing, I…" Chi blinked slowly. "Someone's running the automat, right?"

"Yeah, I got Lexen on it. He'll be fine. He's smart."

"And the, uh… the hotline?"

"Dolly. And she said her friend would do nights."

"Okay. Yeah, okay." He looked down at his notepad. Qualities of a trellis. Where was he trying to go with that? "I needed to talk to you about something."

"Needed, or need?"

"Need," he said, tentative. "I just, um… here." He pressed the notebook to Shiloh's chest, biting the thumbnail on the hand he still held close over his throat. "We need a trellis person. In Kessia. It made sense before, but I– I lost the thought."

Shiloh took the pad, keen violet scanning it over, sharp and understanding. “Fish. You’re right.” He chewed the corner of his mouth. “You know what? This is one of those things I think we’ve gotta figure out on the fly.”

“I hate the fly.”

“I know. It’s gonna be okay. You get dressed, yeah? I’m gonna check everything out one last time.”

“You’ve already checked four times.”

Shiloh shrugged. “One extra time won’t hurt. Give the place a little goodbye.” He smiled. “Go on. Shoo. Get all pretty and whatever. I’ll be here.”

He didn’t expect the sudden hug. “Thank you for coming with me.”

He huffed. “What else do I really have going for me, huh? What does anybody have except a couple friends?”

[ted-undead]

can you infodump about your conlangs? please?

okay. okay. okay okay. get ready for some grade-a incoherence

for all intents and purposes imagine that you are a boy named Shiloh who lives in a city you call TK and some 30 years ago your parents moved to TK from their home nation which you call Kessia. (Khes’kala) The people and the language are both Kessian (Khesh). (it is broken into five prefectures with varying dialects but that is less important.) neighboring Kessia is a smaller nation called Valeste, whose people and language are both called Cross.

Your language is a simplified version of your parents, both out of necessity and out of legal construction. The difference between Khesh and the language you and your friends speak is the same as the difference between a 19th century romantic poem and the average text you send. In terms of mutual intelligibility, a Khesh speaker will understand you, despite finding you extremely odd, while you failed high school english and find it hard to grasp what is being said in Khesh. Reading can be especially difficult because Khesh has its own cursive script, while TK is a solely digital language with separated characters.

in both scripts, vowels are added to a syllable as dots around the consonant. e.g. a dot above and to the left of the character “v” makes the syllable “va”. Syllables in Khesh only end with vowels, L or X, unless the next word begins with a vowel, in which case the last vowel of the word is dropped.

“hey why does the question mark look like the letter for L” i’m so glad you asked. it’s because the character is actually short for the interrogative suffix particle “li”. so. when you ask a question you don’t actually need to change your tone or add any punctuation to the sentence to make it interrogative, just add -li to the end of the verb. similarly, the exclamation mark is short for “ax”, which can also just be said as an exclamation in itself. (where x is pronounced ‘sh’) try it, it’s fun.

(regarding suffixes, all pronouns and indicators are suffixes to verbs. ke = i, myself and vara = to be, so varake = i am. interrogative words also have suffix forms.)

meanwhile, here are the TK characters (not pictured: character m). there’s. a lot less of them. no D, KH, TH, or H, but they do have an extra long i sound. TK speakers use more tone and punctuation but it’s in the same way that we use emojis or stickers to round out messages online.

[author’s note: the alternate options for i, u, and o are NOT actually used in TK, but in Khesh. (i just didn’t want to rewrite all my alphabets for this post T_T.) words generally only start with consonants in TK. the characters come from religious Khesh principles and their sister gods rax ikalade and rax uderav. rax-ika is patron of the past (circle on the left of the line) while rax-uda is patron of the future (circle on the right of the line). “ikhama” means yesterday, “ukhama” means tomorrow, and “okha” means today (o = circle in the middle of the line = present).]

here’s an example of a couple sentences of TK. the box character is the spacer between words.

The first two lines are typed Khesh (_ = space), and the bottom line is an example of what the cursive script looks like in the context of a small poem.

aha so now you ask “where do these words come from” my spreadsheet.

it’s. yeah. pretty incomplete and needs to be updated but it’s there.

okay so maybe you see this and go wow i don’t really care for poetic language or verbal particles or cursive. i would want my language to be straight-to-the-point. good news!! that is exactly the point of Cross.

Valeste is a nation of science. they are very particular about everything, including organizing all matter into indisputable categories. naturally, they run into trouble with this, but continue indefinitely on the quest to find the perfect categorical system for the universe. they consider intersection a founding principle of Cross philosophy, and this is represented in their language.

i have ticker-tape synesthesia, where words are written in my mind’s eye as they’re spoken. i find that accents slightly change how the words are “written out” and decided the phonetic mouth shapes would be an apt basis for Cross characters. consonants are drawn in the shape of the mouth while vowels are drawn as the position of the sound in the mouth.

words are written top-to-bottom, intersecting vertical straight lines which are standard print on “lined paper” similar to what we use. consonants intersect the central line and vowels intersect the consonants. writing is the one place in which a person is allowed a bit of creative freedom. vowels on the right side of the line come after the consonant, and vowels on the left come before. in a name such as “melanie”, one can choose to group “me” and “la” or leave ‘m’ alone and group “ela” if the writer finds it more pleasing or less crowded. the average Cross person often shortens their name to “initials” of the first syllable of their first and last (house) name. this is also up to stylistic interpretation like our own “signatures”. above, each name has two options for how they might sign their initials.

if you have any questions or notes, critiques, or corrections you’d like to make, let me know. this is a lot of fun for me.