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The anthem of absolution is a gentle song. Sussurant whispers through the background of your life in time with the metronome tick of the doomsday clock in your dreams, now magnified by the empty rolling plains into a proclamation of triumph. For the first time in ten years you step outside your prison, and for the first time in your nineteen years you see a blue sky.
>Frolic through the seussian fields
Yeah this is pretty great.
>Find your next victim
Your big-ass ella purnell eyes spot a lone IMP clinging to a nearby pylon.
>Aim
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HAMSTERSPRITE: Nice shot.
>Level up
As you reach the respectable rank of MAXFEASANCE AGENT on your ECHELADDER for your accomplishment--the value of the single BOONCOIN in your GRIFTWALLET responding appropriately with your new notoriety--it occurs to you that in your excitement, you're skipping pretty far ahead in the timeline. What, do you expect a hypothetical audience to have some preexisting framework by which they could intuit the context of your adventure or something? That would be silly.
>Rewind a bit.
No, no, too far back.
>Skip ahead.
Oh come on! Spoilers!
>Find a happy medium between past and future.
That's more like it.
Your name is QIRSMIT though you prefer to go by SMITTY to your extremely small circle of online friends. You live on the tidally locked techno-industrial powerhouse planet of LUSTRIUM, an arbitrarily large number of years in the future removed from the hypothetical audience to this internal monologue. That planet will be destroyed shortly, this you know, or at least have a pretty good hunch about.
This is because you are some kind of PROPHET, with the ability to foretell disaster derived from the strings of numbers you see in your dreams. You turn these numbers into STATISTICAL DATAPOINTS that you compare to the present performance of the Lustrium economy to predict IMMANENTLY DEPRECIATING STOCKS AND CURRENCIES with unerring accuracy.
This has been your job for your entire life, ever since your adoption by the cyborg broker hivemind known collectively as the SHAREBEARS, after you were delivered to the roof of their building by a fortuitous meteor. While not particularly personable, they are attentive to your needs and quick to indulge the many interests you pursue in your free time.
These interests include OLD EARTH MOVIES though the films the Sharebears obtain for you are more often than not related to the stock market and/or data analytics. You enjoy a well-plotted graph, but in your free time you prefer the more mystical studies of SACRED GEOMETRY and OBJECTS OF MATHEMATICAL INTRIGUE.
You enjoy building elaborate MARBLE COURSES and running races, both because it is a practical study of PHYSICS AND ENTROPY as well as very fun to see little glass balls roll down a chute. You have damn good aim with a SLINGSHOT too in case those little glass balls aren’t moving fast enough.
You have an interest in the ancient art of the JAPANESE MANGA and own rare print volumes of your favorite series. You can also amuse yourself for many hours by playing with your dear PET HAMSTER. You are also a bit of a GAMER, particularly virtual reality and simulation games as a substitute for rather limited freedom.
You used to have a lot more freedom, but as the lynchpin of the Sharebears operation there have been several attempts on your life by rival broker organizations over the years. One psychic attack nearly succeeded, resulting in a long stay on the PSYCH MOON to restore your capabilities.
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Now you spend your nights floating in a somnotank of PSYGEL to insulate your mind against unseen threats, and live inside a hermetically sealed reinforced glass bunker at the center of the Sharebears cavernous trading floor. The value of your abilities has provided you with a comfortable life and secure employment, you couldn’t ask for more and on Lustrium alone there are much worse ways to live.
But you often wish you didn’t feel so…bunkertrapped. dwellingenclosed. abodenfixed. There’s probably a good word for it.
>Examine Shorts poster.
SHORTS is your favorite film of all time, quite possibly the greatest film ever made. Given to you by the Sharebears after a misinformed assumption about it's content due to the title. On first watch, your eyes were opened to a world of compelling nonlinear narrative structure, the antique but timeless humor of the year 2009, and whimsical all-ages wishing-rock-related hijinks. You have watched it many times since.
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You dearly wish Toby “Toe” Thompson, Loogie Short, and “Nose” Noseworthy could be your friends. Helvetica Black was your first crush, and while you since question your prepubescent taste, there is something undeniably attractive about a girl with a rocket bike who can turn into a giant wasp. You assume the characters in the film are either entirely fictional, or as you have more recent reason to believe, long dead.
>Look at wishing rock.
For your fascination with the film is also a matter of predestination. When you arrived on Lustrium as a meteor-borne infant, one of the things you brought with you was a rainbow-colored rock. Pretty but unremarkable, until your first exposure to Shorts led you to the astounding discovery that your mundane trinket was the very same wishing rock from the film. There is simply no other explanation.
However, your rock does not grant wishes, you assume it’s power was either exhausted, or it is waiting for the right conditions to activate once more.
You have written up a long list of carefully-worded possible wishes in anticipation of the day it does.