The wind howls.
A lone figure walks the streets of Downtown Portland, their silhouette a cursed mark upon the steel-gray sky. Their shoes clack out a staccato burst of gunfire upon the cobblestones as their coat whips in a melancholy frenzy around them, like the quieted gasp of a fallen angel.
A small bug flies past, looping lazy hellos upon ignored ears.
The figure stops suddenly, and turns upon a deserted lot. If they can strain their ears and squint their eyes, they can almost see the colorfully dressed people running around, the sounds of happy shouts and honks echoing in thon’s ears. But now the square lies empty - in the distance a sign hangs loosely, paint peeling from a poor pachyderm, singing halleluiahs of rust into the twilight; a lone pigeon pecks at the ground before exploding into a tempered ecstasy of flight; the only truly defining feature is a stone sphere, weathered and smoothed with age.
But soft - what colour through yonder drabness breaks? A child, maybe twelve or thirteen years hence their expulsion from the womb, on the cusp of the grand adventure known as pubescence, sits in a bright blue shirt, staring at the ball with a somber expression, chiseled from the granite of confusion.
The figure walks up to the child and speaks, not a slice of velvet falling to the leaf-littered ground, but not the rasp of sandpaper upon dry skin, their voice is simply a voice, and it carried simple words into the breach: “This ball once held an inscription. And this square once held life.” The child looks up, momentarily startled, but not frightened.
“It seems so long ago, and… and maybe it was,” began the figure, “but this plot, this park, even, held a radiant ‘bundance of life each Saturday, along with a radiant abundance of doom, void, light, time, and the rest. Oh, and sometimes Sundays.”
“What happened?”, asked the child, a shiver, not of fear, and not necessarily of cold running down their spinal column and terminating in their sacrum.
“They were a proud and noble tribe, and at a time, their ranks were many, almost as benumbered as their exploits, and their consequent spoils. Below the surface of variety beat a strong and passionate heart of community. To utter their name now is to invite upon oneself a swift and utter death, or at least a sudden rash of unfollowings on tumblr, but once their name commanded respect and enjoyment across the land.”
“Tumblr?”, asked the child, confusion writing a love sonnet across their face, lazily dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
“It got bought out by Google,” said the figure hurriedly, with disinterest riding copilot, “a once mighty lone warrior of what you know today as Appglesoft. It was like Twitbook, but not as shit. But that is neither here nor there, though it might in fact, be all around us, already.” The figure laughed quietly to themself, as if to a private audience only they could see.
“They were a great and powerful tribe, with many members and many leaders - they even were lead by a pineapple for a period - but like all great empires, they had weaknesses, ones their enemies could exploit. The heart that beat so brightly and proudly, is what eventually did themselves in. One of their beloved members began to dawn the guise of a foreign rapscallion and take things people had said and bring them back to the originators, with a striking image of a no-faced creature drinking a hot herbal beverage attached.
"This was intended as a sign of, though not belittlement, at the very least minor annoyance at improper categorization and lack of import. Which, most would agree, is within any person’s right, as long as they take the Pledge of Allegiance to President Zuckerberg, and sign the privacy waiver, which of course is what allows us our many freedoms in this enlightened age.” Though the stranger spoke with sincerity, it was naught but a sheath concealing a claymore of biting steel and sarcasm.
“However, this lone freedom fighter did their work in an antagonist manner - an antagonist manner that contained obvious attempts at humour and even delightful overtones of self-parody and self-awareness, yet still with a grain of truth tucked inside like an agonizing piece of sand stuck inside a clam, because a clam has a much lower rate of yielding the pearl of understanding, because a clam is not an oyster.
"A clam is just a clam, kid. Remember that. A clam is just a clam.” The child nodded with appropriate graveness and sincerity.
“The point is, some took offense to this offensive persona being offensive, which was also their prerogative in those halcyon days of freedom, especially since some judgement was being thrust upon them, albeit by someone pretending to be an immature green-skinned angry alien with a learning disability, and if that doesn’t denote wry self-awareness I don’t know what does.
"No one said anything out loud or formally about a divide between the once-noble peoples of Po- … the Unnamed Tribe, but, often without directly addressing the issue, words were said and lines were drawn. It wasn’t long after the verbal fighting began that the skirmishes marched into the physical realm, starting with harmless but mean-spirited splashing of various liquids, which eventually escalated into full-on battles, complete with CatTanks and Nyanocopters. This was back in the old days before hand-to-hand and vehicular combat was so graciously archived out of humanity’s direct knowledge for 'safe keeping until a time of emergency’ by our beloved President.
"And so, without ever discussing the proper categorization of thoughts and observances about the tribe itself, or if there was really an reason to care about the tagging of such matters, and if there was no reason to care about it, then why should you care if someone else does care, and cares in a way different from your personal preference for their caring, a mighty tribe fell into disrepair and ruin. Not too long afterward, our benevolent benefactor ascended to the Presidency, now completely unchecked in his quest for dominance.
"Err, divinely inspired dominance, of course.”
“Is there nothing that can be done to bring them back?” queried the child, their mouth an interrogation cane of intrigue and youthful hope. A quiet chuckle, tinged with the moss of sadness, escaped from the figure’s mouth.
“No, there truly is nothing to be done. But respects and homage can be made just the same. There used to be a shop just a couple blocks from here, that once stored the tribe’s Holy Elixir, though it went out of business shortly after the tribe’s implosion. A bright and determined individual like yourself could easily work their way in and find that there should still be a few old crates of the elixir left - hopefully it’s not all just Red Pop because that shit was NA-STEE I MEAN DAMN, YO, I MEAN DAMN.”
After taking a moment to compose themselves, the figure continued. “There were some etchings that both predated and predicted the tribe’s existence and eventual, though uneternal, dominance, just few yards from here, in that direction, yes the same as the old shop, and now in a most poetic mirroring, are the only sign that the peoples it predicted would rise to power, ever existed at all. Pour some elixir upon the etchings, kneel, and honk three times.
"Then offer up a prayer that in the next iteration of this universe, things turned out slightly differently, and the Forgotten Tribe remained in power, keeping the forces of evil and boredom and loneliness at bay for many, many years.
"I wish you the very best of luck.” The figure let a smile ghost upon their features and then turned to look at the ball, a mask of sorrow flickering upon their face for the briefest of moments, and then disappeared into the dusk as crow is swallowed by low cloud banks, leaving nothing but a faint odor of waffles in their wake.
The child sat and processed all they had learned. Eventually, they got up, smoothed their clothes, and began the walk to Peterson’s.
There was much to do, much to be done, and much that should have been done before.
#portlandstuck #the thing i find funniest about #whyisthisinthepstucktag #is that none of the posts are ever found in the pstuck tag #its always the portlandstuck tag #INCONSISTENCIES!!!! #also #the phrase like the quieted gasp of a fallen angel might have been the most gloriously stupid thing I have ever written #and i wrote snowman/aradia/hussie/auto-responder smut whilst drunk once #though moss of sadness is also a really dumb phrase