Kinrou's Evaluation Area

Looming is the only word to describe the sound of a city. The constant, grating background noise of humanity mixed with the mechanical heartbeats of engines and irregular flickering of stop-lights. Every moment is like an overexposed photograph, the light too bright, the dark too deep, the truths too shallow, and the lies running like blood.

Washed out, but also oversaturated.
That's what you call overexposed.

In the image of a city, you can hear its sound, rising up at you from colourless film as you move between the negatives, each picture holding a different slice of the wards, districts, towns, whatever you want to call them. For every single image, there is a sound. Short, maybe thirty seconds at most, but there, an undertone leading to— well, who really knows? For some pictures, it's quiet. Barely there. Those pictures usually show busy places— intersections, malls, all-way crosswalks, train stations. The places most trafficked by humanity are those that most lack that searing alien presence and nature, because the constant noise of the people subdues it, mutes it.

Sometimes, there are pictures of apartments. These huge, hulking, monolithic monstrosities that you just know are the forms of slumbering giants, watching, waiting to stand up and be counted among the atrocities as hundreds of tiny bodies fall from them into the ruins of the once-city, the glimmering twilight silhouetting their forms and dragging your attention inexorably to their slowly rotting milky-white eyes as they let out grumbling roars—

and then things shift, and the surreal image wrought by the hands of madness is gone like a waking dream, only it isn't. It's still there, lurking just under the cold lines of concrete architecture, waiting for the right invocation to appear again. Or not.

Tick, tock.

Time moves on, life goes on, everything changes and remains the same all at once. Constancy in chaos is the nature of humanity, and the cities where the sounds of settling remnants of dreams can be heard are just another edifice, as were the pyramids, as was Stonehenge, as remain the older towns— you know the type— in the backcountry. The motifs change. Sometimes it is technology, other times, it is god, and in the past, it was the world itself.

But as much as the motifs change, the constant story remains the same.

How would you rate your luck?

How would you rate mine?

Tick.

So, there's a roll of film showing washed out, oversaturated mammoths of concrete hiding the forms of monsters, and under the shadows of those forms, one hundred thousand humans live, work, eventually fall— and are forgotten in the waters of the river Lethe. And you can't hear the screams, the tears, or the whimpers of the falling people, because over it all is that dull, acerbic, deafeningly silent undertone of the city, that grinding, clattering cacophony of drowned dreams and shattered ambitions.

A success, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure, a failure.

How would you rate your luck?

How would you rate mine?

Tock.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License