Escaping the Dragon, #3

To read from the beginning of the diary I found in the belly of a dragon, read here.

December, 2011
Behind a dumpster in the rain

 Dear...whoever.

I haven't written this diary for a while. And it's not because everything's gone great, and I haven't needed it. It's because the Dragon's surfaced so much I can't even write.

I can't get a second to type about the Dragon because I'm too busy being the Dragon. Screaming and bouncing from dimension to dimension, out of control and locked away, smiling in one world while in the other I'm growing scales and licking things that I definitely should not--

I'm shuddering right now. Shuddering, not because I'm horrified—which I wish so much I could be, I want that, I don't want to lose feeling but the feeling slips away the worse this gets!—but because I'm wet with engine oil and grey rain, and catching a cold.

So back in Science Fiction world, I didn't end up telling the Grandmaster. We sat down on opposite sides of that little floating table, our warm candied wine steaming between us, and I looked at his face, opened my mouth--

And noticed a wrinkle.

Multiple wrinkles. My stars, he's getting older. I remember his youth—the idealistic, brash cover to an uncertain man trying to find his way in a disordered universe by building a Monastery of justice—and his controlling aging phase, during my teenage years, and now? Now friendlier eyes peer out from between rolls, like old little groundhogs popping out of the hills back home.

I love the peace of those hills, and the presumptuous curiosity of the groundhogs, something children share and he's somehow rediscovered, and I could not break that. After all, he's not a dimension-traveller. What does he know of otherworldly viruses? And what do I even say? “I've come to consume your reality in dark pleasure and blood, because I'm actually not myself anymore. I'm turning into a Dragon.”

So I did not tell him. I went on tour with my little apprentice, and presumably that's where I still am. I don't know, because I haven't been there for a while. I let the smiling, cocky face of my subconscious sit in for me, joking and drinking and driving under the thick wall of separation my conscience manages between whatever reality I'm actually in and whatever realities I safeguard on autopilot. Sometimes, when I really don't want to miss anything, I “freeze” a reality—which really just means I pull all the way out, and then pop right back in at the point in time that I left, with no one else the wiser. But I didn't want to do that because a part of me wants to spend time with my apprentice, and another part wants to make damn sure I'm not actually there to ruin his sweet, rebellious little mouthy life. So I'm there and not there.

If only I could do that for every world, no one could get hurt. The virus lives in my consciousness.

No, it's run amok. But I've let it run amok in a world that, well, honestly—it was pretty mangled to begin with. I haven't really added anything out of the ordinary. It's a multidimensional mess, complete with ridiculous physics, mass murderers, and weirdos dressed as various animals and toys duking it out over the high rises like it's some kind of circus up in here, some kind of practical joke on all of us ordinary people while we hope to God someone shows up with a Candid Camera.

On the bright side, I think as messed up as I've been over the past month, I've managed to get some really messed up people to seek help for themselves. Like bonafide therapy help. And they're not afraid to come to me about their issues—multiple resurrections and dimensional rifts and trauma and lack of parents and such—because hey, I've got issues, too. Real issues. Not silly little trifles like drug addiction or even normal murderous tendencies. (Yeah, Comic Book Reality is that bad. Everyone's a druggie or a murderer.) Surprisingly, I'm pretty good at helping with these issues.

But now I'm alone again.

Because one of “they” was repulsed by the Dragon. Not just like emotionally—that, too—but literally thrown into some other dimension, and I don't know how to find him.

And one of they is dead.

Shit. Shit, no, I can't talk about that. I need to, so people know, once it beats me, what actually happened. But not right now. I just

can't

I'm gonna go lie down behind a dumpster and pretend to sleep until the sunlight comes back, or I catch a cold and die. Oh man, wouldn't that be convenient. As far as I can tell, El old Draco can't really do anything with dead brain matter. He'll be trapped in there. He'll rot with me. Unless I've already infected someone else with him. Which I don't think I have. I don't tell the stories he wants me to, the actions he makes me live in here, and I know I caught him in a story so I know that's how he's transmitted.

Hoo, I shoulda written about that first. That's probably what's most useful to any interdimensional researchers out there. You know, because there are so very many of us.

Eh, I'll get to it tomorrow.

Or is that it talking? Oh gosh I can't think about this right now. It's lying-down time. It's weird how safe a thin bit of smelly green metal can make you feel, really. People die all the time on this street—just outta spiteful perversion, too, so a homeless-looking whelp like me's not exempt—but squeezed in behind here, with black trash bags piled up around any and all clefts and openings, I'm really invisible. I like that. The small area almost makes me feel like it can't find me either. It can't fit back here.

You can't fit here, Dragon. There isn't room.

Part four