Alias: being a literal clock, able to pinpoint anything related to timing with so much more ease than the rest of us, and we think it formed/split during the second-to-last week of January, 2017. A little background on Alias before we go into this: it is a clock, like I said, more specifically a pocket watch, and it does not see itself as a human in any way; barely even a person. It doesn't hate itself, it's not self-loathing or anywhere near what null is like, but it has a constant air of empty melancholy, like a casual and peaceful attitude that, when peeled away, reveals a deep-seated depersonalization to the point of feeling discomfort at the idea of receiving sympathy. It is the only one out of all of us who can accurately measure and estimate the time in its head, and it does so with a shocking precision (once, when asked the time in the middle of a grocery trip, it said "I think it's about 8:27" and it was, in fact, exactly 8:27). It has a special affection for uncomfortable, disquieting spaces; backrooms fiction, strange liminal horror games, photographs that don't sit quite right, the basements of libraries at 1 AM.
We attempted in a pit of depression and spent 5 days in a hospital, and there is something to be said about the brain's ability to zero in on a minor, barely-significant annoyance in order to cope with the stress of something much greater shadowing it.
Picture this.
You're 16 years old in a psych ward. You didn't want to die because of a chemical imbalance, you wanted to die because you were immersed in an atmosphere of abuse and dehumanization from the authorities in your life. Your solace is music, the Internet, your favorite shows and your friends, but those aren't allowed. You can't go outside; you are confined to your room and one or two hallways of uncanny, inhospitable atmosphere. You aren't being treated like a person, and unlike your usual, familiar experience of that, you aren't even being treated like an animal or a child either—you're some kind of unthinking thing. You're being given medication and told that any complaints about life circumstances that can't be fixed are just dramatics, so you know there is no light at the end of this tunnel when you go home and nothing is better. None of this is helping.
But all you can think about, all that you're able to agonize over, is that at night, when you're lying in your room and you have no phone, no clock, and your window doesn't let you see the sky, is that you can't tell what time it is.
It's all you can care about anymore. Once they've locked your door just to stop you from leaving into the lobby every five minutes to check the clock, you can't even sleep. And there's nothing else to think about. Maybe they're right; you really are unthinking. You aren't a person. All you care about is the time.
Stranger: following the pattern, here's the necessary context on Stranger. Out of all of us, he would be the first to say that his presentation is specifically butch. He doesn't just affect masculinity, he wraps himself around it like it's a second heart that pumps his blood. But he isn't a human. He sees himself as a monster, a dark figure of a paranormal beastly nature looming in windows, something that any sensible person would balk at the sight of. He gets euphoria from someone saying "You startled me!" because he was too quiet for them to notice he was in the room, and from a sense of unease at how accurately he can mimic another person, as if it might have to come up later that his very appearance can't be trusted.
Now picture another scenario.
You are a pre-teen or perhaps young teen girl, let's say 12–14 years old, and your whole life, you have associated power with fear. The people who demand respect from you are the people who you are most afraid of and the demands which you cannot decline. You know that someone who is in control, who will deal with it, whoever is the person to go to for help, is the person you are also most terrified of.
You are also excruciatingly aware, even if you don't quite have the words for it, that you are at the age where your masculine affinities stop being a quirky tomboy thing, and start being a threat in the eyes of adults around you who endeavor to produce a good feminine woman. You are becoming disgusting. You are becoming something to be afraid of—but not in the same way as the people who raised you, no. You've always been lesser, so your growth into this grotesque thing isn't a growth into power, it's reprehensible. For someone who is following all the rules, being the source of fear is called authority. For someone who dares break them, being the source of fear is called monstrosity.
You are more like a creature from a horror movie than the hero who kills it.
And you are also at the age where you get your own iPod and your music taste starts to veer drastically off of the top 40.
🝯
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