Road Trip 2 (The Sequel): Spring Break

Yes it's that magical time of year where all the partially educated twenty-somethings throw caution to the winds and abandon campus for exciting retreats with plenty of alcohol and no parental supervision.  And while I would no doubt love to join many of my contemporaries in (give me a moment to ask Google) Las Vegas this year, find a way to get my Slender friend caught on MTV and segue it into the stalking and subsequent evisceration of the entire cast of "Jersey Shore", it seems as though I actually have other obligations ( a lot of effort and spellchecking went into that joke, I hope you appreciate it).  Unfortunately those obligations do require me to be out of town for a few days, and that means I'm going to be away from my computer for a few days, maybe a week tops.

Honestly this doesn't really mean anything significant, I simply won't be posting on your blogs or making in new posts for that time, and there's only so much of a chance that I'd be doing that anyways.  The only real reason I'm making this post is because I'm tired of having that other one as my most recent post.  I've tried to erase it, I've tried to edit it, I've tried to figure out who was behind it, but I'm still no closer to figuring any of this out.  SO to whoever keeps hijacking my blog:

STOP IT.  

I'm dealing with enough things right now, and I really don't need some stupid hacker trying to tick me off.  I'm not sure why you're writing these things, I'm not sure why you're targeting me, but all you're doing is pissing me off, and quite frankly, I've got no problem slitting your throat and letting you bleed out.  Right now you're a distraction, and relatively low on my list of concerns, but if you ever turn into an actual nuisance I'm going to get a lot more serious about tracking you down, and in case you didn't catch it: you don't want that happening.

Bah, I'm starting to get tired of all this blogging stuff anyways, I think I'm actually going to enjoy my time off from this.

See you around

-Caged

Feburary 3rd, 2011

I feel like I should write this down.  I don't know why, maybe if I see the actual words on a sheet of paper that will just solidify how ridiclious this all is, like it's a peice of fiction or something.  I've never hullcinated before, but maybe this is just another extension of my psyche being

I'm not writing that out, that's not true, I have NEVER hallucinated before, what I have is not the result of insanity, just a product of being more aware of my mind than the average individual.  It's just me up there, everyone has their own voices, thier own Id, thier own Cage, I can just hear mine.  Why is he acting like this, I've always seen him, heard him, but Cage hasn't had more strength than Free in years, I put him in check long ago.  But lately.  And then today, that couldn't have been him.  I was just tired.  I just need to write this out put it on paper.

Today I saw a man without a face.









                             
You know what, I think that did it, it really does seem stupid now.  I don't know, maybe I'm just on edge, I mean my birthday is next week (yay!) and I've been feeling a little weird all week, like someone's always looking over my shoulder.  I just need to get more sleep or something, Cage is giving me another migrain.

No Turning Back

After my last post I called a "meeting" of sorts out on the campus nature trail.  Fortunately for my that thing isn't used very frequently anyways, and no-one is ever there on nights when there's class the next morning.  I met Phillip at the entrance and we went to a more isolated part of the trail where the Slender Man was waiting.  He was standing under a tall tree off the main part of the trail, illuminated in the moonlight.  As soon as Phillip saw him he knelt on the wet mud, and for a surreal moment I felt compelled to mirror the action.  Just something about the scene, the light, the intensity, the silence, just the image of a fellow human knelling before something so much more powerful than him, something so sure of it's right the rule, it called to something primal in me.  You know He's old, but if you've never seen him standing over someone he owns, you can't realize just how old he is.  But I've refused the kneel before him in the past, and as long as I remain in control of my own mind I will continue to refuse.

After Phillip stood I revealed my plan to them both.  I was... unsure about how the Slender Man felt, for some reason I wasn't able to read him as well as I have been in the past, though talking with him has never been easy.  Phillip, on the other hand, was ecstatic, though it's become obvious that's he's accepted his role as my subordinate and it's unlikely he'll ever appose anything I'll say.  So after a few minutes of collaboration with the two of them I left them to go walk the rest of the trail by myself.  I needed to contemplate some things, and the trail was still the safest place for me to let Cage take control for a while.  I've been keeping a tighter grip on him lately, because I can't allow myself to slip up, now more than ever, but the downside is that sometimes I need to simply give him complete control for a while, to balance things out.  Free does not approve, but he doesn't approve of much of anything I choose lately, then again, neither does Cage, neither do I.

So Friday, yesterday assuming I start typing this faster, I met Elizabeth.  That seems odd to say, because I do in fact meet her every day, as well as some others, I do have something of a social life after all.  But this time I met her with a specific purpose, one script in my mind detailing what what going to happen.  We "ran into each other" outside the student center, where Phillip had managed to delay her usual schedule to force a confrontation, and I asked her how she was feeling.  She naturally responded with deliberately vague answers about how she had been a little stressed out, maybe a little tired, how it was nothing to worry about, and then she asked me why I asked.  My response was also deliberately vague, I mentioned about how I was just feeling on edge for no particular reason, how I was tyring to figure out if there was something going around; I choose my words and tone carefully, designed them to set the idea in her head.  We walked for a few minutes, talking uneasily, dancing around the thing we were about to address.  When He showed up I started coughing, I almost ended up on my knees from putting so much force into it.  Elizabeth turned to check if I was alright and saw Him standing in the trees, watching.  When I recovered from my practiced episode I joined her in staring into the trees, still partially crouched.  Then I repeated the question she asked me not two weeks earlier: "Do you see it?" When she answered her voice was dripping with fear:

"Yes."

Then He was gone, having full filled his role in a plan he had agreed to, the Slender Man was content to leave the rest to me.  My dorm was closer, and my roommate was already gone for the weekend, so we went to my room and discussed our options.  I played some music to try and get the image out of her head and calm her down and asked what was going on.  She only told me things I already knew: She was being hunted, she couldn't sleep without having nightmares, she was receiving threatening messages and signs, and she was trying to find an answer, but I listened as though I was hearing it for the first time.  At first I pretended to join in her fear, to make it seem as though I was even more confused and lost than she was, I even acted as though I couldn't believe it was real.  Then I got angry, I told her that we couldn't lose to Him, that we would find a way to escape whatever was going on.  As we discussed options she mentioned that she had stumbled across a few blogs that seemed to be dealing with him, at first acted was skeptical, but then I had her tell me all she knew about the blogs.  I convinced her to go home for the weekend, and I told her that I would take over looking at the blogs for her, that she should focus on watching the various vlogs instead to see if she could find out anything there.  With our labor divided so that there was no risk of her finding my blog I decided it was best to wrap things up before she could suggest anything different.  I told her I had one last class I had to go to (which was, incidentally, the truth) and that she should go ahead and go home, that maybe getting out of the area would provide some relief for the time being.

So now I'm being "Hunted" along with Elizabeth, the good news is that I can keep her from finding out who and what I am, but the bad news is that I now have a much greater role in her active psychological torture.  And now she knows, for better or worse, that I can see him too.  This means that I'm now entrenched in this mess no matter what, there's no walking away to save myself and still not serving Him, the two options before me are more clear than ever before, and I'm far closer to having to choose one of them.  Somehow it seems that this happens every time I try to buy myself time, but my options beyond that are have always been few anyways.  I suppose that if I have to dig myself a deeper hole than there's something comforting about being the one holding the shovel.

See you around

-Cage

Running Interference

You know, throughout my life I've found several things that should require effort or concern are in fact relatively easy for me to do.  Murder, for example, is easy, you just stand there and push the blade into someones chest, you don't even have to know their name.  Lieing is incredibly easy, you just need to imagine that you truly are speaking the truth, and false information flows from your lips without so much as a waver of the voice to betray your dishonesty.  Running is far easier than some of you make it out to be, you just forget what you had and who you were and go.  Manipulation by itself is not all that difficult, identifying a target, predicting a persons reactions, leading them where you want them; these are all things you can learn without too much difficulty.  However, doing any of those things becomes difficult if your goals include not letting anyone know you're doing them, and when you're trying to exert complete control over someones life, over multiple people's lives, without anyone realizing that you're trying any harder, that isn't easy.  Though I suppose that when one of those people is Hunted and the other is Hollowed that helps.

Every Tuesday and Thursday I go to a class that I share with both Phillip and Elizabeth.  I sit maybe 15 feet away from either of them, and spend the majority of my time trying to figure out how to trick them both into staying away from each other.  Honestly it doesn't really help that things are accelerating faster than I had planned.  Elizabeth pretends that nothing is wrong, she hasn't mentioned the Slender Man or anything resembling him to me or any of our other friends, yet, but I can tell she's already seeing him on a regular basis.  Phillip, on the other hand, is very vocal about his plans and schedules and ambitions.  He can talk for thirty minutes straight about how much work he put into the letter he slipped under Elizabeth's door (I retrieved it before she saw anything), or how honored he is to be working for "Father," but beyond that he seems incapable of casual conversation.  I've had him go on at length about his agenda, but as soon as he's done he just stops talking and stares off in the distance, unable or unwilling to react to anything else for a very long time.  Sometimes I'm really glad I can't see what he's looking at, I promise I'll never envy anyone whose mind has gone through that much trauma.

It's complicated keeping both of them at arms length while trying to make sure neither one is ever within arms length of the other.  I have to monitor my calls with either of them, and I try to never interact with Phillip when Elizabeth is around, if she ever figures out what he is then I don't want her jumping to any conclusions about me.  I've found that as a neutral party I'm not capable of being a very effective buffer, but I'm still faced with my original dilemma of being unable to directly show support for Elizabeth.  This has ended up with me doing a lot of very minor sabotage of Phillip's activities, of course because my role in our perceived partnership is to keep a closer eye on Elizabeth and gauge her reactions I'm able to convince him that the notes he's been trying to leave around have reached her.  The good news here is that Phillip is very easy to manipulate and deceive, he's a predictable element with nowhere near the amount of creativity or depth your average human should posses.  The bad news is that Elizabeth isn't, even with as much as I know about her I can't prepare for her every reaction, and being Hunted makes her much less predictable.

Also in the bad news pile is the fact that she's started doing research.  A couple of nights ago we were with a few friends at her apartment for a movie night.  I'm never very comfortable in groups, but I went anyways, both for the sake of seeming normal and to use the opportunity to keep an eye on her.  Throughout the movie I saw her look out the window several times, even though her antagonist never made an appearance.  Part way through the movie I excused myself to go to the bathroom and covertly checked the search history on her computer.  She had been looking up Slender Man.  If she finds the blogs I'm in trouble, I haven't said anything here that could guarantee she would know it was me, but that's not something I'm willing to risk, I have to find a way to control what information she gets.  I have a plan set up, but it's not one I'm excited about putting into action.

I haven't been Hunted in a long time.  It hasn't been long enough.

See you around

Cage

An Important Message

You know things have been pretty calm this past week or so, so I thought I'd take a break from talking about myself and do something I'm substantially better at: talking about all of you.  Well perhaps that isn't completely accurate, but this is about something that's at least slightly relevant to or directed at most of you.  I'm talking about something that many of encounter on a regular basis: Captha codes.  You know those strings of letters that you have to type in to put your comment on someone else's blog?  They're designed to keep computer programs from posting in places where they aren't supposed to, and in general I suppose that's a good thing, although I turned my captha's off in October, and never once has a program posted here.  You know, a while ago I didn't even mind, but lately they've been getting on my nerves.  Here, let me provide some examples:

(mundona)

This is about as bad as they used to get, which is why I didn't really mind.

(redit)                                                  (stole)

Sometimes they even came out looking like real words, every now and then they would even be words relevant to the comment that I had just made.  I always found these coincidences pretty amusing.

(cooties)                                          (dablog)

And I mean come on, how could you not laugh at a few of them.

(slain. t(r or i)v(I think that's an e followed by a v, maybe)I(not i, I, evidently there's a diffrence now))

But evidently they got tired of being laughed at, and google edited the captha's to prevent human posting as well.

(astere(t or i)(d or l) souls,(" or '', yes there is a diffrence))

It's very irritating trying to figure out what goes on in those blotches.

(usuldo What)

Eventually the codes were later re-edited to allow humans to post again, though still not as easily or entertainingly as before.  "What" indeed, this is actually on of the easier ones.

So yeah, sorry if I got a little whiny there, but it really is easy to turn those things off (just go to "Settings", then "Comments", go down to "Show word verification for comments", and select "No," it's quite simple), and it makes commenting around far less frustrating.  That's all I have for this post, but I really don't want to leave it at this.  I know, how about a song with a tangently relevant title and completely unrelated lyrics?  No, I don't particularly care that it doesn't fit the theme of the whole post, I like the song.

See you around

Cage