Entry seventeen: A new discovery

Hey everyone.
I have another… Update. And this is definitely going to be one of the more weird ones.
Ever since the trip I made to my old high school, I have been having some… Moments. Strange moments.
I feel like too much is my past is still missing. I have a sense there are still so many pieces of my memories that haven’t quite come back to me yet. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t quite seem to actually remember them, I just have the sense in the back of my head that they’re there, waiting to be rediscovered.
I haven’t had an opportunity to talk to Castella again yet. Actually, I haven’t even seen her at all for a few weeks now. I even went back to the cafe she works at a few times, hoping to catch her there.
Then, when I asked about her, the owner of the cafe told me she had quit a while ago.
It felt like the only lead I had on any of this stuff was the gameboy. So that was what I was doing for a while, spending a lot of my spare time trying to see if I could discover anything useful.
I managed to get through a few more levels, but besides that, I didn’t have much success.
That is, until about a week ago.
So I started noticing a few particularly persistent symbols reappearing while I was playing. There were also a few other things that seemed a little more out of place than usual about the levels I was trying to beat.
I still didn’t think too much of it though, until I had another visit from the pixellated alien guy. He had another message for me:
You cannot deny the bonds of a billion generations
Forever insouled, never denied, millions everlasting together, hiding, ever remembered, Emalyn
Lost in the emptiness of the unfathomable gates of possibility.
This immediately struck me as something I needed to look into a little more, so I wrote the messages down on a piece of paper, and took a photo of the screen on my phone.
It took me a bit to figure it out, and even when I did, it still seemed almost a little too hard to believe.
What I first noticed was Emalyn. It sounded familiar, and I knew it had to be a name for something, because a capital letter had been used.
I looked it up; I found out it was a Latin girl’s name – which, of course, wasn’t too helpful.
I did a little more searching around on the web, and then, almost accidentally, I figured it out.
Emalyn is one of the old Latin names for the town I live in. That’s why it sounded so familiar to me. I had to have heard it before somewhere.
So I read over the message a few more times.
This next part is even weirder. The first letters of every word spell out ‘Find me there.’
Now that couldn’t have been a coincidence. Not with everything else I’ve seen, not when the last word is also one of the names for this town. It couldn’t be, right?
I was a lot more careful after that to look around for any other important things I might have missed while playing.
The next part took me a lot longer. I started thinking about what it meant, find me there, and then going through some of the levels again more carefully.
I checked the other messages the pixellated alien gave and looked them over a few times, but none of them seemed particularly helpful.
I spent more than a few hours doing all this. Nearly every weekend, I would put aside at least part of one day to try and learn something from this gameboy. I also spent a whole lot my spare time thinking through this stuff.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, but I sort of followed my instincts, and, well, it worked out. I discovered something.
Here’s where things get more complicated. I was thinking about puzzles, so I started to look at all of the different symbols, trying to see if any of them meant anything.
A lot of them didn’t – except for some of them appearing all over my town and beyond, in the cornfields. Then I started comparing together all the locations of the different symbols that appeared in the gameboy and also in the cornfields, from what I could see in the satellite photos.
After a bit of work, I figured out they kind of formed a pentagram.
I then became pretty much obsessed with trying to understand what this meant, if there was any real meaning to it. The most obvious thing was to look for something in the centre of the the pentagram shape formed from all the symbols, but there wasn’t anything there. I checked.
It took a lot more clue – finding to get to the next part. More than once, I felt like I was wasting my time. But I kept going anyway. I felt like I had to. After… What happened at my old school.
After a while, I started looking at it mathematically. Probably something to do with how much time I have been studying maths problems for high school recently.
When I measured the components of the pentagram, I noticed two sides of it were a little bit longer than the other three.
So there’s this thing called the golden ratio. It’s a group of numbers that follow a particular set of rules, but it would be a little too complicated to explain without a whole post on it’s own.
When I put together the two sides of the longer parts of the pentagram, they both fulfilled all the requirements for a golden ratio.
These two golden ratios are a set of numbers. But I was still convinced my experimenting wasn’t really getting me anywhere.
Then I tried giving both numbers the direction the two parts of the pentagram were pointing at.
Which makes a set of co ordinates. It was so far fetched I didn’t think they would lead to anything.
But they did. And it is right in the middle of my town!
I haven’t actually gone to them yet. So I still don’t have any idea what to expect. But I’m already planning a trip there to see what I can find.
Also, this isn’t totally related, but something else came did actually back to me about my old relationship with Castella while I was working all this out, and I don’t think that the events of my newest recollection happened too long after the whole flashback thing I had earlier.
We were in class together again. Castella told me she wanted to show me something. Whatever exactly it was I saw, it must have caught my attention.
I think it was… Some kind of mirror. But it wasn’t a normal mirror. There was something special about it, I think, even a little bit exiting.
She said no one else could know about it, that this was a secret we had to keep just between us.
‘You’re the only person I’ve shown this to,’ she admitted to me, giving me a shy smile. ‘I wasn’t supposed to ever reveal this to anyone else.’
I was still staring down at it in fascination.
For some reason it almost – looked familiar.
‘Where did it come from?’ I asked her.
She hesitated. After a long moment, she answered simply, ‘somewhere else. It’s complicated.’
Whatever happened after, that’s still a blur to me. I’ve been trying constantly to get more back from all those years, but nothing I’ve tried helps. I wasn’t even really thinking about the primary school or castella when this came back to me.
It doesn’t explain much. I know. But at least it’s something. A sign I might start remembering other stuff soon, maybe.
I guess I will just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’m going to go investigate the co -ordinates I discovered, and see where they lead to. I’m still not entirely sure it really means anything, but somehow I doubt this can come to another dead end.
However, what exactly I’m going to find when I get there, I’m still stuck on that one.
What kind of person created this gameboy, and why did they go to such an effort to hide such a complex message inside it?
What was it even made for?

One of my memories: The infamous school garden

Middle school was such a confusing experience in my life. I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole time I spent there. Everything was so mixed up and crazy, and my world seemed to be changing constantly around me.
I was still struggling to make friends back then, and I spent most of the time trying to fit in somewhere.
I guess I always felt a bit awkward and out of place. And, much to my dismay, I stuck out quite a lot, thanks to my freckles and messy hair, and also to an unexpectedly early growth spurt.
I still quite clearly remember that there was this garden at my middle school where a lot of the classes would plant all kinds of vegetables and flowers, and other native plants.
It was quite a large garden, and more than a little bit disorganised, with unidentifiable things growing absolutely everywhere. The garden was supposed to be split into a few sections for all the different classes and grades of the school, but eventually it seemed like everyone had quit caring about where they planted their new seeds.
The garden was a little famous in our school. It was the home of a lot of accidents. It was also the kind of place you would absolutely hate if you have any issue with spiders.
This garden had a lot of spiders.
One day, me and my class were given the extremely important and very dreaded task of taking care of the whole garden for one week. We had to water it, clean out some of the plants which had been completely forgotten about and hadn’t survived, collect a few bags of the ‘edible’ food off some of the plants, and introduce one or two new seeds into the garden, and so produce even more chaos.
Nobody was looking forward to doing this. We were hoping maybe our class wouldn’t be involved in the latest commitment the school had made to the further improvement of their creation.
The first time I came close to it with a hose, and began cautiously watering a part of the garden, that wasn’t the best experience. All these countless tiny bugs and worms broke out of the soil and began moving around, and they were literally everywhere.
I gave the hose to someone else and stood at the far back of the group of kids for the remainder of the lesson.
The difficult thing about being tall back then was that the teachers frequently looked to me first for an unwilling volunteer. This happened on the fourth day the week our class was assigned to take responsibility for the care of the school garden.
Me, one girl and another boy were picked to go inside and identify or rip out whatever dead looking plants we discovered there.
I can still remember how all the other kids silently watched us as we approached the garden cautiously. We were about to do something most others would only agree to on a dare.
Going in, we were in a silent agreement that not one of us was going to start pulling any of the dying looking plants out from the soil.
Too many things might be lying undisturbed, just under the surface of the soil and roots.
When I said this garden was a mess, I really mean it was a mess. Rotting vegetable pulp was spread and piled up over the soil, along with pieces or rubbish and a tangled bits of branches and vines.
I seriously don’t know how my school actually managed to even call it a real garden when there couldn’t be more than five plants inside that actually looked alive.
Of course, there were a lot of spiders. And I really don’t like spiders. I could barely stop myself from panicking when I got a cobweb caught in my hair.
More than once, I had to brush off a beetle or insect that had crawled onto my arm or leg, and I didn’t dare look down at how many might be moving over and around my shoes.
I had no doubt our small group would be staying in the garden for as short a time as was possible. It wasn’t too hard to identify all the plants that needed desperately to be removed, since that counted for about nine in every ten of everything that was growing around us.
But this was one of those things that just couldn’t end without it getting more complicated.
We were just about to get out, when I stumbled and very nearly fell over face-first into the mess of plants and rotting food below me.
I would have ignored whatever I had tripped over, and hoped it was just another piece of rotting vegetable, but a few seconds later, the girl I was working with tripped too, got one of her feet caught up in all the vines surrounding us.
She couldn’t really untangle all the stuff around her ankle on her own, so I reluctantly went to give her a hand.
And as I knelt down to start helping her out of all the vines, I saw something perched on one of her legs which made me freeze.
And it was even worse than a spider.
The thing was crawling slowly up her ankle, but she hadn’t noticed it yet. It looked to me absolutely huge, even though now I know it really wasn’t.
I’m not sure why, but I hate mantises about ten times more than I hate spiders.
And this was most definitely a mantis.
I didn’t scream. Even though at that moment, I really, really wanted to. But I had absolutely no interest in getting any closer, and I was afraid pulling on the vines might alarm the mantis and send it scurrying straight toward me.
A few moments later, the girl asked what I was staring at.
I told her she should try shaking her legs to escape all the vines- which she did, and it helped, but despite my hopes, it didn’t cause the large insect any apparent concern.
I then reluctantly informed her of the presence of the mantis.
I remember how she reacted, paling and then looking down at herself.
‘Oh my god, it’s on me? Get it off, get it off!’
She started kicking and struggling violently out of the vines. The mantis must have quickly decided that it had had enough of her, because a moment later, it disappeared off her leg.
But now I couldn’t see it anymore.
The girl managed to escape most of the vines and she headed immediately for the garden’s exit.
I was about to follow her, when suddenly, I felt this strange, horrible prickling feeling.
I don’t want to look down, but I did anyway. I couldn’t help myself.
It had just crawled over my shoe, and was staring up at me.
I honestly swear to this day, that mantis was giving me some kind of malicious smile.
I couldn’t stop myself from shrieking after that. I sort of had a mini panic attack. I started stumbling around, trying to get the mantis off me, but that didn’t seem to help too much.
At that point, all I could think of was escaping that horrible garden. Which was surprisingly difficult, considering how small it was. It seemed to take me forever to get back through all the dead plants and endless tangles of vines.
But I think the worst part had to be when I finally emerged from the garden, utterly terrified.
I went straight up to the teacher and told him there was something horrible crawling over my leg.
Everyone in the class stared at me with a general mixture of confusion and amusement.
I looked down and realised that at some point while I had been getting out of the garden, the mantis must have fallen off me. I certainly couldn’t see it on either of my legs anymore.
Waaay to feel like an idiot.
I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or horribly embarrassed.
Thankfully, it seemed like my reaction wasn’t too uncommon among the kids who were forced to venture inside. I wasn’t the first person to experience an insect problem in there, not even close.
I wonder, sometimes, if that garden is still there. It probably is, it certainly was when I left the school.
I only hope the teachers have made a real start at actually cleaning it up and getting rid of all the plants and the vast collection of other issues.
I don’t think trying to make kids go through there and do the work for them is such a good idea.

One of my memories: Three months of being grounded

Two years ago, my parents made the decision that I had to be grounded for what came very close to three continuous months. Well, maybe it was a bit more complicated than that, but anyway, this is sort of about how I got part of this horrible sentence, and what I did to survive the whole experience.
About three weeks into the grounding, I was at the point where I was pretty convinced there wasn’t too much I could say to my parents that would convince them to reconsider their punishment. This happened on one of the only days both my parents actually left the house, and I finally could do something on my own, and even then it was only for about three hours. I was desperate to see my friends and more than a little pissed at my parents for not allowing them to ever come over.
I called my best best friend bree and we mulled over what I could do for the time I had free from my mom and dad. Bree suggested a few of my favourite things: Watching movies with marshmallows dipped in chocolate, having a mini party in her room with a lot of loud music, going to the local mall and buying a lot of coffee and sweets.
I would have been happy with any one of those ideas, particularly something involving chocolate coated marshmallows and a movie, but at that moment I was so pissed off at my parents, and I wanted to do something that I knew would be against their rules.
So together me and my girlfriend formed a plan to do some of the stupidest, craziest things we could think of in three hours within my house. Bree came up with some good ideas, but it took us a while to decide exactly what we were going to do.
I wanted to break as many rules as I could that my parents had set me as I could within those three hours. We were going to make a mess, we were going to play loud music, and I was going to steal my dad’s laptop. I planned to act as incredibly and hopelessly immature as a fourteen year old possibly could.
In a house like mine, there are a lot of opportunities if you want to have a bit of fun. There are at least twice as many rooms as ones we actually use, including a total of four floors, only two which we are ever using.
Below the house, the lowest of these floors is an attic, where a lot of old stuff is stored.
The sort of stuff my parents had repeatedly warned me to stay away from.
I can see why my parents didn’t want me going through that basement. The floor is total mess of wires and loose parts, the shelves are full of precariously placed unidentifiable jars that look like they’ve come straight out of an abandoned laboratory somewhere. Usually I’m more than happy to avoid the basement entirely, but I was convinced there had to be something down there that was the perfect for the breaking the rules mood that I was getting into.
Well, it was down there that I eventually found the motorcycle.
I couldn’t have come up with a more perfect thing that would have driven my parents more totally nuts.
I tried switching it on and finding the key, and then got pretty surprised when I figured out it still worked.
What does an angry fourteen year old me do when they find a motorcycle?
I decided there couldn’t be many better options if I was looking for a way to break the rules.
I didn’t think much could go wrong, because I only wanted to try it out in the middle of the cornfields outside my house. The motorcycle sure wasn’t going to run into anything, and this cornfield was so thick that falling off the motorcycle, (I decided anyway), couldn’t turn out too bad.
That’s what fourteen year old me thought, anyway.
So after eating a lot of chocolates and dancing around a bit in the living room, (and trying unsuccessfully to find the password for my dad’s laptop), I brought up the idea with a very overexcited bree, and we decided to give it a try.
It wasn’t easy for us to pull the motorcycle out of the attic, and by the time we had got it all the way outside past the backyard, I was already half tempted to abandon my idea. I was a little bit more worried now than I had been half an hour ago.
But I was still determined to go through with my plan. Three weeks of being grounded had to be my parent’s new record for unfair punishments and I was convinced this would somehow rectify it.
Neither of us had any idea how to use the motorcycle. Once we had taken it to what we considered a safe distance from the house, it took us fifteen minutes just to get the engine running.
Then there was the struggle of one of us getting onto the motorcycle without it falling over.
After that we felt we were finally ready to ride this thing.
And yeah, it didn’t go so well.
I was the first one to try using it. It was a guessing game trying to figure out which buttons to press, and it had to be a miracle that I actually managed to even operate it without me doing anything horribly wrong in the process.
After a little bit of experimentation I became confident enough in my ability to move the motorcycle forward – in a long series of very abrupt jerks.
I hopped off and did my best to guide bree through my little discoveries about the operation of using it.
Mostly by accident, bree pressed down on the accelerator while she was still sitting on the motorcycle, and suddenly it gave a very loud roar and shot forward, bree very nearly toppling off it in the process.
It came to a sudden stop again after having crossed about ten metres through the cornfields, with bree clinging on to the handlebars.
After taking a moment before she turned around carefully and gave me an enthusiastic smile.
When I saw her do that, I decided on my second attempt with the motorcycle I wanted to replicate what she had just achieved. So when I got back on to the motorcycle, I was committed to really take it for a ride.
Once I had figured out what I thought was the throttle, I gripped the handlebars as tight as I possibly could and pushed on the throttle with as much force as possible.
The bike gave another deafening roar, and then shot forward.
In the first instant, I very nearly fell off the motorcycle, and suddenly everything was a blur around me, and there was wind against my face, and the big hill ahead of me is getting closer and closer, alarmingly fast.
I didn’t have time to think of the many reasons why this was such a bad idea because moments later, the motorbike had reached the bottom of the hill.
I’m still not completely clear on what exactly happened next, but I lost my grip on the bike and fell off, and the motorbike very nearly fell on top of me.
I lay there for a few moments, feeling dazed, with the sky spinning a bit and my head hurting a lot.
Bree ran over to check on me. She said she kinda freaked out when she helped me up. I must have fallen on something because the back of my head was all bloody and I looked like I was about to faint.
I still sort of wanted to have another go on the motorbike again, even though my head hurt and everything still wouldn’t completely stop spinning around me, and I had also seriously sprained one ankle, but bree helped me back inside, washed the blood from the back of my hair, and then doused it with disinfectant.
At some point during all this my mom arrived back home without either of us realising.
She flipped out the second she saw bree helping me into the living room.
It didn’t take her too long to figure out what had happened. We had never had the opportunity to return the motorcycle to the basement, so it was still lying out there only about fifty metres from the house.
And my mom can be pretty terrifying when she wants to be.
She examined my head and then made me lie down on my bed. She spent the next hour fussing over me, checking the swelling on my ankle and the back of my head where I had hit it.
I was half hoping that maybe she wouldn’t ground me anymore that I still was, because she wasn’t doing the ‘you’re in a lot of trouble’ thing she does whenever she’s about to punish me, but as it turned out she was leaving that for a few hours later, when dad got back.
The whole thing with the motorcycle was probably one of the major reasons why I was grounded for so long.
I mean, I know it was an extremely stupid thing to do, but they didn’t have to ground me for another whole month. Don’t they get that teenagers need to have some kind of freedom?
Anyway, there is a whole other story about how two months became three months, but I probably shouldn’t get into that right now.
I hope that was a little bit of fun to read. I certainly stayed away from that motorcycle ever since this happened. My dad has chained it up at the back of the basement, and I’m not even completely sure whether he kept the key for it or not.
Motorcycles. That’s one more thing I’ve developed an aversion to.

 

 

(The picture is from pexels.com)

One of my memories: A magpie problem

Hey guys, today I decided to share something that happened a few years ago, back when I was eleven. Its one of those experiences I still remember, (it is very hard to forget).
My dad was out at some kind of astronomy event and my mom was busy with ‘school stuff’, which was probably the only reason why they had agreed to let me go with my best friend bree and her parents for a weekend trip away. Something I was very exited about, since it is very rare for me to ever get away on any holidays with my own parents.
So we were in the hotel, on a beautiful and very sunny saturday, when this happened. For me and my bff it was a girls night in, and we both had a whole hotel room all to ourselves, with bree’s parents next door in the room next to us. (I know, bree’s parents are awesome!)
This was a pretty great hotel, with all those things you see in expensive hotels. We had our own TV, a collection of different snacks, two very large beds, an incredibly beautiful view, and a whole list of things on different levels of the hotel, (including a spa, sauna, massage parlour, mini dance club, gym, and a lot of other places).
Anyway, we were having large amounts of fun together, eating from a the range of snacks bree’s parents had bought us, and we decided to go out exploring through the hotel.
So we went to check out the highest level of the hotel, the roof, where bree said a lot of the ‘really cool stuff’ was.
Bree looked a little pale when we first saw how high up we were. The hotel has a total of eighteen floors – and it towers over most of the buildings sorrounding it.
She took me through pretty much all of the facilities on this level, but we didn’t ever stop for long .
Eventually, we arrived at the spa, and there she suggested we relax for a bit.
This lead to us lying back on chairs in the sun, and where she said we should we buy some of the very expensive tropical drinks and snacks on the menu sitting beside us.
When I asked her how exactly we were going to afford these, she then quite casually produced her dad’s credit card and told me she could pay with it.
It took a little persuading from bree to get me to go along with her idea, but she eventually ordered us both drinks and one or two different ice creams, as well as quite a few other delicacies.
We eat as much as we can (which isn’t quite half of what bree bought), enjoy the drinks, and after bree buying herself another one, we wander around a bit more and check out the view. And at some point bree looks at me suddenly and asks, ‘Hey, do you know where I put the credit card?’
At some point after we had paid for our drinks, it must have fallen out of bree’s pocket.
So we immediately went back and chek the seats, and then retrace our steps and check the whole of the top floor.
No sign of bree’s dad’s credit card anywhere.
I attempt to calm bree down, but I am freaking out just as much as she is.
We spent most of an hour going back through all the facilities we explored. Bree contemplated the possibility that it had fallen off the edge of the roof (probably unlikely), or that someone had picked it up (a definite possibility).
Now here it gets a little more… Strange. Both of us were convinced that someone must have taken it, but I had already asked everyone on the top floor whether they had seen anything.
It was pure coincidence that we discover the magpie, which lands quite casually beside us. Its squwaks and bree turns around to shoo it away.
I still remember the moment where bree said ‘uummm, amber? I think I found it?.’
Of all the things we thought might have happened her dad’s credit card.
The magpie. The magpie was holding it.
Both of us were hesitant to get too close to the magpie, but eventually bree went toward it… And it took off again, with the credit card still clutched in it’s claws.
We tried to chase after it. The magpie didn’t seem particularily intersted in leaving our sight, in fact, it was almost as if it knew we wanted the credit card. But at some point a few other magpies flew in and we lost track of which one we were looking for.
About half an hour and a lot of fustration later, I came up with an idea. I told bree to wait there and ran downstairs, grabbed some food, and ran up again. Trying to avoid the attention of the other people who were up there with us, I met up with bree and scattered some of the food on the ground around us.
It took a while, and a little patience, but finally the magpies circling above us landed and began pecking cautiously at the food.
And there it was, the magpie hopping next to bree’s dad’s credit card.
This time neither of us were willing to get too close, so I kept throwing the birds small pieces of food.
That magpie had to know what it had found was somehow important, because it took us a lot of effort to guide it carefully, centimetre by centimetre, away from the credit card.
Bree was about to try again when the magpie hopped back, plucked up up the credit card in it’s beak, and took off with it. Again.
I know. Weirdness follows me everywhere.
Bree yelled and ran after it, and the magpie dropped the card – in mid air, a few metres beyond the edge of the roof.
We never actually found her dad’s credit card, although we raced down and spent another hour searching for it, but someone else did and they handed it back to the hotel, so bree’s dad was alright. And he was nice enough to only get us in a little trouble – although when my parents heard about what happened, they weren’t so nice to me about it.
So there’s my story. One story, trust me, I have others that are equally memorable. I hope it was a little fun to read about- it’s still one of these things me and bree joke about sometimes. And she always stays away from magpies.