i am dooomed to immortality.

Okay, so. Thread. Here we go...immortality. One hell of a subject, isn't it? The word alone evokes so much, er...a lot. Truly a thing. As Wikipedia states:

"Biological immortality is an absence of aging, specifically the absence of a sustained increase in rate of mortality as a function of chronological age. A cell or organism that does not experience aging, or ceases to age at some point, is biologically immortal. Biologists have chosen the word immortal to designate cells that are not limited by the Hayflick limit, where cells no longer AHAHAHAHA! I have you again!!

Now read, you troll bait. I'm serious; the narrator of this is not a happy guy. Do something nice and read this (in his own words) "narrative putrescine from a mouth that should have been shut up for good twenty years ago", which is about what happened twenty years ago.

This is an in-universe thing connected to my main writing thread in WB, which I have done before. I'd hope it could stand on its own okay, but if you haven't read that and anything seems too in-universe to understand, just post and ask. I'm sure there will be a few things that it takes having read that to catch. Anyway—

Starring: Inspector Ryu E. Takei

Wait—you're worried that I'm suicidal? No. No, no, no; I don't think I made myself clear. That's not something I'm ever going to do, so no need to call anyone. See, I've given up on dying. I'm too bad at it.

How can one be bad at dying? It's really not so impossible—look at you. How many people come in here to attack you per day again? Like, ten every five minutes or something? And you told me about what happened to your neck, and your eye—the storms here can get pretty mean here. You were lucky. That's not to downplay what happened to you at all; I mean you're lucky if you walk out of the center of one of those anything less than brain dead. I mean that you suck at death, too. You're fucking glued to this mortal coil, man. Or more fitting for you—entangled in it. Heh, tentacles.

But me? Let me explain. I wasn't always a private detective. I didn't become one willingly. You know me; they hand out licenses for that too easily in this city, and I wouldn't have felt qualified if I'd gone that way.

After the situation with my wife was cleared away, I went through the whole police academy shebang, through the hardest courses they had within the city limits. I was afraid I wouldn't get in, felt the thick hesitance in the air during my initial interview. They saw my name and remembered me and what I'd been through; on one watchman's desk, I saw my hearing papers still sitting there and kept my head up, pretending I was a different Ryu Takei.

Perhaps they shouldn't have let me in—someone who had lost the will to live, no way. But it was the law that was the last thing left in me at that time, it having been the only thing that had cared to stand between my wife's knife fetish and I. Let's face it; the watch isn't Iosethep's most ethically ideal system, either, and I think they couldn't resist the temptation of a guy with no more fear of death than a blunt instrument.

I think what finally got me a place was that I told them that I'd wanted to be a detective even before my shit went down. When I was a little kid, like you did. It sounded sane enough. It wasn't true. The truth was that I'd overheard, in the back of a bar like yours (but way shittier), that joining the Ring District Watch that year was a great way to die. That was the year when it wasn't the watch that was really in power out there—that was the year of the Dingoes.

No, not the dogs! Not funny. You know I mean the gang, the conspiracy theorists.

After having deliberately annoyed the watch enough to get "volunteered" to infiltrate the Dingoes' ranks, they put me all in black. For a tremendous price, they even gave me a pair of doglike contact lenses that covered the entire eye to make me look like I'd had my eyes done surgically, the insignia of a punk in their upper echelons. I had to look like one because I was going into the Iosethep catacombs to collect information on what they did to train their leaders so far down there.

I finished off my disguise with a bright green headband, my own touch, knowing how they liked color. On the way to the catacombs' Ring Five entrance, I stopped in an alley so neglected and out of the way, even for the Ring District, that it was still blackened by twentieth century soot. It was the only place where I was safe from the eyes of my superiors. There, I did what they had been too humane to do, even to a nuisance. I took out a bottle cap I'd had hidden in my pocket and closed my eyes. I then twisted the sharp-edged cap over the socket of each until it left scratches, semicircular marks on each of my brows and my cheekbones to remove all doubt that my eyes had been anything but surgically decorated; the marks looked just like those from the clamps the the Dingo surgeons used to keep their mates' eyes open on the operating table. I looked like I'd just had it done.

I put the extra time into my looks because I thought that would be the last outfit I ever wore, but how wrong I was. Despite my best efforts.

edited 19th Nov '10 3:11:04 AM by SPACETRAVEL

O_O The face in that macro is oddly terrifying.

Until next update, dingo puppies, not to be confused with phaser-wielding bikers. [1]◊ [2]◊ [3]◊ Also, a link to the project this crap comes from: [4]

Pun. Hurt. Brain.

That is a horrible pun.

Interesting work.

So Takei in a bar, is telling his life story to a...what exactly?