Boy, it's been a while. Sorry, but with Our Town's opening and the need to focus on homework, I haven't had much time to write for this lately. But anywho, my band is playing at North High School's tailgate party tomorrow after school, so if you can be there, we appreciate all the support we can get.
Also, here's a short story I just finished. Formatting might get funky when I copy and paste from Word, but I can't figure out how to do anything about it. Hope you enjoy it.
Strangland stared into the darkness.
Complete, utter, infinite blackness. That was all there was. That was all there ever was. At least, for a long time. What now surrounded him did intercept the unbroken blackness he knew so well. But the infinite blackness still remained, and though his attention now had other priorities, it lingered nonetheless.
Strangland held his hand in front of him. With light completely absent, he could not even see his own fingers as they wiggled into their now familiar form. He closed his eyes and brought back the amalgamation of ideas that had been brewing in his consciousness.
He could not remember how he entered the blackness. He had no memory of interacting with any other life. If Strangland had been alive before the blackness, it mattered no more, as none of it remained. All he knew now to be real was the empty void. For what seemed like a millennium, and very well could have been, Strangland simply floated through the thick, empty space, no direction to go, and, even if he had one, no means of propelling himself there. His mind remained blank; it had no experiences but those that were in the blackness, so he had no thoughts to develop, no language to use when speaking to himself. He had no sense of time or rhythm, as he knew of no measurement to determine how long he had lived there. Not even his body showed any indication of changing.
Yet somehow, something had seeped through the darkness. After an age passed in the darkness with no direction, the man found the inkling of idiosyncrasy in his mind: a light. It wasn’t strong or large; it wasn’t a beam, but only a tiny dot; and yet its presence was undeniably the most powerful force Strangland had ever encountered. Its presence baffled Strangland; he had no memory of ever seeing anything like it. This tiny glow suddenly became all that mattered to him. Once he had found the light in his mind, it never fully left is consciousness.
As he watched the light in his mind, he realized he could manipulate it to an extent. He could make it grow a bit or shrink, and he could make it lighter or darker. After enough practice, he found he could alter it to no extent. The light could glow bright enough to light several universes, and could grow to fill his entire consciousness - but could never leave his mind. He eventually managed to change the mood of the light as well, even though he didn’t understand how. The light became warmer, cooler, bitter, angry, joyous, terrifying. Strangland didn’t understand what changed in the color, or how to describe it, but this may have been because this was his first encounter with emotion. He still had no words to realize what he was feeling, and nothing to compare it to, so Strangland still didn’t know what to think. (Later, as his understanding of the nature of his inventions became clearer to him, Strangland realized these elements to be color.)
On one occasion, the light had reached its fullest potential in his mind when the darkness around him illuminated as the light exploded from his consciousness, immersing Strangland in a blinding flash. Strangland’s eyes burned in agony, never having been exposed to anything but complete blackness. In mere moments, the light dwindled back into nothingness and Strangland saw the world around him to be as nebulous as ever. The sudden and brief radiance baffled him entirely; how had these mental images manifested themselves into reality? How had the light come to him in the first place? Could some external power interfering from afar? Could there be another being in this existence? Strangland grasped for answers, but as was the case with the rest of his life, he found nothing but emptiness.
Still, he dwelled in his mind, using the light to his enjoyment, his one comfort in a bleak existence.
The light continued to evolve as Strangland experimented with his control over it. Soon he found he could contort it beyond a simple rounded glow to form shapes of increasing complexity. He discovered the forms of basic geometry on his own accord, and in time he even managed to develop three-dimensional shapes.
He found that the flash of light he had seen was not a fluke, as he realized he could manifest the more basic shapes in front of him as well. He could not maintain them for more than an extremely brief period, and his attempts to create anything stronger resulted in failure, but he noticed that he became more powerful with each attempt, closer to keeping the shapes for longer, closer to creating whatever he pleased. His improvement felt slow, and developing his skills would take a considerable amount of time, but Strangland knew that he had no shortage of time. So time and time again, he incessantly exercised his skills.
Indeed, given enough practice, he could create shapes of enormous proportion and hold them in existence for as long as he pleased. To test just how powerful he had become, he decided to develop the first constant in his world, something to interrupt the blackness forever.
Strangland held his hand in front of him and focused all his attention on the space inside it. The tiniest speck of light appeared between his fingers, completely unnoticeable and powerless. But as Strangland stressed his muscles, clenched his jaw and concentrated every speck of his energy on the matter he created, the speck grew and grew and grew into an enormous flaming ball of light, thousands of times larger than Strangland himself. And Strangland found that, in enough time, the manifestation could remain without hardly any effort on his part.
Strangland worked unremittingly from then on. He made shapes of all varieties: objects formed of just a few of his basic shapes, developed with thousands of the ideas he had created before, or even those with no geometric background whatsoever. To practice, and to test his strength and endurance, he developed a practice he would repeat from time to time: he would create an enormous sphere, filled with tiny abnormalities to make its development more strenuous, then cast it so away from himself that the massive ball appeared only as a speck. The size and distance made the maintenance of these forms extremely difficult at first, but in time, he found he could control millions at a time with ease, and even dispersed more balls of light among them.
But these creations were merely distractions in comparison to his primary endeavor. As soon as he realized it could be possible, he began experimenting in his mind relentlessly. The process was slow, and Strangland hit dead ends constantly. No matter how often he found himself clueless as to how to overcome an impassible dilemma, he had confidence that, if he examined and manipulated not just large shapes and figures, but if he designed the tiniest microscopic elements of an object to interact with each other properly, he could create an object that could move and operate without his assistance or observation. With enough work, he might even be able to make one that could think and make decisions as he did. He could create another being.
Now, with all his designs full and complete in his mind, he was ready to bring them into existence. His fingers formed the way they always did for his creations. It was time to create his final project.
After this, he would rest. He might make slight changes to his universe from time to time, but most of his creations would be able to function on their own accord. He had performed the most precise mathematical operations to be sure of it, and had adapted every detail to fit these equations. Besides, he would no longer need to create - he would have the one thing he wanted.
The matter spun and formed a sphere as it had thousands of times before, but Strangland knew this one would be different. As it grew larger, he formed deep crevices and peaks, and filled the lowest geographical points with a material he found to be essential to maintaining the well being of his creations. He called it water in English. He had decided to separate his life forms, allowing for the most fascinating variety of possible means of living. English was only an element of one of these styles.
The planet grew just as large as the rest, an enormous spinning ball of dirt and water. This was the moment. This would be the climax of all that Strangland had created. He took a deep breath, and...
Life sprung forth from the planet. The dirt covered itself in green, forests sprouting up in a matter of seconds, filled with plants and animals of every type, all ready to interact with one another in a means that would provide for a perfect and stable environment. Civilizations that should have taken ages to advance became present instantly. The water exploded with creatures that ranged from whales of colossal size to tiny organisms, hardly visible. Every one of the beings that Strangland brought into existence had been designed with excruciating detail to have its own personality, its own way of living, its own view of the world that developed around it.
Each of these creatures began going about its business as if this day was no different from thousands that had come before it.
Strangland descended upon his world. He had chosen a desert, completely flat for miles. There were far more luscious spots on his new “Earth”, but something about the desert he found to be simple, to be beautiful.
A woman was waiting for him there.
“Hello, Strangland,” she said as his feel touched the sand and rooted themselves upon the ground.
She smiled and extended her hand. “I imagine you’ve been alone for a long time.”
