The Astral Plane

That's what Damien came up with. The fucking Astral Plane. Yeah the place of Spirit Projection and Out of body Experiences. He said that it's how the Slenderman moves about, that he cuts through... or maybe exists in this normally inaccessible place. But he said that if I get in I may be able to rescue that kid, that if I should find it's lair or whatever, that I can pull the boy back into reality. He gave me various instructional papers, and some mp3 that's supposed to help unlock the required mental states or something. Really my focus was more on making it work than understanding how it works, I'm not going to pretend to understand the metaphysics or whatever of it...

Well, I got in… surprisingly. From the stuff Damien had me read I didn’t expect to. It said that people generally needed to regularly attempt astral projection to reliably do it. That it required concentration and relaxation and just various other states of mind I no longer possess…

Sorry. This is story time, not time for me to lament the loss of my peace of mind.
I’ve probably been grieving for it for too long now anyhow.

Leaving your body is a very very strange experience, you’ve got to… got to just let everything go. It’s sort of like letting yourself slip into sleep but… but remaining conscious throughout the process. There are these strange sensations that try to distract you, um the vibrations are probably clearest of them. The whole world starts to kind of shake slightly and it feels like this shaking is coming from inside you. Your limbs fall asleep and you get that pins and needles feeling, except there’s no pain from putting pressure on or moving them. And then you just pull out and everything’s dark. I mean completely devoid of light. If it weren’t for all the other strange things I’ve seen today I’d probably have fled back inside. But after that glamour dropped earlier… blackness or blindness or whatever it was… well it was welcome.

Instead of moving back within which felt so safe I forced myself away from my origin, and doing so cleared my vision somewhat. I still couldn’t see well or… or maybe the world just lacked detail, I don’t know. I didn’t really know what to expect; I don’t know what on my trip was normal. But everything was hazy… sort of like when you first wake up and your eyes refuse to focus but at the same time it wasn’t like that at all. I’m sorry I’m doing a downright shitty job describing this… it’s, it’s just really really not an easy place to describe. I’m trying to tell you how a world feels when you lack the facilities needed for feeling you know?

Anyhow. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Slenderman I suppose, or maybe just a place that felt different from everything else. Some place ominous maybe or just more peculiar than anything else here. Thing is though that everything in this place felt different. There were areas where color flushed out and others supersaturated with it and really I couldn’t even figure out where I was. Geometry was weird in there, warped… I could float down Colfax for a block and end up 4 miles in the other direction. Damien had said this was normal, that space and time don’t work the same way there, that they don’t seemingly work consistently there and that movement is more will based than physically based.

So… I gave that a try. I figured I’d try to head back to the school where I first met it. That maybe its lair or whatever would be back behind the school… I mean just because that’s where Sara had seen him, and that’s where I’d met him and well I didn’t have any better a place to look. I zoomed, flying with focus and appeared high above Forest Ridge. There were shadows below, bounding and hopping in curious ways… they were people but they seemed displaced from my perception, bouncing and evaporating from my sight. And past it all, inside those trees the world turned all black. I floated over and was pulled down, gravity slowly reasserted itself regardless of my will. The trees twisted and bent, wrapping among each other and blocking my path.  Briars sprang from nothing forming great walls and shapes that shouldn’t be possible. And the colors… I said that things went monochrome and that’s true, but beneath the black there was still color shining simultaneously to nothing at all. Deep greens and purple and burgundy, sky blue, random lines and highlights of these colors touched every unfathomable object, it was so unlike everything I’d seen.

And then... then I was yanked back. Out from the bizarre forest behind the school, back into my apartment. Henry had come back and was shaking me out of it and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I fell back into reality and looked up to him, my eyes still fogged from the Astral world. I fucking screamed at him. I pushed him off and tried to go back into it but for whatever reason he wouldn't relent; maybe he's just grown tired of my shit or maybe he's still mad about the other night. I don't know... but he right pissed me off, he fucked things up, he pulled me out when I'd found... something. Whatever. I'm gonna see if Damien is still up.  I need to find out what the fuck was up with that forest.

~Kal.

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Are you ready for some Footbaaaaaaaaaaaall?

I'm not. I've got more important things to do then watch the Superbowl, I've got a bunch of book reports to pre-grade so Mrs. Veglahn can gauge how my grading abilities are coming, I've got books to finish, and I need to of course get some sleep so I can wake up in the morning. I should have done it earlier, the grading that is,  but I was out skiing with my dad for the last time in a long time.

You see the big boss of my dad's company went and demoted my dad's boss into my dad's position and my dad back into his old position. As a result my dad will be moving back to Austin full time and I probably won't get to go skiing much anymore, or see him much anymore. So that sucks, but I suppose that's how life goes right? Terrible unfortunate things happen and you just have to carry on, at least we gave him a proper send off. Both yesterday and today my dad, a work friend of his, and I went skiing. To commemorate the occasion I skied my first doubleblack diamond yesterday, and then continued to ski them today... doubleblack diamonds by the way are basically the hardest thing you can ski besides a cliff face. It was a great weekend, I fell more times than I could count. One time yesterday I even fell face first into a mogul and lost both my skis... all and all an awesome couple of trips. So I won't get to ski much anymore but at least my parents will be living in the same place again and I suppose it means I can go blow all that money I was saving for a snowboard on other things. I do love me some things.

As for school though, despite the constant snow (which is weird), and cold weather (which is unpleasant) Forest Ridge hasn't closed at all unlike other schools in the area. The closest we've gotten is a late day on Thursday where I got to sleep for two extra hours and then show up twenty minutes late due to unfamiliar bus schedules. I think the some of the parents have gotten tired of driving through the traffic and snow when other schools are shut down though because about a third of the class was missing on Friday. This is totally fine by me though, less reports to read :D. 

To be honest I didn't really want to be there Friday either, I spent most of the day peering out the window to the trees behind the school thinking about the woods behind my house when I was a little kid. If it wasn't so cold outside and I didn't have to get all dressed up for work I'd totally go exploring back there like old times. Been a long time since I explored a forest, there's nothing in the world like walking out from the woods all cut up from briers and thorns, scratching at a new case of poison ivy and picking those little spiky balls off your shoelaces. It's just a very satisfying misfortune... kinda like taking a nasty spill while skiing, it's worth the pain. Besides, I've never wandered a Colorado forest before, I wonder what sort of surprises I'd find among all those pines?

Anywho, back to grading
~Kal

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