Hiya friends! It’s me, Prisoner 841773, but you can call me P’pol! That’s right! I am in the slammer, a real pig in the pen… I don’t really like calling myself a pig because it feels mean and I have it rough as it is now, but what can you do! Nothing, apparently! I asked for help like 496 times before this, but hey who’s counting? Me. Prison is a snooze fest! But, Babbit or Krevin or… I don’t know someone from the Babbler did manage to get me a press pass while I’m in here! So I can write again! That’s something!
But what would a sweet lil’ jailbird like me have to write about? My time with the gangs? They are pretty alright, but honestly so many of them just seem to HATE the Empire. It’s really bizarre. Their kids seem to like it enough, but they go to Education Dome instead of having to do manual labor all day so I guess maybe their parents are just lazy. Frankly, though, I love it! I get to stretch, exercise, all that good stuff!
Plus, don’t tell him I said, but my cellmate is a real bore. He just sits around all the time, talking to some shady folks about “the product” and giving the guards stuff. He’s such a couch potato.
I, on the other hand, am industrious! And, like always, it is paying off! Day in, day out, I work hard for the man, grinding away the time until freedom or more likely death, according to the Magistrate who presided over my case! But that’s just being a negative nelly if you ask me! I know hard work pays off and by the time I get outta here I’ll have more than enough credit to buy myself a way to the top! I’m sure they set up an account for us or something. I don’t know how to access it, but I highly doubt they’d let me work for free!
In fact, I have been such a good “stool rat” - a term of endearment the guards call me - that I get special privileges now! For example, lights out is usually when the sun goes down because they don’t have power in the cells! But the guards gave me a flashlight so I could practice my drawing! I have really improved, check it out!
It’s me! Looking good, P’pol! At least, I think I am! They don’t let us have mirrors because of “violence” but if looks could kill then yeah I get it, that’s dangerous!
Anyway, like I said, I got it good here! I get to take on more and more complicated jobs all the time! Like crawling in the ducts, playing “bait” when monsters get too close to the gate, sometimes I even get to hold things in place when welders need a hand! But is that really important? Is that worthy of a whole article? I tell you this, dear readers! It is, but like I mean you know me, I want to break the stories everyone else is too chicken to. And that is what I am going to do here today! By the end of this article, you will be foaming at the mouth and crying out to the heavens shouting “Why, why, oh why why why?” Why? Let’s get into it!
A few weeks ago there was a power flux in one of the main capacitors! That sounds pretty bad, mainly because it most certainly is. There were electrics flying all over the place, big giant sparks “arcing” - that’s the TECHNICAL term they taught me by accident - and everyone was yelling about it “Oh no the experiments oh no the masters will be angry,” whatever it isn’t even that big a deal! Calm down, guys! You got P’pol! That’s probably what they said before coming to get me! They said, “You’re our most expendable fodder, get in there and shut that thing down.” I took my trusty bare hands and got to it!
As I approached the great mechanical… thing… I noticed something odd! The electrics were hurting me pretty badly, and not in the kind of way that I wanted to continue, but when you need something done, call P’pol! That’s my motto! I wish more people would say it! Please say it to your friends and family!
Maybe it was all the sparks in my eyeballs, maybe it was the searing pain also in my eyeballs, but I swore I saw something as I ilmed ever closer to my goal. Something out of this world, and I’m not talking aliens! They don’t like me writing about them anymore and I don’t like the brainwashing machine so we agreed to stop pestering each other. No, what I saw was a revelation beyond anything I have ever seen in my unknowable amount of years on Hydaelyn. In fact, I can’t even begin to understand how to describe it, so just take a peak at this capture from the security cams I traded someone’s time in the Hole to get!
See that above my hand? Where the electrics are getting me? What’s that all about? Huh? Is it a trick of the eye? An electrics doing some sort of fancy show? The time stamp on the camera? I honestly don’t know, but it got me thinking! After I woke up in the infirmary, I realized something. Something no one has ever talked about, as far as I know. I spoke to the Chirurgeon. He said, “You seem to be recovering nicely.” I spoke to him again. He said, “You seem to be recovering nicely.” Again, I engaged in conversation, and for the third time he replied, “You seem to be recovering nicely.”
It was so strange, but when I look back, many of my interactions with people have been much the same. Some phrase repeated over and over about nothing important. They wander in patterns, never paying attention to the things around them. Every day, the prison entertains four lucky adventurers with a show, letting them fight robots that they clean up and reset for them. Why do this? Is it funny? Is the money good? Or… worse…
I have come to the conclusion that no one else ever has, probably. At least no one ever told me, and that’s good enough I guess. And that secret truth is that we are, all of us, TRAPPED! Trapped in a SIMULATION! A simulation of UNKNOWABLE MORALITY! Is it good? Evil? Unknowable, that’s what that means! For years I have wondered why it is I can pull up a full book on things I have done. Pondered the many mysteries of my childhood. I do not remember growing up, do any of you? I saw a kid once, I know that’s a thing! Why can’t I remember that time? Did it happen? Are we in a loop? Do we exist outside of the simulation? What are we?
But… Does it even matter? At the end of the day, whether we can break free or not…. We are stuck here. No one can escape, ever, for any reason and we need to come to terms with it! So I have! Yes, that’s right, I process grief REALLY fast because of all the experience I have with it and my Can-Do attitude! They don’t call me “Punching Bag P’pol” for nothing! No one can beat me up, not even intangible concepts! And I won’t rest until I have unlocked every dark secret plaguing our lives! Where does the air come from? Why won’t seagulls hang out with me if I don’t have bread? There are so many unanswered questions and I promise you I will figure them out!
“But P’pol,” you must be yelling at your newspaper, foam from your mouth blurring out the lines on the page and making the already challenging maze that much more difficult, “with you in prison, how will you be able to uncover the hidden truths of existence, the stars, the cosmos, and beyond? For it is a pity one as exceptionally beautiful and clever as you would be the captive of a fiend most cruel, most vile, with very nice uniforms that I kind of wish I had!” Fret not, and don’t worry about how I knew your reaction would be precisely that! For I have a plan.
I can’t get into much detail but some, shall we say, inmates and I have already devised a plan for escape involving a tunnel, a distraction, and also a big fire we will use to cause a panic and then in the confusion steal the weapons from the guards who respond and then flee into the aforementioned tunnel and use the weapons to break through the flimsy grate that will surely be the only thing blocking us from our freedom! I really wish I could say more, like that it is going to happen next week on Tuesday at around 9:30 PM in E Block, but this is a secret plan that I do not want to jeopardize with my proclivity to get into too much detail.
And if that fails, I have been working another angle! I have a guard who thinks I’m cute and I’m going to use that to steal his uniform and pretend to be him and work as a guard during the day and uncover hidden truths at night! What could go wrong? Until then, this is P’pol signing off! And this is me with that Guard, Sam Mattherson! He works in E Block during third shift!
