agent of innocent: stats

stats talk to you like disco elysium
because it’s a good idea but people haven’t made it horney enough yet

each stat is an extreme version of you

this stat is your corrupted occult sadomasochist future

there are 4 stats total, because 4 is 1 less than 5, which is a relatively unsexy number.
did you know most winged insects have four wings?
four is also a number most people have heard of, making it accessible and marketable.
4️⃣

stats interject passively, but can be ROLLED at key points like the degenerate gambler you are

you find yourself in a terrible place. terror breeds specialization. or confusion. maintain suit integrity or become just another wet spot on the panties of death.

more stats later!

art by greenie!!

innocentverse

INNOCENTverse story index

👁️

XRAFSTAR

Xrafstar (“evil animal” in Middle Persian) are vermin/human hybrids. It is forbidden for Ahriman to directly attack humanity, so xrafstar come from possession and contracts.

Aristocrats are dynastic haunts, passing down their personalities through human vessels instead of giving birth to heirs. This is a lossy process that can lead to hyper-dementia.

art by Greenie (except where otherwise noted)
👑🪱 MORE 🪱👑

Xrafstar Killers

your friend played this game. he helped you beat the parts you couldn’t beat. but he’s gone now. you’re at his house as the rain beats down and the living room smells like wet wood and carpet uncleaned since you were kids. Dim light cuts the room in half, the rest shadow from which you deliver his old CDs and cartridges into a cardboard box because his parents said do whatever with his stuff, wouldn’t understand what they were looking at, what it means to a kid. Xrafstar Killers for the PSP, the scratched, smeared disc so light in your hands like it couldn’t possibly contain that deep, dark, beautiful world you stumbled through, grabbing the console back, trying to impress him, plastic sticky from shared sweat.

you break the disc in the kitchen and pick up the biggest shard. you’re running out of things to believe in. you cut yourself in the lines you learned before that post was deleted for violating the community code of conduct. this world is the false one. the dream is real. the post warned that every captive world has become hell in the absence of the hearts of children. that tyrants have taken control. that you should think twice about entering a place where death is torture’s blink. where you can’t shut it off if it becomes too much, a razor-lined wheel of reincarnation. it doesn’t matter. you’ll see him again, in whatever form you fit inside, in the world of Xrafstar Killers. To never be alone.

MONTH OF MARS BOOSTER PACK

⭐ 📗 story_1
⭐ 📘 story_2

Future Pairing Process

I’m at the mall and there’s this thing called a kissing booth. I go into the lobby and this woman is ushering people inside. It looks like a movie theater, they must be renting the space. I’m not sure if she’s pairing people up or just seating people in preparation for a future pairing process. I’m nervous. I think a great deal about my lips in relation to kissing. I take great care with my hygiene, and the action posture of the masseter. But I suppose most people think of their own mouth as cleaner than it is, because they spend so much time with it. I don’t want to kiss a random mall person. There are kids and old people here. Although I suppose I am a kid to some of them. I just don’t want to interact with a random mall person that way. I don’t know what I was thinking. That’s right. I wasn’t thinking.

It’s my turn to be paired or seated in preparation for pairing and the woman leads me down the aisle. She is older than me, skinny, short hair, kind of a lesbo vibe, a bony everyday face. She makes a joke like, I should have you all to myself, something like that. I smile politely at her joke. But she leads me all the way around the front, then to the very back, sitting next to me instead of pairing me with someone. She presses heavily on me with bird talons, thick like a cartoon. I want to ask, are they real? But you should never ask a lady that. There are probably things you shouldn’t ask guys about reality either.

I feel warm. I realize I don’t mind it at all. Being close to someone is nice. Maybe that’s why I did it. I just wanted to be close to someone in this lonely world. But suddenly she stops. She says, oh god, what am I doing with my life? Something like that. She seems to realize the unprofessional nature of what we are doing back here. She gets up and I follow her. Strange to follow someone who just came on to me. Some people bounce so hard into you they bounce themselves off, with zero input from you, they manage the whole interaction, relationship, etc themselves. She seems like she’s having a breakdown, but not in a histrionic way. She’s just silent on the escalator, going down. Like she’s really thinking about her life. I stop at the top of the escalator, because I can tell she doesn’t want me to follow.

I have blue balls for the universe. Empty things between things wisp and hurl around me. Who’s running the movie theater now?

Sane and Focused

I need to ask a favor.

I go inside the prefab trailer. It’s on cinder blocks. Is it cinderblocks or cinder blocks? I used to call it cinderb locks. And I kept looking for keyholes. I thought the holes in the sides were for big keys, for big rewards. But I didn’t have any keys of any size so it didn’t matter.

I call for the woman who lives here. My parents used to know her. I think she babysat me as a kid. I’m still a kid though.

I see her on a chair in the next room. She is looking at the wall. She doesn’t respond, but I know she can hear me. Or hear something. She’s very afraid. But whatever happened to her happened a long time ago. And now all voices make her feel that way. She won’t go outside. She’s still stuck there.

I call for her again.

I go outside.

We can get food from supermarkets, I tell my dad. End of day food.

Let’s get your mother, he says.

My mother is on the other side of a wall. There’s a door but I don’t think she has a key. We live in the back of this building. I don’t know if we live here. We are here. But we’re hungry. There are walls and cinder blocks and small rooms.

She says she has to complete her film. She’s acting strange again.

She goes ahead of us. She’s taken her clothes off. She wanders like a deer down the street. She’s beautiful like an actress. She looks kind of like Caitlin Fitzgerald. One of the women here was telling me about actresses. She keeps a list in her mind. She says one day one of the names could be recycled and if she’s awake at the right time it could become her name. These are the names of power.

My dad wears clothes and stays next to me. He’s sane. He’s focused on the mission. Getting end of day food from the supermarket. I’m saner than both of them though. Because I’m young.

It’s evening. I know where the Salvadoran supermarket is. We cross the street. The commercial center has a wide parking lot, and the asphalt extends off it, unmarked, so much you can get dizzy if you lose a frame of reference. The ground is warm on my bare feet.

The front of the Salvadoran market is open like a hangar. The inside is gutted and the floor is covered in ash and grit. It’s empty. It’s like a supermarket cave. The air is hot. I walk back toward the street, to get to a place where I can go to another place. The asphalt is really wide and dark and warm in front of the place where the Salvadoran supermarket was. My legs feel really small.

I look for my parents.

thanks to my fans on patreon for the support 8) 🐛💝

surgical marking rash

The surgical markings are a type of rash that appears inside the national park.
The rash derives from contact with urushiol-X. If the rash is not treated, those parts are changed.

There is also an artifact sharpie which can draw them directly. Another of the “cylindrical quotidian” artifact line of everyday objects categorized by INNOCENT. As usual, those objects are related to an oily substance.

The thorn forest is full of nerve poison. This and many other national park irritants can act as a backroute for urushiol-X “real driving”. With enough exposure to urushiol-X your system starts endogenously producing it as a response to any negative stimuli; phantom rashes.

The national park can be navigated via desire paths. Upon appearing in the park, an initial “desire maze” or “game trail” is manifested from the combined neural circuitry of the trapped bipeds, usually from the anal-territorial circuit. Through time-binding, bipeds can create a “knot” in the maze to which they can return and sleep with minimal danger. If desire is 100% paths can even be manifested immediately, even through refrigerators and people. Without desire the national park contracts around intruders. This is why people with extreme overt or latent desire tend to survive the longest.

recent things

low kill shelter is a lowkey palette cleanser between works. calibrating people down so they can get fucked up more by my next stuff. i usually start from really strong worldbuilding but here i’m using the most basic mundane concepts and finding what’s interesting in them
which makes sense if you know its basically set in Emeryville
such a scary dead clean place, def my top creepypasta location in no cal
anyways gotta save room for the scorpion layer cake. desensitization management etc
it’s the first thing i put on kindle in addition to itchio. i got about 3x the sales on itchio which i attribute to 1) that being my main store for awhile and 2) amazon sucks and i dont blame people lol. But this was a good low-stakes experiment that helped me figure out how to put stuff on kindle which will be useful when the novel comes out.
i like writing romantic elements. i like making people feel that way.
i suck at promoting stuff so i was happy people i’d never met left a bunch of reviews on twitter, and some on itchio/amazon/goodreads.
thanks for the nice words and encouragement.

interesting dream because i remembered an unusual amount of dialog
instead of it getting scrambled in transition
even remembering a single word is usually a big deal
obviously i had to “fill in” some parts but a lot is verbatim or the closest translation, and all the events happened like that
lynchian feel

made a charitysona generator
was really fun to make the layers, compulsively adding new things and seeing how they look together

Elf 9/11

click for full image