The Dreamers Exchange

Chapter 3: Back at it Again with the Black Magic

After drugs after drugs after drugs and losing friends after friends after friends Jake returned home coherent. He filmed a video for his channel. His Youtube channel was a pastime of his. Youtube was an website in the 21st century where someone could film and upload a video of themselves online. Then engage with their audience and grow a fanbase or a "fandum" centered around their quirky content and personality. Some people had millions of fans on this site. But Jake had very few.

Jake made basic white girl vlogger content. Some speedpaints that he's done. He had been on the site since he was about 11 years old. His original accounts of him with his long hair in a pony tail. Him talking to the camera and directing his fellow kids on what to do and what to say. These days it was a solo operation.

He'd been texting his friends online. However incoherent. They stopped responding. They all stopped responding. Maika visited with him in the hospital. But outside of that and after that, they all disappeared. Maika included. At a con which is short for convention he met up with Cooks. Conventions in this time period were kind of like giant meet ups, with panels on topics for all nerdy habits. In between the panels people would show up in costumes, and nerd out.

Cooks was awkward. But the message was clear when they briefly saw each other. "I don't want to be friends, with a crazy" or "I don't want to be friends with someone who shows symptoms" despite swearing time and time again they'd always be there despite this. Jake had a tendency to rewind responses. Over and over again. He remembers the last night he saw Maika. He had invited him over. It was a sleepover and Maika was on a rush to get to work. Maika had taken him back briefly after he got better. At least he thought he did. He thought it was just "work". Work that kept his friends' minds busy. Work that kept his friend away.

That night at Jake's house Maika slept. Jake began to have romantic fantasies and that was the last of it. Jake still frequently thinks about Maika. How his one true friend was ghosting him. Ghosting being slang for leaving you on read, leaving you without a proper goodbye, just reading and not responding to your messages. Miaka knew Jake was troubled when people did this sort of thing. Maika knew Jake had people leave his life tragically with no goodbye, no letter no note. Jake's father had even killed himself this way. But Maika did not feel empathy. So Maika didn't respond.Jake just couldn't get over it.

Today Jake would be attending church with his mother's boyfriends assistance. His country despite a formal separation of church and state was a very Christian one. His mother was Jewish like Maika's family. The boyfriend was Catholic. Some kind of gathering every Sunday that his mom often attended. Jake believed every religion was equally real. The term for this was "omnious". His mom didn't think he was fit to be on his feet again but after loosing Maika? He felt the need for ANY sort of community.

Jake's the kind of person who'd let the Latter Day Saints in for Coffee. If only they'd drink coffee. Hell Jake was the kind of person who the Mormon's could recruit do to polite politics alone. Once Jake was at a convention and one of those salespeople had gotten their hands on him and he ended up paying 15$ for a copy of some budhist book he ended up later turning into a booksafe. He felt bad about it later on, growing to respect religion, but at the time? Felt pretty good to be cutting up doctrine.

Jake sighed. Eventually Jake found himself on what is known as "the left handed path". A path of magic and ascension. Jake easily became a magician from his time spent trying and somewhat succeeding to sell his soul. He started attending a local bar in Sandy Springs that was quite a drive and very far away from him, known for its art hostings as well its wide array of video games. Battle Brew as they called it. But despite all of this one thing became clear Jake Caloway soon was alone.