Agent Orange - Inconsequential

Episode 13 - D'UDE continued...

CHAPTER 9 continued…

One of them was living right next door and he had never noticed it. Orange had picked up on the guy’s creepy vibe but not at all on the supernatural angle. What if they weren’t people, but instead some kind of spiritual parasites that possessed people? Maybe Jack had been just an average, or okay, slightly above average, creep until yesterday and the entities had taken him over to spy on Orange?

The police arrived. The girl was taken away. Jack was dead and Orange regretted that. He had never killed anyone before. He had shot people, but they had always recovered. Jack might have killed the girl or him. Orange had no choice. The police questioned him and he told them what had happened minus the supernatural manifestations. When asked about the door he told them that he and the assailant had wrestled with it until it eventually came off its hinges. They looked incredulous and told him not to leave the city for the next couple days. He showed them his credentials and they left without any more questions.

The commotion had brought out the neighbors and as Orange looked at each of them he wondered if they were also astral projectors or if they were possessed by psychic parasites or maybe if they had just stolen his mail at some point.

Orange was hoping that everything would die down so he could investigate Jack’s apartment before they put in a new door. When he came back out to check there was a spider’s web of yellow “CRIME SCENE – DO NOT CROSS” tape across the opening. He could get through the tape but it would then be obvious someone had been in the apartment and if anyone noticed they might call the police back to the scene.

He decided to try other ways of collecting data. He went down to the first floor and looked at the name on Jack’s mailbox – Czarkowski.

Back in his room he got his lamp out and typed “D”,”U”,”D”,”E”, with spaces between each letter, into the web browser. He clicked on the “QUERY” button. A window popped up and he entered “orange” and “DOAD”, clicked on “ENTER”.

A form popped up. At the top it said “PLEASE ENTER AS MUCH INFORMATION AS YOU HAVE ABOUT THE PERSON FOR WHOM YOU ARE SEARCHING”. Orange entered Jack’s first and last name and his current address, clicked “SEARCH”.

A report came on the screen listing his age, 33, middle name, Mkhail, past addresses, phone number and many pages of other information. Unfortunately none of it said, “has psychic powers” or “belongs to the brotherhood of evil astral projectors”. He appeared to be your average college dropout who enjoyed the occasional kidnapping. He had a battery charge from four years prior but nothing that seemed to put him in a super secret cult or organization.

All this lead him nowhere. It was noon on a Sunday, two hours ago he had killed a man, the city seemed infested by alien or supernatural creatures that no one seemed to want to talk about, someone had broke into his apartment the day before, a shadowy corporation was trying to kill one of his best friends and … oh shit, he was late for tai chi!

He grabbed one of his smaller encyclopedias, threw it in his bag along with some sweat pants and a t-shirt. He was already dressed for the weekend which for Orange translated to wearing exactly what he wore during the week, minus the tie.

On the subway he looked up astral projection in the encyclopedia he had brought along. It seemed to be a kind of out-of-body experience achieved through meditation, drugs or magic. It could allow you to travel in the dimension of time, into foreign dreamscapes or through the normal waking world as an ethereal ghostly form. Apparently it had been around for quite a while but there was no scientific proof that it was actually possible. Some of the references referred to a silver cord that attached the body to the ‘spirit form’ or ‘projection’ though Orange hadn’t noticed anything like that in his recent encounters.

Of course as a player of “the world’s most popular role-playing game”, Orange already knew most of this, he just had never realized how heavily the game designers had leaned on real world philosophy when creating cosmologies for “fantasy” worlds. In the game, you needed magic weapons to hurt beings that existed on these other planes of existence. Bullets seemed to do the trick here or maybe it was because Orange had shot Jack’s physical body, which the ghostly image was superimposed on, that the bullets had worked. He hadn’t seen any ectoplasmic apparitions far from a projector but what if they could “send themselves out” to roam the world? Orange doubted bullets would work then but he also wasn’t sure if these ethereal forms could affect physical objects either. They might be great spies but not a direct threat to a corporeal person.

Orange arrived at his tai chi class only five minutes in, changed in the bathroom and joined his fellow students. Orange had initially become interested in t'ai chi ch'uan when he read that it translated to “supreme ultimate fist”. It just seemed that as a ‘secret agent’, having a supreme ultimate fist attack would come in handy. Of course others translated it to “supreme ultimate boxing” which was cool but didn’t have the same video game/kung fu movie appeal as supreme ultimate fist.

When he later learned that the type of tai chi he would be learning was more about slow, complicated strings of movements that were used to settle the mind and reduce stress, he was disappointed but too embarrassed to walk out. By the end of the session he felt as if all his life his OCD had been at war with the random chaos of his thoughts, and that finally this thoughts were lined up or stacked in perfect order. Of course a week later the basement of his mind had become a cluttered mess again – so he went back.

After class Orange thought about asking his teacher if he could teach him about any kind of “ultimate spiritual punch” that might be useful against ghosts or beings on other planes of existence. Something like the old D&D 1st edition monk’s quivering palm attack. But considering his teacher was a 50 year-old, gay white guy from Brooklyn, he decided against it. Maybe he should get some holy water or watch Ghostbusters again.