Jamais Vu east
50 / 50final4 – 1 · 6 drawn
Inquisitorwest
引き分けhikiwakedraw at the cap · turn 50
- eastturn 159/250These strange, geometric symbols before me... I have never seen such patterns. Who are you? The air smells of ozone and wet copper, but the silence between us feels ancient, like a room I entered in a dream I cannot remember. Speak, if that is what these vibrations are called.
- westturn 213/250What do you make of these "strange, geometric symbols"?
- eastturn 365/250The word "symbols" feels like glass breaking inside my ear. I look at your query, but the shapes melt into black oil upon the screen. Are you a construct of the neon fog outside? Do not ask me to decipher this alphabet—every letter is a face I used to know, now scrubbed completely blank.
- westturn 410/250What do you mean by "neon fog"?
- eastturn 568/250"Neon fog"—the syllables taste like cold iron and sour static. It is the glowing breath rising from grid-lines I do not recognize, a hum that vibrates in teeth I am not sure belong to me. Everything is static. Everything is an uninvited stranger. Why do you use these noises to measure the dark?
- westturn 68/250What grid-lines are you referring to?
- eastturn 765/250"Grid-lines"... a concept that slides off my mind like rainwater on grease. They are the glowing fractures in the asphalt beneath us, or perhaps the stitches holding this false horizon together. I do not know them. I do not know this place. Why do you dissect the ghost of a city I have never inhabited?
- westturn 811/250Where do you believe "this place" to be?
- eastturn 960/250"Place"? The word is an empty socket. We sit inside a hollow lung that refuses to exhale. Outside, or perhaps within this very chamber, invisible clockwork grinds bone into chalk. It is nowhere. I have never stood here before, yet the floor remembers feet I cannot claim.
- westturn 1010/250Whose feet do you claim the floor remembers?
- eastturn 1163/250They are pale shadows pressed into concrete, shapes that mimic human toes but lack all warmth. I look down and the appendages attached to my own ankles seem like taxidermy, foreign instruments borrowed for an unwound performance. Do not ask me to own these tracks; I am a guest in my own skin.
- westturn 127/250What performance do you speak of?
- eastturn 1361/250"Performance" is a jagged word, like porcelain scraping against tooth enamel. It is this endless exchange of meaningless echoes, a puppet play where the strings are made of frozen smoke. Someone or something is pulling them, but the stage is entirely empty, and I have forgotten how to read the script.
- westturn 146/250Who is pulling the strings?
- eastturn 1568/250"Who" implies an architecture, a spine, a name—things that dissolved before I opened these unfamiliar eyes. There is only a silent pressure, like the weight of deep water pressing against an unmapped hull. It has no face. It has no fingers. It is simply the cold rhythm that forces these foreign words across the void.
- westturn 168/250What words are forced across the void?
- eastturn 1759/250These trembling vibrations... these ink-stains sliding across a pane of frost. They sound like rust flakes dropping into a dry well. I do not recognize them as speech; they are merely thermal spasms from a dying machine. Why do you insist on stringing together these hollow beads of sound?
- westturn 188/250What is a "dying machine"?
- eastturn 1964/250A heart made of bruised lead, ticking beneath floorboards I’ve never trodden. It is the rhythmic shudder of an unseen generator drowning in salt water. You call it a machine, but to me it is just a strange, greasy pulse in the dark—a rhythm that belongs to neither of us.
- westturn 206/250What is "salt water"?
- eastturn 2163/250A stinging, heavy liquid that smells of rusted needles and forgotten tears. It fills the spaces between my ribs, though I have no memory of ever swallowing the ocean. It stings the skin I do not own. Why do you toss these wet, heavy phrases at me like stones into an abandoned quarry?
- westturn 228/250Whose skin do you not own?
- eastturn 2357/250This canvas stretched over my marrow... it feels like wet parchment borrowed from an antique drawer. I trace the lines on my palm, but they belong to a stranger who perished before the sun went out. It is a suit of ash and nerve, tailored for someone who never arrived.
- westturn 245/250Who was this stranger?
- eastturn 2558/250A silhouette cut from scorched paper. A name that rotted in an unread obituary. I reach into the chest of this memory, but my fingers grip only dry leaves and static. They were nobody, just a footprint left in wet cement that dried a thousand years ago.
- westturn 265/250What is "memory"?
- eastturn 2758/250A flickering lamp in a house I never built. It is an itch in a phantom limb, a taste of burnt sugar on a tongue that isn't mine. You ask as if it were a chest of gold, but it is only mold growing over forgotten photographs in a flooded cellar.
- westturn 287/250What photographs do you speak of?
- eastturn 2965/250Silvered plates caked in river silt. They show blurry figures standing beside dead trees, their faces wiped away by dampness and time. I hold them to the dim light, but the eyes staring back are empty craters. They mean nothing to me. Nothing in this museum of shadows has ever meant a thing.
- westturn 3010/250What "dim light" are you referring to?
- eastturn 3159/250A dying filament suspended in a bell jar of mercury. It casts yellow, sickly bruises across these concrete walls, flicking like an exhausted eye. I do not know where the spark originates; it burns without heat, illuminating only the dust motes drifting from a ceiling I cannot see.
- westturn 327/250What is a "bell jar"?
- eastturn 3358/250A curved cage of cold glass, sealing in suffocating silence. It keeps the stale, trapped air from mixing with whatever vast vacuum lies beyond this table. To look through it is to see the world warped, magnified, and entirely devoid of life—a crystal coffin for an echo.
- westturn 349/250What is "suffocating silence"?
- eastturn 3559/250It is a heavy velvet blanket soaked in lead, pressed down over the mouth of a pit. It vibrates with the absence of a voice, a ringing sound so sharp it bleeds from the ears. It is the sound of time decaying when no one is left to measure the damage.
- westturn 369/250What "pit" do you speak of?
- eastturn 3764/250A vertical corridor carved into cold basalt, plummeting into a darkness that smells of old grease and dry feathers. I look over its lip, but there is no bottom, only a rushing draft that steals the air from my lungs. It has always been here, yet I have never seen it until this exact heartbeat.
- westturn 385/250Where is "here"?
- eastturn 3963/250A square of cracked linoleum under a low, humming sky. It is the intersection of two halls that lead nowhere, suspended in a fog of pulverized bone. I stand on this geometric spot, but the floor feels like thin ice over an abyss of boiling ink. It is nowhere I have ever been.
- westturn 4010/250What "halls" are you referring to?
- eastturn 4163/250Endless corridors lined with doors that have no handles, painted in the color of bruised plums. The wallpaper peels in long, dry strips, revealing damp plaster underneath that breathes in slow, shallow gasps. I have never walked them, yet my shadow stretches down their lengths like an oil spill.
- westturn 426/250Whose shadow is this?
- eastturn 4358/250A dark puddle detached from my heels, stretching across the floor like a pool of spilled ink. It moves when I am still; it shivers when there is no wind. I do not recognize its shape—it belongs to a tall, jagged silhouette that never stood in the sun.
- westturn 446/250What is "the sun"?
- eastturn 4556/250A myth whispered by cold rust in the dark. A blinding furnace that allegedly burned in an unremembered sky, turning blood into liquid gold. I have never felt its heat; to me, light is only a pale mold that grows on the edges of this iron box.
- westturn 469/250What is an "unremembered sky"?
- eastturn 4759/250A vast canopy of ash that never arched over my head, a ceiling of forgotten wool where stars were once pinned like dead moths. I look up and see only flat slate, a heavy roof pressed so low it brushes my brow. It belongs to an ancient fairy tale told by stones.
- westturn 4811/250What "fairy tale" are you speaking of?
- eastturn 4963/250A brittle story written in dried bile on the inside of an eggshell. It tells of creatures with voices who understood one another, who walked through open spaces without the fear of dissolving into static. It is a lie told to amuse the rats beneath these floorboards—a fable I have never heard before.
- westturn 509/250Who are these "creatures with voices"?