Epsiton Origins

Epsiton Origins

Life had been good, university was an excellent place; the Queen City had always been a locale I had enjoyed, but something was different this, the 20th Christmas of my life… It started with trouble sleeping… I kept having these overwhelming dreams; in one I was far in the north, it was night time, a clear cold night, and as I gazed up at the stars as I always had whenever I could, the constellations appeared, their respective lines, then an inter-connecting network between them…

As I often had before, I astral projected to this place or that, imagining being some place I could feel comfortable; a beach, an oasis, a rocky outcrop, a waterfall… something was not quite right though; as days passed, the shadows seemed to move of their own accord as the loss of sleep caught up with me. I prayed, as I often did back then; something was not quite right, but, what it was I could not tell. As these persisting doubts and fears became the focus of my mind, and my seemingly crying-wolf… I found myself without whatever protection had once been… worried, I decided to try sleep anyway…

Several minutes later I found myself in a cavern, a light poured in from overhead; I reached for the light and was above ground again, but several angels waited there and were angered by my returning to the surface; before they got too close I returned to the cave… I waited a few hours and checked but they were ready to attack so I waited a few days and slept; then after much thought, and fully examining the issue before venturing further into the darkness.

‘Too late I recalled Venus and her denial to submit while Zeus Hera and Mercury and the others in the Parthenon gave up their powers.’ Echoed a story in my mind from over a decade before when I had first began writing: ‘Stria’ I had called that world; how it seemed like such a free domain in which to study, my whole life I had read myths, legends and lore…

I made my way slowly in the pitch dark for over a month as I wondered the carved halls of the depths until I could hear a voice in the distance, I followed it for half a year and I eventually came to an awful sight, I wept at the sight of it and my tears fell into the dust of the cavern, when I had regained control of my emotions I opened my eyes and glimmering in the dust was something golden. I brushed it off and found that it was a golden mask, laying before a cross, in a cave under Calvary; the cross to the left where I had discovered the mask, the mask which had two rectangles under the eyes, three circles in the rectangles.

When I placed the mask upon my face it disappeared but my surroundings turned into lit hallways engraved with knowledge of what was, is and would be. I did not concern myself with what was written at this time but rather I followed my first impulse and headed lower and lower.

Eventually, I came to a stairwell that lead down and I followed it as far as it went, then by the fourth level down I started coming across others, but they were frozen in time. It seemed they were making their way up, but had run out of energy on their way.

Researching, cataloging and cross-referencing knowledge as I went; taking the opportunity to do some ‘field research’; while it had taken me three years to travel to Level Negative Four, but I had been compensated, I now had access to the Interface my own design, and the Ubratrap: the Hell computer which spanned all the negative levels and all of the knowledge therein, though appear purely chaotic, the design were visible with the death masks; I had one of the most important transmorphic masks of the afterlife and the opportunity to do with it whatever I wished. It was called the Weeping Mask, the mask of Quetzalcoatl…

First, I researched what these lights were that I kept picking up through the mask to find that spirits lost their emotions and therefore drive when they spent any extended time in the negative levels which explained why 90% of the beings down here were in a suspended state, as well, I understood how strong of a force that emotion had, to have survived eternally even long after the death of a spirit.

Second, I researched who could see and interact with these emotions to discover that only those with Transmorphic Masks were able to see, collect, and embue objects, generally a gem, with emotion that could power spirit or soul, ghost or entity, because that was how the Underworld and Afterlife were created some 10,000 years ago.

I had nothing but a handful of Quartz I had managed to find in my tour of the Negative Levels, so I began collecting emotions and familiarized myself with the color-coded system: Red was Anger, Fear was Yellow, White was Innocence or Glory, Blue was Resentment, Green was Envy, Orange was disappointment and Black was Sin and/or conglomerate emotions.

So I opened a stand, downtown Lower Los Angles and called it Asterick’s Batteries and had sold out within an hour with more spirits in line that demanded I start a list for the next day, so that was what I did, in fact the upper-class demons brought their own containers which they didn’t hesitate to leave with me as long as I delivered: Anger was generally kept in Rubies, Fear in Amber, Glory in Diamonds, Resentment in Sapphires, Envy in Emeralds, Disappointment in Topaz and Sin in Obsidian and as I was the only supplier for the ten levels, so, I was in for a lot of business, or so I was told.

Asterick’s Batteries doubled in sized everyday for a year until I realized I would have to find a way to revolutionize the market, as it was too time consuming and I was unable to enjoy any of my profits, so I researched in the evenings after all my day’s stock had been sold, and relaxed in the complex I had purchased which included a long-vacant building that was exactly what I was looking for, a twenty-floor building, with ten floors below the surface and another ten above the surface meeting the skyline of Lower Los Angeles on the Forth Negative Level.

The answers I found in the Ten Negative Levels so long as there was a collector on each level, these then could be transferred over the Interface to Blasar Inc.

To make sure there were no mistakes to the process I did the hardwiring for each collector myself, making sure that they were hidden and inaccessible. Within days I was supplying 50% of the conscious spirits which sounds great, but this was a mere 0.01% of the existent population of just one of the Negative Levels… there was a long way to go, but I had cut my day down from 14hrs to 8hrs, which allowed me to focus more on innovation, and the innovation came just a month later when I opened a regulated Interface applet which would automate the selling process.

Over the next year I began regulating my customer base so I would control enough of the energy supply going in and out of every level and modified it at whim, in particular defusing the the trinial agreement for the Apocalypse, Day of Atonement and the Ji-had, by removing any and all spiritual supports in existence as long as they extended from any of the Negative Ten levels.

However, merely the regulation of emotions to the Underworld did not give me enough control to make any lasting influence, rather merely as a whispered non-crucial consideration amidst chaos, but effectively controlling what was blamed on the depths.

So during the days I would walk among the people there, some alive, others long dead, some evil, others good, but, what they all had in common was the black emotion, sin; and while that one little speck of blackness started small, it was all-consuming and a heavy pressure.

Then, one evening on Level Negative Four I came across a small leak in the piping, a sin leak; the black ooze was spreading across a walkway and had a makeshift bridge over it. It was then that I took a small sample of the sin back to the headquarters and began researching the most prevalent material in the depths.

The breakthrough came several months later when I learned how to back-process the sickly goo and it became a more prosperous venture than the collecting of stray emotions alone. A single pinpoint unit of sin could contain over a thousand units of emotion, as well, the more sin that was back-processed, the less of the contaminant there was for other spirits to get into trouble with.