INFOGRAPHICS: PLACES

MAPS: OUTER

The Small Map, August 6, 2022

You are walking down a gently curving street in a safe suburban neighborhood when you find the paths of sticky, half-dried blood under your feet. There are five of them. Would you care to follow?

The first path continues down the street you're already on. It is mostly dry, faint, hard to follow. You track it down to the end of the street (about ten silent houses on each side), turn left, and find that the little street becomes a bridge. The dry brown flakes do not cross it; instead, they go into the weeds, down the slope, and underneath. There is a basin beneath, carved out by the periodic surges of flood waters, and to help drain them is a culvert, currently dry. It is large enough to hold a person, lying down. Here, the trail ends.

The middle paths, wet, much stronger, are so close together at first that it's hard to be sure how many of them there really are. There are multiple backtracks, retracings, and drag marks, like a coon trying to evade the hounds... and perhaps failing. A path to next door--halt, pool, drag. A path to the next door after that--halt, pool, drag. A path almost to the next door after that, only to halt, pool, and drag in the middle of the street. Another fork eschews the doors entirely, hopping a fence, clawing through yards, until it rejoins the shortest, strongest, and (in your mind) truest path. This true path stops at no houses, avoids maximum yards, touches minimum pavement. No, the true path runs down the steep driveway, a river rapid running straight across the street, over a fence, through a yard, and into a dry creekbed, full of bramble and limestone and flood drift. Here, the blood spreads out like it lives here, and smaller trails venture off, but things get so tangled and confused that you lose track. All you can be sure is, this is where the blood lives when it's at home.

The final trail, you miss almost entirely. It is secret, hidden under dead leaves and shadows; you can only find it with your feet, not your eyes, and at first you think they must be wrong, because unlike all the other paths, this one goes back the way you came, and who's ever heard of blood running uphill? Nevertheless, you follow it, back up the safe, sanguine street, until it ends, trail and road both, at a corner with a raised bed of antique roses, the kind that hate to grow here, the ones the color of heavy blood clots, thorns uncountable, and thus the most marvelous perfume. They are beautiful roses that don't belong here, flowers from far away, and here, there is no pool, no drag, only an end, with tire treads leading far, far away.

You decide it's time you left too. The houses watch you go with silent, empty eyes of glass.

With you gone, the neighborhood is safe once more.

The Big Map, October 8, 2025

Originally, this was a computer-generated black-and-white master plan of the neighborhood, labeled by hand in pen (and possibly in error) as being from 1982. Y'all ain't getting that map; it was an unreadable nightmare. Everything was white: white lines for roads, white quads for lots, white expanse for land. White as far as the eye could see, all black lines the same weight.

This map, the map you are getting, is hand-traced from the master plan. The roads are yellow. The land is green. The pools, pond, and creekbeds are blue. The buildings are (with a few exceptions) gray. These colors are mostly illusions. The creekbed and pools are usually dry and brown. The land is usually dry and brown. The homes are usually red brick, white and yellow stone, beige pseudo-adobe. At least 8 streets are named after the waters that don't flow here, 5 after trees that don't grow here, and 7 after Native nations who generally don't get to live here.

This neighborhood was built in the 1970s. It contains a couple thousand people, making it larger than some towns we've been in. It has its own monthly newsletter, its own phone directory, a bi-annual garage sale, two pools, two parks, a sewage treatment plant, a creekbed that connects to a massive greenbelt, and at least one accidental cave that a bulldozer fell into while working on the bridge. Shattered crystalline stalactites and stalagmites decorated front yards for years afterward.

Only most of the houses on this map are gray. 7 are marked red. They are mostly downhill from the one black house, where we used to live.

Then there are the shelters. X marks the spots: under the raised wooden footpath by the office, in the pool compound after-hours, in the park, in culverts throughout the creekbed, by the sewer plant, in the abandoned neighborhood entryway of broken asphalt and brown grass.

They are as isolated as a person can get while still being in the neighborhood.

MAP: THE RED HOUSE, August 6, 2022

This is a one-and-a-half story red brick house with the second-steepest driveway in the neighborhood. The first-steepest belongs to the cursed house next door, but that driveway has a big C curve. This house, the red brick house, has a driveway straight as an arrow. A person exiting the red house at a dead sprint would be hard to catch, if they didn't fall.

The house has roughly fifteen rooms, depending if you include the master bath and hallway closet as separate rooms. Nine of them are stained with blood or varying quantities. The three bedrooms and the main bath are drenced; you can smell it from the door. It makes the carpet crunchy under your feet. The kitchen, garage, living room, hall, and master closet also have their share. The foyer, dining room, study, and master bath remain cleann so far; they contain only accidental tracks, nothing serious.

There are paths again, but most are to be expected: out the back door, out the front door, out the back gate, through the garage, a path for every exit.

There are also three fainter ones, one through each bedroom window.

MAPS: INNER

REALITY LAYERS, September 24, 2024

This is a Venn diagram of three circles, each representing one of the worlds we have to deal with. Each intersects with the others in different ways.

First, there is the "real" world. It connects to the land of the black ocean via front, and the Infinity Smashed world via stories.

Then there is the black ocean, or our headspace (that is, the psychological realm stapled to our vessel that will presumably dissolve with our death). It connects to the "real" world via front, and the Infinity Smashed world by portals, first created by Rawlin.

Finally, there is the Infinity Smashed world, which connects to our headspace by portals and the "real" world via story. All three of the worlds collide in dreams, giving the illusion that it's a whole separate realm, instead of just a sandwich of everything.

VOID HOUSE MAP, May 7th, 2009

We made this in MSpaint, a terrible idea. This was the first version of the House, built in March 2007 after the Craig Invasion. Our headspace at the time was a foggy, smoggy, featureless wasteland called the Void, and the House was a squat compound of adobe domes connected together like toes to a pawprint. At the time, there were only five rooms: Miranda's room (with meditation rug), Sneak's room (with porthole out the roof), the shower (which as I recall hardly anyone used), the big common Observatory (where Rogan and Mac used because Rogan had hang-ups around bedrooms), the center of which had stairs up to Gigi's attic, where nobody dared venture without her permission. The only window was the big glass wall of the Observatory; not like there was much to see but dank fog.

VOID HOUSE MAP, December 17, 2016

This is a drawing of the House, two years after Mori resurrected and a year after Biff moved in with her. The same basic paw print design remains, except now Mori and Biff have a room, and Rogan and Mac have finally stopped sleeping in the common room, creating a small glass-walled bedroom atop Gigi (and Falcon's) attic. A big wrought iron staircase connects the stories. The headspace remains a smoggy dark wasteland.

