a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings

E҉̵̼̜̳͎̣̱͂ͪ̊̚͘D̨̝͕͎͌G̷͚͈̮̯̘͇̞͙ͦͩ̎̆́͋ͩ̀A̴̧͎̩̪̠͚͓ͭ̌ͮ̿ͣ̎ͪ̾͡Ṙ͏̘̭̻̙ͯ͑͗ͅ
where
s̨͙̤͕͙̱̤͍̹̞̹̯̩͔̞͖͍ͫͫͦͥͨ͊͋̒̊̚͝͞͡ͅh̴̛̤̫̻̖̙ͩ̅͑̈̍̾͌̄̐̓̈͛̎̈́̏̆̊ͯ̀͟ͅͅi͓̱̳̘̫͈̠̖̦̮̙̮͕̰̅ͦ̉͆̓̀͘͢t̶̤̪̪̮̩̋ͫͥ̃̈́̋̎̊̈ͤ̋͢

[added later]

{exception (uıǝu)ʇsǝnbǝɹ pıןɐʌuı}

Does anyone know who's gone missing?

I'm living in a flat that's not my own, doing totally uninteresting work that utilizes none of my skills, and away from anything neat to study other than the mystery of how I got here in the first place.

For all that, though, I'm finding that this place is a lot better than where I came from. I haven't ruined everything, for one. And that those of you who I knew back "home," are better off than you were when I left you. Even if I only ever saw you at trials.

I'm making a generalization, but the future seems like a very happy place. I should be very grateful to learn about it.

Oh, fuck me. Now I have to take down everything on my wall and set it up again.

From the looks of things, though, they didn't pick and choose based on any particular observations. Maybe they hoped that things would calm down if we only spread out.

The conclusion I have come to, after much reading, is that we should all sit down and have a nice moratorium on discussion of genetics and psychology. I can't say I know overmuch on either subject, but what I have seen here is so bone-headed and uninformed that it has severely altered my DNA, by which I mean it has given me cancer.

I go away for one bloody day and suddenly I'm reading through the script of a really horrible soap opera. What the fuck happened?

[his handwriting is larger and loopier than usual]

You look at certain types of fairytales, it's always hubris they talk about, nothing else. He wanted to mess with what was out of his hands, it was his pride that made him do it! Never any other reasons, or if there were, people will always interpret that, in the end, no matter what he did, he just wanted to get one past the gods.

Or Death, I guess, is what I'm talking about here.

But there's a thing about being quite young and having unfounded pretensions towards genius. And young people - well, men, women are actually sensible about this kind of shit usually - artists of any kind, I guess...tend to assume that the most romantic thing you can possibly do for him her the person you fancy is to do something stupid. Like harming yourself in front of them, that seems to be a popular thing. Or if that's not your thing, you go to great lengths to impress upon them that they are worth more than whatever thing you obsess over all the time - usually by dedicating whatever the fuck you're working on to them. Which is officially fucked if you haven't finished it yet.

I guess that's not an entirely bad thing. But the thing is, the thing is that...well, there is a little bit of hubris in all of it. On your part. Thinking you're so intelligent that you couldn't possibly be horrible at being in love. But if your pretensions towards genius are honest, then you probably are. Because you don't just fancy someone, you obsess. You glue or pin or sew yourself to them, wherever you feel love, in your feet, let's say. You sew them to the soles of your feet, and when they leave - because they will - you suddenly can't walk around.

Whether or not the skin heals and the callouses come back depends on whether or not you have the sense to stop picking at them. Sometimes it's easier if they've just gone off to live their lives elsewhere, with someone else. I could have learned to live with that, knowing that they're happy. Sometimes you'll think it'd have been easier if they died, but if your pretensions are honest, it'll harden over in time, because eventually you'll learn that it's out of your hands.

And maybe if you're sane, you'll learn that the rest is out of your hands as well.

If you're not? It's the worst sort of pain to know that you could have done something, even if you couldn't have. It's not just your jealousy picking at your wounds, then. It's not just your grief. If you loved them, you'd have done something drastic, something stupid.

Pray you're never given the power to do so. And don't talk to me about impossible. The power to bring back what you had, or what you never had, no matter what the consequences...you should have avoided it.

But by the time it's all done, you learn that what you have for them has grown from love into something ugly and cancerous. If it ever was love to begin with. To look at them, cold and suffering...if you had more than a disgusting obsession, you would let them go and follow them back. How could you look at yourself otherwise?

Also, the jelly heart was delicious, thank you.

Once again, the library.

Checked out four books. There are a grand total of two books on magical theory in this entire fucking place. I said before that they weren't useful for finding out how we got here or why.

Now I say that they are only useful as loo paper or fire fuel.

This place is very reminiscent of Victorian London, but for the life of me I could not find a copy of The Origin of Species. Oh, it was only one of the most popular books of its time, no reason why they should have a copy. I did find something called The Selfish Gene by some bloke called Dawkins. It's alright reading. I dunno much about evolutionary biology in the first place, so I can't vouch for its quality.

King Jesus was also on sitting on a table. I like it enough, but fiction's never truly edifying.

I wish I'd been carrying some of my own books. Between this, my own job, and the fact that I possess none of the resources to test my theories, I'm fucking bored.

Does anyone know the locations of either Stonehenge or Skara Brae well enough to Apparate there?

I want to know if this place is actually an outlying dimension not connected with our world or if we genuinely are in the future. I can't say it's the best way of gathering information, but I don't yet have the resources to collect much more than superficial evidence.

( bingo! - comment with ideas )

So they do show Doctor Who now-a-days.

[later]

The doctor was annoying and looks uncannily like Crouch and the companion was terrible and the spaceship was powered by love and he picks up the Olympic torch I threw up in my mouth a little and the spaceship was powered by love the spaceship was powered by love THE SPACESHIP. WAS POWERED. BY LOVE. My mind can't handle that much stupid right now.

I'm scared.

The library's still shit and the city on a whole is made of brown and gray, but if we're never going home we may as well look on the bright side. What's good about being here?

1. A steady income, however incongruous the work is with one's personal skillset, is guaranteed on arrival, as is housing, as is schooling. Even if it is like living in a council house. In London, the waiting on placement for a flat is several months if not a few years if I'm recalling correctly. On its face, it doesn't look so grand, but think of it this way: we all came here with no foothold and were given one for free, making it that much easier for all of us to advance in this society rather than just sleep under bridges.
2. Food is cheap. So is booze.
3. Rate of violent crime seems low.
4. Was there a war going on where you come from? Did you live where there was a state of constant fear or of martial law? Or some kind of magical or natural disaster? Were you in prison? Hell, were you in a miserable marriage? Well, there isn't now, and you aren't. You can forget about your past, or whatever you did. Start over if you want.
5. Was there persecution where you came from? Did you not agree with it? Were you the victim of it? Well, it doesn't exist here.
6. With these journals, you don't even have to properly talk to anyone anymore. And you can watch the neverending font of passive-aggression from your neighbors.

Boss kicked me out of the kitchen early, says he's happy for the help but the hotel'll complain if they pay me too much overtime. Ha! In what country is four hours over considered too much?

So I went to the library again to look at their piss-poor selection. Maybe two proper books on magical theory (but neither of them useful), the rest of it's just a jumble, mostly arts and fiction, some university-level texts on Muggle literature and mathematics, one on science but none on history.

Then I started to wonder - the maximum amount of time one can go forwards and backwards on a Time Turner is a full day. Any student who's been given one probably knows this. The reason behind it is that the magic required to travel through time is immense, and if you tried travelling back, say, a week, the shear amount of force would kill you. That's why Time Turners are kept in my department. The amount of force required to go forward more than seven thousand years would be incalculable by this reasoning. It's an anomaly that must have brought us here, so we can explain it away that way, but the chances of such an anomaly occurring are infinitesimal if the cause is magical like we believe.

But if you look at the world around us, it's both stagnant and jumbled, technologically-speaking. Why do we have both steam power and televisions? Why are the books in the library so useless? Why are we in a socialist environment when by all rights everything looks like it's come out of an era that was the golden age of capitalism?

My theory is this: We are not the first to be brought here, not by a long shot, and this phenomena is not exclusive to wizards. What this might mean is that the first group to be brought here, or maybe the second or tenth or fiftieth, decided that they wouldn't be going back and in order to survive they would need to work together despite their differences.

What does this mean for us? Well, it might mean that there's another flat block full of Muggles. It's perfectly possible, since we all come individually. The leaders in this city know that wizards and Muggles won't get along immediately, so they separate us at first so that we can experience a world where magic and the mundane live side by side. The longer we live here, the more we will come to accept this. One of their ways of integrating us is through our jobs - once we get acclimated and advance in all our careers, we'll grow used to living with Muggles.

Why did they say it was the year 8700? Maybe that was decided arbitrarily so that it will make sense to us. Why does the library have such a shit selection? So that we won't obsess over ways we can get back home. Because we never will.

I asked the librarian if she'd been brought from another world. She gave me a strange look. I can only hope that it's because I'm wrong.

There is pragmatism and then there is outright denial. But that's just theory and practice for certain people. I've seen certain people use the Cruciatus on untried suspects in the name of heightened security. I've seen certain people torture the victims of war criminals in the name of bringing justice to these war criminals.

But I don't study humanity, it's not my job. Perhaps security and justice are worth any price.

This is a beautiful place, ain't it? So many different shades of grey and brown. Even the river is brown, but they didn't get the smell right. Guess they wanted the 19th century without the smell. And child labor. Why are there no seven-year-old chimney sweeps in this city?

Went to the library today when I got out of work. Fuckin' useless, just like everyone says. Not even a decent legal section, so I'd be able to know why I've got this fabulous job frying onions and getting shouted at for it. It's fantastic!

At least it's quiet most of the time. I swear I've not seen a brawl outside of our fair flat block - the stairwell door was open, I heard it from where I was. I know a good number of you come from a war, but is it really necessary to bring it here? Well, I won't stop you. Fate moves as it will and that.

But now I'm on a bridge. What a fabulous bridge this is. When I was in school my father thought I'd make a good engineer, but fuck him. They're such fantastic pieces of work, all iron and masonry. Bloody cold out, though.

I suppose seven time periods and a decent number of people to put on them will be good enough to start putting together a few timelines, see if I can find any patterns.

What's on my wall now looks like a very small tree stuck to my wall. I imagine it'll get more branches. But I don't know if this how it should look. I know a few theories on time and space, not as well as some but enough to make tentative models. Though the practical problem comes when you begin to consider all the possibilities - say, if you decided that the different realities ran parallel to each other. So many of these realities share bits of their history up to a point that it would be sensible to hypothesize that we might all come from different realities, even in the cases of those of us who know each other. It would be easier to spot patterns, then.

I'm also considering the possibility that time and space might be webbed-shaped - that's a common theory, you can find it in most books dealing with time theory. It's much more consequence-based and does away with straight lines. The actions of any individual can have multiple consequences, but it postulates that the progression of history is based on what the majority of individuals decide. One individual can affect another, but to say that one great witch or wizard changed the whole course of history is oversimplifying to a hideous degree. I've read some articles which say that it might even be pure chance which determines who affects whom.

That's that, anyway. I started my job today - they put me in the hotel at the restaurant. The head chef is a Muggle who has a distaste for cooking with magic. Which is just as well since I know very few. He also looks like Patrick Troughton and sounds like a French elephant. He knew I was shit at cooking the moment I walked in the door.

So far I've learned to make absolutely nothing, but I can damn well crack and egg and chop an onion.

Thankfully he didn't notice that I'd stolen a bottle of sherry.

So not would they not tell me anything, but out of everything I wrote down on the form, they decided that "cook" was the best fit for me. They're deliberately setting me up for failure now, the vindictive bastards.

And it's beneath my skill, experience, and talents, oh no oh no oh no whatever will I do.

...Maybe they'll have a good wine cellar.

...Does anyone know how to make restaurant food? Unless they want pancakes all the time.

Right'n. Salutations, pleasantries, my name is Croaker and I've just arrived. Any information about where I've just arrived other than "a city" would be much appreciated. From reading this journal I've gleaned that the rest of you are of magical blood (if you aren't feel free to correct me), mostly British, that you are all from various time periods in the 20th and 21st centuries as a rule, and, judging from the fact that there are few cases of multiple...versions, I suppose, of the same person, that alternate realities exist.

Since the bastard at the employment agency wouldn't tell me where I am, I'm left with nothing but to wonder why we're all here. If nothing else, I've got a few colleagues back home who'd be interested in it. I've a request for you all. Introduce yourself if you like, but when you do, tell me what year you're from as well as a few historical landmarks (say, a war) and what was last going on in the world so I can know which reality you belong to.

I.E.: Hello there! My name is Stephen Croaker, and I'm was am an Unspeakable. I'm from the year 1987. In October it will be six years since the end of the British Wizarding War, a civil conflict between the Death Eaters lead by Lord Voldemort (I imagine there's not much harm in saying that name here) and the semi-allied forces of the Ministry of Magic and Albus Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix. Prior to that there was the pan-European conflict between countries controlled by the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald and those countries which opposed his rule, lasting from 1939 to 1945. Prior to that there was the Muggle First World War. Currently, magical Britain is in a heightened state of security because, owing to a spell of my creation which resurrects the dead, we have found that Voldemort was not killed by Harry Potter but is alive and may be planning his next attack.

Also, does anyone know where there's a newsagent's? I'm running low on fags. Location of an off-license wouldn't be bad, either.

[Initially open to "Crow" but then switched to private.]

Are you here?

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, Why, why, ( why? )