• The Quartz (Life's the Same)
• White Noise (and Black Matter)
• The Trouble with Tim (Bad Sneakers)
• Whereabouts Unknown (Obscured by Clouds)
• Desert Roads (Just Another Day On Earth)
• Aspiring Ascent (Writing on the Wall)
• Breaking Packs (Dogs of War)
• I never wanted to go (to space)
• Life Was Easy (When It Was Boring)
• Numbers for Names (Dulled by Excess)
• Somewhat Damaged (I, Robot)
• In Ruins (Digital Dames)
• Sound Check (Radio Cures)
• Denizens (of a Strange Land)
• No Android (Taking the Hill)
• Isolation (Last Known Surroundings)
• Awake (and Sanity is Waning)

Whereabouts Unknown
(Obscured by Clouds)

Tim is not dead.

“Shit, I wish I was.”

Tim mutters these words in response to what he likens to a hangover; the worst hangover he’s ever had. Wanting to lie motionless with his eyes closed, Tim fears that any change may erupt in sharp, powerful pains screaming through his head. He vaguely remembers what should have been only moments ago. He can’t have a hangover; he hasn’t had anything to drink for some time. Remembering the occurrence with the dumpster Tim decides he should be dead. However, considering that he is not, in fact dead, Tim realizes it may be best to try to get a grip on things. And perhaps prove with the utmost certainty that he has not yet passed away.
“What the hell just happened?” Tim finds himself straining his voice into a murmur once again and struggles to open his eyes. He manages, and looks forward with the ground running parallel to his left side of vision. He can’t move and lies still waiting for his eyes to focus through the pain streaming through his nasal tracks and behind his eyes, hoping sight might help make some sense of what had just occurred.

It doesn’t.

In fact, Tim currently despises his ability to see, and quickly closes his eyes. Nothing is right with what he had just witnessed. In the few seconds he’d kept his eyes open Tim perceived a vast desert of red-orange sand and stone, with large spires and monoliths bearing crooked, unearthly shapes in the distance. As if the scene were formed from some great, violent corrosion happening too suddenly to allow the masses of objects remaining to settle with time.

These formations are set against a dark amaranthine sky, studded endlessly with bright stars pulsing and gleaming through great, quick moving clouds that travel vertically; adverse to the obscured horizon with an apparent contempt to any natural laws Tim thought he knew.

With his eyes still closed Tim rolls over unto his stomach and forces his hands under his chest. Pushing forward with his arms and planting his feet into the strangely soft, malleable soil Tim manages to set himself unto a standing position, albeit an awkward, swaggering and unsure one.

After standing with his eyes closed for one painstaking minute, the pain in his head seems to melt down through his body before completely disappearing.

He opens his eyes.

It couldn’t stay easy forever. Eddie knew this. He also knew that, at least in his life, the instant things becomes too routine something drastic is surely to occur; more often sooner than later. These chaotic shifts forcing new effects into Eddie’s life are very typically found to be in direct relation to something Tim has caused. Though, this is not entirely intentional; all of Tim’s life, or at least the majority of which Eddie is aware, Tim has had the unfortunate habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Eddie supposes his greatest issue with Tim is his reluctance to actually deal, independently, with these situations of inauspiciousness. Instead, he always seems more apt to allow others to overcome his various obstacles; a task Eddie finds most commonly falling into his hands.

But even with all of the past trouble Tim has seen, Eddie grasps the foreboding realization that this is the worst. And Eddie hopes that whatever has happened to Tim, he abandons his typical reliance on his older brother; as though Eddie is determined, his doubts are quickly growing.