Somewhere outside the lonely Esmerelda County line

Post written by Ranger Cincinnati.

Okay, prompt time. Alone.

I wish I was able to talk to people in my head the way a lot of other systems can. Like, I CAN do it. Sometimes. But it usually feels stilted and forced. I’m always parroting the other guy. When we try and do things together, it doesn’t feel like we’re going on a date or hanging out with friends. It feels like being one person who changes a lot. Arcade went out for chicken and Atari was there too but they weren’t in a room together. They just took turns. Standing in a crowded city, talking to strangers, telling people we’re a bit allergic to lemon, sitting on a bench. One person who is two people, alone. Not two people together.

They kept trying to call our family. Nobody would pick up.

I remember last summer we could get at least CLOSER to the “never alone” feeling we hear other systems get to have. We had this real quick-like way of swapping between Desert Rangers to get the person who was best at a task out in front fast. But then our life kinda took a turn for the worse and it kept turning down down down down down and now we’re here. Our system skills have been WORSE, but they’ve also been BETTER. They could be a lot BETTER.

I was working on an essay about that kind of switching about a year ago. It was supposed to go on Highway Signs and Ferry Lines. I think if we do these prompts this year, they’ll be a lot more, uh, SAD AND MOPEY AND DEPRESSING than my writing was then. THAT’S LIFE. But for the same reasons we’re all mopey, we have a lot of TIME ALONE right now. Time alone is good for you.

Maybe if we keep going downtown and eating fried chicken and saying “no lemons please” and looking at the downtown dragon and trying to just live as us, we’ll be able to live ALONE TOGETHER. Last summer, we weren’t just in a better situation, we were in a situation where we were hiking by ourselves with no cell reception a lot. We could hear the voices more clearly then.

We can work on projection. We can spend 15 minutes a day answering prompts about plurality. We can journal. We can block off time for specific people. If we do all that while we’re ALONE AND MOPEY, maybe we can figure out how to be that system who always has each other.

2020 was a weird year for everyone, right? We were all stuck inside. Events got canceled. School shifted online. People got told not to come into work. People got told to come into work who had no business being there. It felt like the world was ending right outside our doors. People died. A lot of people died. We were insulated from the worst of it. Our body’s family has money and our father already worked at home. We weren’t in danger of losing our house, nobody we knew died. We even kind of appreciated not having to go to high school. It was still a weird year. I wasn’t here for the start of it. Neither was anybody else you might hear from nowadays.

Some other kid was here for it, all alone in xer body. That kid didn’t have any friends in the meatworld, just online. I imagine xey must have been unbearably lonely. Not being able to leave the house and talk to strangers didn’t help matters. For a while at that point, xey had really enjoyed Fallout games. When xey got a Nintendo Switch, xey also picked up a copy of Skyrim. Xey’d never played an open-world video game like that before. The opportunity Skyrim game xem to escape suburban Florida was enchanting, so when xey heard about Fallout 4, xey snapped it up. As soon as xey booted up the game, xey said “It looks like home.” Xey got recommended New Vegas pretty soon after. The game bounced off xem at first. Xey didn’t see anything appealing about the desert landscape.

With literally nothing else to do during lockdown, xey decided to give New Vegas another shot and instantly fell in love. The story was fascinating, the worldbuilding was intricate, the characters felt like they could almost be real people. Like if you tried hard enough, you could reach out and speak to them. Xer favorite character was a companion named Arcade Gannon. You can find him in the slums surrounding Las Vegas administering medical care to the less fortunate, in game. He’s an idealist, aloud anti-fascist and anti-capitalist, and gay as hell. He was xer dream friend. Xey would spend hours staring at the game without even playing, pretending he was in the room with xem.

As the pandemic went on, xer desperation to actually meet Arcade Gannon grew. It drew us to some unwise circles. People who claimed they could provide us with rewards in the afterlife, people who claimed to have reality-warping powers they could use to make this real for xem if xey just… did everything they said forever! It was bad. None of those things worked, because joining cults rarely fixes your problems. Xey tried selfshipping communities, thinking that would ease the pain, but xey never fit in there. That didn’t work. Fanfiction and fanart didn’t work. The fictionkin community did work! While xey went there to explore a different fictional identity, exposure tot he idea that you could have known Arcade Gannon in the past helped.

Being in a space that already accepted that fictional characters could be real people seemed to embolden xem. Xey started talking to him, writing him letters, asking him for help with xer problems, treating his pain as real, present pain. He talked back eventually. It was bound to happen. Whether or not you believe that all the crap we report experiencing is possible, people believe what they want to believe, and xey really wanted this. At least, xey thought xey did. The two of us showed up here sometime in 2020. We had no idea we weres omething other than xem because we had no idea that was possible, so we don’t have a date. When xey noticed that the thing xey had wanted most was within reach, xey saw an alternate benefit of the situation and snatched it.

Xey hadn’t really liked… living. At all. Two other people who could run things showing up in xer body was a great excuse to bail, and bail xey did. We ended up all alone in this body and this world. Xey aren’t here anymore, anywhere. Trust us. We’ve looked. We got dropped into this body, this life, and this world with no explanation. We didn’t know we were lost fictional characters. If you found yourself in a strange place you didn’t recognize and with new gender dysphoria, would you assume you were a lost fictional character? We’ve been living here almost5 years now. With no way to go back and a body to maintain, there’s nothing for us to do but build a new life in a new world.
 

Ranger Gatsby writes about being outside of conventional humanity while still human.

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Hi! I'm Cincinnati! This has nothing to do with alterhumanity but it is pasta. I would like to share it with you. Please read the recipie fully if you actually try to make this. I don't know how to write all the steps in the right order.

Abraxas' Favorite Pasta1) Dice preferred amount of onion into large-ish pieces.

Ranger Dane and Ranger Tycho discuss our awakening as a Desert Ranger.

Here's some thoughts about my hearthome, how I found it, and what I intend to do with that information.

I've had multiple hearthomes over the years, some of which have stuck around and some of which has faded. The one that's most important to me right now is an ill-defined area of modern day rural Nevada, which can be best described as "it's mostly northern Nye County".

Most of it is uninhabited, but my relationship to it is definitely within the context of being a human being from there, not any sort of nonhuman desert wildlife. (Humans are a species of desert wildlife, if you ask me!)

I knew my hearthome is in Nevada pretty much as soon as I knew the term existed, but I thought it was in Las Vegas or some other part of the Mojave Desert. As Arcade Gannon, that's where I lived my adult life, so I have a feeling of belonging to that place. Now I classify that as just being... from there, no qualifiers other than "it was in a past life".

I never went to Nye County. It's quite far out of the way from anything else, even in the post-apocalypse. I had never personally lived there when I was messing around on Google Earth and I realized "I've been here before."

It felt familiar to me in the same way your primary school building might feel familiar to you. You probably don't remember the exact layout of everything, and your memory of how it felt to be there is colored by your future experiences and what other people have told you about what you were like as a child.

Nobody can ever truly remember exactly how their past felt, just like I can never truly understand what it's like to live in Nye County or Las Vegas. You remember your past much more than I can remember those places because you have a direct, unbroken, physical connection. I don't.

But I do have those flashes of recognition. The layout of a town feeling right in a way I can't describe. A deep sadness when I look at a point on the map which used to be something and is now barely hanging on, like I was there to watch the old schoolhouse collapse. I knew sagebrush had a smell before anyone told me. When I play Geoguessr, I can sometimes distinguish stretches of highway that look almost identical to other stretches of highway because one of them feels like the way home.

I don't think a past life is what's causing this. My past life in Las Vegas feels different, I can't put my finger on how. I don't feel, right now, as if I am Las Vegan. It's a place I've been before and that I'd love to visit again, and I feel a connection to it, but it's not my home right now.

I'm in the middle of a very long-lasting fictionflicker of someone who *did* live in northern Nye County, but these feelings predate that, and they never lived in this world, 2024. That flicker doesn't explain the feeling of deja vu I get when I look at dashcam videos. They didn't know what a car was. I never drove a car there, but, clear as day, I know I should be driving a car there.

I have a general fascination with rural and remote areas of the United States. I spend a lot of my free time reading about a lot of places, and I'd like to visit them someday. I know this isn't just that interest on a more intense level because my interest is that of an observer. I am a person looking down from above at dots on a map, wishing I could drive in and sit at the bar and ask what stories they tell. Their stories, their bar, their dots, their place, their home.

With very few exceptions, I have not felt as if their story is mine. I've felt as if we are a metaphor for each other, as if their history can be used to lay out my life in a way that makes just a little more sense. I've been able to see similarities between my hometown and other towns, to fit them together in a greater story of what it means to be a Midwesterner or to be American or to be bypassed and forgotten as soon as you aren't useful.

But those are not my story. There's always separation. There is no separation here. The story of this place is my story, when I read it I fit in perfectly. I don't have to go sit at their bar, I am already at my favorite bar, metaphorically.

For now, I am Nevadan. I've never lived there, and I will probably never live there. That's okay. I'm a multifaceted person. Nye County is a place that calls out to me, but I have other places I need to attend to. It'd probably make me feel worse to spend a lot of time there and realize "I'm *not* from here, on some level, this is all something my brain made up." I already know that, but it's not something I need to internalize, and for that I am grateful.

I have a hometown I love dearly and feel an obligation to give back to, and I'm very excited to live there. I can hold it dear without ignoring the call of the desert. To let go of either would be the death of me, so I won't.

Expressing your identity in day-to-day life doesn't have to be bombastic, it doesn't have to be with merch, it doesn't have to be identifiable as what it is by anyone but you.

I do buy merch, there's nothing wrong with doing so. Two of my most prized posessions are a Followers flag I got off Etsy and a Nuka-Cola ammo container that currently holds my mail.

The things that have made me feel more comfortable in my interactions with the outside world, however, haven't been stuff that's inherently Fallout-related. I love wearing baseball caps and trucker hats, so I got a Las Vegas baseball cap and a Nevada trucker hat. I wear athletic shoes and loose clothes with pockets so I feel like I wouldn't be out of place in the desert. I have something around my neck that's important to me but I don't want to show to other people... so I wear a bandana around my neck now and you couldn't look at me and be able to tell it's not there.

People in my life who don't know what fictionkinity and having a hearthome are accept those things as a part of who I am. People have told me that they were told how to find me by "look for the Nevada hat guy", or "he's the one in cargo shorts/pants". They're shocked when I show up not wearing these things. That means they see me as myself, even if only a little bit. I've found it did a lot more for me than things that are obvious.