The Blink
Nothingness Beyond Understanding
The Blink is the emptiness between realities. It bounds universes in every conceivable dimension and fills the gaps between like water. Sinuous in ways impossible to comprehend, this vast labyrinth of nothingness encompasses all worlds, great and small. All realities neighbor the Blink, and all realities are therefore made neighbors by it. Universes of a million times a million galaxies are no more or less than hills of sand in the Blink’s awful emptiness. Many of these worlds are empty places, devoid of life. Others are brimming with it. They do all have one thing in common, however. They all have a story to tell – if you’ll listen.
Detritus
Pieces of Other Worlds
The Blink is adjacent to every point of every reality, and in the shifting, expansion, and contraction of universes, pieces of reality sometimes brush up against one another with nothing between them. What slips through to our world is impossible to predict, and oftentimes difficult to distinguish from our own reality. The noise and chaos of everyday life often renders us numb to the small changes that sneak their way through the Blink.
Brian’s obsession with the Blink, and the realities beyond it, moves him to pursue these changes. The detritus that comes from other worlds, the lights, the thoughts. Brian seeks out quiet places, empty places, desert places. The places where such changes can be noticed – and where the lack of such changes can be recognized and internalized as this reality, pure and still. It is in these quiet places that he feels it most closely – the Blink. The emptiness that surrounds everything, that pervades everything. Nothingness too complete to comprehend. Wrestling with this larger picture of truth makes him both deeply forlorn and inexplicably happy.
The Dolghurst Mining Complex
Initially, the detritus from the Blink that Brian found were stored in his closet in paper ream boxes – the collection growing box-by-box. When the collection grew too large, Brian took the boxes to a nearby tunnel system, in a state park he visited in childhood. In his search for more safe storage within these tunnels, he learned many things about the abandoned place, including its name: the Dolghurst Mining Complex.
Today, Brian continues to clean and explore its expanse. He now spends much of his time in the Head-frame, or the Refuge Chamber – his two favorite places in the complex.
Brian was surprised to discovery a host of servers sitting long-forgotten in racks in the refuge chamber. Just as he has been using the chamber for box storage, he’s also taken to gradually repairing and restoring these servers- which he now uses to digitally store some of the miscellany.
Brian
Brave and Terrified
Brian yawns a lot. His friends tell him it’s “probably an Iron thing.” They also call him “scatterbrained” when he’s not around, but Brian smiles when he hears it.
He has an extra bone in his tongue, which he both loves and hates.