Part Three: Wherein Atlas Knows the Sphere

    The sphere had approached Atlas while he was sleeping.  At the time, Atlas was dreaming about Earth, which wasn't rare for him.  Earth was where he went when he needed a break.  Earth was his favorite place, even despite its current state.  He was at his vacation home in the Antarctic; children playing in the yard, the trees surrounding them on three sides.  They weren't his kids.  In fact, he didn't know who's they were, but it was nice.  The children made him think of the children he'd wanted to have with Elisia, but he felt no sadness.  She was actually there, which he hadn't noticed to be weird.  You see, Elisia was four-and-a-half light years away, with her own family.  But she was his wife, he knew.  They were sharing a drink as the sun set into the purple sky.  The two flew up to the roof of the modest house, to better view the sun and the horizon. Their own son was waiting up there for them, and the three of them watched the sun rise back up, larger than it had been when it set.  It felt like a reunion, meeting his son.  He had seemed so familiar, though he didn't actually exist.  Not outside of Atlas's hopes and dreams, anyway.  Atlas was the happiest he'd ever been.  He was drinking his favorite drink, whatever it was, he didn't really know.  The sun's rays felt perfect on his skin; hot, but not too hot.  A perfect companion for the breeze.  Oh, how he had missed the sun.  It was the sun of his solar system; the sun of his Earth.  It was his sun.  It was perfect.  The Antarctic trees in the distance had disappeared, and all Atlas could see now was his sun against the horizon, knowing his family was by his side.
    The sphere had appeared out of nowhere, through a hole in the air itself.  It knew Atlas was there.  It had come here for him from very, very far away.  The sphere was hungry.  Not in the sense that you and I are hungry.  This sphere needed Atlas.  It wanted to destroy him, punish him.  It wanted to know him, to be him, and to free him.  It wanted to be his worst nightmare and his greatest savior.  You and I could never relate to this sphere's intentions with Atlas.
    The sphere was as familiar as any sphere you've ever seen or ever could see, but it was like nothing else.  It was wrong.  At least, it would seem wrong to your eyes, were you to see it.  You would second guess it, question it.  You would not recognize it as a sphere, but it could be nothing else.  It was black.  Just black.  Nothing else.  The hole it had appeared through lingered.  An ellipse stretched horizontally, pinched at the ends, not completely dissimilar to the shape of an eye.  Nothing could be seen through the hole, now just a black aura surrounding the sphere.  It, the sphere, slowly descended upon Atlas from above, hanging over him.
    The sun had turned black, as Atlas's family held him down.  They were much stronger than he had thought.  Much stronger than himself, actually.  Euphoria turned into panic.  Atlas could feel the gravity and pressure of that strange world he was once stranded on slowly seeping into this world.  The sun was bigger.  It was getting closer.  He could hear the sun screaming, and then himself screaming as his wife and son dug into him with knives.  Not daggers, they seemed more like those non-laser-edged antique steak knives some people keep around in their kitchen.  First his wife cut out his heart and tossed it into the sun, blood staining her entire front side.  His son sawed away at his lungs, ripping one out, and then the other.  They were thrown into the sun.  With each new organ or body part thrown into it, the sun grew larger and closer.  Elisia tore his intestines from his abdomen, one arm-full at a time while his son cut his ears off.  Atlas could still hear.  He was in so much pain he no longer wished to exist.  He wanted to die but obviously that wasn't happening. He could smell his own dismembered body baking in the black sun.  He vomited, expecting it to land in his chest cavity, but instead it flew into the sun, and the sun grew.  His son stabbed and carved Atlas's eyes out, and Atlas watched his eyes fly off into the distance and disappear into the sun.  As his wife sawed away at his leg with the tiny knife, the Earth burst into flame.  His arms and legs were hurled into the sun; Elisia took care of the legs, Atlas's son had the arms.  The smoke from the flames from the Earth parted at the sun, and Atlas could feel hurricane-caliber burning winds as the sun approached.  He was nothing but a head and torso now, his throat slit as his family worked together on the neck.  As the rest of him was hurled toward the sun, he could see that the Earth had completely burned up and only smoke remained.  Atlas plunged deep inside, as the surface of the sun splashed and rippled upon his impact.  The darkness consumed him, and Atlas knew the sphere.
    The sphere's black liquid continued to ooze onto Atlas as he lie unconscious. The sphere knew how much pain he was in, how much suffering he was doing.  The sphere could feel Atlas's presence in him.

---

    He was inside the sun.  It was black and freezing.  He accepted this, even though he had always thought the sun was hot and bright.  He had wondered why he thought that, given how black the sun had always been.  He had been in here for years, wondering who he was or what else existed.  Was this blackness the only existence there was?  Where had he come from?  The sphere had been with him the entire time, and he was grateful to the sphere.  He recognized the interior of his ship; had he been in the ship?  He couldn't remember.  He wondered into the pod room, where all the dimensional jump packs were stored in their pods for later use.  He found his own pack, and noticed the coordinates were off.  He wondered why this was, but didn't give it much thought.  The sphere told him the appropriate coordinates, and Atlas reset them.  One of the other crew walked into the pod room and looked puzzlingly at Atlas and asked him a question, though he couldn't understand it.  Atlas was shocked at the sight of this person, as he or she was inside out; internal organs now external organs, resting against bone and muscle structure.  For reasons unknown to Atlas, he became frightened, enraged, sad.  Atlas grabbed his steak knife and ran screaming at the creature, and it too began to run, but away from Atlas.  The two ran through several rooms, a cold hallway, and another room; the creature shouting things that Atlas couldn't understand.  Atlas caught up to it and tore into its back with the knife, blood covering his hands.  The eight others had run into the room because they heard the screams, and Atlas was faster and stronger than he could believe.  They had been unarmed and Atlas had no trouble cutting into each and every one of them, leaving their bodies sprawled across the control room.  The room was red and dripping.  The sphere informed Atlas that he must go, and Atlas ran back to the pod room and grabbed his pack.  He thanked the sphere for all he had done for him, and made the jump.
    Atlas didn't wake up.  He was in the sphere, and the sphere was in him.  Atlas was now the sphere.  He liked that.  He knew the sphere was God, and that he, himself was a god.  He watched from above as his body opened its eyes and stood up slowly.  He watched as his body repaired the jump pack, over the course of several hours.  And he watched as reality blurred in a nine-foot radius around his body before it disappeared with a boom and a flash.  He no longer felt attached to his body; it belonged to the sphere now.  He could feel the sphere's intentions inside him, and he was at peace.
    Atlas thought he would make this planet his new vacation spot.  He rather enjoyed the massive star and the great pressure and the fog.  But for the moment Atlas decided he had other places to be, and left through the hole in the air.

"We Are Here" Album Covers

Awhile ago I designed some album cover ideas for the band Ladysoal.  They're from Ames and their music is kind of hard to describe, but it definitely rocks.  Anyway I've decided to post some of the drafts I came up with on here (they didn't get used).  Again, these were just ideas, not final drafts.

This is one of the first ones I came up with.  I originally had the sun in the center of the image though, and decided that wasn't interesting enough.  There's a song on the album called "Sunshine" (it's actually on there twice) and the album title is "We Are Here," so I thought this image would be a good fit.  It's a sunrise, and the three people are sort of watching it, as if they think it's fascinating and beautiful, and the sun is very important to them.  Since this is Ladysoal's first album, I thought what better image to represent it than a sunrise. (Ignore the tiny dot in the middle of the sun)

I don't really know how much I like this idea.  I thought the writing inside/around the sun would look cool, but I think I was wrong.  Plus with this idea it's almost necessary for the sun to be in the middle of the image, which I already decided wasn't interesting enough.  I liked the font, though, so it stayed.

I decided to try something simple, and made this in about a minute.  I used one of the color schemes that I found on Kuler, although I don't remember which one.  I think this idea was pretty cool, although it reminds me less of Ladysoal and more of some 1940's sci-fi propaganda poster or something.

I took the color from the sky, emphasizing only the sun, because I wanted the sun to be the main focus of the image.  I did a lot of messing around with gray developing this idea, but in the end no one seemed to like the gray and it didn't make me think of Ladysoal at all.  Besides, when the sun rises, it should fill the world with light and color, so this image basically defeats the whole purpose of using the sunrise to begin with.

I like this image a lot.  This is a gray I can live with.  I think at this point I decided to go more abstract, which is way the oranges and grays are alternating.  That's also why I kept the black lines from the last idea.  The lines don't really mean anything, but I was exploring how they would look, since I thought that without the lines the last images just looked like I failed at making gradients.  The lines looked nice, so I kept them.

I brought the blue back since it was missed, but I kept the lines and the sun's coloration.  This was the cover I think I would have used, since it made the most sense with the music and theme of the album, and was one of the nicest looking.


Anyway I had a lot of fun working in Photoshop again, even though these didn't get used.  You can check out Ladysoal at their Facebook page, or at Ladysoal.com, although I'm not sure how often that last page gets updated.  Check them out and let me know if you think my cover idea(s) were a good fit for the music.

Part Two: Wherein Atlas Remembers the Worm

    It had been some time since the jump, to Atlas it had been months.  He had already had his fair share of this world.  Since the jump he had killed an eight-foot-long flying worm, which was difficult and unsettling to say the least.  He had ran from a giant "jellyfish dinosaur," the only way he knew how to describe it.  He has endured the shifting pressure and gravity. At the moment he felt as though his head could quite literally explode, along with all of his blood vessels.  His suit was, of course, designed for differing pressures and such, and was doing its job of keeping Atlas alive.  Oh, and he'd vomited inside his helmet after the encounter with the worm.
    That worm.  The vivid memory of the encounter with the worm filled his mind.  When Atlas first saw it, the worm silently glided through the air.  He had just jumped out of the worm's way, as it was originally chasing a pack of creatures that looked like a cross between jellyfish and husks of corn.  But the worm had turned its focus towards him, perhaps deciding it would be easier or more rewarding to kill Atlas.  He had managed to cut the worm roughly in half with his light-edged knife, but the worm persisted.  The two worms persisted.  A thin gray smoke poured out of the red worms after the cut, causing Atlas vision troubles as the smoke seemed to almost stick to his helmet's visor.  One thing he could see very clearly though, the worms were throbbing like nothing he'd ever seen.  Were they angry? Were they hungry?  They darted towards him through the air and he had managed to cut one of them again. And again.  And again.  He couldn't tell you how many pieces he had chopped them into, but he'd guessed it was somewhere between thirty and fifty.  Each.  The smoke had eventually turned lime-green and sunk to the ground as a liquid, covering him in the process.  Atlas didn't know if he could smell it through his helmet, or if he'd just imagined the smell, but it was pungent and disgusting, like the smell of an old corpse in rain.  That was when he'd thrown up.  In fact, just remembering that pulsating fucking worm, and how it smelled, and how the pieces had tried to kill him, and how they smelled--Atlas vomited again.  The memory was too much, it was overwhelming his senses as he was in deep hallucination.  He was close to passing out; he could feel himself willingly let go of his consciousness just to escape the smell.  The fact that he was hungry and exhausted didn't help him any.  He was still boiling inside of his suit.  He wanted to explode.
    Several minutes after Atlas had blacked out his body turned to sleep, while his unconscious mind slipped into a dream state.--

Part One: Wherein Atlas Finds Himself Trapped

This is a short story I started; part one of a space opera.

    Atlas landed with a hard "thump" on the dusty, somewhat rocky surface; the weight of the bulky jump-unit on his back almost crushing him.  His suit, made of an air-tight dense polymer, had protected him from the fall and from being crushed, and he would later be glad that his helmet didn't crack.
    "Did it work?  Did the jump work?"  He was trying to take stalk of where he was, the jump-unit still on top of him.  "Guys?  Did it work?  Guys?  GUYS!?"  Confused beyond belief, Atlas scanned his surrounding, looking to the reddish horizon in every direction.  He saw no one, and he obviously wasn't back at the colony.
    "What the fuck," he thought, half-muttering, "am I the only one that made it?  Where the fuck am I?"  They had all preset their jump packs to the same coordinates, to the Higher District of the Royal Colony just in case.  He was panicking.  Someone had obviously messed with his unit, he thought.  This thought made him angry, but he had bigger things to worry about.  He could play detective once he got out of this unsettling place.  He wondered how many of the nine others also didn't make it back to the colony.  Was it just him?  He wondered where they would even be stranded; he had never seen this place before.  He had no idea where he was.
    The sky appeared twilit, as though it was starting to get dark.  Or it was starting to get light, he didn't know.  Either way this strange world wasn't lit very well at that particular moment; the sky was a reddish orange-brown color; red in some spots, orange and brown in others.  He could see a massive white star in the sky, half way between the horizon and the zenith, but it wasn't doing a very good job of illuminating anything.  He guessed the atmosphere was thick, filled with dense gases that were blocking light from whatever star that was.  Looking for the others was going to be a challenge.
    The jump-unit on his back had warped him to this place.  It was of new design, as the technology to create holes through space-time hadn't existed for more than a few years, and was constantly being improved.  Atlas unstrapped the unit from his back to examine it.  It was sleek and blackish-silver, almost reflective.  It was a heavy son-of-a-bitch, weighing about fifty or sixty pounds, and was the size of a large backpack.  The amount of energy required and the actual size of the drive itself wouldn't allow it to be any smaller.  Not until the tech improved, anyway.  Both the top and bottom round-lights and the screen on the unit were no longer glowing, and it wasn't making the quiet, humming noise as it usually does for an hour or so after every jump.  It was somewhat of a prototype, and it was badly damaged.
    Each unit had a tracker in it for locating others and for being located by others, usually indicated by the glowing characters on the tiny screen. Since the jump drive and the tracking device were both damaged, plans A and B were out the window, and unfortunately Atlas didn't have a plan C.  He wanted to try to look for others, just in case they were also stranded here, but he had huge doubts in his mind.  Atlas just wanted to lay down.
     The gravity on this planet felt weird.  Or maybe it wasn't the gravity, but the pressure; maybe both.  Atlas felt as though his body could implode into itself at any moment, which made him nauseous, and he really didn't want to throw up inside his less-than-roomy helmet.  If he jumped, he knew he would vomit.  If he ran, he knew he would vomit.  He had to remove his jump pack.  The heavy metallic box was hurting his back and making him feel weaker, and it wasn't exactly useful anymore.  Still, though, he was reluctant to go anywhere without it, seeing as how it was a very expensive piece of equipment, and could be fixed.  Or the tracker might eventually kick back on.  He decided to sit with his pack for a little while.  He had no plan, no ideas.  He figured sitting down would be just as useful as wandering around, and he was sore as hell from the fall.
    Atlas tried to get comfortable, but he felt as though that massive black star hanging above was boiling him inside his suit.  Wait, black star?  He could have sworn it was white just a few minutes earlier, and it wasn't directly above him either.  Had it moved?  Was it even the same star?  Shit, for all he knew it wasn't a star at all.  He suddenly hated this place, and feared the thought of even using a dimension-jump again, except to get home.  He never thought he'd end up in a place like this.  He'd never even imagined a place like this.

With his tracker and jump pack disabled, he knew he would die here.--

Purpose Statement

I'm going to use this internet-space to post stories or pictures or whatever.  Sort of a place to store the things I make.