fun fact i am writing this fic in an attempt to motivate myself to write music. is it working? that's debatable but i've brought out my old dusty guitar and it's sitting right by my desk and i'm going to play random notes on it and see what i can cook up. probably nothing good at this point. still need a MIDI controller if i want to get into this music production thing.
13/3/20XX, 4:03pm
Unknown number: Machine, please send me your essay outline by tomorrow.
V1: Congratulations! You have activated bomb mode! A pipe bomb will be mailed to your house by tomorrow morning. Do look forward to it!
Unknown number: Do you think this is funny?
V1: yeah
V1: oh shit you’re not a scammer
V1: gabriel?
Gabriel: Yes, as you should have realised.
V1: oh damn
V1: you can never be too careful these days
V1: i thought you didn’t have a phone
Gabriel: I have been convinced that this device is essential to my time here as a student.
Gabriel: Send the outline by tomorrow.
V1: ok
Gabriel: Do you have Mirage’s number?
V1: [Shared contact: Mirage]
V1: btw if this is about quitting
V1: i dont think mirage will mind that much
V1: v2 though
V1: she wont take kindly to broken promises
[Gabriel has gone offline.]
~~~
14/3/20XX, 10:54am
Gabriel: I must apologise. As much as I do want to persist in this endeavour, I must be gone by the end of next month. I can still provide samples of my playing, if that is what you require.
Mirage: It’s alright
Mirage: Thanks for helping
V1: isn’t half your album still unfinished
Gabriel: qLKLAF
[Message deleted]
Gabriel: Why is it here?
Mirage: it’s a group chat.
Mirage: everyone is here
V2: :wave:
Gabriel: V1, you have yet to send your essay outline.
V1: add @ before my name to ping me
V1: like this
V1: @Gabriel
Gabriel: Our assignment needs to be handed in by next week.
[V1 has gone offline.]
[V2 has sent an attachment.]
Gabriel: What is this?
V2: On god we are going to expand your music taste boy
[V2 has sent an attachment.]
V2: This one’s good too if I remember correctly
Gabriel: If you remember?
V2: Haven’t been listening to a lot of music these days
V2: But yeah give those two a try
Mirage: I’ll get the album done by the end of next month.
Mirage: real organ hits different
[V1 is now online.]
V1: what if i teach myself the organ
Gabriel: Do not think you can upstage me.
Gabriel: You are in class now. Pay attention.
V1: you too and i’m not lending you my notes again
[Gabriel has gone offline]
~~~
16/3/20XX, 7:43pm
Gabriel: I have listened to the music you sent me.
Gabriel: @ V2
V1: remove the space after the @
Gabriel: You need to revise your essay outline. It is a rambling mess.
Mirage: keep your studies out of this chat pls
Mirage: so what did you think of them? Those albums
Gabriel: My opinion on music as a whole has not changed. There are certain standards that must be met for art to be considered as such, and this applies to music as well.
Gabriel: Nevertheless, the first few tracks are acceptable to me.
Gabriel: The structure of the melodies remind me of a fugue. Though, they tend to use three parts rather than four.
Mirage: That’s actually some of my earlier stuff
Mirage: Glad you liked it
V2: and the other one
V2: ?
Gabriel: Unlistenable.
V2: lmao
Gabriel: I do not comprehend half the sounds in those pieces. They make my head hurt.
V2: Protip if you don’t know what instrument is making that sound there’s like a 90 percent chance it’s a synth
V2: But yeah that’s digital hardcore
Gabriel: I do not understand how anyone could find this appealing.
V2: It’s music for screaming and breaking stuff
V2: Maybe it’ll grow on you :)
Gabriel: I hope not.
Mirage: rehearsal Monday?
V1: :thumbsup:
V2: if I leave class early yeah
Gabriel: I will have to spend it fixing this disaster of an essay.
Mirage: take it to dms.
V1: :thumbsup:
~~~
16/3/20XX, 8:02pm
Gabriel: You conclude that God is not moral.
V1: yeah
V1: better than starting from a conclusion
Gabriel: Your reasoning is flawed. You see His actions from the perspective of a mortal. Limited, unable to comprehend the choices that lead to the greater good.
V1: 1) i’m not mortal 2) i’m just saying asking a father to sacrifice his son is maybe not the most ethical
V1: and before you can say it yeah i am fuelled by blood. i am not ethical either but i acknowledge it
Gabriel: Does morality not originate from God?
V1: idk you ask him
V1: but doesn’t that make him a dictator basically
Gabriel: He is not human.
V1: and does that give him the right to do whatever he wants
V1: or is he so foreign from us that having our best interests at heart is no longer a priority
Gabriel: The next time I see you I will tear out your wires one by one until you stop moving.
V1: ok
Gabriel: I mean it. You dare blaspheme in the presence of an angel?
V1: :thumbsup:
[V1 has gone offline.]
~~~
Gabriel does not have the chance to dismantle the machine. It signs a heart at him before skipping out of the lecture hall, sliding down the corridor to disappear around a corner when he reaches the exit.
No matter. He has more important things to do.
He had planned to stay here a bit longer, establish himself as a part of this college before digging into more sensitive information. But the Council has forced his hand, and to the library he goes.
He is the only person in the cavernous room, lined wall to wall with bookshelves. Compared to everything else on campus, this place looks fairly well-maintained. No dust collects on the shelves, and the cover of the closest book he extracts is almost gleaming. He’d heard the librarian was an elderly gentleman, dedicated to keeping this space as conducive to studying as possible. Well-loved too, especially by the many Husks.
He strides over to the yearbook section. There are thirty-odd hardcover books here, organised by year. With what limited information he does have, he cannot safely exclude any of these tomes from his search. He starts from the earliest one, still in black-and-white.
Gabriel does not allow himself to skip any pages. He remembers his face well, the only husk in his circle of angels, hoping for a single chance to touch the Father’s holy light. The Council’s scorn had eventually driven him away to this place, and Gabriel had done nothing to stop it.
Guilt spikes through him and he goes back to the old, fragile pages of the yearbook. Mostly Husks, with an odd Machine or two. He looks at each individual portrait, knowing he would never forgive himself if he’d somehow missed the one he was looking for. They’d all left their emails and some their phone numbers. What if he has never left any form of contact behind? What if this leads him to another dead end—
The door to the library creaks open. Gabriel perks up. He could ask the librarian for help. Surely he’d remember a blue skeleton—
Gabriel freezes in place as the man turns slowly in his direction. Pale crown, hole for a face. Suit in place of the rags he wore when he used to live on the streets.
Gabriel grabs the second yearbook, hides his face with it, and runs. The librarian calls after him, confusion evident in his voice, but Gabriel is long gone. As soon as he is out of sight he extracts his phone from his pocket.
Help. He needs someone to borrow all those yearbooks for him. Someone who can keep their mouth shut about him assigning them work…
He scrolls to V1’s contact, frowns, and keeps scrolling.
Any of the three… he does not know them well enough. Perhaps he will pay someone to do it. Someone with eyes, preferably. He wonders how most of the Husks here can manage to read, eyeless as they are.
A noise catches his attention. Muffled drumbeats. Very fast drumbeats.
It appears to be coming from the end of the corridor. Gabriel walks on his toes, careful not to make any additional sound.
The drums come to a stop. He almost jumps at Mirage’s voice, telling someone to ‘please stop rushing, you’re already going fast enough’. Silence as V1 signs its response, followed by V2’s awful synthesiser laugh.
And then the drums start again.
He’d never heard it go so fast before. He’d been too focused on his own playing last time to pay it any attention. How hard could it be to hit something with sticks, anyway?
Very difficult, apparently. It had never occurred to him that each drum makes a different sound. Between the cacophony of crashing cymbals he slowly picks out the patterns. Switching between a gathering of sixteenth notes and polyrhythms. Gabriel sets down his bag and listens.
The drums go quiet for a while as the guitar comes in now, and he’d never heard it scream like this. Had they picked something easy to practice for his first time?
The high wail of something unidentifiable—a synth, he guesses. She’d mentioned before that she played piano—was this skill transferable, then? Could he perhaps learn… no, he has to leave in a month. He does not have enough time.
The drums pick up one last time, then begin to slow down. A stopping engine, each part of this machine grinding to a stop. The synth plays one last cluster of notes.
As the sounds of the instruments fade into nothing, Gabriel realises that he has listened to the entirety of… whatever this is. None of that musicality he had been so hung up on. By all means just a mess of noise.
He quite likes it.
Perhaps he should ask them what… no, not when he’s already on his way out. He gets up to leave just as the door opens.
Mirage stands there, letting the door swing open on its own, her hands on her hips.
‘You’re not as slick as you think you are,’ she says.
Gabriel finds his voice. ‘What was that you were playing?’
‘Just a remix of one of my old pieces,’ she says, looking down at her nonexistent nails. ‘I don’t have to write something completely new if barely anyone has heard the original. It’s not cutting corners, technically.’
‘No, I was asking… which type?’
‘Genre?’
‘Breakcore,’ says V2 from the back.
‘Respectfully, no one knows what breakcore actually is,’ says Mirage.
V1 signs, ‘I think it probably counts. Genres are arbitrary anyway.’
‘Are you going to continue…’ Gabriel gestures vaguely. The others stare at him, the judgement of three bright optic lenses fixated solely on him.
‘Just come in and watch,’ says Mirage. ‘Acoustics in here are shit but you should get the general idea.’
He wants to say he’s sorry for leaving, he wants to see where they go next—to play alongside someone else, he thinks wistfully. So foreign of a concept to him, yet so strangely alluring. To be part of a whole and not feel out of place as long as he is pressing the keys. A single cog of a beautiful machine.
Whatever sense of disgust he feels at that last thought melts away from V1’s quick, decisive hits on the cymbals, and he lets his mind melt into the strange harmony of those drums.
breakcore is when the uhh when the uhh when the drums go all funny like boom crash tap tap tap crash and my brain gets thoroughly massaged. or at least i think so. why does the act 1 soundtrack vinyl cost another kidney
listen to soundtracks for the blind by swans