Lake Heart Asylum- From the Pages of Dr. Ignatius
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		<h2 id="linktree">Play-By-Post: Extreme =&gt; Extreme Small Groups =&gt; Topic started by: Paradox on 09-08-2008, 16:03:05</h2>
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				Title: <strong>Lake Heart Asylum- From the Pages of Dr. Ignatius</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Paradox</strong> on <strong>09-08-2008, 16:03:05</strong>
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				<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;" class="bbc_font"><span style="font-size: 13pt;" class="bbc_size">From the Diary of Doctor Ignatius:<br><br>When I purchased this leather-bound book from one of the street vendors in town, I intended to call it a journal. “Diary” sounds far too feminine for my tastes. It evokes the image of teenage girls so full of angst that it cannot help but spill forth onto the pages before them; the pain in their hearts turns to ink on the paper.<br><br>As I carried the empty tome home to the Asylum along with the rest of the odds and ends I purchased that day, it occurred to me that a journal is really nothing more than a shallow record book. “Journal” comes from a Middle English word that means “a service book containing the day’s hours”. It can be traced back to the Latin word “diurnus”, meaning “of the day”. It carries connotations of work and labor as a logbook; a diary, on the other hand, is more closely related to a collection of personal reflections and feelings. The word “diary” comes from the Latin “dies”, meaning “day”. I intended for this book to be a chronicle of my inner thoughts, not a daily record of my external actions.<br><br>All of this may sound terribly dull to you-- justifiably so-- but it turns out that “dies” is etymologically related to “diety”. Have I unwittingly sought out this diary as some sort of means of confession? The only priest who risked taking on the onerous role of Asylum Chaplin was poisoned along with five other patients when another patient claiming to be Eris incarnated sprinkled hemlock in the communion wine. When I attempt to attend mass at the church in town, I am barred entry every time, yet still I hike the miles down every Sunday morning to see if the clergy had changed its mind,<br><br>My faith and my love for the Lord beckon and beg me to confess my trespasses, yet how can a man excommunicated still commune with his God?<br><br>It would seem as though Christ has called me to account for my myriad sins. Why else would He have chosen a book whose very name means “God”? Though it pains me to transcribe my transgressions instead of giving voice to them at long last, I shall do as my Lord wishes. I am naught but His humble servant, and without Him I am less than nothing; still, part of me cannot help but feel as though I am acting as a heretic (besides the majority of me which too often <em><strong>is</strong></em> heretical) for replacing God with a mere book. Should my hidden madness manifest once more, perhaps I will wind up worshipping this book. Can a man pray to paper?<br><br>Sacrifices and blood offerings, pagan rites performed at the foot of this book...such are the sinister images that suddenly assault my mind; obviously, the tainted cells of the cancerous tumor on my soul have been allowed to thrive for far too long. It is time for me to expose them to the Sun, the medieval symbol of Divine Illumination. Perhaps in the blessed light of day, they will wither to husks and fall away.</span><br></span><br><div style="text-align: right;"> <span style="font-family: Vivaldi;" class="bbc_font"><span style="font-size: 21pt;" class="bbc_size">Ignatius</span></span></div>
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				Title: <strong>Re: Lake Heart Asylum- From the Pages of Dr. Ignatius</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Paradox</strong> on <strong>09-08-2008, 21:41:51</strong>
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				<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;" class="bbc_font"><span style="font-size: 13pt;" class="bbc_size">The last entry (which also happens to be the first) in my diary closed with the hopeful thought of the infirmities of my soul turning to empty husks. Looking back, I see that was an unfortunate choice of wording considering a good percentage of my patients are nothing more than ruined husks themselves. They are bitter, empty shells of men and women; they are automatons mimicking the basic functions of human life, yet they have lost hold of their true humanity.<br><br>Those walking wastelands are the lucky ones.<br>Their eyes are vacant; their gaze is dull. Their souls long ago paid Charon his silver coin and crossed the Acheron. It seems that their bodies and minds simply forgot to die.<br><br>It is the group of patients who are still in the process of damning themselves that I truly pity.<br><br>However, as Dante made his arduous trek through Hell, Virgil had to chastise him not to pity the damned soulstrapped in its bowels. Righteous indignation is the only proper way to react towards Sin. Christ Himself said as much, so I have steeled myself against pity, tempered my soul against feeling sorry for the victims of sin. My pity and my sympathy have been replaced by disdain and downright loathing.<br><br>I loathe the sin, but should I not also loathe the sinner? Irrespective of whether or not I should, I must confess that I do. The twisted minds and dark hearts that fill my halls sicken me. Walking through the Asylum, I am again reminded of Dante and how it must have felt to walk through evil’s final resting place; though here, the damned know no rest. I watch the loathsome sinners in their cells. I see them writhing in agony as though God has seen fit to forgo waiting until their death to begin his retribution. I must also confess that I have, on more occasions than I care to admit, added my own strength to the Lord’s holy lash.<br><br>Please do not misunderstand me. I am not yet so delusional as to believe that I am some sort of Chosen One. I know that I am not empowered to rain divine vengeance upon these unworthy souls. (In the margins of this page, it is written: though I did recently have a dream in which I parted the waters of Lake Heart with a Rod of Asclepius so that a mob of my patients could flee from an oppressor too shrouded in darkness for me to properly identify.) <br><br>Unfortunately, that knowledge has done little to deter me from trying. Certain patients cause the bile to rise in my throat and the righteousness to surge from my soul. In the Fall, I met with a woman so meretricious that she attempted to seduce me in the hopes of winning a reprieve from her scheduled electrotherapy. To show her the error of her ways, I clamped the metal clasps of the machine onto her nipples, pumping more voltage through it..through her..than I have ever risked before. Her bare breasts erupted in flames as though the pit fiends of Malebolge had come to claim her prematurely. The blood-curdling screams that resulted from her torment pierced the air so sharply that they seemed to stab my very brain. Once I was finished putting out her charred, melted mammaries, I shoved the extinguisher’s hose down her throat to silence her harpy’s call. <br>She died from nitrogen poisoning, but I know that it was the wicked tendrils of Sin which had wriggled their way into her heart that were at the heart of her true poisoning- her spiritual poisoning that sounded her death knell.<br><br>Was it my place to mete out such dire punishment? I know not, so I offer it to the Lord to decide. My first confession thus is made through this diary, the instrument of God’s Will.<br><br>I do not feel as unburdened as I hoped I would. I suppose that is because of the legion of <del>demons</del> confessions still welling up inside of me, begging for release; yet all I can think of is the memory of the her breasts turned to ash, ember-laden husks of their former selves.<br><br>I started this with husks, and so shall I end it.</span></span><br><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; <div style="text-align: right;"> <span style="font-family: Vivaldi;" class="bbc_font"><span style="font-size: 21pt;" class="bbc_size">Ignatius</span></span></div>
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				Title: <strong>Re: Lake Heart Asylum- From the Pages of Dr. Ignatius</strong><br>
				Post by: <strong>Paradox</strong> on <strong>10-08-2008, 21:04:00</strong>
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				<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;" class="bbc_font"><span style="font-size: 13pt;" class="bbc_size">Pardon me for breaking the precedent that I have established, but one cannot maintain a discourse on husk references indefinitely; instead, I shall begin this entry with a simple description of my current surroundings (thought I hope not to stray too far from dies into diurnus).<br><br>I sit with one leg crossed over the other, leaning back in my stone seat atop the balcony abutting my bedchamber. Though stone is not at all comfortable, its stark, Spartan nature appeals to my ascetic sense of refraining from the use of any frivolous accoutrements. I must also admit to a more practical reason for choosing to use this rigid slab for a seat: stone cannot blow away in the storms that so often scour the lake that my asylum inhabits the shore of. Even now, Borea and his oread bride Oreithyia’s consummate exertions send gales of wind howling down from the North. Dark clouds, pregnant with pent-up moisture, roll slowly in behind them, carried in the wind’s wake. As I watch, the birds and beasts of the surrounding woods flee the coming onslaught. Bereft of the sun’s comforting rays, they run to hide away in even deeper darkness; obviously, Aesop was mistaken.<br><br>Ah, Aesop, just a drop in the sea of Classical brilliance. His Fables have been downgraded to nothing more than mere children’s stories, meant to impart their morals upon our offspring, yet when those children reach adulthood, they think of his stories as a childhood memory, a simple child’s tale; they see them not a source of valuable lessons, not a source of insight into how to lead your life as Aesop meant them to be. We smile vaguely at the half-remembered stories, but the morals within them are entirely forgotten by the time we reach maturity.<br><br>The same can be said of countless Biblical passages. Daniel and the lions’ den, Joseph and the coat of many colors, Noah’s Ark, Moses and the Ten Commandments, Pharaoh and the Ten Plaques, even Adam and Eve—past cultures and societies treated these and other stories with reverence, respect, and high regard for their spiritual resonance; now, we make asinine songs and animated tripe that trivializes the true impact and meaning of the ancient experiences recounted in scripture. A sort of unintentional iconoclasm is taking place under our noses, and we hardly even realize it. Half of the Old Testament is sneered at and scorned for being an outdated, rigidly strict throwback of an extinct patriarchal society that flourished on the enforcement of arcane orthodox rules, and the other half has been relegated to the fare of absurd cartoon programs for children. The most recent blasphemy I have seen involved anthropomorphic legumes singing and dancing in a terribly misguided attempt to convey the Word of our Lord to a clutch of ADHD-ridden brats whose brains have been addled by the overabundant lack of proper parenting. <br><br>With such garbage passing for spiritual enrichment, it is no wonder that so many of my patients are on the young end of the age spectrum. The girl I met with last week, for instance—she was barely twenty three years of age, yet the iniquity within her could easily rival that of any Midianite; however, just as the children of Moses triumphed over the children of Midian, so too have I triumphed over this witch, Ciarra, by name. As with the patient I described last time, she turned to seduction in an attempt to escape her fate; unlike the previous patient, however, she then turned to bribery, mockery, and finally mania. Her fiery hair seemed to be a physical manifestation of her fiery temperament. <br><br>Like a modern day Circe, she tried to transform me into chauvinistic swine with her seductive wiles, yet I resisted her ensorcellment of my flesh and bested her finally with the sharp end of a hypodermic needle. As my thumb slowly forced down the plunger, filling her with a Chloral Hydrate/Anxiolytic Mood Stabilizer compound, I once again succumbed to the urge to carry out God’s Justice here in the mortal realm.<br><br>Now, as her wasted, withered body wheezes beside me on the balcony, desperately trying to stave of its final death rattle yet despondent in its futility, I cannot decide to whom this loathing I feel is directed. The obvious answer would be towards her for her earlier harlotry, bribery, blasphemy, and violence and her present pathetic state; on the other hand, deep within my soul, I somehow feel as though my actions were ignoble as well. Why else would I feel compelled to detail them in this growing collection of confessions?<br><br>No matter. Thought I feel no pity for this wretch, I shall nonetheless grant her a pittance of mercy. The Lord would do no less, so it is only fitting. <br><br>The storm arrives. The rain on my face feels refreshingly smooth; the thunder in the sky strikes fear into the dark heart of Ciarra. Fitting, is it not? I often feel that names have an intrinsic influence over how we develop. In Irish, Ciarra means “dark”. As she was named, so has she become. I shall now deliver her to her namesake: the swirling pitch black waters that roil so many stories below my balcony. I see now that God has sent this storm to wash away the sin that weighs so heavily on my mind, my soul.<br><br><br><br><br>Her body, broken on the rocks below, swept away in the undertow, engulfed for eternity by the storm, carried under to rot with the rest of her ilk. The Lord may work in mysterious ways, but his methods were startlingly literal today. The storm truly has washed away my sin- her dying body, now a corpse I suppose. <br>Rest well Ciarra, rest well. </span><br></span><br><br>&nbsp;<div style="text-align: right;"> <span style="font-family: Vivaldi;" class="bbc_font"><span style="font-size: 21pt;" class="bbc_size">Ignatius</span></span></div>
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