No.

(Served best cold, with a side of Stella by Moor)

    Five stories in the air, an out-of-work reporter scribbled over the last few inches of window in her apartment in fat, black marker, holding a closet key in her hand.  A door slammed down the hall as her landlord, a short, disagreeable man with curly brown hair and a small splotch of skin cancer on his shoulder waddled toward the stairs, hoping to catch the skinheads who had just double-parked outside of his building.  She ignored it and placed a worn, brown hat on the kitchen counter.  The smell of fecal matter finger paint and decaying woman would bother her neighbors within the week.

    The floorboards creaked and moaned as Ooidal lumbered back to his captive captain.  His hands were fumbling with an extension cord when Dante reappeared.  He beat his fist on the door’s ragged frame to pull the tumor of a man from his work, knocking a clock from the wall.  In eight minutes, a payphone at the foot of a block of rowhouses all frozen in mid-collapse twelve blocks away would begin to ring.  The clock’s face shattered, leaving it forever eight minutes from an exit.

    “You brought this upon y’urself, kid.  You had mo’ than en’uff chances t’uh jus’ give me that gah-damm one-armed bih-“

    “An’ wh’ut, Dante?  Whu’thhen, huh?  Jus’ ‘cause y’uh can’nuh get pas’ Vice dyin’ duz-zent mean y’gottuh live a decade in th’uh past.  An’ it duz-zent mean y’gottuh brin-“

    “This isn’t about Vice, kid.  This isn’t about Vice, or Virtue, or Noble, or you, oh-renny oth’uh ghosts.  This’us jus’ about fixin’ somethin’ that broke.  Virtue was suppos’suh off herself an hour after I dropped her in that hole.  Vice was suppos’suh put a bullet in Noble’s crooked little face.  An’ you were suppos’suh bury your head in the caves at Ere-uh-won and never come up for air again.”  Dante’s lips were wet, and he ran his hands through his hair as he spoke, his eyes not leaving Ooidal’s for a moment.  His tempo fell apart, “That truce fell apart, an’ you jus’ itched for the good ol’ days, right?  You came to me and asked, ‘What can I do, captain?’ an’ I answered.  So what the hell makes you think you can side with her,” he motioned toward the redhead, “or Noone, or any one of these gah-damm brats?  This generation’s not worth savin’, kid.  Not one of ‘em.”

    “Then why d’y’hoo want t’uh fight th’um so badly?” Ooidal squinted, his fingers still diligently working against the tense vinyl.  “Why th’hull didn’t you jus’ take Virtue y’urself when y’foun’ur in New Antigone?”

    The clock still read eight minutes as the two bald men entered the hall.  It still read eight minutes as they stepped over the receptionist’s body, over the late Digamma unit.  And when they climbed the stairs.  And they marched toward the rotten apple of a door; and when the first clubbed Dante, hard, with the butt of his handgun, knocking the surprised man to the ground, his tongue all bloody from biting down on it.  Still when the second trained his weapon on Ooidal, his fingers moving from the last strands of knot to the back of his bald head.  The clock still read eight minutes away from an exit as the two gleaming devils lifted the bear, their trophy, over their shoulders and carried him from the room, leaving Ooidal alone with a girl he had lied to for a very long time.

Last month:

This Month:

QuiDormit wrote:

deimoslvov wrote:

Hey, Walrus and Virrago - you guys truly are amazing these days with all the attention you're giving to us. TY again.

I don't know Walrus, and I don't really know Virrago, but I'm certainly more familiar with him than anyone else left, and I like the guy from what I do know...

But isn't this...  Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this statement?

(In before Fen)

No.  No you're not.

Pass.

I played the trial of EVE with some friends last semester and enjoyed it quite a bit.  If I can get some people to subscribe with me, that's where I'll be heading.

Fen wrote:

The first Matrix film grossed over $460 million dollars.  You have, quite literally, killed the franchise.  That's quite an achievement.  Congratulations.  I won't be around to see how you handle your future projects, so good luck I guess.

If you couldn't see ways to help improve this game, then I'm sorry, you weren't fit to be a producer.  Maybe some advertising?  Maybe actually poking your head in here more than once a year?  In my opinion, you sold us out for bluer  pastures (lulz get it?).  You helped make the awesome game that the Matrix Online was, and then it's like you ditched us without a second thought and have focused everything on the Agency.

Sorry if I'm being harsh, but I loved this game and this franchise, and it infuriates me to see what SOE has done (or rather, HASN'T done) to it.

Exactly.  There is no glass-half-full, there is no humor, and there is no way for you to justify anything.  You should feel terrible for letting not just those of us still here, but everyone who has since quit because "MxO [was] dead" down.

Of course there would be a forum error.

I can't believe the people in this thread being cheery and sending /huggles.  Walrus, you have failed us as a community manager, and it is not okay.  All this time that you've had the chance to keep us informed, or at the very least acknowledge that we still exist, and you didn't.  I fail to see how anyone could view you as less culpable than anyone else at SOE in ignoring us as a community.

I sure could go for a Caesar salad.

Just got back from throwing up on myself in the great weather at the carnival.

Yasamuu wrote:

*looks forward to any Square-Enix news*

*Doesn't*

Windows Live (If I'm awake, I'm on.): tsaagent1@hotmail.com
Steam: TSA Agent 1 (Old, now shows as The Cat in the Hat)
Demiurge Forums: Link
twitter: Link
deviantART: Link
facebook (Put MxO in your request): Link

XElite is actually a ghost with a Marilyn Monroe wig.

Incomplete list of my serious characters, and there current whereabouts:

Eleutherophobia - Alive (Hovercraft Equinox)
2ante - Alive (Hovercraft Lethe)
Ooidal - Alive (Hovercraft Equinox)
Kate Adie - Dead: Suicide (Self-inflicted starvation)
Kompira (Vector Machine Liaison) - Dead: Suicide (Jumped into ruins of Zion)
Routine Emerald - Dead: Suicide (Drug Overdose)
Sweeper Prynne - Deleted: Outdated (New version released, since deleted)
Sihu Lumbee - Dead: Accidental Death (Drug Overdose)
James Hooke - Dead: Murdered (Stabbed to death by a street gang)
Peter Barrie - Alive (Hampton Green Drug Rehabilitation Center)

Kate was always the most fun.

(Here, the story gets hazy, and her hair gets too long.  No doubt, this story will conclude in some fashion before we are torn from the simulation, or rather, the simulation is torn from us.  However, I have been asked, and already have a plan to continue this in some other way once we bid adeau to this world.  It would seem that this is my only shining achievement of the past few years in MxO.  If any of you still follow this, and would care to be enlightened as to where it will exist, please drop a line in this thread.)

I'm back after a semester off to watch the universe that shaped me into what I am today vanish.  Hello again, everyone.

(To be taken with The One That Got Away)

The sun started meekly peeking from behind a whitewashed splotch of sky, its blinding forebears squinting though a Marquis of Queensbury of metal blinds and dusty fabric that were all half-up-half-down in a messy mussed-up kind of way, the little white cord all tangled and knotted into itself.  Shadows from the blinds painted themselves in a careful, geometric sort of pattern across all the room’s surfaces, a slight breeze making the whole wallpaper-and-Berber affair look fluidly mobile.  Something like a bird passed by the window, stabbing madly into the light’s ebb and flow.  The girl blinked hardly, stirring herself from unconsciousness again, her eyes opening into whitish almond shells, painted in a messy light brown and pitted black in the center. 

“Who foun’urr” croaked Ooidal, his sloppy gaze darting between his two captains.

“Some scavenger punk, I ne’er got a good description from Alexis.  Bas’surd got her healthy enough to work an’ sold her into the slave trade,” he coughed.  “I guess it was luck that the Ephialtes was refueling when it was.  Luck that he still recognized her, too.  Told me she was jus’ about in the pawn shop when he bought’er.”  Dante’s caricatured eyebrows lifted for a moment, a smile creeping across his lips.

“Why did’un’t y’hou nab her when y’whurr stringin’ them up by th’urr insides?” hissed the operator, his fat, sweaty nostrils flaring, his jowls slapping at the side of his unhappy chin.

“Don’ think I didn’t try.  Alexis didn’t say two words ‘til I threw his whore’s ear into his lap.  The whole crew was just as close-lipped.  Hell if I know why, though.  The kid’d skipped off to Erehwon at some point, back when they were still buildin’ that hole.”

The girl lifted her head slowly, her wrists still tied snugly to the back of her chair.  She traced the side of her palm across the Braille messages carved all up and down the grain of the wood.  It told a whole meandering, messy story that nobody wanted anything to do with: a haphazard heady tale of a little redheaded girl with pigtails and an old man with a spidery, creased scar across the back of his bald head where a blonde woman had bludgeoned him with a crowbar.  Her head felt heavy, a handful of conflicts squeezing their way between hemorrhaging capillaries and hammerhead migraines.  “Why we’ar y’look’hin’ f’er me, then?” she whispered once, the raspy words only timidly creeping past her lips.  She repeated it, her blurred halfway gaze meeting the lazy, happyish scowl chiseled into Dante’s dark face.

His mouth unbolted, showing just the off-white ankles of his front teeth as a floorboard creaked outside the door.  The room was painted in a softish kind of gleaming yellow for a moment, and again, and again.  The noise followed just after, explosive cracks elbowed their way out of the barrel of Dante’s powerful handgun, though the dusty, distilled air.

The door splintered, three, maybe, distinct holes nestled themselves in the wake of their projectile pedigree.  Ooidal had tightened his fists, and with a vague fire in his belly, landed a shoe next to the door’s handle, sending a shower of toothpicks out into the hall and driving the door wildly out onto the cramped, beige balcony.  A slippery looking red stain, no wider than a coal-miner’s smile contrasted the dark brown of a wooden rail.  Ooidal’s cancerous, rusty form burst through the door’s absence, his hands landing on either side of the stain.  Below, a little blonde sprite with a heart-shaped necklace and a cough from teenage smoking pointed to 1:35 on a collapsed poker table, a brownish-red pooling just under the dramatic tear in her abdomen.

     Alexis grunted, placing the one-armed woman with straw-grass for hair and bleeding splits in her tongue on a shining metal table, knocking half-eaten bowls of something bouncing maverick across the grated floor.  She lay there all rolled into herself like a porcupine cannonball rolling across the deck of some hellborne freighter.  He leaned her onto her back, and she winced, sprawling out across the cold surface, her asymmetrical limbs splayed parallel, hitting six o’clock on the nose.

    Ooidal’s hulking form turned pale as he felt a new kind of sweat splash itself upon his pockmarked forehead, noticing the duct tape across the clock’s mouth.  He turned from the rail, his maw hanging just open enough to taste the 65% polyester, 35% viscose blend of a bootcut black pant leg as it collided with his teeth.  Heavy leather caught the back half of his cheek, and flattened his ear into itself.

    Dante caught himself in the ragged doorframe as the lanky black stroke slashed past him, into the operator’s face.  An overflowing, guttural yell escaped him as he pounced through the hole, tackling the tobacco brunette goon toward, onto, through the balcony’s dry-rotted banister.  They landed with a resonant thud, the dinosaur’s mighty, violent mass concentrated at the assailant, the force of his landing flowing out through the two cannons of his knee and elbow, crushing the man’s pelvis and sternum, respectively.  As he rolled off the rapidly expiring form, Dante caught a glimpse of some kind of Greek looking ϝ tattooed all red and raw around the edges on his neck, teetering on the edge of his collar.

    His sort of bubble-shaped face ended with a goateed chin that he stroked when he was thinking or not thinking, blood from his split lip was dying it a brownish red.  He had no hair up top, but could have grown some if he chose to; maybe it would have disguised the big purple-blue egg forming across his temple.  And he was sort of tan, but in an indistinguishable kind of rugged way that made him look like a pioneer or a circus clown, depending upon the time of day – but now he was a much more whitish kind of shade, shock and blood loss desaturating him quickly.  “She’s gone, you fu-ging maniac,” spat Alexis, mediocre, forgettable captain of the Ephialtes as a rope was fitted around his neck.

    Two more suits clogged the staircase, their roles suddenly shifting from upper- handed offense, to man-to-man defense against the two behemoths.  Ooidal regained himself in just enough time to bring crossed arms in front of his face, blocking a piston-first.  He grit his teeth, and locked his fist, shooting a cannonball uppercut into the tail end of a not-strong-enough ribcage.  The mediumish black form fell into the punch, a strained cough exploding from its mouth.  Trained well enough, its hand found its shoulder holster, snaking around Ooidal’s sausage link arm.

    Fire spat from the beautifully polished and primed machine before it was parallel with the ground.  One, two big serrated holes popped from the floor, then a ham hock elbow plowed into the back of the suit’s head.  The world went all starry and was suddenly more comfortable and soothing – all warm milk and gently crashing waves.  Then it was on the ground with three broken ribs and a dangerous concussion.

    The remaining scowled, remaining on the stairs, removing an unsmiling submachine from inside a jacket that’s flowing cut now gained reason.  His leatherly gloved finger clamped tightly on the little parenthesis of a trigger, and rounds began to pepper the nighthawk jungle.  Liquid air seemed to fill the space between the gun’s screaming mouth and Dante’s hulking construction.  He rolled dynamically to his left, stopping midway and jumping right, catching himself behind an overstuffed loveseat.  Bullets zigzagged through the floral fabric of the armrest just above the man’s vintage haircut, half of them making it through and missing their mark by only a lucky quarter.  And suddenly a much more commanding crash punctuated the meandering statement made by the submachine gun’s rat-a-tat.

    Lethe smirked with one eye closed, the shot firing from his index finger hitting its mark - imaginary smoke pouring from his fingernail.  Ooidal shot again, his forty-five caliber lead hornet stinging the shoulder of the man who was busy mourning his shattered wrist.

    A silent man named Agustus carried another crate full of smuggled cigarettes, terrible, fake cigarettes, toward the Hovercraft Fawkes.  Some slivered piece of wood was digging something fierce into his wrist.  Three more, he counted to himself, then it’ll be the one with air holes – that’ll be a nice break.  He nodded as Noone pointed him in the direction of a cargo hold in the belly of the fatter-than-long ship.  She was just dead weight, anyway.  What good is a miner with only one hand to grip a shovel?  They were building a city, not a cripple’s home.

An unassuming white sedan signaled right, and pulled up just behind a similar one all scribbled over in black.  Grinding the parking break and killing the engine, two big men with shaved heads and white slacks snarled and exited the car.

Sunday for me.

No snow here, but I went to MATH415 this morning, realized it was Doctor Seuss' birthday, and decided to ditch the rest of my classes.

Operation Promiscuous Octopus

Payment sent, deal completed.

-No Violence, of Course-

"Here the story gets hazy and her hair gets too long,
And the tv gets quiet as you hear a real bad song.
The mothers get whiskey and the girlfriends get tongue,
And there's a back of a truck selling smoke free lungs,
And there's a back of a truck selling alien pods,
And there's a back of a truck selling gameshow hosts,
And there's a back of a truck selling the souls of the dead,
And there's a back of a truck selling crumb-free bread."
Regina Spektor - "Back of a Truck"

Edit: Forums

Looking to buy Blurred Sleepwaler Shades, and possibly Faded Jeans/Shoes if the price is right.

/t Eleutherophobia

(I absolutely loved this, and can't wait to see more of your writing.)

Kybutra wrote:

TheChainer wrote:

Tosuno wrote:

I love that show.

Better hope this pic isn't linked to a photobucket! Kybutra will try to pillage it for private time material!

 

She has nice shoes, btw.

Kate's Playground subscibed for the past 2 years ^_^

Honestly, if you don't recognize her, Chainer.  You've never been on the internet.  Also:

xXAnnieXx wrote:

you have no time on your hands

I believe you meant "too much."  As in "Ele has too much free time on his hands, so he corrects grammar on the MxO forums."

Also, back on topic:

I WILL MELT YOUR FACE.

Kybutra wrote:

No one liked the faction before no one likes it now

Oh jeez.  I'm so sorry to hear this.  Rest in peace.

I'll be there to sub-in for ya' when nature calls, Arch. 

I loved the game in small spurts.  I think it took me like four years to beat, because I played it so infrequently.  Hated the BS 'to be continued' ending (sorry if anyone hasn't finished it).  I'll probably check this out.  Good find!

The prodigal son returns.  Welcome home NoodleMojo.

Elevator card games.

Well, whether or not this becomes a reality, here're two (read: one) to get the ball rolling.

I actually really like this idea.  The scarce "Welsh Rarebit" signs really are more silly than meaningful.  Looking at your sign, it appears that the dimensions are 2:1.  I'd say that 1500:750 is hefty enough, hmm  Perhaps some sort of collaberation is in order.

If you're proposing a contest, however, I'd say it's only fitting for Rarebit to pick the winner.  I hope this is plausible.

Whatever you need, I'm available.

I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream has gone from me.

Rarebit, this is truly earth-shattering news.  The Matrix Online has been an integral part of my, all of our lives going on four years for many of us.  Even in the spans of months where my subscription has gone unused, I’ve never strayed far from the forums, and keeping in the loop as to what was coming down the line from our amazing developer with his limitless energy and boundless ways to improve a game that was given to him with no tools for improvement.

In my brief stint as a liaison, I was honored to be able to at least catch a glimpse of your side of this game.  The imagination of your story, even when it seemed to stray from what we wanted, was always something to be admired.

This community will sorely miss you, and I know that my experience will always seem a little hollow without you.  Thank you for everything, and good luck.

XElite wrote:

Eleutherophobia wrote:

Here since the start of November 2005, only 30.

You are actually 42 and in the year 1999. It was all a dream.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

While I'm excited for the movie, I really don't see Keanu as playing Spike...maybe like...jeez, I can't even come up with a throwaway character.  Keanu Reeves doesn't fit the atmosphere of that show even a little bit.