The Feckless Guide to reality

14/08/2025:

Somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean—Around Midday—Possibly ten past twelve.

I’ve always wanted to write a travel guide, having seen a lot of the world on my missions to assassinate, kidnap or otherwise intimidate various members of the world elite.

The thing about wet-work is that you spend a lot of time hanging around places waiting for your target to appear so you can pop their melon like that scene in The Day of the Jackal—the 1973 film directed by Fred Zinnemann, starring Edward Fox, not the clumsy, totally unnecessary TV series remake starring Eddie Redmayne [1].

While you’re waiting for your target, you tend to take in a lot of the local scenery—the architecture, if you’re somewhere urban, or the landscape if you’re, for example, waiting in an Arizona vineyard for Maynard James Keenan to inspect the grape harvest so you can bundle him into a hessian sack and beat him with a rolling pin until he agrees to write lyrics for a new Tool album [2]. This, I think, has given me a heightened appreciation for other cultures, if only in the superficial expression of said cultures through the geography they inhabit and the dwellings they construct for themselves. Of course, Karpal tells me that this sort of “land-watching”—as he calls it—is highly inefficient and what I should be doing is dosing myself on octopine, or ibogaine and meditating, visualising the kill in my mind, like that bit in Hero (2002) where Jet Li’s character, Nameless, visualises his duel with Long Sky, as played by Donnie Yen.

Anyway, I suppose I should explain what this is all about (Karpal Marik: No, Cheese, you shouldn’t—there’s no need to go blabbing about what we’re up to to every Tom, Dick and Wzygglyzyd that reads this nonsense) you see, we’re on a highly sensitive mission of deeply personal dimensions to recover the various body-parts of our late co-leader, Jarvis Lautrec—I won’t tell you exactly why we’re doing this, otherwise Karpal will skin me alive and use my flayed epidermis to fashion a pair of fetching leg-warmers (KM: Damn straight) suffice to say, it’s sort of like the story in Final Fantasy VII (1997) where █████████ ███████ ███ ███ ████ ██ ██████ ██ ████ ████████████ ████ ███ ████—all thanks to the marvels of medical science, newt DNA and the interventions of Dr. Fentanyl Harmstrong, who’s a sort of benevolent Professor Hojo in this analogy.

(Oscillation Jones: Does this guy exclusively communicate in pop-culture references from twenty years ago? I mean, what are they teaching kids at assassin school these days? First transcription duties for an idiot and now editing this nonsense? If the editors are reading this, we need to have words about my contract.)

Our first port of call is to be Bermuda—specifically the capital of Hamilton. As some of the more psychically attuned amongst you may already be aware, Bermuda functions as an outflow for many of the stranger phenomena to be found on our planet—a place where the dregs of these phenomena congregate, like a big Tesco car-park in the middle of the Caribbean. Rumours of an underwater dry riser inlet located somewhere in the middle of the archipelago were all but confirmed when we consulted Martha Fugnugget on the subject and this is generally believed to be the source of Bermuda’s strange powers.

Speaking of Martha, it was to her that we turned in our time of need, having received consent from the editors at Concrete Octopus to approach her. While she agreed to the consultation, she flat-out refused to join us on our voyage—being preoccupied with preparations for her own excursion in search of the so-called “sentient fat-bergs” that occupy the sewer systems of several major cities—and she threatened to “hex [us] into a thousand tiny particles” if we tried to bring her along by force. She did, however, put us in contact with one Fudley Mansfield—a competent, if inexperienced necromancer, previously in the employ of the Tolkien Estate [3].

It is here that we hope to find the first of Jarvis’ dismembered parts—his left shin, to be precise—as, in the aftermath of his murder at the hands of Toe Mogan, we were forced to vacate our hideout at Octoworld© in a bit of a hurry, and the matter of cleaning up what remained of Jarvis was left to the Octoworld© janitors. As it transpired, the janitors weren’t quite as respectful as we might have liked when disposing of his remains, electing to dump them into a nearby dry riser inlet, rather than retaining them until our return, as were our wishes. Now, all the bits and pieces of Jarvis have been scattered across the globe and, quite possibly, across several dimensional rifts—which is a massive pain in the arse if we hope to ████████████ ███ ████ ███ ██████ ███ ████ ██ ███ ████████ ██████.

Anyway, it’s a nice bright day out here on the open ocean and the stewards are currently serving half-price Pinã Coladas at the Tiki Bar on the upper deck. As I write this, Karpal is deep in conversation with Jarvis’ ghost about our plans once we reach Hamilton.

15/08/25:

Still on the Atlantic—10am-ish—Quite hungover.

Jarvis is pretty tetchy at the moment—he’s got the ISD sniffing around his ethereal arsehole and he keeps having to move to different parts of the spirit world to evade them. Karpal’s talking him down right now, but I don’t think he’s going to relax until we’ve found this shin bone of his—he keeps yelling about going “fuck wild” on the ghosts of the Jonestown massacre down the hall from us and it’s only a matter of time before he ends up in another ghost-firefight with Interpol. I think the phrase he used was “re-massacre”, which admittedly has a nice ring to it, but isn’t exactly Karpal’s idea of “laying low”. What the late inhabitants of Jonestown are doing on this cruise, I have no idea—it’s probably best not to speculate.

Fudley and I spent yesterday evening getting spangled on cheap cocktails and now I feel like a dead rat, with a smaller, deader rat, lodged in my brain-stem. I feel sorry for Fudley, since he’s having to work with Jarvis and Karpal today and I can think of few things worse than communing with dead people on a hangover. That said, I’m being put to work today too—apparently, I can’t just sit around drinking all day, since Concrete Octopus are paying us good money for this travel guide and have kindly agreed to pay our drinks tab (OJ: No, we haven’t).

According to the Concrete Octopus researchers, this cruise-liner is actually home to a very peculiar artefact—nicknamed Moctezuma’s Ball-Pit—and I’m supposed to go out and find it.

God, it feels like the smaller, deader rat clinging to my brain-stem just shat itself—a quick bathroom break, maybe a shower and a shave and I’ll be on my way. I wish I had some octopine to take the edge off, but Karpal’s holding all our widgets at the moment and I don’t think he’d appreciate being interrupted. Maybe I can score some coke off the catering staff?

Still on the Atlantic—Midday—Mild buzz.

I have it on good authority that Moctezuma’s Ball-Pit really exists and is definitely somewhere here on this cruise-liner. I was hanging out with a couple of the cooks and one of them promised to show me where it was—according to them, it’s a well-kept secret, which begs the question; how did the guys at Concrete Octopus hear about it in the first place? I mean, we keep hearing about these researchers of theirs, but has anyone ever seen one of them? They certainly seem to get around—stealing chronologically-entangled corporate diaries from the British Museum, securing interviews with A-list celebrities, spying on axolotl farmers in Peru, the list goes on. Frankly, they sound like a bunch of deviants, so naturally I’d love to meet them someday.

Anyway, the cooks said this thing is pretty dangerous—they don’t seem to know exactly what it is, mind you, only that every once in a while, one of the passengers gets a bit too close to it and then it’s all hands on deck for the clover-up—that’s the “clean-up cover-up”, to you and me [4]. I asked them why they didn’t just get rid of the thing and they told me it’s not so much a physical entity as it is a place on the ship where freaky shit happens—sounds to me like one of those Time/World Portals everyone was talking about last year, but who knows?

I’m heading back to my room to pick-up Mr. Browning Hi-Power—I don’t expect I’ll need him, but it’s better to be safe than sorry—you know what they say; tread lightly, but carry an automatic firearm and a mental list of fifty different ways to kill people with your bare hands [5].

Still on the Atlantic—Early Afternoon—Good buzz.

The catering guys have been extremely helpful—not only have they guided me to the location of Moctezuma’s Ball-Pit, but they’ve also given me a baggy of something called “Charlie Sheen”. Apparently, it’s a cocaine analogue or something—one of these research chemicals head-shops sell disguised as fertiliser or fish-food and labelled “not for human consumption”, like that’s going to stop a narco-curious eighteen year old with no self-preservation instinct from ramming it up their nose-holes. My first impressions are; this shit is fan-fucking-tastic—a strong buzz off a couple of lines and now that I’m fully up I feel like I could fight/fuck a tiger. I’m definitely giving catering eight out of eight octopuses in my review of this cruise.

(OJ: Does he actually think we’re asking him to review Aztec Cruises for us? Jesus Christ with tits, this guy is almost as dense as Terry Bumfist.)

Anyway, the Ball-Pit is located in a sealed off play-area on one of the lower decks—so they at least had the common sense to quarantine the fucking thing. Now, I’m not exactly certain what I was expecting, but in hindsight, the name should have been a dead giveaway—I mean, it’s literally a ball-pit, with all those multicoloured plastic balls and shit, and a big blue slide heading right into the middle of it.

I’ve enlisted the help of one of the cooks—a young lad called Langoustine Wetflaps, who seems a lot braver than the rest of his colleagues and also happens to be the source of my new favourite compound. He’s going to hold onto one end of the rope while I go rummaging around in the ball-pit for answers—and he’s also kindly agreed to help me find a tiger to shag once we’ve finished up here.

????—God knows what time—Flagging.

Okay, so I may have made a huge mistake—or several huge mistakes, plural. Turns out, my suspicions might have been correct—the ball-pit is almost certainly a Time/World Portal, though whether it’s the same one Liz Truss entered before becoming Prime Minister, there’s no way of knowing. The Charlie Sheen is starting to wear off too and I’m hesitant to re-up right away—this shit is potent and I just know the comedown is going to be a total bitch—I feel like I really did fuck a tiger and now its making plans for our wedding, so god knows what will happen if I double-dose.

Langoustine is here with me, unintentionally—the plan was to have him pull me out after ten minutes, but it seems the moment I entered the pit, he was dragged in after me. He stopped crying a few minutes ago and now he seems to be doing okay. I know it was probably a bad idea to use the slide to enter the pit, but I haven’t been on one since I was a kid and the Charlie Sheen made it seem like the way to go—I mean, what if you had to use the slide to get here? I could have been farting around in that ball-pit for hours without finding the entrance.

I suppose I should describe where we are right now, since I have no intention of “Gunboating” this article, as Oscillation Jones would put it.

(OJ: Terence, wherever you are, take notes.)

We’re in some sort of labyrinth made of stone—the walls are perfectly smooth, like this place was carved out of rock and sanded flat. Lots of right-angles. It’s pretty dark here, but luckily I have barn-owl retinas [6], so I can see perfectly—Langoustine, on the other hand, is more-or-less blind down here, so I’m having to guide him. I’ve never been good with mazes, so I’m taking Langoustine’s advice and following the left-hand wall—supposedly, this is how you solve mazes and I wish I’d known about this a few years ago, when I was hired to French kiss Shia LeBeouf to death while he was visiting Hampton Court [7].

????—God knows what time, but later—Very tempted to take more drugs.

We’ve finally left the labyrinth and now we’re heading down a corridor. It’s a little lighter here—there are windows in the wall, but they don’t seem to look out onto anything, just a kind of grey void. Langoustine is starting to freak out again so I’ve fed him a little Charlie Sheen, to keep his spirits up, but I’m still hoping to avoid following suit. Langoustine says Sheen withdrawal is fucking awful and I believe him—the comedown has its claws in me already and I’m starting to wish that dead rat in my head was back, because right now it feels like it vacated the premises only to be replaced with a dead walrus instead.

Everything looks very Baroque here, like something out of a Castlevania game—lots of Gothic ornamentations and arches and shit.

It looks like the corridor is coming to an end. There’s a door… Okay, the door just opened by itself—this is fucking weird. I really don’t like this. I’m bringing out Mr. Browning Hi-Power—I swear, if any eldritch monstrosities come at me, I’m going to fill them with lead. I don’t care if they’re trying to mind-fuck me, or just trying to take my coat for a knees-up and a cuppa, I swear I’ll plug them… What the fuck is that? Oh, okay, I think Langoustine’s just shat himself—maybe I went overboard with the straightener.

20/08/25:

Hamilton, Bermuda—Around 9am—Peckish.

Okay, I don’t think there’s any need for me to go into details about what happened with me and Langoustine in Moctezuma’s Ball-Pit—suffice to say, that place is extremely fucked-up and it’s a miracle no one has sued Aztec Cruises yet. They get zero out of eight octopuses for health and safety from me.

Langoustine and I were discovered yesterday, wandering the lower deck in a state of delirium and that’s all you need to know—we got out and I am never going into another Time/World Portal as long as I live. No wonder Liz Truss went completely bat-shit—I mean, more bat-shit than she was to begin with—those things fucking suck.

Thankfully, Fudley found us and brought us back to the cabin before we could cause a stir and Karpal gave us each a little octopine so we could re-sync with reality, but it was a close call. We were in there for four days but at the time, it felt like a couple of hours at most—I’m sure someone clever, like Terry Bumfist, could explain it (OJ: Your definition of “clever” being?) but I’m just glad we made it out alive.

Langoustine’s been fired—since he didn’t show up to work for four days in a row—but Karpal has agreed to take him with us, so I may have just found myself a protégé, as well as an excellent plug for experimental pharmaceuticals.

All in all, this is shaping up to be a very fruitful trip, as long as I’m not sent to explore any more temporal anomalies—I mean, who am I? Redrick Schuhart in the Strugatsky brothers’ 1972 sci-fi novel, Roadside Picnic? Fuck off, Stalker.