The Feckless Guide to reality

21/08/25:

The Rosedon Hotel, Hamilton, Bermuda—11am—Sweaty.

I’m never sure how to start these things, since I don’t read travel guides as a rule—are you supposed to begin by describing the scenery? Or is it better to start with a quote? Concrete or conceptual, that is the question—and frankly, I’m not the person to answer it. For that, you’d need someone like Oscillation Jones, or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Mogan—Karpal and Jarvis have been pretty clear about not mentioning “the mutant” so I need to be careful here, but there’s no denying he asks a good question when the whim takes him and he’s not too busy cutting down sequoias with a stream of radioactive laser-piss.

Anyway, in the aftermath of our escapades aboard the cruise-liner, me and Langoustine are taking a day off to recover. Between you and me, I think the only reason Karpal and Jarvis agreed to this is because they both want some time to relax before we start looking for Jarvis’ shin-bone.

(Karpal Marik: Lies. Also, it defeats the point of having a mysterious, if contrived, sobriquet for your mortal enemy if you go and use his surname right afterwards, Cheese.)

Our rooms at the Rosedon are top-notch—very comfortable with a cosy, Caribbean-Edwardian vibe. You can imagine the original owners sunning themselves by the pool, drinking rum swizzles and picking at a papaya salad—so thanks to the people[?] at Concrete Octopus for setting us up here.

(Oscillation Jones: Wait… Did he say the Rosedon Hotel? For fuck’s sake—they were supposed to go to the Rosemont Guest House up the road. How much is this place anyway…? Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-stick—it’s twice as expensive! The editors are going to pop a bollock over this—or whatever it is they have instead of gonads.)

Langoustine and I are playing slaps at the moment—vital training if he hopes to be accepted into The Feckless Hand as a neophyte—and drinking plenty of rum swizzles to take the edge off the Charlie Sheen comedown. Frankly, it’s a miracle I can even write this entry—I feel like I found my tiger only for it to strap on a dildo, give me a round fucking and kick me out of my own home once it sated itself on my tender boy-pussy. Okay, I think I just threw-up in my mouth a little bit—I need to cool it on the visceral sexual imagery for a while.

22/08/25:

Hamilton, Bermuda—9am—Damp.

My blood is too thick for Bermuda etc. Karpal and Jarvis have turfed me and Langoustine out for the day to start our reconnaissance and it’s already 30° outside. We’re supposed to be looking for information about Jarvis’ shin-bone, but the researchers at Concrete Octopus also want us to go in search of the lost pantaloons of Richard Grenville, so we’re going to get that out of the way first.

Why does Concrete Octopus want some dead bloke’s trousers from five-hundred years ago? Fuck knows, but we at least have a lead on them from the researchers. According to them, they went missing after Grenville came ashore at Bermuda after his famous naval action against the Spanish in 1585—he popped into a knocking-shop for a bit of a tumble and when he was finished, his pantaloons had been whisked away by some villainous tart or other. Not much to go on, but better than nothing—which is the sum total of our intel on Jarvis’ dismembered leg. Coincidentally, Grenville’s ship was called the Tiger, which at this point just feels like the universe taking the piss.

We’re going to check out all the likely places to gather information—the 1862, Casey’s Lounge, Bungalow 56, the Docksider and so on. Once again, thank you to Concrete Octopus for covering our drinks tab on this mission.

(OJ: God-fucking-dammit. I know they had us up against a wall with this, but did we really need to give an international crime syndicate carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they like? I mean half these guys are on the Interpol top ten most wanted list—hell, Jarvis Lautrec and Karpal Marik are joint first place, for fuck’s sake.)

23/08/25:

Still Hamilton, Bermuda—3pm—As moist as a porpoise on MDMA.

We picked up quite a few leads last night, although between me and Langoustine, we only remember one of them. I really should jot these things down in my notebook—I’ll admit I only brought one along because it makes me feel like I’m actually a journalist. It’s all in the mind, you see—if you feel like you’re a travel writer, then it makes it easier to become one; actualisation, it’s called, look it up. Very important in our business, since killing people is harder than it looks—that’s why Karpal and Jarvis started the film nights back in the UK. Every Tuesday we’d sit down and watch a movie about a killer—assassins, homicidal maniacs, Jerry Lee Lewis[1], you name it. For some reason, we’d also watch The Wicker Man once a month—the 1973 original starring Edward “How Much Wood Would An Edward Ward If An Edward Could Ward Wood?” Woodward rather than the godawful 2006 remake with Nick “Not The Bees” Cage. Not sure about the intention there—maybe it was meant to teach us about solidarity in the face of the constabulary? You know, if a copper starts asking difficult questions, stick them in a giant wooden effigy and set them on fire? Weird film—I much prefer the original novel, The Ritual by David Pinner (1967), but I think Karpal has a thing for Christopher Lee in drag, so there we go.

(KM: It’s a great film, Cheese, that’s all there is to it.)

Our first port of call is the harbour, where a local fisherman has agreed to let us charter his boat—apparently, the wreck of the Tiger isn’t far from Hamilton harbour, though how the locals are aware of this when no historical records of that ship’s eventual fate survived into the modern era, I have no idea. Between these helpful Burmudians and the Concrete Octopus researchers, it feels as though there’s a vast network of information that I’m totally oblivious to—like some sort of extradimensional internet that only NPCs and dickheads have access to.

(OJ: Skirting over Cheese calling our researchers “dickheads” for a moment, it does sound as though he’s onto something here—I’ve heard rumours of the so-called “lightweb”, which utilises background psychic radiation to create neural networks between individuals known as “conduits”; a cabal of powerful sensitives working towards the altruistic egalitarian utopia known as the “Light Endarkenment”. I’ll have to ask the editors for more information next time I’m in the office—and give them the latest invoices from this fiasco.)

Hamilton Harbour, Bermuda—5pm—Wet.

It’s been a while since I went scuba-diving—not since I was hired by James Cameron to sabotage the OceanGate Titan submersible back in 2023[2]. Langoustine says he has plenty of experience, since he used to go diving for clam-pearls back in the late 2010s, when they were legal and deregulated—simpler times, in my opinion, before all the nonsense horror stories about addiction started popping up. I mean, most of that stuff was published by greedy octopuses who wanted to horde all those delicious pearls for themselves and it’s no coincidence so-called octopus “researchers” currently have a monopoly on the clam fields in six of the seven seas—it’s all a ruse, I tell you.

(OJ: In the interest of editorial balance, it’s my duty to inform our readers that clam-pearl addiction is very real and its withdrawal symptoms are amongst the worst known to human kind. It is only thanks to the intrepid work of cephalopod researchers such as Qdzynzyqy, Hmlmnyz and Trflygglo the Gelatinous that we are aware of the true risks associated with recreational clam-pearl usage. The fact that all three own substantial stakes in the largest clam field in the Atlantic is purely coincidental at best and, at worst, an indicator of their dedication to science. Le Corbusier owned a concrete manufacturing facility and you don’t hear people saying he had an ulterior motive for promoting it as a “truthful” building material, do you?)

Anyway, we’re suited up and ready to go. Apparently, the wreck is pretty deep down—roughly 100m—so this could take a while. We’ll get a first dive in this afternoon and recon the wreck before coming back tomorrow morning—nobody wants to be sculling through a potentially haunted shipwreck at night when the ghosts are at their most tumescent.

(OJ: I don’t even want to unpack that—I’m just going to assume he’s used the wrong word here, because the alternative is deeply troubling. That said, I have no idea what he meant by this, so I’m leaving it in as is.)

24/08/25:

The Rosedon Hotel, Hamilton, Bermuda—10am—Still drying out.

Okay, so the wreck of the Tiger is a bust—that place is full of some extremely randy ghosts and not a pair of pantaloons in sight. Me and Langoustine hung out there for a while, out of social politeness, but… Yeah, best not to get into it. One good thing did come out of the experience and that’s the lead we received from one of the ghost sailors onboard the wreck—according to them, the pantaloons were actually buried in what is now Victoria Park, roughly where the gent’s toilets are located, so Langoustine and I are off this evening to dig up some antique trousers.

Karpal and Jarvis have been on our case about the shin-bone but I’ve managed to convince them this side-quest is actually related to the main storyline, if you catch my drift? (KM: Cheese, you do realise we read these entries before you send them for publication?) All the same, they’re sending Fudley with us—“to assist with any paranormal problems”, but I know he’s just there to spy on us for Jarvis and Karpal.

Victoria Park, Hamilton, Bermuda—Midnight—Lightly Sheened.

So, Langoustine, Fudley and I decided to hit up a couple of bars before the job—since none of us are super keen about having to dig up a public toilet—and we may have taken things a little too far. It got to around 11pm and we all realised we were a bit too pissed to do the job, so Langoustine had the great idea of doing a bump of Charlie Sheen each, just to level out. Fudley wasn’t sold on the idea, but we spiked his Gin & Tonic and he seems to have given in to the Sheening now—actually, Langoustine did the spiking, as part of his training. Not to say that we do this sort of thing for nefarious purposes—only to kill or kidnap; you’ve got to draw the line somewhere people.

I’ve got to say, I thought there would be more people in the park at this time of night, but Hamilton does have a thriving nightlife and bars stay open pretty late around here. It’s not like London, where your only choice is drinking in public or going to some shithole club that smells like a cracked sewer so you can help pay for the owner’s extortionate business rates with every snifter of store-bought spirits. Speaking of cracked sewers, I think Fudley may have just broken into the soil pipe—hopefully he’s a better necromancer than a labourer because he’s cack-handed with a shovel and hasn’t stopped complaining since we got here. Yep, that’s definitely sewerage. Oh god, it’s everywhere.

25/08/25:

Victoria Park, Hamilton, Bermuda—1am—Just call me “Mr Sheen”.

One hour of tunnelling through shit like Andy Dufresne at the end of The Shawshank Redemption (1994) later and we seem to have hit the jackpot—we’ve discovered the remnants of what appears to be a period appropriate wooden dwelling, possibly some kind of shack or ramshackle abode of the kind I could imagine an enterprising young strumpet living in circa 1580.

Langoustine wasn’t best pleased about the manner of its discovery, but I’ve had a word with him about the nature of our business and the importance of being able to tunnel through fifteen feet of liquid human waste and that seemed to get him back on track—it’s not often that you’re called upon to go rummaging through other people’s feculence, but I can count at least four occasions where it’s been a necessity[3]. Fudley, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare—he flat-out refused to keep digging at one point, so Langoustine and I got him to bang a couple more lines of Charlie Sheen, which sorted him right out. Then we did a couple more lines ourselves, just to show some solidarity and make sure we were all on the same level, which, for reference, is like that level in Aztec Challenge for the C64 (1983) where you’re swimming through piranha-infested waters, except you are the piranha and the water is actually sewerage and the shoals of piranhas are all your best mates and… Oh god, I feel weird…

(OJ: Is it just me or are his references getting more obscure? Aztec Challenge? Sounds like a racist game-show from the 1970s.)

????—2am, best guess—Transcendentally fucked.

So, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, we found the pantaloons—and may be well on our way to finding Jarvis’ shin-bone, if my horseshoe bat pineal gland is anything to go by[4]. The bad news is that they seem to have been turned into a conduit of some kind and the moment we unearthed them, the three of us were transported to god knows where.

Right now, we’re in a brightly lit chamber—no light sources that I can detect, but the walls are white and covered in large panels that look to be made of a ceramic material. The floor is covered in a white spongy material that feels quite pleasant underfoot, but is disconcertingly reminiscent of old-fashioned insane asylums.

We’re all supremely fucked-up at the moment after we decided to block up our nasal passages with Charlie Sheen—since the raw sewerage smell was only getting worse—and being stuck in here is doing nothing for the vibes. We’ve been trying to do an a cappella rendition of Bahia by Prince Rama from their LP Xtreme Now (2016) to pass the time but I can’t hold a note to save my life and Langoustine keeps messing up the lyrics—leading to a surprising discovery in the vocal talents of Fudley; the guy has the voice of an angel.

Thankfully, the pantaloons came along for the ride with us and I’ve got to say, they are rather fetching—if you ignore the fact that they are covered in shit. They’re not quite what I was expecting—the big puffy things that look like velvet marshmallows, which Fudley informs me are actually called “padded hose”—but are instead a pair of sensible shorts, roughly knee-length. Thinking about it, I suppose you could say they are close in style to modern Bermuda shorts—maybe a prototype pair? I’ll have to ask the Concrete Octopus researchers for more details about the story behind them, if we ever get out of this place. Were they stolen out of jealously for Grenville’s snazzy trews? Or because their existence threatened the time-fashion continuum? Perhaps we will never know.

26/08/25:

The Rosedon Hotel, Hamilton, Bermuda—4am—Crashing like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Okay, me and Langoustine just got in and I can feel myself coming down and there’s a lot of shit I need to get out before my brain turns into slime.

Some really incredible stuff has happened in the last 24 hours—and, you know, one major tragedy, but overall I’m calling it as a cosmic win for the Hand.

It turns out, when we unearthed the pantaloons we were instantly teleported onboard a spaceship owned by the Flangian Republic—unlike the resistance that currently inhabits the dry riser inlet outside 10 Langham Place, Birmingham, these Flangians are pretty chill and spend most of their time orbiting developing worlds, not to assess them for entry into some sort of galactic federation or anything, but to observe their culture. They watch our films and television, read our literature and play our video games, but what they really love is fashion—they’re absolutely fascinated by the idea of clothing as an art form, since Flangians are shameless as a rule and spend their whole lives naked as the day they were hatched. They’re also big fans of the culinary arts, but the Republic’s interest in cooking has dropped off since the resistance stole their recipe for raspberry ripple ice-cream.

Anyway, when this particular expedition first reached Earth five-hundred years ago, there was a slight navigational miscalculation and they ended up materialising on the Atlantic ocean, a few miles north of Bermuda, where they encountered Richard Grenville’s ship, the Tiger. By a strange coincidence, Flangian landing craft bear a startling resemblance to Spanish galleons of the period and it was this ship that Grenville claimed to have sunk on his return from the British colony at Roanoake—actually, the sinking of the ship was just the Flangian’s cloaking device activating, masked by all the gun-smoke from the Tiger’s cannons. They proceeded to follow Grenville’s ship to Hamilton, drawn by the allure of his pantaloons and, when he removed them at the Randie Katt Wencherrie, one of their agents stole them, analysed them and buried them in the field which would later become Victoria Park. Supposedly, this was all part of an elaborate plan, but I couldn’t really figure it out while they were explaining it to me—I mean, these guys think in six dimensions simultaneously, so only some kind of genius, like a Terry Bumfist or a J K Hauser would be able to understand it.

(OJ: Has Cheese ever met Terry Bumfist? The only thing that guy understands in six dimensions is how to be a moron—trust me, I met him at the Conoctopticon Industries social mixer last September and having personally transcribed the man’s dreams I can confirm he’s nothing more than a dangerous idiot with abnormally large hands.)

So, what happened to Langoustine, Fudley and I? Well, the Flangians decided to take us to planet Flangi for a day-trip, where they introduced us to the descendants of the lost Roanoake colony, who they had abducted for reasons that are likely to remain obscure—something to do with fucking-over the British Empire, who were being supported by Krognomthalnians, a race of hyper-intelligent lizard people that the Flangians were engaged in a culture war with at the time. We had a massive party down on Flangelato Beach—worth the trip on its own, since the sand there is a mix of white talc and red haematite, and is said to be the inspiration for the famous Flangian raspberry ripple ice-cream—and afterwards, we hung out with the President.

While we were hanging out, we brokered an agreement with him—Concrete Octopus would take ownership of the pantaloons in exchange for six-hundred live hounds, which I believe is a cunning scheme to devalue the resistance’s burgeoning economy. Naturally, we agreed, so I guess the CO editorial team should get on that pretty soon—they’re expecting their first delivery of one-hundred dogs within the month. (OJ: God-fucking-dammit!) While we were chatting with the POTFR, we mentioned our search for Jarvis’ shin-bone (KM: Yeah, that’s right Cheese, just tell everyone you meet about our super secret necromancy plans—maybe set up an Instagram account while you’re at it and broadcast it to the world next time?) and he agreed to put us in touch with one of their agents when we returned to Earth—apparently the Republic has an ear to the ground where this sort of thing is concerned and since they have a semi-permanent outpost in Bermuda, there’s a good chance they’ve heard something.

Now, this is all well and good, but I also have some sad news to impart. Fudley Mansfield is no more. The circumstances of his death are a little hazy, but the last thing I remember is him slamming a massive rail of Charlie Sheen off the flagella of one of our Flangian hosts—I mean, the line was phat as fuck and I remember thinking it was probably too much Sheen even for me and Langoustine. At first, he seemed okay, but then he started shaking uncontrollably and the next thing anyone knew, his head had exploded like that scene in David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981)—a favourite film of mine, since I’ve always wanted to be able to kill people using the power of my mind alone. Anyway, Langoustine and I did have a look at some of the trip reports for Charlie Sheen on Erowid and it turns out spontaneous cranial explosions are a thing—of course, they don’t mention this on the packaging, since it’s currently sold as an industrial-grade pesticide, but you know, it would have been nice to have a heads-up on that particular side-effect before we started snorting it like it was… Well, actually, I can’t think of anything where it’s advisable to stick it up your nose, but you get the idea.

Not sure how we’re going to explain this one to Karpal, but hopefully our Flangian contact will make up for the loss of our only necromancer.

Until next time, this is Cheese McCarthy, signing off!