Upcoming fun.

((Sorry I haven't posted lately guys.... schoolwork's been very draining T.T))

Dear Journal:

When opening my voluminous amounts of fanmail every day, I get a lot of questions saying, "Hey Alberic. I know I can never be as cool or sexy as you are, but can you at least tell me how to see the future like you do? Love, kisses, and sex, Nameoffanhere." (It's usually a sexy Mithra too.)

So I'm going to dedicate some precious journal space to answering that question. Sorry, but not everyone can see the future like I can. Oh, there are ways to get at the right sorts of answers, like fortune-telling, divination, learning to read signs and omens, things like that--the Samurai do something like that when they enter their meditative trances and use their chi to blah blah blah Third Eye. They can see very short amounts of time into the future by setting their conscious minds into some sort of trance and attuning themselves to Vana'diel--to all existence--for brief amounts of time. The reason that works though is because they're only looking a few seconds in advance, maybe 30 seconds at the most. The further ahead you try to look, the more possible futures interfere with your vision, and in case you haven't noticed, it's all those possible futures (or just plain ol' human stupidity) that makes fortune-telling and divinations so unreliable.

The reason I'M so good at what I do is that, when I truly focus, I can see multitudes upon multitudes of possible futures. This is different than what I do when I just look at someone and am like, "Oh hay, better not step in that mud puddle later, har har!" Whenever I meet someone, or am around them for a while, I can usually see little flashes around them of their pasts, and their potential futures. But this isn't true Seeing. These tend to be fairly inaccurate, since my mind isn't focused on what I'm doing, and since that's usually just the result of fluctuations in their destinies due to being around my sexy self.

True Seeing is somewhat... different. Like a Samurai, I have to put myself into a certain state of mind. I have to suspend the conscious mind in some way. Sometimes I do this chemically. Sometimes I simply meditate or even sleep, though I've learned to be wary of prophetic dreams since those tend to have... outside interference. Sometimes I can just downshift my conscious mind and draw on something, or write, or whatever. But the most powerful and effective way of Seeing is to put myself into a full-on prophetic Trance.

These trances are serious business. I had to be taught how to do them by my Master when I was eighteen or so, and the first few times I did it, I screamed in pain through the entire thing. They are physically excruciating, and draw on my Master's power quite a bit, so my lifespan... shortens pretty significantly every time I use this technique, perhaps as much as five or seven years each time. I've only entered six full-on trances in my life, two in training, two at the behest of my Master, and two voluntarily. I'll try to describe how these work.

The first element is sound. The second is wind. The third is fire. The sound is what triggers the trance--my mind shuts down, and my soul is pried upon like a sealed jar; I become a living conduit for the fire, so that what is Seen (well, what is FELT more than seen) is burned onto my soul like a design etched onto steel. I can never forget the things I See in these trances. The wind is created artificially by the power, but it is necessary because it links my soul with reality. It keeps me grounded, too; it's altogether possible that my consciousness, my sanity, my spirit could just be lost to the immensity of All That Is when I'm completely exposed in such a way. It's hard to describe if you haven't felt that intensity, but imagine a single drop of colored ink being dropped down into the center of a swirling vortex whirlpool comprised of the entire ocean. The ink's color is quickly torn apart and lost within all of that. Even the very atoms that comprise my body could be torn apart, and that would mean Very Bad Things if that happened, not only to me but to everything around me if that happened.

So, the third element is fire, and that's where my Master comes in. One of the reasons he uses human puppets for this sort of work is the danger, but he incurs a lot of risk, too; I use almost all of his power to go into one of these trances, and he could be badly damaged as well if I did it wrong. Channeling my Master's power is, as is pretty obvious, not a fun experience for me, so hence the pain. During the trance proper, since my consciousness is put aside, I usually can't feel the pain, but the intensity of the experience and the physical agony tend to combine. Unfortunately, whatever it is I see, you get the most accurate results if I can speak during the trance so that I don't lose anything by translating it consciously.

What sorts of things do I see? Well as I mentioned before, it's not really SEEING, it's like every particle of my body is experiencing it. Past, present, hundreds and thousands of futures all blurring together, flashes of this and that, but they all make sense, because in these trances I can see the latticework of how past becomes present becomes a few near futures becomes infinite possible far futures. It's like chaos, yet not, a constantly moving, shifting, infinitely complex matrix woven not by gods, goddesses, or even crystals, but willing ITSELF into being. I trace that latticework with my rough fingers, trying to comprehend any of it, trying to not lose myself within it, trying to find the specific thing that I need to know, and sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can discover how one ilm or two ilms interlock and are related. That's my job, in a nutshell--one or two ilms of truth.

Speaking of truth, I need to talk to Seik soon. And... I'm getting married soon! Yes, sorry ladies, I'm about to be off the market permanently, haha. Until next time kiddos, stay black.

Alberic