Character Intros: Iga Rosencruz

Hello gentle readers. My name, for those of you who do not know, is Iga Rosencruz, master of the Memory Palace.

If you have not heard of it as well, oh it is a wonderful place, dizzying highs, wondrous vistas, things you never thought could be real, and things you simply never thought.

But right now, I its master, am in a state of melancholy. Because I have lost my key to this door to the place yet again. Shit.

It’s times like this I sit and wonder about the vastness of the worlds before us. And also how I lost the key when I have so many fushlugginer pockets.

Gotta keep weapons in ‘em, and magic items, and potions, and dammit, why do I not have a designated keys pocket?

But, I digress.

This must be for your illumination, as I am a master of this vast palace of delights. I was in my original world as well, but a different one; a darker one, with powers over the very matter of the soul itself. I rejected it, but something darker still came to take its place.

Have you seen a universe die? Like, not burst into flames, not a snap of the fingers and everything is ashes. I mean, truly and utterly die like a human dies, waves of something taken over by pure nothing, pulled into a thing that cannot be said to hunger for it has not even the soul for that, not only light and matter but history and memory and hope ceasing movement; constancy; and then…

…No, no you probably haven’t.

I saved as many as I could, some I should not have, and some who I had to scatter to the many multiverses and hope for the best. I was the vessel for what was left, swimming towards the last ray of something and then…

I woke up in a chapel with an instructional book in my hand, and my girlfriend standing next to me, telling me some of the others were waiting.

The palace likes me. You’d probably suppose anybody likes you if they appoint you master. But, I have no true control over the palace, but rather from its body, from its soul. Perhaps a more accurate title is administrative janitor.

It’s a chaotic hyperfractal madhouse of a place, leaping from cartoon to suffering garden in the span of a door. The paths never stay the same, but I may be the proper one to guide you through them. Maybe, Perhaps. If I can find this damned key.

God I’m hungry. Maybe if I were on the Ticking Train there’d be a lunch-cart, though the space between spaces is lovely.

There are other places that are kin to the palace by the way, with their own masters. The Ticking Train is one of them, the Mental Basement is another, the Grand Machination has inroads to the Palace via the clock tower.

Huh. I may have to go there and get in through that back door if I can’t reember that damned key.

But, even were I not the master of the Palace, I would feel it as my kin. There’s something of a chaos to it that feels beautiful, like the hope of a nihilist; that if nothing matters; anything is possible.

Perhaps that is why I have found so many of its ecosystem linked to it, in the times where I have lost my-

…Huh. I found them. In that pocket as per usual. I need to cut down on my pockets.

But, the time is short, and I must go. There’s another door, a few pages west of you, I’ll leave the key under the neon sign for you. I eagerly await your arrival…

## Author Notes

Yep, it’s my drabble! This time from the perspective of Iga Rosencruz; my head of the Memory Palace.

I worry I didn’t do it well enough, but I did try to get a distinctive voice for him, grandiose and cosmic and slightly pretentious; but with the implication that he’s not quite as calm/cool/slick/in control as he’d like you to think he is.

Regardless, as with all the other Drabbbles; while direct adaptations are CC-BY-SA, the characters/concepts/situations/ect are free to use under a CC-BY Vanlla 4.0 License so long as I, Thomas F. Johnson, am credited as their creator…