I was nineteen when I received my first mission. When I turned nineteen and every day before I turned nineteen I didn't know what missions were. I never even imagined being chosen for one like apparently most everyone else around here does. I think that even now as I know what these missions are I would never think about wanting to actually be apart of one and not just required to be. It wasn't something that I wanted. Also, unlike everybody else in this dreary town, I wasn't always in this town. I was born here, yes, but I was three years old when my father and I had moved out of this place after my mother's death. When I was fourteen years old, my father was killed and I was forced to move back here, to the only family I have left where in less than a month of my arrival my fate was given to me. My fate was a storyteller like my aunt and my grandparents from both my mother and my father's side of the family but unlike my mother who was a traveler and my father who was a healer.
I listened to my family's advice and I read books and watched movies and watched TV and talked to strangers and I listened to my surroundings and observed everything around me and I wrote whenever I could, but storytelling never came to me as naturally as it came to them. I guess that's why they were so surprised when I got a mission and none of them had, especially at such a young age. I suppose that nobody told them or anyone else that missions were for the dammed, for the lost, for the broken, for those who didn't follow the rules, for those who were too thoughtful, too artistic, too creative, for those who couldn't get their fate to be their fate, for the stories of the people who were meant to be forgotten but instead became the required bedtime stories for future generations who were left with nothing but nightmares and promises made out of fear.
My mission was, of course, Bain Taylor. I was supposed to observe her the way I observed everything else and I was supposed to tell her story. Bain Taylor also had a mission, although it'd been unknown to me the way mine was unknown to her. I wasn't supposed to talk to her and she wasn't supposed to see the real me. I was only supposed to observe and watch to see who she was in contact with and what she did during the day. Here's how this worked: the one who selected me for this mission put me in a statue of armor and hooked it up to my senses along with a bunch of cameras so that everything Bain Taylor did would be recorded from my perspective, so that they'd be able to see all of it as well. Surprisingly enough, I was able to move around inside the suit of armor because of some technology that they told me they weren't allowed to explain because it was what the designer requested. Inside the suit of armor I'd be unable to feel things like hunger and fatigue and the need to go to the bathroom. Therefore, I'd be unable to use sleep as an excuse on why I might've missed something important. They were also able to control my movement if she was doing something and I wanted to look away but they didn't want me to. The suit of armor was also inclined to follow her wherever she went by some movement I couldn't control. The only thing I could really control was my hands so I'd be able to jot notes and write.
One of the worst things about being stuck in the suit of armor was time. At first it seemed to pass by slowly but over time it seemed to quicken and I lost track of how long I'd been there. Bain Taylor became my life obsession as quickly as she became my life mission. I started to forget who I was, that I was anything more than this mission, anything more than this suit of armor. I was lost in my work the way I was supposed to have been lost with my words a long time ago. It was scary because sometimes at night when I was forced to watch her sleep I would get this overwhelming sense of panic because there were things from before that I couldn't remember, like my name for example. My name was lost in a very windy breeze and a storm of destruction and I'm afraid that I'll never get it back. I tried to tell this to my boss, the one who selected me and could hear my thoughts with a push of a button, but he just shrugged my concerns away. He told me that it would all come back in the end when I was no longer in the suit of armor. I stopped worrying about it, or at least I stopped thinking about how I was worried about it. I decided to keep focusing on my work. I guess that was the proper way of thinking because after I made that decision I also wrote some of the best things I've ever wrote.
I was nineteen when I received my first mission. When I turned nineteen and every day before I turned nineteen I didn't know what missions were. I never even imagined being chosen for one like apparently most everyone else around here does. I think that even now as I know what these missions are I would never think about wanting to actually be apart of one and not just required to be. It wasn't something that I wanted. Also, unlike everybody else in this dreary town, I wasn't always in this town. I was born here, yes, but I was three years old when my father and I had moved out of this place after my mother's death. When I was fourteen years old, my father was killed and I was forced to move back here, to the only family I have left where in less than a month of my arrival my fate was given to me. My fate was a storyteller like my aunt and my grandparents from both my mother and my father's side of the family but unlike my mother who was a traveler and my father who was a healer.
I listened to my family's advice and I read books and watched movies and watched TV and talked to strangers and I listened to my surroundings and observed everything around me and I wrote whenever I could, but storytelling never came to me as naturally as it came to them. I guess that's why they were so surprised when I got a mission and none of them had, especially at such a young age. I suppose that nobody told them or anyone else that missions were for the dammed, for the lost, for the broken, for those who didn't follow the rules, for those who were too thoughtful, too artistic, too creative, for those who couldn't get their fate to be their fate, for the stories of the people who were meant to be forgotten but instead became the required bedtime stories for future generations who were left with nothing but nightmares and promises made out of fear.
My mission was, of course, Bain Taylor. I was supposed to observe her the way I observed everything else and I was supposed to tell her story. Bain Taylor also had a mission, although it'd been unknown to me the way mine was unknown to her. I wasn't supposed to talk to her and she wasn't supposed to see the real me. I was only supposed to observe and watch to see who she was in contact with and what she did during the day. Here's how this worked: the one who selected me for this mission put me in a statue of armor and hooked it up to my senses along with a bunch of cameras so that everything Bain Taylor did would be recorded from my perspective, so that they'd be able to see all of it as well. Surprisingly enough, I was able to move around inside the suit of armor because of some technology that they told me they weren't allowed to explain because it was what the designer requested. Inside the suit of armor I'd be unable to feel things like hunger and fatigue and the need to go to the bathroom. Therefore, I'd be unable to use sleep as an excuse on why I might've missed something important. They were also able to control my movement if she was doing something and I wanted to look away but they didn't want me to. The suit of armor was also inclined to follow her wherever she went by some movement I couldn't control. The only thing I could really control was my hands so I'd be able to jot notes and write.
One of the worst things about being stuck in the suit of armor was time. At first it seemed to pass by slowly but over time it seemed to quicken and I lost track of how long I'd been there. Bain Taylor became my life obsession as quickly as she became my life mission. I started to forget who I was, that I was anything more than this mission, anything more than this suit of armor. I was lost in my work the way I was supposed to have been lost with my words a long time ago. It was scary because sometimes at night when I was forced to watch her sleep I would get this overwhelming sense of panic because there were things from before that I couldn't remember, like my name for example. My name was lost in a very windy breeze and a storm of destruction and I'm afraid that I'll never get it back. I tried to tell this to my boss, the one who selected me and could hear my thoughts with a push of a button, but he just shrugged my concerns away. He told me that it would all come back in the end when I was no longer in the suit of armor. I stopped worrying about it, or at least I stopped thinking about how I was worried about it. I decided to keep focusing on my work. I guess that was the proper way of thinking because after I made that decision I also wrote some of the best things I've ever wrote.