13 1.07.2 The truth.
Let's go back to years ago when a certain child was born in a lovely home.
Though, they were considered minorities in where they lived and always suffered from some discrimination. The parents of this child never let their son experience any of it.
The child's father was a learned academic and professor from a revered university, while his mother in order to remain a contributing member of the household even after her marriage, started a tailoring business from home.
And to this child, his parents were his everything. For he was unaware of the true world that they hid from him, the true world that he never experienced.
That was only the case until his father's death.
The great man who had a whole future ahead of him was killed by an angry student of his. A student who was failing his classes.
The report that came later spoke of the attack being racially motivated on the student's part. And as the background of said student was huge and his age still low. All the student got was a smack on the back of his head and one year of juvenile detention.
Because to the judges, they can't ruin the future of a child that made a mistake, no matter how heinous.
The correctional facilities and community service ought to fix the lost child.
But then, that's it for the case. Soon in a few months. The case that shook the city was forgotten by the people. And the family who lost their protector also started to be forgotten by the people.
As for the child who lost his father, a child that never experienced any hardships and the truth about reality.
He ran away from the said reality, finding bizarre ways to distract himself.
The child was scared, he wanted to be with his father and his mother. A mother who had stopped looking at his face due to how much her son reminded her of her dead husband.
But even if she found it hard to look at the face of her son that was getting smellier and crazier as days went by, she still wished to provide for him.
And as her tailoring business was not running that well due to her unskilled hands. She joined the textile factory in an attempt to better her craft.
Giving her beloved son of hers a lot more time on his own, letting his madness get worse with time. But what can a mother do in times like these?
So she let it be, she was already proud that her son was able to earn money on the side with his business, besides his madness.
Which gave her peace of mind, as at least her son won't be penniless in the future.
So in the job where she only planned to acquire skills from, it became her life.
And it became the end of her life as well.
The fumes from the chemicals that were used to color the clothes were not as safe as the factory claimed them to be.
And before they learned of this fact, it was already late for this lone mother who had suffered so much.
The only reason she was able to die with happiness was her son.
Who had a sad but kind expression on his face while she died?
And her death became the very thing that unshackled the very little sanity her son had in him.
So he ran away from the place where he grew up.
Away from the memories of his parents.
Away from the happiness he once felt in the place.
And away from the one bit of sanity that was still left in him.
But this journey, which the boy thought would be the true start of his life, was cut short after a certain accident.
He stumbled upon a couple of savages.
And with his weak physique and no way to fight back. He was easily caught by them, along with his pet rats that just turned into roasts for these savages.
It was after his capture, that the boy that had already gone mad experienced the greatest horror in his life.
Being s*domized by these savages day and night, they beat him up for some sadistic reason.
Bled him into a bowl.
And then fed him rotten carcasses of animals for day and night.
And when this mad boy was close to madness, the worst thing happened in his life.
These horrible savages, for some ritual sacrifice, skinned him alive and left him in chains soon after.
Unaware of a certain rat that has survived their roast.
And this particularly hungry rat came and found a familiar scent.
The scent of its previous owner.
And then it nibbles on its owner's hand breaking its owner out of the binds, as it has mutilated the hand of its owner till it became easy for the boy to slip out of the binds.
So with the rat in toe who feasted on his owner's flesh. The boy with his weak body and wrathful vengeance found a bottle of poison from the savages and then killed them by poisoning their water supply.
But even after being poisoned, not all of them died.
No, one might say that the majority survived and then started to hunt for the being that played the cruel prank on them.
Knowing that this might be his only opportunity, the boy rushed past the savages, hiding in the thick of the night, and then climbed a tree, fearing the howling sounds in the forest.
Though, the man didn't notice that gangrenes had started to set in, on his body.
And while thinking it was a peaceful night, the boy closed his eyes for the last time. Dying on the tree next to his rat, which also died after feasting on the poisoned flesh of its owner.
But that was not the end of the story for the boy, unlike what the boy thought before. This was the true beginning of his story and not what he previously assumed.
"What does this mean?" The boy asked, looking at its dead figure on the tree.
An oddly familiar tree where he once slept with peaceful thoughts.
"That corpse was mine?" The boy wondered, his eyes clouded in confusion from moment to moment, his suppressed madness flaring up as if he wanted to laugh at this situation.
But at the moment, he was incapable of laughing, he was even incapable of feeling any joy. Because he was reliving all the moments of his life from a third-person perspective. While being incapable of interfering with any of the events.
"But this makes no sense." The boy thought, as soon as he died. But before he can wonder more, the ground below the corpse of this man cracked, through which a familiar mist started to claw out to the real world.
And the more the boy looked, the more he became aware that the mist was not simple, it hid some things.
Things that were reaching out toward the boy. But no matter how much the thing in the mist tried to capture the corpse of the boy, it would be suppressed by some unseen force.
And this happened until the morning.
When the dead boy opened his eyes once again, recovering all his injuries and even wearing the clothes he originally wore. While the rat, which too woke up after its death, ran away somewhere. Away from its owner.
But the Jester who was watching everything from the side knew that something was wrong with the world after the boy woke up again.
It was a lot more blurry and almost felt fake.
"What is going on?... Can someone explain this to me?" Jester asked again and again into the void, as he saw some familiar scenes play out a bit differently.
The meeting with villagers, the girl he fell in love with, and the bizarre murders.
Everything was the same beside one difference, there was no rat beside him.
And without the warnings of his rat, things turned more and more tragic.
The boy would be accused of these murders and then he would be burned in his home.
And after being burnt, the boy would escape to the cave through the hatch and lead his lover to the hidden cave as well.
A cave that now contained the dead bodies of multiple children which were cut apart horrifically to make smaller totems around the bigger one.
And in anger towards this horror. The lover of the boy kills him.
"How?... When did this happen?" Jester thought as the memory started to come back to him.
The world itself started to rewind to the moment the boy entered this forest.
But each time, there would be some difference. Both the rat and the boy would always make some different choices in the first few runs and before long, these two individuals started to always end up together in the village.
And Jester can see, that it was not him leading these changes, but the little rat he proudly named Grifter.
Unlike the boy that forgets the events after each reset, the rat called Grifter never does that instead, it experiences everything again and again learning the patterns and learning many more things with each loop.
It was as if whatever the thing that was causing this loop was, it never accounted for the actions of the rat.
To this being playing such a horrible game with the boy's life, it ignored a little rat.
"Hah, what a great entertainment it would have been for its creator." Jester wondered as the loops started to get more familiar as his memories kept coming back.
In different loops, he would teach the rat many things knowing or unknowingly. And the goal of his and the rat was to make as many random decisions and actions so as to break the cycle through inconsistencies.
"Haha, so that's it? This is why the villagers were so forgetful over the facts?" Jester started to laugh.
He laughed at the fact that he had been treated as a thing for entertainment by a sadistic being.
A being that loved to see him suffer.
"Is this what they call Karma?"
"Ok, I understand. Now take me out of this place. Mist, underworld, or whatever you are. Take me out." Jester was not foolish. He was well aware that he was in a trance and there was someone purposefully showing him all of this.
The goal of this being was understandable as well.
It wished to end this loop just as Jester wished to now.
He liked being an entertainer, but he never wished to be part of someone else's entertainment.
As the memories started to come to a close and a familiar loop appeared in front of Jester, he was pushed back to the real world.
And to the cave with dead children spread apart on totems.
And in front of him stood a woman.
*****
"Yo…you were the monster?..." A shivering voice filled with contradicting emotions of wrath and fear who aimed a knife at me asked.
A woman I was very familiar with and with whom I have fallen in love multiple times.
But unlike before, I was different.
"Yes, I was." I accepted the crime with my head held high and a wide grin on my burned face.
