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Once upon a time, there was a man. He wasn’t really a man but wore the face and shape of a man. That man lived in a magical shop. The shop was home to many wonders and mysteries. He lived alone in that shop, selling wares to those who needed them. There were others aside from the man. Others with wondrous shops. Each shop had its own personality. Some shops, like the man’s were warm and welcoming. Others were cold and loathsome. One day the man decided to go on an adventure. All of his fellow shopkeepers told him that it would be foolish. The world outside was not for them. “No good will come of this!”, Said one of the Shopkeepers who closely resembled a black flamingo. “It’s foolish! We are meant to stay in our shop! We are here to serve!”, Said another. This one is a strong female voice from among the group. All of the others agreed with the flamingo man and the woman, except for one. Her name was Azina, and she was the kindest and most talented of the group. She made such wonderful gifts for others and for the world around them. She helped and spoke with the humans, as well as the other races that made their way into the shops. “There is much to see in the world. These people can be cruel, true. But they can also be kind, and loving. They care about themselves and the world around them. We should experience the world so that we know the value of what we sell to them.”, Azina pleaded the case before the others. “Foolishness!”, Said the flamingo man. “They have nothing to offer us! It is US who have things for them!”, The flamingo-man scoffed at hers, and the man’s ideas. Still, the man’s mind was made up, bolstered by Azina’s encouragement. The man had long suspected that there was more to see, outside of their shops and the customers. And so, a very long time ago, thousands of years into the future, the man left his shop and traveled the world. “Where would be a good place to go?”, The man asked a poor family as they dragged their cart up the muddied roads. Their horse had died of starvation and had only themselves and their young children to help with the burden of traveling their wares to market. “How would we know? We are simple farmers. The only things we see are our fallow fields and our hovel as it falls into disrepair. We have no time to see the world. We have to get these crops to market or we will starve.”, They replied to the man. The man was puzzled by the speech. He understood the language and the words but had no knowledge of their meaning. The man had no physical needs and couldn’t fathom the true meaning of starvation. “I don’t understand.”, Said the man, perplexed at their plight. “You have all the food you could want in this cart. How would you starve?” The family looked at the man, in his pristine white robes and the flowing, strikingly blue scarf that hung from around the man’s neck. “It doesn’t surprise me that you know nothing of hunger. You don’t look like you’ve lacked for anything in your life.”, The father of the family said. “We need to sell these crops in order to pay the taxes on our home or they’ll take our land. We need these to purchase better seeds so that we’ll have more crops to sell. We must sell these for medicine for when our children get sick. We would like to buy a cow so that our children have milk, and in the lean months, we can butcher it for meat. No, we can’t save these crops.”, The father replied, growing more irritated that the man was wasting their time. “Please, let me help you.”, The man said. “Where are you going? Would you let me pull this cart and allow you a rest. Perhaps you could tell me more as we travel? I wish to know of the world.” The family did tell him of their plight as he tirelessly pulled their cart. They told him of the plague and the droughts. They told him of their poverty and the anguish of losing a child. The man knew of much but still understood very little by the time they reached the town. He bid the family farewell and left them with some coins. He told them of his shop, should they ever wish to visit. The man continued to walk, unaware of the vast sum of money that he’d left the family. He walked for many days along the dirt road. Eventually, dirt and wagon ruts turned to paved stones. He still saw few travelers on the road. The man came upon three highwaymen cornering a mother and her young son. He was unaware of bandits or their weaponry as he approached. “Good morning!”, He said brightly as he approached the bandits and their victims. The highwaymen seemed confused by the man. He wasn’t afraid of them. Clearly, he needed to be taught a lesson. He must have plenty of coin to be dressed as he was. And foolish to approach them, unarmed. The bandits lost interest in their previous targets and turned their attention to the man. “Wha’ ‘ave we 'ere, boys?”, The one with the short sword asked as they moved to surround the man. “Think iz some sorta noble come to save our souls.”, Another said, the wicked dagger gleaming behind his back. “I bet you’s got plen'y 'a coin in those robes.”, The first said. “I do!”, Said the man. “You need money in the world. Though I may not need to eat or drink, it’s a pleasant thing to rest at an inn during my travels.” “Won’ need'ta worry about any 'a that ever again.”, The third said. They all laughed. The man laughed with them, unsure of the implied threat. The laughing stopped as the second bandit sunk his wicked dagger into the man’s back. They expected cries of anguish. They expected begging. They expected blood at the very least. They did not expect the reality of the next few seconds. The man continued to laugh. He seemed entirely unaware of the knife that had been inserted and removed. The man was stabbed again yet still seemed not to notice. Suddenly the bandits were afraid and ran. Their steel clattered across the pavers as they tried to outrun the divine wrath that was sure to follow their crimes. “Was it something I said?”, The man asked, confused. The man continued on his journey. Eventually, the man came to the ocean and booked passage on a ship. The ship was rickety and drafty. The ship listed and shook. It rocked in the high seas and threatened to keel over. But the man was amused and enjoyed his passage. He sloshed around the lower decks and talked with the people. They were all far from home and feared that they’d never see their familiar shores again. They were frightened that the boat would sink and they’d never see their families again. Their plights touched the man. This! This was surely what he was meant to see. He had to tell his siblings of the Human’s fears and their troubles. They couldn’t simply sit in their shops and let these people suffer. But the man also knew of his siblings and knew that most would not help. They were content to sit in their shops. They were content to let the world around them burn. He knew of one that would help him. When the ship arrived at port, he left the people coin, and a gift before he left. The dagger was light and the coin bought them transport, and land. The dagger bought their freedom and the coin cemented it. The man walked from the town as the last cries of the sailors died to silence and their captives escaped into the night. He walked toward Carthage. He walked the roads and passed soldiers. He passed things masquerading as soldiers. He thought nothing of them as he walked the road. Slowly the smoke rose above the horizon and the city came into view. The man had passed those who had sacked Carthage and still thought nothing of them. The man walked the streets and looked down at the burned and butchered bodies and felt their plight. This! This was the very thing that he came to implore his sister’s help to convince the others. The man walked, helping those still alive until he came to his sister’s shop. If the man had blood, it would have run cold as he looked at the battered door and the smoke that billowed from the shattered frame. The man rushed in and fell immediately into tears. He spied the carnage. He walked past the splintered counter and ran his hand along the dead wood. Really and truly dead. He stepped over her wares into the Storeroom. He found her there, surrounded by scores of corpses. He counted them but continued on. He walked through the eery aisles and the toppled shelves. He walked for minutes, sad that he knew precisely how much time had passed. He came to the end of the long room and found what he’d been searching for. He found his sister’s heart, cold and lifeless. The man knew. The man knew that this was the price for embracing the humans. For wanting to know about their world. This was the price for her support of his foolishness. Had he been at his shop would a similar fate have waited for him? In his grief, the man burned the storeroom to ash. No human should ever have access to the wonders held in her shop. And so, the man returned to his shop and remained there for Ages. The man never forgot the things that he’d learned and the people he’d met along the way. But he also never forgot the lesson that he’d been taught in his sister’s death: don’t get close to humanity. And so he stayed, the loyal Shopkeeper. At least until another Age rolled around.

There were rules in the Shop. He didn't have access to everything in history. If it was well and truly destroyed it was just that. However with the right circumstances and the right, or wrong people depending on your view, people about or not, things that were lost did inevitably find their way into the shop. This wasn't a surprise to Myrios. After Ages in the "business," he was used to things appearing. Or not as the case may be. There was only so much physical storage space in the storeroom. If the true inventory of what was stored in the shops was laid out in the physical storeroom it would most likely crack the crust of the planet. Thankfully this was not the case. Often things found their way into the shop that he had no idea about. Not until it was time to put them on the shelves to be sold. It was a slow day for the Shopkeeper and he decided to take a walk through the storeroom. There was nothing like walking through the miscellaneous trash and treasure of several Ages of history to grab his curiosity. When he opened the heavy oaken door beside the counter the dimensional energies would have assaulted anyone close enough. Myrios simply strolled through and made his way through the shelves. He glanced through as he walked. Various bits and bobs, clutter, and priceless artifacts sat jumbled on the overloaded shelves. They were overloaded in appearance only. The physical shelves could have held much more but it was more the symbolism of the thing that mattered. People expected a storeroom in such an establishment. Something to tell them that yes, this was indeed a store. See, there's a room devoted to storing things. It made it very store-like in his opinion. The Shop tended to agree with him. (edited) As the indeterminate seconds passed in the room, he looked more to the side. There was something new that had grabbed his attention. He veered from the drive aisle and took a sharp left, cutting through shelves covered in lawn equipment from various times throughout history. Past the shelves packed with sporting equipment and well past the aisle that held mostly weaponry and armor he came to a strange section that he wasn't entirely familiar with. This puzzled the shopkeeper. There had been shelves in nest rows all the way down to the Heart. He'd made sure of it. He'd spent a long..however, you'd measure time in a place that it didn't normally pass, making sure it looked like a proper Shop storeroom. Off to the side were large pieces of equipment. Equipment that was somehow familiar. A slow, smile spread across his face, tainted by a sort of sadness as he closed the distance. The equipment had been rebuilt and improved upon over months and years. Whatever the opinion of the final product, Myrios had always considered the inventions to be a work of art. Everything that Doc built had been a miracle. These had been no different. He remembered the say these had gone online or a distant ancestor of this final product. He paused in his thoughts. It was the 'final' part of that statement that bothered him. It had been the man's final work. His looking at these devices now brought a sharp pang of sadness to him and he jerked his hand back from the device as if he'd been burnt. That would have been ridiculous for Myrios but these were all recent emotions and he had a hard time processing some of the more stressful ones. He picked up the control board, clear crystalline wires hanging from the plug. He remembered the first time he'd turned the things on. The silly man thought he'd seen everything until it refused to work for him. He'd been the first that Doc had come to aside from the three that came with him. It was his first devoted experience with humanity. That was eight years ago. Or was it? It was hard to tell for him. Linear time had very little meaning to him and had to check outside quite frequently to ensure that it was actually the proper time of day. He pushed the old, familiar buttons and smiled a bit more to himself. He leaned against the large tower and fiddled with switches and sliders and thought back to the years doing this thing that he surprisingly loved so much. The feeling of belonging that it brought. He wasn't that sinister shopkeeper when he was out there. He simply entertained and learned how better to be part of humanity. The sadness returned when he took a step and turned to look over the practically arcane machinery. If it was here then that meant that it had been lost, forgotten, and shuffled to the back room of most people's minds. It was a brief flash in reality and then the magic was gone. Humanity lived such mercurial lives that they couldn't hold onto things for too long. They only had so long in their lives and so many things to experience in this world. For him, these were his favorite times. For someone with all of history behind him, this brief flash was what made the most difference to him. This shining, magical time when he's found love and lost it. Found the love of his life and been married. He'd made friends and defeated evils. He's traveled back in time, on purpose, to rescue that same love. This was the most magical time and looking at these devices meant that some of the magic had left the world. He nodded to himself, wiping what should've been a year from his eye but he decided not to. No particular reason why just didn't want to. He made a decision. He looked at the devices and looked at the distance to the store and decided that it was too great. He had no super strength. He decided on another course of action. He left the anima transmitters and the control boards where they were and set to his workshop. It didn't take him long before the small intricately designed silver box was ready. It didn't need to be complex. It didn't need to be showy or elaborate. It just needed to be big enough. He stalked back through the storeroom until he reached the wall that the large equipment sat next to. Almost as if it had been placed there on purpose. His hand ghosts over the equipment on the way past. He takes in the feel of the carbon materials and the lines. He feels the nick where Blues had dropped his coffee mug. Or the dent in the side where Doc's frustration had borne itself until the moment the light went on and he figured it out. There was a lot of history here and he was sad that it was gone. His hand goes to the wall and he pours his energy into it. His face became haggard and worn. Perhaps one of the few times that he looked and felt exhausted. As his energy faded there was a door in its place. An average-looking white door with a friendly-looking knob. He opened the door and looked inside. It would do. He sets the box in the middle of the room and puts the last bit of his energy into it and walked out, leaning heavily against the door when he left. He knew what the room would look like before he'd opened the door. He'd made the device himself. Though there were some...incidental details that he hadn't intended but no one was perfect. The room was larger than most in the shop. Taller with a skylight taking up most of the ceiling. There were empty walls and various things that he'd need. The equipment wasn't going to die; lost and forgotten to collect dust in the storeroom. He owed it to him to make use of it. Perhaps in some way, he was alive through his action. Gone but not forgotten. Not by him. He'd ask for help later, moving the equipment. Perhaps even find a DJ or two. If not, he'd be there, being his dumb self for everyone to enjoy, for a few hours at least. It's the best any of them could ask for and more than most would be given. - End

Welcome to the new forums! Things are a little different around here. Hopefully, you find them a good sort of 'new'. There are a lot of new or improved features here. But, I'd like to answer a question or two. We still have the domain name. I opted not to pay for the premium account for the ability to use it with Wix. If the website gets enough use that nearly $200 a year is worth the cost, I'll use the domain name once more. The Discord section is experimental. It is a bot, and your posts will be labeled as such. You can't access any areas that bots aren't given permission to. We're considering keeping it this way, or opening up the bot permissions. What I don't want it to end up being is a way for people to troll. We've had problem members in the past that seem to hold bad feelings still. I'm still unsure of how secure it is. So we'll take it as it comes. If there's any more questions, please feel free to ask them in here.