No one else has seen the page before. I am worried that if too many people see it, the Braid Institute will find me. But I have to get the word out.
They gave me a story, a story they told me to keep secret, but I can't. I have to share the story, because it's a story about you.
You were flicking through Doomsday Zine Quarterly, the kind printed on stock so thin it feels like it might whisper your secrets to the wind, when you saw it. A classified ad, tucked between a recipe for mushroom tinctures and a review of a guerrilla theatre performance in Osaka.
THE BRAID INSTITUTE WANTS YOU.
Truth. Transmutation. Ticket to the Solarpunk Beyond.
Email: foxesfortruth@protonmail.jp
You tried showing it to your dance partner. She squinted at the page. There's nothing there,
she said.
That night, you replied.
You were recruited via Zoom, naturally. The interviewer wore glitter on their cheeks and a fox mask from an immersive theatre night you'd once wandered into in a Hackney warehouse. They asked if you could DJ, if you could forage, if you'd ever danced in the ruins of an astrology-themed rave. You answered yes
to everything. They said, Perfect. We're looking for someone neurodivergent enough to see things differently.
They sent you a ticket to Japan.
Now you stay in a temple outside Kobe. It smells like seaweed, incense, and something older, maybe the bones of an ancient god, maybe a forgotten rave flyer. You spend your days crafting props from driftwood and bones for performances everyone feels. At night, you forage with crabs, cats and pigeons. The cats whisper stories of spirits caught in vending machines. The pigeons warn you about the coming zombie tide.
The crabs are your true teachers. Their shells spiral with equations you can't read, their claws scratch truths into the temple floorboards: Time is a remix.
Foxes are watching.
On Thursdays, you dance. A ghost DJ plays ambient noise harvested from dead iPhones and underground train vibrations. You move with others, each step a sigil, each gesture a spell to banish despair. Someone screams about the old religion, how the gods now live in algorithms.
You wonder what truth you came here hoping to find.
No. You realise now: You came for proof that the world is stranger than it claims to be. And here, with the crabs and the foxes and the solarpunk witches, you have it.