From the entries of Commander Mars:
Dear Journal
I'm not a great storyteller. I'm afraid that's what I'm becoming known for in these entries, to whoever may read them. To me, they're archives from a time that has long passed by, long before they're done being written. It's already ancient history.
This isn't one of those journals. Plenty of these are just my musings, where I need space to think and reflect, ponder the nature of certain questions that haunt me. It's for my reading. These are the entries I spend weeks writing, opening and closing the entry in order to continue writing them as new information churns in my head. Sometimes, these questions don't go away, and they spend weeks circling the shower drain of my head, trying to sink in. They go on for months. Years. The prospect of never finding an answer is somewhat self-destructive in just considering. Sometimes it's all I can do.
Part of this is that I don't know who'll ever read these. I know I click the submit button weekly and sometimes daily, but I know it's just a courtesy. No one reads these. Not even me. I don't like to reflect. I keep hard copies beside my desk but I never read them. It's more of a memories thing. For someone who doesn't like to reflect on their past, I certainly end up doing it quite a bit in these. I'm just not good at it, and sometimes I think it shows. I don't know, I already said I don't read these.
Somehow, all of these become stories. Without any certainty or control over it this happens repeatedly. It takes longer for me to get to a point like that than anything else, and it's usually because I'm telling a story.
I don't have a story for today.
I just want to talk about one thing today.
That one thing is Commander Jupiter.
It's a really short conversation, too. Get ready for a doorstopper of a novel that has nothing to do with it.
I don't think we can talk about Team Galactic if we don't talk about Commander Jupiter.
Maybe it's what I said above, that I can't understand Jupiter and I can't live in expectation around her. I've never ever felt comfortable around her. But I don't entirely believe I live in fear of her, or that I don't understand her character. Spending time with her, sharing life with her, it's a slow terrifying expose of something I just don't understand. Just when I think I've seen it all, she throws something new at me. Something new, horrifying, and ignorant of all logic or any understanding I had before. It's jarring. I can't be comfortable around something that always changes, but at the same time I can't always be afraid of it, especially when that something is a leader, or worse, a colleague.
Jupiter's story is not complicated. Thing is, I don't know it. She's never explained where she came from, why she left, and what made her join. I don't think I'll ever know, even when given an explanation. At this point I simply won't believe it. It's too ridiculous at this point to have something that makes sense.
She's a brute. A brute in high heels and lipstick. A woman that could make your will bend before your spine. She's a wolf in bitch's clothing. She acts like a woman, looks like a woman, talks like a woman, smells like a woman, and has the will and character of an absolute monster. You would never know it either.
Something else? She's extremely quiet.
Not only can you not hear her enter or leave, you can't hear her move through a room. It's scary when you know she's doing it. You can feel it, and all you can do is wait, for the most terrifying moment of your life.
You know she's thinking of something. It's terrifying. It goes beyond thinking, pondering, dreaming, wondering, or even knowing. Calculating.
But it's still not the scariest piece of the puzzle. I don't even want to call that a piece of the puzzle. That's just two years of guesswork and forgetting the rest. I could have gained all this insight last week and be explaining the same thing. It's detached from time.
Darkness is just the absence of light, and fear is just the absence of information. When someone hides in your closet and jumps out at you, whatever you knew about that room is gone and replaced by a spine-twisting spleen choking fear. When they scream, you can't trust the silence around you. Everything you knew was wrong, so how much right can you be about anything from now on?
This is the Jupiter effect. The span of two years behind me means almost nothing to me when it comes to her, because I've learned that I can't trust her. It's the same reason you can't trust a closed door when you know someone's in it. It's the same reason you can cross a car in a parking lot and not look twice at a figure behind glass. It's the same reason you lock your door at night, the same reason you lock the bathroom door when you're in it, the same reason you look in the backseat of a car when you get in, the same reason you don't go down that street at night, the same reason you don't eat that one food before a long trip, the same reason you look nice just to go to the store.
It's the same reason you look under your bed for monsters at night: there are enough monsters out there that don't have tentacles but have fingers, toes, the English language, and things you can't tell kids about.
Just like that, the less you know the more detached you are from the reality that is Team Galactic, the Sinnoh Region, the Pokemon world, and the space between your sheets and the rest of a dark room.
For reasons I clearly don't have and that being a reason itself, I don't trust Jupiter.
So, when I'm supposed to trust her with my life, and supposedly trust her life with mine, things get complicated. Celestic Town complicated. And slowly, whether I like it or not, things start to get weird.