Despair Pocket

Occasionally one will find a "dead spot" in existence where the ambient energy is particularly low and/or viscous. Despair pockets are disinspiring, prompting the sudden perspective that none of this really matters, that you've been silly and foolish and are only deceiving yourself and wasting your life chasing impossible dreams and that you really should go and do something that others will relate to and find respectable.   Despair pockets were once thought to be pseudipherous demi-planes connected to the Goddam Desert. It has since been determined that time does pass within them, however miserably, and victims who have managed to escape from a despair pocket have reported that there are no natural portals to the Goddam Desert or its temporally static field within.   Because they’re so often found within Connodoi, between the gullet and the sinusoidal expulsion zones, the currently accepted theory is that a ‘Node creates them as a fail-safe to prevent errant consciousnesses from making any permanent connections between the Gri’xian auric field and the ‘Node itself. This keeps the conscious contents of its stomach within the acceptable frequency tolerance so that it can continue to draw nourishment from their energy, and it keeps the Gri’xian minds from wandering too far into its digestive tract, where they could infect the delicate oscillations and cause a fatal discordance.   Despair pockets are not organic (that we know of), but as they’re so closely related to ‘Nodian anatomy, I suppose I’d better go back and add one to the diagram. —Ed   Inside a despair pocket, all sensory input seems deadened and dull. Colors are muted, sound falls flat, food is bland, and even pleasant thoughts have a pronounced downside. Spirals shrink to mere circles, repeating the same patterns over and over again. Eventually, one’s energy turns in upon itself with a whimper of destructive interference, eliciting a constant state of rumination and self-pity. The longer one remains in this state, the more difficult it is to break free without assistance from trained rescue teams. Even then, the captives often refuse to leave the perceived safety of the truncated perspective, preferring instead to sulk, brood, and compose pages upon pages of intolerably morose, self-centric poetry.   Strange as it may seem, relapses are common among escapees—those who've dwelt too long in such a place tend to become nostalgic for the comfortable familiarity, however dreary it may be, and will often return on their own after a time away.     These insidious dimensional traps can be of any size, and their contents as various as that of existence outside of them. However sluggish existence may be within a despair pocket, life can and does persist therein. They each have native flora and fauna, and some of the larger ones are even known to contain thoroughly miserable outposts and settlements where victims gather to bemoan their fate. Misery loves company, after all.   Often, escapees will bring “souvenirs” of their time in a despair pocket with them when they return to dimensional space proper, though why in the worlds anyone would want to hang on to anything like that, this author cannot guess. Food, seeds, trinkets, postcards (postcards, for gods’ sakes), and other mementos, wisely discarded when their owners come to their senses, can be found in the less-reputable trading districts of Crating. Many of these items fetch a handsome price, as they still carry the essence of the despair pocket from which they came, and can be useful weapons in conflicts involving emotional warfare or even inflicting a rival with a nasty case of Ipseathymia.   The poetry chapbooks, on the other hand, can't even be given away.