It bothered me. I reran it over and over in my mind, and in the rooms of mirrors that replayed the past. My dear brother, more miserable than usual. Staring at his rats. Wanting to quit, wanting to escape. Don't we all? Even humans want to quit being alive (but yet don't want to die.) I've tried to quit myself. (I've let another brother 'rule' the joke of a dimension called Hell, though I suppose I'm still technically king.) But with Meresin it is different. He's up to something. I've had brothers attempt at suicide before. It doesn't usually succeed. The other thing that can almost obliterate our existence as immortal beings is allow ourselves to be consumed by another brother. I know that's something Meresin wouldn't do. He's much too stubborn.

So I went back and replayed our interaction from 'yesterday' one last time.

“I'm thinking about quitting.”

“Oh, you're just having a black mood or something,” I said. I should have shut up right there and let him talk more, but I seriously did not know what he meant.

“Not like that,” said the jerk, mysteriously. He just never said what he meant.

And then just as it began to rain, I noticed something else. I wasn't looking for it, so I didn't see it. Meresin likely didn't see him, either. A good person, a very, very good person, pulled in on the other side of the building. I could tell that he was good based on his aura, his vibration. Meresin can't see good people like him as well as I can. Sometimes he's blind to them. Literally blind to them, making a divide in the dimensions. God can see him, and I can see him-- a unique ability that not all my brothers have. There are exceptions, of course. There are always exceptions.

Joshua, a very high vibrational person. A genuinely good person that lived in his own, very small reality. What was he doing near a Catholic church? It wasn't impossible, but it was unusual. There are many good people that intend on joining the church, but for whatever reason or another, they can't stay. There is literally a variety of reasons for this: they cannot handle the workload, or they end up having philosophical differences, or they want to start a family.

I followed Josh a little longer, leaving my brother alone in that timeline, in that mirror in the parking lot. Josh sat in his truck and smoked weed outside the church. He was listening to Pantera, an usual choice, but as literally the Devil himself, I approved. Then, what surprised me more was he had the uniform of a Catholic-priest-in-training folded up in the passenger's seat of the car. I scanned the front of his mind and learned that he was about to go inside to clean and pray, as he was, in fact, working and going to school to be a priest. He was also waiting on his best friend, my brother's lab rat, Noah.

Noah was a low vibrational creature, but him being my brother's project I've left him alone. I literally knew nothing else about him, other than he was a young man. But, now I know that Noah and Joshua hang out and are best friends. From what I can tell, their friendship is long and solid. They are both studying to be Catholic priests.

The interior of Joshua's car was a garbage can. I sat in the backseat and watched him, amused. He loved rock music and weed and his mother. He decided to be a priest based on her whims, and some sort of tragedy I couldn't quite get a grasp on, just by scanning his aura. There were other priests in his family, and from what I could tell, were a long line of very good people. I like good people, but they're boring. I just thought it might tell me something about what my brother was up to by looking at the people his pet projects interact with.

I sang along to some of the songs on Joshua's mix tape. The truck was old, but her tape player kept on ticking. Joshua's mix tapes weren't bad, either. Joshua never ending up on following up on his good thought-- he never went in to pray and clean. And instead he decided was too hungry to do anything. He considered going and getting something to eat and then returning, but just as he considered this, Noah appeared out the back door of the church. Noah, my brother's project, was a handsome, lonely man that I knew very little about. He said nothing as he slid aside Joshua's pile of clothes in the front seat.

Joshua seemed genuinely glad to see his friend and offered him some weed. Noah accepted and Josh turned the truck around. As far as I could tell, Joshua intended on going to a fast foood drive-thru.

“How'd it go?” Joshua inquired. I couldn't quite tell what he was talking about, just based on the information that I could pick up. Higher vibrational people often keep their thoughts to themselves better.

“Not great,” said Noah. I was surprised at his voice. Noah's voice sounded more feminine than he looked. All I could really see, as an incorporeal being without physical eyes, anyway, was Noah's aura. So, he really didn't look like anything to me other than a sad sack of flesh that crawled into Joshua's car. It was easy to see my sad-sack brother's influence on him.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Joshua, understandingly. Once again, I could tell that he was genuine, and what a good person he was. Also, I could tell that Joshua had no intentions of pushing the conversation on Noah, who seemed sensitive.

I decided to leave because all they were going to do was get stoned and eat things, and I had no particular interest in observing that any further. It did give me the idea, though, to make Joshua my pet project, much the same way Noah belonged to Meresin. I hope to understand him a little better, because just asking him seemed useless.

I thought about going back in time and following Joshua, from his infancy to now. I decided to go back and look though his linage, from his Catholic family in Ireland to their immigration to America. I wanted to know everything about Joshua. If my brother could have pet projects, then so could I.

Which isn't to say I haven't had pet projects before. In a way, all humans are my pet projects. However, some are more personal than others I suppose. The reality is, my brother is my pet project, I was just going to use this human to get there.

My specialty is time. My brothers and I all have access to different information, abilities, and specialties. Meresin likes germs and I like to jump around timelines and see things from different points of view. The problem is I can't ever tell which timeline or reality or possibility is going to appear in natural reality. The only real 'time' is the present, the right-now. And I have no way of seeing quickly enough ahead of time if something is going to manifest as physically real or not. It is a coin-flip every time, 50/50. Will it or won't it be. I can guess with all probability with a 99.9% accuracy that something will turn out red, and I have all the evidence of all the timelines in front of me, right here and right now-- but because of God, or whatever you want to call it, that red thing can be blue instead-- once it hits the surface of the 'now'.

Which makes my powers sort of useless, more or less. But, it's what I have and I am still usually correct (except when I am not). What I have found is the more often I attempt to interfere with physical reality for something to go my way, the more often that it messes up and doesn't go as I intended. It will fail spectacularly bad, in fact. So, I sometimes interfere on purpose with this in mind, (though not as often as you likely think.)

I have a watch, and although the watch isn't physically real, it is a manifestation for me to use to focus on. The watch is like a personal road map-- sometimes on my wrist and sometimes it's a pocket watch. It's a fantastical instrument, with layers of golden dials, stars, and numbers in all different human languages. It's a work of art I made. I wanted to narrow down on Joshua's timeline, maybe, on where he and Noah began.

I wound the little dial on the side of my watch. A dozen stars lined up and I stared, partly hypnotized, by the mechanical alignments. As I looked into the perfectly tuned instrument, I felt myself get sucked down a hole. It can be quite jarring, but it is also as natural to me as water to a fish. Once I was pulled out the other side, I found myself once again in the parking lot. It was roughly the same location as I stood with Meresin, but years ago. It was a sunny day late in the spring, and school was being let out for recess.

The Catholic church where Noah, Meresin's pet human, grew up was also a elementary through high school. It was all in one campus on one city block, along with the perish rectory and several other buildings. The boys were separated from the girls, except in class. They were even segregated at the lunch table. I watched Joshua, a small boy, grow up. His Catholic uniform was a pressed, blue cotton shirt and smart dress pants.

He was a pretty predictable kid. I stood on the recess playground--the parking lot, just as the children were spilling out of the school's double doors. The girls came out of one end of the building, and the boys another. They couldn't see me, but I just stood on the playground to watch.

It was easy to spot Joshua, his sandy blonde hair was perfectly quaffed by his mother with some hair gel. I don't often pay attention to the year, but it was sometime in the late 1990's. There wasn't the smell of burning internet in the air quite yet. He went off to to play with his friend, right in the center of the playground, right by the orange traffic cones. Right there the girls and the boys divide.

The girls had the left side of the parking lot, the boys had the right. In Catholic school, the recess kept them apart. I could tell that Joshua was longing. I could tell that his best friend was on the other divide.

I must remind you that we don't have a mortal body. It is the one thing that we ourselves desire above all else. Not just us, but all things in creation. It is being the center of the universe, the inside out of a black hole. To experience god first hand-- having a body. It is seeing all reality in perfect clarity through the five senses. I have a lot more than five, but none of them work in crystal clarity harmony as having seeing through them with the instrument of a body.

I don't have access to the five senses since I do not have a body of my own. And as such, their faces look blurry. Joshua's face is a blur. I do not have the instrument it takes to see it clearly, I do not have eyes. All I could see as I stood in the parking lot was Joshua, a blurry child, talk insistently to another blurry child just across the gender divide.

I didn't come to realize much later that it was Noah.

Noah, my brother's pet project, was on the girl's side of the parking lot.

I wasn't paying attention to that, I was too focused on Joshua. He was having a good time playing at recess, perhaps in the second or so grade. It was a picture perfect sunny day, getting close to the time when school was let out for summer. It was late spring, and I have had a lot of human pet projects in my existence (all of them to a certain extent) and I was growing very weary of them all. Something about children though, their innocence and potential.

I was at joy and at peace just watching Joshua and his friend playing games in the sunshine. I noticed the sunbeams through the trees and breaking through the gray spring clouds. I could hear Joshua laughing, along with the other children. And then the bell rang. Like clockwork, the boys made a single file and the girls made another.

I could tell Joshua was concerned for his friend. His friend shared a secret, but it didn't change how Joshua felt. He still loved his friend all the same. It was a crush to be sure, but since I was following Joshua's aura and reading him... His feelings were pure. He felt that he would love Noah all the way to his ends, and he meant it. It was a promise he made as a child, and I, as the Devil, felt it. I witnessed it. Joshua's family linage had a history of love and keeping their promises, especially under the Lord.

I watched as the nuns and teachers ushered them back into class. The girls and boys were mixed up, no longer divided, except by uniform. The girls were blue plaid jumpers and the boys blue shirts and plain trousers. Their faces were just a smear, all humanoid and expressionless. The teacher went on and on about sentence diagrams and hominids and words. No one was paying any attention to each other, not the teacher and certainly not the students. The energy was everyone was trudging along.

The children were much more interested in each other, and their stories, and their dramas. Students stole from one another and told stories, had crushes, and lied. Joshua and his friend were sitting right next to each other by choice in the back of the classroom. They were quiet as to not get in trouble, but were passing notes to one another incessantly.

I peeked in just to look, and at first it seemed like nothing. Just children being children, playing games like humans do. Drawings of wieners and warriors and things. It was a drawing they were passing back and forth, but it wasn't a cock and it wasn't a character. It was a map. I read their energies much closer and saw that it was a fictional map, but a map none the less. Of a land they made up together, and played in to get away from the church and school routine of their lives.

This was interesting. Humans do this all the time, especially while they are young. They make up things, like God, loose and genuine. Beautiful art, because it has no inhibition. It is like God because it is just itself. No judgment, no pretense. They made a map of a place where they, Joshua and his friend, could just be. They were sincere in their love of this fictional place.

Joshua handed the map back to Noah. Both of them were children that loved to draw, and Joshua gave the map back to Noah for safe keeping. Noah seemed to be able to keep all their stories and artworks safe. Joshua was the mess of the two-- the compartment inside of his school desk a disheveled, festering box of his old departed lunches and papers. His locker and his bedroom at home were much the same.

So, it was left to Noah to keep things clean and safe. This is not unlike my brother and I. I could see Meresin inside of Noah. They were both studious in nature. Noah was a deeply thoughtful, depressive, troubled child. It was easy to see why he choose this human as his pet project. But it still didn't answer very much. The more I knew the more questions I had.