Steven Dittman

“Disjointed, erratic, secretly miserable. Such is the world I live in. My biggest issue with it is there is not much I can do about it. I can write, so I am a Minnesotan journalist. I do my best to expose the crooked standpoint of this earth. Unfortunately, I am not sure that I reach anyone, who does not want to read it. They probably just see sunshine and rainbows, or earthworms and toast, or literally whatever they prefer to be reading about. The world has not valued truth for a long time. My family has their own perspective. They are one of the ones that chooses to find love everywhere. As a result we marry early, raise several children and send them off to do the same. Unlike most of my counterparts (according to the Perspective Dimension’s representative in the I.N.D.U.C.E. Dimension) I was born much sooner into a world that has disorderedly grown much faster. It is currently 1989, and I am a mere 24 years old. I have decided to abandon my family’s tradition, and hence have been shunned by them. My siblings have all settled down already, and I am the oldest of all fifteen of us. I do not visit, in part because they won’t allow it, and in part because they live what I consider to be excessive and exaggerated lives. This is not all bad, and I certainly still appreciate my parents and siblings on the whole, I just wish they would become more concerned about the worlds issues. The only exception to this rule is my younger brother Leon, who has received permission from our parents to settle down alone. He lets me visit. He is the only one who sort of sympathizes with me, in recognizing that as great as love is, there is more to it than raising huge families. He also recognized other perspectives, as I have come to. Furthermore, he is my mediator, if I ever want to know what the Ditmans are up to.

                Enough about us. You are doubtless wondering what it is I write about. I write about this earth’s heroes. They do not have special powers, just righteous and sound perspectives. They, like my brother and me, can see past the many splendid lies of this planet. They can make more of a difference than I could ever hope to. As a result I try to spread their stories to those blinded by fancy. What exactly blinds these people, other than what they choose to believe, are the infernal spectacles that reinforce those beliefs. They are why everything is in disarray. Invented by a couple back in the twenties, who just wanted to have a realistic reenactment of their honeymoon thirty years earlier, these pairs of glasses have since become an integral part of society, giving a sense of false reality to all who wear them. My brother and I, along with the heroes I mentioned, are among the only people who do not use these glorified eye coverings. Oh, I have glasses, the only kind nowadays that allow their wearer to see things as they really are. I see fire, destruction, and immense corruption. Thanks be to goodness, there is enough order left in society for a man to live in peace, if he chooses. Even with all these painful truths there are bright spots. I do not mean just in the people that resist either. There are still a few trees left. There is at least one open, green field, with a gorgeous sky above it, untainted by any form of industry. The last remaining body of clean water, is thankfully its biggest, the pacific ocean, cut off from the rest of earth’s water, and with the salt artificially removed. It is these things that I write for, and that the heroes fight for! My brother has been kind enough to connect me with all the news he can, and even built up enough resources to contact the I.N.D.U.C.E. Dimension, which regulates all of the other dimensions. Their input and advice over the past few years has been very helpful indeed. I expect you’ll be wanting me to get on with the first of these stories now. I wrote it awhile back, prefacing it with a bit more about how the perspectacles came to be abused. I hope that you are willing to learn something, or I have related this to you for naught.”

2 November 23, 1936

It was dreary day in South Carolina. Most anyone who owned a pair of perspectacles was using them to imagine summer weather, as they kept themselves warm indoors. Most relevant though, was what transpired in Mr. Capricot’s office at Perspecticorp Industries. Mr. Conner Capricot, the inventor of the pespectacles alongside his now deceased wife, and current CEO of the company founded around them, was doing his best to regulate appropriate and legal uses of his creation. He was in a meeting with his board of directors discussing what ought to be done to further sales and increase revenue. The board was pushing for more uses for the glasses, not all of them respectable. Naturally, Mr. Capricot would not here it.

3 Mr. Capricot

“So I am expected to be perfectly okay with someone who wants to use these spectacles to pretend to, if not accidentally, murder innocent people. I am sorry, but have you learned nothing under me? Improving one’s night life, and going on wild adventures is one thing, but role-playing crime as if such a thing was fun! Surely, gentlemen, you cannot be serious.”