Graffiti Wizard

parkour & glowing spraypaint

i bought a one-way ticket to a mostly-abandoned city, on a planet that’s in eternal quarantine. it is a dark, perilous place, still haunted by the mining disaster that caused most of the population to die or pack up or become something more than human.

when i was still human, i watched hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of video taken by locals and brave researchers. videos documenting their culture and biology, documenting the slow siege of nature against the decay of what was once a thriving metropolis, and of course, documenting the Curse. before i emigrated, i knew i would never be able to go back, but what’s more important is that i knew i would never want to. being a graffiti wizard was better than retail.

when i’m not climbing broken buildings with a backpack full of aerosol starpaint, or scavenging for junk to sell to the blackmarket ships, i document everything my own way, with a pencil and paint. because all the photos and videos you’ve seen are missing the scents, textures, temperatures, and emotions of Fioletov. a mere snapshot of a teratid will never convey to you how your own bones shrink away from it, inside your skin, as it walks beneath a bridge where you crouch with one long, held breath. in a video, you can’t feel the heat of its body as it passes or sniff the candy-scented musk that makes you want to ignore everything you’ve ever heard and reach out and touch it. in order to be emotionally accurate, visual documentation cannot be objectively accurate–it must be stylized, warped, the way the Curse remade this world in the first place. this is my purpose.

what you’ve heard about adults encountering cursium is true: it hurts like a dry skullfuck on a sand dune. but it was worth it.