The below was written in response to a bounty by Zephronias. I was attempting to subvert both the original bounty and the basic idea of adventure novels in the first place. I don't know if I like the story or not - I'll let the votes decide.
Pipelinks should be read in a Rocky Horror style - they don't actually exist in the story, but make it more enjoyable.
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Begin log.
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Nothing makes sense anymore.
There are a certain brand of stories which are framed as the main character trying to put together the pieces of their life after everything falls apart. This isn't one of those. There's nothing left to put back together, just the shards of the last few weeks slowly spiraling out of my hands.
I'm not writing this to make the world make sense again. I'm not stupid enough to think that would work.
What I'm writing now is a history. I don't think lives can be wasted - that would mean there was something all humans were supposed to be working towards, which I know isn't true - but I don't want mine to not have an impact after I'm dead. After this week is over.
So I guess I'm writing an epitaph. Or, well, the novelization of an epitaph. Gravestones being as small as they are, epitaphs have something of a length requirement.
I planned my epitaph out multiple times, back before I landed here. I always pictured going out as an action hero - "Here lies Philosophus Stone, lost in the fight to save the human race." "This spot marks the death of Philosophus Stone, gone to ensure the survival of his family of four."
I don't think my epitaph today would be anything so grand. I've actually got one planned that I'm a fan of - a message to anyone who would manage to see it. I might ask the guards if they'll use it.
It's one word.
"Run."
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My name is Philosophus Stone. I'm a twenty-eight year old man, not that age or sex mean anything anymore. But I was born with a penis twenty-eight years ago, and I never quite got into the "better you through surgery" kick. Maybe if I was fifty I'd try changing a few things.
My parents named me Philosophus for one reason: they hated me. My parents were on the cutting edge of the plastic surgery wave, and a big part of their relationship was based on changing things up. Unfortunately, while Dad was a big fan of putting pieces of plastic inside his face he was less keen on wearing rubber down below, and so my mom had to endure the struggle of nine months without a sex change while I occupied her decidedly female-specific uterus. When I did finally pop out, my mother decided to take her revenge on me and my father - who was now living with three "girls" in a shack in Tijuana - through the worst name she could envision.
It was somewhat strange growing up knowing that not only was I a reason for my parent's divorce, I was the primary factor. Of course, I wasn't a big fan of my mother anyway - she was more or less the worst drunkard you could ever meet, and I was lucky that her aim with a bottle was about as accurate as her fifteenth surgeon's scalpel, the one that gave her the scar on the sole of her foot - so by the time I was eight I didn't really care. When I was nine, I sued for emancipation and won due to the defendant not showing up. By the time I was ten, I was off living the action hero life I had always dreamed of.
Those early years are something of a blur. I was just like all the other super powered young children, constantly arguing with my two friends while taking down a strangely large amount of locally based monsters. I'm not exactly proud of those years, but hey. They made me who I am.
The big turning point away from my teenage adventure years was my last year of high school. The school I went to specialized in child heroes, so I shouldn't have had to do exactly what I did by myself. For some reason I was always head and shoulders above everyone else as far as the kicking-ass-and-taking-names department went, so the school chose me. The dean told me about a "Sound of Terror" coming from the bowels of the school, and - while he didn't say it outright - passive-aggressively told me to go do something about it.
This sort of thing happened a lot at school - for some reason, no one had ever suggested moving away from the haunted forest or filling in the cursed bowels of the building - so I figured I could handle whatever the sound was on my own.
After a certain amount of killing animals and other weird obstacles between me and the lowest point of the school, I found the source of the sound. Someone had set an alarm clock and hidden it down here just to piss the entire building off.
That dealt with the sound part of the problem. I still had to find the source of the terror.
Wait, I'm sorry, that makes it sound like finding the source was difficult. The source of the terror was in a garishly dressed clown who was hiding behind the alarm clock.
When he saw me, he got a strange smile on his face. Parting his lips - which I suppose was no easy feat, considering the amount of makeup on them - he bared his teeth at me, before speaking.
"Oh, hey. I wasn't expecting you for a while."
I shrugged. "I'm a senior. This type of adventure just doesn't take me that long anymore."
"That makes sense."
We awkwardly stared one another down until the clown started speaking again.
"Well, I had a big speech for you, but I feel like now isn't a good time. Want to agree to meet again later?"
"Sure," I said. "I'm a fan of thwarting the same people over and over again. It really gives you a feel for them, you know?"
"Yeah, I get that."
We went back to staring.
Once again, the clown cracked the silence. "So, I'm going to head out."
"Yeah, I should probably head back," I responded. "I can't remember the last time I actually went to class."
I turned away and started walking back through the bowels, stepping over the small stream of blood that was starting to flow from the animals I killed earlier. Before I hit the staircase, though, I spun around.
"Hey, what was your name?" I called.
I heard my voice echo from the chamber around me. The clown wasn't there.
I really wish that I had killed him that day.