Hey guys, its been a little bit since I’ve updated (maybe) and I figured I’d let you guys know what I’ve been up to.
Gale has taken me under his wing and is showing me his secrets to surviving in here. He’s a good teacher, and I’m learning some tricks for navigating the DGBs. It’s hard to explain it all, but I’m going to try my best. A lot of it is mental preparation and association, which is really hard to teach, but Gale is a pretty good teacher and ‘m starting to get the hang of it.
The first lesson was how the DGBs work.
“All the Dollar Generals are like spokes on a bike tire. They all move forward, never backward. You can’t go back simply by going through the door. Wherever you entered from is your first spoke on the wheel, that’s why everyone’s journey starts at a different part. My first spoke is different from yours and my last spoke will be different from yours. There are a nearly infinite number of Dollar Generals, at least I’ve never seen one repeat itself by going through the door. I’m sure there must be an end to them, but I’m not sure I want to see what that looks like anymore than you do. Are you with me so far?”
I nodded, but thinking about it made my head hurt a little.
“Traveling the spokes, the Stores, is easy. You just go through the door. Navigating the stores is a little harder. The way I did it was to think of the stores as spokes on a wheel, but a wheel needs a hub. This store is my hub, its the middle point where I come to get out of the wheel. Technically, its a spoke too, but thinking of it as a hub helps ground yourself. You get it?”
“I uh,” I waffled a little, not wanting to admit that it was a little over my head, “kinda?”
Gale laughed, “Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up. It’s like riding a bike, once you do it it’s easy.”
In that he wasn’t wrong.
Lesson number two was traveling with people.
“So, if you’re traveling with other people, you have to be touching them for the two of you to travel together. Here, put a hand on my shoulder,” he said as he prepared to step through the door.
I slid a hand on his shoulder and we stepped through together into a familiar store.
It was KK, the place I had found Gale’s bulletin board.
“See?” he said, “That’s how we came out in my Dollar General when we left the Miasma behind. I had a hand on your back so we came through together.”
That made sense, and we proceeded with lesson three, traveling to specific places.
“You’ve done yourself a favor by leaving marks behind. At first I was popping around to stores I remembered, like the ones with weird letters or the ones with strange things in them, but once I started leaving my own markings I could travel to specific places. Pick out one of the stores you’ve been to before and lets go there.”
He put a hand on my shoulder this time, but when I walked through the door, we came out on LL instead of GG, the store with the mothers day decorations.
I was a little disappointed, but Gale patted my shoulder reassuringly.
“It’s tricky,” he assured me, “Took me a while to figure it out too. Lets try again. Picture the marks you left, close your eyes and get a good mental picture, and then step through the door.”
I tried it again, really focusing on the twin Gs, but when I stepped through this time, it was to find myself in an older location with a single G on the floor.
When I told him I’d goofed again, however, he told me it was progress.
“You’re getting the hang of it. Going to G when thinking og GG is pretty damn close. Keep practicing.”
We spent a while just traveling from one store to the next. Sometimes it got close, sometimes I just moved forward, but after a while I started to travel to the right destination sometimes. It was something that took a lot of focus, and when I put a hand to my head and told him I was getting a headache, Gale suggested we take a break.
“Have a rest, drink some water or Gatorade or maybe some coffee and just kinda take it easy for a bit. It isn’t something you can get right away. It takes practice, and even I sometimes get it wrong after all this time. “
I can’t say how long we were at it, but for what must have been a few days we worked on pinpointing my navigation through the stores I had been to already. I saw a lot of familiar places, though Gale refused to go to the “Meat Market Store” as he called it. He said he had encountered shadows there that thought he might be for sale and he had barely escape with his life. I figured I must have gone while they were closed and counted myself lucky.
After a while I could travel pretty well between stores without too much trouble, and when Gale was pretty confident that I had the process down he suggested we move on to something else.
Lesson four involved bringing other things with you to other stores.
“So your clothes travel with you because you don’t think about them coming with you. It’s like your nose or your hands, they’re a part of you and your mind just assumes that they will. Now I want you to take a good look at yourself and visualize what you look like in your clothes. Once you have it committed to memory, then you can add things to it and take them with you.”
He had me practice in front of a full length mirror, inspecting myself and committing my clothes to memory. The clothes weren’t hard, I had worked at the same place for years and was very aware of what my uniform looked like. No, the hard part was adding to it. I found the most colorful backpack in the store, but committing it to memory was difficult. If it wasn’t just right then it wouldn’t come with me, and Gale assured me that the backpack was all I needed to get right.
“Once you have the backpack down, everything you zip inside is inside. You don’t really have to remember it because it’s inside the bag and you know it’s inside the bag. Once you have the bag down, the rest is cake.”
That one took a while and gave me many headaches.
Sometimes the bag wouldn’t come with me. Sometimes the bag would but the things inside wouldn’t. Sometimes the bag would but I would concentrate so hard on the bag that I wouldn’t travel where I wanted to go. Sometimes I would load it up with stuff and find the bag had stayed where I had been.
Gale told me to be diligent and after a while it came together.
I couldn’t say how long that was, but it had to be months. We went about my training the same way I had gone about traveling. When I was tired, I slept. When I was hungry, I ate. When I had to go, I went. Gale had an answer for the solid waste too, and it made me laugh when he explained it.
“The place with the burnt roof is where I take all my crap to. I figure if its where that thing moves around the most, he is welcome to it.”
We went there when we had a bunch of it, Gale putting it in a Hefty bag and sealing it in his backpack. He tossed it into the gaping ceiling and ran, the two of us coming back to DGB 0 like kids after a prank. Gale said he always waited till he had a whole bag to throw it out and he hoped the creep liked his little presents.
Gale and I became good friends, but I think it was more than that for him. Sometimes when he clapped me on the shoulder, there was an almost parental gleam in his eye. We ate together, we clept near each other, we talked a lot, and we became close quickly. We talked about his travels, the things he had seen in the more than twenty years he had been moving through the Dollar Generals, but eventually we landed on a top I had been hoping he knew something about.
“How far in have you been?” I asked one night as we were cooking marshmallows over a propane burner.
Gale thought about it as he slid the mess between graham crackers and chocolate, “I’ve marked up to two hundred and eighteen, I think.”
“Do you,” I thought about my question a little more as I chewed over my own smore, “Do you fink anyone have made it ot?” I said, slurring a little as the treat stuck to my mouth.
“I don’t know,” he said, “If they did, I don’t suppose we would know. Not unless they left notes.”
I nodded, taking a sip of lukewarm cocoa to clear the roof of my mouth, “Surely the stores can’t go on forever. There has to be an end.”
Gale shrugged, “I suppose. It wouldn’t make sense for them to go on that long. I almost hope there isn’t though. If there is an end, then there’s only so much food, water, and supplies. We will eventually starve to death here, and that’s a bleak prospect.”
We went to bed not long afterward, but I never stopped thinking about that infinite loop of perfectly odd Dollar General stores. What would be at the end, if there was one? Would it be an exit? Would it be where the creature lived? Was the end what lay outside or in the ceiling? I had no answers, so I drifted off thinking about the possibilities as the fluorescent hummed overhead.
Gale and I started exploring more after that, and I think he was looking for other people to add to our group.
“We could go see if the hermit wants to join our band?” I asked, and Gale laughed bitterly as he pointed to his stomach.
“Maybe give him a chance to finish what he started too,”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that the hermit had been the one to stab him, but I did wonder why he never traveled. We never saw him while we were out getting things, and we avoided his little corner like the plague. FF was strictly off limits, and I now realized I had gotten off very lucky in our exchange.
I don’t know how long I spent with Gale, but it felt like years. I know I say that a lot, but its hard to convey how strange time is on that side. Time is something I’m used to counting, used to hoarding like a dragon, but here it isn’t something I have to think about. Whats more, I don’t know if anyone is even getting these updates, and if they are, how quickly or slowly they’re getting them. Are they coming in daily? Weekly? Are you reading this years from each message? Are your children seeing them and having vague memories of something their parents told them when they were very small?
Are all the Dollar Generals, Beyond or otherwise, stones beneath the foundation of some other store?
Does the name mean anything to those who may or may not be reading it?
I don’t know.
I write these updates because it feels write.
I write them because I feel like I should.
I’ve gotten pretty good at traveling now. I can travel back and forth, carry supplies, hold things in my hand and travel, change my clothes and bring them back with me, and its makes me proud and a little afraid.With two of us, Gale and I have used some of the dolly loaders to move the shelves around in our hub. We’ve opened up the floor plans and now we have all this space for activities! I know, cheesy, but it’s a classic. I’ve started keeping a journal of the different Dollar Generals in the Beyond so that I can remember which ones are which.
Here’s a few
Store FF
Designation- Dangerous (highly)
Food- none
People- 1
Theme- Destroyed
Home of the crazy hermit. Beware this Store. The shelves are bare of food. The hermit has horded it all somewhere safe. Could be secrets here, but they will be hard to find.
Store JJJ
Designation- Dangerous (moderate)
Food- Minimal
People- none
Theme- Waste disposal
Where we drop out waste. A fire took ut most of the store a long time ago. The food here is all nonperishables stacked up in the back. Known location where the Miasma comes out.
Store T
Designation- Dangerous (low/Moderate)
Food- plentiful/Strange
People- none/ Shadow creatures a possibility
Theme- Strange human meat market
This is the place where you may encounter shadow creatures. The shelves contain what appears to be human meat and the store smells like coppery. My research partner claims to have been accosted by these creatures so proceed with caution.
Stuff like that. I’m working on a more complete study of them, now that I can take my notes and things with me without putting them on my phone which will run out of space eventually, and I’m hoping to make a complete study of the DGBs.
That’s all for now, I’ll shoot you an update when we have one.
Sitting here writing this out, listening to Gale snore, its nice to have someone to talk to and just be with.
I hope it’s something that will last.
Pt 7- https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15xov8g/trapped_in_the_dollar_general_pt_7_research/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3