Delusionville
Scene One: The Blueprints of Madness
The abandoned roller rink smelled like old sweat, spilled whiskey, and ozone. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, buzzing like they were on the edge of exploding. The rink’s floor was covered in chalked diagrams—spirals, stars, impossible polygons, all drawn in different hands, as if hundreds of lunatics had tried to sketch the same nightmare.
Needles Malone crouched over them, jittering like a live wire, his scarred fingers tracing lines only he could see. He muttered, scratched his chin until it bled, then licked the blood absently.
“Vault ain’t numbers,” he whispered. “It’s shape logic. Sacred locks. You don’t line the triangles with the circles, the circles with the cubes, the cubes with the void—you don’t open a door. You open a mouth. And it eats.”
Joey stared at him, exhausted. “You’re saying the casino vault is alive?”
Needles grinned, teeth jagged as broken glass. “Alive, hungry, and waiting for us.”
Roxy leaned against a defunct jukebox, filing her nails with a dagger. “Perfect. I like my heists with extra bite.”
Doc Holidaye snorted whiskey through his nose, then stitched his own arm without flinching. “Heists. Bites. Death. Same thing. Pass me the morphine.”
The Twins didn’t say anything. They never did. They just spun their knives in unison, the spinning creating faint humming tones that almost sounded like chanting.
Joey rubbed his temples. “This is insane.”
Roxy smirked. “Darling, this is Delusionville. Insane is baseline.”
Scene Two: The Map That Draws Itself
Needles unrolled what looked like blueprints, but the paper pulsed, lines shifting when no one looked. It wasn’t ink. It was living geometry, glyphs pulsing in ultraviolet.
“This map,” Needles said, twitching, “isn’t drawn. It’s grown. It changes based on who’s looking.”
Roxy squinted. “It shows me the vault under the craps pit.”
Doc belched. “I see a morgue. Piles of corpses stacked like chips.”
Joey stared. His vision warped. The lines bent into pyramids inside pyramids, staircases spiraling down into infinity, and at the center—an eye, burning, unblinking. The same eye from his DMT trips.
He jerked back. “That thing’s been in my head since I was fifteen.”
Needles cackled. “Exactly. The vault isn’t just a vault—it’s a memory trap. You don’t crack it with drills. You crack it with yourself.”
Joey’s stomach sank.
Scene Three: Don Vesperelli’s Shadow
Meanwhile, across town, the casino pulsed with life. The Mirage Inferno was never empty, never quiet. Its slot machines wailed like tortured spirits, its roulette wheels spun faster than physics allowed, and its patrons were either blissfully rich, hopelessly broke, or dead without realizing it.
At the top floor, Don Vesperelli sipped espresso. His meteorite-plated revolver gleamed on the table. His bodyguards—reptilian-eyed, scaled beneath their human suits—stood motionless, waiting.
“Another crew,” Vesperelli murmured. His voice was silk soaked in cyanide. “Crankshaft never learns. Send word: anyone who touches my vault doesn’t get buried. They get erased.”
One bodyguard clicked his tongue—a sound more insect than human.
Vesperelli flicked a card from his deck. It wasn’t a queen, king, or ace. It was blank. And as he stared at it, the card filled itself with Joey Marquez’s face.
Vesperelli smiled. “Let’s play.”
Scene Four: Sacred Prep
The crew prepared the way only Delusionville crews did: with blood, drugs, and chaos.
Doc cut open a cadaver (no one asked where it came from) and stuffed the body cavity with dynamite, laughing as he stitched it back up.
Roxy polished her grenades and lipstick in the same motion, humming a tune no one could identify.
The Twins hung upside down from the rink’s rafters, sharpening their blades until sparks rained down.
And Needles? Needles tattooed sacred geometry onto Joey’s arm, using ink mixed with Joey’s own blood. The pattern was a Metatron’s Cube, lines burning as the needle carved.
“Why?” Joey hissed, gritting his teeth.
“Because,” Needles whispered, “the vault only opens to geometry in the flesh. You’re the key, Fasthands. Whether you like it or not.”
Scene Five: Joey’s Vision
That night, Joey couldn’t sleep. The tattoo pulsed, glowing faintly in the dark. He lay back on the roller rink floor and drifted into the kind of dream that wasn’t a dream.
He was floating in endless space, surrounded by geometric constructs: dodecahedrons spinning, spheres nesting into spheres. Entities—jester-faced machine elves—danced along the edges, juggling glowing orbs.
One leaned close. Its face split into a thousand smaller faces.
“You are the fracture,” it whispered. “The lock. The thief. The sacrifice.”
Joey tried to scream, but his mouth was gone.
He snapped awake, drenched in sweat.
And the Twins were standing over him, staring silently, as if they’d been watching the whole time.
Scene Six: The Night Before
The crew gathered at dawn. The casino loomed on the horizon, bent at impossible angles, its neon glow casting sacred shadows across the desert.
“Last chance to bail,” Joey muttered.
Roxy lit a cigarette with a spark from her grenade pin. “Sweetheart, if I wanted safety, I’d have married an accountant.”
Doc laughed, coughing blood into his whiskey. “Let’s go die rich.”
The Twins said nothing, but their knives flashed in the rising sun.
Needles shivered, eyes wide. “The geometry’s awake. It knows we’re coming.”
Joey adjusted his jacket, checked the weight of his pistol, and whispered to himself: “Round two.”
Scene Seven: Enter the Mirage Inferno
The crew stormed the Mirage Inferno through the service entrance. The moment they stepped inside, the casino warped. Slot machines screamed. Lights bent into mandalas. The air itself smelled of ozone and gunpowder.
Security guards rushed in—but they weren’t guards. Their skin rippled, jaws unhinging, rows of alien teeth snapping.
The Twins tore into them with knives, moving like mirrored hurricanes. Blood sprayed across neon walls.
Roxy tossed a grenade into the craps pit. It exploded in slow motion, the smoke forming sacred glyphs in the air.
Doc drove a stolen ambulance straight through the poker tables, sirens wailing, bottles shattering in its wake.
And Joey—Joey pushed forward, the tattoo on his arm glowing like a compass, pulling him toward the vault.
Scene Eight: The Vault
The vault wasn’t a door. It was a black monolith, humming, covered in living geometry that shifted and pulsed. Triangles within circles, circles within cubes, cubes within screaming mouths.
Needles fell to his knees, trembling. “She’s beautiful.”
Roxy rolled her eyes. “She’s a nightmare. Crack it.”
Needles pulled out his drills, but the metal bent in half. Sparks flew. The vault laughed.
“It won’t open with tools,” Joey whispered, clutching his arm. The tattoo pulsed.
He pressed his palm against the surface. Instantly, light exploded. His vision fractured—past, present, future spiraling into one. He saw himself as a child, as an old man, as a corpse, as a god. He saw Delusionville burning, reborn, burning again.
And then—the vault opened.
Scene Nine: The Empty Treasure
Inside was no money. No gold. No jewels.
Just a single object: a cube of pulsating light, humming with alien frequency.
Needles gasped. “The Philosopher’s Geometry.”
Roxy frowned. “That’s it? No cash?”
Doc hiccuped. “We’re fucked.”
The Twins froze, knives trembling.
And Joey—Joey reached out, against every instinct, and touched it.
The cube dissolved into his body. His veins lit up. His eyes burned. He screamed—then laughed—then screamed again.
And then Don Vesperelli walked in.
Scene Ten: Don Vesperelli’s Hand
Vesperelli stood in the vault doorway, meteorite revolver gleaming. His reptilian bodyguards slithered behind him.
“Well,” Vesperelli said, calm as a god. “You’ve opened my toy. Now you’re part of it.”
He raised the revolver.
The cube inside Joey pulsed, sending shockwaves through the room. The walls bent inward, geometry folding into impossible shapes. Guards screamed as their bodies inverted into spirals of flesh.
Joey’s voice wasn’t his own when he spoke. It was a thousand voices at once:
“WELCOME TO DELUSIONVILLE.”
And the lights went out.
(to be continued in Chapter Three…)