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[Jimmy was scribbling in his notebook, trying to work out a twist on a numeric cipher for his most recent story. In between scratching out failed calculations and experimenting with various cyphers and keywords, he manages to write out a certain number.]

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[Oh. Oh dear. He can't tell yet who this is, but Walter is getting a sense of deja vu.]

Check carefully which numbers you just wrote for me, okay? Can you find one that won't leave your head for any reason?

[This message is handwritten, and thus much quieter, but it has the look of something typed, like in a Word document.]

How are you doing this? Is this some kind of illusion trick?

[Because he knew he didn't write that. It definitely wasn't his own writing, which was more of a scrawl. But how did it get into his notebook? ]

A number? I guess.

[He goes back and circles the number that had been stuck in his head these last few weeks. ]

No, though I first thought this was a hallucination myself when my connection went live.

[Not that he can in any way convey his nod when Jimmy circles the Number.]

Right, so you've stumbled upon a phenomenon that's so far been local to Mossgate - there's no rhyme or reason to who can get one, but earlier this summer a handful of us all received a number allowing us to connect to this Network. It works across a large variety of mediums, and those without a number cannot detect anything odd is happening while you browse it.

But what is it? And how does it work?

The 'what' is that people are gaining these - 'Echoes' works as a catchall term. They're not all flashbacks, memories from someone else's point of view; some people have had items show up. When doing something, usually for the first time, we experience this sense of hollowness, hear something like a heartbeat, and then we come out of it and we're stuck with something new. Mostly they're easy enough to hide, but you can check the previous posts on this Network for examples of things that aren't, so much. The 'how' we're still stuck on, unfortunately. I am not fond of conspiracy theories, and I haven't been very spiritual in a long while, let alone religious, but we've stumbled upon something very strange, here.

That all sounds really implausible. Are you really serious about all this, or is it just some kind of joke?

The last time I ran across something this baffling, I was five and my parents had decided to follow someone who turned out to be the worst kind of manipulator. He never had evidence this convincing, or my family would never have gotten out. So yes, I'm serious.

[Very much preaching to the choir of the suspicious, Jimmy.]

But it doesn't make sense! I don't understand how any of that could be possible.

We've sort of run off the edge of what's 'scientifically possible' here, I'm afraid. I have superhuman typing speed, I know one person who can breathe underwater without any aid, and then there's the dog who has full sapience. Yes, there's video to corroborate that last one.

[Sorry, Chad, he's ruining that for you.]

...Suddenly the hallucination theory is sounding more plausible.

It seems a lot more like it if you walk out six miles from the Mossgate River; there's a spatial limit to all of this, and having certain memories or abilities suddenly not there anymore is not fun. As is getting them back.

[Or outright alarming, if you're communicating with someone traveling in a plane over the Boundary.]

[Jimmy has to stare at that one for a while.]

What? But that doesn't make sense! Geographically based temporary amnesia?

And so the headache goes. There are reports of people finding themselves stranded back in time for a few minutes, for seemingly no reason... but that always seemed more like a memetic type of hallucination to me. It's been much harder to handwave all this, though.

What, like deja vu?

I'm trying to make sense of it, but it just sounds so illogical. More like scifi than a mystery story.

More like finding themselves in the wrong century.

[Bless those strange little stories, honestly, but they still seem very sketch.]

But that hasn't been happening here, in any case. Who says it can't be both? Or that it's supposed to 'read' like a story at all?

I am. NOT. A. HALLUCINATION!!!!!!!!

[R U D E]

Can you prove it?

[Jimmy asks the question idly. He wasn't really expecting anything to come out of this, but after so many years burying himself in mysteries, asking for proof was nearly a reflex.]

If you tell me where you live.

Telling a hallucination that won't harm you at all, will it?

[And telling an actual offended tiny dog might make his shoes go mia.]

Pass. It's generally ill advised to give out your home address to people you only know by a voice.

Then you don't think that I'm a hallucination after all.

[T R I U M P H A N T. Got you, rude stranger.]

Just because you might be a hallucination is no reason to ignore basic precautions.

You can't have the cake and eat it too.

...I don't think that saying really applies to this situation.

It applies very well. You just don't want to admit to it.

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