Hellsborough Exposed — pip-rippon

People ask why a grown folklorist wastes his life on old wives' tales, and my answer is that a tale is just an ancient meme: it mutates as it passes between tribes and ages and eras and takes on a life of its own. No story survives the retelling unless it still means something to whoever hears it, which is why I keep chasing the genesis of the daft ones. Half my STEM-brained friends call that pointless and then, in the same breath, confess their faith in a supreme being, and I never can get them to see that their God might be the oldest meme of the lot.

My first crossing of The hinge was, disappointingly, a non-event - no thunder, no lightning, no sign from the universe that I had broken any rule at all, just a bone-deep exhaustion and the dawning question of whether I had crossed over or merely fainted in my own front room. Then I did faint, and as my awareness ebbed I understood physiologically, if not yet cognitively, that I was being poisoned: the murk had curled up my legs and smothered my face within seconds of my arrival. I came round breathing through a psycmask I did not yet have a name for, my air purified, my skull flooded with rivers and hills and whispered words - mutable, fluid, transforming. When I finally sat up in the oldest, most lived-in room I have ever seen, a grizzled figure in a mask patted the chair beyond my shoeless feet and told me, in the broadest Dark Peak idiom, that the murk had had me good and I'd have been crozzled if he hadn't been surfing scerm when he found me. That figure was Van Hallam, and he saved my life largely by accident - I have never forgotten it.

Crosslanders are conditioned to regard the Syncarid and the barghest as folklore — things to frighten children rather than functional facts about the murk. I held this position myself until the night on the Owlerton road when something vast and ray-like descended through the murk toward my prone and beaten body, and something large and shaggy tore it away by its tail. I revised my position on several matters that evening, including my view on the reliability of crosslander folklore.

A HiveMind assessment of Pip Rippon by an unknown sender returned: average height, average weight, indeterminate age, no defining characteristics, and a heart pattern signature with significant similarity to ripperthroat — though no exact match was possible. The sender expressed dissatisfaction. I have not expressed dissatisfaction with this finding, because I am not entirely sure what it means and would prefer to keep it that way.

Pip lost three notebooks to a hexikid in the Wisewood. The hexikid used them to build a nest, which Pip considered professionally insulting.