What connects everything
These works are all connected because they share the same religion — the same idea of how God is, and the same rules for how the world works underneath the story. Different characters, different places, different forms — a game here, a story there — but the God is the same, the dimensions are the same, and good and evil work the same way in every piece.
The cone is not a shape God made. God didn’t make the cone — it just is. It’s a cosmic truth: the law of physics that is also an entity. The cone gathers and directs and points all that enter toward a purpose. Whatever enters one work — a creature in a bog, a boy in a dorm, a light descending — is under the same cone as everything else I make.
There are 13 dimensions, but only 12 distinct pieces — the 13th is the whole pie, like the circumference. We live in the 3rd dimension. That count doesn’t change from story to story; it’s the shape of reality itself, so it holds in the bog, on the island, and in every world that shares memories across time.
Geometric shape is how power is derived. All angels are different shapes, each one unique — no two alike. The beings below, in the flatter dimensions, crave to join the greater geometry above them. When you see a shape matter in one of my stories — a spiral, a shell, a cone — it isn’t decoration. It’s the machinery.
Evil exists below us, in the 2nd and 1st dimensions, trying to reach up into ours. That’s where the horror comes from, in every form it takes: something with less dimension, less shape, less reality, wanting in. The antagonist’s way of thinking — number worship, treating people like mere tokens in a computer — belongs down there too. It cannot process goodness, because goodness can’t be counted or tokenized.
A 3rd-dimension mind’s reality is its own journey, and it’s about its soul. The human spirit stays in the 3rd while the soul rises or sinks through as many spirits as it takes before being pulled onward — its lives’ spirits residing in the spirit world. That’s why the same soul can turn up in two worlds, in two lives, with memories working across time. It’s not a plot trick. It’s how souls work here.
Throughout all tribulation, those that follow God will win — just because they are good. Goodness itself is why they win. Not spared from the tribulation: through it. That holds in horror, in adventure, in a game you play in your browser. If a piece of mine ever seems to break that rule, keep watching — the cone isn’t finished with it yet.
Horror with a moral cosmos, not nihilism. The good win because they are good.
Doors into the one world
Everything below lives under the framework above — the same God, the same dimensions, the same fight between goodness and the counting machine. Start anywhere. You’ll end up in the same world.
Games are where a lot of my time goes now — built to run in the browser, so anyone can step in.
The main way this story will reach people: a 32-bit, EarthBound-style adventure. A bog between two trees, an island it never quite reaches, and underground a conical spiral — the dead shape of a marriage between two trees, tightening as you circle down. You don’t just read the framework here. You walk in it.
Play the first small game ↓A rhythm game built around a truck cab, a cooler in the middle, and Sly Sid. Keep the beat and keep the rhythm — that’s what keeps Sly Sid asleep. Miss it, and the cooler is his. A smaller, stranger corner of the same world: timing, temptation, and holding on to what matters.
Play NEW MAN below ↓A first small game, already playable below. You are a light at the wide mouth of the cone. Gather three sparks on the way down and reach the apex — the cone narrowing around you the whole way. It’s the framework, made into something your hands can learn.
Play it below ↓When I make them, they’ll stand under the same framework as everything else here.
This shelf is waiting for its first title. When a movie is made, it goes here — and it will carry the same God, the same dimensions, and the same rule about goodness as the books and games.
Same here — the shelf is ready. The first series will be another door into the same world, episode by episode.
Open a piece and read it right here.
A surreal narrator takes form — “I become US” — in a bog that is not alive: detritus of two trees, their accumulated dead and fallen material, where things come to live between them. It builds a shelter for a washed-up woman named Tia. The creature is a metaphor for how I was raised — the two trees are its parents — and the story is my explanation of my life to anyone who reads it. Dark, dissecting, and built to pull tears.
Chapter 3 changes eyes: third person, a human named Jace, climbing the steps to his dorm’s glass doors. An ordinary first day — and the same soul as the creature, in another life, with the spiral waiting underneath. Memories work across time; bodies don’t travel. Souls do the connecting.
The raw pieces the bigger work is made from: separation — two rooms, one wall, a fireplace open on both sides as a desperate way through; the shelter; the beach vision. Posted as they come, in my own words first.
Words I made up, Shakespeare-style — not typos, and they stay: mullifying (verb: to mullify — waiting for its fitting dark, scary moment, likely underground in the spiral) and slurrous (a sound and a texture in one word, the way things move and speak in the bog).
Games · Playable now
Play it right here. Keep the beat to keep Sly Sid asleep — tap or press a letter to start, and hold the rhythm so Newman keeps the cooler.
Sly Sid on the left, Newman at the wheel on the right, the cooler between them. The game below is the live version — it plays exactly as it does on its own page, without leaving this site.
If the keys don’t respond at first, tap or click inside the game once to give it focus, then play.
Playable now
The framework says the cone gathers and directs all that enter toward a purpose. Here’s that, as a game: descend, gather, arrive.
You are a small light at the wide mouth. Gather the three sparks on the way down and reach the apex. The walls narrow as you descend — touch one and you’re sent back to the mouth. On a keyboard, steer with the arrow keys or WASD. On a phone, use the arrows.
At the wide mouth. Move down — gather, and be gathered.
In short
I’m E.L. Pineau — Pineau is the original name of my Penney line, out of Quebec — a writer and creator in Traverse City, Michigan. My stories move in simple beats, alternating intensity. I think in shapes. I believe memories work across time, that form itself can be the scary thing, and that a word I have to invent is sometimes the truest one on the page.
That’s the education this site offers: not a list of opinions, but a way of seeing — the same world, the same God, the same cone — worked out across games you can play, stories you can read, and, as they come, movies and shows you can watch. Check back. When something new is ready, it takes its place in the one world.
BOG IS US opens in the first person, as a creature — a surreal narrator who takes form and says, in effect: I become US.
The bog is not alive. But there are things that come to live in it, between the trees.
The creature encounters a washed-up woman named Tia and builds her a shelter. Elsewhere — an island, a beach covered in gnarled branches, kids stranded together, and a boy named Jace starting a new chapter of his life. How all of it connects is the story, and I'm not giving that away here.
The creature is the main character of the other strand — the same soul, in another life. One world is a high school in a small town; the other is a bog floating on a lake, never quite reaching the shore. Memories work across time. Underneath both: the same cone, the same dimensions, the same God.
The main way this story will reach people is as a 32-bit, EarthBound-style adventure game that runs in the browser — so you can walk into the bog and the island yourself. The book text keeps growing alongside it.
In progress. New openings and fragments will be posted here as they're ready to be read.
It's a first day, a new building, nobody he knows yet — an ordinary doorway. What waits underneath it is not ordinary at all: he enters the spiral at its widest and circles tighter as it tapers — a conical spiral, a shell, formed by something real.
In progress. This is the opening of Chapter 3 of BOG IS US.
Fragments & Visions is the working notebook of BOG IS US: short dated pieces, visions, and dreams — the raw material the bigger story and game are built from.
Ongoing. New dated fragments will be added here as they come.