#📘 history

[novanhistorian]

I must say, thus far I have been quite a poor correspondent. The point of this blog is to slow the rate at which I pester my friends with elaborate—and winding, when verbal—rants about various facets of the Imperium Novel, as well as to have a convenient public point of reference for them when I offhandedly mention something like the ��regional parliaments” or when I forget myself and accidentally talk about the gender binary as if it were the gender trinary. (It is partially also because I want a public forum to yell to my very small audience about this thing I’ve been working on for years.)

Needless to say, I have thus far done exactly none of that.

To jumpstart things and give my readership at least something, I have made this massive post.

You can also get this split into separate posts for a better, but less linkable, reading experience:

The Fundamentals

A Sketch of History (masterpost with sublinks)

The Fundamentals

1.3k words.

I am here to talk about the Imperium Novel, which I must immediately clarify is not a novel. What it actually is is a rather massive and intricate worldbuilding project. Now, I could tell you that its name is a relic of the earliest days of its development, when it was really to be one novel with an increasingly cartoonish amount of backstory, and that would be true enough; but the heart of the matter is that I am a painfully pretentious artiste in this specific way. I could have changed the name; I didn’t.

(As for why it is no longer a single novel: As I write this, the [pseudo]historical period I concern myself with covers almost fifteen centuries, most of them quite complicated. Any attempt to cover the whole in one novel would wind up a gargantuan, winding, likely quite boring mess possessing more pages than a medical textbook and less plot than a wet blanket.)

Anyhow, hard segue.

The other basics you need to know are the following:

We are not in our solar system. References to the sun are to the star Scientia (to us, Era Cassiopeiae A), and references to Forsuno or the Far Sun refer to, well, Forsuno (Eta Cassiopeiae B).

The main planet, Terranovo,* has twenty-six-hour days and slightly stronger gravity than Earth. Its days are the standard in most other regions; we are ignoring Ilajn for now because I haven’t formally named their planet. (It has 21.5-ish-hour days and markedly weaker gravity. Let’s hear it for large, fast-rotating terrestrial planets.)

All the planets we care about after 2300 orbit Scientia, and—at the risk of misrepresenting the gravitational dance—the orange dwarf Forsuno basically does too. Scientia’s stellar classification is G0 V, which is to say that it is more or less like our sun, though slightly brighter. Forsuno’s is K7 V, which makes it either an orange or a red dwarf, depending on which classification system one follows. Basically, it’s small, it’s dim (only 6% of the Sun’s luminosity, still far brighter than a full moon), and it will live a very long time after Scientia is dead. Although their orbit is very eccentric (that is to say very elliptical rather than circular), the closest approach between the stars is 36 AU, or just this side of the Kuiper Belt; this allows for stable, although compact, planetary systems around both stars safe from the worst of the gravitational interference of the other star.

Novanity (non-collective singular novan and plural novans) is the sapient species the Novel follows for most of its history. They are, as many of them will bitterly tell you, the products of genetic engineering and a whole lot of moral stupidity on the parts of various humans—but we shall get to that in the history.

* At other points in its history, Terranovo was also known as Terra Nova, Terranova, Tero Nova, and Nova Tero. By the current working date, 745, variation is only historical.

The gender trinary is probably the most relevant thing in here besides the location, but thanks to narrative flow I have to put it down here. The three novan genders occupy roughly the same position as the human two, which is to say that the majority of the population falls into one or another, but there are a large number of outliers besides.

Two of the dominant genders are descendants of our concepts of male and female, and they remain mostly similar and are called by their names. The third is called sendua (an adjective), and people who have it are called senduoj. Its name derives from a shortening of senduuma, a rather nonstandard way of saying “nonbinary;”* it somewhat evolved from the use of the word as an overcategory for a variety of genders,

* It literally means “without a binary;” the human standard, neduuma, is a calque from English.

If you encounter something like Ĉlr or Nŝx/n, that’s reference shorthand, a standardized system used in the Imperium (with War-Era predecessors); it tells you a person’s gender and pronouns, and sometimes their preferred grammatical gender and physical sex.

The capital letters stand for gender and are derived from the gendering suffixes in the Imperium’s dominant language: Ĉ stands for male, N for female, S for sendua, and X (from crossing out the category on a form) for anything else. The lowercase letters, of which there are often more than one, stands for pronouns: l for li, the equivalent of “he;” ŝ for ŝi, “she;” r for ri, “re;” and x for anything else (which is quite rare, but in practice means “ask”).

The lowercase letter after the slash, if it exists, describes grammatical gender—and boy do I wish English had a shorter way to say that. The Imperium’s dominant language is largely non-gendered, and for words which could be gendered—titles, professions, and so on—the default is to use the genderless base word rather than add on one of the gendered suffixes. But some titles are routinely declined by gender, and several minor languages gender their adjectives at a minimum and their verbs at a maximum. As a result, some portion of the population has a preference about which gender is used, and that’s usually denoted like this. (The letters themselves follow the same rule as the actual gender indicator, and good lord have I said “gender” a lot of times in this paragraph.)

Occasionally, an italicized x or y or a centered asterisk, placed after the pronouns, indicates physical sex. The x and y, mean roughly what one would expect—XX or XY chromosomes respectively, without any sort of intersex condition. The asterisk, which in some state governments has subcategories, indicates that the person is intersex. Sex is mostly irrelevant in social life, so its denotation is circumscribed to medical and governmental records.

As you may have guessed by now, the dominant language is Esperanto—or, well, a version of Esperanto that’s evolved like a (fairly regulated) natural language for a millennium and a half. Some people speak one or more of the so-called “minor languages,” usually regional dialects descended from natlangs.

There are two different calendars in use over the course of the Novel, one that continues roughly directly from the Gregorian calendar and is dated relative to the traditional year of birth of Jesus Christ and another dated relative to the Year of Fortifying the Peace (the official end of the War Era, covered in the last two sections of the Sketch of History).

The first or human calendar can be identified because it will almost always have a four-digit year, and in cases where it doesn’t it gets labeled (B.)C.E. The second or novan calendar can usually be identified by having a three-digit year, or else because it uses a minus sign to indicate its negatives. It may also be distinguished by the ᴊ (from jaro, “year”) that precedes single- and double-digit years, as well as any three-digit years that require disambiguation. The novan calendar has a year zero; this is, as can probably be predicted, the Year of Fortifying the Peace.

Technically there are four major dating systems (standard, human, Terranovan orbital, and Ilajnaplaneta orbital). The orbital calendars exist because neither of the inhabited planets have years particularly close to 365 days, so their seasons are wildly out of sync with the administrative calendars. I should probably also note that neither planet has 24-hour days, and that the administrative calendars are standardized on the 26-hour Terranovan day.

I think that’s about it. I’ll write up instructions on how to pronounce all the random Esperanto words soon; for now, the vowels are like Spanish and the J makes a Y sound.

A Sketch of History

Human Future History, 21st to 23rd Centuries

I will cop to it up front that this period is the least interesting to me and has had the least work put into it; I hope to settle most questions about it here and keep the blog to a mostly novan focus. You are welcome to inquire further, but since humanity’s time on Earth is mostly just background to the background it will likely not receive much coverage organically beyond this. If you, like me, are mostly here for in the genetically-engineered cat people and their post-human politicking, you can probably jump ahead to the next section. 2.1k words.

For all my fine talk, we start with humanity as the sole species, and we start with them on Earth. Everything that led up to our time happened. After 2024, humanity narrowly survived climate change with their civilization battered, but in one piece. The sciences progressed; the most relevant for our current purposes are astronomy and space travel, and the most important later on are the advancements in batteries and synthetic biology.

Public interest in space grew, at least partially fostered by escapist thinking, and the World Space Agency (a terrible name, but so is “the World Health Organization” and they get on alright) was formed. At the outset it was more a collaboration of national agencies than an agency unto itself, but over the years it slowly gained authority and independence and evolved from a coordinator into a major player in its own right. It had quite extensive scholarship programs, which probably contributed.

The Moon was not so much settled as populated by sparse construction and mining towns with few steady inhabitants. I will spare you most of the details, but in short the main business of the Moon was construction for spaceflight and asteroid-mining. Its lower gravity (a) made construction rather easier and more importantly (b) made it much easier to reach escape velocity—that is, to launch something off it and into space. Almost no one stayed for more than five years.

Several things built on the Moon were space telescopes, eventual heirs to the long-defunct Webb, with one being roughly comparable to the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory. During the climate crises (plural intended) a dedicated minority of the public attention had turned toward exoplanets. Whether or not humanity could reach them now, they said, we should try to develop the option.

Most of the advocates, being laymen, did not understand how mind-bogglingly far such exoplanets were, nor how mind-bogglingly difficult it would be to get there. Most reasonable astrophysicists, and those in related fields, cautiously encouraged the public fascination because it had caused a funding boom, but rightly downplayed the possibility of finding and settling anything.

Then Eta Cassiopeiae Ae fell into humanity’s collective lap. A terrestrial planet, slightly smaller than Earth; in the habitable zone of a very sunlike star; in possession of an atmosphere, but not too much of one; wet, but not too wet; showing evidence of volcanic activity that likely indicated tectonic action—all this, and only (“only”) 19.42 light-years away! Careful observation even indicated it had a moon comparable in size to Earth’s!

Humanity took the hint. In the middle twenty-second century, relatively shortly after its discovery, η Cas Ae (at the time known as η Cas Ad, as it was discovered after the two outer super-Earths) was confirmed to have the right amount of water to potentially support life. No life yet existed, at least that humanity could detect; but that didn’t mean they couldn’t go over and put some there.

A certain august international body, in company with the World Space Organization, put out a call for anyone of skill interested in the prospect of settling η Cas Ae. The public response was immediate and enthusiastic, and demands were made to give this new Earth an official name rather than its sterile initial designation. In their exuberance, they unwittingly named it after Newfoundland; this was only noticed several months after the fact.

Thus was the Convention for the Terraforming and Settlement of Terra Nova called. The Convention gave way to the Committee for the Terraforming [and so on]; no one wanted to say all that, so most languages shortened it to “the Terra Nova Committee.” In English it was often called the rather snappy “New Eden Project.”

The official language of the project was declared to be Esperanto. This left most of the world very confused and astonished the handful of people who knew what had been going on behind the scenes—they had never expected it to actually work.

(Esperanto, as I hope you know, is an international auxiliary language created by L. L. Zamenhof and first published in 1887. It is designed to be simple and easy to learn, but still capable of a full range of expression. It is the most popular I.A.L., though that does not mean it has ever been exactly societally prevalent. Most everyone I mention it to has never heard of it, or else has only run into its name in passing. I have never, to my knowledge, met an Esperantist—unfortunately including myself, as I am grammatically sound but not yet fluent.)

Most of the work of the Committee was one of five things:

How do we get there?

How do we build that?

What do we do once we get there?

What do we need to accomplish the above?

Whom do we send?

They solved the first question by commissioning various independent teams of experts for potential starship designs, choosing the best three or so, and bringing their creators onto the subcommittee responsible for the actual final design. That committee was given ten years to come up with a first design and was intended to run for thirty overall, then handing things off to another committee that would be responsible for bringing that plan to fruition. It wound up taking forty, but that more or less happened.

The second question was solved incidentally by the first committee from question one, and their answer was “in space.” Given humanity’s off-planet expansion, it seemed the natural choice. By the time of the conclusion of the design phase they were also mining the asteroid belt, very carefully and mostly via robots, which provided the Terra Nova Committee another much easier fount of resources for their project.

The solution to the third question was rather more complicated than it might initially appear. Clearly they had to terraform the new world—that atmosphere, in its current state, was poisonous—and that would require a timescale measured in centuries at the minimum; but whence were they to do it? Where do you send potentially tens of thousands of your children and their children’s children to live and work in pursuit of a goal they themselves will never see?

The best choice was obviously the moon around the planet—it was well-positioned for a base and it should have enough gravity to beat off the worst of the developmental effects. Life on the moon had been proven possible long before, although few who took up residence there stayed very long; so had life in the asteroid belt, whose recently-sighted Terra-Nova-system counterpart they planned to mine. There would have to be improvements—these hypothetical “canned generations” would have to spend their whole lives on the moon, so their situation was not really comparable to that of the human-contemporary lunars.

It fed into the fourth and fifth questions, which were uncomfortably close to one and the same. Once the starship arrived at Terra Nova, its occupants would be alone. Earth would be unable to send help in anything resembling a timely manner, and supply runs were an outright impossibility. The lunar settlement, and later the planetary ones, needed to be self-sufficient and capable of performing the terraforming work laid out before them. But they also had to be able to build the ship in the first place, within reasonable materials constraints. Mass is a major consideration in air- and spacecraft design for many reasons (the most relevant here being its effect on the amount of energy needed to alter a craft’s course, be that for maneuvering reasons or simply to get the blasted thing moving in the first place), so cargo had to be minimized too. As a result, they tried to maximize the amount they could derive from materials in the new system or renewably produce aboard ship—food, water, clothing, plus metals and more water after Advent.

I’ll omit the math and any more of my rambling here, as I have already gone on far too long about the fourth question. Just understand that the fifth question was decided under the same material constraints as the fourth. They decided to send a few hundred carefully-chosen scientists, other “people of expertise,” schoolteachers, and their immediate families, all given training on how to handle the isolation they would face and on how to deal with the vastly different cultures their new roommates would come from. The number of people—around eight or nine hundred—was high enough and their sources global enough that they ran very little risk of problems with genetic diversity or in maintaining their population. Only three of the twelve highest-ranked officials in the Committee (which by this point was more of a Division) opted to go.

Probably in the early twenty-third century, the project was finally ready. The great starship was built, the people were chosen, every single possibly necessary thing had been loaded aboard in triplicate. (That last is an exaggeration—the things allowed on board were very strictly controlled and pared down, and while they were given a margin of error, it was far from triple the expected need.)

They set out—and novan knowledge goes entirely dark.

I write from a post-Departure novan perspective, and although I have my guiding theories and research on how humanity got to Terra Nova and what they did on their way, at the end of the day I like to keep it a black box. With that said, feel free to speculate wildly in my inbox. God knows the novan scientific community has been doing the same for centuries.

We will get to why this disappointing blank exists, and why the dates on the Committee period are so fuzzy, when we arrive at the Departure and then the Devastation. We think the voyage lasted two to three generations, if that helps in your guessing.

We pick up their trail again somewhere between five years (short chronology) and two decades (long chronology) before their arrival at the new solar system, and we do this mostly by reconstruction. The early Lunar period, beginning about two years post-Advent (that being the general term for arrival at the Scientia system), was not targeted for destruction, and thus its records have a much better survival rate. By this point the miracle starship had apparently been disassembled and re-formed into Prime Dome. As Prime Dome is known to have been nearing completion two years after Advent, that allows us to use its culture and current events to reconstruct those of the late Shipboard period.

Shipboard politics were generally quite a restrained affair. Government was handled mostly by an elected committee of respected scientists, professors (these from the shipboard university), and career public servants. It was called simply the Leadership Council and held wide-ranging authority. Social norms, like politics, were fairly rigid, and there was a strong emphasis on the social contract. Cohesion was to be prized and praised, and the good of the collective came first in all cases. The ship required its human components to be in as perfect of working order as its mechanical ones, and any societal crisis would potentially damn everyone aboard to death in the void. In this unstable environment, the Terra Nova Committee had determined, a strong hand was needed at the tiller and social cohesion had to be prized above other goals. (Every member of the project who had embarked from Earth had agreed to their peculiar form of government, which was to be replaced with a less-overbearing republic once they were safely settled on the Moon and could afford such things.)

Scientists from, or whose recent ancestors had been from, certain countries often had minor rivalries or feuds with scientists from certain other countries; but this was kept to a background tension, heated competition over sports and that sort of thing. The ship had a population of perhaps eight hundred at the outset and it seems a similar number arrived at Terra Nova, so there may have been some amount of regulation on reproduction.

Independent organizations of more than a handful of people required official permission, and until they got it were given very little leeway. Political parties were unofficially banned as engines of disunion; one was to vote based on an assessment of the relative merit of the candidates. Most political discussion took place in private discussion clubs, which usually met in a member’s apartment or a restaurant. These clubs, which I will for ease’s sake be calling by their later name, “salons,” generally numbered ten to forty people, the average being twenty-six. Since the population was so small, at their peak there were only nine such salons worthy of the name; by the arrival at Terra Nova four had dwindled out and only two newcomers had risen to take their place, yielding the Seven Salons so notable in later history.

The Pre-Novan Lunar Period, 2300 to 2450

This part of history is predominantly based on the actions of a few key people. I swear to God this is very condensed compared to the amount of canon that actually exists. The next section should be more trends-based, as we and history are no longer working with a population of less than a thousand people wherein everyone knows everyone and individual actions have outsize impact. Please be aware that this section of the summary contains descriptions of what I can only describe as a mishandled crush leading to nonconsensual use of genetic material. I really don’t know if that needs a warning, but what Sikora does is creepy as hell. 4.5k words. Part of “A Sketch of History;” preceded by Human Future History; followed by the Remainder of the Lunar Period.

The Advent, in this instance, has nothing to do with Christ—it refers instead to humanity’s arrival at the new solar system. The shipboard government decided it was such a momentous occasion that they should jump the calendar forward to the suitably impressive year 2300, so they did. (This is important later.) The aim of those aboard then shifted from the holding pattern of life in transit to frantic preparation for their final landing on Terra Nova’s moon.

The early Lunar period is largely dominated by two figures: Alexei Ilyasov and Darya Staravya. I’ll discuss them as briefly as I possibly can here, given that I’ve already had to cut two drafts that spent eight paragraphs on them and them alone. Expect a cleaned-up version of one of those to be posted at some point as an extra.

Alexei Kirilloviĉ Ilyasov was, at Advent, forty-one and supposedly a climatologist. In practice he was a politician of the rather subdued shipboard breed; he ran with no party and gave his rousing speeches on paper. His major focus was preparing for Advent, an event which, while yet unnamed, had loomed large on the horizon for most of his life. He had been an Illustrian—that is, part of a large salon known for meeting in the poshest restaurant on the ship—for about ten years. Like most of his fellow members, he was a reformist and an amateur linguist absolutely convinced he and he alone knew how to perfect Esperanto; also like most of his fellow members, it never came up unless he was asked about it point-blank.

It surprised even him when he was elected Council Chair* shortly before Advent; he was serving a Council term at the time, but had made no bids for the Chair and had planned to guide the Council toward a successful Advent from within rather than above. Regardless, he acquitted himself wonderfully in the office, and his administration—twenty-two years long, with a two-year gap after his eighteenth, when he was voted out of the Chair—did likewise. It was under his authority that the starship was broken down and re-formed into Prime Dome, the first and largest of the lunar dome-habitats; he inaugurated the First University. When he finally retired, construction and terraforming were both proceeding ahead of schedule and the first mining expeditions into the asteroid belt since the construction of Prime Dome were underway.

* His election was the result of a compromise on the Leadership Council between deadlocked Illustrians and Blue-Roomers, who both saw him as inoffensive and unlikely to make any terrible decisions.

Toward the end of Ilyasov’s career, Darya Staravya, the other major figure of this period, comes to prominence. She was born three days after Advent, the first baby of the new solar system, and she would have been notable for that alone. Her parentage—Brits Clarence and Marina Staravia, who had, in accordance with a contemporary fad, made up a “new name for the new world” upon their marriage—is necessary to mention to explain her surname, but they’re most notable as her later collaborators. I should also mention that she was Ilyasov’s goddaughter; he was about a decade older than her parents, but they aligned politically and intellectually and had met in their mutual salon.

Staravya was a prolific inventor and engineer, and in her forties she was the primary mind and force behind the Starry engine (officially the “New Standard Engine, Mk. IV”), which would be the basis for most all interplanetary flight for centuries to come. That was arguably her most distinctive invention, but her most pervasive came about by accident when she was in college. She, like all Scientian children, was in some form of school from age four until eighteen; during the latter half of that time she and a friend* progressively refined a private phonetic script or cipher, which they mostly used for the extremely teenage purpose of snarking at their teachers without them knowing. While students in the First University, they taught their other friends the cipher, and, generations being small when the total population is 1,021 people, it quickly spread through all of theirs.

* Yoshikawa Namiko, about a year older than Staravya, later a biochemist and historian. (Her parents, by contrast to the Staravias, and the Myleras a generation later, were not caught up in the new-name-for-a-new-world craze, seeing as they were Red Hats and didn’t bother with that sort of thing the way the Illustrians and Spider’s Nest did.)

Now I have to step back and give a bit of context. The problem of naming had been under debate since shortly after Advent, when Ilyasov had tried unsuccessfully to force everyone to fully Esperantize their names. (“Aleksejo Ilyasofo,” who did not by any means like writing that version of his name in every blasted language, was almost glad when the motion was shot down by seven elevenths of the rest of the Council.) Debate, among the perhaps sixty percent of the population who cared one way or the other, was split between those who favored the invention of some new writing system and those who instead favored regularization of sounds in names to match the phonology and writing system of some language. The former were called Sonskribists and the latter Regularists (though I anglicize their names here).

Staravya was in the forty percent. She thought it all kind of silly, having heard every possible argument at her dinner table growing up. She had been an unofficial test subject for too many of the new scripts (her parents being ardent Sonskribists, to Ilyasov’s alternating consternation and amusement) to actually take them seriously as a solution; she dismissed the Regularist position out of hand. While she did use her phonetic system to note down names’ pronunciations, it had always functioned as more of a code for her. She and her friend, Yoshikawa Namiko, actually had a minor falling-out over whether or not to encourage the growth of the script, which Yoshikawa believed they should and Staravya dismissed as irrelevant.

Yoshikawa won.

Now we come to a more trend-based as opposed to person-based period, which I can—finally—cover pretty quickly. Staravya went on to be a prolific inventor, as described in the second paragraph of her description, but she never crossed over into a major public figure the way so many others did. The Yoshikawa-Staravya phonetic script became the standard way to note down pronunciations, though it would take a century and a half more until it started replacing Latin and Cyrillic outright for the writing of names. (It never entered some scripts at all, including Arabic, which even well into the novan period adapted all names to its own orthography.)

The Leadership Council does not so much give way to as become the Academy, a name initially belonging to the board of directors of the First University set up by the moon-dwellers. Akademio, translated here as “Academy,” is also the term used for Esperanto’s regulatory body in our world and theirs. The University’s Academy had absorbed the Akademio de Esperanto, to the great consternation of the salon called the Spider’s Nest, back in the early days of the project. The Leadership Council in turn absorbed this unified Academy, at first thanks to near-complete overlap in membership and later by official decree; having so done, it declared itself the Terra-Novan Legislative Academy. (Later historians know it as the First Terra-Novan Legislative Academy.)

Staravya died in 2358, just under two decades after Ilyasov; Yoshikawa lived into the early 2370s, meaning her lifespan just barely overlaps with the next people we need to talk about. They, as they are ultimately more historically important, will take proportionally longer.

Florentine Sikora was born in 2370, or shortly after the official merger of the Leadership Council and the Academy. She grew up in an era of immense (compared to the mostly-static shipboard culture) change, but we’re not going to talk about any of that. We’re going to talk about this thing called the Catgirl Principle, and then we’re going have some bad lesbian representation. (Quite likely it also qualifies as bad allosexual representation, seeing as your author is ace.)

The Catgirl Principle is an oft-cited novan aphorism, most common in the first few centuries of the Imperium and believed to have reached its permanent form sometime in the middle War Era. The sentiment it describes is far older, and we will get to it in due time. The Principle is this: “A statistically significant proportion of the human population would want to fuck a catgirl were the opportunity to present itself. A statistically significant proportion of them would be willing to take active work toward that goal.”

Sikora was in that second proportion, and unlike the vast majority of them she refused to handle it by any reasonable means. I will spare you the details of what I mean here, but in short, Sikora never considered just getting a girlfriend and discussing arrangements for role-play involving a cat-ear headband and a tail.

Sikora wanted a catgirl, and—given the advancements in synthetic biology since our time, which I almost completely glossed over back in “Human Future History”—she figured she could just go ahead and make one. This was an absurd proposition—doable, maybe, for a team of two dozen with good funding, a few decades, unfettered access to the supercomputers in the heart of the First University, and fairly loose ethics. Sikora was a schoolgirl with a dream. But she wouldn’t remain that way forever, and soon enough she was off to the First University, designated a student without work* and planning to major in genetic engineering.

* Most university students had, in addition to their classes, to perform some menial office for perhaps ten hours a week, or two hours per day of the core week. The “student without work” designation was given to those who showed remarkable aptitude in some useful field, as a way of softly forcing them in the direction they would most benefit society or the sciences. With Sikora it paid massive dividends in the most awkward way possible.

Because Sikora lived on the far side of Red Dome (the second erected and first constructed, by the classical reckoning), she was offered the chance to move into an apartment inside the University itself. She took it and was assigned Mieke Nagtegaal as a roommate. Nagtegaal was also a student without work for her promise as a genetic engineer, but—in contrast to Sikora’s animal focus—particularly interested in plants. She was outgoing, very attractive, and the kind of person to listen intently to what someone was telling her no matter how long the explanation lasted, and Sikora fell hard for her. Nagtegaal, for her part, saw Sikora as a surprisingly charming person beneath the quiet exterior, and they became fast, close friends.

As you can imagine, this went badly.

In university as in tertiary school, Sikora was driven; intelligent; especially talented at genetics; and very, very good at ingratiating herself with teachers. In her first year, one of her professors brought her onboard a project that had as one of its goals the development of a large research database of fully sequenced human genomes. Sikora saw this as an excellent opportunity to—instead of, say, confessing her feelings and maybe trying to start a relationship—convince Nagtegaal to contribute her DNA to a public University database, from which Sikora could later retrieve it and use it as the base for the catgirl. The samples were supposedly anonymized, but Sikora figured she would, like Caesar, build that bridge when she came to it.

Their second year brought Nagtegaal a girlfriend, later her wife, and Sikora greater technological access that did not quite make up for the loss. This greater access came in the form of a laptop, powerful even by that time’s impressive standards, running the University’s full suite of cutting-edge-five-years-ago gen-eng software. The project she joined to get access to it is unimportant; it did, however, give her a foot in the door that would prove vital later.

Then she used a professor’s administrative access to locate which anonymized human genome belonged to “Nagtegaal, Mieke,” waited a few days for appearances’ sake, and downloaded roughly seven gigabytes of her roommate’s DNA to her new computer. Creep.

That brings us to what would later be marked as the beginning of (drumroll please) the Novan Development period. Some reckonings have it starting earlier, with Sikora’s initial decision to make a catgirl in her early adolescence or else with her entry into the University; but while she clearly worked on the catgirl project on and off, mostly by research, before acquiring the suite, the actual development begins only now.

It ran ten more years. Sikora was in the University the entire time, pursuing first a master’s and then a doctorate after her baccalaureate failed to give her enough time and access, and often sidelining that doctorate to hop aboard professors’ projects and even headline one of her own. In that time Nagtegaal, who got an excellent offer right after she finished her master’s, moved out and started work, leaving Sikora alone in their apartment.

Sikora’s magnum opus progressed in secret, extensively annotated and tested almost every night (as running it still took four to six hours). Back in her second year, she had quickly and euphemistically named the project file containing Nagtegaal’s DNA “nówka,” roughly “new thing.” The name wormed its way into her head over the years, and in time she came to think of the catgirl as the nówka instead. (It doesn’t hurt that “nówka” happens to decline in the feminine.)

As for the development of the nówka, her ears expanded and shifted down her head to match the too-complicated-to-move human ear canal while keeping a tall-eared silhouette; her tail came along nicely; working claws into her human fingers required completely redesigning her distal phalanges; Sikora quickly abandoned all pretensions at whiskers. (I bold “ears, tail, claws” here because they will come back with a vengeance when we get to the identity crisis of the second century, and that’s not to mention the Novan Nationalists.)*

* Nor “hearing, balance, defense.”

Eight years in, Sikora had done all she could with the simulation capabilities of any of her succession of laptops. The version of the software she had, the one that didn’t have to run on a supercomputer cooled by a lake, could do full simulations of the effects of short genetic sequences (i.e., the resultant biomolecules) and rough simulations of much longer material, but the human genome was more than twice the length of its ostensible input cap. Given a few hours it eventually managed, but her laptops suffered for it and the results it produced were necessarily inexact. Having now gotten the best draft possible with her current resources, she set her sights on better ones.

In flight the supercomputers had been used to manage the ship; now the Academy and the Terraforming Bureau had right to them, and a subset were used for genetic simulations of great accuracy and almost unlimited size. You can see where this is going.

She had by this time been brought onto a project (ultimately ill-fated, but later to inspire the sand-wolves) with an Academian at its head, and although she was in one of the lower rungs she had caught the said Academian’s attention. She had over the years maintained public side projects, partially out of interest and partially to impress her professors, and now it paid off. The Academian—and a few of her colleagues, Sikora’s professors—tacitly suggested that it would not be such a bad thing were Sikora to run the occasional after-hours experiment using one of the supercomputers, if nothing too urgent was going on.

Sikora, given an inch, made like the Devil and the British and took a mile.

She spent the next few years patching the gaping flaws in the nówka’s design that this more precise testing revealed. Finally, in 2407, she had something good. It ran perfectly in the supercomputer; it had all the features she wanted. It would work, she was sure, if she grew it in the real world; so she finangled her way into a frankly absurd set of permissions, never quite letting anyone know just what she was using them for, and actually managed to slip it by the review board.

The first nówka experiment was an utter failure. The nówka fetus, difficult to create and so promising, died before three months were out. Sikora couldn’t understand why, and she couldn’t get together the materials and permissions to do it again. She gave up utterly on the project, wallowed in self-pity, and tried to re-focus on her much more boring normal life.

Here Nagtegaal re-enters our story. She had never left Sikora’s, even though they drifted apart over the years as Sikora failed to call or write. She knew, vaguely, about her former roommate’s attempts to “create a new species,” had gathered that this new species was supposed to be sapient, and had overall thought it was neat. Too ambitious and not in her—Nagtegaal’s—area of primary interest, but neat. She asked about it one day, having asked Sikora out to coffee and Sikora having taken her up on it delightedly. Sikora almost started crying and said she had given up on the project, refusing to give Nagtegaal any more information.

Nagtegaal spent three weeks trying to figure out what happened and to convince her clearly distraught friend to resume work, or at least talk to someone. Then, after the last of a string of near breakdowns on Sikora’s part, Nagtegaal’s concern reached a boiling point. She broke into Sikora’s apartment and tried to find her notes on this “nufka” project, to see who—Nagtegaal was sure it was a who—had so badly damaged her self-confidence.

What she found instead was complete, fastidious, impossible documentation of the genetic code for a new sapient species. At the top of the folder a pinned text file held data about a practical test, ending with a paragraph about the final failure of the experiment.

Nagtegaal was floored.

So was the Academy, when she showed them Sikora’s research (which she had quickly copied onto a flash drive).

With the Presentation to the Academy we come to the Public Phase of Novan Development. The Academy, with Nagtegaal’s advice, privately contacted Sikora, who—despite being a normally dignified doctor in her thirties—sent back a moody email saying simply that the nówka wouldn’t work and there was no point in trying. She refused all involvement, but wanted credit for the initial development of this impossible dream. Maybe there would be a novel about it someday.

She also requested they rename the project from “nówka” to the less Polish and more Esperanto “novo,” which preserved the pun in almost exactly the same form. (Nówka is the adjective meaning “new” plus an ending that turns it into a noun, and so is novo.) It did create some confusion regarding the adjective nova, which now could mean either “new” or “having to do with the project called novo,” which never really got solved. The way the novans later deal with it is to use novara (“having to do with the novan species”) as the adjective form of novo, which works well enough but breaks the stated purpose of Esperanto.

Without going into excessive detail, the Academy liked “novo” mostly because it was so similar in structure to to homo, “human” or (at that time) “person.” Copying that pattern let them quickly produce versions for other languages, including novan (English), and the species name novaro (off the pattern of homaro, “humanity”); it would later produce the Latin novō, which is a homograph of an existing verb and must often be distinguished by context.

The Academy then published Sikora’s research and announced it widely, but declined to form an official committee to continue it. The nówka was in no way relevant to their main focus, that being terraforming efforts,* but anyone to take up the project would be given liberal resources. Essentially, they left it to open-sourced community development. It fostered a surprising camaraderie among the different teams who formed to take up the challenge, and it actually soothed political tensions between diametrically-opposed salons.

Well, it did portions of all these things. Novans have a tendency to assume their creation must have been a society-wide effort, but really perhaps a hundred people ever had more than a surface-level involvement over the decade and a half of novan development. A twelfth of society, yes, but only a twelfth. (Nagtegaal was not one of them, even after someone realized it was her sample used as the basis for novanity. She was, as she put it, just and only a botanic engineer.)

* There were persistent rumors that the Academy fostered the development of early novanity in search of a servant species, and in later days it was commonly believed as fact. It is in reality bullshit. Not unreasonable, given the Academy’s persistent monopoly on and heavy-handed use of power, but bullshit. I have to mention the rumors here because of the influence it has on the Darwins and the various novan identity crises, but the Academy was genuinely focused only on the flagship scientific achievement that novanity represented.

Fifteen years after the Presentation to the Academy, Novan Test 42 was successful. On the seventh of November 2419, a successful novan infant was born to delighted and somewhat terrified foster/surrogate parents the Augereaus. When it looked like she would survive, she was given the name Evo Darwin—Evo being one of two Esperanto forms of Eve and Darwin, of course, being for Charles. (Esperanto lacks /w/ and has very regular emphasis, so her surname lost its original pronunciation. The end result was a name said /ˈe.vo darˈvin/, something like AY-vo dar-VEEN in English phonetic spelling, with “ay” standing for the sound of the name of the letter A. This concludes the awkwardly-shoehorned-in phonology section of this essay.)

Evo proved bright and excelled in school despite her very obvious differences; she had her entire growth charted and wanted to be a genetic engineer when she grew up, just like her mother. When she was twelve, the first male novan (who had been in development for a while) was born; he was given the name Adamo Chikaonda, partially at Evo’s suggestion.* Another female novan followed shortly thereafter, off Evo’s pattern, as that was proven to be stable. Her name was Espero Darwin, thus making the Darwin lineage or gento the first of many to have duplicate line-headers. They were each raised by different families, which may account for Evo’s and Espero’s startling later differences.

* “Chikaonda” is in reference to the late lead developer of the software Sikora had written the initial nówka genome in, who had in his later years had some involvement with the novan project.

Evo fell in love with and married a human after they met in university; they communicated well and were mostly happy together, even when the human started getting strange medical issues they seemed to have inherited from their father. They did not try to reproduce, but adopted a handful of children: a later Darwin, her spouse’s nephew, and a novan patterned off the said spouse’s genome. Adamo and Espero, on the other hand, saw nothing to do but get together and propagate the species, in exactly those terms. They did not love each other romantically, nor share particularly many interests, but they understood each other better than anyone else would. Their seven children, plus an eighth that they wheedled Evo into carrying after Espero suffered an injury and became infertile, split their surnames between them (the first child being a Chikaonda, the second a Darwin, and so on); this would be common early-generation novan practice for the rest of the novan creation period.

Having gotten the rest of their lives out of the way, we need to jump back to when Evo was fifteen, because it was in that year that Sikora asked Nagtegaal out to coffee to celebrate the three-days-past birth of Espero. This was a tradition of theirs, having been started after they had met and held Evo for the first time fifteen years before; but, fatefully, this time Sikora brought moonshine.

Sikora, once tipsy, confessed that—or more accurately joked about how—she had known full well whose genome she was using and that it had its roots in a longstanding crush on Nagtegaal. Then, well, the whole sorry story of novan development came tumbling out of her mouth; it became increasingly clear the nówka was ultimately the result of a sexual fantasy; and Nagtegaal, horrified, exploded. The resulting scene—Nagtegaal standing up and striking the coffee table, irate, while Sikora leans back in her chair and laughs—would later become a frequent subject of paintings and tableaux, especially during the first and second centuries. What would not become such a favorite of the artists was how hard Nagtegaal wept that night, or how she filled a notebook and a half in the next two weeks with everything she knew about Sikora. They sometimes depict her internal torment over what to do with this new horrible knowledge in light of its potential effect on fifteen-year-old Evo Darwin, but they tend to make it a lot prettier than it was.

Three months later, Sikora died of a stroke. Nagtegaal drafted a letter that night.

Mieke Nagtegaal’s memoirs of Dr. Sikora, created with the full approval of then-seventeen-year-old Evo and her parents, were published two years later. The scandal rocked the Moon and destroyed Sikora’s reputation—but not that of the novan project. That, by now, was far more associated with the community of developers and harried university students that had brought it to fruition. The third novan genome sitting in their mutual drafts was originally intended to bear Sikora’s name, and work ground to an internally-snarled halt. After a worrying two-month stall, a public appeal from Evo and Nagtegaal brought it back into motion under the name Moreau.

And that’s the condensed version.

There are three more major sections of history to get to, and hopefully I’ll get them out soon. I’ll both update this and put them up separately, so you don’t have to watch this post for edits.

[tinydancerfreelancersblog]

Wait for it...

[rose-gold-femme]

i’ve been told i give good hugs, so i’m offering up my arms to you

🥺🥺🥺 I'm literally jumping straight into your arms and melting into a puddle

[stormyfog]

classroom obsession 📘

yandere jake x fem!reader

content: college au, yandere behavior, stalking, obsession, kidnapping, manipulation, smut later on

chapter 1

you were a freshman at evergreen university, having just turned 18 a month before moving into your dorm. though a bit nervous about starting university, you couldn’t deny the excitement bubbling within you. you’d attended all the mandatory orientations before the semester began, trying to ease into campus life. your dorm, maple hall, was on the second floor in room 113. since your roommate hadn’t arrived yet, you had your pick of either side of the room. you chose the right side, appreciating the extra bit of space it offered. just as you started unpacking, your roommate walked in. after a quick round of introductions, you exchanged phone numbers, beginning the first steps of sharing your new space.

once you and your roommate, winter, finished unpacking, you both joined your resident assistant, giselle, and the other dorm residents for a required event. giselle led everyone on a ten-minute walk to juniper stadium, one of the main campus buildings, which was bustling with cheers and excitement as you arrived. she guided your group to a section about four rows from the stage, where the college president soon appeared, warmly welcoming everyone and sharing what to expect for the upcoming semester. after the speech, the crowd moved outside to tents giving away free supplies—everything from notebooks and pens to t-shirts. finally, after what felt like an eternity, you and winter returned to your dorm, ready to relax after a packed first day.

classes started the following week, and i spent some time organizing my planner to make sure my schedule was in order. as a biology major, i had a few extra classes to fit in. i double-checked everything: three classes on monday and tuesday, none on wednesday, two on thursday, and just one on friday. i was relieved not to have anything on wednesdays, giving me a bit of a break. when the first week of classes finally arrived, i was ready. in each class, we were asked to introduce ourselves to the person sitting next to us and exchange phone numbers for homework and projects. in my bio 101 class, a boy sat next to me. he had wavy black hair and glasses, and for some reason, he looked familiar, though i couldn't place where i’d seen him before.

as the teacher asked us to introduce ourselves to the person next to us, i turned to the boy beside me. he introduced himself as jake, and that's when the sense of familiarity hit me. "wait, didn’t you go to elm high school?" i asked. "i’m y/n, by the way." jake’s face lit up when he heard my name. "oh yeah, i remember you! i used to ask you for the homework answers in history class." he sounded surprised, but there was something off about the way he said it. it was as if he hadn't been watching me for years, ever since we first started talking back in high school. why was jake like this? well, he was a bit of a loner—no one really talked to him. one day, i noticed he hadn’t finished his homework, which was due by the end of class. i decided to help him out of kindness, never imagining it would lead to anything more. after months of helping him with homework and quizzes, something shifted in jake. this was the beginning of his obsession.

we continued talking like old friends, even though we’d only known each other for about two years. i learned that jake was a year older than me and had opted to stay at a cabin about an hour away from campus, rather than living in the dorms. curious, i asked why he’d choose to stay so far from the university. “oh, well... i enjoy long drives, and the woods are really pretty in the fall,” he explained. i couldn’t argue with that; the fall season was beautiful, after all. but underneath his calm demeanor, i couldn’t shake the feeling that jake wasn’t exactly the innocent, puppy-like person he appeared to be. he acted as though he wasn’t the one who had pictures of me on his phone, the one who had stalked my every move. he’d dug deep to figure out which university i was applying to, then tailored his classes to match mine. he was playing the part of a sweet, harmless guy, and it was working—too well. i had to admit, a small part of me had harbored a crush on jake since high school, but i never had the courage to ask him out. now, i wasn’t sure if my feelings were real—or if he had just manipulated them.

jake had always adored you from afar, never going so far as to act on his feelings, but now it was time to make his plan a reality. back in high school, he’d become jealous whenever anyone spoke to you, especially a group of four boys who liked to tease and nag you relentlessly, pushing you to the point of tears in the bathroom. jake couldn’t stand it, and he knew something had to be done. the next day, when you walked into class, you were surprised to find that the boys weren’t there. as you took your seat, you overheard your classmates gossiping about a horrific accident. apparently, one of the boys had invited the others to his lake house, but only one had returned—he claimed to have found the others dead. they said it was a murder-suicide, the boy stabbing the others with a knife before ending his own life. as you walked toward your desk, you noticed a letter waiting for you, and without thinking, you picked it up and opened it. across the room, jake watched you with quiet intensity. as you read the letter, your eyes widened in shock. the message inside read: “princess, those boys won’t bother you again. i knew how harsh they were to you, so i made them disappear. don’t worry, i’ll always protect you. ♡”

the bell rang, signaling the end of bio class, and i said my goodbyes to jake before heading out of the classroom. what i didn’t realize was that jake was following me, quietly memorizing my schedule. as the day went on, i made my way to the dining hall, which was only a minute’s walk from my dorm. i sat down, about to dig into my food, when i felt a tap on my shoulder. i turned around, startled, and found jake standing there, a casual smile on his face. "oh hey, what a coincidence!" he said, his tone light, as if he hadn’t been trailing me all day. "oh, hi!" i replied, forcing a smile, though something in my gut told me this wasn’t as random as he was pretending.

we chatted for a while, talking about the classes we had in common, and it didn’t take long to realize that we had every single class together. at first, i thought it was a coincidence, but the feeling of unease crept in. i brushed it off as paranoia. it was getting late, and i needed to head back to my dorm to freshen up. when i stood up to leave, jake offered to walk me back. "it’s okay, jake," i said, trying to downplay it. "my dorm is only a minute away. i can walk by myself." but jake insisted, his smile widening. "you never know what danger lurks in the darkness," he said, his voice too calm. reluctantly, i gave in and accepted his offer. he walked me all the way to my dorm, and when we reached the door, i said goodbye. what i didn’t realize was that this was all part of jake’s plan—he now knew the exact hall, floor, and room where i lived.

as i stepped into my dorm room, the door clicking shut behind me, a strange feeling settled in my chest. i couldn’t shake the image of jake’s eyes, still lingering on me from across the dining hall. it felt like he was watching, even though he was gone. i glanced at my phone, but there were no new messages. everything seemed normal, yet a heavy silence hung in the air, like something was about to break. i shook the feeling off, telling myself i was being paranoid, but deep down, i knew something wasn’t right. it was as if jake had somehow wormed his way into my life without me even realizing it—and that thought made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

chapter 2

a couple of months had passed, and you and jake had grown a bit closer. it wasn’t just his cute, puppy-like face that drew you in, but also his promise to protect you after someone started sending you creepy letters—letters that, unbeknownst to you, were from him. you were completely oblivious to it—or at least, that’s what jake thought. lately, though, a sense of unease had begun to creep in whenever you were around him. there was something off, a subtle strangeness in the air whenever you talked to him, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. at first, you didn’t mind when he insisted on walking you everywhere; it was nice to have someone look out for you. but over time, it started to feel less like protection and more like surveillance. the more he followed you, the more you couldn’t shake the feeling that jake was everywhere you went, and it was starting to get unsettling.

things started to go downhill when jake saw you talking to another boy. you were just chatting, nothing serious—he had simply asked for the notes he missed in class. but before you knew it, jake appeared behind you, his grip firm as he wrapped his arm around your waist. he shot the boy a cold, stern look, and with a chilling calmness, he said, "she's mine." the boy, clearly startled, turned and walked away without another word. "jake, what was that for?" you asked, confused and a little angry. "he was just asking for notes." jake's expression hardened. "i don’t care. i don’t like it when other boys talk to you." the tension in the air grew thick, and you felt your frustration bubbling over. "okay, this is getting out of hand. i’m not yours, okay? we’re just friends." without waiting for his response, you turned and walked away, heart pounding in your chest. from behind you, you heard jake’s quiet murmur, "you’ll regret saying that…"

just a week later, news spread that the boy who had asked you for notes was missing. the police had received a report from his roommate, claiming that he had hanged himself in his dorm room. a suicide note was found beside him. of course, jake was behind it all—he had forced the boy to write that note, to twist his mind until the poor guy believed there was no way out. sitting in class, my eyes kept drifting to the empty seat where the boy used to sit. then, jake walked into view, pulling me from my thoughts. “hey, are you okay?” he asked, his voice too calm, too sweet. my heart raced as i looked up at him. “did you do this, jake?” i asked, unable to stop the words from spilling out. my voice shook with the weight of the question, but i couldn’t bring myself to regret asking. he tilted his head, the puppy eyes appearing, as if he were offended. “why would you ask me that?” he said, pouting as though it were the most ridiculous thing. “i was with you when it happened, remember? we were planning to meet in the dining hall.” i faltered, guilt creeping up. “right... sorry. i don’t know why i asked that.” “that’s fine!” jake chirped, his smile far too wide, far too innocent.

that night, i couldn’t stop tossing and turning in bed, my mind racing. how did jake know about when that boy died? the question gnawed at me, pulling me deeper into unease. but eventually, exhaustion took over, and i fell into an uneasy sleep. when i woke up the next morning, the sight that greeted me was more horrifying than anything i could have imagined—my roommate, winter, lying lifeless in her bed, a pool of blood spreading beneath her. i screamed, my body trembling as i scrambled to call 911. who could have done this? and why so soon? the police arrived, ushering me out of the room as they began their investigation. as they retrieved winter’s body, one of the officers found a letter tucked under her pillow—my name scrawled on the front. he walked out and handed it to me. my hands shook as i opened it, the words sending a chill down my spine. “hi sweetheart, i know you’re sad that you lost your friend, but she wasn’t as kind as you thought.” my heart dropped as i read on. “she kept talking behind your back, spreading false rumors about you. but don’t worry, i got rid of her. remember, i’ll always protect you. ♡”

my eyes widened in shock as i read the last sentence. it was the same as the letter i received in high school. this couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? my mind raced, the connection too horrifying to ignore. as the day dragged on, i couldn’t stop thinking about the letter and the brutal death of my roommate. i felt a pang of betrayal—winter, someone i had considered a friend, had been talking behind my back. but that thought quickly faded as the terror crept in. how far would jake go? when i returned to my dorm, giselle, the resident assistant, told me that i could go home if i wanted to, to get away from everything. i hesitated but ultimately declined; my parents lived only half an hour from the university, and i didn’t want to trouble them. little did i know, that would be the biggest mistake i’d ever make. walking into my dorm, my gaze fell on the pile of letters stacked on my desk. another month of them, each one more unsettling than the last. when would it all stop?

as night fell, i began getting ready for bed, the weight of the day still heavy on my mind. just as i was about to settle in, a notification popped up on my phone. it was from jake. the message read: “hey, are you okay? i heard that your roommate died.” my heart skipped a beat. that was strange—no one had released any information about winter’s death, and the police had specifically told everyone not to post anything on social media while they were investigating. “how did you know?” i replied, my fingers trembling. his response came quickly: “oh, i don’t know, someone told me earlier today.” my suspicion deepened. “the police didn’t release any info, so how’d you know?” i texted back, my gut tightening. his reply came just as swiftly, as though he was waiting for me to ask: “are you being suspicious of me?” my breath caught in my throat. “sorry, i’ve just been on high alert.” “that’s fine, i understand how you feel,” jake responded, his tone casual, almost too calm. but something about it made my skin crawl.

later that night, jake knew it was time to set his plan into motion. this was the moment he had been waiting for—the moment when everything would finally fall into place. since he had learned which room i was in, he’d stolen a keycard from the main office to gain access to the dorm building. as he walked up to my room, he slid the keycard against the sensor lock, which let out a small beep before the door unlocked. quietly, he slipped inside. the room was dark, save for the faint glow of the moon, casting long shadows. he spotted me lying on the bed, sleeping peacefully. a sinister smile crept across his face. he moved closer, leaning down until his face was mere inches from mine. then, without warning, he pressed a light kiss to my lips. the unexpected sensation jolted me awake, and my eyes snapped open in confusion and shock. my heart raced as i realized someone had broken into my dorm. before i could scream, jake swiftly climbed over me, his hand covering my mouth. “shh, darling. it’s okay,” he whispered, his voice low and calm, almost soothing. “i’m going to take you somewhere safe, away from all these people.” i froze. his voice. it was jake.

as i struggled to break free from his grip, tears began to stream down my face. my mind raced—what was jake going to do to me? his sweet, innocent puppy eyes were gone, replaced by something darker, something filled with an unsettling desire. “aw, baby, there’s no need to cry,” he cooed, his voice eerily calm. “i promised i’ll always protect you.” the words hit me like a ton of bricks. the truth slammed into me—the letters, the strange behavior, the way he’d always been there... jake had been stalking me all along. he had sent those letters. before i could scream or make another move, jake shoved a rag soaked in some chemical against my face. my breath caught, and i struggled to breathe, panic rising in my chest. but the world around me began to blur, my body growing heavier, until everything went dark.

as i drifted into unconsciousness, a strange, heavy calm settled over me. my body felt limp, my mind slipping further away from reality. the last thing i heard was jake’s low, comforting voice in my ear, as though everything he was doing was for my own good. “don’t worry, darling. i’ll keep you safe... forever.” his words echoed in my mind as the darkness consumed me, leaving me with nothing but a chilling sense of helplessness. and with that, i was lost to the void, unaware of what awaited me next.

chapter 3

i woke up in a daze, my head spinning as i tried to take in my surroundings. the air was damp, the room dark and suffocating. it looked like a basement—no windows, just the faint glow of a small floor lamp that barely illuminated the space. a mattress lay on the cold, concrete floor, worn and dirty, but i couldn’t focus on that. my mind raced with one thought: i have to get out of here. as i attempted to move, i felt the cold metal bite into my leg. a cuff was strapped tightly around my ankle, chained to the wall. panic surged through me as i tried to pull away, but the chain was unforgiving. then, the door creaked open. “hi, sweetheart, you’re finally awake,” jake’s voice cut through the silence, dripping with a sinister sweetness. he stepped closer, a twisted smile curling on his lips. and just like that, my memory flooded back—the terror, the rag, the darkness. he had kidnapped me.

i backed against the wall, my body trembling as jake knelt down in front of me. tears welled in my eyes, my voice breaking. “p-please don’t hurt me…” i pleaded, desperate for any sign of mercy. “don’t worry, doll, i won’t hurt you,” jake said softly, but there was a chilling edge to his words. he reached to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, but i flinched, pulling away. jake paused, then slowly withdrew his hand. “you have no idea how long i’ve waited for this,” he said, his voice low and dark. “for you to be mine... forever.” my heart raced, the fear almost suffocating me. “why, jake...?” i asked, barely able to speak through my sobs. his eyes softened, but there was an unsettling intensity behind them. “you wanna know why? you were the only one who was ever kind to me... since high school. you always helped me, always looked out for me, and i wanted to return that. i wanted you to feel the same way about me.” “not like this, jake,” i whispered, shaking my head. “this isn’t how you show love to someone.” he leaned in closer, his breath hot against my face. “but i had to do what i had to do,” he said, almost pleading. “i couldn’t stand it when another guy looked at you, when they even spoke to you. you’re mine, and i’ll do anything to keep it that way.” my chest tightened as i begged him, “jake, please... just let me go. i won’t tell anyone, i swear.” his face hardened, and with a finality that made my blood run cold, he said, “no. you’re not going anywhere.”

a month had passed, and jake had finally let me out of the basement, allowing me to stay in his bedroom. but with that came a restriction on everything—my freedom, my choices. he wouldn’t let me leave on my own, took away my phone, and insisted that i kiss him every time he came home. i knew better than to try and call for help; the consequences were severe. i hated myself for feeling this way, but i couldn’t deny that a part of me still cared for him. one day, we went out to a restaurant for a meal. we sat down at a table near the front door. when the waitress brought over the menus, i noticed someone from across the room. it was giselle. she locked eyes with me for a moment, and i saw her face drop in shock. i’d been missing for over a month now. jake saw it too. giselle hesitated for a moment before walking up to our table. “y/n! are you okay? you’ve been gone for a while now!”

i glanced at jake, who shot me a stern look before i turned back to giselle. “y-yeah, i’m fine…” i muttered. jake immediately spoke up, his tone sharp and annoyed. “may i help you?” giselle’s gaze shifted to him, her eyes narrowing as she sized up his cold expression. after a moment, she spoke slowly, her voice tinged with concern. “i’m sorry... it’s just... we were all so worried. you disappeared without a word, and we couldn’t get in touch with you. are you sure everything’s okay?”

i glanced nervously at jake, who was gripping his glass a little too tightly, then forced a smile toward giselle. “yeah, i just… needed some time away. it was… unexpected.” giselle didn’t seem convinced. she leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. “if you ever need anything, you know where to find me,” she said, her eyes flicking cautiously between jake and me. “i’m just glad to see you’re alright.” jake’s jaw clenched, his hand subtly squeezing my knee under the table. i held my breath, nodding at giselle as she walked away. as soon as she was out of earshot, jake leaned in, his voice low and icy. “you’d better not forget who you belong to,” he muttered. the restaurant buzzed around us, but his words hung in the air, a chilling reminder of my fragile position.

as giselle turned to leave, i mustered every ounce of courage i had and, when jake wasn’t looking, flashed her the discreet hand sign for help. her eyes widened in alarm, and i could see the gears turning in her head as she tried to figure out what to do. but jake noticed. in an instant, his hand clamped around my wrist, halting my movement. a chilling smile spread across his face as he looked at giselle. “oh, don’t worry about that,” he said with a light, mocking laugh, though his tone was anything but friendly. “y/n has such a quirky sense of humor. just a little prank between us!” giselle’s eyes darted between the two of us, uncertainty written all over her face. she opened her mouth, but seemed unable to say anything, and i could see the moment she gave in. her lips curled into a forced smile before she nodded hesitantly. “right… well, okay then,” she mumbled, stealing one last glance at me before heading back to her table.

jake leaned in, his fingers tightening around my wrist as he hissed, “i’ll deal with you later.” his voice was a low, menacing murmur, a threat meant only for me. we barely made it out of the restaurant and into the car before he tightened his grip, his jaw clenched with barely contained rage. “you thought you were clever, didn’t you?” he spat, starting the engine. “well, i’ll make sure you never try something like that again. you’re overdue for a punishment.” i stared out the window, the restaurant disappearing in the distance, and with it, any flicker of hope i had left.

jake’s anger simmered beneath the surface, and i felt the familiar fear creeping up. i had seen glimpses of his collection—the ‘toys’ he kept hidden in the back of his room, things that weren’t meant for anyone else’s eyes. he didn’t want to hurt me, not really. he wanted to keep me, but in his own twisted way. the promise of punishment hung in the air as we drove home, and i felt my pulse quicken. jake wanted to own me, keep me by his side, and maybe—just maybe—he thought he could make me love him in the process.

chapter 4 (smut)

when we finally arrived back at jake’s house, he dragged me inside with a firm grip on my arm, not giving me a chance to even think about escaping. without a word, he shoved me into the basement, the same cold, dimly lit room i had grown all too familiar with. he attached the chain around my ankle once again, the clinking sound of metal echoing through the silence. as he stepped back to survey his work, his eyes glinted with a dark satisfaction, like he was relishing in the control he had over me. i couldn’t help but feel trapped all over again, my heart sinking with the realization that there was no getting away from him now.

jake stood in the doorway, his gaze dark and unyielding as he watched me struggle against the chains. “you should’ve listened to me, sweetheart,” he said, his voice low and smooth, as if savoring the moment. he took a step closer, his smirk growing with each word. “i told you not to make me angry, and now… well, i’m going to have to think of something to teach you a lesson.” his eyes twinkled with dark amusement, and there was a hint of something almost predatory in his smile. "you’ll learn to appreciate the way i show you just how much i care," he added, and my stomach churned with both fear and a strange, unwanted anticipation.

jake, with a methodical calmness, retrieves a length of rope from the corner of the room, his movements slow and deliberate. his eyes lock onto you as he removes your clothes, leaving you exposed and vulnerable. he begins measuring the rope, ensuring it's long enough to secure you properly. his hands move with unsettling precision as he wraps the rope around your wrists, binding them tightly behind your back. the ropes press against your skin, each knot pulled with firm intent. he never breaks eye contact, making sure you understand that every movement is calculated, every knot a reminder of his control. the ropes are tight, restrictive, leaving you unable to move, your body now positioned to heighten your vulnerability. jake steps back, taking a moment to admire his work, then turns his gaze back to you with a dark smirk playing on his lips.

jake steps toward the corner, retrieving the box of ‘toys’ he had kept hidden, setting it beside the mattress with a soft thud. his eyes gleam with a mix of anticipation and possessiveness as he turns back to you, his gaze unwavering. jake sits down on the mattress, patting his thighs in a silent command. “come here,” he says, his voice calm but firm, his eyes watching you intently. you don’t dare hesitate, moving toward him with reluctance. with a swift motion, he pulls you onto his lap, making you straddle him. your back presses against his chest, your hands bound tightly behind you, the ropes restricting any movement. his arms wrap around your waist, holding you in place as the ropes dig into your skin. you can’t escape his hold, your body pinned against him, and you feel the weight of his control in every inch of your restraint. his breath grazes your neck as his presence consumes you, a constant reminder that you're entirely at his mercy.

jake’s lips press against your neck, soft at first, but quickly becoming more insistent. he kisses and nips at your skin, leaving a trail of fiery marks that make your body tense. his hands roam over your exposed skin, feeling the heat radiating off of you as he traces every curve. the ropes around your wrists pull, restricting you further as his touch grows bolder, more possessive. he lifts you slightly, adjusting your position as his fingers slide across your skin, exploring, marking you as his. you can’t escape, not when his grip tightens around you, not when the sensation of his lips and hands drown out everything else. it’s suffocating, but the deeper you sink into his embrace, the more you feel the undeniable pull of his control over you.

Jake’s hand slowly traveled downward, his fingers tracing along your sensitive clit, making you whimper at the unfamiliar touch. Instinctively, your back arched, a reaction he seemed to savor. He slipped one finger in, then another, moving with a slow, steady rhythm that drew soft moans from your lips. Despite the conflict brewing inside, you couldn’t deny the way your body responded, the heat building steadily. The knot in your stomach tightened, desperate for release. “J-Jake… I’m c-close!” you managed to gasp. A smirk crossed his face. “Go on, come all over my fingers.” And with those words, the tension inside you unraveled, leaving you breathless.

jake reached over to the box nearby, a glint in his eyes as he pulled out a few ‘toys’ that made your heart race. slowly, he revealed each one, giving you just enough time to take in what was coming next. he started with a teasing touch, his movements deliberate, experimenting with the new sensations against your skin. each press and vibration left you breathless, your senses overwhelmed as he skillfully alternated between each toy, drawing out every reaction from you. the intensity only grew, leaving you on the edge, unable to think about anything except the mounting pleasure that jake controlled entirely.

after a moment, you felt the wave of release wash over you, leaving you breathless and dazed. jake chuckled softly and guided you to lie back on the mattress, positioning himself over you. your gaze drifted to the unmistakable bulge in his pants, and you quickly looked away, flustered. catching this, jake smirked, unbuttoning his pants and lowering his boxers, letting his length spring free. your eyes widened, and doubt crept in as you took in his size, unsure if it could even fit. "like what you see?" he teased with a quiet laugh. he aligned himself at your entrance, ready to press forward when you stammered, "w-wait! i don’t think it’ll… fit…" jake’s only response was a reassuring smile as he murmured, “i’ll make it fit,” before slowly entering, inch by inch, filling you gradually.

you were a trembling mess as jake finally filled you completely, tears slipping down your cheeks from the unfamiliar stretch. he leaned close, his voice a soft murmur. "shh, it's okay. you can handle it," he cooed, his tone equal parts soothing and possessive. he began moving in slow, steady thrusts, gradually building his pace until he was driving into you with relentless speed. his hands gripped your waist firmly, pulling you closer as he leaned down to capture your lips in a messy, breath-stealing kiss. the intensity left you reeling, barely able to process the pace he was setting.

“j-jake! i’m so close!” you gasped, arching your back as the pleasure reached its peak. “go ahead,” he murmured, “i want to feel you tighten around me.” moments later, you came undone, waves of ecstasy washing over you as you struggled to catch your breath. you felt jake’s movements grow uneven, his grip tightening as he groaned, “such a good doll, taking me so well…” with one final thrust, he shuddered, releasing inside you, and as he pulled out, you could feel his warmth begin to drip down. the overwhelming sensations left you lightheaded, and you drifted into unconsciousness. jake noticed, chuckling softly as he leaned down to place a gentle kiss on your forehead. carefully, he untied you, lifted you up, and carried you to his bedroom. he dressed you in his t-shirt and boxers, then lay beside you, holding you close. “you’re mine, and you know it,” he whispered.

[canto-one]

HALF LIFE TUMBLR SIMULATOR:

🌐 breenofficial follow

This is your daily reminder that we do in fact see your internet history. Please refrain from looking things up such as "breen leaked feet pics". Thank you.

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To add on: please stop looking up "Metrocop x Reader", thank you.

🪄 c17-mp2901 follow

whoever keeps stealing my rations from the breakroom owes me AT LEAST six days worth at this point.

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Its happening to you too, 2901? I thought it was just me...

🔆 c17-mp89388 follow

This is a reminder that we work hard for our rations and it's kinda fucked up to steal people's hard work... idk if its just me but why is it normalized to make fun of Civil Protection?? We're just doing out job.

@combinefeedback can you fix this??

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Hello! Please email us at combinecomplaints@theoverwatch11.com to submit a formal complaint.

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Lol

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Double agent of the week has been announced! Special thanks to @ bcalhoun for his hard work. He has reportedly stolen weeks worth of rations from the City 17, District 6 breakroom, thoroughly demotivating the metrocops :).

🟠 gfreeman-fan follow

Looking for a roleplay partner! I'd be roleplaying my BlackMesa!OC, Jamie. I'm okay roleplaying with BlackMesa!Ocs or Gordon Freeman. Breen roleplayers please do not interact!

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What's wrong with breen?? /gen

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What do you mean what's wrong with breen?? U literally support... ��️☹️ blocked and reported.

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Gordon Freeman fanart drawn by @gfreemanlefttoe!

[gordon_fanart_final_FINAL_FINALREALLY.jpg]

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Wow! 😍 Most Accurate Drawing I've Seen Yet! Amazing Work, gfreemanlefttoe!

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THE FUCKING USERNAME I CANT.

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As someone who knew Gordon before all this... kinda wild ngl.

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My dad literally worked with Gordon I can't imagine how he feels knowing gfreemanlefttoe is a real username.

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It's funny asf.

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DNI: Breen defenders (wtf is wrong with you), Gordon Freeman x Breen Shippers 😭😭, Resistance snitches, if you work with the combine AT ALL (THIS IS MY BLOG OKAY??), antlions, if you own any headcrabs as pets. They're literally exotic creatures wtf is wrong with you..

⚓️ a-d-vanced follow

[dog_picture.jpg]

Here's a selfie with my pet dog!

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I literally saw him attack a combine soldier yesterday...

⚓️ a-d-vanced follow

And???

🚫 alyxvancehateblog follow

Kinda weird ngl...

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Ermmm in literally neurodivergent and a minor 🤓

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Today, 10 years ago, the Resonance Cascade happened!

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Who remembers x files... 😭😭

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Rb with what you miss most about pre combine life

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Predictably, music...

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Holidays...

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Cats@

[Cat.jpg]

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WHICH MUTUAL REBLOGGED THIS I HAVE ALL CAT TAGS BLOCKED PLEASE TAG YOUR CAT PICTURES. JESUS CHRIST.

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WHO FUCKING DID THIS.

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hehe

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CUBBAGE??? WHAT???

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Username change. Gfhhhh 👍

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Who hacked breen again?

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Lmao

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PLEASE STOP WRITING BREEN X METROCOP STORIES. THANK YOU.

[ninja-muse]

2025 Release TBR

🏳️‍🌈 - queer MC     🇨🇦 - Canadian author    ⭐️ - BIPOC MC 📘 - have an ARC bold - new added

The Songbird - Stacy Lynn Miller (historical fiction) - January 7

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear - Seanan McGuire (fantasy) - January 7

Rebellious Grace - Jeri Westerson (historical mystery) 🏳️‍🌈 - January 7

The Betrayal of Thomas True - A.J. West (historical mystery) 🏳️‍🌈 - January 14

An African History of Africa - Zeinab Badawi (history) ⭐️ - January 14

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales - Heather Fawcett (fantasy) 🇨🇦 - February 11

Upon a Starlit Tide - Kell Woods (fantasy) - February 18

Greenteeth - Molly O’Neill (fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈 - February 25

Once Was Willem - M.R. Carey (historical fantasy) - March 4

May Contain Murder - Orlando Murrin (cozy mystery) 🏳️‍🌈 - March 11

The Tomb of Dragons - Katherine Addison (fantasy/mystery) 🏳️‍🌈 - March 11

Installment Immortality - Seanan McGuire (urban fantasy) - March 11

The Duke at Hazard - KJ Charles (historical romance) 🏳️‍🌈 - March 11

Malinalli - Veronica Chapa (historical fiction) ⭐️ 📘- March 11

Alterations - Kate Maruyama (historical fiction) ⭐️ - March 11

Love and Other Paradoxes - Catriona Silvey (time travel/romance) 📘- March 11

The Hymn to Dionysus - Natasha Pulley (fantasy/retelling) 🏳️‍🌈 - March 18

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephan Graham Jones (horror)⭐️ - March 18

Aunt Tigress - Emily Yu-Xuan Qin (contemporary fantasy) 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 - March 25

Murder by Memory - Olivia Waite (cozy science fiction/mystery) 🏳️‍🌈 - March 18

The Chow Maniac - Vivien Chien (cozy mystery) ⭐️ - April 1

Direct Descendant - Tanya Huff (cozy fantasy/horror) 🇨🇦 🏳️‍🌈 - April 1

Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) - Jesse Q. Sutanto (cozy mystery) ⭐️ - April 1

The Ashfire King - Chelsea Abdullah (fantasy) ⭐️ - April 15

Saga, Vol. 12 - Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (graphic science fiction) 🇨🇦 - April 15

Great Big Beautiful Life - Emily Henry (contemporary romance) - April 22

Overgrowth - Mira Grant (science fiction/horror) - May 6

Austen at Sea - Natalie Jenner (historical fiction) 🇨🇦 - May 6

The Country Under Heaven - Frederic S. Durbin (weird western) - May 13

Strange New World - Vivian Shaw (urban fantasy) - May 20

Baking Across America - B. Dylan Hollis (cookbook) 🏳️‍🌈 - May 20

Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Except Me) - Django Wexler (fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈 - May 27

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association - Caitlin Rozakis (comic fantasy) - May 27

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil - V.E. Schwab (horror/fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈 - June 10

The Mercy Makers - Tessa Gratton (fantasy) - June 17

A Far Better Thing - H.G. Parry (historical fantasy) - June 17

The Rushworth Family Plot - Claudia Gray (historical mystery) - June 17

Stone and Sky - Ben Aaronovitch (urban fantasy) ⭐️ - July 8

The Frozen People - Elly Griffiths (science fiction/mystery) - July 8

Algospeak - Adam Aleksic (linguistics) - July 15

Mayhem at a Halloween Wedding - Emmeline Duncan (cozy mystery) - July 29

Automatic Noodle - Annalee Newitz (cozy science fiction) - August 5

Hemlock and Silver - T. Kingfisher (fantasy) - August 19

Katabasis - R.F. Kuang (dark academia/fantasy) - August 26

Boudicca’s Daughter - Elodie Harper (historical fiction) - August 28

Hot Wax - M.L. Rio (fiction) - September 9

The Haunting of William Thorn - Ben Alderton (gothic horror) 🏳️‍🌈 - September 9

A Tangle in Time - Josiah Bancroft (steampunk/mystery) - September 9

The Summer War - Naomi Novik (fantasy) - September 16

Ladies in Hating - Alexandra Vasti (historical romance) 🏳️‍🌈 - September 25

The Gnomes of Lychford - Paul Cornell (contemporary fantasy) - September 25

What Stalks the Deep - T. Kingfisher (horror) 🏳️‍🌈 - September 30

Silver and Lead - Seanan McGuire (urban fantasy) - September 30

Cinder House - Freya Marske (horror/retelling) 🏳️‍🌈 - October 7

The Bakery Dragon and the Fairy Cake - Devin Elle Kurtz (cozy fantasy/picture book) - October 7

He’s So Possessed With Me - Corey Liu (YA horror) 🏳️‍🌈 🇨🇦 - October 14

The Keeper of Magical Things - Julie Leong (cozy fantasy) ⭐️ - November 4

Brigands and Breadknives - Travis Baldree (cozy fantasy) - November 11

Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot - Alexis Hall (contemporary romance) 🏳️‍🌈 - December 9

[myhyperfixationisbooks]

Who’s gonna wipe away their tears?

Spotify💙 Airbuds🫐 Pinterest📘 My parents: @wish-i-were-heather and @elysianwayy77 My wonderful pookie wife: @azzie-mazzie My other accounts: @edoria-ellowyn @blondes-do-it-better81 I’m Edoria!!! • fifteen(do NOT be weird or you’ll be blocked immediately) • bisexual • she /her • mythology nerd • reader • writer • plays piano (terribly) • cabin ? Idk sadly • def hunter of Artemis • swimmer • slytherin • speak french, german and english • theatre kid • nerd • entj • scorpio <3

Some of my favourites thing~ clothes, books, english class, music, depeche mode, the smiths, converse, lipgloss, my moots, makeup, gilmore girls, mary janes, doc martens, swimming, school(ik it’s bad), halloween, christmas, my doggie, jeans, sweaters, cookies, skiing, fall, summer, my mom, ballet, baking, candles, dark red, heels, history, movies, randomly cutting my hair, being a delusional teenage girl, shopping, the dead poets society, the 80s and 90s,

My music taste~ the smiths, depeche mode, the beatles, chappell roan, mitski, girl in red, mckenna grace, kate bush, conan gray, taylor swift, mother mother, anything disney, billie eilish, fiona apple, arctic monkeys, sza, the cranberries, lana del rey, tv girl, the neighbourhood, cigarettes after sex, marina

FANDOMS~ THE FOLK OF THE AIR • the inheritance games • shatter me • Madeline Miller verse • agggtm • riordanverse aka pjo • heartstopper • book thief • marauders • the maze runner • hamilton •marvel • divergent • six of crows • shadow and bone • ember in the ashes • stranger things • the hunger games • the neighbourhood • taylor swift • chappel roan • billie eilish • arctic monkeys • kennabears • tdps • and so many more if you’re wondering if I’m in the fandom just ask (I probably am)

If we’re moots pls text me the only reason I haven’t texted you is bc idk what to say <3

[frugzyx]

Hogwarts AU

James as Gryffindor❤️, Lars as Slytherin💚, Kirk as Hufflepuff💛 and Cliff as Ravenclaw💙

I'll draw Gryff Jaymz and Ravenclaw Clip more and next time I'll draw Hufflepuff Jason and Slytherin Dave too. i really love this au so maybe I'll draw this when i have time again ;]

*Why I put dave as a Slytherin and not Gyffindor? simple, his ambition is to be better than tallica. maybe his appearance looks so Gryffindor boi but he has a real ambition as a pure Slytherin 💚

My Hogwarts imagination 🪄🧹🔮✨️

These all imaginations, are just my silly imagination of em in hoggy woggy Hogwarts life

Well for Kirky... he'll like muggle studies and magical creatures or transfiguration I guess. also ykw? I'd like to see Kirk in herbology or care of magical creatures classes... it'll be so cute seeing him with a bowtruckle like Newt Scammander... 😭✨️🌿

for James, I think he'll like any class beside divination, ancient runes and other boring classes. I can imagine he prefer to go play quidditch with the sport gang. ohhh and seems he likes duelling to showcase his power like duelling with Dave 🧹✨️ 💨

Lars... hmm... I think he'll like astronomy and charms or maybe defense against the dark arts(DADA) classes. I can see Seamus Finnigan in him when casting wingardium leviosa in charms class and exploded LMFAO 💥💀🪄

Obviously Cliff would love potions, ancient runes, arithmancy, alchemy and history of magic. idk why, but I think it suits him well. I can imagine him being friend with Snape lmfao. and i think he hates divination cuz it doesn't make any sense for him. oh and he's such a good friend of James 📘🪄✨️

I can see Jason interested in muggle stuffs. So I think he'll like muggle studies and muggle arts. not only muggle stuffs, I can see him in transfiguration and charms or care of magical creatures classes with a cute niffler. he's the real Cedric Diggory in this AU hehe 🪶✨️🪄

last but not least... Dave as a Slytherin. yeah you didn't read it wrong!! he has a strong ambition to defeat James, ofc in Quidditch. I can imagine him in DADA class duelling with James. also I think he likes potions and divination. 🧹🔮✨️

okay, we got a new member, Rob!! I can't even put him anywhere bcz I don't know whether he's in Gryff or Hufflepuff. sorry bout that qwq... but dw I asked some of my friends that he's a total Gryff!! I can see him mostly like James. He's okay with all of the classes in hogwarts, but he still finds that divination is such a ridiculous class just like everyone. I think his favorite classes is astronomy and DADA 🌌🪄🪶

[bonequest]

📕📗📘💦🍆 A Brief History of BoneQuest Books: A Foray Into Nonsense

[pitsapitsa]

Last reblog, it's ask reminded me again!!!! About how two years ago I gave my first and annotated with love copy of the secret history to my friend and she haven't read it yet...

I tried to get it back a few times (we live in different cities) and now she is in another another city and I doubt that she took that book with her. I stopped texting her because she stopped replying and i felt miserable tbh.

I'm sad about how those annotations are from a past version of me and i don't even remember what i wrote there. But i remember that I had a whole Henry Winter dedicated bookmark color. (Blue📘)

[novanhistorian]

The Three Worlds

I got to a nasty bit of the Sketch of History where I have to explain the political and social developments of three different, borderline-independent cultural spheres at the same time, so I decided I would write a post complaining about the novan* cultural concept of the Worlds as an indirect explanation and apology. This has been a very bad introductory paragraph.

* The idea started developing as soon as the humans started mining the Asteroid Belt and noticed it took a long time to get letters to their loved ones; but only during the War Era, by which time the humans had left, did the divisions between Terranovo, the Moon, and the Belt become sharp enough that “the Three Worlds” entered common parlance.

Below the cut, in 1.5k words:

What exactly is a World, anyway?

Scientia is a solar system, Earth is a planet.

The Classical and Modern Three Worlds.

What exactly is a World, anyway?

To understand the Worlds, one has to understand the communication shortfalls that plague any civilization stretched over a distance larger than it can comfortably and swiftly travel. Worlds are defined by access to information, and their borders with one another are often rather fuzzy.

Think of the Roman Empire, where a message might take months to go from one side to the other and be, as a result, very out of date by the time it got there. The Moon and the Belt of the First- and Second-Academy eras were like that—despite sharing more or less the same culture and being part of a (mostly) contiguous political unit, the distance between them was so great that it made it very hard, or very time-consuming, to transmit messages from one side to the other. That’s your most connected kind of world.

Admittedly, that’s very close to the end of the weird spectrum of definitions that later novan public opinion draws a great big curly brace over and labels “worlds.” The boundaries between “multiple different worlds” and “one very large world” are fuzzy. Arguments can be and are made that the Moon and the Planet were one world until the Departure, and even your author, who does not agree with them, is a bit hesitant in labelling the mostly cohesive Roman Empire (…we’re assuming the Empire under the Four Good Emperors here, so they’re not at war with themselves) as multiple worlds.

Now think of the Roman Empire and Han China. These two are a good example of the second kind of world, and they’re like the Planet and the Belt were in the War Era—incredibly distant, rarely if ever meeting in person, but knowing of each other and trading, albeit indirectly.

The third kind of world, which one only ever knows about after the fact, is a complete informational impasse. Neither side knows the other exists, and they develop completely independent of one another culturally. You can guess what analogy I’d make here, right?

So, to recap:

A world is an informational and/or cultural sphere, usually defined by physical separation.

The most separated worlds can be compared to Eurasia/Africa and the Americas prior to 1492 and/or the Vikings. No information passes between one and the other, and neither is aware they’re not alone.

The middle type of world separation is like Han China and the Roman Empire. Each is aware the other exists and some information and trade can pass between them, but neither has much effect on the other. Interaction usually happens through independent intermediaries, who may alter information or just boldfacedly lie to suit their own ends.

The closest distinct worlds are within one large cultural sphere, like the Roman Empire, where information takes a very long time to pass from one end to the other. The boundaries between this and just being one very large world are blurry. (England and America at the time of the latter’s revolution would also qualify.)

No one actually distinguishes between these three categories, or has a rigid definition for what a world is anyway. The concept is entirely based on vibes. God I love pop geography.

Scientia is a solar system, Earth is a planet

I shall now get very distracted.

Boundaries between different analogies for the worlds on Earth are often indistinct, seeing as the worst barriers we as a species have between groups are oceans or a hell of a lot of landmass. The different worlds on a hell of a lot of landmass all kind of bleed together—if you went from al-Andalus to Kievan Rus’ in the twelfth century, you’d find (despite a distinctive cultural break between the Muslims and the Christians, and between various regions within Christendom) that every town you passed through was aware of the events in nearby towns. There would be no clear information barrier cleanly differentiating one world from another. There’s a reason novan scholars all but throw out applying the world framework to Earth.

Scientia isn’t like that. Its worlds don’t slowly peter out over thousands of inhabited miles; they terminate in massive physical gulfs.

From the jump, there’s a weeks-long gap between the Moon sending a courier ship out to the miners in the Asteroid Belt and it actually getting there, and although that gets better over time it never goes away. The Belt kept basically the Moon’s culture until the last century before Departure, when the Third Academy curled its limbs to its chest like a dying spider pursued more Lunar-centric policies that indirectly cut a bunch of mining companies loose. These loose mining companies turned into semi-independent proto-states, and the Belt for the first time developed a stable population of its own, not constantly cycling in and out of the Moon and keeping itself culturally Lunar.

There’s an atmosphere between the Moon and Terranovo, so, even though communication by radio or limited internet can go much faster, actual physical transit of people and goods is extremely difficult and costly. The transit difficulty meant Planetary cultures developed largely without the kind of Lunar hegemony the Belt had had, and Lunar discipline (the Moon still being the seat of government and, nominally, all power) in practice came down by ordering some other Planetary city to discipline the miscreant. The amount of information that could flow between the general populace of the Moon and the general populace on Terranovo was fairly small, but did exist under the Human Tenure. After the Departure and the beginning of the War Era, there stopped reliably being people at the government radio receivers on either end of the Planet/Moon divide and information ceased what trickle there had been. Pretty much only the richest merchants and their employees had any off-planet contact, and that was because they physically went there at great expense.

So, in short, Terranovo has an almost-impassable barrier between it and the Moon, and the Moon has between it and the Belt an inconveniently long travel time.

The Classical and Modern Three Worlds

The Classical Three Worlds, only thus named after the fact, are the Moon, the Planet, and the Asteroid Belt.

The Modern Three Worlds are Terranovo, Ilajn, and the Mining Belt (the Moon having been rendered uninhabitable after the Devastation).

Opinions differ on which world to slot the Armada (the Imperial spacefleet) into; it’s clearly a part of the Novan Imperium, which otherwise only exists on Terranovo, but there’s an atmosphere between the two and at times it acts like an independent country. Its cultural exchange is mostly with the Belt, with whom it has a centuries-old trading relationship in addition to, you know, generally being the local suzerain. Making matters worse, it has stiff regulations on what information can lawfully pass between it and all outsiders. If not for tradition, it would probably be considered a world of its own.

[turning-pages-seeking-sages]

📖✨ Monthly Reading Wrap-Up

August 2024 Edition

📕 The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett Fantasy/Mystery | ★★★★☆ (4.5/5) A complex mystery unfolds in a world where magic is part of everyday life, forcing detectives to unravel the truth behind a series of high-profile murders. Review: A delightful mix of Attack on Titan, political intrigue unraveled by an autistic Sherlock Holmes-like character and a queer magically-augmented dyslexic sword-wielding sidekick.

📗 The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo Historical Fiction/Fantasy | ★★★★☆ (4.5/5) Set in 19th-century Malaysia, this tale weaves folklore with history as a woman discovers the magical secrets of an ancient spirit. Review: A beautiful tale of grief, love, magic, and myth that kept me thoroughly engaged.

📘 The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell Historical Fiction | ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) This novel explores the violent and turbulent times of England’s Viking invasions through the eyes of a dispossessed nobleman. Review: Uhtred is a Mary Sue and I don't know why more people don't call it out.

📙 Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend Non-fiction/History | ★★★★★ (5/5) An enlightening account of Aztec history, told from the perspective of the Mexica people themselves, challenging commonly accepted narratives. Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and plan on reading more historical nonfiction about Ancient Mexico.

📕 Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson Contemporary Fiction | ★★★★☆ (4/5) A multi-generational family drama unfolds as siblings discover hidden truths about their mother’s past and inheritance. Review: This book landed a few emotional punches, and I was not prepared.

📗 Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas Horror/Historical Fiction | ★★★★☆ (4/5) In 19th-century Texas, a young healer battles supernatural forces as the undead rise against the living. Review: I enjoyed the historical context of the backdrop but I wish there was more healing magic and horror.

📘 Slewfoot by Brom Horror/Fantasy | ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A Puritan widow in colonial New England makes a pact with a forest spirit to reclaim her land, but dark forces are at play. Review: It had promise but the pacing was off and Abitha made some infuriating choices.

📙 Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson Fantasy | ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) In a world of magical seas, Tress sets out on a perilous journey to save her friend, navigating dangerous waters and an evil sorceress. Review: I tried to read this book at least three times, but it just didn't click with me.

📕 Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist Fantasy | ★★★★☆ (4/5) A family moves into a rural house, only to find themselves entangled in an ancient faerie conflict that threatens their world. Review: Eerie and oddly nostalgic, this book reads more like a movie.

🔮 Reading Challenge Progress:

2024 Book Reading Challenge: 45/52 Progress: 87%

[chbnews]

I've borrowed a history book from cabin 6 and I lost it, now they banned me to borrow any books from them because it happened few times more before that. I apologized but it didn't changed. I dunno what to do, I love history 😔

- Alp Kaya, son of Ares( @best-siblings-ever )

Oh gosh, I’ll see if my friend from cabin 20 can try to make a locating spell for you to find it. (My siblings don’t take missing books very lightly 😭) - 🦋📘Anon Son of Athena📘🦋

[jackiequick]

What If The Dagger Squad Were Teachers Headcanons… 👩‍🏫📚👨‍🏫

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! 📓

—> If you haven’t seen the last post yet, it was What If The Daggers Were YouTubers 🎥

— Starting this out by saying Iceman is the Principal while Slider is Vice Principal of Top Gunner High School 🛩 and Maverick is one of older teachers there, also the Driver’s Ed instructor as well. Now onto the Daggers!

Mr Rooster Bradshaw ~ Music Teacher 🎶

Mr. Bradshaw classroom is a pretty chill environment but it can get kinda chilly due to the AC being on or windows being open sometimes. It’s a very simple set up with posters on the wall, instruments played neatly in alphabetical order and plenty of notes on his write board with the lesson plan.

Bradley easily a very tough but patient teacher, always trying to be very gentle and patient with his students even if they can roughly annoy him sometimes. He’s tough and will call out a child if they’re not being best behavior with the others students, he wants everyone to be treated fairly in his classroom!

In the very front of his classroom, nearby the whiteboard and SMART board, Mr Bradshaw has a gorgeous black cherry one of a kind piano. And he will play that thing every single Friday for his students as everyone sang ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ as loudly as they want! They also has his students play songs on the piano and other instruments too of course.

Rooster tends to take a lot of requests from his students and staff for songs to play everyday they come into the classroom. He labeled it ‘Bradshaw School Playlist’ as hooks it up to the speakers every time he can.

Speaking of song requests, Rooster always takes songs from the suggestion box in the front of the classroom and depending on the song, that will be the song they analyze that day for class.

Mr Hangman Seresin ~ Gym 👟

One of the youngest P.E./Gym teachers in the school and he takes that with pride. He knows he’s one of the young teacher for standard stereotypical ones are supposed to look like but he doesn’t care. Since Hangman a lot more active he’s able to keep up with the young students physically, mentally and emotionally!

He knows all about jokes and fun Tumblr fan pages the students created about him & Mr Rooster. Hell, he encourages it! His students laugh and tease the teachers for their tension haha. Especially the winks Jake leaves Bradley with sometimes during the school week.

Anyways, back to teacher stuff! Jake is a simple and fun gym teacher, every three weeks he has his students playing all the sports and games he can think of. Volleyball, baseball, mini basketball tournaments, hockey, tennis, ping pong, football games outside in the field and etc.

And if you wonder about Time Of The Month, Jake totally understands! He grew up with sisters, a sweet southern mama and a few girlfriends to know how annoyingly painful periods can be. He will let the girls sit on the sidelines of the gym if needed.

Mr Phoenix Trace & Mr Bob Floyd ~ Social Studies & History 📕📗📘

These two have their classrooms next to one another, so it made it easier to keep track of each other’s students while also popping in to chat. Sending their students into classrooms to collect or swap sheets with.

Social Studies with Phoenix is a fun one, she tends to challenge, joke around and teases her students with questions during class to see who was paying attention and who wasn’t (You know who you are!!). She wants all her students to pay attention and treat people with plenty of respect.

Phenix is very helpful as a teacher and always listens to her students. She’s very open to hear them out and give them suggestions or cut them some slack if needed. She’s the Mama Bear of the teachers, cause she has such a big heart!

History with Bob is pretty a chill one, he tends to play music in the background as the students work on their classwork (and whatever was leftover sometimes will be homework on Fridays). Bob always has his eyes and hears on high alert, so he might catch you quickly, if he sees your doing something your not supposed to be doing.

Bob takes participation very seriously as he likes if everyone can communicate, interact nicely and understand the lessons. Sharing thoughts and answering questions. Even coming up to the SMART Board to explain and demonstrate certain topics of history. Bob doesn’t tolerate misbehavior and rude people in his classroom, especially if a teacher or fellow students is presenting something to the class. So be nice! 

Mr. Fanboy Garcia ~ Science teacher 🔬

One of young nerdy science teacher, he tends to try to dabble in teaching a bit everything over the years. But the ones the schools will give him are Biologically and Earth Science, with some Chemistry too.

Fanboy always treats his students with care and respect, expecting the same thing in return. If there’s no respect or everyone is misbehaving in his classroom, you wouldn’t get the happy and somewhat loud teacher. He will be quiet and annoyed, everyone will get memo to act better.

He’s the teacher to nerd out about certain things in between class and if he’s able to incorporate his love for fandoms into the classroom he would. Fanboy will joke around and mention Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Star Trek and etc during lessons to get the point across. Some students will catch onto it and smiles, others might be confused until he explains it in between the lessons.

Those tricky science tests? Well if the class is good enough and depending on the exam, they will be an open book test with notes. Fanboy wants to see who’s actually paying attention and taking notes, and who’s not. So he can re-teach and go over certain topics later on.

Mr Payback Fitch - English teacher 💻

This man one of the chill teachers in this school. So in result his classroom tends to be be very relax and entertaining for his students. Payback tends to have books to read, notebooks to use, sheets of papers in his closet, pens and pencil in the front of the classroom and etc. Along with posters on the wall to help with tips and tricks for writing and reading.

He’s very causal with his students and treats them plenty of patients and support during lessons. He expects the same in return, to have respect and patience with him.

Payback enjoys teaching his students all about writing stories, reading chapters of books their using to the class, explaining themes and ideas, the passion and mindset behind a character, points of view and the list goes on.

He tends to play movies in his classrooms usually they were related to the lessons but sometimes they were used as talking points. As for projects, he has one very specific project he enjoys doing, Shakespeare Fair! Each grade is given a Shakespeare book to reads, have lessons based on and a project to do. This is where he gets to see the creativity of all the students in the school shine!

Mr Coyote Machado - Art Teacher 🎨

Get your sketch books and art supplies out because you will be taking note here. This man is cocky, sweet and a gentlemen, he will joke and call you out on your shit if he notice something ain’t fitting the vibe to the grooves of the classroom.

Coyote is the type of teacher that encourages creativity and critical thinking. His classroom is where students can experiment, make mistakes and learn from each other. Use that mind of theirs!

Each month he puts up two interesting fact about Art to impress and inspire everyone. He doesn’t want his students to give, he wants them to try and try until they feel satisfied with them. Or to at least say they tried!

His art class consist mainly of class projects and assignment reflecting a certain degree of styles. Painting, pop art, cubism, contemporary, fantasy, impressionist and etc. He tends to encourage his students to use the supplies and examples in the room to help with inspiration. Also well as the music Coyote tends to play from his speakers from his computer. He usually takes music requests!

—-

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy it and happy Teacher Appreciation Week 👩‍🏫👨‍🏫

Tags: @mandylove1000 @gaminggirlsstuff @t-nd-rfoot @fanboygarcia @topgun-imagines @rooster-84 @hangmanbrainrot @bradshawsbaby @gcthvile @msrochelleromanofffelton @hanlueluver @starkleila and etc

[ninja-muse]

2024 Release TBR

🏳️‍🌈 - queer MC     🇨🇦 - Canadian author    ⭐️ - BIPOC MC 📘 - have an ARC bold - newly added

The Secret History of Bigfoot - John O'Connor (travel/history) - February 6

Ending the Pursuit - Michael Paramo (sociology) - February 8

Tomorrow’s Children - Daniel Polansky (post-apocalypse) - February 27

The Baker and the Bard - Fern Haught (YA cozy fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈- March 5

The Tower - Flora Carr (historical fiction) 📘 - March 5

Parasol Against the Axe - Helen Oyeyemi (literary fiction) ⭐️📘- March 5

Those Beyond the Wall - Micaiah Johnson (science fiction) ⭐️📘 - March 12

The Floating Hotel - Grace Curtis (cozy science fiction) 🏳️‍🌈 - March 19

The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones (horror) ⭐️ 📘- March 26

This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances - Eric LaRocca (horror) 📘- April 2

Catchpenny - Charlie Huston (science fiction) 📘- April 9

The Proper Thing and Other Stories - Seanan McGuire (fantasy) - May 1

Plain Jane and the Mermaid - Vera Brosgol (YA fantasy) - May 7

Dreadful - Caitlin Rozakis (fantasy) - May 28

Tidal Creatures - Seanan McGuire (contemporary fantasy) - June 4

Echo of Worlds - M.R. Carey (science fiction) - 📘 June 25

Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle (horror) 🏳️‍🌈 - July 9

I Was a Teenage Slasher - Stephen Graham Jones (horror) - July 16 📘⭐️

Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop - Emmeline Duncan (cozy mystery) - July 23

The Wordhunter - Stella Sands (mystery) - August 6

The Dollmakers - Lynn Buchanan (fantasy) - August 13 📘

Radiant Sky - Alan Smale (science fiction) - August 27

Buried Deep and Other Stories - Naomi Novik (fantasy/short stories) - September 17

Nightstrider - Sophia Slade (fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈- September 17

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society - C.M. Waggoner (fantasy) - September 20

Villain - Natalie Zina Walschots (superhero fiction) 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 - October 1 suspect this has moved to 2026

The City in Glass - Nghi Vo (fantasy) - October 1

Swordcrossed - Freya Marske (fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈 - October 8

My Kind of Trouble - L.A. Schwartz (romance) - October 8

Shoestring Theory - Mariana Costa (fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈 - October 8

Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy (cozy fantasy) 🏳️‍🌈 - October 15

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord - Garth Nix (middle grade fantasy) 📘 - October 15

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door - H.G. Parry (fantasy) - October 22

Usurpation - Sue Burke (science fiction) - October 29

The Improvisers - Nicole Glover (historical fantasy) - November 5 ⭐️

Inkworld: the Color of Revenge - Cornelia Funke (middle grade fantasy) - November 12 📘

The Rivals - Jane Pek (mystery) 📘🏳️‍🌈⭐️- December 1 🏳️

[duskcourse]

Our Syscourse Stances

We are filling this out based upon the popularized "Syscourse Code" and will be going in depth in our explanations of our opinions here.

👍💜📘🔺🔵🌖🟦🌲☀️🥧🐊🐞🐳

Question one - Do you believe in endogenic plurality

👍(Y)- Yes

We are pro-endo and have come to the very solidified conclusion that the experience of feeling there is more than one self cannot be limited to one disorder or even category of disorders. It is very clear to me that DID is not "alters disorder" though alternative identities is a major factor in the disorder the focus is on the dissociation and amnesia between these selves/identities. (Selves are a philosophical concept meanwhile "identity" in this sense refers to a psychological phenomenon)

Question two - Opinion on tulpas

💜(TNU) - Nuanced opinion / other

We are pro the practice of what is known as "tulpmancy" in the case that practitioners are willing to learn about the history of the term and understand the problems with how it originally came to be due to the racist history. I believe the modern practice is incredibly divorced from any semblance of what was the original Tibetan practice with "sprulpa". I am however not someone of said culture, thus I defer to them and by and large I have seen the idea that the term should be changed or moved away from.

Question three - Do you think endos just don't remember their trauma

📘(NETR) - People sometimes misunderstand their identity, it doesn't mean everyone is misunderstanding / not remembering.

When we were younger we thought our alters were spontaneous "tulpas" as we were still living in trauma we did not recognize and had excessively high amnesia. We were wrong about that part of our exploration and later amnesia came back and we forgot we were a system all together. This does not mean that all my peers when I was younger had lied about their systems or also were people with DID or OSDD-1.

Question four - Opinion on shared spaces

🔺 (YSP) - Supportive

Originally I thought there should still be specific spaces for DID/OSDD-1 but also as more time has gone by and I have been in so many spaces geared towards mentally ill people- it never goes well. No online spaces should be for just severely vulnerable people. Predators flock there in mass. Thus shared spaces, in my opinion, are best for the safety of all persons. Groups should be created in real life in the form of therapy groups however.

Question five - Do you think endogenic plurality is comparable to transX

🔵(TXA) - No, and I'm against transplural

I want to be clear this isn't us being against willogenic systems and people who engage in what was previously known as "tulpamancy" and now often is referred to as crafting thoughtforms (or the other term I am sadly blanking on). We are against the radqueer community due to extensive racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and abuse apologia. You are not transitioning in the way a trans person is. You are either plural or not. Working with spiritual or psychological practices isn't the same as transitioning in gender. Also I would argue whether or not you happened to be plural by chance or chose to do practices to become so the level of oppression you face is the same- unless it is disordered plurality in which you face systemic ableism as well.

Question six - Do you think you can have DID/OSDD/UDD without trauma

🌖(DTN) - Neutral

I do believe that current research shows all known and studied cases seem to tie back to some level of trauma mixed with other very important elements. However due to the way disorders are categorized in psychology as grouped symptoms and are not actually a true easily spotted one condition... it is very likely that it could be caused by other factors. DID is not one condition, it is a grouping of symptoms. We know all these various symptoms may theoretically occur without trauma. This means it's a very complex issue. However we also know through case studies that almost every case of these coinciding symptoms are predated by trauma.

Question seven - Do you think introjects from other cultures should be able to use that culture's names if they aren't bodily part of it (eg. Japanese introject using Japanese names, while in a white body)

🟦(CNNU) - Nuanced opinion / other

As a mixed white/native person who has never lived in Japan nor had community with Japanese people we believe it would be racist for us to use those names. However there are cases where people can take names from specific groups that on first glance may seem questionable. What matters is the connection to the actual cultures. If someone lives in a specific country, interacts with the cultures, and/or has family of said culture where in the names relate to those relationships it is okay.

Question eight - Opinion on researched self diagnosis

🌲(SDXY) - Supportive

Self diagnosis can be incredibly helpful for those who cannot at some point in time afford care. People who cannot get the care they need should at least have ways to try and find helpful mechanisms to cope. Knowing a disorder you may have can be helpful in order to look at advice and aid from others with the condition or from medical sources until a proper diagnosis and treatment can be had. It is also important you do not attach yourself too much to the self-diagnosis and allow room to accept if it turns out you are wrong and it is something else.

For example when we were younger we thought we might have had BPD aka borderline personality disorder. We have since learned we do not have that disorder and other issues of ours can explain our limited symptomology of BPD.

Question nine - Sysmed as a term

☀️(SMY) - I support it's usage

Sysmed is very useful shorthand for system medicalist and it works well to describe the anti-endo position of needing ton have a diagnosis to explain a form of self-identity that is atypical from the norm. As much as people get mad about it... there is similarities between transgender medicalism and system medicalism.

Question ten - Traumascum as a term

🥧(TSA) - I am against it

My understanding is the term was purposefully made to be shitty by a bait blog. However people at times have used it. It is disgusting and helps nobody.

Question eleven - Endogenic systems using the term 'system'

🐊(ESY) - Supportive

Not that deep- they're systems. System is a very common word.

Question twelve - Endogenic systems using the term 'alter'

🐞 (ESNU) - Nuanced opinion / other

If they're diagnosed with DID or OSDD-1 or medically recognized or have the symptoms aligning with either I believe it's more reasonable. However I do think it's good to have the term alter kept to just DID and OSDD-1 because I see the term as being used more so when expressing there are barriers that need to be worked through between headmates.

Question thirteen - Xeno-origins

🐳 (XEY) - Supportive

Have fun honestly. If labels for yourself help you express and understand your own identity and feel safe and happy then go for it. We like looking for things we can sorta identify with and honestly it can just be comforting as an idea of "wow others experience splits from this too" or similar.