#a lot has happened in the timeframe of originally writing this and coming back to this

[waywardstation]

WIP FRIDAY

I apologize for getting this out two days late, I’ve been busy with lots of packing and events! But I have a little reprieve, so I wanted to post another WIP; this one is from Heart Full, Bowl Empty.

BE AWARE THAT THIS SEGMENT INVOLVES A CONVERSATION REVOLVING AROUND UNWILLING BUT INTENTIONAL STARVATION. I know there are people who say they can’t read this fic because of themes like this, so be aware of this before reading this WIP!!

I included this snippet in today’s WIP because I have like three versions of the entire segment this snippet is from. I feel like it’s a really important segment with a really important conversation, and I’ve had a hard time balancing all the emotions the way I want to between Ingo and Akari, with frustration, sadness, anger, and empathy, to realistically get them to the resolution I want at the end of it.

The final version will probably only include a few parts from this particular segment.

Enjoy!!

—————

“I knew it! You’re doing it again!” Akari’s eyebrows scrunched, trying to understand through the frustration. “You said you wouldn’t!”

“Circumstances will improve soon.” Clearly done with the conversation, that was all Ingo said, but it was confession enough that he had fallen back on his word. Shame contaminated his voice, but if there was any regret, he hid it well.

“No, it won’t!” They were not even half-way through winter yet. “And you know it won’t!”

Ingo said nothing as the kits carefully moved around his slumped form, finding comfortable places to settle around him. She didn’t know if he intended to snuff the conversation out with angered silence, or if he was just too exhausted to care about arguing with her anymore. If it wasn’t for his small occasional signs of movement or acknowledgement, she’d think he was actually sleeping.

Akari carefully stepped into the nesting layers, moving to sit down next to Ingo. She settled with her back against the cavern wall, pulling her knees close as a few kits shuffled around to accommodate her. “You know I’m right.”

Huffing out an irritated sigh and nothing more, it didn’t seem like Ingo had any intentions to engage with her argument anymore.

“You couldn’t even pull yourself up over the ridge,” She prodded at him again, trying to motivate more conversation out of him. “I had to help you!”

“There are many, many factors that go into that.” A reluctant answer, perhaps a reflexive attempt to quell her worry; Ingo feebly rubbed his wrapped hand, almost as a display for his excuse.

“I’ve seen you do more when you’ve been hurt worse.” Akari retorted, a little softer now but still cold.

Ingo’s eyes remained closed, though his hardened expression implied that it came across as more accusatory than she’d intended. But perhaps it was precisely the time to be accusatory.

“Ingo, you’re so tired all the time now – you stopped coming to the training grounds because you just can’t make the trips all the time anymore! And you’re sleeping so much more than you used to, and it’s like you’re always hungry all the time, even though all I see you doing anymore is gathering food!” Akari’s voice grew more jagged as she continued to jab at him, entirely uninterrupted.

It was getting difficult. With Ingo’s tunic still sopping by the bucket, still somewhat red from the exhausted effort of washing out the blood, it could not hide the ribs that pressed out just a little bit more, or help fill out what the waistline had lost under the loosening belt. The abject dread of directly acknowledging that was too much.

“And- and look! You aren’t even willing to hold a conversation with me anymore, and I don’t know if it’s because you just won’t, or because you can’t!” The kits shifted uncomfortably as Akari retreated back into her own frustration instead. “People think you’re sick, Ingo! They’re asking me about you! What are you doing?”

The exhausted man remained where he laid in the nesting material, only moving his hands to rub at his face and sigh — a deep, forced sigh that swelled his side before releasing. Akari almost didn’t think he’d answer her, but with some effort, he propped himself up first onto his elbows, then slumped forward. The teen watched him run shaky fingers through his hair as he sat next to her.

“…I don’t know what I should do.” The guilt. The weary guilt cracked his voice and tore Akari’s anger down to heartache.

[askfallenroyalty]

"After a few months of post-pacifist, Chara feels they "have to true reset" after something bad happens to Flowey"

Ruh-roh; if it's not too spoilery, what happens to Flowey that causes Chara to feel the need to True Reset?

//probably won't be explored for AGES. cause the kids have so much on their plate they're not going to reminisce on why they got on this quest to SAVE Asriel.

And because the True Reset wasn't a year (cause really, that was too extreme in my writing) Frisk isn't like, THAT upset over losing that timeframe. I mean, don't get me wrong, it still sucks, but they were struggling with life post pacifist which is something I regret not committing to. (Frisk implies this way back in Chapter 1)

Frisk likes the adventure underground because its predictable. It's easier than the scary unknown, and Frisk missed their ghost buddy. (another change where because it was so long, Frisk forgot Chara which. I feel is a bit too mean/sad as a story beat. the two saved monsters together. they literally shared a SOUL! of course Frisk cares about Chara and wouldn't forget them!)

anyway i'm going to spoil this plot point. ignore this if you just want to read it in comic.

like in Chapter 4, 5 monsters go missing. (Sans and Papyrus aren't included so it's 5) Frisk is staying with Toriel and is ambassador. There's a lot of tension from that responsibility where they feel torn to just be Toriel's child and being responsible for the peace. Tensions become high but Asgore brushes it off, more humans start to visit monsterkind's home base area. Monsters start exploring the world, more and more monsters go missing and more conflicts build up. Frisk is Scared. The underground is predictable and safe once you know what happens. This is scary, and Frisk has to deal with humanity up front.

Meanwhile, Flowey is the caretaker of the Ruins, mainly gardening and overseeing Chara's grave. When humans start to see Mt.Ebott as a tourist spot, Flowey's home is invaded and defiled. This gets bad enough that a bunch of humans picnic at Chara's grave and get upset when Flowey tells them to scram.

This leads to the humans stomping on the grave (not that anyone knows that it's a grave, but I think on some level Flowey sees it as it. Canon Flowey only pieces that together in NM). Flowey freaks out, gets hit when trying to stop them. Chara's life force is within the flowers + their worry over Flowey causes a True Reset.

This time, while Frisk is upset at being ripped from their life, they understand Chara's dilemma more. Their worries as ambassador and their wish to escape makes this a bit of a relief. (in my thought process that this hard period would of been passed and Frisk would of been happy, but they didn't get the chance to cause of the True Reset)

Also, I want to show Chara and Frisk's bond is greater and more mutual in this version, so Frisk also missed their ghost pal. Cause Chara went through all of that with them. They understand Frisk more than anyone else. They literally shared a SOUL together. Of course Frisk wants their friend back, and right now they're upset. Of course Frisk would see their job as peace keeper and savior incomplete.

in the first writing of AFR I never explained why Chara wanted to True Reset. I was saving to reveal Flowey and Chara had a fight, or that Flowey was growing more depressed and it'd be foreshadowing for Asriel's present day depression but I already felt bad over how the backstory was handled and didn't wanna add more onto it.

Now, when Asriel is king Frisk can reflect on what the original timeline was like, and how stressful it was and Chara can be like "yeah and humans coming in only caused problems for us too. we couldn't protect ourselves." which shows the stakes of what could happen if Asriel doesn't handle things "correctly" this time. Which obvs builds up to the border closing, which while, yeeeessss monsters were unsafe and public understanding of them was limited and humans can suck, is STILL VERY BAD.

hoping this all works better to show character motivations and makes things feel more organic and less angsty x-x like the whole point was they were trying to help Flowey, the focus should be on the kindness of that. And yes, its important to respect Frisk's life too, but I feel it can be in character if pushed in this scenario to want to use the SAVE power alongside Chara. Which is why they can remember true resets, cause they're still a team

[moonshine-nightlight]

Nothing’s Wrong with Dale - Part Five

It’s been a week, but you’re fairly certain your fiancé accidentally got himself replaced by an eldritch being from the Depths. Deciding  that he’s certainly not worse than your original fiancé, you endeavor to keep the engagement and his new non-human state to yourself.

However, this might prove harder than you originally thought.

Fantasy, arranged marriage, malemonsterxfemalereader, M/F

Story Status: Complete 

AO3: Nothing’s Wrong with Dale Chapter 5

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four] Part Five [Part Six] [Part Seven] [Part Seven.5] [Part Eight] [Part Nine] [Part Ten] [Part Eleven] [Part Twelve] [Part Thirteen] [Part Fourteen] [Part Fifteen] [Part Sixteen] [Part Seventeen] [Part Eighteen] [Part Nineteen] [Part Twenty] [Part Twenty-One] [Part Twenty-Two] [Part Twenty-Three] [Part Twenty-Four] [Part Twenty-Five] [Part Twenty-Six] [Part Twenty-Seven] [Part Twenty-Eight] [Part Twenty-Nine] [Part Thirty] [Part Thirty-One] [Part Thirty-Two] [Part Thirty-Three] [Part Thirty-Four] [Part Thirty-Five]

“Are you certain you have the vigor for this, sweetheart?” Grandmother Northridge asks Dale after he joins them at the table, but declines any wine.

“Of course, Grandmother,” he replies smoothly. You’d parted company over an hour ago and he still seems to be as awake and alert as he did them—perhaps he truly has recovered physically. “I simply find that if I refrain from drinking anything besides tea,” he nods at you, “or water until the evening, it’s easier to stay awake.”

Grandfather Northridge laughs, slapping Dale’s shoulder as he walks around him to take his own seat. You tense when Dale does, his eyes flickering all white for a split second before he seems to remember himself, calming as he realizes the hit was not an act of aggression. “You’re becoming an old woman before you’ve even married.”

His wife swipes his goblet with ease, impressive given the state of her eyesight. “Watch what you say, Archie,” she teases, her unfocused eyes still managing to glint with mischief. “What sort of example are you setting for our grandson and his future wife?”

Grandfather pouts briefly as she takes a healthy sip from his goblet before he smiles, leaning over to press a kiss to her cheek. “Of course I didn’t mean you, my lovely battleaxe.”

Grandmother sniffs as she considers his words before she passes the goblet back to him. “Of course.” She winks at you and you look down with a smile. “Now,” Grandmother turns and beckons imperiously. A scribe hurries over from where she’d been fussing with some papers. “We can get back to the real business. Planning your wedding.”

“While the second moon after the spring Equinox is still our rough timeframe, the astrologer I initially hired ran off while you were ill, dear,” she tells Dale. She tuts as she continues, “You know how those sorts are, always prone to flights of fancy and terror.” You swallow, casting a nervous glance at Dale who’s smirking to himself—likely the poor astrologer figured out what happened to him. Since most demons who come over uninvited tend to have rather dramatic and nefarious plans, with a lot of potential for collateral damage, you’re not surprised he left in a hurry.

For a demon summoning, provided one managed to open a portal as deep as they were aiming for with enough power to keep it open, the majority of learning and studies went to writing the correct exclusionary principles and setting the right lures. Summonings were conducted with a specific goal in mind by the summoner and most of the spellwork was to ensure the correct demon was allowed up.

While you’ve no idea what Dale had intended technically, you assume he was attempting to catch a demon who could give him considerable power to take out certain people he saw as rivals and perhaps bully others for more advantageous business dealings. However, there is no chance that he would have consented to being possessed–too full of himself to consider letting someone else in as well.

That means he either didn’t set the parameters right, and summoned a demon powerful enough to possess him anyway, or he didn’t lock in his power source correctly–and a human always has the most potential energy near a summoning. You’d bet on the latter, with Dale being consumed and the portal left open with his body for the taking long enough for a demon to follow the line up.

Regardless, an unsummoned demon rarely was the sort, having fought off others for the opportunity, who lacked ambition or strength. And if there’s one thing that’s true about all demons, is that they’re always ravenous. Freshly summoned, unfettered demons have no qualms about taking what they crave nor waste any time in the taking.

How restrained Dale has been, appetite for food aside, is unusual as far as you can tell as a layperson, but perhaps his weakened state slowed him down long enough for him gain that control? At the very least, he seems committed to staying on the Surface and those that choose to do so tend to care less for immediate gratification.

Still, you wonder what Dale truly hungers for. 

There are a few tales of demons who lived, unbound and unsummoned, on the Surface for years without leaving disaster in their wake, but they are very very rare or not discussed openly—not in your own lands and certainly not here in Northridge. All of this to say that, just because you have no better options other than to stay, doesn’t mean an astrologer felt the same once he realized the potential danger.

You’re surprised Grandmother managed to get a coherent reading from any astrologer since this happened. Especially one who could give a full-write fifty day up as it appeared they had--at least, as far as you could tell from the upside down charts in Grandmother’s hands. While you’re not surprised Grandmother had gone to the trouble of getting a reading done for the wedding, it was a common enough practice among nobility if a bit old-fashioned, you are surprised she found someone new on such short notice who was at all competent. 

Although, maybe they aren’t.

While caught up in your thoughts, Grandmother has pulled over a large mounted glass. It reminds you of the mirrors some lady’s use for their face paint mixed with some sort of magnifying glass an alchemist might use. Apparently it has a high enough magnification that she can read the chart under it, although with the way she’s squinting, you’re not sure how much good it's doing.

Grandfather leans over to look as well, but, given the way he shakes his head, you’re fairly certain it's too magnified for him. Perhaps it's a good thing no one can read whatever predictions the astrologer has laid out. “Ah, here we are. Young people these days—always writing so small. We have plenty of paper, there is no need to be quite so economical with it.”

A fond smile spreads across your face at her complaining. You’re surprised to catch Dale’s eye and notice a similar wry look on his face. He winks at you, cheerfully mischievous in a way that reminds you of Grandmother, but not at all of who he once was. You feel yourself settle, holding his gaze for longer than you have since he was sick. You find yourself warming up to the idea that he might have a true sense of humor.

“Well, this man certainly has a flair for the dramatic. Instead simply saying some days don’t look promising, he’s crossed them out completely. “Under No Circumstances” it says here. Really—the overreaction.” You feel some dread curdle in your gut at the idea that the astrologer could have foreseen something so dire. You know some of them do exaggerate, but given what happened… You eye Dale again, but he doesn’t seem overly concerned, the same indulgent and amused look is still on his face as he listens.

“He’s only left us with three possible dates, the audacity,” Grandmother huffs. “I’ve never seen such a thing.”

“Perhaps we should contract another astrologer,” Grandfather suggests mildly, but he too frowns as he finally locates one of the copies of the calendars to study.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Grandmother chides. “And wait even longer? No, no, we can work with this. I simply might send a strongly worded letter to the certification board president. Why, someone with less nerve than I might be actually frightened by such theatrical language. In the end, he has only truly endorsed the fourteenth, the eighteenth, and the twenty-seventy of Hectary.”

You reach out to pull one of the calendars out from the stack, turning it right way round so you and Dale can study it. You notice the standard notes regarding the handful of feast days, the lunar status, and already known events along with the astrologer’s specific commentary. 

Grandmother is right: his notes are quite peculiar. 

Six of the days shown are completely scribbled over in dark red ink stating “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES”.  More than ten days say nothing more than “IT’S A ‘NO’ FROM ME” or “OUTLOOK NOT GOOD” and also are crossed out with a single thick line of red ink.

Of course, there are a handful of days that say the more typical “WEATHER POOR” or “TRAVEL NOT ADVISED”. 

You have no idea why one day is simply labeled “PROPHECY” or another labeled “SECRETS”. 

“Um.” Your eyes fix on the one you understand the least. “Why are the days labeled “GREAT AUNT DEBORAH WILL SURELY COME” crossed out in red?”

Grandfather shuddered. “No, no—those are sensible. We asked to know that. Definitely not.” His frown depends as he reads another crossed out date that merely says: “You already have plans, don’t forget”. ”What is happening on Pentary 26th?”

“That is our anniversary,” Grandmother replies with a glint in her eye.

“Oh! Right, of course,” Grandfather quickly corrects and looks back down at the calendar. “21st is the Solstice, so we have that feast in the city with the ha Kieths.”

“Do you have any objections to simply choosing one of the acceptable days, dear?” Grandmother asks, turning her gaze to you. The three she mentioned earlier are all clearly labeled in green stating ever so encouragingly “WEDDING CAN OCCUR WITHOUT CATASTROPHE”.

“Oh, no,” you say. You don’t particularly care which day, although perhaps sooner rather than later. You’re not sure how well Dale can control himself for how long. He seems completely human this morning, beyond the brief moment with his eyes. You give a small shrug of your shoulders, for all you can hear your mother’s sniff of disdain at such a common fidget. “Any of them should be fine.”

“Lovely, which seems best?” Grandmother asks the rest of them at large, studying the strange calendar.

“The eighteenth,” Dale says immediately. “Of course.”

Grandfather blinks in the face of his certainty. “The twenty-seventh of Hectary would give us more time to plan.” He’s watching Dale in a way that makes you nervous, like he’s almost suspicious of his answer. Of course it is a suspicious answer—you can’t see original Dale having cared which date in particular, except perhaps the sooner he could inherit, the better.

“And the fourteenth of Hectary would allow you to wed sooner,” Grandmother adds, echoing your thoughts.

“The twenty-seventh is a full moon,” Dale says frowning at them as if they can’t see the obvious. “I’m not sure why the astrologer didn’t take that into account seeing as he took the time to note it, but you cannot be wed with a full moon. And the eighteenth is lucky.” He seems to see how confused the rest of them are and inexplicably looks to you, looking for…something.

“I think I’ve heard that, about a full moon,” you offer tentatively, racking your brain for something to say and bridge this gap between Dale and his grandparents before they think too hard about it. “My Helani friends refuse to travel on full moon nights—or plan anything that might call for travel around then.”

Grandfather sniffs. “A strange superstition.” 

You decide not to point it out that most superstitions are, by definition, strange and arbitrary. “The eighteenth gives us a full month to allow for the travel of others, if we send the invitations within the next day or so without extending our betrothal by another month,” you continue. The best way to divert suspicion from Dale’s insistence is to make it appear logical. “Some of my family might need even those few days of extra time.”

“Additional travel time for guests is always appreciated,” Grandmother says agreeably. “Very well, the eighteenth it is.” She circles the date on her copy of the calendar. You wonder if you can keep the version you and Dale are looking at—some of the astrologer’s notes might prove useful. In particular, that day marked “A SURPRISE - YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS” seems worth preparing for.

Luckily, the next step is the guest list. Grandmother and Grandfather fuss over their own list of local important figures and family members—the majority you recognize from your morning lessons—and national figures who expect an invitation but won’t actually come. 

Dale only questions the royal invitations—not understanding why they would invite someone they know won’t come. Grandfather gives him another questioning look. Luckily Dale must realize he’s missing something he should know and subsides in his objections easily. He still looks confused, but you can’t explain without drawing attention to the fact that he requires one. Dale was very apt at political maneuvering and full of himself, there’s no way he wouldn’t have invited these people on the off chance they might show up for bragging rights alone.

He argues about one distant cousin, saying she’s dead, so why would she be invited? When Grandmother protests she is not and that she has recovered from her bout of illness. You wonder if he can tell somehow, with his other powers, if she is alive or not. He’s smart enough to realize since he can’t say how he knows with any specificity when Grandfather asks and so lets the matter go.

You and your mother had drawn up a guest list before you came over with your father to stay in Northridge almost three weeks ago. Keeping the copy you made yourself, you present the list written in your mother’s secretary's hand. 

“Thank you, dear,” grandmother says as she looks it over briskly with her magnifying glass before handing it to her clerk. “I appreciate your moderation. To hear some of my contemporaries, brides wish to invite every person they have ever met these days.”

You give a meek smile. You’re not going to admit that you have few peers that would deign to show up for the occasion, let alone friends that you would actually want to come. Since you were frequently sick throughout your growing years, you seldom left your family home then. Once you were fit enough to attend schooling, the majority of friendships had long since formed. This left you with few friends, the majority of them not nobility and therefore not fit to be invited. That left family members as the majority of your guest list. You're more than happy for Grandmother to see it as evidence of restraint or modesty.

As for Dale’s guests, he’d contributed a rough draft before he took ill. Current Dale gives it a cursory look over and merely strikes one name from his list and adds another man’s wife next him. He hadn’t written out addresses though, so now he begins to copy those from a ledger he’d brought with him. 

“I know that you will have made a number of friends abroad, dear,” Grandmother says, “but do try to keep your list manageable.”

“Of course, Grandmother,” Dale replies smoothly, without taking his eyes from his careful handwriting. He’s taking a long time to write, but the style is identical to his handwriting before which is a relief. 

“Where is the farthest coming from?” Grandfather asks, leaning over. “We will want to send those with the first messenger.”

“Priyva Shri will have returned home to Khinat by now, but I’m not sure he’ll be able to make it,” Dale says, naming a country on the southern tip of the eastern continent. “A number of the others who joined us later are only in Anjou since they were not with us there in the beginning. I’m not sure what the state of the Vaomen mountain passages are like now—you know how the thaw is unequal.”

“Vaomen? You want to invite one of those devil worshipers?” Grandmother’s voice is sharper than you’ve ever heard it and Dale freezes. You hadn’t forgotten how much Grandmother hated demons, and those associated with them, but you’d forgotten how vehement she was. According to the steward, she’d never liked the ‘whole business’ but after her son and daughter-in-laws’ deaths, well… 

There was a very important reason Grandmother couldn’t figure out what had happened to Dale and it wasn’t that inheritance laws for the possessed were muddled. You are certain that, regardless of what else this demon did, Dale is the one who went looking for trouble and then likely caused his own death out of hubris and greed. Unfortunately, Grandmother’s biggest blindspot is her grandson. She will never see it that way. You like Grandmother and Grandfather, but they are the ones who raised the first Dale and, while he takes the majority of the credit for how he was, so do they for encouraging him, for turning a blind eye to his vices and enabling him.

“I told you, they are not to be trusted.” Dale opens his mouth but Grandmother points at him, cutting him off. “Even if they aren’t summoners. The whole country, the way they let those creatures walk amongst people is ludicrous. I’ll not having any Vaomens in this house. It’s a shame to your parents’ memory.”

You’d heard the story vaguely prior to your engagement—you knew that Dale’s parents were deceased and that’s why his grandparents were negotiating the betrothal. You’d understood that they had been killed, not taken ill or had an accident, and that it had happened when Dale was quite young—but that was it. Steward Bilmont had provided the full story during one of your lessons. 

Over twenty years ago, the prince elected to spend the Spring Equinox at a palace which was less than a week's journey from Northridge and his parents were among the local nobility to stay with them for a time. One day, the family and a few other similarly aged nobles with young children, including two of the prince’s own children, were spending the day in a palace garden to enjoy good weather after days of rain. Not long after Dale had been sent back to their rooms for a nap along with a few of the other youngest children, there was an attack.

The area they were playing in was in the center of a large hedge maze and unfortunately they ended up trapped there. The enemy of the crown, an assassin summoner, snuck into the palace with a pack of mimic demons. Disguised as the afternoon tea service, the group of relaxing nobles were unprepared for the vicious attack. Luckily some of the parents were sparingly armed even with no trouble expected, including Lady Qiana. In the end, she was the one who took down the final demon, guarding the children. Her husband had already been killed and she herself succumbed to her injuries soon after.

The assassin was caught and tried, but it had shaken up a number of the nobility, particularly those who had lost family members. While the assassin was not from Voamen, he had briefly received schooling there before being expelled. that was enough for Grandmother Northridge to take a particularly hard stance about the country as a whole, which was the most permissive of summoning on this continent. Bilmont said she’d found the whole practice distasteful before her first born son was killed and hated anything to do with summoning ever since, enforcing a rigid set of laws in Northridge banning the practice and championing strict laws limiting materials and raising licensing and training requirements within the country in the first decade after the incident. No summoner had even been allowed to travel through Northridge since.

 Bilmont swore she had somewhat loosened her convictions in the most recent few years, that she’d had too with Dale traveling or else have given herself health problems worrying, but obviously she still felt quite strongly. It was merely easy to forget because no one brought demon summoning up in her presence if they could possibly help it. 

“Truly, Dale.” You look up to see Grandfather looking at Dale reproachfully. His voice is gruff as he reaches over with a pen to cross out the guest’s name and information. “You know better than this.” 

Personally, you believe original Dale would merely have been more subtle about it—he is the one who made the list in the first place. He likely would have had it sent to a friend to be redirected or bribed the messenger later on. You don’t like how closely Grandfather is studying Dale and it's obvious he doesn’t either. “Of course,” he says, looking away from Grandfather. He puts a hand on Grandmother’s arm. “My apologies, Grandmother.”

The severe expression on her face melts instantly. “Of course, my boy. It is kind of you to invite all your traveling companions, but we must remember our values.”

Dale murmurs his agreement, looking rather blank, before he reaches into his jacket pocket to take a pull from his flask.

Grandfather’s eyes are still on him as he drinks. “I thought you didn’t want any wine?”

Dale swallows and smiles. “Not wine or any other spirit. An invigorating tea blend, provided by my lovely fiance.”

You blush at his compliment, still not used to how free this Dale is with praise. Grandfather looks at you now and you feel your smile shrink at his still rather hard stare. “Indeed. What manner of tea is this again?”

“Medicinal,” you reply. “I left a few blends with Dale to help him recover his strength. My own personal recipes from when I was ill as a youth.”

“They are most stimulating,” Dale says. He offers the flask to his Grandfather. “Would you like a taste?”

“I’m not sure—,” you start to say. You don’t believe it will upset Grandfather’s stomach, but that would depend on which blend Dale is currently drinking. Grandfather takes a gulp before you can warn him further. Near immediately, his face flushes as his eyes water. “They can be quite strong,” you say weakly, knowing it's too late now. You’re fairly certain that Dale had the tea for chills in his flask and that is strongly spiced with capsicum, something you were fairly certain Grandfather did not usually encounter in his meals and that Dale seemed to have an admirable tolerance to.

Grandfather swallows with reluctance and immediately opens his mouth, reaching for the water pitcher. While Dale accepts back his flask, you hurry over to where the remaining rolls from lunch are. “That was vile!” Grandfather says in between swigs of water. “What the devil is in there? Fire?”

“Here, Grandfather,” you say, pressing a roll into his hand and setting the bowl down next to him. “This will help soothe the heat far better.” He takes it from you with a bit of distrust in his eyes, likely remembering you are the one who made the tea. After a single bite though, he quickly realizes you’re right and stuffs the whole thing into his mouth. 

That’s apparently too much for Grandmother, who cackles at the sight. Dale grins at her obvious entertainment and takes a sip from his flask as if to punctuate the point. “Warming, isn’t it?”

Grandfather snorts at that, eating a second roll more slowly. “That was abysmal. But I suppose I could see how that might have gotten you out of bed.”

Dale winks at you. “Quite.”

[Part Six]

[doublelsatan]

Space Is A Lie[SPOILERS FOR ISWM 4/2/22 TRAILER]

[Just a heads up, I talk in first person for this since I'm placing myself, ideas, and conclusions into this theory. Cause we're all watching the trailer and going to be a captain of Invincible. But for this, its coming from my perspective. Got it? Cool :)]

Let me be honest with y'all, it's 11:25 AM PST time as I'm writing. I just woke up and I wasn't expecting to get hit with a nuke of depression. Thanks for that Mark, didn't know I needed that instead of coffee. Off to a great Saturday morning for me.

Before I go to the main bits that concern me I noticed something. The main hub area going dark, the hallway with the posters saying "Don't Open the Door" that shifts to the spire structure, and the cryo chamber with glowing eyes and a hand also having poster plastered around seem familiar. It's like a call back to WKM(Who Killed Markiplier) when we walk through the house with a green sickly filter. It's like traversing through limbo, being alive but possibly dead. The three shots I listed have that same look to me but it's blue with snow or dust particles floating around. It's pretty cool to see, nice shots bro.

Getting right to the point, the happy crew shot is gone forever and I'm the reason why. The only time we see them is in the hallway scene where Mark isn't trying to spill his drink and at the end giving a run through of new/old faces. But my pride and joy, "The" pride and joy, reason to exist pride and joy is gone. And it's all my fault. Haven't even boarded the ship yet but the trailer is telling me I'm the problem. Always has been.

To stab you even more in the feelies that you can't out skate in heelies, we get new phrases. "You won't save them" and "You can't save them." Like wow, thanks for telling me honestly so I just go in with no soul and watch people die from my mistakes. Which is interesting that I guessed this in another theory before. Now he's just rubbing it in my face. Great manipulation strategy in writing there Mark, 10 outta 10 would recommend. That was sarcasm but in actuality good job on that cause it worked. Every person I meet in Space is just set up to die at a specific timeframe and it's my fault. It will always be my fault...

But what if I told you, that it wasn't real? This is a guess and a real big one too. What if it was all just a simulation of sorts? Like this nice fun fancy cosmic endeavor was just an act for us to play in while something real goes on behind the scenes? We get this idea with the consistent glitching, scenes repeating or changing, the codes telling us a story, words and phrases getting cut out to give a sentence new meaning. I can't be the only one that thinks this right? And it's done intentionally too. Someone or some thing is trying to get us to know the truth of what's actually happening. Now I think we're the one's really asleep and someone from the outside is trying to wake us up. So the "Captain needs sleep" poster makes a lot more sense.

I won't rule him out entirely but it could even be Darkiplier helping us out. He's done it a few times before in the past. So he could be finally breaking out and getting what he wants. Mark's channel. Did you think I would say "me?" Mark doesn't allow his egos to give us affection so the original plan for him stays. And I feel like he's going to be painted as the villain but have the moment to prove himself. Cool if it happens, missed opportunity if it doesn't.

Honestly, I don't mind if you guys think this is stupid and rip this idea to shreds. Not gonna harm me none, it's an idea, a theory I came up with due to the information given. Besides, Mark and the one's that worked on ISWM know exactly how the story unfolds. And it's just an edited trailer to keep us busy until the final project releases. So it's fine, just mindless thoughts into an endless galaxy of theories.

Things just don't happen by accident, especially this. Welp won't know until Monday which is around the corner. We can figure it out, it'll be fine.

[lepusrufus]

So I'm not really sure if this has been asked yet but how does the actual plot of RE8 fit into your AU? Is it something you have plans for, like Miranda never kidnaps Rose, sommit like that or nah? Either way I still bloody love all your stuff!

That's a great question and it actually got me thinking on this.

For starters, the events in Double edged scalpel take place quite a bit before the events of the game, around 2010 or so, even earlier. Dani and Anita's "story" happen in a similar timeframe while Laura comes along a couple years later. (I'm not sure if I'll be writing full on fics for them but I will write oneshots and such to expand on their characters/relationships)

Now for the actual game events, the tldr is Miranda isn't an idiot playing stupid games.

In my AU, she has no intention of messing around. She kidnaps Mia, gets in the house (as Mia), waits for a moment when Ethan is distracted and takes Rose. Before anyone manages to catch on or anything. She then takes Rose with her and just keeps her under her careful watch until the time for the ceremony comes. No splitting her up, none of that redundant stuff.

Ethan manages to find his way into the village, but again Miranda is not being a fool and wants him captured and in a damn cell asap to be experimented on later. No Heisenberg's lil death obstacle course, none of that. Ethan just goes to the castle and does some damage thinking Rose is there. The gals, knowing when to pick their battles just tell him that he's wasting his goddamn time and to leave their home so they have time to regroup (nobody dies tho).

Then he makes his way to the Beneviento house and, since Donna deserves to go full fucked up villain, she captures him. She has the power to psychologically destroy someone and that's exactly what she does, rendering him pretty much brain dead, his mouldy body to be studied later.

Also should add in the fact that the cult has a less... "Miranda is purely using us and will get us killed with the first occasion" dynamic. She does want them around and alive. She basically wants to create her own mini empire (for lack of a better word) for her to rule over and the Lords are all part of that. And therefore, Heisenberg for example, is a lot less inclined to betray and kill her. Also also Miranda doesn't just.. straight up has everyone killed. Dunno I feel like it's at least a bit counterproductive killing all your worshippers instead of collecting people from the outside to work as biomass.

Now with Ethan out of the way, back to Miranda, Rose and Mia. Miranda doesn't actually want to use Rose herself as a vessel, but use a tissue sample to make a copy that then can serve as a vessel. It's not out of the goodness of her heart mind you, it's more of a guarantee the if anything goes wrong with the process, the "original" is still there to get more samples from. Mia doesn't want that but she doesn't exactly have a say in this. It does work though and Miranda gets her Eva back yay for her ig. Mia also gets Rose back and Miranda, in an odd act of kindness, promises that if they ever need anything, Mia knows where to find her.

Now, where things get a lil' weird. Should preface this by saying that I'm basing this detail of the AU on my favorite book, Annihilation (from the Southern Reach trilogy). The gist of it is: aliens create an anomalous area enclosed in something akin to a force field where everything alive gets modified on a biological level by the alien organism and it interferes with any technology within.

Now obviously, no aliens here. But we have the Megamycete at the center of it all and Miranda controlling the whole area in which the village (more akin to a small town in my AU) and its surroundings are enclosed. This is how she controls exactly what comes in from outside and what works inside.

And therefore, Chris can't do jack shit. He can't even enter the area let alone blow anything up. Ok moving on.

As stated before, Miranda's offer to Mia still stands, even as she gives her a bitter "fuck you" as she leaves the village with Rose in her arms. However it takes her little to realize that no matter where they go, Rose is basically gonna become a lab rat under supervision 24/7 so she swallows her pride and comes back to Miranda, asking her to let them stay in the village where nobody from te outside can touch them. She obliges, letting her choose any place she'd like to live in and that's how Mia and Rose settle there. (Also the town is a lot more functional here).

Aaand idk maybe Rose and Eva grow up to be friends or something idk I think that'd be cute. They have a whole ass cultish "family" too so that'd make for some interesting shenanigans.

Also, realizing you may want to know more about the maidens: they do partake in anything ceremony related as much as the sisters, complete with matching outfits. By this point in time they are also married and fully part of the Dimitrescu family. Also had gone through the mutation but no spoilers on that. Just going to say that Miranda comes to see them as at the very least good assets to keep around and therefore somewhat important members of the cult.

[ectonurites]

Holy shit all of those costumes are inaccurate! Tim hasn’t worn the leotard look since like what, 2005?? I don’t mind for Jason, since the leather jacket is superior, but Damian and Stephanie are off too!! Tim’s the biggest “wtf where did that come from” though

quickly threw together a little 'since rebirth' main costumes timeline for these five to kinda. explain it in a bit more detail for anyone who might not be super up to date...

How Dick is the only one in that preview in a costume that makes sense with what the dialogue (Damian bringing up Tim's previous 'Drake' identity) indicates is the timeframe.

and also just. for a 'visual with the costumes' comparison...

(Preview cover for Tim Seeley's Robins, Cover for Robin (2021) #5)

these are the same five characters in what the dialogue in the preview indicates is roughly the same time frame, give or take one Damian costume change that still wouldn't make it match any more.

Do we all see the problem here?

Also, I'd like to point out that on the cover image for Robins it has Tim in a much more recent outfit (it honestly looks closer to his Rebirth Red Robin suit than his current YJ 2019 suit though WHICH if all of them were in their first Rebirth suits then that could have worked fine and this whole thing could just be more of a 'can retroactively fit it into the past' story [kinda like that Master Class batfam story from Detective Comics #1027], but it would have to have been BEFORE Tim was Drake for that to work which the dialogue directly contradicts.. so?????) but on the interior in every in-costume panel of him we've got so far he's drawn in his original Robin outfit from the 90's...?

And like. I shit you not someone approached the creative team about some of this on twitter and Seeley's response?

I would have been fine with like a 'oh it was a communication error on which robin costume' type of answer because ya know that does happen! But for him to defend the choice as it being 'how he's dressing now'... when Tim hasn't worn that as his official regular 'what he's currently wearing day to day for hero stuff' suit since before One Year Later in 2006... Like the name thing I'm willing to be a bit more lenient on because a lot of comics recently have been bouncing back and forth between 'Robin' and 'Red Robin' with him. But... the costume thing, man.

that hasn't been 'how he's dressing now' in like 15 years

Like sorry guys but I really am not interested in a story about discussing these characters' times as Robin written by someone who just demonstrated they are not actually up to date with the characters they'll be writing. Even if we do get a more solid confirmation this is purposefully out of continuity or something, the fact that he thinks that is an up to date handling of Tim actively deters me.

[jamiiviper]

The Jamil Essay

this is a reupload of a post i made a couple of weeks ago - previously it was an external link to a google doc, so it never showed up in any of the twst tags, but i worked so hard on this and i would really love it if more people read it, so i’m reuploading directly to tumblr.

to put it simply, this is a 3.7k word character analysis purely about jamil. and even with a word count like that i wasn’t quite able to cover everything i wanted to say, so who knows, maybe there’ll be a part 2 one day. i’ve also decided i do want to write a kalim version, so i’ll probably start working on that sometime soon! stay tuned!

trigger warnings: mentions of child abuse

jamil is the vice dorm leader of scarabia, who’s been kalim’s caretaker practically since birth. he puts on a facade of not standing out, preferring to remain completely average, and plans his life around kalim’s antics. as we learned in chapter 4, however, his true feelings are that he bears a lot of resentment towards kalim, and that he wants to stand out - he just wasn’t allowed to, as he can never surpass kalim.

in this essay i want to cover not just my personal interpretation of jamil, but also some common misconceptions that people tend to have about him. twitter doesn’t have this problem as much, but with tumblr i’ve found that there are very few jamil stans, especially in the theory and writing communities - meaning it’s quite common for people to misunderstand his character. in the fandom as a whole, it’s common for people to only acknowledge him insofar as “gay for kalim”. 

firstly, jamil’s character development in the main story - i would say he’s arguably the best-developed character in twst, since yana now has enough chapters available to flesh out characters after their main story arc ended. jamil holds very deep-seated resentment against kalim, to the point that he plotted to betray him for probably several years. he plotted to have kalim not just thrown out of nrc, but thoroughly ruin his reputation in the process. after his overblot, those feelings did not magically vanish - far from it. i think earlier twst chapters suffered from arcs being wrapped up a little too neatly post-overblot, but pomefiore’s arc has already proved itself to be the exception and thoroughly covers not just jamil’s continued dislike for kalim, but also the wider consequences for what he did.

since the twst school year begins in september, we know jamil is about 9 months older than kalim. from literally the day kalim was born, jamil’s life has been dedicated to kalim. possibly since the day jamil was born, and he was always fated to be kalim’s caretaker. it may even have been the reason he was born at all. either way, it’s not like he remembers those 9 months. all jamil has ever known is that his sole purpose must be to serve kalim. he must not have desires of his own, he must not do anything for himself - from childhood he was expected to be ready to give up his life for kalim at a moment’s notice. he can’t be good at anything - kalim must always be better (i’ll cover this in more depth in a later paragraph, this philosophy is key to his character). his own parents drilled this into him, even going to the extent of hitting him if he didn’t comply. it seems he has a normal relationship with his family despite this - he bickers with his sister like regular siblings, and pre-overblot he indicated that his desire to be free from servitude wasn’t just about him, he wanted to free his family. nonetheless, the psychological damage his childhood caused him is severe. is it any wonder his unique magic is mind control, when he’s never had an ounce of control over his own life?

moving onto his early teen years, we know both jamil and kalim were severely poisoned at one point, both falling into comas for around two weeks. although we don’t have a timeframe for jamil’s coma, we know kalim’s was when they were around 13 years old. if jamil’s was around this age too - probably a short while afterwards - i think it’s plain to see why jamil’s resentment began to build. he’d have been around the age where he first started to question why his life has to revolve around kalim. why should he be expected to die for someone he doesn’t even like, who’s spoiled and doesn’t realise how much jamil does for him? kalim takes everything for granted: status, friendships, freedom, and jamil is meanwhile left in the shadows with nothing. then one day kalim gets poisoned so badly he falls into a coma - how much do you want to bet jamil was blamed for that, at the age of 13? after that he’s expected to taste-test anything kalim eats beforehand, and eventually starts making all his meals for him because the risk of poison is so high otherwise. then one day he slips up, or it’s an undetectable poison, and jamil is the one to fall into a coma. is anyone blamed for that? does anyone pity jamil outside of his immediate family + kalim? no, probably not. after all, he’s just doing his duty, right? it’s truly… no wonder jamil’s resentment became so intense. he finally has proof that his life truly does not matter. although kalim certainly cares about him, he doesn’t understand jamil’s position. he sees jamil as a friend, an equal; jamil knows this can never be the case, and he also knows kalim is too privileged to ever hope to understand. 

fast forward on a couple of years to jamil receiving his nrc acceptance letter. he thinks that finally, finally he’s going to be free. four years of freedom - and who knows, maybe after that he can be free forever! he can finally excel at his classes and be his true self, without fear of upstaging kalim! 

and then kalim gets accepted a month late. for no reason other than his surname. 

and then kalim gets sorted into his dorm.

it’s a miracle he didn’t just overblot on the spot - but that’s his nature as a scarabia student. careful foresight and planning. this moment was, undoubtedly, the moment he started planning his betrayal. he had his one month of freedom ripped away, just like that. 

oh, don’t forget the fact that not long after, kalim was made dorm leader not because he notably embodies scarabia values at all, but because of nepotism. (side note: most scarabia stans agree kalim does actually reflect scarabia values, just not as obviously as jamil does, but either way jamil himself wouldn’t see it this way. this is a jamil essay so i won’t go in depth about this unless asked to!)

under kalim’s watch, scarabia - known for its intelligence and cunning - is turned into “the party dorm”. this seems to be the fandom’s perception of them too - i mean, just ask any non-scarabia stan what goes on in scarabia, that’s probably the answer they’ll give you. jamil would have probably loved the original scarabia; although we don’t know much about it, we know scarabia students are on a par with octavinelle when it comes to intelligence (paralleling azul’s constant interest in jamil). yet by winter break, scarabia is doing so badly in those same exams that they didn’t even place in the rankings…? without meaning to, kalim clearly harmed scarabia. instead of getting chance to study magic and show off, jamil is now essentially an unpaid, full-time party planner by the time his second year starts.

a few months later, winter break finally arrives, and jamil executes his plan to dethrone kalim. i may have just spent the last two pages defending jamil’s grudge, but his actions themselves are still indefensible. there’s evidence to suggest kalim knew what was occurring on some level - refusing to answer jade’s question about who was hypnotising him proved that 1) he probably had some idea deep down that jamil was betraying him 2) he doesn’t want jamil to get in trouble for it. nonetheless, this does not make what jamil did okay in the slightest, even if kalim allowed it to happen. jamil is, undoubtedly, the bad guy in this situation, no matter how sympathetic his childhood makes you feel. i could go into detail about why kalim acted the way he did, but again, this is jamil-focused.

i’ll skip talking about his overblot, because i covered his hatred for kalim in a lot of depth already and i want to talk about the general aspects of his personality like his desire for praise later on. so moving onto the end of chapter 4, we see jamil’s true self: a snarky, heavily opinionated boy who honestly just wants to be free to be himself.

but just like his freedom, that side of jamil once again only lasts for a brief moment. jamil almost loses everything after his overblot. practically every scarabia student hates him and wants him thrown out of the dorm - even kalim, his sole defender, can’t call him a good person. he’s a traitor. he says he trusts the scarabia students to work out that it’s better for them if he stays, but that day won’t come any time soon, and until then he’s keeping his distance from them all, because their hatred is that strong. if azul truly had been streaming to more people than just jade, his life would have been ruined beyond repair. so what does jamil do? he goes back to serving kalim. as a scarabia student, his foresight is good enough that he knows the option he hates the most is the only one that’ll be good for him in the end. for jamil, being himself is nothing short of a death sentence.

now i’ve talked for far too long about the timeline of his character arc, i can finally get to the good stuff: jamil’s personality, and how it’s changed throughout the stories we’ve seen so far.

the first thing that springs to mind when you think of jamil, other than “snake”, is probably “tired”. or “he’s going to snap”. something along those lines. which... yes, we know he is. he did snap. after chapter 4, this doesn’t seem to have changed too much, but i do get the impression that he’s somewhat less stressed out by kalim. his resentment has dissipated, for the most part (he does still openly insult him, though), so while he does grumble at kalim there’s no suppressed fury behind it. what replaced that fury?

guilt.

in 5-10, jamil tells azul that he intends to continue to obediently follow kalim around in order to restore his reputation, both inside and outside of scarabia. this does of course make him sound pretty selfish (as per usual), and in classic jamil fashion he doesn’t let his true emotions show, so it’s easy to take this at face value and assume he just doesn’t really care. i think in this case, we need to look more at his actions that we see throughout chapter 5. namely, the way it’s being emphasised how he’s silently watching kalim from afar - something he’s always done, yes, but yana seems to be really making a point of it in chapter 5. it’s not just kalim he’s distancing himself from, either. he’s staying away from the rest of the scarabia students too, as mentioned earlier. he never had any friends at all to rely on, even before his overblot. so by doing this, he’s effectively completely isolating himself. he clearly has a lot of thoughts about everything that he’s not sharing with anyone - just listen to the way he sighs at the end of the flashback in 5-10, how annoyed and frustrated he seems. if jamil was telling the truth about just wanting to restore his reputation, he’d probably appreciate kalim’s efforts, even if he dislikes kalim himself. he shouldn’t be upset by kalim persuading the scarabia students to give him another chance. not if he truly just wants to get back to normal. i think on some level, jamil feels incredibly guilty over his actions. he might not have even admitted to himself yet that he feels this way, and by saying things like “i just want to restore my reputation” he’s just trying to convince himself. after all, that’s something he has a history of doing.

ever since jamil’s first introduction, we’ve known jamil lives his life by the philosophy of “not standing out is the best way to succeed”. he hates standing out or receiving any kind of positive attention at all, because he thinks that it’ll only attract trouble. or so we thought, because as we learned from his overblot, jamil desperately wants to stand out. he’s powerful and intelligent, and he wants people to acknowledge that. he wants the praise and recognition he knows he deserves. this means that whenever he said he didn’t want to stand out, he was lying through his teeth - he probably constantly tried and failed to convince himself of this throughout his childhood. during his lab SR story, he even repeats it to himself in his thoughts, like a mantra - “I want to avoid standing out. I can’t be satisfied with this. I cannot be too good, nor fall behind, and neither should I get satisfactory grades or fail. This is the best shortcut to success.”. much like his feelings of guilt, jamil refused to acknowledge how much he truly wanted to show off, even in his own thoughts. he is awful at being honest to himself.

post-ch5, we find out that despite everything, jamil does still hold this philosophy, to some extent. he of course shows off his singing and dancing skills enough to be chosen as a main vocalist, and he says he wants to make a name for himself and show various people just how talented he truly is: kalim, his family, the asims and MC, to name a few. yet in the chapter before that, when kalim compliments his singing and dancing, he’s like “i don’t really want to stand out, but…”. which is honestly a little confusing at first because he does want to. i’d probably interpret it as something along the lines of he wants to show off to the people he cares about, but he still wants to keep his head down in general. so i think that to some extent, maybe he actually has internalised that philosophy now. the one time he truly expressed his desire to stand out, it ended in catastrophe for him. he has this tiny seed of doubt within him now, telling him his parents were right all along. but... he’s working past it, and applying himself as and when he’s comfortable doing so.

going back to him being bad at being honest, jamil’s a pretty big tsundere. there’s one person he does regularly receive praise from: kalim. yet despite desperately wanting to be praised, he often gets annoyed at kalim and tells him something like “this isn’t about me right now” or “what does that have to do with anything?”. plus when the praise is coming from kalim, it’s often in the context of kalim praising him to other people - as a servant, he can’t be seen accepting all these compliments, right? he can never be better than kalim. so he has to reject kalim’s praise. when it’s just the two of them alone, though, is when jamil gets embarrassed to the point he has to hide his blush under his hood. given his childhood, chances are that he doesn’t really know how to process being praised. he knows he wants people’s approval, but when he actually gets it, he just short-circuits. it was the same at his birthday celebration; although he wants to be the centre of attention, when it actually happens, he gets all embarrassed and tsun. i was trying not to let my own personal feelings spill in this but oh my god he’s so cute i can’t

next... this isn’t really linked to any previous topic, but i want to talk about jamil’s cooking! jamil cooks all of kalim’s meals, and regularly cooks entire feasts for kalim’s parties, too (as well as being in charge of getting any animals kalim wants to show off, decorating the dorm, making sure everything runs smoothly… you get the idea). his cooking is very good, and he has a lot of technical knowledge about cooking too - azul, whose parents run a restaurant, didn’t know about emulsification, but jamil was able to explain it to him. despite being so good, though, according to his dorm SSR homescreen lines he doesn’t actually like cooking very much. he says the fact that he cooks so much is “just how things turned out”. of course, he could just be being a tsun, but i do feel like he’s being honest with this - what reason does he have to seriously enjoy something he was forced into doing his entire life? However there is evidence that he might enjoy it after all; he’s particularly good at alchemy because of his cooking knowledge, and according to magical archives he’s completely neutral in motivation for both flying and history lessons, but has slightly higher motivation levels for alchemy, indicating that he can’t stop himself from putting a little bit extra effort into that class. i think it can be interpreted either way with the canon info we have currently, but regardless i would not say he’s the cooking fanatic people often depict him as. 

also, when jamil cooks, although his cooking is good, visually it’s usually very boring, to the point he and his sister would bicker over it. he has the technical skills to cook good food, but no idea how to present it. similarly, in his fairy gala SR he was told that although he perfectly memorised the dance, it was boring to watch - it looked like he was just executing the routine without any passion behind it. jamil is so emotionally repressed that he has no idea how to express his individuality. even in his bedroom, the only truly personal items he owns are a first aid kit (related to his servant position, not him as a human being) and a stereo + headphones set for dancing. he doesn’t have any other hobbies or interests - he doesn’t even know what people his age do for fun, because he’s never been allowed to think about such things. 

dancing is all jamil has that’s not directly related to serving kalim, really - but even that ties into his servant status. although he genuinely enjoys it nowadays and dances by himself for fun, he only picked it up as a hobby because kalim wanted to go to dance practice, and of course jamil had to accompany him. when his flashback after his overblot talks about him deliberately losing to kalim, the story focuses specifically on a dancing competition. which is why it’s honestly so important to jamil’s character that chapter 5 focuses on a singing and dancing competition. jamil finally has the chance not just to show off his skills in general, but his skills at the one thing he’s been allowed to love throughout his life. the one thing where losing to kalim at it hurt so much that it was such a prominent memory for him. when jamil was chosen as a main vocalist, he instinctively tries to say kalim would be better suited for the position, but stops himself and accepts it. it clearly means so much to him that he was chosen for this.

okay i started to scare people with how long this was getting when it was only 50% finished, i think if i write anymore people will actually be concerned for my health so i’ll leave it here. if you read all of this, thank you so much for putting up with my anime boy brainrot for over six full pages! i really.. really like jamil. again, i most certainly do not think his actions should be defended, but god if they’re not fascinating to read about. and i hope i covered the other sides to him well enough, the things that you’d never ordinarily pick up on because so few people talk about him outside of him and kalim as a pair (both platonic scarabia + romantic jamikali, i mean). he has so much depth to him that people don’t see and god i could easily have gone on for another few pages if i wasn’t forcing myself to stop. but please please talk to me if you want to hear more...

yana has treated him so well, jamil stans get too much food if anything but i’m absolutely thriving off it as you can see! thank you for allowing him to exist, yana-sensei!

having said that, i couldn’t stop myself from adding some extra facts about him below. please enjoy.

some fun jamil facts for your soul:

his sister used to bake him cookies on his birthday - specifically, these!

when jamil and kalim went to eat at the cafeteria with ruggie and leona, leona took one look at jamil and went “you look like you’d kill kalim in his sleep”

sebek and jamil find each other’s positions enviable. sebek wishes he could have been by malleus’ side from birth as jamil was with kalim, and jamil just… wishes he served someone he respected as deeply as sebek respects malleus (but he does think sebek is too enthusiastic)

jamil hates surprises with a burning passion, and despite being with kalim for 17 years is still not used to them. for his previous birthday, kalim held a huge surprise party, and i think he still hasn’t recovered from the shock

i think a lot of people already know that in his birthday SSR story he said he wanted a parrot after graduation so he could teach it to call him master, but it goes a bit further than that? it was actually first mentioned during his lesson chats, when kalim gets a parrot. jamil has to research how to care for it, and ended up wanting one of his own afterwards (but got too tsundere to admit it at the time).

also, he heard that the sorcerer of the sands’ parrot (iago) could speak as fluently as a human, and he got excited and watched a bunch of parrot videos on magicam, but was of course disappointed to find out that this was not the case.

he frequently uses flattery to try and get his way, like when he attempts to flatter vil during his SSR story - unfortunately he misjudged vil, as vil’s actually the type of person who hates meaningless flattery. because he does this so frequently, when he genuinely does give compliments people don’t always believe him.

according to the halloween event, jamil is surprisingly environmentally conscious, and insists on holding a sustainable halloween theme. after organising so many parties and seeing the waste they probably produce, i think there’s no wonder he’s so concerned about it.

[englandsgray]

Sherlolly Self-Interviews 2020

Well hi 👋

Ignoring the internal image of Gilderoy Lockheart smiling smugly while flashbulbs pop and saying ‘In my autobiography, Magical Me...’ 🙈😆 I shall take the opportunity of this lovely event to introduce myself as a writer of Sherlolly fanfiction on AO3...

I am English and somewhere over 30.  I watched the show as it aired, and lost my heart as quickly to Molly Hooper as to Sherlock Holmes.  The kiss is British television history.  Series 4 is my favourite.  Moriarty on the beach is life.  The Holmes brothers break my heart every time.

I am extremely lucky to have been provided some questions to answer here by @ohaine and @mybrainrots - huge, huge love and thanks to these two lovelies, and not just for this.  I admire you both so much as writers, and your support means the world to me ❤️ Thanks too, to @sherlollyappreciationweek!

Where did you begin to write, and have you written for other fandoms?  I wrote my first fanfic when I was eleven years old - a 100 page ramble about The Monkees.  Oh yes.  Then in 2018, I fell for the characters of the Disney Pixar film Cars and began writing and publishing.  So far so random!  Writing in this fandom sprang from binge-watching all four series of Sherlock during lockdown.  I remembered reading Louise Brealey talking about being disappointed Molly didn’t get chance to ‘roundly kick Sherlock’s arse’ and agreeing with her wholeheartedly.  That, over a few weeks, turned into my first fic - Who You Really Are.  

You’re a recent (and welcome!) arrival to the Sherlolly ship, and I was wondering if writing in an established, less active than it used to be fandom has been a challenge?   Thank you, firstly.  My experience of this fandom has been incredibly positive - the sense of welcome has been wonderful.  I will admit I was terrified posting the first fic - there are hundreds of times more stories posted daily in the Sherlock fandom as in the one I had some experience of.  But I needn’t have worried, it’s been a blast.  I will also admit, that it’s no small thing to be surrounded by such brilliant writing and the long-standing passion which goes with it.  But I find that inspiring in itself, and I’m very glad to be here - how supportive the fandom are makes me feel like I always have been!       

What’s your favourite place and way to write?  My aesthetic is Lin-Manuel Miranda in his in-law’s laundry room 🤣 I wrote my first ten-thousand words on the notes app on my phone before my other half told me to stop being ridiculous!  I switch between the laptop, my phone and longhand (I’m a sucker for a nice notepad and a Uni-Ball Eye) and, more often than not, not sat up properly at a table.   

Since you’ve (done something I’ve never managed successfully and) written a novella length fic... how did you organise/keep track of all the details and where you wanted the story to go?  Did you outline/plot in advance?  First of all - I would love to see a novella length fic from you @mybrainrots!  The final scene of Who You Really Are came to me very early on and I knew I wanted the fic to fit within TFP - a lot of it takes place in the timeframe of the final montage.  At first, it was going to be much more about Sherlock’s relationship with the ideas of sentiment and love (the phrase ‘I’m not sentimental about you, I love you,’ haunted me for a while) and I spent some time researching the psychology and playing with scenes from throughout the series - one of my favourites I didn’t go on to use was inspired by the final scene of THoB.  Using scenes from the canon gave an automatic structure, and I was always aiming for the final one I wrote early on - the two of them on the beach (everything is about the beach, with me!)  As I went along and started, inevitably, to slow down, I mapped out the chapters with a short note of what I wanted to be in each, then would add notes or phrases as they came to me - often emailed from my phone!  I had to force myself through a tricky section set in Baker Street at one point, but it came together in the end.  I did plot The Pathologist’s Skeletons on paper first, as I found with a casefic which remains a WIP, that I can get confused and lose focus when it comes to details and how to reveal them in a way which stays paced and interesting.  I’ll certainly do that from now on with longer stories and cases.  How did you keep up enthusiasm for the work?  I want to write an original novel, so I am forcing myself to work through the knotty bits and blocks as a learning experience.  Not everything is destined to be finished or finessed, of course, but I’m finding this process is building my confidence that I can overcome problems and slow periods.  I also find I know when I need some external inspiration - some of my favourite scenes have come to me while out walking the dog or sitting on the beach.  I’ve also been inspired by books or other series or things going on in the world, as we all are, and sometimes that’s pushed me on.  Plus, of course, I’m a newbie - I’m very much in the honeymoon period of my writing, even though I’ve loved Sherlock for ten years! (Ten years! Bonkers.) 

You’ve got a knack for writing Sherlock’s thoughts and capturing his voice.  That said, which character do you find easiest to write?  Which is the hardest?  Thank you so much.  I absolutely love writing Sherlock and Mycroft, and I’m sure that’s because they suit my somewhat over-the-top writing style!  I find Molly and her POV really difficult.  I want the scenes I write from her perspective to sound completely different to Sherlock, but that means writing in a style which doesn’t come as naturally to me.  I’m a long way off happy with that at the moment, but I’m enjoying the challenge.

Is there a scene or character that specifically inspired you to start writing Sherlolly?  The whole of TFP, but especially from the moment Sherlock arrives at Musgrave onwards.  I am desperate to see what a Sherlock Holmes who has been reacquainted with his own heart would look like.  I find his emotionality in those final scenes hugely compelling (Mycroft’s office is one of my favourite moments from across all four series) and, as I have always believed in him and Molly, I practically jumped up back in May after watching it and said ‘right, where’s my notebook?!’.

There’s a lovely peaceful, quiet feeling to your fic ‘We’re All Right At The Moment’.  Can you tell us what inspired it and if you’ve thought of doing the backstory that goes with it?  Thank you!  Like everyone, I would go back to January of this year and start again in a heartbeat, but I am hugely fortunate to be able to say that I have a lot to be grateful to the UK lockdowns for.  I might never have begun writing in this fandom otherwise, for one, and I have had a brilliant time so far and met some lovely people. Honestly, I don’t feel able to do any sort of justice in my writing to what has happened in the world in any broader sense than drawing on my own experiences of staying at home and enjoying my family.  This particular super-short fic sees Molly cutting Sherlock’s hair at home in Baker Street.  I wrote it in the evening after I had cut my other half’s hair and had been reminding myself that despite how horribly worried I was - and still am - about everything, we were all right in that moment, and to focus on that as much as possible.  I wanted to try to capture that, if for no reason other than to look back on this entire experience and remember something lovely, so I am so pleased to hear you felt the fic did that.  It was only after I finished it and reread it, that I realised it is ambiguous as to whether Molly is worried about Sherlock contracting the virus, or whether she is remembering him being treated for it... As I say, I don’t think I could write more about these extraordinary circumstances - perhaps it’s just too close at the moment - so I don’t plan on extending it.  But you know how it is, the plot bunnies hop where they will... 

Do you have a Sherlolly music playlist?  What are your top five favs from the list? Here’s a run down of (6 🙊) songs I have been getting emotional over in the last little while, leading my brain to assign their significance to my favourite couple...

Kissing You - Des’Ree - It’s so 90′s, it’s a bit cheesy, it’s oddly disturbing.  It helped me write A Request, Made Properly, and that gave me an excuse to have Sherlock kiss Molly in the snow.

How Long Will I Love You? - Ellie Goulding - part of the playlist, but also in remembrance of a friend who passed away recently.  Life is very short, love is forever.

High and Dry - Jamie Cullum - It’s made me emotional for a very long time.  The original is my partner’s version of choice, this is mine.  

Think About You - Delta Goodrem - Okay, this one isn’t emotional, and it’s not my usual vibe!  Blame the zoom exercise class I do!  But oh my goodness, it’s Molly.  Bless her.

Blinded By Your Grace (P.T.2. F.T. MNEK) - Stormzy - One of the best ever, I reckon.  Spent an awful lot of time thinking about angels and demons, grace and what it takes to save someone, while writing my latest - The Pathologist’s Skeletons.  This has been in my head most of the (blimmin’) time!

Love Me Like You Do - Ellie Goulding - I didn’t know I was a fan of Ellie until I wrote this list... I don’t subscribe to the theory that the love Molly wants or that which Sherlock has to offer is any lesser because it isn’t ‘normal’ or expected. I don’t think romantic entanglement would come easy to either of them. But it’s still love and it would be beautiful.

Thank you so much for reading.  Thanks and love to @ohaine and @mybrainrots. And thank you @sherlollyappreciationweek for the event and for everything you do ❤️

Feel like I should sign off with a quote from the show...

“You’re not a puzzle-solver, you never have been. You’re a drama queen!” Dr John Watson (Moffat & Gatiss) 2014 😜

X

A fav fic of mine by @mybrainrots

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7563193

A fav fic of mine by @ohaine

https://archiveofourown.org/works/10562904

My stuff:

https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglandsGray/works

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

The Wolf-Antelope Will Not Come for Us | Short Story & collection update!

Hi everyone!

Today I’m back with a short story update for a new lil piece called The Wolf-Antelope Will Not Come for Us.

Just a reminder: This is my original work and plagiarism of any form will not be tolerated.

Plot:

After a young girl is allegedly killed by a wolf-antelope, Addie prepares catering services for the funeral while trying to impress charming cult leader, Axel.

Genre: Literary fiction, short fiction

POV: First person present tense

Word count: ~1449

Characters:

Addie (early teens)

Our narrator. Submissive, looking for approval, naive (a lil brainwashed).

Axel (unknown age)

Leader of a religious cult known as the Gates. Domineering, manipulative, has a thing for walnuts, apparently.

Rosa (early teens)

Is dead throughout the story, but we can assume she experimented with her femininity to the disapproval of other Gate members and had a close relationship with Axel.

Conception:

I needed to write this story for a class (must hand it in this coming week lol!) but could NOT get an idea. I’m a little short fiction’d out because I’ve been on a slight roll since July where I’ve written four stories. This would’ve been my fifth in such a short timeframe, and I really wasn’t feeling any short fiction inspo. However, I am a writing major :) which means :) I had no choice :) and I needed an idea FAST! I only had 2 weeks to draft the story, and spent last week tinkering with a different story called The Factory. That story has been giving me some ~trouble and as the week ended and I had not come up with a discernible way to revise it, I decided I needed to write something new.

While attempting revisions on The Factory I’d gotten an idea for a very loose opening to a different short story. It sat there for a while as I tried to make The Factory work, but yesterday, determined to write a draft, I said “let me just try this new story”, sat down, and forced myself to write it!

The writing bit:

I drafted this story in one day, in about three sessions scattering from mid morning to very late at night. Like I said, this was a case of “I just need to finish a draft” which I can rarely do because my headspace when writing short fiction especially is quite meditative and requires time. However, I did not have time! About halfway through the day, I got lost with the story’s direction and had no idea what to do, but managed (somehow!) to push through. The latter half of the story came to me much easier than the first half, which was very difficult. The middle section was trickiest for me because I knew how the story would end, but not would lead up to that, and overall, I think the draft is okay!

I’ve found it increasingly more difficult to write in first person present tense because of how stream-of-conscious-y it can be! I’ve written like 10 books in that POV, but it’s been so long since I’ve practiced that I don’t know how to “root” my narrative when it’s first person present tense. Because of that, the story is quite airy, though I think it works quite well with the voice that is quite self-chiding and instructional, and I think it will make a perfect place in my collection I’m working on.

SPEAKING of collection! If you didn’t know, I am very tentatively writing a short story collection mostly because I have a whole bunch of short stories lying around and some of them are getting published :) so why not!

I don’t have a title for this collection yet which apparently means it’s not a real project (my logic why), but I’m a bit over 30k if we’re counting a few of my older stories (which I’ll most likely swap out, but we’ll see). Here’s a list with tentative order (this will 100% change what even are collection orders I don’t know):

I’m more shocked that I’ve written this many short stories lol how did this happen. I’ve been trying to brainstorm titles, but nothing has bit yet, so until then I feel like this project isn’t fully “set” (I am weird and cannot work if I don’t have a title). As you can see, the status section is pretty vague because I haven’t really dug my feet into pursuing this collection/haven’t read most of these stories since I drafted them, it’s just something that’s happening in the background. Overall, I’m noticing a LOT of similar themes, which would be femininity, the pursuit of individuality, the lack of individuality, sexuality, identity, girlhood, death, and murder.

Aesthetic:

To end off this update, here is an aesthetic for TWAWNCFU!

That’s going to be it for this update! Keep your eye out for a Feeding Habits update, coming soon!

Taglist (please ask to be added or removed!)

@if-one-of-us-falls, @qatarcookie, @chloeswords, @alicewestwater, @laughtracksonata, @shylawrites, @ev--writes​, @jaydewritesfiction��​, @jennawritesstories​, @eowynandfaramir, @august-iswriting

[phantoms-lair]

The Two Werewolves of Scooby Doo Part 4

Okay, this was supposed to be the last chapter, but it ended up being a lot longer than anticipates, so I split it into two.The good news is I’m already halfway through chapter 5

Previous Part

~

 "I know what you're about to ask me, and no, I've made no progress." 

  "Like, we're running out of time." Shaggy said, running his hand through his hair. "The new moon's the night after next." Vincent was right in that without being around a human to lash out at, Daphne's evenings were much better than the first. Wolf Daphne was perfectly content to run around the the area outside Vincent's home chasing lightning bugs, or begging Shaggy for things like ear or chin scritches. 

 But better didn't necessarily mean good. The complete loss of control weighed on Daphne, highlighted even more by the fact that she could remember what happened when her body was outside her control. In the couple hours of sleep she would grab after sunrise, she was plagued by nightmares of what could go wrong. As such, she'd given Vincent a timeframe for the cure. They had through the New Moon, when no transformation would occur, and the day after. But before sunset on that day, if no progress had been made, Shaggy would bite her, thus turning her into a 'true' werewolf.

 And Shaggy didn't want that. He really didn't want that. But Daphne was suffering and he didn't want that either! He respected that this was her decision, and he would honor it, but that didn't stop him from hoping against hope they'd find something beforehand. 

 But so far everything had been a dud. Vincent had tried various remedies, even a de-aging potion to see if Flim Flam's young age was the reason the curse hadn't affected him. It hadn't worked, but Daphne had made an adorable werewolf cub. 

 "I am aware of the date Shaggy, but this is largely a process of trial and error. We don't even know which of the thirteen cursed them, each of which could require a different methodology." Vincent sighed. He understood Shaggy's concern, as well as his desire to help his friend, but there was only so much he could do.

 "I still think it has something to do with that drink." Scrappy said, crossing his arms. 

  "I fail to see how, but it's worth a shot, I suppose." Vincent let out a tired sigh. "I don't have any other ideas at the moment. Of course it will take some time to break down the brew into all possible magical components." 

 "There's a much quicker way, Vince." Flim Flam offered. "I can just drink some." The assembled group looked at him. "What, I'm the only 'normal' human here who could be affected. If it does nothing, we've ruled it out. If I turn into a werewolf too, Daphne can actually stay inside for the night, since there's no one here for her to attack. I'm actually safer that way." He shrugged. 

 Vincent fixed him with a look. "Flim Flam, you understand while identifying the drink as the culprit would narrow things down immensely, it could still be quite a while before I figure out the counter." 

 "I know, but it speeds things up, and I'd actually be in less danger. Besides," Flim Flam shuffled his feet. "You guys have been pretty good to me, and I want to help."  "You know you don't have to do this," Daphne said entering the room. Her clothes and hair were flawless as always, but her makeup couldn't quite hide the bags under her eyes. 

 Shaggy bowed his head. "I wish I could-" 

 "Shaggy, you're the only reason this situation isn't 100% worse, so don't feel guilty you can't be the guinea pig." Daphne chided. "And I'm serious, Flim Flam, you don't have to do this."

 "Well, I choose to." Flim Flam said stubbornly. "It's worth a shot." 

 "A very against the odds shot, which is the only reason I'm agreeing to this." Vincent summoned a tankard from...somewhere...that had SHaggy reeling back with a look of disgust. "However, first I want you to swallow this." He handed  Flim Flam a small object. 

 "It looks like a fossilized hairball." Flim Flam said critically.  

 "It's called a bezoar. It will nullify any poison you ingest." Vincent explained.

  "Won't that mess with the curse?" Scrappy asked. 

 "Not at all. A curse is not poison. Wolfsbane, however, is an extremely deadly one, used as a common form of execution in ancient Greece. The wolfsbane in this has been detoxified as much at it can be, but it's barely safe for an adult. It is absolutely not safe for a child without precautions like this." 

 "If it's so deadly, why put it in a drink? Much less the town specialty?" Daphne wondered. 

 "Hope makes you do stupid things." Shaggy answered, a touch bitterly.

 "Rope?" Scooby asked. 

 "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised you figured it out." Vincent sighed. "The drink was originally an attempt to self medicate. They hoped that such a powerful werewolf repellent such as wolfsbane would ward off the curse. It didn't, but without anything else they could do, they kept at it. That's why they drink it right before sunset." 

 "So they almost poison themselves every night just trying to weaken the curse? I feel kind of bad for them." Daphne said. 

 "I don't." 

 "Shaggy!" 

 "What? I don't." Shaggy crossed his arms. "Like, they were actively trying to keep us from leaving Daph. Which means either they were planning on killing us in their werewolf forms, or trying to get us cursed too. And either way, I'm not feeling sorry for them. We, like, didn't have a choice in this. They made that choice, and they did it during the day. They knew what they were doing." 

 "I...I never thought of it that way. I just thought of them as victims of the curse like me...which is exactly what they wanted us to think." Daphne slammed her fist into the castle's stone wall. "If Scrappy and Flim Flam were right, and it was the drink they served us that carried the curse, then they purposefully tried to curse us so we'd feel sorry or at least kinship with them. And since children can't safely tolerate the drink, they were writing Flim Flam off as dead either way."

  Daphne growled. It wasn't a wolfish one, but it made her rage perfectly clear. "Oooo I wish I could turn into a monster right now and rip them to shreds." 

 "I can do that." Shaggy said, though he looked deeply uncomfortably. "I mean they hurt you and..." 

 Daphne took a deep breath, trying to release her anger. "You could never live with yourself if you did that and I could never live with myself for asking you. I'm just...just a whole lot of bad feelings right now. Thank god tonight's the last time."  

 "Yeah," Shaggy said less than enthusiastically. 

 "And possibly first time. Bottoms up." Flim Flam swallowed the bezoar, then took a large sip of the drink. "Hey not bad." 

 "That's because you're not a werewolf." Shaggy said, wrinkling his nose. He really couldn't understand how people could tolerate that smell, much less like it.  

 "I suggest we all get some rest this afternoon. Between a potential second werewolf and Daphne's cursed self being let loose around my house, I suspect tonight we will all need it." After so many all nighters studying the curse, Vincent knew he certainly did. 

 "Inside? But what if the drink doesn't turn Flim Flam?' Daphne fretted. 

 "Between Shaggy, Scooby, Scrappy, and myself we are more than sufficient to make sure no harm comes to him." Vincent reassured her. "I am far more concerned for my upholstery's safety than his." 

~

 "Last time." Daphne said as she watched the sky turn pink from her window. "Shaggy, really, thank you for everything. Not just keeping me company and corralling me during the night. but being willing to...I know you don't want to." 

 "I really don't." Shaggy admitted. "But your curse is so much worse than mine. I don't want you to go through this anymore either." 

 Daphne sighed. "Are you ever going to tell me what happened?" 

 "Maybe." Shaggy answered. "Are you going to tell Velma and Fred about this?" 

 "I don't know. Not yet. I don't like keeping secrets from them, and I'm not opposed to them knowing. But right now I just don't want to talk about it. It feels too raw." 

 "Maybe one day," Shaggy said for both of them. 

 "One day,"  Daphne agreed as the last rays of the sun, and thus her human mind, vanished in the light of the thinnest sliver of moon.

 It was easy to tell when Daphne stopped being herself. Her whole demeanor changed, relaxing. She nudged his shoulder with her muzzle, tail wagging.

 “Like, at least someone’s having a good time.” he commented, rubbing her neck. He didn’t know if the change was tiring. The first night he wouldn’t have thought so, as she’d tried to attack Flim Flam almost immediately. But every night since had started with the wolf being very docile and wanting affection. Later she would want to explore or run around, but the start of the night was always quiet.

At least it was until a walkie talkie crackled to life.  "I told you guys!"  Scrappy's voice came from the other side. "I told you wolfsbane turns people into werewolves!"

Shaggy grabbed for his radio. "Really? Then Flim Flam is...?" 

 A small yip came from over the device, which made wolf Daphne's ears perk. She looked at Shaggy expectantly. 

 "You want to see another werewolf huh?" Her tail wagged harder. "Well, I guess we can go." Shaggy's feelings were decidedly mixed. They were one step closer to an answer, but it meant Flim Flam was cursed too. The only small mercy was he would never have to deal with the memory of needing to attack humans, since as he pointed out himself, he had been the only normal person there. 

~

 They had reached the living room when the two youngest members of their group joined them. Like Daphne, Flim Flam seemed to have no remnant of his human personality. He and Daphne Wolf stared at each other for a moment, before both jumped on the couch,making happy noises. Daphne Wolf began licking the top of his head, like one packmate grooming another. 

 "Dawww" Scooby cooed at the sight.

 "Like, Daphne's not going to be happy if she gets hairballs." Shaggy comment, feeling a bit torn. The two were so happy, it was obvious the curse werewolves craved each others company, and he'd been keeping Daphne away from the others. But at the same time he didn't trust them, even without their minds. These were the people who had hurt Daphne, and he wouldn't give them a chance to get their claws into her.

 "I truly did not think this would work." Vincent said, entering the room. "I must wonder if one of the ingredients was the original vector, or merely an additional one. Either way it should-" He was cut off by twin growls as Daphne and Flim Flam both rose from the couch, fur standing on end and teeth bared. 

 "Guys NO!" Shaggy moved between them and their intended target, but Vincent had his own ideas, lifting the amulet around his neck ever so slightly. Shaggy was no stranger to fear, it was the emotion he was most familiar with, after all. But he'd never felt anything like this. This cold clutching at his heart, his muscles tensing so much it hurt. Fear so intense he felt he'd almost come around the other side to nothing. 

 Then it broke, and the sudden absence of the fear was enough to push all three werewolves into bolting. "A bit too much?" Vincent asked the gobsmacked Scooby and Scrappy.

 "Rust a reeny rit." Scooby replied, holding his paws barely apart.

~

"Raggy! Raggy!" 

 Scooby's voice broke through the panic that was driving him, and Shaggy shook himself out of it. Vincent had told him, told him, about the whole aura thing, but he hadn't been able to think when he was faced with it. "That was terrifying, man. Like, Mr. Van Ghoul was not kidding about being terrifying to werewolves." Werewolves, oh no. "Did you see where Daphne and Flim Flam went?" 

 "Ruh-Ra," Scooby shook his head. "Rappy rent rafter Rim Ram." 

 "I guess that leaves us to find-" There was a sudden sound of shattering glass. "Daphne just went outside, didn't she?"

 "Rep." Scooby confirmed. 

 Shaggy sighed, "Like I just hope she went through a bottom floor window." 

 She had. And left a clear trail of upturned soil and broken twigs and branches in her path is her rush to escape. With such an easy trail to follow, it didn't take overly long to find her, curled in a ball at the base of a great rock, shacking. 

 Shaggy and Scooby both curled around her her, making reassuring sounds until the shaking stopped. "You good to go back Daph?" Shaggy asked in a gentle tone. 

 Daphne's ears went back, looking scared at even the idea of returning to the castle. "Hey, don't worry. You know Vincent would never hurt us. And besides, Flim Flam and Scrappy's still back there." 

 Daphne let out a small, whine, clearly not happy, but still got up. 

 "Like, I know this won't make you feel better now, but believe me. Human you is going to find me coaxing you into a spooky place hilarious tomorrow." Shaggy assured her as they made their way back. 

 "You found her!" Scrappy waved at them from the broken window. "Did you find Flim Flam?" 

 "Not yet, I figured I should guard the window so he couldn't run out." Scrappy explained.  

 "Good thinking." Shaggy agreed. "I guess we check his room first?" Sure enough, the door was slightly ajar. With a sigh of relief Shaggy opened it, only to freeze at what he saw inside. “Zoinks!” Quickly he tried to shut the door, but he wasn't fast enough as Daphne slipped in the room.

~

 Flim Flam fled as fast as his legs could carry him. When he’d first seen the figure something deep inside him had taken over, driven him to attack. But that was swiftly overridden with the sense of danger and evil that suddenly radiated from it.

 All he could do was was flee and in his rush he’d lost track of the others. So he headed towards the only place that was familiar, the room he’d woken up in. He hadn’t slowed down in time though, and as he burst through the door he collided with a dressers, causing something inside to wobble and then fall off, shattering on the ground.

 Flim Flam dove under the bed and huddled there, ears poked for any sounds, from his friends to the scary man. But there was nothing. There was, however, a smell. It smelled tasty and was coming from whatever had spilled on the floor.

 As scared as he was, he was also curious. Slowly he inched his way out from under the bed, ready to duck back under at moment’s notice. He tentatively took a lick and shuddered as a strange sensation flooded through him. His thoughts became sharper, clearer, more...

 More human! He was thinking like a human! Flim Flam did a double take between his very human hands and clearly still nighttime sky. He glanced down at the broken bottle on the floor and couldn’t help the wide grin that spread across his face.

 For years he’d been written off as a pint-sized conman, but here was proof his Lotsa Luck Joy Juice was the real deal. It had broken a werewolf curse set by one of the thirteen evilest spirit’s in existence!

 “Zoinks!”

 Shaggy’s sudden cry caught Flim Flam by surprise and his head shot up just in time to see the werewolf version of Daphne barrel past Shaggy and into the room.

 Flim Flam felt his heart jump into his throat. He’d been kept far away from Daphne in her transformed state. She’d apologized profusely and he hadn’t held it against her. But the memory of her trying to attack him as still there and now those teeth were an inch from his face.

 Shaggy was there in an instant, hand on Daphne’s shoulder to hold her back.  But Daphne wasn't trying to pull forward to attack, like she had two weeks ago. Nor was she happy like earlier this evening. Instead she just cocked her head to the side before looking at Shaggy. 

 Shaggy shrugged at her. "Like, I think she's confused 'cause you were a werewolf earlier and now you're not. Actually, I am too." 

 "I found the cure. Flim Flam's Lotsa Luck Joy Juice!" Flim Flam said proudly. "Wolf me drank some that spilled from the broken bottle." 

 "That's great!" Shaggy exclaimed. "Is there more? Like without the chance of broken glass." 

 "Well no," Flim Flam admitted. "I kept that for posterity, the rest went into the Flying Mystery Machine's gas tank." An odd name for a plane, but who was he to argue. "But I can make more!"

 “Sounds great,” Shaggy sat, more collapsed,on the bed. It was as if the knowledge that there was an end in sight released even more tension than he’d known he had. His limbs felt noodlely but honestly he felt better than he had in two weeks. “How long does it take?”  “A few days at most. Might take less if Vince has everything I need to make it.” Flim Flam said offhand.

 Shaggy felt his heart sink. They only had a little more than a day. Daphne had made it clear this was her last night transformed by the curse. “What can I do to help?”  Flim Flam thought for a moment. “Nothing. Sorry Shaggy, Part of the process involves silver, and you shouldn’t be near that.”  Shaggy wanted to argue that scars from silver burns would be worth it to save Daphne, but Scooby was giving him a look that said he knew what Shaggy was thinking, and he should stop thinking it right now.

 “Re ran relp,” Scooby indicated himself and Scrappy.

 “Yeah, okay.” Flim Flam nodded. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

 “And Vincent too!” Scrappy added. 

 Daphne let out a slight yelp, then a whine, looking at Shaggy pleadingly.

 “It’s okay, Vincent won’t hurt them,” Shaggy tried to reassure her.  "I know he felt really scary, but we've been living with him for weeks, remember." 

 Flim Flam shuddered. "I know he told us about that, but experiencing it was a whole 'nother thing."

"Like tell me about it," Shaggy suppressed a shudder himself . "I should probably keep Daph away from him till morning. She was really spooked." 

 "Don't blame her." Flim Flam knew it would be a while before he forgot that feeling. "See you on the flip side." He carefully walked past where he and Daphne were before taking off. 

 "Re rot rhis," Scooby promised. "Rit's ronna re rokay." 

 "It's gonna be okay," Shaggy repeated, still not sure he completely believed it, even though he wanted to. Hope was a dangerous luxury.

[mss3ng]

I was tagged by @aurltas to share ten things about myself! Thanks for the tag and also sorry for taking like a day or two to actually write this stuff down XD

1.       I enjoy doing fiber arts and related crafts. I learned spinning and needle felting at a music camp a while back and I’ve always adored Tamora Pierce’s circle of magic books. I’m progressively getting better at spinning but once I have yarn I have literally nothing to do with it because I don’t enjoy knitting or crocheting. I would love to get into embroidery as well I have so many hobbies. Also, I’m not sure it counts as fiber arts but I’ve been getting into Chinese decorative knot tying and that’s also fun but makes my hands hurt.

2.       I’ve never thought of myself as a super athletic jock person but I’ve usually enjoyed sports I’ve tried my hand at. I did basketball for a bit and then danced for 8 years (I did one year of competitions and realized that was not for me, god I was so lonely and played so much Pokémon in hotel rooms in the middle of nowhere). Later on I also dabbled in kendo and other forms of sword fighting (but not fencing. Longswords are much more fun).

3.       The Gris OST has gotten me through intense studying ever since I discovered it and it’s never failed to keep me focused on whatever I’m working on, I have no idea why but that soundtrack is beautiful and must be listened to in order. But also, if I’m not in the mood for it, I’ll also swap it out with the Sayonara Wild Hearts or the Persona 5 Royal OSTs for variation’s sake. If you see me smiling at music, it’s most likely video game soundtracks (this cover of the staff roll from Link’s Awakening) or the xiaohei OST (here)

4.       For a few years in college I played clarinet in a video game orchestra where we covered a bunch of my favorite tracks. The ensemble pieces were a blast to play (chamber music sucked though because I hate playing alone on my instrument) and my favorite would either be Simple and Clean because that counter melody slaps, or Ballad of the Goddess where the main violin solo was replaced with an erhu—okay that one was beautiful and I’m so pissed that the orchestra dissolved before we could perform it.

5.       One of my more embarrassing screw ups at work was full on yanking a connector off the logic board of a MacBook pro, right when my supervisor walked in with ice cream for me. Yes, I am a certified apple repair technician. Luckily I didn’t get in trouble because these things happen. And then a few days later I found out another technician accidentally yanked off a different part of the laptop that wasn’t supposed to come off. (I swear we’re good at our jobs now, that was our first semester on the job and told to try to do things by ourselves).

6.       Birds are my favorite animals, I find them extremely fascinating and love all their strange quirks and traits. I can’t name a favorite bird because I have multiple depending on the category (Although I do have a soft spot for the American Robin) but fun fact! There is a bird called the Ash-Breasted Tit Tyrant and I love that this name exists in the world.

7.       I’ve managed to keep a semi-consistent sleep schedule throughout college and have never pulled an all-nighter before (and hope I never will). The closest I’ve gotten was going to bed at 3am to finish a short story for a fantasy class and I was a complete wreck the next day. Unfortunately, my consistent sleep schedule and early waking hours make me the perfect candidate for opening shifts at whatever job I hold. In tech, it’s not as bad since a 7:30 start time is manageable but for coffee shop opens at 6:15 it sucks to wake up an hour beforehand.

8.       Even though I love and adore houseplants, I struggle with keeping new ones alive. In my apartment I have a dwarf umbrella plant, some sort of ivy, and a monstera. They’re all in varying phases of poor health but I’m trying. I also refuse to get succulents because I like leaf leaves. The longest plants I’ve had are two spider plants propagated from my 10th grade English teacher’s plant and those things are hard to kill. I also have a money tree that is getting waaaaaaay too big to keep lugging around from home to campus and back again.

9.       I’ve only written and uploaded one (1) fanfic in my life! While I enjoy reading fanfics, I’ve never been interested in writing them, mostly because I don’t have as much fun working with pre-existing characters over original ones. I like playing in my own sandbox! But something I’ll do from time to time is sticking my own original characters from their original worlds into a crossover with media I like and watching the interactions explode.

10.       Speaking of original works, I’m a writing major (linguistics minor and I could probably cram in a Chinese minor if that was actually a thing at this college)! I write a lot! My main project is Chinese inspired fantasy with fiber arts, familial betrayal, and messing with the red string of fate trope in an unabashed aroace way. Another one that I’m in the character creation and world building process mode of is a viet-inspired fantasy project that’s got timeframe-based magic and a kingdom hearts style existential crisis. Also magic school because why not.

Wow I actually had a bunch to talk about. I’m only going to tag @liuet and there is 100% no pressure to actually do it XD. Anyone else that sees this is free to do it and tag me as well! 

[houseki-no-suffering]

Pssst.... gush about some thing you’ve wanted to for so long but haven’t found the ask to do so! I really like reading your metas or off-the-wall posts.

aw ty!

mmmh usually i just crank out a random meta when i feel like it, which i havent had the energy to do in a while. so have a lot of hcs about gem language, gem society and how it resembles a totalitarian system cause why not, this is already a dystopia. 

goes from cute to shady real quick, have fun

Gem Vocabulary

gems have no gender, they dont age, they dont reproduce. the whole vocabulary about relationships, aging and sex must be completely different in gem language. they probably lack a lot of words we commonly use, and have unique words for things we dont have (like winter duty, patrol duty... i wouldnt be surprised if gem language had unique grammatical features for those)

this is one of the reasons why its so unfair of aechmea to call cairn ‘wife’ and ‘princess.’ the gems have no concept of wife-ness, we dont know if a gem equivalent of marriage exists, but its definitely much, much different from what the lunarians (and us) perceive as one.

do gems have anything akin coming of age? this could be weird bc gems can potentially live forever, but they can also be abducted by the lunarians at any time, so who’s to say how long a lustrous will live? how do you calculate being ‘of age’? is it by calculating the average life-span of a gem? 

how do they measure time and seasons? we know they have winter and summer and phos mentions ‘spring’ in chapter 20, but what about months and lunar phases? do they have words for that or are months just too small a timeframe for the immortal lustrous to utilize? how do they measure time? in hours and seconds? weeks? different units altogether?

Gem Relationships

similarly, gem relationships are codified in a completely different way. we know they have a concept of romance bc dia ships phos and shinsha and makes comments here and there about other gems being in love. 

at the same time, the relationships btw alexandrite and chrysoberyl, padpa and rutile, ghost/cairn and lapis etc are little different from ‘pure’ sibling/sibling relationships or senpai/kohai relationships.

this is not to say that they’re all romantic in nature, but the way they’re codified in canon (especially in the way the characters grief for their partner) makes me think that even if the gems have no blood/physical kinship with one another they have a very articulated system of establishing family bonds.

dia and bort are clearly siblings, but the same can’t be said, for example, for rutile and padpa, even if they were partners and even if they display a similar junior/senior relationship. this means that relationships are predicated on something else in hnk, and kinship, family and romance are all codified in a different way.

think of vulcans in star trek: physical contact such as two fingers touching, holding hands and kissing is unknown of (save for very specific circumstances). and vulcan people have a completely different way of expressing intimacy and romance than humans. 

this makes me think: just how many canonically romantic relationships are there in hnk (if any) that we’re simply unaware of bc the way gems codify and express romance is so different from ours? is romance even common? rare? perceived as weird? useless? 

what about other relationships? the gems use ‘little brother/ older brother’ but what if this is just japanese approximations? what kind of relationships can lustrous language really express and how different are they from ours?

Imagination

as @ruddy-rutile​ pointed out some time ago, the gems lack a concept of fantasy. thats why i posted that panel about alex’s original lunarian designs. sure, it’s funny, but it also makes you think: these gems are not raised to think outside the box and they can do it without being told so only under exceptional circumstances.

of the vast library of texts that ghost (and lapis) used to take care of, just how many are novels and fiction? none of them? a small amount? a decent amount? in a society thats as focused on practicality, efficiency and conservatism as the lustrous’, how is fiction perceived if perceived at all? 

is there art? red beryl’s craft comes very close to art when they express their feelings about ‘fashion for fashion’s sake,’ but it’s an exception that the other gems find hard to grasp.

phos is often told to stop fantasizing about the world and get things done, the only tale we know the gems are told is the actual story of how their world came to be. the gems always talk about real things, stuff that happened, and make and do things that have a practical use. 

even bort’s jellyfish diary is just made up of a recollection of what happened when they tried to feed them. still, the fact that bort names the jellyfish makes you think that these rocks do have potential for fantasy, theyre just not used to it

Totalitarianism and Privacy

to make this even more shady, here’s your gentle reminder that:

- gems’ rooms have no doors. the only door ive been able to find is the one in shinsha’s room (ch 2) and that is because shinsha’s room is closed off to other people and full of mercury. its like putting a patch on smth you dont want to deal with (much like shinsha’s whole character arc tbh)

- the gems have little to no free time. or their free time can be revoked any time in case an emergency occurs, sensei is napping etc. the gems’ time is rigorously managed by jade, euc and sensei. each gem has a place to be and a time to be.

this means that a missing gem can be found at all times and slackers can be identified very easily. they all have a job and they have to follow it. this is not to say that they have no fun ever, but leisure time is rare and (at least as far as we know) its not contemplated when tasks are assigned each day.

the mere fact that there is a morning assembly and tasks are assigned each day makes you think. is this communism? is this totalitarianism? but most importantly, is this a scary dystopia that hits you in the face like a brick the third time you reread ch 2?   

- sameness > equality. i already went over this in the past. gems society underlines sameness and conformity over anything else. the gems think theyre equal but theyre actually ‘similar.’

a system based on equality emphasizes differences so that every individual can do the best with what they have got and get back what they need, according to their personal needs. 

these gems emphasize sameness: everyone is upheld to the same standards, even when those standards dont match with a gem’s unique characteristics (ie phos cannot be a fighter, no reason to keep saying stuff like ‘if only you were stronger/you’re useless’ etc. they’re a rock with an imagination in a world where dull reality is the rule. just make them write theater plays and play with slugs with shinsha, wth)

It’s real 1984 hours:

all of the above means that:

- your sense of self is subordinated to the group. if you dont belong you’re simply a nothing. at times, the gems almost display a collective consciousness (a pretty hostile one too): everything must be decided together and done together

- you are what you do. gems identify completely with their job. thats why a job is so important, thats why this system is so fucked up. self worth is not inherent, it depends on what you can do. talk about a breeding ground for mental health issues 

- you dont have a saying in picking your career or deciding for you future. thats up to sensei (and maybe euc and jade). unless you have a very strong affinity with a certain task (like red beryl and alex)

- youre expected to follow orders all the damn time. no matter how much sensei wants his gems to exert free will, they still prefer to do what theyre told. ill admit, its much easier than taking your life in your hands and decide what youre gonna do with it, but damn if it isnt depressing. and childish

- euclase and sensei are the authority. sensei and euc are the powers that be. in the sense that they assign tasks, they decide on times and battle plans, on purpose etc. lets not forget that euc was the one to take on sensei’s role after he ‘resigned.’ 

i wonder what would happen if euc were abducted and the gems had no one to follow anymore, no orders. who’d be the new leader? would there be one? lets not forget that no matter how gentle euc is, phos is shit scared of them.

- thought police is a thing. to end this meta on what is probably the shadiest note: surveillance is a thing. the gems report on each other, it’s thought police, no sugarcoating this. 

there’s no privacy, no secrets. even antarc reads rutile’s diary. this goes from cute and childish (’you did this one wrong thing, im gonna tell sensei’) to absolutely fucked up (’you did this one wrong thing, im gonna tell sensei’)

[thetruthnowtold]

regarding arden (@bwisou) and soyoon (@ddaengg)

As many of you may know, the news of Soyoon's (@/ddaengg) passing from cancer was announced back in late December of last year. It has recently come to the attention of those of us closely tied to her and in the general friend group with which she was involved, Soyoon is still alive. We wish this was a time that we could rejoice at the idea of regaining our friend back into our lives, but a lot more troubling information came to light in this situation that prevents us from doing so. Beyond the lie about her death, there are inconsistencies in her explanations that lead us to believe that her reasonings regarding her illness and her treatments are false or heavily altered. Arden, who many of you know as @/bwisou, is an accomplice in this, and did not only aid Soyoon in carrying out this lie, but has fabricated her own lies both directly related to this situation and in our own interactions with her as friends and mutuals, regarding her identity.

On March 9th, there were several people who noticed that Soyoon's twitter account had become active. Thinking that it may have been a family member or friend, a number of us reached out to the user and asked why the account was active again. Alex messaged Soyoon for clarification and Christine reached out to Arden to ask if she knew anything about it, only to receive no response from her, initially. A few hours later, Soyoon dm'd Alex and Christine on twitter explaining how she had suffered a herniation and had been in a coma until mid-late January. She continued to explain how breathing and recuperating had been her focus, and thus she was not able to contact anyone until then, except for Arden. She told Christine that Arden had known about her being alive since early February, but that both decided to keep it a secret. Additionally, it was explained that someone Soyoon had known well prior to her coma had stole her phone and contacted Arden on a different social media platform, acting as Soyoon's brother and announcing that she had passed, and later went on to make post for his "sister" on tumblr. While incredulous, but still somewhat believable, many of us started to question the authenticity of further descriptions of Soyoon's treatments and the timeline within which they took place.

As you can see, in Soyoon’s explanation [at first] she claims that she did not have the twitter app installed on her phone at the time. Later on, she went on to say that she did in fact have the app installed, which was why “he” was able to deactivate her twitter and tumblr in the first place. That is already one inconsistency.

It soon became evident that medical facts weren't adding up, and the things she was able to do within such small timeframes following high risk surgeries did not make sense. Soyoon had told Annie that she had begun her clinical trial in October/November of 2018. However, in her messages to Alex and Christine, she claimed that she had been accepted to and started another clinical trial in NYC as of February.

This isn’t how clinical trials work. In order for clinical trial participants to be approved, it usually takes 6 to 7 months. Additionally, if you go to the U.S.’ database for clinical trials, you can see that they were only recruiting participants in 2014 to 2016. Their status is now: “active, not recruiting”, meaning that she could have not possibly been approved for the trials in February 2019, 3 years after it had initially begun. Secondly, Soyoon described her cancer a stage 4 glioblastoma, which would render the majority of her brain cancerous. However, as you can see in the screenshot, she said that her tumor was “FULLY” removed. If her tumor were to be truly “fully” removed, that would mean that the majority of her brain is gone. And even if that was not true, that would have meant that she would be physically and mentally impaired for a long time. The timestamps show that this message was sent on March 13, 2019 and she said she had recently undergone surgery two weeks ago (and two more procedures prior to that). So within those two weeks, she claimed to have regained her ability to walk and use her hands, be able to write coherent paragraphs with no grammar errors or typos, able to play the guitar, and ice skate with perfect balance.

Soyoon has poor prognosis but was miraculously able to be treated and stabilized within the span of 6 months. Her overall presentation of cancer is inconsistent with typical cases of glioblastoma multiforme. She also claimed to have traveled back and forth between New York and Korea shortly after her surgery, which is unlikely to be cleared by any doctor after undergoing such a high risk procedure due to high altitudes, air pressure, and so on.

In addition to this, Arden's messages also became suspicious in the way that they were not only failing to match up with aspects of the information Soyoon was giving, but contradicting her own posts that she had made in December in regards to attending Soyoon's funeral and claims of passing condolences directly onto the family of the deceased.

When Christine asked Soyoon to clarify the situation, she had mentioned that she had been unaware of such a post until recently, and sent the screenshots of Arden’s explanation from when she asked her directly about it.

She would be under a lot of grief and despair, understandably, however she disregards the fact that people would definitely have paid attention to her tags on her posts. She is the original poster who announced that Soyoon had passed away, and she mentions that she has connections with the family members and will pass along condolences directly.

In trying to explain her story about attending the funeral, she states that when she attended the funeral home, she saw the surname “Kim” and assumed it was Soyoon, though this is quite obviously one of the most common surnames in Korea, and it is a bit strange that she hadn’t confirmed.

This is not the first time that Arden has raised the suspicions of some of us who have built a friendship with her over the last couple of months to years since she has been active in the fandom. Amber had been told that Arden’s hometown was Chicago, but as time went on, she began to say that her hometown was actually Daegu. She first began to tell people of her Korean ethnicity and familiarity with the language privately, but in time it became evident that what she started to present herself as more publicly on her blog was different. ¼, ½, ¾ Korean, a Korean proficiency at a low/grade school level versus her now obvious fluency to the point that she can translate with ease and thoroughly describe the language.

This clarifies things a little, but still doesn’t explain why her statements changed over time from making her “less” to “more” Korean, so to speak.

The most noticeable occurrence has been her recurring tendencies to use the photos of other people as her kakaotalk/line icons, and more recently, as selfie/daily life posts on twitter, and claim that they are her. In 2017, Arden posted a series of selfie tags (1, 2, 3, 4). About a year or so ago on kakaotalk, Amber noticed that the photo Arden had recently changed her icon to did not quite resemble the few photos that she had seen of her in the past, but the image was small and not the clearest. When Amber asked if the photo was Arden and if she had gotten her hair cut/dyed, she got a confirmation that yes, it was her, and she had recently changed her hairstyle. This image was followed by several photos with a similar hairstyle and an unclear face. A few other close friends of Arden noticed this as well, but little was thought of it at the time until it came to Amber's attention later on that the pictures had actually been taken from an account on instagram (ah.hyeon), which did not belong to Arden.

Those of us who were close to Arden began to notice throughout the following months that she took longer to reply than usual, but with her being busy with pre-med in university and with internships, this was understandable. However, Amber and Annie in particular started noticing that Arden's frequent displays of interest in wanting to call, skype, and actually meet up in person would never be followed through with on her end. Concerts, theme parks, trips to other countries, etc. had been in the works between Arden and a number of her mutuals, but they never happened. It seemed that something always came up last minute, or the plans were disregarded on her side altogether. It was inconsiderate towards those who set aside specific time and funds in hopes that the meetings would be followed through with. When Amber attended the Hamilton stops for the Love Yourself tour in September 2018, she caught wind that Arden had driven hours and crossed the border to attend the same show that she had the day prior, but did not communicate with Amber, who had at this point been a close friend of two years, that she was there. Arden had said that she would be/had attended the concert with a friend, but then told Alex that she had attended with her mom (who lives in a different state). Amber had not heard from Arden for almost three weeks prior to this, thus there was no indication to her directly that Arden had chosen to attend. Amber messaged her bluntly, making it known that she was aware they had attended the same show, to which Arden responded to the 3-week old messages as if nothing was wrong, said she hoped Amber had a nice time, and then proceeded to say that it was a mistake not to tell her, but that when she met her for the first time, she wanted to be a better version of herself. Between this and the general past that Amber had experienced with Arden bailing on plans and not replying to her messages while blatantly interacting with others elsewhere, she made the decision to call off their friendship, wishing for no grudges and no hard feelings. Arden then blocked Amber on all platforms and they have had no direct contact since.

This also brings up the topic of attending the Love Yourself concert in Hong Kong, as she had promised to send her mutuals pictures of Hong Kong Disneyland and of the concert while she was there. However, she never did and would change the topic whenever it was brought up. In recent weeks, she has been enthusiastic about the idea of meeting up with Christine when she moves to the west coast for school, but there is little reason for Christine to believe that this would actually play out and be followed through with in the end.

This is around the time that Arden's use of other people's photos she claimed as her own began to increase, this time from a different account (seosoosoo).

Since then she has moved onto using the pictures from a korean pizza restaurant's facebook, and most recently as you can see in the 3rd set of screenshots, photos with a dog in which she altered "her" hair colour in order to match up with her previous claim that she had dyed it purple, while the original owner of the photo is clearly someone else. She received many kind comments that she accepted gratefully from friends who were still unaware of the falsifying of her identity, or that were suspicious but didn't think much of it, much like Amber had nearly a year prior. The photos from seosoosoo in particular were posted from 2016-2018, and she is clearly a fully Korean woman, which is inconsistent with Arden’s claims to be only partially Korean and the photos she had initially posted of herself(?) in her first year or so on tumblr. The chat directly above shows Arden blatantly lying about this photo being of her. The majority of the times that she posts are unprovoked, and none of us pressured her to show us pictures of herself at any point in time.

Christine received a notification on April 3rd from Arden’s line account that she had updated her photo to the 2nd photo above. She proceeded to ask Arden if it was her, which she confirmed as being true. Karina, Christine, and Alicia then confronted her about them being stolen from instagram on April 7th.

She apparently “couldn’t recall” using someone else’s photos in the past, but we are clearly aware that this was not a “single isolated” incident, as we already had copious amounts of proof that she had done this many times before, and she was completely disregarding the blatant lie about the photo of the girl with the dog that she had posted on April 4th. Karina ended their conversation following Arden’s explanation, although Christine was not given the chance to reply to Arden’s messages, as she deleted her public twitter account immediately after sending them. Both Christine and Alicia reached out on line/kkt, where Arden apologised for leaving twitter and was willing to explain. Alicia was told that Arden would be stepping away from social media, and stopped her replies. When Christine had sent the following message, Arden read approximately 2 minutes later, but gave no response.

We understand social anxiety and not wanting to post your face on the internet, however she posted these photos at her own merit and was not forced to do so. She did not have to steal the identity of other people online and claim them as herself, time and time again. Some of her close friends and mutuals, some who wish to remain anonymous, confronted Arden and gave her more than enough chances to come clean, tell the truth and be forgiven. She chose to continue digging herself in a deeper hole, and guilt trip her mutuals into believing her.

In addition to her public twitter account, Arden has now deleted her private account, and Soyoon has followed suit with her own.

Initially we did not want to “expose” Arden or Soyoon because they were our friends, after all. It hurts and disappoints us to know that no matter how many chances we gave them to explain themselves, they would not confess or own up to their mistakes. Instead, they continued to lie and tried to block out those who were suspicious of them or pointed out their lies, and we felt that this was the only option they left us. Cancer and death are not topics to be taken lightly, or used for clout or pity. Many of us are going through a whirlwind of emotions and anxieties due to all of this coming to light. As a group of friends, mutuals, and acquaintances who have been close to one or both of these individuals, who all had to mourn the loss of a friend and who put our faith and trust into two people who always presented themselves as genuine and kind, we feel betrayed, hurt, angry, and sad. We feel as if we are experiencing loss again, not once but two times over. Soyoon and Arden have made it very difficult to determine what is truth and what is a lie, if Soyoon truly is alive or if she ever existed to begin with, if Soyoon and Arden are two different people, or one and the same.

It has been a rough couple of weeks for us all, and it took us a long time to compile the information above and inform many of those who we felt were close enough to the situation to know before we publicly shed light on this issue for many of you who may have also been friends, acquaintances, and followers of these individuals. We wanted to compile and post this information to put you all in the know, but also to spread awareness on how easily it is to be manipulated by others online that you thought you could trust. It is easy to make friends here with similar interests and quickly fall into a rhythm of trusting and loving one another. However, it is still the online world, and there should always be a guard kept up to some extent. Lying, guilt tripping, blaming others, inconsistent stories, breaking plans and promises, and ignoring general responsibilities of being a close friend are all signs to look out for. Arden and Soyoon are well-known for being incredibly nice, genuine, angelic people and it is so easy to refer back to these qualities when suspicion and your own anxiety gets the best of you. It is hard to end friendships, and even those of us who had let go or had been trying to move on found it difficult to rest easy with this situation still lingering in the air. This has been a big burden to carry, we have no hard feelings towards Soyoon or Arden, and ask that you please refrain from sending any negative messages to them. Posting this will be a form of release and closure for all of us, and will hopefully be a way for us to grow stronger in a moment where trust and faith seem so out of reach. We are deeply sorry to those who are shocked and understandably feel betrayed, confused, or overwhelmed by this information. Let this situation be a lesson for you and learn from our experiences.

Thank you and take care.

- @kimseokjin, @hobies, @taeguk, @jiminrolls, @jinsjade, @daegucrew, @artistkimv, @yoonmin

UPDATE: 

Following our post regarding the Arden/Soyoon situation, one of us has been contacted by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. This person is the original owner of the photos that Soyoon has posted and claimed as her own, and we regretfully announce that her identity had been falsified as well. The real owner of the photos wants none of her information released and we will strongly respect that. She wanted us to mention that if any of you think you happen to see the girl in these photos, do not approach her or think she is Soyoon because she is not.

[gargaj]

A breakdown of the Revision 2020 Threeway Battle shader

Those of you who have been following this year's edition of Revision probably remember the unexpected twist in Sunday's timeline, where I was pitted in a coding "battle" against two of the best shader-coders in the world to fend for myself. Admittedly the buzz it caused caught me by surprise, but not as much as the feedback on the final shader I produced, so I hope to shed some light on how the shader works, in a way that's hopefully understandable to beginners and at least entertaining to experts, as well as providing some glimpses into my thought process along the way.

Recorded video of the event

But before we dive into the math and code, however, I think it's important to get some context by recounting the story of how we got here.

A brief history of demoscene live-coding

Visual coding has been massively opened up when graphics APIs began to introduce programmable fragment rendering, perhaps best known to most people as "pixel shaders"; this allowed programmers to run entire programmable functions on each pixel of a triangle, and none was more adamant to do that than a fellow named Iñigo Quilez (IQ), an understated genius who early on recognized the opportunity in covering the entire screen with a single polygon, and just doing the heavy lifting of creating geometry in the shader itself. His vision eventually spiraled into not only the modern 4k scene, but also the website ShaderToy, which almost every graphics programmer uses to test prototypes or just play around with algorithms. IQ, an old friend of mine since the mid-00s, eventually moved to the US, worked at Pixar and Oculus, and became something of a world-revered guru of computer graphics, but that (and life) has unfortunately caused him to shift away from the scene.

His vision of single-shader-single-quad-single-pass shader coding, in the meantime, created a very spectacular kind of live coding competition in the scene where two coders get only 25 minutes and the attention of an entire party hall, and they have to improvise their way out of the duel - this has been wildly successful at parties for the sheer showmanship and spectacle akin to rap battles, and none emerged from this little sport more remarkably than Flopine, a bubbly French girl who routinely shuffled up on stage wearing round spectacles and cat ears (actually they might be pony ears on second thought), and mopped the floor up with the competition. Her and a handful of other live-coders regularly stream on Twitch as practice, and have honed their live-coding craft for a few years at this point, garnering a considerable following.

Just a sample of insanity these people can do.

My contribution to this little sub-scene was coming up with a fancy name for it ("Shader Showdown"), as well as providing a little tool I called Bonzomatic (named after Bonzaj / Plastic, a mutual friend of IQ and myself, and the first person to create a live coding environment for demoparties) that I still maintain, but even though I feel a degree of involvement through the architectural side, I myself haven't been interested in participating: I know I can do okay under time pressure, but I don't really enjoy it, and while there's a certain overlap in what they do and what I do, I was always more interested in things like visual detail and representative geometry aided by editing and direction rather than looping abstract, fractal-like things. It just wasn't my thing.

Mistakes were made

But if I'm not attracted to this type of competition, how did I end up in the crossfire anyway? What I can't say is that it wasn't, to a considerable degree, my fault: as Revision 2020 was entirely online, most of the scene took it to themselves to sit in the demoscene Discord to get an experience closest to on-site socializing, given the somber circumstances of physical distancing. This also allowed a number of people who hasn't been around for a while to pop in to chat - like IQ, who, given his past, was mostly interested in the showdowns (during which Flopine crushed the competition) and the 4k compo.

As I haven't seen him around for a while, and as my mind is always looking for an angle, I somehow put two and two together, and asked him if he would consider taking part in a showdown at some point; he replied that he was up for it - this was around Saturday 10PM. I quickly pinged the rest of the showdown participants and organizers, as I spotted that Bullet was doing a DJ set the next day (which would've been in a relatively convenient timezone for IQ in California as well), and assumed that he didn't really have visuals for it - as there was already a "coding jam" over Ronny's set the day before, I figured there's a chance for squeezing an "extra round" of coding. Flopine was, of course, beyond excited by just the prospect of going against IQ, and by midnight we essentially got everything planned out (Bullet's consent notwithstanding, as he was completely out of the loop on this), and I was excited to watch...

...that is, until Havoc, the head honcho for the showdowns, off-handedly asked me about an at that point entirely hypothetical scenario: what would happen if IQ would, for some reason, challenge me instead of Flopine? Now, as said, I wasn't really into this, but being one to not let a good plan go to waste (especially if it was mine), I told Havoc I'd take one for the team and do it, although it probably wouldn't be very fun to watch. I then proceeded to quickly brief IQ in private and run him through the technicalities of the setup, the tool, the traditions and so on, and all is swell...

...that is, until IQ (this is at around 2AM) offhandedly mentions that "Havoc suggested we do a three-way with me, Flopine... and you." I quickly try to backpedal, but IQ seems to be into the idea, and worst of all, I've already essentially agreed to it, and to me, the only thing worse than being whipped in front of a few thousand people would be going back on your word. The only way out was through.

Weeks of coding can spare you hours of thinking

So now that I've got myself into this jar of pickles, I needed some ideas, and quick. (I didn't sleep much that night.) First off, I didn't want to do anything obviously 3D - both IQ and Flopine are masters of this, and I find it exhausting and frustrating, and it would've failed on every level possible. Fractals I'm awful at and while they do provide a decent amount of visual detail, they need a lot of practice and routine to get right. I also didn't want something very basic 2D, like a byte-beat, because those have a very limited degree of variation available, and the end result always looks a bit crude.

Luckily a few months ago an article I saw do rounds was a write-up by Sasha Martinsen on how to do "FUI"-s, or Fictional User Interfaces; overly complicated and abstract user interfaces that are prominent in sci-fi, with Gmunk being the Michael Jordan of the genre.

Image courtesy of Sasha Martinsen.

Sasha's idea is simple: make a few basic decent looking elements, and then just pile them on top of each other until it looks nice, maybe choose some careful colors, move them around a bit, place them around tastefully in 3D, et voilà, you're hacking the Gibson. It's something I attempted before, if somewhat unsuccessfully, in "Reboot", but I came back to it a few more times in my little private motion graphics experiments with much better results, and my prediction was that it would be doable in the given timeframe - or at least I hoped that my hazy 3AM brain was on the right track.

A bit of math

How to make this whole thing work? First, let's think about our rendering: We have a single rectangle and a single-pass shader that runs on it: this means no meshes, no geometry, no custom textures, no postprocessing, no particle systems and no fonts, which isn't a good place to start from. However, looking at some of Sasha's 3D GIFs, some of them look like they're variations of the same render put on planes one after the other - and as long as we can do one, we can do multiple of that.

Rough sketch of what we want to do; the planes would obviously be infinite in size but this representation is good enough for now.

Can we render multiple planes via a single shader? Sure, but we want them to look nice, and that requires a bit of thinking: The most common technique to render a "2D" shader and get a "3D" look is raymarching, specifically with signed distance fields - starting on a ray, and continually testing distances until a hit is found. This is a good method for "solid-ish" looking objects and scenes, but the idea for us is to have many infinite planes that also have some sort of alpha channel, so we'd have a big problem with 1) inaccuracy, as we'd never find a hit, just something "reasonably close", and even that would take us a few dozen steps, which is costly even for a single plane and 2) the handling of an alpha map can be really annoying, since we'd only find out our alpha value after our initial march, after which if our alpha is transparent we'd need to march again.

But wait - it's just infinite planes and a ray, right? So why don't we just assume that our ray is always hitting the plane (which it is, since we're looking at it), and just calculate an intersection the analytical way?

Note: I would normally refer to this method as "raytracing", but after some consultation with people smarter than I am, we concluded that the terms are used somewhat ambiguously, so let's just stick to "analytical ray solving" or something equally pedantic.

We know the mathematical equation for a ray is position = origin + direction * t (where t is a scalar that represents the distance/progress from the ray origin), and we know that the formula for a plane is A * x + B * y + C * z + D = 0, where (A, B, C) is the normal vector of the plane, and D is the distance from the origin. First, since the intersection will be the point in space that satisfies both equations, we substitute the ray (the above o + d * t for each axis) into the plane:

A * (ox + dx * t) + B * (oy + dy * t) + C * (oz + dz * t) + D = 0

To find out where this point is in space, we need to solve this for t, but it's currently mighty complicated. Luckily, since we assume that our planes are parallel to the X-Y plane, we know our (A, B, C) normal is (0, 0, 1), so we can simplify it down to:

oz + dz * t + D = 0

Which we can easily solve to t:

t = (D - oz) / dz

That's right: analytically finding a ray hit of a plane is literally a single subtraction and a division! Our frame rate (on this part) should be safe, and we're always guaranteed a hit as long as we're not looking completely perpendicular to the planes; we should have everything to start setting up our code.

Full disclosure: Given my (and in a way IQ's) lack of "live coding" experience, we agreed that there would be no voting for the round, and it'd be for glory only, but also that I'd be allowed to use a small cheat sheet of math like the equations for 2D rotation or e.g. the above final equation since I don't do this often enough to remember these things by heart, and I only had a few hours notice before the whole thing.

Setting up the rendering

Time to start coding then. First, let's calculate our texture coordinates in the 0..1 domain using the screen coordinates and the known backbuffer resolution (which is provided to us in Bonzomatic):

vec2 uv = vec2(gl_FragCoord.x / v2Resolution.x, gl_FragCoord.y / v2Resolution.y);

Then, let's create a ray from that:

vec3 rayDir = vec3( uv * 2 - 1, -1.0 ); rayDir.x *= v2Resolution.x / v2Resolution.y; // adjust for aspect ratio vec3 rayOrigin = vec3( 0, 0, 0 );

This creates a 3D vector for our direction that is -1,-1,-1 in the top left corner and 1,1,-1 in the bottom right (i.e. we're looking so that Z is decreasing into the screen), then we adjust the X coordinate since our screen isn't square, but our coordinates currently are - no need to even bother with normalizing, it'll be fine. Our origin is currently just sitting in the center.

Then, let's define (loosely) our plane, which is parallel to the XY plane:

float planeDist = 1.0f; // distance between each plane float planeZ = -5.0f; // Z position of the first plane

And solve our equation to t, as math'd out above:

float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z;

Then, calculate WHERE the hit is by taking that t by inserting it back to the original ray equation using our current direction and origin:

vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir;

And now we have our intersection; since we already know the Z value, we can texture our plane by using the X and Y components to get a color value:

vec4 color = fui( hitPos.xy ); // XY plane our_color = color;

Of course we're gonna need the actual FUI function, which will be our procedural animated FUI texture, but let's just put something dummy there now, like a simple circle:

vec4 fui ( vec2 uv ) { return length(uv - 0.5) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec(0); }

And here we go:

Very good, we have a single circle and if we animate the camera we can indeed tell that it is on a plane.

So first, let's tile it by using a modulo function; the modulo (or modulus) function simply wraps a number around another number (kinda like the remainder after a division, but for floating point numbers) and thus becomes extremely useful for tiling or repeating things:

We'll be using the modulo function rather extensively in this little exercise, so strap in. (Illustration via the Desmos calculator.)

vec4 layer = fui( mod( hitPos.xy, 1.0 ) );

This will wrap the texture coordinates of -inf..inf between 0..1:

We also need multiple planes, but how do we combine them? We could just blend them additively, but with the amount of content we have, we'd just burn them in to white and it'd look like a mess (and not the good kind of mess). We could instead just use normal "crossfade" / "lerp" blending based on the alpha value; the only trick here is to make sure we're rendering them from back to front since the front renders will blend over the back renders:

int steps = 10; float planeDist = 1.0f; for (int i=steps; i>=0; i--) { float planeZ = -1.0f * i * planeDist; float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z; if (t > 0.0f) // check if "t" is in front of us { vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir; vec4 layer = fui( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ); // blend layers based on alpha output colour = mix( colour, layer, layer.a ); } }

And here we go:

We decreased the circles a bit in size to see the effect more.

Not bad! First thing we can do is just fade off the back layers, as if they were in a fog:

layer *= (steps - i) / float(steps);

We have a problem though: we should probably increase the sci-fi effect by moving the camera continually forward, but if we do, we're gonna run into a problem: Currently, since our planeZ is fixed to the 0.0 origin, they won't move with the camera. We could just add our camera Z to them, but then they would be fixed with the camera and wouldn't appear moving. What we instead want is to just render them AS IF they would be the closest 10 planes in front of the camera; the way we could do that is that if e.g. our planes' distance from each other is 5, then round the camera Z down to the nearest multiple of 5 (e.g. if the Z is at 13, we round down to 10), and start drawing from there; rounding up would be more accurate, but rounding down is easier, since we can just subtract the division remainder from Z like so:

float planeZ = (rayOrigin.z - mod(rayOrigin.z, planeDist)) - i * planeDist;

And now we have movement! Our basic rendering path is done.

Our little fictional UI

So now that we have the basic pipeline in place, let's see which elements can we adapt from Sasha's design pieces.

The first one I decided to go with wasn't strictly speaking in the set, but it was something that I saw used as design elements over the last two decades, and that's a thick hatch pattern element; I think it's often used because it has a nice industrial feel with it. Doing it in 2D is easy: We just add X and Y together, which will result in a diagonal gradient, and then we just turn that into an alternating pattern using, again, the modulo. All we need to do is limit it between two strips, and we have a perfectly functional "Police Line Do Not Cross" simulation.

return mod( uv.x + uv.y, 1 ) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec4(0);

So let's stop here for a few moments; this isn't bad, but we're gonna need a few things. First, the repetition doesn't give us the nice symmetric look that Sasha recommends us to do, and secondly, we want them to look alive, to animate a bit.

Solving symmetry can be done just by modifying our repetition code a bit: instead of a straight up modulo with 1.0 that gives us a 0..1 range, let's use 2.0 to get a 0..2 range, then subtract 1.0 to get a -1..1 range, and then take the absolute value.

vec4 layer = fui( abs( mod( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ) - 1 ) );

This will give us a triangle-wave-like function, that goes from 0 to 1, then back to 0, then back to 1; in terms of texture coordinates, it will go back and forth between mirroring the texture in both directions, which, let's face it, looks Totally Sweet.

For animation, first I needed some sort of random value, but one that stayed deterministic based on a seed - in other words, I needed a function that took in a value, and returned a mangled version of it, but in a way that if I sent that value in twice, it would return the same mangled value twice. The most common way of doing it is taking the incoming "seed" value, and then driving it into some sort of function with a very large value that causes the function to alias, and then just returning the fraction portion of the number:

float rand(float x) { return fract(sin(x) * 430147.8193); }

Does it make any sense? No. Is it secure? No. Will it serve our purpose perfectly? Oh yes.

So how do we animate our layers? The obvious choice is animating both the hatch "gradient" value to make it crawl, and the start and end of our hatch pattern which causes the hatched strip to move up and down: simply take a random - seeded by our time value - of somewhere sensible (like between 0.2 and 0.8 so that it doesn't touch the edges) and add another random to it, seasoned to taste - we can even take a binary random to pick between horizontal and vertical strips:

The problems here are, of course, that currently they're moving 1) way too fast and 2) in unison. The fast motion obviously happens because the time value changes every frame, so it seeds our random differently every frame - this is easy to solve by just rounding our time value down to the nearest integer: this will result in some lovely jittery "digital" motion. The unison is also easy to solve: simply take the number of the layer, and add it to our time, thus shifting the time value for each layer; I also chose to multiply the layer ID with a random-ish number so that the layers actually animate independently, and the stutter doesn't happen in unison either:

vec4 fui( vec2 uv, float t ) { t = int(t); float start = rand(t) * 0.8 + 0.1; float end = start + 0.1; [...] } vec4 layer = fui( abs(mod(hitPos.xy, 2.0)-1), fGlobalTime + i * 4.7 );

Lovely!

Note: In hindsight using the Z coordinate of the plane would've given a more consistent result, but the way it animates, it doesn't really matter.

So let's think of more elements: the best looking one that seems to get the best mileage out in Sasha's blog is what I can best describe as the "slant" or "hockey stick" - a simple line, with a 45-degree turn in it. What I love about it is that the symmetry allows it to create little tunnels, gates, corridors, which will work great for our motion.

Creating it is easy: We just take a thin horizontal rectangle, and attach another rectangle to the end, but shift the coordinate of the second rectangle vertically, so that it gives us the 45-degree angle:

float p1 = 0.2; float p2 = 0.5; float p3 = 0.7; float y = 0.5; float thicc = 0.0025; if (p1 < uv.x && uv.x < p2 && y - thicc < uv.y && uv.y < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); } if (p2 < uv.x && uv.x < p3 && y - thicc < uv.y - (uv.x - p2) && uv.y - (uv.x - p2) < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); }

Note: In the final code, I had a rect() call which I originally intended to use as baking glow around my rectangle using a little routine I prototyped out earlier that morning, but I was ultimately too stressed to properly pull that off. Also, it's amazing how juvenile your variable names turn when people are watching.

Looks nice, but since this is such a thin sparse element, let's just... add more of it!

So what more can we add? Well, no sci-fi FUI is complete without random text and numbers, but we don't really have a font at hand. Or do we? For years, Bonzomatic has been "shipping" with this really gross checkerboard texture ostensibly for UV map testing:

What if we just desaturate and invert it?

We can then "slice" it up and render little sprites all over our texture: we already know how to draw a rectangle, so all we need is just 1) calculate which sprite we want to show 2) calculate the texture coordinate WITHIN that sprite and 3) sample the texture:

float sx = 0.3; float sy = 0.3; float size = 0.1; if (sx < uv.x && uv.x < sx + size && sy < uv.y &&uv.y < sy + size) { float spx = 2.0 / 8.0; // we have 8 tiles in the texture float spy = 3.0 / 8.0; vec2 spriteUV = (uv - vec2(sx,sy)) / size; vec4 sam = texture( texChecker, vec2(spx,spy) + spriteUV / 8.0 ); return dot( sam.rgb, vec3(0.33) ); }

Note: In the final code, I was only using the red component instead of desaturation because I forgot the texture doesn't always have red content - I stared at it for waaaay too long during the round trying to figure out why some sprites weren't working.

And again, let's just have more of it:

Getting there!

At this point the last thing I added was just circles and dots, because I was running out of ideas; but I also felt my visual content amount was getting to where I wanted them to be; it was also time to make it look a bit prettier.

Post-production / compositing

So we have our layers, they move, they might even have colors, but I'm still not happy with the visual result, since they are too single-colored, there's not enough tone in the picture.

The first thing I try nowadays when I'm on a black background is to just add either a single color, or a gradient:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); vec4 gradient = mix( vec4(0,0,0.2,1), vec4(0,0,0,1), uv.y); vec4 finalRender = mix( gradient, vec4(colour.xyz,1), colour.a);

This added a good chunk of depth considerably to the image, but I was still not happy with the too much separation between colors.

A very common method used in compositing in digital graphics is to just add bloom / glow; when used right, this helps us add us more luminance content to areas that would otherwise be solid color, and it helps the colors to blend a bit by providing some middle ground; unfortunately if we only have a single pass, the only way to get blur (and by extension, bloom) is repeatedly rendering the picture, and that'd tank our frame rate quickly.

Instead, I went back to one of the classics: the Variform "pixelize" overlay:

This is almost the same as a bloom effect, except instead of blurring the image, all you do is turn it into a lower resolution nearest point sampled version of itself, and blend that over the original image - since this doesn't need more than one sample per pixel (as we can reproduce pixelation by just messing with the texture coordinates), we can get away by rendering the scene only twice:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); colour += renderPlanes(uv - mod( uv, 0.1 ) ) * 0.4;

Much better tonal content!

So what else can we do? Well, most of the colors I chose are in the blue/orange/red range, and we don't get a lot of the green content; one of the things that I learned that it can look quite pretty if one takes a two-tone picture, and uses color-grading to push the midrange of a third tone - that way, the dominant colors will stay in the highlights, and the third tone will cover the mid-tones. (Naturally you have to be careful with this.)

"Boosting" a color in the mids is easy: lucky for us, if we consider the 0..1 range, exponential functions suit our purpose perfectly, because they start at 0, end at 1, but we can change how they get here:

So let's just push the green channel a tiny bit:

finalRender.g = pow(finalRender.g, 0.7);

Now all we need is to roll our camera for maximum cyberspace effect and we're done!

Best laid plans of OBS

As you can see from the code I posted the above, I wrote the final shader in GLSL; those who know me know that I'm a lot more comfortable with DirectX / HLSL, and may wonder why I switched, but of course there's another story here:

Given the remote nature of the event, all of the shader coding competition was performed online as well: since transmitting video from the coder's computer to a mixer, and then to another mixer, and then to a streaming provider, and then to the end user would've probably turned the image to mush, Alkama and Nusan came up with the idea of skipping a step and rigging up a version of Bonzo that ran on the coder's computer, but instead of streaming video, it sent the shader down to another instance of Bonzo, running on Diffty's computer, who then captured that instance and streamed it to the main Revision streaming hub. This, of course, meant that in a three-way, Diffty had to run three separate instances of Bonzo - but it worked fine with GLSL earlier, so why worry?

What we didn't necessarily realize at the time, is that the DirectX 11 shader compiler takes no hostages, and as soon as the shader reached un-unrollable level of complexity, it thoroughly locked down Diffty's machine, to the point that even the video of the DJ set he was playing started to drop out. I, on the other hand, didn't notice any of this, since my single local instance was doing fine, so I spent the first 15 minutes casually nuking Diffty's PC to shreds remotely, until I noticed Diffty and Havoc pleading on Discord to switch to GLSL because I'm setting things on fire unknowingly.

This is fine.

I was reluctant to do so, simply because of the muscle memory, but I was also aware that I should keep the show going if I can because if I bow out without a result, that would be a colossal embarrassment to everyone involved, and I only can take one of those once every week, and I was already above my quota - so, I quickly closed the DX11 version of Bonzo, loaded the shader up in a text editor, replaced "floatX" with "vecX" (fun drinking game: take a shot every time I messed it up during the live event), commented the whole thing out, loaded it into a GLSL bonzo, and quickly fixed all the other syntax differences (of which there were luckily not many, stuff like "mix" instead of "lerp", constructors, etc.), and within a few minutes I was back up and running.

This, weirdly, helped my morale a bit, because it was the kind of clutch move that for some reason appealed to me, and made me quite happy - although at that point I locked in so bad that not only did I pay absolutely not attention to the stream to see what the other two are doing, but that the drinks and snacks I prepared for the hour of battling went completely untouched.

In the end, when the hour clocked off, the shader itself turned out more or less how I wanted it, it worked really well with Bullet's techno-/psy-/hardtrance mix (not necessarily my jam, as everyone knows I'm more a broken beat guy, but pounding monotony can go well with coding focus), and I came away satisfied, although the perhaps saddest point of the adventure was yet to come: the lack of cathartic real-life ending that was taken from us due to the physical distance, when after all the excitement, all the cheers and hugs were merely lines of text on a screen - but you gotta deal with what you gotta deal with.

A small sampling of the Twitch reaction.

Conclusion

In the end, what was my takeaway from the experience?

First off, scoping is everything: Always aim to get an idea where you can maximize the outcome of the time invested with the highest amount of confidence of pulling it off. In this case, even though I was on short notice and in an environment I was unfamiliar with, I relied on something I knew, something I've done before, but no one else really has.

Secondly, broaden your influence: You never know when you can take something that seems initially unrelated, and bend it into something that you're doing with good results.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, step out of your comfort zone every so often; you'll never know what you'll find.

(And don't agree to everything willy-nilly, you absolute moron.)

[sparklyjojos]

CARNIVAL recaps [1/13] These will be full recaps of Carnival, the JDC book between Carnival Eve (recapped here) and Carnival Day (will be recapped as soon as this one is done). It's necessary to know the events of Cosmic, Joker and Carnival Eve before tackling this one. (The Saimon Family Case isn't ultra necessary, but it certainly helps.)

Carnival on its own has 26 episodes, each one spanning a week. They’re told completely out of chronological order. A note at the beginning encourages the reader to either experience them in this weird sequence (“the reader method”), or use the list provided to read them in chronological order (“the writer method”). The recap follows the reader’s way.

This and the next book are intentionally written to be VERY confusing and will constantly jump between places, times and characters. There are dates at the beginning of chapters, but they won't necessary mean a chapter happens exactly in that timeframe. There are tons and tons of characters. GOOD LUCK.

As for content warnings, there will be suicide, a lot of death and grieving in general, mental illness, a global virus pandemic, poorly handled Nazis, and also the author can’t write gay people.

Today’s recap: Christmas on Easter, S-detectives galore, broken gaydars, and the author letting you know early that he won’t hesitate to kill major characters.

--

[PART 1 — CARNIVAL ACT]

--

ONE

23 Nov 1996 — 29 Nov 1996

EASTER ISLAND

--

Now that it's been over three months since the Crime Olympics began on August 10th, the estimated death toll has reached over four hundred million.

Each Saturday a great tragic incident happens somewhere in the world at exactly 1 PM local time. A mysterious terrorist organization RISE announced that it’s the doing of the Billion Killer, an omnipotent being with no tangible form.

While the Billion Killer is fearsome, most of the deaths happen due to other causes. RISE’s “Invisible Soldiers” (IS for short) are stealthily killing people, and the global crime rate is on the rise. Some call it an Invisible War. There’s also a new disease called Alive [or Arrive? can be either word] spreading around and killing people in droves with its extremely low survival chance.

--

Christmas Mizuno has recently been staying on Easter Island. While there, he makes friends with a blind girl called Joyeeta, the daughter of the owner of the inn that Christmas is staying at.

Before he came here, Christmas had assisted Ryuuguu Jounosuke in investigating one of the Billion Killer’s cases in Peru. While they were there, Ryuuguu suddenly collapsed in fever brought on by the Alive disease, but had the extreme luck to recover after a short period of coma. But after he woke up, he seemed… different, and in an unusually brash way told Christmas to basically fuck off and try to find any clues on the Easter Island.

Christmas was confused by the sudden change in Ryuuguu, but at least glad about him surviving. So much has already been lost in the Crime Olympics. The JDC building’s explosion in August killed close to 300 out of 350 members of the organization. Christmas’s beloved Kasumi Fuyuka was dead, and they couldn’t even find Ajiro Souji’s body in the rubble.

--

When Christmas and Joyeeta are riding around the island, she suddenly says in her poor English that “a giant bird is falling”, and immediately afterwards they hear a rumbling sound and feel vibrations like that of an earthquake. Christmas assumes a plane has crashed and they speed up towards the beach.

It turns out the Moai statues have suddenly fallen over and killed a lot of tourists. Between the bodies lies the sixteenth skull of the Billion Killer; these are strangely glistening skulls made out of yet unidentified material, that so far are suspected to be symbolic “medals” of the Crime Olympics, one skull being left on each crime scene of the Billion Killer.

One of the dead tourists managed to draw a dying message in the sand: a simple image of a flying bird (?) and the letters NAS next to it.

When they return to town, they discover Joyeeta’s father had died around the same time the statues fell, stabbed with a yet unknown weapon in a pool full of other people. Christmas thinks a lot about how the impact of this one death is lost next to the more flashy Billion Killer case.

Joyeeta believes that “the bird” may have been brought here by her dead older sister Tierra as revenge, and that it killed their father. Tierra had been once attacked by a guest, pushed him in self-defense and accidentally killed him, which made the enraged father beat her and kick her out. Tierra was found dead on the beach later.

Despite being fed this entire sob story, Christmas already suspects that it was Joyeeta who killed her father, but leaves that be.

He can't guess the trick behind the Moai case. What did the bird and NAS mean? The Nazca bird drawing? Or maybe a NASA space shuttle crashed near the island? Unable to figure out much, Christmas eventually goes back to Peru to reunite with Ryuuguu and investigate the Nazca lines just in case.

After he leaves, we the readers learn that the blind girl named Joyeeta was the one who had died, and Tierra was just pretending to be her. After Joyeeta’s death, Tierra had found a dagger on the beach and prayed to the Moai asking for her father to die somehow. When she checked the beach later, the dagger wasn’t there—and now it seems like the Moai heard her wish.

--

Thinking again on how Joyeeta's father could have been killed, Christmas reasons out that he was stabbed when everyone’s attention was focused on the rumbling and noise. It’s like that saying about “the magician's left hand”—an illusionist distracts the audience with his right hand while really performing the trick with his left.

If something had enough force to topple the Moai statues, maybe it would also be able to fling a knife into the victim somehow. Or maybe Christmas is just rambling again, but hey, wandering around in confusion until he bumps into a solution is his reasoning method after all.

--

TWO

30 Nov 1996 — 06 Dec 1996

NAZCA LINES

--

When Christmas arrives in Peru a week after the Moai case, another weird incident has already happened: the terrain inside the eye of the Condor of the Nazca lines was burned in a pattern resembling a crop circle, yet another skull of the Billion Killer found in the center. There were no victims of the incident.

Christmas, Ryuuguu, Jouka (dressed completely in white which complements Ryuuguu’s black nicely) and the local guide investigate the scene.

Ryuuguu really changed after going through Alive. While he still has all his quirky mannerisms, he acts colder and Christmas gets the unsettling feeling that his usually friendly colleague now hates his guts. What’s more, Ryuuguu recently proposed to Jouka, which came completely out of the blue for someone seemingly as uninterested in relationships. Almost like he’s a whole other person.

Ryuuguu eventually leaves them to board a Cessna with the guide so they can examine the Nazca lines from above. Christmas talks with Jouka. She also noticed the change in their fellow detective, but accepts that nobody stays the same forever.

--

The Cessna crashes.

The guide survives for long enough to explain the accident. Something weird happened to the engine and made them crash. Up until the last moments Ryuuguu encouraged the guide to escape while staying calmly in his seat. His last words were:

“So this is fate… nothing can save you from it… Ryuuguu Jounosuke dies here...”

Detectives aren’t exempt from death. Four million people die every day in the Crime Olympics, Ryuuguu and the guide being just a tiny fraction of that number. Accidents happen. Christmas knows this, but the shocking news are still too much to handle. Jouka starts wearing black.

Christmas thinks that maybe it wasn’t a complete accident. Maybe Ryuuguu was aware of how much the disease changed him and gave up on life. It’s been confirmed that he showed up at the plane’s checkup that day, which someone with his talent for breaking machines would never do to avoid touching something important by accident.

Jouka believes it could have been murder, but can’t guess the details. She says cryptically that she’s certain that “Jounosuke died, but Ryuuguu is still alive”. Christmas desperately wants to believe this means there were TWO Ryuuguus present, one of them a disguised stranger. The real Ryuuguu caught on and sabotaged the engine, thus killing the imposter.

But no matter how hard they hope and investigate, they have to accept that the person who was at the checkup and who died in the crash was the same original Ryuuguu Jounosuke, and he will never come back again.

The only thing they may do is to turn away from the unchangeable past and focus on the future.

--

THREE

24 Aug 1996 — 30 Aug 1996

STONEHENGE

--

Hikimiya Yuuya was lucky enough not to be in the JDC building when it exploded, but it still had a giant emotional impact on him. So many people died, Ajiro Souji went missing, and some like Kirika Mai are still fighting for their life in the hospital.

The Billion Killer struck once again on August 24th, this time causing pieces of the famous Stonehenge to fall over and kill some tourists, the mandatory glistening skull found at the scene. On the same day a similar case happened in France: over a hundred people were killed when the famous Carnac Stones somehow fell on their heads, as if they had been teleported high into the air.

Hikimiya is staying at the Paris headquarters of the international detective organization DOLL, which occupies a large building complex surrounding the Place des Vosges. He’s tasked with assisting one of only seven S-rank detectives in the world. Seven may seem like very few, but it’s actually a lot; often there was just a single S-detective in existence for years, and having more than four at once was unheard of until the last few decades. In comparison, there are over five thousand registered A-detectives.

JDC isn't looking too good in the rankings. They do have two S-ranks (Ajiro and Juku) and one A-rank (Yaiba), but Kirika is C-rank, Jounosuke and Nemu are both D, and poor, poor Hikimiya never rose above an F.

The book gives us a handy list of S detectives, all of which will be highly relevant later. (In order: name — official DOLL title — less official DOLL nickname)

Zerofini Roi — Armchair Leader — Madame Alpha (from France)

Lemuria Sullivan — Knight in Night — Herr Omega (from Spain)

Desert Colosseum — Deus Ex Machina — Frau D (from Germany)

Ronely Queen — Whodunnit Magician — Mistress Queen (from USA)

Souji Ajiro — Philo Sphere — Mister Dick (from Japan)

Firannu Meiruneshia — Locked Empress — E-Mail (from Italy)

Juku Tsukumo — God of Detectives — Jukebox (from Japan)

[I still can’t believe it’s spelt Ronely Queen, and I have long given up on trying to find the correct way to romanize Meiruneshia's name. And I know that Ajiro’s nickname probably comes from “detective” just like Dick Gumshoe, but. MISTER DICK. Who’s responsible for this.]

A person chosen to be an S-detective stays listed as one until their death is confirmed. They will still be considered S-detectives even if they’re kicked out of DOLL (Lemuria Sullivan apparently was, but that's a story for another time).

Strangely enough, all of the S-detectives (aside from Lemuria) can speak fluid Japanese, the official explanation being that Firannu is a giant nerd interested in Japan and infected everyone with enthusiasm towards learning the language.

--

Hikimiya and Desert Colosseum / Frau D are both experts in data analysis. Their work room aside from the traditional shelves full of files also hosts a giant supercomputer, which is affectionately called Egg Mac because of its egg-shaped dome that the operator enters to access the interface.

Despite the nickname, Frau D is a guy. He’s a heavy corpulent man with a charming round face and a weird hairstyle that makes Hikimiya think of a plant (cut short in the back and sides, the rest grown into a slightly green tuft). He has a fastidiously kept thin moustache and skin that’s way too nice for a dude in his early thirties. He’s strangely fashionable too. Really likes chewing gum and popcorn.

Hikimiya has several problems with the man. One, Frau always calls him the equivalent of “boy”, which feels condescending, even though Hikimiya really is like a decade younger and pretty naive. Two, Frau loves stupid pranks like pretending he’s dead, and it’s hard to tell whether he says something seriously or in jest. Three, he changes the number lock to their work room all the time, so Hikimiya has to sit outside and painstakingly figure out the new code.

Frau states that Hikimiya is the one who should mature, learn how to keep cool, and examine the situation carefully instead of relying on preconceptions (and so falling for something like that death prank). He thinks Hikimiya may already be an E-rank detective, maybe even a D-rank, and Frau just wants to help polish his skills.

It’s true that Hikimiya now needs barely an hour to break the number lock instead of half a day… but it’s still insufferable.

--

Hikimiya also meets DOLL’s leader and the single best detective in the world, Madame Alpha. At first sight she seems to be a pretty normal friendly lady. She looks a lot like Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote and has that particular calming mom energy.

Hikimiya is a little awkward with introductions, which makes Frau poke fun at him, to which Madame just advises Hikimiya to never take anything Frau says too seriously. (“But I’m always serious~”, Frau responds.)

Madame states that she already found the culprit of the Carnac Stones case, talked with him, and he promised to go to the police station and turn himself in. (Frau criticizes her naivety, to which she responds like “it’s my case, I do what I want”.) But Madame already knows that it's not the case that Hikimiya wanted to ask about—rather, he wants to know if Ajiro Souji really died in the explosion. As expected from the greatest detective in the world, it's like she's reading his thoughts.

Madame’s unique and for now unexplained Zero Reasoning tells her that Ajiro Souji is still alive.

--

Later Hikimiya admits to Frau that he was surprised about Madame actually being a woman, considering that Frau is a man despite his nickname.

Frau explains that the nickname comes from the fact that in a way, he’s the actual Desert Colosseum's "wife" (Frau D = Frau Desert Colosseum). You see, Frau on his own is simply a talented A-detective. The one called Desert Colosseum is actually the advanced AI of the Egg Mac, and when Frau uses it for data analysis, together they reach the power equivalent to that of an S-rank detective.

--

FOUR

31 Aug 1996 — 06 Sept 1996

CAPPADOCIA

--

Hikimiya meets up in a cafe with two of his colleagues who have just arrived in France to investigate the Carnac Stones case (Madame found the culprit, but the trick itself has yet to be explained). It’s Tsukumo Nemu and Ryuuguu Jounosuke, who have been investigating as a great duo lately.

Jounosuke and Nemu had been lucky enough that they were leaving the JDC building at the time of the explosion, so they came out pretty much unscathed. Nemu still worries about Kirika, but Jounosuke as always is good at putting others at ease with his words. Perhaps it’s because he treats words and languages as dear friends, and always takes great care using them. ...but then he also has all those mannerisms like talking about himself in third person, or calling everyone with a gendered suffix -shi or -jou instead of the expected -san.

Jounosuke gets persuaded to try the local sweet apple tea instead of his usual coffee. The waiter still accidentally brings coffee, and Jounosuke even dumps a bunch of sugar into it on reflex before they have it taken back. Hikimiya says that the tea is already sweet and doesn't need sugar, but Jounosuke's sweet tooth is a hard enemy to defeat. They exchange friendly banter, then Jounosuke out of nowhere tells Hikimiya a riddle, and when surprised Hikimiya can’t find the right answer, Jounosuke triumphantly adds just a tiny amount of sugar into the tea, because hey, he won, he deserves it.

Hikimiya enjoys the stupid banter, but still can’t fully relax because of something that happened the previous day...

--

When he and Frau were at work yesterday, they got news about a new case, this one in Cappadocia. The Billion Killer had somehow managed to instantly burn down the entire rock monastery together with a movie crew, so that only the rock base and yet another skull remained. Frau asked Hikimiya to gather data about the place in the library.

Cappadocia is a quite popular and mysterious tourist spot. There are even wacky theories about the underground city having been an ancient nuclear shelter. Apparently, naturally formed ancient layers with glass have been found in many deserts, and some theorize they had been created by the heat of ancient nuclear explosions. Hikimiya thinks this ancient nuclear war theory is as interesting as it is depressing. Maybe humans really don’t change.

Hikimiya was pretty upset with his day and with Frau, but at least he was looking forward to meeting Nemu and Jounosuke again.

As expected from a detective said to know even tomorrow's news, Frau D already knew about his protégé's future meeting and asked if Nemu was Hikimiya’s girlfriend. When Hikimiya said she wasn't, Frau casually asked if Jounosuke was his boyfriend, then, because from what Frau could see, Hikimiya’s utterly happy expression probably meant he was about to meet with a loved one. Hikimiya sputtered and insisted they’re all just good friends. [Oh Hikimiya, if only you knew what your pixiv tag looks like...]

Frau was still looking at him seriously, so Hikimiya just tried to give him the data on Cappadocia that he had asked for. But Frau then stated he didn't need it, because he had already investigated the topic by himself in full—he just wanted Hikimiya to learn how to use sources instead of blindly accepting information from another person.

Hikimiya’s frustration with his own helplessness and the world hit a peak at this moment, and before he could blink, he was already rambling out completely irrational angry nonsense, like “then why are you keeping me here if I'm so useless, oh I get it, you’re gay and only chose me as an assistant from the DOLL database because of my looks rather than my skills”.

Hikimiya himself wasn’t sure where the hell this line came from. Maybe because he was often perceived as gay despite not swinging that way at all [here described as “being normal”, fuck off], so he was just subconsciously directing any self-doubt away from himself. Or maybe he was afraid of people targeting him for his body or something.

...and also because Frau had once taken him to a place widely known for its gay clientele. That happened too. [Hikimiya, honey, I'm sorry to say this, but if it took you this long to realize a guy who invited you to THE Club Banana Café on a go-go night was gay, then I question your detective skills.]

Frau was at first shocked at this outburst, but then calmed down and asked, “How did you know that I’m gay?” [What do you mean how, you literally took him to- you know what, let's just settle on both these guys being absolute dumbasses.]

--

...so even now when he’s with his friends in a cafeteria Hikimiya can’t fully relax, because he’s still dreading the possibility that oh god, what if the man he’s currently stuck working under really just wants him for his body? Frau told him not to worry, sexual harassment was not at all his thing and he wouldn’t force anyone into a relationship, BUT WHAT IF. [Are we really doing the predatory gay trope? Are we really? Sigh.]

Anyway… they talk about the Crime Olympics some more, and Hikimiya and Jounosuke continue to banter like brothers.

Suddenly there’s a commotion. The waiter that served the detectives’ table stumbles over towards Jounosuke and vomits blood before falling dead.

Jounosuke takes it upon himself to investigate the death. He talks to the chef to learn what happened, then comes back to his friends with a weird expression.

He discovered that the spoon in the sugar bowl at their table didn’t have any fingerprints on it. Of course neither Hikimiya nor Nemu used it (the sweet tea didn't need sugar) and Jounosuke as always had his gloves on, but it’s weird that other patrons who had been sitting there earlier didn’t leave fingerprints.

The only explanation is that any fingerprints were wiped away by the murderer while he was adding poison to the sugar. The waiter probably accidentally poisoned himself with the sweetened coffee he took back to the kitchen. The incident likely wasn’t even a murder attempt directed specifically at the detectives, but just another one of the thousands of everyday chaotic crimes of the Crime Olympics. Jounosuke was incredibly lucky to have used only a little bit of the sugar for his tea. Hikimiya unwittingly saved his life.

Jounosuke can't stop blaming himself for the waiter’s death. Hikimiya knows that this feeling of guilt is partially born from the memory of that time in Geneijo when he couldn’t protect Souya. Hikimiya wasn’t even there at the time, so he has no idea what to say to Jounosuke to cheer him up. Just like every day in the Crime Olympics, he’s just left cursing his own helplessness.

--

[>>>NEXT PART>>>]

[welcometophu]

Into the Split: Revolution 4

Twinned Book 3: Into the Split

Revolution 4

[ Previous | First | Next ]

There is very little sleep in the end. Nikolai naps in the early part of the evening, curled together with Seth in their bed, wrapped around each other. Nikita and Heather sleep at the same time, across the end of the same bed, Nikita’s fingers resting on Nikolai’s ankle. They awaken just before midnight to the sound of an alarm, and Heather and Seth begin the long process of trying to get Pawel to rest.

Nikolai heads back downstairs to work with Nikita and Carolyn and the other Mages who have arrived since he went to nap.

Seth and Heather manage to get Pawel to nap for two hours at the most. When he returns to the kitchen, wavering on his feet, Mac hands him a coffee and says gently, “You’re not driving to Haverhill. Conserve your energy. You’re going to need it.”

Pawel blinks at the gathered group. “Is Rory here?”

Rory raises his hand where he sits next to Kit at the table. He has one hand on Kit’s knee beneath the table as Kit hunches over, drawing quickly. “I know,” he says. “I think I’m as ready as I can be.”

“Everyone has transportation,” Mac says. “We have an entire caravan readied, and we know when the ritual will start. We’ve chosen locations around the world—there are hundreds of them, no more than two hours apart in a web everywhere we can get to. There are places we can’t handle—over the water, or in more remote reaches—but we’ve done our best. Every single place selected has a history with the Dreamscape either through Emergent Shadowwalkers or through Dreamwalkers. To the best of our ability to coordinate information through Del, every single location exists in some manner in both worlds. We can’t say anything for sure about the third world.”

A moment’s quiet as they all think about that: the world that has already fallen.

It takes Mac’s quiet efficiency to get them all fed, cleaned, dressed, and out the door. She doesn’t let anyone pause to think about what they’re doing. No one packs a bag that isn’t related to the Ritual. “We’ll be back tonight,” she says when Pawel brings it up.

He starts to say something else and she gets a hand up and over his mouth. “No. We will be back tonight,” she says firmly. “You’ll call Conor and tell him that the world has been saved. We’ll have pizza and beer to celebrate, and you’ll start panicking about how there are only two weeks left of class and you somehow still have to write a final for a class you’ve barely taught not to mention grading final projects. You might also want to spend some time thinking about great gifts to buy for your TAs once we’re out of this hell; they deserve them. Oh, and either give Carolyn and Kit a great grade for saving the world, or an extension on their final project for their independent study.”

Pawel wraps his fingers around Mac’s wrist, carefully moving her hand. “Do you have a preferred rank, or should we just address you as captain of this sinking ship?”

“Not sinking, not captain, and I’m just the most organized person here. It’s nice getting to plan an op where no one’s going to die.” Mac holds up both hands this time before anyone can say a word. “This is an op where no one is going to die,” she repeats slowly. “Pizza and beer to celebrate when we’re done. Now. Let’s go heal the Split.”

Nikolai lets himself doze on the way to Haverhill. He’s tucked into the back seat of a minivan, squeezed between Nate and Seth. The drone of conversation between Alaric, Chris, Dax, and Nate about running and football eases his mind. It’s nice to hear something that for them, at least, is normal. By the time he wakes, the van is bouncing along the long road that leads to the big house of the Clan community.

They don’t stop at the house, driving as far as they can toward the Berman house before they have to get out and walk. Mac disappears with Pawel; the two are sitting on the cracked step of the house when Nikolai and the others finally arrive.

It takes time to gather, and Nikolai notes significant faces that are missing. The Mage from the New Hampshire Clan is missing, along with Thorne, and several Mages from the Burlington community. Valentine, however, is there, along with Rory.

Valentine stands near Alia, fiddling with her phone. “Elijah talked David into letting him help today.” She sounds resigned as she scrolls through something. “He headed to the site in Maine last night and they’ve promised me they’ll be here as soon as they can after everything’s done. They have more people than we do, but from what we understand, that site was the location of a significant Emergence of more than a dozen Shadowwalkers all at once, in the early days after the original Emergence. Elijah says it feels icky.”

Valentine’s mouth twists, frowning as she surveys the space around the Berman house. “I think I understand what he means.”

“Until recently, no one disturbed this place, aside from teenagers trying to prove they weren’t afraid of ghosts,” Alia says dryly. “You can blame the claw marks on my husband, but the aura is what was left after Mattie Emerged. We had no idea at the time; we blamed her family’s disappearance on magic.”

Valentine glances sideways at Alia. “I get the feeling that a lot of things we’ve blamed on each other over the years may have been due to misunderstandings,” she says quietly.

Alaric makes a low growling sound, and Corbin wraps an arm around him dragging him down and in rub his cheek against Alaric’s head. The noise shifts to something disgruntled as Alaric tries to wrestle himself free.

“We are on a timeframe here,” Pawel says, voice tight. “If you wouldn’t mind getting started.”

They form a loose circle, with Nikolai, Nikita, Carolyn, Del, Mattie, and Chelsea at the center. Chelsea curls in on herself, a slender column of darkness that Nikolai can feel standing next to him, as if she matches the air around them in ways that everyone else doesn’t. The other Mages circle around them, with Rory at a point where he can both touch Kit and the rest of the circle, and lay his hands on Carolyn’s shoulders at the same time.

“This will work,” Rory mutters. It sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself, and that’s not exactly comforting.

Carolyn looks down at the sketch she holds in her hands, bright and fresh and new, drawn just the day before by Kit. Del’s meadow reflects subtle changes that Nikolai has seen since he first met her.

His Talent isn’t the same as Carolyn’s, but he still looks at that image as a focus as he reaches inside for that place where his abilities lie. He leans back into Seth’s anchoring touch, feeling the real world in Seth’s fingertips and the earth below his feet, even while the Dreamscape tickles over his skin.  Nikolai inhales, and on the exhale, he lets it grow, lets the Dreaming come closer to him.

“Now,” Pawel whispers, and the sound echoes around them. Nikolai can see the one word in the air, a soft silvered blue that infuses with light.

Everything feels unreal and all too real all at once. Nikolai slowly turns toward the house and slips his hand into Seth’s. He focuses on the way their fingers curl together as the group moves toward the door that lies open and waiting.

He hopes this is working as planned but they are mid-Ritual and while Nikolai has no idea what the Mages are actually doing, he knows they don’t have time to check their phones. They have to trust that all over the world at this exact moment, groups of Dreamwalkers approach their own liminal spaces in an attempt to enter the Dreamscape together.

They will do this together.

The way ahead is made up of dual images: the scratched and scraped door that hangs open, and a brightly colored front door that is cracked open and waiting. Nikolai crosses the threshold after Carolyn, and stops inside the door as he realizes that his hand is empty.

“Seth?” he turns around to look behind, and there’s Nikita without Heather. Nikolai takes a step toward her, but Nikita’s expression hardens with resolve and she puts her hands on his shoulders.

“They couldn’t come with us here,” she says quietly. “You knew that might happen.” She nudges and he turns to walk with her.

It seems natural to take her hand, to anchor them with each other, their dual selves from different worlds. Nikita squeezes his hand as they stand in the living room.

“This was my home,” Mattie says, turning as she looks around. “As it was then, and still existing in the Dreaming I suppose, and as it is now.”

“This is where we came to find you,” Carolyn agrees. She glances at Del before crossing her arms, shoulders hunched. “I’d really hoped that with Del, we’d be able to do what we did then, and bring the others with us.”

“There are too many of them,” Del says. She offers a slight shrug of her shoulders before she moves to the nearest window, looking through what seems to be bright glass with freshly painted sills, and cracked and dirty glass all at once. “Or maybe there are too many of us, and the Dreamscape wants us for itself. Who knows.”

Nikita and Nikolai. Carolyn. Del. Mattie. And the darkness that is Chelsea, hovering near a corner as if she might melt into it.

She looks uncomfortable in the light.

“We have to assume that it went like this all over the world,” Carolyn says.

“Worlds,” Nikita corrects, emphasizing the plural.

“Worlds,” Carolyn agrees.

“My meadow is outside,” Del comments. She goes to open the window, making a disappointed sound as the sash doesn’t lift. “Door it is.” She skips lightly across the floor, pausing when she reaches the door that lies open, light spilling in around it. “There are a lot of us,” she whispers. “I can feel them. The Dreamscape can barely contain us all, and wants to spill out. But the darkness is pushing in. It’s almost too late.”

She pulls the door wide, and for just a moment, the light is blinding enough that Nikolai brings his free hand up to shade his eyes. The smell of flowers is overwhelming; Nikita sneezes three times, her entire body shaking.

“Let’s go,” Carolyn says, and follows Del through the door.

A lot of us was putting it mildly. The Dreamwalkers stand in knots—groups of anywhere from just a pair to a dozen or more. They are all ages, all races. And there are more of them than Nikolai can count.

Spreading out from the meadow in all directions are places. Nikolai sees the Berman place behind him now, the Benford home like a an image over it. He turns back, wanting to know if he could walk into the Benford home from here, but stops after a step. Not without Seth.

He sees a pond in one direction, a cliff seemingly jutting out of nowhere in another. He swears one is Stonehenge, which makes a kind of sense when he thinks about it, and that may be the largest gathering of Dreamwalkers as well. Some of the liminal places he feels as if he recognizes dimly, other landmarks or legendary locations like Stonehenge. Others are strangely simple, like the truck stop with a flashing neon sign, or the Berman/Benford house behind him. Or the big tree that Grace stands beneath.

Nikolai exhales, and tries to wrap his head around the entire world being here in Del’s meadow. Two worlds, condensed down to entry points in a microcosm that they’ve brought together.

It feels too big and too small all at once.

And it still begs the question: what next?

“There are more people here than in our entire community.”

Nikolai recognizes Brett from his world, his eyes wide as he looks around the meadow.

“We have come together, across two worlds, and we are many,” Amahle says with a gentle smile. “We are well met, and we will persevere.”

“Why is she here?” Grace is angry, jabbing a finger at where Chelsea stands behind Mattie, as if she could somehow become her shadow in the brightness.

“I want to help,” Chelsea whispers.

“The darkness is already crowding in and you bring more?” Grace’s throws their hands wide, and Nikolai follows the gesture. He can see it then, the cracks around every place they’ve brought together. The darkness that threatens to split them all apart. It moves, undulating and alive, and Nikolai imagines he can see faces and hands that grasp and grab at their homes.

He imagines he can see it crumbling.

“Can’t you feel it?” Grace asks.

Nikolai can. It crawls over his skin, pricking at him and pulling at him. It wants to tear him apart, or shove him back to reality. It wants to claim him and suck him dry.

Chelsea takes a step back. “I want to help,” she whispers again. “I don’t want to be part of them. I’m not here to—”

“We have two choices,” Carolyn shouts, and the slow murmur that was building falls silent, cutting the argument short. “We have Dreamwalkers and Travelers both here, and we need to do one of two things before we run out of time.”

Ji-eun and Amahle step forward from their groups. Nikita tugs and Nikolai joins her at Carolyn’s side. They gather slowly, the people he has come to know best from their Dreamwalker network. Even Grace grudgingly joins them, a scowl still twisting their face as they sigh dramatically.

In the distance, Nikolai sees something on the edge of the meadow. Flickering in and out, a third version of some of their selected places. The house that looms in the place of the Benford and Berman homes is larger, a third floor added on, the exterior dark with paint and fallen into disrepair.

“Our third is here,” he murmurs. “Barely, but there’s still something of it out there.”

“It feels hopeless,” Nikita whispers back. “Like it’s waiting for us to fall, too.”

“We have two choices,” Carolyn repeats. Her voice is lower now, but it still carries across the meadow and Nikolai wonders if that’s Del’s doing somehow. Del doesn’t seem to be paying any attention, dancing happily in the sun that streams down in the center of her meadow. At least the people who ring around her will keep her from wandering off.

“We can either pull our two worlds together, squeezing out the Split,” Carolyn says. “Or we can push our worlds apart completely. If we do that, it’s possible the Split will become too big and overwhelm us, or it’ll lose hold.”

“You think we should tie our worlds together,” Ji-eun says.

“What would happen to us? Would we merge into one world? That seems like a bad idea,” Brett says, glancing around the group. “Either you’ll be overrun with Shadows, or we’ll end up overpopulated. We don’t have the same number of people left that you do, but there are still a lot of us. And for the ones who are bedrock, or who have analogs, that could get messy.”

Nikolai tries to imagine a world with two of Alia and he doesn’t think anyone’s ready for that.

“Pawel thinks we might have been one world, once upon a time, and we diverged through whatever small events happened that made us different,” Carolyn says. Nikolai remembers this discussion, vaguely, and it feels right when she says it.

“We’re too different,” he says. “Your world and mine are completely different places, and even though there are similarities I don’t think they can be considered the same anymore. I think that if we pull them closer together, we wouldn’t merge. I’m not even sure anything would change, other than making it so that there’s no room for the Split.”

If there’s no Split lying between the worlds, how would they get home?

That’s not a thought for now.

“No Split means no Shadowwalkers,” Ji-eun says thoughtfully. “Yes, this is our best solution.”

“No Split means no walking death destroying the population of my home.” Brett is emphatic. “I’m in.”

“But what if—?” Grace cuts off when everyone looks at them. They cross their arms, cheeks pulled in as if they are biting their tongue. “Fine,” they say sharply. “But if we cause a cataclysm because we try to squish two realities into one—”

“Three,” Del calls out cheerily.

“I’ve read enough science fiction and comics to know this is a bad idea!” Grace mutters loudly.

“I think it’s worth it,” Nikolai says. He tries to smile when Carolyn offers one of her own, but it feels weak. “There’s a risk, yes, but the reward is higher. We need to end this, not just somehow put a bandage on it, or possibly make it worse.”

“This could still be making it worse,” Grace points out.

“How will we do this?” Amahle asks, and it’s a good question. It’s not like they have any experience in doing something like this.

“We all came from our liminal spaces.” Carolyn gestures at the overlapping places around them. “I’m not experienced on the Dreaming side of things, but if we can bring our reflections—the two or three versions of our spaces—into alignment, then maybe that’ll do it.”

“But what about the Shadowwalkers and the Split? How do we make sure to push them away?” Brett asks.

Nikita makes a small noise, her hand tightening around Nikolai’s abruptly. “That thing. That light thing you do.”

Nikolai’s mouth opens, uncertain. “When I bring the Dreamscape out?” he asks. He needs Seth for that. He needs grounding. He needs to be outside the Dreamscape because that’s what he’s bringing into the real world when he does it. “It’s kind of a weapon, yes, but we’re in the Dreamscape, Nikita. We’re already here.”

“But it gets rid of Shadows,” she says simply. “It pushes them away. And if we push them and the Split away at the same time, they’ll be gone.”

It sounds too easy.

“That might work,” Carolyn agrees.

Other than that it’s too easy to use a trick he’s been doing forever in order to survive, and expect that to save the world, Nikolai can’t think of a reason to object. It means they have to take time, while Nikolai explains to hundreds of Dreamwalkers how to pull on the Dreamscape. How to form it up into small bundles of exploding light, and push it in a certain direction. It’s different here, like it’s right there, wherever he wants it, and directing it out of the Dream seems harder.

It fills him with power, his skin vibrating with this direction connection to his Talent. Around the circle, Dreamwalkers sparkle, their Talent visible to the naked eye as they slowly take control.

Del sighs. “I have a really bad feeling about what this means for my meadow.” She crouches down, running her fingers through the grass. “Just in case,” she whispers. “Goodbye.”

Something flickers in the edge of Nikolai’s vision. He turns to look at the Berman house; it’s wreathed in Shadows, the darkness licking around the edges of it, encroaching on the meadow. “I don’t think we have a lot of time,” he says.

“They’re probably drawn to the amount of power we have in this one place,” Carolyn explains. “Which we can use to our advantage. If they’re here, we can get rid of them. Everyone go back to your own space and start building whatever it is you need to build. Dreamwalkers, if you can reach out to each other, and feel what you’re doing, try to coordinate the timing.”

The Benford house is dark, dim beyond the image of the Berman place. Nikolai hopes that Seth is still back in Haverhill waiting for him, that time is passing differently here than there and that he isn’t panicking.

He feels like if it were him, he’d be panicking.

“Del,” Nikita calls.

Del stays in the center of the meadow, her hands out, butterflies flapping around her, rising into the sky as she slowly spins.

“Guess it’s just us,” Nikita says. She holds out both of her hands, and Nikolai takes them. Carolyn stands nearby, and Mattie and Chelsea watch. Nikolai is aware of other groups of Dreamwalkers doing the same things, and that at some places, there are two groups, as if there’s one from Nikita’s world and one from his own.

It gives him hope that this will be enough. That they can be enough.

“This is going to hurt,” Chelsea murmurs.

That may be the only thing Nikolai regrets. Whatever they are now, the Shadowwalkers were people once. Pawel loved Chelsea and if this works, chances are he’ll never see her again.

Chances are Nikolai will never go home again, too.

He exhales roughly, closing his eyes and extending his senses into the Dreamscape. He can sink into it easily, feeling it rise around him. Nikita’s world and his own, and that faint hint of something else beyond. He feels those and the Shadows, and he clings to them, pulling them in.

The darkness tries to slip between, tries to pull back, and it’s a tug of war. The thing is, it’s a war he knows how to win. All he has to do is twist the dreaming into bright, sparkling particles of unreality, and push those into the darkness.

It builds under his skin, until he feels himself glowing with the effort of keeping it contained.

“Now!” someone shouts.

It’s such a relief to let it go. To open his eyes to the bright diamonds that flash in the sky, that light up the entire Dreamscape until it fills his vision with bright, white light, overloading his mind, painful and sharp like daggers in his skull.

Everything goes incredibly, intensely, bright.

And just as abruptly, it all goes very, very dark.

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