#even though it’s your fourth autistic kid

[goblins-and-gloves]

Angry at parents hour!

Undiagnosed autistic fuckers are delulu.

[daandyli0n]

more Rewrite Refs, y'all!! this time: MCI edition!

it is going to become apparent that my favorite Ghost Trope is the "whatever caused your death shows up on you as a ghost" thing

(warnings: child murder/death, blood/gore, bruises, somewhat obvious broken bones (in Felix's ref), eye injury (again, Felix), eye contact, bright colors/eyestrain, disturbing imagery)

this isn't in order of their deaths, but like. animatronic order, i guess

(click on the images to zoom)

design details!! yippee!!

Gabrielle/"Gabi"

the second of the murders.

soul inside of Freddy

transfem, fun fact!

shy and anxious; pretty much the reason Freddy sticks to the shadows.

biracial! mother is from Mexico and her father is black.

family wasn't too wealthy; her clothes were from her older sister.

was one of Elizabeth's friends, and was a kid that Cassidy was close to in the aftermath of Liz's death.

a "popular girl," mostly due to being friends with Naomi and Liz.

died on June 24, 1982; her birthday :(

Baker

the third of the murders.

soul inside of Bonnie.

the youngest; thought he was being taken to see Bonnie :(

AuDHD. no i will not elaborate.

one of Kelsey and Cassidy's closest friends.

one of the calmer spirits, surprisingly.

he thinks the fact that he became Bonnie is one of the coolest things that could've happened (Charlie thinks that it's either a coping mechanism or due to the fact that Baker was too young to really comprehend what happened).

died on June 25, 1982.

Naomi

like Susie, she was The First.

she wasn't the first to die; she was still alive when Gabi was murdered. she was the first victim of the MCI.

soul inside of Chica.

"popular girl," but not...mean. she Does complain about people who annoy her, though. but it's not too often.

like Gabi; best friends with Liz and close to Cassidy.

died on June 24, 1982; tried to warn Gabi, but was stuck inside of Chica and hardly able to even speak. the most she could do were raspy breaths; think along the lines of the noises Chica and Bonnie make when they enter the office in Fnaf 1.

Felix

the fourth of the murders.

soul inside of Foxy.

big fan of Foxy and pirates in general.

the oldest of the original MCI. (Charlie is 12, and three kids in the '87 Murders were 15-16).

genderqueer; "Idgaf what ye call me tbh. Call me whatever ye like, Matey, I don't care-"

was one of the more skeptical kids being lured; wondered why "O'Hare" was leading him to a back room to see Foxy...

was the only kid who really fought back; led to some...worse injuries (bruised, several smaller cuts, hand got broken, missing an eye).

Angry™

died June 25, 1982.

Kelsey

the final murder

one of the souls in Fredbear.

liked to draw! still does, tbh.

shy and anxious (cough autistic) kid.

close friend of Baker and Cassidy.

doesn't...come from a good home.

was at Fredbear's the day he died.

wandered to the Parts & Service room...where William was. got springlocked.

odd, cut-like wounds are from where he was y'know. a young kid in a springlock suit.

William cleaned the suit up and dumped Kel's body in a lake since he couldn't hide him in the suit.

him and Cassidy have a sort of "Comedy/Tragedy" thing with their masks. Kelsey's is much paler, is frowning, and leaks blood instead of the Black Liquid.

fun fact: Kelsey is technically transfem! didn't get to figure it out, unfortunately...but y'know.

anyway!! @that-darn-clown and @hello-there-world if y'all wanna see this :D

[stupidwittlebaby]

30 Day Non-Human Challenge, Day 20: Tell Us a Few Thoughts About What it's Like Being Your Species.

(TLDR at bottom!)

I've been thinking about how my kintypes feel lately. In themselves, and in how they relate to who I am.

My wyrm self is the clearest kintype I have. I'm not sure how other dragons feel, as I haven't particularly asked yet, but my past life memories aren't anything entirely physical. I didn't reside on a three-dimensional plane of existence. I was a dragon, as in the astral creatures some witchcraft practitioners work with. Honestly, calling myself 'dragonkin' doesn't even feel entirely fitting, but that's the closest descriptor I've got. 'Deitykin' doesn't feel entirely incorrect either, but it gives off a different vibe than I want.

But what's it like being a wyrm? Wonderful. Think about what it feels like to have a really interesting yet calm dream. That's what it was like. Though I don't have wings like the other dragons I spend time around, I know I can fly, though I swim even more. I'm white, with these sort of... feathers, blue ones, that run down along my back. Maybe I shimmer underwater. I wouldn't really know.

As for my alien and robot kintypes, as I've thought about it, I think these are more voidpunk-copinglink-choicekin types. They're my psychological kintypes, in that they relate very heavily to my autism and how I've always struggled terribly to connect with other people. I'm someone that actually enjoys seeing autistic traits portrayed in alien or robot characters in media. It visually represents how I've always felt. Now, after thinking about it for a while, I think I subconsciously took these on as actual pieces of my identity. I didn't do it on purpose, I suppose it was sort of imprinted on me, like how positive interactions with animals imprint on some therians.

So, again, what's it like being an alien or a robot? Well... What's it like being autistic? I like that I'm me. I'm different. I feel like I'm constantly trying to adjust to a culture that I'm not from, which is exhausting for the most part, but at the same time, maybe it gives me a little more confidence in trying new things, because how much harder could it be than what I do everyday anyway? I often run out of RAM, or can't use my solar panels to recharge because it's cloudy. Or something gets buggy inside and there's a lot of static. Sometimes I look at the stars and feel homesick, but I'm not sure for where. Actually, that last one probably leads back to my dragonkinity, since aliens are often theorized to be of different dimensions rather than different planets.

Finally, I've noticed I have a fourth kintype, but it's still eluding me... It might be more like a kintype I had as a kid, a therian shapeshifter of sorts, that hasn't entirely vanished. I'm still feeling it out. Kids are very close to their past lives, their walls of reality are much thinner, so if I was never "human" as a kid, always some kind of animal, that might mean something important to me. We'll see!

Wow that was a long post! Here, uh...

TLDR: Wyrm go swish, swimmy swim. Alien go, "wow, humans. I just think they're neat." Robot go, "ack, brr, beep beep. Oh, my wires are pretty." Shapeshifter go, "?? Rat?? Racoon?? Slug??? Yah."

[selfindulgenttiger]

Childhood Clues

I was discussing with someone today the fact that, to be diagnosed with autism as an adult, you have to have shown signs in early childhood. Depending who you ask, that's before age 6, age 8, age 11, or age 18. With so many people (women most often) being diagnosed as adults, some people are questioning the frequency of diagnosis. (Untreated C-PTSD and PTSD symptoms can manifest very similarly to autism.) That started me reflecting on my own childhood behavior and what clues were missed or dismissed. I wanted to catalogue them (because I'm autistic and that's what we do with information). This is stuff from early childhood to pre-teen years. Category A: Deficits in social communication and social interaction

This area of the diagnostic criteria is the hardest for me to judge, because you don't really see your own deficits in this area. If you don't understand what the social rules are, you don't see how you are breaking them. What I can say is that I never made friends easily, and I wasn't particularly bothered by that until I was old enough to realize I was perceived as weird because of it. From second through fourth grade, I don't remember having a friend. I typically spent recess walking in a circle around my favorite tree, which I enjoyed. I was the outsider everywhere. I didn't make friends in Brownies, I didn't make friends in my performing arts classes, I was even "the weird kid" among the gifted kids. Another part of this is your nonverbal communication. There are literally dozens of photos of me with a flat affect from early childhood. Smiling never came naturally to my face. And I assume there was something off about my eye contact and general manners, because I remember my dad explicitly teaching me to make eye contact, smile, use people's names, and express warmth. (He had read it in a book, so obviously this was novel information to Dad, too, that he felt compelled to share.)

Category B: Repetitive behaviors and restricted interests.

This? Not so hard to spot. I knew I was different in this way. I just didn't understand that it meant something. The first point is basically stimming. Where to begin? Lifelong constant knuckle-cracking. Nail, cuticle, and lip biting till I'd bleed. Knee-bouncing. Echolalia in the form of this high-pitched screech sound I enjoyed making, and singing the same songs again and again and again and again. (I still sing them when I'm really stressed.) My interests were definitely what they mean by "restricted interests" which is basically what we'd call "obsessed" in the lay vernacular. Like I became obsessed with mice from around 7-12. I accumulated 41 mouse stuffed toys that I did not play with but arranged in a tableau. I wanted pet mice, even though they're very short-lived compared to other pets and I'd have total meltdowns when one died. I would talk my parents into getting me another and tell them I'd be able to handle it this time, but I never could. (I also collected Weebles, Barbies, Smurfs, and Cabbage Patch Kids, but no other stuffed animals. Most kids have a mixture of different stuffed animals, but I only wanted mice. I didn't actually really play with the other toys either. I just liked having collections and creating tableaux.) Star Trek was such a fixation from elementary school on. Every year they'd have a 3-day Labor Day weekend marathon on one of our local stations. I would try to stay up for all three days. One year, on day three, I yanked the phone out of the wall for having the temerity to keep ringing during a favorite episode. I had all 79 episode titles and descriptions memorized. I sneakily studied my uncle's copy of the technical manual for the Enterprise, even though he didn't want me touching it because it was collectible. One of the greatest disappointments of my young life was not convincing my parents to take me to the convention. I never played soccer or particularly liked soccer, but I went to all the Strikers games with my dad. He would buy me a program and I would memorize the roster of every team. Then when he'd say "great play by number 12" I would tell him all that person's stats. I didn't love the game, but boy, did I love the stats.

Another thing that falls under this category is sensory sensitivities. I had the stereotypical autistic girl hypersensitivity issues (which for the record are screaming when your hair gets brushed, rejecting blue jeans and socks because of the seams, and complaining about the sound of electricity in the walls or bugs walking). But I also have my own oddball ones, like rejecting shoes. I had to have the tips of three toes reattached before age 10 because I wouldn't even wear shoes when riding a bike or walking outdoors. My poor parents had to take me to the ER so many times. (I still cannot bring myself to keep my shoes on any more than is strictly necessary.)

I also rejected any clothing that was textured (so no corduroy in the 70s) or had heavy seams (no jeans even at the height of the Gloria Vanderbilt trend). I would steal my dad's work shirts because they were smooth. For several years, I went to school in scrubs I got at a yard sale. (Scrubs. In middle school. You can guess how that went.) And finally, of course, the overstimulation issue. I had a meltdown and ended up fighting with my mom or crying at every holiday gathering ever. I ran away from my own 10th birthday party and hid for half an hour because my grandmother was going to give me a kiss. My mother loathed taking me on vacation because I invariably got super excited and then overstimulated and then had a meltdown. By the time I was a teenager, she swore she'd never take me again.

When I look back, yeah, it was very clearly there but no one knew what it was. I just seemed like an unruly, melodramatic, weird kid. (And maybe not all the weird in my family.)

[moonstone27ls]

Chucky finale...

Spoiler warning...

.....

.......

....you’ve been warned....

....warningg....

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...

....warning you...

last warning....

.........

Okay thoughts....

.......welp a lot happened. But mostly felt like Mancini was trying to wrap things up in case this got cancelled/or he’s ending? (again if he choses to end this show I won’t judge.)

Some drama... and some head confusion... a couple of twists.

On the upside Kyle/Andy are still alive.... so if the show ends here I’ll take that as a plus. Thought it was a little rude of Lexy to compare the pair as something bad. I’m like “Uhh kid they saved your ass on a couple of occasions at least be grateful”. And to be fair.... (although Mancini never gives a scene where they all chill/be buds), Andy was the only really obsessed to well be TRAUMATIZED on multiple occasions. Kyle I feel only went to protect him.

I have a couple of issues with the finale not so much issues just tiny nitpicks. Like when the kids reveal to their old teacher about Chucky, they do that while the cops are still in the house. I mean don’t they usually worry someone will hear/and think their nuts? Uhh feel a bit mixed with G.G. Not so much the change/and their new name. More of how and I’m going back as Glenda seemed okay with they mom being a killer/and embraced being a killer. I mean last episodes they were complaining/fighting that issue. And again going back as Glenn, Glenn was fully against killing. Sooo with G.G. being so casual what does that mean? 

Is G.G. going to embrace being a killer? Now that they are “one” being I guess? Or was that the whole point of their travels. Self discovery, find out what their role is, away from their toxic parents. I mean I do give Tiff points for loving and embracing their identities.... but yeahhh still a killer. Improving as a mom but its hard for me to embrace her as an anti-hero. Specifically again even though the show has split her and Chucky (kinda miss them sorry). She’s still very much a killer. I mean I’m sorry but suddenly she cares about how murder effects people? Where was that when literally ANY TIME she’s killed .And she did still willing kidnap Caroline so nah not totally rooting for her.

Though that being said considering how the show ended (not counting breaking fourth wall/meta Chucky)... was that Mancini’s intentions? Heh I dunno I kinda thought Tiff would possess the old doll and she and Chucky would either reconcile (sorry they’re both killers they kinda suit each other) or become rivals as killers

The drama between Jake/Devon felt like it dragged on a bit but heh at least it finished.

Uhh am I shocked that Chucky possessed and kept switching dolls? Not really. Didn’t feel sorry for Dr. Mixter she put herself in that situation, guess it makes sense now why Chucky picked those kids from last season.

Am I shocked Caroline was brainwashed?/or manipulated... uh no. I mean I the kid was literally too quiet through the ENTIRE season with no real change to her personality. Though question does her choosing evil make it bad on people with autism? Not that I know she’s autistic.... I mean felt like the show hinted but I dunno. ANyways back to that... soooo...  if the show is continued what was Chucky wanting from Caroline then? Is she a replacement for “G.G”? Would kinda explain why Chucky told her Tiff was her real mother. 

Dunno how Nica found Tiff or was able to move around so fast but dang a bit obsessed much o3o;. I mean granted I get it. But hmm.. and did G.G. help her find Tiff? Was that why they kinda left? They agreed to help but wouldn’t see it?I dunno was hoping Nica would heal and be with Andy/Kyle. I dunno what with the young three survivors, I figured Nica would be with Andy/Kyle and try to heal.

And then the Belle doll being secretly Chucky... hmm I guess I was surprised. Explained why they kept focusing on that dumb doll. Feel like they ripped that off of Sleepaway camp.

Heh do I have any thoughts? Or hopes for next season if Mancini gets one? I dunno other that the kids and Andy/Kyle/Nica surive. Heh no thats it.

Not interested in Tiff, I mean I love Tilly. But either way unless Manicini’s really okay with saying goodbye to Tilly, I don’t see her being left alone. Cause like Chucky, she’s a KILLER. Any of the 6 survivors would go after her like Chucky too.

And as mean as it is to say I don’t care about Caroline. Heh I just don’t unless next season has her missing Lexy or more sympathic eps. There isn’t much to her. I don’t hate the character just isn’t much to her for me to miss.

[autumn-sweet-fae]

You know you tend to get emotional when stressed? Well, Akari has been under massive amounts of stress since she made it to Hisui. I think it’d get an awful lot of people on her side if, during one of the post battle live streamed interviews, she started crying because the lab is trying to take away her partners. Especially Dusk, who she raised from the time all she knew was Tackle and Growl. Everyone knows how you that is in the life of a Pokémon and suddenly it’s less a girl stealing from a (fine and upstanding) research lab and more a girl on the run trying to hold onto a Pokémon she has raised and loved for what has to be literal years. (I forget how long your au has her in Hisui)

In my Au, by the time Akari and Ingo return to the future, Akari would have been missing a year and Ingo would been missing for three years.

Also, in case no one has picked up on it, I write Akari as also being autistic, largely because it makes her easier for me to write. So crying in front of other people is something she absolutely never wants to do, especially with some stranger. So the moment she feels her throat tightening and her eyes start to burn she would immediately remove herself from the situation. And she would be wearing the mask at the time too so it would look less like someone stepping away to gather themself and more like her harshly brushing the kid off.

Early on in Hisui, Akari’s method of managing her emotions and stress when interacting with human people was to bottle it up and smile and be as polite and present as possible. She would wear a metaphorical mask and always dress and behave appropriately when interacting with authority. She did not want to be alone in this strange world and wanted to be trusted, which is why Commander Kamado’s repeated reminders that she is not trusted hurt so much.

When Akari finds the ‘gift’ containing theZoroark mask left outside her door one morning, she loves it. She likes to keep it on her person and even wears it when interacting with others outside the village. It gives her the comfort of not always having to stress over how others would react to her expression not being perfectly pleasant. She honestly feels like she can only be herself when she’s out in the wilds with her pokemon because out here there’s not really anything to remind her that she’s suck somewhere that she does not belong.

When Rei pulls her aside and gently informs her that the mask was most likely ment as an insult, Akari is honestly heart broken. She stops wearing her in, shoving it away into her trunk. Volo later asks what happened to her favorite spooky accessory and she shrugs, telling him it was childish anyway.

And then she meets Ingo and the two find that they share so much in common. Not just their mysterious origins and love/talent of handling Pokémon, but also in numerous small ways. The fact that Ingo also keeps an empty pokeball in his pocket to play with when his hands need something to do. How he has difficulty controlling his expression, though he struggles to emote much at all while Akari knows she can emote too much. He can talk with her for hours about pokemon and battle strategies and they both have the best time throwing ideas back and fourth. She has this urge to apologize for how much she’s taking about pokemon, but Ingo is so genuinely interested in invested in what she say and makes sure to tell her so. They can both get very loud in they’re excitement but Ingo is significantly Louder.

It’s when Akari is sent to the Icelands that she sees an actual Zorua for the first time while exploring the caves. She caught the little guy with a back shot for a closer look but, he was so very distressed and defensive at her presence that she released him shortly after getting the notes she needed. She tells Ingo about them to get his perspective on it as every other person she’s spoken immediately shuttered and bulked at the idea of a Zorua. Even Professor Laventon seemed scared of them.

As she had hoped, his thoughts on the pokemon and its evolution did not come from a place of fear, but of understanding it to be another pokemon. He even tells her how the Zorua and Zoroark are of those pokemon he remembers differently then they appear in Hisui. He recalls their fur bring black, not white, and that they were known to be tricksters. He believes the didn’t have the best reputation where he was from as well, which was not deserved.

He shares what he had learn of the Hisui Zoroark from the Pearl clan and from what he has observed in the wilds. Their history of exile by cruel humans, the mutual distrust and hostility, how protective they are if their young. That last fact he can’t recall learning, he simply knew it.

After hearing all of this, Akari goes back to her trunk and retrieves her mask, choosing to keep it on her person yet again. This Pokémon deserves to  exist as much as any other and she won’t shove it away as the people of Hisui had done.

Later, after the trauma of Akari’s exile, she starts to wear the mask more and more, no longer caring what the people thought of her. She devotes time to not just studying the pokemon but helping them integrate with humans an learn they don’t need to be hostile. She also will no longer hesitate to call out people on their ignorance of pokemon and how damaging their behavior can be for both the pokemon and themselves.

And this has gotten totally off topic 😅

But yeah, Does Not want to cry in front of anyone that’s not her pokemon or Ingo. Ingo is great and will either give her space if that’s what she wants, or give her a hug while wrapping his coat around her to help her feel safe and hidden.

[recurring-polynya]

ever since you said ‘autistic Byakuya’ I’ve been thinking about it nonstop so now I have to ask, do you think he used to have like. rocking/stimming-type stuff that he learned to suppress? because I’m getting legit emotional thinking about babykuya painstakingly training himself into Correct Noble Deportment. he can’t be expected to make facial expressions! it’s already taking all his energy to prevent himself from doing that weird thing with his hands!

Arright, I guess it's time to talk about my autistic Byakuya headcanon. First off, I want to clarify, it's not that I sat down and said, "I think my man Byakuya has the autism." I had reached a point in my fanfiction where I needed to write about Byakuya's transition from rigid, unfeeling antagonist in the Soul Society Arc to the stilted, but caring Nii-sama and Taichou we see in the later acts, and for some reason, I feel like writing Byakuya perspective sections was the way to do that.

One thing I did not want to do, which I see in fanfiction a lot is to dilute his character. Byakuya being Byakuya--posing, making insane claims about his own greatness, lecturing people on their own arrogance is one of my favorite thing in the world, I just wanted to create an internal narration that would sort of... justify this behavior and evoke some (but not too much) sympathy for the guy. 

The first character trait that I hit on was the idea that B absolutely does not understand other people's motivations, but he makes wild guesses based on his own (extremely non-universal) experience, which often leads to him saying things that seem extremely rude or callous, but it's because you can't see all the internal convolutions that led to such a conclusion.

Around this time, I happened to learn that “cognitive rigidity” is a thing, whereby a person is caused great distress by the idea of acting outside of what their brain tells them is the correct way to do a thing. This might be a fourth grader who cannot bring himself to put a spelling word in a sentence if the sentence isn’t true, or it might be a man who cannot choose between a promise he made to his dead parents and a promise he made to his dead wife, even though one of them involves a person being unjustly executed. Again, from the outside, these problems may look trivial and easy to resolve, but they are very, very real and feel insurmountable to the person experiencing them.

Oh, and then a friend of mine was talking about “masking” which is very common among autistic adults (especially women) who were not diagnosed as children. Basically, one puts on a fake persona to face the world because you’ve spent your childhood learning that all your thoughts and feelings are bad and wrong and weird. Oddly enough, it turns out this is really bad for you, and will mess you up really bad in the long term??

Anyway, at this point, I had a big, personal oh moment, but I also had a big oh moment about Byakuya, which is, what if you take a kid who doesn’t intuit social interactions naturally at all, and who thrives on a clear-cut set of rules, and lay out a system of expectations and etiquette, with himself at the top? You get Byakuya, basically. 

On one hand, he has never grappled with the common autistic anxieties of “why do people have these weird social rules I don’t know about?” or “what’s wrong with me?” He does know the social rules and he’s 💯 at them. He is a perfect Kuchiki. Of course, he doesn’t really connect with people, he’s the Kuchiki Heir (and later) Clan Head. He’s on a different level from other people, where he is more powerful and more important, but also has certain duties and obligations. This is how he is able to say things like “the difference between us is class” to Renji and mean every word of it. All of this fits perfectly within his worldview.

Sensory sensitivity is another thing that I think he experiences, except that when you’re the Head Kuchiki you can just demand silence during your poetry writing time and you can insist on only wearing a certain kind of silk and be very picky about the odors that are present in your home and that’s just normal. Furthermore, it perfectly fits in with my conception of Byakuya that he experiences sensory euphoria, where he’ll hear a piece of music played perfectly, or bite into a delicious piece of fruit, or feel the cool air on his face as he walks though his garden in the middle of the night and just quietly lose his mind over it. 

You asked about stimming, and here is a big downside of Noble Neurodiversity. I do not think Byakuya was a major stimmer, but he definitely got harshly reprimanded for “unseemly behavior” and “fidgeting too much” as a young boy. I imagine that Ginrei had very little patience for this and was concerned that “there was something wrong with the boy,” which I am sure Byakuya picked up on, and did his best to stay still so that Grandfather would know he was a good grandson. As he got older, the ideals of sitting still and being in control of one’s body at all times and closing one’s heart (yikes) were drilled into him. It was not easy for him and I bet he got his knuckles slapped a lot, and also it has not been good for his relationship with his own body or his mental health. I read a fairly comprehensively researched headcanon once that Byakuya was originally left handed and had it trained out of him, and it’s not necessarily something that I’ve adopted, but I certainly can see it.

Conversely! I headcanon our boy Renji as being mildly ADHD, which he deals with very effectively by taking his Soul Ritalin and breaking up his paperwork sessions with trips to the gym and tapping on things constantly. Byakuya tries to make him stop and Renji is like, “Actually sir, you can’t, I got an Accommodation from Squad 4, you gotta let me tap” and Byakuya is like “I have to w h a t” and Renji is like “yeah I got an interest-based nervous system and small repetitive movements and white noise actually help me focus” and Byakuya is like “that is nonsense Lieutenant but I am afraid of Captain Unohana so I will let you have your Accommodation” and then after Renji goes home, he tries tapping a spare brush on his cup while he works and Damn that man!!

Here’s some other autistic habits I think Byakuya has:

When he makes friends he goes deep. I mentioned earlier that he’s a solitary guy, and he thinks that’s his natural state. He is the 28th Head of the Kuchiki Clan. There is no one else like him. That is just a fact. He *is* lonely, but he doesn't identify as lonely. There have been brief periods of time where he bonded strongly with another person and delighted in sharing his life and interests with them (his grandmother, his dad to some degree, Hisana). The reason he is so cold and distant at the beginning of Bleach is because he has intentionally cut himself off from forming relationships with others because he feels such deep pain when he loses them. Fortunately, he does go on to form close relationships with Rukia, Hitsugaya, and Renji-but-he-doesn't-like-to-admit-it (and probably also Ichika).

He hyperfixates, but on, like distinguished things, so no one calls it hyperfixating. Like, I don’t think you can be into chess without being at least a little neurodiverse, but that’s not commonly recognized because “chess is a smart people activity”, unlike, say, knowing far to much about a grim reaper manga for teen boys. In any case, Byakuya is a huge nerd about the history of Soul Society, but I think he’s also really into kidou esoterica and swordfighting theory and all stuff that’s really integrated into his life, so it’s useful, but just because an Interest is useful does not mean it is not also Special. Also, he has an OC.

He has an incredible sense of humor, but all his jokes are extremely niche and require enormous amounts of context. Like, if you accidentally said "grink" instead of "grinch" he would change the group chat name to "was the grink there?" but he would wait 75 years to do so, when all the people who were there originally have moved to Discord. He does not care. His jokes are for him. Rukia thinks he is hilarious. Is this a neurodiverse tendency? I don’t know. I do know that autistic people are some of the funniest people alive (or... not alive. as the case may be)

[irisbleufic]

This is prolly a weird compliment, however I appreciate the signs you know a decent amount about different prescription drugs and therapeutic indications in your fics. Like I get that a lot of the canons you work in are awash in mad science and such, but the flashes of realism in your characters' medical and mental health situations have helped me a lot.

Not a weird compliment, anon! That's one of the more reassuring things a pharmacist's kid can hear, let me tell you. I used to pull my mom's textbooks and continuing ed materials off the bookshelves when I was younger, and I spent from about age 4 to about age 14 regularly hiding behind the counter after school at the drugstores where my mom worked, quietly doing assignments. Past that age, my mom worked for the pharmacies in bigger chain stores instead of in smaller pharmacies, but I was still hit with info nonstop.

More to blame, though, is that I've just had so many fucking surgeries and health issues (mental and otherwise) for someone who's only just approaching 40—and that I've had to change medications more times than I can count because I form resistance worryingly fast. The number of painkillers that will work on me, I can count on one hand; getting me numb at the dentist and getting me put under general anesthesia are both tasks that routinely get fucked up because some clinicians don't read my charts closely enough. You have to give me way too much shit for a small-to-average sized person in order to keep me numb or unconscious for long enough.  Gotta love that redhead problem.

My experience with anxiety meds and antidepressants has been pretty wild. It's the other place where my resistance-forming has been truly pernicious. Citalopram made me a zombie easily startled by any sudden sound, no matter how small, in my vicinity. From there, I was switched to fluoxetine, which seemed to work well for about 3-4 years and then suddenly flatlined no matter how much they raised my dose. About 5 years ago, I was put on venlafaxine and figured out that, in my case, it was only good for fatigue and suicidal ideation no matter what dose I was on. About 3 years ago, I was put on what my psych called one of the "last resort" drugs for their clinic, bupropion, and gabapentin for anxiety/sleep. This has been the most stable combo until recently, when the source of my generic bupropion changed—that tripped off a spike in anxiety and insomnia, and raising the gabapentin dose didn't quite compensate. The workaround du jour was badgering my psych until they assented to fax a Canadian pharmacy my prescription, citing name-brand (Wellbutrin) only, no substitutions, since that's the only way we can guarantee my formulation won't randomly change. I'm maybe 2 weeks into that transition and am starting to feel as close as I ever feel to normal, faster than I've ever gotten there after a meds switch, but I always have to pay close attention for changes in efficacy. I'm hoping bupropion/Wellbutrin remains a keeper, because those early switches were grueling.

(I spent way too long being silenced about mental health struggles, so fuck anybody reading this who thinks it's TMI. People need to know how difficult psychotropics are to calibrate. I also go to therapy and talk extensively with my psych.)

TL;DR it's not any miraculous studiousness on my part above and beyond being a nosy Autistic kid who formed special interests easily, having a mom who never shut up about work, and being sickly AF before I've even hit my fourth decade of life. I guess the way it manifests in my writing is the lemons-to-lemonade principle. I might as well make the best of my complicated relationship to all things medical!

[queen-of-my-goofball-army]

"Sometimes the first villain that we love when we're a kid will remain one of our favorite villains when we're an adult. It might also cement your archetype for how you prefer your villains to be (me preferring them rather goofy than threatening.)" (Me.)

How many of you remember the first villain that you loved when you were a kid? The one that changed the way that you saw as "different" from all the others? For me, I remember mine. He's been a major comfort character of mine since I was five when the show was airing and I watched it with both my mom and my babysitter Natalie. Kim Possible as most of the fans would say it's a very special show. It was different from everything that was on at the time and it dealt with the trails and tribulations of teenage-hood differently too. But we're not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about the villains on Kim Possible. The villains were all equally creative and unique in their own rights, most people would say that there favorite was Shego, but if I'm being entirely honest if somebody forced my hand and made me pick between her or her copartner I would ALWAYS pick Dr Drakken.

Ever since I was a kid I've always preferred villains that were more comedic than an actual threat on cartoons. The start of that for me was with Dr Drakken. Whenever he wasn't the main villain in an episode I was so upset. He was the best part of the show when I was a kid. For some reason he was always the thing that stood out to me because I could maybe I could see him in that episode. Part of it was because he was just this childish character always having temper tantrums. It led to my favorite running gag on the show whenever he would get so mad that he ceased to remember words. (The other one being that you never actually figured out how his skin turned blue in the first place. The best thing that we know as the audience is that it happened on a Tuesday before the ending theme interrupted him.)

When I went back and rewatched the show when I got a little bit older I found that it was better than just having Drakken as the main villain. I found that I had a soft spot for Ron as well. But that never meant that my favorite character had changed. Drakken was always special for me. I never really loved villains when I was a kid I always rooted for the heroes. But in the case of Kim Possible I just loved every second that he was on screen. Whether that be him interacting with Shego, him explaining his dastardly plan knowing what would happen afterwards but just not being able to help himself, or just the daily antics that he would get into. My favorite was on the day that Shego took a vacation day he spent the entire day trying to open a jar of pickles. The entire day. And that scene gets funnier every time that I watch it. Now whenever I can't open something and I take it to my dad, even if it isn't a jar of pickles I still call it Operation Gerken. He never watched the show with me and I think that one day somebody will understand that reference and I'll be funny.

I loved that Drakken was allowed to be not *entirely* evil. He had childish interests. From the cocoa moo incident, to the time that both him and Ron loved the same childish Christmas special. He wasn't just your typical evildoer. But then he'd come back the next week doing the same shtick. When you meet the rest of his family you find that he actually might be the smartest person there. I mean he had a ditzy mom and an idiot for a cousin so that's not really saying a lot. I like to think that when he was Drew he was autistic. It's just a little HC that I have that I have a soft spot for.

When we talk about voice acting in animation one of the few that I mention first is John DiMaggio. He's one of animations biggest talents and has a really long list of credentials that make him the fantastic powerhouse that he is. If you've ever watched Futurama he was Bender, if you watched Adventure Time or Jake Long American Dragon he was talking dogs in both of those as Jake and Fu. Growing up I heard him everywhere it cartoons because in the early 200s he was on the top of the world. The entertaining factor was that it was always something different. Ever since I was a kid though I've always loved Drakken the most out of all his other roles. It was the most different sounding from his natural way of speaking. I've had Futurama on my list because I'm also a moderate Billy West fan as well and I know that show is where he really shines. DiMaggio's voice for Drakken is something that I never really forgot. It's a voice that stuck with me as a child whether it be randomly remembering a line of dialogue or his shampoo rap it's a voice that stuck with me. Also, Drakken has one of my favorite villain laughs of all time. I love just how crazy it sounds and it's one of my favorite things that I could listen to on a loop.

I'm currently just starting to rewatch Kim Possible for the fourth time and every time that I come back and rewatch the series I remember how much I love Dr Drakken. It was why Dr Doofenshmirtz always sort of bugged me because it felt like they were low key taking from KP. I love both of them because they are unique in their own rights but the similarities weren't going over my head when I was growing up. Throughout my childhood Drakken was the only villain that I loved and that is still true to this day. While I have found other villains that I loved nobody has ever come close to touching the best of them all in my opinion Drew Lipski or Dr Drakken.

[roguetelepaths]

we've all had that experience around fourth or fifth grade where you're autistic and a baby queer and also probably a baby pagan but you don't know anything about those last two things yet, and you have a friend who you larp with at recess and initially you're just best friends who do everything together but then she starts to be into boys and boy bands and she makes more and more excuses to go off with her new cooler friends and take teen magazine quizzes instead of spending recess with you

and you think to yourself "what the fuck? she's ten years old. none of us are teens yet."

and you're so distraught because you had a whole storyline planned together that is now on hold indefinitely, and eventually she turns against you because she grew up and you didn't, even though you did grow up, you advanced in years and knowledge just like everyone else, the fact that you have different interests doesn't nullify that fact

and okay you might be a little emotionally immature about the fact that she stopped wanting anything to do with you but come on, it's fifth grade, most adults don't know how to navigate someone just deciding to cut contact with you completely out of the blue for what amounts to no reason

so maybe you were a little toxic and a little mean and said things you'd regret when you became old enough to have a sense that your actions affect other people, but like, so did she, so ultimately any apology you can give won't really mean anything because she weaponized girl talk against you, she made it so that you would forever be known as the weird kid who larped as a cat furry who was also a cryptozoologist well past the age where you were supposed to stop doing that, so that you would forever be known as an undesirable and an outsider for the crime of having interests, and whatever you did in return, that is the kind of bullying that you can only accomplish with the aid of neurotypical social skills.

so yeah, hayley, I'm sorry for how I handled us growing apart but also go fuck yourself.

[ihopesocomic]

As someone who's gone through extreme bullying (like I had an entire school (mainly fourth grade and under) against me due to false rumours), your answer to my question really warms me up. One thing you forgot to mention though, is that some parents/teachers enable (mostly male) child abusers, bc of the myth of "oh he bullies u bc he likes u uwu", which imo is blatant bullshit. Like ppl thought I had a crush on this one dude, just bc he bullied me and I had the audacity to defend myself.

I hear you, anon. The teachers in my elementary school were not only completely useless at enforcing an anti-bullying policy but they pretty much contributed to my experiences because most of my bullies were boys on the football (soccer) team and that apparently allowed them some status to do whatever the hell they pleased.

The principal of my school just outright didn't like me because both my uncle and my mother weren't afraid to say he sucked at his job and had no authority over the students whatsoever. Funnily enough, the school was earmarked for closure once or twice during his reign so it's obvious his superiors thought the same thing.

I remember one incident where some of the aforementioned boys spread a malicious rumour that I'd skipped school on my birthday when I was genuinely ill and he actually took this rumour seriously. He tried wheedling the truth out of me in this 'I'm a nice guy really' Jasper-like way but I could tell that he was getting something of a kick out of the fact that I'd seemingly been caught being the problem child he viewed me as. It was only when I produced a doctor's note and asked him how those who had made the allegation had seen me when they should've been in school themselves that he quickly wrapped up the meeting and was all 'well, I'm just acting on what I've heard'.

Yeah sure, dude. You can tell you're winning at your career as a principal when you're acting on rumours and gossip spread by 10/11-year-old boys. Great job.

Schools suck at tackling bullying in general but, even all these years later, this man will always be a towering asshole in my mind because of how he presented himself as an understanding, reasonable guy while lowkey trying to pin the blame for my own abuse and harassment on me - an autistic child - because it made his job easier. He never fed me the weird sentiment that my bullies bullied me because they "liked me". Quite the opposite: he made it plain they bullied me because they didn't like me and that he "couldn't force the other kids to like me" so it was all out of his hands, which seems to be the universal attitude of school principals dealing with bullying everywhere.

Except here's the thing: I didn't want my bullies to like me. I just wanted them to leave me the hell alone. lol - RJ

[transrevolutions]

Your actions have consequences.

This is what they told you when you were four years old and you lied about where you put your new doll. They put the doll on the high, high shelf in the office and you can’t have it for three whole days, saying

“Your actions have consequences.”

When you were in kindergarten, you misbehaved in class. They lectured you about it, too. They didn’t know you had ADHD and autism and that was why you couldn’t look them in the eyes. They snapped at you until you did, even though it made you feel sick. They say you need to learn

“Your actions have consequences.”

You’re in second grade now, too old to be let off easy, they say. If you want to be a big kid, you should start acting like one. That’s why when you get a discipline slip from the teacher for blurting out in math class, they won’t sign off on it until they shout at you and tell you how disappointed they are over and over again. They make you write a letter of apology to the teacher. None of your classmates’ parents did that.

The other times you get a discipline slip, you leave them in the trash bin. Honesty isn’t worth the cost. After all,

“Your actions have consequences.”

You’re crying. You’re in fourth grade. Too old to cry. Only babies cry. You can’t keep the tears from spilling out (and that’s because you’re autistic but they don’t know that yet). When you tell them you can’t stop, they don’t believe you. “Don’t lie to us,��� they say. “We know you can do better than this.” Eventually you shove your fist in your mouth to stifle the sound, and you wake up with bite marks on your hand. You’ve figured out

“Your actions have consequences.”

You didn’t study. You didn’t make that higher-level math group. You spent too much time doodling and messing around. They tell you that you’ll never go to a college as good as the one your dad did because of this. They crush your dreams beneath their feet and tell you it was your fault for not being good enough. They explain that

“Your actions have consequences.”

You tell them that the kids are bullying you. They ask why, and you tell them. They say you aren’t being socially aware enough. (Soon they will realize that you’re autistic but for now they don’t listen when you say you don’t understand.) They sit you down and tell you that maybe you should think about why they’re teasing you, and if you act different, they’d stop. You cry that night, but you’ve learned how to keep it silent. You don’t have friends because

“Your actions have consequences.”

You disrespected him again. It’s not the first time, or the fifth time, or even the fiftieth. You don’t know why he says you are disrespectful, you don’t understand what he says about your tone. (They don’t know yet that you’re autistic.) He tells you that you’re faking. That you really do know. That he won’t tolerate it. He yells and you cry and your mom doesn’t talk to either of you that night. There are more nights like that than you’d like to remember. He screams at you

“Your actions have consequences.”

They blur together after a while. Day after day, hiding in your mom’s walk-in closet, begging for them to stop telling you something you already know but can’t figure out how to do, rubbing pencil stains off your hands from tear-stained worksheets that weren’t good enough, listening to them snort that your ‘friends’ only feel bad for you, sometimes apologizing and sometimes not but doing it over and over nonetheless.

You get in trouble and you don’t know why. You cry and they scream louder until you stop by almost choking on your spit. You keep your head up at school and lower and lower every day at home. Your life turns into a game of cat and mouse, knowing that one step over the line will turn your entire day into a shattered windowpane. Because every single time they drill it into your head that

“Your actions have consequences.”

One day they bring back test results. You’re autistic (explains the crying and poor social skills), you’re OCD (explains the stubbornness), and you have ADHD (explains the poor attention span and difficulty with math). 

They apologize. They ask for you to forgive them in a voice that says it’s not really a question. They ask for you to focus on everything they did for you, to focus on the good, not the bad. They say they know now, they’ll do better. They shout that they tried their best and who could blame them? They only wanted you to know

“Your actions have consequences.”

.

Fast forward a few years. They want to know why you don’t tell them anything anymore. Why you don’t come down for family movie nights. Why you’d rather be at school than at home. Why you have a calendar counting down the days until you’ll be eighteen and move out. Why you’re angry and sullen. And after all they’ve done for you, all they’ve given up to care for you, all the money and time they spent raising you, why this is how you repay them.

You look them dead in the eye and answer in a flat, emotionless voice

“Your actions have consequences.”

[prose-poetryblog]

The last Sandy Hook

This is the hardest prose I ever had to type in my blog. I don't think I ever became passionate like this with the words I used. Perhaps it's connected to me in a way because it involves a special education teacher and her paraprofessional that met their demise the same day. It feels out of my shell and it took time to be sure I got the victims names right, though I extended a few of them or wrote the Spanish equivalent where applicable. Forgive me for feeling horrible about this.

I know I could barely change all things; I know some things shall always remain constant.

I could give sympathies, condolences or thoughts over anything terrible that happens.

But if there's something I know of that can, shall, and must change -- it's about assault rifles and semi automatic ones too. It's become commonplace and so conspicuous it should be crazy and a crime.

Twenty one lives matter and don't have to leave by a massacre in vain.

The time is around 11:30am CDT on May 24, 2022, and nineteen elementary school students are in the right place where they are meant to be. About four or five of them just had happy things occur to them hours even days earlier.

One girl didn't even want to go to school that day, sensing that something bad was going to happen.

One teacher was planning a wedding anniversary with her husband later, another one was proud of her fourth grade students that she taught all of this year and seventeen others while also known as someone that had helped an autistic student like me during her teaching years.

Most importantly, those nineteen kids were going to come home to their families and two ladies were going to come home to their husbands -- one of them planning twenty five years since she got married to her husband.

They were planning vacation time and more happy things to come to them. It's very close to the end of the academic year.

The fourth graders among them were about to move up to enter fifth grade.

Then an eighteen year old troubled, reserved, and scary troublemaking Chupacabra shoots his weapon to the window through a school parking lot for twelve minutes before just walking into Robb Elementary and going into four different classrooms, systematically commiting robbery on young futures, femicide and genocide on twenty one of his own ethnic Latino people that were strangers to him.

I don't know how or even why he got there, particularly after he almost murders his grandma to later drive and abandon his grandma's pickup truck near the elementary school without a driver's license. I don't understand why he picked that particular elementary school.

His grandpa especially doesn't realize his grandson has bought two legal semi-automatics; he himself has had a criminal record that doesn't let him be in a residence with any weapon.

His mom sends him over to his grandparents because she has a fight and a falling out with her son. Even his grandma has to fight him over a phone bill.

No one in that family even knows where the dad is in this Chupacabra's life.

All of that doesn't matter in the end, even when a border patrol cop eventually annihilated the Chupacabra.

Evangelína Mireles, Irma García, Elíana García, Uziyah García, José Flores Jr., Xavier Diego López, Amerie Josefina Garza, Annabell Guadalupe Rodríguez, Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, Tessa Mariela Mata, Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, Elíahana Cruz Torres, Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares, Alithia Ramírez, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, Jailah Nicole Silguero, Makenna Lee Elrod, Miranda Mathis, Layla Salazar, María-Teresa (Maite) Yuleana Rodríguez, Rojelio Torres

Y'all didn't deserve to leave this earth that morning the way you did.

Amerie, you tried calling for help, Irma, you hugged your students that were scared out of their mind over the guns that were used, Evangelína, you were a lady that helped an autistic student like me years before and you just jumped in to save your students lives, Tessa, you just wanted to go to a Disney park, Alithia, you just celebrated ten years since you came into this unforgivable Earth, Elíahana, you especially wanted to read a Bible that coming Sunday, Jacklyn, you were so happy about a Catholic communion - you would have been more than happy about a quince that was stolen from you.

Estos tiroteos me ponen tan triste, enojado, enfadado y mal. Yo no sé por qué hay que quitarle la felicidad casi de inmediato. Pero este tiroteo se convertirá en la última vez que alguien robe la felicidad de muchachos innocentes.

Por los senadores, representantes, y gobernadores, ser cobarde es malo, y la decisión correcta es a menudo muy difícil. No esperes a hacerlo algo bien antes de que te afecte. No tenga miedo de tomar una decisión difícil con respecto a este problema.

Para la policía, haz tu trabajar mejor para arrinconar a la gente que hace el mal.

Para los residentes de la ciudad, nunca te conformes con la desesperanza con respecto a este problema. Dígale a las personas de su confianza si nota algo que no se ven bien.

Para las personas heridas, tómate todo el tiempo que necesites para sanar del dolor.

Para los sobrevivientes de la masacre, tómense todo el tiempo que necesiten para procesar lo sucedido.

Por las familias y huérfanos de las víctimas, no pierdan la esperanza de que algo bueno salga de está terrible tragedia.

Yo estoy cansando de las masacres que suceden demasiado. Esto no puede seguir pasando cada vez en este país. ¡No más!

[mimicutie]

Pit is Autistic - A “Brief” Analysis

Kid Icarus: Uprising is my favorite game of all time, and one thing I love about it is the characterization of Pit. Specifically, I see him as autistic. Of course, this is just a headcanon of mine, but I wanted to write out a little discussion explaining why I see him as such as well as show some of the autistic traits he demonstrates in Uprising (and the occasional reference to the Guidance conversations from Smash).

(fair warning, this is not very brief)

Difficulty Understanding Words and Jokes

It’s made abundantly clear that Pit isn’t the best at picking up sarcasm or jokes. At times, he struggles with understanding words, phrases, and context. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 11.

Pit: Good! There are survivors! Palutena: They’re a stubborn bunch hanging on like that. [...] Pit: Uh… stubborn? Palutena: Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.

Here, Pit doesn’t understand what Palutena means by “stubborn.” It’s pretty common for autistic people to struggle understanding parts of speech, such as words being used in different contexts than what they’re used to.

Medusa: Hmm… Now this is a little… bizarre. Pit: I know right? The mouth on that guy! I’d never talk like that! Medusa: That’s not what I meant. Palutena: Sorry. He can be a little… thick.

Once again, Pit is misinterpreting the situation. He doesn’t understand what Medusa is alluding to, thinking that she is talking about Dark Pit’s brash behavior. Palutena’s last comment hints that it’s very common for Pit to misunderstand people like this.

Pit: I’m Pit, servant of the goddess Palutena. I’m here to defeat Dark Lord Gaol. Magnus: So you’re here for a slice of the pie too? Pit: Huh? Pie? Where?

Chapter 2 has several examples of Pit not picking up on obvious jokes or idioms, and here’s one. Pit takes the idiom literally, not understanding what Magnus really means at first.

Viridi: Pit certainly is devoted to you, Palutena. Hades: Only because she squeezes his head wreath when he doesn’t follow orders. Palutena: You mean like… THIS?! Pit: No no no no no! You’ll squeeze my brains out! … (sigh) Why do I always fall for that?

In this example from Chapter 15, Palutena is clearly messing with Pit, but as he stated, he always falls for her jokes. Even though it’s clear she is just teasing, Pit can’t pick up on the fact that she isn’t being serious. He consistently struggles with understanding tone.

Pit: This is so annoying. Lady Palutena, help me out here! Palutena: Deploying the Palutena Super Sensor… Pit: I didn’t know you had a super sensor! Palutena: Hee hee. I don’t. You know I like to make stuff up. Pit: I can’t believe you’re messing with me at a time like this!

This dialogue from Chapter 13 is just another example of Palutena clearly joking while Pit does not pick up on it. Even though Palutena has done this time and time again, Pit still struggles to tell when someone, even a person he is incredibly close to like Palutena, is just messing with him. These are just a few examples. Pit commonly struggles with understanding language and tone throughout the game.

Using Words Differently

We can see that Pit has his own unique vocabulary with his own creative phrases like, “Calamaried!” “Re-defeated!” “Pulverazed!” and so on. Pit also makes LOTS of noises throughout the game, all of his “woohoo”s and “woah”s and whatnot. It’s just how he communicates, even if it's a bit particular or different.

Expressiveness

Pit is excitable. Like, really excitable. Sure, he’s a fun video game protagonist, but he’s always very happy-go-lucky and upbeat in a way that reads to me as autistic. Just look at how he jumps in excitement!

And when he gets the Three Sacred Treasure?! Gifs can’t really do the excitement in this scene justice. (link in case tumblr embed isn’t working)

Additionally, while Uprising doesn’t have a lot of cutscenes with Pit just standing around talking, in the ones where he does he is usually very expressive, using his hands to talk and whatnot. Added with his excitability, I feel that this shows us that Pit is so expressive and emotional because he’s autistic!

Extra Help

Pit needs more help with understanding things in comparison to others. Palutena often goes out of her way to guide Pit, whether it be giving him directions or explaining how to defeat an enemy. While Palutena’s advice does work as a guide for the player, it’s clear that Pit needs the help more than someone else his situation might. The clearest proof we have of this comes from Chapter 22.

Palutena: Watch out for that heart-shaped crystal barrier! You see, it’s— Dark Pit: Reflecting my shots back at me, right? Palutena: Well… yes. Dark Pit: I got it, so stop telling me what to do! 

Palutena is expecting Dark Pit to be like Pit, where she needs to explain to him what’s going on and offer her guidance. However, Dark Pit was able to figure out a strategy to defeat Pandora all on his own. Palutena is very aware that Pit needs a bit more help and prepares accordingly for him.

Accidental Rudeness

Many times throughout Uprising, Pit is shown speaking “rudely” towards gods or characters who have authority over him.

Pit: Oh, great! You’re the guy I’m looking for. Listen, I have a favor to ask you. Would you mind if I borrow your chariot for just a little while? Chariot Master: Your foolishness is matched only by your rudeness. How dare you charge in here, flinging unreasonable requests at me? [...] Viridi: You can’t really blame him for being upset. That was kind of rude.

Here, Pit is talking to the Chariot Master very casually, treating him like a friend despite the fact he is breaking into the Chariot Master’s tower and asking him for a precious artifact. Pit doesn’t see it as rude but Viridi and the Chariot Master clearly do. He is breaking an unwritten social norm by talking so casually to someone of high authority. Autistic people often misinterpret social situations or don’t act appropriately, sometimes resulting in “rude” behavior. There are several examples of this throughout the game, such as in Chapter 24…

Pit: You know, the Three Sacred Treasures weren’t exactly durable. Can you please make sure that this new weapon won’t just fall apart? Dyntos: Palutena, you’d be wise to put a muzzle on your chicken.  Palutena: I apologize for him. Again. Pit: I… I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to be rude.

To Pit, he is just stating a fact. However, it comes off to Dyntos as Pit being rude or even insulting his work. This is something that autistic people often do; they are blunt or honest about something, which is again mistaken as being rude.

Pit is also seen being more blunt when under emotional stress, such as in Chapter 20.

Pit: I trusted you because I knew you were on the side of justice, and… and light! But something is blocking that light now. This isn’t the real you. Viridi: Someone cue the strings… Pit: Would you mind holding the commentary for two seconds, Viridi? Phosphora: There are goddesses you’re talking to here, Pit. Watch your tone. Pit: Butt out, Phosphora! The goddess of light has turned dark. Skyworld is destroyed! Everything is wrong, and it’s up to me to make things right! Palutena: Oh, Pit. You’re just as naive as ever. Pit: I’m not naive!

Phew. This scene is pretty noteworthy to me because throughout the game, Pit is never really that angry or upset. He does show hostility, but he never really snaps at anyone, much less gods, like this. But when his home is destroyed and Lady Palutena is not herself, his emotions get the better of him. He doesn’t even seem to care that he is being “rude” to Viridi. I definitely see this moment as Pit having an outburst because of the stressful situation he is under. 

Scripts / Scripting

The most obvious example of Pit using a script is with his “rally cries” that he prepares before fighting enemies. Look at the idol description for this AR Card.

He practices his rally cries a lot in order to be prepared for battles with bosses. Pit even mentions practicing his rally cries in a later chapter.

Pit: Cells of Hades, hear my words! And, um… see my actions! Uh… something, something… I’m going to rain death on you! I can’t remember all the words, but that’s the general gist. Hades: My innards have so longed to hear your battle cry. How could you forget the words? Pit: I didn’t have time to rehearse. I’ve been busy fighting evil, okay?!

While some may see the rally cries as meaningless fun, I think it could be seen as Pit having a script that he likes to fall back to when facing enemies. 

His many references and quotes to video games could be seen as scripting, too. There are lots of instances in Uprising, and especially in Palutena’s Guidance, where Pit quotes famous video game phrases or imitates sounds. Which leads me to…

Special Interest

Pit’s special interest is video games. While Pit’s very vast knowledge of video games could just be because of Uprising’s fourth-wall breaking style of humor, I think it could also be seen as Pit having an intense interest in games. He references various video games such as Metroid, Nintendogs, and Super Smash Bros. in-game. He seems to enjoy bringing up video games or referencing video game mechanics whenever he can, which is very similar to how autistic people enjoy bringing up their special interests in conversations whenever possible. Additionally, while the Palutena’s Guidance conversations aren’t 100% accurate to canon, Pit constantly references and alludes to various video games in them, such as quoting Reyn in Shulk’s conversation or Peppy and General Pepper in Fox’s (which ties back to him scripting). It’s clear that he loves video games and talking about video games!

Pit: Those Aurum troops are doing their best Game and Watch impression! Viridi: Check out the gaming IQ on this guy! You’re a regular video game historian!

See, even Viridi is impressed with his video game knowledge! :D

Sensory Issues

Throughout the game, Pit seems to have an obsession with hot springs. It is never outright explained why he loves them so much, but I’m led to believe it is because of sensory reasons. Many autistic people use extreme temperatures to help soothe or calm themselves, such as cold showers or hot baths. It can often help with sensory overload. Hot springs, similarly to hot baths, may be a way to help soothe Pit and keep his sensory issues to a minimum. 

Pit’s habits with his tunic seem to hint towards sensory issues, too. He doesn’t like to be without his robes, stating that he keeps them on even when he’s in the hot spring. When his clothes seemingly get messed up in Chapter 21, he gets upset, exclaiming that it’s his only tunic. Wearing the same clothes or same types of clothes/fabric is pretty typical for autistic people, and Pit wearing the same tunic everyday is similar to that.

Additionally, Pit’s habits with food could be because of sensory differences. He very well could be hyposensitive to food and tastes, which is why he eats a lot and doesn’t seem to care about what he eats (as long as it isn’t vegetables, according to the Revolting Dinner short ;D ) . 

Small Social Circle

Pit doesn’t have a whole lot of people he can rely on. Before Uprising, the only person he seems to have any affinity for is Palutena. Other than that, he doesn’t seem to talk to anyone else. We don’t have a clear picture on what his relationship with the Centurions is like, but based off of the Revolting Dinner short and Chapter 17, he only really talks to them when he’s working as the Captain of the Army and not as a friend.

While yes, Pit is the only angel left in Skyworld, I still think it’s important to bring up that Pit only really has Palutena to rely on. By the end of Uprising, he has Viridi and Dark Pit as well, but his only clear and completely positive relationship is his mother-son bond with Palutena. I see this as Pit struggling to really befriend others. He’s had over two decades between the original game and Uprising to befriend the Centurions, but again, he only really has Palutena. It’s pretty typical for autistic people to have very small social circles, consisting of just one or two friends. Palutena seems to fit the role of mother and best friend for Pit, and she even remarks that he should make more friends in Chapter 4. 

Working Alone

This is a small one, but still something that I think is worth pointing out. Pit seems very adamant on accomplishing his missions on his own, telling Dark Pit on two separate occasions (Chapter 9 and Chapter 21) that he can handle the situation by himself. Similarly, it’s common for autistic people to prefer working by themselves rather than with others. Paired with the previous point about having a small social circle, this just reads to me as Pit not feeling too comfortable in situations with others.

Conclusion

There’s a few other points that I feel I could bring up but overall I think these are my main points summed up (and yes, I said summed up. this used to be over 2500 words) ! Thanks so much for reading! If you have any other traits that you think Pit has that I didn’t mention, feel free to share them, I’d be more than happy to hear! ^_^

[nightcoremoon]

it's evident people haven't watched enough kids media to adequately understand just what constitutes a kids show as opposed to a show that kids can watch and be entertained by

when I was a kid I watched king of the hill and blues clues (among other things). king of the hill is NOT a kids show by any stretch of the imagination; it is an adult animation, replete with fairly heavy subject matter, sexual themes, political humor, cultural references that kids won't understand, discussion of religion in the modern day, depression and suicidal thoughts, adultery, puberty and sexual awakenings, body image, propane, propane accessories, and ultimately above all else what it means to be family. and blues clues is a show about a man who plays with a shovel & pail, talks to his condiments and mailbox, and sometimes he teleports into the felt dimension, all while playing Sherlock Holmes hercule poirot with his dog, and teaching kids how to count and draw and recognize colors and learn their ABCs. do you see the fucking difference? no? then I'll make it more clear.

dora the explorer & go diego go, mickey mouse clubhouse, handy manny, octonauts, bob the builder, super why, wild kratts, zoboomafoo, jojo's circus, wow wow wubbzy, stanley, doc mcstuffins, max & ruby, wonder pets, bubble guppies, ni hao khai lan, backyardigans, little einsteins, caillou (ugh) and p*w p*trol (double ugh), these are all undeniably kids shows. their audience is children (and the occasional adult by age with severe intellectual disabilities) and maybe the parents whose brains are too fried to care what's on the tv. these shows main purpose is to educate while entertaining on subjects one would encounter in preschool and kindergarten. counting 1-10, ABCs, basic color, basic language, basic intrapersonal skills, basic emotional literacy, problem solving, using your imagination, what sounds do animals make, breaking the fourth wall to ask the audience to answer what's 2+2 or tell them a lesson they learned today like I LEARNED TO NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER or some simple message like that. it's always light, there's no edgelord grimdark "what if they were dead the whole time" bullshit. it's just good clean simple wholesome [except for paw patrol] programs for kids to be distracted for a little bit of time, while also letting them walk away having said they learned something. at least half of the time dedicated to every single one of these shows is devoted to the same shit over and over again. I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map I'm the map WE FUCKING GET IT YOURE THE MAP! backpack backpack I'm the backpack loaded up with things and knickknacks too, anything that you might need I've got inside for you. we did it we did it we did it HOORAY! come on vamanos everybody let's go, come on let's get to it, I know that we can do it,

WHERE ARE WE GOING

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

THESE SONGS ARE BURNED INTO MY BRAIN AND THEYLL BE STUCK IN MY HEAD UNTIL I DIE

say click take a pic, the hot dog dance, CAN HE FIX IT???, pizza! spaghetti!, THE DOC IS IN AND SHELL FIX YOU UP, max & ruby ruby & max max & ruby ruby & max MAX & RUBY RUBY & MAX MAX & RUBY RUBY & MAX, wonder pets wonder pets we're on our way to help the friend and save the day, we're not too big and we're not too tough but when we work together we've got the right stuff, goooOOO WONDER PETS YAAAAY~, yoooour backyard friends the backyardigans (weve got the whole wide world in our yard to explore, thATS WHY EVERY DAY WEEEEERE BACK FOR MOOOORE), were going on a trip in our little rocket ship SOARING THROOOOOUGH THE SKY!!! little einsteins!

I swear to god I've been forced to watch so much children's television in my life it's no wonder there's no room left for serotonin executive function or the ability to speak to morons

point is I know my way around kids shows. my sisters were born in 98, 02, 05, 06, 10, and 18, I think, I don't even know because they're all a blur, I'm literally closer in age to my parents than to my youngest sibling, I never stopped being exposed to kids shows. I know what is and is not a kids show.

adventure time? not a kids show even though kids watch it. it's a "for everyone" show. it's got a target audience of 100% of the planet. steven universe? not a kids show even though kids watch it. miraculous ladybug? not a kids show even though kids watch it. scooby doo? not a kids show even though kids watch it. I'm not discussing the history of adult acceptance of animation, adult animation, or anime, so don't ask. dexter's laboratory. the grim adventures of billy & mandy. codename kids next door. teen titans. fairly oddparents. kim possible. invader zim. AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER. totally spies. courage the cowardly dog. the proud family. SPONGEBOB F*ING SQUAREPANTS. powerpuff girls. foster's home for imaginary friends. oh yeah you know what's coming next. my little goddamn pony friendship is mother fucking magic is not. a. kids. show. even though kids can watch it. it is a cartoon. it is an everyone show. that's why it's disingenuous and fucking stupid to decry any fan over the age of 7 as a pedophile and a weirdo creep; it participates in the infantilization of femininity. why is it ok for 20somethings to keep watching aang and squidward and finn & jake and zim and "return the slab" and everyone's totally fine wth that but when it's twilight sparkle suddenly everyone's like whoa you're a huge fucking loser for watching this girly wussy baby show for girly wussy babies. oh some bronies are sex crazed perverts? I'm sorry have you seen just how much porn there is for spongebob? oh some bronies are cringe? I'm sorry have you met half the steven universe fandom? oh some bronies are fascist rick sanchez kinnies with fedoras and katanas? BREAKING BAD FANS, HELLO!?!?!?

this is such a stupid tiring boring argument. maybe magic talking horses being friends and turning their friendship into magic rainbow nuclear fucking arms and blasting the evil out of a demon and turning her into the coolest fucking half-unicorn biker lesbian in the world is something that brings me, and adult, pure wholesome joy, in between bojack horseman and dark souls and breaking bad and deftones and fallout new vegas and jojo and cannibal corpse and other bleak depressing edgy shit that also brings me comfort. and MAYBE me at 16 starting to watch MLP:FIM becoming finally comfortable with the outward public expression of "traditionally feminine" interests is the main reason why I realized I was a girl when I did, and MAYBE I just like how pretty the colorful ponies look, AND MAYBE I KIN WITH ONE OR TWO OR EIGHT CHARACTERS, WHAT OF IT?

AND MAYBE ITS LITERALLY THE BEST LONG RUNNING FANTASY TV SERIES ON THE MARKET RIGHT NOW* SINCE GAME OF THRONES FUCKING SUCKS

but whatever, kids watch it sometimes so it's illegal for anyone who's not a kid to enjoy it, but only if it's something girly because liking girly things is bad because girliness is inherently bad, and the only things that are good have predominantly male casts*. right? right??? wrong, fucker. g4mlp has so much more in common with adventure time & atla than with blues clues or dora the fucking explora...r.

but keep in mind I'm saying this while hugging a blues clues plushie my grandma gave me for valentine's day because it reminds her of when I was a baby because I may not watch blues clues but it still means a lot to me for nostalgia and is 50% of the reason why I love ray charles. kids media isn't necessarily bad. I still do enjoy watching it with my little sisters. all this is is me being anal about categorization because I'm autistic and I LIVE for categorizing everything.

*besides atla obviously

[alarawriting]

52 Project #30 (Writeober #15: Mortality): Everybody’s Happy As The Dead Come Home

Ever since my mother died of breast cancer a few years ago, I’ve been making time to go visit my elderly father about once a month. That may be conjuring up the wrong image in your head, so let me clarify. My father’s over 70, but he still has a lot of the energy he had as a younger man. He works as a consultant for the big corporation he spent his entire adult pre-retirement life working for, for about three or four times as much money, and he enjoys it. He’s got an active social life, spending time with friends he had shared with Mom as a couple, and new friends he’s made from his bereavement group or his consulting work. And my sister, the baby of the family, lives with him, and my two younger brothers come to visit him a lot more often, since they live a lot closer than I do. So if you’re imagining a lonely, stooped old man pining away in a house that smells like stale cat food – that’s not my dad, and I can’t imagine it would ever be.

I arrived late on a Friday night, as usual. My sister met me at the door, and actually looked me directly in the eye. Stephanie’s autistic; she never looks anyone in the eye. “Eleanor,” she said, and that was another strange thing, because she almost never calls anyone by name… unless she’s doing it for emphasis. “When you find out, don’t say anything about it,” she said.

“About what?” Most of the time Stephanie makes sense, but every so often she says something that sounds like her mind has jumped ahead in the conversation without realizing all the missing pieces she never bothered to say.

“You’ll know,” she said. “And you’ll want to ask ‘why’ and ‘how’, and I’m telling you that you can’t do that. Don’t ask any questions. Just come talk to me after you’re done.”

“Done with what?” I asked.

And then a voice called me from the TV room. “Lennie? Lennie, is that you?”

Only my mom and dad are allowed to call me Lennie. And that was a woman’s voice. I froze in place.

“Go see her,” Stephanie said, and headed off to her room.

I turned toward the TV room, slowly. “Lennie! Come out and see me!” my mom’s voice called.

I didn’t know whether to be terrified, or to start crying and fling myself into her arms. I walked very slowly, very cautiously, to the edge of the kitchen, where I could see my parents in the TV room. Both of my parents. My dad was smiling.

“Lennie!” my mom said, standing up. She hadn’t been able to stand up without help for months before she died, but here she was, standing up easily. She didn’t look any younger than she had when she died, but she looked healthier. The extreme thinness she’d suffered from at the end after it had metastasized and she’d barely been able to eat was gone; her flesh was filled out, her skin as taut as you could expect from a woman her age, and healthy-looking. Pale, but her natural paleness, not the weird, sallow, almost yellow color it had been at the very end.

“Mom?” I whispered.

“Come here. I need a hug,” Mom said, sounding exactly like she always had – joking, but there was always that note of truth under it. She didn’t wait for me to make my way to her – she never had, not until she was too ill to get up – but came straight for me and gave me a hug, and she smelled like herself. Not like a rotting corpse, not like ozone or nothing or whatever a ghost is supposed to smell like.

When I was a kid, my brother Jeff and I watched the miniseries version of “The Martian Chronicles”. In particular, he was always impressed (and terrified) by the part where the astronauts meet their long-lost loved ones, who turn out to be Martian shapechangers luring them to their deaths. I always wondered, if the people they saw on Mars were dead, how did they fall for it? How did they not know that dead people could not somehow be on Mars?

As I held my mom, who’d been dead a few years now, I understood. They’d wanted to believe. I wanted to believe. Stephanie had warned me not to ask anything – no “how are you not dead”, “how can you be here”, “why are you alive,” nothing like that. I assumed that was what she’d meant, anyway.

“Mom, I’ve been trying to trace some of my past that I’ve forgotten. Do you remember the name of my third grade teacher?”

“Huh.” My mom seemed to be thinking about it. “I think it was Mrs. Wilder, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. Second grade was Ms. Jenner, right? And fourth was Mrs. White?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t, in fact, remember my third grade teacher’s name, and neither did my dad. The Martians in the story had been telepaths; they’d been able to perfectly impersonate the astronauts’ loved ones because they could read the astronauts’ minds. Now I had a piece of information whose answer I didn’t know, and no way to easily confirm it unless Jeff remembered; he was only two years younger than me and had had some of the same teachers. But some of the people I had friended on Facebook were high school classmates, and a tiny number of my high school classmates had also been with me in elementary school, and might remember my third grade teacher’s name.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my mom said. “What’s going on in your life?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Things are going okay. Mom, if I’d known you were here I’d have brought the kids.”

“You can bring them up next time,” Mom said.

This was so weird. My mom was definitely dead. I had seen her body in the coffin, lying in state, looking nothing like she had in life. But here she was, impossibly, and I was holding an almost normal conversation with her. “Have Jeff or Aaron come over since you’ve… been here?”

“Jeff was here last weekend,” Dad said. “And Aaron lives next door, so he’s been over nearly every day.”

My grandparents used to live next door. When they died, my mom and my uncle inherited the house. My uncle bought out my mom’s share and rented the house out, and my youngest brother ended up renting it. My other brother lives in an apartment down in the city; I’m the odd one out, living in a completely different state, with a husband and kids.

So all of them had known, and none of them had told me. I expected Stephanie and Aaron to never tell me anything, but I was more than a little irritated with Jeff.

“Let me go drop off my stuff,” I said, since I was still carrying my bag.

I went back to Stephanie’s room, which used to be my room, a long time ago. The boys used to room together, but my room was too small for Stephanie to share with me, and she had needed a lot of space of her own… so they’d converted the loft in the garage into a bedroom. It had never been warm in the winter, though, so as soon as I moved out, Stephanie had moved in.

Stephanie was, as usual, on her computer. I shut the door behind me. “Okay. What the hell is going on?”

“She’s not the only one,” Stephanie said, without looking away from her computer. “I’ve been doing research. They’re all over the place. There’s no explanation yet, and apparently none of them will talk about it. I asked Mom and she said I was really rude, and sulked and was really passive-aggressive.”

“So we’re not worried about Mom turning into a Martian shapechanger or vanishing, we’re just worried that she’ll get mad?” To be fair, making Mom mad had always been a thing worth avoiding at all costs. “When did she come back?”

“I don’t know exactly, but presuming that she came to see me right after she came back, it would have been Monday around 3 pm.”

“And no one told me? You have my email address!”

“…It just didn’t feel right, telling you something like this in email. I felt like I should wait for you to be here.”

“And Jeff didn’t? And Aaron didn’t?”

Stephanie shrugged. She still didn’t look away from her computer. “They probably felt the same way.”

“Does Dad… know? Like, does he even remember that Mom is dead, or does he think this is normal?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

I sat down on her bed. “Steph, I’m asking you to make an informed guess. Has he said anything to you that would either suggest that he’s aware this is abnormal, or that he isn’t?”

“I don’t read minds, but I haven’t heard anything from him one way or the other. He’s very happy, though.”

“I got that impression,” I told her. I went to the guest room, which used to belong to the boys, opened up my laptop, and sent Jeff a question on Facebook about my third grade teacher.

Mom appeared while I was debating whether or not to also ask him why the hell he hadn’t told me about her. “Lennie, don’t hide in your room. Come out and talk to me and your dad. You need to catch me up on your life!”

Part of me wanted to break down crying. Part of me wanted to run to the car. Part of me was annoyed the way I always used to be annoyed when my mom wanted to spend time with me and I had stuff to do. And part of me hated myself for being annoyed by my mom for any reason at all. She was back from the dead and I wanted to hide in my room? But I wanted to hide in my room because I wanted to do research to figure out if this was really my mom or not. And what had Stephanie meant by “all over the place”? People all over the place had returned from the dead? Why wasn’t this all over the news?

What I said was, “Okay, mom,” and I went out to the TV room to talk to her.

***

Here I was, having a completely mundane conversation with a dead woman.

Yes, my husband was doing well at his consulting business. Yes, my oldest daughter was doing well in college. My youngest daughter had a rough spot a few years ago but was doing better. The daughter in the middle was putting a lot of time into her music, and was getting really good. I didn’t mention that my oldest daughter had gotten a diagnosis of autism like her aunt, or that my middle daughter was failing all her subjects because all she cared about was music, or that my youngest daughter was openly bisexual and dating a nonbinary teen in her class, because those would be fraught topics around here. My mother would be openly disapproving of the failing in school – as was I, but I wasn’t here to listen to a lecture about what I should be doing differently to make sure Rhiannon passed her classes – and she’d be what she thought counted as supportive about the other things. Are you sure it’s a good idea for Janie to have an autism diagnosis on her medical record? Lots of people will discriminate against her, just ask Stephanie, it’s not a good thing to admit to the world. And if Lori wanted to date a person who claimed to have no gender, good for her, but was she sure it was a good idea to admit to the world that she was bi when the world is so prejudiced? Blah blah blah. No. I wasn’t going there, not with my mother back from the dead.

All the questions I wanted to ask. How? How was she back? Why? Was there an afterlife after all? What was it like? Are you absolutely sure you’re not a telepathic shapechanger who wants to eat us? Is anyone else coming back or is it just you? But I couldn’t do it. My mouth wouldn’t make the words, and I felt like Mom being alive was a soap bubble that might burst any moment. If I said she was dead, would she disappear? I couldn’t take the risk.

Now I knew why Jeff and Aaron hadn’t told me. The compulsion not to talk about it, the fear that talking about the circumstances of her death and her apparently-no-longer-deadness would cause her to stop being no-longer-dead. I wouldn’t be able to tell my husband about this, or my kids, not unless they came here. Not without feeling like Mom might disappear if I did.

Which was probably how Stephanie had gotten away with it, in the beginning. If this was some kind of emotional pressure, something emanating from the presence of a dead woman... Stephanie was typically immune to emotional pressure. Or pretended she was, anyway. She hid behind her monotone and her face that barely expressed anything until she couldn’t, and then she’d go and have a meltdown in the bathroom. But she wanted to please Mom. We all wanted to please Mom. So if Mom had told her she was rude for mentioning the death thing, Stephanie would be unable to mention it again. Because she wouldn’t want Mom to think she was rude.

This felt very much like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Dead mother back to life, check. Weird inexplicable pressure not to talk about it, check. But Mom clearly remembered things that had happened shortly before her death, and showed no evidence of knowing about anything that had happened since, unless it was public knowledge. She talked about interests the girls had had three years ago, interests they’d all outgrown since. She talked about my plan to remodel my own garage – I had completely forgotten that was even a thing we’d planned at one point, because I’d lost my job shortly after Mom died and then the money wasn’t there for the remodel. She didn’t know I was working with my husband in the consulting business now, which a telepath would obviously know because it dominates my life nowadays. Obviously a Martian telepathic shapechanger would have to pretend not to know things that supposedly happened while they were dead, but if I’d forgotten about the garage, what were the odds a telepath could pull it out of my head? There had to be more accessible thoughts in there, after all.

I didn’t know what to ask Mom. How do you feel? That was always a good one, back in the day, because Mom’s chronic illnesses meant there was always something she could complain about, but she wouldn’t do it until she was asked… she’d just quietly resent the fact that no one had asked her. But did dead people still feel things? Would that intrude on the topic I wasn’t supposed to talk about? What’s going on in your life? Oh, nothing much, Lennie, I’m back from the dead, how about you?

So I talked about myself. I was learning to work leather and I’d made myself a wallet, but I left it at home, I could bring it to show her next time. I was also learning to repair dolls. The girls had all abandoned theirs and I felt bad about it, so I was cleaning them up and repairing them and putting them in dioramas. Mom was very interested in both topics, and asked if I could repair some old dolls she had up in the attic. I was pretty sure I’d already done it – if it was the dolls I was thinking of, Dad had given them to me right after Mom died, and they were the ones I’d learned on. But was it safe to talk about? Dad wasn’t saying anything; had he forgotten he gave me the dolls, which was entirely possible, or did he think it wasn’t safe to talk about either?

I’d wanted for three years to be able to tell my mom that she was wrong about all the weight loss advice she’d given me because now it had come out that scientists had never proven that fat made you fat and the low-carb diets were probably better for you than the low-fat ones, but I didn’t know if she could still eat. Also, my mom was back from the dead and I wanted to start an argument with her about a topic I’d always hated when she talked about? Didn’t I have anything better to do? That really kind of made me a shitty person, didn’t it?

When Mom had been dying, I couldn’t talk to her about the future. I didn’t know how to bring myself to talk about things she’d never see. I’d never known how much my conversations with her consisted of me talking about future plans until I couldn’t any more. Now I couldn’t talk about the future or the past, at least not the past three years, and large parts of the present had to be left out too, because I didn’t know what would remind her that she was dead and make her go back to her grave. Even though, logically, I knew that was unlikely to happen because Stephanie had done it and had just gotten a rebuke that that was rude.

At the same time… I knew I had to say something that Mom could talk about, because if I just talked about myself all night, later on she’d probably make some passive-aggressive remarks about how everything always had to be about me. In desperation, I asked her if she’d seen anything good on television lately.

“Oh, I haven’t been watching anything in a while,” Mom said. “It’s been so long since I felt well enough to go anywhere, so I’ve been going for walks, and your father and I have been taking trips to museums and historic sites. We’re going to be going up to Boston next week.”

“I have a client up there,” Dad said, “and they want me to do a training thing. And I was telling them, no, no, Boston’s too far, but I remembered how much your mom loved Boston, so I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, so now we’re going. We’re going to fly, though. The days I was willing to drive that kind of distance are long over.”

“You could take the Amtrak.”

Dad made a dismissive gesture. “It’s gotten so expensive. Flying’s actually cheaper.”

“When are you going?”

“Next Wednesday we’re going to fly up there,” Mom said, which said something about her opinion of the future, at least. “Your dad’s got his presentations to do on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll wander around the city, and then we’ll spend Saturday seeing the sights together.”

“There’s this fantastic restaurant I went to last time I was up there on business,” Dad said, “and I checked their web page, and they’re still open. So we’re going to go there.”

So Mom could eat. Or Dad wasn’t afraid of talking about eating with her, anyway. Maybe ruled out vampire, but Martian shapechanger was still on the table.

I didn’t literally believe my mom – or the entity that appeared to be my mom – was a telepathic shapechanger from Mars like in The Martian Chronicles. But it was obvious that something so far outside the norm that it was only imaginable by making references to fantasy and science fiction was happening.

I tried, very carefully, “How have you been feeling, Mom?”

“I’m great!” She laughed. “I haven’t felt this good in ages. Sugar’s under control, I can see pretty well, none of the usual aches and pains… I’m doing pretty good!”

Did she remember she had died of cancer? Did she even remember that she’d died?

It was 2 am before I got to go to bed.

***

6 am and I was up and out the door before there was any chance of my mother or father being awake, assuming my mom even slept anymore. But at the very least, she was in her bedroom with the door closed and no view of the driveway I’d parked my car in.

Do I sound like a terrible daughter when I tell you I’ve never visited my mom’s grave? I haven’t been back there since the funeral. I always knew my mother wasn’t really there – that if any part of her had still existed in any form, it wasn’t trapped in a coffin under six feet of dirt. It made it somewhat difficult to find the graveyard, though, because I couldn’t remember where it was, or its name, or which church it was associated with, and it wasn’t exactly like I could ask my mom. When I finally found the place– it wasn’t that hard in the end, my parents live in a small town and there aren’t many graveyards – it took me half an hour to find her grave.

It seemed undisturbed. But if Mom had been back from the dead since Monday, that would have been time to fill in a grave. I went looking for the caretaker.

They get to work early in the graveyard caretaking business, I guess; I found him pushing a lawnmower over on the other side of the graveyard.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But I got an email from a jerk I used to know in high school claiming he was going to dig up my mother’s grave, and I just wanted to make sure nobody’s touched it.”

“Nobody’s touched any of the graves, ma’am,” he assured me. “Aside from a couple of funerals we’ve had this week, no one’s done anything to disturb the ground here at all.”

“Thanks,” I said, “that’s reassuring. He was talking like he was actually going to do it, but I guess he was all talk.”

“Well, if anyone comes by and disturbs any of the graves, we’ll have them arrested,” he said.

I had my answer. My mother had not climbed out of her grave. Which seemed impossible anyway, now that I knew enough about the funeral industry to know exactly how hard it would be to smash a coffin open, let alone dig through six feet of dirt. I couldn’t rule out her turning immaterial and floating out of her grave, but my mom had seemed very material and biological when she’d hugged me. I’d always thought of ghosts as something that were almost never solid enough to interact with the world, if they even existed.

***

If I was going to get up this early, I was going to get a pancake breakfast at the diner. My parents still think sugarless cold cereal is a reasonable thing to eat for breakfast. They were always night owls; I made myself breakfast and school lunch every morning but the first day of school, every year after about third grade. I was also a night owl, once I didn’t have to get up for school anymore, but I used to make my girls a lunch every night and store it in the fridge for them. Now they’re too old and too cool for Mom lunches. They’re eating something, but it might be cafeteria food, lunch they pack for themselves, or for all I know sandwiches from 7-11 or Starbucks with their allowance.

The point is, I hardly ever get a nice breakfast, because I am hardly ever willing to wake up early enough to cook myself one, and my parents certainly weren’t going to. So I went to the diner.

Normally I don’t talk to anyone at a diner, beyond smiling at them and telling them my order in an upbeat, cheerful voice because waitresses get too much shit from too many people for me to add to it inadvertently. Also because I don’t want them to think I’m eating alone because I’m a sad, lonely bitch no one would love; I want them to know I’m doing this because I really, really enjoy not having to socialize. But today I had something I needed to know.

“I’m a writer,” I told the waitress, “and I’m doing research on ghost stories in the area. Have you heard anything, you know, Halloweeny or spooky? Ghosts appearing, dead people walking around, poltergeists, that kind of thing?”

“Can’t say I have, but I’ll ask around, see if any of the girls know any good stories,” the waitress told me.

And then she took my order back to the kitchen, and I surfed the net on my phone while I waited, and then I got my pancakes, and I ate them. I was chasing the last blueberry around on the plate when another waitress approached me. “Stacy told me you were collecting creepy stories for a book?”

“From the local area, yeah.”

“I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, but… my cousin says that a lady on her street, her husband died a few years ago? But she just saw the guy walking with the lady down the street, having a conversation like the guy never died.”

“Do you think you’d be able to give my email to your cousin and have her reach out to me? That sounds like exactly the kind of story I’m looking for.”

“Uh, sure.”

I gave the waitress my email address. This was probably going to come to nothing; I doubted the waitress would even remember to give it to her cousin. But it’d be really good if I could get the details from someone who knew more about it.

***

Jeff’s more of a morning person than I am. I got a response on Facebook, but I had to wait to get back to my parents’ house, where my laptop was, to read it. On mobile, Facebook will only let you read messages if you have the app, which tells Mark Zuckerberg exactly where you are and what you’re doing with your phone, all the time. I don’t have the app. Sometimes this means I can’t read messages on mobile, but I prefer that to having an evil data empire know everything about my movements.

My parents weren’t awake when I got home. Or they were still in their bedroom. They used to do that a lot. Mom’s desk was in there, and Dad had a laptop… which he usually used on Mom’s desk, since she died. I wondered where her machine was, and if she had made a thing about it once she came back.

“I’m not sure I remember what your third grade teacher’s name was… I can barely remember my own third grade teacher. Were they the same? I can’t remember. I think my own teacher’s name was… Wil-something? Wilber? Wilkins? You’d be better off… well, you’re at the house now, or are you back at your home? Kind of important to know, because I could give you some advice about who to ask, but it’d be a different thing if you were at Dad’s house.”

He meant, “You’d be better off asking Mom, but I don’t know if you know Mom is back from the dead or not.” I was pretty sure, anyway.

I responded. “I’m at Dad’s house. Wondering how I’d be able to tell the difference between someone who’s real and a Martian shapechanger. Could the name have been Wilder?”

Five minutes later I got my answer. “Mom isn’t a Martian shapechanger. It was the first thing I thought of, so I checked.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

That answer I didn’t get until half an hour later. “I… just didn’t feel right, talking about it in an impersonal medium like the internet. I know you have a cell phone and I probably even have your number somewhere, but I remember you’re not the biggest fan of actual phone calls, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

I replied with my phone number and the message “Call me.”

And then I had to sit by my phone, doing nothing important, nothing that would engage my attention in any serious way, waiting for him to call. Which took twenty minutes, despite the fact that I could see that he was online.

Finally the phone rang. “You raaaaang?” I answered in my best parody of The Addams Family.

“I’m pretty sure I must have, or you wouldn’t have known to pick up,” Jeff said. “Of course, I might have buzzed. You could have your phone on vibrate. Or maybe I sang, depending on what you have for a ringtone.”

“’You saaaaang?’ doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi to it.”

“Wow, how long has it been since I heard someone put je ne sais quoi in a sentence? I think we’re old. I think that’s an old person expression now.”

“What’s going on with Mom?” I asked, quietly, in case anyone might be in the hallway to hear me.

Jeff sighed. “I don’t know what is, but I can tell you what isn’t,” he said. “Stephanie confirmed that she eats, sleeps and goes to the bathroom normally, and I confirmed all of that for myself. The toilet in their bedroom is still broken enough that they don’t flush it unless they have to.”

I winced. That was a level of detail I could have done without. “So, not vampire or undead. How did you solve the Martian thing?”

“On Monday, Dad woke up and she was laying next to him in bed. If the goal was to kill him, it would have made more sense to do it then, before he woke up, than to put on this whole elaborate performance.”

“You’re taking me too literally. I’m not worried about aliens trying to take our family off guard so they can kill us. There’s any number of things they could be up to, and they don’t have to be aliens. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Stepford Wives. My Little Pony.”

“…My Little Pony?”

“There’s creatures called Changelings that feed on love. They impersonate ponies and take the love that other ponies feel for the ones they’re impersonating, as food.”

“Kind of psychic vampires mashed up with Martian shapechangers.”

“Yeah, but without the telepathy, so they’re not as good at it as you’d think. It’s a children’s show; they have to telegraph to the kids that these aren’t the real ponies. In real life, anyone who did something like that would be more competent.”

“How much verisimilitude do we need, though? She’s got moles in the same places Mom had moles. She’s missing a toenail just like Mom. Things I didn’t consciously think about, things I might not have remembered if you asked me to describe Mom.”

“That just means that if it’s not Mom, it has the ability to rummage deeper into our memories than we’re consciously aware of. That’s why I asked you my third grade teacher’s name. I genuinely don’t remember. Mom would, I’m pretty sure. Dad wouldn’t and Stephanie and Aaron were both too young.”

“I’m not sure I remember, but when you said Wilder, that sounded like it could be right. Do you know anyone from elementary school? Some of them went to high school with us.”

“I have some Facebook friends from high school, and maybe one or two went to the same elementary we did, but I haven’t been able to locate any actual people that I remember from elementary school. They don’t have a Classmates.com thing that works for elementary—”

“It says it does.”

“It lies, there’s nowhere to enter your elementary in your profile. All it lets you put in is high school, and it’s from a drop-down, not even freeform.”

“Huh. Guess I never tried it. I’m still in touch with anyone I cared about from back then.”

“I literally don’t care about anyone from back then, but that makes it hard when you’re trying to figure out your third grade teacher’s name.”

“If she can probe our memories,” Jeff said, “then nothing you or I know, or ever knew, would be safe. You’d have to come up with something to ask her that Dad wouldn’t know, or me, or Aaron, or Steph, or yourself, but that you know Mom would know and that you know someone else who would know it too.”

“I could ask Mariana for something.” My mom’s close friend and high school classmate was one of my Facebook friends. We don’t generally communicate directly with each other, but I follow her posts.

“That’s a good idea.” I heard the sound of a whistling teapot in the background. “That’d be my hot water for my oatmeal. If you get anything from Mariana, can you tell me about it?”

“Yeah.” I’d wanted to tell him about the story I’d heard in the diner, but no one got between Jeff and his oatmeal. “I’ll talk to you later. Probably online. Voice is making me paranoid.”

“I know what you mean. Do you need me to come up this weekend? I could make a day trip tomorrow.”

“That might be a good idea. I want to talk to Aaron, do you know what schedule he’s on?”

“He works nights now, so you’ll want to get him around 2 pm or so.”

“All right. Enjoy your oatmeal.”

“I will!” he said, putting a ridiculous amount of emphasis into it as a joke.

***

Before I could finish writing a message to Mariana – before I could really start, honestly, because how could I explain why I needed what I needed without admitting Mom was back from the dead? – someone knocked on my door. It was Mom. She was wearing one of her usual kind of shapeless but colorful nightgowns, and her hair was not brushed, so it was kind of a wreck. I noticed for the first time that it was grey. Mom had always dyed her hair since she started going grey, and it had still been auburn when she’d died. I’d never seen it fully grey. “Your dad and I are going to the arboretum,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

“Since when have you been into trees, Mom?” My mother had always been fascinated by history, and to some extent natural history like dinosaurs, but I’d never seen her express an interest in nature per se.

“I never was, much,” she admitted, “but the world is so beautiful. I was always more interested in the way humans shape the world than the way it came out of the box, but things like arboretums, Japanese gardens, zoos and aquariums… they’re made of nature, but they’re made by humans, and they say something about the people who chose to make them the way they are. And you know that your dad has always enjoyed nature.” My dad was interested in science, in general, and considered the natural world part of that. He was not exactly the kind of guy who would go camping.

In the past, I would have said “no, thanks.” I was never all that interested in nature myself, certainly not trees – maybe beautiful rocks or interesting landscapes, but looking at trees wouldn’t have seemed interesting to me. I still didn’t care much about trees… but my mom was back from the dead. I’ve gone much stupider and more boring places than an arboretum with her in the past, and now… if this was really her, if she was really alive again, I was going to spend all the time with her that I reasonably could.

“Sure, I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take my own car, though. Just give me the address.” I always took my own car if I possibly could, because I’d get carsick if I wasn’t the one driving. “Should I ask Stephanie if she wants to come?”

“Sure, you can ask. I doubt she will, though.”

Stephanie, however, surprised me. “Yeah, I’ll go with you. We’ll meet Mom and Dad there?”

“Yeah.” Dad had texted me the address, so I pulled it up in my GPS. “About half an hour from here.”

In the car, she asked me, “Have you found anything out? I know you were looking into the whole Mom thing.”

“Jeff thinks she’s really Mom. We have a plan to get Mariana to give us a question that we don’t know the answer to, but that Mom and Mariana both would, so we can confirm she really knows things and isn’t just reading our minds. And a waitress at the diner said her cousin has seen what looks like someone else coming back from the dead.”

“It’s all over the place, actually,” Stephanie said. “I’m finding reports from everywhere.”

I glanced at her. “Why wouldn’t this be making the news, then? People coming back from the dead!”

“I feel like maybe no one wants to go on the record.” Stephanie looked out the window. “Nothing on Twitter or Facebook. No pictures of dead people on Instagram. I’m seeing things on Reddit and Tumblr – places where people use a consistent pseudonym, not like 4chan, but where that pseudonym can’t be tied to their actual identity. I’ve posted about it in both places, but I can’t make myself tweet about it.”

“Any idea why not?”

“It—” She shrugged, hands exaggeratedly widespread and head canted forward slightly. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like… we’re getting away with something. There’s a natural law we’re breaking here. I can post as toomanymushrooms or u/catonahottinroofsundae and no one knows who I am, but if I post as Stephanie Robbins and I tell everyone that my mom Suky Robbins is back from the dead…”

“What if that brought it to the attention of, what, some kind of authorities?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And even if I was just posting under my own name… I don’t have to say Mom’s name. I don’t have to put a mention to her Facebook in a post. But everyone knows my mother’s name, or they could find out from my name if they wanted to.”

“And you think maybe there are a lot of people with these weird feelings?”

“I don’t think so, I know so. A lot of posts explicitly talk about the fact that they can’t bring themselves to say anything in public, or talk about it with their real names on it.”

“Are they all parents?”

“No. It’s all kinds of people. Best friends, siblings, spouses, children… the only pattern I see is that nobody died a long time ago. It’s all, ‘my brother who died last year’ or ‘my aunt who died two years ago’ or something. Longest I’ve seen anyone talk about was a son who died five years ago.”

A thought occurs to me. “I can add something to your pattern, though.”

“Yeah?”

“You’d expect that, even if everyone with a resurrected relative feels this sense of dread about telling anyone about it with their name attached, because they feel it will, I don’t know, maybe cause the dead person to disappear back into their grave… you’d think somebody would do it anyway because they don’t care. Someone whose alcoholic abusive father came back and they wish he’d go away again, someone’s asshole brother, someone’s former best friend who betrayed them. But so far, no one has. How many people have you seen talking about this?”

“It’s hard to say because no one’s using their real names. Someone might post from their main blog and their side blog, or maybe they have a different name on tumblr vs reddit but they posted to both. But I’ve tracked thirteen separate names, and of those, I can tell for a fact there are at least nine unique ones because they talk about different people.”

“Thirteen isn’t ‘all over the place’.”

“I didn’t mean all over the Internet, I meant people coming from all over. I’ve tracked the UK, California, North Dakota, Ontario, France, India and New Zealand. Nobody’s tagging their posts and no one is willing to contribute to a master list, so it’s hard to find anyone outside of the people I follow or the subreddits I’m in, and I don’t know where everyone comes from. But it’s geographically widespread. I suspect it may also be happening in other places where people don’t generally speak English or maybe don’t have Internet access.”

“And what’s their sentiment? Like, are people frightened? Upset? Excited? Weirded out?”

She took a moment to think about it. “They’re happy. People are happy it happened. Weirded out, yes. But happy.”

“No whacked-out conspiracy theories about how it’s the contrails raining down adenochrome or something?”

“Not from the people it’s happened to. There was one flame war I saw where a religious person was saying that the person whose sister was back from the dead had to repudiate her. She’s not really your sister, she’s a demon from Hell sent to trick you, et cetera. And the person whose sister was back turned out to be just as religious, and they threw a holy fit. Literally. A holy fit.” She giggled. “A whole lot of stuff about how the righteous were coming back and Jesus had granted some people eternal life and this was that, and how dare you call these beings demons when they’re obviously blessed by Jesus himself and you’re the kind of person who would have called for Jesus’s crucifixion if you’d been alive then, and all that kind of thing.”

“Did anyone else who’d had returned people say anything?”

“This was Tumblr. None of the people who have had returns are communicating with each other in any way I can see. I reached out to a few on Tumblr private messaging but no one has answered. The only places I’m seeing conversations about it between people with returns have been on Reddit, because it has a forum structure. Tumblr is more like a whole hanging web of disconnected strings.”

“Still, you’d think that someone would be publishing a news article about it. Even if no one is willing to go on the record with their real name…”

“Maybe it’s not enough people. Nine unique instances, maybe up to thirteen, maybe more in places I haven’t surveyed. It’s not like I have access to literally all of Tumblr, after all. But that’s all I can confirm, and what if there isn’t any more?”

“If anyone came back from the dead I would expect the news to take notice.” I turned onto the final road; the arboretum was at the end of this stretch. “I went to the graveyard today. Mom’s grave hasn’t been disturbed. I checked with the groundskeeper. So either Mom’s body floated ethereally through the grave dirt, and her coffin, or her original body is still in there and whatever she is now, it’s not the same as what she was then.”

“It’s too bad we can’t have her exhumed,” Stephanie said.

“It probably wouldn’t tell us much anyway.”

“She’s younger-looking than she was before. Not by much, and the grey hair hides it, but she’s healthier-looking and less wrinkly. And I don’t see any evidence that she still has diabetes, or that she’s taking any pills at all. I haven’t seen her take any insulin shots, or anything.”

“Huh.” She wasn’t restored to her youth, or her hair wouldn’t be grey and there would be no wrinkles at all. She wasn’t restored to what she was at the moment of death, obviously. She wasn’t restored to what she’d have been at the moment of death without the cancer that killed her, if she didn’t have diabetes anymore. I felt like there had to be a pattern here I wasn’t seeing. I really wanted to talk to some of these other people having this experience.

I pulled in to the arboretum’s parking lot. Mom and Dad weren’t there yet; Dad doesn’t drive like an old man, but he doesn’t drive as fast as he used to, either. “Do they do this kind of thing a lot? Arboretums, parks, et cetera?”

“They don’t usually invite me, and I wouldn’t usually come if they did, so I don’t know. They do leave the house a lot.”

Dad’s car pulled in, and he and Mom got out. For the first time I could remember, Mom was actually moving a bit faster than him. Both Mom and Dad were the kind of people who walked quickly everywhere they went, but for a long time, Mom was slowed down by her various illnesses. Dad was still healthy for his age, but he’d slowed down a good bit since Mom’s death – grief was hard on his health, it seemed – and now Mom seemed healthier than he was.

“Did you know there are people who come here from all over just to see our leaves in the autumn?” Mom said.

I did know that; it was typically a factor in making it hard for me to come visit during the autumn. “I think it’s the mountainsides. There’s leaves turning colors all over the country, but not on mountainsides.”

“In California they don’t even consider these mountains,” Mom said. “They call them hills when they come visit.”

“No respect for the elderly,” Dad said.

“Yeah, these young mountains think they’re all that, but wait 100,000 years and see how tall they are then,” Stephanie said.

We strolled around, looking at the trees, reading what it said on the plaques in front of them. American Elm. Yellow Birch. Eastern White Pine. I’d seen trees just like these my whole life, and a good number of them, I’d never known the names.

“You never think about how beautiful the world is,” Mom said. “We’re all rushing through it, trying to accomplish the next thing. Or entertain ourselves. Read a book, watch TV. So few of us really want to interact with nature.”

“Careful, mom, your hippie roots are showing,” I said, teasing.

“I think if my generation had remembered what we were back when we were the hippies, the world would be better off.”

“We didn’t forget, Suky. The hippies were always big news, but you know as well as I do how many people our age just wanted to go punch a clock, buy a house, vote for Ronald Fucking Reagan… We thought we were the generation that would change the world, but it wasn’t our generation, it was us. People like us, who wanted to see a better world and weren’t content to just live like the sheep our parents were… but there’s people like that in every generation. And they’re always outnumbered by the assholes.”

“Actually, they’ve done a study,” Stephanie said. “The reason generations get more conservative as they get older is that at every point, the poor are more likely to die than the rich, and the rich are more conservative than the poor. So by the time you get to middle age, a lot of the people looking for social justice and diversity are dead. And there’s a lot more dead by the time they’re elderly.”

“I don’t buy it,” my dad said. “There’s entirely too many stupid poor people in this country who are brainwashed into supporting causes that help out the rich people and screw themselves over. They’re not living longer than anyone else in this country. The math doesn’t work.”

“Let’s not talk about politics,” Mom said. “I think we all know there’s something more important we ought to be discussing.”

“Mom?” Stephanie said, and looked at her, which is not a thing Stephanie does very often.

“Suky?” Dad said.

I didn’t say anything. I watched as Mom looked up at a tree and said, “It’s time we dealt with the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”

“Are you going to tell us about—” I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t bring myself to make the words.

“About the fact that I was dead, and now I’m not?” She looked at all of us. “I think we should talk about it, yes.”

It felt like there were eyes, watching us. I wanted to yell to my mother, to tell her not to talk about it, that someone might hear… but who? And why would it matter?

“Is that something you’re okay with, Suky?” Dad asked.

“I’m fine, but I’m getting the impression the rest of you aren’t,” she said. “Why haven’t any of you brought it up, except Stephanie, the once?”

“Well, you told me it was rude,” Stephanie said.

Mom sighed. “I guess I did. I’m sorry. This isn’t really easy for me either.”

She sat down on a bench, and Dad sat with her. Stephanie and I sat on a short stone wall around a tree. “I suppose I should start by saying, I don’t really know much more than you do. I don’t have any memories of being dead. I woke up in bed, next to your dad, on Monday morning, and for a while I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there… I assumed I went to bed the previous night, but I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. I couldn’t pin down anything I remembered as to exactly when it happened, not in the recent past. And when your father woke up, the shock on his face and the fact that he kept asking me if I was really here made me think, wait, the last thing I remember was that I was in a hospital dying of cancer, so why am I here now?”

“So you don’t remember any kind of afterlife?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I believe I had some sort of existence, but I don’t remember anything about it. When I wake up, I have flashes, feelings that I dreamed something about it, but I can’t hold it in my head long enough to write it down or even talk about it. It just… disappears, leaving behind only the memory that something was there a few minutes ago.”

“You know how unlikely the idea that an afterlife exists is, scientifically, though. Right?” Dad said. “Consciousness is an emergent property of a trillion neurons working together. Imagining that there could be some sort of construct that exists outside the brain and body is like imagining that a video game character could be waltzing around in front of us.”

“And yet I’m here,” Mom said.

“Time travel or a Star Trek transporter with some modifications would make more sense than something supernatural, like an afterlife,” Dad said stubbornly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephanie said. “If Mom doesn’t remember…”

“Have you had a medical exam?” I asked.

Mom laughed. “I don’t have health insurance anymore. I’m dead, remember? I can’t even begin to figure out how we’re going to address getting me a legal identity again, and to be honest… I can’t know I’ll be around long enough for it to matter.”

“None of us know that,” I said, “about ourselves or anyone else.”

“True, and it’s going to be hard to travel if I don’t have a legal identity. So I suppose I’ll have to address it eventually, if I last that long.”

“Thank God your state ID hasn’t actually expired yet, or there’d be no way we could fly to Boston. The passport’s expired,” Dad said. Mom had been legally blind when she died, so she’d had a state ID rather than a driver’s license.

“Is there any reason you might not? Aside from the things that could kill anyone?” I asked.

Dad said, “Your mother and I discussed… when she first appeared, I found it nearly impossible to talk about the fact that she’d been dead. When she broached the topic, I could talk about it to her, but I couldn’t tell you kids.” He shrugged. “My working theory is that there’s some kind of alien experiment going on or that time travel is somehow involved, but the fact that none of you kids were able to tell each other about it until you knew the other one knew suggests to me that someone with the ability to directly affect human emotions or thought is, for some reason, making it hard to talk about this. Maybe that means it’s a short-lived experiment.”

“Maybe I escaped from hell and no one wants to talk about it for fear the devil will take me back,” Mom said, but she was laughing. Mom had never believed in hell. Dad was an atheist; Mom definitely had strong spiritual beliefs, but they were kind of a package of woo that included reincarnation and ghosts, even though she’d been raised Catholic.

“There are others like you,” Stephanie said. “None of them have talked about it themselves, but family members or friends have talked about it online, under pseudonyms. I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has mentioned anything under their real names.”

“A lot?” Mom was surprised.

“So far I count between nine and thirteen unique individuals, plus Eleanor heard a rumor that someone who might live in town might have come back. We don’t know any details, though.”

“We need to find them,” Mom said. “I need to find them. I have a second chance at life, and I’m not ashamed of it. I won’t be silenced about the fact that I exist.”

“It might not be the best idea, Suky,” Dad said. “There are a lot more crazies out there than there were when you died—”

“—there were plenty of crazies then, Dee—”

“—right, and even then it wouldn’t have been a good idea. There might be some religious nut job who thinks that if you were dead you should stay that way. Or someone else thinks that you know how you came back, and wants to force you to tell them.”

“Those are valid points,” Mom said, nodding. “And to all of those people who might want to harm me because they think I shouldn’t be alive or they think I know how I came back, I say a hearty ‘fuck you.’ I won’t be silent because there are crazy people in the world. I’m not afraid of death, not anymore.”

“You’re going to risk Eleanor’s kids?” Dad asked sharply.

“I agree with Mom,” I said, standing up. “Nobody should have to keep quiet about the fact that they exist. But I have to tell Will.”

Stephanie made a face. My family doesn’t like my husband. They have justifications, but in the past few years, since Mom died, Will’s gone to therapy and has done a lot of work on himself. Mom was the only one in the family ever willing to forgive anything, though, so I’ve never tried to get them to change their minds.

Mom said, “Well, is he still a total asshole?”

“He’s… been trying not to be. He’s in therapy, and we’re doing couples counseling, and he’s working through a lot of baggage from his upbringing.”

“Why not tell him to bring the kids up and join you here, then. Coming back to life, might as well start a clean slate and see where things go from there. And you’re right, he needs to be involved in the discussion. Your girls, too. They all are old enough to understand what’s going on here, and what could happen.”

“You know I will never stand in the way of anything you want,” Dad said, which is the kind of thing Dad says rather than “I love you”. Things like, “If they ever fail to respect you, I will smite them” – talking about us and our treatment of Mom – or “You have always been my worthy opponent.” Yes. Sometimes my father talks like a comic book character.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Stephanie said, “but I know you taught me to be who I am to the world and fuck anyone who gives me shit about it, so… same principle. I don’t think you could be you and lie about who you are.”

“And we need to involve Jeff and Aaron,” Mom said. “I’ll call them and get them to come here.”

“We turned off your cell phone ages ago,” Dad objected.

“Dee, we still have a land line. I know we do because I hear it ring, and sometimes you even answer it.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right, we do.” Dad shook his head. “This world where everyone carries around their phone in their pocket all the time… it’s strange how you get so used to a technological or societal change that you forget that you did it a different way for 67 years.”

Nothing ever stopped my mother when she wanted something strongly enough, if she believed it was right. I hadn’t even thought of the considerations my father brought up before he talked about them, but I’ve never believed it’s okay to hide in conformity and live in fear. I didn’t think Will had ever believed in doing that, either, and my daughters had grown up going to political protests.

“We need to find out more about these other people,” I said to Stephanie on the way home. “See if we can contact them directly, find out if any of the actual returned people are planning on going public like Mom. We could coordinate if they are. Strength in numbers.”

“The religious right are going to crap their pants,” Stephanie said, laughing. “A Deist who believes in reincarnation, is married to an atheist, and has a gay son, came back to life. Jesus Christ hasn’t got a monopoly anymore.”

“That is probably going to be the most fun part of this going public thing,” I said.

***

So now I don’t know what will happen. My husband’s driving up from home with our girls, my oldest younger brother’s on a train, and Mom’s been looking up contact information for journalist friends she had once, checking which ones are still alive, using Facebook – we never deactivated her account – and my dad’s LinkedIn. Stephanie’s found two other people who have family members who came back from the dead, and one of them’s been willing to talk to her in private messaging on Tumblr.

I still have a hard time telling anyone who doesn’t already know, but it turns out, I can write about it without feeling the pressure, the fear. Don’t know if I can post it, yet. I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping that if I can get more information from more people who’ve been through something similar, maybe we’ll find a pattern, a point of commonality… maybe even an explanation for why we all feel this pressure not to talk about it.

Tomorrow we’re all going to talk about whether we’re going to do this or not, but I know my family. What my mom wants, she gets, if it’s possible and if it’s ethical. My husband and my kids are going to be in favor of her going public, and my brothers won’t stand in her way any more than my dad would. So we’re going to do this. The thing we’re really going to talk about is how to keep ourselves safe when we do.

Everything in the world is going to change. I just don’t know exactly how yet.

***

***

Obligatory notes because I’m so fucking late with this piece: 

I have fucked up royally. I went into this without an outline and about 6,000 words in I realized I had attempted to consume a ball of energy larger than my head. This is going to end up being novel length, most likely. I struggled really hard to find a place I could reasonably end it as a short story, and yeah, it is absolutely not an ending. No followup on the Martian shapechanger thing, new idea is brought in and then treated like it’s the climax, protagonist is almost entirely reactive and passive. As a short story, it’s shit.

Unfortunately I found this out after I was already late. Not going to bore everyone with why this was a week late except that it’s allergy season and I’ve been exhausted lately. So there was no time to try to write something else. I hope you found it entertaining, if somewhat frustrating; it’s shit as a short story because it’s plainly a piece of a novel. Which I’m not going to write real soon because I have like 3 novels ahead of this one in the queue, but if I live long enough it will get done.

It’s kinda cute that story #30 falls on the 30th now because I’m late and story #31 is the last of my Spooky 5 Halloween-appropriate stories. But not cute enough to justify how late this is.

BTW, while this is not as autobiographical as “Radio” from Inktober, it is heavily drawn from real life. I altered some things because this is fiction, but the mother and the father in this story are pretty close to real life. Except that my mother hasn’t come back.