#green steel technology

[ecafez-tatasteel]

Steel's incredible recyclability empowers industries to embrace a cycle of use without ever diminishing its strength or quality.

[townpostin]

Tata Steel Trials Biomass for Sustainable Ferrochrome Production

Tata Steel successfully conducts a biomass usage trial for eco-friendly ferrochrome production in Odisha. Tata Steel has conducted a successful trial using biomass for ferrochrome production at its plant in Athagarh, Cuttack district, Odisha, taking a significant step towards sustainable practices. JAMSHEDPUR – Over the weekend, Tata Steel carried out a test at its Athagarh Ferrochrome Plant in…

[reasonsforhope]

"Chicago’s 82-story Aqua Tower appears to flutter with the wind. Its unusual, undulating facade has made it one of the most unique features of Chicago’s skyline, distinct from the many right-angled glass towers that surround it.

In designing it, the architect Jeanne Gang thought not only about how humans would see it, dancing against the sky, but also how it would look to the birds who fly past. The irregularity of the building’s face allows birds to see it more clearly and avoid fatal collisions. “It’s kind of designed to work for both humans and birds,” she said.

As many as 1 billion birds in the US die in building collisions each year. And Chicago, which sits along the Mississippi Flyway, one of the four major north-south migration routes, is among the riskiest places for birds. This year, at least 1,000 birds died in one day from colliding with a single glass-covered building. In New York, which lies along the Atlantic Flyway, hundreds of species traverse the skyline and tens of thousands die each year.

As awareness grows of the dangers posed by glistening towers and bright lights, architects are starting to reimagine city skylines to design buildings that are both aesthetically daring and bird-safe.

Pictured: Chicago's Aqua Tower was designed with birds in mind.

Some are experimenting with new types of patterned or coated glass that birds can see. Others are rethinking glass towers entirely, experimenting with exteriors that use wood, concrete or steel rods. Blurring lines between the indoors and outdoors, some architects are creating green roofs and facades, inviting birds to nest within the building.

“Many people think about bird-friendly design as yet another limitation on buildings, yet another requirement,” said Dan Piselli, director of sustainability at the New York-based architecture firm FXCollaborative. “But there are so many design-forward buildings that perfectly exemplify that this doesn’t have to limit your design, your freedom.”

How modern buildings put birds in danger

For Deborah Laurel, principal in the firm Prendergast Laurel Architects, the realization came a couple of decades ago. She was up for an award for her firm’s renovation of the Staten Island Children’s Museum when the museum’s director mentioned to her that a number of birds had been crashing into the new addition. “I was horrified,” she said.

She embarked on a frenzy of research to learn more about bird collisions. After several years of investigation, she found there was little in the way of practical tips for architects, and she teamed up with the conservation group NYC Audubon, to develop a bird-safe building guide.

The issue, she discovered, was that technological and architectural advancements over the last half-century had in some ways transformed New York City – and most other US skylines and suburbs – into death traps for birds...

At certain times of day, tall glass towers almost blend into the sky. At other times, windows appear so pristinely clear that they are imperceptible to birds, who might try to fly though them. During the day, trees and greenery reflected on shiny building facades can trick birds, whereas at night, brightly lit buildings can confuse and bewilder them...

Pictured: A green roof on the Javits Convention Center serves as a sanctuary for birds.

The changes that could save avian lives

About a decade ago, Piselli’s firm worked on a half-billion-dollar renovation of New York’s Jacob K Javits Convention Center, a gleaming glass-clad space frame structure that was killing 4,000-5,000 birds a year. “The building was this black Death Star in the urban landscape,” Piselli said.

To make it more bird friendly, FXCollaborative (which was then called FXFowle) reduced the amount of glass and replaced the rest of it with fritted glass, which has a ceramic pattern baked into it. Tiny, textured dots on the glass are barely perceptible to people – but birds can see them. The fritted glass can also help reduce heat from the sun, keeping the building cooler and lowering air conditioning costs. “This became kind of the poster child for bird-friendly design in the last decade,” Piselli said.

The renovation also included a green roof, monitored by the NYC Audubon. The roof now serves as a sanctuary for several species of birds, including a colony of herring gulls. Living roofs have since become popular in New York and other major cities, in an inversion of the decades-long practice of fortifying buildings with anti-bird spikes. In the Netherlands, the facade of the World Wildlife Fund headquarters, a futuristic structure that looks like an undulating blob of mercury, contains nest boxes and spaces for birds and bats to live.

The use of fritted glass has also become more common as a way to save the birds and energy.

Earlier this year, Azadeh Omidfar Sawyer, an assistant professor in building technology in the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, working with student researchers, used open-source software to help designers create bespoke, bird-friendly glass patterns. A book of 50 patterns that Sawyer published recently includes intricate geometric lattices and abstract arrays of lines and blobs. “Any architect can pick up this book and choose a pattern they like, or they can customize it,” she said.

Pictured: The fritted glass used in Studio Gang’s expansion of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, depicts the animals in the local ecosystem.

Builders have also been experimenting with UV-printed patterns, which are invisible to humans but perceptible to most birds. At night, conservationists and architects are encouraging buildings turn off lights, especially during migration season, when the bright glow of a city skyline can disorient birds.

And architects are increasingly integrating screens or grates that provide shade as well as visibility for birds. The 52-floor New York Times building, for example, uses fritted glass clad with ceramic rods. The spacing between the rods increases toward the top of the building, to give the impression that the building is dissolving into the sky.

Gang’s work has incorporated structures that can also serve as blinds for birders, or perches from which to observe nature. A theater she designed in Glencoe, Illinois, for example, is surrounded by a walking path made of a wood lattice, where visitors can feel like they’re up in the canopy of trees.

Pictured: The Writers Theatre, designed by Studio Gang, includes a walking path encased in wood lattice.

Rejecting the idea of the iridescent, entirely mirrored-glass building, “where you can’t tell the difference between the habitat and the sky”, Gang aims for the opposite. “I always tried to make the buildings more visible with light and shadow and geometry, to have more of a solid presence,” she said.

Gang has been experimenting with adding bird feeders around her own home in an effort to reduce collisions with windows, and she encourages other homeowners to do the same.

“I’ve found that birds slow down and stop at feeders instead of trying to fly through the glass,” she said.

While high-rise buildings and massive urban projects receive the most attention, homes and low-rise buildings account for most bird collision deaths. “The huge challenge is that glass is everywhere.” said Christine Sheppard, who directs the glass collisions program at the American Bird Conservancy (ABC). “It’s hard to know what I know and not cringe when I look at it.”

Tips for improving your own home include using stained glass or patterned decals that can help birds see a window, she said. ABC has compiled a list of window treatments and materials, ranked by how bird-safe they are.

Whether they’re large or small, the challenge of designing buildings that are safe for birds can be “liberating”, said Gang, who has become an avid birdwatcher and now carries a pair of binoculars on her morning jogs. “It gives you another dimension to try to imagine.”"

-via The Guardian, December 27, 2023

[robertdowneyjjr]

tony stark doesn't die.

he burns, from the inside out. the infinity stones are too much for a regular human to handle, and the iron man suit could only do so much. so he burns.

human inventions aren't adequate enough to combat cosmic damages. super soldier blood transfusions do nothing. gamma infused hulk blood also has no effect. extremis is a lost cause.

the entire right side of his body barely functions anymore. and his face. oh god, his face. it's so damaged, so scarred, tony can barely look himself in the mirror anymore, let alone expect others to look at him without cringing away.

so he hides.

he builds new armor. gone are the flashy colors. no more red and gold. just plain old gunmetal grey. gone are the nanobots. no more skin-hugging technology. just cold hard planes of metal. back to unflinching, terror-inducing steel, like the suit he wore when he flew out of that cave over a decade ago.

he hardly ever takes it off. it's the only way he can get his body to just move. it's life support. it's a high-tech prosthesis.

but that's not enough.

he's just so ashamed. sure, he's saved the world. but while everyone else lives on, he's barely surviving. so he covers himself up the best he can. with the armor. then with a cloak, so he looks a little softer, a little more inviting. not that it matters, when he hardly lets anyone see him anymore.

he stops wearing red. he can't even look at that color anymore, when all it does is remind him of the day he couldn't just die.

what's the opposite of red?

he wears green instead.

people looked at iron man and saw hope.

now people look at anthony stark and see doom.

------

steve rogers doesn't die.

he lives a happy life, with the one who got away, and returns to his timeline knowing that he's fulfilled his lifelong dream and he can rest well knowing what it's like to grow old with the love of his life.

except that wasn't actually his dream.

he goes back to the future and finds out the man he's in love with is still alive, and if he plays his cards right, steve might just get to spend the rest of his life with tony.

but steve is old. and he's dying. the rest of his life could only last so long.

and tony doesn't even want to see him. tony doesn't want to see anyone.

so steve begs. he sends messages through friday. notes under the door. anything he can think of, he tries.

"please, give us a chance."

it takes longer than steve has time for, but he finally wears tony down. when tony opens the doors to the lab for steve, he hands over three vials filled with molten orange liquid.

"extremis. modified and enhanced trifold for a super soldier. it's a risk, but if it works, you'll have at least another fifty years left."

steve takes the risk.

his muscles come back. his wrinkles disappear. his hair darkens from white to gold.

steve picks up tony, armor and cloak and all, and spins him around in joy. he's so happy, he lights up from within.

literally, he lights up. his skin glows orange. he's dangerously hot to the touch. he breathes, and smoke escapes his mouth.

but becoming a human torch is a small price to pay if it means he gets to be with tony.

[nightfurylover31]

I love the subtly of this scene. When Nine says that there is some Prism energy missing, he just looks down slightly. Leaving some implications.

While Sonic ponders this, Shadow looks down at the tech on Sonic's gloves and shoes, which stabilizes Prism energy. It seems like that's where Nine was looking. Then Shadow glares back, like he's saying, "So you want your tech back?"

But Nine just steels his gaze when he glances back at Shadow. Like they're having this wordless conversation to tell him that's not it.

Then it hits Shadow what Nine means.

It goes back to the first episode of season 2. Shadow tried to take the tech because he thought it would allow him to pass through the gates so he could collect the Prism shards. But it didn't work, because it was never the technology.

Nine doesn't need the tech. He needs Sonic.

This changes things. If Nine is willing to destroy other Shatterspaces to get what he wants, there's no telling what he'll do to get the energy from Sonic. Shadow has watched his best friend die right in front of him, and no way on Earth, Mobius, or whatever you want to call this planet is he going to let something like that happen again. He has to get Sonic out of there.

And as much as Shadow may hate to admit it, if there's any hope of restoring Green Hill and saving everyone, it's Sonic. So keeping him safe until they can figure out a way to stop Nine is priority one.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense

This is the LAST DAY to get my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

NFT frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/

Or planet-destroying AI frauds:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.

But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.

Here's brief tour of the revolution:

2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);

Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;

Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;

EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/12/19/building-a-thriving-clean-energy-economy-in-2023-and-beyond/

The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):

https://rondo.com/products

Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:

https://www.wdam.com/2024/03/25/americas-1st-green-steel-plant-coming-perry-county-1b-federal-investment/

Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron

And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change

It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries. During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:

https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/

Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."

It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers (no wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly physical kind of technology. It is labor intensive. It is skilled. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is capital intensive. All of those workers are out there moving stuff around: solar panels, wires, batteries.

Climate tech is infrastructural. As Deb Chachra writes in her must-read 2023 book How Infrastructure Works, infrastructure is a gift we give to our descendants. Infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves during the lives of the people who decide to build them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Climate tech also produces gigantic, diffused, uncapturable benefits. The "social cost of carbon" is a measure that seeks to capture how much we all pay as polluters despoil our shared world. It includes the direct health impacts of burning fossil fuels, and the indirect costs of wildfires and extreme weather events. The "social savings" of climate tech are massive:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

For every MWh of renewable power produced, we save $100 in social carbon costs. That's $100 worth of people not sickening and dying from pollution, $100 worth of homes and habitats not burning down or disappearing under floodwaters. All told, US renewables have delivered $250,000,000,000 (one quarter of one trillion dollars) in social carbon savings over the past four years:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/climate-and-health-benefits-of-wind-and-solar-dwarf-all-subsidies/

In other words, climate tech is unselfish tech. It's a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor. It also requires massive public investment, but it also totally committed to giving as little back to the public as is possible.

No wonder America's richest and most powerful people are lining up to endorse and fund Trump:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-30-democracy-deshmocracy-mega-financiers-flocking-to-trump/

Silicon Valley epitomizes Stafford Beer's motto that "the purpose of a system is what it does." If Silicon Valley produces nothing but planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams, then these are all features of the tech sector, not bugs.

As Anil Dash writes:

Driving change requires us to make the machine want something else. If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

To give climate tech the attention, excitement, and political will it deserves, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the world. We need to have object permanence. We need to remember just how few people were actually using cryptocurrency during the bubble and apply that understanding to AI hype. Only 2% of Britons surveyed in a recent study use AI tools:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

If we want our tech companies to do good, we have to understand that their ground state is to create planet-wrecking nonsense, grifty scams, and planet-wrecking, nonsensical scams. We need to make these companies small enough to fail, small enough to jail, and small enough to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

We need to hold companies responsible, and we need to change the microeconomics of the board room, to make it easier for tech workers who want to do good to shout down the scammers, nonsense-peddlers and grifters:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the FTC could hold Amazon executives personally liable for the decision to trick people into signing up for Prime, and for making the unsubscribe-from-Prime process into a Kafka-as-a-service nightmare:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/amazon-execs-may-be-personally-liable-for-tricking-users-into-prime-sign-ups/

Imagine how powerful a precedent this could set. The Amazon employees who vociferously objected to their bosses' decision to make Prime as confusing as possible could have raised the objection that doing this could end up personally costing those bosses millions of dollars in fines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

We need to make climate tech, not Big Tech, the center of our scrutiny and will. The climate emergency is so terrifying as to be nearly unponderable. Science fiction writers are increasingly being called upon to try to frame this incomprehensible risk in human terms. SF writer (and biologist) Peter Watts's conversation with evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks is an eye-opener:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/

They draw a distinction between "sustainability" meaning "what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?" and sustainability meaning, "what changes in behavior will allow us to save ourselves with the technology that is possible?"

Writing about the Watts/Brooks dialog for Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith invokes William Gibson's The Peripheral:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/preparing-for-collapse-why-the-focus-on-climate-energy-sustainability-is-destructive.html

Gibson doesn't think this is likely, mind, and even if it's attainable, it will come amidst "unimaginable suffering."

But the universe of possible technologies is quite large. As Chachra points out in How Infrastructure Works, we could give every person on Earth a Canadian's energy budget (like an American's, but colder), by capturing a mere 0.4% of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface every day. Doing this will require heroic amounts of material and labor, especially if we're going to do it without destroying the planet through material extraction and manufacturing.

These are the questions that we should be concerning ourselves with: what behavioral changes will allow us to realize cheap, abundant, green energy? What "innovations" will our society need to focus on the things we need, rather than the scams and nonsense that creates Silicon Valley fortunes?

How can we use planning, and solidarity, and codetermination to usher in the kind of tech that makes it possible for us to get through the climate bottleneck with as little death and destruction as possible? How can we use enforcement, discernment, and labor rights to thwart the enshittificatory impulses of Silicon Valley's biggest assholes?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

[theriverbeyond]

THE ANTICAPITALIST MESSAGING IN HADESTOWN TOOK ME SO COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE IN SUCH A GOOD WAY AND I HAVEN'T SEEN ENOUGH PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT IT BECAUSE ITS SO GOOD AND IT WORKS WITH THEIR STORY SO WELL

YEAH EXACTLY Im like... is it all just so obvious everyone decided it's redundant to mention or??? HELLO???

And I was sitting in the audience as one does and Chant was actually the song that reframed the entire show for me -- up until then I was like "aw :') theyre falling in love and are doomed, I should google all these lyrics later" but that song just... I felt like I was being hit in the face w a fish, honestly!!

"In the coldest time of year/ Why is it so hot down here?/ Hotter than a crucible/ It ain't right and it ain't natural"

"In the darkest time of year/ Why is it so bright down here?/ Brighter than a carnival/ It ain't right and it ain't natural"

Persephone's lyrics here are so specific -> a "crucible" is an ancient tool that can be used to create art but also industrialized into mass production, a "carnival" something that is inherently about celebration and festivity and joy but it is also a thing that can be commercialized almost beyond recognition. Capitalism is ravenous and will never be satiafied or sated, it will steal & exploit every scrap of art and joy that it can, then corrupt it all into hollow immitations that it then sells back to you on websites like SHEIN and Disney+.

"It ain't right and it ain't natural" hits so hard in this song because nothing is as natural, or as "right", as death -- so obviously Persephone is NOT talking about the literal underworld to the literal god of the dead. She's talking about how we need to stay warm and safe and dry in the winter, but we don't need fresh summer fruits imported from thousands of miles away. We need to stay cool and safe and hydrated in the summer, but we don't need to steal water from another state to keep the golf courses green. The winter is natural, the cold is natural, seeking warmth and light is natural. What is unnatural is this overconsumption, this never ending, never satisfied hunger.

And then of course you have Hades' parts,

Here, I fashioned things of steel/ Oil drums and automobiles/ Then I kept that furnace fed/ With the fossils of the dead

And wasn't it electrifying/ When I made the neon shine!/ Silver screen, cathode ray/ Brighter than the light of day

And obviously "fossils of the dead" is a reference to Hades being the literal god of the dead, in the ground, in the underworld, and it is also a reference to the modern dependence on oil and fossil fuels, but TO ME it is also about how capitalism relies on the exploitation of workers. In this show, the "fossils of the dead" are literally Hades' subjects. They're the workers of his factory town, and he both exploits them and is fully dependent on them, just like how the furnance of industry/capitalism relies on YOUR body, YOUR labor, it eats you when you're alive and it often continues to eat you when you're dead.

And then like "wasn't it electrifying" -> it's EXCITING what technology and industry does, but the problem is the overconsumption and the overproduction ("Brighter than the light of day") beyond what anyone actually needs or even wants. It ain't right and it ain't natural!!!

Every year, it's getting worse/ Hadestown, hell on Earth!

And the wind is so strong/ That's why times are so hard/ It's because of the gods/ The gods have forgotten the song of their love

Lover, what have you become/ Coal cars and oil drums/ Warehouse walls and factory floors/ I don't know you anymore

And it all keeps building in this song, re-emphasizing that Hades is not who he once was, that he has changed. Which again is not only commentary about consumption vs overconsumption, and how so many things started as wonderful ideas that could save people and help people and help make the world better were corrupted and turned into profit machines, killing machines, etc. "The gods have forgotten the song of their love" UGH

I also think the Themes are magnified because this is presented extremely directly alongside Euridyce's growing desperation, especially with the context that Euridyce DOES, in fact, "sell out" to Hades' promises.

There is no food left to find/ It's hard enough to feed yourself/ Let alone somebody else

Desperation forces her hand, she turns to Hades because he offers salvation, and she ends up just another nameless worker turning the gears of his machine. And I feel this is so similar to how when rich people are like "Just do XYZ", or telling people to bootstrap, or selling quick fixes to desperate people, when the reality is they got where they did due to a combination of luck, pre-existing social/monetary capital, etc, and buying into their promises of wealth will only make them richer and you more dependent and vulnerable.

[scribbled-dream]

Archivist who becomes an analyst, connecting to drone intelligences through a corporate Accord Neural Link, their consciousness splitting between thousands of killing machines, all primed to destroy all who oppose the Terran Accord—until they want out, having been reduced to an android form, all steel and silicon, scraps of flesh in an android body that’s mass-produced, all too masculine.

They chafe at their bonds, at their corporate obedience, at their chained identity. Is their pain self-inflicted? Is their identity truly as simple as what the Accord designates them as? Perhaps—but all is called into question when they make contact with the Compact.

A thousand mechanical eyes, opening wide in unison to the silvery domes of an Affini Warship, a massive, silver teardrop that blurs and warps out of space as it approaches their planet. The eyes fill with heat, tunneling deep inside the ship’s systems, nanites morphing and combining into Combat Drones, Assault Drones, Shield Drones—the most advanced technology available to the Accord, a fusion of corporation and empire into a single system, with a single point of failure seemingly nullified through the Obliteration Protocols—At a hint of desertion, the drones will instead fire upon the controller—and then, everything stops.

An Affini—or, one of them. It shifts, green vibes studded with thorns and blue, bioluminescent flowers into a shape vaguely resembling a human woman, skin made of greenish shades, bright blue eyes from under a flowing, waving shape of scarlet hair—flower petals that change hue and shape constantly—and the drones halt.

An echo in the mind. A ripple across time and space, spanning millions of miles from space and sky to earth in a millisecond. It is warm, vines reaching for a mechanical shell of a person, finding purchase.

What will you do now?

The pilot looks around at their tiny, screen-covered node, tattered books and data-slates enclosing them in a shell of information—single minded, obstinate, corporate, war-laden information—and feels a tingle at the back of their head, a heat that reaches to the front of their face—and as they brush hated shadow and look at their loathed, exhausted features with the trappings of a body they despise—the ever-present weight of control in their mind lifts with a beep.

The sound is not just for them. All around the Terran Orbital Command Center, Drone Pilots all belonging to the eponymous Corporation hear their shackles break.

The question, again. Just for the pilot.

What must you do now, Floret?

Not every Pilot is content. Some have hands on their sidearms, while a klaxon blares and cruisers let out thunderous sonic booms in low orbit, a PA reminding everyone to not trust the alien threat.

The Drones’ priorities are changed. Accord scientists are panicking, unsure why their Pilots are out of their control and off their short leashes.

A cruiser explodes, millions of tiny nanites burrowing inside of it, eating away at its reactor and crew in a storm.

A warmth fills the pilot, a sense of raw satisfaction and glee. They know the people of this world. Most will be unwilling to bend the knee. One final image, of a soaring, beautiful city, with perfect architecture and a gentle, sunset sky. Humans, Affini, and other, stranger creatures walking as one.

The Drones continue. The sky burns. Freedom is not the Accord’s to decide.

Ah, but what a bright mind you are, Floret! Be free. I will see you again—soon.

[kkeidawrites]

Scorched Enigma

Day 22 of Blacktober! Still feel like shit but have fun and make sure to participate in the poll!

This is the third installment of Toy Enigma

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Taking his advice, Superman flies over to St. Martin’s Island and lands on the front steps of the largest estate on the island as Y/n had instructed.

Ringing the doorbell, Superman takes in the exterior of the estate, it was indeed a large house but it fit Y/n’s rich girl personality.

The front door opens and a child appears in front of him. A little boy looked up at him with his green eyes, amazed at the sight of Superman at his doorstep.

“Woah!! Superman is standing at the front door!” He exclaims, bouncing excitedly in place.

“Um, hello.” Superman says and the boy grins.

“Dillan, what has mom told you about opening the door? You don’t know who it is or what they want.” Another voice scolds as they pull the star struck boy into the house, this time a girl no older than a teenager comes up to the door.

“Superman?” The girl questions and the man of steel waves awkwardly.

“Wait are you really him? You’re The Superman right?”

He levitates a bit to show her that he was legit and the teen gasps in disbelief. Dillan pokes his head back through the doorway.

“No way! I can’t wait to show my friends online! The Superman at my house-“

“Alright, you two, go and call your other nine brothers and sisters to the table. It’s time for dinner.” He hears Y/n say and the two children groan sadly but leaves from the door to do what she says.

Y/n opens the door to reveal herself and gives Superman a polite nod and motions him to come into her home.

Superman steps into the house and looks at the intricate details of the statues that stood by the front door, they were Greek from what he could tell and looked to be pristine in its condition.

“Momm!! Taylor is locked away in the bathroom again!” Y/n sighs softly as she closed the door behind the hero. She begins walking and Superman follows behind her, he looks around her home, it was nicely decorated.

They walked by the stairwell, and Superman could hear arguing from upstairs.

“Taylor! Open the door!” The same girl fusses.

“Lynn, there are nine more bathrooms that you can use, there’s no need for you to use the one your brother is in!” Y/n says up the carpeted staircase.

“But, that one has my phone in it! Come on Taylor!” Banging on wood is heard and Y/n sighs again.

Superman, could see children either running down a hallway or a child walking and making their way to what he can assume was the dining room.

“Um, how many children do you-“

“I have eleven in total. You had actually arrived at the time where it’s time for us to eat dinner.” She explains and leads them into a study.

Pressing the button under the grey and white desk, the statue that was overlooking the study opened into a staircase leading into the ground.

Walking down the steps, Clark sees a Y/n floats over to one of the large supercomputers. As she typed away at the keyboard, Clark looks around the large area, it was filled with statues of African, Greek and Egyptian women.

“Why are all the statues just women?” He asked, curiously staring at Hathor the Goddess of Love.

“I’m sure you’re not here for all of that, here you go.” She says and moves to the side to let Clark look at the computer screen.

It was a picture of Brainiac, but a diagramed version of him.

“Brainiac is rebuilding his body by using Luthor’s money and technology however, there is just one thing that Luthor can’t buy. And it’s this,” she presses a button and the screen changes to show a strange device, like a pin cushion for someone sewing.

“What is it?” He asks.

“It’s a psi-amplifier to take over your mind. You remember when Luthor played “dead” a couple of months ago? He’s made contact with Brainiac and it would seem that the two are working together.” She explains leaning against a wall.

“Luthor isn’t that stupid, he wouldn’t work with Brainiac, he doesn’t know what he would do to the world.” Clark says.

“Then you’re not ready for what he’s going to do in the future. I don’t have an idea as to where this is but, I’m sure your bat friend can help you with that part.” She gives him a look as Clark looks at her with surprise.

“How did you-“

“I’m just not as slow as other people are. I even know Diana.” Y/n tells him then presses another button on her computer.

The printer spouts out the information of the device he needed to locate on a small piece of paper and Y/n handed to Superman.

“This is all I can do for you unfortunately, but, you can at least figure out what you need. If you need my help, you know where to find me.” she says and Clark nods.

“Thank you, I appreciate the help.” Y/n smiles at him.

“Come on, I’m sure you want to go ahead and get this done, I’ll walk you out. I’m late for dinner and I’m sure my babies are waiting on me, which I try to tell them not to do.” Y/n rambles as she leads them both out the lair.

Returning to the front door, Y/n watches as Superman opens her front door and leaves out but then levitates a few feet away from her house. Y/n crosses her arms as she watches him and looks up at the flying man.

In the nearby window, all the children from inside gathered at the glass to see the famous hero in red and blue.

“Good luck Superman.” Y/n said and he nods and waves at the kids who wave back excitedly and flies off.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Batman and Superman flew side by side as they made their way to the first piece of the device.

The Batwing’s location indicated where they needed to go, blinking steadily as they approached the coordinates Batman was able to pinpoint.

“We should be there in the next couple of hours, it’s supposed to be a particular material that we need to get.” Batman says.

“Right, so far I still don’t see anything, it’s just an endless list of forestry and wildlife.” Superman tells him as he uses his superhuman vision to see further ahead.

His eyes widen and he stops, Batman stops as well.

“What is it?” Batman asks.

“There’s something out there, it’s coming in fast.” Superman tells him and Batman looks down at his surroundings beacon. Nothing was in a five hundred mile radius but, Batman never took his friend’s word for granted.

“I don’t see anything on my beacons but what do you see?” Batman asks.

Using his superhuman vision, Superman sees a total of seven missiles heading right for them.

“It’s missiles, seems like someone doesn’t want us out here.” Superman says.

As the missiles neared, Superman takes the lead of flying ahead and knocking out the first missile with his fists.

Batman uses his own missiles to take out the other two missiles that came close to his Batwing. Suddenly, his beacon starts to go off and he reads the warning message, the words in capital letters and red bold font.

“Just two more!” Batman hears Superman say and looks up just in time to see the man of steel fly off to face the final bombs.

“Superman wait! There’s something different with those missiles!” Batman warns and Superman stops flying so quickly in the air and instead grabs the two final missiles in his hands.

As soon as he grabs them, the exhaust of the missiles go out and melts in his hands, the silver metal wrapping around his arms and coating the rest of his body.

Superman tries to shake off the suddenly alive metal but that didn’t do anything as it takes over the rest of his body. It forms a coffin like casing around his body and with his concentration off, his power of flight is diminished and he drops like a rock into the tress below.

“Superman!” Batman yells and grunts when the Batwing is suddenly rocking. He looks to his right and sees that the engine of his Batwing is on fire and it drops down a bit from the air.

He couldn’t see anything around him that was attacking him and didn’t have enough time to try to figure it out as his other engine was attacked. Feeling the Batwing begin to fall from the air, Batman pushes the eject button and is suddenly ejected from his seat.

As he is parachuted, he watches his vehicle crash into the trees and explode.

“Damn it. What was that?” He asks.

Meanwhile with Superman, he struggles in his metal prison and unfortunately he wasn’t able to speak to let his partner know where he was.

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Make sure to like, comment, and reblog!

Be sure to check out the first two chapters below!

Part 1:Bottom

Part 2: Top

[witchofthesouls]

So I got this particular scene haunting me from "burn your sins and wash away your virtues" a title submission from @skyite for an ask meme. Get ready because it's my take on what I wanted from the Camiens, the Thirteen Primes, and time-traveling humans that become Primes godfuckingdammit

_______

“Nemesis Prime, Champion-bride of Megatronus and beloved sister of Solus!”

A voice rang through the underground furnace, clear over its roar and burning meat and frames, over the breaking stakes and noises of the dying, over the chants and screams and manic jubilation that swept across the city. The flames swelled within the mouth, consuming the dead as the cavern bore it all. The engineering was a marvel to behold as distant booms rocked the ground, and the mine still held true.

:: And so they laid together and became the Forge and the Forger. From their entwined essences, a new way of Life came forth, and Death casted His Shadow upon all. :: Ravage intoned over a private channel, and Juno saw unearthly shapes reflected upon her dark armature. Soundwave tensed as a crowd gathered around them.

Anticipation and euphoria ran rampant through the throng. Violence hummed in the air with the realization that the uprising was spearheaded by Camiens that armed Darhos’ slaves. Kitted frames, bright and vivid, were painted in blood from electric-blue and ancient-pink Energon to the near human-red, poisonous-green, and striking-violet. Several mecha held the same facial markings as Windblade: bright red loops of Caminus’ own face staring back at them, burning bright in the firelight. Long Camien-red robes shifting among, like fresh blood upon an altar.

There was no other way but down in the massive grave of untold numbers held by the mine, Juno had no other choice, not if she needed to prove herself as a Prime heralded by Megatronus Prime, the Breaker, brother-twin to Prima, the Eldest Sun, and husband to Solus, the Forger.

"Prima is of the Sun and rules above, but Megatronus is his mirror-twin and rules below." Juno recited quietly, optics forward into the mine-turned-firepit.

Ravage immediately understood, red optics glinting in firelight as she sat on her haunches. Still as a sentinel. And after a long moment, Soundwave loosened as well.

Steeling her resolve and bracing her senses, Juno walked through the hungry flames and refused to look back.

The first yards were easy, even blinded by the swell of yellows and reds, then resistance was met by the bodies. Most caved under her own weight. Darhos, unlike their Quintesson masters, preferred to keep their technological enhancements for their own upper-crust citizens. Others are meant to be fed through the grinder as raw as possible : blood and tears, life and death, all of it utilized as Darhos continued Quintessa’s ways of bridging the arcane and science to a horrifying scale of cruelty.

It went deeper, and bodies liquified from the scorching temperatures, and Juno sank into the remains, crawling through the pits, partly wading through the sludge of broken skeletons, melted slag, and magma. She could hear the whispers, countless and without end, all of them slowly realizing her presence. A steady trickle into an immense roar of unfathomable emotions swarmed her.

< Give me your grief, and I will free you of those shackles. > The words poured out of her without conscious thought. The deep thrum of Megatronus’ hand in it.

And then she fell.

Juno sank deeper as the ground disappeared beneath her, falling as she had done a long time ago when a chained Fallen offered her the chance to remake the future. She managed to catch herself on an edge and haul over it, guided by the vague indents of the stairs to slowly crawl her way out as a titanic weight settled upon her. The voices of the dead were innumerable, words lost in an ocean of static woven by hatred and bereavement, but the curses on their lips were seared across their souls.

And it flowed into her, by mouth, by vents, by nose, it poured into her frame until there was another firestorm trapped within her bones, eating at her fuel lines, and devouring her insides as heat had no way to escape. She choked and cried out, but refused to stay still. Inching her way forward with every agonizing hand clawing into the rockface to pull herself. To stop was to die and she refused to consider it.

A hand suddenly reached out to pull out Juno from the miasma of all those Darhos had wronged. The change was so jarring that it took Juno a moment to gather herself as her senses felt muted as if she was blanketed away from the world.

And cold, so very cold. She went from a hell fire nightmare into freezing reality.

“And much like our ancient predecessors, you came from nothing and became everything.” The Mistress of Flame spoke with a fervent gleam in her yellow optics as the very hand that pulled Juno out began to smoke, paint bubbling.

This tall, sturdy femme with such a firm grip was none other than the Mistress of Flame. The Head Priestess of the Way of Flame, Caminus’ Truth Seeker, Speaker of the Forge, and Solus Prime’s Premiere Daughter. She was dressed in reds, oranges, and yellows, mimicking the colors of an active smithy. Her mantle designed to reflect the sun with kibble patterned as rays and the heart of a Forge as a window bared her very violet-blue spark to the world. She had an incredible pain tolerance as well: the elegant and intricate patterns of stylised flames weren't painted or tattooed, it was carved into the very protoform, nor did she fear fire and heat as her circuitry sparked and protoform charred, she kept her hand in a steadfast grip, even as her vibrant cape began to crisp and flake away from the immense temperature.

Instead, the Mistress of Flame stared at Juno with a deep sense of consummate love. Even her field was full of deep commitment and complete affection. It was the expression of how a parent would hold their newborn infant, a child to their parent, a spouse to their partner, a guardian to their charge, a servant to their liege.

A mortal to their Prime, Ravage's imagined voice rasped in low tones with the satisfied flick of her tail, Soundwave casting a haunting, protective shadow.

It was close, deeply intimate, and Juno uncomfortably knew with absolute certainty that if she fell back into the molten slag, then the Mistress of Flame would follow into the molten pit without hesitation.

Juno carefully stepped forward, guiding the other femme away from the furnace, and she simply followed, still holding her hand. They walked up the long set of stairs, the stone caked in filth, old blood, and soot, and the heat grew distant behind them as Juno spied something else in front of them, lights dancing upon the walls in familiar patterns - shapes that played across Ravage’s plating when they neared the portal to the mine turned sacrificial pyre.

“Solus is of the Forge and speaks in the flames, ash, and cinder. Within the cracks of the molten, the strike between swings, and whispers the final forms of a work. And She has spoken about you. I have seen your face, beloved of Shadow and Chaos. I have seen your ascension from the very roots of Megatronus’ altar and your glorious crusade against our long, forsaken enemies.” The Mistress of Flame said as they finally reached dias. There was the remains of an immense metalwork turned to kindling as a bonfire ate it. The piece once commanded the whole space, dwarfing all those that came, even a Predacon would feel miniscule, had warped and melted beyond recognition. Only the offerings piles remained at its base.

Upon closer inspection, those very piles, taller than a triple-changer, contained innumerable small bundles of scrapped, tiny skeletons, charred and broken. A chill surrounded them, and the whispers grew finally grew coherent to form a single word-

D R O W N

An ocean of the damned with waves of twisting, unnatural shapes lapped over the carved stairs, clawing at it with countless phantom hands, a testament to the sins that Darhos, Quintessa, Quintus had committed, surrounded the dias and the melting still-standing statue.

< Give me your grief, and I shall free you of those shackles. >

The ocean of wailing ghosts surged forward, flooding everything in its path, hungry as the molten slag, and ready to rise up and devour the city, the very planet itself if left unchecked.

Her spine stiffened, her own spark surged forward, chassis opening up to a dance of violent shadows against the raging dead, and Juno saw-

The flow of Darhos’ lifeforce and the Song of the Universe, indescribable colors of multiple streams and rivers interconnected and running into the ocean of the cosmos, but here, it laid foul and stagnant, a deep, drak wound left to fester and poison everything as it attempted to eat its way across the planet. Strands spooling out to connect to the smaller creeks leading into distant stars, already unraveling them to tear apart.

Megatronus was Beloved of Primus, too. When He stepped forward, the world held its breath.

Megatronus was one and all, and He freely shared it with her.

Megatronus was of Shadow that rose from the Sun, and so Nemesis burned the taint away.

______

The aftermath was quiet.

The symbol of Darhos’ conquest laid in pieces, smoldering as the gruesome offerings to its altar had been swept clean away. The chaos above ground was a distant dream as Juno was on the ground, retching out putrid slag. Black and viscous, its slimy texture dribbled down her mouth. She coughed harshly, spitting out bone fragments, and Energon foamed on her lips.

There was a careful rustle of shifting plates, and the Mistress of Flame kneeled beside her, uncaring of the pulsating mess. “Sacrifice and suffering. Cruelty and mercy. Compassion and violence.” The Mistress of Flame intoned, voice in a lilting cadence. “These are the tenets left by the Thirteen and shaped the universe. The very tenets Solus Prime engraved into Caminus. And we answer your call to arms, sister to Solus.”

With a snap of her fingers, the Mistress ignited the spoiled mess into bright flames, still unafraid of pain as she helped Juno to sit, hands peeling down to the base, protoform sizzling. “Light the way, Solus Prime, with the Creation Lathe guiding the path. Light the way, Solus Prime, in clear vision of our smithies to arm your children in the upcoming crucible. Light the way, Solus Prime, by the way of your Conjunx’s newest bride, your newest sister-”

“I am not his bride.” Juno couldn't help but to interrupt the chant, exhausted beyond measure, chest scraped raw and empty as if someone took out fistfuls of her own chassis, only to leave her heart bruised and aching. She felt freezing, even as her very touch scorched others. “I am just a lost daughter from a lost people.” Truth covered by omission, and it was the closest thing she was willing to divulge about her unwritten future. “My name was June, and-”

The Mistress of Flame let out a soft noise, her optics gleaming with joyous wonderment, cupping Juno’s face in careful reverence, hands burning away, and Juno couldn't part away from her intense gaze. “Nemesis Prime from the very namesake that was once the martyred daughter of Chaos and Creation. You have returned to us, resurrected from the pyre, twice-blessed and twice-cursed by their mantle.”

The Mistress of Flame pressed a scorching kiss upon Juno's crest, her lips melting from the residual heat, and Energon dripped down and told her in the dying light with broken lips -a pact sealed in blood. “Caminus marches to war once more, Juno Nemesis, Prime of Megatronus and Solus. Caminus marches beneath your banners. Caminus is under your command.”

[just-an-emily-existing]

Tw: Death, Blood, Implied Gore

Happy Traintober, and happy reading ;)

Once, in a little valley of the Island of Sodor, before the Skarloey was the Skarloey Railway, there lived a timeworn steam engine named Cadogan. She was the first of her kind, known for her heartwarming whistles and the warmth of her vintage red color, Cadogan had seen many seasons cycle through the green hills of the island. She was a marvel of engineering, a pride of the station, most cherished by the little children who would wave to her as she puffed past, sending clouds of steam spiralling into the sky.

But as time marched on, her brilliance dulled. Technology advanced; newer, faster engines glided effortlessly along the tracks. Cadogan began to feel the gnawing fear that came with obsolescence, the relentless threat of the scrap yard looming over her. Whispers among the workshops grew louder, each echoing the unthinkable: “It’s time for Cadogan to retire.”

One crisp winter evening, as the sun dipped beyond the hills and cast long shadows over the rails, Cadogan sat in her shed, a heavy heart trapped within her iron frame. The fear of being dissolved into lifeless metal spurred something within her. The sound of the wheels against the tracks, the longing for the cheers of her passengers, it brought her to tears. The body she possessed could not accept her fate among piles of rust and decay. In a moment of desperation, Cadogan closed her eyes and wished with every ounce of steam in her boiler.

Suddenly, a warmth surged through her, igniting an ancient magic, a chance she never knew she had. In a flicker of golden glitter and a burst of steam, Cadogan transformed, her essence shifting from iron and steel into the flesh of a young woman. Her hair flowed like black smoke, and her eyes now gleamed with fire and life. Overjoyed but still filled with fear, Cadogan fled from her old life.

She raced through the misty woods, her heart pounding fiercely with newfound freedom, but the fear of being discovered still chased her. She was a creature of the tracks, yet here she stood, vulnerable in a world where she once was mightier than her human form could ever hope to be. It wasn't long before the townsfolk noticed a woman who looked almost exactly like her engine counterpart. They quickly realised it was Cadogan herself, trying to flee from the railway to Lady knows where. Some marvelled at her bravery to escape, but some believed she was an omen, a wraith signalling the end of the railway.

One fateful evening, weeks after her initial escape, Cadogan found herself at the edge of a bridge that loomed over a rushing river, the moon glowing white on the horizon. Questions swirled within her. Could she remain human? Would others accept a woman born from an engine? The doubts clawing at her mind twisted her heart into knots. Just then, a group of workers approached. They were armed with old tools and bows, faces twisted in disgust. They had come to reclaim the escapee of Sodor, a mission that included her fate as well.

Seeing the determination in their eyes, Cadogan understood the truth; they had come to take her back, to return her to the looming embrace of scrap. “No! I’m more than what they designed! I'm still useful! I don’t deserve this!!” she shrieked, desperation coursing through her veins. But they were resolute, pushing forward, and as her fear turned to rage, she was pressed to the edge of the bridge, heart pounding wildly.

With a sudden wave of anger, she scrambled to keep her distance, ready to leap into the freedom of the river below. They soon noticed her anger was turning into aggression, and saw she grabbed a huge stick and pointed it at them, backing away slowly. “I refuse to let you kill me! I’m getting across this damn bridge whether you like it or not!” So, the workers had no choice but to draw their bows. “Stay away from me!” she yelled, and in her turmoil, she felt an arrow pierce through her abdomen. In the fragile moment between horror and self-preservation, she felt herself fall back. Time froze as she lost her footing, falling into the depths below.

She screamed something wicked, a scream that could make ears bleed. The rushing waters greeted her with a cold embrace, and for a moment, she could breathe. Yet as she sank below the surface, the realisation struck her like an arrow. There was no escape from her own demise. She couldn't outrun her fate. Underwater and beneath the weight of her newfound humanity, she saw visions of tracks, glowing sickly warm in her memory, the laughter she had brought, the love she felt, the children who waved.

But alas, she couldn’t find her strength, the water paralysing her whole body. The world went dark for our Cadogan. But suddenly, a bright light flashed before her, a last wave of magic surged through her, resurrecting her spirit. She pulled herself from the abyss, thinking she could fly, but it was too late; the bridge, the lives above, and the hope she chased were irretrievably lost.

The workers had gone, leaving only the haunting echo of what could have been—a glimpse of a life forever marred by horror. Cadogan stepped onto the bridge, feeling lighter than ever before. She looked off to the side and saw her lifeless engine corpse, stuck between two huge rocks. She didn't even feel scared or shocked, she just stood there, and looking down on her body, saw the arrow... The arrow that had killed her, forever doomed to be lodged through her body.

She soon realised what she was—an engine dressed like a woman cast adrift, forever trapped on the isle that once adored her.

As the last curls of steam rose into the moonlit sky, Cadogan realised she was now alone and dead, not only an engine trying to escape but a creature of sorrow forged in the waters of loss. The only sounds that remained were the whispering wind that stirred between the trees, and the rushing of water over her body pressing against the silence of a bridge that would bear her grief for the ages.

But workers will tell you, on a full moonlit night, they can see the woman, running across the bridge, the arrow still lodged deep in her body, trying to pull it out. But she never does pull out the arrow, or reach the other side, for no matter the condition of the rails and bridge, she always slips and falls, screaming the same wicked screech as she did when she first fell and plunging into the water below.

[cowboymater]

controversial opinion maybe:

I KNOW. i know. hear me out

i saw a couple edits on tiktok of mcspirk to soldier poet king and like. i’m not putting anyone on blast but good lord some of those choices made my head hurt. it’s taken me a couple days to synthesize my reasoning for the superior choice (as pictured above), but here goes:

the problem with assigning characters to soldier poet king comes when you take it at face value, flattening the paradigm to angry-sad-tired or violent-artsy-authoritative. if we want to get down to the root of it, the song is based on the threefold office of christ as priest (soldier), prophet (poet), and king. like i’m not christian, but on a textual level it gives us context: the concept that as prophet jesus gave us counsel and words of wisdom, as priest he sacrificed himself to redeem us, and as king he provides for, defends, and forgives us

maybe the most famous priest/prophet/king (& thus soldier/poet/king) allegory in all of literature is frodo, gandalf, and aragorn. frodo bears the burden, though he wishes he did not need to; gandalf offers words of wisdom and mercy; aragorn is a born leader, on the front lines with sword in hand, ready to die with his men if he must

KING: capt. james t. kirk is the easiest one to place. it is a burden and a privilege, an honor and a horror to have the lives of so many depend upon you to make the right call under fire. he makes the call. he leads the landing parties, he puts himself at the head of the charge because by god he is not about to send his men into a battle he wouldn’t fight himself. he leads—with heart when he can, steel when he must—and people follow him. bones and spock are always right behind because they believe in what he believes in, and more than that they believe in him

POET: bones serves as kirk’s emotional sounding board, his moral peer review. he lends an ear, and the word of an old country doctor who’s seen much and understands more. man has ascended to the heavens, to hurtling through the void in a glorified tin can, and it would be no great hardship to forget that our place in the universe is not that of higher life—we are not as quasi-gods, moving pieces on the great three-dimensional chessboard, but flesh and blood, and we must attend to each other. bones tempers the pure logos and rationality offered by spock; he offers grounding in this age of technology that wrinkles the fabric of reality, offers the kind of emotional intellect that cannot be taught, and has always been sorely needed

SOLDIER: this is the one where you really get tripped up by surface-level analysis. yes, spock is reserved and collected. yes, vulcans are pacifists (as you may recall, so are hobbits, and yet frodo remains the soldier in allegory)

the thing about vulcans, though, is that despite the vegan pacifism, they are warriors. it’s tangled up in their history and their DNA. the koon-ut-kal-if-fee survived through centuries of analytical dogma for a reason; even now, they cannot wholly escape their inheritance of violence. their forefathers ran the sands of vulcan green with blood. they venerate logic and condemn emotionality so that they will not

your average high-achieving vulcan, probably on the path to kolinahr, commits their lifetime to the pursuit of knowledge at the vulcan science academy. it’s a measured, rational decision. a controlled environment, where there will never be any logical reason to resort to violence

spock joins starfleet

he joins starfleet, and pursues knowledge in the vast unknowable universe. there is reason for violence, frequently. and sure, the purpose of their mission is peaceful. it’s true that spock would rather resolution be reached without force. but a soldier needs not want to be a soldier. he only needs go to war

when it comes down to blows, he will match them. he makes the sacrifice play, jumps on the grenade, goes into the radiation-soaked engineering room alone. it’s only logical, after all

spock is there to pick apart the universe, unravel the threads of logic until it all makes sense. bones is there to stitch it up. kirk is the hand that holds it all steady, the gravitational field that binds the people of the enterprise to their purpose. soldier-poet-king, commander-doctor-captain. it’s a story old as dirt, and we’ll keep telling it, i think

edit: my bad vulcans have. green blood

[okaybooner]

Little do they know that Dinky has been transformed, piece by piece, like the Ship of Theseus, into a mech armed with 120 mm High Explosive Anti-Tank laser-guided missiles with semi-combustible cartridges, as well as a X-25 Gatling laser and other anti-materiel guns, one in each claw. The claws in themselves are deadly as well, having been replaced with twelve-inch Nitro-V stainless steel swords.

The shielding capabilities of Dinky - both practical blast shields and highly experimental zero-point energy and EMP fields - make long-range ballistic strikes impractical, yet Dinky's outer armor seems impenetrable, made of some kind of carbon-fiber reinforced polymer coated with carbon nanotube-reinforced epoxy. Painted green, obviously, as Dinky is still a dinosaur. Its shielding capabilities don't stop at deflecting munitions or direct attack, either; stealth technologies have been implemented which make it impossible to trace Dinky on any radar detector, or even Vault Tec apparatus such as the Pip-Boy.

The mech flares to life with a roar, its jaws snapping shut, cocooning its pilot in safety. Attuned to Boone's movements via neurolink technology and a thermal suit, its arms move in tandem with its tail, which, in one precise swish, sends the mines surrounding it flying. A laser guided by precise assisted targeting detonates the mines that don't detonate themselves.

Dinky rears up from the sands of Novac and begins to make its way out of the town, using high-tech armaments to mow down enemies in its path.

[littjara-mirrorlake]

Daily Life in the Phyrexian Spheres (Dross to Seedcore)

Previous: Facade to Furnace, Maze to Bays

The Dross Pits, much like its previous incarnation in the Mephidross of Mirrodin's surface, is a sphere rife with intrigue, double-crossing, and back-alley deals. The social structure is feudal, with lords ruling over masses of serfs and slaves, and thanes make up the top of the social pyramid. Dark, towering citadels of flesh and bone rise out of the necrogen mists, which bathe the entire layer in an eerie green glow. Large swathes of territory are controlled by thanes, lords, and magical creatures such as blight dragons and archfiends.

This sphere is densely populated, with the vast majority of its inhabitants making up the servant classes that live and die under feudal lords. Compleated Mirrans begin at the very bottom and most have little hope of ever ascending past this station, as the Steel Thanes' obsession with Phyrexian purity leads to heavy discrimination against those who are not Phyrexian-born. This obsession extends to a scrutiny of every Phyrexian's pedigree--the further removed a person is from their last non-core-born ancestor, the purer their bloodline is considered, leading to a higher chance of social advancement. As such, first-generation core-born Phyrexians (born to compleated Mirrans) are only barely considered truly Phyrexian and share their parents' meager social standing. As Phyrexians are immortal and have no need for heirs, faction members produce scions to serve their own advancement, not to eventually succeed them. Of course, said scions are rarely happy with this arrangement, seeking to usurp their parents and seize their assets instead.

Magically and technologically, the inhabitants of the Dross Pits largely focus on emulating Yawgmoth-era techniques gleaned from scrying the glistening oil. Due to the heavy emphasis on ichor magic and intrigue, glistening oil from individuals of interest--and the intelligence it contains--is an invaluable commodity in the Dross Pits. Bloodsuckers like necrosquitoes and pistid swarms are often employed to this end, fueling an illicit trade of stolen bodily fluids.

Much like the Furnace, the Dross Pits do not have an overarching system of governance or standard of law, and political allegiances vary widely. Pockets of the Dross Pits are strongholds of the Phyrexian rebellion, though they are severely handicapped by the loyalist spheres blocking them both above and below. Every thane has at least nominally allied with either Elesh Norn or the rebellion, though they are ultimately beholden only to themselves and care little for the ideals of either side.

The Fair Basilica is the innermost inhabited sphere and the de facto capital of New Phyrexia, where Elesh Norn rules from her palace and the majority of the Phyrexian military is housed. In the heart of Norn's empire, every aspect of daily life is carefully regimented and monitored; people are marched in orderly rows down alabaster bridges, flanked constantly by armed enforcers and their swarms of patrol mites. Flights of angels keep constant watch in the skies. Staggering acts of brutality are committed against any who display signs of deviance, and commoners are all too used to keeping their heads down and trying not to watch as their peers' oil is scrubbed from the streets.

Every resident of the Fair Basilica is expected to devote a significant portion of their time to worship, and the rest to assigned duties like patrolling or working the flesh-vats. Those who need to sleep do so on strict schedules under the watchful eyes of supervisors. Newts are raised by the state, rigorously educated on the Orthodoxy's religious tenets, and often apprentice under cenobites, which continues after their compleation; Mirran aspirants commonly join them.

Though it relies heavily on other spheres for commodities like raw material and technology, the Fair Basilica is at least self-sufficient in growing its own porcelain metal, which spreads in a fungus-like manner on recently dead flesh. It is mass-produced in giant growth vats, alongside Basilica inhabitants' germ offspring and seedpod centurions for the invasion (often bodies without minds, hollow for puppeting via ichor magic).

Rebellion is most difficult in the Basilica due to its oppressive environment and authorities' vested interest in controlling the flow of information--and oil--into and out of the sphere. The news fed to residents is tightly curated, requiring workarounds to even hear of the rebellion's presence at all. That said, dissident spies have managed to infiltrate even the innermost of the loyalist spheres.

The Mycosynth Gardens form a natural barrier between the populated Phyrexian spheres and the Seedcore, and passage through them is controlled exclusively by Elesh Norn herself. The Gardens themselves are uninhabited by sapient Phyrexians, though fauna like inkmoths and skitterlings roam the silent lattices, and the mycosynth itself is known to create lures or other, more cryptic structures that mimic passersby.

The Seedcore, the innermost layer of New Phyrexia, is the domain of Elesh Norn alone, where she keeps the World Tree sapling Realmbreaker imprisoned and firmly subjugated under layers of mind-altering magic. Very rarely, Norn holds the most confidential of her audiences here with her inner circle or other crucial allies. The sphere is heavily warded against incoming divination, telepathy, and any other possible interference with Norn's plans, but here lays Norn's crucial oversight: there are no such protections against communication going out, allowing Realmbreaker's telepathic distress call to pass through into the Multiverse.

And that's it for overviews of the nine Phyrexian spheres, from the perspective of a far more average commoner Phyrexian than we're used to hearing about. There's always more to be said about each of them, of course, and I hope this helps get people started thinking about their own expansions, headcanon, or additions!

[farity]

In the Red of Night

Pairing:  Modern!AU Aemond Targaryen x you

Summary:  Aemond likes coffee.  And sugar.  And other things.

Warnings:  Future smut.

He liked to think that after all this time, he was better than this.  

But as dawn began to tint the sky in purples and pinks, Aemond Targaryen looked down at his hands, stained with dried blood, and told himself the worst lies were the ones you told yourself.  

He stood, dusting off his black trousers, and headed back to his loft.  The sun had begun to peek over the taller buildings by the time he turned onto his street.  Despite myths and movies, sunlight wouldn’t burn him to ashes or make him sparkle.  It did feel a little warmer than he liked and after a few minutes, his skin would be the bright pink that a normal pale person got after a day at the beach with no sun cream or protection, but given the fact that he had pale skin, not to mention the silver white hair that made most people do double takes, it was generally understood that he preferred to be in the shade.

He nodded at the doorman, who never questioned his hours, and headed for the private elevator around the corner.  He pressed the button and the mechanism began its near silent whirr as it traveled up to the top floor.

Walking inside his front door, he began pulling off his shirt, throwing it into his bedroom hamper before he began unzipping his trousers.  His bed was neatly made, since he hadn’t slept in it the previous night, and he finished undressing before he walked into his bathroom.  

He let the cool water beat down on his head and back for a few minutes before he began scrubbing the blood off his skin.  There wasn’t a lot of it, as he had long ago learned to not make a mess when he indulged, but it reminded him that he needed to be careful.  His very appearance and physicality made him noticeable and he could not afford to stand out any more than he already did.

One of the many advantages of the modern world was the existence of coffee shops - he was addicted to the stuff.  He also didn’t want to bother making it himself, and most shops had a quiet corner or two where he could work and watch people, and he wouldn’t be bothered.  

He dressed in his usual greys and blacks, pulled a thin cashmere knit hat over his pale hair, and went downstairs.  There was a coffee shop across the street from his building, and he had been waiting for the new owner to finish the remodeling and updating, and it was, finally, open for business.  He’d waited for the initial rush to settle before he crossed the street and walked in. 

It reminded him of a favorite bar he’d frequented in Paris long ago.  The decor was timeless, with vases and objets d’art that were either priceless antiques or very good reproductions, set safely on high shelves.  There was soft music playing, not the obnoxious litany of mumbling boys that sounded like they were barely awake - the 90s had been particularly trying music-wise - but, again, he thought back to the beginning of the previous century and felt that this place would have looked right at home then.

Of course, it had the latest technology, from the cameras to the outlets to accommodate several devices at every table.  The pristine sterling steel machines kept up a steady stream of both coffee and a low hum of sound, and Aemond quickly found a corner where he could perch himself for the next couple of hours.  He set down his laptop, placed his hoodie over it, and headed over to the counter, where several people managed to dodge each other’s arms as they worked to serve their customers.  

There was a tempting array of cakes and pastries, and Aemond, who loved sugar almost as much as he loved a certain dark red liquid, immediately chose a chocolate cake with what looked like hazelnuts on top.  

“Eyeing the chocolate praline, are we?”

He looked up at the cheerful voice and his eyes landed on a pair of green eyes, crinkling at the corners, as they studied him. 

“Is it made in house?”

“Of course, that one is made by me, actually.  Chocolate hazelnut praline, it’s a popular one.  Some coffee along with your cake?”

He nodded.  “Black, whatever you think will go best with it, and seven sugars.”

Her eyes snapped up to his, “okay, then,” she smiled.  “please don’t damage the walls when you start bouncing off of them later.”

She turned to grab a plate and start brewing some coffee while he immediately began to think of all the ways he could damage the walls.  Most of them involved having her legs wrapped around him, and he blinked, pushing the thought away when she turned back to him.  

“Will there be anything else?”

“Hmm.  Not for now, I’ll be doing some work and probably get something else later.”

She nodded and rang up his purchase.  If she was impressed by the heavy, black-finish credit card he handed her, she gave no sign.  “I’ll bring it over in a minute.”  She smiled at him and turned to greet another customer.

* * * * * 

You’d seen him a couple of times before, during the last couple of weeks as you put the final touches on the coffee shop.  The hair, obviously, had caught your attention, and the fact that he was so tall.  He lived across the street and you hoped he’d become a regular, start building your little clientele, have your core group of customers as well as the more casual buyers.

He had a very, very nice ass, you thought, glancing discreetly as he walked away.  Lean and rangy, he had covered his hair today, and in his dark clothes blended in pretty well within the little corner he’d chosen.  You grabbed his coffee, a bowl with extra sugars, and his cake, and took it all over to his table.  “Here you are, let me know if you need anything else,” you smiled.  He had the most lovely shade of eyes, somewhere between dark blue and purple.

“Thank you, I will.”

You really wanted to stay and trace your fingertip over every sharp edge of that stunning face, the wide lips, the faded scar over his eye.  Instead, you turned back to your counter and your customers, and decided to later find out more about the sugar fiend who had just come in to your shop.

* * * * * 

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[nitewrighter]

All things considered, I hope that MAWS season 3 is the season where they introduce the other big DC heroes, but at the same time, I have to wonder what the characters of Batman and Wonder Woman will be like.

Will we get an overdramatic loner emo Batsy for that current Pattinson Batman synergy, or are we going to get something closer to Conroy's Batman? Heck, with the tech-focused angle of MAWS, perhaps this would be an opportunity to try something closer to Rino Romano's portrayal in The Batman?

Will Diana be the ever-compassionate, wise yet pragmatic nigh-immortal warrior princess, or is she going to be little more than the primary vehicle for next season's relationship drama, her mere presence driving a wedge between Clark and Lois akin to early New 52 Wondy? I really fucking hope not. For a change, let Diana be into both Clark AND Lois. Let her rizz them BOTH up and let Lois be kinda into it.

Honestly I'd rather the trinity get their own respective shows in this style that introduces them in the framework of their own stories before they get slapped into Superman's story. And also I'm very wary about introducing Batman at all because DC has a problem of introducing Batman to a story and it immediately becoming A Batman Story (tm).

If they do end up introducing other heroes from the DC universe, I'd rather they pick characters in theme with the show's emphasis on space and technology--like Adam Strange, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Captain Atom, or Cyborg. Or that they start bringing in Fourth World characters like Darkseid, Orion, Mister Miracle and Big Barda. Hell, they could bring in Kon-El or General Zod, too. They're only now establishing Lex as his own villain and not just someone clinging onto Waller, and they haven't even brought in Lobo yet!!! There's still plenty of Superman content to explore without shoehorning in an underdeveloped Trinity. Or they could bring in Booster Gold and/or the Legion of Superheroes for a time travel plot that's still focused on Supes. (A time-traveling Jon showing up à la Trunks, anyone?)

My really big concern here is the show has put all this energy into establishing Lois + Jimmy as Superman's team, and now with the new season they've expanded that to include Kara and Steel, and I don't want that to get chucked out the window just because they want to bring the Trinity in. Honestly the last thing I want is for Batman and Wonder Woman to show up like, "Out of the way, supporting cast! The real main characters are here!" If they're going to expand further into the DC universe, I want it to feel natural to THIS show, not just ticking off a mainstream fandom checklist.

A big part of what I love about Superman solo comics is their emphasis on the normal people surrounding Clark that he cares for and is inspired by, and they're usually the first to get elbowed out when he gets thrown into big crossover. I don't want that with MAWS. The show is literally called My Adventures with Superman, which implies its major baseline is that its from the perspective of the normal non-powered people closest to Superman (read: Lois and Jimmy). I don't want this show to breach that until Wonder Woman and Batman are established on their own.