#hes more likely to use his bipedal form when hes around people he is unfamiliar with or large groups but sometimes

[blighted-lights]

OKAY SO. ended up remaking this post as the other one was having a weird issue where it wouldn't let me edit it, BUT!!

hehe, thank you nonnie <3

softstep DOES have a bipedal form, though he very much prefers to be in his beastform. he was not forged with a bipedal form and only recieved one when he got a full frame redesign during the whole sleeper agent "coditioning" process. when softstep figures out that he is a sleeper agent (after the failed trigger), he doesn't really know how to feel about his bipedal form. it's him, but,, it's not at the same time. it really doesn't help that people take him more seriously when he is in his bipedal form, so he tends to use it around others even when he'd much rather prefer to be in his beastform

i LOVE talking about them <33 if anyone has anymore questions about them PLEASE send em my way 🙏

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

After the Bombs Fall [Animorphs ficlet]

[Note: I seem to have lost the ask where someone requested my post-war headcanon for Alloran, but anyway here it is.]

--

Less than a month after the end of the war, Alloran applies for transfer off of Earth and back to the homeworld.  When the first request gets cancelled due to a minor typo in a sub-section of a supplemental form, he curses himself and immediately applies again.

The second application lingers in the metaphorical z-space between agents for longer, nearly two Earth months, before it gets cancelled as well.  The systems are overtaxed due to the sudden influx of Earth tourism, the form letter tells him this time, and they’re very sorry for their inability to accommodate his request.

The third time he applies, the form remains “under review” on the submission portal for half a year, even though the review process normally takes less than a day.  So he applies a fourth time, a terrible suspicion taking hold by now.  The Electorate automatically cancels both applications, and has the gall to send him a snippy comm message asking that he refrain from filing redundant claims from now on.

The fifth application gets reviewed and cancelled; the sixth one doesn’t even get that courtesy.  It just stays there, “submitted” but not yet “under review,” unwanted and ignored.

Just like its author.

Alloran considers, then.  For nearly a day he paces, watching the andalite computer and the primitive human device alike, and weighs the merits of stealing Visser Three’s Blade ship out of the impound lot.  It wouldn’t be hard; the security system is coded to biometrics.  No one but he or Tom Berenson could fly that ship now, and Tom Berenson is dead.

After another day, Alloran instead morphs human and walks to the nearest CVS.

He has to swallow an entire jumbo bag of marshmallows and three jars of tomato sauce for comfort before he can swallow his pride as well.  But the comfort food does its trick, and at the end he pulls out the human cell phone still registered under one of Esplin 9466′s aliases and enters the fifth speed-dial option.

“Hey, you.”  Eva answers immediately.  “How’s it going?”

They don’t know each other, not really.  And yet in every one of their three conversations, Eva has greeted him like an old friend.  Her voice brings a reaction to Alloran’s human morph: tightness in his throat, the heat of tears behind his eyes.

“I apologize for troubling you,” Alloran says stiffly.  “Please, if you are busy, disregard this request.”

Eva snorts a laugh.  At least, Alloran thinks that that’s what the sound is.  “I’m not busy, and I owe you a favor anyway.  Shoot.”

Alloran glances around the room, but there are no weapons, so he decides to disregard that last.  “I am truly sorry if it slipped my mind,” he says, “but what favor do you owe?”

“My kid is not in jail on some foreign planet right now, and I hear that’s all your fault.  What’s the favor?”

“The War Council would not have imprisoned the Animorphs.  That is, perhaps Aximili and Prince Jake may have been imprisoned, but doubtless the full Electorate court would have proven merciful—”

“Alloran.  What’s the favor.”

He’s stalling, and she knows it.  “It’s a bit of a complicated political matter, and I’m afraid I am not well equipped to explain it to a human, but enforcement of our travel policies is more subject to individual agents’ personal judgment than we ideally would have it be, and...”

“Hijo de puta.  They’re not letting you go home, are they?”

Alloran fills his human lungs with more air than they technically need for speech.  “It’s a complicated matter.”  Nevertheless, his voice comes out small.

“You still camping at the Sharing Community Center?”

“Yes.”  His voice is even smaller now.

“I’ll be there in half an hour, querido.”  She hangs up.

While he waits, he goes outside to run, to graze, to stare up at the stars.

He didn’t lie; it is complicated.  The Andalite Electorate is struggling to recover from a decades-long war, one that threatened the existence of their very soul as a people.  Seerow’s mistakes — and Alloran’s own decision to publicize the failings of his prince — have ensured that the whole debacle was a massive embarrassment even before the defeat on the hork-bajir homeworld.

And then...

He’s heard the word, whispered and hissed and screamed and shouted.

Abomination.

Abomination.

His face is the public face of the Yeerk Empire.  His voice is its voice.  The morph he was just using — a bald, middle-aged human male — was constructed from the DNA of a dozen human-controllers.  Everything he owns, from the black limousine parked at the curb to the press pass of a woman called Aria, was taken from the hands of murdered slaves.

Of course his people don’t want him back.  Of course not.  The quantum virus was one thing, but then he had the gall go to and get himself captured by the yeerks.  And he’d added insult to injury when he’d challenged a captain on Aximili’s behalf.

He can see it.  That’s what stings.  He can stare up at the glittering point of his home star even as he runs across a field of dull foreign grass, and at this rate it’ll never be anything but a fixed point of light in an unfamiliar sky ever again.

Eva shows up then, before he can feel too sorry for himself.

She brings a human substance known as pinot noir.

**********

“And then...”  Eva points a wavering finger at him.  Her words have gotten blurrier over time.  “And then, we just sneak it in, and bam!”  She slaps the tabletop.

Alloran leans in across to her.  “Bam,” he agrees.

“You needed a ride home?”

At the new voice, Alloran stands up sharply.  Too sharply.  He gets his two flimsy little legs tangled in the chair and almost pitches over.

Marco catches him.  “You all right?” he asks.

“I,” Alloran intones, “am intoxicated.  Tox.  I.  Cate.  Ed.  Wonderful word.  Intock.  Sick.  Kate.  Dd-d-d-d-d.”

“Yeeeaah, I was getting those vibes from the—”  Marco leans around him in an impressive display of human balance.  “Bottle of wine apiece you two’ve apparently emptied.”

Eva draws herself up.  “I did not call and request a ride home, I called and requested a ride to the Netherlands!”

“You’re right, you did.”  Marco rolls his eyes.  “Which is why I made the decision to show up and bring you home instead.”

“No, no, the Netherlands.”  Eva steps up next to Alloran.  They both regard Marco carefully.  “Not to worry, we’ve thought it through.  You call your friend with the private plane, Bradley or Bradford or whomever his name is.  We fly out to the Hague tonight.”

“Where is this going,” Marco mutters.

“Holland,” Alloran informs him.  “It is-sssss in...”

“Yeah, I’ve been.”

“Anyway.”  Eva gestures sharply, bringing attention back to her.  “We shall have a perfectly ordinary canister of table salt with us, and we shall request to visit with Visser Three—”

“Oh Jesus.  Mom.”

“The guards will not suspect a thing, for it is just an ordinary condiment.  All we must then do is create a diversion, and...”  Eva flings out both hands as if miming an explosion.

“Splat,” Alloran says.  “Pllll-lat.  Hissssss.”

“And this will accomplish what, exactly?” Marco asks.

“Making Alloran feel better,” Eva whispers to him.  However, she seems to be whispering a great deal louder than she realizes.  Humans are ill-equipped for private communication, with their sad reliance on verbal speech.  “None of the andalites want him back.”

“Yeah.  Cool.”  Marco laughs.  “Ten out of ten therapists recommend war crimes for a friend in need!  And as a guy who’s been to at least ten therapists, I’d know.”

Alloran is not certain, but he believes that Marco might be employing the human verbal quirk known as “sarcasm.”

“No one will suspect a thing.”  Eva pats him on the shoulder.

Marco sighs.  “Security will just think it’s cocaine.”

“Cocaine?” Alloran asks.  “Coke-cane?  Co-c-c-c-c-c-c-aine?”

“Something you’re never going to try.”  Marco levels a hard stare at him.  “Given how well you handle your red wine.”

“Cooo-caaayyy-nnnee.  Co-cane.”

“How did you get wrapped up in this dumbass heist, anyway?”  Marco looks from one of them to the other.

“Alloran needed me,” Eva says.

“I have no friends,” Alloran announces.  “And Arbron does not own a cell phone.  Ell.  Elffffff-own.”

Marco closes his main eyes for several seconds, massaging the bridge of his nose.  An impressive feat of daring, for a creature with no stalk eyes who relies upon bipedalism.  “Should’ve known you’d be a morose drunk,” he says.

“So, you’ll take us to the airfield, then?” Eva asks.

Lifting his head up, Marco opens his eyes.  “In the words of my wise and estimable mother: if you want it that bad, you can have it when you’re sober.”

Eva opens her mouth halfway, squinting in what Alloran would guess is the effort of remembering when she would have said that.  After a second, her expression clears.  “I was right to say it, that floozy would have broken your heart in the morning, and this situation is entirely different!”

“That floozy’s name was Jake Gyllenhaal,” Marco mutters, “and I totally would’ve gone for it when I was sober, but I never got his number.”

Eva says something in Spanish, presumably about the loose morals of Jake Gyllenhaal.  Marco’s expression would suggest that he only pretends not to understand her.

“Anyway.  The point stands.  I’m driving you home.”  Marco jerks his chin at Eva.  “And you,” he says, looking at Alloran, “are gonna morph and sober up before we go anywhere.  I’m not having you nothlited on my conscience.”

“But,” Alloran says, “the salt—”

“We’ll revisit the salt in the morning,” Marco says firmly.  “Demorph.  Please.”

Alloran considers pointing out that he is a war-prince, he does not take orders from alien children, he has his pride... And then considers whether any of those statements is actually true.

He demorphs.

Instantly, he feels both better and worse.  On the upside he’s more clear-headed now, but on the downside he’s more clear-headed.

“I’ll call you.”  Marco gives him a long look while shepherding Eva out the door.

**********

Marco does not call, but he does send several written missives to Alloran’s cell phone.  The Animorphs still have an illegal andalite communication device, it would appear, and Marco has put in requests to channels both official and not about the possibility of transport from Earth to the homeworld.

     —Ax is on it, Marco’s latest text reads.  —He’s calling an old friend.  Might take some smuggling, but we’ve got an idea.

     —Thank you, Alloran types carefully on the tiny keyboard.  —Your assistance is greatly appreciated, and undeserved.

He’s debating whether to hit send when there’s a knock on the door.

Alloran’s in an abandoned building the Sharing used to use for housing human-controllers.  There is very little chance that this is an incidental knock, or someone who wandered by accidentally.

The thought occurs to him that it’d be smarter to morph human and blend in before he answers.  But the fear of facing the unknown in a half-blind, tailless morph wins out.  He opens the door as is.

It proves to be the right decision.  The andalite on the other side didn’t bother to morph either.

Estrid stares at him in silence for several seconds.  Her expression is unreadable, all eyes ahead and carefully blank.  Alloran doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but he lets her look.

«Estrid,» he says at last, when it’s clear she isn’t going to speak first.  He gestures with his tail blade, the downward sweep of greeting for an honored warrior.

«Father,» she says.

Her own sharp tail-turn puts the flat of her blade toward him.  A greeting between equals.  An insult.  Both not formal enough for an aristh to acknowledge a war-prince, and too formal for greeting a family member.

But then, Alloran went for Estrid, didn’t he.  Not Aristh Estrid-Corill-Darrath, not Estri-kala or my child.

They haven’t seen each other in over two years.  They haven’t spoken in almost twenty.

Arguably, given how young she was when he was taken, they’ve never really spoken at all.  Certainly Alloran knows little of the person his daughter has become as a young adult.  As a groundbreaking aristh.  As a brilliant researcher.

As a war criminal.

Humans have a saying, about apples that don’t fall far.

«How is Jahar?» Alloran says.  It’s what he really wants to know, and he doesn’t know how to approach any of the other minefields that lie between them.  «And Ajaht, how is he?»

Judging by Estrid’s expression, she takes this to be a standard small-talk opening instead of the deeply earnest inquiry it is.  «Mother is well enough.  I suppose you’ll have to apologize to her in person.»  She doesn’t mention her brother.

Alloran feels his tail blade drop nearly to the floor without his permission.  «Yes.  Of course.  Estrid...»

«I’m on a diplomatic mission to Earth,» she says briskly.  «Prince Aximili and I have concluded discussions with several local leaders about access to morphing technology and tourism restrictions going forward.  Therefore, I will be able to exit the planet and return home after being subject to nothing more rigorous than human security scans.»  The dismissive little flick of her tail at this last is, all things considered, somewhat warranted.  Humans have yet to devise a single effective way to detect morphers.

«Return home,» Alloran repeats.

Might take some smuggling, Marco said.  It’s sinking in: Estrid is here to bring him home.

Home.  To the wife he disgraced.  The brother he got killed.  The children who won’t even acknowledge him, a feverish pair of overachievers desperate to leave his legacy behind.  Ajaht’s tail-fighting is so legendary that, even using human channels, Alloran has been able to find scraps of news.  Estrid’s skill is not praised so publicly... but the yeerks got ahold of Arbat’s files, after their disastrous mission to Earth.  Alloran knows more about her, he thinks, than he ever wanted to.

«We’re leaving now,» Estrid says.  «My window for authorized exit ends in two-point-eight-six Earth hours, so we need to move.»

She must have been here for days if not weeks, to negotiate the way she’s describing.  And yet she came to find him at the last possible second.  Likely to minimize the time they’re forced to spend together.

Alloran doesn’t have the time or the energy to care.  «What would you prefer me to morph?»

«Something small and Earth-based.»  She barely finishes speaking before she starts to morph herself.

Alloran pauses in surprise, because Estrid morphs with shocking skill, melding from andalite to human in a mere forty-seven seconds, all without ever once losing her footing.  She even wears a normative amount of clothing when she’s finished, a sundress and sneakers and a coat overtop.

She sighs, looking him over.  «We don’t have all day, here.»

«You were wasted in Arbat’s lab,» Alloran says.

«You don’t have to tell me that,» Estrid snaps.  «Tell me, dear father, what else was a girl and a second-born and the child of a disgraced bloodline meant to do?»

Alloran has no answer.  Silently he morphs.

His options are limited — Visser Three overwhelmingly preferred large to small morphs, and Alloran hasn’t bothered acquiring much else — so he opts for snake, Lachesis muta according to a human-controller from the area.  It’s still larger than most Earth reptiles, but by coiling in close he becomes small enough to drop into the oversized pocket of Estrid’s jacket.

Estrid doesn’t speak to him, and he doesn’t ask her to, the entire way back to her fighter.  She’s under no obligation, and he won’t force the issue.

********

«We’re landing soon,» Estrid tells him, three Earth weeks and eighty-two light years later.  She’s maintained that icy formality throughout the entire journey so far, responding to Alloran’s questions — about her research, about her brother, about her morphing — with flat non-answers.

Alloran steps to the viewport to look out over the rolling grasslands of home like a child on his first in-atmosphere flight.  Is it home, really?  It’s been thirty-nine years since he left home to quell the small skirmish on the hork-bajir homeworld, forty-seven since his first offworld assignment serving under Prince Seerow.  He has seen a dozen planets, been a hundred species, since that time.  This body belonged to Visser Three for nearly as long as it did to Alloran himself, decades of nonexistence until he all but forgot his own name.

«What will you do next?» Alloran asks Estrid, still desperate for conversation.

She flicks a dismissive hand at the air.  «I have my work.»

«Even without Arbat?»

«I didn’t say it was easy.»

«And the quantum virus?»

She turns all four eyes on him.  A small part of him wants to scold her for bad form, but a far larger part of him recognizes he’d be overstepping.  «The quantum virus never happened,» she says sharply.  «And if it did, I was never informed of its existence.  This journey was my first visit to Earth, Arbat died in a lab accident, we were never involved in weapons development, and if you even think about saying differently the War Council will back my story, because all of the documentation —»

«Estrid.»  He cuts her off as gently as he can.  «I would never...»

He sees it, in the stiffening of her stalk eyes.  Hears it in the catch of her breath.  She doesn’t want a father.  Or if she does, she doesn’t want him.

«I would never dishonor the memory of my brother by raising questions about his death,» Alloran says instead.

Estrid relaxes, and turns back to the controls.

He is weary of war, weary of being alone.  The person he’d been when he first met Esplin 9466 would have been shouting by now, demanding to know what right Estrid has to consider herself any better than him.  He only deployed a quantum virus, had no hand in its evil creation.  Either she is a hypocrite... or she is just like the War Council officials who consider it a far worse crime to be enslaved by yeerks than to have murdered ten million hork-bajir.

It’s been a long war, and Alloran has missed her every moment of it.  Let her be angry; she’s here.

There is one more delicate question Alloran needs to ask, however, before they disembark on their family’s land.  «Jahar,» he says.  «I assume... She has found someone else.  To help raise you, and...»  Dark Sun, but this is hard.  «She deserves to be loved, of course.»

Eva’s mate remarried, after all.  Together they’d cried about that, somewhere between the third and fourth glasses of wine.

«Who would date her?» Estrid asks.  «Who would be seen speaking to her?  No.  There’s no one.  There hasn’t been.  There was me, and Ajaht, and that’s it.»

Alloran feels sadness and relief and disappointment and shame at his relief, all at once in a rush too complex to understand.  «I see,» he says at last.

«So go to her.»  Estrid yanks hard to unseal the fighter’s outer door; they’ve landed without his noticing.  «Go to her and—»  Another hard yank.  «Kriffing thing!»

Alloran puts his hand next to hers, pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t pull away.  As one they move, and the door comes open at last.

She came to meet them.  Alloran doesn’t know why he wasn’t expecting that, and yet...

Jahar is older, lined around the eyes and stooped in her shoulders and dull-edged around her hooves.  She’s radiant.  Transcendent.

Alloran is frozen.  Aware of all the knocks he’s taken, all the shine he’s lost.  Aware that they’ve been apart for longer than they ever were together.

He blames that last for the way his knees lock.  For the voice that freezes inside his mind, unable to form words.  For the crack in his breath and the painful squeeze of his hearts as she becomes the one to step forward.  As she raises a hand to his cheek, in the first gentle touch he’s felt in over twenty years.

--

[Note: I know that Aloth’s line in #38 about Estrid being Arbat’s niece — which would make her Alloran’s daughter — is probably not meant to be literal in context.  But the straightforward interpretation is boring, so I went with the fun one.]

[city-writes]

All That Glitters

As Durbe continues his impromptu journey with Rio and Ryoga, he learns more about them, including the fact that Mach - his partner, a shiny Rapidash - might not be the only ones Team Rocket could be after.

For @zexalmonth Day 20, the AU day!

Warning(s): Pokémon Trainer AU; Follow-up to this fic Pairing(s): N/A

Read it here on AO3! Commission Info!

_______________

It was growing late that day, the sun beginning to set as the sky began to gently dim. Durbe looked up at the multi-hued sky, a look of thought on his face as he and his companions - twin trainers Rio and Ryoga Kamishiro - made their way towards Fuchsia City. They had been traveling for a few days, Durbe having been the tie breaker between the arguing twins when each wanted to go a separate way: Ryoga to Fuchsia City, and Rio to Celadon City. Ultimately, Durbe had won both twins over by stating that there was a bike path that connected the two cities, and that even though none of them had a bike, they could probably get away with riding two at a time on Mach.

When Ryoga had asked if there was any other way, Durbe had given it a thought, before informing them about the waterways underneath the bike path, saying that if they had enough Water Pokémon between them, they could ride together that way.

Ryoga had looked a little apprehensive at that, but before Durbe could ask about it, Rio spoke up, saying that they could figure it out once they reached Fuchsia City.

That was a handful of days ago. They were so close to Fuchsia City, Durbe half considered walking a couple more hours so they could reach there instead of sleeping outdoors again. Not that he disliked camping with his new friends, but he had to admit, the thought of a mattress as opposed to a sleeping bag was ultimately more appealing. But he and the twins knew it wouldn't be that safe, trekking out while it was dark, so in the end, the three of them took a small detour towards some nearby trees, which looked over a small lake.

As they began setting up their dwellings for the night, Rio and Ryoga let out their Pokémon, to let them spend some time out of their Pokéballs. Durbe watched in amusement as Ryoga let his Magikarp and Greninja out at the lake, Ryoga's Magikarp splashing around happily. Three of his other Pokémon - Gallade, Garchomp, and Gliscor - were meandering around, checking out their surroundings.

Rio's Pokémon, on the other hand, were all staying by her for the most part. Her Alolan Vulpix was by her side as she was setting up her sleeping bag, and her Swablu and Weavile were in a nearby tree, Swablu being perched on a branch, and Weavile being high up, resting its back against the main part of the tree, while it sat on a thick branch. Her Kirlia was tailing Ryoga's Gallade, and her Froslass was swaying between the trees, presumably keeping an eye out for anything that could be perceived as a danger.

Durbe took it upon himself to do the same, letting out his Espurr, and Mach, a shiny Rapidash. Both Pokémon looked at him curiously, before Durbe spoke. "Go on, it's alright."

Mach was fairly quick to venture out on his own, lazily trotting a few paces away and stretching his legs. Espurr, on the other hand, totted over to Durbe, resting a paw on his pant leg. Durbe laughed gently, and nodded down at Espurr. "Ok, ok. You can stick with me." He leaned down slightly then, and whispered, "But stick close, ok? Let's not get you too close to Rio." Espurr nodded in return, the pair of them knowing about Rio's dislike of cat Pokémon.

As the three teens finished setting up their camp for the evening, Durbe noticed something off about the count of their Pokémon. He himself only had Mach and Espurr, a total of two Pokémon. Rio had her five, but at one point shortly after the three began traveling together, Ryoga had mentioned having a full team of Pokémon. So why was Durbe only counting five Pokémon from him? Stealing a glace over to Ryoga, who was settling his backpack by a tree next to his sleeping bag, Durbe counted the number of Pokéballs around his belt. Upon counting six, Durbe blinked, a look of confusion on his face.

"Hey, Ryoga."

Ryoga stood up straight at the sound of Durbe's voice, looking over to the other young man. "What?"

Durbe nodded in Ryoga's direction, looking towards his belt. "Don't you have a full team? Why keep one in its Pokéball?"

Ryoga looked a little hesitant, and looked down at his belt, frowning slightly. "I..." He folded his arms, shrugging slightly. "I'd just rather not let it out just yet."

A look of concern overcame Durbe, and his gaze traveled up to meet Ryoga's. "Is something wrong?" Espurr began toddling over to Ryoga at this point, though the two males kept talking.

"Nothing's wrong, Durbe, I just don't want to let this Pokémon out right now."

"Listen, if it's hurt or something, I have some berries and whatnot to help heal it."

"Durbe--"

The flash of light that accompanied a Pokémon being let out of it's Pokéball shone brightly from Ryoga's waist, as a decently large shadow made itself known in the water. Ryoga went wide-eyed as he looked down to his waist, only to find Espurr at his feet, the small, bipedal feline having used a small portion of its psychic energy to click open the Pokéball that housed his last Pokémon.

All the while this was happening, Rio was merely watching her two companions interact, and watched as Espurr had made its way to Ryoga, letting Ryoga's last Pokémon out of its Pokéball. She, as well as Durbe, looked to the water to see the large shadow that was now present. As Ryoga fumbled to get the Pokéball off of his belt in a hasty attempt to return his Pokémon, Rio approached the lake, and playfully called out, "Sharpedo!"

No sooner than she did that, a pointed purple dorsal fin poked out of the water, more and more of it emerging until the face of a purple Sharpedo with a yellow 'X' on its nose popped out of the water, a happy look gracing the shark Pokémon's face.

"A Sharpedo?" Durbe asked, walking closer to the lake. "I've never seen one in person before."

As Durbe approached the lake, Ryoga's Sharpedo stopped smiling, and glared pointedly at Durbe. It was enough to make the bespectacled male stop in his tracks, before Rio laughed and spoke to Sharpedo again. "Don't worry about him, Sharpedo. Durbe's a friend."

Sharpedo's eyes glanced from Rio, to Durbe, back to Rio again, before relaxing somewhat, allowing Durbe to step closer to the lake. Though as Durbe did, something 'clicked' in his mind. "Wait a second..." He looked over to Ryoga then, and spoke. "This is a shiny Sharpedo...?"

Ryoga, who had been trying to grab at his Sharpedo's Pokéball as it floated in the air thanks to Espurr playing with it using its psychic powers, turned to face Durbe, his lips forming a thin line. "..Yeah."

Durbe looked over Sharpedo once more, kneeling down by the lake as he watched Ryoga's Magikarp happily swam circles around Sharpedo. "I had no clue you also had a shiny Pokémon."

"Ever since coming to Kanto, I try not to flaunt him around." Ryoga murmured, trying once again to grab Sharpedo's Pokéball out of the air. He sighed as Espurr raised the Pokéball high above his head, then watched as the small feline Pokémon made its way to Durbe with Sharpedo's Pokéball. "As much as I love beating the crap out of some Team Rocket idiots, I don't want to lose my Sharpedo to them."

Durbe stood up as he watched Espurr trot over, Espurr mewling and tugging on Durbe's pants leg, plopping the Pokéball in his hands. Kneeling down, Durbe used one hand to pet Espurr's head before gently scolding it against teasing Ryoga like that. He then stood back up, looking at the Pokéball in his hand before looking back to Ryoga. "How long have you had your Sharpedo?"

"Sharpedo was actually my brother's first Pokémon." Rio piped up, taking her eyes off Ryoga's Pokémon in the lake to face Durbe and her brother. At this point, Espurr took the time to walk away from the three trainers, instead going to head towards Mach.

"It was a Carvanha back then." Ryoga explained, motioning for Durbe to toss the Pokéball back at him. Durbe complied, tossing the Pokéball in the air, Ryoga catching it with ease. "I fished alot back home in Hoenn. If I wasn't watching battles on TV or making plans for what I wanted my team to be for when I was finally old enough to be a trainer, I was fishing in the river by my parent's house."

"Every day, he'd fish up all sorts of Pokémon." Rio said, folding her arms. "But because he wasn't a certified trainer yet, he'd have to release them back into the water."

"Until one day," Ryoga smirked, "I reeled in a weird colored Carvanha. Instead of being dark blue and red, it was light blue and green. Not only that, but it was considerably smaller than the average Carvanha. I called my parents, thinking it was sick, but when my father came out to help me, he had me catch it, and said that it was a rare Pokémon, a shiny Pokémon."

"Wow..." Durbe muttered. "So, Sharpedo's been with you since the very beginning."

"Yep." Ryoga nodded, folding his arms as well. "From Hoenn, to Alola, to here. Unfortunately, with Team Rocket being known for stealing other people's Pokémon, I haven't been too fond of letting Sharpedo out when not in a safe area, like a Pokémon center, or a gym."

"I see." Durbe said, looking over to Mach, the equine Pokémon busy entertaining Espurr. "Perhaps I've been too relaxed with letting Mach out so often when we're on the road. I've been so used to him being out on the ranch all the time, that I didn't stop to consider the negative ramifications of him being exposed so much while traveling." A bit of an upset look came over him then. "I don't want to risk Will and Brooks taking him like they constantly tried to at the ranch."

Both twins blinked that the names, them sounding unfamiliar.

"Who are Will and Brooks?" Rio asked.

"The Team Rocket grunts you guys ran into the day we met." Durbe clarified, "Brooks was the female grunt, tall and skinny with short pink hair. Will was the male grunt, short and stocky with lime green hair."

"You actually know their names?" Ryoga asked, an amused look on his face.

"They've come after Mach so many times, my moms and I had heard them call each other by name before."

"Well, regardless of whatever those punks' names are," Ryoga continued, walking over to Durbe, unfolding his arms and placing one hand on Durbe's shoulder. "You shouldn't feel bad about thinking you've been 'too relaxed'. You and Mach are strong together, you've been able to defend yourselves from them." Ryoga gave a cocky smirk then, using the thumb on his spare hand to point at himself. "And besides, you've got me and Rio in your corner. We've got your back no matter what."

Durbe smiled at that, and nodded. "Thanks, Ryoga. I appreciate it."

Ryoga took his hand off of Durbe's shoulder then and began to walk to the lake, looking over his Sharpedo. "I suppose I could be a be more relaxed myself, huh buddy?" His response was a tooth-filled grin from his Sharpedo. "Alright then. You can spend the night in the lake with Magikarp and Greninja."

"I've got your back too, you know." Durbe said, smiling gently. "Mach and I will help you and Rio protect Sharpedo, too."

The two young men shared a look, and Rio smiled herself. "Well, I don't know about you guys," she began, walking in between the both of them and towards their campsite. "But it's about time we get dinner started."

At the mention of dinner, Durbe's stomach growled, and he let out an embarrassed chuckle. "Here, I'll help, Rio."

"I'll keep an eye on the Pokémon, then." Ryoga said, beginning to walk out to where his Gallade and Rio's Kirlia were.

With that, the three trainers took up their respective jobs for the evening, and Durbe couldn't have been more appreciative of his new friends.

[catsafarithewriter]

Prompt 13: "When I say ‘go’, run. Run and don’t look back. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”

A/N: Heya so, reason number 3008 why I’ve been slow on this was distraction caused by the wonderful little series Emara, an animated series on YouTube about a cybernetic superheroine and, naturally, I decided to grab some of my favourite bits and apply it to a TCR setting. 

Basic premise: Baron is a Creation, Haru is… part Creation, for reasons that haven’t been revealed, they’ve worked alongside each other as superheroes for a while now (Haru going by Demeter, for several reasons) but there’s definitely some ulterior motives going on. 

I have a lot more ideas for this AU, so I’m hoping to carry it on/expand it. 

This ended up being super long… sorry! (Like… 3.5K words long)

EDIT: If you enjoyed this, please check out the full fic it became: Do Creations Dream of Clockwork Sheep? FFNET link here and AO3 link here! 

No one was quite sure where Creations came from.

Haru had spent the better part of a year gaining the trustof one, and she still couldn’t answer that. She hadn’t even been sure that theycould blend in with human society until she met Baron.

Humbert.

Baron.

Life had been so much simpler before discovering thatHumbert von Gikkingen, tea shop owner and local busybody, and Baron,self-proclaimed superhero Creation, were one and the same.

She looked to Baron now and tried to see somethingrecognisable. Beyond the feline features and wooden skin hidden behind the fur,there was little to be identified from the human she had thought she’d known.Only his eyes retained their original colour, and even they were changed;rounded and catlike and glimmering like gems. She wondered if, like his skin,his eyes were inorganic too. If, if she touched them, she would feel stone.

It had been easier when he had just been Baron.

What people didknow about Creations was limited, but there were some concrete facts. Creationswere magic. They had mostly inorganic forms – usually stone or wood, but notlimited to either – and were hardier and longer-lived than your average person.

And they certainly didn’t bleed.

Haru watched the red seeping through Baron’s jacket and triedvery hard to believe that. They didn’t bleed and they didn’t get hurt and theycertainly didn’t die on her watch. She helped Baron down to the floor behindthe desk, her hand brushing against the wound and, oh god, it certainly felt like blood. A faint tang of iron inthe air told her it smelt like blood too.

“I thought you were all wood except for the fur,” shewhispered coarsely, trying and only partly succeeding in hiding the horror.“How are you bleeding?”

Baron chuckled, and the chuckle turned into a wince. “Whatcan I say? I like finding new ways to surprise you, Miss Demeter.”

“What I’d like isfor you to shut up and try not to bleed out.”

“How about one out of two?”

“Apparently you can’t do either. How attached are you toyour jacket?”

“Is this a choice between dying and my jacket? Because myimpeccable fashion sense only goes so far.”

“I’ll take that as a negative,” Haru said, and she tore theblood-soaked jacket away to reveal the wound beneath. “Fuck.”

Baron, very carefully, didn’t look down. “That doesn’t soundencouraging.”

Haru folded up the ruined jacket and pressed it into hishand. “Keep that against the wound. Also, again: How are you bleeding?” Haru repeated. And why did there have to be so much? “Aren’t you meant to be madeof wood? Where is the blood even comingfrom?”

Baron was breathing shallowly now, his eyes diluting. “Theelectric shock – I believe it’s disrupted my magic. Can’t… can’t revert back toinorganic state.” His glassy eyes met hers with some difficulty, and heconjured up a watery smile. “But don’t tell anyone – can’t let people know I goall to pieces at a little electricity.”

Haru struggled to return the smile. If Macavity knew it wasthat easy to disrupt Creation magic… the amount that weakness alone would beworth… “How do we stop it?” she asked instead.

“It’ll wear off. In time.”

“We don’t have time. We have a mutant Creation trying to eatus.”

“When you put it like that,it sounds so unwinnable.”

“Well then, how do you suggest we stop it?” Haru snapped.“We have one crazed Creation… thingrampaging the building, you bleeding out, and I…” She finally registered thefaint but insistent beeping trying valiantly to be heard over the cacophony ofchaos on the floor below. “Oh no.” She twisted to one side and pulled up thehem of her trousers to see the light on her artificial legs fade. The strengthin her limbs gave way and she caught the edge of the desk to avoid collapsingentirely. “Oh shit.”

“Demeter?”

Haru lowered herself down. Gentle hysteria and of course this would happen nowskittered on the corner of her mind. She took a shaky breath. “And my legs havejust run out of juice. Fantastic.Perfect time to forget to bring a recharger. I don’t suppose you have one ofyour patented improvised plans in progress, do you?”

“I sling you over my shoulder and make a run for it?”

The crashing got closer. The monster Creation was workingits way up through the building and it sounded like their floor was next on theagenda.

“That would be tempting if you could even support yourself.So that’s Plan A. What’s Plan B? I sling you over my shoulder and haul us out?”

“Just one. Where do you get the magic to recharge yourlegs?”

“What?”

“Only,” and Baron sounded casual in the way that people dowhen they’ve caught someone out in a lie, “all naturally… occurring Creations,even part Creations, generate theirown magic.” Those infuriatingly contradicting gemstone eyes met Haru’s. “So whatare you?”

She held his gaze at the question she had been avoiding formonths now. Macavity supplied her the magic for her part-Creation legs, legssupplied by the same organisation that Macavity ran, but she had never receiveda straight answer for where either came from. She set her mouth in a thin line.“Right now, I’m stuck in the same situation as you. We need a plan.”

He didn’t look away. If he thought she would break down andadmit everything, then he hadn’t been paying attention these last elevenmonths. He gave a tiny nod. Not accepting her answer, but setting aside thedeceit for now. “Apart from the legs, how are you coping?” he asked. “Are youhurt?”

“I hurt like hell everywhere. But, no,” Haru added. “Nothingserious.”

Another nod. Another decision made. “Good. That’s… good.Then you should run for it before the monster Creation reaches us.”

“Weren’t you listening? My legs–” She inhaled sharply asBaron curled a hand around her ankle and a jolt of unfamiliar magic shotthrough her. Feeling flooded her limbs, her metal half-Creation legs sparkingwith white light before settling back to their usual gentle glow. “Baron? Whatdid you–”

“You needed magic. I gave you magic.” He leant back againstthe desk, his eyes dimmed in a way that was neither human nor gemstone. Helifted a hand from his side, despite the hiss of warning from Haru, and gavethat ever-familiar chuckle. “Well, would you look at that? It stopped thebleeding.”

“In the same way that removing all your blood would, yes,”Haru retorted. She shuffled closer and saw that the bloodied wound was scarredwood now. “Baron,” she said, “what does it mean when your fur is just paint?”

Baron’s breathing was definitely hollow now, like windrattling through dead branches. “It means I’m getting dangerously close tooverspending my magic budget.”

“How do we stop it?”

“You don’t. I usually sleep it off before…”

A spasm ricocheted through him and he gasped, a long andhollow gasp, and painted fur stole along his jawline. His fur – real fur, theonly luxury of the illusion of life he usually afforded – sank down, to bereplaced with paint strokes and grainlines.

“Baron?! Before? Before what?”

“Before I automatically revert,” he managed. His words cameout clumsy, like he was fighting around a numbed mouth. His hand found Haru’sand gripped it. She could feel his wooden skin beneath his glove. It felt soempty. “You need to go, before it reaches us.”

“No! I’m not leaving you.”

“The magic in your legs won’t last long before it runs out.You can’t get us both out of here.”

Haru thought back to the chalk pen and symbols she’d beentaught. To confess it now would reveal her work alongside the Cat Kingdom –official portal security identification only – but if it was between that and leaving Baron to die…

“Actually, I have a better idea.”

And that, naturally, was when the monster Creation burstthrough.

In her time working alongside Baron, Haru hadn’t really metmany Creations. Most, she assumed, kept to themselves and didn’t go out onvigilante runs, but even she could tell that there was something… off about this one. It wasn’t just thefact that it was giant, pulled out of proportion of anything approaching human,or the way it lumbered like a newborn calf, if newborn calves were in the habitof being eight feet tall bipedal monstrosities with teeth that clattered likethe unholy offspring between a chainsaw and a meat grinder. It probably wasn’teven only the way magic pulsed out from it, bleeding, tainted, like pus from aninfected wound. There was just something innately… wrong about it.

Even Haru’s first instinct to fight faltered as the creaturepulled itself up through the wreckage in the floor. “Baron. What kind ofCreation is that?”

“The monster type.”

“You don’t have a clue, do you?”

Baron coughed. “I told you; it’s a monster. Now hurry andrun before it eats you.”

“Like hell I’m doing that.” Haru brought herself to herfeet, gingerly testing her legs. Baron had been right; his magic refillwouldn’t last long. She could already feel the foreign energy depleting.

Guess she had to make it count then.

“Hey! Hey, yeah, you! Big and ugly!”

Those luminous eyes turned to her. No pupil. Why did it haveno pupil? Wasn’t it nightmare-inducing enough without? She heard Baron curse,but he wasn’t in any state to stop her exceptionally foolish plan.

“You hungry? Yeah! Then come and get me!” She threwsomething from the nearest desk for good measure – a stapler, it turned out tobe – and made a run for the window. For a moment, she heard no sound of pursuitand almost slowed to glance back to make sure she was being followed, when thefloor shook and something snagged the tails of her coat.

She spun, shaking the jacket off and kept moving. The windowneared and she leapt, twisting her legs up to shatter the glass, and twistingfurther to grab the ledge before she could fall.

A grotesque hand loomed through the window and snatched atempty air.

Haru pulled herself along, grabbing the sill of the window’sunshattered neighbour and digging her toes into the brickwork. “Come on, comeon, come on…” she murmured.

The hand retreated and silence settled. It hadn’t been enough.

Maybe she should have thrown two staplers.

Then the hand reappeared – two hands, a head, those eyes, shoulders, and the monsterCreation began to pull itself through the window.

Haru’s plan was working, but suddenly it didn’t seem so great.

It swung one giant hand her way. She leapt up out of reach,scrabbling for a handhold on the wall, and turned back to eye her pursuer.

It didn’t bat an eyelid – probably because it didn’t haveany – and sunk its claws into the wall beneath her. It released its steady holdon the window frame. It started to swing upwards, hand going for the ledgeabove, and Haru dropped.

She propelled herself down, feet first, burning through theborrowed magic as she shifted her feet into forms of spikes, and plummeted theminto the monster’s face.

There was no blood. She didn’t even feel the spikes sinkinto its sorry excuse for skin, but it howled, and those clattering, grindingteeth even gave pause, and its hold on the building slipped.

It slipped.

And it fell.

It fell and Haru was falling too. She grasped for theshattered windowsill – caught it, slipped, drew blood, and carried on falling –and then her whole body went taut as something grabbed her wrist.

Baron leant out of the window, his face more wood than furnow, but his hold sure. His mouth attempted a smile, but only one side moved.“And where do you think you’re going, Miss Demeter?”

“Up,” she gasped. “Pull me up!”

“As you wish.” Another hand joined the first, the fingerscurling uneasily around her arms – and if Haru listened, she was sure she couldhear the creak of wooden joints – but once it was secure, he hauled her inside.

She tumbled to the floor and immediately pulled herself backto the window. Baron joined her a moment later and they both admired her work.

“Do you think that worked?” Haru asked. “Is it dead?” Itwasn’t moving but, again, there was no blood.

“I think it’s stopped it for now,” Baron answered. Hestarted to move away from the window, but hesitated when Haru continued towatch. “Demeter?”

Among the crowds rapidly surrounding the fallen giant werepeople in dark grey suits. People who moved with a kind of uncanny grace amongthe frantic crowds. One man in particular moved towards the building, tall andgaunt, and turned his sunken eyes up to the destroyed floor.

Haru’s arms were shaking. She let them drop, and she droppedwith them, sinking down to the carpeted floor with no pretence of grace.“They’re coming.”

Baron continued to watch the crowds below. Haru wondered ifhe noticed the outliers amongst the onlookers, knew what they came for.Probably not. They were good at avoiding such attention. “Who?” he asked. “Thepolice? It’ll take them a little time to work their way up through the carnageour monster friend left, who knows, they might even want to congratulate us,for once–”

“No.” Haru exhaled slowly. Her legs were dead. Again.“They’re coming for you. They know you’ll be weak after that.”

“Who?” And this time there was a wariness in his question,like he knew he wouldn’t like the answer. “Who, Demeter?”

She met his gaze. Held it. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why not–”

“Just like I can’t tell you that they’re coming for you. Orthat you should run.”

“Then we should both flee–”

Haru laughed. Short and harsh and more bitter than she hadmeant. “I’m not going anywhere, Baron. Not with these legs.” She grabbed hishand as he reached out. “And you’re not going to repeat your little trick fromearlier. I saw how much it took out of you. You can’t do it again.”

“Demeter, look at me,” Baron said. “I can barely stand – Icouldn’t help when the monster Creation came back for round two, and I couldbarely make it to the window in time to catch you. You’re not the only onewho’s in no fit state to run. But – if I do this – you’re the only one whostands a chance of getting out of here.”

“And that’s where you’d be wrong. Move.”

Baron hesitated, but complied, shuffling away from her. Shepulled out a chalk pen from her pocket, not missing Baron’s raised eyebrow atthe strange gem shimmering at the end. As best she could with her dormant legs,she drew a circle into the floor around her, filling the outer rim with symbolsthat had been carved well into her memory. Once done, she motioned to Baron.“Help me up.”

He did so, carefully avoiding the chalk lines. “What isthis?”

“Teleportation circle. To the Cat Kingdom.”

He inhaled sharply. “Only official portal codes can makethat jump.”

“I know.” She met his gaze, daring him to add anything else.He did not. “This one should go to the edge of the kingdom, to a safe housethat even- that nobody knows about. It only takes one at a time, so take aseat.”

“Me? But you–”

She held up the pens bejewelled end. “Portal crystal codedspecifically to me. You can’t work it, and no other magic will trigger thisportal. Go and don’t look back. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”

He met her gaze. His eyes were entirely dulled now and shewondered if he could even see. But he nodded and gently lowered her to thefloor. “Right behind me,” he echoed.

“Like always,” she lied, and the moment he took to thecentre, she stabbed the portal crystal into the circle and Baron disappeared ina sphere of white light.

The new silence around her felt somehow heavier than thesilence shared between her and Baron, but she tried not to dwell on that.Instead, she dragged herself into the circle’s centre and shakily redrew theblurred lines she left behind. She could hear footsteps ascending their waythrough the building – just one set, getting closer, with a steady and surebeat that she would recognise anywhere – and she struck the circle with thecrystal one last time.

The lines glowed. And then faded. The remnant light in theportal crystal died entirely and the fight melted from Haru’s bones. Bringingthe pen to the light, she could see that a hairline crack ran along the gem.Probably damaged during the fight, and its magic had leaked from it, leavingjust enough for a single journey. “Well,” she said to the empty room, “Itried.”

“Oh, you certain did, Miss Yoshioka.”

She turned her head to see Macavity walk into the room.

The first time Haru met Macavity in his human form, she hadbeen surprised at how real it had seemed. But the more she got to know him, themore she realised you could take the cat out of the Cat Kingdom, but you can’ttake the Cat Kingdom out of the cat. His (true) feline form was a thin gingertabby with sunken eyes and a swaying, snakelike walk that belied something ofthe predator in him. His human form was tall and gaunt, with those same sunkeneyes, human but no warmer for it, and a stride that never broke its internalrhythm.

“Now, we seem to be missing one Creation, don’t you think?”he asked.

“What? Was big and ugly down there not enough for you?” Harureturned, motioning weakly to the window. “What’s a lady gotta do around hereto get some recognition?”

“You were meant to bring Baron in.”

“And I would have done, but it’s a little difficult whenones legs run out of battery.” She patted her inactive calves for emphasis andtried not to let Macavity see the fear behind her eyes. She had gone againsteverything she’d been ordered, every priority and rule set out before her, andthe only thing she had going for her right now was that Macavity hadn’tactually seen her release Baron.

“So I see. Such a shame.” Macavity approached and squatteddown at the edge of her circle, those shadowed eyes falling level with Haru’s. “And,tell me, what kind of state was Baron in after your little spat with the rogueCreation? He didn’t look like he was doing too well when he hauled you backinside. How much magic did he have left?”

“More than I did,” Haru said, biting the inside of her mouthto keep herself from saying anything she would regret. “Look, if I could havestopped him, don’t you think I would have?”

Those sunken eyes didn’t blink. “Would you?”

“Isn’t that my mission?” Haru retorted. “What do you wanthim for, anyway? You never told me that.”

“That’s need to know information, Miss Yoshioka. Need toknow. And you don’t. However, what I needto know is where Baron went next and what, exactly, you are doing with thisfailed attempt at a teleportation circle.” Those eyes narrowed further. “I hopeyou weren’t thinking of running away.”

Failed. He thought she’d failed.Small mercies. She kept her gaze level and told the closest thing to truth shedared. “He’s going to the Cat Kingdom.”

Macavity’s gaze flickered, again, to the chalk circle. Somethingalmost approaching surprise flashed across his face. “The Cat Kingdom?” heechoed.

“Said he was looking for answers.” She watched thefaux-human’s face for any sign that she was hitting the right mark, but therewas nothing. “Since magic originated from the Cat Kingdom in the first place,and Creations are made of magic, or something. It must have made sense to him.I was going to the Cat Kingdom to warn them.”

A moment passed.

Two.

Macavity nodded, accepting her explanation – for now. He straightenedback up, stepping away from Haru. “Well, Miss Yoshioka, I think you’ve done allyou can for today. We’ll get you scooted back home and recharged and we’ll letyou know when you’ll be dropping by the Cat Kingdom to track down our mutualfriend. That sound good?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, good.”

He started for the door, where more people in dark suitsstood waiting. Haru hadn’t noticed them before now.

“Sir?” she asked. “You never told me where the magic for mylegs come from either.”

That gaunt face tilted back, eyes glimmering. “Need to know,Miss Yoshioka. Need to know.”

SHAMELESS EDIT: If you enjoyed this, please check out the full fic it became: Do Creations Dream of Clockwork Sheep? FFNET link here and AO3 link here!

[yarunaningen]

 🚀—“Jｏｉｎ ｗｉｔｈ ｙｅｓｔｅｒｄａｙ'ｓ ｆｏｅ ｔｏ ｓｍａｓｈ ｆａｔｅ,

                                                        💫 — ａｎｄ ｇｒａｂ ｔｏｍｏｒｒｏｗ'ｓ ｐａｔｈ

                                                                                 ｗｉｔｈ ｏｕｒ ｏｗｎ ｈａｎｄｓ!”  

      This was his best chance.

  A pair of viridescent eyes, inhuman and predatory - observed unsuspecting prey in the form of a slender, fair-faced Human who moved a short distance away. The blond kept his pace removed; his presence, innocuous even if detectable.

  He had once been an accomplished hunter of Humankind, after all. Lauded, with numerous commendations. Though he’d never imagined that he would return to these instincts. However, divergent from the bloodstained path that had taken him to this point, Viral had no intention of killing the young fellow he watched. In fact, he preferred not to commit any harm at all... he just needed a guide. And it was necessary that such a guide be Human. 

  Viral’s arrival to this predicament came with a rough landing, and a harsh introduction to the political unrest that burdened so many. Just hours prior, he’d been analyzing data from within his personal craft, a bipedal mecha he called Enki.  An astral phenomenon had caught the eye of the intrepid crew of the Chouginga Daigurren, during a routine sweep of a new sector of space. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before his proximity to the storm’s center disrupted his communications and controls. Moments later, a surge of energy swept both mecha and pilot into a temporal current, one that spat them out into the atmosphere of a distant, unknown world.

  The resilient mecha absorbed most of the impact to the planet’s surface; the damage amassed from the astral storm and and the subsequent fall was critical. Viral’s body, engineered for survival, escaped an otherwise probable death. And, as his bones and tissue knitted back together, he worked to conceal Enki’s wreckage from sight with the flora and landscape available along the tiny, deserted little island they’d crashed upon.  

  Stranded on an unfamiliar world, he greatly needed information. And to repair Enki, he needed materials and tools. The island’s resources were insufficient for both. He would have to secure a method of transportation in order to leave the island - and it would come, at the cost of a good faith.

  The island soon received another set of visitors, a group of Fishmen who responded to Viral’s non-Human features with more favor than the blond could have anticipated. They tended to his wounds, in spite of his protests - and even assisted in covering what they believed to be the components of Viral’s ship, still being built. Though the characteristics were rather understated in comparison to his kin, and though his chronological age was rather advanced, the group of Fishmen eagerly took to calling him the ‘tiger-shark kid.”

   They provided Viral’s initial insight to the world scene. For them, the world was even more murky than pirates, marines, and civilians. They had fled to the island after banding together for a rescue mission. It was through their well-meaning, if radicalized perspective that Viral learned of the hostility - objectification, even, suffered by Fishmen at the hands of Humans. The conflict was much older than their recent efforts to rescue a mermaid relative. They had been successful, but they had lost two friends in the fray. Though he was reluctant to harbor animosity in his heart, again, Viral’s was admittedly swayed by their tale, and he divulged some of his own experiences. - the tribulation, and the more favorable times.      

   They had ferried him from the island, and Viral’s tactical neutrality was tested when the ship came under fire by the same traders who had sought to sell the mermaid mentioned prior. Amidst the canon fire and the indomitable waves, they had been separated, and each had insisted that Viral escape and secure his own safety before worrying over them. The traders departed after a minimal effort to search the ship’s listless, floating debris. And so too, did Viral search for any signs of the four Fishmen. When he couldn’t find a trace, he hoped that it was an assurance of their survival and escape.   

 Perhaps the harrowing situation from the night before was too fresh on his mind; perhaps why he could look at the Human at the distance with such dispassionate determination. There were numerous worlds, with countless races populating them. Perhaps on this one, Humans were less evolved than the individuals with which he was used to interacting. Perhaps they were as his people once were - warring and heedless of the pain they brought others. He was in no position to play at optimism...

  In an instant, he saw his opportunity. Moving like a shaft of sunlight across the shadows of an imposing building, he reached to encircle both of Yuki’s wrists (if successfully captured, they would so easily fit within the palm of just one of his massive paw-hands.) The young Human’s chest would be forced against the wall, with the Beastman’s weight bracing him in place. As an added caution, he was poised to clasp a hand across the Human’s mouth and jaw, if the event drew too loud an exclamation from him.

    ❝Don’t make a scene,  Ningen.  I just need to borrow you for a bit. Do you know your way around a sailing ship? Just nod, if so. Don’t you dare to raise your voice.❞

   Taking a prisoner grated against his sense of honor; but he would allow for this transgression if only out of reverence for the concern and goodwill that his Fishmen rescuers extended. If he could repair Enki without harm coming to himself or this Human, then he could redeem this primitive effort at hand.

                               🐾—ɪ'ᴍ ʜᴇʀᴇ ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜsᴇ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ʜᴇʀᴇ ,                                         ‘ǝɹǝɥ ǝɹ'noʎ ǝsnɐɔǝb ǝɹǝɥ ɯ'I

                                                       ʏᴏᴜ'ᴠᴇ ɢᴏᴛ ᴀ ᴘʀᴏʙʟᴇᴍ ɴᴏᴡ!”                                                                 “!ʍon ɯǝןboɹd ɐ ʇoƃ ǝʌ'noʎ

[tmnt-spear-verse]

Spear-Verse: Hamato Splinter

He is an enigma; father of four turtle sons, and later a human daughter— and later still perhaps a ‘father-in-law’ of sorts to a reckless human man; their sensei, and the unintentional focal point of his unusual family. He knows that without his existence then his family would not be as it is, would not have taken the shape it has. Without him, his daughter would never have met his sons and the last of their clan might not have met any of them. He knows this and has long since mulled over the thought and come to the realization that without his role in things, those who are most dear to him may never have become the family they are. How ironic then that he is uncertain about his origins, which truth is the truth, and which life was his life before the mutation— almost as if whoever he had been before his mutation was a figment of imagination only given a semblance of form and solidified through a catastrophic accident.

Hamato Splinter does not know who he was. Was he Hamato Yoshi? Or Hamato Yoshi’s rat, Splinter? Or was he somehow both? He doesn’t know. His mind during and after the mutation was a confusing swirl of incoherence and wildly conflicting impulses, with images, memories, and sense fragments flickering and dissolving into so much smoke whenever he tried to grasp them. It was easier at that time, so early on, to focus on a task (like Hamato Yoshi would) than to think— even if practicality (like Splinter’s) pulled at him to only look after himself. The turtles he ended up in the sewer with needed him, they were too small and too young to be on their own, they could have been picked off by predators, they were defenseless, he had to (had to?) had to protect them. But there had been the sewer, the dark, the unfamiliar— no, leaving them hadn’t been an option (it was the sensible option, no it was the wrong option, it wasn’t an option) —and no certainty about food or shelter. (Food? Shelter? Leaving them was practical—no, it was wrong. Take them, protect them, they were defenseless, they needed him.) There had been some vague awareness in his mind at the time that if he’d left them they wouldn’t have been able to get out of the sewer (before he knew just how drastic their physical changes would be after the ooze) and they would likely have died due to not being able to find food, but even though it had been a deciding factor in his (his? their?) mind it had been so far in his mental background that he hadn’t consciously processed it.

All he had really been able to recall at that moment was that something (something) terrible had happened, he was no longer home, he was in the dark (in the sewer), he couldn’t go home (where was home?) and there was no going back, but the small (turtles) needed him. Needed him? Needed them. Needed him. And the ooze, the sensation of it hitting his— skin? fur? —before he fell and landed in the dark near the small things (turtles) also covered in glowing green green green… and they needed him. If he was alone, they were more so. He… whatever he was… could survive, could figure out how to survive on his own. They couldn’t. Too young, far too young— so they were his.

He had been in a haze, but even with the confused jumble his mind had been at the time he could still recall the physical sensations of rolling an empty coffee can toward them, picking them up one by one and swiping off as much of the ooze as he could before putting them in the can, the eventual ache of his jaws as he tugged the can after himself (rolling it wasn’t an option, they could have gotten hurt— they could have gotten hurt?— yes, they could have gotten hurt, you don’t shake turtles in a coffee can damn it) to a more secure location (hands— useful hands, bigger hands —would have been helpful, but no his were too small). Safety, shelter, then food. And keeping the sma- turtles safe. Keeping them safe was more important than anything. Something bad had happened to carry them all into the sewer, there were bad and dangerous things (people?) in the world and might still be there and he/they/he (he? he) had to keep them safe. When he finally slept, with the coffee can safely upright so the turtles couldn’t go anywhere, it was with the worst headache he (Yoshi? Splinter? he?) had ever experienced.

The next day, or whenever it was that he’d woken up, had turned out not to be any less confusing. The coffee can looked much smaller than he’d remembered it being and where it had been big enough to keep the turtles contained without budging prior to his sleep, after waking it had been rattling ominously, in danger of tipping over. On seeing that the four of them were double the size they had been, it was fitting that his first real coherent thought had been along the lines of ‘This is not natural.’ And yet… they needed him. Too young, too small to be on their own. Bigger, but too small. And he had been bigger too. They didn’t stay in the can for long and he did his best to keep them close.

Days of rapid change followed, increasing clarity and increasing size, and some of the vague memories flitting through his mind became a bit easier to grasp— and along with it the realization that the turtles (his turtles) needed names. Names. Names were important, like his own, like— wait. Hamato. Hamato yes, but… Splint-er? Yoshi? Splinter? …Splinter? Yoshi? Spl— who had he been? It had almost been enough to set off another headache, but he’d resolutely shoved his confusion aside in favor of focusing on his turtles. They were bigger, they were smarter, and they were faster than they had been. They might be like him, words waiting to swirl in their minds, shaping and clarifying the world around them. They needed names. His own could wait. And memories… Almost like a message lighting the way, he had suddenly remembered a… a book… on art. Art classics. No, art history. And the feel of his/not his/his/not his/his? hands on the pages as he— Yoshi— studied the text with interest and… he knew what to name them. The calmest one, the one who tried to keep the others close to him, was Leonardo. The irritable one, the one who kept trying to bite— him as well as the other turtles— and charge off regularly, was Raphael. The curious one, the one determined to look at things even if it meant he had to climb to places he couldn’t easily reach, was Donatello. And the playful one, the one who happily chirped at him and started pouncing on his tail and on the other turtles’ shells, was Michelangelo. And they were… his turtles? His sons? His sons.

They were his sons and he was their… father? grandfather? father? grandfather? father and grandfather? Splinter or Yoshi, Yoshi or Splinter—who had he been? If the turtles were his sons then Splinter was Yoshi’s son, which would make Yoshi their grandfather— but was he Yoshi or Splinter? If he was Yoshi, then what happened to their… brother? father? brother? If he was Splinter, then what happened to their grandfather and why was he… why did he remember… why did he have some of Yoshi’s memories? And the cage— warm, home, safeplace— why could he remember that so clearly if he was Yoshi? Was he (could he be?)—was he both? (both? both?) Rat and human (human and rat)? Rat imprinted on human, human imprinted on rat, rat/human/rat/human/rat/human/rat but also human also rat? He’d had to put the brakes on that train of thought, too easy to provoke another painful headache in his confusion— and he couldn’t let on to his sons that there was something wrong with him. They were too young, they needed him, they couldn’t understand if he fell apart, they weren’t equipped to handle that— and he was their father. He would NOT lay that burden on them. He would solve his problems on his own, or at least what he could, and then he would put off the rest of it until he was better equipped to address those remaining problems, but he would not let his problems affect his sons.

Deciding that granted him a certain amount of clarity; he didn’t know who he had been, which truth was the truth for whatever he had been before the accident, but when it came to looking after his sons he didn’t need to. Knowing exactly what the truth was of whatever he’d been before mattered comparatively little when he needed to make certain they had shelter, a safe place to sleep, and food that wouldn’t make them sick. So, not knowing whether it was accurate or not but choosing to let his (bipedal rat) form dictate his name, he chose to go by ‘Splinter’. It helped soothe his frustrated self-questioning to know that if he was Splinter it was accurate, and if he was Yoshi then it was in respectful memory of Splinter. Confusing still, yes, but more tolerable than the self-interrogation that got him nowhere with only a headache to show for it. Letting go of that need for an answer had also made it easier for him to pay attention to whatever was occurring in a given moment.

He didn’t know when he started speaking to them, if he had even noticed a change in the structure of his throat or jaw that made it possible for him to, or if he’d been subconsciously trying to mutter to them from the start (since they ended up in the sewers, not before, before was too cloudy and confused), but the day he heard a warbled attempt to say ‘otousan’ it came crashing into his awareness full-force. Michelangelo, it turned out, had apparently been frustrated that he’d been lost in his own mind trying to sort out what he’d needed to do and hadn’t noticed his youngest son’s attempts to indicate that he wanted to cuddle in his father’s lap. (He’d been reasonably certain that Michelangelo was the youngest; he was the smallest and there was something about his scent that incomprehensibly said ‘youngest’ to Hamato Splinter’s mind.) And further, Michelangelo had been frustrated enough to attempt the complicated noises his father made. That it got him exactly what he wanted provided the impetus for his brothers to follow his lead and start speaking not long after. Within days all four of them were babbling, interspersed with the chirps and clicks they’d started aiming at him not long after he’d taken them in.

He’d been so proud of them, ecstatic that they were like him and that he could give them someone to speak to and— the realization that he’d needed to teach them to read as soon as they were old enough had hit him with the same level of severity as realizing that they were learning to speak. He’d been more than prepared for the possibility that his sons might not be like him, that they might not be able to grasp language like he did, but the fact that everything seemed to point to them being capable of what he was meant that he’d have to work to meet those unthought-of needs. So many things to plan, to prepare, to carry out to give his sons the best chance he could when there were things— no, people— who might lash out at them on first sight if they weren’t careful… it had been overwhelming. The infuriating question in the back of his mind of whether his own language fluency rested with Yoshi or (unlikely) Splinter hadn’t helped, but he’d shoved it back with yet another reminder to himself that the knowledge source didn’t matter. It only mattered that he had the knowledge and could use it, and that he could pass it on to his sons.

Finding a safe place for them to stay in the long run had been a Kami-sent gift, granting him the peace of mind in knowing that he no longer had to worry about them getting into trouble by drifting too far away from him. The abandoned subway station hadn’t been entirely ideal (broken glass, old garbage, and enough cobwebs and dust to make him feel like he’d never get it out of his fur after all), but as an enclosed space with doors to sub-rooms that could be closed it had been a vast improvement over semi-nomadically inhabiting tunnels that seemed not to get a lot of traffic from technicians (or whoever else might have reason to be in New York’s tunnels). It had also offered the benefit that with a permanent place to stay, or at least permanent enough, it was easier to accumulate the sorts of possessions and necessities that made things far less complicated— such as blankets enough to ensure none of them were too cold.

Even so, it hardly surprised him that his sons preferred to sleep curled up to him— not only did it provide them comfort, but he was also a constantly radiating source of warmth. It also had the added benefit of getting his tired mind to shut off when he was trying to sleep instead of constantly jerking awake in a mild panic that his (too cool for humans—they’re NOT humans, they’re turtles, they’re running WARM for turtles, so shut up and GO TO SLEEP) sons were going to freeze to death before they were even a year old. Or two years old? There was research that needed to be done if he could retrace their steps back to where they’d fallen and find out where the four of them had come from.

It was on that first time he temporarily left them— being certain to close his sons into the room that had become their communal sleeping-space after having carefully told them he would be back (Donatello seemed to have a better understanding of the concept of time, so he felt reasonably certain Donatello could keep the others from panicking over his absence) —that he discovered his odd mix of memories ran deeper than he’d thought. The rat in him made it easy to find his way back to where they had fallen, and the human in him made it easy to work out how to get up to the street and move around without being seen, even with the street lights not giving him anywhere near as much darkness and shadows to work with as he would have preferred. The glass from the tank his sons had been in (the pieces still undisturbed where they’d fallen in the sewer) had just enough scent clinging to the shards still that it gave him some direction, matching up with the smells he hadn’t really processed on that day. It wasn’t the sort of information he would have preferred to rely on, but a ninja (ninja? he was a ninja?) used the tools they had at their disposal. Without thinking, he fell back on almost two decades’ worth of training— whether it was his own or not his own didn’t matter— to trace the path to that specific pet store, to get inside quickly and quietly as soon as he was certain no one was around, to look around for sales records (did they have sales records? …Yes!), and to start looking through the files in the limited light.

And then he hit the first snag in his evening; he had no idea what species they were. Fortunately there were pictures of the animals attached to each sales record (why did that seem unusual to him? maybe they were more invested than most pet stores in making certain animals went to good homes?), but there were enough files that without a specific date or species to look by that he could easily look for far too long and never find it. A different tactic was needed. So he cautiously crept out from the back rooms to roam through the store itself, checking the scents of each tank that had turtles until he found the right smell— red-eared sliders. They’d been red-eared sliders. With that information secured, he returned to the back and tried again. Looking through the most recent sales and working his way back eventually led him to the file, the right one, and with it he found not only the day they’d been sold and the accident had happened (that date had felt like a bolt of lightning in his mind) but also the day they’d hatched— and their birth order. They already looked so different than they had, and the low-lighting hadn’t helped, but the patterns of their shells were as familiar to him now as his own unusual hands. The picture of the four of them on the page, with numbers and arrows pointing to each of them, told him what he’d wanted to know. His instincts had been right; Leonardo, then Raphael, then Donatello, then Michelangelo.

His training told him that he should have just left the record there and kept the memory of it locked in his mind. Leave no trace, leave no sign— and yet, as their father, he couldn’t bring himself to let go of the only picture he might ever have of them. He put everything back in order and left the shop, taking the file with him. It was perhaps fitting, due to his (discovered? re-discovered?) abilities, that on his way back out of the corner of his eye he spotted the brown gi top that would become part of his daily wear on a laundry line. That too went with him, the odd sense of familiarity completely overriding any confusion or guilt he might have had over the action. He had training, and lots of it, buried in his mind— if he could figure out the limits of it then he could also take that knowledge and teach it to his sons when they were old enough, so they could defend themselves.

That was far from his only outing, but it was certainly one of the most stressful due to how young his sons were. On another occasion, a dreamed memory belonging to Hamato Yoshi led him to retrieving his? Yoshi’s? weapons from a storage facility owned by… Who were the utrom? No matter, he knew that the facility wasn’t as guarded as most facilities they owned (???), Hamato Yoshi’s property would have been left undisturbed, and using the correct code on the keypad wouldn’t raise any alarms. Retrieving them had been easy, and when he’d returned home it was all the easier to test himself and the ingrained knowledge he had but wasn’t conscious of.

Picking up the habit of doing katas daily helped things fall into place. There was still an enormous amount of confusion in his mind, but testing his limits and knowledge (and adjusting to the fact that he couldn’t precisely match the memories of the way Hamato Yoshi had moved due to different body designs) helped make things clearer and pointed him toward other pieces of knowledge he’d been unaware he’d had. Meditation helped immensely. Fragments of knowledge and information were easier to take hold of and stitch back together when he was gently probing his mind instead of desperately trying to scrape together anything he remembered. Sometimes what he recovered initially made no sense to him, but trusting that it would in time eliminated a great deal of stress. Of course, there were times his sons pulled him from his meditation— whether by flopping against his side, clambering onto his lap, pouncing on his tail (usually Michelangelo, but the others had their moments), or trying to scale his back— but he could hardly be angry with them over it. How could he be when they made his confusing life worth living? Perhaps he was over-indulgent at times, but it set the tone for how he treated them.

Their lives passed like that for some years: his katas and meditation (often before his sons woke, although they each gradually drifted into joining him— of which Leonardo had been first— by occupying the edges of the room before he began formally teaching them ninjutsu), breakfast, teaching them to read through the supplies he carefully collected (he felt like a downright idiot when he realized he’d been teaching them nothing but Japanese on the day he began to seriously work on how to teach them to read), teaching them English, teaching them math and whatever else he thought they might need, lunch, giving them time to play and explore, taking them with him on his supply runs as needed (once they were old enough), dinner, putting them to bed, repeat. It wasn’t ideal, raising quadruplets in an abandoned train station underground with no one else to speak to could hardly be considered anything close to ideal, but he was happy. And while part of his mind often insisted that he should maintain some level of ‘dignity,’ he often shoved it back— he was their father, ‘dignity’ didn’t matter when it came to parenting his sons through play, training, and affection. It was far more important to him that they knew they were loved; ‘dignity’ was secondary. It made the day he gave them their masks and formally inducted them in as his students in ninjutsu all the more meaningful and heartfelt, and his heart had swollen with pride at the sight of the line of four young turtles seated in seiza before him for the first time. They were his students, his sons, and only the need for teaching them the concept of formality kept him from sweeping the four of them into his arms— at least until the formal mood broke anyway.

He delighted in watching them grow and change, in seeing how their personalities developed and where their own unique gifts lay. Seeing how Leonardo tried to be the responsible one, while Raphael fought to find the balance between his anger and his desire to protect, as Donatello absorbed information and tried to figure out how things worked, and Michelangelo was bursting at the seams with art and play… it warmed his heart. They were his sons, in all their tangled complexity and even as they tried to put too much pressure on themselves at times. They were his sons and nothing could change that. True, there were times he was frustrated— such as the rare instances when the brothers were fighting and he had to push them into talking things out— but it was still entirely worth it. Even before the collapse he’d developed a thorough appreciation for what made each of them who they were, but the onset of the collapse forced them to grow up faster than he would have preferred.

It started out small, political and social unrest that he overheard whispers of when his sons were 6. At the time he brushed it off, tried not to pay it much attention. He’d hoped that it would quiet down relatively quickly, and that his ability to obtain food and other necessities wouldn’t be hampered by what was happening above-ground. It didn’t quiet down. Things got progressively worse during the year, and it became increasingly dangerous for him or his sons to even consider being on the surface. The first riot he witnessed, just barely avoiding being caught in the middle of, was enough for him to decide it was no longer safe for his sons to accompany him on his supply runs. If humans were gunning each other down in the street, then it was far too dangerous to risk being a mutant and being seen— as mutant children his sons wouldn’t have stood a chance. And then there was the night the TCRI building (the utrom’s building! the utrom? The Utrom) exploded, the remnants burning to the ground. Were they gone? They were supposed to be gone, somehow Hamato Splinter knew that much, but the TCRI building going like that… It wasn’t good news, and he wasn’t entirely certain why.

Other mutants started turning up not long after. Things got even worse.

Splinter took to listening, eavesdropping at grates and drains, stealing newspapers when he could. People were disappearing, there were whispers that an entire city (Detroit?) had gone dark and no one knew what was happening there, rumors of partially-eaten corpses turning up in alleys started circulating. One of the hospitals was bombed. Schools closed. After one riot, fires raged in Manhattan for three days. Something, or someone, began prowling the sewers. He heard whispers that some people were seriously considering going into hiding in the sewers and tunnels underneath New York for their safety— a dangerous proposition for his sons. The day he stumbled across a body, someone who had either been a sanitation worker or seeking refuge with their throat torn out and smears of blood on the tunnel walls, was the day he decided it was time for his family to get out of New York and disappear into the largest span of wilderness they could get to on foot. His sons were 8 years old; he didn’t want them seeing dead bodies or blood on the walls, didn’t want to risk meeting whatever had killed the human he’d carefully stepped around, didn’t want to risk his sons encountering the source of that death. It was time to leave.

When he returned home he collected the four of them to tell them that things had gotten too dangerous, it was no longer safe, and that the five of them needed to pack up their things as quickly and as quietly as possible; and further, that once they left they would not be coming back. He hated seeing the fear in their eyes, the sadness at leaving the only home they had known. He hated having to tell them that there would be things they would have to leave behind. He helped them sort through what they wanted to keep, pack away what they could in backpacks that he’d gotten for them when he first started taking them on supply runs with him, and gave them a final day to be certain they had everything they wanted to take with them before they left.

Soon after he dismissed his sons to their rooms to collect what they wanted to keep, Leonardo silently approached him; he held Leonardo as his eldest son sobbed that it wasn’t fair that they had to leave when they hadn’t done anything wrong. When he was helping Raphael sort through his things his son suddenly turned and clung to him, prompting Splinter to wrap his arms around his second eldest just as Raphael started shaking wordlessly. When he checked on Donatello, his second youngest was a frantic mess of trying to sort out what books were important to him to keep, changing his mind almost as soon as he’d settled on a pile based on whether the information was important or if he could carry all of it or— Donatello broke down crying almost as soon as Splinter opened the door, prompting him to tuck the little turtle under his chin as he gently wiped away tears and traced soothing circles on his son’s shell with his claws. And Michelangelo… Michelangelo wasn’t in any better of a state than his older brothers; he’d gotten to his room and then just sat frozen and numb in the center of it, staring at nothing for as long as it had taken Splinter to reach him. That look, when Splinter saw it, was one he never wanted to see on his youngest son’s face ever again. Taking him into his arms hadn’t felt like it could ever have been enough in that moment.

They slept in his bed that night.

When they left it was in near-silence. They briefly stopped by the library, long enough for Splinter to look up a suitable location to travel to— the Stewart State Forest seemed both distant and large enough to suit their needs— and take a map before leaving. If New York was anything to judge by, it was far too dangerous for them to risk getting lost. They had to make their trip as quick as possible and hope that they could avoid encountering anyone on the way. If Splinter had never felt anxious before, he certainly felt so then. The days following were a nightmare of desperately avoiding being seen, trying to stay hidden from the roads while also following them to make certain they didn’t lose their way, wishing that there had been some easy means to carry his sons when they got too tired or hungry or sore to walk anymore, looking for safe places to sleep during their trip that wouldn’t leave them too exposed… and seeing the ways his sons handled their fear and uncertainty. If he could have taken that fear and uncertainty from them he would have done so in a heartbeat.

When they arrived, it should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. Where before Hamato Splinter had had a sizable amount of knowledge to fall back on to keep his family safe, in the environment of the forest he found his knowledge was far more limited than he would have preferred— even if he somehow knew that it exceeded what most humans knew about surviving in a forest. They had to go hungry that first night in favor of constructing a shelter; a rather laughable one in his opinion— they had downgraded from an abandoned station where they’d managed to get electricity and running water to a literal hole in the ground with woven branches to cover the entrance! —but it was better than sleeping out in open view in the elements. It was the first in a long stretch of days of uncertainty.

Despite that uncertainty, it soon became apparent that some good came from the change in where they lived. Where before Raphael had seemed perpetually at war with himself, his anger, and the way he felt he should treat his brothers, that fight within himself seemed to have completely vanished— as if he’d found himself and who he was meant to be. It started out small, Raphael jerking awake when Michelangelo woke up from a nightmare only to wrap his arms around his youngest brother with a growl as he promised he wouldn’t let anyone touch him, but in time it grew into much more. Splinter had thought, prior to the beginning of the collapse, that he would have had to encourage his sons to eventually give up their growls, hisses, snarls, chirps, and clicks— to protect them and give them a better chance of being recognized as people should they ever encounter humans personally— but the collapse had driven the thought from his mind. And that night, not reacting and laying still near his sons with his eyes not-quite-closed, hearing how that rumbling growl underlying Raphael’s words soothed Michelangelo, Hamato Splinter began to re-think the assumption that his sons would eventually have to ‘grow out of’ their sounds.

Just as Raphael seemed to have found his place, so did Donatello— diving with a fervor into reading the books he’d salvaged, putting the information in some of them to immediate practice and sharing what he learned with his brothers and father. Their home expanded, digging deeper into the ground with carefully placed supports, while at the same time the family began to learn the fine art of steam-shaping wood through trial and error. Nets, snares, and shaping stone for tools soon followed— something which Leonardo took to with enthusiasm. Soon enough Leonardo could tell whether a rock could be shaped into anything useful on sight alone (having the skill to do so was another matter entirely and led his eldest son into having an ever-growing rock collection that he intended to shape eventually). And while all four of his sons were initially squeamish about killing, cleaning, and skinning the prey that was caught in their snares or nets, once Michelangelo finally processed it as a food source it was like a switch had been thrown and he not only took to it with gusto, he began actively stalking small prey to see just how close he could get before they bolted.

And then came the day Raphael stood his ground against a bear that had been eyeing Donatello too much for his liking. They’d gone net-fishing, intending to get enough for a meal or two as well as some surplus to make their first attempt at smoking the meat. Splinter hadn’t been far from them, just around the bend in the river with Leonardo and Michelangelo ranged out in the opposite direction from where Raphael and Donatello had gone, but he’d been far enough not to see the danger obscured by trees and undergrowth. The bone-chilling howling scream Raphael had given instantly froze Splinter in place, provoking the rat in him to a near-instant panic that he’d fought down with an effort (not that the human in him had been much better off). That it made the bear turn tail and run changed everything. After he got the explanation from his middle sons, once he’d collected all four of them and they returned home, he began to put more thought into the practicality of their sounds. And when, several days later, Donatello came to him with a detailed argument in favor of the four of them not only using their sounds but learning how to refine them and use them deliberately, along with weaponizing some of them, he was unintentionally reminded of the day he had recovered the only picture he had of his sons. A ninja uses whatever tools they have at their disposal. Hamato Splinter approved.

Theirs was a world where being ‘acceptable enough’ to humans should a hypothetical encounter ever become reality could no longer increase the odds of their survival enough for it to be a goal worth pursuing, but using the skills they naturally had at their disposal in addition to their ninja training just might. Any remaining reluctance he’d had about his family’s ‘less human’ characteristics— his sons’ and his own— faded like so much smoke dissipating into the wind. He still hadn’t had any idea if he’d started out as a rat or a human, but he found his more rat-ish impulses far less infuriating and it became much easier to use them to his advantage. At least the more useful ones at any rate.

Chirps, clicks, purrs, hisses, growls, snarls, yowls, and— yes— even those blood-curdling howls became a larger part of Splinter’s lived reality. When he was training them, working on their kata (once they’d managed to suitably clear and flatten a large enough area for the purpose), or leading them in meditation practice, they were perfectly capable of being the silent ninja-in-training they needed to be. Outside of that training and moments dictating silence their sounds bled into the fabric of almost every conversation or interaction; to the point where if there weren’t clicks bouncing back and forth and his sons were otherwise being quiet for too long he found himself becoming concerned. That his own subconscious habit of occasionally clicking his tongue whenever he was comforting them reflected the expression of affection he’d picked up from them in their first year together, was hardly a surprise when he finally realized he’d been doing it. It wasn’t exactly the same sound as the one his sons made, but it was similar enough that the warmth contained in it was unmistakable.

Perhaps it was that comfort with disregarding the concept of being ‘human enough,’ born out of his comfort with his sons, that led him to barely bat an eye the day Michelangelo came running into camp with a (terrified) live bird in his hands while gleefully announcing that he’d caught it. Hamato Splinter found himself far less disturbed about the concept that his sons would grow up to be predators when they were 10 than he would have imagined he’d be when they were 8. It didn’t hurt that the four of them learning how to stalk prey and hunt could only increase their chances of eating well, while also honing their skills as ninja to move silently and go unseen. He found himself encouraging Michelangelo, as well as encouraging the other three to follow Michelangelo’s lead in adopting the practice of stalking small prey. He certainly didn’t want them actively hunting before they were ready for it, but getting in the practice until then could only benefit them.

Years of practice, training, building up their skills as he and his sons learned how to build a better dwelling and give it shape through the use of stone, wood, moss, and tanned hides transformed their section of the forest from just being where they were living into their home. Giving them the weapons they’d trained to use when they were 14, the very same weapons that he had recovered from the utrom storage facility, reinforced that feeling. Bestowing (his?) Hamato Yoshi’s weapons on them solidified the area that had become their dojo as a place that was special to all of them— one that could never be replaced. And when his sons finally did begin actively hunting, and Raphael began to show how deep his need to be the family protector ran by creating the arm-and-leg-guards that the brothers took to wearing, Splinter could find nothing in himself but pride and love for his sons. Moving to the forest and the circumstances that had prompted it had been far from ideal, but it had given Splinter and his sons the rare opportunity to live life on their own terms. Given the opportunity to reverse it all and prevent the collapse from even happening, he found he could never wish differently for them. His sons were free to live in the sunlight, express themselves in ways that came naturally to them, and live without the baggage that being a mutant in a human city could have come with.

Of course it was only a matter of time before a reminder of the fears he’d had before they left New York reared its head again. The night his sons came bolting into camp— Raphael with a seriously injured and bleeding Leonardo in his arms, Donatello supporting a limping mutant alligator who was in almost as bad a state as Leonardo trailing behind, and Michelangelo darting back and forth between them— was the night that Splinter was forced to remember the fears and nightmares that had plagued him in the year leading up to when they’d left. They might have escaped the nightmares that had come into being in New York, but on that night it became entirely too clear that those threats had persisted in their absence and spread out. It was a long night, not knowing if Leonardo would live (Donatello had been certain he would but hadn’t known if he could recover fully) and being just as uncertain if their guest— Leatherhead— would succumb to his own injuries.

That worry was all-consuming and for several days the Hamato family (at least the uninjured members) spent their hours in a tense watch over Leonardo and Leatherhead while keeping an ear out should anyone approach. Had their injuries not been so severe or the situation so worrying then perhaps the vague sense of familiarity brought on by Leatherhead would have stirred up his memories sooner, but it was only as his nerves finally began settling on the fourth day that an enormous chunk of Hamato Yoshi’s memories fell into place.

Hamato Yoshi had been a guardian— no, a Guardian for the utrom. He’d worked for them; furthering their goals, helping them bring down their enemy, helping them to… what? conquer? NO. Not to conquer, but to go home, to leave Earth. And Leatherhead… Yoshi had seen him, met him, long before the accident… The alligator had been so young, his head barely above Yoshi’s knee... Three years old. He’d been three years old at that point (how long ago had that been?), his mutation an unexpected effect of coming in contact with the ooze— no, the mutagen— and reason enough for the utrom to be concerned, yet… The utrom had taken Leatherhead in, not unlike what Splinter had done for his sons, and gave him a home and a family. His mutation had been an accident, an unqualifiable disaster that had resulted in repercussions for the Guardian that hadn’t been careful enough when transporting the mutagen, but they’d- the utrom had claimed Leatherhead as their responsibility, their child. Was that why he (Splinter? Yoshi? Splinter? Yoshi? Yoshi and Splinter, Splinter and Yoshi, Y- he) had responded so immediately to his sons’ need for him all those years ago? Had it been thanks to the precedent set by knowing Leatherhead? Was it— had it been? —knowing without knowing the effects of the mutagen that had helped him cope in those early days?

No, not important, not now, but… What had happened to Leatherhead after the utrom left? Had they left? They were supposed to have left several days after Splinter and his sons had been mutated, but for Leatherhead to be left behind… However jumbled and confused the memories he had from Yoshi and Splinter from before the accident, of one thing Hamato Splinter was certain— had it been him, he never would have been able to leave his sons behind. And if Yoshi worked for the utrom, and they considered Leatherhead their child, then he found it immensely doubtful that they would have voluntarily left him behind unless they felt it was in his best interests. Which— yes, that was it. Another memory, one of the Guardians had been assigned to take in Leatherhead after the utrom were to leave— and yet all those years later Leatherhead had been so alone that if it hadn’t been for the intervention of Splinter’s sons he wouldn’t have been alive. That memory of a shy and sweet three-year-old peeking around the robotic leg of an utrom exo-suit to quietly wave at Yoshi, giving a hesitant but genuine smile when Yoshi waved back, and the realization that that same boy had grown up to almost be killed for nothing more than just being what he was, had made something painful and sharp twist in Splinter’s chest.

He couldn’t erase the damage that had been done, the injuries or scars that Leatherhead had gained or that he had clearly lost what family he’d had left after the utrom had gone (if they had gone— it was a reasonable assumption that they had), but he could at least make it clear that Leatherhead was safe with them and was welcome. His sons made conveying that all the easier. Ultimately, Leatherhead chose not to live with them— he feared that his temper might cause him to do something he’d regret thanks to his traumas— although he did make the decision to live nearby. It took some time for the six of them to make a home suitable for Leatherhead to inhabit (the place he’d chosen was closer to the river than the Hamato home because he found the sound of the running river soothing), but the process cemented the bond between Leatherhead and the Hamato family. He could turn to them or visit whenever he felt the need to, and in turn he extended the same courtesy to them.

It was clearly a sign of how strong that bond was when Michelangelo took to wearing one of Leatherhead’s larger shed teeth on a leather cord around his neck— something which Splinter’s youngest at least had the sense to ask permission for before doing it— but it was one that Splinter could have easily done without. Leave it to his youngest to take an unsettling concept and run with it. Although admittedly that was probably preferable to his own uncertain avoidance of letting Leatherhead know that he (he? Yoshi) had known him before the collapse… No matter, it would eventually come out, of that he’d been certain.

Perhaps Leatherhead returning with his sons and living so close by was what made him trust so thoroughly in his sons’ judgement about others. They had proven every bit as compassionate as he’d hoped, even with the concerns about the dangers of the world he’d raised them to be aware of. And despite having their socialization limited to their family up until that point, they had proven to be more than capable of judging the trustworthiness of someone accurately— so when they came home with April he was far from worried.

Any worries he might have had were immediately discarded in recognition of the fact that April was hurting, and she had lost everything. The moment he laid eyes on her his heart had given that same painful twist as it had the day he’d made the decision to take his family and leave New York, the very same twist when he realized that the sweet little alligator he’d once known had been attacked just for not being human; and when his sons explained what had happened he looked into her eyes and his heart said daughter. Under other circumstances the familiarity of cupping her cheek as if she was one of his children while welcoming her into their home might have been unwelcome, but it proved to be exactly what she needed. In that moment as he held her while she cried, he knew that whether it was ever openly addressed or not he would forever consider her one of his.

He was happy to see April gradually heal and recuperate to the point where she could finally smile again, and when she eventually started slipping into the fold with his sons— bantering, bickering, teasing, and playing, casually interacting with them with affectionate words and contact— he couldn’t help but smile warmly. It was as if she was supposed to have been there beside his sons all along. She was home, she was part of their family, and he found he loved her every bit as much as he loved his sons. And when she called him ‘Dad’ for the first time, he’d wrapped her in his arms, his heart feeling fit to burst. She might have been 18 when she joined their family, but she was his and he would defend her just as fiercely as he would defend her brothers.

April becoming part of their family came with unexpected gifts; meeting her needs required them to reach out to their ‘neighbors,’ beyond Leatherhead, and gave them all much needed socialization and friendships. With April leading the way, their human neighbors soon knew and trusted them well— both increasing the safety of their family and helping eliminate the fear of mutants that so many humans in the area had had. For the first time since that fateful day all those years ago, Hamato Splinter and his sons were able to openly walk in view of others… and they had April to thank.

When Casey Jones turned up— someone who Raphael had already vented about on several occasions throughout the months prior before coming to grudgingly admit they’d become friends— he was far from the only person to have expressed any interest in his children, though he was the first to express interest in two of them at the same time. (The girl Leonardo had been with for a time was entertaining and almost a force of nature in her own right, but due to unfortunate circumstances she’d had to move away with part of her family for her safety. A pity really. Splinter was of the opinion that Sassy had been a good influence on his eldest son by keeping him from taking himself too seriously.) Not that Casey was immediately obvious about being interested in April and Donatello both, but when it did become clear his actions felt like a natural outgrowth of the way he’d started bantering with them from the first moment he was coherent enough to do so.

Splinter might have been annoyed (as only a good parent could be) by the situation, but he was nothing if not observant where his children were concerned. So long as Donatello and April weren’t uncomfortable with Casey’s behavior, he was content to sit back and let the three of them work things out on their own. It very quickly became obvious that, however loud his personality might be, Casey was the perfect gentleman when it came to respecting April and Donatello’s boundaries. Much to his surprise, Splinter found himself unbothered by the idea that his second youngest and his daughter might individually end up with the same partner— especially when that potential partner clearly respected them and cared for them so deeply. Seeing the poor young man nearly walk into a tree on several occasions also proved rather amusing, and to some extent Splinter couldn’t help but sympathize. Living with two people he was so clearly attracted to and in love with, without being in official relationships with either of them, couldn’t be easy for Casey. Despite that, Casey stayed— clearly having made up his mind that being near them was enough even if it was all he might get. If he’d approved of Casey before, with that knowledge his approval of him as a potential partner to his children increased substantially. (Not that Hamato Splinter didn’t get a fair amount of amusement from witnessing the reactions from all three of them when their neighbors eventually began verbalizing their assumptions about Casey’s relationships with April and Donatello. Still, the least he could do for them was to not make that amusement too obvious.) And really, with how unusual his life was, what was one more unusual piece to it? As long as his family— the rebuilt Hamato clan— were happy, then that was what mattered.

Enigma, focal point, sensei, and father; rat or human, human or rat, or even both; he is Hamato Splinter, and what’s most important to him is that his clan— his family— all know that he will always be there for them. And if that means who he was before his mutation forever remains a mystery, then so be it.

[man-creates-dinosaurs]

For Halloween I decided I wanted to try and write about something spooky that nevertheless still fit in with the overall theme of this blog. To this end I’ve decided to write about the fascinating field of cryptozoology and my own interest in the subject from the time I was in middle school till now and about how my views on the subject have changed and evolved.  Enjoy! CRYPTOZOOLOGY AND ME: A MEMOIR

When I was in middle school I went through a big cryptozoology phase. I chalk this up to a number of cultural influences. At the time my three favorite shows on TV were The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Invader Zim – all heavily steeped in the paranormal. For those who don’t know, cryptozoology refers to “the study of hidden animals” and its coinage is typically attributed to either Bernard Heuvelmans or Ivan T. Sanderson – who I’ll talk about more later on. For all practical purposes however, today the term generally denotes the vocation of “monster hunter” with the prize quarries being such legendary creatures as Bigfoot and the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster and other lake monsters including Champ the Lake Champlain monster and  Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan, sea serpents, living dinosaurs such as the Mokèlé-mbèmbé – an alleged sauropod living in the African Congo – or the Ropen – a bioluminescent pterosaur inhabiting Papua New Guinea – , as well as such decidedly weirder and less biologically plausible creatures as the Jersey Devil, Mothman and the Chupacabra.

As a kid I read all the major cryptozoological authors: Bernard Heuvelmans (On the Track of Unknown Animals, 1955), Ivan T. Sanderson (Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, 1961), Loren Coleman (Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti, & Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, 1999), Jerome Clark (Unexplained! 2nd Ed., 1998), Coleman and Clark (Cryptozoology A To Z, 1999), Karl P.N. Shuker (From Flying Toads to Snakes with Wings, 1997), John A. Keel (The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, 1994), Janet and Colin Bord (Alien Animals, 1981) and Brad Stiger (Out Of The Dark: The Complete Guide to Beings from Beyond, 2001). I also had a well-read copy of W. Haden Blackman’s The Field Guide to North American Monsters (1998) and readily consumed every cryptozoological related documentary or program that came on TV from Animal Planet’s Animal-X to Discovery’s X-Creatures – you can see the influence the X-Files had on pop-culture here! – to The History Channel’s History’s Mysteries.

Looking back on all this I’m not sure how much I really believed that cryptids – the nickname cryptozoologists use for the monsters they track – actually existed. But like many proponents of the paranormal I think it’s fair to say that, at the time, I had a very open mind about all of this.

It may also come as a surprise to many readers to learn that among the various cryptids my favorite wasn’t any of the alleged living dinosaurs or other supposed prehistoric survivors but rather Mothman. I don’t know what it was about the story of the Mothman that so fully captivated me. I think it must have been how utterly alien the creature seemed. By the time I was in middle school dinosaurs, pterosaurs, prehistoric marine reptiles, dragons and even giant bipedal apes were a pretty common part of my imaginary menagerie thanks to lifetime of consuming books and movies about dinosaurs. However until I read Keel’s 1994 book I had never heard of anything even remotely resembling a Mothman.

Today Mothman seems fairly well integrated into contemporary pop-culture – there was even a 2002 film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, though it did admittedly bomb upon its release – but for those who are unfamiliar here’s the basic gist as it has come down in the paranormal literature and is still being recounted to this day: Beginning roughly in November of 1966, citizens of the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia – located along the Ohio River – began reporting sightings of a creature which was described as a humanoid being with black/grey skin, red glowing eyes and a pair of giant bat-like wings which came out of its back. This gargoyle-like creature – which the local media would eventually dub “The Mothman” – was seen by dozens of eyewitnesses, usually in passing, though in one dramatic early encounter was said to have chased four young adults who were driving in excess of 100 mph down a deserted road. The sightings eventually came to an end nearly one year later in December of 1967 coinciding with the collapse of the area Silver Gate Bridge which killed 46 people. Many paranormalists, and even some cryptozoologists, have attempted to link the creature with the bridge collapse claiming that Mothman acts as a kind of harbinger of impending catastrophes.

By the summer of 2002 I was so obsessed with the story of the Mothman that I convinced my parents to stop by the town of Point Pleasant during our summer vacation to Niagara Falls. I wanted to see the town where Mothman had appeared. This would turn out to be a poignant trip for me because while on it I acquired the book Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend (2002) by Donnie Sergent Jr. and Jeff Wamsley. Sergent Jr. and Wamsley were Point Pleasant locals who had undertaken the arduous task of combing through local and state newspaper archives and locating the original Mothman newspaper reports which they then reprinted – alongside original eyewitness statements, police reports, and letters exchanged between Keel and locals – in their book. Sergent Jr. and Wamsley don’t attempt to make any argument about what the Mothman was or wasn’t, their book is simply a collection of primary source documents about the phenomena which unfolded in Point Pleasant between ’66 and ’67. Being able to go back to the original reports and read them for myself had a profound impact on me because it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Mothman… was a bird. In the original newspaper reports and statements delivered by eyewitnesses the creature which came to be known as Mothman is repeatedly described as a bird. It does not have the body of a man but rather is described as being as tall as one. It does not have red glowing eyes but is rather described as having red markings around its eyes. It does not have leathery bat-like wings but rather feathers and wings like a bird. In some accounts it is even described as having long skinny legs and a beak! In a few cases eyewitnesses describe seeing multiple creatures together in a flock standing in a field or a clutch of trees before flying away. Many witnesses - including those aforementioned scared twenty-somethings who claimed Mothman chased them down a road - reported that the creature produced a high-pitch squeaking sound. What these people are describing is likely a flock of sandhill cranes which stand six-feet-tall, have grey feathers, bright red patches around their eyes and as for the sound they make: just listen. Sandhill cranes are not native to West Virginia but do migrate down the Mississippi River making it conceivable that a flock could have gotten blown off course and ended up in Point Pleasant where they proceeded to scare the daylights out of locals unfamiliar with such large, odd-looking birds. Another possibility is that some sightings of Mothman were of a snowy owl, which is also uncommon in West Virginia. However as documented in Sergent Jr. and Wamsley’s book in December of ’66 several news outlets reported that a local farmer had killed just such an owl. It is worth noting that after this, sightings of the Mothman largely fell off and were replaced by reports of UFOs (which in all likelihood were, pardon the cliché but I’m being dead serious here, weather balloons). A few sightings that occurred in the area during the summer of ’67 appear to have been the result of common turkey vultures. What this means is that contrary to what the paranormalists like to claim the Mothman ‘flap’ did not occur over a 12-month period but only for about three months at the end of ’66/start of ’67 and was certainly the result of people seeing unusually large birds in the area.

However what Sergent Jr. and Wamsley’s book also demonstrated via their reprinting of sci-fi TV screenwriter turned paranormal investigator John Keel’s private letters with local residents was that Keel was actively manipulating information and witnesses in order to have their accounts match the scenario he had envisioned in which the small town of Point Pleasant played host to a virtual invasion of flying saucers and alien monsters portending the disaster which was the Silver Bridge collapse. Keel initially presented these ideas in a streamlined manner in a chapter for his 1970 book Strange Creatures From Time and Space which he would revise in 1994 as his cryptozoological/UFOlogical “encyclopedia” The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. Between that time Keel wrote a more extensive version of the Mothman incident as he saw it in the form of a sundry mish-mash of paranormal potpourri that was his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies. Today more people know Keel’s version of the events then they do the actual eyewitnesses’ and while Keel’s books captivated me as a middle schooler nowadays I find them more than a little cringe worthy. Keel was vehemently anti-science, anti-academia, never cited his sources and often embellished and exaggerated events to make them read better.

The same year I became convinced that Mothman was just a misidentified bird I also encountered the magazine Skeptical Inquirer at a local Barnes & Noble. The cover story was “Evaluating 50 Years of Bigfoot Evidence” by researcher Benjamin Radford. I got the magazine and in six short pages Radford had disabused me of any notion that Bigfoot might exist. A final encounter with marine biologist Richard Ellis’ book Monsters of the Sea (1994) on a trip to the library convinced me that sea serpents and lake monsters were also likewise nothing more than figments of mankind’s imagination. My fascination with cryptozoology now thoroughly deflated I redirected by interests back towards world mythology and folklore; a path which eventually led to me obtaining two degrees in Religious Studies and teaching in the field.

I didn’t think much more about cryptozoology during my time in college with a few exceptions. In grad school I took a class on the paranormal in American culture and had to read the book Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture (2011) by Christopher Bader, Frederick Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker. I ended up having a lot of issues with the trio of scholar’s methodology – for example the fact that they seemed willing to accept certain claims made by cryptozoologists at face value such as the idea that Native American lore is full of descriptions of Bigfoot-like creatures: it isn’t – but one point they do make and make well is that the kind of spin-doctor treatment employed by Keel when writing about the Mothman is rampant within the field of cryptozoology and goes all the way back to its very founders.

As mentioned at the top, the coining of the term cryptozoology is generally ascribed to either Bernard Heuvelmans or Ivan T. Sanderson. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1911, Sanderson attended Cambridge University where he obtained a BA in zoology and later an MA in both botany and ethnology. For a while Sanderson worked as a science popularizer penning articles and appearing on TV with live animals. However, beginning in the 1940s Sanderson developed an interest in the paranormal in general and cryptids in particular – especially Bigfoot and the Yeti – and began writing about such topics fulltime; mostly for pulp-style men’s adventure magazines. As detailed by Joshua Blu Buhs in his book Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (2009), while Sanderson certainly seemed to believe that Bigfoot and the Yeti existed he nevertheless didn’t hold most Bigfoot eyewitnesses in high regard, which is to say nothing of his low opinion of his fellow Bigfoot researches. Despite such misgivings however Sanderson knew what his reader’s did and didn’t want to hear and as a result spun stories in which less than reputable eyewitnesses became upstanding citizens, crazy sounding sightings were reworked into more feasible narratives, and credulous cryptid hunters became competent men of action.

In 1948 one of Sanderson’s articles on the possibility of living dinosaurs caught the attention of Heuvelmans; a Belgian-French zoologist who had earned his PhD from the Free University of Brussels studying mammal dentition. Like Sanderson, Heuvelmans became enraptured by the idea of cryptids and spent the rest of his life writing articles and books on the subject. Two of these books, On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955) and In the Wake of Sea Serpents (1965), were especially influential and worked to establish what would become the overarching methodology of all cryptozoologists. The first of these, employed in On the Track, is what paleontologist Darren Naish has dubbed the “prehistoric survivor paradigm.” Simply put this approach advocates that when attempting to identify an alleged mystery animal the first route one should take is finding a prehistoric animal which superficially matches the description of said mystery animal and proclaiming it the creature you’re looking for. Application of the “prehistoric survivor paradigm” is widespread in cryptozoology with Bigfoot and the Yeti being identified as Gigantopithecus – an extinct species of giant ape similar to an orangutan from Southeast Asia –, sea serpents and lake monsters being dubbed extant plesiosaurs, pliosaurs, mosasaurs, Pleistocene era whales like basilosaurus and in the case of cryptozoologist Dennis Hall a long necked Triassic era reptile known as tanystropheus, supposed giant Thunderbirds being claimed as either pterosaurs or surviving members of a clade of large North American vultures known as Teratorns, and legendary African dragons being seen as evidence of living dinosaurs. In one remarkable case Heuvelmans even proposed that the Australian cryptid feline known as the Queensland Tiger might be an extinct species of marsupial known as the thylacoleo. Thylacoleo means “pouch lion” but the lion part of the name is metaphorical not literal since in life the thylacoleo would have looked more like a giant wombat then a tiger.

The problem with the “prehistoric survivor paradigm” should be self-evident. Namely that the animals in question are extinct, in most cases by many millions of years. Proposing that a supposed mystery animal is a relic from some bygone era is a bit like a detective assuming that a mugger who a witness describes as being a tall Caucasian male with dark eyes and a beard must be Abraham Lincoln simply because he matches certain aspects of the witness’s description. Cryptozoologists of course love to point to the case of the coelacanth; a Cretaceous era fish believed extinct until living ones were discovered in 1938 in the West Indian Ocean. However this prehistoric fish is something of a red herring. It is one thing to lose track of a fish in the fossil record. It is another entirely to claim that large marine and terrestrial animals such as dinosaurs could somehow survive for millions of years without leaving any evidence.      

In the advent that the “prehistoric survivor paradigm” should fail, Heuvelmans’ second approach was to simply makeup an animal. This is what he does with wild abandon in his In the Wake of Sea Serpents. Have an eyewitness who claims to have seen an animal swimming in the water with brown fur, a long neck and tail, webbed feet and a horse-like head? No problem! This is clearly a description of an unknown species of giant long-necked, long-faced otter! Heuvelmans does this throughout Sea Serpents going as far as to invent nine whole new species of undiscovered sea monster. As Buhs notes in his Bigfoot book, Heuvelmans appears to have operated under the peculiar belief that as long as one could describe an animal so that it sounded scientifically plausible then that was enough to assume that it likely existed! Modern cryptozoologists still operate under this rubric. Loren Coleman, the most prominent cryptozoologist alive today and curator of the International Cryptozoology Museum located in Portland, Maine, follows Heuvelmans’ example perfectly in his 1999 Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti, & Other Mystery Primates Worldwide co-authored by Patrick Huyghe and illustrated by Harry Trumbore. In this book, Coleman proposes the existence of a dozen different species of unknown hominid ranging from extant Gigantopithecus and Neanderthals, huge “devil-monkeys,” swamp dwelling Skunk Apes, fairy-tale style “True Giants” and even a type of semi-aquatic species of primate with webbed claws and spines which he believes may be responsible for reports of the chupacabra – who we will come back to shortly.

Despite the fact that Heuvelmans and Sanderson’s methods were scientifically unsound, scores of self-professed cryptozoologists continue to use them to this day. And as Benjamin Radford notes in his book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore (2011) whenever the claim that cryptids are merely cultural constructions is raised cryptozoologists immediately point back to the alleged eyewitness testimony: the bread and butter of cryptozoology. People don’t have eyewitnesses encounters with cultural constructs they say. Except for the fact that they do. Human perception and recollection is extremely unreliable. People get confused, forget, misremember, make mistakes and unknowingly fabricate details even about some of the most commonplace and important events in their lives. With regards to seeing something that isn’t really there, a classic example is the case of the escaped red panda of the Netherlands’ Rotterdam Zoo in 1978. After news got out that one of the zoo’s red pandas had escaped its enclosure hundreds of eyewitness sightings from across the country poured in. Suddenly people were seeing red pandas everywhere and anywhere. Eventually zookeepers found the animal and determined that it had not traveled outside the zoo’s immediate vicinity. How then does one account for the multiple eyewitness sightings of the animal? Merely that people upon hearing about the escaped red panda became primed and expected to see it and so did. This same phenomena happens when people travel to places like the woods of the Pacific Northwest or Loch Ness. Because they’ve heard the legend of Bigfoot and Nessie they now expect – even if only subconsciously – to encounter the monster and as a result any unusual sight or sound becomes the beast. This is what celebrated folklorist Bill Ellis refers to as “Legend Tripping.”

Of course in some instances people actually do see some animal they can’t identify, but then we’re back to the sandhill crane in Point Pleasant. A former colleague of mine, Alan Rauch who specializes in the area of animals and their representations in literature and popular-culture, often speaks about the issue of “animal illiteracy” among the general public. The simple fact of the matter is that most people are not particularly familiar with the numerous creatures that inhabit this planet alongside us outside of those few domesticated animals we keep as pets or on farms and those celebrity animals found in zoos and aquariums like lions, elephants, gorillas, giraffes, dolphins, whales, etc... And many are also unfamiliar with the full capabilities of many animals. For example, few people seem to know that bears can move about on their hind legs, that moose and deer are excellent swimmers or that alligators are adept at climbing. The issue of animal illiteracy is undoubtedly responsible for a great many alleged cryptid sightings as was demonstrated in 2010 when a video posted online of a great frigatebird was mistaken by many Americans as footage of a pterosaur!

Once instances of legend tripping and animal illiteracy have been removed the small numbers of supposed cryptid sightings that remain often tend to be so outlandish as to raise serious doubts about their legitimacy. A good example of this is the case of the original chupacabra eyewitness Madelyne Tolentino; a Puerto Rican woman with an interest in UFOs and conspiracy theories who claimed that she encountered a creature identical to the monster from the movie SPIECIES (1995, Dir. Roger Donaldson) which she had just recently watched. Not only does Tolentino claim that she encountered this creature but that she was able to observe minute details about its anatomy – such as a lack of genitals – even though she was a considerable distance from it and that it levitated and communicated with her telepathically. She also claims that this was only the first of two chupacabra encounters that she had with the second occurring while she was taking a taxi across town! Despite the fact that Tolentino claims to have had two other eyewitnesses with her at the time of her first encounter no one has been able to corroborate her story, though her husband did at one point claim he was in possession of “chupacabra slime” similar in appearance to the ectoplasm seen in the movie GHOSTBUSTERS (1984, Dir. Ivan Reitman) though he could never produce the actual substance for anyone to see. Radford, in his aforementioned book Tracking the Chupacabra, concludes that if Tolentino is not perpetuating a hoax then she is likely a victim of confabulation; a psychiatric disorder in which a person loses the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction as evidenced by Tolentino’s conviction that the monster and events from the movie SPIECIES are real. Of course, even the most dyed in the wool cryptozoologists realize how ridiculous a story like Tolentino’s sounds, and so in the tradition of Sanderson and Keel will judiciously edit the tale when relating it in books and articles on the chupacabra removing inconvenient details and instead making it sound as if Tolentino merely had an eyewitness encounter with a strange animal.  

In wrapping up, I want to talk about what renewed my interest in cryptozoology. As stated before, after the boom and bust cycle of my middle school years I didn’t think much about cryptids. I don’t regret the time I spent looking into the subject however because I love monsters and because I believe that learning about cryptozoology and then learning to recognize the flaws inherent in cryptozoological methodology as outlined above helped me to develop critical thinking and research skills that served me well as I began to peruse a degree in Religious Studies – an academic field where researchers are often confronted with many issues similar to those found in cryptozoology (i.e. the importance of primary source documents, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the deliberate and accidental blurring of fact and fiction, etc…)

Then in 2010/2011 I discovered the podcast Monster Talk (tagline: “The Science Show About Monsters”) hosted by Blake Smith with co-hosts Karen Stollznow and, for the first few years, Benjamin Radford. As Blake has explained many times over the years the idea behind Monster Talk was to do a show on cryptozoology and the paranormal that amounted to more than just wide-eyed mystery mongering. To this end Monster Talk is firmly rooted in science and academic scholarship. Each episode focuses on a particular topic with special guests called in to speak on specific matters. These guests are not only fascinating to listen to but have also provided me with a wealth of new reading material including such books and papers as Robert E. Bartholomew’s The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America's Loch Ness Monster (2012), Robert Lebling’s Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar (2011), Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda’s Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide (2012), Christopher Josiffe’s article on Gef the Talking Mongoose, Joe Laycock and Natalia Mikels’ work on the connection between Nessie and Buddhism, and Brian Regal’s fascinating research on the history of the Jersey Devil. And now is a great time to be interested in critical approaches to cryptozoology too with multiple excellent books available. Two that come highly recommended are Darren Naish’s Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths (2017) and Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids (2012) by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero.

To be clear, the aim of Monster Talk is not to ridicule cryptozoologists or those who believe or even just have an interest in such creatures but rather to try and separate history from legend and to do so with nary an ounce of cynicism about the subject matter. The hosts of Monster Talk are not doing this show because they think monsters are dumb. They clearly love monsters. It’s just that they believe (as I do) that it’s important to remain aware of where fact ends and fiction begins, and that often time truth is indeed far stranger than fiction.     

Image: Acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy painter Frank Frazetta’s art which adorned the first cover for John A. Keel’s Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970).                

[nayrusfountain]

Simply Human

His raspy shaky breath caught in his throat, the sensation of pulling air into his refined lungs feeling completely alien to him... His body had shrunk, but that is the least of his worries...Pure white scales molted away as he shifts his appearance against his will, giving way to pale light skin. Every fin on his once shark like body completely phase out of existence, with nothing to replace them. He hesitantly look down at his shaky hands with wide startled eyes as his scales peel off of his fingers, sprinkling the metal floor like flakes of new fallen snow. The fingers shorten with the rest of him, and his blue claws cracked off as new, growing nails push them out forcefully in their place. He felt the sharp teeth in his mouth is all but gone now, instead there were blunted and squared, more suitable to grinding plant matter... Mikau wanted to scream, but his voice came out distorted and horribly wrong in his ears...Wait, what happen to his ears?! He reach to stroke where his dangling fin had been on the side of his head...now there were an elf like ear instead, twitching with a soft jingle as he gingerly felt them. As he did, he grew startled as he felt something soft and furry tickling his scaleless fingers, and he realize instantly that it was hair. His hair. He need not to be a rocket scientist to figure out that obvious trivia. Laughing cackle from all direction, mocking him as he dwell in his confusion. It was at the moment that panic overwhelm his rational thinking. With little regard of his new physical form, Mikau instinctively leaped into the pool of water in the lab, disappearing into its blue depths. He suck in the water through his mouth, and instantly regretted it. His eyes widen, wild with fear as his limbs kick and flail frantically, and muffle screams gurgle out of his mouth as the ex-Zora hurry back to the surface. His lungs scream angrily at him, cursing him for his foolish actions as the reality that his gills are gone ram him hard. An explosion of liquid crystals shatter into the air as he practically jump back onto the cold metal floor of the room. He flop heavily to the floor, trending water and heaving painfully as he heard the people laughing at him again. A puny blubbery creature came forward and tap his shoulder. It was grayish blue in color, with a round funny face, tiny polished pebbles for eyes, and a small dorsal fin on the back of its head with a grin that never shifts. It basically looks like a bipedal Irrawaddy Dolphin. When he glare up at her, she presented him with a mirror, her smile never leaving. Mikau angrily snatch the object out of her grasp and look into its reflective glass. What greeted him was the face of a man. Mikau's eyes grew in size and he nearly drop the mirror in his shock. His head was cover in white hair and side burns cascade in front of his ears, with strings and bangs casting shadows over his now cerulean eyes, rimmed with whites around the pools of blue. His skin tone is a pale light shade, and his inner ears had extended out of his skull in a slender elfin fashion. What in Nayru's name did they do to him...?! "How you like your new look Zora?" "Screw you," he spat, his voice dripping with venom. Oh how he wish he still had his claws, fangs and fins. Then he'll gladly rip each of their insides out and hang them with their own intestines! "Be nice, sharky!" she growl crazily, whipping out a surgical knife to his face. She wave it around as one would with their finger, eyeing the use to be Zora with the same unsettling grin. "Not what we wanted; you should've been dolphin like us, but its good enough! Next is your girly friend. She be a pretty mammal too!" "Touch her and I'll fu-!!" "Shut up fishy!" Slash! "Ah!" Mikau's head's forcefully slam against the floor, stunned as he try to make sense of what just occur. A warm liquid trickle down his cheek under his right blue eye, smearing his skin red. He reach with his fingers and pull back to see it was coated in a thin layer of blood as it continue cascading from his slashed cheek. A growl radiated from his throat, coming off as awkward and nonthreatening compare to a Zora's more animalistic noises. "You son of a..." "Son? You mean daughter," she giggled as she did a little dance, stroking the blood soaked blade nonchalantly. "You stupid shark! Always resorting to violence to solve your problems. 'Oh! I mad! Imma bite people and watch them bleed and die!' You so naughty! We trying to help you! Give you better life and purpose. That's what we're here to do; to correct Nayru's mistake and you came out beautifully. Be a good little human, and no bloodshed from me. Kay?" "Don't call me that! I'm a Zora! And don't say such garbage about my species. Who are you to play Goddess by meddling with her creation? Everything exist for a reason, and sharks are vital to the ecosystem to keep the ocean healthy. Stop spreading racial bullshit about sharks just because of your paranoia." "He has delusion. So sad...boo hoo!" The dolphin like thing gave a loving pet to his snow white hair before trotting happily over a frozen Lulu surrounded by more of the mammalian sea creatures. The Malletila Zora stare straight into his eyes, her voice caught in her throat as if trying to say something. The little dolphin creature stop in front of her with the same insane smile beaming from her rubbery face. "Hello!" "Hey..." Lulu murmur absently, adverting her gaze as a wave of cackling echo throughout the small lab. She cringe and gave a low hiss in response. The last thing she wants right now was to associate with these giggling freaks. "Hissy shark. Very hissy," the she dolphin tsked as she materialize a slender glass tablet in her hands from seemingly nowhere. It pulsed with radiating magic as holographic data file up on the touch screen. "Let's see your species' criminal status so we can fix you, shall we?" "Please don't. All I want to do is be with Mikau right now," muttered Lulu as she look back at Mikau. The poor male seems completely out of it despite his outbursts, trying to get up from his shaky knees as he topple over clumsily. "Nonsense! I need to gather vital information to further help you overcome your breed's psychopathic instincts. We're not trying to be mean at all. We just what you to be happy with yourself." "I do not need help!" Lulu yelled sternly, her beautiful fins flagging in anger as her fangs flash. She caught glimpse of Mikau's reaction, the ex-Zora perking considerably from his kneel position and his new elf like ears twitching to her voice. "Right...Now let's see here. Ah! The marvelous Malletila Zora; descendants of the Hammerhead line, the Sphyrnidae family. Habitats: Tropical waters! Yay! I mean no! That's bad! Anyway...Malletila Zoras are timid shark people and only mildly aggressive when disturbed, but attacks are extremely rare. That's good. Out of the 9 species only three had been known to attack people...Great, Smooth, and Scallop variants...Uh oh." "Oh no." Lulu backed away with a warning glare, aware that her Great Hammerhead lineage is going to get her in deep trouble. "It seems your kind is bit naughty," The freak chuckle deviously, getting uncomfortably close to Lulu's nose. Lulu had to resist the urge to strike her stupid round face away from hers. "What else do I have to say on your evil breed? The fact that you're all cannibals!? Ha! Hammerhead Sharks are known to eat their own pups; what are the chances of their Zoran equivalent preforming the same atrocity?" A crazy grin reveal the creature's sharp conical teeth. "And I bet you eat dolphins like us too..." Swoosh! "AIEEE!!!!" The beakless bipedal dolphin squeal bloody murder as a stream of blood splay out of her now shredded face, covering her wounds with her hands. She drop the frail tablet in her agonizing distress, the magical device shattering into thousands of tiny glass shards and magic bursting in a ball of hot white light. She topple to her side with hard thud, screeching in high pitched squeals not unlike her cetacean brethren. Lulu scramble to her flippers and leaped over the injured...thing....and dash over to Mikau's side, grabbing his arm as she help him to his feet. Her left clawed hand was soaked in glistening crimson, the crazy lady's blood. "Damn...The way you bury your claws into her fat face was satisfying," Mikau whistle as he stumble a bit, pleased to see the creature in pain. His weak legs felt like gelatin, bucking slightly as he fights to stand erect. Lulu allow him to fall into her soft pearly body, the welcoming coolness of her glassy scales easing his troubles. He saw his unfamiliar face reflecting off of her body, shuddering at the idea of being trap in this body forever. He couldn't bare to live like this for the rest of his life honestly. This boring, unimpressive terrestrial creature with an ego bigger then their fully develop brains; there is nothing more rewarding then being born a magically gifted Zora and ruling a magical world many would never dream of. He likes humans enough, for instance Kafei is one of his closest Hylian friends, and he loves hanging out with the Sheikah, his favorite breed for they share a lot in common with Zoran Heroes. But living as one? No thank you!   "Savages!" A male creature howl in fury, coal black eyes blazing. He has the face of a striped dolphin, beak and everything, and his humanoid body is mostly the color of moon frost streaked with rivers of silvers. He is also well build, smooth slick blubber that express a fair amount of muscles. Fairly good looking for someone that looks like he's wearing a goofy, black duck beak. The striped dolphin thing cast a hateful glare directly at Lulu, taking a menacing step towards the Zoran lovers while the rest of the mammal-things scramble for their non lethal weapons such as teasers as they help their downed comrade. "Naughty creature! Bad creature! How dare you mistreat my sweet Lianna, you feral fish brained brute! You need a big time out!" "Hey dumbass, maybe if your annoying girlfriend wasn't being a total b!tch and invading her personal privacy, and committed witch crafting to turn me into a human of sorts, she wouldn't had felt incline to cut her face up! The dumb chick was basically asking to be attacked by us 'savages' at that point. Piss off and leave us alone!" Mikau defended, getting ready take on the male as he stood before Lulu protectively. He tentatively usher Lulu to back up with him as he shield her from the crazed creature's seething glare, and the mob of the mutated beasts juggle over the pair in quick fleeting prances, surrounding them. Teasers and electric prods cackled dancing, explosive neon, their intelligent eyes glowing madly. For the first time in a long time, Mikau felt primal fear shallow his courage as he stood at their mercy, spreading his arms in vain attempt to protect Lulu. His newly refined heart thump heavily in his chest, knowing that as he is now he is no match to challenge these quick and crafty cetacean people. More likely, he will fall, and they'll have their sadistic ways. But he has to protect Lulu. No matter the cast. The dolphin man, blinded by his rage, unleashed an madden feral roar and charge straight into the couple screaming, "This is for Lianna!" "Kill!" Lianna hiss in an almost demonic way, a sadistic bloody grin exposing her rusted tainted teeth. She crane her neck back and laugh maniacally as the blood drizzle down her face. "Kill! Kill!" The air in the room soon echo with the word "kill" being repeated as the rest of the cetacean people chanted out the phrase with her. The dolphin man lunge for the fish folks, his neck outstretch as he intends to ram them with his hard beak. Mikau spring forth, diving under the enrage creature and swinging up into his stomach. The dolphin was violently jerked backward and and the two males roll and tumble across the metal flooring. The mammal spring to his flippers instantly and roar wildly as he leap over the ex-Zora for his female friend. Mikau quickly recover and swiftly swung his leg into the rampaging creature's ankle, causing the craze male to drop heavily to the floor. The dolphin grew angrier, and without warning spun around and propel himself to Mikau instead, his beak open to bite his assaulter. Mikau duck and roll out of harms way and the dolphin was met with a mouth full of air. Growling, unleashed a shrill high pitch squeal, and as if on command, the rest of the cetacean people rush for Lulu in a chorus of loud whistling and obnoxious chirps that sounds more like sick birds being butcher in the slaughter. "Mik!" Lulu cry as she swung her claws and sank her teeth into their blubbery skins, shaking her head wildly to twist the flesh beneath. She yelp and growl, turning and chasing after them as she snap and lash at the offending creatures. They jump at her with artificial shocks of their teasers or ram her with their iron hard beaks, pushing her forcefully into the wall as they dug their own teeth his her scaly skin. Creature after creature hammer her into the without letting her recover, only leaping back when she viciously rake their faces and tear chunks of blubber in between her wickedly sharp fangs. The metal began to indent as they bury her further and harder into the wall, laughing insanely as they listen to her squeals of distress. "No!" Mikau push himself forward as he rush to her rescue, but felt his frail body pinned painfully to the ground as the dolphin man trap him under his grasp. Mikau squirm desperately to break free of his iron grip, but his strength is too inferior in this form to properly fight back. "Release me you freak!" Out of nowhere, the scarlet coated face of Lianna suddenly pop into his view, blood still pouring out of her wounds at an alarming rate. Ugly claw marks plague her shimmering blue-grey face as the crimson liquid drench her chin and jaws, drooling from her mouth as she grin. "Beautiful boy. She is impure. Must be dealt with before she cause more bloodshed. After we beat her to bloody plump, we heal her with enlightenment and perfection. You will understand soon enough." "No! I don't care about this 'perfection' you speak of! Just let her go and keep me instead! Or I'll kill you both in cold blood if I have to." "You still dare to oppose me? After what we've done for you?" her male friend boom as he press down on the scrawny humanized shark. "You are a weak little human; a mistake in our experimental hexing ritual. The way you are now, you're only going to end up seriously hurt or dead. Give up already. Its not worth it." "I don't care. Lulu is special to me. I may have lost my previous body, but my Zoran spirit burns strong. I'll protect her even if it means I'll lose to you. Please let me fight for her. Its too painful to watch..." "And yet you think its fine to spread pain onto others? You think it wasn't painful for me to watch that wretch damage my mate's face? You vile creature! All of you sharks are the same! Only thinking of yourselves and expressing your sadistic, bloodthirsty nature onto other creatures. If anything, this is justice being serve! And what can you do as of now, you whelp? A weak, insignificant little insect that are humans? Until we send you to rehabilitation and preform better spells, you are nothing but a cockroach to us." Mikau stop struggling and look at his free hand, his arm twisted in an odd angle. A small noise came out of his mouth, his gaze anything but happy. No blue claws or winter scales, but in their place weak nails and soft skin which is useless in relation to the situation. The hurting is much more evident as a human, whereas his Zoran self have a higher tolerance to pain, being of a fighting breed. But above all that, he felt an unfamiliar weight to him, and he knew that it was because his skeleton had trade cartilage for bone, which is denser... A spark flew through his cerulean gaze, and as he glance up to notice the pair giggling giddily to themselves as they watch Lulu kick out at one of their demented friends. The cheerful Malletila Zora is no push over; she'll valiantly fight back if she has to and this is clear as day as she grab hold of another dolphin creature in her claws and struck her hammerhead skull against its crown (a weapon often use by her breed.) The humanoid animal squeal as it tumble back holding its forehead, and Lulu gradually pull herself from the dented wall and pants at the now wary cetacean people. After dealing a decent round of punishment to them despite their frequent attacks, Lulu manage to give the mammals second thoughts of blindly charging her. Many of them bled from deep cuts and gashes across their faces and adornment, some were even limping or whimpering. They whistle to each other, clicking out various tones in their strange language. The stripe dolphin holding the ex-Zora down beam, chirping to Lianna as he directed his authority to the pod. "Don't be discourage my friends. She's just one mindless shark while you're an army of highly intellectual beings. Give her your worst." "Yes please," sang Lianna playfully, eager to see the female Zora suffer. 'Now's my chance,' Mikau mentally said. In a flash of a second, he thrust his finless arm backward towards the man holding him captive. His elbow dug into the stripe dolphin's stomach, the bones providing extract force to the impact. The sea mammal gasp in shock and release his hold on Mikau, rolling on to his side in pain. Lianna screech in disbelief and anger, lunging for the white haired human. Mikau duck and sprinted towards Lulu, pushing past the startle creatures as they whine and squeal. Lulu's heart flutter with joy as she open her arms. Mikau jump into her welcoming embrace and nuzzle into her chest, the female Zora spinning him around in their brief moment of bliss together Its funny being the one to be lifted off his feet like this when it had always the other way around, being naturally taller then her (Sylovaakiens are normally a towering 12 ft while Malletilas are 8 to 9 ft, dwarf by the former.) He gave her a quick satisfying peck on the lips before being set back down by her, turning their sights on the boiling rage building up within the cetacean pair. They have little time to rejoice, for they must find a means of escape. Lianna nuzzle her partner, squeaking softly as he dwell in his agony. She turn her hateful eyes back to the Zoran couple, bouncing up and down immaturely. "No fair! You cheat! You dummy dumb dumbs! Now you leave me no choice! I'm going to unleash my super ultra sonic means of wavy doom! Prepare to beeee....nullified!" Mikau and Lulu back away, this time with Lulu standing protectively over her boyfriend's small frame. They had an idea what this "super ultra sonic means of wavy doom" actually is. Cetacean are famous for their echolocation, and they had seem some use it as weapons against shark firsthand...Its most likely how they ended up in these guys' clutches; one moment an awkward face to face confrontation with this psycho specifically while minding their business, and the next thing they knew they woke up with major headaches in their cold lab. The room around once again rang with laughter, and the chorus gradually grew in volume as the beakless female's eyes grew wilder and dark. Suddenly the only door to the room slid open, and a larger dolphin man waded through but stop and blink by the doorway. He looks like a bipedal orca, sharing the coloration and dorsal fin on his back. He stand 14 ft tall, very imposing looking. Unlike the smaller abominations, he seems to be mentally stable as his bronze eyes held a calm and relax demeanor despite his surprise. When he spoke, a row of sharp tawny gold teeth neatly line his mouth, and a spotted tongue lays within. "Lianna, Nixon, what is the meaning of this? This isn't right! You're not suppose to torture our guests! We're here to help them reach a new positive life through healthy means. How would they accept our society with open arms if you treat them so poorly?" The room seem to grow eerily silent. Lulu and Mikau watch as the cetacean people stood there, as if realizing their blindsided mistake. However, they dwell little on the creatures' thought process for they practically flew for the open doorway without a moment's hesitation. They swift darted past the orca and race down the hallway, pressing faster and faster against the hard metallic floor. They ran so fast that their feet barely touch the ground as they merge into a fleeting blur for random cetacean scatter around the facility. Mikau pants as he try his best not to leave Lulu behind, knowing how clumsy of runners Zoras make. As a human, Mikau's feet gain more traction, allowing him to sprint faster then he ever have in his life on land. A rush of icy air suddenly chilled them to their cores, but they press on running, never looking back. They blaze through the snow, slipping through the ice as flakes of frigid breath of winter sheered their faces, but still they ran. They ran and ran, never stopping, never turning. They just blasted through the dark blue woods, startling animals into hiding as they rain through shimmering threads of beautiful frozen dewdrops draping like delicate curtains from the branches. Blue fairies lit the forest as they cluster the crusty shrubs and treetops like fireflies, lighting their way through the night. The glow of the city beam from the distant valley, its Clock Tower emitting a beacon for all who lost their way... *** Mikau and Lulu finally slow to a brisk trot as they trudge down the icy street of a well off neighborhood, the streetlights stretching their shadows as they pass by. The shine of their brightness reflected off the slick black ice that froze over the sidewalk they roam on, causing the pair to slip and slide as they continue marching on. Many of the houses were fairly lit, and plumes of fluffy smoke rose from the chimneys indicating the inviting warmth of the indoors. Decorations for the upcoming holidays grace the houses in bushy greens, ribbon reds, and blinking colors as tiny lights strewn across the windows and hangs from roofs and porches. Snowmen would occasionally greet the pair as they past by the yards, and once in a while a dog could be heard barking into the night. One of the Moons shone crisply like a silver sickle in the black, smoky sky, faith glimmers of stars seen twinkling beyond the flurries next to it. Mikau lag behind as he struggle to keep himself warm, hugging himself feebly as his breath converted into frost laced crystals. The only protection he wore was a old trashy t-shirt with cartoonish dolphins on it and tight, ripped sweatpants the cetacean gave him at some point, mostly after his transformation when he was still knocked out. It looks like something they just dug out of the trash so they can cover his exposed dignity, but honestly he wouldn't be surprise as that is mostly the case base given its appalling smell. Lulu meanwhile didn't seem bothered by the cold, her scales insulating some heat during the sunny day to keep her mildly comfortable. She look back at the under dress human, concern laced in her facial features as she confronts her friend. "Oh Mikau, just hold on a little longer. We're almost at Kafei's house. He'll know what to do." "I-I hope so..." Mikau murmur as he cast his eyes to his buckling knees, ready to to drop from the cold and exhaustion. He cough hoarsely, rubbing his throat in pain. "I'll get hypothermia if-if I don't t-t-turn back to my Zoran self. I don't want to be a human forever." "Don't be so rough on your appearance." She giving him a soft hug. She pet his soft hair as she continues. "I think you're cute as a little human." "Babe, you find everything cute...N-not that I blame you." "I mean it though. You're quite the looker as a tiny person. You're adorable!" "Oh Lu," Mikau sigh as he bury into her, half for warmth, half out of affection. There is truly no other girl in the world that he rather be with then with his mate. But in midst of their embrace, he something was off with Lulu, an eerie silence falling on her as her eyes grew dark and concern. "Lulu? What's wrong? You're not hurting from the attack are you?" "Mikau," Lulu breathe, trying to muster up her courage as she carry on. "When I was being ram into the wall of the laboratory, I heard it; I heard the yells and cries of distress Zoras on the other side." "What?" Mikau pull away from her with such a bewildered expression, such surprise as it flash across his blue eyes. Worry soon wash over him. "Are you sure there were others?" Lulu quickly nodded. "Yes. I heard them yelling and squealing from their side. They said things like 'Another one?!' They're torturing her!' 'Leave her alone you warm blooded freaks!' But what really caught my ears were these one sentences; 'How many innocent shark Zoras in Termina are they going to kidnap and turn into dolphin people? They need to understand that our kind matters just as much as any stupid sea mammal!' Mik, there were more Zoras then just the two of us back there. They are all shark Zoras like us, I knew this much by that last quote. They're trying to erase sharks off the earth by replacing them with their own kind." "Oh Goddesses...Its coming back to me. Sharks and dolphins had been mortal enemies since the beginning of time. The instinctual hatred must've carry over in the cetacean people's own evolution line. That's why they were so eager to put us through their little experiment against our will. They want to 'fix' us to avoid competition. Paranoid freaks. I never thought I'd hate a group of dolphins this much, especially since the ones in our oceans had coexisted peacefully with domestic sharks. We can live in harmony if they just give us the chance." "Sadly, they are too blinded by their mammalian superiority complex to care. They see fish as unintelligent and lacking of any real feelings. They'll only continued committing these unspeakable crimes as they come in contact and collect more breeds of shark Zoras." "All the more reason to find Kafei and turn me back then. I'll give them a good asswhipping and serve them to our pet sharks. Come on. Let's find Kafei' house." *** Kafei lean back comfortably in his couch as he read his book, the fire crackling and popping softly in front of him. Sprinkle of glistening snow flutter down from the outside world beyond the foggy window next to him, the lights from houses across from his barely pouring into his living room. He bundle himself with a velvety raspberry robe that match his plush carpet. The golden flames before him danced and licked briskly at the protective barrier of the fireplace as the sparks and embers glowed with an alien hue. By his bunny slippered feet was a Keaton, resting quietly on the rug as it snore. It had its head on its paws, its face masked with a peaceful expression as is side breathes steady, its fluffy tails curled around its body like a blanket. Kafei's mother was understandably never keen on allowing wild animals into the house for safety concern like diseases or attacking, always telling her son to respect their space and admire them from their backyard. The large yard borders a small wooded area where Clock Town's domestic animal and Pokemon residents (smuggle into the realm for illegal pet trades) likes to hang out with their wilder counterparts. Wild critters would pop up on their property all the time through a hole in the fence his father fail to fix up, and his mommy was quite stern when she wants minimal interacting between him and "vermin". But despite her warnings that doesn't stop him from sneaking his little "pet" in when they weren't around. He known the Keaton for years, remembering when the curious fox approach him and Anju during a festival as he wore the Keaton mask. Obviously it was smitten with him for that reason and began a series of it following him around and asking for attention. He started to feed and play with it, and the two had share a strong bond since. A knock on the door pulled him out of the novel he was reading, and he saw his Keaton sleepily raise its head, its eyes still close as it whimper quietly to itself. Just when he was in the most suspenseful part of the plot too! Annoyed with the abrupt interruption, Kafei speed walk over to the door and try not to glare into the peephole. When he comprehend who was standing outside, cover in shimmering scales that brim like opal, he felt his heart skip a beat and butterflies crashing blindly in his stomach. Immediately he undid the padlock and nearly swung the door open. And swirl of powdery snow wisp into the warm house, chilling his skin as it yank his robe back forcefully, revealing an Indigo-Go's boxers that he wore. Kafei squeal like a startled puppy as he try to hurriedly cover himself, his blood red eyes wide as he smile stupidly in his visitor's direction. Lulu held her hand to her as she struggle to surpass her giggle, watching the little elf eared human quickly cover himself as his face grew a hot red. She felt Mikau huddling up to her, peering into the tempting warmth of his house with a longing expression. Lulu clear her throat. "Oh Kafei! Let's ignore that little moment and get to the point. Can we come in?" "Sure!" nodded Kafei with a bright smile. "Anything for a frie-" His crimson sights landed on the under dress person latch onto her silky smooth frame, the man shivering so violently he could hear his teeth clattering. The poor...Hylian? Sheikah?...had frost lacing his snowy white hair, and his skin had turn pale with a tinge of blue from the cold. "Oh my Goddesses Lulu! Who's this sad bloke? And is he poorly dressed in this weather?" "I-its a l-l-long story," Mikau murmur, struggling to speak as his throat became scratchy and irritated. "Wait, Mikau?!" Kafei blink as he step back in shock, his eyes suddenly wild as he recognize his voice. The only thing different was that it lacked the elegant aquatic trill of a Zora. "What the hell-?" "Y-yes, We know. Looong s-st-story. Please let us in already. I'm dying out here. My ass is freezing off!" "Yep, that's Mikau all right," Kafei commented half humorously as he allow the two into his house. Lulu picked up Mikau and carry him in as Kafei locked the door behind them. In the position he is in now, Mikau felt both embarrass for being whisk around like a little pet. The last time he was carry around like this was several years ago, and before that was roughly a decade ago. It was Darmani who had carry him that last time in response to the daredevil Zora having twisted his ankle after skiing down Snowhead. The Goron had to struggle across the mountain just to get his scaly rear to the nearest hospital. Now, here he is, being cradle like a newborn tadpole as Lulu snuggle him in her arms. She keeps saying things like "Who makes a cute little human? You! You're so cute!" and pet names. Zoras sometimes see humans as pets, and vice versa. Though humans tend to be sensitive with being called animals even if that makes zero sense since they ARE animals like Zoras, though not in the same sense as his fish brethren. Lulu rub her nose against his, and Mikau remember that his electro-sensitivity, a trait unique to sharks of all kind, was no more. He no longer felt the tingling sensation that he pleasures when Lulu and him rub their sensitive noses together. But that didn't stop him from closing his eyes with and trying to purr in delight. He nuzzle into the nape of her neck, curling into a ball as he try to take in the warmth of the living room. Lulu's fins were wrap around him protectively, trying to provide extra warmth as she scooted onto the couch. She carefully lay Mikau on the cushion, stroking his velvety hair as she cuddle onto him. Kafei trotted over the the next room over and quickly reappear with a bundle of blankets in his arms. He usher the female away and cover the humanized Zora under the thick soft covers. Mikau breathe a sigh of relief and duck his head underneath, disappearing completely as he shuffle to absorb its warmth and get comfortable. "Thanks pal," he smiled, satisfied with the comforting blankets as the fire slowly heat him up. He bundle himself up and nuzzle into its cozy embrace blowing playfully at the little Keaton as it came to inspect him. The golden three tailed fox whine happily and it gave him quick licks with a tiny pink tongue as the ex-Zora tickle its cheeks. "No problem. But I have so many questions regarding your little....er..." "Transformation?" The couple both quoted in unison. "Yeah, that. I mean-What the freaking hell? How and why did you become human?" "There was an unusual incident that occurred today," Lulu began as she stroke Mikau's head. "We were 'invited' to participate in a program geared towards Zoras, specifically those of the shark family. Turns out we were abducted to be part of some bizarre experiment to turn us into bipedal sea mammals." Kafei's crimson eyes grew large and held his hand up to briefly silence her. "Wait a minute. Bipedal sea mammals? Were those the freaky things that pop up in Clock Town a few week ago? Nobody would shut up about these humanoid animals since." "Y-yeah. And they're freaking obnoxious," Mikau growl as he was reminded of the dolphin people's unholy existence. "What do you know 'bout them?" "I'll tell you what I know. They are not native here in Termina. In fact the marine biologist Dr. Mizumi found out that they came from the distant seas of a country called Holodrum, which is in another dimension altogether. Apparently there are no Zoras there, and they rule as the dominate species of their ocean domain unopposed. Ever since they found a way to Termina, Zoras had been disappearing left and right at an alarming rate, all who are shark Zoras like you guys. I keep hearing it on the news and work. Many Zoras are on edge because of those creatures." "Another dimension? You've got to be kidding me..." Mikau groan inwardly. "And in an effort to turn me into one of them, the stupid female creature read the wrong spell book and turn me into a defenseless little person instead. If they're going to turn Zoras into members of their own races, at least be competent enough to do their job. Like really. I don't even know what breed of elf-eared human am I. There's Gerudo, Sheikah, Hylian, Lokomo, Cobble and Twili. Obviously Twili are out of the picture since they evolved separately from the main branch and are radically different from any other members of your species to the point they look like aliens. I don't have the sunburned color of a Gerudo, so that's ruled out too. Maybe I'm a Sheikah given the hair? They do traditionally have white and blond hair after all." "No, you're just a Hylian," Kafei said as he point in the direction of Mikau's newly develop ears. "You see, elfin humans have slight variants of our pointed ears depending on the race. Though because of its minor alteration, it is not noticeable among regular humans and non-humans like you guys unless you really look at them. Hylians have slightly broader ears, while Sheikah ears are slender. To make my next statement really count, all Sheikah have blood red eyes. It is a specific trait that only exist among Sheikah and Sheikah hybrids. Its what defines us as the Shadow Folks." He finished off with a gesture to his own almond shaped eyes, the blood coloration betraying his lineage as a descendant of the ninja people. His grandmother from his father's side was a pure blooded Sheikah, and thus Kafei had inherited the traditional eye genetics of her people. Though he still has more qualities of a Hylian then a Sheikah.     "Aw, that's kinda disappointing. Sheikah are my favorite because they remind me of my own species in so many ways. We share some things in common, and it gives me even more of an excuse to kick those freaks' blubbery asses in the most epic moveset imaginable. Not that there's anything wrong with Hylians." "No problem. I recon that since you obviously had a bad day, you want to get back at those guys and turn back into a Zora?" "We both want to get back at them," Lulu nodded. "With the knowledge we learned, Mikau and I agree that with the combine forces of the authorities we shall avenge our fellow Zoras and punish those giggling lunatics harshly. But at the state he's in now, Mikau cannot take them on. He has no defenses, and can easily be overpowered by the much larger dolphin folk. And you know how Mikau is not one to sit back in a fight. That and he is getting sick from the cold. We were hoping you know of a way to turn him back to normal. You are very savvy with how to solve other people's problems." Kafei click his tongue, ruffling the fur of his Keaton as it nudge his hand with its snout. "Well lucky you, this race change, magic or not, is completely reversible, so you're in luck. However there is only one person that I know that has the power to change you back...and I don't think you'll like the concept of the idea very much." "Who is it? I'm willing to meet them if it means turning back into a Zora again," Mikau said with a cough, getting annoyed at the feeble state he's plunging into. Kafei seem to hesitate, then, in a meek voice utter the following. "The Great Fairy of North Clock Town." ... ... ...Silence... "Oh! Um of coarse," Lulu laugh awkwardly, looking at Mikau's direction. His face was a mixture of complete horror and disgust. She never seen such lively expressions on his face before, all thanks to his Hylian transformation which allows his emotions to be that much clearer. "No way. I think I can get use to a human lifestyle instead. Being a human is suddenly not so bad." "Oh come on guys! I know she's famous for being a little...suggestive...flirty and maybe overly skimpy...but she can really help you regain your true form back. Don't you want to be a Zora again? You ALWAYS boast how amazing Zoras are and how proud you are to be born as one. Besides you can't stay like that forever. What about your lifestyle as a musician? Your career and millions of adoring fans? You're a Zora! Think of your friends waiting for you back at sea. Think of Lulu. You can't have any of this looking like that." Mikau took a longing look to Lulu at the mention of her name. Their eyes met, and he knew deep inside that he want nothing more then to be by her side for an eternity and more. Those beautiful, haunting orbs of magenta shining against her pearly white body. The lilac/indigo tinge of her crown and rims of her wing-like fins. Her curvy hourglass frame. The glittering scales that gleam like opal in the light of the fire. She is the definition of perfection and he knew that life would be hard living away from her. He needs her, and he knew that she needed him too. They were more then mere band mates. They were more then simply mates... "You're right. I need to get my form back not only for the ass kicking I'll commit upon those ocean rejects, but for the sake of my friends. When should we go to the see her?" "Tomorrow," Kafei answered pointing his finger to the clock mounted onto the fireplace. The time signified 10:00 pm, a little late to go out and about especially at this time of year. "The snow's set to settle sometime in the night, and the roads should be plowed by the time we head out. I know you're a little ill, but I already been told by my parents to watch over the house for the weekend while they are away, and too not invite people over. I promise though her shrine is in the park only a couple blocks from here. We should arrive there in a few minutes of foot." "Well I guess we're stuck here for the night huh?" Mikau said as he smile at Lulu. She smirk softly, bopping his nose with her own yet again. "I suppose so," confirm Kafei warmly. "My mom and dad won't be coming back til Monday morning. But I don't mind having company tonight; they don't have to know anyway. I was getting a little lonely today and was thinking of inviting Anju tomorrow. I'm glad you guys decided to stop by, though I know for a fact you two must be tire from your little adventure. There's a guest room that you can use tonight. Its down the hall to the left of the stairs." "Thank you Kafei," Lulu bowed politely, picking Mikau up in her arms. He felt heavier with the thick bundles wrapping around his weak frame, but she did not mind. Kafei got up and escorted them to their temporary room, his Keaton padding along besides him. The travel through the dining room and past the stairs where they came across a lovely little bedroom inviting them in. Lulu set Mikau down and brush his hair away from his eyes, planting a soft kiss to his forehead. Never had she kissed a human before, and his skin felt so... Soft and tender. "If you need anything, give me a call ok? In the meantime I'll prepare some nourishing soup for Mikau's cold and a nice batch of milkberry tea." Kafei quoted and the pair nodded delightfully. He smile as he quietly shut the door, and his muffle footstep journey to the kitchen in preparation of the beverages. Mikau invited Lulu to lay next to him, patting on the open space on the queen sized bed. She gladly crawl in and they curl into each other's arms closing their eyes. Mikau felt so much better knowing that Lulu is with him. Even as a human, he knows that their future will remain bright and positive for years to come. The hardships they endure had only strengthen their spiritual bond for each other, and now, as he awaits the arrival of Din's Dawn to smite Nayu's Night, his human heart thump against her beating chest. And he sigh as he drifted off in her embrace. Beating an unbreakable musical rhythm. Between human and Zora.

Oh my gosh I’m sorry this came so freaking late. But I had no choice but to write a Fanfiction out of the blue because the prompt for that day was "human" and trust me my human drawing skills is atrocious to say the least. I had to write something instead, and I just made up this ridiculous story as I went along. I remember reading a Ratchet and Clank story long ago in which Ratchet woke up as human instead of a Lombax and was deeply confused. That became my inspiration and it help me get through this story. I wanted Mikau to go through a similar thing by waking up as a Hylian rather then a simple alternate universe where the characters are just randomly humans. I think it fits better in terms of the Zelda universe. Spoilers!: If Zelda can turn into a Sheikah with magic, why not expand upon the race changing concept? 

Hope you don’t mind!  

[heartslogos]

seas who could sing so deep and strong [36]

“So is your girl okay?” Chic says as he settles into the stands next to her. He can tell that part of her attention is on her ticket slips for all of her wagers. Judge didn’t know that there were Tenno who made their living on gambling and market trades instead of - actual Tenno stuff. He thinks it’s pretty neat. You’ve got to have a head for numbers and trends and calculations of risk and reward and stuff. Judge is self aware enough to know he’d never make it if he tried doing what Chic does, he’d probably be broke by the end of an Earth week.

“Yeah,” Judge says, though he’s not so sure himself. After the whole thing in the Derelict Kore went off grid for about two weeks, the only sign of her left was a single signal from the Void where apparently, according to her Cephalon, she spent the entire week doing extermination and sabotage and bounty capture drops.

Kore came back after those two weeks looking absolutely fresh and well rested and glowing in ways that you probably shouldn’t be looking after two weeks of isolation and one-way killing sprees.

“Self-care,” Kore had said, “Is retreating into the Void to kill the corrupted with your cat or dog or non-mammalian based companion.”

Kore had apparently been in such a good mood after, that she kissed his cheek - Kissed! Him! Judge! On the cheek! With her mouth! And everything! Judge still hasn’t gotten over it and he’s accidentally smacked his head on low-hanging ship parts about two dozen times whenever he remembers it. He knows that number because Scylla has been keeping count. - when she came back on her way to saying hello to his Kubrow and Kavats - minus Handsome, who Kore just kicked out of her way.

“She’s just really shy?” Judge says, voice tilting upwards at the end because he’s not exactly sure what to call Kore’s absolute loathing of having to interact with new people, more than one new person at one time, unfamiliarity with any situation or person, and complete and total near-black-out-violence disgust at being seen in less than perfect form by someone who isn’t Judge.

Judge is of the opinion that Kore - regardless of whether she’s in an incredibly un-tried warframe with less her usual load out of weaponry, or whether she’s gleaming white, devouring black, and brazen red in her Saryn Prime unit with the Stalker’s broken sword on her back, her sinister and sleek Rubico lazily held in her hands - is always in top form and he would honestly have the same reaction to meeting or seeing her for the first time regardless of whether she’s in a weak uncalibrated Vauban frame or her well worn and well balanced Excalibur frame. Though he admits he’s incredibly biased.

After all, Judge got to love her by the color of her - as Kore would say it - soul than the frame it was housed in. Judge loved her before he even had a voice to ask for her name.

His chest squirms like Kore’s favorite fizz-cola.

“Right, shy,” Chic says, leaning back in her seat and propping Trinity’s feet up on the seat in front of them. Lucky that there isn’t anyone sitting there, Judge things. Trinity’s feet are a little pointy. “Is that what you call it? Whatever it is, it’s cute and I’m sorry Punk and I over stepped. He’s like a really dumb Kubrow that doesn’t realize it isn’t a puppy and that maybe some people are allergic to Kubrow.”

That sounds about right, except for how Kore adores anything that isn’t people-shaped and bipedal. Actually, now that he thinks about it, that might be why Kore doesn’t like Punk to start with.

Judge imagines it must be very difficult for her to handle what is essentially a really enthusiastic puppy in person-shape.

“Do you and Punk come here often?” Judge asks, looking around the Conclave arena, “I’m not much of a fan. I dabble a bit, but I’m not so good.”

“Punk’s actually a really good fighter,” Chic says, “Not against, you know, actual threats, but in an arena fight like this he knows what he’s doing. He’s making me money. What about Persephone? She seems like she’d be amazing at this.”

“Ah, no, as Persephone says - the sports disagree with her,” Judge laughs. “Also she has a profound distaste for being the focus of more than two people’s attention at once, unless they’re trying to kill her and she’s good to kill them back.”

“Huh, that explains things,” Chic muses and the general murmuring of the crowd quiets as a new frame ports into the arena.

Punk is still shaking hands with the other one, good natured and familiar in a way that Judge thinks means that both of them are regulars who fight often in Conclave.

The new warframe in the arena seems to freeze, locking up and then slowly turning to look around.

Judge realizes it just as the new frame tries to hail Teshin - based on the way it waves its warms -

“Teshin!” Judge stands up, waving his arms also to try and catch the man’s attention, “Teshin stop the match! Stop the match!”

After Judge gets up, Chic must realize too because she joins him in trying to get Teshin to notice them.

Because that’s Kore in the arena and Judge can hear her now, she’s using a voice synthesizer but he knows it’s her. He just didn’t recognize her at first because she wasn’t in one of her usual frames. Judge knows that Kore has a Mirage frame, she just rarely uses it.

“This is a mistake,” Kore says, “I ported in by accident, let me out.”

And then the worst possible thing happens.

Punk recognizes Kore. Judge doesn’t know how he does it, but he does.

“Oh!” Punk says, clapping his hands together, “Hey! Hey! Persephone! Hi! I haven’t seen you in forever, what’s up girl?”

And then Kore’s arms stop waving in the air and she slowly turns to look at the other Tenno in the arena.

Kore doesn’t say anything through the synthesizer, but Judge knows her well enough to know exactly what she’s doing back on her ship.

Kore is re-evaluating the entire situation, weighing the pros and cons of it. Kore is currently picking Punk apart with her eyes, like the Ballas trained elite fighter she is. Kore is currently smiling with all of her teeth and making a sound like oho? Ohoho. Ohohoho.

“Never mind,” Kore says, eerily calmly - and knowing her as Judge knows her, she’s trapped all of her glee inside and is pulling on full spiteful vengeful professional assassin mode on to cover it -, “Proceed.”

“Wait!” Chic says, still waving her arms, “Hold on!”

“Yes! No! Stop!” Judge agrees, because this can only end very badly and they need to stop this match right now.

“I need to change my bets, hold on!” Chic yells and Judge turns to gape at her. Never mind that she can’t see it since Nova doesn’t have a mouth.

“Chic.”

“She doesn’t do Conclave right, so this is her first time?” Chic says, frantic as she starts changing her ticket, “Alright. First fight she loses, second is a draw, third she wins, fourth she loses - based on her personality? She’s going to draw this out. Alternating to crush Punk into the ground for maximum catharsis on her part. I’m going to make so many credits off of your girl, you have no idea. I love this.”

“Aren’t you concerned that they’re going to get seriously hurt?”

“It’s Conclave, Hades,” Chic shrugs, “Besides. Punk? At all times he could always use a beat down. Trust me on this.”

“Void,” Judge groans, “They’re going to pound each other into the ground and it won’t even be for the same reasons.”

“I know, it’s wonderful. Punk will think he’s just teaching Persephone Conclave. And Persephone is going to like - wipe the arena clean with his blood, I love it.”

[kaaramel]

i conked out at like 2am writing this so weigh that in your mind vis-a-vis expectations of quality

the dialogue is weird and stilted a'purpose, partly as like, 'translation' into english from trashtalk (which i imagine is mostly pretty direct) and partly because fish hasnt held a damn conversation in years

whatever woooo apocalypse time

The day had been scorchingly hot, which was bad, and witheringly dry, which was worse. Time was, he might have preferred a dry heat, but things had changed. Drastically so. Now his water supply was unfathomably precious, and he was wasting half of it by sloshing it over his thin, membranous skin, trying in vain to keep himself moist, to wash off the dust and sand and ash that clung to him.

Once upon a time, the beginning of the end of the world, there had been all sorts of crackpot theories, doomsday cults and conspiracists blooming and thriving on the chaos of the profound, unstoppable destruction. One faction he remembered with particular bitterness had held that the influx of radiation was simply ushering in a new age - the powerful mutagen was gifting stagnant humanity a new method of evolution, allowing them to adapt to their new environments, guiding them to radiate into a thousand brand-new, more powerful, better-suited forms. The cults were long since disbanded or dead or themselves mutated into unrecognizability, but he would have liked to confront them, perhaps. Demand what their oh-so-idealistic philosophy of hyperadaptation could say to explain away being shaped into a fish in the middle of the desert.

He'd kept two legs, two arms, two eyes, one head, and such. That was more than some poor bastards could say. His skin was more like a frog's than a fish's, strictly speaking, scale-free and smooth and a vivid shade of green; it was the fins and the wide, thick-lipped mouth that gave him the impression that he’d go well with tartar sauce. He'd never been near a body of water large enough to test whether he actually had gills, but a certain internal fluttering and other changes in the way he breathed suggested he might. He'd never been much of a looker, even before, but he could run and talk and shoot, all of which were skills that counted, in this new and harsher world.

He was not much more than another desert scavenger, competing with the scorpions and the maggots. The bandage-cloaked bandit gangs were the closest thing to civilization, and they bickered and stole and fought among themselves, endlessly. He survived; that was about all that could be said, and it pained him, when he had the energy to spare for self-reflection.

The bandit gangs had been quiet lately, which really should have been a sign. He hadn't paid enough attention, had just been grateful for the lull in activity. As far as he could gather, several factions had been united under a single strong leader. He had not, unfortunately, deduced this through some sort of brilliantly skilled ex-cop investigative work. It was a guess inspired by his current state of being shot at by a big fuckin' bandit and his swarm of cronies.

Cowering behind cover (the bleached skull of some long-dead fishlike creature, which wasn't particularly encouraging) he worked to reload his trusty, slightly battered revolver. He'd been hit once, but that was fine, he'd always worked better under stress. Think of it as motivation to get this over with quickly. Another flurry of bullets whizzed around him, some of them cracking into his makeshift protection, which wouldn't last forever. He just needed to find the right moment.

The shooting paused. The bandit leader spat some crude and guttural jabbering about cowardice, his voice betraying that he was on the move, angling for a new position. Time to move - he ducked and rolled, came up on his feet, revolver steady -

Something burst out of the rocky wall of the canyon - about baseline human-size and bipedal, purple, faceted surfaces that the sun reflected off. It continued the wild charge, funneled its momentum seamlessly into a furious uppercut that sent one unlucky bandit flying off its feet and crashing headlong into another. Both went down in a tangle of wrappings and rifles. The lead bandit turned, distracted, unloaded a wild barrage of gunfire at the newcomer with a roar of rage. The forgotten loner, not distracted at all, trained his revolver on the towering figure and fired, over and over, until his target crumpled to the desert sand.

The remaining bandits cut their losses and fled, trading frantic accusations and vicious insults (Trashtalk, as its name would suggest, was a language truly rich with insults - even the simplified pidgin the bandits spoke). He approached the big bandit's corpse as the dust cleared, anxious to loot him before any particularly daring bandits chose to regroup. It was a shame about the mutant that had leapt into the fray like that, earning itself nothing but a showy entrance and a point-blank flurry of gunfire, but perhaps it had been carrying valuables as well...

A crystalline formation jutting out of the ground beside the fallen bandit glittered brilliantly in the sunlight, and resolved itself somehow into a humanoid shape, albeit a squat and bulky one, with no obvious neck or any division between head and torso. It was the mutant that had plowed through a solid wall of rock, then taken the brunt of bandit gunfire, and it was clearly untouched. Grinning, it raised a chunky hand in friendly greeting.

"Hello." Its Trashtalk had an odd, eerie echo to it, but was entirely understandable. "Good shooting."

"How you alive?" he demanded, blunter and gruffer than he liked, his voice rough from disuse. He wished he could spare a drink of water.

It grinned, and its teeth were sharp and blindingly shiny. "Oh, that? I'm tough. I can handle a few bullets." The constructions it used when referring to itself were unfamiliar to him for a moment, and then he recognized the form. Feminine. She continued. "Like a rock, see? I reflect -" She flexed an arm, showing an impressive bicep, and it went rigid and sharp, the flat panes of it glossy in the bright desert sun. Pointed with the other, mimed a bullet's path bouncing off of it. "Ka-ping."

"You're very strong." He edged closer to the big bandit's body, wondering bleakly if she would demand the spoils from the kill. His best chance in that case would be to grab what he could and try to outrun her. There was something curious about the dirt near his corpse, a darker shape, a hint of movement.

"You too. Like I said. Good marksman." Her radiant smile hadn't faded. "Call me Crystal. What do I call you?"

Proper names in the wasteland were precious and rare. Too many painful memories were locked up in names from before, and on the flipside there were people now who hadn't been 'people' until the radiation, who hadn't had names at all. Mostly descriptions would do. Something snappy and short enough for your friends to yell, something obvious that didn't give too much away.

He shrugged. "Fish." What else?

"You alone? You want to come with me?"

He lost his train of thought entirely. "I - Alone. Yes. What?"

"Through the portals." He had heard the word, but not what it meant - by way of illustration, she pointed at the yawning purple vortex that had opened beside the bandit's corpse, swallowing a trickle of fine desert sand that swirled and disappeared inside. "I'm looking for something. Special. Important. You should come, Fish-out-of-water. This is no place for you."

What did he have to lose?

"Fläshyn," he grunted. Let's do this.

The bandits had carried nothing much useful besides ammunition and guns. Fish managed to patch himself up, liberated a shotgun and some shells that didn't seem in too dire a state. Crystal slung a machinegun over her craggy shoulder and strode confidently toward the portal.

"We need to stick together," she warned him, bracing her feet against the inexorable suction, and held out a hand for him to take. It was solid but surprisingly warm - not on the surface like a rock that had been in the sun, but truly heated from within. "It'll be rough. Hope you don't get sick easy."

"I'll survive," he said, and the portal drew them in to a dizzying timeless rushing void - nothing solid, nothing still, no way to orient himself or measure how long he'd been inside

- and emerged into clear blue waters.

He gasped reflexively for air and got a rush of warm water that soothed parts of his throat he hadn't known existed. He could breathe! Not labored, painful gasps for hot, dry, sandy air, real breathing!

Crystal's chuckle was distorted even more by the water. "Portals aren't always this nice. Lucky you, Fish."

"I will drink. This entire oasis." It was the only word that came to mind for body-of-water. Fish kicked off from the ground, swimming a few strokes experimentally. His efforts were a little clumsy, but respectable enough. Crystal appeared to be heavy enough to simply walk along the bottom.

"Staying here then? I won't make you go. This might be a good place." It was tempting for perhaps half a second.

Other fish - animal fish, not humanoid mutants - were already gathering. The bony, visible ribcages and sharp teeth weren't especially encouraging. A few tenacious scraps of water plants were clinging to the rocky bottom, achingly brilliant rippling green strands, but even as he watched, a few of the starvation-skinny fish got into a fight over the few stringy mouthfuls, snapping and ramming at each other viciously. If this was the state of the local wildlife, he'd just as soon keep moving.

"Was a nice thought." Guns and water didn't mix; he pulled out the only thing he carried that might be effective: a screwdriver, but one large and hefty enough to do some damage. Crystal flexed her fists and shifted into a fighting stance as the school of hungry fish closed in.

[imherebecauseyourehere]

@glxtzy a ONEPIECE XOVER starter:

🚀—“Jｏｉｎ ｗｉｔｈ ｙｅｓｔｅｒｄａｙ'ｓ ｆｏｅ ｔｏ ｓｍａｓｈ ｆａｔｅ,

                                                    💫 — ａｎｄ ｇｒａｂ ｔｏｍｏｒｒｏｗ'ｓ ｐａｔｈ

                                                                             ｗｉｔｈ ｏｕｒ ｏｗｎ ｈａｎｄｓ!”

 This was his best chance.

  A pair of viridescent eyes, inhuman and predatory - observed unsuspecting prey in the form of a slender, fair-faced Human who moved a short distance away. The blond kept his pace removed; his presence, innocuous even if detectable.

  He had once been an accomplished hunter of Humankind, after all. Lauded, with numerous commendations. Though he’d never imagined that he would return to these instincts. However, divergent from the bloodstained path that had taken him to this point, Viral had no intention of killing the young fellow he watched. In fact, he preferred not to commit any harm at all… he just needed a guide. And it was necessary that such a guide be Human.  

  Viral’s arrival to this predicament came with a rough landing, and a harsh introduction to the political unrest that burdened so many. Just hours prior, he’d been analyzing data from within his personal craft, a bipedal mecha he called Enki.  An astral phenomenon had caught the eye of the intrepid crew of the Chouginga Daigurren, during a routine sweep of a new sector of space. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before his proximity to the storm’s center disrupted his communications and controls. Moments later, a surge of energy swept both mecha and pilot into a temporal current, one that spat them out into the atmosphere of a distant, unknown world.

  The resilient mecha absorbed most of the impact to the planet’s surface; the damage amassed from the astral storm and and the subsequent fall was critical. Viral’s body, engineered for survival, escaped an otherwise probable death. And, as his bones and tissue knitted back together, he worked to conceal Enki’s wreckage from sight with the flora and landscape available along the tiny, deserted little island they’d crashed upon.  

  Stranded on an unfamiliar world, he greatly needed information. And to repair Enki, he needed materials and tools. The island’s resources were insufficient for both. He would have to secure a method of transportation in order to leave the island - and it would come, at the cost of a good faith.

 The island soon received another set of visitors, a group of Fishmen who responded to Viral’s non-Human features with more favor than the blond could have anticipated. They tended to his wounds, in spite of his protests - and even assisted in covering what they believed to be the components of Viral’s ship, still being built. Though the characteristics were rather understated in comparison to his kin, and though his chronological age was rather advanced, the group of Fishmen eagerly took to calling him the ‘tiger-shark kid.”

  They provided Viral’s initial insight to the world scene. For them, the world was even more murky than pirates, marines, and civilians. They had fled to the island after banding together for a rescue mission. It was through their well-meaning, if radicalized perspective that Viral learned of the hostility - objectification, even, suffered by Fishmen at the hands of Humans. The conflict was much older than their recent efforts to rescue a mermaid relative. They had been successful, but they had lost two friends in the fray. Though he was reluctant to harbor animosity in his heart, again, Viral’s was admittedly swayed by their tale, and he divulged some of his own experiences. - the tribulation, and the more favorable times.    

  They had ferried him from the island, and Viral’s tactical neutrality was tested when the ship came under fire by the same traders who had sought to sell the mermaid mentioned prior. Amidst the canon fire and the indomitable waves, they had been separated, and each had insisted that Viral escape and secure his own safety before worrying over them. The traders departed after a minimal effort to search the ship’s listless, floating debris. And so too, did Viral search for any signs of the four Fishmen. When he couldn’t find a trace, he hoped that it was an assurance of their survival and escape.  

 Perhaps the harrowing situation from the night before was too fresh on his mind; perhaps why he could look at the Human at the distance with such dispassionate determination. There were numerous worlds, with countless races populating them. Perhaps on this one, Humans were less evolved than the individuals with which he was used to interacting. Perhaps they were as his people once were - warring and heedless of the pain they brought others. He was in no position to play at optimism…

 In an instant, he saw his opportunity. Moving like a shaft of sunlight across the shadows of an imposing building, he reached to encircle both of Yuki’s wrists (if successfully captured, they would so easily fit within the palm of just one of his massive paw-hands.) The young Human’s chest would be forced against the wall, with the Beastman’s weight bracing him in place. As an added caution, he was poised to clasp a hand across the Human’s mouth and jaw, if the event drew too loud an exclamation from him.

    ❝Don’t make a scene,  Ningen.  I just need to borrow you for a bit. Do you know your way around a sailing ship? Just nod, if so. Don’t you dare to raise your voice.❞

  Taking a prisoner grated against his sense of honor; but he would allow for this transgression if only out of reverence for the concern and goodwill that his Fishmen rescuers extended. If he could repair Enki without harm coming to himself or this Human, then he could redeem this primitive effort at hand.

                                     🐾—ɪ'ᴍ ʜᴇʀᴇ ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜsᴇ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ʜᴇʀᴇ ,                                           ‘ǝɹǝɥ ǝɹ'noʎ ǝsnɐɔǝb ǝɹǝɥ ɯ'I

                                             ʏᴏᴜ'ᴠᴇ ɢᴏᴛ ᴀ ᴘʀᴏʙʟᴇᴍ ɴᴏᴡ!”                                              “!ʍon ɯǝןboɹd ɐ ʇoƃ ǝʌ'noʎ

[noramoya]

WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS. NEW DISCOVERY ABOUT THE HUMAN MIND SHOWS THE LIMITATIONS OF REASON.02/19/2017.

— By Elizabeth Kolbert .

“In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances. As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.” A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from. The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context. Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective. Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile. If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias. ”Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own. A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this assymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.”

— ELIZABETH KOLBERT .

[weirdspookystories]

The Cold Prototype

Black barked-claws, like twitching tendrils on velvet purple night sky, flickered and parted against an encroaching beam of pale light. It arcs as dense vegetation parts to expel a camouflaged figure. After a stumble, the beam of light quickly settles. The large silhouette stands on the edge of a shallow stream, fumbling for their map, quickly. They also check their wrist-navigator before moving along, expertly ensuring that they are unfollowed. Too much was on the line. A shrill whirr could be heard, faintly, on the wind.

Inside, meanwhile, Edward stretched, yawned, then checked his displays. There had, unusually, been an official report sent to him, a motion signature detected by one of the prevalent, silent security-drones, from just across the valley. This city was eventually to house CEOs and world leaders, with the current residents effectively pampered lab-rats. So far it wasn’t boding well.  Although it was getting on for midnight, it didn’t feel like the picturesque, wholesome neighbourhood that branding had suggested it would become. Outwardly pleasant, but still hostile just below the surface. The report unsettled Edward, whose mind filled instinctively with memories of the brutes he had faced back in the dense concrete sprawl of his hometown. He looked down at his left hand, almost entirely organic prosthetics, only a light shimmer and loss of dexterity would reveal it, but it was always there. The security chief had spent years earning this job: to coworkers and friends he was confident and funny, but those he had faced had seen him much differently...he accepted the unpleasantness of his role as necessary.

The city was privately owned, self-sufficient, and safe. Safety was hard to come by during that time of civil war, but the fact that the company shared their victories with their patrons was inarguably generous. The city was a beautiful prototype: only touching the sky would have given away that it was a holographic ceiling, designed to relax company citizens, and the floor was hard, cold marble, brutally pristine. Making his way through the corridors of the compactly-inhabited neighbourhood, the security guard quietly documented the search through a small digital implant in his throat.

As he marched, Edward thought of the kind of person surviving outside the neocity or fighting in the brutal Corporate War and shuddered, it wasn’t a life he would live. It was necessary, though, and he couldn’t imagine society being any other way. He wasn’t politically minded. Focusing instead on his work, he tried ascertaining the kind of dissident that would be trespassing in such a remote, secure location, especially considering how difficult simply reaching this new fortress city nearly-undetected would be. Someone well-trained, but not from the company? Impossible, those people were barely educated, he thought, and they would have had to crawl through the electronic smartpipe, which was secure, and full of heat-seeking drones. Ed arrived at a thick steel door, looking out of place amongst the modern and bright design of the structure.

Outside, the creeper stealthily crouches at the edge of the access panel: intel had suggested it would be the weakest and shallowest around the unfinished concrete cube city. They began mechanically and methodically digging in the cold dirt to find the handle, exactly where it was predicted to be, a few feet deep in the grainy, dead soil. In an unwitnessed display of superhuman strength, the stranger plied open the metre-squared, dirt-covered panel of lightweight and somewhat corroded metal, shining the torch into the ominous tunnel. Moonlight pierced the Entrance’s darkness like an abdominal wound. This was it.

Edward inhaled cool fresh air deeply. He would miss this. It was a reminder that future citizens would be living their whole lives in their comfortable boxes. The outside wouldn’t be secret, of course, but there would benothing they’d know to miss. After walking for an hour, he was standing at the handrail, looking out across theunfamiliar  landscape. He felt exposed without strong walls. As he was looking, he saw a soft light, a strange orange glow in the twisting brown limbs that he hadn’t spotted before, so he moved to approach. 

Edward stepped into thin air, off the edge, finding the thin iron rungs embedded in the cross-laminated timber. They were designed to rust away, leaving the city impenetrable to any aggravators or non-citizens when it was completed. Noah’s ark came to mind as Edward stepped off into a world he felt was, in many ways, now too hostile to survive for long in. Things weren’t always nice in the neocity, like the brief outages of power and emotional evictions, but otherwise he felt safe, and he couldn’t ask for anything more. Touching the floor delicately and entering the scenery, he felt the eyes of hundreds of potential ambushers sizing him up. He wasn’t aware that the vegetation thinned out barely a mile away: the soil wasnt fertile enough out there, and it barely was around the city anyway, but it looked nice on posters and in marketing to have some rare greenery. There was a small clearing between the trees, which he headed for. Edward felt isolated, and  the formless presence of the unfamiliar trees wasn’t helping. He felt a twinge just below his stomach.

There was the Entrance. Smoke drifted out, but Edward hadn’t seen smoke in person before. He coughed, looking around, before looking deeper into the opening, hesitant. The glow he had spotted from above was emergency lighting, humming orange halogen bulbs like old streetlights. They were embedded in the concrete, by the ladder, which,

like the other,

he

descended.

Losing track of the rungs, he almost jumped when he felt stable floor underfoot again. Edward had reached a mesh platform, through which an abyss of wiring and dust could be seen below, appearing infinite. In truth, it was indeed a very long fall to the nuclear core, but infinity cannot really be known. A few tunnels and corners later, the walkway narrowed to a bank of important-looking yet highly complex computers. Ed had never been here before, and he was acutely aware of it, how alien it felt to him, even though it was so near to where he was living. It felt more cramped than even the older shanty-cities he’d had to work at, but not as dirty. His hand shimmered in the gloom apprehensively.

At the end of the section of walkway the illegal man stood, hunched, but the man was not a man. The…stranger pulled back the camoflagued veil to reveal nothing remotely human. Illuminated by the fire it had started down here, Edward gawped at the pot-metal machine, intricate handiwork contrasting with cheap materials and aggressive functionalism, clearly built below-surface, far, far away. It spoke with a fuzzy voice, which only barely anthropomorphised the bipedal tool, sounding like a distorted vintage recording. “Mr Security. I am sorry. We have to terminate your settlement. It is built on lies and destruction”. Unlike light and safety, sound flourished in the unseen expanses around them and through rusting caverns of empty pipes, where parts of the station had festered. “I am here to fix this. I am sorry. You see, the more synchronised control your company gave itself over the environment, the more vulnerable it became. Dependencies nurtured, nature neglected. Cracks will always form”. Edward drew his baton and moved to strike in a quick motion at the automaton’s exposed pseudo-neck joints, denting some pneumatics and weakening some exposed circuitry. With the force of four tons a split second later, the robot pushed its arm through Edward, just below his stomach, and out his back, narrowly avoiding his spine.

There was a morbid breeze colder than nuclear winter, incomparable to the calm of the surface breeze.

The machine explained, tearing its soaked arm from the dying guard’s viscera. The hulking space-station was the prototype the citizens had been sent to, not simply the new city. A whole planet, or at least, the surface-above appearance of it. All occupants were kept unaware that they were not even on earth. This was the company’s most lucrative venture yet: industrialisation of an entire planet from core to atmosphere, a celestial body made of machine. The pinnacle of the species and closest to god they had come, but it was also flawed: it was cold and dead. Careful assignment of employment would allow the company to have its citizens maintain the planet from its surface, without knowing that it was no real planet, but it was too large to monitor everything on its surface with available technology. 

The neoplanet’s now-century-old veins were pipes, pumping fuels, nutrients, water, coolant. Whole new ecosystems began to coalesce in the harsh environments. Gaps between mechanised planetary viscera became homes and inorganic jungles. The occupant’s sounds were drips and clangs and groans, and some had never seen sunlight. Some of the creatures already had lost their resemblance to the construction workers they had been.These people were not permitted to be alive through their inadvertant trespass, though, once their roles were fulfilled. The automated planet knew to redirect its fruits to those that the company happened to deem worthy. Some of them, in a small, desperate way, put their engineering to a more retributional use, building the metal guerilla.

At this point, the robot had shut off all digital pathways and pipelines to the city, all major surface amenities and resources. By the time the over-defensive failsafe satellite had engaged, aiming to wipe out all organic material in a two-mile radius, it was too late. It had been deactivated and began falling to the surface, a chunk of expensive scrap metal, melting and breaking at the static, unrelenting force of nature. The planet would die too, but more would take its place, after the prototype data was collected.

Eventually, the scavenged, pretend-person explained, these planets would be coordinated to form the ultimate system of production, allowing total control of unprecedented minutae, from the genetics of their workers, to the geography of their cities, to the flavour of the air, and to the directors’ every whim. It disposed of itself by climbing off the handrail and plummeting instantly.

Some things might be better not known, Edward thought distantly, unhearing. He had missed most of the robot’s preprogrammed speech, maybe on purpose, or maybe because of the hole inside him. Rather, his last moments were spent with the gratitude that he did not feel the pain, avoiding confronting his situation with any real focus. He was laying on the walkway and gargling blood, feeling instead heavy with exhaustion and betrayal. He felt his eyelids sink as his life sunk, red, into the vast dark below: infinity was cold.

[worldtop10wonder-blog]

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New Post has been published on http://www.buzzbasement.com/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds/

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring. ♦

[sciencewonders]

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New Post has been published on http://www.buzzbasement.com/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds/

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring. ♦

[buzzbasement]

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New Post has been published on http://www.buzzbasement.com/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds/

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring. ♦