#i GET it it's ENTROPY that's the POINT . fuck off

[july-19th-club]

finished it and you know what? i actually have just as little patience for this sort of narrative as i did fifteen years ago. like. i spent months working my way through this and for what! dispersal?!? bullshit

the actual star and going bovine have more in common than i would at all have expected going into it but luckily at this point in my life i THINK im better equipped to handle this kind of book

[evilminji]

You know one of the purposes of Lining?

Shock Absorption.

If the Zone is the Inter- and EXTRA-Dimensional Lining, connecting, containing, and generally powering all of Multiversal Creation? The Great Primordial Soup? The Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, from which we came and too which we return?

If the Zone itself is basicly the place between Universe, where your soul goes to get washed down, cleaned up, recharged, and sent out to wherever the next random portal takes it? To BECOME whatever you happen to find? An infinte recycler and Multiversal management?

The great metaphorical Yggdrasil, grown far beyond few branches, into an incomprehensible forest of one?

Well!

That kinda changes things! And also nothing! Because it means that those who remain? Are basicly squatting in the DMV's attic. Have built bunkers, under the country's main power generator. They really SHOULD move along. Granted, there is no one to MAKE them... but like...

That's cause no one thought anyone would NEED too?

Lol. Don't they feel silly? Anyway, I'ma put MY house over-! *wander off to go squat in the rafters*

Yeah, the CONCEPTS are native. But those probably just generate naturally. It's all the Souls constantly flowing through. Lots of background Sentience and Memories and such being washed away into the air. But? Then these lil souls were like "yeah, but if THEY get to stay... me too! D:< " "no, you can-" "ME TOO" and then they stopped listening and did what they wanted.

Good thing we have literally infinte amounts of room.

T...there's so MANY, you guys.

But! Not the point here!

*smacks white board* Realities! The Die too sometimes! And get born! A beautiful process, really. You can find Reality Beads if you know When and Where to look, some times. They, OBVIOUSLY, don't last for very long. Since they are basicly just seed universe. The explosive growth takes them almost immediately out of our range of perception, as they Begin.

Foundations of all Life and such.

But good God are they MAGNIFICENT!

However, sometimes? The REVERSE happens. If you find the area of the Zone your in? Is getting... "wavey" is the best way people describe it. Distorted. Fun house mirror. As though your vision has weird wrinkles that are distorting and stretching your view of things? Get Out. FAST.

If it's only SLIGHT? Barely noticeable? You can grab your Lair. IF, and ONLY IF you are NEARBY! If not? Remember. Things can be replaced. YOU? Can not.

Cause that "wavey"-ness? Is the final stage of Realm Entropy. The universe that portion over the Zone is covering and connected too, is all hollowed out. And about to CAVE IN. You DO NOT want to be there when that happens!

Remember! You see "waves"? Fly for three days!

Get to the edge of the affected area then KEEP GOING for a full three days flight. Warn everyone in you path. We stay safe together, guy. Collapses are NO JOKE. People get... well. Let's just say it's NOT a nice way too go.

Knowing this of course? We should all be SAFE right? Respectful if Awed distance from Reality Seeds, run like he'll if "waves"? We Gucci?

.....Sooooorta.

*flips Whiteboard to other side, to reveal a cartoonishly drawn Supervillian labeled "Asshole"*

Behold! A Terrorist!

It's a charged word. Not used lightly. But THESE fuckers? Oh ho ho! THESE fuckers?! "Ooooh~! Look at MEEEEE! I'm gonna play with FORCES I DONT UNDERSTAAAAAAAND! Destabilize my whole funckin UNIVERSE! Kill countless TRILLIONS OF TRILLIONS! Cause life was bad to me personally and I'm mad about it! Wah wah wah!!" ASSHOLES!

These fuckers? Cause Collapses. Blow Outs. Weird Fucked Up Cancerous Real Growths. You ever seen the Cleaners? No? You don't WANT TOO. They are basically eldritch, deep sea, angler fish looking mother fuckers THE SIZE OF SOLAR SYSTEMS. They travel in SCHOOLS.

BIG ONES.

When Realities collapse, they "fall off" as it were. Detach. And have to get recycled. All the countless impurities of Life eaten way to a blank slate. So it too, can start again. Thus the Fish. But! They ALSO eat anything "problematic".

Like tumors. Cancers. Poisoned, Multiversal Threats. Those quote on quote "God Killers".

Yes. Yes this IS part of why you DONT want to be near a Collapsing Reality.

No I WON'T explain how I know.

I DONT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.

*smack the board with pointer* pay attention.

Jason Todd. Not! An Asshole. Sexy thighs. Fancy lil hair strip. We all miss him. But! He's off living his "no really, I'm totally alive, guys" hot girl summer or whatever. We are going to respect that! But!!! How did that happen? When he was DEFINITELY Hella dead?

Superboy Prime-y Pants. Who IS an ASSHOLE.

Because THAT fucker? PUNCHED HIS REALITY SO HARD IT NEARLY SHATTERED. Oh, no, I'm sorry! He punched SOMEONE ELSE'S reality! Because he is a tantruming MAN CHILD! And NOW? Now, Your Majesty, that WHOLE ASS Reality is more hair line cracks then border walls! One good shove? It'll cave in. Killing every soul inside.

The Cleaners are ALREADY circling.

It needs to be patched. Immediately. But that's not something normal ghosts can DO. The Zone won't LISTEN to us. Nor allocate the energy for it. The Concepts of Healing? We can't even FIND them.

We need help.

Please help them, King Phantom. You're the only one who CAN.

@hdgnj @babbling-babull @hypewinter @ailithnight @mutable-manifestation @nerdpoe @the-witchhunter

[emofrogboy79]

Lighter Lorenz (ZZZ) HCs

Just some queer inclusive headcanons of our leather-clad baddie 🫣 Both silly and serious hcs!

Spoilers for his Agent Trust Events!

1. Light-sensitivity

In his Agent Trust Event, he tells you that while his eyes have healed from the injury, it still flares up sometimes. Hence, the sunglasses. I personally headcanon —in addition to it being an emotional "barrier" between him and others— that they're his disability aid :]

2. Blue Flames

He's the strongest there is, rivaling Caesar herself. Instead of the typical red flames, his flames appear as bright blue before they lower in temperature. See: Azula From Avatar The Last Airbender

3. Runs Cold

I know a lot of Lighter fics have him running hot, but (pushing up glasses nerdily) Entropy Or Whatever (I have no idea how it works but fuck it we ball), so when he uses his flame abilities his body gets noticeably colder to the touch for a while. He doesn't notice it until someone touches his bare skin and they're like wow, dude, are you okay. You're Super Cold. And he's like ??? I'm fine? It's a side effect of his extra hot flames.

That way you can have nice cool cuddles during summer and warm cuddle winters 🫣

4. Emotional Power

IMO, a lot of his flame-conjuring is based off emotion. He used to be just a physical fighter like Jane, but after he spent time in The Underground Fight Scene, his flames ignited—earning him the moniker of Lighter. He was mad at himself for his short-comings as a leader—and in a way—the flames manifested as physical representations of his guilt. It burned him alive.

5. Touch Sensitive

Not per-say, touch starved (he gets enough bear hugs from Caesar) but touching his bare skin is Significant to him. He has Alot of scars, to the point it would be deeply concerning to see someone of his age (Mid-late twenties) with that many. Especially so with the (hc'd) scar on his eye (the one that he covers).

He doesn't mind answering questions about his scars, but dislikes it if you poke fun at him for them. Many of them came from the underground arena, as illegal weaponry was used.

Touching his bare hands are a Big One for him. He usually has them in gloves or bandages, since they're supremely fucked up. He also thinks that his hands have been used to hurt so many people, that anything soft like holding his hand or kissing his bruised knuckles would make his heart ache.

5. Smoker

Yeah with a name like Lighter it would be crazy if he wasn't. Though, it's infrequent. He is guaranteed to smoke on bad nights when he can't sleep, or on particular anniversaries.

6. Light-weight

In his agent trust events, he says himself that he's a light weight with alcohol 😳 Your Proxy can out drink him!

7. Tigers are his favorite animal

Like why else would he have that gaudy animal print on his hip pouch and jacket 😭

8. Light country accent

He didn't grow up in the Outer Ring like Caesar, so his accent isn't as strong, but he's lived there for a significant amount of time. It's rubbed off on him a little.

9. Fond of nicknames

Prefers calling people he doesn't know well by nicknames. Lucy was called "Princess" for the longest time, before her and Lighter became like family.

10. Lighter isn't his government mame

Because who in their right mind would name their child LIGHTER 😭 Lorenz is his real last name though. His ex-mercenary team knew him by his government name, and after the Arena, "Lighter", just stuck. The only people who know this is Lucy and Piper. Because they bothered to ask. He's not opposed to sharing his government name per-say, he's just grown into "Lighter" much more.

[cedarxwing]

After Alana freed Hannibal in Digestivo, he dresses in the clothes of the first bodyguard he kills, then kills six more bodyguards (he even plays dead, as in Silence of the Lambs). He pauses at the front doorway of Muskrat Farm, looks at the snowy field, and thinks about how he could be free if he ran now. No one would ever be able to catch him if Will died. And then he turns back into the building to rescue Will.

Not having been anesthetized, Will is immobilized but still conscious while Hannibal kills Cordell and removes his face. Then Hannibal carries a barely-conscious, but still conscious, Will off the property. Imagine what Will is thinking. Probably something like "Ugh. Fuck all this."

I love the idea of Hannibal carrying Will for miles, but I think it's more likely he steals a car or maybe Chiyoh drives them. At the house, Hannibal stitches his forehead and the incision on his jawline. He changes into Will's clothes. Is Will still conscious for this? The paralysis probably wears off in 0.5-3 hours, so it's possible he washes and changes himself. Does he pass out from stress/exhaustion or just take a nap? Maybe he chooses to lie in bed to mentally compose his break-up speech.

Hannibal sits at Will's bedside and writes time-travel equations in a notebook. Here's the quote from Hannibal: "Lecter sits in his armchair with a big pad of butcher paper doing calculations. The pages are filled with the symbols both of astrophysics and particle physics. There are repeated efforts with the symbols of string theory. The few mathematicians who could follow him might say his equations begin brilliantly and then decline, doomed by wishful thinking. Dr. Lecter wants time to reverse — no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way."

He sits, watches Will, and thinks, "How do I get us to be a family again?"

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

pt XII good omens sEAsOn 2 (the non-traumatic part) episode 1

Alright yes I know, I know, it's been two days since the livestream. I was reading fanfiction. Don't blame me, love made me crazy, and all that. I'm enjoying myself as much as I can before we get to the season 2 finale. But here we go, season 2, episode one, maggots:

[on reading this back after finishing, a lot of text is my being in love with Crowley. mainly, points 3, 4, 9, 14, 17, 18, yes I have issues, feel free to skip that for an absolutely concise and precise summary]

Before the livestream starts, everyone decides that there will be no spoilers whatsoever on the chat, even hidden with the black, because I have a tendency to keep clicking and revealing them. I'm sorry, temptation and all. I have emotional support fruit, an apple, two kiwis, two sapotes and two bananas.

When the livestream starts, it has to be restarted, because I am an incompetent nincompoop and have somehow managed to muck up my settings. And it is absolutely imperative that I watch the opening scene.

So then I do. And immediately have to consume my emotional support apple because I am so fucking in love with Crowley. Already? someone asks. Yes bloody already, I need that apple.

Thanks, guys. I'm broken. Crowley. Just. She looks so peaceful and untraumatised, so delighted with the plans, so full of wonder at what she's creating. Let there be light, she says, and rather than seeing Crowley turn off a streetlight with a flick of his fingers, we get to see her create nebulas. Aziraphale looks at her and he's just instantly so spellbound, and who would bloody blame him? His wings just do a slight dip of realisation that he's fucked when Crowley says the gorgeous line. Look at Crowley. Worried about the apocalypse. Smiling at Aziraphale, and we can see Azi's concern because something as pure as that has to be protected and Aziraphale knows what Heaven will do to Crowley if she dares to ask questions. Crowley is angelic and filled with light and Aziraphale sees that and tries to keep her safe with his words.

Hey spoiler alert, it doesn't work, Crowley's wings are greying even as she protects Azi and Crowley falls and I hate everything and I am filled with unbridled rage.

UNDERSTAND? RAGE.

I am speculating how much pain and torture Crowley went through when she fell into Hell that first time. I am told to not ask questions I don't want answers to.

Maggie sells records, Aziraphale is a cutiepie, and Maggie is very gay for Nina.

Crowley is lounging on a park bench, suit and skinny tie, just being all sexy and demonic and probably contemplating nihilism.

Crowley spreads awareness about duck health. No bread, guys. Frozen peas. He also angsts a lot to Shax (whom I keep mixing up with Michael) about the meaning of life. Someone points out that this is very Barbie of him. "do you ever think about death". Ah, Crowley.

More lesbians gaying. I would kill for Nina's hair.

JIMBRIEL IN THE HOUSE. I WON'T SAY ANYMORE ABOUT HIS ENTRANCE BECAUSE THIS IS NOW A TOPIC OF CONTROVERSY. BUT JIMBRIEL IN THE HOUSE.

Aziraphale, ah I love him, absolutely fucking panics and has the loading symbol over his angelic little head at all times. FINALLY, THIS SHOW IS A COMEDY.

Crowley is leaning on his Bentley and mmmmhm his arms and his lounging and his personality I am back to crunching on my temptation emotional support apple.

Sorry back to the summary. Jim finds Aziraphale funny and says he loves him. Someone points out that this was the fandom upon encountering my dumbass self. "You're funny Asmi we love you."

Aziraphale is a little bitchy babygirl, really just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing. Just absolutely slaying through every Jimbriel scene. 100000/10.

Six shots of fucking espresso in a big cup. Crowley, I love you. Can I love Crowley any more than this? Yes I can. My love for Crowley is like the universe, infinite and yet ever-expanding, explosive with entropy.

Crowley holds the door open for Aziraphale and holds his plate and honestly what absolute husband (gn) behaviour.

CROWLEY MEETS JIMBRIEL WHO IS FUCKING DUSTING AND LEAPS BACKWARD AND JUST RELIVES TRAUMA WHILE JIM IS CHILLING AND AZIRAPHALE IS STILL GAY PANICKING. I LOVE THIS SHOW.

MARRIAGE QUARRELS ABOUT ADOPTING JIM, JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE FELL-CROWLEY HOUSEHOLD.

Coffeeshop AU lesbians time.

Heaven is horrible.

MURIEL IS BABY I LOVE THEM HELLO CUTIEPATOOTIE.

There is an ethereal paper file.

Beezlebub beezles their way into Crowley's car and is very concerned in Hell about finding Jimbriel.

Nina's partner is a toxic ass don't worry about it.

Sulky Crowley says he's back and apology dance time mmmhm.

Miracle hide Jimbriel time, but they've got to be subtle. They do the miracle. Jim is glad to have friends.

They are very proud of themselves for their subtle miracle.

THEY ARE SO FUCKING USELESS. FUCKING USELESS LITTLE GAYASS DISASTERS JESUS LORD IN HEAVEN. LITERALLY IN HEAVEN ALARM BELLS ARE EVERYWHERE.

GREAT JOB, GAYS. GREAT JOB.

End of episode one. Take this screenshot.

[omegalomania]

i actually have to wax lyrical about fourth of july for a minute because it might legitimately be one of my favorite fall out boy songs ever written primarily because it's not a song i think could have been written prior to the hiatus. it feels a bit like a logical extension to "miss missing you" in how it's a song that discusses what it is to live without someone more than anything else.

say you loved someone. could be a friend, a family member, a significant other, whatever. say you loved them. say that relationship split apart for some reason or another. say it's been years since you thought about them and you realize you can't picture them so easily anymore. the little details that once shown so clearly in the walkways of your memory have begun to fade, and in a strange solemn kind of way you feel like you have to mourn that, the entropy hemorrhaging away your recollections of them. you have a weakness for nostalgia. you obsess over old scars. you obsess even more over the way that they dont ache the way they used to unless you pry them open of your own accord.

here is a song that presents an old, fractured relationship. here is a song that says that maybe it was for the best that it fell apart. it is not spiteful or angry or resentful of the other party. it's almost apologetic. it acknowledges that you're so far out of each other's lives at this point that it doesn't really matter, whether or not you miss them, or whether or not they miss you. sometimes things simply don't carry out to completion. and that's okay. the torture of small talk with someone you used to love.

it's the refrain that sticks with me, more than anything. it's a lyric i carry so close to my heart to this day:

may the bridges i have burned light my way back home.

this part of your life ended. the bridge was burned, it collapsed beneath its own weight, it is nothing but cinder and fucking ash underfoot. this person in your past is not who they once were to you, and they never will be again. you used to love them. you don't anymore. maybe sometimes you miss them, but they'll never get to know that now. you burned that bridge and you found hope in it - you found such hope and earnest joy and relief in that part of your life being sent for the burning. you watched that relationship fall apart and you were better for it, you turned its embers into a beacon, you saw your way out of it and maybe sometimes it still hurts, maybe sometimes you still feel lonely, sometimes you miss this specific persons company, but thats okay.

its a song about grief, more than anything. you mourn the people you used to be. and you live without them anyway. you live without the version of you who loved this person. you live without the person you once loved. past tense. and it burns a little venom out of your veins when you think of them, but you feel better and you breathe a little easier afterwards.

it's a song that has all the affectations of a love song but is anything but. it's a farewell song. it's a song that acknowledges that maybe once you loved someone, but you don't anymore. and that while maybe you were better off for having loved them, you are better still for having walked away in the end. for all its upbeat nature, the son lux sampling that picks up the whole tempo and transforms the chorus into a soaring, almost triumphant anthem, "fourth of july" is about what it means to walk away from a relationship and realize that you are better for having done so.

like i said. it's not a song they could have written pre-hiatus. it's utterly devoid of the spite and agitation that permeated so many of their early songs. it's about acceptance and the way some things end, and that's okay. they were meant to. and you're better for it. and if anyone turns this post into about a ship i will be coming to your house and peeling off all your skin like a fucking orange.

[aurae-rori]

Oh yeah, I forgot about my actual thought when I got distracted by comedic potential!

I’ve brought up Nous no longer calculating futures before, and since I’ve been studying philosophy for the past month, it gave me this fun new insight into the whole thing when put next to my cursory knowledge of non-relativistic and informational/statistical physics! Don’t come for me if I get it wrong people, I despise any mathematics that isn’t statistics

Nous’s whole deal is determinism, something I’ve also mentioned before. Theoretically, if we could track every possible variable in the entire universe, then yes, reality is probably predetermined. And Nous is clearly capable of that.

But here’s another definition:

Entropy is the measure of chaos in a closed system.

In thermodynamics, isolated systems of high entropy tend towards thermodynamic equilibrium (hello HooH) where things don’t wanna change.

In other applications, it refers to energy dispersal. Basically, as time goes on, things get watered down, energy gets less efficient, heat death of the universe blah blah blah (Hello Nanook? Hello Qlipoth even???)

It’s a lot more complicated obviously, but this general principle, limited possibilities trending in a largely predictable way, is the so called “determinism.” Entropy levels cannot change, energy can’t really be destroyed, and the systems want to stabilize because of it. They want to be in a certain configuration.

But what happened if, suddenly, it’s not a closed system?

What if there’s suddenly enough outside interference that the initial conditions no longer apply? Think those multi-pendulums. Welt Yang, Acheron, the Trailblazer, and God knows who else. There’s a decent argument to be made that someone, something, multiples of people and things, threw off the whole system.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. But it can be introduced. The Stellaron Hunters seem to be tracking these outside interferences on a macro level, collecting stellarons specifically. Is it any coincidence that this is what the Trailblazer has been put in possession of? Are stellarons some form of, for lack of a better word, outside data poisoning?

I’m just rambling wildly at this point, but I wasn’t allowed to start taking about spacetime theory in relation to philosophical determinism in class so I’ve gotta let off steam somehow.

- 🦋

this is so intelligent that my brain has been scrambling for words that are coherent enough to respond to this as neatly as youve placed it for me, but now i just dont care and youre gonna get my unhinged ramblings.

i love the theory. i fucking love it so much and i enjoy the idea of the stellaron hunters actively fucking with shit by bringing in unknown variables. open that closed system. fuck with that all knowing machine, nous. nous cant calculate due to the system being opened, i think is what you're proposing? and i fuck with that. like yeah "fuck your closed system im gonna open it forcefully with the power of this trash raccoon and this old ass man from hi3"

i do enjoy philosophy and i think i understand what you're getting at, but my brain was so fucking scrambled im so sorry butterfly anon i always love your asks sm KSDHKSLJGHLKjh <3

[curetapwater]

Another thing about Kyubey. He is SUCH an effective antagonist. Like holy shit. Like, cute animals getting hurt and/or killed is one of my biggest triggers, like I Can't watch most media involving that. ESPECIALLY cats, which Kyubey most resembles. But they made Kyubey so fucking despicable that whenever he gets hurt I laugh and cheer. Like it's to the point where I forget he's supposed to look cute, like I'm surprised when he fools people who haven't seen the show. Because to me he's just a little piece of shit!!!!!!!!

It's a different kind if evil, with him, is the thing. Like, he doesn't take pleasure in what he's doing, he just so completely has objectified these girls that he does not process that their suffering is wrong. He's all utility. Which, on its own, isn't necessarily a bad thing. There exist real people who lack emotions or empathy and they don't do the shit that he does. It's not just a lack of emotion with him. The Incubators it seems are to some extent capable of emotion, but they've pathologized it on an individual level. They experience collective surprise at their initial discovery of the human race, Kyubey seems awfully eager to taunt Homura with the knowledge that her actions have only made Madoka more powerful, and he seems genuinely disturbed when things don't go his way at the end of Rebellion. Heck, the fact that the Incubators go through all this trouble to stave off entropy means they do, to some extent, care about SOMETHING. He HAS emotions, but he rejects all that don't support his stupid fucking energy quota.

Kyubey in-universe is a person, or at least a hivemind collective that is ultimately a person in some capacity. But it's what he represents, that holds the true horror of PMMM. He represents not a person, but an oppressive system. I do greatly enjoy the read that he represents capitalism, how he commodifies and exploits girls until they are harvested and discarded when no longer useful. I also think he's an exploration of the dangers of collectivism when taken to extremes, with his talk of how targeting a specific demographic is okay if it ensures the survival of the wider species. And on a grander scale, he ultimately doesn't give a shit about the well-being of humanity if it means the rest of the universe can carry on. But to me, he specifically represents the historical exploitation of young girls. As my friend @a-dream-journalist put it, it's no coincidence that he's male-coded. And it's no coincidence that he targets young girls specifically. Kyubey isn't scary because hivemind alien with limited capacity for emotion. To me, that's the fantastical window dressing to contextualuze what he represents in-universe. He's scary because he's the patriarchy, dressed up in a cute, friendly exterior to lure girls into his crushing system of oppression and abuse.

[rametarin]

I hate it here.

Communicating when I don't feel well is absolutely pointless when I live with a fucking delusional narcissistic piece of shit. No matter what my symptoms or how I'm feeling unwell, it's always whatever stupid bullshit she has on her mind at the time.

"Oh you feel sick [in this way]? You must just be hot. Lets do something about the heat. Because clearly your problem is you're just hot. You don't have a problem, you're just hot. It's easily solved by spending no money and doing nothing, you just have to deal with the heat."

The air conditioner is on, it's only 70F in the house, and there's a fan blowing in my room, you fucking psychopath. I tell you I'm feeling unwell with breathing problems, you proceed to ignore my actual symptoms and then turn the AC off the dry setting.

And it has always been like this. It doesn't fucking matter what the illness or the problem is, it has to be whatever she wants it to be or it doesn't exist. She's quite sincerely one of those fucking assholes that saw Oprah Winfrey's "Power of Positive Thinking" and The Secret type bullshit and decided she could bend the universe backwards to make it whatever she wanted it to be, if only she gave into her delusions and tried to force reality to be whatever she wants. Just, trying to browbeat the universe.

I absolutely hate women like this, because only a sheltered being can think this way. To be a man that thinks this way, you have to have a certain degree of wealth and people working under you that feel the heat and friction and destruction before it gets to you, to insulate yourself from consequences. If you're a woman with men around you, you have people between you and the consequences of your actions that are socially obligated to do the shit you aren't on the hook to do. And that translates to someone in more of a moderator position that can try and stubbornly close their eyes and "BLAHBLAHBLAH UNIVERSE IT'S A CERTAIN WAY I CAN'T HEAR YOU" and think they're somehow beating back causality and entropy, while the men around them are burning alive.

We could stop spending money on frivolous shit and she could help me. She chooses instead to buy troves of bullshit that will rot in a week and refuses to buy or invest in anything else. But if I have any spending cash on me, suddenly my money goes into HER expenses. And there's fuckall I can do about it but go live by myself in a fucking gutter. I can't afford to leave, but I can't make any money staying. It is MARGINALLY safer than living in a ditch in any season but I can't make any progress while here.

And she refuses to stop buying enormous piles of shit for the simple reason she's too proud and indignant that SHE would have to help ME. From her perspective, she's supposed to have access to all my income and then if she spends it, I'm unable to escape. I can't make income in my condition until I'm well. She refuses to help me get well, for the simple fact that if I have to do it, then I'm on the hook for thousands of dollars of medical debt that I need a hole to live in to save money to pay off. Which she intends to pioritize herself first in my spending, so I'd be stuck paying TWO FORTUNES on minimum wage.

Despite my vocabulary and despite having nigh infinite space to write, I can't quite verbalize just how much I despise this cunt. I'll be happy after she dies of natural causes and she's no longer a pain in my ass. She has deliberately destroyed my life, my entire life, just for vanity and pride. Just, over and over again, chronic and sustained. Unfailingly. Choosing to be a fucking monster when she could just fucking stop at any point. But having absolute control and a noose around my neck and the fucking abyss if I try and just fucking leave is how she's decided to control my life. Threatening me with homelessness and implying she'll trump up stories about fake ass domestic abuse just to sic the state on me if I try and up and leave.

This worthless bitch uses denial as a weapon to manipulate everybody, including herself.

[wildwinterlunas]

from lovingoverwatchguys - On that Omnics Win AU thing. I see you put that Gabriel and Ana die, while Jack lives. What if Soldier 76's whole thing is a still grief-stricken Jack using vigilante methods to push for cloning Ana and Gabriel, even though it's unlikely to actually work. It makes 76's mission just as much a product of Jack's stubbornness, inability to let go, and his deep love. That hurts 😭Maybe throw him a bone in this and have Gabriel come back somehow and make r76 endgame lol

Ok, this might have made me change my decision on killing Reyes off, because I thought of something to explore that could be both interesting and incredibly fun.

So I had to check the math on this but Moira would have been 22 when the Crisis started. So though she would have never experimented on Reyes by this point, she would have probably written a thesis on entropy and preventing the rate at which things decay. Which is something I believe the Omnics would be interested in, not only because of further preserving food and crops, but also to possibly help with the cloning process. Basically I think Moira's research, even in it's early stages, would be useful in this world.

However something I want to stress is that the Omnics actually run tests to make sure what they're doing is stable... problem is when they decide to start testing this on humans they decide it would be safer to use the already deceased, and because of SEP Reyes's body already decayed slower so they thought he would be perfect...

A problem arose when they accidentally revived him...

So yeah now in this universe Reyes is still alive, the whole "Reaper" thing just happened a lot earlier. Though he doesn't actually become "Reaper", and after a few years he isn't in constant pain because the Omnics focus on, you know, stopping that. Though I do think there would be a short time where he didn't remember a lot since dying kind of fucks up your brain a bit, but he gets better.

So there, Reyes is alive now and Jack can have a happy ending for a change :)

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere 049-064 (pt. 1)

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy, 013-032, 033-048 [all Flower posts]

Hoo boy this is a bunch of chapters. It's time for more Flower.

All together now: no, not that flower.

...yeah, I'm having to reach for flower-related videos to keep up this running gag at this point. But hey, look, hear me out here: Kanae Nozawa is really fucking good at playing the erhu. And it's called 'Flower Dance'. I think that's flowery enough.

...yeah, I will take suggestions for the next one. Send me your favourite flower-related videos. Especially if they're anime and kinda dark.

Anyway, welcome back to my liveblog of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, an ongoing serial web novel by @lurinatftbn. Our arc titles today are The Die Falls and Cut-Out Face.

And this time around, Umineko intensifies. I won't say too much more than that above the fold this time, because we're starting to get some mysteries answered (opening more mysteries, naturally). But if you don't mind spoilers, the space elevator awaits.

So where we left off last time, Su had discovered the body of (probably) Neferuaten. It's time to get into that part of Umineko where people are dropping like flies and everyone is desperately trying to figure out who's doing it before it's their turn. However, in this case, everyone involved is a wizard, so this makes things a little more complicated.

There was one important mystery missing from my list of mysteries, incidentally - the pantry with the signs of aging and the tally marks.

Someone on the Flower discord helpfully pointed out that I'd misremembered the rule on red text. I edited the previous post, but just in case: the rule is that if you get a description of a body in red, it's definitely a dead human (and that person is definitely really dead, it's not a spare body or anything). But which dead person? There's no rule that Su correctly identifies the deceased. So while Su definitely found a body, there's no guarantee that it's Neferuaten's body. It's not even guaranteed to be a member of the known cast, since we don't know how many people were already on the island.

Indeed, in this pair of arcs, we start to see characters question the identity of a corpse. So it's definitely intended that you keep that kind of question in mind whenever Su finds a body.

To broadly outline the events in this arc (as much to keep it straight in my head as anything):

Su finds Neferatuen's body and reports it to Linos and Lilith.

They link up with the rest of Su's class and break the news. Everyone freaks out a bit.

A broadcast is made to every computer on the island in which we get an Umineko-style challenge, declaring that everyone on the island will soon be killed by 'heavenly beasts', but it is - sportingly - possible to escape the security system and get off the island. Everyone freaks out a lot.

Fang, who apparently put all of their points into 'chill', takes charge of the situation. Linos explains how the lockdown works.

Linos sends Su and a few others up to get a map. While they're up there, Su bungles her way into confessing the body that she and Kamrusepa discovered earlier. The characters start to compare notes.

Moving as a group, they all set out to shut down the lockdown at the admin centre, covered by various types of magic shield. They blunder into a trap which involved Linos's gun being rigged to fire to cause a distraction, and then Bardiya is murdered while the party is split. According to Theo, the only witness, he was attacked by something which dragged him into the window.

The party share various recriminations and perform some diagnostic magic. Theo and Linos are declared Intensely Sussy, but Fang points out a narrow possibility that an external culprit could have dunnit while Linos's shield had briefly been disabled.

Mehit flips out and grabs Linos's gun. She takes Lilith away from the group of arcanists, intending to wait out the crisis in one of the areas where the Power is suppressed.

The gang moves out. Ran challenges Linos on some of his claims about the nature of the lockdown. It turns out he's been telling some fibs.

They travel through a tunnel that runs from the womens' entrance hall into the research dome. There, they discover a big bloody hole in the ground, and also Anna and Zeno are there.

Zeno's back in girlmode and is trying to transport a bunch of boxes. It turns out their actual 'main body' is a kind of a Made in Abyss 'cartridge' situation - surgically minimised, in this case to slow down aging as much as possible, and hidden. All their bodies are (according to them!) puppet bodies. I'm behind 7 proxy bodies or whatever.

Anna, it turns out, has age regwessied! We get a flashback narrated by Ran (notably not marked reliable) in which we find out what happened during Su's amnesiac episode - more on that later, but the upshot is that Fang brought a spike of true iron that they finished on behalf of Su's grandfather, which allows the Order to operate a giant machine built by Su's grandfather to interact with entropy. The Great Work is successful, and Anna was age regwiessed down to a young adult again.

Su has started to suspect Balthazar knows something time loop shaped. She and Ran and Linos go to confront him. Bal pretty much says yes: we are in fact in a time loop, we've already had thousands of iterations, and I get to remember it, and you should remember it too Su. Every single time, everyone dies and someone makes a tally mark in the pantry, which is for some reason not getting reset. Bal intends to wait out the timeloop where he is with a magazine and won't budge. He also says this is supposed to be the last loop. Ran and Su are dismissive. We the readers know better. Although somehow I suspect this isn't the last loop.

Anna hands out tracking bands.

A flashback sequence shows what happened when Ran found out about Su's situation. More on that later.

The gang go downstairs to find the admin console. On the way down, they discover a bloody magic circle with Durvasa's name written in it.

The three present Order members (Linos, Zeno, and Anna) are able to log into the admin console. They discover that it's not a standard lockdown, but a secret time-triggered protocol installed 20 years ago, around when Su's grandfather was fiddling with the computers. This means it can't easily be reset. Also, in a couple hours the security golems will turn on. Wuh oh.

They hatch a plan B. Everyone goes upstairs to 1. get masks from the mask room to bypass the golems (idk if I mentioned the mask room, there's a mask room) and 2. hopefully rewire re-rune the inputs to the security centre to spoof its inputs and activate the exit.

In the mask room, they discover Durvasa has probably been murdered, but the corpse is too severely mutilated to permit positive identification.

All the students are given masks in order to pass as members of the order. Su anticipates that these masks are going to create a situation where it's harder to identify who's who.

I think that's all the main points. Lots of moving around.

Having done what I promised not to do and write a plot summary, let's get on to the actual substance...

Mystery solution unlocked (somewhat): who is Su?

I feel like I should have been able to predict this one, in retrospect.

In logical terms, maybe not deduce it. But with this reveal, the narrative purpose of a lot of earlier scenes falls into place.

So, Su's unnamed childhood friend - the nerdy academic one who she met on the beach and encouraged her. Well, that friend is in fact Utsushikome of Fusai, or Shiko to her friends!

Wuh? Isn't that our dear protagonist? No - the character we're calling 'Su' is the mind of the other girl, our POV in that flashback. Or maybe it's the other way round, I'm a still little unclear on which POV was which in those flashbacks. I'm fairly sure though that POV girl is Su, and the other girl is Shiko. It's confusing because multiple flashbacks are narrated in the first person - the memories of the beach probably belong to Su, while the memories of the doctor's office where she learned about ascension probably belong to Shiko.

Anyway, we're told in chapter 55 a bit more about the mechanics of how arcanists work. Basically, the Tower of Asphodel, in addition to a few hundred thousand human bodies, also has billions of backup minds in the form of 'pneuma', a semi-biological element that interacts with the higher planes and basically amounts to a soul. The pneuma encodes memories (redundantly it seems), as well as preferences and habits - it's something akin to what Seth Dickinson calls the 'inner law'. In modern times, egomancy - the kind of magic that fucks with pneuma - is highly forbidden.

When humans are born in this world (perhaps more accurately 'instantiated'), stage 1 is to block the pneuma in the clone and permit a new one to form. Unfortunately this breaks the Power.

It was found that the new generation, the children born from this process, had no capacity to use the Power. Even though it had no visible effect on consciousness or intellect, this alteration to the nature of their pneumas damaged the ability of their minds to take on an Index, meaning that using the Power was impossible. There were cases where this didn't happen - where the 'trauma' healed just so - but they were one in a million. So rare as to be useless.

So, to set someone up as an arcanist, you download one of these backed up pneumas from the Tower, and install it over the existing pneuma. But the downloaded pneuma is deliberately weakened so that usually the downloaded personality dissolves quickly and reverts back to the identity of the person who became an arcanist. This process is apparently destructive to the backed up pneuma in the Tower.

So when Lilith said that all arcanists are murderers, what she means is that in a 'proper' initiation, you devour the soul of someone from a dead universe in order to steal their admin password.

In Shiko's case, something different happened. Instead of downloading the soul of someone from a dead universe, she's got the soul of a regular living girl from her own universe.

Here's how Su recalls the situation:

"One day, I got a letter. It offered me a whole bunch of stuff... My own house, shares in a bunch of local businesses that'd get me a stream of luxury credit.. If I agreed to go along with something for a couple weeks. That was what it said-- A couple of weeks." Under the table, I was having trouble keeping my legs still. "I thought it was some strange prank at first, but when we met, they seemed really serious. They said it would be best if it was someone who knew her." "Knew who?" "Oh..." I shifted reluctantly in my seat, my voice getting even quieter. "U-Utsushikome, I mean. I'd known her when we were kids... But we hadn't spoken in years." I cleared my throat. I felt so anxious about what was happening that I was shivering. "Anyway. They told me that her grandfather was dying, and there was something he'd been trying to do for years and years, but it was too late for it t-to work out. But they wanted to-- I dunno, do the next best thing, give him some peace--"

So, agents of Shiko's grandfather - who was evidently up to his fucking follicles in conspiracies - approached the girl we're now calling Su (her original name is not given, for reasons we'll see), operating under false pretenses. It's not clear how much they told her, just that it would involve Shiko. She agreed. They extracted the soul from her body and implanted it in Shiko at Shiko's induction. It seems likely that Shiko's grandfather intended to do this with his own soul, but could not for some reason? Why they did this with some random girl remains unknown. It's also not clear why Su of all people should have chmod +x for the Power.

Su was presumably supposed to dissolve back into Shiko's identity, but probably because the induction was far from normal, she retained her previous identity and Shiko was the one suppressed. Su did her best to try and figure out how to pretend to be Shiko, but Ran - not yet an arcanist herself - noticed her sudden personality change and confronted her. Su came clean, and Ran was all 'kill yourself, bitch' over it.

Seriously she does not let up. Here's some quotes:

This time, she did glance at me, a scowl forming on her face. "Don't try to act compassionate, you perverted fucking body-snatcher. You're not my friend." (...) She grunted. "Just be late next time. I don't want you messing with how she looks on your own impulse." (...) It was strange, us investigating it together like this. Even though I went along with it, acted repentantly, and had explained to her that the way things were weren't exactly my fault - that I'd been deceived at the premise of what I'd agreed to do - she wasn't willing to afford me much charity, but in a way, that was comforting. She was like a beacon of sharp reality in the dreamlike, dissociated existence I was now living.

And so on. Even when Su reveals that her original body is now months dead, and there is no body to go back to, Ran will not cut her a break:

"...this isn't you getting cold feet about trying to save her, is it?" she asked, suddenly suspicious. "Because you can't--" (...) Ran must have realized the absurdity of the statement, because a few moments later she spoke up again-- Disgust having crept back into her tone, even if that hint of conflict still remained. "Don't act sorry for yourself," she said. "It's your own fault for going along with something so perverse for your own gain. Blame her grandfather for being such a fucking lunatic, if you want, but don't act like a victim. No one gives a shit about you."

People in the comments start pulling out the word 'abuser' over this kind of thing and yeah, *sucks in air through teeth* they're not wrong. No wonder Su has such a complex nowadays.

It's notable how much Su's fantastical scenario here has in common with the experience of plurality/DID. Certain friends who are plural talk about how they may be able to recall alters' memories, but with difficulty, and it feels like they belong to someone else. And of course there's the process of forming new alters. Manifesting suddenly in a body full of memories of another person seems like a pretty distressing experience all told, but it's also something that the other people you're sharing with can make easier.

I talked a bit more about this in the Baru article on brains, so I won't reprise it all here. Broadly speaking, if someone is plural, their mind supports different 'alters', which are states of being which typically express distinct senses of identity, access to memory, preferences, stream of consciousness etc. Whether you think of them as distinct 'people' or distinct states of 'one person' seems like a matter of philosophical speculation, but 'co-consciousness' of alters is not an unusual thing, and sometimes I've witnessed externalised disagreements between alters. Since we don't have any ability to prove the existence of other minds in general, the only surefire way to know what it's like to be plural is to be plural already. Unfortunately the main way to inculcate plurality seems to be 'go through severe child abuse', so it's not easy to find out. But maybe tulpamancy is real?

Su's situation is not so different from the recent recurring 'lesbians and imperialism' subgenre device of having someone's mind inserted into a protagonist's body through some kind of scifi means. In modern 'plural system' terms, the word used is 'introject': in brief, an alter derived from another person, who often (but not always) understands themselves to be that person even in another body.

The big difference for Su of course is that the other alter she'd hypothetically be sharing this body with has just disappeared. Su can't talk to Shiko, Shiko's gone. It's not actually uncommon for alters to disappear like that, I've known people who very rapidly generate and discard identities in an intense traumatic situation, but the timeline doesn't really fit that here, and it's pretty much nonexistent I think for all alters but one to disappear and leave someone a singleton again.

I admit I'm not familiar with all the modern taxonomy of what psychiatry terms 'dissociative disorders', so perhaps there are other related categories, that are closer to Su's situation. Of course, even ignoring all the flaws and limitations of the DSM approach, this is a sci-fantasy world in which souls are real and manifest in a specific organ (ironic given how I declared they definitely aren't real and 'the body is all that is' in the first post on this book), so different rules apply!

What's not clear to me at this point is whether Samium the egomancer is going to be capable of restoring Shiko's soul in any meaningful way. It seems like when you shove two pneumas into a body, only one survives.

Anyway, as for Ran, she's clearly backed off on the 'perverted fucking body-snatcher' talk, having spent many years building up a friendship with Su and losing sight of her original zeal to save Shiko. Despite this, she really hasn't owned up to the fact that she's a big part of the reason Su is so determined to do a special magic suicide.

We could only suppose that if Shiko was brought back at this point, she would be in the exact same situation Su was - suddenly inhabiting a body filled with memories that are not her own, surrounded by people she does not know, and forced to carry on pretending to be the previous occupant. None of Su's present classmates know Shiko. Shiko's context was the school, and that is now in the distant past.

Su, however, is carrying The Mega Traumas and has spent however many years defining her life's purpose as dying to bring back Shiko. She has fully internalised the idea that she's a monster and doesn't deserve to live, that it's somehow her moral responsibility for the twisted experiment that Su's grandfather performed on these two girls.

At this point, the 'healthiest' outcomes are one of two things. Maybe Samium the egomancer could reactivate Shiko's identity, but without destroying Su, and Su/Shiko can share the body. Being plural doesn't seem to be so bad. (I admit I don't know what it's like, but if there's anything I've observed from knowing people who are plural, it's that once that cat's out of the bag and you recognise that you're plural, you can't really just try and suppress it. Trying to just will yourself into not switching is going to fuck you up much worse than coming to terms with it and developing ways to interact comfortably and share embodiment with your new headmate. Apparently 'integration' or fusion of alters is possible, and was traditionally pursued by therapists, but if it's rushed it just breaks down. And that would be disagreed with by the modern plural identity movement.)

On the other hand, it seems fairly plausible that it won't be possible to bring back Shiko. In this case, both Su and Ran need to finally grieve their friend who was effectively murdered at a young age by Su's grandfather, and move on. Easier said than done, of course. And they're definitely not going to get there if they can't have a very honest discussion about it. Which doesn't seem very likely with all these distracting murders.

Anyway, that resolves a few of my list of mysteries...

what skulduggery happened with Su’s ascension that made it go so badly wrong?: Shiki had the soul of her childhood friend, now known as 'Su', instead of some rando from the Tower of Asphodel. why did Ran react so badly to knowing that Su can’t assimilate?: she was not yet an arcanist and did not know about what initiation entails. she sees Su as culpable, even though Su was deceived. Su is a stranger and she will happily let a stranger die to save Shiki, and rationalises this. what did Su’s grandfather have to do with it?: agents claiming to work on behalf of Shiki's grandfather deceived Su. it seems it was too late to do it with his own mind.

it also opens some brand new mysteries.

why did Shiki's grandfather carry out this sadistic experiment? how is this the 'next-best thing'? is it just to prove the body-hopping technology works?

did Shiki's grandfather and co. anticipate that Shiki's mind would be overwritten by Su, or did they expect Su to be killed, the same as minds from Asphodel?

who are the agents who carried out this weird plot? do they have any relation to the current murder spree?

can the mind of Shiki really be retrieved?

Now I've gone through all the ins and outs of it - this plot is really cool and spicy. So much drama to be had. Now I understand the point of those flashback scenes to Su's childhood, and it fits so neatly that I wonder how I couldn't see it before. Not enough imagination! But if this is the wavelength the story is operating on, I should try and imagine similar payoffs for the other mysteries...

Anyway, now that we've established that body transfers are possible, we might wonder if anyone else had one done.

Let me wrap up this section by saying... body-snatcher is a very specific term! It tickles me to think that Ran might have seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The time loop

This was described at the outset as a 'control' scenario, but we have several apparent divergences. And supposedly thousands of iterations of this experiment have already run with slightly different outcomes.

Su's memory is slightly leaking info from the other loops, but for the most part she remains immersed in the scenario. Balthazar, meanwhile, obviously has history with Su from previous runs. This explains Su's inexplicable feelings of animosity towards him, his knowledge of the name 'Shiki', and many of his remarks.

As mentioned up above, the pantry is somehow not getting rolled back after each loop. This explains why it's so old. I had previously been assuming it was some kind of 'hyperbolic time chamber' type scenario, and the tally marks were the time that someone was stuck in the pantry, but this is way more interesting and cool.

We have our equivalent of On the ninth twilight, the witch revives, and none shall be left alive. from Balthazar:

"When I said this is a closed circle, I meant it in every sense," he explained. "In absolutely every instance, for every marking made on that wall... By the time this is over, there isn't a single person here left alive."

Presumably either Balthazar or Su is the mark-maker, and they always end up dead after making this mark. I assume they usually mark the wall fairly early in the loop in order to make sure they don't die too soon before making it!

This actually means I think we have a fairly good suspect for the "who knocked out Yantho" case. If Balthazar came here to mark the wall (although why bother, if it's the final run), and Yantho was about to see him, maybe he'd have panicked and knocked Yantho out? I don't think that would extend as far as killing the cook and faking her suicide though!

Anyway, Balthazar claims this is the final run. One commenter had a little hissy fit about this not fitting the standard time loop story mold, but I'm more inclined to wait and see. Admittedly, I have the unfair knowledge, compared to when this chapter came out, that the story is hundreds of chapters long and still going strong, and given the murders are now going at a rapid pace, I feel like we'll surely see at least one more loop. Hard to say though. Just because it's inspired by Umineko doesn't mean it's got the same structure.

Anyway, let's revisit the very first chapter given what we now know...

They were also a woman, though you wouldn't have been able to tell. Everything beneath the head-area was buried under black fabric, without so much as an inch of flesh visible, and their face was covered with a expressionless, androgynous porcelain mask. Otherwise, the outfit evoked something like a funeral gown, with only subtle frills around the cuffs and hem of the skirt.

We can now recognise this is probably the outfit of a member of the Order, back when they hid their identities. The mask sounds similar to how Neferuaten's mask is described in chapter 31:

It took me a moment to realize which mask she was pointing out, since it was so unremarkable. It was little more than an oval of silver, with holes cut for the two eyes and mouth, and a little dent to accommodate the nose.

Though Nef's mask is described as silver, not porcelain.

We can also get to hear Su's victory condition.

"Understand this: Your role in the scenario has been elevated from that of bystander to that of the heroine, and your victory condition is thus," she continued. "You must ascertain the identity of your opponent, the cause of the bloodshed to follow, and prevent it before it comes to pass. In order to accomplish this goal, you must pay close heed to all which transpires, and use deduction, alongside your skills and past experience of the events to follow. Do you understand your role?" (...) "Should you deviate from your role, the scenario will be compromised, and a grave outcome is forewritten. But should you succeed, then you shall open the path to a brighter future." She paused for a moment. "That is all. Should we begin?"

It's not at all clear why this should be the final loop, given that Su seems nowhere near close to 'winning' at this point. It's hard to know whether 'the scenario will be compromised' applies beyond a single loop though.

Two more mysteries to put on the list: who is Su's interlocutor here? And what was Su's request?

One thing I noticed, incidentally, is that chapter 000 was written some time after chapter 1, released 27 July 2020 - the timestamp places it in between chapters 020 (24 July) and 021 (6 August). I don't think this means anything - the intended version of the story is clearly now the one with the prologue attached - but it's an interesting example of how a serial novel can evolve with time.

Anyway, if the time loop is a challenge for Su to solve, it raises the obvious question of why Balthazar gets to remember the loop. (There's also incidentally a thing where most of the students' clocks are mysteriously stopped, with the exception of Ophelia's and Ran's.)

Anyway, Su (like us) has to solve whodunnit and whydunnit. Though howdunnit is probably also relevant.

I'm going to wildly speculate that Su's identity stuff is somehow connected to the timeloop scenario, just because narrative efficiency. Here are some possibilities to consider:

the woman in the mask is Shiko

the woman in the mask is Su. the POV of the first chapter is that of Shiko, and her request is that a scenario could be created where Su has to take on the scenario.

the culprit of all the murders and shit is Shiko. she was not overwritten, but evicted into a different body again.

the culprit of all the murders and shit is Shiki, from Tsukihime.

Ran's chapters and the Great Work

Ran recounts some of the stuff that happened while Su was out of it. This is later shown to be a diegetic conversation.

These chapters are super cool and intriguing. That said, while it starts out fairly believable - Ran's summaries with her voice - there is something a bit weird about how Ran can quote long conversations verbatim. Admittedly, if Su is telling the story, she is also able to remember everything in incredible detail. But Su has been established to have something like an eidetic memory, at least as far as figures are concerned, so I can sorta handwave that part.

Though that said, it's just a minor stylistic quibble. Putting it in Ran's mouth is an interesting device. Ran's inner voice is quite sarcastic, way more so than Su, who is honestly painfully sincere?

More importantly, these chapters are not marked with a first purple letter to confirm they are reliable. This is a narrative that Ran is telling Su. We can probably assume the broad details are accurate-ish, but it's entirely possible that Ran is lying or omitting things according to the rules of the game.

Anyway, the students are all taken down to a huge chamber underneath the Everblossom that's full of fractal cables and complicated magic runes that use a city's worth of eris to interface with the Ironworker entropy machine. So far it lets them essentially perfectly recover information from the past, allowing them to do stuff like de-age Anna.

It's a little bit handwavey how it all works. Anna's memories appear to be intact, so her entire body can't have been rolled back. We could raise all sorts of questions about motion and the interface between brain and body but it's a nitpicking.

What we know is that after Fang brings out a piece of iron and it's integrated into the machine... Anna goes offscreen with the other members of the Order, and then comes back appearing much younger, and they claim the machine worked as intended. Not much time to celebrate though because shortly after, the murders start.

There remains the possibility that the younger individual we're being told is Anna is... not Anna, but someone else acting as her (perhaps even Neferatuen). Though why the Order would deceive the students in such a way I couldn't guess, so it's a pretty dubious theory.

The murders

The murder of Bardiya is fairly extensively discussed by the characters. The two scenarios raised are: Theo attacked Bardiya, then lied about it, or, an unknown party ducked in while the shield was lowered very briefly, then attacked Bardiya through the window.

Given the specifity of the window stuff, I'm inclined to believe the second story. Theo definitely has something going on with him (he's been super cagey about some personal business), but he doesn't have a murderer vibe, unless he's an improbably good actor. The capabilities of the adversary remain unclear.

It's also possible that the death somehow involved an adverse interaction with Linos's shield. This possibility was raised by a commentator.

...actually, fine, let me go into Linos's shield.

Linos's shield (or the inevitable nitpicking)

The main group of characters rely on Linos's high level casting of a shielding spell called energy-nullifying-projecting. This takes incoming energy and redirects it back out. We get more details later:

"The base component terminates all motion in anything that comes into contact with it and essentially acts as a brick wall on top of blocking incoming incantations, while the additional one conjures an electromagnetic repelling force, physically damaging any matter that tries to pass through it."

"Wait, uh, I'm kind of confused," Ptolema said, scratching her head. "If it works like that, wouldn't just moving it around damage stuff? Like, when you expanded it to cover the kitchen, shouldn't it have smashed the wall to bits?" "Mm, well, the energy nullification doesn't actually apply when I move the barrier, so as long as everything I'm expanding it through is motionless already, then it'll just pass through harmlessly. I do have to disable the repulsive component for those times, though--- There's an element of the incantation to give me dynamic control over it."

My nitpicks are two: firstly, Ran mentioned special relativity applies to this universe in an earlier chapter. 'Motionless' is relative, and in Newtonian physics and relativity, you don't have a 'preferred' reference frame in which things can be 'absolutely' at rest. So I wonder how the spell is able to distinguish between 'thing moving towards Linos' (block) vs 'Linos moving towards thing' (don't block).

My second nitpick is thermal motion. Even a solid object is constantly full of random lattice vibrations corresponding to temperature. Negating all motion that touches the barrier would amount to flash-freezing anything that comes into contact. Though perhaps you can 'code' it to identify macro-scale objects in motion and block them.

Neither of these are like important.

Anyway here's how Bardiya's death is described by Theo...

"I... Bardiya was right up near the window at the far side of the room, when I turned. I only saw him clearly for a moment before the lamp fell over... But the window was open, and he was staring out of-- No, rather, it almost looked like he was being pulled by something. One of his arms reached out to try and grab hold of something, but there was nothing." He shook his head. "When the light was gone, I tried to call out, but I couldn't hear a sound from my own mouth... Or from anywhere at all. And then, I... I..." He ran his hands urgently through his hair, as if trying to wipe something off them, and gasped urgently. Mehit, who was sitting next to him, stared wide-eyed. "I couldn't see well, but it looked like something was... Was feeding on him," he went on. "He kept being pulled out through the window over and over again, and every time, there was more and more blood when he pulled back. I could even feel some of it splatter on my face, see the light reflecting off the puddle... And more than anything, I could smell it. It was like a butcher's shop, but sickly sweet." He shuddered. "E-Eventually, whatever it was let him go, and he slumped down. I'd been too shocked to move up until that point, but realized I needed to help him, so... I tried to step forward. I still couldn't hear my own voice, so I tried to turn his body around. That's when I... That close, I could see..."

Getting pulled out of the window by an unseen force and torn to bits definitely sounds kinda like getting caught in a repulsive barrier, right? Then again, there's no reason Bard would stick his hand out the window unless forced.

It's a shame, I liked Bardiya. Had a good head on his shoulders. But hey, I guess that's the point! You always kill the fan appeal character first for maximum tragedy points. (By the same token, I expect Ezekiel will last a long time.)

Durvasa we have less information to go on, since the corpse was arranged decoratively post killing. As we've observed, it might not even be Durvasa.

I'm too tired now to try to solve this one, but I might do a followup, to comment on any other stuff that stands out, later.

Great story, anyway. I'm so intrigued by all that's going on. I accidentally posted this instead of sending it to drafts, so I'm gonna unprivate it now, see you next time for more on these chapters or maybe just advancing straight to the next batch!

Thanks for reading my liveblog! And if you read this Lurina, great work, this book kicks ass, so many intriguing ideas and moving parts, I have no idea how you keep track of it all lol.

Umineko liveblog to pick up after sleep hopefully. We'll see though.

[e17omm]

Regarding "that" moment in Part 2 chapter 6 of HI3... (Spoilers)

I'm not sure how to feel about Coralie's death.

Its only mildly foreshadowed with the dog talk, and even after it happens in the simulation, I dont think anyone would have logged out to check on her if Helia hadn't done it.

Because my god, everyone else seemingly lacks empathy. "Hey Helia, wanna join us in the meeting we're gonna have in 15 minutes discussing our next move? We'll re-enter the simulation afterward. Oh Coralie? Didn't you know she died 6 minutes ago?"

Like BRUH. B R U H

Didn't Coralie just DIE? Even if you, elite Valkyries, can brush of death of a partner on this mission you're all on, did you even think for a moment that Helia would be down to continue the mission within an hour after Coralie fucking died?

Its not like they have a time press, doesnt Ajita checkpoint and save their progress? They can literally return at any point. Let Helia grieve for fucks sake!

Like I'm more angry at what happens after Coralie gets mortally wounded. Everyone else seemingly just moves on.

I didn't get particulary attached to either Coralie or Helia before chapter 6, and honestly Helia was basically a different character with how massive her inferiority complex is starting chapter 6, but if Helia just had enough and fucked off and did her own thing now, I think I'd be more invested in her.

Because I dont want Helia to go through "oh Im such a failure, I'll never amount to anything" for a THIRD time. And I sure as hell aren't expecting her to be excited going into the simulation again.

Maybe she'll go back in just to hunt down Listost and get herself killed? I think its that, Helia just being fed up with everyone else and doing her own thing, basically going rogue which I'd like to see because its the most interesting option, or going off to shoot herself due to her insignificance and weakness getting others killed. (In her mind)

I think the "Listost can kill you so hard you die in real life" is kinda bullshit and comes out of nowhere still. Nothing even hinted that the simulation could affect reality to any extent really (I mean... I guess Kiana? But she's rarely brought up). I was expecting Coralie to be gasping and in pain and needing medical and be out of commission for a while. But Listost killing her so hard in the simulation that she dies in real life?

And Coralie herself...? I mean, I'm gonna miss her banter, but her death's gonna come down to how Helia reacts and her actions afterwards.

Because nobody else cared.

The more I think of it the worse it gets. Entropy, Dudu, and Theresa was going to bring back the new Valkyrie into the simulation where their other new Valkyrie was just mortally wounded at like an hour ago.

No empathy for Helia? No concern for her safety since Litost can kill anyone for real? You're not gonna let Helia sit this one out and let her grieve while you go in as an elite striketeam, you know, as the people that could actually fight Listost???

I'd care more for Helia if the writers did!

We kinda didnt see much of Coralie in her final moments so I cant say much about that honestly.

[sarandipitywrites]

DRDW draft 2 update 12/5 (IT'S DONE)

yes, draft 2 of Dead Roots, Dark Water is DONE. all those scattered documents and pictures of handwritten scenes (why did i do that, i should have just typed them out right after writing it, uggghhh) are finally in one, edited, cohesive document.

[image id: a screenshot from a word processor. it reads: "Words: 176,697. Characters: 982,176. Page: 292 of 292. end image id.]

one absurdly long, edited, cohesive document. i didn't mean for it to get this bad i swear, this is fanfic, why did i do this.

and now we're on to draft 3! i'm planning on taking a week or so to work on the plot revision for The Art of Empty Space (and to not stare at this draft for a minute) and then i'll be working on draft 3 for the rest of december. after that, who knows? i want to start redrafting AES in january, but we'll see how badly this sinks its claws into me ;)

short excerpt because... end of the story, basically everything is spoilers. but this part isn't so bad

"And what? You think I could still be a sage?" "Sure, why not? Hey, maybe you could be a dark sage, too. You're probably better with that stuff than anyone else alive, at this point. Is that even a thing? Dark sage?" Jak snorted. "Yeah, I'm sure Samos would be happy about that. His own apprentice, a sage of chaos and entropy." "Fuck yeah, who wouldn't be? I can see it now: Jak Sabo, the first dark eco sage. Samos'll swear you in, teach you the secret handshake and everything. You'll go off and make your home in a shack in Boggy Swamp—" "I have to live in the swamp?" "Uh, yeah? Swamps are hotbeds of chaos and entropy, babe. Keep up. You'll live in the swamp, where only the worthy will find you and seek your teaching. You'll cultivate all these weird, awesome plants. You'll mutate a bunch of swamp rats to do your bidding. We'll never have to sweep the floors, 'cause they'll do it with their little rat-sized brooms—" "You'll be there?" Warmth bloomed in his chest. "Obviously. How else am I supposed to live in your attic?"

general taglist (ask to be added or removed): @innocentlymacabre

DRDW taglist (ask to be added or removed): no one (yet)

[moonfurthetemmie]

Sophism

oh no uh oh we have a problem lads

Sophism (Delusion/Obsidian):

Slightly more stable personality. Delusion wasn't too hung up on the murderer thing aside from ‘you can’t do that that’s illegal’

magic is notably less stable though. Feelings hurt. All feelings hurt. ow.

Delusion was good at squishing his emotions but was letting his aura fill in the gaps, and Obsidian just ignored his. Sophism can’t be Blank all the time, no matter how hard he tries. and boy do he try

Very manipulative. Do not trust him unless you have solid evidence that he’s telling the truth. Jasper got stuck with him well before he or anyone else realized this. Jasper is not fully getting away, even if Sophism Un-Fuses

people are even more desperate to unfuse him after he decides to, yknow, take over everything. Especially since he’s found a very good (for him) middle ground and so he’s now occasionally able to summon fucking storms

also if he does decide to try taking over (which he will), Delusion and Obsidian may be much more amenable to fusing again. much, much more. Like. ‘Nah actually he’s got a point. let’s do this’, though with the intention of unfusing by the end. sophism may not let this happen if he can help it tho

if they do unfuse, they may decide they're rather fond of each other. Sort of. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, though. Neither Sophism nor the fucked up power couple that would be Delusion and Obsidian should be in charge of anything, never mind everything.

Far more willing to get his hands dirty than Delusion was, but doesn't enjoy it quite as much as Obsidian did.

Dual swords because badassery, and also because one is more Delusion's vibe and the other Obsidian's. Same shape, just different aesthetics. he did have to learn how to dual wield first tho neither of his sources knew how

Delusion's signature sword becomes essentially ceremonial; he doesn't use it in combat, but he does bring it out when he's showing off or something of the like

Grew his hair out a little, but unlike Entropy is actually taking very good care of it and oh it looks so royal and lovely. fluffier that Atrophy's for some reason.

A king must look at least a little fabulous, no? Also he needs gold and silver and less of this black shit obsidian you emo little fuck-

obsidian is an emo little fuck though so there's still a fair amount of black

Dyed a bit of his hair black and bleached a bit blonde. The all brown was fucking with him and he couldn't decide which he'd rather have. This ended up being symbolic of how he's come to terms with the fact that he's a fusion of Delusion and Obsidian, and is totally fine with it. also it looks pretty.

you can ask where he got that crown, but he won't tell you.

The radiant-looking magic, as well as he one eye, is notably more orange than the other iterations of Entropy.

this bitch is leaning very much into a 'royalty' vibe.

He spent quite a while very conflicted about his existence (not helped by the fact that Delusion's wonky radiance has resulted in literally all of his emotions causing him physical/magical pain), but after a while he chilled a little, sat down, and said to himself "Well. I'm here now. I can't spend my entire existence bemoaning the state of affairs. What should I do?"

And after a bit of thinking it occurs to him that actually, he very much would like to rule over everything. It would be fun. Everyone would have to give him attention. He's got some conflicting feelings on what kind of a ruler he should be, but he's pretty sure he could work something out between Obsidian wanting to be feared by all and Delusion wanting to create a utopian world.

and he is so excited about it

so he goes disappears from public eye for a while, and when he comes back he is far more of a menace than Delusion or Obsidian ever was.

If anyone from JMV asks why he's trying to do anything helpful, he says something about Delusion's kindness. If someone from H!DS asks why he's begun executing people in the fucking streets, he says something about Obsidian's ruthlessness.

It works far better than one might hope. The people in JMV slowly start asking Sophism for help when something happens. The people in H!DS are becoming more and more afraid of him. It's slowly averaging out to a general attitude of "He's willing to help, but if you're the one causing problems you're going to fucking die. so. yknow."

And he's definitely got a "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" thing going on.

Un-fused, I think Delusion and Obsidian would be rather disturbed by how well his plan was working, but not like. try to stop it. might even just fuse again the second people turn their backs.

Aside from Jasper, whom he snatched without much thought to anyone else, Gouge is probably the first one he went to find when he decided to start shit. Especially if Obsidian's team disappeared, which I'm going to say they did. They probably scampered off to JR to try and get help dealing with Sophism, not knowing anything about what Delusion was actually like. Jade and Zuli may or may not have gone off elsewhere, but fortunately as a fusion he's not too terribly concerned in harming them.

Anyway. initially Gouge was a little confused and not terribly interested, until he said "I would very much like your assistance. I can, of course, continue paying you for your services. But should I require any information from anyone, or an example to be made of someone…"

and she went "well shit if you're gonna twist my arm about it."

He asked her if she knew where Obsidian's team was, to start with, and she told him they were in JR. Something about collaborating to try to un-fuse him.

And he goes "hm. not entirely unexpected, but still pointless. Would you mind helping me…'round them up'?"

"yeah. sure. by the way you're not technically in charge of JR so how you gonna pay me"

"oh, I'll be fixing that immediately. Don't worry."

Congratulations JR. You are now the personal guard of a somewhat delusional megalomaniac. Having the castle is definitely not going to give him a huge power trip.

The funniest part about this is that JMV genuinely thinks Delusion's influence is making the Obsidian part of him Nicer, and H!DS genuinely thinks that Obsidian's influence is making the Delusion part of him more evil

but 95% of it is just that Obsidian's lack of fucks given and Delusion's heavy mask of benevolence combined to be a mask that's half on/half off. Hiding less that Delusion did, but more than Obsidian did.

[wolpatinga]

okey. hms -> harry jean trant. in that order. final answer (prob not but. you know)

i'll ebog some quote as sources after. for persuasion tactics. first you get the overview

de is set in revachol, which is an occupied city. some years ago, there was a revolution, and then a war, and now there's a puppet government that's really controlled by an international neoliberal group called the Moralintern (moralist international). harry and jean work as police partners under the puppet government, and they lead a taskforce, the Major Crimes Unit. trant is a "civilian" who technically is just an advisor. there's a somewhat popular theory that trant's some sort of double agent. regardless, trant's fucking sketchy, and he sees himself as removed from harry and trant, even through he's always going along with them

another thing - entropy. the world that de is set in is afflicted by a tangible entropy thing called the pale that's slowly eating the world. harry embraces it, jean hates it, and trant is really hard to get a read on tbh. like you can say that harry's amnesia was caused by the pale and trant skirts around giving any sort of answer

harry is just. so much. like if you aren't familiar with harry, i'm not sure where to begin. he's just... a guy who loves hard and hates harder i guess. he's prone to violent outbursts, he's obsessive, he's a people pleaser and he's public enemy number one (actually no! he hates violence and he hates that he's so prone to violence and he just wishes he wasn't put into these situations where he has to defend himself all the time! he is usually perceiving threats as more than they are, and is an aggressor). he's prone to self destructive habits and retreats into himself when he knows he's being too much. just before the plot of de, harry realized he was being too much, he got in a massive fight with jean, and he realized that he had to fuck off or he'd really fuck things up. sometimes driving your car into the sea can be like digging a pit. but he's also full of love and fears entropy and augh. he's sick of everyone always leaving him. he's sick of always making people leave him

jean would claim that he's sooooo normal. he's just trying to do his job, he's just trying to bring a little order to the city. he acts like he's the whole reason this taskforce hasn't fallen apart. jean is a miserable sopping wet beast of a man who is so tired of harry not listening to him and so sad that harry is such a burden on him. he's desperate to keep trant around too, desperate to play the cold, calloused role of lieutenant to keep a functioning taskforce and earn respect. he's noted as being very lenient with harry, so much to the point that the two of them are referred to as "heterosexual life partners". he's seen a lot of shit and he's not alright and doesn't understand why harry fights with him so much. he wants peace, man, he wants an end to harry's bullshit. he's sick of giving him second chances

trant is, as i said, technically not a part of this. his allegiances lie elsewhere. he's got this smile plastered on, and he's studying the other two like bugs. he's fascinated by the past, particularly an old computer called the FELD Playback Experiment. The game is technically played through this FELD Playback Experiment. it's the tape computer that lets you watch this case over and over and over and the cycle of harry being a shitkid and jean trying not to take it personally and trant watching in fascination. another thing - girl child revolution. there's a rumor in revachol that a unifying, depersonalizing force is coming that will "resolve history", and trant is SO focused on her. harry picks up on it too, to the point where harry gets glimpses of her whispers, but trant's willing to break all of his rules about "not getting involved" to tell you how much he loves the idea of her. trant's got all these connections, and he's got all these mysterious dealings he's in, and i'm convinced that he's trying to bring her back. and harry and jean are pawns in this

anyways. harry and jean once had to deal with a very large piece of graffiti. it depicted two lovers kissing and read "true love is only possible in the next world, for new people. it is too late for us." technically they were supposed to get it removed and arrest the people responsible, but both of these doom sad men were so in agreement about it that they instead spent a week trying to get the public to let it stay

idk where else i was going with this. but you see what i'm saying. there's headcanons that harry's some sort of magical being that's going to lead the coming storm. no. he's just a prophet of entropy, and a pawn in greater schemes. schemes being created by guys like trant

also disco elysium timeloop real

[ebitenpura]

I *still* don't know if I'll get around to it but for Eight's Alliance Alert, if you are Nine, you are given a codeword by the Minister at some point: entropy.

He says to use it wisely. Someone will fight for you without question if you do, on their honor as a fellow Cipher. Whether you accept the person who arrives is up to you. For some reason, the Minister looks profoundly sad saying this. You think nothing of it.

When you arrive, Eight explains that his duty was to chase after Jadus--your loose end, and now, he's tied to him for the rest of his life. That was how he escaped most of ImpIntel's restructuring. The others either weren't so lucky, or were reabsorbed into the system under a new master. How's the galaxy without Intelligence, Nine? Lonely, isn't it? It's not quite the same without them. The old man, the Watchers. But we get by.

Why Jadus? You want to ask, buried under layers of old dread and loathing from those dark times.

Why not? Eight answers. He's my mission. My mission is my life. And now, it's yours.

You are faced with a choice:

> Reject him. "I can't trust you." 'You don't have to. I gave my word to Keeper.' "I don't trust him, either." 'You're a funny one. Don't worry about it. When you're in a pinch, I'll come. You can go back to pretending neither of us exist.'

> Accept him. "You want to get away from here?" 'If there's drinks and sun where we're going, sure.'

> But leave Jadus. 'Ah.' He stops following you. 'I can't. He's a part of me.' Your blood chills.

> ... "Is he controlling you?" 'No,' Eight says, all smiles and a light like the glint off flinty obsidian in his eyes, 'but it might be all the same to you and yours.' You shift uncomfortably.

[Face Jadus. Again. Continue at finish what you started]

[No way. I'm outta here. Scroll all the way down to Oh Hell No]

> I need to finish what I started. 'It's not your burden to bear anymore. You can leave.'

> It's for me.

'Then I won't stop you,' Eight says, with a tone of finality that speaks of what weighs heavy on the soul, 'but we'll go together.'

> You walk into the darkness of the cave to confront your fears.

It's so dark you can't see your hands in front of you. You stumble, but a firm hand grips yours and leads you on, even as your nerves sing of the end. You hang on like your life depends on it.

The walk is long. The path is sharp and cutting. At the nexus, you feel him.

You can't see him, but your paranoia pieces together the image of him as you first met him; impossibly towering, unassailable, rising from the depths. As your fear rears its ugly head, so too, does the great leviathan of the past.

"We meet again," Jadus echoes. His voice sucks out the marrow from your bones. It freezes through your pores, metallic, toxic, lifeless. You think you will never scrub it from your body. "Object of my hatred."

> Oh hell no. (alternate) You grab Eight and drag him onto the ship to get the fuck out of dodge. You'll consider nuking the planet from orbit as soon as you're a few lightyears away from that psychopath. End.