#mention of divine extinction campaign

[dndwriting]

Someone I Used to Know

When Bastian goes to his old friend Draiocht for help, the fire genasi finds similarities between Bastian's party and some old friends of his...

Draiocht had been dealing with the consequences of the now ended war in Calinsham. Having helped people evacuate, he had taken refuge in the church. The last he heard of his old friend Bastian, he had been building some sort of portal to bring those from other dimensions. Whether or not it had been successful is unknown. However, his questions were about to be answered when he heard people enter the church.

"Hello?" he heard an unfamiliar voice's echo. "Is anyone here?" Figuring it was just a random explorer, he made his footsteps prominent as he snuck between each pillar, hoping to scare the person off. When he looked out to peek, he noticed his old friend Bastian and a couple of unsettled looking humans. One of them seemed to be carrying an undead bird. He felt bad for unsettling strangers that were accompanying his friend, so he stepped out, trying not to look intimidating. Bastian simply smiled.

"Hello there, Draiocht." The fire genasi chuckled as his cyan mask covered his face.

"Long time no see, eh Bastian?" he said, shaking hands with the old man. "What can I do for you?"

"Well," Bastian said as he switched hands to hold his cane and rub the back of his neck. "My portal worked a little... too well." Draiocht's eyes widened upon realizing those people accompanying Bastian were not from Taleryn at all.

"Bastian!" Draiocht exclaimed. "How many times do I have to tell you to not mess with planar travel?" Bastian put his hands up.

"I know! I know! That's why I'm here. We found something in Skulltrod that you might want to see." Bastian holds out a chest to Draiocht, to which the genasi opens it. Inside he finds a gold dragon comb with garnet stones that seem to resemble eyes, a jade chess board with gold playing pieces, a black mask stitched with silver, and a handkerchief. Out of everything, Draiocht took the handkerchief out, observing the letters embroidered onto it: S.C. His expression turns to one of worry and curiosity.

"How did this get here?" Draiocht asked. "Last I saw of Silver, he had that handkerchief..."

"I'm not sure," Bastian shrugs. "There should also be a crown in there." Draiocht stuck his hand back in, trying to feel for a crown to no avail.

"There's not a single crown in there." Bastian began to panic for a moment before turning to Cloud with a cold stare.

"Did you steal it again?" Cloud began to sweat a little.

"Nuh uh!-"

"Take off your hat." Defeated, Cloud takes off his hat to reveal a golden crown. Draiocht walks over to Cloud, taking the crown off his head.

"A fellow rogue," he chuckles. "Word of advice next time, get a satchel. I've stolen plenty of artifacts in my time and trust me, it does wonders for such a small bag!" Cloud nods at Draiocht as the genasi looks at the crown, using his hair to light up the room a little more.

"So?" Bastian cuts in. "Is it what I think it is?"

"It's Ralph's crown alright," Draiocht nods. "Silver's probably going to be looking for these things."

"You know where he is?" Jade asks, a glimmer of hope in her eyes.

"I don't," Draiocht sighs. "But I have an idea of where he could be. I'm 90% sure he's at Silverwind's kingdom."

"Well, how do we get there?" Jade looks at Bastian and Draiocht. Bastian went to answer, but the genasi answered first.

"If you all really want to reach Silver... into the woods, you will find a crossroads. Go to the left. When you get to a harbor, you will find two ships: choose the left ship. Trust me, I've been on both, the left is a smoother ride. Once you land in the frigid cold harbor, continue into the woods across the wooden bridge. When you get to the city, stock up on supplies. Then, head straight to the kingdom. There, you'll find the new king and Silver." Everyone took a mental note of the directions before Cloud speaks up.

"This is cool and all, but how do we get home?" Draiocht looks at Bastian. The two walk closer.

"Don't tell me they have to go through-" Bastian says worriedly.

"Unfortunately... I don't see another option." Draiocht solemnly nods.

"Go through where?" Jade cuts in. Draiocht points down at the ground.

"As much as I hate to say this, you may end up in the Underworld at some point or another. Some of the items Bastian needs comes from there. I'd recommend reading up on what goes on down there just in case."

"How would you know?" Cloud asks, stepping closer, dropping Fray in the corner. He approached Draiocht, trying to intimidate him, which did not work in the slightest.

"I've been there before," Draiocht says deadpan. "It's not for the weak. Not many humans end up in hell, so creatures may want to kill you. The place is mainly demons, dragons, and goblins. Well, at least Avernus is."

"Avernus?" Cloud says.

"The first level of hell," Bastian chimes in. "Draiocht has died there before."

"I wasn't even me," Draiocht grumbled. "I was in the vessel of a stupid bird brain-" Before he could finish, Cloud narrows his eyes.

"Are you insulting Fray?" Draiocht paused, looking at Fray still asleep in the corner.

"...why would I insult a sleeping bird? Besides, I was an aaracokra, not an owl." Cloud backed off. Bastian walked over to Draiocht, seemingly holding out his hand for something. The genasi pulled out a piece of paper. "Here, just in case you guys get into a situation in hell." Jade walked over to look at the paper. Bastian opened the paper to find the goblin language written down.

"How did you know about this?" Jade asked. Draiocht cleared his throat, speaking fluent goblin. The party's eyes widened, Bastian's especially. Draiocht laughed at their shock before calming down.

"I've had a few encounters with goblins, so I decided to learn their language. You'll definitely need it in hell."

"Why can't you come with us?" Jade asked. "I mean, you know your way around hell, don't you?"

"I- um-" Draiocht stammered in surprise. "I mean I do, but I don't know how much good it will do you all, especially since I'm more prone to dying in there." Jade shrugged that statement off.

"If we're going to a place, I don't know about you, but I'd like to go with someone who has a good idea of where we're going." There was something about that sentence that set some memory off in Draiocht. Something familiar...

When his party had finally escaped hell and went back to their bodies, they all rejoiced, Draiocht specifically. The fact he was back to normal and not a stupid birdbrain was something he cherished.

"About time!" he sighed, hugging himself happily. "I feel like me again!"

"Speak for yourself, lettuce head!" Vixen said, back as his deertaur self. "At least you didn't change races a thousand times!"

"Well at least you were alive for most of it, Vixen." That sentence caused Vixen to shut up. Draiocht turned around to see his dragonborn friend Iron looking somewhat content as he hugged Kiara. The two had been inseparable in hell. The fact they were back to normal now made Draiocht feel happy for them. After a bit, Kiara turned around to notice Draiocht alive and okay.

"Draiocht!" she called out, running to him and hugging him tightly. Draiocht's happiness took over his thoughts, hugging Kiara back with the same familial love she was giving to him.

"Kiara! Thank gods you're alright!"

"I should be saying that to you, silly!" she laughed. "I mean, you're here and alive!" Kiara eventually let go and turned to the others with a smile. Draiocht stood up straight, looking ahead.

"So what's next?"

"We continue stopping this god war, duh!" Vixen chimed in, making Draiocht's stomach drop.

"Do we have to keep on with this?" Iron complained. "We've been doing this for how long at this point? It's like this will never end!"

"I'm with Iron," Draiocht said. "After what went down in hell, I'm not sure I want to keep doing this." Kiara frowned, grabbing Draiocht's shoulders.

"Hey, we're family. We're going to do this together in hell or high water. Plus, what will Athena think if we just gave up now? You have us, Draiocht. I promise."

As Draiocht snapped out of his memory, he saw Jade looking at him concerned. It was as if she was calling him for a while now.

"Draiocht? Are you alright?" she asked him. All Draiocht could hear was Kiara, his old party member. The one he always saw eye to eye with. There was something about Jade's kindness that just reminded me of her. The genasi smiled gently at Jade.

"I'm alright," he said softly. "You just remind me so much of an old friend of mine. Your whole party does. That hotshot blonde over there reminds me a lot of my pal Vixen, while the sleepy bird reminds me a lot of my friend Iron. You all just have so much in common with people I know. It's like I'm with them again." Jade nodded understandably.

"Well, I'm glad we can provide you with some sort of comfort. Um- do you think me and Cloud can talk in private?" Draiocht and Bastian both nodded, walking out of the church with the box. Bastian leaned against the church's exterior with a sigh.

"They're something special, aren't they?"

"Oh yes," Draiocht smiled. "I'd say keep them close, dear friend. You struck gold like I did. With the party you have, they may get into mischief, but I believe that you will make good memories as I did with mine." Draiocht took out a picture of his old party. They appeared to be in a nice grassy area when they took the picture. He rubbed his thumb across the picture reminiscently. Bastian patted his back.

"I'll protect them as best as I can, I promise." Draiocht nodded as he looked in the church's window, noticing Cloud and Jade talking to an orange butterfly.

"I never thought I'd ever see a butterfly again. Nature doesn't come through here often."

"I think that's just Jade's patron," Bastian said, looking with him.

"Still," Draiocht smiled. "Still a precious sight."

"I agree," Bastian added before looking at Draiocht. "I see what you mean when you said Cloud reminded you of Vixen. You could have sworn he's a bard, but he's not. As for Fray, he's just like Iron. He mainly stays off to the side and he's quiet, but I can tell he has quite the potential."

"We'll have to see in the future, but I believe in them, Bastian. You harnessed a fine party. I know I've said it multiple times, but I mean it."

"I appreciate it, young man." Bastian chuckled at calling Draiocht a young man. He wasn't wrong. Their age gap was insane. While Bastian was 84, Draiocht had lots of life ahead of him at just 27 years old. The two had shared plenty of laughs in the 6 years they knew each other. They shared ambitions, inventions, even tears. The bond the two had were close to what Draiocht would considered as strong as his previous party.

Eventually, Cloud and Jade would walk out of the church, Fray over Cloud's shoulder.

"Welcome back, you two!" Bastian greeted them with a warm smile.

"Yeah, yeah, we're still here," Cloud said dramatically. "Let's just go."

"Cloud!-" Jade elbowed Cloud gently. Draiocht chuckled.

"Yep, just like them."

[alittlefoxedup]

D&D Headcanons for the Batfam

Tim had been asked to DM a one-shot for the YJ team. They couldn’t commit to doing it regularly, but Tim really enjoyed it. He wanted to make it a regular thing even if it was just once a month. Steph enjoyed the one-shot and suggests getting his family involved.

Dick is the first one to be approached. He doesn’t fully understand it, but he likes the idea of acting and family bonding.

Damian takes a week of convincing. Tim finally mentions the possibility of an animal companion, and Damian is fully on board if Titus can act as his animal companion. Tim decides not to fight him on it.

Cass agrees the quickest. Steph had told her about the one-shot so Cass wanted to give it a shot. Acting and undercover work was still difficult for her so she saw it as an opportunity to practice.

Jason did not want to join. Nothing Tim said could convince him so Dick stepped in. Dick got nowhere. Cass sealed the deal with one text. “Everyone will be pretending to be someone else the whole time so won’t talk about real life stuff” Jason claimed Cass harasses him until he said yes. Cass will neither confirm nor deny this but is secretly thrilled Jason does want to spend time with them.

Bruce didn’t understand a word of what Tim told him. Role playing was very different in his mind. Tim was mortified when he realized why Bruce wasn’t getting it and just sent Bruce a YouTube video explaining the game and mentioned everyone was on board.

Alfred declined. Tim didn’t push and told Alfred to enjoy his time away from their insanity. Alfred reads and relaxes whenever they’re playing.

With everyone one board, Tim explains the world he created. It’s super in depth and has the option for all kinds of quests. The first arc of their campaign will revolve around the thieves’ guild of a city in the middle of the continent then go from there.

All agree that it should be recorded so Tim gets to use his new cameras.

The characters:

Bruce: LG human cleric

Dick: CG half elf rogue (there was a fight over this but he pulled big brother card)

Cass: NG dwarf barbarian

Jason: N tiefling wizard (no one had been expecting the wizard part but unsurprised about the race)

Steph: LN halfling monk

Tim: DM

Damian: CN ranger

Titus: Damian’s wolf (strangely good at role playing)

Tim decides to start them off on a good old fashion goblin extinction that the blacksmith they all use sent them on.

Jason insists he has no need for a blacksmith.

Tim reminds him he has a dagger and continues on.

Their first dungeon is cleared largely by mishaps that Bruce heals them out of (Dick and Cass rushing in) and Jason’s strangely deep understanding of his spells.

Everyone slowly realizes that Jason has the highest int as he comes up with the best tactics.

Dick falls unconscious three times in the first dungeon because he abandons tactics quickly.

Cass holds the record for most 1s and 20s and rarely rolls in between

Steph winks at Dick every time she adds an unnecessary flip. All flips are successful, but she’s horrible at avoiding traps.

Damian tends to go along with Jason’s tactics and they mess goblins up together.

Bruce is just so happy. He’s spending time with his kids. Everyone’s mostly getting along. They get to see the absolute genius Jason can be when he wants to.

It takes nearly seven hours for them to finish the first dungeon and hit level two.

Tim was not expecting Jason to choose divination and has no idea how he’s going to keep things challenging for Jason’s planning while making sure Dick doesn’t die in one round.

Everyone wants to play again in a week.

Jason stays for dinner.

Bruce manages to tell Jason that he’s happy that Jason’s happy without running him off.

Steph spends dinner trying to get Jason to explain how he came up with his plans.

Jason reveals nothing.

Patrol goes smoother than it has in months.

[theradioghost]

could you elaborate on the long term plot of greater boston? i don't mind spoilers! i tried it but couldn't get past the first episode :( but i trust your taste and i've liked every other show you've rec'd so i wanna keep listening

EDIT: okay for some reason the formatting of this post is EXTREMELY befuckened and I can’t get it to behave, so it’s possible that this isn’t going to display with a spoiler cut and if so I am VERY sorry. the “keep reading” break is in the ask instead of the body of the post I have no idea what’s happening right now but if you don’t want spoilers please be aware this post spoils like everything about the show

Sure thing! I will .... do my best, but because of the nature of GB’s plot it’s a bit difficult to describe it without ending up either way too detailed or way too vague. But I will absolutely do my best because if there is any show out there that deserves it, this is that show. Cut for Obvious Spoiler Reasons!

So, there’s a LOT of plot that goes on, but what a plot summary could never convey is that the real heart and soul of this show is the characters. There are a metric fuckton of them, and every one of them is multidimensional and dynamic and wonderful, even if it’s not always obvious at first.

Leon Stamatis of course starts the show by abruptly dying of Existential Crisis/Panic Attack on a roller coaster, which sets everything else in motion. Of that big ensemble cast, at first the most important players are

Nica, Leon’s little sister who wants to be famous but doesn’t really have any concrete plans as to how

Dimitri, Leon’s little brother who is currently traveling in a submarine attempting to find Atlantis and keeps sending Leon letters, unaware that he’s dead

Louisa, Leon’s recent ex, a wedding photographer who later quits and becomes a crime scene photographer slash detective

Leon’s best friend/roommate Michael, who is unemployed and has just had a relapse after being sober for 12 years because he has no idea what to do without Leon

Gemma, a lesbian who absolutely hates her job as an editor at Third Sight, a company which publishes magazines relating to astrology/psychic stuff/divination/etc

Charlotte, Gemma’s pregnant wife, who has recently lost her job as an animation background artist and is feeling directionless

Professor Paul Montgomery Chelmsworth, aka the Mayor of the Red Line, a slightly eccentric college professor and casual friend of Leon’s who is inspired by his death to call for a referendum declaring that the Red Line of the Boston subway system will become an independent city.

It’s that last one that is the real ~main plot~ of the show: at first, more and more of the characters getting caught up in the campaign to create the city of Red Line, and then the chaos that results when they succeed and actually have to run it. But you also have characters like Louisa and Nica and Michael, dealing with a whole rainbow of grief and distress as they cope with Leon’s death. His eccentric personality is the other driving force of the show’s events -- Leon was caring and compassionate, but also obsessed with timetables, organization, and scheduling every action in his life down to the minute.

The other major force in the show is Third Sight, a magazine publisher with a focus on fortunetelling and the like; Michael ends up working there, along with Gemma and several other major characters. Third Sight also has an enigmatic boss no one has ever seen, who turns out to be a manipulative little bastard named Oliver West.

While Red Line successfully becomes a city, “Mayor” Chelmsworth turns out to have some major commitment issues and vanishes as soon as the vote passes, leaving Charlotte and Gemma to clean up the mess. Charlotte ends up interim mayor, but also begins to campaign for the upcoming mayoral election, in which she has two opponents: Isabelle Powell, a Black realtor and an incredible character whom I absolutely cannot do justice here, and Emily Bespin, Literally The Worst Person Who Has Ever Existed, Holy Fuck I Hate Her So Much.

The election is being manipulated behind the scenes by Oliver West, who also takes advantage of Nica’s isolation and a near mental breakdown to convince her to help him by orchestrating several escalating ~pranks~ in Red Line. Honestly he’s manipulating literally everyone, and also heavily backing Emily Bespin, in an attempt to profit off of influence in the new city. Eventually this ends up with Michael kidnapped and imprisoned, several other characters attacked and one badly hurt during a wedding in Red Line, and Isabelle Powell’s nephew framed for the attack. That results in Powell’s supporters beginning a set of protests which throw Red Line into even further chaos, even as Charlotte and Nica begin to have some real moral epiphanies about how they’ve been acting.

As events continue to escalate and the election draws closer and closer, the now-assembled cast have to figure out just who exactly is manipulating events and how -- not to mention how to prove Powell’s nephew’s innocence, what the hell has happened to Michael, and what the hell they’re going to do if Bespin wins the election and makes good on her promise to evict everyone involved in the protests.

Meanwhile, Dimitri is traumatized by finding a mass grave at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, gets rescued and then imprisoned in Alaska by infamous vanished plane hijacker DB Cooper, finally makes it home to Boston disillusioned and lonely only to inevitably find out his brother has been dead for two years, and then gets totally rejected by his sister, because he basically can’t catch a break.

Also meanwhile, the same conflicts playing out in Red Line play out on a more metaphysical level, in the structure of the show itself. While the first season only hints at the possibility that Leon might not be quite as gone as everyone thinks, as the show progresses Leon’s ghost makes his presence known by starting to argue with the omniscient narration. Increasingly taking over the show’s narration until a brilliant scene where said narrator quits and audibly gets up from the microphone and leaves, Leon, the man who spent his whole life trying to impose order on the chaos of the universe around him, finds himself battling the very structure of the story they’re in, in an attempt to help his friends as both he and they are caught up in the chaos of Red Line and Oliver West’s plans. Unfortunately, the structure of the story has other ideas, and plans of its own.

None of this, of course, even begins to touch on the cheese robots; or Michael’s ongoing struggle with self-actualization and alcoholism; or Mallory the foulmouthed teenager who somehow manages to first witness and then be involved in nearly every major plot event of the show; or the in-depth examination of structural racism as it relates to things like housing and city planning and Boston’s history and well-intentioned white liberals and the imprisonment of Black youth; or Star Trek obsessed chaotic neutral gay reporter Chuck Octagon and that one time he flirted with his own mirror universe self; or the complex but beautiful process of Charlotte and Gemma working on their relationship in the midst of all this chaos because while they have troubles throughout they truly love one another and are trying to be better people; or the fact that one of the other major characters is an insufferable Loud Vegan member of a polyamorous commune who -- on the advice of his ~spirit advisor~ the ghost of 19th century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft keeps changing his name throughout the show to things including Earthman, Panda Bear, Extinction Event, and Dipshit; or the unfortunately real Olive Garden food truck; or the laughter and the tears and the flamethrowers and the fact that one of the show’s most important and heartbreaking conversations takes place on an amusement park log flume ride audibly filled with liquid nacho cheese.

It’s a good show, is what I’m saying, basically.

[selemina]

Also you mentioned you have a campaign of your own, meaning you DM it right? Who of your buddies has your current favorite player and who's your favorite NPC you voice?

Well, I don’t do voices and I don’t do favorites, so... XD But I can tell you a bit about the world of the First Casters Campaign! ;)

France, current times. There is a thing called the Synchrotron near paris, which is a big scientific building that essentially curves light and throws it at objects ; depending on how the photons scatter and how deep they go before they bounce, we can learn a lot about said analyzed object.

A nearby math teacher is VERY into science, and manages to organize a visit to the place for his students and a few others. However, things go wrong in a very flashy, but harmless way... Excet people start hearing voices. Seeing symbols, hearing balads they never heard before, having hallucinations... And what about this person that suddenly appeared in a nearby sub-lab, and was immediately covered up and brought out by security?

First Caster is about a group of college students suddenly discovering powers as magic wakes up in our world. Gods come back to life, monsters and creatures come forth, and unexpected travelers ask for help. Turns out this world is somewhat linked to a new one, where magic is very present, but for both worlds, this is first contact... With all the government panic and cover-up that it entails. ;)

Meet the cast! :D Glaire, a trans woman with faulty top surgery and a phoenix ancestry (now happily retired with her BN lover, the group’s tech wizard NPC now that she can maintain alter self all day! :D) Lyn, a reluctant divine soul sorcerer, and newly found aasimar, which a guardian angel she could honestly do without! Damiana, modern artificer and low key psychic, but if she is fully aware of the first part, the second one still remains to be adressed, along with her newly formed tiefling traits! Alexia, Warlock of the grey painting, linked to the central statue of the school’s funder. Her patron was probably one of the last magical adept on this world before the magic went extinct, and they are slowly becoming one as she becomes more and more powerful. Isa, adorable black bard, the moral compass of the group, ultimate soft girl, carrying the spirit of her dead father in her flute for aditional emotional support! Basically she baby. :) Dr. Ivan Standon, no-nonsense cleric of the group, with his.... evolving relationship to the Omideus. Essentially, all the gods have merged into an ever shifting deity, but, well... having a direct line to Gods is not as easy as it seems... ;) Permid, a soft boi Wizard trying his best, and VERY much here to learn more about magic and the other world! If only things could stop being grim and stressful for 5 minutes... And Saka, a “magic cop” from the other world, Looking very competent and professional, but deep down missing his kidnapped brother so freaking much, someone hug this poor dragonborn, please!

A few of my favorite NPCS : Loki : yes, nordic god of mischief, but also the dominant face of the omnideus whenever Ivan is involved. Likes to cosplay other gods for fun. Teasing Ivan is a national sport for him. ;) Damien : Rough district brawler, the kid is actually a repressed softy. Tsundere prime. Loves pastries Alexia make for him. Would kill for anybody of the group, gets siblingly bullied by Damiana. Also a tiefling in desguise. Peter : Yes, hi, did someone say vampire gentleman? :) Yes, I did, and I’m the DM, get a vampire gentleman. Likes to flex on people that believe themselves to be clever, like the next NPC in this list. Special Agent Dylan Ross : Look at this absolute Bastard. Bastard man. Appointed by the government to figure out what the FUCK is going on around Saclay, he’s clearly in over his head, but hey nobody knew magic was a thing, so... He’s a plotting asshole with a tired attitude and sass in every word for anybody antigonizing him. Determined to get to the bottom of this, he’s met with both compliance and held back secrets... Recently got threatened by a 15ft statue! :) Oni : When you make a villain all around a storm theme. To challenge one of your player characters. You overlevel him a bit to be scary but fair-ish, to be able to beat the player character without feeling unfair. You nail the dramatic entrance. Everyone is scared. You down the mouthy cleric with one backhand (Ivan going down was an accident to be fair) and injure half the group to underline that yes, THIS GUY MEANS BUSINESS. You get a hardcore, awesome duel between him and the player character he’s made to be the nemesis of... And then he gets his shit kicked in, doesn’t manage to escape as you had planned, gets actually executed, leaving the group shaken of what they had done. Nobody liked that. Emotions everywhere. You give the cleric one free use of a resurrection spell as an option because fuck, that got dark (amazingly dark, don’t get me wrong, that was good shit right there! Top RP, character development, the whole deal!) So now Ivan has a newly resurrected, naked young adult at the back of his car, driving straight to the hospital, because fuck that noise, let’s not be murderers! And that’s how my latest villain got adopted, after getting killed and resurrected, by the players! :D He’s a loud mouthed bastard, but his japanese demon ancestry also comes with a code of honor : Ivan saved his life, he has a life dept towards him now. Ivan of course won’t let him become a servant, leaving him in a limbo of trying to be useful in any other way, all while rubbing it in everybody’s face all the time that HEY GUYS REMEMBER THAT TIME WHEN YOU KILLED ME? :DDD YEAH ME TOO!

[kaile-hultner]

Dialogues With A Dreg, Part Four

Spoilers for Destiny and Destiny 2 ahead.

Hello, Guardian.

Let’s drop the allegory for a while. I don’t think it was working to begin with, and I prefer to speak plainly instead of in prose.

I love the game you serve as the protagonist in, at least mechanically. Part of the reason I’ve put nearly a thousand hours in piloting you around and clicking on enemy heads is because I’m chasing that satisfying “pop” when something’s brain explodes after I get them with a linear fusion rifle. I guess it’s better than being addicted to drugs or alcohol or video games with gambling mechan- oh shit god dammit wait, fuck, there’s Eververse here, I forgot.

Anyway, Destiny 2 has my full buy-in when it comes to gameplay, as I think it’s grabbed many folks in its three-year lifespan. I’m not as big a fan of the many modes to choose from in the game, and I think the story – when looked at holistically – is more-or-less a wash. But one aspect I can’t ignore is one I’ve tried to reason out in these Dialogues: Bungie, the game’s developer, wants me to live at least part-time in this world, and there are certain ramifications that come with that.

I first noticed these ramifications during the Faction Rallies in D2Y1, when it asked me to pick a faction and fuck shit up across the solar system. I picked what I thought was the coolest-looking faction, a group of (it turned out) thanatonautic, neoliberal warmongers calling themselves Future War Cult. They basically killed themselves over and over to see the future, and as a result they want Guardians everywhere to become absolute war machines. But as far as I could see, they were a “better” option than the other two factions: Dead Orbit, who just wanted to get the fuck out of the solar system and away from the Traveler, our slumbering charge, and New Monarchy.

New Monarchy is the MAGA hat gang of Destiny 2. They want to keep humanity safe by locking them inside the Last City, forming an eternal Guardian-led kingdom, and ruling with an iron fist. Yeesh.

In my first Faction Rally, I fought hard for FWC. I liked the gear they were giving me, not to mention the guns I could earn from them. They had an aesthetic I liked, and the story of thanatonautics is interesting enough for me to want to know more about how all that worked. But I didn’t like the insistence that we “reclaim” the far-flung reaches of the solar system, as if they belonged to us inherently. I didn’t like the ramping-up, constant drumbeat for war they were throwing out. Even if Lakshmi-2, FWC’s leader, seemed like the eye of a hurricane – calm, yet clearly still dangerous – the hurricane she was the center of was starting to irk me.

I’m sorry to say I didn’t drop FWC in subsequent Rallies, even if I wasn’t as enthusiastic about them as I was initially. If I could pick again, though, I know now I’d pick Dead Orbit. They had it the most right, plus Peter Stormare plays Arach Jalaal, the faction’s leader, which is just cool.

But the winner of pretty much every rally was New Monarchy. I couldn’t see the appeal, even if you stripped the clear trump-ass bullshit away. But a LOT of other Destiny 2 players fought for them, and they were the victors constantly. Bungie took the Faction Rally away in D2Y2, but it basically put me on an inexorable thought track to where we are today.

Simply put, I think the world that Destiny 2 is advocating for is at best a fascist one. At worst, we’re talking about reinstating the divine right of kings. Not only does mortal humanity lose in this bargain, but every other living creature inhabiting our solar system suffers for it as well.

Now, Guardian, I can see that this is an unwelcome statement to hear. I get it. After spending the entire five years of your existence thanklessly putting around the solar system and killing gargantuan, god-level threats to humanity and life itself, watching some nerdy, doughy writer cast aspersions on everything you do probably extends past irritation and into wishing you could shoulder-charge me into Glimmer particles. But I want to be clear: yours isn’t the only video game world – or even the only sci-fi world in general – that does this. As Nic Reuben (the original Destiny 2 fascism warner) put it in his 2017 post on the subject, Bungie writers are “blindly following a set of culturally encoded science-fantasy tropes”:

“‘True leaders are born. It’s genetic. The right to rule is inherited.’ Any time you play as a really, really ridiculously good looking person killing mobs of ugly things for a vaguely defined reason, you’re witnessing this kind of ideology first hand.”

One thing I would like to point out, though, before we continue: Guardian, I know you personally. I’ve fought as you across the stars. I know you don’t inherently want to rule over anything. You are intentionally a blank slate, you never voice your own desires except for that one time when a possessed Awoken prince killed your best ramen bud, and I want to believe that the only thing you want — which is the only thing I want — is to race Sparrows on Mars. But the version of you I play as is not the only version of you that exists. There are over a million of you. And aside from that million iterations of you that exist in this game world, there are others who absolutely want to rule. It’s high time to interrogate this world.

Fantasy Space Fascism: The Game

In his book Against the Fascist Creep, freelance journalist and Portland State Ph.D candidate Alexander Reid Ross defines fascism as “an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the ‘new man.'” He continues:

“Fascism is also mythopoetic insofar as its ideological system does not only seek to create new myths but also to create a kind of mythical reality (ed. emphasis mine), or an everyday life that stems from myth rather than fact. Fascists hope to produce a new kind of rationale envisioning a common destiny that can replace modern civilization. The person with authority is the one who can interpret these myths into real-world strategy through a sacralized process that defines and delimits the seen and the unseen, the thinkable and the unthinkable.

“That which is most commonly encouraged through fascism is producerism, which augments working-class militancy against the ‘owner class’ by focusing instead on the difference between ‘parasites’ (typically Jews, speculators, technocrats, and immigrants) and the productive workers and elites of the nation. In this way, fascism can be both functionally cross class and ideologically anticlass, desiring a classless society based on a ‘natural hierarchy’ of deserving elites and disciplined workers. By destroying parasites and deploying some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism, fascists promise to create an ideal state or suprastate – a spiritual entity more than a modern nation-state, closer to the unitary sovereignty of the empire than political systems of messy compromises and divisions of power.”

Ross, A. R. (2017). Against the Fascist Creep. AK Press.

The Destiny franchise begins with you, a freshly-reborn Guardian, shooting and punching your way through a hive of vaguely-arachnid aliens your Ghost companion calls “Fallen.” You find a decrepit jumpship deep in the heart of the Old Russia Cosmodrome, which your Ghost fires up and uses to take you to the “last safe city on Earth,” a walled metropolis underneath the Traveler. You first meet with the Vanguard triumvirate, Titan Commander Zavala, Warlock Ikora, and Hunter Cayde-6, and then, after completing some tasks for them, you are granted an audience with the Speaker (voiced by Bill Nighy):

“THE SPEAKER: There was a time when we were much more powerful. But that was long ago. Until it wakes and finds its voice, I am the one who speaks for The Traveler.

“You must have no end of questions, Guardian. In its dying breath, The Traveler created the Ghosts to seek out those who can wield its Light as a weapon—Guardians—to protect us and do what the Traveler itself no longer can.

“GUARDIAN: What happened to it?

“THE SPEAKER: I could tell you of the great battle centuries ago, how the Traveler was crippled. I could tell you of the power of The Darkness, its ancient enemy. There are many tales told throughout the City to frighten children. Lately, those tales have stopped. Now… the children are frightened anyway. The Darkness is coming back. We will not survive it this time.

“GHOST: Its armies surround us. The Fallen are just the beginning.

“GUARDIAN: What can I do?

“THE SPEAKER: You must push back the Darkness. Guardians are fighting on Earth and beyond. Join them. Your Ghost will guide you. I only hope he chose wisely.”

Bungie. Destiny. Activision Entertainment, 2015.

This introduction to the world of Destiny is… shockingly reductive. Even playing the campaign when this happens, my first thoughts were, “wait so we’re not even smart or good enough to hear the children’s scary stories about the history of this world? what the fuck?” But over the course of years, we find out more and more about the so-called Golden Age of Humanity, the tools humans built with implied assistance from the Traveler, the various rich families and corporate megaliths that consolidated power over people across the solar system in the years and decades leading to the arrival of the Darkness and the ensuing Collapse.

Not only that, we start to get a pretty clear image of what life was like immediately following the Collapse. Humanity was almost driven to extinction, and the people left alive after this apocalypse soon wished they were dead. The Traveler “defeated” the Darkness but in the process put itself into something similar to an emergency reboot mode. It deployed the Ghosts, who resurrected people who could, as the Speaker put it, “wield its Light as a weapon,” but the first of these “Risen” were nothing short of horrific. They used their Ghosts’ regeneration and resurrection powers to become regional warlords, subjugating what few mortal people remained, draining the desolate wastes of what few resources they had, and basically sealing the deal on the “Dark Age” brought on by the Collapse. It wasn’t until the advent of the Iron Lords that these warlords were defeated and the “age of Guardians” could begin, but even the Iron Lords did some pretty heinous shit – like use a whole town of mortals as bait to lure in a band of warlords on the run.

But when it comes to creating a mythical reality, the Speaker has his formula down pat. Don’t get too bogged down with details, paint the conflict in stark good vs. evil, literal “Light vs. Darkness” broad strokes, and mythologize the actions of Guardians (but most importantly, our Guardian). And oh, what fodder for mythology we are.

By the end of the first campaign, we’re the hero who severed the connection between the Hive, the Vex and the Traveler and tore out the heart of the Black Garden. By the end of The Taken King, we’ve slain a god-king. In the Rise of Iron expansion, we stop the spread of a virulent nanoparticle with murderous intent called SIVA in its tracks, using nothing but our fists. In Destiny 2, we become the Hero of the Red War, the one who put an end to a Vex plot to sterilize all worlds, and who killed a Hive Worm God. We avenge our fallen Hunter Vanguard, we kill a Taken Ahamkara. We are the hub on which the spokes of history are turning.

In terms of video game power fantasies, I really truly can’t imagine a better-feeling one. It’s basically pure uncut dopamine being transmitted directly to the pleasure centers of the brain, one Herculean feat at a time. And if we were the only Guardian, if we were not part of a larger world, if everything around us was in a vacuum, I don’t know if I would be writing this article. But Bungie has been very clear about wanting to make a world where our actions do materially affect our surroundings. As such, we are essentially a walking propaganda tool for the Consensus, a pseudo-democratic government over the Last City, consisting of faction leaders, the Vanguard and the (now-presumed-dead, hasn’t been replaced) Speaker.

The Consensus wants badly to declare the advent of the New Golden Age, a time in which Humanity can finally emerge from under the shadow of the Traveler to pick up where it left off prior to the Collapse. The problem we supposedly face is the never-ending onslaught of Enemies. Four alien species showed up on our doorstep after the Collapse, all seeking to finish us off (according to the Speaker): the Fallen, the Cabal, the Hive/Taken, and the Vex.

Of the four-ish races of enemy, only one can said to be truly, deeply “evil” in the sense the Speaker intends: the Hive and Taken, led by Taken King Oryx and his sisters Sivu Arath and Savathun, the only force in the galaxy more fascist than the Guardians. The Vex are a race of machines whose only focus is on making more of themselves, a threat similar to SIVA. The other two alien forces, the Fallen and the Cabal, are certainly antagonistic toward Guardians but our initial reasons for fighting them are, frankly, butt-ass stupid. Basically, we fight them because they’re there. They have the audacity to land on planets that “belong to us” and scavenge resources from them. Until the Red Legion showed up on Earth, we basically only ever fought Cabal on Mars, and there’s really no reason as to why.

The Fallen, or Eliksni, on the other hand, end up coming off more as the tragic victims of our flippantly rampant genocidaire practices than actual “enemies.” They’re probably the weakest alien species we come up against. Their backstory involves them living in peace under the Traveler before their entire society was caught up in a Collapse-like “Whirlwind” and destroyed. Rather than give them Guardians, like it did with us, the Traveler instead just up and peaced out, leaving the Eliksni for dead against the maelstrom of the Darkness. The surviving “Fallen” got in their skiffs and desperately chased the Traveler across the heavens, stratifying the remnants of their society into “houses” and developing religious devotion to machines like Servitors in the process.

They tried to take the Traveler back at the Battle of the Five Fronts and Twilight Gap, and lost. Their armies were shattered, and we’ve been nonchalantly killing them en masse ever since. They are the “parasites” our Guardian must exterminate, along with the Hive, Cabal, and Vex. When we make friends with, or even simply allies with, a Fallen (like Variks the Loyal, Mithrax the Forsaken, or the Spider), it is made clear almost immediately that this 100 percent doesn’t change the relationship we have with the Fallen as a group. Variks is absolutely subservient to Mara Sov and the Awoken. Mithrax wants to create an Eliksni House that bows down to Guardians and Humanity for being “better stewards” of the Traveler than the Eliksni was. The Spider makes it clear that he only wants to grow his crime syndicate, but that we can help him out if we want. Never once does the Vanguard or the Consensus reach out to these allies and try to broker peace. And in-game, we simply don’t have an option but to fire on and kill Eliksni in droves. Kill or be “killed,” right?

When it comes to Humanity itself, while we never get a chance to actually leave the Tower and walk through the streets of the Last City, there are at least hints as to the deep class stratification at work here. You can’t get much more on-the-nose than an ivory tower of immortal beings overlooking an enclosed human race. Guardians atop humanity, the Speaker above the Vanguard over the Consensus over the people, and you, the very fulcrum on which history pivots, functionally over everything else. But in the mythical reality of this game, it’s really the Traveler über Alles, and humanity underneath the Traveler has become a wonderful, diverse melting pot without class, without fear. An ideal state where the walls keep Darkness at bay and humanity can discover the joys of tonkotsu ramen yet again.

A Light Story Vs. Lore Steeped in Darkness

Destiny has a reputation, unfairly earned, for being an okay game with a bad story, or at best a nonexistent one. The story isn’t really all that bad, it’s just poorly implemented up front, and I think my willingness to engage with the game’s world to the extent that I have is a testament to how powerful and evocative some of the beats in Destiny’s writing truly are. If we dissect the game we can separate the writing of the “story” from the writing of the “lore,” and in watching the plot develop over the past few years, we can see a gradual unification of these two areas start to occur.

This is helped greatly by third-party resources like Ishtar Collective, and by mechanical decisions Bungie made in D2Y2. Adding the lore back into the game with Forsaken was a good idea; choosing to fully integrate the lore into the world starting with Season of the Forge was a great one.

A side-effect of this lore-plot unification is a dismantling-in-real-time of some of the game’s most beloved and widely-spread legends, like the legend of Shin Malphur and Dredgen Yor. Even our personal legend is challenged in this way, and it’s a really neat way that Bungie writers new and old are critically engaging with their work. But it also really throws into stark relief some of the issues I’ve laid out in this article so far.

Take, for example, the lore book “Stolen Intelligence.”

Presented to us as intercepted secret Vanguard transmissions, “Stolen Intelligence” shows us exactly what the Vanguard really thinks of our actions, and what their goals really are. It was part of Season of the Drifter, which overall had a “trust no one” vibe to it, but some of the entries here are BLEAK, y’all.

Here’s an excerpt from the first entry, titled “Outliers.”

“Fallen armed forces continue to fall back from active fronts across Terra. Factions of House Dusk remain active in the European Dead Zone. Throughout the rest of the globe, refugee attack incidents have dropped by more than 70 percent since the conclusion of the Red War – largely attributable to depressed Fallen and human populations rather than any significant change in interspecies relations.

[…]

“The recent trending emergence of so-called “crime syndicates” (cf. report #004-FALLEN-SIV) is emblematic of the continuing destructuralization of Fallen society. Likely an artifact of multi-generational colonization of human strongholds, this agent believes that because these syndicates have no relation to indigenous Fallen culture, young Fallen are appropriating and imitating human mythology in absence of a strong cultural heritage of their own.

[…]

“VIP #3987, another former confederate of the Awoken, is a lesser-known personality known as Mithrax. Scattered field reports suggest that like #1121, #3987 styles himself a Kell of the so-called “House Light,” an otherwise unknown House apparently founded by #3987 himself. We have secondhand accounts that Mithrax has engaged in allied operations with Guardians in the field, though we have not as yet been able to corroborate these accounts with any degree of veracity. This agent is inclined to treat these reports with a healthy degree of skepticism until otherwise confirmed, as they may be propaganda from Fallen sympathizers in the Old Russian and Red War Guardian cohorts. We have requested intelligence records from the Awoken which may further clarify the matter.

“In addition, whatever the findings of said intelligence records may be, it should be stressed that one or two sympathetic outliers cannot be relied upon to erase the wrongs of past centuries, nor should their good-faith efforts to correct the sins of their forbears be taken as sufficient symbolic reparation.

[…]

“We have come too far to pull our punches now.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Outliers. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Here’s another piece of “Stolen Intelligence,” about our relationship with Cabal Emperor Calus:

“Related to the above, #3801’s aggressive propaganda campaign appears to have been successful. Despite #3801’s recent inactivity, sentiment polls captured in the Tower at regular intervals over the last several months indicate that he has successfully swayed a significant percentage of the Red War cohort to believe that he may be a potential ally. Given our history with the Cabal as well as the events of the Red War itself, this is shocking and perhaps attributable to a case of mass traumatic bonding.

“It is my strong recommendation that the Vanguard pursue a reeducation curriculum before #3801 invites any Guardians of the City to defect to his service, a possibility which we have documented in multiple previous reports.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Passivity. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Other entries detail the efforts of the Vanguard from keeping ostensible “conspiracy theories” from being published in the Cryptarchy’s journals; show the apparent oddity of mortal-Guardian “integrated neighborhoods;” and discuss the ongoing surveillance of the Drifter, a rogue Lightbearer who has survived since the early Dark Ages and who uses Darkness-aligned technology to run a PVEVP game called “Gambit”.

There are many other stories like these, scattered throughout the lore. Stories of Cryptarchy students being banished for making fun of New Monarchy’s leaders, of Guardians messing with Hive technology being burned alive and killed fully by the Praxic Order for their crimes of experimentation. Stories like these wouldn’t happen – couldn’t happen! – to our Guardian, because they’re too important, but are seemingly everyday occurrences to less consequential members of this society. In the real world, we’d call that an increasingly oppressive police state. In Destiny 2, it’s just flavor text.

There was a degree of narrative complexity added to Season of the Drifter that hadn’t been in the game prior. The entire season was essentially boiled down to “which side are you on, the Drifter’s or the Vanguard’s,” and in our path to make a choice, we heard from various bit players in our world. The Drifter told us his story in greater detail than perhaps we needed (and how much of it is true is debatable), but his story is also the story of a less morally-pure Guardian class. Everyone from the warlords to the Iron Lords did heinous shit to humanity while the Drifter watched, and it hardened him. The Praxic Warlock Aunor goes all in on her adherence to the City’s propaganda and ideology, trying to show us how untrustworthy the Drifter is. She ends up revealing more of her order’s goals than perhaps was wise.

This narrative complexity is nice, but it still betrays the game in a fundamental way. We now have the documents. We know what Guardians are actually about, and how they’re not exactly shining beacons of unwavering good like the Speaker would have had us believe. Regardless of declining Fallen activity, of a shift in Fallen culture, of actual living Fallen who want to ally with Guardians, the Vanguard is still adamantly pursuing “extirpation,” which is a fancy way of saying genocide (I’m not kidding, it literally means “root out and destroy completely”). We know the Vanguard and the Praxic Order have a hard-on for exile, reeducation and information suppression.

On top of everything, the narrative complexity was not met with any kind of mechanical complexity. Even with proof that the Vanguard wants to kill every Eliksni in the system, conscientious objectors don’t get to opt out. The narrative path that forks between the Drifter and Aunor converges again by the end of the quest. The “conspiracy theorist” that has been trying to publish paper after paper detailing exactly how the Nine worked with Dominus Ghaul to sneak his fleet into City airspace undetected was proven right by lore WE FIND IN THE GAME, but that doesn’t change our combat relationship with the Cabal remnants anywhere in the system, and homeboy still gets his papers rejected.

Ikora and Zavala, our remaining Vanguard members, insist repeatedly that Guardians are not a warfighting force, that the Vanguard and the Consensus is not an authoritarian organization. But everything we do says otherwise.

“A peace born from violence is no peace at all.”

Guardians do not get to choose their paths in the world of Destiny 2. The paths laid out before them lead to a life of warfare, of pain, of endless murder. Ostensibly, they are agents of good, trying to beat back the forces of evil, but if you look too close you see that really they’re just a bunch of indiscriminate killers with a mandate from the Orb God. Desperate to get out from under the heels of warlords, the Guardians created a fascist society, and adding insult to injury they pretend it’s a democratic, free one. Killing the Fallen is genocide, but you can literally never stop killing them because the game won’t let you. The only right way to play at that point is to turn off your console and go outside.

Destiny 2 isn’t the only video game to fall into this trap. As Nic Reuben said in the follow-up piece to his first story on how Destiny 2 is fascist, “I’m not saying Destiny is propaganda, just reliant on some of the same narrative tricks that make propaganda so powerful. At the same time, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that games like Call of Duty make certain assumptions about what is justifiable, righteous slaughter and what is terrorism. Replace modern military hardware with future tech, replace terrorists with alien races that have traits synonymous with cartoon portrayals of traditionally marginalized social groups, and you’re effectively playing through the worst aspects of Call of Duty with a new coat of a paint.”

There is one glimmer of hope in the game. One sliver of lore that gives us pause and helps make the game bearable in its current state. It comes in the form of Lady Efrideet, former Iron Banner handler, youngest member of the Iron Lords, and a Guardian in self-exile from the City, the Vanguard, and its fascist dogma.

Lady Efrideet is one of the most fearsome Hunters in the Destiny universe. She is known as one of the best marksmen, if not the best one. She is impossibly strong, having once thrown Lord Saladin bodily off a mountain into a Fallen Spider Walker, destroying it. And she is also one of the only named pacifist Guardians who isn’t a member of the Cryptarchy. Her story is the story of the fall of the Iron Lords, as well as the beginning of the SIVA crisis, many years before our Guardian’s rise is documented.

But it isn’t SIVA or the Iron Lords that we’re interested in. Instead, we know that after SIVA was sealed away, Efrideet snuck away from Earth. She saw the deaths of everyone she knew and her will to fight was shattered. If this was the result of fighting for the Traveler, she didn’t want any part in it. So she took to the stars. In doing so, she ended up in the far reaches of the solar system, beyond even where we currently roam. It turns out, a small enclave of other Lightbearers, hesitant or unwilling to use their powers to kill, had also fled to this part of the system and had established a colony. It’s there that Efrideet resides, and it’s there I’d like to go.

Unfortunately, our Guardian is too “important” to the vast tidal forces at work in the Destiny universe for us to be able to leave for the outer reaches whenever we want. Because we are the hub on which the wheel of history turns, and there is no escaping that now, if ever we could. We are death, the flattening of a complex and intricate universe into one of simple shapes, the sword logic in a human/Awoken/Exo body. We are needed for the plans of the Nine/Mara Sov/Hive Queen Savathun to come to fruition. When or if the Darkness ever does come back, we will be the force that faces it and, win or lose, shape our future afterward.

Sometimes it’s nice having a video game place your character on a linear track. Games like Half-Life or Titanfall present to us simple choices in otherwise-complex story environments: progress, or die. Our characters are not immortal, but they have help from the technologies around us, are tenacious, are resourceful, are quick to adapt to changing situations. In Destiny, we simply exist. We can’t truly die. Even when it comes to the rules of the game, our immense “paracausality” causes us to shrug Darkness Zones off as mere inconveniences where other Guardians have died their final deaths. Because we are necessary. The Vanguard and Consensus need us to justify their horrific fascist policies. The great forces at work in the background need us to work as a pawn. Even Bungie itself needs us, powerful, trapped beings with a sense of right and wrong but no agency to actually act on those ethics, to continue its game.

I haven’t preordered Shadowkeep yet. For once I’m glad we’re not focusing on the Fallen or the Cabal. Going to the Moon means we’ll pretty much just be dealing with Hive, to say nothing of the unreal Nightmares we’re supposed to face. But I’m still undecided as to whether I even want to order Shadowkeep in the first place. If Lady Efrideet can go to the edge of known space and live peacefully with other pacifist Guardians, maybe I can put my controller down and step away, once and for all. It would be nice to have the extra space on my Xbox One’s hard drive. Other games exist to be played, and having the time and energy to do so would help me here, with No Escape.

But even then. I’m not expressing agency as a Guardian, but rather as the person who controls you, Guardian. While I go off to play other games, you sit and wait in stasis. Even if I don’t play, there are a million iterations of you willing to commit genocide daily for cheap rewards (shoutouts to the sixtieth Edge Transit drop in my inventory this month alone). Sure, it’s just a game. But this is what having a dynamic world means in practice. There are consequences to your actions. There always have been.

There is no reason why Humanity couldn’t share the Traveler’s gifts with, at the very least, the Eliksni. There is no reason why we couldn’t just ignore the Cabal in a state of mutually assured destruction, given how small a faction the Red Legion was relative to the Cabal army’s full size. Of the two remaining enemies, the Vex are less evil than they are simply a thing that wants the universe to be like it, and that’s threatening to diverse life throughout the universe, not just Humanity. The Hive/Taken are the true enemies in the game, but even they are directed, pawn-like, by their Worm Gods.

There is, likewise, no reason why the Risen had to organize in the fascist context they did. They could have created a society in which everyone could come and go freely, where ideas and actions could be given and received absent interference, where a true “golden age” could have sprung up naturally simply by living together harmoniously and using the Light the Traveler gave them to create, rather than destroy.

But that’s not how this story shakes out.

[fatesought]

hhhh the campaign group chat just mentioned not knowing how many problems our party has inserted themselves into. they thought i was joking when i said i had a list.

L’s turf war. “Does the red and blue correlate to fire and water?” / “Something like that” bad bad bad thing to hear from an aboleth 

Still questioning what use Quarth’s blood would have been to grandma / L and why it was wanted at all. 

whAT THE FUCK KILLED TWO BLUE DRAGONS (doubting it was npc-pcs because the aquarium would have been looted)

Nightmares --> confirmed "divination” dreams re: mass extinction event. Past or future?�� 

Extermination of the ‘evil’ races. 

“Some of you are failing side quests and haven’t even realized it yet”

Related (?) Edward’s scrying mirror smoke; self flagellation? Suicide? Knowing you’re trapped and trying to get out? Or trapped and escape impossible, only going to hurt self? (or overthinking metaphor for quarth’s backstory) 

sOMETHING RELATED TO PLOT HAS TO DO WITH THEIR HOMEWORK DO YOUR FUCKING HOMEWORK GUYS

my favorite game: is this a post apocalyptic (but still urban fantasy) rendition of faerun, or is the DM just memeing us right back

the sun is dying/broken 

blood oaths and following letter vs spirit of said contract. is the limit to killing ‘every last one of those bastards’ the immediate group? a larger structure? all out genocide/blood war?

we just started a fucking forest fire next to a refugee camp 

where did our emo golem son go

Not problems but some sketchy ass shit

anything could be a simulation within a simulation because fuck aboleths and fuck mind flayers and fuck zenzo they already put us in one confirmed simulation to experiment on us, who is to say how many we were put through

consider: the first group of npc-pcs we found were actually us irl 

why do monsters keep consistently overlooking quarth. even if provoked, they still will leave him alone and i don’t believe that monster solidarity is a thing as much as he wishes it was 

did we just accidentally create an oathbreaker paladin 

[savedfromsalvation]

The Jesus Myth

by Barbara G. Walker

Excerpted from:

Man Made God

Thanks to centuries of the most insistent and aggressive indoctrination campaign the world has ever seen, the biography of Jesus is more familiar to more people than any other. Socrates, Charlemagne, Shakespeare, Napoleon: there are many who never heard of them, or who only vaguely recognize their names. But all of Western civilization and most of the rest of the world "knows" Jesus's life story.

Everybody "knows" that Jesus was begotten by a god and born of a virgin, even though the gospel writers unaccountably trace his ancestry through the virgin's mortal husband. His birth was attended by angels, shepherds and gift-giving wise men. His infancy was threatened by an evil king who had babies slaughtered in a futile effort to kill him. When grown, he gathered a group of 12 disciples and went about teaching that his adherents would gain eternal life. He walked on water, healed the sick, exorcised devils, made the blind see and the lame walk. He was anointed with chrism and thus made into a Christ (which means "anointed one") by a mysterious woman who may or may not have been his lover, depending on which gospel you read, and who was the sole official enunciator of his later resurrection. After a triumphal procession accompanied by waving palms and the traditional obsequies of a sacred king, he attended a meal at which he was symbolically cannibalized, the eating of his flesh and blood deemed necessary for his followers' absolution. Then he was scourged, crucified, died and descended into the underworld. Later he returned to earth, apparently alive again, and then ascended bodily into the sky, where he somehow still lives and pays attention to all the doings of humanity. These things are "known" and commemorated every year, over and over.

But during the past century or so, scholars have shown that all these "known" details of Jesus's life story are mythic: That is, they were told for many centuries before his time about many previous savior-gods and legendary heroes in pre-Christian lore. Not a single detail of Jesus's life story can be considered authentic. Some investigators have tried to peel away the layers of myth in search of a historical core, but this task is like peeling the layers of an onion. It seems that there is no core. The layers of myth go all the way to the center.

Fact or Fiction?

One of the problems faced by Christian scholars is that there is no record of Jesus's existence in any contemporary source. The earliest literature concerning him was written by Paul, who never knew him or anyone else who might have known him and who never heard anything about his life story. Paul mentioned none of these now-so-familiar details, which were added much later by unknown writers who pretended to bear the names of various disciples and who sprinkled their writings with mythic data gathered from sacred-king traditions of contemporary Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian and Levantine salvation cults.

"Undeniably, Christian leaders have a vested interest in maintaining the myth."

Educated theologians know this fact perfectly well; yet, they maintain the pretense of apostolic authorship and keep the truth hidden from lay congregants. Undeniably, Christian leaders have a vested interest in maintaining the myth.

The synoptic gospels now accepted into the canon are only a small remnant of perhaps hundreds of proto-Christian gospels extant during the first few centuries BCE and AD/CE. Also, they bear the marks of extensive interpolation, revision and reinterpretation added by Church authorities centuries later. As reference works, the New Testament writings are hardly more reliable than fairy tales.

The Silence of Historians

For a possible hint of Jesus's historicity, Christian authorities relied heavily on a single brief paragraph in the works of the respected Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who was born in 37 AD/CE, served as governor of Galilee and traveled extensively in the very same area where Jesus allegedly lived and taught. If anyone was in a position to report the wonder-workings of a local holy man in his own parents' generation, it was Josephus, a dedicated reporter of minute details. Yet in all his voluminous works, the single paragraph (Ant. 18.3.3)-called the "Testimonium Flavianum" or "TF"-says only that Jesus was "a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."

The problems with this famous passage are many. First of all, it is noticeably out of context with the surrounding material. Second, it evidently did not appear in the early copies of Josephus's works, nor in the second-century version quoted by Church father Origen, who would certainly have mentioned it if it had been there. The TF does not appear in any known works until the beginning of the fourth century and is first quoted by Bishop Eusebius, the enthusiastic advocate of what he apparently called "holy lying" for the greater glory of the Church, known to have been responsible for many interpolations, revisions and blatant forgeries.

Moreover, Josephus was a Jew and would hardly have referred to Jesus's ministry as "the truth" or "wonderful things"; nor would he have called Jesus "the Christ." Neither could he have mentioned "the tribe of Christians," for there were no Christians in his day. Christianity did not get off the ground until the second century.

Philo Judaeus (20 BCE-50 AD/CE) was born before the beginning of the Christian era and lived until long after Jesus's time. Philo knew Jerusalem well, and would have known of Herod's massacre of children, plus Jesus's miracles, well-attended preachings, triumphal entry parade and crucifixion, with its attendant earthquake, reanimated corpses and many other wonders. He would have heard about the resurrection before many witnesses.

Another historian, Justus of Tiberius (1st cent.), a native of Galilee, wrote a history covering the period of Jesus's lifetime. His work is lost, but the Christian scholar Photius read it in the ninth century and expressed amazement ("Biblioteca," 33) that it contained "not the least mention of the appearance of the Christ."

"Mythical mentions of the Christ figure are numerous throughout the ancient world."

However, mythical mentions of the Christ figure are numerous throughout the ancient world. In addition to the title of Christos they had names like Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Orpheus, Mithra, Tammuz, Heracles, Hermes, Aleyin and Iasus, Iasion, Jason, Jesu, Yeshua or Jeud. These latter epithets applied to the "only-begotten son" of the god-king Isra-El, who was "dressed in royal robes" and sacrificed by his heavenly father.

Most of the savior gods were identified with the edible flesh and blood of the earth, meaning the bread and wine, harvested, consumed and resurrected with the next planting. Osiris, Adonis and Mithra were all eaten in the form of communion bread, declared to be the god's flesh, which the worshiper thus made a part of his own flesh in order to share the god's resurrection.

Adonis was miraculously born of a temple maiden in Bethlehem, which means "the House of Bread." He appears to have been the "Bread of God," which became the worshiper's body also, as in John 6:56: "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him."

The sacrificed god Dionysus, another son of the Heavenly Father, first performed Jesus's miracle of turning water into wine at temples in Sidon and other places, representing the rain of heaven fructifying the vine. In Alexandria, the Dionysian/Christian miracle was demonstrated literally by means of an ingenious system of siphons invented by an engineer named Heron, to enhance the awe of the faithful....

According to the Roman writer Celsus (2nd cent.), the empire was teeming with miscellaneous vagabonds aspiring to such titles, claiming to be gods, sons of God, or saviors, prophesying the end of the world and their own glorious return from the dead at the End of Days. Celsus scoffed at the alleged Christian miracles as no more than "common works of enchanters" who perform for a few coins. "The magicians of Egypt," he said, "cast out evil spirits, cure diseases by a breath, and so influence some uncultured men, that they produce in them whatever sights and sounds they please. But because they do such things shall we consider them the sons of God?"

Nevertheless, the Eastern provinces swarmed with self-styled Messiahs and Christs, so that the gospels' version is most likely to have been a composite picture drawn from an era of widespread credulity and superstitious dread. As we might perceive in our own day, fundamentalist superstitions tend to flower in periods of cultural decline, when a formerly enlightened civilization begins to feel threatened by forces of decay both without and within....

Pagan Christs

These groups were greatly influenced by Persian worshippers of Mithra—the ancient Magi or "magicians" who attended the savior's miraculous birth—and their prophecies of the oncoming Doomsday with its sharp division between the saved and the damned: those who would go to dwell forever in heaven with the solar deity, Light of the World; and those who would dwell forever in underground darkness with the evil Great Serpent and his armies of demons, rebellious angels who had defied the heavenly father and had been cast down to their punishment. Mithra's cult was hugely popular in the later Roman empire and contributed much to the Jesus myth, including even the service of Mass, which was based on the Persian mizd, translated into Latin missa, featuring wafers marked with a cross.

According to Ezekiel 8:14, priestesses in Jerusalem continued to celebrate the cult of Tammuz, the Heavenly Shepherd or Only-Begotten Son, whose blood fertilized the whole earth when he was killed each year on the Day of Atonement. He was slain in the form of a lamb, but this incarnation was understood to be a substitute for earlier human sacrifice. He reappeared in the New Testament as Thomas, sometimes viewed as Jesus's twin, who became known as Doubting Thomas for questioning Jesus's miraculous return to life. The gospel writer declared that Thomas finally accepted Jesus as "my Lord and my God" (Jhn 20:28), indicating the older savior's deference to the newer one. However, 1,000 years later Syrian farmers were still sacrificing to their grain god Ta-uz, who was considered essential to the welfare of the crops, and women were still bewailing his annual demise just as they did in the time of Ezekiel.

"The Jesus myth was really a concatenation of pagan ideas and practices."

Realizing that the Jesus myth was really a concatenation of pagan ideas and practices, early Christian fathers decided to account for this fact by calling all the previous gods "demons," and declaring that Satan in his omniscience had foreseen the coming of the true Christ and had invented all these earlier imitations just to confuse people. Even St. Augustine (Retractiones 1.13) had to admit that his religion existed "from the beginning of the human race," and came to be called Christian only after the lifetime of Jesus.

Gospel teachings attributed to Jesus have been found in earlier texts, often word for word, some-like the famous Beatitudes-in Buddhist scriptures. The Golden Rule was not a Christian teaching but a Tantric Buddhist expression of karmic law, repeated in the proverbs of Egypt's Goddess Maat, the Mother of Justice, as well as those of Greece's Goddess Dike, ruler of fate, and of the Jewish sage Hillel. Nothing truly original has been found in any of the Jesus traditions, and the wonder-tales that used to compel belief because of their very incredibility are now dismissed as crude anachronisms persuasive only to the most naive and credulous minds....

And according to Acts 4:13, the apostles were all "unlearned and ignorant men" who could not have been responsible for writing the gospels or anything else. Therefore those who put apostles' names to their gospel writings were forgers, and all the gospels are essentially fakes.

The truth is that the gospels are not reliable "historical" accounts to tell us what Jesus was—or even if he was. But it is fairly clear that he was connected with the myths of pagan saviors, who were mostly nature deities, representing the eternal cycles of life and death. In this respect their myths might point toward an updated religion more firmly founded on the realities of our world.

Once the Jesus myth is more widely understood as a composite relic of a credulous past, we may be able to go forward toward a more satisfying set of spiritual hopes and insights, and leave behind the simplistic magics of a less enlightened people. We have "modernized" nearly every other aspect of our Western culture. Perhaps it is time to modernize its religion into a form that enlightenment may embrace without insulting its own intelligence.

For more information, including citations, see Man Made God.

[the-j-esther-shalom-they]

At Abydos - Hall of Sokar & Nefertem Up & down yawn gruff grunts register from the inner chamber halls here at the temple of Sokar & Nefertem. Rocks are moved, in the shade men take breaks from market’s bustle & blaze, masons in a maze, dizzy with work for a mad son. Workers flake Shavings off the gods' limestone block stunt doubles: the daredevil twins by artisan are called, a necromancy whose mandate is to work within a dialectic’s trick scenery fit with trap doors & skeletons, specters of those who came before & did not make it through. Just a hint of ruler's visage allowable, studio pros backing up undisputed (at least not audibly) solo leads. A final comment period to public trust is given, sack of grain with a mechanical winch to reel it back when command is ex- ecuted. The first section presented just so before unveiling what will to history be visible against workers finesse, tailoring divine couture as if god attend ruler’s runway shows for the spring’s upcoming line. The manicure is precise. Vines divide terrace botanical, delicate verisimilitude in the act: Sety pours water over lotuses. sweat drips, forms brine & to petal condenses into dew. Color is absorb’d, radiation slants, incline steadfast reads steep pitch, geometric figures skew to regernation, as if ruler’s rep- lication were a spiritual thing, like a mason working the stone, dying before his work is done. Fell’d In time you & I will forget just as we forgot shoots of alfalfa pushing up through the dirt exchanged it for memorabilia of larger things system, polis the world over forget over & again bless the dead sing & pay tribute to, in debt with the dead one could say some throw gold into holes others dig bury sing & touch it is a dis– appearing act,— with piers plenty to wave at or deboard peering into another, helping the 90– year-old Russian woman regain the most temporary instance of equilibrium, the leather clog with a two-inch- thick rubber sole, brief embrace, horns & laughter part of gravity, tough waddle up three bus steps returning home to Queens, sigh of relief felt through plexiglas. Absalon Tracks Traction the night: dismemberment Perfect pitch, sensation Together cutup, fragment Ether-clean procedure limbs Reckless sun crossbraid’d thru truss came A will to delay what needed to be Dead, king’s head staked Splitting grain of solid-timber door Midas touching whatever’s in sight At a migrant site benefit party— Didn’t nothing duty full-spell do Deaf neighbor Jessica Made less than peony pullstring Note naught all nautical call cot muh-muh-muh trip-all-lit Trip all catch fly knot maze An throw a pod down from forum Crude sutures sciatica Under junipers where Mars Is a pan-risen loaf scarved In bloodwind & can’t sibling Muh-muh mirror act acrid Ligatures to bring us Neptune’s Blue storms, uninhabit’d by rock Obstacle, storm funnels & cones Pressurized cyclone, nadir Of nigh comedy is a C.S. Space bus ride where you Ain’t you used to sickus phantoms. Wigs to scalps cement bile glue Turned ten-nugget gold pan nougat Palm’d, glass inert though credits’re— For its pains suffering gaze un- Broken without respite in fact Only clean’d & polish’d, its subjects Scaring at the sight of themselves Relay’d back with ghostprint fuzz From what look like marine sponge Or Coral, blues radiating all around Bet turn ensure cutups remain with- Out locus or rose, surveyors Poking around marshland tool- Sick & dopey, does walking toward Camouflage men, bellydown on Rot logs water-bogg’d even a spring To their solar plexus & ribcages Around trunk & into bark gripping Like tines of a tool once used To bale hay into gumdrop pods Recall plateau sediment simulate Erosion, sights on dime a dozen Magi high from cliff’s cavernous Lateral dwelling prays, hiber- Nation exchange with it is said Thousands of millions of organisms A vibration said to emerge formal Quiet though approaching absolute Zero in the verdant oracular Math of moving things no longer Thought to be materials, pie Season fish on a stick twin Turbo pieta with fin de siecle All season all wheel drive all Sales final, lute season extinction Newts in creeks orange against Payne’s grey rock with neon Algae beards stretching coastal Creeks & Southwest Sea— Tabor bores Tudor, tabulates Tab for boos expected for Royal wedding on Europa during Rare Earth Materials Riots On Asteroid Earth Colony 1 Forgery document foundries Molten for extraction, Babylon 3’s Bureau of Interstellar Executors Scandals originating from Couch décor—upholstery sewn From Martian infant skin The shoreline properties discover’d It was a musical thing Saw sharpener lathe & satchel Filled with files, hatchet Versatile as lethe, familiar Lath & plaster & denim bot Pugille box in a tint’d boxcar Celan or Hades’ moat forest Forces without frame for Getting lost back to tort law Approach to campaign of ex-term Disney Lego Freedom Jet Ski Castle parapets slick no need For pales of tar or arrows arrows Non-hod carrier limp for a, for a neurochemical green volume Of a great lake drain’d & dredged Neon dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki though soldiers Dollie dock & ship back saki In & of itself a cold laden chute Stanchion Right On Station Jewels no art dealer wants Juice of their cores prime tv Programming ancien regime Bereaved treaties glass’d in Muses entities ties tinnitus Kingdoms cover’d but tweezers & archaeological spirit keeps live Memorabilia of contracts in whose Stanzas those destroy’d millenia Ago come alive in especial cases When precedent & hermeneutic Legal arcs are heed’d with obedience An impossibility comic twine- Drying thyme urges in curse’s re- Veal crops dust’d consciousness Masses shelving off palisade con- Tinuance aunties with nuance Necessary forgetting polish’d Glaze or stonehound barrel Dissident principia lending den Lens abstinence centennial Hawk’s Nest Raptor Fiasco Translucence penumbrae Scalds craters ships dock’d Wreckage age’d heaps keeps Hacksaw brigade near grave Sides sly slays Santa Ana winds Chainsaw wedge ponderosa O pine dies with cyan beetles Hematic recess highest “C” Pitch but curvature & integral In silence follow’d cost leant Against an afterward fence Durable adhesive memorabilia Across the street bandits plasma Blast neighbor pulpwood Take megafauna personals Hands up (Mars metal mines Irradiating north county) Pairs dime with dozen split Down the middle bisectional Purse his story bright lunar Cy Tom to morse code us crypt Align myo-like bind terror for Or fail fuss with a hitch Gripping cord so-call’d voce Boxcutter turnkey paddywagon Deviation pregnant Di of soFi Percussion punks devilish Re Entry schemes when MaryFay Of Earth’s Elite Fleet 1 fell Expiration began O2 levels Ration’d bleeds in young & old Breath stretches sputter sputum Smut knick’d by one of time's blades Without thickness still there in the grass Marrow frozen cores Ice sheet winter wheat Lake thickened to tar so surfacable A planar gift on whose surface Crews cross to just between junction Junk pose & jukeboxes floating In tanks of Penny Does It shops Mountains of bodies like peat Or dirt was when oldtimers leave Wagon shells mountains of bodies Where it dirt would glow from Neighboring moons as it said Insect world motion & frequency Quiet absolute zeroing instruments The glow so black & dense that’s Where everyone stops when talking Whole mountains of bodies turn’d to peat In a single season. Aquarium Diver In the water-color piranha tank Said to exist across conjugation’s verse forms—dust cov'rings spackle glass faces in multiples, untended but lunar, it shrugs off pride of its shine. Stardust pink clouds informed by a regional firm’s to-do list: di- Vest & still back-slides reputed collective hero; marshmallows Grovel from stomach, corn the eye. He’s a centenarian on a speaking tour. Preschoolers kid around, play nation’s diplomatic chaste chaste severity assless with meat stick hat. It’s time to stuff another gaunt crow with a pig-in-a-blanket. The tank’s edges’re shellacked, free & with house dealer catch light Radiating moss; a geometry Suggests placement, shape, & core relational routine to a performance. (Its layout when described sounded like a composer speaking of a fugue Or requiem). He from the tank's reasonable vantage took it in, the audience, it appears the Physio dinosaur workout machine lacked facticity (not to mention near-imperceptible). A dilation: Even to watch (an imperative) This singularly collective act Ramrods the tank’s face in A snowed-on snow-boot Step, crunching over gravel— Had there been any to boot. The diver breaks Water. The drooling Catalyzes loss, something Curates, courses, pressures, pushing Muscle organ bodies There, we’re gourded afloat, the diver Dips down through fans of blue Toward the white sand, to neat Scripts of sea anemone. Muzzled chatter Grows elocutionary... for whom Yet not known. Over glassfuls of wine marvel a Greek ending: Can you make out the record? I h___ li__ ten___y but Now __ mu__ re___, to— As a token (what else) Of concern, those looking in Throw something of value, Tulips and roses pulled up From the neighbor’s pots. “Travel safe, have a good trip!” The cameras wrestle out The pocket and purse already On camera in the observatory On camera on the large City block. Hunkered down. The laborer steps up To the flat glass tank, Eel in right, eel in left. Faces modulate, echoing Limited sets of expression In infinitely shifting ways, To feel hydrangeas have a code To themselves, amnesia, like love Is for these very viewers. T hrills fill light, matter, mass Anticipation for not just a passing, But the sound bite of sacrifice... It is clear the diver cannot Return to his beautiful Green ship. His body to Be dispersed, a scattering: Why memorialize a detail here Another there, really, the Eels calibrate a method For a prize like any good Member of the animal kingdom, Barely a dance their corded bodies flex Blurring circular blinks against fish, Ribbon twirls, effusion. Sand Makes a bed for sleep, deep sleep. Unnamed resonance in witness The teeth robotonate As any buzz saw removing Fungal-prone limbs Shadowing heavy traffic. Gambling Splendor rises from cuneiform In a classroom, the ceilings of which Hold mirrors dangling like a trick. Shape making patents drawn from given shapes— Trachea airlock gambling coin & air carrier tube. Spare the necessity of value for sheer farce Nickel coats & dusk's banishment Suggestive of aging luster Madly in love with exiling others Before monarchs carry off a corpse To be disincorporated Over mountain & desert expanse. Refraction cues transparency —wheeling projector just to Skip real time with mama Dickinson. But would customer ask plumber If they really knew how to use A silver-based solder Or ask their preference when copper Supply lines are off the table & galvanized lead begin their Second century soiree? Concentricity works with a verb like swirl. Light, transfixing fire; occurrence chord Tritonal phonics opt for optics department. Rubber pupils make dilation comically elastic; Last city to fall cataclysmically? To generate a billion-dollar surplus? When watching an all-day troupe act, A student reminds me: it’s not just Parsing gesture; it’s language In its own right; it’s its own language. “Becoming light stretches latex cordage For parachute discussions, scuba whales Steeples knifing skyline, diacritical skyline Chip dip finish gloss on the nails, Underestimated frontal growth in a forge. Untied to anything: this, a king; United by belief sweetdick king. When Frederic stops by, top hat stacked, annals of paysage Artemis, cross Off the remainder of the day's Appointments, sounding like an Employee shadows that in the mirror. What happened next: art missed. Radioactive materials gotta be handled With care when expressed or moved. Like a stage, a player's habits stagger An unbecoming show, casino chip danger Dagger turns wager spins badger churns Wholesale body fuck. No. Those coins Are to be measured; not till the till's right. Sluices sink into drain, violets rainwater Runoff into gutter where parent-teacher Conferences are underway!— Amazon’s thing is Stalinist plus web pornography & cartel meth for a diverse american spread. Sand to glass. Velvet blinds. Across a face slap thing is—the thing is— This is where PhD candidates Emphasize the body, the body, the body. Polyps phonograph ear tuft cirrhosis Crust in foam headphones, cacophony The shimmering winnings raining down In a room of misery & pleasure. Gloucester, glue, metal melts on skin Like hot topping over ice cream scoops. Strap. Strange, manufactured jaws Fractured source-code error in larynx? This word isn’t pluralized with any “i” see? Coercion rivets a spur along sandy lane. Deep between rail blades, this bliss, this ecstasy to a landowner married young you say Though specifying botany & geography need it no defense. Remember to zip tie them If there's a chance they defy taxonomic classification. Accompany the doctor down to the incinerator Before he's off to meet with the research team Super fun university funders company. That shouldn't have to be repeated. [oregonian orkin man] What should I gaine by the exaction of the forfeyture? [Movement 1] Light scars mountainside in bars - filets assumed substances’ shared atmosphere - returning radiation mark’d - light laying on in a line on the side of a barge – though none of it – not a thing – not nothing (thin nog, hint within) none of it stays on - save for atom at home – moat un- scroll’d - aqueous ring constable centering city in a trick play - urn ash fuzzy - swore a radio statistician in baritone comb’d through daily spaghetti with Lachrymose D-minor most arks Mozart a gluten 8 binding in fins it t-shirks calligraphic DEX text - tares scale weight back to zero’s enduring baseline oblong song heard through speakers full of wool KG’s voice sable coated coated in honey LR help’d in harvesting from HUMVEE engine compartments - redemption from resume buttons so on all the time they froze - LR laugh backing yard & garlic & iron horses & slabs of wood & Cedar keeping watch Ruth scoping library books - Gandolph using eBay but a woman - John’s sorrow agile under- understood though though a gaggle would sit or stand with him through impossible hours - friend in Bucharest the call issues out from cellular mass but no echo do amoeba colonies register thermodynamic circles tight- rope walking one of time’s tensile steel cable lines - clouds work rote routes - cursory but heavy with shape codified jest surf syrup clot in figured may pole grain - am hurt am burst by black light excretory polygons touring a green-blue or three - audible then booking a ride 512 bus means dig out zinc from sink’s secretarial cove - look of suburban versions of teethwhite crime whose luster’s best seen dead on – lining up in yards with two-car garages in hailing DEET sargeants - boysenberry trucks & good brags - hum-mum-bull-full & well clean goes in archaeopteryx skeletal remains - neighborhood’s vale of value’s optimus primus sending in marine ex- term nation-gate pizza farmer – germs churn in whorls - ohm mite god! at last this report tablet Sumerian imitation but grain tables & floodwater chronology tabulated in you - 4 “e” vows follow’d by tomb’s odd homophony zoom rocket boost mic - scope the algebra solving at least for lost bracket tearing up during grapheme golden hour - shunt in a valve casing sausage cowboy tennis - see mimeograph mime eidetic charm! - the lightbulb field sprouts prussian turnips - nip in the bud see what turns up geniuses – wingèd – tentacle suction-cup-horn’d – morpheme - then hand-name manus - hand jest in the style of factus - in helices like peas climb up stalk & – though no time lapse accelerants on board – given time & giving time — beyond but this is where jupiter’s Martian splotch becomes a gaseous swimming hole & neptune creates a billion-note tonal scale out of its blue winds undisrupt’d - no instruments meter’ing utilities, runaway customs - cuz faith in a stoic’s a valueless stock – cussing at innocents vellum crow’d to Kum & Go lot - from a gap bodying amplitude empty between the clefs - canyon’s sounds maintain : none-of-em stay always on - records in logs – recall Abel’s speech-spokes from low gravity zone - chlorophylls postal carriers with alphabets scribed into sugars & enzymes – mycological threads tethering spore print rorschachs - gill diameter a hundred minnow fishbones – language CFCs escaped from pressurized cans refrigerants boring through air with drillbit none - no torsional force at all chemists grab Erleynmeyer just to be sure ezra-cyborg.z1 get it - symbolic arrangements from tongue to hex- ameter for fire’s dis- appearance past seek to recover its ashes by way of tale - the survival of which depends in part on the pre- servation of the unrecover- able mystery of fire’s de- parture into pieces sold for parts - exorcisms of black light pitch’d back - script with spirit encryption to be re–constructed though green-blues’ll lack ideogram or alphabet from original tongue of groups around the fire, a task thrown out so in - to- ward one of the many namesake others in drag for the day - using the name by which our loves call us :: man age game holsters cent & usury menagerie bisque detail multiplies pension - sutures pence curves hull as tug holds tight & charge goes by :: [movement no. 2] ensures barn noon nuns find between them lodged A prism, protractor, styliss & without cartography no part of it — evolving equation. tools re-visit listening shapes then if in possible way broke biscuits shared, a company of others engagèd - deuterium green plums ripening about catnip at its base - Naps lucky moment - sum indecision parietal orbit profiteering caricature well-meaning derangement ignorant in excursus forgo excuses from start, hard Hart— raid : raid ration : rationate : state rate raid : nation race ration : clay state raz's iron rate station raid: throw drain nation : air rations raid state : rain bow’d station: terrain bowl’d stain shun: ratio nation rate stadium gain : raid rations gold radio waves : save nation : everyone nation : discard nation : rat ate ionization : polite save aid : ration: come here : rapport nation : rapt gate nation: contain nation caution: raid nation : raz’d notion of the prism shift, gist & contract legal sneeze read with ease squared-off edges millimeter machinèd possibility exaction contact focal point photons lit internals at a boil - locus mapp’d then gone— landscape sculpting a— ”the sam hell are we”-- forays of alpine terrain altitudinal gains weathervane move with bot any name errs or moves with its directional intent - not one of capture but fortune’s junction : brackish carbilimades source bracket “frick” sound top teeth gripping bottom lip axel’s racket flakes of dust rust off featherlike at first fistfulls accrue suddenly your’re hunting for labor - COLONIAL LANES - HIRING NOW at town’s edge you got bowling lanes booze lot chop-chop chatter practically a legislature lube shop & a remoteness schooled to be so peculiar - part by part it ticks - talc cuts in nonstick - it’s home in the sine wave signs - “sin” - “nature” foreground give-in a laughter full - the fugitive Parthians follow through Media Mesa - Patmos - aim ame love shakes a tackle - rattles bait free - line - hook - sinker summon then from bottom deep the shelters whither the routed fly nuns around triangular prism in intervals angles just-so though there are,— some nights complications. — architecture bur to fur picket sticks stymie tics sweat wet burning surfaces collective magnification — heat tough penninsular nunery stay link’d with ease stoke a giant a jar sprouts out dirt floor con- fiscation & props lining cool glass walls pliant gymnasts carpenters with plumbing wrenches oil paint recipes catechetical erasures radical handbooks one nun calls a zine — short word blurb from a— from scene disbelief together climbs rafters tall then falls back down to ground, kink in a pipe sneaks a leak geese bleat — squeezed beatitude with attitude :: & just nowhere a head, torso but above & below nothing— as in—traction as to the arc of Orkin’s spin & stir salesmanship decaffeinated say i brief sublimity encrypted thoughtless error, subtitution, pressure applied to glib clips but squid swim just off rocky Sequim Washington but for a second: flesh silicone casters, enamel robotic limb-assisted controls— torn even so torso goes on senseless it raises hatred body & self to but bother’d not they in the slightest— mess in front visual field — gore orthography, special signs nuns a specialized structure to labor have— picking away with probable probe, chisel to chip, fine-haired brush to sweep sweet enameling & nothing one finds is said to be filed as fine by team— were there grenadine a feeling hearse on the go — cold brew braggadocio— vivid temp stations silver illness—abscess from absence stiff-arm serif— momentousness no moment us to suss us, mousetrap from foam mousse, toupee glue dripped down in- to odd-tune soup— gloop a hoof a huff hoarse from — nuns wiping brow my back sticker’d with hay, molasses to molecules hangs blurs--hand feels absent tool belt & spray canisters & moldable insect models gigantic & not to scale for effect gulp :: time slow go there a necessity :: engine — tears gasket swears bit it —snake oil that’d seal it & save the gremlin out loud denim sleeve fed, sling— is that wind? water sips from pewter tongue an audible sense of its cold lip— distant winch’s capitulation between sheets tanks out pyramid sky- seismologist over a moat cascadia subduction junction future’s figure spree spending a coin or two anthropocene gravity —(just now already passed not so much point as on-ramp access on different dimension or synthetic scrim script’d outside parameters of limited programming functions) / deter - rinse - rate - aerate - ate shunts to cement stunt landing - caught in netting, wear— woo’d by worcester, wool piccadilly robe, rhombu rocking chair : so go beams sift awl holes in the sheets still, compressed into reams , phasor hex head lag screw together a stone graph consequence charting territory old sour fig [sic.] signature :: anything new Noob — bile bite grip’s nipples got my — tips overlay / knit coriander doves hover joists cloud qualia from clover & radishes — for i but have — my gut, it covereth breast & anon.’s a favorite speaker please god prayer blankets choral quality of Is IVs & Vs their voices reconstituting body then it clear now an accident victim surveilled thought I an other but supercede —given by others me to temporary lay pain low so grave & stave to shapes may rise can’t - can’t knot - esc. key signature haze! in inner space face settles with spies charts & map graphs screen creamtop adhesive Elmer’s elementary glues muskox copper ties side tongue tasters to cheek-bit torsion of titanium bit - tighten it one nun at noon says with gesture - linen sheets set before lowering I'm HELLO — SEA - AT - AL! rummaging. wow. so. loud. craven cranberry pair justice the neighbors before asked about the nuns— nuthouse fuckbag hang yourself, save the world! nice neighbors - in silk bands the hours go tender practitioners render to center solar plexus landing strip punctuation - notes worn by torso flat float secure & bedded to carriage upholstery— revolutions per, — up scabrous reality don’t mind do I distant stochastics scattering murmurations moor’d to shroud & this fear neutralizèd a shine only is left - shirks sharks shoulders do they solo mother— sex & rage downstream ripped text- tile — chips evidentiary to story’s misnomer hovering— nuns with shovels now conical blades metallics gold only what dust does pressurized & shot through with light ascendancy high-8 tapes demonstrate salmon run sells itself fantasy turbulence, thicket gross domestic product recollection recovery - lost daimon dominion prints prison,— scratch wall border the fact of a body scarf or collar jug- ular in regular thumps swells into drum earing disappearing —calendar baseball on AM radio in pitcher’s palm who happened to be dad of a boy in a book— scene overcrowded with nature’s angels roaming moor in romantic flux on schisms rely - nuns social bulwark against this —what scenes degrade as most light cannot get through layers of dirt covering blood hares skate surfaces pools light inside & glass sacrament wine, ligature & typeface design patriot at his climax truest rendition :: gratitude glazed by grace’s drunken fender expeditional piths myths molten-core driven show true, how to— background of sirens & vehicles moving with velocity accelerating, danger (how shine incisors with the sale, no training in drama, awe, obvious) scrap sell-off from any collision floss through teeth as if a meal metal flesh together proxied by petrochemical fires — blue-grey & red with weaponries of white moonshine for a feeding step right up to drive-in theater seats endeavor letters heat-death's in leather afternoon sun driving through un- an T’s adage sort teary hullos hourglass god gives mourning folk waiting at the wake for forest of clear rings cut - kind of thing where as long as rock tumbler or track spins the lot loose - ‘’ not of loss but from it - wade in to banks whose river-marsh don dune buggies they themselves caught with tusks - walrus tusk, mammoth oathes - it doesn’t come but but the wake works - this ending up leech gripping concrete between orange sutures & backhoes frozen as if waiting for a pike from drainage grate to strike - construction project, bolts soldiers aligned With flags & settlements if hit by idiots— T-REX PROJECT & congestion— sienna lilac bogies thick spokes of upward brushstrokes suspended beneath cash register’s 100-story shadow.

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Individuals within this modern-day period are still as ridiculous along with astrology similar to individuals in the historical times. Some writers describe the home builders as Megalithic or even Big-stone people, given that they utilized huge stones, like the fabled Cyclopes of the old Greeks, that worked and also constructed enormous wall structures in metals. From the huge selection from early Egyptian art work, documentation exists from many species of birds that are currently extinct. Kings used to hoard both silver and gold as an action of their riches in ancient times. He believes these folks were a descendant of a people called the Urus that offered the idea of monotheism to the Early Egyptians. Utilizing the bottom lines established in the United Nations Universal Announcement from Constitutional rights, the book chronicles the clashes from ideas, social movements, and armies that make up the background of constitutionals rights. Series pupils pictures of the old Egyptian pyramids, discussing that they were areas to place the mummified body systems of pharaohs and their loved ones. Bone tissue was plentiful as well as the old Egyptians fabricated this in to precious jewelry as well as arrowheads. This very same practice was also typical to ancient Babylon, where some of the women discovered how to swim. In early times, dining tables were created coming from distinct components as well as in distinct concepts from today: as an example the Egyptians utilized hardwood or even stone and also their tables were fashioned like pedestals, whereas the Assyrians made use of metal. Program trainees pictures or even internet recreations from wall surface art works off historical people that highlight elements of lifestyle as it was lived in old opportunities. Tribe tattoo design styles have actually remained preferred throughout the ages, ever since they were first made use of in the early times. It pays attention to an amazing ancient device from divination that makes use of thrown earth as manner of divining through cautiously examining its own setup and also purchase based on an individual's lifestyle, individual and also his past times, present and, future celebrations. The historical theorists, nevertheless, possessed a different standpoint on character and also personality. There is actually documentation from the tomb paintings that the ancient Egyptians often brought cheetahs they had subjugated. That Chinese society is actually an intricate one also uncovers that the gold colour possesses a form of double meaning as well as that is actually the grieving colour utilized by the Mandarin Buddhists. Take flight sportfishing in the modern times came from the flows from Northern England and also Scotland. The ancient Greeks along with their wealthy bring ins coming from several spots included an unique components and seasonings to the Italian cuisine. In historical Mexico, blue-green was actually reserved for the gods as well as could possibly certainly not be actually worn by mere individuals. This visibility implies that our hair needs to be brushed for its health much more compared to in historical times. Within this manual filled in 1906, Jim and Della Dillingham Young are a pair in love, however which can rarely afford their house. Ancient Moments additionally throws a couple of roleplay subject matters, along with offering social and also relaxation subjects. The early Romans strongly believed that the Aquamarine was actually blessed to Neptune, the god of the sea, having actually dropped coming from the gem containers from sirens and cleaned into shore. Just like a person should have principles and also moral values instilled in his attribute or good publication must consist of proper relevant information, in a similar way the marble to become utilized in property decoration has to have certain qualities which will certainly create this the correct option for varieties. Early knowledge, coupled along with origins from metaphysical and also doctrinal in nature, besides the understanding theory of old greek, the bases from an one-of-a-kind metaphysical mind science that simply the Druze League can easily claim to be their very own. Context: Archaeologists are actually attempting to learn about these ancient individuals through excavating in the wrecks to find artifacts. Other blossoms that were actually well-known in the course of historical Egyptian times included the papyrus vegetation and the hand tree. Common porcelains including blocks as well as glasses are actually still produced by historical procedures. These titans present an excellent graphic ... big, dense, historical microorganisms relatively unbreakable yet-their survival relies on 2 little varieties of squirrels as well as beetles that climb up past the range from step ladders to giant branches, where they split open significant pine conoids, and dispersed the redwood seeds throughout the forest floor. The Napoleon Egyptian campaign increased the appeal of another collection from historical attractive motifs that were actually included right into the Empire type. Of course, our team may certainly not restrict the Quran discovering how to the Muslims simply due to the fact that it is a manual of Hidaya for the whole humanity. The art works located on the wall structures in the days of historical Egypt are actually quite a bit various coming from the masterpieces from the Awakening. The old philosophers will mention, whatever your strength, pursue its opposite. Making use of the main points built in the United Nations Universal Affirmation from Constitutional rights, the book records the clashes of concepts, social motions, as well as militaries that make up the record from constitutionals rights. Program students photos of the ancient Egyptian pyramids, revealing that they were locations to put the mummified physical bodies from pharaohs and their loved ones. Bone tissue was plentiful and also the early Egyptians made this right into precious jewelry and arrowheads. This exact same process was actually also usual to historical Babylon, where a few of the ladies discovered how to go for a swim. In the event you loved this post and you would love to receive much more information concerning yellow pages online free; look these up, kindly visit our webpage. But this was the setting where Michel de Nostredame matured. That seems to be Michel was recognized as one of the most smart of the group and thus he was actually the one appointed to devote his lifestyle to the research study from the early text messages of the Kabbalah. This was at opportunities set aside for aristocracy as well as lots of lifestyles felt this had a theological importance. Morten St. George is the author of the Nostradamus-related book Incantation from the Rule Against Inept Doubters and the inventor an internet site about Nostradamus et los angeles Kabbale His website includes the Nostradamus textual variations of the Paris editions and also other technological support for the concepts of the short article. The meaning is the same if you are actually the groom and also you can certainly not view the bride-to-be's face. The globe could pick a Hindu encouraged astrology which is just as intriguing as that is actually reaching be actually a lot more fascinating with the times. Historical societies felt that the globe was specified upon an enormous sapphire, which repainted the heavens blue with its representation. The book consists of instructions making rods, line and also hooks utilized in fly sportfishing. People from historical Egypt were actually generally pescarian, indicating they will frequently eat fish. These blessed abilities who may figure out and decipher the position from the inter-planetary body systems to the early individuals's lifestyle were actually considered as prophets, wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, sorcerers, druids, therapists, witch doctors, mediums, conjurers or even illusionists. The modern-day practice of giving a significance to every blossom is believed to have been actually given Europe after the French as well as the English expert it in Chicken. I am immersing on my own in learning more about ancient Druid life for history information. Over the past millennia there were numerous strategies of divination carried out by individuals of historical times apart from astrology, which was initially crafted for this was the 1st offered motor vehicle or even means of prophecy used through our historical forefathers. Repetitive pronouncing of a title has an influence on viewpoints, traits, and also skills, as well as interaction type.