#seeing stuff like this can severely alter your brain chemistry

[grudgecollector]

I find it so funny when people say Nam-gyu is the scariest character of the season when In-ho is literally right there

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo)—"Just put your lips together...and blow" excuse me ma'am i'm briefly going to turn into a kettle. She's the quintessential Femme Fatale who may betray me in the end but I'd let her it'd be worth it

Pearl Bailey (Carmen Jones, St. Louis Blues, Porgy and Bess)—vintage crush of all time, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, and my GOD the PIPES! She wasn't in nearly enough movies, but every time I see her I'm aghast all over with what a gorgeous woman she was. Vote Pearl for diva glamor like no one else! (also....she was on the Muppet Show!)

This is round 5 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Lauren Bacall:

"She is soooo neat. And hot. And everything. That one scene in To Have and Have Not where she says "you know how to whistle don't you? You just put your lips together and blow" altered my brain chemistry during media archaeology class and here we are."

"The VOICE, the SLINK, the EYES. Woof."

"Lauren Bacall was a major lesbian awakening for me. Every picture of her makes it look like she’s about to destroy you physically and emotionally (why is that so hot, I may need help). She had incredible long running chemistry with her husband, Humphrey Bogart, but was an absolute star in her own right. I’ll never be over my crush on her."

"She's got that confident, no-nonsense air about her. She's a boss babe who knows what she wants and gets it DONE. Staunch liberal Democrat her whole life. Campaigned for RFK. From Wikipedia: "In a 2005 interview with Larry King, Bacall described herself as "anti-Republican... A liberal. The L-word". She added that "being a liberal is the best thing on Earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind."" Beautiful hair. Beautiful eyes. Beautiful lips. She's just beauty. LISTEN TO HER VOICE. TELL ME THAT'S NOT THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF."

"HER VOICE. Like yeah, she was absolutely stunning but oh my god, I'm obsessed with her voice"

"A gorgeous lady inside and out. One half of an absolute power couple with Humphrey Bogart, tended to him and other actors suffering from malaria whilst filming the African Queen, generally radiated grace and poise throughout her life. Also her last role was in Family Guy so she needs justice for that"

"She was stunning. Tall and beautiful with a distinctive voice and able to carry her own in a male dominated field. She won the heart of millions, including one of Hollywood's most iconic leading men, Humphrey Bogart. Their story was the stuff of legends, and the chemistry between them was apparent in the multiple films they started in together. She personified the film noir dame and yet she also adapted as Hollywood changed. Her career spanned decades, and she was honored multiple times."

Pearl Bailey propaganda:

"Pearl Bailey was an absolute POWERHOUSE! She's best known for her career in music and theater (she's a DIVINE singer, and very funny). But she also did several feature films, including a controversial adaptation of Porgy and Bess (controversial because of the story; the actors were pretty much coerced into it). She's got a style all her own, you can recognize it from a mile away. She's got you chuckling and crying from one phrase to the next. I love her <3"

"Cheekbones to die for"

[suffarustuffaru]

i need to share my very horrible idea to combine the reinhard/julius/otto/subaru boy drama into one julius-centric fic

ok so a little while ago ive made all kinds of ottojuli and reinjuli posts and while i havent finished all my major julisuba posts Yet i am quite fond of julisuba also and i think itd be incredibly funny if you just dumped all of these ships into one story. just go ALL IN on that boy drama!!!! go big or go home amirite!!!! the worlds WORST love trapezoid youve ever seen!!!!

this post is just me rambling fic ideas bc i sadly dont have time for Every Fic Idea and also i just. i just think itd be funny putting multiple ships with the same person in them into one fic. on a serious level its like mimicking real life relationships where sometimes people come and go and you have different dynamics with each person!! on another level i just think this is also very funny so!! here we go. under the cut:

anyway so my idea for this is that you know, julius of course meets reinhard when hes ten and reinhard is eight and then it alters julius's brain chemistry. at first he's in complete awe of reinhard. and then over time the shame starts setting in. that julius isnt as strong as reinhard. and the jealousy sets in a bit too, so julius's got this chip in his shoulder trying to carry his family's legacy and trying to carry the weight of knighthood to be as perfect as possible. to be as close to reinhard as he can. they meet again in their teens and julius shows reinhard the ropes of like basic knight stuff bc reinhard just joined the knights. and of course reinjuli become friends but julius has spent his whole life quietly watching reinhard from afar and now julius still has that distance with reinhard even as theyre supposedly friends now. reinhard is a God, you know? his powers and his leash from the kingdom and his family keep him distant and the two of them are ignoring that. classic homoerotic "do i want him or want to be him" friendship where both of you are too scared to get any closer for various reasons with a Twist (reinhard's very real monster complex that keeps getting validated bc Everyone Around Him thinks hes a monster).

anyway but then julius remembers that you know, shit between reinhard and him wont work out for many reasons, like reinhards family deciding to torment julius at various points in his life (heinkel, whos julius's boss, and reid, who went from julius's childhood idol to. you know.), and also reinhard needs to have kids because hes the sword saint, and also homophobia exists in rezero. and also even if those werent all obstacles julius still has his Complexes connected to reinhard and they got that distance between them so. no go. (repression gets in the way of relationships :((( )

also quick side note is that ex 4 happens and julius reinhard ferris go to vollachia and julius interrupts a meeting with vincent vollachia himself to go "I UNDERSTOOD THAT LITERARY REFERENCE YOU JUST MADE. THATS A REALLY GOOD REFERENCE I LIKED IT A LOT" bc hes a massive nerd and ig this is slightly-more-of-a-disaster-gay julius au so julius is like ............................. vincent was kinda cool for that.

AND THEN SUBARU CRASHES INTO JULIUS'S LIFE and julius is like seeing this guy who's also got a chip in his shoulder and then he insults the knights and says the knights are all depending on their dads (nepotism) and julius is like .......the chip in my shoulder was bad enough and also youre kinda like me fr. and you are clearly a fucking misguided kid so now i have to save your ass. i cant NOT save your ass. and reinhards like "julius and subaru nooo you dont have to do this :((((" and julius cant admit atm that hes also doing this to save subarus life so julius is just like "he disrespected the knights >:(((("

but yes we all know what happened there. julius saves subarus life. julius has to slice subarus throat in that one failed loop. they become friends across several timelines. they also homoerotically share souls, you know, typical bromance things, rivals to lovers except subarus the one going YOURE MY RIVAL and julius is like he is SUCH an upstart. hes really grown on me like a fungus but thats the appeal. and julius i think sees subaru as like a kindred spirit (or at least thats how i interpret julisuba) except subaru is like way more freer than julius is. same desire to prove yourself but subarus not restraining himself constantly like julius. its sometimes to the point of recklessness and general stupidity and what have you, but his boldness and bravery and determination and heart really is admirable.........................

yeah so anyway julius falls for ANOTHER guy again, you know how it is sometimes. the heart wants what it wants and julius is cursed to always have the worst meetings with his closest friends. and of course julius gets heartbroken bc wtf i have to kill my new friend :((( noo!!!! but in the finished loop its like. oh subaru...... hes really improved himself. hes grown so much already. hes kind of. inspirational really. idk how he does it. except subarus you know got that Mystery to him the same way reinhard does (theyre traumatized and Cant Take About It Normally so they just randomly lore drop what they can) and also subarus SUPER into emilia. and julius is like .................... well. subarus taken. haha. and reinhards. taken. fuck me. fuck. and like somethings going on with subaru and rem and emilia right. fuck. and subarus got his whole toxic masculinity / gender crisis..... and he doesnt know hes Bisexual yet...... man. what a loss for julius amirite haha.

and also subarus busy after arc 3........... and julius has no idea whats happening there but that seems Real serious :(( and julius's got other things to attend to so he hopes subaru reaches out to him eventually..... or that they cross paths again since subarus in the emilia camp and julius is in ana camp (and of course reinhard is in felt camp and like that was a whole debacle bc wtf. reinhard, u do know thatd be a big deal to our mutual friend felix?). so. julius pines from afar ONCE AGAIN HAHA.

(also of course subarus still attracted to reinhard here. its um. well julisuba can bond now over pining over reinhard but thats for later also!!)

anyway of course during arc 3 julius briefly runs into some gray haired merchant twink thats being dragged around by subaru bc ana camp rescued this guy from a cave somewhere??? and this new guy and subaru made a deal or whatever so he was just helping out in the background of the fight against sloth??

and whaddya know................ julius goes to drink at a bar bc you know he probably tastes wine for fun in his free time (hes definitely Fond of wine anyway iirc) and now hes Sad over the Ones That Got Away so. bar it is. and gray haired merchant twink is there!! no way. they start talking a bit casually while drinking you know and julius's taste is Unfortunately either the graceful ones (anastasia, because julius has great taste in women) or the cringe fail ones (all the twinks - except for felix - that julius keeps having the wildest first meetings with, because julius has slightly shit taste in men) so julius is like huh this otto guys kinda funny lol. endearing in a weird way!! and -

oops they both end up being a little. they make a little bit of a move on each other. bc they were drinking and got a Bit tipsy. ottos Also not over the one that got away (subaru) (again) and hey. the finest knight truly is. Fine. objectively fine. totally. so you know. things get a little out of hand, maybe they do a bit of cringe fail flirting hidden underneath five million layers of repression and the Horrors of Being Known but ultimately they both embarrass themselves somehow (read: how far they went with each other while under the influence is up to you) and agree to Never Speak of This Again bc oopsies they were both technically each other's first time being Straightforwardly Not Straight with another man. oops. anyway julius has to go back to his camp and otto fucking bolts but he bolts right into subaru and gets his ass dragged into sanctuary drama.

julius is totally not a little bit envious about that.................... about otto getting to accompany subaru to sanctuary... but dont worry julius!! youll get to make up for it later!! bc eventually arc 5 stuff happens. and julius is Glad to see reinhard and subaru again. even with all the Baggage. and subaru is of course Weird about julius but eventually subaru reassures julius after they both confide in each other about the astrea drama (theyre honorary astreas via being dragged into the astrea family mess). and subarus reassuring to julius in a whole new way okay. subaru, whos unrestrained and incapable of being on the down low about anything, and julius, whos always holding himself back with a gazillion layers of repression, starts learning to let go a bit...

but also juliotto meet again. its terribly awkward and they both agreed to never speak of their awkward encounters again. subaru is going ??? and reinhard is clueless. otto then also goes to save reinhard and felt from heinkel trying to take felt hostage, which was also terribly awkward but reinhard and felt are grateful about it (but lbr if reinhard and otto knew each other deeper reinhard would maybe be a little. Apprehensive. around otto while otto would be sympathetic with reinhard bc hes like male emilia). but then while otto manages not to get erased by gluttony....... julius gets erased. of course. which you know results in being forgotten by reinhard in julius's THIRD first meeting ever with reinhard. and subarus the only one who remembers him of course.

then arc 6 happens :,))))) and julius of course has to confront his ideas of knighthood, his identity, his self esteem, and who he is outside of His Name. and also julius gets his ass beat by reid. his childhood idol. who reinhard KNEW was a shitty person but never ever told julius (whether this is because reinhard wanted to spare julius's hero worship or because reinhard never got the chance to tell julius is hard to say lajdsf). but julius does get to triumphantly win in the end!! grow as a person!!! learn to undo a bit of that repression and not hold himself to impossible standards all the time!! hes growing still!!! hes finally solidified his friendships with people like subaru and emilia!! hes remaking his relationship with anastasia!! hes asserted himself, hes planning on going to meet reinhard again one day and duel him!! things are looking up even if its still bittersweet that he doesnt have his name back yet!! does this mean?? perhaps?? a HAPPY ENDING?? julius can have the two men (reinhard and subaru) he admires the most in his life?????? as friends???? or as boyfriends?????? slowburn mutual pining????????????????????????????????????????

and then comes. arc 8 otto. that piece of shit.

julius is very much someone who has to grapple with the weight of the expectations that people throw at him. and also reinhard is someone who May envy julius a bit, but there's also you know, joshua and subaru with the Explicit Envy and (past) resentment because theyre placing heavy expectations on julius!! theyre pointing blame at julius!! julius is trying to find himself outside of stuff like that, especially after arc 6, but he's still got stuff to work on you know? he still has duties to fulfill!! loyalty that he has to act on bc hes gotta help subaru and co in arc 8!! and then in comes otto.

otto is also someone with expectation placed on him, but its Different. ottos mostly a nobody and when hes Not a nobody, his reputation tends to be Derogatory. hes a menace. hes a bad luck charm. hes grappling with the fact that he has to keep being left behind - post-arc 5 bc he was injured, but also repeatedly during arcs 7 and 8 because hes too physically weak to be on the same playing field as emilia or garfiel or subaru on the battlefield. he feels Useless after placing his identity on the expectation that hes Dependable and Useful.

julius is a bit more on even ground with otto now that julius is. also mostly a nobody bc his name is still gone. and also julius had to deal with having that part of his identity crushed. julius tried to be useful over and over in arc 6 only to get his ass repeatedly curb stomped by reid in the beginning. he was a nobody. he wasnt dependable anymore. and also otto is that one guy he had a Passing Fling with over having The Ones Who Got Away and julius was still vaguely hopeful about maybe being pals at least but ottos brushed him off a bit since arc 5. theyre like each others secrets you know? and now otto doesnt know that shit - julius is the only one who Knows - and otto also hates julius's fucking guts now. over SUBARU. and julius has been through this whole rodeo clown circus with arc 3 subaru so this is an absolutely terrible ride through memory lane.

and this is julius's THIRD twink that hates him for terribly unfair reasons. julius is very tired and a bit heartbroken in this au trying to pretend it doesnt bother him. on one level it doesnt. bc ottos pathetic and clearly Overcompensating for Something. on another level it kinda does bc julius had a Thing going with otto. and otto is the complete opposite of julius. like hes different from the other guys julius has liked.

julisuba is about complimentary opposites - they appear Extremely Different at first glance but theyre very similar. theyre people who try to look and act bigger than they are, people who keep reaching to be The Best, to be Perfect, because theyre overcompensating. theyre worried their entire identity is only built off of trying to be bigger than the shadow that other people in their lives (like their families) cast. but they cant reach perfection. and julius is like subaru but if subaru tried to really make himself "refined" - if he tried to stop putting his heart on his sleeve all the time. reinsuba are very similar too. theyre very refined knights who try to keep themselves in check at all times while the weight of the world is on their shoulders. they cant have a hair out of place. except julius is like the "smaller" version of reinhard. julius is less powerful. its like comparing a human and a "god" - reinhard, whos untouchable. but its a double edged sword, because julius gets to be a normal person, because half the expectation placed on him is also purely from himself, while reinhard isnt. reinhard isnt Free. hes on a leash by the kingdom and his family. julius even gets his kind of "celebrity" status stolen from him via the loss of his name. hes truly kind of Normal now - julius is like if reinhard didnt have his crazy abilities and had a little more of a chance to be free.

otto? yeah otto is. very very far from all of that. hes so obviously imperfect that most of his reputation, when its brought up, is just him being known as a mess who's caused various forms of chaos everywhere he goes. either that or hes just. There. Invisible. very very average. and otto is someone who wants a nice comfortable life, someone who wants to fit in - julius and subaru arent Exactly like that, and while reinhard also wants to be normal, ottos the one who has more of an opportunity. but he doesnt. because otto Dooms Himself by being recklessly cutthroat. otto is like if subaru was just. More of an asshole, so ottojuli would just be a rather Extreme Challenge for julius to have to deal with HAH. and normally otto is someone who repays how people treat him - a very "you treat me like this, i'll treat you the same way in turn" kind of deal, except ottos developed a vendetta against julius and its basically like if subaru never let go of his arc 3 julius vendetta.

yes so anyway. etc etc stuff probably happens but i ran out of ideas lajdlfjasdf i just think combining ALL the boy drama and recontextualizing + adding to canon would be. batshit crazy. and terribly entertaining. im so sorry julius but i want to see you crack a bit under the pressure. reinjuli as a ship is like tragic gay yearning that never goes anywhere past being friends with quiet homoerotic tension, then julisuba is. you know. extreme rivals to lovers, starts out Rough but then ends up being super super sweet and theyre Trying their best underneath the self esteem issues. and then ottojuli is. toxic yaoi at its finest (pun intended). you get Every flavor of mlm possible!!

ok so you may be asking "ok what would you even name this fic then" and to that i say that this would be called To All the Boys I've Loved Before.

anyway i really wanna write this idea someday ill inform you guys (if youre reading this and are Interested) if it ever happens :< so. in conclusion this is just julius the entire time throughout all of these events:

[antimonyandthyme]

Hi. I've just finished reading Shutter Speed. I've been trying to come up with the words to tell you how grateful I am to you for writing this. The fic has been on my list for several weeks now but I've been putting it off for one reason or the other. And I'm sure life has given it to me at the right time because I've been going through some pretty horrible stuff these past few weeks and reading your fic has given me some really needed relief. It made me smile so much and I could actually feel the warmth in my chest when I read certain paragraphs. It's just so beautiful and I feel like I'm not expressing how thankful I am for every second of effort you put into writing this gorgeous work.... THANK YOU. I am in tears as I type this. Your work let me escape the real world and the emotional stress I am under for a few hours. I spent so much time looking through the work of all the photographers you've mentioned in the fics. I had such a wonderful time. Your writing is truly incredible. Seb's insecurity and Mark's undisguised longing when he looks at him 😭🖤 And Lewis and Val's gentle and easy love in the background. Britta being the queen that she is. And that tender sex scene in the end???? Just.... God I have no words.

'The Nikon 70-200mm lens seems absurdly heavy in his hands. It feels like a responsibility.'

'Sebastian wants to shake Mark awake and go, Look, look at that. See that gold? See how it matches your hair?'

“I didn’t feel unsafe. Not for a second.”

“He’s excellent in front of the camera,” Sebastian says hastily, when what he means is, The light strikes him as if he were a diamond, and the shadows adhere to his face like a lover.

“It’s the way you look at my camera.”

“I’m not looking at your camera,” Mark says this like a fact. “I’m looking at you.”

“I can’t see anything else,” Sebastian gasps, and it’s the truth. He closes his eyes and Mark’s there. He gazes off in the distance where the sun sets and Mark’s there. “All I see is you.”

All these lines permanently altered my brain chemistry.

I am so sorry. I really wish I could put into words how much your fic means to me right now. I'll just settle for 'Thank you' at the moment. I just feel like your fic has picked me up and given me a huge, warm hug. I look forward to reading more of your work. I hope you have an amazing holiday season.

dear dear anon. i've read and reread this lovely comment so many times and am very much at a loss for words. honestly means the world that you took the time to share your thoughts with me. i'm so over the moon the fic could be a source of encouragement in a tough time; writing brings me a lot of joy in part because i get to share it with people, and this is the greatest thing i could have hoped for with a fic! the most wonderful thing. thank you for letting me know i appreciate it from the bottom of my heart!

also i'm so so happy you looked up the photographers mentioned, if you have any thoughts on them you'd like to share i'd love to hear it! here's a lil tidbit i wanna share with you, when i mentioned iconic photographs of lips this was one of them by daido moriyama of course!

i am wrapping you in a blanket and sharing a cup of hot choco with you i am giving you the biggest, hugest warm hug i possibly can, i hope you're doing better, wherever you are, and i'm wishing you the very very best. mwah mwah mwah

[katoska]

Yeah that's what I meant by "the eventual understanding that he'll leave if she asks". I wanna see more fake banishments, and I want him to honor them despite not having to, after he pulls whatever attention-grabbing stuff he thinks is impressive/romantic. That church scene altered my brain chemistry and I need to see more wooing, dammit. She spent 30mins with him in both movies altogether so far, tops. I want at least a few "newspaper" (the kind that reports on bigfoot) headlines about an uptick of hauntings in Connecticut and which expert medium to call if you have snakes and vermin manifesting in your house or see the local stripey cryptid whom no one can quite agree on what he looks like, as a shortcut to tell the audience that our mains are building a relationship, even if it's half-adversarial and a little bit under false pretenses, as we'll later find out. And ofc I'd also like to see at least one such encounter between the two, and that she's having fun "defeating" him. Whatever the bigger plot may be, if we wanna get to a both-sided romantic wedding, or at least a both-sided romance, they need to spend more time together. Also, as you said, she needs to realise that he can make himself be seen by several living people, but he only cares about being seen by her.

I'm pretty sure writers can't acknowledge reading fanworks at all so they can't be accused of plagiarism. Which imo is dumb. I sure af wouldn't complain, and I wouldn't throw theories out if I didn't see hints in canon in the first place. We got mention of Trade, we got Loopholes to cut a Deceased's time short, and we got consummate Dealmaker Betelguise doing something nice for apparently free. For Lydia's ex, at that. The dots are all there and they aren't mine, I'm just connecting them and extrapolating a very little.

Yeah, movie 1 had a(n almost) wedding. Movie 2 had 3 weddings (well, 1 wedding and two almost weddings). Betelgeuse x Delores, Rory x Lydia, and Betelgeuse x Lydia. If they wanna make a pattern, next movie might actually have be set in Vegas lol.

Personally, I'd be happy enough if Betelgeuse joined the family as their mostly-helpful ghost whom Lydia is sort-of dating but she doesn't wanna put a label on it (abandonment issues + got burned too often). Though they are obviously still very committed, albeit him more obviously so than her, and obviously endgame.

Wrt the curse. The name thing still seems to somewhat apply. He could hear Delia call him and came on the second mention of his name, voluntarily. Idk if that's part of the same curse that keeps him out of the living world unless called and which marriage could fix (cause divorce apparently didn't), or just a generic ghost thing though. I obviously want to believe it's the latter. Maybe they all can feel when someone's calling out to them, or maybe Betel himself just happens to be very psychically gifted. No one said you have to be anywhere near the model fo Betel to hear you call him, after all (Lydia should have tried it in Jeremy's room rather than go all the way back home). He managed to keep a connection to Astrid after she said his name twice, too. At least, I think that's how he knew about Dostoyevsky. Seems more perk than curse, tbh.

And now I'm imagining Lydia "banishing" Betelgeuse so often in front of witnesses that his name becomes too well-known in the living world, like Bloody Mary. He'd hate that because it'd be annoying, and his annoyance would be both entirely his own fault and ironic considering his desperation to be called on in movie 1, and it could be what forces him to out himself as free bc it's either that or having to do at least two shows per night ("I won't do it. I won't"). Would fit in with the probable title of movie 3, too, right? And it would be good if he were forced to ask Lydia for help for once. Like giving him her last name helping him to very publicly demonstrate that he might come when called, but won't leave upon hearing the magic words anymore, not even if they come out of involuntarily-famous-medium Lydia Deetz's mouth, so people better think twice. Cause he'll only leave once he's done with you or if Lydia (or Astrid) asks him too. And those two have better things to do than rescue idiots who are trying to summon poltergeists for funsies. Which means that anytime Lydia does show up afterwards to watch deal with B's antics, it'll be of her own free will, maybe to consume a nice candlelit dinner cooked in some possessed idiot's (very nice, cause I'm sure Betelgeuse would only pick the best locations for a date haunting) kitchen. Which means if he starts possessing some Elvis impersonators in Vegas, she could take that as the invitation/proposal that it would be intended as, rather than a hostage situation. Cause she can't actually force him to get out of the Elvis guy, or to get an actual priest instead of the Elvis guy (Elvis can stay as witness though). But she knows he will, if she asks.

Betelgeuse and marriage theory

A Beetlejuice head-canon/theory I have (warning, it's somewhat "Beauty & The Beast" coded 🌹🥀).

Having died poisoned on his wedding night, Betelgeuse's soul is bound by the ritual of marriage.

We already know he will be able to reenter the mortal world if he marries a living person (due to the rules of the afterlife and whatnot), but here's where my head-canon starts:

Bound to the ritual of marriage, if he marries someone he loves, who truly love him back, dead or alive, his soul will be freed and he will be able to pass on to the great beyond next to his beloved (once his beloved passes away as well, assuming she happens to be currently alive *hint hint*). This person has to wear Delores' ring and accept and love Betelgeuse as is. She has to fall in love with his soul. Only loving him truly, wearing the ring, and sealing the deal with a kiss will release him, and that way, in the end, both his soul and his beloved's (it has got to be Lydia, please) can move on peacefully into the great beyond and exist without curses or attachments.

Totally a fantasy in my head because there's no way something like this would happen in canon much to the sadness of my little heart lol, but I thought I'd share it with you all. And who knows, maybe if there's a third movie they will explore what it is about Betelgeuse's character that is so attached to the concept of marriage. Because, listen, maybe the ritual where a ghost marries a living person and can materialize in the living world is something that is bound to the rules of the afterlife, and detailed in the Manual for the Recently Deceased, but the symbols and ritual of marriage is something intrinsic to the character of Betelgeuse itself.

He died on his wedding night, for starters. He was tricked by Delores and fell for her immediately. One could argue he fell quickly because she is so gorgeous and no doubt manipulated him into believing she loved him, and that's definitely part of it, but also, (and I have no doubt about this one), he believed her and fell for her immediately because Betelgeuse wants to be loved. He's a romantic underneath it all, and he wants to love and be loved. He might have been desiring it for a long time, failing to find love throughout his life until he met Delores.

He may exude self-confidence (maybe even to a delulu extent lol) and present himself in this very raunchy way, but inside, I'm sure he desires a genuine love; he wants to love someone and be loved truly. And he died, murdered by his bride on the night of his wedding. Betelgeuse was murdered on the night that should have been the happiest of his life, and his desire for love and a wedding stayed with him beyond the grave, now stained with blood and betrayal and a curse that can only be broken, in my head-canon/theory, by marrying someone who truly loves him, whom he truly loves.

Marriage is definitely a very important theme in Beetlejuice, so it'd be interesting if there's something more underneath it, which could be explored in the next movie if we are so lucky to get it.

[ckneal]

About a month ago, I had a fairly random revelation that Lilith was to Lucifer what Adam was to Michael. Not in the sense that she was ever his vessel, as all humans capable of serving that role are purportedly descended from Adam and Eve, and, while it’s never specifically confirmed to be true for the Supernatural universe, most lore surrounding Lilith sets her up as being too old for that.

And I also don’t necessarily mean that Lucifer and Lilith were in love—Lucifer is too egotistical and arrogant for me, personally, to believe he’s capable of a true romantic bond, and it is twice stated that he lost his virginity to Kelly Kline, in settings that leant themselves toward his credibility on this subject (musing aloud to an uncomprehending Kelly in the privacy of their bedroom, and awkwardly grappling for something to say in his first unplanned meeting with Jack, respectively)—leading me to believe that the recognizable sleazy substitute for love (lust) was not present between these two either. But, I do think that there was a connection there, and I do find myself curious about it.

After all, Lilith was willing to die to set Lucifer free from the cage. And yes, I am aware that she had made a deal with Michael to help set off the apocalypse, and she was obligated to carry out her part, but has anyone ever wondered what exactly Lilith got out of the bargain? She’s not exactly written like Eve, from season 6. She is not mothering toward demonkind. I can’t see her sharing Michael’s motivation to bring God back. The one who stood to benefit from her sacrifice, was, in fact, Lucifer. (And Michael, obviously.)

I think that the bond Lilith and Lucifer formed was a bit similar to what Adam and Michael had, in that it came from a lack of choice. I firmly believe that Lilith and Lucifer spent a decent amount of time together in Hell, just the two of them. Likely for a much longer period of time than Michael and Adam did in the cage. We don’t know exactly when Lucifer made Lilith, but we do know that he was out and moving around for awhile after the apple incident that Gadreel was incarcerated for—after all, Cain was a grown man when he caught Lucifer circling Abel and agreed to take the Mark. And bible ages are a little strange, but let’s say that that’s a good couple of decades in earth time. That’s much longer in Hell. Assuming that Lilith was turned prior to Cain, that’s a long time with Lucifer and Lilith being the only two occupants of Hell. (Well, except for Ramsey and her hellpuppies; remember she was pregnant when Lucifer saved her from extinction.)

And I wonder if in that time, the two of them could have developed a begrudging sort of friendship? Just from the forced proximity—Michael was clearly capable of decimating Lilith on sight if she went back to earth, and there weren’t exactly a lot of humans wondering around that early on in the species to provide her with cover—not to mention a meatsuit. She was pretty much stuck there, while Lucifer was presumably laying low, while he got his schemes together. Setting up the horsemen, binding Death, somehow getting and hiding the demon tablet, creating the Princes of Hell, and such. . .Just a lot of stuff, and where he used to have a vast multitude of siblings to talk to, he now just had this snarky little corrupted human soul, and I think—I think—they became friends.

And Lucifer considers this to be the filthiest thing that he’s ever done—on par with the most torrid, disgusting affair that anyone has ever had, and he still hates everything about it to this day. That’s why Lucifer never once talks about Lilith. He is nauseated by the fact that they were the original frenemies, completely disgusted and powerless to resist their intense conversational chemistry, and if they saw each other tomorrow there’s a tiny part of him that will still light up because no one has ever been more thoroughly on his level.

And it’s fucking mutual. If they saw each other tomorrow, they would exchange the most vehement of insults, maybe even physically attack one another, shouting their hatred at full volume—and then a few hours later be spotted at a coffee shop, passionately talking trash on Sam Winchester, and set terrible, terrible plans in motion that will plague Sammy’s life for the next several years. When they part ways, they would both feel intensely dirty, telling themselves that this will never happen again—but Lucifer has never been one to resist temptation, and at 3am finds himself sending that text message he knows he’ll regret later. . . “So what are your thoughts on Dean? ;)” And off they go again, all night long.

And that’s why Lilith was willing to lay down her life to set Lucifer free. And it’s also why she had her moment of doubt, when she nearly got Sam to agree to that demon deal. She had a moment of realizing that she was about to die for an asshole she doesn’t even like.

I personally like to think that Michael was the archangel who nearly came blasting in to defend Chuck that night, when Dean pulled the plug on the deal Sam was about to make (and before you try to tell me that wasn’t a real deal because Lilith was planning a trap—rewatch that scene, Sam was the one who played dirty by reaching for the demon-killing knife; Lilith was busy eyeing his crotch through his jeans and feeling up his chest). After Lilith smoked out of her meatsuit, I like to think that Michael followed her and gave a kind of prep talk, telling her that it’s important that they remember their motivations, shameful though they might be

At which point, Lilith just bursts into tears, crying, “Oh god, you’re right. . .He’s my best friend—how did this happen? How did this—Oh god, oh god, oh god, I’m going to be sick!”

Lilith sobs into Michael’s wings, while Michael is just sort of stuck standing there, because Lilith is gripping one of his four heads with both hands as she cries, while the other three are looking around for help, intensely confused because he, of course, was talking about bringing God back, and now he has no idea what to do to get out of this uncomfortable social situation that he does not understand.

And thinking about Lucifer and Lilith and Michael and Adam as parallels, it gets me asking these questions about how things would go if the roles were reversed. Would Adam willing lay down his life to free Michael from the cage? As a fanfiction writer, I enjoy the idea of saying yes.

In fact, I’m a little enamored with the idea of a parallel world where everything is flipped. Where it’s Michael in the box, and Adam running around breaking seals, Adam on that final, fateful night—after having had his moment of doubt in which he’d lured Ramiel into a secluded spot and offered to stand down and nearly banged Ramiel’s brains out in the bargain—but that’s all past, and now he’s firm in his resolve. Adam standing in front of a mirror—but instead of the white gown that Lilith wore, Adam’s in a black suit, dressed as if it were his wedding day, though he’ll never see his groom. And Raphael appearing at his elbow, looking concerned—instead of some random follower of Lilith’s, and Adam telling Raphael to be happy. Everything is going to be okay.

And it’s Adam reclining against the alter, all serene anticipation as Ramiel—the second Prince of Hell, who rejected his place in the succession because all he wanted was to live out a quiet life with his fishing gear, well away from the Pit and the Life—comes storming into the church with Zachariah at his side, assuring Ramiel that he’s trained for this, he can do it—only to have Azazel come bursting in behind them, shouting, “NO, RAMMY! IT’S WHAT HE WANTS!”

[youthagainstrape]

Porn:- An addiction needed to be stopped

Porn:- Porn is a short/long video or any printed thing, which has sensational aspects thing on it. Both men and women see porn. Nowadays youth is much connected to it. Porn is also a reason for rape cases. It is mistaken and when somebody sees it they then this is easy and everybody does the same but that’s defiantly not the case. Effect of Porn on Teenagers Depression and Loss of Interests: When a young person is being exposed to the challenges of life, they need to cope. Often, they are under-resourced to do so emotionally – partly because their brain is still forming, and teenagers usually encounter many challenges. Porn is a dopamine volcano that can boost a teen out of a funk. It is overwhelming and exciting to the brain, and it can quickly be associated with feeling better. Further, it is part of the nature of curiosity and exploration of sexuality – except that it is a lie that can consume them. Sadly, depression sets in when we become beholden to a shameful, secretive and brain chemistry-altering stimulus. Seeking this stimulus, keeping it hidden and managing nagging shame can consume a teen. Depression naturally lowers enjoyment in other things teens may have liked and made them more susceptible to return to porn. Video game addiction also functions in a similar manner and often co-occurs with pornography use. Lying, Stealing and Secrets: If a teen has increased the number of lies they tell and the secrets they hide, it is worth noting! People often assume these are natural actions of teenagers who are “finding their way.” This is true to some extent, yet if we take a step back, we can usually trust our internal sense of when this is growing into a problem. Further, if you have any money or cards stolen, passwords changed, the “password reset email” (when you didn’t activate it), etc., you shouldn’t blindly look the other way. Shame is the best friend of lying, stealing, and secrets. Don’t expect a quick or easy confession, and don’t press hard for one! This is more likely to make the teen go further into hiding. Extended Late Nights Yes, teens often stay up late, but if this falls into an unhealthy pattern, it is likely serving some purpose. It is important to teen can account for their actions and use of time. Debilitating Pursuit of Immediate Gratification: Again, this is common among teens, but it should be monitored. If your teen can’t move away from pleasure-seeking behavior, this either is causing them problems, or it will. A relentless search that negates the necessary tasks of growing up (school, chores, sleep, relationships, etc.) is a sign of something wrong. Technology Obsession: The previous point ties in with technology obsession. Teens with unfiltered and unmonitored access to internet-enabled devices are at great risk. Technology (including games) can quickly become addictive, and an inability to not use it is problematic. It is important to monitor the device history and downloads. You will quickly discover if inappropriate content is being accessed, or deleted or covered up (especially if history is consistently missing). You must get familiar with the technology your teens are using – including websites, apps, devices, etc. Truth of Porn:& Many people are mistaken by considering that what happens in the video that they have to do the same without any parameters. They just see the video they don’t go behind the scene. The truth is they do it for money and there is a whole industry of it. They sign a contract and then shoot the video according to it. They have their own thing and they follow. Role of Sex Education to stop Porn Sex Education is important now. Many of the teenagers don’t know what actually they are seeing because they are getting exposure to the world. In the meantime, if they don’t get the real guide or knowledge about it then it can be very harmful. Sex education is very vital to stop porn as the person who knows and has proper knowledge understands what is wrong and what is right. In addition, there are several things you should know about check out the blog on sex education on our platform. Ways to Stop Porn Addiction Key Points To Remember For Parents (Parental Guide): Start an ongoing, age-appropriate conversation about sex early. The child is more likely to be responsive and find you safe. Teach them. It is your responsibility as a parent. Place boundaries and safeguards. Explain to them as appropriate. Make space for hard conversations when you least want them – and when they most want them! Talk about sex and process your struggles with your partner. You need to know where you stand and have a strong starting place. Get expert help if you need it. Key Points For teens:- Take help of experts Understand the negative effect you can go through due to porn addiction you have to delete all the materials related to it Learn to control your trigger (feeling to see porn or do the activity) One thing is trying to cut down the times every day. (If you are watching porn 6 times a week then make it 3 then 1 then 0. Make a goal in small parts) Focus on doing other activities more so that you don’t get time to see. How To Approach Your Teenager Firstly, if you have evidence of pornography use, it is likely you don’t know the entire story. If you have evidence, the first thing to do is check that it didn’t come from someone else in the home – seriously. Then, bring the evidence to your teen at a time they are most likely to engage with you (if this is never, then make your best decision). You should non-judgmentally let them know what you found. Ask them about it, without venom, tears, accusation or anything else! Be calm and genuine. You need to be safe for them to move toward, and you need to deal with your own emotions, Don’t put that burden onto the teen. Wait on their response and gently bring it back around to the question if they sidetrack. Express how you care about them and want the best for them. Let them know what you think they might be feeling (shame, fear, anger) and acknowledge that you “get that” and it makes sense. Reassure them you aren’t judging them and are willing to walk with them in their experience. Listen, listen, listen if they are talking! When appropriate, move to explain the myth of pornography – that is normal that they would enjoy it, and that you disagree with their continued use of it and why. Your values should be communicated, as should the support you will give to your teen. The safer you become, the more they are likely to share. If you suspect something, follow the same steps as above. Start by initiating a conversation about porn from a sexually exploitative viewpoint (such as a sexualized billboard or ludicrous movie scene). Start with something like, “You know… as I saw X, it made me wonder about how all this over-sexualized stuff is impacting you?” Don’t be condescending, fake or make accusations. Do, however, get to a pornography discussion. They will more likely respect straight talk! Conclusion:-. The people who are in videos or in an industry they are not wrong. They are doing their work. However, the people who see it without knowing the real thing and do the wrong thing by inspiring seeing the video are wrong. Otherwise, Sunny Leone also does charity and many others have their family. Therefore, knowing the real part of it is important and not following it is better than doing the wrong thing. It can be harmful to society as well as to yourself.

[twitchesandstitches]

Swapping Out Your Body, infinite headcanon forms for everyone!

One of the inspirations for Crossthicc’s general scope and free-for-all approach to altering your body for profit and self-expressions is the tabletop RPG Eclipse Phase, a post-apocalyptic sci fi setting where one of the main draws is a transhumanist approach that, among other things, manifests as virtually unlimited immortality for everyone and technology that lets you swap bodies as you need

This is important, because a similar assumption is baked into Crossthicc, and I want to be sure that it’s understood?

the bodies a character is described as having? They are not permanent.

any given character’s body can be what you want, if it makes sense!

The exact ways of swapping bodies differs from faction to faction, and on an individual basis, but the key point is that anyone’s body can be switched up if needed.

This is for several purposes; first, any headcanon look can be implemented, with it being a body a character happens to be using in that specific scenario. This also allows me, or anyone doing stuff in this AU (which you have full permission to do, btw!) to do whatever character design they want to go with.

Want, say, a character who is an alien in this AU to have a human form based on their canonical appearance? You can have it like that!

Want, say, Terezi to appear as a humanized human woman? Doable! Want her to have a troll look compliant with your headcanons? Also doable!

Want Gems to have a totally different projection style? Doable! Want a Gem to be placed into a physical body, with a situation similar to Steven’s canonical hybrid thing? Can do!

Want to make a character who is explicitly human to have a monster/alien body, like making Sierra into a full on demon/angel monster creature? It’s doable!

ESsentially nothing is set in stone, and any character can have whatever body is required for a given scenario.

A few limits on this sort of thing below:

Powers and how they affect this: Powers transfer. It is assumed that physical mutations and mods are permanent and stick to the character, so if they swap bodies, they will manifest on the body. Powers proper (defined as actual metanormal abilities, such as pyrokinesis, and not related to physical abilities) always transfer, since they aren’t really a body thing. They usually MANIFEST as such, but they are more soul-based than that!

Body swapping effectively works by taking your soul and swapping it into a new body. As a consequence, there CAN be mental consequences;; your soul is You, but the body’s brain does the actual thinking, and changes in the brain chemistry you were used to can have issues. Other methods may have their own problems, too, depending on how it happens.

Mental health can be closely tied to a body that Feels right; if someone’s self-image of themselves is tied to being a specific perception of gender, being put into a body that doesn’t fit it can cause severe dysphora, and something similar applies to a body lacking certain qualities, such as claws, amphibious skin, or otherwise mapping to what feels Right for that person. A powerful enough person (at least enough to be notably bigger than normal) can cause a body to mutate to match their self perception.

(Note that the above doesn’t apply to girl-ifying male characters if desired; if this happens to them, its likely they at least have a bit of curiousity towards percieving themselves as women on some level or at least seeing what a different body would be like. The default assumption of this AU is that anyone is at least a little bit non-binary, where this particular idea is concerned!)

Bodies are not cheap to make; whether flesh or mechanical, a construct suitable to be used as a suit for your soul does take some time and effort to create, assuming you can synchronize with it. Swapping to a new body isn’t a minor decision!

Each faction has their own vibe for this sort of thing, and it is assumed everyone does it. The Fleet explicitly usually unbirths people who have died and gestates them new bodies to their specifications, in a pregnancy-focused form of resurrective immortality, and they can do this to willing people to give them new bodies as they want. The Stingers probably handcraft new bodies in special formsmithing shops, at great expense for the best quality forms. The Coalition distill new bodies in gene-vats, paying VERY close attention to synchronizing them with customer’s minds.

[canmom]

A few months ago I tried to quit SSRIs cold turkey, on the suspicion that they were probably not doing much more than placebo. (I am on paroxetine, after bad experiences with the ‘standard’ ones like fluoxetine). I had tried to taper them before but ADHD made it difficult to remember where I was in the process of tapering so, when I accidentally ran out for couple of weeks, I decided I just wouldn’t go back on them.

The result was that I got severely depressed and suicidal in a way I haven’t been in years and damaged various relationships by withdrawing and generally being morose. You can call that severe rebound depression, or regression to a baseline that was worse than I realised. I prefer the rebound explanation personally (esp. since the paper I dug up suggested it was common for paroxetine to have rebound) but this one anecdotal experience isn’t enough to tell either way.

I have now sort of resigned myself to the idea that I’m going to have to take these pills for the rest of my life. It has historically felt like a clockwork cycle where I routinely run out every month and experience withdrawal. Now I’m a lot more scared about going off them so I have been better at getting my prescription early. We’ll see how long that lasts.

If someone is considering getting on SSRIs... I can’t say how much they helped, what mostly addressed my depression and suicidality was a series of major life changes over a period of years, but maybe they blunted it enough to make those changes possible, who knows. I definitely feel like I was experiencing emotions more strongly when I tried to quit, negative ofc but also sometimes positive. But I would say, consider that it may be very difficult to quit them, and the withdrawal symptoms are vicious. Sometimes it feels like “oh, you’re depressed? have a free drug addiction to go with it” was the policy.

As far as antipsychotics, nobody I’ve met who’s taken them has had a good time with it. Just from that anecdotal impression I would be fucking terrified to try them honestly.

It is nuts to me how with many (not all) physical illnesses, we define them by a specific reasonably well-understood biological cause - there’s a virus replicating in your cells and your immune system is fighting it, some of your cells are replicating out of control, you broke a bone or tore a ligament, etc. etc. Not to say it’s easy to differentially diagnose all the myriad illnesses out there ofc., and there are catchall ‘we don’t really know what this is’ categories like ‘chronic fatigue’, but there’s some sort of basis. But with ‘mental illness’, they’re literally just clusters of symptoms that some committee deemed to occur together frequently. So we look at the overwhelmingly complex brain chemistry and signalling which we barely understand and inject stuff which messes with the amounts of neurotransmitters, based only on very approximate statistical tools which suggest it might help improve a measure of one of these rather arbitrarily defined conditions (p<5%).

And since that’s obviously dangerous and unpredictable... we define a social role of ‘expert’ who guards the secrets of psych drugs, and invent a bureaucracy where you have to perform these conditions to their satisfaction, walking a tightrope to hit ‘getting a chance to try a given treatment and the option to reject it’ rather than ‘dismissed out of hand’ or ‘all autonomy taken away and locked in a box’. You wait until someone (who is in the absolute best case severely overworked and in the worst case an outright sadist) gets ten minutes to pattern-match what you say to some checklist ‘inventory’ written in the 70s, and if you score high enough pass you to a multi year waiting list to see another specialist who will make you tick the same boxes and interview you for an hour or two, and eventually one of them gives you one of a handful of drugs to drastically alter your psychology and motivations, hopefully for the better - if not, let’s try another one! One of them’s got to work!

This is the state of the art of medicine somehow. And people moralise about it! I feel like if they still did lobotomies, the same arguments would be mobilised in favour. At least the chemical treatments are... mostly reversible. I’m not saying what we have now is the same as randomly hacking at peoples’ brains, but it’s still incredibly crude for what’s frequently presented as an inarguable no-brainer choice.

Anyway I’m going to be trying stimulants for ‘ADHD’ soon so. Sure hope this one goes better than SSRIs did :|

“Oh, these drugs will alter my brain? Well so does eating and breathing! Ha ha ha!”

If your food gives you cognitive deficits and motor disorders that escalate into permanent neurological disabilities if left unabated, you should in fact start seriously considering alternative diets. If the only reasons to object to daily doses of “Potion of painfully fucks over yr motor control and ability to have abstract thought” are abject deference to the natural order, that’s a pretty compelling point in favour of abject deference to the natural order! Bc routinely sabotaging yr ability to organise yr thoughts and muscles is in fact pretty obviously fucked up. These are the “brain alterations” ppl talk about when they warn about antipsychotic side effects! If you take the neurological damage of “long covid” seriously enough to take extensive precautions, you should be taking these pretty seriously as well!

It’s sort of stomach-churning the way in which these allegedly progressive ppl will start talking about pills with language ripped from soulless ratchedesque bureaucrats at state hospitals. “I simply do not understand medication resistance!” You realise these are the same words ppl use to justify strapping down inmates convicted of no crime to inject them with haldol while they scream for mercy, yes? This doesn’t perturb you? You do not get an inkling, even a faint little glimmer, of “Are we the baddies?”?

[theunderdogwrites]

Ghislaine Maxwell: Co-Conspirator or Victim?

There are a few things in this world that gross me out to my very core:

-          Children eating ice cream. Just no. More gets on their face than in their mouths and it activates my gag reflex and I must look away in horror. And someone get the hose because I am not touching any of it come clean up time.

-          Feet.  There are no words

-          Bestial older men who terrorize young women and under-age girls with sex and those who help them engage in lascivious behavior. Should this not be something that disgusts everyone?

My zodiac sign pegs me as more of a leader than a follower. I find this laughable, but some around me might argue that I am capable of taking the reigns, but not always the best at adhering to authority exerted by others. If I am challenging you for your position, it’s because you’re either a bully or a fucking senseless shitbag and I don’t want those around you subjected to your vast lack of insight. Because in reality, I am super happy to follow intelligent, respectful human beings and even behave myself. It means I can just smile and nod and day dream – my favorite pastime.

If you are not familiar with the name Ghislaine Maxwell, I still hope you cringe at the name Jeffery Epstein. Convicted sex offender and all-around sack of malevolent slime. Also, a coward. Also, unfortunately dead (either by his own hand *I don’t believe it* or snuffed out by some frightened people of great power *I believe this*) before he was able to be made someone’s bitch in prison. Such a tragedy when sex offenders / sex traffickers don’t live long enough in prison to be passed around and used like a cum dumpster. Sometimes the punishment SHOULD fit the crime.

There is plenty of information out there about Ghislaine Maxwell. Here are a few key points on her:

-          Her father was Robert Maxwell. He was a British media proprietor, a former member of Parliament (MP), a suspected spy, and a fraudster (having misappropriated the pension funds of his employees). Just to give you a good idea of who Robert Maxwell was: he was the inspiration for the villainous media baron Elliot Carver in the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. I. Am. Jealous!

 -          Her father died in November 1991. He had boarded his 190-foot yacht, aptly name, Lady Ghislaine and found the next morning naked, spread-eagled and afloat in the Atlantic. Two autopsies could not conclusively prove a cause of death, but most say suicide because he was set to answer questions surrounding his corporation’s billion-pound debt load that was distributed among at least nine different international banks and investment firms, and the massive hole in its pension reserves. In simpler terms – he was fucked

 -          Robert Maxwell left his family in ruins. Ghislaine, his favorite child whom he groomed in his image from a young age, was understandably crushed

  -          Ghislaine is best known for being a socialite with immense connections among the international elite. It’s been stated that she was quite personable, a little bit quirky and therefore often a standout at parties; with many people being drawn to her. (Side note: I recently watched the HBO documentary on her titled, ‘Epstein’s Shadow’ and the tagline under ALL of the people they interviewed who knew her on a social level read, “former friend of Ghislaine Maxwell”. This just made me laugh. I’ve tried to envision the conversation where these people demanded that FORMER be included. Yes, quickly distance yourself from the stink less they think you too might smell bad)

  -          Depending on who you listen to, Ghislaine met Epstein in either the late 1980’s when her father introduced them (how apropos) or in the late 1990’s at a party in New York following a difficult breakup with a Count. I wonder what breaking up with a Count looks like, feels like. A Count is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, generally of average rank in the hierarchy of nobility. So basically, he’s not THAT special. But probably feels he is because, well, he has a title. Just imagine the insult you could hurl at him during the break-up: “Count von Count has a bigger penis than you!” *If you do not know who that is – just leave now because you’re shameful*.

 -          Epstein and Maxwell started out as a couple, but that morphed into more of a companionship / friendship / let’s rape young girls together type situation. You know, how most connections organically evolve.

 -          Ghislaine Maxwell has been accused of befriending minors and attempting to build a relationship with them, then later delivering them to Jeffrey Epstein to abuse. Maxwell would allegedly lure the young girls to Epstein’s residence under the guise of paid massage work. She’d target disadvantaged minors who she thought wouldn’t be able to refuse the money. Maxwell & Epstein allegedly lured slightly older women into their gross lives with the promise to assist in their careers.

 -          Additionally, Maxwell and Epstein have been accused of trafficking some of these girls out to their friends and associates among their extremely elite circle. Most notably, is Prince Andrew. Investigators have identified as many as 36 girls that were victims of Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking ring. Some of them - as young as 14. It’s believed there are many more victims yet to be identified.

 -          Following Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, the FBI started looking for Ghislaine. She went into hiding. Eleven months after Epstein’s “suicide” in prison on August 10, 2019, Maxwell was located. She was arrested in New Hampshire, where she was living a life of seclusion on a sprawling ranch.

 -          Ghislaine Maxwell faces federal charges including transporting a minor for the purposes of criminal sexual activity, and conspiring to entice minors to travel and engage in illegal sex acts. She is awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail. A trial that was to begin July 12, 2021 but has been delayed till the fall at the request of Maxwell.

 You now know all you need to know about Ghislaine Maxwell for the purposes of finishing this piece.

The HBO documentary poised a question and instead of answering it, they’ve pretty much left this viewer with repetitive thoughts and disrupted sleep while trying to answer that very question… ‘Ghislaine Maxwell, Co-Conspirator or Victim?’.

Victim: a person who suffers from a destructive or injurious action or agency / a person who is deceived or cheated, as by his or her own emotions or ignorance, by the dishonesty of others, or by some impersonal agency

My first thought when this question came up: “Wow HBO, if I was a victim of Epstein’s depravity, I’d be so pissed at you right now. Daring to group in the woman accused (several times over) of basically being a fancy pimp and securing playthings for her rich, giant-faced brute and his pals, with the young women whose lives and brain chemistry (yes, I said that: see TRAUMA) have been forever altered by Epstein’s fuckery… BOLD”.

But that thought took me to this thought: “Ghislaine was a Daddy’s girl. And as we know, her dad was a fiend. It is repeated many times in print, that Robert Maxwell conditioned his daughter and corrupted her character. In some twisted way, there might be a case in which she is in fact, a victim. A victim of a severe patriarchal environment that started at a young age and was instrumental in forming her concepts of success, decency and love (given and received)”.

My mind then went straight to this:

 She was raised by a plump, rotten human being and most likely, wanted to please her dad… as most daughters often do, and perhaps never thought to question anything. How many of us are guilty of that?

Robert Maxwell passes (Ghislaine has maintained that he was murdered, but with no evidence to support her claims) and the now lost, without a compass Ghislaine, finds her way to Jeffery Epstein.

I think there is something to be said for what and who we attract into our lives. And for what and who we allow to stay in our lives. I’m just going to assume that the majority of people in this world do not willingly desire to attract destructive, soul sucking wankers into their lives, but have had to expunge a number of them from their existence. Full vision doesn’t always mean you are not blind. Love can be murky and really fuck up those rose-coloured glasses.

Co-Conspirator: A co-conspirator is a fellow conspirator - someone engaged in a secret plan by multiple people to do something evil or illegal

By this definition, Ghislaine Maxwell should be spending a great deal of the rest of her life in prison.

She saw bad stuff. She blinded herself to bad stuff. She facilitated bad stuff. She became the bad stuff.

If I was the prosecuting attorney, I might end with those four sentences. But make it all dramatic… throw in a brief pause after each one… maybe do the Bill Clinton “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” thumb gesture:

 On second thought, considering how intertwined he could be in all of this… I’d most likely just use the classier karate chop into the open palm to bring my points home:

 (Side Note: if you really hate your life, try a deep dive on active hand gestures and how they often provide social leverage)

 So, to finally answer HBO’s question: ‘Ghislaine Maxwell, Co-Conspirator or Victim?’…

As I was told numerous times in counselling… “You are not at fault for the things that happened to you when you were young and had no control. But as an adult, you can’t let those past experiences define you and your actions. If you do, then you are responsible for the things you do now”.

Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.

Ghislaine is not at fault for how she was raised or groomed, but if she lured just ONE girl/woman into Epstein’s clutches to be raped and trafficked, then she is absolutely responsible and should be held fully accountable.

She was a victim who turned into not just a co-conspirator but also a lying coward.

I believe ALL the women.

[missmentelle]

hi, i was wondering how exactly you can tell if you are bipolar. for a long time now, i will be intensely happy one day, then be massively depressed the next & it changes rather rapidly. sometimes it depends on something & sometimes it doesn’t. im not sure if this is a side effect of my adhd meds i take or if theres something wrong with me or if this is normal. on really bad days, i will cut & even attempt suicide but then feel stupid when i feel happy/okay the next day. (part 1)

often my mood can even alter between hours, its not just daily. i dont exactly have a lot of people in my life who i can turn to & talk about this kind of stuff. i try to bring up stuff with my psychiatrist (who ive been seeing weekly for over 3 years now) but its hard for me. if there was something wrong, wouldnt she say something by now? i feel like im overreacting, and im not sure theres even anything to BE done. i dont mean to whine and complain & sorry for making this so long. (part 2)I can’t offer you a definitive diagnosis, but I can tell you that what you’re describing sounds a lot like something called ultra-rapid cycling bipolar disorder, which is a version of bipolar disorder where your moods shift wildly over the course of several days or even several hours. I don’t know if this could be a result of your ADHD medication, but that’s something your psychiatrist could discuss with you. In any case, this is absolutely not normal - people do have mood swings and “off” days, but it’s not normal to suddenly become so depressed that you self-harm or attempt suicide. This is an issue that’s making you completely miserable and putting your safety at risk, and you absolutely need to bring this up with your psychiatrist as soon as you can. You don’t need to feel stupid or ashamed here - what’s happening to you is a result of your brain chemistry, and it isn’t your fault. You deserve help here. Psychiatrists can be very helpful, but they aren’t wizards - your psychiatrist can’t know that there’s something wrong unless you tell her. Most people are able to hold it together for a weekly one-hour appointment; unless you’re visibly cycling through moods during your sessions with her, she has no way to know that you’re struggling with this. It’s really important that you find a way to tell her, especially since this is leading you to self-harm and attempt suicide. If you have a hard time saying it out loud, you could send her an email, write her a note, practice saying it to her with a friend or just by yourself in a mirror, or avoid looking at her when you tell her. But you do need to tell her. This is something that she wants to talk about with you. She did years and years of school to get this job because she wanted to make people feel better, and this is an issue she can definitely help you with, if you give her a chance to. And you deserve to be helped.Best of luck to you!

[sparklyeevee]

Yeah, this is... Complicated. Like... Psych meds are chemicals that alter your brain chemistry in ways that affect how you think, perceive, and/or feel. Distinction between psych meds and anything that does that but isn't a psychiatric medication is mostly socially constructed. Everything about like, alcohol, for example, that makes it not a psychiatric medication is something that could plausibly change.

Even if literally all mental illness is the result of basically stress, trauma, and other life shittiness, (which, it probably isn't, but schizophrenia can look very different in different cultures and even with conditions that are for sure genetic and don't vary cross culturally in their symptoms, the amount of distress and impairment those symptoms cause still depends on what else you have going on, so honestly who knows - we know so fucking little about the human brain), and even if that meant it was realistic to aim for a society where none of that happens at all (it isn't - you can get trauma from falling out of a tree), I don't at all see where that would mean that using psychiatric medication is like, a bad thing to do in the hear and now where shitty life stuff does happen and people do have mental illnesses. When you're having a bad time, doing something that doesn't hurt anyone else, using the tools available, so that you're having a less bad time, is inherently a reasonable thing to do, and the fact that in the long run a more comprehensive solution might be possible... doesn't affect that at all.

I see like, two arguments against this, mostly, one of which is valid but kinda tangential, and the other of which isn't valid at all.

1. The existence not only of psych meds but of the prevailing social paradigms around them, means that sometimes people get told "Your distress bothers me, take medication so you will stop experiencing it", when they would rather address their distress a different way. And that's bad. Depending on the power dynamics involved, sometimes people are forced to take psychiatric medication when they don't want to, because their distress is inconvenient to someone else. That's very bad. But none of that is inherently caused by the availability of psychiatric medication, nor exacerbated by people voluntarily using it.

2. Some people seem to believe that since psychiatric medication can increase our ability to tolerate the shitty conditions of capitalism, oppression, etc, it would be better not to use them, because if we are less able to tolerate those conditions, we will be more motivated to change them. This overlooks the fact that not personally wanting to die all the time does not impair my ability to use my noodle, notice that everything is shit, and want to do something about it, and that my ability to actually, y'know, fight the system and stuff, is better when I am doing okay than when I'm severely depressed, and much better when I'm alive than when I'm dead. I think they just kinda forget that death is a thing, and I find that unsettling.

If u criticize the way the psychiatric field tends to give people medication without addressing environmental factors causing their depression and anxiety I get it and im with you, but if that criticism for you takes the form of implying that all psych meds are useless and products of capitalism I need you to know that you're actively hurting psychotic and especially schizophrenic people who literally cannot function or exist without paranoid psychosis unless they're on antipsychotics

[janeykath318]

The Trials Of Being A Bodyguard 10

[twitchesandstitches]

Hyper Brain Jane Growth Comm

Commission fic roughly set in the Labbound AU by me and Alt-Hammer, but non-canon to that AU.

Contains hyper growth typical of my work, but is mainly focused around hyper brain/head expansion.

-----

It had been many years on Earth, since the Lalonde family had made the mysterious discoveries of cloning and other technologies. Along with the other three great families, the secrets of gene splicing and the beginning of modding: self-controlled evolution and altering the body, and with it, the birth of the troll species, and others to come.

But in those days, the legality of their existence had been a serious conflict, and that was always on the minds of some of those, like Meenah the Elder, and her heiress.

“Fer frick’s sake, girl,” the husky and incredibly resonant voice from the speaker said, making little metal fixtures in the walls rattle. “Sit up and quiet hiding when you talk. You’re my heiress. You should be making people quiver and cower when you sit up!”

“They do, ma’am, really!”

A snort. “Trying ta avoid yer tits knocking ‘em down doesn’t count.”

The voice, for its vulgarity, was a beautiful voice. The kind that hotwired your brain and hit the ‘YES MA’AM’ buttons. A primordial voice of authority, one suited to an ancient warlord or a modern corporate officer; someone of a less charitable mindset might ask if there was genuinely a difference between the two: same amount of ruthlessness, and while the carnage was less physical, it was no less obvious.

Jane Egbert - though she took the surname Crocker as pat of the legal technicalities to be the heiress to Meenah the Elder, troll celebrity, top CEO and firm fighter on behalf of trolls and all the other sapients to come from Lalonde Labs - did not feel she had the same effect, even when she was easily the most physically intimidating human in history, if you discounted fertility statues that had quite a strong resemblance to her. She was aware of the fact that she was an ultra-curvy giant of a woman, nearly as much troll as human from all the genetic treatments and even the human percentage was balanced with more cerebral-enhancing cybernetics than anyone else on record. Beneficiary of fertility on par with a troll and the enhancements to breast size and milk production that came with it, and quite a few visible signs of trollish traits, as though she were transforming into one.

It was quite a sight to see a woman more than eight feet tall, with hips even wider than that and breasts quite visibly requiring special bras to absorb the excess milk she was producing, looking mortified. She was so big that any normal human could be driven to stunned meekness by the sheer scale of her; a Polynesian woman, she had grown to immense size from all the breast enhancement, muscle reinforcing, fertility amplifying, and general boost treatments known to the public at large, and quite a few that weren’t. Girthy, a bit chubby, she had the motherly look of someone fully prepared to gestate dozens of children in a single sitting, even if she had never actually had any. Her proportions were massive, on par with trolls; breasts as large as beach balls scaled up to her size and weighing several hundred pounds each, a mammoth backside that required several chairs each… she looked exactly like the model superwoman of the modern age, and had featured in the Crocker Corp’s posters. ‘Take our stuff’, they seemed to say, ‘and you can be gorgeous like her!’

That was before the… other treatments. The ones designed to make a perfect heiress out of her, and more akin to the woman who had adopted her, with all the strengths thereof. She didn’t have human ears, but smaller versions of the colorful frond-like displays that grew from sea dwelling trolls, and feathery gills grew along her throat and the sides of her body. She couldn’t wear gloves, not with those heavy claws and webbed fingers (perfect for swimming), and long, powerful fangs shone in her mouth. Even her eyes, bright blue, had a hint of trollish slit pupils. To say nothing of the small but functional pair of wings flapping from her back!

From the speaker, a kind of two-way phone made popular by the corporation that Jane was poised to take over some day, there came a sigh. On the other end of it, somewhere on the other side of the world, Meenah Peixes the Elder was rolling her eyes. “Try to at least look cool in front of the workforce while you hold the fort down, okay? Ya wanna be taken seriously, try not to blush at everything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said.

There was a pause. “...Just ma’am?”

“Yes, Condesce?” Jane tried again, using the nickname that the elder Peixes’ batch friends had coined in their youth. The Signless, the Dolorosa, and the rest; they had become troll celebrities and unintentionally set the stage for their growing people’s culture to take titles as a form of self-identity.

There was a longer pause. And then a more heartfelt sigh. “You CAN call me Meenah. Y’know. Or mother. Or… look, you don’t work for me, okay? I ain’t yer boss.”

Jane wiggled uncomfortably, causing something small and metal to glint in her cleavage. “...Yes, ma’am,” she said, looking at the ground, or at least her cleavage. It was too big to actually see any floor. She clutched at the metal object, like holding the hand of a loved one to feel more confident.

There was one last final sigh, and it spoke to a lot of regrets. Mistakes made with parenting, words you couldn’t take back, and one last attempt to try to fix it, with a fear of doing it wrong all over again. “...You’ll keep me posted on important crap going on, yeah? Like that meeting coming up.”

Jane’s heart sank, and her stomach felt queasy. “Yes. I’ll… I’ll represent our cause well.”

Meenah the Elder sighed, and there was a strong impression of eyes being rolled. “I’m doing my part here, but you’ll have to make a good case. C’mon! You can do it. I believe in ya, girl.”

“I’ll… I’ll do it!”

“That’s the spirit!” There was a sound, as if of a kiss being blown. “Don’t tell no one, but love ya.” The speaker disconnected.

Jane sighed in relief, and sat back, and her free hand came up to rub at her temples, right above a sub-dermal implanted augmenting her brain’s processing power. “Ugh…” She winced at what felt like a fairly rough headache.

The metal in her hand shimmered to life; this was not a metaphor. It glowed brightly, with a faint red color striking against a black casing, and a single bright red light glowed. It was alive, a person in its own right. Not life in the same way as cells and blood, but life in electricity and silicon: a true artificial intelligence. This particular one, having a wicked sense of humor and taste for irony that had probably been inherited from the family that had produced him, had named himself after a famous antagonistic AI; he called himself Hal Strider.

Various mechanical synapses wired into her kicked in, and the comforting presence of a familiar mind extruding into hers, at the border of consciousness, rather like a worshipper prostrating themselves before a deity. Hal’s mind hovered, and remotely took control of a small set of speakers Jane carried for this purpose. “Sup, Jane. You’re kinda freaked out.”

Jane groaned. “How can you tell…?” She asked with only a bit of sarcasm.

“I got my ways. Reading that your hearts, all three of ‘em, are pumping mad. Blood pressure is… hoo, that’s not healthy. Shoot, your muscles are tense, especially the ones built into support your… chest. And you’re getting one monster of a headache.” He stopped, perhaps in apology. “Also, it’s kind of obvious you’re freaked out. I’ll order some meds for that headache.”

“You’re a treat, Hal.” Jane slowly got up, dreading going to work. She enjoyed being an administrator, but that meeting loomed over her, and she felt queasy at it. ‘It’s just the possible future of extreme modding, all the potential benefits of self-controlled evolution and all that at stake. And if it’s penalized, trolls and carapacians and the other sapients could be legally prosecuted for having them built in… it’s all on ME.’

She sighed again. “No pressure.” She stood up straight, causing some hefty sloshing from her massive breasts, and cracking from her suit. Oh well. She had a job to do! She pocketed Hal’s corporeal container back into her cleavage, where he sank deep, right against her chest… right against her heart. It beat a bit faster, but definitely not from stress. She patted her upper swell of mammary, enjoying the feel of him so close. “Any medical issues to report?”

There was the briefest pauses from Hal, and Jane later would think this was probably a relevant point. As an artificial intelligence, Hal thought FAST; any hesitation from him was just for deliberate effect, or imitating human social behavior. He thought so fast that he never needed any time to check and report.

But any kind of pause, from him, was the equivalent of waiting several hours to just think really, really hard about something important.

In the span of that pause, Hal looked over Jane’s biology, checked her cybernetic implants, and all the rest. This was actually his job, at least in the official records, because ‘health care officer’ for the world’s most important heiress looked a lot better than ‘personal companion’ for a paycheck. There was some interesting activity going on with her brain. She was thinking so much lately, and her intelligent implants were processing over time, and there was something going on there… Hal noticed something odd there, in her brain chemistry. Chemical markers of something else-

Oh. Yes, of course. The… stuff Meenah the Elder had used to transform Jane from an ordinary, if modded, human into the behemoth she was growing into. All Hal knew about it is that it was absolutely off the books, and had come in a syringe. It hadn’t been manufactured; it had come from somewhere, and best as he could work out from the data he’d mined in old communications between the founding families, had something to do with some site that had started… well, everything.

No one did know exactly how Mom Lalonde, Roxy the First, had created the technologies and genetic splicing techniques to create the trolls in the first place. Or how easy the creation of the carapacians was, as if she had been working from a template. And there were other mysteries there… like that mutagenic stuff Meenah the Elder had used on Jane, treating it first with her own genetics, as if to fashion Jane into her own daughter in the physical sense.

It would seem it was still in Jane’s body. It was working all the time, slowly transforming her in subtle ways, making her a true fusion of human and troll, producing all kinds of mutations, and now it was interlacing with Jane’s cerebral implants and intelligence-boosting mods. And it was doing… something.

In that pause, Hal took a long time to figure out if he should tell Jane about all that, as he was honor bound to do, or if it was better not to worry here. In the end, AIs have hearts as much as anyone. Jane was stressed enough as it were. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and onto Jane’s augmented reality-capable glasses, he made a little avatar of himself giving a thumbs up and a wink.

Jane smiled. “You’re sweet,” she said, and off they went to the offices.

Things did not improve much from there.

Several hours in: several hours of signing off on paperwork in her adoptive mother’s name, personally answering letters about their work that ranged from the merely offensive to the politically extremely disastrous if handled wrong. And then the mod stuff, addressing the medical aspects that were so crucial to their long-term success; they had to focus on the benefits of it to stay relevant in the eyes of the world, and they needed to fix so much…

Jane sighed in her office, Hal close at hand and presently extending himself into a terminal for this purpose. Letters flashed as he relayed several messages from Feferi and Roxy the Younger, and their suggestions for improving mods, and sent them to the labs once Jane gave her okay.

With the pain in her head, like something was trying to hammer its way out of here and making shocks that were hurting her spine, balancing the needs of modifications that could prove vital to the company’s success, and the welfare of all trolls and other beings, Jane was feeling physically ill; it was just too much, all at once.

“I can do this,” she mumbled to herself. “I can do it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Hal said soothingly. “Hasn’t that stuff I got you done anything yet?”

Jane clutched her head. She swore she could feel her skull moving beneath her fingers. Little hairline segments opening, and things sliding around, very gradually. And...pressing against her fingers? It was an illusion from the pain.

It had to be. “It’s not working…!” She hissed, shutting her eyes. Hal turned off visuals to her glasses, blanketing it in blessed darkness. “Ah… that’s better.”

Hal did the digital equivalent of relaxing… and then froze up. Aw shit, he thought.

The alert got past him, and a video call appeared on a TV. “Hello, miss acting executive,” said an oily voice doing its best to be deliberately unpleasant.

Jane stared at it. “Uhhh. Oh no…”

She was a human woman, of ordinary and unmodded build, and she had a certain look of someone who just love bringing bad news, and takes too much joy in being unpleasant. She smiled, thinly. “May I assume you are the representative of your company’s chief officer in this meeting?” she said, and wiggled her fingers at ‘chief officer’. She probably had wanted to say ‘animal’ instead, and gave the words a nasty spin that had the same effect.

Jane groaned. Dealing with bigots who openly wanted trolls declared subhuman creatures was not something she was fit to do in her state. She blinked hard, trying to focus; the whole world, even with her glasses going to full visibility again, swam in and out of focus. She cried out, pain stabbing hard right from inside her skull.

And again, and another one, and one more, harder than before: she clutched her head, oh god it HURTS!

The representative stared at Jane with poorly concealed distaste, eyes lingering sourly upon Jane’s gigantic cleavage, the faint moisture visible upon her suit from inside, and the other bits of what she had once referred to as ‘oversexed grotesquery’. “Perhap we might… reschedule,” she said nastily. “To account for your troubles. An implant misfiring, perhaps.”

“N-no!” Jane cried out. “I can attend- ah!” she clutched her head, falling onto the desk. Her breasts made it creak as they slammed down, and the rest of her bored down all the way, and the poor desk couldn’t take all her weight. It slowly folded inwards, and then burst, exploding over the room.

The monitor fell onto the floor. It was cracked, and where Jane heard the sound of dollars going up in smoke for nothing, she also heard the representative sounding pleased about her suffering. “This, I’m so afraid, will not look good for the use of implants and modifications. Not if they can backfire so terribly. I will recommend that we postpone the meeting. Ta~” The video ended.

Hal could sometimes be blunt. “Aw, shit.”

“No, no no no!” Jane thrust a fist onto the floor and it shook. She almost punched right through it. “I fucked up! I was working for barely one day, I was supposed to be a good heiress and I already fucked up!” She clutched her head. “And my head hurts, it hurts, oh goddammit stop HURTING!” She raised her head up, to headbutt the ground in a desperate attempt to do SOMETHINg to make it stop.

“Jane, no!” Hal cried out.

Jane yelled, in anger and pain and frustration but mostly the unending agony in her head-

The room went blue.

Psionics flooded out from her, energy bubbling up and exploding outwards in a single pulse, and the walls exploded. Or they ceased to exist, or exploded SO fast, and in such fine form, that they might as well have been annihilated. The blast kept going but got weaker, bowling desks over and trapping the employees. It kept going, setting off alarms and rattling drinking coolers, and all the way to the outer office windows, where the glass shook. This was pretty impressive, when they’d been built to tank anything short of a direct meteor strike.

Hal, silently, noted that Jane’s psionic put out had just risen to that expected of a fully trained goldblood specialist. “Jane…?” Hal asked. “How long have you been able to do that?”

Jane stared open-mouthed, a few bits of rubble falling on her. “I… can’t.” She swallowed. “And I just keep digging myself deeper. Oh, look at all this damage…!” she clutched her head against another fresh stab of pain, and now, she didn’t even notice a swell of blue from her hands flare up at it. She wasn’t in much of a position to be aware that as the pain rose, so did her psionic ratings, while something in her head changed.

Hal did, though. “Uh, Jane?”

“WHAT.”

Hal gave up. “I’ll call someone to help you get out of here.”

Jane’s impulse to insist she could handle this and convince the officials not to postpone the meeting faltered beneath another brutal swell, and a grinding sound in her head. “Oh God… okay, okay! That, that would be best. Okay. Do it. Please…?”

She laid down there for some time, her head grinding and the pain swelling and rising in random waves. And there, Jane realized something odd. With each peak of pain, when the hurting hit the point where it was so bad she could barely think, she kept having ideas.

She didn’t know where they came from. It was as if something was pushing them together, and some part of her was working things out. That the pain was making something happen, and she was figuring things, working through them.

As Hal ran his request out to the first available person, Jane held a hand out and fumbled in the rubble. Still laying down, she found a little tablet that had survived the destruction. She couldn’t look directly at it, not with that screen glare, but she could feel it, and she typed out on it. She sent it.

As an attendant was brought in to escort Jane home, the labs were surprised to receive a write up on a mod formula that had been puzzling them for a while; it was a perfect one, an absolutely ideal suggestion that stood up to all testing. And the really tricky bit?

When they’d sent it upstairs for review, it had only been a concept. Not a fully fleshed out mod; that took months of constant research and testing to do, and Jane had finished it in moments. She’d figured it out.

Upstairs, Jane was being helped to her feet with the help of a black carapacian who called himself the Archive Ranger. “Up you get, ma’am,” he said cheerfully, supporting her massive frame with a small forklift.

“Uhhh…” Jane groaned.

“Uh, Janey. If you give me access, my implants are all over your nervous system and brain; I can shut off your pain receptors for a while-”

“DO IT, PLEASE.”

Hal did so. Jane felt satisfying numbness, and almost fell over. She clutched her head, in relief-

And froze. There was rubble in the way, obscuring her head from sight, but she still felt something round there. Protruding out from her skull, inhumanly. And she still felt her head grinding, shifting…

Transforming. Growing.

For, as the rubble fell away when she was lifted up, it revealed her head in full.

And that, from directly above her eyes, her head had swelled into a perfect sphere.

The Archive Ranger peered. “Um. You, uh. Feeling okay, ma’am?”

Jane breathed in. “What the fu-”

-----

It was a few hours later. The pain was still gone, courtesy of Hal’s presence, and that just left room for Jane to get extremely upset.

Well, not upset, per se. More angry. Or ‘blisteringly furious’.

“You could have told me!” She yelled, stomping around in one of the palatial expanses of her private suite, doing her best not to fall over. She’d been figuring that out for a while, but now she was having to balance not just gigantic hips and hyper-productive breasts larger than her torso, but… well.

That. She felt up her head again, gingerly, as if trying to remind herself it was real. Her fingers slid up from her jawline, to her temple, and there. Where she expected hair, her skull had grown up, swelling upwards, outwards, at a fairly steep angle. Her fingers slid across a strange combination of trollish, human and mechanical bits, all of it growing together in a curious melding. Swells of biomechanical implants that had grown larger from some unknown process, chitinous structure growing beneath the skin to support her new growth, and human skin, thicker than usual. And yet another troll bit, interwoven into ordinary brown skin, vein-line conduits of psionic energy, glowing a vibrant shade of light blue.

She was now in the same league as the Captor line of trolls, in terms of raw psionic power. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Mostly she was concerned about how, according to the x-ray scans that had been taken, her brain had expanded. It had grown outwards, and her skull’s expanded size, for all its disturbing girth, was actually a fairly thin layer. Robust and armored, to be sure, but almost all the mass was her brain.

Her thoughts moved fast, so fast they doubled in on themselves, they criss-crossed and planted new mini-thoughts that blossomed on their own, to unexpectedly arrive at another point and yield insights that felt so perfect, so sublime. It was a pleasure, feeling the depth of her thoughts, the sudden clarity of it.

“You could have told me,” she said again, trying to hold on to the anger. And not focus on how good it felt, thinking so… so profoundly, with such perfect clearness. And the air on her enlarged head felt so nice. It was odd, but so pleasant. Her body shivered at the sensations, and after the horrific headaches of earlier, this was a welcome change of pace.

“I…” Hal hesitated. Another one of those little pauses, so significant in a hyper intelligent AI. “Shit. You’re right. You’re correct, okay? I was scared, okay? I thought you were too stressed out, and when i picked up there was something going on with your head, I figured… I don’t know. Just a little mutation.”

Jane indicated her expanded cranium. She pointed at what had presumably been a intelligence-boosting implant. Somehow, it had grown larger, from a sub-dermal machine to a large swath of smoothly moving machinery, with an oily motion, arcing upwards into a shape uncannily like a troll’s horn. “This? A little?”

“I didn’t realize what was going on! Okay!?”

“How!? You’re a super intelligent AI, how could you not pick that up!?”

Hal tried to figure that one out. It wasn’t as if Jane’s changes had been subtle. “Best as I can figure out, your skull changing was the cause of all that pain, and, I don’t know, something with it boosted your psionics. Built in a better energy network? It interfered with my readings too much, and I was stretched thin. I had no idea any of that was happening!”

“Hmph.” Jane tapped her foot. “Okay… okay then.” Several dozen ideas ran around, meshed together, and sixteen conclusions presented themselves. “That sounds about right.”

“I suppose we could call Meenah the Elder,” Hal said. “We can figure something out-”

“No!” Jane cried out, her eyes wide, ad psionic energy rising around her. “We can’t! It hasn’t even been a day! I need to show her I can do this! I’m a worthy heiress, I need to prove it!”

“But-”

“I can handle this!” She glared at the nearest camera that she knew he was seeing her through.

It lowered dejectedly. Hal gave in. “Okay, okay… so. What do we do then.”

Jane glanced to a nearby computer. She sighed, going over to it and sitting down in the quadruple chair arrangement, suitable to her gigantic backside. “Well, for one, I start working from home. I might as well set a good example; even unexpectedly mutated, I still do as I promised!”

“Wait, don’t forget to-”

There was a crash. And the distinctive sound of a troll-scale chair falling over.

“And perhaps we can get something up her to support my head,” Jane said, from the floor.

Several days passed.

Several days of heady, rampant mutation.

Jane sat at a bench of sorts, examining a holographic blueprint of what appeared to be a purely synthetic body; a robotic shell, capable of fulfilling all relevant biological capabilities, particularly those related to reproduction.

She leaned forward. A harness looped to her head, linked to several wheeled poles to support her head, moved with her.

Her head was far from reaching its final growth. It had only gotten bigger, nearly doubling in size; it was nearly as large as Jane herself, and strangely it didn’t feel that heavy. Jane suspected that her psionics were being naturally diverted into supporting its weight, a minor use of her growing powers she didn’t even have to think about, and Hal’s investigations supported this.

Several glowing spots, reservoirs of psionic energy, shimmered like cyan sunspots on the side of her head. Peaking atop it, her cybernetic bits had just gotten bigger, angling further and further, projecting into distinctive horn shapes, which felt rather appropriate to her.

All of today’s office work is done, she thought to herself, the notion blazing past so fast it had a dozen other variations analyzing the idea from every angle. Her thoughts were coming faster these days, and more clearly; it was like having twenty other Janes thinking with her, and each day, her head got bigger, and her intelligence seemed to be growing as much as her brain was; she felt the peak of some strange singularity, hovering before her.

Surely it wasn’t usual to find… pleasure in just thinking? But here she was, a cool shiver sliding up her back with every moment of pontification. It felt like being milked; an almost shameful pleasure for how different it was from the human norm, and there was so MUCH of it!

The work of an entire week’s worth, finished before breakfast. Jane contemplated that, as fast as she could pull off work now, having an entire day with nothing in particular to do felt a bit daunting. Now what?

Thus, her pet project.

Jane, in addition to her brain, was significantly bigger than she’d been that day she had come from the office. Her appetite had grown truly terrifying; she felt compelled to just eat and eat, fueling her brain’s expansion, but it was going to the rest of her body. She was wider, taller… mostly a lot taller. She wasn’t sure how much so, but she’d had to smash through doorways, mostly with her expanding hips, and none of her clothes fit either. She expected she was upwards of ten feet tall now, and only getting bigger.

“So, what are you working on here, Jane?” Hal said, a camera tilting towards her.

“I assume you recall the project to create truly functional bodies for synthetics,” Jane said,typing on a keyboard and entering in new schematics.

“Hah, yeah. Of course. It’s only been everything I ever wanted.” He made an irritable synthetic noise. “Trapped in these shells that can’t feel, away from you except by proxy… it sucks. It’s literally the worst. Get a dictionary, look up ‘The Worst’, and you’ll find these sucker shells next to ‘em.”

“Yep.” Jane’s head did not wobble much, being about the only part of her that didn’t. It was smooth, gleaming faintly, with not a bit of hair at all now. It did crackle faintly with blue light as she thought about several significant things at once. “The problem with making a chassis that can support a digital consciousness; not being the root of it, but just a channel for it.”

‘The same way I ride in whatever shell I can get.”

“Yes. And of course…” Jane felt conscious of her potential. Her broodmother potential, in fact. “No one’s been able to work out a way to make a synthetic body that’s actual virile. Capable of reproducing.”

Hal paused for a significant amount of time. “...No. They haven’t.” Bitterness and longing twanged from his words.

“I expect that there’s ways to make synthetic reproduction work through creative application of genetic templates and delivery systems,” Jane said thoughtfully. She was built for breeding, she’d redesigned herself to be the ultimate reproductive force just like any troll woman, but… she’d never had any person she really wanted to do that with. Except for one, and he was physically incapable of it. He didn’t even have a body.

Jane glanced down at the schematic. Until now, at least.

Hal spoke up. Something seemed to have been on his mind. “We can, you know, reverse the change. Get into talk with Roxy or Feferi. They know mutation better than anyone else. If you don’t want this, we can reverse it…?” The tone hung in the air, a delicate question.

Jane let the thousands of possibilities for rebuttal soar inside her mind, circling about and becoming more loud and furious, and she reveled in how good it felt to let the thoughts grow. The clarity of her thinking, the speed of it. She felt so… smart.

“Nah,” Jane said, opting for gentleness. She reached into her cleavage with a sloshy sound as her boobs shifted, and cradled Hal with a tough. “I’m… fine with this.”

And that was the amazing part. There was no lie there. She really was happy with this.

Reflectively, she thought that it would have been surprising to others. This mutation was by far even more extreme than her fusion of troll and human traits; she’d been straddling the line between species as is.

But, as shocking as it was, as utterly inhuman this change was…

Between the pleasure of her thoughts and the vastness of her growing intellect, the expansion of her psionic abilities, and the simply physical sensations, this felt good. The thought of going back was horrifying, and it made her feel faint, and small.

She never wanted to feel small again.

That reminded her; the meeting had been rescheduled after all, the bulk of her growth rendering her unable to attend any discussions about that, and soon it would be time to prove she could handle her duties.

She swallowed. She still wasn’t feeling confident enough…

But perhaps, she thought as twenty two ways of pretending to be confident and steely of purpose instantly were plain to her, she could fake it really well. She could out think her foe here, for sure.

Her stomach rumbled. “Hal, sweetie, can you order a fifty-course meal? I’m feeling peckish and growing this much is hungry work!”

“I’ll order up the tailors again,” Hal said dryly.

She waved a finger scoldingly at the camera. “Don’t tease.”

Weeks passed as the meeting was arranged, and Jane went through a period of ‘oh god I’m making so much trouble happen, this expense is all because of me’, but some common sense came through when she thought about the situation. As Hal agreed, even if this wouldn’t look good for her image that they had to postpone a meeting on her account, the time spent organizing everything, from catering to preparing agendas to securing an appropriate venue with the right amount of prestige, was time Jane had to prepare herself.

She wouldn’t have been prepared on that meeting day. And her thoughts moved fast, and examining everything from all the possible angles, the idea emerged within her wondrous brain that she could still have done it that day. By the skin of her teeth, perhaps, but she still could have secured victory.

Meenah the Elder had all the world to pick from for her heiress. She had chosen Jane, and now Jane had the perspective to think that maybe the wily leviathan had seen something she hadn’t.

“An interesting choice of school,” Jane observed during her training regimen, as she called it. She sat at a table, laden with food to supercharge her body and a number of mutagenic package serums, running up in IVs to various parts of her body. Before here, surrounded by small mountains of food that Jane’s ravenous appetite considered a small snack, there was a small folder and it was opened to a record of the woman responsible for rearranging the meeting, seemingly just to mock Jane.

“How so?” Hal asked. Jane turned, and leaning over the table, there was a robot. It was Hal, at last in a new body, handcrafted by her. Not the most advanced sort, she had to admit, but it was the best she could do on short notice and Hal, Hal was not picky. A crude shape, similar to a crash test dummy, but he was there.

His body was just a test run, an essay in the craft she was creating all on her own. She’d make better ones. But he was holding her hand. He looked so small, for the body was human-sized, and she was already troll-sized, and his palm barely fit over one knuckle. But she could feel him, and he could feel her.

Even if she didn’t relish all the marvelous results of her enlarged brain, that alone would have made the change worth it.

“Take a look!” She handed the folder over, minding her head, and she had to lean down heavily to pass it down. Lots of things bumped into one another; her constantly swelling breasts, creaking heavily and wetly against her pajamas, made the table creak beneath them, and her expanded her almost crushed the dishes beneath it.

Hal took it. “School created by her parents, huh. And no non-humans allowed… blanket ban of AIs… charming. We’ve barely existed for more than a few decades, too. That’s a fast ban. I’m kind of proud; my people are truly irritating bastards! And her parents were also involved in politics were dealing. Nepotism there, I imagine.” He flipped through the rest of the folder, and just for fun, hacked into the relevant servers and pulled all information on her. “Okay, got the rest of it, so have fun with a personality outline. Good for strategies.”

Jane tapped her head smugly. “I’ve already figured that out, but you’re a dear. Thank you. I think I should begin my regimen for today, then.”

“No problem.” Hal began powering up the IVs, fluids pouring up into Jane. He considered one that ran up into her brain. “You’re sure about this, then?”

“Yes!” Jane’s expression was a little delirious.

Hal did a few calculations, mostly concerning the experimental nature of the mod she was applying to her brain. Mental enhancement, augmenting memory storage, processing speed, and introducing the capacity for creating shelf-minds to briefly examine a question from multiple perspectives. It was not terribly subtle as an enhancement; most of the other Crocker Corp mods of this nature simply amplified existing capacity, but this one did rearrange the structure of the brain to improve it.

He looked up. Jane’s brain was bigger than she was now; several times bigger than her, eclipsing her and it was still growing. Her skull had fully reshaped around it into a kind of cartilaginous support as hard as armor, complex networks of psionic light producing a fascinatingly complex arrangement around its curves. He wasn’t sure how this stuff would change her brain… but if Jane wanted it, he wouldn’t argue.

Hal happily considered himself an absolute bastard, but when it came to Jane, he was a doormat. “Full force on those mod delivery systems!” Jane commanded, and he did so.

She squeaked, happily, as they hit her system. Many of them were amplification mods, designed to expand on your existing shape and traits (and existing mods), and since Jane was so modded up, they had a lot to work with. Her clothes creaked, built to support her massive body but unable to withstand the pressures of her growth all at once: stitches popped as her breasts grew, expanding by a troll cup-size every few seconds, heavily swelling outwards. Her milk production ramped up, supported by some enhancements Jane had worked there with a clever little addition that made her breast tissue synchronize with her brain; more boob size and milk amplified her processing power,

Her hips grew, waistband creaking and popping right off. Her belly, already so heavy and dense, grew out and just over the swell of her groin, right onto thighs that were growing individual larger than some troll boys on the spot. It didn’t help her legs were getting longer, her bones expanding and reshaping to support such architectural weight. Jane visibly grew upwards, even as her hips grew wider than a couple trucks parked together, her backside swallowing up and crushing the chairs she sat on as it billowed out.

A foot taller. A couple feet, then three feet. Jane kept growing, taller and taller, right alone with her curves getting bigger, her enlarged breasts instantly filling up with brain-boosting milk, and she squealed with delight as her clothes popped right off, burst from her body’s best efforts to outdo itself.

And her brain was shifted, squirming from within. Jane’s eyes crossed as she momentarily blacked out. The change didn’t take long, but it was by far the most complex happening in her body, even exceeding the troll/human hybridization process. Hal supposed it was like upgrading a motherboard while the terminal was still on; you had to have some shutdown.

A fairly human brain design was being reworked from the ground up; her brain, beneath the skull, became a complex arrangement of zig-zags and criss crossed knots, not doing individual jobs but becoming a mass of interconnected processors, linked together to a central core. Amplifying it, adding additional layers to itself, and what that brain had originally been capable of was redefined, evolutionary missteps corrected instantaneously and improved upon.

At this point the other mods kicked in; the boosters, the additional intelligence amps, and some cybernetic upgrades.

Jane’s eyes opened and she squealed in delight when her head expanded. Her eyes almost went cross as her head began rapidly growing. Not an inch at a time, but rather, a whole foot, all in a second. Visibly her head swelled, skull reforming into something much more flexible, rather like an organic balloon, just to keep pace with it.

And like a balloon it grew! As if invisible hands were spreading raw material into it and kneading it all into place, Jane’s head grew larger, and larger still.  It got even rounder, with nodules of cybernetic relays, ports popping up like fins, curling whorls where her chitinous support plates and psionic networks knitted together and then grew bigger.

It was already bigger than Jane, who by now was over fifteen feet tall. A proper troll size, close to what Meenah the Elder had been at her age. A brain over sixteen feet around, nearly twenty five feet across, radiating enough raw psionic energy to erase a small mountain-

And it was still growing. It pulsed from within, glowing blue with just a hint of more neon fuchsias.

And Jane gasped, on the verge of something grand and alien, but good. Her eyes shone like someone who saw the shape of the universe, and the code thereof. She put her hands up to her head, eyes wide and full of delight. “I can see it! I understand it!”

“Understand… what?” Hal asked, baffled.

Jane took a deep breath and nearly shouted, “Everything!”

The weeks of waiting, and additional growth for Jane and all her different plans to be worked out, came to an end. The meeting, and its possible implications for the future of modding and the Lalonde offspring species, was upon them.

Jane was late, citing transportation difficulties. This did not pass unnoticed by the meeting crowd.

“The poor mutant has likely gotten herself wedged in some doorway or something,” the representative who had reorganized the meeting in the first place said with a tutting sound. “Or I dare say all those artificial hormones she’s flooded her body with have done terrible things to her memory.”

“Allowances for size problems were accounted for,” objected a thin fellow who was taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude to the whole matter at hand. He was starting to suspect some kind of personal vendetta from the first representative, and it was starting to grate at him.

The representative smirked. “They wouldn’t be necessary if they didn’t permit mutation into such overlarge forms.”

“If that was the case, the trolls would be harshly penalized for being born over the legal limit of size,” observed another person. They didn’t sound like they thought this was a good thing, or a bad thing. They just said it.

“Which would be cruel and inhumane, to punish people for their biology,” another woman said, more sternly. This got a few nods, but not many, from the fence-sitting portion of the representatives.

The first representative smiled in a very nasty way. “We’ll see.” Those on her side of the ‘lets just be absolute bastards’ crowd nodded. Though in a non committal way. They were intending on making life just the worst for trolls and those like them, but they weren’t going to put themselves onto a bullseye for it.

There came a sound, as if of footsteps, so heavy they made the walls shake even in this auditorium selected for its size. “Ah,” said another. “That must be-”

The door opened. A foot, in an elegant high heeled shoe longer than a child’s bed, crashed into the floor. Then the walls abruptly exploded into a perfect silhouette for something very big to step though; expanding hugely for monstrously huge hips, even more for breasts that looked like they needed trucks to support them, and then, an enormous globe glowing like a blue son.

The awe-inspiringly big woman, as large as any troll, dd not step in. She took another movement and floated into the air, seemingly as light as a leaf. Behind her, the wall rubble floated back into place and sealed itself back into solid form, as though it had never been broken.

“Her,” the figure who had spoken finished weakly.

“So sorry I am late,” Jane Crocker said smoothly, doing her best to hide her screaming nervousness and keep up the pretense of a Cool Business Leader Who Knows Her Stuff. “But then you were all warned, but I apologize again.”

They stared up at her, and the general attitude was of meekness and terrified shock; most of them had never actually been in the same room as a troll before, and weren’t the type to be around people who enjoyed modding themselves; it was their first time seeing someone three times as tall as a human, and so curvaceous, or floating with telekinesis.

It was probably more relevant to their shock that Jane's head, above her eyes, was a massive ball generating so much psionic energy it glowed like light, so thickly that it had taken on solid form and rather resembled her old hair style. Light blue, at that. And it was so massive, taking up a good chunk of the auditorium where she was; it had to measure almost fifty feet across, at least!

“What the fu-” the first representative, the dreadful one, started to say, her eyes widening in disgust and shock.

Jane held up a finger. “Ah. Please let’s not be vulgar?”

The representative stopped. She kept staring, openly repelled. “What have you done to yourself…?! You’re not even human anymore?”

Ah, perfect! Jane repressed the urge to smirk victoriously. Her foe was presenting an overly antagonistic front, and setting herself up to look like the bad guy. This was almost too easy. Her gigantic brain, and all the intellectual boosts it provided, gave her no less than twenty six thousand different routes, each perfectly assured to give her what she wanted, to discredit her foe’s position.

She selected one. ‘Miss, I apologize but whether or not a certain degree of modding voids my species is not the subject of this meeting, nor is it entirely appropriate to comment upon. May I ask that we proceed with the meeting?”

“Ah, yes,” another representative said, rather dazed. He coughed. “First on the agenda, I believe. Now, as representative of the… the biggest modding corporation in the world…” he paused again, trailing off. He kept glancing at Jane’s… well, everything. Jane had to admit that perhaps the low cut of her business suit was rather daring but she was feeling proud of her handiwork in reshaping herself.

“Are mods dangerous? Please!” This was the obnoxious representative, again. Jane had to give her credit; she was dogged. “You WOULD be the expert on that!”

Jane was pleased, despite the insult. The woman had likely prepared a line of questioning intended to poison the meeting against even a moderate position for modding, a subtle one, and Jane’s appearance had rattled her so much, she was showing her hand without thinking.

Making sure to keep her poise and calm demeanor intact, Jane replied evenly, her glasses gleaming in reflection from her cyan aura. A background susurration of her thinking went around, providing perfect counters to everything that might be used against her, and a stray thought observed that Jane’s glass effect probably made her look very spooky.

Jane made her point, briefly but winding her words with so much sincerity and earnestness that just objecting to them would be deeply offensive and cruel. Certainly it would make an opponent look bad, and the woman who had started all this looked uncertain how to proceed.

Appropriate, then. The whole reason that dreadful woman had rearranged the meeting had been to humiliate Jane. And Jane’s position of course; that was a political thing, Making your opponent look back, striking at their position through proxy.

Well, Jane thought. Two could play that role.

Jane reinforced her point, with no less than sixteen different arguments that also served as counter arguments for… well, at least twenty five separate retorts that were in the seventy-six most likely statements she would have to face. That was just off the top of her head of course; she had much stronger arguments in store if they really pushed her.

And she hadn’t cried at all, or showed a sign of her nervous she actually was! She was getting good at pretending to be confident.

About fifteen minutes in, there was something of a problem. “Well, I… ah… that is… I believe Miss Crocker, Egbert…? I think you’ve nicely summed up our side's position on the matter,” said a man who Jane felt certain was on her side. He looked faint, all the same, too unsteady to be certain of what he was really saying.

Jane blinked. She had seen something like this coming, her mighty brain had worked it out, but it was a surprise all the same. “But it’s only been fifteen minutes!”

“Well, yes,” said another. “You thought of everything you needed to say!”

The opponents shook their heads glumly. “What am I supposed to say to any of that?” one managed, shrugging. The first representative didn’t say anything at all. She had a venomous look, but from what Jane had gathered from her, that was just her default state of expression.

“...Oh,” Jane said, using those valuable pauses to work out what to say next. “I am so sorry, everyone!”

“No need, miss,” and this, surprisingly enough, came from the crowd opposed to her position. “I must say. I’m still not comfortably with the idea of injecting things into yourself, or eating things that do things like that to your body… but it’s helped you think faster and better, yes?”

“But of course,” Jane said primly. “The corporation I work at, we are laboring all the time to make such products available for everyone. In more subtle forms, if that pleases you.” She tapped a cybernetic extrusion that looked like the tines of a crown. “It may seem… an unusual choice, but we are all about personal freedom and respect of the body. I can assure you!”

“Certainly something to think about, ma’am,” the speaker replied, and Jane did not miss the switch from ‘Miss’ to ‘ma’am’.

This, of course, left them with nearly six hours left, and not really much less to do for the meeting. In all honesty, she hadn’t seen that coming at all.

Life went on.

Those with a political ear to the ground, or who a close on the research communities, heard of the restrictions around modding being lightened, or at least that they were being considered for it. Trolls, carapacians, and others sighed in relief, grmly waiting for the next government-sponsored threat to their existence, but felt a bit better about this support.

That said, the precise events of the meeting were unknown to most people. The authorities involved were too embarrassed to own up to what had actually happened, and were keeping the particulars under wraps.

This was certainly interesting to Meenah the Elder, known to her friends and employees as the Condesce. She fancied herself a shrewd political player, even if it was mostly of the ‘smash your face against the wall until the wall breaks’ kind of play, and badly wanted to know the specifics.

“Couldn’t tell ya, I didn’t actually attend,” said Li’l Hal, sitting across from her on her personal jet, and he was drinking a cup of milk that was apparently of excellent source, with a hint of alcoholic spice. This was interesting to the Condesce, as he was. Well. In a physical body.

Of all the people to have arrived specifically to meet her at the eve of her trip ending and escorting her to Jane’s mysterious post-politics retreat, she had not expected Jane’s assistant. Particularly in person.

Several questions posed themselves. She settled for, “How the hell did you get a body?”

Hal smirked. His physical body was obviously robotic; a shining and shimmering automaton modeled broadly on the human form, with a hint of carapacian, and facial features from all of those. He didn’t have many features from humans; his antipathy towards the species that had made them was rather infamous, and no doubt he had refused to honor his makers in any way possible with his design.

“Jane designed it,” he said.

She paused. “Janey.”

“Yep.”

“Janey built you a body.”

“Yep.”

“Janey, who has absolutely no interest in mechanics, worked out a branch of robotics we’ve been trying to figure out for decades.”

“Yep.”

“And in the course of mah little trip out, yeah?”

“If I said yep again, would that be redundant.”

Meenah the Elder scoffed. She sat back, a giantess even by the standard of trolls, her engorged figure so enormously swelled that it was said her bras qualified as architectural support and her custom chairs made from old tanks. “Sure, fine. Don’t tell me, chumbait.”

Hal chuckled again, in that very dark way he’d worked out to make people as worried as possible.

Meenah glanced outside. The jet approached an island, the sea visible far below. It offended her ancestry to be so far away from the sea, which was a bit perplexing when she was the first troll of her blood color, but you couldn’t help how you felt. “Huh. That’s the island the Harleys keep all their weird experiments at, right? Where they test the new lusii and keep those big monster things at.”

Hal glanced out the window. A pteranodon was drifting in view, without paying them much interest. “The dinosaurs and stuff. Yeah. Nepeta comes here for hunting and isolation when she’s pregnant.”

“So what’s Janey doing here.”

Hal scratched the side of his arm absently, apparently itching. “She’s working on something and she’s finishing a round of transformation. I guess she wanted to be alone in peace for it.” With a hint of smugness he added, “Except for me.”

“Don’t go breaking yer arm patting yourself on the back,” Meenah the Elder said dryly. “Ya only just got the body.” She glanced out, looking pleased. “Transformation, eh? Janey’s sent me messages ‘bout that. She finally growing big as a troll, like I always figured?”

“Well. Uh. She has. But…?” Hal felt uncharacteristically uncertain. “What DID Jane tell you?”

“Talk about how she’s gotten bigger. And she thinks she’s full of herself.”

“She what?”

“Y’know. She said she’s got a swelled head. Ain’t a bad thing. She knows how good she is, now!”

“I. okay. Wow. I think you may have misunderstood what she meant. I mean. She IS big like a troll now, but-”

“But what?” Meenah the Elder frowned. “Whatta ya getting at?”

Hal considered just telling her, and decided against it. Firstly, it would be a breach of Jane’s trust, telling people without her say so. Secondly, she wanted to greet Meenah the Elder in person, on this eve of her great success. And three, and perhaps most importantly, it was gonna be goddamn hilarious.

“Better to show you,” he said, and successfully did not burst out into a round of maniacal cackling.

The jet touched down onto a runway on a part of the island not particularly frequented by recombinant tyrannosaurs produced by the Harleys (and the meek personalities of kakapo birds, apparently) or rampaging lusii grown to kaiju size from unforeseen complications in the mutations, and the gigantically curvy older troll was pleased by the palatial estate sprawling partway into the sea. Jane liked the finer things in life, and Meenah approved. A short distance away, was… Meenah squinted.

A hill, floating in the air? And beneath it was some kind of round building. Hrm, she considered. Janey was working on some kinda experiment. Worth investigating.

Hal escorted her out and led her, not to the estate, but to Meenah’s surprise, to the hill.

As they got closer, she became aware of a radiant light she had initially believed was a fancy lightshow, but as they walked up a path going to it, she felt the distinctive tingle and skin rippling pressure of psionics. Very powerful ones, at that. “The hell is she doing here? Some kinda psionic battery?”

“That’s… technically true,” Hal said. “I wouldn’t know, though. Not my field.”

She grunted in disinterest.

They came up to it, and small bits of stony rubble, with bits of moss there, were gently floating down. Blue light engulfed them and, as they fell, were reshaped. Carved, perhaps, by an unseen hand. Meenah looked up and saw the hill above them, eclipsed by the vast shape overhead, being changed. The rough edges were being smoothed out, ground down. Little statuettes and gargoyles were extending outwards, getting longer and more ludicrously detailed. The middle of the hill’s bottom half looked like an overworked stonemason’s idea of perfect Gothic architecture, and it was spreading to the rest of it.

Meenah held a hand out. A bit of hill was formed into what was unmistakably a small hand that pressed against her palm. It turned blue and fell away. “Some serious psionics there! Is she carving the damn thing!?”

“I guess so?” Hal said, shrugging.

Meenah looked down, and stars extended from beneath her toe claws. They rose up, moving upwards, all the way up to the top of the hill, but below the big globe above it.

Her wings, fashioned after a manta rays, fluttered and closed. “Guess we go up,” she said, and did so. The stairs didn’t creak beneath her weight, but flexed at the same time her monster hips did. She tried to swat Hal off the stars behind her with her tail, just for mischief, but he dodged it without comment. It was an automatic reaction from her, too.

Meenah came to the top. “Janey! Where are you, girl!?”

“Hey!” A voice said brightly, from in front of her.

Meenah looked up, towards the globe, and for a moment her vision failed her. She saw Jane, sure enough, and from her perspective, floating right below the big globe above them. A globe that was radiant blue, and obscured in a way that made it hard to make out. Jane looked different; bigger, wider, more of that sweet troll bigness.e

Meenah held her arms out, commanding. “C’mere, didn’t come halfway around the world and not get a hug first thing!”

Jane slowly floated down and inside, Meenah thought: ‘Psionics? Hell yeah! That’s a big change, how’d you get to do that!?’ She had been working on that upgrade for a while now. The big globe came with her, so perhaps it really was a battery of some kind.

Jane’s arms, broad and thick with muscle but thicker with softness, came around Meenah’s middle and squeezed her tightly. Meenah hugged her back, and took stock of her in a second; bigger body, much bigger, way more curvy. Hips huge enough to wreck doors; she was a little below Meenah’s elbow and just the right size for a tall troll girl, breasts so big they made up most of her body weight - good and milky, from the sound! - and at this point Condy took in face.

Or rather, Jane’s head.

The globe she had seen was Jane’s head. That massive round shape, larger than an entire apartment building, was a part of Jane! Her head expanded outwards above the temples, into a complex curve of chitinous support frames and complicated psionic networks and great chunks of cybernetic designs, all glowing with so much blue light that it looked like a rather calming star.

Meenah could feel the power emanating from her. That Jane wasn’t even trying to float, and hold up the hill, and carve it up at the microscopic level, all at once.

“Holy shit, yes,” she breathed out, with a rather frightening grin.

“I did it!” Jane said, full of delight and joy. “I did so well at that meeting!”

“I knew it, didn’t I?” Meenah agreed. “Told ya, all those years, you had it! And you did good!” She hugged her again, and then clasped the closest curves of Jane’s enlarged head. “And what’s this beauty I see, eh?”

“Um. The mutagens in my system reacted with my brain boosts and my head sort of … swelled. I tried to tell you.”

“What’s it do for ya? Huh?”

“Psionic boosts,” Jane said promptly. “And a vast increase to intelligence! And, oh, all manner of things. Better reasoning ability, memory retaining, new forms of thinking…”

“Learning a whole new branch of robotics, in a day?” Meenah said.

Jane blushed. “That too…”

“Ya robot boy’s body looks nice.”

“Thank you!”

Meenah patted Jane’s head. It was firm to the touch, very solid, and crackled against her skin. “So, that’s what you meant by a swelled head, huh?” Jane nodded, almost bonking Meenah it he rhead, and this gave Meenah the opportunity to note that the largest bits of biomechanical parts looked like horns. Long, rather thin and… she tried to ignore her hearts skipping a beat. They looked like, her own horns.

Meenah hugged her again. Full of pride, no small amount of respect, and a lot of professional fascination with what Jane had done. “Don’t you tell no one, but I’m this proud of ya. Knew you had it in you.”

Jane grinned, and for once, the pride she felt was not feigned. “Aw!” She thought, in rapid succession, of the best thing to reply, and the obvious one suggested itself. “Thank you… Mother.”

Meenah’s expression, the delighted widening of that smile into something more genuine and sweet, was the finest thing she’d ever seen.

[elsewhereuniversity]

continuation of the ODSS-1b fig newton story

the person who sent in those other asks was totally right so ive continued my earlier story some to reflect that. i might write more in this same vein? im not sure. this is sorta… idk, it’s not the Best thing but it sure is a thing, and at least i remembered to save it this time lmao

—

The first time you notice them is probably a Thursday. You’re just guessing, though; you’ve been in the library for a long time. They’re in the psychology section, which intrigues you, so you walk up behind them silently. They have their index finger on the spine of a book titled “Dissociative Disorders: a Guide” which you’ve read and don’t like, so you tell them so,

“That one doesn’t have reliable sources and contains lots of misinformation.”

They flinch, and drop the other books they’re carrying. As they bend down and scrabble to pick them up, they also duck their head, hiding behind a thick curtain of dark hair.

“Oh, sorry,” you say, and kneel down to help them. Oops. You hope they never think to call that in. You’ve been here for practically Ever, you should have this down by now.

“I’ve got it,” they say suddenly, severely, almost sounding scared.

You catch a glimpse of a tattered notebook before it disappears behind a Chemistry textbook. When they’ve finished gathering their stuff back up, they don’t look at you, but still ask,

“Um… How do you know the book is bad?” 

“I’ve read it,” you tell them, “and I was in a position where I needed accurate information, and it lead me to Make a Deal that maybe wasn’t the best choice.” 

They look up at you then, dark eyes striking and intense, and say,

“You made a deal based on the information in a book on dissociative disorders.”

It’s not quite a question, but you nod anyway. You narrow your eyes at them, and they dip their head to let their hair cover the left side of their face back up. They’re still looking at you with the other eye, and you’re beginning to suspect they’re in a similar situation to where you were upon arriving at Elsewhere University. They’re a freshman; you can tell because a copy of the orientation brochure is sticking out of their Chemistry textbook.

“I can recommend a better book if this is for a class project…?” you let your voice tilt up at the end of your sentence to make it into a question, and they hesitate, before shaking their head.

“It’s maybe a little bit personal.”

You nod, because that’s what you thought.

“In that case, I can provide you with some information on the way all this works.”

You’re being deliberately vague, because you don’t want to spook them if they could use your help, and because if they’re a neurotypical looking for shit to dramatise, you aren’t in the mood for bigotry. They still hesitate, and you remember to add,

“Freely given.”

You don’t know how much they know about common practices on campus, but they’ve probably been advised on accepting favours that aren’t freely given, because they nod. You hold out a hand.

“Follow me?”

They chew on their lower lip, and look at your hand for a long moment, then look up at you and nod. You let your hand fall back down to your side and turn on your heel.

“You may’ve noticed that the library does weird things to your sense of time,” you say, as you walk down the aisle, glancing over your shoulder to check if they’re still following you.

“Yes,” they say, “just, it’s hard to tell if that was… Well, usually it’s my own fault. Are you saying–”

“That it’s the library doing that? Yeah.”

They breathe out a sigh of relief, and start to say,

“So can I assume–”

“Not yet,” you tell them, “it’s not safe to talk about secrets in open areas of the library.” 

The rest of the walk to your office is silent. You open the door and let them enter first, and then shut it. They flinch at the click of the latch, and you ask them,

“Do you need this open? I’ve got a salt border under the carpet so it should be okay, I usually only close it for the sake of my various, ah… Brain Quirks.” 

They don’t respond, but you’re pretty sure just by looking that the answer is yes, so you open it about a third of the way and then walk around your desk to sit down. You indicate the chair across from you and offer them a Fig Newton, “freely given,” which they decline. They sit down.

“First things first, you can withdraw from this conversation at any time for any reason without explaining yourself, alright? Your well-being should be your first priority, since, if I’m reading the situation correctly, we’re about to discuss some heavy things.” 

“Heavy like your chain?”

You look down at your trauma, which you’ve taken to hanging things off of, like a six-pack of coke, with three sodas hanging off one side and three on the other. 

“Yeah, that’s… heh, it’s actually my trauma made tangible, so sorta like that.”

They might raise an eyebrow; you can’t tell, because their hair is still all in their face. 

“That’s… hardcore.”

You nod, and pop a coke out of the six-ringed plastic doodad, leaving five hanging off the chain. You flick the top before you open it, which is supposed to keep it from spraying everywhere, but you doubt it would stop one of Them from messing with you. The soda doesn’t spray, though, so you count yourself lucky this time. 

“I suppose. I don’t know how obvious it is, but I’m not so great yet at being one person, and lately I’ve been trying more creative ways of coping with it. I painted it a few weeks ago,” you just made up that length of time, you have no idea how long it actually was, “but… it didn’t help, it was a bit too much like pretending it wasn’t trauma.

They sort of shy away at your mention of being one person, and, because talking a lot is one of your personality traits (and the thing you cling to when you’re dissociating, to the chagrin of many students in the library), you say, 

“You don’t ever have to integrate, though, it should always be a personal choice, which is why that book back there isn’t good. It talks about it like it should be a goal for every system, which just isn’t realistic, and– sorry, I’m rambling.” Dammit, you need to stop apologising. They don’t respond, which leads you to believe they’ve noticed every damn time you say sorry, and they probably plan to use it if you ever try to hurt them. You don’t blame them, honestly; as a freshman with a stigmatised mental disorder, they need every advantage they can get.

You spin around in your chair and pick a drawer of your file cabinet at random. The thing you’re looking for will probably be in there. At this point, you aren’t consciously aware of the locations of most of your things, but since time hasn’t actually passed nearly as much as it feels like, some part of you still knows where it all is. 

And yep, here it is, the schedule you drew for yourself sophomore year, once you realised winging it wasn’t going to work out. You put it on the desk and slide it over to them.

“So I recommend making one of these, if you haven’t already. Those are my alters, from when I wasn’t completely me, we split up classes, Georgie took Humanities related stuff, Cotink did the mandatory math class, that sort of thing.” 

They nod.

“I’ve got one. Sort of. It’s hard to enforce. And I have a question?” 

“Yeah?”

“There’s something happening here that’s really big, isn’t there, something that doesn’t follow science, something I’m missing. What is it?” 

You grin, and temple your fingers as you lean forwards and tell them, 

“Fairies.”

They’re silent for a long moment. Then:

“Ah. And… do these fairies grant favours, or…” 

“You have to have something they want. There’s one behind the freshman dorms that likes fig newtons and is really good at getting Names back, for instance. That’s the one I made my deal with.”

“The obsession with names is something I don’t understand.” 

“If someone has your true name, they have power over you. We started going by the name we had chosen for when we integrated, which was a bad thing for multiple reasons. I hope you didn’t choose a Name that belongs to any of you?” 

They shake their head.

“I’m Fish, nice to meet you.” 

“I’m Ozzie. Like osmium, since it’s the densest element and the guy I dated the month after my trauma draped itself across me was a chemistry major who liked puns.”

You think you see a smirk behind their hair, but you aren’t sure.

“And the salt and iron?” 

“Fairies can’t touch either of them. They avoid me for obvious reasons. They might avoid anyone who has trauma, but I’ve got no way to test it, and it seems unlikely, honestly.”

Fish nods, and then checks their watch. 

“Um, I should probably go? I don’t know, my watch is acting up.”

“Time passes differently in the library,” you reply, and grin at them as they stand and walk through the door. Then you chug your coke, because you forgot about it and don’t want it to go to waste. Good talk.

[soyosauce]

In This Cyberpunk Novel, Truth Is In The Eyes Of The Mindplayer

 “You’ve got to look while it’s happening…Otherwise you miss seeing it the way it should be seen.”

With first wave cyberpunk in full swing in 1987, Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers represents somewhat of an anomaly. While cyberspace was the predominate playground for most cyberpunk at that time, there are no runners traversing digital lines into some corporations' information vaults lined with protective ICE. Instead, a kind of cyberspace exists only to facilitate mind-to-mind contact, lucid dreaming, and mind-altering substances.

Allie is a mind criminal who uses a number of banned substances and illegal devices before she's actually busted by the mind police. When a friend named Jerry steals a mindcap and convinces her to use it, her mind is left with lasting damage. He dumps her off to get help but they both get snatched, starting their very separate journeys.

“Does all of this really mean that much to you? It’s just stuff. Jerry. It’s just expensive stuff. You’re risking your - your self for a goddamn nouveau couch?”

Turns out instead of serving time, you can become a mindplayer—encompassing several disciplines that people use to alter their state of consciousness. Roughly, these services are kind of forms of therapy, though there are also neurosis peddlers too, so who knows. Rather than go to jail, Allie decides to become a mindplayer.  After all, if you mess yourself up enough then they can just scrub your mind, at least, ostensibly you can. No big deal, right?

Mindplayers is at its absolute best when its exploring ideas around psychosis and how the people who meet and interact with one another, mold and shape each other; with or without their knowledge. This is taken to extremes when people meet mind-to-mind, navigating the contours of one another's consciousness. Opening the flood gates and exposing this contact for all sorts of allegories.

Thankfully, with subject matter like this there is no poverty tourism or fetishization, or even hyper-sexualism that is often present in this wave of cyberpunk books. Instead, the judiciary system decides Allie is a criminal and her best option as presented to her, is to assimilate into the system that labels her a threat, or else suffer extreme repercussions. While she may have been on a dangerous trajectory, as it's implied that she had been using a lot of other mind-altering illegal substances, but not mindcaps, to be in a continual altered state, it's interesting to me that in this story, the omnipresence is actually something systemic. There is no "evil" corporation. It's just the state. It analyzes her, determines she has value due to her brain chemistry, and immediately commodifies her.

“Anyone’s capable of developing delusions under the right conditions.”

The majority of the story is Allie undergoing this training and the obstacles she faces, which change her mind in unexpected ways. And the situations she's put in with her clients in order to work off this debt are inherently dangerous and each of them leaves an "after taste" on the mind. People's fetishes, violent desires, and neurosis become weaponized, physical forces in a medium like mind-to-mind contact. So in an effort to commodify her she is also dehumanized and risks losing her sense of self. With the alternative being jail. It’s a compelling and different. To connect mind-to-mind you use technology that attaches to the optic nerve (typically, though there are exceptions), which means peoples’ eyes are removed. They sometimes need to purchase new ones when the old ones wear out, and they can become status symbols when people buy cats eyes or ones associated with different gem stones. Though a bit on the nose, it leads to both of these kinds of people not being able to see things for what they truly are, whether oppressed by the system or apart of it.

The only downside to a narrative exploring this kind of subject matter is that it necessarily feels quite loose, and dreamy, which is not indicative of a genre generally known for frenetic pacing. I could see it being off putting to people reading the sub-genre frequently. While most of the subversions of masculine cyberpunk are welcome, this did make it hard to get invested in. I wanted to get to the next exploration of the waking or subconscious mind. While the story came to a satisfying conclusion, and the format for which it's presented in makes sense, the pacing was hindered by it.

“Do you know there are no longer any actors alive today who still have their own eyes?…It seems strange. Drawing on life and looking at it through artificial eyes.”

On another positive note, though, another welcome subversion indicative of Cadigan's work is how she writes her protagonists. I mentioned that there is no hyper-sexualization, but it's more so that sexuality doesn't play much of a role in the story at all. While Allie has relationships with others, the story rarely if ever focuses on the physicality of anything. It’s on point for the story being told and contributes to its uniqueness.

Additionally, masculine cyberpunk and feminine cyberpunk tend to be most different with how embodiment is handled. Masculine leans toward mind over body; feminine gives far more weight to a persons' body comprising their overall identity. Mindplayers falls somewhere in the middle. Later, in Synners, Cadigan has made up her mind about this. But here mind-to-mind contact is more of extrapolation between people's interactions in real life. In that way, embodiment matters. But it always feels like a medium, with not much weight really being attributed to it beyond that. Allie is simply not a physical person, she continually reiterates that she has always had an active mind and been in her head, rather than a busy social life. The minor details of her life, from her perspective, truly fall away in the story. For good and, sometimes, at the expense of a more thematically tight narrative. It’s compelling to see the starting of a throughline that would ultimately lead to Synners, which feels like it benefited greatly from this this against the grain tale.

“Not a single thing that’s passed between us has been real and yet you’ve been hunting me like the hound of heaven.”