#unfortunately that specimen got destroyed before i could pin it

[ratcandy]

what is your opinion on plume moths. personally i like em they look like lil airplanes

I LOVE plume moths they're such weird little freaks

(image cred)

I caught a spiderling plume moth (Megalorhipida leucodactylus) once for class and that was my first time ever seeing anything out of Pterophoridae . Prior to capturing that little thang I had never even heard of plume moths, so you can imagine the bewilderment I experienced when I saw this unexplainable little creachure just hanging out on the wall of my uni's eatery as though that is just where it always belonged

[mst3kproject]

Voodoo Island

Leonard Maltin thought this movie was boring, which is, honestly, kind of terrifying.  Its ostensible star is Boris Karloff, who somehow managed to avoid ever being on MST3K, but it was produced by Howard Koch, the director of Untamed Youth, and was written by Richard Laundau, who did the same for Lost Continent (uhoh).  It’s also got Jean Engstrom from The Space Children, and if the voice of the radio operator sounds familiar that’s because it’s 🎶 Adam Weeeeeest.

A hotel company wants to build a resort on a tropical island, but the scouting party they sent never came back – except for one guy, Mitchell, who has been reduced to a catatonic state by whatever it was he saw there.  Worried, the hotelier sends renowned skeptic Mr. Knight to find out if it’s true that the island is under some kind of voodoo curse.  After much wasting of the audience’s time, Knight’s party reaches the island and finds it infested with man-eating plants, coconut crabs, and unfriendly natives.  I wish I could tell you more of the plot, but that’s basically all there is.

Voodoo Island is unusual as bad movies go, in that you don’t actually realize how bad it is until it’s over.  Things that seem to be the plot move merrily along, always feeling like it’s building up to something cool… and then at the last moment it just deflates like a gas station tube man with his fan turned off.  In hindsight, the audience realizes that very little of what they just saw had anything to do with what was supposedly going on. In many ways, you never do find out what was going on at all!

The middle section of this movie is not quite as obviously padded as Lost Continent with its endless rock climbing, but almost all of it is, retrospectively, pointless.  On the first leg of their journey to the island, the party’s plane is caught in a storm and forced to make an emergency landing – only to find that the weather has mysteriously cleared right up!  After repairing their radio they set off again, and nothing much comes of the incident.  They stop on another island where they have trouble hiring a boat, and where somebody puts a curse of some sort on them.  Nothing comes of this.  Later still, their boat stalls out and refuses to start again, even after they’ve cleared a blocked fuel line.  This has no real consequences, because the tide carries them in anyway, and the movie never deals with what happens when they try to leave the island again.

Along for the ride is Mitchell, the guy who was so terrified by what he saw on the island that he hasn’t moved or spoken since. He has a couple of medical emergencies that resolve themselves without long-term consequences, and then simply drops dead before they ever reach the island.  They don’t learn anything from him or his condition.  A similar fate later befalls another character, Finch, but this time the movie ends before he has a chance to either die or snap out of it. Mitchell is only in this movie to make it longer, and possibly so it could claim it had a zombie.

With the movie already half-over, we finally reach this mysterious island.  The group are greeted by a trail of clues that make Knight thing somebody is trying to lead them somewhere… perhaps to answers, perhaps to a trap.  Eventually they’re captured by the natives, but there’s no reason they had to be in a particular place for this to happen – the natives have been following them the whole time and could have intervened at any point.  None of this stuff reads as padding because it feels like it’s going to lead to something.  Again, it’s only when the credits unexpectedly start to roll that you realize almost the whole movie was irrelevant.

Padding is not Voodoo Island’s only problem – the dialogue is awkward at best.  Most of it is on a Revenge of the Sith level, where characters just say exactly what they’re thinking in a way that might have sounded poetic on paper but just doesn’t work out loud.  The boat captain, Gunn, gets a Gunslinger moment in which he narrates his traumatic backstory in a single talking head shot.  Knight is forever going on about Rational Explanations and then suddenly declares his change of heart when confronted with a voodoo doll.  There’s no meat to this arc at all, no sense of Knight questioning his worldview or coming to terms with anything – he just says I do believe! like he’s in a Santa Claus movie and then it’s over.

The worst of both the dialogue and the supposed character arcs occur in the love story.  There are girls in this movie, so of course there has to be a love story, and it’s terrible.  The lady half of this one is Knight’s assistant Miss Adams, who is very poised and professional and doesn’t smoke or drink, and spends the first half of the movie being tutted at by just about everybody.  The other woman in the group, Claire, tells her she could just be so pretty if she’d only change the way she did her hair.  Gunn calls her a ‘machine’ and asks if she even knows how to be a woman.  This raises some hackles in the modern viewer, who wants to see Adams appreciated for what she is rather than what she has the potential to be if she changes everything about herself.

But Voodoo Island was made in the fifties, when changing yourself to please a man was what women aspired to!  Miss Adams therefore swears off being a nerd and kisses Gunn, whose main personality trait is being a stunning asshole.  He’s drunk and bitter, and earlier in the movie he tried to hit on Claire, who had to tell him to fuck off about four times before he got the idea.  Later he insults and threatens Adams because her intelligence makes him feel like less of a man.  Apparently one kiss from her completely undoes his PTSD and he’s a better person now.

These two getting together also totally dismisses the healthy and supportive friendship Adams has with Knight, who is not only her boss but has some fatherly affection for her.  He praises her work ethic and tells her that she shouldn’t listen to people who think she’s boring.  I guess we’re supposed to think it’s good that she quits working for him so she can run off with a drunk who’s threatened to slap her, because Gunn will make her life more exciting.

At the supposed climax, the natives (an assortment of ethnic-looking extras who never speak) take the group prisoner, and they are brought before the chief (a white guy in dark makeup), who tells them why outsiders aren’t allowed on the island.  The prisoners are taken to a hut where they are tied up.  One of them is possibly murdered by voodoo, and then the chief… just lets the rest of them leave.  No conditions specified, although it’s implied that the islanders have more voodoo dolls and plenty of pins.  We don’t even find out if they actually made it back.  To get to their boat, the party will have to pass back through the carnivorous jungle without a guide, and once they reach the beach, they’ll have to fix their engine.  It really feels like there ought to have been more of a climax, never mind a denouement. As the credits begin, I was just going, “that’s it?”

The actors are mostly mediocre.  Boris Karloff tries really hard to rise above the material but never gets there, which is understandable when his lines are things like, “no, you fool, they’ll slaughter us to bits!”.  All this badness really is a terrible shame, too, because Voodoo Island’s setpiece monsters, the man-eating plants, are actually incredibly cool.  They never look real, but they’re much more creative than the standard giant Venus’ flytrap.  There’s a thing that wraps long bean-like leaves around a swimmer and drowns her, another than catches its victims with a sticky bulbous stem, and yet a third that folds ferny fronds around prey and digests it!  A movie that made proper use of these monsters would be a great time. I hope the prop people went on to the better things they deserved.

(At the other end of the effects scale are the coconut crabs I mentioned.  These are not actual coconut crabs, but dead specimens of some other, much more gracile species.  This, too, is unfortunate, because coconut crabs are living crustacean nightmares capable of killing and eating seagulls.  One theory about Amelia Earhart’s ultimate fate is that she was devoured by coconut crabs.)

As for Voodoo Island having anything to say… it has some kind of muddled point about not dismissing the supernatural out of hand, but its ‘magic’ is pretty lame, and Knight’s arc is handled so badly that it passes by without making much of an impression.  The story does seem to have another possible theme, though.  As usual I can’t tell if this is intentional or not, but Voodoo Island seems to have something to say about concepts of ownership.

The hotelier has taken an interest in the island because he did an inventory of his properties and discovered he owned it. How he came to do so, we have no idea… it must have been sold to him by somebody else who’d likewise never been there, since the tribal chief tells us that Mitchell and his companions were the first white men to ever go there.  What made that person think they owned it?  Does the concept of ownership even mean anything when you don’t know that you own something?  Does owning something entitle you to destroy it?

The natives own the island in the much less abstract sense that they live there.  The chief tells the party that his people went to this island on purpose, because they thought its nasty flora would keep white people from following them there. They want no part of modern civilization, and seem completely unaware that somebody outside their community is claiming he owns this land.  Whether the idea of ‘owning’ land is even a meaningful one to them, we can’t tell. When the Lenape allowed the Dutch to live on Manhattan Island, they probably had no idea the settlers would consider the land exclusively theirs.

These are some things that still need thinking about in the twenty-first century, and if you’re going to watch Voodoo Island do it for that and for the fun monsters.  Even then, you’re likely to be disappointed.

[aurora-the-kunoichi]

Bishop’s Angel

 Part One

Reader and the turtles

 Pain, that was the first thing that invaded your senses, brisling bright and sharp. Before your vision returned or even movement in your limbs, a blinding pain that felt like a million knives imbedded deep in the back of your skull screamed for the relief in the form of a swift death. Your mouth was dry as the Sahara and you felt like you needed to vomit and the throbbing behind your eyes was not helping in the slightest. This wasn’t going to be a good day, you could tell already. Next you willed your eyes to open and they thankfully obliged, but you promptly regretted the decision when a white searing light assaulted your vision. How long had you been out for light to be this excruciating? You needed to rub away the ache but found your limbs unwilling to comply or more accurate, couldn’t.

 “Fuck.” You mumbled taking another pull hoping your arms and legs were just entangled in your sheets after a restless night of sleep. Nope, no such luck, no movement yet again. Slowly this time, you opened your eyes allowing the light to slowly penetrate easing the light to dilate your pupils gradually. Your vision still slightly blurry your surroundings came into view. White, lots and lots of white and machines and metal instruments. Like a heavy weight, dread filling your stomach, you were not fully aware of your surroundings yet, but you knew a lab when you saw one.

 A heavy sigh escaped you as you tried to remember how you got in this position, the last thing you remembered was getting onto your ship and getting into hyper sleep for the long arduous journey to the outer rim of the Milky way for your next assignment. Then another hot stabbing pain rolled through your skull making you groan at the unpleasant sensation. And something inside snapped and a flood of images came rushing back making the urge to purge the contents of your stomach intensify.

 Memories came surging back, and you suddenly remembered what had happened. Midflight a stray meteor hit your ship damaging the navigation system and thrusters. That set off a domino effect of errors which woke you from your slumber. By the time you got back to the bridge you were already too close to the planet and had been caught in its gravitational pull. There was nothing you could do but try to ease the landing and prepare for impact. Thankfully your heat shields protected you from the rough entry into the primitive planet’s atmosphere, but the landing had been jostling. Somehow you managed not to break any bones or your other precious appendages, but you were cut pretty bad from flying debris.

 Earth is where you had landed unfortunately. The planet itself was pleasant, with fresh water, lush green foliage and a wide variety of amazing animals. But its higher life forms were less then pleasant. Humans were cruel and stupid, taking all that they had for granted. They were ruining their magnificent planet at an alarming rate and if they kept destroying it at their current pace they would kill it in less than 100 years. They were foolish and selfish, killing each other over stupid reasons like religion and who they were allowed loved. Wars and bloodshed was this planets calling card which is why they were kept out of the Intergalactic Peace Corp and why no intelligent life visited.

 After you had freed yourself from your harness and put out the fires on deck one and two you needed to open the bay doors to remove the smoke that clogged the ventilation systems but when the ramp lowered you found yourself no longer alone. Your ship was surrounded by a swarm of humans dressed in black with their guns drawn pointed at you.

 When they first caught glimpse of you their eyes widened in shock and each took a step back. Easily startled little pricks scared of anything different than them, fucking humans. Granted in most ways you looked like them, you had supple tan flesh, and being a female, you had the same reproductive organs as theirs with two breasts and a cunt. You had two legs, two arms with ten toes and fingers with nails and cuticles. You were just a little taller than their average height with a long light brown hair. Even your eyes were the same, but the violet of your eyes were not represented on this planet which only added to your exotic look. But the two appendages protruding from your back were the most shocking features about you and you pumped the two large white wings behind you just to give the humans a show.

 It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do in hindsight because the next thing you knew you were pumped full of some sort of tranquilizer and now were strapped down to a metal table in an unknown location with your wings pinned painfully under you.

 This was your third visit to the planet, granted this one wasn’t planned but a visit non the less and it reiterated why this was by far your least favorite planet in this system. Such a jumpy species, fucking humans.

 Back in the present you concentrated at the task at hand, you quickly assessed your current situation, your arms and legs were restrained with simple leather straps which will be easily broken with just your strength alone. The sound of a door opening halted your escape attempt and you observed as a man dressed in a black suit and tie with a pair of sunglasses over his eyes strolled up next to you. His index finger drug lazily up your leg to your midsection pressing down ever so slightly testing your skins resilience.

 Thankfully they had left you clothed, or someone was about to die. The smirk on his face indicated he thought he had you trapped at his mercy, but little did this smug asshole know leather straps wouldn’t keep you bound to this table for much longer. You just needed to bide your time waiting for the right moment.

 After a few moments the man spoke lifting the dark glasses up to the top of his head to reveal his icy grey iris’, “And I thought today was going to be uneventful. I love getting new toys to play with.” His voice was scratchy and dull, lacking any kind of compassion and filled with contempt which gave you a bit of apprehension. Just one sentence from the man and you knew already he wasn’t one to be trifled with.

 His hands lifted to your cheek stroking the warm skin almost lovingly, but you knew even the small touch had a purpose. He was studying you with just his fingers gauging your reactions, waiting to see what you would do. Next his fingers traced the edges of your soft wings gathering a feather between his fingers examining the texture.

 “Interesting.” He cooed sharply yanking the white feather from its root with a brutal tug.

 Not prepared for such an abrasive act and sharp sting you let out a shriek of pain when the quill left the sinew of your wing. “Fuck! You indignant asshole! That hurt!”

 “You speak English, how fascinating. You look like us besides the gorgeous wings and you speak our tongue. You, my dear, are not only stunning for an alien but also just as vexing. What are you doing on earth?”

 Refusing to answer the man’s questions you returned with your own, “Where is my ship?”  

 “Nah ahh ahh don’t be rude, I ask the questions here. You came into our atmosphere unidentified and uninvited making a colossal mess for me to clean up. The least you could do is answer a few questions.” If the tone if his voice was any sweeter, sugar would have been dripping from his lips. He leaned down bringing his nose close to your neck taking a long pull of your scent. “You smell unique as well, like nutmeg or some other sweet spice. I think you’ll be my new favorite. I wonder what your insides look like.”

 “Is this how you treat guests on this planet? Capture and threaten them with dissection?”

 Suddenly the door to your room burst open and a frantic man wearing a long white lab coat came rushing to your host’s side. Taking a few moments to catch his breath the subordinate finally calmed down enough to address the man no doubt in charge.

 “Bishop, those mutants are coming too, the big one nearly broke free!”

 The calm and collected facade slipped from the man they called Bishop and his fists clenched in tight angry fists. “Then drug them again! Do you have any idea how long I planned and waited to capture those god damn turtles?! Almost two years you fucking moron and 5 million of the government’s money, I cannot lose them. They are too important to my work for them to disappear again! Contain the beasts!”

 The cowering man nodded quickly and slinked away to take care of his problem leaving you and Bishop alone yet again. He straightened his tie and coughed regaining his lost restraint. His cold eyes found yours again and he smiled ever so sweetly caressing your cheek once again.

 “You my dear will have to wait, I have four prior engagements I need to attend too. We shall continue this play date a little later. I look forward to learning every inch of you inside and out…..Rachel!”

 Again the door swung open and a woman with long red hair and a white lab coat appeared fully engrossed with the man addressing her.  “Yes Agent Bishop?”

 “Rachel please give this wonderful new specimen of mine a delicious cocktail to let her rest until I have time to attend to her. I have a shell to peel from one of those turtles backs. But first dinner!” And with that Bishop slipped from the room heading towards his meal.

 The woman ignored you and turned to the table to her left and started to fiddle with something.

 “Please.” You tried to plead with the woman. “Please help me.”

 Slowly the woman turned around holding a syringe up pressing the stopper to expel the excess air from the needle. She looked down and shook her head allowing the red curls of her hair to shake around her shoulders. “I’m sorry dearie but Mr. Bishop always gets what he wants and you’re the first alien he’s gotten his hands on. You’re not going anywhere.”  

 You figured her answer would be ‘no’ so you were poised and ready, your muscles flexing under the taught band of leather. “On the contrary Rachel, I’m not an alien. Only this primitive planet uses that word.” A pop and a gasp from your nurse the leather gave way freeing your hands and feet from their constraints. Your hand shot out dislodging the syringe from her hands and you quickly grabbed it plunging the needle deep in her neck pressing the cocktail into her system.

 Her eyes widened in pain still processing your lightening fast movements. She tried to scream reaching out to steady her failing legs but crumbled to the floor in a huddled mess at your feet.

 “Rest well Rachel.” Getting to your feet you surveyed the room and fortunately found all your blades at the far back corner of the room. “Idiots.” Shoving them back into their sheaths you headed for the door pressing your ear to the cold surface listening for any sign of life on the other side. You waited patiently for two sets of footsteps to pass and fade into the distance before you pushed open the door peering out into the equally blinding white corridor. Did they hear of colors?

 Slipping out silently you made your way cautiously as you could down the hallways being aware or your surroundings moving forward to find some sort of exit. Then voices came from behind and you entered into the next unlocked room praying it was empty and closed the door just as four guards entered into the hallway. You had to wait for them to pass by but back luck was apparently in abundance today so they stopped almost at the door you hide behind to stop and chat. You were stuck, at least for the moment.

 The room you had entered was dark and machines hummed quietly in the back. Hopefully dark meant uninhabited but metal shifting behind you told you otherwise. Your hand gripped the hilt of your blade at your side and slowly turned around ready to defend yourself. Your eyes were already starting to adjust to the darkness and you could see four large tables containing four large masses. With no one standing before you to try and capture you again your fingers sought the light switch and drenched the room in white light.

 There before you lay four large humanoid turtles strapped to the same metal tables you had just occupied. The difference was they were restrained with thick metal cuffs secured to the solid heavy tables that were bolted to the ground. They weren’t going anywhere, not without assistance. Where these the four mutants turtles Bishop was talking about deshelling? How were these four massive creatures on this planet? They were not human that was for sure.

 You saw all four had masks on, each a different color. One was huge, bulky like a raging bull adorned with red. That had to be the ‘big one’ the sniveling man told Bishop had almost escaped. You could see why they were terrified, he was impressive. Next to him was the smallest of the four but still equally muscled with orange around his skull, then a tall lanky one, not as bulky as the rest of them but still well defined, he had purple. Then at the end was one just a bit smaller then the large red brute, his scalp wrapped in blue. They were blindfolded and gagged as well shifting weakly on the tables. Bishop had said they were hard to capture, maybe you could help each other. You just hoped they weren’t hostile.

 Silent as the night, you made your way to the blue turtle, your fingers hovering over his blindfold still making up your mind if you wanted to help them. His head turned to you somehow knowing you were there. They were awake and he tried to talk through the offending rubber gag. You watched his nostrils flare struggling to take in air. Damn your bleeding heart.

 Reaching down you ripped the blindfold free along with the gag. His eyes were a mystifying blue swirling with confusion and resolve but when they met yours they blew wide. His mouth worked his jaw loose and his tongue darted out to moisten his dry lips but stilled as his eyes followed up your wings span bobbing gently behind you.

 “Holy Shell.”

@blossom-skies

[cloudbattrolls]

Recontre

Chimera || 2nd Timeline

They were made of music! You can’t imagine how that inspired me. I’d just given over my burden and -

“Get ahold of yourself. Go back.”

“That’s what we can’t do, Miru.”

“Try.”

“I suppose.”

Well, anyway. Trolls were wonderful, but far past the window where Miruka or I would interfere. Such an empire! Remarkable, given how many of their own they killed. I can’t say I was terribly fond of their system, but then again, I’m not one to talk.

So we parted ways after our affairs on Alternia. It was about time! Miru is terribly tiresome, and we spat something awful if we’re cooped up together on the same planet too long. We had some fun, though - when we weren’t busy with our trolls, we did the whole divinity shtick a bit. Someone made some lovely cave art of us. 

I know we’re not supposed to leave records anymore, but look, I’m a trillion linear years old. Let me be vain.

Anyway, we left before we both got cranky and started rearranging the continuum at each other. Bad news all around when we do that, especially if anything’s alive in the nearest solar system.

So like the responsible denizens we are, we took off.

I still swear she copied the world I went to, though, just to be a sod.

--

Miruka || 2nd timeline

“Blah blah preservation. Blah blah traditions.”

“How gratingly simplistic.”

“Am I wrong, though.”

“No, I suppose.”

“Hey, stop stealing my lines.”

They were living harmonic resonances. Biological life existed in that universe as well - plenty of it - but it was the Polyphonic peoples who intrigued us far more. Neither of us had ever seen anything like them, and we have watched stars birth and die without much fuss.

I studied them, and what I found satisfied me beyond anything I could have hoped. Here was a race at the peak of achievement! Such power. Such organization. Their focus on consciousness was so similar to mine. Their system was perfect - raising species from single-celled forms to sentient networks, ensuring they became peaceful and enlightened, feeding on their sentience as necessary. Stable. Beautiful.

I was old now, even by the age of universes. We were both ancient beyond reckoning, so much that time loses much meaning at all when it is controllable with the flick of a thought. Still, we felt our years weighing us down.

We are immortal, Chimera and I, but even the immortal long for an end at some point.

--

“I guess we got what we wanted. Sort of.”

“This is not even the dignity of a proper end. We are trapped by our own machinations. By your foolish gambit.”

“Would you rather us dead and the entire timeline decayed, the backlash striking the polyphon and sarrandis? Our pawns did what they had to, and they saved more than they knew. Can you claim the same?”

“...peace, Chimera.”

--

Chimera || 2nd Timeline

It turned to war, as it always does when the two of us want the same prize.

We fought through encouraging ideologies in the host populations, through planting ideas and encouraging them to delicate scholarly debates...no good. The polyphon were always there to mop up any sort of disturbance I made, and even Miru grew frustrated by the fact that they didn’t seem to need her at all. She’s petty like that, what can I say. Insecurity issues a galaxy wide.

It’s not true what she says, though. I hadn’t severed my burden just to go make another bloodbath. I genuinely wanted to do it the right way this time.

I must have grown forgetful in my old age. There is never a right way. For all my power, all my experiences - there is no one answer to deal with living creatures and their civilizations. I can fix issues with a flick of my claws - that does not necessarily make me the right person to do so. 

Yet I am who I am for a reason. Not using my abilities would be tantamount to allowing slavery and oppression to continue.

The polyphon thrived on it.

Beautiful, diverse creatures - I will admit, they were well-organized, highly rational. If my own species had been half as advanced...

Still, the polyphon existed to create food for themselves, glorified butchers playing a very long game. You could argue it wasn’t so bad. They stopped all conflict, didn’t they? They guarded their myriad host species from every kind of harm, unless the population had grown too successful and needed a culling, in which case they would raise a plague until they dropped to sustainable levels for the planet.

They shaped many of those planets, terraforming them to better support the rise of sentient life. Many lifeforms would not exist without the polyphon and their interventions.

I hated it. It reminded me too much of myself when I was younger.

There didn’t need to be a species making the same mistakes I had, dizzy from my new power and convinced I could do whatever I wanted.

Their music was beautiful and terrifying, their philosophies fascinating. Did you know view they time not as a construct, but as living force? 

They were sound given solidity! Architecture of wavelengths hardened into life-mimicking forms! (In some cases, anyway. Some of them look nothing like any biological lifeform).

I loved them. I couldn’t tolerate their existence.

There is no greater folly than knowing what should be done, but casting it aside for love. That was me, thinking I’d found a workaround.

Unfortunately, I was right. Just not in the way I expected.

I persuaded some polyphon to perform inversions - to sour their notes, flipping the core of their beings upside down, ripping them from the song that enthralled all of their hierarchy, so they’d no longer be in sway to it. They could make their own choices now; they changed physically, becoming separate from their originators, if still alike in many ways. I named them sarrandis.

It worked a bit too well. When I told them to make the most of their freedom, some of them attacked the polyphon, who naturally retaliated.

Slowly, for both species perceive time on a scale where millennia are short units, it spiraled into many battles.

Perhaps I could have tried to stop them. I should have tried to stop them. But I was old and my powers weren’t what they used to be. I hoped that perhaps the sarrandis would decide to free their host races, or at least respect them as equals. That it would be worth it, eventually.

I should have known better when Miruka fought with the polyphon, forcing me into the war to level the field.

--

“You’re forgetting the part where you tried to assassinate me with a group of Sarrandis and destroyed several non-combative Polyphon to get to me.”

“Please, we’ve tried to kill each other so many times we could get infinite free sundaes with the attempts.”

“The collateral means nothing to you? I thought you were so moral.”

“Do you expect regret from me, Miruka? Neither of us are moral, for any given value of the word. We are terrible creatures, and I am as callous as you. Perhaps moreso. But should I ever stop trying to pretend that I can do good, there will be nothing left. All I have are dreams of righteousness, and they are bloody and false; still, they are mine.”

“Pretty words. Too bad they’re empty.”

“Forgive me for trying to be a better being than I am.”

“It’s far more fun to know you’ll never forgive yourself.”

Miruka || 2nd Timeline

We fought to a stalemate. The usual ending of our conflicts. This time it was to be the last. We were old and weary and longing for a release.

Neither of us wanted to die knowing the other had won the war. This was our hesitation, our drawing back from a mutual end. 

We wound up in a time-lock, one of the very few things capable of holding beings of our power. We both enforced it on the other, trapping us there, locked in an eternal pause, forever poised immediately before the moment of our oblivions. 

So it would have been, if both of us had not cheated.

Our souls were not entirely locked there, in that time and space. We each left something behind on Alternia.

When the reset came, the trolls were not the only ones who were saved.

“’Saved’ is a nice to way to put it. More like stuck.”

“Would you prefer to exist in unending ennui and regret? Shut up.”

“I don’t like pinning our hopes on a shoddy piecemeal of a lifeform. Call me paranoid.”

“It was YOUR idea.”

“I know! You should’ve stopped me.”

“We weren’t exactly high on options, and you cheated as is.”

“I cheat better than anyone.”

“I think the little blueblood could give you a run for money with that.”

“Don’t even talk to me about that. I regret the entire Dolcez line.”

“Whereas my Juzuxts are lovely, most recent specimen aside.”

“No, that one’s cute! So poofy. Plus, hey, wait a moment. You threw ten kinds of fits when Sazuud ran off!”

“I’ve forgiven her.”

“That’s RICH, considering what you DID.”

“You blithely brush off several murders, and pout at me for something nonlethal?”

“It was MEAN.”

“How is cold-blooded murder less mean?”

“I don’t make the rules.”

“Yes, we do.”

“I don’t think so, Miru. We’re as much players as the rest of them this time.”

“What a horrendous thought.”

“Give me a nickel, I’m full of them.”

“I’m not even going to attempt to dissect the absurdity of that statement.”

“Thank god. Maybe I can catch a nap.”

“...you do that.”