#white faced locus

[minespatch1]

[midnightarcheress]

woke up wanting to write something with my pretty boy kyle and this was born.

cw: nsfw. f!reader. gaz obsessing over the pretty college girl by his side. implied future stalking ig? unedited. part one | part two

someone catches Kyle’s attention on the plane.

his legs are on the verge of cramping and his breath is ragged, running to board his connection flight at the last call. after falling off a helicopter twice in the last operations, he developed an uneasiness of flying, no matter the aircraft, preferring taking the train over being miles up in the air, even if it triples the travel. but this time, he just wanted to get home the fastest way possible for a much-needed night of sleep in his own bed, instead of the barely cushioned military-issued mattress.

he hopped on the plane and made his way through the corridor, gaze fixed on the numbers under the luggage rack, attentively looking for his spot. he stopped by row thirteen, eyes darting between the number and the woman on the window seat. i could’ve sworn i marked that one when i booked? Kyle checks the boarding ticket again – row 13, seat A. it’s the right seat, why is there someone on it? 

an annoyed sigh escapes his lips, gathering the energy to speak up and reclaim his rightfully bought seat. the problem is, he gets ultimately struck when the seat-thief notices him standing and turns to face him. wide eyes meet his brown ones, immediately softening at the sight of your tempting glossy lips and delicate fingers pushing a lock of hair behind your ear. pretty little thing.

“i’m sorry, is this your seat? it was empty on the first flight,” you say, an apologetic tone in your voice as you frantically close the book on your lap and shove it in a bag, “i’ll move back for you–��

“it’s alright, keep it.” he interrupts, throwing his carry-on in the rack and taking the empty middle spot beside you. he smirks at your appreciative nod and watches you settling again on the backrest, buckling the seatbelt at the shining signal hovering your heads and paying extra attention to the flight attendant announcements, even when no one around seems to care. sweet girl, so considerate to everyone.

the plane starts speeding on the runway, and from his peripheral he views your squeezed eyes and nearly white fingers gripping the armrest, breathing quickening during the gravity push of the take off. it takes a moment for you to release your tight grasp and exhale, making his hand twitch with an urge to soothe you, tell you that you’re safe.

he shakes the sensation and leans his head back, focusing on the one thing he can do to pass the time – sleep. but he can’t keep his gaze out of you, glancing to his left whenever you make a movement, no matter how small. the rapid keyboard tapping guides his irises to your laptop screen, catching a few words in a sea of what for him sounds like an alien language. DNA strand? allele? locus mutation?

he sneaks a look through your figure and his eyes land on the familiar blue logo on your hoodie, the same one he always sees on the walk from the market to his flat. uni a couple blocks from me. do you live on campus? or nearby? that neighborhood is awful at night, full of old blokes searching the pubs for a quick fuck with a naive college girl. but you seem smart, not the type to fall for their tricks, right?

the harder he tries to avoid your presence, the more you make yourself known, almost making him feel like it’s on purpose. the way your plump lips wrap on the water bottle, slight drop scaping on the corner and trailing down your neck, your flowery perfume filling his nostrils when you shift on your seat to remove the top layer of your clothing, exposing the low-cut blouse underneath and the soft roundness of your tits. is that for me, sweet girl? need a break from studying so hard? the sudden tightness of his trousers brings him back to his senses, stirring the thought out of his brain. 

keep it cool, Garrick, he repeats over and over in his mind, ignoring the tent forming on his lap and praying to whatever god is out there that you won’t see it, even while standing up and brushing your legs on his knees to get to the corridor due the cramped space. however, he doesn’t miss how the guy by his side shamelessly ogles your cleavage when you step past him, making his blood boil and his fists clench – like he wasn’t doing the same exact thing minutes before.

while you're away, he glances at your screen again, noticing the constant message notifications from the contact ‘Marcus - DO NOT ANSWER’. already looking bad for you, mate. curiosity takes hold of him and he starts reading the texts, silently chuckling at the guy’s pathetic attempts to get your attention. what did he do to earn a cold shoulder, sweetheart? did he hurt you? didn’t he pay enough attention to you? i bet he couldn’t even fuck you the way you deserve. 

he keeps skimming the messages until the grin tugging on the corners of his mouth fades into a frown when he reads ‘you’re gonna regret leaving me’. now, who’s this prick? think you’ll get away with threatening my girl?

his body stiffens when you come back, eyes darting back to the small telly in front of him when your hand brushes on his thigh while sitting once again. he hears your irritated huff when you skim through the messages, shutting the laptop with near violence. i can take care of him for you, love. you won’t have to deal with that by yourself anymore. 

the pilot’s muffled voice coming through the speakers and announcing the landing shortens his daydreams about getting rid of Marcus. it would be a great way to keep himself busy while on leave, making sure to do it fast and secretly, of course, just to protect his sweet little thing. poor guy wouldn’t even know what hit him.

the pressure change on his ear is the telltale sign of the aircraft lowering its altitude, landing gear out to hit the lane and brake the machine. he turns to the side, watching again your knitted eyebrows and how your nails dig into the seat. this time he doesn’t contain himself and his hand gently lingers over yours, the softness of it sending lightning strikes over his body and almost making him cum instantly. 

your glinting eyes find his face with a grateful gaze, lips mouthing a sugary thank you when the plane finally stops. he helps you take your handbag out of the rack with ease, using the situation to flaunt his muscles. i can even pick you up, darling. would love to feel your pretty thighs around my waist. you wouldn’t have to walk a day in your life. 

his eyes follow the sway of your hips through the airport, heart almost bursting when you wave goodbye and flash him a timid smile. you think that’s the last time you’ll see him, he thinks this is just the beginning. a name and university? he’s used to finding people with even less information. see you soon, sweet girl.

[crimson-and-clover-1717]

Can we talk about Taika’s acting here?

The reaction to Izzy’s line… The slight move backwards in an instinctive act of self-preservation; the eyebrows raised in shock and confusion, then lowered into a furrow; Ed registering the full weight and implication of the words. Eyes wide; mouth going from relaxed to taut, the top lip rising ever-so slightly by the emotional jolt; shoulders rising slightly also at the small intake of breath.

Taika shows Ed processing myriad things in this moment. That he’s not safe to be the soft person he’s always hidden away. That a white man believes he has ownership over his life and death. That agency is an illusion. That he has no locus of control around his destiny. That everything’s gone full circle. Stede’s gone, and he’s back to being who he had to be in 103 and before to survive. Trapped in a phantasmagorical nightmare in which his self and identity is distorted, manipulated and controlled by another.

And Taika conveys all this with a backwards-lean and a few muscles in his face. It’s god-tier.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sphinxmumps Linkdump

On THURSDAY (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On FRIDAY (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

Welcome to my 20th Linkdump, in which I declare link bankruptcy and discharge my link-debts by telling you about all the open tabs I didn't get a chance to cover in this week's newsletters. Here's the previous 19 installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Starting off this week with a gorgeous book that is also one of my favorite books: Beehive's special slipcased edition of Dante's Inferno, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with new illustrations by UK linocut artist Sophy Hollington:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-inferno

I've loved Inferno since middle-school, when I read the John Ciardi translation, principally because I'd just read Niven and Pournelle's weird (and politically odious) (but cracking) sf novel of the same name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel)

But also because Ciardi wrote "About Crows," one of my all-time favorite bits of doggerel, a poem that pierced my soul when I was 12 and continues to do so now that I'm 52, for completely opposite reasons (now there's a poem with staying power!):

https://spirituallythinking.blogspot.com/2011/10/about-crows-by-john-ciardi.html

Beehive has a well-deserved rep for making absolutely beautiful new editions of great public domain books, each with new illustrations and intros, all in matching livery to make a bookshelf look classy af. I have several of them and I've just ordered my copy of Inferno. How could I not? So looking forward to this, along with its intro by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky and essay by Dante scholar Kristina Olson.

The Beehive editions show us how a rich public domain can be the soil from which new and inspiring creative works sprout. Any honest assessment of a creator's work must include the fact that creativity is a collective act, both inspired by and inspiring to other creators, past, present and future.

One of the distressing aspects of the debate over the exploitative grift of AI is that it's provoked a wave of copyright maximalism among otherwise thoughtful artists, despite the fact that a new copyright that lets you control model training will do nothing to prevent your boss from forcing you to sign over that right in your contracts, training an AI on your work, and then using the model as a pretext to erode your wages or fire your ass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Same goes for some privacy advocates, whose imaginations were cramped by the fact that the only regulation we enforce on the internet is copyright, causing them to forget that privacy rights can exist separate from the nonsensical prospect of "owning" facts about your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

We should address AI's labor questions with labor rights, and we should address AI's privacy questions with privacy rights. You can tell that these are the approaches that would actually work for the public because our bosses hate these approaches and instead insist that the answer is just giving us more virtual property that we can sell to them, because they know they'll have a buyer's market that will let them scoop up all these rights at bargain prices and use the resulting hoards to torment, immiserate and pauperize us.

Take Clearview AI, a facial recognition tool created by eugenicists and white nationalists in order to help giant corporations and militarized, unaccountable cops hunt us by our faces:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

Clearview scraped billions of images of our faces and shoveled them into their model. This led to a class action suit in Illinois, which boasts America's best biometric privacy law, under which Clearview owes tens of billions of dollars in statutory damages. Now, Clearview has offered a settlement that illustrates neatly the problem with making privacy into property that you can sell instead of a right that can't be violated: they're going to offer Illinoisians a small share of the company's stock:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/clearview_ai_reaches_creative_settlement/

To call this perverse is to go a grave injustice to good, hardworking perverts. The sums involved will be infinitesimal, and the only way to make those sums really count is for everyone in Illinois to root for Clearview to commit more grotesque privacy invasions of the rest of us to make its creepy, terrible product more valuable.

Worse still: by crafting a bespoke, one-off, forgiveness-oriented regulation specifically for Clearview, we ensure that it will continue, but that it will also never be disciplined by competitors. That is, rather than banning this kind of facial recognition tech, we grant them a monopoly over it, allowing them to charge all the traffic will bear.

We're in an extraordinary moment for both labor and privacy rights. Two of Biden's most powerful agency heads, Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra have made unprecedented use of their powers to create new national privacy regulations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

In so doing, they're bypassing Congressional deadlock. Congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history to newspaper reporters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

Congress hasn't given us a single law protecting American consumers from the digital era's all-out assault on our privacy. But between the agencies, state legislatures, and a growing coalition of groups demanding action on privacy, a new federal privacy law seems all but assured:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

When that happens, we're going to have to decide what to do about products created through mass-scale privacy violations, like Clearview AI – but also all of OpenAI's products, Google's AI, Facebook's AI, Microsoft's AI, and so on. Do we offer them a deal like the one Clearview's angling for in Illinois, fining them an affordable sum and grandfathering in the products they built by violating our rights?

Doing so would give these companies a permanent advantage, and the ongoing use of their products would continue to violate billions of peoples' privacy, billions of times per day. It would ensure that there was no market for privacy-preserving competitors thus enshrining privacy invasion as a permanent aspect of our technology and lives.

There's an alternative: "model disgorgement." "Disgorgement" is the legal term for forcing someone to cough up something they've stolen (for example, forcing an embezzler to give back the money). "Model disgorgement" can be a legal requirement to destroy models created illegally:

https://iapp.org/news/a/explaining-model-disgorgement

It's grounded in the idea that there's no known way to unscramble the AI eggs: once you train a model on data that shouldn't be in it, you can't untrain the model to get the private data out of it again. Model disgorgement doesn't insist that offending models be destroyed, but it shifts the burden of figuring out how to unscramble the AI omelet to the AI companies. If they can't figure out how to get the ill-gotten data out of the model, then they have to start over.

This framework aligns everyone's incentives. Unlike the Clearview approach – move fast, break things, attain an unassailable, permanent monopoly thanks to a grandfather exception – model disgorgement makes AI companies act with extreme care, because getting it wrong means going back to square one.

This is the kind of hard-nosed, public-interest-oriented rulemaking we're seeing from Biden's best anti-corporate enforcers. After decades kid-glove treatment that allowed companies like Microsoft, Equifax, Wells Fargo and Exxon commit ghastly crimes and then crime again another day, Biden's corporate cops are no longer treating the survival of massive, structurally important corporate criminals as a necessity.

It's been so long since anyone in the US government treated the corporate death penalty as a serious proposition that it can be hard to believe it's even happening, but boy is it happening. The DOJ Antitrust Division is seeking to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and they are tipped to win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And that's one of the major suits against Google that Big G is losing. Another suit, jointly brought by the feds and dozens of state AGs, is just about to start, despite Google's failed attempt to get the suit dismissed:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-loses-bid-end-us-antitrust-case-over-digital-advertising-2024-06-14/

I'm a huge fan of the Biden antitrust enforcers, but that doesn't make me a huge fan of Biden. Even before Biden's disgraceful collaboration in genocide, I had plenty of reasons – old and new – to distrust him and deplore his politics. I'm not the only leftist who's struggling with the dilemma posed by the worst part of Biden's record in light of the coming election.

You've doubtless read the arguments (or rather, "arguments," since they all generate a lot more heat than light and I doubt whether any of them will convince anyone). But this week, Anand Giridharadas republished his 2020 interview with Noam Chomsky about Biden and electoral politics, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind:

https://the.ink/p/free-noam-chomsky-life-voting-biden-the-left

Chomsky contrasts the left position on politics with the liberal position. For leftists, Chomsky says, "real politics" are a matter of "constant activism." It's not a "laser-like focus on the quadrennial extravaganza" of national elections, after which you "go home and let your superiors take over."

For leftists, politics means working all the time, "and every once in a while there's an event called an election." This should command "10 or 15 minutes" of your attention before you get back to the real work.

This makes the voting decision more obvious and less fraught for Chomsky. There's "never been a greater difference" between the candidates, so leftists should go take 15 minutes, "push the lever, and go back to work."

Chomsky attributed the good parts of Biden's 2020 platform to being "hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and other." That's the real work, that hammering. That's "real politics."

For Chomsky, voting for Biden isn't support for Biden. It's "support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics."

Chomsky tells us that the self-described "masters of the universe" understand that something has changed: "the peasants are coming with their pitchforks." They have all kinds of euphemisms for this ("reputational risks") but the core here is a winner-take-all battle for the future of the planet and the species. That's why the even the "sensible" ultra-rich threw in for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and why they're backing him even harder in 2024:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckvvlv3lewxo

Chomsky tells us not to bother trying to figure out Biden's personality. Instead, we should focus on "how things get done." Biden won't do what's necessary to end genocide and preserve our habitable planet out of conviction, but he may do so out of necessity. Indeed, it doesn't matter how he feels about anything – what matters is what we can make him do.

Chomksy himself is in his 90s and his health is reportedly in terminal decline, so this is probably the only word we'll get from him on this issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/1aj56hj/updates_on_noams_health_from_his_longtime_mit/

The link between concentrated wealth, concentrated power, and the existential risks to our species and civilization is obvious – to me, at least. Any time a tiny minority holds unaccountable power, they will end up using it to harm everyone except themselves. I'm not the first one to take note of this – it used to be a commonplace in American politics.

Back in 1936, FDR gave a speech at the DNC, accepting their nomination for president. Unlike FDR's election night speech ("I welcome their hatred"), this speech has been largely forgotten, but it's a banger:

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/acceptance-speech-at-the-democratic-national-convention-1936/

In that speech, Roosevelt brought a new term into our political parlance: "economic royalists." He described the American plutocracy as the spiritual descendants of the hereditary nobility that Americans had overthrown in 1776. The English aristocracy "governed without the consent of the governed" and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power":

Roosevelt said that these new royalists conquered the nation's economy and then set out to seize its politics, backing candidates that would create "a new despotism wrapped in the robes of legal sanction…an industrial dictatorship."

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, this has strong parallels to today's world, where "Silicon Valley, Big Oil, and Wall Street come together to back a transactional presidential candidate who promises them specific favors, after reducing their corporate taxes by 40 percent the last time he was president":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-06-14-speech-fdr-would-give/

Roosevelt, of course, went on to win by a landslide, wiping out the Republicans despite the endless financial support of the ruling class.

The thing is, FDR's policies didn't originate with him. He came from the uppermost of the American upper crust, after all, and famously refused to define the "New Deal" even as he campaigned on it. The "New Deal" became whatever activists in the Democratic Party's left could force him to do, and while it was bold and transformative, it wasn't nearly enough.

The compromise FDR brokered within the Democratic Party froze out Black Americans to a terrible degree. Writing for the Institute for Local Self Reliance, Ron Knox and Susan Holmberg reveal the long shadow cast by that unforgivable compromise:

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/045dcde7333243df9b7f4ed8147979cd

They describe how redlining – the formalization of anti-Black racism in New Deal housing policy – led to the ruin of Toledo's once-thriving Dorr Street neighborhood, a "Black Wall Street" where a Black middle class lived and thrived. New Deal policies starved the neighborhood of funds, then ripped it in two with a freeway, sacrificing it and the people who lived in it.

But the story of Dorr Street isn't over. As Knox and Holmberg write, the people of Dorr Street never gave up on their community, and today, there's an awful lot of Chomsky's "constant activism" that is painstakingly bringing the community back, inch by aching inch. The community is locked in a guerrilla war against the same forces that the Biden antitrust enforcers are fighting on the open field of battle. The work that activists do to drag Democratic Party policies to the left is critical to making reparations for the sins of the New Deal – and for realizing its promise for everybody.

In my lifetime, there's never been a Democratic Party that represented my values. The first Democratic President of my life, Carter, kicked off Reaganomics by beginning the dismantling of America's antitrust enforcement, in the mistaken belief that acting like a Republican would get Democrats to vote for him again. He failed and delivered Reagan, whose Reaganomics were the official policy of every Democrat since, from Clinton ("end welfare as we know it") to Obama ("foam the runways for the banks").

In other words, I don't give a damn about Biden, but I am entirely consumed with what we can force his administration to do, and there are lots of areas where I like our chances.

For example: getting Biden's IRS to go after the super-rich, ending the impunity for elite tax evasion that Spencer Woodman pitilessly dissects in this week's superb investigation for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:

https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2024/06/how-the-irs-went-soft-on-billionaires-and-corporate-tax-cheats/

Ending elite tax cheating will make them poorer, and that will make them weaker, because their power comes from money alone (they don't wield power because their want to make us all better off!).

Or getting Biden's enforcers to continue their fight against the monopolists who've spiked the prices of our groceries even as they transformed shopping into a panopticon, so that their business is increasingly about selling our data to other giant corporations, with selling food to us as an afterthought:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

For forty years, since the Carter administration, we've been told that our only power comes from our role as "consumers." That's a word that always conjures up one of my favorite William Gibson quotes, from 2003's Idoru:

Something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

The normie, corporate wing of the Democratic Party sees us that way. They decry any action against concentrated corporate power as "anti-consumer" and insist that using the law to fight against corporate power is a waste of our time:

https://www.thesling.org/sorry-matt-yglesias-hipster-antitrust-does-not-mean-the-abandonment-of-consumers-but-it-does-mean-new-ways-to-protect-workers-2/

But after giving it some careful thought, I'm with Chomsky on this, not Yglesias. The election is something we have to pay some attention to as activists, but only "10 or 15 minutes." Yeah, "push the lever," but then "go back to work." I don't care what Biden wants to do. I care what we can make him do.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/15/disarrangement/#credo-in-un-dio-crudel

Image: Jim's Photo World (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimsphotoworld/5360343644/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[homonationalist]

At one point Sameer spoke of being stopped and searched at Israeli checkpoints. He spoke in a manner that seemed not to require my presence. I hadn't seen this level of concentration and detachment in him before. That was fine. He was grieving. "The shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body," he said. Then he added, "But the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew." The earth gave way. The thought that my place in the unconscious of Palestinians fighting for their freedom was the same dishonorable place I occupied in the minds of Whites in America and Israel chilled me. I gathered enough wits about me to tell him that his feelings were odd, seeing how Palestinians were at war with Israelis, and White Israelis at that. How was it that the people who stole his land and slaughtered his relatives were somehow less of a threat in his imagination than Black Jews, often implements of Israeli madness, who sometimes do their dirty work? What, I wondered silently, was it about Black people (about me) that made us so fungible we could be tossed like a salad in the minds of oppressors and the oppressed? I was faced with the realization that in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people. What they share is a largely unconscious consensus that Blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim. At one moment Blackness is a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon; at another moment Blackness is a sentient implement to be joyously deployed for reasons and agendas that have little to do with Black liberation. There I sat, yearning, in solidarity with my Palestinian friend's yearning, for the full restoration of Palestinian sovereignty; mourning, in solidarity with my friend's mourning, over the loss of his insurgent cousin; yearning, that is, for the historical and political redemption of what I thought was a violated commons to which we both belonged—when, all of a sudden, my friend reached down into the unconscious of his people and slapped me upside the head with a wet gym shoe: the startling realization that not only was I barred, ab initio, from the denouement of historical and political redemption, but that the borders of redemption are policed by Whites and non-Whites alike, even as they kill each other. It's worse than that. I, as a Black person (if person, subject, being are appropriate, since Human is not), am both barred from the denouement of social and historical redemption and needed if redemption is to attain any form of coherence.

Frank B. Wilderson III from "For Halloween I Washed My Face" in Afropessimism (2020)

[dailydegurechaff]

What is Marry like in this AU of yours?

God I fucking hate Tanya von Degurechaff so fucking much holy shit. Holy shit, every piece of propaganda she's in, every photo, every parade, every video, she's got this painfully serious, annoying as shit, fuckass blank look on her stupid fucking face. Absolutely no part of her ugly as sin piece of shit appearance is endearing. Her stumpy fucking legs? How the hell is someone that fucking short. Her dumb little silver wings medal? Her shitty, round bastard face? The three thousand percent unnecessary dumbass shitass fucking ANTENNAE that no person in her company has EVER FUCKING TRIED TO FIX FOR HER IN tHE HISTORY OF GOD'S GREEN FUCKING EARTH? God, I hate her. I hate her so much. So FUCKING much. Every time I see a White Silver toy or a propaganda poster or a shitty goddamn commercial, it ignites my primal rage response and I'm overcome by the need to punt this shitty little war criminal into the fucking sun. "tee-hee! I'm Tanya, the White Fucking Silver, I like war crimes". Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. You look like a shithead little brat. Your dumb fucking antenna hair makes your whole shitty head look like an unkempt street cat. I hate your dumb fucking little button nose and your stupid, stern blue eyes and your over-the-top no-nonsense hardass asshole personality. Any time she smiles it invokes all the wrath and fury of a spoiled child having a meltdown over a chocolate bar in a w*lmart checkout line. And I know its irrational. That's the worst part. I know she's just a single fucking child soldier in a giant fucking empire’s army, I know it doesn't matter, I know I shouldn't care. But that's part of the problem. The part where no matter the might and fury of my hatred, the locus of my homicidal intent is alltogether a tiny piece of a greater evil. I find myself laying awake in the dark in the early hours of the morning consumed by the spirit of Wrath itself, all the force and might of a flaming hurricane directed at a bottle of piss in a ditch by the highway. The absurdity of it all burns me to my core. What better things could this energy be directed towards? And yet my disdain for this stupid, useless, insubstantial failure of endearing propaganda utterly eclipses the intrigue of all other pursuits. I hate her. I hate her on a level of my mind reserved for the worst of the world's array of sinners, and I can't even begin to justify it. Tanya the Evil is, for all intents and purposes, a single facet of the army subjugating the world- a propagandized pawn distilled into the single, hateable form of a shining ideal soldier for every other imperial scumbag to emulate. The fucking. Fuck. I have no words. There is no cuss or epithet in any language that can encapsulate the height of the emotions I am experiencing. God, I hate her so much. I hate her so, so fucking much. I want to light her ugly little dumpster body on fire. I want to graphically beat her to death with the butt of the gun she stole off my father. I want to punch her to death. You know that weird feeling you get, when you see a picture of something so cute you find yourself overcome with the bizarre, inexplicable urge to squeeze it? It's EXACTLY like that, except instead of cuteness it's disgust. The wordless knowledge that her existence as a war hero is evidence of all the failures of mankind. I find myself possessed by the will of a Holy Angel gone rogue with the belief that God has made a mistake, and I alone must correct it. This is the trial by which Samael himself fell from grace. This wild, meaningless rage. A thousand blades of shining steel cast with inhuman force in the direction of a plastic grocery bag floating on a breeze. What horrors must I have committed in a past life to be plagued by this torment now? I must Unmake this sinful child

(x)

[rubykgrant]

I've been slowly re-doing/adjusting my RVB face designs, and also working on more characters! It will eventually be a LOT, but for now; here are the main Reds, Blues, Freelancers, Doc, plus a bonus of Locus, Flowers, and my OC Poppy (just for the fun of it~). I love designing characters, and playing around with features so everybody has different noses, mouths, chins/jaw-lines, etc. For everybody, I have two versions. The first being their signature armor color, and then their actual people colors. I also wanted to include things like facial hair, glasses, scars, freckles and what-not (like Donut's hearing aide and Carolina's eye shadow, because she can't NOT be edgey haha).

(below is some design descriptions and notes on my thought process for everybody. it is a LOT, don't feel obligated to read it~)

Grif and Simmons both clash and compliment each other not only in personality, but in physical features as well (Simmons is sharp, and Grif is soft). I wanted to show that Simmons actually isn't as scrawny and gawky as he used to be, but he hasn't totally registered that he's finally "grown into himself", or that some muscles have happened (once he does, this unlocks "Confident Simmons", and nobody is safe. for now, he's just too used to feeling awkward). Simmons has a fairly strong jawline, an aquiline nose, and hair the color of red clay. He's had his hair very short and properly styled for many years, but after Chorus it started to grow out, and when he pulled it back to see how much he needed to trim, he realized he liked being a ponytail guy! (also, it isn't visually shown here, but trans Simmons is real~) Grif is a big guy, fat and pretty darn strong with thick limbs, and rough around the edges. He's also handsome and beautiful (not "in spite" of those features, but BECAUSE of them). His features are like a combination of rebellious and charming, with his default expression being chill. He has warm copper brown skin, and hair that reaches his shoulders, dark brown, very thick and wavy (it also magically never gets tangled). You can see where Simmons' cyborg prosthetics match the same area where Grif got his skin grafts, but over the years Grif has sort of "absorbed" the organic material, and the skin is a shade darker than when the surgery was fresh (Simmons himself isn't too terribly pale, but still lighter than Grif). Grif occasionally shaves or lets his beard grow in more full, but usually likes to keep just a little bit of face-fuzz around his chin

Sarge is very boxy and built like a brick. I enjoy the irony of a character who has a very BIG personality being somewhat short in stature, and Sarge is certainly a little bundle of dynamite. Despite his claims of only being 29, he somewhere in his 50s (possibly getting into 60s), but still going strong. I wanted to show the age lines around his mouth and his eyes, so he doesn't just look weirdly "smooth" (this man is basically leather, and proud of it. he also has larger earlobes, and bushy eyebrows). His hair has gone white and gray, kept in a perpetual buzz-cut, and he has some scruffy facial hair. He's broken both his nose and his jaw several times in his life, resulting in some unique shapes. Most of his scars happened years ago when he was younger, but the scar on the side of his head is from getting shot during Blood Gulch. He's rather pale thanks to wearing the armor every day for a few decades. His "solution" was to try and sun burnt on purpose so he'll be RED again, but Donut, Simmons, and Doc stopped him before it got too bad. He typically looks very grumpy and stern, but we all know Sarge is EXPRESSIVE with his emotions

My thought process with Donut was to combine Barbie with GI Joe; very pretty, but also pretty darn strong! He has sort of a "soft diamond" shape to his face and jawline. He looks very sweet, but has the potential to be INTIMIDATING. In the past, his hair was light blonde, but turned a strawberry-brown as he got older. During Blood Gulch, when he got EXPLODED, Donut got some scars on the right side of his face, and the hair in that area never entirely grew back. After finally accepting that he is PINK, Donut has also embraced other aspects of himself, both loving who he already is and enjoying what he wants to be. He doesn't hid his scars, but he styles his hair with a side under-cut and dyes the longer lengths a lighter blonde. He also wears a hearing-aid for his right ear, and his eyebrow on that side is a bit thin too. Donut's mouth naturally makes the "cute kitty shape", and he usually has some shiny chapstick/lip-balm on as well. He likes to get some sun on his skin, but is careful not to tan too much, and always uses lots of lotion

Doc is very "in the middle", not too tall or too short, he's not skinny but not chubby either... however, he's got sort of a sturdy build, very athletic without being too buff. A rounded jawline that ends in a small point with his chin. He has a very high bridge to his nose, making a refined line from his forehead down in profile, with sharper edges at the sides of the nostrils. His skin is a deep brown, and his hair is very dark, kept short, with the curls swept up out of his face. Doc isn't "vain" exactly, but he likes to feel comfortable with himself, and to a certain degree, this involves being satisfied with his appearance. O'Malley also enjoys feeling sort of "cozy" with the hair and what-not, so it is a shared reassurance. Doc wears glasses, and O'Malley absolutely knows how to do the "intense anime glasses thing" when he wants to look DRAMATIC. Something I wanted to show with both of them; Doc has very welcoming and kind vibes, but he is perfectly capable of being a sarcastic little smart-mouth, with a fierce sense of resolve. O'Malley likes to be very over-the-top and appear threatening, but there's potential for him to protective, and even joyful. Again, he looks very in the middle, applying to Doc and O'Malley's attitudes

Kai resembles her brother in many ways, but I wanted to make sure she's still unique to herself. Things they have in common; warm copper skin, thick and wavy hair, and they're both chubby. There is a subtle heart-shape to her face (above around her forehead and hair, and also lower with her jaw). Kai has had fun with lots of different hairstyles through the years, but she's decided to just let it grow out. She's dyed it some crazy colors in the past, without really knowing what she was using, but now Donut helps her coordinate, so she has a gradient going on (darker golden-brown at the roots, lighter shades of brown in the middle, and finally yellow at the ends). To keep it from getting tangles, she usually has her hair tied back, or wrapped up while she sleeps. Kai is somebody who is very aware of what she's physically capable of, in terms of both strength and flexibility. Sometimes she shows off with some interesting party tricks, but also just has a graceful way of moving when she wants to dance (or kick somebody's butt). Everything about Kai is LOUD and PROUD, but that doesn't mean she can't calm down and share quiet moments with the people she cares about. She also has two double sets of earrings; two studs up on her right ear, and two small hoops lower on her left ear

The first rule when drawing Tucker; he is the prettiest. He has fairly long and noticeable eyelashes. His nose has a defined smooth and broad curve to it, giving him a profile that is a bit regal, even heroic. He's one of those people who always looks younger than he actually is (not exactly a "baby face", but naturally youthful, until one day he's just gonna suddenly become a silver fox). He has dark brown skin, and thick black hair (4c), kept a little long at the top, but styled as a fade. He has pierced ears, usually just two studs (but can be more elaborate if he wants to dress up). Tucker is an interesting character; visually, he can very easily be a pretty boy, or a prince charming... but then he starts talking, and you realize how obnoxious and annoying he is. Underneath the flirty attitude and sarcastic jokes, he has genuine concern for others, and a fear that he won't be strong enough to protect people. Underneath THAT, he's a determined and clever person that is capable of doing amazing things. All that is wrapped-up within Tucker. I wanted to see a hint of the charm and smug attitude in his face, but the noble look is in there too. Physically, he's a short-king (manlet), but after training with Wash, Tucker has impressive muscles that combine with some quick reflexes

I imagine Caboose as one of the BIGGER characters. He also has the strongest "huggable vibes" (he's literally friend-shaped, no matter how much Church used to argue this fact). Caboose has a naturally sweet smile, which makes it all the more serious when he's upset (a sad Caboose will break your heart... a mad Caboose might break your arms). As Sarge once said- "He's like an ox!". His skin is a shade of sandy brown. His hair is a deeper brown, very soft and a little bit fluffy (I'm especially happy with how his bangs turned out~). I really wanted to make it clear that while Caboose might be all kinds of adorable, he is indeed a grown man, able to take care of himself, and others as well (he understands things some of them never notice). The curve of his jaw is low and subtle, but also shows how "solid" he is built. Caboose is a hopeful person, and has the will power to MAKE things turn out OK one way or another. No matter how unusual his ideas might be, Caboose is dependable, and intuitively has the strength to be kind on purpose

Wash has kept the beard despite the teasing, which has finally transformed him from looking like a very tired lost teenager into a dad who works at a library (the beardo-fication of Wash~). His hair is mostly a light blonde, more golden brown at the roots and through his facial hair (during Project Freelancer, he had a shock of gray after the Epsilon incident, but it has faded). His skin is a light tan color, covered with MANY freckles, and a few scars on his face (the most recent neck injury isn't visible. the scar above his eye is actually from a skateboarding accident as a kid, but the one across his nose was sometime after Project Freelancer started to fall apart). Although he fusses over other people a lot, Wash is bad at taking his own advice, and tends to not eat or sleep enough. It also didn't help that he had a bad habit of ignoring his own emotional breaking points until he was in the middle of losing control... he's finally learned to recognize certain things, and accept every part of himself (a little punk kid, a dork, Mr Serious, a guy who had a Villain Moment, and somebody who really found where he belongs). Under the beard, he has an angular chin, his nose has a curved swoop shape to it, and he has a defined lower lip

Carolina is one of the few characters we see without armor in the series, so I knew what I was working with, but I also wanted to show how she has changed. Carolina is a naturally intense person with somewhat slender features, and she's worked hard to be VERY strong. Now that she's spent time with this group of goobers, and had some chill lessons from Grif, Carolina is rediscovering how to enjoy herself and be less harsh (remember, she is the BEST. this means she's gonna be the Best Red, the Best Blue, the Best at Being Annoying~). She cut her hair during Iris, a little bit choppy at the time, but later decided to keep it short and give it a cleaner trim. She's dyed it a darker, less vibrant shade of red (I imagine her natural red is a bit more carrot). She still uses heavy eye shadow though! (at this point, it is out of spite toward anybody who everybody who ever said it looked silly; not so silly when she's kicking your but, is it?). She's a bit pale, but with a warm tone to her skin. Most of Carolina's scars came from incidents when she didn't have armor, or was so determined to finish a mission, she didn't care if she got hurt. It isn't visible here, but she doesn't bother with shaving her legs (not to get all deep about it, but Carolina sort of has her own balance with embracing certain aspects of femininity, and also ignoring expectations of "beauty". she knows what she's about, and does what she wants)

These designs for Tex and Church exist within my story-line where they get to return in synthetic human bodies (originally intended for the Director to use for himself and Allison, once he could properly "resurrect" her... which didn't work). DNA samples were used as the basic building blocks, the genetic information was allowed to "randomize" itself. As a result, Tex isn't an identical clone of Allison (just like parents can have more than one child; related, but physically different). Ironically, Tex takes after Allison's maternal grandmother, and so does Carolina. Tex has light skin and blonde hair, which she keeps tied back in a ponytail, with two lengths that frame the sides of her face. Carolina and Tex have the same nose shape, a long bridge that curves up at the end. She considered cutting her hair different, or dying it another color... but she didn't want to constantly worry about "changing" herself to avoid any similarities with Allison. Instead, Tex wants to find out what it means to be HERSELF; which is BIG and BUFF. She's pretty tall with a thick body-type already, so she just had to work on the muscles (also, even with long hair, she still has a "warrior dude" vibe, and she's very proud of it). Tex naturally has a lot of confidence and a rebellious attitude, but she really isn't "mean"... at least, not all the time

Church definitely has some traits that came from the Director... but Church was always a contrary little so-and-so, and even though he had no control over how his body formed, it seemed he was destined to be the "opposite" of what somebody else intended. Church is much shorter than the Director, with a thicker more "chunky" body-type (he puts on some healthy weight later, getting a bit more chubby. he also works on being strong enough to pick Tex up. that was his whole motivation). He has a broader nose, and more squared jaw. He has light skin, but a bit more of a sandy color. The most obvious resemblance is his black hair, which sticks up like a soft hedgehog. He asked Carolina and Tex if he should avoid having facial hair (since they have to look at him, and he doesn't want them to be reminded of any unpleasant memories). They assure him that it's fine, and the hair on his chin kind of suits him (it fact, even through the similarities, they can look at him and just see CHURCH, as he is). Church can be a smug, loud-mouth jerk... but though all his rants full of curse words and insults, he cares very deeply about people. Even though he had some ego-trips, he mostly just thought of himself as "some guy". Now he knows how important he is, not because he's a special and highly advanced AI, but because a lot of people missed him. Now he can actually be with them all again, and just like Epsilon, he has the chance to find out what he's truly capable of (they can still project holographic avatars of themselves, but all of the AI Fragments are back too, and happily spend time in Church's head~). Although they make different expression, Church and Carolina have the same "neutral" shape to their mouths

Poppy was originally sent to a different group of Red and Blue Flag Zealots, meant to identify needed supplies and order more ammunition. She was designated "neutral", and had white armor with tan accents. When the teams ran out of bullets, they kept fighting in non-lethal ways, which Poppy thought was preferable to a clearly pointless war, so she just never put in the order for more. Both teams considered her a friend, playfully fighting over who's side she was on, but never getting mad at her for getting along with them all. After a dangerous incident left her knocked-out and recovering, Temple's group arrived to recruit more Sim Troopers. Poppy's group refused to join. When she woke up, they were all gone. She misses them dearly. Because she's still considered part of the Flag Zealots, the UNSC decided to throw her back into a new training program (which was actually pretty shady and insidious), and that's where she meets Sarge. Poppy has a calm yet sarcastic personality, with a raging inferno of a temper once somebody ticks her off. Perfect for Red Team! Poppy is medium-short, about the same as Doc. She has broad shoulders and strong arms, very sure-footed and versatile when it comes to fighting. A very go-with-the-flow attitude, somebody who can be comforting and encouraging, but isn't shy about showing her emotions. She has a somewhat rounded fact with a short, sturdy chin. Her skin is a light shade of brown, and her long hair is a dark earthy brown. Not pictures is her own prosthetic arm (she's meant to be a "mirror" for Simmons, clever like him, but not a know-it-all. she was the one in the accident, and woke up with cyborg parts. Sarge decides to just adopt her, and this SHOULD immediately make him hater her, but Simmons finds himself feeling pretty fond and protective of Poppy. accidental sibling! also, they're both trans in opposite directions~)

We've seen Locus without armor in a flash-back before Chorus, so I tried to translate that into my style I use here. I imagine that he actually wasn't doing to great Chorus, not eating or sleeping enough, what with the whole crisis involved; thinking of himself as a murder-machine unable to see the worth of kindness or mercy, and THEN recovering enough humanity to be horrified by his actions thus considering himself a monster without a purpose... y'know, that whole song and dance. Anyway, the Reds and Blues force him to be a person again, so he gained some weight back. While he has a very strong jaw, it's kind of low where the angle is (so he doesn't have a "long" chin, but a wide one). He also has pretty defined cheek bones, and other features as well (he wasn't smiling much for a LONG time, but he does indeed have lines on his face that deepen when it happens). He's BIG, burly, and buff... but hopefully looks less harsh than before

I like to imagine that Flowers keeps faking his own death, and has a set of plans outside of what Project Freelancer was trying to do... nothing ever worked out properly. Flowers mainly doesn’t like the idea of people being “thrown away” or treated like they’re worthless, and at his worst, that meant using people for some goal they didn’t choose for themselves. He wouldn’t like to admit it, but… “daddy doesn’t always know best”, and he’s trying to include people on the decisions of these goals now (while the Director and Councilor might have just thrown together Red and Blue teams to mimic the other group who had a nearly endless stalemate going, Flowers picked out the Reds and Blues for Blood Gulch because he LIKED them, and he genuinely thought Alpha would too… in a very twisted way, Flowers founded this family). Nobody entirely trusts him at first, what with all the lying. Plus he keeps talking like a overly cheerful serial killer. He’s an older and distinguished gentleman. Some gray streaks in his hair, which he keeps wrapped up in several small braids that make a flower-shaped bun. Some scars on his body from many missions and fights (including the ax to the shoulder). He has a warm, brown skin, and back tattoo that is just barely visible; orange blossoms. He has a tall and lanky body-type, but even past middle-age he still has thick muscles

[mistblaze]

Firekin

Sparktail and his descendants. Tracking only those who have kids/a role in the story.

The Firestarters

Jake

I´m a subscriber to the "Jake is a somali, actually" headcanon, meaning he´s actually BLACK, not a ginger. He´s not quite breed standard, making sure not all his kids are ticked tabbies lol. He´s a longhair.

B/b A/a Ta/ l/l W/W D/d

So he looks solid red with minimal striping at the legs and face. Important note, he´s a darker red than most gingers, looking really, really deep read rather than orange.

Quince

Quince is described as solid gray, so black dilute. She needs a bit of white for her kits to work, so lets give her white toes. She´s a shorthair.

B/ a/a d/d L/l W/S

Tabby genes don´t matter because all their kids are solid lol.

Nutmeg

Nutmeg is described as a brown and white tabby she-cat. Let´s make her mackarel, just for fun. She is heterozygot on the L-locus, meaning she is somewhere between longhair and shorthair.

b/b A/a D/ Mc/ L/l W/S ta/ta

Ticked locus does matter because Jake.

Jake + Quince

Socks

Socks first because he doesn´t really show up much and doesn´t have kits. He´s described as a black tuxedo, which works out perfectly.

B/B a/a D/d W/S l/l

End of story. He might be rusted black, meaning he looks a little red in sunlight. But honestly, I might keep that reserved for Shadowstalk.

Ruby

Her mommy´s little clone in canon. I took creative liberties.

B/B a/a d/d W/W L/l

Dilute black solid, no white, half long fur.

Shadowstalk

The baby. The dramatic, striking, solid black cat ... execpt he looks like a glowing ember in sunlight. I like to imagine that at least one kit in every litter gets Jake´s high ruffusing and has the chance to pass it on. Unfortunately, Shadowstalk doesn´t have biokits, so it ends with him in Quince´s line.

B/B a/a D/d W/S L/l

Jake + Nutmeg

I will only list Fireheart, Tommy Princess here because quite frankly, the other two don´t play a role.

Princess

We´re starting with her because I firmly believe she´s Rusty´s older sister. Maybe even the oldest of the litter.

B/b D/ A/ Ta/ta Mc/ W/S L/

Ticked black tabby with low white. She´s a housecat, but a fierce one. I´m expanding her role as Fireheart´s sister, Cloudtail´s mom and as a supporting Character in Zack´s Apprentices.

Tommy

The middle child of the litter. He will adopt twin kittens, but won´t have any himself. He´s described as dark brown, so watch me continue messing up Jake´s breed standard.

b/b D/ a/a W/S l/l

Shorthair solid chocolate with low white. He´s a street cat and one of Brick´s best raiders.

Fireheart

Finally, the baby of the litter himself

B/b D/ A/ Ta/ Mc/ S/S L/

Black ticked tabby with really high rufussing that essentially turns him into Jake´s reflection.

[hexiva]

ON NAR SHADDAA, UNEXPECTED HAVEN FOR FORCE BELIEVERS

Twenty-one years after Order 66, Hutt mystics still practice Jedi-like ways

By Angan Agondo, Alliance Network News

‘Spirituality’ isn’t the first word you think of when you think of Nar Shaddaa. But that’s exactly what Quiga Len-Wi (20) was seeking when he first set foot on the Huttese moon, three years ago. A native Mirialan, Baloo grew up in a culture with a deep connection to the Force, and with a deep affinity for it. If he had been born just a few years earlier, he probably would have grown up in the Jedi Order. 

But these days, believers in the Force are cut off from any galactic community. The Jedi are gone, and ancient local practices face serious repressions from the Empire. 

Len-Wi first heard about the Hutt mystics from a Twi’lek medic who visited his small town on Mirial. Charitable organizations from wealthy Core Worlds sometimes send out groups of medics and droids to provide care to the ‘magenta’ worlds - a list of worlds devastated by the fall of the Republic, so called for the magenta dots used to signify them on Imperial Holovision’s galactic map. 

“She wanted to treat us,” Len-Wi recalls, “But most of us just wanted to hear what was going on in the galaxy. No one trusts Imperial Holovision on Mirial, so whenever we meet an offworlder, they’re sure to be bombarded with questions about Coruscant.”

The medic had never been to Coruscant, but she was happy to tell stories about her life on Nal Hutta. 

“I’d spent my whole life wanting to be a Jedi,” Len-Wi says. “But there was no chance of that in the Empire. So when I heard about these Hutts who are in touch with the Force, who use it for spirituality and combat - I thought, what do I have to lose?”

Indeed, the similarities between Hutt mystics and Jedi are hard to ignore. “The Force is the Force,” Master Borgga Agashjic (724) says. “Certain species connect to it in different ways, but at their core, all Force traditions are similar.”

Aesthetically, Hutt mystics couldn’t be more opposite to the Jedi. A 12-foot-long Hutt, Borgga wears no robes, but instead a black-and-white mask with large antlers. Their amber eyes are hidden behind black lenses, and their mouth is covered by a gas mask built into the mask. Their green skin is covered in colorful body paint. 

But when they practice their art, any human watcher is immediately reminded of the old stories about the Jedi. With a wave of their stubby arm, they levitate the row of mystic masks which line the walls. They lunge across the room like a dancer with a speed and delicacy which belies their size, and at times it almost seems that they defy gravity. Humans aren’t used to thinking of Hutts as beautiful, but watching them, it’s hard to deny their alien grace. 

Unlike the great Jedi temple, there is no central locus for Hutt mystics. There are instead thousands of smaller temples, each with its own competing power structure and beliefs. But, like the Jedi and Sith of old, Hutt mystics are divided. 

“The Force flows through all living beings,” Borgga emphasizes to me. “You, me, Emperor Palpatine - all of us equally. So how can you justify slavery?” They shake their great, masked head. “Nal Hutta is the capital of the greatest society that the galaxy has ever known - we don’t have to allow this unnatural state to stain our history.”

Borgga is not alone in their anti-slavery stance. The greater community of Hutt mystics is torn between unilateral support for the policies and practices of the ruling Hutt Clan, and a long tradition of societal criticism. Although Hutt mystics are often separate from the ruling clans and their financial dealings, they enjoy a certain degree of traditional protection, and they have always engaged in a delicate push-and-pull relationship with the ruling clans. 

Borgga goes further than most, though. At Borgga’s small temple, crammed into a complex in the Nar Shaddaa industrial district, Hutt mystics practice their art alongside a handful of humanoids. Len-Wi is one of them. A tall fat man with green skin and black hair, his traditional Mirialan tattoos are hidden under body paint, and he wears a horned green mask. 

“People always talk about Hutt chauvinism in the Empire, how the Hutts think they’re better than everyone else and look down on humanoids,” Len-Wi tells me. “But what about human chauvinism? I might look more like a human than a Hutt, but humans still treated me like dirt every day of my life in the Empire. There’s nothing left for me back there. Even if the Rebellion triumphed, I wouldn’t go back.” Because of the Hutt Clans’ relationship to the Empire, Hutt Space enjoys a measure of protection from the restrictions placed on Imperial citizens. 

But not everyone in the mystic community has such a rosy view of life on Nar Shaddaa. Soan Starkiller, the only Twi’lek in Borgga’s temple, says that the movement still has a long way to go. “My family thinks I’m crazy for joining a Hutt temple,” she says. “Mostly, mystics are the same as other Hutts - they think a Twi’lek is a commodity, not a person. Master Borgga has done a lot for our people, but even here, all of the temple masters are Hutts. Humanoids, and especially Twi’leks, can only rise so far.”

When I point this out to Borgga, they look past me at my camera crew, and note that they’re all human. “Progress isn’t overnight,” they say. “But Hutts live a long time. If the Force is with us, I’ll live to see a Twi’lek temple master - and an Organa in the Imperial palace.”

[elysium-the-true-faceofsalvation]

Pre Trial One MV- Undercover

It first starts on a static shot of a singular tree on a hill, the only things moving are its leaves. The camera then starts moving towards the tree, as it hits its trunk, the camera immediately shoots down to the ground and enters what appears to be some kind of underground tunnel. The tree’s roots are all around the tunnel, and they continue until the tunnel ends. As the camera reaches the bottom, it ends up in a room full of roots, leaves, and a bed with a TV above it. At the very center of the room, Numen can be seen with his back towards the camera. She is holding two small boxes. One is pitch black, and the other is purely white. Numen begins to turn around to face the camera, and as they do so, the boxes begin to slowly open. The TV that was above the bed begins to flicker, and a smirk can be seen forming on it. The camera zooms in at the two boxes, as they completely open, the scene cuts. 

Numen now can be seen standing right at the center of ‘The Centrum Vitae’. Right behind them, ‘The Et Locus Fati’ is almost fully visible. Numen is looking at the ground, his expression is unreadable. After some time, Numen turns their back to the camera, and starts moving towards Et Locus Fati. After they almost reach its gate, the scene changes.

UNDER; Receiving and inflicting wounds, but never opening your mouth, No bark, no bite, you’re just a weakling now

01’s door is in full display. The door is pitch black, just like the others, with various details in crimson. The door has the number ‘01’ right at its center. In crimson, the silhouette of a ram can be seen below the 01. But, behind the 01, there is the silhouette of a sheep, its color glowing much more strongly than the ram’s.

UNDER; Tell me everything you like, Come one, come all! I’ll bring your perfect person

02’s door appears now. The door is just pitch black other than the number 02 and two theater masks, which are both in seafoam. The two theater masks are a comedy mask and a tragedy mask. They are at the sides of the ‘02’.

After the lyric ‘perfect person’ is said, two images flash briefly on the screen. One is of Aoi’s door open, with him leaning against it with a very angry expression. The other is of Emari’s door open, only her upper body can be seen. She has a weak smile on her face.  

The screen then changes, flashing two more images. The first is Syouga peeking his head outside his door, with a smirk on his face. The second is of Reika completely outside her door. Her arms are crossed over her chest, and she is also smirking.

UNDER; I promised that I would live on forever, If it’s going to be like this, then see you in hell

03’s door is shown, it has multiple indigo eyes scattered all across it. The ‘03’ is in the center of all of the eyes, as all of them are looking directly at it.

UNDER; I’ll show you what true evil is, I have no need to be worshiped when my crown is fake.

04’s door only has the ‘04’ and crown on top of it. They are both sapphire. The crown seems to have some kind of crack in it.

As the last lyric is said, it cuts briefly to the image of a leaf falling from a tree. After it hits the ground, the scene changes.

See everything with your own eyes, As the glowing halos wrap around their necks. Ignoring their wishes, disturbing the order, But who even are you? As life and death starts to become meaningless, You cling to what was never truly there. Extending your hand, while playing god, But can you really save them?

All of the souls can be seen with a shocked expression on their face. The camera continues to circle back and forth between them. As the last lyric is said, an image of Numen smiling is shown.

After that, four images flashed on the screen. The first one being Haru smiling happily as he is opening his door. The second is Harlow leaning against the door completely closed, she has a complete neutral expression on her face. The third is Genki sitting against the door with his head on his knees. The fourth is Saki closing her door forcefully, she has an angry expression on her face.

UNDER; Clinging to life as you avert your eyes, One day you’ll see what our love is like

05’s door is completely filled with pink hearts. Right at the center there’s a broken heart, the ‘05’ can be seen inside it.

UNDER; Bring a smile to every ‘who am I?’ Everything for the wishes of the masses

06’s door is completely null of color other than a yellow sun above the ‘06’. The rays of sunlight from the sun go from the top to the bottom.

UNDER; I’m so sorry for existing, Please, help me stop

07’s door doesn’t have anything other than the ‘07’ and an orange teardrop that’s coming out of the ‘07’.

UNDER; The daggers don’t hurt when you’re used to it, Spare me of your empty blessings, just leave me alone

08’s door only has the ‘08’ and a dark gray moon. The moon is almost covering the dark gray completely.

As the last lyric is said, another leaf falls to the ground before the scene changes.

See everything with your own eyes, As the glowing halos wrap around their necks. Ignoring their wishes, disturbing the order, But who even are you? As life and death starts to become meaningless, You cling to what was never truly there. Extending your hand, while playing god, But can you really save them?

A glowing halo can be seen wrapping around each soul’s neck. They are all trying to get it out as the camera continues to circle back and forth between them. As the last lyric is said, an image of Numen with their back to the camera flashes on the screen.

The music slows down, and a set of images start to briefly appear on the screen.

The first one is zoomed in with two hands holding each other on a bench. The sun seems like is setting

The second one is what it seems to be like a young girl doing various chores. 

The third one is zoomed in at a hand that is holding a golden earring. The hand seems to be handing it to someone.

The fourth one is an empty school hall. There is someone with their head on their knees sitting at a corner. They seem to be crying, there is a bloody knife next to them.

The fifth one looks to be someone arguing with a teenager in a kitchen.

The sixth one looks like someone walking away from a group of friends. They have their hoodie on, and they don't look happy.

The seventh one is someone happily petting a puppy.

The eight one is of someone handcuffed. They are being pushed onto a police car. They seem to be smirking.

The ninth one is a young teenager looking at a heart monitor. It stopped.

The last one is of someone laying on their bed, looking at a ceiling. The clock besides their bed says ‘2:00 AM’

After the last image appears, it cuts to Eisuke and Akari appearing beside their doors. Eisuke is leaning against his door. He is looking at the floor, he appears to be thinking. Akari is in the exact same pose as him. She just has more of an empty expression on her face.

UNDER; I know i’m not supposed to feel this way, But what do I do if it consumes me?

09’s door doesn’t have anything on it besides his prisoner number in dark blue.

UNDER; I don’t care about what was happening, This is just my life now.

10’s door has multiple violet bells around her number. They are all ringing.

Ravaging brawling, losers please exit left. Even with accusations full of faults and mistakes You will, for sure, with a smile for sure Be pleased and satisfied

All of the souls appear standing right in front of their doors. Each one has their hand in their mouth. As the last lyric starts to be spoken, the camera zooms in each of them removing their hand from their mouth. As they do so, they each start to have a different expression when the camera shows a different person. It goes from a faint sad expression, to holding back tears, to fully crying. As the last one disappears, an image of Numen on their knees on the ground appears, they are crying. Her eyes are glowing in two different colors. Black and white.

See everything with your own eyes, As the glowing halos wrap around their necks. Ignoring their wishes, disturbing the order, But who even are you? As life and death starts to become meaningless, You cling to what was never truly there. Extending your hand, while playing god, But can you really save them?

Numen is seen killing each of the souls in a different way as the camera circles back and forth between them.

Aoi is being shot in the chest by Numen with a gun.

Numen is on top of Emari while holding her neck. They are holding their fist back, as if they are preparing a punch.

Syouga has his hands on his back as Numen is pointing a gun at his head. Syouga is smirking.

Reika is in a fetal position while Numen has their back against her. Numen is holding a lighter.

Numen is stepping on Haru’s chest as he’s gasping for air.

Numen is kicking Harlow on the stomach, causing her to fall.

Numen is shooting Genki on his head. Genki seems to have dropped a knife that he was holding.

Numen is kicking Saki on the ribs.

Numen is looking down at Eisuke as he’s laying down on his back

Numen is holding Akari by her hair. They are throwing his fist back as if they are about to punch her.

Is it still possible to save what’s deep UNDER?

A faint image of a singular tree on a hill can be seen. The camera starts to get closer and closer to it. Until suddenly, the video ends.

[wolverina2002]

Strill Genetics Ramble

Base Colors:

Strills have three base colors. Gold, represented by V, brown, represented by D, and gray, represented by g. The dominance order goes like this:

V=D>g

If a strill is V/D, it can either be brown or golden, or a light brown with golden shading towards the throat, belly, the insides of the legs and the flight skin.

Strills can also be black, the melanism gene being on a different locus, represented by n for black and N for no black. Dominance order is:

N>n

Black is epistatic to everything happening on the other color locus, unless the strill is striped.

Agouti:

Strills can have stripes through the agouti gene, and/or the fur crest down their spine can be differently colored than the rest of their fur.

Agouti is a for stripes and A for no stripes, with A being dominant.

The different crest color is c, with C being the crest matching the rest of the body. C is dominant over c.

The stripes are always a darker shade of the body color, unless the strill is

a) heterozygotous V/D, in which case the stripes are golden. b) heterozygotous N/n, in which case the stripes are black c) homozygotous n/n with a/a, in which case the stripes are whatever dominant color is on the other locus

c/c causes the crest to be

a) golden, when V/D b) grey, when V/g or D/g c) black, when N/n d) darker or lighter than base, when V/V, D/D or g/g

Strills have three different stripe patterns, of which two are actually spots but are on the same locus.

Tiger-like stripes, represented by S.

Panthera, faint spots and rosettes over legs, undersides and flight skins, represented by p.

Cheetah, stripes broken up into smaller spots and tear stripes down the face, represented by c.

S>p=c

If both p and c are present, the strill ends up with rosettes and tear marks but no spots.

Silver Crested:

The silver crested gene is rare and seems to come from a population in the ancient steppe of the northern continent, which does no longer exist today. It causes the crest - and only the crest - to be a light, silvery gray. G stands for a normally colored crest, with g standing for silver.

G/G produces a normal colored crest. G/g produces a crest with most of the hair silver and the tips whatever color the crest would be without silver. g/g produces a fully silver crest.

White:

White - true white, not the silver fur crest gene - is an extremly rare, recessive gene that is being activly selected against both in the wild and in breeding programs. w stands for white, with W standing for no white.

W/w causes depigmented leathers and gums, white feet and, if c/c, a white crest. It can also cause roaning in the crest in age.

w/w causes piebald, random white scattered across the body, with potential deafness when the white covers the ears, blindness when the eyes are blue and a connection to a shortend lifespan.

Double piebald happens when you breed two piebals, and is a purely white strill with pink gums and leathers, lacking flight skin and blue eyes, guaranteed to be blind and deaf. Most pups will be stillborn or don´t survive the nursing period, and no individual has survided past three years.

[larissa-the-scribe]

Terrarium Lights, pt. 3.12

Previously on Terrarium Lights: the ghost reaches a decision about what to do about the other ghost (Next part >>here)

And so it was that, before the sun had even lifted its crown out of the sea, she found herself traipsing along on an overgrown, meandering forest path, clearing her way with a walking stick, and following a ghost. She had her second-best hat on, the one with the hand-stitched lace from her daughter—trying to strike the balance between respect for the dead and the practicality of shoving her head beneath grasping tree branches. Besides that, she had her heavy boots on, ready for any terrain they might be subject to, and a sturdy, carved oak walking stick her son David had given her long ago. She still had her work apron on, too, in the in the interest of keeping her clothes a tad more intact, and her warmest shawl was tucked around her shoulders.

There was just enough light to make her way by, and just enough dark to make the shadows tricky, but that was part of the reason for the walking stick, to clear and test her way by.

"This way," Jonathon beckoned, pressing on ahead, and twisting himself to slide under branches and around trees. He was excitedly contorting into shapes that Gail, with her advanced years and thicker build, could not hope to mimic.

He didn't seem affected by spiderwebs, either, which she felt was rather the unfairest part of the whole business. Maybe he should keep his current form, she thought jokingly to herself—careening through the woods without spidersilk sticking to your hair was a rare luxury indeed.

She didn't say as much. She was saving her breath for chasing after him.

Whether he was driven by the fear of his choices and what lay ahead, the urgency gripping him now his mind was clearer, or simply the impatience of youth, she could not tell. She could, however, tell that he was going faster than was comfortable.

But the spring, pre-dawn cold nipped at her face and nose and gave her an energy to keep warm and moving; the dawn chorus was starting its opening notes; the living gray, heralding the approaching sun, filtered into the wooded world around her. Spidersilk and all, she was enjoying herself.

It felt like when she was a young girl, trying to run with the deer—it didn't make sense, and it couldn’t last, but it made the blood quicker, the feet nimbler, the lungs tighter, and suddenly you were a part of the living world in a way you weren’t before, when you lurked along the tame edges.

Maybe it had something to do with the promise of sunlight, seeping into her bones as the world hovered between sleeping and waking. Perhaps, in the olden days, when there had been rituals and magic made under the light of the unrisen sun, they were on to something. Not something she agreed with, but a seed of something true.

"Not far now," Jonathon encouraged. He looked back and faltered, on the brink of dashing off with renewed vigor.

Enjoying herself or not, Gail had lost most of her breath. She hadn’t run like this in years.

"Tha’s good news," Gail replied, in between sucking in air through her nose with a noise to frighten all the wildlife for a several-mile radius. "Then we should be able to walk without much trouble, eh?"

Jonathon looked reluctant to concede the point, but nodded, and slowed to something brisk—better than the flat-out run he'd been threatening for the past several minutes.

"Not quite as spry as I used to be," Gail said, still sucking in air in as big of gulps as she decently could. "Lovely weather out, though."

"Yes, sunrise is a pretty time," Jonathon replied, half sincerely, half impatiently.

Then, through the trees—the sea. The sky beyond it was painted with pale shades of yellow, blue, green, pink, purple, deepening upwards and outwards and catching in the shadows of the fluffy clouds. Just above the horizon was a locus of white-gold, growing brighter, threatening to spill over onto the sea. Soon, very soon, the sun would rise above it. The ebbing crash of waves mixed with the morning melodies of the birds and bugs.

There was a margin of salt marsh between the woods and the ocean, and the smell of wind-swept salt added a fresh richness to the smell of trees and undergrowth.

Jonathon was heading for a stand of trees edging the salt marsh, one of the last outposts between land and sea. He was not paying much attention to the world around him, marching straight on. Gail was glad she had brought boots. While he was not venturing anywhere particularly dangerous or deep, it would have been much muddier and far more unpleasant. As it was, Gail hitched her skirts up as high as she could and followed the rough, sparse trail after him.

And so they went—under the Spanish moss festooning the trees, pushing through the undergrowth that was threatening the trail, stumbling across a few rocks—then, between the trees, something dark and shining all at once.

Gail wasn't quite sure what she was seeing. It was shaped like a person, but it looked wrong. The skin was aquamarine, deeply shadowed in odd places, and speckled with lighter flecks of blue. The short, chopped-off fringe around the face (she assumed it was hair) was a grayish-purple, almost dark lavender, and the person (or perhaps creature) was outlined in softly radiating black. The clothes looked normal enough, but were also in odd colors—all the opposite of what she would have expected, pale where it should be dark, dark where it should be pale.

But Gail was not prepared for the person—seemingly a young man, similar in age to Jonathon—to turn around and meet her gaze with eyes of livid orange ringed in black.

Even before she came closer, she could feel a chill growing in the air, as if her heat were being sucked out of her.

The young lad waved, smiling. He had a friendly enough countenance, once Gail managed to make sense of it; it was a solid, square face, carved for smiles and laughter. But his eyes—odd, piercing eyes as they were—stayed weighted with sadness, untouched by his grin.

Previous

Next

[invivoinsomnium]

You slowly come out of your deep sleep, light reached towards your eyelids, your vision is still foggy from the long slumber, your hearing picks up the sounds of medical monitors, you groan naturally but find yourself unable to stretch your limbs, something is holding your arms and legs.

Suddenly a intense cramping sensation occurs coming from your stomach, your abdominal muscles clenches harshly and immediately scream in pain followed by rapid breathless huffing. The cramps stops as quick as they began and the sudden rush of adrenaline brings you out of your hazy state, your vision finally clears and the first thing that catches your eyes is this incredibly huge, massive, protruding bare belly, your medical gown rolled up and tucked beneath your breasts.

You're so confused and begin panicking, the very last thing you remembered was helping out an innocent woman after coming out of the gym from a long evening workout, before you felt a bee sting pricking your neck and blacking out.

Years of exercise maintaining your body and keeping it well toned, taking birth control implants ever since you entered college, there's no way it should be possible, yet here you are, in a hospital, restrained, and very pregnant.

Before you can put the missing pieces together, another painful abdominal cramp occurs, but they're different from last time, you see erratic movements rippling rapidly beneath your gravid gut, wether it was by instincts or fear, you immediately recognize that this isn't a normal pregnancy. Whatever's in your womb isn't human...

Anon I love this.

18+

Fantasy.

My breathing becomes even more irratic, panic settling in as I move my head around, taking in the sights of the room. It's clinical, everything white and pristine almost to the point of blinding, especially with the large light shining down upon me.I can see a belt wrapped around my swollen belly, its connected to a machine beside me, there are several more machines but I don't know what purpose they serve.I squeeze my eyes shut trying to understand what happened to me but my mind is blank. I'm pregnant and from the size of my belly full term. Another abdominal cramp occurs and I'm almost bowing my back off the bed trying to fight it. I can feel something heavy bearing down inside of me, a pressure like nothing I've ever felt before steadily building"Hoo....hoo...." I pant out in desperation.

How am I so pregnant? What am I pregnant with? Where am I? My mind is flooded with questions. Suddenly the door tot he room opens and various medical staff swarm in like locus; their faces are cover and yet when I catch any of their eyes I can see delight within them. They begin to set up recording equipment as one of them takes a seat between my spread legs.

I cry out as fat fingers press inside of me, another contracton follows as the press and poke. "Won't be long now," a voice announces. I turn my focus to the one between my legs, "I knew you were perfect. Unlike all other subjects you've carried to term, you're gonna give us a large one aren't you?" the voice chuckles patting my belly, "get ready momma, I'm gonna need you to start pushing soon. Just gonna break those waters and move things a long a little faster. Breath for me," the voice instructs.

I try to protest but all that leaves my lips is a scream. I'm not ready, I don't want to do this. Someone, please wake me from this nightmare...

[glitterdragonthegreatprotector]

Abaddon

Archangel of repletion

Seraphim (insect variant)

He was in charge of supplies for heaven/caelum, but started stealing some of the supplies for himself as there was no need for such large amounts of certain metals and crops. He also started roughhousing with some of the thrones for bets over food and shiny things.

Fell at age 8, not too long after his little brother Satan.

He/her, aromantic, genderfluid, and he shows sthenolagnia as a preference. He only liked to have children with anyone as strong or stronger than him (though not that many demons get to be very strong, so he often sneaks to the mortal realm during times of war to watch soldiers train, or caber toss games)

Slight inferiority complex, along with immense amounts of comfort eating. He often cries to Satan or Beelzebub over eating food meant for the people, as he has more trouble with impulse control. He occasionally pisses off other devils, due to a need to fight, and he runs off into battle during purges even though it’s better for everyone if he hides. His hallucinations involve taunts and unintelligible words that he mistakes for insults (he will randomly fight or cry because of these, depends on his mood.) He is cursed to inevitably destroy everything he touches, which is why he goes after the strongest, in hopes that someone will survive his curse, or that his children with whomever he mated with will survive.

Original look: blood red eyes, pale skin, black long hair, white wings, blue robes, brown sandals.

New look: a centaur with insect limbs bent to look like horse limbs, the front and back of his legs are ripped off below the joint, and replaced with horse hooves (god mocked his love for the centaurs with this form.), his head is a locus face sitting on top of a humanoid one that has lion teeth and mandibles behind his lips. He has a ring of his own face on the back of his head, with their eyes gouged out, and their hair covers them (these make him have an echo-y voice as he speaks with these mouths instead of his main mouth. He roars/screeches with the insect/lion head.) He has torn up locus wings on his back, a scorpion tail, along with his top dominant arms being Scorpion claws. He has two other extra pairs of arms that look like locus arms, with “fingers” that look like the claws at the end of a locus’s tarsus. Embedded deep in his skin, working like an exoskeleton, is hot iron, that eternally burns his skin (he has not grown numb to the pain, but he has grown better at hiding his suffering.) Around his waist is a belt of skulls, varying from human skulls to demon ones, these are his lovers from over the years, or how he puts them, his “Faces of Strength” as he does not marry for love, but respect for demons and humans that push against the odds and become the strongest despite everything being against them.

Full form: a swarm of flaming locusts, each plated in hot iron instead of their natural shells, taking the form of a flaming pterocentaur. His faces on the back of his head float around the “head” of the swarm that makes up his body, his original face missing their eyes is copied 20 times, with 9 on the top row and 11 on the bottom (Reference to when he shows up in the bible, in Revelation 9:11.)

[eccentric-nucleus]

here's a chunk of text i wrote for hell game 2 that i'm debating the canonicity of. i will probably tweak some of the implications. this is, surprisingly, not pornographic.

There's an Abomination here: a collection of organic parts, mostly bone and muscle and chitin, formed into something approximating the locomotion framework of a particularly large hyena-wolf. Fruiting bodies sprout from across its back in white-blue tendrils. Its head is the most directly analogous: a cage of rotted bone, worn away into irregular, asymmetrical pits, each of which opens into a glowing yellow eye, half ruptured and oozing ichor down its face. Below that, there's an articulated mandible -- a jaw -- that yawns open, a mess of fat tentacles spilling out like frothy tongues. That's an accommodation to human foibles; they don't need a centralized sensory locus the way humans do. But humans like having something to look at when they talk to someone.

This isn't a Hell thing; these were on the station before the disaster. {SWITCH %PC.startSpecies: human -> It's a little comforting to see someone familiar. You think you had a work-shift with this one, maybe. / ai -> ... }

ABOMINATION: Ah. {= %PC.name}. What's your sitrep?

-> Bad.

----

Abominations were originally conceived as an information extraction/torture device during the Third Martian Conflict. When Phobos was deorbited at the height of the war, hotlabs on the moon had their habitats ruptured during the impact, and the first generation of Abomination spores circulated free within the Martian atmosphere, eventually obtaining complete biosphere dominance. Abomination bioframes still present many theming elements drawn from Martian flora and fauna that were absorbed during their initial rampancy.

The initial assumption was that Abominations were mere grey goo: some kind of insensate matter reprocessing virus, specifically targeted to extract and store information from neural tissue they consumed. That may or may not have been their original design; historical records are thin on account of their origin hotlab having crashed into another planet and then subjected to several decades of Abomination-dominant biosphere.

In the aftermath of the war and the total loss of Mars, the interplanetary community was at odds for what to do with the Abomination incursion. A human -- or anything we would consider 'a living thing' -- existing in shared atmosphere with an Abomination fruiting body would be incapacitated within minutes, and kept alive but in excruciating pain as they were slowly flensed apart and had all their biomatter repurposed for the use of the local hive network for the next several weeks. It was a form of life inherently designed for use as a biological weapon. Even if they were, unexpectedly, sentient and capable of communication, it was a form of life that seemed impossible to live alongside. Abomination communicated among themselves with spore signals and mycorrhizal webs. Imagine if your eyes killed anyone you saw, and your voice had the force of a bomb.

Any official {UN; united federation of planets; w/e} response was preempted by the release of the first-phase Abomination antigen in the Martian atmosphere. The antigen bound to the spore network and disrupted fungal signals, effectively sterilizing their inter-body communication and utterly destroying the emerging hive network. At the time, though controversial, this was heralded as a huge step towards interspecies coordination. It made them 'safe', incapable of accidentally devouring everything their thoughts turned to. Once it became clear it was impractical from scientific, biological, and political to remove the antigen, several different strains were prototyped, allowing Abominations some level of hive connection without rising to a dangerous (to humans) threshold.

That was the state of things for nearly two hundred years, until contact was made with an unaltered hive trapped in Martian orbit since the Phobos deorbiting. Careful study and synthesis between the Abominations in orbit and a crew of rebel scientists, most Abominations themselves, lead to the development of a Human tolerogen gene therapy. The human staff of the research group voluntarily inoculated them, allowing them to inhabit the same space as Abominations without either species being in danger of being eaten alive or having all their senses burned out of them.

This was, in a very real sense, an existential threat to humanity. Altering the Abominations by cutting off their eyes and hands was one thing, if it was needed to keep humanity pure. Altering humans to make them compatible with the Abomination hive-networks meant that on a deep, biological level, humans who went through the process were no longer humans. They expressed different biological markers in all forms, from egg to death. To call the widespread use of the tolerogen gene therapy politically contentious would be understating things enormously.

The initial gene therapy altered and amended human biological processes sufficiently to make them capable of rudimentary integration to the Abomination hive-network. Incidence of development of psychic powers from access to Abomination communication flows rate at 0.013% of human population converted, and are a source of quiet humor to Abominations, where even the most 'psychically-active' human is very much like a toddler constantly polluting their network with uncontrolled, unexamined babble.

Large amounts of study have been put towards plant & animal bioengeering; altered humans are mostly-inert receptors, but Abominations still have a tendency to strip biospheres bare to reinterpret and process all foreign materials. As collective humanity makes its first steps out of the solar system, a source of hot debate is that our combined biosphere is intensely aggressive to any life lacking very specific biomarkers. Ecological contamination from space exploration has always been a concern, but once a majority of humanity began harboring a specifically-engineered consuming biovirus the topic became more contentious.

In much the same way human habitation is defined by a certain pressure level and gas mix, it's becoming increasingly clear that in the future the expansion of the human bionetwork will involve highly specific signalling chemicals, as much a part of the spread of collective humanity as gut flora and skin mites. What is a biosphere, if not a collection of process that attempt to choke out competing ones on contact? Collective humanity's is just considerably better at it than most.

Unaltered flora and fauna have been limited to preserves that inevitably decline in size yearly, given the impossibility of sharing atmospheres without fear of cross-contamination. The latest issue, as of {year marker; current day basically}, is the fundamental extirpation of all life not tailored in some sense for coexistence with collective humanity. It represents, perhaps, a new stage in existence, one where all biological processes that exist throughout the solar system only exist by the consent of bioengineers who have specifically designed them to work. The ending of nature, or, perhaps, the unleashing of a new kind of nature. Evolution still happens within the spore network, after all.

That a lot of them decided to look like giant nightmarish wolf-things is a joke. Humanity domesticated the wolf, after all.

anyway, you can fuck it.

[artandreading]

With the adept to natures unknown i here by this all awe inspiring dwindling factors of nature and religion the much needed begger I assume taken part that is more than a man but a god who lived in the before times and after the fact held the seems of his locus reality in abundance with dreams and visions of dued part is now afflicting don't doubt yourself the enki'ik design is to be feathered in white by luck or mishap in the back round the harps play as part of your fortune as now been fulldfilled day by day you have to see it that lamp this is lit in the mind for a real meadling desire has to be undertook with skeptics higher than thoes than the hair's that brush the face serpentine fashionably .Late is the circumstance where one has done the part Subduing afflicting natures Karam consumes you undoubtedly and no viliiouns is aspired through the arts of heroism the lust gravitates between awareness of the nymph of naomid in harnessed relpases placed between set boundaries between whats said in the last of the meantimes the blue factor is altercated in rhythm foreclosed in thought of an appearance of a suggestion their is no subordinate to that nature .