#revel systems

[merchantservices444]

Automotive POS System

[deikshen]

One day, Airplane sends a message to Peerless Cucumber, something like "Hey bro!! I promise not to doxx you. In fact, [redacted] is my name irl. What's yours?! :D"

Shen Yuan is curious and intrigued, so he decides to answer him truthfully. After all, Shen is a very common surname. So common that even the damn Scum Villain uses it.

A few hours later, in his inbox, Shen Yuan has a poor imitation of a marriage certificate that Airplane made for him, something like marrying him to Luo Binghe to stop him from crying and complain, and be considered an honorary harem member. Obviously Shen Yuan sends him to hell and back.

Moving forward, Shen Yuan is now Shen Qingqiu, and he is with his very real and not fictional at all husband Luo Binghe walking in some pretty city. So, they find an old fortune teller who seems to be right about very specific things about their pasts and histories together, then, the next thing she says can only be true. And the next thing she says is:

"Oh, this blackened lotus... I can see how his soul is intertwined with someone beyond the understanding of this world. He has been married to this soul in a way beyond what we know."

Luo Binghe, simple and pompous at the same time, says something like: "Of course, Shen Qingqiu is my husband."

And the old fortune teller, looking at Shen Qingqiu, just smiles and says, "No. You have married a soul twice, but it is not Shen Qingqiu's soul."

And Luo Binghe doesn't understand anything at all. But... it must be true, right? From how nervous his Shizun looks about it. And Shen Qingqiu insists that they leave, ignoring that old lady's expression and calling her a bit of a liar about it.

Shen Qingqiu distracts his husband, but despite this, Luo Binghe can't stop thinking. And think, and think...

And somehow, Luo Binghe comes to a conclusion: the soul now inhabiting Shen Qingqiu is his soulmate that comes from another world. He could assume that Other Worlds exist, after all, that Binghe double of his exists, so… Why couldn’t there be another Shen Qingqiu? Or another Shen-something? And, think that maybe this Shen Qingqiu (which, surely, is another name, but he won't go into that) had wanted... another chance? Another life? If they were married in another world as the old woman said, and the other Binghe had a harem, maybe he was one of those harem wives? But why had he thrown him into the Abyss then? It made even less sense now.

Luo Binghe is not clear about it. He wakes up very early and goes to talk to the fortune teller, secretly. The woman just laughs at him:

"Of course, if we look at it in some way, the soul you married could be part of a harem... In some spiritual way" and that doesn't clarify anything.

Luo Binghe can only come up with a few resolutions about it. Shen Qingqiu is a body with his husband's soul. There is an almost divine power beyond what is understood and explained that controls and regulates what truths his Shizun can or cannot tell. Binghe's story was written, but not in stone. And the soul he had married was aware of that.

Luo Binghe is too confused, thoughtful, overwhelmed. The truth is that he had never wanted to meddle too much in his husband's secrets. If his husband wanted to tell him something, he would. Or Luo Binghe would coax it out of him with kisses or pleasure until he had to confess. But this, this was bigger than even Shizun could explain.

And Luo Binghe doesn't know what to do with it.

(Hilariously, Shang Qinghua passes by that old fortune teller out of curiosity after Shen Qingqiu tells him about it, and ends up being called Dear Creator, which turns his hysteria upside down. Well, that crazy old lady is very OP, but the enthusiasm is appreciated. Someone nerf her.)

[sunderwight]

It's wild to think that liushen probably has a bigger age gap than bingqiu. Especially by the end of the story.

Like, we don't have firm ages for anyone other than Luo Binghe, but we know Shen Yuan is vaguely in his twenties when he dies the first time, that the Qing generation of peak lords are all within a reasonable age range of one another, and that Yue Qingyuan was a grown adult when he helped seal Tianlang Jun under the mountain. And that this happened after Shen Qingqiu had been accepted into the sect and become the successor of Qing Jing Peak, which, consider Shen Jiu was considered a late addition and also that he presumably didn't climb the social hierarchy of his peak overnight, probably means Yue Qingyuan was closer to 30 than 20 when he fought Tianlang Jun (assuming they weren't even older than that).

Which would put the Qing generation around their 40's, most likely, by the start of the story. Probably mid-40's, which works out for simplification sake because that would mean the best guess is that Shen Yuan is about 10 years older than Luo Binghe at the start of the story, and Liu Qingge is about 20 years older than Shen Yuan.

I mean we could absolutely take more generous estimates to get it closer to one end of a range or another, especially for a particular fic or whatnot, but this is like, the most reasonable guesstimate without doing any of that. I think? I mean you could feasibly make the bingqiu age gap as small as six years or as big as fifteen without really defying canon, and if we want to be very generous to Liu Qingge we could say he's the youngest of the peak lord and just barely squeaked into their generation and is closer to 30 than 40 and shorten the liushen age gap to 10 years instead, but there's also no real reason to assume that either. All things being equal, Liu Qingge being like 45 seems to be more likely than him being 30 or than him being like, 100, even though both are technically possible (to be honest we don't even know if he's actually younger than Yue Qingyuan, since peak lord hierarchy is about the rank of your peak, not your actual age).

Anyway of course eventually Shen Yuan dies again and stays dead for a few years, Luo Binghe gets to catch up to him a bit but Liu Qingge keeps going. Which just widens the liushen age gap (whatever it is) while shortening the bingqiu one. So even if the liushen gap's closer to a 10 years than 20, by the end of the story it's still probably bigger than the bingqiu gap.

I think what makes this extra amusing is that nobody would enjoy the revelation of all this, though. Luo Binghe and his age gap kink would be appalled to learn that his shizun is barely older than him. Liu Qingge (who is firmly in the thick of things with his childhood-enemies-to-lovers arc) would also probably not take it well to find out that he's been unwittingly attempting to rob a cradle.

Nobody likes this!

[starry-bi-sky]

new Danyal al Ghul au just dropped! --or at least some art of it did. I call it the "Stillborn? No, no, still born" au (or stillborn just for short)

it's based off a batfam comment I saw that mentioned in the early comics Bruce knew about Talia's pregnancy and was ecstatic to be a father. So much so that Talia feared he'd give up being Batman for it, so when she gave birth she put the baby (Damian) on a doorstep and (seemingly) told Bruce that the baby was stillborn.

I saw it, thought "mm, tasty!" and thought what if that baby was Danny instead of Damian? By default I was thinking of making him a few years older, however, it works just as well with demon twins. I need to think it over. Meet Daniel Brown! 14 year old foster kid whose been with the Fentons for the last two years! He has SO many issues haha. hah. lmfao even.

Danny's theme song is literally just "Good Kid" from the Percy Jackson musical, to sum him up.

[knightscanfeeltoo]

Pretty much Bedman in Guilty Gear Strive...

(Except there is No Covid Quarantine in Guilty Gear Strive, I think...)

[afsosville]

Ever After High, but make it a PIDW AU.

Imagine how fucked up it would be if Shen Jiu is up there doing the book signing ceremony that seals his destiny of becoming the next 'Shen Qingqiu', and the mirrors display him getting thrown away by his martial siblings at the trial, and his limbs being torn off and other despicable tortures, and being brought down so low that your humanity is stripped away from you, all for an audience to see. And they cheer. The crowd is ecstatic, perhaps even more so than when his father, Shen Qingqiu, was put on trial.

[johnskleats]

Also?? Is this a real perspective? Katara being 14 creates a power dynamic between the cannon couple that's balanced out by the fact he's a tantrum-throwing supernova? Really?

[see-arcane]

Seeing grown men say Oh we need to keep politics out of metal is funny as hell to me because I'm younger than this guy and still know damn well that metal genres have been having political songs since the 70s, for example,

Black Sabbath - War Pigs (1970) was written against the Vietnam war. Metallica - Disposable Heroes (1986) uses WW1 imagery but is about how patriotism is used for creating cannon fodder (Soldier boy, made of clay/Now an empty shell/Twenty one, only son/But he served us well). Their song One (1988) is based on Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novella. System of a Down - BYOB (2004) is an anti-Iraq war protest song. Their song Holy Mountains (2005) is about the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire and how the USA refuses to acknowledge it to not upset their good ally Turkey. The list is endless.

Honestly, after seeing so many tone deaf right-wingers and hand-wringers act aghast over Rage Against the Machine being about -checks notes- raging against the machine*, I've given up hope for literacy or introspection from these guys, period

(*authoritarianism, capitalist wage slavery, general insidious abuses within varied shitty systems of status quo)

Like, I get just tuning into a song because Sound Good, but the lyrics and the performers are sometimes actually saying something and the entire genre maybe possibly has its roots in defiance against the injustices and conservative constrictions of the world

[serpenttailedangel]

The (entirely undisclosed) writing system Brin came up with in the World of Elan drives me nuts. Symbols were made with consideration for the schwa sound and their version of S looks like an O. (Or at least, whatever the first sound in their word for 'sun' is, that letter looks like an O.) The schwa accommodation alone means it's not the Latin alphabet. The S/O thing is probably further proof it's not the Latin alphabet, but could also indicate they're not speaking English. Which is kind of a moot point because everything pre-Riyria is implicitly localized into English if for no other reason than that most of the Fhrey language is blatantly localized and in Legends and also the old writing in Riyria does not match modern speech which is, itself, portrayed in English.

Anyway, it's not the Latin alphabet nor does it seem to be a cipher of the Latin alphabet because, again, it's got schwas. Assuming I read the bit about Brin and Roan discussing schwas correctly, anyway.

So they're not speaking English probably and they're also definitely not writing with the Latin alphabet or a 1:1 cypher... yet in Death of Dulgath, Payne makes a point of explicitly stating that his name is spelled with a Y and an E rather than an I, and Royce later makes a quip about his name being Pain after all.

(Not even gonna get into all the other times etymology is made up for words in the story, or the apparent vowel shift that managed to happen during the only few centuries of the empire where reading was wide-spread.)

I understand this is all still something that can be handwaved by saying "it's just localized into English" but my brain is still churning over this. Like...

Royce's whole entire name comes from a misread of Roy, a couple city segments reduced to initials, and someone slurring the words "male" and "born" together. And I'm gonna just ignore that the E in Royce is silent and the implications that has on the in-story alphabet. I'm not ignoring it. "Royce" only has three phonemes in it and even if you assume that the actual city section symbols were swapped out for Latin alphabet letters, how much space does that leave for the name Turin claimed while dropping him off at the orphanage? Did Brin invent a whole entire alphabet with useless extra letters despite her writing system actually being tailored for the language it was made in? Did the local language morph to the point of dropping certain sounds but keeping the old spelling, thus generating silent letters? Why? The vowel shift that I said I wasn't gonna get into seems, at least from how I read it, to mean that words are outright spelled differently between Fariland and Esrahaddon's time, which seems to imply that they adjust spellings to stick to pronunciation more readily than English does. But his last name is just comes from slurring the words "male" and "born" together. Given that there's no necessary reason for those words to be the same, what's his real name.

I understand that any second-world fantasy I read that uses names that sound like English words technically has this problem, but most of them don't also reference inventing an a writing system that explicitly isn't English and then making me think about it.

Realistically, I don't want Tolkien levels of worldbuilding. I like conlangs and fantasy writing systems, but when they're on the level of needing to read an appendix to learn that the fantasy language actually has a formal and informal you but only in certain cultures and some of the characters didn't use it and there were nuances to the social interactions I read that went overlooked due to all utterances of "you" being translated with the same word in English, you are expecting too much of me as a reader. But like... there is a little part of me that wants to know what their real names are when you tie their names to a bunch of words that I'm assuming were localized.

Also I'd like a Fhrey dictionary. I just... I need to know the pattern for the words. I want this.

[sunderwight]

Demon Shen Jiu is such a fun idea though.

Especially if he himself doesn't know. Like imagine, Yue Qi finds this abandoned baby and the baby is REALLY OBVIOUSLY not human. But this also enables Shen Jiu to survive being abandoned at such a young age -- a human baby would die without adequate nutrition or care, but demons are a little more resilient. Baby Demon SJ has a way more forgiving digestive system and can move under his own power from a much earlier age. By the time he's a year old he's hunting his own rodents and small birds, and has to be stopped from biting and mauling anyone he doesn't like. Which is most people. Qi-ge develops amazing reflexes.

Why do the slavers tolerate a demon baby hanging around? Maybe it's really not all that uncommon. Demons come across the borderlands from time to time, and are as liable to abandon their kids or die or etc as anyone else. It's maybe an open secret among slavers that demon-blooded kids are a better investment, even, because they can survive for longer on less. The only downside is if they don't ever look human enough to pass as human, because that limits potential buyers, but that's only relevant when the slavers are trying to sell them. For the purposes of having a network of street kids stealing and grifting and spying and etc, it's fine. A lot of the slavers themselves started out as demon-blooded street kids with no other options.

But in SJ's case, he pretty quickly starts passing as human. Mostly because he's quite strong, and he's convinced that he's the same as his Qi-ge, so he makes himself the same. Makes his hands look the same and his teeth look the same and etc. It's largely subconscious, and once he starts doing it, it becomes automatic. SJ forgets that he's a demon in the way that most people don't retain their earliest childhood memories -- although he remembers that some of the slavers were demons.

Then of course there's the question of why didn't the Cang Qiong cultivators notice?

A few options. One is that whatever kind of demon SJ is, it's really good at mimicking humans. Another is that he's only part demon, and like Luo Binghe, fully capable of handling both kinds of cultivation. So once he starts learning spiritual cultivation, even from a heretic like Wu Yanzi, he doesn't seem different from any other recruit with a patchy education on the subject. Anything else odd about him could be easily attributed to his exposure to Wu Yanzi and his wicked practices.

Although full demon SJ is a fascinating idea. (Also, it could contribute to all those qi deviations -- he's trying to cultivate AND "fake" human cultivation at the same time, I doubt Qing Jing's techniques are totally compatible with everything going on there even without the psychological turmoil.) Like I'd imagine Airplane wrote that SJ was abandoned on the streets as a baby, and the system was like "hmm he probably wouldn't survive that?" and then in some nine billionth wife arc, Airplane also creates a variety of demon that can fully pass as human (for some identity conflict with a prospective wife), even to the point of fooling human cultivators and demon-detecting tools. So the system just ties these two disparate pieces of world-building together in order to patch a critical plothole (Airplane doesn't know anything about babies). Which has the side effect that Shang Qinghua doesn't even know that SJ became a demon!

And SJ himself doesn't know. The only person who knows is Yue Qi.

Obviously this wouldn't come up much in PIDW, but it could be pretty funny in the SVSSS timeline. YQY just sitting there through the whole Luo Binghe being a half-demon reveal, wondering if he should say something. Subsequently being the most absolutely chill about the whole demon reveal thing anyway. Like he's definitely not upset that Luo Binghe is a demon, or part demon, and the multiple people who try to make a point about it just run afoul of his impenetrable smile and get nowhere.

Then eventually Yue Qingyuan decides that he should probably tell Bingqiu that Shen Qingqiu is a demon. For like, safety purposes if nothing else. He's kept the secret so long also for safety purposes (even if someone put Shen Qingqiu under a truth compulsion he wouldn't be able to admit to being a demon, because he himself doesn't know!), and he's done tons of stuff to prevent anyone ever finding out (although Xiao Jiu is so talented that he didn't have to do much), but Luo Binghe is the demon emperor. That changes things. If Shen Qingqiu is going to be visiting the demon kingdoms regularly then there's a chance something could reveal the truth unexpectedly, and that would probably be worse.

So Yue Qingyuan sits down and has a very serious discussion with Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe about how Shen Qingqiu is actually a demon, was just the cutest little demon baby in fact, here he drew a picture from memory of what Xiao Jiu used to look like before he learned to look more human, and also how a lot of slave kids and slavers and people who fall through the cracks in society have demon ancestry, some more recent than others, and Shen Qingqiu always retained a certain discomfort around his own kind because of the adult slavers who sold him off, and etc etc.

[phoenixcatch7]

We could make Sqq a transformer in his past life. Like optimus prime sorta transformer. Cybertronian.

He'd be the only surviving seeker (winged guy) on the autobots side (I don't know all the canons but I don't think they have, like, any). Pretty young when the war started - unfathomably ancient for humans, the kiddie of the group to them.

And he arrives on earth. Discovers the Internet. Immediately gets hooked on critiquing stupid Web novels in every language, which being a sentient machine he can do at great speed without forgetting anything. Decides to read the final chapter during a battle because he's so close to the end and airplane had better pull SOMETHING good. Is so infuriated (distracted) by the ending he messes up and immediately gets killed by some low level decepticon. After FIVE MILLION years of war he gets offed by some loser over a stupid human story that wasn't even very good. He dies SO furious.

And then he gets reborn a human.

He is, as the kids say, big mad.

How by Primus do they do anything??

[vampirecatprince]

It's actually really interesting sometimes with my PDID because I'm a really, really fictive heavy system and sometimes I will feel myself trying very desperately to form a fictive of a specific character and I can feel my subconscious struggle with their voice/tone/speech quirk just enough that I can actually feel said alter give up on forming.

My alters will often treat their fictive identity more like a role they're playing or a costume they find comfort in and, oddly enough, getting the voice right is very important to many of them. I've actually had fictives shapeshift into different characters just because they struggled so much with the role they originally formed as and refused to do it any other way. They take a lot of comfort in their fictive identities most of the time and even if they try to experiment with who they are, they still usually fall back into being Blorbo from My Shows™️. They still get false memories and still have feelings about their canon and can still "miss" it in a paradoxical way, but there's definitely a layer of performativity to it for us that I don't know if other systems have.

[19silvermirrors]

Oh fandom joy of translating random characters! Here I was translating 灣 [wān] — bay, gulf — getting down to 彎 [wān] — to bend, to flex, curve — and then to 䜌 [luán] — chaotic, confused —which is a compound of many beautiful words like 鸞 [luán]. At that moment the golden light of divine revelation poured all over the place and I felt this gorgeous luan MUST have to do smth with LQG's Cheng Luan. Guess what🔥 It's written precisely as 乘鸞 and means smth like 'riding a phoenix'? How epic is that??

乘 [chéng] — to travel, to ride, take a chance, multiply 鸞 [luán] — luan, a mythical phoenix-like bird

[knightscanfeeltoo]

Ramlethal just watching Malenia trying out the Cheeseburger for the First Time to see if she Likes them or Not...

(I could use the Guilty Gear Strive Ramlethal Valentine Model in Source Filmmaker but Of Course they are Not in SFM Workshop so I went with her Other Model from Xrd instead...)

[burningcomputerpersona]

the way spaces end up getting casually gendered is so weird. i normally try to get to my classes a bit early so i can choose where to sit and it's fascinating to watch how ppl will gravitate towards a certain spot depending on the gender of the ppl sitting nearby. by the time the lecture starts the classroom almost always has a visible distinction between the 'guys' section and the 'girls' section. and it happens individually too even when there's not a huge friend group clustering around the same place.

[wifewatersflowers]

I hope gracie abrams is healthy and happy and taking care of herself