#+ figuring out how things will evolve

[rot-to-the-core]

i really like the headcanon that aventurine texts like a boomer because he doesn't spend time with teenagers and mostly uses tech for work purposes and dr ratio has picked up some slang from his students

that being said i can't stop laughing at the idea aventurine discovering stickers on microsoft teams and whatsapp good morning gifs and texting like this as a result

vs ratio 😭

[psychomusic]

sith oc!

her name is (for now, but I'm not sure) Kalusna (attribute of the underworld domain in etruscan language). she is part twi'lek and her lekkus have more mobility. i have outlined most of her background but have still major problems on her period as sith alchemist and her late journey bcs i don't wanna break the eu continuity in any way.

backstory under the cut!

she lived on shili during a time of intense conflicts between the togrutas and other alien species (& their hybrids), back when the hydian expansion region was being discovered, (haven't decided the years precisely YET but probably around the great hyperspace war or earlier). shili was not very frequented at the times but it had visitors and was on its way to become part of the Republic.

she was ousted by her community after her parents' death, and was left behind in the grasslands with an albino akul who she tamed thanks to her force abilities.

akuls, for those not super familiar with the lore, are supposed to be the apex predator of shili, very powerful orange quadrupedals, prone to albinism, with which they make headdresses after a hunt, because it's a symbol of the hunter's capacity.

she then found many other people and full groups and decided to unite them under her powerful rule. they settled in a strip of land surrounded by a sea on one side and a lake on the other, and there they lived and trained, with the secret goal of taking over the key communities of shili. she guided her people and, starting with nearby villages, she quickly expanded her territory to the point where the main cities suffered from the many refugees who left their homes at the mercy of her army.

when they conquered a village, they usually took some of the villagers as prisoners and cavies for her experiments with the dark side. to create a more powerful army, she created hybrid monsters with a rudimentary sith alchemy and thus strengthened both her warriors and the animals they kept.

when the rejected reign got closer to a bigger city, the togrutas called the republic for help, and two jedi ambassadors were sent. as soon as they realized a dark side user was involved, they called for reinforcements, but the news of their arrival had gotten to Kalusna's hears. the outcasts quickly launched an attack on the city, but the jedi, scared of the threat, had already evacuated most of the citizens and prepared for their arrival. a bloody battle began, and it ended the togrutas and the only remaining jedi setting a trap for her and her avant-garde warriors, that initiated an explosive chain reaction that expanded and tore down most of the side of the city under her control.

as the jedi called in for reinforcements, the news got to the ears of the sith, who, intrigued, sent one of them to bring kalusna to the academy on korriban before she fell into the jedi's hands.

but, with her whole army gone to the explosion, and too many wounded to tend to, she was presumed dead by the jedi and left behind. the sith then found her, alive with burns, clinging to her best friend (trandoshan-togruta hybrid) who shielded her from the explosions, and took them to korriban, where she would keep on studying alchemy and sorcery, and got particularly interested in semi-sentient animals. her friend, though, died on the ship before having the chance to reach a hospital.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[fisheito]

UNLOCKED SCORCHING SUN (sunburst fever) DANTE ! (Spoilers? Here is a short summary of my reactions):

-eiden i live for the cheesy things you say when you wanna bone someone. ehehehehe when the corny roleplay actually works too well🎶🎵

-oh um 😳 eiden getting himself off bygrinding against Dante's leg ahaha💦💦 ok uhhh 💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦

- THE CONFUSED SPUTTERING WHEN EIDEN GETS SUDDENLY BLUE BALLED🤣🤣

-oh shir dante lore drop

-oh SGIT DAnte is working even harder than i thought just to make an equal society like,, dude,, that is sO MUCH to take on YOU ARE ONLY A BABY. BUT YOU TRY TO FIX CENTURIES OF INJUSTICE 😭

-aawwww...... gentle.....🥹

-DAMMIT EIDEN STOP BRATTING FOR 60SECONDS AAHHHHHAJAJAhaha oihh ahhhh

-dante is like the Grinch he doesn't know what the dokidoki in his chest is (.it's his heart) but. He'll get it one day

- they're cute 😭 and funny 😭😭 and eiden's "why do *i* have to go" is so... PETULANT i love them they're bickering idiots 🥳

ah, correction*: why "THE HELL HAVE" i gotta go. to be fair, that is a mild reaction to dante suddenly cockblocking him from himself(?). yeah. selfish lover moment deserves at MINIMUM that amount of sass 🤣

[kafkaoftherubble]

把死人给带回来？ 难道...?！

// If They Are Bringing Back the Dead...

This post contains spoilers for Chapter 184.1 of To Your Eternity.

It also contains speculations galore. This is NOT a meta essay.

Shoutout to my homie branetheory in Discord!

Thanks to them, I was reminded of what Parts of My Brain had wanted to talk about:

Bruh. I can't believe ToFu made me so high last night that I forgot to talk about this.

Honestly I regret nothing Okay, memory water.

A little Kafka Aside: I'm gonna have to consciously ignore how... not-there the scientific backing for this is. Honestly, this Memory Water thing reminded me of the New Age/Pseudoscientific idea of "water memory" or Masaru Emoto's "water consciousness" thing or DNA teleportation. However, this is a story where weirder shits have happened, so suspension of disbelief willingly and gleefully granted. I just need to get this out of my head first.

To reiterate, Kaibara's experimental procedure involves

Extracting cells from a person's body

"Turn" it into water (how?)

Make a "clone" drink it (who?)

-----------------------------------------------------

Who could these clones be?

The only clones we know so far are the Mizuha clones. Their existence seems to imply a similar purpose to Hayase's descendants—they are supposed to inherit Hayase's Will, which is 95% "get injected with a tumor we call the Left Hand Nokker."

But Nokkers have long become invisible and fully integrated into this ecosystem. In the Future Era, they are embedded in tag chips, and they grant the bodies they possess all sorts of abilities and augmentations.

What would an inheritance of Hayase's Will even look like here? At first, I thought it would be similar: a tag chip with the Left Hand in it. Mizuha's, uh, possession (for the lack of a better word) manifested through the same mechanism other Nokkers used, after all.

However, the story gradually told us that the clones had all been massacred via an unknown operation for yet-untold reasons. Why would they do that?

Were these clones failures?

If they were failures, then it would make sense why Kaibara treated them as disposable; after all, in the past, the Guardians always exalted Hayase's Descendant(s) no matter how incompetent they were at their mission. Failure to secure Fushi's seeds I mean love never made them disposable enough to be killed, right?

So, as branetheory (crediting my homie even though they might not see this ahahhahah) also thought—

Could it be that Hayase herself has been successfully reincarnated in the body of one of these clones? (8)

I assigned this hypothesis an 8, or "80% confidence level."

Is she who you're gonna see, Bon?

Why would Kaibara need so many Mizuha clones in the first place? They only need one Descendant. They only have one Left-Hand Nokker...

Unless these clones were made specifically for bringing back Hayase. They were all experiments. Few experiments ever go right at the first trial. But this? Experiments this challenging and important as "recreating our legendary progenitor, Hayase?"

It will definitely require a lot of trial and error. So these clones were made to be expendables.

Honestly, who would name their offspring with numbers if they weren't meant to be seen as expendables?

----

There is an interesting point to note: Memory Water only works if one has a Nokker implanted in them. Remember how Abel can't drink it and instantly know the answers to their stupid-ass questions?

So do all clones have Nokkers implanted in them? They all own a tag chip, after all. But there is only one Left Hand Nokker, and that bitch seems deadset on possessing only Hayase's appointed heir (or in this case, Hayase herself).

Does that mean

all the clones have their own Nokkers, but none of it is the Left Hand, until the Experiment? (3) OR

all the clones have empty tag chips until the Experiment, in which the Left Hand Nokker is then implanted inside before the subject drinks the Memory Water? (6) OR

other hypotheses I could not think of at the moment? (1)

------------------------------------------

Doro and Her Sisters: Were They Trying To Stage a Rebellion Against Kaibara's Highest Echelon? (7)

Assigned (7); "70% confidence level"

Could this scene actually depict a failed experimental result, where #32/Doro was the subject? After all, she didn't look like she died in a massacre. She looked like she died alone, leaving her sisters behind..

Doro liaisoned with Fushi in secret. So secretly, Tonari didn't know it happened.

Why would she do that? Way back then, me and the Discord gang had speculated some sort of clash between Doro and the rest of Kaibara. At that time, I think our speculation was that it had to do with the Wish-granting Orb specifically.

But now, with this new information in mind...

Could it be that the liaison was part of the clones' planned rebellion? (6)

Assigned 6; "60% confidence level."

It could be that, in addition to passing vital information about Kaibara to Fushi (who is still not exactly forthcoming about what they know so far), Doro was also trying to ensure that the Wish-granting Orb will never fall into the Highest Echelon's hands.

Was her conviction formed out of concerns about what Kaibara might do with the orb?

Or was her reasoning more pragmatic—she didn't want Kaibara to have the power to crush her rebellion?

----

Back to the number-as-naming convention. What if these weren't names, but the assigned turn of each clone for the ultimate experiment (6)? If that's the case, then Doro is the 32nd experiment that failed.

That's a lot. And the fact that she failed would mean the experiment will keep going. The clones will keep being bred to be used for these experiments. It's a conflict ripe for seeds of rebellion, right?

And so, there are extra hypotheses as to why the clones were massacred in the first place:

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated (8)

The clones' rebellion plan has been found out (7)

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated AND the clones' rebellion plan has been found out (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

----------------------------------------

Dolly's Purpose(s)

While Doll's original purpose might have been for amusement and fun—Doro rescued it from some trash heap and just engineered it to be a playmate—I had always found its ability to dish out powerful punches suspicious. Why would a playmate be good at granting people concussions in the first place?!

And it was good enough to take out mercenaries, right?

I'm quite confident that Doll's punch is a defensive ability to guard whatever's stored in its memory (9).

I should review what Previous Me had speculated:

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves or consciousness

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker within it

Doll is a combination of Doro's consciousness/brainwaves and its original AI

There is also the speculation that Doll is the Wish-granting Orb itself, but I think the confidence level for that hypothesis has gone pretty low... at least to me, personally. It sits at less than 10%.

Now, I want to add new hypotheses and rearrange them from most confident to least:

Doll's memories include Kaibara's top secret: key infrastructures, their real master(s), their experiments, whatever information they have gained about the Wish-granting Orb, their master plan to counter Fushi, and the like. Things that could give rebelling clones an edge. (8)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness integrated within its original AI (7)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness AND it is Doro's consciousness/memories that possess knowledge of Kaibara's top secret (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker (less than 2)

The first (and by extension, the third) hypothesis can be supplemented by the fact that Kaibara really wants the Doll. Why, if not because the Doll holds vital information regarding the entire company?

They could go after it for Doro's consciousness, sure, but the priority would drop a lot more, wouldn't it? ...Unless the third hypothesis is true!

The second hypothesis can be partially supplemented by Abel's dedication to possessing the Doll; he really cherished Doro, and to him, the Doll could lead him to her again. He also claimed that Doro "is still alive," though when pressed, he gave no evidence.

Was it wistful thinking, or could he have been privy to Doro's experiment to transfer her consciousness into Doll? Did he really know nothing about Doro's death?

There is also the "Now I am human" line Doro uttered while blindfolded. Given we now know what the clones are used for, Doro might see her existence to be inhuman/subhuman because of her real purpose. Maybe, to her, she could feel more human by being a doll than in her human body.

Hell, who knows? Doro might secretly envy Abel's humanness—a guy who was likely born from normal copulation and couldn't fit in with the rest of the Tagged society, yet all the more a genuine human being than the rest of them.

-----------------------------------

What is the nature of Doll's Brainwaves?

Could it have been a digital transfer, or could it have used a similar mechanism to the Memory Water?

----------------------------------

Miscellaneous Implications of Memory Water Bringing Back the Dead

Bruh I swear if they reincarnated the Nameless Boy to torment Fushi I will fucking sever my friendship with Left Hand Nokker and nuke their Paradise. Oh hi Left Hand, nothing over here.

----------------------------------

And that concludes my hypotheses round-up, updated to only Chapter 184.1. Remember! Y'all are always welcome to reblog and add your own thoughts to it!

Fuck, I will be so honored if y'all Fushi-fied my writing by adding absolutely anything.

Thank you for reading my ramble. Rest assured, I have prepared just the right image for the moment I clown myself by having most of my hypotheses come out spectacularly falsified:

(Hi everyone this is Kei from Ajin)

[good-wine-and-cheese]

Lowkey hate when I have the rest of my fic fully figured out because then I end up getting excited about the endgame stuff but I still have to like, get there.

Like I have some 6-7 chapters left and at this rate I'm going to write the back end 5 before the actual next chapter lmao

[thatringboy]

rwby in a honkai star rail AU where the plot is exactly the same except the Brothers are now Long and Tayzzyronth and Salem hasn’t realized that those aeons are dead is this anything

[spotsupstuff]

Are ancients actually anemones? Are they a group of anemones that became bilaterally symmetrical separate from other bilateral organisms?

oh you ask such things of a non-native english speaker who isn't even that deep of a biology nerd...

i understand what bilaterally symmetrical means, i googled it n i get it now, but how does the. sentence of them becoming separate from other bilateral organisms comes into place. do you mean evolved into the leading dominant species on the planet and therefore being separete from the others?

oh-! or is it more on the subject of Everything Else in this world is some kind of insect/arachnid yet They are Anthozoa?

i actually got That figured out n was one of the main things i was lookin into while trynna figure them out- here's me ponderings from my n Shkiki's dms on the subject:

on the question of: if the rest of the fauna has adapted to this new oxygen rich environment, why haven't the ancients?

i'm thinkin that this world got "this is so fucking weird, it might as well happen"-d in the form of evolution through the Respawn Mechanic. the animals didn't exactly have a choice but repeatedly die until they learnt to somehow deal with it (and if physically then so be it), while the Ancients adapted by creating the rebreather masks

[sqlmn]

What does he look like as drowned rat?

Them, in all their drowned rat glory.

They start off as a really good agent, filled with confidence and really convincing to others! Then start to find out things on their own that the agency would rather they don't know (also through very illegal means but hey, whatever) and decide to dip.

Before leaving though, they act as the mentor to Clifford, a young and impressionable agent in training... and make sure that he's the best agent he can be according to their very harsh standards. They then even tell the higher ups, hey, kid's ready and you should give him a nice name for missions. And then suggests Bravo, convinced Clifford will accept any code name with gratitude, they want it more personal. But like. Personal to /them/.

So every time someone uses that code name, it's basically praising their hard work with the guy. Anyone who uses the name Bravo is acknowledging Clifford's skills, but more importantly, acknowledging the one who gave him those skills.

[atanxdoesstuff]

my favourite koi boi <3

tried a bit of a different artstyle, i think it turned out quite nice :3

fun fact: the colour is ALL on one layer (except for the background)

anyway lemme know if you wanna see the procreate speed paint vid

[goldensunset]

i need to make a full outline for what i’d headcanon kh characters’ pokémon teams to look like at some point

[chronurgy]

highly-specific assumption: you come across like you enjoyed history classes in school or at the very least have an above-average interest in history, like particularly biography and narrative takes on history: not memorizing the details of wars or trade agreements but on the lives of people in the past. not because you literally discuss history in your fanfiction, but because of the way you pull together threads of setting detail, the way the world informs the person.

Highly specific but correct anyway! A good portion of my history education really focused on trends and currents and understanding how technology shaped social change and vice versa (example - the rise of protestantism as a function of the printing press and rising literacy levels). I found that view of history particularly fascinating and almost certainly did enjoy it more than average. I love seeing what shaped historical events and how people were shaped by them in turn. Some of my favorite questions to ask when reading or writing are "how did people respond to that/how does this change things" and "what made this person the way they are" and I guess that comes through!

[jurweemn]

"UH-HUH!"

[front-facing-pokemon]

[vaugarde]

One thing about my worldbuilding that isn't really important, I just think it's cute: the Pokemon anime is a TV show within the main gameverse and it's meant to educate kids about certain Pokemon while telling it's own story that's very, very, verrry loosely based on Red's journey.

[wibblyparfait]

pt 2 to this post, mayb i shouldve waited til i could post both these vers together but i do not CARE because Ilis <3

aka. treat making an older-ish version when he gets stuck in the Library after LobCorp 👍 despite how L Corp Was (statement.) he kinda preferred that over the Library & hence is sorta itching to Get Oute, trying to pretend hes not homesick & wanting to see his moms again & helping out w receptions mainly for the sake of Getting It Done rather than Cuz He Wants To Do A Good Job like before o(-(

he is not perceiving his own burnout arc tho shh let him pretend all is well & continue Chesedkissing esp now that he is Not A Box & prolly needs better stress coping mechanisms than lowkey picking up smoking </3 DNFNDF