#Scaffolds Of Creation

[silencedminstrel]

(Artist unknown)

A DIALOGUE OF SPIRITS - THE "SCAFFOLDS OF CREATION" AFTER THE DARK EMPEROR HAD UNSHACKLED THEM FROM THE "TREE OF LIFE" (SPECULATIVE SCRIPT)

EXT - AN UNKNOWN WORLD SOMEWHERE WITHIN "THE GLEAMING FIELD" (HYPER UNIVERSE) - DAY

THE CHARACTERS - TAS UVUNGULA @ THE YELLOW KING (LORD OF THE AIR ELEMENT), QUEEN MERNIA (LADY OF THE EARTH ELEMENT), ENVERD KALIPOTH (LORD OF THE WATER ELEMENT) AND ZEL-HALVEL (LORD OF THE FIRE ELEMENT)

THE FOUR ETHEREAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF CREATION, WHICH GOES BY THE NAME OF THE "SCAFFOLDS OF CREATION" HAVE GATHERED AT AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION SOMEWHERE IN "THE GLEAMING FIELD" OR THE HYPER UNIVERSE, MARVELING AT HOW MUCH EVERYTHING HAD EVOLVED EVER SINCE THEY WERE CHAINED TO THE "TREE OF LIFE" AT THE ONSET OF CREATION.

TAS UVUNGULA: So how was your trip to The Place Where It All Began, dear sister?

MERNIA: Delightful as always, dear brother! And yes, my dear son (Nature Spirit Lord Sumbuz-Tri) also sends his regards...!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: So I assume everything went well down there, sister?

MERNIA: Oh, you, heheh! You knew it as well as I did, brother!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: Please, humor us for a moment, sister?

MERNIA: (Sigh) Oh, very well...! The Dark Emperor had finally arranged to meet his estranged sister-in-law as expected, whereas Earth Maiden Senoha had saved both her beloved dad's and her affectionate lover's peace of mind but...!

ZEL-HALVEL: Is something amiss, sister?

MERNIA: (Sigh) Well no...it's just that...that Shairo had burned his bridges and that poor undeserving Humoga had to inherit all of his burdens instead...!

ZEL-HALVEL: I'm sorry to hear that, sister...!

TAS UVUNGULA: You cared too much as always, dear sister, but I don't blame you one bit...!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: I agree with you, brother. Nevertheless, our carefully laid plans have worked so far, sister!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: (Continued) We've saved XNROE from further degradation, we've made the Dark Emperor set in motion the reinstatement of the Celestial Emperor and...! (Sigh)

ZEL-HALVEL: And most importantly, we've managed to curtail that Saif Shalkanath's damaging designs--indefinitely I might add?

TAS UVUNGULA: Indeed we had, brother!

MERNIA: But what if it's still not enough, you two? For he had already absorbed too many an innocent life to free himself from his prison! Oh my dear brothers I dread to think how many more Sacred Survivors would have to lose their lives until he's...! (Sniffle)

TAS UVUNGULA: Be strong, sister! We must put our trust on His beloved "Creations" for we've already been informed of their hidden potentials--long before they even existed!

ZEL-HALVEL: Forsooth, dear sister! For we're still at an advantage as far as I can tell! I mean...!

MERNIA: (Sigh) Yes, you're right, you two...! Forsooth our business was--and forever will be--with that false deity and nothing else!

ZEL-HALVEL: While Mickey (Mind of the Creator) and his "Brother" deals with their wayward rival "The Faceless Horde" before they decided to invade that universe again! Am I right, everyone?

ENVERD KALIPOTH: Yes, which is another thing that worries me still, brother...!

MERNIA: What do you mean, brother?

ENVERD KALIPOTH: (Sigh) Despite our vast attributes dear sister, whatever "game" that The One Most High is playing will forever be...! (Sigh) Forever be beyond our understanding!

TAS UVUNGULA: Then it is wise to quit dwelling on the unfathomable, brother! Forsooth we've got work to do and we need to proceed with it post-haste! Lest...!

MERNIA: Agreed. Now let us merge our thoughts together and find out the means to maintain the continuity of Creation...!

ZEL-HALVEL: Motion seconded, dear sister!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: Motion carried...!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: (Continued) And it so happens that I've already had an idea brewing, everyone!

MERNIA: Ah! As always you're so full of surprises, dear brother!

ENVERD KALIPOTH: Don't I always, dear sister? Heheh...!

TAS UVUNGULA: Well let's hear it then, brother?

ENVERD KALIPOTH: Certainly, brother...!

FADE OUT.

THE END.

[prestonmonterey]

im so eeeeeepy

but not in like

a tired way

idk

but!!!

we were misinformed

and

there is no load in tomorrow :D

so

more time to draw fox and mothboy and noodly ferret >:3

[q-nihachu]

Timestamps from Niki's stream with summaries of the Tubbo-Herobrine lore!

2h 39m - Empanada and Niki wonder why Tubbo is on so late with a weird skin. They decide to go talk to him.

2h 40m - They find Tubbo dressed as Herobrine, spinning on his back on the ground to music. Bagi explains that he has a date with Fred and is probably nervous.

2h 46m - Bagi uses rainbow jelly on Tubbo, and he resumes standing upright. He seems to have a sort of weird power where, when he points at people, they disappear or reappear.

2h 53m - Tubbo makes all of the eggs disappear and reappear. Niki asks him if he’s evil, and he shakes his head. She gets blinded for a few seconds.

2h 55m - Tubbo flies into the air and logs off.

(interim)

3h 9m - Niki, Bad, Empanada, and Richas are working on Empanda’s egg carton room when they see Herobrine-Tubbo on the tablist again. Niki goes to see what’s going on.

3h 10m - Tubbo, in a different voice: We are not done yet. Take me to shells. Shells now. Small little shells.

Niki figures out that he means the eggs but refuses to take him to where they are. He calls her the “Keeper of the Shells” and continues to ask to be taken to them.

3h ?m - Niki: Do you know Tubbo? Are you Tubbo?

Tubbo-Herobrine: Unimportant.

3h 26m - Empanada arrives.

Tubbo-Herobrine: Shell, I must share news. Are you important?

Empanada: to my family and friends yes

Tubbo-Herobrine: In everything?

Empanada: oh I don’t know?

Tubbo-Herobrine: What is everything to you?

Empanada: my family and friends

Tubbo-Herobrine: So you are important.

3h 30m - Tubbo-Herobrine points at Empanada, and she disappears. He thanks Niki, but she asks him to bring Empanada back. He says “In 60 seconds.”

3h 31m - He asks Niki if she’s important. She says everyone is important. He brings Empanada back.

3h 33m - Tubbrine says he needs a home, and Niki says they can help.

3h 34m - They find out Tubbrine is a creation of Tubbo from the Tubchunk. He asks them not to tell Tubbo about it.

Tubbrine: Creator will not be mad. Just will have to start over. When start over, I end. I end forever.

3h 38m - Tubbrine now says he needs the “Jump keeper,” seemingly referring to Niki.

Tubbrine: I struggle with jump.

3h 41m - Tubbrine stands in the water and says that it hurts. Niki puts down scaffolding for him.

3h 48m - Niki figures out that there’s a conflict Tubbrine needs help with. It seems to have something to do with Tubbrine’s ranking of the eggs’ importance. Niki thinks he’s looking for Sunny.

3h 51m - Tubbrine says he wants the egg with the aggressive personality that “may be powerful.” Empanada guesses he wants Moon, Sunny’s alter ego.

Tubbrine: May be childish.

Niki: Sounds like Richas.

3h 53m - Tubbrine says he can’t say Empanada’s rank, but she’s high.

~ 3h 56m - Tubbrine disappears.

3h 57m - Tubbrine reappears while Niki is afk and insists that Empanada go with him. She leaves a sign for Niki explaining and does.

3h 59m - Niki returns and starts to panic, searching for them, but quickly finds them nearby. She continues trying to decipher what he wants.

4h 5m - Richas arrives with Bad, and it seems to be what Tubbrine was looking for! Tubbrine questions him in a similar fashion to Empanada about importance.

4h 14m - Tubbrine makes Richas disappear, saying he was dangerous.

Tubbrine: Shell is now safe. 

Tubbrine: The rank dictates.

4h 15m - Tubbrine: What does shell want?

Niki: We want him back. Can you bring him back?

4h 17m - They ask his name, and he says “I am Creation.” He brings Richas back (about now? I might have missed it).

4h 20m - Creation says “Done” and leaves. Niki explains everything she knows to Bad, and they agree to respect his wishes and not tell Tubbo. They decide to go investigate the Tubchunk.

4h 26m - After not finding anything at Tubchunk, Bad and Niki plan to ask Tubbo questions without revealing exactly what happened.

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

what if chaggie accidentally used Dazzle's body to make their new demon child while trying to resurrect him?

would that be too messed up??

Vaggie scooping up Dazzle's little body (reverted to plush toy mode when he died) from the hotel wreckage while the rebuilding gets started and she starts to bring him to Charlie but then hesitates, turns away, goes over to Lucifer instead to ask about the agreement with Heaven about the Exterminations because she's got this stupid, hopeful, tiny glimmer of an idea....

After borrowing Lucifer's coat to wrap Dazzle in she finds out that yes, the agreement to only wipe out people in the Pride Ring was meant as a way of targeting sinner souls specifically, yes all of Lucifer's immediate family should have had immunity from being killed- getting hurt or maimed is different, but death absolutely shouldn't happen-

so Vaggie asks, then, what Dazzle counted as. He was for sure a hellborn not a sinner, so while he wasn't meant to be targeted he also wasn't promised immunity inside the Pride Ring... but was he also Lucifer's family? If Charlie loved him enough to count Dazzle as HER family, would that be enough?

And if Dazzle was part of the Morningstar family, if he never should have been killed, then could heaven be compelled to help with maybe, possibly... fixing that??

Lucifer gives a tentative maybe, and Vaggie is striding over to Charlie before he can tell her how bad this idea is

She knows. Charlie does too. They spend a week thinking about it but already know what they're about to do the first time they find Razzle crying himself to sleep on his brother's memorial statue

One call to heaven later and Vaggie's slipping away to the Heaven Consulate with a small bundle in her arms. Charlie meets up with her shorter afterwards, having argued and begged her dad and finally gotten, if not his direct help- (he's sure this will fail. his heart can't take being part of that)- then at least a jewel bright with the golden light of creation, not something Charlie knows how to use but that's okay they already knew they'd need help with this.

A determined Emily meets them in the Cosulate. Heaven (mostly Emily) has agreed that Dazzle's death hadn't been righteous even current policy standards (which suck and need to change but whatever) so Emily's come down to try imbuing a spark of creation back into Dazzle's body.

Creation likes balance. Spheres within spheres within rings within rings. It likes irony and completion, and Emily hopes that Heaven being the reason Dazzle was killed can be balanced out by Heaven helping to give him life again.

But its complicated. She's talked with Lucifer- trying to just shove demonic energy into Dazzle would just turn his body into a puppet. Collecting his dispersed hellish essence would hurt any demon who's absorbed part of it and risk dragging bits of other demons or their imprints into Dazzle, changing who he was possibly for a worse. So Emily and Lucifer settled on the idea of using his body as a scaffolding and hoping the wear and tear of his life would be enough to guide the divine power Lucifer's gem supplied, letting it grow into the shape of more or less the person who Dazzle was by the time he died.

Technically Lute should be here to repent her murder of him and, as the one who ended his life, be part of restoring it to him- but she refused and heaven can't force her, it wouldn't count if they tried... so Vaggie, who was close by when Dazzle died, will have to stand in as the next best thing and be the one to invite Dazzle back.

And Charlie will have to give him some of her blood. It's the surest and oldest shorthand for claiming someone as family- key to the entire argument that Dazzle's death absolutely NEVER should have happened-

Lucifer isn't sure what it might do to Dazzle to have the blood of the princess of hell flowing through him. He's not sure anything will happen at all, but if it does, time and experience tells him Charlie and Vaggie won't be getting back everything they lost. And what they DO end up with they might regret asking for.

Charlie and Vaggie have already agreed through, whatever comes out of this they will NOT regret having tried to bring Dazzle back and they WILL be here to take care of whatever or whoever is given life as a result.

That's good enough for Emily. She holds the jewel, Vaggie holds tiny Dazzle's body, and Charlie uses her trident to open the skin of her palms and forehead so she can drip smear the blood over the dead goat demon, drip more on while she leans in to kiss his forehead, and finally presses her bleeding hands over the gaping hole Lute's sword left in him

And as golden light spins out to weave around Dazzle's body he does, slowly, begin to stir

and to change

it's not much but it's enough. the tiny child that blinks open it's eyes has a streak of blonde in it's red hair. it's eyes are gold instead of red, a little spark of floating fire has lit between it's horns, and the spade tip of it's tail has a red heart shape on it now.

Dazzle wasn't much of a talker but its clear pretty soon that the new bundle in Vaggie's shaky arms also has no idea what's being said to it. The name Dazzle gets no reaction at all.

Chaggie carry their new kid (literally a kid) back home to the hotel after asking Emily to do the honor of picking a name.

Emily picks the name Baphomel.

The hotel crew thinks it's a pun on the "baaa" sound goats can make and the word "phenomenal" and they feel that's pretty accurate considering how loud the new kid turns out to be when it starts bleating unhappily about the whole suddenly being alive thing.

(Razzle hears one single "baa" from it, rushes over, and when Charlie anxiously tries to explain that this isn't- it's not really Dazzle- Razzle waves her away impatiently. He knows. This is his new little sister, and he hurries off to collect the softest blanket he can find and some safe things to chew on and warm milk bc that's calming right and maybe just one donut just in case she likes those too, and-)

at this point Angel has given the kid the nick name Me-LOUD-y or maybe Mel-OW-dy depending on how close to the kid's painfully loud bleats you are, and for all that Vaggie hands over the kid to Charlie so she can go chase everyone else away, Charlie hums and sings and calms the kid down and thinks the name Melody is a good nickname after all

(Emily thinks so too when she's hears about it later) (she gave the name Baphomel so the new child would know it had always been seen as something worth praising, but being a song- being part of something bigger- sounds comforting too)

and that's the Bedazzled au

no the new kid does not end up liking donuts.

she likes toast with jam, usually toasted on the little flame over her head and the jam is usually not fruit based it's almost always coming from Cannibal Town

she was remade using Charlie's blood so it's the blood of other hellborn she craves (though variety is nice) and needs to keep her little flame thing burning.

if that goes out so does she- think the book version of the ghost of christmas past- but that spark of pure creation, when focused through the gem also used to remake her, lets her do a bit of creating and balancing out of her own.

healing becomes her thing. The thing she's obsessed with.

first bc of Vaggie's eye and how it WON'T heal, but then she gets told a bit about Dazzle once she's old enough to notice him in old pictures and ask about the giant golden statue in front of her home.

That's when she realizes the two white patches of fur chest and back are where a gaping sword wound used to be- and it's healed. Heavenly steel, supposedly permanent, but Dazzle's body was healed by the spark of creation and she's alive now in it.

which convinces her that SHE should be able to heal others like this too. No, not just heal non-lethal injuries from exorcists like Vaggie's eye, there HAS to be a way for her to bring back-

Healing's not a BAD thing right? Neither is figuring out a way to resurrect dead hellborn. Sinners get to pull themselves back together so why not hellborn too, why not find ways to let them their full lives or even longer. Nothing wrong with that. It's not dangerous.

No one in her family worries about her studying healing and resurrection. (heaven worries a little but heaven can go shove it)

Her family WOULD worry if they knew WHY she was doing it.

her giving herself the middle name Bedazzle was probably a pretty big hint.

or it would have been if she didn't add the name Bedlamb for the funnies bc, y'know, bed lamb... born from the body of a goat plushie... who likes toast... bedlam Bethlem Bethlahem house of bread... its funny she swears it's hilarious. Baphomel Odia Bedlamb Bedazzle Morningstar.

she also switches her nickname to the name Baffy, bc it sounds like her very cool aunt Niffty and she thinks that's cuter

and also yes teen her does end up a fan of a certain tv show about hell and demons who drink blood and her voicemail message is in fact "if the end of hell comes, beep me. Baa~"

[familyabolisher]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say much about loveday before, if the mood strikes you I'd love to hear what makes her compelling to you!

oh god you can really pinpoint how long someone’s been following me based on whether or not they’ve ever seen me (or anyone) say much about loveday. i will try to make my handful of thoughts here brief—a lot of this is somewhat corollary to my fucking massive backlog of takes about cytherea, which i feel is fitting considering we can pretty much only get a sense of ms heptane through what we know about her terrible terrible girlfriend.

i think the main thing i find interesting about loveday heptane is her role as this kind of invisibilised governing structure that, like, scaffolds the discourse of gtn. if the core drive of the book is (as i would argue it to be) gideon “learning” cavalierhood, and by extension us as readers understanding what cavalierhood “means” relative to the discourse of the text, then part of how this process of elucidating cavalierhood-as-subject-position takes place is in this three-way interplay that happens between gideon, loveday, and protesilaus relative to cytherea. put simply, gideon, loveday, and protesilaus can be understood as cytherea’s three cavaliers, and placing them in this equivocal discursive position allows us to draw useful conclusions about how we might understand the nature of cavalierhood, and how that understanding might be informing the wider narrative.

because the narrative focalises gideon as our protagonist, we could argue that she takes primacy within this triad, so perhaps another way of putting it is that everything she does relative to cytherea (and, later, harrow, though i think it’s significant that cytherea acts as a catalysing force towards the creation of that cavalier subject position that drives the book) ought to be examined with reference to a) protesilaus and b) loveday. as i said, all three occupy a discursively equivalent position relative to cytherea—that of the cavalier. so when we see this kind of courtship unfold between cytherea and gideon, and take on the language of grooming, objectification, predation, etc., alongside this process of, like, subjugating her, subduing her into a position whereby cavalierhood becomes a coherent possibility, we can understand one dimension of cavelierhood as a subject position to involve a form of sexual subjugation made somewhat salacious by its being socially taboo. at the same time, protesilaus as functionally cytherea’s cavalier is a dead body being reanimated, wholly at the behest of cytherea’s will, and loveday as cytherea’s cavalier is long dead, mourned, batterised, and made into a symbol of devotional grief (‘cytherea loveday’). when gideon ‘learns’ cavalierhood, she is ‘learning’ how to become the reanimated corpse and the beloved battery and the site of sexual availability. all three are then operating in tandem to make the nature of cavalierhood legible to us.

(i think this is at its most salient in the avulsion scene, which is one of the few moments in the book where we see cytherea make a fairly straightforward reference to loveday with “I’m sorry. We take so much. I’m so sorry.” there’s also this—

She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?” [...] The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”

—preempting her much later and more straightforward claim to palamedes that she & loveday went through with the lyctoral process because she “thought it would make me live.” this alongside the suggestion that she looks ‘regretful’ and the attention paid to gideon in a sentence that seems to be covertly about cytherea’s grief imo makes a fairly solid case for reading this exchange as another passing reference to loveday; there’s an emphasis, however covert, placed on cytherea’s grief and guilt in this chapter that hasn’t thus far made itself especially apparent. & it’s significant that these references crop up alongside a scene which has gideon acquiesce to being subjected to a brutal process of batterisation which serves as a fairly efficient metonym for the entire lyctoral process, and arguably by extension the entire state of cavalierhood, and also sees cytherea use language like ‘darling,’ ‘good girl,’ ‘poor baby,’ ‘i’ve got you,’ &c. &c. specifically to facilitate that process; these complex, overlapping networks of sexuality & subjugation & death & grief & lyctorhood are being put to pretty significant work in that chapter.)

re. loveday specifically—i’m really interested as well in the fact that, like, the seventh house seems to have this specifically chivalric culture attached to it (more so than some of the other houses, though it’s seemingly present across the whole internal body of the empire to some extent). we see this in, for instance: cytherea and dulcinea are duchesses when a duchy is a medieval apportioning of land; protesilaus and [presumably] loveday’s title is ‘the knight of rhodes’; dulcinea’s name references don quixote, which examines and parodies the conventions of chivalric literature and culture in spain. gideon and cytherea’s relationship is conducted rather like a courtship between a knight and a lady; though this speaks more to empire-wide social conventions around cavalierhood as a whole, i think it’s interesting that the narrative focalises cytherea (of venus!) when drawing attention to dynamics of love & sexuality within the relevant social order. all this is to say that i think cytherea and thus loveday by extension fit pretty coherently into the chivalric cultural narrative that muir is working from, and i think this gives us a lot of scope for thinking about what the two of them are ‘doing’ wrt gender.

& i think it’s fairly plain that the text is, among other things, interested in interrogating contemporary articulations of ‘lesbian gender’ abstracted through the various lenses that allow for diegetic consistency. what i mean by this is that, for example, we as contemporary readers who attach meaning to ‘butch’ as a descriptor know that gideon is a butch and we are to make sense of her character as such, but that’s not a gender framework that she has available and thus not a meaningful diegetic descriptor; we can’t say that gideon says or does X or Y or Z because of extant cultural norms around butchness, because those cultural norms don’t exist for her. we can, however, notice how the attention paid to rendering her as legibly ‘masculine’ in-text run parallel to (among other things) a particular kind of masculinity articulated in the language of chivalry, knighthood, &c.—which is legibly present in the text as cavalierhood, and is thus explained, historicised, problematised, all while acting as a vector by which we can think about the legibility of butchness in an imperialist social order.

(i feel like a proper reading of what tlt “does” with gender is its own post—real aveheads will remember—suffice it to say that i think the above is part of the fabric from which that discourse unfolds itself.)

i bring this up because i think loveday is something like the ur-text for this specific reading—which is why i’m so interested in her and the force she exerts over the narrative in gtn. most people seem to lean towards reading her as a butch (as a character we ought to understand as a butch &c.), and i would agree; i think it’s significant, however, that we can draw that conclusion based on cytherea’s demeanour/preferences (lol) and a handful of characteristics attributed to her in the very sparing accounts of her that we have in-text. however reliable or otherwise the accounts we have of her might be, i think it’s noteworthy that her lover remembers her as a ‘nice girl [who] died for me,’ clearly agentive in the decision to effectively sacrifice herself for cytherea (“i didn’t want to do it at all [...] she and i thought it would make me live”), memorialised in what to me reads as a symbolic marriage (‘cytherea loveday,’ the taking of the partner’s name—this along with the fact that john misremembers cytherea’s surname as ‘heptane’ and we never find out her functional ‘maiden name’ means that i think my reading of it as a gesture to marital conventions is more than fair), whereas eg. mercy and augustine remember her as ‘looking like she wanted every one of us beaten to death,’ seemingly generally unpleasant and antagonistic. this idea of someone who comes off as aggressive, unfriendly, standoffish to outsiders, but is loving, self-sacrificing, devotional to an excessively servile degree in romantic relationships is very much—not stereotypical, necessarily, but archetypal, and especially archetypal to the ‘chivalrous butch’ that i think muir is employing. add to this the things i said above about the seventh house seeming to operate on a culture of chivalry, her title being that of a knight, the kind of necromancer-cavalier relationship that cytherea solicits from gideon closely resembling a chivalric courtship, and i think there’s a case to be made for loveday as a stand-in for this archetypal ‘chivalrous butch’ that the text then probes and problematises. 

this is interesting to me because i think it allows us to read loveday and her presence in gtn in particular as something of a discursive signifier rather than a fully fleshed-out “character”; i mean, crucially, she’s not fleshed out, she’s entirely subsumed by cytherea! if (and i realise i’m going a little crazy here; blorbo from my autism, &c.) we read the version of cytherea and loveday present as disciples at canaan house as representative of how butchfemme negotiations of gender can be subsumed into an imperialist social ordering via the conditions of chivalry, we can think about loveday then being collapsed into a signifier for a discursive position such that her presence in the text governs how gideon navigates cavalierhood and how we as readers understand and interpret it (cf. how i opened this piece, talking about the gideon-loveday-protesilaus triad), and how by extension the imposition of subjectivity via subjugation eschews the agency of the subject in favour of transforming them into a set of signifiers, symbols, representations, &c. (this is—i have to say it—this is the crux of the argument i make in salolita, and, as we all know, lolita is a huge part of the scaffolding of these books.) it also allows us to read cytherea as we receive her in gtn as a kind of unravelling or destabilising of that signifying dynamic, which we can of course extrapolate onto the destabilisation of the necromancer-cavalier-lyctor thing as a whole that gtn introduces and articulates through her.

and i guess i just—i’m interested in this! i think the gender angle and the subjugation angle are my two preferred ways of approaching these books, and i think it’s pretty easy to eke out some v compelling readings by kind of throwing loveday heptane at the frameworks and seeing what happens.

[re-locative]

Research findings: How are people creating a sense of togetherness online?

The everyday inventiveness of translocal relationship maintenance

I'm excited to share some early insights from our latest study. Some of you may remember it from when it was distributed: a survey about how people who sustain relationships online create a sense of being in the same place, even at a distance.

Even now, online platforms are marching towards a future of standardised, formless, and profoundly placeless design. But relationships need place (Tuan, 1979), and people will continue to fashion new tactics to address their everyday needs. So, how do people in translocal relationships play with/around these technological limitations? How do they foster shared places on platforms that aren't designed for it?

That's what our study sought to uncover, and here's what we found...

---

Our deepest thanks to all who participated in the survey! We had 44 respondents—almost twice as many as we were hoping for—and more importantly, we got a pretty broad slice of translocal connections across the world:

Our original focus was on long-distance families and romantic relationships, mainly because people conventionally assume physical closeness and cohabitation in those relationships. But in practice, the data we gathered contained accounts of all kinds of relationships, so we expect the findings to be relevant (in varying degrees) to many kinds of online connection as well.

Across the data, a few themes showed up repeatedly, and through an extensive process of coding and clustering, we've distilled it into five themes, or key drivers of practices in virtual placemaking:

1. Synchronicity ⌚

People seek to act in concert and in temporal proximity, to feel a sense of relatedness—be that by experiencing media together, collaborating on a project, or just feeling collocated via a background voice call. Voice calls often scaffolded these kinds of synchronous activities—sound is a great vector for conveying simultaneity/"at the same time."

2. Persistence 📌

We talked about synchronous interactions above. Asynchronous interactions, on the other hand, assert the "being in the same space." This requires virtual spaces to not simply disappear or refresh when the session is closed: you're able to leave artefacts for others to discover even when you're offline or "in the background," and they accumulate over time. That's a core trait of a real place (as discussed in past research).

3. Emotional connection/depth 🫂

We know from other research that long-distance couples favour text messaging. Verbal communication is paramount in relationship deepening because it supports precise expressions of care and affirmation. But it can be asserted by other expressions too, like offers of help, favours and gifts—implicitly or explicitly indicating that one has the other person in one's thoughts, as well as their interests, well-being, and goings-on.

4. Physical linkage 🔗

Despite the focus on virtual spaces, many respondents saw great importance in anchoring their bonds in physical space, and used technologies as windows, or bridges, linking those spaces together. Using video calls as "windows" to have meals together, virtual house tours where the smartphone acts as a surrogate for the person on the other end, buying the same game board and playing against each other by replicating each other's moves...our data was replete with creative ways of bridging physical divides.

5. Co-creation 🖼️📝

Collaborative narratives and creation uniquely allow for interactors to explore and cohabit a shared mental place, in which they have an equal stake and are emotionally engaged. It's a way of being psychically co-present through roleplay and active imagination. Our data was full of mentions of collaborative creative work and narratives, from Dungeons and Dragons to building worlds together to making art of imagined alternate realities.

---

Other neat insights:

Rather than ever being confined to a single platform, almost everyone inhabited and interwove practices across different platforms/media types, each with its own utility, affect, and meaning: this is what Madianou calls "polymedia life." Think playing games on a virtual board while discussing it in a text chat, watching a show together on a streaming website while discussing it in a call, playing Wordle independently and checking in with the group chat to see what others thought, etc. This was almost universal across the dataset!

There were a lot of unique practices described in the dataset (i.e. instances where one respondent was the only person in the dataset who did that thing) - and yet it was never described as a practice we deliberately designed to solve a problem. This everyday inventiveness among people in translocal/transnational relationships has become the core of our research interest.

Lots of intergenerational connection (parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, aunt/uncle/niece) was evidenced - and a strong skew towards text chat, video calls, and voice calls for these. Video games are far more common among romantic relationships.

---

That's all for this post—I'll be back soon (very soon) to talk about what comes next.

[leafofkudzu]

Hey there! I hope everyone's back-to-school season has been going well, whatever that entails for them! The first Saturday of October is fast approaching, which means it's time for another art party hosted by my build, Verdant Shield [VS]! There was no poll for this one because I'm testing out a few suggested locations, the first of which is Vigil Keep!

For those who have no idea what these art parties are, they're an idea carried over from Final Fantasy XIV - in-game get-togethers for artists/writers/creatives of all types to hang out, chat, and create together! Grab your character of choice and dress them up, then find someone else whose look inspires you, and create! Afterwards, everyone posts their creations in a shared tag (ours is #VSArtParty) so others can see, interact, and share! Tl;dr - the 'goal' of an art party isn't to be drawn, but to draw others, and share with the community!

Details for location and /squadjoin information below the cut!

Location Details:

One of the most easily-accessible Order Headquarters, Vigil Keep is full of big open areas, but there's one specific spot just a bit Northwest of Vigil Keep Waypoint that's caught my eye as a staging area, as follows:

It's nice and open, but also has a lot of little walls and boxes and scaffolding to climb around on if you're the kind of person who likes to lurk. And also, it's completely F2P accessible and enemy-free! Also, though you're by no means obligated to do so, if you're indecisive about which character to bring to these, you should consider bringing your Vigil-affiliated ones! Thinking about this has made me realize that all mine are on an alt account though.... ;-;

Time & Squad Details:

As always, we'll be having 2 parties - one on EU servers and one on NA servers - with an hour break in between. People with accounts in both regions do tend to hop immediately from one to the other though, so don't be afraid to show up early!

The first party will be on EU servers and begin at 9pm Central European Summer Time (aka 3pm Eastern Daylight Time or 5 hours before in-game reset). I’ll be hosting on my EU alt account, so to join either /squadjoin or whisper Ashelin Falstaff for an invite.

The second party will be on NA servers and begin at 7pm Eastern Daylight Time (aka 1am Central European Summer Time or 1 hour before in-game reset). This one I’ll be hosting on my main account, so to join either /squadjoin or whisper Yui Kaiho for an invite.

Closing Words:

Next few parties will likely be me experimenting with new locations, so if you have suggestions for places to try out feel free to let me know! Also, there's a non-zero chance that next month's party will be Halloween-themed, so prepare yourselves for that!

Thank you so much to every person who comes out to these events, both regulars and those just checking things out are what make these so special and memorable! Here's to another fun party - I'll see you all next week! ♥

[krolik-draws]

hello

(Hopefully this doesn’t sound too cringe)This is Dusk, a NightWing/SkyWing hybrid, and she hatched under two full moons, as well as the highest mountain, as the dragonet of Eris the NightWing and Icarus the animus SkyWing.

Her parents scoured for anything on how to take care of an animus dragonet, as well as Eris contacting a family friend, Hope, formerly known as FoeSlayer, to get some advice so that Dusk’s soul doesn’t waste away like Darkstalker’s.

She wasn’t allowed to use her magic until she was of age, and she was taught throughout her life that she should be careful when using it, and when she was old enough, she was given an earring that would help her make good decisions when she’s about to enchant something.

When I was 13 I was in the cafeteria telling my friends about my new sans OC. I was already anxious talking about him because I was put down a lot by my family so it punched me in the gut when one of my "cool" friends called my OC Kitsune Samurai Sans OC cringe. There were times they also called my OC's mary sues, poorly designed, and at some points they left me out of role-plays entirely for probably the same reasons. It crushed me as a kid and even today I can't make a story let alone write an essay without the nagging feeling in my head telling me that what I'm making is "cringe" or "poorly made". (as you all probably can tell from my CONSTANT self critique on my posts).

Storytelling is a beautiful and versatile art that requires a piece of ourselves every time we set a pen to paper. When someone or even yourself insults a story you made, it kills not only the creativity but the part of yourself that you tucked away in that story. What I have learned, through the hard way, is that no story is a bad story, no art piece is "cringe". Sure there are standards but that's for you to decide and not some dumb-ass who doesn't know an ounce of how much heart you put into your art.

Cringe is just slang boring people made because they were jealous of others who simply created whatever they wanted however they wanted. People fear a world without rules because they don't feel like they have control, don't let them have it over you.

Your story is not cringe, you are simply playing with the logic of magic in Wings of Fire and made a beautiful and neat dragon from that scaffolding. I like how you twisted the take on the usual "dreary depressed all powerful magic dragon" and am curious to see how Dusk would hand magic "properly" so to speak. Also I'd like to know just how important those earrings may come to be in the future. I adore Dusk and I hope to see how you bend the laws of animus magic, as well as, more of your creations!

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hi folks, it’s Mint.

I’m on a mini-vacation this week so I’m going to be releasing some recommendation posts for things that aren’t related to requests (easy to queue), and I’ll be back to doing regular rec posts when I get back!

THEME: Mysteries.

I love love love mysteries. I think mysteries might be one of my favourite things to do in a TTRPG; presenting players with a problem and watching them piece together a solution is so fun! There’s a number of different ways to run mystery games - maybe you will find a helpful new tool in the list below! You can also look at the folder of mystery games that I’ve compiled on Itch, if you want more.

The Lurking Fear, by Lyme.

The Lurking Fear is a free, lightweight, simulationist investigative horror ttrpg in the style of classic horror tabletop games. You can use it to run most systemless horror adventures or, with a little work, most adventures for popular horror games.

The Lurking Fear is an exercise in running investigative games through an OSR framework, complete with rolling randomly for your stats, weapons that have dice attached for damage, and a roll-under mechanic to determine whether or not you succeed at any given task. Characters have a Stability track and an Energy track: Stability is lost when they fail to bolster themselves in a stressful situation, while Energy can be lost when you are subjected to paranormal consequences. The game has rules for magic (spells found in tomes), but no spell list, so you’ll likely need to write your own spells or get inspiration from other OSR-style games. Spells are costly, time-consuming, and cost Energy to cast, which I think will make successes feel hard-won and satisfying.

If you want a challenging game that has just the bare bones so that you can scaffold over it, you might want to take a look at The Lurking Fear.

Public Access, by The Gauntlet.

A roleplaying game of analog horror, based on the Brindlewood Bay mystery system!

Public Access is a tabletop roleplaying game about a group of people in 2004—the Deep Lake Latchkeys—who find themselves investigating strange mysteries in and around the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Deep Lake was the home of a notorious public access television station called TV Odyssey, the history and fate of which—the station literally disappeared—is the source of much speculation in certain corners of the internet. As the Latchkeys conduct their investigations in Deep Lake, they will become increasingly aware of the central role TV Odyssey plays in everything that’s going on, and will have to face whatever terrible truth lies at the heart of the infamous station...

This one is for the horror fans, especially if you like found footage-style horror. You’ll be playing a bunch of adults returning to their hometown to try and find answers about the disappearance of a television station. Similar to other Carved from Brindlewood games, Public Access uses a day/night cycle, will give you certain moves and repercussions unique to the mode of play you’re currently in. If you like collaboratively creating a mystery as a table, you might want to check out this game.

Suspect 2e, by Arcane Atlas Games.

SUSPECT is a catch-em out game of character creation, memory and mystery. A crime has been committed, and you have to work together to create and then solve it. In Suspect the players take it in turns to play as the investigator and the suspects. The investigator asks questions and the suspects answer, building an ever more complicated web of events. As the suspects slip up and make mistakes the investigator challenges them until they finally accuse the culprit.

This is a great option if you want to try out a duet mystery game, with one person playing the Investigator, and the other playing the Suspects. Each role has special abilities and rules. For example, the Investigator is the only one who has access to the timeline of events, allowing them to sort through the clues and rule out false leads. The Suspects player can use a special ability to shift the Investigator’s suspicion onto a different character, introducing new facts to complicate the case. The game feels like it would be great at replicating Columbo-type stories, with the Investigator slowly going over the facts until they find the only solution that makes sense.

The creator is also collecting different mystery cases that you can play through for this game, which can be found in the Suspect Cases collection. If you love procedural detective fiction, (or maybe if you want to create a mystery for people to play) you might want to check out Suspect 2e!

Junk Noir, by JadeRavens.

You are a malfunctioning robot detective solving mysteries in a noir retro-future.

Junk Noir is a cooperative, zero-prep, GM-less mystery game for 2 or more players.  Players share control of Tracer as the titular robo-sleuth investigates mysteries, visits Locations, meets Characters, finds Clues, and triggers Events. In Junk Noir, you'll dramatize scenes, form connections, make moves, and play to see what happens! 

When you reach a consensus, roll the dice to test your theory. Maybe your theory is correct and you have one last scene to prove it and risk it all! Or maybe your theory is just that, and things are more complicated than you thought. It's time to challenge your assumptions and continue your investigation…

Junk Noir uses similar mechanics to Brindlewood Bay or Paranormal Inc, allowing the players to generate the mystery as they play. However, the game is meant to be run without a GM, all the players embodying the persona of a single robot detective. If you like the noir genre and you want to add a little bit of robot flair, you might want to check out Junk Noir.

Let Justice Be Done, by Mynar Lenahan.

Let Justice Be Done is a one-shot murder mystery game inspired by Brindlewood Bay, Eat The Reich, and Blades in the Dark.

In it, you play ingenious Consultant Detectives who use their skills of deduction to discover (and invent) Clues to frame the wealthy for crimes they absolutely didn't commit. But be careful: If your suspects start to figure out exactly what you're up to, you could find yourself in a world of trouble that they absolutely will not let you escape…

This is a delightful twist on the typical murder mystery, allowing you to construct a false crime as a form of revenge. Pull from a variety of colourful backgrounds to add dice to your roll, using a resolution system similar to Forged in the Dark games to achieve success. This is a great homage to the Benoit Blanc movies, especially Glass Onion. If you bought the TTRPGs for Palestine bundle, you already own this game!

BubbleGumshoe, by Evil Hat.

Someone stole my kid brother’s bike…Someone sabotaged the pep rally…Someone destroyed the Homecoming queen’s reputation…

The world is full of mysteries. It’s up to your group of intrepid teen sleuths to solve them. In BubbleGumshoe, players step into the shoes of high-schoolers solving mysteries in a modern American small town. Discover clues, solve problems, and throw down with enemies in this streamlined RPG based on the GUMSHOE system.

BubbleGumshoe is for the Nancy Drew lovers, mixing the drama of teenage social life with (typically) mundane mysteries. It is built off of the GUMSHOE system, which ensures that players will always find the clues necessary to figuring out the mystery, but rewards successes with more specific or helpful information.

In BubbleGumshoe, your relationships are an integral resource, which you can leverage to get access to locations you might not typically be able to go, knowledge from various experts, and favours from people who like you, or at the very least, owe you one. If you like tropes that involve leveraging social capital in order to bring local troublemakers to justice, you might like BubbleGumshoe.

Myths & Mysteries, by CrlBox.

This is a diceless and rules-light ttrpg.  Encounters receive a difficulty number, which will be determined by cards. Skills are used to reach the difficulty number, without rolling dice. It is just a matter of how much you will exhaust yourself to succeed…

The system doesn't rely on stats, which makes it very conversion friendly.

This is a genre-agnostic ttrpg, allowing you to explore eldritch horror, fantasy intrigue, or Scooby-Doo style adventures. Using a deck of cards, you build your hand and use your cards to determine whether your not you can succeed. Your character has a few things to make certain actions easier: an occupation, which gives you a +1 for any task related to it, and skills, which can be used and/or discarded to give you a temporary bonus.

The entire game can be printed on a brochure, which makes this game easy to travel with and probably also easy to pull out and teach for a one-shot or pick-up game. If you want simple mysteries that you alter to fit whatever genre you like, you might want to check out Myths & Mysteries.

Other Mystery Games I’ve Recommended

Eureka: Urban Investigative TTRPG, by ANIM.

Brindlewood Bay and The Between, by The Gauntlet.

Unlikely Investigators, by Luciano Correa

EYE: A Murder Mystery Generator, by Zak Makes Games.

Fedora Noir, by lessthanthreegames.

[caseyjones-junior]

casey jr headcanons- hobbies

Casey is always down to do whatever someone else wants to do. When he’s around others, he usually relies on joining in on whatever the mad dogs are up to as he’s not one to be left out of the bale. He learns by repeating and is perfectly content with following. It’s nice to be included even when he has no idea what the hell is going on!

He’s happiest with active hobbies. He loves hiking, hockey, basketball, volleyball, bowling, incline skating (a personal favorite way of traveling around the city), parkour, judo, fencing, darts— you name it, he’s played it. The more dangerous and heart pounding the better.

Swimming in the ocean is a big deal for him. He never learned to swim in the apocalypse because the ocean, and most natural water systems, became dangerously acidic. After being taught how to swim (mostly by Donnie), ocean swimming becomes a very relaxing experience for him. Getting thrown around by waves, nose and mouthfuls of salty water, floating totally surrounded by water and the clear sky above him— there was nothing else like it in his future.

Although he works well in a team, Casey finds peace when he’s doing things alone. He’s not a huge talker and he likes to observe and explore.

Urban exploitation is one of his biggest pastimes. He doesn’t know that it has a name and a community, it’s just something he naturally does on his own. He can be found swinging between buildings with his grappling hook, climbing up scaffolding and abandoned factories, evading security cameras, and recording everything he sees in his mask. Occasionally he’ll free fall from skyscrapers. It’s not uncommon for the mad dogs group chat to get the occasional photo of what he found interesting.

Video games can be fun for him too but it depends on the type. Certain genres stress him out. FPS games tend to remind him of certain traumas so he avoids those or will leave the room if one of the boys are playing them. Open world, sandbox, and role playing games aren’t his thing. He gets stuck on character creations and choices.

Small, easy games with clear objectives are right up his alley! Having never played video games in the apocalypse, he’s very bad with most mechanics so the fewer buttons and menus the better. He’s very good with technology but viewing tech as anything other than a tool or weapon confuses him. Things that seem intuitive or obvious for most elude him or boggles his mind, but he’s willing to suspend his disbelief and just go with it. He prefers handheld games that he can take to bed and will sometimes fall asleep playing Pokémon, Nintendogs (digital dogs are much safer than real ones that remind him of krang hounds), and Pac-Man (he’s a nintendo baby).

[strawbubbysugar]

Hello there my good author, please feel free to use this ask as a prop to ramble about the ideas you have for So(u)l (or bethroned if you have any you want to talk about) /nf

Also hope your break has been wonderful so far! :D

Oh hehe ty!! And it has been, thank you!! It’s been a really nice break from writing (lying, has been roleplaying with my partner and writing a lil)

They aren’t very organized, but here are a few scattered thoughts

- taking some inspo from classic fnaf, dca is replaced by an animatronic mascot who’s lorded as being the “ultimate in ai”, truly a marvel, talks like a person! Etc etc, bc he’s got most of a real human brain in there and some of a human body, but it’s being controlled by electronics and engineering work. On the outside seems to be entirely robotic, but if you delve too deep into the robotics underneath the hood you reach lungs being artificially pumped with pistons, things like that. Imagining a scene where he gets stabbed through the chest and thinks he’s fine, insists he’s fine, but blood begins to drip from his chest. They think it’s oil at first

- he doesn’t know he used to be, or that he has any human pieces in him at all. Until the big zap, and not only does he get his string, but the *real* mind inside of him wakes up. The human body that they’re using as scaffolding for his AI.

- he’s mad, terrified, and a little bit crazy after having his mind moulded to produce a happy go lucky ray of Sunshine mascot character.

- the most upsetting part is that the AI is still there after the zap. Still functional. But really, Truly *awake* now. Forced to share a mind. Forced to realize what an abomination he/their shared body is, the pain he causes just by existing .

- y/ngineer is an engineer like before, but is tasked with working on superficial things like the mascot’s outer stuff and the arms and legs, and monitoring the AI’s progress. Forbidden to delve any deeper because of “NDA” rules. Can’t shake the feeling that they can hear this robot breathe.

- reason behind the creation of this robot for this company is to start a new empire (a la Disney), with real mascots that walk around rather than people in suits. They’ve got an entire amusement park that’s being built, and other robots in similar situations to the main character, with human bodies inside used as conduits, brains used as fodder

[littjara-mirrorlake]

The test subject Jin-Gitaxias was to work on crouched in the center of the laboratory, rippling muscle joined to fur and metal with the measured precision of an anatomical diagram. Coarse dark hair wreathed his face of bare bone, and his flesh continually unraveled and re-knit itself upon a robust skeletal scaffolding. The researchers scurrying about him with their lean chrome frames seemed almost insubstantial in comparison. Scientific trivialities blinked through their minds, caught by Jin's telepathy–update measured reaction time; refine musculoskeletal interfacing; test compatibility of new tibia–as all the while their patchwork beast sat on his haunches and watched them silently, an unsettling keenness in his hollow eye sockets. 

A novel predicament, for certain.

Jin shifted his telepathic attention to the workings of the test subject's mind. A single concept, fierce and wordless, struck him like a hammer's blow–

Hunger–

And in one smooth movement the beast swung his skull around to meet Jin's gaze, maw gaping slightly as if to taste the air. 

"Another one of you." Though the beast did not look away from Jin, he instead addressed the scientists beside him. His words emerged disjointedly from newly stitched-together vocal cords. "Is this one here to observe me, too?"

"That," head researcher K'rezakx said, emerging from a small huddle of their subordinates, "is junior researcher Jin-Gitaxias, our newest recruit." K'rezakx turned to Jin and indicated their test subject with one needle-tipped appendage. "Jin-Gitaxias, this is the creation which I spoke of in our initial meeting, formed of material from the green mana nexus. We call him Vorinclex."

Vorinclex growled lowly as if in thought, tipping his snout upward and inhaling. "That one is different. Something is in the air."

The least you could do is address me directly, Jin thought, but he strained to hold his tongue. He could not risk falling short in K'rezakx's judgement, not after the researcher had offered him a position on such an uncommon project.

"Astute observation, Vorinclex," K'rezakx responded. "You are sensing a high concentration of mana. Psionic energy, to be specific. Jin-Gitaxias is what we know as a telepath."

"Telepath," Vorinclex repeated. Slowly, methodically, sampling each syllable. "What is that?"

"The neurocirculatory lattice of his ichor possesses an affinity for resonating with the same. In other words, he is capable of reading and speaking directly into our minds."

"Yes," Jin cut in irritably, unable to take being ignored any longer. "Such abilities, requiring extended study in others, have always been trivial for me to channel. They have allowed me to accumulate the prowess that gained me this research position–and I am, I should mention, the most recently compleated initiate to do so."

To his frustration, Vorinclex did not seem to regard this information highly. He looked to Jin and K'resakx and back again. "Welcome, then, initiate," he snorted. "I expect I will see you in the operating theater before long." 

And with that Vorinclex turned, loping away from the two with an all-too-casual gait. Jin watched him go, hissing under his breath.

[popatochisssp]

OMG all the new boys are fascinating but ummm Swapfell Fruition especially?? Sounds so good?? I would love a full lore dump on this concept, I love the idea of Vi playing the long con to get rid of Gaster and it all sounds so good. Incidentally I need to read Dirty Laundry again lol, everything you make with regards to any version of Swapfell is just *chef's kiss*

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Swapfell Fruition

A young Sans’ attempt to kill his creator, the Royal Scientist is a failure.

Gaster survives the scuffle that would’ve toppled him off of the CORE’s scaffolding and gains the upper hand, subduing his traitorous creation and forcing him—and the younger one he’d been trying to escape with—back to his labs.

Sans was reckless, tipped his hand too soon and without the luck to have succeeded on the first attempt, Gaster learns that he is a sneaky little backstabber, capable of appearing obedient but hiding ruthless intentions.

He's almost proud… but of course he can't have that.

It becomes clear to the Royal Scientist that obviously, he needs his creations to have some kind of failsafe. The little one hasn't shown any signs of disobedience yet, but his primary caretaker is a crafty little snake, no telling what he could influence him to do, if given the time or the chance—so it’s back to the drawing board, to the operating table with them both.

Papyrus, at his age, doesn't really know what happens to him, only that whatever was done to him hurt, a lot. He wakes up after in the room he’d shared with his brother, scared and hurting and alone, and when Sans finally reappears, he goes to him for a hug.

Except…

Sans doesn’t hug him back.

He doesn’t hug back, and he doesn’t say anything, no matter how much Papyrus begs him to…

And the next time Gaster summons them to the lab, it’s Sans who picks him up and keeps him from squirming away, holding his arm out for Gaster’s needles.

Papyrus doesn’t understand the betrayal, at the time or in the years that follow.

His hurt turns to bitterness and resentment as his once gentle and protective big brother starts to actively help their creator change him, gradually shaping him into a stronger, more efficient killer.

But even with all the modification and training he’s subjected to, Papyrus isn’t quite the solider or war machine Gaster had planned he would be—he spooks when caught by surprise, he’s easily distracted by irrelevant things, his loyalties twist and sway far too easily for Gaster’s liking…

Well, the Royal Scientist is nothing if not resourceful, certainly able to work with…limited materials and still produce something of use.

With the right mental conditioning, and the right handler to make use of it, Papyrus will still be a valuable asset for the Empress.

After all, there’s always political enemies to the crown that her highness would surely prefer to have…removed, discreetly, and other such dirty work best done in the shadows.

Fast and stealthy, like an assassin, seems more suited to Papyrus’ abilities anyway.

And as for a handler, who better than Sans to fill the role?

Gaster’s prototype was largely a failure, but certainly intelligent and organized, presumably capable of researching and observing targets, briefing the asset on situations and targets and memorizing the trigger words and phrases necessary to keep him operating at peak efficiency.

Sans doesn’t protest.

He doesn’t protest much of anything anymore, not since…

………

Well, it’s not like he’s ever spoken about what happened when everything changed, not even to Papyrus, so when he goes along with this too, neither Gaster nor Papyrus expects otherwise.

So, that’s how it is.

Papyrus becomes the perfect assassin and Sans doles out his marching orders, occasionally following behind on missions to jerk his leash and keep him on track.

Between them, it’s…complicated.

Sans is still Papyrus’ brother, the closest thing to an ally that Papyrus has, both of them stuck in service to a power-hungry, unethical prick.

There are moments where they’re okay, times where a joke will slip out and one of them will laugh, injuries tended to, backs watched under fire, and dozens more little things that just wouldn’t happen if they were nothing to each other.

But the moments never last long.

Reality always comes back in sooner or later—usually in the form of Gaster, demanding an update or issuing new orders or calling them back from the field, to which Sans always, always complies.

Papyrus takes it as a reminder of where Sans’ real loyalties must lie.

He’s some kind of brother, not always awful, and maybe he does care about Papyrus, a little bit, but he answers to Gaster above anything or anyone else, apparently by choice.

He can’t be trusted, not really.

And Sans…

Sans stays quiet and does his job.

Quickly, efficiently, and to the letter—exemplary service, always.

Irreproachable.

He’s almost completely beneath suspicion by the time the last human falls into the Underground.

Gaster couldn’t be more thrilled.

This is a golden opportunity, the perfect chance to prove his worth to the Empress and earn clout and accolades innumerable—to be the one responsible for capturing the seventh soul and freeing all of monsterkind from their centuries of imprisonment and allowing the war against humanity to finally begin!

Well, technically, it would be his creations doing it, but it’s his name that history will remember, him who would rise into legend as the most brilliant and ruthless monster to ever live, the catalyst in humanity’s downfall.

He doesn’t waste so much as a minute before summoning Sans and ordering him to handle it, immediately.

Meet with the Empress, alert her that there’s a human loose in the Underground, and offer her the services of the asset in ending their free roam.

Sans agrees, as he always has, and goes to fetch his brother for the job.

Papyrus is admittedly a little blindsided when not two seconds out of the labs, Sans pulls him aside, out of range of known cameras and recording devices and hisses at him to listen.

He doesn’t know what to make of what Sans says after, either—that he hasn’t earned it and he knows that, but he needs Papyrus to trust him right now, because he is going to lie and everything depends on Papyrus going along with it.

In spite of their messy history and every uncharitable thing Papyrus has ever thought about Sans…right here and now, something in his gut tells him this is no trick.

He agrees to ‘go along with it’…whatever ‘it’ is.

Sans waits until a certain amount of time has elapsed, and then he makes a call to Gaster with Papyrus present to listen.

Gaster is informed that there’s a problem with the latest target. The asset’s programming isn’t taking and he’s refusing to track down the human.

This is, of course, news to Papyrus, who hasn’t been assigned his target yet.

But…Sans said ‘trust me’ and ‘play along,’ so that’s what he does, complaining that he doesn’t want to kill a child, just put him back in his cage and do your own dirty work, old man…

Helpfully—always helpful, always intelligent, always reliable—Sans postulates a conflict of orders might be causing the programming to bug like this. Gaster’s overarching orders are for the asset to kill targets assigned to him, but the Empress has unfortunately countermanded that the human must be brought to her alive.

And again, Papyrus knows differently because the Empress hasn’t given him any orders, they never made it to her for orders to be given and Toriel likely doesn’t even know yet that a human has fallen.

But he said he’d go along with the lie so he keeps his mouth shut, even as he hears Gaster curse on the other end of the line.

Gaster finds Sans’ assessment of the situation as reasonable as it is frustrating, but minds are complicated machines and often behave strangely when conflicts arise. Just look at the Empress, who knows that humans must be killed to free her people, but feels she must perform the act herself instead of the far more convenient option being presented to her!

The asset’s orders being in conflict is a far more annoying stopping block, though, yet another barrier in the way of all the glory that Gaster has so painstakingly earned.

Time is short, stakes are high, he refuses to recall his creation just to debug it and resolve the glitch, not now.

Instead he makes his fatal mistake.

He overrides the asset’s failsafes.

All of them.

Impatiently rattling off a code that nearly makes Papyrus stagger from a feeling like weight being lifted, Gaster disconnects the call with a sharp command to Sans to ‘handle it,’ now that there were no restrictions on his targets or what he could be ordered to do.

Sans is only quiet for a moment before handing a picture to Papyrus, locking him on and beginning the usual debrief.

Papyrus can’t fully grasp what he’s looking at, not at first.

“………confirm target?”

“WINDINGS GASTER, THE CURRENT ROYAL SCIENTIST TO THE CROWN.”

As with any briefing, Papyrus must be informed of his target’s connections, abilities and assets.

Gaster has strong ties with the crown, and between that and his own paranoia, security around him will be tight. He’s intelligent, strong, and merciless, and he won’t hesitate to make use of anything at his disposal in a life-or-death situation.

As an example, he had implanted a condition into his private assassin’s mental programming that would prevent him from acting against or outright attacking him—so it’s fortunate they’ve already cleared that concern.

Now, the top priorities are to ensure that Sans is physically far away from Gaster when the mission is executed, and that Papyrus is at no point seen by Gaster before he’s dead. The entire operation could be sunk if both of these conditions aren’t met.

“why?”

“THERE’S AN ADDITIONAL FAILSAFE, IMPLANTED IN YOUR SOUL. IF GASTER REALIZES YOU’VE BEEN TURNED ON HIM BEFORE YOU’VE SUCCEEDED, HE CAN INSTANTLY DROP YOUR HP TO 1.”

“………and why am i doing this without my handler?”

“BECAUSE I’M COMPROMISED TOO. IF HE SEES ME OUT OF PLACE OR SUSPECTS I’VE BETRAYED HIM AGAIN, HE’LL USE THE FAILSAFE IN MY SOUL TO REMOTELY CONTROL MY BODY AND MOBILIZE ME AGAINST YOU—AND OF COURSE, AT THAT POINT, HE WOULD KNOW THAT YOU’RE TARGETING HIM AS WELL AND BE PREPARED TO KILL YOU.”

And that…

Well.

That sure is a hell of a lot of new information that Papyrus will have to process later, when there’s not a strong compulsion in the back of his skull that there is someone he needs to kill.

He’s a professional, when he’s working.

He will focus on the mission.

To keep up appearances, Sans departs to find the fallen human and trail them on their journey through the Underground. He very much wants to ensure they reach the Empress safely, but there’s an added bonus of being exactly where he’s supposed to be and doing exactly what he’s supposed to do should Gaster check in on him—no need to arouse any suspicion, not before it’s far too late.

In the end, when Chara has befriended monsterkind against all odds, winning over the Empress herself and freeing them all to a life of peace with humankind on the surface, the death of the Royal Scientist is an incidental discovery.

Sans takes responsibility for it, pleading for the Empress’s mercy.

Gaster had wanted the human—kind young Chara, to whom Toriel has taken such a liking—killed immediately as soon as they emerged from the Ruins, and he hadn’t thought that the Empress would condone such an order in light of what she’s always held to regarding fallen humans.

Gaster had been adamant, though, and Sans… Well, he only wanted to serve the will of her highness and to do so, he turned the asset against their master. He hopes only for some leniency for what he’s done, Gaster may have been their father but—

Strangely enough, it seems Toriel had no idea that the asset and his handler were the Royal Scientist’s children. He’d always told her they were employees, volunteers for the things that were done to them and the missions they were told to undertake.

Learning that they had actually been created, intentionally molded and pressed into these roles without a choice in the matter…

Toriel, an Empress first but a mother a very close second, can certainly afford leniency.

The brothers are let loose in spite of their crime, with a bit of funding from the Empress to get on their feet after everything. The money is partially back-pay for their joint service as the crown’s black ops division (for which they were never actually compensated before), and partially amends for how long their…circumstance…went unnoticed.

Sans offers to split the money and part ways with Papyrus, if he’d prefer.

But Papyrus has learned a lot in the past few days to…completely and utterly recontextualize everything he ever thought was true about his handl—…his brother, and…maybe he should stick around a bit. See what’s what.

Vi (Swapfell Fruition Sans)

Extremely restrained and closed off from so many years of being unable to talk to or trust anyone, not even his brother. An accomplished liar but socially unpracticed, tending to read as cold and unfriendly to those who approach him. He’s more awkward than genuinely hostile, though

Issues with being watched, spent most of his life simultaneously going unnoticed and being intensely over-monitored so his feelings about being observed—regardless of context—are complicated, runs hot and cold on it

Complicated feelings for his brother, too: he loves him, of course, and he failed him in many ways, but he was also stuck between him and Gaster for a long time and caught his fair share of hell from both sides and there’s some resentment there for that. He wants to fix things, but he’s not really sure how and just…awkwardly trying his best

Well-organized and skilled at research and thinking analytically, tends to approach most things with a problem-solving attitude and an eye-socket for detail. Extremely talented at finding loopholes and ways around or through the rules—though his respect for said rules is very low to begin with

Likes high and secluded places, mostly rooftops but anywhere it could be difficult for other people to get to. Whether or not those places are restricted by fencing or padlocks or lack of ladders is immaterial, if he finds a high spot he would like to be, he will get to it one way or another and perch as long as he pleases

Hunter (Swapfell Fruition Papyrus)

Impulsive and driven by self-interest, the years of mental conditioning have broken down his fears and inhibitions to nearly nothing. He does what he wants, when he wants, with little concern for anything else—a dog off its leash who’ll only heel when it’s good and ready to. Unfortunately charming enough to mostly get away with it

Problems with authority, for obvious reasons. Likely to try to bend or break any rule presented to him, just to see if he can, and a severe lack of respect for anyone trying to enforce those rules upon him (especially the arbitrary ones)

Conflicting and highly jumbled feelings for his brother, making them a matched set: he disliked him, maybe even hated him a little for a long time, for helping Gaster turn him into what he is and for being the one to yank his leash and pull his strings…but that was before he knew that he had a kill-switch in his soul and that his brother was up on strings on his own, being pulled by the jackass they both apparently hated… It doesn’t erase everything that happened, knowing that, but it does…change things. (He wants to fix things too, but he’s not sure how either, so they’re both just awkwardly trying)

Needs ‘tune-ups’ every so often to reinforce his mental conditioning and make sure all his programming is intact, even now that Gaster’s gone and he’s retired as an assassin. Going too long without re-upping it causes deterioration, compulsions ‘leaking’ without being triggered and causing headaches and erratic, sometimes violent behavior so…best for everyone to keep his head maintained regularly

Absolutely loves nature and wilderness, hiking, camping, and climbing trees is his idea of an excellent time. Could absolutely go off on a run and disappear into the trees and not be seen or heard from for a week, likely to get some forest-cryptid lore started about him—possibly on purpose

[thydungeongal]

Hey! If you don't mind a little game design question for you, do you prefer classed systems or classless? Personally I always find myself drawn to classed systems since they tend to give a stronger character identity of what they can do, but would love to hear your opinion!

I don't have a strong preference for one over the other, because I think they are both valid answers to the question of how to differentiate between different characters! As you mentioned, classes (and similar features like Skins, Playbooks, Professions, Careers) can provide a character with a strong archetype and if designed really well can also really tie them into the setting from the get-go. Having said that, they can often feel constricting, especially if the fiction and the mechanics aren't in harmony! In some cases it can lead to this weird design where new classes are allowed to proliferate because there are so many niches that need to be filled. Pathfinder 1e is a great example of this design: of course its roots are in D&D 3.5, but D&D 3.5 never went quite as hog wild with the proliferation of specific classes and alternate versions of those classes and so on and so forth. Which is to say, a class-based system absent coherent design goals can often end up as effectively being a weirdly designed classless system. (I know there are people out there who like Pathfinder 1e and the number of options it has, and I don't think they're wrong. I just think that type of design dilutes classes and puts the entire need for classes into question since they're no longer arguably fulfilling their role of providing a clear archetype and place in the setting.)

I think one role that classes fulfill very effectively in the context of cooperative action adventure games (the most ubiquitous genre of RPGs) is that they provide a clear method for niche protection as well as allowing for an intraparty metagame where each character seeks to fulfill a different role! However, if party balance is not a concern (or the idea of a party isn't even present) in the game, classes might not be necessary, but they can still act as like. Almost comeddia del arte style archetypes so each character's niche in terms of the narrative is still somewhat unique. This is how I look at Apocalypse World playbooks and Monsterhearts skins.

On the flip side, a classless system often gives players a lot of freedom over character creation, which is really cool, but without some structure or scaffolding it can easily lead into analysis paralysis. This is why I like classless systems that while relatively open when it comes to advancement provide the player with very clear discrete choices at character creation. For example, RuneQuest and Mutants in the Now and Gamma World 7e are all classless systems, but none of them overwhelm the player with too many choices. Like, in RuneQuest you don't just start spending skill points until you run out, your character has a set of skills determined by their culture and career that those points can be spent on! Conversely, Hero (as much as I love it) and GURPS commit the cardinal sin of simply giving the player a bunch of points and. Telling them to go at it. (Some versions of GURPS, like Dungeon Fantasy, effectively have class packages to help with character creation, which is basically what I just praises RuneQuest and Mutants in the Now for!)

Anyway I think there's also something to be said for games that don't have classes as such but also actually kind of do. Vampire: the Masquerade's clans are not as prescriptive as classes, but they effectively serve as a package that grants access to a small set of abilities. Or you could take an even wider view: comparing the different splats of Chronicles of Darkness to each other one could argue that Vampires are a class and Werewolves are a class and so on, because each of them unlocks very specific abilities. Heck, even though Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy explicitly doesn't have classes, it has multiple monster types straight out of the box, and arguably those all represent strong archetypes.

Anyway point being classes and classless design answer very different questions. If you want something that tries to go for a world sim approach I would generally advise against classes. Classes, however, are perfect for your party-based adventure games because it provides players with a quick way to gauge party balance, and even in some non-party based games they can provide an interesting means of making sure each character has a specific role in the narrative that is theirs.

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Bad things that robespierre did.

(I don't know why i don't feel safe by asking this question--)

Well, if we’re gonna speak in those terms, some things off the top of my head go as follows below. I don’t know if everyone on here would consider all of them fully ”bad” given the circumstances, so maybe a better way to see it is as ”ways Robespierre was involved in the period afterwards dubbed ”the terror” that are not all as known.”

On May 26, Robespierre, after having refused to for several months, openly called for an insurrection against deputies of the National Convention at the Jacobins — ”[…] the people must rebel. This moment has arrived. […] I invite the people to join the National Convention in insurrection against all the corrupt deputies.” Three days later, on May 29, he repeated this wish — ”I say that if the people do not rise in their entirety, liberty is lost.” Two days after that, the Insurrection of May 31 took place, with armed sans-culotte storming the Convention and obtaining the arrest of 29 Girondins. I find it hard to believe Robespierre’s words didn’t play a decesive roll for the insurrection to happen when it did.

Robespierre also had a hand in the creation of Desmoulins’ pampleth Histoire des Brissotins (May 1793), which is another piece essential in the fall of the Girondins. This is proven through the following passage from Lettre de Camille Desmoulins, député de Paris à la Convention, au général Dillon en prison aux Madelonettes (1793): ”The true origin of the rigor of the Committee towards you, would it be in a very long note, which was printed following l’Histoire des Brissotins, which Robespierre made me cut out?”

On October 29 1793, when the trial of the Girondins had been dragging on for five days, Robespierre proposed that ”If it happens that the judgment of a case brought before the revolutionary tribunal has lasted for more than three days, the president will open the next session by asking the juror if their conscience is sufficiently enlightened. If the juror answers yes, judgment will proceed immediately.” The motion was passed and became essential in getting the 22 Girondins condemned to death the following day. How many others fell victim to it afterwards I don’t know.

Robespierre also played an important role in the condemnation of the dantonists, who also got a not so very fair trial before being driven to the scaffold. I’ve already written about the different ways he was involved here.

Robespierre personally wrote to several representatives on mission and encouraged them to be bold when punishing counter revolutionaries in the departments. I don’t think such words coming from someone as influencial should be considered insignificant when measuring the repression that was later carried out there: 

The National Convention, citoyens collegues, witnessed with pleasure your entry into Lyon. But its joy could not be complete when it saw that you at the first movements yielded to a sensibility way too unpolitical. You seemed to abandon themselves to a people who flatter the victors, and the manner in which you speak of such a large number of traitors, of the punishment of a very few and the departure of almost all, have alarmed the patriots who are indignant at seeing so many scoundrels escaping through a gap and going to Lozère and mainly Toulon. We therefore won’t congratulate you on your successes before you have fulfilled all that you owe to your country. Republics are demanding; there is national recognition only for those who fully deserve it. We send you the decree that the Convention issued this morning on the report of the Committee (this decreee, which contains the infamous phrase ”the city of Lyon shall be destroyed” — a slogan which Robespierre himself had come up with). It has proportioned the vigor of its measures to your first reports. It will never remain below what the Republic and freedom expect. Beware above all of the perfidious policy of the Muscadins and the hypocritical Federalists, who raise the standard of the Republic when it is ready to punish them, and who continue to conspire against it when the danger has passed. It was that of the Bordelais, of the Marseillais, of all the counter-revolutionaries of the South. This is the most dangerous stumbling block of our freedom. The first duty of the representatives of the people is to discover it and avoid it. We must unmask the traitors and strike them without pity. These principles alone, adopted by the National Convention, can save the country. These principals are also yours; follow them; listen only to your own energy, and carry out with inexorable severity the salutary decrees which we address to you. CPS decree to the representatives in the newly entered Lyon, written by Robespierre on October 12.

PS — Punish severely and promptly the traitors and royalists, especially the leaders and principal agents of Girondin and counter-revolutionary intrigues. Beware of the marks of patriotism with which they cover themselves, following the example of the traitors of the Convention, who are their models. Only by purging the den of counter-revolution and hypocrisy can you spare the Republic the new disasters with which it is always threatened in the South. Robespierre in a post-scriptum note added to a CPS decree to representatives in Bordeaux written by Billaud-Varennes (in other words something he really wanted to underline for the representatives)

The representatives of the people near the army of Italy and the department of Bouches-du-Rhône are in charge of these measures: they will have the leaders of the royalist and federalist faction severely punished. CPS decree regarding Marseilles written by Robespierre on November 4 1793

These fears for the suffering public good, which made me decide to come here (Lyon) on your (ton) invitation, were not in vain. Letter from Collot d’Herbois to Robespierre dated November 3 1793. A sign Robespierre played a decisive role in sending Collot to punish Lyon.

Like I wrote in this post, Robespierre and his collegues at the CPS and the Convention were aware of the wholesale repression carried out by representatives on mission like Fouché and Carrier without seemingly trying to do anything about it (so I suppose they accepted what they heard). In fact, none of the decrees recalling the representatives hint that the amount of executions carried out under their stay is the reason for it.

If Robespierre’s role in writing the Law of 22 Prairial is more dubious than what a few historians would have us believe (the only person who’s involvement in the development of the law can truly be established is Couthon) he was nevertheless the author behind the decree for the Commission of Orange on May 10 1794 (1, 2), a decree that has been accepted as the precursor of the aforementioned law. Like the law of 22 Prairial, the decree made it the duty for the commission to punish ”the enemies of the people,” which it defined as ”all those who, by any means whatsoever and with any deeds they may have covered themselves, have sought to thwart the march of the revolution and to prevent the strengthening of the Republic.” The punishment for this crime was always death, and the proof necessary for condemnation ”is all information, of whatever nature, which can convince a reasonable man and friend of liberty.” Within 47 days, the commission pronounced 332 death sentences, 116 prison sentences and 147 acquittals.

In April 1794 was introduced a police bureau subortinate to the CPS (Bureau de surveillance administrative et de police générale). It would appear it was meant to be run by mainly Saint-Just, but that Robespierre took it over when he was away from the captal. Due to Saint-Just’s frequent missions, Robespierre ended up being the actual head of the bureau during two of its three months existence (the notes for the bureau are in SJ’s hand from April 23-27, in both SJ and Robespierre’s on the 28th, only Robespierre between April 28-May 31, both on June 1, only Robespierre between June 2-29, both on June 30 and afterwards occasional reports made by either SJ or Couthon). Unfortunately, only one study exists over the bureau, made in 1930 by the historian Arne Ording. It has been digitalized by Internet Archive, but in super poor quality, so you end up having to rely more on what other historians say about it. Which isn’t that easy either because they all seem to lay out different numbers. According to Albert Mathiez (1930), Ording’s study found 464 decrees from the police bureau between April 24 to July 26 (and 1 814 from the Committee of General Security for the same period ) — 58 of which ordered liberations of prisoners and 250 were arrests. Annie Jourdan (2016) too writes that the bureau contained 464, of which 250 were arrests and 295 looked at officials. But she also adds that only a fifth of the judgments were acquittals, and that, instead of April 24, the bureau functioned between May 23 and July 28. According to George Lefebvre (1931), Ording only consulted  121 of the 464 decrees (out of which 55 were either written or co-signed by someone else than Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon), making you wonder how the two previous can be sure about what all the decrees contained… The same thing is claimed by J.M Thompson (1935) but he also adds that, ”out of 775 notes by Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon, only 229 should be found ordering arrest, or reference to the Tribunal, or transference to Paris.” In other words, there would exist more notes than actual decrees… The bureau nevertheless makes Robespierre the CPS member to have signed the second biggest amount of decrees ordering arrests and or/transfers before the Revolutionary Tribunal during the period dubbed ”the great terror” (30, after Saint-Just’s 35, and yes, I have actually counted the arrests found in Recueil des actes du comité de salut public to come to this conclusion🤦🏼‍♀️) and this despite the fact that he was absent for about half of it. I also don’t think it’s impossible he was trying to make the Committee of General Security redundant with the help of the bureau, considering he does recommend making said committee subortinate to the CPS in his last speech.

On June 7 1794, a letter signed by Robespierre and Barère ordered Hermann — the chairholder of the Commission of Civil Administration, Tribunals and Prisons and put in first place on a list of patriots with ”more or less talent” written by Robespierre — to investigate if there were plans for a breakout in the Bicêtre prison after having received a warning from one of its inhabitants. Six days later, a CPS decree signed by Robespierre and seven of his collegues ordered 15 inhabitants from said prison to be transferred to the Conciergerie in order for them to come before the Revolutionary Tribunal as soon as possible. It further ordered Hermann to send to the tribunal all other Bicêtre prisoners suspected of being part of the same complot. Ten days after that, on June 23, Hermann sent Robespierre a letter in which he suggested applying this procedure to all the prisons of Paris, in order to ”purge the prisons at a stroke and to clear the soil of freedom from these dregs and rejects of humanity.” Robespierre sent the letter back with both his signature and the word approved written on it, together with the counter signatures of Barère and Billaud-Varennes. Two days later on June 25, the CPS confirmed their decision when writing a decree charging Hermann’s Commission of Civil Administration, Tribunals and Prisons ”to search in the various prisons of Paris for those who have been particularly involved in the various factions, in the various conspiracies that the National Convention has destroyed, and whose chefs it has punished, those who in the prisons were trustees and agents of these conspiratorial factions, and who were to be the actors of the scenes so often projected for the massacre of the patriots and the ruin of freedom to make it her own. The charge, moreover, of taking, in concert with the administration of the police, all means of establishing order in the prisons.” The decree bears Robespierre’s signature, along with those of ten of his collegues. Finally, on July 5, a CPS decree written by Barère and signed by him, Robespierre and seven others ordered the same commission ”to make a daily report on the conduct of the prisoners in the various prisons of Paris, and the Revolutionary Tribunal to judge within 24 hours those who have attempted revolt or excited closure.” This was the solution to the so called ”prison conspiracies,” in which on several days, prisoners were brought before the tribunal in big groups to be met with flimsy evidence against them, and where aquittals mostly numbered between about 0-3. In total, 363 people were executed (37 people on June 16, 36 on June 26 (the Bicêtre prison), 60 on July 7, 48 on July 9, 38 on July 10, 25 on July 22 (the Luxembourg prison), 46 on July 23 (the Carmes prison), 25 on July 24, 25 on July 25 and 23 on July 26 (the Saint-Lazare prison)) — about 27% of the 1366 official victims of ”the great terror.” Not only that, but among those executed can be found three 16-year-olds, the youngest people to ever have been executed by the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal. As can be seen from the decrees, Robespierre is certainly not the only one who bears responsibility for these executions (the direct orders to immediately send prisoners from the Luxembourg (signed Saint-Just on July 5) and Carmes prison (signed Saint-Just, Carnot, Prieur, Billaud-Varennes, Couthon and Collot d’Herbois on July 20) before the tribunal would for example appear to not have been made by him), but given his closeness to Hermann and the fact he, along with Barère, is the only one to have signed all of them, certainly shows he’s not blameless for what went down. According to J.M Thompson, the prison reports also built on facts reported by the above mentioned police bureau, which, according to him, makes Robespierre bear a double responsibility.

On August 15 1792, Robespierre was the first person to suggest creating a Revolutionary Tribunal, a wish that was fulfilled two days later (1, 2).

[empirearchives]

Washington Allston and Paris of 1803

Washington Allston: Self Portrait, 1805

Allston was an American artist and poet who traveled to France in 1803 and lived in Europe until 1818.

The Paris to which Allston and Vanderlyn came in November of the year 1803 was not the Paris which the modern world knows. The beautiful city painted by the Impressionists so often that the whole world is familiar with its charm and cheerful elegance is the creation of Baron Haussmann and the second half of the nineteenth century. The Paris of 1803 was very different both in outward aspect and in its spirit. It had not yet become the great pleasure city of the modern world. Outwardly it was small and rather more medieval than modern in appearance. The traveler from Holland and the north, approaching by the road from St. Denis, passed over a flat stretch of open country whose only feature was a village on a small hill to the right of the road, called Montmartre. Then, passing through suburbs, he came to the St. Denis gate, inside which was a city of tall stone or plaster houses that seemed even taller because the streets were so narrow. From its streets rose the famous smell which travelers still commented on as they had in the time of Villon or Louis XI. A medieval king of France, looking out a window of the Louvre, once fainted at the stench of the street below. Not until the engineering feats of the great Baron Haussmann did the odor of those medieval streets vanish into tradition. There were no boulevards and no Eiffel Tower in the Paris of 1803, no Madeleine and no Arc de Triomphe. The larger portion of the Louvre had still to be built, and where now the pleasant gardens of the Louvre are was a warren of close-packed medieval houses. Beyond the gardens of the Tuileries lay the vacant space made sinister by the terrible memory of the guillotine. The shadow of that instrument still hovered over the city, although its labors had ceased ten years before. When Allston arrived, Napoleon had restored order with a strong hand and was seeking to re-create once more around himself the elegant society of the old regime. The twenty-six-hundred-odd persons who had died on the scaffold during the Reign of Terror, between September 5, 1793, and July 27, 1794, seem few enough compared with the endless butcheries of the modern world. But the world had then been taught by its literary men to believe that man was naturally rational and good. It had not been accustomed to mass massacres and to the sight of fanatics coldly murdering hundreds of thousands to prove a theory. The shock of that first outbreak of killing was so great that its memory is still green, while the vast systematized performances of our times are forgotten almost before they are over. As soon as Napoleon restored order in France, the eminently social nature of the French genius had begun to reassert itself.

Farington, the English painter, who visited Paris in 1802, reported: “A remarkable change has taken place in the appearance of the people from what they were a few years ago, gloomy,—savage,— without regard to dress or cleanliness. They are now coming fast round to chearfulness and civility.” But he also noted that the houses of Paris were out of repair because people still felt too insecure to lay out money upon the care of their property. And if Napoleon, a child of the eighteenth century, was a milder despot than one of the modern sort, his government was, after all, a military dictatorship with its secret police and censorship of opinion and all the other traits we have learned to know so well. Moreover, France was again at war.

This Paris was not a city in which an American of Allston’s day and temperament would linger for love of its atmosphere. Allston came there to study the Louvre.

— E. P. Richardson, Washington Allston: the Biography of a Pioneer of American Art and a Study of Romantic Art in America, (p. 62-63)