#Vanguard of Your Destruction

[theoriginalladya]

WIP Whenever

So, I finished up Hell Week for work today - yay! - and was wasting a few minutes looking through my WIPs and came across this piece of art that I absolutely ADORE of Kaidan and his twin sister, Kandra. Which got me to start looking through the bits of Vanguard of Your Destruction which I started for Nano...three years ago, I think? Decided to share this little bit I came across early on in the story.

(commissioned artwork of Kaidan and Kandra Alenkoby @xla-hainex)

I can’t stay.  Bits of plaster rain down from the ceiling as the building shakes for a fourth time, and this time it doesn't just push the button to her brain, it slaps it down hard.  She dashes back to her room, throwing the closet doors open until they bang against the wall. Rooting through the clothes hanging there, she finally grasps hold of the evacuation bag Kaidan had her create months ago.  Clothing.  First-aid kit.  All the necessities a girl needs to get from Vancouver to the BC interior when an invasion hits! she’d quipped at the time.  Another bellowing wail from outside screams through the windows. She clasps her hands to her ears, but not in time.

As she turns to leave, a glint of mahogany catches her eye and she hesitates, staring at the jewelry box. No...I can't... Without thought or permission, she finds herself standing directly in front of it. Anger fills her, a rage she's not felt since...since... Biting her lip until she tastes blood, she lifts a hand and settles it on the top.  It's strange to see her fingers shaking so badly, knowing it has nothing to do with immediate dangers brought by alien space creatures, but everything to do with the peace of mind she's been trying to find since her youth. Breath rattling from her lungs, her fingers brush across the lock, unsealing it. Slowly, cautiously, she lifts the lid, as if afraid it might jump out and bite her. As well it could, too. It doesn't. Carefully wrapped in the small piece of fabric Kaidan had wrapped around it, it sits there in the corner of the box, behind her charm bracelet and the earrings her grandmother had left her when she passed. Sitting there. Still. Quiet. Unassuming. And yet it offers so much. Yet another deep, resonant, mechanical wail fills the air around her, seeping in through sealed windows.  Kandra cringes out of instinct, but at the same time, her fingers close around the fabric-wrapped item.  I know you don’t want to think about it, but Kan, you need to.  I’m not kidding… The fabric falls away, like the peel on an orange, and she stares, torn by twin feelings of hope and horror. I shouldn't have to make this choice! I vowed never, EVER, to pick one up again! The very fact she does is...offensive.  Despicable.  Frustrating as all hell, too, because no matter how badly she wants to deny it, if she's going to live, to survive, she has to accept that he's right.  Quick tears fill her eyes even as the fabric fall to the floor.  It’s an older style Savant, the one he used back before the Normandy was destroyed, but it’s better than the old Gemini they’d been issued at Brain Camp.  Kan, you HAVE to survive..

The tears trickle down her cheeks as old muscle memory kicks in, fingers removing the cover before sliding the device into the port. She imagines she can hear a soft click as it fits, but that's mostly her brain playing tricks. Swiping at her cheeks with her shirt sleeve, she shoulders her bag and spins on her heel, stalking out of the room towards the front of her apartment. Dammit, K, I hate it when you’re right!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[soon-palestine]

We write this call from our student movement in the Gaza Strip, from the heart of occupied Palestine, from under the brutal Zionist bombing, explosions, and the clutches of the monstrous nightmare of death that lurks around us in every corner, house, and street.

We raise it from prison cells, from beneath the destruction, and from inside the rubble, to send it to our fellow students, our comrades, brothers and sisters, in all the universities, schools and institutes of the world everywhere, & we address the global student movement… that was launched in order to stop the genocidal war that is being engineered and financed by the governments of the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and others… this courageous student movement that was born in the universities as an integral part of our struggle, that expresses the conscience of students and peoples who yearn for justice and freedom.

We in the Gaza Strip look at you with pride and honour, as you are a revolutionary fighting vanguard, and a natural and integral part of our Palestinian liberation movement. You have come in a resounding, honest and clear response against the Israeli massacres and those who finance them, confronting the companies of the Zionist war of genocide and ethnic cleansing that have claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinian students of all ages… including hundreds of struggling Palestinian student cadres, wounded and imprisoned, in addition to our great loss in the martyrdom of our professors and teachers, and the destruction of our universities, institutes and schools.

Today, we call on you, from the midst of massacres and siege, to a new revolutionary phase of comprehensive escalation. We call on you to raise the pace and ceiling of your struggle and your honorable stances, quantitatively and qualitatively, against the institutions, corporations, and governments that participate in the slaughter of our children, our students, and our people.. In Rafah, Jabalia, Khan Younis, and the entire Gaza Strip, and against the settler gangs, armies of Zionist killers, that commit their crimes in camps, cities and villages in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. We call on you to besiege the White House in Washington, and to surround Western colonial governments and Zionist embassies, and the corporations that finance the Zionist entity and arm its criminal army with all kinds of bombs and means of death and destruction. These criminal colonial symbols represent the forces that support “Israel” to kill us – with your tax money and the money spent at complicit corporations, to destroy our homes, our society, and our future.

Therefore, we call on you to blockade them until the American Zionist aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip stops. At the same time, we renew our call to the teaching, academic, and union bodies in universities, as well as cultural, academic, and scientific figures, to advocate for and support student movements until they achieve their goals. Today we turn to high school students all over the world to participate widely in the struggles and activities of the university student movement, organizing demonstrations, and organizing educational days about the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return.

Secondary schools constitute a strong fortress and a great support for university students everywhere. Once again, we send special greetings to our brothers and sisters, the students of Palestine in the diaspora.

We greet our comrades and colleagues in Students for Justice in Palestine, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Palestine Action, and the academic boycott and divestment campaigns, and we salute everyone who participated and participates in student encampments. The duty and responsibility of Palestinian students in the Gaza Strip and all of occupied Palestine is steadfastness, commitment, resistance, unity, and alignment with the resistance and the people… …until the U.S. – Zionist aggression stops and the occupation is defeated and removed from our land — all our land, from the river to the sea.

Long live the struggle of Palestine’s students for return and liberation.

Long live international solidarity. And together we will be victorious!

Secretariat of Palestinian Student Frameworks – Gaza Strip

(available in AR original, EN, ES, FR, NL, DE)

https://samidoun.net/2024/05/a-call-from-the-palestinian-student-movement-in-gaza-time-for-revolutionary-escalation-of-the-global-intifada/

[nyashykyunnie]

˗ˏˋ Sung Jinwoo x Terminally ill Reader ◛⑅·˚ ༘ ♡

ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕘 𝕁𝕚𝕟𝕨𝕠𝕠˚◦○˚ ୧ .˚ₓ

‼️[ TW: Terminal Illness, Angst to Fluff, Solo Leveling Spoilers ]

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅ Part 2 || Part 1 ♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

╰┈➤ ❝ [ We'll Try This Again, Begin Again with Zero. But This Time? I'm Never Letting You Go. ] ¡! ❞

Living felt more like a punishment more than anything. The pain he goes through starts feeling more and more deserving in his eyes. He was pushing himself to the limits when he shouldn't, he's punishing himself over a sin that wasn't really his fault.

But if anyone tells him that, he wouldn't look back at them. He would ignore their concerns.

He has a duty to uphold anyway, a duty that only he can do as a monarch.

Jinwoo has ultimately grown to be a vessel of war thanks to the system.

He didn't really care much, he already placed insurance to his name if anything happens to him.

When he's gone, his remaining family would atleast live off of something.

He has already watched his father die too thanks to the godforsaken monarchs.

What more can he loose?

Over and over again, he puts himself in the battlefield, exhausting himself on purpose, never even sleeping nor eating.

He was just fighting like a dog.

Well, dog's get much more care than what he does to himself, so does it really count?

It doesn't matte,r Jinwoo physically cannot be exhausted.

But mentally? It's a different story.

He wasn't really depressed, at least, that's what he tells himself.

He really felt numb, not exactly sad, not exactly happy either. It's as if his emotions lie in the middle.

Jinwoo felt hollow, completely hollow.

As if he were merely nothing more than a puppet in war.

The only thing that really urges him to move forward is the distant sound of his beloved's voice in the back of his head.

And soon, after he had finally murdered the Monarch of Destruction— He would be granted a wish.

Battered and tired while on the floor, he thought of what he could possibly ask from the rulers.

Thought of?

No, Jinwoo already knew what he wanted.

It was to turn back time.

To meet old friends again, to stop the gates from opening, to have his family whole again

,... To meet you again.

Yes. That's right. All of this was for you anyway.

Jinwoo recalls that memory very clearly, how you were still in the hospital bed and you two were playing a game of cards while he tells you about how he plans to be a hunter soon.

Your words were quite cute really: "I hope Woowoo becomes a really strong man!"

Those silly, innocent words of yours.

Up to this day, he still smiles lovingly whenever he remembers that.

He became this strong not just for himself and his family who needs him, but for you, the brave little soul who endured that illness—

Jinwoo fought for you

And since he is given the opportunity to correct the past, he requiested for time to be rewinded.

Right then and there, a brilliant flash of white would engulf the earth, bathing it in all it's glory. eradicating all traces of the lifeforms and shadows there is to this pathetic universe. For once in a million years, the earth was beautiful again. It looked like a star gleaming along with countless others.

Soon, Jinwoo would wake up to the sound of his baby sister's calling. Jinwoo would sit up, gently smiling at her.

It took a while for everything to sink in, for everything for him to realize that this? All of this was reality.

How badly he wanted to find you in the time he spent, for just a few weeks, he enjoyed being a child again.

Laughing with friends, screaming at others for a vanguard or healer in the pc cafe— He wanted to find you in an instant. But not right now.

He took care of some stuff first.

Your illness wont awaken until then after all.

27 years, he spent time in that goddamn dimensional crack fighting monarchs and all that crap.

When he was done, he finally came home.

Just as he set foot back in earth again, he went straight to the hospital.

April 9th of spring, where the pink petals bloomed and flew around the air— This beautiful but tragic day.

Was the first time you had collapsed and coughed out blood.

It started with your lungs, to your kidneys, to your heart, to everywhere.

You had metastatic cancer.

Coughing up blood was only the start.

And Jinwoo had come home just in time.

He didn't even ask for directions, he just went straight to your hospital room.

He knew this godforsaken place better than the doctors and nurses himself after all.

As he pried open the door, there you were, resting on the bed staring absentmindedly at the pink trees outside your window. When yopu heard the sound of the door, you turned your attention to Jinwoo.

Dazzling and innocent eyes, just as he remembers. Your youthful face, free of any sign of wrinkles. Still chubby and plump that he wanted to just kiss your cheeks all over.

As you called out his name, Jinwoo marched over and embraced you tightly.

"I'm sorry, it took me a while" Jinwoo whispers ever so lovingly as he rubs the b ack of your head affectionately.

You were confused at first, wondering why your best friend is acting all cuddly and sappy when he totally did not disappear off of the face of the earth and come out of nowhere like some sort of boogey man. But regardless, you can't help but notice the traces of tears about to break from lovely grey eyes.

When you reached over to touch his face, his voice broke and he started crying almost instantly.

Panicked and confused, you pulled him to a tight hug.

Jinwoo was crying, and in his tears and broken voice you could hear the amount of anguish he had been bottling up, the brokenness in his heart finally being revealed in the open for you to hear and see. It felt as if Jinwoo was carrying a hundred years worth of burden. And you could do nothing more than to soothe him.

"I'm sorry... Ditching you out of nowhere and acting like a sappy pup wo got kicked" He chokes as he chuckles gently, "I promise, promise, that I won't leave you like that anymore. Just trust me, okay? Here, drink this."

He hands you a weird fantasy-potion thing with red liquid inside. You wanted to deny him of it but Jinwoo stubbornly insisted upon it, as if your life depended on it.

Well, tehnically speaking, it did depended on that potion.

After making sure you gulped down every single drop of the crimson liquid, Jinwoo pressed his forehead against yours.

Mumbling ever so sweetly; "Let's do this again, okay? You and me, goofing around. I'll let you eat as much sweets as you like, I'll show a lot of pretty things. Don't worry about anything else, Woowoo will take care of it."

Somehow, you felt that Jinwoo meant that on a deeper level. You felt like right now, what in front of you wasn't just anyone else, but someone ready to lay down their life for your sake. The person in front of you, you felt as if he was going to follow you to the ends of the earth to the stars above your heads. Somehow, it feels as if his words was a promise that he would follow you wherever you go.

He already lost you once, damned will he be if that happens again.

[desultory-novice]

"Whoever said 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' left a lot of stuff out..."

[Name:] Noir Fontaine "...It's pronounced 'fawn-tan'"

[Reference Image:]

[[Tournament Asks Masterpost]]

[Notes on Personality:]

"My pronouns are he/some-kind -of-planet-invading hellspawn, I guess."

A kindhearted teen beneath the surface, growing up amidst humanity's depressive twilight hours on a hostile, frozen wasteland, plus a lifetime of tragedies no one his age should have to bear, has hardened Noir into a sarcastic, sassy little edgelord with a bitter tongue that's as sharp as his cursed sword, both of which he'll turn on anything he finds threatening with little provocation.

Noir's oodles and caboodles of twitchy paranoia combined with him having the approachability of a flea-ridden alley cat, makes breaking the thick ice to touch the heart of the scarred boy hiding beneath a task for only the most patient (or masochistic) of souls.

...And even then, he'll still sass you.

Likes: storytelling, games, the night sky, his siblings Dislikes: violence, crowds, touch, food, opening up

[Backstory and Lore:]

"...My life had way more talking plushies playing key roles than I'd have guessed."

Son of <L.D. Violet Level Access Only> and <L.D. Violet Level Access Only> Noir is a normal (?) human (?) teen from Shiver Star and Adeleine's older brother.

After the early death of his parents under very suspicious circumstances, Noir took over as sole guardian of his little sister, giving up the little-to-nothing he had to keep her safe and happy, including his own happiness, his health, and very nearly his sanity.

His preternaturally bad luck took a turn for the absolutely devastating when–while searching for a cheer-up gift for his little sister amongst some suspicious New World relics–he just so happened to acquire a psychic blade forged of Dark Matter.

As if it knew exactly who he was and exactly who he could go on to be, the Blade attached itself to him in a rather physical (:cough: and un-removable :cough:) manner and began slowly but surely corrupting him, body, mind, and soul.

Yet, he was able to use its destructive gifts to quietly rescue his sister Adeleine from Shiver Star's apocalyptic, dead-end environs and send her off into the endless possibilities waiting in the sea of stars, guaranteeing she, at least, would have a future.

The corruption devours him soon after.

In a 'verse close to that of the canon games, Noir loses his human body upon death along with (most) of his memories, and his captive soul is reforged by Zero as the eldritch entity's elite vanguard, a position which caused King Dedede to dub him "Blade."

In this form, the emotionless(?) Dark Matter drone would go on to adopt Gooey (in place of the sister he could not fully remember) and lead the invasion of Popstar for the collective, unaware it was the very planet Adeleine escaped to. She would not discover the one-eyed shadow monster was her brother till much, much later...

Noir dies a second time, in a duel against Popstar's hero, Kirby of the Stars, having remembered his human life too late to do anything about it. Noir would die for a third time after a disappointed Zero resurrects, tortures, and brainwashes him in order to force his participation in the second, penultimate invasion of Popstar.

Tragically, even after banishing Dark Matter from Popstar and destroying Zero, Noir's soul remains trapped in darkness.

...He would've liked to see his little sister and brother again...

In another 'verse, he and Adeleine swap fates and... :cough:

Favorite Dream Landers: Adeleine, Gooey, King Dedede, Kirby

---

[Notes on Potential (???) Interactions:]

If your OC has ANY ability to sense Dark Matter, is or ever was Dark Matter, or has a grudge against Dark Matter, Noir should set them off like a particularly obnoxious car alarm. He radiates Dark Matter energy, even when he's not doing anything.

If your OC is small, cute, and harmless (ie: reminds him of Adeleine or Gooey in any way) you may earn some begrudging care from the boy. He's got a terminal case of big-brother syndrome, after all.

If your OC has been through the horrors (and specifically NOT come out a better, healthier person for it) he will probably sympathize.

Address him as "Swordsman" and watch him twitch! It's fun!

[Etc:]

For this event, Noir is visually in his "last days as a living human" form, ie: purple-black patches of corrupted flesh and veins and monster hands beneath his gloves.

He's below average height and weight for his age, but being an Earth-human like Adeleine (and taller than her) generally winds up taller than most average Dream Land-type residents

As far as physical appearance goes, Noir is still 16 (the age he died at) but he spent a sizable period of time as Dark Matter and his true mental/emotional age is difficult to calculate.

Outside of the powers he picked up from the sword (teleportation, darkness control, memory-based matter re-creation, etc) Noir, owing to his heritage, has some mild powers all of his own (pre-cognition, cross-dimensional sight, etc) though he is untrained in the use of them and remains unaware they are "powers" at all.

---

PS: You can read more about Noir [HERE]

---

Well, I have done it. I have thrown my son to the Shark-Dees! XD Shall we see how The Boy Who Always Dies does at the @kirbyoctournament ?

[zalia]

Truth to Power, Chiasmus, and the Final Shape (or, has anyone else noticed we're playing the story backwards?)

Through a set of circumstances, I ended up getting onto an unhinged rambling session at 3am so thanks to my friend who let me (one time when different time zones was actually useful).

Some of this may be a little bit of a reach, but I think it bears out, and i've put the truly out there thoughts at the end.

Contains spoilers for Season of the Wish finale, and basically of Destiny, including the Final Shape trailers and ViDocs.

Okay, lets talk about Truth to Power and Ikora and Arach Jalaal's discussion of it in the Witch Queen CE.

Truth to Power is a lore book from Forsaken and it is... odd to say the least. It starts out as a message from 'Eris' and then cycles through other characters Eris > Medusa > Quria > Dul Incaru > Savathun, and then back again. It includes a 'choose your own adventure' section, a hidden challenge to defeat Shattered Throne solo at light level 999, a hidden note to data miners, and talks a lot about Ahamkara, the Distributary and the Dreaming City, black holes, and Savathun's (potential) plans regarding it. Especially the idea of moving through worlds contained within worlds via black holes.

In the Hidden Dossier decoded from the Witch Queen CE, Ikora and Arach Jalaal discuss this book, it's many readings, and what it might mean.

One thing that comes up is that the story uses a literary device called 'chiasmus'

REY >> JALAAL Look at the structure of the text. At first, Eris is real. Then we learn Eris's voice is a deception by Medusa. Then we learn Medusa is nested inside Quria. Then we learn Quria is a fiction of Dûl Incaru. And at the center, Savathûn reveals herself to be the parent of it all. We are headed inward, as if moving from parent to child universe. Then we proceed in reverse. Savathûn is revealed to be a fiction of Dûl Incaru. Dûl Incaru a simulation by Quria, and so on. So in the end, Truth to Power moves outwards. Just as Savathûn plans to move. In from our universe and out to the Distributary— Or out from our universe to its parent. JALAAL >> REY Oh. I see. I see! A literary structure like that is called a chiasmus, and chiasmus means "crossing point"! Like a wormhole or a portal! It was hidden in plain sight.

They can also be thought of as ring structures. We end at the beginning.

Which incidentally is the tag line for the Akashic Revelation lore from Season of the Deep about a Guardian trying to enter the portal in the Traveller and getting visions of his original human life!

Which will become relevant i swear.

Lots of people have commented about the finale cutscene from Season of the Wish, and how it mirrors Forsaken - with Crow at Cayde's mercy, vs Cayde at Uldren's mercy. And you can kind of look at Crow's story in general as a reflection of Uldren's. Crow resurrected > Imprisoned by Spider > Manipulated by Savathun > Growing into himself and his freedom as a guardian > Reconciliation with Mara > Jumping through a portal to another facet of reality

vs

Uldren following Mara out of the Distributary > the growing distance between him and Mara > Prince of the Awoken, tricking Guardians, visiting the Black Garden > his growing madness leading to his imprisonment in the Prison of Elders and manipulation by Riven (who was controlled by Savathun) > Death

There's another cycle (there are many cycles) I noticed with Saint and Osiris.

Vanguard Commanders > Separation+Exile > Saint's loss of the Light + death > [Sundial Incident] > Osiris' loss of the Light and imprisonment > [Nezarec Tea Incident] > Recovery+being reunited > Vanguard Commanders

We've also had in the ViDoc the mention of receiving the Khvostov because it's the first weapon we ever use in D1, returning to the freeway we were resurrected at, returning to the beginning.

With me so far?

We've ended Season of the Wish with a redux version of the final fight of D1 Vanilla - the destruction of the Black Heart. Symbolically bringing us back to the start of our journey. But if you look at a lot of the themes of recent seasons... we've been travelling backwards loosely through a reflection of D1's storylines.

Season of the Wish/D1 Vanilla

In D1, we are guided to enter the Black Garden and destroy the Black Heart created by the Vex. This is the story where we first encounter Mara and Uldren who send us to get the eye of a Vex Gate Lord to enter the Garden. Which involves us going to the Ishtar Academy on Venus to find out more about the Vex (incidentally this is also where the Vex Citadel is located - something which has been very prominently visible in the Starcrossed Mission).

In Season of the Wish, we are following up work done by Maya Sundaresh and Chioma Esi of the Ishtar Collective on the Veil which was revealed to be what the Black Heart was trying to recreate. We're working with Mara and Crow (and Crow even lampshades the original story in a joke about the eye of a Vex Gate Lord!). Eventually we end up confronting the Vex and destroying a new copy of the Black Heart.

Season of the Witch/The Dark Below

In the Dark Below, we are guided by Eris to stop the resurrection of Crota by disrupting a ritual, and eventually kill him in his Throne World in the Crota's End raid.

In Season of thr Witch, we take part in a ritual to tithe to Eris to help her ascend into becoming the Hive god of vengeance so that she can cut Xivu Arath off from her Throne World

Eris: Crota's soul is banished. You have given me the gift of vengeance. I thank you… - D1

Season of the Deep/The Taken King

I admit that this is out of order and a little more of a stretch, but chiasmus is not necessarily an exact thing and I think the parallels are there.

In The Taken King, we are confronted with Oryx's fleet arriving in the system to get revenge for the killing of Crota. He destroys a large portion of the Awoken Fleet who were there to buy us time, including killing Mara Sov (she had a plan and got better!). We have to pretend to be Ascendant Hive to face him on the Dreadnaught (which is created from the body of one of the Worm Gods) and we take shards of his sword to create our own. Eventually we face him in King's Fall, use his hoarded stolen Light and free it to defeat him.

In Season of the Deep, we have the sudden reappearance of Titan in the system sent by Xivu Arath. We have Sloane who has willingly become half Taken to learn about Xivu's plans and undermine them, and she is supported by Ahsa, one of the proto-worms who is seemingly akin to the Worm Gods (Eris uses her name and the name of her slaughtered family in her ritual in Season of the Witch, alongside the names of the Worm Gods). We save Ahsa, Sloane is possessed briefly by Xivu but recovers. We also enter a pyramid and take a gift of Darkness (Wicked Implement) left to us by Xivu.

Also we have a whole dungeon about the Lucent Hive trying to resurrect Oryx and Xivu's voice memories regarding him and everything about the Hive.

Season of Defiance/House of Wolves

In House of Wolves, Skolas, Kell of Wolves, is freed from his imprisonment by one of the Nine. he declares himself Kell of Kells, frees his followers from the Prison of Elders, attempts to assassinate Mara Sov. Mara, angered by this, gives Guardians the freedom of the Reef to hunt Skolas down as he tries to unite the various houses. He eventually breaks into the Vault of Glass to bring Wolves from the past to aid him. We stop him, capture him, and eventually kill him in the Prison of Elders. This leads to a very slight improvement of relations between the Reef and the City, although the Awoken, barring Petra, are still mainly ambivalent and Mara is absolutely only interested in us as a means to an end.

In Season of Defiance, the Shadow Legion are capturing humans and Eliksni and imprisoning them on the pyramid ships. We are aided in their rescue by Misraaks, once of the House of Wolves (as was his mother) now Kell of Light (and potentially Kell of Kells eventually???), and Mara Sov, who comes to aid us, willingly using her power to let us walk the Ascendant plane in order to rescue our people. It very much solidifies the alliance between the City and the Reef.

So essentially, House of Wolves is former allies of the Reef turning on them to destroy them. Season of Defiance is former enemies banding together to save their people.

Also Taniks is in House of Wolves, and conspicuously mentioned in Season of Defiance.

Lightfall/The Red War

Again, out of order slightly, but the more I think about it, the more I see the parallels.

In the Red War, the Last City is attacked by the Red Legion led by Dominus Ghaul who is obsessed with claiming the Light, and captures the Speaker. The Guardians lose the Light and are driven out of the City. We have to regain our Light abilities from the Shard of the Traveller that we are guided to. The Speaker is killed after admitting the Traveller doesn't speak to him. We go to gather our allies once more, assault the City, fight Ghaul who is then destroyed by the Light when the Traveller awakens. The Black Fleet is shown to activate at the edge of the System.

In Lightfall, we follow Osiris who has had a vision of Neptune. We arrive in Neomuna which is a City under assault from the Shadow Legion led by Calus (who was exiled and deposed by Ghaul). Our Light abilities are suppressed so we have to master Strand which is seemingly a product of the Veil. We gather our allies, including Caiatl who had taken over command after Ghaul's death, and combat the Shadow Legion's assault on Neomuna. We fight and defeat Calus who has been granted Darkness abilities. But the Witness communes with the Veil, damages the Traveller, and most of the Black Fleet leaves the system to enter the Traveller.

Season of the Seraph/Rise of Iron

In Rise of Iron, we're called by Saladin Forge, the last of the Iron Lords, to stop the Eliksni House of Devils from taking control of SIVA, the nanomachine plague which killed the other Iron Lords when they went to seek it to save humanity, because Rasputin got mad that the Traveller resurrected his son as Felwinter. We fight the SIVA animated corpses of some of the Iron Lords and destroy the replication chamber. We fight the Devil Splicers who have been augmented by SIVA.

In Season of the Seraph, we are working to recover a damaged Rasputin and stop Xivu Arath from taking control of Rasputin's Warsat network and weapons. We enter bunkers to recover his data, including returning to Felwinter Peak to recover Felwinter's memories which leads to Rasputin sacrificing himself to save humanity, where before he had sacrificed the Iron Lords for his own selfishness. We also fight Witness animated corpses of Eliksni (the Scorn) and Eliksni Wrathborn infected by Xivu Arath's cryptoliths (which can also infect computer systems). Eramis, once a Baron of the House of Devils has to see and grieve her friends and comrades turned into mindless puppets, as Saladin once had to see the Iron Lords turned into puppets by SIVA.

I think there's also a note to be had about how we're doing these repeats. In D1 the vast majority of the time, we are alone. We are not yet the Young Wolf, the Godslayer, the hero. We are just one random Guardian.

In D1 vanilla, there's no real mission control. You have Elsie Bray tell you to follow a signal and give you some info, but then you are on your own. Mara and Uldren are quite relaxed about potentially getting you killed. In Season of the Wish, we are guided by Osiris and Mara, aided by Crow. We have people with us every step of the way. At this point in D1, Petra was more or less exiled from the Reef. In Season of the Wish, she is one of Mara's greatest supports, and you can hear how much Mara cares about her.

The Dark Below has you guided by an Eris who is alone, untrusted and seen as crazy at best, or a genuine threat to the City at worst. She has nothing in her life but vengeance. In Season of the Witch, we have an Eris who has Ikora and Drifter and Mara there to support her and who trust her. The worry is mostly for her rather than about her.

We have gone from the Last City being a last bastion of humanity with the whole universe against us, to one of two cities, filled with those we had once called enemies.

Conclusion

So yeah, a theory that we're travelling back through our story, a chiasmus (there may well be other parallels in previous seasons too) which is taking us right back to the start of our story.

Except here's the thing... Elsie Bray is the one who starts things off by having us destroy the Black Heart. It's implied to be the major event that changed things. But Elsie's timeloops are stated to always take her back way before our resurrection, to the moment when Cayde becomes Hunter Vanguard.

Well, we're just about to get Cayde back.

So what happens when you reach the beginning/end of the story and yet it continues? We're outside the boundaries of this story now! Off the path we've been following!

But unlike when we were resurrected, alone save for Ghost, when we go into the Pale Heart, we will not be going alone. We've come through the chiasmus and we've done things better, built alliances, made friends, united the Light and the Darkness.

So when we step beyond the boundaries of the storyI would suggest one thing – Guardians make their own fates.

The actual unhinged theorising

So, there was one connection my mind made at like 7am when I briefly woke up after going to bed at 4am. A Chismus is kind of like a labyrinth.

In English, Labyrinth is often synonymous to maze, and it can be! However maze and labyrinth are also used as specialised terms - a maze is a multicursal puzzle with many branching paths, while a labyrinth is unicursal, and has only one winding path to the centre and out again.

You can see them in lots of places, including places of worship where they can represent symbols of pilgrimage, or a path to enlightment/salvation. Walking them can be used as a form of meditation. And historically they've also had sometimes been used as a way to trap evil spirits, or turn away evil.

So a Chiasmus is a ring structure, and you follow it from start to finish then back to start, and a labyrinth is a unicursal winding path that takes you to the centre and then back out again, and the story of Destiny is (loosely) following that structure.

There is one specific labyrinth I think it's worth looking at.

This is a labyrinth carved into the portico of Lucca Cathedral in Italy. The inscription is Latin and translated reads "This is the labyrinth built by Dedalus of Crete; all who entered therein were lost, save Theseus, thanks to Ariadne's thread"

This is the seal for Season of Arrivals... oh hey that... that looks familiar.

This is from the Live Action Witch Queen trailer showing the Cradle on Mars with... oh wait... is that... the same fucking labyrinth?

It crops up in a lot of places in Destiny. You will see it everywhere.

Where am I going with this?

Look at the inscription for the Lucca Cathedral labyrinth: "This is the labyrinth built by Dedalus of Crete; all who entered therein were lost, save Theseus, thanks to Ariadne's thread"

We know the story of Thesus and the Minotaur. He was able to find his way through thanks to a spool of thread given to him by Ariadne (oh hey, guess what subclass we just got in the last expansion...).

Well, Ariadne's Thread is the name for a method of solving puzzles by an exhaustive application of logic to all available routes. Wikipedia says about this method:

At any moment that there is a choice to be made, make one arbitrarily from those not already marked as failures, and follow it logically as far as possible.

If a contradiction results, back up to the last decision made, mark it as a failure, and try another decision at the same point. If no other options exist there, back up to the last place in the record that does have options, mark the failure at that level, and proceed onward.

That sounds kind of Vex-like huh? Or even more specifically... sounds almost like what Elsie Bray has been doing. She is reset each time to the last set point (Cayde becoming Hunter Vanguard), and in each loop she tests paths up until destruction. It's how she comes to realise that she has to be the person who finds stasis first.

Each loop cuts off a branch of the maze, a set of possibilities that do not lead to the right outcome. And cutting off each branch until there is only one path turns it into a labyrinth.

I've thought for a while that it feels like something is iterating, working through every option until all the pieces align and there is only one path. Making sure the chiasmus works.

Piecing together a perfectly constructed bomb to take on the sword, which will detonate into the exact kind of chaos that Guardians are good at.

I apologise for the extreme longness of this post. I really hope it is semi-coherent at least?

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: Heironeous, The Vindicator

Let our hands never falter, sparing evil the sword Let our hearts never waiver, letting weakness take root Let our march never end, lest the task be left undone

Champions, zealots, fools. All these words describe the followers of Heironeous; patron god of those blinded by duty and self righteousness. From the guards who rough up vagrants for the sake of social order, to the patriotic songs sung by soldiers on the way to invade a land they've never seen, to the teacher who’s convinced they can instruct through pain, because sparing the rod really does spoil the child.

It is a terrifying thing after all to be in the wrong, to have no easy answers, to be filled with doubt, and so the Archpaladin and his clergy intercede to provide the fearful populace with direction, with easy answers, and with scapegoats when necessary.

Adventure Hooks:

The party are asked by some troubled parents to look in on the local chapterhouse of the Invincible Vanguard, who took over for the town's royal garrison some years ago. A number of youths, bored of life in their sleepy little town decided to sign up with the Vanguard a few months past and have not been seen since. The Heironeian are cagey to say the least, but through their investigation the party might stumble across the same awful secret the kids did during their initiation, as well as their ultimate fate.

A beast rampages through the countryside, sowing fear, destruction, and rumour wherever it goes. Defeating it is no easy task, but one of the local lords is willing to pay a high price should the party bring him its head as proof. Imagine their surprise when a few days later a group of Heironeian paladins are paraded through the street carrying THEIR trophy aloft, claiming all the credit and with that same lord backing their claims. It seems the party has been part of a cruel PR stunt, however will they make this right?

A series of inexplicable mishaps and borderline disasters that plague a frontier village have come to a head with one of the Vindicator's itinerant preachers convinces the locals that devilry is the source of their woes, pointing the blacksmith's tiefling apprentice. It's up to the party to prevent the kid from getting strung up, and make the villagers see reason before there's an out and out witchhunt on their hands.

Setup: From the outside, with the perspective of history, it’s easy enough to see that there’s something wrong with faith of Heironeous, how their temples and icons venerate violence, whether it be martial glory or the suffering of martyrs that needed to be avenged. How their liturgy teaches the faithful that sympathy to outsiders, questions to authority, even the smallest of doubts are weaknesses to be overcome.

But the Heironeans are the ones fighting off the monsters encroaching on your village when the baron won’t pay for garrisons or adventurers, and it’s their priests who come to hand out food to the hungry and say there’s work the town over building their new fortress, and it’s their inquisitors who stand in the market square telling the crowd that all the awful things that happened these past few years is the fault of sinful, faithless rulers, and if only they could be led by righteous men (and it is always men) and expel the social parasites then truly this realm could be one beloved by the gods. 

That’s the grift, the Heironeans seize on a crisis or a fear and offer to put your life on a better track, nevermind that it’s a permanent war footing where you and your family and neighbours are conscripted to roles based on how you’d be most useful, and disagreement amounts to insubordination.

Heironeans say they’re justified of course because evil is always out there, the one true evil, Hextor, the grotesque, six armed lord of bloodshed and suffering who wishes to make slaves or corpses of all the world and the heavens besides. He is jealous of Heironeous you see, his twin brother, who is propheciesed to be the only one who can defeat him. Hextor never rests, always spawning more evil in the world, and anyone could be his follower without even knowing it... all they’d need to do is work to subvert the will of the archpaladin and they’d be abetting the scourge.  You don’t want to be an agent of evil do you? Then tithe to the church, enlist in the vanguard, obey your betters, marry early and within your kind and have more children to carry on the fight when you are too week, raise them up right, kneel when you are told, submit. Do all these things and the Vindicator will know you are good, and worth fighting for, and will forgive your mortal failings. 

There is a deeper lore, behind even what the faithful or even most of their leaders know:  that Heironeous and Hextor are the same being. Sometimes it is the monster wearing the golden hero like a mask, sometimes it is the bright and radiant warrior casting a most wicked shadow, sometimes it is simply that the god of war and slaughter has two faces, fair and foul, both righteous, both tyrannical, both hungering for blood.

The cult of Hextor is a secret order within the faith, membership offered only to those chosen by their god or those that see the worship of the archpaladin for what it really is: Violence for the sake of power, power for the sake of violence. They are secretive, deflecting rumours of their existence onto puppets and figureheads that they manipulate, going so far as to create false-cults to the Scourge to draw the faithful’s attention and ire. Any fault in the church can be blamed on Hextorian infiltration, any opponent that challenges them is but an agent of the Scourge.

  Titles:  The invincible, the vindicator, the archpaladin / the scourge, the herald of hells

Signs:  Oddly serene visions of violence and pain, wounds or blood on the image or relics of martyrs or weapons of champions, prophetic nightmares about the victory of Hextor.

Symbols:  A white hand or clapsed around a silver lightning bolt/ a black gauntlet clutched around six red arrows

Inspiration: Cruelty cloaked in the guise of righteousness is not an original concept but after writing  about how d&d has weird habit of using a frankly childlike view of morality in order to justify its violence  the same way that IRL hategroups do, I wanted to play around with the concept. 

Likewise, I felt my campaigns needed a solid “badguy with the aesthetic of goodguy” villain and I was tired of using overzealous followers of the dawnfather or bahamut to fill out the roster.  Specifically, rather than bad people in service to an ostensibly good god (who are objectively real in the setting and thus would try to oust the bad apples), I wanted to create an evil god that used the trappings of goodness to dupe average people into doing bad, the same way that has happened over and over again historically in our own world.

 I ended up choosing Heironeous for this villain makeover because like a lot of other default d&d deities I find the base form of him painfully one note, he’s the paladin god of paladins and he has hero IN HIS NAME. That said, he has a twin brother Hextor, god of war and tyrants that serves as his dark mirror and there’s thematic meat in that... Merging the two into one god gives us this delicious setup where the theology of Heironeous creates the problem and sells the solution, benefiting no matter who wins in the supposed cosmic power struggle.

Art

[utilitycaster]

RE: Ruidusborn superstition - It's weird because Matt has had several opportunities to make it about persecution and hasn't. Laura could've made it a stronger point in her backstory with Gelvaan and didn't. This rounding up Ruidusborn and throwing them in jail is a theoretical crime that a bad guy in a cult told them might happen. 

Dealing with the unfair persecution of non Vanguard Ruidusborn in the fallout of this could be interesting to explore, but a) it hasn’t happened yet and b) still entirely the fault of the Vanguard for, ya know, all the crime. I just don’t get why some folks aren’t exploring the actual interesting conflict in front of them (i.e. being tied to something inherently destructive, your parent using you as a justification for her crimes, etc.) and instead make it about some secret twist coming that will totally make Liliana and the Vanguard “correct” actually in order to (I assume?) justify Imogen’s brief consideration of them and dunk on Orym for having the audacity to not be objective about the organization that killed his family.

Hey anon,

This is a very good point re: the actual conflicts present. I know I've been guilty of going hard on Liliana and the thing is I do find her a profoundly compelling and sympathetic villain. I think she was placed in an impossible position by Predathos imbuing her with troubling and at times painful powers; that despite having good intentions with regards to the nature of Ruidus (there is a lot of value in both studying it and in concealing its nature, depending on your perspective) people other than Ludinus were unable to give her answers and so she was easy prey for his cult; and she has since been driven by these motivations so far down the road of the Ruby Vanguard that even when the daughter she has believed herself for so long to be protecting tries to give her an out and asks her why she's doing this, she can't answer but is terrified of leaving. She is very sympathetic. She is very much a villain. And yes, I'll cover Orym in a second.

The following is, by necessity due to the nature of what I want to discuss, going to touch on some real-world politics though mostly in the sense of abstract strategy with very few specific actual positions. I want to note that we are talking about a fictional work here, and while I do have some presumptions regarding the people advocating for the Vanguard, they are just that - presumptions. I will only say that if this is how the people advocating for the Vanguard engage with people in real-world activism (if they partake in that in the first place), this may be a revealing insight into why they are perhaps less than successful.

Every argument in favor of killing the gods ultimately presupposes killing the gods is correct. They are all, ultimately, either tautological (we should kill the gods because they are deserving of death) and assume that the only objective conclusion is "we should kill the gods", therefore anything other than "we should kill the gods" cannot be objective.

I may be repeating myself since I've said this a lot since the last episode but: there as a truly bone-chilling lack of empathy in thestatement that Orym needs to stop bringing up his dead family and get over it and be objective (read: agree with the premise that the gods should be killed). Actually, if you are a person capable of perceiving others as people, you will likely realize that it is cruel and absurd to expect someone to say "this group murdered my family, but because they did so with the correct motivations, I shall stop mentioning it." As you indicated, it's bizarre that Orym is expected to set the wholesale murder - deliberately set up with no hope of resurrection, just to twist the knife - aside, but Imogen is never expected to set aside the (let's face it, extremely tenuous, given that Liliana's been absent for over a quarter-century) feelings about her mother, a person who recruits child soldiers, turned Vax into an orb, and is a general in the death cult that murdered Orym's husband and father. Like, in a real-world scenario, someone in Orym's position very well might have just left over this. Your friends keep failing to consider your trauma? Perhaps it's time to, painful as it may be, find friends who will be sensitive. [I don't want to focus on the shipping or character dynamic aspects with that particularly argument against Orym, but this is a fictional work and I do think another running theme in all sorts of discourse is that you do not need to justify your ships as logical, and when you do, you really do sound like "why doesn't Ross, the largest friend, simply eat all the other friends." There are logical reasons why Orym might not want to talk with, for example, Fearne or Ashton; but also the heart wants what it wants, and again, if you aren't truly ignorant about the way human psychology works you have to acknowledge that.]

Before I move on to other items I want to note I've as of late seen attempts not just to discredit Orym but to pathologize his behavior as self-harming or moral OCD or a failure to get fully over grief (again, an expectation that is not just devoid of empathy but also sets the standard of 'get over grief' as "agrees with me") and not just "hey, this group killed my husband and father in front of me and I understandably will not budge on this particular front. So there's also a growing ableist push, here, because someone doesn't agree with you and will not agree with you and also might want to kiss someone different than whom you want them to kiss.

As of late, the banner of those wronged by the gods has shifted from any of Bells Hells to those of Aeor, and that is a bad sign in a D&D campaign. If you need to set aside the PCs in order to rely on NPCs who have not shown up in the current narrative? You are clinging to a melting iceberg, my man. (More so after invoking FCG as one of the victims of Aeor's demise, rather than someone created to be used for malicious purposes by Aeor; and even more so after they destroyed themself specifically in heroic sacrifice to save the rest of the party from a Vanguard general.). But more seriously, the focus on Aeor feels reminiscent of advocacy for the unborn; or, to take a page from my own personal experiences and move this back into a fandom realm, the way people will frequently more loudly decry antisemitism for depictions of goblins than for, say, the fact that I don't know of an American synagogue that hasn't experienced a bomb threat in the past 10 years. It's very easy to advocate for corpses or fetuses over the living, or for fictional characters over real people who might be less than perfect. Much easier to ensure they never do such inconvenient things as disagree with you or have their own suggestions or be complicated. It hearkens back to some of the conversations I and others had earlier this campaign about a denial of agency because by making characters victims "stripped of choice," (always that phrasing) suddenly they can't do wrong. They make for a shit story, but at least you can feel morally pure about your flavorless cardboard that ultimately means nothing in-world or out. (And if they don't have agency, that means your morality pet can't run away. Or blow themselves up in a stunning rejection of your argument.)

Returning to the Vanguard: an ongoing discussion in activist spaces (and internet ones as well) is that there's a weird ignorance of optics as an important factor in activism. I know it seems frustrating - why can't people just see that this cause is just - but optics have always been a crucial part of any successful movement. I mean, even if you do believe that we need to do more to combat climate change - and I do - my, and most people's response to the environmental activists who keep throwing soup or paint on artwork is "ugh, this again?" I mean, functionally, while the cause is far more just, it's not terribly distinct from the weird-ass He Gets Us ad campaign; most people are going to say "and you're doing this instead of anything helpful...why?" The Vanguard's optics SUCK. Sure, they've fomented some unrest, but it is an unfortunate truth that the vast majority of people will prefer the inherent violence of a stable system that they are used to over violent unrest. For a successful coup or radical change, either you need to strike at the seat of power extremely quickly or you need to show that you are the more, for lack of a better term, civilized option, and the Vanguard has failed utterly in both these. You're going to get a few places like Hearthdell (though, really, how long will that last given that they got rid of the temple without a scrap of help from Ludinus) but you're going to get a lot of places where city dwellers say "ugh, these stupid crystals are so fucking loud, could this motherfucker shut up" and you're also going to get no shortage of places that say "my family member was taken in by this cult" or "these guys murdered my professor". The rightness or wrongness of the Vanguard's politics aside, a lot of people in-world are likely to side with Orym - these people are murderers who disturb the peace and we should stop them. The cause is lost. Is it, in some absolute sense, fair that people will judge you more for how you convey a message than what the message is? No, although if you convey it in rivers of blood, then, perhaps, yes. But it is, fair or not, often true.

Which brings me back to Orym. I think the reason people are stooping so low specifically to malign and discredit Orym is because he brings all of the above uncomfortably to light. He's aligned with Keyleth, who quite frankly until pretty recently was, within the fandom, partly as (understandable) backlash to the hate she received, and partly because she was, if nothing else, always portrayed as someone deeply attuned to the human costs, treated as a morally infallible authority; and she is no friend to the gods yet still believes their demise is far too great a risk to take. Again, thinking of yourself as Exandria's equivalent of the man on the street (Imahara Joe the Plumber?), are you going to listen to "those people killed my husband and father to prove a hypothesis so that they could tether the moon?" or "my mom, who left me when I was two years old and never came back or sent a letter, is one of those people?" And that's assuming Imogen's even going to make that argument, which, as her actions indicate, she's probably not going to. But most of all I think they really don't like that Orym isn't backing down from "That is the blade that killed my father and husband. She is not right." He's kept to this story the entire time, while the positions of others have evolved. And he's telling the truth. Every time he says this, I think anyone who isn't actually a complete black hole of empathy must confront how much of their humanity they are supressing just to make a poorly-argued point about a D&D show and I'd imagine that can't make one feel very good.

I think people are terrified of Orym's conviction, because he has shown, time and time again, that he is not going to be swayed. I don't think, in fact, that he's going to be swayed by seeing Aeor, should that happen, since Aeor was destroyed a thousand years before he, Will, or Derrig were born, and their murders failed to undo that harm in any way. A really good way to turn people away from your cause, even if it's a good one, is killing those they love. And again, it's fine if you see that position as unfair, or ignorant, or even amoral. It's also extremely true. And I think people realize it's true, given that the only defenses I've seen for Liliana have been "well, but she's Imogen's mother" and "well, it's shockingly easy for people to fall into a cult, because this has happened to my family members." Clearly, we agree that people will place personal connections and the pain of those close to them over ideology. Orym's is just really inconvenient for some people, and so he must be discredited.

In the end: the people in the story who at every turn choose manipulation, indoctrination, violence, subjugation, and conquest are saying "This is the way; you just have to trust me." Is it any surprise most people watching the show are saying "No, I don't think I will"?

[krmoaten-blog]

"RUDIMENTARY CREATURES OF BLOOD AND FLESH. YOU TOUCH MY MIND, FUMBLING IN IGNORANCE, INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING. THERE IS A REALM OF EXISTENCE SO FAR BEYOND YOUR OWN YOU CANNOT EVEN IMAGINE IT. I AM BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION. I AM SHOGUN. ORGANIC LIFE IS NOTHING BUT A GENETIC MUTATION, AN ACCIDENT. YOUR LIVES ARE MEASURED IN YEARS AND DECADES. YOU WITHER, AND DIE. WE ARE ETERNAL. THE PINNACLE OF EVOLUTION AND EXISTENCE. BEFORE US, YOU ARE NOTHING. YOUR EXTINCTION IS INEVITABLE. WE ARE THE END OF EVERYTHING. WE IMPOSE ORDER ON THE CHAOS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. YOU EXIST BECAUSE WE ALLOW IT, AND YOU WILL END BECAUSE WE DEMAND IT. MY KIND TRANSCENDS YOUR VERY UNDERSTANDING. WE ARE EACH A NATION — INDEPENDENT, FREE OF ALL WEAKNESS. YOU CANNOT EVEN GRASP THE NATURE OF OUR EXISTENCE. WE HAVE NO BEGINNING. WE HAVE NO END. WE ARE INFINITE. MILLIONS OF YEARS AFTER YOUR CIVILIZATION HAS BEEN ERADICATED AND FORGOTTEN, WE WILL ENDURE. WE ARE LEGION. THE TIME OF OUR RETURN IS COMING. OUR NUMBERS WILL DARKEN THE SKY OF EVERY WORLD. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE YOUR DOOM. I AM THE VANGUARD OF YOUR DESTRUCTION. THIS EXCHANGE IS OVER."

[imonthemoonitsmadeofcheese]

Hello! Me again, back to pester you about lore.

So what's going on with The Drifter? For once I know a little about the character, I read 'A Man With No Name', but I still have questions. From how the book read, Drifter convinced Felwinter to get revenge for the destruction of the village. Did that go anywhere? And what did Drifter get up to for the (unspecified very long) timeskip between the book and the game?

And with the modern day, does the Vanguard know he's running a fighting ring out of the basement? Or does every single guardian look away when Zavala tries figuring out where people keep getting these weapons? I guess first rule of fight club and all that. What's he even trying to do? He seems to be pretty against most of the Vanguard's leadership.

Anyway, another invitation to infodump about your other blorbo. I hope you don't mind XD

If you thought I was long-winded about Eris... She's maybe 400 years old whereas the Drifter may be 900... get comfy... this will not be quick.

"Dark Age was wild times."

I adore the Drifter and a good chunk of how and why I adore him is his voice - both the voice acting and the syntax/diction/phrasing used in the writing, but voice alone does not cover why I find his character so utterly enthralling and fantastic.

I wrote a short piece consisting of Eris telling Ikora what she sees in him in my story Finders Keepers. It's basically a personality analysis and some people have (I think probably accurately) accused it of being a love letter to that character. (Reminder: that link is fanfiction - I wrote it - it is not lore, but it is based on lore. However, everything else I list after this is actual lore.)

But, personality aside, ultimately the Drifter's story is what I find most compelling about him and makes him so empathetic. You mentioned you've read A Man with No Name, but there's more. A lot more.

To start, the Drifter is D2's most violent pacifist.

He doesn't want to fight and when he does, it's vicious. The Emissary of the Nine, formerly Orin (his ex-best friend and/or ex-lover, depending upon how you read it) aptly says "He hates violence. He hates it so much he'll murder anyone who tries to inflict it on him."

In A Man with No Name, we see him go from hiding in a town and having it obliterated by warlords, to running a bar at the bottom of Felwinter peak, to getting Lord Felwinter himself to avenge the town. Drifter doesn't fight anywhere in there and gets other people to do his fighting for him, which is a pretty standard tactic for him. And yes, it is strongly implied that Felwinter does indeed murder the fuck out of Lord Dryden when he says "Call Lord Dryden. Prepare my Iron Banner arsenal."

But then we get Dark Age Drifter entries where he's gunning down Fallen attackers with quotes like "He had never brought himself to shoot a human. Or anything even resembling a human. Risen included." (Bonus mention: notice "Alright" repeated here and compare to his standard Gambit opening of Alright, alright, alright...") Where he's slipping away from non-violence, specifying, in particular, that he won't shoot a human but will defend himself from aliens.

And then he becomes something else entirely in these amazing entries with what I've been calling his Breakneck crew:

Now Otto's a Sword man. He's all about "craft." Technique. Precision. It's disgusting, but I don't care how he does it, as long as it gets done, so I just let him do it. And Otto does it so beautifully that, when he's done, you're standing there holding your guts in your hands and thanking him for the show.

Never touches a gun, that girl. She likes to get close. Likes to look right in their eyes and be the last thing they see.

The chumps that run out to stop us are babies. That's the kicker with Warlords—other than ours, there's not a Ghost in sight here. Just civilians who can barely hold their guns without wetting their pants, who can't aim worth a damn, who stick their necks out for the bad guys with eternal life. Real geniuses.

Cenric stood up. That vein of his looked about ready to pop. Drifter let his feet down as he reached for his rifle, asp-quick. "And you know what we do with rats, don't you, brother."

And the thing I love about this is the character development this speaks to where he goes from pacifist who won't fight at all... to someone who will use a machine gun competently, repeating "Alright" and getting himself used to killing, but not humans, never humans... to stone cold vicious murder-Drifter talking about the lightless who die to his crew in ways that make them (and himself) seem no longer human, to gunning down his own crew, people he felt were a perfect team, when they make deals with warlords behind his back and lie to him about it.

The Drifter started out adhering to an ideal of nonviolence and it destroyed him and everyone he cared for. His sense of self, his principles, everything he believed in is eroded until he completely loses all hope and in order to survive the cruelty of the world he lives in he becomes a ruthless monster.

Either before or after his Breakneck-era crew (it's not clear), the Drifter (under the name Eli) joins the Pilgrim Guard, a group of Titans protecting lightless people as they travel to the Last City. He does this out of a desire/need to be near Orin, a Titan with a complicated past and strong ties to both Queen Mara and the Nine. But then after spending time with Eli/Drifter and the Pilgrim Guard, Orin, the one person Drifter's ever had a deep human connection with, the person he considers his best friend, leaves without a word.

It's very telling that the green snakes, the jade coin, and the red string on those same coins that form such profound parts of the Drifter's symbolism and identity all come from Orin. When the Drifter truly cares for someone, he incorporates part of them into himself, into his identity, making them part of who he becomes, so they live on inside of him.

After his time with Orin, we get into the extremely confusing, contradictory mess that is the Drifter's intersection with Shin Malfur-related Rose/Thorn/Lumina lore. And by this I mean that the Drifter, after fighting alongside people doing genuinely noble good work, in the wake of losing Orin, leaves the Pilgrim Guard and eventually ends up joining the evil cult of evil: following in the footsteps of one of the most reviled risen to ever exist - the guardian-killer: Dredgen Yor.

If you're gonna hang with me, you need to know about the Shadows of Yor. They follow the edicts of a very bad man named Dredgen Yor. And what're his Shadows after? Everything the Light can't provide. I thought they could help me find an answer to the battles of Light versus Light that raged during the Dark Age. But the longer I flew with them, the more I saw they're blind as all those who follow the Traveler. One albatross for another. I was done with 'em.

And while in the cult, in some sort of ritual, he communes with the Darkness directly and gets some sort of Darkness powers (possibly Stasis, possibly something else - it's super unclear) and the Darkness whispers to him his Dredgen name: Dredgen Hope, which is particularly brutal in context with this quote from Dredgen Yor himself:

I care only to give hope to the frightened, huddled masses so that when I come upon them they will have more to lose. Their pain will be greater. Their screams more pure… Nothing dies like hope. I cherish it.

But it is also particularly pointed because hope is the thing the Drifter doesn't have. Trust is the thing he doesn't have the ability to do any more because of his experiences (and is also the name of the hand cannon he wears shoved into his pants). He is the most jaded (literally - constantly fidgeting with a jade coin) character in the D2 universe. He loses everything and leans in on it and follows that path to full evil.

And then he walks away. Because evil doesn't work for him either.

But also (either before or after he's completely left the cult - it's ambiguous, but possibly when he's still entangled but it's already fracturing and falling apart) he finds Orin again (he's using the name Wu Ming at this point - either having returned to it, or because he hasn't changed it yet from Felwinter Peak, or perhaps this happens before Felwinter Peak - the order and timeline is somewhat fuzzy).

Orin does not remember who he is when he finds her the second time (she's pretty nuts at this point - her story is filled with madness and tragedy), and is going insane with grief over losing Namqi (the person she left with when she disappeared the first time) as well as her obsession with the Nine. And the Drifter is once more drawn to her and once more connects deeply with her:

Wu Ming leaves his questions by the wayside as he is drawn inexorably into the gravity well of her desperate honesty. Her confessions lower his defenses. He talks of himself. Of his fear. Of his loneliness. How he feels he is one fingernail away from plummeting into an abyss. How he feels vicious resentment every time he is brought back from the dead: He never asked for the gift of the Light... They make excuse after excuse to meet again. Every conversation is colored by excavated truths; every day they feel they will reach some bedrock that will break them to pieces. It is as frightening as it is intoxicating.

But then Orin finds out about him being a Dredgen, terminates their relationship, goes off to become the Emissary of the Nine and, as someone I was talking with once referred to it: 'it was a breakup so bad he had to leave the solar system.'

Things go very poorly the first time the Drifter loses Orin but the second time is far worse. He has a full-on Lovecraftian 'At the Mountains of Madness' style horror-movie-plot experience with a crew he calls his 'best friends' (which may or may not be all ex-Dredgens but there's at least evidence they might be) out on a frozen planet being stalked and driven to insane levels of paranoia by Darkness creatures able to snuff out their light:

I think I mentioned we're all raving psychos at this point. Well, we did what all measured raving psychos would do. We thought we each had been betrayed by the others. We drew on each other.

The Drifter kills them all to keep them from killing him (at least, that's what he says - no one else is alive to argue). Then his ghost, who up until now has been kind of a moralistic asshole, suggests he hunt down the ghosts of his former crew and Frankenstein them together in order to survive:

And the craziest thing happened. My Ghost snapped... But we would need parts. Ghost parts. And we knew where we could get some... The Ghosts of my former crew all fled as soon as their charges hit the dirt. So me'n mine, we hunted them... "Hey. There's always hope. For what it's worth, I'm proud of you." It was the last thing my Ghost ever said, and the last lie it ever told.

The Drifter's ghost is rendered mute from the experience (either mechanically or due to the trauma of hunting down and murdering other ghosts - it's not clear) but the plan works, they survive, and the Drifter builds the Derelict out of scrap, returning to the Tower where he sets up Gambit.

It's super unclear (again, the Shin-related lore is just a mess and deliberately confusing) but it turns out that Drifter going on about how the Man with the Golden Gun is out to get him is actually a deal he made with Shin to set up Gambit (because, spoiler: the leader of the entire Dredgen cult, Dredgen Vale, turns out to be none other than Shin Malphur, the Man with the Golden Gun, who hunts Dredgens and who the Drifter has been saying is out to get him this entire time) to draw out the truly Darkness-corrupted guardians so Shin can kill them. (And this is ultimately why the Vanguard lets him run a fighting ring in the basement - because Shin convinces them it will help find the truly bad guardians so they can be eliminated).

If you find that confusing, that's because it is. Anything to do with Shin Malphur/Dredgen Yor/Rose/Thorn/Lumnia is pretty much an acid-trip, continuity-wise. It hurts my brain.

As for where the Drifter gets the weapons he gives us for Gambit? To the surprise of no one, he's stealing them. Because of course he is. It's him.

While running Gambit, he ends up visited by the Emissary of the Nine (formerly Orin - same body, different person) and has the Haul attached to the Derelict as a 'gift' in this amazing cutscene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtmr___dSw

And he pretty much stays in "shifty morally ambiguous guy in the basement" mode until Arrivals when the pyramids show up on Io and we get one of my favourite lore tabs in all of D2: Whispering slab.

The two sit. They speak. They listen. Linkages forged in Light and Dark of traded secrets as the Derelict hangs in orbit around the Earth. Pacts are made. Soon, there is only the silence of knowing left between them.

"Next time you fly over the Moon, dust your boots. Tracking that crap all over my floors."

Both of the Drifter's deep emotional entanglements with Orin happen when he really genuinely talks to her, and now in Whispering Slab, he's genuinely talking to someone else, plus we get the origin of why he calls that someone else Moondust.

Then, during Arrivals, we get the amazing banter between him and Eris, and in Beyond Light they learn to control Stasis together with the result being (in my highly subjective opinion) the best cutscene in all of D2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQAB-sSi6P0

At the end of Haunted we get Eris' message to him about healing and finding joy , he has this line in Plunder "What we do now matters more than who we were", we end up with the Kept Confidence lore tab during Season of the Witch where the person who previously insisted he trusted no one now is saying: "He didn't trust them. He trusted her" and then in the Gloaming Journeyer tab, he pulls her into a hug and reminds her of what she told him once (in the Prophesy dungeon dialogue): "That we'll live in the night if we have to. We do it for what comes after." (What comes after is dawn, hope, the continuance of existence after the darkest point.)

Someone in a chat I was in once summed up the core dynamic of the Drifter and Eris' relationship perfectly as "He gives her trust. She gives him hope."

There are people online who are very frustrated with the Drifter's character development, feeling that the Drifter has 'had his teeth filed off' and that he 'got his depression cured by getting a goth girlfriend' but I feel that's just people who don't like change. The Drifter has, throughout his entire storyline been constantly changing who he is. Change is part of his many self-constructed identities which he re-creates over and over as his old sense of self is destroyed and remade. Gritty vicious Drifter is still in there and he will be just as brutal as ever if he needs to be.

He doesn't want to be, though. He never has. And as someone who deals with medical-grade depression and who found themselves in a situation where they needed to reconstruct a sense of self to replace the one that was lost, the Drifter finding a way to hope and trust again after all he's been through is an extremely powerful and poignant narrative which speaks to me on many levels.

It's not trite, thoughtless happy fluffy rainbows, friendship-fixes-everything-whee! It's painful and slow and beautiful as the Drifter learns to have healthy relationships with other people. We need stories like this to speak to us at an unconscious level and tell us that even if you're not Eris Morn and you failed, and you gave up, and you didn't make it out of the Hellmouth, and you in fact gave in to despair and completely lost all hope, your experience erasing who it was you were and having that old you replaced with someone else, you can still find hope again. Even if you've been burned so severely by so many, many, negative human interactions that you cannot trust anyone, if you find the right people, you can slowly learn how to trust again.

The Drifter's story has been called a redemption arc, and I guess in a way it is that too but, for me, the essential quality of the Drifter's narrative isn't redemption: it's healing.

Stories have power. We incorporate them into who we are. Dredgen Hope ultimately does live up to his name. Within D2 he is finally starting to heal. I find that idea, of healing in spite of being so altered by one's experiences as to have had to become an entirely different person in order to survive, of being unable to trust and still finding a way to learn how to trust again, to be important and beautiful to have in my subconscious as something to draw from. It is a story that is very much needed by a lot of people. We need to be reminded that we can be irrevocably changed and have everything taken from us and still find a way to trust and hope and love again. That might seem a bit much for a shooty game, but I maintain this is why D2 has some of the best storytelling of any game I've ever played and that the character of the Drifter is a huge part of what makes that storytelling so compelling.

Sorry this took so long to answer. This seriously was as short as I could make it and still say everything that I felt needed to be said. There's more, and more detail, of course, but this is my treatise on why the Drifter is as awesome as I think he is.

That is all.

[khizuo]

A call from the Palestinian student movement in Gaza: Time for revolutionary escalation of the global intifada

We in the Gaza Strip look at you with pride and honour, as you are a revolutionary fighting vanguard, and a natural and integral part of our Palestinian liberation movement. You have come in a resounding, honest and clear response against the Israeli massacres and those who finance them, confronting the companies of the Zionist war of genocide and ethnic cleansing that have claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinian students of all ages, including hundreds of struggling Palestinian student cadres, wounded and imprisoned, in addition to our great loss in the martyrdom of our professors and teachers, and the destruction of our universities, institutes and schools. Today, we call on you, from the midst of massacres and siege, to a new revolutionary phase of comprehensive escalation, and to raise the pace and ceiling of your struggle and your honorable stances, quantitatively and qualitatively, against the institutions, corporations, and governments that participate in the slaughter of our children, our students, and our people in Rafah, Jabalia, Khan Younis, and the entire Gaza Strip, and against the settler gangs, armies of Zionist killers, and so on that commit their crimes in camps, cities and villages in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

(May 29, 2024)

[tgrailwar-zero]

... erm.

... Lord Sigurd? Not to ask the obvious question but...

... you keep talking about having sealed us, and stuff we did before... there's a good bit of folks with opinions about us based on who we used to be... but we have, at best, patchwork memories of... well, anything. The sharpest memories I have were jostled loose when Setanta jumped us, and that was just about Cu Chulainn.

Could I ask you to catch us up on... who we were? What we were, exactly? What we did, and all that?

SIGURD: "Right... I wish I could provide you answers, but your exact nature is difficult to parse. I know that you are related to the Void Cell, and are made up of many souls, but your past is your own... or perhaps not even that. I'm sorry."

SIGURD: "However, I can at least provide context from the point of view of the Solar Cell. It's a long story, but I will happily regale you if you'd like to listen."

He adjusted his glasses, before speaking.

"The Moon Cell was a natural phenomenon. Rich with data, collected over thousands and thousands of years."

"And as such, it was a treasure trove for magi. However, it also fell under the gaze of less caring eyes."

"The Void Cell. An entity made to steal, consume, and destroy data. It landed in the midst of one of the Moon Cell's 'Holy Grail Wars', and began to harvest relentlessly."

"And as such came the first 'Invader'-class Servant. The Anti-Cell. A 'Foreigner' made for naught but the destruction of human history. Catastrophe made flesh, it did nothing but destroy and rend apart the Masters of the Moon as they tried to defend the Moon Cell- to save the data that had been collected over millennia. It corrupted heroes, made an army of its own. Masters fell, Servants fell, and the surface of the Moon turned into a battleground. When things reached their limit, one of the Servants stepped forward."

"Using a power that she had forbid herself from accessing before, she became a Heavenly Divinity- a being of Creation- and therefore possessed the capabilities to build a safe-haven for humanity's data. She knew she could not fight the Anti-Cell as she was, and so sought to 'defend' rather than 'fight."

"And thus, the Solar Cell was created. A last bastion for human history. A final stand for mankind. However, with fear in her heart, the Heavenly Divinity did not immediately wage war with the Invader. Rather, she wished to gather power, and to rid herself of her own doubts and hesitations. And as such, she locked herself within the core, gathering her strength- and summoned Servants to serve as the vanguard. And, due to possessing the data of humanity, a digital humanity began to flourish on the Solar Cell itself- cultivated by the resting soul of the Heavenly Divinity."

"Nine of us were summoned to defend the Solar Cell. To care for the Solar Cell, and the new world that was being developed. We were assigned titles, rather than Class-names, to help conceal our True Names while simultaneously giving us a role as 'Warriors of the Sun', rather than just 'Servants'."

"The Beastmaster. A complicated spirit that taught the people of the Solar Cell to govern and fight for themselves. Who mocked our circumstances, yet happily provided aid."

"The Healer. A spirit who spent their time protecting those who couldn't protect themselves, and tending to the wounded- no matter who, or what they were."

"The Priestess. A wise woman who did all she could to ward off danger and incoming threats, while blessing the people with the light of the sun."

"The Slayer. A powerful soul that stood on the precipice of the Sun and the Moon, ready to wage war against the incoming darkness."

"The Keeper. A proud warrior who made sure that the history of both the Moon and the Sun remained in the grasp of the people, and who used his immense knowledge to ensure our future."

"The General. A soft-spoken hero, who's taciturn nature allowed him to provide comfort to those under his protection, and put fear into the hearts of his enemies."

"The Pharaoh. An unshakable spirit that enraptured the hearts of those residing in the Solar Cell, and who laughed in the face of the Void Cell's threat."

"The Protector. A stalwart, shining heart that served as a beacon of constant hope throughout the Solar Cell, whenever they took the battlefield."

"And myself. The 'Freyr'. Using both wisdom and might, I did my best to guide my allies… though I didn't do well enough. Many of them are gone. Replaced, thankfully, by similarly legendary souls. But I often wonder if I could have done more..."

"Regardless, back then, we did what we could to defend and nurture the Solar Cell. We shored our defenses, built settlements, prepared for battle, watched over the budding digital life, and waited for the Invaders to attack."

"And, rather than enemies, we encountered the Interlopers- your 'past selves'- and their Servants."

"We originally thought that they were travelers- survivors from the Moon Cell that had made it to the Solar Cell. Perhaps Servants that had been summoned by the Moon, and had been in search for allies. They asked questions, shared stories regarding the state of the Moon... for a short while, they were welcome."

"Unfortunately for us, it was a 'Trojan Horse'. Presumably an entity crafted by those loyal to the Anti-Cell to slip past our defenses, and tear us apart from the inside. It was our fault. We were all incredibly powerful Servants- each of us almost certain to win a Grail War if summoned… and that made us arrogant. We had expected an all-our war from the start, and instead we were stabbed in the back, and our home lit ablaze as we tried to recover."

"We were betrayed, and war spread across the Solar Cell. We were powerful, but the Servants of the Interlopers fought with an undying rage, an unending hunger, that we couldn't keep up with. When they couldn't defeat us in direct battle, then they'd force us into positions where our people would be at risk, or use the power of the Void Cell to overwhelm us. In our darkest hour, the Priestess proposed an idea. If we could not stop the Interlopers, then we could hold them back for long enough for the Heavenly Divinity to manifest."

"And so, we pooled all of our wit, skill, magic, and strength into developing a seal. Every bit of magic we had, we put into it, placing a conditional curse. For the conflict that they had waged against the Solar Cell, and for as long as the flames of rage burned within them, they would be made to fight among themselves."

"…Afterwards, we focused on rebuilding. And to speed up the Heavenly Divinity's growth, we began siphoning energy from the Moon Cell to wage our own Grail Wars, using the mana of the defeated Servants to fuel the Solar Cell."

SIGURD: "Then, eventually, after a few cycles of gathering energy- you broke free."

[sir-yeehaw-paws]

Death Stranding Novels Vol 1: Continued

I really like this passage. Not sure why, but I do.

The Elder having a drink with the lead Fragile Express porter is fun, I'm enjoying their conversation.

"Bridget reckons she formed Bridges to make Bridges. Clever, right?" the porter said sarcastically.

"Amazing wordplay. But building a bridge is no good if you don't let anyone cross it."

Elder has a point.

I enjoy symbolism that's to the point and in your face.

Oh the Fragile Express dude is Fragile's dad!

"Thanks, she's a girl. Going to name her Fragile."

Did he name his daughter after the company..?

Elder chats away to Sam about how Fragile Express was under Higgs and Fragile. He goes on for a bit about Higgs explaining how they could use DOOMS to their advantage in a positive way, but over time he got more and more out of control. Then he describes Higgs getting megalomaniac about things and that he started wearing the gold mask.

Sam suspects Fragile doesn't just feel guilty about the nuke, but the destruction her own DOOMS causes. Sam's sympathetic in his speculation and notes feeling the same.

Sam's self loathing tends to be consistent.

Little more penance and atonement talk, and a parting thought from Sam.

'Guess I'm just the vanguard hired by a company of grim reapers'.

Sam hallucinates that he's holding the Elder's severed hand, then falls into a nightmare. This man's brain is his own personal torture chamber.

Fragile and Sam chatting after her shower, Sam getting the Nuke from Higgs. All same as the game.

I'm sort of taking mental notes as I read too for a later analysis because a few boxes are ticking off in my brain.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

So, you want to do Integrated Strategies

I've wanted to put together my thoughts on how I tackle Integrated Strategies stages and the various tips and ideas that I've learned from watching other people (particularly more high level runners) go through their runs. As it stands right now, this is going to mostly focus on IS2 and IS3 as those are the modes I have the most experience with and feel reasonably comfortable with, but I will talk about IS4 to some degree. While I imagine most people are at least a little comfortable doing IS to some degree, I want to start off my thoughts with the beginning stuff, for the newer players and players who are less confident in their ability to tackle IS.

What is the basic flow of an Integrated Strategies run?

A run of Integrated Strategies starts by picking three operators from a selection of four different squad options, and then going through a randomly generated dungeon made from a variety of different nodes, which include battles, nodes with scripted rewards, and shops. You'll gradually build up your squad by obtaining Recruitment Vouchers, and get stronger by obtaining or purchasing relics with powerful effects. There are two boss encounters you'll need to fight: a mid-boss on the 3rd floor, and a final boss on the 5th floor.

Starting A Run

When you start a run, you will first have to choose a difficulty for performing the run. In IS2, the difficulties are Easy, Normal, and Hard, while IS3 and IS4 used a more gradual system of 15 different difficulty levels that stack on top of each other. Exactly how these systems work will be gone over later, but this gives you some control over how difficult you want your run to be.

Then, you'll be asked to pick your choice of squad. There is a set of squads that is consistent between each of the IS modes, which I'll briefly list here. More in-depth discussion will depend on which IS you're looking at, since some of them have slightly different effects depending on which theme you're playing.

Leader Squad: Focused on having more HP and survivability Gathering Squad: Allows you to bring and deploy more operators Support Squad: Gives you more of IS's resources Spearhead Squad: Starts you with low life, but gives your operators a statistical bonus Tactical Assault Squad: Squad that benefits recruiting Guards and Vanguards Tactical Fortification Squad: Squad that benefits recruiting Defenders and Supporters Tactical Ranged Squad: Squad that benefits recruiting Snipers and Medics Tactical Destruction Squad: Squad that benefits recruiting Casters and Specialists Research Squad: Squad that provides a little more HP and more Command EXP First-Class Squad: Squad that makes recruiting 5-stars slightly easier

Then, if you got to Floor 3 on your last run, you'll be given some small rewards. These rewards aren't insignificant, but are rarely worth resetting over since they require a bit of an investment to get. They range from extra Hope and shop money, to trading away a bit of a resource for a relic.

Then, you're given your voucher choices. You initially start with three, and then unlock the fourth by doing a run with the previous three.

First Move Advantage: Start with a Sniper Voucher, a Vanguard Voucher, and a Specialist Voucher. Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Start with a Defender Voucher, a Caster Voucher, and a Sniper Voucher. Overcoming Your Weaknesses: Start with a Guard Voucher, a Supporter Voucher, and a Medic Voucher. As Your Heart Desires: Your vouches will be three random classes, with the possibility for duplicates, but one of them will be an Elite Recruitment Voucher

At this point we should go over how recruitment actually works, so you know what you're doing when you first enter this screen.

Each operator costs some Hope to recruit and to promote, and managing your Hope in order to always have some available is an important aspect of Integrated Strategies. Each rarity of operator has its own Hope cost to recruit and to promote, which are as follows:

-6-star: 6 Hope to recruit, 3 Hope to promote -5-star: 3 Hope to recruit, 2 Hope to promote -4-star: 2 Hope to recruit, 1 Hope to promote -3-star and below: Free to recruit

Recruited operators are only as strong as the operators in your roster. For my Eyjafjalla, she'll be recruited at E1 Max Level at SL7, and then promoted to E2 Lv60 7/M3/M3 with no Module (don't yell at me!). If you don't have an operator at E2, promoting them does nothing, so keep that in mind.

There's two exceptions to this rule. The first you might have noticed at the top right: the support option. You can recruit operators from your friend's support lists, and they will be the level and promotion that your friend raised them too. You can only recruit a support Operator from the initial recruitment, so if you pass this opportunity up, you cannot recruit via this method for the rest of the run.

In addition, you will rarely discover Temporary Recruitments. These are essentially free operators the game will randomly give you. They always cost 0 Hope to recruit (and will always by 4, 5, and 6 stars as a result) but cost the normal amount of Hope to promote. When promoted, these operators will always be as strong as possible. This means E2 Max Level, with all skills M3, Level 3 modules, and I believe maximum potentials as well. There is also a list of IS exclusive operators that can only be found via temporary recruitment.

So with this, you've started the run, and we can move onto discussing exploration basics.

Up at the top left is your Life Points and Command Level. Life Points is a resource you build up over the run, and this will behave slightly differently depending on the theme you play, and is shared across all operations. You tend to build up a lot more than 3 Life Points over a run, so make sure to use it expeditiously when needed.

Your Command Level goes up as you complete fights in IS, and will give you additional Hope, Life Points, and Squad Slots. This is your primary means of making Hope.

Skipping the Light area for a moment, we move over to Hope. This displays your current Hope and your Maximum Hope. Maximum Hope is very rarely relevant but can be useful for tracking certain unlocks. Next to that is your Originium Ingots, which is a currency you use to buy things from the shop as sometimes comes in handy in certain other nodes. Moving to the bottom, you will see a bar that shows your most recently collected relics, how many operators you've recruited, and your squad, allowing you to edit it and make changes before deciding which node to get to.

Each IS theme has its own nodes, but the most basic (and most common) are:

Combat Operations: A fight. Gives you Command EXP, a recruitment voucher, some ingots, and rarely a relic. Encounter: A random event. These can do a wide variety of things and range from very good to sometimes a bit bad. Emergency Operations: A more difficult version of a fight, similar to Challenge Mode, with enemies boasting increased stats typically. Offers more Command EXP and always guarantees a relic. Rogue Trader: The shop. Buy stuff here. Downtime Recreation: Gambling nodes. Put a resource in (Life Points, Hope, Ingots) to get a random output. Boons/Wish Fulfilled: A node that gives you a choice of relics, which depends on the IS. Dreadful Foes: Boss fights. Give a lot of Command EXP, better Recruitment Vouchers, and a high rarity Relic.

That's about it for the basics. Next, my friends, is IS2.

[burningsuitfire]

Ludinus's Research (and Essek)

Okay so. I actually think Essek might've known way more than the fandom assumes.

First of all, he hints multiple times that he knew Da'leth had a secret weak spot, research that he couldn't afford for anyone in the Empire to discover. And as such, Ludinus needed the war to stop.

How much do you want to bet Essek keyed onto and was talking about the Martinet's secret dunamis research for his moon plans?

(91) Caleb: I want to see the conflict end and I do not get that sense from them. Essek: ...What is the biggest danger... to secret research? Caduceus: Discovery. Essek: Discovery. What better way to avoid discovery than to find a way to stop a conflict that pries into what you're doing?

(125) Beau: You'd be smart to focus your attention to Ludinus and Ikithon. Yudala Fon: It never leaves them. And they've been acting quite nervous recently.

(97) Essek: (...) you're all in terrible danger for the things that you know. Their research is to continue and we are to correspond as the research progresses. There is intent to end this war.

Also, common fanon seems to think Essek didn't get any research when Matt, Da'leth, and Essek himself said the deal was an ongoing cooperative exchange.

If anything, DeRogna, Yeza, and Ikithon said that the Assembly was having a massive amount of trouble on their end trying to work with dunamis and the beacons, and would really need Essek in their work for insights (as Essek said was happening) and to work with the dunamantic expert and intelligence lynchpin.

And another point. The raids. Even if Ludinus wasn't forthcoming with Essek in their meetings (which Essek said he was), the Kryn were raiding research facilities.

The Felderwin raid, which people seem to take as evidence that Essek wasn't getting information, kinda looks like it suggests the opposite. Only after months of experiments and effort and expense and problems did they get a single potion, and Yeza said it was barely days after the completion when the Kryn raided. Incredible timing.

Meaning that it sure seems like the Martinet gave Essek information, possibly even more than he intended, and Essek wasn't playing nice.

Essek, who said his being in Rosohna was the exception right up until the ceasefire (where we saw him constantly in both important wartime full den meetings and sparse late night meetings, seated on the council, deeply influential and personally requested for the Bright Queen's strategy and war efforts)

(94) Essek: It prevents me from some of my capabilities throughout the day each time I do this, so while I'm here in my home and things are not requiring me to be elsewhere rapidly, thankfully this is a moment in time in which I am more useful here in the city.

He could've even been in Felderwin.

Also, if Ludinus was trying to sway Essek over to the Vanguard and his side, easy money that the heretic (a self-proclaimed "coward" who refused self-preservation via consecution, and managed to annoy his own intensely religious father to the point of self-destruction) wouldn't be happy about it.

That attempt at recruitment and following rejection could've easily been the cause of the unpleasant dynamic and tense conversation between the two on the Assembly's boat.

Bonus, Essek's leyline device. That's relatively simple, and a friend clued me in. Essek being able to track leyline strength is just useful for timing dunamancy research for his "personal studies" as he calls them. It's been pointed out multiple times in CR lore that wizards like ley spikes and solstices because the flare in leyline strength and ley energy just means it's easier to manipulate arcane energy and make new spells.

Look where the Tal'Dorei Guide talks about leyline strength and spellmaking.

The Verdant Expanse is saturated with magic. The ley energies that suffuse the greenwood make it easy for arcanists to create works of spellcraft by themselves, when it might take a half-dozen mages working in concert in other lands.

[melanodis]

the vanguard of your destruction