#also the nature of your magic in your magic system is a perfect case of when to Tell > Show as far as construction goes

[raayllum]

Hi! I saw in the tags of one of your reblogs you talking about how sometimes magic systems need to be malevolent and that you sometimes write parasitic magic systems. I was wondering if you could recommend anything with a magic system like this? I find in my reading I usually gravitate towards neutral magic systems, where it's kind of like using a sword. But I'm super fascinated by the idea of a story where perhaps the magic itself is evil, rather than the evil side to a good half (like the Sith and the Jedi type of thing.) I hope my question was articulate! And thank you for your time and the awesome blog, of course.

Re: this post. So I would argue Dark Magic falls under a malevolent magic system with primal magic under a beneficial to volatile magic system (aka it can still be dangerous but is mostly about control), since Dark Magic consistently damages the body and the souls of other beings (re: Through the Moon, Bloodmoon Huntress, and even the containment of Sarai's last breath saying "No" before Thunder is slain). Also obligatory mention of TDP's Jewish themes and its implementation of Kosher / views of nature and animals.

ATLA gets close to having a mostly spiritual and tool based magic system, as sometimes bending is linked to spirituality (illusion of separation, which bloodbending arguably violates because it doesn't separate enough)

(And is now making me curious as to how Aaravos' body has withstood centuries, possibly millennia or more, of dark magic use)

I myself write a volatile to parasitic magic system, in which the danger is of constant excess of power in the body. The limited set of magic users are more in tune with the world; with each other, with certain elements (more awake at night, alert when it rains, or out in nature, or when surrounded by death, etc etc), so in some ways they're living a fuller experience than ordinary humans. But the magic is also latched onto their souls and does not care for them as a vessel, and will consume/destroy them if they use too much. Cue this snippet from my drafts:

“Better nothing than too much,” Rynn said, eyes flashing. “Your nea is not a game, Ally. You have no idea how much power is held behind that block of yours, and what it will do if too much of it leaked out before you were ready. It is not something to push—or it will consume you.”

which was heavily inspired by interpretations of the Force in Star Wars from certain materials, expertly laid out in this post, and a type of magic system I find very compelling (and why I think I love Dark Magic and its various allegories - for cannibalism, hunting, and fossil fuels - because the characters themselves also hold those matching, allegorical attitudes towards it).

Malevolent magic systems used to be far more common in like, older tales and mythos (think anything with traditional fae) because magic was a symbol of the Unknown, and the Unknown was always Dangerous (a lot of cautionary tales, for example) but it's not nearly as common an exploration nowadays, which is too bad. I don't read nearly as much fantasy as I should, so i don't have any strong recommendations in that regard - and I would say most fantasy leans on magic being neutral and it depends on what the user is well, using it for. Which has its own interesting set of ethical and moral implications / explorations & allegories, it's just not what I'm super keen to explore!

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: 013-032

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy [all Flower posts]

Time for more flower...

...no, not that flower!

Unless...?

Welcome back to my liveblog of sorts for web novel The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere by @lurinatftbn! Shout out to the Flower discord for giving me such a kind welcome. You're making me want to go all out on this liveblog, but, I musn't...! So I'm going to try to just comment on things that jumped out as especially noteworthy rather than write down everything that went down.

Especially since... a lot happened in these chapters. We have a perfect androgyne tree thing! Magical duels! Questionable student/teacher relationships! Steamed hams! Intense political arguments at dinner! Metafictional assurance of fair play! Prosognostic events! Transgender AIs! And of course........

a murder!!!!!

...ok that one was kinda obvious. But the first body has hit the floor! I don't feel like I have nearly enough information yet to start speculating about who might have dunnit.

That's a lie. It was definitely Kinzo Ushiromiya. That bastard.

So, from the top!

We're introduced to a few of the members of the Order, with by far the most screen time going to Su's mentor and ah, kinda-girlfriend? Neferuaten. And like, damn, lot going on there!

Before I get into the meat of that - first the bit where I search a character's name on Wikipedia. Neferuaten's name is most likely a reference to an Egyptian female king/pharaoh (a rank that's apparently distinct, conceptually, from a queen) variously called Ankhkheperure-Merit-Neferkheperure, Waenre, and Aten Neferneferuaten. Most often shortened to just Neferneferuaten.

Her exact historical identity seems to be a little unclear - she may or may not be the same person as Nefertiti for example. Whoever she was, she apparently reigned for a couple of years around 1334–1332 BCE, and was then succeeded by the famous child king Tutankhamun. Or maybe Smenkhkare came in between them? Seems to be a matter of some debate. Girl really needed to leave a few more vast and trunkless legs of stone so we can figure this stuff out.

In any case, this version of Neferuaten goes way back with Su. Her introduction is to launch a magical attack on our poor girl while she's contemplating the 'everblossom'. One of those classic 'master surprise attacks the student to see how much they've learned' deals. This servers as a fine exposition for the exact mechanics of magical duels.

Zettai! Ummei! Mokushiroku!

Let's briefly note how magical duels and magic works here, since it seems like it will be very relevant later.

The more we learn about magic, the more explicit is that this system is not some natural property of the universe, but something that's designed by the mysterious Ironworkers. It seems like it's kind of an API to the Ironworker admin console. The Ironworkers wanted to make it difficult to do magic on human bodies, and therefore they designed a system for detecting what is 'human', based on three heuristics - anatomical, motion and neurological.

Humans, being the freaky little hackers that we are, of course set about figuring out how to bypass this system, and created standardised means, consisting of three spells, termed [x]-beguiling arcana. In a sense the three criteria are something like three 'hitpoints': the primary way to win a duel is to get all three spells off, thus making your opponent vulnerable to magic.

To achieve this, you can either speak the words of a spell or sign them by drawing them with your fingers - i.e. one way or the other express the appropriate string of symbols. This is risky because if you're interrupted at the wrong time, your spell can backfire and blow up, and getting a spell right requires precise pronunciation and also rapid mental maths. So the general 'gameplay' of magical duels involves attempting to disrupt the opponent's focus and aim, while fast-casting the spells that are most familiar to you.

We're introduced to a few spells that could be useful in battle, such as

Matter-Shifting (telekinesis spell with a geometric bent, used to move a cube of dirt to act as a smokescreen),

Matter-Annihilating (deletes stuff),

Entropy-Denying (essentially a shield that freezes objects and fluids in relative motion),

Air-Thrusting (creates a shockwave air blast),

Light-Warping (fucks up the light for visual cover),

World-Deafening (mutes all sound, which can interrupt casts)

Entropy-Accelerating (disrupts coherency, causing rapid aging-like effects - can be used on a 'higher plane' to disrupt all magic in an area)

Entropy-Reversing (rewinds matter along its path of motion - reference to entropy here seems a tad dubious but w/e)

It's clearly a pretty carefully thought out system - I appreciate that it's approached from the point of view of someone trying to exploit the shit out of the system and figure out what the real meta would be. It does kinda seem like if you got the drop on a wizard and shot them with a sniper rifle they'd be toast, but we'll see later that much more powerful weapons than mere chemical firearms exist in this world, and presumably in a combat situation everyone would have entropy-denying (or equivalent) shields up, so maybe that's a moot point.

Anyway, we are later informed by the closest thing to authorial voice that everything we're told here about magic can be assumed to be axiomatically true, similar to the red text in Umineko. Which pretty heavily foreshadows that this is going to be on the test, if you like!

the magical metaphysics

With apologies to Neferuaten, who will get more detailed comments shortly, there are some other big revelations about magic and the nature of this world that I should talk about while we're on the subject of magic!

In the last post I wondered whether casting magic is an innate quality or a 'skill issue' situation. It turns out the answer is sorta 'neither'. In fact, it's something that has to be unlocked, using special equipment and a particular ritual. The cost of this ritual is not yet entirely spelled out, but we definitely get an inkling. It's rather ominously implied by this exchange in chapter 22:

"We're supposed to want to save people, to make the world better. To defend a bunch of people who practically committed murder--" "You're a murderer too, dour girl." I stopped, and blinked. It took me some moments to process the words. They'd come from Lilith, who now seemed to have finished with her dessert. Now she was just slowly swirling her spoon around in the last remnants of the chocolate sludge on the plate and, occasionally, dipping a finger into her cream bowl and licking little bits of it up. Her expression was irritated, but disconnected. "All arcanists are," she said. "It's how it happens. So having fights over moral high ground like this is very stupid and annoying. Please stop."

In the same chapter, Su uses something called an 'acclimation log', in which she records her 'association' with a series of diary entries from her childhood self. It all suggests that Su's present consciousness has somehow taken over the body of another character, who we could maybe call original!Su.

A few chapters later, we find out what's the deal with prosognostic events. In fact we get a pretty extensive exposition. It turns out that iron is magical in this universe, providing access to higher dimensions, FTL and all sorts of shit. However, because the Mimikos and other worlds are running on a 'substrate' of iron - sort of like a simulation - we are told this is why they can't recursively include iron within. And since the human body includes a certain amount of iron (most notably, in the haemoglobin protein in red blood cells), it is not possible to fully realise the human body inside these artificial worlds.

a self-referential quibble

Here's how Su puts it:

A substrate cannot exist within itself. That sounds awkward when I put it so directly, but it's not too hard to understand if you think about it in abstract-- A foundation obviously can't support another foundation of equal weight and nature, because… Well, it would make nonsense of the whole premise. A book is a device for storing information, but it cannot contain within its letters everything about itself and what it contains, because that is already more than it contains. A box cannot hold another box of equal size, unless it is bent or otherwise changed. A mind cannot hold another mind…

On the face of it, this seems on the face of it... not entirely true, at least in some domains? You can run a virtual machine program on a computer, representing any particular combination of hardware and software, which is from the perspective of software 'on the inside', essentially indistinguishable from a computer running on 'bare metal' hardware. The only real difference is that operating the virtual machine has some computational overhead, so it will be slower. The more virtual machines you nest, the slower it gets.

But 'from the inside', the only way to tell which layer of virtual machine you're on would be to refer to some kind of external clock signal (which can trivially be spoofed) and notice that it's running slower than it should!

We could also mention here the subject of quines, which are programs which print their own source code.

Let's consider Su's examples. The book that completely describes its contents might be able to get around this problem in a similar fashion to a quine, by exploiting redundancy and self-reference.

For example, let's try creating a string that completely describes its own content, using a quine-style technique.

This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: "This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: " wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

In fact the '100 letter ws' could literally be the entire string that follows. Suppose the length of the 'real content' of the book is S, and the length of the rest of the 'metadata sentence' describing properties of the book is M; then the total length of the book is 2M+3S.

You can add as much additional information to the 'metadata' string as you like, provided you quote it again afterwards. If you don't like having a book be three times the length it needs to be, you could compress the 'real content' string using an algorithm like DEFLATE, and include instructions in the 'metadata' on how to decompress it. (Text tends to compress really well.) This is where we run up into notions probably all too familiar to rats, or indeed anyone who recently read Seth Dickinson's new novel Exordia, such as Kolmogorov complexity.

But... I think this might well be intentional. Given how common notions like 'stacks of simulations' and 'self-reference' are in rat space, I suspect we may be being misled! The 'rules' of the game - more on that in a moment - say that Su won't deliberately lie to us, and won't withold information without saying so, but her perceptions could be mistaken. Maybe she's been given a false explanation of why the world works the way it does.

It's also totally possible that while the general point (you can't contain a thing in itself) may have some edge cases, the specific instance - you can't build a universe on a giant higher-dimensional iron spike and still have that universe contain iron - may still be true. We don't know the first thing about building universes using magic iron after all.

anyway... the Deal with Prosognisia!

The Ironworkers had a hacky workaround to the 'no iron' rule: they had a few tens of thousands of preserved human bodies on board their Tower of Asphodel. Asphodel, incidentally, is a genus of flower, said to carpet the Asphodel Meadows, one of the three divisions of the realm of Hades. (In their game, Supergiant decided to convert it into a lava zone.) It looks rather pretty actually!

So, they were able to instantiate these bodies in their rebuilt worlds by sort of making them into a reference to one of these stored human bodies. Here's Su again, chapter 26:

Some human bodies, or at least the impression of them and the iron within, had been preserved as part of the Tower, frozen in a timeless place. And because of that, it was eventually discovered it was possible for them to exist in the artificed planes as a sort of stable paradox. After all, while a book can't exist within itself, it can still reference other stuff it does contain internally, even if it makes for somewhat awkward reading. A few tweaks and workarounds solved the problem of the iron associated with that human body staying a part of it, and just like that, human beings were walking something at least akin to the earth once again. However, this only permitted replicas of those bodies within the Tower to exist. The creation of new ones remained impossible, and births not incubated by anima taken by the same mechanism would inevitably fail. And there were far fewer preserved bodies than minds; scarcely more than ten thousand or so for each party.

So every human born in the Mimikos is forked from one of these human bodies. For... mysterious reasons, if you recognise that someone nearby is forked from the same body as you, you both straight up die. If you touch such a person (a 'contact paradox') it's even worse, and all the iron in your body disappears, leaving behind a 'greenish sludge', which seems to be a severe enough disaster to cause deaths of nearby people as well.

(This is a little surprising given that the iron in the human body is only about 60 parts per million by mass, but it would kinda destroy your blood's ability to carry oxygen, so it would definitely be pretty fatal.)

The 'distinction treatment' we heard about is able to mitigate the risks somewhat - with quick medical intervention and time magic, it's possible to allow the people involved to make a full recovery. An interesting wrinkle is that it's implied either Ophelia or new character Balthazar is trans, because normally people of the same gender can't share an upstream body.

That definitely leads to a very fascinating fucked up medical emergency scene, but the reason I'm discussing it now is because it's got bearing on this big-deal question of 'what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway'...

so what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway?

Having finally answered one of the major questions, we can start zeroing in on another. In a flashback scene in chapter 30, we learn that the 'original' bodies have innate access to the magic API, but when you're given a distinct identity at birth you quickly lose it. To have your sv_cheats 1 restored, you have to go through a process that, it would seem, downloads a new mind into your head from one of those original bodies...

The man sat back a little in his chair, crossing his legs idly. "It's intimidating in concept, but please do understand that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, there are no observable effects whatsoever. Around half of the individuals who go through it don't even lose consciousness, and of the other, four out of five don't report any abnormalities when they reawaken. And even of the remaining 10%, the symptoms are negligible for nine out of ten-- Fleeting false memories, minor alterations in temperament that self correct, usually in under a day..." "And the others?" I inquired. "The remaining one percent." He considered this question for a few moments, obviously choosing his words carefully. "The technical term for the rare cases where confusion persists in the longer term is pneumaic assimilation failure. We have a program for treatment, using a combination of various phychological and medical means. It's time-tested. It brings people back to themselves quickly, usually within only only a few months at most." 'Confusion.' 'Brings people back to themselves.' I wasn't feeling fond of the way he couched everything in euphemism. It wasn't helping. "What do you mean by 'it brings people back to themselves'..?" I furrowed my brow. "They just... Forget everything?" "Not immediately," he said. "But they lose a sense of association with... Well, with anything that shouldn't be there, and that leads those memories and feelings to fade over time." He smiled. "The human mind is very adept at excising anything it judges to be out of place. All it needs is a push in the right direction."

The new mind tends to rapidly adjust to its new context, connecting to the memories stored in the body and assuming continuity of identity. But in rare cases it fails! Nuts! And we can infer poor Su appears to be one such case.

Presumably this is what Lilith is referring to when she says that all arcanists are murderers. It's not clear if there is continuity of consciousness when you get /mode +o'd - since you (usually) inherit the memories it is perhaps hard to say whether such a thing is meaningful.

In any case, Su's mega-guilt complex, the reason she seems to want to visit the mysterious egomancer Samium, seems to be at least partly that she's evicted the previous consciousness to inhabit this body. I don't think that's the whole story though! Her grandad seems to be involved somehow too. I don't think Su is literally the reincarnation of her grandad, because it seems unlikely that he'd be motivated to carry out ego suicide like this.

introducing teacher mommy

All those major revelations aside, let's get back to the subject of Neferuaten, aka 'Grandmaster', Su's old mentor in entropic thanatomancy. She quickly establishes herself as one of the most likeable of the inner circle of the Order - she's funny, understanding, generally affable and a little self-effacing. Su definitely puts her on a massive pedestal - though other characters such as Ran find her a little more sussy.

I gotta say, the author is really good at writing old academics. Each one of them comes across as strongly believable, distinctive, motivated and flawed characters. I'll talk a bit about the others in a bit but first let's talk age gap yuri! lmao

Anyway, at the end of chapter 20 we get this:

Then she leaned over and, in an impulsive, almost casual gesture, kissed me on the lips. Before turning, heading to the exit.

'Huh!' thinks the reader. 'That sure is an unusual thing for someone's teacher to do.'

It is quite a few chapters later before Su gets round to telling us a bit more about what's going on...

After that, we met outside of the university more and more often, her becoming sort of a source of emotional support. At some point, I became aware that what was happening was probably quite inappropriate. It's not like I was underage, having turned 25 two years prior, but she was my professor. But I'd been bad at making friends in both of... Well, in both my past contexts, and I'd felt so lonely living in Tem-Aphat, away from Ran and any reminders of the resolutions we'd made. And it all somehow felt so natural. Things got out of hand. One day, I'd had a fight with my father over the logic bridge, and had got a little drunk when I was due to see her. I don't know exactly what I was thinking, but I did something uncharacteristic of me. Inappropriate. But she didn't respond in the way I'd expected. To my shock, she didn't act like it was inappropriate at all. It wasn't as if we ended up dating. That would never have worked, and I was pretty sure she was past wanting that sort of thing anyway. On some levels, she always kept her distance. But it became something we did together, an avenue of private expression that became part of her support for me - and mine, eventually for her.

Su then expresses a bunch of guilt over the whole thing. (Not least because it's a 'selfish' thing she's doing in a body that, implicitly, she doesn't think of as hers.)

The issue of age here is interesting lol. Definitely my gut reaction, and probably the one the story is aiming to elicit, is to be a bit 'wuh oh' by all this, maybe think of Makima wrapping Denji round her finger. That said, by vastly expanding the range of human ages, it's definitely poking pretty hard at our intuitions about what's 'appropriate'. The vibes are like... the students are constantly referred to as 'the kids' by the hundreds-year-old wizards. I don't think we're told Su's current age, but if she was 27 in this flashback, and in the present she says a 29 year old computer is close in age to her, so I would guess currently early 30s. Neferuaten's age is not stated at this point but given her position she's def a few hundred years up there.

The vibe though is that Su is infatuated with someone who has vastly more emotional maturity and experience of the world, not to mention social power over her, and that person is all too happy to encourage it.

The way Su tells it, it sounds like this fling went pretty ok for them? But I definitely feel like things are probably not gonna stay ok, given how clearly the 'inappropriate' nature of this relationship has been foregrounded!

Dark yuri is literally one of the things I'm here for, so I'm looking forward to the fireworks lmao.

Anyway, besides that, we get a bit of a sense of Neferuaten's ideology. She actually shares a lot of Su's skepticism about the viability of the whole immortality project. She makes a big point of making sure the gang get a sense of the order's culture and rituals, apparently viewing this as a chance for their project to be judged by outsiders for the first time. On a personal level, she raises the issue of if the project might be able to save only the young - whether they might be the last humans to not become immortal. Nef's attitude seems to be that she'd be good with that - something she clashes with Kam over.

Otherwise, she's kinda... world-weary, I suppose you could say. She seems to look at the firey youngsters with an attitude along the lines of 'wish I still had that'. She does love to perform to an audience, asking leading questions to set up some lesson or another.

She's a fun character, I enjoy reading her a lot.

Also she seems to have made a sapient AI in the basement! Only everyone says it's definitely not sapient - it is in some sense not agentic, it can't change its motivation, allegedly. Still, it definitely has a 'passing the Turing test' sorta vibe.

don't mention the war

Besides Nef, we get introduced to a few of the remaining members of the class, and also the masters of the Order. Of note is Bardiya, the former revolutionary. He's a very 'speak his mind without preamble' sort of character, which can land him in hot water.

So, returning to Chapter 22, we have a really juicy scene in which a dinner conversation gets very heated after Bardiya mentions his role in the war, provoking a political row with Durvasa, a member of the order. It's a really well observed social dynamics scene - the characters dancing around the topic and the way a row is almost avoided, and then it isn't - Bard's determination, Kam's brown-nosing, Su getting drawn in against her better judgement in a deeply relatable way.

Thanks to this convo, we get a sense of the events of the revolution! So, as @nightpool helpfully informed me, I actually got things a bit mixed up in my rough timeline last time. The 'gerontocrats' were not a feature of the distant-past imperial era - rather it's a figure identified as an oppressor class by a very recent movement, still within living memory for even the youngsters.

The events broadly seem to reflect something like the Paris Commune. There was a famine under the hand of a 'Meritist' city council, killing thousands, which led to a popular uprising let by a 'paritist' movement. The paritists executed a handful of people and redistributed property based primarily on age, intending to break the power of the 'gerontocrats' who had neglected the 'younger generations' by hoarding resources. The Administration overseeing the whole world alliance then cracked down hard - deploying a poison gas that, though it was intended to be nonlethal, turned out to have unexpected lethal side effects.

In the aftermath of the revolution, it seems many reforms were made - besides relaxing the rules on what magic is banned, they changed the equation of scarcity so that food could be replicated more readily? Little unclear on this part. Su mentions that the situation is different now than it was when the Alliance was built, with the material scarcity mostly gone, but clearly there was a famine in recent memory.

Anyway, there is naturally a big generational divide over this. The older generations lived through some pretty fucked-up sounding wars, called things like the 'Great Interplanar War', and in the aftermath built a political system that was supposed to secure peace. (c.f. League of Nations, UN). Although she broadly sympathises with the revolutionaries, Su seems to extends the older generation a fair bit of understanding for having built this system and fearing what would happen if it were destroyed. Though the most relativist view comes from the mouth of Neferuaten:

"I think a common problem with inter-generational communication is an inability to really convey context and scope," Neferuaten said. I noted she didn't actually convey if Kam's understanding of what her point had been was correct or not. "Someone who lived through the Interluminary Strife might tell a young person from the modern day that they have no understanding of hunger, only for the latter to stubbornly retort that they lived through that Ikaryonic famine that preluded the civil dispute… Except that one was a catastrophe that lasted decades and killed tens of millions, while the other slew less than a thousand." She sighed. "People try to relate the experiences of others to their own lives in order to contextualize their understanding of the world and how it might be bettered, but those second-hand experiences inevitably become caricatures, conveying no useful truths. It makes me wonder if human beings, both young and old, are capable of learning from history at all."

Around here is raised the question of a person's political development - the arc from a young person's anger at the state of the world and determination to tear it aside for something better, against the resignation of an older person who fears losing what is already there, however flawed. (We might note of course that there exist young conservatives and old radicals. Circumstances have a lot to do with it.)

Of course, with this whole 'gerontocrat' business at stake already, the mission of the Order hoping to achieve immortality is naturally cast in a dubious light. Fun conflict. On the one hand we have 'can immortality be achieved, and what will it cost', on the other 'who will benefit from it, if it is'! So much narrative force is obtained by politicising this, attaching it to characters with personal motivations and histories, instead of leaving it up to an abstract 'living forever good/bad'.

But it's not all political debates and shagging your teacher...

Over the course of these chapters we get a sense of what the order's been up to!

Let's talk flowers. Just prior to the meeting with Nef, Su comes across an enormous freaky plantlike thing. This turns out to be an experiment to create a being that can survive in even the most extreme environments, like the bottom of the ocean - an attempt to demonstrate that immortality is possible at least in principle. This lifeform is termed the Nittaimalaru or 'Everblossom'. It seems like a pretty good candidate for being the story's eponymous Flower - symbolically, the underwater immortality-granting plant that appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It's worth noting here that 'indefinite lifespan' is actually not entirely impossible in our natural world. I was talking about this with a friend who raised some interesting points:

reading the first post i wanna bring up that while the concept of cancer is fundamental to any multicellular organism the presence of cancer as a problem is actually pretty niche. same with telomere degradation, which is a purposeful anti-cancer measurement. like pretty much all perennial plant life is capable of absolute immortality. while the lobster grows forever until it can no longer use its legs to push its great weight along the sand towards food, if a tree overshoots its growth it's more than happy to break off its unnecessaries, though with both of them at a certain point it's always good to have help after a while. as mammals we're very obsessed with the concept of like ending death as this sort of ultimate goal, prime directive, whatever, when that shit was deliberately turned on in the first place (assigning intent to evolution sue me), because in terms of cost benefit it gave us something in return that we as students of medicine or biology are still not fully grasping.

After a little more discussion:

@play-now-my-lord wrote:

even if humans weren't causing climate change, climactic fluctuations over centuries upend a lot of what is normal in specific areas. if the people on a farmstead in bronze age sweden lived 500 years, the methods and habits they internalized when they were young would habitually be incorrect for the conditions as they existed, the weather, the soil

other friend:

that's how most trees die in the end the root system operates as a weak parallel to the tree's neurons, with a more physiological bent than say our chemical one. patterns around balance, nutrient access, hydrology, and wind are ingrained and learned over centuries and the more regular/consistent that cycle is the more a root will grow. if a tree's roots are built around buttressing from a wind tunnel due to forest conditions and the trees around it fall for whatever reason, it has to relearn what used to be a hundred year old certainty that it needs to lean against the westerly gale every winter, etc. - this is generally a pretty brittle process altogether when it comes to the base of the plant n stuff

some caveats:

should be noted i overlooked a lot of nuance about perennial mortality, like, some plants are more used to investing into survival than others i'm thinking of like how beech bark disease doesn't affect the roots of the beech, so the trunk dies but new shoots continue to grow out and eventually catch the disease and repeat, so the plant is essentially still immortal but forced into a perpetual state of adolescence. but i think for a great number of trees if the tree falls it just goes "eh the rot consumes us all " and dies

Among mammals, we could also note the cancer resistance of the naked mole rat, which loves to defy all sorts of generalisations (also one of the only non-arthropod eusocial animals). They're not exactly immortal, living around 37 years on average, but their chance of dying at any given year is pretty much flat rather than increasing with age.

Of course, longevity and resilience are different things. Nef mentions the resilience of tardigrades as an inspiration. As far as their experiment goes, the 'everblossom' is not an entirely successful experiment, requiring twice-yearly maintenance to address an imbalance.

Given how prominently it features, and the invocation of Gilgamesh, it seems pretty damn likely that the everblossom will in fact be a key to immortality, or something like it.

Religion exists after all!

Other parts of the facility are also pretty funky. We learn that it was patterned after the old headquarters of the Order, which was destroyed when they got found out; that headquarters was built in an old church compound. What sort of thing does a church worship in this world? Actually it's kinda goffic as fuck. Makes Catholicism look downright tame. It's a polytheistic religion and the deities involved are figures like this...

In the center of the circle was a statue, about 8 feet high, and of the kind of ornate-but-formulaic design that characterized art from the Second Resurrection. It depicted a tall, skinny woman, though her two sides, left and right, were very different in nature. The left was beautiful and youthful in a generic, almost ethnicity-less way, dressed in the most delicate of silk peploi, with long and unrealistically tidy curls falling elegantly over her shoulders. Her lip was curled into a gentle half-smile, kind but slightly mysterious, teasing. Her right... Well, her right, to say the least, was very different. On that side, she appeared to be skinless, although it was hard to tell with a statue; I recalled it being a matter of hot debate among the boys in my class back in secondary school. It was possible she was simply incredibly emaciated, or that there were supposed to be growths - like scales - erupting from her flesh. Her hair was made up of hateful, eyeless wyrms, biting and hissing at each other, and her flesh, which was naked save for a tasteful rag covering one area in particular, was covered in numerous stab wounds, bleeding openly. As for her face, it was grim and wide eyed. Mournful and contemptful both. I recognized the figure depicted at once; I passed one of her temples whenever I went to the distribution hall to pick up groceries. This was Phui, Dying Goddess of Love Given Way To Anguish, one of the eleven deities of the now largely defunct Ysaran-Inotian Pantheon.

In the stories, Phui was the third-to-last of the gods to fall during the end of the world, who attempted to take her own life after the death of her lover. But the breaking of the heavens had left her unable to die, meaning that no matter how she much she cut into her flesh, how much she starved herself of food and drink, reprieve would never come. Only relentless, unceasing pain, and grief for that which she had lost.

Metal album cover ass-religion, I'm into it.

The mysterious Ironworkers seem to have really drummed into the population of their new Mimikos that there was a very nice world once, and they'd better be damn sad about what happened to it. However, religion has waned in the present day, and it seems most characters are atheists of some sort.

What did happen to it, anyway? It's referred to as 'the collapse' with a lowercase c; I noticed an author's comment where the author says it's not a case of just a name for the apocalypse. A few people in the comments started speculating about false vacuum collapse. This is a physics thing. Basically, a remote possibility exists in the standard model of particle physics that the existence of matter in our universe could be in a kind of local energy minimum, but it would be possible for it to locally fall into a true minimum, creating a kind of bubble that expands at the speed of light and just deletes everything. We're pretty sure that isn't true though. If it did happen we literally would not be able to do anything... at least in a universe without FTL.

(Curiously, Su mentions special relativity at one point. With all the funky cosmology stuff I kinda wondered if special relativity is still real, but apparently it is! Electromagnetism has been mentioned as still being a thing a couple of times now, so rather than being totally absent it seems like the physics is a bit different, with an electric shock being sufficient to cause radiation poisoning.)

The fair play interlude

In between chapters 22 and 24 we get a curious little interlude called Intermission ∞ 1. The introduction presents it as something that is happening on one of the 'higher planes', translated into terms we can understand, which is grounds for it to get metafictional.

Two entities, calling themselves the Playwright and the Director, discuss the direction of the story so far before laying out the version of fair-play mystery rules this story will be operating under. They are as follows:

THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PROTAGONIST IS ALWAYS TRUTHFUL

ALL EVENTS FOLLOW THE RULES OF CONVENTIONAL REALITY, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

ALL SYSTEMS INTRODUCED CANNOT BREAK THEIR OWN RULES AS DEFINED WITHIN THE NARRATIVE, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

I made them red because it feels like they would be red in Umineko.

Further clarifications and caveats allow that Su can withold information (for dramatic tension or whatever I guess) but she'll always tell us when she does, and an example of 'system introduced' is the magic duel sequence: the characters know accurately how magic duels work.

The two entities are performing this story for some sort of audience, and during their double-act credit themselves with control over the direction of the scenario, sometimes disagreeing. (Another one, the chorus, enters at the end.) Probably best not to think too hard about what that implies for our characters on the 'main' level of the story being 'real', it's probably just a cute bit to take the audience aside without completely breaking the fourth wall. Then again... who knows!

What this means is that my concerns about professed liar Su being an unreliable narrator are unfounded. It's still a limited POV, so Su could fail to notice things or be deceived, but she's not trying to pull one over on us.

I bring this up because...

There's been a mordah!

So, in the last chapter I read - strictly the beginning of a new arc - we find someone dead!

Well, this was kinda foreshadowed earlier. The chef disappeared, the assistant chef was knocked out by magic, and some kinda crazy time magic happened in the pantry - with the heavy implication that someone was trapped in some kinda hyperbolic time pantry for many years. At least they'd have plenty to eat..? The characters don't pick up on the implication of the tally marks and write it off as a stasis field malfunction.

So, it was natural to suspect the cook is dead. Indeed they are: Su finds a mysterious note in the book given to her by an academic at the school as a parting gift, warning her not to trust the inner council - inexplicably written two years prior and warning her to check the archive in a certain position. Investigating this, she and Kam find a secret armoury room. In there is a tunnel, and at the bottom, the cook appears to have committed suicide, leaving a suicide note vaguely implying the Order is up to some seriously sussy shit.

Of course, Kam and Su immediately suspect foul play. But they also both have ulterior motives for coming to this conference, so they agree to keep it hush-hush. This is definitely a great idea that won't get everyone killed by Beatrice... I mean uh. Whoever the murderer is.

The obvious question is, who dunnit? And why? Unfortunately, we don't really have alibis for most of the characters. Many of the inner circle haven't even shown up on screen yet. So there's a lot of people who it might have been.

More suspects! More suspects!

I haven't even mentioned several of the characters. We also have Sacnicte, steward of the house - she's an arcanist, and Su is kinda insanely horny for her aesthetically appreciative, in a way that the other characters notice and are literally like 'I don't see it'... which makes me wonder if we have a situation where someone has fucked with her perceptions. She's very down to earth and casual.

Her name is probably a reference to the Maya princess Sac Nicté, meaning 'white flower', who according to legend was involved in the migration of the Itza people from the Chichen Itza. Mind you the article I'm getting this from is kinda horrendous; the sole source is in Spanish and appears to be some random website from 2004.

Among the older generation, we have Theo's dad, Linos. He is a generally affable chap, kinda socially awkward (he's responsible for prolonging the political discussion by a botched apology) but otherwise not particularly standing out among the Order members.

Linos or Linus is another Greek name with a few referents.

The Order member who really does stand out is Anna, or in full, Amtu-hedu-anna. She's the one who's properly old, having dodged many of the 'kills people around 500' bullets of this setting, and not especially inclined to make nice. Very 'straight to the point' kinda lady. We meet her fairly briefly - Ran seems to have landed in her good books.

This one really took some digging! It seems to be based on Enheduanna, who was a Sumerian high priestess of Nanna and the oldest named author in history, credited for tablets like The Exaltation of Inanna, although it seems there's some debate over whether she definitely wrote them. Her rank in Sumerian was Entu, and I could fully believe 'amtu hedu anna' is a different transliteration of 'Entu Hedu Anna'.

As mentioned above, we're introduced to two logic engines, Sekhmet and Eshmun, built respectively by Neferuaten and (the as yet unseen) Hamilcar. Sekhmet has more biological components and wants to be a human. She wants to be human, and she's also expressed a distinct pronoun preference and gender id, which I suppose makes her trans. Eshmun is a more traditional logic engine with a lot of cogs; Sekhmet calls him 'big brother', so I guess he gets he pronouns from that.

Sekhmet is of course named for the Egyptian lion-headed warrior/medicine goddess. Eshmun is a Phoenician god of healing. Hamilcar was a name used by a number of Carthaginians, mostly generals.

Ezekiel is another one of the student gang. We haven't seen much of him yet, so I don't have a lot to say about him. Abrahamic prophet.

Balthazar is a student from another school - another thanatomancer in fact. He's something like the protégé of Zeno, and his presence is Zeno's condition for having this whole affair go ahead. He's got the same eyes as Ophelia, and Zeno failing to do his paperwork and allowing to happen is a big deal. But Zeno's kind of a bigshot so it might not come to anything. Anyway, Su is kind of suspicious towards Balthazar, but he takes it all in good humour.

Balthazar was one of the three magi in Christian mythology. There were a few Zenos, but the best known is surely Zeno of Elea, who came up with his famous "we need to invent calculus to solve this" paradoxes around infinite sums.

Yantho is a member of the Order staff, who was cooking when whoever did shenanigans in the kitchen... did shenanigans in the kitchen. His roast was ruined, but sadly he was too unconscious to order fast food and pass it off as his cooking. He can't speak and communicates by writing on his tablet.

The name crops up as an obscure Maya deity, part of a trio of brothers with Usukun and Uyitzin, but I can't find any source that seems particularly definitive.

Samium is an old egomancer, whose presence is a secret that only Su and Ran are in on. Su wants to speak to him, for reasons that are probably to do with finding out if he can restore 'original!Su' into her body, or maybe resurrecting her grandfather, or something?

...is that everyone? I think that's everyone. At some point I probably need to make an Umineko-style character screen lol.

can we solve anything yet?

Since this chapter is the beginning of the arc, I suspect there's more info to divulge before we can think about trying to solve this one. And, given the Umineko inspo, the problem to solve probably isn't simply 'whodunnit' but something more fundamental to the nature of this world.

Still, it seems all but spelled out explicitly that current!Su failed to properly assimilate into her body after she became an arcanist. Her grandfather's final 'kindness' is less clear. Her intentions with Samium... I've mentioned the obvious theories about already. She's mega guilty about overwriting this poor girl and has decided the only course of action is to try and restore the mind that inhabited her body originally. But I don't think we have the whole picture just yet, because I still can't figure out what her granddad did.

Given her discussion of 'dragon' vs 'phoenix' resurrection, and of how her meeting with Samium might change the order, I also theorised - before I really twigged the arcanist thing - that she was here to resurrect her grandfather in her own body. Body-hopping is like, the classic immortality strat after all. But... I'm less convinced of that one now? It doesn't seem like Su particularly liked the old man, she definitely doesn't want to follow in his footsteps, and 'saw him die unexpectedly during the revolution' does not seem like it would inspire the same sort of guilt.

Still, he surely did something to her, she's definitely cryptically alluded to that enough times.

Besides that?

Obviously really digging this story! Honestly, this one rules. It helps that the author is clearly into a lot of the same shit I am. All the long discussions and beat by beat narration could potentially feel a little dry, but honestly, I'm pretty hooked, it's definitely pulling me forwards. It's a fascinating, conflict-rich setting, that raises all sorts of interesting concepts. It's confident in knowing what it wants to be. Umineko is a hell of a tough act to follow, but this one has a distinct identity of its own. Can't wait to see what happens now the mystery seems to be about to kick off for real.

With that in mind, I'm sure it won't be long until the next one of these. I may have to dial back the detail a bit, this is kinda having a bad effect on my work right now. There's just so many fascinating corners to follow up ^^'

Anyway, I realise these posts are kinda massive for tumblr, so I'm gonna start copying them over to canmom.art soon. <See you next time>.

[the-splorts-eye]

Do you love detective stories but hate cops?

Do you love gay detective stories and hate capitalism?

Like disabled main characters who's disability actually comes up?

Like characters of color but not in the mood for stories on racism?

Tempted by the thought of romance at ages of 30+?

Does the idea of stories so queer you'll hesitate before calling any character a "man" or a "woman" make you think "Ah, yes pronoun shenanigans, just like my discord used to make"

And you into an abundance of strong, diverse female and nonbinary characters?

Do you fight for women's wrongs?

I know rep-only recommendations can be annoying, but I'm trying to grab your attention to promote some indie media. Luckily, though, this post isn't rep-only!

To read my full recommendation and review of Three of Hearts, click below. ♦️♥️♣️♠️

And if you aren't in the mood for a new thing right now, consider reblogging! Maybe even ping a friend who might be into this! You love supporting queer indie creators, right?

The story

♠️♣️♥️♦️Three of Hearts♦️♥️♣️♠️ centers on two paragovernmental agents in a fantasy, post-war, queernormative 1950s.

Roughly 20 years before the opening, a set of heroes purged magic from the world to turn the tide of the war. But scraps of this thaumaturgic energy still remain. S.U.I.T.S (securing unpredictable injurious thaumaturgic situations) is an agency founded to deal with everything left behind.

When two of the longest standing employees at S.U.I.T.S, Agent Vellum and Agent Felspar, are called onto a new case involving stone crops and a missing person, Felspar isn't surprised (Though Vellum, who's injury had him doing desk work most of his career, is). Things devolve quickly when the Agents realize this case comes from Felspar's home town of Cloven heart, an idyllic magical village that prefers to handle justice on it's own.

Answers yield only more questions, as the Agents realize almost everyone in town has something to hide, and Felspar isn't the only one whose past keeps catching up to him:

How much magic is still around? What's Vellum got sloshing around in there that people think is so juicy? What is Diamond, elven pop star and queer icon, doing in such a small town? Just how big is this case, and how can the Agents balance their legal responsibility, with promises they've made to Cloven Heart?

WHEN. WILL. THEY. JUST. KISS?

(if you're skeptical about central romances, I get it! See notes on aro/aceness and platonic relationships in the rep section for more info)

The combination of magic and newfangled war tech — think telegrams and radios — is somehow just as charming as a rotating cast of characters who will each stake their claim on your heart, but betrayal is imminent and mistrust is rife. The story strikes a wonderful balance between slice of life goodness, and edge-of-your-seat high drama, culminating In a show I highly recommend.

But are they just reskinned cops: my answer has got to be no. While they are technically law enforcement, the main two are entering a commune-like space, where that isn't so welcome. It's a situation they treat with caution and respect. The classic cop-plot of "Should I make myself judge, jury, and executioner because The Bad Guy™ deserves punishment" just isn't a problem. The justice system isn't perfect, in our world or the show's, and the story acknowledges that. But in a social, cultural way, they don't act like cops. They DO act like detectives. But the rules they choose to break and the ones they choose to follow will hopefully satisfy my fellow cop-haters who crave a good mystery

mid post note: I am not involved with the making of the show or the game space Kings. I just really like this podcast. Also, if you are seeing this text you are looking at a copy of the original posted on an unused sideblog so that I can keep the notes separate from my naturally spreading original without looking like a bot, and not get blaze notification spam.the references to "look in the notes for more" won't work for you. Yes, I spent my own money on this.

The format

♠️♣️♥️♦️Three of Hearts♦️♥️♣️♠️ is an Indie actual play — this is not DnD, hear me out — podcast in the game Space Kings. All the tension of dice rolls, without drawn out combat or clunkiness, it's a breeze of story-forward listening, even if you've never listened to actually play podcasts before!

If you've tried dnd actual plays, and haven't like the flow of them, I would recommend trying this. A few encounters that may feel random (though they're not) get the story kicked off at a fast pace, but it quickly settles into a story with a tight plot, great pacing, and impactful character development.

The use of a playing card deck to see the outcomes of risky actions means that no matter what happens, success or failure, the tension keeps rising, because there are only so many successes in the deck before you shuffle. The hosts do a wonderful job of explaining mechanics in the show, so it never interrupts the listening experience.

Actual-play connessuires who want to primarily see people playing a game might not be satisfied, as bonuses are given liberally, and I would describe the podcast as more story focused than game focused, But the risks are ALWAYS real, sometimes (often) with thrilling, shocking outcomes.

Also concerned AP listeners should know there's some chaos magic involved! I was surprised when it first came up, and doubtful about how it might affect the story, but it ended up weaving into the rest of the plot really well, and I feel neither like it had no affect, nor like it shook up everything the party was building in an unsatisfying way. Personally I would have preferred to go in knowing it was there, but I also don't think it's major enough to belong in the main synopsis. Now you know, though!

The hosts make a real effort to blend stats and story, and I think the pull it off wonderfully without spending too much time on mechanics. If you want to see that though, session 0 and other crunchy details are on the Patreon (where you get the same content no matter how much you pay, at a minimum of a dollar a month).

The pod has all the lighthearted fun and banter of a "friends around the table" show, but never once have I had that "oh my god, I'm not a part of your inside joke, shut up and play!" Feeling.

EDIT: i did not know "friends around the table" was the name of another podcast. no hate to them I'm sure they're lovely, this was just the use of a phrase.

I think it's a delight for AP and non-AP fans alike.

The episodes: roughly 45- 75 minutes long, with a midtro and some post-end music scenes, so listen through the end music, or check that there isn't extra content by seeing how close the play head is when the end music starts. It's not too long and quite pleasant in my opinion! The midtros always come at a nice moment to step back from the story, and are not too long and not irritating. I enjoyed listening to them! At some point, a midtro starts getting reused, and I was slightly disappointed I wasn't hearing new jokes every episode, but it's a small thing. I skip the repetitive ones with my 30 seconds forward button, and while I haven't timed the Intro, that's worked really well for me. I don't have to fiddle with my play head to make sure I don't skip forward too far. Super convenient.

Trigger warnings: the show is pretty lighthearted! Listeners sensitive non-graphic mentions of needles, blood, and/or guns might want to skip on this one, but most episodes don't get heavy. The few that do have pre-episode notes that warn you things get dark, how they get dark, and how to skip the darkest bits. Personally, I listened through them and enjoyed those parts a lot! But if that's not your thing, I agree with the warning that they're very skippable, and I think trigger-sensitive listeners will be pleased. As an indie pod, there are no fan made, super specific lists of triggers.

I'm trying to emphasize the balance between lightheartedness and drama, but if your mental health is sensitive to grim & dark media, i think this one is pretty safe. Please always exercise caution! But I'd describe 3o♥️s as emotionally restful.

Transcripts: transcripts are in the works, but do not currently exist except for episodes 1 and 2. Three of Hearts is a non-scripted show, so those are also unavailable. Some of the money given to the show will be used to hire a queer disabled transcriptionist! So if you listen and love it, consider sending cash their way. All transcripts are on patreon for free.

The rep

Don't you hate when someone raves about rep and you go in expecting something good and get like. One dog-boy described as having "chocolate colored skin"? Or when people make a "watch for rep" post and then mention like. Gay and maybe trans people and that's it, even when shows DO have disability and POC rep? Yeah that's not me. Here's the spoiler free rundown, race is at the bottom because I get into more detail with it, not because it isn't important:

Edit: For more on some of these topics from a hosts perspective, see the reblogged addition by @/citrusandsalt

MLM characters: Main characters, one confirmed bi the other unknown

Wlw characters: Reoccurring side characters (present or mentioned in every episode I think) Married. Orientation unspecified.

Enby love: LOTS. It's actually hard to really categorize mlm and wlw stuff because almost every character is nonbinary. Anyways— it's VERY queer

Women: I...I don't know exactly which characters are women 😂. But there are many feminine characters, and they're badass as fuck. Some are compassionate, some are cold, some are chaotic, most are a mix! The two main characters are...masculine...(I say with much hesitation) but you will not feel robbed for your woman-ly content.

Non-traditional family structures: All of the families in the story, pretty much, are non-traditional. Adoption is super common. (You want some wlw who just KEEP adopting kids? You got em) Found family is a MASSIVE force in the story. Also, It's a post-war story.........which is to say almost everyone's parents are dead.

Edit: an MC had poly parents, which may not be obvious but is true!

Polyamory: to my knowledge so far, there are polyam characters, and it is definitely present in the world! But no poly relationships in the forefront. I am about 2/3 through the current episodes, so there may be a present polyamorous relationship later, but also if I confirmed it that would be a spoiler. This may be that "playing it by ear" thing that happens with ttrpgs. I wouldn't listen for the hope of polyamory alone, but I don't tell you it's not there/won't happen.

Trans characters: almost all of them. Might think "oh there are only a few!" And you are wrong. You are so wrong.

Neopronoun users: yup! To my knowledge, minor characters. A handful who use at least he/she/they or they/them and may also use neos in a manner im forgetting

Plurality: no system characters yet, but the creators are friendly, I asked ;)

Aro/ace characters: none confirmed yet to my knowledge. Romance is very central, sex is joked about on occasion but it isn't at the forefront of the story at all. There are many, single characters who are thriving.

Edit: Actually! There is one character who discusses demiromanticism in cannon that I forgot, and another confirmed out of cannon character who is ace. Both are non-main major characters!

Platonic relationships: YES. As an aro person who hates so many romance tropes this one gets my stamp of approval. There's no real jealousy drama, exes who communicate and are supportive, and romance doesn't kill friendships. There's a central sibling relationship and non-familial platonic ones that have conflict, drama, resolutions, and a deeply satisfying significance in the story. If you don't like romance at all, this one might not be for you. If you just don't like stories exclusively about romance, I think you'll enjoy this. Genre wise, I'd definitely describe three of hearts as a mystery primarily with a strong romantic subplot, not a romance itself, and that comes through in player and character's additives and priorities.

Age diversity: the youngest characters in the show are older to middling teens, and the oldest are in their 400s. Okay but the oldest in human terms are roughly 60-70. The most common age range, and the ones the central characters are in, is 30-40. The second most common is that 60-70, then some ~40-50 folks here and there, with people in their 20s being probably the rarest (no named ones off the top of my head?) And there are a small number of teens. This is not a story about youth and youthful beauty. Generally, the older a character becomes the most bad ass/spooky powerful they are, and older characters are very involved in the plot.

Mental illness and neurodivergency: to my knowledge so far no characters are in cannon confirmed to have a specific mental illness or ND, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was part of a character or the main characters, and just hadn't come up. Listeners with cluster b or "scary" disorders, or with conditions that may cause them to lash out, will find satisfaction with how compassionately the narrative treats werefolk. To say more encounters spoilers. I would also say that depression, while the word isn't used and it is not central to the story, is present as a narrative force, and also treated wisely and with compassion. Still, as is usually for a good story, all of these bitches need therapy.

Disability: LOTS. There's a lot of "different, not broken" themes that disabled listeners are likely to love, but both of the main characters are disabled! One is a cane user, the other experiences migraines. These have a genuine, pressing, mechanical impact on the story. It's COMES UP. It's a real joy. For a magical world, there is no magical healing! Or there is, but it isn't a perfect solution, which in my opinion is just a magical version of real healing, though yours may differ! Also, there is a minor, reoccurring character who's a wheelchair user, and I think he's really fun.

Disfigurement: Excuse me if I am not prepared with the most sensitive way to speak about this, but I'm doing my best! There is a character with no eyes or nose, who is central and lovely. To my knowledge, there are no amputee characters or characters with limb differences (of the wheelchair user I'm not sure if it's specified whether or not he has legs). There is a character of questionable morality who has significant facial and bodily disfigurement. In as few spoilers as possible: this was not injury or genetic related. The disfigurement is treated with a firm compassion, and does not exist as a "this character is evil" signal. It's a long arc, but I imagine people who relate will be satisfied, though I cannot speak for anyone.

Characters of color: many! The main two are Hispanic and Asian. Terms like "dark skinned" are used for characters, but in the fantasy world race doesn't exactly translate, and I wouldn't call it "important" in this story. Read more about race below:

Fantasy racism: sort of! The word "race" is used to mean "humanoid species" and I know some folks don't like that? None of these fantasy races are oppressed, but specific people (Magic versus non-magic people) have conflict about that aspect of their identity, and policing is a related concern. I would place the allegory more in the space of transness and disability/neurodivergency if pressed to choose, but it doesn't feel like it's trying to tell a story about real-world oppression, primarily. I have more complicated thoughts on exactly what I'm trying to communicate here, but they involved some spoilers. DM me for more info!

Hosts/creator identity: out of three hosts, two are white, one is not! They are very queer, and disability is also...a thing! These are real life people, so I'm not going to get into detail, but check out their twitters plugged in the show for more on how they self-identify.

Edit: One of the hosts, Essay (@/citrusandsalts) discussed more on hosts identities in a reblog! If this concerns you, and you want less of me walking on eggshells about other people's identities, read her addition too!

Edit 2: Jordan, the GM also has commented additions!

Okay but are they racist: Real talk! As a black person who thinks I keep my ears sharp, I would say no! Not at all! This is one of those situations where I was like "YOU'RE WHITE?" And shocked about it, (if you listened to TSCOSI, same vibe) which is a very good thing in my books. The hosts are open and sensitive, and I have no complaints, however, this is just one perspective! This isn't coincidental, race is an active consideration in how the story is told — just not a central theme.

Minor but worth mentioning: A minor character has a name with what I believe is the Nahuatl "tl" sound in it, which is not pronounced correctly. It's a really hard sound! And I, op, can't really do it! But if that really irritates you this might not be the podcast for you.

[lythea-creation]

I'm Nothing Like You - Remus Lupin x daughter reader (alternative ending)

Originial Version

summary: So this is basically like my original Oneshot, but with a turn in the middle. I don't wanna tell you too much here.

warnings: Basically just angst ig

word count: 1.589

Author's note: Feel free to check out my Masterlists and make requests. No reposting please! Reblogging, comments and requests are always appreciated <3 If you like the story/my writing, please don't be shy to say it via comments or asks! It takes you a few seconds and might make my day. It's the best appreciation you can show to a writer you like.

Requested? Yes

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

I had always lived in the shadow of my younger twin sister Amy. Growing up in an orphanage you quickly learn if you are sociable.

Amy never had any difficulties to make new friends. She was the center of attention. Beautiful, charismatic, smart, funny. She had it all.

Meanwhile I was rather a quiet and shy person, mostly overlooked.

The only thing I was good at was drawing. But nobody seemed to be interested in that.

Whenever I scribbled into my notebooks because I was overwhelmed with a task, I got scolded for playing around, ruining my expensive devices. Then they would blame my bad grades on drawing instead of paying attention in class.

They had no idea, did not even want to understand that it was hard for me to learn. Theory simply was not my strength. But instead of helping me they mocked me.

Amy had tried to support me, explain it to me. But she had given up after some time. I was a hopeless case.

I thought that might all change when we got an acceptance letter for Hogwarts. We were both absolutely excited to get to study magic, live in a literal castle instead of a run down, underfunded house.

But it turned out that I was a failure at either school.

I transformed only one half of an object, accidentally invented new potions, did not manage to fly higher than three feet above the ground.

Amy attempted to encourage me, told me that I only needed more time, but it felt hopeless. No matter how hard I tried, how much longer I trained, how many times I practiced, I just did not get any better.

What was I supposed to do?

It all took a turn for the worse in our second year, when Remus Lupin became our teacher. None of us had known that he was our father until Dumbledore had revealed it. In contrast to me Dumbledore appeared to know everything.

Amy and Remus quickly came along. Amy's easy-going nature and her awesome grades were making it hard for people not to love her.

I, on the other hand, was having difficulties to bond with Remus. Ironic that I was even failing in that matter.

We just did not have anything in common.

Instead of having a greater support system, it felt like I was falling behind my sister even more. I felt like an outcast when the three of us spend time together, even though they tried to integrate me.

I wondered if they also turned away from me if we were not blood-related.

“Now it's time to get your grades”, Professor McGonagall announced.

I was anxiously scribbling away at a piece of parchment. Remus had bought me a pencil set for my birthday.

When the professor handed me my grades, she sent me a disappointed look. I had barely managed not to fail, all thanks to Amy's help and my endless hours of studying and practicing when everybody else had been out and having fun together.

“I'm so excited to visit dad again”, Amy rejoiced during the train ride.

We had just finished our fourth year at Hogwarts. So we only knew Remus for three years now. When had Amy started calling him dad?

I was torn between being happy for her and feeling even more like an outcast.

When the train arrived I watched Amy hugging Remus from afar. They looked like a picture perfect father-daughter-duo.

I felt my heart sink at the sight. Somehow it felt like I had even lost my sister all of a sudden.

My hands tightened around the straps of my backpack. Amy and I were used to not carrying around to much. So instead of a suitcase like most of the other students we were usually just taking a backpack with us.

Remus had not spotted me yet. Amy had not noticed that I had stayed behind. Why was I even here? I was always feeling out of place anyway.

My feet moved on their own, away from the platform. The piece of paper in my backpack was only spurring me on in not wanting to go to Remus' place.

Back in my muggle time Amy and I had been wandering around the city a lot as nobody really cared if we were gone or not. So I was used to the labyrinth of streets and did not even have to think about the way to Jenny's place.

Jenny was the only muggle friend I had left. She understood me. So it was intuitive to go over to her. Where else was I supposed to go anyway?

After about two hours of walking around I finally arrived at her apartment. Ringing the doorbell was natural. I had spent a lot of time with her after all.

“Hey, (f/n)”, Jenny greeted me surprised but excited, immediately enveloping me in a hug.

“Hey, Jen. Can I come in?”, I inquired.

“Of course”, she assured me and took a step to the side to let me in.

Thanks to the laws she did not know about the literally magical aspects of my life. But I was just leaving that part out when telling her how I was doing.

“Not that I'm complaining, but what are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be at Remus' place?”, she wondered.

By now we were in her room, a full tea cup in our hands.

“Yeah, it's just … I kinda feel like I don't belong there, ya know?”, I confessed. “I also barely passed school again.”

“But you did pass, didn't you?”, she questioned.

“Yes, but with so much effort that pathetic would be an understatement”, I proposed.

“I've known you for quite some time now”, Jenny recalled. “And trust me when I say that I've never met anyone that's more hard-working than you. That's a skill as well. Don't think it's a weakness. It's not your fault that learning is hard for you.”

“Thanks, Jen”, I whispered.

“So how about some video games to get your mind off of things?”, she suggested.

She did not just manage but excelled at that. I had no idea when I had laughed so much the last time.

After eating breakfast together the next morning we both settled that I should return to Remus and my sister, although I was reluctant about it.

Ringing Remus' doorbell was not even nearly natural. My whole body was feeling paralyzed as I could not muster the courage to lift my arm.

“(f/n)”, Amy exclaimed and ran into my arms.

She had been so fast that I had barely realized her opening the door.

“Where the hell have you been? We were looking for you the whole day and were just about to leave again”, she enlightened me.

Suddenly guilt was creeping up inside of me. I had not expected them to recognize my absence. They seemed truly upset. It looked like they had not slept at all.

“I'm so glad you're back”, Remus joined in, hugging us both.

He let go again and gently pushed us into the house. “Come on in, first. We can talk about it while sitting down”, he considered.

I did as he said, taking a seat next to Amy on the couch.

The mood was tense and uncomfortable, none of us knowing how to break the silence right now. Even my outgoing sister was silent for once.

“So ...”, Remus uttered. “Where have you been?”

“I was over at Jenny's place”, I enlightened them.

“You're still talking? I thought you hate each other now”, Amy declared.

“No, we made up about a year ago”, I revealed.

“Why didn't you tell me?”, she wondered.

“Well, I was kinda busy”, I brushed it off.

“(f/n)”, Remus intervened. “Of course, it's completely fine if you wanna meet your friends, but please tell at least one of us where you are. We were worried sick.”

I was taken aback by his statement. Worried?

“I thought you'd be thrilled to have some quality time alone”, I thought aloud.

“What?”, Amy mumbled dumbfounded.

“You two are getting along so well. I didn't wanna pull you down”, I claimed.

“Is that really what you're thinking?”, Amy questioned.

“I'm just nothing like you, neither of you. I feel like I don't belong here”, I admitted.

“I'm so sorry”, Remus muttered, his head hanging low. “I had no idea you were feeling left out. I should have paid more attention.”

“No, I'm not saying you're at fault”, I justified him.

“You might not. But I do. No matter how long we've known, I am your dad. It's my responsibility to take care of you, make you feel loved and supported. And I know I'm not the best at it. But I'll definitely try to work on myself to show you how much you matter to me”, he promised.

“I ...” I was overwhelmed. To me his words were feeling absolutely surreal. How could he love me?

“You have a bad habit of underestimating yourself”, Amy pointed out. “We wanna be here for you, but you have to let us in.”

“I guess … I just don't know how”, I assumed.

“We'll figure it out”, Remus assured me, pulling me into his arms. “How about doing something you love? Present your world to us.”

[kittycatpopprincess]

Honestly, one of my biggest fantasies is to make the Shiny Chariot card game playable. I still haven't been able to buy any of the physical cards (Full set goes for around 400 quids last I checked on ebay) and the unique shape makes them hard to actually replicate with a good quality. But beyond that, I'm still trying to think of a system which would make them playable as is. Amongst the obvious problems, beyond the lack of actual cards with only 20 canon ones (which I can't exactly do much about), there's the the mana system, the lack of effects, and the lack of a clear win condition.

For the mana system, I feel one solution would be to use cards as mana sources directly. Cards being used as resources is not necessarily new or unique, Wixoss did it with their Life Cloth system, as well as Duel Masters with their Shield Zone for example. The very basic version could be to discard cards to gain mana equal to their mana cost. Ie, if I have three cards in hand, one costing 3 Mana, one costing 2 Mana, and one costing 5, I could discard the one costing 3 and the one costing 2 to summon the 5 Mana cards, or invertly, discard the 5 Mana card to summon the 3 Mana and 2 Mana cards.

From there, the issue of the low card count comes back into play. With the game being obviously based on Magic the Gathering, if we consider that each card can provide Mana to cards of the same colour (The colours here being Sun, Moon and Star), Then each deck would have between 6 (for the Sun and Moon decks) and 8 (for the Star decks) cards in total. In other words, it would be tricky to discard for cost or even have a permanent discard without the game being over in seconds. One possible solution to that could be a discard counter system, or something of that nature. The base idea would be that, when a card is discarded, put a certain number of Discard Counters on it, with one counter being deducted at the beginning of every turn. When all Discard Counters are removed, put the card back into play. (This solution, of course, is far from perfect as is. One problem would be that this would effectively turn the game into a pure deck building one, removing all chance aspect from it since all cards would be available to you from the start.) It also goes without saying that the Discard Counter mechanic could also come into play with specific card effects, allowing for swarming possibilities for example by discarding lots of cards and reducing Discard Counters via effects.

With that being said, card limit also deserves to be a topic of discussion. Essentially, allowing for a certain copies of each card to be in one deck would make deck building more interesting, since we could reintroduce the idea of deck size. (For example, allowing for up to 4 copies of each card per deck like in MtG would allow for a maximum possible of 24 cards for the Sun and Moon deck, and 32 cards for the Star deck. Given this, a limit of, for example again, 15 cards could introduce some diversity already even within the same decks.)

The lack of explicit win condition is not necessarily that huge of a problem. With the game borrowing so heavily from Magic the Gathering, it's fair to say the cards were made with a life point system in mind. There's also the topic of synergy which could be discussed, which interestingly enough the cards already have. (The Moon cards have a clearly more defensive focus, going as far as to have the only card with a defense exceeding five, Woodward being a 1/9 card; The star cards focusing on high-mana costs and high stats, as well as the A Believing Heart Is Your Magic, whose statline (X/X) indicates either some kind of cost, something like +1/+1 for each mana paid to summon this card, in which case there would also be the option to pay more mana than necessary; And the Sun cards being mostly balanced)

So yeah, it would take a bunch of work, including playtesting and adjusting stuff, as well as creating effects for the cards (none of them having explicit effects so far), but I think that actually making the Shiny Chariot card game is very much possible and I'd love to try eventually

[scentedsstuff]

Song of Silver, Flame like Night

By Amélie Wen Zhao

Rating: 2/5⭐️

This was a book I really wanted to love, from the gorgeous cover alone to the actual premise given, it seemed perfect for me, unfortunately that didn't turn out to be the case.

It started off quite promising with the mystery behind Lan's seal, which I was very invested in. The pacing and overall atmosphere at the beginning of the book immediately drew me in, unfortunately the interest was lost about halfway through and the book was finished more for the sake of it then any actual enjoyment of it.

As far as main characters go, I figured as the book continued I'd become more attached to our female lead, Lan, but I found that the more we got to see of her, the more she fell flat as a character, only fulfilling the role of your typical YA female lead.

She's described as someone having been forced to grow up too fast, someone street smart, yet there's little to show for it, barely living up to the description. Then you have her prodigious abilities, where any task or training she undertakes she naturally excels at. With this in particular it just felt rushed, there is an explanation given for this later on but I felt it was more of a cop-out, an excuse to rush past the training stage to push her into cool fight scenes right away and establish her as some force to be reckoned with, conveniently in time for some epic showdown in the latter half of the book.

Our male lead Zen was just there in my opinion, the typical stoic male character whose walls slowly crumble due to the female protagonist. He's got his own demons (literally and figuratively) to deal with but didn't interest me much from there.

I found myself not being attached to any of the main or side characters. Throughout the book it felt like the same process of being introduced to a new character, being told that they mattered somehow to one of the main two and that in turn we should also care for them without there being much to show for it.

Did I like the relationship between the two main characters? Sure. Was I invested? NO. (apply this to any and every important relationship in this book and it still rings true)

I mentioned it briefly before but there was a lot of info dumping done throughout the book, which on one hand I understand because it is only the first book in a duology and the author is trying to set the groundwork, but at times it was too much.

It wasn't all bad, there were elements of the book that I did enjoy, such as the mythology, the lore and the magic system. It was all very fascinating to learn about but it can only do so much to keep you reading if the characters and the plot aren't doing much to maintain your interest.

All in all, it's a 2 star read for me, but this is merely one review out of an endless sea of mostly 4-5 star reviews so it might just be the perfect book for someone else.

[dailycharacteroption]

Class Feature Friday: Air School (Wizard Elementalist School)

(art by Christina Kritikou on Artstation)

 And we’re back with another elemental school, this time focusing on the first of the classic western elements: Air!

In case you missed the entry on Aether, elemental schools are an alternative to traditional arcane schools hailing from lands and locations where the elements take metaphysical precedent over what the spells themselves do. While these wizards are just as capable of all the same feats as more classically trained ones, their specialization is much broader than what you’d expect.

With that in mind, students of aeromancy are by default opposed to the magics of geomancy in the western elemental system… and outright unheard of to followers of the eastern elemental system as air is replaced by wood and metal in that system.

In any case, aeromancers are the masters of everything about the element of air, ranging from wind, weather, and even storms and electricity (shoots a look at Second Edition).

As such, they can be expected to have the solution when problems arise in the open air. Need more speed for your ship on the sea? Aeromancer casting gust of wind or control winds. Enemy in the air? Cast fly and bring them down with wind and lightning. Enemy on the ground with no good ranged weaponry? Take to the air again and rain down hell from above.

With all these offensive applications, one might assume that aeromancers are limited to careers in warfare but that is hardly the case. They can also be engineers of flying vehicles or even entire flying cities, important members of ship crews, long-distance communicators, messengers, and so on.

Unlike certain other elemental schools, the spells of what is “in school” for the element of Air doesn’t really include anything that is outside of normal wizard abilities, but naturally includes the basic spells that work with all elements, as well as those that manipulate wind, weather, electricity, and even sound in some cases, as well as those that grant aerial utility abilities such as flight.

 These wizards are true masters of the air, training themselves to be better fliers. What’s more, they devote some of the magic to defying gravity. At first they can use this to slow their fall at will, but later they can use it to ascend vertically, or even properly fly. At their zenith, their mastery of flight is so great that they cannot fall unless they want to.

As an offensive measure, they can discharge a small flash of lightning around themselves to harm foes and dazzle them.

They also learn to create a minature cyclone around themselves, blocking incoming projectiles, making it difficult to approach them, and even knocking flying foes above them out of the air.

The ability to eventually fly at will, as well as ground other fliers can be quite effective, and this school is perfect if you plan to be a flying spellcaster that rains down spells from above. Don’t forget to diversify though, for while you are certainly set up to blast from afar, wizardry is more than just damage-dealing spells.

 Air typically represents concepts like freedom, whimsy, and the like, and certainly a fair share of aeromancers share these traits, but they don’t necessarily have to. Indeed, some may have the even temper of still air, or they might be as tulmultuous as the storm.

  Though the sun hurts their eyes and their darkvision limits their abilities in the air at night, the orcs of Mount Yakraan have a special love for the sky and flight, wearing smoked goggles as they ride mighty flying steeds. Their shamans, however, need not steed, instead using arcane magic to master the sky all on their own, and strike down their enemies with lightning from above.

 Powerful and wary, the legendary emperor stags almost rival the legendary cerynitus in desirability as a hunter’s prize. Most nobles let their hunting hounds mostly do the work, but the most recently discovered bodies have been slain by even less sportsmanlike behavior, sporting burns on the tops of their backs. Someone with mastery of air magic has been ambushing them from above, taking their antlers and leaving the poor beasts to rot.

 Those who face an aeromancer expecting only lightning underestimate the versatility of the atmosphere. Indeed, the current mage duel champion, Viksa, is infamous for calling down superheated siroccos and blizzards, or simply blowing them off the arena with a mighty gale.

[gothamghostwhispers]

Hello ooc introduction! Last updated 5/31/24

I’m Coolcat101s (that’s where I follow from) I’ve been rping on and off for over a decade now, but this is my first time rping in the dc community. My response speed and length varies but I’m online often. I’m primarily a mobile user.

Much like dc canon the ‘canonical’ (for lack of a better word) nature of any given story line is decided by vibes especially since this is a crossover friendly blog I figure this approach will help make things mesh best so if I ever have plot holes or contradict myself maybe that was a different continuity

Along that thought line while there are plots happening and time passing, because rping takes time I won’t say there’s like a set matching timeframe if that makes sense? comic time logic you know? Sometimes a day takes 3 panels and sometimes it’s 3 issues.

It can take people a while to reply I get that ^^”

Posts are in character unless otherwise specified, but some posts are meant to be things that happen in the “real world” the stylistic chooses should make these posts obvious but I like to practice writing with my ocs so expect those sometimes

-

I am okay with shipping/flirting with Artem I think it’s fun ^^ but be aware that they are pretty oblivious to many things

I’m okay with violence in rp but I’d like a conversation before we do anything that would need a content warning

Same with more suggestive content, conversions first, probably using a red/yellow/green check in system in the tags

Minors can interact but be mindful! Muse and mun are the same age (You should really be mindful anytime youre in a mixed age group but that is sometimes forgotten by many in online spaces) I tend to keep things pg 13 and anything not would be tagged as ‘suggestive’. Any minors caught interacting with anything tagged as suggestive will get one warning in case they didn’t read this post but after that you will be blocked if it happens again

Im crossover friendly but only for content that I know if I don’t know it Artem will act confused and will wrap it up to multidimensional shenanigans causing worlds to temporarily touch or whatnot. ( known crossovers that I’m chill with: Danny Phantom, Miraculous Ladybug I’ll add more as I come across them I guess)

Artem was a self insert at one point but they became their own thing after rotating them in different scenarios so now they’re their own oc

Ongoing arc(s):

Power suppression arc (hiatus kinda, abduction interrupted so might be done)

Magic experiments

Completed arc: abduction arc

Bread boy arc

-4’11 blue eyes, hair is naturally brown but they keep it blue

-birthday June 11th (whatever year makes their age match mine in whatever continuity also their chart isn’t mathematically possible but it’s what makes sense for them)

-they’re agender and pan/demisexual, also polyamorous in theory but single in practice

They have a boyfriend ( @bugboi-of-gotham )

-currently has 3 children legally but in the process of adopting more

-went to college on a full Wayne scholarship, they have a bachelors in English with a minor in folklore

-job hops between restaurant and goon positions

-the first goon they ever worked for was calendar man when they were 17 and they currently work under riddler, penguin, scarecrow, and ivy

-they get robbed a lot because they have a resting smile and generally give the vibe of an easy mark when not hanging out with scary people (subsequently they hang out with scary people often)

-lives in a building owned by Red Hood but it’s debatable if they know that

Due to plot they are moving to the Manson family Manor that they inherited with their kids and bb

-Forcibly outed as a meta publicly during the abduction arc

Artem also has an easy time learning instruments and perfect pitch but they don’t equate those to a meta ability (it is linked to their power though)

-has a cat and an aloe plant

-soft spot for kids

-Artem is a witch but doesn’t have much time to study, does small spells though

-grew up going to an anti meta church/cult

-Joker killed their mom in front of them when they were 16, they aren’t really the killing type when at all possible so they don’t seek vengeance but they avoid him at all costs and will not work with him

Layout of the Manson Manor! (Manson being Artem’s mother Amara’s maiden name, if the Wayne’s are gothams royal family then think of the Manson family as like barons of gotham I guess? Rich in an old money way. Probably not well known by average people but press/other gotham elites might recognize the name. They’re like the 42nd richest family in gotham)

Protections listed in link bellow

Source: https://archivaldesigns.com/collections/mansion-house-plans/products/balmoral-castle-house-plan

[thelreads]

Oh! So we are talking about the orkz! ALRIGHT! This is my stuff! Some interesting tidbits that weren't mentioned by the other ask!

-Warhammer 40k having the setting in space, you may wonder: How the green bastards get to be in one planet? It's all int their cycle of reproduction. Orkz are basically fungus, that grow in a underground womb. But not only orkz, their whole species and sub-species grows from the same fungus, like squigs, that are use for food and the gretchin that are use as servants that help to the less ork-iss labors, like building seetlements, taking care of the squigs and to cultivate more fungus.

-An Ork releases spores of this fungus during his live and even more in his death. So with even a little of these spores get to a planet, the fungus that results may made an optimal ecosystem for orkz. Eliminate them is quite hard in combat and even harder to eliminate the fungus, because of the harsh conditions in which can develop, in some of the worse cases, when the volume of orks become huge, it becomes necessary to burn the whole planet.

-The physiology of the orkz is quite interesting because its needed a huge amount of damage to put ONE down. That also means that pain is less than a nuisance to them, includes losing limbs, which can be easily reattach and stich together, to the point that one of the most important Orkz in recent history was beheaded and a Painboy (a Doctor in Ok culture) reattach his head to another body, good as new!

-This means they are highly curious and amused by the reactions of others species to pain. Add that to their love for war and fighting, you got a species that is always a threat to the imperium of man.

-The more they fight. The bigger they get, the more orks follow. But also the smarter they get. A normal Ork gets to 2m. But the biggest Ork ever encounter by human kind was a whooping 10m tall called The Beast and put the imperium in total peril.

-The ork groups are called WAAAGH, in reference to the scream they made while charging to battle. The leader of the WAAGH is the Warboos, which is the biggest ork that other orks follow because their society is based on "the strongest rules", but is not a perfect, looting others is always a constant and the in-fighting too.

-The solely reason they haven't conquer the galaxy is because of their own nature, their love for fighting often creates conflict withing a WAAAGH and their culture of "The strongest rule over the weak" often leads to challenges to the leader that in some cases divide the orks into groups to see who's the strongest. Their lack of self preservation also factors in, the often made charges head on againts the enemy. If the enemy is prepare, this tactic proves fatal for the orkz.

-With all of this i just tell you, i haven't told you the most horrific fact..is that the Orkz are descendants of a race called Kork: 12m beast that had armor and weapons that rival (and surpass) the most sophisticated tecnology of humanity. The belief system that the other ask told about the Orkz is something that the Krok had full knowledge and were able to use it consciously. They had the tecnological knowledge integrated in their DNA, something that the modern Ork has too but lacks the inteligence to understand it.

-Remember when i mentioned that when a Ork wins battles, it becomes bigger? It's believe that if an Ork grows enough, it regress to that earlier state of a Krok. The Beast being the closest example.

Imagine an angry mash of mold that can rip yours limbs out with ease and it's basically impervious to harm. That's basically the orkz.

You literally just described a magical girl.

[thecandlelightsociety]

Welcome to our blog!

We are the Candlelight System, a system shaped by but not entirely made through intentional tulpamancy skills. We have been an established system for over a year now and have an interest in teaching others about tulpamancy, sharing projects of ours both related and unrelated to tulpamancy and plurality, and having a place to discuss some of the fun happenings in our life.

Some fun facts about ourselves in no real order:

Bodily adult

Current system size is 17 members including the original. This may expand in the future but we believe not by much.

Origin of the system isn't particularly important to us but we believe ourselves to be endogenic for the time being and as previously stated tulpamantic/parogenic for the most part. Due to an unusual entrance to plurality with our first non original member though and the fact that there is traumatic stuff in our past we leave room open for change to a CDD status pending further investigation. Most of us would still choose to identify as tulpas either way though.

No disorderly system mechanics to our understanding. We have complete control of switching and perfect communication between members. We also do not gain new members without actively choosing to accept a potential member (what the tulpamancy community refers to as walk-ins) or creating them via tulpamancy practices. We do have memory problems and past trauma, but do not view it as related to our system or most of it's mechanics. Are open to changing this if future data suggests differently.

Bodily male but most of the system identifies as female. Do not care about pronouns and will be fine with whatever ones are used unless specified otherwise. While not fans of neopronouns ourselves we respect others who are and will attempt to use preferred pronouns, please forgive us if we are not perfect in this regard.

Some of our hobbies include psychology, philosophy, hypnosis, reading, writing, mythology, spirituality, paranormal topics, astronomy, nature, gardening, stage magic, weapons, martial arts, drawing, cooking, and more.

Now that we have discussed a little about ourselves let's get some things straight about this blog and how to interact with it. None of these requests are ironclad and there is plenty of exceptions for each, but that will be decided on a case by case basis.

We do not have a DNI list as we find them limiting and a great way to make echochambers, that being said we reserve the right to block, ignore, and remove anyone who actively gets on our nerves or we find to be unwanted here.

We are not a syscourse blog. We may occasionally reblog or comment on a syscourse topic with appropriate tags for people to ignore if desired, but we are not syscourse focused nor do we want to be. Do not bring syscourse to our blog directly unless it somehow relates directly to us and or we give the ok first in asks.

No fakeclaiming or attempting to bend us to whatever you think we should be. Do not come here without previous context or permission and try to convince us we must be traumagenic, that is for us to investigate the possibility of and it would be done with a trained professional, not tumblr of all things. This rule goes for endos aswell if we ever identify as traumagenic in the future.

We are currently studying to become a psychologist, but we are still very much learning and fallible, do your own research on any topic we discuss and come to your own conclusions using evidence and logic, not more tumblr blogs.

We'd like to stay out of mundane politics on this blog, unless we give permission first, which we have the right to revoke, don't bring it here.

Do not call us willogenic/willomates, ever. We'll accept thoughtform but do not prefer it.

We have other medias we post on much more often which you could contact us on. As a warning these other platforms may be NSFW at times. We'll label things accordingly but interact with caution.

Reddit: u/Candlelight_System

Discord: Candlelight #0107

Syscourse sideblog: @discourse-by-candlelight

Our personal website:

This should cover all the basics of our blog. We'll provide a quick color list for our active blogging members, some members use the same color so be sure to pay attention to the identifier at the beginning of all our posts.

Blue: Astra or Aqua

Purple: Dawn

Red: Sera or Scarlet

Orange: Cinderella

Green: Michael (host)

Black: Shade or undefined

This list is subject to change, as previously stated pay attention to identifiers at the beginning of any post.

This should cover everything you will need to know about us, please enjoy our blog and we hope to have a great time in this community!

[mihrsuri]

Can you talk a little about Gregory Cromwell and his rltship with Anne/Henry? Rereading Wolf Hall again and despite Mantel’s portrayal of Anne, just love the bustling, busy nature of Austin Friars (Cromwell’s house)! Also, I think Anne/Grace Cromwell (his daughters) rltship would also be lovely had they lived.

That’s question one! And question two is: in your world building (esp for Golden World), how do you decide what stays constant and what changes? Like, after Mihrimah marries Thomas, obviously she brings Ottoman medical institutions etc to Tudor England etc and that would mean the medical system would change.

Re the second - a lot of it honestly starts with wish fulfillment tbh. I wanted a kindest possible world with no imperialism so the overall changes start from there. For things like fashion I started with asking some friends who know sewing/fashion history - I also actually looked at some of the 1700s styles that drew from the Ottoman world, looked at Ottoman clothing of the 1500s and also looked at Tudor fashions. One thing I learned was that Elizabethan fashion drew from Spain and in this world, partly due to the fact that Anne lived and partly because Thomas Cromwell + Italy it comes much more from France and Italian Renaissance fashion - so I looked at that (specifically Florence/Venice) and noted down ideas about how my fictional historical fashion might evolve.

Things like religion - Thomas and siblings were raised by three parents and a beloved older sister and aunt in KOA who had differing religious views and for Mihrimah religious pluralism was absolutely a thing (even if it’s only pragmatic policy that makes sense/not perfect the Ottoman world did allow Jewish etc peoples to live and work there) so they would definitely open up England and sell it as pragmatic. (Which is helped because the religious settlement that happened after Henry’s great matter was settled in this world was that everyone (at that point Christian but) could worship in peace and it worked really well so people were way more open to widening it.

Medicine absolutely also does change as a result - also education (I read that Hurrem Sultan endowed both primary schools for girls and actually female physicians and I think scholars/poets so it would make sense that Mihrimah as Queen continues that). I absolutely knew that bath houses and infrastructure/social support would change for the better in a big way (or in the case of bath houses really come back) - Henry VIII actually proposed something like an early NHS early on and Thomas Cromwell was Big Concerned about infrastructure (especially roads) so having the influence he does as secret consort means it really gets done. So the shorter answer is that I try to combine wish fulfillment with research - I think about how they might get there, what the historical context is (I’ll research it depending) and then I’ll think about how it might change.

As for the first? Gregory Cromwell adores Anne, he does. If I ever wrote the extended edition(s) of the first two fic(s) in this verse I would be exploring his feelings about Henry and also more about Thomas and his domestic life at home (in this AU Thomas is born in 1505 and therefore everyone is younger and also there is some Magical Time Line Wrangling Going On Probably) and also if Grace and Nora (I called Tom Cromwell’s other daughter with Liz Wykes Nora in this universe) had lived that would be Amazing. Also Gregory Cromwell becomes a Duke’s son in this universe which is a whole other thing.

<33333. Thank you for letting me babble.

[pretty-pink-seaslug]

Maestro species headcanons I have that tie into my madre au, feel free to use some of these hcs yourself if you wanna!

Natural Maestros of any species (Slugterrian, Arachnid, Reptling, etc.) are naturally above average human height, if they disguise themselves as a human, they’ll shrink down by 1-2 feet, however, if they’re real good at magic (see; Balan and Lance) they can shrink themselves down to a more humane height

-> In my AUs, Balan and Lance’s human forms are about 8’7, since their maestro forms are roughly double the size of a common 15 year old boy (Leo), that makes them about 11’3 tall, no human being is 9 feet tall so they both opted to shrink down by 3 feet 😊

Maestros don’t really have last names, nor do they even have real human names, their names are usually words, phrases, adjectives, hell even random syllables put together to sound like a name! Think of characters from Nights Into Dreams—

There’s a whole Maestro world out there! Titled “The Offworld”, Offworld is kind of a realm/second earth separate from ours, that’s where Maestros come from!

-> All Maestros no matter the subspecies are born with magical/non-human abilities, though depending on the subspecies, the magic level your born with would be higher or lower, Theater Maestros (see Balan and Lance) have a natural high level of Magic, since their subspecies is more of a wildcard subspecies, being that they’re not based on any sort of animal or insect. Balan and Lance’s levels were the average magic level, but for reasons I haven’t thought of yet 🙈, they trained their magic to such a high degree, they were able to create a big enough pocket dimension to have other worlds inside it, alas, Wonderworld!

In Offworld, there are regions where a certain subspieces of Maestro is most common, whether that place is based off an actual region of our world I haven’t fully decided, tho I’ve had the little idea in mind lately that Slugterrians come from a kinda Maestro Malaysia—

There’s a ton of magical stuff and legends all over the world in Offworld, Millennial tree from cookie run? There’s a legend like that. Sailor Moon? There’s a legend like that. You think about any magic/Fatidic story, and there’s a story similar or just like that in Offworld. And it’s all true too and just happened like millions of years ago—

Madre isn’t actually a human, but a used to be Maestro, She was a theater maestro specifically, and at some point in her early-mid adulthood, banded together with a bunch of other maestros of several different subspecies, became a high enchantress with very high power, and with them created the heartbreak project! To take in humans with broken hearts that don’t want to be in the pain/world/painful world their in, and lift them to a magic sophistication ✨ and grant that very wish of being in a different world! Free of their mental and emotional even physical pain!

-> the best part about this system to them, is them powering the heartbreakers, helps power the coveters back! (that’s what I call the leaders of the heartbreak project) It’s a cycle to help one another 😌🙏 They use their powers to ‘fix’ and help broken humans ascend, the journey of the human’s ascension uses the Coveter’s power while also sharing some of their power too, after a while the ascension is complete, no more power is needed, the cycle repeats! Magic to generate more magic to then power more magic that generates magic—

Maestros that practice magic of heart can read emotions just by catching a sort of aura off of you, the stronger that emotion the greater said aura, and depending on that Maestro’s stance (positive, negative, and in rare cases neutral) they can gain a small bit of power by feeding off of your aura, Balan and Lance feeding off positive and negative energies respectively

Originally I had the idea that Maestro kind are all positive and radiant and super peaceful and :D perfect!!!11!1!1!1 :D but I’ve been liking the idea more lately that they had wars and stuff like us too just less of them— They’re not all innately perfect and positive obviously but I just imagine they’re like earth but if it went in the right direction, kinda like Splatoon where the sea life learns from humanity’s mistakes (a little bit anyways 😰) except instead of Maestros learning from Humanity it’s like Humanity in The Good Timeline lol

Some Maestros walk among humans, and have been doing so for many centuries, tho most decide not to cuz well it’s a world that isn’t where you’re from— but they get along with humans just fine! You can never really tell who’s a maestro and who’s not unless like they transform right in front of you lol

-> James Charles is a reptling maestro (THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS A JOKE DONT HATE ME—)

Aaand that’s it for the headcanons/lore! Again feel free to incorporate any of these into your AUs n stuff if you like it, I don’t mind!

also here’s a transparent Vanity silhouette because it’s cool✨

[kariachi]

Okay, the old post for humany-ossy au stuff was getting long and cluttered so, we now have the humany-ossys tag on my blog and shit will go into their own posts or smaller threads as I think of them.

Traveling is so fucking common amongst these fuckers. Just, a very strong cultural push for young people to go out and see the world is one of the common points in every Ossy culture on Earth. Not for ‘go and experience life while you can’ reasons- though there’s always a bit of that, every decent parent wants their kids to have and experience more than them- but more to spread the blood around.

As mentioned before, populations tend to be small and in a small community there’s only so many generations that can stay in one spot before we start getting into closer incest than these guys are here for. Genetically you wanna be at least fourth cousins without extra shared ancestors and when there’s only a very limited number of options in your area in the first place, the odds of finding one of those starts dropping.

This is actually becoming less of an issue now that IVF is a thing, but that’s still not a perfect solution yet due to problems like having to set up systems specifically for Ossys, or to make sure Ossys can find each other’s shit, along with concerns about costs.

As a result of the traveling thing, Ossy children are also more strongly encouraged to learn new languages and how to do practical things like read maps. Also as a result it’s not uncommon for parents to try to save money to fund their children traveling, rather than expecting to pay for weddings or schooling.

As a result of that, Ossy weddings tend to err towards the smaller and cheaper side. It’s less likely you’re going to be able to get financial aid from family, and it’s pretty much always been that way, so paying for weddings is all on the people involved and most of the drive for larger, more ornate and expensive weddings comes from influence from the larger human communities.

Opinions on polygamy tend to differ from region to region, but lean towards positive as long as everybody involved is unrelated.

~

Different cultures tend towards different explanations of the species backstory, though all include the true portion that is “we look similar to humans because we are related to them, we are also the children of the Unknowable Void”. Most tend towards focusing on one side more than the other though. Individuals from cultures that focus on the ‘humans are kin’ side are more likely to live in or near human settlements, while those from cultures that lean more towards the ‘we’re voidlings’ side are more likely to live in Ossy-focused communities but also are more likely to marry and interbreed with other species, though both sides will.

Cultural and racial intermixing, meanwhile, has never been anything Ossys have really worried about. Again, at a certain population size and growth rate no differences can make it fucking matter within the species. As far as Ossys are concerned a ‘mixed marriage’ is between an Ossy and a non-Ossy, racial or cultural differences be damned.

“Can we trust they’ll keep The Secret? Then it’s all good.”

~

Every Ossy is capable of learning and using magic, but whether they will varies depending on natural proclivity and how common magic use is in their family. As mentioned before Ossys are encouraged to focus primarily on one aspect of their powers- though they’re taught the basics of all of them- as part of the maintaining of the masquerade, and what they focus on is generally chosen by natural proclivity. Not always, some cultures have rituals and traditions tied to determining what someone will go for, but in the modern day it’s generally what a child seems most attuned to.

(For instance, while Kevin doesn’t use it much if ever after OS for reasons that are obvious pre-Rooters arc (I think for these fuckers I’m gonna continue my ongoing headcanon which is that the ‘electricity fucks with his head’ thing is a case of ‘this is what happens when you deal with a lot of power when you’re young and aren’t getting the right diet’) he’s very clearly incredibly skilled with it, and so probably would’ve been encouraged to focus it**)

~

Schooling varies, depending on the area and culture, but mostly area. Preferably children would go to an Ossy-only school until somewhere between 10 and 13, when parents can be certain they’ll be mature enough to understand and keep the big secrets, but in many areas this isn’t an option. In areas where there aren’t Ossy-only schools, then homeschooling is preferred up to those ages, often involving retired or similarly jobless relatives in areas and households where multiple sources of income are required. 

It’s not uncommon for Ossy-only schools to be combined, with kids of all ages learning in the same building and sometimes with the children of multiple communities going to the same school. Mostly because of the whole numbers game- you can’t justify spreading the kids out between different buildings when there’s so few kids in the first place. If you and the neighboring community both have ten children in total, it makes more sense to teach them together than keep them separate as long as the distance between the two isn’t too great.

Plus, it’s easier to guard one school than two and Ossy-only schools are more well secured than some banks. If these fuckers could safely put their classrooms under the hoards of dragons? They would do so in a heartbeat. As it is, security systems are intense and it’s not unknown for communities far enough from humans to keep cryptid and mythical animals to serve as guards for the children.

(listen the image of a school keeping cactus cats as an alternative to guard dogs is too damn good...)

~

**This is a hypothetical, of course, because I still don’t know how I want to do his backstory in this AU. If he grew up in an Ossy household he would’ve been encouraged to focus on electricity and possibly other forms of energy, if not this obviously doesn’t apply.

[reyna-cartwright]

Here's a free magic system for you guys! It's nice and arbitrary and allows for a nice degree of flexibility depending on your project (just tell me if you're gonna use it because I like knowing that I'm being useful).

Ok so here it goes (brace yourselves for lots of text):

All living beings are composed of two things, the flesh, and the voice. Objects are things that only bear the flesh, spirits are those that are only the voice (also called the soul).

Basically, flesh is hardware, voice is software (not a perfect analogy, but it's close). Magic is simply the coding language for the voice, the same way physics and chemistry and science in general is the coding language for the flesh. So Mages are scientists of the metaphysical, discovering new properties and trying to find universal laws. No one really knows the rules so that's why magic can do some things but not others.

Here's where it gets interesting: An individual voice is weak, while some might be born with a stronger one than others, it will all too easily be drowned out by all the other metaphysical noise going on. Even people with unusually strong Voices can only do some small innate magic. To get louder you need more voices. Here's how you acquire them:

Ok so remember those spirits I mentioned earlier, here's where they come in: Spirits form either naturally for unknown reasons, or are Voices shed from Flesh at the moment of death. No longer constrained by the limitations of Flesh, like-minded spirits often bind together to form a Chorus. All major spirits are Choruses, composite beings made out of possibly billions of Voices (in the case of gods). Choruses come in three tiers generally (though there's a lot of room in each tier).

1. The Spirits Familiar

2. The Spirits Aristocratic

3. The Spirits Deific

All Choruses are generally also defined by their overarching desire. Lesser Choruses typically have more specific desires, while Spirits Deific can often be defined by one word.

Choruses only want one thing, to be louder, to have more Voices join their metaphysical harmony. They acquire more Voices in several ways. A few are listed below:

1. Start a Religion in order to cultivate certain mindsets that will shape Voices in your image, and therefore make your worshippers a part of you when they die. On the mortals end, they might get some magic from the Chorus simply because they're already resonating with it so strongly that they can tap into a bit of it's power.

2. Bargain for Flesh. Sometimes people will willingly sacrifice their autonomy in exchange for power, or exchange others autonomy. Mages often grant a Spirit Familiar the body of a small animal for use as a vessel, allowing the spirit flesh with which to consume more Voices (Choruses when bound to a body consume both the physical and metaphysical) and therefore grow in power, while also allowing the mage to tap into the powers of the Chorus. Spirits Aristocratic often bargain for greater bodies that might better contain their great volume. Often they bargain for human bodies, either the mages, or the mages unfortunate victims. Any body possessed by a Chorus is wholly subject to its will, both the Voice and the Flesh. Choruses Vessels grow in size as the Chorus grows in power. All tales of dragons come from the Spirit Aristocratic known as Mammon, whose greed was so all consuming and served so well to inspire greed in others, that he grew to immense size and wore a form most wicked.

3. Bargain for someones voice. Chorus gives caster magic, in exchange for the caster's Voice when they die.

Now onto what magic can do:

1. Whatever the fuck you want, it's an arbitrary magic system, have fun

[parag-chakraborty]

My Miniverse: Life with the Nova X5

Let's face it, smartphones are an extension of ourselves these days. They're our cameras, our connection to the world, and sometimes, even our wallets. So, when it came time to upgrade my trusty (but slightly outdated) phone, I did my research and landed on the Nova X5. Here's a glimpse into my experience with this little powerhouse so far:

First Impressions: Sleek and Speedy

The Nova X5 is a looker. The phone feels incredibly thin and light, but still manages to have a reassuringly solid build quality. The holographic finish on the back catches the light beautifully, and almost feels too pretty to put in a case (almost). Turning it on, I was immediately impressed by the super smooth refresh rate of the display. Scrolling through feeds and webpages is a joy, with no lag whatsoever.

Camera Magic

I'm a bit of a photography enthusiast, and the Nova X5's camera system does not disappoint. The triple-lens setup takes stunningly clear photos, even in low-light conditions. The portrait mode with its adjustable depth effect is fantastic for capturing those Insta-worthy close-ups, and the macro lens lets you get up close and personal with the details in nature. Plus, the pro mode gives you tons of manual controls for photography nerds like myself.

Powerhouse Performance

Whether I'm editing photos, playing a graphics-intensive game, or juggling multiple apps at once, the Nova X5 handles it all with ease. The battery life is also impressive. I can easily get through a full day of moderate use on a single charge, and even heavy users will likely find themselves reaching for the charger less often than with previous phones.

A Few Nitpicks

No phone is perfect, and the Nova X5 is no exception. The default ringtone options are a bit bland, and while the phone comes with a decent amount of storage, power users might find themselves needing to invest in additional memory.

Overall Verdict: A Winner

Despite these minor quibbles, I'm absolutely loving the Nova X5. It's a sleek, powerful phone with a camera that takes incredible photos. If you're looking for a phone that can keep up with your busy lifestyle and capture all those special moments, the Nova X5 is definitely worth considering.

[puremagicevent]

Mastering Outdoor Events: Strategies for Success Rain or Shine!

Outdoor events possess a unique charm, offering attendees a breath of fresh air and a sense of freedom that indoor venues simply can't match. However, with the unpredictability of weather patterns, organizing outdoor events comes with its own set of challenges. But fear not! With the right strategies and a touch of magic from Pure Magic Events Management, you can ensure your outdoor event is a resounding success, come rain or shine.

1. Scout the Perfect Venue:

The success of your outdoor event hinges largely on your choice of venue. Look for a location that not only aligns with your event theme and vision but also offers practical advantages. Consider factors such as accessibility, amenities, and most importantly, weather resilience. Pure Magic Events Management specializes in scouting venues that can withstand various weather conditions while still providing a picturesque backdrop for your event.

2. Weatherproof Your Setup:

Mother Nature can be unpredictable, so it's crucial to weatherproof your event setup to minimize the impact of adverse conditions. Invest in sturdy tents, marquees, or canopies to provide shelter from rain or harsh sunlight. Ensure that all equipment, such as sound systems and lighting fixtures, are waterproofed or shielded from the elements. Pure Magic Events Management offers expert advice on weatherproofing your setup, ensuring that your event runs smoothly regardless of the forecast.

3. Create Flexible Timelines:

Flexibility is key when it comes to outdoor events, especially when weather conditions are at play. Create a flexible timeline that allows for adjustments in case of unexpected weather changes. Have backup plans in place for outdoor activities that may need to be moved indoors or rescheduled. Pure Magic Events Management excels in creating dynamic event schedules that can adapt to changing weather conditions while still delivering an unforgettable experience for attendees.

4. Communicate Effectively:

Clear and timely communication is essential when hosting outdoor events, particularly regarding weather updates and contingency plans. Keep attendees, vendors, and staff informed about any potential weather-related changes to the event schedule or logistics. Utilize multiple communication channels, such as email, social media, and event signage, to ensure that everyone is kept in the loop. Pure Magic Events Management specializes in effective event communication, ensuring that all stakeholders are well-informed and prepared for any weather scenario.

5. Embrace the Elements:

While adverse weather conditions can pose challenges, they can also add a unique element of excitement and spontaneity to your outdoor event. Encourage attendees to embrace the elements by providing weather-appropriate attire or accessories, such as umbrellas or sunscreen. Emphasize the beauty of nature and the resilience of your event team in overcoming any weather-related obstacles. With the help of Pure Magic Events Management, you can turn any weather condition into an opportunity to create magical moments and unforgettable memories.

Mastering outdoor events requires careful planning, strategic thinking, and a willingness to adapt to whatever Mother Nature throws your way. With the expert guidance of Pure Magic Events Management and the tips outlined above, you can host outdoor events that shine brightly, rain or shine. Let's make your next outdoor event an enchanting experience that leaves attendees spellbound from start to finish.