#episode 196 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

letterstosestrilles · 2 years

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Dear Tyko,

Well, it’s been a reasonably eventful day since I last wrote you, somewhat frustrated, from our lunch table on our way to the ship registry office.

Not long after I finished writing, we finished our journey there, and when I recast Tongues on myself, Niko cast it on Maliah, which made me feel like an idiot for not thinking to do that before, because I always think of it as a talking thing when Maliah generally doesn’t like to talk to strangers when I’m there to do it, but of course it’s just as much a spell of understanding, and she doesn’t speak any of the languages here any more than I do. So I’ve promised to trade off casting it for Maliah with Niko as long as we need to while we’re here, and it doesn’t make up for being a bit thoughtless, but at least I can be better in the future.

Anyway, armed with understanding for all of us (except Squirt, who as far as I know does not have the hitherto unknown ability to understand Celestial like happened with Aquan, but at this point if Maliah told me he did I would just take it with weary acceptance, there’s only so much a body can handle in a day), we went into the dock registry office, where a very weary bureaucrat heard that we’d been sent in search of Alat Misaahav by Divination and visibly decided that it was not worth asking more questions or trying to get us to fill out a form. Forms tend to not have neat boxes for things like “quests out of myth and legend.”

They gave us a berth number and told us to look for The Subtle Winds, and off we went to search, with Niko in charge, as the only person who could actually read the berth numbers, since Tongues doesn’t do a thing for written comprehension. We had to go to a different area of the port, where the berths are a bit smaller, meant for family crafts down to single-person ones, and eventually arrived at The Subtle Winds, and hailed them on their intercom.

We were, after a moment, answered by a baffled voice that got suspicious when we said we wanted to speak to Alat Misaahav, and even more suspicious when I explained that we had a question about star lore. There was a long wait, and I half-expected to be told to go away, but after almost a quarter of an hour, the hatch opened, and two people awaited us in the doorway.

In front was a woman who I think is mostly Maelah, a little older, in a hoverchair of a very nice design I was not nosy enough to ask about (but you would have liked it, looked like a way more complex version of that chair control mechanism you were saying you’d been reading about in your professional magazine a while back). She was Alat Misaahav, and was very intrigued to know what we were there for and how we’d known to come in the first place. Behind her was a companion who chose to give themselves no introduction, who clearly wished us flung out into the void to float our way back and would probably happily have wished the same on the god who gave us Alat’s name.

Alat, though, with the startled delight of anyone with a deep interest in a subject most people don’t care much about, was glad to talk about what she could tell us, though she warned us, as everyone seems to, that not a lot of star lore is out there attached to the stars’ actual names. We asked about Kireul, though, and she produced, after some searching, a few fragments of an invocation that comes from a planet that orbits them, describing the planet (Ikhel, she said, once she puzzled her way to pronouncing it, since it’s not a natural sound for someone used to Celestial) as a jewel in Kireul’s crown, and referring to them as “a lonely and distant watcher” and then, unnervingly, as “calm and dire.” (Calm is fine, a star with a temper sounds like a dangerous person to ask a favor of, but I can’t say I like the sound of “dire.”) She regretfully but firmly declined to guess if any of the unnamed stars in other lore might also be Kireul, and had nothing at all when we asked about Jhasdej, but offered to reach out to other enthusiasts, so we’ve asked her to but aren’t optimistic about the chances.

She also asked how we came to her, and seemed baffled and a little alarmed to have been called by name by a god, and there at least I could sympathize with her wholeheartedly, remembering how Altas contacted me. Then, of course, I ruined the feeling of kinship by explaining perhaps a bit too much about our mission, in hopes that maybe legends about a star crafting had circulated. They hadn’t, and she was blinking in that way people do when we tell them what we’re up to, so Maliah hastily changed the subject to ask about the star fields, and any information she could provide about those.

It seems like the star fields are mysterious to most of the mortal beings of the Astral Sea the same way, well, the city at the bottom of the ocean on Sestrilles is a mystery to most people who live there—they’re doing better than we were until very recently to even know there were stars out there! That’s not surprising, with a bit of logic, but it’s still disappointing.

And the disappointment remained as we thanked her and left, going off to find a store selling technology to get us adapters to allow us to at least access the Astral Sea’s internet, if not our own. That wasn’t too difficult, and we got set up, and Niko got a message account set up, since she’s the only one of us who can actually read Celestial. (Though I’ve asked her for some lessons as we travel here, both for practicality and because it’s a lovely language. Do you want to learn as well? Or maybe I should ask Alion, though it sounds from the last I talked to them like the Dwarvish future tense is giving them headaches right now.)

While we were getting set up, we stopped at one of the storm gardens between the tech store and The Weary Sage, looking out over the patterns of lightning, and I admit I was sulking a little, feeling stuck. Niko did her best to be encouraging, making the very reasonable point that if the Lady of Stars gave us two names, probably both are equally likely to help us (which I do know, but if one is likely to respond well to an emotional plea and the other prefers pure logic, I’d like to know that going in). We talked a little about our need to go to the port temple to the Lady of Stars and ask her about which star is closer, but I feel stupidly nervous about that even knowing, as Maliah gently pointed out, that she likes me. In part it’s that I don’t relish the nosebleeds and the dizziness from my interactions with deities aside from Aluarashi (oh, Aluarashi would love the storm gardens and probably this whole plane, it’s a pity one can’t really send a god a postcard). In part it’s that, after a while, I start feeling like I might be annoying her, or worse, failing her, by not just taking the information she sees fit to give me.

Maliah, again gently, told me that’s not really reasonable, and that if the Lady says no, that leaves us no worse off than we are now, except I still worry about annoying her, because this isn’t the last favor I’m going to ask of her, and the other one is a good deal more important—but I’m not asking it yet.

Still, I know doing it is the smart choice, and maybe the only way we can really make a decision, so we’ll go over tomorrow.

Out of curiosity, I went looking on the Astral Sea’s network for information about the planet Ikhel, wishing I could connect to ours, which must have much more. (I’m very tempted to Send to you and ask you to research it, except you’d only have a few words to tell me what you could find.) There was a little, which was actually more than I was expecting to find, part of some decade-old mapping project that gave me some relative coordinates, and after puzzling, I figured out that it’s pretty far out from the centers I mostly traveled through on The Promise, and only a few major trade routes go even close to it, so I wouldn’t have visited it. There wasn’t any information about the denizens, and from one two-syllable words I couldn’t figure out the language at least the first settlers must have spoken, though Maliah and I could eliminate a few between us (probably not Gnomish or Halfling, my guess is not Elvish unless it’s a drow colony independent of the Underdark, but Infernal, Dwarvish, and Primordial are all possible, and I couldn’t eliminate several others either).

Even that much, though, was enough to remind me how high the stakes are on this quest. If there’s a catastrophic failure and we hurt a star too badly to fix, there’s a chance of a star that people orbit dying, a whole planet of lives in danger because of us. But, as Maliah pointed out, if Jhasdej happens not to have living inhabitants around their more literal form, they might not understand or care much about the loss of creativity, so we’re once again left with spinning the wheel and picking one or the other.

Only—only I was sitting there, and I was disappointed in myself and in the lack of information, feeling like I’d been asking the wrong questions, and Niko was saying it might be worth asking Gaizka to cast Legend Lore even though they don’t know much about the relevant situation, and I said “I wish I could cast Legend Lore to find out more about Kireul” and I did.

One moment I was looking at the lightning dancing across the storm and then it’s like I was hearing a hundred songs at once in a hundred voices, in words I shouldn’t understand but did. I was hearing a child singing a skipping rhyme about the days of the week, and a poet reading quietly as though checking their meter the full version of the poem Alat had showed us, and then song after song about a sun.

Not our sun on Sestrilles, where I remember teachers smiling and saying “the sun helps the crops grow, the sun brings the summer, the sun is always facing some part of the planet” like the star is a doting aunt inclined to show up on holidays with gifts. This sun, Kireul, is—oh, it’s so stupid to say that they’re not as warm, because they’re a star. But the people of Ikhel, while they seem to perhaps worship Kireul as one of their pantheon, while they sing of them with reverence and respect and the love you’d give to a distant and famous grandparent, don’t think of them as friendly.

What they speak of, over and over, is Kireul as a witness. A person who has immense knowledge not through study of what people long-dead discovered and then chooses to elaborate on it, but through constant and careful observation. A person who has seen the birth of their society and will see its death, and who notes everything, large or small. Intimidating and remote, perhaps, but it’s a little hopeful, because I don’t think you can know that much about people without loving them at least a little, and people you love are people you want to save.

And then it was over, and Maliah was frowning at me, and I blurted out that I’d somehow cast Legend Lore, which didn’t seem possible, but I so obviously had. It wasn’t the Lady of Stars hearing my doubts and helping me, because I know her voice now. This was the voices of legends and myths, of a living story, and while it was disorienting, it didn’t fill my skull like bursting, and it didn’t feel like tripping over something I’d always known that got shunted to the front of my thoughts like when Aluarashi wants me to know something. It felt like I was learning it, just impossibly quickly. I described it to Maliah and Niko, and will describe it to you, like my mind was a crowded room and I rapidly had to shove a few bits of furniture out of the way to make space for a new box arriving.

Maliah and Niko were both confused and a little alarmed, maybe because I was both confused and alarmed, and I said that I didn’t know how I’d done it, I just wished that I could and it happened, and Niko realized a beat before I did that it wasn’t just a wish, it was a Wish. As in the spell.

And I’d known, after Avka’s lair, that I’d grown more powerful. I understand better how and when that happens these days, and after a little experimentation, I can usually figure out what’s different, but this time, there’d been a spell I’d been thinking of, hoping it might help us sometimes, and I’d felt the tune for that click into place the day after we got out of the volcano, and that didn’t quite feel like all, but I thought maybe I hadn’t unlocked everything about that spell yet. I hadn’t thought for a second that there was a whole new spell, and that it was Wish, of all things.

I hardly even know the rules of Wish, other than that I can cast nearly any spell now, if only once a day, by using it. Even the shows about high-level adventurers don’t bother with Wish, because it’s an unbelievable spell. Who’s powerful enough to cast it these days? An audience can believe almost any spell over a Wish, anything except maybe a True Resurrection, so all I know about it, I know from fairy tales.

It’s not comfortable, finding myself playing the role of The Prince Who Held The Tide or the maiden in your grandfather’s old story about the dragon’s impossible wishes. I don’t want to be a myth or a fairy tale, grateful as I am for the help of anything that will get us to the end of this quest. Part of me is absolutely dying of glee, remembering being a kid and imagining myself casting Wish for reasons silly and serious, imagining Wishing my way into riding a bird through the clouds or, of course, bring my parents back.

The other part of me can’t stop thinking about the way people have been looking at me all day, and ever since I arrived here. The librarians disbelieving that anyone seems to seriously be looking into stars as anything but distant figures of legend and study. The clerics at the storm god’s temple being unnerved by our requests. The dock registry officer wanting us gone, Alat’s overwhelmed expression when I told her about our quest, her companion mistrustful of us.

Maliah and Niko seemed to understand that I’ve had quite enough for the day, and after they’d made sure it was nothing worse than shock, I told them what I’d learned, told them I desperately wanted to eat something greasy followed by something sweet, and let them lead me off to do that before shutting myself in my room to write you.

It’s stupid to be upset over something so amazing, and Gaizka at least hardly blinked (or only blinked out of my sight) and asked me a lot of interested questions about how it worked, not that I really knew, so I’m trying to remember the good, and there’s a lot of it. Tomorrow, I should be able to see what I can learn about Jhasdej, though I might also wait another day or two to see if Atal can find us an anchor point to work from, since I think I was only able to learn as much as I did about Kireul because I knew the name of the planet that orbits them.

Tonight, I’m going to read that romance you recommended me when I was home, which I’ve been saving for when I needed it. And I’m going to take comfort in the fact that you, at least, are unlikely to ever look at me like I’m a legend, or if you do, it’s only a legend of how one person can wear so many holes in socks.

Love,

Elyn

#in character #in character: letter #letter to: tyko #episode 196 #location: the astral sea #location: the storm gardens of amsiel #person: maliah #person: mehrnikorsa(niko)#person: alat misaahav #person: gaizka zebari #information gathering

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its-your-mind · 3 months

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*deep breath in*

the fears 👏 have always 👏 been (in one way or another) 👏 parallel 👏 to 👏 desire 👏

let me explain.

so many of the statements given by actual avatars center around some sort of need that was met by their entity. Lots of them even had a positive relationship with the fear that drove them.

Jane Prentiss is an excellent example - the Corruption has always been about a form of toxic and possessive love, but she personally has a deep desire to be “fully consumed by what loves her,” and finds a perverse joy and relief at allowing herself to be a home

Jude Perry is another - she fucking loved watching people’s lives be utterly destroyed. The Desolation only offered her a power of destruction on a grander scale, and then gave her a more intense rush of joy as she did its work. When she tells Jon that he needs to feed the Eye before it feeds on him, it’s almost as an afterthought; she was happily feeding the Desolation long before it burned her into a new existence.

Simon Fairchild. Every time that old loose bag of bones wanders into the picture, he is having a fucking EXCELLENT time playing with the Vast. He loves showing people their own insignificance, and he loves luring them into situations where he can throw them into the void as he smiles and waves.

Peter Lukas (hell, the whole Lukas family (except Evan. RIP Evan.)) hated. people. all he wanted was for them all to go away, to leave him alone. The Lonely only fulfilled that desire.

Daisy, Trevor, and Julia, all devoted to hunting those things they deemed monstrous.

Melanie, holding tight to that bullet in her leg because on some level, she wanted it. It felt good, it felt right, it felt like it fit right alongside the anger and spite that drove her to success.

Annabelle Cane first encountered the Web when she was a child, running away from home in order to tug on her parents’ heartstrings in just the right way to have them wrapped around her little finger. Later on she volunteered to be the subject of an ESP study. Hell, she’s the one who dangled the “Is it really You that wants this?” question over Jon’s head in S4.

And that brings us to Jon, beloved Jarchivist, the Voice that Opened the Door. Ever since he was a child targeted by the Web, he was looking for answers. He joined the Magnus Institute’s Research Department looking for them, he stalked his coworkers in search for them, he broke into Gertrude’s flat and laptop out of desperation for them. And when he realized that all he had to do was Ask to get truthful answers to his questions? It was only natural for him to jump at that opportunity.

Elias told S3 Jon that he did want this, that he chose it, that at every crossroads he kept pushing onwards, and the inner turmoil that caused was one of the focal points for Jon’s character through the rest of the podcast.

There’s a certain line of thinking in many circles about the power of the Devil: he’s not able to create anything new. All he’s able to do is twist and warp that which was already present, making it something ugly and profane while still maintaining the facade of something desirable.

Jon didn’t choose the Eye. But he did wander into its realm of power, exhibiting exactly the qualities it was most capable of hijacking and warping to its own ends. Jon didn’t choose the Apocalypse. But Jonah picked at him little by little, pointing him towards each Fear individually. Jon didn’t want to release the Fears. But the Web tugged on his strings just so and laid a pretty trail for him to follow until he reached its desired conclusion.

Jon didn’t choose ultimate power, or omniscience, or even his own role as Head Archivist. But he said “yes” to the right (wrong?) orders and kept on pushing for the right (wrong?) answers. He wanted to succeed at the work he had been assigned. He wanted to protect his friends. He wanted to rescue them when they were lost. He wanted to prevent the apocalypse, to save the world. He wanted to know why he was still alive, when so many had died right in front of him.

The Great Wheel of Evil Color that is the Entities might not fit as neatly into categories in this universe - maybe there was no Robert Smirke trying to impose strict categories on emotional experiences, or maybe the ways they manifest in the world has turned on its head (goodness knows many of them have been showcased and blended in some very fun and new and horrifying ways so far) - but their fundamental foundations seem to be the same. Hell, in episode one we learned that there had been enough individual incidents to create a distinction between “dolls, watching” and “dolls, human skin.”

Smirke’s Fourteen isn’t going to be relevant as common parlance, RQ said that already, but I don’t think that means the Fears themselves (and their Dream Logic-based rules) are different - I think it means that the levels of understanding, language used, and personal connections among people “in the know” are going to be entirely unfamiliar

#tma #tmagp #the magnus protocol #tmagp meta #tmagp analysis #the entities #robert smirke #smirke's fourteen #mind write a meta post that doesn’t turn into a fucking essay challenge #I literally thought about citing my episode sources here but decided that would get too FUCKING long.#anyway I’m pulling mostly from Gerry’s statement (111) and #and the Big Elias Group Confrontation (92)#and Annabelle’s statement (147)#and then finale - 196 / 197 / 200 #there are other little lines that I grabbed - tbh feel free to ask about anything I’ve said bc I feel like I’m ready to defend a thesis #I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few weeks since the desire thing started going around #I have an obsession with Themes as they relate to Worldbuilding and now I have subjected you all to it as well #I am serious tho if anyone wants me to pull the specific parts I’m talking about (whether cuz you have Questions or you wanna ref them too)#lmk #my hyperfocus on silly media brain might as well come in useful somehow #aight peace ✌️

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