#full of primordial soup

[viceroys-cabinet]

Uhhh hi! She’s done!! Belomor, canary of the star court. She’s a bug ballerina! Her main arms, legs, and neck are poseable with wire.

I know I went radio-silent on progress pictures, turns out I’m not so good at remembering to do those 😅

This is the most doll-like doll I’ve ever made…truly a gauntlet of a million thin, finicky pieces. I’m not sure I would ever consider doing this again! I’ve gone back on my word before though, so we’ll have to see if I get another painful idea lol!

I’d planned to make her eyes aquamarines, but that will have to wait a while as my package got lost on its way here :(

[blinkpen]

speaking of webbed sites and digital worlds

i was trying to dig deep and figure out what is the actual, absolute first show that i ever watched AND that my toddler brain retained anything from enough to recall that i did, in fact, watch it, if not able to recall much else, and i think it miiiiight be ReBoot? in fact i am 99% sure it's ReBoot. so i'm giving it a rewatch off to the side it it's like

oh. so this is the true kind of Formative Mulch, the kind so early but fundamental to what grows over it, i didn't remember a lick of it, it's been hidden by year after year of leaf litter, since and i have not even thought about in like 20 years, but knowing i absolutely did watch it as a tiny baby child still as impressionable as putty? Yeah That Tracks. That Makes A Lot of Sense.

[romanromulus]

finished a read thru of the first draft of my novel and I loved it. loved it. it didn’t deliver on any of the themes, the emotional beats didn’t hit, revelations were glossed over, the characters were more or less cardboard, and I read it in one sitting and couldn’t stop. I loved it. in fact I feel deeply sad about having to rewrite it from scratch because I’m so attached to this flawed little mess. I’m in love with the shadow of the thing, even though I know I’ll love the thing itself even more. oh I’m having a romantic moment. i’m so happy and i’m so scared and so excited and i’m in love! I can’t wait to start the second draft and at the same time i’m putting off starting it. big weird feelings and all of them are gooey

[gay-jewish-bucky]

no thoughts, head full of primordial soup with a thick fog obscuring everything further than a few centimetres in front of your face

[ulmus-spellook]

To any earth focused pagans I recommend learning about the primordial soup. I never feel more connected to the earth than I do when I read about the ~soup~ creationists are pussies for hating the soup. We are the result of ancient chemical reactions forming the very base of what are the ancestors of life. You come from the soup (if panspermia is a thing you would still come from soup somewhere) we come from the soup, and the soup was earth itself. The soup was made of a planet, probably our own present one

[the-californicationist]

he changes your mind

John Price has been trying his best to convince you to let him give you a baby. After learning about his willingness to make sacrifices for you and your family, you decide to grant his wish.

MDNI/18+

TW: breeding, pregnancy, explicit sex

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51167794

Be sure to stop by my archive for more COD fics and to view my completed Kinktober collection, "Gauntlet".

John Price was smiling again. His cheeks were crushed up underneath his pale blue eyes, full of wonder and searing joy. The creases at the edges of his lashes cut and folded like the beginnings of an origami crane along his temple, and even though they did the same folds every single time, your heart skipped a beat when you saw them. The beard that lay flat and smooth around his mouth stretched with his smile, broad and keen. Sincere. Innocent and pure. And his laugh sent a knife right through your belly, melting down inside of you like coffee too hot, letting you feel your shapes and holes and secrets all the way down until you couldn’t breathe until he laughed again. Desperate for it. You wanted to rip it from him and keep it inside of you instead so you could tap into that bliss like an addict. You wanted a button to push to force it out of him so you could hear the sound in your darkest days, using him to turn on the light. 

To make matters worse, he was holding a baby.

He was making you want one. In fact, he was making you want him to put one inside of you. His baby. One of your very own. One with blue eyes that crinkled at the edges like shining cellophane. 

You resisted the pull like a yearling in a harness. You wanted to buck against it and kick it in the teeth. You didn’t want a child. John was always gone - mission after mission - and you weren’t willing to raise a whole person by yourself. You could do it, but you wouldn’t. That wasn’t fair. A child needs their guardian, and when your guardian was the guardian of the world…how could you come first?

So, you boxed it up and put it away in you with the rest of your ghosts. You haunted yourself with it sometimes. When you scrolled through your online purchases of milk and bread, sometimes it would suggest baby formula to add to your cart, as if, subtly suggesting like a mother-in-law, you were missing something important. But, you kept busy. You worked hard, you traveled, you spent time with friends. You loved John dearly, and you craved him more and more every day. You were happy, as happy as anyone should have the right to be. Why should you be entitled to open a box you had no business opening?

But, there it was, down from the attic of your mind again and cracked open in the foyer of your frontal cortex, waiting for you to pluck from it a warm, writhing little bundle that needed you to hold it and kiss it and tell it how to drive a manual transmission. A Janice or an Eric or a Persephone - someone new for the world to put through its horrors. Someone to catch a cold, to have their heart broken, to lose their job. Someone new to put you and John in matching coffins and lower you down into matching holes where you’d be covered and buried in the same place from whence they’d come. Entropy. 

You watched as John crooked his elbow just so, supportive and careful, his massive form suddenly as agile as an arching ballerina, holding the bottle and the towel and the someone new as gently as a leaf holds the dew in the mornings in the spring.

You were wet. Your heart and your womb were fully committed to the bit. Some ancient bacteria that divided for the first time back when you were just primordial soup had optimized you for just this moment. It was lying in wait for John Price to crane his neck down to leave little chirping kisses on the softest pink cheek and then to smile when it garnered its reaction. That instinctual drive revved inside of you when he wiped away a stray drop of milk from a grinning toothless mouth. A mouth that would learn how to give kisses right back one day and beg you for them. 

The way your hands clenched around your arms was going to leave a bruise. 

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

“Such a cute lad, aye?” John commented, driving you down the dark road to your home. 

“Gaz sure has his hands full,” you nodded.

“He’ll make it work. It always works itself out, right?” He was suggestive, and you weren’t about to have that.

“If it did, we wouldn’t need the orphanages.”

He was silent. The battle you had just won meant little to the war that raged on in the silence between you.

“I asked Laswell for the hiatus.”

“What?”

“You said that you needed me here. No more away missions. No more black sites. And you said we’d discuss it.”

“I said we might discuss - ”

“No, you said you needed those to happen, and I made them happen. She wrote up the paperwork. When I sign it, I’m here, for good. I’m a full on intel analyst. And it’s a pay raise,” he raised his volume, and his knuckles were white around the steering wheel.

“Okay,” you said.

“Okay? What does that mean?”

“It means okay. We can try, okay?”

“Don’t play with me, pumpkin. I can’t - ”

You put your hand on his thigh and squeezed it, giving him a soft smile. 

“I said okay.”

He drove faster. He barely stopped at stop signs. He parked in the gravel instead of pulling under the carport. He opened your door and nearly pulled you out. 

With his hand at the small of your back, he walked you to the front door, keys jangling loudly in his hand, the tip of the key scraping at the edges of the lock like a dog at the door, clamoring to get in. The door cracked. You were inside before you knew it. The keys fell to the floor and the door slammed shut behind you. John scooped you up and kicked in the panel to your bedroom. He fell on top of you, kissing you roughly, like he had mere minutes to spare. Your blood was rushing, pounding in your ears, and you could feel how heavy his breaths were as his chest pushed and pulled inside of himself.

“John. Jo- Hey, John. Wait - ”

John stopped, his hands stuffed under your dress, fingers looped in your panties, frozen in place like you had paused time itself. He didn’t look up at you. His head stayed down, and he waited for you to do something about it. 

You grabbed his cheeks and forced him to meet your eyes,

“What’s wrong?” You asked in a whisper.

“Please, sweetheart,” John’s eyes held within them a fragile prayer, “Let me give you a baby. I want to see you hold her inside, right here,” he kissed your belly as he raised up your dress, “I want to see you in her face when she smiles and laughs.”

You smiled at him, petting his hair, enjoying his kisses,

“How do you know it’ll be a girl?”

He scoffed, kissing you further down, peeling the panties away as he had first intended, 

“Just let me dream, alright? You said you would try.”

His hot mouth covered your clit and suckled against it with a renewed hunger. You tried to respond,

“Mm, I will, John. We’ll try.”

“We’re going to try right now.” 

His fingers spread you apart and he began to fuck you deeply on his hand, licking you apart at the seams, letting your binds and ties melt like sugar on his tongue, freeing you from the confines of the world around you, ripping you from reality and dragging you with him into his primal wonderland. You could feel his fingers stretching up, deeper than he usually did, feeling around for the soft roundness of the entrance to your womb. He found it and circled around it, as if mapping it for himself, visualizing it and teasing himself with all of its possibilities. It made you squirm, and he sucked harder, cowing you into submission with an orgasm, which you gasped out in shock. You’d been struggling to hold it together since Nova’s baby shower, and you were desperate for relief. That relief hit you like a truck, and you came hard enough to see stars in the dim light of your bedroom.

As soon as John felt you clench around his hand, he fucked you harder, adding a finger and curling them into you, stretching you to fit his thickness. He had his length out and ready at your entrance faster than you thought was physically possible, spitting down onto himself and positioning himself inside your folds, ready to commit. 

Then, for all of his anxious hurry, he stopped, as if he was missing something. He looked at you, concerned and needy, still fully clothed and unable to think straight. He looked lost. You held his hips in your hands and coaxed him forward,

“It’s okay, John. C’mon, let’s try.”

You thought he might break down and cry from the relief that washed over him. It was like you’d pulled a burning arrow from his heart. He sank into you like a stone in a lake, quick and sure, wet and eager. 

“Oh, fuuuuuck!” John shouted. It was loud enough that you wondered briefly about your neighbors. 

He fell on top of you, crawling over you with his hulking arms, prowling up to kiss your neck like a horny teenager, full of the same level of vigor. His thrusts were deep - deeper than usual - as if he was searching out that smoothness of your anatomy, looking for his target. You canted your hips downward to help him find it. When he did, you both groaned for each other. 

"That's it, my sweet girl," he rubbed your clit in gentle circles, sending you back into orbit, "I'm so fuckin' ready to see my baby in you. Fuck! I can't wait."

The way his cock throbbed with each of his thrusts was sending you into a sort of trance. Your pussy felt stuffed, like it was struggling around his fat cock, bending and pulling at its walls to allow him to fit. His kisses were formless and weak, but his hips were merciless in their pounding. The two divergent sensations forced a rift in your mind, and your pleasure stretched to meet his fierce and gentle need. You felt the wave-like tingle of your recent orgasm tumbling in the back of your mind, threatening to rise again to crash upon your shore, growing with each pull of his rocking rhythm. 

"Feel so good," he confessed in your ear, "Letting me give this to you, do this for you. Like heaven, love."

You encouraged the motion of his body with your hands, touching the snapping, ferocious muscles of his spread back, digging your nails into his furry skin when he angled himself just so, casting spell after spell to hypnotize you into pliant submission. Then, he quickened, panting, pleading, whispering his pleas over and over to you or to God, you couldn’t tell. He was making you feel like one and the same. His voice cracked,

"Bloody hell, I can't hold it back. Goddamnit. I'm - ahhh!"

When he filled you, and he damn well filled you, he held himself tightly pressed to your womb’s gate like he would be washed away at sea, gripping your body like a lifeline. He reached beside you for his pillow and shoved it under your hips, groaning and panting as he came down from his high, one-track minded. John kept his cock in you like a seal, holding you there much longer than usual. As you regained your senses and your ability to form words, you looked up at him and asked,

“John, what are you doing?”

“Shh, just wait. I want to make sure it’s there. Has to be deep enough for you, love.”

He kissed you again, using his long tongue to lick all the way into your mouth, still desperate and devout. You didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was weeks away from your ovulation window. Maybe you would just keep that to yourself.

[evilminji]

You know one of the purposes of Lining?

Shock Absorption.

If the Zone is the Inter- and EXTRA-Dimensional Lining, connecting, containing, and generally powering all of Multiversal Creation? The Great Primordial Soup? The Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, from which we came and too which we return?

If the Zone itself is basicly the place between Universe, where your soul goes to get washed down, cleaned up, recharged, and sent out to wherever the next random portal takes it? To BECOME whatever you happen to find? An infinte recycler and Multiversal management?

The great metaphorical Yggdrasil, grown far beyond few branches, into an incomprehensible forest of one?

Well!

That kinda changes things! And also nothing! Because it means that those who remain? Are basicly squatting in the DMV's attic. Have built bunkers, under the country's main power generator. They really SHOULD move along. Granted, there is no one to MAKE them... but like...

That's cause no one thought anyone would NEED too?

Lol. Don't they feel silly? Anyway, I'ma put MY house over-! *wander off to go squat in the rafters*

Yeah, the CONCEPTS are native. But those probably just generate naturally. It's all the Souls constantly flowing through. Lots of background Sentience and Memories and such being washed away into the air. But? Then these lil souls were like "yeah, but if THEY get to stay... me too! D:< " "no, you can-" "ME TOO" and then they stopped listening and did what they wanted.

Good thing we have literally infinte amounts of room.

T...there's so MANY, you guys.

But! Not the point here!

*smacks white board* Realities! The Die too sometimes! And get born! A beautiful process, really. You can find Reality Beads if you know When and Where to look, some times. They, OBVIOUSLY, don't last for very long. Since they are basicly just seed universe. The explosive growth takes them almost immediately out of our range of perception, as they Begin.

Foundations of all Life and such.

But good God are they MAGNIFICENT!

However, sometimes? The REVERSE happens. If you find the area of the Zone your in? Is getting... "wavey" is the best way people describe it. Distorted. Fun house mirror. As though your vision has weird wrinkles that are distorting and stretching your view of things? Get Out. FAST.

If it's only SLIGHT? Barely noticeable? You can grab your Lair. IF, and ONLY IF you are NEARBY! If not? Remember. Things can be replaced. YOU? Can not.

Cause that "wavey"-ness? Is the final stage of Realm Entropy. The universe that portion over the Zone is covering and connected too, is all hollowed out. And about to CAVE IN. You DO NOT want to be there when that happens!

Remember! You see "waves"? Fly for three days!

Get to the edge of the affected area then KEEP GOING for a full three days flight. Warn everyone in you path. We stay safe together, guy. Collapses are NO JOKE. People get... well. Let's just say it's NOT a nice way too go.

Knowing this of course? We should all be SAFE right? Respectful if Awed distance from Reality Seeds, run like he'll if "waves"? We Gucci?

.....Sooooorta.

*flips Whiteboard to other side, to reveal a cartoonishly drawn Supervillian labeled "Asshole"*

Behold! A Terrorist!

It's a charged word. Not used lightly. But THESE fuckers? Oh ho ho! THESE fuckers?! "Ooooh~! Look at MEEEEE! I'm gonna play with FORCES I DONT UNDERSTAAAAAAAND! Destabilize my whole funckin UNIVERSE! Kill countless TRILLIONS OF TRILLIONS! Cause life was bad to me personally and I'm mad about it! Wah wah wah!!" ASSHOLES!

These fuckers? Cause Collapses. Blow Outs. Weird Fucked Up Cancerous Real Growths. You ever seen the Cleaners? No? You don't WANT TOO. They are basically eldritch, deep sea, angler fish looking mother fuckers THE SIZE OF SOLAR SYSTEMS. They travel in SCHOOLS.

BIG ONES.

When Realities collapse, they "fall off" as it were. Detach. And have to get recycled. All the countless impurities of Life eaten way to a blank slate. So it too, can start again. Thus the Fish. But! They ALSO eat anything "problematic".

Like tumors. Cancers. Poisoned, Multiversal Threats. Those quote on quote "God Killers".

Yes. Yes this IS part of why you DONT want to be near a Collapsing Reality.

No I WON'T explain how I know.

I DONT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.

*smack the board with pointer* pay attention.

Jason Todd. Not! An Asshole. Sexy thighs. Fancy lil hair strip. We all miss him. But! He's off living his "no really, I'm totally alive, guys" hot girl summer or whatever. We are going to respect that! But!!! How did that happen? When he was DEFINITELY Hella dead?

Superboy Prime-y Pants. Who IS an ASSHOLE.

Because THAT fucker? PUNCHED HIS REALITY SO HARD IT NEARLY SHATTERED. Oh, no, I'm sorry! He punched SOMEONE ELSE'S reality! Because he is a tantruming MAN CHILD! And NOW? Now, Your Majesty, that WHOLE ASS Reality is more hair line cracks then border walls! One good shove? It'll cave in. Killing every soul inside.

The Cleaners are ALREADY circling.

It needs to be patched. Immediately. But that's not something normal ghosts can DO. The Zone won't LISTEN to us. Nor allocate the energy for it. The Concepts of Healing? We can't even FIND them.

We need help.

Please help them, King Phantom. You're the only one who CAN.

@hdgnj @babbling-babull @hypewinter @ailithnight @mutable-manifestation @nerdpoe @the-witchhunter

[ossidae-passeridae]

I'd be fascinated to hear more about gnosticism in tlt if you ever feel like writing about it.

I honestly don't know what's already been written r.e. gnosticism and TLT, so might be reinventing the wheel here, but I'll do a brief description of the overarching themes present throughout the books?

The uh, first layer of the gnosticism onion, as it were.

So to start this off I'm going to give a broad and at least partially incorrect overview of gnosticism:

Gnosticism is a tenth century mess that's loosely based off of Christianity, but then gets Weird. Thanks to some fun political situations in the Gulf, the Christians in the South were isolated from other Christians for decades thus spun off wildly from "mainstream" Christianity. We mostly have fragments left, and a lot of them contradict each other, so working out exactly what they believed/meant is Very Fun and also Somewhat Impossible. (Like the fragments of documents left in Canaan House, you could say...)

That being said, parts of their beliefs we do know better than others. They have the bible, of course, but on top of that they also have this pre-Bible creation myth regarding how God came to be in the first place.

It goes something like: In The Beginning there was a sort of primordial god-soup. This god-soup occasionally emits binary pairs of entities, also known as aeons and (later) twin flames. These binary pairs are two souls made for one another and with one another, and together they are balanced, and perfect, and full of Holy Light(tm). Each binary pair had one grammatically-masculine name, and one grammatically-feminine name. These names do not necessarily relate to perceived gender, and in fact the binary pairs are often referred to as if they are Beyond Gender Altogether. (*stares pointedly at the Lyctors*, *stares even more pointedly at Gideon's name*) [I could probably write a whole thing on this alone, honestly, they're sometimes referred to as like, the fingers on God's hand which, yeah.]

Anyway, in this pure and godly space, there is no matter, only Holy Light. But one of the entities, known as Sophia, goes off on her own and interacts with the shadowy chaos that exists outside of the godly soup. She's half of a whole, unbalanced. And through her meddling she (unintentionally) creates another half that's not pure and holy and full of godly light, but instead a dark reflection of what he Should Be. This is generally referred to as the Demiurge.

Unlike all these other beings, the Demiurge is made of matter. He is the first thing of matter to exist and he looks around the void that he's birthed into, bare aside from him, and concludes that he and he alone is God. (Hi Jod)

Then he makes earth, and heaven, and a bunch of other things besides, the things we know as the universe today. In the immortal words of Douglass Adams — this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

The problem is — all of these things that the Demiurge has created are made of matter. And being made of matter, they're cut off from the light of Godness (which is incorporeal and made of Pure Energy), thus inherently flawed. What's more, they're never meant to have existed in the first place. The Demiurge is tormented by his failure, but unable to create anything that is not inherently Wrong. (oh look it's the Nine Houses, I'd bet money that there's a link between being cut off from Godly Light and the Nine Houses being the only stable thanergenic planets here)

Sophia, who has watched these unintended consequences unfold and the suffering they've caused, cannot undo what's been done, but she can descend into the material world to share the light of wisdom and try to alleviate what suffering she can. So she does.

The story culminates with Christ being born and teaching all of humanity Gnosis — a special, mystical knowledge that can only come from the Divine, we are not really given specifics here — before he's sacrificed in order to make humanity's ascent beyond their material prison possible.

So that's the broad strokes of gnosticism as a religion, and also first layer of the TLT gnosticism onion. Just the really broad spectrum thematic *waves hands around* Stuff. I've refrained from speculating on the end because until Alecto comes out we really don't know.

If you want anything more specific anon, let me know?? I've been in the gnosticism soup for so long I can't always tell what's common knowledge and what isn't.

[jollysunflora]

I got inspired by a theory I found from this post however I disagreed with some of their choices...so I made my own version of an aspect breakdown.

Space is divided into Start and Place, which is further divided into Stir and Flux for the former and Scope and Vast for the latter. Stir was inspired by the primordial soup from which all life began and flux was honestly due to my playing overwatch too much but also has to do with gravity itself. Scope and Vast kind of go hand in hand and deal with spatial dimensions.

Time is split into Stream, for the flow of time itself. The MSPA reader saying that "time is like a river" gave me this idea. Eon is the other half of time. Stream breaks down into Hint to represent how any moment can cause an entire timeline to diverge into an offshoot, and into Trend which signifies how once a timeline becomes doomed things just get worse and worse. Eon goes into Bide since we've always had moments where we've had to bide our time, and Stop because once a timeline is over, it's done.

Light is divided into Bright and Lot. Bright is then divided into Flash and Warm which are really self explanatory. Lot (as in "casting lots") is broken into Grasp (as in grasping information) and Odds (they can be good or bad)

Void is broken down into Still (like the still puddle in the image) and Dark. Still then turns into Depth and Hide. Dark turns into Fog and Shade. I feel these are self explanatory, but if anyone wants me to go into them, I'm open to any questions.

Life is Grow and Romp. Grow becomes Sprout (who hasn't noticed tiny little green shoots out of the ground when spring comes?) and Pluck (for who but the young are so full of energy and Life?) Also good for a reference to the webcomic itself (lad/lass scamper, pluck). Romp (a word for playing or being at play) turns into Wild and Vim. Animals play all the time and life keeps going even after we try and tear it down.

Doom becomes Curb and Grind. Curb (think like how the curb keeps a car from crashing into innocent pedestrians) turns into Rule (for rules and laws keep us from running Wild-get it?) and Yield (for we all must submit to things we don't want to do for the greater good). Chose the picture of the stigmata because well tbh I am still a Christian and because it fits. Grind (like how gamers grind to get better at what they do) goes down into Sift (sifting the good from the bad) and Trim (as in trimming overgrown leaves and branches).

Breath is Move and Sound. Move then is Rush (running so fast you can feel the wind on your face) and Lift (because then you can fly). Sound becomes Din (the noise, noise, noise) and Tell (because sound and thus voices carry through air).

Blood is diluted (get it? cause it's liquid?) into Yoke ("we are equally yoked") and Trust (in order to accomplish bigger things). Yoke turns into Serve and Vow. I know that marriage vows aren't the only kind of vow, but I thought the picture fit best. Trust turns into Touch and Lead.

Heart (my own aspect!) is Pith and Whim. Pith is the core of something (for example, the pith of a fruit) and whim-because who hasn't ever done something on a whim? Pith is then divided into Self and Groove. (We all have our own self and groove) Whim becomes sway and mood, because moods can sway us to act one way or another.

With Mind I agreed with @wakraya in that it was Will and Thought. However for me, Will then becomes Seek and Delve. Thought becomes Plan and Mull. If you notice, I left a tiny reference to Terezi in way of the icons-none of them have open eyes.

Hope, to me, is Yearn and Dare. We all yearn for better things, but only some of us dare to take that first step. Yearn turns into Dream (not dreams like the space aspect pushed too far) but to dream at night and during the day when we want more, and into Grace. This is where I think the whole "physical attraction" part of Hope players comes in. Dare breaks down into Fun and Wish. Yes, this means I believe that Hope is inherently magical, or that magic itself is a part of the Hope aspect. That, or (if you believe that magic is fake like Eridan does) that advanced enough science/technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Rage is broken down into Fume and Shun. Fume (to be angry in silence) turns into Spur and Force. Since Rage is doing the opposite of just Hoping, I feel these subcategories are accurate. Shun turns into Warn (of danger) and Fear (think of the fight or flight or freeze or fawn response in nature. To fawn is when one tries to please in order to mitigate danger.)

This took me about a day to make but I had a bunch of fun doing it and figuring out how to break down each Aspect. Hit me up if you have any questions or comments! (I also want to credit the person behind the original theory, but they aren't on tumblr anymore.)

[plaguedocboi]

The Eyes of Andros

The Bahamas are best known for white sand beaches and shallow turquoise seas, but what many people don’t know is that there is a hidden underworld beneath these picturesque islands. The largest island in the Bahama chain, Andros, is home to over two hundred “blue holes”.

Blue holes can occur in the sea or on land, and form when the tops of caves collapse inward to produce a sheer-sided sinkhole full of water. On Andros, these blue holes are all connected by a series of tunnels and caverns that stretch for miles, linking the interior of the island with the open sea far beyond. Most of these caves have never been mapped, but estimates put many of them up to a thousand feet deep.

Called “the eyes of Andros”, these caves appear to be murky portals, evoking curiosity and fear as to what may lie beneath the black surface. It is little wonder that the legends surrounding these blue holes are just as dark as their waters.

There are a number of reported deaths in the blue holes that involve swimmers being dragged under by unseen creatures, never to resurface, and the bodies never recovered. Some claim this is the work of the Lusca, an animal that is half-shark, half-octopus, who pulls its prey down into the dark heart of the island to devour them.

Not only are they the potential home of terrifying monsters, they pose a very real threat to swimmers and divers as well. While oceanic blue holes are often full of life, those found in the interior of Andros are toxic. With limited tidal influence, and no currents to mix the water, the caves are highly stratified. The first few feet of the water column is stagnant freshwater, hiding denser saltwater below. This saltwater is devoid of oxygen, and is instead full of another, very dangerous, gas; hydrogen sulfide.

With no oxygen and a plethora of toxic gas, one would assume these blue holes can harbor no life. But the opposite is true. The deep caverns are inhabited by prehistoric extremophile bacteria, and the diversity is staggering. A sample of five blue holes across the island revealed that they contained no shared species; that is, every hole represents its own isolated world, and the bacteria that thrive in each are completely unique.

Some scientists liken the seawater deep in the blue holes to the primordial soup of early Earth, and research is being conducted on these bacteria to supplement our understanding of how life might evolve on other planets. Thus, divers who brave the depths of the caves here are stepping into another world, one fundamentally unlike the one above. This place is hostile to us, and to life as we know it.

So, then, this begs the question: if the the eyes of Andros are toxic to complex life, and the only things to be found are primeval, alien bacteria, then what exactly is plucking swimmers from the surface and consuming their bodies without leaving a trace?

[viceroys-cabinet]

Flitter (he/him), the bat! I still have all the fabrics I used for my wintry son so this colour palette will probably come back this year 💖

(I used an ouji pattern to improvise his bloomers)

[linka-from-captain-planet]

no so much a director's cut as it is a teaser, trailer or sneak peak, but do you have any tidbits from WIP fics (for any pairing) that you can share?

Due to being lizard-brained, most of my drafts/WIPS live in the primordial soup of my mind until I can dump them into a doc in a dedicated writing session, but I have a little written down to share!

Below the cut:

sneak peek at Minthara/Florrick #3

two snippets from Shadowheart/Nocturne fics I wish my brain would let me finish

a chunk of an abandoned followup to 'when my blue moon turns to gold again', a Shadowheart/Lae'zel fic focusing on Lae'zel raising the gith egg alone on K'liir/ the Astral Plane.

The first two installments of I could liken you to a werewolf (but I admit I provided a full moon) (Minthara/Florrick) are very much about Minthara with Florrick just being along for the ride, but the third installment is much more about Florrick and her life, both with and without Minthara. Florrick being polyamorous and having other lovers has been brought up in passing, but by the time of this third installment, Minthara is much more oriented to her true feelings for Florrick and the existence of (perceived) rivals becomes Relevant, even as they've developed a sort of tense, weird-vibed domesticity in the months since fic #2.

The evening is golden, cool and clear as the infernal sun sets behind the open veranda door. Florrick, matron of her own hideously modest House at the edge of the Upper and Lower City, overlooking the park, sent her only full-time servant home in the early afternoon, and so Minthara hovers about the sink as she braises vegetables from her garden and sears thick steaks of venison from her man.  On the counter, a smart pair of black-dyed buckskin gloves stand out against the light-oiled wood. “I understand if you don’t want them,” Florrick had floated cautiously the night before, placing them like an olive branch where they still lie, untouched, “but Ambrose just wanted to say hello.”  They looks like they would fit perfectly, the cuff and palm sewn deliberately to fit a battle-thickened wrist, and Minthara’s stomach sours for the dozenth time as she dwells on it. Minthara had thought it pragmatic at first, that Florrick should keep a pet man on a long leash, far from dirtying her fastidiously clean home but close enough to rub her feet or pleasure her on demand. Minthara herself had kept several jaluk to the same effect in Menzoberranzan. But Ambrose is no pet.

I want to return to the Shadowheart/Nocturne arena sometime soon, so I have two WIPs percolating for them. One is from Selunite Shadowheart's perspective and takes place post-canon, where she meets Nocturne again in her travels. I've mentioned it before, to be titled "under your skin, over the moon."

In Baldur’s Gate, in those first few weeks she hung around and helped heal wounds and cart away rubble, she could hardly take a step without someone reaching out to shake her hand, to offer her a bottle of fine vintage or the watch off their wrist in gratitude, to beseech her to lay a hand in blessing on their child. For someone raised in a locked vault, spewing the virtues of a life spent skulking the shadows, the sudden thrust into the limelight was… uncomfortable, to be charitable. She already felt like enough of a fraud. Felt enough like her skin was stretched too tight over her frayed nerves and her grief, as if it were someone else’s, bleached and cut and sewn into a grotesque costume. She looks in the mirror, and she sees the ragged faces of her parents framed in unearned silver. Forty years held captive. Tortured by her own hand, at times. Sacrificed, for her—for nothing. Because in the end, it was exactly as she’d been taught in the dark: only nothingness endures.

I also have another Shadowheart/Nocturne WIP, from Nocturne's perspective, that I wanted to cover the whole of their relationship in the cloister. This has been tricky because writing religious indoctrination is pretty hard without any of that experience IRL, and keeping the balance of what the narration says and what's actually happening, so it's been slow going and this WIP has been parked in the same state for months. If I ever finish it, this is 'my sparrow blue'.

The night is black and moonless, blanketing the Lower City beneath them in Her sacred darkness. It was on a similar night those decades ago that Nocturne found her name, looking up at the endless, empty void of space, swallowed up by it, listening to the crickets sing Her somber melody. It was then, and remains as always, just as the Mother Superior taught: “The Dark Lady guides us all. We find our true selves in Her embrace.” If she had a mother before the Mother, Nocturne doesn’t recall; that part of her life is mercifully blank, long since surrendered in Her name. Who or what she was before then is irrelevant, although she supposes she may owe a thank-you to whatever whore, herself devil-cursed or lain with such, that must have begat and abandoned her. She’s seen plenty enough of tiefling urchins swarming in the muck like rats, slithering aimlessly through their invariably short lives. Without Lady Shar, she would have nothing. She would be nothing. Through Her, and the Mother, and the cloister, Nocturne has not only a home, meals, and education, but a purpose and an identity—and with guidance, difficult as it may have been, the right identity, to boot. And, she has a friend. Supper is several hours behind them by now, by design the most meager meal of the day. Emptiness is a holy state, they’re taught, and so an empty belly is said to enhance an evening spent contemplating Her canon, but…  Nocturne’s belly feels chock-full of butterflies, and all she can contemplate is the warmth seeping into her thigh from Shadowheart’s foot pressed, just barely, against it.  Initiates aren’t supposed to touch each other outside of training, and even then, instructors are quick with a lashing. They aren’t kids anymore, with a blind eye turned on play-wrestling or braiding one another’s hair; they’re expected to practice restraint and turn from, not toward, false comforts. Perhaps it’d be easier if Shadowheart were better at meeting expectations. But Shadowheart has always seemed so special, so important despite her failings. To the Dark Lady, to Mother.

Lastly, I was going to write a sequel to 'when my blue moon turns to gold again', but I think this one's solidly abandoned, especially after being torpedoed by Patch 5. This fic is mostly about Lae'zel raising the gith egg baby, named Jenevelle, alone in the Astral plane, but with Shadowheart always on her mind. I was also playing with gith biology in this one.

Even the kind-faced new varsh, hand-selected by Lae’zel herself, quirked a brow when presented with a late-stage githyanki egg that had been dormant for nearly half a decade. The sentiment was shared. Its odds were poor, especially knowing that the egg was a slow hatch to begin with. But Shadowheart bathed that egg in milk every night for weeks, an old gith trick, to put it into stasis until it could be a found a safer creche to resume incubation and, hopefully, hatch. Shadowheart helped shield it from the hungry owlbear cub and the odd ambush in camp. Shadowheart rocked it in her arms on chilly nights, worried about it freezing—a pointless paranoia, but by then, Lae’zel had learned well that acts of love aren’t always optimized for efficiency. So, she had to try.

It took several years of hard-won battles, campaigning, all but pulling out a lute and singing of the lich queen’s betrayal, but Lae’zel did not merely find a safe creche: she rebuilt one. Hers. Creche K’liir, nestled inside the moon-bathed asteroid of Stardock, trailing Selûne. It seemed fitting for Shadowheart’s egg. Lae’zel told herself that she was finished with it, then. She’d done what she’d promised herself she would: found the egg a safe place and a fair chance. But it wasn’t a week later before Varsh D’narav approached her with wrung hands and news that the youngling was attempting to hatch, but the egg only rocked back and forth listlessly in the pool. It was unable to breach the shell like the others, and soon, the egg’s air sac would fail and its nutrients would be depleted. Varsh D’narav wanted to verify whether the old procedure should apply. They had skirted the issue in prior discussions—optimism and foolishness, all the same. A part of Lae’zel wanted to bark an affirmative and berate the varsh for barging in on her war-room just to share news of a weakling needing to be culled. The rest ran to the hatchery and scooped the trembling egg from the pool with her bare hands, ignoring the sting as acid splashed up her arms. For all the slates in the vast library, there would be none prescribing a procedure. If a githyanki had ever before attempted to rescue a failing hatch, they would have been wise not to leave evidence behind. Under Vlaakith’s rule, such shameful tenderness would have the egg and the gith flung into the abyss such that it couldn’t spread. But some instinct roared within Lae’zel, from somewhere deep inside down to her very being, buried underneath her lifetime of training and the embers of her indoctrination. It was as if the instructions were whispered directly into her ear by Mother Gith herself. She tore into the leathery shell with her teeth, puncturing it right over the dead space above the shriveled air sac. Pressure released from the hole, and Lae’zel pried it larger with her fingers and claws. A serous liquid seeped out, soothing the acid burns on her skin, like that was the way it was always supposed to be done. A tiny fist shot out of the tear as soon as enough space was made for it. Shadowheart’s youngling wanted to live. She worked quickly, desperately. Eggs are weaker from within than the outside, so she uses her fingers hooked into the hole to rend the shell wide enough that she could pull the air sac out entirely. In doing so, she uncovered the hatchling’s nose and mouth, exposing it to the outside world for the first time. It sneezed. Sputtered. Wailed.  Lae’zel hardly heard it.  She was too transfixed on the hatchling’s black hair. The peach tint to her skin. The nose that was still unmistakably gith, but also so unmistakably reminiscent of a larger, fleshier one that she derisively called ‘decadent’ just once, but later kissed goodnight far too few times. She hadn’t known that non-gith could imprint on a gith egg.

[krawlernyannyan]

Had some thoughts about Ruan Mei and Aeonhood, because her possibly becoming an Aeon is obviously being set up and I've seen some conceptual titles thrown around like "Aeon of Creation" or "Aeon of Origin". I definitely agree with those estimations, but where my thoughts went is what an Aeon of Creation or Origin would actually be.

Aeons are, above all else, single-mindedly focused on the Paths they embody, so an Aeon of Creation would be fixated on creation, on the act of creation, on the birth and original state of things. Everything after that?

Just look at how Ruan Mei already acts. Her obsession is a hypothetical "perfect" creation, something greater than just any other form of life. She can create life, intelligent life even, but what she wants is a genius - something intelligent enough to be worthy of acknowledgement by the Aeon of Erudition. Failing that? She wants to create an Emanator, something on the level of a demigod in this universe, and even that is just a consolation prize for her ultimate goal of reproducing an Aeon outright.

Even without Aeonic abilities she can just accidentally create new civilizations, can create entire living planets, she can terraform places on a whim...but she doesn't care to maintain any of it. Once she's created something and that hypothesis turns into something physical that's been made and she has to look at it, it's not satisfying enough and she leaves it behind. She just keeps moving on to the next thing, because that creation might be the one she wants.

And frankly, I don't think she'd find that satisfaction even after becoming an Aeon. I see Ruan Mei the Aeon of Creation, as a living kind of primordial soup, where she can create vast swathes of organisms, evolution becoming putty in her hands, and could make anything except the thing she desires most. Once her children start existing they stop being relevant - just data to discard and leave to their own devices, or perhaps worse, something to break down, dismantle, and reassemble into some "better" shape.

And let's not even get into how an Aeon of Creation ought to embody creation itself. I imagine an entity not unlike a phoenix, that is constantly in a cycle of birth and decline to continuously recreate itself. Its own body, living through this rebirth, becoming just another part of the flurry of form and function their own powers manifest into.

As for the impact of an entity like this, we're not talking about just accidentally making a society of living moon cakes, we're talking about already-inhabited star systems reduced to an Aeon's laboratory and full-on sentient species left behind with societal abandonment complexes - and who knows what kind of chaos they'd wreak to get their creator's attention back.

And I don't even want to start talking about potential conflicts with other Aeons (I could see Yaoshi taking some issues with this whole arrangement) because this ramble's gone on for long enough.

In conclusion: Well, I just don't think this would be good for anybody, but I'm not about to tell women in STEM not to keep up the hustle.

[dailyadventureprompts]

I really enjoyed your takes on Baphomet and Orcus as demon lords that might have plausible cults in the mortal world. I’ve gone through and attached similar reasonable-albeit-extreme spheres of influence for most of the other major demon lords I plan to incorporate, but the one I’m getting stuck on is Jubliex. What sort of portfolio or sphere could a giant thinking slime embody that a reasonable, very desperate mortal would choose to worship it? I’m hoping to keep it in a shape that would preserve its 5e statblock, but everything else is fair game.

Footnotes on Foes: Juiblex, Godsmidden

Juiblex touches on many of the same factors I mentioned in my recent revamp of Zuggtmoy: A "Fill in the Blank Baddie" that is 100% all slime all the time. This doesn't make them a really great villain, which wouldn't be a problem except Juiblex is up there with other demon princes as a pantheon of badguys you can base your late game campaign on. " Slime" isn't really that rich a thematic well to draw from compared to blood oaths, cruelty, or lies, now is it?

So here's my proposed revision: One part tar pit, one part garbage heap, Juiblex is a grotesque amalgamation of all that is unwanted by the gods, a cosmic dumping ground that has spontaneously developed a will of its own. Slithering through the lowest caverns of the underdark, the shadowfell, and the dead realms, bridging them together like a network of interdimensional sewer tunnels.

The actual "being" of Juiblex is dispersed across this septic sea, byproduct of the decay of dead gods, alchemical runoff, cursed artifacts, and innumerable corpses all being broken down and blending with one another into a primordial soup. Bereft of an actual "self", Juiblex experiences flashes of identity and cognition as its internal currents dredge up errant personality traits, with the remains of particularly resistant entities influencing its outlook and personality for decades or even centuries. Lacking anything resembling a cult, Juiblex’s regurgitated personality influences those who’s water it taints, with such blighted individuals feeling the will of the formless lord fermenting in the places between their own thoughts. This alien aliment sometimes progresses into full on possession, with the most dangerous cases retching up the component for a portal and opening up a new interdimensional wellspring for the princeps of ooze.

Hooks

While normally contained to the lower reaches of the multiverse, Juiblex's influence sometimes pours through in unexpected places, exuding half-digested horrors upon the face of the world like flotsam left on a beach after a tide. This might be a reason why so many sewers in great and ancient cities seem to spontaneously develop infestations of aberrations and oozes, as well as how relics from forgotten times might end up unleashed on the present. Those tho traverse these dank and fetid chambers might unwittingly seek to dredge Juiblex for more treasures, drawing a little more of the demon-ooze's influence into the world in the process.

Millennia after his defeat, a slain and mostly dissolved war god of has clawed his way to the top of the midden and has begun to direct the princeps of ooze with his desperate desire to get back at the gods that cast him down. Sowing a bit of sickness into the water supply of a military garrison, a cohort of fevered, delirious soldiers now marches through the countryside desecrating temples and raiding villages for supplies. Even if the party is able to route these foes, unless they discover the true nature of the affliction it’s very likely they’ll be fighting a mob of the common people that’ve caught the contagious dissent.

Seeking to avoid the barbarities of lesser folk, a conclave of elves established a city high atop a mountain, retreating into hedonistic indulgence and introspective study while their magic provided for every need. Something went wrong, the city’s water became tainted, and the conclave slowly succumbed to poison while the world below passed them by. Centuries after they were forgotten, the glacier that built up around their abandoned home is starting to melt, releasing their poisonous contents into the local watertable. Flooded mines, sickened townsfolk, and ravening monsters are sure to follow, all under the sway of a local manifestation of Juiblex that thinks it’s a clique of clever, highborn elvan socialites of a forgotten era, their egos and eccentricities all melded into one.

Art

[potatotomatopomato]

We are conceived in soup.

Our bodies formed from the nutrients it contains.

Then we leave the warmth of soup.

We have solidified, though we are still full of soup.

It's the blood that fills our veins,

The meningial fluid that bathes our brains.

We crave the primordial warmth of soup,

It feeds us, fills us and keeps the cold out.

Like everything, we decay then become soup.

Soup made us,

Soup sustains us,

Us becomes soup.

[indelicateink]

it's almost that time again. pouring one out for the team entering the bizarre dream primordial soup

Den of Geek, Nov. 16, 2022 Cosmetically, technically, and emotionally, what is something no one prepares you for when you take on the role of a vampire?

Jacob Anderson: Nights. The nights.

Sam Reid: Yeah. Working at night.

Jacob Anderson: Yeah, because the scripts are so beautifully written. They’re so dense, full of ideas, and full of beautiful dialogue. You don’t want to mess any of it up. You have to switch your brain into a place where it can operate at full capacity. At 4 a.m., you’re having to do this very lofty stuff, and it’s very difficult to actually prepare for that without just doing it.

Bailey Bass: Because, eventually, we all have a time at night where we start to get delusional. I documented the whole show, I’m watching videos of myself and I can pinpoint exactly when I started to lose my mind. You have to rework it to keep acting at 100%.

Along with that, no one could have prepared me for the lenses. Your vision is restricted. Sometimes we couldn’t see our other actors’ faces while we’re acting, which can make it really difficult because one of the first things you learn when you’re acting, as part of acting, is reacting. It’s mainly: when you can’t see the muscles of your actors’ face, how are you supposed to do that? Along with that, the lenses change how they feel in your eyes, based on the environment you’re in. So, if we’re working at 4 a.m., depending on the degrees it is outside, it will affect how the lenses feel on your eyes. No one can even explain that until you feel it on your eyeball.

Sam Reid: Yeah, the nights and the lenses. It’s very hard to grasp what that feels like, for the extended period of time that we did it. You enter something like a dream world, literally, that’s the best way that I can think of describing it. It’s like this bizarre dream primordial soup.