#get cronenbergian

[bagofbonesmp3]

like with most things I think skincare obsession comes from a place of wanting control of your body but forgetting "beauty" is 90% genetics. which. it's another obsession with control

[rpfisfine]

ppl on here are always advocating for more kink in movies and in media and fetishes that are like weird and irredeemable and obvious and offputting but as soon as quentin tarantino puts a woman showing her feet in one of his movies everyone is on the verge of calling the cops

[dykesynthezoid]

Daniel working with the Talamasca or as I like to call it his Naked Lunch (1991) arc

[groupwest]

finally..two halves meet in the middle. insertion - penetration - a hole is filled and two becomes one - fusion - amalgamation - consummation.

[violence-infatuation]

wish my brain would shut the fuck up abt cronenberg fr like who gives a fuck. me bitch look at my man

[horrorsequel]

guy who hates body horror: nice time to finally watch every cronenberg movie

[romanceyourdemons]

i swear to god if my second dnd character in a row gets accidentally ignominiously killed by a cronenbergian flesh monster

[freeuselandonorris]

↻FLIP FLOP: like milk from a baby, any scene - writer's pick

anon and kee @vroombeams thank you so much for requesting this 🙏

full disclosure i am in the very feral (like, even by my standards) bit of pms, and i wrote this all in one go while listening to rippin kittin on repeat. mmm cronenbergian monster sex

cw for oviposition i guess?

He tries not to think about it too much, usually. The aftermath. Everything he’s put inside Oscar, and what he might do with it afterwards. Get rid of it, he guesses. No different to how Oscar might nut inside some girl, tie off the condom and flush it down the toilet.

It feels obscene, watching one of his eggs slide free of Oscar’s body, right there in front of him. Profane in the same way it would feel to see Oscar’s organs, something that should be hidden away being exposed right there for him to look at.

Oscar’s stomach looks like it hurts. It’s swollen from hipbone to hipbone, his cock bouncing up stiff against the curve of it. Lando’s not hurting anymore. He feels like he always does afterwards, boneless and tired, limbs warm with a wrung-out kind of pleasure. 

His ovi twitches as he watches Oscar’s hole stretch itself open around the milky translucence of another egg. It’s the same colour as the boundaries to Oscar’s body, slick and pink. 

The egg slides from him, landing on the ruined towel. Oscar’s still stretched open, dripping Lando’s fluids. Lando’s still dripping, he can feel it running down his thigh. It’s never usually like this. He wants to rub the tip, the sensitive spot just inside that he’s never mentioned to Oscar. Oscar probably doesn’t even know he can come like that, probably thinks it’s just a once-a-month deal.

Oscar’s hole flexes, opening and closing like a tiny toothless mouth. His insides briefly visible, then hidden again. 

Lando reaches out before he can think better of it. He only means to touch, but Oscar’s so soft and wet and open his first two fingers slide straight in. With the tips of his fingers, still over-sensitive, he can feel something smooth and gelatinous. His eggs, nestled and warm. 

Too late, he registers the shocked jolt of Oscar’s body. 

“Sorry,” Lando says hastily, sliding his fingers free. He can’t quite bring himself to move away entirely, ends up leaving them awkwardly hovering, smearing slick across the seam of him. “I just – you’re full of me.”

His throat threatens to close up as he says it. Stupid. He should never have asked Oscar to do it. He should have stuck to the device they’d given him at the hospital when he’d turned 13, the embarrassing fleshlight with a thin plastic sac attached at one end, coloured cloudy grey like it was embarrassed too. At least that hadn’t made him feel like this. He didn’t feel anything much about it at all, then, other than relief it was over.

He should shut up, he knows, but his mouth is working without his permission now. It goes like this, sometimes. Endorphins, or something. Riding the wave of the emptiness, feeling cleansed and fresh. 

“I wanna feel it,” Lando’s mouth says for him. Voice barely audible, but not so quiet Oscar can’t hear. “Can I?” 

Oscar doesn’t reply. Doesn’t take his hand away from his face. But in hesitating, jerky movements, he widens his knees, exposing himself fully. 

Lando makes a desperate, low sound. His salivary glands are working overtime; he feels like he might start drooling, everything tasting metallic. Beneath the skin of his back, he feels the articulated plates of his spine ripple, pushing against the skin. 

He pushes his fingers back into Oscar’s body, rubbing the weeping tip of his ovi with the fingertips of his free hand, trying to ease the pressure. 

When he twists his wrist, he can feel his eggs moving against each other, slipping easily, conforming to the shape they’re given. Lando stretches his fingers until they ache, transfixed by the way Oscar’s body accommodates him like it welcomes his presence. 

The eggs, no longer held tight by Oscar’s body, slide past him. One slithers down into the vee of his fingers, nudging into the skin there. The fine hairs on Lando’s arms prickle. 

He moves, just slightly, and he can see the egg now. He takes his other hand away from himself, the fingers shining and smelling of salt. Holds his palm beneath Oscar and lets the egg drop into it. 

He’s never really looked at them properly. The strange texture of their membrane, smooth-rough like the skin of a peach beneath the coating of his slick. The odd vein-like structures beneath it, the murky shapes within. There’s weird shit online, he knows; people bursting them, getting off on it. It’s always made him feel sick, the thought of it. Feels cruel, somehow, even though there’s nothing – like, in them. No potential there, when they’re fresh from his body and dumped into the bin.

It’s warm in his palm, the heat of Oscar’s body soaking through. Not heavy, exactly, but a definite weight. For the first time, looking at it, Lando can kind of see how it might be something that could harbour life. 

Oscar’s leg keeps twitching. His cock is drooling against his belly. Lando wants to take it in his mouth, drink him down, return the favour. He wants to press one of the eggs into Oscar’s mouth, gag him with it, kiss him and pass it between their tongues until they’ve sucked the goodness from it. 

“There’s one more, I think,” he says. His throat feels ribbed and dry. He stretches his fingers, dislodging the final egg. “I can just about feel it. You might have to – push a bit.”

He can barely get the words out. Can’t tell what it is he wants.

He could lock the door, refuse to let Oscar out until they’ve figured out every possible combination for their bodies to fit together.

It’s never been like this before. Never felt so raw. He feels like chopped meat, teeth cutting into his tongue. He knows he’s doing a bad job of hiding the bits of himself he usually keeps under wraps. 

Dropping the eggs onto the towel, he grabs himself again, fucking his fingertip through the tip where he’s wet and swollen.

Oscar’s watching him, dazed and panting. 

He squeezes around Lando’s fingers, a sudden burst of strength from his exhausted muscles. Lando hears himself make a noise, and suddenly Oscar’s shaking all over, spilling. His own come, shooting from the tip of his untouched cock. The last of Lando’s eggs.

[foone]

I'm tired of trying to 3D print little boxes for my electronics projects. I think I'm gonna just get some of that skin-colored silicone mix from aliexpress and pour it over them.

a keyboard adapter? why have it be a little box that's a pain to print, when it can be a Cronenbergian flesh lump that slightly glows from the inside?

[cowboycannibalism]

just got out of a late showing of Talk To Me and I have thoughts!

⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

so let's dive in while it's still fresh in my mind

Grief is a heavy player in this movie and that's what makes it so good. So much of what happens is because of Mia not being able to let go or face her grief. she's vulnerable to the spirits/demons/souls because she's lonely and sad and she's trying to find anything to make her feel.

The opening scene was absolutely amazing! it sets up how fucking crazy the movie is going to be. It brings us into the world where everything is for views, everyone is entertainment even when they're suffering. It's not the focus of the film but they way social media guides the story is interesting.

to add to the previous point, every time someone does the "game"/seance, the others whip out their phones with lightening speed. They laugh, they point their cameras at the possessed and scream and shout in joy regardless of what the possessed is doing. we see this in Daniel's first go which is a weird sexual possession that leaves him embarrassed and scared, whereas the group is laughing and recording. it's also what brings Mia to the hand in the first place, she keeps seeing the videos posted of people playing the game and having "fun"

I really liked the kangaroo scene because it was so jarring and the foreshadowing was just mwah. wonderful.

I will admit Mia got annoying because you want her to know that she should stop, but she won't. I was literally trying not to yell at the screen lol

on the other hand (ha hand), I get it. She was desperate, grief will do that to you, she just wanted answers and closure. And that can drive you mad.

The gore/violence in the movie was so good for a possession film! The Riley scene was intense and had the small amount of us in the theater squirming and yelling and gasping. And the limbo/purgatory scene although brief was not what I was expecting and it blew me away, it gave cronenbergian/yuzna's Society [1989] vibes.

the cast was very very good! Sophie Wilde played Mia with such an intensity and passion that drew me in even when I didn't care for her character's actions. And the supporting cast stood their own which was awesome because sometimes in horror those other characters can sometimes get pushed aside or fade into the background.

the sound design had me so tense! I swear I thought I was hearing things and not sure if it was me or the movie. We don't talk enough about sound when it comes to horror. It's honestly what really scares me, more than the actual scenes, it's the score that revs up my anxiety and fear.

All in all, the movie was really good! I'm not even a huge fan of possession horror but I was excited to see it and really glad that I did. I know it's been greenlit for a sequel which would be interesting depending on where they take the story but I'm definitely more interested in the prequel that they've already made!! I hope it gets picked up by A24 like the sequel is because I definitely would like to know more about the hand and mythology behind the "game".

Just to add on some more personal thoughts: It's interesting to me how often grief plays a role in horror. From Midsommar to Hereditary to The Babadook to classics like Pet Sematary, the list goes on. We are vulnerable when we're grieving, easier to let bad things in or ignore the people who love us who are trying to help. When I watch horror about grief, it gets to me more often than any others because I've known grief like a childhood friend. It's been with me my entire life. But I've learned to handle it better than I used to, and with movies like this it's a safe place for me to let it consume me, let it be messy and overwhelming like it is for the characters in the movie.

Anyways to wrap this up please go see Talk To Me! If you like possession movies you'll like it, if you like movies with deeper layers you'll like it, it feels like there's a little bit of everything to appeal to most horror fans.

[heedra]

my hypothetical redline oc is a guy who just gets down and runs on all fours but is kitted out with a gazillion different horrific cronenbergian, all-tomorrows, caves of qudcore biomods so that they can go as fast as a racecar

[mrs-stans]

Meet the makeup wizard who transformed Sebastian Stan into ‘A Different Man’

By Josh Rottenberg

At the tender age of 5, Mike Marino saw “The Elephant Man” for the first time and his life was forever changed. When David Lynch’s haunting and heartbreaking story of the disfigured John Merrick would air on HBO in the early 1980s, Marino found himself horrified but unable to look away, sparking a fascination with prosthetics that would eventually lead him to becoming one of Hollywood’s top makeup artists.

“I was so afraid of it, but little did I know how beautiful that story was and how much of an imprint it would leave on my brain and soul,” says Marino, 47, who earned consecutive Oscar nominations in 2022 and 2023 for his makeup work on “Coming 2 America” and “The Batman,” the latter starring a totally transformed Colin Farrell. “If it wasn’t for that film, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

But for actor, TV presenter and disability rights advocate Adam Pearson, Lynch’s film took on a more painful role in his life. Growing up in England with neurofibromatosis type 1, a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on his face, Pearson was often taunted by classmates who cruelly called him “Elephant Man” and other names. As he got older, he saw how movies routinely depicted people with disfigurements as freaks, villains or victims, stripping away their humanity. “There’s an element of laziness to it,” says Pearson, 39. “How do we show this character is evil? Let’s slap a scar on them.”

Now, through a twist of fate, the lives of Marino and Pearson have intersected on a very different project: the darkly funny, mind-bending psychological thriller “A Different Man.” Directed by Aaron Schimberg, the A24 film stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, a shy, disfigured actor working in New York City who undergoes an experimental procedure to transform his appearance, only to find himself losing the role he was born to play — himself — to a cheerful, outgoing man named Oswald with his same facial deformity, played by Pearson. Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) co-stars as a playwright whose latest work brings Edward’s identity crisis to a head.

“A Different Man,” which The Times called “a self-deconstructing meta-pretzel of a dark comedy” following its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, tackles complex themes of identity, beauty and disability with a blend of Charlie Kaufman-esque surrealism and David Cronenbergian body horror. Along with Stan’s performance, Marino’s meticulously crafted prosthetics are key to bringing Edward and his inner agonies to life, reflecting the deeper emotional anguish of a man trying to escape his own skin.

“The movie portrays how the shell of who we are should not dictate our spirit and our personality,” Marino says. “I think it’s a very important film, much like ‘The Elephant Man’ was.”

When Schimberg first wrote the script, inspired by his own struggles with a cleft palate and his experience working with Pearson on his 2019 satire “Chained for Life,” he initially had no idea how he would actually pull off the film’s demanding prosthetics work. “I was sort of blissfully ignorant,” says Schimberg. “After Sebastian came aboard, we started cobbling the film together very quickly. It was only about a month before shooting that I realized this film was going to completely fall apart if we didn’t get this right. It was very down to the wire.”

Signing on as an executive producer for the film, Stan asked around about makeup artists in the New York area who could handle such a difficult job under that kind of time pressure. One answer consistently came back: “Literally everyone, hands down, was like, ‘You’ve got to get Marino,’ ” the actor recalls.

Though he was already busy with a job on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Marino, who has done his share of more fantastical creatures, leapt at the challenge of re-creating a real-life disfigurement like Pearson’s. “I’m fascinated with people that have something going on with their skin because it’s just the most interesting, artistic, natural thing,” Marino says. “For me, there’s an amazing beauty to how Adam looks. This was not about a scary face or a monstrous person. I don’t like to do things like that with no soul or purpose.”

Marino’s passion for makeup and prosthetics took root early in life, inspired by industry legends like Dick Smith (“The Exorcist”) and Rick Baker (“An American Werewolf in London”). Growing up in New York, Marino started honing his skills as a preteen by practicing on his friends with latex, foam and various chemicals, destroying his bedroom rug in the process, to the chagrin of his parents. While still in high school, he mailed his portfolio to Smith and received encouragement and advice by phone from the makeup legend, who won an Oscar in 1985 for “Amadeus” and earned an honorary Academy Award for his life’s work in 2012. “Once he acknowledged me, it was like, OK, this is serious. There was no stopping me.”

After cutting his teeth on “Saturday Night Live” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Marino broke into film with the 2007 psychological thriller “Anamorph” and quickly became known for his versatility, seamlessly switching between fantasy creatures and more subtle, realistic applications. His work on Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” amplified the film’s psychological horror, while on Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” he enhanced the film’s digital de-aging of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino with carefully crafted prosthetics.

Outside of film, Marino created the Weeknd’s plastic-surgery-gone-wrong look for the singer’s “Save Your Tears” video. “It’s all problems to solve,” Marino says. “There is no playbook.”

Diving into “A Different Man,” Marino used photographs and 3D scans of Pearson’s face, which has undergone some 40 surgeries over the years, as the basis for a multi-piece silicone prosthetic that would work with Stan’s features. “There was no way I could completely replicate Adam’s exact proportions,” he says. “I had to make some aesthetic choices.”

While the makeup work in “The Elephant Man” benefited from that film’s grainy black-and-white cinematography, the prosthetics in “A Different Man” had to withstand more unforgiving scrutiny. To put his Edward face to the test, Stan would walk from Marino’s makeup chair to the set through the streets of New York and crowds of strangers, giving him tremendous insight into how people treat those who look different.

“I went to my old coffee shop and the same barista who’d served me for years couldn’t identify me,” Stan recalls. “I got to really feel people’s reactions in real time. There were people who couldn’t even look at me, other people were staring and sometimes you’d get a bigger reaction, like, ‘Oh s—, it’s the Elephant Man!’ As Adam puts it, you feel like public property.”

Pearson, who shares his character’s sunny gregariousness, encouraged Stan to think about it like he does with his own experience as a movie star. “I was like, ‘You don’t know the level of invasion I get with people pointing, staring and taking photos, but you do understand a very similar thing from this angle, so lean into that heavily,’ ” he says. “ ‘And if it makes you uncomfortable, lean into it further.’ ”

While wearing the prosthetics, Stan could only see out of one eye and had limited hearing in one ear, challenges that helped further inform his performance as a man who has learned to shy away from potential threats and insults. “Edward is a character that has had to endure a lot of emotional abuse and probably some physical abuse, so he is probably always on his left foot a little bit in case something happens,” Stan says.

As Edward’s face changes following his radical treatment, Marino made additional prosthetics showing the transition, including an “extremely soft, mushy version” that, in a particularly Cronenbergian scene, Stan could pull off in chunks.

Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot in “The Batman,” work for which Marino was Oscar-nominated. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Marino’s talent for transforming stars is on full display in Farrell’s hulking, thuggish look as the Penguin in 2022’s “The Batman” and the new HBO spinoff series. “When Colin saw the sculpture I made, ideas started exploding,” Marino says. “Once we did a makeup test, it was magical — he knew how to speak, how to walk and he was already the guy.”

Marino, who is preparing to make his directorial debut based on a script he wrote set in the 1980s (“It’s deliberately not effects-heavy,” he hints), has lost none of his passion for the transformative power of latex and silicone since the days he was obsessively poring through issues of Cinefex magazine as a teenager. “If you think of Michelangelo showing beauty 500 years ago in painting and sculpture, I’m still showing that same beauty but in this new hyper-realistic way, in silicone,” says Marino, who named his makeup effects studio Prosthetic Renaissance. “It’s a very unique art. It’s like moving sculptures and paintings all at once.”

As for Pearson, if he were offered an experimental treatment to change his face, like in “A Different Man,” he says he wouldn’t take it. Despite the challenges it has brought him, Pearson believes his face has shaped the life he leads today.

“I joke with my friends that my disability does a lot of heavy lifting for my appalling personality,” he says with a laugh. “Everyone thinks it’s hard to go from non-disabled to disabled but I think the other way around would be even harder. The path we walk and the struggles we go through make us who we are and they’re inseparable from one another.”

[rassilon-imprimatur]

I'm such a Biogoji purist compared to the later Heisei designs and suits. I think I've always really resonated with how it syncs with Godzilla vs Biollante's wider biopunk horror aesthetic and grim tone, and I think the design just barely borders being flatout disturbing?

So much of the look of Godzilla vs Biollante clearly and famously owes to Gunhed, which reflects a sense of the Cronenbergian in its grisly biology just as it is a showcase of gorgeously grisly mecha.

Putting the obvious factor of Biollante herself aside for a moment, the whole of Godzilla vs Biollante feels so tethered to the roughly contemporaneous Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue and Zeiram. Its truly a flatout biopunk horror flick. It’s to a point where it actually looks a little wrong to me without VHS fuzz.

Feels like a relative of Hiruko The Goblin as well, if I'm being honest.

I dunno! The movie’s just blatantly a horror picture show in a way not a lot (not enough) of Godzilla movies are? 

I think Biogoji becoming the basis for the later Heisei suits, the design morphing over the 90s to the 1994 and 1995 suits becoming the "defacto" Godzilla for so long, has overshadowed the aspects of the design that are truly... gross? The texture of his skin, constantly soaking and in the movie's color palette, his dark brown predatory eyes that look completely black (like a shark's), his double rows of shark teeth. His dorsal fins, while a reworking of the classic 60s look, are actually distressingly "gory" in a way I think that gets taken for granted. Bone tearing out of his flesh.

There's so many classic elements of his body (mostly the Shodaigoji and Kinggoji) at play, and he is supposed to carry a regal “classic” aesthetic to contrast with and act as an uncanny dissonance against Biollante's more blatant nightmare, but I dunno! He's a quietly nasty boy, a simmer of energy Shin Godzilla cranked up to a boil?

(And he's goT THE BEST WITTLE ANGWY SCWUNCHED UP FACE!)

[antisocialxconstruct]

I may not be the only one who's commented on this but shoutout to all the people on this site who started watching Scavengers Reign for that one incredibly homoerotic scene of Azi and Levi and didn't realize they were getting into a Cronenbergian scifi horror series.

[definitely-not-an-alb]

ooh, how do you think molly would grift essek?

Alright. Let’s grift Essek.

First I need to note that any objection along the line of ‘Essek is too intelligent to fall for grifts’ is unnecessary, because whatever you think of Essek’s specific characterisation, assuming you are to intelligent to fall for a grift is one of the major ways people fall for them, in a ‘renowned high pressure social group researcher proclaiming on twitter that Sissy Porn is real and dangerous’ kinda way (look it up it’s some hysterical terf bs).

Gonna use that joke as a sidenote that if I am conflating grifts and high pressure social groups in this, it’s ‘cause as far as I care the difference is how self-aware the people running the show are. Watch any MLM-Doku (and I think we can all agree MLMs are grifts) and you’ll inevitably get to the part about weird aspiration culture bs and group pressure. It’s all one soup.

With that out of the way, let’s establish a baseline: What’s Molly’s reason for grifting Essek? Probably money and also the fun of it/being bored. Considering Kingsley abandoned his perfectly fine shipping company job to run off to be pirate king, I don’t think ‘Molly keeps grifting long after the M9 have become financially stable for shits and giggles and because Jester enjoys it’ is too outlandish a projection. Additionally, I don’t think Molly is great with impulse control nor this whole thing where current actions cause future consequences.

Now; why would Essek fall for a grift. Grifting relies on the dupe wanting something more than having good sense about it. Most people want money, so most girfts are structured around greed, but we know money is no object to Essek (though this does make him a juicy target – what he would barely miss might make a good haul for any grifter). We do know he is primarily motivated by knowledge instead, as well as a desire to be recognized as intelligent and exceptional. Additionally, we know he needs (in the character development sense) The Power of Friendship. Lastly, I think it’s fair to say he subconsciously longs for excitement (happy, fulfilled bureaucrats don’t become heretic spies; nor do they befriend a gang of mercenaries; implicitly, Essek is happier living the life of a wayward refugee-adventurer wizard than that of an Evil Gay Vizier Court Wizard or whatever papers a Shadowhand stamps nine-to-five.).

Being a paranoid bastard makes him a harder target, though the fact that we know he has fallen for someone’s bs before (I’m counting the spectacularly bad decision that is him allying with the Assembly as falling for a grift here. That’s a stupid decision to make!) makes him an easier target. Being so socially isolated makes him an easier victim, too, though his general rejection of people and clear discomfort with social interactions makes him an unlikely target for something like a romance scam. Essek’s relationship to tolerating bullshit is a weird one; on the one hand, he does put up with Jester’s (and the rest of the Nein’s) shenanigans, on the other he clearly knows how to and dares to tell someone to fuck off, and there’s that time he just ditches everyone via teleport (hilarious). So boundaries-wise, he could go either way. Lastly, I’d argue he’s at least somewhat impulsive or at least not risk averse. Always remember we are looking at an NPC next to Sword’n’Sorcery Adventurers – Essek might look cautious next to ruin-trawling wizards, but compare him to Gundula, 55, who works in Insurance and just clicked on a phishing link to claim her Totally Real Oilve Garden Gift Card, and you’ll see what I mean – most people are too risk-averse and unimpulsive to, again, commit treason via international conspiracy and then run off without a moment’s notice to dig around a cursed-ass ruin to save the world from a Cronenbergian nightmare.

Conclusion: He’s rich, he’s bored, he loves pretending to be a spy or grand discoverer, he wants to buy your dodgy foreign papers and incredible discoveries about the Luxon so, so badly and he has absolutely no one left in his life who’ll tell him it’s a bad idea.

So, for example, Molly could Voynich him. All he needs is a battered notebook and some writing supplies, whatever knowledge of what wizards’ and alchemists’ and spies’ scribbles look like he can easily pick up from traveling with the Nein and an opportunity to ask Essek to have a look at this encoded notebook he’s been lugging around all over the continent with him, why, he was at this party in Zadash and everyone else was some boring old pompous wizard (such a bore!) so he pickpocketed one of them, just for the fun of it, but, well, turns out neither Caleb nor Beau can make head nor tails of the weird sign code it’s written in (how tragic, if only someone happened to be so much cleverer than both of them!) and if Essek wants to have a look Molly would be more than happy to lighten his pack. For a small pittance, of course.

What’s small change to Essek is probably pretty nice to have for Molly, even by that level and especially if we’re mostly doing this for the fun of it. Essek gets to fall face first into his desire to show up Caleb, Beau and potentially an unknown Assembly member with his clearly superior decoding, espionage and wizardly skills and gain Secret Knowledge, maybe even Assembly Secrets on top of that.

Arguably, this one does rely very heavily on the fact that it’s hard to prove a negative, or in this case, hard to prove a barely-literate conman’s scribbles are just that. Do keep in mind Essek doesn’t know Molly is a habitual conman, but even so, it’s not a fantastic con (Essek isn’t dumb and knows his arcana after all and Molly doesn’t, or at least not enough to make a proper Voynich).

You could make it a better Voynich by getting Caleb in on it, but instead let’s pep it and turn it into a proper Real Stradivari by changing the hints that this manuscript might be legit to being alchemy-related and adding in a shill. Let’s go with Jester, because she’s down to clown, can lie and has a way with Essek’s boundaries.

So this time around, we aren’t asking Essek outright to buy our bogus notes – instead Molly gives him the whole spiel, hands him the notebook, fucks off with as little time to actually look at it as possible before Jester enters the scene to ask what THAT is and go oh it’s about ALCHEMY well, that DOES look like the signs she saw around Yezza’s house, pretty suuuure, oh, do you think it might be Yezza’s? Do you think Yezza might want it? Do you think she should ask Molly to sell it to her so she can give it to Yezza as a present to be nice because she’s such a nice friend who does nice things?

Honestly, the money part is optional if this is wholly about making Essek look up to see if the ceiling does indeed say gullible (and if Jester is involved, it might well do so! Always better to check, with her!), but a proper Violin Drop concludes with the Grifter returning to take their worthless thing back only to be asked to sell by the victim, who thinks the grifter doesn’t know what worth he has. If it was real, offering to buy the notebook would mean Essek outsmarted a minimum of three people (Beau and Caleb can’t crack the code, Molly is too dumb and illiterate to know valuable research notes from the morning paper) and gets his hands on potentially unknown-to-him luxon-related secrets! Alas, it’s not real, as he will realize soon.

So these are two (related) ways to scam Essek. But there’s a third one I want to mention one that is a lot of cinematic fun and I didn’t know had a name until Wikipedia told me no one does it irl (boo! That’s no fun!). It takes a lot of prep, math, and a lot of people and combines Essek’s obsession with the Luxon’s secrets and Molly’s penchant for passing himself off as psychic.

Molly would need something people in Rosohna bet on, like some kind of sport, preferably one with only two results and places people do said betting on said sport in groups. I’m assuming this exists on account of gambling and sports being culturally pretty universal concepts that love to go together.

Anyway. Imagine you’re Essek Thelyss, and one day a bunch of weirdos show up in court with a piece of the god you’re atheistically-heretically obsessed with. A few weeks later, you, having your ears to the ground about new developments regarding said not-god-pieces, hear one of the weirdos has made a name for himself as a outright oracle, correctly predicting the outcome of Fantasy-Dodgeball (Rosohnas’ favourite sport) perfectly six weeks running. He swears it’s because proximity to the Luxon amplified his inborn and long-trained psychic powers to predict the future.

Now, this is obviously bullshit. Except if Essek, being regrettably acquainted with the weirdos, were to ask, Molly would certainly confirm that sure, he has mystic powers and certainly they were amplified by the Luxon and predicting sport results is a hobby of his wherever they go, does Essek want to see? and lead Essek to a bar where every regular can swear on whatever he likes that Molly has correctly predicted the results of Fantasy-Dodgeball since the first week of being in Rosohna, in fact since before he himself knew the rules or track-record of any of the teams. Not only that, but there’s a second bar full of people Molly can introduce him too. And if he wants, he can certainly come back for a drink in one of them again next week when Molly has done it once more. Just call on Molly, he’ll tell you the time and date to meet some true believers, not all of whom can possibly be his shills.

(And, incidentally, barely worth mentioning, really, since Molly’s psychic blessings from the Luxon are so accurate, he has Exciting Business Opportunities for anyone willing to place more than their weekly betting budget in his trust, and he’d love for Essek to take a look at his powers. For a small compensation of his time, of course.)

Of course Molly can’t predict the results of Fantasy-Dodgeball. Instead, the first week of downtime in Rosohna, he found out what people like to bet on in Rosohna and where, picked one or two places in each district, go there and make predictions with a fifty-fifty split, then eliminate each watering hole where he was wrong each week, slowly cutting his audience back to only people who are getting to know him as That Outlander Who Always Knows The Results of Fantasy-Dodgeball, all the while escalating the story from him being just some dude betting and drinking with the guys to the whole Chosen By The Luxon thing. Considering this is a double-scam involving a faith aspect, he might very well still cash in in places he’s been wrong once only since victims of faith-based scams are very likely to overlook inconsistencies in their scammer’s stories or promised results. By the time Essek gets involved Molly’d be down to one or two places of true believers coming to him for ‘always accurate’ tips and a bunch of other people all over Rosohna he might get some money off based on the faith-aspect. And now perhaps one intrigued high-ranking government official who’s more than willing to overlook the hereticism inherent to the whole thing and is instead very likely to fall in the academic glue-trap of trying to disprove something clearly bogus that you do kind of want to believe in because like.

Wouldn’t it be cool? If the Luxon had more awesome powers? And one of them happened to fall in Essek’s hands, with no oversight and no need to cooperate with someone like Trent or Ludinus? Would he not want it to be real?

Anyway. The real answer to this question is: Enlist Beau to send bogus stuffed bills to Essek’s secretary. Bureaucrat on bureaucrat violence, let’s go.

[garpond]

ppl on campus who do OC stuff try to communicate with me but i cant risk talking to them because theyre making pure and wholesome dnd fae softboi deergirl froggy pastel found family characters and im writing about regular men from the late 60s and early 70s getting serial killed (social commentary + secret extended erotic cronenbergian version ❔)