FLUXES [Celestis: Engineered Participants / Technologies]
Example: "DOCTOR, The"
[Image description, courtesy of @quailfence: a series of pictures of text, alternated with screencaps and gifs from Doctor Who.
1: Text: Fluxes: [Celestis: Engineered Participants/Technology] Individuals transposed backwards in time but not too far in space, using a very high chaotic limiter setting and tied to their home period by a thread of biodata
2: The Eleventh Doctor stands in the future corpse of his TARDIS, looking and a pulsing stream of light that has replaced the console. He says, "That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space."
3: Text: He raised a finger. 'Look. There.
Now she could just make out the thread in the moonlight. It was just a faint reflection, maybe a foot or two long, about a metre off the ground. A taut strand of spiderweb hanging in the air, not attached to anything.
'What is it?' Fitz asked.
'It's only partially rotated into three dimensions,' he said. He pushed his finger right through the glimmering line, without affecting it. 'That's why it looks one- or two-dimensional. The rest is still perpendicular to what we can see - woven into higher space, or the time vortex…'
'Yes,' said Fitz, 'but what is it?' 'It's what your friend mistook for a ley line.' The Doctor was scuttling around the silver thread, peering at it from every angle, getting more and more agitated. 'It's part of the fabric of space-time itself. What DNA is to your genetic code, this stuff is to biodata. And it's all just exposed here now. Personality, history, memory, perception, all vulnerable…'
'I'm going to have to ask you again, aren't I?' said Fitz.
The Doctor said, 'It's me.'
4: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth doctors in the TARDIS. 14: "But you're fine?" 15: "I'm fine, because you fixed yourself. We're Time Lords, we're doing rehab out of order."
5: Text: The subject is turned loose in his or her own history, and the limiter setting allows tiny actions taken by the future version to have considerable effects on the past version. The biodata link then transfers these changes to the future version, which alters it, and thus alters the changes made to the past version. Therefore, the individual's history is kept constantly in flux.
6: The Fugitive Doctor says, "Let me take it from the top: Hello, I'm the Doctor."
7: Text: Let me finish. Think back to that time when you went to see your previous selves.
8: Ten, Eleven, and War talk to each other. Ten: "You're not actually suggesting that we change our own personal history?" Eleven: "We change history all the time. I'm suggesting far worse."
9: Text: 'Maybe there's no one home on Gallifrey,' said the boy softly. There was just the one of him.
The Doctor looked at him, cupping the small white cube in his hands. The boy said, Maybe they all left. Or maybe the whole planet's being destroyed, and undestroyed, and destroyed, and you just caught them at the wrong moment.
10: The TARDIS by the ruins of Gallifrey
11: Text: 'It's impossible,' said the Doctor. 'It's impossible for my people. Our past is unreachable. What's written can't be unwritten.'
'Who said your history can't change?'
Another boy answered, 'Someone from his history.'
And another: 'Maybe it's the second-biggest lie in Time Lord history.'
12: Dhawan!Master tells Thirteen, "You are the Timeless Child."
13: Thitreen stares at a ruined house. Swarm whispers in her ear and tells her, "All the memories you've lost, all the people you've been. It's all in there, contained within that house."
14: Text: And it was like the Doctor's home. As if his ship understood the loss of the House and had compensated to fill the emptiness. Shadowy corridors, alcoves and stairways, a secret at every turn. Like being in the Doctor's head. Like his life, for that matter, the details of which were strewn like flotsam across the floor.
15: Text: 'Sweet,' said the little boy. 'That's my favourite of your origin stories, too.'
The Doctor opened his eyes. He had been laughing, he realised, he felt that lightness in himself. The boys had all moved away, behind him, leaving him facing the empty dark of the warehouse.
'What do you mean?' he asked. His voice sounded very small.
'Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?'
'Feel free to believe either of them,' snapped the Doctor, 'or both of them, or neither of them. If you're curious about my past, I want there to be as many wrong answers as possible.'
16: The Eighth Doctor tells someone, "I'm half human. On my mother's side."
17: Text: 'Well he's a hybrid, you know that. A Gallifreyan not born of Gallifreyan, the one who unites the two races and brings good old human niceness into their alien society. Aliens need that, y'know.'
'A human hybrid? She saw the contempt in his curling lip. 'Pseudoscientific nonsense. There's no evidence,' he repeated.
'He's allowed to be different. He's got a prophecy and everything.'
18: Lady Me says, "By your own reasoning, why couldn't the Hybrid be half Time Lord, half human?"
19: Text: Someone giggled. 'Let's play pin the tale on the donkey.'
'Maybe you didn't use to have a father.'
'Maybe you're living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there's an Enemy out there -'
The Doctor shouted, 'I'm not listening!'
'- who's rewriting you when you're not looking!'
'Maybe you weren't always half human.'
'But now you've become always half human.' 'Maybe you weren't always a Time Lord.'
But now you've always been a Time Lord.'
'Maybe you originally came from some planet in the forty-ninth century. Fleeing from the Enemy who'd overrun your home -'
'I said I'm not listening! Laa laa laa laa laa -'
'- and you've just been written and rewritten and overwritten, ever since.'
'Pin the tale!'
'How d'you know it's not true?'
'How could you know it's not true?'
The voices crowded in. 'How would you know, huh?'
'How would you know?'
'How would 'How would you 'How 'How would you know? you know? you know? know?'
'Why would I care?' shouted the Doctor.
The boy fell silent.
20: Lady Me asks, "Am I right? Is it true?" Twelve replies, "Does it matter?"
21: Text: However, the one group from the Homeworld which has excelled at flux-engineering is the Celestis.
22: Two asks the Time Lords, "Now then… what about me?"
23: Tecteun tells Thirteen, "Which is ehy we engineered the Fluyx: Shut the universe down and you within it."
24: Text: Even Mictlan itself can be considered a kind of enormous flux, an endlessly-shifting realm so cortosive to the rest of history that its heartland has to be kept on the outer skin of the universe
24: The Fourteenth Doctor tells Donna, "I invoked a supersition, at the edge of the universe, where the walls are thin and everything is possible."
25: The space station from Wild Blue Yonder
26: Text: There are suggestions of a stable middle-ground between the two fates, in which the physical matter of the flux is lost but the meaning of the subject/ victim is retained, a series of memetic connections with no flesh to support it. Yet this entity exists only on a purely theoretical level, relying on the perceptions of others to survive at all.
27: The Twelfth Doctor walks up to the TARDIS console. He says, "Can't wait to hear what I say." Glancing at the viewer, he adds, "I'm noting without an audience."
28: Text: You know what Sam represents. If a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound? Stop me if I'm getting too abstract here, but if a Time Lord saves the world and nobody witnesses him doing it, does history care? She's your witness. The thing you need to make you whole.
29: The First Doctor looks at the viewer and says, "Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!" End description.]
[Plain text: Fluxes [Celestis: Engineered Participants / Technologies] Example: "Doctor, The". End plain text.]
@dw-described
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steve is a ride-or-die husband in married for real
doesn't even ask why danny wants to kill someone, just who, and immediately assumes they will be doing it together, just like everything else.
all jokes aside about how deeply married they are, genuinely it's astounding how truly intertwined their lives are. 'your problems become my problems'. just like in a real marriage there's a certain entitlement towards each other's possessions, 'what's mine is yours and viceversa'.
steve drives danny's car and even danny slips and calls it 'our car'
danny calls steve's living room 'our living room'
'why is he mad at us?' 'must be your fault' aka they share enemies and grudges
steve helps himself to danny's wallet (basically pooled finances) but also drops exorbitant amounts of money on gifts to danny and grace
danny wanders into steve's house without knocking and helps himself to steve's fridge whenever he feels like it
not to mention how possessive he is over steve's kitchen and is indignant when he sees another man using what's his (because when he lived in a shitty apartment he basically used it whenever to learn to cook properly as by the end of s1 he's clearly cooked steve breakfast enough times that steve knows he hates his eggs)
'what are WE thinking, buddy'
co-parenting danny's kids together (steve even calls grace 'my girl' and worries about her being sent to a school that's gonna be a den of sin)
'if a guy was taking pictures like that of my daughter I'd kill him' 'me too'
when danny gets called away for work steve finishes charlie's bedroom by himself and then tells charlie danny did it just like a stay-at-home parent covering up for the busy parent
danny delegates activities he doesn't want to do (jogging, training, surfing) but steve would love to do to him so they are both contributing in raising grace. (meanwhile he hates that stan is paying for her tennis lessons, intruding on something danny willingly lets steve in on)
steve sees danny's retirement as their business, 'our retirement'
they go 50/50 on a restaurant which is danny's dream and steve is nothing if not a supportive husband
all the times danny stays at the house for weeks rent free (and sleeps in steve's bed while house-sitting and blames it on the dog) and moves in twice, second time permanently
dreams of shared future together, 'this is how I always thought it was gonna end, two guys sitting on the beach, watching sunsets'
they really are married in all but the legal sense. it's a mutually beneficial partnership where they are equals not in the sense that they literally contribute the same amount but they contribute what they can in accordance to their ability and compromise and fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. they even have an almost innate telepathy only characteristic of people that have been married for decades.
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Potential Ango backstory. Because I like to make connections that don't exist.
I received a tag under my last post about Ango...
I have been enabled.
What I said in that last post was that due to the disconnect between Ango's values and the values of the Special Division - in particular, their views on necessary sacrifice and the greater good - I found it odd for this to be Ango's career choice. So, I have this theory... it's really more headcanon than anything but basically, I wonder if Ango didn't choose to work there, but rather had no choice.
First off, Ango being a government agent before he joined the Mafia means that he was already one under the age of 19... which is. Well, far from uncommon in the BSD universe but... does the government itself really not have age restrictions on potential members? Ango would've been younger than 19 when he started working for the Special Division. He was 22 ish in Dark Era, first met Oda and Dazai two years earlier, and joined the Mafia one year before that. I know we like to joke that the preferred hiring age in BSD is like... 14-15, but for the Mafia, this makes sense - there's no hiring age there; most of them are or were kids with nowhere else to go. Fukuzawa hires minors who typically also have nowhere to go. Ango was really young when he joined the Special Division. Since they would, at least, have to follow some laws (I believe anyways), the circumstances of Ango's joining were probably not the usual.
Here's another weird bit: the government sent a 19 year old spy to infiltrate the Mafia, one who was too low-ranked to have any say in decisions (he had no say in their sending in of Shibusawa, for instance). That's... weird, on it's own. He had no influence but they felt certain the man wouldn't betray them or get caught? That's a lot of faith to place in him. Now, granted, he's a very reliable person and his ability is absolutely the reason he was selected - but it's still strange.
You might be thinking, okay, but what about his replacement? Tachihara was sent in after Ango so the government could keep monitoring the mafia's activities, and he was a young, new recruit. Yes, that's true but see, here's the thing: Tachihara's nature as a Hunting Dog means the government has a guaranteed hold on him - Teruko mentions that the Hunting Dogs need to undergo monthly surgeries to maintain their bodies after their enhancements. I see no reason Tachihara wouldn't have had to do the same. So, in my mind, that goes to show that they needed some kind of hold on Ango too, right? Wouldn't you want some kind of insurance on someone so presumably new?
I'm going to cut away from this for a moment so I can point out a passage from Dark Era where Oda finds how Ango (allegedly) joined the Mafia:
The gist of it was: Ango was a hacker -> he helped a gang steal money -> the money was stolen from a Mafia front company -> Ango was on the run for several months before the Mafia caught him -> Ango's manipulation of the trackers' information was so impressive to Mori that he invited Ango to join the Mafia
Obviously, this is a cover story. But at the surface it kind of has to be true, otherwise the Mafia would know. So, it was set up for Ango to help steal that money by the government. Why this particular story though? Well, they say the best lies are often rooted in truth. Before he joined the Division, I suggest that Ango really was a hacker and seller of information. (Just fyi, his real life author inspiration was a bit of a delinquent so... make of that what you will.)
Now this next part is a mess because we still don't know how all the pieces fit together.
Remember that the Special Division, and by extension the government, are considered so incredibly powerful that they could destroy the Mafia. From Dark Era:
That legal document appears to be the only thing that keeps ability users reasonably safe. Atsushi was being tracked as the "rampaging tiger" and had nowhere else to go. What about people like Yosano or Chuuya, associated with military research? Even Kenji - he was hired after he moved a mountain out of grief. It appears that the permit is a necessary protection to those ability users who reveal they are ability users publicly.
In Gaiden, Tsujimura explains that the Division also continuously monitors the activities of ability users. Essentially, in addition to the legal protection the permits provide, they also seem to make the Division's job of keeping track of all ability users, what they're using their abilities for, and how dangerous the abilities are, much easier. We also know that if an ability user proves too great of a threat to the general public, the Special Division can and will eliminate targets unless the target proves especially useful (ex. Ayatsuji).
Ok why am I going over all this? I'm just trying to make it clear how incredibly powerful the Division is. But what I also want to denote is that they are focused primarily on the greater good and will justify sacrifice of individuals (which contradicts Ango's beliefs directly), and they also take orders still from higher ups in the government (and the government in bsd is... a bit shifty if you ask me).
And about Ango: his values lie in life and an appreciation for it. He prioritizes memory and records, especially of those who have passed. He has many regrets and is, at heart, a kind person. However, he also has the capacity to do what "needs to be done", seems particularly vengeful and angry with Sigma for Taneda's stabbing, and was ready to shoot Atsushi when he collapsed after the Sky Casino arc. He also went from making deliberate stubborn efforts to create records of the dead, to being part of the cover up for a group of disgraced soldiers and one of his closest friends. He does things because he thinks no one else can do them - so this means it is his obligation.
So, finally, here's my deranged conspiracy: I think Ango was a hacker in his teenage years, and I think he always had the intention of preserving life in some way. Perhaps he attempted to make information about the war, or something to do with ability users, public. Whatever he found, he got in serious trouble, whether with a criminal organization, or with the government itself, I'm not clear on. Ango needed to join the Division for protection, and perhaps it was Taneda's idea to invite him, seeing that his ability would be very useful - that would explain the loyalty. It's also possible that Ango's actions resulted in a loss of life, and so he no longer trusts himself, which is why he is constantly torn between opposing values. I wonder if it was explained to Ango by the people in charge why certain information had to be withheld from the public, in such a way that he felt guilty for what he'd done - maybe that's why he's so diligent. It would be tragic if guilt turned out to have always been the motivator for his character and if he stands with the Division despite his offset values because he really does think they know how to better help people than his instinctive response ever could. While I'm sure the Division was confident in Ango's loyalty (one of his dislikes is written as betrayal for goodness sake), they also had a hold on him due to the nature of his ability. He is a walking store of classified information, which we are told repeatedly in Dark Era makes him a prime target. This means that nowhere is safe for him unless he stays with the Division. There is no guarantee that the government itself wouldn't also consider him a liability if he were to suddenly quit. In summary, Ango's joining of the Division was not a free choice, and while he likely feels grateful to people like Taneda for that chance - he also cannot leave.
Regardless of whether or not you all think I am wholly deranged now, there is definitely something to Ango we're not privy to yet. Here's some extra stuff on Ango to chew on:
He had the experience once of taking in so much information he passed out while his brain tried to process it (much like Atsushi did after Sigma transfers the information to him about the Page)
He had some run-in with Chuuya which apparently led to Chuuya owing him for something?
He seems to have been more comfortable defying expectations in the Mafia than he ever was in the Division
Thus concludes my Ango theory.
Source? Just trust me bro.
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