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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?

Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).

After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.

Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.

Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.

It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).

Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond

That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.

Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.

Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:

https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/

Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.

Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.

For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.

Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:

https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger

Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration

Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.

They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:

https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769

Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.

Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:

https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/

Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.

Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."

Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

Image: KMJ (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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tanadrin · 7 months ago

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The impression I get from Revolutions is that in the 19th century there was a real uncertainty about the empirical question of how to achieve socialist aims in politics. On the one side you had forces like the Russian Narodists, who eschewed engagement with the system (and "the system" was, in the Russian context, Tsarist autocracy), fearing that to do so would be to legitimize the system and allow the desire for reform to be coopted, and thus allow it to be stalled out. This was framed in somewhat Romantic terms, with language about, like, the "vitality" of the "revolutionary spirit," but I think the underlying concern is one I'm sympathetic to, even if I would use different language to describe it. And, after all, the system you want to build is pretty politically and socially divorced from the circumstances around you, and it's hard to envision how you get from the current system to that one, in any kind of reasonable timeframe, by purely incremental reform.

On the other hand, you had agitators like Martov and also social democrats willing to work within the (limited, and definitely undemocratic) parliamentary systems that European states were grudgingly establishing, or even the pretty powerless zemstvas in Russia, but whose engagement of the system also came in the form of, like, strikes and demanding concessions from bosses and capitalists, which is something that a lot of anarchists and Narodist and others on the "anti-engagement" side thought was a waste of time, and tended to grant the legitimacy of the position of these bosses at the top of the hierarchy. Equality and freedom and the like wasn't something you should be granted, it was something you should take. At its most extreme, this dichotomy expressed itself in political terrorism: 19th century anarchists really thought that killing a king or a tsar (or even a president) might spark a national revolution and cause the whole system to come crumbling down.

But the course of the 19th century, especially the latter 19th century, pretty much answered these questions. For one, assassinations just provoked brutal crackdowns that tended to destroy radical organizations. For two, the labor movement proved effective. Wildly effective, in fact. For three, the fears of arch-conservatives proved correct: a little bit of parliamentarism was a foot in the door for genuine democracy, and once your foot was in the door you could keep pushing, and revolution was still an option on the table if progress stalled out too hard or for too long.

And yet I also have the suspicion that the long 19th century was a period where revolution was an unusually effective tactic, and that in the centuries before and the century-and-change since, it has proved to be a much dicier proposition. Revolutions are of course hard to kick off even under ideal circumstances--you can miss your chance one day because it rains and people stay home, or a protest over one pastor getting evicted can bring down your whole regime. But autocracy is brittle, the 19th century (and early 20th) was a period of extremely rapid social change and an extremely entrenched reactionary ruling class, and the alternative a lot of revolutionaries had in mind--liberal parliamentary democracy--can actually be surprisingly stable once it gets entrenched.

Revolutions that switch out one strongman for another, or install more oligarchic republican forms, or otherwise create governments with weak legitimacy can instead devolve into a generation of political chaos. But by the 19th century, Europe was starting to converge on a pretty durable model of governance, one pioneered in Britain (which managed to avoid revolution entirely throughout the period!). And I think in this framework participation in the system is both easier to justify and is inarguably more effective than abstention. Abstention, in both its more peacefully separatist and its aggressive kill-the-king-and-hope-everything-collapses forms, proved too utopian; building a parallel drop-in replacement for the state is simply too vast a coordination problem, and the whole reason states exist in the first place is that they solve big coordination problems (even if in deeply suboptimal ways). You can secede to form your own little community in the wilderness, if that's the flavor you want your anarchism or agrarian socialism to have, and if it is, more power to you--but if you want to remake society, rather than just remove yourself from it, ultimately you have to confront and engage with the channels of power that already exist.

#revolutions podcast

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rosesrotofficial · 9 months ago

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what would all the KC characters be doing if they werent serial killers?

ronin - he'd be the lead singer in his very own death metal band, "devilwood", straight outta angelwood. man's got his groupies as he sings about misery... living the dream.

angel - still modelling :P but maybe with a healthier work/life/murder balance. i'd like to think she takes up v-tubing honestly as a healthier alternative to murder: sure, eyes are still on her, but they're not seeing her - judging her - making so much of her. and she gets to game???

misaki - working in their parents' corner store, trying to make ends meet, getting terrorised by loan sharks... :( but also in this verse i'd love to see her game with angel too, probably as a vtuber she ripped off vrchat or something like that LOL. i don't think they'd stream but they would maybe show up sometimes in angel's and people get all interested in her??? and maybe she gets to earn that sweet cash from the net???

v - a socialite who's busy spending his time raising money for charitable causes, helping the innocently accused, and reforming the justice system with an eye-watering amount of cash. it's not really working but he's trying.

#killer chat #killer chat asks #killer chat au #faq

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tf2occontest · 5 months ago

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The Barman VS Ned

(Full matchup list here)

Alright team, here's a recap: This is a contest to determine who amongst you will take the top of the leaderboards and be hired at TFI! Simply put, whoever gets the most votes gets to move on, and whoever doesn't... Well. They'll be put down swiftly and cleanly. :}

So, mann your stations, because here are your next contestants! Vote for your favorite mercenary who you want to win the TF2 OC Contest! - P

OC INFO UNDER THE CUT!

We highly encourage you to take a peek to make your decision!

The Barman (Thomas Armstrong)

@trypo-p

Image credit: @/trypo-p

Born and raised in Stratford, Ontario, Barman is an affable gentleman who specializes in the art of mixology. Among the mercenaries, Barman is relatively tame in comparison; he gets along with everyone and is seen as an almost "parental" figure to most of the team. Whether it be telling old stories of his life back in Canada, or smacking Scout on the back of his neck for forgetting his manners, he has his ways of making the team remember that he's their elder.

Most of the man's time is spent in his makeshift bar in the team's base, or in his own room. That, of which, contains a multitude of model train sets. Sadly Barman was unable to live his dream of becoming a train conductor, but he can still lose himself in the fantasy when he's alone in his room with his models.

When he's in his bar, however, he gets to have casual conversation among his teammates. During his time working for the team he had become quite friendly with Demoman and Spy, often spending nights with them at the bar after a long battle. He'd listen to everyones worries, give them advice, then laugh the rest of the night away to lighten up the mood.

Ned

@el-beau

Image credit: @/el-beau

Frode ‘Ned the Net’ Havn is a 34 year old fisherman who led a grief stricken, excruciatingly boring, quiet life in the village he was born and raised in – Selbyen, Norway. Having spent his days fishing, taking care of the wild seals and perfecting his net tying skills, the least he expected was that damn company.

Team Fortress Industries bought up the village in their insatiable thirst for land, intending to empty it to reform it into a violent playground for Mann Co.’s mercenaries. Frode, as the last man standing, took it upon himself to rebel against the cruelties of the company through a display of such violence, that they had no other choice but to SEAL a deal with him, to use what few capabilities he has to their advantage – or at least watch him get stuck in a near infinite loop of dying and respawning for their own sick amusement. Through the contract, he’s at the very least capable of sending the entirety of his paycheck to his displaced family and friends, wherever they may be.

Stripped of his name – replaced by the stupid rhyme Ned the Net–, equipped with a baboon heart and with the shakiness of a wet dog, Ned is thrown into battle with nothing but his trusty old tools, an additional handgun, and a formidable rage that’d built up his entire life, ready to be unleashed upon unsuspecting RED team members. If they’d suspect him, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Which is why he uses his immaculate knowledge of his birthplace’s layout to his advantage, sneaking around and CATCHing people off guard with his weighted NET – the ‘Big Catch’. Although a support class hailing from peace loving village people, he’s not reserved about defending himself if must be. By being ambidextrous, the man is certainly capable of – though not always successful at – pulling off a pin ’n’ kill combo, by reeling enemies in with the reinforced handheld ‘Harm-poon’ and letting them SLEEP with the FISHES with the ‘Sleeper’, a small pistol.

His near unhinged frenzy and trembling unpredictability might prove useful on the battlefield.

#tf2occontest2024 #poll #round 2 #the barman #the net #trypo-p #el-beau

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slowd1ving · 10 months ago

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✦ III. OH, HOW TRAGIC IS HE

'It was an accident. “I’m sorry. Ah, shit—” Something wet splashed your cheek, followed by a fumbling hand that tried to brush it away but only succeeded in smearing the thin liquid across your face awkwardly. “Don’t— fuck, I’ll stay with you, alright?” Fingers wrapped around your own, flesh against bone. Pulsing life alongside a silent end. The last thing on your lips was an apology, in the form of a salty tear dripping from above.' • . * cursed prince ratio + alchemist m reader rough design for minoan fashion ratio here warnings: video game violence, death? kind of? tyranny (are we surprised), male-coded reader (or at least the in-game avatar is) wc: 11.9k

LAMENT OF OUROBOROS MASTERLIST

HONKAI STAR RAIL MASTERLIST

MASTERLIST ・゜・NAVIGATION

‘If man’s hour were to come, no one could escape it: not the brave, nor the cowardly. In the case of the city-state of Metis—referred to by romantics as the ‘Eroded Kingdom’—its collapse was widely regarded as inevitable. Frankly, as al-Ghazali pointed out in his ‘Fall of Empires’, Metis was inherently doomed to fail from its intrinsic characteristics: military hubris (relying on the susceptible and corrupt polemarch Aetos in the final decade of the kingdom’s existence); economic failure (due to the recessions Aha created and failed to mitigate); the subsequent loss of capital, and perhaps, most poignantly, its alienation of alchemists and increasingly alarming anti-heretical laws which provoked regional rebellions that soon spiralled into the so-called ‘Scholar’s March’ of 786 of the Attican Calendar, or year 352 of the Amber Age¹.

Who could’ve predicted that the citizens could grow so united in the face of such tyranny? For years the Metisians had endured the brutal taxation, the reforms in education, and the yokes of the cult-like Elation—the catalyst could only be the mass executions and disappearances that occurred the year prior the March. Of course, scholars like Ignis the Argumentative would insist it was the sudden disappearance of capable officials that set the cataclysm into motion—but further examination by other contemporaries reproached this interpretation as there was no real policy difference between the lawmakers in terms of addressing both long- and short-term triggers that led to the fall of Old Metis, as Antiquus the Elder points out in his ‘Treatises of the Archipelago’².

Now, a millennium later, New Metis continues to repeat its historical mistakes from a bygone age—continuing legislation to heavily restrict and outright ban certain schools of thought. For most of the New Metis citizens, this isn’t an issue; but this begs the question, when will it be a problem? Tyranny has not been redefined—it’s still hiding in New Metis today, under the smiling masks of your politicians! Wake up, New Metis!’

— Inana, P. (1433 2AA). Civilisation: Modeling Metis as a continuation of a failed empire. Journal Politik, 47 (3), 101-110

. 　⁺ ✦

Like all days, the pills were particularly hard to swallow. Chalky, bitter—a tepid medley of medicine that neither made you more energetic nor erased the hangover of the liquor still remaining in your system. It was an unfortunate cocktail: vitamins and painkillers tossed from a drugstore shelf with no regard for its expiry date but rather the price and time you were running out of.

It was a tepid day, that day was. Humid streams of vapour clung to the asphalt as you stumbled out of the store with a plastic, rustling bag slung onto your wrist hurriedly—reusable coffee cup grasped tight in one hand, the dose of tablets clutched painstakingly in the other. It felt like a rush to work, and perhaps it was; this day was like all others, in hindsight. For others, the routine mundanity of your life might’ve been hellish; for you, however, the brimstone and fire had long faded into a tired cliché, where all the impact of your suffering trickled into a steady background hum.

There was a sort of beauty in the aches and pains of your life—not in the pretentious way, not in the nihilistic way—but rather in the sense that one might feel a brow raise at the sight of a pattern embroidered delicately into cloth. If you were to give a less quixotic analogy, it would be the satisfaction of a computer programme doing its job: lines upon lines of code melding seamlessly into a never ending loop with no errors.

Yes. Comfort came in the shape of these grey roads, these monochromatic buildings, and the stink of pollution on your way to your monotonous job. Comfort came in the ritualistic bread (drugstore painkillers) and wine (bitter, cheap coffee) that you partook in each morning after Friday. Comfort came in the perfunctory, solid thump of sole against pavement; the cat you’d passed by for the past month; and the worn earbuds that were slowly reaching the limits with their tinny quality and exposed wire.

It was a painful life. It was a painless life.

Tragedy seeped in through the sterile nitrile of your gloves. Tragedy ghosted its fingers over your polyester lab coat, and tapped on the clear plastic of your goggles. Tragedy weaved through the tired yawns as you spun on your stool and waited for the centrifuge to settle to a halt. Maybe if you crossed your fingers enough, the seconds would pass by quicker, and maybe there’d be something decent in the cafeteria. Well. It was never worth the money, but then again, there was nothing to save for. No occasions to buy nice clothes for. No particular want or need for holidays.

No one to treat, either, not even the nice old lady in the apartment next to yours. Not anymore, at least.

You sighed, and the matter in the Petri dish sighed with you.

And thus, a sense of purpose continued eluding you—but so did any profound pain. This was ordinary, as an achromatic existence like this didn’t stand out in the grand machine, and you didn’t think it ever would. That was fine. That was expected. In fact, it was downright comforting that you wouldn’t particularly matter in the long run.

(Is it truly an anodyne, like you make it seem? Where is the solace, when your teeth worry at your lips as you gaze at human connexion?)

You lied. You lied, but who would persecute you for your sin, when the sin was merely doubt about your reality?

Like all other days, it began with a healthy dosage of denial, and perhaps that is what led to the events that transpired.

. 　⁺ ✦

In retrospect, it was practically expected that your tired life would beget yet another tired cliché.

There was something completely unoriginal in the series of misfortunes that befell the proletariat salaryman (read: you). In novels, movies, and the occasional game, the most ordinary of souls stumbled across a situation that chose them. For once, someone in their weary lives had need of them; not as a pushover, nor a lackey, but someone courageous and brave who became a hero. Forums and comments oft scorned these overused plotlines—and you agreed, of course—but it was an interesting premise to think about.

“There’s a survivor on the third floor—”

Still, no matter how intriguing the promise of escape from the mundane was, it was pointless. It wouldn’t happen.

“Hey— can you get up? Blink if you can hear me, alright?

The accident in the lab was almost poetic. Of course, when a protagonist encountered an explosion in their place of work, there was always an accompanying montage that indicated something was wrong. Whether it be the change in key in the background chords, or a close up of cracking machinery, the audience got some sort of closure as to why. Was it fate? Was it the cruel machinations of man? Was it just an unfortunate accident?

“We need oxygen here—he’s going into shock! Help—you—get a gurney immediately!”

But actually, there was none of that fanfare for you. Just a sluggish warmth that crawled from your limbs and back into your heart, from limbs far too cold to move. No, not cold. You simply couldn’t feel them—much like when a body part suddenly fell asleep on you.

If you scrunched your face a bit, you could smell the acrid wisps of rubble: paint chips and stone all congealing into an antiquated scent. You couldn’t exactly see, but maybe that was for the better.

“What’s happen—” Your tongue felt leaden in your mouth: heavy and contorted as you awkwardly sounded out your question. An explosion? A gas leak? A mine that somehow went off? There was something wet dribbling from your mouth; tasting like white hot iron, seeping past your aching lips. A hero would know. A hero would have that information playing out panel by panel while they bled out, farewells and anguish for their loved ones already melding into the fabric of existence.

Ow.

“Shh, don’t talk, okay? We’ll get you out of here, alright?” There weren’t any reassurances for your state. No ‘you’ll be okay’, no ‘stay with me, alright?’. You weren’t stupid. You weren’t, but it was in that moment when you wished you were—dropping out before doing your degree and doctorate, keeping far from the lab, and holding on to your life with blissful ignorance on your side.

You opened your mouth.

“No, you don’t need to say anything, alright?” The voice was kind, you noted drowsily. If not a little clumsy, swaddling you in a foil blanket like some overgrown child. Well. You couldn’t see it, and neither could you feel its texture, but you could feel your limbs lolling this way and that way at the movements—like some grotesque, decommissioned marionette.

At least it didn’t hurt.

“Thank you,” you whispered. There was nothing outrageous about your last words. Like the rest of your life, the syllables were as ordinary as they came. A quiet beginning. A quiet end. There was nobody to say goodbye to, nobody to wait for past the veil.

It was an accident.

“I’m sorry. Ah, shit—” Something wet splashed your cheek, followed by a fumbling hand that tried to brush it away but only succeeded in smearing the thin liquid across your face awkwardly. “Don’t— fuck, I’ll stay with you, alright?”

Fingers wrapped around your own, flesh against bone. Pulsing life alongside a silent end.

The last thing on your lips was an apology, in the form of a salty tear dripping from above.

. 　⁺ ✦

“Hey, wake up.”

Death came in the gentle touch of a rolling breeze; riding on its coattails was the disembodied laughter of a child, alongside the kiss of three words that stirred your sleep-crusted lashes. Death seeped into the loamy scent of petrichor: soaked past the balmy fragrance of wildflowers and grass, against the clean soap of freshly-laundered linen. Death trailed its sepulchral fingers past the damp ground cradling your slumbering body—rustling and tugging at the jewel-toned robe draping your limbs that rose and fell with your chest.

“How peaceful,” you murmured, and the mouthfeel of the words was as crisp as water straight from a burbling brook. Copper no longer defiled your lips, and neither did the burning heat of your dying syllables. Rather, cool air replaced the oily blood that slid across your tongue mere moments ago.

Had you trespassed the veil warding life from death?

Peeking at the haze hanging over your head, something had clearly gone wrong with your passage to the afterlife. No, was it even an afterlife? Clumsily, like a foal stumbling on its hooves for the first time, you sat up shakily—to find your limbs sprightly and healthy, with none of the gelid quality you’d felt before you woke up. In fact, your head was clearer than ever: not a hint of any throbbing in your temples.

Even the very breeze felt different: fuller, yet decidedly more empty.

In hindsight, it was likely shock that delayed your registration of the very obvious problem at hand. Rolling, verdant fields aside, the firmament stretching from horizon to horizon shone bright with two heavenly bodies. Were you seeing double?

“Two suns,” you muttered, squinting at the brilliant sky. Brilliant, though it wasn’t blue like you’d expected—but a more melancholy array of hues, even with the twin bodies illuminating the vast canvas. Two suns, an unfamiliar sky, and alien constellations littering it. “Where the fuck am I?”

Great. Wonderful. A new headache had presented itself, because clearly you were no longer on Earth—which now begged the question, where were you?

Or, more poignantly, who were you?

The first law of thermodynamics proposed energy was neither created nor destroyed, simply transferred from one form to another. In turn, perhaps it was less surprising that you’d reawakened in another form—rather, the puzzling element was how this new vessel came to be. Its movements were familiar, its shape and flow of limbs, too, was an exact replica of your Earthbound form, but far less bone-weary than you had been.

You died. This you accepted.

You… reawoke. Passed on? Ended up in a coma? Got stuck in limbo? That was something far more difficult to fathom: flung into a world far removed from your own, it was hard to suppress the epistemic needs of a human.

Would it have been easier, being reborn into this otherworldly place, without any memories of before your death? Was it… normal, continuing existence like this? Were there any precedents?

What the hell was going on?

It was perhaps on a whim that you finally looked down, gazing at the lush field and your vivid clothes. Staring at the garb that adorned you, you neither recognised the cut of the material nor the rich dye that stained it—but you supposed that was par for the course when not even the sky looked familiar to you. That was expected.

The translucent, almost glass-like window that popped up over in your line of vision was decidedly not. Immediately, your focus snapped from the delicate embroidery right on to the rolling script appearing; a series of whorls and lines that somehow resonated with your tired brain.

“Rida mis vizenia,” you murmured as the syllables made themselves known to you, something you didn’t even need to translate manually. Your breath caught in your throat when the mechanical pronunciation loosened your fumbling tongue—like speaking your mother tongue after decades of disuse.

You squinted at the block of text, alongside the tiny mannequin depicting what you wore.

[Robes of Ambiguity (◼◼◼◼◼ Robes): a style of clothing popular among New Metis officials wishing to keep their exact station unknown. Neither this colourful palette nor this traditional embroidery belongs to any particular rank nor department, ◼◼ning those wishing to stay obscure typically favour these well-made garments; ◼◼◼◼◼◼ ◼◼ ◼◼◼. There’s more to the wearer than meets the eye, you know? ◼◼◼◼ limited to those of high rank, thus regular civilians also enjoy wearing these for more special occasions.]

What was this, a game? An exasperated groan left your mouth at the new possibility—furious due to that, but also the lack of any helpful information given by these garments. No clue about your identity, only that these clothes were from New Metis. New Metis. There was nothing—no sudden recognition, no extra-heavy thump of your heart, and certainly not any memories from this new body that could point you in any direction.

The only thing that was truly helpful was the appearance of this floating, rectangular entity: two valuable clues had sprung from it, after all.

One: this interface could be the light that would guide you, providing its information was reliable. Game or not, it could very well be that this apparent saviour was some sick ploy, for whatever reason. It was a welcome sight regardless; you’d seen it countless times in various media, whether it be in novels or video games.

Still, you eyed the screen sceptically. Who was behind it, anyway?

Two: it appeared there was still information you weren’t privy to, judging by the error marks against the azure window. Or maybe this information was never intended for you in the first place; the screen blurred and glitched like it couldn’t wait to escape your view. Like cotton candy, its shape dissolved and formed just as capriciously in the rolling breeze: melting and undulating with virtual strands of data.

[Name: ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼, working currently as ◼◼◼◼◼◼. One of unknown origin, fluent in common tongue, honey tongue, and the ancient tongue of thought.]

“That’s it?” you muttered incredulously. That was your face displayed on the pixelated screen, your name that kept ebbing and flowing from existence like an evasive childhood song. Even the damn clothing you donned had a more detailed log of information—and the important part was erased from existence.

It was the latter part that intrigued you most, unknown occupation aside. Common tongue. It felt right when describing the syllables leaving your mouth, even if you hadn’t realised you’d been talking to yourself in it for the past however many minutes.

With a long-winded sigh, you unfocused your gaze and it seemed the window sighed with relief too: fading out with nary a blip. If this was a game, clearly you weren’t the protagonist; no cutscene greeted you, not even an introduction to the error-laden system it seemed to have anomalously assigned you.

Honey tongue.

Tongue of thought.

They were important enough to mention, important enough that they were present in your profile without regard for anything else. But in a way, the lack of expectations was nice. A simple blank resumé, waiting to develop into a ‘you’. ‘You’ weren’t assuming someone else’s identity. ‘You’ were freshly dumped anew, without the ties to burden you to an overused plot and allegiance.

But that wasn’t a tangent to mull over at the moment. There were far more pressing matters to contend with.

Think. You were in the vast open country, with neither food, water, nor a map. Neither horizon boasted any traces of civilisation, which made your situation slightly more dire. No landmarks. No forests. No creatures either, but the abundance of flora called for pollination, right? Unless, of course, the rules of biology and physics have all been messed up… what’s the gravitational field strength on this planet…. is this even the same universe as Earth… does this follow video game mechanics or is it its own world… what does an atom look like….

Needless to say, the post-rebirth clarity hit you hard.

“Useless,” you muttered in common tongue—turned to a long string of foreign-yet-familiar profanity as you tried to switch back to your mother tongue. It was only after a tense concentration that the word ‘fuck’ breached your stumbling lips; though, by the reverence and relief in your voice, nobody would ever think you were letting loose imprecations in this serene landscape.

But that begged the question: to what were you saying useless to?

As it turned out, the hand rummaging through the luxurious fabric draped across you came back barren—utterly empty as you stared at the flesh, haggard.

There was no map, and you could forget about a compass.

There was no sustenance.

There wasn’t even a fly to pitifully leave your vacuous pocket.

Instead, the pulling and tugging of these sumptuous clothes revealed elaborate lines inking your roughened skin—colours melded into labyrinthine formulae you instinctively understood. Somehow, the intricate tattoos that wove against your dermis and shimmered expectantly—just like the window that faded in and out of view capriciously—resembled the long strings of formulae you’d derived and memorised for your degree and doctorate, to the point where blood dribbled from your nose each night. Metallic letters, meaningless without the painstaking effort behind them.

But…

Your brows furrowed. Inked upon your arms and torso, and likely extending to your very legs, were shifting chromatic designs that visually could not be the same formulae you knew. That was what anyone from Earth would say, but something in your gut told you to decipher and understand these complex designs on you—like the most delicate of embroideries on a magnificent tapestry, your body was covered in the most exquisite of patterns.

On your wrist, the characters grew incandescent as you clumsily sounded out the tongue of thought. This was neither the familiar shape of Earth languages, nor was it the common tongue you’d grown accustomed to—but something far more ancient, something far more unconstrained. It was guttural, it was refined: it was everything in between and outside of it as you mouthed the patterns on you aloud.

“◼◼◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼.” Equivalent exchange, you finally read out—and something rose within as collateral. It was neither your soul nor your life, but a warm, pulsing energy: enough to make you drowsy with its absence.

A prayer fluttered in the wind, just like the slow blink of your lashes as they fought to keep awake—heavy as they were from the price offered for your request.

“Want… answers,” you slurred, unintelligible to all but the concentric circles forming beneath you and seeping into your flesh. “Humans.”

And the world whispered back, hearing your supplication.

. 　⁺ ✦

It was with a dazed (though quite refreshed, you had to say) sort of stupor that you woke to the sound of light footsteps. Senses that had somehow been honed to a fine, sharp point now served you well as you stirred at the slightest tremors in the ground. In fact, the smallest of changes in air flow had already put you on high alert—but something was telling you to wait it out.

People.

Your plea had altered a predestined course.

[Name: ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼, working currently as an a◼che◼◼. One of unknown origin, fluent in common tongue, honey tongue, and the ancient tongue of thought.]

A◼che◼◼.

Change was good. Change would free you from stagnancy, even if you weren’t aware of its shift.

. 　⁺ ✦

She gave a sweeping bow: complete with the elegant curl of her hand and not a strand of fiery hair out of place. It was perfect in all its points—though you didn’t quite know why it registered as such. A perfunctory standard greeting… complete with, but not limited to, the hand gesture that typically denotes merchants or nomadic ones… The thoughts whirled incoherently alongside the fragmented cerulean window that intermittently, though no information of the woman before you appeared.

“Himeko, of house Murata, greets thee.” She spoke with the polite dialect of common tongue—the specific intonation in her words carried a query in return for her civility: who are you? Why are you here? Behind her was a sizable procession of wagons—or at least, what you thought were wagons. Their elegant shape was utterly unlike any of the crude wooden ones you’d seen; rather, colourful cars of various forms were interlinked. Almost like a train, if a train was pulled by beasts the size of a small hut: complete with a steely carapace and long, floppy ears that were scarily like a rabbit’s.

You swallowed. No longer could Earth be considered your point of reference.

This was not Earth. This was not Earth, so you gave the most basic of bows back—a hand placed gently on your chest sincerely, eyes fluttering closed—and hoped she didn’t take affront. This was not Earth, thus you didn’t quite know whether the abrupt guffaw she gave at your awkward greeting was positive or not. This was not Earth, therefore her continued introduction of being a caravan master meant little to you. Navigator and caravan master of the Blazing Trail, she’d summarised, though you were distracted by the glitching window that appeared promptly in the moment she spoke.

[Himeko Mura◼◼a. Navigator and caravan master of the Blazing Trail, a renowned nomadic force known for its astute inter- and intra-continental diplomacy. Its ◼◼◼ makes it almost like a private army, though none can ◼◼ hire it. ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼ she is utterly astute and a brilliant engineer.]

It was a name you didn’t recognise. Maybe if you looked through your games library on your old laptop, or pulled up each and every novel you’d read, maybe there’d be something similar—but at the moment, none of the information resembled anything you knew.

The caravan master was kind, if not a little eccentric. Her kindness came in the form of a seat round the elegant burner—the two suns had long since winked past the horizon, after all, and in their place shone a lonely moon.

It’s warm, you thought.

Her kindness also came in the round shape of a bowl of stew: handed unceremoniously into your fumbling hands by a hare-like creature who seemed all too accustomed to Miss Himeko bringing along strange things with her. The stares you received were curious, but not hostile—though one dark-haired man with frigid irises seemed to gaze at you as if saying ‘another one?’. And as unreliable as your system was, there were no introductions afforded to the other few nomads.

“Could you tell me about New Metis?” The meat was salty and gamey as you chewed and swallowed, accompanied by the flatbread that needed no ingredients save coarse flour and a clear liquid that was likely this planet’s form of water. In fact, the bread’s unexpected soft texture distracted you enough that you almost didn’t see Miss Himeko’s eyes pause right on your clothes.

Her blood-hued lips opened and closed, quite incredulously at that. From the cut of clearly Metisian garb, to the Metisian style of greeting, would you not have been the better authority than a nomad who flitted from place to place?

“Don’t get me wrong,” you continued in a more informal dialect, as did she after she invited you to sit with her round the small, contained fire. It flickered green in the engraved metal bowl, then a blazing azure. “I woke up and couldn’t remember anything, except my name and the name New Metis.”

Without an ounce of shame, it was far better to simply confess your shortcomings, rather than masquerade as something you were not.

“Better off than me,” the girl with cotton candy-pink hair sighed in solidarity. The tips of your fingers burned at the sudden acknowledgement—unused to any attention on you for prolonged lengths of time. “I didn’t remember anything after I awoke and Himeko found me, not even my name. I got called March 7th after the day I was dislodged from ice—funny how life works, huh?”

Does she make a habit of picking up amnesiacs or something? The fire crackled with your silent query. But before that, there was something in the girl’s words that gave you pause: lodged glaringly in her very name.

March 7th. March 7th. Spoken with the common tongue accent, but undeniably the same system of dates as Earth—why? Unless this place shared ties to your former planet, it was nigh impossible for the calendar to be the exact same.

Unless this really is a game. That would make more sense if this world was a creation of your past one; if small details were to match up with what you knew from Earth, then the evidence would no doubt point to this world being present in Earthen media.

Nonetheless, you couldn’t take this place lightly, even if it wasn’t real. After all, there were books that took place on Earth—and that alone didn’t make the planet fictional.

Nothing was out of the question anymore.

“March 7th?” you muttered, half to yourself, half-probing. “What does the calendar currently look like?”

The cost of figuring out whether Earth played a part in the formation of this place was a mere question and a few scraps of your dignity.

“Worldwide, the Amber Calendar is currently used—twelve months, three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days,” the man with those frigid eyes answered in a clipped, but not unfriendly tone. It was as if he was used to patiently explaining information to people, over and over—and for that he immediately became more useful than the stupid system windows.

Thank you, March 8th, you replied, silently.

“Split into twelve months? January, February and so forth?” you probed. The month names felt awkward to insert into the smooth flow of the common tongue, but there were no looks of confusion thrown your way. Well, shit.

“Yes, that’s correct,” he affirmed quietly—gaze turning slightly less guarded in the face of what appeared to be an idiot. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything?”

Three hundred and sixty five days and a quarter. What an oddly specific number to assign, even arbitrarily. It seemed the developers had unconsciously used Earth as a point of reference, once more. Or maybe this world used the same metric to assign ‘years’, with the exact same length of time it took to orbit the binary pair in the sky. In that case, it would truly be an amazing coincidence, would it not, that the angular frequency of orbit and the distance travelled by this new planet was exactly the same?

“How long is a day?” It was your final question, one so earnest he had to scrap the thought of you purposefully asking stupid questions. In actuality, the passion in your voice was a very final verification.

“Twenty-four hours, with an hour being sixty minutes and a minute being sixty seconds.” Prompt and curt, in that melodious voice.

“Thank you.” And there was a smile on your face this time, so mellow and warm that he couldn’t help but duck his head back to his bowl at your sincerity. “Looks like I won’t have to relearn as much as I thought.”

“Ah— right,” he murmured, but the crack in his voice went unnoticed by all but his dinner. That, and the countless stars dotting the ever-changing sky.

“But New Metis still eludes me,” you sighed, dipping the spoon back into the broth. The utensil was weirder than the ones on earth—deeper and more cone-like in the centre, like a miniature ladle. It made savouring the complex flavours far easier; both piquante broth and the salty game were eagerly wolfed down by your hungry mouth.

“We’re pretty close to it now, actually, only around ten ro away.” The set of Himeko’s mouth was thoughtful as she unstoppered the carafe at her side, taking a large swig from it. Then, from an ornate tube hanging from her belt, she slid out a scroll of what appeared to be expensive parchment—revealing an intricate map of what appeared to be the side of a continent alongside a large archipelago. “New Metis is located—here, on that central island—and past the straits, the mountains on the continent signal the Borderlands. Well, it would be more accurate to say that these islands are all technically part of Metis—but the capital, New Metis, is located on the central one specifically. We’re currently on the northern isles.”

“I see.” You used the remaining carb to mop up the last of the stew in your bowl, scooping up what appeared to be aromatics—onion-equivalents, maybe?—and the last of the umami broth. “I think I’ll get more answers if I go there myself. Is there anything I should be wary of while I’m there?”

Ding! Something chimed, but you paid it no heed.

“Well, if you’re not a scholar, then regulations are a bit more lax. Uh, new legislation was passed quite recently, but it’s mostly just caution for nomads and merchants. If you’re completely new to the city—that is, if your memories of New Metis are completely gone, then the anti-heretical laws are pretty tough,” the man with inky curls rambled, causing your eyes to snap from Miss Himeko to his face in slight incredulity at his sudden talkativeness.

Ding! Ding!

“Anti-heretical?” you questioned, already feeling a headache form at the sudden onslaught of religion. “Could you expand on that?”

Ding!

“Ah, yes,” he cleared his throat, setting his bowl down by his side with an awkward clunk. “Um, strictly speaking, they’re colloquially dubbed anti-heresy—since the legislation condemns it based on more fraudulent grounds than religious, but everyone who’s ever stepped foot in New Metis—”

Ding! You subconsciously swatted the window away as you stared right at him.

“Dan Heng, get to the point before he falls asleep,” March 7th interrupted: looking at the man completely askance, as if asking ‘can you believe this guy?’.

“Uh, sorry,” he said sheepishly, with a self-conscious smile. Dan Heng. Dan Heng. The name was no more familiar than any other, but it was pleasant to sound out. “They’ve banned most magical arts in the city and the wider span of islands for several centuries now, actually—”

Ding!

Irritatedly, you glanced at your hand, only to find an updated profile shining against the back of your wrist. What—you squinted, feeling a tad bit more sleepy, before the rolling script faded into focus.

“—Heng, don’t just say magical arts without explaining what those entail.”

[Name: ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼, working currently as an a◼che◼◼. One of unknown origin, fluent in common tongue, honey tongue, and the ancient tongue of thought.]

But… the section in the middle was glitching particularly furiously, as though it were urgently trying to tell you something. You furrowed your brow. What?

Ding!

“Stuff like subverting from typical paths and orthodox elements—instead gaining power through sorcery, witchcraft and—”

Ding! Ding!

[Name: ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼, working currently as an alchemist. One of unknown origin, fluent in common tongue, honey tongue, and the ancient tongue of thought.]

“—alchemy.”

You paused. You stared. The headache you’d been anticipating finally had its advent.

(Equivalent exchange.)

“I don’t think you’ll have anything to worry about,” March 7th smiled reassuringly, but her beaming face felt more like a threat. “Do you remember what your job was?”

“I’m a sculptor,” you deadpanned, working your jaw. It was said on a whim, but who knew the wavering between an art or a chemistry doctorate would finally come in handy today?

Ding!

What… did that mean?

“Life price,” you murmured in concentration. Was that related to your death? Not only that, the sudden influx of knowledge made you dizzy. It seemed you’d go undetected as an alchemist for the foreseeable future, but what were the limits?

“Sorry, did you say something?” Himeko glanced to her left, but you only shook your head in defeat.

Was that what you did earlier? Summoned help by offering your energy as collateral? Was it also your life that you were offering in exchange? More importantly, what did it mean by life price? Did your meaningless death coalesce into boundless regrets?

Your heart throbbed.

“Here.” An elegant silver chalice nudged the delicate patterns on the back of your hands, and you startled—all with what you could only assume was a very stupid expression on your face. Dan Heng looked equally taken aback, fumbling a hurried apology on his lips in his lilting common tongue (“Ack, sorry—you just looked out of it so I thought you needed something to slake your thirst.”). A crescent smile formed briefly on your face as you stared at his honest face; far less world-weary than yours, far more eager. You accepted the goblet, running your fingers across its intricate engravings.

“Thank you,” you replied warmly, taking a sip of the sweet liquid within—some saccharine nectar that had a similar tartness to cherry. “It’s delicious.”

His fingers touched yours as he settled on your other side by the flames. He’s shivering slightly, you noted—a slight trembling that was out of character on this warm night. Well, you washed down the observation with drink thoughtfully, you always did run on the hotter side.

To business—you instead prioritised, which was to figure out what game you’d landed in exactly.

“Um,” you turned to Dan Heng as you munched on the fresh fruit set out, juice dripping down your fingers. Its flesh was orange and tender, seeping sweet across your skin as you tore into its fragrant body. Yum. Licking your fingers clean, it was perhaps for the best that you didn’t witness the rosy flush that spread across his face. After all, you were preoccupied with the equations that now heated the inside of your mouth—squiggling formulae now taking root on your tongue, all warm and fuzzy. “Have there been any heroes lately?”

“Hmm?” he started, fingers fidgeting against his own, well-crafted robes. “You’d… uh… need to be more specific than that.”

“People we look up to? People who’ve contributed to developing their nations? People who’ve made leaps and progressions in their industries?” Himeko interjected, and the three questions made you realise that this wasn’t a two-dimensional pixelated world, but a real one. Numbskull, you criticised yourself—of course something as ambiguous as ‘hero’ was wholly open to interpretation.

“Like…” you paused. How the fuck would you describe it? A protagonist? Someone who saved the world? This looked like an open-world RPG, so maybe— “...a travelling hero who took care of threats to the world? Alongside companions? Defeated evil entities? Was extremely well-known globally?”

Your questions were as unsure as Himeko’s face was.

“That’s not my expertise,” she answered hesitantly. “There are quite a few who fit the description, but perhaps you’re thinking of Akivili, the late founder of the Blazing Trail?”

Akivili. That name didn’t ring a bell either, but it couldn’t hurt to probe. “When… was the Blazing Trail established?”

“Ah… about a millennium ago,” she replied, somewhat abashed. Your brows furrowed—of course, transmigrating into a game didn’t necessarily mean you’d get into the same timeline as the hero, but a thousand years…

“Any prophesied heroes?” you questioned desperately.

“Hold on,” Dan Heng murmured beside you thoughtfully—tapping his fingers against his knee. “There’s a more recent one that makes more sense.”

“How recent is recent?” you deadpanned.

“Three hundred years ago, this time,” he furrowed his brows. Okay, but there was still hope if this still wasn’t the protagonist. “This ‘hero’ got rid of the Stellarons, the countless seeds of destruction from which spawned countless monsters, with his companions. Then, after his glory, he abruptly disappeared.”

It sounded like a classic conclusion—a hero returning back to their homeworld after the game reached its end. Of course, had you not died back on Earth, maybe you would have despaired more; this protagonist might’ve held the key to allowing you to go back home. But as it stood, his existence would only serve to inform you exactly where you were stuck.

“And this hero’s name?” you prompted. A slight foreboding trickled down your spine as you waited.

“Odysseus.”

Odysseus. Odysseus. Odysseus. It sounded unpleasantly familiar, not just because it was the name of a classical hero, but also—

“What’s the name of this planet, again?” You prayed it wasn’t so. With a head bowed in supplication, and fingers ardently crossed, you were the picture of devout want.

“Ouroboros,” he concluded, and it was then that a tear slipped down your face.

. 　⁺ ✦

Lament of Ouroboros. As the title suggested, the indie, open-world RPG narrated the woes of the planet and the hero come to save it—a format popular among most, if not all, adventure-themed video games. It was on a whim you downloaded it: clicking on the surprisingly well-drawn icon and quickly skimming the synopsis to escape your boring life for a bit. On forums it was well-known enough to be frequently discussed, but it didn’t have the widespread recognition to garner severe criticisms.

With a large mug of tea and an abandoned pack of sweets, you’d booted up that game one August afternoon—worn keys clacking smoothly against your fingers as you tapped out your name. It was a nice interface, you acknowledged while erasing all traces of ‘Odysseus’. The graphics may have been the standard open world fields, but there was something charming about the two cheery suns and pretty backdrop of the sky.

Your mouse selected the specialisation generator randomly, though you hadn’t paid attention enough to the animation apart from noting what appeared to be a sword, then a staff at one frame in particular. A warrior, and a mage, you observed in slight interest, but ultimately it didn’t matter what it picked.

Although, neither warrior nor mage appeared as your final selection: rather, a pair of ornate scales floated into view from the tranquil lake.

{Alchemist (S-Class) (hidden).]

“Cool,” you’d said at the time, clicking past the opening animation and into the story. Your brief fascination was just that—brief. The story was somewhat engaging, yet the plotline was saturated with tropes you’d seen time and time again in various games. A protagonist chosen to save the world, a home to return to, and companions that were pushy at best, and completely irritating at worst.

Maybe if you hadn’t played through and seen countless media like this, the plotline might’ve been more engaging—but for your tired, exhausted mind, this clichéd game was not unlike your clichéd, boring life.

It took the span of one afternoon for you to promptly delete Lament from your laptop, staring at the dregs of your tea in defeat. In any case, only the hero’s name and the actual title was retained in your disinterested memory: no lore, no plotline apart from what you could easily piece together based on context, and absolutely zero clue of the ending of the story.

“Are you alright?” March 7th’s shoulder bumped yours on the large landbeast. The carapace was surprisingly comfortable to ride on, if you ignored the large tusks coming from that furry thing’s mouth, and the perpetual death stare in its red eyes. “I know it’s hard waking up and not knowing anything.”

“Yeah,” you replied quietly, resisting the urge to bash your head in. “It is hard.”

Seriously, what the hell did you do to reincarnate into this shitty RPG?

. 　⁺ ✦

“Do you think he’s grateful for the new opportunity?” In HER deft palms, the distaff continued to spin as the maiden began the conversation. Everything started with HER—the youngest, the most rash, but also the most creative. As it were, the threads SHE spun were of highest quality; mixed with the most tragic emotions and the most joyful, but humans would never appreciate the work SHE did for them. “His life was rather miserable, was it not?”

“He should be,” the matron scorned. HER own fingers unravelled the spool, pressing HER rod to measure adequate life spans fairly—for SHE was nothing if not just. “He’ll never grasp just how much probability we had to sacrifice to tamper with his string of fate.”

“You know mortals. They’re never grateful, Lachesis.” The hag’s shears didn’t hesitate to cut the string where marked—HER blinded eyes needed not to see in order to precisely locate where the matron had allotted an end. After all, THEIR habits were known to each other from the very beginning of time, when the universe was still in its cradle.

“I was against this from the start, you hear?” Lachesis complained. SHE was the most cynical out of the three, or as SHE liked to describe: the most pragmatic.

“Yes, yes, yet you were the one who opened up communications to find a suitable vessel for his rebirth,” the maiden scoffed. HER words were callous and sharp, but they parsed directly into the heart of the matter: the Moirai were far more soft-hearted than they appeared,

“If I hadn’t, then I would’ve missed the opportunity for Atropos to owe me a favour,” Lachesis returned, turning back to HER ruler. Those who knew HER saw the abashedness in her bowed head and clenched fists.

“Ha. As if you weren’t also rooting for the prince still entrapped in stone,” Atropos cackled. HER gnarled hands were the only ones that paused in their duties as SHE wheezed with laughter; even as tears ran down HER wrinkled cheeks.

“He’s paid too much already. Who else will settle the balance of fate if not us?” Lachesis rationalised, waving HER rod against the cosmos in frustration. “I do not pity mortals.”

THEY were quiet, for once. Only the sound of thread against thread, the whish of a rod, and the snip of scissors seeped into the silence.

“This one too. He has also paid the life-price. He is entitled to lesser sacrifices to fulfil his whims,” the youngest commented for the final time, for Clotho enjoyed making the balance too. Both the beginning and end were HERS for this conversation.

The three watched on.

. 　⁺ ✦

In accordance with your propensity to live a quiet life, there were three things you came to accept: one, it was impossible to get your old life back, not just because of your death, but Odysseus and his irritating cast were long gone; two, venturing into the city of New Metis for anything prolonged was probably the stupidest move you could do, even if your status as an alchemist wasn’t obvious at all; and three, to live a new quiet life as a sculptor, your new priority was finding a place to live.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” the caravan master worried, golden eyes surveying you up and down. Her arms crossed over her loose white robes, sharpened nails tapping right against her skin—a dead giveaway for her thoughts that clearly questioned your capacity to fend for yourself. Honestly, you couldn’t blame her; finding someone fast asleep in the middle of nowhere was sure to cast doubt into their capability to stay safe. “There’s always open spots if you wish to travel with us.”

A quiet life. Awkwardly, you scratched the side of your neck, and the chromatic patterns on your fingers pressed warmly into your flesh. A quiet life, unlike the suffering of your past one. There was no debt to pay off this time, no shitty apartment nor landlord, and nothing to tie you to one place any longer. A quiet life, more idealistic and stable than the previous one. It was far past time to take a rest—in a peaceful paradise that you’d create.

A truly serene life. Were you to tread on the fiery path they did, you would not find the future you wanted. This you deduced not from the unreliable system, but the careful observations you’d made over the past day.

A quiet beginning, and a quiet end. You’d accept that. Thus, you bade the woman who’d rescued you a sincere goodbye filled with well wishes.

“Stay safe.” It was Dan Heng who spoke to you last, pressing a talisman with his cool fingers against your own, heated palm. The spherical, intricately carved bauble resembled glassy jade—a soft green just like his robes. Corded through the middle was a length of twine that formed a loop, one that you slid over your head. Coldly, it lay against the dip of your chest, peeking out from your exquisite garb and shining right against the almost-incandescent equations etched into your body.

The immediate acceptance of his gift made him flush—as did the evident trust you held in him. “I— this contains around ten minae, or about a thousand drachma. Breaking it down further, it’s around six-thousand obols, enough to get you board and food in New Metis for around two months if you’re frugal. Here—”

His thumb pressed into a specific etching on the jade: a snake that appeared to wriggle somewhat in invitation as you stared at it. Just like that, a shadow around a handspan wide appeared in front of you, then vanished just as quickly when he pressed it once more. This close, you couldn’t help but stare wonderingly at his face as he explained how to reach in and grab the exact sum of Metisian currency, how six obols were one drachma, a hundred drachma were one mina, six hundred minae were one talent, how a loaf of bread cost only one obol and so forth. He smelled faintly of mint.

“—and that’s how it works. You can store other objects in there as well. If you get in trouble or change your mind, go to the local bank and let them guide you to the designated vault when you show them this key; there’s a way to contact us from there…” he rambled, trailing off when you clasped his hand in yours.

“Thank you.” Perfunctorily, you performed the appropriate gesture of profound gratefulness—a kiss on a merchant’s index knuckle for his generosity—and watched his composed face melt into a stupid little smile.

A wolf whistle pierced the air from where a certain pink-haired nomad sat. “The rich young master’s got moves!” she cackled gleefully, and you laughed for the first time in months: so bright it was hard to imagine it came from you.

Your own face donned a drowsy grin—offering energy as a collateral once more. There were no flowers by the docks, after all, thus the bloom in your hands seemed to have been conjured from thin air. “One last thanks, Dan Heng.”

Thus, there was only one thing you left behind on the isle of Thasos: a flower, pinned against a robe fluttering wildly in the salty breeze.

. 　⁺ ✦

New Metis was cold, in the same way your parents were cold—one buried and frigid, the other gone with only debts left behind.

Objectively, the city was stunning. Ancient architecture entwined itself with more modern innovation, blending into captivating citadels that held the essence of the past and the painstaking strides towards the future. Everywhere you looked, massive structures housed scholars and extensive collections of books, while the public buildings and amphitheatres were bursting with symposia and teeming discussions.

This really is the scholar capital, you thought. Though, as you bit into the soft sesame ring you’d purchased at the toss of an obol, it seemed… stagnant. In comparison to the warm bread in your mouth, the metropolis could not be considered friendly.

“No wonder, if what Dan Heng said was true.” You licked the remainder of the sesame from your lips, washing them down with an orange-like sort of juice that had the rich sweetness of honey and the sharpness of carbonation. If the city truly was as restrictive as claimed, there was little surprise as to why the scholars and every other citizen seemed a bit standoffish. Though, you couldn’t deny that the students that you observed in their element seemed to be in the throes of joy (and pain) as they buried themselves in their work and studying—the quality of teaching in Metis clearly was a cut above the rest, even with the restrictions in place. “Corruption really is everywhere, huh.”

In the places of reading, the students crammed on tables with books piled as tall as them reminded you sorely of your own days of youth. Your degrees were displayed proudly in your tiny apartment, alongside a small plaque you’d bought on a whim that simply read doctor’s office.

The sudden thought made your heart ache. Where were those certificates now?

There was nobody you were close enough to, nobody to carefully place your belongings into a cardboard box—then stow it away in some corner of their hearts. Nobody would miss you, not even your estranged mother.

With a sombre expression, you thumbed through the tomes on the dark shelves. Synthetic methods and reaction mechanisms. Industrial and environmental chemistry. Inorganic and organometallic molecules. How far was this a creation of another? How far had the humans here developed on their own, outside the limits of a game?

Bitterly, you left the library and walked back out into the stifling streets: past the agora, past the bustling market stalls, past a scholar earnestly discussing philosophy with passersby. The streets were paved with achromatic stones that appeared to have centuries-worth of wear on them, yet still seemed as pristine as if they’d just been laid yesterday—thus your shoes remained clean and unscuffed, though your heart certainly wasn’t.

You… couldn’t stay in this city. Even if you put up a front and became an artisan, even if you assimilated into New Metis with your local clothing and perfectly accented common tongue, even if you decided to take back your chemistry certification in this world too, the sheer crowds and constant reminders that this was not Earth made you sick to your stomach.

Bile spilled over your tongue and tainted the honey-sweet remainders of your drink.

More accurately, it was the stares you garnered with the intricate formulae marking your skin. Though you wore their garb and spoke their dialect with native fluency, there was something clearly ‘other’ about you—enough that you didn’t even bother checking into a hotel, but asked around for an estate agent instead. Master of houses, etched carefully into the marble-like stone, was a welcome sight in comparison to the looks you’d received throughout the day. They weren’t overtly hostile. They weren’t, but the inherently elitist atmosphere and cold you’d felt in this arid climate answered for you.

Would you like to see the rooms in the synoikia near the plaza? A firm diagonal slant of your hand signalled no: the quick, but also local way of traders and merchants communicating in busy environments. How about a townhouse? In the end, you flatly asked the housemaster if there were any remote houses for sale—to which a hologram from a recording stone showed a house nestled right in the Borderlands, surrounded by forests with mountains cradling the structure. House was too modest; the architecture, like all the buildings here, was practically a work of art in itself.

Tense location at the Borderlands… remote location… universities located on the central island and concentrated in New Metis…

You suppressed the devilish smile on your face as you smelled a bargain. It was a triad of real estate woes: poor location, low demand, and even more poor location.

“Four hundred drachma is the asking price,” he offered with a tentative smile—less than half the market price for a box apartment in the metropolis. After even more haggling (in between maintaining a look of disinterest), the property was sold with twelve percent shaved off the already-bargain.

Score for the penny-pinchers.

In the end, you made one final purchase from New Metis. Two technically, bought for only one drachma and one obol.

The first was a set of chisels and a hammer. The second was a small wooden piece of wood. It was not a plank, nor an offcut, but had the perfect size for a plaque. A new doctor’s office, to carve in with painstaking effort and calloused hands.

It was crude, and somewhat ugly—etched first in English, then below in the curling script of the common tongue (which was wholly unsuitable for this type of woodwork)—but looking at it made your bleeding heart ache slightly less.

After all, it was your last piece of Earth.

. 　⁺ ✦

Retrospectively, it would’ve been wiser to spend several nights in the city and send necessities to your new home by courier. More pragmatic, if you would—easing into your life in a new world rather than jumping headlong into it. But unfortunately, it seemed you’d become more lax as you crossed the boundaries between lives: electing instead to take the high-speed rail right across the sea and into the Borderlands, with nothing but the clothes on your back, a money dimension pocket, and a crudely made plaque. And your hammer and chisels, naturally, as well as some Metisian street food that vanished far too quickly.

In fact, it was downright foolish to come to the Borderlands on your first day. Even the conductor stared at you in disbelief—though your clothing and your accent was purposefully as Metisian as they came—so you got the gist that it was even more fucking stupid to go as a complete newcomer.

Borderlands, remnants of monsters from the Stellarons, highly volatile region, most travellers typically make the journey in groups, you nodded as you pieced together the rough state of the area whilst watching the sea and land speed by. Was it recklessness that endowed you with the guts to arm yourself with only a map and your wits? Were you perhaps… turning into an imbecile?

Actually, it was neither. The combination of brimming energy (from the street foods you gorged yourself on) and the updated character profile had ignited a chilling sort of passion for experimentation that was hard to extinguish, even as you crossed into this life.

[Name: ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼, working currently as an alchemist. One of unknown origin, fluent in common tongue, honey tongue, and the ancient tongue of thought. Although practising alchemists typically require various apparatuses to perform transmutation and practise the law of equivalent exchange, ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼ is a bit unique in that his body is the medium for the price instead—rather than formulae in common tongue on paper, the tattoos he’s earned in the tongue of thought are far more effective. After all, he is the only alchemist to have survived the life ‘price’. The law of equivalent exchange for ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼ specifically calls for energy, in return granting a ‘wish’. The larger the desire, the more energy will be depleted; but the most efficient ‘wishes’ involve transmuting one type of energy into another. Of course, a longer incantation—a more accurate incantation—will make the conversion less burdensome as well.]

So, quite literally, as long as you stayed fed and watered, you could transfer that chemical energy into explosive kinetic energy, or imbue weapons with heat or charge with the right ‘equation’. The Borderlands were yours for lab rat exploitation, essentially.

But the question remained—what were the limits?

And more importantly, how were the limits of these ‘wishes’ enforced?

You didn’t actually have to wait all that long to test out your abilities as an alchemist, though perhaps not in the way you’d expected. The journey to the house—with its own garden and goddamn pillars and stunning architecture—was far more uneventful than you’d anticipated (read: hoped), thus in a last ditch attempt, you decided to take matters into your own hands.

It really wasn’t on a whim, though. Seeing the sparse rooms, as well as a profound lack of a bed to sleep on—the binary suns had begun their slumber too, after all—it was perhaps pragmatic rather than foolish that you built up the long chant in the tongue of thought. More accurate, more accurate, you sweated, tracing the length of the equations up your arms and on your chest by using the small looking-glass attached to your belt.

“◼◼◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼,” you finished the incantation, feeling warmth seep from your limbs as the payment. “Refurbish.”

It wasn’t the wisest move, not at all. But who could blame you, when the materialised gauzy fabrics against stone walls, as well as the jewel-hued rugs, looked so darn nice?

Well, before you collapsed, of course—with a dopey grin on your face nonetheless. Those two things were all you could appreciate before you got totally knocked out.

Thus, the limits were deduced to be large-scale summonings, enforced by a good night's sleep—noted cheerfully by the alchemist who peeled his face off a brand new ornate rug in the morning, rather than the bed he’d sacrificed his consciousness for.

. 　⁺ ✦

When you unstuck yourself off the fastidiously complex rug (skin imprinted with its thread patterns, since you slept corpse-like in a single position), you almost didn’t recognise the once sparse house. To be more accurate, the intricate tapestries and glitzy trinkets, vases and decorations were familiar to what you pictured; but placed in conjunction with the stone walls, delicately carved pillars, and spacious, airy rooms took them to a completely new level.

The wish was thorough, you had to admit. With your feel pattering against the almost-glassy, colourful tiles, you took in the area where you woke up: the kitchen. Dried bundles of herbs hung from copper-hued rafters, perfuming the air with aromatic fragrances and balsamic scents. Past sage cupboards were conjured utensils that gleamed with a disused sort of enthusiasm that made your brows raise. I didn’t even think of these, you noted, flinging open the cupboards by the elegant cooker to reveal stacks upon stacks of charming ceramics and everything else you might possibly need to exist in the kitchen. Even the icebox, a large storeroom imbued with enchantments above its doorway (the Metisian equivalent of a modern refrigerator) was packed with meats and vegetables that looked visually dissimilar to Earth’s, but were somehow familiar to your mind.

It raised a question—if you ate food you conjured, would it not just be an endless loop of energy?

More importantly, would you even need the money still stored in the jade bead around your neck?

On the other side of the open-plan ground floor was the living area, strewn with various oddities and memorabilia. Two bookshelves stood proudly in a rich walnut colour, creaking under the weight of various books you’d skimmed in those reading-places back in the city. There were also titles you’d never come across before, but were sure to read on the plushy couches strewn with soft, patterned blankets and jewel-toned cushions. It was cosier than anything you might’ve desired, especially with the dim amber lamps perched on the dark-stained low table and the vibrant, low-hanging mosaic ceiling lights that looked like delicate baubles dropping from the heavens.

You ignored the stairs that spiralled to the top floor—to where there were a few rooms still detailed on the floor plan—since they were likely to contain the same levels of decoration both the kitchen and salon had. Rather, you tiptoed through the sunny corridor leading to the eastern part of the sprawling home: gauzy, rich-hued curtains brushing lightly past your skin. There, past the stunning mahogany door was a bright, vast studio—complete with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the extensive gardens and the distant mountains, as well as all the tools you could possibly need for sculpting, alongside the hammer and chisels you’d purchased just yesterday.

For a while you simply stared at the scenic landscape—nothing you’d ever seen on Earth, not when every day consisted of grey asphalt and ash-coloured buildings. There was a damn pond in your backyard, with a delicately wrought table and chair set at the edge. Had you imagined this too?

In any case, it was in a slight daze that you finally checked out the rooms upstairs; two guest rooms with large beds, desks and wardrobes; a large bathroom with picturesque views of the distant horizon and forests, as well as a massive tub; and finally, your room.

How did you know it was your room?

It looked lived in. Just like downstairs, a massive bookshelf lined the wall adjacent to the large windows: gauzy curtains fluttered over the tomes and let in the cool, fresh breeze. A large rug decorated the panels on the floor and slipped beneath your bed: a massive, round thing that looked like a jewel-bright, appetising cloud to simply dive into. And past the bed, an imposing armoire was stuffed to its seams in outfits both similar to the ones you were wearing (intricate, soft garments with detailed embroidery and vibrant palettes) as well as simpler, yet extraordinarily well-crafted, garments.

In essence, you were set for life. This space was an ideal, permanent vacation home: even if it were in no-man’s territory, with monsters sullying its landscape. You intended to sequester yourself until you died once more—with a book laid on your chest, a mug of tea still on the table, and a fat bee bumbling past as you closed your eyes in peaceful, eternal slumber. That was the ignorant bliss you would afford yourself: the you who got a break in this idyllic game after you passed on.

Perhaps this form of living would’ve been considered lamentable back on Earth. You, with the laurels of being a doctor in your profession, now spent the afternoon languidly draped over a soft couch simply reading. There were no samples to analyse, no reports to check, no research to work on. In fact, it was only a week later that you finally ventured out the sprawling gardens and into the forests. It wasn’t to check out the academic fruits of the bustling metropolis, nor was it to analyse the chemical makeup of the soil and flora—the most you’d done for that was conjuring some compost to make your new vegetable garden more acidic.

No, setting out into the forest was more to idly take inspiration from these pulchritudinous sights, and maybe fight a few monsters to learn how real combat worked in this open-world, combat-based RPG.

Maybe you’d get lucky and find some clay to practise sculpting before you found stone to work on. It was a forgiving medium, after all—soft and supple under your hands, rather than cold and flawless. Any mistakes could be worked away, any blunders would fade in the face of the cool, wet earth, and if you polished your rusty skills, you could make it into a job—it was a solid cover to disguise your use of alchemy.

As the grass with no apparent paths was trodden on (for the first time in perhaps decades), the loamy scent of petrichor and foliage quickly filled your senses; it was so tranquil, in fact, that your hold on your metal pail grew more absent-minded as you swept a large stick this way and that to brush longer plants aside. If you unfurled the slightly-outdated map you’d paid a sesame ring for, there was… a river nearby, right?

You squinted at the parchment, still unheeding of the warnings you’d received about this forest. With a full belly and over twelve hours of sleep, there was a dormant energy that was somewhat overshadowed by a bumbling drowsiness: only dispelling when you heard the sound of running water.

Clay—your eyes lit up like beacons, and the formulae on your body seemed to glow as you rolled the sleeves of your loose cream shirt up, as well as the soft material of your navy trousers. It was casual, to the point of being somewhat scandalous—nothing like the classy drapes of fabric that constituted every day in New Metis.

Well, you thought with a smug sort of vehemence. This is the Borderlands. Thus, there was an unseemly sort of flippancy to your gait as you trod in the direction of what you hoped was the river, pail and stick in hand as your shield and sword.

It was, perhaps, far too easy to find the softer clay deposits on the bank of the river; prying into the earth above to reveal the slick medium beneath and depositing it into your bucket. In fact, life had been going so smoothly in the past few days that you were lulled into a sense of false security.

Had you forgotten how your life was prior to your death?

You’d gotten complacent as you dusted yourself off—shirt and pants plastered with a gorgeous mauve, though you paid it little mind. It would be hell to clean out, unless you simply dubbed these the ‘work clothes’. In any case, your biggest worry currently was the staining of your conjured clothes—a far cry from the life and death you’d experienced.

It couldn’t simply be attributed to accustomising yourself to mundanity—no, maybe you were a bit of a reckless idiot as you strolled along the banks, sunning yourself with the binary stars in the heavens. There was not a care in the world as you closed your eyes to the Borderlands in favour of merely existing. Listening to the clear sounds of water cascading over riverstones. Feeling the clean breeze wash over your bare forearms and wet legs. Tasting the powdery, thick scent of clay after practically burying your face in it as you dug the mauve medium up.

But like all good things, they eventually had to end.

You weren’t foolish enough to keep turning a blind eye when you sensed danger.

The leaves stirred. The waters vacillated—equilibrium was no longer an option. The forest, like a stricken pulse, seemed to constrict around you; the very wind took shallow breaths against your skin.

Please, the Borderlands seemed to whisper. Get out while you can.

Your stick tapped a rhythm against the soft mud—partly passively sinking, partly actively getting dragged into what was quickly becoming quicksand.

For a brief moment, everything stilled—before you heard rapidly approaching footsteps coming right your way. Mentally, you began the long chant… tongue of thought for strengthening…. equation for charge… Coulomb’s law….

From the water too, came a sudden rush of volume flung to the skies—though the fleeting steps reached you first. A flash of blond. Your eyes met widened, almost-neon coloured irises. The stench of blood, too, filled the banks—before he crashed right into you, barrelling you against the rough bark of a tree whilst desperately clasping a hand over your mouth.

“Niedra; ćhiho tu, albo ka arakhel,” he breathed, panic so thick in each syllable that you could only stare. It wasn’t the common tongue, but you instinctively got the message from his hushed cadence. No, wait.

Don’t panic, the words had ghosted over your dampened flesh. Quiet, or it’ll find us.

In a language so smooth that it sounded like song, like an intricate tapestry woven from gossamer, he’d conveyed to you panic, fear, and a camaraderie so primal that this partnership was instinctual.

“Don’t speak, and hold your breath,” he then urgently translated into common tongue, when you merely looked at him, unblinking. “The Borderlands are very dangerous.”

The sudden switch allowed you to figure out why exactly you could parse together the clear meaning in his silvery syllables.

“Xatarav,” you murmured. ‘I understand’, for it was not in a language you didn’t know. The language that had not seen use—the tongue of honey—had finally encountered one of its own.

But the surprise in his face—the questions imbibed on insatiable lips—went unnoticed by you, for ‘it’ had finally found you.

Water splashed against the tree where the two of you were pressed against—soaking into the bark, and seeping cold into the fabric of your shirt. You couldn’t see ‘it’ from your position, but you could see the behemoth reflected in those captivating eyes—towering in his sclera as the leviathan uncoiled from the depths of the now-raging river. It shook its mane out—webbed tendrils fanning out angrily as it swung its massive head this way and that.

A frigid sort of fear washed over you, leeching any sort of warmth that had remained in your limbs.

Well over forty-metres high, it was only its poor eyesight that prevented it from slithering round this tree and snapping the two of you up in its deadly snapping jaws—reminding you acutely of the thrumming iron that pumped deep in your veins, and just how easy it was to spill.

You were painfully aware of the fact your only emergency ally was covered in gashes and wounds, bleeding into the already-purple mess of your clothes. His breathing was unsteady and his pulse was arrhythmic, but his eyes bore into yours with an intensity that seemed to ask ‘what will you do?’.

Would you run? Would you sling his arm over your shoulders and somehow evade the lightning-quick serpent? Would you leave him behind?

Your grip tightened around the stick—interrupted equations leaving it with a slight prickly sensation, rather than the full extent of charge. He noticed the muscles of your arm clench in response to your urgent grasp, and he frantically slanted his hand diagonally in an abject ‘no’.

“Na ka umire,” you muttered, making sure he understood exactly what you were saying in his mother tongue. ‘I won’t die.’

And you wouldn’t.

Not today, not tomorrow.

You wouldn’t die in vain a second time.

. 　⁺ ✦

90 notes · View notes

mamasbakeria · 2 years ago

Text

hey, what's your major again?

summary: my credible expert opinion on what the aot characters would study in university. what are my qualifications? the dozens of hours i’ve spent staring at my school’s program bulletin trying to figure out what i’m majoring in

genre | includes: headcanons, sfw, minor language, uninformed percy jackson reference (pls don't hate me if im wrong)

characters: eren jaeger, mikasa ackerman, armin arlert, sasha braus, jean kirschtein, connie springer, historia reiss, ymir, reiner braun, annie leonhardt

author’s note: had this in my drafts for months now. i just need to post it so it stops haunting me. might do the rest of the marleyans and vets in the future! lmk your thoughts, my only tumblr notifications are from p*rn bots, so i'd love to hear from real people lol. enjoy <3

eren: sociology and public policy, 4+1 program for a social work masters

there’s only so many times you can hear “you’re gonna be a doctor just like your dad” before you start to believe it. that’s why eren started out with biology on the premed track. the thing is, he really didn’t care for it. eren is really passionate about lessening equity gaps and is a firm believer in “if you want something done right, do it yourself”. this is why i see him making the switch to a double major in public policy and sociology. he wants to know about how society got to the point of perpetuating disparities so that he can fix them. but he also knows that the government fucking sucks and thinks its naive to expect policy change to be the only method of change. and like the maniac he is, eren is enrolled in a 4+1 program so he can get his master’s in social work when he’s done with his undergrad. he’s determined to graduate with both degrees in just 4 years though. rip his summers.

armin: international relations and military ethics, minor in communications or smth

everyone always says armin would study marine biology or oceanographic studies, but i honestly think that it’s a passion that he pursues on the side. he takes marine bio courses for his breadth requirements, but knows he’d end up hating the ocean if he spent the rest of his life studying it. he also strikes me as someone who would rather run buck naked into traffic than sit through multiple semesters of organic chemistry. armin was always a good public speaker, though, despite being a bit insecure. that’s why his speech and debate teacher during sophomore year of high school recommended model united nations to him. he was hooked after his first conference and now genuinely sees the path of international diplomacy as his calling. that’s why he’s majoring in international relations. his concentration in military ethics is something he tacks on in his junior year after taking some courses and publishing research with dr. erwin smith. he probably minors in communications because he can.

mikasa: forensic science

mikasa had no idea what she wanted to do when she started uni. she’s good at nearly everything. like never gotten a B in her life and is the student who the curve is based off of. but excelling in every environment you’re put in often means you don’t know what you’re best at. she knew deep down that she wanted to do something justice related like her childhood best friends did, but she’s no public speaker and has no interest in political reform. she was, however, emo in high school and heard a fair share of undertaker jokes at her expense. it wouldn’t hurt to look into right? as cool as the title sounds, morticians don’t make enough money for the job they have. fortunately enough, forensic pathologists do and mikasa looks good in a lab coat. she would never admit it to spare armin and eren’s feelings, but when they, as children, recreated the crime-solving shows mrs. jaeger always had on, mikasa always wanted to be the brains. so criminology and forensic science it is. (side note: she definitely joins the military and they pay for her education)

jean: structural engineering and industrial design with a minor in studio art

more than anything, jean wants to provide for his mom and knows he can’t guarantee a retirement of luxury for her as the freelance artist he wishes he could be. he’s decent at math when he tries and doesn’t hate physics, so he decided he’d give structural engineering a try for at least a semester or two. he wasn’t expecting to get much from it, to be honest. he had a plethora of backup plans waiting for his supposedly inevitable distaste for engineering, but he found that he didn’t hate it at all. someone once told jean that he had the makings of a great leader and he didn’t believe them until he started taking the lead on design projects and producing incredible results. his only qualm is that he just doesn’t get to be as creative as he wanted to be. that was easily rectified by an additional major in industrial design and a minor in studio art. he’s unbelievably busy, busier than he anticipated when he started his post-secondary journey, but he’s content and there’s nothing some extra coffee can’t solve.

sasha: environmental science and sustainability

sasha spent her childhood ankle-deep in mud and fighting her way through forest thickets without a compass. an upbringing like that doesn’t leave your spirit, no matter how far into the city you go for school. so sasha’s always been passively passionate about the environment. that passiveness became significantly more prominent when part of the woods she grew up in was cleared out to build an industrial complex. it was then that she started researching and writing petitions about preserving wildlife and making environmentally conscious decisions. her work actually got her the scholarship she’s on (because god knows it wasn’t her grades). and she genuinely loves what she does, so why wouldn’t she keep learning about it? the environmental science and sustainability program at the school is small, but tight-knit and known for churning out changemakers. sasha knows she’ll be one of them one day. just hide your plastic straws from her, okay?

connie: computer science and chinese

stick with me here okay? everyone expects connie to be a douchebag marketing major whose hardest assignments are graphing functions and making posters on photoshop, but he’s a lot more invested in his education than he looks. don’t get me wrong, connie has always struggled academically, but that’s because so much of early education is pre-determined. he performed way better when he could choose what courses he took. it’s kind of like percy jackson being dyslexic in english because he was wired to read in greek. connie can’t keep his eyes on a history textbook for shit, but will gladly sit in front of the c++ code on his pc for hours. he doesn’t even get mad when he realizes that he was missing a semicolon. connie loves how versatile of a future he could have with a compsci degree, because, let’s be real, he could never survive in a typical office environment. definitely takes a bunch of chinese classes and doesn’t realize that he has enough credits for it to be a minor until his second to last semester.

historia: political science with a minor in international relations and child development

historia is a lot like eren in the sense that she knows her time is best spent doing hands-on work in the fields she cares about. she realizes this sometime after reconnecting with her estranged father and volunteering at the orphanage she grew up in. but now that she’s publicly associated with a powerful political figure, historia doesn’t get to do what she wants, only what is expected of her. that’s how she ends up on the pre-law political science and public policy route. the nickname “ms. president” that connie and sasha give her only further reminds her that she’s heading down a path she never wanted for herself. after lots of encouragement from ymir, historia decided to take child development courses on the side. even if she doesn’t take on the full minor, she’s taking some classes she cares about. maybe she’ll find use for it someday. at the very least, it’s her first step in becoming the most selfish girl in the world.

ymir: data science and business management

ymir is smart. much smarter than she presents herself to be, almost as a form of protection. nobody expects much of someone who is aloof, so it makes it easy to slip through the cracks to remain safe and comfortable in the shadows. business management is notoriously low commitment and easy to skate by with. guaranteed internships, post-graduate employment, and so on. To anyone who doesn’t know ymir well, it’s perfect. but they have her mistaken, ymir will do as little as possible to go as far as possible. sure, she can live comfortably with a business degree, but it could be better with a little bit of data science in her arsenal. she’s intelligent enough to pick up on it, and determined enough to make it her bitch. yeah, academia is a money-sucking pipeline into the capitalist hellscape, she doesn’t believe in it yada yada, but at the end of the day, ymir’s gonna get the bag. so what if she’s gotta sleep through some stats classes to get it?

reiner: behavioral economics

reiner’s mother had convinced him his whole life that getting a high paying job would fix their lives and bring his father back. believing “perfect grades lead to a perfect life” made high school tough for reiner; gifted kid burnout is no joke. it really messed him up. he wasn’t sure if he could withstand the pressures of university, but here he is. reiner was never allowed a therapist, so he figured pursuing psychology would, at the very least, give him some answers and be a good pathway to a medical degree. he loved getting to understand how people work and why they act the way they do, but something was missing. he found out what it was when a guest lecturer spoke in his economics class. he knew making the switch would be risky, it’s a new field and his current career options are really only research, academia, or government, but the interdisciplinary study of behavioral economics is calling reiner’s name.

annie: biomedical engineering and kinesiology

annie’s entire life revolved around her father, including the injury he was never able to heal from. the one she gave him. he’s claimed to be over it, she’s forgiven, but annie will never feel like she’s earned that forgiveness until she gets rid of the problem entirely. how is she going to do that exactly? with biomedical engineering. she has years of hell in front of her, especially with her concentration on biomechanics, but she doesn’t care. annie will throw herself into her work to get the results she wants. she takes the highest amount of credits possible every semester so she can graduate early. you’ll most likely find her chained to a study cubicle at the library at all hours of the day and running on 2 hours of sleep, but it doesn’t faze her. she tacks on a minor in kinesiology because it makes sense and she had most of the credits for it anyway. and as if it couldn’t get worse, she probably TAs for a thermodynamics course or something crazy like that.

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hamsterclaw · 2 years ago

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Fic Library: Jimin

Lost and Found by @kimvtae. An idolverse AU featuring Jimin as a problematic idol who gets sent for rehab in America, where he meets reader. Beautiful writing and reformed bad boy Jimin is characterised so well here.

Adonis by @xjoonchildx. Jimin's a hot paramedic who you meet with a little help from the little old lady next door. Funny, cute and written in Ana's incomparable style.

Put it on me by @jimilter features models Jimin and reader on a shoot and it's laugh out loud funny, snappy and smutty. So so good.

La Grande Maison by @softyoongiionly features Jimin x reader and is a mystery/thriller with great scene-setting and beautifully realised friendships.

I know a place by @augustbutwinter has Jimin and a gender-neutral reader in a sweet pining story about unrequited love.

Fall like moondrops by @madbutgloriouspond is a beautiful story set in a just-post-college AU featuring a dancer Jimin who's determined, sweet, and an all-round decent guy. It captures the end-of-summer vibe and apprehension about upcoming change perfectly.

Devil's in the backseat by @ugh-yoongi is a sexy, smutty tale with banter that's sparky and so so funny, featuring Jimin x f! reader in an established relationship.

Headrush (It's too sweet) by the uber-talented @minisugakoobies is a spiky, sexy, fun, headrush featuring stylist reader and idol Jimin.

Neon Seoul by @readyplayerhobi has a noir murder mystery set in a cyberpunk dystopia and features detectives Jimin x reader. The worldbuilding is stellar.

Make an offer by @bangtanintotheroom features an irresistibly sexy Jimin in a sugar daddy/sugar baby AU.

Of stars erased by @fantasybangtan. I'm a sucker for dystopian future AUs, and this is a story that makes me reflect on how lucky I am to be able to read stories like this, for free. Incredible storytelling by a fantastic writer.

An Ghealach by @theharrowing is sexy horror at it's best. A haunting, ambiguous, unreliable-narrator tale featuring linguist Jimin and a mysterious OC.

Like Crazy by @thatlongspringnight is a beautifully realised story about loneliness and seeking solace in transience that features Jimin x f! reader.

Blunt Rotation by @gimmethatagustd is a law school AU featuring pretty boy Jimin and weed girl reader. Funny, chaotic and razor sharp.

Weight by @augustbutwinter features Jimin x f! reader and is set in a semi-historical, royal AU, where nothing is quite as it seems.

Menace by @eoieopda features Jimin x Kim! reader in an irresistible relationship dynamic characterised by brattiness and hate sex and a Jimin who lives up to the title of the story. So so good.

The airport couple: P(ass)enger from hell by @dovechim features frequent traveller Jimin and TSA agent reader and is so good I've reread it time and again. Cracky, hilarious and Jimin is perfectly written as an outrageous little shit.

On the borderline by @jimilter is a friends to lovers AU in progress that's a super fun read - deliciously smutty, angsty and infused with Ash's signature brand of humour.

Red flag by @xjoonchildx has rich boy Jimin x reader in a witty, sparkling smutty caper that's a romp of a read.

Shadows in the graveyard by @minisugakoobies is sexy, kitschy, schlocky horror at it's best featuring reader x Jimin stranded in the woods.

#fic rec: jimin #these authors are amazing

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fatehbaz · 1 year ago

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Coral today is an icon of environmental crisis, its disappearance from the world’s oceans an emblem for the richness of forms and habitats either lost to us or at risk. Yet, as Michelle Currie Navakas shows in [...] Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, our accounts today of coral as beauty, loss, and precarious future depend on an inherited language from the nineteenth century. [...] Navakas traces how coral became the material with which writers, poets, and artists debated community, labor, and polity in the United States.

The coral reef produced a compelling teleological vision of the nation: just as the minute coral “insect,” working invisibly under the waves, built immense structures that accumulated through efforts of countless others, living and dead, so the nation’s developing form depended on the countless workers whose individuality was almost impossible to detect. This identification of coral with human communities, Navakas shows, was not only revisited but also revised and challenged throughout the century. Coral had a global biography, a history as currency and ornament that linked it to the violence of slavery. It was also already a talisman - readymade for a modern symbol [...]. Not least, for nineteenth-century readers in the United States, it was also an artifact of knowledge and discovery, with coral fans and branches brought back from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to sit in American parlors and museums. [...]

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[W]ith material culture analysis, [...] [there are] three common early American coral artifacts, familiar objects that made coral as a substance much more familiar to the nineteenth century than today: red coral beads for jewelry, the coral teething toy, and the natural history specimen. This chapter [...] [brings] together a fascinating range of representations of coral in nineteenth-century painting and sculptures.

With the material presence of coral firmly in place, Navakas returns us to its place in texts as metaphor for labor, with close readings of poetry and ephemeral literature up to the Civil War era. [...] [Navakas] includes an intriguing examination of the posthumous reputation of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean-André Peyssonnel who first claimed that coral should be classed as an animal (or “insect”), not plant. Navakas then [...] considers white reformers [...] and Black authors and activists, including James McCune Smith and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and a singular Black charitable association in Cleveland, Ohio, at the end of the century, called the Coral Builders’ Society. [...]

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[H]er attention to layered knowledge allows her to examine the subversions of coral imagery that arose [...]. Obviously, the mid-nineteenth-century poems that lauded coral as a metaphor for laboring men who raised solid structures for a collective future also sought to naturalize a system that kept some kinds of labor and some kinds of people firmly pressed beneath the surface. Coral’s biography, she notes, was “inseparable from colonial violence at almost every turn” (p. 7). Yet coral was also part of the material history of the Black Atlantic [...].

Thus, a children’s Christmas story, “The Story of a Coral Bracelet” (1861), written by a West Indian writer, Sophy Moody, described the coral trade in the structure of a slave narrative. [...] In addition, coral’s protean shapes and ambiguity - rock, plant, or animal? - gave Americans a model for the difficulty of defining essential qualities from surface appearance, a message that troubled biological essentialists [...]. Navakas thus repeatedly brings into view the racialized and gendered meanings of coral [...].

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Some readers from the blue humanities will want more attention, for example, to [...] different oceans [...]: Navakas’s gaze is clearly eastward to the Atlantic and Mediterranean and (to a degree) to the Caribbean [...], even though much of the natural historical explorations, not to mention the missionary interest in coral islands, turns decidedly to the Pacific. [...] First, under my hat as a historian of science, I note [...] [that] [q]uestions about the structure of coral islands among naturalists for the rest of the century pitted supporters of Darwinian evolutionary theory against his opponents [...]. These disputes surely sustained the liveliness of coral - its teleology and its ambiguities - in popular American literature. [...]

My second desire, from the standpoint of Victorian studies, is for a more specific account of religious traditions and coral. While Navakas identifies many writers of coral poetry and fables, both British and American, as “evangelical,” she avoids detailed analysis of the theological context that would be relevant, such as the millennial fascination with chaos and reconstruction and the intense Anglo-American missionary interest in the Pacific. [...] [However] reasons for this move are quickly apparent. First, her focus on coral as an icon that enabled explicit discussion of labor and community means that she takes the more familiar arguments connecting natural history and Christianity in this period as a given. [...] Coral, she argues, is most significant as an object of/in translation, mediating across the Black Atlantic and between many particular cultures. These critical strategies are easy to understand and accept, and yet the word - the script, in her terms - that I kept waiting for her to take up was “monuments”: a favorite nineteenth-century description of coral.

Navakas does often refer to the awareness of coral “temporalities” - how coral served as metaphor for the bridges between past, present, and future. Yet the way that a coral reef was understood as a literal graveyard, in an age that made death practices and new forms of cemeteries so vital a part of social and civic bonds, seems to deserve a place in this study. These are a greedy reader’s questions, wanting more. As Navakas notes [...], the method [...] is to understand our present circumstances as framed by legacies from the past, legacies that are never smooth but point us to friction and complexity.

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All text above by: Katharine Anderson. "Review of Navakas, Michele Currie, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America." H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. December 2023. Published at: [networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20017692/anderson-navakas-coral-lives-literature-labor-and-making-america] [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

#ecologies #tidalectics #multispecies #geographic imaginaries #ecology #archipelagic thinking #interspecies

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mybeautifulchristianjourney · 2 months ago

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Roman Catholic Objection: “Sola Scriptura refutes itself because it’s not found in Scripture.”

Refutation:

Sola Scriptura is a theological conclusion drawn from Scripture, not a verse-by-verse quote.

Sola Scriptura means Scripture is the only infallible authority, not the only authority at all. The doctrine is rooted in texts such as:

—2 Timothy 3:16–17 – Scripture is “God-breathed” and “sufficient to make the man of God complete.”

—Acts 17:11 – The Bereans are commended for testing Paul’s teaching by the Scriptures.

—Mark 7:13 – Jesus rebukes tradition that nullifies the Word of God.

As Michael J. Kruger writes:

“The reformers never claimed that every doctrine must be explicitly stated in Scripture using the same words. Rather, it must be derived from Scripture by good and necessary consequence.” (Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited, p. 43)

Roman Catholic Objection: “You can’t even prove which books belong in the Bible without the Church.”

Refutation:

This assumes a Roman Catholic model of the canon, which Kruger critiques as circular.

According to Rome:

The Church determines the canon, therefore the Bible depends on the Church’s authority.

Kruger argues this wrongly subordinates Scripture to the Church:

“This view makes the authority of Scripture dependent upon the Church’s declaration, which turns the Church into the ultimate authority.” (Kruger, Canon Revisited, p. 91)

Self-Authenticating Canon Model (Kruger’s Response)

The canon is not authenticated by external authority, but is self-authenticating through the internal marks of Scripture, the work of the Spirit, and its apostolic origins.

Kruger defends a threefold model:

a. Providential Exposure – The books were recognized because God ensured they were exposed to the churches.

b. Attributes of Canonicity – These books bear divine qualities, such as:

Beauty and excellency (Ps. 19; John 7:46)

Unity and harmony (Luke 24:27; Heb. 1:1–2)

Transforming power (Heb. 4:12; Jer. 23:29)

c. Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit –

“Just as the Holy Spirit authenticates Scripture to the individual believer, so He authenticates the canon to the church collectively.” (Kruger, Canon Revisited, p. 101)

Roman Catholic Objection: “No Church, no Bible.”

Refutation:

This confuses the role of the Church as a recognizer of the canon, not its creator.

The Church did not make the canon; it received and recognized it.

As Calvin says:

“As to their question — How can we be assured that this has flowed from God, unless we have recourse to a decree of the Church? — it is like asking, Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?” *(Calvin, Institutes, 1.7.2)

Kruger puts it this way:

“The church is more like a thermometer than a thermostat. It does not determine the temperature (canon), but registers it.” (Kruger, Canon Revisited, p. 94)

Conclusion

Sola Scriptura does not refute itself, nor does it rely on the Roman Church for its foundation. The canon is self-authenticating: recognized through divine qualities, apostolic origins, and the Holy Spirit's testimony. The Church’s role was not to create Scripture, but to recognize what God had already given.

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daydreamingsommie · 1 hour ago

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Random Modern AU ideas

Lumera is a CEO and Alear is studying to take over the company Vander's is Lumera's secretary Clanne and Framme are Alear's childhood friends and are like little siblings to them Veyle and Alear got separated in the foster system and they're trying to reunite

Alfred and Céline come from a family that runs a fashion company Alfred works as a physical therapist Etie's a personal trainer Boucheron is a librarian Céline works as a waitress at a cafe while attending med school Louis works at a daycare Chloé is a food vlogger Louis and Chloé are both cinematography students. They usually bicker during group projects

Diamant and Alcryst are from a military family Diamant is expected to be a marine like their dad, but wants to be something else. Though he hasn't decided yet Alcryst's training to be an Olympic archer Jade is a famous athlete while still being an author Amber is from a small town and went to the city to become a superhero movie actor Lapis is a STEM major on a scholarship program Citrinne's her roommate and is a little lost about what she wants to be Saphir's a retired vet who now owns a fishing store Yunaka is a reformed criminal who runs a rehabilitation center to give other people second chances

Ivy is majoring in law and history Kagetsu is a kendo or fencing instructor. He does travel vlogging on the side Zelkov is a pharmacist with a lot of random skills Hortensia, Goldmary, and Rosado are an idol group They have a friendly competition about who can get the most views on their fashion and makeup videos Lindon's obviously a university professor

Timerra wants to be a choreographer and has history in gymnastics Merrin and Panette are part of Timerra's dance crew Merrin works at an animal shelter and Panette does special effect makeup when they're not recording dance videos Fogado's a waiter at the same cafe Céline works at and is studying for a business degree Pandreo volunteers at a church and is studying to become a therapist Bunet is of course a head chef at a restaurant Seadall's an actor, model, and dancer

Anna and Jean are children, so they are just children :P

I haven't decided where the Xenologue characters fit in a modern AU yet

#fire emblem #fire emblem engage #fe engage #fe17

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myfanfic-urfantrash · 17 days ago

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I always dound the vidyhadara weird. A race that doesn't reproduce at all wouldn't have a need for reproductive organs so them having genders is strange.

The origin of the race is unknown besides being connected to Long. Whether they were truly created by Long, transformed from another race into Long's followers, or anything else. However, I think they don't deal with the same trans experience as other races because of the whole rebirth thing. We don't know what decides the sex of the next reincarnation so in my own theory, it's guided by the reformation of the soul of the person. It's not as simple as losing your memory, even amnesiacs can end up falling into the same habits or finding sentiment in the things from before. It's the body undergoing transformation along with the soul and mind too. Thus, unless there was something very wrong with the transformation (vidyhadara diseases of this nature are *extremely* rare), the soul will always fit the body.

Also, I'm vibrating over here. Basically everyone I've talked about trans hcs with has different ones than I do. I struggle with being the "Um, actually 🤓☝️" person. Chomping at the bit trying to be a better person and not shake other people by the shoulders just for having different opinions for me. I respectfully disagree but I WILL be respectful, mindful, and mature. Ignore the different parts of me throwing hands over a conference table, they aren't in charge right now.

Tbh my only really strong trans hcs have been Wanderer from genshin and Feixiao from hsr.

Regarding HSR: I think that in general, unless a planet is particularly stubborn and conservative with gender/sex types, then any planet connected to the wider universe for a decent amount of time will slowly have certain things fade from cultural significance.

The medical technology available through universal trade makes something like transitioning very easy and hardly worth mentioning. Psychology and neurology are probably pretty advanced too. Not to mention the fact that there are thousands to millions of sentient species other than humans in HSR (but the devs can't be bothered even making npc models for that shit, boo devs) probably with their own sexes and genders that are completely different from the system we have. Being trans is probably considered the same as being blonde.

Seriously, no one bats an eye at Boothill basically being 90% cyborg. I'm not sayimg discrimination doesn't exist in HSR (it definitely does) but at the very least, in places like Penacony and the Xianzhou with wider access to the universe, certain issues irl are not seen as that big of a deal there and don't result in a culture identity being formed in resistance to oppression.

...

...did I get too nerdy. This ask is way too long. My bad. I don't have a degree in it but ever so occasionally I like to think about sociology, especially that of fictional worlds. Because studying the real world makes me depressed.

You cannot "um actually🤓☝️" your way through this I am if I have already considered these things :P

I know though this was all just for fun applying a little bit of some real world aspects just as a thinking point basically. Like in general when it comes to fantasy worlds and races like these you really can't expect them to follow the real world's thought process when it comes to gender so I didn't go into that because you could go so many ways about it. I mean even in the real world you can't expect everyone to follow the same idea of what gender identity and expression is either it's all very different ones way of identifying as a man could be different to someone thousands of miles across the world and these ideas can conflict because of culture differences.

Like you said with the Vidyahara it could really not matter at all because they live so differently from other species and things like gender could be irrelevant to them or not apply to them in the way it applies to others and with the advanced technology such things like changing gender would be trivial. There's also the fact some planets are isolated from these technology or different planets and species so really anything can happen.

With the Xianzhou while they are pretty welcoming to outsiders they are pretty harsh when it comes to differences to the norm also and while it was seen from the side of disability it could apply to other parts as well. Not saying there'd be major needs to like fight for rights or such just that it's gonna feel pretty bad if they suffered from dysphoria but only could do so much about it unlike other species. There'd probably be some form of longing because they'd see these other races capable of changing so much but they can't change how they want to.

In like the case of how I hc Xingqiu for the post such things are so normal it slips the mind and people forget that they can do very obvious things sorta like how there's no rule for how to do the dishes and if you don't like doing them because you don't like to get your hands wet there's the obvious solution of wearing gloves or getting a dishwasher to do it for you.

In truth they probably wouldn't even have the same terms we do for such experiences and identities. Like Transgender probably doesn't exist and if we want to get even more into it probably various sexualities don't really exist either. If we're going for some more HSR hcs based on the universe then there'd probably be a whole thing started by the IPC in order to sorta classify beings for the sake of records or whatever which could be another point for why many hate the IPC because their identity is sorta reduced to something more easily digestible cause like there could be a whole nuanced way someone expresses themselves and the IPC would be like 'cool you do this, dress like that and have these parts you have been labeled as a masculine woman case closed. Now buy our product it is suitable for those like you.'

I jump around different hcs for all characters when it comes to gender, sexualities, attraction, and etc based on what we see/know in canon. We'll never know a character is or isn't something or has or had something unless the creators you know straight up say it directly or heavily imply it to the point they're actually shouting it from the roof tops basically. Like with Wanderer for all we know could have been made male originally or could have been made female and then later decided to identify as male as he figured out the world around him who knows man is a puppet and whatever gender applied to him is based on our own perception not his own. Honestly you could literally point to any character in existence and hc them as trans or whatever with or without any sort of reason behind it and call it a day even if it makes no sense if you consider a characters lore and interactions with their world.

Anyways all of it was just for fun to explore what it'd be like for them if they were trans in a similar way to our understanding of being trans and gender and what not while considering their stories, some of the in universe events, and such at the ungodly hours of 2am.

#FicMode Chat #FicMode Ideas

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dearestscript · 18 days ago

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

Text

By: Christina Buttons

Published: May 13, 2024

A guide to the international debate on youth medical transition, where medical authorities in the United States depart from a growing international consensus.

The world is reacting to the U.K.'s Cass Review and associated systematic evidence reviews, which found "remarkably weak" evidence supporting medical interventions for gender transition in minors. Released on April 9, 2024, the final report from the national gender clinic service for those under 18—following four years of meta-analyses of the available literature—dealt a major blow to the gender-affirming model of care and marked its termination in England.

NHS England, which commissioned the report, expressed gratitude to Dr. Hilary Cass and committed to implementing her recommendations. These advocate for primarily relying on psychotherapy to address gender-related distress in minors and discontinuing the use of puberty blockers as part of England’s publicly funded healthcare system. The NHS predicted the landmark review would have "major international importance and significance"—a prediction that has proven correct. Just one month later, we are already beginning to see its impact.

What’s New

Scotland and Wales

In response to the Cass Review, Wales and Scotland have joined England in halting new prescriptions of puberty blockers for minors under 18 diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Additionally, in Scotland, cross-sex hormones will not be available to those under 18. In the last few years, beyond the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have adopted a more cautious approach by placing restrictions on medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors. Norway has also signaled intentions to follow a similar path.

Germany

Now, Germany has emerged as the latest country to initiate steps towards placing restrictions on gender transition treatments for minors. Earlier this week, the German Medical Assembly, a pivotal body representing medical professionals across the country, passed a resolution that calls for the restriction of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for gender dysphoric youth to strictly controlled research settings. Another resolution passed that stated minors should not be permitted to "self-identify" into a chosen sex without first undergoing a specialist child and adolescent psychiatric evaluation and consultation.

While national restrictions have not yet been formalized, experts in gender medicine research are describing this update as a “major development” — especially considering that Germany has been one of the most permissive countries on this issue.

Read the SEGM Analysis

Belgium

Additionally, in Belgium, leading physicians are advocating for significant reforms in the treatment protocols for gender dysphoria in children and adolescents. According to an April 2024 report authored by pediatricians and psychiatrists P. Vankrunkelsven, K. Casteels, and J. De Vleminck from Leuven, there is a pressing need to follow the precedents set by Sweden and Finland, where hormones are regarded as a last resort. Their findings and recommendations were published in a prestigious medical journal associated with Dutch-speaking medical faculties in Belgium and their alumni associations.

International Bodies

International bodies such as the United Nations (UN) have also responded to the Cass Review. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, issued a statement on the UN’s website declaring that the Review’s recommendations are essential for protecting children, especially girls, from harm.

In addition, the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP), a prominent umbrella association of 36 Child and Adolescent Psychiatry societies worldwide, recently issued a policy statement on child and adolescent gender dysphoria. They urged healthcare providers to "not to promote experimental and unnecessarily invasive treatments with unproven psycho-social effects and, therefore, to adhere to the ‘primum-nil-nocere’ (first, do no harm) principle."

These responses stand in stark contrast to that of World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a body-modification advocacy organization. WPATH emailed a statement to its subscribers in response to the Cass Review, vehemently rejecting its findings and adhering to its ideological beliefs. WPATH criticized the Cass Report as “harmful” and "rooted in a false premise" that suggests distressed children can be helped without "medical pathways.”

United States

In response to the Cass Review, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Endocrine Society (ES) recently provided statements to WBUR, doubling down on their endorsement of the gender-affirming model of care and medical interventions for minors. Both blamed “politics” for spreading “misinformation.” Meanwhile, prominent gender clinicians have expressed to WBUR that they are “perplexed and concerned” by these organizations’ statements, given the Cass Review’s findings.

WPATH, AAP, and ES continue to mislead the public by claiming that the gender-affirming model of care adheres to the principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM), despite clear evidence to the contrary. Their recommendations for medical interventions are not grounded in robust evidence but rather rely on "circular referencing" of each other’s guidelines, effectively creating a citation cartel.

Comprehensive Overview of the International Debate On Youth Transition by Country

In recent years, there has been an ongoing debate about the best approach for treating gender-distressed youth, addressing the global increase in young people, primarily adolescent females, seeking services from gender clinics. Countries with pediatric gender clinic services have shown varied responses, ranging from highly medicalized treatment pathways to approaches that prioritize psychotherapy.

Nations such as the UK, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have taken unified steps to heavily restrict medical transitions for minors, aligning their guidance with the results of systematic evidence reviews, with Norway similarly indicating moves in this direction. Elsewhere, medical and health authorities remain divided on best practices, although there are signs of some reevaluating their positions on the medical transition of minors. This guide will highlight significant updates and changes observed in these practices over recent years.

The Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the birthplace of the Dutch Protocol—the highly medicalized approach to treating youth with gender dysphoria—is facing increased scrutiny. As of 2023, there is a growing debate within medical, legal, and cultural realms about the practice of youth gender transitions.

On February 15, 2024, the Dutch Parliament ordered an investigation into the physical and mental health outcomes of children who have been prescribed puberty blockers. Despite these developments, the guidelines for treating gender dysphoria have not yet been updated.

In April 2024, Amsterdam UMC, the Dutch clinic that pioneered youth gender transition practices, issued a statement in response to the Cass Report. The clinic commended several elements of the report but expressed disagreement with its conclusion that the evidence supporting the use of puberty blockers is insufficient.

In May 2024, one of the Netherlands' national newspapers profiled the new policy statement from The European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) that advocated for a non-medicalized approach to treating child and adolescent gender dysphoria.

Norway

In 2023, the Healthcare Investigation Board of Norway (Ukom) issued recommendations urging the Ministry of Health and Care to instruct the Directorate of Health to revise the national professional guideline for gender incongruence, drawing on systematic evidence reviews. Additionally, the Ukom report proposed classifying puberty blockers, as well as hormonal and surgical interventions for children and young people, as experimental treatments. This classification would subject these treatments to more stringent regulations regarding informed consent, eligibility, and outcome evaluation. However, Norway has not yet issued any explicit new guidelines following these recommendations.

Denmark

In July 2023, Ugeskrift for Læger, the journal of the Danish Medical Association, reported a significant shift in Denmark's approach to treating youth with gender dysphoria. Instead of receiving prescriptions for puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery, most young people referred to the centralized gender clinic now receive therapeutic counseling and support.

France

In 2022, the National Academy of Medicine in France advised exercising "the utmost medical caution" for the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children and adolescents, citing the risk of regret. Despite this caution, the prescription of these treatments remains permissible at any age with parental authorization.

A 2023 poll by the Journal International de Médecine found 84% of healthcare professionals in France are in favor of a moratorium on the administration of hormonal treatments for trans-identified minors.

In March 2024, French senators released a 369-page report advocating for the cessation of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers on minors. Based on the findings of this report, lawmakers have drafted a bill that is set to be debated on May 28, 2024.

Italy

In January 2023, the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) wrote a letter to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, expressing "great concern" over the "ongoing experimentation" with drugs designed to halt puberty in children and calling for a "rigorous scientific discussion."

In March 2024, the Vatican’s doctrine office, after five years of preparation, released a report approved by Pope Francis that declared gender-related surgeries to be "a grave violation of human dignity."

In April 2024, five Italian medical organizations released a joint position paper on managing adolescent gender dysphoria. This document, which extensively references WPATH, supports the medical transition of minors.

Sweden

In 2022, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare declared that the potential harms of puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone treatments for individuals under 18 years of age surpass the possible benefits for this demographic. The board recommended that such treatments should primarily occur within a research setting to better assess their effects on gender dysphoria, mental health, and quality of life among young people. Additionally, it noted that hormone treatments could still be administered in exceptional circumstances.

In April 2023, a systematic review conducted by researchers from Karolinska Institutet, University of Gothenburg, Umeå University, and the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services was published in Acta Paediatrica. This review assessed the existing evidence on hormonal treatment for individuals under 18 years old with gender dysphoria. The researchers concluded that such interventions “should be considered experimental treatment rather than standard procedure.”

Finland

Finland was the first Western country to conduct a systematic review of the evidence for youth gender transition, that led to a significant update of its guidelines in 2020. Observations from Finnish gender clinics showed that hormone treatments do not typically improve—and can worsen—the functioning of gender-dysphoric youth. In response, the country's Council for Choices in Health Care revised its guidelines to emphasize psychosocial support as the primary approach and restricted hormonal interventions to exceptional cases. These interventions are permitted before age 18 only if the individual's cross-sex identity is confirmed as permanent and causes severe dysphoria, the child fully understands the significance, benefits, and risks of the treatments, and there are no contraindications.

In October 2023, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a leading Finnish gender clinician and researcher at Tampere University Hospital, wrote an op-ed in The Free Press, titled "Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It.” She highlighted concerns about the practice of pediatric medical transition in the U.S. and the lack of solid evidence supporting the efficacy of medical transition in reducing suicide rates among young people.

In February 2023, a landmark study from Finland revealed low suicide rates among trans-identified youth and found no evidence of benefits from gender reassignment. The study showed that, after accounting for psychiatric needs, there was no statistically significant evidence that gender-referred youth have higher suicide rates compared to the general population. The authors concluded that the risk of suicide related to transgender identity and/or gender dysphoria "may have been overestimated."

England

In January 2020, National Health Service (NHS) England formed a Policy Working Group (PWG) to conduct an assessment of the existing research on the use of puberty blockers and feminizing/masculinizing hormones in children and young people with gender dysphoria. This was aimed at shaping a policy stance on their continued application. The findings from these reviews were released in March 2021.

In February 2022, the interim report to the Cass Review was published, which had been commissioned by NHS England to evaluate the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, the UK's only national clinic for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria. The review highlighted significant concerns about the clinical decision-making framework, noting a lack of robust evidence and consensus on the most effective treatments.

In July 2022, NHS England announced it would close GIDS in Spring 2023, which was delayed until Spring 2024. Two new regional hubs opened in London and the north of England to move away from a single-service model.

In October 2022, the NHS England issued new draft guidance following their systematic evidence review, stating that there is "scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision-making" for minors with gender dysphoria, and for most who present before puberty, it will be a "transient phase" requiring psychological support rather than medical intervention.

In March 2024, NHS England announced that it would end the prescription of puberty blockers at gender clinics for children due to insufficient evidence regarding their safety and effectiveness. These treatments will now only be accessible through clinical research trials.

On April 9, 2024, the final 388-page report of the Cass Review was published, along with 9 studies (8 of which were systematic evidence reviews) by the University of York.

Ireland

In March 2023, HSE published a review of the interim Cass Report to assess Gender Identity Services for children and young people in Ireland.

In April 2024, the Health Service Executive (HSE) announced the development of a new clinical program for gender healthcare, scheduled over the next two years. They also stated that the final report for the Cass Review will be included as part of this process.

Canada

In January 2024, Alberta announced the implementation of measures that significantly restrict medical transitions for minors. This policy establishes Alberta as the only province in Canada to enforce such limitations on gender transition procedures for individuals under 18. Under the new regulations, minors are prohibited from undergoing any gender-related surgeries, and those aged 16 and younger are prevented from accessing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

United States

The three main organizations that have issued guidelines on youth medical transition include the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Endocrine Society (ES), and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Other groups, such as the American Medical Association, have either publicly supported “affirming” medical practices without presenting evidence, or have aligned themselves with the guidelines set by one or more of these three organizations. Notably, none of these organizations have yet conducted systematic reviews of the evidence, which are designed to avoid selective inclusion of studies and biased interpretations.

Leaders at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) ignored five resolutions from its members over four consecutive years, each urging that youth transition guidelines be aligned with findings from systematic evidence reviews. In August 2023, the AAP Board of Directors finally agreed to conduct their own systematic review of the evidence and consider updating its guidance. At the same time, the Board "voted to reaffirm" its 2018 policy statement on gender-affirming care.

In 2022, Florida took the lead as the first state to curtail the widespread administration of hormonal and surgical interventions to the increasing number of gender-dysphoric youth. Early in the year, Florida’s public health authority commissioned an overview of existing English-language systematic evidence reviews. Based on the findings from this review, the Florida Boards of Medicine subsequently decided to halt the provision of gender-transition services to minors, unless conducted within research settings across the state.

As of April 2024, 24 states have now placed age restrictions on hormonal and surgical sex-trait modification interventions for minors. Democrats in four states (Texas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Maine) have voted in favor of age restriction laws or against turning their states into hormone sanctuaries.

Spain

In 2018, the Spanish Association of Paediatrics and the Spanish Society of Paediatric Endocrinology published a statement endorsing youth medical transition.

In 2022, the directors of Spain’s Society of Psychiatry, Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Society of Endocrinology expressed their opposition to a proposed law that would enable minors to access medical transition procedures. El Mundo, the second-largest daily newspaper in Spain, highlighted this controversy on its front page with the headline: “Psychiatrists explode against the Trans Law: It can bring a lot of pain and regret to many people.”

Australia and New Zealand

In August 2021, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) issued its first position statement focused on the mental health needs of individuals with gender dysphoria, followed by an update in September 2021. This statement was the first from a professional body that did not explicitly endorse a gender-affirming approach.

Australia has experienced considerable debate in recent years regarding youth medical transition. This topic has been extensively covered by Australian journalist Bernard Lane for his Substack, Gender Clinic News.

New Zealand's Ministry of Health was expected to release an evidence brief in early 2024, aimed at reviewing the current evidence on the safety of puberty blockers. Although the publication has been delayed, it is anticipated to be released soon.

In April 2024, Guardian Australia reported that neither New South Wales or Victoria have plans to make changes to puberty blocker prescribing or accessibility as a result of the Cass Review.

International Bodies

In July 2023, for the first time, international experts publicly weighed in on the American debate over "gender-affirming care." 21 leading experts on pediatric gender medicine from eight countries wrote a letter expressing disagreement with US-based medical organizations over the treatment of gender dysphoria in youth, urging them to align their recommendations with unbiased evidence “rather than exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks.”

In January 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) updated its announcement on developing healthcare guidelines for “trans and gender diverse (TGD) people.” The WHO stated in an FAQ that it would not be making recommendations that impact minors. Importantly, they made the following admission: "[O]n review, the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender affirming care for children and adolescents" (January, 2024).

Further Information

For additional information, one of the studies that contributed to the Cass Review conducted a survey of European gender services for children and adolescents from September 2022 to April 2023. Additionally, a Wikipedia page provides an overview of the "legal status of gender-affirming healthcare" (for adults) in various countries worldwide.

If you found this guide helpful, I am working on developing an information-based website that will feature up-to-date data, counterarguments to activist claims, explainers on research, and useful resources related to gender pseudoscience.

#Christina Buttons #systematic review #Cass report #Cass review #gender affirming care #gender affirming healthcare #gender affirmation #medical scandal #medical corruption #medical malpractice #head in the sand #willful ignorance

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