#so who's reducing people to biological functions here again?

[alexseanchai]

[image: Tumblr tags: #i mean anemia is still a big thing in menstruating people today #esp young people]

There was a TikTok post about an advertisement for “blood-making pills for weak women” someone found in a newspaper from the 1890s and everybody seemed to think it was just an example of the weird misogyny of the day and age but no. Anemia was a massive public health concern. It always has been through history but part of the reason we have this idea of old timey women thought history being physical weak, chronically cold and pale and fainting is because they often they were. Anemia was also a massive problem for men in that day but even now it disproportionally affects people who menstruate. So tonics full of stimulants and “healthful vitamins” were marketed at young women in pages upon pages of advertisements in every newspaper. People generally felt like shit all the time back then.

[syzygyzip]

The Soul Still Burns: Analysis of the Lords of Cinder (DS3)

What follows is a short essay on the Lords of Cinder from Dark Souls 3, exploring their symbolism on spiritual and metatextual levels. After that is a related reading of Slave Knight Gael, the final adversary of the Dark Souls trilogy.

The Lords of Cinder are in many ways the primary adversaries of Dark Souls 3. This title they share, “Lord of Cinder,” refers to a personage who has rekindled the first flame, keeping the cycle of light and dark going.

Cinder is a substance which continues to burn without the presence of fire but does not reduce to ash. So euphemistically, it seems that the Lords are somehow stuck in their process of purification, and the game suggests that the world is stuck along with them; this is why it is the Ashen One’s task to “set them upon their thrones”—to hurry them along and thus allow the world to follow its natural decline. As individual characters, each of these Lords represents a different attitude that complicates and prolongs the cycle.

Through these stubborn Lords the game is commenting on at least two things. On the metaphysical level, it reflects the Buddhist idea that certain attitudes keep people reincarnating over and over again, unable to extricate themselves from the material world of suffering (samsara). While on the metatextual level, the game is suggesting that certain attitudes keep players coming back to Dark Souls again and again, starting new games, making new builds and revisiting old files.

The idea there on the metaphysical side finds an easy analogy in Buddhist doctrine: the “three poisons,” the three root causes of suffering. These are hatred, greed, and delusion. What’s interesting is that these essential vices also fit pretty easily onto the different types of players that are being caricatured by the Lords. We’ll break these correspondences down in a second.

But First: Why Do They Correspond? So we have these sets of three. Three lords, three poisons in Buddhism, three types of Souls players. How convenient. When we analyze art, we sometimes ask, “Huh, is this structure really there, or am I projecting it into the material?” And if the structure is really there, baked into the work, that doesn’t mean that it’s due to developer intention. Archetypal forms sometimes show up in work via an unconscious influence, be it due to the cultural milieu, personal psychology, or some a priori biological disposition of the human being.

And the thing about Dark Souls is that it’s an unusually honest piece of art, in that its creative team allows their own free associations and intuitions to show up in the work without too much self-censorship or questioning. They make space for a mystery to show up on its own terms, and in leaving its riddles unanswered, there is more space for discovery by the people who play it.

It should also be said that cultural ideas persist for a reason. Beneath the ethics and ideology of the people who originally named the Buddhist “three poisons,” there may be something timeless, something perennially descriptive of human nature. If that is the case, then it would make sense for this same triplicity to unfurl itself in other cultural products. So for one reason or another, these three poisons, these addictions, show up diegetically in the characters and are also expressed in player psychology.

I say all this just because sometimes I feel very aware of the disconnect between much of Souls lore discourse and the broader field of mythological study. Since we are gamers first, there may be this tendency to want to “solve” the lore, but that’s not what we’re doing here. Myth functions because it elaborates our experience of the world through affective resonance; it attaches images and characters and stories which help us anchor our own prelinguistic impressions of the world, cultivating our sensitivity there.

Anyway, let’s look at these Lords.

Abyss Watchers Poison: Hatred The lore of the Abyss Watchers is pretty clear: they have an obsessive fixation on the abyss, and are ready to raze an entire town if they suspect abyssal encroachment. This obsession has literally possessed them, as they are now “abyss touched.” Gaze too much into the abyss, etc. They carry such strong contempt for the disavowed object that they don’t care what comes between it and their sword. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that they are a brotherhood yet are unhesitatingly slaughtering themselves again and again. Hatred has made them blind, and has also caused them to resign their individuality (they are identical, mere instruments of a transpersonal grudge). They cannot die, their hatred keeps them locked in combat.

Type of Player: competitive | Interest: combat The Abyss Watchers are a representation of PvP addicts. They have no powers other than tenacity; they perform the same combos repeatedly. When you are really gripped by a PvP binge in Souls, you often end up doing the same thing again and again. The fight takes place in a mausoleum, on top of many chambers filled with human remains. The fact that this boss fight is instructional about combat, specifically about looking for tells (a cloud of dust always signifies the end of their combos) might be another clue. There is no limit to how good you get at Souls PvP; every foe is an opportunity to improve timing and strategy. You can just keep stacking anonymous bodies under yourself.

Aldrich Poison: Greed Aldrich invokes the concept of supremacy many times: he is in the supreme area from Dark Souls 1; in the supreme boss room of that area; he wears as a crown the former supreme lord of that area. This is because he devours lords; he tries to take prestige upon himself through acquisition and incorporation—greed.

Type of Player: completionist | Interest: content Aldrich is a commentary on completionist players. He is someone who “plays the game to death”, acquiring every object, reaching every achievement, devouring the soul of the game through taking everything into himself. He becomes bloated by consuming as much of the game’s content as possible. The old God whose likeness he has adopted is Gwyndolin, who was, in narrative terms, the one pulling the strings in the land of the Gods. And in gameplay terms, he is a secret boss. So on both counts we have someone who is elusive, and exists more or less at the boundary of the gameworld. When a player tries to see every last little morsel of a game, they become somewhat like Gwyndolin, a manipulator of a virtual world. If you know too much about a game, you have the risk of being less immmersed.

Yhorm Posion: Delusion In Buddhism, the poison of delusion secretly underlies the other two poisons, as the impulse toward hatred and greed are ultimately born of some false view about reality. This is akin to how the profaned capital sits below the rest of the kingdoms. To beat Yhorm you essentially have to “play pretend” with him, picking up a fake super-weapon, or fighting alongside Siegward, a knight who appears to be somewhat deluded about the state of the world, enthralled in the same fantasy as Yhorm himself.

Type of Player: lore researcher | Interest: meaning The profaned capital is full of statues—fixed images of myth; and empty goblets—treasures with no utility. Not to mention the area with the swamp which is full of symbolic imagery, but serves no narrative or mechanical purpose. The entire profaned capital challenges us to make sense of it; it is the ultimate temptation of lorekeepers in DS3. It throws at us a disproportionate amount of reference to DS2, which is famous among Souls players as the least thematically sensible Souls game. The Greatshield of Glory is found right outside Yhorm’s room, in a conspicuous room full of treasure, and yet it is a very impractical shield and offers very little lore value. If a lore-minded player picks it up, it directs them to a legendary personage from the War of Giants, which raises far more questions than it answers. The same is true of much of this area—the Eleanora, the Monstrosities, the Profaned Flame itself—they are all there to get you to speculate. These are the players who come to Souls games again and again, trying to find the “ultimate meaning.” They seek the grail, claim to find it, and then chuck in a pile with the others.

Yhorm's story also imitates the primordial Artorias myth: forsaking his shield in preservation of something more valuable. Other than that Yhorm is largely a cipher when it comes to biography, with a void for a face, which itself epitomizes what must remain at the center of mythology and storytelling: mystery.

Sit Down and Seek Guidance So we have the three reasons that people become fixated on Souls: the combat, the achievements, and the mystery. But there is a fourth lord of cinder boss, who is conceptually apart from these three: the Lothric Twins. They represent yet another kind of person who must keep playing Dark Souls: the developers. Lothric is striving to produce “a worthy heir,” a proper sequel to Dark Souls 1. The Princes are bound to their chamber as the developers are bound to their project, as that is their curse—“but you may rest here too, if you like.” In this context we can see their duality as the dual nature of having to work on the game and also play it to death. The privilege and the loftiness of the promise of a great piece of art (Lothric), and also having to go back "into the trenches" of the work itself (Lorian). Notably, neither of them can walk, they just teleport around. They are stuck at work, trying to bring the new world into being. Also I can’t go this whole essay without mentioning the obvious: that the Ashen One is bringing Lords to their thrones, and we players and developers have to assume our little chairs and couches when we access this world.

Playing Beyond the Point of Pleasure Of course the most extreme example of someone stubbornly remaining in the world no matter what is Slave Knight Gael. He is looking for pigment, which seems to be a euphemism for the substance of humanity (the Dark Soul). He wants to give it to the painter, the world-creator, so that a new world can be made. He is willing to indulge in a wasteland of abject violence for as long as it takes in order to renew something. Ironic that he is probably only prolonging the current world in his obsessive drive to recycle it faster.

Let’s examine the relationship between the figure of the painter and her relationship to Gael. That she is a spiritual entity is obvious: we never see her touch the ground, she is always in an upper room and lifted on a piece of furniture. Among other things, she is a clear metaphor for life springing eternally. A creative child who continues to paint despite kidnapping and imprisonment. She is the heart of the painted world, itself a place that symbolizes the idea of the representation of reality.

I want to make sure this is clear, because it is a bit of a kaleidoscope to consider. Any subject in Dark Souls stands for many things, but something that the painted world specifically represents is the very concept of representation. So of course the places in our imaginations are painted worlds, but so is this physical world of appearance, the maya of mundane reality. Not to mention that a work of art is a painted world, and the game we’re discussing is a painted world. When a work of art is able to recreate itself in itself, we can see this funny effect of mirrors reflecting mirrors infinitely. This results in seemingly inexhaustible symbolic content—there is so much potential to find meaning and create connections. Because Moby Dick represents a work of literature; the Tempest represents a play; Twin Peaks represents a TV show, these works can offer extensive insights not only into their medium but into the nature of reality. In these and other examples, the representation of the medium within the work may or may not be a single subject, but since Dark Souls is formally a game about levels and level design, the painted world is the heart of its self-reflexivity. The painted world can be pointed to as the summary of this fractal device. And the personification of that device, its ambassador to the player, is the painter.

The miracle or divine child is also an archetype familiar to us from Lothric, in their struggle to produce the “worthy heir.” Reality seeks salvation through the appearance of grace. They want it in a clear, incontestable form—to be able to point at it and say, "thank goodness we went through all that, because look, now here is the meaning, here is that which validates all that came before." In the world of Dark Souls 3 the religion of the masses is the Lothric stuff; meanwhile knowledge of the painted world is much more obscure. Lothric’s religion is obviously regulated and hierarchical, while Gael’s devotion to the painter is highly personal and private: he carries around a scrap of painting; he prostrates to a hidden idol in a small chapel; he considers the painter his family. He is emotionally close to the object of his worship.

But whether it’s Lothric or Ariandel, they are anticipating the divine child to redeem the world. As an archetype, the child ultimately represents surprise. The possibility of being delighted by life in its creative novelty. The child as an archetype appears in our own behavior when we do something without any sort of contrivance or mental interference, doing something in the world which doesn’t seem to have come from who we conceive ourselves to be. This is miraculous. Such an action enchants the world, and there is no explaining it, even if it may weave all kinds of stories around itself, retroactively framing things that have led up to it as portents or promises. (Though not exclusive to him, this trait is well-known in characterizations of Christ, and DS3 is clearly indebted to Christian iconography, so do with that what you will). Regardless of the specific cultural invocation, the divine child is a personification of something that happens within the human spirit. TFW you are renewed by a fresh and spontaneous engagement with life.

The grace of the miraculous often comes to us through play. Play is more of an attitude than an activity; the feeling of play may come to us through making a painting, or chatting with a friend, or moving around in a video game. We can play video games idly, competitively, experimentally, creatively, studiously, whatever, the feeling of “play” can show up regardless. We can sit there playing a certain game from a certain motivation, and feel totally rote and joyless, and question, “Why am I doing this?” Or we might sit there and play the same game with the same motivation, feeling totally lit up by it, its purpose to us obvious and self-validating. We are not even questioning why we are doing it, we are enjoying life.

This is really the ground that the miraculous tends to land on. Grace, meaning, and an immanent love of life are more likely to show up when we are in flow and not exercising our capacity for self-assessment. But like everything in life, we mistake the images and objects around us for the feeling of grace. Any given object might only be the catalyst once; it’s not about the object. This is extremely easy to see in cases of acute nostalgia; adults chase enchantment through collecting Zelda memorabilia or going to Disneyland, in pursuit of what kindled their spirit as a child. It was never really the game or the character that was doing it, it was what they were able to access within themselves.

So anyway Gael has yet to realize this. He thinks the Dark Soul is out there in something else. That it will be yielded as a drop if he just kills the right enemy, or 10,000 enemies, or goes to the right place at the right time. You can see that this is something of a synthesis of all the other Buddhist defilements: there are elements of completionism/greed, violence/hatred, mysticism/delusion. There is even the suggestion of the developer of these games again, in that Gael is a “slave,” forced into participation in the world to assist some creative apotheosis. (Isn’t it funny that his weapon is a worn-down executioner’s sword?—whether the person coding or the person playing, we are all “executing” command after command). The thing that really keeps him on the wheel is something beyond any of the player types and their vices; it is almost some sort of pure, amoral automatism, a churning drive that on one side resembles wanton nihilism, and on another side single-minded piousness. Is one disguised as the other, or has Gael somehow stepped beyond this binary? Yet another dichotomy in Dark Souls that begs to be reconciled, but whose tension creates the opportunity to participate creatively in its expansive mythology. When things are held apart we can move between them.

To really understand Gael, we have to contend with the question of a person’s relationship to their own soul, since that relationship is so plainly suggested by Gael and the painter. (This question, by the way, is much elaborated in Elden Ring, with its repeated foregrounding of the image of the maiden or “consort”). If we were to see Gael and the painter as partitions within one person--whether she is his soul, or his inner life, or his better nature, whatever—then in any case Gael is the side which goes out into the world and experiences it. He is the creative extension into the world as its active participant and realizer. Yet he is clothed as the warrior, the executioner. While the one who is dressed as the artist, the painter, just stays in her room and imagines the world—but this is where the magic of creation is really felt. We involve ourselves in life, or in a game, but we are only really changed and renewed when that exterior experience is “brought home” into the inner life. We do something “in the game,” but the act of “painting,” in renewing the world through our creative interpretation, is a decidedly interior experience.

[cozycourse]

I know I said a dozen reasons but I’m tired and can only think of ten if that’s okay

1) JKR’s essay and the subsequent hate for her made more people look into gender critical views end up in radfem circles

2) Other events cause mass peaking among radfems. Most recently, the woman who was doxxed by a trans woman (I believe) for blocking the trans woman who made her uncomfortable. Another example was pxr some time back who was run off of tumblr for commenting/making a joke (can’t remember which) about not wanting to fuck a dick as a lesbian.

3) Homophobic abuse and conversion therapy in the name of trans activism causes people to peak

4) Misogyny, silencing of women, and sexual violence in the name of trans activism causes people to peak

5) Seeing women reduced down to their body parts (eg: uterus haver, vagina owner, etc) in the name of being inclusive causes people to peak, especially when opposed to the men who don’t experience the same labelling

6) Other forms of violent threats and abuse in the name of trans activism causes people to peak

7) Lots of people get confused by the contradicting lies about radfems or keeping up with new trans identities which leads them to actually read radfem logic and then they become radfems (know more than one radfem who peaked from hate-reading radfem blogs)

8) Seeing trans women in women’s sports and other denials about the existence/importance of biological sex causes people to peak

9) Since r/GC went down, radfems have found other spaces to come together and radblr has been one of the better ones for community so more people flock here (like I’ve seen two posts about how toxic radtwitter is today)

10) The ‘based on your likes’ function typically shows TRAs radfems because we often run in circles not too far separated from each other (through similar feminist topic posts and cryptos) which makes it look like there’s just a lot of us

Makes sense, I’m tired too lmao. Decided to reply to some of them by number!

Makes sense, I read up on that said essay and it’s..certainly something.

What woman doxxed whom, I feel like there’s needed context here. Lesbians not wanting to take dick is fine and NOT transphobic at all, BUT it depends on context and how you say it.

Source? You can’t just say things and not give me at least a site reference.

Again…source? Thats a very strong statement you’re making that sexual violence has been taken place in the name of trans activism!

There’s a LOT to unpack in this one reply.

Woman are ‘reduced’ down to their body parts due to not all woman having said parts. Not all woman have a vagina, uterus, whatever the fuck.

 also this might come as a shock to you, but intersex people exist and intersex people need to be included, hence inclusive language. (this goes for both ‘men’ & ‘woman’)

It’s the same for men as well, at least in the circles i’m in. i use my fair share of “if someone has a cock” or “ball haver” in replace of something else!

The concept of men and women are societally made anyways, we have given ourselves these labels (cause that’s all they are, labels.)

6) source?

[mitigatedchaos]

On Having “Whiteness”

(~2,200 words, 11 minutes)

Summary: A metaphysics of “Whiteness” has overtaken actual sociology in the Democrats’ popular consciousness - blinding them to racial interventions that might actually work and taking them off the table of political discussion.

-★★★-

Donald Moss - On Having Whiteness, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (emphasis mine)

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

So both @arcticdementor [here] and @samueldays have linked me to this allegedly “peer-reviewed” article.  The Federalist has a bit more context, but it doesn’t really make the situation better.

Race Theory Problems

Obviously, this is a work of sloppy thinking.  The categorization of “white supremacy culture” or “whiteness” used by people like this is vague handwaving that describes being bad at management as “white supremacy culture,” and which in general labels universal human problems, like organizations being resource-constrained, or people being impatient, as somehow uniquely “white.” 

But this sort of article is really what I mean when I say that social justice’s approach to “whiteness” is about “spiritual contamination.” 

Samueldays called it “the ‘I’m not touching you’ of inciting race war,” and I may cover more of his response to it later.  Suffice it to say, it has the same general kind of problems as “stolen land” arguments (where an entire present population’s living area becomes undefined), unbounded “reparations” arguments where no amount of transfers by the designated oppressor are considered to clear the debt, and so on.

This is exactly the sort of material that conservatives are seeking to remove government funding for and prohibit from use in employment training.  This is the kind of material that the Trump Anti-CRT executive order prohibiting racial scapegoating was meant to cover.

Race Theory Definitions

This kind of stuff is, of course, not really defensible, so usually at this point people will argue that 1), “that’s not real critical race theory,” and then 2), “it’s just a few weirdos.”  For those, I would say...

1) If it’s not real “Critical Race Theory,” then what is it?

We can’t measure or disprove Moss’s proposed “Whiteness,” and this malevolent psychic entity said to “deform” white people obviously isn’t based on a comparison with other human populations or historical periods.  When it comes to “insatiable” appetites, one study argued that the Mongol invasions killed so many people that it showed up in the carbon record.

At best, it’s sloppy race science as practiced by an amateur, like twitter users idly speculating whether whites have ‘oppressor epigenetics’ - but with the veneer of official status.  And it has similar risks to proposing that there is such a thing as biologically-inherited class enemy status, and other collective intergenerational justice logic.

Presumably, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association is intended as a journal of science, or at least serious scholarship, and not of bad racist poetry with no rhyme or meter.

Moss provides a relatively pure example of whatever-this-is. I need to know what it’s called, so we can get rid of it.

Race Theory Prohibitions

2) If it’s just the product of a few race-obssessed weirdos, then it won’t hurt to get rid of it.  So get rid of it.

The actual text [PDF] of the Trump Anti-CRT order does not ban teaching about the Trail of Tears, or Jim Crow, and so on, and both of those topics were taught in school before this recent wave of whatever-this-is was popularized.

Trump’s order banned teaching that any race is inherently guilty or evil due to the actions of their ancestors, and the level of resistance to this has been bizarre.

These teachings don’t seem to provide gains in relatively objective metrics like underrepresented minority test scores (or at least that’s not something I’ve seen - and the continued opposition to standardized tests suggests proponents do not expect it to), so it’s unclear just what of value is going to be lost here. 

Collateral Damage

Samueldays wrote,

Because right now the conservatives talking about "critical race theory" as they fire in the direction of Moss et al. are very important in preventing another race war and you have a moral duty to help them aim, not throw smoke for Moss.

Right now Conservatives are assessing just how much stuff they’re going to have to rip out to make “standardized tests are racist” and “it’s impossible to be racist to white people” stop.  While this may not be the message that Liberals are intending to send, it is the message that many people are receiving.  (I discuss problems with both, and some alternatives to handle them better, in another post.)

Liberals need to get out in front of this.  Sooner is better.

If Conservatives think that they have to gut hostile work environment law in order to avoid their children being taught that they’re permanently morally contaminated by their race, and Liberals have no means to actually close race gaps within a 4-8 year period (and right now it’s slim pickings on that front), Conservatives are just going to gut hostile work environment law.

Aether

From their perspective, why not? 

Everything in the world is only six degrees of separation from something racist.  Anything in the world can be tied to something racist.  (So can anyone.)

But nowhere in this pervasive atmosphere of tying things to racism are there solutions.  There are guesses based on correlations.  Proposals.  But usually when you reach out to grab them, to really get a grip on whether it’s correlation or causation, they dissolve in your hands.  The few that do have any solidity to them are moderate in their success (such as Heckman’s involvement in the Reach Up & Learn study in Jamaica) - and don’t appear to be based on the same style of thinking as shown by Moss and others.

It isn’t just that trying to turn combating an invisible, non-measurable, unfalsifiable, parasitic psychic force into an actual political program would inevitably be oppressive and totalitarian.  It isn’t just that articles like Moss’s are an in-kind donation to the 2024 DeSantis Presidential campaign for that very reason.

It isn’t just that unfalsifiable Metaphysics of Whiteness content like White Privilege Theory has been found to lower sympathy for the poor, and that present diversity training doesn’t work...

Race Content Crowding

This stuff is crowding out legitimate scholarship.  I don’t just mean in terms of funding, tenure track positions, or high-flying magazine coverage - all limited by their nature.  I mean among the base.  I have been interrogating Democrats on Twitter for months, and not a single one has been able to cite a strongly-demonstrated intervention that’s being held back, or even a past one that was conclusively demonstrated to be effective.  They can often recite a list of racial grievances on cue.

Tucker Carlson could run boomer_update.exe on a list of every educational failure since the 1970s, and they would be reduced to sputtering accusations of racism against people who increasingly don’t care.  He could do this tomorrow.  The only thing that prevents this is Tucker Carlson’s conscience.

I discovered the Reach Up & Learn program through Glenn Loury - described as a ‘conservative.’ Scott Alexander, attacked by the New York Times crew, brought some success with multivitamins to my attention.  When I first heard about the Perry Preschool program, I believe it was from someone well to the right of him.

About the only one brought to my attention by the Democratic establishment constellation proper was lead removal, and the gains on that are probably getting tapped out.  The frame it was proposed in was not Critical Race Theorist, as this was likely in 2012. 

As it stands, I’m more likely to find something that works from someone the New York Times would disapprove of than someone they wouldn’t.  Or, as Wesley Yang wrote,

Reality has been contrarian for a while.

Succeed Early

Even if we suppose that Conservatives are inherently racist, Liberals have a duty to support interventions that work.  In fact, the more that Conservatives are a seething, undifferentiated mass of uniform racial hatred, the more important it is that Liberals stick to racial interventions that work, because nobody else is going to fix the problem if Liberals get it wrong.

It isn’t just a matter of resources per year.  It’s also a matter of time.

From Heckman’s website,

Although Perry did not produce long-run gains in IQ, it did create lasting improvements in character skills [...] which consequently improved a number of labor market outcomes and health behaviors as well as reduced criminal activity.

Even if we propose an unlimited amount of funding (which is not the case), people and politicians only have a limited amount of time and attention each year.  Newspapers only publish so many issues with so many pages each week.  Television programs only cover so many hours for so many viewers each day.  Even the dedicated can only read so many books in a year.

Even though the Perry intervention was imperfect, and the sample size was not as large as desirable, every second Democrat I talked to should have been able to answer the question “can you name an effective intervention?” with “what about Perry Preschool?”

Every year that we have entire cottage industries working on and popularizing contentious, ineffective, and backlash-provoking Metaphysics of Whiteness content, based on oversimplified oppressor/oppressed binaries, or theories in which power is held collectively by races as monolithic blobs (rather than modelling power as a network of relations between individuals, in which an individual of any background might be destroyed by the racialized relations in their environment), is another year we haven’t spent that energy on finding or implementing something that actually works.

This isn’t just an individual failure by Democrat voters, who typically have day jobs to focus on - it is a failure by the institutions who are supposed to inform and guide them.  This institutional failure likely contributed to the popularization of Metaphysics of Whiteness content in the first place.

Okay, now what?

Donald Moss is a crackpot.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable.  The idea that there is a psychic parasite of “Whiteness” is not a legitimate field of study; it’s parasociology.  The idea that “a sense of urgency” is “white supremacy culture” isn’t much better. [1]

We already tried isolating this content to obscure corners of academia, where individuals with high racial attachment could write about it.  It leaked out. 

We need to get this stuff out of the popular consciousness to make room for stuff that might actually work.  The best way to do that may be to cut off the source.  Since Donald Moss is a crackpot, perhaps it’s time we started treating him, and everyone else like him, as what they are.

People involved in Metaphysics of Whiteness content, like Donald Moss, need to be (figuratively) grabbed by the shoulder, and firmly, but politely, told to stop.  Society has been recklessly handing out race-colored glasses to the general population since around 2014, resulting in a rise in amateur race science, of which both right-wing Twitter users memeing about Italians and Metaphysics of Whiteness participants like Moss are examples.  If they do not stop, they must be stripped of institutional authority.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable and we should not be certifying it.

If institutions refuse to reduce the authority of Metaphysics of Whiteness practitioners, those institutions must have their accreditation penalized, and their government funding reduced or eliminated, just as if they insisted on producing study after study on magic or ESP which failed to yield results.  If they do not comply, they must be replaced.

It’s possible that Metaphysics of Whiteness content might have had some obscure, niche function in terms of the exploration of the idea space. 

However, as it has displaced popular knowledge of interventions that might work, and the attention given to them in the political system, Liberals should seek to surgically remove it, at the very least until some more effective interventions see the political light of day.

If not, Conservatives will attempt to remove it with a bludgeon.  "They described an entire race as ‘voracious, insatiable, and perverse,’ and here’s the citation for the exact page where they did that,” is perfect material with which to abolish entire departments.

-★★★-

[1] If we go a bit farther out, scholars of “Decolonization” argue that the field is wholly unconcerned with “settler futurity,” a phrase not much less ominous than describing “whiteness” as “incurable.”  It seems that their entire job should be to answer the very difficult questions they have decided not to.

[cassandraclare]

Jessa/Wessa ship wars

teenagefunbouquet said:Isn't it enough Tessa&Jem got a wedding comic, two kids (and you say more), a lifetime as the only mates for each other and your most explicitly written sex scene After the Bridge? Wessa are the most popular and we get nothing, every wessa moment is shared with Jem while Jessa get to be alone, Wessa fans got no "anticipation" like jessa fans are getting now everyday you give them a book in jem's pov or a short story or a new kid. it feels like wessa is dead.

I’ll be interested in people’s thoughts on this. (I left the username as is since it’s a blank account, probably created to ask this question, so no one’s really getting hurt in this minor drama.) Most of my long and somewhat crabbish post is under the read more.

First, let me reply with the obvious, which is the Jessa rebuttal: “Isn’t it enough that Will gets to be Tessa’s first love and Jem only gets to be her second? Isn’t it enough that Will and Tessa had sex when they thought Jem was dead? Isn’t it enough that there’s a whole series about Will and Tessa’s kids but we only find out that Jem and Tessa had a kid in a short story? Isn’t enough that Jem and Tessa have spent half their relationship looking for a kid who’s related to Will, not either of them? Isn’t it enough that Will and Tessa got two biological kids they got to spend eighteen years raising and Jem and Tessa only get like two years with Kit? Jessa are the most popular, but half the stories in Ghosts of the Shadow Market happened while Will was still alive! And now Wessa fans are getting content every day and have two more books of Wessa being married and doing cute stuff to look forward to. Every day they’re getting a special edition of a book with a whole short story about their wedding. It feels like Jessa is dead.”

Not that I believe any of that either: I think both complaints are equally silly and selfish. But they are complaints rooted in the same logic, which is “My ship is the best and most popular, and every time I see something that in my mind supports the ship I hate I feel angry and diminished, and rather than perhaps examining those feelings I’d like to vent them on other fans and the creator.”

So. My feeling about this is: I am sad to see there is still some kind of a ship war here. As far as I am concerned...

the Wessa/Jessa ship war ended in 2012 when we found out Tessa loved both boys equally and would spend a lifetime with both of them. The end. Quibbling about irrelevant details like how many kids each couple has subsequently or examining closely the explicitness of their sex scenes seem bizarre and pointless. It has nothing to do with how books and stories are made, or how they work, or what functions they serve. At this point it’s like you decided your favorite football team could definitely beat another team, and you spend all your time obsessing about it even though they will never play against the other team because the other team is a hockey team.

When I see people say that “Wessa got” something or “Jessa got” something, it makes me cringe. It reduces stories that are about other things, often friendship, to being about a ship war I am not a part of. (Not every story or book in which a couple appears is a story about that ship. Sometimes they’re just grouting their shower or fighting a demon.) Wessa and Jessa are not dueling pop stars fighting over who gets to perform on the Tonight Show. In fact, they are not fighting at all, which is part of the underlying problem. People are used to love triangles where two guys are fighting over a girl and are jealous of each other. Will and Jem are not jealous of each other. They are not fighting over Tessa. To believe that it lessens Will and Tessa’s relationship that Jem is around and alive, or that it makes Jem and Tessa’s relationship better that Will is dead, is a fundamental misunderstanding of these characters and the story they are in. You are trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it will cause you endless misery and frustration.

For instance, claiming that “every Wessa moment is spent with Jem.” Well, that’s ridiculous. Obviously, Will and Tessa spent an enormous amount of quality time alone together in TID. (Otherwise, you would have no investment in this relationship in the first place. There’s a reason you’re attached to it.) Jem did not attend their wedding. He is around in Chain of Gold mostly in his role as a Silent Brother: tending the sick, helping James, bringing news. He is not around during the scene where Will and Tessa make love, or when they kiss and cuddle in the drawing room, grossing out their kids. (I had to fight very very hard to retain even one scene of Will and Tessa alone: in a normal YA book, you would never see a sex scene between the parents, from their point of view.)

The problem is not that there is no “Wessa content” to “anticipate.” The majority of Wessa fans are happy to enjoy stuff like the wedding story or the Wessa moments in TLH. The problem is that the person asking this question will only accept a TLH book in which Jem isn’t mentioned at all as “Wessa content,” and since that would be a fundamental and appalling betrayal of the story and characters — something I would never write and never consider — they will forever feel they are not getting what they deserve.

Asker: if you think that it’s somehow better for Jem and Tessa that Will is dead, that they “get” something that Will and Tessa don’t by having had something awful happen to them, then I do not even know how to begin to speak to you. What has always been meaningful to me about Will, Jem and Tessa is that they all loved each other equally. If that is not the case, then they are not people I am interested in writing about. If that being the case makes you not want to read about them, then you are free to stop �� please do — but the story is not going to become something other than it is because you feel your ship is the “most popular.” (Which it is not in my experience, the ships are about equal, and I don’t know why it would matter if it was.)

In After the Bridge, which is not an explicit sex scene but rather a short story that contains sex (they exist!) Will is mentioned thirty-two times. Here’s an example:

“Jem swallowed, running his fingers up and down the blade. “He had only just died,” he said. She didn’t need to ask who he was. There was really only one He when it was the two of them speaking. “I was afraid. I saw what happened to the other Silent Brothers. I saw how they hardened over time, lost the people they had been. How as the people who loved them and who they loved died, they became less human. I was afraid that I would lose my ability to care. To know what this knife meant to Will and what Will meant to me.”

If you think Will isn’t present in Jem and Tessa’s relationship just because he’s dead, you’re wrong. He’s mentioned constantly. (And if someone thought that made it not Jessa content, I would have the same discussion with them: If Jem and Tessa didn’t care about Will, I wouldn't care about them.)

As long as there has been fandom, there have been ship wars. Social media has added a new dimension to that, which is what you’re doing here: the ability to run to the creator and complain, hoping they’ll side with you or give you what you want.

Here’s the problem: it’s really really toxic to have been involved in a clearly vicious ship battle for years. It will destroy utterly your ability to read or enjoy the canon you’re arguing about. I’ve been there, I’ve had friends be there. If you think it’s a point for Jem and Tessa that Will is dead, if you went into Last Hours thinking Jem wouldn’t be in it, that is a sign of a profound detachment from the actual reality of the canon books. You are not interacting with what I am writing or the characters as they are. You are interacting with the fight you are having. That is why your discourse has spun so far off from the books it no longer resembles what is actually happening in them, and demands such extreme gestures to be appeased — like leaving Jem out of Lost Book when he’s actually from the city the characters are visiting, or cutting him from Last Hours even though it would be unrealistic, cruel, and a disappointment to the vast majority of readers.

Dismissing every single moment Will and Tessa have together in TLH because Jem is alive somewhere and it’s bothering you is a recipe for you to be miserable. Clearly you didn’t enjoy the Wessa wedding, or the Will and Tessa love scenes in Chain of Gold. Clearly you consider Jem and Tessa having children not to be a reason for happiness but rather bitter rage even though it is totally irrelevant to Will and Tessa’s past relationship. The only thing that would be satisfactory would be a rewrite of Clockwork Princess in which Jem was run over by a tank and Will and Tessa didn’t care and were happy and got married and we never had to hear about Jem again. But because that would require time travel and a rewrite of Will and Tessa as vile assholes, that is not a thing you are going to get. If you are determined to always be miserable about the reality of what this story is, than the only result of that is that you will always be miserable.

There is never going to be a winner of this love triangle. It isn’t that story. No amount of anything I do is ever going to change that: no short stories I write, or content I produce, or books or sex scenes or longform poems about either couple will change the fact that both Will and Jem ended up with Tessa and she loves them equally. If you want a “somebody wins” kind of love triangle, there are other books that will provide that for you. These will never be those books.

So why did you write this long screed, Cassie, the rest of you might be wondering, and fairly. Three reasons. One is that there are other questions that are carbon copies of this one (as in, written by the same person/small group of people) cluttering up my inbox, and I want to put a stop to the idea that this kind of thing is going to be acknowledged as a valid comment or complaint. It’s not. Second, we have all been driven bananas by quarantine and I am no exception. The third is that this is the last time I am going to address this kind of ship-fight-disguised-as-question. Any further demands for me to favor one Tessa ship over another will be responded to with a link to this post. In the end I’m hoping this will be a time saver once we’re all allowed outside again.

[comrade-meow]

The Marxist left finds itself confronted by three insidious big lies that threaten the revolutionary and emancipatory foundation of the Marxist project, all related to undermining women’s liberation; they are:

1. Transwomen are women.

2. Sex work is work.

3. Feminism is bourgeois.

Misogyny in its many forms has long been a challenge for the left; not just the misogyny of the reactionary right, but misogyny coming from within the left itself. But it has not been until recently that this leftist misogyny has sought to portray itself as being inherently progressive. By engaging in revisionism of the most blatant kind, reactionary elements within the left have managed to posit themselves as the agents of progress. Much has already been written about the harms caused by these three lies, but no attempt has yet to be made to debunk them from a solidly Marxist standpoint. That is what we are out to accomplish here; to demonstrate definitively that these big lies are not just regressive, but inherently revisionist and anti-Marxist to the core.

The first of these three big lies, “Transwomen are women”, might well be the most damaging, because it directly contradicts the heart of the Marxist method: dialectical materialism. There are two main definitions used by proponents of transgenderism to explain their narrative. The first is that gender is an identity; the state of being a man or a woman (or any one of the other numerous “gender identities”) stems not from biological sex (to the extent that transactivists acknowledge the existence of biological sex), but from an internal identity, i.e. personal feelings, personal consciousness. The second definition says that transpeople are not really the sex they physically are, but the sex they say they are, because they really have “male” or “female” brains. Both of these definitions are rooted in the personal, not the material. One of the patron saints of queer theory, Judith Butler, says:

“It’s one thing to say that gender is performed and that is a little different from saying gender is performative. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that our acting or our role-playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.”[1]

Though queer theory is a postmodernist philosophy, its roots go far deeper than just postmodernism; rather, this statement of Butler’s is an example of the dialectics of idealism. Marxism, as a philosophy, was formed in reaction to the idealist dialectics of the Young Hegelians. The dialects of idealism posit that reality flows from consciousness. Marx, on the other hand, argued “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”[2] That is, it is not our thoughts that shape material reality, but material reality that shapes our thoughts. In fact, Marx’s first major work, The German Ideology, is exclusively dedicated to explaining this.

So what is the materialist definition of gender? And how does the embrace of the idealist definition under the guise of Marxism harm the Marxist aim of women’s liberation? The foundational Marxist text dealing with the oppression of women is Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. According to Engels, while there has always existed a sexual division of labor in human society, it is not until the rise of private property that this division becomes hierarchical. Before the rise of private property, society was organized under what was called “mother right”, i.e. a person’s family is traced through their mother, given the difficulty of identifying with certainty the father in primitive communist society. But because private property grew out of male labor, and became concentrated in male hands, mother right gave way to “father right”. In order to bequeath his property to his son, the father needed to know with certainty who his sons were. This meant controlling the reproductive labor of the female sex, and its subordination to male supremacy; thus the advent of patriarchy. In Chapter II of Origin of Family Engels calls the overthrow of mother-right “…the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”[3] Note that Engels here is dealing with sex, with biology. Women are not oppressed because of some abstract gender identity, but because of their sex. Class society and patriarchy, the two of which exist in a symbiosis, need to control women’s reproductive labor to sustain themselves. To put it more bluntly, they need to control the means of reproduction. Thus, women’s oppression has its origin in material reality.

But we have not yet dealt with the concept of gender. In the current queer theory dominated discourse, sex and gender are increasingly become conflated to the point that they are being used as synonyms for one another. Engels analysis of patriarchy is in many ways incomplete, but it forms the basis of future materialist explorations of sex and gender. The second-wave feminists who developed much of the thought around gender did not revise these fundamentals, but expanded on them, the opposite of what today’s revisionists are doing. Gender, according to the radical feminist Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, is “the value system that prescribes and proscribes forms of behaviour and appearance for members of the different sex classes, and that assigns superior value to one sex class at the expense of the other.”[4] Gender is therefore not the same thing as biological sex, but a kind of parasite grafted on top of biological sex to maintain the current sexual hierarchy, and ensure continued male control over reproductive labor. Gender non-conforming, as well as homosexual, men and women are therefore “exiled” from their gender community not because of some abstract identity, but because they do not fulfill their proscribed functions as members of their sex class; they are essentially class traitors. Intersex people, which form a distinct material category, are also lumped into this community of “exiles” because they too are unable to fulfill the goals of the patriarchal sexual hierarchy. Such communities of exiles have existed throughout history, and continue to exist to this day in all parts of the world, from the hijra in India to the two-spirited people of the Native Americans to the contemporary shunning and violence directed at gender non-conforming individuals. But to reiterate, none of this has to do with identity, but with the material structuring of class society.

While transactivists have started to turn against the biomedical explanation for transgenderism, it is very much alive and well in the medical and psychological community. Victorian-era theories about “brain sex” that would have earned the ire of Marx and Engels are now making a comeback. At best, these theories are chimerical pseudoscience which have not even come close to being conclusively proven in any legitimate scientific study. The standards by which gender dysphoria is diagnosed falls back on the constructed tropes of masculinity and femininity already discussed. Such theories risk misconstruing gender roles as being rooted in nature as opposed to constructions that reinforce ruling class control. Rather than being seen as the disease, dysphoria should be seen as the symptom of the sexual hierarchy. The pressures of gendered socialization are ubiquitous, and begin at birth. Very often we are not aware of the subtle forms socialization exerts upon us. For those who reject this socialization, it follows that they would experience levels of extreme discomfort and anguish. Gendered socialization is not just some abstract phenomena, but is, again, literally grafted onto us. Under this system of socialization, the penis becomes more than just the male sex organ, but the symbol of male aggression and supremacy, in the same way the vagina becomes the symbol of female inferiority and subjugation. Sensitive individuals who struggle against this socialization often hate their bodies, but not because their bodies are somehow “wrong”, but because of what they are drilled into believing their bodies are. What they suffer from is the inability to tear away the curtain that has been placed in front of material reality and to see reality in an objective manner. The fields of medical and psychological science are not immune from the influence of the ruling class. This is especially the case in the world of psychology, where a method of analysis is employed that isolates the individual from the wider society around them, preferring to view internal struggle as the result of some defect as opposed to the result of material and social forces exerted on the individual.

While capitalism has broken down certain elements of patriarchy, and allowed for women to make some gains, it has not dismantled patriarchy completely. Capitalism, being a class system, still needs to retain control of the means of reproduction. For example, laws that restrict access to abortion and contraceptives, while having negative repercussions for all women, have the most negative impact on poor, working-class women. These laws may be cloaked in the terminology of moralism, but have a far more base logic; they ensure the continued production of future proletarians for the benefit of the capitalist machine.

By shifting the definition of “woman” away from a materialist one to an idealistic one, we lose the ability to define and fight the causes of women’s oppression. In its most extreme form it erases women as a class, and makes it impossible to talk about patriarchy as an existing force. Why, then, are Marxists, who are supposed to be dialectical materialists embracing a set of ideas the very opposite of dialectical materialism? To answer this, we need to look at the nature of patriarchy; it is a system that predates capitalism. As already stated above, patriarchy and class exist in a symbiosis with one another. The one cannot be eliminated without the elimination of the other. Overthrowing capitalism is not the same as overthrowing class. As Mao pointed out, class dynamics still exist in the socialist society, and require continuous vigilance and combat on the part of revolutionaries. This is why many socialist states still restricted women’s rights to certain degrees, such as the draconian anti-abortion laws of Ceausescu’s Romania. All males benefit in some way from patriarchy, even males in a socialist society. It therefore follows that socialist males fighting capitalism also benefit from patriarchy. While men and women may be in solidarity with one another as workers, working class men also belong to the male sex class, a class that predates the existence of the modern working class. Class allegiances run deep. This is why so many socialist and “feminist” men are quick to defend and even endorse the violent language and actions perpetrated by some gender non-conforming men against the female sex class, regardless of how these gender non-conforming men identify themselves. This is not to deny that gender non-conforming men are discriminated against, and face harassment and violence themselves, but even as exiles from the male sex-class, they still benefit from some of the privileges awarded to this sex class. Note that I do not use privilege in the manner it’s currently used by the regressive left, i.e. as some abstract notion that needs to be “checked”. Rather, it is an actually existing force that must be combated, just as white revolutionaries must actively combat white supremacy, and first world revolutionaries must actively combat “their” state’s imperialism.

Opportunism and the “fear” of being on the “wrong side of history” are also driving forces behind this embrace of revisionism. The Anglophone left, especially in the United States, given its weakness in the overall political arena, has long sought to be seen as “acceptable” and “polite”, and is often eager to jump on any bandwagon it believes can advance it. This desire to be accepted also drives the fear. It is true that communists have made serious errors in judgment in the past, but that is not an excuse to rebel against core philosophies and hastily embrace ideas and movements without fully analyzing their beliefs and goals. This is not to say that communists should not be on the forefront in defending gender non-conforming individuals. A thoroughgoing socialist revolution requires that these existing oppressive structures be cast aside. But it is possible to defend gender non-conforming people without embracing misogynistic pseudoscience and revisionism.

Women are not just oppressed, but thoroughly exploited. Working class women make up what is possibly the most thoroughly exploited section of human society. By embracing philosophies that not only erase their ability to define and explain their exploitation, but also deny them the agency to organize as a revolutionary class, these “Marxists” have proven that they are in direct contradiction to Marxist philosophy and ideas. They are engaging in revisionism.

In the next part, we will examine the second big lie plaguing the left today, the notion that “sex work is work”.

[splicejunction]

Please tell me about shatterstar's Childhood

oh my god anon okay I’m assuming in context of what I’ve recently posted you want like... my version of events rather than what’s canon but just in case I hope you know that there’s basically zero canon material that actually describes his childhood/young adulthood beyond “I was a warrior born” or whatever the fuck. if you want to know about that idk go on the fucken... marvel wiki page or something

also--I hate that I have to put this out here and I doubt anyone would actually do this but just in case--I have spent like 1 million hours thinking about this because I have brain disorders and it is very close to my heart so please do not A) use this in fics, etc without letting me know/getting my permission in advance or B) reblog this post

anyways. this is a can of worms so I’m going to do a cheeky lil

first we have to get something out of the way: I hate the “shatterstar’s his own grandpa” paradox. I am sorry if this angers people but it makes me mad so I ignore it. the reason it bothers me is because it means alison blaire essentially married her grandson, which is A) weird and B) bad from a genetics perspective.

in my version of canon ‘star IS the biological child of longshot and dazzler but longshot wasn’t cloned using ‘star’s DNA because..... oh god... another whole separate post can be made about this but... in my head, on mojoworld the way genetic engineering works is not really the same as it is here. here genetic engineering generally means taking an existing genome and inserting or deleting genes. this is how they make, for example, animals that glow, or confer pesticide resistance to plants.

but on mojoworld I think the way they genetically engineer is more like... the way we mechanically engineer. like the entire organism is built from the ground up. there’s a master genetic blueprint which is essentially the “minimal genome” required for a functioning humanoid. this was created by study of Earth humans by arize and the other genetic engineers. they can then go in and customize by adding elements to the genome that code for the signals/building blocks that control things like height, strength, hair color, eye color, having hollow bones etc. so in my head longshot was sort of... designed with ‘star as the inspiration, but not directly cloned. that wouldn’t even make sense anyways because A) different hair color and B) LONGSHOT HAS 3 FINGERS ON EACH HAND and shatterstar has 4!! thats NOT HOW CLONES WOULD WORK!!!!

(side note, the concept of a minimal functional genome is a real thing in biology! some scientists have taken a bacterium that already has a small genome and reduced it to the minimum size required for viability. here is a wikipedia article on it and here is the original paper (DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5447.2165) which I can explain in more detail because I took a class on synthetic biology which this technically falls under and I had to read this paper very closely).

fuck I’ve written 4 paragraphs and not even talked about his childhood yet. I am so sorry. anyways. so the way I think they raise the gladiators on mojoworld is they create them in batches of 5 to 10 identical copies of a certain “model”, place each copy in a different “class” with a set of 2-3 mentors/teachers, and train them to fight until they are 13 or 14. until this time the only names they have are the names that identify the “model”--like for shatterstar that would be gaveedra-seven where the model identifier is “gaveedra” and he is (in the lore that I have come up with) the 7th of 8 total.

the reason they create multiples and put them in different classes is each mentor is going to have a slightly different style of teaching which is going to work better for some and worse for others, so it allows them to have more mass production while increasing the chances of creating a truly great champion. it’s classic nature versus nurture--the genetic engineers create your nature, but you don’t end up exactly the same as others of your model. maybe you get an edge, maybe you don’t.

another thing that happens is different mentors believe in different ways of raising the kids in their care. shatterstar specifically was raised in a class where there was absolutely zero emotional development at all and no attachments allowed beyond fighting alliances. that’s not the case in all classes, and it also had the effect of making him somewhat of an outsider even within the other gladiators as he got older.

at 13 or 14--and yes I realize this is very fucked up but dude its fucking mojoworld idk what you expected--they start participating in fights. the first ones aren’t to the death and they’re as teams and they’re not usually televised they’re more like high school sports games that are attended by scouts (here, they’re “sponsors”--I think that’s a canonical term but I honestly can’t remember) and if you get sponsored you leave your class and join a new “team” that’s really just a bunch of people who all have the same sponsorship. this is where things can get interesting because they’ve all been raised with slightly different fighting styles but more importantly, slightly different degrees of Personhood.

also at this point I should mention that by this time, there are usually only 2, maybe 3 of each model left. either they died or were recognized as not having talent so they were sent to eventually fulfill other roles in the network. in ‘star’s case there was just him and gaveedra-five. once you get to the stage where you’re sponsored and you’re actually fighting to the death one of the first people you’ll fight is any remaining members of your model group.

by the time you’re the only one left of your group, you’re also eligible to earn a stage name. this usually happens if you have a particularly epic fight with a lot of viewers, you win and the commentators will typically say something like “Let’s give this crowd a real name to cheer!” and they’ll have a few candidate names and they’ll kind of just pick one. AUGH I actually have this scene written out in story form but its too long so I think I’ll save it.... :) 

after you get a name you also get a cool outfit and usually some kind of mark or tattoo that serves as a brand. this brings me to another important point--shatterstar inherited the X-gene from alison and therefore he IS a mutant. his mutation is the swords vibration thing and the glowing eye. the star mark is a tattoo and teleportation is benjamin russell’s mutation (how he fits into all this is... for another post). basically after he got his name the costuming department guys were like “hey your eye glows, you look like the Legendary Warrior of Old, Longshot, we’re gonna pattern your look after him” so they gave him the star tattoo and the outfit that’s literally inverse colors of longshot’s.

also this brings me to another aside: you’re probably wondering “if he’s the biological kid of longshot and alison how are there 8 gaveedras?” when the genetic engineers got a hold on him as a baby they were like Sick! free baby! free genetic material! thats our job done for us! so they cloned him (in the traditional sense) and made 7 copies. this was also to kind of conceal his identity as technically being from outside mojoworld, which would make him stick out and thus be a target. they DID edit out the x-gene in the other gaveedra models though. this wasn’t a problem for ‘star because his mutation didn’t manifest until he was already sponsored.

I think that’s .... pretty much it for macroscopic lore on what it was like to be a kid gladiator on mojoworld. now let me give you some Tidbits of his life specifically:

like I said he was raised in a particularly cold and ruthless class. the mentors that raised him are like well-known by everyone to produce some of the best warriors but also there’s discourse on mojoworld because some people say perfectly emotionless killing machines aren’t as fun to watch. when he was sponsored there were 4-5 others in the same sponsorship and they were like Theres Something Wrong With You LOL

they speak earth languages on mojoworld because they’re imitating the broadcasts they (the spineless ones) used to hear from earth. however, most of the lower-class as well as almost all arena fighters and other television personalities speak cadre or other languages which are native to the planet. the stage names are all vaguely in english, but the gladiators don’t really understand them at first.

shatterstar got his name before he got the glowing eye, and when he learned what stars are, and saw his eye as a little star, he was like wow :) this is Me :) which is why that name is so important to him. it’s also one of the first things that wholly belonged to him.

(you can’t see stars on mojoworld because of light pollution and also because it’s a pocket dimension and there just aren’t that many stars to see)

I hate to bring up the s**ley miniseries but I do think it would be interesting to have him have a sort of ... mentor/first friend, similar to the concept of gringrave but they were NOT in a relationship. it was more like... another kid who was a year or so older than him got a soft spot for him and helped him not be so clueless. she didn’t make as much progress as xforce did, obviously. but they were.... something like friends.

unfortunately she was used by spiral to get shatterstar to murder the first rebel guy who tried to get him out of there. then she got switched sponsors (this can happen) and he had to kill her, and he was like well I will simply never develop any kind of attachment to anyone ever again.

he almost didn’t make it out of the first training session with his sponsorship group (this is semi-canon--there’s a reference when he’s teaching terry to swordfight to almost not surviving the first time he was in a gladiator class or whatever it was).

the closest he ever came to losing was the day he got the name. that’s why the crowds loved it so much.

the double-bladed sword was a gimmick weapon but when he got his mutation they realized it works way better if there’s resonance between two parallel blades so they redesigned it as an actual weapon.

(forgot this but I feel like I should include it) at 17 he escaped the arenas and joined the cadre alliance. two years later he came to earth and joined xforce.

I think that’s going to have to be it for now because it’s literally almost midnight and I have work tomorrow and I did NOT intend to stay up this late but I did. thank you for this opportunity anon :) feel free to ask me any other questions and also I realize a lot of this probably makes no fucking sense and that’s because I am not a writer or anything I’m just a biochemist with brain problems that cause me to obsess over stupid shit

[cacodaemonia]

Mandalorian Technology Theories

Since I'm a science nerd who loves to think about things like this, I've come up with theories for two bits of technology that we see in The Mandalorian TV show. So far, there's no explanation for them, and because this is Star Wars and not hard sci-fi, I don't expect there to be. That said, it's still fun to think about and try to explain.

And no, I'm not talking about the tracking fobs, though I do wish I had a passable explanation for how those work! They frustrate me to no end. XD

Note: all screencaps are from cap-that.com. I've increased the contrast in most of them to show more details, so apologies for the chunky quality.

1. Din's HUD in episode 4 shows him using a tracking feature twice: once, when he's tracking Cara before their scuffle, and later when they follow the Klatooinians and discover the AT-ST tracks. With the footprints I was like, "okay, maybe his HUD can pick up minute amounts of residual heat left from footsteps?"

But then Din scans upward and we see this:

There's no way that's heat. So I started trying to figure out what the two sets of clues had in common and came up with biological disturbance. I'm not a biologist or chemist, so if anyone with more knowledge ever reads this, please correct me. However, I do know that plants emit more volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, when they're damaged. Similarly, many microbes, including soil microbes, produce VOCs. It stands to reason that, if soil is disturbed, more VOCs would be released.

So because Din notices crushed soil and broken tree branches, my theory is that his HUD can detect at least some VOCs. That would be useful for tracking anything in environments where there are, at the very least, soil bacteria.

2. I'm hoping this gets expanded upon at some point in the show, but Din's armor - and presumably that of the other Mandalorians in his covert as well - is not just plates of metal. It doesn't even seem to have straps to hold it in place. Rather, as we see in episode one when he gets his shiny new beskar pauldron, the armor appears to clip on, perhaps magnetically, to the cloth under armor. There are even a couple tiny lights visible on Din's shoulder before the pauldron goes on, so there's definitely some kind of electrical wiring in there as well.

In episode 2 we get an even better look at the complexity of Din's armor when he's trying to repair it by the campfire. I know next to nothing about electrical engineering, and because this is Star Wars, there's probably no rhyme of reason to the wiring under Din's breastplate, but I'd love to hear an electrician's take on it! We get a really good shot of the back side of his old breastplate here:

There's clearly quite a bit going on! Then we see where the breastplate attaches to his under armor here:

I couldn't figure out a reason - other than the props department being like, "hey, this looks cool!" - for all the hardware underneath the armor, and then I started thinking about how Din's chest didn't get completely crushed by the mudhorn charging him, and how he fell quite a way from the top of the Jawa's sandcrawler and survived. Now, again, this is Star Wars, so of course people are going to miraculously survive situations that would kill someone in real life. But my science brain doesn't shut up, so I started to think that maybe the armor hardware is some kind of kinetic energy dampener/absorber. The only example of anything like this I could find in the SW universe is the kinetic armor used by a people called the Echani thousands of years before The Mandalorian takes place. It seems to function by emitting a shield around the wearer, however, so clearly it's not the same technology.

So if this technology reduces the kinetic energy of physical attacks as well as blaster shots, that might explain why even Mandalorian armor made from materials such as durasteel or duraplast is so effective.

Thanks for coming to my TED-Talk. ;) I'd love to hear if anyone else has theories about the tech in The Mandalorian!

[nerdygaymormon]

what do you think about the new handbook?

In January 2016 I received a calling that gave me access to the Church’s Handbooks and I was surprised at the amount of specific things in there on which I had never considered the Church having an official position. I imagine a lot of people are having that experience this week.

I’m glad the Church made the Handbook available to everyone, it’s a move towards transparency. Before this, people were being held to standards or facing processes that only their leaders could access.

I appreciate that in some areas there’s better framework and clarity, but am sad that it often came in the form of being more restrictive or not in line with modern science.

I’m going to outline the changes and add a few comments. ’ll put my opinion about all of this at the end, so if that’s what you want to see, scroll to the bottom.

————————————————————— 

Miscellaneous

The Handbook covers a lot of information, so I’m certain in the days and weeks ahead more new things will be discovered. But for now, here’s some assorted policies.

Sacrament

We’re supposed to take the Sacrament with our right hands

The wording that young men are encouraged, but not required, to wear a white shirt and tie is gone. All males who pass the Sacrament are asked to be clean and well groomed.

For a long time, which hand to use has been considered a personal choice, and some associated special meaning by using their right hand.

In February 2019, Elder Oaks saw some youth take the Sacrament with the left hand and he gave a short lecture that went viral telling these kids they were wrong, and now it’s official policy in the Handbook.

Dress Standards

The Relief Society Presidency is to teach dress standards to the sisters so their appearance and clothing show reverence and respect at Church and at the temple.

These are adult women!!! They can’t figure this out for themselves? It mentions ostentatious jewelry and casual clothes without any examples of what this means. I’m afraid some leaders will enforce their personal opinions, such as pants are verboten.

Also this section included a comment about ostentatious jewelry. What is that? Having 2 earrings in 1 ear?

—————————————————————

Discipline

Disciplinary councils have been renamed “Membership Councils”

People no longer are disfellowshipped or excommunicated. They have “formal membership restrictions” or “withdrawal of membership”

Does away with the unequal disciplinary structure for adult men vs adult women.

Before, men who were endowed had a disciplinary council at the stake level. Everyone else had a disciplinary council held by their bishopric.

Now anyone who is endowed and likely to have their Church membership withdrawn will have a stake membership council. Everyone else has a ward membership council for serious sins & actions

At the ward level, membership councils still function the same (the bishopric holds a council with the person whose membership is at risk).

At the stake level, the council now is similar to the way it works at the ward level (the stake presidency meets, without the high council also being involved).

The individual’s bishops can sit in on the council. The individual can also choose for the Elders Quorum or Relief Society President to sit in on the council.

Same-sex marriage is no longer apostasy

Apostasy has been removed from a list of reasons to hold a membership council. Instead it is on a case-by-case basis.

The stake president can place informal membership restrictions on the person and the stake president counsels with the Area Presidency (which are Seventy) about anything more than that, such as a membership council

The language is softer but the results are the same.

I like that men & women are treated equally in this new system. It always struck me wrong that most men in the church automatically had a council of 15 men and women had 3 men.

The reversal of the 2015 Policy of Exclusion finally made it to the Handbook. 

————————————————————— 

Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Same-Sex Attracted

Families & members should be sensitive, love and respectful of people who are gay, lesbian & bi

Sexual activity with someone of the same gender is on the same level as an unmarried sex.

Membership councils are optional in these cases, based on the leader’s discretion.

As long as an LGBTQ member is “striving” to live the law of chastity, they’re allowed to hold a calling and temple recommend

“Sexual cohabitation” used to be forbidden, now it’s “cohabitation”. So I guess gay people living together is a problem regardless of whether they have sex. I do know of a few couples who live together, but have given up sex in order to be temple worthy. I guess that’s no longer an option.

The mormonandgay website was done away with and some of the items moved to a new page titled “Same-Sex Attraction.”

Most of the links on this new page don’t work. I’m sure this will get fixed

Most of the “resources” from the old page aren’t on the new page.

The last 4 video stories of members from the former site are on the new site.

Credit for finally making this page available in languages other than English.

I wonder if it will still say it’s okay to identify using the terms gay, bi or lesbian.I know President Oaks prefers the phrase “same-sex attraction” and a lot of his influence is seen in the new Handbook changes. 

The best section of the previous site was a collection of 17 members who are gay, bi and lesbian (well, 2 of them are parents of gay kids). Hearing them tell their story in their own words was powerful. Most of them have asked for their video to be removed.

The only stories remaining are 2 people in a mixed-orientation marriage and 2 parents who have a gay son. Each of those 4 members now has multiple videos (Laurie, Laurie’s husband, Laurie’s bishop, Laurie’s friend). 

The experience of most LGB people in the Church is now absent from this page, which again confirms for me that this has been a site for leaders & family, not actual members who are bisexual, lesbian or gay.

—————————————————————

Transgender

Preferred names can be noted in your membership record and Church leaders are encouraged to use them.

People can also to ask others to use their chosen pronouns

Elective surgical or medical intervention (which I believe means hormone treatment) for the purpose of transitioning, and social transitioning will result in membership restrictions.

These restrictions include not getting to exercise the priesthood, receiving or using a temple recommend, and receiving some Church callings

Even if the hormone therapy is prescribed by a medical professional to ease gender dysphoria or reduce suicidal thoughts, membership restrictions will result

Transgender people who don’t transition can have Church callings & temple recommends

Gender is defined as “biological sex at birth.”

This is recorded on Church records and determines whether someone can receive the priesthood and how they experience the temple ordinances

Transgender people & their family are welcome to attend Sunday church meetings and social events

There is now a page for transgender people, just as there has been for LGB people

This whole section of the Handbook makes me sad because it reduces these members to being a mistake and they need to choose a side. Nevermind they were born this way and have complex lives, they need to look and act like a cishet member.

I’d love if the church leaders could show scriptural backing & the words of the Savior to justify their views on trans folks other than the Family Proclamation.

Credit to the Church for switching from “transsexual” to “transgender

While trans people are welcome to attend the 2nd hour of church, no guidance was given about if they can choose either Relief Society or Elders Quorum

It’s problematic to define gender being as your biological sex at birth. If gender is eternal, why is “at birth” needed? A doctor or nurse assigns a biological sex at birth by taking a look at the newborn’s external genitals. This is only 1 of 5 markers of gender. A doctor or a nurse is not God.

5 components of biological sex

external genitalia

inner reproductive anatomy

sex hormones

chromosomes

gonad differentiation (gonad secretions cause sex-specific patterns in many other tissues & the brain)

This section of the Handbook still speaks of gender as binary–you’re either male or female and trans. Genderfluid, nonbinary, or any acknowledgement of a spectrum doesn’t exist.

To say a trans person will face consequences for social transitioning is really troubling. What does “social transitioning” mean? Do pronouns count as “social transitioning?” Long or short hair? If people must dress according to gender stereotypes, then it seems like leadership is more concerned about the feelings of the 99 and not the health & well being of the 1.

Why is it only transgender members who have a ban on these surgeries? Lots of breast enhancements, reductions and mastectomies take place every month with not a whiff of interest by church leaders, but if it’s done to affirm one’s gender identity, then it’s forbidden, even if it’s life saving.

It did make me feel queasy to read that even if medical or surgical intervention is prescribed by medical professionals to deal with gender dysphoria or suicidal thoughts, too bad, we’re still going to punish you. What kind of monsters came up with this?

————————————————————— 

Intersex, aka People Whose Sex isn’t Clear at Birth

The Handbook says the incident rate of intersex is extremely rare

Questions about membership records, priesthood ordination and temple ordinances for youth or adults who were born with sexual ambiguity should be directed to the Office of the First Presidency.

This is the first I’ve seen Intersex given their own section in the Handbook.

While policies about LGBT people are listed as “moral issues”, the section on intersex people is under “medical and health policies.” That’s a good sign, it means that the medical profession determines what is best, not a church leader.

I appreciate that church takes this out of the hands of local leadership. It’s a complex issue that untrained people shouldn’t get to have say over.

The Church assumes that surgical & medical intervention is needed for this group of people. Unfortunately it implies the default is to do so in infancy or early childhood when current best practices would be delaying, if possible, until the individual can weigh in on their body & identity. 

The idea that intersex is rare, well that depends on what they consider rare.

The rate could be as high as 2% of the population or as low as 1 in 2000.

If we think of that in terms of Church congregations, it suddenly seems not so rare.

In North America, a ward must have 300 members. If 1%-2% are intersex, that’s a couple people in each congregation.

If we go with the lowest rate of 1 in 2000, consider that in the US & Canada a stake requires a minimum of 3000 members. So 1 or 2 members per stake would be intersex.

—————————————————————

I think these changes show that the Church is willing to include queer people up to a point. We can feel & be the person we believe ourselves to be as long as we don’t actually act in a way that affirms who we are.

We are to be loved, respected and welcomed, however these homophobic and transphobic policies remain in place. Love & respect is more than smiling & being nice to someone.

The policies of the Church regarding queer people is out of line with science. As science continues to advance and confirm that gender identities and sexual orientations are real and biological and not changeable by will, the tension for the Church on these topics will continue to grow.

“The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” -Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

Considering Jesus admonishes us again and again to love each other and that we are all alike to God, I can only guess that Jesus wept. Again.

[ill-will-editions]

MARGINAL NOTES ON THE AGAMBEN SCANDAL

Originally published in Italian here.  

“Soon afterwards, something else emerged – yet another justification for incorporating the ‘Children’s Songs’ into the ‘Poems from Exile’. Brecht, standing before me in the grass, spoke with rare forcefulness:‘In the struggle against them, it is vital that nothing be overlooked. They don’t think small. They plan thirty thousand years ahead. Horrendous things. Horrendous crimes. They will stop at nothing. They will attack anything. Every cell convulses under their blows. So we mustn’t forget a single one. They distort the child in the womb. We can under no circumstances forget the children.’ While he was talking, I felt moved by a power that was the equal of that of fascism – one that is no less deeply rooted in the depths of history than fascism’s power. It was a very strange feeling, wholly new to me.” 

- Benjamin on a conversation with Brecht, 1938

It seems that what irritates many and persuades few about Giorgio Agamben's ongoing reflections, deep down, is his rendering of the image of passive consent to the state of exception imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. An image that manifests itself as a normalized adherence to the injunction of the absolute primacy of bare life, a life reduced to mere reproduction, deprived of any attributes of the experience of freedom. The image of this consent would suggest that bare life is revealed as the only horizon, or value, remaining of human experience, which is tantamount to saying that the human now denies itself any experience: it reveals itself as an intuited fact, a fact that emerges today in these circumstances, and which was therefore already present before.

Incidentally, it should be noted that something else is proven to be pre-existing or proemial to pandemic management—something that applies to the historical proletariat, i.e. the industrial worker, as much as to contemporary workers of all kinds; something that reveals itself in the mirror image of the majority of elderly people left to die alone under the legitimation of social protection from contagion, while the truth is that after years of state sanctioned austerity measures there are not enough hospital beds; something to do with the fact that Italy, “no country for young people”, is determined by the miserable distribution of income, ergo by the misery and predation of welfare—this pre-existing fact is that the injunction of biological reproduction is absolutely relative at a global scale according to different people’s privileges based on their geographical location, at a local scale, since social reproduction depends on the convenience of the economic machine, and finally at a time scale unique to each form of life with regards to the constant destructive forces of predation. So there is an experience of the thanatalogical power held by the present human society. 

Yet in the present situation, the image given by Agamben, that is to say the one in which it would appear that the social cement to which we objectively seem to adhere is revealed to be the command of bare life alone, is not inexact. At least, as long as a mass consent to the suspension or disembodiment of social relations, under threat of losing basic biological reproduction, persists. But what does this mean?

In an important passage from 1955, Georges Canguilhem argued against identifying human social organizations with living organisms. Canguilhem argues that while every human society or rather human society in general is a collectivity of living beings, this collectivity is neither an individual, since it does not obey the laws of homeostasis of a singular biological organism, nor a species, since it cannot be confused with “humanity” which is always open to the search for its specific sociability, while society is by definition closed. Society is a means, a tool, says Canguilhem. It demands rules but has no capacity for self-regulation, and thus disorder is its only presumably normal state. For this reason, regulation cannot be left to an apparatus produced by society itself; it must come from elsewhere—and here, again through Bergson, Canguilhem goes back even more surprisingly to Plato on the same question Walter Benjamin had returned to in order to arrive at his critique of sovereignty and the law by philologically revealing its fiction: justice. Canguilhem uses justice according to Plato, a supreme form of society that is at the same time irreducible to its bodies, to make the Bergsonian opposition between wisdom and heroism work: unlike in the living organism, there is no wisdom in society, and the proof is that its normal state of crisis constantly gives rise to the need for heroes and heroisms who emerge in the background of a crisis situation and are then called upon to give it a solution—all of this of course legitimized by a representation of extreme danger that is the mirror image of the permanent sense of threat perceived by society in its precarious nature.

It is clear that, in spite of some contrived and astonishing Marxian syncretisms, which have unfortunately run their theoretical course, we are dealing with social reproduction in its materialistically determined distinction from simple reproduction.

Let us try to make Canguilhem work in what appears to be Agamben’s contradiction: between him capturing the political truth on the state of exception and an aporia of his current discourse on normality, the rule of exception as taught by the tradition of the oppressed—to borrow from Benjamin’s 8th thesis on the concept of history. What particular kind of adherence to the formal exception are we seeing in the face of this pandemic? Or rather, why is it that the injunction of bare life displays itself in this circumstance?

This pandemic is not the dengue, which still causes more infections and victims than the coronavirus in Latin America, or the yellow fever, that has made new massacres in the last two years from South East Asia to Africa. This pandemic is global because it threatens the definitive global relations of capitalist society. The virus starts in the central metropolis of the global construction industry, a haven for capital in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and then impacts primarily in China, Europe and the US, with the addition of the oil states and those engaged in conflicts in the Middle East. This explains the representation of the danger, but not yet the social acceptance that it is gaining: in order to grasp it, it is perhaps necessary to question whether this same support is in fact illusory. This does not exempt us from ascertaining the force of the historical reification of this apparent image and therefore from ascertaining, as Agamben does precisely by capturing the truth of this moment’s image as it presents itself to history, that adherence to the guarantee of bare life is the foundation of the social pact. But we know, precisely with Agamben and Benjamin, that both this guarantee and the social pact are a pair of fictions—in other words, a false synthesis of opposites: such as, in close kinship, that of sovereign legitimacy in relation to justice and law. What does the experience of the oppressed teach us about the relationship between the life-form of capitalist society and simple reproduction if not that this relationship is simply null and void? That the mission of capitalist society, reversed through thirty years of globalization, is precisely exclusion, disinterest, the power or profit to command freely, independently from any guarantee of biological reproduction? It is this truth, affirmed in the practice of governance and introjected by the oppressed, that is now laid bare: the injunction to isolate and the suspension of social life are accepted precisely because it is at the moment in which society—and, coincidentally but separately, biological life—is most endangered that the whole experience of the divorce between the two finally condenses. In other words, individuals suddenly become conscious that it was power itself that laid down the fiction of the social pact in the first place: and therefore, it is the reality of society itself that is laid bare, its pure coincidence with power, and its powerlessness to produce any stability, any healing for the sick, any protection for life.

It is true that in this instinctive recording of the truth about society and power the injunction to cling to bare life as the sole horizon of social behaviour is reproduced: but it would be better to say that it is reflected in it. On the one hand, in fact, power enjoins the suspension of social life as a necessary condition for its own re-legitimization; on the other hand, this same suspension finds acceptance among people only as a condition consciously forced upon them by the evident fact that power and its social organization have no capacity to defend life effectively. In this dichotomy and beyond the instantaneous image of a forced convergence we can glimpse the crossroads between forms-of-life that are being prepared. On one side of this crossroads, there is an emergent form-of-life which, accepting the nakedness of society and power, secedes from it in order to affirm the value of life as an encounter and the mutual aid of bodies in their affections, thereby re-opening the horizon of a free experience, and on the other side a form-of-life imposed as a reproduction of society and its command, reconfigured exactly on the acceptance of the truth of their substantial powerlessness to protect life, bodies, and affections as what is common to us, and indeed on the acceptance of their destiny to separate us in the face of a distribution of death. And it is all the more so true—as seems to be the case in our present situation—that the reconfiguration of capitalist society and its general relations of power take the form of a predominance of digital capitalism, of data capture and of a predictive function of the devices of control: that is, of a total grip on the biological that at the same time mineralizes it.

In this sense, as shocking as the image used by Agamben, the anonymous article, “What the Virus Said,” published by Lundimatin appears to be a discursive operation with a different effectiveness and power: precisely in its address to the current form—captured at this moment—of the average social behaviour and to place itself ahead of that choice. A choice that seems to take on a global body in many different signs of conflictual life, which tend to dispel the crystallized image of a common decision on life itself paralyzed in the capture by the naked thanatocracy to which corresponds the automaton that we have come to call the Leviathan.

-Correspondence and Translation Committee - Vitalist International (Roman Section) 

Translated by the Vitalist International, Atlanta Section

[dmitri-smerdyakov]

The Fantastic Beasts Franchise and JK Rowling

Alright, so...hi everyone.

I don’t know how many people follow this blog anymore because my main blog of operation is now @alwaysahiccupandastrid - I still try to keep this blog relatively active though, just because it was my original blog, I’ve had it since I was 13, and I have so many memories attached to it.

I’m aware that a lot of the people who follow me, especially since late 2016, do so because a) I was a loud and proud Fantastic Beasts fan, b) I wrote some Newtina and Jakweenie fic, and c)...I don’t know. I literally don’t know why people bother following me anywhere because I don’t feel like I have a lot to say. But, anyway, many people probably follow me due to Fantastic Beasts and my posts/fanfics within the fandom.

Those who follow my active blog will already know my feelings and thoughts, but because of the fact many things about this blog - me, the posts for the last four-ish years, the url itself - are Beasts related, I felt it was necessary to come and write an actual post here instead of just reblogging things and calling it a day. I’ve always been very outspoken online, but I’ve been avoiding a certain topic of conversation on this blog for years now, and I’m finally in a place where we can discuss it.

I am, of course, talking about the hot topic that is JK Rowling.

Back in the days between FBAWTFT and FBTCOG, I was a very outspoken defender of JK Rowling and her decision to defend Johnny Depp’s inclusion in the films. Now, this is something I still stand by to this day, and due to the evidence that has since come out, I’m even more steadfast in the opinion that keeping Depp was a great decision. I am fully in support of him and the way he’s currently battling against his abuser. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about right now. As I was saying, back in the day, I was outspoken about the opinion that “we don’t know the full story” etc., and as a result I received very colourful anon messages. Now, to my knowledge, none of these were about JKR being a TERF/transphone, but I think it’s important to mention that at the time I scoffed at the idea she could be one. I openly admit that I didn’t listen to what other people - including actual trans individuals - were saying about JKR and her transphobia because I frankly didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to admit that the person who wrote something that saved my life could be so hateful and a bad person - that, and at the time I passed it all off as “wokeness out of control”.

It is now 2020. Up until last Saturday night, I was still in support of JK Rowling - I didn’t agree with some of the stuff she had said, but I was trying to be positive and have hope by telling myself that she didn’t mean to be transphobic, that she just didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, even though the evidence clearly showed otherwise (I.e. her liking transphobic / radfem tweets). I said to my followers on my Beasts page that instead of cancelling people outright, we should be attempting to educate them instead, and if they choose not to learn then fine. And, being 100% obvious, I didn’t want to admit it because I frankly already was feeling annoyed at two different Beasts cast members for different reasons: Ezra Miller (for choking a girl) and Dan Fogler (for his tweet about BLM - admittedly that was probably him being well intentioned but not saying it right). So yeah, I didn’t want to cancel another member of the Beasts “family”.

I had JKR’s tweets on notifications, and for the most part over the last few weeks, it was all about the Ickabog. However, on Saturday night I noticed that she had suddenly tweeted something completely different, and I looked at it. Given that I had adamantly defended her and said “freedom of speech” for so long, it’s telling that my first thought upon seeing her tweet was literally “for fuck sake, Jo, why”.

I won’t post her tweets here but to sum that first tweet up, it was her being annoyed over the term “people who menstruate” being used in an article instead of “woman”, and mockingly saying “there used to be a word for that” before pretending she didn’t know the word. She knew that tweeting it would start arguments and anger, and yet she still made the decision to do so. Her follow up tweets frankly dug the hole deeper; she tried to defend herself by saying, to sum it up, “I have a butch lesbian friend who agrees with me” “I just care about women’s rights!” And “IF trans people were marginalised I’d march with you!” (“If”, of course, being the real kicker here because what do you mean IF. They ARE. Every DAY.)

Since then, JKR has written an essay on her website defending herself and her opinions, and yes, I read it. I read it a few times, in fact. At first, I felt my anger simmer and felt I had been too hasty to make anti JKR jokes, that I was wrong...but then I read it again properly and realised that what she had written was a piece that turned herself into the victim, and that despite putting on the appearance of her saying she supports trans people, including the phrases “I support trans people” and “of course trans women are real women”, she still spewed much transphobic vitriol and hate. She cited no sources for any of her proclamations or statements about statistics, implied that trans men transition to escape their “womanhood”, that trans women are men in dresses, that trans women are dangerous to “real” women (aka cis women) and shouldn’t be allowed into women’s changing rooms or toilets. There was also the autism comment, and the implication of autistic girls somehow not being able to make decisions or whatever.

I’m going to get straight to the point: I don’t support JK Rowling or her radical feminism.

As someone who is a proud feminist (libfem?), I can honestly say that never have I felt threatened or like I was being silenced by the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces or conversation. Never. In my second year at sixth form, I was in charge of the LGBTQ+ club until a new leader with better leadership skills could step in, and - put simply - that year, the club was made almost entirely of first year transgender students. Even though I had called myself a trans ally for years, I realised there was a lot I didn’t know, and I learnt quite a lot from these students. I continue to still learn today. They were some of the nicest and most intelligent people I got the chance to meet, and I can truly say that at no point was I ever worried to be in a room alone with a trans woman, nor was I concerned about which bathroom they went in - bathrooms are bathrooms. Speaking of bathrooms...when I was at uni during a particularly tense rehearsal a few weeks before our final show last year, a guy in our group made me cry and I ran to the women’s bathroom to escape. Not only did the other girls come to comfort me, but you know what? The guy came in and apologised profusely to me. Did any of us girls give a shit about having a guy in our toilet? Absolutely not. It’s a fucking toilet. And, on that note, I was never worried about a trans woman or even a cis man attacking me in the toilets. You know who DID attack me in the toilets regularly? Other cisgender women.

As a feminist, I fully support trans women and am not threatened by the inclusion of trans women in women’s spaces or in women’s rights discussions. While I agree that cis women and trans women inevitably go through different struggles, at the end of the day, we all identify as women and are women. I think that if your feminism is so threatened by the existence of trans women - TERFs, RadFems, JKR, looking at you - then your feminism is flimsy and not feminism at all.

As a woman, I find it highly offensive that JKR and many RadFems focus so much of womanhood and feminism on an involuntary biological function that, frankly, many of us would rather do without. Yeah, I’m talking about periods - no matter how proud I am to be a woman, I still fucking hate periods and would get rid of mine if I could without erasing my chance of having kids someday. I can hear the RadFems accusing me of “internalised woman hatred” for saying I hate my periods, but you know what, they suck and they hurt and fuck them. The fact that JKR (also the the radfem movement) reduced “women” to just people who menstruate and can have children, and vice versa, is incredibly offensive and misogynistic. For a start, trans men menstruate, intersex people can, non binary can etc. Next, not even ALL cis women have periods - women who are menopausal, young women who haven’t started puberty yet (some do start very late), some women don’t have regular cycles, some women have medical problems that affect their cycle, some women are on birth control that can stop their cycles. So the idea of women being defined as “those who menstruate” is offensive not only to trans/intersex/non binary individuals but also to cis ones too.

As I write this, I’m a 22 year old woman who is still learning and changing every day, and one of the things that I’ve found myself thinking about recently - especially since we’re in lockdown and we have nothing BUT time to think - is about myself and my identity as a woman. What prompted this was when I saw Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved book, “Little Women”, which I’ve since read, for my birthday back in January, and I left the cinema feeling exalted and powerful with my own identity as a woman. (I’ll be returning to LW in a bit)

After some thinking, I’ve realised some things. For me, my identity as a woman is not just because once a month my uterus decides to shed; I do not identify as a woman just because I have certain physical features. I am not a particularly feminine person either, and I’m what some may call a “tomboy” (a phrase I actually don’t mind but I know a lot of people do for understandable reasons since it’s a phrase designed to differentiate people who don’t conform to society’s expectations etc) because I prefer video games and more geeky stuff to shopping or dressing up or make up.

For me, there is no one way a person has to be or appear in order to identify as a woman. Women are beautiful, complex human beings; we are not defined by our genitalia, by an involuntary biological process. Women are strong, intelligent, and interesting people - no two are the same. For example, some decide to raise families, some choose to pursue a career, some do both - all of these are valid and none are more “feminist” or “womanly” than the others, because it’s our as women. I guarantee that if you lined up every single woman in the world - cis AND trans - no two would be the exact same.

I mentioned “Little Women” earlier, and as I was pondering over what makes me identify as a “woman”, I thought a lot about a certain quote from the 2019 film that has stayed with me since it was first said in the release of the trailer. It’s spoken by Jo March to her mother, and I’ve started to understand what for me makes me a woman.

For me, being a woman is all of this: having minds, hearts, souls, ambition, talent, and being beautiful each in our own ways. Women are capable of love and empathy, capable of desire, capable of the most complex and human feelings and emotions, and coming out the stronger for it.

Sex is one thing; gender identity is another.

I won’t dissect every single thing JKR wrote in her essay, but I will just say this: her comments regarding autistic girls are extremely tone deaf and she does not speak for those with autism. I’m going to be honest and admit something here I haven’t before: I have not been diagnosed with autism or aspergers but I AM currently on the waiting list to see someone who COULD diagnose me. Apparently I show signs of a potential diagnosis, so...we’ll have to see. But I have friends who are autistic, and they’re disgusted by JKR trying to use them to support her TERF arguments. Autistic and other neurodivergent people are absolutely capable of making decisions and are NOT people who need to be babied or have their hands held, to be told who they are. It’s incredibly ableist of JK Rowling frankly.

I would also like to point out... I’ve seen people saying “but she doesn’t hate autistic people, Newt is autistic!!!” - yes, but JKR didn’t write him as autistic. Eddie Redmayne chose to play Newt as autistic - JK Rowling didn’t do shit.

It’s also time that I acknowledge that both Potter and Beasts inevitably hold JKR’s problematic views, and that by denying her ownership of her work, we’re not holding her accountable for the horrible things she’s done. This includes - but is not limited to -:

Anti-Semitic stereotypes in the goblins

Lycanthropy being used as a metaphor for AIDS - an illness that is heavily associated to the gay community, and also there was the panic of the AIDs crisis in the 90s where much misinformation and homophobia was generated and spread because of it.

Adding further to the lycanthropy point, one of the infected individuals - Greyback - is stated to have a sick preference for infecting children. Not only are werewolves tied to harmful gay/AIDs stereotypes, but also to the disgusting and frankly wrong notion that gay people are pedophiles.

The only Asian character is called Cho Chang. Cho Chang. That’s two steps away from outright just calling her “Ching Chong”. It’s not a name an actual Asian person would have.

The Goldstein sisters are probably distantly related to Anthony Goldstein, who JKR confirmed (on Twitter of course) is Jewish, meaning that Tina and Queenie are most likely Jewish too (and Goldstein is a Jewish surname). However, despite the fact that the first FBaWTFT is set DURING Hanukkah in 1926, there’s zero signs of them celebrating or observing it. Maybe that’s more on set design than anything else, but come on - if I, a fanfic writer, can do some research, JK/the crew of a major movie can too!

Adding on from that, gotta love how one of the JEWISH main characters then decides to join the Wizarding world equivalent of Hitler. I already had problems with Queenie’s characterisation in CoG, but that’s the icing on the cake.

POC/Black characters - in both series but since I’m a Beasts blog... Seraphina Picquery, a Black female president serving a term during a MAJOR wizarding world crisis, is severely reduced to have only 3 lines in CoG. Nagini’s only purpose is to be the only friend of Credence, a white man, before he joins Wizard Hitler and abandons her; she’s also an Asian character who we know one day permanently becomes a SNAKE, and who goes on to actually have a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside of her?? And some do see her as his slave, though you could argue that she’s actually the only being that he holds any love or respect for. Leta Lestrange is a half-black woman who is killed/literally sacrifices herself for TWO WHITE MEN, and who’s death was literally confirmed to have been added in last minute.

Also, the whole Lestrange storyline was fucking nasty: white Lestrange Sr imperius-ed a black woman (Yusuf Kama’s mother), raped her, and she then died in childbirth. I’m sorry, what the fuck??

In Harry Potter, Seamus is a terrible stereotype of an Irish person - he likes to blow things up. Look up the IRA and their bombings. Fucking Irish stereotype. As someone with Irish grandparents and who is proud of their Irish heritage, this really pisses me off.

Let’s not forget the whole Native American cultural appropriation. That truly speaks for itself.

So here is where I speak candidly to everyone who follows me and/or sees this post. While Beasts is no longer my No. 1 fandom these days, it and Potter still hold a huge piece of my heart. I have 5 wizarding world tattoos, so much merchandise, and I can safely say that being a fan of both series has shaped me as a person. Both of those series helped me get through the darkest days of my life, including bullying at school, my Nan passing away, and my mental health struggles.

This is why what’s happened has impacted me so much and broken my heart. For me, it feels like it’s tainted now because of Jo and her views. I know that we should separate the art from the artist, but when her views are so clearly woven into the very fabric of the Wizarding world, it’s a huge problem.

Here’s another part of the dilemma - I do not wish for the Beasts films to be cancelled. I’m well aware that the *cough* people who dislike me will say I’m trying to be negative, trying to boycott the series blah blah blah, but that’s truly the last thing I want. I still love the story, the characters, the soundtrack, and I want to know how it ends, if only for my own piece of mind. It’s also important to add that by boycotting Beasts, it’s also harming the hard working thousands of others who worked on the films: the cast, the crew, the extras, the musicians, etc., not to mention the fans who actually are invested in the series and have taken solace in it. It’s not fair for them to all suffer over the actions of one TERF.

This is one of my biggest worries, however: the Fantastic Beasts films do NOT have a good reputation as it is. The second film was boycotted by some due to Depp, and now there’s talk of people boycotting number 3 because of JK Rowling. Lots of people already talk hatred about it, and this will only fire that hatred up even more.

There’s also talk of Eddie Redmayne potentially being kicked from the franchise due to a “leak” that he doesn’t want to work with JKR anymore, but this could be sensationalist news reporting. But if it came down to it, I can honestly say that I would rather continue to have Eddie play Newt than keep JKR as a writer. Eddie has done more for Newt than even JKR has, and if he goes, then that will be the last straw for me within the fandom. That will be when I take a sharp exit out, sell my FB merch and have my tattoos covered.

To add, the Fantastic Beasts scripts are...not great. Or, at least, what we saw on-screen wasn’t. Maybe that’s David Yates being the literal worst (fuck you, Yates, you suck) and cutting all the parts with strong female characters, but I honestly don’t think that JKR can write screenplays well at all. I think she’s clearly better at writing books, and that’s fine - books obviously allow for more time to explore characters and story/plot arcs etc, and film scripts offer way less of those chances. I don’t think screenplays allow her to write what she needs to in order to tell the story she wants to, hence why CoG was kind of a hot mess. So maybe it’s just that she’s not suited for screenplays and should stick to books.

Honestly, I kind of just wish that WB would hire another person to finish writing the Fantastic Beasts movies - obviously they’d have to keep JKR on board to tell them the actual plot, but get someone who can actually write screenplays and not be problematic to write them.

By now I’ve gone on long enough that I’ve forgotten my original intent while writing this, so I’ll try to sum up and end now. In short, I am extremely disappointed in JK Rowling and do not support her or her views any longer.

I don’t know how any of you guys are feeling but I would be interested to hear other people’s thoughts, especially other Fantastic Beasts fans. I want to also add that, as always, my DMs and inbox are always open - if not here, then always at @alwaysahiccupandastrid where I’m more active nowadays.

Finally, you guys don’t need me - a white cis woman - to tell you this but you’re all valid and magical and fuck JK Rowling. Her characters would all be ashamed of her, and the characters we grew up with would not stand for the bigotry and vile hatred she spreads under the guise of ““protecting women””. Several of the amazing actors from Potter and Beasts have spoken out against her and her tweets: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Bonnie Wright, Katie Leung, Chris Rankin, Eddie Redmayne. Some have been...less inspiring (Tom Felton, Evanna Lynch, looking at you two 👀)

I’m sending love to everyone right now. I wish I could say something more useful but I’ve spoken enough - I’ve made my opinion clear. I love you all, please stay safe.

[cool-crap-daily]

Here is a cool thing I wrote. It's meant to be a prologue, but the book it's a prologue to doesn't exist because I am lazy. If you don't like it, too bad, you just read the whole thing sucks to be you ig.

Earth. 

    A planet full of natural wonders, rich in resources, and green with life, reduced to a festering pile of rubble and poverty. Not decimated by some outside force, no, it was ruined by scientific advancement and the sinfulness of man. The paragons of those horrors were called The Ascended. The Ascended were a group of individuals who had used the secrets of The Breakthrough to ‘ascend’. Each of them gained levels of power akin to those of the gods of legend. Every man, woman, and child in The Empire knew their names. Havoc, Seraphim, Volt, Stratagem, Hive, and finally, The Beholder.

    Havoc mastered the art of destruction. Originally the CEO of the world's leading weapons manufacturer, "Arcturus Armaments", The Breakthrough allowed him to fuse his mortal form with the instruments of chaos he created. Wielding atomic lasers and hypersonic rail-cannons as well as a panoply of other ordinances, he became an unstoppable courier of fire and death. To top it all off, his body was armor-plated in a composite meta-material that left him virtually invincible.

    Seraphim, the biological angel of life, had mastered the power of healing, the inverse of Havoc. Once the world's foremost scientist of medical studies, she created technologies that saved millions of lives. After the breakthrough, however, she melded herself with prototype machines she'd been working on in secret and obtained the ultimate treasure. The terrible prize that so many in history had sought after. Immortality. Any wounds she received closed as quickly as they opened, her aging halted in its tracks. She had an immune system aided by nanotech so that no pathogen stood a chance against her. Alas, she gave in to her dark fantasies of endless reign and destroyed all notes, machines, and evidence of her immortality tech, so that only she would be without a mortal end.

    Volt, the mover of mountains and Hermes incarnate, was once a man known as Ahmad Cunningham. He was the lead engineer of Athletonics Inc, the world's largest manufacturer of cybernetics, as well as his own startup: Fusoria Industries, the most advanced in Fusion power research. Using The Breakthrough, he molded his body into his most ambitious exoskeleton yet. This suit had so much potential that it needed impossible amounts of power to function. The only thing that could fuel such a bionic juggernaut was a prototype fusion reactor that he incorporated into the design. He could run and fly at incomprehensible speeds and could deliver enough energy in a single blow to flatten a skyscraper.

    Stratagem, the shadow of the abyss and master of illusion, was a trillionaire like the others in her former life, but her field of choice was espionage and stealth technologies. The Breakthrough allowed her to become nothing but a whisper on the airwaves, just a flickering of distortion on the edge of the most advanced cameras on the planet. She cloaked herself in stealth tech decades ahead of anything else ever conceived. She was completely invisible to the naked eye, and utterly silent to the ear. The only sensors that could hope to detect her were the ones she herself invented and replaced her eyes with. She could look through concrete walls and magnify her view enough to see miles away.

    Hive, the unfeeling swarm of symmetrical horror, was born out of a man named Stewart Stanford, the Head of Robotics and Androids Research of Rubicon Industries. Rubicon Industries used to be a competitor of Athletonics Inc. until the Ascended took over. Utilizing The Breakthrough, he uploaded his consciousness into his company’s hypercomputers, which were capable of processing petabytes of information per second. In doing so he gained unbelievable power but lost his humanity. After stealing FTL communication tech from a competing company, he could command his legion of millions of drones as if they were his body, seeing through myriads of eyes, controlling an endless swarm of weapons and tools. He could mine resources to create more drone factories and computers for himself, and there was nothing to stop him from doubling his forces every few weeks if left unchecked.

    The final member of the Ascended was The Beholder. Unlike the others, who are all incredibly infamous, few knew much about The Beholder. He used to work as a scientist at Tesseract Labs, whose main goal was to discover the secrets of quantum mechanics and dimensional dynamics. Before The Breakthrough, they had produced an FTL communication prototype, but it had vanished mysteriously, and they lost their government grants. Just before they shut down, an infinite number of new avenues for research opened up thanks to The Breakthrough. The lab was back in action. Using the power of The Breakthrough, they built a machine to study the secrets of existence itself. The machine was to a particle accelerator as a particle accelerator was to a particularly uninteresting rock. Alas, the scientists became arrogant and dug too deep, and it cost them everything. A horrible calamity struck as they probed into the folds of reality, ripping the entire facility out of the fabric of the universe and whipping it into the deepest Oblivion as the machine imploded. 

    The only survivor, if one could even call him that, was the man who was operating the machine during the calamity. Alexander Belton. The Beholder. His consciousness was caught between the two sides of the schism, split into an infinite number of parts and pieced together again over and over for an abstract eternity. Slowly, he learned to control the forces beyond reality and started to hold himself together. He built himself a physical form, found his way through the ever-changing miasma of the ethereal beyond back to our world. Coming back into existence crippled him, though, limiting his power and preventing him from ever leaving again. He anchored himself to this plane. Still, he was the most powerful of the Ascended by far, able to manipulate reality and travel through spacetime effortlessly, though not able to interact with the past. No one knew anything about where he was, what his motives were, or if the stories were even true. The other Ascended denied his existence, but endless numbers of sightings and stories of hope from the oppressed said otherwise.

    Together, the Ascended ruled the world uncontested, vowing a tentative truce, and promising to never allow anyone else to discover the secrets of The Breakthrough. They feared someone else could ascend using its power, jeopardizing their rule. They had scuffles occasionally, obliterating a few square miles of city here and there, but mostly they minded their business. They held a public meeting once a month to make decisions and ensure benevolent relations between them, as well as to agree on any new tenets to press onto the dying people of their world. They were corrupt, and they were only growing more so, but they enslaved the people in factories and power plants, under so much surveillance that the citizens were utterly powerless to stop them.

    Each of them controlled a different aspect of The Empire. Havoc was in charge of all military efforts as well as policing the citizens. His loyal knights carried out executions and silenced hope, armed with weapons that had power mirroring his own.

Seraphim was responsible for all biological research and plague control, as well as the only hospital left in existence. The Hospital was only open to the most elite, and only they could even afford a visit.

Volt was in charge of all power generation for The Empire. All electricity was generated by four massive fusion reactors, one in each district. Each absolutely dominated its skyline and required only tiny amounts of fuel to run in comparison. The fuel that they did need, however, was incredibly hard to produce, requiring tens of thousands of hours of manual labor involving harsh chemicals and radiation to create even a single gram.

Stratagem worked day and night to make sure that every square inch of The Empire was surveilled by one of her cameras, bugs, drones, or agents at all times. This way, the Ascended could stamp out any notion of an uprising or rebellion before it even began. She had hundreds of operatives who scoured The Empire and cyberspace for any intel or data that the Ascended could use.

Hive controlled all construction and resource gathering, his body made up of an endless swarm. If another thirty-story domestic housing unit needed to be constructed, it could be done overnight. Any steel or alloys that were required, he strip-mined from the less habitable parts of the planet, placed onto automated trains that carried them back to the factories. If any single part of the logistic chain was broken or destroyed, there was enough redundancy in the system that he could fix it in a matter of hours or even minutes.

Together, the six Ascended ruled The Empire with an iron fist, surveying their dystopia with cold, calculated, pride. They took comfort in the fact that no human alive could ever hope to topple their rule. It all worked like a well-oiled machine; oiled with blood, but oiled nonetheless. They sat on their thrones in The Floating Citadel, basking in the perverted glory of their ultimate abomination. Earth.

But seven became eight, and now, The Godhunter stalks her prey.

[Initiate Epic Soundtrack]

[ncfan-1]

Rhea’s Twelve Children

Okay. I said I was gonna chew on this once I was finished playing Silver Snow. Welp, I’ve finished playing Silver Snow, and good grief, did I get something to chew on.

[CN/TW: Unethical experimentation, attempted death of personality, abuse (and this holds true regardless of what you think the origins of the twelve to be)]

(I don’t don’t call my avatar ‘Byleth,’ but since this is a general meta post, I’ll be calling her ‘Byleth’ simply for clarity.

And obviously, if you think of Rhea as a benevolent person with benevolent goals—I don’t, and you should take that into account before reading any further. If Mobile fucks up again and eats the Read More in the Mobile version of this post, I’m sorry, and please just scroll past.)

      Up there is what is effectively Rhea’s deathbed confession in Silver Snow. She relates how she created twelve people to serve as vessels for Sothis, only for each attempt to end in failure. Then, she talks about how, when Byleth was born, her mother was dying and Byleth herself appeared to be either dying or stillborn, and that she used Sothis’s Crest Stone to revive her—and that later, she tried to use Byleth the way she had tried to use the twelve who came before her.

It is, at present, unclear as to whether the twelve were Rhea’s biological children, or people she created via magic. To me, I think the former explanation is by far the most likely. Verdant Wind is the only route I haven’t gotten through, and while I know that one is lore-heavy, it seems to have a lot more to do with the general (true) history of Fódlan than with Byleth’s origins and how those origins play into Rhea’s machinations. The only person who seems to have had the power to create life by such means as Rhea would have had to in order to have literally “created bodies” is Sothis, and Rhea doesn’t have Sothis’s powers. I have thus far read nothing in this game to suggest that there is magic that can create a person. Given the lack of evidence pointing in any other direction, the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true: these twelve people were Rhea’s biological children, brought into the world via sexual reproduction, and she refers to them as “created bodies” in an attempt to distance herself from them as much as possible.

And even if they aren’t her biological children, even if she clearly does not regard them as such, these people were Rhea’s children in one sense of the word or another. Biological children or created via magic, she gave them life.

So. Rhea had twelve children, and each time she had one, she brought them into the world with the intent of snuffing out everything that made them who they were so that she could give her mother’s soul a body to pilot and use to interact with the physical plane again. Twelve times, she did this, and never seriously thought she should stop. Well, more like thirteen.

She doesn’t regard these people as her children; this much is clear from the outset. She consistently refers to them as “failures”, unable to resist the urge to objectify them and reduce everything that they were down to the base function for which she brought them into this world—and to imply that everything they were was meaningless in the face of their being unable to be what she wanted them to be. It is, at best, unclear as to what just happened to these people once Rhea realized that their bodies wouldn’t be able to act as vessels for Sothis. Byleth’s mother was still very young when she died—depending on the time of year when she was born, she was either nineteen or twenty—and Rhea, as we have seen, is murderously possessive of Sothis’s Crest Stone.

I can’t speak much on this since we have basically no information on how she responded when she finally realized that each of the children were unable to become vessels for Sothis. Nemesis was slain in Imperial Year 91, and the game starts in Imperial Year 1180. That’s 1,089 years; divided by 12, that’s 90.75 years. Even if you assume Rhea waited a while before her first try at resurrecting her mother, that’s more than enough time for each of them to have died of old age and/or natural causes, and for Rhea to simply harvest the Crest Stone after their deaths. The fact that we know at least one of them died at the ripe old age of twenty (at the oldest) gives us even more leeway. We don’t know what happened to each of the eleven who preceded Byleth’s mother when Rhea realized that they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the role she created them to fill. We likely never will.

Rhea probably didn’t kill them, but she certainly didn’t view them as people in their own right, and certainly not as anyone to be truly cherished for who they were. They were, after all, “failures.”

This, on its own, is completely unconscionable. I don’t know what else to call having twelve children (or creating twelve children by means other than the typical), and then trying to snuff out everything they are so their bodies can be used as a vessel for another soul to interact with the physical plane without going into phrasing that could pass into the realm of deliberately inflammatory. All of the stuff Rhea did in the past in regards to the twelve was unconscionable, but let’s talk about what she did to #13.

It is established that Rhea saved Byleth’s life by implanting Sothis’s Crest Stone into her heart as a newborn. If that is where she had stopped, I would be able to say, without reservation, that this was a purely altruistic act. I would be able to say that it was a benevolent act. How else do you describe someone resorting to drastic measures to save a newborn’s life, if it doesn’t involve selling their soul to a demon or something?

But that’s not where this story ended.

Jeralt notes in his diary that both he and newborn Byleth have been put under surveillance by the church; he had to fake the baby’s death and take advantage of her utter silence to successfully smuggle her out of the monastery. Rhea had no intention of letting Byleth slip out from her grasp, and the fact that she doesn’t even try to feed Jeralt some edited version of what happened, doesn’t try to forestall his worries with an edited story of what happened when Byleth was born, doesn’t speak of someone who’s particularly willing to cooperate with Jeralt in the raising of this child. Her intent, her sole intent, is to make sure Byleth isn’t taken out from under her gaze. Or, to be more accurate, to ensure that her mother’s Crest Stone isn’t carried off to where she can’t retrieve it from.

When Jeralt and Byleth are brought back to the monastery at the start of the game is where Rhea starts her nearly year-long campaign of aggressively grooming Byleth to ensure that she trusts Rhea as much as possible, is as compliant to Rhea’s wishes as possible. Though the term ‘grooming’ is often used to describe sexual abuse, it doesn’t have to be sexual in nature, and in this case, I can’t think of a better way to call what Rhea is doing.

Rhea shows Byleth an unusual amount of favor right from the start, by making her a professor at the Officers Academy, which is a prestigious position and would, as Seteth points out, never usually be given to a young stranger who hasn’t been thoroughly vetted and whose qualifications haven’t been extensively verified. She is constantly complimentary towards Byleth, and entrusts her, a near-stranger, with the Sword of the Creator, even though it is a weapon both hugely important to the Church of Seiros and incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. Their supports take place in Rhea’s bedchamber, far away from prying eyes. Rhea often sends Jeralt out of the monastery on long-term missions. It’s noted over and over again, by multiple people, that Rhea treats Byleth very differently than how she treats everyone else, and that Byleth has definitely been receiving special treatment.

Rhea spent a year aggressively grooming Byleth, trying to cultivate their absolute trust as quickly as possible. All of this, to ensure that when Rhea asked Byleth to sit on Sothis’s throne, to do the thing she confidently assumed would snuff out everything that made Byleth who they were, Byleth would do it with no fuss, and no hesitation.

So. Twelve times she had children she intended to turn into her mother, but thirteen times she’s tried to turn someone into her mother, after all.

Not once did it occur to her that maybe she should stop.

And yeah, she expresses apparently genuine remorse when explaining all this to Byleth in Silver Snow, but it’s easy to be remorseful when you’re on your deathbed. It’s easy to be remorseful for your wrongdoings when you know you’re not going to be around to experience the consequences of them for much longer. I’m not saying it’s not genuine. I’m saying it’s not terribly meaningful. And even here, Rhea was talking to Byleth with the intent of achieving a goal, her goal being to ensure that Byleth would accept the responsibility of ruling over Fódlan after she herself was gone. She told the truth, but because it was the only card she had left to play.

Yeah, Silver Snow gave me a lot to chew on, alright.

[takerfoxx]

RD Walpurgis Nights 8, Part 12

Then…

The further they got into Freehaven, the happier Kriemhild was that this was to be their new home.

It was…nice. Oh, it was beautiful. It was strange in a mystical sort of way. It was lovely and peaceful-looking and fascinating and just seemed like a wonderful place to live.

But overall, it was nice. It was pretty weird, but it wasn’t over-the-top with it. It was beautiful, but not intimidatingly so. It felt kind and welcoming, if a city could be said to be kind and welcoming. And as strange and wonderful as it seemed, it also felt like a place where people actually lived.

Most of the building were tall and pretty close together, but the place that they were led was wide and open. There was a large, three-story building that sat in a white-stone plaza. It had the same white walls and red roof that the rest of the place did, though it had a high tower in the front, and two more towers on either side. The area surrounding it reminded Kriemhild of a school, with sports courts, a swimming pool, a grassy field, a garden, and a concrete quad with tables and umbrellas.

“That’s it,” said the woman leading them. “The Freehaven Integration Bureau. That’s where you all will be staying for now.”

“For now?” said one of the girls. “Like, for how long? And doing what?”

“A little of everything. It’s there to help girls like you learn about your new life and get used to things. And it doubles as a school so you won’t lose out on your education.”

“What! Seriously? We’re supposed to be dead! We still have to go to school even though we’re dead? Like, how is that fair?”

“We’re not dead, don’t you believe it,” muttered another girl.

The woman smiled patiently. “This way, please.”

“Come on,” Kriemhild said, tugging on Homulilly’s hand.

After the bad encounter on that plane…helicopter…thingy, Homulilly had managed to get her hands on a pair of full-arm gloves, ones that covered her all the way from her shoulders to her hands. Personally, Kriemhild felt that she shouldn’t need them. After all, they had already seen several people just as weird as she was walking openly. Heck, Kriemhild herself was just as weird, and no one gave her any problem with her legs.

Still, that was Homulilly’s choice to make, so Kriemhild just held her hand and kept her near. She had a feeling that her friend was finding everything to be a lot scarier than she was.

One of the other girls, a white girl with long, blonde hair, kept glancing at them. As they entered the building, she sidled up to the pair.

“Hey,” she said. “You guys are witches too, right?”

Kriemhild brightened at that. “We sure are!”

“Cool! I was afraid I was going to be the only one. I like your…legs, by the way. Bet you can get some distance with those.”

“Oh, well, yes.” Gretchen bobbled up and down a bit. “It’s pretty exhilarating. What’s your thing?”

The girl smirked. She tilted her head to one side and tapped her neck. “You know, I think I’ll save that for later. But trust me, it’s a riot.” She stuck out her hand. “The name’s Lucy, by the way.”

Kriemhild had already started to bow in greeting, but then stopped. Oh yeah, that was how people from other parts of the world greeted each other. “Er, Kriemhild Gretchen!” she said as she shook Lucy’s hand.

Lucy stared back. “Krimpled Gretchen?”

Homulilly, who had been hanging back, suddenly looked up.

“No!” Kriemhild said with a laugh. “Kriemhild!”

“Uh, okay. Hey, is it okay if I just call you ‘Gretchen’? Because your first name’s kind of a mouthful.”

“You can’t learn her name?” Homulilly said. “Why is that so-”

“Homulilly, it’s okay!” Kriemhild said. She turned to Lucy, who looked a little taken back by the sudden antagonism. “Sure! I was actually thinking of just going by that anyway.”

“Er, okay!” Lucy coughed into her hand. “Nice to meet you!”

As she hurried away, Homulilly turned to Gretchen with a frown. “Why not just have her use your full name?”

Gretchen made a face. “Er, I was actually going to talk to you about that.”

“Huh?”

“I was thinking of just going by ‘Gretchen.’”

“What? Why?”

Gretchen shrugged. “Well, because I think it sounds kind of nicer. Besides, I already had like three people mess up ‘Kriemhild,’ so it’ll just make it easier.”

Homulilly didn’t respond. She just stared.

“But you can call me whatever you want!” Gretchen said hastily. “I don’t mind!”

“Huh,” Homulilly said. “You really rather be called by your second name?”

“Kind of. Yeah.”

“Oh. Um, okay. I guess I can get used to it then.”

Gretchen smiled and gave her hand a squeeze. “Come on,” she said. The ground was starting to get pretty far ahead. “Let’s go see what this new world has for us.”

…

Now…

All in all, Ophelia did not consider herself to be missing out on whatever biological functions she had lost when she ceased to be, well, biological.

Periods? That was one of the first things they learned to get their bodies to stop doing. Aging? Forever young, hell yeah! Boys? Girls were so much prettier and they had boobs. Injuries that didn’t just fix themselves in a few minutes? The constant risk of death itself? Surely, it need not be explained why neither of them were missed.

Still, if she were to be truly honest, the one thing that she couldn’t fault those she knew for feeling cheated out of was the opportunity to become a mother, even if it wasn’t something she herself felt strongly about. Sure, it was probably a lot of hassle and heartbreak and way too much responsibility with no real guarantee that things would even work out, but there really was something attractive about creating a tiny person, helping them grow and mature, watching them develop an actual personality and interests of their own, seeing them make the same mistakes that you once made and deal with problems that you once thought world-ending but now feel trite in hindsight. And as someone who knew enough about her past to realize that her own upbringing had been…spotted, she did at times wish that she had the opportunity to correct that karma wheel, to do the good by her own child that wasn’t done for her.

However, being a parent had several significant drawbacks that she also had to acknowledge, and one of them was having to deal with the fallout when your kid had gone and done something really stupid and gotten themselves into an incredible amount of trouble. And as she approached the Militia headquarters to collect a certain Kriemhild Gretchen and Homulilly, she realized that she had never felt more like a parent than she did in that moment.

A very angry parent.

On the bright side, at least they weren’t locked up. Instead, they were sitting together along the wall in the front lobby, with a slightly bored marshal standing watch over them. The two had their heads bowed, and Gretchen’s legs had twisted themselves into so many knots that it would be a wonder if she was even still able to walk.

As Ophelia entered the lobby, Homulilly reflexively glanced up. As soon as she saw who it was, her face reddened and she quickly looked down again. Gretchen just gave her the quickest of glances and winced.

Ophelia, however, did not immediately look away. She stared right at them, eyes narrowed, until the weight of her gaze literally started to bend their shoulders. Oh yeah, they knew that they were in trouble.

Then she turned her attention to the receptionist, who looked just as bored as her coworker.

“Hello,” Ophelia said, her tone cool and professional. “I am Ophelia, and I am here to collect the two smog vapors in the corner there.”

“Hmmm. Hoe-kay.” Not even bothering to correct her slouch, the receptionist tapped a couple keys on her terminal. A pair of marshal reports suddenly materialized in the air in front of Ophelia, one of them containing a very unhappy looking Homulilly and the other an equally morose Gretchen. Next to each of their pictures was a rundown of the charges, which amounted to misdemeanors for breaking and entering of the Freehaven Integration Bureau and participating in the sabotage of their security system, and another for absconding with a special case new arrival, reduced from a felony charge due to the new arrival’s quick return.

“Bail for the pair comes out to seven thousand talents,” the receptionist said. Ophelia winced. It was certainly affordable, but also far beyond the amount she was used to dropping all at one time. Another readout appeared next to the girls’ records, this one providing details of their bail requirements. “As the poster you will then be responsible for the defendants’ behavior until their court date, which you will be notified of within twenty-four hours. I assume that they will be in your care until then?”

“Oh, most definitely yes.” Ophelia pulled out her bank card and slid it into the glowing receptacle on the desk.

“Mmmm-hmmm. Mark here.” A flashing octagon appear at bottom of the holographic display. Ophelia pulled off one glove and stuck her thumb into it. The octagon turned green.

The receptionist swiped her hand through the hologram, and it all immediately collected into a tiny glowing ball hovering over her thumb. She picked up a data crystal and stuck the ball into it. The crystal started glowing orange.

“The defendants have been fitted with tracking implants, and will neither be allowed to leave the city nor enter the FIB protected zone until told otherwise,” the receptionist said as she handed the data crystal to Ophelia. “Any further misdemeanors in that time will result in immediate incarceration with a new bail of nine thousand credits, and another two thousand for each additional misdemeanor. Felonies will result in the complete removal of bail entirely until their court date, and will be judged alongside the current charges.”

“Okay, but what if they behave themselves and show up when they’re supposed to? Can I get my bail back?”

The receptionist shrugged. “If found innocent, then yes. But considering they were kind of caught red-handed, then that’s up to the courts.”

“Ah.” Ophelia cast a sidelong look at the two defendants in question. Both of whom, it must be noted, were finding the patterns of the floor tiles to be extremely fascinating. “I see.”

Moments later Ophelia was seven thousand talents poorer and a great deal angrier. She pocketed the data crystal and made her way over to the pair. The marshal standing watch over them simply tilted her head toward them and shrugged before departing.

However, Ophelia didn’t leave with them immediately. She had just paid a hefty amount of money for her moral high ground, and by whatever nameless prehistorical magical girl that had wished her world into existence, she was going to get her money’s worth.

So she stood there, looming over them with her arms crossed, the fingers of her right hand tapping out a rhythm against her bicep.

As cheery and flamboyant as Ophelia normally was, she prided herself on having a fantastic glower, which she was now turning the full force toward the two criminals now under her care. And they felt it too. Their heads remained bowed, but their shoulders seemed to drop a few centimeters, Gretchen’s legs untangled themselves to lay flat like soggy noodles, and the petals of Homulilly’s flower actually started to wilt.

Ophelia kept the heat on until their discomfort was as palpable as her anger. Then she kept it going for another thirty seconds.

“Okay,” she said at last, making Gretchen visibly flinch. “Let’s go.”

She turned and headed for the door. She didn’t need to check to see if they were following. She could hear Homulilly’s heavy footsteps and the patter of Gretchen’s legs.

The Militia headquarters was nestled in the heart of the city, sitting on the boundary of the FIB protected zone, so it was a pretty long walk back to Ladoga. Sure, they could have taken the roofways, or even called for a zipper. But Ophelia needed time to stew, so they walked.

And walked.

And walked.

Partway there, Gretchen suddenly cleared her throat. “Um, O-Ophelia. I-”

Ophelia whirled perfectly on her heel and stamped her other foot down, bringing herself to a sudden stop after a hundred and eighty degrees.

“What?” she barked.

Gretchen winced. “N-Never mind. Sorry.”

Snorting, Ophelia turned back around again and plodded forward without another a word.

Finally they left the tall buildings and narrows streets and entered the winding cobblestone paths and thick foliage of Ladoga. Ophelia remained silent as she led the pair all the way to the fence, down the front path, up the patio stairs, and opened the door.

Oktavia was in her mechanized chair next to the stairs, and Candeloro was sitting in her easy chair. The two of them immediately straightened up as the trio entered, their faces full of questions.

There would be plenty of time for that later. Her hand still on the knob, Ophelia stood to one side and motioned with her hand for Homulilly and Gretchen to enter. They did so as slowly and heavily like the soon-to-be condemned that they undoubtedly felt like. Once they were fully inside, Ophelia shut the door and locked it.

“All right,” she said to the pair. “Sit.”

Homulilly and Gretchen hesitated for half a second, and then hurried over to the couch. They sat down with their heads bowed and hands in their laps, exactly the same way as they had done on the Militia bench.

“So,” Ophelia said as she removed her hat and placed it on the waiting hatstand. She walked over to stand across from the pair with the tea table between them. “This is an unexpected turn. You’d think I’d be used to them by now, considering how our week has been going, but honestly the two of you getting yourselves arrested is a new one. I sure as hell did not see this coming.” She glanced over to her girlfriend, who was parked right next to her. “How about you, Oktavia? You see this coming?”

“Nope,” the mermaid said. “Absolutely blindsided here.”

“Completely out of the blue,” Ophelia agreed.

“No warning whatsoever.”

“We just-” Gretchen started to say.

“You just wanted to find Charlotte because you were worried that she would leave us and be gone forever,” Ophelia coldly finished for her. “You felt that if you could get to her, you might be able to talk some sense into her. But since you had no idea where she was, you decided to start using your friend Hitomi Shizuki’s powers for good and get taken straight to her. Do I have the right of it?”

Gretchen’s head dropped again. “Yes,” she mumbled.

Ophelia sighed. “Well, congratulations. It worked. Charlotte called about an hour ago, and she and Candeloro are meeting face-to-face tomorrow.”

“But…then it worked!” Homulilly said, perking up. “We saved the family!”

“Yes. It worked,” Ophelia agreed. “You know what else worked?”

“Uh…” Homulilly and Gretchen said in unison.

“You successfully getting that intern that you shanghaied into helping you fired! There goes her chosen career. And probably someone else as well once they’ve finished their investigation! You two now have a record, so that’ll make any future job prospects kind of difficult. You made Hitomi take you to Charlotte without even knowing where Charlotte even was! What if she was someplace incredibly dangerous? What if you had gotten attacked? And…” Ophelia pulled out the data crystal and summoned up the list above her palm. “Oh yeah, the FIB was really pissed about this one. You roped one of the newly arrived, someone who has already proven herself to be extremely fragile emotionally and possibly even mentally, into your scheme!” She closed her fist, banishing the floating readout. “Do I even need to list all the different ways this could have fucked her up in the long term? Say what you want about all the things she’s done, but I thought we all agreed that the best place for her was at the FIB, getting help! But as soon as she was actually doing that, you go and yank her right out! Do you have any idea how fragile the trust is between them and her is right now?”

Homulilly opened her mouth. “But-”

“Take the whole last week out of the equation,” Ophelia said. “Take yourselves and your history with her and put it aside. Now, think back to your own time in the FIB. Think about all the times you’ve seen the newly arrived and how messed up they were over losing their family, losing their homes, and oh yeah, having fucking violently died pretty recently. Now, imagine that you heard that a couple of jackasses from the town decided to sneak into where one of the worst cases was being kept and twisted her arm into using her powers to help solve one of their personal problems. What would you think of those people.”

Gretchen winced. “Well…”

“YOU’D THINK THAT WAS A REALLY FUCKED UP THING TO DO!” Ophelia all but roared.

“But we just asked!” Homulilly wailed. “We didn’t force her or anything.”

Ophelia fixated her glower upon her. “Oh yeah? So you didn’t use her history against her at all? I know you have your own issues with the kid. You’re going to tell me that you didn’t use any of that to help, ahem, convince her.”

To this she got no answer, which was enough of an answer for her.

Ophelia continued. “And here’s another thing: I know we’re all upset over Charlotte having come down with a bad case of the stupid, but it’s CHARLOTTE! Yeah, she can get really stubborn and pigheaded, but odds are that after she had some time to herself to cool down and think about things, she would have come back on her own!”

At this, Homulilly scowled. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“No, I do not!” Ophelia snapped. “Just like you didn’t know that your scheme wouldn’t have gotten all three of you hurt! Or that you wouldn’t have made things worse and driven her off completely!”

Okay, now Ophelia’s smoldering anger was starting to erupt into white-hot fury. So she plopped down into her big red chair and slumped forward, fingertips pressed into her temples as she slowly breathed in and out, gradually getting her emotions back under control.

Once she felt that she had cooled off enough, Ophelia said, “Look. I know you two had the best of intentions. I know you got good hearts and were only doing what you thought you had to for our sake. But good intentions and good results don’t necessarily excuse bad actions. And I’m betting you knew that going in. You probably told a lot of people that if you did get caught, you two would take all the blame. Am I right?”

Gretchen swallowed. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “We’re prepared to accept whatever consequences you might have for us.”

“Me?” Ophelia sighed. “Aw fuck. What am I gonna do, ground you?”

Then Oktavia cleared her throat. “You know, you technically can.”

“Huh? They’re adults now! Besides, they’re not my kids, I don’t own them.”

“How much did you pay to bail them out?”

Ophelia hadn’t thought of that. “Huh. Well, that’s a good point. I guess I do own you now.”

Gretchen let out one of her frightened squeaks. Homulilly said nothing at all, though her face was now almost the same shade of white as Charlotte’s.

Ophelia mulled on that possibility for a bit, but then shook her head. No, grounding was for kids. This was an adult situation, which called for an adult response.

Besides, as pissed off as she was, she couldn’t deny the results.

“All right, I want you to understand that I am still very angry and very disappointed,” she said at last. “And I don’t like being either of those things, so that makes me frustrated on top of everything else. But I would be lying if I said that I’m also not…” she sighed, “incredibly grateful that you pulled it off. Despite anything I might have said out of anger these last few days, I wanted Charlotte back as much as anyone else, and it looks like that’ll happen.

Both of the girls started to relax a little, but they froze when they saw the look that Ophelia was shooting them.

“But that still doesn’t let you two off the hook,” Ophelia said. “So, here’s how it’s going to go: when we finally get your court date, you two are going to show up, apologize profusely, and accept whatever consequences they give you. Maybe they’ll just let you off with a warning and probation, though considering that the FIB is involved and they take this sort of thing very seriously, I really doubt that. So maybe you’ll have to pay a fine. Maybe you’ll be given community service. Hell, maybe you’ll have to do a little time.

Homulilly gulped. “We might go to jail?”

“Yah,” Ophelia said, staring at her. “That’s what happens when you fuck with the single most protected class in town. They’re probably going to completely revamp security in that whole zone, so future generations will have you girls to thank for the sudden lack of freedom.”

“We didn’t think of that,” Homulilly said, her petals wilting.

“Yeah. Hey. No shit.” Ophelia looked from Homulilly’s face to Gretchen’s. “So, we in agreement here?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said without hesitation.

Ophelia nodded. “That’s one of you. Homulilly?”

“Agreed.”

“Thank you. Now, after the dust have finally settled-”

“But,” Homulilly said, interrupting her. “I’d still do it again. If it meant getting any of you back, I’d do it again.”

Ophelia straightened up in her chair. Her fingers dug into the armrests. She said nothing.

Neither did Homulilly. She returned Ophelia’s stare without blinking.

While that was most definitely not what Ophelia had wanted to hear, she had to admit to being a little impressed. Homulilly had come a long way from the quivering little girl who hated to even go outside by herself. She had some real tough vapors in her gut, Ophelia had to give her that.

Ophelia considered making an issue of that little comment, but then decided against it. She had said her piece. Arguing further wouldn’t help.

“As I was saying,” Ophelia said at last. “Once the dust has finally settled, let’s also agree to put this whole dumb dumbness behind us. In the meantime, I have a lawyer to talk to.” She stood up and headed for the door, grabbing her hat on the way. “Jesus, I need leashes for all y’all, just to keep everything from devolving into pure anarchy! I’m supposed to be the rebel! When the hell did I stop being the rebel?”

With that, she was out the door, slamming it hard behind her.

…

Back inside, Homulilly and Gretchen finally let themselves relax a little. Holy crap, they knew that Ophelia was tough, but they hadn’t known her to be that scary.

“That…I guess it could have gone worse,” Gretchen said.

“Not by a lot,” Homulilly muttered.

“Still. At least she didn’t kick us out.”

Homulilly didn’t respond to that. The now very real possibility of going to jail was still looming all too fresh in her mind.

She glanced up at Oktavia, who was still reclining in her chair, watching the pair with a mixture of pity and disappointment.

“Well, don’t look at me,” Oktavia said. “I’m on her side.”

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. “We didn’t-”

“Ugh,” Oktavia said, making a face. “Let’s wait until we know what’s going to happen before we get to that. Though, uh, Homulilly?”

“What?”

“Now that you also did something really rash because you didn’t want to lose someone you loved, how about you give Hitomi a break if she ends up becoming a part of our lives in the future?”

Homulilly slowly breathed out. “I already talked to her about that. We’re fine. No more grudges.”

“Okay, good,” Oktavia nodded. She touched the control panel on her armrest, moving her chair in motion toward the door Ophelia had just stormed out of. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m headed to the studio. Ophelia did all the yelling despite promising that I’d get in a lick or two, so now I got all this angry aggression to burn off. I’m thinking…thrash metal.”

For the second time in half-an-hour, the door slammed. Homulilly and Gretchen were left alone.

Alone…with Candeloro.

Candeloro, it should be noted, had been sitting in silence the entire time. She had stayed silent during Ophelia’s entire lecture, she had stayed silent when things had gotten heated, she had stayed silent when Homulilly had started to talk back, she had stayed silent when Ophelia had left, and she had stayed silent when Oktavia had chimed in with her own piece.

But now that the two of them were gone, she finally raised her head and turned toward Homulilly and Gretchen.

Unlike Ophelia and Oktavia, she didn’t look the slightest bit angry. Quite the contrary, she was positively beaming. It was the first time Homulilly had seen her happy since…their graduation day, actually.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m not mad at you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “Thank you. Thank you so…”

She couldn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t need to. They understood. Homulilly and Gretchen exchanged a quick look. Then, as one, they got up and went over to where Candeloro was crying and embraced her.

“Do you want us to come with you?” Gretchen whispered.

Candeloro shook her head. “No. She said she just wanted to talk to me. But, um, when you talked to her, did she say why she…”

Homulilly shook her head. “She doesn’t really believe that you’re Candeloro. She thinks that you’re just Mami Tomoe.”

“I thought as much,” Candeloro sighed. “How did you get her to change her mind? About talking to me, I mean.”

Gretchen winced. “Um, guilt trip, basically.”

That made Candeloro laugh. “I guess I can’t argue with the results.” She wiped the tears away from her eyes. “I just hope that I’m as effective.”

Gretchen sat up on Candeloro’s armrests. “You know her better than anyone alive,” she said, squeezing Candeloro’s shoulder. “Well, I mean, better than anyone living…existing…you know what I mean! Just make her see you as you.”

Candeloro swallowed back the lump in her throat. “What if I can’t though? I do know Charlotte, and you know how stubborn she is!”

Homulilly sighed. She straightened up on the other armrest. “Then…I don’t know. I guess if she won’t listen now, then just say something that’ll get stuck in her head, something that’ll make her change her mind later. I mean, Ophelia did say that she might just need some time to think about things.”

“I hope so,” Candeloro said softly. “I don’t know how I’m going to face all this without her.”

…

The next day…

The first time Candeloro and Charlotte had gone on a date, Candeloro hadn’t even realized that it was a date until about a third of the way in.

It had been a few months since her friends had bound together to intervene in her cycle of depression and drunkenness. Getting her to get off the drink had taken a lot of coaxing and support, but they had succeeded. Unfortunately, it hadn’t done much for her feelings of shame and self-loathing, and since she no longer had anything to drown them with, they had filled her every waking moment, until it had started to become too much of a chore to even get out of bed.

That had been when Charlotte had stepped in. One day, she had told Candeloro that they were going for a walk, and that was that. Candeloro had been fully prepared to ignore her, but Charlotte had insisted, coaxing her out of bed, to get cleaned up, to get changed, to eat a full breakfast, and then to go with her out the door. And Candeloro had gone along with it mostly because she couldn’t summon up enough willpower to resist. What did it matter?

The walk had ended up being a lot longer than Candeloro had thought it would be. Instead of around the facility grounds Charlotte had led her all the way out of the protected zone and down to the town square. Charlotte had talked nonstop, going on and on about their classes, about some new book she had read, about something funny that Oktavia had said, about some weird alien fact she had just learned about.

Candeloro hadn’t been very responsive at first. She was mostly just humoring Charlotte, after all. But after a while Charlotte ended up saying a few things that she found interesting. Then she began to respond. Then she began to engage. And before too long, they were having an actual conversation, like they used to have before Candeloro had made her big mistake.

By then Candeloro had started to feel much better. And by the time they gone out for lunch she almost felt like her normal self again. But it wasn’t until they had stopped by an ice cream stand and walked along the boardwalk while the sun set over the beach that Candeloro became aware that this walk was becoming a lot more intimate than hangouts they had had in the past. Furthermore, Charlotte was holding her hand.

Right about then was when she started to put things together.

It was one of her happiest memories, in part because for the simple fact of being their first date, but also because it was a time of pure happiness following the darkest point in her life. The town square always had a special place in her heart after that.

It was darkly fitting then that after being the place that her relationship had begun it would end up possibly being the place that it shattered to pieces.

The town square was a large, open plaza that lay nestled in the stretch of flat land between the foot of the hill and the beach, ringed with a short brick wall with a wide fountain in the middle. It was a popular place for town events, concerts, holiday celebrations, and pretty much anything that would require a large outdoor crowd. During the summer, the fountain would essentially become a small water park, with people splashing in the shallow water and playing among the shooting water jets. In the winter, magic would be used to make it snow in the plaza, the fountain would be frozen over into an ice skating rink, and a massive Christmas tree would be placed in its center.

Despite being in the dead of tourist season, the place was actually much less populated than usual. The storm had chased off most of the visitors that had been unlucky enough to be caught when it had hit, and had discouraged new ones from arriving. There was still a fair amount of people wandering about, but only about a third of what there normally would be. Candeloro was perfectly okay with that.

Candeloro got there at about 11:50, a full ten minutes before Charlotte said to meet her.

She stood at the entrance to the square and looked around. Per usual, people were going about their pleasant day: strolling, talking, laughing, flirting, playing, and overall just enjoying the sun, all of them completely unaware that an extreme anomaly in this world of freaks was among them. Had they known what she was, what had happened to her, she would no doubt would be swarmed by throngs of the curious, and that was if she was lucky.

On the one hand, she was thankful that nobody knew. That kind of attention was the last thing that she needed. And yet, on the other hand, she couldn’t help but be a little resentful. Her entire world had been upturned, both without and within, and here everyone was just having a nice time while being completely oblivious to the turmoil she was having to deal with. She knew it was unfair to be upset about that, but there wasn’t a whole of fair happening to her at the moment.

There was no sign of Charlotte, so she walked around until she found an empty bench and sat down. And then she waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It was only ten minutes, but the perception of time was a subjective thing, and every second seemed to crawl at a snail’s pace. She could feel her hair growing. She was aware of every itch on her skin, most of them concentrated on her new arms. She tried to lay her hands on the bench’s boards on either side of her, but that felt awkward and unnatural. She then placed one on the twisting metal armrest and the other across her lap, but they wouldn’t stop twitching.

She checked the time. To her dismay, it had only been two minutes. She had worked entire full time shifts that hadn’t felt this long!

Speaking of which, she still hadn’t figured out what she was going to do about her job. She hadn’t officially quit yet, and she certainly didn’t want to, but she kind of had to, didn’t she? There was no way she could hide her new condition from her coworkers, but she also couldn’t let them in on the secret. They had already called the house twice inquiring about when she was going to come back, the first time genuinely concerned and the second a little more on the impatient side. Ophelia had taken the call both times, letting them know that Candeloro was feeling out of sorts.

She needed to let them know that she wasn’t coming back, but she really didn’t want to. They needed to know so they could find a replacement. It wasn’t fair to keep them short-handed for so long. But she felt that if she cut that part off from her life, then she would lose her last bit of her old life. Her sense of self was gone, her wife was gone, and now she was going to lose her job and all her friends there as well, one that she genuinely enjoyed. It wasn’t fair at all.

She checked the time again. 11:46. Bleh.

Wasn’t time supposed to go faster here than it was in the world of the living? Apparently, her entire life as Candeloro had been squeezed into only a few weeks over there. She wasn’t really clear on what the exchange rate was, but that meant that this infuriatingly long ten minutes was contained within the tiniest fraction of a millisecond over there.

And that meant that her new existence as Mami Tomoe had lasted only a handful of seconds probably, if that. Someone alive somewhere on Earth had probably felt a sneeze coming on when she had made the change that still hadn’t come out yet. Or maybe it had. She didn’t know.

11:48

What if Charlotte didn’t come? What if she changed her mind at the last minute? Somehow, that would be far worse than if Charlotte had shown up just to tell her that she didn’t love her anymore and didn’t want to ever see her again. At least that meant that she cared enough to do it in person. But to have Charlotte simply disappear out of her life without so much as a goodbye? That almost made Candeloro regret not just simply letting her get eaten by the karnuk. At least then she could have been recovered and not turn her back on everything once she was hauled out of the beast’s stomach.

Almost.

Candeloro’s legs started bouncing. She was wringing her fingers together and couldn’t stop. Charlotte wasn’t coming. Candeloro was going to lose her without even being given the chance to fight.

Then a tingle went down her back.

It was sort of strange how it felt to be joined to someone on a spiritual level. She and Charlotte spent so much time together that they didn’t even notice the feelings of peace and contentment that the other’s presence brought them, but the longer they spent apart, the more that the other’s absence gnawed at their minds. Spending a few hours on their own to go to work or run errands or anything like that wasn’t a problem. But after a day or two feelings of unease would start to grow, like a persistent itch that they were unable to scratch. The last few days weren’t the longest period of time they had spent apart, but they had been by far the worst. At least with the other instances Candeloro knew exactly when she would be back with Charlotte and still talked to her daily. But the constant yearning for her while not knowing if her wife was ever coming back and knowing how much she was repulsed by her had been absolutely unbearable.

But by the same token, it did mean that they both instinctively knew when the other was near. Candeloro remembered stepping off the elysian from her trip to Ordo’s Furnace and entering the Freehaven skyport. Even though she hadn’t been told where the others would be waiting for her, her head had turned automatically in their direction as she had passed by a junction. And sure enough, there they had been, with Charlotte standing in their midst like a pink-haired angel.

Candeloro did not hear Charlotte’s footsteps over the sound of the fountain. She did not see her coming. But she still knew.

Sure enough, a moment later the space next to her was filled. Candeloro glanced over. There she was, wearing tight white pants that ended right over her calves, a pink-and-black striped shirt, and pink sneakers. She had on a pair of large-lensed sunglasses and was wearing a backpack.

Save for the backpack, all of that was part of Charlotte’s usual fashion sense, and none of it had come from their closet or dresser. Charlotte had bought new clothes. She was truly prepared to leave.

Candeloro swallowed back the lump she felt forming in her throat. Charlotte was there, but she wasn’t saying anything. She wasn’t even looking at her. She was just sitting there with her hands on her knees, gaze directed out toward the horizon.

Finally Candeloro couldn’t take it anymore. Someone had to be the first to break the silence. “You came,” she said softly.

Charlotte winced visibly behind her sunglasses. “Yeah.”

“I was starting to think you weren’t going to show up at all.”

“I…” Charlotte sighed. “I almost didn’t.”

Candeloro swallowed. “Why? Because…I’m not worth it? Because you still think that I’m just Mami Tomoe, that I replaced Candeloro?”

“That’s…I don’t know. Maybe.”

Candeloro looked down at the ground. “I’m not, you know. I’m not just some…”

Her voice trailed off. This wasn’t working. She had worked on what she had wanted to say, had rehearsed it in her head dozens of times, but now that she was actually there, now that Charlotte was finally here, she couldn’t seem to get the words out. Her throat felt thick, and her chest seemed to tighten every time she tried to talk.

The two sat in silence, watching everyone around them as they had fun. For once the place wasn’t oppressively crowded, likely due to the aftermath of the hurricane, but there still was a lot of people milling around, the sound of their voices talking and laughing mixing with the crashing of the surf and the calls of the gulls.

It all seemed so…normal, as if nobody was at all aware of the changes that had happened in Candeloro’s life. And how could they? To them it was just another pleasant day out in the sun. How could they know that the ninth official de-witching was among them? How could they not that only a few days prior, the two of them had done battle with the alien sea-monster that had caused the beaches to be closed? How could they know that one of their most tight-knit families was on the verge of falling apart?

Change. Change and fear. It really came down to that. Their life had been one where change had been gradual and only came when expected, and fear had been practically non-existent. But throw one major curve-ball at them, and things just collapsed. It really made her question how strong those bonds had been to begin with.

“So,” she said. “Do you, uh, want to go first, or…”

Charlotte sighed.

Then she suddenly stood up, making Candeloro jerk away a bit.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Charlotte said.

…

Spying on someone in Freehaven wasn’t exactly smiled upon. Stalking was, of course, illegal, but keeping an eye on someone wasn’t, not really, though where the line between one and the other wasn’t all that well defined. Still, following someone that really would rather not be followed could get you into big trouble with the marshals, assuming that you didn’t get found out and beaten senseless first. With death a non-factor and most injuries barely worth remarking on, bodily violence actually ranked far below harassment on the felony scale, so that was always something to keep in mind.

That having been said, while stalking was a bad idea, there was nothing stopping the gang from keeping an eye on things. And since Homulilly, Gretchen, and Oktavia weren’t in any position to go anywhere at the moment, Ophelia had become the designated scout.

She stood on a rooftop in the shade of a potted palm tree, chewing on a stick of taffy as she watched the town square. She had on a pair of contacts that functioned as adjustable binoculars. All she had to do was think it, and they would zoom in and out on anything she wanted.

“Okay, Candy’s still just sitting there,” she said into her phone, which was sitting on the pot and was on speaker. “No sign of our little runaway.”

“What’s she doing?” Oktavia’s voice asked.

“I just told you, she’s just sitting there, looking all nervous! And…”

Suddenly she caught sight of a very shapely brunette with a pair of equally lovely redheads, all of them wearing the absolute minimum of clothing walking by, and judging by the way the brunette was hugging the pair of redheads close to her it was pretty evident that their shared relationship was a few degrees beyond being simply friends.

“-oh, hello!”

“What? Is it her?” Gretchen said.

“No, I know that tone,” Oktavia growled. “Ophelia! Stop checking out girls and do your damned job!”

“Sorry, sorry.” Ophelia refocused on Candeloro. “Okay, still no sign of…hang on.” She turned her attention to one of the side entrances to the square. “Oh, wait, wait, wait, there she is. The jackass is in the house.”

“Is she with anyone?” Gretchen said.

“Nope. Just her, and a really stupid pair of sunglasses.”

“I don’t think anyone that wears your kind of hat is in any position to make fun of anyone’s taste in fashion,” Oktavia said.

“Shut up. My hat may be stupid, but I rock it.” Not today though. Her big, red slouch hat was too much of a giveaway, so she had on that baseball cap she had gotten from the Aurora Borealis. “Okay, she’s seen Candy. And…yup, she’s heading right for her. This is happening.”

Ophelia watched as Charlotte walked over to where Candeloro was sitting and took the seat next to her. Unfortunately their backs were to her so she couldn’t make out much beyond that.

After a few seconds went by Oktavia said impatiently, “Well? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Ophelia said. “They’re just…sitting there. I don’t even think they’re talking.”

“What? Why not?”

“I don’t know. Awkwardness, I guess. And…okay, no, now they’re talking.”

“About what? What are they saying?”

“How should I know? I’m like half a kilometer away!”

“Just move and download the lip-reading app! It’s not that expensive!”

“No! I told you, I’m just keeping an eye on them, not…okay, wait. They’re getting up together. And now they’re leaving the square.”

“Where?” Homulilly’s voice demanded. “Where are they going?”

“Hush. Let me…let me see…”

She tracked their movements as they moved from the square and started heading up the hill. It was one of the center streets, so it was wide enough for her to keep them in sight.

Then she saw where they were heading and sighed. “Uh-oh.”

“What?” Oktavia said. “Why uh-oh? What’s going on?”

“I’m about to lose them.”

“You know that already? Why?”

“‘Cause they’re heading straight for the Rising Gardens.”

…

The Rising Gardens was located a little bit up the hill. It functioned as a nature walk, but also had kind of a twist, in that it was sort of a three-dimensional hedge maze. The whole place was a tiered structure made of wooden mesh and had went up about four stories, and those four stories were crammed with vines, flowers, fungus, shrugs, ferns, grasses, and even tree trunks that extended down through all four stories to rise up and spread their branches over the gardens. The paths were winding, rising up and down via random staircases, and no matter where you went you were surrounded by exotic plant life. Special hidden devices filled the maze halls with sunlight, and enough separation had been enforced between the roots, trunks, and vines to keep the interior from feeling claustrophobic. Non-pest insects such as butterflies, moths, and bees flitted everywhere. It was a wonderful place to just go and let yourself get lost in.

“Homulilly and Gretchen said that they found you in Old Town,” Candeloro said as they walked along.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Figured it was the best place to lay low while I figured things out. Still not sure how they managed to find me.”

“Well, uh…” Candeloro wondered how much she ought to reveal. Her younger friends’ legal troubles weren’t exactly appropriate conversation material.

Then she sighed. Oh, to hell with it. Charlotte ought to know what they did on her behalf. “Well, basically they broke into the FIB and convinced Hitomi to take them to you.”

Charlotte came to a sudden stop next to a vibrant patch of pink-and-violet orchids. “What.”

“Yes. And they apparently botched their return and were arrested.” Candeloro made sure that she had a good view of Charlotte’s face. “Ophelia was on her way to go bail them out when you called last night.”

Sure enough, Charlotte looked positively horrified. “Homulilly and Gretchen broke into the FIB, absconded with Hitomi Shizuki, and got themselves arrested? Them?!”

Candeloro shrugged. “Yes.”

Charlotte’s face seemed to go to war with itself. Her mouth kept forming itself around words that seemed unable to emerge while her cheeks, brow, and eyes tightened and loosened in response to the many conflicting emotions she was probably feeling. “But that’s…they couldn’t have…don’t they get how-”

Candeloro laid a hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. “I don’t think you’re in any position to judge them,” she said. “They did it for you.”

Her face falling in defeat, Charlotte sighed. She gestured helplessly and shrugged.

Then she glanced at the hand on her shoulder. She didn’t say anything, but her face did clench up.

Wincing, Candeloro moved her hand away.

“Sorry, it’s just…” Charlotte motioned toward Candeloro’s arm. “I’m not really, um…”

“It’s okay, I get it.”

Shaking her head, Charlotte started walking again.

“They said you had a flight out of here,” Candeloro said after a bit.

“I did,” Charlotte said with a nod. “Still do. Just…rescheduled. For later today.”

Candeloro winced. “Why? I mean, I understand if you needed some time to yourself. But why were you leaving town?” Well, it was time to broach the question that had been hanging between them from the start. “Does me being…this really repulse you that much?”

“I…” Charlotte pressed the fingertips of her right hand against her forehead. “Ah, damn it. I guess there’s no gentle way to put this. Mami, you scare me.”

Candeloro wasn’t sure what hurt her more: the idea that her own wife was scared of her or that she was still thinking of her exclusively as “Mami.”

“I mean, a witch turning all the way back into a Puella Magi? That’s…you have a better chance of going full witch than you have of that! It’s such a remote possibility that it’s not even worth thinking about, it should have never had happened! But it did. And now you’re here.”

Candeloro shot her a look. “Me being…?”

“Oh, don’t start that. You know exactly what I mean. You being Mami Tomoe!” Charlotte threw her hands up in the air in dramatic fashion, scaring away a few pigeons that had been nesting atop a nearby vine-covered statue. “Mami Tomoe, Puella Magi! The one who got caught up in the Incubators’ stupid system and turned into a witch! The one that’s supposed to be dead! The one that Candeloro was made from!”

Candeloro winced. Thankfully no one had really taken notice of Charlotte’s outburst, or if they had, they were making sure not to pay attention.

To her credit, Charlotte also seemed to notice that she had made a poor decision, if the grimace she was wearing as she looked around was any indication. She lowered her arms and stuck her hands into her pockets.

“So, is that what you think?” Candeloro said after they had walked a ways. “That I’ve…replaced Candeloro? That I’m really not her?”

Charlotte huffed. “I can…accept that you think that you’re Candeloro. I can accept that you might have your memories.”

“I do. And I can prove it.”

“You don’t need to-”

Candeloro took a deep breath. Then she said, “Your name is Charlotte, but your fans call you Charlotte Walpurgis, a name that Ophelia dared you to take because you refused to believe your publishers would take it seriously, and you ended up owing her ten talents when they didn’t even bat an eye. We all went to school at the Cloudbreak Public University, and you used to get into fights with Oktavia because she wouldn’t stop playing her keyboard when you were trying to sleep. You got a Masters in Classic Literature and figured that was enough to get yourself a job at the library.

“You like listening to vaskergoros folk and vekoo jazz, but can’t stand heavy metal no matter what species it comes from, despite going through a very loud punk phase when you were in your second-to-last year. You go into weird fits whenever you come within spitting distance of cheese, something we found out when you literally dove over the lunchline back during our first year and had to be dragged out by your ankles. When we got our parrot, we all threw dice to decide who got to name him, and you won and named him ‘Cheese’ as a joke. You’re allergic to green beans for some strange reason. You and Ophelia once spent an entire month waging war on one another for no logical reason whatsoever, and it only stopped when Ophelia accidentally hit me in the face with a snowball she had been keeping in the freezer. You once tried to prank Oktavia and I into going on a terrifying ride at Sardi’s Land of Miracles, only for it to backfire and you passed out on the ride. We had to replace the kitchen window once when you started showing off throwing darts during a barbeque. You’ve been arrested twice, once during our FIB days for getting drunk and breaking into the pool after hours to go skinny dipping with your friends, and again two years after we all graduated when you, once again, got drunk with your friends and broke into the FIB pool to go skinny dipping. Oktavia was with you both times. And they say I have a drinking problem. You flunked Physics our Senior year and begged Ophelia to tutor you so you could get through the makeup course. She waited four years to call in that favor, and to this day I cannot get any of you to tell me what she made you do, I just know it was kind of illegal and Oktavia was involved somehow. Also, you enjoy having me tie your arms to the bedframe whenever we make love, and having me leave a trail of kisses all the way from your forehead all the way down to your-”

“Stop it,” Charlotte growled. “I get it.”

“I just wanted to prove to you that I’m still me.”

“So I’ve heard. Homulilly even told me that you’re still using her name.”

The constant attacks to her identity were making Candeloro’s stomach sour. “But?”

“I can’t accept that she is the one in the driver’s seat. That you’re really her, instead of someone who just slipped back into your skin and took over.”

“Why?” Candeloro demanded. “Why are you so sure?”

Then Charlotte was taken over by a rage and fury so pure and so hot that it made Candeloro recoil. She had seen Charlotte angry before, but never like that, not with her face twisted up in hate and grief.

“Because she felt you coming back,” Charlotte snarled. “She was terrified of you, terrified that you would wake up and take away everything from her! Remember? Do you remember the day I went to talk to Hitomi Shizuki and learned everyone’s old names? Do you remember what happened that night?”

…

Then…

“Candeloro? Are you all right?”

It was late evening. Most of the household had gone to bed, though Charlotte doubted that any of them would be doing much sleeping. There was just too much weighing on their minds. Hell, Charlotte had learned exactly nothing of her own past, and she was expecting to be kept up for several hours through empathetic insomnia alone.

As if only to prove her point, instead of going to bed after undressing, Candeloro was standing at the window, staring out at the neighborhood. Ladoga was pretty quiet as far as streets went, and most of their neighbors had turned in for the night as well, so most of the lights were out. They had always liked how the neighborhood looked at night, with the heavy foresting and curving cobblestone streets and the graceful, elfin streetlamps. At night, when the lights went down, the streetlamps went on, and the night insects came out, it looked like something out of a fairytale. When they had first moved in, the two of them would often just spread a blanket on the roof and lay there in each other’s arms, listening to the sounds of the night. They still did that on occasion, when they mood took them.

But that look of peaceful allure wasn’t what she saw in Candeloro. Instead, her wife looked pensive, almost haunted. It was pretty troubling.

“Candeloro?”

Instead of turning to her, Candeloro continued to stare out the window while saying, “Do you know what the strangest thing about all this is?”

Charlotte pursed her lips. “Uh, the fact that one of Gretchen and Homulilly’s old buddies just so happen to show up right on their graduation day and not only knows most of our old names, but major details about our pasts as well? Because that’s pretty damn strange.”

“I mean besides the obvious.”

After mentally sifting through just about every possible answer to that question, Charlotte shrugged. There was so much strangeness going on that she didn’t even know which one to pick first. “Okay. Shoot.”

“It’s that…it’s despite the fact that I am still technically dead, I’m the one that feels haunted. I mean, that’s strange, right? According to every objective scale, I am a ghost.” Candeloro laid the end of a ribbon against the glass. “But I can’t shake this feeling that the dead are watching me. Calling out to me. Isn’t that weird?”

Charlotte pursed her lips as she thought on that. “Nah,” she said after a bit. She shook her head. “It’s not weird at all. I mean, if you think about it, you’re not the dead one.”

Candeloro glanced at her from over her shoulder, her face troubled. “How do you figure?”

“It’s just something I read in a book once. You can’t be dead in your own world. Every world has its own version of alive, and when you stop being alive in that world, you go to wherever you’re supposed to be next, right? So if this world was made specifically for people like us, then according to the law of the land, we’re the alive ones. But our past selves?” Charlotte shrugged. “Well, they up and died in that other world. So they’re dead and we’re not. What you’re feeling is perfectly logical.”

She actually got a small laugh from her wife for that. “Oh, good Lord,” Candeloro said with a roll of her eyes. She left the window to finally head over to the bed. “Leave it to you to try to take apart an existential crisis with literal terminology.”

“Yeah, that’s me. ‘Charlotte Walpurgis destroys identity angst with facts and logic!’”

Candeloro made a face. “Is that from something? Because it sounds insufferable!”

“Ah, I got it from this anti-witch idiot’s channel on GalacWork. Most of her holos have stupid titles like that. On the one hand, they really are as stupid as they sound. On the other…comedy. Gold.”

Candeloro shot her a very familiar look.

“Yeah, I guess now’s not the time,” Charlotte sighed. She held the bedcovers open, letting Candeloro slide in. “Sorry.”

Candeloro laid her head back into the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “Do you remember back at the FIB, how we’d sit around talking about what kind of people we might have used to be, making up lives for our past selves, that sort of thing?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Remember how I told you that I would have given anything to know my story? To know what happened to me, what that car and all those tea pots were all about?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, now I do know! About the car at least. And I can find out almost everything I ever wanted to know! I can ask you her name right now and I’ll find out.”

Charlotte pressed herself close to Candeloro, nestling her chin on Candeloro’s shoulder and wrapping her arms around her torso. “But…you don’t want it anymore?”

“No,” Candeloro said after a pause. “No, I do not. In fact, I kind of wish that I didn’t learn what I do know. It feels like everything I learn wakes her up a little bit more, and if I keep going she’ll…” Candeloro shivered.

Charlotte’s brow furrowed. “She’s dead, Candy.”

“I know. But…”

“She’s dead. Her story’s over. And everything that’s left of her is living a perfectly happy life in you. And if you ask me, she probably prefers it that way.” Charlotte slipped an arm behind Candeloro’s head and gently turned her face toward her. “So stop worrying about something that’s not going to happen. Worst that could happen is that maybe we’ll have to go into therapy for a bit if spiritual dissonance starts to happen. And that happens all the time. Trust me, you have nothing to worry about.”

…

Now…

“So what am I then?” Candeloro demanded. “Some kind of parasite?”

“No, you’re the host,” Charlotte said flatly. “I fell in love with the parasite. You know, seeing how I’m one myself. Then you exterminated her. Took your body back, took your name back, took back everything. Well, fine. It was yours to begin with. And if the others are so willing to just let you slip in and replace her, then that’s on them. But I don’t have to be a part of it.”

Candeloro slowly breathed in and out. “Charlotte, that might the single ugliest thing I have ever heard you say.”

“I tell it like it is. And you’ll notice that I’ve done most of the talking here. Weren’t you supposed to try to convince that I’m wrong, that you really are still Candeloro, just with some kind of expansion pack or something? Some kind of upgrade? Candeloro+ or something? Candeloro MK II? Candelmami? Mamiloro?”

“Stop it!” Candeloro cried. “Stop it right now! This is tearing me up enough as it is, and you’re making jokes?”

“Then get on with it already!” Charlotte said with an impatient roll of her wrist. “Convince me!”

At that moment, a trio of girls appeared around the corner, oohing and aweing over the flowers. Candeloro and Charlotte froze in place and then tried to look inconspicuous. If the trio had noticed the argument taking place, they made no sign as they walked right past them and headed up a nearby stairway to the upper level.

Once they were out of sight, Charlotte sighed and said, “Well? Go ahead.”

Candeloro opened her mouth…and then closed it again. She looked down at the ground, tears prickling her eyes.

Charlotte tilted her head to one side. “Well?”

“That…That’s just it,” Candeloro said, her voice shaking. “As terrible as it is, I’m not sure you’re wrong.”

…

“Well?” Oktavia demanded. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, because I can’t see them!” Ophelia snapped back. “They’re way deep in the maze!”

“Then follow them!”

“No, you pushy voyeur!” Ophelia said down with her legs crossed Indian-style and her arms folded. “I’m going to sit here and wait until one of them comes out! That’s it! Go read a book or compose a diss-track if you’re so bored!”

…

“Okay,” Charlotte said after the silence between them had gone on long enough. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

Candeloro tried to wipe her eyes with her fingers but found them too stiff and too shaky to really do the job without potentially jabbing herself in the eye, so she used her wrist instead. “Right after…right after the change, the whole, um, Candeloro and Mami dichotomy was…pretty stable, I guess. I still had my sense of self, I still had my old impulses and reflexes and tics, I just had this part of me opened up. A-And while all those memories were…painful, I figured I would get used to them in time. And while we were on the Aurora Borealis I had too much on my mind to really give much thought to sorting that out-”

“You mean me,” Charlotte said.

Candeloro sighed. “Yes, you. Being rejected by my wife was a little distracting, yes.”

“Fair enough.”

“Besides, the memories were all fresh then and hitting me all at once. I thought that once I was home, once I was someplace familiar, things might…settle into place.”

Charlotte frowned. “I’m guessing that they didn’t?”

Candeloro shook her head. “That, or they decided to settle in the worst way possible.”

…

Then…

“Only thing is, he won’t tell us the last part! How do you make it? I have to know!”

Despite having spent most of the day walking around in a silent, robotic trance, that actually managed to pull Candeloro out of her funk, at least enough to feel a small trickle of amusement. The recipe that the marshal was referring to actually was not one of her own, or Charlotte’s. Rather, it had been a fairly standard recipe that Ophelia had read out loud to Cheese from a cookbook in a vain attempt to break him of his swearing habit. The marshals could probably just search up the name of the cookbook and get the rest without trouble.

Then Cheese, who had been happily walking back and forth across Ophelia’s shoulders as she talked to the marshal, suddenly took notice of Candeloro.

Candeloro was admittedly not all that close to the family bird, at least not as much as the others. Oh sure, they liked each other well enough, and she did her part to help take care of him, but he always seemed to prefer the company of the two other couples than to her and Charlotte, which had been fine with her. He was great fun to have around, but he tended to be pretty needy when it came to attention, and he had almost developed a bad habit of chewing on her ribbons until they managed to break him of it.

Still, they did get along just fine, and she was honestly glad that he was okay. However, as soon as he saw her, he suddenly straightened up, all of his feather flaring up. Then he started flapping his wings in agitation, squawking loudly.

“Cheese! Hey! Knock it off, you asshole!” Ophelia shielded the back of her neck with one hand while shoving the other arm against Cheese’s legs to get him to step on so she could get him away from the back of her head. “Jesus, what has gotten into you?”

Candeloro said nothing. She was wearing a pretty bulky hooded jacket and had her hands nestled in the front pocket, so if anyone who knew her saw her they wouldn’t notice that something was amiss without taking a really good look.

But still, Cheese somehow knew that something was off.

“Wonder what got into him?” said one of the marshals, who had been in the process of leaving when the bird’s fit had brought her to a stop.

“He’s…moody,” Homulilly told her. “Sometimes he just throws temper tantrums for no reason. I’m surprised he didn’t act out when he was staying with you girls.”

“Well, he was kind of a handful, but I thought he’d calm down once you all got back.” The marshal shrugged. “Animals. Who can tell, eh?”

Candeloro glanced at her and shrugged.

Then she did a double-take.

The marshal was a witch. Physically, she looked to be a short, petite girl with dark skin and straight black hair. A jagged blue line divided her face in half, starting on her forehead over her right eyebrow to zigzag down between her eyes, over about two-thirds of her nose, past her mouth, and down her chin to disappear into the collar of her uniform. Everything on the left side looked perfectly normal, but the entire right looked like it had been carved from an opal. The color seemed to change as she moved, sometimes being marble-white, then sea blue, then pale green, then blood red. The part of her lips on the shimmering side also changed color, but to whatever the opposite her skin happened to be at the time. One dark eye looked perfectly normal, while the other was jet black with a bright golden iris.

Although she knew what she would find and dreaded it, Candeloro’s eyes went down toward the marshal’s arms. Most of them were covered with the thick brown sleeves of her uniform, but she could still see her hands.

They were blocky and made of yellow-painted steel, with gleaming pistons running down her arms into her wrist and across each finger and cables stretching from jutting poles, like a construction crane arm.

All in all, the girl’s witch remnants were striking, but hardly noteworthy. Candeloro encountered people just as strange every day, and not too long ago would have been thought of as just as odd. But seeing the girl had jogged something inside her, something from a long time…

…the massive crane-arm slammed into the steel girders that Mami had been standing upon. Had she not leapt off when she had, she would have been crushed into a pasty smear.

Still, she had dodged just in time. Unfortunately, she had been rather high up at the time, and didn’t have destination in mind when she had jumped; she had just been trying to get away from the witch’s attack.

And once she was in the air, there was nowhere to go but down.

Mami had been nine stories up the skeletal network of catwalks and girders, a little more than halfway to the witch’s head. And with the structure lacking walls, ceilings, or more importantly floors she found her trajectory headed somewhere hard, painful, and quite possibly lethal.

Arms and legs flailing at nothing, she started to fall.

“KYYYYUUUUUUBEEEEYYYYYY!” she screamed as the girder and pipes whooshed past her and the concrete floor rushed up to meet her.

“Your ribbons!” Kyubey called to her, speaking in her head like he always did. “Use them to break your fall! Hurry!”

Her ribbons?

Oh, right. She had those now.

Mami thrust a hand out. In response, a yellow ribbons materialized, one end clutched in her hand and the other wrapped around a girder. With a painful jerk her trajectory was suddenly redirected as she stopped falling and started to swing out.

Too late she realized that swinging outward when surrounded by so many steel beams was just as potentially lethal as falling straight down.

Her ribbon hit one such beam and she was sent hurtling. In desperation she created another and managed to pull herself out of the way before smacking headlong into a girder.

Then one of the witch’s crane-arms came down, hitting where the ribbon was connected and severing it.

Mami was again tumbling through the air, but this time had half-a-second more to react. She thrust her hands right in front of her, created a spiral of ribbons between her and the beam she was about to fly into. They absorbed her momentum, slowing her down. Then, before she could be hit again, she thrust another ribbon at a nearby girder and launched herself through an opening in the beams, sending her safely outside of the witch’s body.

Her landing was still rough, but not nearly as painful as it would have been otherwise. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled under her, and she fell fully onto her back as the world spun around her.

Adrenaline was still coursing through her veins, and her heartbeat was pounding away in her ears. This was only the third witch she had fought, and it was easily the craziest. The other two hadn’t come nearly as close to getting her as this one had, nor had she had any kind of escape quite so…thrilling.

“Uh, hey!” the marshal said, suddenly breaking Mami from her trance.

Mami stared back at her. “Huh?”

“I asked you what was wrong. You just…started staring at me. Are you all right?”

Mami didn’t answer. She just stared.

“I said, are you all right?”

A fluffy white blur was bounding toward her. “Mami! Are you all right?”

Mami shook her head to get everything to stop spinning. Then she looked up.

Things were still…weird. The “sky,” if it could be called that, was in actuality a canopy made up of blue balloons painted with white clouds that clustered tightly together. The “sun” was a massive yellow spotlight that was pressed through the balloon, which sent a single glaring beam straight down at the witch, which was a bit on the…large side.

Most of the witch looked like the steel gridwork of a skyscraper still under construction: fourteen stories of girders, beams, and catwalks. Twelve construction cranes protruded from its edges, four on each edge, which were surprisingly fast, considering their size. And suspended on a crisscross of cables top and center was a huge dome-shaped magnet, such as the kind used in junkyards.

Stuck onto the magnet was a metal ring, which in turn suspended a glass bowl the size of a house, full of some kind of clear liquid. And floating in that liquid was the witch’s head.

Half of it looked like a child’s doll, with dark plastic skin, dark straight hair, and a dark plastic eye that swiveled crazily in its socket. But the other, divided from the plastic side with a jagged line, gleamed like mother-of-pearl, its colors constantly changing. Its mouth was open, and it seemed to be reciting an endless deluge of mathematical equations in a disconcerting monotone voice, which were broadcasted throughout its labyrinth courtesy of the megaphones stuck through its body’s framework.

Mami leapt to her feet. “I’m fine,” she said as she started running toward the witch again. Climbing its body so as to get a clear shot at the head hadn’t worked, but she was already formulating another plan. “Kyubey, you said that the weapons conjured up by my ribbons are limited only by my own understanding of those weapons internal workings, right?”

“Correct,” Kyubey said as he bounded after her. “That is why you have had so much success with muskets. Their mechanisms are simple and therefore easy to replicate.”

Mami nodded. She deftly dodged two strikes from the cranes as they tried to impale her and darted into the gridwork. “Okay. But is there anything that says I can’t make something similar to the muskets, only…larger?”

“Nothing at all. Why?”

This time, instead of heading upward, Mami went inward, heading to the center of the structure until she was directly beneath the suspended bowl that held the witch’s head. There were still plenty of beams crisscrossing between her and it, hence her previous attempt to get closer.

But even if she had gotten close enough to get a clear shot, she doubted that she would be able to do much damage. She didn’t know how much in common with real steel its body had, but it was probably close enough to blunt her bullets, magic though they were.

“Because sometimes, you don’t need to get closer,” Mami said as she backed up until she found a point of trajectory that was relatively clear of steel beams. Then she held out a hand. “Sometimes you need to get bigger.”

As was the case whenever she summoned up her muskets, her ribbons twisted around each other, only this time there were many, many times more of them, and they took on a much, much larger shape. When the thing solidified, she was holding into the grips of a cannon that any battleship would be proud to display on its prow.

Mami took aim. Then she fired.

Her gleaming, golden cannonball shot straight and true. What steel beams and cables that did get in the way were shredded in its wake without stopping its momentum. It struck the side of the glass bowl, covering it with cracks and sending the magnet swinging.

The cables holding the magnet snapped, and the whole thing fell: magnet, bowl, head, and all. It struck several of the beams along the way, each one shattering or denting it a little more. Mami rushed out of the way to avoid getting hit by the glass shards.

The witch’s head wasn’t nearly so lucky. By the time it hit the ground, it was already a cracked and broken mess, one that fell to pieces upon impact.

Then, just as the other two witch labyrinths had, this one shimmered and fell apart, and Mami found herself standing next to the steel factory in the city’s industrial zone where she had tracked the witch.

And sure enough, at her feet was a jet-black grief seed.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Mami knelt down and picked it up. Using that giant cannon took considerably more magic than her muskets, so this would be of great help. Still, the cannon made for a great finishing move. She should probably keep using it. Though she probably ought to come up with a cool name for it though. Something like that was too good to go unnamed.

“Uh, hello? What’s up? You’re kind of freaking me out.”

Ursula the Construction Witch’s patchwork brow furrowed in concern. She waved her mechanical crane hands in front of Mami’s face. “Hellllloooooo?”

Mami jerked abruptly out of her stupor. “I, uh, s-s-sorry…”

Then Homura took her by the arm. “I’m sorry, she’s been feeling a little out of sorts. She got real seasick on the way back and spent the whole trip throwing up, so she’s still a little woozy.”

Ursula took a reflexive step back. “Ah. Say no more. Hope you feel better.”

“Right!” Homura started to move Mami toward the front door. “So let’s just get her inside so she can get her inside and-”

“Wait, hold on.” Ursula suddenly moved herself in front of Mami. She leaned for a closer look. “Have we…met? Because I am getting the weirdest sense of déjà vu right about now.”

Before either Mami or Homura could respond, the marshal that had met them at the door called out, “Sully, seriously? Of course she does! Their photos are all over the house!”

“Nah, that’s not it. I swear we’ve met…”

Mami’s tongue felt like it was glued to the top of her mouth.

Then Ursula shrugged. “Oh well, probably just ran into you…somewhere. Sorry about being weird.”

“No problem!” Homura said with a nervous laugh. She started leading Mami away again. “Um, thank you for looking after the house! Owe you one!”

The others quickly fell into place around them and moved Mami fully inside the house. Once she was inside, the spell broke, and she start trembling.

No, not Mami, she thought. That’s not my name anymore. I am Candeloro. She is Homulilly, that is Ophelia, and Oktavia, and Gretchen. Get a grip. Just because you killed that witch years ago is no reason to…”

“Okay, what just happened?” Ophelia said. “You all right?”

Swallowing, Mami managed a shaky nod. “I am. Sorry.”

“You sure?” Ophelia said, not looking in the slightest bit convinced. “Because-”

“Just a weird. I’m fine. Really.”

But she wasn’t. She was very far from being fine.

…

Now…

“Okay,” Charlotte said. “You’re telling me that seeing this girl not only triggered flashbacks to when you killed her, but it also triggered a full-on identity crisis?”

Candeloro sighed. “Yes, Charlotte. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Ah.” Charlotte’s hand fidgeted, the fingers tapping out an anxious rhythm against her thigh. “That…Wait, just seeing her face kicked this off, but hanging out with the others didn’t? I mean, you knew them when you were all alive.”

Candeloro fell silent.

“What?”

Candeloro slowly breathed in the humid, earthy air. “That’s just it. Once that one happened, the others did so as well.”

…

Then…

“I’ll…I’m just going to go take a nap,” Candeloro said as she wearily made for the stairs.

“Anything I can get you?” Ophelia called after her.

Though she was grateful for the offer, Candeloro just shook her head. After her little episode, all she wanted was sleep. She started up the stairs, one hand laid flat on the bannister. She reflexively tried to wrap her whole hand around it before remembering that she didn’t have that level of flexibility anymore, so she settled for just stiffly curling her fingers around it.

As she walked upward, she heard Ophelia say to Homulilly and Gretchen, “Um, let me know if anything in your room is out of place, I guess. I’m going to go check on the garage.”

Candeloro paused halfway up. She glanced down to watch Ophelia walk into the kitchen.

Ophelia, Witch of Flames. Ophelia, whose lifestyle was as eccentric as her choice of dress. Ophelia, diligent engineer and accomplished dancer, who paradoxically balanced a juvenile sense of humor with a strong sense of personal responsibility, whose attitude was so childish in some ways while being the most grown-up of them in others. Ophelia, to whom Candeloro had lost her virginity during a very poor string of bad decisions but still remained one of her closest friends years later.

But that wasn’t all she was.

Candeloro started up the stairs again. She tried not to look at the framed pictures that hung on the wall to her left, but one did give her pause.

It was all of them back during their time in the FIB, long before any of them had really figured out who they were. That had been a very chaotic time for all of them. Everything had been so new and fascinating, but also kind of scary, full of new surprises and strange oddities.

Everyone looked pretty much the same as they did now, thanks to the benefits of never aging. And yet they all looked so different, mainly due to their evolving tastes in fashion. Candeloro herself had on a pair of black shorts and a midriff-revealing top that she was kind of embarrassed about now. She was of course comfortable with her own sexuality, but it had been a long time since she had felt any need to flaunt it. Her final two years there had been kind of a wild time.

Of all of them, Charlotte had probably changed the most. She had really been into some…very interesting kind of music back then, and was wearing a leather jacket with several band patches sewn on that was probably still at the back of their closet, a pair of faded jeans with a studded belt, and a shirt bearing the main character of a cartoon famed for its racy humor. Her hair was also much different, in that it had been gelled up into some kind of hawk. Also, she had on way more makeup back then, especially around the eyes, and had a lip ring. Candeloro had actually liked that lip ring, though Charlotte had stopped wearing it when it had accidentally gotten caught on Candeloro’s lip when they had made out just a little too enthusiastically.

As for Oktavia, well, she hadn’t gotten her cap then, but she looked more-or-less the same. For some reason she had never deviated from the short, boyish haircut she had shown up with. Candeloro supposed that having short hair made all her time in the ocean easier. At any rate, here she was just a pair of aviator sunglasses and shirt decorated with colorful seahorses.

As for Ophelia, this had been long before she had settled into what would become her trademark style of dress. Instead, she was wearing a simple black tee-shirt, a pair of cut-off shorts, a dark blue denim jacket, a pair of calf-high boots, and black baseball cap bearing the logo of a wrestler she had been a fan of. She was standing with one foot resting on the edge of a low wall, one hand on her hip, and the other touching the brim of her hat as she half-grinned at the camera, her fang showing prominently.

Candeloro stared at her in particular. In her mind, the denim jacket morphed into a green hoodie, and the cap was replaced by a long, flowing scarlet ponytail tied back with a black ribbon.

I’m Kyoko Sakura. Thanks. If hadn’t come by I would have bit it.

Mami reached up and gently pressed her fingertips to the image of the hat, so that Kyoko’s face stood in stark relief.

You saved me. Wow. I never knew there was such an amazing magical girl here in Mitakihara.

Her eye twitched, and she hastily moved the rest of the way up the stairs.

Unfortunately it was too late. Now that her mind had focused on that particular set of memories, they wouldn’t shut up.

So long as we’re talking about selfishness, I wanted to ask you: may I please become Mami-san’s student?

Mami quickened her gait, as if moving faster would allow her to outrun the downpour of memories that were threatening to bury her.

If that’s the case, I’ll be fine then. Ever since I was small, I watched my father and thought about how I wanted to bring happiness to everyone. I guess my wish to make my father happy was the first step towards making that a reality. To protect the happiness of everyone, that’s my wish.

Her hand didn’t tremble in the slightest as she tore the door to her (and Charlotte’s) room open and bolted inside. She slammed it shut and collapsed with her back to the door.

They’re gone. It was my wish. I just wanted them to have happiness, but it broke him. He found out what I did and it broke him!

Her legs buckled out from under her, and she slid down to the floor, her fingertips digging into her temple and forehead.

Huh? What the hell do you know? There’s a difference between losing your family in an accident and losing your family because it’s your own damn fault! It all happened because of my magic! So you know what? I’m never going to use my magic for anyone else’s sake again! I’ve decided that all this power is only for me to use, for my sake.

Mami half-crawled, half-staggered her way over to her bed. She didn’t bother to undress before she hauled herself onto her side.

I’ve had it with you! Our partnership is now officially done!

Her hand instinctively reached out for Charlotte’s, but she then remembered that Charlotte was gone.

Being lonely is a hell of a lot better than putting up with you all the time!

Instead, she seized up Charlotte’s pillow and pressed it down over her head, but nothing would drown out the angry shouting echoing in her head, or the sound of fists connecting with flesh.

Now take that!

And that!

And that!

…

Now…

“Ah,” Charlotte said. “Well. Um, I don’t really know what to say to that.”

“Her father had just murdered her mother and sister before hanging himself because he found out about her contract,” Candeloro said flatly. “She was not exactly in a good place at the time.”

“No kidding. Was she the only one?”

Candeloro sighed. “No. Not by a long shot. It just kept happening.”

…

Then…

“Well, hey,” Oktavia said. “Look who’s up. How you feeling?”

Candeloro walked out into the backyard. There, Oktavia was lounging in one of the lawnchairs, reading a book. “Better,” she said. “A lot better.” She plopped down in the chair next to Oktavia.

“Well, sometimes all you need is a really good night’s sleep,” Oktavia said. “God knows, none of us were sleeping well on the boat.”

That much was for certain. “Can’t argue with that,” Candeloro said. “Um, hey, Oktavia. I don’t suppose you guys have heard anything about…?”

Her question trailed off, but Oktavia obviously knew what she was talking about. Grimacing, she shook her head. “No, sorry. Still no word from her.”

“Oh.”

“But don’t sweat it! You know Charlotte, sometimes she gets all moody and stubborn! Once she’s come to her senses she’ll come right back, probably on hands and knees just begging you to take her back!”

“There’s an interesting image,” Candeloro said dryly.

“Eh, it’s what I do,” Oktavia said with a shrug. “Besides, you know how love is. It-”

“-sucks!”

“Huh?” Candeloro said.

“I said love’s complicated, you know?”

“Really? I thought you just said it sucks.”

Oktavia shot her an odd look. “Nooooo. It’s messy sometimes, but-”

“-I can’t believe she would do this to me! Now! I thought we were friends!”

“Well, sometimes even the best of friends don’t always see the whole picture,” Mami said. “She probably thinks that she’s doing you a favor.”

Sayaka’s face twisted up in confusion. “Candy, what the hell are you talking about? Why would Charlotte be thinking that she’s doing me a favor?”

“But you know what the worst if it is? Maybe she’s right. Because there was a moment where…where I regretted saving her from that witch! Isn’t that awful? How could he love someone who thinks like that!”

“Don’t think like that!” Mami cried. “It’s not your fault. It’s not-”

Then she blinked.

Wait.

What?

Sayaka (no, no, no, no, no! Not Sayaka! Her name was…was…was Oktavia now!) was staring at her in bewilderment. “Er, Candy? Uh, sorry, I know you’re going through a hard time right now, but you are making exactly zero sense. The hell?”

Mami shook her head. “I…I’m sorry. I just had a really weird episode.”

“I can tell,” Saya…Oktavia said. “Um, do you want me to get Ophelia or something?”

“No,” Mami said as she hastily stood up. “No, I just…need to clear my…”

Then she quickly moved back into the house, all the while echoes continued to bounce around in her head.

Some hero! How could I think to be worth anything if I have that in me! How could I ever think I could be like you!

…

Now…

“And happening.”

…

Then…

Candeloro reached for the bathroom door. Before she could touch it, the door opened, and Gretchen stepped out.

The younger girl was obviously just freshly showered and changed, if her still-damp hair was any indication. “Oh!” she said, seeing Candeloro. “Sorry, let me get out of your way.”

“Not at all,” Candeloro said, moving aside so Gretchen could scuttle past. She was about to enter the bathroom herself when she heard Gretchen clear her throat.

“Um, Candeloro?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you…are you doing okay?”

Candeloro swallowed. “Well, as well as can be expected, given the circumstances. But I am fine, thank you.”

“Okay. It’s just that Oktavia said you, uh, had kind of a weird…”

“Yes. I had a strange flashback. Just…still need to sort these new memories out, I guess.”

“Okay, because if you ever-”

“I’m fine,” Candeloro said, and then she winced. That had come out a lot more harshly than she had wanted.

“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Sorry.”

“It’s-”

But Gretchen had already scurried off to her and Homulilly’s room.

Sighing, Candeloro went inside and closed and locked the door. She looked at herself in the mirror.

The face of Candeloro stared back at her.

She looked like a horror. Her eyes were sunken, her golden hair a frightful mess. And after snapping at Gretchen, she felt pretty horrible too.

Oh, Gretchen, Gretchen, Gretchen. The sweetest girl Candeloro had ever met. Even as she had grown older she had never lost her kind heart.

Of course, it had come with the territory. She had always been kind to a fault, selfless and caring and…

No!

No, she couldn’t go down that path again! She couldn’t let those memories creep up, memories like-

I’m sorry for crying.

No! Not again!

Don’t be. It’s a scary thing, the first time you get hurt. Now hold still. Magic might speed up the healing process, but we still need to disinfect the wound. This’ll sting.

Stop it! Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!

I just wish I could be as brave and strong as you. Or Kyoko-chan! Or even Sayaka-chan! I just feel like I drag you all down sometimes.

Candeloro pounded her fists against her head. It did no good.

Madoka, don’t think like that. You have by far one of the kindest hearts I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And I want you to stay like that. That is your strength.

Please, make it stop!

We’re in a fight against monsters, against curses born from the worst kinds of hearts. We need someone like you. So don’t ever change who you are.

Who you are.

Change.

Change…into a…

Mami looked back up at the mirror. Her face was no longer a mess, her hair no longer disheveled. Rather, she was properly made up, and her hair neatly tied up in a pair of drill-tails on either side of her head.

She jerked back in surprise and looked down.

When she had entered the bathroom, she had been wearing a pair of jeans and blue blouse. But now she was wearing her Puella Magi uniform.

Mami pinched the hem of her skirt with shaking fingers. Then she lifted her gloved hands and squeezed them. When had that change happened? She didn’t recall wanting to change into her uniform, and yet here it was.

She closed her eyes and gripped her hands into fists at her side.

Go away, go away, go away, go away!

When she opened her eyes again, her old clothes were back, and her face was a proper disaster again.

But so was the rest of her.

She sat heavily down on the toilet lid, her face buried in her unwanted hands.

“I’m Candeloro,” she whispered. “I’m Candeloro! The Ribbon Witch! I don’t want to be Mami, I don’t want to be Mami, I don’t want to be Mami…”

…

Now…

“And happening!”

…

Then…

To her complete lack of surprise and no small amount of irritation, Candeloro couldn’t sleep.

She tossed. She turned. She opened the window and counted backwards from a hundred. Nothing worked.

Tomorrow she was going to meet face-to-face with Charlotte. Tomorrow she might end up losing her wife forever. How the hell could her mind not obsess over that?

Finally she got up with a growl and left her room.

It was a little past two in the morning and the house was dark. She didn’t know if anyone else was asleep though. Ophelia and Oktavia were probably still up, playing some video game or watching a movie.

Even so, Candeloro kept her steps light as she tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen.

To her surprise, there was a light coming from the kitchen. Specifically, the refrigerator light. Someone had it open and was rummaging around inside.

The door closed with a click, and a dark-haired silhouette straightened up and turned around.

“Oh!” Homulilly said, jerking up. The cup of water she had in her hands slipped from her grasp.

She tried to grab it, but Candeloro already had it covered. A ribbon shot out from her hand to lasso the cup and jerk it back toward her into her palm with barely any spilt.

“Here,” Candeloro said, handing her the cup. “Sorry for scaring you.”

“It’s…okay,” Homulilly said. She tilted her head to one side. Though the lights were out, Candeloro knew the curious look she was wearing. “So, uh, the ribbon-whip thing. That’s…”

“My Puella Magi power, yes,” Candeloro said.

“I thought you had guns.”

“It’s…a little hard to explain,” Candeloro said wearily. She quickly changed the subject. “You can’t sleep either?”

“Not really,” Homulilly admitted. “I’m not surprised that you can’t.”

“Well, it’s not something you can face without having some kind of nervous breakdown,” Candeloro said as she went over to the fridge to remove a pitcher of cranberry juice.

“I bet. Mind if I turn on the light?”

“Sure.”

The kitchen light stung Candeloro’s eyes a bit. She blinked a bit and shook her head.

Homulilly was already sitting at the table, her cup nestled in her hands. “Just juice, huh?”

“Just juice,” Candeloro confirmed as she poured herself a cup. “After what happened last time, I’m staying well away from alcohol.”

“Hmmm. But, uh, you still kind of…”

“More than you can believe,” Candeloro sighed. She sat down across from Homulilly. “Thank you again, by the way. For what you did.”

“Of course. I just hope it was worth it.”

Candeloro nodded. “Me too. Um, hey, Homulilly. I hope I’m not prying, but may I ask you a question?”

Homulilly frowned. “Um, sure?”

“Say you were in Charlotte’s position, and Gretchen had turned back into Madoka Kaname. What would…how would you react?”

Homulilly sighed. “Oh, I’ve been asking myself that question longer than Hitomi Shizuki’s been around.”

“Oh. Um, and?”

Homulilly’s skeletal finger tapped against the side of her glass. “Gretchen is the most important person in the world to me,” she said softly. “If she…became her old self, and didn’t remember me anymore, or at least only remembered Homura Akemi, it would…it would hurt a lot.”

“Would you leave?”

“No,” Homulilly said after a pause. “Because…it would still be her, right? How could I leave her? And if she still…still wanted me around, even if it was just as a friend, then that would…” She swallowed. “That would be enough.”

Candeloro sighed and took a small sip. “Yes, you always were very-”

She blinked.

“Very…what?”

We need to talk.

Candeloro shook her head. “Uh, sorry, I just-”

What about, Akemi-san?

Oh no.

You put Madoka in danger. Your plan failed, and she was hurt.

“Candeloro?” Homura said in puzzlement. “Are you all right?

This is unacceptable. You are our leader. Therefore, Madoka’s safety is your responsibility as much as it is mine.

Mami grabbed her head. Not again. Not again!

Akemi-san, it was an accident! I did everything I could to look after her, but fighting witches is inherently dangerous! You can’t prepare for all-

Enough.

“Should I call for help?” Homura asked, rising. “Let me get Ophelia-”

“No!” Mami said hastily. “I’m-”

No life matters more to me than Madoka’s. I helped you convince Sayaka Miki to make a contract for Madoka’s protection. I brought back Kyoko Sakura for Madoka’s protection. If you cannot ensure her safety despite having all that at your disposal, then perhaps a change of leadership is needed.

“Uh,” Mami stood up, and did so too quickly. Her elbow knocked over her glass of juice, spilling it across the table.

“Oh, damn! Shit!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Homura quickly grabbed a handful of paper towels and began mopping up the spilled juice.

“I should-”

“No, I got it,” Homura said. “Look, you’re in a bad place. Let me help, okay?”

Mami nodded numbly. “Okay. I’d…better go to bed, before I knock over something else.”

“Okay. And, uh, Candeloro?”

“What?”

Homura smiled at her. “It’ll be okay. You got-”

-no right to be acting so reckless. So, keep that in mind.

But-

Keep it in mind, Mami Tomoe. Speak to no one of our conversation, do your job and keep Madoka Kaname safe, and we shall have no problems.

“-this, okay?”

Mami numbly nodded. Then she turned and practically fled back up the stairs.

Remember my warning, Mami Tomoe.

Remember my warning.

…

Now…

“Holy shit,” Charlotte said, staring.

“I know,” Candeloro groaned. “It just…I never know when it’ll happen next, it just happens! And the more time I spend around them, the more it happens!”

“Yeah, I bet. Jesus.” Then Charlotte’s brow furrowed. “Still, this just proves my point! We were better off without any of that! We didn’t need to learn our names or our histories or any of that! We should have just said ‘no’ and left Hitomi alone!”

“I know that, Charlotte! But we didn’t! We took that risk, we opened that box, and now we have to deal with the consequences.” Candeloro looked down at her shaking hands. “And they scare me. I don’t want these memories. I don’t want this name. I don’t want to feel like who I am is just…I feel like my entire sense of self is like water in a shallow glass bowl sitting on the tip of a pin, and the slightest push can cause it to tip over and pour me out! I thought I could just g-get used to having this part of me opened up, but it’s more than just remembering everything I used to be. Because whenever these memories hit, then…I don’t know, but my sense of self starts…flowing. I feel less like Candeloro and more like Mami, and it takes longer and longer to get it under control!”

Now Charlotte’s hands started to shake as well. “So you’re telling me that the Mami half is slowly taking over, and when it does there’ll be nothing of Candeloro left?”

“I don’t know! That’s the point, I don’t know how this works, I don’t know what’s happening to me, I don’t know how it’s happening, I don’t know where Mami ends and Candeloro begins or if there even is a divide, I don’t know anything!” Now the tears were flowing freely. “I don’t know, and it scares me, Charlotte! You talk about how much it scares you?” Mami slapped her new hands against her own chest. “What about me? It’s happening to me! And right when I need you the most, you’re just going to run off on me? How could you?”

“I…”

“We were supposed to be together forever! Together, keeping each other strong through the centuries. I love you. I love you so much that the thought of you leaving me hurts more than the storm inside my head. And I thought you loved me too! So why, Charlotte?”

“Because…” Charlotte was starting to shake with agitation. “Because…uh…”

Candeloro reached for her, but Charlotte flinched away.

“I can’t,” Charlotte said as she backed away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But I just can’t.”

“But why? I need you!”

Shaking her head, Charlotte kept back further and further away.

“Charlotte,” Candeloro pleaded. “Please. Don’t.”

“I just…” Then Charlotte turned and fled, running to disappear into the mists. Candeloro was left standing alone, arms that she had never wanted still reaching out, with her eyes wet, her throat clenched up, and her heart heavy.

…

The Rising Gardens were intended to be lost in. There were maps you could pick up that would always keep you informed of your location and marked out the quickest way out, but Charlotte had neglected to grab one. And now that she really, really wanted to leave, she found that she couldn’t.

Every turn just led to more turns, every staircase seemed to just plunge her deeper into the woman-made jungle. It was like being lost in a real jungle, one just as thick and dark.

Come on, come on, she thought as she ran. Where’s the way out?

“Come on, come on!” she said out loud. “It has to be around here-”

Then she turned a corner and came to a sudden stop.

She was staring at Candeloro’s (no! Mami Tomoe’s!) back. Somehow, she had ended up just coming back around again.

Sensing her, Mami Tomoe turned around. Her golden eyes were wet and bloodshot from crying, and her face was scrunched up with pure misery.

Mami Tomoe saw her, and her eyes widened. With hope.

Before she could speak, Charlotte spun on her heel and headed back the way she came.

There had to be a way out! The Rising Gardens had exits on every level! So where were they? Where was the damned-

The next thing she knew, Charlotte was bursting into sunlight.

She was standing on the second level, staring out at Freehaven. Though the sun overhead was nice and warm, she was still shivering.

Charlotte started running again. She hopped off the gardens entirely and ran for the facility exit. As she did so, she had her new phone out, fingers hastily calling for a zipper.

…

“Hey, wait a second!” Ophelia yelped as she leapt to her feet.

“Finally!” Oktavia said. “What’s going on?”

“Charlotte just ran out of the garden!”

“Alone?!”

“Yes, alone! And she looks kind of terrified!”

“Huh? What, did Candeloro summon up those silver guns of hers and try to take her head off?”

“Uh, probably not? Can’t blame her if she tried though!”

Then Charlotte leapt to the street and kept running. Ophelia’s eyes narrowed.

“Oh, hell no,” she growled.

“You’re going after her!” Gretchen’s voice cheered.

“Damn straight. Candy shot her shot, now it’s my turn!”

Ophelia dove right off the roof she was standing on. She hit the street in a parkour roll and came up running.

Charlotte was fast. Her slender body and long legs were well-suited for speed. But she didn’t do a tenth of the cardiovascular exercises that Ophelia did daily. Ophelia’s toned legs became a blur as she took off like a rocket, weaving between what people she could and leaping fully over those that she couldn’t.

Unfortunately, Charlotte still had a considerable lead on her. And overhead, Ophelia could see the distinctive silver glint of a descending zipper.

Hell no!

“Hey!” she called as she shot toward the fleeing Charlotte like a bolt of lightning. “Stop!”

If Charlotte could hear her she didn’t make any indication. The zipper landed in a circular designated pick-up point and opened up.

Zippers were essentially egg-shaped shells that surrounded a ring of four padded seats, with a large luggage space on the bottom. But only Charlotte was in need of one, so only one side opened up. Charlotte zeroed in on it and increased her speed.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Ophelia snarled. She increased her speed…

…only to be brought to screeching halt when an entire bike team came riding right across her path. And wouldn’t you know it, there was a bridge overhead that prevented her from leaping over them.

“Shit!” Ophelia bounded upward, hoping to clear the buildings entirely before Charlotte got in.

She managed to reach the roof in a manner of seconds, but by the time she reached a vantage point, Charlotte had already reached the zipper and was climbing inside.

“No!” Ophelia leapt onto the road again, well past the bike team, and took off sprinting. “Charlotte! Stop!”

The side of the zipper closed up.

“Wait!”

Then it shot into the sky. Ophelia reached the pick-up spot mere seconds later, just in time to see it vanish over the rooftops.

…

Charlotte collapsed into her seat a panting, shaking, and sweating mess. “Go!” she shouted. The door closed shut, and the zipper launched into the air.

Oh God, she had not expected that. Having Mami Tomoe try to argue with her that she was still Candeloro? Yes. Yes, that had very much been expected and prepared for. But for her to say that she was still Candeloro, but the Mami Tomoe part was slowly taking over and for her to beg for Charlotte to stay and help her fight it off? That possibility hadn’t exactly occurred to her.

Still trembling, Charlotte leaned back…only to scowl. She quickly slipped her backpack off her shoulders and tossed it into the seat next to her before finally slumping back with a sigh. Why had she done that? Why had she run? That hadn’t been the thing that had stolen her love away from her and was wearing her face. That had been her love begging her not to let the thing take her away in the first place! That had been Candeloro all right. If Candeloro and Mami Tomoe were supposed to be the same soul, then Candeloro would be able to tell if it was Mami Tomoe lying. And she hadn’t been. That had been the truth.

Of course it was, said the irritated voice in her head, the one that had been yelling at her all week, the one she had been arguing with or trying to ignore. But you ran away anyway. You coward. You idiot.

“Shut up,” she muttered.

No! You know I’m right! You’re a coward and an idiot who ran out on her family and-

“I said shut up!”

“I’m sorry,” said the digitized voice of the zipper’s AI. “I didn’t quite get that. Where would you like to go?”

Charlotte sighed. She ought to have had this thing waiting with preprogrammed coordinates. “Freehaven Skyport,” she said wearily. “Terminal seven.”

“Acknowledged.” The monitor lit up with the flight route and estimated time of arrival, which was about seven minutes.

Charlotte slumped back into her seat. She blinked. And then she blinked again, slower this time. She hadn’t slept well at all the previous night for obvious reasons. Come to think of it, she hadn’t been sleeping much all week. And though she had expected to pass out on the elysian, she had thought that her nerves would have kept her awake until then. But her lack of sleep was catching up to her in a bad way. This was bad timing too. With such a short trip, nodding off now wouldn’t give her any sort of rest.

But surely it would be all right if she just closed her eyes for a bit…

…

The storyteller was confronted by the griever…

Charlotte finds herself in the inoffensive yet chillingly sterile waiting room of a hospital emergency room. She is sitting in one of the chairs, waiting for her name to be called. There are other people waiting in there with her; she can see them in her peripheral vision, can hear their muted conversations. But every time she looks up to focus on any of them in particular, she sees nothing but empty chairs.

She sits anxiously, hands clutching the sides of her seat. She can’t remember exactly why she was there, but she knows that it’s important. She is visiting someone, someone who is very ill, someone who isn’t expected to make it. She hadn’t been visiting them like she had promised, and that made her feel terrible.

“Charlotte? You can go in now.”

Charlotte sighs and stands up. She heads for the entrance to the hospital halls only to remember that she wasn’t sure of the way. Stopping by the receptionist’s desk, she turns toward the older lady that had called her name to ask her for directions.

“Excuse me, but which was to-”

Then she stops. The chair behind the desk is empty. Furthermore, all the hospital staff that she thought were working behind the counter are all gone.

Charlotte turns back toward the waiting room. As she does so, the muted babble of whispered conversations coming from the other people waiting dies off, as does the sound of the television. There is no one else there, and the television is off.

Blinking, Charlotte shakes her head and walks into the halls. As she does so, the conversations resume behind her, as does the patter of the hospital staff diligently working and the sound of the newscasters’ voices coming from the television.

As Charlotte walks through the halls, she passes many people. Doctors, nurses, security guards, midwives, patients, and other visitors, all of whom simply vanish the moment she gives them her full attention. She nods at the aging man at the security booth and stops to see if he knows the way, only to find the booth empty. She sidesteps a male nurse pushing a young woman in a wheelchair, only to see a solitary wheelchair sitting by itself by the wall. She approaches a nurse’s station with three middle-aged women chatting as they work, only to find the station unmanned. It is like she is trying to find her way through a world of ghosts. But who is the ghost? Is it the people that disappear all around her, or is she the one haunting the halls?

Finally she turns a corner and sees a recovery room down the hall with its door open. A bright line is shining out. That has to be the place.

Charlotte hurries toward the light. As she does so, the shadow people around her start to recede entirely, as does the rest of the hospital. She can feel the halls start to come apart around her while deep, loud rushing builds in her ears, like a consuming flood burst from a dam.

She hurries into the recovery room and slams the door. The rushing stops.

There are three curtain-shrouded beds in the room, two of which are open and empty. The curtain is drawn over the third bed, the one at the far end of the room. Behind it, she can see the silhouette of a young woman sitting in a chair.

Swallowing, Charlotte cautiously makes her way toward the curtain. She lays a hand on the curtain, hesitates, and then slowly pulls it open, half-expecting the woman to disappear like everyone else did.

She doesn’t.

The young woman is sitting in a blue chair next to the hospital bed, her legs crossed and hands clasped over her knee. She is wearing tight green pants and a frilly white blouse decorated with pink and blue mice. Her pink hair is done up in a pair of messy twintails, and her eyes are of the same color. Freckles dust her face, and she has a slight overbite.

It’s her. It’s clearly Charlotte. Granted, the woman’s skin is of a normal human hue rather than alabaster white, the freckles are new, their eyes are of different colors, and the other woman doesn’t have a tail, but other than that they are the same.

“So,” the other Charlotte says. “There you are. You kept me waiting.”

The spell of vague uncertainty that hung over all dreams broke then. In a rush Charlotte remembers everything. She understands what it is that is going on.

“No way,” she says. “Really?”

“Yup. Really really.”

Charlotte fumbles around until she grabs a nearby empty chair and sits down before her legs gives way beneath her. “But…I-I heard that the others, um, that the others-”

The other Charlotte crosses her legs and folds her arms over her chest. “Talked to their past selves in a dream or somesuch. Yeah, I know.”

“But…they all spiritual dissonance, right? Something that woke all that up? I never did though! So how-”

“Well, you know what they say,” the other Charlotte says with a shrug. “Sometimes you get woken up by the sound of your name, but sometimes you get dragged away by the irresistible need to slap a stupid bitch.”

“What?”

The other Charlotte stands up. She walks over to where the dumbfounded Charlotte was sitting and sticks out her hand. “Hi there. My name is Nozomi Momoe. You’re my witch, and you are also the idiot in the driver’s seat, because your stupidity was literally powerful enough to drag me back to life. Pleased to fucking meet you.”

Then before Charlotte has time to process that little revelation, Nozomi’s hand flies, striking Charlotte across the face.

Normally something like that would be enough to jolt Charlotte awake, likely with heavy panting and her illusionary heart racing. However, this was not that kind of dream.

“Got your attention?” Nozomi says.

Charlotte lifts a hand to her cheek. For a dream, the stinging sensation is impressively realistic. “The hell was that for?”

“You know,” Nozomi says with a derisive snort. She walks back to her seat and sits down. “All right, let me clear things up for you and answer everything you’re about to ask. Yes, I am your past self. Duh. Yes, this is really happening. Yes, we are the same person. Same soul, continuation of consciousness or whatever you guys call it. So when I say ‘I’ or ‘you’ or ‘we,’ don’t take it too literally. Yes, this is happening due to supernatural circumstances. No, I’m not telling you how. No, I’m not really real as a separate entity. This is all one big metaphor for how Nozomi would actually feel about what your dumb ass is doing right now. But yes, what I am saying to you comes from a very fucking real place. Are we clear?”

That…really did cover most of what Charlotte wants to ask, though not being able to ask them was kind of frustrating. Hell, she was still in need of a moment to really think on the whole “Nozomi Momoe” thing. “Wow, okay,” she says. “You’re…throwing a lot at me right now. And frankly, I don’t even know where to begin-”

“Great! Because I do.” Nozomi leans forward so as to glower at her more efficiently. “Why exactly are you listening to that big wad of dumb you got lodged in your head and throwing away literally the best thing to happen to you, to happen to us, to happen to me?”

Charlotte scowls. Oh, so that was what this was all about. “This is about Mami Tomoe, isn’t it?”

“Eh.” Nozomi waggles one of her palms. “Half right. This is about Mami Tomoe and Candeloro. Which, incidentally enough, do qualify as the same thing, if you want to get technical about it.”

Charlotte scowls. “I don’t have to explain that to you. I don’t have to explain it to anyone.”

“I am you, of course you don’t have to explain it! And you already had that whole deal torn down! What I want to know is why that even after realizing that you’re wrong, you’re still running away!”

“What, you expect me to be able to deal with…whatever that is? You expect me to be able to deal with any of this insanity?”

“No shit, I do! Because that’s what wives are supposed to do! Love and support in sickness and in health! She wants us to help her, she needs us by her side, and you’re just gonna go run away.

“Well, whatever. I owe you anything, and you don’t know-”

“Yeah, I’m just going to cut you off right there, Cheese-Brain.” Nozomi says, holding up a palm. “I do, actually. Been living through you for sixteen years now, so I know you pretty damned well.”

“Do you? Fine.” Charlotte leaned back in her chair, one arm draped over the back, legs crossed, while she gestured with the other. “Then by all means: explain it to me.”

“Fine. You’re running away not because you really believe that Mami’s gonna completely replace Candeloro, but because you’re scared of what she represents. Because all this time, things were set in a certain way, and you liked it that way! Sure, maybe all your friends had some kind of group dynamic back in the day, but who cares? Right now, everyone’s a witch, you’ve got a new group dynamic to which you are essential, and life is good!

“But then Hitomi Shizuki showed up and changed all that. Suddenly there’s new names being thrown around, reveals about past relationships. And things started to crack. They started to crumble. In just a few short days, people you thought you knew start making bad decisions, start drifting apart, started behaving out of character.

“And that scared you, didn’t it? Not just because it meant that this perfect life you’ve built was falling to pieces, but the thing you were dreading was coming back. Their past. Their group, the group that you were not a part of. And despite all evidence to the contrary, you couldn’t help but wonder, ‘Well, if they all do go back to being who they were, would there still be a place for me? Would they even want me?’” She snorts. “Talk about paranoid.”

“It’s not paranoid!” Charlotte shouts. “It did happen! One of them did come back, and she’s taking the place of my wife!”

“Yeah, Mami Tomoe did come back. She came back to save you, because you were in danger, and now that you wife is in the most trouble she’s ever been, when she needs you the most, you just selfishly abandon her? Because you were afraid that Mami would reject you?”

“No! I don’t care if Mami wants me or not! I care that the person I loved is gone!”

“She’s not gone, you idiot! But she is in the most pain that she’s ever in! She made a choice for your sake, and now she’s struggling with something big and terrifying, and instead of staying by her side like you should, you’re just going to abandon her and the rest of your family! You’re so afraid of change taking away everything you had that you’d rather throw it all away first, just because of a possibility! And you’ll run out on the woman you love more than anything in her time of need! She begged you to stay, she was weeping for you to stay, and you turned your back on her!”

Nozomi then thrusts a finger at the hospital bed next to her. And for the first time, Charlotte notices that it’s not empty. There is a body in it, that of woman. She is not that old, just a little out of middle-age, but she is so frail and withered that she could have been mistaken for being past eighty.

“I had a chance to save the only thing that mattered to me, but I refused to see the situation for what it was and lost our mother. Because of an assumption! So I will be damned before I let your fear hurt the ones that matter the most to us now! I’m not letting you run away!”

“I…” Charlotte struggles to find her voice. “But I…”

However, Nozomi is not letting her have the chance to speak. She thrusts her hand into the air, and suddenly the small space is filled with a burst of dark pink light. When it clears, Nozomi is wearing a sleeveless, double-breasted black tunic with gold buttons in the shaped of wrapped candy and a high collar; a tight black-and-white striped shirt under with frilly wrists; brown fingerless gloves; a knee-length pink skirt; black-and-white striped tights; and dainty ballet shoes. In her hand is a long black pole studded with pink polka-dots, topped with that wrapped candy shape.

Nozomi charges. Charlotte tries to dodge, but Nozomi thrusts her pole out, and golden wires erupt from the tip to ensnare Charlotte’s legs and yank them out from under her.

The next thing Charlotte knows, she’s lying flat on her back with legs straddling her chest, staring up at a face that looks so much like the one she sees every day in the mirror, only it is glaring down at her in pure hatred.

“No, you don’t get to run!” Nozomi screams. She strikes Charlotte across the face, causing her head to snap to one side. “You bitch!” She hits her again from the other side. “You coward!” She hits her again.

Then Nozomi is just raining blows down on Charlotte, from the left to the right to the left to the right again. “You! Won’t! Run! Away! If you do, I swear I will haunt you every time you go to sleep! I will make every second a waking nightmare! You can’t escape me, and you won’t-”

…

Charlotte jerked awake with a gasp. Her hands were in the air to ward off another attack, the screams still echoing in her ears.

There was nobody there. She was back in the zipper.

Charlotte slowly lowered her hands. Then she checked the time. To her shock, she saw that she had only been asleep for less than thirty seconds. The zipper was still moving above Freehaven toward the skyport.

Stupefied, Charlotte struggled to collect her thoughts. Though the details of the dream were swiftly fading away, the terror of it was not, nor was the sense of immense shame, guilt, and self-loathing.

She knew what had happened. She had heard of the others and their dream-meetings with their past selves, and how they had all made peace. And she had finally had her own. Only hers had been anything but peaceful.

And she knew exactly why.

Charlotte felt horrified. Oh God, what was she doing? How had things gotten this far?

“Wait!” Charlotte hoarsely called out. “Stop!”

The zipper paused.

“Cancel the trip! Take me back!”

“Trip cancellations incur a fee of-”

“I don’t care, charge me whatever, and just do it!”

The blue digital face shimmered, and the zipper turned around.

…

“Damn it,” Ophelia groused as she slouched her way across the rooftop. She kicked a pinecone that had somehow gotten up there. “Damn it, damn it, damn it. We were so close. So close. So-”

Then something zoomed past her head, something silver and shiny.

Ophelia froze. No, it couldn’t be. It had to be some other zipper. There were plenty of those coming and going all the time. There was no way it was…

She ran to the edge of the roof. The zipper had dove down to the same pick-up spot that Charlotte’s had departed from. Her illusionary heartbeat pounding away, Ophelia watched as its side opened up.

And then Charlotte stumbled out.

“No way,” Ophelia said. As she watched, Charlotte took off running, heading back toward the Rising Gardens.

Things still sucked a whole lot, but Ophelia couldn’t stop grinning. She pulled out her phone and reentered the group. “Hey guys,” she said. “Cancel the funeral. Guess what just happened!”

…

Sniffing, Candeloro slowly exited the Rising Gardens. She felt more miserable than she had ever felt in her entire life.

What was she going to do? What was she going to tell the others? Oh, they would feel bad for her, try to comfort her, say many bad things about Charlotte, but that wouldn’t change anything. She had gone to bring her back, to heal their family, but she had failed. In the end, Charlotte had rejected her.

Maybe she should just let the Mami Tomoe part take over completely. Mami Tomoe had never been married. Mami Tomoe hadn’t been abandoned by her wife. Maybe that would make things easier to-

“Candy! Wait! Stop!”

Candeloro made a sound not unlike air escaping a bike tire. She spun around, almost not daring to hope.

Charlotte was there, running toward her.

“What?” was all Candeloro could think of to say.

Charlotte looked like she was reaching out to grab her, but then stopped herself at the last minute. She looked at her outstretched hands, swallowed, and let them drop.

“So, uh,” she said as she stared down at the ground and shuffled her feet. “I…kind of just had a change of heart.”

Candeloro’s jaw dropped. “How? It’s been…like five minutes!”

“I know. But you know how your perception of time gets really weird in a dream and you could feel like it’s been hours when it’s only been like a couple minutes? Like how you wake up ten minutes before your alarm goes off and drift back to sleep and then have like this whole adventure that seems like it takes…” Charlotte seemed to realize that she was babbling and cut herself off. “Um, well, I kind of fell asleep in the zipper, and got yelled at by my past self, and she beat me up. Like, a lot.”

“Huh?”

“I finally met my past self,” Charlotte said. “You know, like the others did. And she was pissed.”

Candeloro had no idea what to think of that. “Really?”

“Yes. And…” Charlotte sighed. “Candy, I am so sorry. I’ve been an idiot, and a coward, and kind of a cruel one at that.” She ran her fingers through her sweat-soaked hair. “I don’t know what got into my head, I don’t have any kind of real excuse. I just got scared and freaked out and made a really, really bad choice.”

Candeloro was finding it very hard to put her thoughts to words. She was finding it very hard to have articulate thoughts at all. “Wait, are you saying…”

“I’m not leaving you. I should have never left in the first place. And…okay, this whole thing that’s going on with you still scares the crap out of me, but I don’t have the right to abandon you, and-”

The rest of her apology was choked off: not by tears, but by Candeloro’s arms. Specifically, the ones she had thrown around Charlotte’s neck.

“Thank you,” Candeloro wept into Charlotte’s neck. “I don’t know what I would have done if you had gone.”

“God, way to make me feel worse,” Charlotte muttered, but she wrapped her arms around Candeloro’s back as well.

It felt so good to be held by her again. Candeloro was still a little angry about almost being abandoned, but the relief she felt was so much more powerful.

But then she drew back with a sigh. “But you know I’m still messed up,” she said. “I don’t know even where to begin to fix this.”

Charlotte grimaced. “Yeah. I…I can see that.”

“I mean, there’s no one in Freehaven with any experience with this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, this is kind of way above their pay grade,” Charlotte agreed. “I mean, sure, they can help an angry teenager who lost her family or someone who’s not adjusting well, but this is kind of…”

Suddenly her eyes went wide. “Wait, hold on!” she gasped. “Maybe there is someone!”

…

“Okay, confirmed!” Ophelia said into her phone. “Huggies have stopped, and C1 and C2 are on the move!”

“On the move back home, right?” Homulilly said testily.

“Uh…can’t tell yet. They’re…oh shit.”

“What?”

Ophelia dove behind a planter. “They’re headed for the roofs. Almost got spotted just now.”

“But that means they’re headed back, right?” Gretchen asked. “You go to the roofs when you want to get somewhere in a hurry, right?”

Ophelia peeked out. Then she frowned. “No, wait, they’re going the wrong way for that.”

There was a heavy pause, and then Oktavia said crankily, “Well, then, where the hell are they headed?”

“I dunno. North…eastish? Hey, I’m gonna just tail them for a bit. I’ll call you when I have some idea of what’s going on.”

“Wait, what about-”

Ophelia hung up. And then she got up to follow.

Keeping up was a lot harder than it sounded. Sure, she could probably run either one of them down, but she didn’t want to catch up, she just wanted to keep them in sight, while making sure that she stayed out of theirs. So she had to stop periodically to dart into some kind of shade and hang back until she was sure that they weren’t going to look in her direction.

Fortunately, they didn’t think that they were being followed, so they weren’t glancing over their shoulders or anything. And before too long they came to a stop and dropped down to the streets.

Ophelia came to a stop too. She had figured out where they were headed, and now that she did it made perfect sense.

“So hey,” she said, reentering the group. “I figured out where they’re heading.”

“Well?” Oktavia said. “Where?”

“Probably the one place in town with anyone that understands what Candeloro’s going through.”

…

Despite living in Freehaven her entire life, Candeloro had only been to the museum a handful of times. There had been the obligatory trip back during her integration days of course, and the odd daytrip just for the heck of it scattered over the years. She had always enjoyed the visits and had learned much, but that sort of thing had always been more of Charlotte’s thing than hers, so she had never just gone on her own, and she certainly had never had a one-on-one conversation with the museum’s curator, Astrid.

Astrid, it should be noted, was not her usual calm, unflappable self. Granted, Candeloro hadn’t even seen her during every trip, so she supposed that she didn’t have much experience to really get a read on the older woman, but she had not expected to see Astrid as shaken as she was when Candeloro and Charlotte had shown up during what had no doubt been an otherwise uneventful day looking over the exhibits and answering menial questions about the artifacts and anxiously requested a private conversation on account that she was the only other person that had gone through the same thing Candeloro had that they had any sort of access to.

Still, she had agreed, and had asked her girlfriend to keep an eye on things while she took the pair to her apartment at the back of the complex. Candeloro hadn’t known what to expect of that. Maybe a place filled with as many strange relics of the past as the museum itself was? Or maybe the exact opposite, a place with minimal comforts and Spartan trappings.

As it turned out, it was neither. Instead, the furniture was old, yet comfortable and well-used. There were a great many colorful plants sitting on shelves, on windowsills, and in corners. Several paintings were hung on the walls: some of them landscape, some of them abstract, some of them humorous caricatures, even a couple of nudes. There were several open windows, letting in plenty of sunlight.

There were a number of cats wandering around. They immediately headed for the door as Astrid entered, but upon seeing Candeloro and Charlotte behind her they froze and then bolted, all of them leaping out of one of the windows, somehow managing to avoid upsetting the two potted plants sitting on the sill.

“Are those yours?” Candeloro asked.

Astrid started a little at the question. “What, the cats? No, they’re all strays.”

“Strays?”

Astrid shrugged. “We, uh, learned a long time ago that permanent pets…get kind of depressing after a while, so we just keep the place open to local cats and sometimes birds. That way, there’s always someone fuzzy and warm about, but they don’t, uh, you don’t come home to find their, er, bodies every few years.”

Candeloro had no idea how to respond to something like that, so she said nothing.

“Uh, sit down!” Astrid said, indicating the wooden dinner table. It was covered with a white table cloth and had a vase of yellow flowers in the middle, and its wooden legs were covered with years and years of animal scratches. “Can I get you guys something? Tea, maybe?”

“Thank you,” Candeloro said as she and Charlotte took their seats. “Ginger, please. If you have it.”

“Got it. Be right back.”

Astrid hurried into the kitchen. Candeloro tried to sit still as Astrid put the kettle on and moved around the cabinets. She must have used magic to heat the water, because the kettle started singing in less than a minute.

The Norse woman returned, carrying a tray with an old but quite charming blue tea set. She set it down, handed a cup in a saucer to each of her guests, and poured them each a cup.

“Sugar?” she said.

“No, thank you.”

Astrid nodded. “So,” she said, sitting down. “Let me see if I have this right: you…are a witch,” she said, gesturing to Charlotte.

Charlotte looked down at the pearl-white skin of her hands. She glanced over her shoulder to where her tail hung down through the bars of the chair’s back. “Looks like.”

“And…you are…not,” Astrid said with a look toward Candeloro.

Candeloro took a deep breath. “No. Not anymore.”

“But you were.”

“Until about a week ago. That’s right.”

Astrid slowly breathed out. “Right. When, where, and how?”

“During the storm,” Candeloro said. “That big one that hit recently?”

“Right. We lost some trees and had some minor roof damage. None of the exhibits were damaged, fortunately. But, um, was it the storm itself, or something that happened during the storm, or…?” Astrid rolled her wrist, indicating for someone to fill in the blank.

Candeloro sighed. “It was…a very strange combination of different things coming together all at once.”

Keeping her descriptions as short as possible, Candeloro told her of the events that had led to her transformation, from the sudden arrival of Hitomi Shizuki to the subsequent problems with spiritual dissonance that they all started to feel to the battle with the karnuk and finally her own change.

“I don’t know exactly what happened or who I talked to,” Candeloro said. “I just…know I talked to someone, and they gave me a choice. And I said ‘yes.’”

“Ah. I see.” Astrid slowly stirred her tea with a small silver spoon. “Mine was…rather similar, actually.”

“I know. Th-That’s why we’re here, actually.”

“I figured.” Astrid steepled her fingers and tapped the tips against her nose. “Okay. Well, this is…a lot to take in. Does anyone else know?”

“Well, there’s us two, of course,” Charlotte said. “And the rest of our Walpurgisnacht.”

Astrid’s brow rose at that. “You’re a Walpurgisnacht?”

“Yes. Us two, and two others.”

“Ah. Well, that’s four. Who else?”

“Two close friends who also live with us,” Candeloro said. “And, uh, Hitomi Shizuki apparently figured it out.”

“I see.”

Candeloro looked down into the murky liquid in her cup. “And…everyone on board the Aurora Borealis, I guess.”

Astrid’s fingers froze in mid-tap. “The aquatic research facility?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Well.” Astrid slowly laid her hands flat onto the tabletop. “That is a lot of names.”

“I know,” Candeloro said.

“I assume you’re trying to keep this quiet?”

Candeloro felt her right eyelid start to twitch. “Trying to.”

“Understandable. I…imagine it must be…very stressful.”

“You imagine?” Charlotte said, her tone incredulous. “You went through the same thing! That’s why we’re here! She needs help! Advice! Anything!”

“Advice?”

“Yes,” Candeloro said. “Y-You see, I was friends with everyone in our Walpurgisnacht. And with our two other friends as well. I mean, back when we were alive, I knew all of them and they knew me. And…these flashbacks keep happening. They don’t remember any of it of course, but I’ll just be talking to them or even just look at them, and suddenly I’m back, reliving something significant about our past relationship, usually something tragic, and I feel…” One hand went to her temple, the fingers digging into her skin. “I feel like the other half of me is trying…trying to be all of me. I lose sense of myself, my name starts…” She slowly breathed out. “I don’t know how to handle this. I don’t know when the next flash will come or how hard it’ll hit. I just know it gets harder and harder each time to reestablish who I am.” She looked pleadingly into Astrid’s pale silver eyes. “But you had to have gone through the same thing, right? There has to be something you can do to help me!”

“I understand,” Astrid said. “But you have to understand…my change was literally centuries ago! And…I was a little preoccupied with escaping the Withering Lands at the time.”

Candeloro and Charlotte both stared at her in dismay. “So, you…didn’t have those flashes? You didn’t struggle with your sense of identity?”

Astrid let out a long, belabored sigh. “I…didn’t encounter anyone I had known in life. There was no one to trigger any of those flashbacks. Occasionally someone would say something or I would see something that would bring an old memory into stark relief, but those were rare. Besides, after Zoya and I had stolen that boat and headed off to sea, there was a very, very long and uncomfortable trip before we wound up in Freehaven. Let’s just say I had plenty of time and space to really sift through my memories and come to terms with myself.”

Candeloro felt a lump start to form in her throat. She stared back down at her reflection in the murky liquid. “And you decided to go b-by Astrid.”

Astrid shrugged. “My time as Sif was pretty miserable. Granted, my life as Astrid wasn’t exactly fantastic either, but it was at least better. It was an easy change to make.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t want to make that change,” Charlotte said. “She wants to stay being Candeloro, at least in her head. So is there anything you can suggest? Any…tricks or some kind of meditation or something? I mean, part of your job is to help people like you!”

“Yes. Other runaway Void Walkers,” Astrid said. “There aren’t very many of the un-witched coming by Freehaven. In fact, you would make number two.”

“What about the others?” Candeloro said, perking up.

“The others?”

“Yes! The other…the other un-witched. You know them, don’t you? Can’t they help us?”

Astrid made a face. “Shared experience doesn’t necessarily mean we’re friends. Actually, you and I are the only humans that have done so.”

“So? I have alien friends.”

“So do I. But when they’re from species that don’t exactly get along with Freehaven, it makes establishing any kind of rapport a bit of a problem.” Astrid scooped up a spoonful of tea and slowly let it spill back into her cup. “Also, just because someone is on the record of having un-witched sometime in the distant past doesn’t mean that they’re still around. Two of them ended up becoming Void Walkers and have since been released.”

“Oh,” Candeloro said.

“Or at least that’s the official story anyway. And of the others…Filsa the nask ended up getting kidnapped and was never heard from again. Nitrogen and Blitzkrieg the calliopes…well, Nitrogen served as dance leader of her territory for a number of years before retiring. I suppose I could look her up, but she’s something of an attention whore, so if you want to keep your condition under wraps, she’s probably the last person you want to talk to. And last I heard of Blitzkrieg, she’s currently running a cult somewhere out in some remote territory where she’s worshipped as a god.”

“Oh,” Charlotte said. “Huh.”

“As for the others, well, Ostilk Misanti Viskero the andalite is apparently something of a recluse. She didn’t care much for the fame her condition brought her, and her current location is a closely guarded secret. And you know andalites and their secrets.” Astrid sighed. “Honestly, your best bet would be to contact Silvet the dockengaut.”

Candeloro nearly leapt out of her chair. Charlotte actually did so. “Wait, the last of the un-witched is a dockengaut?” Charlotte said, her voice cracking.

“Yes, believe it or not. And she’s actually on our side, as such things are judged.”

“What,” Candeloro said flatly.

Astrid spread her hands. “There are a small number of dockengauts that do not subscribe to their species’ predatory values. A few even defected after those videos went out. You know the ones, right?”

Candeloro shuddered. Apparently, once the dockengauts’ cannibalistic nature had been made known, several species had banded together in an attempt to intimidate them. The dockengauts’ response had been to send each and every one of them a video showing them devouring a member of each of the species that had allied against them, in graphic detail. Candeloro had never seen any of the infamous recordings, but apparently Charlotte had. And she had stalwartly refused to ever divulge what she had seen.

She glanced over to Charlotte. Sure enough, her wife looked like she was going to be sick.

“I see that you do,” Astrid said with a grim smile. “Anyway, believe it or not, there were a few dockengauts that didn’t care for that attitude, and ended up running away. One of them was a dockengaut witch. And she ended up, well, un-witching during her escape. I’ve only met her a couple of times, but she seemed…pretty decent. A bit shy, actually.”

“Excuse me?” Charlotte said. “A decent dockengaut? And she’s shy?”

“They do exist. Though the rest of their species tend to regard them the same way regard sociopaths. You know, as someone who is critically mentally ill. Anyway, last I heard she was working in Budbrekka. It’s a Norse encampment in the foothills far to the north, one of the last ones. I still try to keep in contact with them, as there aren’t many of us left. I can probably arrange-”

“No, thank you,” Candeloro said hastily. “I’m sorry, I’m sure…she is a very lovely…swarm of cannibalistic spiders, but I’d rather not talk to a dockengaut right now.”

“I thought not.”

Charlotte slumped back into her chair. “Well, I guess that’s that. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Hold on,” Astrid said, holding up a hand. “Now, my experiences may not line up with yours, but I do pride myself as a practical woman. You have to be to last as long as I have.”

“Your point?” Charlotte said.

“It seems to me that part of the problem is that you’re too close to things that are closely connected to your past. You’re constantly exposing yourself to memory triggers, at a time when the wounds are still raw.”

Candeloro swallowed. “So, uh, what are you suggesting?”

…

When Candeloro and Charlotte got back to the house, they found everyone already gathered in the living room, waiting for them.

Candeloro entered first, with Charlotte nervously hanging behind. “I’m back,” she said as she stepped inside. “Well, we’re back, and-”

Then she saw all four pairs of eyes staring expectantly at her.

Candeloro paused, her hand still on the doorknob. She looked at each face in turn before sighing and saying, “Were you spying on us?”

“Yes,” Ophelia said without hesitation.

“So you heard everything?”

“No. Your talk was your talk, so visual only.”

“Well. Thank you for granting us that measure of privacy at least,” Candeloro said in a clipped tone. “Then I guess this part doesn’t need explaining.”

She stood to one side and motioned for Charlotte to enter. Wincing, Charlotte stepped inside the house.

“Um, hi guys,” she said.

“Hi,” Gretchen said. No one else returned the greeting. Ophelia and Oktavia both leaned back in their seats, Ophelia with her legs crossed and arms behind her head and Oktavia with her hands folded in her lap. Homulilly just sat with her arms crossed, waiting.

Her head bowed, Charlotte shuffled her feet. “I guess…I owe you some kind-”

“Motherfucking, bitch-ass traitor!” Cheese suddenly screeched from the kitchen.

Charlotte paused. “Okay. Harsh. But…fair, I guess.”

“Who taught him the word ‘traitor’?” Candeloro asked.

“I did,” Ophelia said. “Or rather, the last wrestling PPV I watched did. Major heel turn. I was pissed.”

“Right,” Charlotte said. “Um, so, like I said, I owe all of you a huge apology.”

“You mean for straight-up running out on us without so much as a text message?” Oktavia said.

“Yes. For that.”

“For abandoning your wife when she needed you the most,” Homulilly said.

“Also that. Yeah.”

“For completely shutting us out so that Gretchen and Homulilly had to go commit actual crimes and get arrested just to have some sense talked into you?” Ophelia said.

“W-Well, that wasn’t exactly-”

“Ahem!”

Charlotte sighed. “Okay. Yes. For that too. And everything else.”

“Okay,” Ophelia said. “Well, say your piece.”

Charlotte swallowed. “Look. I don’t…have some kind of well-reasoned, logical reason for doing what I did. I got scared. Like, really scared. I guess I really do have a lot of issues about, you know, our past selves, about how I wasn’t actually part of your group, and about any part of that coming back. Yeah, I know you told me that it doesn’t matter, but…I don’t know. I got a bad case of the stupid.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” Ophelia said.

“Yeah.” Charlotte sighed. “And…when Candy changed, I thought that, you know, the Candeloro part was gone for good. That it was just Mami Tomoe that was left. I thought my wife was gone, and I couldn’t…”

“Okay, okay, question,” Oktavia interrupted. “Look, we know that already. We figured that part out right away. But why the hell wouldn’t you talk to anyone of us? Why wouldn’t you try to find out if you were right or not? Why just assume that it’s true and split? Wouldn’t you, um, want to at least verify before you lock all your friends out and throw your life away?”

“Ugh. I know, I know! It was stupid! I guess..” Charlotte shook her head. “I guess that…once I had calmed down and started to think about it, I guess I got scared that I was wrong. And if I was wrong, that meant that I turned my back on my family for nothing.”

Ophelia coughed into her fist. “Whichyoudid.”

“Ophelia,” Candeloro said, warning in her voice.

“No, she’s right,” Charlotte said. “But I just kept telling myself that I was right, that I really had lost Candeloro and that meant I was justified in leaving. You know, the universe had conspired to take away the person that I loved the most, so what did I owe it?”

“We’re not the universe,” Homulilly said. “We’re…us.”

“I know! I know! But…imagine if Gretchen had been replaced with someone else. Like, the girl you loved was gone and never coming back, but there was someone that still looked like her, that talked like her, that acted like her, but it wasn’t her, and everyone was openly accepting this new Gretchen in the place of the old one, and they wanted you to just take the new Gretchen when you knew that the one you loved was gone for good.”

“But…that’s not what happened!” Oktavia protested. Her tail started bouncing in its support apparatus, a tic that kicked in whenever she was agitated. “She wasn’t gone! She was just…you know, sort of expanded upon in a kind of disturbing way.”

“I know that now! And I guess I knew that then! But…oh, I don’t know, I was really scared that it was the way I thought it was, so I just kept telling myself that it was that way until I half-believed it!”

“So I guess Homulilly and Gretchen showing up at your hidey-hole wasn’t enough to make you think otherwise,” Ophelia said.

“No,” Charlotte admitted. She glanced over to where Candeloro was standing. “I mean, yeah, they convinced me to at least talk with her before I left, but I still went in thinking I was right.”

“And seeing how you kind of ran away after all that, Candeloro didn’t have much luck either.”

Charlotte’s mouth set in a straight line. “I mean, sort of? She told me some things that I wasn’t expecting, and it scared me, so that’s why I ran.”

“Huh? What’s that mean?”

“I mean she kind of showed me that I was being an idiot. Kind of hard to lie to yourself after that.” Charlotte ran her fingers through her hair while her tail roped itself around her upper thigh. “Also, it’s kind of hard to lie to yourself when yourself is straight up calling you out on your bullshit while she punches your face in.”

As expected, this pronouncement was met with mostly confusion from her housemates, mainly in the form of more blank stares and the scratching of heads.

“Huh?” Gretchen said, tilting her head to one side.

“You’ve lost me,” Oktavia added.

Charlotte swallowed. “Um, you know those dreams you guys apparently had back on the Aurora Borealis where you all met your past selves and made peace or whatever?”

“How’d you know about those?” Ophelia demanded.

“Word got back to me. Anyway, after I got into that zipper, I kind of fell asleep and, well, had one of my own. And it turns out my past self didn’t really approve of recent life decisions and decided to tell me. And she beat me up. Like, a lot.”

“Okay,” Ophelia said after a very long bout of silence. “Where exactly does the metaphor end and stuff that actually happened begin here?”

“I don’t know, it was weird!” Charlotte groused. “But that…that was kind of the wake-up call I needed. So that’s why I turned that thing around.”

“And that’s when you decided to go to the museum, to get advice from Astrid!” Oktavia said, her tail excitedly bouncing.

“Yeah.”

Gretchen looked up, her face hopeful. “But you’re back now, right? I mean, what you just said was extremely weird, but you two made up, so we can…start fixing things now? Go back…well, get used to how things are and be a whole family again, right?”

The younger girl’s voice was so full of hope that Candeloro hated herself for what came next. “Not yet.”

“Excuse me?” Homulilly said. In sharp contrast to Gretchen’s, her voice was full of steel and poison, the sort of tone that not lightly offended.

“Listen,” Candeloro said. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate how helpful and accepting you all have been. You’ve all been wonderful. But-”

“You’re leaving,” Homulilly finished for her. When everyone stared at her, she looked around at everyone and rolled her eyes. “What? That’s what she’s saying, isn’t it? We went from losing one member of the family to losing two! That’s the opposite of what was supposed to happen!”

Candeloro said, “Homulilly-”

“No!” Homulilly leapt to her feet and thrust an angry, bony finger at her. “Listen to me! Gretchen and I went and got ourselves into a lot of trouble for you, for both of you! We might go to jail! But okay, that would have been worth it if it got you and Charlotte to make up and everyone was home. But instead, you’re both going away! How is that fair?”

“Hey, I agree with the floral skeleton,” Oktavia broke in. In contrast to Homulilly’s cold steel, she sounded like she couldn’t decide whether to start yelling or burst into tears, but it was no less angry. “What the hell? We’re family! We’re a Walpurgisnacht! Our souls are literally connected! Now you’re just gonna, what, go away? After everything? Charlotte was the one that walked out on you! Why are you choosing her over us?”

Charlotte openly winced at that. “It’s not like that!” Candeloro said quickly. “I-It’s true, we do need to leave for a while, but we’re not going away forever! Probably not even a full year.”

While all this was going on, Ophelia was merely sitting still, upper body leaning forward with her skinny arms crossed over her knees, scarlet eyes boring holes into the two of them. “Explain,” her voice having all the steel of Homulilly’s and all the fire of Oktavia’s.

Though it was hard to keep her voice steady and not to trip over her words, Candeloro did her best to explain the slips of memory she had been experiencing, starting with the one with the marshal and then detailing the ones she had been having with all of her friends. She told them about how her sense of self was far more fluid than she would have liked, and how it was happening more and more often.

“…and the more it happens, the harder it is to regain my sense of self,” she finished. “And yes, you have all been wonderful, but staying here only makes it worse. These memories just keep getting triggered, and I don’t know when the next one will hit.”

“You know there are quite a few qualified people here in Freehaven to help with that,” Ophelia pointed out. Her anger seemed to have cooled, though the firmness had not.

“And none of them can help me with this!” Candeloro said, her voice cracking. “I’m sorry, but they can’t! Not even Astrid could! Besides, I can’t talk to any of them without risking blowing my secret!”

Homulilly inhaled sharply through her teeth. “Well, I mean, between us, Astrid, Hitomi, and like at least fifty people over in that science boat, I’d say that’s a ticking time bomb already.”

“Exactly! That’s another reason why I need to just…go somewhere else for a while. Wait for things to blow over.”

Ophelia tilted her head to one side. “And Charlotte?”

“Look,” Charlotte said with a sigh. “I got scared and did a bad thing. And this whole deal still kind of scares me. So, we both have a lot of things we need to come to terms with.”

Gretchen had mostly remained silent during the whole exchange. She had watched with a thoughtful look, privately musing over everything that was being said. And now she spoke, doing so carefully and with great deliberation. “So…you’re not really leaving us. You’re just getting some space to help you deal with these new problems so that when you do come back you’ll both be healthy.”

“Yes,” Candeloro said with a grateful sigh. Leave it to Gretchen to give things the best spin possible. And it wasn’t like she was wrong. “Thank you. That’s it exactly.”

However, Oktavia was less than mollified. “But what if you don’t?” she said, her voice nearly rising to a shout. “What if you don’t come back? What if you get scared like Charlotte did and you don’t ever come back?”

“It won’t! I promise-”

“No! No promises right now. You don’t know what’s going to happen, none of us know what’s going to happen, so don’t promise something you can’t keep! Like, half a week ago we were all set to have our family get bigger! Then all this shit happened, and now you have to leave! What if something new happens?”

“Tavi, babe,” Ophelia said, rising to go over to her. “It’s okay. You don’t-”

Oktavia swatter her hand away. “No! Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay when you don’t know it’s going to be okay. You don’t know that, no one knows that!”

“Oktavia,” Candeloro said. “I-”

Now openly crying, Oktavia roughly grabbed the controls to her chair and wretched it around. “No. I can’t deal with this right now. I’m…I just can’t. Not now.”

Everyone watched as she stomped off toward her and Ophelia’s room. A moment later the door slammed.

“Well,” Ophelia said after a long while. “Look. I’ll talk to her after she’s had some time to cool down. But tell me honestly: do you really have to go?”

“For a little while,” Candeloro said. “Yeah.”

Ophelia’s jaw clenched up. “But you are coming back? Once you two got all your issues worked out, you’re coming back to us. Right?”

Everything in Ophelia’s voice made it clear that they damned well better.

“Yes,” Candeloro said. “I swear.”

“I see.” Ophelia looked down at the ground, and then up at them. “You’ll keep in touch, at least. Right?”

“Of course we will! It’s not like we’re falling right off the map.”

“Heh. There’s probably places where you can literally do that.” Then Ophelia let out a long sigh. She walked over to the pair and laid a hand on Candeloro’s shoulder.

“Okay,” she said. “But you get better. I don’t care what you’re calling yourself when you come back, I know it’ll still be you. Just get yourself better, okay?”

Candeloro swallowed. She wanted to reassure her that she most definitely would, but she suddenly found herself unable to speak.

So she settled for grabbing Ophelia in a tight embrace instead.

There came a low patter of incredibly thin legs, followed by the steps of two perfectly normal ones, and soon two more pairs joined them. Candeloro, Ophelia, Gretchen, and Homulilly all stood there, wrapped up in each other’s love.

Then without releasing her grip or raising her head, Ophelia said, “Charlotte, you waiting for a written invitation. Get in on this!”

“Oh!” Charlotte said in genuine surprise. “Uh, right away!” Soon her arms were holding the whole group from behind Candeloro.

Then they heard a door open in another place of the house, followed by the whine-hiss of Oktavia’s chair. The mermaid herself appeared a moment later.

Everyone paused, and then turned to look at her. Oktavia’s eyes were red and wet, and her nose looked raw, as if it had been blown very hard recently.

She moved her chair closer. “Okay, look,” she said. “I’m still mad at you, and I’m still going to yell at you later. But I really need a hug too, and you guys don’t get to have one without me!”

“Well, come on then,” Homulilly said. Oktavia came in closer, and Homulilly and Ophelia both lifted her up by the arms and brought her in to join them, completing the set.

Candeloro sighed. Genuinely happy moments seemed to be hard to come by as of late, but this most certainly was one.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank-”

“-you.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it!” Sayaka said with a happy slap onto Mami’s back. “I mean, we’re a team, aren’t we? You woulda done the same for any of us.”

That much was true, but Mami still was grateful. She had gotten a little cocky during that last witch fight, and had nearly lost her head as a result. Had she been alone, she would have surely died.

But she wasn’t alone. Not anymore.

Madoka rushed up to her and clutched her hand with both of her own. “But please be more careful, Mami-san!” she said. “You scared me back there!”

“I will,” Mami promised. “I guess that just goes to show that even when you have a lot of experience, you can still get careless.”

“A hard lesson to learn,” Homura Akemi agreed. The dark and mysterious new member to their group held out her hand. There was a flash of violet light, and she was suddenly clad in her normal clothes again, her soul gem reduced to a small, silver ring. “Still, I am glad that you’re unhurt.”

Then she smiled. It was a rare thing for Homura Akemi to smile, but here one was. Mami just wished that she hadn’t needed to endanger her own life in order to see one.

“Come on, I’ll race you guys back!” Madoka took off running, heading up the road toward Mami’s apartment.

“Hey, Madoka! Wait up!” Sayaka ran after her. A moment later Homura followed.

Mami didn’t run after them. Let them have their fun. She would catch up soon enough.

Besides, it wasn’t like she was alone.

“That was a kinda dumb move,” Kyoko remarked as she started to walk beside Mami. “Seriously, what were you thinking, showing off like that? The kids are already impressed with you. No need to drop your guard like that.”

“I know. You’re right. I’ll…set a better example in the future.”

“Hmmm.” Kyoko pulled out one of those boxes of pocky she always seemed to have on hand. “Still, don’t tell the others I said this, but I’m glad you’re okay.”

She opened the box, and held it out toward her.

Mami blinked. She looked down at the pocky, and then up at Kyoko.

“Well,” Kyoko said, giving the box a jiggle.

Smiling, Mami took one of the candy sticks and bit into it. It was good.

“I’m glad you came back,” she said as the two started up the hill together.

“Hey, don’t go getting all sappy on me,” Kyoko said as she stuck a stick into her mouth. “I just didn’t like the thought of you going crazy all by yourself. You kinda go to pieces when you don’t have anyone around to watch you. It kinda sucks to be alone, you know?”

“I know,” Mami said. She looked up the hill at their juniors. “But I’m not alone. Not anymore.”

Her arms still entwined with those of her loved ones, Mami’s eyes welled up. Again her sense of self had shifted, but this time she didn’t try to fight it. Because there were happy memories mixed with the bad, and if Mami Tomoe and Candeloro were to be the same person from now on, then at least she was getting those as well.

…

So, um.

Writing this…was a journey, and if I do end up doing a look-back on the Hitomi/Mami arc, this chapter will get a very long section all to itself.

Jesus Christ.

Anyway, this is it. Epilogue goes up next week, hopefully.

Until next time, everyone.

[anishankit]

Hearing X3 Review

Hearing X3 Review

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What Is Hearing X3?

Zenith Labs Hearing X3 is a healthy dietary supplement that provides a unique solution for all hearing-impaired people. Hearing loss is a usual problem that can affect anyone, regardless of age or condition. The causes of hearing loss can vary that includes constant noise, head injuries, and aging. This is the latest treatment in which you can hear all types of losses.

 How Does Hearing X3 Works?

Hearing X3 supplement is intended to help avoid future hearing misfortune. It contains various nutrients and minerals that reestablish bloodstream to the cochlea and the minor hairs that are on it. In reality, this herb could bolster certain proteins that could give a medicinal effect to your body to empower it to recover speedier from oxidative mischief. Hearing X3 will support your ears to get the supply of oxidized blood. This will protect you shield us from the bad bacteria. So that you can enhance your hearing aid.

Benefits 

Zenith Labs Hearing X3 provides natural protection against biological inflammation. Also, reduces CoX-2 protein, oxidation damage, and poor circulation.

The ingredients contain strong nutrients that protect the hair cells in the inner ear. Thus it provides a good opportunity to avoid hearing loss in the future.

Get powerful antioxidants that can help protect brain tissue and reduce cell death from oxygen deficiency.

Control the overproduction of homo-cysteine in inflammatory chemicals and maintain the internal health of the vessels.

This is better protected against possible degradation. That can cause toxic and latent noise that can damage the ear ecosystem.

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It improves damaged nerves and protects your body against glutamate to prevent nerve inflammation.

This increases the production of nitrite oxide in the body to improve blood circulation.

Pros

The  Hearing X3 supplement is GMO-free and made in the United States.

Protect hair cells and help them become healthier in the process.

Increase blood flow to your cochlea and inner ear hair cells.

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Recommended daily dose of 1 capsule.

Hearing X3 contains several vitamins and minerals that have to prove to help your overall health.

Cons 

Without an internet connection, you are not able to buy Hearing X3 product, because it is available online only.

Conclusion

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