#the start of this year was. kinda rough

[greens-multiverse]

[hi! i’m mitzi, and i can’t draw, so instead of making mads or animatics or whatever when i get a blorbo song stuck in my head i write really pretentious songfic. this particular one is something i’ve had cooking in the back of my head for years, about the end of tpp anniversary crystal, and azure chasing OLDEN through the depths of reality. around - the end of last year, criminy, life’s really been happening a lot lately - i started rambling about the fossil gods on the tpp lorecord, which segued into rambling about amber, which segued into rambling about OLDEN, which segued into this. i’ve been working on this post since march, bird jesus save us all. check my ‘mitzi writing’ tag for the previous rambles, but they shouldn’t be strictly necessary to understand this]

[our story starts at the end of anniversary crystal, itself the end (and also the beginning, it’s complicated) of the long battle against OLDEN. the REALITY-DEVOURING GODMONSTER has been defeated (though IT isn’t quite dead yet), the voices are getting ready to leave evan, the world is slowly falling apart, but don’t worry, that’s supposed to happen, and at the tomb of the voices on top of mt silver, a meeting takes place]

[our song being ficced tonight is cosmo’s ‘the ai girl and the deep heart sea’ - specifically, the first fifty seconds of it. it’s a long way to the bottom of the ocean of reality, and this is just the first step]

you ever hear that story about the shadows on the cave wall? like, some people were locked up underground, chained in place, unable to even move, for their entire lives. in front of them was a blank cave wall, and behind them was a blazing fire. between them and the fire, sometimes, would pass... things. people, animals, objects, moving behind the prisoners where they couldn't be seen all the prisoners could see were the shadows projected on the wall in front of them. that was all they knew of reality it's a metaphor, like. just as the prisoners see only the shadows and not the objects that cast them, so the world we know is just a distorted reflection of the true reality beneath. beyond this transient, illusory physical world, the philosophers say, lie the forms and concepts that create it, abstract and eternal. reality as we perceive it is just a flimsy crust over the true nature of the universe now, that's not entirely true. just because our world is a product of the deeper structures of reality doesn't make any less real. every part of the universe, from the most distant depths of the substructure to the soaring peaks of the noos, exists just as much as every other part. still, the philosophers do have the right idea. beneath our reality lies concepts, and beneath those concepts lie mathematics, and beneath that... well, it gets hard to describe the substructure in human language past that point. but it continues down, for many, many more layers. if the shadows on the wall are cast by objects, then those objects are themselves shadows, as are the things they are shadows of in turn. really, the allegory of the cave breaks down too quickly to be that useful. a better metaphor might be... the world we know is just the surface of an endless black sea

0. the surface a short conversation beneath a black sky

at the top of the mountain, among the ruins of the tomb, she sits. once upon a time the icy biting wind might have bothered her, but she's weathered far worse. she tosses snowflakes between her gloved fingers, and waits

above her, the phantom stars are slowly fading away. next will be the sky, and after that -

"hey!"

he strides through the rubble, limbs passing straight through solid stone. in his eyes is a light from beyond the world, but around them is still a lenseless pair of glasses. he talks as he walks, Voice perfectly pitched to catch her attention. "i've been looking for you everywhere! what're you up to?"

she glances at him, and then back to the sky. "waiting for the end"

he sighs, a little wistfully. "yeah. it'll all be over soon." he finds his own spot to sit in the ruins, and for a moment, they watch the stars blink out together. then he hrmmms. "actually"

it always has to be business with him, doesn't it. "what do you want now," she groans, more tired than anything else

"oh, nothing, if you don't want to get involved!" he shakes his head so hard his neck almost twists. "I just thought you might be interested, and you could -"

she groans again, more irritably. "get to the point already"

"right, right." he exhales, adjusts his empty glasses. "OLDEN"

he stands up and starts pacing in a circle, hands flying through gestures she doesn't even try to interpret. "see, IT's not - the Voices injured IT pretty badly, but IT's still existing. IT's fled into..." he slows down, furrowing his brow. "...I'm just going to call it the substructure of reality for now, we really don't have time for the full explanation. the fossil gods are going to chase IT down and finish IT off, once and for all. I’m coming along, as..." another furrow. "sort of a focus? anyway"

he stops and turns to face her again. "we wanted to know if you were coming too"

she - pauses, just for a second. then she narrows her eyes. "why would I?"

neither of them so much as glances at the back of her right hand. what point would there be in alluding to things they're both all too familiar with?

instead, he starts gesticulating even more wildly. "because you could help, most of all! you're better at navigating the haze than I ever was, you must know a thousand shortcuts we can use to catch up with IT. it'd be a good idea to have someone who isn't plugged into the heart of the universe along in general, just in case IT throws up an anti-reality barrier or an outsider-sifting net or something like that. and..."

he trails off. then he nods his head, just once, and looks her right in the eyes. "and there's a chance - just a chance, I don't even know how we'd do it - that we could save him." he shuts his eyes. "it's probably the last one we'll ever get"

the words hang in the air. he is silent, she is silent, the stars vanish, one by one. finally, she lets out a long, slow breath. "alright"

"all..." his face lights up again. "yes! great! cool! thank you, Azure"

there's maybe a slightly fond twist to her mouth. "let's just get going, Abe"

"yeah, we probably should. if you just..." he tilts his head like he's listening to something, and then nods. "just take my hand"

he holds out his. it's already tinted purple, its borders beginning to fuzz into incoherence like every other object around them - except the clear, sharp outline of the one she extends to grasp it. their palms touch and their fingers lock -

and they plunge beneath the surface of reality

deep, deep down in a sea of possibility

in blackness so far down no hint of form ever pierces it

a single IDEA coalesced in bright white

the world blocked out by the haze of ITs tears

[front-facing-pokemon]

[mochasucculent]

Yea idk how I haven't shared them here yet but here's some doodles of Tabitha and "Apathy" (she ain't got a name yet), the two protags of my ghost story!

Grieving after the sudden loss of her grandmother, Apathy accidentally becomes bound to the spirit of Tabitha, a young girl who was murdered in the 1870s. Stuck together in unfamiliar circumstances, the two must discover how to send Tabitha on to the afterlife, and if they even can.

UPDATEEEEEEEEE Apathy's name is Naomi :)

[alluralater]

i bet i’m in a coma and all of you are just projections of the things i hear in the hallway outside my room

[hiddencarpet]

Please do not lick cacti

*id in alt*

featuring oc commander Kamon. (any pronouns)

[invaders-gaming]

Mannnnn I started thinking about dragalia lost and I wish it was just a game you could buy i absolutely loved it and never even got to actually finish the story the characters were fun the story was good gameplay was even fun for me

It's to bad it ended service it feels like a lot of stories got cut short I don't even remember when service ended it feels like its been a long time

[official-rugi]

My new job has kept me busy, so I dont get to make art as often as I like DX BUT I am working on a couple lil things for pride > w O

[bloomingbluebell]

me, who started uni thinking i was entirely neurotypical and able-bodied but just lazy: i'm a failure for how long it's taking me to finish this degree. i'm a failure for being unable to get a job while i do so, much less handle it while i study. i don't deserve to take a semester off, i need to be doing something. i need to be able to support myself somehow. i'm failing at life

random voice in my head: you're not even 25 yet. most of your classmates are the same age as you. you can only handle so much and the threshold is much lower for you than for an able-bodied and -minded person. everyone deserves a break and should be able to take one without consequence and it's a shame that you don't feel you deserve it. the milestones you're worried about aren't real and even the one deadline you're worried about is 4 years in the future and your advisor told you not to worry about it anyways. deep breaths. it'll be alright.

[persephonaae]

Helloooooo everyone hi, so as you may or may not know I'm trying to get things together to start offering art commissions because I'm facing a lot of pressure to earn more money for my family, but while I'm trying to sort all that out and have better examples of my digital art (and tbh wanna save up for a good art scanner so I can better do half my work traditionally and half digitally) but anywho yes while I'm sorting all that out I was wondering if it would be worthwhile setting up a ko-fi just to get some passive tips and hopefully alleviate some of the stress I'm feeling from family stuff. So below I'll just have a poll of some different stuff, I really wanna gauge where my followers are at with such things

And of course I'd love feedback in the replies!

[sorenlionheart]

i am dangerously close to making my own interpretation of superman

[jupiterjunebug]

i am seeing some people who uh. i dont think realize that takeshita is not a new japan talent.

at least i assume. that is why we are saying "tony khan should do the right thing and let takeshita have the belt off moxley at double or nothing". Because the alternative is thinking that the right thing to do to rectify an aew talent defending the main new japan belt in america is to...........drop it to a guy who is from a third promotion on a ppv that new japan has NOTHING to do with? Just because that man is um? Japanese?

[skrunksthatwunk]

gritting my teeth so hard sparks fly out why is it so hard to ask people to sit down and watch something you like with you

[disposal-blueeee]

a bunch of chapter 20/21 scri stuff

[latin-dr-robotnik]

I'm at this point in my 20s I just log into Tumblr to reblog cool fanart or vent a bit, usually both at the same time.

[syn4k]

Hello! You said in your pinned post that we can ask about your inner world. I don't know a whole lot about how that works, but I know inner worlds can be very different, and I was wondering what yours is like.

you can indeed! i was wondering when someone was gonna take us up on that offer. not gonna go into too much detail here for privacy reasons but ok you know how in a lot of mcyt fics the setting is still minecraft but it's this weird half-realism version of minecraft with a lot of the same mechanics and dimensions and monsters and magic systems and stuff? it's like that, but there's also an entire expanded multiverse and a few pantheons floating around

currently, there are several dozen people living in the village immediately surrounding front (where people can come up and talk to people outside the system and even control the body for a bit if they want. we call this "piloting" because it is incredibly similar to having a robot mech like in evangelion i've never seen evangelion), although most of them keep to themselves and come up here quite rarely. i say "people" quite lightly here- there's a lot of nonhumans, including the two permafronters (me [Ray] and Lance)!

it's pretty chill actually. we get a lot of people who wander in and out looking for a place to stay the night or who are escaping rough places. not all of them have clearly defined sources, but those who do 99% of the time come from within headspace itself, because for some reason our brain saw every mcyt we've ever been fixated on and went "what if i ran that through the autism filter and then made it an actual place that you can visit up here" and then did that. this applies to the multiverses as well which means that at any given time there are at least two Pixlriffses and three Xisumas living in the same general area, to name a few (they all find the situation hilarious and get along great).

there's never really a dull moment because after two years of "hey wait a minute there's more people in my me", a lot of inside jokes and silly rivalries have formed. there's also a fully recognized pantheon of deities for the main universe (the one where front is physically located) alone, but that's a whole nother bag of rats

but yeah. headspace my beloved <3

[gardenerian]

me: i am a little mel made of pure love today, the world is so gorgeous and i am so happy to be here.

me: *thinks about HOS in the year 2023*

me: nope. evil.