#working out some preliminary theories

[unlockedcuriositydoor]

Karen being Alice Creel makes it all unthinkably tragic - does this mean Mike will blame himself for what has happened to Will? If a great deal of Vecna's plan comes down to vengeance upon the family that abandoned his young self, then targeting Mike by targeting Will, the most special person to Mike, was of course just the beginning.

But I do think Will was targeted for something intrinsic to Will himself, as well. The connection between Mike and Will and what harm may come to them because of it is worth a hundred posts, but I'll try to keep this first one brief.

I think of Karen and Mike's reunion at the end of season 4. The first thing she told him was not that she was relieved and happy to see him, but that he was "never going on vacation again." No college either - "you are staying right here," she insisted. Right here, in this fucked up, broken town? Why? Perhaps there is something about Mike's presence in Hawkins that keeps Vecna in check, so to speak. And perhaps this applies to all of the Wheelers, not only Mike. I think, though, that Mike is the key to all of this. Throughout season 4, we see Mike physically and psychically drained. Perhaps Vecna is siphoning energy from him. As Vecna gains strength, Mike loses it. By the end of season 4, Vecna is badly hurt and down for the count - and it's only then that Mike gathers the strength and conviction to reach across the divide and make physical contact with Will.

Vecna targeted another physically drained person - Chrissy, who had an eating disorder.

Mike's trip to California may have well been the first time Mike ever left Hawkins. Maybe, if Nancy had left too, things would've gotten even worse in Hawkins. Vecna chose her to hit with a blast of True Sight for a reason.

This may explain why Karen conducts a life she does not find fulfilling - she considers it a duty to carry out. Something of both real world and supernatural consequence.

[my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction]

Infected

Miguel O'Hara X F!Reader • Rating: 18+ pals Masterlist• ao3• want to be tagged? | request info

Summary: An accident at one of Alchemax’s labs has led to Miguel being briefly contaminated with cA1m - a prototype drug that is meant to calm animals. However it seems to have a very different effect in humans.

A/N: A massive thank you to @midgardian-witch for reading the beginning of this (catching a hilarious typo), making some excellent suggestions,  and reassuring me that I hadn’t just lost my mind completely (yet).

Reader doesn’t know Miguel’s spiderman.

Warnings: dubious consent - it’s basically a sex pollen fic, blood, hair pulling (can I write a fic without an Oscar Isaac character getting their hair pulled?), so much cum, hand job, oral (both m and f receiving), things get a little rough, face fucking, cum eating, biting, scratching, p in v sex, typos, please let me know if I’ve missed a warning!

Word Count: 5433

________________________________

“It’s mainly preliminary.” You said with a smile. “You weren’t in the room, but the filtration system links four of the labs.” 

You check over Miguel’s notes, so far, he didn’t have any symptoms. 

There had been an ‘accident’ in Lab B2, an accident that was being rapidly looked into. Lab B1, and B4 had been empty, but Miguel had been in B3. 

Miguel was currently in a rapidly repurposed testing room, sitting on the bed with his shirt rolled up his forearms. His specific request for somewhere with reinforced walls, doors and windows had been… unusual. But he was a big guy, couldn’t hurt to be too careful. 

“How are the others doing?” He asked with a slightly raised eyebrow. 

“Okay,” you nodded. There had been eight people in Lab B2 when the container had broken. Two people, like Miguel, weren’t showing any symptoms. 

The chemical compound, nicknamed cA1m, while liquid in its storage unit, turned to a gas at above zero degrees. Luckily it also denatured quickly, and there was a good chance that those who still weren’t showing symptoms were unaffected. 

The chemical’s intention was for a more humane way to calm wild animals and livestock during veterinary checks. That way the animal in question didn’t need potentially dangerous anaesthetic for basic to mild level medical care. 

It also wore off in 24 hours. 

However, it still needed some work. And while early tests had gone well, apparently it did not have the desired effect in humans. 

Four of the six infected had gone feral, absolutely crazy with rage, trying to kill and destroy everything and everyone within their reach. 

Luckily no one had been severely injured before they had been tranquilised. 

The other two were different, they had… other urges. 

“Have you found any links as to why Doctor Guerrero and Doctor Vaughan didn’t react like the others?” Miguel asks. His voice was calm and controlled, like it always was. Politely interested, like he was listening to a presentation about your latest control data. 

“Well, I have an idea. Though I haven’t fully proven it yet.” 

He tilted his head to the side in a silent question. The action was endearing, it made your heart flutter and heat rise to your skin. And you hated it so, so much. 

You smiled quickly and looked down, trying to cover the fact you’d been staring at him for a second too long. 

“So,” you continued, drawing the word out a little to give you a pause of breathing room. “Both Guerrero and Vaughan are in relationships, both of them wanted to,” you pause for a moment, trying to find the most professional way to phrase it. “get to their partners. Unlike the others they also had a massively increased level of oxytocin.” 

“Your theory is that that cA1m causes a berserk level of rage unless the subject is in love?” There was the smallest smirk on his lips.

It sounded stupid when he put it like that. 

“Well… yes.” You fold your arms. “Look, Miguel,” he grinned when you said his name and you fought, and lost, the urge to smile back. “I’ve had fourteen hours and six people to base this off, plus three who are showing no symptoms. Give me a break, yeah?” 

He held up his hands playfully. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You gave me a look.”

“What look?” He teased. 

“I know you want to be trying to figure this out yourself, but you’re the one who insisted on not being allowed any breakable, or expensive, equipment while you’re in here.” 

He smiled. “It’s true.” His gaze was heavy, crushing almost. 

You shook your head and turned to the side table. “Anyway, are you gonna let me draw some blood or what?” 

He nodded and held his arm out to you. 

You know why you had been ‘nominated’ (begged) to be the one to see Miguel. He wasn’t the easiest CEO to work for in the sense that he was both physically and mentally intimidating, but what usually threw most people was that he was quiet, tended to watch and listen. 

And he had a bit of resting bitch face.  

But he was actually pretty pleasant to talk to when you got to know him. 

You brushed your arm against his as you moved to get your equipment. Miguel audibly gasped. 

A flash of worry pinched at your mind, you turned to look at him. “You okay?” 

Miguel nodded; he was staring straight ahead at the wall. Obviously in distress.

“Miguel?” This wasn’t the same as those who had suddenly developed into a full-blown rage, but still you couldn’t help the sense of apprehension that crawled along your skin. You glanced at the sedative on the side table and shook your head.

“Miguel?” You spoke again, a little softer and moved a step closer towards him. 

He shuddered at your voice, screwing his eyes up tightly. Sweat was beading on his forehead, heat rolling off him in waves.

“Miguel, I’m gonna-”

He moved faster than you could comprehend, one second he was sitting on the bed and the next he was looming over you, his hands clenched tightly around your biceps, and forcing you back.

You yelped as he pressed you into the wall, grabbing hold of his forearms. 

His eyes were dark and wild, brimming with a terrifying energy.

“Miguel, wh-”

He crashed his lips into yours, swallowing down your words and slipping his tongue into your mouth frantically. It took you a fragment of a second to react, surprise freezing your limbs solid. 

Miguel took your delay to his advantage, pushing his knee between your legs and pressing close. Not leaving a fraction of space between you as he devoured your mouth. Stealing your breath and igniting heat along your veins. 

“Miguel,” you managed to push him back, the heels of your hands in his chest. This was the cA1m affecting him, it was the only explanation. Maybe the filtration system had diluted the chemical and caused a delayed reaction. “You need to-”

He snarled, his eyes pinpoint focused on you as he leaned forward and kissed you, hard. All tongue and sharp teeth as he wrapped his fingers around the back of your neck and gripped your thigh bruisingly tight, hitching it high on his hip. 

You’d had dreams like this, fantasies, where he pinned you to the wall and kissed you until you couldn’t breathe. But you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t take advantage of him like this- 

There was a sharp pinch of pain as Miguel sank his teeth into your bottom lip. You let out a small squeak of surprise, pulling away from him. And raised your hand to your mouth, your fingers coming back red. 

Miguel, however, seemed unphased as he trailed kisses along your neck, smearing your blood along your skin. He ground his hips into yours, rocking back and forth and- oh god, he was big, just like the rest of him. 

“Miguel, you need to,” you swallowed down a whimper as he sucked at your pulse point, just managing to resist the urge to hold him closer, to run your hands through his hair. “It’s the cA1m, you’re not thinking straight.”

He murmured something into your neck, his mouth not leaving your skin far enough for the words to be intelligible. 

“Miguel-” You gasped as he nipped at your throat, not enough to break the skin this time. 

Heat was burning from his skin, scorching into your body like you were too close to a flame. 

You grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back a fraction too forcefully. You thought the brief pain might snap him out of it, give him a second of clarity. But as his chin tilted upwards, exposing his neck, he let out a long groan, his eyes squeezed shut. 

It went straight to your core, your thighs clenching at the sound. 

“Need you so bad, shit,” he rocked against you harder, pressing his length right up against your centre. “Always need you, you don’t understand,” he moaned and buried his head back into your neck, despite your grip on his hair, and sucked a love bite into your skin.

This time you couldn’t resist the urge. You sunk your fingers deeper, scratching your nails along his scalp and pulled him closer, pushing his face in your neck.

Miguel groaned appreciatively, digging his sharp nails into your shoulders. He nipped just below your ear, the keen, yet sweet little sting of pain blended with the slow and steady roll of his hips was simply tortuous. Almost enough to make you lose all common sense. 

Almost. 

You couldn’t do this, you couldn’t do this, you just couldn’t do this. 

“Miguel-”

He whined as you said his name. 

And you had to bite your lips together in order to hold onto your fading self respect. 

“On the table,” you swallowed, trying to get your words out quickly, “there’s a sedative. It’ll help, it’ll-”

“You’ll help, being near you helps.” He mumbles, the words barely audible. He snakes his fingers along your ribs, just teasing the hem of your shirt.

“We just need to-oh!”

Miguel grabs hold of your shirt and pulls, ripping it open, buttons pinging off and going flying. Honestly, there’s less resistance from the material than you expected.

And then he's everywhere, his face buried in your chest, kissing the tops of your breasts as his fingers pinch at your nipples through the thin fabric of your bra. 

You can't stop the moan of surprise that escapes your lips as you arch into his touch. 

You had to stop this, now. Before he did something you'd very much enjoy and he'd very much regret. 

"Fuck," you hiss under your breath and act quickly, trying not to overthink and get yourself caught up. 

Maybe if he… had some relief you could grab the sedative in the afterglow. Hell, maybe he wouldn't even need the sedative if he came once. 

Before you can lose your nerve you quickly unbuckled his trousers and managed to squeeze your hand under the material despite Miguel's frenzied mind trying to keep the physical space separating you both to a minimum. 

He gasps as you touch him, letting out a choked sob that your brain was already committing to memory and filing under 'for use later'. 

The velvety soft skin was rock hard and burning hot against your hand. So big that you couldn't even get your fingers fully round his girth. 

"Please." He muttered, pressing his forehead against yours, his hands resting tightly on your waist. 

His eyes were screwed shut, his mouth slightly open and when you moved your hand, the smallest upwards movement. He let out the sweetest sigh. 

You bite your lip and wince as you catch the broken skin, but it doesn’t stop you from tracing your thumb over the tip of him, smearing precome along the head. You were trying to be quick, methodical, clinical, as you began to stroke him, setting an even pace. This was just a problem to solve. You should not be enjoying this. 

But every glide of your hand, every touch, made Miguel gasp and moan as if it was the first time he’d ever experienced such sensations, made him bite his lip with his sharp (had they always been that sharp?) teeth, and it was intoxicating. 

He pistoned his hips into your touch, thrusting faster and faster, and practically growling as he grew closer to his release. 

You couldn’t help but watch him, enraptured, as heat pooled in your lower stomach, your own need growing. But this wasn’t about you. 

Still, you couldn’t help yourself rocking back and forth against his leg ever so slightly to just take the edge off. 

Miguel grunted, his eyes rolling back in his head, and there was a sharp pinch of pain as he tightened his grip on your waist, his nails digging in much harder than they surely should have been able to.

He swore under his breath as he cums, twitching under your touch, and coating your hand and stomach with his release. 

There’s so much of it, far more than there should be as he cums and cums, gasping for air. Another side effect of the cA1m - perhaps you’d be annoyed as his release soaks into your ruined shirt if the sight of him reaching his peak wasn’t exhilarating. 

You let go of him quickly, managing to disentangle yourself from him, despite Miguel low, exhausted whine of protest. 

God, how were you going to get a new shirt without running into someone? And, you realised, probably a new pair of trousers too. Miguel’s spend had run down and soaked into the left side. 

You grabbed the sedative from the side table. Your mind already racing, it wasn’t Miguel’s fault but would he remember? Would he be awkward with you now? Would your little chats and jokes stop? You swallowed down a pang of fear and turned. Now wasn’t the time for what ifs you-

Miguel grabbed your arms and you squeaked in surprise. How could he move so silently? His eyes were dark, hooded with lust, his trousers just hanging from his hips and… well, obviously so much for the idea that him cumming once would be enough. 

“I need you.” He growled, his voice so low that you almost felt light headed. “I know you want me too, I can smell it.” He leaned forward scraping his teeth over your pulse point, and for a shameful moment you let yourself get caught up again, allowed yourself to revel in the sensation for the smallest second. 

While he was distracted you pushed the needle into his upper arm, through his shirt, and injected the sedative. 

It shouldn't take long. 

He growled, pulling his mouth away from your neck to stare dangerously into your eyes. 

You swallowed. A spike of fear dug into the base of your skull, some ancient urge telling you to run. 

“It’s okay,” you said soothingly, unsure if you were really talking to Miguel or yourself. “It’s just the sedative.” You pulled the needle out of his arm. “You’ll be fine, let’s lay you down so-”

He kissed you hungrily, harsh and demanding as he forced his tongue into your mouth. 

You allowed yourself to kiss him back the smallest amount as you waited for the sedative to work. 

And waited… And waited…

Oh, no, just no, this wasn’t right, this couldn’t be right. There was more than enough in the injection to knock him out and yet he didn’t show any signs of slowing down. 

Okay, so, this definitely wasn’t how it went with the others. 

You side step, trying to twist past him and break his hold all in one movement. Maybe you could get to the door, maybe you could do… something. Your mind raced, there had to be a way to fix this, to help him, to be useful. 

The side step didn’t work, Miguel’s grip was too tight, and you stumbled, skidding around and to your knees. The edge of the bed thumped into your back. 

You gasp, gulp and stare up at him. That spike of fear dragging itself down your spine. 

He growls and moves closer, his length bobbing and perfectly at your eye level. His gaze is dark and desperate, his bottom lip pinched between his teeth. You could see his pulse thundering in his neck, echoing along the length of his dick. 

Rapid heartbeat was one of the side effects all the others had experienced, the sedative being the only thing that had managed to return it to a normaler level. 

Maybe there was only one way you could be useful. 

Miguel shifts his weight, preparing to move, but you lean forward first and run your tongue along the length of him. 

A deep moan rumbles in his chest as you touch him, a gasp of breath. The sound floods heat to your core. 

You wrap your lips around the tip, grabbing hold of his hips to pull him closer as you swallow as much of him as you can. You bob your head, encouraging him to move with you and there is a moment where you can feel the tension in his muscles, the strain in his thighs as he tries to hold back, to keep himself in check. 

It doesn’t last long. 

He snarls and thrusts forward, snapping his hips and nearly choking you. You splutter, trying to breathe through your nose but Miguel doesn’t give you a second to recover. He pushes forward, the back of your head slamming against the edge of the bed as he plunges deeper and deeper into your mouth, hitting the back of your throat with ease and still not even half way in. 

Your grip on his hips tightens and you don’t know if you’re trying to pull him away or urging him on. 

It burns, the size of him makes your jaw ache, tears roll down the sides of your cheeks from the force of his relentless thrusts. 

His hands dig into the mattress by the side of you head, tearing into the fabric as he pounds into you, fucking your mouth with everything he’s got. 

He groans, “yes, baby, yes,” his voice low and barely distinguishable as words. 

You do your best to just hold on, to breathe and take as much as you can. The sounds of his moans filling your ears and mind, and god, how you wished you didn’t have a gag reflex and could take him deeper. 

He keeps ramming into your mouth, snapping his hips against you with a frenzied energy and you push against his lower back, silently begging him to keep going. 

Your neck throbs from discomfort, bruising forming where the skin is repeatedly hitting against the hard outline of the bed frame. Your knees burn from where they continuously rub against the floor with every buck and thrust. 

Miguel lets out a short, animalistic cry as he cums down your throat suddenly. You moan against him, trying to swallow all of it but there’s just so, so much. It spills out of the side of your mouth and down your chin despite your best efforts.

He leans forward, breathing hard, his cock still in your mouth. And for a second you think this is it, the sedative will take hold or maybe this mindless lust has come to an end. 

But he’s still hard when he pulls himself out of your mouth, his eyes still glazed over with the same madness when he looks down at you. He runs his hand over your chin, the pads of his fingers slightly sharp, and collects some of his spend that hasn’t trickled down your neck and onto your torn shirt and bra. Another item of clothing you’d need to change. 

He smears his cum along your cheek, the movement possessive, like he was marking his territory. 

There’s a pause, the lull in the eye of the storm before he pulls you up from the ground with a shocking display of strength, moving as if you were no heavier than a glass of water he was eager to drink down. 

You can’t help the little yelp of surprise that escapes you as he practically throws you onto the bed, your back hitting the mattress and momentarily knocking the air out of your lungs.

But then he’s on top of you, pressing himself firmly between your legs as he growls and snaps his teeth close to your neck. He bites at your throat, hard enough to break the skin and you cry out as the pain quickly disappears into pleasure. 

Your mewls only make his actions more frenzied as he tears your clothes completely off you with a speed that makes your head spin, before removing his own. The material rips so easily, as if he used a blade. 

He runs his tongue along your chest, messily cleaning up the cum he’d spilt along you just moments before. 

“Miguel-” You try to start, but then his mouth is back on yours, tasting like salt and iron as he drinks down your words to leave you breathless. 

You gasp as he breaks away, trailing sloppy kisses down your body, his fingers running over your skin and leaving scratches. He bites your hip partially deeply and you keen, arching up into him as he moans. 

“Your so fucking sweet.” He mutters before kissing lower and lower and, oh god. You nearly scream as his lips wrap around your clit and he sucks hard. Pleasure coils tight in your belly as a new wave of wetness leaks out and soaks into the torn up sheets beneath you. 

His fingers dig into your thighs as he pushes his face into you, only breaking away so that he can lick through your folds hungrily, devouring you like a starving animal. 

“Miguel!” You whine, letting out a series of high pitch moans that sound alien even to your own ears. 

He sucks your clit once more, his teeth just grazing across it before he snarls and pulls away, pushing the back of your thighs and pressing them against your chest with a crushing strength. 

You struggle to take a breath, barely filling your lungs before he’s thrusting into you with a guttural groan and a sharp snap of his hips. 

The size of him hurts, it’s too much, too fast and you gasp in pain. You clench your jaw, your eyes screwing up as your hands fly to his shoulders, trying to push him back even though you know it’s no use against his strength. 

But he stops instantly, stilling his movements. 

You stare up at him in surprise. His eyes are still dark but there’s something else there, something pushing through that lust haze. 

“Pain?” He whispers, sounding the most like his old self that he has since this ordeal began.

You swallow and nod, tears building at the corners of your eyes. 

He slowly loosens his grip around your thighs, letting go shakily as if it is taking a lot of self control to do so. And while he doesn’t pull out, he doesn’t thrust in deeper either. 

Carefully, he manoeuvres your legs down onto the bed either side of him, watching your face for any sign of increased discomfort. It’s only then that he looks down to where you’re joined, completely split open with only a quarter of his length inside. 

He groans lows and you brace yourself for a brutal thrust that never comes. Instead he keeps his hips still as he slowly trails his sharp nails down your stomach, teasing the very edge of your clit before pressing his thumb against it fully. 

A small moan escapes you and you clench down instinctively. Miguel hums in approval and starts to slowly circle the bundle of nerves, the touch light and soft as he just borders on the edge of losing control. 

The pain starts to dissipate quickly, replaced with a steady continuous build of that deep need from before. You start to squirm. The pressure of his thumb isn’t enough and you rock your hips ever so slightly, your breathing hitching in your throat. 

"More?" He whispers.

You nod your head rapidly. 

“Thank god.” Miguel sighs, the words mumbled like a prayer almost too quietly for you to hear, and lets some of his weakening control slip. 

Slowly he pushes further in, the tension shaking in his thighs as he fights with every instinct to pound you into the mattress and turn you into a crying mess beneath him. 

He keeps circling your clit, groaning as feels a fresh wave of wetness leaking out of you. 

You moan, grabbing hold of his shoulders. But this time you pull him towards you, urging him deeper. God, he’s big. Already it’s like you can feel him in your throat. 

The stretch burns, but it’s good, it feels right. Like he is going to reach a whole new devastating part of you. Make you cum so hard that he’ll ruin any other sexual partner for good.

You hook your left leg on his hip and squeeze your calf over his lower back, encouraging him closer, deeper. While you plant your right foot firmly against the bed to rock up against him. 

Miguel groans, his eyes closed. His movements on your clit falter as he slides further in. 

There’s a sharp pain in your hip where his left hand holds you tight,  his nails (it had to be his nails) dug in so deep that they broke your skin. 

You let out a soft whine, clenching around his girth as he presses up against you perfectly and still pushes further in. The pleasure in your stomach tightening and starting to completely overwhelm all other thoughts, urging you to just chase your release. 

Tears prick again at the corners of your eyes, a soft emotion beating hard in your chest. And you can’t help yourself, you grab hold of the back of Miguel’s neck, pulling him down towards you and arching up at the same time to kiss him hungrily. 

He moans into your mouth, pushing back against you and forcing you into the mattress. His hips snap forward, finally sheathing himself completely in your tight, wet heat. 

For a moment it’s like you can’t breathe, so completely full that not even air can enter. 

Miguel stills, giving you a moment to adjust as he licks into your mouth and groans as your walls squeeze around his length. His pubis bone presses firmly against your clit, and you can feel the echo of his racing heart beat along his skin. 

He breaks the kiss to breathe hard, his eyes closed and forehead pressed against yours. “I can’t… I need to…”

“Please,” you answer desperately, kissing him softly as you start to rock your hips ever so slightly. 

Miguel lets out a whine, his eyebrows pinched together in bliss and the expression alone is nearly enough to make you cum on the spot. 

“Can’t stop,” he mutters and you're not even sure if he’s aware of what he’s saying anymore as he grabs your wrists in either of his hands and pins them to the bed. “Feels so…” He ruts into you, pulling out so that just the tip of his cock stays inside before slamming back into you. “Fuck. So. Fucking. Tight.”

You wail under him as pleasure runs up your spine and down your legs as he punctuates every thrust with an upwards rock of his hips, continuously rubbing against your clit and pressing the head of his length to that perfect spot inside. 

“So. Fucking. Wet.” He growls. His nails are slicing into your wrists, but you don’t care. Can’t care, you’ve lost all ability to feel anything but the glide of his cock and the heady build of your orgasm. 

“So. Mine.” He growls and bites down hard on your neck. You cry out, the brutal pace of his hips only increasing, bringing you closer and closer and-

You gasp, his name catching in your throat as you finally cum. Every muscle shaking as it crashes over you in waves. 

Miguel tears his mouth away from your neck, blood shining on his lips as he watches you come undone. He moans, his thrusts not faltering for a second. 

“That’s it, cum all over me,” he glances down for a moment watching himself disappearing into you, amazed at how well you’re taking him, how tightly your walls are griping him, trying to milk him for all he’s worth. “Squeezing me so tight, oh shit-” 

He cums loudly, still pistoning in and out of you as he fills you up with his release. There’s still so much of it, some leaks out, spilling out of your abused hole and sticking to your thighs. 

You breathe deeply, your mind foggy from how hard you came. Your legs ache from being stretched so wide, your pussy throbs from overstimulation. 

Miguel doesn’t stop, still rock hard and trusting. Pushing his cum deeper into you. 

“Miguel,” you whine, your throat raw. 

“I can’t-” he bites his lip, “I can’t stop, I need to, fuck, please, I need to-”

You kiss his neck, biting harder than you normally would at his jugular. He whines, the sound going straight to your core. Heat starts to build again.

“Keep going,” you mutter against his skin. “Keep going as long as you need to.” 

.

You wake up sore and sticky. Aching and in pain. Even the slightest movement brings out an array of discomfort. Every muscle throbs, like you had done a year's worth of exercise in one day, and all the bites and scratches sting as you shift, the scrapes making you feel like someone had tossed you naked into a bush of brambles and thorns. 

It takes you a moment to remember where you are, the tiredness in your bones trying to coax you back to sleep. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Miguel’s voice makes you jump. He’s still close to you, laying on his side with his chest pressed up against your back. One arm around your waist. There’s tension there, you know he wants to move away but is scared to move at the same time. 

His cock is pressed against your backside, soft and sated. 

You turn to look at him, too tired to worry about your nakedness. Besides, he had seen plenty of it anyway.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” 

He scoffs. His mouth pressed into a thin line as he looks down. 

It’s only then as you turn around completely to look at him that you see tears in his eyes. “Miguel?” 

You softly touch his cheek but he flinches away from you. The action spikes through your heart. He can’t even look at you now. 

“I’ve got everything to be sorry for, I, I took advantage of you, I rap-”

“No, no, no, no,” you can’t help but touch him again, putting your hand back on his cheek and rubbing your thumb soothingly across his skin. 

This time he leans into it, letting out the smallest, shaky breath. 

“You were infected, Miguel, you couldn’t control yourself. I don’t know how much you remember but the sedative didn’t work, and your heart rate was just, I mean, it was crazy high. And, if anything, I was the one that took advantage of you and-”

His eyes snap open. “You? You took advantage of me?” He says disbelievingly. “Look at you.” He touches the bite marks on your neck gently. 

You give him a little smile. “I don’t mind.”

He breathes out another shaky breath, but there’s a hint of a smile. “You don’t mind?” 

You shake your head. “Happy to help.” 

He chuckles a little at that and nods as he runs a hand through his hair. 

There’s a pause, a silence that you can’t stand. 

“I guess I was wrong.”

Miguel frowns a little, confused. 

“My theory, about people having that reaction if they’re in love, I mean.” 

There’s a pause, the only sound a little gulp as Miguel swallows. Something passes over his face for a second, a faint trace of heat rising to his skin.

Oh. Maybe you weren’t wrong. 

“Miguel?”

He breathes deeply, looking down. “I-”

You don’t give him a chance to finish, letting your adrenaline overwhelm you as you quickly lean forward and press your lips to his. Hoping against hope that you weren’t misreading the situation. 

He’s caught by surprise for a moment, but moans happily and softly kisses you back as his arm wraps around you and pulls you close. 

The kiss is slow and gentle, languid and sweet. It makes your stomach drop like you were falling from a great height. His embrace the only thing keeping you safe. 

He runs his tongue over your bottom lip lightly, careful of the cuts, but licks into your mouth hungrily the second you part your lips. It’s not the same lustful need from before, this is deeper, sharper and desperate in a different way. As if after devouring your body he now needed to devour your soul. 

He kisses you again, lightly before you both pull back for a second. He grins at you, a little shyly and you smile as you stroke his cheek.  

“You weren’t wrong.” He muttered. 

You frown and shake your head, confused. 

He chuckles and kisses you again. “Your theory about love.” 

____________________________________

Thank you for reading!

@pleasurebuttonwrites @raven-rk @campingwiththecharmings @alexxavicry @mystinky-butt @cocodiem @oscarisaacsspit @whatthefishh @mbakubabe @solobagginses @romanarose @saturn-rings-writes

[odditycircus-2002]

Medusa!Reader and Shang Tsung MK 1: Part 5

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Spoilers for Story Mode: Proceed with Caution

The Imperial soldiers aren’t too gentle when they throw you into a cell; luckily, Johnny Cage’s unconscious form broke your fall. You were still blindfolded and tied up, yet you quickly picked up Baraka’s familiar grave voice. He asks what happened as he removes your gag, but you stop him from removing your blindfold by putting a hand over his. You first explain that you lost your mask, so it’s not a good idea for him to remove the blindfold yet. Then you recall what happened upstairs, although Kenshi is the one who reveals it was Mileena being treated for Tarkat. You hiss at Kenshi for disclosing such sensitive information casually. He’s lucky he’s already injured, else you’d give him a good reason to see a healer!

While understandably upset by you withholding the truth, the Tarkatan can’t find it in himself to be mad at you. You were only upholding your vows and doing your duty diligently for the Royal House.

Baraka then asks about your welfare, carefully skimming his hands over your form to check for injuries. You reply that you’re okay before asking Baraka to close his eyes so you can check over him, too. The latter insists it’s some scrapes and bruises, so there's nothing to care for; nonetheless, he complies with your request when you press. After preliminary checking on Baraka, your hands lingering around his face longer than necessary, you look over Kenshi.

However, there wasn’t much you could do for the now blind man since your apothecary bag was confiscated besides using your minimal magic to stop the bleeding. There wasn’t anything else you could do for the others besides wait for them to come to; you were able to turn your attention to the horrors right outside your prison.

You have treated soldiers during your training on the front lines without falter. You have carved open your fair share of cadavers without so much as flinching while digging around in their insides for medical studies. You had even helped dispose of your fair share of cadavers by gathering them to be burned in a pit without issue. Yet what you saw before you trumps all of that and more.

The first thing to hit you was the smell, by the gods' awful smell of death, both new and old. Which mixed with a sickly sweet smell reminiscent of mildew. It was intensified for you since you and your snakes could TASTE it on your tongues. You gagged as it threatened to be the only thing you’ll ever taste again. Then the sounds you’d only ever expect to hear from the Netherealm’s damned souls languishing in eternal torment.

Empty cages hang from the ceiling, with cells lining the walls on your side. You could see arms poking out from between the bars of these cells, desperately trying to scrape for the bloody remains all over the stone floors, which were stained with freshly spilled and hardened blood. From the position of your cell, you could see giant tubes filled with a mysterious green substance and malformed bodies obviously inflected with Tarkat. You felt bile rise in your throat from the dread filling your stomach.

You... you recognize some of the experiments from your mind. All those times you shared your theories and hypotheses with Shang Tsung... Is this all because of what you put into his head??? No! You always, ALWAYS, explicitly expressed how they would be crimes against nature! You did not create such depravity with your hands! Yet, it did nothing to alleviate the guilt already burrowing into your head.

Still, the amount of information that must've been gathered from these- NO! NO! You will not even indulge in such dark thoughts! Shang Tsung has twisted your research beyond recognition of their original intention! This whole lab shouldn't existed! After putting your blindfold back on, you desperately get to work to assist Baraka in breaking out of your prison in more ways than one.

Despite hours of effort, the bars were too thick and deeply embedded in the stone to rip apart. Kenshi eventually speaks again, asking you and Baraka to help take his mind off their current situation. You listen to the ill man retell his life before his disease, about his family and former vocation. Though you have heard it many times before, your heart broke for Baraka when he reiterated how Tarkat took his entire family. Not for the first time, you say that you would've loved to have met Baraka before his misfortune, met his family since they sound so lovely, and seen him happy. You then add how you two would've been good friends even then.

You don't see Baraka's thoughtful expression as both Johnny Cage and Kung Lao begin to regain consciousness. The first quickly remembers Kenshi's condition and rushes to check on his state. You explain to the actor that you did your best, but your apothecary bag was confiscated. Johnny and Kung Lao had understandable reactions when they realized the nightmare they'd woken up in. All your attention then turns to a lone figure entering through a heavy sliding door.

You let out a gasp as you recognize the figure to be none other than Syzoth, Shang Tsung's "assistant." You call out to him, catching the Zaterran's attention. Judging by how his eyes widened and he took a step back, he wasn't expecting you, of all people, to be down here.

The Zaterran avoids looking in your direction out of guilt; even if it was safe to make eye contact, he wouldn't be able to look you in the eye. He then turns his attention to the now blind Kenshi crouched on the stone floor and inquires about his condition. Syzoth then digs around in your apothecary bag next to your cell to pull out a jar of cream you made to dull the pain. He then hands the pot to you first, asking if this is correct. After opening it to give it a sniff, you confirmed he was right before handing it over to Johnny. Johnny offers you a pair of his shades to pay you back, citing you'll need to see. While the latter cared for his friend, you could feel Baraka's questioning gaze.

After commenting on how Syzoth is vile to be a part of Shang's schemes, he questions how you two know each other. You explain that you thought Syzoth was a lab assistant Shang brought along and a friend, the last part you add bitterly. The Zatteran looks at you and the rest in remorse before firmly stating that while you are Shang's prisoners, he is his slave. Your eyes widen behind your new sunglasses as Syzoth explains that the Sorcerer has his family hostage. While he's genuinely sorry for what Shang did to you and everything he was forced to do, he must obey Shang to keep his family alive. You felt conflicted in your sudden urge to strangle Syzoth and your sympathy for his plight. It does dawn on you that having his family hostage explains Syzoth's behavior around Shang Tsung. You weren't surprised to learn that Shang learned shapeshifting from Syzoth, as the latter has demonstrated the ability to you before.

However, you did try to warn Syzoth that, given what you know by now, Shang won't keep his word to him. Baraka assures you that you don't need to show your form if you don't feel comfortable, but you insist otherwise. That's when you removed your hood and cloak from your form to reveal the true extent of what Shang Tsung has done to you, reminding him of the day your life changed forever. The Zaterran barely swallowed his gasp in horror at the sight before him. Your entire body was covered in scales; you had a nest of living and slithering snakes atop your head; your teeth were sharpened points; you had some small spikes on your shoulders and on your forearm; you also had two bat-like wings reminiscent of a Vaternian's, flare from your back.

Shang teleports in front of you not long after revealing your new body. He glances in your direction briefly, taking in your changes with a look of interest. Baraka growls at the Sorcerer before moving in front of you as you put your hooded cloak back on. Shang scowls at the Tarkatan before happily informing the rest of your fellow prisoners of the gruesome fate that awaits them. He directly addresses you after boasting about how he can't be apprehended so easily.

"I truly did want to spare you of your fate, my sweet. Rest assured, my benefactor has told me you are still needed alive for her goals. I will be back soon, dear Y/N."

"... I hope the Netherrealm claims your soul."

After instructing Syzoth to "take care" of you, he teleports away, leaving the rest to their doom. After you and Baraka implore Syzoth that he doesn't have to obey Shang, the Zaterran glances toward you before restating that it's either you or his wife and son. When he raises your cell's gate and a cell containing dozens of Tarkatan abominations, all of you fight back. You finally put your petrifying gaze to use in combat, stopping three combinations in mid-pounce before they could pile on top of Baraka. Kung Lao watches in a mixture of horror and amazement when the three stone hybrids shatter to the ground.

After Baraka defeated some of the larger hybrids, you and Kung Lao assisted him in freeing the others who were put in electrified cells, much to Syzoth's dismay, who knew that Shang Tsung would torture his family to punish him. Before Baraka shifts his stance to fight the Zaterran, you tell him not to blame him for Shang's evil doings. Baraka acquises by not killing Syzoth, informing him that he would've done the same if he were in the Zaterran's shoes.

You go to help up your scaley friend right when Shang reappears. The Sorcerer scowled, displeased at seeing his prisoners free and his experiments killed. You and the rest stood ready to fight as Shang berated Syzoth for ruining his plans for vivisection. Seeing he's surrounded, Shang then uses his magic to release what you instantly recognize as poisonous gas. After revealing that he's killed Syzoth's family long before, Shang teleports away before the enraged reptiloid can grab him.

However, the Sorcerer quickly appears behind you, forcing your mask on your face before you bite him. However, one of your head's snakes managed to nick him on the finger. The last thing you hear before teleporting away is Baraka screaming your name.

[m---a---x]

Welcome to the premier of One-Picture-Proof!

This is either going to be the first installment of a long running series or something I will never do again. (We'll see, don't know yet.)

Like the name suggests each iteration will showcase a theorem with its proof, all in one picture. I will provide preliminaries and definitions, as well as some execises so you can test your understanding. (Answers will be provided below the break.)

The goal is to ease people with some basic knowledge in mathematics into set theory, and its categorical approach specifically. While many of the theorems in this series will apply to topos theory in general, our main interest will be the topos Set. I will assume you are aware of the notations of commutative diagrams and some terminology. You will find each post to be very information dense, don't feel discouraged if you need some time on each diagram. When you have internalized everything mentioned in this post you have completed weeks worth of study from a variety of undergrad and grad courses. Try to work through the proof arrow by arrow, try out specific examples and it will become clear in retrospect.

Please feel free to submit your solutions and ask questions, I will try to clear up missunderstandings and it will help me designing further illustrations. (Of course you can just cheat, but where's the fun in that. Noone's here to judge you!)

Preliminaries and Definitions:

B^A is the exponential object, which contains all morphisms A→B. I comes equipped with the morphism eval. : A×(B^A)→B which can be thought of as evaluating an input-morphism pair (a,f)↦f(a).

The natural isomorphism curry sends a morphism X×A→B to the morphism X→B^A that partially evaluates it. (1×A≃A)

φ is just some morphism A→B^A.

Δ is the diagonal, which maps a↦(a,a).

1 is the terminal object, you can think of it as a single-point set.

We will start out with some introductory theorem, which many of you may already be familiar with. Here it is again, so you don't have to scroll all the way up:

Exercises:

What is the statement of the theorem?

Work through the proof, follow the arrows in the diagram, understand how it is composed.

What is the more popular name for this technique?

What are some applications of it? Work through those corollaries in the diagram.

Can the theorem be modified for epimorphisms? Why or why not?

For the advanced: What is the precise requirement on the category, such that we can perform this proof?

For the advanced: Can you alter the proof to lessen this requirement?

Bonus question: Can you see the Sicko face? Can you unsee it now?

Expand to see the solutions:

Solutions:

This is Lawvere's Fixed-Point Theorem. It states that, if there is a point-surjective morphism φ:A→B^A, then every endomorphism on B has a fixed point.

Good job! Nothing else to say here.

This is most commonly known as diagonalization, though many corollaries carry their own name. Usually it is stated in its contraposition: Given a fixed-point-less endomorphism on B there is no surjective morphism A→B^A.

Most famous is certainly Cantor's Diagonalization, which introduced the technique and founded the field of set theory. For this we work in the category of sets where morphisms are functions. Let A=ℕ and B=2={0,1}. Now the function 2→2, 0↦1, 1↦0 witnesses that there can not be a surjection ℕ→2^ℕ, and thus there is more than one infinite cardinal. Similarly it is also the prototypiacal proof of incompletness arguments, such as Gödels Incompleteness Theorem when applied to a Gödel-numbering, the Halting Problem when we enumerate all programs (more generally Rice's Theorem), Russells Paradox, the Liar Paradox and Tarski's Non-Defineability of Truth when we enumerate definable formulas or Curry's Paradox which shows lambda calculus is incompatible with the implication symbol (minimal logic) as well as many many more. As in the proof for Curry's Paradox it can be used to construct a fixed-point combinator. It also is the basis for forcing but this will be discussed in detail at a later date.

If we were to replace point-surjective with epimorphism the theorem would no longer hold for general categories. (Of course in Set the epimorphisms are exactly the surjective functions.) The standard counterexample is somewhat technical and uses an epimorphism ℕ→S^ℕ in the category of compactly generated Hausdorff spaces. This either made it very obvious to you or not at all. Either way, don't linger on this for too long. (Maybe in future installments we will talk about Polish spaces, then you may want to look at this again.) If you really want to you can read more in the nLab page mentioned below.

This proof requires our category to be cartesian closed. This means that it has all finite products and gives us some "meta knowledge", called closed monoidal structure, to work with exponentials.

Yanofsky's theorem is a slight generalization. It combines our proof steps where we use the closed monoidal structure such that we only use finite products by pre-evaluating everything. But this in turn requires us to introduce a corresponding technicallity to the statement of the theorem which makes working with it much more cumbersome. So it is worth keeping in the back of your mind that it exists, but usually you want to be working with Lawvere's version.

Yes you can. No, you will never be able to look at this diagram the same way again.

We see that Lawvere's Theorem forms the foundation of foundational mathematics and logic, appears everywhere and is (imo) its most important theorem. Hence why I thought it a good pick to kick of this series.

If you want to read more, the nLab page expands on some of the only tangentially mentioned topics, but in my opinion this suprisingly beginner friendly paper by Yanofsky is the best way to read about the topic.

[mbti-notes]

Funny story, the other day I received a question about the quotation "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate". (Sorry to the person who asked because I lost track of your handle and must now post the full response here. You're about to see the journey you've sent me on.) The question was vaguely worded, so I can only assume it was requesting a source for the quotation. This struck me as odd for a couple reasons. First, the quotation is widely attributed to Jung, so it shouldn't be very difficult to find the source. When I say "widely", I mean it is not only used all over the internet, it also appears in numerous books. Second, the quotation does a great job of encapsulating a central tenet of Jung's theory, so there is nothing particularly strange or suspicious about it.

Since I'm used to academic writing and wading through research materials, I'm usually diligent about finding the original source of quotations in order to avoid misattributions. But I was lax in this case because I allowed myself to assume that such a well-known quotation must have already been checked by someone. A mistake. A preliminary search revealed that a small handful of people have doubted the attribution, but a definitive answer seemed elusive. So, I decided to take a deep dive into the literature. I searched through Jung's as well as whatever Jung-adjacent and Jung-inspired works I could get my hands on.

I was unable to find a verbatim source in Jung's own writing. However, this isn't enough for me to claim that he never said it. It's possible that it was lifted from a discussion, lecture, or interview, of which the transcripts are not readily available. Jung did write sentences that were remarkably similar to the quotation in meaning, so it's also possible that the quotation was somehow mangled or lost in translation from the original language, which makes it difficult to match up with the official English editions of his work.

I then decided to locate its earliest usage in order to piece together an origin story. The earliest date I could find was ~2006, which is a huge red flag. Books by Jung and about Jung span the entire last century, so one would expect at least a few references from earlier periods, especially throughout the 90s when psychoanalytic theory was widely referenced in a variety of academic disciplines. Of course, books before the 90s haven't all been indexed and made available to search online, so a citation might still exist out there somewhere in a very obscure book.

I then decided to examine books published since 2006 that contained the quotation to see if any included a citation. This was even more of a red flag because, in every case, the authors either did not provide a citation, cited another post-2006 book, or cited a (dubious) internet resource. It turns out that 2006 might be an important piece of the puzzle because it was around then that goodreads.com went online and became a widely used resource for quotations.

Although goodreads makes it clear that they don't verify information, people often trust the website because it is assumed that readers are quoting accurately as they read the actual books. The Jung quotation in question is listed on their website and could even be the first instance, but there was no citation and I couldn't find who originally posted it in order to ask where they got it from. Whoever originally posted it was obviously familiar enough with Jungian theory to capture some of its essence.

In conclusion, I hazard to guess that there are three main possibilities for how this quotation came into being. Around the mid 2000s, someone reading something in the original language posted their own personal translation of it, or they got it from an obscure source, or they fabricated it for reasons unknown. From there, the quotation got picked up by various parties and spread far and wide.

I decided to tell this story because I think it's a good example of how misinformation creeps around online and gradually becomes "reality". The numerous steps I had to go through to investigate this one tiny piece of information illustrates how tedious it can be to verify the things you read. Should we expect the masses to verify every word they come across? It's not realistic, is it? Teachers and parents tell kids to be careful about the internet content they consume, to not take things at face value, to not believe everything they see and hear, etc. But it isn't easy (or fun) to always be on alert even for the motivated, even for this weary and grizzled researcher.

Fortunately, nobody's gonna die from a misattributed quote. But, what about subjects of consequence such as medicine or geopolitics where truth really matters? I love that we have so much information at our fingertips. I just wish we didn't always have to battle against greed and chaos to find the good stuff.

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

PRELIMINARY ROUND - STAR TREK

PROPAGANDA

T'Pol

1.) dressed as a sex object. far more qualified & experienced than the (male) captain yet treated as less capable. had her agency removed when her past rape was revealed against her wishes & the episode treated it as a good thing. her taking command of the ship got humanity wiped out in an alternate timeline & she "redeemed herself" by becoming a housewife. there was a scene where the captain fell face first into her boobs. whatever they paid her actress, it should have been at least 3x more

2.) i think you can most clearly see the misogyny t'pol deals with in her costuming and makeup. she is given clear special treatment to make her look "more attractive": she wears catsuits throughout the show (despite neither institution she works for having any other similar uniforms, even for other women), sexy little silk pajamas, a cropped jumpsuit one time (even tho…it's a one piece?? and makes no sense to be cropped????), and SFX makeup that doesnt make her look as "alien" as other members of the literal alien species she's a part of. enterprise's main crime is sexualization, and while everyone (quite literally EVERY member of the cast) is hit with it at least once, t'pol pretty much never gets a break. there's a difference between sexy and overly sexualized, and ent is FAR into the over sexualized side of that spectrum. love you t'pol wish your canon was better xoxo

3.) The classic “Rick Berman Star Trek needs a woman who is strong and competent and part of the crew but gets skintight jumpsuits with low necklines instead of standard issue Starfleet uniforms to show cleavage and keep the male audience on board”.

Kes

1.) Poor Kes had it so bad. She's an Ocampan, which is a kind of alien with psychic powers and a 9-year long life-span. I was pretty interested in what they were going to do with her character when I started watching because in theory with the show having seven seasons, we could have seen her go through pretty much her whole life span over the course of the show. Unfortunately, most of her character is tied up in her terrible boyfriend Neelix, who is at a lower estimate in his mid 30s, and at an upper estimate his mid 50. He met her and started dating her while she was taken prisoner after being kidnapped. Neelix is mostly meant to be comic relief, he acts like an annoying, forcefully cheerful clown for the majority of his time on-screen (when he's not having war flashbacks) except for when he's interacting with Kes. With Kes he is possessive, controlling and manipulative. He's constantly accusing her of trying to cheat on him or leave him, throwing himself pity parties whenever she talks to another man and belittling her. And worst of all he's often framed as being in the right. She hardly gets any screen-time that isn't somehow actually about her boyfriend, the Doctor she's the assistant of or another male crew member who has a crush on her (also too old for her). When she does it's pretty much always focused on her psychic powers and not her as a person.

Some of the highlights of her time on the show include the time that Neelix's lungs were stolen, and after he spends the whole episode feeling sorry for himself and accusing her of being happy about it because he thinks she wants to leave him she donates him one of her lungs. Then there's the time some space anomaly makes her prematurely fertile so she has to decide if she ever wants kids right at that moment, and for some reason, almost the whole episode is focused on whether Neelix wants kids. She eventually breaks up with Neelix. Which is great! But she was possessed at the time. So she didn't even get to do that herself.

She was written off the show at the start of season 4 when another character was added and they needed to boot someone. She "ascends to a higher plane of existence". And then everyone on the crew proceeds to completely forget her about her straight afterwards. I'm not sure anyone was actually sad about her essentially dying. She comes back in a later episode called "Fury" which is about her trying to take revenge on the crew for her poor treatment. You'd think this would be good. But for some reason, she's mostly angry at the captain for allowing her to get on the ship in the first place, despite one of her few character traits being that she's adventurous and always wanting to learn things that no one else has. So the episode mostly focuses on trying to pick apart one of the only parts of her character that was well-defined and consistent. Her past self does tell her that she's forgotten what she truly wanted or something to talk her out of her revenge plan. I'm not really sure what they were going for. She tells the captain she was only an innocent child, so she shouldn't have been allowed to make the decision to get on the ship. She is never shown to be angry at Neelix. The man who started dating her when she was according to her future self a child. And a prisoner.

2.) She's kind of the sexy born yesterday character who's already taken. She's an alien whose race only lives nine years, so when i say that she got married at two that's a bit less alarming. She lived underground her "whole" life (about a year and a half) before she left her town, to find the surface, got kidnapped and then rescued by Neelix, a middle-aged scavenger/smuggler/chef who looks like a Cats character from a regular aging alien race. Neelix promises to show her new places and they apparently fall in love and get married and then Neelix takes her to the Voyager, and she leaves her home forever. At the age of 2. She lived in a cave her whole life, then found this gross little man, married him for some reason, and then was convinced to leave everything she had ever known, her entire family and life, to get on a star ship whose express mission was getting to the other side of the universe as fast as they were able.

Once on the ship she was able to find some independence and her own interests, and eventually left neelix, but god their entire relationship was really just loser old man and naive teenager and it was soooooooo uncomfortable

3.) I rewatched the Kes parts of Voyager. The "General Observations" section can be taken as a TL;DR (sorry for the essay). Here are a few not-so-fun facts about Kes:

General Observations:

Kes was kidnapped 4 times over the course of the show.

Kes often talks like a child especially early on in the show. She acts like a classic Disney Princess; sweet, but not quite understanding what's going on around her.

A lot of Kes's character revolves around the fact that she is very young, and a lot of the more uncomfortable aspects of her treatment revolve around this too. It's not like it's an impossible concept to pull off, in the same show the EMH is actually younger than Kes, and has several romantic relationships that don't feel super creepy in the same way most of Kes's do. This is because the writers don't make him act like a child and they actually give him agency in his relationships.

Kes's people, the Ocampa, live underground on a desert planet. Kes travelled to the surface when she was less than 1 year old, where she was captured by the people living there and tortured for information using "every method of persuasion" that they know. This is where she met and started dating Neelix. He explicitly says he thinks she is dating him because she owes him for getting her out of that situation, and yet it seems like the writers think this is a cute and heartwarming relationship.

Nearly all of her screen time is devoted to emotionally counseling the men around her, helping their character development, comforting and caring for them. She is hardly ever shown to have negative emotions ("Fury" aside), and then it's generally only when a man she cares about is in trouble. This includes when she is kidnapped. Even then she has to be calm, understanding and empathetic.

Kes's established character traits: curious, smart, psychic, caring, kind, young, innocent, naive. Pretty much all of these get tossed out the window in "Fury". She kills people she's known most of her life and tries to sell everyone out to organ harvesters because she gets "confused". She decides not to do this in the end because her younger self tells her she's acting out of character. This episode is one of the worst instances of character assassination I have ever seen.

In about 10 of her 70 total episodes on the show Kes makes a significant contribution to the plot that is not focused on a man. Most of those were more her acting as a psychic plot device rather than anything about her as an actual character. There was only one episode "Before and After", which I would count as truly being devoted to Kes as a character.

Practically every man Kes comes across is attracted to her. Often her attractiveness is mentioned in the same breath as the fact that she is literally a 1-3 year old.

Kes's love interests: Neelix, the EMH, Tom Paris, Tuvix, Ameron (while possessed), Nori (while possessed), Zahir. Aside from Zahir, she has pretty much no agency in any of these relationships.

Neelix calls Kes "sweetie", and talks to her like she's a child. When he's not shouting at her, anyway. Kes unconditionally loves and adores him for some reason.

Observations while watching:

When Neelix's lungs are stolen Kes refuses to leave his side and one of the first things she does is offer to donate one of her own, refuses to let the EMH perform any medical procedures until she's sure it's safe. Meanwhile, Neelix goes on a jealous rant at her because she called another man by his first name.

When Kes donates a lung Neelix refuses at first because the operation would be too dangerous, but Kes says "you've done so much for me, let me give you something once", implying that Kes owes him a lung for him helping free her from the people torturing her.

The episode "Elogium" was apparently meant to be a metaphor for teen pregnancy. With Kes as the teen and Neelix (whose actor says that he sees him as being in his 50s) as the father.

Ocampan puberty apparently happens between the ages of 4 and 5. Kes starts the series at less than 1 year old, and leaves at 3. She is apparently at an age where it would be dangerous to conceive a child in "Elogium". She is not sure she is finished growing. She has been dating Neelix for about a year (possibly more) at this point.

When the EMH hallucinates Kes as his wife, she makes him promise not to tell Neelix, because he tends to get "a little jealous"

In "Elogium", Neelix interrogates Kes over the fact that Tom Paris says "see you later" to her because he "Sees the way he looks at (her). (He) used to look at women that way (he) knows what it means." Neelix is later implied to be in the right here, Kes is being naive thinking Tom Paris could be her friend, apparently.

In "Twisted" Kes turns two years old. Tom Paris gives her a locket for her birthday. Neelix gets pissed off because he thinks he's trying to charm her. Neelix is, again framed as being in the right here.

Kes has a very good memory and is able to remember where everyone's rooms are. When she demonstrates this, Neelix implies she knows this because she's slept with every man on the ship. At the end of this episode, Kes decides to put his photo in her locket to always keep him close.

When Kes is upset that Neelix attacked Tom Paris over her, the EMH tells her she should consider herself lucky to have two men fighting over her.

Tom Paris admits to Neelix that he finds Kes attractive, but says that he won't try anything with her because he respects Neelix. He asks if Neelix would allow him to be her friend. Because who cares what Kes wants right? I guess if Neelix had said no he would have just stopped talking to her?

Tom says Kes is very devoted to Neelix, and Neelix admits he thinks she's only with him because he saved her life and she's grateful he freed her from captivity and she owes him. He is dating her despite this. This is never addressed.

Tanis, another Ocampan, calls her innocent and naive, so she seems quite young even by the standards of her own species.

Tuvix, having inherited Neelix's manipulative tendencies tries to manipulate Kes into begging the captain for his life.

Kes gets kidnapped by caveman aliens. When someone comes to rescue her, the cavemen try to trade another woman to them so they can keep Kes.

Kes goes into a coma and acts as the damsel in distress again in "Sacred Ground"

"This is typical of you Neelix… it bothers you that I'm making friends of my own, you always have to involve yourself somehow." "You can spend time with anyone you want" "As long as I spend most of it with you… I never realised a relationship could be any different. I've never been with anyone but you." Kes when she breaks up with Neelix. Except this isn't Kes because she's actually possessed at the time. She doesn't even get agency in her own breakup.

Kes is dressed in skintight leather trousers and high heels and tries to seduce everyone while possessed by a male warlord. He describes Kes as a "little girl".

In "Darkling" Kes starts wearing form fitting jumpsuits somewhat similar to the ones Seven of Nine wears (though not quite as tight). This is possibly because she's supposed to look more mature, and she starts having "young adult" storylines instead of teenager storylines.

"Everyone seems to be treating me like a child, I'm three years old now"

The EMH kidnaps Kes in "Darkling" when he turns temporarily evil. His treatment of her in this episode includes shoving her into a wall and putting his hand around her neck, repeatedly grabbing and shoving her, holding her at gunpoint and throwing her off a cliff.

The evil EMH kidnaps Kes because she wants to leave the ship to travel with her new boyfriend. This is framed as the good inside of him because he is trying to "protect" her. Kes decides to stay on the ship because of this. She never expresses any negative emotions about this incident.

In "Before and After" Kes goes through her entire life in reverse. In the future she sees, she has married Tom Paris and had a daughter with him, and her daughter has a child with Harry Kim, who was the best man at Kes and Tom's wedding. This is by far the best Kes episode, but she never really gets to react to anything that happens in it. Soon after this she ascends to a higher plane of existence in "The Gift".

In "Before and After" Kes sees threats in advance and warns the crew about them, preventing the Captain's death in the future. This isn't really acknowledged.

Half of "The Gift" is focused on Seven of Nine and the Borg. Not even Kes's send-off episode is really focused on her.

In "The Gift", Neelix and Kes have one final scene together. Neelix gets quite self-pitying again and says she broke up with him because he was holding her back. Kes says that wasn't it but doesn't say why it happened. This is the only time they directly talk about their breakup outside of when Kes was possessed.

When Kes decides to ascend, the captain begs her to reconsider. Kes insists she has not lost her judgement or come under an alien influence. Captain Janeway tells her she's family and tearfully embraces her. Tuvok puts out a candle in mourning (everyone forgets about her after this episode ends though).

In "Fury" Kes is back in physical form somehow, despite ascending into some higher plane of existence in the last episode she appeared. She is also much older in appearance.

In "Fury" Kes gets onto the ship, starts exploding everything she can with her psychic powers, kills everyone she comes across and goes back in time to the start of the show to kidnap herself.

Kes and Neelix have a scene in "Fury". It makes Neelix much nicer than he ever was in the early parts of the show (especially to Kes). He actually notices something is wrong and asks her how she is and prepares her favourite meal for her because she had a bad day. I'm not sure he ever even asked her how she was before. I guess at this point they must have wanted to pretend the relationship was a lot less creepy and unhealthy than it actually was. Especially since Kes is the villain of the episode.

Older Kes's plan in "Fury" is to travel back in time, sell out the people she spent the majority of her life with to organ harvesters so she can send her and her younger self back to her home world because the crew "abandoned her a long time ago". I think this manages to dismantle practically every established character trait she has.

Older Kes's explanation of her actions in "Fury": "You (Captain Janeway) took her (young Kes) from Ocampa. Her home. She's a prisoner on this ship. I was a child, you corrupted me. Your ideas. Exploration, discovery. I believed you. In three years I'm going to leave Voyager in search of higher things because you encouraged me to do it. You encouraged me to develop my mental abilities. What I found, I couldn't control it, it scared me… I trusted you!" Neelix was the one who took her from Ocampa. As noted before, Captain Janeway begged her not to ascend.

Old Kes is killed by the captain. They know something terrible happened to Kes when she ascended, but apparently all that they did was get Kes to record a video of herself saying that she shouldn't take revenge because it's not who she is. This worked for some reason, she says she killed everyone because she was confused.

Kes decides to go back to Ocampa. Due to the Ocampan lifespan, everyone she knew before she left is probably dead. To add insult to injury, Neelix is the last person she sees before she leaves for good.

[garmgeyr]

CHARACTERIZATION UPDATE & THEORIES

Now that Penacony’s story has officially concluded, I’ve combed through the script to compile all of Gallagher’s dialogue in a doc that I can use and continue to add onto as a reference (as of right now, it only has dialogue and my preliminary annotations, but since this is a character who is simultaneously an unreliable narrator and a figure deeply tied to Penacony’s history, I intend to supplement it with links to evidence from other sources as I revisit the Penacony readables and NPCs). In light of the information presented in 2.3, I’m updating my portrayal here in GH as well.

The information below will be full of major spoilers from 2.2, so proceed at your own risk.

First of all, who - or what - is Gallagher?

Gallagher is an emanator of Enigmata, and is himself a work of fiction (within the fiction that is HSR). The philosophy of Enigmata asserts that the singular truth in this world is that nothing can truly be known, and that certainty (i.e. Fate, Destiny, the past repeating itself) stagnates life. As a “virtual character,” Gallagher’s existence is a lie and will end once this is revealed, which we can assume is one of the rules emanators of Enigmata must follow in order to continue enjoying their aeon’s blessings. This is a fascinating concept and part of Gallagher’s appeal to me, and were it not for the fact I’ve chosen to pick him up in a RP group, I’d leave it at that. But RP does demand a certain degree of certainty about a character, so my goal is not to undermine this concept with “truth,” but to establish a foundation for my writing.

To distill his character, I’ve separated canon information provided by the main story into “Verified By Another Source” and “Accepted As True Until Proven False.” Most of the information in the first category has been verified by Micah, Mikhail’s memory, and the Dreamjoy Memoir event, all of which we have to assume are trustworthy sources, while most information in the second category has been provided by Gallagher himself, who has a history of lying to the player characters without them - or the audience - being aware.

Verified By Another Source

Gallagher is a History Fictionologist, an emanator of Enigmata

He’s been branded as a traitor by the Family, along with Mikhail and Micah, and has a deep-seated distrust toward the Family

He’s existed as “Gallagher” in Penacony at least since the Age of Dreaming, which was several Amber Eras ago, and assisted Mikhail in developing the Watchmaker facade to lure visitors from all across the cosmos to the Planet of Festivities

He helped create Dreamflux Reef out of the primordial dreamscape, however, at the moment I only have concrete confirmation that he was responsible for the second time it was lifted. This was after Mikhail’s exile and it was used as a refuge for the other exiles who were fleeing the Family. Dreamflux Reef is the oldest city in the dreamscape and the place where Mikhail’s history as the Father of Penacony began, so it existed at some point prior to their exile

His appearance and parts of his character are copied from other members of the Family. According to Sunday’s suspect list, he: is laidback with a calm demeanor, is a Bloodhound security officer and also a charismatic drinksmith, slacks off on the job, has a habit of messing with his tie, smokes cigarettes, loves soda, likes to have a piece of candy before getting down to work, seems mentally older than he appears, has a stocky stature and distinguishable scars, regularly goes to the bar to drink after work, is generally unkempt and slobbish, and has a subtle sense of humor

He has the tendency to come and go quietly, and show up at just the right time

He created the memetic entity called Dormancy, which took several years of effort

He wrote the Charmony Festival invitations to bring competing factions to the Planet of Festivities and hoped that this would smoke out the true traitor in the Family

Sunday essentially “killed” him when he saw through Gallagher’s persona. If you watch the scene at the end of Act II, the background music quiets and a mournful bell chimes after this revelation, and then Gallagher gets pretty antsy. From outright stating that he's running out of time, to taking a more active role in the story's progression (almost to the point of pushiness), his behavior shifts quite a bit from this moment on

Accepted as True Until Proven False

Gallagher is a child of the Watchmaker, similar to Micah. This tells us that Gallagher is significantly younger than Mikhail and was "raised" by him like the other children orphaned during the War of Independence

Mikhail, Micah, and the others never found out he was a “virtual character” or else he would have had to give up the persona long ago. This lends credence to the idea that he’s been known as “Gallagher” for a very long time

The features he collected from the individuals in the Family to concoct his persona were taken over time, not all at once. He's been refining his persona for years (much like one might refine their own personality in reality, hm?)

He self-identifies as a traitor to Mikhail, stating that he “did nothing” when Mikhail needed him. This seems to have been after the truth about the Family’s use of the Stellaron had been discovered (sometime after the Age of Dreaming), and Mikhail was getting pretty old. At some point, Mikhail gave Gallagher the directive to send invitations for the Charmony Festival, and then left for the frontier again (where he died and was later brought back to be enshrined in Dreamflux’s garden). If what Gallagher says about betraying Mikhail is true, then it may be that he hesitated for too long to send the invitations. Being as skeptical as he is, especially after centuries as a witness to Mikhail’s futile attempts to contact the Astral Express, I don’t think he believed that Mikhail’s idea would work, and so he and Micah (and others) tried to find a different way, to no avail. During this time, Mikhail disappeared and died out of sight

Gallagher was the only other person outside of the passengers of the Express who could see Misha, but having known Mikhail only in adulthood, he didn’t realize that this was the childhood spirit of his old friend until the Crew uncovered the secret of the dream bubble. In his About Misha II voice line, the JP version makes it more explicit that with meeting Misha, Gallagher is now a witness to the entirety of Mikhail’s life

He’s a “Virtual Character” who’s been around for a few Eras - so what does that mean?

When I first brought Gallagher into the group, my working theory was that he was created by some off-screen History Fictionologist and puppeted like one might control an avatar in a game. However, I no longer believe this to be a fitting interpretation. In the main story, Gallagher consistently calls himself the Fictionologist, and that Fictionologists cease to exist once their lie has been discovered. We don’t have any information to prove otherwise, so for now we have to simply believe him. It’s still congruent with his loading screen information and his character stories too: he fabricated this persona, which makes him both the author and the character. Firefly’s About Gallagher line seems to support this idea as well:

Learning about everything he experienced is like reading a brilliant novel. You know that the people are made up, but you still can't help but feel joy and sadness for them. Maybe by the end, we'll have long-lost track of who the author, the reader, and the characters are.

The end of 2.2 and 2.3, as well as the letter Gallagher leaves for the Trailblazer on the Express, all drive home the idea that Gallagher the character is gone now. “Life and death are merely fiction on the road to Enigmata, just like farewells and reunions.” He’s fulfilled his mission and has been uncovered as a fabrication; however, I believe that some part of what made Gallagher is still around. 

The Hound statues associated with Gallagher continue to exist all throughout Penacony, and the one I think is the most interesting is the one you can find in the Scorchsand venue after 2.2. It’s sitting on a table directly across from the mysterious film that begins the Scorchsand Vacation adventure quest, which has tidbits about Gallagher’s and Dormancy’s fates, all captured by a “Mr. Reka” who, from the limited information we have about him, seems to be a Fictionologist as well. My red string theory is that this person, who still exists in the world, is linked to Gallagher.

“Even now, the world is still filled with characters that we’ve played.”

But that’s a post for another day.

Continuity in GH

Personally, I believe that Gallagher disappearing at the end of the story is poignant and stays true to the concept that he was made to convey. In any other situation, I wouldn’t try to figure out how to prove or explain how he still exists after the fact, but Gnostic Hymns requires characters to be up to date with canon, and I can’t write a current iteration of a character who doesn’t exist. As the mun who chose to pick up this tricky character for a group like this, I have to establish some way to keep him around past 2.3 in a recognizable form.

For GH’s purposes, I’m making the following assumptions:

Gallagher is not human. The “truest” part of him is likely the magenta energy that glows beneath his scars and in the eyes of the Hound statues. To keep up his human facade over the centuries though, he’s physically aged at the same rate as Micah (which means that he did indeed stop aging a while ago, since Micah’s physical body is gone now and Micah himself says that the way he appears is probably the way he looked the last time he entered the dream)

It’s through the blessing of Abundance that he has a near-immortal existence

With Enigmata being born from Remembrance, I believe that Emanators of Enigmata have similar rules and abilities as Emanators of Remembrance. In other words, both have the ability to exist as complex memetic entities that can travel wherever they want and assume the appearance of locals, as long as they’re fulfilling their aeon’s desires. Gallagher is therefore not confined to Penacony’s dreamscape

The Hound statues around Penacony are Gallagher’s avatars, through which he can observe areas where they’ve been placed. His existence in this way is more like that of a spirit

He and Dormancy are cut from the same cloth (in JP, Sunday even says this during their confrontation, instead saying that they’re merely “linked”), which is what gives him unique control over it. This seems to imply that he's more like a meme (similar to Black Swan, who can also control Dormancy to an extent) than human

So what now? In true Enigmata fashion, Gallagher simply exists in GH. He doesn’t have an explanation for it. I don’t have an explanation for it. Followers of Enigmata are said to even have trouble understanding themselves, so this still aligns with the lore. For threads that take place after 2.2, Gallagher is once more a drinksmith, although one who is found in Dreamflux more often than in the Family’s dreamscape. As far as anyone else is concerned, including those who knew him before 2.2, he’s just another dreamchaser. He’ll make no allusions to his involvement with the Astral Express or Penacony’s fate, and will be crafting a new backstory from his future interactions in GH, including those that take place in other worlds.

This doesn’t change how he’ll participate in threads outside of Penacony though. In all other instances, he’ll adopt a new persona for the purpose of the environment, although it will look and act similar to the Gallagher we know.

While I don’t believe Gallagher will make a return in future patches, I do think that there will be additional information pertinent to the path of Enigmata and History Fictionologists, so I expect to continuously update my interpretation as the game continues.

My favorite thing about Gallagher, and what I hope to keep at the core of my interpretation, is that ultimately, his presence in the story asks us to think about what we consider to be real. Can something fictional have a tangible effect on others or make a lasting impact on the world? I don’t think I have to guess what the writers of a RP group would say to that.

[caitlynlynch]

Hi. I've sometimes considered getting into narration and I was just wondering how you got yourself into the industry, if you have a moment...

I got in because I was already inside the house :P

Let me elaborate. I was already an author. I'd written stuff that suited my voice. I'd been wondering for a while about audio and when my writing org (Romance Writers of Australia) ran an online course about how to record your own audio, I decided to pay the $55 cost and see what it was all about. I had a high school acting background and was reasonably confident I had a suitable voice, I already had a cheap USB mic, I hung a few blankets in my closet, and got to work. I recorded a couple of short stories I'd written in the Austen fanfic genre and posted them for free in an Austen fanfic fan group on Facebook asking what people thought. Within literally days I had other authors pretty much all over me asking what I charged. I really didn't know what it was worth, so I did a bit of research and quoted a rate (about 2/3 of my current rate) and booked my first paying project. I then got really lucky. I got hired by an author to do a series of 12 books, one a month, if I would guarantee the rate I was then charging. Sure, I said. I've since done over 30 books for that author. I've upgraded my equipment and my skills since then, but tbh most of my work still comes through authors I know - I hardly have to audition - and my theory is this: People are lazy. If you need a skilled job doing and you have a close acquaintance who has that skill, you hire them. An electrician, or a plumber, for example. You don't go looking for a different one. If someone wants a British-accented female narrator and they've been chatting with me on social media for 5 years, there's a high probability they're gonna say "Hey you want the job?" rather than have to go through the auditioning process and then trust a complete stranger when quite a bit of money is on the line. The way I got into narration won't work for people who aren't already embedded in the author community, unfortunately. I'd already done the preliminary work, not that I realised what I was doing, and I was positioned to take advantage of it.

If you want to get into narration, the first thing you need to do is go to the Narrator's Roadmap and take advantage of allll the free resources. Now, you need to do some PRACTICE. I've recommended before to people who want; approach fanfic authors and ask if you can make podfic of their work. You won't get paid but you'll learn A LOT.

Once you've got a few recordings under your belt I recommend getting a tech consult. There are a couple of people who will do a freebie to start - Don Baarns is a leading engineer in the field, or my personal tech guru is Jim Edgar.

Don't skip this step. You need to be sure your work is up to quality standards or you're wasting your time auditioning. And then you need to start auditioning. Go back to the Narrator's Roadmap for the where and how.

Good luck. It's not for everyone, but it's something I love doing, and I'm lucky enough to be earning a decent rate for it. I could absolutely make a full-time living out of it but, for me, sitting in a cupboard all day talking to fictional people isn't great for my mental health, so I keep a part-time day job to get me out of the house.

[missamyrisa2]

Miss Amy and the Sensitivity Test

I posted this on my dA and old tumblr but since the scenario came in an ask, here it is again for anyone who hasn't read it~<3 And even if you have, I went through and added some more details and dialog because I can't help teasing myself further~<3

Amy twiddled her thumbs nervously. She'd been literally laughed out of work everywhere else in town ever since her secret was spilled at the library. The salon couldn't keep their ladies from testing their makeup and pedicure technique on Amy. The warehouse found Amy going on endless giggle-laden rides on the forklifts in place of the workers moving their shipments. And that stint at the local TV station certainly made for a lively weather update when sneaky crew members were tickling her stockinged feet and sneaking tickles at her sides through the green screen.

All of Amy's supervisors had been reluctant to let her go, they simply couldn't afford the distraction. But most of them were amicable enough to give her one last chance by showing she could hold her composure as the HR reps tested her ticklishness over and over - usually having her held by her arms and feet as questions and tickles were administered in equal measure. Unfortunately, Amy never could fight off those tickles and was brought to giggly exhaustion each time - just to be sure she hadn't passed the test.

Never did Amy guess she would be looking at working a library again, but this new branch was insistent they needed someone with her reputation. Amy was flattered, and then confused when she was told she couldn't start working until a physical exam was completed. Having been through so many tickly adventures, Amy felt as though she had developed a tickle sense to see impending wickedness down the line. Her theory definitely had proven true when she narrowly avoided a gang of feather-toting motorcyclists on the way to the doctor's office. But unfortunately, Amy's tickle sense was not quite honed enough to detect what lay in store in this unassuming exam room.

She sat with an understated trepidation, looking down at her purple socked feet. It seemed odd that the bubbly receptionist insisted Amy take off her shoes and leave them behind at the front desk. "Oh yes, we insist all patients leave their shoes and belongings up here. We don't want any...distractions" Amy complied and couldn't help but feel like she receptionist was jotting down notes about her as she bent over to take off her shoes and straighten up her outfit. It was probably nothing.

"Hello Amy, I'm Dr. Jahli." The doctor entered the room, speaking in a rather mousy tone. Her face was partially hidden under a medical mask, but her eyes were certainly friendly. Amy relaxed a bit and shook hands with the attractively curvy doctor, admiring and crushing on for a moment Dr. Jahli's stylish black dress under a white overcoat, cinched with a wide white belt and shiny oversized buckle. "What we're going to do today is a series of simple tests. Hopefully we should have you out in an hour." Amy pursed her lips, seemed a bit much for a physical, but she really wanted this job.

"Sure, sounds... good."

"The preliminary test is for your hearing and vision. Could you please turn towards this poster over here?" The doctor pointed to a poster with letters of varying sizes. "Please read the top letter?"

Amy furrowed her brow at the giant letter E at the top. "Uh...E?"

"Okay, and the next line?"

"H-a?" Amy said with a shrug.

"And that spells...?"

"Ha? Like ha ha?" Amy smirked. The doctor grinned under her mask.

"And the fifth line?" She continued.

"Brush." Amy thought she saw the doctor tremble as she spoke the next word.

"Mmm. Next?"

"Tickle." Amy said out loud. Both doctor and patient shivered for a moment, though for different reasons and neither seemed to catch each other's tell. Amy assumed it was a coincidence. Her common sense seemed to have a weakness for fetishy story plots. Dr. Jahli took a moment, and then produced a multi-colored fluffy duster.

"Great, Amy. Now can you identify the colors you see as I move this funny little thing around your head?" She fluttered the soft tendrils around Amy's cheek and ears. Amy tried to call out the multiple colors, fighting back her squirms and giggles.

"R-gree-yellow! Um...green! Err. Blue now."

"Mmm-hmm. And what color is down here that I'm pointing to?" The doctor slipped her hands down and drew fingertips over Amy's purple socks.

"Purple!! purple! purple!!!"

"Wonderful. Now we're going to move on to the physical."

"First, I'll need to check your breathing. Lift your shirt please-oh wait." She chuckled, gesturing to Amy's cropped black top, which left much of her midsection exposed.

Amy felt a little twitch scurry across her midsection when Dr. Jahli produced a stethoscope and immediately placed it square on Amy's tummy. "Ooh!"

"Just checking your breathing. Everything sounds...lovely." Amy thought she heard a snicker. The cool end of the tool made Amy writhe slightly.

"Sorry, it's...ee...cold" Amy murmured, feeling a faint prick of blush on her cheeks. Her taut tummy flexed involuntarily and slipped a little gurgle. The doctor took notes and observed closely, nodding slowly.

"That's normal. Your outfit is very cute by the way. And makes this process that much easier. Lean back for me please." Dr. Jahli motioned Amy back on the exam table. Hazel eyes under dark long lashes glanced over Amy's exposed tummy with a curious gaze.

"Thank you...oooh! Oh, okay. okay. Yours is cuute too!" Amy squeaked as the doctor gently placed a palm on Amy's tummy, feeling her breathe rapidly.

"Thank you, you are very sweet. Next I'm just going to press on your abdomen lightly." The touch made Amy's body visibly tremble. Had her eyes not been squinted through her embarrassment, Amy would have seen the knowing glint in the doctor's eyes, betraying the intent of what would follow. "Very good. Does this hurt?"

"N-no!" Amy squeaked out, her tummy inhaling rapidly. The doctor's cool hands following her movement. "I'm going to press a little more. I thought I felt something." Curious fingers slid along Amy's tender skin, probing for reactions and lighting up a pathway of sensitive nerves. "Does this hurt, Amy?"

Amy stammered to respond, fighting back a giggle that eagerly wanted to bounce out of her belly. "It doesn't...hurt." She responded sheepishly. The doctor put a hand on her hip and leaned in to watch the little twitchies echoing the light tickly sensations Amy had been feeling. Amy pressed her lips to stop a babble from escaping. Her eyes rolled back as she felt fingers curiously probing the gap between her shorts and hip, sliding in slightly, grazing that hot spot. A giggly moan was percolating but eased off as the fingers retracted and a mere squeak escaped.

"Okay Amy, I'm just going to test your reflexes now. I'm going to take this across your belly and measure the reaction." Dr. Jahli reached into her coat and produced a long white feather.

"Wait a feather? That can't be right!"

"Please relax Amy, just lean back. I need to test your sensitivity. That's what this exam is for." She reassured, waving the supple instrument back and forth slowly. Amy gripped the table and inhaled sharply as the wispy feather tip stroked in a crescent pattern over her bellybutton, then did the same under it. Small giggles slipped from Amy's mouth as she tried to hold back.

"Don't try to fight it. Just react naturally. I'm going to test the reflexes in your bellybutton next" Amy closed her eyes and squeaked out as the feather traced the rim of her navel before flicking over each side. "What about this? Does this hurt? Amy? Aaaamy?"

"...Yesss!! It tickles!!"

"Oh, it does?" She replied with mock concern. "Well that is...unexpected, but side effects are common with this test. You're doing wonderfully." Dr. Jahli said warmly, watching Amy's tummy quiver madly from the feathery inquisition. She exchanged the feather for a small wand with hair-like protrusions. Amy thought it looked a lot like a mascara wand, and when she estimated the size of the wand and what it was designed to probe, she nearly jumped from the exam table.

"Ok hold the phone! Put it on hold and redial. Is that necessary?"

"Oh yes, Amy. This is just the next procedure for your reflexive test. Please lean back."

"But...that's a really...sensitive area."

"Yes, I should think so. Don't worry yourself, this is all very standard testing procedures. Now please, we need to test here otherwise we won't be able to give you the approval for your job."

Amy sighed and watched that little tool as the doctor dipped it into a container. When it was pulled out, the little spiky hairs glistened with oil. Amy trembled as it drew closer, the doctor twisting it back and forth. A hand was placed on Amy's tummy to hold it steady. "Just relax Amy." Amy giggled uncontrollably as the lubricated surface began twirling into her navel, eliciting all manner of twitches and bounces. "Relax sweetheart." Amy tried to hold on but she was bucking and laughing within moments of the wand entering her highly sensitive navel, and it only got worse as it was slowly drilled back and forth with all those little tickly hairs stimulating her ticklish nerves on all sides.

"You're doing so well Amy!" Dr. Jahli said over Amy's hysteric giggles, holding her belly tight as she twirled the tickly wand back and forth, dipping it in and out, coating Amy's tender button with the tickly oil. When it finally withdrew for the last time, Amy was gasping through silly giggles, her face a mess of blushes and stray hairs. She barely had time to gain some composure when the doctor next produced a small white implement with a hose leading under the table. With the flick of a switch, the hollow tip squealed to life, making a sucking noise.

"Now we'll just need to clean up that excess oil. This is Mr. Thirsty~" Immediately Amy could see the tip as a mouth and the bolts on the top as eyes looking to their target ahead of his snakey body. Amy whimpered as he was taken to her twitching tickled navel. Mr. Thirsty eagerly gobbled up the excess droplets of oil, the air rushing over Amy's sensitized skin like an invisible carpet of tiny feathers. Amy tried to endure but found her hips trembling in protest and laughs freely falling out of her mouth.

"Please stop!! That tickles so much!! I don't think I like Mr. Thirstyyy"

"Amy, you're fine. You're doing just fine. He's just here to help, aren't you Mr. Thirsty." The doctor retorted, lovingly stroking Amy's long locks of blonde hair as she mercilessly ran the suction tool all along Amy's rim and inner crevice. When at last her bellybutton was clear of the tickly oil, Amy was even more a mess of ticklish laughs. Just when she thought it couldn't get worse, the doctor produced a large metal bucket from under the table. The second sound was Dr. Jahli snapping a medical glove onto her hand.

"Oh my gosh, what is next? Haven't you tested me enough?"

"Most definitely not." she balked, barely suppressing a giggle. "Okay Amy, the library has deemed it necessary to test your cold sensitivity. Sometimes the air conditioning in the building goes on the fritz and they need to know you can withstand such conditions."

"Seriously?"

"Absolutely. We don't want you to get frostbite. If you aren't able to detect a sudden drop in temperature then the library would be liable. Now~there are a few spots that are most viable for this test." The doctor replied, motioning Amy to lean back once again as she reached into her bucket and produced an ice cube. With one hand on Amy's beltline, she carefully positioned the frigid cube and began grazing it along Amy's abdomen and waist, tracing along the top of Amy's little shorts.

"How does that feel, Amy?"

"It's....cold!" Amy squirmed and writhed, feeling the blast of coolness riveting through her midsection. It was a different sort of tickle, but one that made her giggle out all the same. The streaks of cooling sensation lingered and layered as the ice cube went back and forth.

"I might have guessed that Amy. Does this tickle? Does the cold make you more ticklish?"

"I think so?? Maybe? What do you care? I don't know!! Just stop....stop icing meee!" Amy protested as the cube was taken up her happy trail and in circles around her navel, and over to each hip where it deposited little droplets of arctic water. Amy laughed out and trembled on the table, legs shaking as the coolness continued to send tickly shocks down her form even after the doctor withdrew the ice cube. The droplets running down into her shorts coated her hips and even her upper thighs with tickly streaks. "You're doing great, Amy."

"Sorry, looks like I've gotten some water on you."

Amy begged her no as she heard the suction tool firing up again. "That's no...not necessary please nooo! Not Mr. Thirsty!" She cried out in laughter with her objections ignored as the water was sucked away from her skin, stimulating those muscles and nerves further as Dr. Jahli meticulously cleaned every bit of her wiggling skin. The cool water had nearly filled Amy's navel to the brim, so the doctor placed Mr. Thirsty in Amy's crevice and let it drain away the liquid, occasionally sucking at the bottom of Amy's navel, tugging on the little hidden nubbin. Amy howled with laughter, trying to stay on the table as her feet kicked madly.

Amy was left gasping, barely able to hold on or resist as the doctor continued.

"Very good. Now we need to move to a new test site. Just relax Amy." She reached up and rolled Amy's cropped top further, exposing Amy's little nipples. Amy barely had a chance to whine when a new ice fragment was applied to her sensitive nubbin.

"Mmmhh!! Not there!"

"Does it tickle, Amy? Does ice on your nipple tickle you?" The doctor continued her line of questioning, smiling through her mask knowing Amy could never produce a response as she laughed and squirmed herself silly. Amy's face was completely red with blush, and the blooms spread down her neck quickly.

"Yussss it's mmmh okay okay okayyyyyy royal button pushes you're entering the Amynami code for extra ticklessss!"

"You're doing great Amy. Just a little more on this nipple. Whoops. I think we need Mr. Thirsty again." Amy screamed a laugh as the ice was circling her nipple and Mr. Thirsty eagerly caught the excess water while tugging incessantly at her button like a little pair of lips. Her nipples swelled in protest, and her giggles grew higher pitched.

"Doing okay, Amy?"

Amy gasped and rolled her eyes, laying flat against the table. "Um. I'm a little tickled! How about we stop for a minute."

"We're almost finished with the procedures Amy. You can take a break when we're done." The doctor grew authoritative for a moment, not that Amy had the energy at this point to get off the table or even resist as the doctor moved to take her bare hand to Amy's belly and another ice cube to her nipples.

"We're going to test both your belly and chest now. It is important to ascertain whether or not you can withstand both at once." Amy's eyes widened and she squealed out in laughter as finely manicured nails began ever so lightly scratching along her belly while a fresh ice cube was circling around each nipple in a figure-8 pattern. Amy gasped and threw her arms about, kicked her feet up and down, trying to endure the dual tickles. The nails followed her squirms, darting in and out of her navel, tracing her waistline back and forth, spidering up each side. The ice melted away on her buttons and ribs, and even made its way up to her neck occasionally. When one cube grew small, the remains were placed into her navel to fill it with the cold liquid, and a new cube was retrieved. The water droplets in her bellybutton were then splashed about as a finger came in to play, diving into the water with taunting taps sending tiny splashes everywhere. This of course, necessitated a visit from Mr. Thirsty to happily vacuum up the excess. By the end of this procedure, Amy was a mushy giggling mess.

Dimly aware of what was happening next, Amy felt her body being repositioned. Her legs were pulled up on to the table. Her arms were lifted. She tried to resist, but couldn't stop giggling, and her eyes were a haze of tears. By the time she recentered, Amy looked down to see her legs sitting on stirrups and looked up to see her arms were gently bound over her head with a restraint.

"Doing okay Amy? You were struggling a lot with the last test so this is just a safety protocol."

Amy nodded dreamily, it seemed all so reasonable. Just another test for the job right? All she had to do was sit and relax and giggle a little. No big deal. Amy smiled and watched as Dr. Jahli retrieved new instruments. Both her hands were gloved now. A large canister was wheeled out near the exam table and she pulled up a hose with a pointed nozzle. Before Amy could even get the words to protest, the machine whizzed to life. With a loud blast of sound, a white cloud erupted from the tip of her tool and coated Amy's belly with frigid crystals.

Amy's dreamy haze was quickly knocked away by renewed intense sensitive sensation as the doctor now worked her true craft freely. She dusted Amy's nipples next with the icy dust. "Doing great Amy!" her tone never wavered as Amy bucked in her bondage, laughing from the sensation, screaming with laughs as the doctor then took her multi-colored duster and twirled it all about Amy's over-sensitized skin.

"What perfect reactions. What a lovely body you have Amy." The doctor's shifted tone sent Amy into giggly hysterics. It happened again. And then a more intense look from those hazel eyes flashed.

"You love to tease with your lovely body don't you? Yes, I can tell. You love that attention."

Those sweet yet imposing words made Amy blush all over, even as she wiggled helplessly, bucking up and down, every tendril of that fluffy tool like a rapid scattering detonation of tickly fingers, scurrying about her body. As her body eventually warmed up, Amy's laughs and struggles leveled off. She relaxed for a moment, ready to protest these new tests, but lost the words as she squeaked helplessly at the sight of the next procedure.

"I'm just going to use some vibratory testing now. Most people say it's like a little massage." Dr. Jahli held up a wand with a big spherical soft tip, which hummed softly and lit up brightly. She let it graze along Amy's ribs and underarms, up over her nipples, and down to each hip. Amy screeched with giggles, trying desperately to pull away as those vibrations extracted some deep-laden laughs.

"What beautiful big belly laughs. Just let it out now. This is what you wanted, you wanted attention didn't you? A naughty thing, I think." She murmured, drawing the wand over Amy's navel and waist, her free hand playing at Amy's waistline. At last Amy was able to manage some words.

"You! You don't understand!! You don't know what you're doing to me!"

The doctor cocked her head to one side, letting the wand rest on Amy's waistline. Amy could see the grin in her eyes, and shuddered.

"Well, you've certainly piqued my curiosity Amy. There is something I thought I saw, and now it definitely needs further investigation."

Deep red blush appeared down Amy's face as she tried to hide in her hair. She pulled at her bonds frantically as she felt those medical gloves playing at her belt, moving over the material. "Nuuuu don't ooh gosh pllleeease don't!"

"Mmm?" Dr. Jahli watched Amy's reactions closely as she carefully and slowly unbuckled the large silver flower-shaped buckle by pulling it loose from the black belt. She studied Amy's whimpers as her fingers pulled the button from her shorts and unzipped them, which was difficult to start and easy to finish from the swelling panties peaking out below. Amy breathlessly giggle moaned when the doctor began tugging down her little shorts. Heavy gasps followed as she felt her pink panties being exposed, and the pressure of her tight shorts being pulled away.

The doctor cast her curious eyes downward, looking up and down at the swell in Amy's hot pink frilly undergarments. "Well, you are certainly full of surprises, Amy." Amy tried desperately to close her legs, to twist away as her doctor leaned down and inspected the swollen fabric, lightly tracing a fingertip along its length. Amy quivered.

"No don't!! Oh gossssh you're killing meee!"

"I believe more sensitivity tests are in order. I'm just going to tickle your thighs and waist now"

Amy squealed in disbelief, once again laughing hysterically as fingers began squeezing at her bare thighs and a feather traced her frilly waistline back and forth, teasing that panty line over and over. "You're doing great Amy!"

Her howls were interrupted by the occasional moan as the doctor would let the feather dip into her panties or would quickly reach up to plunge a probing finger into Amy's oversensitized navel. This repeated until Amy was once again a melted puddle of giggles, the teases and tickles just wearing her down.

"I think...this is needed. You are clearly teasing people. And it's quite appropriate for you to feel the sensations right back, and perhaps tenfold, Amy."

Once again the doctor decided to use the cold to reactivate her little test subject. Amy pulled at her wrists and giggled out when she heard the nozzle blasting again, but looked down in shock when she didn't feel the dust coating any part of her body. Instead she looked up in horror to see Dr. Jahli had removed her belt from her shorts and was dousing the metal buckle with the solution.

"Metal is an excellent conductor of cold. I didn't have any spare material to do this test so I hope you don't mind I borrowed this." Amy shook her head no frantically as the shiny buckle was lowered to her belly and placed on her navel. The ultra cold surface sent spidering tickle sensations radiating outward in all directions. The doctor kept it pressed there as she took her vibrating wand up and down the bulge in Amy's panties.

"Get it off!! It's too cold I can feel the petals ooh my gosh this is too tickly!! Don't touch my princess part!!"

"Doing sooo great Amy!"

The doctor kept her vibing tool and the frigid buckle trained to Amy's body, delighting as she struggled to fight the dual sensations off. When it seemed Amy was right on the edge of a ticklegasm, she withdrew both and began dancing long feathers over Amy's exposed legs while she came down slowly from the intense teasing.

"I'm so glad you were brought to me Amy. The other doctors here I don't think would appreciate you like I do." She playfully tugged at Amy's pantyline, adjusting it over her swollen princess parts.

Amy tried to regain any composure, but found she was so overtickled by this point she simply laid there and took her tickles, along with the revelation that this was a very carefully planned tickle attack. And with the doctor's next words, she began to realize this woman knew so much about Amy.

"For our final test, I'm going to really push your envelope." She picked up Amy's thick belt again and started wrapping it around her waist. Amy whimpered as her beloved yet extremely teasing companion floated back over, the shiny flower glinting in the overhead light. "You really like this thing don't you? It sort of lights your fire?"

Amy whimpered as she felt her belt being put around her pantyline, and positioned just so it went over her swollen naughty parts. She nodded embarrassingly, trying to stifle her moans as she watched the flower buckle placed right over her most tender member, the pressure on that hot spot from something she highly fetishized immediately sending her into overdrive. The doctor was quick to restart the tickle attack, digging her wiggly fingers into Amy's bellybutton and thigh. Every squirm adjusted the pressure on Amy's panties, and she knew she wouldn't hold on long. The doctor eventually brought the vibrating wand back out and started tracing the buckle, sending the vibes down through the metal and her frilly panties. Amy's giggling moans were almost soundless. She had been brought to the brink so many times. Her body simply complied to the tickles, struggling and bucking sweetly as Dr. Jahli edged her once more.

"You're doing just great Amy."

At last with one completely soundless scream, Amy arched and pulled when the vibrations and pressure triggered her ticklegasm. She laughed, snorted, and moaned out, her body flopping wildly. Her princess part swelled to a new maximum hardness performance, working its way out of the panties with the crown poking out from under the belt. Her words were complete squeaking gibberish capped off with a desperate scream as she gigglecame, princess drops spilling out and pooling into her bellybutton before falling limply back to the table and bucking gently through giggling aftershocks. Through the slits in her eyes and the fuzz in her ears, Amy saw the doctor was exchanging her tools one more time. "Guess we need Mr. Thirsty again."

[pennysperfectpolls]

Preliminaries round 2 match 6

Pennywise (It) vs Penny Hofstadter (Big Bang Theory) vs Penny (Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog)

Only 2 will move on

Propaganda under the cut

Pennywise (IT)

• Scary, goofy outfit, gives out balloons

• he's a clown. he's a demon. he's an alien. he's a serial killer. a bunch of kids with a baseball bat are enough to take him down.

• funny murder clown, i wanna see him among all the other probably not clowny pennies.

• :)

Penny Hofstadter (Big Bang Theory)

• Penny has no last name but when married, it becomes Penny Hofstadter. Her brother was in jail for drugs. She definitely does not have an alcohol problem. She had an addiction to video games causing her to not move for days. She marries Leonard despite everyone believing she could do better. She is described as a gorilla many times, which is ironic as she starred in a film where she turned into a gorilla.

• She's the only main character who doesnt have a phd but also the only one who knows how to gut a fish so i guess it balances out

Penny (Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog)

• she’s an incredible and tragic character whose love and trust gets her killed in the end. also Dr horrible is a very underrated media in general I want her to win

• Ordinary person in a supervillain story, just wants to shelter people and do her laundry. Relatable!

• She’s a sexy lamp but boy is she a cutie

• She’s the only genuinely good person in the whole show. She’s sweet and very naive. Love her <3

• Penny is an extremely empathetic and caring person. She works at a homeless shelter and is gentle and friendly with everyone there. She meets the main character at a laundromat and immediately becomes a very supportive and encouraging friend. Her goal throughout the narrative is to open a second location of the shelter so she can help more people. She has a sad backstory of not being accepted when she was younger and has learned to focus on optimism to make it through. Her main flaw is that she tolerates a romantic relationship with a man who doesnt respect her because she isn't well-practiced with respecting herself, but after he takes it too far, she does stand up for herself and walk out on him (growth!)

Pollrunners notes: all of these are some of the most submitted characters

[celestemagnoliathewriter]

The Infinite Divide: A Study on Horcruxes and Souls in the Harry Potter Universe

This is a meta on the nature of the soul in the Harry Potter universe. You can read below or on AO3. Any and all feedback most welcome! Meta below, or again, read on AO3.

Introduction

The integrity of the soul is one of the cornerstones of the Harry Potter universe (henceforth HPU). Harry’s intact soul is able to resist total possession by Voldemort during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries; Voldemort’s fractured soul leads to his downfall. This work centers on the magic of Horcruxes as presented in the HPU. It necessarily delves into the nature of the soul, its integrity, and how the creation of the Horcrux destabilizes - but does not diminish - the integrity of the soul. 

That is, I propose a theory of the soul that cannot be reduced numerically, but rather an infinite soul, that, when divided through the creation of a Horcrux (or several, in the case of Lord Voldemort), becomes less stable but is not reduced in its capacity. Instead, the soul’s essentialnature - that of animating a human person and imbuing that person with the capacity for meaning and relationships - is weakened. This weakening - the reduction of functional humanity - is what renders the Horcrux-creator unstable. Terms will be discussed next.

Preliminary Terms

We begin with the soul itself. What do we mean by the soul? Within the context of the HPU, the soul seems to serve two purposes: first, it animates the physical, human body,[i] such that the human body can engage in a life filled with meaning, and second, it is the vehicle for engaging in interpersonal relationships. Without a soul, the human body is but a mechanical shell. The soul imbues the human body with the capacity to pursue or enjoy meaningful activities: even in the case of the Longbottoms, who were tortured to insanity, it is assumed their souls are intact and capable of engaging with the world around them (though not without limitations).[ii]

The soul allows one to dream, desire, and engage in the world. Thus, I propose that the soulless, physical human body is incapable of functioning without the essential animation required for a) pursuing a life filled with meaning and b) interpersonal interaction. This leads us to the next point: the soul allows one to engage in mutual interpersonal relationships, particularly familial, fraternal, and/or romantic ones.[iii]

The importance of relationships is another crucial part of the HPU: Harry’s relationship with his friends brings him ‘back’ from the limbo of King’s Cross. It is his relationships that allow him to fight Voldemort off. His relationships continue to save him; Voldemort’s relationships with others are neither familial nor friendly, and this lack of mutually giving relationships further alienates him from functional humanity.[iv]

These personal relationships are independent of life or death. A ghost is an imprint of a body, animated by a soul left behind, who engages with living beings and other ghosts. A soul that has gone onto the afterlife appears to engage in relationships with others in the afterlife and can, when circumstances are sufficient, interact with the living. The soul that animates a living human body is capable of interaction with the living and the dead, but the relationship with the dead is rare. The ‘typical’ human person in the HPU has their body animated by their soul, and when the soul leaves the body, it enters a plane to which we as readers can only imagine.[v]

Because the soul is capable of interaction between the living and the dead, I suggest it is infinite, or, at the very least unending upon its creation. Canon gives no indication as to whether a soul pre-exists before birth. Given the work’s religious themes, borne out of a largely Christian tradition, I propose the simple explanation: the body is imbued with a soul at some point between conception and birth, and, once imbued, has either a finite end at death or an infinite fate beyond death. I suggest the latter, given canon’s tentative exploration of the afterlife, as given by the scene at the cemetery in Little Hangleton, the presence of ghosts, and Harry’s experience at King’s Cross in The Deathly Hallows. 

For this work, we will define the soul as the animating force required for living human beings to participate in mutual interpersonal relationships and engage in a life filled with meaning. When the soul is healthy and intact, it is able to engage in both planes of meaning and relationship. This, then, is what I term as functional humanity. When one is wholly unable to engage in a life filled with meaning and participate in interpersonal relationships, their functional humanity suffers. The person becomes less human and therefore more unstable. 

Let us move onto the Horcrux. The Horcrux, in the HPU, is an object in which a magical person has concealed a part of their soul for safekeeping. The Horcrux presents a slew of concerns: first, it is considered highly unnatural, ’Dark’ magic to split the soul. The intact soul is meant to stay this way. Second, it’s crucial to recall that in the HPU, Horcrux creation is made possible through murder, or the intentional act of taking the life of an innocent person.[vi]

Canon suggests that the committing of a crime distorts one’s soul; through murder, it becomes possible to distort the soul further by splitting it. The person who chooses to create a Horcrux - or several, in the case of Lord Voldemort - knowingly or unknowingly destabilizes their soul. As the soul is meant to be intact and whole, as a single entity, a person becomes unstable. This instability - and its relation to the soul - will be the subject of the next part of this work.

The ‘Infinite’ Soul and Limited Scientific Analogies

Canon asserts that the soul becomes unstable as a result of Horcrux creation. Instability is the consequence of Dark, unnatural magic and actions. This raises one of the central questions of this work: what makes Voldemort’s soul unstable after creating multiple Horcruxes? Is the instability a result of the soul’s reduction in potency or strength, as with dilution or numerical decreasing, or is it instability brought about through reduced functionality (meaning, do we get a smaller percentage of Voldemort with each horcrux creation, or do we get the same ‘proportion’ of Voldemort)? 

I argue for the latter - the soul’s instability is a consequence of the willful, malicious, and methodical destruction of human functionality. We get the same infinite ‘amount’ of Voldemort’s soul per Horcrux, but with each split, the soul becomes more volatile in one sense without reducing its magical capacity or potency. This is the question we answer next: how does the splitting of the soul result in reduced functionality without reducing potency?

Put in simpler terms, why is Voldemort still 100% Voldemort, no matter where and how his soul is split? Moreover, why is his soul increasingly unstable without affecting his magical ability? 

Analogies will be helpful in our understanding.[vii]

Mathematics

We move onto our first analogy: mathematics. How many numbers are there between one and three? On its face, one or two. But consider decimals now – 1.01, 1.0001, 1.00001, and so on. It results that between one and three there are, in fact, an infinite number of numbers. Yet, if I ask you what three minus one is, you’ll tell me it’s simply two. If there is an infinity of numbers between zero and one, one and two, and two and three, but I take one away from three, there is still an infinite amount of numbers between zero and one and one and two. The infiniteness has not disappeared; it has been reduced but it remains infinite.

So it is with the infinite soul. The soul remains infinite while intact. When the soul is split, the soul is still infinite – like the gap of numbers between zero and one or one and two – but the infiniteness remains. I take one away from three, and the sum is two. Yet, because of decimals, there is still an infinite number between each integer. 

Under this model, each Horcrux is still an infinite ‘piece’ of soul, albeit reduced from the whole, yet retaining its infinitude. The ‘infinitude,’ or the magic, is what is not lost or reduced when the soul is split. The total functionality is reduced, as the difference between one integer and another.

Particle Physics

We continue with particle physics, or more specifically, a carbon-12 atom. Carbon-12 is the most common isotope or ‘flavor’ of carbon available. Carbon-12 is also remarkably stable – and wants to stay that way. Stable atoms do not like to be split (and in the case of carbon-12, there’s no human way to split it without changing it first, which will be described shortly).

Carbon-12 contains six neutrons, six protons, and six electrons. What makes the atom carbon is the number of protons within it; it is the neutrons that determines the isotope. Thus carbon-14 has eight neutrons and six protons and carbon-12 has six neutrons and six protons. 

When outside the atom, the neutrons, protons, and electrons are heavier than within the atom itself. The reason for this discrepancy: energy is required to bind the neutrons and protons together to create the atom’s nucleus. Mass from the neutrons and protons is converted to energy, which binds the nucleus. (For those unaware or have forgotten, matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can be transferred from one state to the other; see Einstein’s theory of relativity [e.g. E=mc^2].)

The atom is held together by both its smaller components and the energy that binds it. The neutrons and protons are bound together in a nucleus and electrons move around it, as they are drawn to the nucleus. The forces uniting these components are stable and want to stay together; thus, carbon-12 is extremely resistant to splitting, and it is what we will liken the soul to. 

Consider, for a moment, any atom being split. It is possible—and indeed common—for atoms to split and splinter. Elements that are radioactive, and therefore unstable, want to split to become stable. Elements that are stable want to stay stable, such as carbon-12. 

Certain atoms are more difficult (if not impossible, in human hands) to split; when they do split, the consequences are variable. 

For the purposes of this work, we will not consider a soul splitting as an everyday occurrence (again, remember these are imperfect analogies). Instead, we will focus our attention on the soul splitting as an intentional, directed splitting of an atom that ought not to split under unnatural circumstances, such as a stable carbon-12 atom.[viii]

A carbon-12 atom can be split in one of two ways. The first way is humanly possible: to break apart the carbon-12 atom, it must be changed to an unstable isotope, such as carbon-14. That isotope is unstable and will want to split to become stable. The other way is not humanly possible (that we are aware of): to break apart a carbon-12 atom, which would change it to other elements, the carbon atom would have to be ‘struck’ in a particle accelerator at the right angle, with the right amount of energy, and with the right material to break it apart. To my knowledge this is theoretical only; carbon-12 is very stable and changing it to another carbon isotope is the best (and only) means to break it apart.

Let us return to the horcrux and the soul. Suppose that the soul is a carbon-12 atom, stable and content as it is. To change it, we must add two neutrons to make it carbon-14. It is then radioactive, willing to change to become stable. In the process of splitting, it decays, leaving evidence of radioactive decay. 

We know little of the process of creating a horcrux, outside a requisite murder, which is considered evil and unnatural. Murder enables the creation of the horcrux. Let us then liken murder to adding two neutrons to the carbon-12 atom, making it carbon-14. The murder makes the soul unstable, and perhaps, like naturally occurring carbon-14, the atom will change on its own to become stable. 

However, we can assume that the process of creating a horcrux is more involved and intentional than simple, cold-blooded murder. This is where we add the element of magic—the spell, curse, or force that the wizard casts to conceal a part of their soul within another object. 

Recall that for carbon to be carbon, it requires six protons. Imagine the murder as the element that adds the two neutrons to the carbon-12 (stable soul). Now imagine the spell or curse that the wizard casts as the process of splitting the soul. For both the original piece of soul (Voldemort) and the piece of soul in the horcrux to be stable carbon-12 atoms, splitting the carbon-14 perfectly into two carbon-12 atoms is impossible – not without taking more protons and neutrons to the ‘unfinished’ piece.

Let me rephrase this. Suppose you have a carbon-12 atom (the intact soul) and add two neutrons to it (the evil act of murder). You have a carbon-14 atom and wish to split it because it is unstable. You hit the carbon-14 atom with energy in a particular way (the spell or curse of horcrux creation), and the carbon-14 atom splits. 

It does not split evenly. Perhaps, for the purposes of our discussion, three protons go in one direction and three in the other. Three protons means you have lithium, not carbon. What are you to do to get more protons to ensure you have carbon?

This is what I suggest as another part of the process of horcrux creation—the protons must be cannibalized from another source. I suggest not literal cannibalism on behalf of the wizard creating a horcrux (although, as repulsive as the thought is, I do not put it past the wizard who willingly murders for their own self-interest), but perhaps spiritual cannibalism.

That is, when the wizard murders and casts the curse to create a horcrux, it takes away part of the life of the innocent person to “seal” the wizard’s soul to the object. This is but a theory, of course, but it does give some credence to Voldemort’s insistence that he kill Harry to make his final horcrux. 

In the process of this cannibalism—or vampirism, if you will—the ‘protons’ or life/spirit force of another ‘restabilizes’ the carbon-14/carbon-12 that was split. 

However, this does not solve the matter of the unstable soul. Why, if the horcrux and Voldemort both have ‘carbon-12’ or intact souls, would there be instability?

Remember that for a carbon atom to be carbon, it requires six protons. When the carbon-14 atom splits and Voldemort ‘finds’ protons to keep his soul stable, there is the possibility that what was originally in the carbon-14 (or his soul) is unevenly split. The number of neutrons may be unequal and results in two different carbon isotopes. 

It is still carbon (a soul), but no longer carbon-12 (a stable soul). This unstable soul, while functionally carbon, is not stable. An unstable atom is radioactive: this means instability both for the atom and the atoms around it.

In short, when Voldemort creates a horcrux and splits his soul, the ‘essence’ of the soul remains the same, while its stability is in danger. This instability goes beyond itself and affects others.

We shall explore this further in the following section. 

Electricity and Magnetism

Let us consider a third analogy: electricity and magnetism. As with previous sections, we must define terms before we can continue.

Imagine a charged particle in motion (CPM). Think of it as a single dot that is thrown across an empty room. When the charged particle moves, it creates both an electric field and a magnetic field around it. We will continue with our example of carbon-12; though a carbon-12 atom is not itself charged, the nucleus is. Consider the nucleus of the carbon-12 atom as the dot or CPM that is thrown across an empty room and creates an electro-magnetic field. 

The CPM creates two planes: electric and magnetic. Where there is a CPM, there is both an electric field and a magnetic field. Let us suppose that the electric field is the physical plane in which the soul operates, in which the body is animated and interacts in a world of meaning, dreams, and desires. Let us then suppose that the magnetic field is the relational plane in which the soul operates, in which the soul is capable of interpersonal relationships, both with the living and the dead. 

Suppose that we have our soul (the stable carbon-12 atom), add neutrons to it (a murder, changing it to carbon-14), and split it (the curse of horcrux creation). We take the life of another (protons) and ‘stabilize’ our soul in two pieces (two carbon atoms with uneven numbers of neutrons), with radioactivity (the carbon atoms are no longer stable carbon-12). 

In the process of splitting the atom or soul, we release energy (this is a very simple, rudimentary understanding of what nuclear fission is). Suppose, for the purposes of our study, that the energy sends the two atoms or soul pieces in opposite directions. Consider these pieces as CPMs; they go off in their own trajectory and create their own electromagnetic fields. 

Because they are radioactive, their electromagnetic fields are dangerous. Radioactive particles (think neutrons, for our purposes) seek new homes/atoms in an effort for radioactive, unstable atoms to become stable. But remember – when neutrons are added to atoms’ nuclei, they create unstable isotopes. In the process of decay, or the process of trying to become stable, the isotopes can replace healthy isotopes in a healthy body to radioactive, cancer-causing ones.[ix]

Unsurprisingly, CPMs do not move in empty rooms or vacuums. CPMs can interact with each other, thus bringing together their electromagnetic fields with varying results.[x]

We will return to horcruxes, as enough has been said on CPMs and their fields. Imagine the pieces of soul, or radioactive CPMs, going in different directions (the physical body versus the object in which a piece of the soul has been concealed). While these CPMs are going in two different directions, there are other CPMs or souls coming and going alongside them.

Imagine all these charged particles in motion as souls engaging with each other. Our inner hopes and dreams intersect with our meaningful relationships. When we are stable (and this is an imperfect analogy, but bear with me), our fields ebb and flow accordingly.

Take the unstable soul of Voldemort, like an atom struggling for stability and undergoing radioactive decay. As the pieces of his soul struggle for stability, releasing radioactive material around him, that radioactivity affects those around him.

The radioactivity poisons others, affects their functionality, both in terms of self-determination and engaging in meaningful interpersonal relationships. This is rather evident in the case of the horcruxes; the diary possesses Ginny and isolates her from friends and family. The locket drives Harry, Ron, and Hermione into their own versions of despair and loneliness. 

The darkness and evil that Lord Voldemort has brought into the world is parasitic, vampiric, cannibalistic. It feeds off others, incapable of returning anything but evil while yearning for stability. This is due not only to the soul being fundamentally built to be intact, but to be animating a living human being, rather than an inanimate object.

What might this mean for the long-term stability of the horcrux? If we imagine the horcrux – and Voldemort himself – as unstable pieces of soul, yearning for stability, it might be hundreds, if not thousands of years until stability is reached, if ever. (This is not unlike the length of time it takes for radioactivity to cease-as an example, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, after the catastrophe in 1986, will not be fit for human habitation for upwards to 20,000 years).[xi]

In my estimation, the healthy, stable soul is meant to engage in life-giving human function: pursuit of dreams and meaningful activity and mutual interpersonal relationships, with relationships as perhaps the more important of these two facets.

This leads us to our conclusion.

Conclusion

If the soul is unable to properly live or die, as pieces of metal cannot engage in genuine human relationships, the soul continues to be unstable. It is a full soul, infinite and reduced; it is a full soul, like carbon with too many neutrons; it is a full soul, capable of affecting others, but it is a dysfunctional soul, a broken soul, separated from its place of belonging.

In the HPU, the human soul belongs in the human body until death, the next great adventure. Without being able to truly live or die, with repeated broken relationships and evil, it is unsurprising that Voldemort is described as having an unstable soul by the time he reaches Harry Potter.

And, when the Killing Curse backfires on Voldemort, the fragmented soul, seeking stability, latches onto the most stable entity: the orphaned infant, who grows up to have love and relationships that save him from total destruction.

This is the magic of Harry Potter: the power of love that returns good for evil and safeguards one’s humanity. 

[i] Allow me a moment to digress to discuss Animagi, Maledicti, and werewolves (among other magical creatures). Animagi are human beings who, through magical means, have the ability to transform into a particular animal form at will. In essence they are human beings with a magical ability. Thus, an Animagus does not lose their soul when they transform. A Maledictus, meanwhile, is a human being who, through a blood curse, becomes prisoner to their animal form and ‘forgets’ their humanity (see Nagini). It is possible that a Maledictus loses their soul when the process is complete, or the soul remains intact but ‘hidden,’ making it impossible for the human within the Maledictus body to engage in meaningful interpersonal relationships and pursue a life filled with meaning. In the case of Voldemort and Nagini-as-horcrux, it is unknown if there are two souls dwelling within one physical body, or if the soul of Nagini, once-fully-human, is no longer animating the snake’s body. As in the Fantastic Beasts franchise (FB) Nagini is able to transform at will and retain her sensibilities, I suggest the Maledictus does retain their soul until death, though limited due to the nature they have assumed for the rest of their days. As for werewolves and other magical creatures, though outside the scope of this work, we can extrapolate that the more ‘human’ the creature, the likelier it is that they have souls identical to full human persons; as an example, Remus Lupin’s soul is intact and what prevents him from assuming its full human capability at the full moon is the curse of lycanthropy. Wolfsbane Potion allows him to retain control of his human mind (and the soul that animates it).

[ii] The case of the Longbottoms, and later, Gilderoy Lockhart, suggests that there is a concept of wizards with intellectual disabilities, whether caused by magical accidents or perhaps, magical neurodivergence. Like many points in this work, it is outside the aim to develop these ideas further. I add this point to not only suggest, but emphatically assert, that persons with severe intellectual disabilities are included in my understanding of what it means to live a life filled with meaning, even if it is not within their capabilities to easily communicate what brings them meaning. Comments and questions on this particular issue are more than welcome.

[iii] Without the soul, this animating force, the human person cannot participate in social behavior. The need for meaningful social interaction is hardly unusual, given modern psychology; a person without a soul or animation cannot be in relationship with others. A life without relationships, particularly in early childhood, is emotionally and developmentally devastating.

[iv] We must address Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This work, which is considered canonical by the author of the original series, poses a curious problem for Voldemort and relationships. In short, the original author claims that Voldemort has a child, Delphini, with Bellatrix Lestrange, which suggests a sexual relationship with Lestrange and a paternal relationship with Delphini. It is possible (and in my opinion, highly likely) that if such relationships existed, they were not filled with genuine human emotion. Bellatrix was the means to an end - a child - and the child itself was a means to an end as well. In the ‘other’ future that CC presents, Delphini is at Voldemort’s right-hand side, ruling over the wizarding world. I suggest that even in this context, for Voldemort’s character to remain consistent with his upbringing, Delphini remains a tool. I believe Voldemort is capable of certain fondness for his most devoted followers, such as Bellatrix (he exhibits some reaction upon her death in DH), but I believe it is a step too far to consider this a loving relationship, or even a relationship that is life-fulfilling or life-sustaining. Delphini and Bellatrix represent the lengths to which Voldemort will go for unquestioning devotion and loyalty, but they are certainly not his loved ones, or relations in the sense that bring out his humanity in its fullness.

[v] My fledgling series “The Death of” explores some possibilities within the wizarding afterlife. It is one interpretation of many; I recommend FloreatCastellum’s Vetus Amicus as another interpretation, told from the perspective of the character ‘Death.’ There is an indication in canon that the afterlife is a place, state of mind, or plane of existence, though as with many concepts in canon, it is underdeveloped and merits further consideration. It is outside the scope of this work to investigate the wizarding afterlife; recommendations for works that do explore this aspect of the HPU are most welcome in comments.

[vi] Though we are not privy to the details beyond the requisite murder, it is possible other Dark magic is involved in horcrux creation.

[vii] Bear in mind that analogies are imperfect, especially when considering an infinite entity. The human brain is literally incapable of processing infinites and thus any attempt at reducing the infinite to the finite will result in imperfections and error. Blame language and the finiteness of the human mind. 

[viii] When I initially formulated this idea, I considered an electron or proton. A proton can be split into quarks, which doesn’t quite solve the issue of intentional splitting. An electron cannot be split into further elements (as far as we are aware), and as the results of such a split cannot be observed out of supposed impossibility, I must work with the original idea of a split atom. 

[ix] Consider the use of iodine pills in reducing the risk of developing thyroid cancer. Iodine is a necessary element in the function of the healthy thyroid. Without iodine, the thyroid ceases to function normally. Imagine a nuclear disaster (such as the Chernobyl explosion of 1986), in which radioactive isotopes of iodine are released into the air. These radioactive isotopes can replace the isotopes that are supposed to be inside the human body. This distortion will destroy the function of the thyroid (and DNA), which can lead to cancer. Iodine pills can be taken to reduce the risk by flooding the body with the necessary kind of iodine for healthy thyroid function. For further reading, see this article.  

[x] NASA has excellent graphics to understand how these fields/waves are formed. I strongly recommend reading this article for further learning. 

[xi] For an explanation of this figure, please see this article.

[allisticntprivilege]

I saw you reblogging a post about NT experts on mental states&illnesses and I wondered: What do you think about Simon Baron-Cohen and his works&ideas he postulates? (I myself don't like him but that's just me and that would extend the limits of this ask box...)

He has moved from Direct Pathologizing (extreme male brain, theory of mind -- which is still his most cited work, describing autistic transmasculinity & autistic women not being straight as testosterone related disorders) to aspie elitism masquerading as neurodiversity (but still some theory of mind shit) but, like, that’s still bad. Aspie supremacy can kill.

And, like, there’s his idea of what post-diagnostic support means: https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/psb.1816 and the categorization of AAC as only showing preliminary evidence of benefit https://www.thelancet.com/article/S1474-4422(20)30034-X/abstract (Hint: no, if you consider the AAC fields own literature it gets the same Evidence-Based label, and if you don’t consider the field’s own literature then that rule should be applied to all the other folks studying their own so-called supports.)

He is, at this point, supervising work where a careful reader trying to pull useful bits out will absolutely find those useful buts. However, never trust his framing of anything. The framing still tends to be very Typical Autism Essay.

[aesethewitch]

Digital Divination: Preliminary Thoughts & Personal Theories

If you've been following the last week or so, you may have seen me ranting about questions regarding digital divination. I've been fascinated with divination since I was a teenager, and now I've got a handful of personal theories and UPGs that I definitely take for granted. It's been a long time since I've asked the whys and hows of divination.

Time to go back to square one.

But if I'm going to dive into what makes divination work and, therefore, why digital divination does or doesn't work, I ought to start with what I know. Or, rather, what I think. So, we start with my personal theory.

*cracks knuckles*

Why does divination work in the first place?

I suppose it depends on what you're using it for. Some use it to literally divine the future. Others see divination as a tool for self-reflection or as a meditative focus. Others still seem somewhere in between, using it as a introspective tool to help with decision making based off of what is already known.

I fall somewhere between the "true" diviners of the future and the introspective tool users. In my opinion, divination (especially tarot) is best used as an assistant and self-improvement tool. I believe divination can predict the future… sort of.

It isn't perfect. That's certain. My existing running theory on why divination works has to do with the interconnectivity of all things, and this is why it works both ways, depending on the diviner's goals. It's either that, or the diviner is specifically requesting messages or assistance from a spirit, who guides their attention and tools toward the appropriate answers.

In the case of interconnectivity, the diviner essentially "taps into" those connections. This doesn't necessarily have to be via meditation or trance. For me, I rarely need to do either. It does require a focus, though, which I suppose could be construed as a trance-like state. The process involves reaching out for the connections and following them to draw conclusions.

In the case of spirit communication or receiving messages, it works somewhat similarly. I don't think that spirits can directly, tangibly affect the physical world we exist in. I do think they can manipulate connections like we can (and sometimes with greater effectiveness or power). So rather than a spirit shuffling and literally pulling the cards for you, they might tug on a connection to your hands and make a card fly out, influence you to stop shuffling at a certain point, tug on the strands surrounding a pendulum to make it swing, etc.

This all ties in with my personal views on fate and faith and free will, which... I may talk about at some point. For now, *handwaves us onwards*.

But Aese, you offer tarot readings all the time. You even take money for tarot readings! Don't you think they can predict the future? I hear you ask, very hypothetically.

Yes! And also, no.

According to my theory, it isn't so simple. There are countless winding, interconnected paths weaving into a blurred future which hasn't taken shape yet. Though I believe in fate (*noncommittal handwiggle with accompanying ehhhhh, it's complicated noise*), the willful interference of humanity and spirits in the world reshapes the future constantly.

At its core, divination is a connection to the inner self, the subconscious. It's through this connection, branching outwards into the world, that we're able to divine.

There is no way to be 100% positive about an outcome. There is always a chance that something will change and alter the situation and, therefore, the future. Nothing is set in stone until it happens. This is why you'll get divinatory readings that resonate really strongly but which don't come to pass.

The goal with divination shouldn't be to obtain certainty. It should be a tool to observe the present and determine the most likely outcomes. It's a decision-making assistant. Is it often correct? When I do it, yes. But that's because I'm specifically pulling for the most likely outcome. Without severe interference (and sometime accounting for it), I find a rather consistent success rate.

For this reason, I don't like yes/no questions. The answer is almost always going to be "maybe." People don't particularly like that, especially people who don't do divination themselves.

I also immediately distrust any diviner who espouses a 100% accuracy guarantee when predicting the future (unless, of course, it's hyperbole for advertising or humor purposes). I definitely believe there are those whose accuracy rates are extremely high and who have a certain skill with divination. They deserve to be proud of their skills. Hell, I'm proud of my skills.

But no one will ever be 100% accurate all the time. You would have to account for every tangent, every twist, every interference to be perfectly accurate. And to do that would take so much time, effort, and skill that it would be prohibitively expensive and/or a ridiculous waste. Just go live your life. Yeesh.

But none of this mentions tools. None of my existing theories require that I have a firm connection to a tool. I've picked up a new tarot deck and had spectacular success without practice or "seasoning" it.

So why, then, doesn't digital divination work for me?

I don't know! I have absolutely no idea. It could be because of my personal connection to the medium, it could be unfamiliarity, it could be that I just don't like it and so it doesn't work. It could be a preconception that it won't work, and therefore, it ends up inaccurate. Not a clue!

Yet.

My next steps are going to be compiling other theories on why divination works. I want to have as wide a net to cast as possible so that I can test multiple theories at once. Then, I'll hunt down as many apps, websites, and various online tools as I can to test, dig through reviews, decide which ones to use, and then get down to it. It's the scientific method, baby! Hypothesis, experiment, record results, do it again.

If you have thoughts, theories, or want to yell about divination with me, feel free to add a comment or reply or send me an ask. I'm going absolutely feral about this and would love to chat about it!!

If you like my work and want to throw a couple dollars my way via Ko-Fi, it would be much appreciated! This research is going to be mostly public for exposure and interaction, but there may be behind-the-scenes notes and more in-depth UPG stuff that'll be Ko-Fi exclusive. Plus, even one-time supporters get extra and early stuff all the time!

[mariacallous]

This story first appeared in Signal, Meduza’s Russian-language newsletter on the rhetoric of Putinism. The translation below appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue of The Beet delivered directly to your inbox.

Hello, and welcome back to The Beet! 

Almost exactly one month ago, a group of gunmen attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow, killing and injuring hundreds of people. A

On the evening of March 22, terrorists attacked Crocus City Hall, a concert venue outside of Moscow where a crowd of spectators was waiting to see a performance by the Russian band Piknik. Several men armed with machine guns entered the venue, opened fire on the crowd, set fire to the building, and then fled. The attack killed 144 people and injured more than 500 others. As of this writing, dozens of concertgoers are still considered missing. 

Almost immediately, unconfirmed reports emerged, including in the Western press, that an ISIS offshoot had taken responsibility for the events at Crocus City Hall. By midday on March 23, the ISIS-affiliated news outlet Amaq was reporting that Islamic State militants “had carried out a coordinated attack on a large crowd of Christians.” Then, news broke that the FSB had made a number of arrests in connection with the attack, and that at least some of the apprehended suspects were citizens of Tajikistan.

Nearly 24 hours after the tragedy, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian people. He declared March 24 a day of national mourning and promised that all those responsible for the terrorist attack would be punished.

That phrase, “terrorist attack” — terakt in Russian — was once a central element of Putin’s rhetoric. Now, after more than a decade on the sidelines, it has reemerged in Russian politics, displacing the out-of-favor (and banned in the context of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine) word “war.” 

Who is to blame?

The FSB has arrested — and in some cases, tortured — around a dozen suspects in connection with the March 22 attack, but the identities of its architects are still unknown. 

Amid an emerging global consensus that the attack on Crocus City Hall was the work of ISIS-K, or the Islamic State-Khorasan, which operates primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Russian public seems inclined to believe otherwise. Judging by the tenor of Russian social media discourse, at least, a few other narratives are gaining more traction.

The first alternative theory points the finger at Ukraine. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-controlled media network RT, called reports linking the attack to ISIS “fake,” strongly suggesting in social media posts that Ukraine organized the attack with help from the “collective West.” The so-called Z-patriot war bloggers are unanimously critical of the Russian security forces’ impotence but haven’t reached a consensus on whether they believe Western intelligence or Kyiv orchestrated the attack. Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev was especially quick to blame the “Kyiv regime.” Putin also referenced “preliminary information” about Ukraine’s role in the attack.

Then there are the Kremlin opponents who believe that Russian authorities engineered the attack. They support this idea with a conspiracy theory from the late 1990s, which holds that a series of apartment bombings in Moscow during that period was an inside job. This particular theory seems to be gaining popularity — on the day of the Crocus attack, there were over 200 times more hits, compared to the previous baseline, for the Wikipedia page about the Moscow apartment blasts. The anti-Putin opposition also believes the attack will be a pretext for Russian authorities to “tighten the screws” and announce a second wave of mobilization following Putin’s recent “electoral victory.” 

For now, there are more questions than answers surrounding the March 22 attack. But it does seem clear that a feeling united Russians that day, and it had little to do with the logistics of the attack. For more than a decade, the phrase “terrorist attack” meant one of two things for most Russians: something that happened far away to other people or a meaningless phrase in Federal Security Service reports about the latest successful operation thwarting an attempt to “destabilize the socio-political situation” in Russia.

There have been times in relatively recent Russian history when both terrorism and the expectation of the next attack were routine. Memories of those times seemed to be well buried. But after March 22, they suddenly burst to the surface, inflecting Russians’ perceptions of what happened that night at Crocus City Hall.

Pandemic, war, drone attacks, shelling in cities on the Russia–Ukraine border — none of these notably catastrophic events called up a remotely similar reaction. Crocus, like the town of Beslan, will forever be connected with terrorism in the minds of Russians. Many will never forget where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that men with machine guns had stormed the entertainment complex.

‘All of us’

The terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall wasn’t simply a mass shooting at a concert venue — it was also a reminder of all the other traumatic events in Russia’s relatively recent past. And collective traumas tend to unite, at least momentarily, even very fragmented and atomized societies, becoming part of civic identity. 

In the weeks that followed, Russian society has fiercely debated the specifics of the attack: whether it could have been prevented, the adequacy and proportionality of authorities’ response, and who should be held responsible. At the same time, Russians quickly came to view Crocus City Hall as an attack on “all of us,” merging it with the collective memory of the terrorist attacks that became a crucial part of national identity in the 1990s and 2000s.  

That period was a difficult and dangerous one for Russians, marked by the apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999; the bombing of Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 2000; the bombing of the Victory Day parade in Kaspiysk, Dagestan, in 2002; the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002; suicide bombings at the Krylya rock festival in Tushino, outside of Moscow, in 2003; an explosion on a commuter train in Stavropol Krai in 2003; a bombing on the Moscow metro in 2003; the Beslan school siege in 2004; bombings on the Moscow metro in 2010; a suicide bombing in Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in 2011; and many other incidents.

People who experienced this difficult era remember the pervasive fear that came with it: the sense that you or your loved ones could be killed at any moment; the habit of avoiding large crowds; and finding comfort in superstitious behaviors, like always sitting on the fourth subway car because the last bombing happened on the second one. 

That omnipresent fear was largely forgotten over the course of the last 10 years or so — and this is widely considered a great achievement for Russian society. But the feeling turned out to be lurking under the surface. Now, following the Crocus attack, a new generation of people, who don’t personally remember residential buildings blowing up in Moscow or suicide bombings at music festivals, will inherit the collective memory of living daily life in fear. 

Making connections

Like “terakt,” the word “connections” has a specific set of connotations regarding security issues in Putin’s Russia. Following Crocus, pro-Putin media started referring to a possible “Ukraine connection.” To understand that phrase, it’s helpful to recall past “connections” Russia has made.

From 1994 to 1996, Russia was at war with the separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, and by the mid-1990s, the phrase “Chechen connections” was already played out in public discourse. Authorities and media searched for “connections to Chechnya” in almost every high-profile murder or fraud case. During that period, it was not uncommon to hear government officials attribute any and every social problem to the “Chechen connection” or the “Islamic factor.” The tendency was so widespread that novelist Viktor Pelevin satirized it in the 1999 novel Generation P.

In the 2000s, when Russia was waging its second war on Chechen separatism and suffered a series of bloody terrorist attacks, “Chechnya” was usually the first and main explanation for unfortunate or tragic events — it was also often the correct explanation.

“Chechen connections” were subsequently found in high-profile cases like the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015 and the arson attack on a local office of Russian human rights organization Memorial in Ingushetia in 2018 (the Putin administration forced Memorial to shut down in 2021). In the 2010s, however, the phrase took on a different meaning. In the 1990s and 2000s, vague “connections” to Chechnya were supposed to lead back to Chechen militants hiding out in the Caucasus mountains. More recently, it has come to mean the Chechen authorities — i.e. regional Governor Ramzan Kadyrov and his security forces. And though the phrase persists in the media, Russian officials no longer utter the words “connections to Chechnya.”

Similarly, after Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, and especially following the 2008 Russia–Georgia War, Russian state media and authorities sought out “Georgian connections.” The ones they found were somewhat tenuous. After the Beslan school siege in 2004, then-Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Sergey Baburin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov both hinted at possible links to Georgia. In 2010, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said that an investigation had uncovered “Georgian connections” in two bombings on the Moscow metro. (Chechen separatist militant leader Dokka Umarov, who was presumed to be residing in Georgian territory at that point, took responsibility for the attacks, which killed 41 people.) In 2012, Russian security forces and propagandists claimed that Givi Targamadze, a Georgian politician and leading figure in the Rose Revolution, had organized rioting at a Moscow protest.

From terrorist threat to moral panic

Vladimir Putin sees his chief task as Russian president as eliminating all real and imagined threats against his personal power and Russia itself. The Kremlin is always fighting off carefully labeled menaces: “Chechen terrorists,” “color revolutions,” “the Collective West,” “anti-Russia,” “U.S. hegemony,” “LGBT ideology,” and so on.

If the threats on that list seem increasingly abstract, it’s because the real threats to Putin’s presidency have dissipated (or, more accurately, been systematically eliminated), leading the Russian authorities to set their sights on potential future threats. And where they’ve failed to find potential threats, they’ve resorted to fabricating them. This process has had some unintended consequences: the constant search for threats inevitably leads to over-simplifications of politically complex issues, as well as to bizarre phobias — which explains how Russian politicians wound up asserting that Russia’s Armed Forces are waging war against gender-neutral toilets in Ukraine.

At times, the Kremlin’s perception of actual threats differs sharply from ordinary Russians’ perceptions. To try to bridge that gap, Russian authorities learned to incite moral panics during Putin’s third term as president, from 2012 to 2018. The government sought broad social support and, perhaps even more importantly, the appearance of support for its policies, by presenting Russia as the defender of “traditional values,” “the union between man and woman,” and other conservative social positions. In 2024, the supposed potential threat now comes from the “collective West” rather than somewhere deep in the Caucasus. 

The political mechanism is simple: convince people that someone or something (the LGBTQ+ community, globalism, migrants — it doesn’t really matter who or what) threatens their safety and their way of life, and that the authorities are protecting them from that threat.

Politicians the world over propose urgent, decisive measures and see their popularity rise, their supporters rally around them, and their power to enact their own agendas grow. Examples abound: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Putin, and many others. The specific enemy in every moral panic is new, but the threat — the destruction of a common way of life — is always the same. 

The moral panic mechanism is most effective in authoritarian regimes, like Putin’s Russia, where the authorities control the information space. But it’s not limited to autocracies — the right wing in the U.S. incited very successful moral panics about hippies in the 1970s and “gay culture” in the 1980s.  

A transparent — but powerful — pretext

The attack on Crocus City Hall was a real — not imaginary or potential — threat to public security, but Ukraine is the subject of Russia’s current moral panic. The Russian authorities are seeking a “Ukrainian connection” in the Crocus events simply out of inertia — their current worldview leaves no room for any other enemy. 

But no one — not Dmitry Medvedev, not Margarita Simonyan, and none of the pro-Kremlin war bloggers (with maybe an exception or two) — is really out to convince millions of Russian nationals that Ukraine organized the Crocus attack.

The main audience for “Ukraine connection” propaganda is Vladimir Putin himself. And, of course, he doesn’t need to be convinced of anything. What he requires is a demonstration that everyone — from the security forces and propagandists to the Russian people — is behind him and shares his fixation on Ukraine. As for everyone else, the public demonstration of belief in a “Ukraine connection” is a core part of Russia’s current patriotic credo. If you want to be considered a Russian patriot, you have to express certainty that Russian troops did nothing wrong in Bucha; that Russia didn’t shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17; that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”; that Moscow should capture Kyiv; and, now, that there’s no doubt about a “Ukraine connection” to the Crocus attack. 

Supporting the “Ukraine connection” theory as confidently and loudly as possible amounts to a demonstration of loyalty to “our own” and hatred of the enemy against whom “we” have united. That’s why convincing evidence of Ukraine’s involvement is unnecessary and no counterargument is effective. No one is even asking how organizing the attack would benefit Ukraine — the country has long since been cast in the role of infernal evil.

Even public displays of grief for the victims of the Crocus attack have become demonstrations of loyalty. Public officials were reportedly instructed to lay flowers at memorials in the days after the attack — this kind of enforced public grieving is a first in Putin’s Russia. The private sector has undertaken analogous shows of solidarity, like writing off victims’ debts. The Crocus City Hall attack presents an ideal opportunity for public and private sector workers alike to show that they support “their own” because, in this case, they don’t have to identify with a war of aggression to do so.

What the Putin administration needs most is public buy-in for its war on Ukraine. Much of its current rhetoric — from complaints about the “collective West” to outlawing “LGBT propaganda” — has become part of a campaign to generate consent for a senseless invasion, just as the invasion itself is framed as the “logical” answer to those “threats.” 

There is little evidence that the attack on Crocus City Hall was the work either of Kyiv or of Moscow itself. It seems likely, instead, to have its roots in other issues, like Russia’s colonial past, its involvement in wars in Chechnya and Syria, and its treatment of Muslim communities within its borders. But those who believe it was an inside job are right about one thing: the deadly tragedy has become a convenient way for the Kremlin to stir up fear and suspicion about Ukraine, while exploiting a difficult period in Russia’s recent past to rally people around its brutal present-day policies.  

[thirdchoiceurl]

Oh cool whats NAA? Also I've heard of using neutrons to treat nuclear waste, but I was never able to find any recent papers on it? Or maybe I wasn't using the correct search terms.

NAA stands for Neutron Activation Analysis. There’s a few varieties, but in our lab we typically do Delayed Gamma Neutron Activation Analysis or DGNAA. We bombard samples with a strong flux of thermal neutrons from the reactor, and the neutrons are absorbed by all manner of atoms in the material. In doing so, the stable nuclei are transmuted into short-lived radioisotopes that then decay via beta emission and emit gamma photons with characteristic energies. By using a scintillator and photomultiplier with an MCA (or the HPGe setup if it’s available (it never is) and we have the nitrogen (we never do)), we can then build a gamma ray spectrum that tells us exactly which trace elements are in the sample and, through cross-section analysis, we can get good measures of exactly how much of each element is present.

It’s an incredibly powerful tool for detecting and characterizing trace elements, with sensitivity several thousand times beyond purely chemical methods. One of the recent experiments we did analysis for involved mapping ancient trade routes in Central America by using pottery shards to identify the characteristic minerals of specific clay deposits and correlating them with how far they had traveled from their origin point. The amount of information that can be found from the atomic fingerprint of an object is astounding.

My pet project (the “refried beans” theory of nuclear waste as some of my buddies call it) is typically referred to as waste transmutation. High-level nuclear waste is produced from the processing of spent fuel, which is laden with highly radioactive fission products that pose a serious danger to anyone who may carelessly handle it in the present or future. While many of these fission products are short-lived and decay almost completely while the fuel waits in the cooling pool of its reactor, some isotopes (especially Caesium-137 and Strontium-90) have half-lives in the range of decades and product abundance above 5%. These nuclides are in the sour spot of maximum danger, with half-lives short enough to be ferociously radioactive even in tiny quantities and long enough that one can’t simply wait for them to decay significantly in a human lifetime.

My project, which is currently a bunch of spreadsheets and slideshows I use to try to convince someone to let me mess around with some highly corrosive extremely radioactive nitric acid salts, involves intercepting the fission product waste after reprocessing separates out the industrially useful heavy radioactinides and placing that waste back into the neutron flux of a reactor or accelerator. In doing so, preliminary simulations show that significant portions of the long-term waste activity can be reduced as the hardy and problematic long-lived isotopes are transmuted into short-lived ephemeral products that decay into stable nuclei in a matter of days rather than centuries.

This process isn’t without its drawbacks and hazards. Waste to be transmuted must be carefully chemically treated to remove elements like Calcium or Chlorine which can absorb neutrons from the beam and become new nuclear waste. Another issue is that the transmutation process makes the waste drastically more radioactive for a brief period of time. No fission product exists can be transmuted directly into a stable isotope, we can only pre-empt their decay. In time, the refried waste and the untreated waste will release the exact same quantity of radiation, and forcing it to undergo centuries’ worth of decay in a matter of weeks will make it extremely hot both physically and metaphorically.

It’s a work in progress.

[misarem]

Umineko Episode 5 Thoughts: The Part Where I Try To Lock In

I feel the need to just get this out while I have the chance to do this before I start episode 6. I think I finished this episode over a week ago at this point and have since been doing other stuff, been too busy with real life to pour over this vn, etc. My thoughts on the episode itself will be kinda minor but I'll compensate with my current theories on the overarching mystery and the murders. What I'm hoping to do is have preliminary theories ready for episode 6 so that I can develop them while reading it and be ready for endgame. I even started making a physical journal of my thoughts on each murder, character, and rule because after like 80% of my life in the education system this is all I know how to do to retain information, plus! itll be cute. but anyways

Doing what's easy for me and starting at the beginning and just working my way through. I'm still kinda burnt by Beato in episode 3 but I really do wanna believe she's like fully dejected now that Battler isn't matching her as an opponent the way she thought he would. Surreal to see her practically dead but I guess this is signaling that the game is becoming something much bigger than Battler vs Beatrice, to the point where Bern and Lambda are more active and Knox is now involved. Through some meta lens I almost wanna read this as like, an event within the world of detective fiction where a story spirals out of control and the foundations that do exist need to intervene. Feels like commentary on stories as a whole, what has been established as "good" and "reasonable" and what it means to subvert those paradigms, and how far you can reasonably go. And having these larger themes on fiction as a whole run parallel to the events of Rokkenjima, with the ideas of love and trust being established and broken between family mirroring the trust between an author and reader and the love for reading and storytelling, is very satisfying. And if you read the witches as authors and critics of mystery stories, or just stories in general, then the idea of fiction giving our lives fulfilment and meaning also operates on all these levels: the witches weave the narrative on Rokkenjima from a higher plane to stave off their boredom, those on Rokkenjima cope with the dire situation by blaming the murders on witches and demons, and outside of the murders, the people who struggle because of this family cope with fantasy, from Ange and Maria easing their loneliness with the sisters and Sakutaro, to, as we see later, Natsuhi finding refuge from her responsibilities in an imaginary Kinzo and his furniture.

Going off my ideas about black and white magic in the last episode, Natsuhi herself is beginning to resemble a white witch in the same way Maria did. Her and Jessica finally beginning to come to an understanding of one another only in the dire circumstances that were the murders of Rokkenjima was one of the first terrifyingly realo depictions of strained family relationships I latched onto in the game, and I was sorta sad to see her fall to the wayside in the rest of the Question Arcs (altho everyone else getting some focus was important). Very nice to see her in the forefront again here, this time focusing more on her self-sacrificing nature and her sense of duty to the image and wellbeing of the Ushiromiya family that feeds it.

Having THIS be the backdrop of her inner monologue is fitting considering the way everything she faces ends up spiraling into her own guilt and self-loathing, and how she needs to take everything on for her family. I can't even blame her at this point for imagining Kinzo recognizing her for her work cuz idk how else I would live like this. And when she tries to help her husband and he just keeps making the same types of decisions that fail his business ventures and she ends up just acquiescing every time. Wow its just harrowing. They can never make me hate Natsuhi. Also I forget if I addressed Maria's torture of Rosa in the last write up, I don't wanna say a whole lot besides the cycle of abuse within the Ushiromiya family is horrifying, and that it feels like this chapter, Maria's turn to inflicting harm on others to cope feels unaddressed in a concerning way. Like I'm scared

As for the new characters, I like Erika a decent amount so far, I'm mainly just waiting for her to fly off the handle because she was just so dominant here until the end of the episode. Her being an avatar of Bernkastel almost makes me think of her as like a joke on author insert characters in fiction, also makes me wonder just what Erika is, if she's supposed to be like a meta entity like the witches even tho she's meant to be a human? Does she just exist between reality and fiction as Berns fucked up creation? Its interesting to me. Also they keep namedropping Ange when talking abt Erika as a piece and its getting on my damn nerves keep my homegirls name out your mouth. I like Dlanor a lot too and how cordial and nice she can be. even tho formally she's usually an enemy.

Not much changed here besides moving Natsuhi up and Krauss down again lmao. I'll keep doing these just to track my opinions but it might be good to be more nuanced with it, add a few more tiers or find some other way to address the cast overall altho by this point, almost all of them in the okay tier or above are so well established and integrated into the story. If I take anything from this vn its gonna be the cast.

The murders themselves I was like fine with. I hope Jessica died painlessly she deserves a break. Obviously things went way differently but, I thought the way it worked was a little boring and I almost expect episode 6 to be some sort of do-over for it altho that feels unlikely at the same time. Altho I do understand it, this is supposed to be a breaking point for Battler, seeing someone actually be (wrongfully?) implicated but being powerless to fight against it before he has his epiphany moment so it's fine. The court scene also made up for it just in its style alone, the sound design, visual effects and transitions are such a treat and give this game such a strong identity among visual novels. The OST with tracks like patchwork chimera, ACI-L and totemblume is like incredible, -45 does such incredible work and I wish I could have them all on my vgm tag on this blog. I might need to liek stop being lazy and do my own vgm uploads and quit replying on other blogs to do it if i want them on my blog lmao. Still a good episode and it's obviously setting up for greater payoffs but it's hard for me to imagine that Bern and Lambda find this first game of theirs particularly interesting before the court scene.

What I'm interested about thought is Natsuhi's baby, if that will end up being a full-fledged piece of Lambda's, and if its the character who I think it is from the little snippets of him I've seen in the intro. It does kinda tickle me that the first twilight murders were all very deep, clean slices to the neck and there's just a Battler-aged, brown haired dude in the intro with a sword. Considering how hard he implicated Natsuhi by controlling her movements, his presence in the story is cooperative with Erika's sleuthing and I'm curious if they'll end up working together as, I guess meta entities in the story? We'll see.

Like I said before I go into ep 6 I wanted to just get down what I have as the solution so far. Nothing concrete still, and I know the how is super important even tho I kinda only have the who and sorta the why, but again I'm hoping episode 6 will help me develop that.

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Anyways I really think it's Kyrie. PIOKJHGFHJKL:L I can't help it. I almost feel like I'm approaching it at the wrong angle and that she's a red herring or something, and I keep going back and forth, but at the same time, so much of the movement of the characters makes sense when you think of it as Kyrie manipulating things. Her face being completely smashed in the first twilight of episode 1. Her being the one to rile the other parents up by warning them about Beatrice in episode 2. The details she reveals about herself in episode 3 and the part of her and Hideyoshi's characters tab that alludes to her shooting him (maybe an accident but ???). And the way she positions herself slightly under Krauss when they're in the dungeon of episode 4, letting him take the reins but still having a lot of influence and command as well as watching them all die as they escape, being the only one to make it inside, being "missed" a bunch by the Chiesters and telling Battler in her own words to believe in magic while her version of the actual events as it is given to Battler is glossed over by the narration. The mystery of the code above the parlor in (i think) episode 3 and half of the numbers corresponding to Battler's birthday. And that, as Beatrice said, because of Battler's sin, people on the island die, that the sin feels like it could be connected to his unclear parentage and that the sin, by the fact that it occurred 6 years in the past, was close to Asumu's death, Rudolph's marriage to Kyrie and Ange's birth. Again I could be barking up the wrong tree cuz I really don't have the how or why down like, in a concrete way yet but I don't know it just feels so likely like I just feel it. And she at least has Genji or Shannon in cahoots too, not committing the murders but just helping with keys or acting as certain people. It would be easy to say they're acting on Kinzo's will but he's dead now so idk. But my vague guess is she wants revenge against the Ushiromiya family for how (like how it affects literally everyone elses like a huge trauma abuse machine) it affected her life, her relationship with Rudolph and the birth of her child. Maybe Battler really is hers but was taken at birth because Asumu's child had died or she has miscarriage and the family wanted to save face. And I think by manipulating the situation and her in-laws she managed to create a state of paranoia on the island, which facilitated most if not all of the murders even without her needing to act. Just because of some of the ways she dies, and some of the red truths restricting the possibilities, I don't know right now if it's possible for her to have killed everyone, but I think it's possible for her to have led people like Rosa and Eva to kill.

Kyrie is shown early on to be among the most shrewd and observant people on the island, at least concerning the battle for inheritance, and since her and the other siblings, besides Krauss and Natsuhi, are already in cooperation against Krauss, I don't find it hard to imagine that she could splinter the group further by influencing any one person in it on her own, away from the others, and I feel like that's how she got some things done in the first couple episodes, and maybe episode 3? Like for the first, I can imagine Kyrie taking Eva aside and using her competitiveness and resentment to convince her to go along with her plan to kill all the other siblings, blame Natsuhi to get her out of the way so the inheritance can be enjoyed by Eva and Hideyoshi with Kyrie taking a fraction while pretending to be dead. Eva goes along with it and after the murders, where Kyrie's whole face is obscured (and Shannon's half-face is hidden from George), and after they return to the parlor, Eva implicates Natsuhi heavily while stoking tensions even further by leaving with Hideyoshi and being very overt about setting the chain to their door and only coming out at precisely dinnertime. Going with the idea that Kyrie's still alive, she hides out in the designated guest room and kills the couple, escaping when Genji and Kanon discover it but leave to get help, escaping and resetting the chain from outside somehow, like with some sort of tool perhaps? and draws the magic circle and leaves, or if we believe Shannon is also alive, that her face was obscured for a reason and any confirmation that "Shannon is dead" can be bypassed with a loophole about her real name (Sayo I think I remember but if I google it I'll get spoiled), Shannon makes the circle and when Kanon and Kumasawa cut the chain, enter and move away from the door to one of the bodies, Kyrie slips out. I can't find any specific red text for this specific locked room other than the one for all locked rooms, so I'm guessing the instances where the entrances are unattended are deliberate. Kanon's death, from what I can find, isn't denied to have been with a trap like Natsuhi's is, so I'll guess that and then say the rest of the deaths were committed straightforwardly, with Shannon disguised as Beatrice for Maria and possibly Natsuhi as Kyrie kills them.

Episode 2 is weird cuz I don't feel like I can act like Kyrie can be proven to be alive atm but it feels like she could have been in contact with Rosa instead, potentially starting with the appearance of Beatrice at the "19th guest". Rosa witnesses her and while it isn't revealed in this episode, it's feels possible that this is likely Shannon in disguise having an effect on her because of how she watched Beatrice die as a kid. Kyrie is in the entrance when Beatrice "enters the mansion", and I think she likely pretended to see her to rile up the other siblings, saw Rosa as potentially weak and had her corroborate to seem more convincing. And later that night, at the chapel, Rosa kills the other siblings. No set motive for this, but when I read the red text which specifies that the key to the chapel didn't pass thru anyone else's hands before Rosa took it, it didn't, to my knowledge, specify that Rosa only took it once, so she could have grabbed the key around midnight and let them all in before killing them, forgetting or pretending she didn't, and then locking and leaving. I also think that the reason they were all at the chapel was over the gold, which we see three ingots after the discovery of the bodies. If the gold is real, I think Rosa could have solved the mystery here considering she solved it in episode 3, and brought some gold as proof, or Kyrie could have solved it and not said anything although that somehow seems less likely. Either way, over the fight about the gold, Rosa in a stupor or frenzy or something kills them and leaves. Since Shannon isn't shown here, maybe she pretends to be the Beatrice we see talking to them here and guts the corpses after, also placing the magic circle, but having Rosa return the key for her to find again. I don't know about the later deaths though I still have to work some of them out. Like what we see as Kanon being warped away and suddenly trudging around outside the kitchen might just be him being killed or gravely wounded and the body being taken and laid against that back door for Gohda to find. Stuff like that but I need to work it out.

Eva in episode 3 almost feels so obvious that it seems like a red herring. If Shannon and maybe Genji and mayyyyybe Kanon? are in kahoots then the six part locked room seems more doable. Eva killing the five after that feels really on the nose, I'm wondering if Beatrice losing some of the games to Battler's Eva culprit Hideyoshi accomplice theory was her playing her own game against him. Altho even with that there's still some mystery like the floating gun killing Hideyoshi which the character tips seem to imply was Kyrie's doing. Battler also proposes that Kyrie's idea about going to the mansion was to privately confront Hideyoshi, in his eyes to confirm that Eva was going out because Eva hated his smoke but a cigarette butt was found in an ashtray of the rom, and I think this is likely, but I also think that maybe, potentially like episode 1, Kyrie colluded with Eva and Hideyoshi and she wanted Hideyoshi to explain why Eva was acting suspicious, in the privacy of the mansion as the smaller guesthouse leaves more opportunity for conversation to be overheard. I also wonder if Kyrie knew that Eva found the gold. If Kyrie was with Rosa here the way she might have been in episode 2, Rosa might've told Kyrie that Eva found it, and besides that, I feel like Kyrie is the type of person to be able to deduce that Eva found it, but this is speculation. No clue what was happening as Kyrie's stomach was bleeding out in front of Eva though.

But this kind of is the best I got right now before I go into episode 6. All of this is assuming Kyrie's able to fake her death as a couple key points and that multiple murderers and servant accomplices are even permitted, I don't think I saw anything in red or any Knox rules against these things but that theory just makes things work better. Technically a lot of these murders can have anyone as the culprit with someone like Shannon as an accomplice but this is the most complete idea I can come up with. I don't even know about episode 5. Hopefully ep6 elucidates some things. Maybe Eva knew Kyrie was a killer and that's part of her resentment of Ange. Maybe there is some fucky true identity shit with Asumu and Kyrie. who knows! Also I had to text search and replace every time I called an episode a chapter because I'm barely cognizant of all the names of the individual chapters within the episodes and I'm just thinking of this like a big book god help me