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[tavrene]

My contributions for the first half of Kitzsah's wonderful Big Resurrection Event fic

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"The Sixth House doesn't move for moral philosophy."

Out of the ruins of Canaan House and the ugly truth of Lyctorhood rises an alternative or threat - possibly both - to the only world Master Warden Camilla Hectos and Palamedes the Sixth have ever known. Regardless how little solace it brings them, these two children of the Library are forced to confront the truth of the universe outside of Dominicus as they navigate exactly what it takes to lead the Sixth House into a brave new world.

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Thank you for a fantastic collaboration, I couldn't have asked for better communication, enthusiasm or attention to detail.

[tavrene]

Person who also spent too much time pondering Camilla's surname here 👋

The ancient greek cardinal 6 is ἕξ (héx), but the ordinal is ἕκτος (héktos). I figured that's the source

Yeah I picked that up too! I'm mostly just spinning my wheels over why Hect and not Hekt then, when the former has a contradictory meaning and Muir's been so good in terms of this aspect of worldbuilding that this doesn't feel like the kind of mistake she'd make.

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IIRC Muir has gone on the record saying she stuck to Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit; that means any of the apparent similarities to languages other than those is likely due to their common Indo-European origin + the layer of scifantasy mutation.

Oh cool, didn't know that - thanks!!

(Now I'm wondering where John The Dude learned Sanskrit post-Resurrection hahaha. Greek and Latin (at least the prefixes/suffixes if not the actual grammar) are pretty well instilled into anyone with a scientific/medical background, but Sanskrit feels...way less likely for a poor Maori boy from New Zealand to have picked up. (Though he could've had Hindu neighbors and taken an interest, I suppose.) Anyway, still imagining him with Giant Dictionaries post-Resurrection making up lists of names for his new houses haha.)

Actually, this begs the question of whether Latin and Greek (and Sanskrit, but the former two are more important in terms of the English language) are considered languages in the Nine Houses? Like, obviously they exist in terms of the naming system - but are they recognized as independent, learnable languages. It's the difference between Houses synthesizing their own names under certain acceptable parameters vs picking name from a Massive Book The Emperor Bestowed Them with no real comprehension of the underlying linguistics. Or Palamedes in the context of the word, say, hemopneumothorax - would he just to memorize that as a whole indivisible chunk that means "blood and air in the chest cavity" or would he be able to parse "hemo = blood," "pneumo = air," "thorax = chest," and independently come up with "blood and air in the chest"?)

[tavrene]

about your thoughts on camilla's surname, i wonder if it ties somehow to when someone (i think it was silas but i don't have the books with me to check) said they "doubted [camilla's] "legal" claim to the title of cavalier primary" and i wonder if it's because they caught on to the fact her surname isn't a sixth surname;

also, as revealed in the doctor sex mini book, the sixth regularly ships off members so they, well, swap genetic material with other houses; so maybe camilla's odd surname may come from outside the sixth house somewhat recently (which still begs the question -> comes from where exactly?)

Oooh that's super interesting to think about!

And yes, it was Silas and his exact words were "Your companion is a mad dog, and I doubt her legal claim to the title of cavalier primary."

I'd assumed/headcanoned that this was a jab at the Sixth House selecting their cavaliers primary via civil examination and not any actual sword skill, so therefore is considered less valid, but the idea of this being directed at Camilla herself is interesting. That said, she's still on record as Palamedes's second cousin, and I don't think that's a lie, so she definitely is genetically Sixth House in at least one branch of the family tree. Also, I'm not sure why her coming from Elsewhere would leave her with a nonconforming last name or stigma, seeing as Gideon "Dropped out of space into a drill shaft and has absolutely no family of origin" Nav got a perfectly ordinary Niner surname and no one seems to doubt her legal claim to the title cavalier primary on the basis of Not Being Genetically Related To The Ninth. And Ortus had a mother from the Eighth and seemed to be in perfectly good standing to be the cavalier primary other than the whole "Not wanting to do it" thing.

(Also, my first thought for "soldiers sent to acquire new genetic material" plus "front lines/occupation duty" plus "something coming outside the house with Stigma" mostly equals "someone had a Very Close Relationship with a local while deployed." (Gideon the First and Pyrrha couldn't have been the only ones into that, or even just a more mundane Ordinary Non-House civilian. Definitely would not be the first time in human history.) But I'm mostly unsure why the Sixth House would give kids who are the result of that a readily discernable unconformist surname if that were the case, because I doubt they'd want to draw attention to this.)

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well the simple answer is that Camilla is probably named after the Hectagon.

You're thinking of the hexagon! A hectogon is a one hundred-sided polygon.

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What's...going on with Camilla's surname? Because almost all the other house last names etymology line up with what you'd expect, except the Greek prefix for six is *hex-* (occasionally transliterated as hekt) not hect-, which is actually the prefix for *one hundred?*

Because I look at that and can't stop thinking about Cassiopeia and Anastasia's project of "Five hundred into fifty" that resulted in Teacher and the other constructs at Canaan House. For the record, I don't believe Camilla is a construct or anything other than an ordinary person born in the Dominicus system, but in a world where just about every other surname is very clearly derived from a number, someone named Hect coming from the Sixth House just...kinda stands out.

(The easy answer is that Tamsyn Muir wasn't thinking too hard about it and just went with the principle of "they sound similar enough," but given her intricate layers of referencing that's evident in every other aspect of The Locked Tomb, that feels a bit disingenuous to me. She knew enough to pick out which Greek mythology she liked for Palamedes and Protesilaus and every other reference throughout the series, but she completely missed that hect- isn't actually a numerical prefix that means six and has an entirely different numerical meaning altogether? Especially when she could have just as easily gone with Hekt for the same effect.)

Also, I'd dearly love to know exactly how the Houses are sourcing these names from haha. Like, suspension of disbelief and all/we are reading these books in English and there's only one Tolkien and absurd linguistics, but you have Greek and Latin surnames, languages which seems reasonable that John would be familiar with, having been a scientist sufficiently educated to lead a cryo project (I definitely know way too many Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes from medical training), and then you have a whole bunch of Sanskrit (Shodash, Chatur, and Asht), one Slavic or possibly Pali (Dve), and then Nav which is Breton. None of which I think are languages that John The Dude was likely to have known. And given that everyone in Dominicus speaks House (which I'm presuming to be English on the basis of the Sex Pal joke), I don't think people were necessarily Resurrected with their languages intact.

At this point, I'm literally imagining him immediately post-resurrection digging up assorted language dictionaries that survived the whole nuclear apocalypse and handing each of the houses as they're being founded A Super Long List Of Possible Prefixes From Which They May Generate Names For The Next Myriad.

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Question - what percentage of the population of the Nine Houses actually have necromantic abilities?

Judging from the side-material regarding the cohort and saying how individual Cohort necromancers are supported by units of non-necromantic sword wielders, I think it's fair to say that they're a minority. (Though I could be wrong, because Cohort demographics don't necessarily perfectly align with that of the Nine Houses at large).

And then there's the Ninth House situation, which possibly gives us the best insight. (Though it still might not be completely representative, what with.... Everything).

Harrow's parents are stated to have had trouble conceiving because of their status as necromancers, so that could be one significant limiting factor, but M. Bias' sermon also says, "The non-necromancer will still have necromantic children. The necromancer will have parents who lacked the aptitude," so that presumably at least partially makes up for it.

The two hundred killed in the "Creche Flu" in order to conceive Harrow made me think for a while that the ratio might have been somewhere around 1/200 (give or take), but after the reveals of Nona the Ninth and that Alecto had a specific debt owed to Anastasia's line, now I'm wondering whether there were actually adepts among the two hundred children; and that Harrow's parents needed a necromantic heir born specifically of their direct lineage, not just a Ninth necromancer, which would totally skew with the numbers.

[tavrene]

"We are one flesh."

"I am your end."

We recorded the tape recorder scene from Chapter 17 in Nona the Ninth. Enjoy your freshly broken heart!

Camilla is AvoMarquis on Tiktok!

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a few days ago a coworker asked me to explain Hanukkah and I asked her if she knew what a menorah was. She said, “like the Northern Lights?”

I’m simultaneously haunted by and wild about this concept now. instead of aurora borealis, menorah borealis. menorah borealis

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Poppies make remembrance easy; that’s why they can become so tasteless. (They didn’t used to be like that. Times change.)

What those poppies represent isn’t as easy.

What they represent is real people who died, and other real people who learned about their deaths through the arid phrasing of an Army Council telegram.

The one that began “Deeply regret to inform you…”

Sometimes that sentiment was reduced to a rubber stamp…

…and sometimes it was pre-printed…

…all to save a couple of seconds in completing the thousands of telegrams needed after yet another Big Push on the Western Front went nowhere.

Sometimes the telegram was followed by a letter…

Maybe even a letter whose spaces were beautifully filled in…

Printed or stamped, pencilled scribble or copperplate script, they all meant the same thing: a husband or son, father or brother wouldn’t be coming home again.

They’d be staying with their mates.

If anyone ever learns a way to make this tasteless, I don’t want to know.

More here.

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so my grandma died recently, and my parents have been dealing with the quantities of Stuff accumulated over the course of her and my grandpa’s lives, which could be interesting on its own as a family matter, but, well, grandpa was a science fiction writer, and they knew a lot of science fiction writers, which means a lot of the stuff is classic sci-fi and fantasy. books, artwork, that kind of thing. what i had not realized, but perhaps should have predicted, was that knowing a lot of science fiction writers in the ‘60s meant that they knew people who had written for this one TV show in the ‘60s that some science fiction writers worked on, and these people liked to share stuff.

what i’m saying is that i have now held in my hands one of the original, physical scripts for the star trek episode “amok time”.

it was like holding a piece of history. my own hands, carefully cradling the origin of sex pollen and fuck or die. a work whose influence went far behind what the writer could have expected–sacred, almost, in its way. who knows how much spawned from this episode? how much fanfiction would never have existed were it not for this holy text? indeed, the very concept of slash itself? an artifact, a priceless relic, sitting on my parents’ couch.

i haven’t seen the entirety of the episode itself, so i don’t know if there are any real differences between the script and what was aired, but i had to skim it anyway–and i did find something that is perhaps worth mentioning, whether or not this actually counts as canon. but hey, hard to get more canon than an Actual Official Script, right?

VULCANS BLUSH YELLOW, BITCHES, IT’S CANON

also, this:

thanks for specifying “karate-type”, theodore sturgeon. coulda gotten confusing, that.

anyway, it was a deeply surreal experience and i’m pretty sure the script is getting donated someplace with a lot of the other stuff, but man, my grandparents were cool

[tavrene]

"We need to talk about that little stunt you pulled earlier," for Camilla and Palamedes, if you wouldn't mind?

sorry it's cam and pyrrha not cam and pal

Send me dialogue prompts!

“You should be at work,” Camilla said.

“We need to talk about that little stunt you pulled yesterday,” Pyrrha said.

“We need to eat,” Cam countered. Her throat felt desert dry, and she muffled a cough into her elbow. Pyrrha was already at her side with a glass of water, which she downed in one go, a little water dripping down her chin. It was not the worst Camilla had ever felt in her life, but that bar had been raised considerably over the last year and a half.

“I’ll hit the card tables tonight,” Pyrrha said. “Should be able to make it up. If I ask you how you’re feeling, is there any chance at all I’ll get an honest assessment?”

“I’m fine.”

Pyrrha scrubbed her hand against the stubble under her chin. “You are an insufferable hard-ass, Hect.”

“Takes one to know one,” Camilla said.

“You got me there.” Pyrrha walked back to the kitchen, and Camilla heard the icebox open and close again, the sound of Pyrrha re-filling the glass. Camilla started acquainting herself with the absolutely splitting headache that was forming just behind her brows.

“Here,” Pyrrha said, with a full glass of water. “Drink that. Slowly, though. You’re going to make yourself hurl.”

Camilla dedicated some effort to taking little sips, though her mouth felt like she’d been eating as much sand as Nona. “Thanks.”

“Once you’re feeling level you need to swap back with Sextus,” Pyrrha said. “Let him run inventory, make sure he didn’t fuck up your brain too much.”

“Sure.”

“And also see if he can convince you to take another fucking painkiller, God knows I’ll have no luck with that.”

Camilla’s right hand was trembling slightly, so she wrapped both hands around the glass in an attempt to hide it. If she focused, she could keep the water in the center from rippling. What she really wanted was to get up off the bed and stretch, but Pyrrha had such a deep worry crease between her eyebrows that Camilla thought she might tackle her if she tried.

Pyrrha sat in watchful silence for another couple minutes while Camilla drank. She really didn’t want to think about how much water she’d lost via blood volume. Then, apropos of nothing, Pyrrha said, “When did you make cavalier?”

“What?”

“How old were you, I mean. How old were you when you made cavalier?” She said this without looking Camilla in the eye, instead reaching out to absentmindedly hold her wrist and take Camilla’s pulse.

“I applied at twelve. Oversight Body accepted me for the position at thirteen.”

“With a sword hand like that, the cohort never tried to recruit you?”

“Never got the chance,” Camilla said. Her hands felt distinctly steadier now that she’d had a glass and a half of water. The headache was not improving. “Recruitment age on the Sixth House is sixteen.” This was the highest recruitment age in the Houses, as far as Camilla was aware, and was a source of much ire.

“So you never did anything else, huh?”

So that’s where that was going, Camilla thought darkly. “I don’t need a lecture, Dve.”

She held up her hands defensively, a little cease fire gesture. “I’m not, I’m not. I swear. You had me scared as hell for a second last night and I got a little intense, but I know you and the Warden are big kids who are going to make your own decisions.”

“Still sounding like a lecture.”

“I just — you understand that there are a single digit number of people in the entire universe who understand what you two are dealing with right now, and I am one of them. You can talk to me Camilla. The absolute last thing I want is for you two to keep doing this shit behind my back.”

“You run out of nicotine patches? You’re going all sentimental.”

“I actually am, now that you mention it. I can’t promise I won’t tell you two off for taking stupid-dangerous risks, so I won’t. But God knows I can’t stop you, so if Sextus is trying to turn you into a vegetable, I’d appreciate a heads up, is all. Don’t keep me in the dark.”

“Okay,” Camilla said. And then, after a pause, “And thank you. For last night.”

Pyrrha screwed up her face like she was thinking hard about something, and then roughly hugged Camilla with one arm. Camilla froze, a bit like a prey animal who had been picked up by a bird. “One more thing, and then I’ll stop.”

“Promise?” Camilla said.

Pyrrha laughed, and it was always that rough laugh that reminded Camilla who Pyrrha really was. It was so like Pal’s laugh on the recorder, sounding both so familiar and so odd when filtered through her own vocal cords. “Sure. Just…when Sextus is back, you need to tell him what really happened, all of it.”

“Pyrrha…”

“I’m not going to go over your head, I’m not going to snitch on you. I know it’s a cavalier’s job to take all the punches, really. I understand that more intimately than you can imagine. But Hect…you cannot die to save him anymore. You are the thin and fragile line between him and the River. You’re taking calculated risks, I understand that, but you are toying with both your lives, and the least you can do is give the Warden all the data. Don’t price your own life so cheaply, and don’t make him fly blind.”

The very corner of Camilla’s mouth quirked up. “Appealing to my logical and academic nature. Clever.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Pyrrha said, roughly mussing her hair.

“We select for it, on the Sixth.”

[tavrene]

As Emergency Services on the ambo end - YEP.

The last time a rookie decided to tempt fate and bring the wrath of the ambulance gods down on us because she didn't believe it when we told her not to and said the Q Word, we had non-stop calls until well past 0200. This also goes for the S Word.

They Are Not To Be Said. Ever.

Things that are missing from or just silly in ER/A&E based fiction shows:

- superstition. You think actors or sailors are superstitious? You’ve never said the word “quiet” in an emergency department. Do Not Say The Q-word.

- the strong and important relationships, in a good one, between the various nurses and the orderlies/porters. They will have favourites and deep arcane alliances and if the leadership isn’t careful, feuds.

- where are all the ponytails. why have all these women spent all this time blowdrying their hair and perfect styling? Ponytails. So many ponytails.

- the jokes. Why are these people not cracking wry jokes 24/7 except when actually dealing with a crisis and sometimes even then?

- did I mention the superstition? DO NOT SAY THE Q WORD.

- the deeply fascinating cross section of humanity in triage.

- for the record, like: actual Trauma/Resus action is the most eerily calm thing you’ve ever seen. Almost all fiction makes it both much more frantic and yet much more dignified than it really is. Being stabilized from a bad physical trauma or being resuscitated is brutal and has zero dignity whatsoever. It’s collars and tubes being poked in and clothes cut off and all under bright lights, with people very calmly talking over your head like you’re NOT a bleeding mess and in extreme pain.

- why the hell have all these nurses and doctors presenting female got perfect makeup.

- how many times, if you’re conscious, or if you’re the conscious accompaniment to an unconscious patient, you will have to repeat the story of why youre There and what happened. YOU WILL GET SO TIRED OF REPEATING IT AND WONDER WHY THEY CAN’T JUST READ THE CHART. It’s because that’s actually a bad idea.

- remember about the superstition.

[tavrene]

What do you call a snake that’s exactly 3.14 feet long? 

[tavrene]

Happy Pi Day guys! :)

[tavrene]

Please do enlighten us...how DID you come to be hit in the face with a severed leg?

I can honestly only laugh about this because it was like six years ago. At the time it fucking sucked but in retrospect it’s as hilarious as it is intense, so strap yourself in, friend. 

When I was in high school I worked on pretty much every production we did–if I wasn’t in the show, I did tech, and since I’m not much of a singer (for reals I sound like I’ve got a mouth full of gravel and only Tom Waits can pull that shit off), when we did musicals I was in the wings. Or, as in the case of Little Shop of Horrors, inside a giant fucking plant puppet. 

Now, we were a little ambitious and decided to build our own Audreys instead of renting them from New York for a small fortune. The first two were hand puppets but the third one weighed a over a hundred pounds and required a full body harness and the last one was roughly the size of a VW Bug. (I’m not fucking exaggerating–this thing was engineered to swallow live actors, one of whom was wearing a fucking fat suit. ‘Epic proportions’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.) 

I don’t know how familiar you are with the plot of Little Shop, so here’s a breakdown: nerdy botanist grows man-eating space plant in order to impress girlfriend of sadistic dentist. (I shit you not. Broadway is fuckin’ wild.) So this was my junior year and because my school was brand spankin’ new I had departmental seniority and for some jolly reason this meant that the ridiculously awesome title of ‘Puppet Master’ was levied upon me. The less glamorous reality meant sitting in a fucking box for most of Act One to sing to the twit playing Seymour and then getting strapped into some kind of mental bondage harness attached to a giant fucking flytrap made of felt and foam and PVC and trying to match the articulated mouth to the words of a voice actor standing fifty feet away on the stage right wing. This shit was a fucking job, let me tell you. 

So Audrey 2.3 (as we called the third puppet) is supported by two long ‘crutches’ that are meant to take some of the weight so not all 100+ pounds of it is just hanging on my back. I’ve got my hips braced against a giant ceramic pot and my arms in these like fucking alligator jaws and I can’t see a fucking thing because the mesh is too dense and I’m sweating like absolute hell because BEING IN A GIANT FUCKING COCOON OF FOAM AND FELT UNDER THOUSAND-DEGREE STAGE LIGHTS WHILE HOLDING THE EQUIVALENT WEIGHT OF BILBO FUCKING BAGGINS ON YOUR BACK IS HARD FUCKING WORK. 

Right, anyway, it’s a long story but the dentist dies and Seymour chops him up into little Dentist McNuggets to feed to Audrey 2.3, who isn’t big enough yet to be swallowing people whole (we save that shit for Act 2). Our second night of show Seymour is like kind of high on success from the night before and getting really overzealous with the feeding. He’s got a chum bucket of ‘body parts’–most of them are like intestines made of pantyhose and cotton wadding (tech people are ingenious) and that sort of shit–soft and harmless–but at the bottom of the bucket is the piece de resistance, this fucking stupidly realistic severed leg with a giant bone sticking out which was used on a film set for some kind of war movie and honestly I have no idea how we ended up with it, but it was gruesome and horrible and made out of hard fucking industrial plastic. 

Anyway we’re like halfway through the song and it’s the big bombastic Act 1 finale and Seymour is absolutely fucking losing his shit and flinging intestines and kidneys and fingers into the puppet mouth and I’m like frantically grabbing them as fast as I can before they can go dribbling out again–if you’ve never seen this show you absolutely do not understand how fucking gross it is–and one of the intestines gets away from me. I need one hand for the jaw and one to grab the snacks and I’m like shit shit shit this intestine is sticking out of my mouth like a goddamn Cuban cigar and I’m leaning forward to grab it and WHAM. I get kicked full in the face by a severed fucking foot and honestly, I can’t even explain, it felt like getting a roundhouse to the jaw from a fucking kangaroo. 

So I go reeling backwards–and bear in mind this freakin’ giant plant is in no way anchored to the floor, just my body–and I knock one of the ‘crutches’ off the back of the platform. Seymour is still belting his fucking lungs out, totally oblivious to the fact that Audrey is like imploding behind him–and 100+ pounds of man-eating plant suddenly drops off the back of the platform, drags me down with it and crunch crunch snap the weight cracks three of my ribs like fucking matchsticks. The song ends, the crowd goes wild, the lights go out and I’m falling halfway off the back platform, all the dead Audrey weight still strapped on and hanging on my shoulders and it literally hurt so fucking badly I couldn’t even breathe to start swearing. 

Anyway thank God someone (unlike Seymour) was paying attention, and as soon as the drape closes Mushnik comes thundering onstage and stars tearing the plant open like it’s a deleted scene from Jaws or some shit, going “OH MY GOD HOLY SHIT ARE YOU OKAY” and I’m like “NO I’M FUCKING NOT I’M SUFFOCATING AND MY RIBS ARE BROKEN AND I’M PRETTY SURE I HAVE A FAT LIP FROM GETTING KICKED IN THE MOUTH BY A DISEMBODIED FUCKING FOOT.”

I spent intermission lying shirtless on the floor with a sack of ice on my back and enough tape around my ribs to stick a walrus to the ceiling and you know what? We finished the fucking show and did four more after that. Don’t even fucking tell me theatre people are not hardcore. 

And that is the story of the time I got kicked in the face by a severed leg and a carnivorous alien plant broke three of my ribs.