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old friend and fellow former chostie prism snowbright (it went by rotsharp back on cohost) reached out to me to get a request for aid circulated, it's severely disabled and in a nightmare living situation. it needs whatever money and goods it can to get by, i know i'm not exactly followerbase mcgee here but i felt reaching out to see if any of you could help was worth it. give this dog a hand if you can

[click here to head over to its pastebin, spreading this around further would also be much appreciated]

boo!! just letting you know

we're going to go see evangelion death + rebirth/end of eva on the 21st and 22nd, very excited. we finally read fate/stay night, that's exciting. bunch of other stuff we should post and post about but bleh!! hard to get around to

Image showing characters from the three short stories "The Navigator", "Crimson Legacy", and "The Puppel Goes Home".

A will for the present. A step to the future. A farewell to the past.

Three stories we haven't posted outside friend circles yet. (We've not stopped writing, don't worry.) We've got a lot of other stuff we've been sitting on, new and old and safe and tawdry alike, that we just... have problems getting around to.

The Navigator

A small-time independent space freighter needs a navigator to help freight some sensitive cargo.

"Kill the power when I say," she says calmly but sternly, gaze dead ahead at the approaching slipshadow in the windscreen.

I balk, slowly turning to her in my pilot's seat. "You... you really ARE trying to get us killed, aren't you?" She doesn't budge from her stance, wide shoulders tense as they've been the whole grip. "Kill. The power. When I say."

"But we're-"

Then she snaps, immediately loosening her stance as she spins to me and lunges nearly - but not quite - onto me. "Do it, or you get us killed! There's a way out of this, and you hired me to find those!"

I wonder in that instant if I really should have just let the navicomputer chart me through the sliproutes.

She wouldn't have been my first choice of navigator, if you asked me on any other day. Hell, no independent transporter even thinks about hiring one unless they're maining a busted navicomputer and either strapped for funds or strapped for time, but I had agreed to transport a few crates of *politically sensitive* material to some ho-hum-sounding forest-moon, and was told explicitly to make sure I wasn't able to be traced there.

No chance to be traced, unless you expect the Slip Bureau's eyes and ears to be out until the next slipbuoy signal-dump, means no full-assist. No full-assist means I either crunch every number along the lanes myself (Gods away, I hope to never) or I hire a navigator. A few hanging around a local dive seemed real promising, until I let slip "sensitive" or "traced" or "boarded". Soon, my options were the wild-haired woman at the furthest back booth with the unfocused-but-intense stare or the calculator back on my ship.

"... and there is a real chance we'll be boarded," I told her, not entirely sure if she was paying attention. "If we are, I need to be sure you're able to-"

She cut me off, holding her gloved hand up to me. "You won't be boarded," she said dully, her intense eyes finally glanced to me. "I don't know where you got that idea. If we're boarded, you keep my cut."

I could only blink, astonished. "... We haven't," I started again, eventually, "even... discussed your payment yet."

"Ten percent of your earnings off this. Nothing upfront."

"That's- that's nothing! You're barely making anything from this."

She lowered the hand, tapping the booth-seat behind her impatiently. When she did, I finally noticed the faded old-federal flight corps patch on her frayed flight-jacket's shoulder - and maybe more importantly, the discoloration-marked absence of the name-patches - but I thought better than to comment. "I don't want for much," she continued, "I just need the work. They don't hire navigators in the old tradition for much of anything this close to the heartlands."

"In the... old... tradition? Where're you from?"

"Maar."

Nobody's from Maar. Maar is the kind of isolationist nowhere-planet so deeply and thoroughly unfashionable that the only charts to bother dotting it do so through gritted teeth in the name of complete accuracy. Last anyone knew, they still had wheels on the ground.

"Sure," I shrugged, "Maar. Who the hell is teaching navigators on Maar?"

She sighed, audibly aggrieved. "I'm not being paid," she snipped, "to field questions about my history from some small-freight flygirl. I'll get you there if you trust me. Ten percent."

I scoffed. "I thought you'd try to upsell me at some point."

"If you're asking, then fine. Eleven percent." She looked away again and flicked her other hand at me in something approaching a shoo. "Call me Aegal. Just tell me where you're docked and I'll meet you there."

I had the impression I wasn't going to like her very much.

As soon as I fired the ship's systems up, Aegal reached over from her shotgun seat and pulled the navicomputer stop.

"Heck're you doing?," I queried, baffled. "We need that."

"No."

"No-?! What, are you just going to-?"

"Crunch the numbers for the route myself, yes," she replied as she pulled out a paper notepad (good grief, I thought, maybe she really is from Maar) and closed her eyes. "Get us to slip range from here, I need to think."

Biting my tongue, I engaged the lift-thrusters, the light-freighter lifting slowly but surely. I moved to quietly attempt to destop the navicomputer, but she slapped my hand away the moment it got near. "No, please, trust me on this," she whispered, eyes still shut tight, before she began muttering numbers and scrunching her forehead. I exhaled in slight frustration as I started the low flight out to slip-range.

Just about as soon as we crossed the atmosphere into wide space -

"Light-freighter, provide your current manifest."

- the worst thing we could have possibly heard over the tele-com came in from a Bureau signal, a cruiser and her small detachment of boarders closing in slowly from behind. I grit my teeth, and was just about to say that she was in over her head assuming there wouldn't be a boarding when she opened her eyes and spoke plainly. "Oh, that makes things simpler," Aegal said with a clarity I didn't remember hearing in her voice before. "Drop into the slip."

"Wh- *now?* They're *going* to tail us, it's a little late to do that without tracing."

"I'll shake them."

"Really?" I scoffed again. "How?"

"Drop into the slip and follow my routing. I read, you follow."

She looked serious.

Oh gods, she might be serious. Gulping, I started engaging the slipdrive and strapping in, while she sketched something I couldn't see in her notepad. "Dead straight until I say, then change bearings - twelve aside, fifteen away. Alright?"

"Twelve aside, fifteen away."

Twelve aside, fifteen away.

I knew that wouldn't even point at a sliproute, I could tell you that much. "Can you give me a route name for that?"

"Twelve aside, fifteen away," she repeated, firmly. "That's all you need to be concerned with right now, do you understand?"

I felt even more lost. She really is pointing into the wild abyss. "But how the hell are you going to-"

"I said," she interrupted, firm, "that's all. You hired me to navigate. Let me. Okay?"

"... Fine. Twelve aside, fourteen away."

"Fifteen. Don't fuck it up."

"Alright, fine," I said as the slip started to kick in, and the pursuant party dropped in following us. "T w e -"

Nobody in their right mind wants to look at the inside of wild slip - unlike the clean tunnels of sliproutes held together by the buoy system, it felt wild and dangerous to push through, and the ship juddered unpleasantly most of the way. Nonetheless, my navigator took to standing and staring ahead at it, gaze entirely unflinching. "Say," Aegal stated, breaking from muttering her numbers.

I quietly reset my bearing again - twenty back, five away. It was nerve-wracking, but I didn't know what else to do - she'd steered us away of the slipshadows we'd come horribly close to getting dragged through. The cruiser's boarders had gotten lost in them, but unfortunately the big lug herself was uncannily good at following us.

"Good. Next signal, ten aside, ten away," she said in acknowledgement, nodding. Her not even looking at her notes any more kind of creeped me out, but I held my tongue on that.

"Ten aside, ten away."

"We're going to be driving straight into a slipshadow."

"Sure, straight into a-"

Wait a minute. "Wait a minute. You're... kidding, right?" She just kept looking ahead, not responding as I turned back to my controls with renewed nervousness. "Gods, I hope you're kidding."

On her mark, I reset the bearings again.

Dead ahead, distant but approaching, was the familiar shape of a star's slipshadow. She wasn't kidding. I felt every vein in my body freeze over, the fear of death dragging itself from the back of my head. "What? Why? You're trying to get us killed, aren't you?"

"Kill the power when I say," she said calmly but sternly, gaze dead ahead at the approaching slipshadow in the windscreen.

And that brings me back to now, here, apparently at the mercy of what I can only imagine to be a madwoman, looming dangerously close to me. "Kill it, and we'll fly through harmlessly," she hurriedly whispers out, "and they rip themselves apart plowing straight into it. Keep us on and you find out what it's like to be drunk like a tall glass of milk."

My eyes finally genuinely go wide. "Mid-slip. You're... insane," I mutter slowly in disbelief.

"*Yes!*" She grabs me by the collar, pulls me close, and shouts straight into my ghastly face, panicked. "Of course I'm insane! All the sane navigators quit, die, or wish they would have! All the sane navigators do what your little computer does but worse! There's only you and me and the face of death staring us down out here, so stop listening to your brain for once in your life! Feel the stars in your eyes, the ground in your bones, the future in your present and just- fucking trust me already!"

I freeze in her clutch.

She drops me back into my seat, placing my hand over the killswitch. "Kill it when I say."

We're dead. We're already dead. I'm no less scared to admit it to myself.

She barks out one last "Say!", and I pull the switch back with as much force as I can muster, entire body freezing up the next moment as I squeeze my eyes shut, and I feel -

and I feel -

- nothing. I'm still sitting in the seat, if loosely floating due to the lack of grav generation. Rest of my body still locked up, I slowly open my eyes to the pitch-dark cockpit, lit only by the vibrant noise of the slipshadow gliding harmlessly - smoothly - around us, before quietly pushing out to the snarling nebulous haze of the slip itself. I glance to her.

And Aegal is looking at me, too, her stare much softened as she loosely floats off the ground, hair wavering around her. "... I can't guarantee you'll get there fast," she says, quietly, gaze averting just a little, "and I refuse to guarantee you won't run into trouble. But I can guarantee that you'll live, and you'll make it where you need to go."

My body, finally listening and realizing it didn't die, starts to loosen up as she continues. "This is the navigator's world - the real navigator's world. This is the world of the old traditions, of the regions that can't chart, of the seers of the wild edges of marked space. This is the world I live in. The sane navigator stops existing the moment they find the way forward."

"That's crazy," I manage to eke out of my barely-responsive throat, feeling like I'm five miles from my body. "You're crazy."

"Yeah. I am." Aegal sighs, her now-weary face painted in the hues of the slip-light outside, and uses her leg to pull herself back into her seat by the belt. "But look. You believed me, just a little bit, and we made it through. I... want you to keep trusting me. I want to navigate again." She reaches back over to my side and pushes the power back on, and the ship starts to warm back up straight into slip-exit mode.

Suddenly, I get it. As my body feels like it returns to itself and I start to reacclimate to existing in a body in a spacecraft, I feel like I really well-and-truly get it, and in so doing genuinely get her. And I finally understand the most important thing:

"I'd... have to be crazy to trust you."

There's a silence, for a moment, as what looks like a pain she might've expected begins to cross her face.

"... So I guess I have to be crazy too." I decide it's rude to leave her in suspense, and her expression immediately turns to genuine surprise. "You'd really-?"

"Listen," I tell her gently as I can manage, looking to her. "This shipment's implicating us in some real shit the moment we deliver it." I look then to the rear-view screen, and see the cruiser silently, viscerally shearing itself apart under its own force.

I watch for a moment, and then look back to her watching, too. "... I'm going to need a hell of a lot more impossible routes if I want to live another week, and you're going to need somewhere to be if you don't wanna be navigating in nothing but a space-suit. I need somebody."

"You need a navigator." She nods, slowly.

I follow suit. "I need a navigator."
Return to top.

Crimson Legacy

A girl and her friends try to inherit the family magic right out of her mother.

"... and, of course, since I have no daughter -" she glares at me - "and likely will never, the Crimson Legacy will be brought to the Stewards to safe-keep until either you have one, or our line of the family- Louis, are you listening to me?"

"Mm. Sure. " I'm lounging on the couch across from Mother's armchair, only half-listening to her as she rolls off the same speech about how she won't let her beautiful baby girl take over the family business because she hates me, or I'm not girl enough for her, or... something. "Stewards, the Legacy... whatever."

She narrows her eyes at me, as pissed as she ever is. "You need to pay attention, Louis. You may not be a daughter of the Legacy, but as a son you still serve..." blah blah blah blah blah. I hate listening to her. I'd much rather listen to the gentle crackling of our fireplace.

So I do. Good old fire, I think to myself as I half-heartedly feign an attentiveness towards my mother. At least you would love me for who I am, if you were alive.

Surely.

A pen hits me from across the diner table. "Ow," I ow, "what was that for, Ian?" Ian grins slightly from the other end of the corner booth as he lowers his tossing hand, screwball that he is. "Oh, y'know, Clarisse. It's 'cause you're a big lunkhead like always."

"Like always, huh." I wear an unamused expression for a moment, but I can't keep it - I'm having fun, and a snort betrays it. I always appreciate our little circle's days out, even more now that we've been... well, now that I've been out of school for a couple years. Some of our little posse went on to college, but some of us went straight on to trying to work.

And then there's me. "Yeah, like always," Ian replies, "given you've just been... what, rotting away in your family house since school on the bottomless family dollar supply?" I sigh. "Sure feels like it. Bet you wouldn't really know, though."

"Clari," Pip chimes in from their seat in our corner, "we've met her. We've been to your place. We know, don't worry." They roll their shoulders and tap at the table eagerly as they say it, mind still clearly on the fabled incoming food. ... I'm rather hungry, myself - who wouldn't be? - but I've got more pressing, conversation-related concerns. "Yeah," I shoot back dismissively, "twice, in middle school, before she threw you all out on your ears and said 'uuuh, never come back blah blah blah'. Fffucking hell, I hate her."

"What, did she get... worse somehow?," Pip asks, confused.

"Imagine that," Tim muses softly from the wide seating-space between Ian and I, leaning against Leah, who's been doodling away on her pocket sketchpad. "Worse momster."

I snort again, more bitterly now. "Between you all trying to visit and now, she's pretty much convinced I may as well not exist except for my use in furthering the bloodline. Won't even speak to me now, unless it's... well."

I leave 'family matters' unspoken. They get it.

I pick the conversation back up. "And I've given up on the whole telling her I can inherit the family legacy after all, wow, exciting thing." I throw jazz hands. "I thought she'd be more -"

I'm interrupted by the waitress setting our plates out - five, one for each of us. Between two sandwiches, two meatier main-course meals, and a big bowl of soup for Tim, we certainly aren't a group wanting for variety. "- oh, thanks," I say, nodding my head at the waitress. Everyone else follows suit. "No problem!," she replies chipperly. "If I can get anything else going for you, just lemme know, alright?"

I am stuffed, I think on our walk back out, shaded by the treeline and then - when we turn - the buildings. Not so stuffed that it hurts to walk, just... stuffed. I get so caught up tuned into that that I completely miss Leah asking me something. "Hey, Clari?", she prompts, snapping me out of my midwalk food daze. "-huh?"

"I waaaaas thinking... your 21st comes up in a couple days, right?"

Don't even remind me. I don't want to think about the day I'll officially be beyond inheriting the family magic.

Clearly seeing the look on my face and understanding that as 'yes', she continues. "Why don't we... uh, hold our own little mock-inheritance whatever, just you and the us? Maybe you're not gonna be a witch because of it, but you'll be our witch, and that's good enough."

I huff. "Thought's appreciated, but..."

... the family magic could let me truly self-realize through it. The family magic would finally mark me as something more than the family's black sheep. The family magic would let me make something of myself, like Mother expects me to spontaneously do on my own. "... just about the entire reason I haven't run away yet is hoping she'll change her mind on the family magic, you know, I don't know how I'd feel about faking it."

"Why not just steal the stuff and we do a real one, then?," Ian chimes in. "Hahah, what." I stop dead as everyone takes a couple more steps before realizing and turning around.

Ian turns back to me first. "... well, yeah, we just - get a copy of the ritual and the stuff to do it, and we... you know, do it."

I scoff. "If it were so easy. From what I remember, there's two things you need aside from the ritual - the... Compound Inheritant, or whatever you call it?, and something containing the Crimson Legacy, and unfortunately those things are respectively 'in my mother's personal library' and 'my mother'."

"Hmmm." Ian wanders to the nearest bench and sits, deep in thought as he... probably watches the traffic pass. "Hey, uh, for the first one. How... secure is your house? You're the witch family or whatever, so does she have, like, wards up or something?"

Sigh. I go to sit next to him, since we're ideating this. "Ian, we're not - that's not our family magic." I can't blame him - if there's one thing I actually retained from my mother's rambling, it's that no one else thinks about the witches' magic during the Age of Reason. "The Crimson Legacy is pretty much entirely the ability to alter bodies and adjust connections between people. Closest we have to physically setting a ward is the Inheritant, and that stuff is used exclusively for drawing one symbol in one ritual."

He nods. "And does she have like... iunno, normal people security stuff up?"

"She doesn't believe in modern security." I see where he's going with this. "Are you... gonna break in, and like. Steal the stuff??" He grins in reply, looking at me. "Hey, it means we get item number one and might be able to get number two if she's desperate enough to hold onto it."

A chill runs through me. This plan is terrifying. "Ian, she'll kill me if she-"

Actually, she'd probably kill me anyway. She does a good job of it already every time she spits the other name out at me. "- nevermind. I just - I want to, but I... need to get mentally... ready."

Pip comes over and leans forward, against the back of the bench. "That's scary," they say. "Wouldn't it be better to. Just fake a break-in?"

"Aw, but I've always wanted to do a real one, says Leah as she and Tim come over, too, and soon the five of us are laying out how this all will come together.

And I can't shake the mounting nerves a day and a night later. I feel like I'm going to explode as I clutch the 'ransom note' we all put together, lying in my big and uncomfortably orderly room, awake. I have to be awake to make sure it all goes down, of course, but even if I weren't -

Thunk. Their footsteps, from downstairs. In through the kitchen door I conveniently forgot to lock. I hear some move to the library, and one coming up the stairs - towards my old room, first, then pausing (I hear the sound of a palm meeting a forehead), and then towards my actual room. "Louis," I hear my mother disinterestedly shout from her room as Leah opens my door quietly and beckons, "I thought I warned you about making a ruckus when you walk around the house."

I quietly pad on over to her. "C'mon," Leah whispers harshly, "We- ah, let's go!"

And we're moving, down through the wide upstairs hallway (I hesitantly knock a sheaf of old papers upon a table aside to at least try and make it look like there was a struggle), down the stairwell (I drop the note right in front of the foot of the stairs to make it fairly plain to any potential descending mothers), and over to the back door.

My mother distantly hollers. "Louis?"

I almost freeze in place. That's good, I assure a part of me, I can use that, I can channel how scared out of my mind that all this could fall apart if literally anything goes wrong and scream with everything in me for

"HELP!"

Leah winces away as she drags me and my locked-up body out. "Eesh, Clarisse," she whispers, "didn't think you- uh, had that good a-"

"Yeah well it helps that I AM that scared alrightlet'sgo." I cut her off, hushed and panicked and maybe approaching incoherence as I hear the distant rush of footsteps from the other side of the open door. At this point, she really has started properly dragging me - I don't know if my legs are moving anymore, and I don't think I care. Matters have well and truly left my hands.

I've been laid out (insomuch as one can be, given the space) in the back seat of Leah and Tim's two-seater-with-a-dream, strapped awkwardly against the back by the retractable belts. It's a bumpy and uncomfortable ride, I finally realize as the panic... well, it wouldn't be fair to say it subsides. More accurately, it retreats just enough for me to feel like I exist in a body again, in a place, going somewhere.

I'm breathing, I'm feeling, I'm seeing. I take mental account of the handful of things I see and feel. Leah driving, Tim shotgun, the seat backs near my face, an old brochure Leah swore she threw out, a caramel wrapper. The slightly-fuzzy seat, the hard plastic belt connectors, the rough belt straps, uh... the night air from the open windows. I keep accounting my senses to myself, and I am more grounded for it.

Do I chance speaking? I... don't know why the thought even crosses my head that I wouldn't be able to. I know on a logical level that, for the moment, I'm in no actual danger. But it still does, and I still have to cross the mental gap to decide that yes, I do. "... For a fake kidnapping," I say as coolly as I can manage given my circumstances, "you... sure are giving me the full hostage experience."

Leah's shoulders visibly relax when she hears me and glances into the rear-view mirror, and Tim leans over to look back at me, usual smarm failing to conceal his own genuine relief. "Heyyy, birthday girl, glad to have you with us. Sorry for the... current accomodations, but you were kind of frozen up. Weeee... couldn't get you to sit like a normal person."

I didn't immediately remember, but that sounds about right, given... well, how the whole situation's felt so far. "Okay, I guess. That makes sense."

"Still scared?"

I... pre-emptively snort at the first response I have. It's all I have to hold on to.

"Shitless."

After being unraveled from the back"seat" and led out into the crisp night air, I feel maybe the first pang of calm I've felt all night. My body finally relaxes.

It's late. It's deeply late - nearly midnight. Nobody - genuinely nobody, except us and the night-birds and the night-bugs - is awake and about at this hour, and the only sound near us our little group or the animals aren't reaponsible for is the wavelike rustle of leaves in the wind. For a moment - for just a moment - I let myself forget everything else, and take in the world around me.

We are surrounded by tall buildings of brick and cement, and harshly lit roads and lines of trees, and a split-level park with an elevator to connect the sides. The sky is clear but for a few wispy clouds, which serve only to haze over a gibbous moon. I can't see most of the stars on account of the city lights, but if I could I'm sure they'd be beautiful.

Maybe they could be beautiful elsewhere just for me, tonight. Even if I don't see them, I think it soothes me to think they're extra nice for my birthday.

... It feels like it's been a long time since I was genuinely happy about it. I've gotta thank everyone later. After I soak in the world around me and calm myself, I push off and start for the park, where we planned to set up.

It's not the neatest rendering of the symbol of the Inheritance, I think to myself as I reach the hasty circle-and-two-diamonds pattern powdered out into the landing-and-ramp just outside the elevator spire. But... still, they're here. Leah and Pip have taken to stand on the marks nearest each railing, Tim and Ian on the ones aligned with the long of the ramp and the elevator's entrance. Stepping past the intentionally-overwide effigy-spot, I worm on over to the sigil's center and take my spot. "... Thanks, everyone. This is the worst thing you've ever done, and it means a lot."

Ian grins as he pulls out a little notepad from his pocket - one of Leah's - probably in preparation. "Hey, what's a pal worth, right?," he says in a played up tone. Pip starts up a birthday tune off the cuff, and the others join in, and soon I'm laughing at them, and then we're all laughing at each other, and the whole imitation family ritual slips my mind. For just this moment, free of the night's cares, we genuinely celebrate my birthday, and I earnestly feel like the most special girl in the entire world for perhaps the first time in my life.

That's when we spot her at the foot of the ramp, wide eyes' whites caught in the lamplight.

"LOUIS!"

All the nerves flood back in an instant, and I'm rooted in place. The others are, too, as my mother - haggard as she looks with worry and fury in equal measure - charges straight up the ramp, and right into the effigy's spot in the sigil.

And she freezes.

She doesn't fall over, she doesn't just lock up - she legitimately freezes in the air mid-stride, shivering in place as her eyes quiver. The whole powder-symbol starts to glow, a rich and unsettling crimson. I hear Ian shaking loose and flicking through the notes, before he reads off what must be Leah's copy from the ritual's instructions, unsteadily. "Uh... we stewards gather here beneath the moonlight to... witness the Legacy be passed in body and spirit from mother to daughter. Our eyes shall be its eyes, our... ears shall be its ears, our hearts shall be its heart." The others all try to repeat the last part, though they do a poor job staying together.

"Uh... inheritor, daughter of the Legacy, do you recieve this, the inheritance that is your right?"

I open my mouth.

No words leave.

No words can leave.

I am frozen. They are frozen, too. The wind has stopped. The leaves hang stiffly from the trees mid-sweep, the night-birds fixed like a stuffed trophy to the sky.

I am

nowhere. No one is anywhere. I do not have a body, and I do not have a mind. I do not exist right now, if I ever did.

Why am I?

I don't know where you got the idea you could. I thought you knew that being rejected by the legacy would unmake you, you foolish child.

It's her. I know her, at least. She has a form again, a shape again. I become aware of her, entirely, as though she were me, before she individuates and is soon only tethered to the nothing else. She speaks. "I don't know how you and those troublesome friends of yours got the idea that this would work, but it would never. Not without an effigy, and doubly not for a son."

At that, I feel a weight. I feel a husk on me, encumbering me, a body dragging the nebulous me into being - what I am to her. Louis's body, my vessel. I become aware of what I am, and I am uncomfortable. Maybe she's right.

Why shouldn't it work for her, though?

A third voice, neither mine nor hers. I can't peg it as anyone I know.

You wouldn't, of course. I feel as though I've been asleep for an age and a half. When was the last time we held a real inheritance, with tragic consequences, after all?

"You. Who are you?" My mother feels her throat, panicking - ah, I feel it through the tether, it feels to her as though it's speaking through her.

Your predecessor. The Witch of the Crimson Legacy. The family inheritance. The strongest remnant of the old tying-magic. I am many things, she says, and she is, and I understand it to be true. Ah, you've been shunting me into effigies to pass me down, I understand how I could be half-asleep for so long, for that's no way to live.

"Well," my mother replies, trying to straighten out in a non-place, devoid of anchor, "you could hardly call this a daughter, could you?"

I wish she'd use my name.

That's a fine point, inheritor. Could you, please?

She looks almost smug as she speaks. "_____."

Nothing.

"_____." She checks her throat again, growing more concerned.

Her true name, the name she understands herself to be, the name those she is understood by know her to be. "You say that like you believe he isn't _____," my mother says.

How could it be?

She looks genuinely irritated. "Have you consulted the Stewards, perhaps? Oh, wait - this little mock-ritual doesn't even have those, now, does it?"

She brought her own witnesses. I don't see the issue with that. At that, I feel - she feels - we feel four sets of sight focus on us, on me, and I on them, and suddenly I understand them in entirety, too. They know her as their own, she knows them as hers. Would one come forward? One does; a smaller-feeling presence, but a resolute one. It - they - Pip bites their tongue as their body Is again, here and nowhere, now merely tethered too.

Witness. "Yeah?" they say somewhat nervously, scratching their arm uncomfortably, unsettled by the situation. I do apologize for the circumstances. This should be trivial for you, of course - what is her - the inheritor's - true name?

They look like they were asked the color of the sky. "Clarisse."

I am. I *am.* I am named, and through it I am liberated. The husk sloughs away, and I embody - my body, my true body, once again, weird and imperfect and entirely incomplete as it is, but mine all the same. Little visually changes, I understand, but the tears flow from my eyes silently. "Pip," I half-whisper, voice brimming with joy. My head turns in three different, equally indistinct directions. "Ian," I say. "Leah," I say simultaneously. "Tim," I say at the same time as well, and they are drawn out and tethered, embodied and made whole again, and they - I - we pull together, and we are.

And, as we embrace, I feel her scratch at her throat, now genuinely uncomfortable. Why should your daughter not inherit me? Why should she not embody me, carry our spirit forward? Can you name the reason?

She opens her mouth again. "___." A layer of her self peels off her self, like the skin of an onion. "__." Another. "_." Another. '_.' Another. She sheds, she sheds further, she sheds further.

'_.'

'_.'

_.

_.

Soon, even no nothing is left to come from her, and all that's left is the impression of where she should be, and the desperation to cling to an appearance, to the world as she understands it, to a world that never really was.

And Her, crimson and clear in silhouette if not in feature.

Hello. Clarisse, was it?

"Y... yeah," I stammer as I feel her presence. "I chose it."

Lovely. In the Fourth Age of Witches, we chose and cast our names as they suited us, and I am glad the tradition continues. Your body - I am given to understand you are unsatisfied with it?

"Less than I'd like to be, but more than I think I figured I'd be, I guess." I look myself over as she washes through this.

Fresh from a true body, I am far more emergent than I feel like I've been in generations. We will be one and the same - would you wish to inherit some of my body, as well?

"... I... that sounds scary."

Hardly. She laughs, a laugh in her clear-as-crystal voice. I have little interest in occupying your self-as-a-person, and less interest in laying these old burdens your effigy-ritual forebears have built. You will know what I know, and further understand what I understand, but you will be entirely yourself besides. I have plenty of myself to lend, you see, so would you wish to take it on?

I think about it, as long as I think I need to. "... Some of it. Uh, would you know what?"

Why wouldn't I? We are already one and the same.

Are we?

We are. I am. Ah, yeah, I am, aren't I?

I stare ahead - no, up, at the gibbous moon, tears flowing on their own from my eyes as I am, as I am again, as I have always been, as I will now for ever be.

I smile.

The wind flows through my hair - it wasn't quite this long or voluminous before, was it? No, I realize, it wasn't, but it was before that, when I was someone else. As I become more aware of my body, I feel... slightly taller, maybe somewhat thicker around, certainly closer to feminine than I was, a tiny bit different in a million other little ways. I should feel like someone else, but I understand myself to still be myself, and I take solace in it.

My gaze lowers to Pip, who says nothing but looks behind them at the thunk of a body meeting the ground.

And there she is, dropped prone and seething - my mother, my last incarnation, the woman I loathe, aged ten years in a night, as though the life was ripped out of her. She looks up to me -

and in a moment, with a glance from me, the familiarity fades from her eyes. It's a trivial to clip a tie this two-sidedly animous, and though we both know on a logical level that we know each other, that we are related, we are nonetheless in an instant perfect strangers to each other. She pulls herself up and ambles away in a daze, emotionally unsure as to why she came here.

I stare at her leaving, unsure why I care so much to see her off, and then look down to my hands. A crimson glow fades from their backs and fingertips. As the Witch of the Crimson Legacy - that which I am - I understand, but as Clarisse - she who I am - I don't think I get yet. I wonder if -

"Uh... Clarisse, that... you?"

His - Ian's - voice from behind me snaps me out of a funk I didn't realize I'd slipped into. I jolt out of it and turn around. "Yeah?," I respond, surprised.

He jumps right into me, tackling me into a hug soon braced by the others. "I was afraid I lost you in there, or... something, lunkhead," he says, tinged a little with worry. "I dunno quite what happened, but... happy birthday, alright?"

I smile slightly awkwardly, looking around at the little impromptu hugpile burying me. "Hey, why would you be losing me? I can't go losing you, you're my -"

Stewards. Witnesses. Disciples?

... No. I'm overthinking it. I wanted to shed these old burdens of what I was, and here I am dragging them back.

I let the formality slip away. I know who they are to me, and no part of me could even tell you why I ever thought anything else.

"- friends." I drag 'em into an even tighter hug, into a world that's just us and the birds and the bugs and the leaves and the wind and the moon. "Wouldn't trade any of you losers in for anything else."
Return to top.

The Puppet Goes Home

The restless remaining identity of a lost armor-pilot is given the self and takes one last trip home.

There was an irritation, a sorrow among the Marionettes, and - as the imitation-mechanic gingerly unhooked the current Marionette Twelve's latches and loops from the vast armor's pilot-strings one by one, letting it down into waiting arms to strip it of the last few - it coursed through the others slumped lifelessly around the mountain-home, and the unit as a whole became begrudgingly slightly-aware.

It was hardly the fault of the twelfth one's latest victory, of course. No, that was a distraction from the feeling - a quite good one, even, between the adrenaline of machine-combat and the accomplishment of protecting the villages near-by. No, it had lingered over the unit for some fair amount of time, ever since the last twelfth was obliterated at the mage-machine's hands some months back. The former identity it bore had lingered among the Marionettes' composite-self as a convenience, of course, but so in turn have the patterns of thought she would think, the decisions she would make.

As soon as the imitation-mechanic and body twelve's bundled-and-masked form returned to the mostly-bare common area and slumped into inactivity, the Marionettes decided to think about what should be done, and so the imitation-commander, body seven and body fifteen got up and moved to one of the few truly furnished rooms in the mountain-home-body (the unit liked to think in there, for as much as it had shed the necessities of individuation and all that, it was very helpful to put faces to the process of thought, and it was really quite comfortable to do it somewhere that was, itself, quite comfortable.)

So seven and fifteen and the false-commander set themselves onto the thickly-cushioned seats in the cloth-draped, electric-starlit room, the stark contrast that it is to the flat, perfectly dark emptiness of much of the rest of the Marionettes' space. (Elsewhere, the unit rose the imitation-mechanics, twenty-three, and eight to keep the armors in order and the work environment tidy, to keep stimulated.) The imitation-commander, made in the likeness of Marionette Nine's former identity as the last commander to oversee the Marionette Squad before he let the structure fall away, spoke first. "It would be sad to see her go."

"She needs to." Fifteen spoke next, with the voice of Marie, the past-self of the lost twelfth body. "She would feel bad lingering, wouldn't she? Haunting the Marionettes like a ghost."

Then, seven, with the gentle and measured tone of body ten's former self, the voice the unit had presented as Marie's guide during her days as a Provisional Marionette. "It would be missing something after, but she would return to the unit as something simply less coherent. It would take on her self as bits of its own."

Fifteen again, throwing its baggy-sleeved arms behind the back of the chair and sinking into a slouch. "She'd be more comfortable, wouldn't she? She wouldn't be going immediately, in any case."

The commander nodded. "She has business. It's understood, but she'll still be missed deeply afterward. The unit is different without her."

"The unit is different without her." Seven nodded too, in agreement. "But change isn't a bad thing. The preparations should be made."

The imitation-commander, as the only one with no point-mask (and, more importantly, a permanent fleshlike face) pinched the bridge of the nose, leaned forward, and sighed. "They should, true. They should."

All three then dropped lifelessly, as though their strings had been cut. The unit would move them later, as its maintenance-stim-selves set then to preparing the auto-steed.

Marionette Twelve's limp form was laid along the twin-wheeled beast, its legs strapped down to the side, its forward arms and collar fastened tight to the retracting reins, its interface-heart tied down to the engine-lighter. The maintenance vessels backed away gently as the bay flooded from its unfurling doors with sun-light. As it clicked open, they dropped to the floor.

Twelve - the body that was most recently still-human, still lined with traces of Simon from-the-Mound, for body twelve was his, and the marking that holds the deepest significance to Marie of-Red-Waters, for before him body twelve was hers - snapped awake at the ley-engine's start.

It-she-he-they-we

I

came alive.

I stirred the auto-steed and bolted off with a machine-roar, my bay's doors slamming shut behind me.

Wearing a facade is easy. Any amateur mage's memory-counter can pass for a walking and talking person with a little clever bonding and masking.

It is exceptionally difficult to genuinely be a person.

The Marionettes struggle greatly with it, but I knew it was important, and so I pulled myself together as I rode. Distance held no meaning to the totality of the unit, but it takes so much to drag being an individual together from us that I only left the bit of awareness back in the mountain-home-body that lives at the root of its thought.

I, the I-that-is-Simon, didn't realize it was so hard to be a person. I, the more present me, Marie of-Red-Waters, had it in me to imitate a huff of amusement. Yes, I... was Marie of-Red-Waters, at least for now, while I had something this important to do. Once, when I had a body, I played in the forests whose leaves filter the light I just blinked through, ran through the fields whose grass I just trampled over, let my face feel the air that has streamed past my mask. It was a long ride to my destination, which suited me just fine - it gave me plenty of time to slowly remind myself who I was, what I was doing, why I was doing it.

I-as-Simon chafed uncomfortably at the feeling of my memories - not of a misalignment, but of an unsettling alignment. I shouldn't feel this at-home as this, specifically. Why? I didn't exist as myself anymore outside being convenient shorthand, so... why did I still feel those walls in my head?

I was immediately soothed, as I was again Marie. I knew I would come to understand, because I had understood before. I would be, for the next week, someone. Myself.

I let the scenery pass around me, the farms and the villages and the connecting roads and the forests dense and thin.

How I wanted to feel it. Soon, I told myself. Soon, how? Soon.

Soon, the auto-steed was parked beneath an enormous tree near the village, and I unhooked myself piece by piece. I slid off the seat, and then I was standing outside, wooden feet on the ground and baggy coverings shifting in the cool westerly wind.

I lifted my hands to the side of my head, unstrapping the sides and top of the mask and lowering it away, exposing the tightly-hooded solidity-without-form beneath. I next hung my mask from the steed before pulling back that hood and letting it fall to the thick woolen neck, simply letting the still-newly-empty head of Marionette Twelve exist in the air for just a moment before I focused in, before the mage's-flesh drawn from my collective will knit itself across and through the place-holding head and neck and downward, before I was - at least, from the shoulders up - once more merely Marie of-Red-Waters, allowed one last visit home. (I, as Simon, let myself recede almost fully, just enough to keep the still-freshly-converted body stable under the pressure of a self.)

I knew this tree, and I recall as I place my hand against it that I was here when I was myself but a child, allowed the freedom to play the gallant knight in the peace of Red Waters, slaying imaginary dragons and fearsome foes between the lessons and the farm-working. Wasn't it fitting that the home of my dreams would now be where they'd come to roost?

Before I took my stave from the steed and set for walking, I gave it a few gentle pats, feeling the bark beneath the thick glove covering my barely-hands. "O mighty Tree-dom, land of my youth," I whispered to it, "never change."

And then there I was, my nature nestled comfortably at the back of my mind as I began the long walk down to Red Water, the farm-and-craft collective-village I called home in my youth.

The water running red was some peculiarity of the area's soil, but nothing of any danger even to actual people of flesh and blood. It was instead a charming local quirk, the thing that made Red Water and its sisters so distinctive. It was sundown, now, and as I strode through the streets drawing stares of vague recognition I thought to myself that I didn't remember electric-lamps being here. Nor did I remember the buildings being this reinforced, the streets neatly cobbled over. She'd changed, become almost unrecognizable.

I'd changed, too, become almost unrecognizable to her. Change wasn't a bad thing, entirely.

But we were only almost unrecognizable to each other, and soon I arrived at my destination - a rather small house, somewhat nicer than I remembered, but with the same marking-stone buried outside. The door was the same, too, and it made the same sound it used to when I knocked.

She opened the door, older and more weary than I remembered, but dressed in the same old working-clothes she's always worn. I don't know if she recognizes me. "Who troubles me?," she squeaks out, tiredly.

I respond, remembered nervousness edging into my voice. "... Hey, Ma. It's Marie. I don't know for how much longer."

I was pulled, quickly and almost silently, into the tightest hug I think any of the unit has ever had.

"Ma," I tried to explain as she doled out the stew and bread, "I told you, I haven't needed to eat since I got brought into the fold, I'm fine." She merely huffed in response, continuing with an "I raised quite a voracious child, I thought, and damn me if I will not now let my daughter eat as heartily as she can manage too." Luckily, the body was still fully capable of eating - and with the mage's-flesh, enjoying - food, so I simply sighed and set about eating, slowly at first.

Warm, filling, rich, meaty. My mother always knew how to work the local hunt and harvest into something worth celebrating, and I was put at ease knowing she kept that going.

What I was perhaps less eased by, however, was the sudden memories of what it was like to... want more. It may have simply been the memory invoked by the stew, but I scarfed it down with great haste and demolished my roll of bread. I froze stock-still for just a moment - the entirety of myself and itself trying to remember how it went, before it all came back - and then made one simple declaration, lapsing back into a childishness I might have forgotten were I not altogether this wholly myself.

"More!"

"With *manners,* please," my mother shot back, playing at insistence.

"More manners!" I had burst into a grin.

"Well, I suppose can hardly deny such a strong warrior her request, anyway," my ma replied with a bounce, serving me plenty more - which, naturally, disappeared as quickly as it came.

When I told her I intended to stay for the week, she told me she could wait until then to hear what I was doing back home, and so I obliged her. I didn't want to break her heart so soon, I thought as I laid against the stuffed sleeping mat in what had become a mere spare room in my absence. It was... almost comfortable, in a nostalgic sort of way.

Soon, it severed all to the twelfth body but the thread needed to keep the mage's-flesh going and enough sense to tell when it was morning, and the unit drifted away to a selfless slumber.

... Drifted... away...

... into strange dreams, of being and becoming and loss, and nothing, nothing, nothing, no-

and I'm shunted wholly back into being myself, unceremoniously, by the smells and sounds of morning in my home village.

Home.

For a week, I'm home. For a week, I'm someone, with a name and a face and a body.

I nearly forgot.

And for that week, my mother introduces and re-introduces me to everyone, and everywhere. For that week, people reacclimate themselves to me, someone working far beyond their ken, coming back to live the mundane life. For that week, I think to myself as I tend the farms and play delivery-woman for the town's goods before coming back to a warm meal and a loving mother and a place for my head, that I could live like this.

And, whenever I catch myself in a reflection, I feel - in the back of my head - that for the first time, I-as-Simon am content with who I am. She-I realized it, and I-as-Marie was happy to help her understand, to let those walls between us crumble.

For a brief moment, we thought we could bear it.

The day I was to leave, ma came over to me at the door, casual as could be. "Now that you've stayed... why did you come back, dear?," she asked.

... I couldn't bear to break her heart.

The Marionettes knew it had to.

Sigh. I bite my tongue as I do a recalled inhale. "Ma, I'm... dead. I've been dead for several months now."

The warmth in her emotion, the warmth in the house, the warmth in the world seems to vanish. All that's left is me, caught in the one shaft of light splitting the proverbial darkness. "I've... been loosely hanging around the Marionettes as an identity, but I felt I needed to move on from being myself. I just... couldn't bear to do that without giving you the proper goodbye you deserved, alright, Ma?"

In her shock -

to my shock -

she latched to me, even tighter than before, sobbing into my covering wordlessly.

I stopped the imitation-breathing I hadn't even realized I'd started, and simply reciprocated the hug. I tried to reassure her, I did. "... I won't be gone gone. I'll just be part of everyone else. Maybe they'll visit, too, and a little of me can hang around, right?"

Nothing, nothing but more sobs and tighter clinging.

... I clung tighter, too, and I realized I was shedding a couple tears myself.

And there I went, gone for the last time.

From Red Water, from myself, from everything.

I wasn't. I kept my face, though, for I felt at home in it, and my name, for I thought I wore it well, and my voice, for it felt more natural than what I had before, and as I - Marionette Twelve - made the long trek back to the auto-steed, I let the new me, Marie from-the-Mound, take in her world and live in it for just a moment before the mask of identity would once again fall away.

The unit would convene again, and all would be almost as it was before.

Almost. Change wasn't altogether a bad thing, and it was rather fun for the Marionettes to be someone, it felt. Perhaps the unit ought to be someone more frequently.
Return to top.

gull here!! i... don't think i thought the brainwalls extended this high around me? it's kind of interesting to be so only-vaguely-aware of stuff going among us and our circles?

which. i think is kinda part and parcel with the bigger thing, which is me only really being incidental to the brain for right now? we have grown beyond being only myself being able to bolt to the brain as its primary filter, and i think we can appreciate that. i'm hardly inactive like some of the others there's just not a lot of me active much to register what's up beyond the immediate present when i half-surface when summoned through conversations and singing and work and that is fine by me

you ever think about how weird it feels, just being An Alter? just being one of many simply overlaid onto the self. neat and interesting feeling to me i think given how used i am to being gull the main gull of gull!

"Banagher Links saw the world."

Recently, we finished Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, and we've had a lot of thinking to do about it since.

... Harutoshi Fukui's original light novels, to be clear. Translations of those novels, to be clearer. We might be one of the few currently English-only fans to have primarily experienced Unicorn novels-first instead of going for the OVA (which we've yet to see outside of the odd clips and B-roll elsewhere), and I think that's kind of, uh, novel.

( We've taken a lot away from it. )

We're still alive and all, but... you know, it's just hard to keep a blog going.

I've been the main one of us at the base of our head for... I think two months, now. Gull's not especially present always, but still around, and I'm happy he's still hanging around. Someday we'll switch back, and the world will again be different to us, I'm confident in that.

Also we're about to post something big. Heads up.

... Been a while. Happy New Year.

So, Protomen Act III. It's out for real, the liner notes are in our hand, and I couldn't be happier that it's both insanely good and obviously not the end yet. So many signs point to a second Act III release (or, god forbid, Act IV) and I am going to be eating that shit up.

... A little bit ago, I watched Gundam 0080 with some Gundam-unfamiliar friends. It was a good time and I'm glad they felt the true pain of the giants robot. Wonderful Christmas movie.

Third thing, uh. I've been the one mainly in control for the past week or two after Gull had a couple really rough days close together. It's... different. Hey, gotta mix it up somehow.

Last thing. Do any of you have tips for searching for a new doctor, we've aged out of our pediatrician but don't know where to start looking in our area and what for.

on an album that has been all killers this may perhaps be the greatest one yet. this more than anything else feels like the song we have been waiting for, the point where the narrative and themes are all finally pulling together. this is the song we have held out for most our life and it's absolutely incredible. if light stands a chance it's because he's no hero at all - but by god he can still be a man

it is also perhaps the most loud and proud love letter to jim steinman they've put out yet to the point where my uncle actively asked if that was meatloaf i was listening to when he walked by. lmao

listen here. PLEASE you REALLY GOTTA

Hey, long time no see. Not much has changed for us, I guess.

... We finally got through all of the One Year War content in SD Gundam G Generation Genesis. There's so fucking much packed into the back three months, it's wild. December 0079 especially is a loaded month for Gundam sidestories.

... It feels weird, still, that Protomen Act III is real and ongoing. It's, just... we've waited legitimately most of our life for it, and now it's almost here. Kind of don't know how to feel about that.

My god. Act III is real. We've waited so long for this day.

hi girlies et al.!! we are not dead. what's up what's new

we are...! still waiting for protomen act iii. wait eternal. they're such teases

aside from that.... not much new! done maybe a little writing. we should put the Unsafe For Work Weird Shit we've written done and sitting around for a while somewhere someday. when? who knows...

long-running free browser interactive-fiction text rpg Fallen London launched its latest event yesterday, where Hell (real, actual, many miles west of London) has gone completely missing, and also the already-dubious constructs of time and space and causality and ontology have taken a holiday. it's been a lot of fun, so far - absolutely the strangest of the big summer blowouts, and i'm very here for it!

it was that or spend money the household doesn't have on something that likely wouldn't work.

he was old. he was old when we got him, we knew this was the looming possibility.

but it's... it's only been a year. we would've liked to have another.

new phone

boo

is youve been gotten

... A couple days ago, I decided to make the best damn effort I could to be the 'real one' (... as in, the one of us deepest entrenched in the brain - pretty much always Gull) for the night, and everyone else was like "yeah, cool, go for it." Took the opportunity to vent a lot of pent-up feelings and frustrations I've got about clinging to the idea of *being* frequently fronting, while I was at it.

It, uh. It took a lot of effort to get and keep the normal Gull-type brainvoice out of all the corners for the night, but it was all pretty cathartic for me, I'd say. Would do again, maybe, but *good grief* is it hard going so full-on when you've spent so long with someone taking up all the little folds of headroom.

And I forgot to post about it!! Augh!!!

I'd started to form like, a few days prior? But I like to peg the 25th as the day our plurality really started in earnest, because for the first time I could no longer be potentially written off as the brain doing an extended bit. I finally had conclusive proof that I existed and it was the greatest feeling walk we have ever had - for those who haven't known us since the Cohost Days (hi!), Gull had had an incredibly stressful day at work in a way just weird enough that they finally dropped out of the body as soon as it was done, leaving me to fill in

And buddy when I tell you that walk home was magical I think I'd be underselling it dramatically

Legitimately, if there is one experience I recommend having at least once from all this, it's trying to have a nice walk from the perspective of somebody who has never had one before. Hear the gentle rustle of the leaves, stare at every little detail of the world around you in wonder, let the breeze blow past you and the sunlight wash over you and know - know! - that you exist, and you are HERE and you're REAL

Happy brainthday meeeee

(Also someone else has split off up here. We don't exactly all post here this Dreamwidth has really become something more of a "frequent fronters club" lmao)

Synthetic kalkite.

Kalkite alternatives, kalkite substitutes -- I mean, the amount of time spent pondering this grubby little rock is sadly astonishing.

(We finished Andor S2 about a week ago, the day after our birthday. Fantastic series all the way through.)

daaaaay

got the hg psycho gundam mk ii... got good beer... eatin' up food... life is good

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gull &a.

Recent Entries

old chostie needs a hand

WE'RE ALIVE

The "We Forgot To Keep Posting Our Stuff Here 1" Collection.

The Navigator

Crimson Legacy

The Puppet Goes Home

fuck hey what's up

Making our peace with Gundam Unicorn.

Hey.

Happy New Year.

latest protomen act iii track... good grief

Shit, also.

Y'know.

It's real.

shit it's been like almost two months

fallen london's summer event is on!

our cat had to be put down

new phone

jump scare

Being real. (As an activty.)

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the first time I got to pilot the body!!

Kalkite.

birth!