Temple fade black men
The House of Black and White
2016.05.03 18:35 kcsapper The House of Black and White
The House of Black and White is a temple in Braavos dedicated to the Many-Faced God. It also serves as the headquarters of the guild of assassins known as the Faceless Men. It sits alone on a small island in the lagoon of Braavos.
2018.09.27 06:32 sailorjupiter28titan Witches vs Patriarchy
WitchesVsPatriarchy is a woman-centered sub with a witchy twist, aimed at healing, supporting, and uplifting one another through humor and magic. The goal is to at once embrace, and poke fun at, the mystical aspects of femininity that have been previously demonized and/or devalued by the patriarchy. This subreddit is a Safe Space for Women, BIPOC, and anyone in the LGBTQ+ community. We are Sisters, not Cisters. If you do not consider yourself an ally, then this subreddit is not for you.
2015.01.07 11:40 Zadeinator Halo Role Play
Home of the internet's best Halo Roleplaying Community, HaloRP
2023.03.24 14:08 Yarus43 I want this game to be "bigger"
Bigger isn't necessarily better Not in the map sense, I actually would be happy if this game was smaller than fo4 or Skyrim. I'm talking let's gets a smaller map that encompasses one province. I hope they don't do two provinces because that either entails watering down cities and less development time on what I thinks more important. Alot of people are thinking the game will take place in both provinces of high rock and hammerfell, I would personally prefer a focus on hammerfell itself, with small regions of high rock or maybe elsweyr. I think the illiac bay would be best because the geographical variety would be dope. I didn't like Skyrim and oblivions lack of big islands to swim or catch a boat to. There's volikhar that's it. In Morrowind I thought it was awesome to go to sheogorad and adventure. I felt like a pioneer mucking about.
Design Philosophy
Another thing, I would prefer if the design philosophy of Skyrim would be gone as a whole. What I mean is no matter where you're standing on the map there's a dungeon or ruin 20 meters in every direction. It really feels like this world is manufactured for us the player rather than something that naturally formed over time. In Morrowind, egg mines were near settlements, as were most tombs. Daedric ruins for the most part are out of the way or in secret places (shrines in vivecs sewers we're awesome). Dwemer ruins were mostly forts taking up areas that control travel or overlooking important areas (makes sense considering the dwemer we're at war and also subterranean so making surface settlements at strategic areas makes sense). When there is a settlement in Skyrim don't make it because the area is empty and needs people, think about what does this village or town need, is there a mine or special export? Skyrim did this a bit with mining towns. Also don't be afraid to just make large swathes of area with fewer towns at equal distance. Let me explore a frontier, a desert that separates hammerfell. It could make travel interesting. Real cities don't form in every territory because we need one. The Midwest in the US is far less populated because theres not as much coast line. I think changing the design philosophy could make the game feel much larger than Skyrim without a physically bigger map.
Cities
Kind of cementing more of the same, one thing I do want actually bigger? Cities. And I want them open. There's concerns that doing this will hamper cpu and cause framerate loss. I think if the world is built by the devs to be open it will be negligible. The problem with modding skyrims cities to open is they are not meant to be from the get go. Npc's in Bethesda games are not generic actors, they all have special stats and skills like the player. By opening up cities you make them feel more apart of the world. If you need heavy cpu performance in an area with high npc's, I'd say the best way to do this is just put them in an interior cell. What do I mean? Make a market with an interior for vendor npc's. I don't think this should be necessary if done right but it's a solution. Also if we want high amounts of people walking around, the devs could make a secondary type of npc. One that doesn't have all the states and attributes of normal actors. Theres a lot of games I'm having issues thinking of, that use crowds of people more like a object where people you engage with are more personal. I don't know if this is the best idea because tes games have become very dependent on interpersonal npc's.
Npc's
Speaking of which, I don't want Bethesda to just make the npc's have a even higher amount of scheduled tasks. The novelty of it sounds cool, but to me in Skyrim I never really noticed so and so npc chopping wood at a certain hour, or going somewhere at a certain time. If it's a must, make them do things that we'll notice. I think oblivion has an NPC that paints at a certain time of day and I find that adds to the game because it's noticeable. It's like rdr2s horse testicle shrinkage. Yeah it's interesting that you went into that much detail but the majority of people aren't going to notice and it won't really effect gameplay or add to the game. It will take people from development when they could flesh out other aspects.
Factions/People
I want multiple factions, one of my favorite things in tes3 was being able to join not only a mage, fighter, and assassins guild but variations, and also the local political entity. I want hammerfell to have a fighters guild and a different more local version of one, hell if I could eat my cake too id like three. I can already see it now, you got just straight up fighters guild, then you got a guild that is more in tune with the provinces culture and beliefs (sorta how the companions were in Skyrim). Maybe there's another guild thats more of an honourable knighthood in the north near the border with high rock. Get that intermixing of culture, while redguards and Bretons might not always get along maybe a local mercenary or lord descended from Bretons sponsors the guild. The potential is limitless.
What I don't want is to always focus on a greater narrative of previous guilds. The dark brotherhood for example is cool, and I hope they're still around but I don't want them to always be the "big" assassin group. Groups lose power and get displaced. Look at the Morag tong, they themselves kinda got displaced momentarily by the dark brotherhood. These organizations are full of people with ideas and ambition, having a stale never changing roster limits the story telling of these factions.
Make it weirder
One of Tes's biggest strengths is its wierd lore. The dwemer may have become the numidiums skin. The world is a dream by a giant sleeping god head. Vivec has a dick spear. Sotha sil made clockwork nirn. The falmer are advancing in a wierd subterranean way, black reach is a giant world under Skyrim with completely different flora. Argonians are tree robots, altmer are Hapsburg, perfectionist, nazi elves. The bosmer are Tolkien's wood elves with a neat twist, they love plants so fucking much they only eat meat, and YOU. Khajiit rely on the moon for their anatomy...etc. Something Skyrim did well was black reach, but it felt like it could've gone weirder. Let's have these snow whales, let's have nords worshiping shor and the old gods, half giants, wise men, naked barbarians that shout down walls, let's have imperials that live in a jungle with rice paddies and a wierd Chinese/Roman mix of culture. I want altmer to live in wierd glass dragonfly towers. The architecture and culture should differ from each city.
Whiterun for example, their sigil is a horse on a yellow background. Why? They don't seem to use horses or cavalry, atleast not more than the rest of Skyrim. A nord from whiterun acts like a nord from riften or solitude. Solitude nords should be more imperialized, using nibbenese and Colovian fashions, while Windhelm should be staunch traditionalists. If white run is based off edoras make it so they're renowned cavalry (it would make even more sense why they're a big player in the war). Dawnstar raids and pillages like vikings, riften is full of warriors who have are honorable and full of experience from skirmishes on the Morrowind border, they contrast to the underway and it's numerous criminals like the thieves or the corrupt black briars. Adds tension and intrigue. What we got was "this is the thief city now give me gold or you can't get into city, also the thieves guild don't exist despite like 20 of their members walking around looking for extortion everyday".
Just take everything I said and apply it to a new game. Hammerfell should be a very unique place with very diverse culture and people across it's world.
Sorry if sounded like a morrowboomer, just the game I had as a good reference.
submitted by Yarus43 to nextelderscrolls [link] [comments]
Design Philosophy
Another thing, I would prefer if the design philosophy of Skyrim would be gone as a whole. What I mean is no matter where you're standing on the map there's a dungeon or ruin 20 meters in every direction. It really feels like this world is manufactured for us the player rather than something that naturally formed over time. In Morrowind, egg mines were near settlements, as were most tombs. Daedric ruins for the most part are out of the way or in secret places (shrines in vivecs sewers we're awesome). Dwemer ruins were mostly forts taking up areas that control travel or overlooking important areas (makes sense considering the dwemer we're at war and also subterranean so making surface settlements at strategic areas makes sense). When there is a settlement in Skyrim don't make it because the area is empty and needs people, think about what does this village or town need, is there a mine or special export? Skyrim did this a bit with mining towns. Also don't be afraid to just make large swathes of area with fewer towns at equal distance. Let me explore a frontier, a desert that separates hammerfell. It could make travel interesting. Real cities don't form in every territory because we need one. The Midwest in the US is far less populated because theres not as much coast line. I think changing the design philosophy could make the game feel much larger than Skyrim without a physically bigger map.
Cities
Kind of cementing more of the same, one thing I do want actually bigger? Cities. And I want them open. There's concerns that doing this will hamper cpu and cause framerate loss. I think if the world is built by the devs to be open it will be negligible. The problem with modding skyrims cities to open is they are not meant to be from the get go. Npc's in Bethesda games are not generic actors, they all have special stats and skills like the player. By opening up cities you make them feel more apart of the world. If you need heavy cpu performance in an area with high npc's, I'd say the best way to do this is just put them in an interior cell. What do I mean? Make a market with an interior for vendor npc's. I don't think this should be necessary if done right but it's a solution. Also if we want high amounts of people walking around, the devs could make a secondary type of npc. One that doesn't have all the states and attributes of normal actors. Theres a lot of games I'm having issues thinking of, that use crowds of people more like a object where people you engage with are more personal. I don't know if this is the best idea because tes games have become very dependent on interpersonal npc's.
Npc's
Speaking of which, I don't want Bethesda to just make the npc's have a even higher amount of scheduled tasks. The novelty of it sounds cool, but to me in Skyrim I never really noticed so and so npc chopping wood at a certain hour, or going somewhere at a certain time. If it's a must, make them do things that we'll notice. I think oblivion has an NPC that paints at a certain time of day and I find that adds to the game because it's noticeable. It's like rdr2s horse testicle shrinkage. Yeah it's interesting that you went into that much detail but the majority of people aren't going to notice and it won't really effect gameplay or add to the game. It will take people from development when they could flesh out other aspects.
Factions/People
I want multiple factions, one of my favorite things in tes3 was being able to join not only a mage, fighter, and assassins guild but variations, and also the local political entity. I want hammerfell to have a fighters guild and a different more local version of one, hell if I could eat my cake too id like three. I can already see it now, you got just straight up fighters guild, then you got a guild that is more in tune with the provinces culture and beliefs (sorta how the companions were in Skyrim). Maybe there's another guild thats more of an honourable knighthood in the north near the border with high rock. Get that intermixing of culture, while redguards and Bretons might not always get along maybe a local mercenary or lord descended from Bretons sponsors the guild. The potential is limitless.
What I don't want is to always focus on a greater narrative of previous guilds. The dark brotherhood for example is cool, and I hope they're still around but I don't want them to always be the "big" assassin group. Groups lose power and get displaced. Look at the Morag tong, they themselves kinda got displaced momentarily by the dark brotherhood. These organizations are full of people with ideas and ambition, having a stale never changing roster limits the story telling of these factions.
Make it weirder
One of Tes's biggest strengths is its wierd lore. The dwemer may have become the numidiums skin. The world is a dream by a giant sleeping god head. Vivec has a dick spear. Sotha sil made clockwork nirn. The falmer are advancing in a wierd subterranean way, black reach is a giant world under Skyrim with completely different flora. Argonians are tree robots, altmer are Hapsburg, perfectionist, nazi elves. The bosmer are Tolkien's wood elves with a neat twist, they love plants so fucking much they only eat meat, and YOU. Khajiit rely on the moon for their anatomy...etc. Something Skyrim did well was black reach, but it felt like it could've gone weirder. Let's have these snow whales, let's have nords worshiping shor and the old gods, half giants, wise men, naked barbarians that shout down walls, let's have imperials that live in a jungle with rice paddies and a wierd Chinese/Roman mix of culture. I want altmer to live in wierd glass dragonfly towers. The architecture and culture should differ from each city.
Whiterun for example, their sigil is a horse on a yellow background. Why? They don't seem to use horses or cavalry, atleast not more than the rest of Skyrim. A nord from whiterun acts like a nord from riften or solitude. Solitude nords should be more imperialized, using nibbenese and Colovian fashions, while Windhelm should be staunch traditionalists. If white run is based off edoras make it so they're renowned cavalry (it would make even more sense why they're a big player in the war). Dawnstar raids and pillages like vikings, riften is full of warriors who have are honorable and full of experience from skirmishes on the Morrowind border, they contrast to the underway and it's numerous criminals like the thieves or the corrupt black briars. Adds tension and intrigue. What we got was "this is the thief city now give me gold or you can't get into city, also the thieves guild don't exist despite like 20 of their members walking around looking for extortion everyday".
Just take everything I said and apply it to a new game. Hammerfell should be a very unique place with very diverse culture and people across it's world.
Sorry if sounded like a morrowboomer, just the game I had as a good reference.
2023.03.24 14:05 DealsPoster Nintendo Switch Sale on eShop
List of Nintendo Switch titles on sale with Metacritic score 65+
M: Matches Previous Low
L: Lowest Historical Price
submitted by DealsPoster to consoledeals [link] [comments]
M: Matches Previous Low
L: Lowest Historical Price
2023.03.24 14:04 Educational_Age1275 37 [M4F] #NYC Dominant man looking for CNC hook ups
My cock / body - https://imgur.com/a/W1MeJDc
Hey, thanks for reading my ad. I’m looking for submissive obedient women that are interested in CNC. If you aren’t aware of what that is, it’s consensual non-consent. It’s basically like a role played scene of a forced sexual encounter. I set up the scene, we discuss your boundaries, exchange safety procedures and then we arrange to meet up.
Free use - you are just a free use slut that I pick up, take wherever I want, and use you how I’d like.
Car blowjob bitch - exclusively used in my car, easy pick up and park somewhere to use your mouth only no reciprocation.
Tinder date (role played) - a Netflix and chill tinder date that goes wrong when you are forced to have sex.
Uber driver (role played) - I am your drive taking you to a destination when I decide to take you instead.
Movie date (role played) - an actual movie/dinner date where you are forced to have sex afterwards.
Home invasion (role played) - I come to your place and let myself in while you’re home alone to force you.
Cheating (role played) - either role played, or legitimately cheating on your partner with me.
Threesome / Group - this is not offered until I meet up with you one on one first, but I’m interested in arranging group sessions.
Blackmail (role played) - not for the feint of heart, i black mail you with nudes / pictures and force you to submit to me.
Safe words - I use red, yellow, green for safety during sessions. I respect all safe words.
Verification - I am contacted by a ton of cat fish and fake bots trying to fish pictures or sext with me. I require a form of verification before meeting, and sometimes even before chatting. This can come in the form of a picture, face time, etc. you do not have to reveal your face or identity to verify. Offense at being asked for verification is a red flag.
I assume everyone I speak to is a cat fish until they verify.
No I am not interested in men or transsexuals. If you are a “couple” I do not want to talk to any men, and the woman must verify.
If you are not local, please don’t contact me. If you are “visiting soon”, please contact me when you are actually here, not before.
I don’t want to have to chase you, have to ask you multiple times when we are going to meet up, or have to “convince” you to make up your mind. If you are contacting me, be fairly certain you are looking to meet up sooner rather than later.
Mental health issues - I am a stable and non - dangerous individual. If you have serious mental health issues and you’re unstable / chaotic I’m not interested.
Under age - do not contact me
Thank you for reading, the best method of contacting me is Reddit chat. I’m usually very responsive unless I’m working or sleeping.
submitted by Educational_Age1275 to r4rNYC [link] [comments]
Hey, thanks for reading my ad. I’m looking for submissive obedient women that are interested in CNC. If you aren’t aware of what that is, it’s consensual non-consent. It’s basically like a role played scene of a forced sexual encounter. I set up the scene, we discuss your boundaries, exchange safety procedures and then we arrange to meet up.
The scenes
Before meeting, all of my scenes are negotiated and boundaries are established. Some scenes are role played, other scenes are not.Free use - you are just a free use slut that I pick up, take wherever I want, and use you how I’d like.
Car blowjob bitch - exclusively used in my car, easy pick up and park somewhere to use your mouth only no reciprocation.
Tinder date (role played) - a Netflix and chill tinder date that goes wrong when you are forced to have sex.
Uber driver (role played) - I am your drive taking you to a destination when I decide to take you instead.
Movie date (role played) - an actual movie/dinner date where you are forced to have sex afterwards.
Home invasion (role played) - I come to your place and let myself in while you’re home alone to force you.
Cheating (role played) - either role played, or legitimately cheating on your partner with me.
Threesome / Group - this is not offered until I meet up with you one on one first, but I’m interested in arranging group sessions.
Blackmail (role played) - not for the feint of heart, i black mail you with nudes / pictures and force you to submit to me.
Safety
Boundaries - before meeting I always discuss boundaries with my partner. This includes what kinks you have and what is off limits. I respect all boundaries.Safe words - I use red, yellow, green for safety during sessions. I respect all safe words.
Verification - I am contacted by a ton of cat fish and fake bots trying to fish pictures or sext with me. I require a form of verification before meeting, and sometimes even before chatting. This can come in the form of a picture, face time, etc. you do not have to reveal your face or identity to verify. Offense at being asked for verification is a red flag.
I assume everyone I speak to is a cat fish until they verify.
Etiquette
If you are contacting me do not simply say “hey” or “hi” . Please give me some brief information about yourself, maybe a few pictures, and what scenes you are interested in. Be ready and willing to verify. Do not waste my time trying to cat fish me, it won’t work.No I am not interested in men or transsexuals. If you are a “couple” I do not want to talk to any men, and the woman must verify.
If you are not local, please don’t contact me. If you are “visiting soon”, please contact me when you are actually here, not before.
I don’t want to have to chase you, have to ask you multiple times when we are going to meet up, or have to “convince” you to make up your mind. If you are contacting me, be fairly certain you are looking to meet up sooner rather than later.
My Kinks
I’m dominant so my kinks include rough play, slapping, choking, light punching, hair pulling, spitting, toys like gag balls, anal plugs, leashes, chains, etc. I like to piss on girls too. I also enjoy recording and taking pictures if you consent to that. I respect all boundaries so if you aren’t into some of my kinks you can let me know that it’s a boundary for you.Red flags 🚩
Heavy drug usage - I smoke marijuana, that’s about as far as I go. I’m not judgmental, but I do not want to interact with women that are heavy drug users.Mental health issues - I am a stable and non - dangerous individual. If you have serious mental health issues and you’re unstable / chaotic I’m not interested.
Under age - do not contact me
Thank you for reading, the best method of contacting me is Reddit chat. I’m usually very responsive unless I’m working or sleeping.
IF YOU CONTACT ME, PLEASE TURN YOUR NOTIFICATIONS ON BECAUSE I DONT LIKE UNRESPONSIVE WOMEN WHO TAKE HOURS OR EVEN DAYS TO TEXT ME BACK. PLEASE DONT WASTE MY TIME.
2023.03.24 14:02 LukeMedia Cerakote Trim or Spray Paint?
Hi everyone!
I have a 2011 Honda Civic with a badly faded cowl. After trying back-to-black, realizing it sucks, and doing some research I've found that one of the easiest recommended solutions is to use Cerakote Trim restorer.
I was also already considering prepping the cowl, applying plastic primer, and then black spray paint to fix the faded look. Taking a look through my garage, I already have both cerakote trim coat (when did I buy this?) as well as the paint I would need.
Between these two options, what choice makes the most sense? With repainting, I'm not sure how I'd seal/protect it after it's painted. I don't know if I could use Cerakote on painted trim or not. With the Cerakote, I'm worried about it not applying evenly, since certain parts of my cowl are faded worse than other parts. (Probably wax or polish got on it at some point).
Hoping y'all can point me in the right direction, thanks in advance!
submitted by LukeMedia to Detailing [link] [comments]
I have a 2011 Honda Civic with a badly faded cowl. After trying back-to-black, realizing it sucks, and doing some research I've found that one of the easiest recommended solutions is to use Cerakote Trim restorer.
I was also already considering prepping the cowl, applying plastic primer, and then black spray paint to fix the faded look. Taking a look through my garage, I already have both cerakote trim coat (when did I buy this?) as well as the paint I would need.
Between these two options, what choice makes the most sense? With repainting, I'm not sure how I'd seal/protect it after it's painted. I don't know if I could use Cerakote on painted trim or not. With the Cerakote, I'm worried about it not applying evenly, since certain parts of my cowl are faded worse than other parts. (Probably wax or polish got on it at some point).
Hoping y'all can point me in the right direction, thanks in advance!
2023.03.24 13:57 rephlexi0n The Universe's Final Creation
Let me start by saying I’m breaching contract by sharing this. If the company’s lookouts link this post to me – which they will – I’ll be disgraced, and any chance at getting a job in this profession again will be out of the picture. I have the common sense to keep my name unknown, but all that’s gonna do is slow them down.
Keeping this hidden would be a crime against humanity of the highest order. You all deserve to know, as terrible as it is.
I work at an unnamed technological research company as, you guessed it, a researcher. In recent years, we’ve made astonishing advancements in developing technology that can interact with and harness tachyons.
Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light; that’s the most important part. They’ve been a subject of theoretical physics since the late 60s, but as far as public knowledge goes, they’re still just that. Theoretical.
But they are most certainly real. Well, not “tachyons” per se, though their behaviour is equatable. I won’t bore you with the technicalities, but the result of a particle travelling faster than light is that said particle is able to, effectively, travel backwards in time.
My other group members and I have been experimenting with these particles for the best part of two years now. We’ve made major advances, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Yesterday, 23/03/2023, at 09:07 am, my equipment detected a tachyon signal. This was in the morning, mind you, and no tests had yet been carried out. From what I can tell, this signal originated – or, rather, will originate – from elsewhere.
Playing it out loud, it at first just sounded like a garbled mess of frequencies. But after observing the audio structure, I found it to be made up of thousands of tones, of which there were only two types – long, and short.
The realisation hit pretty quick. It was Morse code, or, at least, it could be interpreted as such. The most fundamental form of digital communication known to man. So, I ran it through an auto-interpreter a few times, and got a fully coherent message.
I refuse to believe that I’m seeing patterns where there are none. The chances are so astronomically low that I can’t feasibly consider it to be a random signal, especially considering I’ve never received one from somewhere outside the lab.
I’m going to copy over the translation here. I do not wish to instil panic, but please, spread this post. People need to be aware that this is a real possibility.
To whomever is reading this, prepare yourself.
Here it is.
[TRANSCRIPT BEGIN]
Hi.
My name is Tim Hermelle. Before I write down this account, I should insist that this is the truth. This is happening to us all right now. This is not a joke, prank, or an interactive project.
This is the truth. You HAVE to believe what you are about to read, for our sakes.
Okay, with that out of the way… shit, it’s getting closer. I’ll write down what I can before we’re pulled back to the city, to join the others. I hope enough context is given in my account for you to fully understand.
I live - lived - in the great city of Pharades (that’s Pha-ra-dees). The utopia of humanity’s future. Life was amazing. Every aspect brought joy and satisfaction to every person. No hunger, thirst, no overpopulation, pollution… a Nirvana if there ever was. The level of advancement may be difficult for some of you to believe
Work was optional, and automatons would fill the spaces left by those choosing to pursue their own personal dreams. Even so, a large number of people here still choose to have jobs, vocations I suppose. Healthcare was unparalleled, and not one person has died during my time here.
Everything major was decided by a vote. It was the perfect democratic system, but I’m no politician, so I wouldn’t be able to explain to you why that is.
Hell, we even had a collective vote to decide the next week’s weather every Sunday. That’s right, we’d taken control of the weather. Want to splash around in puddles, smelling the petrichor? Maybe get a tan on? You’d just have to go and vote for it.
Pharades was, without hyperbole, fucking beautiful. In between the city blocks, there were great swathes of woodland and meadows. Crystal rivers flowed underneath silver bridges, and leaves of every colour painted the landscape like polka dots.
And the city itself, well, they say nature trumps anything manmade in terms of beauty, but I disagree. The intricately designed towers were accented by all the most complementary colours, gold, chrome, red, blue, any combination you could imagine, it was here. Arches, spirals, and patterns of every variety adorned the structures.
The day in question was a Wednesday – not that days of the week held any particular significance anymore. I’d planned to meet with two of my buddies, Erin and Tuan, at our favourite coffee shop a couple of districts over, in the Wantania area.
Historically, the journey may have been arduous, or frustrating. Not now. Most people didn’t even use vehicles anymore – instead, the city had built a vast underground network of ever-shifting and rearranging tracks, called “Tubyrinth”. Each person owned a personal pod of sorts, customisable to any degree.
I input Wantania Central, and hopped inside. My pod contained a sofa and a minifridge, stocked up with my favourite drinks. The journey was always snappy. Each time, the underground superstructure would arrange a new and unique track to be used, direct to a reserved bay.
Just fifteen minutes later, I was stood under the vaulted, ornamental expanse of the station roof, a hundred or so feet above. I always stopped here to just stare upwards for a moment, absorbing the imaginative architecture.
After exiting the station, I was surprised to see that both Erin and Tuan were already waiting for me outside. The good kind of surprised, that slaps a goofy smile onto your face.
“Took you long enough!” Tuan chuckled, finding the irony in his own words hilarious.
“God, I know right?” added Erin, “I was worried I’d need crutches after standing out here waiting!”
“Well, heh, you’re not gonna like this next part,” I joked, and we set off down the street, laughing. Our favourite café was called “Beansmith’s Forge”. It was a cheesy, but endearing name, and the theme fit the three of us like a glove; as I said before, we’d been working on worldbuilding for our fantasy RPG, an immersive neurolink VR experience, where the player could design their own character and have a unique questline auto-generated out of a complex system.
We ordered brunch, and, of course, coffee. I won’t get into the details of our talks, but we quickly finished up, paid, and set off down Gerben Street.
The more exciting event of the day was our session booked at the aptly named Noji Box, something you could call an “anti-grav playground”. Admittedly, I’ve never fully known how it works, just that it involves paired wormholes, immensely powerful electromagnets, and a huge vacuum-chamber.
One thing I was always grateful for was that the automatons, who I saw working robotically through storefront windows, were withheld any accurate human likeness – I’m sure you’ve heard of the uncanny valley, so you’ll know what I mean. They fell just short of it.
All was calm on the walk, as to be expected. We made it to the Noji Box in good time, ten minutes before our session booking. I get it’s company policy to take everyone through the safety basics, but it was admittedly a little boring after many, many past visits.
The only real requirement was that you’d have to wear an “osteopatic suit”. No, osteostatic? Something about keeping your bones from floating away from each other, or from disappearing over time.
We were suited up, ready to enter “S.S. Slamdown”, when a sudden tremor shook the building’s foundations. Everyone shared the same puzzled expression – not once had something like that ever happened in Pharades.
The staff looked a bit stumped at first. I guess they never had to deal with a situation like this in the past. To our dismay, but unsurprisingly, our session was cancelled, and we were told that they would call us later to sort out a re-booking.
I had the strangest feeling when we left and began back down the road. Something similar to déjà vu, but not quite. Like nostalgia, but without the accompanying feeling of reminiscence or joy.
Trying to brush it off, I distracted my mind by humming a tune. I didn’t know what it was from, at the time, but I knew it was a stringed melody. A violin? Thing is, I wasn’t really humming it as much as hearing it in my head.
We rounded a corner, and Erin paused in surprise.
“Oh, that’s… hey, that’s Jeremiah! He’s been playing that fiddle the street over from mine for the past, what, two weeks? Come on, let’s go listen.”
I grew confused when we approached, only to hear the exact same melody that had just been looping in my head. Before I’d heard this guy playing. I don’t remember stumbling upon this particular street performer before this point.
We stood listening for a few minutes, then continued our walk. Thoughts no longer infested with that tune, I was hit with what I can only describe as a taste. The savoury taste of something on my tongue, complete with mustard and relish. Meat of some kind?
The concern started to flourish when we came upon a food truck, and Tuan asked if we were hungry. Sure, we’d just eaten at the coffee shop, but I could fit in one more tasty bite. He offered to pay, which we gladly accepted, and he returned with… hotdogs. With mustard. And relish.
My gratitude masked the ever-growing confusion within me. Was this just a weird coincidence, or something else? Did I know we were going to get hotdogs?
We wound up back at the station, where a feeling of detached sorrow welled up inside me, something you might feel after recalling a bad memory from which you’ve since recovered. I understood then that I would run into my on-good-terms ex inside. But, before we could enter, another rumbling tremor swept across the street, followed by the clamour of destruction and screams from inside.
A grey dust cloud plumed out from the entrance, sweeping us off of our feet. I saw Erin flipped face-first into the pavement, just as I caught my heel on the base of a stop sign. Yet another quake boomed underneath the asphalt.
The asphalt I was falling down onto… but the impact didn’t come. Instead of a hard surface, the sensation of falling went on. You know that feeling when you think there’s another step at the bottom of the stairs, only to find the floor instead? It was just like that.
The ground I fell upon wasn’t asphalt. It rang out as I collided, almost hollow-sounding. Metallic. Maybe it was just my head ringing, but without a doubt, I was not in the street anymore.
I sat up, and my palms confirmed I was on a metal floor, the kind with those diamond-shaped grips. Looking around almost caused a complete sensory overload, immediately. A multitude of flashing lights, screens, wires, buttons, and all sorts decorated the room. It looked not far off from the control room of an intelligence agency – at least, how they’re depicted in movies.
I got onto one knee and pivoted to look around. The tall man standing directly behind me almost led to a second fall, but instead I scooted backward frantically at the sight.
The man – well, I say “man”, but this person didn’t really have any distinguishing features. They were wearing a spotless black and white cloak of some kind, and a metal cage covering the upper half of their face, so that only their mouth was visible.
They stood still, not reacting to my show of surprise, then spoke in the most androgynous voice conceivable.
“How did you get in here?”
I scanned the room, finding that there were no obvious entrances anywhere around, like we were inside a closed-off box.
“I- uh, I fell over, a-and next thing I know – here,” I stuttered.
“Well, you shouldn’t be here, and there’s no way that you should be able to get here.”
I stood up, feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of this stranger, though not letting my guard down entirely. Now, I could see the pictures displayed across the screens – they seemed to be feeds of countless locations in Pharades, streets, woodlands, you name it.
“What… what the hell’s going on here? Who are you? Why are you spying on the city?”
The stranger didn’t seem amused, being pelted with questions, and held up a hand, gesturing me to stop. They let out a deep, held breath.
“Well, since you’re here, I may as well enlighten you. Take a seat.”
So I did. I sat in shock and disbelief for the next five minutes as the person answered all my questions, even the ones I didn’t know I wanted to ask. They introduced themselves simply as “Administrator”, but I chose “Admin”, to avoid the mouthful.
Admin proceeded to tell me the truth, as casually as one would talk about the weather.
It wasn’t real.
A simulation.
They told me we were inside a highly advanced, self-sustaining, supercomputer pod travelling through deep space, harvesting energy from ions extracted from the surrounding vacuum. Over a hundred trillion years ago, those living here now consented in having their consciousness imported to the device.
On top of the ion harvesting, power was supposedly generated from emotions experienced by a consciousness – the more intense an emotion or feeling, the more power generated.
I interrupted the monologue at this point with a question they hadn’t seemed to consider,
“Let’s say I believe what you’re saying. If this system’s been up for as long as you say, why did I only just have my 29th birthday, what, two months back now?”
“I understand your concern, but allow me to continue. Every 50 years, it is reset. All your memories are wiped and locked away until the moments when you would again make those memories. There are only a set number of people who were uploaded to the system, and their minds cannot simply be deleted if they were to die.”
Not only a simulation, but an endless loop? My brain felt like it might burst.
“Wait,” I said, “if we’re reset every time, and everything plays out the same… then, we can’t possibly have any free will of our own, right?”
“I suppose you could say that. But the illusion we, I, have worked tirelessly to maintain, gives the impression that you do.”
“Wh… what? So, the original me signed up for this? But I’m not him! I’m a copy, aren’t I? Do I have a choice in this?”
“There is no way for me to erase any person that lives here. Only if the pod itself is damaged or destroyed, can I, or anyone else, truly die. The Great Stellar Extinction has come and gone, and all that remains outside is cold, and dark. A handful of black and brown dwarves, and black holes. To my knowledge.”
The sudden feeling of intense, hollow loneliness filled up my chest. We were alone in a great black sea of nothingness. My slack jaw must have told Admin I didn’t have the capacity to speak.
“Over time, I have lost contact with the hundreds of thousands of other pods that were ejected from Earth all that time ago. Either they are too far now, or they met a destructive end. I can’t say which is the better, anymore.”
Absorbing the sudden truth, the emptiness evolved into anger.
“Let me get this straight. We, living our lives down there, are puppets to you? Is that it? Just an endless cycle of digital paradise, kept in the dark of all you’ve just told me? How can you possibly justify this?!”
“Calm down. Having your memories wiped is a luxury I cannot afford. Anyway, that’s only the preface of what I need to talk about. I’m sure you also noticed the tremors, down there?”
“The tremors? Oh, oh yeah. Sort of ruined my plans, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“I didn’t do anything. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Whatever the cause, it’s not within this pod.”
I took it all in. A system malfunction? Why did the Admin feel the need to share this with me?
“Is… is that why, maybe, that I could predict some of the things that happened afterwards?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The memory suppression seems to be failing.”
Both of us paused for a moment. The silence was deafening.
“I’ve been taking readings on the external sensors. There’s… something out there. An object. It’s been following us for a while now, but with no starlight left, I don’t know what it is. Space debris couldn’t move on its own accord like this thing is.”
“What are you trying to say?” I sputtered, the dread I felt deepening by the second.
“I’m saying that something has found us.”
My blood ran cold. Found us? What could have found us?
“Didn’t you say all the stars are dead? The universe is just darkness now. What could have found us? What?”
“I wish I had the answers, too. I don’t think we’re safe anymore. The most recent readings imply that whatever it is, it’s latched onto the pod somehow. Possibly-“
Admin was cut off by the loud screech of static from the speakers around the room. Their head shot up to the nearest corner in a manner that set me on a knife’s edge.
The tremors returned with a vengeance now, and the both of us were sent sprawling onto the floor. I didn’t fall through it this time, though. Sparks flew and monitors went offline.
I was about to ask what we should do, when the roaring static settled, and something else started to play.
An innocent, childlike giggle. Gurgled coos, infantile squeals of joy that pierced my eardrums like needles and left them ringing. Remembering the sounds that came from those speakers make my insides twist and yearn to escape my body, knowing what came next.
The laughter grew, and so did the tremors. The room started to collapse, wires and boxes raining down upon us. Well, not really collapse, no, but change. The far wall crumpled, like something on the other side assailed it with forceful impacts, and the room began to shrink.
As if that dark place wasn’t claustrophobic enough, the ceiling, walls, everything began to close in on us. All the while, the childlike giggling only grew in joy. I thought we were to be crushed and snapped by the pressure, when we were abruptly freed.
It had happened again. Pushed through the floor and spat out somewhere else. This time, I – we – found ourselves near a paved road leading out of one of the city blocks, into a green meadow which gave way to trees a ways down.
Something was terribly wrong. Only after brushing myself off and standing up did I become aware of the swirling darkness that replaced the once baby-blue sky, with its cotton candy clouds. A heavy and unsettling calm had fallen upon us, dampening the city’s brilliance. No more did sunlight gleam off the ornate spires and arches, replaced by a still, hanging shadow.
The eerie quiet was shattered by that godforsaken crackling, booming across the landscape, despite not a speaker in sight, again followed by those ill-belonging coos and cries. Accompanying the infantile sputtering came an uproar of cracking and crumbling, great impacts from deep within the city’s heart.
Both Admin and I stared in disbelief as distant buildings sunk into the ground, while others twisted and warped their way into the sky, as if made from soft clay. Some just disappeared entirely, leaving not a shred of evidence behind that they had ever been there, while their former inhabitants plunged from storeys above.
“It’s taken my place.”
Those four unprompted words shook me to the core of my being. The god of this world had been usurped.
“But why?” I found myself asking, “with what motive?”
Admin went to reply, but stopped upon seeing the great, pinkish masses floating up out of the streets, far ahead. We stared in bewilderment, trying to make out what they were. The chorus of screams hurried us to the realisation that the balls were… they were made of people.
Agonised, howling faces littered the fleshy abominations, while more objects rose around them. Structural beams, signposts, metal objects of every kind gravitated toward the amalgams of humanity, before their relentless assaults began.
Ripping, tearing, stabbing, slicing… it was already too much for my mind to comprehend. It garnered no reaction from myself other than stunned shock. Flesh and blood spewed from the masses, and orbited around them like the rings of Saturn, falling back in to haphazardly patch themselves back onto the wailing people.
My thoughtless attention was redirected as a frantic deluge of citizens fled the city, running down the street towards us. One by one, the exodus was halted, people seeming to stop in place abruptly, though the screams did not relent.
I couldn’t see what had stopped them until the crowd drew closer, where I saw an elderly man whip forward, foot stuck fast, instantly snapping his knee from the momentum. He let out a heart-wrenching cry as he fell down and looked to see what had stopped him.
Something that looked like roots, water pipes maybe, had erupted through the tarmac and coiled their way up his leg. I could see the strength draining in his eyes as they stood him back upright by force, wrapping around his entire body.
I watched in abject horror as he was raised off the ground, and each and every one of the old man’s limbs were bent and snapped at unnatural angles, shattering frail bones into dust.
His feeble cries were promptly silenced as a squirming metal tube forced its way inside his mouth, his eyes rolling back in unfathomable agony as the bulging mass forced its way down his throat, splitting his ribcage apart and allowing the organs within to slop out and float in the air, as if weightless. The whole process seemed to reverse itself in time, then repeat, over and over.
I could only hear the echoes of Admin’s shouts and the faint sensation of their grip on my forearm as they pulled me away from the mind-bending atrocity. My vacant body tumbled backward, sending both of us falling onto the grass.
Still I could only sit there, frozen. Somewhere off to the right, I saw a young woman pulling presumably her daughter along by the wrist, fleeing the hellscape of flesh and bone down a small alley. Her head spun wildly as she noticed the walls of the alleyway closing in around them.
She burst out into the open, but was yanked back, her grip fast. She turned in desperation, only to see her daughter, who couldn’t have been more than seven, being slowly crushed into a paste of bloody flesh and yellow fat. Her pitiful screams still ring in my ears, seeing her child suffer such a terrible fate.
Admin was finally triumphant in breaking my trance, and I rushed to my feet, stumbling before gaining my footing and bolting the fuck out of there. The childish giggling echoing out over the sky only served to push me forwards and away from that place.
“What the fuck is going on?!” I yelped, glancing over to Admin, hoping they could offer just the slightest of explanations.
“I have an idea, but we need to get somewhere first. You see that hill through the woods, right over there?”
“Hill? To the observatory?”
“There’s one last thing we can try to stop this. It’s a shot in the dark, but I can’t just stand here and fade away with the rest.”
High speed winds whipped the trees as we ran below them, leaves fluttering in a wild seizure. Air-splitting cracks sounded, so loud my ears began to ring once more, and I looked over my shoulder to see what they could have been.
Blazing spouts of fire shot down from the clouds behind, more akin to lightning than anything, striking the forsaken with white-hot temperatures. Even from a distance, I could see skin and flesh melt off of bones like candle wax, forming spiralling clouds of organic vapour.
In my distraction, I ran straight into a tree, and tumbled over, blood leaking from a small cut on my forehead. Admin skidded to a stop and pulled me up to my feet, and ran onwards, not waiting for a moment to ask if I was okay.
Neither of us were okay. That was a given now.
We reached the top of the hill without too much effort – seems it was programmed for everyone to have an above-average level of fitness, young or old regardless.
Admin frantically, but methodically, sifted through what appeared to be a large hoop of keys, searching for the one to fit the observatory’s door. I looked back over to where we had fled from.
The twisted buildings coiled toward the sky, gargantuan talons holding captive everyone I’d ever known. But there was something else. Far behind the city, in the distant hills and woodland, a great black wave that spanned the horizon was travelling towards us, eviscerating the world itself. All it left behind was an endless chasm of darkness, defying reality itself.
The tsunami came closer, before stopping at the city’s outskirts, leaving only a towering earthen spire of suffering, flaming bolts cracking down upon it.
“Admin, what is going on?!”
They paused for a moment, then continued working on the several locks barring our entry.
“Do you remember what I told you earlier, when you found me? How this system is able to keep on running, over the trillions of years?”
“…ions?”
“Yes, but that’s only the basis. I told you that emotional activity generates power, yes? The more intense an emotion, the more power generated?”
“What are you getting at?”
“This is pure theory, but I believe that whatever is out there is feeding off of the system.”
“Is that why all that was happening? The-“
I stifled a gag, recalling the horrors fresh in my memory.
“Again, it’s a theory. I don’t understand what it is. If the constraints of the universe are loose enough for something to evolve in its endless darkness, to predate on the last sources of energy within it… I don’t know. And I doubt we ever will.”
I stared out at the hellscape, speechless. Finally, Admin found the right key, yanked the door open, and pulled me inside by the arm.
“Hey!” Admin yelled, snapping their fingers, “I need you to be present for this. I am restricted in this world, I can’t break and reform things like you can. A failsafe, for if the power were to go to my head. Follow my instructions exactly.”
They told me how to break apart some of the technology in the observatory, and rewire it into a different machine. I had no idea what we were creating at the time, but complied nonetheless.
The finished product was a makeshift beacon of some kind, connected to the nearby terminal.
“Thank you. Now, type.”
“Type what?”
“Everything that has happened. Add as many details as you can, because we won’t have another chance to get this out there.”
“O-okay, what is this thing? A radio?”
“In a way. The observatory is one of the only places here that has a connection to the outside. I have used it more than once to observe the universe fading away. This setup will send our transmission as a unique, superluminal type of wave. Hurry, we can’t waste time chatting about this.”
And so, here we are. I don’t know who will be hearing this, if anyone at all.
I beg of you, consider how our advancements might be our downfall.
It’s almost here. I can hear the flaming bolts striking the forest, closer.
This is my account. Please save us. Please spare us.
Don’t condemn us as you have.
[TRANSCRIPT END]
There it is. I’ve revised the translation more times than I can count, and I’m sure there’s no mistake here.
Other readings imply that this message has travelled an unimaginably vast distance, and not only over space. Repeated triangulation only tells me this came from above, somewhere far away, among the stars.
I can feel the edges of my mind singeing. This can’t be proven as truth, nor can it be discredited. There’s no possible way to explain how this message came from our own planet.
I’m trying to be rational, but I think we need to consider future development very carefully. As a people, we have always rushed through our technological advancements at an incredible speed, not stopping to consider all the consequences that might follow.
If anyone will believe this, please spread it around. I have no doubt this post will be taken down the moment they find it. As for myself, I’ll be disgraced, probably. Stuck in a cold cell, most likely.
Spread the word. The fact that the higher-ups will attempt to conceal this is a cruel thing indeed, if any of it’s true.
Signing off.
submitted by rephlexi0n to rephlect [link] [comments]
Keeping this hidden would be a crime against humanity of the highest order. You all deserve to know, as terrible as it is.
I work at an unnamed technological research company as, you guessed it, a researcher. In recent years, we’ve made astonishing advancements in developing technology that can interact with and harness tachyons.
Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light; that’s the most important part. They’ve been a subject of theoretical physics since the late 60s, but as far as public knowledge goes, they’re still just that. Theoretical.
But they are most certainly real. Well, not “tachyons” per se, though their behaviour is equatable. I won’t bore you with the technicalities, but the result of a particle travelling faster than light is that said particle is able to, effectively, travel backwards in time.
My other group members and I have been experimenting with these particles for the best part of two years now. We’ve made major advances, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Yesterday, 23/03/2023, at 09:07 am, my equipment detected a tachyon signal. This was in the morning, mind you, and no tests had yet been carried out. From what I can tell, this signal originated – or, rather, will originate – from elsewhere.
Playing it out loud, it at first just sounded like a garbled mess of frequencies. But after observing the audio structure, I found it to be made up of thousands of tones, of which there were only two types – long, and short.
The realisation hit pretty quick. It was Morse code, or, at least, it could be interpreted as such. The most fundamental form of digital communication known to man. So, I ran it through an auto-interpreter a few times, and got a fully coherent message.
I refuse to believe that I’m seeing patterns where there are none. The chances are so astronomically low that I can’t feasibly consider it to be a random signal, especially considering I’ve never received one from somewhere outside the lab.
I’m going to copy over the translation here. I do not wish to instil panic, but please, spread this post. People need to be aware that this is a real possibility.
To whomever is reading this, prepare yourself.
Here it is.
[TRANSCRIPT BEGIN]
Hi.
My name is Tim Hermelle. Before I write down this account, I should insist that this is the truth. This is happening to us all right now. This is not a joke, prank, or an interactive project.
This is the truth. You HAVE to believe what you are about to read, for our sakes.
Okay, with that out of the way… shit, it’s getting closer. I’ll write down what I can before we’re pulled back to the city, to join the others. I hope enough context is given in my account for you to fully understand.
I live - lived - in the great city of Pharades (that’s Pha-ra-dees). The utopia of humanity’s future. Life was amazing. Every aspect brought joy and satisfaction to every person. No hunger, thirst, no overpopulation, pollution… a Nirvana if there ever was. The level of advancement may be difficult for some of you to believe
Work was optional, and automatons would fill the spaces left by those choosing to pursue their own personal dreams. Even so, a large number of people here still choose to have jobs, vocations I suppose. Healthcare was unparalleled, and not one person has died during my time here.
Everything major was decided by a vote. It was the perfect democratic system, but I’m no politician, so I wouldn’t be able to explain to you why that is.
Hell, we even had a collective vote to decide the next week’s weather every Sunday. That’s right, we’d taken control of the weather. Want to splash around in puddles, smelling the petrichor? Maybe get a tan on? You’d just have to go and vote for it.
Pharades was, without hyperbole, fucking beautiful. In between the city blocks, there were great swathes of woodland and meadows. Crystal rivers flowed underneath silver bridges, and leaves of every colour painted the landscape like polka dots.
And the city itself, well, they say nature trumps anything manmade in terms of beauty, but I disagree. The intricately designed towers were accented by all the most complementary colours, gold, chrome, red, blue, any combination you could imagine, it was here. Arches, spirals, and patterns of every variety adorned the structures.
The day in question was a Wednesday – not that days of the week held any particular significance anymore. I’d planned to meet with two of my buddies, Erin and Tuan, at our favourite coffee shop a couple of districts over, in the Wantania area.
Historically, the journey may have been arduous, or frustrating. Not now. Most people didn’t even use vehicles anymore – instead, the city had built a vast underground network of ever-shifting and rearranging tracks, called “Tubyrinth”. Each person owned a personal pod of sorts, customisable to any degree.
I input Wantania Central, and hopped inside. My pod contained a sofa and a minifridge, stocked up with my favourite drinks. The journey was always snappy. Each time, the underground superstructure would arrange a new and unique track to be used, direct to a reserved bay.
Just fifteen minutes later, I was stood under the vaulted, ornamental expanse of the station roof, a hundred or so feet above. I always stopped here to just stare upwards for a moment, absorbing the imaginative architecture.
After exiting the station, I was surprised to see that both Erin and Tuan were already waiting for me outside. The good kind of surprised, that slaps a goofy smile onto your face.
“Took you long enough!” Tuan chuckled, finding the irony in his own words hilarious.
“God, I know right?” added Erin, “I was worried I’d need crutches after standing out here waiting!”
“Well, heh, you’re not gonna like this next part,” I joked, and we set off down the street, laughing. Our favourite café was called “Beansmith’s Forge”. It was a cheesy, but endearing name, and the theme fit the three of us like a glove; as I said before, we’d been working on worldbuilding for our fantasy RPG, an immersive neurolink VR experience, where the player could design their own character and have a unique questline auto-generated out of a complex system.
We ordered brunch, and, of course, coffee. I won’t get into the details of our talks, but we quickly finished up, paid, and set off down Gerben Street.
The more exciting event of the day was our session booked at the aptly named Noji Box, something you could call an “anti-grav playground”. Admittedly, I’ve never fully known how it works, just that it involves paired wormholes, immensely powerful electromagnets, and a huge vacuum-chamber.
One thing I was always grateful for was that the automatons, who I saw working robotically through storefront windows, were withheld any accurate human likeness – I’m sure you’ve heard of the uncanny valley, so you’ll know what I mean. They fell just short of it.
All was calm on the walk, as to be expected. We made it to the Noji Box in good time, ten minutes before our session booking. I get it’s company policy to take everyone through the safety basics, but it was admittedly a little boring after many, many past visits.
The only real requirement was that you’d have to wear an “osteopatic suit”. No, osteostatic? Something about keeping your bones from floating away from each other, or from disappearing over time.
We were suited up, ready to enter “S.S. Slamdown”, when a sudden tremor shook the building’s foundations. Everyone shared the same puzzled expression – not once had something like that ever happened in Pharades.
The staff looked a bit stumped at first. I guess they never had to deal with a situation like this in the past. To our dismay, but unsurprisingly, our session was cancelled, and we were told that they would call us later to sort out a re-booking.
I had the strangest feeling when we left and began back down the road. Something similar to déjà vu, but not quite. Like nostalgia, but without the accompanying feeling of reminiscence or joy.
Trying to brush it off, I distracted my mind by humming a tune. I didn’t know what it was from, at the time, but I knew it was a stringed melody. A violin? Thing is, I wasn’t really humming it as much as hearing it in my head.
We rounded a corner, and Erin paused in surprise.
“Oh, that’s… hey, that’s Jeremiah! He’s been playing that fiddle the street over from mine for the past, what, two weeks? Come on, let’s go listen.”
I grew confused when we approached, only to hear the exact same melody that had just been looping in my head. Before I’d heard this guy playing. I don’t remember stumbling upon this particular street performer before this point.
We stood listening for a few minutes, then continued our walk. Thoughts no longer infested with that tune, I was hit with what I can only describe as a taste. The savoury taste of something on my tongue, complete with mustard and relish. Meat of some kind?
The concern started to flourish when we came upon a food truck, and Tuan asked if we were hungry. Sure, we’d just eaten at the coffee shop, but I could fit in one more tasty bite. He offered to pay, which we gladly accepted, and he returned with… hotdogs. With mustard. And relish.
My gratitude masked the ever-growing confusion within me. Was this just a weird coincidence, or something else? Did I know we were going to get hotdogs?
We wound up back at the station, where a feeling of detached sorrow welled up inside me, something you might feel after recalling a bad memory from which you’ve since recovered. I understood then that I would run into my on-good-terms ex inside. But, before we could enter, another rumbling tremor swept across the street, followed by the clamour of destruction and screams from inside.
A grey dust cloud plumed out from the entrance, sweeping us off of our feet. I saw Erin flipped face-first into the pavement, just as I caught my heel on the base of a stop sign. Yet another quake boomed underneath the asphalt.
The asphalt I was falling down onto… but the impact didn’t come. Instead of a hard surface, the sensation of falling went on. You know that feeling when you think there’s another step at the bottom of the stairs, only to find the floor instead? It was just like that.
The ground I fell upon wasn’t asphalt. It rang out as I collided, almost hollow-sounding. Metallic. Maybe it was just my head ringing, but without a doubt, I was not in the street anymore.
I sat up, and my palms confirmed I was on a metal floor, the kind with those diamond-shaped grips. Looking around almost caused a complete sensory overload, immediately. A multitude of flashing lights, screens, wires, buttons, and all sorts decorated the room. It looked not far off from the control room of an intelligence agency – at least, how they’re depicted in movies.
I got onto one knee and pivoted to look around. The tall man standing directly behind me almost led to a second fall, but instead I scooted backward frantically at the sight.
The man – well, I say “man”, but this person didn’t really have any distinguishing features. They were wearing a spotless black and white cloak of some kind, and a metal cage covering the upper half of their face, so that only their mouth was visible.
They stood still, not reacting to my show of surprise, then spoke in the most androgynous voice conceivable.
“How did you get in here?”
I scanned the room, finding that there were no obvious entrances anywhere around, like we were inside a closed-off box.
“I- uh, I fell over, a-and next thing I know – here,” I stuttered.
“Well, you shouldn’t be here, and there’s no way that you should be able to get here.”
I stood up, feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of this stranger, though not letting my guard down entirely. Now, I could see the pictures displayed across the screens – they seemed to be feeds of countless locations in Pharades, streets, woodlands, you name it.
“What… what the hell’s going on here? Who are you? Why are you spying on the city?”
The stranger didn’t seem amused, being pelted with questions, and held up a hand, gesturing me to stop. They let out a deep, held breath.
“Well, since you’re here, I may as well enlighten you. Take a seat.”
So I did. I sat in shock and disbelief for the next five minutes as the person answered all my questions, even the ones I didn’t know I wanted to ask. They introduced themselves simply as “Administrator”, but I chose “Admin”, to avoid the mouthful.
Admin proceeded to tell me the truth, as casually as one would talk about the weather.
It wasn’t real.
A simulation.
They told me we were inside a highly advanced, self-sustaining, supercomputer pod travelling through deep space, harvesting energy from ions extracted from the surrounding vacuum. Over a hundred trillion years ago, those living here now consented in having their consciousness imported to the device.
On top of the ion harvesting, power was supposedly generated from emotions experienced by a consciousness – the more intense an emotion or feeling, the more power generated.
I interrupted the monologue at this point with a question they hadn’t seemed to consider,
“Let’s say I believe what you’re saying. If this system’s been up for as long as you say, why did I only just have my 29th birthday, what, two months back now?”
“I understand your concern, but allow me to continue. Every 50 years, it is reset. All your memories are wiped and locked away until the moments when you would again make those memories. There are only a set number of people who were uploaded to the system, and their minds cannot simply be deleted if they were to die.”
Not only a simulation, but an endless loop? My brain felt like it might burst.
“Wait,” I said, “if we’re reset every time, and everything plays out the same… then, we can’t possibly have any free will of our own, right?”
“I suppose you could say that. But the illusion we, I, have worked tirelessly to maintain, gives the impression that you do.”
“Wh… what? So, the original me signed up for this? But I’m not him! I’m a copy, aren’t I? Do I have a choice in this?”
“There is no way for me to erase any person that lives here. Only if the pod itself is damaged or destroyed, can I, or anyone else, truly die. The Great Stellar Extinction has come and gone, and all that remains outside is cold, and dark. A handful of black and brown dwarves, and black holes. To my knowledge.”
The sudden feeling of intense, hollow loneliness filled up my chest. We were alone in a great black sea of nothingness. My slack jaw must have told Admin I didn’t have the capacity to speak.
“Over time, I have lost contact with the hundreds of thousands of other pods that were ejected from Earth all that time ago. Either they are too far now, or they met a destructive end. I can’t say which is the better, anymore.”
Absorbing the sudden truth, the emptiness evolved into anger.
“Let me get this straight. We, living our lives down there, are puppets to you? Is that it? Just an endless cycle of digital paradise, kept in the dark of all you’ve just told me? How can you possibly justify this?!”
“Calm down. Having your memories wiped is a luxury I cannot afford. Anyway, that’s only the preface of what I need to talk about. I’m sure you also noticed the tremors, down there?”
“The tremors? Oh, oh yeah. Sort of ruined my plans, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“I didn’t do anything. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Whatever the cause, it’s not within this pod.”
I took it all in. A system malfunction? Why did the Admin feel the need to share this with me?
“Is… is that why, maybe, that I could predict some of the things that happened afterwards?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The memory suppression seems to be failing.”
Both of us paused for a moment. The silence was deafening.
“I’ve been taking readings on the external sensors. There’s… something out there. An object. It’s been following us for a while now, but with no starlight left, I don’t know what it is. Space debris couldn’t move on its own accord like this thing is.”
“What are you trying to say?” I sputtered, the dread I felt deepening by the second.
“I’m saying that something has found us.”
My blood ran cold. Found us? What could have found us?
“Didn’t you say all the stars are dead? The universe is just darkness now. What could have found us? What?”
“I wish I had the answers, too. I don’t think we’re safe anymore. The most recent readings imply that whatever it is, it’s latched onto the pod somehow. Possibly-“
Admin was cut off by the loud screech of static from the speakers around the room. Their head shot up to the nearest corner in a manner that set me on a knife’s edge.
The tremors returned with a vengeance now, and the both of us were sent sprawling onto the floor. I didn’t fall through it this time, though. Sparks flew and monitors went offline.
I was about to ask what we should do, when the roaring static settled, and something else started to play.
An innocent, childlike giggle. Gurgled coos, infantile squeals of joy that pierced my eardrums like needles and left them ringing. Remembering the sounds that came from those speakers make my insides twist and yearn to escape my body, knowing what came next.
The laughter grew, and so did the tremors. The room started to collapse, wires and boxes raining down upon us. Well, not really collapse, no, but change. The far wall crumpled, like something on the other side assailed it with forceful impacts, and the room began to shrink.
As if that dark place wasn’t claustrophobic enough, the ceiling, walls, everything began to close in on us. All the while, the childlike giggling only grew in joy. I thought we were to be crushed and snapped by the pressure, when we were abruptly freed.
It had happened again. Pushed through the floor and spat out somewhere else. This time, I – we – found ourselves near a paved road leading out of one of the city blocks, into a green meadow which gave way to trees a ways down.
Something was terribly wrong. Only after brushing myself off and standing up did I become aware of the swirling darkness that replaced the once baby-blue sky, with its cotton candy clouds. A heavy and unsettling calm had fallen upon us, dampening the city’s brilliance. No more did sunlight gleam off the ornate spires and arches, replaced by a still, hanging shadow.
The eerie quiet was shattered by that godforsaken crackling, booming across the landscape, despite not a speaker in sight, again followed by those ill-belonging coos and cries. Accompanying the infantile sputtering came an uproar of cracking and crumbling, great impacts from deep within the city’s heart.
Both Admin and I stared in disbelief as distant buildings sunk into the ground, while others twisted and warped their way into the sky, as if made from soft clay. Some just disappeared entirely, leaving not a shred of evidence behind that they had ever been there, while their former inhabitants plunged from storeys above.
“It’s taken my place.”
Those four unprompted words shook me to the core of my being. The god of this world had been usurped.
“But why?” I found myself asking, “with what motive?”
Admin went to reply, but stopped upon seeing the great, pinkish masses floating up out of the streets, far ahead. We stared in bewilderment, trying to make out what they were. The chorus of screams hurried us to the realisation that the balls were… they were made of people.
Agonised, howling faces littered the fleshy abominations, while more objects rose around them. Structural beams, signposts, metal objects of every kind gravitated toward the amalgams of humanity, before their relentless assaults began.
Ripping, tearing, stabbing, slicing… it was already too much for my mind to comprehend. It garnered no reaction from myself other than stunned shock. Flesh and blood spewed from the masses, and orbited around them like the rings of Saturn, falling back in to haphazardly patch themselves back onto the wailing people.
My thoughtless attention was redirected as a frantic deluge of citizens fled the city, running down the street towards us. One by one, the exodus was halted, people seeming to stop in place abruptly, though the screams did not relent.
I couldn’t see what had stopped them until the crowd drew closer, where I saw an elderly man whip forward, foot stuck fast, instantly snapping his knee from the momentum. He let out a heart-wrenching cry as he fell down and looked to see what had stopped him.
Something that looked like roots, water pipes maybe, had erupted through the tarmac and coiled their way up his leg. I could see the strength draining in his eyes as they stood him back upright by force, wrapping around his entire body.
I watched in abject horror as he was raised off the ground, and each and every one of the old man’s limbs were bent and snapped at unnatural angles, shattering frail bones into dust.
His feeble cries were promptly silenced as a squirming metal tube forced its way inside his mouth, his eyes rolling back in unfathomable agony as the bulging mass forced its way down his throat, splitting his ribcage apart and allowing the organs within to slop out and float in the air, as if weightless. The whole process seemed to reverse itself in time, then repeat, over and over.
I could only hear the echoes of Admin’s shouts and the faint sensation of their grip on my forearm as they pulled me away from the mind-bending atrocity. My vacant body tumbled backward, sending both of us falling onto the grass.
Still I could only sit there, frozen. Somewhere off to the right, I saw a young woman pulling presumably her daughter along by the wrist, fleeing the hellscape of flesh and bone down a small alley. Her head spun wildly as she noticed the walls of the alleyway closing in around them.
She burst out into the open, but was yanked back, her grip fast. She turned in desperation, only to see her daughter, who couldn’t have been more than seven, being slowly crushed into a paste of bloody flesh and yellow fat. Her pitiful screams still ring in my ears, seeing her child suffer such a terrible fate.
Admin was finally triumphant in breaking my trance, and I rushed to my feet, stumbling before gaining my footing and bolting the fuck out of there. The childish giggling echoing out over the sky only served to push me forwards and away from that place.
“What the fuck is going on?!” I yelped, glancing over to Admin, hoping they could offer just the slightest of explanations.
“I have an idea, but we need to get somewhere first. You see that hill through the woods, right over there?”
“Hill? To the observatory?”
“There’s one last thing we can try to stop this. It’s a shot in the dark, but I can’t just stand here and fade away with the rest.”
High speed winds whipped the trees as we ran below them, leaves fluttering in a wild seizure. Air-splitting cracks sounded, so loud my ears began to ring once more, and I looked over my shoulder to see what they could have been.
Blazing spouts of fire shot down from the clouds behind, more akin to lightning than anything, striking the forsaken with white-hot temperatures. Even from a distance, I could see skin and flesh melt off of bones like candle wax, forming spiralling clouds of organic vapour.
In my distraction, I ran straight into a tree, and tumbled over, blood leaking from a small cut on my forehead. Admin skidded to a stop and pulled me up to my feet, and ran onwards, not waiting for a moment to ask if I was okay.
Neither of us were okay. That was a given now.
We reached the top of the hill without too much effort – seems it was programmed for everyone to have an above-average level of fitness, young or old regardless.
Admin frantically, but methodically, sifted through what appeared to be a large hoop of keys, searching for the one to fit the observatory’s door. I looked back over to where we had fled from.
The twisted buildings coiled toward the sky, gargantuan talons holding captive everyone I’d ever known. But there was something else. Far behind the city, in the distant hills and woodland, a great black wave that spanned the horizon was travelling towards us, eviscerating the world itself. All it left behind was an endless chasm of darkness, defying reality itself.
The tsunami came closer, before stopping at the city’s outskirts, leaving only a towering earthen spire of suffering, flaming bolts cracking down upon it.
“Admin, what is going on?!”
They paused for a moment, then continued working on the several locks barring our entry.
“Do you remember what I told you earlier, when you found me? How this system is able to keep on running, over the trillions of years?”
“…ions?”
“Yes, but that’s only the basis. I told you that emotional activity generates power, yes? The more intense an emotion, the more power generated?”
“What are you getting at?”
“This is pure theory, but I believe that whatever is out there is feeding off of the system.”
“Is that why all that was happening? The-“
I stifled a gag, recalling the horrors fresh in my memory.
“Again, it’s a theory. I don’t understand what it is. If the constraints of the universe are loose enough for something to evolve in its endless darkness, to predate on the last sources of energy within it… I don’t know. And I doubt we ever will.”
I stared out at the hellscape, speechless. Finally, Admin found the right key, yanked the door open, and pulled me inside by the arm.
“Hey!” Admin yelled, snapping their fingers, “I need you to be present for this. I am restricted in this world, I can’t break and reform things like you can. A failsafe, for if the power were to go to my head. Follow my instructions exactly.”
They told me how to break apart some of the technology in the observatory, and rewire it into a different machine. I had no idea what we were creating at the time, but complied nonetheless.
The finished product was a makeshift beacon of some kind, connected to the nearby terminal.
“Thank you. Now, type.”
“Type what?”
“Everything that has happened. Add as many details as you can, because we won’t have another chance to get this out there.”
“O-okay, what is this thing? A radio?”
“In a way. The observatory is one of the only places here that has a connection to the outside. I have used it more than once to observe the universe fading away. This setup will send our transmission as a unique, superluminal type of wave. Hurry, we can’t waste time chatting about this.”
And so, here we are. I don’t know who will be hearing this, if anyone at all.
I beg of you, consider how our advancements might be our downfall.
It’s almost here. I can hear the flaming bolts striking the forest, closer.
This is my account. Please save us. Please spare us.
Don’t condemn us as you have.
[TRANSCRIPT END]
There it is. I’ve revised the translation more times than I can count, and I’m sure there’s no mistake here.
Other readings imply that this message has travelled an unimaginably vast distance, and not only over space. Repeated triangulation only tells me this came from above, somewhere far away, among the stars.
I can feel the edges of my mind singeing. This can’t be proven as truth, nor can it be discredited. There’s no possible way to explain how this message came from our own planet.
I’m trying to be rational, but I think we need to consider future development very carefully. As a people, we have always rushed through our technological advancements at an incredible speed, not stopping to consider all the consequences that might follow.
If anyone will believe this, please spread it around. I have no doubt this post will be taken down the moment they find it. As for myself, I’ll be disgraced, probably. Stuck in a cold cell, most likely.
Spread the word. The fact that the higher-ups will attempt to conceal this is a cruel thing indeed, if any of it’s true.
Signing off.
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2023.03.24 13:46 Emotional_Ratio5666 A Rant About a Co-Worker and Advice on How to Deal With Her.
Since this is my first post here, here's a little about me, my name is Nizoe and I'm a 27-year-old Afro-Irish American (Have an Irish mum and a Nigerian-American father) who works as a sous chef in Charlottesville, Virginia. I currently live just outside of Henrico and I'm also an amateur romance/erotica author.
Anyway, this is a bit of a windy rant about a Black co-worker of mine who I think is being really racist so fair warning and if this isn't allowed, feel free to let me know.
So a couple of days ago, we got a new chef in the kitchen, a fellow Black woman, which was a welcome relief to me because I'm the token Black woman on the kitchen brigade. However, a few hours after meeting her, she brought up the fact that she has a white boyfriend and began asking me about my dating preferences. I told her that I just recently discovered I'm bisexual after believing myself to be gay for the longest time, that all of my ex-gfs were Black and that I'm attracted to black people in general. I also told her that I write Black romance and erotica.
Ever since then, she's been going on almost daily rants towards me about how Black people are criminals and thugs and how much happier I would be with a white guy because her boyfriend gives her everything she wants. She also continuously offers me chances to meet her boyfriend's brother who just got out of prison and could turn me from the "depressed stud" that I am to a "happy housewife with beautiful 3/4 white babies". She's also begun pointing out "statistics" that show how 95% of Black women marry outside of their race and how those marriages last far longer than those between Black men and Black women, something I know to be entirely false.
She also makes rather pointed remarks about how my mother should have never gotten with my father despite the fact that my mother is an Irish immigrant and my father is full-blooded Nigerian-American. Even though I've told her I have no intention of being with a white guy, she's continued to make these sort of remarks and yesterday morning, it's begun crossing a line since one of the front desk agents approach me as I was coming in yesterday, her having told him that I was needing a tall white stud to fuck my brains out.
When I confronted her about this, she stated that it was for my benefit and after I went to HR about her, they told me that they can't do anything since she's entitled to say what she wants. As a result, she's continued to go on these rants almost incessantly. I've begun ignoring it but it's to the point where I can't so much as I get a word in to her without her mentioning how my attraction to Black people is unnatural and how Black people need to get with Whites to produce a "superior race".
Being that we work in a kitchen, communication is key and when someone isn't focusing or able to give commands, it's a major liability and I know this could affect my job performance in the near future especially being that I'm technically in charge as the most senior sous chef when the Executive Chef isn't here.
Does anyone have any advice on how I can deal with her because this is starting to push me to the point where I may snap and give in to the fighting urge of my maternal ancestors.
submitted by Emotional_Ratio5666 to blackladies [link] [comments]
Anyway, this is a bit of a windy rant about a Black co-worker of mine who I think is being really racist so fair warning and if this isn't allowed, feel free to let me know.
So a couple of days ago, we got a new chef in the kitchen, a fellow Black woman, which was a welcome relief to me because I'm the token Black woman on the kitchen brigade. However, a few hours after meeting her, she brought up the fact that she has a white boyfriend and began asking me about my dating preferences. I told her that I just recently discovered I'm bisexual after believing myself to be gay for the longest time, that all of my ex-gfs were Black and that I'm attracted to black people in general. I also told her that I write Black romance and erotica.
Ever since then, she's been going on almost daily rants towards me about how Black people are criminals and thugs and how much happier I would be with a white guy because her boyfriend gives her everything she wants. She also continuously offers me chances to meet her boyfriend's brother who just got out of prison and could turn me from the "depressed stud" that I am to a "happy housewife with beautiful 3/4 white babies". She's also begun pointing out "statistics" that show how 95% of Black women marry outside of their race and how those marriages last far longer than those between Black men and Black women, something I know to be entirely false.
She also makes rather pointed remarks about how my mother should have never gotten with my father despite the fact that my mother is an Irish immigrant and my father is full-blooded Nigerian-American. Even though I've told her I have no intention of being with a white guy, she's continued to make these sort of remarks and yesterday morning, it's begun crossing a line since one of the front desk agents approach me as I was coming in yesterday, her having told him that I was needing a tall white stud to fuck my brains out.
When I confronted her about this, she stated that it was for my benefit and after I went to HR about her, they told me that they can't do anything since she's entitled to say what she wants. As a result, she's continued to go on these rants almost incessantly. I've begun ignoring it but it's to the point where I can't so much as I get a word in to her without her mentioning how my attraction to Black people is unnatural and how Black people need to get with Whites to produce a "superior race".
Being that we work in a kitchen, communication is key and when someone isn't focusing or able to give commands, it's a major liability and I know this could affect my job performance in the near future especially being that I'm technically in charge as the most senior sous chef when the Executive Chef isn't here.
Does anyone have any advice on how I can deal with her because this is starting to push me to the point where I may snap and give in to the fighting urge of my maternal ancestors.
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2023.03.24 13:17 AnderLouis_ Hail and Farewell (George Moore) - Chapter 7.3
PODCAST: https://ayearofwarandpeace.podbean.com/e/ep1513-hail-and-farewell-george-moore-ave-chapter-73/
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Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:
And Edward is a beginner, and he isn't progressing, I said, and may remain a beginner. For he came into the world a sketch, une ébauche by a great master, and was left unfinished, whether by design or accident it is impossible to say. A delightful study he is! And in the embowered villa I sat, looking into his mind, interested in its unmapped spaces (Australia used to interest me in much the same manner when I was a child) until the young girl came upstairs to tell me it was time to go to the theatre. One knows a single word—Spielhaus. My eyes went to the clock, the hands pointed to four, and from four to five is the hottest hour of a summer's day. By four the sun, blazing forth from a cloudless sky, has sucked all the cool of the night away, and heated unendurably every brick and tile and stone it can strike with a ray. Even in the shady villa under the lindens one could not think of the tall gables in the town, the fierce sun beating on them, or of the cobble-stones in the streets, without congratulating oneself that Edward's inclinations had been resisted. Those low-ceilinged rooms above the kitchen would stifle on such a day, and I was able to look back on my courage with admiration. It had given me a splendid view of a corn-field with reapers working in it, the sun shining on their backs—that one straightening himself to wipe the sweat from his brow with a ragged sleeve.
And while walking through the corn-field I remembered a letter to Bülow in which the Master says: One thing is certain—I am not a musician, meaning thereby that music was only part of his message. He tells in these words that his art enjoined separation from the drone of daily life, and that is why he chose Bayreuth, a small Bavarian town difficult to get at, but not impossible to reach. It had a train service even in Wagner's time, and there was a sufficient number of dirty inns and lodgings in the town to house the pilgrims. Humanity was an open book to the Master, and the hardships he was inflicting on his pilgrims he knew to be for their good, for it would induce in them the disposition of mind suitable for the reception of the sacramental Ring. And while building his theatre on the brow of the hill in the shade of the pines, there can be no doubt that he foresaw the added charm it would be to the pilgrim to leave the town and plod through the glare up the long street past the railway-station into the avenue of chestnut trees. He foresaw them, pausing in their ascent, leaning upon their staves; and the restaurant which he allowed to be built next his theatre is a tribute to his perfect understanding of men, for however beautiful his music might be he knew that none could listen to it for five hours upon an empty belly. He liked, I am sure, the little green-painted restaurant higher up the hill in the orchard close, and must have gone there himself and sat under the trees, drinking Rhenish wine mixed with cool water from stone jars. The Master, who thought of everything, must have foreseen the great charm it would be to walk through the pine-wood, seeing beyond the red bark of the trees the purple ranges of hills that enclose the great plain, slope after slope rising at evening, and no one too far distant for the eye to follow the noble shapes and all the delicate sinuosities travelling down the skyline. Every shape and every outline is visible between the acts of The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and the Götterdämmerung. The village standing in the middle of the plain is often lighted by a last ray. Between the acts an extraordinary harmony gathers; art and Nature abandon their accustomed strife, and with ears filled with calm, exalted melodies, our eyes follow the beautiful landscape in which Bayreuth stands.
There are off-days at Bayreuth when there are no performances, and these are pleasant days of rest, that give us time to think of what we have heard, and what we are going to hear, and time to stroll about the town admiring its German life. The town is more interesting than Rothenburg—to me at least—for it is less archaic. One cannot imagine oneself living in the fifteenth century, whereas one can imagine oneself living at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth. Bayreuth is very yesteryear, suranné as the French say. A foreign word is a veiled face. The veil is often slight, but there is a veil always, wherefore we like foreign words—a weakness. The great gables which show themselves against the blue skies at Bayreuth mean more to me than the red-tiled roofs with the dormer windows in Rothenburg, for I can imagine myself born in Bayreuth, or growing up in it, and living there, seeing the Margrave and his court. It would be pleasant to live under the protection of a Margrave. One asks the name of the last, and wonders what he was like in his Schloss, a melancholy building full of tall official portraits and heavy German furniture, surrounded by gardens full of trees in which there is artificial water and swans. The year I am writing of the swans were followed by a brood of cygnets, and we used to watch these, not Edward and I, but myself and the daughter of a great painter, one who has inherited some of the intensity of her father's early pictures—a woman loving music dearly, and travelling with her husband in search of it.
It was pleasant to leave The Tale of a Town and visit her, and to walk about under the sunlit trees, or through the town, or to visit with her the old Court Theatre, perhaps picking up Edward on the way there and taking him along with us.
He will always go to see a building, and though we had both visited the Court Theatre many times before, it was pleasant to see it again, and she and he and I together admired its pillared front and its quaint interior, German rococo, clumsy, quaint, heavy, but representative of the German mind. And together we admired the gilded cupids, the garlands of flowers and the little boxes on either side of the stage, in which the Margrave's trumpeters used to appear to announce his arrival—a theatre not intended for the populace, but for the Court, containing only fifty or sixty stalls, beautifully designed and comfortable withal. The gilded balconies reminded us of drawing-rooms; we spoke of the courtly air of the theatre, now forbidden to the mime for many a day. A beautiful little theatre, we said—a theatre designed for the performance of Mozart or Gluck's operas, and I think Edward would have given up some performances of Parsifal to hear Gluck or Mozart in this out-of-date theatre.
In the afternoon my friends suggested to us that we should accompany them to a village some six or seven miles distant, and we went there in a carriage drawn by two long-tailed Bavarian horses, that drew us slowly but surely out of Bayreuth along smooth white roads, every one lined with apple trees and loaded with fruit. It was a wonder to us how these trees were not despoiled by thieves, so easy would it be to carry away the fruit by night. In England, in Ireland, or in Scotland a great deal of fruit would certainly have been robbed, and we asked ourselves if the Bavarian peasants are more naturally honest than the English, or if it were mere custom that prevented the waggonner from gathering as many apples as he pleased. The lady's husband, who is a politician, suggested that these wayside trees belonged to the community, and he is no doubt right; and we accepted his explanation that the honesty of the Bavarian is to be found in the fact that everybody shared in the fruit and, this being so, it was nobody's interest to strip the trees.
Behold the trees, and the long undivided plain stretching away to the foot of the hills, without wall or hedge, and we asking ourselves how do the peasants distinguish between the different farms, somebody telling how one of his farmers had called another to admire a fence he had put up between their lands. I'd like the fence, aye, twice as well, if thee 'ad not taken in some six or seven inches of my land. In our appreciation of the German landscape there is to be reckoned our disappointment at seeing nowhere beautiful English trees—ash, elm, beech, and oak—only the pine, and we, being tree-lovers, think the pine a tedious tree, if it can be called a tree; it isn't in our apprehension of one, only being intended by Nature for what the French call bois charpentier. No man would care to sit under a pine (and a woman still less), needles underfoot and needles overhead. To us English folk the beauty of a wood is as much in the underwoods as in the tall trees, and the pine allows no underwood. In a pine wood one meets few birds. A goshawk, startled from the branches, flees quickly down the long aisles. The pine is cultivated in Germany; the unfortunate pine, ugly by nature, is made still more ugly by cultivation. Pines cover the lower hills, forming black stains in the landscape and disfiguring their purple.
The long-tailed Bavarian horses walked up some steep ascent, trotted down a hill, at the bottom of which a pretty brook purls through an orchard, and the village was reached at last, built under the foot of a steep black hill, on which stand the ruins of a castle. There are paths through the woods, and one becomes conscious of the ceaseless change in human life as one follows the paths to the gateway of the robber-baron who lived there three centuries ago, defying Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, until his castle was battered with cannon. It was fortunate for Adolphus that he had cannon to batter it with, for without cannon he would not have captured it.
We came upon a ravine, and on each hillside a wooden platform had been built; the orchestra playing in the pit between, no doubt, as in the theatre at Bayreuth. We strolled up and down the steep paths, wondering if players were heard from hillside to hillside, inclining to the belief that human voices would not carry so far, and to put the natural acoustics of the wood to the test, some went to the other hillside and spoke to us. But what play had been acted in this wood? Somebody suggested a miracle play, and leaping at the suggestion, I spoke of the miracle plays in Oberammergau.
Some pious people of your sect, Edward, I said, taking his arm, who would set Asiatic Gods against native divinities.
My aphorism was not at first understood, and I explained it—how Bavaria comprises two spectacles: the Asiatic Gods in the South on the Tyrolean frontier, while the original Rhine Gods display themselves in the North at Bayreuth—Wotan, Loki, Donner, Froh, and the Goddesses Frika, Erda, and Freia. My remark had some success, and we walked on, wondering how it was that this division of the deities had not been remarked before. All were interested except Edward, who said he did not care to listen to blasphemy.
But, my dear Edward, it cannot be blasphemy to tell the truth, and surely the Gods that Oberammergau exhibits are Asiatic. And there can be no doubt that the Gods that Bayreuth exhibits are German and Scandinavian; and I pressed Edward to explain to me how a mere statement of fact, the truth of which could not be contested, could be called blasphemous, falsehood being implicit in every blasphemy. To escape from this quandary Edward began to argue that the Rhenish Gods had come from Asia, too, by way of Scandinavia, finding solace, apparently, in the belief in the Asiatic origin of all Gods. We laughed at this novel defence of divinity.
It is like China tea, I answered, only grown in Asia. Somebody else spoke of Havana cigars, and very soon all the life died out of the argument. We were but vaguely interested in it, for none amongst us, perhaps not even the youngest, was entirely free from the thought inspired by the empty platforms. We were all thinking how every generation is but a pageant, that all is but pageant here below. Part of our excursion was already behind us, and in later years how little of it would be remembered! Such philosophies are soon exhausted, and we sympathised with a lady who was anxious about her daughter and husband. They were walking in the woods, and she feared they might be overtaken by the coming darkness. But we assured her there would be light for many hours still, and whistled the motives of The Ring....
We returned through the hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening above us, and apple-trees lining the roads, all the apples now reddened and ready for gathering. We admired the purple crests illuminated by the sunset, as millions of men and women had done before us, and as millions of men and women shall do after us. Voices dropped and faces grew pensive. We asked if we should ever meet at Bayreuth again, and our thoughts turned towards the great Master lying in his grave, whose dreams had given us such sweet realities.
Too soon over, somebody said. In a few days Bayreuth would be deserted like the platforms we found in the wood. The long distance we had come was mentioned, and somebody asked if the pleasure we had received were worth the journey. The answer made to this—and it was a woman who made it—was that the journey would be more real in six months' time than it was today, and picking up the thought, I answered quickly:
So you think that we must live not so much for the moment as for the sake of the memory of it?
Somebody answered that memory was, perhaps, half of life and this was denied.
He who cannot enjoy things as they go by is but a poor companion.
A poor lover, I interjected. And soon after found myself arguing that the great gift Nature has bestowed upon woman is the power of enjoying things as they go by—a great gift truly it is, and sufficient compensation for lack of interest in religion and morals. It may be that that is why women have not written a great book, or painted a great picture. Or invented a religion, some one added.
Women are not idealists, Edward said, speaking out of his remembrance of his play The Heather Field.
In the evening we were all going to the house that Wagner had lived in, and in which he had written the last act of Siegfried, the Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal. Every one who goes to Bayreuth is asked there if he leaves a card upon Madame Wagner. Such, at least, used to be the custom. One presented an invitation card at the door and walked about the music-room and into Wagner's library. Edward was much moved to see the Master's books and his writing-table. Things interest him more than human beings, whereas Wagner's books and writing-table merely depressed me, and refusing to follow Edward to the grave, I sought for a friend who might introduce me to Madame Wagner.
A tall, thin woman, nearer sixty than seventy, very vital, with a high nose like her father's, came forward to meet me, full of cordiality, full of conversation and pleasant greeting. Liszt lives again in her, I said, the same inveigling manner; she casts her spells like her father, and—Well, there is no way of telling my impression except to tell the thought that passed through my mind: it was, But how is all this to end? Am I going to run away with her? And when we arrive somewhere, what am I to do with her? A woman nearly seventy years! And I thought what an extraordinary fascination she must have been when she heard Tristan for the first time, and felt she could no longer live with Bülow.
It is always pleasant, she said, to welcome to Bayreuth strangers who come to hear our art.
The arrogance of the expression amused me; but after all, music is the art of Germany just as poetry is the art of England; and feeling in the next five minutes that I must either take her hand or interrupt the conversation, I chose the latter course, and asked her to introduce me to her son. She hastened to comply with my wish, and put herself to some trouble to find him. He was found at last, and I was introduced to him.
My impression of Madame Wagner is compressed in the Am I going to run away with her? And the same words, with a change of preposition and pronoun, will describe the impression that Siegfried Wagner produced upon me. The son is the father in everything except his genius—the same large head, the same brow, the same chin and jaw. A sort of deserted shrine! I cried to myself and gasped for words.
Van Roy was singing at the time, and I succeeded at last in asking Siegfried Wagner who had composed the song.
I do not know, but it should be by Grandpapa Liszt.
I bowed, thanked him, and moved away, glad to escape from his repelling blankness. Shyness it may have been, or perhaps boredom. If we had met at Venice or in London—anywhere except in that crowd, we might have become friends. So I was glad to meet him on the bench in front of the theatre, and to find him slightly more forthcoming than he had shown himself to me in his mother's house. We spoke about his opera, and about Ellis, who had translated his libretto, and for a moment it looked as if we were going to know each other, to become acquainted, for in answer to my question whether he thought it was of advantage that the musician should write his own libretto, he answered that he thought it was, for while writing the libretto the musician sang his first ideas of the music.
Meeting me again on the same seat at the same hour, he asked me why I was not in the theatre, and it only occurred to me to tell the mere truth, that I came to Bayreuth to hear The Ring and not Parsifal. Perhaps if you knew the score of Parsifal.
I can never know a score, for I'm not a musician, but I've heard it many times, and it makes no personal appeal as do the other works.
The explanation was received in silence, and I thought how I might have better explained my position if I had said that, though I recognised Milton to be a great poet, he wrote in vain so far as I was concerned. But Siegfried's manner checks the words upon one's lips, and the people began to come out of the theatre soon after.
We parted, and all the way to the café where Edward and I went to have supper I turned Siegfried over in my mind and understood him to be a man of talent, for he is the son of a man of genius. One must be a man of talent to conduct The Ring as I had heard him conduct it, bearing the last scene of The Valkyrie along with him like a banner. A man of talent, the son of a man of genius, without sufficient vitality to be very much interested in anything; his life a sort of diffused sadness like a blank summer day when the clouds are low; and he must be conscious, too, that there is no place on earth where he can lay his head and call it his own.
If the physical resemblance were not so marked, I said to myself as we entered the café.
That little café! What enchanting hours Edward and I have spent in it between half past ten and in the morning, amid beer and cigars and endless discussions as to the values of certain scenes and acts, of singers and conductors! The year that I am now referring to, Parsifal was conducted in turn by Fischer, Mottl, and Seidl, Wagner's favourite pupil and disciple. He sat in the far end of the café by himself, and I often wondered why his society was not more sought after. Although he was an old man, and in declining health, it was a pleasure for me to sit with him and engage him in conversation, telling him that under his direction the first act of Parsifal played ten minutes quicker than it did under Mottl, and that Mottl was five minutes quicker than Fischer.
So much as that?
Yes, I took the time. And how much better I like your conducting of The Flower Maidens! Mottl gets a crescendo in the middle.
Whereas there is no necessity. It goes as well without, doesn't it?
A thin, spare man, quiet, speaking but little—a kindly man, as the reader has already guessed from the few phrases exchanged between him and me, and an unassuming man, apparently taking a pleasure even in such appreciations as Edward's and mine; a man between sixty and seventy, at the time I am speaking of, and as I write this line I can see his small, refined features and his iron-grey hair, which once must have been black. My thoughts pause, and I like to indulge myself in the regret that I did not walk home with him in the evenings to his lodgings. He might have asked me to come to see him in the morning, and over the piano, perhaps, would have told me many things regarding his relations with Wagner and his understanding of the music, and things about himself, for Seidl lived among great men, and was easily inveigled in the confessional.
He died a year or two later, and the café is no longer as attractive as it was when all the actors came down from the theatre to eat their supper there. Klafsky was my first Brünnhilde; when she died Gulbranson took her place, and the moment she came into the cafe all eyes went towards her, and I may say all hearts, for very soon a beautiful smile would light up a round, rosy, very ordinary face, suffusing it, transforming a plain woman into one to whom one's heart goes instinctively, convinced that all that is necessary to be happy is to be with her.
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PROMPTS: I wonder what is going on in Moore's head... Oh wait no I don't
Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:
And Edward is a beginner, and he isn't progressing, I said, and may remain a beginner. For he came into the world a sketch, une ébauche by a great master, and was left unfinished, whether by design or accident it is impossible to say. A delightful study he is! And in the embowered villa I sat, looking into his mind, interested in its unmapped spaces (Australia used to interest me in much the same manner when I was a child) until the young girl came upstairs to tell me it was time to go to the theatre. One knows a single word—Spielhaus. My eyes went to the clock, the hands pointed to four, and from four to five is the hottest hour of a summer's day. By four the sun, blazing forth from a cloudless sky, has sucked all the cool of the night away, and heated unendurably every brick and tile and stone it can strike with a ray. Even in the shady villa under the lindens one could not think of the tall gables in the town, the fierce sun beating on them, or of the cobble-stones in the streets, without congratulating oneself that Edward's inclinations had been resisted. Those low-ceilinged rooms above the kitchen would stifle on such a day, and I was able to look back on my courage with admiration. It had given me a splendid view of a corn-field with reapers working in it, the sun shining on their backs—that one straightening himself to wipe the sweat from his brow with a ragged sleeve.
And while walking through the corn-field I remembered a letter to Bülow in which the Master says: One thing is certain—I am not a musician, meaning thereby that music was only part of his message. He tells in these words that his art enjoined separation from the drone of daily life, and that is why he chose Bayreuth, a small Bavarian town difficult to get at, but not impossible to reach. It had a train service even in Wagner's time, and there was a sufficient number of dirty inns and lodgings in the town to house the pilgrims. Humanity was an open book to the Master, and the hardships he was inflicting on his pilgrims he knew to be for their good, for it would induce in them the disposition of mind suitable for the reception of the sacramental Ring. And while building his theatre on the brow of the hill in the shade of the pines, there can be no doubt that he foresaw the added charm it would be to the pilgrim to leave the town and plod through the glare up the long street past the railway-station into the avenue of chestnut trees. He foresaw them, pausing in their ascent, leaning upon their staves; and the restaurant which he allowed to be built next his theatre is a tribute to his perfect understanding of men, for however beautiful his music might be he knew that none could listen to it for five hours upon an empty belly. He liked, I am sure, the little green-painted restaurant higher up the hill in the orchard close, and must have gone there himself and sat under the trees, drinking Rhenish wine mixed with cool water from stone jars. The Master, who thought of everything, must have foreseen the great charm it would be to walk through the pine-wood, seeing beyond the red bark of the trees the purple ranges of hills that enclose the great plain, slope after slope rising at evening, and no one too far distant for the eye to follow the noble shapes and all the delicate sinuosities travelling down the skyline. Every shape and every outline is visible between the acts of The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and the Götterdämmerung. The village standing in the middle of the plain is often lighted by a last ray. Between the acts an extraordinary harmony gathers; art and Nature abandon their accustomed strife, and with ears filled with calm, exalted melodies, our eyes follow the beautiful landscape in which Bayreuth stands.
There are off-days at Bayreuth when there are no performances, and these are pleasant days of rest, that give us time to think of what we have heard, and what we are going to hear, and time to stroll about the town admiring its German life. The town is more interesting than Rothenburg—to me at least—for it is less archaic. One cannot imagine oneself living in the fifteenth century, whereas one can imagine oneself living at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth. Bayreuth is very yesteryear, suranné as the French say. A foreign word is a veiled face. The veil is often slight, but there is a veil always, wherefore we like foreign words—a weakness. The great gables which show themselves against the blue skies at Bayreuth mean more to me than the red-tiled roofs with the dormer windows in Rothenburg, for I can imagine myself born in Bayreuth, or growing up in it, and living there, seeing the Margrave and his court. It would be pleasant to live under the protection of a Margrave. One asks the name of the last, and wonders what he was like in his Schloss, a melancholy building full of tall official portraits and heavy German furniture, surrounded by gardens full of trees in which there is artificial water and swans. The year I am writing of the swans were followed by a brood of cygnets, and we used to watch these, not Edward and I, but myself and the daughter of a great painter, one who has inherited some of the intensity of her father's early pictures—a woman loving music dearly, and travelling with her husband in search of it.
It was pleasant to leave The Tale of a Town and visit her, and to walk about under the sunlit trees, or through the town, or to visit with her the old Court Theatre, perhaps picking up Edward on the way there and taking him along with us.
He will always go to see a building, and though we had both visited the Court Theatre many times before, it was pleasant to see it again, and she and he and I together admired its pillared front and its quaint interior, German rococo, clumsy, quaint, heavy, but representative of the German mind. And together we admired the gilded cupids, the garlands of flowers and the little boxes on either side of the stage, in which the Margrave's trumpeters used to appear to announce his arrival—a theatre not intended for the populace, but for the Court, containing only fifty or sixty stalls, beautifully designed and comfortable withal. The gilded balconies reminded us of drawing-rooms; we spoke of the courtly air of the theatre, now forbidden to the mime for many a day. A beautiful little theatre, we said—a theatre designed for the performance of Mozart or Gluck's operas, and I think Edward would have given up some performances of Parsifal to hear Gluck or Mozart in this out-of-date theatre.
In the afternoon my friends suggested to us that we should accompany them to a village some six or seven miles distant, and we went there in a carriage drawn by two long-tailed Bavarian horses, that drew us slowly but surely out of Bayreuth along smooth white roads, every one lined with apple trees and loaded with fruit. It was a wonder to us how these trees were not despoiled by thieves, so easy would it be to carry away the fruit by night. In England, in Ireland, or in Scotland a great deal of fruit would certainly have been robbed, and we asked ourselves if the Bavarian peasants are more naturally honest than the English, or if it were mere custom that prevented the waggonner from gathering as many apples as he pleased. The lady's husband, who is a politician, suggested that these wayside trees belonged to the community, and he is no doubt right; and we accepted his explanation that the honesty of the Bavarian is to be found in the fact that everybody shared in the fruit and, this being so, it was nobody's interest to strip the trees.
Behold the trees, and the long undivided plain stretching away to the foot of the hills, without wall or hedge, and we asking ourselves how do the peasants distinguish between the different farms, somebody telling how one of his farmers had called another to admire a fence he had put up between their lands. I'd like the fence, aye, twice as well, if thee 'ad not taken in some six or seven inches of my land. In our appreciation of the German landscape there is to be reckoned our disappointment at seeing nowhere beautiful English trees—ash, elm, beech, and oak—only the pine, and we, being tree-lovers, think the pine a tedious tree, if it can be called a tree; it isn't in our apprehension of one, only being intended by Nature for what the French call bois charpentier. No man would care to sit under a pine (and a woman still less), needles underfoot and needles overhead. To us English folk the beauty of a wood is as much in the underwoods as in the tall trees, and the pine allows no underwood. In a pine wood one meets few birds. A goshawk, startled from the branches, flees quickly down the long aisles. The pine is cultivated in Germany; the unfortunate pine, ugly by nature, is made still more ugly by cultivation. Pines cover the lower hills, forming black stains in the landscape and disfiguring their purple.
The long-tailed Bavarian horses walked up some steep ascent, trotted down a hill, at the bottom of which a pretty brook purls through an orchard, and the village was reached at last, built under the foot of a steep black hill, on which stand the ruins of a castle. There are paths through the woods, and one becomes conscious of the ceaseless change in human life as one follows the paths to the gateway of the robber-baron who lived there three centuries ago, defying Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, until his castle was battered with cannon. It was fortunate for Adolphus that he had cannon to batter it with, for without cannon he would not have captured it.
We came upon a ravine, and on each hillside a wooden platform had been built; the orchestra playing in the pit between, no doubt, as in the theatre at Bayreuth. We strolled up and down the steep paths, wondering if players were heard from hillside to hillside, inclining to the belief that human voices would not carry so far, and to put the natural acoustics of the wood to the test, some went to the other hillside and spoke to us. But what play had been acted in this wood? Somebody suggested a miracle play, and leaping at the suggestion, I spoke of the miracle plays in Oberammergau.
Some pious people of your sect, Edward, I said, taking his arm, who would set Asiatic Gods against native divinities.
My aphorism was not at first understood, and I explained it—how Bavaria comprises two spectacles: the Asiatic Gods in the South on the Tyrolean frontier, while the original Rhine Gods display themselves in the North at Bayreuth—Wotan, Loki, Donner, Froh, and the Goddesses Frika, Erda, and Freia. My remark had some success, and we walked on, wondering how it was that this division of the deities had not been remarked before. All were interested except Edward, who said he did not care to listen to blasphemy.
But, my dear Edward, it cannot be blasphemy to tell the truth, and surely the Gods that Oberammergau exhibits are Asiatic. And there can be no doubt that the Gods that Bayreuth exhibits are German and Scandinavian; and I pressed Edward to explain to me how a mere statement of fact, the truth of which could not be contested, could be called blasphemous, falsehood being implicit in every blasphemy. To escape from this quandary Edward began to argue that the Rhenish Gods had come from Asia, too, by way of Scandinavia, finding solace, apparently, in the belief in the Asiatic origin of all Gods. We laughed at this novel defence of divinity.
It is like China tea, I answered, only grown in Asia. Somebody else spoke of Havana cigars, and very soon all the life died out of the argument. We were but vaguely interested in it, for none amongst us, perhaps not even the youngest, was entirely free from the thought inspired by the empty platforms. We were all thinking how every generation is but a pageant, that all is but pageant here below. Part of our excursion was already behind us, and in later years how little of it would be remembered! Such philosophies are soon exhausted, and we sympathised with a lady who was anxious about her daughter and husband. They were walking in the woods, and she feared they might be overtaken by the coming darkness. But we assured her there would be light for many hours still, and whistled the motives of The Ring....
We returned through the hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening above us, and apple-trees lining the roads, all the apples now reddened and ready for gathering. We admired the purple crests illuminated by the sunset, as millions of men and women had done before us, and as millions of men and women shall do after us. Voices dropped and faces grew pensive. We asked if we should ever meet at Bayreuth again, and our thoughts turned towards the great Master lying in his grave, whose dreams had given us such sweet realities.
Too soon over, somebody said. In a few days Bayreuth would be deserted like the platforms we found in the wood. The long distance we had come was mentioned, and somebody asked if the pleasure we had received were worth the journey. The answer made to this—and it was a woman who made it—was that the journey would be more real in six months' time than it was today, and picking up the thought, I answered quickly:
So you think that we must live not so much for the moment as for the sake of the memory of it?
Somebody answered that memory was, perhaps, half of life and this was denied.
He who cannot enjoy things as they go by is but a poor companion.
A poor lover, I interjected. And soon after found myself arguing that the great gift Nature has bestowed upon woman is the power of enjoying things as they go by—a great gift truly it is, and sufficient compensation for lack of interest in religion and morals. It may be that that is why women have not written a great book, or painted a great picture. Or invented a religion, some one added.
Women are not idealists, Edward said, speaking out of his remembrance of his play The Heather Field.
In the evening we were all going to the house that Wagner had lived in, and in which he had written the last act of Siegfried, the Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal. Every one who goes to Bayreuth is asked there if he leaves a card upon Madame Wagner. Such, at least, used to be the custom. One presented an invitation card at the door and walked about the music-room and into Wagner's library. Edward was much moved to see the Master's books and his writing-table. Things interest him more than human beings, whereas Wagner's books and writing-table merely depressed me, and refusing to follow Edward to the grave, I sought for a friend who might introduce me to Madame Wagner.
A tall, thin woman, nearer sixty than seventy, very vital, with a high nose like her father's, came forward to meet me, full of cordiality, full of conversation and pleasant greeting. Liszt lives again in her, I said, the same inveigling manner; she casts her spells like her father, and—Well, there is no way of telling my impression except to tell the thought that passed through my mind: it was, But how is all this to end? Am I going to run away with her? And when we arrive somewhere, what am I to do with her? A woman nearly seventy years! And I thought what an extraordinary fascination she must have been when she heard Tristan for the first time, and felt she could no longer live with Bülow.
It is always pleasant, she said, to welcome to Bayreuth strangers who come to hear our art.
The arrogance of the expression amused me; but after all, music is the art of Germany just as poetry is the art of England; and feeling in the next five minutes that I must either take her hand or interrupt the conversation, I chose the latter course, and asked her to introduce me to her son. She hastened to comply with my wish, and put herself to some trouble to find him. He was found at last, and I was introduced to him.
My impression of Madame Wagner is compressed in the Am I going to run away with her? And the same words, with a change of preposition and pronoun, will describe the impression that Siegfried Wagner produced upon me. The son is the father in everything except his genius—the same large head, the same brow, the same chin and jaw. A sort of deserted shrine! I cried to myself and gasped for words.
Van Roy was singing at the time, and I succeeded at last in asking Siegfried Wagner who had composed the song.
I do not know, but it should be by Grandpapa Liszt.
I bowed, thanked him, and moved away, glad to escape from his repelling blankness. Shyness it may have been, or perhaps boredom. If we had met at Venice or in London—anywhere except in that crowd, we might have become friends. So I was glad to meet him on the bench in front of the theatre, and to find him slightly more forthcoming than he had shown himself to me in his mother's house. We spoke about his opera, and about Ellis, who had translated his libretto, and for a moment it looked as if we were going to know each other, to become acquainted, for in answer to my question whether he thought it was of advantage that the musician should write his own libretto, he answered that he thought it was, for while writing the libretto the musician sang his first ideas of the music.
Meeting me again on the same seat at the same hour, he asked me why I was not in the theatre, and it only occurred to me to tell the mere truth, that I came to Bayreuth to hear The Ring and not Parsifal. Perhaps if you knew the score of Parsifal.
I can never know a score, for I'm not a musician, but I've heard it many times, and it makes no personal appeal as do the other works.
The explanation was received in silence, and I thought how I might have better explained my position if I had said that, though I recognised Milton to be a great poet, he wrote in vain so far as I was concerned. But Siegfried's manner checks the words upon one's lips, and the people began to come out of the theatre soon after.
We parted, and all the way to the café where Edward and I went to have supper I turned Siegfried over in my mind and understood him to be a man of talent, for he is the son of a man of genius. One must be a man of talent to conduct The Ring as I had heard him conduct it, bearing the last scene of The Valkyrie along with him like a banner. A man of talent, the son of a man of genius, without sufficient vitality to be very much interested in anything; his life a sort of diffused sadness like a blank summer day when the clouds are low; and he must be conscious, too, that there is no place on earth where he can lay his head and call it his own.
If the physical resemblance were not so marked, I said to myself as we entered the café.
That little café! What enchanting hours Edward and I have spent in it between half past ten and in the morning, amid beer and cigars and endless discussions as to the values of certain scenes and acts, of singers and conductors! The year that I am now referring to, Parsifal was conducted in turn by Fischer, Mottl, and Seidl, Wagner's favourite pupil and disciple. He sat in the far end of the café by himself, and I often wondered why his society was not more sought after. Although he was an old man, and in declining health, it was a pleasure for me to sit with him and engage him in conversation, telling him that under his direction the first act of Parsifal played ten minutes quicker than it did under Mottl, and that Mottl was five minutes quicker than Fischer.
So much as that?
Yes, I took the time. And how much better I like your conducting of The Flower Maidens! Mottl gets a crescendo in the middle.
Whereas there is no necessity. It goes as well without, doesn't it?
A thin, spare man, quiet, speaking but little—a kindly man, as the reader has already guessed from the few phrases exchanged between him and me, and an unassuming man, apparently taking a pleasure even in such appreciations as Edward's and mine; a man between sixty and seventy, at the time I am speaking of, and as I write this line I can see his small, refined features and his iron-grey hair, which once must have been black. My thoughts pause, and I like to indulge myself in the regret that I did not walk home with him in the evenings to his lodgings. He might have asked me to come to see him in the morning, and over the piano, perhaps, would have told me many things regarding his relations with Wagner and his understanding of the music, and things about himself, for Seidl lived among great men, and was easily inveigled in the confessional.
He died a year or two later, and the café is no longer as attractive as it was when all the actors came down from the theatre to eat their supper there. Klafsky was my first Brünnhilde; when she died Gulbranson took her place, and the moment she came into the cafe all eyes went towards her, and I may say all hearts, for very soon a beautiful smile would light up a round, rosy, very ordinary face, suffusing it, transforming a plain woman into one to whom one's heart goes instinctively, convinced that all that is necessary to be happy is to be with her.
2023.03.24 13:13 I_Stay_Solid Black Hoodie For Men's
 | submitted by I_Stay_Solid to u/I_Stay_Solid [link] [comments] |
2023.03.24 13:07 Demonic_Disposition My Experiences
Our name is Murtons. We have made previous accounts on Reddit and made previous posts on this subreddit and others and have deleted them time and again. We have promised information that might relate to some of the experiencers of this subreddit. Now that we have acquired technology which makes such an idea possible, this will be our permanent account and everything we know and WILL know, we will tell to you, if not at the time when that information is acquired or when the event happens, then when it is safe to do so for ourself or when we are allowed.
For context, I do not have MPD nor am I trying to rip off any other users claiming to be "2 People" or "2 Entities". I assure you that my situation is unique. I will not share my own name but the name of the other entity is Carrabelle.
Carrabelle was attached to me in a previous life as a form of sarcastic "Marriage into the family". His "Species" is unique in that, when he is attached biologically, he is attached to your consciousness and will be there in every life after the one that he was attached until detached. The longer that he is attached, the harder it is to remove him. After a certain amount of time, physical removal will not be enough as he will just grow back. My family (Again, non-human) have managed to set up an inhibitor of sorts for the time that I did not have my memories and until they are back that will stop him from making my life difficult...mostly.
As for information on myself if you want it; I have had a fear of Jesters and carnivals for a long time, along with the associated patterns. I have a fear of fictional settings with dark cyberpunk themes such as games like Observer. I have Autism, ADHD, OCD and I heal really quickly. My hair and nails grow quickly as well. I also get cold electric feelings across my body, especially when I am stressed or sick. I am introverted and have only recently begun to learn important life skills, such as being able to talk to people. My home life is terrible as well, which is important to this. Oh yeah and I have survived Meningococcal, Pneumonia, Meningitis and Leukemia twice.
As there is so much to unpack, I will be making a separate post for each life, excluding this life, which will instead be split into 3 parts. I will also be making a post explaining certain concepts that I have learned, along with things I have learned which relate to the many other experiences of many other experiencers and maybe a Q&A, though the latter probably will not be necessary. In this post, I will be talking about the sudden re-emerging of my memories, dreams and the subsequent events.
I got out of bed and walked towards the door. Though it was dark, I could tell that my door was slowly opening on its own and I was frozen with fear. I saw slight movement and a shape but due to how dark it was and my own fear, I started to question if the door was opening or not. In both a curious movement to see if the door was shut or not and the thought that I might be dreaming so what I do doesn't matter, I moved towards the door.
In an instant, I felt myself flying towards my bed with a figure moving towards me and suddenly being forced onto my stomach. I felt 1 hand pushing my face into the bed, another 2 arms holding my arms down and another hand on my back. I tried fighting to see the face of my attacker, thinking that I could gain some small victory if I saw their face (Not that it would matter, as I could not tell anyone) but I fell unconscious.
I awoke slowly, the images blurry in front of me, some kind of colourful effect dancing in my vision, dissipating the longer I was awake, my emotions dull but not dead. There were sand/mud buildings in front of and around me. They did not look made by some primitive civilization but made with the intent to last. I was walking on a footpath of some kind with a road to the right of me. It was humid and felt as though I was wearing thick clothing. I just knew that I was dreaming, this whole situation was absurd.
I looked to the left of me and saw someone walking beside me. I was fairly short for a 15 year old but this person was tall, like 7-8ft tall. I slowly noticed the way that they dressed; overly colourful, a strange hat and 4 sleeves containing 4 different arms. They must have noticed that I was looking in their direction because they looked down at me, opened their mouth and as they did so, what looked like chunks of meat and wires spilled out and I looked away as terrified as I could be. I had a weird feeling that it did not hurt them in any way and that they only did it to scare me.
As we continued walking along this footpath, we came to a crossing in the road and on the other side was some kind of checkpoint. Two tall guards with tight outfits, white masks and guns guarded a metal door that was built into either a wall or a fence. I knew that if this was somehow not a dream, going through that door was the point of no return. If it was a dream, then running or staying has no real world consequence but if it was real, then running was the only option. I slowly backed away, hoping to be out of the vision of that thing before I started running.
As I started running, I turned around and saw whatever that thing was screaming, all 4 arms outstretched, clutching some kind of wand in one hand. I was as scared as my body would allow, running back the way we came, when a vehicle nearly hit me. The car was fairly low to the ground and the driver looked me with confusion. I ran back to the footpath that took me to the checkpoint and I just kept running, not knowing where to go but hoping to figure it out as I went. After a few moments of running, I heard someone yell for me and when I looked, there was someone in an alleyway next to me.
I felt myself being quickly yanked into the alleyway and I though that I had been caught. I was grabbed and made to face the person who I had unknowingly been saved by. My memory is not perfectly clear but she had bluish purplish skin, large yellow eyes and what looked like spikes coming out of her head, not straight out like a porcupine but in a way that looked like a substitute for hair.
"Ahhh, a demon" I said sarcastically, assuming myself to be dreaming.
"I am not a demon" she said bemused.
"Well, this is my dream and you look like a demon, so you are a demon'' I said extremely smugly.
"You are not dreaming".
That went on for about 30 seconds. I asked her who she was and she told me that she was my best friend. I asked her, that if she was my best friend, then how I did not remember her and she told me that I asked to have my memory erased, which made no sense to me. I asked where I was, to which she said that I was currently on Mars. Eventually I heard a voice behind me trying to get my attention. The voice belonged to another girl. She had bleached white skin, large eyes (She is not a grey. She hates being called that.), black hair and black clothes.
"Hey *****, how have you be-..." the previous girl interrupted her and would not let her speak. The first girl seemed to be somewhat... territorial. My memory faltered and I seemed to forget the conversation that had transpired seconds before. The second girl walked off with a scowl across her face, which I without my memory, assumed to be directed at me. My focus was brought back to the first girl with the spikes for hair and I noticed a watch on her wrist which reminded me of the watch the Yautja wear in the "PREDATOR" franchise, with its own differences of course.
After a while, she said that they were taking me home . I was looking forward to going somewhere familiar and less confusing. She walked to my right and I saw movement down the other end of the alleyway, which I scared me but after they didn't react, I assumed that it was more of them, so I calmed down. The girl with the spikes pulled out what looked like a fork like device but in between the middle two prongs was a circular object. She asked me if I was ready and when I said that I was, she placed the object to my right temple and my vision nearly instantly went black, I felt relaxed and I felt my body collapse, along with someone catch me and then the sensation of being dragged.
I woke up restrained and facing someone that I only have the memory of the colour green to associate them with. They simply asked me "Are you sure that you want to go home?" to which I replied with a somewhat confused "Yes", wondering why they would even ask that.
I woke up. My Mum remembered nothing and seemed fine, while my memory of the event was distorted, only remembering the city, the guards, the 4 armed monstrosity and the fact that a conversation of some kind had happened. The only possible evidence of the night prior was found later when we could not lock the front door. My memory of that "Dream" began to fade quick, being gone within 2 weeks.
I had friends online that I eventually got rid of due to realizing that they were not friends. While I had those friends, I gained memories back of a fight with some girl 2 years beforehand, which I did not realize at the time was a part of something so big. That situation is part of the last of the 3 key events and will be covered in a post.
For 2-3 months during those 6 months, every night to every second night, I would get strange dreams with reoccurring characters, that always felt so real at the time and that I would always either slowly forget or I would forget when I woke up. I will tell you everything that is worth mentioning, though I can guarantee you, everything except for the first "Dream", will not be in chronological order. Sometimes the "Dreams" would have actual dreams before or after them, most of the time related to something I saw during the events of the "Dream" or something I glimpsed before I was fully conscious in said "Dream". Sometimes, the real dreams were unrelated.
Sometimes I had real dreams that I also know were manipulated as they would relate directly to a game I had played or something similar. I will not mention these. Any comparisons I make to fiction after this point is not meant to imply that they are real dreams but merely a comparison to something that one might consider familiar.
A girl with spikes instead of hair run up to me and gave me a thumbs up whilst saying "Good Job!". Forgetting that Kingston existed, I assumed that she was the one who threatened to kill me and told her not to patronize me. She seemed hurt and confused. When I woke up, I for some reason went on some rant about how they cannot just kill whoever they want and they told me that they were killing bad people and that I needed to calm down.
What looked like hundreds of those lizard people were running towards the railings. One of the other people firing yelled "I'm out of ammo" and then everyone else did as well. I was terrified and I suddenly got a sudden burst of confidence. I jumped onto the railing and with both guns, started firing on the lizards... and then so did everyone else. They lied to see what I would do.
There was a sudden explosion and the neon pink building exploded. I was grabbed and told to run. They were jumping of a ledge onto a street. The ground looked slippery and I was scared. They told me that I had to jump. They were telling me that it was not a dream and that if I did not jump then I would die. I think someone pushed me and someone else caught me.
We walked along the street in the rain and I started crying. Someone comforted me and I fell unconscious. I woke up in bed
I waited a long time and was bored. He told me to be patient. Eventually a kind of ship arrived and he told me that they are not to see me, as the people on board do not like me because of what I had done. I asked what I did wrong but he refused to tell me. At some point, I fell unconscious. I woke up in bed.
I could feel what felt like pure energy running through my hands and when I looked down, my hands were glowing orange. Not having anything else to do, I put my hands out and just thought "hehe, it's like magic in Skyrim" and jokingly put my hands out to "Shoot Flames". Instead, orange energy with sparks started to come out of my hands. I looked at the person who seemed familiar and he nodded with a smile saying "Go ahead!".
I leapt at the two people who were moments ago bullying and tormenting me. I jump on the one on the right, punching him in the face. I fear the one next to me will try to stop me and so I jump, without effort, onto a wall, laughing and the leap back. I continue jumping in and out, throwing various punches and attacks, until all that is left is an unmoving gory mess and by the end I feel unstoppable.
The tall blue man who had obviously come to rescue me says "Okay, that is enough" and I fall unconscious. I wake up in bed.
I see someone tall and they glance at me for a moment before whipping their head around and staring at me. I realized they are not friendly and run away. I did not count the arms.
I walk down a pathway and notice a few public benches in front of a small fenced off decorative public bush with the wood chips beneath it. There are 2 staircases on either side of the fenced off bush, leading to what seemed like an oval and there appeared to be a helicopter or some kind of aerial vehicle, landing on said oval. I was not sure if it was there to save me or not and so I approached the staircase cautiously.
Eventually, what looked like a SWAT member started walking down the stairs. I noticed what looked like metal beams moving very fast behind his back and even before I noticed that, I realized that he was not any kind of SWAT member or cop. I panicked and ran. I heard him yell "WAIT! I'M A FRIEND!" and I responded with "WHY IN THE FUCK WOULD I BELIEVE YOU?!". In a lower voice I heard him say "Good point".
I felt my feet dragged out from under me and myself being dragged away. I tried digging my nails into the concrete and realizing that it was pointless, painful and stereotypical of every B grade horror movie, I stopped. Just as I stopped being a stereotype, my body was picked up and made to face my "Friend". I realized that mechanical arms that came from his back held me up off the ground. I told him to wait desperately, repeating myself over and over before I saw one of his mechanical arms move next to my neck/head and then I fell unconscious. I woke up in bed.
After they stopped laughing, they told me that they needed me to come with them. I said that I just wanted to go home and they told me that I could, if I came with them. I assumed that they were trying to trick me, so I ran the opposite direction. They yelled after me telling me that I needed to stop doing this.
I reached a cliff and managed to find a few paths down the side of it and get away from my pursuers. I don't remember how but I stumbled up what looked like a military outpost. There were tents, a few temporary looking structures and a strange rounded pyramid shaped tank. The tank had what looked like a pivoting sphere on the top with the barrel attached to one of the sides. When I arrived, the whole place woke up. I started running as people were leaving the tents and structures with guns. The tank woke up.
The 4 people who were pursuing me caught up and managed to save me. They obviously were not happy, as I got them into a gun fight instead of just listening. I do not remember falling unconscious but I woke up in bed.
Sometimes after remembering one of these dreams, I would tell my mother and I would say how weird it is that I keep having dreams with the same people. This on it's own is strange as I never remembered any key parts of any of the dreams when telling my mother. Either I only remembered the characters within the "Dreams" or I only remembered when thinking about the latest "Dream".
I went on Reddit, creating my first Reddit Account (As far as I am aware) and going to the appropriate subreddits, asking questions. I started getting memories of a family of blue aliens and being terrified. I had various memories of walking down the corridors of a ship.
The next day was the day I moved in with the family of my mothers previously "Just a friend" . In my new home, I kept getting these memories. I eventually met a Reddit user who seems to have deleted his account. We both helped each other remember something... terrifying.
We remembered cephalopodic beings in suits. They seemed to like crystals and had rings around their fingers attached to strings which attached to computers. I began Calling them pianists. Eventually he started to doubt himself and I never heard from him again. He did however mention glowing orbs that followed him as a child and have since started following his own child. I also remember the orbs following me as a child.
I started to realize that a lot of the previous memories that I had remembered just did not happen. Eventually I started remembering more memories that I eventually realized did not happen. Not all of the memories however were false. Eventually the memories started to become real mixed with fake. What was real and false started to become clearer and eventually certain "Characters" in these memories started to become more consistent and stop being replaced by other fake "Characters".
I started getting memories of meeting a porcupine girl when I was 4-5. She seemed like a mix between a Human and a porcupine. I also remembered a guy with mechanical arms and his face was deformed and repaired with metal. I also started getting memories of Jesters with multiple arms... too many arms.
After enough time, the memories of the Human porcupine and the deformed man with mechanical arms changed. The man with mechanical arms was no longer deformed and was now wearing a mask and due to his similarity to an aforementioned videogame character, I began calling him Spectre. The porcupine girl stopped looking so Human and instead looked more like a girl with spikes instead of hair. I remembered that there indeed was another girl that looked Human. She had bleached white skin, black hair, black clothes and she loved to give everyone attitude.
Eventually, I met another user on Reddit who was and is very useful. He told me about his unique abilities and since he has been given multiple visions, some of which are visions of different people which I eventually learned were my past incarnations. He has also been given visions of the cephalopodic beings and a few details were made clearer. Their appearance is similar enough to the fictional DND species Illithids that I changed the spelling around and began calling them Ithilids and oddly enough, I also started reading it like that too. Eventually the real memories became obvious and very consistent.
After learning some stuff from that user, he told me that he had a vision while he was sleeping. In that vision, a tall ethereal man in a trench coat with a cybernetic arm and welding goggles contacted him. He only said "Say goodbye to your buddy Murtons" before messing around inside his head. I eventually remembered him. He was the tall blue guy. His name is Mason.
I have since remembered previous lives, 5 to be exact. What happened in them will be discussed in future posts, if future posts are wanted. What I have remembered about my current life will also be discussed in future posts if those future posts are wanted. What I will say is this: 3 of those 4 people are from my previous life and all 4 are my family. They have recently started visiting me after I fall asleep and I am certain that they are not dreams. They are also not the abducting kind in the slightest (Even though... yeah... they do technically abduct me). If you got to know them, within less than a week, they would seem like regular people (Because they are) and their physical appearance would no longer bother you. They are supposed to come back in August and I am so excited.
In one of my recent visits from my family, I learned that the girl with spikes for hair is called Piper.
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On a side note, I am well aware that people are going to try to call me out as a LARP or for trying to create an ARG or trying to be a TAA copy cat. I am not trying to do any of that nor am I writing fiction. I am doing this to try to help people and also help myself by actually putting this out there instead of keeping it in. I would actually like to talk with people but if you are going to troll, please do not bother. I get enough ridicule from every other Human that I tell about my memories, so please do not think that your words hurts.
I am also sure that I do not have any medical issues that could be causing delusions or visions. Thank you for your concern in advance.
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Murtons Out...
submitted by Demonic_Disposition to Experiencers [link] [comments]
An Introduction
As you know, our name is Murtons. Murtons is a pseudonym, not for 2 people but for 2 entities contained within a single body. Our story is long and I will be creating multiple posts on this subreddit and perhaps others if this post is received well, telling our story, making posts that are just information dumps made up of relevant information and maybe update posts on our situation. At no point am I making the claim that I am an authority on the subject but I will say that I know what I know. From this point on, I am referring to myself without plural, unless it is necessary to do otherwise, as it is just me doing the work at the moment and speaking in plural is exhausting.For context, I do not have MPD nor am I trying to rip off any other users claiming to be "2 People" or "2 Entities". I assure you that my situation is unique. I will not share my own name but the name of the other entity is Carrabelle.
Carrabelle was attached to me in a previous life as a form of sarcastic "Marriage into the family". His "Species" is unique in that, when he is attached biologically, he is attached to your consciousness and will be there in every life after the one that he was attached until detached. The longer that he is attached, the harder it is to remove him. After a certain amount of time, physical removal will not be enough as he will just grow back. My family (Again, non-human) have managed to set up an inhibitor of sorts for the time that I did not have my memories and until they are back that will stop him from making my life difficult...mostly.
As for information on myself if you want it; I have had a fear of Jesters and carnivals for a long time, along with the associated patterns. I have a fear of fictional settings with dark cyberpunk themes such as games like Observer. I have Autism, ADHD, OCD and I heal really quickly. My hair and nails grow quickly as well. I also get cold electric feelings across my body, especially when I am stressed or sick. I am introverted and have only recently begun to learn important life skills, such as being able to talk to people. My home life is terrible as well, which is important to this. Oh yeah and I have survived Meningococcal, Pneumonia, Meningitis and Leukemia twice.
My Experiences
During the course of the past 2 years, I regained memories from 5 different lives and from 3 key points in this life as well as remembering certain "Dreams" which I can guarantee are more real than I had assumed at the time. I have remembered that 3-4 of those 5 previous lives have interacted with this one and that this life happening was a direct consequence of the choices of my previous incarnation. I have remembered that I would not be who I am today without the non-humans that I call Family.As there is so much to unpack, I will be making a separate post for each life, excluding this life, which will instead be split into 3 parts. I will also be making a post explaining certain concepts that I have learned, along with things I have learned which relate to the many other experiences of many other experiencers and maybe a Q&A, though the latter probably will not be necessary. In this post, I will be talking about the sudden re-emerging of my memories, dreams and the subsequent events.
2019
I (Only 15 at the time) woke up to the sound of glass smashing and my mother screaming. I looked around and it was pitch black and it seemed my Mum was asleep. I assumed that she had dropped something in the middle of the night and screamed and I had managed to sleep through it, only waking up to the extremely loud subconscious recollection hours later. I felt strange though, like my body knew something was wrong but I could not figure it out myself.I got out of bed and walked towards the door. Though it was dark, I could tell that my door was slowly opening on its own and I was frozen with fear. I saw slight movement and a shape but due to how dark it was and my own fear, I started to question if the door was opening or not. In both a curious movement to see if the door was shut or not and the thought that I might be dreaming so what I do doesn't matter, I moved towards the door.
In an instant, I felt myself flying towards my bed with a figure moving towards me and suddenly being forced onto my stomach. I felt 1 hand pushing my face into the bed, another 2 arms holding my arms down and another hand on my back. I tried fighting to see the face of my attacker, thinking that I could gain some small victory if I saw their face (Not that it would matter, as I could not tell anyone) but I fell unconscious.
I awoke slowly, the images blurry in front of me, some kind of colourful effect dancing in my vision, dissipating the longer I was awake, my emotions dull but not dead. There were sand/mud buildings in front of and around me. They did not look made by some primitive civilization but made with the intent to last. I was walking on a footpath of some kind with a road to the right of me. It was humid and felt as though I was wearing thick clothing. I just knew that I was dreaming, this whole situation was absurd.
I looked to the left of me and saw someone walking beside me. I was fairly short for a 15 year old but this person was tall, like 7-8ft tall. I slowly noticed the way that they dressed; overly colourful, a strange hat and 4 sleeves containing 4 different arms. They must have noticed that I was looking in their direction because they looked down at me, opened their mouth and as they did so, what looked like chunks of meat and wires spilled out and I looked away as terrified as I could be. I had a weird feeling that it did not hurt them in any way and that they only did it to scare me.
As we continued walking along this footpath, we came to a crossing in the road and on the other side was some kind of checkpoint. Two tall guards with tight outfits, white masks and guns guarded a metal door that was built into either a wall or a fence. I knew that if this was somehow not a dream, going through that door was the point of no return. If it was a dream, then running or staying has no real world consequence but if it was real, then running was the only option. I slowly backed away, hoping to be out of the vision of that thing before I started running.
As I started running, I turned around and saw whatever that thing was screaming, all 4 arms outstretched, clutching some kind of wand in one hand. I was as scared as my body would allow, running back the way we came, when a vehicle nearly hit me. The car was fairly low to the ground and the driver looked me with confusion. I ran back to the footpath that took me to the checkpoint and I just kept running, not knowing where to go but hoping to figure it out as I went. After a few moments of running, I heard someone yell for me and when I looked, there was someone in an alleyway next to me.
I felt myself being quickly yanked into the alleyway and I though that I had been caught. I was grabbed and made to face the person who I had unknowingly been saved by. My memory is not perfectly clear but she had bluish purplish skin, large yellow eyes and what looked like spikes coming out of her head, not straight out like a porcupine but in a way that looked like a substitute for hair.
"Ahhh, a demon" I said sarcastically, assuming myself to be dreaming.
"I am not a demon" she said bemused.
"Well, this is my dream and you look like a demon, so you are a demon'' I said extremely smugly.
"You are not dreaming".
That went on for about 30 seconds. I asked her who she was and she told me that she was my best friend. I asked her, that if she was my best friend, then how I did not remember her and she told me that I asked to have my memory erased, which made no sense to me. I asked where I was, to which she said that I was currently on Mars. Eventually I heard a voice behind me trying to get my attention. The voice belonged to another girl. She had bleached white skin, large eyes (She is not a grey. She hates being called that.), black hair and black clothes.
"Hey *****, how have you be-..." the previous girl interrupted her and would not let her speak. The first girl seemed to be somewhat... territorial. My memory faltered and I seemed to forget the conversation that had transpired seconds before. The second girl walked off with a scowl across her face, which I without my memory, assumed to be directed at me. My focus was brought back to the first girl with the spikes for hair and I noticed a watch on her wrist which reminded me of the watch the Yautja wear in the "PREDATOR" franchise, with its own differences of course.
After a while, she said that they were taking me home . I was looking forward to going somewhere familiar and less confusing. She walked to my right and I saw movement down the other end of the alleyway, which I scared me but after they didn't react, I assumed that it was more of them, so I calmed down. The girl with the spikes pulled out what looked like a fork like device but in between the middle two prongs was a circular object. She asked me if I was ready and when I said that I was, she placed the object to my right temple and my vision nearly instantly went black, I felt relaxed and I felt my body collapse, along with someone catch me and then the sensation of being dragged.
I woke up restrained and facing someone that I only have the memory of the colour green to associate them with. They simply asked me "Are you sure that you want to go home?" to which I replied with a somewhat confused "Yes", wondering why they would even ask that.
I woke up. My Mum remembered nothing and seemed fine, while my memory of the event was distorted, only remembering the city, the guards, the 4 armed monstrosity and the fact that a conversation of some kind had happened. The only possible evidence of the night prior was found later when we could not lock the front door. My memory of that "Dream" began to fade quick, being gone within 2 weeks.
2020
I had dropped out of High School due to Covid making things difficult and my School being next to useless. My Mum had begun to leave me alone over a couple of nights to go and talk to her "Just a friend". A couple of nights turned into weeks and weeks turned into 6 months. She would occasionally re stock the fridge and pantry while I was asleep, stay a few hours in the morning so she could say that she tried to see me (My sleep patterns were all over the place) and then she would leave.I had friends online that I eventually got rid of due to realizing that they were not friends. While I had those friends, I gained memories back of a fight with some girl 2 years beforehand, which I did not realize at the time was a part of something so big. That situation is part of the last of the 3 key events and will be covered in a post.
For 2-3 months during those 6 months, every night to every second night, I would get strange dreams with reoccurring characters, that always felt so real at the time and that I would always either slowly forget or I would forget when I woke up. I will tell you everything that is worth mentioning, though I can guarantee you, everything except for the first "Dream", will not be in chronological order. Sometimes the "Dreams" would have actual dreams before or after them, most of the time related to something I saw during the events of the "Dream" or something I glimpsed before I was fully conscious in said "Dream". Sometimes, the real dreams were unrelated.
Sometimes I had real dreams that I also know were manipulated as they would relate directly to a game I had played or something similar. I will not mention these. Any comparisons I make to fiction after this point is not meant to imply that they are real dreams but merely a comparison to something that one might consider familiar.
- I Woke up to loud sounds. I was paralyzed and leaning against a wall. A girl ran up to me and knelt down. She had black hair, was wearing black and had large eyes with bleached white skin. She put 2 guns down in front of me. There were people behind her firing down over the railings of the plateau we appeared to be on with a large neon people skyscraper in the far background. The girl said that her name was Kingston and that they will explain everything but first I have to wake up.
A girl with spikes instead of hair run up to me and gave me a thumbs up whilst saying "Good Job!". Forgetting that Kingston existed, I assumed that she was the one who threatened to kill me and told her not to patronize me. She seemed hurt and confused. When I woke up, I for some reason went on some rant about how they cannot just kill whoever they want and they told me that they were killing bad people and that I needed to calm down.
What looked like hundreds of those lizard people were running towards the railings. One of the other people firing yelled "I'm out of ammo" and then everyone else did as well. I was terrified and I suddenly got a sudden burst of confidence. I jumped onto the railing and with both guns, started firing on the lizards... and then so did everyone else. They lied to see what I would do.
There was a sudden explosion and the neon pink building exploded. I was grabbed and told to run. They were jumping of a ledge onto a street. The ground looked slippery and I was scared. They told me that I had to jump. They were telling me that it was not a dream and that if I did not jump then I would die. I think someone pushed me and someone else caught me.
We walked along the street in the rain and I started crying. Someone comforted me and I fell unconscious. I woke up in bed
- I was in what looked like a harbor. There was an ocean to my left and there were market tents and stands on both sides. The architecture was vaguely similar to Feudal Japan. I had 2 people with me, though I was not in enough control of my body to see who they were.
I saw someone ahead of me running from a group of people. They were holding an oily black sphere. one of the people beside me, Kingston, dressed in a thicker outfit than usual, yelled at me to chase him and the girl on the other side with spikes instead of hair, encouraged me to go after him but in a softer voice.
- I woke up in a jungle. I was behind a vehicle. I felt more awake than usual. Someone was next to me and I could not look at them without activating my fight or flight response. A tall blue guy wearing welding goggles said something about the car while working on it. I assume that we had broken down and he was trying to fix it.
- I woke up to a tight circular metal room with doors. The room was filled with buttons and levers on a round curved bench that lined the walls and it had a very steampunk aesthetic. There was a staircase that lead down. The 2 doors were open and when I went out, I saw a railing that went around the outside of the small room. The only thing that I can compare the obvious water vehicle to, is the life raft at the end of the videogame Bioshock 2.
I waited a long time and was bored. He told me to be patient. Eventually a kind of ship arrived and he told me that they are not to see me, as the people on board do not like me because of what I had done. I asked what I did wrong but he refused to tell me. At some point, I fell unconscious. I woke up in bed.
- I have a small memory of waking up and in doing so, getting a bit behind the people that I was obviously following. I caught up with them and tried getting their attention. They said hello to me and I kept following them. They were the tall blue guy, the girl with spikes, the guy with the mechanical arms and Kingston. I do not remember falling unconscious but I woke up in bed.
- I woke up to someone pulling me up off the floor. My surroundings were metal. The person pulling me off the floor was tall, blue and wearing a trench coat. They looked at me and asked me if I remembered them. I told them them that I did but not really.
I could feel what felt like pure energy running through my hands and when I looked down, my hands were glowing orange. Not having anything else to do, I put my hands out and just thought "hehe, it's like magic in Skyrim" and jokingly put my hands out to "Shoot Flames". Instead, orange energy with sparks started to come out of my hands. I looked at the person who seemed familiar and he nodded with a smile saying "Go ahead!".
I leapt at the two people who were moments ago bullying and tormenting me. I jump on the one on the right, punching him in the face. I fear the one next to me will try to stop me and so I jump, without effort, onto a wall, laughing and the leap back. I continue jumping in and out, throwing various punches and attacks, until all that is left is an unmoving gory mess and by the end I feel unstoppable.
The tall blue man who had obviously come to rescue me says "Okay, that is enough" and I fall unconscious. I wake up in bed.
- I wake up on the ground. It is concrete, as are my surroundings. Kingston runs up to me and hands me an ear piece, says to listen carefully and then disappears. I do not remember hearing a voice through the ear piece at any time. I walk around for a bit and it reminds me of a building in my school and I think that I am there for a moment but I knew that it could not be because nothing else is familiar and it is far too large.
I see someone tall and they glance at me for a moment before whipping their head around and staring at me. I realized they are not friendly and run away. I did not count the arms.
I walk down a pathway and notice a few public benches in front of a small fenced off decorative public bush with the wood chips beneath it. There are 2 staircases on either side of the fenced off bush, leading to what seemed like an oval and there appeared to be a helicopter or some kind of aerial vehicle, landing on said oval. I was not sure if it was there to save me or not and so I approached the staircase cautiously.
Eventually, what looked like a SWAT member started walking down the stairs. I noticed what looked like metal beams moving very fast behind his back and even before I noticed that, I realized that he was not any kind of SWAT member or cop. I panicked and ran. I heard him yell "WAIT! I'M A FRIEND!" and I responded with "WHY IN THE FUCK WOULD I BELIEVE YOU?!". In a lower voice I heard him say "Good point".
I felt my feet dragged out from under me and myself being dragged away. I tried digging my nails into the concrete and realizing that it was pointless, painful and stereotypical of every B grade horror movie, I stopped. Just as I stopped being a stereotype, my body was picked up and made to face my "Friend". I realized that mechanical arms that came from his back held me up off the ground. I told him to wait desperately, repeating myself over and over before I saw one of his mechanical arms move next to my neck/head and then I fell unconscious. I woke up in bed.
- I felt wind on my face. I felt something really close to my face. My tiredness disappeared and alertness took over. I opened my eyes and what looked like a shredded face was millimeters from my own. The faces lips moved and I heard them say "Boo!".
After they stopped laughing, they told me that they needed me to come with them. I said that I just wanted to go home and they told me that I could, if I came with them. I assumed that they were trying to trick me, so I ran the opposite direction. They yelled after me telling me that I needed to stop doing this.
I reached a cliff and managed to find a few paths down the side of it and get away from my pursuers. I don't remember how but I stumbled up what looked like a military outpost. There were tents, a few temporary looking structures and a strange rounded pyramid shaped tank. The tank had what looked like a pivoting sphere on the top with the barrel attached to one of the sides. When I arrived, the whole place woke up. I started running as people were leaving the tents and structures with guns. The tank woke up.
The 4 people who were pursuing me caught up and managed to save me. They obviously were not happy, as I got them into a gun fight instead of just listening. I do not remember falling unconscious but I woke up in bed.
Sometimes after remembering one of these dreams, I would tell my mother and I would say how weird it is that I keep having dreams with the same people. This on it's own is strange as I never remembered any key parts of any of the dreams when telling my mother. Either I only remembered the characters within the "Dreams" or I only remembered when thinking about the latest "Dream".
2021 - Now
One late night, I had the sudden inexplicable urge to research aliens. I had found so many links to various articles and stories but a lot of it seemed ridiculous. After a few hours, I got a strange vision. It lasted less than half a second but it was unmistakable. A pair of eyes in blue sunken sockets.I went on Reddit, creating my first Reddit Account (As far as I am aware) and going to the appropriate subreddits, asking questions. I started getting memories of a family of blue aliens and being terrified. I had various memories of walking down the corridors of a ship.
The next day was the day I moved in with the family of my mothers previously "Just a friend" . In my new home, I kept getting these memories. I eventually met a Reddit user who seems to have deleted his account. We both helped each other remember something... terrifying.
We remembered cephalopodic beings in suits. They seemed to like crystals and had rings around their fingers attached to strings which attached to computers. I began Calling them pianists. Eventually he started to doubt himself and I never heard from him again. He did however mention glowing orbs that followed him as a child and have since started following his own child. I also remember the orbs following me as a child.
I started to realize that a lot of the previous memories that I had remembered just did not happen. Eventually I started remembering more memories that I eventually realized did not happen. Not all of the memories however were false. Eventually the memories started to become real mixed with fake. What was real and false started to become clearer and eventually certain "Characters" in these memories started to become more consistent and stop being replaced by other fake "Characters".
I started getting memories of meeting a porcupine girl when I was 4-5. She seemed like a mix between a Human and a porcupine. I also remembered a guy with mechanical arms and his face was deformed and repaired with metal. I also started getting memories of Jesters with multiple arms... too many arms.
After enough time, the memories of the Human porcupine and the deformed man with mechanical arms changed. The man with mechanical arms was no longer deformed and was now wearing a mask and due to his similarity to an aforementioned videogame character, I began calling him Spectre. The porcupine girl stopped looking so Human and instead looked more like a girl with spikes instead of hair. I remembered that there indeed was another girl that looked Human. She had bleached white skin, black hair, black clothes and she loved to give everyone attitude.
Eventually, I met another user on Reddit who was and is very useful. He told me about his unique abilities and since he has been given multiple visions, some of which are visions of different people which I eventually learned were my past incarnations. He has also been given visions of the cephalopodic beings and a few details were made clearer. Their appearance is similar enough to the fictional DND species Illithids that I changed the spelling around and began calling them Ithilids and oddly enough, I also started reading it like that too. Eventually the real memories became obvious and very consistent.
After learning some stuff from that user, he told me that he had a vision while he was sleeping. In that vision, a tall ethereal man in a trench coat with a cybernetic arm and welding goggles contacted him. He only said "Say goodbye to your buddy Murtons" before messing around inside his head. I eventually remembered him. He was the tall blue guy. His name is Mason.
I have since remembered previous lives, 5 to be exact. What happened in them will be discussed in future posts, if future posts are wanted. What I have remembered about my current life will also be discussed in future posts if those future posts are wanted. What I will say is this: 3 of those 4 people are from my previous life and all 4 are my family. They have recently started visiting me after I fall asleep and I am certain that they are not dreams. They are also not the abducting kind in the slightest (Even though... yeah... they do technically abduct me). If you got to know them, within less than a week, they would seem like regular people (Because they are) and their physical appearance would no longer bother you. They are supposed to come back in August and I am so excited.
In one of my recent visits from my family, I learned that the girl with spikes for hair is called Piper.
Something Weird
Upon reading the KGB Secret Alien Races Book, I noticed 3 things in all of the obvious misinformation. 3 things which terrify me and also helped to make some memories clearer.
- The Caraveldi mentioned in the book are reported to be about 9 ft tall, have 4 arms and be extremely dangerous. This is an identical description to the Jesters that I remember and the thing that I saw on Mars.
- At the end of the book are different "Notes". Most are just gibberish or fake quotes. They do however mention something about Putin being chosen to start an avalanche. Before recently, people had assumed that it was referencing one of his other actions, especially due to another quote talking about Medvedev.
- In the notes section, there is a quote. The quote reads "Why do Australian Humans do not see September 23?". I am Australian and that is my birthday and as far as I am aware, the book was first made in 2008, the year that I met my family for the first time in this life. Creepy.
Your Choice
It is entirely your choice in what order I make my posts. I can put them all in chronological order and the give the Information Dump. I can do the posts on this life first and then the aforementioned order or whatever order is wanted. It is your choice.
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On a side note, I am well aware that people are going to try to call me out as a LARP or for trying to create an ARG or trying to be a TAA copy cat. I am not trying to do any of that nor am I writing fiction. I am doing this to try to help people and also help myself by actually putting this out there instead of keeping it in. I would actually like to talk with people but if you are going to troll, please do not bother. I get enough ridicule from every other Human that I tell about my memories, so please do not think that your words hurts.
I am also sure that I do not have any medical issues that could be causing delusions or visions. Thank you for your concern in advance.
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Murtons Out...
2023.03.24 13:03 CaptVaughnTrap 10 Ways Daisy Jones on Amazon series destroyed the book by turning TJR’s uniquely iconic characters into tropes to make bland TV. SPOILERS!
Overall it is a good, yet formulaic TV show that had potential for greatness. Instead they destroyed the source material to dumb it down for broad mainstream audiences. Here are my top 10 tropes:
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- The mean mommy trope. Book Daisy wasn’t abused. She was overindulged, displayed, financially spoiled and ignored. The shoehorned in mean mommy in episode 1 & 10 are book ends to everything wrong with this adaptation. Leading into…
- The wide-eyed ingénue trope. Innocent abused and sheltered Daisy arrives on the sunset strip to discover music and is taken advantage of by those mean, mean men. Book Daisy is confirmed gone.
- The waitress struggling to make it trope. Now instead of the iconic “it-girl” dating musicians and living it up at chateaux marmot on her parents dime and sporting free Halstons (that Billy later describes as “talent wasted on people like daisy”). She bootstrapping it as a waitress and couch-surfing with her [honorable mention trope] wise black woman BFF.
- The insecure “who-me?” trope. Instead of the overconfident Daisy who is signed to a label without working for it, and is almost sued because she will only record her own stuff (which is actually not yet good) we get the singersong writer nervously trying to make ends meet who can’t decide if she’s really a good singer songwriter only to discover gee…I really am good when she helps create the first hit song! 😱 We also lose more of that iconic tank top & coke vial Daisy we love from the book to get love stricken weak Daisy (more to discuss later).
- The nice guy friend-zoned by the hot girl trope. Karen and Graham in the book had the hots for each other right away, but in the TV show their sexy from the get go relationship is turned into the “she didn’t notice him till he got another girl then suddenly wants him” trope. The whole third wheel date episode was a waste of space and offensive to Karen’s book character and just makes her look jealous and petty. Karen is not the driven musician who of course would never choose family life over her career. She’s barely featured beyond this mundane episode.
- The victim wife trope. Camilla in the book is not the doe-eyed girl who just follows Billy to LA. She chooses to love Billy despite his flaws and cheating and darkness and acknowledges that monogamy in marriage isn’t necessarily a requirement for happiness. In the book her love/caring for Daisy and poweconfidence in herself and her family is demonstrated when she tells Daisy Billy will never leave his family. Daisy needs to recognize she’s destroying herself and Camilla asks her to leave the band to save herself. We also lose the documentarian reveal in this scene as well, which is later revived with a less impactful replacement.
- The hooker with a heart of gold trope. Of course Nic would never be the abusive Italian prince (of which there are actually hundreds—see Fox reality TV in 2000’s) conman keeping Daisy loaded up on drugs. He’s just a misunderstood Irish prince (what?!?!) aristocrat whose parents died and he’s been so sad till he found Daisy and can’t stand losing her so he has to flee rather than see her die.
- The Saved by the Boy trope. In one fell swoop one of the most important moments of the book is erased when instead of waking up in the shower to see Nic would let her die rather than call the police, and Daisy reclaims her power, she’s instead saved by the boy (she even tells him “you saved me!” in the following episode). We never get the iconic line “Leave him a message: Lola LaCava wants a divorce.” Nor “That part of my life is over now”. We don’t get to see a fully realized Daisy win a Grammy or become the absolute icon as she is written. She stays small and is a forgettable singer in a band you might remember from the late 70’s.
- The manic pixie dream girl trope. TV Billy is drinking prepared to leave his wife & child until Daisy decides magnanimously to send him back to his family after teaching him that he would only be hurting everyone by choosing her and her unobtainable manic pixie ways. Gone is the choose tequila/Daisy or your family mental showdown at the bar with the stranger where Billy chooses his family for himself (“again and again and will always make that choice”)—just as Camilla is telling that same thing to Daisy at the same time in another part of the hotel.
- The will they or won’t they trope. This is probably the most damaging part of the tv adaptation. The story of this band’s separate origins & evolution greatness and sudden disappearance is no longer the story. Instead it’s replaced by predictable “they’ve always loved each other, when will they finally get together” tension. The book never discusses Billy loving, let alone kissing Daisy. He always maintains how much he hates her excesses and drug abuse and how she destroys Honeycomb by adding questions. Is that unreliable narrator because he’s talking to his daughter? Maybe. But his struggles with alcohol & drugs are his demon, not Daisy. He hates how she makes him look at his own insecurities around his addiction and fear of losing his family. We also lose the impactful scene when Billy tries to get Daisy into rehab only to find out Teddy has died and abandons her. We lose entirely the momentous band scenes spent out singing at the piano bar with Jonah when rolling stone writes the “six who should be seven” headline and the iconic SNL performance that starts to turn the narrative to a possible Billy & Daisy angle. These are affordable, bottle location episodes, which drive story and character, and could easily replace the Greece episode. Yes, Daisy does love Billy but she doesn’t acknowledge that until nearly the end of the book, after she has embraced her own power is and fully self aware and she sings Honeycomb to Billy the way he wrote it. The love story is not driving narrative the entire time. Towards the end it starts to rip apart her soul when she’s not burying it with drugs, and might force Billy off the wagon, and it becomes tragic in its own right.
2023.03.24 12:51 SpRaY123123 [Store] Over 350 Knives & Gloves Karambit gamma doppler Phase 2 fn 0.03, Awp medusa ft 0.35, M9 marble fade fn 0.007, Butterfly damascus steel fn 0.06, M9 slaughter fn 0.03, M9 autotronic ft 0.32, Karambit black laminate ft 0.20, Bowie ruby 0.02 fn, Bayonet fade fn 0.03, Stiletto fade fn 0.007
[Store] Over 350 Knives & Gloves Karambit gamma doppler Phase 2 fn 0.03, Awp medusa ft 0.35, M9 marble fade fn 0.007, Butterfly damascus steel fn 0.06, M9 slaughter fn 0.03, M9 autotronic ft 0.32, Karambit black laminate ft 0.20, Bowie ruby 0.02 fn, Bayonet fade fn 0.03, Stiletto fade fn 0.007
📷Store
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Profile : https://steamcommunity.com/id/SpRaYeRRRR
Items B/O :
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★ Stiletto Boreal Forest (Field-Tested) B/O 205$
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Have more items that are not listed here, check my inventory if u want and hit me up if you`re interested!
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📷Store
Accepting csgo skins only.
Tradelink : https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffenew/?partner=123980288&token=5OeD13Oi
Profile : https://steamcommunity.com/id/SpRaYeRRRR
Items B/O :
★ Karambit Gamma Doppler Phase 2 (Factory New) B/O 2120$
★ Awp Medusa (Field-Tested) B/O 2100$
★ Butterfly Vanilla B/O 1600$
★ M9 Marble Fade (Factory New) B/O 1280$
★ Butterfly Damascus Steel (Factory New) B/O 1120$ ★ M9 Vanilla B/O 1065$ ★ M9 Slaughter (Factory New) B/O 1040$
★ Moto Gloves Pow! (Minimal Wear) 960$
★ M9 Autotronic (Field-Tested) 950$
★ Karambit Black Laminate (Field-Tested) B/O 875$
★ Bowie Ruby (Factory New) B/O 860$ ★ Hand Wraps Cobalt Skulls (Field-Tested) 650$
★ ST Flip Crimson Web (Minimal Wear) 640$ ★ Karambit Rust coat (Battle-Scarred) B/O 550$
★ M9 Blue Steel (Well-Worn) B/O 535$
★ Stiletto Doppler Phase 3 (Factory New) B/O 525$
★ Bayonet Doppler Phase 1 (Factory New) B/O 510$
★ ST M9 Scorched (Battle-Scarred) B/O 500$ ★ Flip Marble Fade (Factory New) B/O 492$ ★ Shadow Daggers Ruby (Factory New) B/O 488$
★ Paracord Crimson Web (Minimal Wear) 475$
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Have more items that are not listed here, check my inventory if u want and hit me up if you`re interested!
2023.03.24 12:48 NikkolasKing Dutch - Romanticism & Civilization
turncloaks asked in a thread a few weeks ago on why Dutch is opposed to civilization. I wanted to offer a thorough reply based on my own amateurish philosophical readings.
First off, we have to look at what RDR shows us of "Civilization"
"Okay, there she is...a real city...the future."
Civilization Triumphant
Notice how Saint-Denis is basically Mordor from Lord of the Rings. (or more like Isengard for hardcore LOTR nerds - an outpost of brutal industrialization in a still wild land) Imposing, ominous, a black stain upon pure wilderness. By RDR1, "the future" Dutch and Arthur so detested was here in force. John has to listen to rich hags brag about how they've "civilized" the Natives, either by genociding them or reducing them to living like animals, while a priest - a symbol of "civilized purity and goodness" - boasts about how savages don't get to go to Heaven.
We've set the scene, we've set the mood. The games are unambiguous in that "Progress" is disgusting, immoral, and inevitable.
Part of what drew me to the game in the first place was what I read of the character of Dutch van der Linde. This game ultimately might be the story of one man's (Arthur's) journey to redemption but as compelling as that is, it wasn't what drew me to play it for myself. I was far more intrigued by the overarching story of the gang as a whole - the story of these holdouts fighting the encroachment of civilization and capitalism. I had sympathies with al this long before I heard of this game, or even before it came out. I might not be a philosopher or even a philosophy student, but I have done my best to read and learn since about 2016 or so. I figured I could share at least some of that with other fans and help flesh out the game. A great piece of art has to say something in my view so what is Red Dead Redemption 2 saying?
Firstly....
Arthur: We're thieves, in a world that don't want us no more.
Dutch: We are dreamers, in an ever-duller world of facts, I'll give you that.
Dutch: It's the illlnes of romantics.
Arthur: What is?
Dutch: Hope
What is Romanticism?
I think this fits Dutch's overall philosophy to the letter. In fact, it might be an underlying philosophy of the game, too. The feeling of "loss," of being obsolete and unwanted, of "none of this really matters" is present from the start, even in the more joyful parts of the game. I remember Arthur having a talk with Mary-Beth all the way in Chapter 2 about how none of this matters because the world doesn't want people like them anymore. They fight and they fight and they fight, and none of it did any good, as Dutch says himself in RDR1. Arthur may have realized it sooner, or he may have simply accepted it sooner, owing more to his very different temperament from Dutch. But I don't think enough people really stress how very similar Dutch and Arthur are in their basic view of the world, the main difference is how they act on this worldview. John is the same. Our two heroes fundamentally agree with Dutch in their disdain for civilization.
That is how I understood the whole relationship Arthur had with both Hamish and especially Charlotte To continue quoting from the book:
This is Charlotte to the letter. In order to discover a more true, authentic, and noble life, she and her husband fled the city and the modern world. Hamish doesn't say he specifically did this but, as Arthur points out, it isn't like he gets much company where he lives. He lives off the land just like Charlotte does. To me, this feels like Arthur's ultimate "tendency" as the book calls it. There is no pushing back the modern world, the best you can do is retreat from it and save your soul by living in harmony with the natural world. Arthur bonds with Hamish over this simple way of life and he teaches Charlotte how to survive this way of life. These are two people living his dream, in essence.
Dutch, by contrast...
Colm: Better world...pure world... How's that coming along?
Dutch: Just fine.
[...]
Dutch: We're trying to reform society to a kinder, truer, better way.
Dutch would never be content with the life of Charlotte. As said in the book, it's an illusion. The modern world and all its incomparable evils are still there, still growing, you're just turning a blind eye to them. You have to fight back, you have to try and build something real, to "improve things," like Hosea says Dutch taught him.
And to quote a description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from a different book....
Dutch says at one point that, for as bad as the New World is, the Old World was even worse. While some things may be open to interpretation about his character, his hatred for the Old World - which arguably manifests in his hatred of the Old South given its close likeness to America's European ancestry - seems beyond doubt to me. He is not content with simply retreating from the modern world, nor is he happy to try and rebuild some ancient society. He wants something radically different from both the past and present. He wants to take those modern ideals of liberation and realize them, turn them from just a fiction on a piece of paper to a real utopia. Fight back against modernity tooth and nail, don't run from it is how I view him vs. Arthur. Could be the difference between an idealist (Dutch) and a realist (Arthur).
If there is any past he might valorize or deem noble, it is that of non-European peoples, like Native Americans. To quote yet another book on Rousseau:
Remember how Dutch shoots down Bill's racism on the way to kill Bronte. Note how he follows this up by talking about how he had tried to "teach" all of them something. What had he tried to teach? That America far away from European tyranny was "God's last creation." I suspect it's as close as anything to Dutch's ideal.
Now, a word that comes up a lot in RDR is "Civilization." Arthur says it right at the start and it's repeated all throughout the game. Well, what is civilization? It's another tricky word to define. I enjoy this distinction and definition:
Civilization is, in brief, the most superficial things humans have ever created. In the name of so-called progress or morality, It is the opening of RDR1. Enlightened Europeans and Americans destroyed "primitive" peoples and ways of life. Now people get to live in complacency and arrogance about how they're oh so much better than everyone who came before when in reality they're infinitely worse off in all the ways that truly matter. George Bernard Shaw framed it as:
In conclusion, let me answer the question I posted at the beginning. "What is Red Dead saying?" The American government and industrialists have perpetrated crimes that dwarf anything the gang ever could have done. They erased entire Peoples and cultures. Thousands, tens of thousands, dead, countless more ethnically cleansed. Dutch and Arthur and the gang lived in a time when the United States was a genocidal empire and they saw it first hand. They tried to fight it, they tried to maintain some freedom. That is why the gang is mostly composed of exploited people like various minorities or the women or even drug addicts. No matter how bad they were, they were better to their own than the state was to its own. The gang fought hard for Dutch's "savage utopia" but the war was over before it began, just like all groups who tried to fight "Civilization."
submitted by NikkolasKing to RDR2 [link] [comments]
First off, we have to look at what RDR shows us of "Civilization"
"Okay, there she is...a real city...the future."
Civilization Triumphant
Notice how Saint-Denis is basically Mordor from Lord of the Rings. (or more like Isengard for hardcore LOTR nerds - an outpost of brutal industrialization in a still wild land) Imposing, ominous, a black stain upon pure wilderness. By RDR1, "the future" Dutch and Arthur so detested was here in force. John has to listen to rich hags brag about how they've "civilized" the Natives, either by genociding them or reducing them to living like animals, while a priest - a symbol of "civilized purity and goodness" - boasts about how savages don't get to go to Heaven.
We've set the scene, we've set the mood. The games are unambiguous in that "Progress" is disgusting, immoral, and inevitable.
Part of what drew me to the game in the first place was what I read of the character of Dutch van der Linde. This game ultimately might be the story of one man's (Arthur's) journey to redemption but as compelling as that is, it wasn't what drew me to play it for myself. I was far more intrigued by the overarching story of the gang as a whole - the story of these holdouts fighting the encroachment of civilization and capitalism. I had sympathies with al this long before I heard of this game, or even before it came out. I might not be a philosopher or even a philosophy student, but I have done my best to read and learn since about 2016 or so. I figured I could share at least some of that with other fans and help flesh out the game. A great piece of art has to say something in my view so what is Red Dead Redemption 2 saying?
Firstly....
Arthur: We're thieves, in a world that don't want us no more.
Dutch: We are dreamers, in an ever-duller world of facts, I'll give you that.
Dutch: It's the illlnes of romantics.
Arthur: What is?
Dutch: Hope
What is Romanticism?
Having posited a rejection of capitalist modernity as the foundation and first phase of Romanticism, we need to specify our concept further, since Romanticism represents just one modality, a particular tonality in which critiques of the modern world may be couched. The Romantic critique is bound up with an experience of loss. The Romantic vision is characterized by the painful and melancholic conviction that in modern reality something precious has been lost, at the level of both individuals and humanity at large; certain essential human values have been alienated. This alienation, keenly sensed, is often experienced as exile: in defining the Romantic sensibility, Friedrich Schlegel speaks of the soul “under the willows of exile” (unter den Trauerweiden der Verbannung);44 the soul, the seat of humanness, now lives far removed from its true hearth or homeland (Heimat); thus according to Arnold Hauser “the feeling of homelessness (Heimatslosigkeit) and loneliness became the fundamental experience” of the Romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century.45 And Walter Benjamin, himself deeply imbued with this worldview, sees in the German Romantics’ appeal to dream life an indication of the obstacles raised by real life on the “path of the soul’s homeward journey to the motherland” (der Heimweg der Seele ins Mutterland).46Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
The soul ardently desires to go home again, to return to its homeland, in the spiritual sense, and this nostalgia is at the heart of the Romantic attitude. What is lacking in the present existed once upon a time, in a more or less distant past. The defining characteristic of that past is its difference from the present: the past is the period in which the various modern alienations did not yet exist. Romantic nostalgia looks to a precapitalist past, or at least to a past in which the modern socioeconomic system was not yet fully developed. Thus nostalgia for the past is—to borrow a term from Marx and Engels, who noted this feature among the English capitalists—“closely linked” to the critique of the capitalist world.47
The past that is the object of nostalgia may be entirely mythological or legendary, as in the reference to Eden, to the Golden Age, or to the lost Atlantis. It may also constitute a personal myth, like the “mysterious City” in Nerval’s Aurélia.48 But even in the many instances in which a real historical past is invoked, the past is always idealized. The Romantic vision selects a moment from the actual past in which the harmful characteristics of modernity did not yet exist and in which the human values that have been since stifled by modernity were still operative; that moment is then transformed into a utopia, shaped as the embodiment of Romantic aspirations. This is one way to explain the seeming paradox according to which the Romantic orientation toward the past can also involve looking ahead; the image of a dreamed-of future beyond the contemporary world is inscribed within the evocation of a precapitalist era.
[…]
Primitive societies, the Hebrew people of the biblical era, Greek and Roman antiquity, the English Renaissance, the Old Regime in France—all these served as vehicles for the Romantic vision. The choice—and especially the interpretation—of a particular period in the past depended on the specific orientation of the form of Romanticism in question.
Nostalgia for a lost paradise is generally accompanied by a quest for what has been lost. An active principle at the heart of Romanticism has often been noted in various forms: anxiety, a state of perpetual becoming, interrogation, quest, struggle. In general, then, a third moment is constituted by an active response, an attempt to find or to re-create the ideal past state; there is such a thing, nevertheless, as a resigned Romanticism.
I think this fits Dutch's overall philosophy to the letter. In fact, it might be an underlying philosophy of the game, too. The feeling of "loss," of being obsolete and unwanted, of "none of this really matters" is present from the start, even in the more joyful parts of the game. I remember Arthur having a talk with Mary-Beth all the way in Chapter 2 about how none of this matters because the world doesn't want people like them anymore. They fight and they fight and they fight, and none of it did any good, as Dutch says himself in RDR1. Arthur may have realized it sooner, or he may have simply accepted it sooner, owing more to his very different temperament from Dutch. But I don't think enough people really stress how very similar Dutch and Arthur are in their basic view of the world, the main difference is how they act on this worldview. John is the same. Our two heroes fundamentally agree with Dutch in their disdain for civilization.
That is how I understood the whole relationship Arthur had with both Hamish and especially Charlotte To continue quoting from the book:
A second tendency seeks to rediscover paradise in present reality. [...] But one may also choose to flee bourgeois society, leaving cities behind for the country, trading modern countries for exotic ones, abandoning the centers of capitalist development for some “elsewhere” that keeps a more primitive past alive in the present. The approach of exoticism is a search for a past in the present by a mere displacement in space. Nodier brings the fundamental principle of exoticism to light when he explains that his tales Smarra and Trilby are set in a wild Scottish landscape because it is only by leaving Europe behind that one can find remnants of humanity’s springtime, an idyllic period in which the sources of the imagination and sensitivity had not yet dried up.53Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
This is Charlotte to the letter. In order to discover a more true, authentic, and noble life, she and her husband fled the city and the modern world. Hamish doesn't say he specifically did this but, as Arthur points out, it isn't like he gets much company where he lives. He lives off the land just like Charlotte does. To me, this feels like Arthur's ultimate "tendency" as the book calls it. There is no pushing back the modern world, the best you can do is retreat from it and save your soul by living in harmony with the natural world. Arthur bonds with Hamish over this simple way of life and he teaches Charlotte how to survive this way of life. These are two people living his dream, in essence.
Dutch, by contrast...
A third tendency holds the preceding solutions to be illusory, or in any event merely partial; it embarks on the path of authentic future realization. [...] From the standpoint that is oriented toward future accomplishments, that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Morris, or Walter Benjamin, for example, the recollection of the past serves as a weapon in the struggle for the future. A well-known poem by Blake gives remarkable expression to this view. In a short text that is part of the preface to Milton, the poet wonders whether the divine presence manifested itself in England “in ancient time,” before its hills were covered by “these dark Satanic mills.” In conclusion, he commits himself to a “spiritual struggle” that will end only when “we have built Jerusalem/in Englands green & pleasant land.”55 In this form of Romanticism, the quest aims at the creation of a new Jerusalem.Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
Colm: Better world...pure world... How's that coming along?
Dutch: Just fine.
[...]
Dutch: We're trying to reform society to a kinder, truer, better way.
Dutch would never be content with the life of Charlotte. As said in the book, it's an illusion. The modern world and all its incomparable evils are still there, still growing, you're just turning a blind eye to them. You have to fight back, you have to try and build something real, to "improve things," like Hosea says Dutch taught him.
And to quote a description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from a different book....
To describe that influence in a somewhat different way, Rousseau may be said to have inaugurated the “radical tradition” of philosophical discontent with modernity which, since his time, has formed a permanent and integral part of modernity itself—culminating today in the declaration of a new, “post-modern” era. Standing at the threshold of the “modern age” inaugurated by the American, French, and Industrial revolutions, the threshold of that long journey toward technological, welfare-capitalist/socialist, liberal, mass, democratic society that today still goes by the name of “modernization”—Rousseau was the first to cry, “stop.” And in presenting his classic diagnosis of the ills of modern society—the loss of social and psychic unity—he defined the problem which succeeding generations of critical thinkers would try to solve.The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought
Of course, Rousseau was not simply the first to cry stop to modernization, since many had done so before him in the name of the ancien regime and the old monarchic and Christian principles. But he was the first to do so as a more advanced adherent of the new modern ideas. The Enlightenment and the new Party of Reason had plenty of enemies; Rousseau was its first defector, its first “dialectical” opponent. His defection, moreover, turned out to be the founding event of a since unbroken tradition of modern self-hatred, of protest against modernity arising from within the modern camp, and the first clear indication of the theoretical instability and continuously self-devouring character of the modern revolution.
In other words, Rousseau became the prototype of the modern alienated intellectual: the thinker who agrees with the modern rejection of the principles that underlay the classical and Christian worlds, but who nevertheless loathes the new world that these modern ideas have created. Knowing the man-made character of this world, and blaming it for the unhealthy state of his own soul, he seeks the restoration of the world and his soul through a still more radical, progressive application of these modern ideas.
Dutch says at one point that, for as bad as the New World is, the Old World was even worse. While some things may be open to interpretation about his character, his hatred for the Old World - which arguably manifests in his hatred of the Old South given its close likeness to America's European ancestry - seems beyond doubt to me. He is not content with simply retreating from the modern world, nor is he happy to try and rebuild some ancient society. He wants something radically different from both the past and present. He wants to take those modern ideals of liberation and realize them, turn them from just a fiction on a piece of paper to a real utopia. Fight back against modernity tooth and nail, don't run from it is how I view him vs. Arthur. Could be the difference between an idealist (Dutch) and a realist (Arthur).
If there is any past he might valorize or deem noble, it is that of non-European peoples, like Native Americans. To quote yet another book on Rousseau:
The origins of what we call the romantic “enchanted garden” can be found among the early romantics, that is to say the writers and philosophers usually identified as romantic. Although for us the romantic worldview is not limited to the so-called Romantic period but is alive in modern culture up to the present, the early romantics were undoubtedly the ones who laid the first stepping-stones of the unfinished romantic narrative. Romanticism of course does not have a single birth date. But if we wanted to pick one moment as a symbolic starting point it might be 1755, the year in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. This astonishing document constitutes perhaps the first romantic manifesto, with its ferocious critique of modern civilization and celebration of the “noble savage.” The association between these two topoi is to be found among many later romantic writers and artists, from the eighteenth century up to our time, as will be evident throughout this book.Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature
While Voltaire, the great proponent of Enlightenment and progress, pictures indigenous peoples as anthropophagic barbarians in his philosophical satire Candide (1759), the romantic Rousseau sees them as “the true youth of the world.” For him, all the subsequent steps of progress, which were supposed to lead towards the perfection of the individual, “were in effect steps towards the degradation (décrépitude) of the species.” The savage “breathes only rest and freedom,” while civilized man “works until he dies” and is “proud of his serfdom.”10 In fact, Rousseau emphasizes, the barbarian “refuses to bow his head to the yoke that the civilized person bears without grumbling,” and prefers the most dangerous freedom to the most peaceful submission. In a passage that seems almost to foresee anticolonial struggles, Rousseau argues that the love of freedom is so strong among “savages” that they “are willing to face hunger, fire, iron and death to keep their independence.”11 Although the philosopher’s “state of nature” may be a fiction, his portrayal of the life of primitive peoples is almost surely based on travelers reports. Rousseau in any case often explicitly refers in his essay to specific groups: Hottentots, Caribbeans, and “savages of the Americas.”12
Remember how Dutch shoots down Bill's racism on the way to kill Bronte. Note how he follows this up by talking about how he had tried to "teach" all of them something. What had he tried to teach? That America far away from European tyranny was "God's last creation." I suspect it's as close as anything to Dutch's ideal.
Now, a word that comes up a lot in RDR is "Civilization." Arthur says it right at the start and it's repeated all throughout the game. Well, what is civilization? It's another tricky word to define. I enjoy this distinction and definition:
Our word “culture” and the German term “Kultur” are both derived from the Latin colere, “to cultivate.” In the early modern period, it was used – rather rarely – as a metaphor to describe the social and political “cultivation” of civilization, the process of civilizing a person out of a barbaric state. In the late eighteenth century, however, the notion of culture underwent a significant change, transformed in the thought of J. G. Herder, Immanuel Kant, and J. G. Fichte.6 After this transformation, culture became a quite frequent – even everyday term – in the West.7Nietzsche's Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period
The main change these thinkers effected was to oppose culture and civilization. Along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, these philosophers challenged civilization and the civilized person.8 According to this critique, civilization satisfies our bodily needs and creates external order and peace, but it fails to attend to our spiritual needs and inner longings. Modern civilization possesses an artificial character – in its manners, its impersonal bureaucratic forms of rule, its obsession with economic development – that destroys the spiritual unity of the people. Moreover, the secular character of modern civilization – in particular, the decline of religious influence on individuals’ lives, summed up by Nietzsche as the “death of God” – frustrates our spiritual need for our life to have meaning or significance. In short, modern civilization reliably produces comfort, pleasure, wealth, and abundance, but it also undermines communal belonging, civic virtue and nobility, and spiritual self-development.
These thinkers did not want to turn back the clock to ancient politics or medieval religious societies, but rather developed another form of community alongside civilization, a distinctively modern form of spiritual community that could infuse meaning and purpose into modern civilization. They referred to this form of community as Kultur. 9 They drew on the received notion of culture as involving a process of education but decisively transformed the character of that education. Whereas civilization prepares individuals to be useful for the material aims of society, politics, and market, culture shapes individuals to participate in the common spiritual – especially moral, artistic, and philosophical – pursuit of the good life. For Kant, Fichte, and Herder, the purpose of culture is to realize human freedom, for the human spirit to elevate itself out of a condition of animal instinct and determine its own fate. Culture, then, is a replacement for the role of religion in political society and human life, but instead of serving the purpose of reflecting the will of God, culture serves to reflect and ennoble humanity’s freedom. In other words, according to these philosophers, culture is not opposed to freedom and equality but at its very origins was understood to be the proper realization of these goods.
For instance, consider this influential passage from Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent”:
We are cultivated [kultiviert] to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized [zivilisiert] to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and propensities. ... While the idea of morality is indeed present in culture [Kultur], an application of this idea which only extends to the semblances of morality, as in love of honor and outward propriety, amounts merely to civilization. But as long as states apply all their resources to their vain and violent schemes of expansion, thus incessantly obstructing the slow and laborious efforts of their citizens to cultivate their minds, and even deprive them of all support in these efforts, no progress in this direction can be expected. For a long internal process of careful work on the part of each commonwealth is necessary for the education [Bildung] of its citizens. (Idea 49)
For Kant, civilization undermines our project of moral progress, attaching us to the material goods of social status (through the “semblances of morality,” social manners) and political power (through state “expansion”). Culture, by contrast, promotes moral progress by attaching us to the ends of the arts and sciences and supplying us with the “idea of morality.” Finally, Kant suggests here that politics plays an important role in promoting culture in its people by supplying the right “education of its citizens.”10
While Kant speaks of the “splendid misery” of materialist civilization (Idea 49), Herder attacks the moral self-aggrandizement and chauvinism of modern Enlightenment civilization (LAH 380). For Herder, modern progressive civilization asks us to “over-extend” our “feelings,” which leads us to “blur them into mere words and generate nothing but misery for itself and everybody else,” whereas the “savage who loves himself, his wife and child, with quiet joy” is at peace with the world (Ideas 400).11 Like Kant, Herder opposes culture to civilization.12 He says that “culture” (Kultur) – derived from “the cultivation of the ground” – has as its purpose the “education” (Erziehung) and “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) of a people (Ideas 410). Culture consists in the “education of mankind” (Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts) (Ideas 407).
Civilization is, in brief, the most superficial things humans have ever created. In the name of so-called progress or morality, It is the opening of RDR1. Enlightened Europeans and Americans destroyed "primitive" peoples and ways of life. Now people get to live in complacency and arrogance about how they're oh so much better than everyone who came before when in reality they're infinitely worse off in all the ways that truly matter. George Bernard Shaw framed it as:
If you had said to him, 'We may be in hell ; but we feel extremely comfortable ', Ruskin, being a genuinely religious man, would have replied, That simply shows that you are dammed to the uttermost depths of damnation, because not only are you in hell, but you like being in hell'.Ruskin's Politics
In conclusion, let me answer the question I posted at the beginning. "What is Red Dead saying?" The American government and industrialists have perpetrated crimes that dwarf anything the gang ever could have done. They erased entire Peoples and cultures. Thousands, tens of thousands, dead, countless more ethnically cleansed. Dutch and Arthur and the gang lived in a time when the United States was a genocidal empire and they saw it first hand. They tried to fight it, they tried to maintain some freedom. That is why the gang is mostly composed of exploited people like various minorities or the women or even drug addicts. No matter how bad they were, they were better to their own than the state was to its own. The gang fought hard for Dutch's "savage utopia" but the war was over before it began, just like all groups who tried to fight "Civilization."
2023.03.24 12:38 Simple_Mechanic_6999 Purple stem?
 | submitted by Simple_Mechanic_6999 to RedHotChiliPeppers [link] [comments] |
2023.03.24 12:34 fatherandyriley Fixing the X-Men films redone
A while back I did an X-Men rewrite and u/killthebatman2475 credited me for my ideas when he did his own version. Looking at his version has made me want to go over my own rewrite again so I'd like to thank them for their help with this.
Here's the link to the original
Here's the film order:
submitted by fatherandyriley to fixingmovies [link] [comments]
Here's the link to the original
Here's the film order:
- X-Men (2000)
- X-Men 2 (2003)
- X-Men 3: The Last Stand (2005)
- X-Men 4: Dark Phoenix (2007)
- X-Men Origins Wolverine (2009)
- X-Factor (2010)
- X-Men First Class (2011)
- The Wolverine (2013)
- X-Men Days of Future Past (2014)
- X-Men the Shadow King (2015)
- Deadpool (2016)
- X-Men Apocalypse (2016)
- Logan (2017)
- Deadpool 2 (2018)
- X-Men Onslaught (2019)
- Since the original film is just over 100min with the extra characters in this version this would have a runtime of over 2hrs.
- The team also includes Beast (played by Kelsey Grammar), Banshee (played by Liam Neeson), Forge and they're the oldest team members as well as Colossus (who's a recent graduate of the school and the youngest member).
- When the team goes on missions at least one member will stay behind to watch over the school.
- The Brotherhood of Mutants also includes Pyro, Avalanche, the Blob and Gambit (played by Taylor Kitsch since he's only a year older than Anna Paquin). When we're introduced to Magneto's base, the 4 of them are shown playing poker and from their interactions we learn a bit about them. For a bit of comedy, despite Pyro's love of destruction he finds cheating at poker completely unacceptable.
- Gambit's girlfriend abandoned him when his powers first emerged and he went on the run and became a thief until Magneto took him in. He's more misguided than anything else and has his doubts about the Brotherhood.
- When the Blob's powers emerged he was attacked by a mob but due to his timid nature and self-esteem he didn't put up much of a fight until Magneto saved him. Similar to that scene in X2 with Pyro, Magneto played up the Blob's ego, told him he was a god among insects.
- Pyro and Avalanche are shown to have a close friendship, often joking with each other while causing destruction.
- We get a few more scenes at the school to expand on the X-Men, their roles at the school and their dynamics with each other. For example we see Banshee with his teenage daughter Siryn who's close friends with Kitty. Despite him being a superhero and a former interpol agent, Siryn finds him as embarrassing as any other parent.
- I'd remove Logan's love triangle with Jean and Scott. Any tension between Logan and Scott comes from the Scott's by the books approach contrasting with Logan's rule-breaking loner attitude.
- At the train station the X-Men (minus Beast) and Brotherhood fight. Colossus and Cyclops fight Blob. Forge is able to destroy Pyro's gauntlets while Storm and Banshee put out his flames and they capture him and bring him back to the mansion where they learn about Magneto's plan.
- When the X-Men (minus Colossus) arrive at the Statue of Liberty the entrance is guarded by Avalanche and the Blob.
- Storm fights off Avalanche and Forge and Banshee fight off the Blob while the others enter.
- Wolverine fights Mystique while Beast fights Toad and Cyclops and Jean fight Gambit. Jean uses her telekinesis to throw Gambit's cards back at him. Toad and Gambit are forced to retreat further up.
- The team regroups but are captured by Magneto.
- Unable to bear Rogue's cries for help any longer, Gambit frees Wolverine and the two fight Toad and Sabertooth.
- When destroying the machine, Colossus throws Wolverine. If you're wondering why not send Banshee since he can fly I'll say that when fighting Blob his costume is damaged preventing him from doing so.
- At the end, Magneto, Toad and Sabertooth are captured. Mystique still shapeshifts into a guard while the Blob and Avalanche escape on their boat.
- Gambit joins the school.
- Beast takes pity on Kelly and goes with him to Washington.
- At the museum Gambit uses his powers when he gets in a standoff when sticking up for Rogue with Professor X freezing everyone. He's befriended Bobby by this point who's a lot more reserved than Gambit is.
- Beast plays a smaller role in the film. We get a few scenes of him in Washington with Kelly who we see start to change his views and in the bar where Mystique seduces that guard we see a debate on TV between him and Graydon Creed. At some point Stryker is able to capture and brainwash him too.
- Cyclops, Storm and Jean go after Nightcrawler while Forge takes Xavier to see Magneto.
- Forge puts up a good fight against the guards but just before he can save Xavier Lady Deathstrike knocks him out.
- Back at the mansion at night Logan talks with Banshee and Siryn. I admit I haven't the faintest clue what they'd talk about, I'd just want to flesh out these characters a little more. He then talks with Bobby and Gambit, the former about his parents not knowing the full truth about the school and the latter about his difficulties adjusting to the school and feelings for Rogue.
- When Stryker attacks, he sends in the mind-controlled Toad and Sabertooth first to disable the security systems which inadvertedly allows Pyro to escape from the cell he's being held in at the mansion. He then sends in his troops.
- Banshee and Siryn use their scream to awaken everyone.
- Logan, Colossus, Banshee, Pyro, Iceman, Gambit and Rogue fight the guards while evacuating the children.
- Colossus leads most of the children to safety.
- Banshee stays behind to hold off Toad and Sabertooth to allow the others to escape and he's captured.
- I'd give some time to fleshing out Scott and Jean's romance more.
- I'd keep in the scene at Bobby's house and Pyro's rampage.
- I'd cut down the scene's of Xavier's mind controlled illusion since they drag on.
- When the X-Men and brotherhood storm Stryker's base Pyro goes with Magneto and Mystique and they fight and free Sabertooth.
- Cyclops and Jean fight Banshee and Forge and free them.
- Gambit, Rogue and Iceman fight Beast and Toad and free them too, the latter goes to find Magneto.
- When the Brotherhood leave the base, Sabertooth finds Deathstrike and we see him surprised and concerned and immediately drags her out the water and begs Magneto to save her which he does. Deathstrike recognises Sabertooth and she joins them as they escape.
- At the end Nightcrawler joins the school.
- Takes place 1 year after X2 and focuses on the mutant cure.
- I'd keep the intro with Angel and him trying to remove his wings and eventually reject the cure.
- Wolverine plays more of a supporting role this time. He's been making good progress restoring his memories and he and Nightcrawler have been training to become teachers at the school as well as other skills like flying the blackbird.
- The main focus is on Cyclops who's still in mourning. He commissioned the danger room (which Beast and Forge played a big role in building) to ensure the X-Men would be better prepared.
- We get a scene with the X-Men in the danger room.
- By this point, Gambit, Rogue, Iceman and Kitty are team members with uniforms.
- With the success of the first 2 films and the Raimi Spider-Man films I'd start to embrace the comics more. The X-Men wear new costumes that are a transition away from their black ones to the comic ones.
- Cyclops wants the students to have a life outside of the school and this leads to some tension with Storm who points out not everyone will turn out like Jean.
- By this point the brotherhood has been gathering strength. Avalanche and the Blob who were on the run from the law during X2 have reunited with Magneto and brought with them a new recruit who they broke out of prison: Havok. His relation to Cyclops is hinted at.
- We're introduced to a new villain faction: the Friends of Humanity secretly led by Graydon Creed.
- Forge is killed by the FoH.
- For the climax I wouldn't have the Golden Gate Bridge scene as while it's cool it makes me wonder why Magneto simply didn't drop the bridge on the lab or just use all the metal in the building to rip it apart. I'd also keep out Magneto sending in the weaker mutants to die first.
- Magneto's plan is to send 2 boats to Alcatraz as he already knows about the plastic weapons. The larger boat has the majority of the brotherhood who will keep the soldiers distracted (he warns them not to go rushing into them but not all listen to his advice) while the smaller submarine boat with his inner circle will go to the other side of the island where they make short work of the few soldiers there.
- The X-Men arrive and for the battle it goes:
- Gambit and Kitty vs Avalanche and Mystique but are outmatched until Rogue sneaks up on Avalanche and touches him and uses his powers on Mystique. Since Gambit and Kitty are too injured to fight they give Rogue their powers.
- Wolverine and Beast vs Sabertooth and Deathstrike. They're evenly matched but Deathstrike finds a cure and tries to inject it into Wolverine until Rogue blasts away Sabertooth with Gambit's cards and sinks Deathstrike into the ground. Wolverine grabs the cure and injects it into Deathstrike and stabs her and apologises to her before she dies.
- Colossus vs Blob, the latter having the upper hand until Wolverine and Beast help beat him.
- Cyclops vs Havok. Because their powers don't work on each other they rely on hand to hand combat where Cyclops has the edge.
- Iceman vs Pyro which plays out like in the film.
- Nightcrawler vs Toad, the latter having the edge until Iceman freezes him, allowing Cyclops to blast him.
- Storm and Banshee vs Magneto who's holding his own until Angel arrives and tackles him to the ground, giving Nightcrawler the opportunity to cure him.
- More soldiers arrive to capture the brotherhood, forcing the inner circle to flee. Magneto is cast out of the brotherhood with Mystique taking over.
- In the first 3 films I'd give a few hints towards the Hellfire Club pulling the strings e.g. post-credit scenes.
- I'd downplay the alien elements in this adaptation as there wouldn't be enough time.
- Gladiator and his imperial guard arrive on Earth and they explain that the Phoenix Force has travelled to different planets seeking powerful hosts and leaving destruction in its wake but the previous hosts had all died as their bodies couldn't handle the raw power.
- The combined efforts of the Imperial Guard and X-Men defeat Phoenix and the Hellfire Club but when it becomes clear that Gladiator intends to kill Jean it leads to a battle between the 2 teams.
- When Scott is almost killed by Gladiator Jean goes berserk and turns into Dark Phoenix, kills the Hellfire Club and goes on a destructive rampage during which Banshee is killed.
- Professor X is forced to amplify his power using Cerebro to dangerous new heights to get through to Jean who senses Siryn's grief over her father's death which allows her to gain control over the Phoenix Force long enough to banish it. The Imperial Guard are able to contain the Phoenix Force in some special device and send it into a black hole.
- Ends on a downer with the team disbanding and mutant rights activists back to square 1. Jean goes into self-imposed exile and Scott goes with her. Wolverine goes to Japan and Nightcrawler goes with him.
- We get a post-credit scene of Omega Red.
- I'd essentially make the intro with Wolverine and Sabertooth fighting in different wars the premise of the whole film.
- Lady Deathstrike and Wolverine's past with her is an important plot in it too.
- The film ends with Wolverine getting the claws and losing his memory.
- Set after X4, Colossus returns to Russia only to find out about Omega Red's plan to restore the Soviet Union.
- Omega Red has hired Juggernaut and Black Tom to aid him.
- Colossus gets Gambit, Rogue, Iceman, Kitty, Angel and Siryn (taking up Banshee's mantle) to help him. The focus is on the younger team members having to learn not to rely on the older members.
- We get hints at Juggernaut's past with Xavier. To tie the Gem of Cittorak better into the more grounded approach of these films I'll say that it was created by the Shi'Ar Empire until the ship it was on crash landed on Earth.
- We're shown flashbacks of Banshee and Tom's rivalry. Tom is disappointed he never got to settle the score with his cousin so Siryn will have to do.
- Angel sacrifices himself to save his teammates.
- The film ends with X-Factor returning to the school to bury Angel.
- We get a post-credits scene of the US government being approached by Bolivar Trask and his sentinels program.
- Mr Sinister would be the main villain with the Marauders as his henchmen. We get hints at his past with Apocalypse.
- I'd have the film be set in the 70s.
- The team consists of: Xavier, Erik, Mystique, Beast, Forge, Banshee, Toad and Psylocke.
- At the end, the remaining Marauders along with Toad and Mystique join Magneto.
- We get a post-credits scene of the Shadow King.
- Not too sure what I'd change about this film aside from having it rated 15/R.
- As I said I'd have Nightcrawler with Wolverine as I like the dynamic they share with the former's optimism clashing with the latter's cynicism.
- We still get the same mid-credits scene with Logan, Magneto and Xavier.
- Exclusively involves the original cast rather than the prequels.
- In the future, mutants have been driven to near-extinction by the sentinels led by Mastermold and Nimrod. The only surviving X-Men are: Xavier, Wolverine, Caliban, Bishop and Cable. Before Forge died in X3 he began working on a time machine and they were able to find his research and use it to build the machine. Bishop and Cable go back in time to stop the brotherhood from killing Trask as well as find a way of stopping the sentinels in their own time.
- Bishop and Cable find Xavier and with his help they gather the team back together.
- By this point Scott and Jean are living with the morlocks and have a son, Nathan.
- Magneto has regained his powers and has recruited Destiny and Multiple Man into the brotherhood.
- For the climax, the X-Men finally don their comic book costumes.
- Cable is able to convince Havok to change sides and help them.
- Cable and Bishop use an emergency shutdown code that Trask secretly installed in the sentinels to stop them in the future and they sacrifice themselves to destroy Mastermold and Nimrod.
- Time travel in this version leads to a new timeline branching off from the old one. I'll call the sentinels timeline TL1 and that's where Logan takes place. I'll call the new timeline created in this film TL2 which is where Apocalypse takes place.
- We get a post-credits scene of Apocalypse having witnessed the events and decided now is the time to strike.
- Set in the 80s, the Shadow King forms an alliance with the Brotherhood.
- We see how Scott, Storm and Jean joined the school. By this point Banshee is an interpol agent.
- The X-Men are no match for the Shadow King and Brotherhood on their own so they reluctantly allow the teenage Scott, Storm and Jean to join the team.
- Psylocke is killed by the Shadow King.
- We get a post-credits scene in TL2 of Apocalypse at the graves of the fallen X-Men and stealing their bodies.
- This film serves as a send-off to the original cast.
- Apocalypse is a time-traveller who has decided that TL2 is the ideal one to establish his rule in.
- Mutant rights have finally been making progress again.
- Apocalypse resurrects Forge, Banshee, Psylocke and Angel as his horsemen.
- The combined efforts of the X-Men and Brotherhood are no match for Apocalypse but they're able to steal a time machine and use it to get the help of their younger selves, bringing in the prequels cast.
- When the younger X-Men and Brotherhood return to their own time, Xavier and Erik agree to a truce. We get a post-credits scene of Onslaught who was secretly created by the events of this film and latched onto the younger Xavier.
- As mentioned above, it takes place in TL1. The sentinels are gone but they succeeded in wiping out almost all mutants and any humans that could produce them with Xavier accidentally killing the few surviving mutants in a telepathic seizure except Logan and Caliban.
- I can't really think of anything that I'd change aside from maybe replacing X-24 with Sabertooth as I figured it's quite fitting for Logan to die in one last fight against his nemesis.
- Set in the late 80s, serves as a send-off to the prequels cast.
2023.03.24 12:30 grandadmiral99 For Sale: Celtic and Green Bay Voyageurs kits
Celtic 03-04 Away kit (black magic kit), size XL, has had an alteration done to repair a hole (pics in imgur) and the star is fading, fair condition: $35 shipped OBO
Celtic 07-08 Home kit, European version player issue, Size L: $85
Celtic 2010-2011 Away kit long sleeve, size Large: $40 shipped OBO
Green Bay Voyageurs, size L (away kit): $40 OBO
Images: https://imgur.com/a/fisGEuM
submitted by grandadmiral99 to KitSwap [link] [comments]
Celtic 07-08 Home kit, European version player issue, Size L: $85
Celtic 2010-2011 Away kit long sleeve, size Large: $40 shipped OBO
Green Bay Voyageurs, size L (away kit): $40 OBO
Images: https://imgur.com/a/fisGEuM
2023.03.24 12:30 grandadmiral99 For Sale: Celtic and Green Bay Voyageurs kits
Celtic 03-04 Away kit (black magic kit), size XL, has had an alteration done to repair a hole (pics in imgur) and the star is fading, fair condition: $35 shipped OBO
Celtic 07-08 Home kit, European version player issue, Size L: $85
Celtic 2010-2011 Away kit long sleeve, size Large: $40 shipped OBO
Green Bay Voyageurs, size L (away kit): $40 OBO
Images: https://imgur.com/a/fisGEuM
submitted by grandadmiral99 to SoccerJerseys [link] [comments]
Celtic 07-08 Home kit, European version player issue, Size L: $85
Celtic 2010-2011 Away kit long sleeve, size Large: $40 shipped OBO
Green Bay Voyageurs, size L (away kit): $40 OBO
Images: https://imgur.com/a/fisGEuM
2023.03.24 12:26 InfernityExpert Yoshi Commits Tax Fraud
A quick fill-in for some context. I started a DnD campaign a little while ago, and the DM asked us for ideas for mounts that we could eventually ride. I asked if I could ride a purple and white Yoshi since that's the color scheme of my character, and she said that was fine. I asked if it could be wearing shoes of my choice, so long as they were aesthetics and not a magic item, and she said yes. So that might be needed info if you read the story. If you want an explanation for the tax fraud, I think it's probably just better left unsaid. I haven't really shared my writing online since it's mainly for fun, but if you wanted to give some critique, I'm always down. Otherwise, this was just something fun I wanted to share with everyone. Anyway, here's my mount's introduction into the Dnd campaign:
It was his first day on the job. Steven Career stood like a marble statue in the courtyard of the enormous stone prison. That morning, he had polished his black leather boots, shaved his balding head, and oiled his thick, brown, handlebar mustache. It wasn't a protocol, but all the guards stood in the same position on the front line of the property: Legs spread at shoulder width, eyes straight ahead, and thumbs hooked into their belt buckles. The day was peaceful. A light drizzle of chilled autumn rain lightly coated the yard, and a soft breeze blew dried leaves across Cheshire Prison's paved walkway. The sky was a cool gray as the rainclouds overhead preserved the calm atmosphere below.
"Man, this job is such a breeze," Steven said to himself beneath his breath. "I could get real used to this."
No sooner did the words leave his hair-lined lip before he heard it.
Behind him, from deeper within the prison, the crack of a massive explosion sent a shockwave rippling through the air. It was so powerful that Steven was knocked forward onto the ground. He didn't even have enough time to turn around before the screams of men could be heard echoing through the halls of the prison lobby.
His ears were still ringing when he gathered the strength to turn around. Through his daze, the next thing he noticed was the smell. Then he saw the smoke.
The entire main hall of the prison was on fire. Bright flames tossed embers in every direction, as if commanded by a chaotic god to spread the seeds of hellfire. The sight sent a shudder of terror that started at the base of his neck and pulsated through each vertebrae. He was not equipped to deal with this. The confidence that he felt just moments prior had been completely replaced with a primal fear. His life was at stake, and he knew it.
Everything was happening so quickly. The explosion, the smell, the smoke, then the second explosion. This time, however, it was from the main hall. Molten debris filled the air yet again, and a pressure roared through the entrance so great it pushed him backwards ten feet, flinging him like a helpless ragdoll.
Steven, still prone, looked up from the dirt with tears in his eyes. Through the flames, he could see a figure. A man. He was running at full speed towards him. His arms were raised over his head, and a blue cloak (worn only by commanders) flapped in the air, on fire, behind him.
In the brief moment when their eyes met, another explosion erupted from the prison, and the man was launched forward, landing him within an arm's reach of Steven. His face was covered in blood. Half of his thick handlebar mustache was seared off. A single lense of his aviator glasses had been shattered, letting a single green eye peer through and look with a stern intensity at Steven.
He could only muster one word in that moment. "Run."
But Steven could not run. Reality simply gave him no time to do anything more than peer into the flame as the creature emerged.
It sauntered. The slow, rhythmic ticks of footfall seemed to be the only sound that cut through the fire, which gently crackled in the background. Blazing, crimson flames obscured the features, and cast a dark shadow upon the figure, revealing only its bulbous outline at first. As it walked, the finer details emerged.
It was a lizard, but it walked upright on two legs. It's scales were a grotesque, milky mixture of white and purple. It's features were indeed bulbous, including its eyes, head, and snout. Below the head, a long, thick neck connected to a round torso, which was covered with a slimy purple shell. It was wearing red air force ones.
Side to side, the eyes moved. Across the charred debris, over the black grass, and finally onto Steven and the commander.
For a moment they stopped, as if thinking of what to do next. The self awareness in its expression hinted that this was an intelligent creature. It gazed at them, planning, coming to a decision. Ultimately, it shrugged them off with a dismissive glance, and lurched into the tree line with an agility usually displayed by large cats.
The men were saved. There was no way they could defend themselves if the monster chose to attack. Steven was badly bloodied and bruised from the falls. It was the commander who mustered the strength to stand.
From the ground, Steven looked up at him and managed to speak. "What," he coughed, "What was that thing?"
The commander slowly shook his head. He raised a shaking hand, removed the aviators, and tossed them aside.
Steven could only manage to ask one more question.
"Why... Why was it here?"
To that, the commander shook his head knowingly. He began to walk, the burning prison at his back. He reached into his cloak and pulled out a second pair of aviators. Slowly, he began to lower them onto his face, and moments before the final explosion, which decimated all life within a mile of the prison, he answered Steven's question.
"Tax fraud."
submitted by InfernityExpert to creativewriting [link] [comments]
It was his first day on the job. Steven Career stood like a marble statue in the courtyard of the enormous stone prison. That morning, he had polished his black leather boots, shaved his balding head, and oiled his thick, brown, handlebar mustache. It wasn't a protocol, but all the guards stood in the same position on the front line of the property: Legs spread at shoulder width, eyes straight ahead, and thumbs hooked into their belt buckles. The day was peaceful. A light drizzle of chilled autumn rain lightly coated the yard, and a soft breeze blew dried leaves across Cheshire Prison's paved walkway. The sky was a cool gray as the rainclouds overhead preserved the calm atmosphere below.
"Man, this job is such a breeze," Steven said to himself beneath his breath. "I could get real used to this."
No sooner did the words leave his hair-lined lip before he heard it.
Behind him, from deeper within the prison, the crack of a massive explosion sent a shockwave rippling through the air. It was so powerful that Steven was knocked forward onto the ground. He didn't even have enough time to turn around before the screams of men could be heard echoing through the halls of the prison lobby.
His ears were still ringing when he gathered the strength to turn around. Through his daze, the next thing he noticed was the smell. Then he saw the smoke.
The entire main hall of the prison was on fire. Bright flames tossed embers in every direction, as if commanded by a chaotic god to spread the seeds of hellfire. The sight sent a shudder of terror that started at the base of his neck and pulsated through each vertebrae. He was not equipped to deal with this. The confidence that he felt just moments prior had been completely replaced with a primal fear. His life was at stake, and he knew it.
Everything was happening so quickly. The explosion, the smell, the smoke, then the second explosion. This time, however, it was from the main hall. Molten debris filled the air yet again, and a pressure roared through the entrance so great it pushed him backwards ten feet, flinging him like a helpless ragdoll.
Steven, still prone, looked up from the dirt with tears in his eyes. Through the flames, he could see a figure. A man. He was running at full speed towards him. His arms were raised over his head, and a blue cloak (worn only by commanders) flapped in the air, on fire, behind him.
In the brief moment when their eyes met, another explosion erupted from the prison, and the man was launched forward, landing him within an arm's reach of Steven. His face was covered in blood. Half of his thick handlebar mustache was seared off. A single lense of his aviator glasses had been shattered, letting a single green eye peer through and look with a stern intensity at Steven.
He could only muster one word in that moment. "Run."
But Steven could not run. Reality simply gave him no time to do anything more than peer into the flame as the creature emerged.
It sauntered. The slow, rhythmic ticks of footfall seemed to be the only sound that cut through the fire, which gently crackled in the background. Blazing, crimson flames obscured the features, and cast a dark shadow upon the figure, revealing only its bulbous outline at first. As it walked, the finer details emerged.
It was a lizard, but it walked upright on two legs. It's scales were a grotesque, milky mixture of white and purple. It's features were indeed bulbous, including its eyes, head, and snout. Below the head, a long, thick neck connected to a round torso, which was covered with a slimy purple shell. It was wearing red air force ones.
Side to side, the eyes moved. Across the charred debris, over the black grass, and finally onto Steven and the commander.
For a moment they stopped, as if thinking of what to do next. The self awareness in its expression hinted that this was an intelligent creature. It gazed at them, planning, coming to a decision. Ultimately, it shrugged them off with a dismissive glance, and lurched into the tree line with an agility usually displayed by large cats.
The men were saved. There was no way they could defend themselves if the monster chose to attack. Steven was badly bloodied and bruised from the falls. It was the commander who mustered the strength to stand.
From the ground, Steven looked up at him and managed to speak. "What," he coughed, "What was that thing?"
The commander slowly shook his head. He raised a shaking hand, removed the aviators, and tossed them aside.
Steven could only manage to ask one more question.
"Why... Why was it here?"
To that, the commander shook his head knowingly. He began to walk, the burning prison at his back. He reached into his cloak and pulled out a second pair of aviators. Slowly, he began to lower them onto his face, and moments before the final explosion, which decimated all life within a mile of the prison, he answered Steven's question.
"Tax fraud."
2023.03.24 12:25 SniffAdvisor Mullets
When you guys do a mullet do you have your fade behind the ears almost like a burst fade or do you do more of a taper (at the temples)
submitted by SniffAdvisor to Barber [link] [comments]
2023.03.24 12:23 Wolfblood-is-here The unquiet dead of Dromos 6
When first we landed on Dromos 6, we thought they were a myth.
Dromos 6, The Planet of Cracked Rocks. Our war against the T'tana had been raging in the sky for six months and on the ground for two before I arrived. Part of the 42nd Vanguard, the tip of the High Council's spear. The 7th Vanguard had set up landing sites with the help of the Yonos privateers, we were coming alongside the 16th and 31st plus a few mercenaries to start gaining some real ground.
The T'tana are not to be underestimated, but to my mind they look scarier than they are. Their formidable size makes them especially dangerous in close quarters but means you've got a big target to aim for. They aren't stupid by any means, but whether its bad doctrine or a quirk of their insectoid origins, they seem to struggle with independent decision making; their soldiers will always look to the officers and the officers will make bad decisions if communications are cut off. Still, they had the foothold, and the many canyons and caves and sandy dunes of Dromos 6 favoured their physiology and strategy better than ours; we are after all more at home in the open water, where sightlines are long and we aren't limited to two dimensions of movement.
I was stationed at a patrol base overlooking the river Omel, under the command of Captain Ghatus. Ghatus couldn't have been older than 100 given his rank, yet war had aged him, his shell already turning blue around the joints, the only hints of youth remaining being the quickness of his step and the fire in his eyes. We were upstream of an old colony that the T'tana had destroyed thirty years ago, when they first arrived, that belonged to a young species of sapient mammals known as 'humans'. We weren't told much about them, they had only been living on the planet for a short time and had only set up a couple settlements before the T'tana wiped them out. Those of us that bothered to consult the codex found they are a type 1.9 civilisation, they're working on a star harvester they refer to as a 'dyson swarm' but since construction is not yet completed they do not have full membership to the galactic community. Dromos 6 was a frontier colony for them, one of a few dozen they were setting up after discovering warp travel. Other than that, even the codex only listed the broad strokes, complex social system, unified government, comparable to us in size, etc etc.
We first took proper notice due to the whisperings of T'tana prisoners and civilians. Many believed humans were still alive on the planet, that they haunted the place like angry spirits. At first we thought it was the usual stories, making the humans seem scarier and more capable to justify their unprovoked first strike, and to have a boogieman to blame for every piece of broken machinery and deserting conscript. Yet the fear was very real, and no boogieman would explain the images of slit throats and eviscerated patrols. After a few weeks we began finding unlabelled supply pods and abandoned camps, and started ourselves to believe in spirits and unquiet dead.
I met these humans after we suffered a T'tana ambush. Automatic weapons cut down three men including our sergeant, and left our communications technician and Captain Ghatus wounded before we fled through a smokescreen. After a few hours of slow march, we sought shelter in a cave, and that's when she appeared. She seemed an aspiration, a vision brought on by heat and lack of water, naked save for some cloth, her skin the same tone as the sands, walking out of the sun. She yelled to us, and waved her limbs, a warning it seemed, and we braced ourselves for attack. Then she began gesturing to the cave mouth, and we noticed for the first time, nearly invisible, a tripwire.
She came to us, and guided us inside; with the choice between trusting her and letting two bleed out, we followed. There were more humans in the cave, a simple camp with boxes of supplies. They did not seem to regard us with suspicion, and handed us a crate of medical supplies, rudimentary but functional. Looking at them, we could not tell if they were civilian or solider, eventually realising they were somewhere in between, peaceful folk turned violent, dangerous not from learning warfare from codex and instruction but action. Death was their tutor and he taught them all his ways.
By the time we woke they were gone, alongside all their supplies but those we would need to stagger back to base. We were their allies, but not their kin, and they faded back into the mix of light and shadows from whence they came, back to haunt our mutual enemy, back to the place between life and death they had been forced to reside.
I never saw humans that close again, only glimpses: a silhouette on a ridge before a T'tana scout fell dead, a faint set of footprints leading away from the aftermath of a hidden explosive, a cave empty save for drawings on the wall showing victory in a bloody battle lacking the honour of those who make fighting a game instead of a way of being.
The T'tana have retreated from Dromos 6 now, but we have not conquered the planet, and if we stay beyond our welcome we too shall be haunted by vengeful spirits. That place is sacred and forbidden ground, every rock a monument to creatures that do not care if they are angels or daemons. It is not ours to take.
Signed, acting Sergeant (confirmation of field promotion pending) Aztun, 42nd Vanguard, veteran of Dromos 6.
submitted by Wolfblood-is-here to HFY [link] [comments]
Dromos 6, The Planet of Cracked Rocks. Our war against the T'tana had been raging in the sky for six months and on the ground for two before I arrived. Part of the 42nd Vanguard, the tip of the High Council's spear. The 7th Vanguard had set up landing sites with the help of the Yonos privateers, we were coming alongside the 16th and 31st plus a few mercenaries to start gaining some real ground.
The T'tana are not to be underestimated, but to my mind they look scarier than they are. Their formidable size makes them especially dangerous in close quarters but means you've got a big target to aim for. They aren't stupid by any means, but whether its bad doctrine or a quirk of their insectoid origins, they seem to struggle with independent decision making; their soldiers will always look to the officers and the officers will make bad decisions if communications are cut off. Still, they had the foothold, and the many canyons and caves and sandy dunes of Dromos 6 favoured their physiology and strategy better than ours; we are after all more at home in the open water, where sightlines are long and we aren't limited to two dimensions of movement.
I was stationed at a patrol base overlooking the river Omel, under the command of Captain Ghatus. Ghatus couldn't have been older than 100 given his rank, yet war had aged him, his shell already turning blue around the joints, the only hints of youth remaining being the quickness of his step and the fire in his eyes. We were upstream of an old colony that the T'tana had destroyed thirty years ago, when they first arrived, that belonged to a young species of sapient mammals known as 'humans'. We weren't told much about them, they had only been living on the planet for a short time and had only set up a couple settlements before the T'tana wiped them out. Those of us that bothered to consult the codex found they are a type 1.9 civilisation, they're working on a star harvester they refer to as a 'dyson swarm' but since construction is not yet completed they do not have full membership to the galactic community. Dromos 6 was a frontier colony for them, one of a few dozen they were setting up after discovering warp travel. Other than that, even the codex only listed the broad strokes, complex social system, unified government, comparable to us in size, etc etc.
We first took proper notice due to the whisperings of T'tana prisoners and civilians. Many believed humans were still alive on the planet, that they haunted the place like angry spirits. At first we thought it was the usual stories, making the humans seem scarier and more capable to justify their unprovoked first strike, and to have a boogieman to blame for every piece of broken machinery and deserting conscript. Yet the fear was very real, and no boogieman would explain the images of slit throats and eviscerated patrols. After a few weeks we began finding unlabelled supply pods and abandoned camps, and started ourselves to believe in spirits and unquiet dead.
I met these humans after we suffered a T'tana ambush. Automatic weapons cut down three men including our sergeant, and left our communications technician and Captain Ghatus wounded before we fled through a smokescreen. After a few hours of slow march, we sought shelter in a cave, and that's when she appeared. She seemed an aspiration, a vision brought on by heat and lack of water, naked save for some cloth, her skin the same tone as the sands, walking out of the sun. She yelled to us, and waved her limbs, a warning it seemed, and we braced ourselves for attack. Then she began gesturing to the cave mouth, and we noticed for the first time, nearly invisible, a tripwire.
She came to us, and guided us inside; with the choice between trusting her and letting two bleed out, we followed. There were more humans in the cave, a simple camp with boxes of supplies. They did not seem to regard us with suspicion, and handed us a crate of medical supplies, rudimentary but functional. Looking at them, we could not tell if they were civilian or solider, eventually realising they were somewhere in between, peaceful folk turned violent, dangerous not from learning warfare from codex and instruction but action. Death was their tutor and he taught them all his ways.
By the time we woke they were gone, alongside all their supplies but those we would need to stagger back to base. We were their allies, but not their kin, and they faded back into the mix of light and shadows from whence they came, back to haunt our mutual enemy, back to the place between life and death they had been forced to reside.
I never saw humans that close again, only glimpses: a silhouette on a ridge before a T'tana scout fell dead, a faint set of footprints leading away from the aftermath of a hidden explosive, a cave empty save for drawings on the wall showing victory in a bloody battle lacking the honour of those who make fighting a game instead of a way of being.
The T'tana have retreated from Dromos 6 now, but we have not conquered the planet, and if we stay beyond our welcome we too shall be haunted by vengeful spirits. That place is sacred and forbidden ground, every rock a monument to creatures that do not care if they are angels or daemons. It is not ours to take.
Signed, acting Sergeant (confirmation of field promotion pending) Aztun, 42nd Vanguard, veteran of Dromos 6.