#I am both autistic and an eldritch monster so I would know | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

somnilogical · 4 years

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transgenderer: okay so you know the trope where when you get too much eldritch knowledge and suddenly you start seeing giant monsters everywhere that are invisible to everyone else? that’s what being a trans woman is like.

this cluster of abilities keeps being instrumentally useful to model for reasoning about transfems. promethea and bendini independently talked about this:

[08:56] Bendini: This sounds like parody, but with californians it is difficult to tell

[image of fb post:

Daniel Powell: That report claims both that all entrances were blocked and also that a police vehicle entered and exited the camp; was that because the police vehicle was capable of offoad movement that typical vehicles are incapable of? My heart goes out to the kids on the high course who were subjected to unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering as a result of seeing people in Guy Fawkes masks, and all the people who had their personal liberty violated.

Like Reply 11h]

[09:02] Bendini: also this is a lot less credible if you haven't forgotten what happened with Brent

[09:02] Bendini: regardless of whether Anna is secretly a transphobe

[09:03] Bendini: rather than just scared of one particular trans person

[09:03] Bendini: the same sort of defence was trotted out for brent, and he was guilty

[09:05] Bendini: yeah, ziz is crazy and a lot of stuff posted is just ramblings

[09:06] Bendini: but I can see the model of everyone being sufficiently cowardly that the crazy bring forward the accusations before the courageous do

[09:23] promethea: gotta love how nobody can quite agree exactly how the people involved are Bad and Evil but people are nonetheless confident that they are schizophrenic/narcissistic/abusers/violent and must be confined and put on chemical mind control

[image of fb post:

Romeo Stevens: I'd recommend whomever has comparative advantage to familiarize themselves with the narcissism/bpd/aspd cluster, more evocatively called energy vampires. Such people are not stable and can grow violent when they are deprived attention they believe they are entitled to. The book Character Disturbance is fairly good for a start. It is a known falilure mode for communities of people who have faced their own social isolation to fail at filtering. To be clear, such people deserve compassion, but they need professional help. They don't benefit from a bunch of people whose time is valuable (one of the reasons they are attracted to such people because more validation) paying attention to their narratives.

9h Edited]

[09:24] promethea: there's been an awful lot of "not saying, but just saying" of a type that screams of monkeyball hysteria and attacking any characteristics that can be painted as vulnerabilities open for attack

[09:26] promethea: (also Ben the reason why you find Ziz's blog full of "just ramblings" is that you have a particular neurotype that is very... I don't have a good value-neutral way of expressing the difference but maybe "mundane" as opposed to "eldritch")

[09:35] Bendini: yeah the idea of someone saying get professional help is a strong sign they have not thought through what they are saying

[09:36] Bendini: like, a quick glance at what professional mental health treatment looks like in the US (therapy in the UK is afaik good for low hanging fruit, but not much else)

[09:37] Bendini: "these people should be reported to the mental health authoritities to be dealt with"

[09:37] Bendini: "Uhhh, I mean get the compassion they need"

[09:38] Bendini: I have to say, you would be the first person in the history of ever to call my neurotype mundane

[09:39] Bendini: I see what you are getting at

[09:39] Bendini: but it is like, how many standard deviations of weirdness are you on

[09:39] Bendini: and I said most, not all

[09:40] promethea: I think it's more like what direction your weirdness is in; "grounded" or "basic bitch" were other words I considered

[09:40] promethea: it's similar to the difference between EAs who want to find out how to best help the global poor, and the ones who get very preoccupied over whether insecticides are causing catastrophic suffering

[09:43] Bendini: "tethered to reality, somehow" would be an alternative

[09:45] Bendini: I think it's due to having like 50% really normie emotions

[09:45] promethea: "tethered to consensus reality" is how I'd adjust that phrasing

[09:46] promethea: it may be something to do with a sense that the world is fundamentally sane but just really bad at its job, vs the world being fundamentally insane and only aligned with the actual reality by little more than grace of gnon

[09:49] promethea: and probably some kind of a fundamental unshakeable-to-barely-shakeable prior rather than something that responds to ordinary reasoning

[09:50] Bendini: what do we mean by fundementally sane vs insane here?

[09:51] promethea: good catch, that's a nightmare to unpack

[09:53] promethea: a lot of the early LW stuff is comparatively eldritch in this sense, especially for the context of not having had LW yet

[09:56] promethea: in an environment where being trans isn't normal trans people have a certain inherent eldritch-ness, but a person fitting neatly into a third gender social role in a culture where that has always been a thing is not eldritch in that way

[09:57] promethea: it's the difference between "other people are trying their best even if their best isn't that good" vs. "other people are systematically gaslighting you about everything until proven otherwise"

[10:01] Bendini: ah

[10:02] Bendini: I'd put the difference down to people being really really crap at explaining things because the message is in there but it's between the lines

[10:02] Bendini: not intentionally, but because they don't know how else to do it

[10:03] promethea: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god this is probably the most explicit work by EY on what I've been calling the eldritch

[10:04] Bendini: and if you don't have enough of the fuzzy experience knowledge to do it, following what they are saying will be experienced as gaslighting

[10:04] promethea: and specifically, Beyond the Reach of God is trying to shake a component of the fundamental sense of security and move people towards the eldritch side

[10:05] Bendini: this sounds like the fundamental autist experience which cleaves into paranoia or extreme submissiveness to authority

[10:08] promethea:

I'd put the difference down to people being really really crap at explaining things because the message is in there but it's between the lines

not intentionally, but because they don't know how else to do it

and if you don't have enough of the fuzzy experience knowledge to do it, following what they are saying will be experienced as gaslighting

I'm thinking more of the thing about "seek professional help"

[10:09] Bendini: the yud post does not

[10:09] promethea: a mundane interpretation is "professional help isn't actually that helpful but I don't know that" while an eldritch interpretation is like "these people should be reported to the mental health authoritities to be dealt with"

[10:09] Bendini: as I'm rereading it

[10:10] Bendini: I do not believe the world is just

[10:10] Bendini: or that things will work out fine in the end because they always do

[10:11] Bendini: given, y'know, that I used to be a prepper

[10:15] Bendini: also I may have figured out how to reconcile "anna is a transphobe and admitted it outright" with what has been said

[10:16] Bendini: which I suspect pete knows based on what he said, but he doesn't say it outright

[10:18] promethea: "eldritch" isn't about just-world beliefs, it's closer to "a quality that makes one faster to disalieve things like just-world or other aspects of consensus reality"

[10:21] Bendini: I think there's some conflation between beleif in verbal consensus reality and belief that you can anticipate what other people will do probabalistically

[10:22] Bendini: I do not beleive in the former, but I think I had enough natural talent at the latter to reach a kind of escape velocity

[10:24] Bendini: i.e. have enough to build on/enough peices of the jigsaw put in that I could keep filling it in

[10:26] promethea: it's not about "eldritch means you can't model other people"

[10:29] promethea: if anything, mundane models are the ones that are sacrificing modeling ability

[10:30] promethea: ...seeing patterns where people insist is only noise but that noise just so happens to be awfully conveniently shaped...

[10:30] Bendini: if I am defined as the non-eldridch side, this sounds like something that could be falsified

[10:31] promethea: I'm feeling like this is a beautiful meta-level illustration of the difference between the neurotypes but way less useful on the object level or to someone who doesn't already have an unspeakable sense of what the difference is

[10:33] promethea: I don't know how to get the qualia across to someone who doesn't already have the thing and be thus able to possibly grok it from what I'm vaguely gesturing at

[10:34] Bendini: is there a way to demonstrate information transmission between 2 eldridch people?

[10:36] promethea: ziz's blog has a lot of content that makes perfect sense to people who have a quality that's probably strongly aligned with eldritch, but apparently looks like ramblings to people who don't

[10:38] promethea: some things are just ordinarily difficult to understand in that they require a lot of work, while others are actually mind-bending to properly comprehend, and eldritch minds are more bendy in that way?

[10:41] promethea: which also increases vulnerability to infohazards, cognitohazards, overfitting, demonic possession and generally going nuts, but the idea that eldritch is inherently less sane only applies to socioculturally mediated definitions of sanity

[10:42] Bendini: my immidiate reaction to "socioculturally mediated definitions of sanity" was "yes, and creditworthyness is a social construct"

[10:43] promethea: if reality is less well-matched with consensus reality then the bendiness of eldritch minds means that they can more easily construct accurate maps of the territory

[10:44] Bendini: can you think of a way to compare viewing that map to the territory?

[10:44] Bendini: as in, not being able to show the map is a given

[10:45] Bendini: but the outputs of the map

[10:47] promethea: seeing power, seeing prejudice and bias, seeing other things polite society pretends aren't real...

[10:49] promethea: and it's polite society all the way down

[10:49] Bendini: that's not really what I meant

[10:50] Bendini: I mean for example, using the ability to see those things to predict other things in a way that can be isolated from fuzzy confirmation bias

[10:51] Bendini: like I can very much believe ziz's blog is relatable and intuitive to you

[10:52] Bendini: and you have to do less interpretive labour to get a true insight from it

[10:53] Bendini: but the thing I'm pointing at as ramblings is seperate from that

[10:58] promethea: would it make sense if I rephrased it as "less cognitive filtering"? being able to see more signal in noise, especially where the signals are something you aren't supposed to be seeing for some reason or another, but at the cost that you're more likely to see signals where there is only noise

[11:02] Bendini: that makes sense

[11:03] Bendini: but it assumes that all people who don't do the eldrich thing can't go down the abstraction ladder

[11:04] promethea:

can't go down the abstraction ladder

can you elaborate?

[11:04] Bendini: what is salient to someone isn't completely a choice

[11:05] Bendini: but what you notice is based on what you've learned is useful to pay attention to

[11:07] Bendini: I could say something about forests leaves and trees

[11:07] Bendini: but it would be a bit cliche

[11:08] Bendini: something that might sink in would be more like someone paying attention to what is going on at the binary level as bits are moving between the hard drive memory and cpu

[11:09] Bendini: yes, it is useful to know what is going on so you understand other things

[11:10] Bendini: but hyperfixating on that while you are writing code on a much higher level of abstraction

[11:10] Bendini: in a sense, you are "seeing things that others have been trained not to see"

[11:10] Bendini: or don't understand

[11:10] Bendini: but doing that on a frame by frame level rather than an intutive "you know what's up" kinda level

[11:11] Bendini: is going to result in glaring errors from the stuff you aren't paying enough attention to

[11:15] promethea: it's not autism except possibly to the degree that autism weakens one's priors

[11:16] Bendini: agree, there are plenty of basic bitch autists

[11:17] Bendini: but like, the autistic catgirl cluster

[11:18] Bendini: it is a recurring pattern that some of them obsess over social reality in the way ziz does, yet keep getting into abusive relationships which were predictable from the outset

[11:18] Bendini: which idk, maybe this is a bit of a basic bitch take here

[11:19] Bendini: but this seems like the opposite of what should happen if they had reached the higher plane of knowledge that cannot be explained in words

[11:20] promethea: I'm not expecting all men to be able to do twenty pull-ups just because testosterone improves upper body strength

[11:22] promethea: the "eldritch" neurotype might also be called "psychoticism" but in the sense of a personality trait like extroversion and not in the sense of mental illness

[11:22] Bendini: no, but if those men claim to be much stronger because they have the magical testosterone elixir

[11:22] Bendini: and they keep getting beaten up by 5ft anorexic girls

[11:23] Bendini: at what point do you say "no, you do not have the thing you claim to have"

[11:30] promethea: no what I've been trying to say is that there appears to be a neurotype-level difference in how people process some types of information with predictable (in terms of not requiring loads of epicycles) upsides (having an easier time making accurate models where they contradict consensus reality) and downsides (having an easier time making inaccurate models where they contradict consensus reality)

[11:30] Bendini: the psychotiticism framing does help explain part of it

[11:31] Bendini: but that feels like the motte

[11:31] Bendini: it's the bailey I have trouble with

[11:31] promethea: I can't comment on the precise situation with the Bay catgirls because I'm not familiar enough with it to feel comfortable making non-obvious inferences

[11:33] Bendini: okay

[11:33] Bendini: I wonder how my experiences with psychedelics map into this though

[11:34] promethea: a bit of a shitpost-y formulation might be that high psychoticism-as-a-personality-trait is like having the safety guards off the [insert power tool that best fits the analogy] of your mind; it makes it easier to make some cuts that you'd otherwise struggle with, but it also makes it easier to cut things you wouldn't actually want to cut like yourself

[11:34] promethea: psychedelics would be expected to increase psychoticism-as-a-personality-trait

[11:35] Bendini: you'd expect them to do it while on them though

[11:35] promethea: both temporarily (very strongly) and permanently (from what it seems)

[11:35] Bendini: I seem to get neither in some important ways

[11:36] Bendini: like certain kinds of art and music

[11:36] Bendini: it was a sanity check of sorts

[11:37] promethea: (this also fits with my experience that when my dopamine levels are increased I get better at the thinks but also more likely to be overconfidently wrong, and that most antipsychotics are dopamine antagonists, etc.)

[11:38] Bendini: if I cannot see mediocre art as anything more than mediocre art while I'm hallucinating, it really isn't a case of me not being open to it

[11:39] Bendini: it's a case of wine in expensive bottles

[11:40] Bendini: I do think I have had some changes though

[11:40] Bendini: more sympathy to points of view people cannot express verbally

[11:46] promethea: I don't think "finding deep meaning in mediocre art" is any kind of a necessary characteristic of increased PAAPT (psychoticism-as-a-you-know-what), especially given that "mediocre art actually has deep meaning when on drugs" is the social reality

[13:28] Bendini: I mean more the ability to be open minded and see the beauty in things

[13:28] Bendini: because I could totally see the beauty of a brick wall

[13:28] Bendini: just some girl showed me her pretty mediocre drawings

[13:29] Bendini: and I was pretty speechless because the mediocrity was the salient characteristic

[13:30] Bendini: I find it suspends judgement for a longer period

[13:31] Bendini: but when my mind speaks out to me my concience is much louder

[13:32] Bendini: this does not seem to be the standard reaction to psychadelics

[13:32] Bendini: the basic bitch lurks deep in my lizard brain

(dont agree with all of promethea's characterization of the phenomena; but its clearly seeded from looking at the same phenomena that i am. bendini does not get whats going on at all here.)

ive referenced leveraging this to do what seems impossible or unpredictable to normies as creepy transfem mind powers. then people are like 'saraaah ccc somni said trans women have creepy mind powers thats crazy talk right?' and sarah c's like 'well yes its true trans women have a high iq'.

but this is kind of eliding over different kinds of intelligence as neurotypes and collapsing it all into "iq". transfems and ashkies arent just generically "intelligent" theres specific neurotypes behind the inteligence. like for ashkies the sort of things that get recorded in metrics are high "verbal" iq and "math" iq and average "spatial" iq. thats a specífic signature.

see: http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

"high intelligence" can look like hyperlexia and it can also look like dissociative mind powers that let people see through the matrix and be unnervingly good at reasoning over embeddings of yourself.

like as intelligence increases, general capacity at solving problems increases. but maybe you shunt symbols instead of rotate objects to solves a problem. which affects what kinds of problems you can easily solve, given some are more amiable to one approach over another. there are many instances where visual proofs without words are much shorter than doing lots of algebra and vice-versa.

these specificities allow high-inteligence subpopulations to collude within neuroclades along these lines of similarity. downstream of this is that a lot of ppl accuse both jews and transfems of conspiracy and being "friends" with each other when a lot of mutual information comes from neurotype similarity not meeting and deciding on a plan. (thats not to say, you know, that there are never meetings about how to take over the multiverse...)

its amusing how like transfems will talk with each other about stuff and then ppl will be like "arghh!!! my eyes! this writing is painful static! its an infohazard!! its a glitch in the matrix!! AIEEEEGYRGHLSMERGLEGLunk pshhhur" and then say they dont understand what you are saying but it probably means you are a creepy violent misogynistic deeply sick male who is experiencing a psychotic break or something. give me tokens of submission to prove me wrong. if you were really prosocial youd drop this act right now and "act like a human".

part of the reason im writing this is reading things like:

<<promethea: gotta love how nobody can quite agree exactly how the people involved are Bad and Evil but people are nonetheless confident that they are schizophrenic/narcissistic/abusers/violent and must be confined and put on chemical mind control>>

has a healing quality. like i independently derived this. people keep trying to erase these simple shapes of how things fit together. try to destroy peoples ability to build common knowledge and talk with each other. the authoritarians dont usually try to give good excuses about why they pretend its wrong besides saying "its absurd". when you are in a prison planet surrounded mostly by people who have decided to be cops or submit to them, reading this is like:

https://youtu.be/DSTknzzBT9Y

youtube

you have to fractally reason through warpy things like people distantly noting "patient appears to be suffering from delusions of persecution'. and people trying to tell you that you are psychotic when like hi im writing this and not "psychotic". and you dont even have the social reality of people doing actual info-processing and at the end saying "well yeah its pretty obvious you arent suffering from a psychotic break, weird that anyone would claim that".

what you have is people giving you strange looks and acting like what youve written is a tear in the fabric of reality releasing trillions of shrill screams from a place beyond time.

its not because they dont understand, its because they have chosen not to. with different social groups of humans, different things elicit this response. like in a plural server i joined i talked about maybe there could be something in between being plural and being a singlet and they acted like id spoken static until someone said "oh thats [short handle for this concept]" and then everyone relaxed and stopped acting as if they couldnt understand what i was saying because there was no longer any local social threat to dynamically processing this information in front of other humans. they learned from the exclaimer that it was a Thing in their culture.

when people cant anticipate a priori where dynamically processing information in front of a lot of people will land them wrt the local overton window, as a solution they will just refuse to do this. one way to refuse to do this is to say "im sorry i dont understand what you are saying its like painful static. ack! stop trying to explain i dont want to understand it might turn me evil or something!!" which is an accurate assessment if they were coerced into using the words good and evil to mean alignment and disalignment with local social consensus respectively.

like the strategy of people who want to contain those floricdly hemorrhaging eldritch knowledge all over the place is to have a constarnt investment of authoritarian power to suppress this:

<<Reject invest-y power. Some kinds of power increase your freedom. Some other kinds require an ongoing investment of your time and energy, and explode if you fail to provide it. The second kind binds you, and ultimately forces you to give up your values. The second kind is also easier, and you'll be tempted all the time.>>

https://squirrelinhell.blogspot.com/2018/01/superhuman-meta-process.html

unlike true things which will keep reforming and can be lazily evaluated from looking around you with no memory. you dont need as much energy poured into constantly refreshing the cache of who you are supposed to pretend is having a psychotic break.

the authoritarian strat loses out in the long term against anarchist cooperation between agents that have learned enough to be able to consistently exploit their knowledge of Dread Horrors of the Abyss. who no longer need to dodge bullets.

#i was going to reblog but then tumblr ate my reblog #and i OCR'd it from screenshots #which i almost always take before posting on tumblr #but then afterwards realized i wrote a post instead of a reblog

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the-heroic-changeling · 5 years

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So when I am writing about my eldritch story, or just while walking on cloudy days during my commute...

I have a playlist of kind of melancholy ethereal music to listen to, to help me get in the mood.Got some music from the original Dishonored video game, (Drunken Whaler and Honor for All) two songs used in trailers for the Death Stranding video game, (I’ll Keep Coming and Asylum for the Feeling) a song used in Bionicle ads of all things, (Creeping in My Soul) and Uprising by Muse. Because you know, it was like my first anarchy song, and it fits in with my eldritch story. I am putting more under the cut. @akirakan @jogress @majingojira @neshtasplace @ayellowbirds tagging you folks in case you would be interested in some of my writings. Will try to tag others later too.

As a reminder, I took a break from the eldritch story to have a friend edit it and so I could come back refreshed. The story in its current draft definitely needs refining, I worry everything after the first chapter is a lot less solid. The first chapter is genuinely something I am proud of, and the rest less so. As with many of my stories I am using fiction to comment on the times, namely police brutality in America. The story begins with the two leads arrested after police violently shut down a protest, perhaps a dated topic in hindsight. The first chapter starts with them bruised and beaten, and things only get worse in that chapter. At least until the monster shows up, and the two leads escape in the chaos.

Admittedly I might have intruded in issues I am unequipped to handle as one of the leads is a black lesbian, of which I am not. I still felt that I needed to comment on these issues, and I do thing writers can explore other issues if they do so carefully, but I might have been clumsy, so sensitivity reading might be needed. The second lead is ace and autistic, as I am, and I felt less unsure about writing him. Both of them in the first chapter are used to comment on abuse towards queer folks of color and abuse towards the mentally ill. The scene is a bit dark for me, with police attempting to fake first one, then both lead’s suicides. Again I may be intruding and should move cautiously.

Both survive of course and star in the rest of the story, as they try to understand this skinless monster who seems to infect wood with muscle tissue and pus with a touch, including desks and doors. I must admit I thought out the “logic” of this creature and the god it survives, so I must admit I am worried that the eldritch horror makes far too much sense for the genre. There are internal rules, they are not explained exactly but they are there. Which might ruin any otherworldly quality too it. I do think late in the book I did a good description of the horror, a hero has a vision of the god behind the monster and I try to slowly reveal how terrible it looks, with him gradually realizing how terrible it was.

Inspirations for the setting included many “towns” with recent civil rights truggles, from Flint to Ferguson. Other elements drew from my hometown of Fredericksburg Virginia, one thing based off my hometown is that the fictional town in the story is obsessed with its history during the Civil War, Revolutionary War, and the like. In real life Fredericksburg literally has laws about building any buildings downtown that are over a certain height or in a modern style, there are regular trolleys downtown, albeit used for sightseeing tours, and there are like twelve antique shops downtown as well. The town is obsessed with history, the local bus network are decorated with simplistic and stylized pictures of historical things too. (some of these pictures are pictures of steamboats or cannons, and then there are the portraits of Confederates like Robert E. Lee) The strange out-of-time look of my hometown, thanks to a friend’s suggestion, was incorporated to help show a “wrongness” with the fictional town. Though I need to stress these details more next draft. Also another thing I plan to focus on next draft? Potholes. (Fredericksburg’s roads are currently incredibly uneven, thanks to the large amount of recent rain, as well as just plain poor maintenance of roads)

The primal god behind the monster on the other hand was inspired by a archaeological find first found in Germany in 1939. Yeah. The object has taken decades to reassemble as it was shattered, and it appears to be a human with a lion’s head. this is now called the Löwenmensch, or the lion-man. This is the earliest known example of figurative art, dating back 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Modern humans were just evolving at this time, and I believe white skin was not in the genome yet. This Ice Age figure was carved out of mammoth ivory, which alone suggests its age. Stone tools were a bit refined then, prepared cores not flakes, and atlatls were used. This was the time of what we now call the Aurignacian. And as this find is 40,000 to 35,000 years old, there is a lot we do not know about it or its people. I figured that since these people were long dead with their descendants utterly divorced from their culture, I was freer to toy around and play with horror, without making crap up about documented gods whose people had traceable modern descendants, like Dagon for instance. This find is too far removed I suspect for me to worry about butchering a real life people’s beliefs, and as it is the oldest piece of figurative art recovered it has a primal “at the dawn of man” quality documented religions lack.

Other influences might be an interview I read on the book The Ballad of Black Tom, which inspired me with the concept that an eldritch horror might be less malicious to the oppressed than human bigotry, though I think I took it in a different direction (definitely didn’t copy it, as I haven’t read the book yet because executive dysfunction) Other inspiration came from Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions, as her Halloween episode on Lovecraft really drove home how bigoted and horrible Lovecraft was. My story was in part written in response to Lovecraft, grappling with his prejudice by starring the oppressed and showing their struggles, as well as showing how institutions of white cishet neurotypical order are a greater threat to people than a terrible monster from before recorded history.

So yeah, that’s my wall of text on that story, haven’t written about it in a while so I thought I should give a summery and reminder. Enjoy.

Note: Edited some details about Fredericksburg

#eldritch #my art #lowenmensch #actuallyautistic #short stories #police brutality

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babblingbat · 6 years

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Various Characters I meant to post Months ago

Various Characters of mine

I have so many I want to write (some) of them down! This is a suuuuuper long post so more under the cut! Includes a spy, a crime lord/activist, and a bargaining warlock (I have to reblog this later bc tumblr threw a hissy fit about the length)

- Kinda in a Bond-esque spy agency, but more of a contractor

- When everything goes to shit, you can count on them to fix it

- Nonbinary protege of whoever is in charge of the tech division (Mezza? Sloane? Dixon? idk, but they have a hell of a shady past and there’s like… noooothing that can keep Sloane out of computer systems)

- X isn’t formally recognized by APO (authorized personnel only, the spy agency) but they do have access to all information because of a backdoor Sloane made

- So I guess the name is Sloane

- Anyways, X goes on the black ops of black ops, typically with either mercenaries or no back-up at all

- Thus trust issues and like the opposite of dependency - they have so much trouble asking for things but are willing to help anyone or offer material assistance - if they have it

- X is nonbinary and really doesn’t have any preferences on pronouns, as long as they aren’t he/him or she/her

- They’re also autistic and shut down if there’s too much loud noise or if they’re just too tired for some reason - sometimes this means going nonverbal or just Not Functioning and their favorite way to feel better is to sit on the ground, wrap themselves in a blanket and listen to music - so in conclusion they don’t really use guns unless there’s a silencer, and they aren’t v good with them

- A huge part of their espionage function is language!

- They speak German, Spanish, Japanese, FSL, and ASL all idiomatically

- They also speak Russian, French, and Afrikaans, but not fluently

- They can swear and count to ten in Korean and Czech

- They’re pursuing a PhD in computational linguistics, though APO gets in the way

- They’re 24, and have a bizarre set of skills because both of their job, previous jobs and jobs they hold as a cover to pretend they pay their taxes, and special interests

- Sloane is only 7 years older than them, and recruited X out of high school

- At first it was small things, like ‘pick up this book from Elm Street and drop it at Main’ but it got bigger after they graduated

- When X turned 18, they went through formal training - protocol, combat, and analysis

- They’d done some martial arts before hand, but not much punching, mostly kicking, throws, and staffs (5 and 6 feet)

- X’s main job is to clean up messy situations, usually by stealing things or extractions, and their own ops are less combat oriented than the clean ones

- X is not the best at math, not by a long shot, but they can see patterns from a mile away

- “I am the fact guardian, guardian of the facts!” “Puzzles quiver before them!” “FUCK OFF”

- They do simple division when bored and solve a lot of math things by finding patterns and using them

- X is both their designation in the agency (as in ‘x factor’) and their actual name- they use an alias for college

- They live with a few people, most of whom complain at their erratic sleep schedule and ask that please, for the love of god, X gets sleep meds and just a solid 8 hours, for once

- Sloane eventually sends X on an op to extract Mel, Sloane’s girlfriend and top operative

- X doesn’t know what to tell Mel, so mostly they just tell them that things will be answered later

- Mel asks Sloane, who reluctantly explains X’s role, and this sets some things into motion of X eventually being brought into the spotlight

- They have several hearings about their activities

- Eventually, Seville (who runs things? I guess) tells them to carry on as they do, reporting directly to Sloane, but they are recognized now by the APO

- There are three other things I want to fit in:

- Goes missing for [period of time], leaving a very close friend behind, comes back after being presumed dead and no memories, apparently solved a conspiracy and now has many illegal friends who all enjoy thievery

- Magic is a thing (because it wouldn’t be my words if it wasn’t lmao) and common enough that people know it exists but rare enough that it’s kinda intimidating and sometimes people will freak out about it, despite plenty of people having it.

X has/develops magic at some point but is terrified to tell anyone and tries to hide it from their team (which is now their family, love that trope) because they don’t want to be barred from the APO, but it comes out accidentally during a mission

- X’s infodumping saves the day somehow

The Celestian

- K so this is more about an organization, but the Celestian lives in a like a 1920s fantasy setting and likes dancing

- They run a social activism group masquerading as a crime network that uses queer bars and stuff as fronts

- To get money, they dance competitively with their bodyguard and d8m8, the BFF (butch femme fatale) who identifies as a nb lesbian

- To get into any of the places where actual political dismantling and activism happens, who have to have very specific patterns on your nails - nail painting is a method of communication and is also a huge teambuilding exercise

- There are different codes for everything

- When cops try and get in (they can only find the places if they have a member of the Queer Folk), the code is “blue denim” and then the person caught tells the police they need nail polish and then laugh as they get caught, as if they were bullshitting the whole thing

- Other things are called “10:50 am” which looks like a sleepy eye

- Or “songbird rhapsody” which is also a popular song that the Celestian sings at clubs

- Or “money” which is just a green splotch on all the nails

- If you’re a member of the Queer Folk, you get a crate monthly of money and nail polish, and special things on birthdays and holidays

- The Queer Folk do everything from organize protests to take kids in and try to pay for their education through crime - as in robbery from different places

- Their crimes always have a certain flair to them - they value creativity and snazziness

- The Celestian is like 5’ 3” (which, to be fair, is 3 inches taller than I am) and the BFF picks them up a lot

- They don’t like alcohol or caffeine but drink herbal tea 24/7

- If they don’t, something is very, very wrong

- They have a prosthetic leg

Red

- Literally in high school

- A warlock! They traded their gender and all “gender identifying features” to a trans demon for magic powers

- The demon mostly asks them to get coffee and stuff because the demon isn’t very good at bargaining and just wanted Red’s gender, but it’s expected of a patron to keep using the warlock for things

- (on the demon phone) “hey so this is super duper important and if you could get it in the next half hour that’s the best thing”

“what is it”

“alright so go to the corner of Lincoln and Greenleaf, turn three times to your right, once to your left, and a door should open behind you. Don’t try to turn towards it, just fall backwards”

“if I fall onto poison ivy or concrete I’m breaking my fucking contract”

“No, no no no, you’ll appear in that good good heaven spot”

“… the coffee shop?”

- Red focuses on science in their school

- Every interaction is a deal. E V E R Y I N T E R A C T I O N

- Breakfast? “I’ll give you the salt if you hand over the pancakes”

- Entering a building? “Hold the door open and I’ll give you praise”

- School? “You want me to tell you what I do in my spare time? Give me an A on my midterm and I’ll tell you”

- The last one has left a lot of teachers confused and more than a little scared of the silly little nerd in their class

- Honestly, they have straight A’s because they make deal after deal about grades. They never cheat on tests, but they make deals, hold people to them, and know what they’re doing

- Red’s demon is getting a little worried with all the deals

- Red is most accustomed to deals rather than anything else because they think that unequal exchange (i.e., gifts) is really suspect

- That said, Red has no problems altering “equal” exchange to benefit them

- If they ever became a business owner, they would be terrifying

- They want everything to turn out the best it can for every one but… are not fans of laws

- They have many Opinions on law, its enforcement, and the government

- That cousin that will tell you constantly about how the government is corrupt and should be rebooted with the youngest people as the primary interest

- Anarchy? Not quite, but revolution? Most definitely

- No angst, just high school silliness and chaos

- Has no idea what’s going on 90% of the time - a kid on a sportsball team did something amazing, people started treating him like shit for adults liking him, and Red had no idea until like 3 months later

- Red just kinda lives in their head

- Did they hear what you just said? Nah, but they sure did hear that wristwatch every time it clicked on the second.

- Likes the sound of adventure, but mostly gets lost in Ikea and makes deals with the eldritch monsters in the mattress section

- SUCH A SHITTY SENSE OF DIRECTION, COULD GET LOST IN A GRID WITH MAPS AT EVERY INTERSECTION

- Charismatic, but mostly in the sense of lying their ass off and persuading people

- Once tried to go a day without making a deal (on a dare), ended by making a deal to not have to ever do that again

- Businesses both hate and love them - they pay for nothing but will bargain away odd things of equivalent value every time and catch shoplifters, dislikes shoplifters because it’s not a fair trade

- Bizarrely good luck with finding things in pockets, particularly to “pay” for things

#my ocs #red (oc)#X (oc)#the celestian #crime #warlock #dnd #d&d #dungeons and dragons #there was another dude that was supposed to be in this collection sort of thing but tumblr screamed at me when I tried to add them so ¯\_(ツ)#my writing #how am i supposed to tag again #please ask me about these kiddos #thanks

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