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blimbo-buddy · 4 months

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Twolegplace Folktales: A Molly Named Johnny

Often, some of the folktales and fictional stories spread around Twolegplace to Twolegplace originated not from the UK, but from places far beyond the ocean. Songs of heroes and villains, epics of the protagonist's journey to save something or someone, poems pondering the nature of life through fictional scenarios.

But sometimes, these stories are not about some great journey, or philosophical questions, but rather something as simple as the land around the cats, or the other individuals they may meet, or maybe even the meeting of a cat and a Demonio. One such story is one that goes by many names, "The Demonio and the Fiddler", "The Molly's Fiddle", but the most well-known title of the story is "A Molly Named Johnny".

Cats who came from beyond the sea, from other lands, were the ones who brought the folktale with them onto the ships. This folktale was one of many that caught the ears and attention of many cats, each passing down the tale to the next, and on and on. The plot since then will differ depending on which Twolegplace you visit, some tell of different fates for the characters and some even add new characters. However, the rough summary of the plot is;

A Demonio had wandered the countryside, heart aching for a soul to snatch and add to its collection, it was a trickster and a clever one at that. It stood on two legs and where it's front paws would be was replaced with grotesque, human hands. It's trick was to fool a cat into a fiddling contest, knowing of a feline's lack of proper thumbs to grasp anything, it always won. One dawn, it stumbled upon a lit up barn, bustling with feline life and joy and cheer. And in that barn was music from instruments, but not just any instrument, a fiddle.

It calmly waltzed to the barn, the ceilings decorated with lights and cats eating and drinking the night away, but the fiddle had stopped playing when it reached the barn doors and the Demonio could not figure who was playing it. Cats froze as they laid their eyes onto the Demonio, and it called out, demanding the presence of whoever played the fiddle. Silence filled the air, until a scruffy old molly-cat took a step out from the backstage of the barn and responded back to the stranger. The Demonio offered a deal to the molly-cat, if she could beat them in a fiddling contest, she would get a beautiful golden fiddle. But if she lost, her soul was theirs and they would come back to the barn every year to take a new soul. The air was still, but the molly-cat puffed up in pride and called out, "Well then, my name's Johnny and I'll gladly take your deal, Demonio!"

And so, the Demonio summoned a case out of thin air and pulled out their golden fiddle. They drew the bow along the strings with a horrible hiss and began to play a fast, screeching, but highly impressive song. They scratched the bow along the strings so harshly that smoke seeped from it and into the air, but ol' Johnny didn't give much care. The Demonio finished, and Johnny was impressed, but she gave a smirk, grabbed her old fiddle, and said, "Let ol' Johnny show you how it's done!". She put her entire heart into her song, each note came from a place that didn't demand attention or praise, but lovingly played for no audience, only herself. She finished, and the Demonio was impressed at her ability to be able to handle a fiddle. The Demonio was a trickster, but they were fair. They put their hands up and admitted Johnny's victory, handing her the golden fiddle, but she declined. She didn't need a fiddle of pure gold, all ol' Johnny wanted to do was entertain and play her old fiddle for the barn. The Demonio was humbled, but accepted Johnny's rejection. And they left with a bow, never to be seen by Johnny or the barn ever again. Johnny cleared her throat, waltzed up onto the stage, and simply began playing her fiddle once more.

Changes to the story often seen

Johnny being portrayed as more egotistical and prideful. In some endings of the story, this Johnny does accept the golden fiddle

The meeting of Johnny and the Demonio being just between the two instead of meeting in the crowded barn

The Demonio implied to previously visit the barn to snatch another soul, to which Johnny put an end to

Tied in to the last one; Johnny's mother or father being one of the Demonio's victims. Characters who never showed up in the old story

The appearances of Johnny and the Demonio in the original story are left as vague as possible, however many versions will often describe Johnny and the Demonio

Adding on; A few popular versions of Johnny's appearance is a brown tabby, an orange tabby, or a tortie

Johnny having six toes on her paws which in some explanations within these stories, "Gave her a better grip on the fiddle"

The Demonio being accompanied by other Demonios to aid in their favor

Conclusion

A Molly Named Johnny is one of fiction, cats cannot properly hold a fiddle as I'm sure we know. However, some cats cite the folktale as being one that gives them bravery to face against a challenge that frightens them. Some also use the folktale as a message that a cat can use a Demonio's own tricks against them if the situation calls for it. Johnny, to many, is a hero. One who stood up to a Demonio and defeated them, one who did not back down or feel fear in the presence of one, something that so many cats wish they could be.

#blimbo rambles #blimmy art #wc #warrior cats #wc rewrite #blimbo's twolegplace culture #the devil went down to georgia: warrior cats edition

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jasminewalkerauthor · 4 months

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Deep dives into folklore: Norse mythology

Norse mythology is a rich and complex tapestry of tales, gods, and creatures that originated from the pre-Christian belief systems of the Norse people, who lived in what is now Scandinavia. These myths have been preserved primarily in two major sources: the Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century, and the Poetic Edda, a collection of anonymous poems from earlier centuries. Together, they provide a fascinating glimpse into the worldview, cosmology, and cultural values of the ancient Norse people.

Cosmology: The Nine Worlds

Norse mythology describes a cosmology that is divided into nine interconnected worlds, held together by the World Tree, Yggdrasil. These worlds are:

Asgard: The realm of the Aesir gods, including Odin, Thor, and Frigg. Asgard is often associated with the sky and serves as the dwelling place of the divine.

Midgard: The realm of humans, representing the Earth. Midgard is connected to Asgard by the Bifrost, a rainbow bridge.

Vanaheim: Home to the Vanir gods, a group of deities associated with fertility, prosperity, and nature. The Aesir and Vanir fought a war in the past but eventually established a truce.

Jotunheim: Inhabited by the Jotnar, or giants, who are often portrayed as antagonists to the Aesir. Not all giants are malevolent, and some even form alliances with the gods.

Alfheim: The realm of the Light Elves, benevolent and ethereal beings associated with light and beauty.

Svartalfheim: Home to the Dwarves, skilled craftsmen and blacksmiths who create powerful artifacts for the gods.

Nidavellir: Another realm associated with Dwarves, specifically known for its connection to the creation of the legendary hammer Mjolnir, wielded by Thor.

Helheim: The realm of the dead, ruled by the goddess Hel. It is a realm for those who did not die in battle and is often described as a cold and dreary place.

Muspelheim: A realm of fire and heat, inhabited by fire giants and ruled by the fire giant Surtr. Muspelheim is associated with chaos and destruction.

The Pantheon of Gods

The Norse pantheon is composed of a diverse array of deities, each with distinct personalities, domains, and roles. Some of the key gods include:

Odin: The Allfather and chief of the Aesir. Odin is associated with wisdom, war, poetry, and magic. He sacrificed an eye at Mímir's well to gain knowledge.

Thor: The thunder god, known for his incredible strength and his powerful hammer, Mjolnir. Thor is a defender of Asgard and Midgard.

Frigg: Odin's wife and queen of the Aesir. She is associated with fertility, motherhood, and wisdom.

Loki: A trickster god and shape-shifter, often causing mischief among the gods. Despite being a Jotunn, he forms complicated alliances with the Aesir.

Balder: The god of beauty, light, and joy. Balder's death becomes a significant event in Norse mythology, leading to Ragnarok.

Freya: A goddess associated with love, beauty, and fertility. She is also skilled in magic and has a connection to the Valkyries.

Ragnarok: The End of the World

Norse mythology predicts a cataclysmic event known as Ragnarok, signaling the end of the world and the rebirth of a new cycle. During Ragnarok, a series of events unfold, leading to the downfall of many gods, the destruction of Yggdrasil, and the submersion of the world in water. The surviving gods and two human survivors will then emerge to repopulate the world and begin a new era.

Norse mythology provides a rich and multifaceted view of the world, blending elements of creation, destruction, fate, and free will. The stories and characters within this mythology continue to captivate readers and have left a lasting impact on popular culture, influencing literature, art, and entertainment for centuries. The intricate web of relationships among gods, giants, elves, and humans creates a narrative tapestry that reflects the complexities of the human experience and the forces that shape the world.

Taglist (reply/reblog to be added): @axl-ul @crow-flower @thoughts-fromthevoid @alderwoodbooks @harleyacoincidence @tuberosumtater @sonic-spade @theonlygardenia @holymzogynybatman @nulliel-tres @w0rkah0licz @sylvanthorn @tigertaurus22 @profiterole-reads @mathias-musings

#writeblr #writers of tumblr #writing #bookish #booklr #fantasy books #creative writing #book blog #ya fantasy books #ya books #norse mythology #thor #ragnarok #mythology #deep dives into folklore #folklore

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miss-bvnny · 6 months

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And what if none of their souls were saved? They went to their maker impeccably shaved

My own little spooky challenge for the month!! Two of my favorite things: Sweeney Todd 07, and giving fictional characters government assigned fursonas!!

Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett - Dalmatian and Red fox

When I started this, I KNEW I wanted Todd to be an animal that was black and white. The monochromatic theme in Depp's version of Sweeney is SO Tim Burton that I wanted to preserve it. ALMOST settled on a skunk, but the thought of dalmatian spots mixing with blood spots was TOO cool of a concept in my eyes. TBH there WAS a time when I was tempted to make him a fox, because Sweeney TODD. Get it? But I held off because I didn't want to reuse specific animals TOO much. Speaking of which-

Mrs Lovett was always a fox from the first second. It fits her entire character (Seductive, trickster, lots of red, not to be trusted) FAR too well. The way her ears are posed are also supposed to bring a pair of horns to mind. Something DEEPLY wrong with this woman <3333

Lucy Barker/Miserable Woman - Afghan hound

PROBABLY a very uninspired and obvious choice, but...I wanted to draw ''hair ears'' lmao. Sweeney describes her blonde hair as one of the only things he remembers about her, so I wanted a dog breed that naturally had long blonde hair about it. I de-saturated her colors for her ''Miserable Woman'' look to make her look sadder and dirtier.

Anthony and Johanna - Mutt and Golden dalmatian

Yes I KNOW they look like Scamp and Angel okay. The inspiration was intentional but I might've accidentally strayed...TOO close to the source.

Johanna was one of two characters that took me on a bit of a trip. First she was an Afghan just like Lucy, then she was a doe, but I decided to have a little more fun with her. I made her a golden dalmatian, with the ''dalmatian'' coming from her father and the ''Golden'' coming from her mother. I imagined she's a bit like Oddball from 102 Dalmatians, where she's actually ''blank'' aside from the spots on her face and the two on her shoulder (she gets these ones from Todd) The black on her ear is also from Todd. I could have chosen the easy way out and made her look like her mother, but in my own silly way I thought it'd be fucked up if she looked like her father, considering the scene they share near the end of the movie.

Anthony is a sailor, so I gave him a very ''Sea dog'' mutt look. I just kind of...combined a bunch of traits and characteristics that I thought would work for him. You can see a LITTLE of Toughy from LATT in him, only because I liked the eye patch and all the scruff.

Tobias Ragg (aka Toby) - Bat

Toby was a fun one!! Oh, look how adorable he is!!! Since Toby has the final kill of the movie, and he kills Todd at that, I wanted him something small and cute but...potentially very dangerous. I settled on a bat, because they're very cute and they can carry rabies!!

And yes, that's his wig he's carrying. Didn't know how to portray him holding a pie, and I wasn't about to draw him drinking a bottle of gin, so I thought his little wig might be cute. He was honestly one of my favorites to draw <3

Adolfo Pirelli - Ring-tailed lemur

Pirelli is a ring-tailed lemur for two reasons. The first reason, is because since all the other animals are quadrupeds, having a bipedal animal felt more ''exotic'' to go with how he's seen as very special and from out of town. It makes him stick out naturally as someone of note.

The second reason he's a lemur.......is because he's played by Sacha Baron Cohen in 07.

Beadle Bamford and Judge Turpin - Hyena and Vulture

Yeah I'm just gonna come out and say it - Beadle Bamford is one of my fav characters in this movie so I made him a Hyena out of pure favoritism. Having Timothy Spall play him the same year he was Nathaniel in Enchanted was just for me, I think.

Originally, Turpin was a lion. Because...Bamford's a hyena...and they're the villains...sooooooo....yeah. And I WOULD have stuck with that, but....he's described as a vulture in No Place Like London. And while I knew my designs didn't have to adhere to that...I felt like ignoring it would have been stupid on my part. Glad I stuck with it, since...I gotta admit it works REALLY well for him. I've never drawn a vulture before, and it was fun to try something new anyway <3

#NeatO draws #NeatO fanart #Sweeney Todd #Yeahhhh im three days early whaddya want from me lmao

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dateamonster · 15 days

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working on refining my idea of how demons and angels present in Other School lore feel free to ignore

demons originated as a pretty garden variety subsect of trickster spirit who fed off human misery. as both human and demon populations began to grow, it became harder to rattle humans with just a little mischief and destruction, while at the same time the increased number of demons were becoming more and more aggressively competitive and territorial. at some point they would start taking a page out of the faeries book and simply abduct humans back to the infernal realm to torment and feed off them indefinitely. mortal existence already being such a fragile thing, angels were dispatched from the celestial realm to curb demon activity.

the ensuing war was the inciting incident for pretty much all future angel/demon hostility. the demons were at a categorical disadvantage, but still managed to do some real damage to the angels numbers after one of their highest ranking angels defected and took a big chunk of his men with him. this was the first instance of fallen angels and really shook up a lot of angel society.

eventually treaty lines were drawn and angels and demons were bound to a pact that prevented them from directly harming one another. demons freedom of movement in the mortal realm was also pretty strongly limited, but as compromise they were still allowed claim over humans that went to them willingly, those who forfeited their souls to feed their own greed or lust for power, and only after death, since as long as they were alive there was still a chance for redemption. likewise, angels could not interfere with a humans fate if that was the path they chose.

this worked out well enough for the demons for a while. while they couldnt force a mark into selling their soul they quickly learned there were plenty of little ways to stack the odds in their favor not strictly forbidden by the terms of the treaty, and a number of them returned to the old ways of killing crops and causing poor sleep and little miseries like that to tide them over until some bigger target beefed it and ended up fair game for them to torment eternally.

but demons were still a competitive and greedy bunch by nature, and the cleverer of them continued searching for new ways to navigate around the rules and get higher numbers of souls in their possession. eventually someone realized that once they owned a human soul, they didnt strictly speaking have to just torture them, they could make them do other stuff, including acting as a middle man. so they began drafting up a deal for the humans they lured, a contract you might say, which offered them freedom from the agonies inflicted on them in exchange for meeting a certain quota of souls claimed and evil done. they even sweetened the deal by allowing them to extend this offer to any humans they corrupted themself, creating a tidy chain of command. demons claiming human souls, turning them into demons, and sending them out to repeat the process, feeding infinitly off the flow of ambient misery this naturally produced. hells first pyramid scheme baby!!

over the course of centuries demonic society shifted from a chaotic free-for-all of violent internal and external power struggles to a grand, horrible, corporate machine, whose influence would eventually seep out and form the basis for a lot of the worst structures in the mortal realm as well.

demons are still demons however so even within this more ordered system there's still plenty of double crossing, spying, demons serving two rival masters without their knowing, demons killing their higher ups and taking their place, things like that. the level of self destruction innate to this kind of environment keeps all powers in check and prevents humankind from being fully subsumed into hell to a point where the angels would need to break the fragile peace theyve maintained for eons and intervene again. but still they are keeping an eye on them..

its allllll good lol

#demons #angels #ungodly screeching #worldbuilding

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senatushq · 3 months

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"Seems to me, the last person standing gets final say on who is right or wrong." - Corellon Larethian, God King of the Seldarine

Anyone with intuition could feel it, demons were the most sensitive to the shift, spirits especially. The Inferno was gone and the gods, demigods, and various aspects who relied on the comforts of Elysia, Elysium, and the other afterlives no longer could. The Archfiends had chased many from their divine homes, and the Inferno had dissolved entirely; the Otherworld was flooded with demonic forces. Where The City of New Dis once stood was a crater, a hole punched through the foundation of the Otherworld, through the Underdark, and into the outer rings of the Abyss below.

The Court of Drow came upon it first, they’d been charged with securing the boundaries of the Otherworld from creatures like the amphisbaena or Koh; entities along with countless other Fiends previously kept at bay by Titania’s protection. Where once the might of the fey shielded the mortal realm, now it fell to the workings of sorcerers and priestesses; Lloth’s will. Fiends that crawled from the Lake of Dis below were hunted, captured, or dispersed by the forces led by Somniar, Felandaris, Amadeus, Nyloth, Severon, Faerinaal, and Nidhogg. Sorcerers through their training contended with the magic of the Abyss, demonology was a focal point for their arcane training, and shielding the hidden ways into the mortal realm as well as the Court itself was a simple enough measure.

What remained was the truth that entities like Archfiends would continue to crawl from the Abyss, or send their emissaries in their place. While it would be difficult for these forces to step into the mortal realm physically; the Greater Demons and Original Vampires had proven that it was still possible through possession. Another truth was that they were not alone, the Draconic God Oztalun was revived, risen in new Abyssal glory. Druids could feel his return and would feel their sense of indebted loyalty towards the deity once more.

From the distant places of the Otherworld, Titania’s erasure eliminated the last of her longstanding protection, the eyes of many turned their gazes towards the mortal realm. From long-forgotten places they had already begun to stir: Oberon and his lorendrow who sought a home free of plague, and the Dark Seldarine who’d been silent for ages had begun to whisper once again. Eilistraee had already made herself known, Vhaeraun had forged an aasimar into a scourge, and as Lloth wove from the Demonweb Pitts, her generals gathered again. The dark elves could feel this just as surely as the high elves could feel their old patrons walking among them once more; Sehanine’s lythari had brought their faith to the mortal shores. Sune’s love shone upon the sun elves, through the miasma of decay the face of a trickster snickered from beyond the veil, and whispers of a dark but proud cold bellowed from the mountains of the lunar elves.

As the senate met in preparation for the upcoming Lupercalia, rats scurried about the Forum, in the center of the hall they formed together, their exposed brains indicative of their drow nature as the cranium abominations that were under Somniar’s control. He told the members of the senate: the senators, marshals, ambassadors, and emissaries alike that Oztalun had risen, and that he was behind the Abyss opening; the spellplague that had destroyed the elven empire and the proto-drow could very well be at their door within a year. From Felandaris he relayed that members of the Asphodel, past or current, would remain bound to Oztalun’s will. From Nyloth the Inquisitor informed the senate that the Seldarine would seek to make patrons of not only the elves, but the rest of the realm as well, and that only creatures of the Abyss were immune to the effects of the spellplague. She had seen firsthand how it devastated the elven empire.

The emissaries of the elven court observed that Farenduil had been infected by the spellplague, but by purging his magic, he was cleansed of it as well. Eren proposed that it was clear that the Abyss did not have power over people without magic; those who’d had it destroyed within themselves by Seraphim, and those who’d been purged of it by Nettelia were no longer beholden to the call of the necronomicon. Still, a truth remained that perhaps there were other ways to separate from it, or to somehow cure the spellplague. Yurena was quick to point out that it had been made clear that those who wished to leave the Asphodel could sacrifice the person they love most, but beyond that, she knew of no other way.

The business of the Otherworld set aside, another matter needed to be contended with. As Octavian had been ostracized from the city, and the known members of the Asphodel had been captured, stripped of their magic, and imprisoned, others needed to answer for their war crimes as well. Eve had confided in Lilith the weakness of an original vampire long ago; naturally, Lilith then gratefully passed the information along to the various disciples of Pluto who had been betrayed; the problem they were encountering was that killing an original vampire had far-reaching implications that they did not yet understand.

A deal was struck, and with Otherworldly stakes gathered and blessed by Trivia, Senator Xerxes, his marshals, and others with an axe to grind impaled the vampire and petrified him. Given to Trivia to conceal so that none from his line would ever seek to release him as a gesture of goodwill Lilith very kindly offered to take the original vampire’s body off of her hands; bound by Trivia through an unbreakable oath, Lilith would not allow the creature to be killed or resurrected. High Priestess of the Abyss, she buried him deep within the pit in a sanctum that she had claimed as her own, and it was there that Pluto would remain trapped for eternity. She dribbled blood into his mouth so he’d forget himself entirely, he'd remember only an existence of pain, petrification, and the frequent nightmares where the High Priestess of the Abyss would visit him.

ooc info:

Pluto is closed and will not be made playable.

Helen is also closed and will not be made playable.

Lupercalia will begin February 16th at 11am.

There will be 3 drops to the event, February 16th, 19th, and 23rd.

Again, this is a mini event so the drops are just "it starts," "these people won tickets to cirque," and then "this is your new alpha."

Any senate-connected character will now know the inferno is gone, Oztalun is back, and he's somehow connected to the Asphodel.

Nearly all members of the Asphodel, past or current, are still enthralled to Oztalun.

#senatus.ii.i #senatus.plot

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autumnalwalker · 1 year

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Magic System Inspiration Tag

Thank you for the tag, @blind-the-winds.

Passing the tag to @cljordan-imperium, @talesofsorrowandofruin, @ceph-the-ghost-writer, @writernopal, @druidx, @anthros-vanitas-archive, and an open tag for anyone else who wants to share.

Rules: list the inspiration(s) for your WIP's magic system and, if you want, go into detail.

So, both The Archivist's Journal and Empty Names qualify as fantasy and have magic, but really only Empty Names has a "magic system" per say.

The Archivist's Journal is more like "try to keep individual elements internally consistent but otherwise throw supernatural odds and ends at the wall and see what sticks." How or why anything magical works in that world is intentionally meant to be ultimately unknowable and barely comprehensible (at least to the Archivist) and making peace with that inability to know is something that I've come to realize wound up being something of an overall theme. And whether anything really even is magic and not some combination of placebo effect, hallucination, and/or disguised/misunderstood science and technology is a bit of a recurring background question.

In that vein then, I suppose one might point to some Lovecraftian cosmic horror influence, but with the twist that the unknown has just as much - if not more - capacity to inspire wonder and whimsy as it does horror and madness. Meanwhile, things like the nature sprite's fey trickster vibe and the tendency for objects to take on unusual properties after being cared for for a very long time have any number of precedents in folklore and pop culture, so it's hard to point to any one source of inspiration.

As for Empty Names, well, at the end of the day there's really only one magic system/concept at the core of everything, but it's one that can be extrapolated out to a number of things, allowing me to play fast and loose with "rules" for magic and enabling what looks like multiple conflicting magic systems to be running at once.

Going to hide the rest of this under a "Keep Reading" line because I expect this to turn into a rambling essay.

The core magic system:

So, anyway, the core "magic system" in Empty Names is that reality is influenced and defined by belief and perception, both of the individual and of the collective human consciousness. This ultimately started as me trying to come up with an explanation for why magic stuff needs kept out of the public eye in an urban fantasy setting. That explanation being that having an entire "anchor world" full of people that fundamentally believe the universe to be stable and bound by physical laws gives enough stability to allow other worlds to be more fantastical without reality breaking down altogether. It was an idea that I'd sort of played with of and on over the years in various iterations when trying to come up with ideas for TTRPG campaigns to run, but it wasn't until I came across a certain Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) image gallery (those are something of a guilty pleasure of mine) that made use of this concept in an extremely similar way that I found a good way to properly define and articulate it.

Once I had that down, everything else magic-related in this setting was ultimately able to tie back to that. All the different magic systems at play here are essentially just "it works this way because the mage using it expects it to work that way, and so do enough other people that follow that tradition of magical practice." There's probably more than a little bit of the Warhammer 40K Ork tech principle in that idea's genealogy.

The Autogenesis Principle:

The Autogenesis Principle (or just "autogenesis" as it more often gets referred to in the text) is probably the most original thing I came up with for the setting. Taking the "reality reflect perception" idea and applying it on the individual level instead of to the world so that the internalized view people have of themselves physically manifests as changes to their bodies. I think I originally came up with it as an explanation for Eris having the superhuman strength and durability to be able to throw down with monsters barehanded and then ran with it as an excuse to give Lacuna alternating hope/angst about gender dysphoria stuff. Or maybe it was the other way around. And when planning on doing an episodic monster-of-the-week type of anthology (as was the original plan for the project), playing into the classic trope of "person who does monstrous things literally turns into a monster because of it" gives a convenient source of monsters to deal with. But similar to The Archivist's Journal recasting unknowability as potentially good and wondrous, that aligning of body with perception has the potential to be wonderfully affirming too (see again, the hopeful wish-fulfillment side of Lacuna's gender hope/angst).

Also, some of the capacity of autogenesis being tied to reality stabilization stems from the endless and tiring internet forum arguments of "Why don't people in <Insert Setting Here> just use magic to boil blood/cause an aneurysm/suck air out of lungs/<Insert Other Cheap And Brutal Auto-Win Strategy Here>?" The implicit explanation of "your self-image doesn't usually include being on fire, so autogenesis protects you from mages internally combusting you" preemptively fills that potential plot hole.

Crossherd and other pocket dimensions:

Crossherd, "the largest and most connected-to pocket dimension in North America" and "collective wistful dream of every small town that could have been a metropolis if only history had gone a little differently" owes its meta-existence to two primary influences. The first is from a campaign I ran for the "Glitter Hearts" magical girl genre TTRPG. That campaign's setting was a bit of a thought experiment of "What if a couple key local historical events went differently so that my own small hometown had grown into a major metropolitan center for the region?" and the name "Crossherd" is itself a butchered AU-ified version of my irl hometown's name.

The second major influence for the Empty Names version of Crossherd as a pocket dimension haven for the supernatural within the otherwise seemingly mundane anchor world is Three Portlands from the SCP wiki, particularly as it appears in the "Third Law" canon. Actually, a lot of Empty Names is influenced by "Third Law" and the adjacent SCP tales and canons, seeing as I'd just finished reading every article linked from that canon hub when I started jotting down the initial notes for this project. And while I'm at it, not technically "Third Law" or magic system related, but special shoutout to Aldon from the "Learning the Alphabet with Aldon & Finnegan" collection of SCP tales as being an influence on Lacuna's search for a way to get herself a new body after learning that magic exists.

Meanwhile, Carnette's eclectically adorned and bigger-on-the-inside Bridgewood Manor draws its biggest inspiration from the player housing in the MMORPGs AION and Final Fantasy FXIV and the exploits that some players would get up to in order to create far more impressive displays than the designers ever seemingly intended. And just like the high-end players who have saved the world several times over spending all their time post-campaign breaking the game to make the coolest house possible, Carnette Bridgewood - the world's most powerful mage - spent her days experimenting with how to best break reality itself over her knee for the sake of interior decorating. There's also traces of House of Leaves in the manor's inspiration. There's even a labyrinth out behind the house, perfect for a Minotaur.

Rituals, Enchanting, and Lacuna's tech approach to magic:

Another big magic sub-system for Empty Names is the use of elaborately drawn magic circles and long involved chants for rituals to produce magical effects without needing to be a full-fledged mage. That general idea of magic circles and slow elaborate rituals instead of wizards just casually tossing fireballs around has a long, long, history with any number of mythology/folklore/pop-culture examples, but I think the D&D 4e and 5e approaches to it as it explicitly being a way for non-spellcaster characters to do magic is the most immediate influence for me here. And then there's plenty of RPG (video game and tabletop) influence on being able to use rituals like that for drawing glyphs onto objects as enchantments to buff equipment.

Lacuna's particular method of using a digital projector to perfectly draw her ritual circle in the first chapter and then her later work with using AI to make real-time adjustable circles and sped up computer-generated chanting to do ridiculously complex rituals in a short amount of time once again draws inspiration from the SCP wiki, with similar technology showing up in the "Third Law" and "All That Glisters" canons. Also, the fleshy laptop Sullivan gives her is rather directly inspired by the so-called Osteotronic Cubes from the latter canon.

Going back to the "magic works how your expect it to work" thing, Lacuna being a huge anime nerd with a fondness for Fullmetal Alchemist is low-key part of the reason the glyph-circle based magic works so well for her. And, drawing from some of my own irl experience with coming on board late into legacy code bases and programming, Lacuna's got no idea how the innermost workings of that AI system function, she just has faith that it does and knows what surface-level components she can modify and add onto without breaking it. This probably won't wrap back around to "belief shapes reality" and accelerate the AI system into a nascent machine god singularity or something.

Not quite Lacuna's field, but magic and tech related, there's some background worldbuilding of technically mundane tech in Crossherd being sped up decades ahead of the mundane world via techniques inspired by the Theosophical Society and attempts at Occult Chemistry to use clairvoyance to divine the atomic structures. RevaTech, the company that Lacuna left, is short for Revelation Technologies as a nod to this. Meanwhile, actual paranormal technology getting referred to as "paratech" is another SCP reference.

Ashan's magic:

The world that Ashan learned magic on is based on a homebrew D&D campaign I ran once and has some tendency to follow similar D&D-esque classifications of magic into schools/styles based on effect. The similarity to D&D's magic system mostly ends there though (aside from the aforementioned rituals). The real inspiration for Ashan's particular spellcasting style of drawing/painting his conjurations into existence comes from the trend of early games on the Nintendo DS and Wii to make gameplay gimmicks of incorporating the stylus or remote respectively to have the player draw things on the screen. I never actually played Okami myself so I might be off base with it, but it's the big one that always jumps to mind for me as an example.

That random necromancer Ashan fights in Chapter 2:

This particular application of necromancy as manipulating flesh and bone rather than raising the dead was mostly inspired by Tamsyn Muir's "The Locked Tomb" series.

Culescu and Flesh-shaping:

A world that gets mentioned a bunch in Chapters 8 through 12, known for its inhabitants' secretive mastery of a brand of magic that easily transforms and shapes living flesh in spite of autogenesis normally making that incredibly difficult. That was all born from a heavily reflavored (but mechanically unaltered) psion class character I played in a 4th Edition D&D campaign over a decade ago. Jero, who shows up in Chapter 12 is the most recent iteration of that character. I ended up reusing the character and the concept in several of my own homebrew campaigns over the years, expanding on it into a world/culture as I went (even if my players hardly ever directly encountered any of it).

The biggest inspiration on that is my own personal tendency to react to the body horror genre and Geiger-esque art with fascination instead of horror or disgust. Asking the question "What if instead of such dramatic bodily transformations being horrible, painful, and traumatic, they were painless and willingly initiated as a way to experiment with new physical sensations, explore the relationship between mind and body, and allow for self-determination and affirmation of one's identity?" "What if this was easily accessible, reversible, and normalized?" "What if it were elevated to an art form?"

The art of Lucian Stanculescu (aka hypnothalamus), particularly circa 2010-2014, was a big influence on how I'd often pictured such artistic application of flesh-shaping often coming out. Enough so that the name of the world is an homage to that artist.

Also, the manga "Franken Fran" is a somewhat more twisted version of this vibe and something of an influence on Jero's tendency to walk the line between chipperly helpful and deeply unsettling.

Cosmology and travel between worlds:

While I don't expect it will get too much screen time or explanation in Empty Names proper, aside from the early-mentioned bits about "anchor worlds" the biggest influence on my perception of some worlds being "closer" or "farther" from one another despite them being different dimensions/universes rather than a separation of physical space (and their surprising fragility) comes from the webcomic "White Noise" by Adrien Lee. I tend to imagine the stations in Crossherd for traveling between worlds as looking similar to the portal stations in that comic as well.

As for the space between worlds (and again, their surprising fragility) there's definitely a Lovecraftian cosmic horror eldritch monster all-is-the-dream-of-Azathoth type stuff going on. The "Void Without" that Sullivan swears by. Well, if I'm being really honest, it's perhaps even more directly inspired by that concept but as portrayed in the dream bubbles and Horrorterrors of the Furthest Ring in Homestuck.

Names and name-based magic:

Once again, there's no shortage of sources to draw inspiration from in pop culture and folklore when it comes to stories about faeries stealing people's names, or names otherwise being stolen or sold, often with the result being some combination of the new holder of the name controlling, taking the form of, or abandoning the original owner to be an empty husk. And once again, the SCP wiki's takes on this was one of the biggest immediate inspirations for how this plays out in Empty Names. The memetic geass NDA contract that Lacuna had to sign when leaving her old job was similarly inspired by the "Third Law" SCP canon.

The biggest inspiration for the workings and inclusion of nominative magic in Empty Names however are the various short stories, poems, and social media posts I've seen speculating on how such a fey theft or sale of a name might affect a trans person trying to get rid of a deadname. Lacuna going through such a bargain in order to bind a fairy into her service as a familiar by trading it her deadname was actually one of the first scenes I wrote a rough draft of. It'll be a long time until the main story gets to that point though.

Xenocolors:

There have been a couple of offhand mentions to specific weird colors that produce certain effects when seen. This is less "inspired by" and more "referencing" Fallen London's Neathbow.

Whatever is going on with Sullivan in Chapter 11:

Kirby, but simultaneously human-shaped and more explicitly Lovecraftian.

#tag game #writing tag games #The Archivist's Journal #Empty Names #writing inspiration #worldbuilding #magic system

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twstrhythm · 2 years

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“Don’t judge a book by its cover. Things may not be as you perceive them to be.”

Technical Information:

Name: Xuě Lóng Yang Nicknames: Silvery Dolphin (Floyd); Monsieur Illusion (Rook); The Yang to my Yin (Jianyu); Mister Guardian (Peri); Trickster Dragon (Longwei), Shixiong (Chenxi); Xuehua (Jiawen), Piaopiao (as a joke, by Ziwei) Voice Actor: Romi Park (Toshiro Hitsugaya, Bleach)

Biological Information:

Gender: Male Pronouns: He/Him Age: 315 Birthday: March 11 Star Sign: Pisces Height: 157.5 cm Hair color: White Eye color: Black Homeland: Xianglong Zhigong Family: See Here

Professional Status:

School: Night Raven College Dorm: Diasomnia School Year: Third Class: 3-C Student Number: 27 Occupation: Student Club: Cooking Best Subject: Ancient Incantations

Fun facts:

Dominant hand: Right Favorite Food: Nai huang bao Least Favorite Food: Taro Dislikes: Having nothing to do; Extreme Temperatures Hobbies: Playing the Guzheng Talents: Danger sense

Appearance:

Xuě Lóng has medium length white hair that he keeps in a low ponytail that rests on his left shoulder. Contrary to what some may think, it is his natural hair color. He had black colored eyes which makes it difficult to see his slitted pupils. He also wears a pair of black framed glasses and a single red tassel earring. He wears the standard school uniform of NRC.

Personality:

Xuě Lóng is intuitive and selfless. He tends to focus on work until he gets bored, but that is something that rarely happens. He does not usually talk very much and tends to keep to himself. He does not like sharing his troubles with other people because he is afraid of burdening them. As such, people tend to have trouble understanding how he feels and tend to believe that nothing is bothering him.

Background:

Xuě Lóng is from a line of lóng that originates from Xianglong Zhigong. For most of his childhood, he was raised by his father because his mother had passed away due to an illness. His mother had been a sweet and kind person who believed in letting him make his own choices. Xuě Lóng had been disinterested in doing many things and was not very sociable, but his father decided to train him in the ways of the guardian. While he didn’t really care for it, he complied with his father’s wishes.

One day, he was introduced to Jiǎn-Yǔ Song and told that the other boy would be joining them from now on. While he had not been fond of the idea, he did not argue against it. During one of the training sessions, Xuě Lóng had accidentally injured Jiǎn-Yǔ. Feeling guilty about it, he hid himself away in his room. Much to his surprise, Jiǎn-Yǔ had returned and insisted on becoming friends. Slowly, he grew used to the other boy’s presence and started to go out of his home more often.

Somewhere down the line, Xuě Lóng had gone out to do some errands on his own. During those errands, Xuě Lóng ran into a visitor from the Kingdom of Domhnall. However, he did not get along with this visitor and ended up getting into a fight with him. Neither of them got out unscathed. Xuě Lóng’s father had scolded him for this. Deciding that a change in scenery would help, his father suggested Xuě Lóng enroll in a magic school to hone his skills.

Alongside Jiǎn-Yǔ, Xuě Lóng enrolled into a magic school to further develop his magic skills because he thought it would help him with future endeavors. He partly regrets it because it required him to go somewhere far from home. On the other hand, he learned to have independence from his father and family with the new experience. He had also been able to make more friends as a result.

However, he was still worried that things would not go well back home. As a result, he would often try to check in with his father every so often to make sure everything is alright. When he had breaks, Xuě Lóng went back to Xianglong Zhigong to check on his family. Due to his friend’s intervention, he was able to open up more to his family. Over time became closer to his cousins; Haoyu Yang, Xīnyí Tián, and YǎTíng Tián.

Xuě Lóng did not realize he had a half-sibling until he went to Night Raven College. During the school year, he met KūnMíng Ruǎn, his half-brother. The two have slowly been working on getting to know one another, and he occasionally returns home to speak with half-sister, Hóngméi Ruǎn more.

Skills and Abilities:

Intelligence: Xuě Lóng is highly intelligent, and he is very capable of thinking his way through different situations. He enjoys coming up with plans.

Quick Thinker: He is a quick thinker and can come up with plans on the spot.

Excellent Planning: When he comes up with plans, he usually comes up with multiple backup plans in case one goes wrong.

Magical Skill: He is skilled in magic, particularly water magic. He has great control over his magic, and he is able to minimize damage done to his surroundings.

Dragon Transformation: Xuě Lóng is capable of transforming into a dragon.

Enhanced Speed: He has enhanced speed and is capable of keeping up with a fast moving car in his dragon form.

Enhanced Strength: He has enhanced strength in dragon form.

Extra Flexible: He is extra flexible in his dragon form.

Flight: He is capable of flying despite having no wings in dragon form.

Imaginative Thinker: As his Unique Magic requires, he has a good imagination.

Unique Magic:

Xuě Lóng’s Unique Magic is called Illusionary Screens. It allows him to create illusions. The magic cost depends on the scale of the illusion, and it is harder to keep up the illusion on large groups of people.

Chant: "Things are not as they appear to be. Don't blink, Illusionary Screens."

Trivia:

Xuě Lóng has a dragon form.

There is a rule in Diasomnia centering it: never piss off Xuě Lóng Yang.

When Xuě gets angered, like really really pissed, he unconsciously transforms into a dragon. People say that you can hear it as the bones shift and snap into place when this transformation happens. It is an absolutely terrifying and nightmare fueling experience to bear witness to.

Xuehua means snowflake

Xianglong Zhigong (翔龙之宫) literally meaning Kingdom/palace of flying dragons.

Xuě (雪) meaning snow.

Lóng (龙) meaning dragon.

The person Xuě Lóng fought was Issac Miller.

Xuě Lóng has a few scars from that fight. Most of his scars are hidden minus the one that is on his left hand.

He had been stabbed straight through that hand during the fight. There is some lasting damage from that since it had damaged a few nerve endings.

Xuě Lóng has some feeling in that hand, but not that much. He also has trouble holding things for too long with his left hand and can't properly grasp things anymore. He used to be able to use both hands but can't anymore.

He really enjoys eating, but he is afraid to tell people that.

He is infamous among other guardians for having fought against the ones he was meant to protect at some point.

He was expelled from RSA after deciding to partake in an endless staircase prank.

Xuě Lóng writes letters to home every two weeks.

He is currently assigned to be Shen Liu’s guardian.

#twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland oc #twst oc #male twst oc #twst male oc #oc: xue long yang #chenxi belongs to my friend #jiawen belongs to a friend

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nehswritesstuffs · 2 years

Text

Thousand Arc Reactor Derived Intertemporal Starship, but we just call her Thousand Sunny

OR, “Why Are So Many of These Space-Time Adventurers Extremely Hot?”: An Essay Crisis Bi-Panic Essay By Sanji Jambenoire

I apologize in advance for this, like, wow.

4042 words; come and feast your eyes upon what is definitely a most unholy of unions between two of my favorite fandoms and I’m still amazed I took this long to come up with it despite the fact it should have been clear in retrospect that I’m a ticking time bomb; contains ZoSan and mentions of other ships for our favorite blond bicycle, as well as some Sanji ogling because, well, it’s Sanji;

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Things had not exactly been normal since the day Monkey D. Luffy crashed into Sanji’s life.

For one, the dude was a fucking alien. Not, like, from a foreign country alien, but from another goddamned galaxy. Literally. The asshole crashed his ship into his foster dad’s restaurant and everything had devolved from there. One minute he was kicking out an asshole who wasted food, the next there’s this blue box smoldering in the dining room, with a young man stumbling out to announce how hungry he was and stretched his limbs to gobble up the food the asshole was going to waste.

Yeah. Stretched. Like taffy. Bloody fucking alien from outer space.

Secondly, after a lot of arguing, his dad kicked him out of the restaurant and onto the ship, claiming it would do him some good. While the thing nominally looked like a blue police box, inside the seemingly-wooden doors and there truly was an entire ship inside. It was a rather big adjustment, but everything seemed to slot into place fairly easily…

…and that mostly was because of the third thing: the rest of the “ship’s crew” was more than a bit on the odd side.

Luffy had a habit of… collecting people, as it were. Sanji was only one of many people he ended up collecting in his adventures. Well… maybe the term “collecting” wasn’t entirely the case. Possibly “acquired” might be better. No matter what, it was a weird group, though they always made things feel natural, in a ways.

Then again, how could one think things were really, genuinely natural when there was a nine-foot skeleton, a blue-haired cyborg, and a man-fish that sort of wandered around everywhere?

Not a terribly easy thing to do—he really deserved a fucking medal.

Thusly, Sanji traveled with this man—this Time Lord—and his motley crew of weirdos whose origins stretched throughout time and space. There were a lot of Time Lords out there, and the most enigmatic of them with the initial D. in their name, and sometimes, their paths crossed.

“I swear by all that is right in the galaxies, Strawhat-ya, I will break my Hippocratic Oath one day and flat-out murder you,” grumbled the Time Lord they were now currently stranded on a planet with. Both of their ships had picked up distress signals, which meant that Luffy—the Straw Hat—wanted to investigate and Trafalgar Law—the Surgeon—had wanted to make certain there was no one that needed medical attention. Unluckily for both of them, tractor beams kept both their ships grounded while they attempted to figure out what was keeping them there.

“Shishishi—looks like there’s no other choice but to go on an adventure, Torao!” Luffy grinned draping his arm around the other man’s shoulders in the casual way only an interdimensional trickster-god-cum-hazard-to-all-life-itself could pull off. “Isn’t that great?!”

“It’s… something.” Law glared at the small cluster of Luffy’s “crew” that had gathered and attempted to bore a hole through them with only his eyes. When it didn’t work, he raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you happen to have some sense of normalcy, unlike your captain.”

“I’d agree with you,” Sanji shrugged, “but he did convince us to leave our lives and travel with him.”

The Surgeon closed his eyes and grumbled—of course he did.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

The biggest thing about travelling with Monkey D. Luffy—the Straw Hat, Time Lord Extraordinaire—Sanji found was that he did like to keep an interesting ship.

The particular space-time ship that they were on was custom-built by a cyborg named Franky, the sleek walls and tasteful décor contrasting his loud and obnoxious personality. Was he just an American? From the future? The blond really didn’t know. Shit, he didn’t even know what the Historian found in him.

Oh, yeah, there were other Time Lords on the crew as well. The Historian—Nico Robin, to some—was a powerful woman whose ability to replicate her limbs made Sanji’s heart flutter at the possibilities. The Musician—Soul King Brook—was the walking skeleton with an ear for music so uncanny it could alter emotions and thoughts. The Physician—Tony Tony Chopper—could transform between different sorts of reindeer-themed forms. It was all a bit much, really.

It wasn’t as though the non-Time Lord crewmembers were shoddy, however. Nami was a cartography whiz with the innate ability to find their way through a transtemporal storm with ease. Usopp was an incredible marksman, having grown up in an idyllic colony where really the only thing to do on the entire planet was target practice. Jinbe, despite being an Earthen Sea Devil from the dawn of time, if one would believe, was an excellent driver and could handle any craft from the sprawling multi-dimensional ship to a motorbike. Roronoa Zoro of the Shimotsuki Clan of Wano Prefecture, the spicy-as-fuck actual samurai from the actual Sengoku fucking Jidai fuck fuck fuck why is he hot like a tater tot, could cut through pert near anything with his three swords. No, one of them was not permanently attached. Sanji was not equipped to see all four of the man’s “swords” at once.

It almost made his talent of cooking seem like child’s play, in a way.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

“How in the hell have we really survived this long?”

Sanji, Zoro, and Law were all watching as Luffy, Usopp, Chopper, and several members of Law’s crew bounced happily on the spongy surface of the planet, Robin having deduced that it was a living organism of sorts that colonized the planet after more active species accidentally left some during a resupply stop. Much of the Straw Hat and Surgeon’s crews were off investigating the area, all with the exception of the dozen who were left.

“This is… typical,” Law muttered. “Whenever Strawhat-ya is around, logic and reason and maturity seem to go right out the airlock.”

“Eh, could be worse,” Zoro shrugged. The other two looked at him, eyebrows raised. “We could also be underwater right now.”

Ah, yes, the tragic flaw of the Time Lord: their bodies were so dense due to the extra… stuff allowing them to do their respective weirdo things that they could not float. Sanji knew it well, having had to fish Luffy out of the shallow end of a kiddie pool before. Law was also suspiciously silent—it nearly sounded like he was in agreement.

“Hey, Captain!” one of the Surgeon’s minions laughed. Porg? Penguin? Puffin? Sanji couldn’t keep track anymore. “Come on! Jump with us!”

“I’ll stay here, thank you,” Law grumbled. “Where is Ikkaku-ya and Clione-ya? I need their report.”

“You’re also starting to think there’s no need for distress beacons on this plant too, aren’t you?” Sanji wondered aloud. He side-eyed Law and tried not to drool—how in the hell did he make those gross tats look delectable? “It really is too damn quiet.”

“Wish it weren’t the case, Blackleg-ya.” There was a loud thud behind him and they turned, seeing the Surgeon’s aforementioned crewmates scrambling to get to their feet and run to them. “Report.”

“We think we found the source of the distress signal,” the man, Clione, replied as he gulped for breath. “It was definitely a plea for assistance from a sentient being.”

“Was…?” Zoro wondered, eyebrow raised.

Ikakku’s mouth twisted as she tried not to shudder. “You ever see turkey jerky?”

No; Zoro had never seen a turkey, let alone a jerky of it.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Every so often, they take a break on Earth. Mostly it’s Sanji and Nami’s home spacetime, in their flat that they only can afford because his foster dad owns the building, and it’s not like they really mind. Logueton is a decently-sized city, with enough weird shite going on that people might look twice at the Musician, but not think too hard about it.

It also helps that UNIT’s there, although they’re not much help either. Absolutely riddled with other Time Lords, it acts as the front to all the extraterrestrial hullabaloo that goes on, explaining it away as military drills or film sets or a gas leak. Some days it succeeds better than others. They’re working on it.

It was dark as Sanji was walking back from his closing shift at the Baratie, his foster father’s riverboat restaurant, when he came across Zoro staring at a tree. Well, more like glaring at the tree.

“Oi, marimo, it’s not going to bow unless you cut it,” he mentioned around his cigarette. He took a drag and let the smoke filter out slowly in the cool evening air as he walked up to the other man. “What did it ever do to you?”

“You don’t have trees here.”

“You’re looking straight at one, dipshit.”

“…but it’s one tree. Why aren’t there many others? I get lost so easy without the trees.”

“…because this isn’t a nature park or forest,” Sanji frowned. He looked at the way the Western dress shirt and slacks hung on Zoro and choked back a whine—fuck, he could be a model… a surly, green-haired, built-as-hell model. “Maybe I can take you to one on my next day off. Would you like that?”

“Is that a Logueton courtship ritual?”

“It doesn’t have to be.” Except, please, yes, just do it already. “Come on; let’s walk home.”

“Another courtship ritual.”

“What’s with you and the courtship rituals?”

“You’re the one who keeps suggesting them.”

“…and what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that if we hurry back to the flat then there will be no one there to overhear me bust your ass raw with my hips.”

A curled eyebrow raised. “Oh…? How cute. You think you’d top.”

“Don’t need to in order to make you lose all control, future pretty boy.”

Sanji grinned, terrified. Oh, it was on.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Ikkaku and Clione did genuinely find the source of the distress signals, but it wasn’t pretty.

It had been the doing of another Time Lord, one that was clearly more vicious than any of the ones within their current ranks. Both crews gathered around the charred corpse, most none too pleased that they were dealing with something this big already.

“Who do you think it was?” Nami scowled. “This doesn’t look like the Garrison’s doing.”

“Miss Nami,” one of the Surgeon’s crew grimaced, “with all due respect: the man is West Quadrant Mafioso.”

“She’s right—he’s too into guns,” the Historian supplied. “This is also not the Haboob—the victim is too hydrated.”

“Sand-themed shit should give you a better name than Haboob,” Usopp frowned. He then looked at the Historian with a raised eyebrow. “How would you know?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers for,” Jinbe said. He glanced up at the Straw Hat, who seemed to be vibrating in excitement. “You seem to know what’s going on, don’t you?”

“Nope!” Luffy beamed. “This is pretty neat though, isn’t it? The mystery! The adventure!”

“Something that knew how to send a distress signal is dead,” the Physician chided as he examined the corpse. The Surgeon knelt next to him, watching pensively. “What do you think?”

“The body was clearly damaged after death,” he replied. Taking a finger, he outlined the neck, stopping at a specific point. “Point of impact was here—they tried to misdirect the blame, make it seem as though someone like the Haboob or the Electrician, but the signs are there, pointing to only one person.”

“Whom?”

“None other than the Heavenly Yaksha himself, Blackleg-ya,” the Surgeon said, deathly serious. “There’s going to be additional bodies somewhere—possibly a colony or a ship that fell by the wayside—and that’s where we’re going to find answers.”

Why couldn’t they have a normal, less-threatening adventure for once? Weird food and pretty space-women and maybe some bizarro-world environments like saltwater in rain and native species that had eyes in their hands. Was that really too much to ask?

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

“While I appreciate you’ve made friends, I’d like if you not get distracted while at work.”

Sanji snapped out of his stupor and looked down at the stock pot in front of him, near to bubbling over and ruining the soup. His face went red as he adjusted the heat and glared at his foster father from across the Baratie’s kitchen.

“I wasn’t thinking about them,” he lied.

“Carne lives right below you and that Japanese lad had you screaming into your mattress for two hours last night.” Oh, fuck—caught. “See you got over Viola pretty quick.”

“She wanted a stability I am not ready to provide.”

“Pudding’s been asking after you again.”

“She attends my cookery class once and she’s the most in love she claims to have ever been in.”

“Gin stopped in yesterday.”

“What can I say? I’m just destined to leave a trail of broken hearts behind me.”

“You’re destined to burn the fucking soup if you’re not careful,” his dad snapped. “If I crack open a history book about feudal Japan, am I going to see a woodcut of your new bedwarmer committing seppuku due to the painful memory of his blond lover from the stars?”

“You wound me.”

“You get away from the fucking soup and work on chopping this veg—maybe the repetition will clear your head before the dinner rush.”

“You sure giving me a knife is a good idea, Pops?”

“Just the fuck away from the soup, Eggplant.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Sanji took the knife and began chopping vegetables for use in other dishes later that night. He popped a stick of chewing gum in his mouth and started on the onions—what a great single solution for multiple problems. “At least I get a leg up every now and then.”

“You don’t want to know what I get up to,” Zeff scoffed from the soup. “It’d make your toes curl.”

“Wouldn’t change the fact that you still go home to a cat.” Sanji grinned inwardly—ha, got him.

“At least it’s not a ball of moss.”

Fuck—had him there.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

As usual, the Surgeon was correct with pinpoint accuracy. There were more bodies further out, clustered around what appeared to be not only a downed spaceship, but a generations-old colony that surrounded it. Both crews moved about the carnage with unease.

“It must have just happened,” Usopp noticed. “The grass is still pretty short—I’d say the last time they ran a mower through was a week ago.”

“That’s how you notice?” Sanji scoffed. A weird feeling lurched in his gut as he looked around; there was something extra-wrong about this. “What are the rest of you seeing?”

“There’s absolutely no one adorned in any sort of decoration,” one of the Surgeon’s crew said. “There’s no jewelry, necklaces, rings, tattoos, piercings… and everyone has one of three haircuts.”

“Not only that,” the Physician whimpered, “there’s a sour smell in the air, worse than death normally is.”

“No children,” the Historian replied. She allowed the Physician to bury his face in her side, patting him as a mother would her child. “This colony has been around for many decades, and yet there are no children. There is a school, but none of her students amongst the dead. It is highly improbable all of them escaped.”

“Then we just have to find the survivors,” Luffy nodded. Sanji glanced over at the Surgeon, noting how the other man had gone near sheet-white in his face. “What’s wrong, Torao?”

“I hate being right,” the Surgeon grumbled. He nodded once, gesturing over towards a building with a crossed-out smiley face painted on it. “That’s his symbol.”

“Who’s?” Luffy asked, picking his nose. Nami smacked him on the backside of his head, causing him to tumble forward.

“Heavenly Yaksha, you moron!” she sniped. “Weren’t you even listening back there?! I don’t want to get mixed up in that creep’s business!”

“Sorry, but we already are,” Bepo said. For being a bipedal talking polar bear, he certainly had an adorable, little brother sort of air about him. “By answering the distress signal, we’re in it now.”

“Luffy, if I’m late for my next shift because of this, I’m going to kick your ass,” Sanji hissed. The Straw Hat simply grinned at him before wandering off.

“We travel in space-time ships,” Franky noted. “Being late for work is a super-high improbability.”

“...except it’s Luffy: everything improbable happens when it comes to him.”

Shit—he was right.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

It was weird enough splitting his time between his father’s restaurant and adventuring throughout time and space, but it was much weirder as the two lives he lived began to blur together like a glitch between reality and the Matrix.

At least Nami living at his flat had been pretty normal before then. She was Human, as most people on Earth came, and that wasn’t too disorienting. It was when the rest of Luffy’s collection began showing up around Logueton and at the Baratie did it become a point of contention.

The Historian wasn’t terribly bad, sitting in the corner with tea and a book, and Zeff guessed the Musician and Jinbe were alright on a slow day, but the Straw Hat showing up usually meant that there was something weird about to happen, and chances were something was also going to be broken. Few of the rest of them made for a calmer time, which raised the old man’s blood pressure more than he cared to admit.

“I hate to say that your cross-century affair is one of the most normal things about this,” Zeff said through gritted teeth. He was overseeing as his dining room was being cleaned up, as Usopp had been working on a new batch of Ghost Pepper Exploding Stars and Luffy, Franky, and Chopper had knocked into him, the entire thing exploding. Tears streamed down their faces as they cleaned, the materials of the munitions getting to them. Sanji and some of the rest of staff were watching as well, waiting to be able to prep to open the restaurant.

“It’s weirder that our little shit’s not sleeping with the ginger after all,” Carne mumbled. Patty hit his fist atop the other man’s head and he cursed. “Hey! He’s fucking horny and she’s a hot score! It’d be hard for anyone to keep out of her bed, I imagine.”

“You’re just pissed you lost money on it,” Patty quipped. Eh, couldn’t argue there. He looked over at the corner booth where Zoro was sleeping while Robin read and Jinbe and Brook shared tea. “Aren’t any of you going to help?”

“They need to learn to clean their own messes,” Brook chuckled. “Besides, ghost pepper sauce is for ribs that still have meat on them… which I distinctly lack.”

“I still wonder some days what kind of soup you boil into,” Carne shot back. The Musician shivered at the chill in the air—how threatening.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

The two crews eventually found where the colony’s children were being held hostage, and it was subsequently difficult for them all not to go bloody ballistic. The children—along with a small group of adults—were tied up and imprisoned inside a laboratory, with a small staff milling about freely. When the leader saw the Surgeon had broken into the lair, he tried to hide his fear behind laughter.

“Funny it is to see you here, Trafalgar Law,” he chortled. “I see you’ve brought some friends.”

“What are you doing?!” the Surgeon demanded. The lead scientist shrugged.

“Joker’s wishes,” he replied. He then turned his attention to the Straw Hat and the others. “How cute—friends? Other subjects?”

“The people who are going to kick your ass,” Luffy snarled.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

“It’s called Cup-a-Soup. I get nice ones—not the American shit. It’ll do until I can go to the store.”

Trafalgar Law stared at the box in Sanji’s hand, his brow furrowed in confusion. What about instant soup was absolutely blowing that man’s mind? He and several of his crew were currently stuffed into the flat along with all the Sunny’s usual bunch, meaning the blond didn’t have nearly enough food in the place to feed all of them at that exact moment.

“Don’t they have instant soup on your planet?”

He didn’t know if the stunned silence was cute or just plain infuriating.

“Fine; I’m taking Chopper and we’re getting supplies. None of you assholes touch anything. That includes you, Luffy!” He pointed at the stretchy Time Lord as he let go of the windowsill, allowing the twist of his arms that wrapped around his body to snap back into place. Grabbing his keys, phone, and wallet, he went with the small reindeer-teen out of the flat and began the walk to the store. “Fuck, Zeff’s going to kill me.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?” Chopper wondered. Sanji looked at his friend and sighed—the Physician was too pure a person to get embroiled in half of the shit they were involved in.

“The flat he’s currently letting Nami-swan and I rent is currently filled with no fewer than fifteen rowdy crazies from across time and space, and I know that the man who lives underneath us needs to open the restaurant in the morning.” He lit a cigarette to smoke as they went—what a fucking pain. At least it was dark out, meaning that Chopper didn’t have to worry as much about which form he was wandering about in. “I feel like I need more than a goddamned smoke.”

“You know how I feel about that,” Chopper chided gently.

“I know.” He patted him on the head. “I’ll get there, one day. Just gotta get these fucking stress levels down, you know?”

Chopper reluctantly nodded in agreement and changed into a large, fur-covered man as they went into the store. The pair went and bought enough supplies to feed a small army, with Chopper’s immense size helping as they readied to take the shopping home. On their way, they almost ran directly into a woman who was carrying a sword and wearing a pair of eyeglasses atop her head.

“Citizens! I’m from the United Naval Integral Taskforce! Have you seen a giant man-eating gorilla come out of the supermarket?! I have reports of something along that description threatening the peace!”

“It went that way,” Sanji and Chopper said in unison, pointing in the opposite in which they were walking. The woman sprinted off, leaving the other two to go about their business.

“I wonder why she just doesn’t wear contacts,” Chopper wondered.

“…and risk touching an eyeball? I get why she doesn’t.” They calmly went back to the flat and opened the door, only to find that the kitchen was now a complete disaster, with the sane ones having fled to the inside of the Sunny while someone decided to try to make Cup-a-Soup.

How Sanji had never had a stroke was honestly beyond medical knowledge.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Caesar Clown was exactly that—a clown for Luffy to punch into oblivion as the rest of the crew freed the captured colonists. Some of the Surgeon’s crew were able to work with Franky to rig the laboratory—a spaceship in its own right—to jettison itself out of the atmosphere and past orbit, sending him back to where the Heavenly Yaksha had his base of operations. It was then up to the two crews to help bury the dead and, afterwards, lead the remaining inhabitants in a Glad to Be Alive party.

“So, who killed the colonists?” the Surgeon asked. The Straw Hat chewed his food and stared at him.

“Uhh… the Heavenly Yaksha.”

“Yes—now who did we just narrowly miss running into here because he left early?”

“The Heavenly Yaksha.”

“Good,” Sanji groaned. “Now, who did we just send Caesar Clown to?”

“Joker.”

“So this means…?”

“We still need to find out the connection between Heavenly Yaksha and Joker! Hey! Usopp! That’s my meat!” The Straw Hat dove across the table for some more mutton, which made both Sanji and the Surgeon groan in frustration.

“Blackleg-ya, I don’t really know how you do this all the bloody time,” the Time Lord said.

“To be honest? I’m not entirely sure how I do either.”

#One Piece #Doctor Who #this is most absolutely one of the crazier things I've done I feel like #and yet I absolutely regret none of it #Sanji-centric #poor dude can't catch a break #Vinsmoke Sanji #Sanji #One Piece Sanji

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lavenderpop · 2 years

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daughters of draxum blurb

i wrote this as a train of thought, so sorry if it’s a little all over the place

i want to start off by saying, THIS AU IS PROBABLY GONNA BE A LOT DARKER THAN THE SHOW

as time goes on it’ll become a bit more goofy but the beginning? ANGST. it’s horrible and i’m horrible for putting my poor ocs through all of this <3

i’m not 100% on their names yet, so far i have (in order of age): Seraphina, Lolita, Zelda, and Jinx

i’ve changed Seraphina’s name three times now and i’m STILL unsure about it

i originally thought about making their names based on female painters but thought that would be too on the nose

(if you have any ideas for names i would love to hear them!)

Draxum probably didn’t give them names, just calls them by their experiment numbers, so they named themselves

i REALLY like the name Zelda for Donatello’s clutchmate, i don’t know why but it fits for me

also, when i say clutchmate, i mean the sibling that is from the same group of eggs.

Zelda is Donatello’s, Lolita is Leonardo’s, Seraphina is Raphael’s, and Jinx is Michelangelo’s ✌️

sad fact, but while they call each other sisters, Zelda is the only one who doesn’t truly view them as sisters

in order of fighting abilities from strongest to weakest: Zelda, Lolita, Seraphina, and Jinx

softshell turtles are naturally more aggressive because their shell is so soft, so Zelda really puts in her all when training so she’s not a hazard

Lolita HATES the fact that Zelda is stronger than her, mainly due to the fact that she’s constantly seeking out Draxum’s approval and if she’s not the best than she might as well be the worst

Zelda and Lolita don’t exactly see eye-to-eye, think of Leo and Ralph in almost every other TMNT media. yeah.

Zelda is pretty mean, very aggressive, and can come off as insensitive. she hates being referred to as soft in any way, and saying so could result in utter doom

really, Zelda is just broken inside and needs some SERIOUS therapy

Lolita is… almost completely void of emotions. you remember Todoroki at the start of BNHA before Deku went all “power of friendship” on his ass? yeah. she’s that.

(literally every time i imagine Lolita’s voice, it’s just fucking Todoroki, i can’t stop)

your feelings are not her problem, HER feelings aren’t her problem either (until they do become a problem because she’s been doing the classic “bottle up my emotions until i die” trick, and we all know how well that works)

Lolita has some… very depressing daddy issues. essentially, she’s not the favorite and she’s upset by this :)

Seraphina… sigh… i don’t know how Draxum thought this kid could be a monster, she’s sweet, she’s cuddly, and she cares deeply for her sisters. probably the one who gets punished the most because of this but it never changes how she feels.

classic older sister, has an undying need to protect her family and pretty much tries to raise them as best as she could with Draxum being… well… Draxum.

Jinx!! my girl!! my sunshine!!! my trickster!!!

i legit thought about naming her Loki

while Michelangelo likes playing pranks, Jinx enjoys pranks as well! just more… harmful than playful

it’s her form of entertainment, really. like when you see the character step on a rake and it comes up and wacks them in the face? yeah, pain is her humor.

Jinx likes vandalism, chaos, and all of the sour candy in your pantry.

she’s devious and extremely mischievous, she may be the weakest and smallest of the four, but she makes up for it by being FAST and agile

i feel like Jinx probably meets our favorite boys when she’s out causing mayhem by herself and takes a liking to them (probably teases them by calling them goofy looking)

definitely gets punished afterwards because she comes home all excited “i met four other turtles today! they were just like us!!”

she keeps sneaking out to find them because they seem really nice and whenever she watches them they all seem really close to each other and she wants that too :(

Jinx is the first to defect and become a good guy, Seraphina follows soon after because “tHAT’S MY BABY SISTER”

Zelda would take awhile because of how defensive she is, but would eventually come around

LOLITA ON THE OTHERHAND

it takes MONTHS and honestly probably ends up in a whole fight sequence just to get her to switch sides

(i have a whole fight sequence in mind and let me say :) Donatello might need some therapy after)

that’s what i have for now, i want to talk more about it but i feel like i might spoil the stuff i have planned out, if i figure out non-spoiler stuff i’ll add more but that’s it!

#daughters of draxum #tmnt #rottmnt #tmnt au #rottmnt au #teenage mutant ninja turtles #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #teenage mutant ninja turtles au #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles au #au #the whole theme of this au is totally OUCH PAIN ANGST OH MY GOD POOR DONATELLO #i’m so sorry Donnie 😔

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lokitvsource · 2 years

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Tom Hiddleston Says He’s a ‘Temporary Torchbearer’ Playing Loki

Tom Hiddleston has said he sees himself as a “temporary torchbearer” when it comes to playing Marvel’s god of chaos.

Hiddleston made the comments in a panel discussion about Disney Plus’ original series “Loki” on Wednesday evening hosted by the Royal Television Society. Hiddleston was joined on stage in London, U.K. by his co-star Sophia Di Martino, who plays Sylvie, series writer Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron [who appeared via Zoom.]

“I’m a temporary torchbearer,” Hiddleston said of sharing the character with Di Martino as well as Richard E. Grant and an alligator — all of whom play Loki variants — in the series. “I’ve always thought that. It’s a great role. It’s an archetype, the trickster god, the agent of chaos. I’m just here interpreting that for the time being. Loki has been here for centuries and will be here for centuries more and I’m just stepping into that silhouette for now.”

His comments come as the first tranche of Marvel Cinematic Universe faces — including Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans — hang up their superhero suits following the release of “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019.

Hiddleston, who has now been playing Loki for over a decade, explained that he was drawn to making the eponymous limited series due to the show’s themes of identity and acceptance. “This idea of somehow the [Time Variance Authority] confronting Loki with the shape-shifting nature of his identity and asking him ‘Who are you?’ I found it a new avenue to explore with this character I’ve been playing for a while,” Hiddleston said. “It felt original. It didn’t feel like we were repeating.”

“Loki,” which centers around time travel, even touches on more erudite topics such as philosophy and psychology. “Michael [Waldron] and I were having breakfast a couple of years ago when [he’d] written that first pilot and found ourselves talking about psychoanalytic theory and repetition compulsion and [the question of] can you ever change?” Hiddleston recalled. “Is it possible for people to change? Even if you do will people accept that you’ve changed? Is it possible to know yourself entirely?”

“And then Owen [Wilson] came and was so forensic about examining all of that stuff, and then we realized we were in a police detective thriller. When I was cast as Loki however many years ago, I never thought this character is a detective. But he is here.”

In a wide-ranging talk, Hiddleston, Di Martino, Waldron and Herron discussed various aspects of the series, which will be returning for a second season. “You’ve got to test the fences,” Waldron, who has also written the forthcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” said of some of the show’s wackier elements (such as the afore-mentioned Loki alligator).

“With [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige, you get to see how far you can go,” Waldron explained. “So you write in Sylvie soccer kicking an armadillo with a laser mounted on its back and they tell you ‘OK, that’s too much. I like the mind invasion but maybe pull back on the laser armadillo.’”

Waldron also revealed that “Loki’s” dialogue-heavy structure was “me testing the fences. That could have easily been another laser armadillo situation.”

He recalled turning in a 15-page dialogue scene between Loki and Mobius for the pilot episode with the expectation he’d eventually cut it down. “And instead the response came back, ‘Can this be longer?’” Waldron said. “And so then I got excited.”

In Waldron’s eyes, the extended dialogue made sense for the character. “One of Loki’s superpowers is his ability to talk his way out of any situation, talk his way into any situation. You want to watch Superman fly, so I wanted to watch Loki talk.”

“And so because this was a show — because we had six hours — that was the most exciting thing to me,” Waldron said. “We get to take a villain from an action movie franchise and have these dialogue-heavy scenes that feel like prestige television.”

The extended dialogues and long takes (“I love a long take,” Herron admitted) also gave the actors the sense they were acting in a theater at points. “Owen actually turned to me at one point said, ‘This feels like a play,’” Hiddleston recalled.

The scale of the show presented a challenge, however. “It was like making almost three Marvel movies just because we were filming so many hours of content at the same time,” Herron said. “I think I just didn’t think about it in terms of the massive scale and just tried to tackle it day by day, just because it was such a mammoth task to get it done.”

Di Martino had recently given birth when she embarked on the shoot, which required her to relocate (with her family) across the Atlantic, so she said it took some time to grapple with the enormity of the job. “There was a lot going on,” said Di Martino. “I think I didn’t really come to terms with it. I just sort of ignored it for as long as possible and just treated it like any other job.”

“And then there’s a moment where you’re on the stage in the studio with, you know, Gugu [Mbatha-Raw] and Tom, and we’re doing this huge fight scene,” Di Martino recalled. “And there was a moment towards the end of filming where I was like, ‘Shit. I’m doing a Marvel show.’ I think it took a while to sink in.” (Variety)

#tom hiddleston #loki tv #loki series #loki #sophia di martino #michael waldron #kate herron #royal television society #article #interview

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lokiondisneyplus · 2 years

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Tom Hiddleston has said he sees himself as a “temporary torchbearer” when it comes to playing Marvel’s god of chaos.

Waldron also revealed that “Loki’s” dialogue-heavy structure was “me testing the fences. That could have easily been another laser armadillo situation.”

#tom hiddleston #loki #sophia di martino #kate herron #michael waldron

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dailyloki · 2 years

Text

"“I’m a temporary torchbearer,” Hiddleston said of sharing the character with Di Martino as well as Richard E. Grant and an alligator — all of whom play Loki variants — in the series. “I’ve always thought that. It’s a great role. It’s an archetype, the trickster god, the agent of chaos. I’m just here interpreting that for the time being. Loki has been here for centuries and will be here for centuries more and I’m just stepping into that silhouette for now.”

Waldron also revealed that “Loki’s” dialogue-heavy structure was “me testing the fences. That could have easily been another laser armadillo situation.”

#marvel #tom hiddleston #loki #loki series #news

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uesp · 3 years

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Theory: Todd is the sleeping Godhead that we all talk about. Also he achieved absolute CHIM

You're definitely free to come up with whatever theory on that you like, but if you're genuinely curious, I would say you're a bit off from the intended takeaway.

Trying to figure out who the Godhead is a bit of a self-defeating exercise. In fact, to get a bit ahead of the point I'm going to make, it's often easier to describe the One by what he is not. If you're looking at the rare in-series mentions of the Godhead (most of the uses of "godhead" are actually referring to more generic godhood, which is also a more modern form of "godhead"), you come up with two mentions of the Godhead, and only one of them describes the Godhead at all.

The eyes, once bleached by falling stars of utmost revelation, will forever see the faint insight drawn by the overwhelming question, as only the True Enquiry shapes the edge of thought. The rest is vulgar fiction, attempts to impose order on the consensus mantlings of an uncaring godhead.

From Waking Dreams of A Starless Sky

The Godhead is uncaring. And that is basically the depth of actual text on the Godhead. If you go with sources that did not appear in the game, you'll do a bit better, but not really to any satisfying degree. So how do we get a satisfying answer? We escape the confines of the rare and deliberately esoteric mentions of this part of the lore and look at its real-world inspiration. Speaking for myself, the best summary of this part of the lore I ever read is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

Sincerely, after reading that and its associated articles, I went from "wow this is all a bit complex" to "alright, this is surprisingly straightforward". To tangent slightly, while there are numerous fan writings that try to explore these concepts, and I do enjoy a lot of them, I find that some of them often have trouble expressing what it all actually means because they often restrict themselves to the trappings of TES. We're going to remove those trappings, and see if it helps.

If you want more help, here is how I mentally tie some TES lore topics to its real world counterpart.

The Godhead is the Godhead (Monad)

CHIM is Gnosis

CHIM has been described as the secret syllable of royalty. It is best understood as a state of being which allows for escape from all known laws and limitations. It is the process of reaching some sort of epiphany about the nature of the universe and one's place in it, leading to a simultaneous comprehension of the full scope of existence as well as one's own individuality.

Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge. It is best known from Gnosticism, where it signifies a spiritual knowledge or insight into humanity's real nature as divine, leading to the deliverance of the divine spark within humanity from the constraints of earthly existence.

Amaranth is Emanationism

The Tower touches all the mantles of Heaven, brother-noviates, and by its apex one can be as he will. More: be as he was and yet changed for all else on that path for those that walk after. This is the third key of Nu-mantia and the secret of how mortals become makers, and makers back to mortals.

Emanationism is an idea in the cosmology or cosmogony of certain religious or philosophical systems. Emanation, from the Latin emanare meaning "to flow from" or "to pour forth or out of", is the mode by which all things are derived from the first reality, or principle. All things are derived from the first reality or perfect God by steps of degradation to lesser degrees of the first reality or God, and at every step the emanating beings are less pure, less perfect, less divine. Emanationism is a transcendent principle from which everything is derived, and is opposed to both creationism (wherein the universe is created by a sentient God who is separate from creation) and materialism (which posits no underlying subjective and/or ontological nature behind phenomena being immanent).

Anu and Padomay and their derivatives are Aeons

Lorkhan is the Demiurge

Lorkhan, the Missing God, is the Creator-Trickster-Tester deity present in every Tamrielic mythic tradition. He is known as the Spirit of Nirn, the god of all mortals. Names for versions or aspects of Lorkhan include Lorkhaj (the Moon Beast) in Elsweyr, Lorkh, the Spirit of Man, the Mortal Spirit, or the Sower of Flesh to the Reachmen, Sep in Hammerfell, Sheor in High Rock, Shor in Skyrim, and Shezarr in Cyrodiil. He convinced or contrived the Original Spirits (et'Ada) to bring about the creation of the Mundus, upsetting the status quo—much like his (figurative) father Padomay is usually credited for introducing instability, and hence possibility for creation, into the undivided universe (or the Beginning Place).

In the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy, the demiurge is an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. The Gnostics adopted the term demiurge. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the monotheistic sense, because the demiurge itself and the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are both considered consequences of something else. Depending on the system, they may be considered either uncreated and eternal or the product of some other entity.

The word demiurge is an English word derived from demiurgus, a Latinised form of the Greek δημιουργός or dēmiurgós. It was originally a common noun meaning "craftsman" or "artisan", but gradually came to mean "producer", and eventually "creator". The philosophical usage and the proper noun derive from Plato's Timaeus, written c. 360 BC, where the demiurge is presented as the creator of the universe. The demiurge is also described as a creator in the Platonic (c. 310–90 BC) and Middle Platonic (c. 90 BC – AD 300) philosophical traditions. In the various branches of the Neoplatonic school (third century onwards), the demiurge is the fashioner of the real, perceptible world after the model of the Ideas, but (in most Neoplatonic systems) is still not itself "the One". In the arch-dualist ideology of the various Gnostic systems, the material universe is evil, while the non-material world is good. According to some strains of Gnosticism, the demiurge is malevolent, as it is linked to the material world. In others, including the teaching of Valentinus, the demiurge is simply ignorant or misguided.

I think that by seeing these concepts side by side it will help make sense of it all. You can definitely research this further, and argue that specific parts of the lore are more directly related to other concepts, but from my limited understanding of theology/philosophy, this is a framework for understanding what the lore was based on, and the ideas that might otherwise go unconnected. If you can do better than me here, by all means, be better than me.

But this takes us to the secret question within all of this: How does this effect the setting? The answer to that is that it really doesn't. Knowing that the setting of The Elder Scrolls is the material world created by the Demiurge, separating its inhabitants from the Godhead, doesn't really change anything. After all, you can literally say the exact same thing about our world. The presence of these concepts in The Elder Scrolls setting should change how you appreciate it in roughly the same way that this school of thought existing in our own world changes your view on our setting.

If you thought this was interesting, I certainly agree with you. If you think this is all a bit too much, and don't want to think about it anymore, you won't be missing out on much by ignoring it going forward. If you want to explore different theories on this, you’re definitely free too, I hope you enjoy exploring your own thoughts on this subject.

#UESP #The Elder Scrolls #Lore #Real Life Lore

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