#the messenger

[enchantedbook]

'The Messenger' by Jon Carraher

#jon carraher #the messenger #painting

[zegalba]

The Messenger by Richard Cartwright

#Richard Cartwright #The Messenger #art #paintings #illustrations #sky #night #horse

[prokopetz]

Been playing Sea of Stars since your post finally pushed me to get it, and you were right. The plot keeps happening. What the fuck.

(With reference to this post here.)

You know how The Messenger initially appears to be a linear side-scrolling platformer in the mode of Ninja Gaiden, but when you beat the "final boss" it pulls that bullshit time travel twist, and you realise that you're actually only halfway through the game, the back half of which is inexplicably a completely different genre?

Being from the same developer, it's not surprising that Sea of Stars also does that. Sea of Stars, however, does it multiple times; I'm not going to say how many times, because it's more fun if you don't know whether you've seen the last of it – but if you're only one fakeout final act deep, well, let's just say you've got a road ahead of you.

#gaming #video games #sea of stars #the messenger #swearing #sea of stars spoilers #the messenger spoilers #spoilers

[weirdlookindog]

“Will you be still?” she said. “Still as death,” I said. - Robert W. Chambers

Virgil Finlay - The Messenger

(Famous Fantastic Mysteries - April 1948)

#virgil finlay #the messenger #robert w. chambers #famous fantastic mysteries #pulp art #horror art #art #story illustration #illustration

[bebemoon]

oh. oh, okay,

#milla jovovich #joan of arc #the messenger #film #90s #queue

[maifazcomics]

More SOSTM fanart, that i didn't post just because these images were too big and i'm too lazy (until now!)

(every opportunity i have to put Ninja in a Sea of Stars fanart, i'm putting him)

#sea of stars #the messenger game #the messenger #sabotage studio #indie games #seraï #zale #valere #erlina #brugaves #headmaster moraine #the messenger ninja #the artificer #maifazartes #my art #illustration

[boredgrace23-gracepotts]

Mandela catalogue doodles

Did you know that Mandela catalogue has a website? I didn't even know until like 2 weeks ago, it's pretty groovy stuff.

A small headcanon of mine: If the preacher wasn't an alternate trying to sneak-kill Adam while he slept, I'd like to imagine she'd be a mother figure to Mark, Adam and Jonah, like how Six is a father figure to Mark.

#the mandela catalogue #stanley mandela catalogue #mandela county #mandela catalogue #mandela catalouge gabriel #evelin miller #thatcher davis #jonah marshall #adam murray #kid mark heathcliff #mark heathcliff #cesar torres #alternate cesar #the messenger #the preacher #an intruder #the intruder #alternates #archangel gabriel

[onefleshonepod]

Strange Names in Nona the Ninth

Nona’s gang of kids, plus the Angel, all appear to have weird names because they are Nona’s transliterations of their names in their native languages into the language of the Nine Houses.

Hot Sauce nodded. Nona guessed again, “Born in the Morning.” “You mean Born in the Morning,” said Hot Sauce. “That’s what I said,” said Nona.

There are seventeen local languages (according to Ianthe) on New Rho. Nona can speak all of them, without really understanding what she’s doing, so she understands the names she hears and the meaning of these names to be synonymous.

Nona understood everybody, and could speak back to them so that they understood her, and nobody ever said she had an accent. This confounded Palamedes. When she first said that she could speak back by watching them talk and making her lips look like theirs, it confounded him so much more that it gave Camilla a headache.

(I think the same thing’s going on with The Building that Troia cell lives in; I think it’s a word in another language that means building and is used as an official name for the building, but I have no guesses as to what that could be.)

I believe Nona is able to do this both because she is Alecto, who plays the role of the Holy Spirit in Tamsyn's Catholic Trinity 2.0, and the Holy Spirit gave the Apostles the gift of tongues during Pentecost, and because she is the soul of Earth. The languages spoken on New Rho presumably came from Earth, so of course she can speak all of them!

This is my attempt to reverse engineer all of these names into House / English.

The Angel / The Messenger

BOE calls Aim "the Messenger" and the children and Nona call her "the Angel.”

We Suffer: “Usually you both meeting up with the Messenger, whom you call the Angel, would have been very bad.”

When the Angel first appears, her name is playing on the meaning of “angel” as a caring and godly being – the reader gets that it would make sense for children who love her to see her as an angel, so this remark flies under on the radar:

The Angel was what they called the nondescript, washed-out, dusty-haired personage who came to teach the Hour of Science. Why they called her the Angel was unclear.

But it is clear why they call her The Angel! It comes from a word with two meanings: the Greek word “angelos” originally meant “messenger” and later took on the meaning of “angel” or “messenger of God,” so all names originating from this word have both of those meanings.

Names originating from “angelos” include Angela (English, Spanish), Aniela (Polish), Aingeal (Irish), Anděla (Czech), Andjela (Serbian), Angèle (French), Angiola (Italian), Anzhela (Russian), and diminutives like Angelina.

The name is intended by BOE to mean Messenger, because of her societal role, but Nona is translating the other meaning of her name, Angel, because that meaning is what makes more sense to her given the way she sees and loves the Angel.

It's also possible that BOE has a more formal version of this name as a title for the Messenger and the children's "the Angel" which Nona hears as distinct from "the Messenger" is a diminutive or less formal version of the same name.

Born in the Morning

This name could be Sabah (Arabic), Akinyi (Luo from Kenya), or Asa (Japanese), all names which mean “morning” and more specifically “born in the morning.”

Honesty

This is a bit more difficult and I’m really not sure about any of these. There are quite a few boys' names meaning “honesty.” There are even more names that mean “honest” or “truthful,” but for strictly the noun “honesty” we have these names:

Pheakdei (Khmer, from Cambodia); Satyam, Onnesha, and Sachh (Hindi); Zaka and Sadaqat (Arabic); and Onestà or Onesto (Italian).

I don’t speak any of these languages, so I can’t comment on which name is most likely, and there are probably also way more possibilities that I missed in my deep dive into 457 baby name websites and dictionary translations!

Edit: I've seen "Frank" suggested a lot as a potential name, but I don't think this is likely, because "Honesty" is a noun, and "Frank" is an adjective. I think if Tamsyn intended the name to be a transliteration of "Frank" she would have used the adjective "Honest," not the noun "Honesty " – she doesn't seem the type to overlook something like that.

Beautiful Ruby

I think this name is probably just two names, in an unknown language, one meaning “beautiful” and one meaning “ruby.”

Unfortunately, there are millions of possibilities here and I can’t find any combination that particularly jumps out. If you have more thoughts on this please let me know!

Hot Sauce

Hot Sauce, of course – as a delightful choice that only serves to confuse the reader more with respect to all of these names – is literally just named Hot Sauce. You CAN put it on rice and you CAN put it on bread!!

#nona the ninth #ntnspoilers #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth spoilers #the angel #the messenger #aim #honesty #beautiful ruby #born in the morning #hot sauce #nona #edited to fix my misconception that lemuria and new rho are the same #ours

[the-sword-lesbian]

Reblog to spread the brainrot

#the locked tomb shitpost #the locked tomb series #the locked tomb #nona the ninth spoilers #abigail pent #aiglamene #commander wake #we suffer #camilla hect #palamedes sextus #paul tlt #juno zeta #pyrrha dve #mercymorn the first #aim tlt #the messenger #cytherea loveday #i didn’t put Alecto as a choice because she already hates being a person let alone a ‘milf’

[monstermonger]

The age of Empires and Godfire is finally over...

But now there's some fixing up to do.

In a little town cursed with bad luck, a young boy and fledgling dragonbird spirit take on a quest, in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems. The journey will take them much farther from home and to many more silly, bizarre, and powerful spirits than they could've imagined.

As some of you might know, I'm making a comic called The Messenger!!

It's a silly little adventure story, but I'm still really proud of sticking with it despite everything going on in life ;b; and it's even in Hiveworks now!!

If you want to check it out, here's the Prologue! Thanks for sticking around all :D

To continue reading, here's the main comic website - Just got to Chapter Two and excited to share what's in store in this part :3

#Alright- wanted to make a post like this so i could pin it :D TY FOR THE PATIENCE #the messenger #comic #webcomic #aaaAAAAAAA #and it's the thing taking up all my freetime these days so >.> unfortunately that's why i'm posting way less illustrations on twitter #don't have any new stuff these days but #tis worth it #anyway if anyone wants to check it out #here it is! THANKS!!! #bird #dragonbird #indie comic #dragons #adventure fantasy #fantasy creatures #hiveworks #indie comics #original comic

[thaumana]

Zale and Valere (sketch)

#sea of stars #zale #valere #the messenger

[racefortheironthrone]

BOE, the Messenger(s), and the Trillionaires

Introduction

I’ve been doing a re-read of the Locked Tomb - although technically it’s a re-listen, because I like the audiobooks - and I stumbled across a particular passage that hadn’t stuck in my memory before that made me rethink my understanding of the origin of Blood of Eden. Ever since Harrow the Ninth and especially since Nona the Ninth, there’s been this common interpretation that the BOE are descendants of the trillionaires who abandoned Earth and that’s why John is at war with them. I’m not so sure that’s true any more. 

Here’s why. In Nona, when the whole business with Crown/Corona infiltrating the barracks kicks off, there’s an interesting exchange between Camilla and We Suffer about the Oversight Committee that includes this statement:

“Hect, what you must understand about Blood of Eden is that we own things in common, we share responsibilities and resources in common. She could have moved these resources at will...but I must make one move at a time. And above all, I must place the safety of...Blood of Eden’s continuity...even above the mission.” (Emphasis mine.)

This took me aback somewhat, because the emphasis on militant communal ownership doesn’t really fit with the idea of “descendants of trillionaires.” I suppose one could say that it’s been ten thousand years, cultures change and drift over time...except that, as I’ll get into later, the BOE seems very very insistent on cultural preservation, so it would be a bit out-of-character if they changed that stance on this one particular issue. 

And that’s what made me think: what if the BOE aren’t the descendants of the trillionaires? What if they’re the descendants of the non-trillionaires on the FTL ships?

East of Eden: A Theory About What Happened After the FTL Ships Jumped

So here’s the question that’s been percolating in my mind: once you’re out in space, why keep listening to the trillionaires, especially about the vital question of who owns the precious resources brought from Eden and who gets to decide happens next? There would probably be some residual cultural deference to the visionary disruptors, but the traditional answers of property law backed up by the state or men with guns paid to enforce the orders of the capitalists kind of break down when you consider that:

In John’s chapters (and verses) in Nona, we get an account of what happened leading up to and during the Resurrection: according to John, the trillionaires pulled a con job on the planet with their FTL ships, pretending that a fleet of twelve ships, each carrying a few thousand people (made up of “hand-picked guys” and “two hundred nominated people”), was merely the first wave of a planetary evacuation. As Mercymorn and others worked out, there were no future waves, no plan to come back and pick up more, the trillionaires had liquidated their cash and financial assets in favor of buying up material resources they’d need in space, and everyone else was being left for dead.

These twelve ships (possibly minus one, it’s not clear whether John managed to destroy the one he grabbed before it jumped) and the 20-odd thousand people on them must be the ancestors of exo-humanity as it exists in the myriadic year. But we know that of those 20-odd thousand people, only a “half-dozen” were the trillionaires. Everyone else was staff they’d selected to do the work of planetary colonization, plus a tiny group of people chosen by the governments of Earth Eden. 

other than 200 randos who are likely to be recruited from the ranks of elected officials and upper management bureaucracy rather than Special Forces, the forces of the state are not only light-years away but also just got eaten by John Gaius.

it’s a bit harder to pull off the Jay Gould method when you’ve turned all of your cash into raw materials, there’s nowhere to spend cash in space, and it doesn’t take long for men with guns in that scenario to decide that the resources belong to them actually, because they have the guns. 

While we know that some form of a market economy exists on New Rho and the other exo-planets, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of an oligarchical ruling class based on ownership of capital. Rather, we see a state of anarchy where there is no hegemonic entity but duelling centers of power. This suggests to me that the trillionaires’ power did not last very long after human settlement outside the solar system, possibly due to a (potentially bloodless) revolution in which the only surviving members of humanity just decided not to listen to six old (white) men and took their shit in order to survive.

In that scenario, I could see it being the case that the collective memory of communal ownership of property in the midst of a crisis could linger among a certain sub-population and provide the origin for this aspect of BOE’s internal culture. 

So where did BOE come from?

Well, in large part it emerged as an organic response to John Gaius’ imperialist campaign against exo-humanity. As I noted elsewhere, John’s revenge against those who abandoned Earth in her hour of need is essentially a re-enactment of colonialism - the Cohort shows up with their overwhelming military might, forces the local population into subjugation with unequal treaties, imposes its language and customs, destroys the natural environment in a drive for short-term resource extraction, and then forces people into an endless cycle of being resettled on reservations over and over again - which makes a certain sick sense, in that it’s probably the worst thing that a Kiwi of Maori heritage could think of doing to their enemies. 

He even goes to the extent of modelling the Cohort uniforms on 19th century British Army uniforms with the colors reversed, and coming up with his own gloss on the Christianity that was imposed on indigenous populations in the name of “civilizing” them. This campaign is only mystifying to outside observers like Augustine and Coronabeth because they don’t have the cultural context to know what John’s up to (in no small part because he’s used his necromantic powers and political position in order to suppress all knowledge of that context). 

And thus, it’s not that surprising that John’s imperialism provoked anti-colonial resistance: when his Empire made contact with exo-humanity, to the extent that anyone still remembered him, it was as the horrific necromantic cult leader who murdered the ten billion and destroyed Eden, and now he’s come to finish the job in the name of collective punishment for the sins of six dead men, and by the way he’s bringing death and the defilement of the dead and the destruction of everything you’ve ever built with him. There probably have been dozens and hundreds of resistance movements - some local, some planetary, some multi-planetary - that rose up and got crushed over thousands of years. 

So what makes BOE different from all other resistance movements?

The Messenger(s)

I want to go back a few thousand years and talk about what happened when the FTL ships managed to escape the solar system. While interplanetary colonization would always be an incredibly stressful experience even without a revolution, the fact that all of this was happening in the wake of John nuking Earth and killing the ten billion, then devouring the solar system, and their narrow escape from his wrothful grasp would have added an entirely different level of terror to the event - but also a new sense of responsibility. 

Because - regardless of whether people on the FTL ships knew about the trillionaires’ supposed plan to abandon humanity on Earth or believed John’s accusations - they were now the sole survivors of humanity, the carriers of all culture and history. The ao3 author Griselda_Gimpel has a really good series of fics imagining the development of exo-humanity from the FTL ships onwards, and in one scene they mention the enormous sense of cultural loss that people on those ships would have felt when they realized that the internet was gone forever. 

And this got me thinking: what if some nerds on those ships had that kind of profound reaction and decided to preserve as much of Earth’s heritage as possible? How would you do that with limited access to computer storage and humanity potentially scattering across multiple planets, and knowledge being lost forever with the march of time as the original settler generation died off and was replaced by new generations born outside the solar system? I think the answer is:

Oral tradition. See, one of the things that fans of the series have been talking about for a while is the implications of the myriadic duration of the Empire, what that would have done to language and culture in the Nine Houses and among BOE, how is it that people can still be speaking the same language or reading the same writing as from the time of the Resurrection, let alone remember memes and cultural references from the 21st century? This is a fair reaction from a Western perspective - after all, ten thousand years ago would be roughly 8000 BCE or smack dab in the Early Neolithic. Surely it would have been impossible for the memory of Earth to have survived that long. 

But, as people have said, Tamsyn Muir is writing a very Kiwi series. And one of the things that is very distinctive about the culture of Aotearoa is the oral traditions of the Maori and Pasifika cultures more generally. While Maori oral histories go back to the 13th century CE when Aotearoa was settled, Australian Aboriginal oral tradition goes back as far as potentially 30,000-40,000 years. Oral tradition is not perfectly reliable, it undergoes drift and change over time, it can experience loss and disruption (from colonization, for example), but it can endure across millennia. 

My theory is that these nerds on the FTL ships or their descendants dedicated themselves to the mission of cultural preservation through oral tradition, and thus the Messengers were born. And at some point, the Messengers met up with Blood of Eden and explained that John Gaius’ colonial campaign wasn’t just an unjustified act of aggression and imperialism, but an act of cultural genocide stretching back 10,000 years:

“I charge you with...the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of-”

“...they’re dead words--a human chain reaching back ten thousand years...how did they feel?” (Harrow the Ninth)

Somewhere around this point, then, BOE took as its mission the preservation of the Messengers, which is why they are given BOE bodyguards, why discharging a weapon in their presence is grounds for execution, and why they are both deeply respected and honored by BOE but kept away from sensitive missions and not necessarily kept in the loop on critical intel. 

Why AIM is “They”

This part of my theory suggested an explanation for why AIM is called “they” by Blood of Eden, and why Palamedes Sextus sensed a necromantic implant when they “stumbled” into AIM at the school. We know that the Sixth House has been in contact with Blood of Eden for a very long time, and that Cassiopeia was not only responsible for the Sixth’s “break clause” but also was BOE’s “Source Gram.”

My theory is that Cassiopeia and the Sixth, being a bunch of librarian nerds obsessed with the preservation of cultural knowledge, would never have been entirely comfortable with taking John Gaius’ word for what happened during the Resurrection and what life was like on pre-Resurrection Earth. The natural place to look for an alternate source of documentation would be exo-humanity, and I think she/they went looking clandestinely and came across the Messengers and BOE. Somehow, they avoided killing each other and came to a modus vivendi.

I think part of this modus vivendi was an offer by Cassiopeia/the Sixth to provide the Messengers with an improved means of preserving their oral tradition: namely, a necromantic implant that would preserve the ghosts of dead Messengers and let them communicate with their successors, ensuring that the oral tradition could be passed down perfectly from generation to generation. After all, not only are the Sixth House spirit magicians, but they are specialist psychometricians who know better than anyone else how to pull information about and from the past from material objects, and it was Doctor Sex who gave Palamedes the idea for preserving revenant spirits after death by giving them a physical anchor. 

Hence, AIM is they because they are a collective “human chain” of all the Messengers who came before them - they have the voices of hundreds of cultural preservations in their heads, telling them of all that was lost with the fall of Eden. No wonder they want to play school teacher and be “she” for a while. 

Conclusion

TLDR: BOE aren’t trillionaires, they’re commie terrorists with a fetish for cultural preservation. So I guess this makes the whole war a case of leftist infighting, considered in the long run?

#the locked tomb #blood of eden #boe #aim #the messenger #the angel #ntn #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth #pash #our lady of the passion #the sixth house #cassiopeia #tlt

[deadlinesmb]

Shop Fusion Collab - Thumbnail

Lastly, I was given the opportunity to make the thumbnail for the collab! This was a fun composition previously pitched by moralem, one of the artists on our team (sketch in the 2nd image). I'm glad we were able to fit in so many beloved characters to this meaty collaborative project. This was the most fun I've ever had working on a SiIvaGunner project bar none, and everyone on the team is very happy to be able to share this 6-month long creative journey with the world.

#siivagunner #shop fusion collab #splatoon #splatoon 3 #undertale #zelda cdi #the messenger #plants vs zombies #harmony #temmie #morshu #the messenger shopkeeper #crazy dave

[sheepb1t]

Favorite games I played this year that I have not played before and did NOT release in 2023 (in no particular order but. NMH is #1)

#no more heroes #the messenger #a hat in time #twewy #late night sketches #sheepb1tart

[nona-gay-simus]

What if the messsage is for Alecto? Think about it. AIM says that the message is too big for simple humans and has many parts. The only person in the series who is not a human is Alecto. Why else would AIM go to the Ninth?

#am i rediscovering america 😅 #maybe this was obvious to everyone else #ntn #nona the ninth #ntn spoilers #tlt meta #the locked tomb #the locked tomb meta #aim #the angel #the messenger #tlt #mine #alecto the first

[auroranekai]

I've been thoroughly enjoying myself playing through Sea of Stars, what an underrated hidden gem of an RPG! I LOVE it. The artstyle, the character and environmental designs, the lighting, the world-building, the combat, the layered level designs, the music, the story... AND WHEELS!! It's just so fun and immersive! I highly recommend it.

Alt versions under the cut ! :)

A more rendered version.

Lineart.

#sea of stars #sos #sea of stars fanart #garl #valere #zale #fanart #fan art #my art #digital art #procreate #sabotage studio #the messenger #role-playing game #rpg #Solstice Warriors