it's a good thing the dark lord is a shut-in! / Triangulation

CW: social anxiety, public humiliation, inappropriate media exposure, bad therapy, incest kink, sexualized neoteny, objectification (interpersonal), dub/noncon erotica, suicide, parental neglect, ambiguous sexual harassment, surveillance, interpersonal privacy violation

Last time he’d only had to walk a block down his own street. Now he was going a whole borough over, stumbling through crowds. Every time a noise he couldn’t identify issued from somewhere in the chaos - a name he couldn’t make out, a transport wagon bumping on pavement or grinding on snow, a streetcar whistling along the wires - it landed on his ears as a shout, a curse, a hiss, directed personally at him. Why won’t any of you fuckers leave me alone. What am I doing just walking here. Oh Goddess what am I doing just walking here.

When someone attacks you, Ykhil Tsÿo had written in The Stopped Clock Is Right Again, swinging a blackjack and yelling, the yell hits as much as the weapon. In fact, it hits even if you have no fear of the weapon, no reason to believe it will hit you. The opponent’s momentum, their suddenness, the look in their eyes – all disrupt your equilibrium by themselves, by the fact that another person is directing them at you. In other words, there is a calm one can maintain when faced with, say, a spinning chain on a machine, that is much more difficult faced with a person.

Every time he noticed out of the corner of his eye someone accelerating so much as a step toward him, before turning or swerving away, felt like a jumpscare-level feint in his direction. It was enough to make his head spin. Yet somehow he absorbed every hit, as Marzanna tirelessly dragged his wrist.

He looked where he was going, but also kept his phone screen open, autoplaying his favourite OPs, just beneath his field of vision, where a little sister’s red shiny hair might bob. Amazing what worked just enough. Walking, and this stoic dissociated silence, came back like riding a bicycle, which of course he had never tried.

It is hard to explain Luskonneg Gwl’kerrien other than as a perfect statistical storm of anomalous bad luck. The problem is that we have statisticians, understand that such outliers appear inevitably in complex systems, and have recursively layered ours to mitigate them. He is like a case from an inverted developmental textbook. The standard parental gender structure was inverted, and one parent removed from the picture in the cruellest possible way; as anyone literate in social politics and psychology knows, these are hardly death sentences. His mother lived on Grief Subsidies for most of his childhood.

A brief rotating cast of childcare supports lasted no more than one month at a time, and he seems to mostly blame himself for their departures…

Marzanna watched him from the vine-looped patio of the restaurant where she needled a macaron to a pincushion while sipping a gin and berry tea. Writing this felt like pulling a fireworm out of an infected wound, but what else was there to do? She was never going to be allowed to publish this article. It was a prop, and an unofficial briefing for spies – the only civilian eyes that would get to see any of it would be Gallvren’s, to prepare her for what she was about to face. And even then, the handlers had requested she be allowed a few organic surprises.

Yet Marzanna had kept investigating as if finishing the article she had set out to write. She had managed to track down a few students from Luskonneg’s high school cohort. Only one - the very Lachezel, now a fairly reclusive magic repairman - had taken her into a spell-sealed room and showed her a waiver and sleeper activation form he claimed everyone in the school had been made to sign on entry, alluding to “safe psychomagical experimentation”. He looked haunted - or hunted - like he still wasn’t telling the whole story.

Only a handful of the same teachers were still at the school. That level of mobility was also unusual in the system - people became attached to places, communities, friends. Most of the transfers had happened in the past five years – since Luskonneg had moved out. The only one who had taught him was a gym teacher. (Was that also sex ed or did they have an Ecclesiastical visitant?) A man who in Luskonneg’s memories was dissociatively brutal but in person, merely dissociatively reserved. But the teacher pretended not to remember any of those years for as long as he could before running off to a meeting. Didn’t come back. She sat around in the lobby like a confused parent, looking up at student paintings - Gallvren would like these - and tapping sentences in and out.

Could this all be serial fabrication? It would be the simplest explanation, and there were already alarming omissions she had identified in his greentext stories. That back and forth would have been the crowd-pleaser of the feature. Maybe she could salvage its structure as some kind of fiction, when all this was over. Maybe Gallvren would read it.

“When I was a kid and needed a snack I would just ask for bread product.”

“Awww that’s adorable! I know a lot of places to go for bread product, if you don’t.”

“Mmm. I mostly… eat in. You don’t have to… store it anywhere special… for it not to go bad. Although one time I got sick from mold spores.”

“You got sick… from mold spores? Like in the air, or on your walls?”

“I don’t - quite remember.”

“OK, I’ll just leave that. That won’t happen at any of the places I’m telling you about, though…”

….

“One time Shunny Najda said ‘I need to be able to imagine whatever I want to regardless of whether I have or will ever experience it, because I intend to spend my life imagining more things than I experience.’”

“For me the important thing is imagining something that someone might have experienced, even if I have no way of knowing myself. I think there are very deep facets of Order it’s possible to tap into by trying, even if it’s ultimately impossible.”

“Someone, as in the Heroes specifically, or Someone as in anyone…?”

“The former is a useful constraint for attaining the latter.”

….

“How long is the longest grammatically correct sentence you think you’ve composed in real time?”

“…people think about that?”

“The rhetoric club when I was in high school did. I spent a couple years with them but I hated debates.”

“The rhetoric club when I was in high school used to compete to find ways to trick me into saying embarrassing things…”

….

“So much of it doesn’t even touch on Double-Serpent erototheology, just casting the lovers into straightforward Serpent/Goddess roles! Which I get, because it has heretical associations for a lot of people, but it’s been integrated in orthodoxy for 150 years now…”

“Wait, is that the Double-Dancer sigil on your scarf? Are you a… a… a…”

“Hehe, you noticed! No, one of my friends who is a lesbian knit it for me… how did you manage to explode a packet of red pepper sauce all over your nose?”

“Sh-shorry!”

….

“Do they do much of anything with the Dark Lands, like historically reconstructing them? It’s a crazy area of research, the Dark Lands now are nothing like they must have been.”

“A lot of people just write them like the modern Dark Lands and focus on character stuff. That’s probably what I’d do, if I ever gave it a shot, just because I don’t like to pull description from nowhere. But there’s a whole genre where they get like, tricked or mind controlled by Dark creatures into doing non-consensual stuff with each other, which gets hit with Defamation charges fairly often…. oh my god, you blew another pack!”

….

Luskonneg had a recurring hypnagogic image that came to him more and more often when he thought about the interviews, rereading or replaying conversations or planning future ones. He would pull open some sort of tab of loose skin (he always had one), unzip his body all the way down the front, growing larger and larger until he could cover the sky like a meat-purple manta ray, spotted with pale bubbles, and drown the world in pus.

On some level, he knew, his longstanding fantasy of being interviewed like this was only a version of this fantasy.

He first remembers the image from staring at himself in the nightlit mirror, hours after his mother had gone to sleep, trying to pop several zits ugly enough he didn’t dare attempt when anyone would walk in on him. (She never failed to comment; she seemed to think she was doing him some kind of favour by pointing out the blemish he was trying to eliminate as if it had never occurred to him.)

He could hear see the roiling disgust in her eyes behind the cheery uptalk but Dr. Mark’eg said he couldn’t see things in people’s eyes that contradicted their tone, that was delusion bordering on the heresy of Fungibility, so he tried to talking to other people the same way regardless of how they looked at him, Mom when her shirt rolled up on the couch and he could see her stretch marks, Dad when he showed up one night in the month and his teeth were yellowed and his breath smelled. “What are you getting so fucking touchy about.” “Where’d that tone come from?”

Their second meetup was in public, in a square he could vividly imagine his flayed body-sail covering from roof to roof, at a neotraditional C’harnian clay bowl stand - chickpeas, coleslaw or potato noodles and fries topped with shrimp and fish cakes, slopped in local bean and paprika sauces or global curries and chillies.

Getting there - with Marzanna following

“But otaku culture developed out of the comikets, which were built using Silmenon’s legal exceptions for traditional handicraft markets, which weren’t subject to art or media censorship in the first place. Those famous woodblock prints came from there too.”

“Now that I think of it, Pontquarno had a collection of those. Wait, were those and the first comikets at the same time?”

“No, centuries earlier.”

“And but so heretical religious ideas were transmitted through handicrafts, too, right?”

He almost buried his face in his bowl. “Not - not exactly heretical…”

“I don’t mean - heretical in a bad way!” Gallvren waved her hands across the steam rising into her nostrils.

“…huh?”

“I mean, it was considered heretical then. But it’s accepted now. I’m not a trad or something.”

“But it doesn’t scare you… that people in the past were prohibiting things that were acceptable? That in the future something prohibited now, something disgusting, something Dark, might be orthodoxy?”

“…now you’re starting to freak me out, didn’t you do a unit on this in high school like everyone else? As our conception of Order expands, so can the access of Chaos - it doesn’t need to be walled off from areas it might damage.”

By that point he managed Theology classes (and others, but Theology in particular) by treating them as exercises in purely phonetic transcription, routing sounds to letters without going through the perilous labyrinth of words. Try to understand and every argument against what the teacher was saying - even if he didn’t actually believe them - would jump him like an endless gang of robbers the moment his mind turned the corner (inevitable in the moment of comprehension) “what if”. Weighing these arguments was part of the class, but he couldn’t weigh one against another without being distracted by three more. He all but sat out dialectics, no one knew how to make him participate, he would be called on and repeat something the teacher had said

What was remarkable was that he understood the ideas as posed in even the most esoteric Najda anime (and doujin) just fine. Even how one arc or episode posed a question, and another answered it.

“Pontquarno’s letters to the authorities on this are quite beautiful, the quiet faith, the - hmmm, how did Najda talk about it, in the Poets’ Court?” She blew a hair off her lip. “I don’t get it. If Marzanna wants to write an article about this, can’t she just research it herself? Why does she need us to talk about it.”

She still didn’t understand that the article was about him? Or was Marzanna lying to both of them, was it really about something else? She’ll hate me when it comes out, unless I explain… but his mouth was dry, and he wouldn’t be able to explain this even by text without preparation. “Oh sorry. I’ll shut up if you don’t want me to talk.”

She glanced across the blonde wood of the booth at him with curiosity verging on annoyance. (Not verging on, hiding, like his mother hid - you can’t read people’s eyes - but you can’t read anything else either, she doesn’t want you to read, she pities or fears you too much to let you read her annoyance so you must predict it, Skazja’s Wager, 100% chance because 0 evidence.) “I didn’t say that.”

He nodded, and gulped down the literal sense of her words, which said nothing.

“…Najda? …the Poets’ Court? Sorry, I’m - still trying to talk.”

Not talking would make her more uncomfortable, he heard in Marzanna’s mocking voice. “He actually focused more on Circus Law, since it was descended from Silmenon himself: contradiction and catharsis, the management of the unpredictable…”

“But how does that relate to… well, I was thinking about what you told me last time, and it actually helped me think about what made me uncomfortable of that doll show. It reminded me of the Heresy of Neoteny.”

“The Heresy of…” No, of course he had heard of this. Why was he pretending not to have heard of this. Why did his face feel like it was made of wet clay, like he was some kind of golem. “The idea that with age our faces, our bodies deviate necessarily from Order. Like it does when we age.”

“Right, that’s the theory of the Prime used by medicine.” He knew this from reading arguments online, he always stopped when it came up, he couldn’t explain why he didn’t want to make those arguments himself. “The ideal of the body as expressed by its internal Order, dictated by its DNA.”

“That’s also a, a, a- DNA isn’t Ideal Order, that’s geneticism-”

“Oh, true, but it’s a permitted simplification, not a Heresy.”

“It can be a heresy.”

“I’m not talking about that.” She was frowning now. She was hating him now. She was going to dedicate every scalpel of her existence to destroying him now. She was going to do what Ylian never could have. “Of course chance deviations tend to accumulate with age, and eventually you die, because we haven’t figured out how to maintain the body at its ideal Order,. But the body is always marked by deviations from its own Order, whether due to youth, or age, or temporary sickness. The Heresy is believing the body was actually… better when it was younger. That even things in our DNA, like body hair or cellular aging, could be deviations from Order. That the Goddess wants us all to be fetal in Her womb forever.”

“Isn’t-” He didn’t believe this either, he wasn’t a heretic, if he was he couldn’t keep having an ordinary life as a jaded commentator… “that metaphor… in…”

He blanked on the name of the text.

A text by Maullan.

He hadn’t read it.

He just saw it cited in /theo/ posts (mostly, “how orthodox is your fetish” threads).

If he was online right now, he would have it in his quotable posts index.

That was on his phone - not the full thing, but at least the zipped version from eight months ago.

Which pocket was it in? Could he feel it with his hands this numb? Left, right -

“I - I think I’ve lost my phone.”

They got as far as heading back to the streetcar stop and calling the municipal lost and found before a server from the stand came back with what had been hiding under their napkin. Luskonneg, self-consciousness momentarily washed out by joy, clutched the block of plastic and glass to his scraggly cheek (which despite being flecked beneath with acne, and above with beads of sauce from the bowl, and neither shaved exactly nor combed exactly, but pulled at compulsively with his hands, now looked less like an accumulation of hair in the drain and more like the chaotic-Order of a tangle of branches along a park walkway). “There you were! You silly little- silly! Never worry Big Brother like that again!” He stopped and looked up, his face a mask of horror, to see Gallvren - smiling. “I guess… the heresy makes a bit of sense when it comes to stuff like that.”

He let his phone hand fall and stared - not at her, he couldn’t look, was over the rooftops far enough away.

“I wonder if it’s true that Silmenon is the only place it’s detected at the same rates in men as women.”

His gaze filtered down to her like chum in water. He couldn’t look away too long either. She wasn’t really looking at him either - drifting off in the direction of the next train,

“But then, you can do stuff like that because your own adult form, or the adult form of a parent, exists to do it. Even just as a model.”

“Saying something needs to exist in a state of less perfect Order for something more perfect to exist as more is the heresy of stratification, and that’s way worse.” He remembered that from another argument.

She puffed a half-laugh. “Yes, obviously. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you go back over everything you learned in high school.”

They had taught that, huh?

Well, he’d half-remembered.

More importantly, he’d looked like he had. Like he’d known all along.

Which meant that if she ever discovered his real self, his sins would be compounded with every deception.

Which real self? You’re not actually a heretic, you’d have been flagged if you were, this was just more anxiety.

No, you’re worse. Heretics, unlike actual Dark practitioners, lived decent lives in privacy or secret communities, blacklisted away from public life or media but otherwise like everyone else, sometimes slipping their selective firewalls to post on /ma/ and /theo/. They didn’t even get blown up by Punkin Patch, their case managers would intervene for them. Maybe if he was a heretic… but he could never pick one. His mind was too broken to even maintain a consistent theology. Sometimes he felt like the Goddess was infinitely far away, like he wasn’t the Serpent but some graceless legged thing crawling along a desert where She was always equally distant. He ‘knew’ this ‘wasn’t’ ‘true’, in that he could answer the question that way, and that made it normal.

“Did you think any more about what I was saying last time?”

She asked, definitely not looking this time. His steamed redness was almost comforting.

“Oh. Yeah, well. I’ve been over that option with psychologists before. I don’t think having a nicer body would really change… me living in it. It’d be an even bigger deviation from Order, if anything.”

“I don’t usually say this to people I’ve… just met. Or know these kinds of things about people I’ve just met. But… I believe you can find answers to this stuff. These aren’t new problems.”

“Are they problems… you’ve had? Is that why Marzanna put us together?”

Drawing away, in a way even his 2D social grammar knew to read for discomfort. “Not… really. Again, I barely understood the Neoteny stuff, when I saw it with the dolls. I think I understand it better now, what it’s processing, for someone at least. Now that I understand it, it seems obvious, I have to assume there must be.”

“And how can you assume that.” He snapped. He hadn’t known his own voice. Was it the Slaver? Or someone new?

“Because… society works? Oh wait, I see, this is why Marzanna wanted me to talk to you,” she sighed. “She’s barely let me read any of her writing, but I know she’s obsessed with this idea that something’s wrong. Which like… I think something always is, we live in a world made of Chaos approaching Order, that isn’t already there. But that doesn’t mean the problem is with society, whatever that would even mean, it’s not like she even takes a political or religious stance about it.” She tittered. “Sorry, I don’t mean to make it sound like I don’t like Marzanna. I just don’t understand what she’s doing.”

“Ahhh. I see. I see.” Luskonneg lowered his eyes, to not show… what? “Of course you believe that.”

“…what do you think is wrong with society?”

That wasn’t what he opened himself up about in his fantasy. He could only open up himself, not society. What did he know about society? He wanted to bleed himself onto society. And it could decide what to say about the disaster, if it cared. He just wanted to get in their hair, on their faces.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That it made me!”

She stood, opened her mouth, yawned. “Oooooo. Kay.” long enough for stars to die. “You know, maybe you should read more Kamann fic, or even Maullan when it’s not too didactic. The way he looked at the world around him, a lot of the problems he saw are still problems we struggle with, because they will be anywhere. You could get a clearer idea of what you feel bad about, what failed you, what you would want to be different.”

“…maybe you’re right,” he managed to pull through himself, like the laces of a skate pulling right for the first time. “Maybe you’re right.” And held them tight enough they would unravel until he was on the streetcar again, alone.

>Gwaëlle won’t talk to me in public any more

>even at the Public Morals Committee table

>eventually stop showing up

>eat lunch at the bottom of a stairwell down to the boiler room

>on my way up to class, walk by Ylian

>she grabs me by the arm

>stare almost makes me cum my pants, hit myself, or both

>”Hey brat. Just so you know, I don’t back out of an agreement. Meet me after school by the vegetable garden.”

>Gardening Club runs a little patch at the back of the field

>spring so it’s just starting to send up sprouts

>”Doing this in school has come to attract too much attention’s we’ll be making it extracurricular. Walk with me.”

>I’m not stylizing like I’m pretending my life is a movie I remember the actual sentences

>does that mean I loved her?

>does that mean I chose right?

>and failed anyway?

>anyway

>we went to a public library

>for the same district as the school

>which I’d never been to

>bc my school was outside my district

>for some weird reason that was never fully explained to me

>or it was

>a lot of times

>and I could never remember even at the time

>so I stopped caring

>I couldn’t like. remember that in full sentences

>normal people can’t right

>sorry

>anyway

>sorry for greentexting bad I should probably take my crytype bs out of the greentext

>nah too funny sorry/fuck you/anyway

>I’d never been to the public library

>I barely studied, just wanted to look at every book

>every different kind, asking her what things were like a kid

>she tried to stop me but her heart wasn’t in it

>next week it was

>couldn’t look at a single non-school book for more than five seconds without it getting slapped out of my hands

>couldn’t tell why we were even doing this if the point was to be a friendship simulator, the problem wasn’t my grades (ok those were also a problem)

>broke down crying by the end

>she gives me one book to read for the last five minutes

>YA dreck, didn’t get to anything happening obviously

>try to go back on my own on weekend

>not used to wandering around city on my own

>look for more local one

>Mom badgers me into not taking my phone, doesn’t want me to waste data or get distracted & says directions should be easy to remember

>they aren’t

>break down in a post office asking for directions

>she comes to pick me up, we **** *******, she bans me from going back again since I’m gonna embarrass myself

>so I can only go with Elian

>start sneaking books in front of her just to make her get upset at me

>not even ones I like

>start reading humiliation stuff late at night, I can make it hot

The week Luskonneg had his first Sex Ed class, his mother made him watch “this show about dumb horny teenagers in the First Heroic Age trying to get into a red light district, there was nothing gross actually on screen but it still felt slimy like something in my throat, the only one who manages to ‘score’ is the fat kid who gets eaten by a shapeshifter with a mouth in her belly.” *(too long, find spot for elsewhere: “I have no idea why she liked any of this stuff. It doesn’t fit my understanding of human, and that’s how I know how other people must feel about me”. )

From an afternoon in the Winter City Media Preservation Library, I have concluded that this could only be the 2754 TV comedy version of Bregann Island Tavern, which was banned within a decade of being aired. Now, if anyone would know about Bregann Island Tavern to confabulate this story, it might be Luskonneg, but he generally prides himself on not caring about his own country’s media.

The following week, which would have normally contextualized this unsettling and humiliating display, was Love Ed. Luskonneg was sick the entire week of Love Ed – the ethically essential emotional complement to the vivid mechanical detail of the previous week – actually sick, not playing hooky, with a fever treated with stimulants. Sex and Love Ed classes, of course, are taught in staggered weeks, so anyone who misses theirs can simply join another week’s. But his replacement class was shuffled by documentation errors from one to the next until the middle of exams, which he skipped to study, and then couldn’t attend the next year because of the age gap in attendance.

If all of this is true, how do so many institutional failures pile up in one person’s life? If Sex Ed hadn’t covered basic Consent, Paraphilia Management etc., or if he had been sick that week, we would have produced a monster, not simply a recluse. Monsters, of course, exist – I have never been particularly interested in them, because they usually resist social conditioning at predictable points, rather than being routed on a convoluted tangent through it.

My mind wanders to an incident from my first year in Winter City, a story I was trying to write about a traditionalist theological quiz game circle that met at an ice cafe. An hour after the official meeting was over, the crotchetiest old women - one from the Braz family - were talking about how the censorship guidelines were so fine-grained now, there was no way the Ecclesia and the Psychological Union could be determining them from general principles - they had to be conducting experiments, even with the most extreme content, outright Darkness and heresy, things that would be illegal to expose a civilian to. I wanted to prove them wrong, but political journalism has never been my forte and I couldn’t get publicization access to enough censorship board documentation. That the Serpentine turn in theology - which is particularly well-represented in the Psychological Union - has required Dark experiments all along.

This conspiracy theory itself probably isn’t publicized enough to be worth the access, I thought, but it hits different when you see what a victim might look like, even if you don’t believe it. It makes me think differently about my roommate’s obsession with Heroes’ Love fiction, which I first used as bait to lure him into real world companionship. Clearly it’s good for her, the kind of pure, immersive passion I wish I could have for my own work. But in the process of discovering this, how many like Luskonneg might have been sacrificed?

If such a sacrifice, undeniably Dark by the standards of whatever orthodoxy it could possibly be intended to preserve, were indeed taking place - as I tentatively concluded in my original piece that the traditionalists did not believe, or they would take more action than grousing around a quiz game circle - what would a citizen be obligated to -

She hovered her finger for almost three minutes before deleting. It went to the trash, which she didn’t empty. Could the Ecclesia read her trash more easily than they could read her keystrokes? Was she sending a message? Did she need to send a second message by deleting it, or not deleting it?

“If you have sexual thoughts about someone, can you still be their friend?”

Luskonneg asked Dr. Mark’eg, and was almost dizzied by the speed of the “no”.

“So how do I clear those thoughts, if I just want to be friends with somebody. I have them about everybody. I can’t be in a relationship with everybody… can I?”

School Harem. One of his most deranged fantasies that he only played when he had his head down somewhere in the dark where absolutely no one could see him. Its frequency increased tenfold after that session. What if, say in some sort of magical anomaly - the frequency that caused everyone to be repelled by him switched to them desiring him. (Is there a doujin like this - late night searches - inexplicably no results but the other posters were probably hiding it from him, as they mocked him for begging. He had to get better at keywords. Draw one myself. He’d get as far as the faces and then start scribbling them over, overwhelmed by the contradictory impulses, into something resembling a gnawing void or flesh pit.) Each one helplessly, but ego-syntonically helplessly wanting him, wanting everything he could possibly want from them. So glutted for choice, he had to find ways of randomizing which classmate he chose to take to the bathroom, coding page numbers in textbooks. After what happened with the Public Morals Committee, this became his only personal fantasy. Anything else too personal.

“Probably not. But yes, while suboptimal, that is physical, impersonal, it isn’t… reshaping a relationship that exists in real life. The relationship between friends itself is a higher Order that consists of the private thoughts of both parties as well as shared interactions.”

“Wait, in health class they were saying that wasn’t true even for a romantic relationship.”

A brief pause, almost as if he might change his mind - and what then? Would Luskonneg be like the cartoon predator sawing off its own branch in pursuit of its prey, with only his thoughts to ground their own validity? “They are expecting most people’s thoughts to be normal. Within a normal range, private thoughts won’t damage the Order of a relationship more than healthy communication between adults should account for anyway. With you that’s… different.”

He gripped the insides of his pockets with white knuckles. “What if… the thoughts are… involuntary? Just… just Currents?”

“Well, if they pass and you feel no need to hang onto them. We’ve already talked about those, but those weren’t what you were discussing at the beginning of this session, were they.” “N-no.” What had he been discussing? He didn’t dare remember.

“Put it this way. You either want to approach this person intimately, as Serpent to Goddess, or you don’t.”

“Most things I feel pleasurable Currents about… down there…”

“Don’t say it like that, you’ll put the image in my head, Goddess, that’s inappropriate boundaries.”

“Sorry.”

The image - but if having the image meant wanting to - then did he -

No, the image could accompany wanting or not wanting, and that voice, that disgust, conveyed the certainty of not wanting.

Do I have to be not-wanted to not want? Do I have to not-want like that to convince others I don’t want them? Especially after I’ve already failed at tsundere…?

“…oh come on, finish what you were going to say, don’t manipulate me.”

To do what? “Most things I… think about like that… I don’t actually think I want.”

He could read things that broke the rules Mark’eg was asserting, even without paying attention in Health Class or Theology.

The word ‘tension’, for instance. What the hell did ‘tension’ mean? Surely not the drawn-and-quartered agony he felt between thoughts that made each other impossible. But that proved Mark’eg’s point about the same rules not applying to him.

Besides, he could also read things that break any moral or psychological rule, as long as they abide by the laws of the Poets’ Court, dictating that they do not claim the authority of models. “Art may traverse the outer rim of Chaos and the inner manifolds of Order, so as to prove that the Goddess’ silver rays extend unbroken from one to the other.”

Dr. Mark’eg was unimpressed. “With someone you don’t talk to, or that doesn’t exist, that question may not be operative. In a personal relationship, it always is.”

Most of the time, even Luskonneg had learned to detect, it sounded like Dr. Mark’eg didn’t quite believe what he was saying, he just knew it was the correct thing to say at this particular junction to someone with this particular problem, which Luskonneg of course believed. This time, at least in the memory that had scabbed around this moment, he sounded almost sincere.

“I… I missed Love Ed. Last year. Can you tell me what they would have taught me in Love Ed about… picking the right person? You have the same textbooks, right?”

“Yes, but you know we have good reasons to believe the textbooks may not apply to you.”

“Then what am I supposed to do. It’s the same if you tell me, I won’t know the difference.”

“You think I can simply tell you?”

“Not tell me” – he nearly spit between every break “– who to like! Just what they’d tell me in Love Ed – how I should be – deciding! If I have to!”

“Can’t you just read the textbooks yourself, if you’re convinced that’s all you need?”

“You know I can’t read textbooks on my own!” He almost screamed - almost choked. “Isn’t it enough to go along with them because I need friends? What if they drag me in one direction and my – my fucking dick drags me in another, why do I have to go along with either of them?”

“So you can not care enough to not think about them, not touch it, not think about touching or not touching it, et cetera? Or even apply for oblation and be done with it? Brilliant! Our treatment here, I believe, must be nearing its conclusion.” Mark’eg’s voice was like the edge of a blade and made him feel things only real authority, not even Ylian’s, not even his mother’s could. “Stop being dishonest with yourself. That’s the first thing they would have taught you.” The fluorescent light flashed through the underside of Mark’eg’s glasses. “You mean won’t. If you will, you must accept the consequences. You have entered a man’s world.”

“Do you really think…” Ymañn had started casually asking philosophical questions of Mark’eg the way he once had of Braz, which felt like a betrayal, even though he had tried with countless other agents who simply wouldn’t or didn’t respond. “…we’ve made him better? T-the things in his head are horrible… because of us, how do we know they would be worse? What if we’re making the Dark Lord even more dangerous?”

Mark’eg sat on a dog’s outstretched paw, pondering and sipping black coffee. “Stretch your arm out along here,” he said, holding out the heated blade, and Ymañn obeyed silently, letting it dig into his flab just enough for the flesh to crease around it without bleeding, to seal it in an envelope of pain. “I want you to hold it there for as long as it takes me to supply an answer to this question.” He mused for another minute before the dog began to whine and Ymañn to sniffle.

“There is no ‘even more dangerous’ than the Dark Lord. That’s what I’m sure you have been told already. But I managed the Dark Lord’s ‘mental health’ up close. Week after week. You were there too, I was responsible for what he did, every week. As in, I was not solely determining it – I was a tiny factor determining it – but if he deviated from plan, I would hold myself responsible. You have never been responsible for him, in that way. All you have to do is sleep. So from my perspective, there was an ‘even more dangerous’ than the Dark Lord – everything that could go wrong up to the Dark Lord’s awakening, even if he failed to awaken. Not only was I responsible for the safety of the world, I was responsible for the safety of every student at that school. With or without becoming the Dark Lord – although the more extreme the violence, the more likely to trigger an awakening – the right combination of our influences and his latent tendencies could have led to him raping a classmate, or bringing a sword into school and slicing up his classmates, and/or himself. A normal person under the conditions we had subjected him to might have done those things. There are people who do them under less. The person you dream about every day is probably the best possible version of Luskonneg Gwl’kerrien. This is not indicative of any underlying innocence that would make our work shameful. This is the product of my work, my brain on the razor’s edge every week. Without the non-standard affordances of the Inquisition which you so enjoy.” He switched hands on the sword, running the fingers of the first along the other side of the blade as white flesh snapped like hot dog meat along Ymañn’s underarm.

“The other thing I am sure you are already aware of is that these tasks are one and the same. If the Dark Lord comes into direct conflict with others – that is, if he tries to impose his will upon them, or vice versa – he enters the conditions for awakening. On the other hand, if he has no conflicts with others… then sooner or later others will start to pity him, to take interest in him. And other conditions emerge. Thus, he must always be in conflict with others, but not directly, not the one he believes himself to be in. That this is, to some extent, true of almost all conflict makes things harder, not easier.”

He was at the stage of avoiding jacking off to characters who had one database point in common with her at the first layer of the ontology on Zerobooru, and two on the third (the fourth could count things like “human”). Within this range, it would feel like he was trying to substitute the image for her and cheat the rule around thinking about friends. Or she would simply invade along the line of similarity, like a magic substrate.

It had, of course, occurred to him that he only had these problems because of gooning, that if he refused enough stimulation they would simply burn away in the heat of his willpower. After that crashout at 19 where he broke a mirror on his face and got glass embedded everywhere, he held the line of NoFap for 5 months, in his last futile attempt to come out a real person, but even - or especially - without images the fantasies became even stronger, and indistinguishable from the intrusive thoughts or nightmares. He had a wet dream to a little girl version of his mother tearing his bandages off and digging into the bloody flesh under his eyes and knew it was never getting better and he had to look at some fucked up stuff someone else had thought of so it wouldn’t feel like him.

The closer the object of desire, the realer the desire of the object, the more he had to take responsibility.

He did, however, want to get off to at least some of the erotica she was telling him about. That was what most of it was, right? Women’s erotica. Which she’d told him about because he was so ridiculous and embarrassing there was no possible way he would take it as any sort of flirting. Because their inner worlds were so different that nothing that appeared sexual to one would even appear sexual to the other. And besides Gallvren had been able to sublimate her sexuality so much that it shone everywhere through her body. Shone everywhere through her. While his clung to him like a stink.

That had to mean she didn’t believe he would be staining her fantasies with his. But he asked for them after talking about what they both respectively liked, saying he wanted to try them, even she would know what that meant. Eroticism was a sense. It was impossible to tell what a work of erotic art meant without experiencing it physically. Meeting it in its own dimension.

But these were also the Heroes. One of the only important things he’d been able to pay attention to in school, because their stories were exciting and inspiring – admittedly the kind that made him want to poke holes and probe like with any kind of fiction, but they weren’t fiction, they were real people who had saved and built the world he lived in. The shitty world he lived in – but at least not the Dark world, the world that looked like the inside of his head on the outside. They were held as close as humans were allowed to be to the sacredness of the Ecclesia’s symbols of the divine.

He simultaneously felt like he shouldn’t get off to it and didn’t want to because he should. But there was no way he would restrain his curiosity from reading.

He was no stranger to stuff involving guys, but the tropes in this were very different than he was used to - a stark, straightforward dynamic, which was usually either self-inserting being penetrated by a huge, hot-blooded or brutal warrior, or penetrating a pliant, beautiful boy. He wasn’t sure who he could possibly self insert as, out of the heroes, but the way Gallvren described this stuff you weren’t really supposed to self insert anyway. Elthazan was the obvious, ethnically and in terms of having plenty of fics of the first category with Kamann, but he didn’t like to even imagine spending all day every day outside, bare feet crunching on spiky cedar twigs and cold wind getting under his fur wrap. Silmenon, on the other hand… Silmenon/Elthazan was a pairing he had looked up. The one that had really done it for him, the absolute success, was one where Silmenon treats Elthazan as a dog. It was downvoted and flamed by dozens of authors; the depiction had been judged by Elthazan fans as racially offensive, one-dimensional characterization. He’d blacked out that night and posted a rant on /hl/ that somehow, the next morning, was being passed around as copypasta by people on his own Feed who didn’t even read it.

Now he was 12 chapters into a fic where Silmenon is approached in the Dark Lands by a real succubus, not a “succu-angel” but still somewhere adjacent in his mental landscape, taking the form of his unrequited love Miwa, except with mostly-male anatomy. The succubus seduced him under the pretext of experimentation with monster bodies, but quickly disabled his target’s magic and subjected him to his own round of experimentation on the limits of human bodies. Luskonneg would edge himself near completion on the dominant parts of the first 7 chapters, then let go first chance he got on the submissive later ones. Except as soon as he tried to let go, he didn’t, he clenched up, until there was a knot of physical pain like a chastity cage. He knew he was imagining Gallvren judging his thoughts, his pleasure, which even if he told her about the story he would report nothing of, yet which by imagining he was inviting her into his pleasure – no, dragging her in, without her consent.

Sometimes this would manifest literally, when he would slip back into self insertion unconsciously and then, in his preferred position, see her watching over him. Grimacing like Ylian sometimes; smirking like Marzanna in others; most often appraising with a cool, academic interest that drove him crazier than either of them. Her gaze filled him up with her pleasure, even though he knew she would derive no pleasure from the flabby scabby body of himself, and he was stealing it through the body of a Hero. Another trope of dubious consent. The first time he noticed the intrusion he nutted on the spot.

So now he was at the point of avoiding this too. Or at least, getting halfway there, enough to let the erotic sense pervade the story, and letting it build up.

And at the same time, he couldn’t pay attention to anything else. The Dark Lands were advancing, both on on everything he could do, and everything he could think.

As an alternative outlet, he was stabbing himself on his own again, with a pin pushed through a bottlecap. It still felt better than his life before. But for how long?

>hey you gonna get back to Gallvren

hear youve been ghosting her

next time I wanna take you on the funiculars together. all three of us

did something change

>no

doesn’t mean it wont

Im getting scared

I don’t want things to be too far gone wen they di

*do

>ok we’ve been over that I’m not gonna force you to do anything

but you seemed to be having fun both times I saw you!

>yes.. that’s t problem

He also still thought about Marzanna. Didn’t he?

He hadn’t even thought about Dr. Mark’eg’s axiom when he first fantasized about Marzanna. Training him, tackling him and pinning him down, or pinned herself under a surprisingly powerful move he’d found hidden somewhere in the back of his brain like a hereditary secret magic - his ‘killer instinct’.

His other therapists, when he touched on the rule, didn’t even understand why he felt so strongly about it. But when he presented them with Dr. Mark’eg’s arguments, they shied away and tried to focus on his feelings again. (Sessions where he felt everything, learned nothing. And then felt the same thing, as if hypnotized, throughout the week.) Dr. Mark’eg had been bracing, challenging, even if he hadn’t helped, Luskonneg wanted to believe he was the one who had failed. Every other therapist was just telling him what he wanted to hear.

So taking it seriously now, didn’t this mean he was now inescapably caught in a love triangle again?

>study sessions become a battle of wills

>start bringing my phone to take notes instead of reading, she tries to check it at random times

>look at anime, manga, chans, even porn on it

>none of this has even bothered Mom in half a year, she’ll walk by and say something casually insulting and ignore me

>try to hide it but the mixed reaction when I can’t feels good in a weird way

>”tension”

>one time she snaps and gives my phone to the librarian to keep until we leave

>librarian asks what our relationship is

>she stumbles and says “big sister”

>imagine this for the rest of the session

>actually manage to get some studying done (finally understand wavelength/frequency/speed; can’t remember that shit now)

>vivid dream where Smilia scolds me for falling in love with my big sister and cries

>wake up crying

>for some reason scared to tell Dr. Mark’eg about any of this

>try reading big sister stuff but the big Current doesn’t come, can’t/don’t want to get off (still feels good)

>switch to other stuff, can’t get off either, word Currents start coming more intense

>start having trouble sleeping again

>also start waking up early, like 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning

>try watching shows about Love Ed to see how much I can reconstruct

>”Love Ed harem” is a whole genre, in fact it got started around the time modern Love Ed curricula did

>both watch the classic stuff like Ekuirian’s ‘Afterschool Recursion’ and more recent, trope-parody-based takes like ‘I’m Not Crazy, my Teacher is Trying To Engineer a Love Ed Rom Com, Right?’, as well as explicitly didactic attempts like ‘Intersecting Ripples’

>the recent tropey stuff is the easiest to watch

>Afterschool Recursion and Intersecting Ripples each have a bunch of moments resembling stuff I’m going through that make me break down and start hyperventilating and stop watching

>talk to Mark’eg about it

>he has me match attributes of the characters and their relationships to my relationship candidates

>none of them are exactly analogous, each apparent analogue to Ylian or Gwaëlle in the shows has some attributes of each other

>can’t draw any conclusions

>decide to look for the Love Ed textbooks that I missed at library sessions with Ylian

>at first sneak them behind other books, but it looks like I’m really studying bc I am really having trouble

>this doesn’t last long bc they’re big books

>break down red and crying, tell her about missing the classes

>she seems to think this is serious but she shouldn’t be managing remedial work for me, offers me 15min on them at the end of each session as a reward if I study my current stuff

>15min way too short, I’ll struggle with a sentence like “The Two-Serpent Theory: Love is an Order encountered by both parties as Chaos” which is basically Theology and she’ll have to leave before she can explain it

>in fact she barely interacts with me within the 15min for reasons I can guess

>struggle to look at the textbook and not her, which feels like looking between her and the textbook deliberately

>out of nowhere Gwaëlle emails me through the school messaging system

>wants to know how things are going with Ylian, doesn’t hear anything at Morals Committee meetings any more

>tell her I’m trying to study the Love Ed stuff

>she offers to meet up at a goddamn cafe

>a cute cafe

>fucking scared

>her friends already pulled this on me

>this is even more ridiculous

>like it’s out of one of the tropey anime

>is she actually just an idiot

>or is she planning an extremely complex test as a member of the fucking Public Morals Committee

>put off the offer for three weeks

>feeling worst I ever have but can’t do anything disruptive that might draw their attention

>just don’t do anything in class, haven’t completed half my assignments for Theology or Naturalism but if I don’t disrupt them they won’t disrupt me, at this point I’m basically skipping in my head

>one time I just don’t go to class because I straight up don’t remember where I am

>wander back through a haze and see Ylian and Gwaëlle standing outside a classroom, calming down a crying girl I recognize from my Literature class

>stand a bit too long trying to see what’s happening even though I don’t plan to intervene

>Gwaëlle is looking at me, not like she’s making sure I won’t do something but just a kind of sadness

>deer on traintrack

>can’t look at them, can’t look away

>Ylian notices me too

>start walking and do a thing I’ve practiced occasionally when someone’s body distracts me in gym class:

>look up at the ceiling over her and try to visualize Smilia* descending from heaven

*Smilia appears when Astig can’t talk to the girl he really loves, which doesn’t (I think) mean either of them are the one I really love. She’s the backup girl, Heaven’s Guarantee, and that’s what I like about her. I always wanted someone to make her happy, even though Najda himself said that’s “the fans”, which means me.

>Smilia descends and… this is going to sound like a creepypasta so tbc I wasn’t “seeing” this any more literally than I would be if I visualized it normally… moves on her own and pulls out the Eros Gun from ep. 16 (https://panopti.con/37454584856)

>bolt in the opposite direction (past them again) into a stairwell

>literally feel it hit me from behind, like a tingling

>sit down in corner of landing with my eyes closed until I feel a hand on my elbow >arrow will affect whoever I next look at

>priorities lock into place

>Gwaëlle maybe wants to be my friend, Ylian doesn’t

>if I go for Ylian romantically I can maybe still be friends with Gwaëlle

>if I go for Gwaëlle romantically I will probably lose both

>someone’s hand slips under my elbow

>can’t tell who it is just from hand

>don’t open eyes

>incidentally just finished Death Box a few nights before this which makes a point that some problems can’t be resolved like this, you have to assume all Order in one place and risk it

>no idea if it’s theologically orthodox bc I can’t remember my classes, assume it isn’t and I shouldn’t be taking it that seriously

>spend all night after looking up threads about it and even the /theo/ trads like it

>mfw

>Gwaëlle asking if I’m OK

>say I accept her invitation without opening her eyes

>Ylian asks what invitation

>look up at source of voice

>she’s so obviously beautiful how was I fighting myself about this so hard

>Ylian asks what the fuck she’s talking about

>Gwaëlle suddenly looks scared

>Ylian demands an explanation in strict terms - some ultra-disciplined PMCspeak I couldn’t remember, never come across in media since

>Gwaëlle explains she was emailing me

>Ylian says this contradicts their plan of dealing with me separately

>something something ”….didn’t realize it was that strict”

>something like: “the Public Morals Committee keeps its commitments in exact terms…. we both know you know that well enough to know you are reducing an already dubious…. to a personal pity project…. if you want me to continue working with him…. cease all communication.”

>Gwaëlle looking at me, shaking, almost crying

>“do you want… do you want to go with her”

>force myself to nod

>mfw when

Mirmansaur was a real tourist trap, with shops all along the main road selling birch bark elf masks, wall scrolls of Sacred Circus performances, bamboo umbrellas, sailor romances and spring-opening plastic coracles like inverted tents (there was a whole dock for them). And it was too grey and rainy to do any touristing. It felt like the dead end of a delusional quest in a pretentious play about Order misrecognition. Maybe it was - in which case where would she have gotten off track? Before her memories started, it felt like, but that wouldn’t be actionable and thus wasn’t worth thinking. She was following the available information strictly according to procedure, and good information was appearing. Would it have been better to chase down and tear through the Black Mushroom Initiates, who at least seemed to have some idea who the Seer In The Half Light was? For all they claimed not to know, they were the ones who had been laying in wait where the clues led - maybe the Seer In The Half Light was a secret project of theirs, or some other Dark sect’s with a pedigree, not sprung magically from a kitsch bauble of rural Silmenon. On the docks, she stared out at the grey quartz-scarred waves over a plaque indicating she was a mere 2821 km from the Forbidden Continents. A cluster of small analog screens clung to a pole nearby with magical drone videos of unbroken forests of ginkgo and cedar and sassafras, trail cams and highlight reels of beavers and fishing cats. Despite the winking folkloristic nudges at the end of the text, you’d never see an elf on any of them. (“Elves don’t show up on video, they can resist photomagic, duh.”) The Forbidden Lands had been barred to human developments in the Great Treaty with the animals at the end of the First Dark War, and elves weren’t plausibly depicted long before then. If they were ever a real hominid, they went extinct when we were crawling out of caves. No matter what Shaïgnar says he’d put research money into. Her mind snagged on a loose end of memory – Shaïgnar? Then she trudged back to the town record hall (its sloping red gables at the end of a long spit of terraced rocks crumbling into the sea off the side of the main peninsula, marked off by a torii) to look for the name she had been assigned to think about.

There would be no family to interview, according to the archivist who seemed to be the type to know everyone personally, their long thin silver forelocks drooping like chains on either side of their hexagonal red glasses as they stretched their snowy flecks of eyebrows sympathetically into the middle of their forehead. Azesul Aeeth was dead in a boating accident several years after her only child left home; Malhawa Aeeth had run off to Klauxion for a late-life business venture, a desperate attempt at salvaging meaning from his failed life. “What about Seullgyo?” The sympathy sank into a stolid reserve as it became clear what Braz was poking around at. The Seullgyos lived on one of the lowest stone jetties, in a thatched dome elevated on a concrete foundation-ring. Stavour Seullgyo came to the door with a knife and a sliced-open fish in his hand, one face flopping from the other.

“What could you possibly want to know about my brother this long after we’d started to heal. Do I have to swear an order of public secrecy to make you vultures go away?”

She couldn’t help it. “What kinds of ‘vultures’ talked to you before?” She showed her badge. His eyes recoiled into their sockets and his mouth ground beneath black and white bristles.

“Shouldn’t you know already?”

“The orders I’m on are so secret our departments don’t even talk to each other about them.”

“He really wasn’t involved in anything Dark.” The tall, heavyset man looked about to cry. “He was just depressed. Even in the happiest and most orthodox families, it happens sometimes, a mistake in the brain maybe…”

“Maybe so, but I’m not only interested in them. Did you know their friend, Lacriz Aeeth? Did they ever visit? How long did they know each other?”

“Aeeth… came to us and told us what happened. We didn’t read Romarosa newspapers. They blamed themself. They had been… no, they hadn’t been lovers. That was the problem.” He sniffed - no sign of tears, but every sign of their suppression. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t thought about them in so long. I didn’t accept their… I couldn’t accept their responsibility. Everyone who ever loved them was responsible.”

“You just said it was a brain mistake. What kind of responsibility would you have for that?”

“I don’t know, could we have paid enough attention? Could we have kept him here? Should we have, or would that just have been torturing him? Our confessor told us we couldn’t answer these questions, and now an inquisitor like you -”

“I’m not an inquisitor.”

“Same type - wants to ask them?”

“I’m sorry.” She stepped, without asking, into the gap he had made in the doorway, eye on the knife. She had already learned enough to do something uncharacteristically stupid, something maybe just stupid enough to cap off the tedious existential drama this journey was becoming.

He was at the stage of waking up early again.

7:00 or 6:00 or sometimes even 5:00. And no school to get to.

As soon as the dawn broke, as the light changed. And that was happening earlier. Spring.

There had been buds on the trees in the square when they’d gone all the way out into the city. Neon bright. As if a bomb had gone off, irradiating everything with some alien substance.

Not as if ‘stopped time had started moving’ - but as if time had moved without him.

Nothing had changed inside him. He couldn’t have imagined sitting there calmly talking the way he did on Feed even two months ago, but… nothing had changed inside him, just his tolerance for it. For the weight, the debt, on his side of the balance building up.

Time, moving without him. Spring, season of love. Of the Serpent’s approach to the Goddess - after which the world becomes too hot, and starts to wither, and She retreats again; though the dream of modern science is that the approach does not have to be a cycle, that the Serpent can learn to become cold in Her embrace.

If he didn’t approach now, it would be worse luck for him to do so for another year. Another year wouldn’t be so bad except…

Time could only be too long or too short, one at a time. Always too short to prepare, and too long to endure.

Besides, the light he woke up to wasn’t warm. It didn’t make him think of spring or dawn. The sun itself did not reach his window until it was already normalized, white on blue. The red blaze of dawn did not face his window. The light that woke him was a thin, fluorescent blue thickening to blue-white, like a computer’s death screen, like the halo of static after his mother fell asleep with the TV on. He had a private name for it - ‘cold blue flame’ - that he saw, very occasionally, in the lighting of certain frames of anime or visual novels, that he had a folder with a collection of, that was nostalgic as long as he wasn’t experiencing it.

A folder he could no longer look at.

Had the cold blue flame of the skull he had imagined reading Seer In The Half Light been the same thing? (Was that the very half light, in which they saw?) Had it now encompassed his entire world? Did it have anything useful to say to him?

He rolled over into his pillow and tried to imagine it. It flaked into birds as the sky whitened. No. You’re on your own.

What defined a life more: the rarest experiences or the most common ones? Say a normie goes to work and talks to the same people on break every day but hangs out with his closest friends once a month. Or say they look at some newspaper pinup every day, but only have sex a couple of times a year, at a Sowing Season Mixer or with an out-of-town partner – those people are still more important to them right? And these are normies, with more access to any of these things. Also, your birth and your death only happen once. It has to be the rarest.

But any time you do something new, or uncommon, you have to be simultaneously drawing from your whole world of experience. And that world of experience will be made up of those common things, no matter how unimportant you are. He could only talk to Gallvren for so long at a time, for instance, because he was using the same experience from talking online. So an uncommon relationship that evoked the currents of desire, no matter how different, could not help but evoke the things he looked at every day.

It was obvious enough how they mapped to the last time this had happened, right? Gallvren was the one who, maybe, potentially wanted to be his friend. Which meant Marzanna was the one he should pursue – although those fantasies had dropped off precipitously after he started seeing Gallvren.

But that was the mistake he had made last time. He had tried to pick two boxes instead of one. (Watch Death Box again. Watch it for clues. He kept starting and then arguing with himself too much to pay attention.)

The most intriguing lead that had cropped up in Marzanna’s external investigations was that there was no indication that Luskonneg’s father was dead.

He stopped showing up to parent-teacher meetings, or signing documents, or giving feedback to report cards, but in student information, a deceased parent was always marked with an X – this was useful information for a teacher. It appeared nowhere, as far up as his graduation.

She’d looked up the name Gwl’kerrien as soon as she’d learned it. It wasn’t common, and it wasn’t from the tribal side of his heritage; it was in the third tier of C’harnian names. She’d looked it up and there was one who worked in the kind of ‘company’ or ‘office’ he had alluded to, at an experimental agricultural coordination and transportation guild based in Klauxion, negotiating with Elthazan government plans and targets. So his father both literally helped put food on the table - on the shelf - and there was no way of explaining to a child what he actually did.

No social media. No social club memberships. Just a deadpan profile on the guild site. A job title that only meant anything to the couple dozen above him in the organizational flowchart.

She would have left it at that if she was just an ordinary reporter and not a Punkin Patch user.

Using a separate, personalized search algorithm, she had also found an account just labelled “gwlkerrien” on a popular online military simulation game, with thousands of hours logged.

It wasn’t the kind of game that Luskonneg seemed like he’d show any interest in - a search of his Feed revealed only a handful of comments disparaging the conduct of its playerbase in other games (a RTS with gijinka of Chariots from the Second Dark War) from three years ago. Still, what did he get up to all day? It was a bottomless pit - but then, as her training had to remind her, it wasn’t. Simply the breadth of reference scattered over the insane ramblings on his Feed, and the other pieces of his activities he had suggested to her, would not afford him the time to dedicate to this game in his 13 or so waking hours a day. And he would have to have been playing it since middle school.

There wasn’t enough to work with here, unless she was actually going to publish the article. It would be a good story - the workaholic father is a media addict too, a real workaholic in a fantasy world - a disgustingly good story, like an overwrought parody of the kind of story she had been hoping to find.

There had to be a point past which it was unhealthy for her to pay any more attention to this, and tracking down his father seemed like a good marker for it.

Maybe he had already passed it when she stopped being able to explain it. She mourned her old explanations like childhood fantasies of chasing orcs out on the steppe: it could have just been Obviously someone as fucked up as him is involved in something Dark. Obviously this is a bog standard entrapment scheme. Obviously this is spontaneous magic, a statistical anomaly generated by the Goddess for the purpose of humiliating my puerile dreams.

Rather than reaching out through work – where she expected him to have ways of stonewalling her – she made a burner account in the game and shot him a DM.

It was different this time. He could be systematic now. In school he’d had to splinter his fantasies, his monologue, his media consumption, between homework assignments, his mom telling him to rearrange random things lying around (“you mean chores?” “no, she didn’t let me do actual chores, unless I could follow her weird pretend chores I couldn’t do them” “that sounds like just chores you were too young to get bruh” – Feed conversation with @kendrama, blocked since 10/????) or about something he should like as much as her or something mildly irritating (but it wouldn’t have been “mildly irritating” for him, it would have broken him, she only talked about it) that happened during her day answering phone calls part time for the city from the couch. Every fragment was bright and seemed to exist in its own pocket of time but that was why they could only clash blindingly like glass swords in the middle of his brain.

He had long since gotten the hang of, the requisite coldness for, comparing girls – fictional ones, at least. Scrolling through pages of cels and panels and fanart, absorbing and averaging every angle and artist’s vision, filling in the on-model schemata in with his favourite interpretations of curves and creases until he could practically vibe out the size of their pores. Decompose the voice actors’ timbre to the yips they might let out when he gnawed on their respective necks.

With Gallvren, as much as her collarbone drove him crazy (with urge to snap it – no no no –would that be bearable up close?), as much as he could feel the milkweed edge of her hair along any part of his body as he writhed in the blanket, he mostly found himself blocking out these images, trying to continue conversations in his head without arriving at Bad Ends. (If he tried to treat the conversation as real, to visualize anything about it besides the chain of text, the bad end became more likely. If she was a person in the outside world, a person with collarbones and soft hair and thin pale skin and delicate skull – a sprawling knot of organs. Have you heard of an eroguro art series called ‘Extension’? It’s basically just an anatomy diagram – a body’s internal organs extended as far from each other in every direction as possible, like a long line along the intestine with things branching off from it, muscles unrolled in flat sheets around bone, circulatory system spreading out like a slime mold. You can get it in one giant file or like 60 pages, you look at any one page and can’t tell what you’re looking at. It won a conceptual art prize, but the author was an assistant on – the voice in his head could say something about how it was like a physical version of superflat writing, how the Heroes’ Love Experimental Vanguard (he had been reading back through their archive, searching for anything that could compare to the extremities in his favourites) had adopted this style from upper-mainstream novelists like Velkon Kashel, transcribing an unbroken internal monologue over hours or days or drily itemizing the hundreds of elements in a character’s field of perception over one long paragraph as impenetrable as his floor. He had been reading or at least reading up on every text she mentioned, not even to talk about them but to imagine how she would talk about them. The key was not to wonder too hard what she would actually say, for instance, if she liked or disliked it, because then he could end up at her liking or disliking him, a Good or Bad end. Although certain answers felt more or less plausible as if by gravity, the way they usually did for a familiar character.

Mental notes:

1) Talking with her as a mental ‘character’ felt good but left a sort of mental ache, something missing, and also made it harder to interact with other ‘characters’.

2) Talking with her as a mental ‘person’ led to ‘Bad Ends’ and either violent or sexual (or both) intrusive thoughts.

3) In those thoughts he was more often the aggressor, even when she humiliated him, which was worse than the opposite (with Marzanna, who he couldn’t possibly hurt, who could hurt him in endless and fascinating ways).

3.1) He didn’t like to think of himself as someone possessed by those thoughts, although the heroines he liked, Smilia, all lent themselves to it – a deviance closer to Dark, not merely an intensification of the governing order.

3.2) Although Dr. Mark’eg had let slip, in unguarded moments, that something like it seemed correctly calibrated to him. But he wasn’t with him any more, so he no longer had any authority. If you have been moved to a new psychologist, the old one’s authority had been superseded, even if it hadn’t, and he was never going to talk to the new psychologist about the kinds of things he talked to Dr. Mark’eg about anyway.

4) Refusing to indulge those thoughts made them come back worse.

5) Indulging them on purpose didn’t feel… like letting something natural happen. It wasn’t pleasant. Details would dissolve into the air, and the air would weigh down on him. It felt like forcing something artificial and bizarre, like when he tried to convince himself he loved a flavour of the month seasonal.

With Marzanna, the affects he had felt toward her at first now felt silly, even primitive, except that she was an even more powerful gaze than Gallvren. Was she Gwaëlle or Ylian? She was the one who had approached him, who had taken initiative, who had shown interest in him outside of someone else’s bounded social experiment. That alone meant he should learn from experience to pursue her, which seemed much less intuitive – he didn’t know a thing about her outside her job and the fact that she could ruin his life on Punkin Patch or in the newspaper. So on top of the , the erotic appeal of Ylian, of being judged and hated, though it had never accreted to her body the same way, she looked incapable of it. But she was, and if he was thinking about Extension, being reduced to diagram, wasn’t that what he wanted after all? Maybe he didn’t even have to make her like him, just make her hate him enough, which meant he could do all the things he already knew how to do…

No, that way lay Darkness, the only barrier he had not yet passed.

Mental notes:

1) Bored, possibly because I feel less bad about her.

2) I feel less bad about her because I know she cannot be threatened by me in any way, a fact which alone should make her the correct choice.

3) She doesn’t just understand weird online fiction scenes and fetishes; she understands the feeling that something is wrong.

3.1) How do I ask her about that?

…deadlocked, again.

He had done this every night for almost 13 nights now.

In the old days he could have managed hundreds. Now, he could barely manage a couple dozen. He might actually die.

He would have to do something stupid to force himself to move.

The Seer in the Half Light. I understand them.

She had been expecting no answer, and instead she was overwhelmed by answers.

Answers overwhelmed even her sense of why she was doing what she was doing.

As in, it didn’t bother her that she didn’t know why any more.

Spoiled.

How spoiled could someone be.

To refuse someone you promised to care for over mere infinity?

The Seer in the Half Light. I don’t understand them.

How could they - how could they make that decision, and then not see the error of that decision, and then turn away from the Goddess and all civilization in doubling down on it?

Something was trembling - her brain? Her heart?

Her rhi?

Her lateral decision instincts - honed in memory erased training - kicked in. She started a Recording Circulation and pulled out the waveform reader she had requisitioned after Voidhanger.

She had come to the right place after all. The best possible place. She stood up, scanning the living room for objects, barking “stay here” at her interview subject who had stopped mid-sentence as she looked back up the stairs.

Homing spells were an old art, one of the oldest of magical spycraft. Used by hunters in the time of Elthazan, shepherds finding runaway sheep, hedge witches cursing runaway lovers.

One of the most subjective still practiced - the most like magic in a folktale.

Theoretically, a spell could home or target an individual as long as you could define, in words that excluded any other possible target, something absolutely unique to them. This was harder than you thought. Anything you thought was unique to someone almost certainly wasn’t.

That was why spells that required a piece of someone’s body - a lock of hair, or a fingernail, or a drop of blood or semen - were so common in stories. But many of those didn’t work, or were alleged to have worked in the hands of skilled improvisational magicians no one could replicate - it’s harder than it sounds, for instance, to define something relative to a whole it was once a part of.

Detectives in the early days of standardized magic always used fingerprints. Nowadays, police and Inquisitors favoured DNA. Schools, universities, hospitals all collected it and shared it with the local and central databases according to the treaties; it was the most common way you caught Shapeshifters, too. As soon as she’d had the name Lacriz Aeeth she’d called her superiors - a Colonel-Inquisitor whose name she didn’t remember picked up the line - and asked them to home in on it; no results, which was unsurprising if they’d been involved with the Black Mushroom Initiates. One of the known and sought-after effects of the Black Mushroom was horizontal gene transfer; the plastids randomly generated in the genetic potpourri of its spores, released when the cell walls broke down in digestion, made the DNA of anyone who partook regularly illegible.

Homing by Rhi signature had been the dream for millennia. The only problem was that individuals’ rhi changed too much - “individual rhi signatures” didn’t exist, though dogma and the standard model said they were supposed to. Supposed to exist, but not necessarily be computable Like love, individuals were too important for their rhi to be identified as a simple function. Rhi was the Resonance-in-Order; it was produced by everything which had an irreducible existence, a unique structure which could be defined self-reflexively apart from any other possible structure, produced rhi by vibrating that structure through the dimensional manifold. Humans, as individuals, produced rhi; therefore, humans, as individuals, were irreducible - and the unique dimensional structure that produced their rhi, incalculable. Or something within them was - the exact ontology was debated. DNA dictated a blueprint, but two instances of the same blueprint could produce different results. The rhi of an individual was both blueprint and outcome, could only be determined both backwards and forwards in time.

The “rhi patterns” that could be known and studied in magic, even used as substrates, were not the dimensional manifolds that produced and resonated rhi but consistencies across it, structured sets of infinities - like “humans-in-general”, or a particular circulation within a body. Even “narrative homing”, therefore, the use of rhi to target a particular individual, did not rely on an individual’s unique rhi, and that was why it worked. A rhi-pattern that inexorably marked one individual could be consistently produced by another, by second-order reference to their relationship itself as a pattern within the first.

It had that same “why hadn’t I thought of that” quality by which, Braz had read, scientists often identified breakthrough discoveries. And for that reason, despite what the Black Mushroom Initiate had said, she believed she could reproduce the Seer In The Half Light’s magic.

(The Black Mushroom Initiate, maybe even the Seer In The Half Light, had only seen what she had been demoted to. They would have no way of knowing what Rraihha Braz knew she couldn’t remember having been.)

She came back down the stairs carrying a book that had been more dog-eared than the others on Seullgyo’s shelf - The Fact of Decay and the Heresy of Neoteny; on top of it, a slim copy of Elphantom’s Cry at the End of the Night; a black iron sword brooch that was apparently a birthday gift from the target; a stack of printed-out emails about missed classes and bills for lost books, annotated in red sharpie; a paper graded by Selbstember in mechanical pencil; a mini-CD of ASMR affirmations by a popular voice actor; the Tarot card “The Sea”, worn with cigarette ash and fingerprints. From the kitchen she added a mostly empty dropper of cannabis extract labelled I. S. - from the living room a pillow that appeared in a photograph of the two as middle schoolers, playing dead on the couch. “What are you… going to do with all that? Do you need any help? Please, don’t take it for long, the room’s stayed -” She was adept at carrying this many items of interest balanced together, even if she’d forgotten an evidence bag. “It’ll be back in the morning, and in the exact same place, and you can pretend I was a dream.”

It didn’t help that, on top of everything else, the assignment Marzanna had been selected for was so top secret that she couldn’t talk about it to her ordinary Confessor.

She had been given, along with her first briefing, a Portable Tabernacle - a peaked wooden cabinet about a foot high, framed by ridged and voluted arches like the booths and arcades inside a cathedral, the cloth and grille of microphone and speaker filling in each arch. Press down on serpent-egg finial, and it would start recording, or stop. A few buttons hidden in the tracery could save, toggle back and forward through saved recordings, and playback. But the booth was not private; the recordings were transmitted to an accredited Confessor, somewhere. At some point, probably a psychologist.

The mics could pick you up even if you whispered. It was a better place for her doubts than scrapped and deleted files. But she’d open her mouth, and try to form the words she had just been able to type, and delete, and get nothing. Wait until she had to start over and pull her head together from space again. (What if he’s some kind of psychohazard, what if he’s contagious.) She slammed the finial, and tried again. And within thirty, then ten, then three seconds she knew she wasn’t getting anywhere. And would have to start again. Slam. Slam. Slam.

The door was loose, not open enough to let light in or be seen unintended, but enough to open at a gentle push, with the tips of fingers. It was after midnight, the window sucked light, the amber streetlight angled through its corner seemed as present in the room as the lamp and the screen on Marzanna’s table. Gallvren was in her nightclothes - a long robin’s egg blue dress ending in lace halfway down her shins, with matching pants descending not much further. Her shoulders, her collarbone, the hint of gap between her ribs, these were things only Marzanna got to see. She had appreciated the miraculous injustice of this when she first saw them two and a half years ago, and resolved not to push her luck.

Marzanna was still wearing everything she had been wearing during the day, although that included PJ pants, a newspaper-collage T-shirt covered in joke headlines from her graduating class, and the top half of a sparring gi. She swivelled in her chair, bangs draining into her baggy eyes, and greeted her roommate with a half-smile.

“Everything OK?”

“Oh god,” she looked up, eyes at least dry because they always were, “you could hear me?”

“Well I wondered why you were up first. I thought you were like, typing loud? Because that’s me sometimes and I wonder if you can hear when I crash out and tear up pages. Were you working on… the thing about me and that guy? If you’re struggling, I could like, read it. I’m really… curious.”

“I’m… I’m starting to rethink that whole thing, actually.”

“All the more reason. I mean, if we’re friends enough. I won’t ask for credit. I never really wanted to push to read any of your stuff, because Goddess forbid you want to read mine. But now, I mean, you’ve already read some of mine for this haven’t you?…”

Marzanna’s sigh extended into a moan, of pain and relief simultaneously, like an animal that didn’t distinguish the Currents it had to let out into the air as a howl.

“You. I’m rethinking including you in it. It’s weird stuff I research, and I shouldn’t just assume you’d be interested, let alone enough to be worth dealing with someone that unsettling. I feel bad for like, associating your kind of fandom and his.”

“I don’t find him that unsettling. I’m getting the hang of him. There was a really learning disabled person who used to come in the shop until last fall and always wanted to follow me around showing me Lacrosse cards…”

“You don’t know what I know about him. I’m almost afraid he might be dangerous.”

“Then shouldn’t you talk to Civic Services or the Ecclesia? Plus you’re always there ready to flip out with some crazy Miwa techniques.” She beamed through meshed lashes.

“They know about him. I don’t know, maybe I’m being crazy. You’ve never… really looked between the cracks like I have.”

Her voice stiffened. “What makes you think I haven’t?”

“Priors. The vast majority of other people haven’t. Even in my job.”

“But maybe it is kinda fucked up if… this guy thinks you’re trying to save him, for reasons he doesn’t really believe or understand. And neither do I but - If you didn’t really believe in that, if you’re just using him for the story? Almost like that site, what’s it called - Punkin Patch.”

Did she know. “I - I don’t -”

“See, I’ve heard of Punkin Patch because it fucks with HL authors all the time, that isn’t some elite journo secret. What, does he use it? Is that what freaked you out so much?” She laughed - brightly. Genuinely. Like someone who could still love her, if she moved fast.

What did that mean to her? Were her feelings just as shallow as Luskonneg’s in high school, or for that matter now? No, the difference was, she knew it didn’t matter, she would seize her chance no matter the cost and then the circumstances that made this a question would change, she would orient herself not towards a vague yearning but a specific person, and not toward a vague tonal cluster of the kind of writing she wanted to make her famous, but the important position of a quiet life, customized by Dr. Iolaw Mark’eg for her unique psychology.

“No, I… guess I feel like that too. I saw this guy online who just seemed like a funny profile of a Silmenon-style otaku, and… didn’t realize how deep his issues went. But I got into this partly because I wanted to talk to you about, and write about, the secret embarrassing things you were into. I found someone who’d be… more embarrassing, make it easier for you to open up next to. And that sounds more fucked up the more I think about literally any of the ways I went about it, and I’m really sorry.”

Gallvren furrowed her brow and sat down on the side of Marzanna’s bed.

“That’s. That’s really cute. A little scary-cute. You know, I’ve been preparing for what happens when a guy like him confesses something crazy like that to me because he’s obviously going to. I didn’t expect it from you.”

Marzanna hung her head in her hands, like the hull of some ancient ruined ship.

“I also don’t want that to happen. Not for me, I’m not worried, like, I don’t want to have inflicted that on you. Let’s just abort this stupid operation.”

“Do all Yn Dahh’t journalists talk like secret agents all the time or is it just you?”

She cramped her diaphragm laughing and rolled off her chair onto the bed, and couldn’t even explain why.

“If I tell you… I’ll have to… oh sorry, I can’t do it. I can’t be that corny.”

“That’s a kind of stiffness, that isn’t necessarily good for you, you know?”

Gallvren reached out, towering above her like a grainy dream of a mother silhouetted in the door-light. Thank the Goddess, she wasn’t going to have to do it on purpose, it was just going to happen on its own, and she could believe she was doing the right thing…

“You read the greentext background I sent you, right?”

“Yes. I can’t believe he types all that out like that.”

“OK. So you remember the concept art he made for the knitting club. Spring Lambs of Holygrove High.”

“Uh-huh. That sounded adorable. I don’t know why they were so mean to him.”

“I have it. I obtained it. From Gwaëlle Finsteryon.”

“Goddess, you’re going… deep, for a random person, aren’t you? Do you have… ethics approval for this, or…”

“It doesn’t matter. The article’s not going to get published anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. It’s probably better to just… drop it and focus on something else, then.”

This wasn’t going as she had planned at all, and that didn’t just mean bad things for her, did it – her stumbling was endangering this whole project, whatever it was. (Did she want it to succeed now? Should she be fucking up worse? – Shut up, I’m not giving up her for him. The Ecclesia knew what it was doing, how had she even dared to second guess it this long.)

“You don’t get it. I’m trying to warn you. About what I got you into.” She gritted her teeth and finally landed the right image in her phone gallery.

The three girls – and the boy in the midst of them – were drawn entirely nude, with a layer of loose white knitwork in the shape of fanciful costumes, glued (poorly) over the pencil outlines. The outlines were shaky and looked like they had been erased and redrawn many times, so much that you almost couldn’t see them and their incriminating details under the clouds of grey smudging. But still her eyes flickered over them, refusing to settle like magnets held over a like pole. If they had been drawn realistically… or, she couldn’t expect that of a child, but naïvely… she spent hours a day sometimes picturing the Hero who founded her country naked. (Of course, her background awareness of Pontquarno’s apologetics told her, that wasn’t the same. Elthazan had passed into history, and was not present to be confronted with his representation without his consent, and had consented in life to be seen skyclad by strangers…) It would still have been wrong, of course, on the grounds of ordinary ethics and subject to ordinary discipline, but the artistic impulse would have been understandable. No, she could see the parts she understood, if she looked too closely, which she didn’t want to – felt as if she was herself ogling photographs of real naked children – parts that were the product of real observation and the exploration of observation that she gave herself over to in writing, the sag of a breast or the crease of a stomach, you could tell because they were not only more detailed but subtly larger than the rest of the stiff action-figure outlines they were sutured onto. The stylizations she had expected weren’t entirely present – those, more than the offending anatomy, were suppressed or disavowed – except where he clearly had no empirical data to work from, or that data had receded into his abstraction of a generic body plan. Observation but no unity, like a collage, the whole image must have never been held in the mind at once, even after it was completed, no wonder her own eyes skipped around, albeit away from rather than towards the focal areas.

“Haha. That’s almost cool on concept, but. I thought he did learn basic consent stuff? I’m starting to get a sense of what you’re worried about. But.” She paused. “In the story, the version I read, they were already planning to humiliate him before he showed them that, right?”

Braz’s guest room was in an old lighthouse. Squat blue metal, barely a garage’s height about ground, rounded, the riveted cuteness of rural Silmenon infrastructure. It was the highest-priority guest-room in town; the highest-priority guest it usually received was a local fishing champion, a magistrate on a feedback visit. The room was small, but its circular format naturally fit the ritual she was about to perform. Her sleeping bag was crumpled against the wall.

She stood (slightly hunched under the low ceiling) in the phosphorescent lines of the eight-pointed star she had drawn in standard self-erasing chalk between the eight objects she had brought home. that would liquefy and dissolve in under an hour. Which didn’t give her a lot of time to mess around or get anything wrong. She had her whole handbag of documents, the only other possession she was now carrying, in hand’s reach but outside the central intersection of the star. This, at least, would make selection straightforward. Not too much choice or interpretation: few items, all leading in intuitive ways to a next step in the investigation.

After that, there would be no way to know if she was being led on a wild goose chase by an incorrect reconstruction of an impossible or made up spell until she hit some obvious lead, or didn’t. Like those Skeptics’ Theatre performances that make the audience try to determine if some rare or novel magic took place.

Moonlight glowed through blue scale-ripples on the underside of clouds outside the window. Faint mist condensing to rain.

She kneeled down, unzipped the handbag, and lifted the first document into the centre with her. As she did, she began to sing.

She had painted a calligraphy wave based on the rhi she had recorded that afternoon on a talisman, which now fluttered between the fingers with which she drew the paper. She had then transposed it through an International Inquisition notation grid into a melody, which she now sang.

The objects surrounding her joined, faintly, in the song.

Meandering like a wolf’s howl.

They wouldn’t be quiet for any of it - all the documents pertained to the Seer In The Half Light, and had been provided to her. That made for a baseline hum of relevance. What was supposed to increase its volume, its clarity, its keening was “potential novel information”, a hell of an abstract theoretical concept she’d had to define in spellcode. Luckily her memory wipe hadn’t hit the special training module she’d taken on magical information theory.

University grades and reports, hospital documentation. The fluctuations were mild, the melody from the objects sounding almost like it was fading in and out on a radio.

Frustrated, she let her fingers rummage deeper, as if she could guess something more relevant by feel – and encountered something so rolled and bent and folded up she hadn’t even remembered it was there. She pulled out the charcoal drawing of a man’s face.

It had been gathering lint in the pocket of her coat and she hadn’t recognized it at all, but thought it might be some associate or suspect to keep an eye out for. Framed by matted hair, draining into a swamp of beard-moss. It couldn’t have been Seullgyo – the features were Northern nomadic – but its eyes reminded her of how she realized she’d been picturing his: hooded and bagged, watery yet beady, miserable yet sinister. Arrogant despair.

The Elphantom book fell over in its position on the circle.

She knelt down to pick it up. She spotted the capital letters in the middle of the largest paragraph on the page it had fallen open to before. Spiral March. A famous rock formation in the Dark Marches, a storied lookout turned tourist spot. Also, a franchise of inns in other cities named after, and managed by branches of the founding family of the inn at the lookout. There was one just under the cliff in Winter City.

Name: Tacimarsa

Birthday: March 11th

Sex: Female

Occupation: Consultant, Savannah staff

Blood Type: B

Likes: History, mathematics, superiors with the stomach to rein her in, simple starchmeal, exotic jewelry, watching things change in real time

Dislikes: Poetry, travel, weather, pleasantries, industrial sectors and the people who occupy them, capitals, resorts, and other centers of power, meat.

Seen with: Not often seen.

Surprisingly few syllables for a Triactian of her stature. Hails from much more cosmopolitan areas of the world, and yet has chosen to make her living and projects in the most corporate-core spaces she could gain access to. Mixed-species, Lunic and changeling, but has little interest in either home culture and still thinks of herself as being from the mass, undifferentiated orbitals. Has had a very eventful and impactful life but little of it has been written down. A bad omen, an angel investor, a quiet and grave woman with a childlike curious push to the direction of her eyes. The member of staff perhaps most involved with the Weylbloom project, but seems to have no strong feelings on its outcome for better or worse.

Something of a drifter, with a resume filled with ambitious but unrelated projects; a revolutionary idealist allergic to connection. No social instinct outside of life debt. Born to be a herald of some established hegemonic organization, secret or not, but never had the chance to sign on with a grand conspiracy, only petty ones. A parasite? A representative, after all? A lone, crazed ideologue? A mere member of a small, likeminded circle? Whichever it is, she has been a great asset to Savannah staff, responsible for many of its crucial funding connections and the success of its sponsorship agreements with Hightower and Triactis. Without her, the habitat’s most recent history would have run much more slow and sparse.