CW: nudity, fantasy racism, underage fictional sexualization, online stalking communities, fanservice tropes, nonconsensual verbal and mental sexualization, mind alteration, amnesia, suicide, clowns, public humiliation, self-harm, gaslighting, emotional incest, delusions, verbal outbursts, consensual torture, age gap relationship
“Straw shafts of sunlight fall like spears in the snow around Kamann from where the naked shadow glances into the nimbus of platinum-saturated cloud. Trees twist in elegantly agonized poses as he charges on straight, snow stinging and melting inside his gazelleskin boots. He stumbles. One or two stumbles more and he knows he won’t be able to see it any more.”
She needs a way to work the blue of the sky into that first sentence to evoke the colours of the flag Elthazan supposedly designed to represent that scene, three diagonal bars of gold between pale blue and white. But when she pictures it there are only scraps of blue in the sky.
“And maybe that blue-silver streak of hair, that deep rivulet of spine, will run out of his memory like meltwater, like one of the scraps of blue remaining between the clouds.”
She’s been picturing this scene since she was first told about the meaning of the flag’s colours, and at some point the colours drifted, bled out, maybe from seeing it against the half-cloudy sky so many times on the walk home from school, maybe from thinking about how and when those spears of sunlight actually appear. She’s read at least a hundred renditions, but none of them quite capture that sky that springs into her had first.
“He’s already accepted the wild man getting away with his prize, but that thought, of remembering less and less of this scene as he tells it, sends him into a blind panic. He responds not from moral or practical judgment - those two guiding stars Maullan has taught him orbit each other like the Goddess and Her lover - but from need. His right arm reaches across his left thigh for his sling.
He lets the stone drop into the pouch, pauses barely a moment to aim and swing - and in that moment notices his target is already gone. His devastation targets the sun, as if to shoot it out of the sky - and the weight lands on his shoulders, his knees buckle. Heavy wrists grind into his until the snow compacts beneath them. Hot breath, like a beast’s, grazes the hairs along his neck - then a tongue.”
How could he have fallen back so quickly? - no good, she was trying to stop using those kinds of cheap rhetorical questions. But she had to indicate what had happened somehow, didn’t she? Even if everyone who read it already knew?
“"If you hadn’t been so fast - and so focused - I couldn’t have tricked you like that.” The wild man’s hot breath made spread in cool rings of condensation over Kamann’s ear. “I don’t care about keeping the prize, you can bring it in for your bounty or whatever, but the chase was fun, wasn’t it?”
Of all the parts of his body now pressing into snow, there was a direct line between the still-mounting blaze in his face and the alarmingly hard tip of his hueroth chafing against the rough-sewn seam of his pants. “I-I have extra clothes in my bag, can you put some on before we parley?””
Did she need to use that archaic word? (And the Elthazan one, not the Kamann one, because it fit the aesthetic she was going for, even though she was using Kamann’s perspective.)
“"Other hunters don’t usually mind that I’m like this.”
“That’s because they’re barbarians!””
She could use that word, right? Nobody was quite sure where this story was set, and whether Kamann would have meant barbarians in a way that encompassed the C’harn tribes or just those they had used to call barbarians. But those at this point they would have called wodwos.
Even though most of them weren’t the way Elthazan, “the last wodwo and first ranger”, was, and nobody really knows his ethnicity because it’s accepted that he was one because he was cut off from it. That was one of the dynamics she wanted to get into.
“"How do you even handle it in this cold? Is it true that wodwos are descended from”
No, even if he believed this he wouldn’t have said it, especially having known Maullan for three years and the precepts of ethnic chivalry were among the first of her writings to survive.
On the other hand, if he thought it, that would help set up whatever she did with the dynamic further down the line. Like: “Was it true that wodwos had thick impervious skins because they were descended from elves, or dwarfs, or orcs, the people he usually shot down at the campfire could never decide which?”
“Well, if I’m not getting a workout I’m doing it wrong. Usually that includes when I catch someone…””
Strike two. There was no reason he couldn’t have said that yet - there were plenty of fics in which he did, ones where they did it right there on the snow - but she wasn’t trying to write one of those fics. She was writing for no less august a Winter City institution than the annual Heroes’ Love competition founded by the Spinsters’ Legion, polishing the best of three or six (depending on how she counted) pieces she’d already written into one.
She was even doing it on a typewriter, which made her have to think slow, and not want to pile up struck-through lines where she ran away with herself.
But the entire reason she was writing something like this was because she tended to run away with herself, always had, even looking at a flag on a grey sky as the metro pulled up to the school gates.
The key is to run away with yourself, Joyelez Pontquarno, founder of the Patriotic Spinsters’ Legion of Winter City during the second Dark war, had said - but only up to a point.
But what frustrated her was when not only the distance but the direction was wrong.
Her roommate knocked on the door. “Dinner’s ready.” Marzanna could be weirdly motherly about that sometimes. Other times she was the one silently crouched over her laptop all night in the dark, and Gallvren got to slip into the kitchen and do the same for her. This was their friendly rivalry.
At least Gallvren’s room wasn’t like that, even when she was alone and jumpy in it. She had hemp and lavender incense sticks burning softly in a two-headed lion holder, magically preserved lilacs from the shop strung along the window’s edge, three lights in slightly different shades of yellow and orange lighting her in three point. She never posted it on social media. The essence of a C’harn gentlewoman, her mother (who was only such a thing in the aspirational sense of universal nobility promoted in Elthazan newspapers) said, was elegance in privacy. And Marzanna’s room was elegant too - the prayer mat and different cushions she could move between to keep her posture and rhi balanced on that thing for hours - but Marzanna didn’t seem to care.
Or maybe she just hadn’t gone in there enough - but would she allow the same?
Marzanna had placed two plates of pesto reed noodles with scallops on either side of the small circular table. They blessed the food together but after as Gallvren eagerly sunk her fork to the bottom of the plate, she threw her arms over the chair’s back and waited a minute to talk with her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“How much do you know about… otaku?”
Gallvren untwisted a forkload and whipped its loose ends back into her mouth. “The Silmenon kind? They’re gross.”
“Yeah, I mean the guys who… wait, as opposed to?” The limber monk flipped her frame forward onto her elbows.
Shit! The qualification - the defense - had come out automatically - on some parts of the internet, she’d be considered one. Especially by the Silmenon kind, they were the only people who would talk about fans as a kind of otaku rather than otaku as a kind of fans. But apparently Joyelez Pontquarno had maintained a correspondence during the war with Sukiton Decoby, and there were rumours she had contributed an anonymous work at the first Romarosa Comiket. The things they had in common weren’t just stories, imagination or even obsession, but sex and skirting-the-edge-of-blasphemy.
The tricky part was going to be, she didn’t want to trap herself into hiding everything around her roommate forever. She only talked to other HL fans at the monthly meets at the library; Marzanna sometimes seemed like the kind of girl she could take there. She almost certainly had something at least as corny going on that she didn’t ask about - wait, what if the otaku was her?
Maybe this was an opportunity. She hadn’t known how to gauge Marzanna’s tolerance, and if she worded it right…
“Well, I do watch a few Silmenon shows, and in those they use it to refer to pretty much everything. Like if you’re really into trains. It seems useful to have a word for that, besides just… obsessive? Which is like, a diagnosis?” Marzanna perched a frown on her slightly hairy upper lip. “Hmmm. The guy I’m thinking of isn’t really that obsessed with anything… I mean, he knows a lot of pointless bullshit, but I’m not sure he’s focused enough to be obsessed with any of it.”
“Guy?”
“Somebody in a human interest pitch I got from an agency. They wanna do some story about comparing male and female otaku. Anyway, what’s gross?”
Gallvren spluttered. Was she being called on her prejudice, or asked to prove her own non-grossness? Two interpretations of the same words with completely incompatible implications for what she said next. “I-I-I mean I assumed you’d also get it, they even say it about themselves, they-”
“The guy I’m talking to specifically is, and I don’t know how much of an outlier he is because I’ve never really met this kinda person. But I’m a journalist, anyway, I’m supposed to ask these kinds of framing questions. Like establish the assumptions you’re using to analyze. Also as a journalist mine have to be pretty open anyway. I probably find less things gross than you, because we’re trained in that specifically as journalist-monks. I won’t bite if you mention something weird. It’s a good exercise.”
“Uhhh, well, obviously the sex stuff, but not just the fact that they’re fantasizing about cartoons or fictional characters. It’s when they’re like, really young-looking? There are women into that too, I see sometimes…” She stopped herself, then continued. Maybe she could thread the needle here. “Like one time at the library they had a HL convention and I stopped through. Because I was curious.” She hadn’t meant to lie, to have to go back on it, but in person she couldn’t edit. “You know like…”
“Heroes’ Love.” Marzanna smiled, snickered. Not unkindly, but not… familiarly.
“And most of it was just writing and art and audio drama, but there was one table that was like… Silmenon style ball jointed dolls. They had all the heroes, but the male - I shouldn’t say that for Elthazan, I know they used neutral pronouns in all the contemporary documents, but it’s how most of these people still think of them - the male-coded heroes were in the front row in more suggestive poses. But the dolls’ proportions were like… they would only make sense if I were casting a pre-quest fic, but they were wearing their quest costumes. Or half-wearing” (she thought of Silmenon’s kimono slipping all the way over his white hairline-spiderwebbed plaster shoulder, the edge of his nipple peeking over the same pink as his bow lip - thought up to a point, and stopped, and returned to words) “- and it wasn’t even just a literal thing, like people don’t look like that, but what creeps me out is how you’re trying to imagine a person - one of the Heroes that made our world no less, but I feel like once you can imagine one person that way you can imagine any - what are you imagining when you imagine them that way. Like you don’t want to break them, because if she did she would. But like she wanted to want to.” Gallvren shook her head. This was going to make her, make the whole convention sound bad, wasn’t it. “I don’t know, I couldn’t look at it for long. Like physically.”
Marzanna was grinning. She had her notebook out in front of her and was taking down phrases without looking down, a skill Gallvren had always envied. “That’s really - if I do something with this can I quote you? I haven’t heard it said like that before. Now I really want to put you in front of the creepiest male otaku I can find - don’t worry I’ll protect you, also I’ve already found him - and get more quotes. As a reward, maybe I could take you out to another Heroes’ Love thing…”
Gallvren smiled cautiously back, giggled, and Marzanna thought for the first time she wouldn’t mind destroying her subject for her mysterious handlers.
~
“Well, you’re right. Your life doesn’t seem to be much of a story.” Marzanna spoke with the video off now; Luskonneg occupied himself by floating various characters, from waifus to memes, in front of the empty frame with its masklike default icon. “So we’ll have to make it one. What if I told you I could find that woman who helped you and you embarrassed and apologized to her?”
“…I embarrassed her?” He’d hardly dared to think it in his endless replays of the event that had mostly stopped in just the past week or so as things had settled comfortably into weirder. What would that even mean - would she have been replaying it five to twenty times daily for the past month? Imagining she should have done… what?
“The video that was uploaded to Punkin Patch - which to be clear, almost no one watched, you’re not famous or anything - was titled ‘lady tries to help spaz, he just spazzes out more’.”
Luskonneg didn’t even think to turn off his mic as his groan dragged itself out into a gurgling, throat-scraping scream.
“You’re doing it again.” The voice rose implacable, like an accusing ghost in a play, from the computer he had just thrown limply across the mattress in front of him.
Pain pulled loops out of his back as he sat up in a hunched C. A few more years like this, he imagined, and maybe his muscles would atrophy and he wouldn’t be able to walk or even stand. Maybe if he put on enough wait his bones would just crumble under his body if he tried, like a kaiju’s would in real life. @Suburbophile had found a video of a CG physics model based on Super Tannin 89 doing just that and it had become one of his most comforting stims.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry - I shouldn’t do this to you too, he internally addressed his anthropomorphized laptop, before reassuring himself that it had landed in the lap of a body pillow. (The pillow he had hastily stretched with a cover of Gelmer Gadders, his current seasonal waifu, who he had also kicked out of bed in frustration.)
“Does she know about it?”
“Yes, but she’s more offended by whoever took the video than you - she knows there’s something wrong with you. She wanted me to find you and get you in the system - I found that less interesting, and it’s clear the system already knows what it can and can’t do.” Marzanna braced for another scream, but just gurgles. “I know this sounds humiliating and pointless, but if you treat this as a regular apology you might be able to interact with somebody as a regular human.”
“You’re fine… putting someone else at risk from me.”
“Risk of what? If you’d ever really hurt someone you’d be in…” well, probably better conditions than he was now, but she caught that it probably wasn’t a good idea to say that, although Luskonneg seemed pretty dedicated to staying out of institutions anyway. If nothing else there was no way he’d get to keep all that shit in them. At one point after she’d asked he’d sent her a string of 20 very selectively framed photos of his room - a few redundant, “these are the best ones I’ve posted in the ita-room threads on 42chan before and actually set up properly but they’re almost a year out of date”.
She’d played around formatting them in a collage, with the conspicuous gaps left open between them for text. She had come to hate everything about this story, but most of all the fact that there was actual material here - and, according to the secret instructions she’d been receiving, she’d never be allowed to use any of it, although if something went according to plan she’d be granted a special state service income and access to all kinds of classified bullshit she’d never wanted to write about in the first place.
“…you’d be really shut in.” Was twisting the knife working? Or was she trying to get cut off from this confusing nightmare?
“Well. I could embarrass her more.” He started laughing. “Hehehehe - I could embarrass her - trip and fall into her boobs or her panties, I could walk in on her in the shower - those sorts of things happen around me, you know.”
The voice on the other side was dry and skeptical but unmistakably turned upward a bit with anxiety at the end. “Do they really.”
“…no.”
“If they happened on purpose that’d be harassment and you’d be in the same situation I know you’re already not in. And if they happened by accident… I suspect your life would be more interesting than it is.”
His life was already starting to behave like that, though - she was there, like some girl who fell from the sky, trying to fix him for no reason. Why wouldn’t the rest of it happen too? And what would - what could - he do if it did?
Put him face first in some stranger’s panties and there was no way he could respond with Astig’s sputtering dignity.
“What if they happened on someone else’s purpose.” A pause long enough to hear birdsong. “I… suppose that would also be harassment? By someone else? Has that ever happened?”
“Not… exactly.” But this had happened. This pattern, this momentum, this careful push that in anime they would call - in the lines of his high school agenda he had called - “stopped time starting to move again”. Things that had seemed just as impossible, implausible, fictional - and had proven to be. “OK. I’ll apologize, do anything she needs me to do to make it right, give money, and then never talk to her again.” Or anyone else, or… the thoughts ran away into the comforting distance of absolutes.
“No, that’s not really what I was thinking, that’s not much of a story either. I was thinking, you apologize, and then buy a meal together and have a normal conversation for say… fifteen minutes. No cameras, and I’m there only for safety.”
“I-i-i-i-isn’t this some kind of malpractice?!?!” Luskonneg hadn’t picked up the computer - he was staring at it like it was a time bomb. (Gelmer, use your explosion-absorbing magic skirt… oh no, it’s around your feet, isn’t it…)
“So would be tackling people in the middle of the street, but - Yn Dahh’t license. At no point here is she going to do anything she isn’t comfortable with and - if I can make it possible at all - neither will you.”
“She can’t possibly know what she’s consenting to. And you- you can’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not even a psychologist. Real psychologists have been trying this for… my entire life.”
“She already knows you’re crazy. Look, nothing I’m saying is contingent on a happy ending. If you fuck up, I get to see it in action. Which doesn’t mean I have to write about anything you don’t want me to. But there’s two ways this could go, by definition. Either you really are as special a case you insist you are - in which case there’s something for me to research, a hole in our system that catches everything, a new kind of mental cancer, maybe something you can get treated by some new psychological method they don’t have practitioners of here. Or there isn’t, you just needed the right person, the right push, the right circumstance, and I have a feel-good human interest story.”
“It’s not special,” he choked. “It’s just me. No one can get better unless they want to get better. I don’t want to, I don’t care, it’s been so long. The system lets me, it lets hundreds of people like me, I talk to them all day. You could go in any thread and pick one of them at random and you’d get the same ‘two options’, and it wouldn’t mean anything which one you got. If you got the feel good story it’d just mean they were faking it all along.”
“Of course, that’s more or less what I did. You’re underestimating my desperation here - I’m perfectly aware that I’m forcing a story.” Her voice was speeding, heating up, like steam would be coming out of her nostrils in an anime. The laptop somehow getting more dangerous to touch. “But there is one advantage to you, from what I’ve read now of your online profiles. Which you wanted to show me - that you wanted to be an icon for shut-ins, a representative.”
The last time he’d thought about that fantasy, he’d imagined becoming that after he was dead. But there were earlier versions, which he had cultivated for their absurdity on Feed, megalomania was disarming there, especially alternating with self-deprecation and venting, everyone knew you wouldn’t make it and probably wouldn’t kill yourself either…
Damn it. Even for someone he had been using to indulge this fantasy of someone knowing him, she knew him too well.
>using
>to indulge
>fantasy
What fantasy will you use who to indulge next, huuuuuuhhhhh? a mocking voice ripped through his skull.
It sounded a bit like Ylian from the Public Morals Committee, combined with Dominaura from Hell Harrowing, combined with himself when he screamed at himself in the mirror.
~
These days suburbs spread out for an hour and a half around the Great Rosehedge Wall by train - almost twenty minutes longer than the last time Braz had been here. Red terracotta barrel tiles, sloping eaves, artificial hillsides of interlocking mass-produced plaster blocks with gardens that were just starting to bud, sprays of mustard and half-opened cherry and crabapple blossoms everywhere, winding stairways and flying buttresses between them, all unimpeachable examples of the beauty of Romarosan architecture and all surely commissioned to form a mandala of lacelike intricacy and beauty from above, but at some point it got repetitive. Or she was just phasing it out - it felt like a flat, randomly-generated screensaver unrolling across the window. The best part was always how it framed some incongruous element of a scene that would be lost in a split second - a dog running down a colonnade with an unattached leash, a single dancing shoe hung on a laundry wire. Even melancholy in Romarosa, they said, was melancholy in Romarosa - or even boredom in Romarosa is boredom in Romarosa, a kind of silky opium stupor. She supposed it would be boredom here, and melancholy by the time she reached the old city within the Hedge and the sun was setting, a cool pink-veined halo behind the convex silhouette of the capitoline peak. The old city alone was the size of the entire upper plateau of Winter City - the campus of the university she was visiting a sizeable neighbourhood in its own right, overlooked by an imposing barracks of state-owned guest housing, five storeys of open arched facades. She would unpack in an Ecclesiastic confidential suite on the penthouse. Wash her hands in a foliate-face basin of scented water in the wall. The floating spherical lanterns along the promenades would be glowing mauve, the first white butterflies would be out. The university buildings would seem as opaque from above as within, their windows narrow and stained, gargoyles and ridge beasts menacing the wandering eye. And she would take a walk around before going back to her room to try and sort out her notes and plan her investigations for the following day, go to a garland booth or a poetry reading in the park, try to appreciate it in the way she hadn’t on her childhood vacations and graduation trips. It was hard to think too much about her mission, after all, if she didn’t understand what it was. She felt like she was dreaming - and wasn’t that the way you were supposed to feel in Romarosa?
She had come so far south the season had changed in time-lapse, literally journeying into the heat of the sun. As she stepped out, several carillons sounded in a syncopated echo, and a colony of bats jetted from one of the historic cliffside catacombs overhead. As the sound evaporated a music box wafted up from somewhere far below.
Her ignorance wasn’t any better than knowledge. It wrapped around her head like a coil of smoke. And she had the distinct, stinging sense that this will to rest in her ignorance had gotten her here. So she paid a kind of frantic, restless attention to everything she had on her field exams, the ones where you had to find your instructions first.
She was disappointed to find that the nebulous commercial area formerly known as the Floating World and now as the Electric City had crept all the way up to the base wall of the campus. Presumably a lot of students these days wanted a place in walking distance to buy and play video games, stay on top of collectable lines, read self-published fan pornography, ogle cosplay waiters and waitresses, and say things like “moe moe kyun” out loud. The more traditionally seedy attractions of the floating world had also always appealed to students, but the city (and the school) had put in more of a token effort to keep them away.
All these distractions - life sized anime girl sticker waving from a window, splayed 2D panties on a doorside bookstand, flashy stage-magic explosions from a plastic gizmo looping on a billboard, cat-eared butler beckoning her with a flash of inexplicably poignant turquoise wig - were at least in part the product of the secret military-ecclesiastic bureaucracy she represented. Had represented? In what capacity, she was no longer sure - only that she had instructions she could not disregard.
All to protect the world from the Dark Lord - at the cost of degrading it into the kind of world that could feed that black hole of a mind a steady drip of hyperstimulus to keep it satisfied.
Well… that was speculative, wasn’t it?
The classified services had their fingers in all kinds of places, using all kinds of psychological models that might or might not be administrative fads, but no one knew what exactly worked or didn’t. All the previous Dark Lords had developed some sort of compensatory obsession, but no one knew what this current one’s was exactly.
But she could just imagine it. She had never been a fan of any kind of pop culture, or understood the Silmenon government’s enthusiasm to drape it all over their cultural heritage, but the feeling of that heritage had already slipped over her like a flock of seabirds again, while the sights replacing it filled her with a sudden revulsion disproportionate to her expectations. This was the swamp the Dark Lord of this generation would choose to sink in. If it had been designed by some maximum-clearance committee of psychologists for this purpose she could forgive its existence. But not walk through it without reminding herself that he was out there somewhere, and even though they were not at war, had deprived her of any chance at a normal life and something more important she couldn’t remember.
Last time she had been here, she had sat on the battlements of the university wall far overhead with Agryaux and Nevenna, friends she couldn’t remember if she’d seen in a decade. They had been assigned to airgapped divisions, so probably not. Now that the intervening memories were missing, however, they felt recently parted.
Maybe that was how the [Taboo Preserver] felt all the time.
She blacked out and found she had trancewalked the rest of the block. She retook her surroundings, paying less close attention to anything anime - that had tripped something? How was she supposed to work like this?
She recognized the sound of the same music box, the same slow pentatonic melody. Followed it around tight cobblestone turns until she found a clown wearing the inverted grieving mask supposedly customary since Silmenon himself on a triangular corner overhung by silver magic-preserved rhododendrons. There were various legends about the mask - that Silmenon designed it after his troupe was massacred, or that it had been invented by a clown who had been his closest friend or lover among them. In either case it represented sorrow expressed as laughter, and had an uncanny quality of muscle groups that didn’t exist being pulled too tightly.
The clown was sing-speaking in the fashion of first-Dark-War-era Silmenon theatre:
My heart is like a boiling pot
The Serpent squeezes until
The egg of water shatters
And sweats out his poisonous brood
They multiply and find other lovers
But the shell is never remade
The learned tell how the water returns
But I know what is lost
She wasn’t dressed in costume that displayed her Ecclesiastical affiliation - a long, stiff, slightly flaring indigo dress-coat with fur lining its high collar - though a popular devotional serpent-dancer brooch clasped its upper pocket. And theologically unsound metaphors for despair had been accepted in the fine arts for centuries. But still, she stood and narrowed her eyes.
“Is that from an anime?”
“It’s a song by a famous suicide.” The clown motioned towards his bulbous cauldron hat on the ground. “I’m raising credit for mental health research.”
“Suicides are famous here? In Elthazan it’s considered disrespectful to make the dead a spectacle. Especially a clown show.”
“That’s why I won’t say their name. I guess it’s true what I hear that northerners like their happy and sad unseasoned.”
“No, we simply find certain seasonings vulgar, but I’ll admit you’re making me curious about this one.”
“If you pay me well enough I might give you a hint.”
Braz reached into her pockets - coat, fatigues behind her belt, grey seal purse. “Thirty florets?” The three bills were more than any other identifiable unit in their open suitcase - full of strange little pamphlets and drawings - but not so much that it would suggest a motive beyond the slightly apologetic magnanimity of the well-off.
“They came to the university above us, from a province, a cape where people still claim to see elves. They say people with elf blood in them never live long.” Now this was the kind of superstition a Romarosa busker would try to bait tourists who hung around the anime shops with. Maybe there was no reason for her trembling intuition. “Would students recognize it?”
“I wonder how many still do.”
“I thought you said they were famous.”
“Not for song.” The clown reprised the melody on the music-box, and she dropped in another floret to see if he would say anything else. Other than the movement of his hands and the tapping of his foot, he was still as a statue until she walked off.
~
“It shouldn’t be that hard, you’ve gotten the hang of talking to me in complete sentences already. Fairly elaborate ones sometimes.”
“Right, but I’m thinking of you in the same way I think of my psychologist now. Someone I can dump whatever on and they won’t care.”
That categorically excluded any relationship where he cared about the other person’s reciprocation.
Did he really not care about Marzanna’s - the very destined angel of implausibility come to rescue him from his loneliness - reciprocation? It was part of why he had asked her to turn off the camera, although he still pictured the sound of her voice mushing around on his ear ASMR-style.
“All things considered, you haven’t dumped all that much on me, compared to…” some of the lolcows - “some of the subjects I’ve dealt with.”
With a kind of dull amazement, he realized he hadn’t.
He had no reason to believe anything he said would alienate her - she had as good as said it wouldn’t - so he hadn’t been thinking of half the things that would.
But if he didn’t go through with this, she would have no reason to stay. That was why he had been trying so hard.
She had already worked herself under his inertia, like a razor under a nail. “But you have more than I’d want to put on” - she paused, again, to force down the lump in her throat when thinking of Gallvren. “Someone you’re already trying to apologize for making uncomfortable. Which is why I want you to practice just talking, not just confessing.”
Confessing. When was the last time he had been to a priest? He flinched away from a whole other upsetting rabbit hole.
“So for instance, this is kind of like a journalistic skill - try summarizing a bit of what your life is like now, without too much upsetting detail, but maybe like one detail that might lead into something interesting you could elaborate. I’ll wait.”
“Uhhhh, I sit around my room and… play video games… and watch cartoons… mostly from Silmenon… but I liked Cig Blaster recently and that was from here. Have you seen Cig Blaster?”
Marzanna burst out laughing - real, sudden, spontaneous chrome bells - and he threw himself across the mattress to record it. “I loved Cig Blaster! Sorry, not speaking as her or in exercise here. I have a T-shirt of it I wear in bed.”
T-shirt… in bed… he hadn’t seen enough of her to picture what shape of chest the speech bubble full of curse marks spilling from the yellowed overbite, the six-barrel cig-gatlings at the ends of the adult superhero’s angular arms, stretched and cracked over.
“What would you want to do, if you could do something, to contribute to society?”
“Well, this, being a representative for NEET-” he stopped himself, this sounded silly, like he was running for some kind of elected position. Well, other professions had their guild representatives - but if that was real he wouldn’t be able to handle the responsibility, it had to be a kind of informal celebrity like this.
A kind of total address that would almost inevitably have to end in suicide if it didn’t begin in death.
“You never think about- making any of the kinds of things you consume?”
“I- I’m not creative. On Feed I’m basically- a critic. If I could do that for real- I’d be basically- doing what you do, I guess.”
Because he was a critic, he couldn’t create. He sometimes fantasized about having created, but he would see every flaw in everything he created even faster, with more ruthless focus, than he did his interactions with people. He knew real creators used that to push themselves forward, but he could hardly make vent shit any more, unless it was so bad on purpose (and not bad-on-purpose in a funny way, he knew how to parse that as good or bad, he was one of the best at it) it constituted a deliberate aggression against the part of him that cared about anything.
Thin tears had started leaking out of his eyes, completely silently, without so much as a hiccup in his breathing. Just on this question. Why?
“This isn’t working. Isn’t going to work. I’m still talking to you as you.”
“Hmmm. Do you think you could talk to her as me?”
“No, that would defeat the point, look, I don’t want it to be easier, I want it to be real - n-n-not like love or friendship real even, just that like, the other person is really listening or wanting to listen because if they pretend to, then I really don’t know when to stop, then things will really get bad. The last time I tried this I -”
He was already on his hands and knees over the body pillow and the laptop. Before he could finish his own sentence his elbow moved as if on its own and slammed it shut.
He wasn’t going to talk about the Public Morals Committee. He couldn’t. He would have to… summarize, not confess, like she was asking him.
Unless she said something that indicated she was supposed to know about them.
And since when did he do what he was supposed to?
He had done everything he was supposed to, when they had tried to help him, too. Well, not at first. Maybe he’d messed it up forever one of those first few times, gotten a bad end on an early choice.
The difference between real life and a visual novel was you could hit a bad end, and it would just keep going on, and on, and on, and on, and you’d never know for sure.
Like end credits stuck in a loop.
But if he’d hit a bad end back then none of this would matter, somehow, no matter what it looked like, so he could keep doing anything he wasn’t supposed to.
Except, well, any of the things he really wasn’t supposed to.
He really didn’t want to do things he was or wasn’t supposed to, any more. He had spent the last five years of his life narrowly specializing into the handful of things that were neither.
When was the last time anyone had told him he was supposed to anything, anyway? Even Mom had given up at some point. The only things that felt like that any more - the things he was thinking about now - were things he wanted. As soon as he wanted them, it felt like something else was putting the weight of that desire on him, and he didn’t want them anymore.
It was a bit, he’d said one time in an IRC server, like in certain Miwa scriptures he hadn’t read but had heard quoted by characters in visual novels - desire itself, its rough Current, always comes from outside and imposes itself on the harmony of the dance, of the flawless dancing Goddess at the centre of you, no matter how much you feel like it comes from “you” or impels you toward Her.
Except this wasn’t the Current of his desire - it was whatever machine he used to force it against the endless counter-Currents, until it was buffeted back, and added itself to the inertia of being buffeted back.
This machine was “himself” - the stored-up directionless Current he could point anywhere he needed in feeble spurts - and also the shadow of everyone who had encouraged him to push further.
Dr. Mark’eg, the Public Morals Committee.
Mom, those first few times.
Gwaëlle.
Gwaëlle Finsteryon, second chair of the Public Morals Committee.
“It’s depressing having to keep tabs on you, you know that?” Her first words to him that he had bothered to keep in memory - there had been many before, that disappeared almost as soon as he responded to them - keeping tabs. “All the delinquents and regular headcases talk to me every chance they get, try to make their case to me so I’ll go to the teachers for them, or complain about their enemies, or call me names and shit. Eskrahan still tries to flip my skirt when I wear one. You just sit there, looking like you’re dying.”
“Well if I never do anything, maybe you don’t have to waste your time watching me.” His words came out straighter than he expected, with only a few stumbles. “You can tell them you did and nothing happened as usual. You can go…” He had absolutely no idea what she did for fun. She had some kind of little black-bound book she flipped through that wasn’t the Public Morals Committee notebook but didn’t seem to have anything on the cover.
She appeared to him in bits and pieces in those days - all of which seemed larger than life, ruins of lost civilizations. Crossed ankles that shouldn’t have been allowed so close to him, tapering in fine mauve socks into an outdated black leather variant of the school shoe. (A bit below his eye level - she sat on a desk while he hunched in a chair.) Sandy-blonde hair mushrooming in an old peasant woman’s bun through a grey bow. A cleft chin, unbearably soft pale collapse over cartilage depression. The stitched edges of the long felt coat she often kept on indoors. If any one part of her caught his eye, he would avoid looking at it any other part, and it would become a phantom hovering over his vision wherever else he looked, until he kept sneaking glances back at it. Her voice would seem to come from it, gigantic and disembodied. “You think a second chair of the Public Morals Committee is just going to fudge the rules like that?” She raised a faint eyebrow over an eye he could no more look at than the sun.
“You just told me other people expect that! And I’m boring because I don’t!”
“Depressing, not boring. And most of the people who do that are stupid. Not depressing, but stupid. I thought you might not be.”
Stupid! He clenched his jaw and eyes against the echoes and in the red haze of force the phantom of her ankle flew off in a spray of blood and splintered bone. (When he had described how he saw people this way Dr. Mark’eg referred to it in worried tones as a dismemberment fantasy and he had just been getting that thought under control.) His hands trembled and he anchored them on the corners of a desk, then slammed his head down as hard as he could - which was much harder than he usually could (he usually flinched and missed it) - into the corner.
Through the haze of almost subjectless pain on the way to the nurse’s office he felt like he could take in her whole profile and even voice as another ordinary person, the way an anime character in a neutral shot or himself in the bathroom mirror sometimes looked. “See, that’s why I can’t just leave you alone!”
Even since the first suspension, there had been more than enough incidents - getting caught masturbating in the bathroom (not even particularly thinking about or aroused by anything, just trying to pull himself back to his physical body), cutting himself and using his blood when red marker ran out on a group poster, dropping across the track in the middle of running laps in gym class and tripping up three kids. The incidents were too distinct, inexplicable except in terms of their internal logic, which Mark’eg unspooled over weeks at a time only to censor for the school officials. Every time Luskonneg tried to introduce himself to a new group of friends, which he had pretty much stopped, he ended up either crying or saying something alarming if not rule-breaking within the first hour. He had been told the pressure would ease at some point, and instead it just built up like floodwaters the longer he had to either wait or keep coming up with words. By the time most people had invested in even a casual friendship, he could only assume it would be like the Xivuagla Trench.
But I only did that… because of… you… his wasn’t present enough to decide whether to (not) make it sound like a confession or an accusation, and it came out like a friendly chain of bubbles.
The school nurse, who he’d seen enough times that he could now fake it to get away from things without attracting suspicion, didn’t touch him, barely spoke to him, looked at him like a piece of rotting fish. When she could be seen by other people, though, she expressed such effusive concern (not effusive in his mother’s way, that tried to erase its object from the world with preverbal force) that he had to conclude he had been imagining the aura of hostility, the twenty-minute disappearances that made it worth disappearing to in the first place.
He drifted in and out between a place of peaceful, droning pain and cacophonous, fragmented aloneness for three hours before he was picked up by his mother.
She held him, fifteen, in bed in the dark, grating into his collarbones with her fingernails when he tried to stumble up to get water. When he was back from banging around the house without having taken so much as a painkiller, she had returned to the TV as if the rooms of the house had rotated around him.
~
A narrow path covered by an empty, arched cast-iron frame diverged from the walkway that snaked from the visitors’ residences between all the main subdivisions of campus to the ceremonial gates at the bottom of its terraced slope, disappearing into dense ranks of sycamore behind which the low-domed quartzite roofs of the Department could barely be seen rising. The three domes, marked by a triad of icons on the campus map: a rose, a winged skull and a serpent-egg, were connected by broad covered walkways.
The former director at the time of the Seullgyo Incident had an office on the curved edge of the skull, lit in hazy wedges by tiny arrowslits and a minimal chrome desk lamp. Her hair fell in straight bangs with a clean rectangular window for her face, accents of black still visible under the bars of filigree silver. Her throat bobbed constantly, and she avoided eye contact in a way that didn’t suggest nervousness or guilt so much as the habitual need for a neutral object of attention.
“I’m afraid we don’t have any of Dr. Selbstember’s research from the four years leading up to the incident, since she got access to our labs.”
“Is this customary for a sacked professor? Or did the order come down from somewhere?”
“The workers didn’t make a distinction packing the office up. No one thought to ask them to. Everyone was still so shaken up. I consider it an error on my part.”
If it had been done with an Ecclesiastical asset slip, there might be no way to know if it had without digging into their internal records. In the worst case scenario, it would be something she wouldn’t have authority to access. She could maybe request anonymous mission-specific input from someone who would. But that wasn’t how heresy was normally dealt with.
“She never put anything in the archives, or on the intranet?” Braz knew she hadn’t published - in her last three years at Romarosa University, Fraxine Selbstember had gone dark as a researcher.
“Some Mysteries researchers are - as I’m sure you’re well aware - very cagey about their work. We had an associate professor, moved to a military institute a few years ago, who didn’t tell us what he was working on for ten years. It ended up being a conlang that has some remarkably consistent magical effects, but we’re having trouble studying them because it’s borderline unlearnable.” She laughed drily.
“Did she ever talk to you about what she was working on?”
“I did progress meetings but they were always vague. She was trying to focus more on teaching. But she had a steam dray in there for some reason. In her private lab space. ”
“Steam …dray?”
Prof. Kunian rotated the computer screen to show Braz a grainy picture. The thing took up most of a wall of the room; it had a sort of giant kettle attached with pistons to one wheel at the front of a low, flat wooden bed supported by two more in the back. “It was something West C’harnian miners used for a couple of decades between the wars before magical transportation equipment got better. Honestly I thought it might be a LARP or cosplay thing. It looks like some contraption a spunky kid with one shoe open would ride in an early Shunny Najda show.”
“Was she… into that?”
“No, but you know how this city’s getting.”
Braz sighed, exaggerating the expression to hide her abstract panic. “Nothing connected to Druid poetry?”
“She probably checked out a few, but she read everything. At most half of it ever had to do with her research. Some people go into Mysteries just to have an excuse to read all day - I know I did. I can put in a request for her library records for you.”
“Thank you. Did the Inquisition get a look at all of it first?”
“I think so. They asked for a lot but didn’t tell us anything, just left it all here.”
“What about Selbstember herself? Are you still in contact? Is anyone?”
Prof. Kunian threw her head back and rolled it on the headrest of her ergonomic chair. “Fraxine lives somewhere in the alumni district, I know because I saw her at the convenience store at Coral Bells & Poinsettia. She got a special basic income for trauma. As far as I know she’s… basically a shut-in.”
Braz shivered momentarily. “Do you think she was the kind of person who would react like that if she didn’t have anything to do with the Seullgyo incident?”
“If she was at some rut in her research, if she lost it all, and if what was giving her meaning was teaching and that happened to one of her students… I’ve read Seullgyo’s file over and over, he had the worst depressive scores in his cohort. If there was some secret heresy or Dark magic that pushed him over the edge, either you people know or it’s lost to history.”
She nodded. There was a genuine grief in this woman’s voice that had long since vanished in the endless equilibrium of the Abbot’s. “Did an undergrad in the same cohort by the name of Lacriz Aeeth ever come to your attention?”
“Aeeth… Is that… let me go back through…” She clicked through some folders Braz couldn’t see, humming to indicate to her to wait. “Right. Azaru Maiençugaru - who taught the same intro course as Selbstember, they retired three years ago - told me Aeeth was close to turning it into a mimetic suicide chain and they’d recommended them to a specialist instead of the usual campus psychologist. They wanted someone who understood Mysteries jargon, although that doesn’t necessarily mean anything to do with Selbstember, Aeeth appears in all their other notes as a genius reading far beyond their level, the kind of person who could twist ordinary grief or depression into some kind of theoretical argument.”
Braz nodded slightly. Whoever was briefing her had found the “Seer in the Half Light” blog by now. It was frustratingly cartoonish and vapid for the nemesis of the Pious Alliance, although the Dark always was, a pocket of hermetically preserved infant petulance even in the most sophisticated Order. Like the reverse of Shaïgnar’s - she wasn’t sure what fact or statement by or about the infamous general she was remembering. A connection to a vanished Mysteries professor would certainly be more satisfying than a connection to a pulp light novel - had she seen any Elphantom in the Electric City the other day? would there be any benefit to reading it? - but there were enough obvious lines to draw a simpler conclusion: driven Dark by a friend’s, or a lover’s, or an unrequited love’s death.
Something smoldered in her heart. You don’t burn down the world just because it doesn’t have anything for you any more - you fight to preserve it and make it work better so no one else has to suffer what you did, so what you lost can be revived in them.
If you’re a broken piece, you just keep working until you die.
She had always believed that, even before she had been told to - reading ahead in Maullan’s Scriptures, feeling like nothing could ever be truly lost, as long as she identified with the Order beyond herself. But had she really lived it? She suddenly thought of every moment of resistance to her duty - her aimless, resentful wandering yesterday, and whatever unknowable guilt she was increasingly sure lurked behind her vanished memory - as a willful act of destruction comparable to Elphantom’s, to the Seer in the Half-Light’s.
“Oh. They were both from Mirmansaur. I wonder if they knew each other.”
Mirmansaur. A peninsula and archipelago to the Southwest, known as the last place the elves crossed the sea in their coracles -
If it was that obvious, she was being led on by someone. The ones who had sent her, or the one she was pursuing?
If they thought they could lead her into a trap-
They have led you into a trap, one you can’t imagine falling for at your age and rank, so shameful you still remember it and are blocking all by yourself, you are still wandering around the edges of it -
She updated by a few degrees on the voice - intrusive thoughts were to be expected with extensive mindwiping. If I haven’t already fallen into something obvious - and if I have it’s likely an exception - they’re making a mistake trying to trap me. The first thing she had learned in counter-espionage: Every trap contains degrees of information leading back to its source superior to the background noise.
~
Luskonneg said he could only talk about this part of his backstory (yes he called it that) by text.
She agreed and said it would be useful to know about to model how she should approach this part of the exercise. She had suspected - from her own experience with bizarre antisocial people - that something this obvious couldn’t have been left untried, and she still had a glaring gap between his first year of high school and debut on Feed. She had expected piecing this weird life story together to drag out over a month or however long it would take for him to open up, before the new asset briefings came in with instructions to speed things up for a crash. But this would be better for notes anyway. Besides, his voice was grating in a way she still wasn’t sure, with all her speech training, how to correct - but she wasn’t supposed to.
He sent the entire thing, with two minute to two hour breaks between every message, in greentext:
>top three of the Public Morals Committee invite me to eat at their table at lunch
>one day a week at least
>Gwaëlle’s idea (the one who was keeping tabs on me (not gonna go into that))
>wouldn’t get them clowned or shunned because everyone knew it was some kind of moral experiment, the last graduating class’s Public Morals Committee fasted for a whole year and they had to live up to that
>we eat together every day the day before my therapy
>the next day I can still remember what I said with them and tell him about it
>it’s like my life is a show with an episode every week
>even if nothing happens in the week I can always stretch it out into enough content for two conversations
>the chair, Ylian, really hates me and is against the idea but defers to her first and second seat together (yes I know chair vs seat is confusing)
>she’s the one who orchestrated a lot of their picking on me in the wake of the first incident
>white-blonde, sharp bangs, impossibly severe, like a Public Morals Committee chair in a manga
>first seat is Lachezel, a North Kamann guy with a shaved head, also in the Historical Reenactment Club
>explicitly takes my side on stuff, but as part of some pretentious esoteric religious argument he’s having with Ylian
>already can’t talk about basically any of my interests bc they’re the Public Morals Committee
>Dr. Mark’eg talked about it as “grounding Currents” (he’d switch between water and electrical interpretations of the metaphor, dunno if that’s standard, said the analogy worked to both kinds of flows). the more extreme my thoughts, both the desires and the fears, the more extreme content I had to look up to give the Current somewhere to go out of me
>jumped straight from watching a handful of mystery things to extreme doujins and eroge with no basic acclimatization in between, haven’t even seen Hell Harrowing yet
>basically just say things directly out of workbooks
>they can actually talk like that
>start watching normie shows Lachezel tells me about
>draw insane guro of them (terrible) in extra notepads mom buys every week because I “fill them up fast” without wondering why
>it actually kind of works when it’s a routine
After an overnight break extending up to noon, she messaged back (maybe she should have been doing that the whole time.) Ok, she asked, where’s the catch.
Late in the afternoon while she was simmering a new sauce for the same pasta her phone dinged in her pocket: why ddo I have to tell u
She knew those typing tells, and felt a gut-twisting feeling like she was now in one of the screencaps she pored over. She had conducted “interviews” when scarecrows had come to the Patch of their own accord, but that was when they were feeling either functional or megalomaniacal. Moving to texting… might have been the wrong move after all, didn’t that technically mean putting herself on call 24/7 for the loneliest person she had ever met? At least she was using her government-issued second line…
because you said you were going to, and you started. why did you want to?
maybe you can start by trying to explain and work backwards. without getting into details until you’re comfortable.
Marzanna was suddenly aware of the pressure of silence behind the door of Gallvren’s room, where she was working on… Marzanna could only guess. According to her spooky source, something that could give Luskonneg the illusion of a connection if everything went according to plan - something she hadn’t shared with her roommate of the past two years, but would share in fifteen minutes with a creepy recluse. Maybe she herself would have to facilitate this somehow.
Gallvren worked at a flower shop, which she loved and had no ambitions of doing anything else, there was nothing in her life to stop her from bouncing around telling Marzanna about Lotos video loops or sitting at the coffee table, discussing history and the different kinds of documentation that lent themselves to the subjectivities of different periods all evening. She had mentioned running into a Heroes’ Love thing at the library, not a regular boys’ love thing, which they wouldn’t have at the library unless a particularly zealous fangirl got her hands on the recommendation shelf, but which she might have encountered somewhere else, but if what if she hadn’t just run into it…
y do you wan2 kno again..
bc I’m doing something you’re scared of bc it reminds you of something, and I can help come up with strategies to cope with or avoid that if I know what it is.
cant u guess… w ur deductionz szkillz… journaloid (not mad)
She clenched her phone in her hand, then released it. She hadn’t expected much better than this from the Kissler, if she’d ever managed to track him down. It was all the other absurd features of this situation that made her feel like she had less control, and so could control her reactions less - especially the fact that she was dragging Gallvren into it.
well, you were betrayed or abandoned or rejected somehow?
She received an artifacted “Top 10 Anime Betrayals” screen cap (with a decades old picture of a C’harnian comedian tripping over his dog in the thumbnail) in response.
they didn’t betray me, all right? if I start thinkgn that I[‘’m makinnh myself a,,, Victim
You’re the one already crytyping, she groaned silently, but noted inwardly that this overt concern with not appearing as one was something she saw on the Patch. Not in scarecrows - in users. Many of whom were understood to be just as miserable and deviant as their targets, defining themselves by their sole saving grace of self-awareness. That they knew they were not victims, of others or circumstances, simply worse than other people.
Sometimes I wonder, she had written in one of her scraps of an article on the Patch itself, whether this false objectivity is in fact a worse failure of self-awareness… which should entail awareness of the possible Order, not only the actual Chaos, of the “self”.
were you?
getting betrayed in high school isn’t that weird, especially if you’re weird
it doesn’t have to mean you’re holding it against them for the rest of your life, they were just kids
Marzanna wasn’t supposed to actually help him, but this was where she got in a flow state, on the Patch or in her interview projects (maybe she should have explained this to that gatekeeping anon); it was an extension of the same logic, not of stinging compassion but of asking the right questions, finding the most useful framings for their own sake.
Expecting either a wait or something long, she put her phone back in her pocket and stirred the pot.
To her surprise she felt the vibration of a Porthole call against her thigh.
It was voice only. At least she didn’t have to try to do a video call through her phone. “Can I do something I… promise not to do when you take me to meet this person. Please. Please I… need to do it now so I know I won’t do it or something like it when it matters, so the Current won’t keep building up.”
“On this call… right now?” Marzanna turned the heat down on the pot and backed away quickly behind her door.
“Yes. Is it OK? Can I ask you?”
“Y… yes. That’s a good way to deal with it if you have nothing else. Did anyone ever tell you to do that?”
“No. I mean yes. THEY DID THEY TOLD ME THEY FUCKING TOLD ME AUUUUGGHHH IT WON’T WORK IT’S A TRAP IT WAS ALL PLANNED FROM THE START THEY AREN’T HUMAN THEY’RE SHAPESHIFTERS WHY WHY WHY. I’m. I’m not a victim. They never had any reason to like me. They had the right to trick me. They did it completely on purpose from the start knowing everything AND THEY WERE COMPLETELY RIGHT TO. THEY COULD HEAR INSIDE MY HEAD. THEY COULD HEAR ALL THE THINGS I WANTED TO DO THEY KNEW I WANTED TO” - her brain started to phase it out somewhere past this point, but she took notes, and her head swam when she looked at them after.
“Someone… someone needed to hear that?” she stammered finally. “Not just the wall or the back of your head.”
“N-n-no. N-no. FUCK!”
“That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Did someone - another person? …but no one in particular.”
“I needed to - bore myself with the concept of doing that.”
“…are you bored?”
“I think but. I can’t prove that to you. I don’t know how I know it.”
“Is the Current still strong?”
“…no. It’s stagnant now.”
“If something like that is going to happen again, give me a hand signal like this” - she held her first and second finger across her third and fourth - “and I’ll kick into gear, break things up.” After all, that wasn’t the scenario the handlers wanted - although it seemed like it would meet their criteria regardless.
The pit beneath the floorboards felt like it was thousands of feet deep and ice cold. Like she could keep falling and falling and not wake up.
“I see. So there’s no way it could happen. I can’t get out of it. Unless you’re lying.”
“So someone lied to you? What did they lie about.”
“Nobody lied to me. If I said they lied to me… I’d be making myself a victim.”
He hung up.
The lid of the pot rattled.
>eventually it started falling into a pattern
>I would say a few things, they’d respond politely, then mostly talk about their own stuff
>obviously no way I’m going to join the Public Morals Committee so no way for me to keep up
>start saying less as I’m less motivated, miss a few lunches and they ask what’s going on
>break into tears, go somewhere else, Gwaëlle follows me
>proposes experimenting with helping me make other friends
>Lachezel thinks I should join a club; anime, literature, and psychology (lol) are options
>people already kinda know I’m the PMC charity case so this will probably be harder than before
>Ylian agrees so they can get me off their hands (her disgusted looks every week have already given me a new fetish)
>full week of preparation to meet them
>I still haven’t finished any of the normie anime Lachezel’s told me about, and I can’t test if they’ll know any of the deep otaku stuff bc the Public Morals Committee will be there
>Lachezel comes with to introduce me; he’s hung out with some of these guys
>only four members there, three I find out later didn’t come to avoid having to meet me
>club leader is this really trad looking Silmenon dude, long fringes and everything
>his name is deadass like (unless this is a delusion, dunno where to look him up or anything) Tsuillon Maqarmel
>when they ask my favourite I slip and say Ero-Guro Puzzlebox
>leader’s heard of it, impressed
>we’re watching some historical thing about Northern barbarian tribes. I think Ice Floe Saga? I’m having trouble paying attention
>really boring realistic style
>Tsuillon keeps looking at me
>genuinely think I’m imagining it, then start thinking it’s either a crush (he’s really pretty) or he hates me
>cannot remember a moment of what happens after the the second episode starts (it’s an after school club, they watch four in a session) bc I’m paying so much attention to/for it
>Lachezel says I look like I’m in a sauna
>no idea how he can see this because the room is dark
>I can’t say it directly because it would look exactly like my first blowup
>Lachezel notices and asks for me
>Tsuillon says he was worried if I would have any opinions on how culturally accurate it is
>it’s historical, I don’t blame the writers for this, but despite not paying any attention I notice they’ve just said wodwo like five times in the last five minutes. (how did I notice this then? dunno my brain’s evil lol)
>nb: I’m not a wodwo. don't mean that in a 'don't call me that' way
>mom always says we’re not and if anyone calls me one you can’t trust anything they say ever again
>it's one of those weird technical things but I did a lot of research
>full on hit the roof spaz like I did just now from built-up pressure
>Tsuillon gets caught by Lachezel and sent to the principal for saying a slur
>problem: I was saying it too, and repeating self-hating racist stuff my mom said, which I genuinely did not think applied to me
>Lachezel gets me out because I was the one affected
>except one other Northern person who got upset at what I was saying
>now everyone in the club I have the most in common with thinks of me as the Public Morals Committee’s pet who got their leader in trouble over petty bullshit
>and enough other people hear about it and the inconsistency Lachezel showed to defend me that it becomes a scandal around the school
>people are going to the Student Council about it
>Gwaëlle still fights Ylian about keeping me, says I shouldn’t have to pay for Lachezel’s mistake
>still hasn’t ever suggested hanging out one on one tbc, doesn’t look at me the entire time she’s arguing
>Lachezel proposes turning me into a game
>each of them tries to introduce me to one group and if I burn through all of them they leave me alone
>Gwaëlle, since she’s arguing with me, goes next
>I might have to do that again, to write this part, actually
Marzanna didn’t reply. She set her phone down on the peeling windowsill. She practiced katas in the hazy early moonlight.
~
s
“Why not just use the original woman he saw? Why drag yet another innocent person into this?”
Mark’eg had Ymañn doing chin-ups from his sword, letting his chin rest on the scalding blade. One, two, three at a time, with intervals of blank exhaustion paralysis between in which his words entered the old young man’s ears as if in a dream he could no longer have in his own right. As long as Ymañn clearly assented - and he did every time - the dogs could only watch and whimper. They understood by now.
Every one of these punishments was his own idea.
Only Mark’eg had suggested he might actually apply them.
“I should probably be more careful sharing information like this with you, given the recent security breaches here and your role in them. But I sympathize with you and your newfound sense of doubt, so you deserve to know. We looked for her first - that woman never existed.”
“Never- huh??”
“She was a shapeshifter. One of… our estimates for Winter City are still only a few hundred. But that could change if, say, this Seer In The Half Light figures out where the Dark Lord is. Which finding the Commissioner in Elthazan narrows down. We’re not the only ones manipulating the fabric of ‘everyday life’. Most of these are on magic networks too attenuated for complex military or cultural maneuvers. Goddess, I hated playing the bumbling male recruit in briefings with your lover. It’s so easy to prove to those who think they should know things that they do.”
“Braz… knew more than any General or Inquisitor who came in here.” (That one she respected a lot had, strangely, never come in.)
“As far as you knew. The Inquisition suspected her as a weak link from the beginning and wasn’t sharing this information with her - though she could have found it on her own if she’d looked in the right places, or even asked the right questions. The shapeshifter appeared twice at the same place because it has a regular rotation. The Punkin video uploader was also a shapeshifter. They’ve all been cleared since.”
“Then why are we engaging with this at all? It’s obviously a trap. We should be moving the Dark Lord - what if they know?”
“We already have more assets in that block than anywhere else in the city, and based on our model of how they’re spread out there would be one that close anywhere we moved him. If they knew we would know, and we’d be at war. Their behaviours are probably designed to trigger “narrative events”. Which is the trap we’re accounting for. At minimum, we want to re-destroy his will to pursue them.”
“You’re the one setting up a ‘narrative event’!”
“In the sense he’s used to, the sense that makes them impossible. He needs something like this to happen, or at this rate, he might figure out how to make things happen on his own. And with this many Dark agents closing in, he might not have to make much happen on his own. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t think we can aim for a policy of stasis, the enemy has momentum and we’re losing it. But the brass who don’t know psychology don’t know how good our position is. Right now, the directions we’d need to push to destroy him or awaken him aren’t the same direction. They may look like it, but they aren’t.”
“This sounds like something Braz wouldn’t…”
“I told you. From now on, you need to do the opposite of whatever you think Rraihha Braz would do. Not even for the good of the operation, but for yourself.” Mark’eg tilted the blade against Ymañn’s chin as he held it. “Or else none of this is for anything. We only have a few studies of previous Dark Lord incarnations, but they’re very consistent. Either he’s discovered by his minions, raised as the Dark Lord and develops smoothly with no distinct ‘awakening’ at all, or he awakens at the point of an important decision with concrete stakes where he needs real power.” Ymañn dropped on the bed, panting, and didn’t get up, his hands still limply clinging to the sword. “You’re the [Taboo Preserver], you have access to all the relevant literature to study the century of arguments about the exact trigger conditions yourself, the Dark Contract theory, the decision theoretic models, but in all this time you haven’t. Even if you sometimes let Braz tell you. She didn’t even know your big secret, did she? That you’re his psychological template.”
“I wasn’t - authorized to,” Ymañn gasped, with a voice already resigned to being refuted.
“You weren’t authorized to love her. But now you’re talking as if you love someone else you weren’t authorized to.”
“You- you mean-” He practically barked. A feeble whimper-bark. A yap. Cringing was a dog’s gesture. But the dogs didn’t cringe - they just hung their heads.
“You have huge reserves of empathy - which of course are necessary in allowing the Dark Lord to have enough for even basic aversive reactions. Or at least, that was the theory - in my own readings of the studies, I don’t think the Dark Lord has unusually low empathy in the first place, he has something else that overrules it. In any case, what we can do with someone like you as a template is make it both useless and meaningless. A horror at its own lack that feeds back until it cannot possibly have an object. Whereas yours simply settles on the worst possible object consistently. Now that the Commissioner is gone, it should be…”
“You. It’ll be you. That’s what I’m doing all this for, right? You take my stupid ‘transference’ and neutralize it.”
“Well, that would be a relatively non-disastrous outcome. But it wouldn’t be reliable enough, which is why we want to accelerate the timeframe of this operation. Things can’t go on like this, there are too many risks. My interest here is to mold a you that can survive the end of the operation and reintegrate.”
“And then… then can I go and…”
“What, marry the traitor? And what, live in her family’s palace like you do here? Bring the dogs with you?” Ymann held on at the peak with a stability he hadn’t on any of his previous pulls, a humming equilibrium with pain. “Why not?”
“Well, the dogs are property of the state. They have to wait for his next reincarnation, the next [Taboo Preserver], and it could be as little as weeks or months.”
“I mean the rest of it.”
“I mean it wouldn’t be unconventional in a family like that. But as someone who has knowingly and willingly broken people myself, I don’t believe it’s right for us to just discard them if we can help it.” His voice became gentle, as he withdrew the blade and lay it in front of Ymañn. He gestured. “Traditionalists like her are too quick to assume someone has found an Order appropriate to them. It is the Serpent that, every time our society has needed to find a better one, reared up its head in dissatisfaction. Perhaps there is no true Goddess but the one it seeks - receding forever in the heart of every atom.” Shaking, arms crossed across his jiggling nipples as if it was cold, Ymañn lifted one foot over and sat on it the flat of the blade.
“Stop blaming her. I’m the one who… needed her. Lured her. I didn’t think I was ever going to do it again, but I should have known. You people should have known.”
He had done it before. He still didn’t believe Braz had been the same thing as that first time - he had really believed she could be something better, healthier, after all, wasn’t he older? (He felt tired when he woke up from those dreams as if he had lived them.) When he was with Braz, some part of him still loved her. Still ran from her. For something to be a third as real was a miracle.
“I don’t believe that either of you would know how to live with each other. You found something in each other that couldn’t have existed under conditions of ordinary humanity. It’s not you or her, two stunted shapes that shouldn’t have met each other did, and even at our highest levels of surveillance we can only work with 20, 30% of the relevant information.”
He knew had been too young to love her. She hadn’t invited him to. He was the one who had exploited her. She had, herself, been naive. As Braz had been. He had always known his own limits, and when he was passing beyond them. He had wanted to pass beyond them. But only ever to pass unknown and harmless to the other whose limits he passed, so he would not have to justify himself to them. His own limits were those of others. He had no others. He floated in an infinite field of coloured points, and there were grey fields of static called “others”, and as a flaming Serpent, he wished to penetrate them. Merely, it had seemed, to explore new zones.
He had found another Serpent that bit and burned.
“Or did you know… all along. That something like this would happen.”
Mark’eg leaned back and mimed laughing, then exhaled as the scent of burnt hair began to rise from the round bulge in Ymañn’s pants flattening against the sword. “I wish.”
He had known what the psychologists said about the power dynamic. That had been his alibi. He knew he had used this knowledge cruelly, and that still it had hurt him more than her, and still it had hurt both of them for no reason. He hadn’t explained it well enough. He didn’t know if he could explain it to this one, but at least he was building his capacity for burning, purifying pain. At some point, it would be enough to face what he couldn’t say.