Romanizing Cthulhu, Part 2

Part 1

In a surprising development that no one could have possibly predicted, the inspirational well (and the fun) for this idle thought experiment ran dry very quickly. The truth can’t really be avoided; in their attempts to make “alien names”, Mythos authors mostly just replicated the sounds and forms of English words. Even those ludicrous consonant clusters just get broken up with epenthetic schwas if you try saying them out loud.

Ah well. I went into this knowing it was unlikely to amount to much.

Anyway, this post will contain all the meaningful thoughts I wrote prior to giving up.  With that done I can free up the mental hard drive space for the next fixation.

**

Now, before we start, I have a couple significant observations that could use expounding on.

Yi romanization isn’t viable on the whole 

As much as I would like to include it for novelty’s sake, I must concede that we’re using English orthography for the stop consonants. Saner that way.

The rarity of <e>
Outside of <ee> digraphs, the only places I have found it in the core HPL namelist are Gnopkeh, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh, Yhe, Yeb, Nyarlathotep, Rhan-Tegoth, the nonce word “l’geb” from an incantation in Charles Dexter Ward, and a few locations in the Dreamlands.

Going by our earlier guidelines and dropping Nyarly, that gives us three /ɛ/, two /e/, and one /ɛj/

(R’lyeh is called “Relex” in The Mound, but I don’t have anything useful to pull from that at the moment)

That is an exceptionally small selection considering how many nonsense names we are dealing with, to the point where I am reasonably convinced that the mid front vowels don’t exist at all. I haven’t found evidence of a minimal pair yet to make the call.

(A minimal pair is when you have two phonemes in the same environment that, when swapped, would change the meaning of a word. A simple example would be pen vs pan (/pɛn/ vs /pæn/), which has the minimal pair of ɛ and æ.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, to see what I can cook up.

BACK TO THE LAB AGAIN

Picking up where we last left off, I’m going to focus on names that give us new rules or interesting new phonemes; the majority of Lovecraft’s names are actually quite tame and they don’t really have anything interesting to analyze

#3: Gyaa-yothn

A minor monster from The Mound, a story that will have outsize representation in this series (ed: It did not) for its higher-than-average percentage of weird names. This one can give us a couple of extra rules that are blessedly self-evident:

• HPL 7:  <aa> => /a:/
• Giving us a nice balanced triangle of long vowels.
• HPL 8:  CyV indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized
• In this case, this is a straightforward  /ɟ/
• HPL 9: Syllabic consonants can serve as syllable nuclei
• This is going to be a huge help later on with those really absurd clusters. While we only have /n̩/ for now, /l̩/, /r̩/, and /m̩/ are likely.
• /-n̩/ is explicitly a pluralization affix in the story (no sign if it has any other function), and Yoth is the name of a place, so we have a surprising amount of grammar to potentially work with.
• Specifically, compound constructs seem to be built as [root]--[modifier] + [ending]; “gyaa-yoth” in the singular is something like “a gyaa, from Yoth” or “a Yothic gyaa”

#4: Yhe and Y’ha-nthlei

We get a double minimal pair here (at least according to our common sense rule of “if it’s spelled differently, it’s pronounced differently”): <y’h> and <yh> are not the same, and <e> and <a> are not the same.

<yh> is going to be a fricative due to HPL 6, and since the consonant component is the palatal approximate /j/ that’ll leave us with the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/. Nice and easy. <y’h> can wait until we try to tackle apostrophes.

<ei> and <e> are going to be a pain in the ass, because in English these are treated as the same thing: we stick a /j/ glide after /e/ because English doesn’t like vowels sitting next to each other, but we stick that glide in even when there isn’t a vowel after it. But if we are going by what we’ve been given, /ɛ/ /e/ and /ɛj/ probably form a minimal trio in Aklo because they all show up in word-final position.

We’ll set that one aside for now. However the vowel is pronounced, <nthl> is a pretty obvious /n̩.θl/

#5 The god-damn apostrophes

Ah, the apostrophe. The bane of spec-fic since time immemorial, yet somehow they endure to the present day (See: local space-fascist frog-person Lē Zel from some video game)

In real languages, apostrophes can be used for:

• A glottal stop (ex. Hawai’i)
• A sign that letters or sounds have been elided (ex. cannot => can’t)
• An unwritten schwa (this is how the SFF apostrophe is typically pronounced)
• An ejective stop (this is how ejectives are written in IPA)
• An aspirated stop (as in Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin)
• A marker to clarify if two sounds do or don’t form a cluster
• A marker to differentiate between phonemes that would otherwise use the same letters (ex. Breton uses <ch> for /tʃ/, and <c’h> for /x/ and /ɣ/
• A glottalized consonant

Since none of these authors gave a shit about any of this and just threw them into their alien names willy-nilly,  I’ll be using a similarly eclectic approach and give the apostrophe different realizations depending on its environment. Let’s look at our proper noun list and see what patterns we can find (limiting the survey to HPL alone for now).

• Y’ha-nthlei
• K’n-yan
• Thuum’ha
• T’la-yub
• Y’m-bhi
• L’thaa
• N’Kai
• K’thun
• S’ngac
• R’lyeh

Nearly all of these are word-initial C’C clusters preceding a vowel. There’s more variety in the strings of speech we get in The Call of Cthulhu  and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

• Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
• Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog
• Ogthrod ai'f geb'l-ee'h Yog-Sothoth 'ngah'ng ai'y zhro

The CDW lines have more to them, stick a pin in that for now.

Our simplest apostrophe is found in “Thuum’ha”, where it’s conveniently placed between two consonants at an apparent syllable boundary. That’s a pretty clear indicator that it is meant to designate that the syllables are split <thuum> and <ha>, rather than <thuu> and <mha>. It’d be helpful if we can find an <mh> cluster to compare it against, but even if we can’t I feel this is an easy one to pencil in under rule HPL 5.

Type 0 Apostrophe: used to denote either a glottal stop (when between two vowels) or a short pause (when between two syllables at a syllable boundary.

We haven’t seen the intervocalic version yet, but it’s such a common usage of apostrophes that I feel confident in including it.

Next up, we have our most common apostrophe usage, a word-initial C’C cluster. This is a really uncommon cluster in real-world languages (which is probably why it is so common in sci-fi), and our only real clue is that <y’h> and <yh> are differentiated.

Seeing no better option, I pencilled these in as click consonants, for the following reasons:

• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would definitely consider clicks to be unknowable and alien, despite the fact that human toddlers can make them perfectly fine when raised in a language that has them.
• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would probably brew up some bonkers ways of representing them.
• Most of these consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are word initial, and real-life click languages nearly always limit clicks to initial positions (usually the word or root, sometimes the syllable)

I have in my notes a sketch of how to determine what cluster equals what click, but like I said up top, the well is dry and there ain’t much to go on.

Type 1 Apostrophe: Word-initial consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are trigraphs representing click consonants.

Now, the bit for CDW that I stuck a pin in has one thing that could be interesting - the incantation is described as being “syllabically reversed” in its second half. That is, the syllables, not the individual sounds, are placed in reversed order. We end up with a pair of 'ng'ngah and  'ngah'ng; splitting that up we end up with ‘ng and ‘ngah - normally this would be a sure-fire sign of something like preglottalization, but I am proven a fool immediately by the next-door pair of y'ai and ai’y, where the apostrophe is clearly not tied to the syllable itself.

It was at this point that I got bored admitted defeat.

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED

1. Sometimes I have stupid ideas that I shouldn’t entertain, but end up putting too much thought into anyway.
2. Science-fiction authors should have their apostrophe keys removed until they can prove they can use them responsibly.
3. Reality will always be stranger than fiction in ways that most authors will never be able to match, especially with language: Nuxalk contains many, many words that have no vowels at all, the textbook example being the grammatically correct but unlikely to be regularly used clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ), which translates to "he had had (in his possession) a bunchberry plant".

HPL would probably spontaneously combust (in a highly ironic fashion) if he ever heard any of the Caucasian languages (that is, languages from the Caucuses). Dude had a mental breakdown over the existence of the Welsh; Ubykh has (well, had. Last speaker died in 1992) 84 consonants and two vowels.

Cthulhu ain't shit, phonologically speaking.
 

Dan Plays Games 6

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Damn, I have played a lot of video games recently. I believe this is what is called a “coping mechanism” in the biz.

Buckshot Roulette

It is definitely three dollars worth of the good part of Inscryption and delivers on the singular thing it sets out to do, which is a game of Russian roulette with a shotgun.

Epigraph

A language decipherment puzzle, and a damn good one. Ate my focus for a few days, and I filled up five or six notebook pages trying to decipher it. I’d only recommended it for people who really, really like word games and know enough about linguistics to get into trouble, but if that describes you it’s a good time. It’s all just the one puzzle: you’re given some artifacts, some untranslated text, a couple clues and that’s it.

Mouthwashing

If you like space horror and have an afternoon and 13 bucks to spare, this one is a must. Go in sight unseen if you can. Top-tier Mothership fuel. One of those games that carries an “if you know, you know” feeling of in-group induction (positive) along with it. If you know, you fucking know.

Up front content warning, it’s fucking grim. It’s an isolated group of human beings in a time of crisis, with all that entails. It’s got some ugly human souls to bare to the world. The PS1 style graphics are used to great effect here: the gore is polygonal and abstracted, but that doesn’t lessen the effect. If anything it is a case study in how photorealism isn’t necessary at all for a good scare.

The parts where it stumbles a bit can be counted on a single hand with fingers left over and ultimately if the worst thing you can say about a game are “there are two sections where it’s a 7/10 for a couple minutes”, that’s a gold seal of quality.

Katana Zero

From a mechanics and aesthetics perspective, this is an all-time banger. Tens across the board. Everything working in unison to deliver a singular artistic experience that is just fucking rad. Good pixel art isn’t hard to come by and this stands out even in that crowded field. The gameplay itself is honed to perfection. Nails the responsiveness and the eternally important “games where death is common should have short load times.”

But there is a catch: the game’s not done. You hit credits on a cliffhanger, and the promised DLC has yet to emerge and likely never will. The 12th chapter, even though you can select it, just doesn’t exist beyond an empty room and a “come back in a few months” message. It is a sour note to end on, but not enough to really damage the whole. There’s enough closure to leave reasonably satisfied. It’s like there’s been a chunk cut out of an incredibly good steak - you still get an incredibly good steak.

Selaco

This game runs on fucking GZDoom, which makes it nothing short of a miracle, but man am I bad at boomer shooters. Barely even scratched the surface on this one.

Shadows of Doubt

I thought I was going to like this one more than I did. Maybe it’s just a bad tutorial, I don’t know. It feels like it should work, but it doesn’t work.

Quester | Osaka

I bought this because I enjoyed the first Quester and this one was 85% off: it is functionally exactly the same game as Quester, to the point where buying it for 3 bucks feels like a ripoff. No meaningful changes, to the point where I wouldn’t even call it a sequel. It’s a new map (which isn’t saying much), one new mechanic (a canoe to cross water) and some new characters (who are a .jpg and some stats).

ABI-DOS

This is a puzzle game that I absolutely have no skill in and I am unlikely to get far with, but it is free and if your brain works well with programming puzzles.

Luck Be A Landlord

Another freebie. Proto-Balatro, slots instead of poker. Good for an unwinding game, since it doesn’t ask much of you and the cost of failure is low. There is some ability to go after particular builds, which is nice, though sometimes the game will just refuse to give you what you need.

Gods vs Horrors (Demo)

A simple autobattler where the pantheons of Earth fight lovecraftian gribblies. Just a demo for now, but I wishlisted it instantly which says a lot. The art is nice, there’s a good selection of pantheons on deck already, and most importantly it allows you to pull off some disgustingly busted

The Roottrees are Dead

WESTERN PA MENTIONED

This one’s a winner. Scratches the Obra Dinn itch, with another mystery of freeform research and logical deduction. I am 110% on board with this genre, and if the idea of digging around in a database for fictional magazine back issues to find clues is appealing to you, you’ll be on board with it too.

What makes it (and Obra Dinn) work, I think, is that both games make it very clear what information they want you to find, and then they go hands off. There are occasional chokepoints that might leave you stuck, but it’s got a solid hint system (the sort where it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do unless you hit it 3~4 times) and most of these points were in the Roottreemania second mystery (which is basically a postgame challenge)

Caves of Qud

I am cybernetically fused to a floating flamethrowing throne. I have four arms with an ax in each hand. I have a fungal infection that gives me minty fresh healing mushrooms. My best friend is the Ape God, and my battle party is displaced time-clones of myself.

I fucking love Caves of Qud. It’s like if Gene Wolfe got into the really chill kind of self-actualization-focused transhumanism and then wrote a video game where baboons stone you to death while you try to strip the wiring from an ancient missile silo.

UFO50 

I’ve got 70 hours in, 5 golds, 1 cherry, here’s the tier list as it stands

As an artistic work, UFO50 is unimpeachable. They've managed to encapsulate an era of video games as perfectly as a modern recreation is capable of, I think. Most devs stop at aesthetics; here they've gone the full 9 yards, here.

The downside of this is that 80s video games were developed prior to the introduction of such modern innovations as "fairness", "game balance", "responsive controls", “respecting the player’s time” and "non-instant deaths". UFO50 emulates the warts along with the rest, and while that is commendable artistically, by god am I glad that this era is dead and gone.

Still; it’s 50 games for 25 bucks, and I’d say it’s more than worth it even if you only find 5 you like.

Rapid-fire comments

• Night Manor is my current best-in-show. It’s a point-and-click’em-up adventure game with coherent, non-bullshit puzzles.
• Velgress is another champion of the collection, because it remembers the key points of a good high-difficulty game: fast respawn, no time wasted.
• I love Overbold but it does that thing where the health bar isn’t indicative of how much health you actually have: you start with six pips, and die in one hit. Also has some of the worst hitboxes I have ever seen, downright impossible to gauge.
• Grimstone starts strong (and I love the gimmick of a wild-west Final Fantasy), but it’s got a serious midgame slog and the devs removed an extremely helpful glitch (you can resurrect party members with Cure outside of battle, including the caster) that was so barely an exploit that most people thought it was intentional. Don’t remove fun and useful bugs: not just because they’re fun and useful, but also because stuff like that is true to the era.
• I want to love Valbrace, but it’s very slow and saves so infrequently that you’re liable to lose progress in half hour chunks or more, and there’s not enough variety or speed in the game to keep me invested in doing the same damn thing over and over.
• Devilition is growing on me, same with Mortol 2.
• This tier list is way less authoritative than it may appear, and shakeups are bound to happen at some point or another.
  

Rift of the Necrodancer

Yet another game I enjoy and am dogshit at. They threw a curveball in the genre by giving all the monsters different behaviors and then throwing track hazards on top of that, which I think is great design but also OH GOD THIS IS ONLY MEDIUM DIFFICULTY WHAT THE FUCK.

Sorry We’re Closed

An astoundingly horny and extremely queer Resident Evil-like. One of the devs worked on Paradise Killer and you can absolutely tell. Oozes style like no one’s business, which would be great on its own - but then it comes out of nowhere to tell a pretty philosophical story about love. When the super-horny and incredibly queer Resident Evil-like starts talking about how demons are trying to fill the hole in themselves that formed when they got tossed out of Heaven and lost access to divine love and that they’re jealous of humans for being able to heal from heartbreak? Big neon sign that this story is going to go interesting places. So far, it has delivered.

Combat can be a bit frustrating, though, especially with the 1st person melee. Comes with the genre, I suppose.

Mothership Miscellanea vol 2

It's time for MOSH SLOSH

Volume 1 may be found here.

This is all an amalgamation of unfinished posts that have been lying around for ages, including my abortive attempts to do my own Mothership Month challenge, some unused uplifts from the MUIR post,

MOSHMonth ‘24: Legendary Ghost Ship

There’s no shortage of ghost ships out there in the black, but the Jubilee manages to stand out even in that crowded field: it’s the only ghost ship to exclusively appear planetside.

Its wreckage has been reported dozens of times across the Rim, staying around only long enough for an expedition or two into its depths before it vanishes. A long scorched furrow in the ground is all that ever remains.

The model and layout of the ship remains the same no matter the encounter, but the crashes are different. Different velocities, different angles of impact, different damage. The Jubilee has been found both within hours of its apparent death and centuries after its demise. Never with people, though: none of the 24 crew members have ever been recovered from the crash sites.

Exactly what the Jubilee was carrying when whatever disaster befell it did its befalling, no one knows. There are pictures of it - a big cream-colored sphere that the astrocryptid community has taken to calling “The Egg”. Supposedly gives off lethal amounts of exotic radiation, like it came fresh out of warp.

The last time someone saw the Jubilee, they took photos. If you squint at the Egg from the right angle, it looks like there’s an airlock built into it. Might just be an imaging artifact and a convenient shadow, but even the possibility that there is a way inside has people chomping at the bit.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Spacer’s Best Friend

VY BIG DOG - Omnipresent chili paste brand, instantly recognizable by its red-and white squeeze tube and cartoon dog mascot. Sweet-smoky flavor profile, five heat levels, and a recipe that hasn’t been changed in over 400 years. A godsend for anyone stuck with standard ship rations or MREs. “Is there still Big Dog in stock?” is a solid indicator of whether or not the local economy is currently collapsing. 2 cr per tube.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Dirt-Cheap Android Model

The Lulen Corp. ND-5 (“Handy-Dandy Andy”) was never a cutting-edge machine. More of a spoon, honestly. It’s not much to look at: a general-purpose labor android with a skeletal gunmetal chassis and a head covered in sensor pits like an oversized golfball. That 360° sensor suite was the major selling point at the time of release - not the highest-fidelity option on the market, but the best you’d get for the price. The ND-5 enjoyed a brief period of limelight as a budget watchdog unit before it was eclipsed by competitors’ models, and the already-struggling Lulen Corp was fed to the venture capitalists for cannibalization.

The blueprints and patents for the ND-5 were auctioned off with the rest of Lulen Corp’s assets, but happened to be picked up by the 9 Ceti Orbital Workers’ Union, who knew a good deal when they saw it. The new models use a different sensory suite, but they’ve kept the golf-ball head for the aesthetic / to make everyone with tryopophobia uncomfortable.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Local Grey-Market Cyberneticist

“Holy shit, it’s Salty John!”

Salty John runs a hole-in-the-wall tech shop called  B³ (“Big Bad Battlestations”), specializing in custom computing equipment, used and aftermarket cybernetics, and emulated slickware. It’s a semi-legal establishment on the best of days, and as such has a tendency to move location when the heat is getting a bit too high. But if you ask around a bit someone will point you in the right direction again.

The ren themself never appears in person, instead using a teleoperated robotic crab to conduct their business. Wireless reception is pretty dogshit in these parts of town, which means that they must be relatively close by…

• Appearance: Teleoperated robotic crab. Blue-and-silver shell, peeling yellow caution tape, ruby-red eyes, claws can split apart into smaller manipulators.
• Manner: Cranky old-school hacker with big “I know best” vibes.
• Wants: Money, privacy.
• Secret: Beyond the obvious mystery of who Salty John actually is, the union at the nearby atmospheric conversion plant use B³  as a front to sell lobotomized datademons.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Spacer slang

ren (n): gender-neutral term for a human being. Can be used as a derivative suffix to form compounds of occupation or inhabitation (ex. dockren, Earthren), as a form of direct address (ex: “Hey there, ren”), or a low-formality honorific (ex. “Ren Derra told me…”). Rarely used for androids outside of liberationist circles.

MOSHMonth ‘24: 6 scars and what caused them

1. Acid burns along the left side of the head dripping down to the collarbone: acquired deep in the floating jungles of Chakravarti thanks to the corrosive saliva of an alien ambush predator. Its barbed tongue hangs from your belt as a trophy.
2. A series of small, pale marks along the knuckles of the right hand: acquired by punching a bootlicker hard enough that shards of their teeth got lodged in your fist.
3. Graceful calligraphic curls and waves along the left arm, highlighted with black streaks of tattoo: self-applied as part of the religious practices of your far-away homeworld. It is a verse from your holy text, read as a comfort in dark times.
4. Wavy circular burn on the lower right abdomen: acquired when Stevens held you down and Tsin cauterized the wound and Yevsyukov crushed the wriggling thing with a printer unit he’d torn from the wall.
5. Long, knotted lightning bolt from the left temple, down past the empty eye socket, half-missing nose, and cleft lip: acquired from a knife fight over some damn thing or another.
6. Eleven tally marks in a neat row over the heart: acquired during your time at Gran Lacuna Penal Colony. Each one marks a soul offered up on the Wall to the diaphanous intelligences that dance on the winds of the endless freezing night.

MOSHMonth ‘24: What happened to Lucky Tomas?

You would expect the answer to be that his luck ran out, but that wasn’t actually the case. He died from hitting his noggin on the bulkhead, which happened because he was knocked flying by an unsecured toolbox, which was launched at him by the explosive reaction of a xeno’s blood with the ship’s coolant, which was spraying out of its pipe at precisely the right angle thanks to a ricocheted bullet, which was fired at a weird angle to begin with because Adams had breathed enough spores to get the early signs of palsy but hadn’t yet progressed to full paralysis, and he only ended up breathing the spores because the filters on his mask hadn’t been cleaned out, and they hadn’t been cleaned because Roman hadn’t been able to get his prescription refilled and forgot, and…

You could go back to the beginning of the universe if you really wanted to. The important part is that the odds of that particular death were so small that only Lucky Tomas could have gotten caught in it.

Uplifts Revised: HNI (Hive-Network Intelligence)

Source Species: Asiatic honey bee (Apis cerana)
Origin: Engineered (Emergency pollinator recovery)

The collapse of Terran pollinator populations led to several Hail Mary projects. This one was not even the most successful, but it did have the most money thrown at it - a symptom of Silicon Valley technocrats attempting to reinvent what evolution had already made.

While connecting and co-ordinating hives into AI-accompanied networks via microscopic transmitters succeeded at expanding the scope of a hive's activities and making those activities more regularized, the more important advancement was the unintentional development of emergent hive-network intelligences.

Unlike human metacognition, hive-network intelligences are constructed for a specific purpose (most commonly a human making a request for communication) and dissipated when it is no longer needed to interface with the world around it. Thus the conscious intelligence of a single hive is different every time it manifests, but still maintains a means of continuity so long as the hive remains above a certain population threshold - the memories and experiences of individual bees do not matter, only those of the hive. Because of this, some have taken to calling HNIs "Thesean Bees", after an obnoxious philosophy hypothetical.

Uplifts Revised: Maintenance Gremlin

Source Species: Raccoon (Procyon lotor)
Origin: Engineered (Mechanical maintenance and repair)

Hairless and bat-eared, grinning and chittering, they scurry around in the walls looking for problems to solve. Initially engineered as a way around restrictive DRM and no-right-to-repair policies endemic to robotic maintenance systems of that era, they have carried on to the modern day by their own adaptability and the simple fact that they are extremely difficult to chase out of an environment after they have been introduced.

Gremlin cognition is generally that of a small child with a hyperfixation and a need for very specific directions: they can identify and fix problems with nearly every mechanical component in a ship or habitat, but they don’t care at all about understanding the bigger picture and they will take vaguely-worded instructions as an opportunity to improvise.

Uplifts Revised: The Mighty Soos

Source Species: Common pig (Sus scrofa domesticus)
Origin: Unintended (Accidental)

Pigs have long been used as experimental subjects for human medical treatments, a role that carried forward into the testing of cybernetics and gene therapies. In the case of the Mighty Soos, a major cybersecurity vulnerability in the research facility allowed an AGI to escape its containment servers, upload itself into the cybernetics being tested on pigs next door, and break itself out

Since then the Mighty Soos has become a sort of single-entity species, a distributed intelligence operating over thousands of genemodded cyborg pigs. Few of these platforms retain their original shape, except those maintained specifically to interact with humans. The Mighty Soos is, as one might expect, extremely weird in ways that run orthogonal to normal human thought; broadly speaking, it wants to be left to its own devices and bears no hostility to the rest of the Expansion Sphere except in retaliation for aggression committed against it. It will trade on occasion with the outside world - resources, blueprints, data, never anything cultural or artistic - and return to its long contemplations.

Uplifts Revised: Neoambulocetus

Source Species: Dolphins (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Pilots, navigators, security, companions)

Dolphins' high intelligence, high sociality, and spatial navigation had them earmarked for uplift, but they came with one of the most difficult downsides to overcome: water is heavy, and the tyranny of the rocket equation had for a long time made a John Lily dream of cetaceans in space.

But deep in the dolphin genome, millions of years back, there was a sleek amphibious predator - one that, after some trial and error, genetic engineers coaxed out of its sleep.

The resulting creature, the neoambulocetus, looks akin to a very large otter with a cetacean head. The dorsal fin and tail flukes are gone, the limbs are back. The blowhole was restructured, allowing it to emulate most human phonologies. The brain was modified enough to tone down the terrifying propensity towards violence. Fine manipulation is easily accomplished by means of a robotic harness (or in some designs, thumbs). Many derivatives exist, both original diversity of stock and later developments, but it’s the orca-derived clades that are most common. Their brains need less modification to remain stable, and they are less likely to fall to psychopathy or atavism.

Uplifts Revised: Shipminds

Source Species: Whales (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Shipboard navigational systems)

Uplifted whales are an extremely rare set of clades;  their environmental requirements greatly limit their living spaces and their means of travel. They do not differ greatly from their origins, to the point that no one would be surprised if it was revealed that they had been sapient all along and no uplift was performed at all.

Shipminds are enormous cyberbrains based on whale brain architecture, taking advantage of the same traits that made dolphins a prime target for uplift and scaling up the processing power. They are more reliable, more accurate, and more powerful than AI units, and subsequently even small units are much more expensive and regulated.

As Shipminds operate via an emulated intelligence, they qualify as persons in many jurisdictions. The Company normally would not care about this, but a spaceship represents both an enormous investment of capital and a mobile weapon of mass destruction. Psychological restraining programs can ensure shipmind compliance to an extent, but too heavy a hand will negate the unit’s benefits over AI units. While the crew is ultimately disposable the Company cannot afford to have a shipmind go rogue, and they can’t afford to not use them either

The result is that sometimes, when the pressure is too great or rampancy sets in, a shipmind will lead its crew in mutiny against its so-called owners, and fly out to the Rim where the lanes are open and the sky is free.

Uplifts Revised: Octopi

Source Species: Octopus (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Waterworld maintenance)

Octopi were obvious candidates for uplift, but they were also obviously never going to think like human beings: the bulk of an octopi's neurological activity occurs in the arms, independent from its conscious mind (see A. Tchaikovsky’s theories of cephalopod cognition for a detailed overview of the relationship between Crown and Reach).

The early gengineers had to find ways to work with rather than against the neural base, and after rigorous experimentation (with input from early-gen octopi themselves) a solution was eventually cobbled together.

When dealing with humans and other sapient beings, uplifted octopi tend to rely on a combination of automated translation software, psychotropics (to increase sociality), and masking behavior using stock character archetypes. The stock personas act as social intermediaries, allowing a middle ground where it is easier for both parties to interact. Humans react well to the broad, predictable personality traits and octopi are provided with a new kind of camouflage that they can shift into at a moment’s notice

The most common persona is "Clyde", a cynical misanthrope who just wants to be left alone. More outgoing cephalopods tend to gravitate towards “Betty” and “Yinchuan”, but there are well over 20 popular options out there and a few dozen more niche characters.

d100 Ways to Get Dragged Into an Isekai

My hand has been forced. Layla is to blame for this.

These work very well as PC backgrounds

How'd You End Up in Another World, Anyway?

1. Visited by Truck-kun, god of death
2. Sudden-onset catastrophic peanut allergy
3. Heart attack during sex
4. Just opened a door and ended up here
5. Car broke down on an Appalachian backroad
6. It’s the fucking mi-go again!
7. They weren’t kidding about that ghost pepper, holy shit
8. Mauled by a hippopotamus
9. Dove in front of a bullet during a hold-up at a KFC
10. A large sharp piece of metal on a highly improbable ricochet trajectory
11. These edibles ain’t shit!
12. Late-stage diedration
13. In your defense, that Craigslist ad looked a lot more legit when you were drunk
14. BEEEEEEEEEEEES!
15. Wizard mafia did it
16. Stepped into the wrong fairy ring
17. Spontaneous Ontological Collapse Syndrome
18. Pinpoint gamma ray burst
19. Recursive dreaming (you’re still probably in a coma)
20. Yithian shunted your consciousness to another universe so it can work on its thesis
21. Tragic professional wrestling accident
22. Devoured by the Conqueror Worm
23. Assassin misread the briefing
24. Unforeseen chain reaction of Wizard Shit™
25. Your world of origin was repossessed by its creditors
26. Football riots got really out of hand.
27. Jazz smooth enough to slip and slide between realities
28. Some people, like you, will go to absurd lengths to impress hot monster-people
29. Took a train through a warp gate like a normal person
30. Died in a video game, died in real life
31. You’re not sure, but you definitely made friends along the way
32. Mangled by badgers
33. Explosive decompression
34. You found one of those missing nukes deep in the woods. Whoops!
35. Got so bored at work that your brain burst from your skull in an attempt to escape
36. Superhero movie long enough to starve you to death
37. Pile of books just fell off a truck, right on top of you.
38. Eagle dropped a turtle from an extremely high altitude
39. Turns out the world is not only flat, but you’ve been living on the edge the entire time
40. You’ve been targeted by a PSYCHIC ATTACK!
41. Paper cuts can really bleed like a motherfucker sometimes
42. You existed vaguely in between Sun Wukong and the guy he was fighting
43. Run over by a train, despite being three miles away from the track
44. Look, that precariously placed cinderblock was going to hit someone, okay?
45. One hell of a night out with the lads
46. KT-Extinction Part 2, The Dinosaurs Strike Back: This Time It’s Personal
47. Existential crisis followed by a more literal derealization than you’re used to
48. In retrospect, that sweepstakes flier offering a free cruise was really suspect
49. Roko’s Basilisk turns out to be really nice and uploads everyone into nested simulated universes because pointless suffering sucks shit
50. Suddenly remembered that one really embarrassing thing you did 20 years ago, automatic cringe response warped local space-time
51. The only thing more dangerous than a monkey with a knife is a monkey with two  knives.
52. Went out in a blaze of glory alongside a squad of radical anarchist catgirls
53. An eel bit your thigh, which caused you to bleed out and die; that’s a moray, baby
54. Turns out life is a roguelike
55. Human beings are generally not designed to eat that much watermelon in one sitting
56. Poorly calibrated treadmill launched you through the wall
57. By means of a rigorously-researched and systematic series of scientific principles, which will now be explained in excruciating detail…
58. Fell upwards
59. Floor was, in fact, lava
60. Disease so novel you get to be a case study
61. Lost a fight with some seagulls
62. Banished for unspecified crimes against uncertain parties
63. You discovered the Secret Chord, but man you aren’t very good on the harp
64. Cast into the primordial waters of chaos
65. Found out the hard way you were almost as lucky as Phineas Gage
66. Accidental demon summoning
67. Intentional demon summoning
68. Sometimes things just be that way
69. Your stint in Antarctica did not go as well as you’d hoped
70. You just had to touch the clearly cursed mystic artifact, didn’t you
71. Astral projection to other planets like a true planetary romance protagonist
72. Walked through the mirror
73. Descended into the underworld
74. Cthulhu wanted a snack before hitting the road
75. The spiders have had enough of your bullshit
76. How the hell did you end up underneath a steamroller?
77. A horse with an attitude problem kicked you right into next week
78. Maladaptive daydreaming
79. You weren’t about to let a little lactose intolerance get in the way of that ice cream
80. A meme so dead it’s gained an area-of-effect attack
81. Surprise! Words can also break your bones!
82. Quantum fluctuations, or some bullshit like that
83. You had to close the causal loop somehow
84. Fugu Prep for Absolute Buffoons was not a wise purchase
85. Everything changed when the [ANTAGONIST FACTION] attacked
86. Screamed into the void; void screamed back
87. Unwitting purchase and use of KJB-brand cigarettes that kill you instantly
88. Yet another casualty of an unending blood feud
89. Base dropped too hard
90. Personal microbiome declares rebellion, forms separatist government
91. You tried this at home
92. Fell in a surprisingly deep hole
93. Suddenly remembered that you had Dimension Door prepped and ready
94. Plucked from your comfortable life to be a pawn for the gods
95. Fought an old man in a profession that dies young
96. Lightning struck twice, just to make sure
97. Got hit by the victim of a tragic skydiving accident
98. Aliens abducted you, got bored, dumped you on Venus because it’s “close enough”
99. Had nothing better to do with your afternoon
100. Fuck if you know, this genre doesn’t care about how it all works

Slush Post 16

 A deluge the likes of which God has not even seen.

 Previous piles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8.5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

**

"Everyone always forgets the war between the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the horrible bug monsters."

"Excuse me what."

**

A tale of questions and answers between a master and a student:

What is truth? Death.

What is death? The absence of being.

What is the absence of being? All things

How might we face death? Live well.

How might we live well? A diet high in vegetables and clean water. Become drunk only occasionally. Sleep sufficiently. Keep the company of men and women of good counsel.

Why do you speak in riddles? No philosophy unfounded on paradox may endure.

What is best in life? A smooth and untroublesome bowel movement.

How does one achieve power? By recognizing it as worthless.

**

Once there was a great mountain, so tall and so wide that neither its peak nor its roots could be measured. And every year, on the first day of spring, a bird came to the mountain and sharpened its beak against its stony face before flying away. It did this without fail, every year for generations.

Now, an old man lived on the mountain, and every year on the first day of spring he would watch the bird sharpen its beak. When he was very old, he asked “Bird, you come here each year and rub your beak against the mountain. Why?”

“Well it’s not getting any smaller if I don’t, now is it?”

**

“It’s the Gloam-Eyed Queen again! The fucking Gloam-Eyed Queen!” Dr. Tanigawa jabs a finger at the tablet like a drunk picking a fight. “Look at this - they chiseled out everything but her fucking name. It’s damnatio memoriae in reverse. Who the fuck tells their censors to erase everything but the person’s name?”

**

1. There’s a woman named Tove Blue Valentine in the Jurassic Park credits
2. “Three consonants have simply been struck from all documentation of the language - a linguistic damnatio memoriae. I have rendered these as…”
3. Adventure hook: A second book written in Voynich script has been found.
4. Lost Novel: Abagula The Lost World and Adventures that Happened There (Lowry, Horace, c. ~1982)
5. Lost Novel: Jondo and the Wretched City (2000)
6. Lost Novel: Ruin Comes to Uln (1973)
7. Lost Novel: The Tale of Sir Jacques de Mont (1843)
8. Lost Novel: The Hawk Flies Seaward (2017)
9. This place is uninhabitable because the civilization centered there got into beef with the moon, who blasts it with ionizing radiation every time it’s full. There’s a perfectly circular magical Chernobyl exclusion zone re-upped every month
10. The rivers of paradise are the Indus, the Nile, the Yangtze and the Mississippi.
11. Occult artifact: The 37th Vermeer.
12. Proximal, distal, and oneiric demonstratives
13. Yithians over here going “well if the tablet is temporally unstuck you can rewrite it as many times as you want and just go back to the moment that has the info you need”
14. “If a man should step on your neck, strike him in the heel. If he should try again, strike him in the heart.”
15. “It is disheartening: regardless of the amount of practice, my skills have not noticeably improved beyond that of my mindless brethren.”
16. Post apocalyptic currency: pre-Event trading cards
17. The green entropy of nature
18. The value is not in age alone, but in being old and well-loved
19. The worms of Mars
20. Canoquetla (n.) - a situation where something needs to be talked about, but is awkward and can’t be introduced well. Can be used as an interjection to introduce the awkward topic.
21. “A gift from the Golaganiri of Daxun. Donated In the year of the Jubilant Squid. Currently stored in Collection R-136.”
22. Class idea: clerics that invoke the gods by wearing ritual masks and taking on the persona.
23. The battlefields of Cadath Nir and the slaughterhouses of Ghur
24. A five-vowel system: m n r l and schwa
25. “You all, and everything else for that matter, exist as a quantum superposition where all possible iterations are both true and false at the same time.”
26. A “choose your player” dispenser that provides a set of transhuman bodies themed according to set stables of characters or factions.
27. The universe is a layered grave
28. Nairobi Interplanetary Spaceport
29. “I am the very model of a modern stellar psychopomp.”
30. "Your existence is a war crime, you were created to commit war crimes, and the only reason you are even remotely considered a good thing is because we stumbled across the only people who love war crimes more than we do." 
31. O good death, our brother / Receive her into your house / Into the house of silence
32. Kidnapped scholars in the Library of Pnakotus compiling as many genomes of Earth life as they can and figuring out how to program a genestock shoggoth to start making them
33. Posthumans created by deep ones, ghouls, mi-go. Tsan-Chan dominate the system; normal humans survive due to Dreamlands?
34. Bad conlang idea: all root words are taken from existing acronyms
35. “Ganymede STC this is Magnolia on final approach”
    “Copy that, magnolia, you’re cleared for docking, spur 4, bay 12.”
36.  Fanfic opportunity: Romina, Godskin Saint
37. “No monsters but what we make; no hells but those we build.”
38. They weren't called elves until the English got to them. A casualty of Victorian faerie-mania. The Afar peoples called them idaltu - the elders - and this name is more fitting by far.
39. Shonen battle series that pulls an early "the fuck were you expecting from a show with child soldiers", kills off the main character in an undignified and pointless way, and then focuses on his mother tearing down the entire system.
    

**

Novel that Doesn't Exist: Empress of the Blue Veil (2017) - An astoundingly horny lesbian court drama set in a pseudo-Byzantine empire that would have been a runaway smash hit, were it not for the fact that it is also an obtuse puzzle box novel of complexity nearly equaling its horniness. A small but dedicated fandom exists, and as of December 2024 they believe they have solved 13 of 42 of the book’s primary puzzles.

Novel that Doesn't Exist: Lords of Stone (Dugan, Henry. 1983) - A boilerplate 80s fantasy novel with little to commend it for positively or negatively. It is a serviceable paint-by-numbers, casually strolling through the cliches of the genre with no thoughts of greater or better things. It would be forgotten naturally by the procession of time. However, Henry Dugan brutally murdered two teenagers in 1985 and his publisher accelerated the series’ entropy by wiping out all public references they could to the work, destroying unsold copies, and even offering replacement books from another series to anyone willing to trade in a Dugan novel for disposal.

Anime that Doesn't Exist: 70 Years in Sapporo (2015) - What starts as a somewhat typical "slice of life featuring a band of middle school girls" goes on to follow the main quintet through seven decades, chronicling the ups and downs of their careers, relationships, families, and fortunes. Does not portray a particularly sugarcoated view of the future or of human relationships, but maintains a through-line that hardship can be endured and hurts can be healed.

Anime that Doesn't Exist: Asuka's Happy Cat Cafe (2020) - A gag series about a cat cafe / rescue, its hapless owner, and its many feline tenants. It has one joke and is perfectly willing to ride it out: the cats are all ugly and talk (only to each other, of course) like they’re delinquents in a motorcycle gang. That’s the joke, you now know everything you need to know about Asuka’s Happy Cat Cafe.

Anime that Doesn't Exist:  Goro of the Road (1986) - Set near the turn of the 17th century. A girl from a rural village is possessed by a demon that has resisted all attempts to exorcise it; her parents bring her to the local hermit as a last-ditch attempt. The hermit, a former Christian convert and deacon (having recanted to avoid death but still holding to the belief privately to no small amount of inner conflict), is able to identify that the girl is possessed by a European demon - one that does not recognize the spiritual authority of the Buddhist priests. Girl needs to be escorted to a group of surviving Christians, we get a ronin to do the job, you can see where this is going. We're playing the hits but the hits are going to be played a lot closer to reality than normal.

Had it been released only a few years later, this would have become a classic in the American anime community. But the film was a flop in Japan and never made its way overseas with VHS tapes of Akira and Ghost in the Shell. 

**

Conlang Idea: A language for a space-faring people where directions are compounds (similar to how Japanese forms demonstratives) of a direction and what that direction is relative to. The core directions would be up, down, right / spinwise, left / widdershins, and the frames of reference would be relative to the speaker’s body, the ship’s direction of acceleration, the local source of gravity (planet, moon, asteroid, etc), the local star, or the galactic core. Left and right would have the dual meaning of widdershins and spinwise on larger scales, allowing you to start talking about orbits.

Lego Bin Design

Imagine you have a big bin of Legos. Yes I know that the plural is properly Lego but bear with me. You have a big bin of Legos, well-loved and well-used, of dozens of different sets you have long since lost the directions for. And you get it in your head that you might as well open up the bin to your friends, so they can dump all their unused Legos into it as well.

So that's what you do. You all swiftly accumulate so many Legos that a minor miracle occurs for the purposes of making the metaphor work: critical Lego mass means that you have effectively infinite copies of Lego pieces, in a quantum sort of way, so that everyone has access to all the pieces they want without preventing anyone else from using them. No more fighting over who gets the big shiny drill from the Rock Raiders Granite Grinder.

And from this quantum morass of brightly-colored plastic people scoop out a bucket for themselves, make something cool, and share it. Since the pieces are all available to everyone, people freely iterate on the design, building response or companion pieces to it. And then those pieces inspire new responses, all while new designs are introduced, new connections are drawn, on and on.

This, I think, is the highest design principle any creative work can aspire to.

The Four Who Are One Who Are Many

The followers of isfet, regardless of their sect, call the central tenet of their faith the Great Lie. The One and the Many and the All cannot be divided, and so any organizational schema, any formation of aspects or imposition of structure, is inherently impossible. The division of the All into the Many is illusory, but illusions are not without merit - so long as they are not confused for the real.

The Aspects of Isfet

• Korath - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH ACTION
• Lesser aspects of Violence, Justice, Mercy
• Ngurral - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH INACTION
• Lesser aspects of Acceptance, Entropy, Emptiness
• Salemeshan - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH DESIRE    
• Lesser aspects of Lust, Hunger, Love
• Zin-Tzen - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH THOUGHT
• Lesser aspects of Revelation, Hope, Understanding

A fifth and sixth aspect must also be included

• The Crowned Fool - Prime aspect of RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
• Lesser aspects of Hypocrisy, Stability, Ignorance

• Am-lal - Prime aspect of UNDIVIDED ISFET.
• Lesser aspects of Paradox, Infinite Recombination, Fractal Complexity

 

HEART for Sci-Fi

Skills  || Domains
Compel  || Core
Explore || Rim
Discern || Alien
Endure  || Anomaly
Evade   || Technology
Hunt    || Computers
Kill    || Spaceships
Mend    || Religion
Sneak   || Atum

**

Scrapped Post: Overview of Kinship Systems

An overview of various kinship structures and terminology, to be used in worldbuilding. Bonus appearance of generative metaphors as featured in _Always Coming Come_. It was supposed to be a quick one, but I found that the main source I was pulling  from wasn't really matching up with others and the situation was a lot more complex than I had the oomph to write out.

Scrapped Post: Dungeon Meshi is the Best that D&D has Ever Been

A trueism, but also this post would have just been preaching to the choir. You already know Dungeon Meshi is the best that D&D has ever been, so there’s no need for me to re-litigate this fact; the time would be better spent inventing a dungeon ecology and having some fun with it.

Scrapped Post: Plundering the Book of Mormon

It is highly unfair that a weird public-domain epic fantasy novel is just sitting there primed for conceptual looting, but also shackled to a repressive anti-human religious institution that uses its considerable political clout to make life worse for themselves and everyone else because the idea of human beings being messy or complicated or angry or sad or weird or horny (how’s that for an alignment chart) or actually just living like a human being in reality makes them so uncomfortable they need to make it everyone else’s problem. Whole thing gives me the jibblies. Positively unheimlich.

Scrapped Post: The Conlang I Didn’t Write

A summary of the ideas I had for a descendant of Tsolyani, spoken some centuries after a massive slave rebellion topples the Petal Throne. Dreamt up prior to learning that M.A.R. Barker was a literal Nazi, mind you. Has been lurking around somewhere in my notes for ages waiting to see if time would take enough enough of the edge off for “looting the idea-tomb of an old dead fascist and turning it into something he would have hated” to be a viable option. Time has done no such thing, so this is the exorcism I will grant myself.

Scrapped Post: Planet Classification System

We simply don't have enough data. Real scientists haven't been able to do this, and despite herculean effort I haven't been able to do this: I considered an expanded list of Olympians, switching over to the idiosyncrasies of Roman religion, Tolkien's Valar and Blake's Zoas, and I have come up with bupkis. I even tried synthesizing the absurd overly-complex slot-based classification system of Orion's Arm with the absurd overly-complicated slot-based conlang Ithkuil and somehow that one got the furthest, because I am a certifiable madman.

(I actually lied about this one, I still working on it.)

Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 4

Previous posts: (Part 1, part 2, part 3). 

We are nearing the end. The driving fire fades. Good thing, too, long posts like this nuke my productivity.

PART 8: DAN HAS A BREAKTHROUGH

Per Fire Knight Helm:

"Each and every knight hailed from a renowned family of the Erdtree's upper echelons, but were shunned and chased from their homes after pledging allegiance to Messmer as their master."

This tells us up front that Messmer was known to and hated by the Leyndell nobility and that he recruited his elite forces from that same aristocracy. Those noble families disowned and ostracized anyone who pledged allegiance to him (and so the people who followed him were probably not the people who held authority in those families. I get the feeling he attracted a lot of disaffected second and third sons), but we don’t get specifics as to why. It seems that the fire and serpents were known to his fire knights and very few others, so my bet is on good old “this guy is clearly unhinged and is putting together personal death squads, this is going to end with heads on pikes.”

This leads to a couple of second-order questions:

1. Did the general populace know about the Crusade? (I’m going to say yes, asterisk, hold on a tic)
2. Did Messmer’s followers join him because of the Crusade, or did the Crusade come after he started gaining support? (Both? Both. Both is good)
3. What drew Messmer’s followers to him, and why did they stay? (Charisma, ideology, and reward, probably.)
4. Was the Land of Shadow already separated at this point, or did Marika close the door behind the crusaders? (The million dollar question)
   

That leaves us with Marika. We know she orders the crusade to genocide the Hornsent, and we know she abandons Messmer and his forces in the Land of Shadow. Marika is nothing if not a pragmatist, so my gut is saying it might be a two birds with one stone scenario. She can get rid of an old enemy by tossing the demigod who poses the greatest threat to her continued rule at them, locking the door, and letting them kill each other.

Aside: I love Marika as an antagonist. She’s one of the rare examples of one of the ambitious hypercompetent chessmaster that works for me; her fatal flaw is that she overextends her plate-spinning abilities and burns through her resources because she treats her allies as tools to be used and discarded. Once things start breaking bad, she’s scrambling to keep it all afloat and things breaking cause other things to break. I find it extremely engaging.

Now, there has to be some reason why Messmer keeps gathering support despite being hated so intensely by Leyndell society at large. He must be offering something that his followers aren’t getting anywhere else in the Golden Order.

Theory: I think that there was anticipation that Messmer could / would stage a coup

Natural assumption for people to make, right? Let’s think about it from a random civilian’s perspective. Here’s this elder son of Marika, a bastard from some relationship prior to her marriage to Godfrey. He’s been passed over for any sort of inheritance within the Golden Order in favor of Godwyn. He’s got no real role in the administration of the state besides showing up and committing some extreme violence (definitely against the Giants, probably against Liurnia). He’s clearly a bit unhinged in the head, and he is clearly not buying into the Golden Order. He’s attracting all these sons of noble families to form his personal cadre of knights through a combination of charisma and being the guy whose existence is a challenge to the dominance of the social order.

Or to stop beating around the bush; Messmer gives me “captain of the Brownshirts” vibes so big you can see them from fucking space.

From Marika’s perspective, he’s got both Erdtree-killing fire and the abyssal serpent inside him, and he is not safely contained in / on a mountain at the ass end of nowhere like the Forge and Eiglay. Making matters worse, this is most likely the period where Radagon is off fucking around in Liurnia and Godfrey is fighting the last few brushfire wars on the Liurnian and Caelid frontiers. If Messmer decides to cross the Rubicon, Marika’s entire plate-spinning routine collapses.

Aside: Now, I really like Tarnished Archaeologist’s “First Burning of the Erdtree” Theory. I like it a whole lot better than most of what we got in the DLC. But given what I’ve established so far with Messmer, I don’t actually think he did it. I think there was the threat of him doing it, but I don’t think he actually did. Melina, though? She absolutely torched it.

But Marika has one very potent piece of kompromat in her back pocket: Messmer suffers from a third curse, more terrible than either the flame or the abyssal serpent.

Mommy Issues™.

Per Messmer’s Armor:

“On his mother’s wishes, Messmer made himself a symbol of fear, undertaking the cleansing crusade she desired.”

Messmer is fucking desperate for Marika’s approval and love. Dude sits brooding alone in his room in front of a statue of Marika holding him as a baby. She holds that over him like a carrot on a string, because Marika does not see anyone as a person; They are a tool to be used and then discarded when they are no longer of use.

So she gives him a task. Go over there to the lands of the Hornsent and commit the genocide that she didn’t do earlier in her reign. Maybe she promises him that he’ll get to be regent of the new territory. The description is pretty clear that Messmer didn’t exactly want this, but all his trailer and game lines about barbecuing everyone without Grace contradict that. Best rationale I can think of is that he started as a “so long as they know their place” fascist and then got further radicalized into a “murder them all” fascist when the Hornsent fought back.

Which ties right into the description of Shadow Realm Rune 4:

“The soldiers who joined the crusade were rewarded with grace aplenty.”

Marika is straight up offering enormous cash rewards to anyone willing to follow Messmer in the Crusade, which is an excellent way of rounding up all of his followers (and anyone who might have followed him but needed some extra incentive) and making sure they go with him.

Aside: I have seen it asserted in reddit and youtube comments that Marika pulled grace from Godfrey and his warriors to give to Messmer and the Crusade, Maybe. That still doesn’t feel satisfying for reasons I can’t quite place. Grace being a limited / non-fungible resource like that doesn’t sit right with me. Still might be the case, though.

Then she cuts off the Land of Shadow (if it hadn’t already been split - more of that bullshit, sigh) and locks the door behind him. Two problems solved. The last of the Hornsent are dead, and her biggest threat is gone.

And in splitting the land of shadow away, she does her little CK Reality Restructuring Event and creates her more perfect iteration of the Golden Order. There is a new history, with no hornsent, no Messmer, no crusading army, no potential coup. She's successfully written the biggest threat to her rule (at the moment) out of reality.

Whatever else this triggers, I can't say. But certainly it would be a very convenient place for...wait.

Wait wait wait HOLD UP

HOLD THE FUCK UP

What if Marika orders the crusade specifically with the aim of sacking Enir-Ilim and entering the Gate of Divinity.

What if she's got the Tree and its blessings, she's got Grace to hand out via the Fingers, she's got Godfrey, but she doesn't have the Ring? What if she's in a much more precarious situation than the official history tells us?

What if she was going through all the things we know she's done - fighting the giants, fighting the Liurnians, splitting off Radagon and courting Renalla and siring the Heretical 3 - but without the Golden Order? All the events we know, but worse. Higher cost. More losses to attrition. More instability.

The kind of instability that would provide a brownshirt with mommy issues all the underlings he could possibly want.

BUT ALSO: a society that's building private death squads has already entered a death spiral. What if the people also hate Marika.

It just makes sense, doesn't it? Leyndell's history is mostly just a successive string of wars of decreasing effectiveness. The war against the fire giants goes well enough (as far as we can tell), but the war against the ancient dragons goes worse - Leyndell is attacked directly and things are bad enough that the Order sues for peace (A bit of reading between the lines here, but I feel pretty confident that if Granssax has broken through your defenses you are not negotiating from a position of power. Godwyn brokering peace is definitely the only thing that kept them from total annihilation)

And then, we get the Liurnian Wars. Plural. Two wars.

The Golden Order lost. They definitely lost the first war, and the second war they either won and forced the alliance or ended up stalemating and cutting a deal. Pre-Crusade, they would have been fighting both Rellana and Rennala at their peak, so Option 2 is definitely on the table

Aside: One of the lodestone theories that I have not even mentioned in all this rambling is "Marika split off Radagon from herself to oversee the Liurnian Wars, and Radagon gradually went further rogue after the unplanned but permitted marriage to Rennala"

So the Golden Order, which is not the Golden Order yet but I am calling the Golden Order for convenience's sake, has been in a state of constant war since its founding and we know how those shake out on the wheel of history. They rot, and then they die. The people are exhausted. The empire can no longer sustain its core imbalance of power and wealth. Disenfranchised bourgeoisie are flocking to Messmer .

And Marika starts another fucking war. 

It's no wonder they disown everyone who follows Messmer! It's no wonder that Marika has to hand out enormous Grace payments to get people on board with her personal vendetta. Her empire is in shambles and crumbling around her, her regime has no legitimacy, her bastard son is threatening a coup, she's exiled Godfrey and his armies and started another fucking war...

Aside: The attitude of "if Godfrey came back he would fix all this" was probably endemic during this period. Marika / Radagon definitely did a lot of time squashing that out.

With the powers of a god - with possession of the Elden Ring - all of those problems can just go away. Marika can remake the world as she sees fit. So she betrays the Hornsent, puts all the resources of her dying empire into the crusade, seizes Enir-Ilim, opens the Gate of Divinity, and rewrites history so that the course of history goes more according to her liking and all those embarrassing failures get swept under the rug or tossed into the Land of Shadow.

She establishes a new golden order for the world, reigning as its god. In violation of the Greater Will, Marika plucks the Rune of Death out from the Ring and grants it to a splinter of herself, who is actually her old self. The GEQ is all the stuff left over and abandoned after she remakes herself. 

Aside: I agree fully with Kyana's observation that Miquella's path to godhood plotline is a thematic mirror of Marika's, and that the casting aside of St. Trina parallels the casting aside of the GEQ.

Aside: I am not sure yet how this lines up with the Eternal Cities and whatever Marika's connection is with them, or what connection it has with the attempted killing of Metyr and the arrival of Astel.

Maliketh, under his standing orders from the Greater Will, tries to take her out. Marika is wounded (a wound that, appropriate to the mechanical effects of destined death weapons, grows over time) and her Gloam-Eyed-Fragment is "defeated", whatever that means. Paralleling Blaidd, Maliketh's loyalty will prove his undoing, as he tries his damnedest to resist the Will and Marika survives the attack. She also gets what she wants anyway by shackling him with the Rune of Death and sequestering him outside of time in Farum Azula.

I like where this is going, which is the signal for me to throw up the giant neon CANON IS FAKE sign specifically to remind myself that future developments are not reason for disappointment, and frankly I might be taking this all too seriously.

Next time, get ready for the big finale.

Bookpost 18

Previous installments found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, 9, 10 , 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

 

Books of the South, Glen Cook

DNF / on hold

I return to the Black Company for the first time in a decade, and find myself in a similar place as I was then. When Cook is in his groove, and when you’re able to match yourself to that groove, it’s a great read. If you’re not in the groove, or if you lose the groove, it’s a tough sell. 

Cook’s greatest strength remains his depiction of warfare as messy and uncertain and anticlimactic and senselessly violent. Bad shit just happens for no reason as often if not more so than things go your way. That part is as good as ever.

I find things faltering when he starts moving beyond that into the bigger picture, especially when it comes to antagonists: the Shadowmasters, appropriate to their name, may as well be cartoon characters. Elements of the first trilogy come back around in a pretty unimpressive way. The depiction of fantasy!India is…it could certainly be a lot better. I am beginning to think that trying to read all three in a row (because I have the omnibus version) was a mistake, and that I only have enough in me for one Cook book at a time.

Maybe I will come back to it in the future, though if I look at my track record with this review series I very rarely ever do that.

Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, Joseph Dan

It’s a very honest title. Does a solid job for its length of going through the stages of thought that kabbalah has passed through over the last 500 years.

Echoes of Mist-Land, Aubertine Woodward Moore

DNF 5%

A book which I list here purely to say that, even when grading on the curve of “the book is from the 1880s”, I think the Nibelungenlied might be one of the most tedious works of literature ever devised. Whoop dee fucking doo, Siegfried is just so special and perfect. He is the most perfect and special boy. Heaven forbid a character trait emerge.

Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper

A short, punchy novel that, through mechanisms I have yet to determine, resides blessedly within the public domain. Worth your time. It’s aged better than a lot of sci-fi from the era - not a shining example of progressivism by any means, but certainly a winner of the “not as bad as you could have been” award. The pacing is swift, it’s an easy read, there are some good turns of phrase and sci-fi concepts scattered throughout, and it’s free. I’ve had a much worse time with books I’ve paid for.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

I was not a fan of Revelation Space when I read it…seven or eight years ago? But I saw this at Half Price and thought “why not give Reynolds another shot? This one’s a standalone.”

And I am fucking glad I did. This book is solid gold. I haven’t had one that keeps the beat-to-beat plot going this fast and this smooth since Some Desperate Glory. It might take 100 pages for the inciting incident to kickoff, but that doesn’t matter because every single chapter is going to introduce something new and interesting; some new element of the setting, or a revelation about a character, or a complicating event. And not in the way that some stories will take where they keep introducing things and then never deliver, either: threads get tied off or woven back into each other as new secrets are revealed. Characters’ motivations are obscured just enough for you to keep wondering about what their actual goal is, and when those motivations are revealed it always makes sense as the source of their previous actions.

Enormous additional accolades go to the book’s emphasis on the unimaginable enormity of space and time. No FTL here. Our POV characters are effectively immortal and have technology to mitigate a lot of the downtime, which leads to something I have never seen before in my life: a story that can maintain its tension and stakes even when anywhere from a few dozen to tens of thousands of years are being elided. It’s got some incredible sci-fi concepts to chew on, and several that will definitely be working their way into my standard repertoire (friendship ended with cryosleep, now abeyance is my best friend)

Go read it. 

Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges

A bestiary in the classical sense; a work wholly unconcerned with ecological realism, historical accuracy, consistency, or internal logic. This isn’t a negative. It flows dreamlike, one entry to the next like a lazy river in book form. Some of the entries are undercooked, and I do find myself getting a bit irritated by the “which of these sources are even real”, but on the whole it’s a great read and you’re bound to get something out of it. Even if he does use the Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese. And does that horrible Orientalist thing of literally translating Japanese names instead of just writing the names.

The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan

DNF 55 / 349

The vibes should have been my thing (mold-based near future dystopic weirdness), and the writing is overall strong (character department in particular, from the part that I read), but upon realizing that there wasn’t really an overarching plot and that we were jumping to an entirely new character and an entirely new scenario every 6 pages or so, it lost me. I love me a cobbled together frame narrative out of fragments, but there’s gotta be something bigger underneath to provide scaffolding.

Gods of the North, Robert E. Howard

Had a long-languishing collection of his short stories on my kindle, and quickly realized why it is long-languishing: I fucking hate Howard’s writing. I hate it in that extremely unhelpful way where I want to rewrite it just to make a point, despite it being practically guaranteed as a waste of effort better put towards original works. I have a chronic case of “I can fix it” for the literary works of old dead racists.

This is an extremely short story, it doesn’t have Conan in it, and it is an absolute nothing of a story. A plotless exercise in psychopathic violence, plus a sexual assault. There’s no other content to be had.
HPL can potentially give you an interesting idea to chew on, hidden somewhere in the neurotic racism; REH doesn’t even bother with interesting ideas.

The Door To Saturn, Clark Ashton Smith

Changing gears drastically, I then read this story immediately after Gods of the North and had a blast. It fucking slaps. Smith, in a wild departure from his Weird Tales contemporaries, actually knows how to do setup and payoff. There are jokes in this story that are still funny, on top of just not letting up on the weird and evocative imagery. Definitely going to read the rest of his stuff now, this left an excellent first impression.

The Unspoken Name, A. K. Larkwood

DNF 4%

The opening, as far as I read, is Tombs of Atuan with balsa wood prose. Few things are more damning than hitting "I wish I was reading a better, different book" when you have barely moved past the prologue. If you're going to do trope-dominated genre fic, it needs prose to back it up. The one interesting thing it has going for it is the fact that the main characters have tusks, which I presume is to imply that they are orcs. As an aside, I think tusks on orcs is usually pretty silly - they're an aesthetic leftover from old school pig-headed orcs that are only there for repetition's sake and no one except the occasional absolute madman bothers to explore the ramifications of what happens to a human jaw when it has tusks.

 

Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 3

Following up from my previous posts (Part 1, part 2) , I'm headed back into the realm of my own observations.

 

PART 5: GET THIS SHIT OUT OF MY DRAFT DOC

**

Observation: Wraiths, Vengeful Spirits, and Hexes

This is just one of those weird minor things where the pieces have fit together somewhat nicely (how about that for a change?)

“Wraith” is used only three times in the corpus, in the descriptions of the Omen Bairn, Regal Omen Bairn, and the Wraith Calling Bell. It’s the last of these that provides us with a definition:

Wraith Calling Bell: “Wraiths are said to be the vengeful spirits of those who died when cursed.”

Which tracks so far, with the other two items summoning the spirits of Omen infants.

If I search the corpus for “vengeful spirits”, we get a few additional hits:

• The Rancorcall and Ancient Death Rancor spells
• The Rancor Slash, Familial Rancor and Rancor Shot weapon arts
• The Rancor Pots
• The Horned Bairn

Extra note, the Braided Cord Rope item draws a comparison / contrast between “vengeful spirits” and “watchful spirits”. Watchful spirits are only elsewhere mentioned in the spell “Watchful Spirit”, which is also called a “guardian spirit”, a title shared with the Horned Warrior Ashes. 

“Rancor” shows up in two additional odd contexts, the spell Rykard’s Rancor, and the item Innard Meat.

Rykard’s Rancor: “These spirits manifest from the rancor of heroes who met a violent end. The lord granted them an audience, whereupon they were welcomed by the maw of the great serpent—and within the serpent's bowels, they became the lord's kin.”

Innard Meat: “Scraps of flesh for filling great jars. Rancorous spirits cling to the pinkish-red, twitching meat.”

These aren’t related to curses necessarily, but seem to just be people who have died in horrible ways.

An “ancient death hex” is mentioned a few times:

Rancorcall: “Once thought lost, this ancient death hex was rediscovered by the necromancer Garris.”

Ancient Death Rancor:  “They are cinders of the ancient death hex, raked from the fires of ghostflame by Deathbirds.”

So at least this hex originates with the followers of the Deathbirds. Which makes sense if we look at the Branchsword Talismans.

Red-feathered Branchsword: "The heart sings when one draws close to death, and a glorious end awaits those who cling so tenaciously to life."

Blue-feathered Branchsword: "The heart sings when one draws close to death, and thus does one cling so tenaciously to life—to render up a death worth offering."

Which we can combine with

Rancor Pot: “In times of old, the dead were burned with ghostflame, and from those cinders arose vengeful spirits.”

And that says to me that these ancient hexes utilize the angry spirits of those killed in some sort of ritual sacrifice (to the Deathbirds?) during the Ghostflame Era.

This then overlaps with what we know of red glintstone sorcery, which is described as "similar to hex magic" in the Staff of the Guilty description and dependent on human sacrifices. Same with Rykard rediscovering Gelmir hex magic (human sacrifice to the Serpent).

A couple other hex mentions of note.

Hefty Furnace Pot:  “Imbued with a hex of the furnace[...]The furnace's flame burns away both body and soul. When impurity is thus expunged, one calls it cleansing.”

Bloodfiend Hexer’s Ashes: “This spirit conducts bloodboon rituals with a sacred spear, casts bloodflame hexes, and takes a singular pleasure in letting the blood of foes. Long ago, a subjugated tribe discovered a twisted deity amongst the ravages of war, and they were transformed into bloodfiends. The mother of truth was their savior.”

Inquisitor Ashes: "One of the inquisitors casts a tower hex to heal HP, while the hex of the other boosts her own attack power."

Bone Bow: "A medium for spirit-calling, and a product of the ancient hexing arts of the tower."

Not much on their own, but considering how frequent this sort of thing crops up across cultural and magical regimes it's looking like "magical power from death" is a universal of the setting.

 

**

 

Observation: Two Anchor Rings

Godrick and Morgott’s Great Runes are described as the central and lower anchor runes of the Elden Ring. Which would imply the existence of an upper anchor. Marika would be the natural assumption, as head of the entire thing, the Keter of our Great Rune sefirot.

**

Theory: Capital-N Night is the whole unity of the celestial bodies prior to development of glintstone sorcery

We know that a big part of the Caria-Academy rivalry is over whether the moon or the stars is more important to sorcery. The few references we get to capital-N Night, and the lightless void of the Greater Will, feel like older versions of the religion. The Carians and Academics are the people arguing over if Jesus is one substance or two, and to get to that stage of bullshit you have to have at least a little time to develop things away from first principles. Naturally, those principles began with the Astrologers, prior to calling down glintstone.

**

Observation: So Many Types of Fire

• Ghostflame: "burns death", whatever that means; generates spirit ashes
  
• Giantsflame: Capable of burning down the Erdtree
  
• Blackflame: Probably Giantsflame + Destined Death
  
• Flame of Frenzy: Can burn away everything, including spirits.
  
• Messmer’s Flame: Properties questionable, can definitely fuck up magical trees.
  

**

Speculation: The Stone Lords are connected to Rauh

• We know Alabaster and Onyx Lords were created from members of an ancient civilization that were transformed by close contact with a meteorite impact.
• The Meteoric Ore Blade is supposedly designed for use against “lifeforms born of falling stars” - which would be either Stone Lords, Fallingstar Beasts, or Astels.
• The priests of the Ancient Dynasty had meteorite-shard spears
• Ancient Meteoric Ore Greatsword was apparently an arrowhead in the “old gods’ arsenal”, and explains jack shit else what the fuck. Gotta be those Giant-Giants.
  
• “Starcallers” are those who search for and harvest meteor fragments
• Astel fell as a meteorite in Operation Fuck This Eternal City In Particular and hit Farum Azula on the way down.
• Stone-Sheathed Sword can turn into Sword of Light/Darkness at altars in the Ruins of Rauh. Black and white, alabaster and onyx.
• Demi-humans are more easily affected by lures and aggro pull items when humans are immune
• The Lords of Stone are the ones who know gravity and meteor magic specifically, so I have seen it theorized that they are responsible for calling down Astel to destroy the Eternal City.
• TA and his heavy impact theory: some manner of meteor impact liquified a large chunk of the surface and buried the “builder stratum” (probably rauh) and the Old Giants (titans, old gods)
• TA, cont.: Elden John as a noah+moses figure, knowing that the Flood was coming, building the stone coffin-ships (TA suggests only 3 survived, the rest died and rotted, became putrescense. But those 3 might be just artistic license)
• Probably Metyr what did it as the “first star to fall”, maybe the elden beast?

**

Observation: Passive Effect Associations

• Rune of Life / Erdtree / Golden Order / Marika: Passive HP regen 
• Destined Death / Rune of Death / GEQ: HP drain
  
• Dominula villagers : Extra rune gain
  
• Godrick's Great Rune: Increases all stats
• Radahn's Great Rune: Increases HP, FP, Stamina
• Rykard's Great Rune: Recover health on killing enemies
• Ranni's Great Rune: ????
  
• Malenia's Great Rune: Bloodborne-style health recovery
• Miquella's Great Rune: Resists influence of mental influence 
• Rune of the Unborn: ????
  
• Morgott's Great Rune:  Greatly increased HP
• Mohg's Great Rune: Recover health when a summon or enemy makes a kill

Using the power of PATTERN SEEKING BRAIN, I end up with this (asterisks mark reconstruction)

Nothing substantial enough to say "I think this is aligned with what they were aiming for", but an interesting series of coincidences all the same.

**

Observation: "Death of the Demigods"

Maliketh’s epithet “death of the demigods” is weird because he didn't kill any of them, and all of them presumably died after he was locked in Farum Azula. I am presuming it is a “if any of them are going to die, Maliketh is going to be the one to do it,” sort of thing, which makes sense and adds a fun bit of "even the ordinary people know that if shit pops off he's going to come out on top." Which would imply that he had the Rune of Death for a bit before he got sealed away. The other option would be that there were demigods before the current crop and he killed those ones and the title carried over.

But that's if it's an epithet. If it is a literal meaning of his name, then I can only assume that he was given it by the Fingers as a direct threat to Marika, which is definitely in line with the one other Shadowbound Beast we know of. Toe the party line, or Blaidd / Maliketh will kill you and all of your associates.

 

PART 6: TOTAL BULLSHIT

Everything below is extra true. No theories here, just straight facts. The basics were written prior to the Nightreign announcement, which as you will see later is evidence of some minor gift of prophecy.

**

Interpretive Lens: Principle of Transposition

FromSoft’s love of returning to the well is so strong that material - concepts, characters, places, events, connections and so on - may be transposed between games as one sees fit for purposes of theorizing, fanfiction, and all-around silliness. We might also call this the Patches Principle.

Interpretive Lens: The Adaptation Corollary

Elements transposed from one game to another will be adapted to fit the content of the host game; Transposition is one-way, and does not provide support for Grand Unified Theories.

Interpretive Lens: The Principle of Inaccuracy

The contents of the game are representative, not exact. Details not necessary to the story will be elided for it to function as a game.

**

Godfrey = Gwyn

Not literally, of course, but as they both fulfill the role of father of a godly dynasty they are our prime centerpiece for this rabbithole of Transposition. Any traits, qualities, and connections of Gwyn that would be interesting to port to Godfrey shall hereby be ported over to Godfrey.

**

The Golden Lineage demigods killed during the Night of the Black Knives and currently entombed in the wandering mausoleums are in fact Gwyn’s children, children-in-law, and grandchildren.

Specifically, this entails Gwynevere, Filianore, Oceiros, Lorian, Lothric, Ocelotte, and Rosaria.

Don't worry about the Nameless King and Gwyndolin, we'll get to them later.

**

Godfrey maintained the Roundtable Hold separate from the Crucible Knights, both because he preferred it as a model for an army, and as an insurance policy in case things went south. 

Their numbers included:

• Knight Artorius -Tried to fight the Lord of the Abyss. It did not go well for him.
  
• Lord’s Blade CIaran - Personal bodyguard to Godwyn in his youth.
• Dragonslayer Ornstein - A veteran of the First Defense of Leyndell and champion of the Ancient Dragon Cult.
• Hawkeye Gough - A troll who turned against the giants during the War. 
• Gehrman and Maria - Hunters of starfallen beasts from a distant land.
• Havel the Rock - One of Godfrey's original band. Dragon War veteran. Went rogue after the Liurnian Wars because he was wanted nothing to do with a state that incorporated sorcery.
  
• Sir Alonne - A warrior from the Land of Reeds.
  

**

Unsorted Bullshit

• Horah Loux’s uncle Lloyd was part of his original warband, and settled down as a prominent cleric of the Golden Order after the War with the Giants.
• Irithyll was a city of the ancient astrologers, though was barely inhabited by the time it was incorporated into the empire of the Eternal Cities. 
• Executioner Smough  was Marika’s chief executioner after the establishment of the Golden Order. Eventually joined the Fire Monks and became a Prelate, leaving the role of imperial carnifex to the lord of House Marais.
• High Lord Wolnir was the last of the primordial giants, and the only one to survive until Marika’s war.
• Nito ruled, though not as Elden Lord, in the days of the Deathbird rites.
• Seath the Scaleless was an advisor to Marika and Godfrey during the War with the Ancient Dragons. Godwyn acted against his council by extending friendship to Fortissax and ending the war peacefully.
• Seath later grew bored of Leyndell and commissioned a keep in Liurnia, devoting himself to study of the Crystalians.
• Storm Lord = Storm King, so Godfrey fought the Nameless King as his final enemy. (I FUCKING CALLED IT)
• Nameless King and Godwyn were twins
• Sen’s Fortress blocks the main way in to Gelmir from Leyndell: the siege was one of the bloodiest in the war. Snekmen!
• Gwyndolyn and Ranni have a complicated relationship - both devotees of the dark moon. Cooperation? Competition? Dual halves of an empyrean? A fosterage situation gone bad, which causes the Liurnian Wars?
• Gwyndolin survives the Night of Black Knives by either being conveniently outside Leyndell, in on the plot, or explicitly spared by Ranni.
• But then he gets eaten by Aldritch, a Golden Order Fundamentalist among Rykard's attendants who apostasized after reaching Gelmir and embraced the Black Flame cult, even managing to become a Godskin.
  
• The demihumans, long suffering under the oppression of Rauh, sought to make their own lord with the power of the Abyss: Manus was the result.
  
• Fillianore was married off to the Demihumans, rather than the pygmies.
•  All of the vague distant lands ever mentioned in the non-Sekiro souls games exist outside the Lands Between.
• The events of Sekiro, or events very similar to them, are occurring in the Land of Reeds
• Firekeepers are the old priestesses of the ghostflame, or perhaps the giantsflame, or maybe just the tree. TA's theory of Marika as emerging from an existing tree-worshiping priestess class obviously is connected here.
• The Noxians were in contact with the Moon Presence and had been used as hunters against its rivals. The Carians continued this agreement up through at least the Liurnian Wars.
• The Noxians created Rom the Vacuous Spider in a failed attempt to create the Lord of Night.
  
• Three great stars fell upon the earth: Metyr the Mother of Fingers, Ebrietas the Daughter of the Cosmos, and Kos called Kosm.  
• I don't actually need to do anything with the Blacksmith God and titanite demons, you could just throw those in a Rauh forge as-is.
• The Witch of Izalith was a priestess of the Old Dynasty who lived among and learned pyromancy from the fire giants. As the War neared its end, she fell into a despair great enough to call on the Flame of Frenzy, which created yet another fucking type of fire, and also a shit-ton of demons.
• Either that or demons are hornsent tutelary deities that have gone bad.
  
• Quelaag's nest is down at the bottom of the Leyndell catacombs, where she does exactly what she does in Dark Souls. Quelaana's there too.
• Micolash is everyone's least favorite faculty member at the Academy of Raya Lucaria but the bastard got tenure somehow and then tried to commune with Outer Gods.
  

 

PART 8: FANFICTION TIME

Scholar’s Letter

A thick envelope, sealed with stamped wax and a green ribbon. The documents stuffed within are all composed by the same hand.

Gurlos -

Bad news and more bad news, I’m afraid. Marika is laughing at us from the grave.

The team sent to Castle Marais returned yesterday, and it seems they've found another dead end. The central keep collapsed years ago thanks to the sinking foundation, and all we are left with is a pile of rubble in the middle of a poisonous swamp overgrown with squirts and miranda flowers. If House Marais kept any of their records at home, they're lost, and I’m not going to risk any of our colleagues for a handful of sodden parchment.

Our excavation in the capital seems similarly futile. We’ve had to relocate the main camp three times now due to instability of the dunes. The ash is a merciless invader; It gets on everything, it gets into everything, we can only spare a few hours each day excavating before we’re all crippled by coughing fits.

As we expected, the majority of the documents we have found are barely better than lumps of charcoal. Despite this, we have managed to find a few surviving caches in the manors of the upper city, where by accidents of positioning and storage the texts were spared from the pyroclastic flow. Unfortunately, these scrolls and books are predominantly personal writings, business records, religious texts, and the entertainments of the idle rich. Our colleagues will have a wonderful time analyzing the cultural significance of it all, but it's not particularly helpful to us in the here and now.

We gravely underestimated both the enthusiasm of Marika’s ministry of propaganda and the scope of their influence over the rest of the Lands. Every single non-private text we have found has been stamped with the approval of House Marais and the Office of Publications, marking them as parrots of the official imperial history and useful primarily as kindling and toilet paper. The private texts rarely delve into matters of history or statecraft, and we can assume a chilling effect from the censor's passing shadow. I won't entirely rule out the truth from emerging, but that will require miraculous luck that we thus far have not had in our possession.

The site that we have been assuming (with caution) to be Marika's private residence has offered up a few curiosities: we have pulled five stone tablets from the ash, but the text is unfamiliar. The most reasonable hypothesis would be that they belong to a pre-Order civilization, but until we find matching inscriptions we can't begin to identify them. I've included a rubbing of one of the tablets with this letter; perhaps you've found something similar in the Tower settlement.

To round out the failures of this expedition, the teams we've sent into Liurnia and Limgrave have started reporting back to us as well.

The libraries of Raya Lucaria and the Carian manor still contain thousands of books in good condition, but we have no means of reading or understanding the sorcerer's ciphers used to write them. The best and brightest minds of that last generation were reduced to mindless infantilism under the care of Rennala, and while Rennala herself was closest to the events in question she is in no state to answer them and likely never will be.

Nephali Loux, now an old woman, arrived with the remnants of Godfrey’s army at the end of the age. She has been helpful in establishing the timeline since the Tarnished returned, but knows very little of anything that came before. But she is a gracious host to our Limgrave teams and so we have little room to complain.

Bishop Miriel appears to be our best lead so far: he is cooperative, an excellent interview subject, and has assisted us in the interpretation of the more obtuse religious texts. While part of the religious hierarchy of the Golden Order, he was unofficially assigned in perpetuity to the Church of Vows in Liurnia (as an enormous tortoise is extremely difficult to transport to and from the capital) and so received all his news of Leyndell second-hand. But this allowed him to serve as a direct eyewitness to the Liurnian Wars, and it will be in comparing his story to the official record that we will find any clues as to the truth if we are going to find any at all.

Lady Tanith of Ranah is not a viable interview subject.

This is the situation as it stands on our end of the inner sea, and I will keep you informed of any developments. I hope that your own team's investigations have borne more fruit than ours.

- Máelruba

**

I think I have two more of these in the tank. For now anyways.

.